TRASHFUTURE - Bossed in Space feat. Laurie Laybourn-Langton
Episode Date: May 23, 2019It seems like we have limited choices for the future of humanity. On one hand, we could stop the endless, destructive growth cycle that will ruin our climate, but that might affect shareholders’ por...tfolios. We could also build hellish capitalism in space, according to Jeff Bezos. This week, Riley, Milo, Alice, and Olga met with IPPR Associate Fellow Laurie Laybourn-Langton to discuss our options. Turns out, capital doesn’t want us to choose the good one! If you like this show, sign up to the Patreon and get a second free episode each week! You’ll also get access to our Discord server, where good opinions abound. https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’ll be performing once again at the Star of Kings in Kings Cross (126 York Way, Kings Cross, London N1 0AX) on Thursday, May 30 at 7:30 pm. Get your tickets here and return to the podcasting basement! https://www.tickettext.co.uk/trashfuture-podcast/trashfuture-live-30052019/ *ADDITIONAL LIVE SHOW ALERT* On June 15, we’ll perform at Wolfson College Bar (Wolfson College, Cambridge CB3 9BB) in Cambridge. The show starts at 8:30 pm, so be there and be ready to hear about Gundams. Tickets are £8 for students and £10 for general admission: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/trashfuture-podcast/trashfuture-live-in-cambridge-15062019/ Also: you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/, and what’s more, it’s mandatory if you want to be taken seriously. Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front
Transcript
Discussion (0)
So you have to picture me waggling my eyebrows theatrically.
But how's this?
So much for the lactose intolerant left.
Oh!
Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew!
Got him.
Damn, are you going to start writing for Leno?
I think I have to, yeah.
Is Leno still in the air?
Leno's on Mars now.
Wearing like huge trousers.
Oh, no, no, it's the last car.
It's the last car you can drive is like the Mars rover.
I thought you were going to be like the planet Mars.
Look at my car.
It's as big as a whale.
It's Mars tonight with Jay Leno.
He's doing donuts in the Mars rover.
I continue to be the only person on Mars.
My guest tonight will be me, Jay Leno.
A bit of the Martian where he just goes insane
and starts thinking he's Jay Leno.
Director Scott.
Hey, everybody, have you seen this?
Have you heard about this?
No, because I'm the only person on Mars.
Wait, he's Mike Tyson.
The pardon cast away with Tom Hanks' interviews, Wilson?
No, it's the bit of the Martian where Matt Damon
bites off a potato's ear, of course.
Prang it up.
Yeah, it's the potato of Interholi Field.
Hi, welcome back to GettingYourDickSuck.com presents
Trash Future Podcast, the podcast of GettingYourDickSuck.com,
the website.
It's me, Riley.
You may remember me from every other previous episode
of this podcast.
I'm here with Milo on the boards.
Hey, yeah, it's me.
I'm filling in for our special son, Nate, our darling boy,
podcast dad, who's also the son somehow,
because he has a bad tooth.
He's got a bad tooth, folks.
If the audio is bad on this episode,
it's my fault.
Nate can do no wrong.
No, it's Nate's dentist from a decade ago's fault.
Oh, yeah.
Goddamn, he's always foiling our plans.
The one guy who's been a consistent thorn in our side,
our most powerful and old enemy.
And we've also got Olga.
Olga Koch, prostate hunter.
Yep, she's hunting prostates.
We've got Alice on the phone.
Yep, dental health entirely normal over here.
Yep, of course, absolutely.
Getting an extra row of teeth, in fact.
Like a piranha.
Hussein's in parliament right now,
which is hilarious.
Humble brag much.
Yeah, getting his teeth checked out.
He demanded, yeah, he's in the teeth
in the parliament dentist.
The special dentist that all of these guys are doing.
If you know what I mean.
And we're also joined by Laurie Labrin Langton.
Hi.
Laurie, how are you doing?
I'm well.
My oral hygiene is pretty good right now.
Perfect.
So, how are you doing?
So, Laurie is an economist.
He has worked with the IPPR in the past,
but I believe you are doing something else now.
I'm still doing some stuff with IPPR
on environmental breakdown,
but also writing a book at the moment
on the same subject for Verso
and then doing some work with people
who are doing a lot of thinking about the new economy.
You're exploring a solo career.
Exactly.
The time has come for me to do that.
I don't know much about environmental breakdown,
but from those two words,
I assume it's good.
Unambiguously.
It's like the breakdown, like part of a song.
Yeah, exactly.
It's the bit of the environment
where the drummer gets a little solo.
The bit that everyone really wants to hear.
Exactly.
I mean, actually, the developmental breakdown
is the bridge in total.
We broke up with the environment
and now it's breaking down.
Look, Riley's electronic music corner.
Much of house music was actually born
when people would cut out the breaks
and then replicate them to make
entire records of just breaks.
We took the drum breaks of rock songs
and then extended them.
We humans.
What do you mean?
The people in Chicago that started house music?
We humans.
Also, this look.
If we can do that, we can go to Mars.
That's how house was born.
Ultimately, the point of house
was to lead to techno, and that's where techno came from.
Wait, I thought the point of house was to
diagnose mysterious illnesses.
The moral arc of the universe is long,
but it bends towards techno.
Yeah, specifically it bends.
Millennials don't do houses anymore.
They only do.
It's a house in crisis joke. Thank you very much.
I'm at rock and roll on Twitter.
The arc of history is long and it bends
towards Kreuzberg.
Oh, wow. That was a Berlin geography reference.
Welcome to our insufferable podcast.
Welcome to Riley trying to tell that story
about how he got into Burgine once.
No more than once.
Many times.
This is a sex podcast then.
No, no, no.
It's a techno podcast.
Riley, what was the last product we just did on these?
That's actually because of the way that this is going to be released.
That doesn't come out until a couple days from now.
Checkmate lives.
Yeah, so there's a preview
for all you premium subscribers out there.
But first, look, here's the thing.
We've talked about cool stuff
and the point of why humanity exists,
which is techno, for long enough.
It's time to talk about a startup
because I have a startup for us.
The startup is called
Cody.
C-O-D-I.
As in agent banks.
No, C-O-D-I.
C-O-D-I.
That just sounds like a porn stuff to me.
Yeah, yeah.
It does sound like that, but it's not.
It's not, okay.
Is it...
Is it like a coding school for little kids?
Fuck.
Hi, I'm Cody.
Oh, it's like Clippy, but for coding.
Yeah.
It looks like you're trying to hack into the Pentagon.
Could you use some help with that?
I hope it's not for Islamic extremism.
You guys are ridiculously off base.
Oh.
Laurie, anything?
Yeah.
It can only be about coding, right?
It's not. It's about nothing to do with coding.
Okay, okay.
I don't know. Maybe we should call them.
We'd give them some free consulting.
Yeah, it's like calling a news website.
Gettingyourdigsuck.com.
It makes no sense.
Like fast-order codeine for millennials?
I can see they're being a big marketer.
Nothing to do with that.
They hate owning things, but they love them.
They need them on demand.
Okay, I'm thinking fitness and pets somehow together.
Petness.
Okay, so wait.
We have a porn star, fitness pets,
and various kinds of either drug distribution
or coding platforms.
Just like yelling, get your cat real hench this summer.
Or agent Cody Banks.
The best film ever made.
Get your cat really high.
Exactly.
We're talking to you while falling asleep
about fog hat for like an hour.
It's the great new thing for your cat.
It's just like catnip, but it's fentanyl.
Okay.
So fentanyl for your cat is the strongest guest so far.
By strongest, do you mean best or closest?
Neither.
Okay, here's the first blank to outline.
Today, we're excited to unveil Cody,
a new kind of blank
that aims to improve communities
by connecting professionals to blank.
Shut up.
Oh, it's a new kind of opiate that
improves your community by connecting
professionals to fentanyl.
Cody by Purdue Pharmaceuticals.
Exactly.
The cutesy name makes me think of like a robot,
like the standing security guard ones.
A new kind of security robot.
Like with a segway on the bottom.
That delivers you the fentanyl.
It's a new kind of security robot
that aims to improve communities
by connecting professionals to fentanyl.
Okay, it's professionals.
So what do professionals do?
They circle back.
They do.
They do pop balls to learn about their bodies.
Exactly.
They wear little golf visors
and use adding machines with one hand.
Well, they say things like,
Janine, get me the figures from accounts.
Wait, what if it's like a secretary mistress service?
So it aims to improve communities
by connecting professionals to robot pussy.
Yes.
Is it British?
If it's British, you could...
It's from San Francisco.
San Francisco, how is it not robot boy pussy?
Yeah, exactly.
I'll give you a hint.
The service it offers is only available
in the San Francisco area.
Robussy.
A big one there is...
Dr. Robussy.
Traffic is a big one there.
Oh boy, is it ever.
Is it a traffic thing?
It actually makes a claim about traffic.
It says it will improve traffic.
Is it going to be some kind of weird living solution?
Because San Francisco has the world's most
hellish...
Co-Dominion stuff.
It's going to be like a giant boy pussy
that you can live in.
The rent is slightly cheaper.
Yeah, come live in this prison, the food is free.
You don't live like a stackable boy pussy.
Co-working space.
Yes, Laurie has it.
Compared to WeWork or something.
But it takes WeWork,
but it Airbnb's it.
I want to die.
I'm dead.
