Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Should We Ban Extreme Wealth?” with Prof. Carl Rhodes

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"Should We Ban Extreme Wealth?” with Prof. Carl Rhodes · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
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Here's a dangerous idea for you, and one that's becoming increasingly popular in our
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economically polarized and unequal times.
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The idea is that any society which allows people to amass as much wealth as we have allowed
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the super rich to amass for themselves is fundamentally broken.
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And it should not be possible, basically, to be a billionaire.
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That's basically the gist of today's guest, Karl Rhodes.
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He is the former dean of the Business School at the University of Technology Sydney.
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He's just stepped down from that position, and he's now a professor at UTS Business School.
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We had him on the show a few years ago when he wrote a book called Woke Capitalism, which
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was about how big mega corporations cynically manipulate social justice causes to make themselves
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look super woke and curry favor with the social justice mobs.
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His new book is called Stinking Rich, the Four Myths of the Good Billionaire, and it examines
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our attitudes towards people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Steve Jobs.
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And asks how we should think about the capacity of people to become vast industrialists,
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how we should think about hereditary wealth, how we should think about the growth in inequality
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caused by the property boom, how we should think about social democracy.
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And so Karl and I talk about white privilege and diversity and DEI programs and democratic
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Scandinavian socialism and so on, and basically how to create a more just society and what
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the unintended consequences of trying to do so might be.
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Hope you enjoy it as much as I did, the one the only professor, Karl Rhodes.
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We spoke to you, we were talking about woke capitalism, right?
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We're just chart for me the arc of woke capitalism in the years since we spoke.
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I have a sense that we've probably spoke during peak woke, right, in the early years of
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this decade.
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Is it your assessment as well that that moment has tapered off?
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Absolutely.
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I'd say we're in the post woke era at the moment, but I think there are continuities
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nevertheless.
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I mean my book woke capitalism was specifically about the involvement of businesses in the
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so-called woke agenda and through Colin Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter with Nike and the
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toxic masculinity with Gillette, do you remember all these things, right?
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I didn't until you mentioned them, but now that you say them, you're like from a fever
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dream, isn't it?
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No, it's because I hadn't heard the name Colin Kaepernick in about like three years or something.
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I don't know what he's doing, yeah.
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It's like these strange things from another strange year, it really put me straight back
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into like the COVID era sort of weirdness of all that.
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I don't even remember what the Gillette ad was, but it was about razors for men and for women
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or something.
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No, no, no.
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It had his picture of men intervening in episodes of toxic masculinity.
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Oh, and standing up for women and stuff and standing up for women.
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And standing up for a different kind of masculinity, yeah, then there was a backlash.
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Yeah.
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And so there was all of that kind of stuff.
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In my argument in the book, I've just never really opposed to so-called woke politics
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as a relatively progressive person.
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I thought there was a lot of businesses were just kind of cashing in on it and that's
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what I was more opposed to.
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And I think what you're seeing now as, you know, look at Facebook who was, you know,
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when, when, when, you know, they were storming the capital at the end of Trump's first
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presidency, after that Facebook banned him and they thought this was gone.
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And then they had a chance to look a book initiative, which is a kind of charitable foundation
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supporting all kinds of woke stuff.
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And they've let all that go now that the foundations now focusing more on scientific stuff and
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Zuckerberg is kissing the Trump ring just like the other billionaires.
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Now what's changed?
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Sure.
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It's gone from woke to post woke, but the absolute focus on engaging in a politics of self-interest
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remains entirely unchanged.
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There's just a chameleon changing colors with the environment to survive as best as they
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can.
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That hasn't changed, but I think we are relatively post woke.
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Yeah.
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And I think one of the, one of the enduring moments, one of the enduring phenomena from that
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moment that endures is that the lip service, at least to diversity and equity and inclusion
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policies within organizations, so there's been a, there's been a sort of a sloughing off
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of all of the nonsense around we're going to put rainbow flags in our Twitter, you know,
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25,000 things like that and, you know, all the corporations doing all this and that out
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in terms of being outwardly woke.
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But I do still think we're in a moment in which it would be impossible for even a Zuckerberg
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to talk about them saying, well, we're just going to hire on the basis of merit now.
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We're not going to pay too much attention to what they're not.
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We know we're adequately representing particular ethnicities or sexualities in our workforce.
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That would still be taboo.
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And it'll be interesting to see whether or not that.
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I mean, diversity is interesting, you know, I mean, a lot of companies getting rid of diversity
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initiatives in the U.S. often to curry favor with Trump, but that's, you know, that's happening
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elsewhere in the, in the world now.
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And I was talking to someone recently, kind of expressing concern about this, someone
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who clearly knew more than me about it.
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And their view was, it never worked anyway.
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So it's good.
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Let's scrap it and actually start looking at what can really be done around the real issues
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of justice that aren't necessarily about, you know, corporate programs.
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And if you look at these programs, you know, if you look at the hard things, gender pay
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gap hasn't really changed that much.
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You know, look at the list of billionaires around the world and they're still, they're still
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kind of divided on racial and gender grounds as well.
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So what is really expected, I mean, in defense of those programs, you wouldn't expect them
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to work that quickly that they could change the complexion of the world's billionaires
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in less than a decade of implementation.
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Yeah, I think they're probably in around more than a decade, but no, not in terms of billionaires,
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but in terms of, in terms of things like the gender pay gap, you might expect that
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more.
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I mean, I think the more devastating critique from people who I know who work in this space
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and many of them are people from historically disadvantaged communities themselves, is
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that the kinds of diversity that you get are very glib and superficial.
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So, you know, if you need, if a company is committed to having 20% of its workforce
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be people of color or something like that, all you're really doing is having some middle-class
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well-educated people give a leg up to other middle-class well-educated people so that you'll
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have the, you know, the Indian, Australian, aspirational person who knows exactly how to
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fill out the forms correctly and who knows how to play the diversity game, being selected
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over another almost identical white-skinned person who is demographically and economically
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from the same basket, and you're not actually doing it, you're not actually diversifying,
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you're not creating more opportunity for people, for the downtrodden people who people
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claim to be caring about, one of the best of these policies.
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But, in a sense, class was never part of the diversity agenda, and I'd say that's
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probably one of its weaknesses.
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I mean, having said that, I was in the US in Las Vegas, have all places, two weeks after
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Trump's inauguration at an academic conference, and this was, I think it was actually 11 days
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after the inauguration, and he'd already started to cut funding to university programs,
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and I'm talking to people there who had students on scholarships that they had as part
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of diversity initiatives that had just been suddenly chopped, and you'd have deans
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having to go to these students and say, I'm really sorry, you can't study here anymore,
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people doing PhDs, or people in research fellowships suddenly lost their employment and livelihood
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because of this drastic ideological movement against diversity.
