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- [00:16]
A
So we keep losing really important, special people. It is with a heavy heart that I have to bring you the news that looks maxing influencer Connor Murphy has died while trying to inject himself with gold to raise his IQ by several points.
- [00:36]
B
Oh, it's been a bad week for celebrity deaths. You know, like, I personally, I'm really broken up about Sam Neill. I mean, that guy was a great actor. And, you know, there was also another one, which I guess we should talk about. I think. I think the main thing is look at what the deep state will do and look at how frightened they are of us on the left. Because if you remember last episode, we were like, this time we're going to talk about Nigel Farage running for election against a bin. We're going to give it all of the scrutiny of which he is rightfully terrified. We're going to be absolute wolfhounds of new media on this. Look at what they did to distract us, to make our work impossible.
- [01:18]
A
That's right. You know what they're going to have, they're going to have to weekend it. Bernie's and Witticam's husband and put him in the Eric Kirk outfit. He's going to have to come onto, like a stage with lots of pyromancy. So if you don't know Anne Whitakem, the, I would say pantomime villain of the British, back when Britain was a more liberal place before we decided it was chud hegemony.
- [01:39]
B
Yeah. I would say that the key way of understanding Anne Widdicombe is that in British traditional media, being willing to, like, pick up the phone and go on TV on no notice is a virtue all its own. And if what you're going to say is, is going to be something so repulsive that it makes people watch, then that's so much the better. And that was her role for a long time.
- [01:59]
A
She was last in politics as a junior minister in John Major's cabinet in charge of prisons. Her flagship policy was to keep pregnant prisoners shackled during childbirth to prevent any escaping, I guess, while recovering from childbirth.
- [02:16]
B
Yeah. And then having sort of like had her career top out with that was like, well, I guess I'm evil now. I guess that's my sort of job forever.
- [02:24]
A
That's the.
- [02:25]
C
The problem became that there were too many people doing that thing.
- [02:27]
B
Yeah. I mean, this is the thing, you know, not everybody heard Anne Widdakeham, but everyone who did went out and founded a right wing party.
- [02:34]
A
Yeah. And I mean, so this is someone who has just been A pantomime villain of British television now for decades.
- [02:43]
B
Yeah, because I think there's always the temptation when this happens to a right wing influencer when they're murdered by someone to craft a very satisfying narrative of like, well, they were living under the delusion that they could go on GB and say, hmm, someone's gotta do something about all these migrants thinking that they were inculcating stochastic violence against the migrants, not knowing that the stochastic violence can flow both ways. And maybe out there, you know, someone is thinking, I understand, Prime Minister Kirsten, that I will follow your orders. I will drive 200 miles to murder Anne Whitaker.
- [03:18]
C
There are like questions over because like the guy who was arrested and then sort of like not kind of released and has been arrested again and counterterrorism is involved. And I do think it's very compelling because I think the sort of hot thinking from what I understand is that this may be like reform, restore, beef.
- [03:33]
B
I don't think we know. I don't think we're going to have any idea for a while yet.
- [03:37]
C
They hadn't entertained the idea that it could be like a Keer loyalist.
- [03:40]
B
Who wouldn't want to impress him? You know, I think the thing is, right, you know, you photoshop him as Bashar Al Assad or Hitler one too many times and that line of thinking follows you places. No, I think the thing is that narrative doesn't quite work because I don't think anyone really took Anne Widdicombe seriously.
- [03:58]
C
Right.
- [03:59]
B
I don't think she had a sort of most negative effect on sort of reform or Restore or anyone else. I think she was riding the wave. It just strikes me as desperately, desperately sad to have sort of come up in this kind of politics of New labor where it's like, yeah, no, we can send her out there to defend making people give birth while they're handcuffed. And just the arc from there to just being this kind of provocateur just endlessly until everything is so fractured that someone decides, yeah, this is a good idea to just maybe murder this woman is that's, that's like you had a small part in the tearing of like a much bigger social fabric. And it's just really depressing in the main.
- [04:45]
A
Yeah.
- [04:45]
B
So, you know, you know, condolences to Josh Whitaker on his loss.
- [04:51]
A
We were all using that social fabric.
- [04:53]
B
Yeah, it turns out.
- [04:55]
A
Yeah. Well, the thing is, right, this is someone who as well, I think it is being remembered, let's say very fondly by people like Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner. And the theme that comes up again and again and again is this was a distinguished politician over many years, many achievements. It's a huge loss. It's right. That we pay tribute across the divide to the many years of public service. It's like as you say, nova. Public service in terms of what? Of just being a pantomite villain, making
- [05:19]
B
it worse, but also not really effectually either. I think the other thing is that means that it rings even more falsely when the right do their sort of. You just created a million Anne Widdicombs act. Right. Because the only effect that that would have would be to make the job of like daytime TV's scheduling assistance much harder. I don't know that that would do anything.
- [05:42]
C
We already have an oversupply of Anne Widdicombs.
- [05:45]
B
Right.
- [05:45]
C
Like, I don't know whether you saw the story, I think last week where like GB News was cutting down stuff and cutting down like freelance producers and everything. And that's like, I feel like that's real red flag in the sense of like, if you can't run a right wing news channel in the uk, then we've got some serious problems. Right. But that also means that like, you know, only the best Anne Widdicombs can survive this economy.
- [06:07]
B
And so we had this thing on the right where they like initially wanted this to be, you know, I assume some kind of migrant. And then following the guidance that all of these chuds made the police change. The police went, no, it's a white British man. And every single one of these chuds jumped immediately to, ah, you're talking about a trans woman woman who murdered Anne Widdicom. I don't know if that's true. I would be highly surprised, but that's fine. I've been highly surprised before. But again, I don't know that any of this matters other than as a sort of morbid symptom of how bad everything is, you know.
- [06:46]
A
Well, Reform are trying to turn her into, into Charlie Kirk in the sense that they're saying, well, this means that that 5 million pound donation from Christopher Harborne, the crypto and gambling entrepreneur who happens to share a crypto gambling project with George Cottrell, the sort of, sort of convicted money launderer that Nigel Farage is.
- [07:07]
B
You would talk about finances at a time like this, Riley?
- [07:11]
A
Well, well, quite. This, this is, this is what their point was, which was, oh, the every. Nigel Farage even said, I took all of these donations in a personal capacity in one case from the guy this Christopher harbor and this guy as a personal reward for delivering Brexit, because he was so happy about Brexit and he's.
- [07:28]
B
Farage has been like, so by this and so ill tempered. And then he's just sort of handed this discursive gift. Right. And I don't think that it can be interpreted as anything else. I think the other thing here is we need to know what Lord Buckethead said about this or Count Bin Face, whatever the fuck his name is.
- [07:49]
C
Lord Buckethead was like a different character. Right. I was sort of thinking the other day that, like, there was another, like, bin face kind of guy. But who was it? And it was. And it was Buckethead.
- [07:58]
A
Yeah.
- [07:59]
B
We have two Count Bin Face. You are temporarily important. Important. And we are obliged to, like, take your bit seriously. What's the statement been like? Do you keep the bit up for that?
- [08:10]
C
Do you take.
- [08:11]
B
Do you like. At this point, you've got to start thinking contingency planning, right? What if Faraj gets assassinated? What do I do? Do I take off the bin? Do I do like a piece to Cat? Do I do like a solemn bin? Am I wearing a more sombrely colored bin?
- [08:28]
A
How do you make a bin more like a coffin without. With tasteful. How do you.
- [08:33]
B
Elected MP for Clacton by default, after Nigel Farage is assassinated by someone with an inscrutable loyalty to Keir Starmer and just forced to swear the oath at the House of Commons in memory of Nigel Farage.