The way we do our jobs,
whether it's how we get to the office,
where our office is located or even where we eat lunch
has a major impact on how a city operates.
If we want cities to be
sustainable, efficient and livable,
then we'll need to consider some of the
norms to which we become accustomed.
Including...
Eating food.
Including...
Like living in your own apartment.
Yeah.
So...
It's Agent Cody Banks 3.
The banks won't give me a mortgage.
Each
Cody provides a unique opportunity
for neighbors to connect, share
and co-work in one another's
unused home spaces.
I do like.
The countable noun is the worst part of this.
So it's wealthy people
earning more money from owning property
by renting it out to
people that use it.
How is it different from Airbnb?
That's because I could do it by the hour, like a love hotel?
Yes.
Oh, come fucking my house.
That's how the bus comes in.
You could do it in my house for free.
Just let me watch. Thank you.
That's all I request.
Is this not socialism?
I'm trying to remember
Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry was the guy
that had the chain of restaurants.
Yeah, the secret cameras in the toilets.
We could watch women pee. Wait, did Johnny be good?
Chuck Berry? That guy?
Yeah, that guy. Johnny was not good.
None.
I can tell you that much. Johnny being very naughty and that's
ridiculous.
Every generation of celebrities has turned out to just
be awful.
What's going to happen to like Cameron Dallas
is 40.
Who's Cameron Dallas? The Vine guy who was
the star of Chasing Cameron.
He'll do something awful through
Cody.
He'll just be Bam Margera.
That's what
Bam Margera is like that guy
of 20 years ago.
That's what happened. MTV was just Vine
but in the 90s.
You got famous on MTV for no reason
and then you got
addicted to a head of yourself. You got addicted to
all kinds of drugs and then you get fat
and you have to sell yourself saying like,
hey Gina, happy birthday on some website
for like $40.
That website rolls though.
My birth is coming up.
It's on June 11th specifically.
I would like someone to please
buy me a cameo of Bam Margera.
It's on June 11th and June 11th only.
No.
Yes, Bam Margera surprised me.
Say eat this pussy Riley.
Look,
so look, guys,
guys, guys,
if we want cities to be
sustainable, efficient and livable,
we need to reconsider some of the norms to which
we've become accustomed, including
having offices.
We can't have offices anymore. I mean, I hate the idea
that they get you by like saying a reasonable
thing. It's like we can all agree
that cities are fucked up and we're like yes
and it's like you've signed up for hell.
Oh, perfect.
So then we're just going to let a bunch of strangers
like make
like, I don't know, like tinder for allotments
in your kitchen table.
Have you considered my
norms?
Have you considered
hot desking in purgatory?
What if
what if you were never alone again?
That's the thing.
If something like this ever becomes
regular, then
the market will never be regular.
The market just adjusts to it and then
the people who have all the property can just
charge the adjusted rate.
So if it's then expected that you're going to rent
out your living room for like eight hours a day,
five days a week at least, then
your rent will go up by that much.
Yeah, when people on the right say that like socialism
is wishful thinking, if socialism is wishful
thinking, then like Silicon Valley is like
the monkey's poor wishful thinking
where it's like
oh, you would like everyone to have
somewhere to live? Sure.
You live in a gulag.
It's just another example.
Your universal basic income is a thin potato soup
that everyone has served at a certain time of day.
That's just it.
We've said this again and again.
The Silicon Valley mindset
is turning all of the
Western world
into what we imagined the Soviet Union was.
Yeah.
It's just, yeah, it's privatized
Soviet Union, baby.
The gulag brought to you by Virgin Health.
Something less efficient.
Yeah, exactly. And we work
would just buy loads of property now
and then just rent that out
and dominate the market. Aren't they the number one
property owner in New York? Or like top three
for sure? Almost certainly.
Yeah, it's good. And in fact
there's some bigger property owners
in New York and New York. We're not going to go
into it. People with very big portfolios
actually.
Donald Trump just believing it's the
tallest property owner.
Thank you. Folks, I'm at least
four and a half inches taller
than Adam Newman. His hair, it's disgraceful.
It's very long. He wouldn't get taken
seriously anywhere that's what matters.
Look, that Christmas party they had
it was literally in hell. I'm not joking.
Other people were there. Pamela Anderson
she was there. She can tell you. Thank you.
So, each Cody
provides a unique opportunity for neighbors
to connect, share and co-work
in one of their unused home spaces.
We are passionately committed to growing
local businesses by developing a strong
circular economy within
each community. Strong circular economy.
Strong circular economy.
I don't understand.
It's like, what do you mean? Did you just call
my house a small business?
No, it's part of a complicated circular
economy which is not money laundering
somehow.
That's how they solved the fact
this is a pyramid scheme.
It's a circle.
When I move my drug profits through my network
of car washes, that's a strong
circular economy.
This is my local community.
Listen, guys. This isn't a pyramid scheme
so much as it's a kind of a business
centipede.
It's an efficiency triangle.
The triangle is the strongest
shape. So, how could this pyramid scheme possibly
fail? Anyone who talks about
if there's supposed to be unlimited growth
plus the circular economy, but the circular
economy is about people dealing with one
another in sequence and it
not using extra resources,
then it basically
violates one of the laws of thermodynamics.
Everyone working in everyone else's
homes making apps that are
competitors to Cody.
It's like
Cody disrupts the
home office dichotomy by
being there is no dichotomy. Everything's
an office now. Everything's a home. Just sleep on the street.
Do whatever. Feel free.
The thing that disrupts
that is just going to be,
look, you're not using every square foot
you step on all the time. You could
stack up to 18 people
like cordwood in your living room.
Are you really using all of your mitochondria?
What have your
mitochondria been doing for you lately?
It's like those ads that say, like, how hard
is your money working? Sitting there
in a bank account, why not give it to us?
How much is your liver doing?
Do you know how much uranium needs
to be refined?
How much are you working? Like eight hours a day?
What are you doing the rest of the day? Why not
be a desk for someone?
Some people would pay good money.
This is
one of the most grotesque examples.
Every time there is a company
that's like, we've disrupted something.
Actually, what they've done is they put a technical
veneer on just
making your life stupid
or more terrible. While you sleep
you can use your body as ballast for
some kind of construction.
We won the big
ideas innovation competition.
Oh, we got Google it right now and see who else
was in the fucking running.
Cody, formerly Hyvan.
What is Hyvan?
Wait, it's Professor Frank's company.
It's an I
with an umlaut.
What?
What?
H-I-U-M-L-O-T-V-E-N.
Wait, so, but that...
Wait, if it's on an I then it's a de-eresis, isn't it?
Yes. What a de-eresis means is that
that has to be pronounced separately
from the so be that.
Like that's...
They clearly didn't know the umlaut...
Sorry, what's the problem?
They clearly didn't know what an umlaut was.
No, or crucially what a de-eresis is.
Crucially, I didn't know what it was
because I pronounced it wrong just now.
I know.
But this thing, they named a business after it
that's gotten a lot of investment
and they called it, huh, even.
Yeah.
What were these just generated algorithmically though?
Oh, man.
I think a couple of years ago.
All of them now.
It's like kids' YouTube.
Startups are just kids' YouTube
but like, they get
higher budget.
What if all your co-workers
were constantly swapping heads?
Yeah, so this prize,
they won this prize because
they were accelerating
the race to the bottom.
Like what...
Who sponsored this prize?
They accelerated it better than anyone else.
Can you look up who else was in the Big Ideas prize?
Because this is fascinating.
It better have Uber for birds.
Because I submitted that four years in a row.
Big Ideas
is an annual contest
aimed at providing funding, support, and encouragement
to interdisciplinary students
who have, quote,
Big Ideas.
Wait, do they give you any money or they just give you encouragement?
Is encouragement the prize?
I'm withdrawing my Uber for birds idea.
I need funding.
Those birds aren't cheap.
Gotta keep those puppies caged.
By leveraging the creativity
of students and the power
of competition to drive innovation,
Big Ideas creates lasting, positive,
and impactful social change
empowering a new generation
of social innovators.
So this isn't just a startup
you know,
probably going to drive up rents
and make everyone's houses more useless
to them by stripping away the idea
that you have any personal space.
No, it's also a social fund
because it's creating a circular economy
that isn't a pyramid scheme for reasons.
I also love entering a competition
for your startup notionally to get funding
and then you come away with just encouragement.
The startup competition is run
by Big Time Tommy.
It's like, hey, look kid, you don't get any funding
but listen, if you believe in yourself,
your startup's going to go great.
Keeping it old school.
I want to be the bad reality show
contestant of that.
The one who's like, I'm not here
to make friends, I'm here to win.
Sorry, your theoretical
startup incubator contest
is run by Carl from Aquatine Hunger Force.
Wait, are we not familiar
with Big Time Tommy?
Oh, it's the best person on Instagram.
It's this really fat but really short
middle-aged Italian-American guy.
He's a gargoyle.
Who's always smoking a cigar,
literally smoking a cigar all the time.
There's this amazing video where he's like,
hey, Big Time Tommy here.
Listen, if there's one thing I do in my life,
it's keeping it old school.
You can slowly hear this building 80s
dance music in the background.
He's like, I'm chilling here with my boy,
DJ Vinny Dice, and he goes into this room
and his mate, who's called DJ Vinny Dice,
who's DJing on decks that are covered
with pictures of dice.
