 Good evening and welcome to Tiskey sour. We have three massive stories for you this evening. The Dominic Cummings Laura Koonsburg BBC tell all interview. Some pretty exciting juicy stuff in there. We're also going to be talking about vaccine passports and Jeff Bezos going to space. I'm of course joined by Dalia Gabriel. How are you doing Dalia? I'm doing well Michael. How are you doing? I'm melting in my bedroom. But you know, what can you do? I'll get to open the window when the show ends. And that's what I've been looking forward to all day. No, I obviously only just have to close it before we go live. You might want to contact us throughout the show. If you do want to let us know what you are thinking about any of the topics we are discussing tonight, do tweet on the hashtag Tiskey Sour or send us your super chats. Let's go straight to our first story. Since leaving Downing Street, Dominic Cummings has made it his mission to undermine and even oust Boris Johnson as the UK's Prime Minister. The campaign has taken the form of tweets, blog posts, briefing to newspapers and a seven hour session in front of a parliamentary committee. We did a whole show on that. You might remember it was really entertaining seven hours for many people watching. Very, very interesting. On Tuesday night, we got the latest installment of the Dom Cummings show. This was a one hour prime time interview with the BBC's Laura Kuhnsberg. Now, perhaps to differentiate the interview from that Commons committee briefing, which was quite technical, Laura Kuhnsberg tried to make this interview a bit more personal. A lot of people listening to you today might just think this is revenge. You lost influence in Downing Street. You lost the argument. You lost your job. And now you're angry. And so you're attacking. It's revenge, isn't it? The reason why I'm speaking out is I want people to be thinking about these questions. How are we governed? How does power actually exercised in number 10? What sort of things should be more transparent? How should these power structures be opened up? But you could be making, Dominic Cummings, all of those points about how you see Whitehall work, how you see government work, how concerned you are about structures. You could be making all of those arguments without trying to trash the reputation of other ministers without being so personal. This is also revenge, isn't it? No, it's all about revenge. But it's about and also it doesn't matter if it's personal. It doesn't matter if people are upset. All these MPs or ministers or officials or whoever that might say, well, it's also difficult and also personal. We need more difficult conversations in this country. We need more people upset. A lot of people have a pop at me. You don't see me crying about it. Now, a lot of the interview was like that. I think Laura Kuhnsberg was basically trying to channel the angry public. So she knows that she's doing an interview with someone who's fairly unpopular. She's always trying to say, but Dominic Cummings, don't you think you did the wrong thing? Potentially, I found that sort of slowed down some of the meatier parts, but lots of people watched it apparently. I want to go to some of the revelations from that interview. There were some new allegations made. One of the most striking sent it around an anecdote from March last year. I said, what are you doing? And he said, well, I'm going to see the Queen. And I said, what on earth are you talking about? Of course, you can't go and see the Queen. He said, well, that's what I do every Wednesday. So this, I'm going to go and see her. I said, I really don't think you should do that. Look around this office. As we spoke, we were in the outer office just outside his study. It was basically empty, partly because people in that office were isolated at home with symptoms. I said to him, there's people in this office who are isolating. You might have coronavirus. I might have coronavirus. You can't go and see the Queen. What if you give, what if you go and see her and then give the Queen coronavirus? It obviously can't go. So the possibility went through your head at that moment that the Prime Minister might pass coronavirus to the Queen? Yes. How did you persuade him not to do it? I just said, if you go and you give a coronavirus and she dies, what are you going to, you can't do that. You can't risk that. That's completely insane. And he said, he almost basically just hadn't thought it through. And he said, yeah, holy shit, I can't go. Downing Street says that that didn't happen. What did you say to that? Well, they've officially said that that's not, well, I know it happened and other people who were there know it happened. Now, people often joke about Boris Johnson. You know, he can do anything. His decisions have been responsible for countless, tens of thousands of deaths that didn't need to happen. He lies constantly. He clearly doesn't care that much about his job, but he's still always, it seems, 10 points ahead in the polls. Darlia, do you think if he had accidentally killed the Queen, he would still be 10 points ahead in the polls? Do you think that would be another one of those ones he could brush off with Teflon? Boris Johnson have survived killing the monarch? I mean, this entire interview was like the equivalent of that scene in Mean Girls where Regina George just like scatters the photocopies of the burn book all over the hallway and that everyone's like screaming and crying. And I can imagine that's kind of what Downing Street looks like right now. Some sort of a fellow meets Mean Girls like comedy tragedy. And, you know, if there weren't thousands of lives at stake, then, you know, I'd be watching it with popcorn and enjoying the right sort of tear itself apart. But unfortunately, you know, there are and continues to be many lives at stake. So it's not even funny, but it's really hard to say actually whether this will make a dent in Tory hegemony. That depends on whether or