TRIGGERnometry - An Honest Conversation with a Marxist - Aaron Bastani

Episode Date: August 27, 2023

Aaron Bastani is a British journalist and writer. He co-founded the left-wing media organisation Novara Media in 2011, and has hosted and co-hosted many of its podcasts and videos. He has written for The Guardian, London Review of Books, UnHerd and Vice, and is the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019) the title for which is a term coined by Bastani which refers to a post-capitalist society in which automation greatly reduces the amount of labour humans need to do. SPONSORED BY: AG1. Go to https://www.drinkAG1.com/triggernometry/ to get 5 free AG1 Travel Packs and a FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D with your first purchase! Become a Premium Member to receive exclusive benefits https://triggernometry.supercast.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I do think we have a particular view. I mean, people say the 1%. I mean, I'd probably call it the nought point nought 1%. And that isn't just, you know, tech CEO bad guys. It can also be people like, what's it, Dame Alison Rose, you know, the CEO of Nat West. This is really daft. You're talking about how inclusive you are

because you've debanked to know that Nigel Farage. You can't even pay men and women the same. Are you excited about a storm of premiership? No. I think we need a political revolution in this country. And I don't mean like, get out the bayonets and kill everyone. I think we need a profound shift in power, economic, political and cultural,

away from London, away from Westminster, towards ordinary people. I saw Chavez come to power. And I saw everyone on the left venerate Chavez, venerate socialism, including Corbyn, including people saying this is an example of socialism working. And now everybody's moved on, and they've moved on to the next project. And I guess my question is to you, seeing countries like Venezuela, seeing countries like the Soviet Union. How can you identify with socialism when it's never worked?

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Boster. I'm Constantine Kiss. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is an author, journalist and the founder of Navarra Media, Aaron Bastani. Welcome to Trigonometry.

My pleasure to be here. Yeah, we've been trying to get you on for a long time. Whenever anyone wants to accuse us of being right wing, what they say is why haven't you had Aaron Bastani on? Please tell them it's not our fault. We're trying to have you on for ages. It's your fault. You're now officially left wing.

Yeah, exactly. The home of the left. Exactly. We prefer the term cuck, Sarah. We had the two and three years ago, didn't win? I flaked on you guys. So if that means you've got heat for being, you know, politically partial or whatever. My apologies, it was all on me.

but I'm here now. It's all water under the bridge, May. It's great to have you here. Tell everybody a little bit about your background. Who are you? How are you where you are? What has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

So I have a background in new media. I co-founded in Navarra Media, a bit like yourselves of trigonometry. I started it more than a decade ago with some people who've... Some have left the picture, some haven't. And I was doing a PhD at the time. It meant I had time on my hands.

resources. And as I was doing my PhD, which was on media to some extent, two things became really clear to me. Firstly, there was no going back to the politics and the economy of pre-2008. Something really had decisively shifted in politics. We weren't just going to go back to Easy Street, wages going up, house prices are going up, broadly people aren't that, you know, critical of the political status quo. And at the same time, it was really obvious that people were switching off legacy media. That's only gotten worse. over time, or gotten better over time, depending on how you see it, that's only intensified over time. But in the sort of 2013, 2013, 2014, you know, with Scottish independence referendum, for

instance, you don't have to support independence for Scotland to see. Some of the BBC stories were just extraordinary, extraordinary propaganda. And time after time, after time, I was finding myself very frustrated with the state of political commentary, political journalism, and obviously I had a set of political commitments, as my now colleagues do. And, and, you know, I'm a lot of And so we thought, well, look, here's a problem. And here's also potentially a solution in that we start our own outlet, which is what we did. And today, we've just grown beyond any expectations. I'm sure it's a similar story to you guys, right?

No, man, we had massive expectations. You don't think, like, I think last month on Instagram we reached 12, 13 million people. That's amazing. Yeah, we're reaching lots of people on YouTube, like yourselves. Lots of people with podcasts. We do articles as well. some of them are really, we've broken some interesting stories, you know, we brought the label leak story.

I don't think we expected that all to happen. I think that's partly because the talent of my colleagues were brilliant, and also partly because the legacy media is just so bad at their job that people are craving something different. Well, that's something we can easily agree, and I think, and that's actually what I was going to ask you, you were ahead of the curve in terms of us. We started this in April 2018.

You would have started in 2013? You said 10 years ago. Yeah, so we had a podcast, well, it wasn't even a podcast. radio show on a community radio station in London called Resonance FM. So we were actually going out on an FM frequency with a weekly show, but we didn't have a podcast with a website until 2013, yeah. Right. And so what was the moment for you when you realized the mainstream media are just, they're not doing a good job of journalism anymore? Because I can tell you what for a lot of people who are sort of heterodox center where I see us and right-leaning people too, one of the key moments

was Jordan Peterson being interviewed by Kathy Newman. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah, of course. And a lot of people just went, wait, this isn't, this is fake. This isn't a conversation. This isn't how people talk. If you had a psychology professor in your living room that you may disagree with, that's not how you would talk to them.

And if you did talk to them like that, you'd think this person's demented. Was there a moment like that for you coming from a left-wing perspective where you were just like, I saw that and I was like, okay, there's no going back for the mainstream anymore? There's so many. It happens every week, isn't it? I think for me, one of the wow moments was, I think at the time, Andrew Maher was the BBC political editor, and he wrote a novel, which I find quite strange. You shouldn't really have time to write a novel when you're earning hundreds of thousands of pounds paid by the BBC, but anyway, maybe I'm being mean. And the launch party for that novel, can you guess where it was?

Number 10 Downing Street. And so you think your job is to scrutinize these people. They're doing you a favour to launch your novel. And I just thought, you're not serious. Like, I don't, you shouldn't be hectoring them and being angry with them, but there should be a slight frisson, slight tension between politicians and political journalists. There's just, I'm a bit wary of that guy, be careful.

Don't, you know, don't be too loose lips. That's healthy for democracy. And when I saw that story, I thought, I think the BBC's bugged. And I think more broadly, the relationship between politicians and the media in this country is bugged in. It is so unhealthy. And I think it's worse than the US because in this country, everything's in London.

Everything's in London. Whereas in the US, you've got your politicians in Washington, you've got your L.A. people, your Texas people, your New York people. Here it's so bad. It isn't. It's a very profound point. Here it is bad.

Was there a moment for you where you realised that left-wing media wasn't everything it purported to be? Where you looked at certain outlets. I mean, maybe it's a guardian, maybe it's others, where you thought, hang on a minute, this isn't what I associate with the left or left-wing media. Well, there's not that much left-wing media in the UK. So, I mean, I'd start with, set the Daily Mirror.

It's been a Labour supporting paper for a very long time. You know, I remember doing BBC Any Questions. And I mentioned a story. And then, you know, these are, this is Middle England, right? I was somewhere in, like, Yoval or something that, you know, Lib Dem Tory floating voters. This is Middle England. and I said, oh, the story's from the Daily Mirror. They all started laughing at me, right?