He's playing this like, pounding
80s dance, who's like,
and he's like, he's like really jamming it.
But you can just see it from
the guy's like, it's like him with a cigar,
selfie mode, camera flips around, it's DJ Vinny Dice,
he's going in, he's going like,
give it up for my man, Big Time Tommy!
And then the camera pans around the room
and there's just no one in the room.
He's just like, really aggressively DJing
to an empty room.
And that's the problem Cody aims to solve.
Yeah, and then Big Time Tommy just goes,
old school baby!
That's just the end of the video.
Does anyone think that late capitalism is just
something constructed to mock
basically just us in this room and the people
that listen to this podcast?
Yeah, I think.
My working theory is that actually
all of us, like we're in a final destination
situation and we died a while ago
and that we are,
we just were too bad.
So we're in like an early circle of hell.
Yeah, but there's also weird technology.
So it's like final fantasy destination.
Like the fucking, like the
the US who invented the sword missile thing.
The two avoid collateral damage, right?
Just like shoots a sword at you instead of a bomb.
Like, here we are.
We're like, you know, like the first couple
circles of hell in Inferno, we're just like...
Yeah, we're being chased by bees
for like time and age, or some other sin
that doesn't exist anymore.
Like when you're a codie.
That actually is a form of Simon.
There's like too much wind
or like these like early circles.
That's one of the circles.
Adulterers were all weird.
Adulterers had too much wind.
Their circle of hell was just, it was windy.
Like, because adulterers hate flying kites.
No, because they're blown on the
blusters of their passions.
They be getting blown, that's for sure.
Because you cheated on your wife with a can of beans?
Sorry, that's very stupid.
But you know how like, Piers Morgan,
thank you very much for laughing.
Piers Morgan and Greg's had the same PR guy.
I feel like Terash Future and Cody have the same PR guy.
Yeah, wait a minute.
Folks, folks, folks.
Do we want to hear the three benefits of Cody?
Yes. There are three.
Also, a codie sounds like it would be like a time period
in like a weird posh sport, like eating fives or something.
And at the end of the first codie, the score is 14
hands to three.
Or like at some point in like the
eaten wall game.
Like there's the Cody announced and then everyone
just like gets to go take a rest and have some tea.
Yeah, everyone has to get one bowl out
and sing a song.
Wait, is it Cody a really fancy bank?
No, that's Coots.
I never knew how to pronounce it.
It's a really fancy agent banks.
Cody.
Look, look, look.
The three benefits.
The three. Number one.
A better commute.
To someone else's house.
Right.
So it's still a commute.
You have a commute to someone else's house if you take
out burglary and it's more societal.
Yeah.
A better Uber journey to there.
Wait, but in this moment, I'm renting my house out to someone
else. I'm just exchanging living rooms with someone.
Presumably, yes.
Damn.
Wait, this would be an amazing way if you were a burglar
to just like case people's houses.
That's the other thing.
Is that to your point Olga,
if this was to become widespread
and then any landlord
was just going to expect that you're going to do some
Cody renting to someone else,
then
you would be paying for that premium
by renting Cody from someone else.
But you'd be paying their premium
by renting Cody from a third person.
Okay. I'm writing the first ever Cody
romantic comedy where it's like
she lives in a pietta tear.
He lives in a penthouse.
None of those people are using
Cody.
They're like, they all have like
like child sacrifice dungeons to go
into.
They can do their work in the basement of that
pizza restaurant.
Agent Cody Wanks.
Instead of spending time traveling to and
from the freaking office
or a traditional co-working space.
I love my traditional
co-working space.
Co-working space is too newer thing to be talked about
about.
Use a workspace
right in your own neighborhood
and he gains several hours a week.
A traditional co-working space is a plantation.
Oh boy.
Yikes.
Well, we said that.
To be fair, a lot of the same people are
heavily invested in those too.
Trash issue does not
endorse slavery or plantations.
I don't think you've ever implied that we did.
Whoever.
Benefit the second.
A great co-working community.
If you work from home,
you know it can be isolating and mundane.
Oh my.
Cody lets you surround yourself.
It depends how much red dead redemption you play.
Cody lets you surround yourself with
like-minded professionals who can offer a lot
more inspiration than your houseplants.
It sounds like an orgy now.
Wait Hans, they're saying that people are more
inspirational than plants.
Have you ever tried to have a conversation
with a houseplant? Not much fun, huh?
Wait, I'm renting out my living room to multiple people?
Apparently, yes.
They're gonna fuck in my living room.
Hey, look if you get more than two people
in a room, they fucked. That's the rule.
Old school, baby.
Old school.
It's me.
DJ Vinny Dice. No one else.
If there was another guy in here,
we'd have to fuck and that would be gay.
I don't make the rules.
Yeah.
There's also another.
Sorry, I just remembered another amazing one.
He's like, you know
we Italians,
you can just see him.
We Italians have a lot of phrases we like to use.
Well, I'm here teaching my friend Michael
some of our Italian phrases.
Michael's not Italian, he's Chinese.
He just turns the camera and looks like a Chinese guy there.
And he goes, so I'm teaching him Italian
phrase today. It's
forget about it.
Yes, that famous Italian phrase.
It's just the bit that killed me that was just
he's not Italian, he's Chinese.
In case you were looking at him thinking
that guy's not Italian.
He's just going to get to a Chinese person and be like
hey, what part of the boot you from, buddy?
Shanghai
Lemiglia.
Oh, Shanghai. It ends with a vowel.
Of course, it's from Italy.
Oh.
Yeah, so that's the thing.
They're basically pitching it like a swingers party.
You know, like my professionals
more inspirational than your house plans.
You just put all of your lanyards
in a big fishbowl
and then just
Oh lord.
No, surely they'd do an app for the swinging thing.
They'd be like a randomized.
I don't have to fuck my succulents anymore.
Yeah.
If you work in a building like this, no one would have keys
because you have to open the door with your phone.
Why have I broke again earlier today?
I know and the door wouldn't open.
So we had to fuck on the street to keep warm.
You didn't have code over here.
Again.
So is this going on in LA, San Francisco?
San Francisco.
In Berkeley.
All of the wealthy communities get to have
the succulent orgy things
and then the rest of the neighborhoods are left
working for Walmart and just stocking
the shops.
I think most orgies are succulent
in one way or another.
They're full of plants
that require little to no water.
Anyway, yeah, well, that's the thing.
These innovations are always created
by people in San Francisco
who assume it's going to be a bunch of tech zillionaires
using it for fun.
Uber was like, at least its PR
was that this is a
way for middle-class professionals
who are bored to earn a little bit of fun money
on the side,
driving your Tesla and recording YouTube videos
in the front, which we know you love to do
because they love to drive.
Tinder date comes in me and Tesla on autopilot.
We have Uber to thank for that in some ways.
But that was the PR.
Just like the PR for this is
break up the routine
and go to someone's house.
But in fact, it's just going to basically
if it goes to scale,
which fortunately it won't because it's
incredibly dumb.
If something like this goes to scale,
it will be pitched as a lifestyle choice
that then very quickly becomes a necessity
for most people.
We're very sorry that we opened
Kodi Austria
and we did not fully establish
what would be going on in various of the basements
that we enable people to exchange.
I knew it was coming!
I knew it was coming!
You're a comedian too. You have the sense.
You can reverse engineer a joke.
You know where it has to lead.
Olga doesn't see the joke matrix anymore.
She just sees blonde brunette, Joseph Riesel.
What's the third then?
These have been devastating so far.
The third one's the worst one by quite a margin.
Oh, excellent.
Strap in.
Supercharge your productivity.
Yes.
Gettingyourdicksucked.com
Gettingyourproductivitysucked.
Make sure you follow GYDS.com
on Twitter, D-O-T-C-O-M.
We're going to have a website up soon.
We've already paid someone to make it, I think.
People are like, wait, I completely understand the concept
of gettingyourdicksucked.com and I want to fill it on Twitter,
but how do you spell .com?
So, supercharge your productivity.
No more hunting down
the only table at the coffee shop
that's near an outlet.
Instead, you can hunt down
the only seat at your neighbor's house
that's near an outlet.
The library.
The idea store.
Yes.
Hey, go buy an idea, pal.
Read a book.
You know how to read.
In someone's home.
Excuse me.
Reading a book, that's some fourth grade stuff.
You're clearly very full of stuff.
Sorry, guys, really quickly.
I can't poop in public places, so that's why I downloaded
Cody to go.
That's the next one.
I'm going to rent someone's from room
and I'm going to come up with that where we
have been being people's toilets. They're done.
I'm into that.
I get so insecure in Starbucks, I can't take my time.
Because you're intimidated by how fancy it is.
I need to go to someone else.
That's the thing.
So, Laurie, your idea is to make every day
like Notting Hill Carnival.
Where people just sell you the chance
to piss in their toilet for four pounds.
That's sex.
By toilet, they mean bussy.
With Cody, you can stay focused on your work
in a secure, comfortable workspace.
I don't know how they guarantee it's secure.
You're just going to someone's house.
They could murder the shit out of you.
Only doing the little Richard thing.
In a secure, comfortable workspace
with a reliable Wi-Fi connection.
Again, how do they know?
Because all the people that we're doing it
will have those two things.
Because they mumble them the house.
For about...
And here's the best thing of all.
For about half the cost of traditional
co-working alternatives.