- [08:49]
C
Yeah.
- [08:51]
A
I may be a have I Got news for you writer or whatever, but I promise to govern as Nigel Farage would have governed.
- [08:58]
B
I mean, I think the other thing is, it's Starmer learning the lesson of a lot of dictators, which is you can just assassinate all the dissidents on the way out. It's easy to do.
- [09:07]
A
So this, I mean, this is genuinely what. How Nigel Farage is portraying it. Because, like, Farage claims that, like, every parliamentary standards inquiry, every tough question from a journalist about how come all of these zillionaires keep on, how come he gets like the Lord ali treatment, like 50 times a day, right, Is actually that's giving him the full widicum. Not Josh, but Anne, he's getting the full widicum every time he gets asked that question.
- [09:33]
B
Pulling any of these threads, right, Going like, hey, why did Elon Musk's shitty brother say that the Musk family Foundation paid for Tommy Robinson to go to Moscow? Asking that is basically like attacking me. Like Cato from the Pink Panther has happened to Anne widdicom. Allegedly.
- [09:52]
A
Yeah, alleged by us. And he said, all of these inquiries are demonizing me in public life, just like. And Whitakem was demonized in public life again, largely by herself, because she knew that was her role on panel shows
- [10:07]
B
because she made herself a pantomime villain. Yeah, like I, I don't know and I won't, you know, speculate as to what extent she actually believed the things that she said, but she said them in the full knowledge that it was a career of like, you know, poking the sort of starving dogs. Right.
- [10:24]
C
I mean, also, yeah, also this is the thing that's sort of been running through my head, which is like, this is the stuff that you want, right? Like you want. But what they actually want is like, they want to be the villain. They want to get like enough blowback or enough sort of like criticism or whatever from people who are like, broadly insignificant in the way that influence is sort of taken serious and who's influenced, who gets taken seriously and who does they want to be criticized by people who they know will not be taken seriously by institutions that can actually do something. And so they do want to sort of feel the pressure of like at least a victimhood that they can control, but the moment that they can no longer control it, it sort of becomes a problem. And in Farage's case, it's the fact that like, you know, he is kind of, you know, the sort of charismatic pints guy is not really a character that he can really play for that much longer. And again, like, less of that is to do with just like, oh, he's now being taken seriously as a politician. It's like, no, it's just that he exists in like a media environment with like, guys like HS Tikki Toky and like, he just can't. And he just can't survive in that because like, for all you know, you know, he set the blueprint for how you can get this constant stream of attention across like multiple platform of multiple verticals. And now he's competing against like all these like fucking 20 year olds who can do it so much better than him. And so he is going to be taken like, seriously in a different way and he can't handle that. And then you've got another side of the spectrum of people who like, really were able to make quite a good career or compose parliamentary career being the worst person that you know. But like, as you mentioned, November at the start of the thing, like, if you're going to play with the loaded gun, like, you do have to accept that, like, the bullet might come for you, you know.
- [11:59]
B
Yeah. You have to accept that Keir Starmer has sho.
- [12:04]
A
And so I think then moving into the Farage thing a little bit. Right. Because Farage is now trying to deal with all of these scandals that have grown up around him and, you know, we'll sort of go through them a little bit. One of them is, again, this undeclared donation. I think the fact that it was a personal reward for how happy he was with Brexit is ludicrous to me. The other, the second statement, of course, was actually, this is to fund personal security for the rest of my life because. And he said this, I am the most physically and verbally assaulted politician in all of British history.
- [12:36]
B
One crypto investor seeing him get milkshake and is so horrified, he immediately starts writing a blank check.
- [12:42]
A
Yeah. Or I think, you know, that there have. Britain's had a lot of politicians, some of whom have made, let's see, King Charles the second leaps to mind as a politician against whom some violence was done.
- [12:54]
B
Well, also, not. Not to sort of belabor this point, but after Jo Cox was murdered, Farage talked about how, you know, Brexit had been won without a single shot being fired.
- [13:04]
A
So.
- [13:04]
C
But now that shot is coming for him and Anne Whittaker.
- [13:07]
B
Yeah. So it seems. So it seems that there are sort of like, you know, continuity Starmerists out there with caches of arms who, you know, we don't know what they're prepared to do. And thankfully, this isn't my problem because I fucking hate Keir Starmer.
- [13:20]
A
Are we suggesting that, like, the Obama administration left caches of small arms around, like, the BBC studios in parts of Gloucestershire? I don't think Storm or gladio.
- [13:30]
B
We want to lathe people believing in pronouns, gladio into existence, although they kind of already do. This is kind of what, like, reform and restore, people sort of believe.
- [13:41]
A
And so the other thing is. So this is the other. This is the one thing, right, which is I need this gambling and crypto billionaire to give me £5 million for personal security for the rest of my life. He also has.
- [13:51]
B
Yeah, why don't we get any of that? Like, we just get regular, like, Patreon subs. If you think we've done an unusually good episode, you should be able to, like, give us five million quid.
- [14:00]
A
Yeah, yeah. For personal security for the rest of our lives.
- [14:03]
B
Well, yeah, in case we do an episode that's so good that we're going to get assassinated.
- [14:08]
A
So Farage also appears to have this kind of Caesar Augustus relationship with George Cottrell, the scion of an aristocratic family, a crypto guy who went to prison in the US for money laundering, also
- [14:18]
B
involved in tether document and who calls Farage daddy.
- [14:21]
A
Yeah, I mean, this is the. That typical sense of, oh, are they trolling? Are they not trolling? Doesn't matter, right? Because they're. They're having fun together, basically. They're having fun doing some real, like,
- [14:32]
B
twinks for Trump energy, you know, it's crazy how Milo Yiannopoulos can regenerate like the Doctor.
- [14:38]
A
So. So, yeah, as they refer to each other as father and son.
- [14:41]
B
No, they don't. They refer to each other as daddy and son. Different thing.
- [14:44]
A
Daddy and son, different thing. And he always had these strange semi official gray roles in Reform. A bit like Lord Ali or had in labor or Peter Mandelson before he was appointed. He would just be like, wandering around 10 Downing street because it's like, well, I'm important and I'm here and I should be here. But Cottrell and his friend, who is like, again, profiled in the Times, why
- [15:02]
B
is it that like, anyone in politics, any party, is just like, oh, yeah, here's my guy from the Black Lodge.
- [15:07]
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, as his, like, fascist dark Zoomer friend did, all Reform's media production came up with the idea of the Boris Wave and so on and so on. It's just a little another version of the same thing. And this is again, like the party of old people, everyday working people, law and order, et cetera, et cetera. All these things that they claim, right? It's. It's being ridden by like, Zoomer fascists. And you know, because once again, like, politics is libidinal. The reform supporters aren't like, loving reform because its anti elite in general. They want to be lorded over by a baron. They don't want to be lorded over by their barista.
- [15:45]
B
In their imagination, it's Libidinal Faragists versus Libidinal Starmerists.
- [15:51]
A
Yeah. God.
- [15:52]
B
I mean, think about it this way. Think about it this way, right? Like, it really kind of mogs the left, right? Because we've just been doing electoralism and like, community stuff and Zach Polanski, you know, we won a couple of by elections, right? That's all great, fantastic. We've got good policies. You look over at what the labour rights are doing and it's just start killing them. Just gun. Just start killing them.
- [16:11]
D
Them.
- [16:12]
B
I don't know that I agree with that, but it's got a tempo all its own, you know.
- [16:19]
A
Yeah. There's a shadow war going on. Whether that is like arson attacks or sort of Nigel Farage being murdered by a Parliamentary Standards inquiry.