Rightly so, because for them it's just a tabloid. You know, I don't think it has necessarily a sort of political take on things. You know, it's a spin on, you know, it's like the sun, but the other side. I don't think it's quite as bad, but, you know, that's the ballpark. The Guardian, I think, is a liberal paper

rather than a left paper, but, you know, we can park that for a moment. What I would say is that the Guardian has really regressed. So 10 years ago, It had the bravery to do the Snowden stuff. It had the bravery to do the WikiLeaks stuff. That would not happen now.

Really? Why not? I think editorial choices would just say, I just don't think it would happen. I think, well, definitely with WikiLeaks. Snowden, I don't know. With WikiLeaks and the Glenn Greenwood stuff, I think, you know, it's easy to say, oh, Alan Rushbridge is gone.

Kath Fein is the editor now. They wouldn't do that. But I just feel like there's not the same intellectual curiosity they used to be at the Guardian, even 15 years ago. And I can't quite, you know, I would buy the Guardian 15 years ago. I wouldn't buy it now. I wouldn't pay for it now. You know, I have a subscription for the FT. I read the FT and it's full of facts and data.

I'll disagree with all the columnists, but it's useful, high-value information. I'm sorry to say the Guardian isn't that, you know. And do you think part of the problem is identity politics and writing through always, the prism of race and gender. And that's not to say that that doesn't have merit occasionally, but that then means that you just ignore the sheer facts of the situation. What is happening on the ground?

Well, the problem is I don't really read the guardian. So I don't know. But, you know, I agree with your point here. So, for instance, there's something that really irritates me, which is your ex, this person's Y, therefore this person is the only person that can have valid opinions on issues relating to why people. That can be with the birth of race, gender, etc.

So, for instance, I'm half-Iranian. I might say I'm... I think the protests in Iran are bad. I don't think they're bad before. You know, if you clips that up, I might say they're bad. I might say something which is quite controversial, right? At which point, you know, you might say,

as I mean, it's not Iranian, you're like, I disagree. They seem quite good. It's about women's liberation, civil liberties. They seem very positive. I would say, you can't have a legitimate view on this because you're not Iranian. Somewhere in the middle of all this

are the facts and the truth and values, which don't really, they aren't contingent on who you are, your identity and so on. So on that point, I agree with you. Is it a problem really for the Guardian? It's a hard one to say. I mean, I just don't read their columns that much. I think actually it's worse than that in a way

because this stuff has percolated a whole layer of the media, and you can find it in ad campaigns, you can find it in the Guardian, you might even find it in sort of censor-sensor-right newspapers sometimes. Yeah. Oh, for sure. So I think it's a bit bigger than that, actually, yeah. Well, our whole society is infested with this idea, actually,

that we should look at everything through the prism of, well, you can't speak about this because you're not that thing. I agree. I was curious, you mentioned there's not much left-wing media in the UK. Would you, are you one of the people on the left who feels that the BBC is right-leaning? No, I think the BBC is liberal, right? So what do I mean by that? It's socially liberal and has a socially liberal agenda.

Absolutely. It was absolutely opposed to Brexit. I said that somebody voted to remain. It was opposed to Brexit. And it's also economically liberal. So I think it's very, what's the word, circumspect about, radical economic ideas, particularly from the left. But actually, I think any kind of radical economic ideas,

anybody is saying, there's a problem, let's try this solution. An actual solution-oriented sort of mode of thinking just doesn't sit well with them. So I think lots of people from the left, just like the BBC, because they see the fact that it's economically liberal, then lots of people from the right see the BBC, and they say, well, it's socially liberal. And so I can see both points of view. And because we don't have a successful liberal party in this country anymore, which we did until the early 20th century.

It is very much a continuation of that sort of patrician liberalism, which was the Liberal Party, which broadly speaking, after it collapsed, kind of becomes a faction within both Labour and the Tories. So the BBC has kind of progressive moments, and it has like journalists who are on the left, for sure. But I would say it's a liberal news organisation. So explain that to us, because those words liberal and left get used very differently by different people. And they also get used very differently in the United States versus the UK. Like a liberal in America is a left-winger, basically, right? Although there is increasing conversation about classical liberalism and that is a different thing entirely.

When you say the BBC is a liberal institution and you're positioning that as a different thing to you, which is left-wing, explain that to people. What do you mean? What's the difference? How are these things different? So a really great way of explaining this, I think, is the fact that the BBC, I think, has changed. now, but they didn't have an industrial relations correspondent. They didn't have a Labor correspondent. So they, or editor rather, I think it had a correspondent. They didn't have a Labor editor, which they would have had all the way through really to the 1980s, which is somebody whose job is to say, these workers are getting screwed here,

a thousand people have just been laid off here, like the P&O story, for instance, right? These people have gone on strike, they've got a big pay rise. These women are campaigning for better maternity leave, conditions at work, etc. The BBC doesn't focus on that stuff. Now, as somebody who's on the left, I care about that stuff, right? I care deeply about that stuff. Instead, the BBC will focus on, like, as a liberal organisation, representation. More women in boardrooms, right?

I'm not saying more women in boardrooms is bad. Although it is. I'm not saying it's bad. But that affects a tiny slither of society. Meanwhile, you're not talking about women organizing in their workplaces for better maternity care policies. for instance. Yeah. So that makes perfect sense.

And I remember during the whole Ngozi-Falani affair, it was covered like it was a terrorist attack, when you sort of think there's probably much bigger core issues affecting way more people, which I think is where you're talking. So is your focus basically an old-school class-based approach where you are like, well, the workers who are the majority of the society, they're at the bottom,

they're not getting paid enough, they're not treated well by their employers. That's who I'm advocating for. Is that broadly speaking the angle? I wouldn't say that at the bottom. I would say we are interested in the stories of working people. And that's something like politicians aren't. But frankly, you know, the middle class and the working class in this country, we just did a show on this actually with a great guy, Dan Evans. You know, we talked about the petty bourgeois. What does it mean? You know, my dad's a taxi driver. He categorized him as petty bourgeois, right? Lots of people with their own shops or small businesses. They work harder than the most exploited workers. It's a different relationship, right? Because of course, they get the dividends and the profit, and one day they might be very rich as a result,

but they work incredibly hard some of these people, literally exhausting themselves and killing themselves. In terms of what we do, like I said, it's about working people. I do think, though, in terms of what you said old-school, sort of socialist way, I do think we have a particular view. I mean, people say the 1%. I mean, I'd probably call it the 0.0.0.0.1%. You know, the economic elite, frankly,

who are pro privatisation with regards to things like water, who fundamentally don't think democracy matters, who contrives sort of Mickey Mouse bizarre issues so that we don't actually confront the real problems in society. And that isn't just, you know, tech CEO bad guys. It can also be people like, was it Dame Allison Rose, you know, the CEO of Nat West.

You know, Nat West have all these, quote-unquote, progressive inclusive policies, and yet I think the gender pay gap in the organisation was something like 30%, right? Like, this is really daft. We're talking about how inclusive you are because you've debanks them at Nigel Farage. You can't even pay men and women the same for doing the same job. So, you know, this elite also in a way mirrors what I was saying about the BBC.

