 If there's anything more surprising than how much we let landlords get away with in this country, earning half of people's wages for doing very little, it's how they justify it to themselves. Landlords don't tend to think they are parasitic on other people's work. They tend to think they're doing a good thing. There was a video of a landlord who lacked self-awareness, which went viral on Twitter this week. We're going to show it and we're going to talk about it. Let's take a look. I work in London. I live in Buckinghamshire, but I invest up north. Right now we're in Huddersfield. This is Huddersfield. You buy a house here for like £80,000. You're going to rent it for £600. In London, you'll buy a house for £800,000. You're not going to rent it for 10 times the price. So you want to buy low rent high with a property manager nearby. People say, oh, but Samuel, I have to buy close to where I live so that I can keep an eye on it if there's any problems. That's not financial freedom. That's called a rope around your neck. You want to buy properties in cheap areas. You want to rent them high and you want to have systems in place and property managers that can make it passive income so that you can have financial freedom. That's called property investing the smart way. Sorry, I said that was a Twitter video. It was originally a TikTok video, but it then went viral on Twitter. It's had over half a million views. Darlia, I want your take on this guy. I think the thing that I suppose really shocked people is this idea that he's a weird guy, but for any landlord, they are expecting passive income. They're expecting that you buy this asset and then you just get to slowly collect money and then own the house at the end of it. Basically, you've had someone who works for a living pay your mortgage. Even if he's describing it in a particularly vulgar way, what he's talking about there is how landlordism works. Yeah, I mean, those of us who grew up in working class, black and brown neighborhoods in London, we know this story of gentrification extremely well. It was in our communities that the tools of gentrification, this model of wealth building and hoarding that is based on essentially displacement and breaking communities up was developed. In my years of renting in London, I don't think I've ever had a landlord that's lived in my neighborhood. My current landlord and my last landlord both didn't even live in the same country as me. We have seen our neighborhoods destroyed our local businesses, our communities displaced, and generally just treated like dirt that needs to be cleaned out, literally socially cleansed in order to make way for profitable or productive use of the land. When my contract is up where I'm living now, I'll probably be priced out of the area that I grew up in in London. That matters. It's where my family is. It's where my community is. It's also one of the few places that I really can call my home. It's really heartbreaking actually and really annoying to see people who 10 years ago wouldn't have stepped foot in my neighborhood who took the piss out of me for where I grew up. Now being able to live there when I myself and people that I grew up with no longer can. These kinds of parasitic rent seeking practices are practiced on racialized working class communities and across the country and then exported to the rest of the population. As you mentioned, this video causes a lot of shock and disgust because he just says it in such plain terms, but it's not an aberration. It's the norm. It's not a bug. It's the function of our economy right now. I think that we've really failed with the exception of renting movements like Acorn. We've really failed to make a political movement out of opposition to this parasitic rents here kind of capitalism. As productivity continues to stagnate, which will probably get worse after Brexit, what this landlord calls passive income of people who already have capital owning shit and making money of renting it out to people who don't have capital is going to become absolutely essential to how our economy runs. It's being sold as an acceptable way of making money in what is a very dysfunctional economy. That's only going to entrench inequality even further. I mean, it is feudalism, isn't it? That's why you had Adam Smith, Karl Marx, all the classic economists. They thought it shouldn't exist even in a functional capitalist system because these people aren't producing anything. Basically, you have enough capital to buy a buy to let home, then someone who has to go and do productive work has to pay you for no reason a third to a half of their income. You don't do anything. People say, oh, I can't lower the rent because then I wouldn't be able to pay the mortgage. Why should you be able to pay a mortgage of someone else's work? It doesn't make any sense. You're not adding anything. This is why people say landlordism is parasitic. People say, oh, that's such a horrible thing to say. That's such a horrible thing to say. There are good people who are landlords who just want some financial security. That's true. I'm not saying everyone who's a landlord is evil, but I'm saying that there is no justification to have landlords in any society because they don't add anything. If there weren't landlords, people say, oh, then how would you rent if there weren't landlords? The house would still be there. It would just be the case that there wouldn't be someone who demands half of your income just so you can sleep there while they still own it. It doesn't make any sense. We should only have social housing and then affordable housing. There's no reason whatsoever to have exploitative private landlords. It doesn't add anything. There's nothing I resent more than paying half of my income to someone who doesn't do any work. I don't know if they do any work because I don't have any idea who they are, but they're definitely not doing any work to justify me paying them half of my income. It makes no sense. This guy, while we're outraged at him, yes, most landlords probably don't speak like that shouting in the middle of the street, but he is just explaining a reality which is the reality of the private rental market, which is people buy properties for as lower prices they can, rent them for as high as they can. It doesn't need to have any relationship whatsoever between how much they paid for it and definitely rent has no relationship to how good a landlord they are. It's not a market which works in any of the ways that a capitalist market is supposed to work. There are no price signals. It's not that if you're a bad landlord, then you don't get any money, so you have to become a better landlord. No, there's no competition in this market. It's terrible and people should join. As Dalia said, Acorn, if you want to help end this scam, now talking of scams, I thought when I saw this video and we were going to do this section, it was just going to be a react to an exploitative landlord, but it turns out that actually, I mean he is an exploitative parasitic landlord, but there's also more going on here because this man who is called Samuel Leeds is also a con man, which might be why the numbers he mentioned in that video didn't quite add up. He runs training courses for how to get rich quick buying properties under his company, Property Investors. Now, in semi-religious training sessions, they've been described as cult-like. He encourages people to sign up for courses that cost thousands of pounds. He's saying, look, I got rich quick. You can get rich quick, but you can only get rich quick if you buy access to my courses and the personal tailored advice that I will give you. He's basically saying, that's why that