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So things like that, that's real people suffering from this kind of politics.
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That's the nature of an extreme sort of hagelian swing to a throw, isn't it?
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The wrecking ball comes in to try to undo the excesses of the last regime, and we'd
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all be better off if there was a bit more sophistication in just going, all right, well, we're
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going to change this policy, obviously we can grandfather in the people who came here
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under the previous policy, but henceforth it's going to go a bit different, but that's
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not how human emotions behave when they run around.
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But the thing, too, is the idea that diversity replaced meritocracy was kind of nonsense anyway.
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We always had quotas, it was, the quotas were just 100% white men quota.
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That quota was in place for a long, long time, but so it's not that diversity didn't replace
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meritocracy, it replaced, I mean, never fully replaced its predecessor anyway, but that's
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also a myth to suggest that there was some naturally occurring market for talent that was
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disrupted by.
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Yes, and it was totally, well, no, I mean, true things could be true, it could be true that
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there was discrimination against non, against people who weren't straight white males,
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which is undeniably true, and then it can also be true that the diversity movement ended
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up in a, in a position in some institutions, especially in academia and in some of the
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more woke corporations, where it actually was anti meritocratic in the sense that if
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you do did have, you know, admissions with universities are especially profound, did
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we just get light, did the light just change?
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No, it did, it went purple.
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The light went purple, but anyway, don't know.
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And it could also be true that, you know, we got to a position, certainly in academia,
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some university admissions, another, in other, in woke corporations, where the balance
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did tip such that people were intentional, I mean, anyone who's worked in the companies
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knows this, the balance was wildly in favor of the woman of color versus an equally
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well qualified white male, I mean, I just know from having gone to a bazillion meetings
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at the public broadcaster and in production companies and everything, you couldn't
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pitch anything without it being like, so what's the, what's the diversity angle, we're
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going to need to hire somebody who's a, yeah, you know, they wouldn't say as much, but
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a token diversity higher in order to get this across the line.
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Yeah, I haven't seen that so much in universities.
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I think there is increased diversity in, in university academics now, but I've been involved
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in more selection and promotion panels than I care to mention, and I've, this has never
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been a vote.
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I've seen lots of moves to prevent discrimination in favor of people who might be from dominant
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groups, but not to, to select people on the basis of gender race or, or, well, yours would
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be the only institution, that would be extraordinary, how, extraordinary given how widespread, I mean,
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if you've got, if there are 10 of you all at the top and you're all white men and you're
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looking at a, and you've got 10 candidates, you're seriously telling me that part of your
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mind isn't going, well, one of them is a South Asian woman.
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Yeah, and then in my mind, then it would be any unnecessary discrimination in favor of
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the majority needs to be avoided, not to discriminate in favor, necessarily, of the minority,
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because that is the history.
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You know, when I went to university, wait, are you talking about any, making sure that
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there's no discrimination in the representation of the, of the, of the upcoming, of the cohort
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that is the eventual result of the diversity higher, because that's different from, like there
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are two levels on which diversity, on which diversity or discrimination could play out.
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You've got your 10 white guys and they're hiring from a group of candidates.
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You could say the anti-discriminatory thing to do is to be biased towards the person
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of color, because then you're going to end up with 11 people, one of whom is a person
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of color, and that is a less discriminatory body to end up with than one which is 11 white
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guys, but involved in the facilitation of that outcome is a discriminatory decision
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in the choosing of the person of color over an equally qualified white person or a more
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qualified white person.
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Yeah, I'm not sure.
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Let me tell you, so to more practically, I did my first degree at the University of
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Wales in Cardiff in the UK, degree in economics, between 84 and 87.
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Every single one of my lecturers was a white man, there was no single woman on staff, at
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least not one that I ever met in a classroom, I had to get away with that.
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I'm not a single person, I mean, I think there might have been a few Europeans, I mean,
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that's how diverse it is in mainland Europe, it's about as diverse as it is Greek, he's
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kind of black.
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Yeah, that sounds like discrimination to me, yeah, not the fact when the, no it is, but
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I'm already said, I mean, we of course we know that the pastor is hugely discriminatory.
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I was talking to another friend of mine who was Dean at, I won't mention the names,
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I had a quite famous business school in the UK, I went to he was appointed, they made
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this big press thing, you know, ex business school, appoints first woman dean after 100
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years, actually looked at me and she said, you think they'd be embarrassed, but instead
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they were kind of a big deal of how great they were, she was definitely the most competent
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person for the job, so I think it's about, you know, done well, it's about removing the
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forms of discrimination that have historically done well, because the reason we've got
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Trump, I would argue is because it hasn't been done well, like it wasn't being done
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well, it was not simply a case of let's just remove the discrimination, so that the highly
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qualified minority candidates could naturally be selected independently, you know, in a colour
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blind way, there was nothing colour blind about it, in fact, colour blindness is overtly,
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you know, dismissed by the sort of work social justice, left as being anathema to true
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justice, which has to proactively discriminate against historically privileged communities.
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Yeah, and we've never had the quota systems that the US has had here in the same way,
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the way the universities have been managed in terms of university admissions.
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Oh, in terms of employment in corporates and border, there's been targets.
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Although, I mean, someone was pointing out to me who works in the creative arts the other
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day that, there doesn't seem to have been a single play put on in Australia by a playwright,
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by a white, straight male playwright who was born in the past 30 years, anywhere.
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Okay.
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It doesn't get up, I mean, it may not be a formal quota, but there's no theatre company,
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there's any theatre company when they have a limited number of slots, you know, is not
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going to have some 28 year old, straight white male playwright and they've got some, you
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know, this whole range of things that they could choose from, who the perception will be
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that they're uplifting traditionally marginalized voices and pandering to their subscribers
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who will sit in the stands and clap politely, it doesn't happen.
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I mean, in reality, there is a massive skew the other way.
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So now I think it's, it's kind of, I don't know much about the theatre, but I was recently
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actually reading about a play called The Summer of the 17th Doll by Australian playwright
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from the 50s. His name was just, I've aided me at the moment.
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And it was the first, it was recognized as a play that, that kind of brought out the idea
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of the great Australian dream, home ownership and suburban, you know, utopias and so forth.
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But at that time, the problem was that they weren't, he was one of the first Australian
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playwrights to have a play produced, where they would always produce in Australia.
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Up until the 50s, right, playwrights were overseas, particularly British.