Wow. That's so cheap.
That's not that much less, considering.
If you're paying, I don't know,
800 bucks a month for a WeWork,
it's 400 bucks, sure, but
where's that 400 bucks going?
Like someone else is providing the coffee,
the space, the infrastructure.
All you're doing is connecting people
via a text message.
Wait, so that doesn't get paid to the...
It doesn't get paid to the person
No, of course not.
It just gets paid to the system.
It's not even as progressive
as Airbnb.
It is the mob thing.
It's you kick up to Cody and nobody else.
You kick up to little Cody.
No, of course.
I just realized I have drastically
misunderstood this idea.
Of course, most of it goes to the person you're
renting from, but still, that seems like...
It still seems like a pretty bad deal
for everyone.
One of the biggest things for WeWork
is to get all this VC money to buy the
buildings to be one of the biggest property
owners in, say, New York or whatever,
pay for all the free pints that people get
to pull in, thank you,
in these places.
And this, of course, like any other
these apps is outsourcing it and placing
the burden down upon other people.
So the company will take a cut, right?
And we'll get an enormous amount off the
back of it because it doesn't have to
invest in anything. It just comes up with
the people in San Francisco who will sign up to it
or have decent homes with decent Wi-Fi.
It will scale initially, if it does well,
off the back of its little encouragement
from that price. And then
it will know that people will start to buy into
us. And then LA and London
and Berlin will go, oh, great, this is
a great idea. And it will snowball
from there and then VCs will step in and make loads
of money. And then people said, well, make loads of money themselves
and they'll buy out and, you know, you're off to the races
and you could just keep doing that. And then the toilet idea
like we love about it, but like
you could do it, right? You could do this
stupid crap over
and over again and create this buzz,
work out what your constituency is
to make it look like a massive idea,
attract VC money, jump
out, whatever, let it scale. And it just
you just, it's a hype. It's a hype economy.
Just keep hyping.
But then like...
That's all it is.
But in a perfect world, you would get everyone
on Kodi, which means that it's like a zero-sum
game for people who are renting and
like renting out and renting the space
because they are wasting the money to go to
someone else's house while renting their own.
So literally the only people making money are Kodi.
And landlords. Yeah.
But you wouldn't even get that, right? That's the thing.
So yeah, that's where it would extrapolate to a certain point.
But this is just about hyping something up
to get funding,
to make a bit of a bubble and then buy out
or get bought up by one of the big firms
and that kind of thing, you know?
Yeah. I mean, we say that Kodi had no capital expenditure
but obviously they've spent a huge amount of money
on blue sky thinking and learning about their body.
Oh, and improv workshops for their workers?
Oh yeah.
Team building? Obviously.
My favorite hype man detail is that
at the height of his fame, Mike Tyson paid
a guy $50,000 ago
to yell guerrilla warfare at his press
conferences.
$50,000.
And how much did you receive that for $150?
Mike, call me.
And how much did this podcast receive to hype Kodi?
Not enough.
Technical difficulties.
Just encouragement.
The true currency.
Big time Tommy told us to do.
We can be bought for the price of kind words
but no, I revised my earlier thing.
Cameo from Bear Margera, don't want it.
Cameo from this Tony fellow?
Big time Tommy.
You can have to get his name right if you want to.
I want to come in from the Kodi fund.
That's what I want.
I'm an inspiration guy but he's never actually
achieved anything so it's amazing.
There's this incredible bit where he goes
listen kids, it's final season
is coming up.
So if you're in college,
you've got to hit the books and study hard
for those tests.
I've forgotten like what do they call them now
in the college there?
You have to write the things on the paper
and then they tell you if you're good on that.
Test, yeah, that's it.
I want him to read my 23 and me result.
10%
Eastern European.
I think more than 10%.
20% Sicilian.
I'm probably 99%.
100% old school.
100% old school, 100% not gay.
He just looks at it,
squints, puts on a pair of half moon spectacles
and is like ah, you're probably Italian.
10% Sicilian.
20% Roman.
I'm going to set Florence.
Just clearly
can't read.
Of course, we can get made because we was only half
old school.
All right.
So that's the Cody.
Mostly it seems like he used to talk
about big time Tony.
Exactly, big time Tommy.
Tell me if you're listening, we're keeping it
old school here at Trash Teacher.
I bet he's into WeWork as well.
100%.
Laurie, this is drawing from your report
from the third chapter specifically.
Between 1900 and
2010, global resource consumption
increased by over 800%
and resource use per person has nearly
tripled. It is estimated that each year
human activity is on average consuming
more than 70%
more ecological resources
than nature can regenerate. However,
it is only the rich people who do this
and are able to do this because in fact
most people's dividends from say this
exploitation are shrinking
to nil.
Yeah, I mean, we've really messed it up.
Well, we haven't, right?
So this is exactly to your point.
We're in
a situation where what we're calling
environmental breakdown, so it's not just
climate change, it's all sorts of other stuff.
It's what we've done to our soils, it's driving
extinction of species has reached a critical
level and we've got a big difference between
what scientists are warning
and then what politicians and other leaders
are saying we should do, right?
We can understand it in three ways, right?
So we've got the scale and pace of this thing
is extraordinary and not accepted
in the political debate.
The second is then what that means
and the third is what we need to do about it
and those three elements are not being spoken about.
So on the scale and pace
this goes beyond climate change
to, as I was saying, the
depletion of our soils because we over-farm them,
we're killing enormous amounts of species
because we're destroying their habitats
and some of the changes to these key natural
systems. So we talk about the climate one all
the time, but it's also water,
it's nitrogen that
makes it enable us to be able
to grow food and other things are being
changed in a way that we have not seen for millions
of years or in some cases
billions of years, right? So this is
an unprecedented change, it's reached an
unbelievable level now and
we've got many UN agencies warning about this,
we've got campaigners now really beginning to bring
it up, the media agenda. The second
thing is that doesn't mean just getting really
sad about seeing a video being shared about
showing emaciated polar bears
on Twitter or whatever, this
means growing incidence of famine,
it means more migration of people across
the world and ultimately more
conflict and economic destabilization.
We're entering a new, we already in some ways
have entered a new type of world
that's going to be vastly different to the one
that we were born in and grew up in, more
destabilized, more shocks.
I hear what you're saying.
We're about keeping it old school.
Sorry, I hear what you're saying, but
have you considered that we just
don't do anything? It'd be fine.
Yeah. Well, and this is basically
the narrative, right? That we're sort of like,
well, yeah, fine. You know, as an individual
care about it, like hear Extinction Rebellion.
Don't use plastic bags, for example. Yeah, exactly.
Don't have your GMT, but don't
have a straw with it or demand that it's
a paper straw or whatever. But this is
a huge deal out of demanding
that's a paper straw. Demand that they make a straw
out of your dick. If you're leaving the land
that you've been living on, consider
codying it.
Yeah, exactly.
Use assets more,
use them more sustainably, etc.
Use the individual,
probably cause this problem, use the individual
need to care about it, use the individual need
to do something about it. But this is a structural
result of the way
that our economies have been built. It was not
our individual faults. And by our
here, I mean people who are under the age
of 40 or
whatever, who have been alive for a much
longer amount of time and have been in the nations
that have disproportionately caused this problem,
right? Because it is not us,
it's the structures around us that necessitate
that this happens. We live in economies here
where there's not what we can do
about not destroying the environment. Fine.
I could not go and pour bleach into a river
or I could not. It's not so much fun.
Exactly, this is the bottom line. Capitalism
says like pouring bleach in a river is fun
and you might wonder what am I supposed to do about it?
That's the thing, if there was...
If we had a model
where
let's say pouring bleach into a river was
like a, I don't know, a rite of passage or whatever
and we could then charge for the privilege
of pouring bleach into the river, everyone did it.
It was a significant contributor to GDP
and maybe, I don't know,
like Alan Sugar
or Richard Branson had a huge pouring bleach
into a river company. We would say,
look, we'd love to stop pouring bleach
into this river. But I'm afraid
it's just not realistic. In fact
in every society where they've tried to stop
pouring bleach into the river, they've
actually fallen apart.
Listen, I gave you guys a very simple task
to go out and pour bleach into the river
and what... Now
Margaret, what is it that James exactly did?
He poured the bleach into his own
asshole. Now, James,
it was a very simple task.
I wasn't asking you to build a very complex
highly technological email
phone. I was just asking you to pour the bleach
into the river. Could you explain
to me why
that you poured it into your own ass?
Are you turning Alan Sugar
into Jason Statham?
That's nothing like Jason Statham.
Jason Statham.
Listen, James,
if you don't pour this bleach into the river in the next 15 minutes
and then some genius comes along
and makes an app that's like, oh, we'll more efficiently
share the bleach asset
so that we can pour it into the river
and cut down the... We'll pour the bleach into the river
in a reusable container.
Yeah, exactly.
On the way here, I
there was a guy
on one of those electric scooters.
He knocked me over
and me as an intellectual liberal
stood up and thanked him
for driving an electric scooter.
Thank you, sir, for reminding me.
Yeah.
On his way to fuck your wife.
Yeah, exactly. Using an app.
In my life.
Cody, that's what it's for.
In my own home.
I ubered to my
Cody where I got to live a room
while my wife was cocked.
No, you were cocked.
Yeah, you were cocked.