Generally speaking, it's actually not more socially liberal than we think. So people on the right will say, this elite is socially liberal. They're all lefties. I'm on the left saying they're also economically liberal and they're exploiting the rest of society. and we're probably both right in a way. Do you ever get frustrated how the left is mischaracterised? Because I'm not on the left as a whole. There's certain aspects of the left that I'm very sympathetic to.

But I see people on the right going, all lefties think like this. And you go, no, they don't. And if somebody said the inverse, you'd get upset with them. So how is it fair to say all left are pro-remain liberals? And you go, well, you're overlooking Lexington. for example. Let's be real.

Corbyn was pro-Brexit. If Corbyn, I was thinking about this. He wasn't very honest. Well, I think he's a Democrat. So I think, you know, he was the party leader. I think he did what he thought was right. I don't think he secretly,

you know, there's this conspiracy thing. He's secretly went in the ballot box and voted leave. I won't go that far. I mean, maybe he did. I don't think he went that far, though. But there is a sort of weird alternative reality where Jeremy Corbyn isn't the Labour leader

in 2016. Somebody else is. Labor sort of lose the election. election, Brexit, Labor lose the referendum rather, because they would have been campaigning for Remain. And Jeremy Corbyn is like elevated to like this cult hero because, you know, him and Farage secured, you know, there's this. And also what I found really funny is in that scenario, he would also be expelled from the Labour Party. You know, he ends up in a similar place. So, no, not all left-wing people feel the same. This is the great thing with, with the RMT and

the strikes we've had, you know, Mick Lynch, who's their, their chief, the, the railway. as union, I think it's so useful for the average Joe Bloggs, you know, member of the public, to see a guy, you know, who, you know, bald, late 50s, early 60s, a gruff, a Millwall fan, and he's left wing. And I think that's so good for a number of things. I think it's good for the left because it undoes a few caricatures. But I also think it's just so healthy for our society. You know, you can't presume somebody's politics just by how they look. That's a really You know, it's a really bigoted thing to do, actually. Yeah.

He may look like a gammon is what Aaron is saying. You don't know that he is. Yeah, and that is a profound point, because in 2016 and post-2016, that term gammon would have been used for people like Mick Lynch and Eddie Dempsey, who I would have seen as the fulcrum of the left, the people who what I think left-wing means,

which is people coming out, representing workers trying to get them a better deal. And what I've seen on the left now, and look, maybe it's Twitter amplifying these voices, you know, somebody going, you know, if you're fatphobic, you're Hitler. And I go... Did you actually see that?

Pretty much... You may be exaggerating. You may be exaggerating a touch. I go... Do you know what we mean? Yeah. I go, that's not left-wing. That's just internet insanity.

Well, I think fat phobias, I think it's bad to discriminate against somebody because of how they look or to bully them on that basis, but I don't think that makes... Mate, I fad shamed him for two years. Look how slimmy looks now. I don't think that makes you look like a hill. Well, I'm older now.

I'm 39, but I mean, I was quite ripped until about 30, and that was definitely because of my dad's body shaming, and I was about nine. So I sort of got into bodybuilding and athletics and whatnot. But on a serious note, is that left wing? I mean, look, there are lots of things which are right wing. There are lots of things which are conservatives. There are conservatives out there,

that want to pull down all the trees and build loads of skyscrapers and, you know, chase GDP relentlessly. There are also conservatives out there who want to reintroduce beaver and, you know, rewild things and introduce regenerative farming. And I think, in a very strange way, they both sit in the same tradition. I think you have to be realistic on the left. You know, those arguments are on the left because they're taking aim at a form of oppression or antagonism or hatred is a strong word. But you know what I mean? And so I think they probably are on the left.

I don't agree with that proposition, though. So the left is a very broad coalition. So what can Labor do and Kirstarmer do to hold together this very broad coalition of people who actually think and believe very, very different things? Somebody who is a left-wing progressive, I mean, it's a cliche in Islington, is going to think very differently

to an old-school former minor in a town like Darlington? It's a great question. I mean, the thing is, Labor, like people say, Tony Blair's the most successful prominent. Actually, it's Harrow Wilson. He won four elections. And in the 60s, Labor had the exact same problem. They kept on winning. You know, they won in, what, 64, 66, 74, I think 76. So they won repeatedly with their economic base being, you know, organised labour,

but also introducing things like the rights to divorce, abortion, decriminalising homosexuality. So a very socially liberal agenda. And they made that work. So I think, you know, it's not impossible. You can do it. I think you just need to be open with the electorate about it. You know, I increasingly find myself drawn to the Green Party. I like the Greens.

I'm pro-Nuclear, right? I'm pro-Hs2. I'm pro-what else? So you're drawn to the Greens. They're not drawn to you. Yeah, exactly. But I like a lot of what they stand for. I like their values.

I just think they're wrong about some really big issues. Yeah. I'll vote Labour in the next election, but I think if I was in Bristol West, for instance, where they have a good chance of winning, I would vote for the Greens. You know, I think most of the electorate's adult enough, actually, to vote on a...

I think that's what happened in 2017, right? I think lots of people don't like Jeremy Corbyn. They say, I'm actually quite like three or four of those policies, and I'll plump for Labor. I think by 2019, the avalanche was so strong. The media campaign, the unforced errors by the Labour leadership, Brexit, it was too much to hold back.

But I think most of the electorate's sensible enough to go, These two or three things really matter to me. I think they'll do a better job than the other lot on those two or three things. I'll ask you the same question that I've asked. We've had a bunch of left wingers on the show in the short succession, actually. But it seems to me that Stama and Labour Party are going to win the next election. Look, anything can happen between now and then, but it's looking that way. Are you excited about a Stama premiership?

No. Why not? No, I'm not. Well, I was asked this question. The evil Tories are going to be out. Isn't that a good thing? The evil Tories will be out. Yeah, great.

I mean, what's interesting is that Boris Johnson in 2019, at the moment, on, for instance, climate change, was to the left of Kierstammer right now. He was. It's very hard for people, not even the Twitter left. I like the Twitter. I'm on the Twitter left. The sort of big liberal accounts on social media. No, you're not, but you like most of my tweets. No, that's true.

I'm a hedger-dox thinker. I think that's how the new statesmen describe me. All over the place is how normal people would describe it. You know, the nasty Tories have to go. They're awful, blah, blah, blah. Well, Boris Johnson was funding LTNs, right? Which is, you know, they want to disown that now. Low traffic neighbourhoods, yeah.

Yeah, they want to disown that now. They had very ambitious commitments on decarbonisation. They moved huge numbers of public sector jobs, for instance, to Darlington. Brilliant, great. I'm really happy about that. I mean, the public sector workers weren't, but take your point. The North East has got its attractions. And, you know, I feel like this is the most right-wing government in history.

It's like on the political economy side, it really isn't. Like there's a few, you know, sometimes you'll hear something crazy and, you know, that they release as a press release or as a media message, but on the sort of fundamentals, Boris Johnson was to the left of David Cameron. These same people had no problem with David Cameron, right? And austerity between 2010 and 2016 in terms of how, you know, how it dismantled lots of really core parts of how, you know, this country functions. So, yes, the Tories will be gone. I think that's good.