- [16:29]
B
Well, you know what it is? You know what it is? It's the combination of the sort of high of England doing well in the World cup and the knowledge of Burnham being about to come in. You know how Starmer's been like more fun on social media lately? This is wise. He's undoing the tie, he's opening the top button, he's issuing the kill orders on like all of the chs.
- [16:47]
A
Everybody. Yeah, he got issue is him that got Lindsay Graham. Not a lot of people know that. You know, they were like, all right, Britain, Britain can do MI6 wanted to MOG the CIA and was like, we're going to get one of them in America. You're going to see.
- [17:02]
C
Star was going for a walk and he just came across a book that said Death Note on it. And he was just like Mitch McConnell
- [17:09]
B
getting a signed bouquet, like a bouquet from MI6 that says you have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once.
- [17:17]
A
But yeah, so Farage is doing his usual shtick. He's calling this an establishment hit job. And the funny thing is he's right.
- [17:22]
B
Which, to be clear, we agree with.
- [17:23]
A
Yeah, that's right. All of these investigations, the journalists suddenly figuring out how to ask follow up questions fully. An establishment hit job. Absolutely correct.
- [17:33]
B
Yeah. Sometimes they just turn the taps off, right? We saw it happen with Corbyn, right, Where it's just like the media in this country has a kill switch, right? And it gets to go like, oh no, you're done with playing, you're done playing with this toy, you're done with this person, right? Like you. Because they're not serious, right? And once they're not serious, it's actually kind of embarrassing for you to like this person anymore.
- [17:54]
A
Yeah, we saw it happen with, with Rishi, we saw it happen with Starmer, right? When all these, they get bored and then they notice all the shitty stuff that you've done. And the only way to get that senior is to do a bunch of shitty stuff, apparently. Or if you haven't done a bunch of shitty stuff, they look at all the good stuff you've done and said that was bad. And then, and this is just, it's happening to Farage because you know what? Farage hit a ceiling. He's got a, he's hit a ceiling of 30%, he's got a competitor on the right. He's no longer fun, he's no longer hot.
- [18:24]
B
No longer hot.
- [18:26]
A
And so, yeah, fully, this is an establishment hit job. It's just all of the charges happen to also be correct because Nigel Farage only knows how to play British politics on Tutorial Island. He's been playing with like God mode cheat codes on for fucking decades. And now suddenly he's not. And this is what brings, brings it back around. It's like the moment Nigel Farage stopped playing British politics with God mode on, he found himself in a solo election against a sort of tiresome joke candidate. And that's gotta hurt. That's gotta hurt.
- [19:00]
B
I mean, the other. There is one other detail, one other Widdicombe thing that I want to focus on, which is I've been paying close attention to this. Are you? University researcher in Scotland is getting investigated by the police for posting what I would describe as a risky joke. But I get it, right? Where she's like, I think she said she deserved to get killed. And I hope she died handcuffed to the bed, screaming in pain because that's what she wanted to be inflicted on pregnant prison inmates. I get that. But it looks bad on paper. That's the first stage of this where you try and push the envelope as far as it can go. And you get a minute's silence at the World cup semifinals for Anne Whitakem or whatever. Give it six months. I want to hear about like a six figure settlement for that woman.
- [19:47]
A
You think we're going to get like the woke Professor's Witticam fund?
- [19:50]
B
Start the clock is all I'm saying.
- [19:52]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Look, look, before we, before we exit today, I wanted to do one company. This is companies. It's been in the news, but I looked into it and there's more to it than that. So the company is called FIA P H I A. And I'm gonna start with a question. What do Khloe Kardashian, Alex Earle, Mindy Kaling, Karlie Kloss, Jessica Alba, Ashley Graham Halsey, Jay Shetty, Olivia Culpo, Winnie Harlow, Laurie Javi, Barbie Brown, Rachel Zoe, Sydney Sweeney, Paris Hilton, Priyanka Chopra, Jonas all have in common?
- [20:24]
B
That's a tough one. I don't know. Credibly linked to the assassination of Ann Wood.
- [20:30]
A
It was the reverse John Hinckley where it was like a bunch of celebrities thought that they were. You talk about the television. Yeah.
- [20:37]
B
People don't know this. It was actually a kind of like a murder on The Orient Express type situation.
- [20:42]
A
It was an ensemble. They all invested in FIA's Series A raise.
- [20:47]
B
Oh. If that's where Priyanka Chopra is putting her money, then yeah, absolutely.
- [20:52]
A
So alongside Robinhood's Vlad Tenev and other some serious tech investors. So what does FIA do? This is from their site. Find the lowest price every time. Tap on FIA on any item page and we'll find you cheaper alternatives. Are you familiar with this kind of product? It's a browser extension, basically that price compares for you and finds voucher codes.
- [21:10]
B
That's it.
- [21:10]
A
That's it. It's a browser extension.
- [21:12]
B
That's some pretty thin gruel. How much money? If they raised, it can't be a lot, right?
- [21:17]
A
Let's see, they're valued post money at $185 million.
- [21:22]
B
Oh, okay, sure.
- [21:26]
A
Why, thank you so much for asking. So like I say, it's largely a browser extension that does quote, unquote, AI powered and heavy air quotes. Price compari. The other thing to note, there are a million of these. This is a commodity. This is not a big innovation. This is a commodity. This is a write up from Time magazine's best invention of 2025 article. So it was one of the best inventions of 2025. Online shopping is overwhelming and it's tricky to weigh the pros and cons of prices, quality and environmental impact. Enter fia, a free AI powered shopping assistant co founded by former Stanford classmates Sophie Kiani and Phoebe Gates.
- [22:01]
B
Oh, okay, right. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Gotcha.
- [22:06]
A
There we go. So FIA's user friendly interface, available on iOS as a Google Chrome browser extension, compares prices for new and used clothing, shoes and accessories. One click. It also provides insights into how certain brands hold value in the resale market.
- [22:19]
B
Mm.
- [22:20]
A
Mm.
- [22:20]
B
And crucially, it has an unlimited line of money. So long as one of the founders can call her dad.
- [22:29]
A
Yes, I believe so. Moreover, funding it would be a great way to do a favor for her dad.
- [22:36]
B
Because like previously, the ways to do favors for her dad you can't do anymore because he doesn't get on those sorts of planes anymore that we know of, allegedly.
- [22:43]
A
Phoebe Gates wants you to know that she is making what is essentially a gussied up affiliate marketing Chrome extension. By the way, the most famous one, it's called Honey. It was owned by PayPal, currently the subject of a huge class action lawsuit because of how much data it collects on people. People. So she wants you to know that she's making this organization to get out from under the shadow of her Father.
- [23:03]
B
Oh, okay. Well, that'll work. Right? Because it's famously small.
- [23:05]
A
Yes. It's a small shadow. And she's got a brilliant product that's only been done dozens of times before.
- [23:12]
B
You kind of can't do that is the problem. Like at a certain point, right. You get rich enough and it becomes kind of like an evil thing to have kids. Right. Because there's nothing that they could do that would not make them sort of like chiefly your kid.
- [23:31]
A
Yeah.
- [23:31]
B
In. In the same way that like, you know, fucking and all this stuff is like, unfortunately, like tangibly heritable. Like, it just. It's real bad.
- [23:42]
A
I mean, the only thing she could do maybe, hey, she could do like, she could become like Keir Starmer's number one hit woman, I guess. And that would make her fame people be like, her dad was the tech guy. That's weird.
- [23:52]
C
You can.