I didn't know anything about sex terminology.
Sex terminology. Any case.
It seems quite
sort of... It seems
quite painfully clear
that as long as
it is a sort of existential
imperative for the societies
in which we live to organize themselves
around growing returns to capital
that
we are not just going to be in a situation
where we say, oh, the top 100
companies in the world contribute 71% of the emissions.
This is a statistic I think a lot of people know.
But I think if you look at environmental
degradation as a whole, as you
do, then you can notice
that it's not individuals
who spend money to consume
who do this. It is people
who invest money to make more money who do this.
Because, again,
beloved why the circular
economy is bullshit is that
you do
consume energy, you do consume
resources as you
as you chase returns.
And we might think, oh, yes, well,
I don't know.
Honda is using recycled paper
in its dashboards or whatever that all
of any PR campaign
around making one of these
massive polluting companies look greener
is essentially nothing
and that as long as there are
pools of capital chasing returns, we are
never going to escape this problem.
Yeah, let's put it like this.
We're all as individuals who are not involved
in the structures of the economy.
We are stuck in those structures, right?
And as you say, those structures about
accumulating capital and getting returns from it.
And there's very little,
these campaigns about not flying.
And that's useful, right?
We've all got to consider those individual choices,
whether we use the app to go and pour
bleach in the river.
But we're still captured
within those systems that necessitate
us to move around in certain ways to
consume food in certain ways and that kind of stuff.
And there is an argument
out there that says, hey, look, fine,
those structures exist, but we can
decouple them from their environmental impact.
We can continue to have this relentless
economic growth measured in
quarterly GDP growth
and we can decouple that, right?
So we can do all that we're doing now,
but we can stop it from emitting carbon
and we can stop it from destroying soil
and all these other kind of things.
Well, that's people's Republic of Walmart, isn't it?
Yeah, well, yeah, right.
And the evidence is growing more and more
and there's a fantastic academic
at Goldsmith University, Jason Hickle,
who's done a lot of work in bringing together
the empirical evidence that shows that
in the case of carbon emissions,
the one that everyone concentrates on
and ignores the rest of the environmental stuff,
you maybe be able to decouple
economic growth from
carbon emissions, but you're not going to be
to do that in time in this sort of 10 years
or so period that we've been talked about.
But then for resource use in general,
it's probably not possible
to totally decouple
the two things that if you pursue
relentless economic growth,
it will necessarily
destroy the planet.
And you can just think this compounding growth
over and over again. If I've got...
If I grow at 2.5% a year
and I've got a whole pile of stuff,
fast forward many, many, many decades
and that pile of stuff is
many, many, many, many times
the original amount of that stuff.
And so that kind of relentless
dynamic is something that we are...
It is extraordinary.
You see these memes on the internet at the moment, right?
Like, oh, I just went to work,
which feels pretty weird
because we're in the middle of an extinction event.
And I know people who have kids now
who are doing their GCSE mocks and they're like,
why am I learning about Shakespeare
when I've just been told by the
scientific community that the world is being destroyed.
And then the prevailing political narrative is
oh, yeah, so
energy saving light bulbs and
stop flying.
And people get crazy about the light bulbs.
Yeah, and then people are like arguing about the light bulbs
and you're like, no, no, no, hang on a minute.
This is quite...
Very extraordinary moment because
arguments that have always been made against
this relentless seeking of returns
from compounding
investment in capital
has smashed through
these environmental limits.
So it's almost an arithmetical result
that we need to
change our economic system fundamentally
and to have done it incredibly quickly.
Not only that,
it's that we talk
of a lot of the people who argue against this
say, oh, but how dare you ask
people to sacrifice economic prosperity?
The problem is, and again,
even if you go back to the episode where we talked about
the Tony Blair report on
why Britain needs to get more racist,
he talked about how, oh, yeah,
well, people are anxious because
the economic recovery hasn't gone
to local communities but has benefited
the economy as a whole,
which means that the
economic growth that's driving the
extinction of everyone, everywhere,
forever,
it's going, even then,
it's going to like four guys.
It's like Jeff Fairburn and Jeff Bezos.
A lot of guys named Jeff, basically.
Big Time Tommy, DJ Vinny Dice.
Milo, that's just the problem.
It's not going to Big Time Tommy
and DJ Vinny Dice.
Joey Capitalism Amygdia.
Yeah, it's going to
it's going to be
MCM Leo. What if we get Jeff Bezos
to date a communist
thought?
And then he like buys her,
he just like gives her credit card or cash
and she just like redistributes it into the community.
I think that might be
look, that's a little bit of a preview
of what's coming.
What if Jeremy Corbyn had a huge sexy ass?
Guys, if you want me to fuck Jeff Bezos,
what if Jeremy Corbyn
was summer ray?
And he had like an Amazon
wish list but it was like nationalized railways.
He's like, you want my private snaps?
You want my private snaps?
Olga,
friend of the show Pepper wants a picture of you with a gold microphone.
My phone's just died. Can you do a selfie?
Yes, I'll send it to her.
I'm a huge fan of Pepper.
Everybody consume Pepper's content.
Right, so
in effect,
we live in a system
that is
putting a brick down on the accelerator
of a car headed toward a canyon
and says that if we remove the brick
then the brick won't be comfortable.
Yeah, that's nice.
Very good.
Just to
characterize this,
there's two or three basic schools
of thought. There's de-gross,
right?
And then there's the People's Republic of Walmart
decoupling thing.
And then there's my third synthesis thing
which is full beard
Sufi life of this world
is illusion, just get drunk all the time
and give up.
Which of these is least likely to kill all of us?
Wow, that's a good way of putting it.
I've not heard it like that before.
What's the fourth one?
Steven Pinker's idea.
What? Yeah, come on.
Steven Pinker's idea is that we can stop
most of climate change
if we deploy...
I forgot about this.
In fact, the solution
to climate change is simple.
By the way, it's not complex. There aren't all these things happening.
It's just a carbon problem.
Yeah, absolutely.
And he's gone to Harvard, so
you might want to revise what you've said.
He has the IQ haircut.
Yeah, he has Malcolm Gladwell.
Who else?
Adam Newman, the WeWork CEO.
They all have the IQ haircut.
Christian Nemitz.
What do the Cody guys have?
Hi, Christian.
Robbie Travis has like a proto IQ haircut.
No, Christian.
I think Christian Nemitz listens to this show.
I'm a great fan.
You know, Steven Pinker's idea
is cloud ships.
Right. So I think zeppelins
that spray sort of like a silver material
and we can just
continue growing forever
and there'll be a silver material
in the clouds and then
those contradictions are solved.
Because it reflects the light away, you see.
Every cloud, honey.
So it's all we have to do
to solve this very
sort of core elemental problem
with the way our society is organized
is some final fantasy shit.
If anyone ever tells you this stuff,
you need to
you need to ignore them or you need to
throw milkshakes at them?
Yeah.
Like ban them from ever going
in your living room to co-work through Cody.
Like this is...
But then he spray paints his dick
and he's like, I'm C3 p.m.
Just throwing milkshakes
into the atmosphere to protect us from climate change.
But look, we have one other solution
because Steven Pinker,
according to this solution,
which is to build a bunch of zeppelins
that's thinking too small.
We are going to think
bigger than that.
This is thinking too.
Are we ready for this?
Because thinking too says
just not
de-terraforming Earth is too complicated.
We have to do something
fucking wild.
Oh, no. Nice.
I have an inkling.
Are we starting a ska band?
Is it Cody again?
Jeff almost, maybe Cody can play into it.
Jeff Bezos asks
a crowded room last week.
Do we want
stasis and rationing?
Or do we want dynamism
and growth?
We know this is an easy choice
and we know what we want.
Folks, what do we think he's talking about?
They were like, sir, this is an oncology unit.
I
have an idea
and I think it's Amazon
going into the Weyland Utani business.
I mean, yeah, more or less.
Quote from Bezos.
The Earth is finite.
True.
If you listen to my last comedy book club,
you'll know that that's more or less an analytic truth.
And if the world economy and population
is to keep expanding,
space is the only way to go, folks.
We've got to shoot people into space.
Off-world colonies.
Look, why solve our problems
when we can just shoot our problems
into space?
Given how long I've been waiting for my Amazon order
that I ordered last week,
if I was living in space,
I'd be waiting even longer, so I'm not hugely optimistic.
The problem is,
if we just
shoot our problems into space,
then we get to preserve the system
that has made Jeff Bezos
able to be
so rich that he could probably buy
a lot of murders.
Like, every time someone gets canceled,
we shoot them into space.
But then they start a new and powerful base
on the moon.
But the other thing to remember is,
yeah, the Earth is finite.
It's very easy to say that, yes,
of course we're happy with Jeff Bezos
not having any of his fortune.
In fact, having it shrink considerably.
But if
a moment of seriousness,
if you look back into the Japs,
a lot of pension funds
are invested in
industries that
are destroying
our futures as well.
There is some growth
that is enjoyed on a mass scale,
not much and not nearly
not most of it,
but that's all going to have to stop too.
Can someone give me a reason
why my program of
up isn't like the same option
here?
And so Jeff Bezos
basically is
in saying that alongside
I mean, I don't know if he's one of the people
that bought one of these boat holes in New Zealand
that all the tech being there.
I'm almost certainly he did through the 18th
of the show's collaborations.