My view is that Labour will be less bad, which is obviously not great. And it's probably why people aren't sort of, you know, infused about a Stama premiership. But equally, I think that's probably why he's going to win over lots of floating Lib Dem Tory voters or floating Lib Dem Labour voters or Tory Labour voters and the Red Writers. wall. I think there'll be less bad. But fundamentally, I think we need a political revolution in this country. And I don't mean like get out the bare nets and kill everyone. I think we need a profound shift in power, economic, political and cultural, away from London, away from Westminster, towards ordinary people. A few ways of doing that. Portia representation. I think electoral reform

of some kind. And I think you need to start dismantling some of the really dysfunctional parts of British politics. Which have what? Well, for instance, the electoral system is the first one for me. And this is going to sound sort of strange. The worst part for me, of first part of the post, isn't the two-party system, it's the liberal Democrats. Because the liberal Democrats, in Tory seats, will say to Labor voters, we're the only ones that can meet the Tories.

You have to vote for us. Then they'll go in Labor seats, say to Tory voters, we're the only ones that can meet Labor, right? They have actual no substantial politics. They're purely a consequence of the two-party system. We're not, you know, we're not that bad. And if you don't like these guys, these other guys can't. How the hell is that a basis for a democratic vote?

So I just think when you look at the Tories, you look at Labor, you look at the Lib Dems, so much is dysfunctional with First Past the Post. That would be the first one for me, I think. I mean, we've had plenty of people on to talk about the problems with First Past the Post and what a proportional system might mean. One of the things it will likely mean is that extremist politics, parties do very well. And so I sometimes, and I'm very open to the idea of PR, but I wonder whether people have

thought about that. But look, I actually, you've raised a few points that I think are bigger than this whole Twitter left-right bullshit that we spend too much time talking about. And I want to talk to you about a couple of things where we may agree less than we have done so far. One of them is, and I'm glad you said the n0.0.0.1%. But this narrative generally worries me, because people talk. talk about the 1% or the top this or the top that. And I look at the statistics. The top 10% of

people in this country pay 60% of all the income tax. Right. And I sort of think like, I mean, okay, they're rich and we're British, so we have to slag off people who've done well. It's kind of part of our culture. But are they really the bad guys? The people who are earning what would be put in top 10% of probably like over 80 grand? Yeah. Are they really the bad ones that we have to point our fingers at and go, you're not paying enough tax? their 10% are providing 60% of the income. Do you know what I mean? No, I entirely agree. I mean, Labor's manifesto in 2019, they would increase tax for the top 5%. So even that, I agree with you. There could be somebody, look, on 80 grand a year, they've got a couple of kids, maybe the other

half, whether it's the wife for the husband, maybe just works part-time, for whatever reason, partly because of caring for the kids or whatever. You know, given what's just happened, mortgage rates, energy, they might think I need to put some away to look after my parents a few years, my own pension, you know, it doesn't go that far. So I'd agree they're not the enemy. But, you know, there was an amazing quote recently from the managing director of Harrods. And this was in the midst of the sort of crisis, you know, with living standards. And they said, we're doing great, you know, recessions and economic downturns are, the rich always get rich in a recession. That's what they said. And I think that is a problem.

I think that is a problem. I think it's a problem that in the European Union, we're not in the European Union, in Europe. The most valuable company is LVMH, Louis Vuitton, Moe, Hennessy. It's a luxury goods brand. The biggest companies in the United States are producing extraordinary goods and services for literally billions of people.

We're making designer handbags and champagne. There's nothing wrong with that, but I think it says something quite significant about how our economies work. And also, is that really the basis of, like, future prosperity? I suspect it's not. No, probably not. But I guess what I'm asking you more about is this, I hear this a lot.

And I'm not talking about Twitter. I'm talking about question time. I'm talking about mainstream flagship programs. People always talk, I'm not in the 1%. I may never be in the 1%. But the more I meet people who are, the more I realize that the, look, of course, this country has a history of the landed gentry, right?

People whose only achievement as they went to Eaton in the 7th generation. I've met those people and they're annoying, admittedly. But there's not a lot of them. Most of the people I meet who are wealthy and who have a high income are people who've created things that are of value to other people, right? They are actually creating jobs. They're creating opportunities.

So when I see them being sort of demonized as the problem, I don't really know that that to me is accurate because I'm not envious of them. I'm like, you've done well because you've contributed to other people's lives. you've created opportunities for other people. You've created a product that other people want to buy or a service or whatever. And I am quite uncomfortable with that rhetoric.

Do you know what I mean? Well, I sort of disagree. So, like, look at landlords. We have a lot of landlords. Yeah. A lot. So it's not even the 1% like you say. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like over 2 million of them. Yeah. And it's lots of people. They would be electricians or tradesmen and they didn't pay national insurance and that's their pension, right? Yeah.

So they're not like, you know, they're exploiting arguably their tenants, but they're not like, you know, this caricature of the 1% absolutely. But the way I see it is this, all the capital that's going into Baita Letts, all the intel, these are very smart people, right? All the construction work and the application that goes into building these little rabbit hutches for people. I just think, and then you look at the high street, and you think surely it would make more sense to society, you want to make money, like you say, you should be making money from selling goods and services to people. starting a business.

And I think too much of the money, capital and the know-how and the ambition has gone, for instance, and buy-to-lets in this country of the last 20 years. This is where you and I would, and Francis, would agree completely. The housing market is completely fucked, on purpose, and they refuse to fix it.

Yeah. Right? Because the incentive structure rewards all the behaviour that's there. But that's a different issue to the 1%. Because, as you say, most of the buy-to-letes are just owned by people who built up some capital

in their housing. and then bought another flat when they could or whatever and rent it out. And I agree with the housing market is a big problem that needs fixing. But that isn't my point. My point is, are the people at the top, the captains of industry, let's say, the people who started a big business, even if the... Well, the captains of industry often don't start businesses anymore. Maybe, maybe.

But I know people who do, this is what I'm saying, right? People who run big businesses, let's say, it doesn't really matter. They are creating value for the rest of us, one way or another. Why are they a problem? And I'm open to the possibility that they are. I'm just saying, why is there this narrative? And maybe I'm holding the wrong person to account here. Maybe you don't think that.

I don't know. Do you see what I'm getting at? The housing market is a real issue. But if we set that aside, why is creating wealth and earning a high income a problem? I don't think it is necessarily. You don't think it is. I mean, as long as there's a great line by Clement Attlee, and I think he was sort of criticizing charity. He said, you know, a patriot would just pay their taxes and that would be done.

I think charities are cold, I can't remember, a cold dreadful thing, something like that. And I, you know, look, if you are willing to work hard and, like you say, you meet these people, almost all of them say, I've been very lucky, right? People have done really spectacular things in business, whatever. They go, I worked hard, I'm smart, blah, blah, blah. I was also really lucky at right place, right time. Maybe it would have happened at a different time, you know, if I hadn't happened then, but generally speaking, I was very lucky.