- [23:53]
B
You can, I guess, get like disowned by them. Like, like Elon Musk's Daugh. The one kid that Steve Jobs never acknowledged. I guess. But even then.
- [24:03]
A
So any case, Bill Gates, even because he's involved as an advisor, not as an investor, even helped her out by working for one day on the FIA
- [24:13]
B
customer experience team was the advice. Would you like infinity money? Because I have that. Because I'm Bill Gates. The advice is don't go on vacation to little St. James. It's not as good anymore.
- [24:25]
A
Honestly. He was there as a customer service associate for a day. Which meant if that was true. True and not just a lie. Probably was a lie. But still generationally missed opportunity to start talking about Epstein stuff.
- [24:36]
B
Getting Bill Gates on the web chat thing for my browser extension.
- [24:40]
A
Hi, I'm Bill. I see you. You're looking for a voucher code. So she has this chip on her shoulder. Does Phoebe Gates daughter of Bill Gates. Because she's more than just the daughter of Bill Gates. Said the daughter of Bill. Bill Gates. Gates.
- [24:53]
B
But. But she's not though, is the problem like.
- [24:56]
A
So Kleiner Perkins, Coastal Adventures in Notable Capital, alongside this like star studded term sheet, all also invested. But they're serious institutional money. They would invest in crap, right?
- [25:06]
B
Well, no, no, not unless they had like a big name attached to it.
- [25:10]
A
Well, the other. Yeah, because it's like, would the any serious institutional money have invested in this totally undifferentiated commodity product up to 185 million if it was fronted by someone else? Because it's just a great way to buy a favor from Bill Phoebe Gates, father Gates. And notable is also the two Founders very large social media followings were front and center in the pitch deck. Now here's the thing. This would just be normal, funny and almost not worth mentioning. Unless the product wasn't one of the genuinely shittiest, leakiest pieces of shit to ever curse your browser. It was horrible. They didn't even make their Nepo company right.
- [25:47]
B
You're telling me that we got a sort of software Wyatt Coke here? We.
- [25:52]
A
You know what? You could buy his shirts using Fear.
- [25:55]
B
Yeah. And the shirts closed all the way. You could button them.
- [26:01]
A
This would be like if Wyatt Cokes shirts, you couldn't button them or like every time you ordered them, they came printed with your Social Security number on them. Or like, like they had a. They had a QR code to all like your online banking information. Because. Because remember this? October 2025, it gets written up in time as one of the best innovations of 2025. November 2025 it is determined that FIA's independent security researchers find that FIA's extension captures HTML snapshots and of every web page the user visited all the time.
- [26:36]
B
Is it supposed to do that?
- [26:38]
A
It is 100% not supposed to do that, but they may. It was made so lazily, presumably just by like shopping out like two different random fiverr people to like just make different modules. That what it would do. And I'm going to read from Mahir Sharma's independent security Reachers Medium post. At first I wasn't expecting anything unusual. I casually switched over to my Gmail tab to reply to a few emails, planning to explore the functionality of the extension link later. However, when I returned to my console, something unexpected caught my eye. A series of queries have been triggered in the background. Even though I hadn't even visited any e commerce sites or clicked the Should I buy this button button. One particular API call stood out, which is log complete. Each HTML to GCS being sent to API fia.com, which means they were basically taking full screenshots of everywhere you went and then sending it back to fia. So it could determine if it is an online shopping site which includes emails, bank statements, passwords, Instagram messages, everything.
- [27:35]
B
Savings Panopticon.
- [27:37]
A
Yeah. Bill Gates and her college roommate and a bunch of celebrities got together to create a sort of online shopping Panopticon by accident.
- [27:46]
B
And you're sure they didn't do this on purpose? It's not like evil, it's just.
- [27:50]
A
Yeah, this is.
- [27:50]
B
This is vibe coded.
- [27:52]
A
Yeah. This is not part of their core offering. This is not related to their business at all they just accidentally happened to spy on everything that everybody was doing without making it part of their. Their browser extension app company.
- [28:05]
B
That's cool.
- [28:06]
C
I mean, like, look, we, you know, we went from one phase where like we were developing sort of military systems that ended up having some civilian capabilities once we were done with them. And now we're trying to make civilian based software that people don't like, but we're turning them into like military tools instead.
- [28:23]
A
Are you describing the reverse microwave?
- [28:26]
B
Yeah.
- [28:27]
C
Well, look, if our friend Phoebe Gates is listening, here's an idea for you. The reverse microwave.
- [28:34]
B
If anyone has this tab open, she is listening.
- [28:36]
C
What if your like, Teflon pan was also a gun? How about that?
- [28:41]
A
So through sloppy construction or simple carelessness, Fia was monitoring snapshots of everything you do. And it wasn't even on purpose, really. They claimed to have fixed this. Fine.
- [28:49]
C
You know, this is so funny because it's also like the first thing immediately because I guess I've been thinking a lot about Christopher Nolan today for reasons. But it's like that, you know, at the end, like sort of in the Dark Knight where they make the surveillance system and Lucius Fox is like, if you use this, I can't work here because I'm. I'm too ethical. And Batman's like, yeah, whatever, old man. See you in the next one. This is what Phoebe Gates has done. She's made the Dark Knight surveillance machine out of her shopping app. And Lucius Fox is in the background being like, phoebe, you can't do this. You can't do this. I can't be here if you keep doing this. And she's just ignoring him. Yeah. And she's basically built the surveillance tool of the 21st century. And we are all going to be subject to it eventually.
- [29:33]
B
Hey, but we might get some discounts.
- [29:35]
A
So here's the thing that was the first scandal. There is a new scandal with Fia.
- [29:40]
B
There's something else wrong with this penopticon.
- [29:43]
A
So this is from Bloomberg, where Bloomberg tested Fia's extension across more than 50 retail sites. So how this usually works, right, this affiliate thing is that you'll get referred is that you say, hey, Fia, find me this thing. And then I'll find you a bunch. And you click on it and you buy it and then you clicking on it and buying it gets that. That Fia then charges the person who sold you the, I don't know, the dress or the shoes or whatever, like some pennies for the conversion.
- [30:07]
B
Yeah, it's. It' sort of affiliate link commission.
- [30:09]
A
It literally is an affiliate. It's literally an affiliate marketing program worth $185 million.
- [30:14]
B
Because it would have to be, because that's already something that like, you know, Amazon or whatever have built. Right? It would have to just be this thing and use that architecture.
- [30:23]
A
So it turns out, and FIA's team claims this was a mistake, that FIA entirely by accident, what they do is they open a background tab during checkout processes that have nothing to do with with it and maliciously inserts its own referral code in order to artificially juice its sales numbers to appear like a more legitimate company and not like the product of two fail daughters.
- [30:44]
B
Riley. Riley. That's a sort of like terminological inexactitude. You say maliciously. I say hustlingly.
- [30:51]
A
That's right.
- [30:52]
B
Entrepreneurially. Because the thing is, not everybody would do that, but the people who do have a certain kind of brilliance, and you know what that Brilliance is worth? $185 million.
- [31:00]
A
The funny thing thing is it's not even an original crime. It's like so common that in the affiliate marketing industry it has a name called packet stuffing. Like it's, it's like not only is their company committing what appears to be fraud, it's not even innovating in the form of fraud. It's committing. It's just a straight up boring old fraud. And the funny thing is, here's the funny, the funniest thing about it. What made me decide that I was going to. Oh, should we talk about this? Should we not? Because. Because the whole thing, right, the whole company was never designed to make money for Phoebe Gates or its investors. The whole thing is just the investors buying access to Bill Gates and then Phoebe Gates getting to feel like instead of having to sit on like an art galleries board or whatever, right now you need to be an entrepreneur just like everybody else. All that is we're paper clipping fail children into cosplaying the people that are supposed to create fail children. Right. And you can hear them talk about all of this on the Burnouts with Phoebe and Sophia presented on the Call Her Daddy podcast network.