Yeah, so all these tech being there,
they buy
these like, these retreats
in New Zealand when the world
that the policies they espouse
ends up happening, so everything collapses.
They can run away and hide
under the ground in no boat hole.
There may be those in there as well.
She's not interested.
Why is this boat hole filled with acid?
Yeah.
Why is this boat hole filled with canned goods?
Okay, let's assume he has one of these as well
as the space suggestion.
He is
the current iteration
of
what has now been a process that started
probably in earnest
in the 1400s. So basically
the western nations, so this
country, France
and others,
in the Netherlands, invented this early
modern capitalism in which you had the same
kind of trends that we see now of
profit making from compound
growth. And that basically
accelerated
the impact that human beings have
on the environment, right? Human beings are always going to have
an impact on the environment, hundreds of gatherers going around
and harvesting stuff and
making fires, that kind of stuff.
These dynamics of capitalism
accelerated that exponentially so that
we were tearing down forests
and we're doing all this kind of stuff.
We're always seeking new frontiers
that can provide us with the cheap things
that we need to keep that game
on the road, right? Slaves, cheap labour.
Or the environment,
cheap nature that we feed into this process
to create energy and to create soil
to grow crops from, on and on and on.
After
the 1400s, 1500s
people who were
seeking these returns
and feeding us that compound growth then went around
the world and created empires and they found
new frontiers in which they could
extract from nature and they could extract from human beings
and other things as well.
And that has led us to a situation in which
like
those early people in Europe
crashed up against the environmental boundaries
in their own countries.
So this island that we're on in the
Britain used to be a
massive forest, we just cut that all down
and it caused extraordinary environmental degradation.
And similar things happen in other
parts of the world. You bang up against
the limits in which that cheap
you can use that cheap stuff.
And we've banged up against the ultimate
limit because we have destroyed the
environment so much
that we are eroding the foundation upon which society
even occur because that environmental breakdown
is so severe.
So Jeff Bezos is just the next iteration
in the intellectual journey that then
says, oh well we destroyed that bit.
So let's go to the next frontier.
I like that one of those guys,
Alexander Hamilton
invented, well
more or less, central banking
and our cultural response to that was
to make a zany musical about him.
I think that's going to be fine.
I think that's equipped to like defeat that.
Oh my god.
Yeah, well that's the thing.
Game's up, kill yourself.
That's the thing, Laurie.
All of your saying about just like, you know
that's based on the real fact
of just the fact that there's not that much
earth and that on the earth there is
not that much resource.
Now to sustain all of us, yes
there is enough, but to sustain
infinite limitless compounding growth,
no of course there's not. You're budding up against
the laws of thermodynamics.
But here's what you haven't considered
is that you haven't considered
that we could just build infinite
O'Neill colonies
which are miles long space stations that
of course contain just a few million people each.
O'Neill colonies are where everyone has to
wear that surf brand from the late 90s.
So there have been
This is just sea-steading. It's sea-steading
but dumber because there's no oxygen.
Yes, right, that's correct.
It's sea-steading but for people who haven't
seen Apollo 13.
We're going to have a bunch of these
space stations with really dubious
age of consent laws.
And that's the future of humanity.
Hey, I've got this friend
Jeffrey and
he says that the biggest international waters
of all is space.
Wait, isn't there like a thing
where it's like, when you go into space
you come back, the time moves differently there.
No, you get
fucked up with radiation so you lose
all of your bone density and you get really
sick and die. In space, nobody can hear
that you're 14. The problem is
that
is depressing. So
we don't think about it.
Wait, okay, but also I would just like to
I feel like one solution that hasn't been
addressed this whole time that's just been like
the elephant in the room is the kingdom of
Asgardia.
Oh yes, you were telling me about this.
A country that was founded in 2016.
It doesn't have any physical manifestation just
yet. But
what it is is a micro nation formed
by a group of people who have launched a satellite
into the Earth orbit. They refer
to themselves as Asgardians.
Okay. The audience of the ass.
And they have given the satellite.
A lot of microstates.
I love to massage the microstates.
A lot of ass related microstates.
And they have given their satellite the name Asgardia 1.
They have declared sovereignty over
the space occupied by and contained
with Asgardia 1. The Asgardians
have adopted a constitution and they intend
to access outer space free
of the control of existing nations and establish
a permanent settlement under the moon by
2043. The constitution just
says my girlfriend shouldn't have to wear
a car seat.
Where are the Asgardians from?
It's a slow burn of a job.
Where are they all from?
The administrative center is in Vienna, Austria.
Russian. But you
know that the head of the nation is a man named
Igor and he is Russian.
Classic.
These satellites
are in the shape of a basement.
It was a request from our host in France.
Oh my.
Okay. So.
O'Neill. Let's hear about O'Neill.
So this is what all of Jeff Bezos is big thing.
We like this. We make
fun of this. But the fact that
there are a bunch of like insane
billionaires who have
these space ambitions to fix
all of like the environmental
to escape them.
Yeah. To escape. They say
it's probably to escape them. Yes.
But the marketing is about how, oh,
everyone's going to be able to solve it this way.
This kind of thing, like
this is written about in Bloomberg, like
a lot of politicians and
powerful people read Bloomberg.
And they're just like, well, this is believable enough.
Yeah. What's also this ridiculous thing
where like it's like billionaires like Jeff Bezos
in particular are like weirdly taken
seriously on stuff that they know nothing
about for like reasons. And it's not even
just because they're billionaires, because like
no one asks like Alasharezmanov what
he thinks about the future of the human race
because everyone's like, yeah, that guy just like murdered
people in the nineties and took their stuff and now
he's a billionaire. Sure. He wouldn't know
about space. And just in the same way, like Jeff
Bezos is a guy who like sold
books out of his garage and it got out of hand.
And then now people take him
seriously on what the future of like the human
race might be because like he enslaves
people and doesn't let them piss.
Is that good enough?
Is that like, is that like, oh, this man can
build the utopia on Mars where we all work
on a production line where we're scared to piss?
Like what? Luckily enough, Milo,
that actually does factor into his
plan. Oh, of course it does.
This always
factors into his plan.
Before we go further into the pieces,
before we go into further into Bezos's plan,
he was basically what Bezos
is doing is using his billions to enact
the fantasy of this mad Princeton professor
called Gerard O'Neill
from the 1970s,
who was like a tech utopian.
So his
vision of space is more or less what colored
the imagination of Bezos as one of his students.
And this is a quote from a paper.
O'Neill's space colonies
promised to be the productive wonderlands
of consumer abundance, providing
capitalism with the necessary limitless
space, phenomenally cheap solar energy
and the resources of the universe
to expand ad infinitum.
Solar energy is free because you're on the
sun.
What are the Jetsons once?
Yes, it's the Jetsons.
He basically is inspired by someone who
wrote the Jetsons into an academic paper.
His vision is
suburbia,
American suburbia,
but in rotating space colonies
because just not
de-teriforming the Earth is too hard.
I like the Libertarian hellscape better.
I would rather live on Murray Rothbard
station than this.
Where is our solution?
It's not the Jetsons, it's the Flintstones.
We're keeping it old school.
The Flintstones.
Everyone's Italian.
Betty's a piece ass.
Italian-American space colony
where people are just endlessly sucked out
of windows they open to tell each other.
Shut up.
DJ Vinny Dice on the
Brontosaurus once and through.
Italian-American Flintstone space colony
let's fucking go.
Oh, yeah.
Bezos describes an idyllic life
aboard his future space colonies.
That phrase fucking kills me.
This is free article.
Bezos describes an idyllic life
aboard his future space colonies.
Each of which could have its own theme.
I love it.
My entire civilization is fancy dress.
I'd rather live on the Shrek planet, please.
Not the orgy planet.
Just the ball pit planet for me.
Yeah.
The orgy planet is just Earth.
Sorry.
Westminster, I think you'll find.
It's more Kensington.
Some might resemble historic cities.
Others might be space farms
or interplanetary wilderness areas.
You've got to grow this space somewhere.
Like Paris and China.
And you could have a recreational one that keeps 0G
so you can go flying with your own wings.
Direct quote from Bezos.
Again, interesting use of your own wings.
I'd also like 0G isn't flying
and doesn't require wings.
Also, it kills you.
It makes you dead.
If you live in 0G, you'll die.
You read this stuff out and again,
I go back to late capitalism
is just satire
to mock the people who are
golden and listen to this book.
He used to sell many books on Amazon.
Now he just sells Atlas Shrugged.
It's just like a warehouse
just full of it on Mars.
I keep thinking about how
my cousin who frequently attends
trash future shows, shouts out
she asked
for a copy.
Yeah, she's great.
She asked for a copy of the communist manifesto
when she was a preteen,
like a tween, and then her mother
bought her that and Atlas Shrugged
so she could get a vote.
A balanced view.
A balanced view? Yeah.
Love it.
That's what the balanced view is.
The balanced view is either
we don't de-terroform the world
so that we can go from
10 years from now to 10 years from now
being Mad Max to 10 years later
being all dead to
just imagining that we can make the Jetsons
because
epic pretty cool and all the stuff
that's a structural problem with the fact
that it's very hard to live in space
was dismissed as being depressing.
Also, they're the same people that are
going to completely green energy sources
and stuff on Earth. That's unrealistic.
But moving everyone to Mars to a planet
that's themed around the film Saturday Night Fever.