And there's a lot of gratitude there. But let's pick one issue, corporation tax. Corporation tax, you need to be competitive, obviously. We have higher rates of corporation tax in places like Japan or California or Germany than we do here. Now, the argument would be, don't corporation taxes are tax on corporate profits to start with. If you're not making any profits, you're not taxed on. The argument would be, oh, the lower the rate of corporation tax, the higher the incentives to set up businesses, right? But actually what we know empirically is that a higher rate of corporation tax, not too high, because yes, they will go.

But a higher rate of corporation tax means that businesses reinvest in fixed capital, robotics, upskilling workers, because they don't want to pay tax. They'd rather reinvest it in the business than give it to HMRC. And so there's a very sensible pro-business argument for higher corporation tax. Not 60, 70%, but, you know, somewhere close to Germany. And in the last election, again, Labour was saying, let's get at 26%. And that's still lower than the places I just mentioned. And I think if you want a high productivity, smart economy, then I think you'd have to do something like that.

It doesn't mean I hate rich people, or I think profits are bad. It's about, like you say, aligning the incentives to create a more affluent, prosperous country. If you look at, for instance, there are remarkable tables on this. Industrial robots per head, you know, Britain is the country that gave the world the Industrial Revolution. We're nowhere. We're below like Thailand, right?

We have a very, very low automation economy in this country. So it should be a question of like public policy interests. How do we change that? I think one answer is probably corporation tax. I mean, given the dust spin the country's in right now, maybe not. But in the media... Don't forget, countries do have to make a profit to pay dividends to attract investment. So there's a trade-off there.

Of course, no, there is a trade-off. But I think it should be part of a policy mix. And if people disagree, they need to explain why. I think something like corporation tax, for too long, I was just been like, you're jealous of rich people. I'm sure some people are. That's not what I'm saying. Yeah.

I'm hearing a lot of this talk about the 1%. And look, I think it's fair to say, and this isn't me trying to attack the left in any way. Please, yeah. But it is fair to say that a lot of people, vocal people on the left, do hate rich people. I see that when I see the way they talk about it. Now, you clearly don't.

But I hate it's a strong word, isn't it? Isn't they hate them? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there is... Can you give me an example? I know, I'm not saying it don't exist, but can you give me an example, obviously?

I actually can't, because I'm not thinking of a specific moment, but I hear this over and over, and as I say, I'm not talking about Twitter, or X or whatever it's called now. I'm talking about big discussion shows where it's like, the rich, the rich, the rich. And I don't...

I've never seen The Ridge as bad people in and of themselves. No. You know? But it sounds like you don't either. Well, look, let's go to the OG, Karl Marx. You know, he would say that in a way, capitalists are, in a way, they are in a desperate situation. Because as capitalists, you're in competition with one other, right?

And this is the beauty of capitalism. You're in competition with one other. You have to produce the best goods and services at the best price to get market share. If you don't, you're screwed. Your opponent gets, your rival gets market share. This is great for the customer. If you're, you know, this is the sort of neoliberal or the liberal classical economists read on things. What Mark says is a really important insight is they're in competition with each other, and this makes them permanently anxious.

Because, of course, if you fail, the worst thing of all happens, you join the working class. So, and you have to do certain things. So for instance... Right, that sounds terrifying. If you own a business and you're selling ex-product at £10, and your rival is selling it for £9, you have to sell it for £9,000. Otherwise, you're gone. So what does that mean? Ideally, you know, you find new ways of increasing productivity, which don't hurt anybody.

but the first port of call for many is, okay, cut head count, cut quality, reduce pay, you know, get rid of this benefit. So, and that might not be because they're a bad person. They have to do it because capitalism is inherently a competitive system. And Amazon, sorry, Francis, we'll just wrap up here. No, no, no, it's cool, it's cool. Amazon would be a very good example of this. I mean, we had James Bloodworth on to talk about his book, which exposed a lot of the practices that these giant multinational corporations are engaging in to drive.

down their costs. And by the way, you talk about the high street. That's why the high street is, fuck. It's not because people aren't investing in it. It's because they can't compete with Amazon. So I hear you. I was just curious because I just, I wonder how we have a productive economy

if there is a section of the population who sees anyone who's made any money as a problem, you know, and sort of sometimes feels like that to me. But anyway. Yeah, so, I mean, that is the issue. I think the problem is, is that people talk about the rich and they conflate the Amazons

and the Jeff Bezos of this world with the bloke who's maybe a very successful estate agent on 90K a year. Do you think that is... He is an estate agent, I'm there. Yeah, so you're right to hate them. It's a good point. I think there's an interesting angle here, which is obviously we're in the anglophone world, right?

We speak English. And what's the great line? You know, the United States and Britain are separated by the same language. which, you know. Two countries divided by a common language. Exactly. Very well put.

That's exactly it. And I think a lot of this comes from the US, where it's entirely legitimate, right? Where you have a country which with tens of millions of people that don't have access necessarily to healthcare, where the working class, blue-collar workers in the US have been screwed, frankly, let's be real, for 20, 25 years. And where there is a runaway plutocratically. They are earning huge amounts of money, not even earning.

The market caps of their businesses, skyrocketing and they obviously own lots of that. So, yeah, Bezos, mask. You know, when I was growing up, the idea of a company being worth a trillion dollars was like, well, well, that probably never happened. You know, I think Apple now is touching three trillion dollars. And some of the business practices which underpin that, yes, Apple sell amazing products. I've got an iPhone here. I have an IMAQ. But there's also lots of, you could say shadier stuff, right? Share buybacks, they're inflating the price of their stock. That makes the people like Tim Cook, for instance, better off. Elon Musk with Tesla. I think he's done an amazing thing with Tesla. People love to bash Elon Musk,

me included, I think he's probably, I think he's maybe screwed Twitter. We'll see. You know, he's defied predictions before. He accelerated the adoption of electric vehicles probably by about 15, 20 years, like an incredible thing to do. He took on like the major car manufacturers and he's done really well, like incredible thing to do. But there's a few what economists would call negative externalities with this. If you're worth 200, billion. You know, the amount of political power you can buy with 200 billion is incredibly dangerous. That to me is the main thing. So, yes, it's bad that these people have so much money, but it's what they can buy with that money in terms of political influence, the media,

opinion-making. So if the Koch brothers were just billionaires, fine. But it's the fact that they are trying to buy massive political influence in a range of areas. They're trying to really, they've tried to basically buy candidates in the past. So I think for much of, the left, the big problem is political capture by the elite as much as those people being rich. If they were just rich and they sort of just, you know, did their thing and enjoyed life, I think we'd be having a slightly different debate. But, you know, Jeff Bezos has the Washington Post and then the Washington Post runs something excoriating Donald Trump. I can see why the average American voters would say, this is kind of screwed up, actually. I completely agree

of you. And it's a very good point. My issue always with the left is it's a very very personal thing to me. So my background, everyone's going to drink because, you know, it's the in-joke. So my mother's from Venezuela. I saw Chavez come to power in 99. I saw him bring Socialismo, as we would say, to the country. I saw him shut down journalists. He put one of my relatives under house arrest because he refused to enact Chavez's wishes, which would make the country poorer. and he was put under house arrest until he complied. I saw Chavez threatened journalists until the point my cousin had to leave

because he didn't know at 1 o'clock in the morning there was going to be a knock on the door and he was going to a prison called La Tumba. I don't need to explain what that is. And I saw everyone on the left venerate Chavez, venerate socialism, including Corbyn, including people saying this is an example of socialism working. And that was a moment for me where I fell out of love with the left because I was trying to say,

hang on, this isn't what you think it is, but people didn't care. And now everybody's moved on and they've moved on to the next project and saying they're socialists. And everyone in my country is screwed, to be honest with you. And I guess my question is to you seeing countries like Venezuela. seeing countries like the Soviet Union. How can you identify with socialism when it's never worked? Well, that's an interesting one.