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So there, you know, that was the discrimination of the day too, and the idea of promoting
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Australian playwrights came up and, and this play Summer of the 17th Doll was, I think
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it was first published, I first came out in Melbourne in 1955 or 56. So yeah, these things
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kind of come and go. Yeah, yeah. Certainly. No, I mean, I mean, but again, nobody's denying
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that there was discrimination in the past. I think what people, what frustrates people
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is when we're gaslit and told that there's no discrimination, that there has been no discrimination
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taking place over the past 10 years, like I'd rather people just owned it and went, yes,
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historically, white males were, you know, on top. Therefore, we're going to sacrifice
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an entire generation of white males now and subject them to the same kind of dispossession
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as we've, as they inflict, as they are four bears inflicted on other people because
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of the color of their skin and their sex. And that's the price, sorry, that's the price
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they're going to have to pay instead of being like, well, actually, no, it's not happening.
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We're really just working on merit. Like, it doesn't pass the bullshit test, but I don't
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know. I think of myself, you know, I'm white, middle aged, I mean, a middle class profession,
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I'm straight cisgender. I got nothing of this. You're the one who won the lottery. You
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were born at a time when, when I can't, I can't honestly say I have never felt discriminated
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against because of that. No, that's because you were presumably born in the 60s.
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67, yeah. Right. You won the lottery. I don't know. I think it's 57. There's a lot of
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three winners. No, I was, I was the end of that. I was in that kind of in between blank
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generation that Richard. Well, that's the thing about, yeah, probably, yeah, the, the
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Gen X, the gen, what is it? Is it Gen X? Yeah. I think I said this to you before I think
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of myself as Gen N. What's that mean? I'm the neoliberal generation. I was, I was turned
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18 when, you know, that she was in the, and that extreme Reagan was in, in the White House.
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So I've grown up through that. So speaking of the glorification of wealth and materialism,
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a veteran Reagan brings us to the subject of your book, which is billionaires. I think
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the premise here is that we have a kind of an assumption that, that billionaires are particularly
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brilliant or virtuous or, or deserving. And yet the way I feel, at least among my peer group,
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is that billionaires are quite suspect. So what is the tension that you're trying to get at
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with our relationship to? I think there's, I mean, ultra rich. The book, in a sense,
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is more about inequality than it is about billionaires. Billionaires are just a way to talk about
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inequality because they represent economic inequality. They represent it at such a gross level.
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And inequality is widening the number of billionaires is increasing the amount of wealth that
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they command is, is also increasing. But they seem, they seem to be fairly socially acceptable
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figures at some level. And even though people may be suspicious of them, I think increasingly so,
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even since I finished the book and Elon Musk's been prancing around like a fool around the world,
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it's probably been more so. But for many people, they're heroes. Musk has his so-called
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musketeers who think that he's just a brilliant individual. And there has been, in many
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cases, either kind of thinking of these people of heroes or else thinking of them as somehow
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of the salvation of the world, you know, the billionaires and politicians head off to the
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Davos along with Bono and whoever else, you know, celebrities to solve the world's problems. And
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meanwhile, all this happens, inequality is getting worse. It's getting worse within countries,
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not just between them. It's getting worse across generations, which for the first time in a long
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time, you see kids being less well off than their parents. And we've seen no real political will
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to do anything about it. I mean, you know, some people would say that some years ago,
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Bill Shorten lost the election here because of his position on franking credits. I mean, how are
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we actually going to deal with anything that's seriously about the fair distribution of wealth,
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even in prosperous countries like Australia? Well, it's going to get worse as more
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as the population ages because the reason, you know, people vote against redistributive
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policies is because they're old and rich. And they got rich on a property boom. And that was
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what that election that you're alluding to was about as well. You know, the possibility of
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maybe clawing back a fairly unjust tax benefit that old wealthy people have in order to be able
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to fund programs for the poor. And it was it was political suicides. I don't know how. Yeah,
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I mean, I'm not optimistic that we're going to find a way to take goodies away from rich old
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voters and give them to struggling younger citizens. No, I'm not optimistic about that either. I
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think things will actually get worse because what will happen is you will have a generational shift
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in wealth where these people, these homeowners, many of them owning multiple homes and able
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again by the tax system around negative gearing will pass those homes to their children. And that
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will be just a form of of pass reproduction. And it's the people then who don't have parents
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who own homes or don't own as many of them who will create a bigger divide. I mean, so that's a
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change that that we will see, you know, in the coming, you know, yeah, we're already we're already
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seeing aren't we the development of a of a society in which it's no longer true really that everybody
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has access. I mean, not even a majority of people have access to the dream of owning a home
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in this country anymore. That used to be the aspiration, but it's now so many let orders. I mean,
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so many years of median income to get a home that unless you come from a lineage of homeowners,
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unless your parents were able to get into the market, you probably will never be able to. So now you
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have what some European societies have had for some time, which is a division between property owners
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and renters. Does that have to matter? You know, there are countries like the Netherlands where
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people don't own their homes and they're they're well off. I think it does I think it does matter
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because if you think, I mean, tens of June, by the way, the average Australian home across the
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entire country went to over a million dollars. I think it was a million and two hundred and fifty
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of two thousand five hundred and twenty. And for that to be the average across the country,
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how expensive does it have to be in the nice bits of the big cities? Oh, I mean, and this includes
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all homes, right? From every micro studio apartment on the you know, in a basement to to to
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you know, to mansion. So that's that's the average of a million dollars. There isn't
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all capital cities in Australia now are over a million. I think Sydney fell first about 10 years
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or so ago, but then the others have kind of followed. And that the average income in Australia
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is a gross income. I think it's around about a hundred thousand. So that's about ten times
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different. I mean more if you look at what people will get after tax. And that's got worse and worse
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and worse and worse over recent decades. So so-called housing affordability is getting worse. But if
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you think about the so-called great Australian dream, which we're just mentioning from the 1950s
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was it started that it was about about home ownership. And the Australian dream much more practical
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than the American dream, which was everyone can be widely successful. But if you think about that
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dream of Australia, and it was a dream for white immigrants to Australia, they're not for Indigenous
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Australians, but it was about- Well, not just white immigrants, it was a dream that a lot of people
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from other- Oh, in the 50s though, it was still- In the 50s, of course, Australia.