Yeah, that's completely realistic.
That's so doable.
If only we were just thinking inside the box like that.
Bioshock gave these guys too much credit.
Yeah. I think it's really interesting how
there's many different universes
and they're like, you could go to themed planets
but not one of the planets has legal abortion.
Like, yeah, you live in Shrek
but you still can't get an abortion.
We just go back to like, you can't get an abortion.
Wait, apartheid is everywhere. What the hell?
Well, okay. It's interesting to say that
because one of the biggest
cultural
moments like lost moments recently was the film.
Anyone watch the film District 9?
Yes, of course.
Right. So that's this.
The planet becomes
this sort of dystopian
underclass that like feeds the few
space stations that enable to keep the whole thing going.
Laurie, you're right, but you have it
backwards.
That's the thing. Don't worry.
There's still an underclass.
In Jeff Bezos' Utopia, there is still
a downtrodden underclass. It's just
you have it backwards.
It's the Irish.
Finally.
Meanwhile, the original
pyramids came.
Meanwhile, all
heavy industry would be moved off Earth.
Again, of course, easy, way easier than
just, you know, sorting out the planet.
I was joking with the better life in the off-world colonies.
Yeah.
They always are.
Meanwhile, heavy industry would be moved
off Earth. Again, simple.
Famously not heavy at all.
Famously heavy things are difficult to put
in space. So easy to launch
and just have a logistical chain
that goes to fucking space.
Meanwhile, heavy industry
would be moved off Earth to preserve
this unique gem of a planet, which is completely
irreplaceable, but not more irreplaceable
than my hundreds of billions of dollars, by the way.
There is no Plan B.
We have to save this planet. We shouldn't
give up the future of our grandchildren's
grandchildren of dynamism and growth.
They need dynamism and growth.
How will they live without growth?
So Jeff Bezos could live on a nature reserve
in what used to be fucking Ohio.
It's horrifying.
Jeff Bezos fucking, just like everything
he thinks is like inspiring.
It's just like a garbled, like
if you hit yourself in the head with a cinder block
and then watch the speech from Independence Day.
To Jeff Bezos, that is like the most inspiring
thing is possible to write like
Jeff Bezos is like
unaware that poetry exists.
No, Jeff Bezos
is basically just like has
suffered the effects of smoke inhalation
and then watched a Liz Truss speech.
He's just suffered the effects of that
inhalation.
Yeah, where he's just like
it's like yes, dynamism and growth
forever because
we can just keep expanding
like a virus.
I say keep expanding like a virus.
It's not human population that expands
like a virus. No, that's enthusiasm.
That's Malthusian bullshit.
It's human need to grow
these pools of capital
forever. The magic money.
It's MCM. There is no magic money tree
because we're all going to die.
Man Crush Monday?
That's what's ending the planet.
Too many man crushes.
Jeff Bezos just really quickly.
You said that he doesn't have any poetry
so I'm just going to read a poem that I wrote for him real quick.
Roses are red.
Violets are blue. I've pissed in a bottle
and I've sent it to you.
Thank you very much.
With all the primes.
So here's his plan.
Earth ends up zoned residential
in light industry.
It'll be a beautiful place to live.
Does he think he's the
mayor of a subdivision?
No, he thinks he's the mayor of Earth.
It's a really shitty homeowner's association.
You can paint your Earth in this
range of Earth tones.
That's what gets left on set
for Bezos' entire space plan
is that he's going to say
he's going to decide what colonies get built because he builds them all
and then he's going to zone Earth.
Wait, the whole...
Jeff Bezos, there is no emperor of humanity.
There's the leader of the humanity
homeowner's association.
All of Earth
is going to become like the
boardwalk in Newark in the Sopranos
where all the mob guys
are trying to get in on the rezoning of Earth.
Jeff Bezos
is trying to build a space station
and it falls apart in midair
because a bunch of Italians
stole all the copper pipes.
Because
Meadow's boyfriend didn't do any of the riveting
because Don Vito
was too busy hitting on him.
It's like two cultural references.
Yeah, yeah.
And they're both right.
Yeah, it'll be a beautiful place to live.
It'll be a beautiful place to visit.
Folks, it'll be a beautiful place.
We're going to turn the whole earth into a Trump resort.
It's going to be fantastic.
You know what it is? It's Trump's ice rink
that he made in Central Park
that he made a big show of renovating
for the public good
and they just kind of forgot about.
It'll be a beautiful place to live.
It'll be a beautiful place to visit.
It'll be a beautiful place to go to college
and do some
light industry
and to learn about O'Neill.
Yeah, you can learn about O'Neill.
You can like, you know,
you can be on the lacrosse team.
You can go to keggers.
Jeff Bezos wants to turn the entire world
into like, I don't know,
like a mid-range American campus university.
He wants to make the northeast into all brand ice
and he wants to make the Midwest
into all, I don't know,
I don't know, American universities.
I'd love to go to Baylor forever.
Yeah.
We're all just going to be in uni forever.
Yeah, I love those nights at uni
when you go out with the lads
and you have a few too many sand bookers
and then you just find yourself
just like manufacturing parts for the Huawei factory.
I'm going to love
to live in the district of the earth
where I have to wear sub-fusk
to dinner.
That's going to be a fucking task.
I went to Mecca, Sarah Lawrence
because I wanted the college experience.
Yeah, but the thing is
that like hell university earth,
it wouldn't be Oxford or Cambridge,
it would be Durham.
We all know this to be true.
It's like you have to pour a bottle of pour over your head
every single day.
Amazon's shit, but you know what's worse, Durham.
Fuck you, Durham.
Real talk, all of their celebrations are ridiculous.
Yeah, everyone in Durham
is either wearing black tie all the time
or dungarees all the time.
That's the only two kinds of people you get, don't ask me.
It's too gendered.
It's look, it's it's it's
that's Jeth-a-fishing
for Jeff Bezos.
I want to start like a restaurant
and the only thing of the restaurant is that
like the toilets are just confusingly labeled.
One of them just has a tuxedo on it
and the other one has a pair of dungarees on it
and people are like, but which is which?
One of these space stations.
Welcome to 2019 town.
The confusing
gender toilet restaurant.
It's not woke, it's just confusing.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that's his that's his vision of earth is
I mean
modeling basically.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it is just
the continuation of the historical trend
that when
it crashes up against certain boundaries
it has to seek
to seek other kind of boundaries
as well.
The other thing here is that
there's a
we really need
to get people to understand
the scale of environmental breakdown
how bad things have got
and it's not just climate change.
It is all the other things that we've been discussing
and that is pushing us towards a situation where
there's going to be famine, there's going to be mass migration,
I think to say like the mass
migration itself is not a bad
thing. No, no.
So much as like the fact that it's compelled.
Exactly.
We got to get people to understand this because
this crossroads right and one
one direction is that
we structurally change our economies
so that we derail this
enormous machine that's smashing through
these environmental boundaries
and we realize that we have the kind of
technologies and we have the kind of models
for society that would enable us
to, you know, support those people
who people are going to be displaced
but we support them and we don't do it
in a violent way. We make sure that we're
working with their communities and sort
these kind of problems out. Or the other fork
in the road is that people
you get this horrendous and this is the thing that Jeff Bezos
is I mean he may be
thinking about this is that the
as all that horrendous stuff kicks off and you
interpret it as horrendous
the power of this ethno-nationalist right
that's behind Trump behind other people grows
because you hear
about the migration stuff and you immediately think
oh we've got to build the walls and I agree with that politician
over there and oh we've got
scant resources left so we've got to fight over the
few that remain.
There's a sticker campaign in London at the moment
which has a little rhyme fun little
ditty that says
something along the lines of plant more trees
save the bees
deport the refugees
which has come from
a lot of the
well that really took a turn with line 3
the first two lines are like
a thing that's out there in the environmental movement
this is the new sort of eco-fascist
turn that's kicking off.