- [32:05]
B
Yes, Background. Call Her Daddy.
- [32:08]
A
Yeah. So. So would you believe it as well? It was releasing pretty regularly until about mid May.
- [32:17]
B
That's fine. That can be gaps and things. I'm so. Listen, you don't have to part the veil for these people. It's sometimes those productions stuff and they'll find out about it when they find out about it.
- [32:27]
A
So they have episodes such as dating as an ambitious woman, how to seduce anyone Featuring Chloe Shi. They have Billionaire Makeup Artist Spills the Kardashians Beauty Secrets and How Celebs Get Perfect faces.
- [32:39]
B
Oh, shit. That's big news.
- [32:40]
A
Yeah. They also have. They have, like, they have an interview with Michael Rubin. What it's really like at a billionaire's private party. Which, again, Phoebe Gates. That is the wrong billionaire to be asking what private parties are like. Duolingo CEO, how to Brainwash Yourself to Success and Get Addicted to learning the top lessons from building a $185 million business. And the Phoebe and Sophia's best lessons they've learned from the career playbooks of the most successful people in the world. And the thumbnail image I shit you not is do not wear sweatpants from the daughter of Bill Gates slacks Only get rich off your side hustle from Phoebe Gates.
- [33:18]
B
Yeah, well, isn't that what she's doing?
- [33:21]
A
So, like, I actually think they started the company. Company to, like, the product of the company is the podcast, actually.
- [33:28]
B
Yeah, that's also. That's also true of our company. But the thing is that we make the podcast and we don't spy on them.
- [33:34]
C
Not yet. Well, not yet anyway.
- [33:35]
B
Like, you know, that's coming. Like, don't get me wrong, but, like, we are committed to innovation in the fraud space.
- [33:41]
A
It's like if we did. If we were actually an oil warehouse, but we started an oil warehouse in order to talk to, like, oil traders, that's what this would be.
- [33:52]
C
That's quite clever, actually. Actually, that's actually a very clever idea.
- [33:57]
B
Starting a podcast is just an excuse to hang out with people you like.
- [34:01]
C
What if you started a sort of finance. Like a finance podcast, and you talk to finance people, and in that podcast, you sort of make them so comfortable. If they tell you, like in. They tell you secrets that you can then sort of insider trade, too.
- [34:14]
A
I wouldn't know anything.
- [34:14]
B
It couldn't just be any finance people, right?
- [34:16]
A
It would have to be someone pretty
- [34:18]
B
high up, I think.
- [34:20]
A
Do you think they can get him.
- [34:22]
B
Not like a cfo, you know, like, higher than that? Yeah.
- [34:27]
A
Oh, you mean. You mean maybe we can see someone higher than a CFO's diary? Maybe you take a peek inside that little diary.
- [34:35]
C
I'm looking through the diary of the CEO, and it just has Anne Whitakem, question mark.
- [34:46]
A
Right. Look, I think that's. That's as good a button as any to put on this segment. Why don't you follow Nova and I into the second segment where we speak with academic and author Kojo Koram about his New book on the legalization of drugs and what that will look like in the coming years. So check that out in just a few seconds. So from the first half, I'm gonna welcome us here to the second half where Nova and I are talking with Kojo Coram, returning champion, a professor of law and political economy at Loughborough University. And you're coming to us with a new book under your belt, the Next Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs. Kojo, welcome back to the show.
- [35:38]
D
Thank you so much for having me. Riley. Great to be back.
- [35:40]
A
Yeah. Now, here's the thing. Gotta know if you know I have some little interests on. There are things that peak that I. I will just keep going at it.
- [35:49]
B
Well, you can just say autism.
- [35:51]
A
Okay. I have some very special interests. And weirdly, one of my special interests has overlapped with something that you talk about, which is what the legal drug economy will look like, who will benefit, and how capital will use it to just keep accumulating, often by dispossession. So I want to open on a character which is interesting to us. There's a guy called Brendan Kennedy, who was one of the first people to become a billionaire from legalized cannabis. He's the founder, founder and CEO of Privateer holdings, as well as, and this is where it intersects with my interests, Tilray, which Eagle Eared listeners will remember, is the entity that purchased Brewdog out of administration two months ago.
- [36:31]
D
Yes, indeed, indeed.
- [36:33]
B
Ooh, I'm detecting some vibes off of this guy and I don't think I like any of them.
- [36:38]
A
Yeah, so this guy Kennedy got his MBA from Yale in 2005. He now has to claim, like in interviews and stuff, that he, quote, experimented with cannabis before starting Privateer, but never really got that into it. He worked at Silicon Valley bank before he realized it was going to be a bonanza and drug realization. And then as of 2019, he was the second highest paid CEO after Elon Musk. And this is not somebody who would have been in the drug business until, let's say it was a very much opportune for him to do so. So with that context in mind, tell me about the world into which Tilray exists in the role of drugs, prohibition culture, these things you talk about in the book.
- [37:18]
D
No, absolutely. I mean, like you say, what's happened with Tilray, what's happened with Kira Le, what's happened with people like Kennedy or Boris Jordan, who Forbes magazine profiled back in 2019 as the very first person to become a billionaire through legal cannabis. This has all been the Result of a dramatic change in the way that drugs are actually regulated and commercialized over the past decade. And it's one that I think has really slipped under the radar of a lot of mainstream political discourse. You will have grown up in the aftermath or the kind of the dying days of the War on drugs discourse, as did I, where, you know, the just say no policy. The idea that legalizing drugs was a serious political initiative for anybody, apart from, you know, maybe a couple wacky hippies and Rastas, was seen as, you know, just simply de rigueur. Over the past decade, starting with Colorado and Washington State legalizing a fully recreational commercial cannabis market in 2012, there has been a widespread transformation and how drugs are being regulated, primarily cannabis. And now over the past few years, psychedelics. You know, we have half of the US States with legal commercial cannabis markets. Canada, Germany, legalized cannabis, Uruguay, Australia, rescheduled psychedelics to make legal psychedelic therapy legal in a nation state for the very first time. And in the aftermath of those regulatory changes, regulatory changes which were often produced by on the ground grassroots activism that was led by racial justice activists, rights groups pushing for access to public health with things like medicinal cannabis, things like psychedelic informed therapy, environmental justice groups who are campaigning on the devastation that the war on drugs has impacted in places in the global South. They pushed for and delivered a lot of that change. But a lot of the beneficiaries of that change have actually been Silicon Valley backed biotech companies, multinational and multistate cannabis corporations that are now floating on the New York Stock exchange like True Leave. True Leave just did very recently. And we are looking at a world in the future where I think that there's going to be a real bifurcation between how different people are treated for the exact same act. And so I, you know, I pretty much started off the book, the next fix by going back to when I first got interested in drug policy reform, which is when I worked as a lawyer in the United States at a prison called Angola Prison Prison, which is the largest maximum security prison in the United States of America and is based on a former slave plantation, hence the name Angola. And it keeps the name to this day, just to give you a little indication of the friendly atmosphere of this institution. And a lot of the inmates that I spoke to are there for drug convictions. Multiple drug convictions in Louisiana could lead to you having life in prison. And this institution and the entire system of mass incarceration that was built by the war on Drugs, it's happening at exactly the same time that there are People becoming literal billionaires doing exactly the same thing, cultivating and distributing cannabis. And so we're in a very different world in the 21st century. And with the next fix, I just tried to navigate that. I traveled across all these different countries that have gone through some sort of drug legalization initiative and really tried to look at what the impacts were. You know, what were the social costs, what were the political costs, and perhaps most and substantially for me, what were the economic consequences?