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Right. But this dream is not, sorry, doing traffic, finished a thought. But I mean, this dream
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is not something that was extinguished in like 1960. There's something that was extinguished
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within the past decade or decade and half, right? I mean, you had huge waves of migration from Asia,
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from all over the world, all of whom were buying into the idea that if our children work hard and
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get a good education, then they're going to be able to fulfill the Australian dream. Your majority
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of the country has arrived since the Second World War, all kinds of different colours, one of the most
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multicultural countries in the world, and everyone's bought into this. And it is now turning out
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to, perhaps, have been alive, but carry on with your- Yeah, my point is that you can't disassociate
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the Australian dream from the idea of Australian democracy. And as kind of people, particularly first
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immigrants left coming from Europe, were coming back from countries that were still deeply
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enmeshed in the kind of feudal past. And the feudal past was a system of landowners and
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vassals and tenants. And the idea that everyone could own land and everyone could own home
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is a deeply democratic ideal that we don't have a society of a class division based on land
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ownership. And I think that's kind of being removed. And that would be different from immigrants
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from non-European countries, but still the idea of independence, not being dependent on land
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lords. No one can kick you out. No one can kick you out. And this being a sign of prosperity that
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you have wealth that you can hand down to your children, they're deeply tied into a kind of
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democratic tradition. So moving back now to a society of, well, we're not there yet, but in the
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direction of a society that the biggest kind of divide is between land lords and tenants.
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That's a kind of feudal system that democracy sought to overthrow. So democracy's not just about
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politics. It's about economic structures as well. So that's kind of what worries me, particularly
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about the uniquely Australian context, because we talk about inequality globally and billionaires
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are a global phenomenon, but it manifests differently in different countries as well.
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I mean, I think mobility is the thing that many people intuitively regard as being the most
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morally salient thing, right? It's not per se inequality that I think is too galling,
27:43
because I think many people, if they had the option of a slightly more unequal society,
27:48
where everyone is fabulously wealthier versus a poor society where everyone is equally poor,
27:54
they'll cop the inequality, but they'd want to know that there's some sort of justice to it and
27:59
some sort of mobility between from the, from the poor to the rich, and that also, as I understand,
28:05
it is declining. Indeed. But I think as part of that, to the political ambition is declining.
28:13
The question politically of what constitutes a just society isn't asked anymore. I moved to Australia
28:19
from the UK at 20 years old in 1987, and it was at the time in 1987 that Bob Hawke was running
28:27
the campaign for his second term in office as prime minister, and he issued his famous speech
28:35
where he says, by 1990, no Australian child shall live in poverty, somewhat naive kind of ambition
28:42
that he had, it was never realized. She says it was only a few years ago. I know. I remember,
28:47
dude, pick up further, more distant date. But in any case, the nature of that ambition,
28:53
the nature of an ambition that your success and your life in this country isn't going to be
28:59
determined by the wealth of your parents, which is what meritocracy is about. Meritocracy is massively
29:04
unfair system. You know, if you're rich and I'm not, why should your kids have a good life and
29:09
go to the dentist and mine and count, you know, I have to eat self-bred because of the teeth
29:13
are filled with cavities, right? That seems to me to be primarily unjust meritocracy itself.
29:20
But the question of a just society, that was embedded in the kind of vision that Bob Hawke
29:27
was portraying with that statement. I don't see any of that kind of ambition for a fair
29:35
society in today's mainstream politics. It's more every Australian will have the right to make a
29:41
deal. You see in Australia, you don't, but you do see little flare-ups of it in Jeremy Corbyn
29:50
and Bernie Sanders and AOC and some of these figures, and even weirdly in the far right in Europe,
29:58
in some ways. I mean, in some ways you look at the national front and some of these, these,
30:03
and they're at the same time as they're being wildly racist and xenophobic,
30:08
they pander to their base of wealthy receiving good socialists and French people as well,
30:14
and talk about egalitarianism and like everybody sort of, you know, even Trump is like super,
30:21
at the same time as he's incredibly divisive democratically, he never touches going after
30:28
social security, going after Medicare or that sort of stuff. With the exception of the fact he's
30:32
about to pass a bill of his rights, Medicaid. I guess I'm speaking rhetorically more than,
30:39
in fact, there is still a sense and a longing for the politics that you're talking about.
30:46
It just doesn't seem to have a quorum to get it over the edge.
30:49
Yeah, well, I don't think in Trump's case and more generally with this kind of right-wing
30:53
populism, you see this kind of testing to these kind of ideals is more of a kind of tactic used
31:03
to con people into getting votes. If you look at Trump's policies, that's not what they're about.
31:09
I mean, you look at the great, big, beautiful bill. I mean, what, that is third grade,
31:13
I came up with that name. His name is Donald J Trump.
31:17
Yes. What's it about? It's about increasing spending in various things and decreasing
31:25
tax for exactly what he did. It's mildly reckless on the deficit, but what it doesn't do is
31:31
do the actual hard reforms of social security and Medicare that would be necessary,
31:36
like the Republicans of a generation ago felt were fundamental to the Republican brand.
31:41
It doesn't rip apart the social safety net in the way that, for example, what was his name?
31:48
The vice presidential candidate to Mitt Romney, who was the leader of the House of Representatives
31:52
and he was a prominent Republican. Anyway, people will remember him talking about, but he was like
31:56
regarded as being the visionary of the Republican Party 20 years ago and was all about like,
32:01
we have to tighten our fiscal belts and raise the retirement age and pull back on benefits
32:07
and all these harsh, very fatter-right sort of Reagan-ite kind of reforms. That's not Trump.
32:11
Trump is like, let it rein money. Yeah, someone else's problem.
32:15
Someone else's problem. He didn't do anything when you know what it's the fact.
32:20
Although this is part of the recent fallout between Elon Musk and Donald Trump is around
32:28
these issues too. So, Elon Musk goes in initially, I think he was claiming that he would save
32:34
one trillion. Then he upped it to two trillion. I think he's ended up to be about 150 million
32:39
that doges saved by the public bullshit. Yeah, people are even questioning whether that's the case,
32:44
but that was the sort of thing he went in on. Maybe this is why Trump cut him at the knees on this.
32:51
Oh, certainly. Then Elon came out and publicly said that he thought the bill was completely reckless
32:55
and wildly. To be adding trillions of dollars to the deficit while he's dilly-dallying around
33:00
with a few hundred million here and a few hundred million there is totally insane.
33:05
So, billionaires as a sort of proxy for inequality. You talk about some various aspects of this.