video looks like that. He's saying, this is super easy. You can get rich like me. The problem is that many people don't get rich. Many people end up disappointed and looking up this guy, I found this really tragic article actually, the BBC wrote about Samuel Leeds after someone who paid for his training committed suicide. So the person who tragically committed suicide was called Danny Butcher. He was 37. He'd paid £13,000, sorry, for courses run by Samuel Leeds, which promised to make attendees financially free. You heard him say that in that video, as well. That's his point. You become financially free by essentially getting someone else's income paid into your bank account, which is how landlordism works. Now, the article describes the work of Samuel Leeds in the following way. So they write, Property Investors, which is the company, puts on free two-day crash courses offering people the option to sign up to a training academy where they will learn how to become financially free by investing in property. The company described Mr. Leeds as having found his own success after attending training courses with his wealth coming primarily from his property investment activity. So there, you can be like me. You can get rich, easy and not have to work and just withdraw the income of people who work for a living. So Mr. Leeds posts videos on YouTube nearly every day promoting his methods in one he joked that he would punch people in the throat unless they subscribe to his YouTube channel. In one clip, he promises to work one-on-one with his customers to provide a custom tailored bespoke plan and hold your hand, make it happen. So that's the really important part. There you say, you don't even have to, you don't have to be smart. You don't have to know about property investing. You don't have to have loads of capital. All you need to do is follow these easy steps and I will hold your hand through the process. You can't fail. You will get rich. Unfortunately, many of the people who paid money for this course didn't get rich. I'd assume the majority of the people who paid for this course didn't get rich and one of them tragically was Danny Butcher, the person who committed suicide after handing over 13 grand of Butcher. The BBC article writes, Mr. Butcher attended a free course in March with his brother-in-law, Glyn Jones. Mr. Jones said, it felt like brainwashing, like a religious cult kind of thing, but done on a much smaller scale. What he's offering never appears. I don't see how it can. According to his wife, Mr. Butcher's gut instinct told him not to sign up for the academy and he held out for two days before changing his mind, swayed by the promise of exclusive mentorship and one-to-one training. Mr. Butcher's family said he did not get the support he had been promised. And as we've said, after failing to make any money, Danny Butcher took his own life in October 2019. He's not the only person who's had severe problems with his courses. There are currently at least 78 people trying to claim back more than 200,000 pounds between them from the company property investors. This guy seems to be one of the most evil people, I suppose. I don't really like using the language of good and evil. But I mean, this guy who is actively encouraging people to parasitically invest in poor communities so that they can charge them extortionate rent also happens to be someone who is exploiting people who want to become financially free, who doesn't want to be financially free. They get on these courses, they get sold down or led down the garden path. And there are some really tragic results from all of this. I mean, I was blown away when I found this out after seeing that Twitter video. I mean, this actually really reminded me of Donald Trump's university and all of that, and that thing about the promising one-to-one tailored business advice. And it reminded me a lot as well of the multi-level marketing, what many would say is what many call basically similar to a pyramid scheme. The reason that these kinds of models cause so much mental health stress and mental anguish is not only because the disappointment or the fact that for a lot of people who turn to these kind of schemes, it's because there's a desperation for income, especially as formal employment is shrinking and most in-work poverty is rising. Even people who are in employment, they don't feel stable, they don't feel secure from that source of employment. And they turn to these kinds of things, whether it's selling little bottles of moisturizers to your friends or it's this horrible parasitic model of becoming a landlord so that you don't have to have a landlord. It's not just because of the money loss, it's also because the way that a lot, and they describe it as like a religious cult. It's also because a lot of these kinds of cult-like money-making schemes rest on this idea that if you don't make money out of it, if you don't get rich quick, it's because of a personal failing in you. And it's this kind of self-help entrepreneur kind of positive thinking movement that's really, really popular in the US, but it's also becoming much more popular in the UK as well. And it just this kind of part and parcel of this whole package that is structured. Obviously, this guy is kind of like a sort of example of this, but it's a model of money-making of wealth building based on exploitation, based on extraction, based on deception, on parasitic behavior that is directly encouraged by our economy. So whilst obviously he is accountable for the disgusting things he has done, it's also important to see that he's not the only one. But this is actually a kind of behavior and a kind of wealth building that increasingly making money through being able to provide for yourself and for your family and for people that you love through just a regular nine to five is increasingly becoming impossible. So people are turning to exploiting one another in order to try and have that sense of security. So that's really being encouraged not only by the conditions of our economy, but also by the fact that people who are valorized, people like Donald Trump are examples of this kind of, you know, cult style, economic entrepreneur, you know, cult of the entrepreneur model that is becoming increasingly appealing to a lot of people. I mean, it's also important to say, I mean, based on the reports that we've presented to you here and what I've read about in the past couple of days, it seems in my opinion that this guy is a con man, right? But it is important also to say why I think he's a con man, right? Based on these reports. And that's not because he's telling people they can have passive income and become financially free by becoming landlords, because you actually can do that. The lie or how he seems to be misleading people from these reports is by telling people you can do that even if you're not rich. The con isn't to say you can become financially free by buying houses and renting them out for high prices when you bought the house for a low price. No, the con is saying you can do that without already having a huge store of assets to your name, without already having lumps of money that you've inherited or other houses, which you can remortgage, right? So even though this is a pyramid, well, this is a scheme where you can actually get rich quick, but you can only get rich quick. If you're already rich, you can get richer quick. Let's put it like that. I thought that video was incredibly instructive both about our housing market as it stands and then investigating him after seeing it from these reports. I mean, he does just seem symbolic, in my opinion, of so many things that are wrong in this country right now.