- [40:51]
A
These things are all very bound up together with one another, right? Like the social, legal and economic costs of drug legalization. If you have like mushrooms by Monsanto, right? And let's say the certain cultivars of psilocybin or cannabis or whatever become patented and regulated like seeds by Monsanto are, you could end up with a world where instead of just most drugs being de facto legal for wealthier, whiter people in the global north, it becomes actually formal, where let's say, well, I actually, I have my. The legal cartel works with the, like the wealthy or sort of social insiders, and everyone else still has to deal with the illegal cartel. So you still get to fill up Angola, but Monsanto gets to cultivate a whole range of new plants. Is that one of the futures that you see?
- [41:36]
D
I think that's the particularly dystopian future that could be one pathway forward. And this is something I really started to have to wrestle with as I was going through the journey of the research, research that then produce the next fix. We now are in a world where just in April this year, a Republican conservative president in Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office. That's the same Oval Office that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan sat in every night. George H.W. bush telling the American public about how drugs were public enemy number one and we needed to be vigilant in our streets and our schools to fight the war on drugs. Well, in that very same Overlook office earlier this year, Donald Trump sat, you know, flanked by Joe Rogan, of all people, signing an executive order to fast track psychedelic, informed therapeutic treatment across the United States of America. And he's joking about, you know, you know, could I have some ibogaine? Like, you know, this is something that I think, you know, if Ronald Reagan could see this, you know, he would be, you know, he'd be like, what if someone spiked me with. This is. So this is the new world that we're moving into. And in some ways, I think, you know, people are part of positive about the way that these reforms are breaking through so much that, you know, even The Trump administration is, you know, rescheduling cannabis, as it's doing at the moment, fast tracking psychedelic medicines. And, you know, don't get me wrong, if people are able to access these treatments, which the clinical evidence has shown can have dramatic consequences for people with acute depression, you know, suicidal ideation, that is obviously a progressive social movement. But as you mentioned, we also need to keep an eye on what the process of commodification actually is looking like, because the patenting of psychedelic medicines, the buying up and monopolization of licenses around the distribution of cannabis and cannabis dispensaries, a lot of these are flowing through the very same mechanisms of capitalist accumulation that have led to the grossly unequal world that we're all trying to make navigate. You know, look at the people who are funding the biotech companies that are commandeering so much of the value of the, you know, emerging psychedelic marketplace. Peter Thiel put £125 million into a biotech company that was developing psychedelic medicines. Google. Sergei Brin's done the same. You know, you can see a lot of the same game plan of how Silicon Valley captured the entire value of the Internet now being implemented on these ostensibly progressive social reforms that so many people have fought so hard for. And I think that, you know, if you want to look at what the future might appear, appear to be, where you can have mass criminalization and mass commercialization happen at the same time. You know, you can look at December 2, 2025, where Donald Trump signed an executive order rescheduling cannabis in the very same month that he used the laws around drug criminalization to seize Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela on drug trafficking charges and extradite him to the United States. So criminalization and commercialization can happen at the same time, especially when commercialization allows for such a capture of the value of these potentially incredibly profitable commodities. And people might want to look at some of the interviews that Peter Thompson, Thiel's partner in the kind of psychedelic renaissance, the CEO of atai, Christian Angermeier, they just finished doing the Enhanced Games together. And Psychedelic Transformation is their other great collaborative project. His interviews with the New York Times recently or with Bloomberg, where he says, I know we're going to be a billion dollar company because we own this entire sector. And by owning means, the capture and the hoarding of the patents around the particular drug molecules that will be given the FDA approval to be rolled out in these psychedelic informed wellness services.
- [45:27]
B
It's weird, culturally, these guys, because I know it's sort of a canard now to say that drugs won the war on drugs. I wasn't expecting the Drugs that Won the War on Drugs to be Eric Schmidt's Burning man ayahuasca trip. You know, and it's so much weirder now that sort of people like Peter Thiel are involved because, you know, you mentioned the enhanced games and you know, you think about things like peptides as well. It's so, so weird to me that these people are transhumanists for everything except gender, it seems like. And somehow also profoundly chudded.
- [46:03]
D
Absolutely. I think that it's, it really is fascinating the kind of also cultural shift that's happened, particularly with psychedelics, which, you know, you go back to those, to those kind of mantras of the war on drugs. The idea that, you know, psychedelics were a pathway to either making you insane, you would lose your mind, you think you could fly, jump off a building or whatever, or it would make you a loser. You know, you would be disengaged from the, the traditional capitalist productive incentive. And, you know, you would spend your life wasting away playing video games. And then now, you know, you, you read the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and they will all have articles about the potential productive power of microdose and psilocybin, you know, of, you know, accessing this kind of biohacking self optimization rhetoric. You know, there was the famous Wall Street Journal interview with Elon Musk where he's being quizzed about his ketamine use. And, you know, he responds by saying, well, look at the, look at the value of my companies. You know, so whatever I'm taking, you know, this should be celebrated. This should be, you know, this is just a further example of further confirmation, as you mentioned, of the belief that at least for a certain portion of human society there is a ability through technology, drugs, and, you know, science alongside, like you mentioned, this transhumanist discourse that extends to everything from gene editing to the synthesis of AI in the human body. That the idea that the accepted constraints of the human, human existence, you know, sadness, aging, you know, trauma, these can all be transcended for a particular proportion, you know, of the cognitive elite. And, you know, psychedelics is, is, is an element, is an element for that. You know, it's almost this idea that like, well, if I take psychedelics, you know, I will reach some enlightened space of consciousness because I, you know, I'm already of a cognitive kind of register removed from yourself. But if you take it, you know that that will lead to disillusionment with your particular social role and we can't have that. And that needs to be policed and needs to be criminalized and needs to be punished with the full force of the law. So I think we really are moving into a world where there are going to be different rules for the same drugs for different people.
- [48:21]
A
What this sounds to me, right, like is that old proverb which is both kings and beggars have the liberty to sleep under a bridge.
- [48:27]
B
You know, I, I hate that the winners on the war on drugs are brew dog though.
- [48:35]
A
Yeah. I mean, because like this, this view that like there are some cognitive elites that can take drugs and the thing is, people like taking drugs. It's popular for a reason. And there always is some explanation as to why.
- [48:46]
C
Real loading screen tip.
- [48:49]
A
People like taking drugs. It's popular for a reason. Watch out for exclamation points above. Police officers. It used to be, right now the big one is psychedelics. Among the tech bro elite used to be cocaine for bankers, right? Where there was this belief that this same substance sort of distributed to one of two different kinds of people, produces two different kinds of outcomes. Either if it's consumed by black people in the form of crack, it creates crime. If it's consumed by white people and cephalated as a powder, it creates enormous value at Golden. Right. If anything, it's like it's the same story getting told over and over again. And it's like. What's different now, it seems, is that this industry and the actual policymaking machine have become so close that instead of being de facto legal for certain kinds of people, the goal is to make more and more drugs officially legal, again only for the right kinds of person. But what's very strange is that that is happening at such different paces around the world, not only in different geographies, but with different substances.
- [49:53]
B
Right.
- [49:53]
A
Like opioids were legal for a while if you got them through Purdue Pharmaceuticals, but you never got enough to, to like keep you going once they addicted you. Nothing is illegal in Britain at all. In fact, if you remember about eight years ago, they accidentally made coffee illegal. Briefly.