33:13
Let's just start with the one that you alluded to about Elon, which is that there's something kind of,
33:18
there's like a frisson of ingenuity that there's a kind of a Thomas Edison-like quality,
33:24
he's an iron man. I find myself somewhat tempted in the pre-Twitter era of Elon to be vulnerable
33:33
to that idea. The man's got a company that's going to bore through the ground and create hyper loops
33:39
and things and he's built shuttles that literally go into space finesse and he built the first
33:46
popular electric car. I always found it a little bit melee-mouthed when people would be like,
33:52
oh, he sells himself as a great engineer, but all he is really is a great businessman or a great
33:57
capitalist or whatever. And I would be like, well, okay, that's a bit ungenerous. He's like
34:03
changed the world with, he's changed the world of automobiles and he's changed the world of space
34:06
travel. So, I don't know, what is wrong with my thinking on that, setting aside again all the
34:15
Trump and that. I mean, obviously, he's not stupid and he's talented. He was introduced at one of
34:23
these Trump events as the world's greatest capitalists. He's kind of the world's greatest investor
34:29
of government money, but not real. But isn't that also sort of a cheap shot? It's perfectly
34:35
legitimate for a capitalist company to win tenders from whoever they want to. And if they're providing
34:41
a service that the government needs that the government can't produce on its own because NASA
34:45
can't do it as well, then the government is a client. There's a customer. It's not it's not
34:50
large-ess. I mean, it's not social welfare. The government isn't paying in money because
34:56
for the same reasons that Putin pays his friends money, the government's buying a thing from him
35:00
that he has a capitalist produced. I think I fall into this trap and I think I just did slightly
35:07
is that we can debate the relative merits of individual billionaires and whether we'd like
35:13
Trump or we don't like Trump or we can talk about. Mark Zuckerberg's new hairdo. Do you think it's
35:22
great for the world of fashion? But it's like who cares? Because that actually distracts from the fact
35:27
that we have a fundamental system that is increasingly producing economic inequality. So the question
35:33
isn't about whether Trump is a genius or not. The question is he's predicted now that he'll
35:40
become the first trillionaire within the next five years. Musk, so yeah. Trump's a little
35:46
level on the billionaires. He is a perfect example of what a capitalist shouldn't be,
35:52
which is a person who manipulates the coercive force of government in order to enrich themselves
35:59
rather than producing anything productive. Let's assume that Musk is some massively ingenious
36:08
kind of capitalist superhero. Does that mean he should have so much money? He should command
36:17
so much wealth that it creates a system of such massive inequality that he becomes the first
36:23
trillionaire. And I think as much as debating whether we like particular people or not,
36:34
it's more about what do we think of the system that produces these inequalities? Should that
36:39
change somehow? Because whether we like billionaires... What's the somehow there? Is it a high
36:44
global tax? Because of course you have to... You come up with if you're going to start taxing
36:50
the way that we did in the Eisenhower years, you've got 90% tax rates above a certain amount,
36:55
then you're going to have a flight and then Elon will just leave the United States and he'll go
36:59
somewhere where there's... He'll move to Ireland. He'll move his company to Ireland. So do you need a
37:04
global minimum tax or something? What's the solution? The first part of the solution is we need
37:12
we need in democratic countries at least. There needs to be a growing awareness of the problem
37:17
and there needs to be a kind of relatively popular movement that wants to see
37:22
countries achieve greater economic justice because you're not going to get that change from
37:26
major politicians. Politicians are going to chase votes. So the change will come from changes
37:31
in public opinion. But again, so maybe Elon will take his money and go to Ireland and then
37:39
just wave goodbye to him and let someone else do... Well then you have no tax base to pay for
37:43
things because if all the rich people go... Well, they don't pay much tax anyway.
37:50
If in the world in which you're taxing them properly, they do. Oh, yes. So you end up not achieving
37:55
the thing you want to achieve because you impose this punitive tax in order to fund all of the
38:00
social... All of the redistributive social welfare systems, but then the tax base flees the country,
38:05
so you don't have it. Like this is a conundrum that countries face. The individual countries do face.
38:11
And I remember some years ago when I think the European Union rules that Apple had loads of
38:18
unpaid tax in Ireland and wanted to get it back and the Irish government was saying no, no, no,
38:24
let them carry on as they want because they provide employment and so forth. Absolutely.
38:28
I mean, that intentionally did that. And there was that case of like France introduced a wealth
38:32
tax and then Gerard Depardieu just left France and everyone was like, see, this is what happens
38:37
and I was like, well, it's not that bad. You lost Gerard Depardieu, that's not the worst thing in the world.
38:42
They found out about him later on. Let him go to Sicily, it doesn't have wherever he went.
38:47
Well, I mean, let's see if that actually happens and whether there is a change of that nature
38:53
because that doesn't... I mean, you know, the Rolling Stones left the UK during the 60s to avoid
39:00
tax. That's the only real example I can think of. Don't Gerard Depardieu, now I'm going to say
39:04
an example. Well, you see reverse examples all the time in the case of somewhere like Ireland,
39:10
where they make an intentional decision to not tax, you know, tax companies or to tax them
39:15
in a very low rate and all of a sudden, all of the world's tax companies are based in Ireland.
39:19
Yeah. And so you can see that the company corporations do respond to incentives,
39:25
it's a bit harder for human beings to because, you know, they have to live somewhere.
39:30
But nonetheless, I don't think it would not have an effect. Is the problem of Elon and the
39:36
Steve Jobs and the Bill Gates the same problem as the problem of
39:45
entrenched inequality and hereditary wealth? It's not, right? I mean, there must be two different
39:50
things that we're talking about here. One is our concern that a lack of redistribution combined
39:58
with skyrocketing property prices is leading to a bifurcated society where there's an economy of
40:05
inherited wealth and an economy that's struggling running along in parallel. That strikes me as
40:12
but create me from wrong because I'm just talking at my ass. A different problem than the problem
40:17
of the existence of a class of ultra-rich people who are mostly self-made industrialists,
40:24
capitalists, entrepreneurs. Most ultra-rich people aren't self-made.
40:29
Well, the one we're talking about here are Rupert Murdoch, you know, Elon Musk
40:36
Bill Gates. I mean, yeah, he didn't come from absolutely nothing, but do you mean
40:44
Elon Musk or Elon Musk's dad? Yeah, yeah. And Murdoch's dad had a little newspaper in South
40:50
Australia, but these are completely, these orders have made actually billions of times different
40:55
from the wealth that they created, the wealth that they inherited. Well, the wealth that they
40:59
took, I would say, but no, the wealth that they got from their parents, right? Yeah. They have,
41:04
they have not just 10x or 100x or 1000x, they've millions of times extra. Yeah, but it's still
41:10
through through engagement in monopoly-based forms of competition. If you look at most of the tech
41:16
billionaires that their wealth has come from creating unfair markets, in many cases it comes from
41:24
aspects of cronism, in some cases inheritance, in the Australian context, the richest people are
41:30
the ones who dig up and sell the stolen land that we all that we all live on. So there's a kind of,
41:36
you know, postcolonial element to that as well. Also, the biggest one of them is a hereditary
41:43
inheritance, right? I mean, Gina Reinhardt, yeah, is just a sion, you know. Yeah, well, again,
41:49
she did multiply the wealth that she was much more, she's been much more successful than her father,
41:57
Hancock was, but you know, it still kind of comes through this process. But I mean, the other question
42:05
is, even if these people ask so-called self-made, do you actually, is it actually correct to be a
42:11
self-made billionaire? Think about how much, I'm going to open my notebook here because I'm going
42:15
to get to some numbers now. A billion dollars. Start counting now. One, two, three, four, five.