Let's start with Venezuela. So I think South America is incredibly unique because of the Monroo doctrine, because of the fact that you have this global superpower to your north, the United States never let social democracy happen in South America. It was not allowed. This happens in Guatemala with a guy called Arbenz. in the 1950s. He really just wants to institute a bit of land reform and trade union rights.

Really nothing radical. Nothing that wasn't happening by social democratic parties in Europe. The point was that wasn't allowed. That was not allowed. So this idea of, well, if only the South Americans could have sort of mainstream center-left politicians. They tried it. Okay. They were removed by military coups. And interestingly enough, who was in Guatemala in the 50s when that happened? Che Guevara. Yeah. And he says, well, they're not going to let us do that. then we've got to seize control by, you know, by military means. And actually we're going to have to hold on to power in a very different way. So I think the development of socialism and South America,

it's not to make excuses for anyone, but I think the development of socialism in South America is quite unique and quite particular because parliamentary democratic socialism or social democracy like we have in Europe was not allowed. It was completely off the table. So that's parking that one. And in terms of socialism not working, I suppose,

and again, I also wouldn't compare the Soviet Union to Venezuela. Yeah. I think Venezuela under Chavez did well because of high oil prices. So there was a sense of rising prosperity. And obviously when oil prices went down, that sort of disappeared again. I think with the Soviet Union, it was different in so much as there was a national project of industrialization too quickly. But there was a different kind of project. It was reaching towards a modernity in a different kind of way to somewhere like Venezuela, I feel.

I might be wrong. And the Russian people and the peoples of the former Soviet Union, I think, can be proud of certain accomplishments, such as the first person in space. I think it's an incredible technological achievement. I think it's an amazing achievement. The defeat of Nazism. I think you should be very proud of that. That wasn't so much a technological achievement, but yeah. Well, no, but you know, you say that, but there's some really interesting stuff about this, about the ability of the Soviet Union after 1940, 41, to actually start developing incredible tanks, incredible military technology. Incredible, but it could rival the Germans.

There's a way that nobody predicts in the 1930s. You know what, actually, it's the other way around, interestingly. So the Soviet Union, people don't know this because the Soviets got overrun in 41 and early 42. What actually happened is the Soviets had far superior technology in the early period, but then they got outpaced by the German military machine as the war went on. So by the end of the war, what the kind of technology the Germans had is the basis of all our technology now. They had cruise missiles, basically, in their thousands, et cetera. And there's a reason the Soviets lost 20 million people in World War II. But, I mean, look, your point, look, every society has positives and every way of structuring

it. I guess the point that Francis is making about it not working is in the Soviet Union and in Venezuela, the argument would be about socialism that it is a way of thinking about the world that is so unnatural to human beings, the way that we evolved to think about our interest on the interests of others in the Soviet Union, as you know, the idea was that you were supposed to put the needs of the state above those of your own family, that it takes putting people in Latumba, or it takes people being put into gulags, to achieve that dream in which Pavlik Marozov gives up his parents to the state, because it's such an unnatural way that doesn't really apply onto how human beings are white. If we were mole rats or ants,

where we were genetically linked, that might be easier to do. Do you see what, that's kind of more the argument? No, I think that's, and I think the 20th century has a series of experiments like this from Nazi Germany to the USSR to the Khmer Rouge, where you have this incredibly, I mean, I don't even think there are economic projects,

extremely cultural projects, and extremely innovative as cultural projects. I like the idea that a human being is a tabula rasa, blank slate, and look, I don't think that's necessarily doesn't have to be socialism or fascism or anything like that. I think it has a certain interpretation of human nature which we now know is wrong.

We know that doesn't function. So why am I a socialist? I would actually, I'm a Marxist, frankly. And I can also go back to a few what I would call success stories regarding democratic socialism. We'll part that for a moment. I'm a socialist because I believe that workers generally should be as close to the product of their labour as possible.

They should have as little of it, alienated from them as possible, which means a fair deal for workers, right? So if a worker is creating value per hour of 30 pounds an hour, I think they should be earning a significant chunk of that. Clearly, there should be a little bit of profit, there should be some taxes and so on and so forth. But the idea that a worker should be exploited from the products of their labour, I think, is a moral affront. And I think that to me, I'm a Catholic, but that to me is almost like an article of faith. I think a good society allows workers to enjoy a significant share of the value that they create. In terms of Marxism, I'm a Marxist,

capital, Das Capital, isn't, is not a manifesto. He does a manifesto called the Communist Manifesto, but Capital is called Capital Critique of Political Economy. So what he does in Capitalis, he's critiquing the classical political economists,

J.S. Mill, Adam Smith, Riccardo, and whatnot. And I know this is pretty quite cliched for many people, and clearly that's not what happens in the 20th century, but Marx wasn't a programmatic thinker. he has some parts where he says you may need to do this, this or this, or he talks about, you know, civil war in France, military theory and whatnot. But the stuff that you see in the Soviet Union or with the Khmer Rouge is as connected to what Marx is talking about as, say, Nazi Germany is with Edmund Buck.

That's my view. You know, it's like saying, how could you be a conservative because of look where it ends up when you believe in flag, family. tradition. And tradition and, you know, patriotism and very muscular robustness. Look where it ends up. Well, there's been many decent people who believe in all those things who never ended up in that place. So I tried to have a bit more of a nuanced view. And then in terms of where it sort of succeeded, you know, look at Singapore. Li Kwang-Yu would have identified as a democratic socialist. Look, he's very, you know, he's very controversial figure. But Singapore and the state had a very

distinct role in its development, really from the 1950s all the way through to today. Today, Perthead, it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world, has no natural resources. Basically, people thought it wouldn't last 10 minutes once the British left, I think, in the early 1970s. They built an incredibly complex, sophisticated, high productivity economy. How do they do that? Central planning. They promoted people on the basis of competence and talent. And they didn't allow the free market to run riot in so much as having an unplanned economy.

There was, you know, let the invisible hand do its thing. They didn't do that. They had a significant amount of planning, and they wanted that planning to create wealth, which would lead to a more prosperous country. And it worked. Now, I'm not saying Singapore is a socialist paradise, but on things like, for instance, land.