Fascism arises as
in some ways a fear reaction
exactly and has got this
this is really the
horrendous interesting mix between the
the fear element of
those people over there are coming
they're coming to get the stuff the limited
stuff that we have so it's a very zero
some kind of logic but then it's also
got this rooting in this idea of like
blood and soil of
ideas of race and location
and it is very interesting
and horrifying to see
how a lot of the ideas
of
some of these so-called identitarian movements
that exist in Europe now
which believe in this great replacement
white genocide theory have begun
to merge into the real world and link
with the environment or environmental concerns
and the guy that
shot up that those mosques in
Christchurch New Zealand
explicitly identified in his
manifesto as an eco-fascist
because of these kind of concerns
so we sort of in this
situation where we rapidly need to understand
how bad environmental breakdown is and then rapidly need to understand
that it is caused by
our economic system
lest we open this door up
to the eco-fascist ethonosis
right because if we don't
realise the structural causes of this
we look around and be like oh my god I just see people coming
for the scant resources we have and then you bind
the eco-fascist thing
all the while
very very wealthy interests build their
space station and escape
Well it's because fascism as like
there are many definitions but it's like
militarily enforced nationalist
nostalgia is basically a cup and ball trick
where it says that you
have more in common with the billionaires of your
society than with your fellow working class
of another society
and so it says well you and
the billionaires need to band together
to defend yourself against the others
who are degrading you
who are causing this degeneration
who are making things worse, who are making you afraid
but it's a trick
it's a shell game
Exactly and it
could get to a point in the not too
distant future where
you won't even have to go
that far, you will literally have populations who
see
certain types of people trying to
just mass, like migratory crises
that we just
that make the so called
migrant crisis that we saw
over the last half of many years
that will be Charles Page talking about an order of magnitude
higher than that and I'm
I'm particularly concerned about Britain
because you know people lament
the fact that Britain is no longer a powerful country
or this kind of stuff whatever
but it's still a famous country
and I'm concerned that as a famous country
we will shoot people in the English Channel
who are trying to come over
and I found it astonishing
and terrifying that over Christmas
Sadid Javid, the Home Secretary
managed to persuade
the Defence Secretary at the time to dispatch the Royal Navy
which there's one boat left
so I assume the Royal Navy is the name of the one boat
and
well yeah I mean actually
Chris Grayling had sold off the boat
so he's actually just a dingy
with Royal Navy spray painted on the side
because that's if we can take some
solace in the fact that like
and people try to get here as they will
and should like at least
the fascists are
too cartoonishly
incompetent to do much about it
but this is the problem, they've created enough of a foundation
has been created by
so called mainstream politicians
to mean that these kind of views become very seductive
like people are going to get displaced
this is something that
people particularly on the left need to realise
that destabilisation is guaranteed
our job
or people who are interested in this job
is to make sure that they create the political narratives
that when things
increasingly kick off
we don't think loads of migrants
oh my god build the wall
or shoot them down in the channel
we think ah there are structural causes
for this problem
and we need to make sure that we're supporting our fellow people
who by the way
are experiencing a problem that has
been caused by very wealthy nations
as we were saying earlier
well like I know Steve Bannon
got I think over hyped
for his intelligence for having read two books
but
I'm a show down the ground
as a manifesto
everyone was like oh what a genius
because he reads but one of the things
which he said was like a foundational influence
was this racist wrench novel
camp of the saints which is very much about this
and I think that was
one of the few times when he was genuinely prescient
yeah well eco fascism
to me is a very exciting concept
just because I'm waiting for like Tommy Robinson
to have a milkshake thrown in and go is that a plastic straw
actually like
what's the overlap do we think between the people
who are at demos wearing those shirts
saying like war crimes in Northern Ireland
I did them and I'm not sorry
and being hit
with a milkshake is social murder
I'm not sure
probably a Venn diagram it's a perfect circle
but here's the thing
we talk about you know oh yeah
doom and gloom eco fascism a massive
a massive crisis that we're creating
because we need to keep funding
blah blah blah but have you considered
subscribing to the patreon
this is a quote
from Jeff Bezos a quote
this is his solution is his better vision
this is his vision our vision of a better world
is one we are radically more
equal and empathetic in which
the resource of society are shared by all
Jeff Bezos' vision quote
that wasn't his vision this is a vision
quote quote quote quote because this is very important
if we're out in the solar system
and we can have a trillion humans
that means we'll have a thousand Mozart's
and a thousand Einstein's
no
no
this is a good thing
literally what the fuck
yo what if 10 Michael Bay's directed
transformer
he's also he's confusing like all the humans
who've ever been alive with all of the humans
who are alive now which are very different numbers
how many Joseph Fredtos
yeah
it's not like Mozart and Einstein are still
alive
now we have zero
Mozart and Einstein's now
if they work in some off world
fulfillment center then it doesn't
fucking matter how smart they are
what if Mozart
use ipad
wouldn't it be so cool
if like we had 10 Tony
Starks and 10 iron men
watch him
the iron man is a sex robot
Einstein got cancelled because he got
dreads
how funny would it be
that's basically how
Jeff Bezos is a stupid guy
who's like
damn what if we had 10
Vin Diesel's
are we gonna have 10 Bezos's that suck each other's dicks
otherwise I'm now going to Mars
agent 30x
look
look
I think we just have to
decide you know there are three
there's a triple fork in the road
if we expand into space poll walker will come back to life
the only reason to go because there's gonna be
10 me so I can find like fuck myself
either to buddy what are you 10
I just one other one would be enough
well because that would be like Mars me like with a tentacle
and shit
just one tentacle
so that's what we have we have three choices for
society we have
eco fascism descending
into mad max we have
a radically fairer society where we dismantle
the power of like billionaires in capital
to demolish the world to
like build their own insane you know
space ideas or three
we can be as smart as a million Einstein's
no no no plan D
plan Alice master
spare
like he has like he has done us
an enormous favor here because in the way that
that sticker of the like you know
save the bees growing more trees or whatever
deport refugees like sums up
in one quick meme the
the eco fascist side one of those options
he's done a great service here because he has
provided in one completely outrageous
meme like literally him speaking crap
like he's the other one the like
techno you cook to utopian
hyper capitalist outcome yet it's very useful
it's it's he's shown that basically
it's he's just plagiarizing
the Jetsons which wasn't
even a very good cartoon and he's
and he's also he's plagiarizing Magellan
and he's plagiarizing other like early
imperialists and that he's just expanding
that outer space like it's astonishing so
look if you don't want to plagiarize
Magellan what you should do is a number of
things you can subscribe to our patreon
to get a second episode for every every
link damn
Magellan wouldn't have done that Bezos wouldn't do
that no um
look Laurie thank you very much for coming
out today my pleasure
um in the meantime
yes you can subscribe to that patreon you
can also come to our live show the only possible
infinite growth is the infinite growth of the trash
teacher patreon exactly we need to be able
to build a competing space station that will
suck less yeah it will suck your dick
well yes also
please keep sending pitches to the
gettingyourdicksuck.com
dms on twitter remember
the only joke is the url
it was the last url available it's a serious
news site yeah
and also to come to our live show
on may 30th at the star of kings
the link will be in the description
well it's gonna be bitching Alice is gonna be there
Alice is coming
well it's coming to London if I'm not
like too blackpilled by then and just
like rolling hole and pushing smog
into the atmosphere
we're in the space station already
I love that
convince Alice to stop turning on generators
around her house with petrol
you will never convince me of that
yeah baby please come
see my new show if then that I'm performing
in a variety of festivals this summer including
latitude and the Edinburgh fringe
and also
Alec Fullerton hi daddy
he's older than
just 19
also yeah sorry go ahead
more comedy news on Thursday the 23rd
which I think is the day after this comes out
Olga and I are both doing a comedy
show at Smoke which is
at the Secfords
Alec we'll see you there
tickets are a fiver get them
get them the link in the description
yeah
Alec Fullerton ASMR
Patreon only
episode
yo you gotta pay $15
a month to get the Alec Fullerton Patreon
Alec Fullerton is a 19 year old I met at Glasgow
that I'm obsessed with and then he keeps
DMing me saying he's actually 21
really?
I'm not 19 I'm 21
that's not
that's the same
can I do a quick plug as well
everyone should go and google
Green New Deal because it is
the solution to this it is the third track
it is the way in which
we deal with the social and economic destruction
of neoliberalism we stop the crazy billionaires
launching space stations
we actually sort the problem out
and the idea is right
people are working on it there are all sorts of groups
google it and get involved
but also for balance google Venezuela
yeah
God I always forget to say that
I've written on my forearm
I always forget to say that
that's the thing like yeah I don't want to die
but like Venezuela
yeah if you're going to read the communist manifesto
read Atlas shrugged and if you're going to google
the Green New Deal google Venezuela
and if you google if you're going to google
get any dicksucked.com but why not treat yourself
and get your dicksucked
but not on the website we don't talk about that
it's a serious local report
we are reinvent we are using the money
we're making from the patreon to fund
a crucial local service
in terms of investigative journalism
but we're doing it as a dick joke
Alec Fullerton is the Glasgow reporter
he's our man on the ground
is he
do you know if Alex is going to a Green New Deal
yet
Alex
sorry Alec
he seems to be the linchpin
we're everybody
he's going to make 7 billion more of the
is your name Alec Fullerton
come with me
if you want to live
okay number one everyone listen to this
follow Alec Fullerton on twitter
number two i don't know what his ad is
we'll put it in the description
it's Alec Fullerton
we have to get one Simpsons reference for episodes
so it's the auto dialer
this is the direct podcast to Abraham Abramson
Abramson is a kowski are the biggest gossips in town
okay so Alec Fullerton google the Green New Deal
everyone else do what Alec does
add Alec Fullerton
or DM him
quizzing him on the Green New Deal
ask ad alec fullerton about the Green New Deal
I bet you wish
I bet this guy wishes he never talked to you
how dare you all men love me
alright
alright we've done
way too many plugs
also May 30th and June 1st
i'm doing my tour show in Brighton
May 30th
it's the last show that we're doing
no man
it's been a long episode
and day and life
May 31st and June 1st
we'll fix the capitalism we won't be that much longer
we can only hope
September 1st is my birthday
and i'm renting one of those hot tub boats
that goes on the canal
on Cody
is Alec coming
i'm gonna bring Alec
can we invite Alec
if Alec comes down from Glasgow can he come to your birthday
100%
that's your invite if you come down to London
you can come to Olga's birthday
on the hot tub boat
in the hot tub boat on the canal
no one else just Alec
i'm not even coming
okay
this has gone long enough especially since
it's probably the most when you think about it
depressing episode we've ever done
have a good commute
unless you're working at a Cody in which case
enjoy shitting in his stranger's toilet
and mouth
goodbye