42:25
Never sleep. How long will it take you to reach a billion?
42:29
Hmm, 17 months. 32 years. According to my calculations. You know, if you said, if you're a
42:42
billionaire and you said, I want to take a billion dollars and a hundred dollar notes,
42:48
would weigh 10 tons, the money. If you took it, you can't, don't have them here anymore,
42:54
but if you enter the US and you want a hundred billion in one dollar bills,
42:59
you could wrap around the world four times. It's an unfathomable amount. You know what I mean,
43:05
we kind of use this number, but it's just a ridiculous amount of number and amount of money.
43:13
So do you imagine anyone actually deserves that? They've made it and that it's not something that
43:21
they've kind of taken one way or another. It seems not possible to me. It doesn't seem not
43:27
possible to me. I might be with you about what we should do about the fact that they have that
43:33
much money and how we would be all be better off living in a society in which we didn't allow
43:39
them to have that much money. But I don't, because wealth can be created out of nothing but ideas,
43:47
because wealth is not just the raw stuff of the land. There were lots of countries that are
43:53
mineral rich and dirt poor. And companies can just create prosperity for people by creating things
44:03
that people want and then people clamor to have that thing. So they give them money for it,
44:07
like an iPhone or something like that. Steve Jobs really did just create an enormous amount
44:13
of wealth that had not been pre-existing. And it wasn't just the wealth of the lithium that he
44:19
bought that had been dug out of the ground. It was the wealth that was created by his ingenuity
44:23
in designing the iPhone or getting people to design it for him and then marketing it the way
44:27
that he did. So it doesn't strike me as bizarre that in producing a tremendous amount of wealth,
44:35
a person would be able to and rightly be able to retain some portion of that.
44:41
The question I think is it actually about creating wealth? On the one hand, you'll have someone
44:46
like Jeff Bezos, you know, with Amazon. His wealth is created not by actually creating anything,
44:55
it's all rent. So he has his massive distribution network, which is hard for sellers to avoid.
45:03
So if you want to sell your thing on there, instead of you getting the money for what you have
45:08
legitimately produced, he gets in the vicinity, I think, of about 40% of it. Let's just rent
45:14
seeking behavior. There is no value added ability to seek rents now that he's built the biggest
45:19
retailer in the world. But it wasn't always that way. He had to create wealth, I mean, I'm not
45:23
not going to go into bat too hard for Jeff Bezos, but he did not just go around creating
45:31
scenarios in which it was impossible for people to escape his rent seeking. What he did was the
45:36
wealth that he created was I needed some laundry detergent last night and it was 6 p.m.
45:42
And I realized that we were almost out and I'm going away tomorrow night and I didn't want to leave
45:46
my spouse with no laundry detergent. I mean, they're here to go and run to the shops. So instead of
45:50
me running to the shops, I hopped onto an app and within about 18 seconds, when I get home today,
45:55
there'll be laundry detergent sitting outside my front door. That's a value. It's a value that I
46:00
value. It's a value that he created in his just on time delivery and his, you know, perfecting
46:06
meticulously the art of speedy delivery and all that sort of stuff. And I think because of that,
46:12
he deserves to be richer than other people. The question is how much richer?
46:17
Well, what do you say to the argument that that's sort of up to him and his customers? It's up to
46:23
me to decide how rich I make him by how much I use his services and then how and then it's up
46:27
to the board of Amazon to decide what his compensation should be.
46:33
Yeah, I think that's what you work, basically, like what is the market value in that?
46:38
But where does the wealth actually get come from? It comes from the people who do the work,
46:43
ultimately, you know, a value is created through the work of, through labor.
46:49
How much does it cost you?
46:50
Marx. But you can't deny the fact that at least some extent labor.
46:57
But so why it is some extent is the point there, right?
47:00
There are people who are doing back breaking labor in Africa who are earning a lot of money
47:04
and they're working harder than Amazon employees. Yes. So the value ad is the Bezos productivity boost.
47:13
I don't, yeah, I don't really see it that way. I think that's what Bezos has found a way of doing
47:19
is extracting more of the value for himself rather than distributing it to the people who
47:25
actually created and not just Bezos. I mean, this is the system. It look at CEOs, right?
47:30
I think today the average CEO in the US earns like 300 times more than the average worker,
47:37
where if you go back to the, I can't remember the exact numbers, I think we go back to the 80s,
47:43
it was probably more like somewhere between 50 and 100 is today's CEO three times better than
47:49
the one at a time. No, and I think that's a good example. And in some ways, I suspect that it's
47:52
a bit of a distraction to talk about Elon and Jobs and Bezos because they really are outliers
47:59
doing something strange. They've built entirely new ways of doing something. And as a result,
48:05
they've simply taken some fraction and kept themselves some fraction of a tremendous new
48:10
amount of fraction of the total wealth. Like the total amount of, like if you measured the increase
48:20
in GDP that is derived from the existence of iPhones and iPads, I bet Steve Jobs' wealth at his
48:27
death was not that much in comparison to that. Well, yeah, before all that. So, you know,
48:34
some fraction of the increased wealth that Bezos has produced through his productivity innovations
48:41
is accruing to him, but not a hundred percent of it. However, I take your point that there's like
48:48
a structural mechanism by which people who are not wild innovators who are creating world
48:55
changing technologies and companies and new ways of doing, of living and doing business,
49:00
who are just basically lucky private school kids who got a good job, learned the right
49:07
backs to slap and the right way to be on a board and the right rings to kiss, find themselves
49:13
in sea-sweets and are now by default earning staggering amounts of money. And I do think that's a
49:21
different problem. Well, I think it's the same problem in this sense that you have people who
49:29
use whatever means they have to take a large and unfair share of the prosperity generated by an
49:36
economy. Some people might be better at it than others, but there is still that attempt to do so.