Actually, how land policy works in Singapore, it's effectively a socialist policy. So, you know, I think it's hard to say, well, where has it worked? We've got very clear, identifiable examples of socialist policy working. very well. To finish, it's interesting if you compare someone like Singapore to Venezuela. If Singapore has oil, none of that happens, right? You do not let Lee Kuan Yew and a bunch of really

intelligent, competent, remarkable young men run a country if they have a shedload of hydrocarbons. Because we have many examples where people tried to do that and they mostly got murdered. Singapore's advantage was it had no natural resources and it was in the same neighbourhood as Vietnam and China. So the US was actually quite happy to sort of say, well, look, let them do their thing. So it's a bit more complicated that. And I don't want to be, I hope I've never seen as an apologist for the other. No, you don't sound like that. But I do think there are really important lessons to learn from a whole range of societies. And I think, I think there are positive lessons to learn from, you know, quote-unquote conservative societies. And I think it's about

what works. So let's look at the positive lessons from what would you implement left-wing policies in this country that we do not have to make society fairer and better for all. What would you do? Left-wing policies? Yes. I think my first policies

wouldn't even be that left-wing, but okay. Well, what would be your policies? Yeah, that's the interesting thing. They wouldn't even be left-wing. I think the very first thing I'd do is I'd scrap police and crime commissioners. I think we have far too many non-jobs in this country.

Yeah, political parties creating up. Exactly. I'm not trying to be popular, because I have such a bug bear with police and crime commissioners. I'd reduce the House of Lords and I think there's arguments about how it works do you have it elected

do you scrap it all together do you keep it as it's presently composed those arguments are actually quite strong I don't necessarily agree with them but we can have that debate As you say this isn't the left wing point that there's lots of people on the right and in the centre who agree with that

yeah but I think you should definitely be smaller right it's presently like 900 400 tops I would half the number of councillors but I'd pay councillors double what they presently get because I don't think people and we don't really have

towns people in local government because they're not paid enough So I'd give them twice the responsibility and twice the pay. None of that's left wing, but I think that's like really low-hanging fruit to improve the country. Right. Then in terms of socialist policies,

so for instance, I think what Singapore does on land is really good. You know, I think I would probably scrap council tax and introduce a land value tax because it's fairer. And land value tax is a few things. It incentivises the productive use of land. So if you own land and nothing's happening with it

and you're being taxed, even if it's a small amount of tax a year, you shift it quite quickly or if you've got an empty building in central London it's put into use very quickly. So that would be my first thing probably is a land value tax and get rid of council tax

which is incredibly unfair. Why? Why is it unfair? Yeah. Because it's not about how much you earn. So for instance, you might be living in a... I'll give a really good example.

Students don't pay it. For instance. Students don't pay council tax. And if you're in Leeds or... where I live in Portsmouth, you might be in a council ward where there are thousands of students, they still have the bins collected, they still have all manner of services they can use, but they're not paying into it. What would be far better is if the landlord was paying a land value tax. So there's lots of problems with council tax. Again, pensioners tend not to pay it. You can get various forms of relief and whatnot.

I think a land value tax has less bureaucracy, less administration, because you don't have all these little opt-outs. and I think it's just fairer. Well, look, I don't have any issue with any of that, but what about seizing the means of production? When does that happen? I wouldn't. I'm taking the piss. But I'm just curious because none of that is,

like you say you're a Marxist, but none of that is really a Marxist thing, right? So where does the Marxism come in? Yeah, so for instance, I would have a National Development Bank. I would have a bank which is owned by the state, which goes around really financing businesses. It's led by business, people, right? It's not just financing every dumb dick and Harry, but it's, for instance,

looking to grow businesses in underdeveloped areas. Oh, mate, I've said this for ages. Like, why doesn't the government buy a piece of land in the centre of London somewhere, close to the centre, and start something for people like us where you get subsidised rent on a space that is suitable for the new tech industries, the new media, whatever, where you can rent a podcast studio to launch yourself. And then once you've done well, you go off and you do it by an incubator. Yeah, an incubator, exactly. I'm totally with that. Can we come back to the kind of more like big idea principle?

Because you mentioned something about workers having a bigger share of the productive stuff that they create, basically, right? And I was curious about this, and please understand, this is not a gotcha. Please, go for it. Get the tweets out. I don't know what your situation is with Navarra, but if you found it, I imagine you have a chunk of the equity. Is that fair to say?

There's no equity. Is it is not a business or? So I'm not even a director. You know what, fuck it then. It doesn't matter. Because I'm not trying to catch you out. No, you can, no, no. No, but I don't want to.

I'm trying to have a conversation. So trigonometry, right? Me and Francis started it, right? We owned 50-50. We also then had someone come in and be our executive producer. He owns some of the equity of it. We owe it. The socialists.

Well, we know. We're capitalists. We knew that for him, him to be fully invested in it and also for him to accept the terribly low wage we could pay him at the time. Exploitative. Exactly. The exploitative wage he was paid at the time.

I mean, we own nothing at that time, so we were happy with it. Anyway, my point is, right, we created this. We took all the entrepreneurial risk. We put our own money into it for years without taking any money out of it, right? We worked incredibly hard. Yes, someone who comes in now and contributes 30 pounds worth of work an hour, should get a significant chunk of that. But what about the fact that someone had to start this

and take all of the risk for the worker to then come in and actually do it? Because we don't really live in the world that Marx was writing about where all you needed was a loom in a factory and then you just get some bodies in there to work it. Do you know what I mean? USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance.

With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. You're entirely right. It's a very different world. It's a very different world to what it was 50, 60 years ago when our parents were our age or, you know, a bit younger. It's a very fair point. And as somebody who's, you know, also co-founded a media organization, I feel your pain.

It's your baby. No, but I think you're right. There's no pain. I'm very happy to pay people what I think is a fair wage. But it's not going to look like what you think is a fair wage, is my point. Well, so let's say you guys get a cleaner. Yeah. And I don't know what you, you, I don't know what the arrangement is for you guys.

You get a cleaner. I presume you would, you know, so you wouldn't say, let's give her a minimum wage. I don't know what your values are. But if you're paid decent money and you're doing well and your audience likes you, I genuinely think it's a perfectly normal humane response to say, yeah, give the cleaner 15, 16 quid an hour. She does a great job, the place is clean. We value a clean studio. We actually pay a cleaner more than that.

Yeah, there you go, right? So, well, here's the thing. And it's not even a necessarily a criticism of capitalism then, right? We're going to something different, things like outsourcing. And that's actually how lots of this country works today, right? And I feel like sometimes we're having debates at like the wrong level. Circo, Colas, G4S, Sodexo. These companies are disgusting.

They shouldn't exist. Because what they do is they'll go into a workplace, let's say a hospital or whatever or a school, and, you know, they function on a similar-ish way to what we just, sort of discuss, somebody's paid relatively well. Coales will go in there and they say, you know what, they're not, they're paid too much. We need to reduce costs. The whole point of outsourcing is screwing, working people over. So there's a few layers here. And I think, frankly, too much of the UK economy looks like that, right? If people were like yourself,

starting businesses, and I think that's the natural human impulse and instinct, they do a good job, pay them a fair wage. Right. Yeah. But that isn't where we are as a country. That isn't where we are, right? Well, it's where we are. That's where you are. And my point is, I feel quite often, the conversation we have about these issues sort of fails to take that nuance into account. Now, this is not unusual for political debate, admittedly. They never take nuance into account. Look, on all this big government outsourcing with these companies that abuse people, I completely agree with that. I don't agree with them. I agree with you, what I'm trying to say. I guess the one point that someone would make is, look, Aaron, automation is coming in.