- [50:09]
D
Yeah, Substances Bill. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [50:12]
A
They briefly made coffee illegal. And then in Canada, in the States, it's state by state, substance by substance. There's not really that much of. I don't think a put a and economic pressure group to legalize heroin beyond sort of like safe injection sites. But that's a huge fight in British Columbia. And so just bringing it all back round sort of back home. The Britain seems to be outside of like Thailand and Malaysia One of the most restrictive in terms of its official legal status of drugs. And you could see this with like Zach Polanski getting pilloried for suggesting, hey, maybe we should agree that the war on drugs has been a failure.
- [50:49]
D
Yeah, no, I think that, you know, some of those, those kind of like structural failings of how the British state, you know, can respond to regulatory change that's happening across the world that you identified as is clear with this, you know, the way that cannabis has been legalized across the United States has been, like I mentioned, kind of bottom up led. So, you know, America, you know, for all of the failures of the American legislative system, of which there are many, you know, does have a legislative of instrument at the state level called a ballot initiative, where if enough people want something to go, you know, on popular referendum at an electoral cycle, it'll do so. And that is how legal cannabis was kind of demanded and then voted through across now 25 of the American states. Virginia just being also just going online just last month. Britain, of course, has a very centralized Westminster system in which power is very much hoarded within the Westminster bubble. And so it's really dependent upon a political party to kind of make the claim for reform in order for that to actually happen. And like you mentioned, you know, the Green Party is one of only, I think they're the only ones that full legalization and regulation as part of their manifesto. I know the Lib Dems have decriminalization, the SNPs have some decriminalization, and they've obviously opened up a drug consumption room over there as well. But you saw the response of the Green Party where Labour thought that it was going to be a real stick that they could beat them with at the Gorton and Denton by election. But I would rebut that. What was the consequences of that attack by the Labour Party where they had all these billboards and adverts saying the Green Party want to give crack cocaine to children, they want it to be sold heroin, sold free with every crunching of cornflakes or whatever. The Labour Party got absolutely destroyed that election. The British public were clearly not swayed by that argument. Hannah Spencer won for the Green Party in that by election by a shocking majority. And the Labour Party finished in third place, which is a devastating result for the same party of government. So the British public, I would say, is in a very different place to the British political class. I would also point out in terms of the role the British capital is playing within this transformation. It also is playing a role that I Think quite quietly outside of the cameras is more in line with the commercialization that's happened over the past decade, where, as you mentioned, there's always been a kind of a de facto legalization for those who have the resources. There's not going to be the same level of drug policing at Oxford University as there is going to be in Toxeth or Handsworth. That's been clear for everyone to know. There was a fascinating Conservative Party leadership election in 2019, actually, where at the same time the Conservative Party were talking about, you know, taking driving licenses away from anybody caught with drug possession. Every single one of their final five leadership candidates were all on record for having their own personal drug use. Michael Gove with cocaine as a journalist. Jeremy Hunt, Rory Stewart, Boris Johnson. So that dichotomy has always been in place. What has happened over the past 10 years, years, though, is the attempt for capital to turn previously prohibited drugs from being contraband into being something that could be commodified into being things that now can receive investment from private wealth officers or be floated on the stock exchange or be able to facilitate mergers and acquisitions. And this commodification of previously prohibited drugs is also very, very apparent in Britain's now rapidly growing and highly lucrative private medicinal cannabis industry. And so this, for me, and I tell the story of this in the book, is almost a perfect example of how capital conceives this type of social change. Medicinal cannabis was legalized in the UK by the activism of mothers of desperately sick children with chronic epilepsy who had, through going abroad, realized the medicine cannabis was one of the most effective ways of treating this form of kind of chronic, complex epilepsy. They came back, they campaigned for the law to change. The Theresa May government changed the law in 2018 in order to stop these negative headlines about mothers with desperately sick children who the government were prohibiting access to their medicine. And then after they changed the law, they did nothing to build an industry that would actually serve those types of patients. So instead it's all been handed over to private medical cannabis industry that, you know, just through the profit incentive, is going to develop medication for people with, you know, sleep anxiety, you know, or, you know, people who might have a little bit of chronic pain. You know, that's going to be the big market. You know, people with acute illnesses like complex epilepsy or multiple sclerosis is going to be a smaller market. And so they are, you know, those various patients are now being, being underserved by the industry that's emerged in their. In the wake of their activism. It's obviously incredibly expensive to get the medication that you require. It can be up to £2,000amonth again to access that medication. And if you look at the Sunday Times list recently published of the hundred fastest growing companies in the United Kingdom, and number eight sat a company called Mamedica, which is a medical cannabis company.
- [56:08]
A
Can you tell us about some of, like the, the examples of, of what a more inclusive transition away from the war on drugs towards something like a legal, just drug economy would look like? What have you seen?
- [56:23]
D
Excellent. We have all these different countries doing these different initiatives at different times means that you can kind of get a little bit of a compare and contrast of the different ways in which the process of drug legalization could be delivered. And it could be either highly commercialized and highly commodified, or it could also have at its concerns, you know, what in the US is broadly described as social equity. And in other places, you might even go as far as considering it, reparative justice initiatives in order to make sure that those who are damaged by the, by the failed war on drugs are at the front of the line when it comes to the new market that's emerging. And so a couple of examples that, you know, I think might be interesting, interesting for readers to explore further is looking at how in the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, they have been able to fund essentially a universal basic income program for their poorest residents through their cannabis tax revenues. And so, you know, initiatives like universal basic income initiatives like reparations. The city of Evanston in Illinois launched the first sanctioned municipal reparations program program in the USA through their cannabis sales tax revenue, up to $25,000 for all qualifying black families for home repairs for historic housing oppression that's actually been sued by the Trump administration. So how, how far they'll be able to get with that, of course, is an ongoing development, but something that's, that's relatively interesting. And then I think there's also more kind of market design initiatives in terms of us trying to move away from this heavily monopolized form of commodity exchange that has really captured so much of the global economy over the past few decades. The idea that legalization has to mean a commercial retail model, particularly one that is privately owned, I think is one that we might want to slow down and take a little bit of time in thinking about, well, what are the other regulatory tools? What are the other forms of production, Production, distribution and consumption we might be able to facilitate through this essentially emerging market that we get to design from Scratch. And so Rhode island, for example, requires in its legalization law that 25% of all the licenses for the cannabis stores go to worker owned cooperatives. And so this idea of how we might want to try a cooperative owned distributor is being implemented in there, similar in Germany where they legally cannabis but didn't legalize a commercial retail store model. And this is partly because of some of the restrictions of the European Union law. But also I think there's a, there's a tradition and a history in places like Barcelona and on continental Europe of cannabis social clubs where you're allowed to become a member of the social club, learn how to grow, cultivate the plants, but you're not establishing a retail commercial initiative that, that is driven for private profit. And I think that when we look at also how this cultivation might end up as so much does being drawn from the global south. You know, I ended the book go into Ghana, which along with a number of other African states has legalized cannabis cultivation, particularly for the export to this new emerging market. You know, could we look at initiatives like, you know, seed banks for the farmers to be able to access the seeds they require to grow, breaking out from that Monsanto owned patenting structure that you mentioned a little bit earlier, could we think about land being held in a commons that is made available for farmers to do this cultivation? Cooperative farming agreements being the type of agreements that governments give their licenses to. This might be the overly optimistic side of me because I've given so much negativity in this incident of you so far. But I think that there is a potential for really stopping and thinking how would we design a market if we got to design it from scratch? You know, so often we're all trying to lobby against all these different industries where power has been crystallized and centralized now for decades, whether that's fossil fuels, whether that's the tech industry. And here we have an example of an industry where the rules are set still to be written. They're still being written at the moment, but I think unless we argue for them and unless we make these demands, these rules are going to be written, like you say, by the paedophiles of the world, whilst at the same time being presented as being a progressive move away from the tragedy and the failure of mass criminalization and the war on drugs.