49:43
And as I say, it's also done by manipulating markets, you know, and most of billionaire wealth
49:51
is wrapped up in stock market as well. So, there's kind of the whole casino capitalism in
49:56
other insane thing which is that they don't pay any tax because they don't have any income. So,
50:00
they just, you know, the other baseless, the incredible baseless thing in that New York Times
50:05
investigation, I think it was into the tax practices of the ultra-rich, which is that when he wants
50:10
to buy a yacht, he doesn't pay himself money and then pay tax on that and buy a yacht with the
50:16
post-tax money. He uses his Amazon stock as collateral, borrows the value of the yacht, gets to
50:26
deduct from his taxes, the interest that he's paying on the loan, and then buys the yacht not only
50:34
with tax-free money because it's alone, but he actually gets a discount from the tax office because
50:41
he had to borrow it and he gets a discount on the interest. So, that finances their entire lifestyle,
50:49
all of their lifestyle is free. I'm not what it means is, so then baseless will die and it'll have
50:56
X billion dollars, you know, in wealth and then it'll have a smaller amount in debt and that's
51:04
the end of it. And that's a very common, particularly in the US kind of approach to
51:10
paying no income tax as well. And of course, the other thing that these large billionaire driven
51:16
companies do is do whatever it takes to avoid paying corporate tax as well. So, there's a whole
51:28
army of lawyers and accountants engaged in tax minimization because tax, the ultimate corporate
51:36
social responsibility is to pay tax, but people treat it like a cost and what do you do with costs?
51:43
You minimize them, just like labor costs, you minimize it. And unless there is, you know,
51:49
we live in a liberal democratic society, which is basically a society that managed, in my view,
51:56
that has to manage the tense relationship between capitalism and democracy.
52:00
And I think all of these aspects of inequality that we see and this kind of this particular,
52:07
you know, most grossly with billionaires are a sign that capitalism is donating democracy and
52:15
it should be the other way around. Corporations only exist by virtue of laws that create them.
52:20
They virtue exist by virtue of a legal system that is part of a democratic, and you know,
52:28
obviously not in a country like Australia or US and so forth, part of democracy and the rule
52:35
of law. But it's kind of like a Frankenstein's monster that's kind of got out of control now.
52:42
And instead of corporations serving the interests of society, which is what they were originally
52:47
designed to do, they're just serving the interests of inequality and of extremely wealthy people.
52:55
And that's what I think needs to change. And true, how to do it is pretty tough.
52:59
But they would say that they're not serving interests of very wealthy people. They're serving
53:02
interests of their shareholders, that that's their fiduciary responsibility and that all the
53:06
mums and dads of Australia who have their superannuation funds are also invested in shares and so on.
53:12
One thing that you touch on in your book, which I want to make sure we don't run out of time on,
53:15
is the myth of the the billionaire philanthropist. It's not a myth, but the allure of the billionaire
53:21
philanthropist. So as you're talking about all those things, I'm thinking to myself,
53:24
if I were a pro billionaire capitalist person, well, of course, they're minimizing their taxes.
53:29
Why? Because governments have shown themselves time and time again to not be the most effective
53:35
avenues for producing good outcomes in society. So you've got Bill Gates,
53:40
then he creates the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and he brings a rigorous scientific
53:45
approach to whatever he's trying to tackle, you know, malaria in Africa or something like that.
53:50
You know, the counterpoint is, does anyone seriously believe that if all of that money was going
53:54
to the IRS, that it would be more fruitfully spent than what he's doing with his money?
54:00
I think the question with someone like Bill Gates is, Bill Gates, ruthless
54:07
monopolist. People forget what he was like back in the Microsoft days, right? He was a ruthless,
54:11
ruthless business person monopolist. He's a guy early in his career who used to
54:17
look at the car park outside of Microsoft at 6 p.m. So he could see he was still at work and
54:23
make sure those are the people who got who got rewarded. So, you know, exploitative kind of person.
54:30
That's not exploitative. Yes, it's rewarding hard work. It's rewarding people who
54:36
want to hate rewarding people who give up their lives and sacrifice their families for their
54:41
worth. Here, here, here. Get out of the whip. We'll have to disagree on that one.
54:46
I mean, who else are you going to promote? The people who leave early?
54:50
The people who, oh, not the people who leave early, you know, people who stay late to, you know,
54:57
kiss the boss's ass and the ones who should get promoted. Because what would happen in that
55:01
environment? You'd make sure your car was still there while you're in your office in those days.
55:06
I don't know, playing Pac-Man or, you know, so I don't think that all you get the boss home and
55:12
leave your car in the car park if you were clever. So I don't think that's necessarily true, but
55:18
very, very ruthless. His monopolist behavior was obviously came under extreme scrutiny in the
55:25
court and he seemed to get away with that and he became at one point the richest man in the world.
55:30
All of a sudden, he kind of reams the events himself as a kind of a vincular savior of
55:35
humankind with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It strikes me that this is just this
55:41
constant desire for more and more power. He released two books a few years ago, one book after the
55:47
other. The first one, I can't remember what you ordered, but one of them was about how to solve,
55:51
you know, the World Health Crisis. He knew that and completely unqualified. His second one was how
55:56
to prevent ever having future pandemics. He knew the answer to that too. This is about individual
56:02
people who think they have some godlike capacity to do things that other people won't do. Why should
56:09
the world rely on a single private individual with zero public accountability to solve the world's
56:17
health crisis instead of relying on more democratically agreed and negotiated ways and maybe
56:27
governments aren't the most efficient, but that's also a bit of a myth too. I've spent a lot of
56:32
time studying corporations, trust me, they waste a lot of money as well, but they're just not
56:36
necessarily held up for it. And in any case, if governments not working well, then reform
56:43
government will not replace it with something worse. I mean, yes, it is interesting. The question of
56:50
whether or not government is working and can work can become a little bit sort of, I don't know,
56:57
idealistic. It's like, yeah, in an ideal world, we would not have Bill Gates solving the world's
57:04
pandemic problems. We would live in a stable, sane, we would have a demos that is rational and
57:09
we would have a polity that's reactive to that demos. But we don't live in that world, right?
57:16
Like we live in a world in which either Bill Gates spends his money on good things or he spends
57:21
it on bad things. And who is he to write the book about pandemics? A very clever, polymathic guy
57:28
who was very successful in a range of fields. Why not? Because I don't think he has been saying,
57:37
I mean, he was successful in business and a lot of his ideas were, you know, reportedly taken
57:43
from elsewhere as well. But whether the system works or not, you know, last year I was very ill.