We're seeing it. We're seeing it with AI. We're seeing it with robots. If you're going to pay people a lot and you're saying to them, you know, they deserve a fairer chunk, which emotionally, and look, my mum, first generation immigrant, before the minimum wage, I think she was on like £2.30 an hour. It was something like that in the 90s. She earned literally nothing, had no rights to a pension. She's disabled now, entirely dependent on my dad.

And with me helping them, they scrape by. So I get what you're saying. And it resonates with me. I guess we're looking down the line at AI automation, and you're going, are we not just going to make people millions of jobs obsolete? Is that not the danger here as well? I wrote a look about it. You did.

Fully automated luxury communism. I think, and this is why, you know, I use the C word. And this is why I use the C word. Because I think, and the trajectory here is 50 or 100 years, realistically, we're looking at a situation when basically every human task can be automated, I think, within 50 to 100 years. I think that's quite likely, right? Except podcasts. Except podcasts. And at which point, like you say, that creates massive dysfunction in a bunch of ways. So, for instance, if you have workers who don't have

cash capital to buy goods and services, which are made more productively than ever before, because you have some much automation, then you have a crisis of what's called under demand, crisis of demand or under consumption, which is you don't have people who can buy all the goods and services being made. You have a problem. Another issue is that the remaining jobs that are there and which are captured by uniquely human sort of characteristics,

those are paid better and better and better because you can't automate Cristiana Ronaldo or a great TV or podcast. You can't automate those guys, right? For now. And so what that means is that automation compresses jobs like, you know, we've seen it in manufacturing for decades, but I think it's going to come for driving in a decade or two,

and then basically it's going to come for everything. And so I think as a society, we have a bunch of problems there, like I say, crisis of demand. And if we think inequality is bad now, my God, you know, it's going to be even worse than 30, 40, 50 years time. And I would also add, Aaron, a crisis of meaning. Because jobs bring dignity, and they bring an identity, and they bring structure.

Well, that's why I used the, and that's why I use the C word, because this is a profound challenged capitalism. It's a profound challenge to capitalism. And I think we need to be honest about that. Because the economists did a great line about this in 2013. They said, what happens when capital becomes labor? Which is to say, there is no distinction between capital and labor once you can automate pretty much everything.

And that we might not see it. I think we probably will. Our children will see it. And so what's the sort of political economic settlement when that happens? You know, it doesn't look like capitalism. It doesn't look like capitalism as we know it. So that's why I use the C word. Controversial way.

The thing is, I don't think, I don't know about Francis. I certainly don't disagree that in a world when no one has to work, it sort of doesn't make sense that the people who historically have held the capital now own everything and no one else has anything. In a world where no one needs to work and everything is done by robots, a system of distributing resources fairly equally in that world is great, actually, I think. I'm sure there's counter arguments to that that I probably haven't considered, but I'm open to that.

But what Francis was asking was something else, which is in the interim, because we're all going to live in that interim 100 years, right? There's quite a lot of human lives in that. When you raise wages, what you are doing is you incentivizing those jobs out of existence. Yeah. Right?

And so isn't there a counterproductive element to some of those drives for higher wages in certain industries? Yeah. There's a guy he just died, actually, a guy called Mario Tronte. He was a Marxist Italian sort of thinker. And he said exactly this. So historically, people have always thought innovation is driven by capitalists, right?

Yeah. Great levels of automation, new innovations, to create things more productively. He says, no, it's created by workers and struggle. Them struggling for better work, better paying conditions, more money, is the catalyst for better innovation. Right. Because that leads to, like, the things you're talking about. You create incentives.

Yeah. And this is literally like page one or two of the wealth of nations, right? So I think, I think, again, even if you're not on the left, if you want a high productivity, high performance economy, there's the argument for higher wages, because you're going to create incentives for businesses to increase productivity, use more fixed capital. Hold on, you care about the working people.

You want to automate their jobs out of existence. No, no, no. But if you have working class representation, you have labor organizations, and the state is on their side, they can be reallocated to other parts of the labour market, they can be retrained, or you can say, look... The evidence is very poor on people being retrained.

No, I agree with you. Well, in an ageing population, we probably will need to retrain some people to help, you know, with regards to wealthy care work, for instance. I don't mean like retrain, design an app, that's bullshit. I agree with you there. But on things like, I mean really demographic ageing.

So I think in the US, over 50% of the jobs which are growing significantly are in relation to health and elderly care services because we're getting older as a society. We have fewer babies and people are living longer, generally speaking. So I suppose the quick answer is, in the interim, what do we do? I think there's a bunch of challenges in the 21st century that we need to take head on

to borrow a phrase from Keer-Stymer, a mission-oriented sense. I agree with that. I think one is demographic ageing. I think another is the housing crisis, and I think a third is climate change. Now, people might be watching this. Oh, climate change, look at the weather outside.

Globally speaking, it's a huge challenge, particularly for countries to our south. They're going to really struggle. And I think, you know, we're going to have to gear up to a world which looks very different to today. So those will be what I say. We need to use the dividend of technological change to human genius

to address those challenges in the interim because, like you say, full automation is decades away. Yeah. I wish we hadn't run out of time there because I'd love to talk to you about climate change, but we're going to go to locals where we'll continue the conversation with questions from our audience,

so people can follow us there. But before we do, we always aim with the same question. What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? I've just used my demographic ageing card. But you can talk about it. Let's talk about it more. Just give us a brief headline of what you're talking about.

We talk about climate change. We talk about a bunch of other crises. I think for the West over the next 50 years, demographic ageing is the biggest problem because you have people living longer. you have the portion of the oldest old, people over 85, mushrooming, good, that's a success story, but they have incredibly expensive care needs. At the same time, the tax base, the working age population is comparatively shrinking, has so many challenges with regards to growth, with regards

to what healthy political culture looks like, and how you fund public services. So this is the thing which I think it's a terrifying challenge, although it comes from a very good place, living longer, and we generally don't talk about it enough. We need to do what you and I are doing, which is have more babies. That's it. Yeah, mine's on the way. You need to do like Elon Musk, you know? I mean, there's different ways of doing it.

Seven or eight, right? Yeah, yeah. But I sort of feel like if you're going to have children, you should really be there, is how I feel. This isn't a go of Elon Musk. This is a go of everyone. Aaron Bastani, thank you so much for coming on. If you like Aaron's work, follow him at Navarra Media.

but join us on locals for your questions and answers. You know what? Fuck it. We've got time. Well, not much, but we've got some time. Climate change. This episode sponsored by Maximus Tribe. You train, you track, you eat right. But if you're over 40, you've felt it. The results don't match the effort anymore. That's not willpower. It's biology. Hormones drop. Metabolism slows. Your body stops responding the way it used to. Maximus is. is the online clinic that reverses your decline with prescription performance medicines, gLP1s, testosterone, and peptides that reduce belly fat, restore energy, and boost recovery. Over 50,000 high performers have already broken through their plateaus.

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