- [60:54]
B
I think it's interesting as well that this is coming at a time when we're sort of exploring other avenues of mass criminalization. I think about, about sort of flock cameras and you know, various sort of new methods of Surveillance. I wonder if it strikes you that it's sort of like now we don't need as much of the sort of logic of the War on drugs in order to perpetuate mass incarceration.
- [61:18]
D
I mean, I think that they're still using it. You know, the thing which is striking, we don't maybe need the logic of the War on drugs, but it's still a very useful tool. And we're seeing whether it's ICE agents rounding up people to sense El Salvador, whether it's like I mentioned, even on an international level, the use of the legislative architecture of the War on drugs to justify the seizure of Nicolas Maduro or the threatening of Gustavo Petro. Are we in the next year going to see another Latin American leader brought to the US on narco trafficking charges? There's a long, long history of using the war on drugs in this, in, in this manner. And these have been the ultimate consequences of the War on drugs, not the stated goals of the War on Drugs. You know, we need to remember and kind of really hold the war on Drugs to its own standard. And this is something that I think, you know, people who've advocated for legalization really need to, need, need to be full throated about. Because with these experiments in legalization as it's framed over the past decade, there's been a lot of questioning about, well, what's the review process? How are we going to make sure the legalization reaches the requirements that it requires? But the reality is the War on drugs was the pro, was the experiment, Prohibition was the experiment. You know, in this, in the history of humans, relationship with these substances. And the war on drugs didn't reach any of the objectives that it promised it would do. It was supposed to deliver less drugs use, less drug deaths, a drug free world. As the United nations held a meeting under the banner in 1998, it hasn't delivered those. And what has it delivered? It has delivered the establishment of a system of mass incarceration not just in the US but Brazil, Colombia, the uk. Our prisons are overcrowded because of the amount of people in there on drug offenses. And it has delivered an architecture that has facilitated Western and intervention in the global south in a number of different jurisdictions. And so I think that there is a potentially dystopian future where that system of criminalization is maintained. At the same time the capital seeks to try and turn some of these drugs into new sources of profit and commodification. Because for me it's no coincidence that the changes in the laws on drugs which have been argued for by progressive since the 1960s at least started to actually break through in the post 2008 moment. At a time in which the economy reaches its moment of stagnation. Now capital is desperately searching for new sources of profit, new things to input into the economy to facilitate growth. Public services are struggling under austerity and looking for new forms of tax revenue. And it's in that context that we start to get the legalization of cannabis and now psychedelics.
- [64:05]
A
The way that I tend to think about this is less that these are molecules, plants, whatever. Is that what we've been talking about the Last sort of 30 or so minutes is the opening of a frontier. Because capital always needs a frontier. And in this case for a number of historically contingent reasons, this is a frontier that has historically been the space of sort of anyone between liberals and progressives with a few libertarian whack jobs thrown in. And what you're talking about is the rate to define what this previously, let's say unused in terms of a legal economy frontier. This frontier territory is going to look like because the legal economy is moving into it no matter what. Think of it in almost territorial terms. What goes there? Is it a co op or is it Monsanto? Is it a seed that gets shared or patented? Is it going to be someone going to jail because, because they're using a psychedelic mushroom and can't afford $20,000 a year? Or another example I was thinking of just before we end as well is ketamine. Ketamine is a very powerful antidepressant that costs 12,000 pounds a year if you want to be treated by it in the uk. So there's just example after example after example of that logic that we don't want being prepared to be shoved in there. And there are tons of opportunities that you've talked about around the world, especially in places that have more bottom up governance in the global north, like you know, like cities in the United States or like cities in other parts of Europe or like, like approaches to more collective farming in the global South. And here in the UK it might not be as obvious, but it's exactly as important. So you know, this is, this is about what the transition looks like.
- [65:48]
D
Absolutely. I think that that frontier metaphor that you gave is, is absolutely perfect. You know, that this is these new spaces the capital is looking to move into, to commodify. You know, I drew the title the Next Fix, you know, partly with the meaning of fix in terms of, you know, its role as kind of drug slang, of being that, you know, addiction that has to be, you know, drawn in to maintain a drug dependency, but also in terms of the kind of classic Marxist understanding of the role of fix within capitalist economies. Obviously drawing on the fantastic work of David Harvey, you know, where he talks about the spatial fix that the last time that capital reached this point of stagnation and plateauing, where, you know, it literally moved into new territories in the global south and commodified those territories in order to relaunch this next cycle of growth. And I think that this is, you know, one of the few territories that have not yet been fully commodified. The kind of vast, untapped resources of the human consciousness as a sense of terrain and the commodification of it and the monopolization of it that I think is. Is being discussed in the kind of citadels of capital, you know, they are preparing for the world after the war on drugs whilst we're still debating, you know, drug legalization, good or bad. You know, they are registering the patents, you know, buying up the licenses in anticipation of that market coming online. And I think we should remember this is not the very first time that these same drugs have been commodified. You know, as I mentioned, the war on drugs, which we've come to see as the kind of historical norm which we start to see as almost like common sense, was the radical departure from the way that even the European empires dealt with cannabis, cocaine and opium. I mean, Britain, I mean, we will launch an entire war in order to protect our right to trade opium in the 19th century. You know, the drug war of the 19th century was a war by colonial shipping companies and, you know, the largest corporate actors in the global economy, you know, waging a war on the Qing dynasty of China to say, you have to accept our trade of these drugs, you know, and so this is not something that hasn't happened in the past. You know, this mass commercialization and the protecting of the profits of companies who are trading in drugs. You know, companies who I think were much more. More successful drug traffickers than, you know, the Pablo Escobar that we demonized in the 19th century. You know, Pablo Escobar wishes he could have been William Jardine or James Matheson. You know, they died in the House of Commons, not in a hail of bullets. You know, these individuals could be the precursors to what we're moving into in the 21st century. All these different attempts to try and create a relationship to these still risky substances, but ones that put forward the human commitment towards environmental justice. Public health and I think explicitly reparative justice as well. You know, we can't have the world that we're living in now where there are, as you mentioned, people who are now billionaires for legally trading cannabis and there are still people sitting in prison in sometimes the very same state that these businesses are running for doing literally exactly the same thing.
- [69:04]
B
Very, very dystopian to see who you. Not even who's going to be the Starbucks of weed so much as who's going to be the Bill Gates of perception. Terrifying.
- [69:14]
A
Well, I think that's as good a place as any to end it. Kojo, I want to thank you so much for coming on. The book is the Next Fix. Where can people get it?
- [69:23]
D
So, yeah, it's available all good and even bad bookstores, but the publisher would be Hachette and Verso putting it out in the U.S. so, yeah, the Next fix, the winners and losers in the future of drugs. And yeah, thank you so much for talking to me about this. And, you know, I think that this is something that's going to continue to develop as the industry develops over the next few years. And so, yeah, hopefully we can talk again in the future.
- [69:50]
A
Absolutely. And if you want more of this, don't forget there is a Patreon we have. It's $5 a month and you can get more episodes every week. I think. You know what I think in the spirit of, in the spirit of the conversation we've had today, our outro music is Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield. Thanks, everybody. My life with arms wide open.
- [70:26]
D
Today is where your book begins. The rest is still unwritten.