57:49
And I walked into the hospital, IPA and campedown. And I was immediately seen, I received the best
57:59
treatment possible. And I was put on a road to recovery, which took some time. That seems to
58:07
me a system that worked. If I was in a more capitalist, purely capitalist system like the US,
58:14
I would have probably had to sell my house for that treatment or go bankrupt. But, you know,
58:18
one of the greatest reasons wasn't because you were a university professor. I say you'd have
58:21
had a particular health insurance. But still, this seemed to me to be a system irrespective of who I
58:29
was. I would have received the same treatment. That seems to me a system that works. So this idea
58:35
that the system doesn't work. Again, then I remember, I remember when I was in the UK in the 80s,
58:44
that she was privatizing everything because it was going to become more efficient. Have you used any
58:50
public services in the UK recently that are run by private corporations? They've been left to
58:58
right. They don't work. You know, if you want to catch a train from here to there, you've got to
59:02
spend a fortune. No, then you have to spend a fortune. For people who don't know who haven't
59:07
experienced this in the UK, I don't know if it's still, this is still the case. But when I was living
59:12
there when I was, I went to school there for six months. And the train was a different company
59:18
than the track. So I would have to make sure that I bought the correct ticket for the train on that
59:25
track. And if I missed that train, the next train belonged to a different company. And I would have
59:29
bought a ticket. I would have paid ticket for the track company, but not the ticket for the train
59:35
company. And therefore, like, who thought it was a good idea to sell the track? So that there's
59:42
a company that just has to own the track. Talk about rent. Talk about seeking rent.
59:47
But then that's also a classic kind of thing in economics, right? With a train track,
59:53
there is one best way, right? As the crow flies as far as you can navigate around the land. So you
59:59
had to have a competitive competitive really a beard on the track. Also, the track is useless without
1:00:05
the train. And the train is useless without the track. What's the point in separating? I don't
1:00:09
want the train without the track. And I don't want the track without the track. But so this myth,
1:00:13
then, that the private sector runs things more efficiently and better than public sector
1:00:20
organizations. Well, this is a talent count, for example, that that's absolutely not the case.
1:00:27
So that's just on an efficiency level before you then get on the level of what is a more
1:00:33
just system, which the health example would consider. So say, I was in the US and I got sick and
1:00:39
my health insurance could cover me and I get better. What about the person who doesn't have that
1:00:46
insurance? Why is it fair that that person gets ill and possibly dies? And I don't. What the question
1:00:56
of a fair society? I don't have the answer to that question. But I do worry a lot that no one's
1:01:00
asking it anymore. But yes, that is a worry. But then the worry of the small L liberal or the
1:01:06
conservative is that that's a very tempting question. But that if you follow it too far,
1:01:13
then you end up with Venezuela. And then you don't want to be in a hospital in Venezuela either.
1:01:18
Because, you know, well, why should they be? They should not get a hospital care when you do.
1:01:23
Well, why should you have a car? And they don't. Why should you have there are all kinds of
1:01:27
like life sucks. It's not fair. You know what I mean? Like that's the sort of libertarian
1:01:31
responses. And like if you want everyone to be equal, then everyone's just going to be dirt poor
1:01:35
because that's what happens. I think it's good to think about equality, right? And do
1:01:41
society needs some level of inequality, I would say. Because that's what means that someone's
1:01:48
going to kind of work harder and try and progress and try and do more in their life in order
1:01:53
to have more money and have and somehow have a materially better life. That's a very practical
1:02:01
aspect of inequality. The idea that that person deserves more, that's moralizing the question.
1:02:08
And I think when you start doing that, moralizing that they deserve more because they're a better
1:02:12
person, then you get in trouble. The morality question should come into what to just, which is
1:02:19
about how much more should that person have? You know what? I think there's a third metric, which
1:02:27
could help the left. You've mentioned dessert, right? Like do they deserve more? And you've
1:02:33
mentioned justice and what is what is just just slightly different things? I think there's a more
1:02:39
compelling case, which can dodge a lot of these ideological clashes where you can just say what
1:02:44
kind of outcome do we want? What kind of society do we want to live in? Like what do we want to end
1:02:48
up with? Yeah. Forget about whether it's fair or unfair. Forget about whether they deserve,
1:02:53
do I didn't deserve? Forget about whether or not this is like, what do we want to achieve? Because
1:03:00
I think there are a lot of people who are middle class who would say, I own my wealth. I worked
1:03:05
very hard for that first deposit on a home in 1978. You know, there was a $30,000 house that's
1:03:12
now worth two and a half million dollars. We worked hard for it. I deserve every penny. The
1:03:16
fair thing to do is for me to keep it all basically, right? But then when you say, do you want to live
1:03:22
in a society where like the people who are serving you at the supermarket, if there are any people left
1:03:28
serving anyone at supermarkets, you don't have any teeth because they're kind of forward to go to
1:03:32
the dentist because we don't have any because dental isn't in Medicare. You know, do you want to
1:03:37
live in a society where like single parents find it impossible to properly nourish their kids and
1:03:42
send them to good schools because the local school is crumbling? Is that enough money for food? Like
1:03:47
then it's like, let's just be pragmatic about it. Forget about justice. Let's just where do you
1:03:51
want to live? Do you want to live in a dysfunctional crumbling society full of houses with private security
1:03:58
guards behind gates and high levels of crime and in the street, or do you want to live in a society
1:04:03
where yeah, you pay higher taxes, sorry, you know, and everyone kind of muddles along.
1:04:09
Like, our views seem to be converging finally. I mean, walk through Copenhagen or Amsterdam and
1:04:17
tell me it's not more pleasant to live in a egalitarian society. You know, then walking through some
1:04:22
walk through San Francisco. Yeah, walk through San Francisco or downtown Los Angeles. Yeah,
1:04:28
and I think that that is the question ultimately because coming back to your, you know,
1:04:34
you're personally bought the house in 1978. This is a thing that's it's not really justice. If I'm
1:04:40
saying, oh, it's not just because I deserve what I have, that's just me worrying about my self-interest.
1:04:46
If you want justice is not a feature of how it affects me, justice is a feature of the system,
1:04:52
which means justice has to be about justice for other people, not justice for oneself or justice
1:04:58
for everybody. That is what justice is about. It's about how do we live together in a community,
1:05:04
in a society, in a nation state, in a way that is somehow fair. And that's not about it being
1:05:13
fair for me. That's childish idea of what justice is about. It's got to be about thinking about
1:05:20
other people. And kind of removing this kind of individualism and selfishness that I think
1:05:26
many society in many ways has come to come to, has become normalized in society. It's almost
1:05:33
a kind of greed is good, good and gecko kind of thing. And that we have to think about other people
1:05:38
and not just what's fair for me. That's not justice. That's just self-interest,
1:05:42
mask with nice words. Kyle, it's always fascinating for me ideas around with you.
1:05:47
Thanks so much for stopping by. Really great to talk to you again.