not the opposition and the media make a big enough deal of it, right? And on whether or not the public trust on it comes, you know, as you as you mentioned, he's not generally a trustworthy person. You know, we know that he is willing to essentially lie to save his reputation to promote his his brand. But I think that on this particular occasion, his own personal gain happens to align with the truth. And, you know, because that's be clear, he's coming out with all of this. I think, you know, because he's pissed off that he got shafted, you know, he's had he not been, he would still be, you know, up in number 10, enjoying his proximity to power. So, you know, it's important that we don't sort of accidentally enable his self self proposition as like speaking truth to power. I think it's more that, you know, despite Cummings being untrustworthy, we can believe that what he what he is saying right now, because what he is describing completely aligns with the reality that we all lived through that we all witnessed in 2020 and in this year as well, you know, the kind of ideological framework, the priorities, the dismissive way in which, you know, Boris Johnson talks about people dying, the dismissiveness of public health officials, public health expertise, you know, that is in, you know, that is the exact scenario that would produce the outputs that we have, which is that, you know, the UK has, you know, a really, really high death rate proportional to its population size. So, you know, if those connections are being made by the public, you know, what what Dominic Cummings is describing and the reality that they are seeing, then of course, you know, it's incredibly damaging. But at the same time, you know, when you look at the front pages of the newspapers today, you know, we see really scarce mention of the interview and and where it is mentioned, it's not in a way that directly implicates the Prime Minister or in a way that kind of makes these connections and talks about what the Prime Minister is being accused of here. Instead, it just sort of focuses on that personal angle of, you know, coming this being just Cummings is power play or, you know, this being about Cummings being disloyal and, you know, as much as I think that this is probably partly motivated by him, you know, being pissed off that he's no longer in the sort of inner ring of power. The biggest story here is that the reality that he is describing has matched with not only, you know, other accounts that we've heard, but the very reality that we've all experienced, but instead it's being kind of metabolized as just Westminster gossip in a way that generally leaves Boris Johnson pretty unscathed. So given that it's, you know, it's no it's no wonder that, you know, no matter how much evidence we have, that government mismanagement of the pandemic is the reason why we have such a huge death tolls, such a huge case rate, the message isn't really getting through because the public is not being encouraged to focus on that part of the story. They're not being encouraged to make those connections. And so it's not culminating in accountability of that very government, you know, the interview was, of course, significant. But in many ways, it didn't tell us much that we didn't already know, and it didn't fix our broken media system and our broken opposition. So until that's done, we're not going to see the accountability that we sort of desperately need right now. I totally agree with your point in terms of maybe this is take him taking revenge, but you know, who cares? It's actually one of the strong points that the Dominic Cummings made in that interview. She said, is this personal? He said, who cares if it's personal? Maybe it's personal, but I'm going to tell you a lot of information. You want to report it? I want to focus on policy. As you say, it's those policy decisions that have cost lives, those policy decisions that have had the most concrete material impact on so many people in this country. And the ground that was covered, recovered in the interview went over territory, which we'd already seen in the select committee hearing, and which we've talked about at length at length on the on this show. So I don't want to go over it in too much detail. But what I quite liked about this interview was that it focused more on the period September and October 2020 than it did in March 2020. Now, from my perspective, March 2020, that was system failure. The reason Britain had such a high death toll there was one, yes, Boris Johnson wasn't a good prime minister to be in that place at that time. But also he was getting scientific advice that wasn't correct at that point. The second half of the year, all totally Boris Johnson's fault. The scientific advice at that point was essentially correct. He was ignoring it. And in this interview, the clip I'm going to show you is Cummings explaining those circumstances in which Boris Johnson was ignoring the scientific advice in this moment in time. It was the advice to introduce a circuit breaker mini lockdown. To be completely clear about what you're saying that by the middle of September, you, Chris Whitty, Patrick Valens, other people in the government are trying to push Boris Johnson to bring back restrictions. And you're saying he was refusing? Essentially, yes, it was because a combination of Starmer had said it should happen. And therefore, Prime Minister felt it would be politically disastrous for him just to suddenly admit that Starmer had been right. Secondly, he had a bunch of Tory MPs screaming at him. Remember, some of those Tory MPs similar to the ones on Brexit had lost their minds. And were saying all kinds of complete fake news about COVID. And third, he had the telegraph, who you always refer to as his quote, my real boss, unquote. So he had those three things all saying, pushing him not to act. Sorry, the Prime Minister calls the telegraph his real boss, you just said. And the telegraph, of course, was extremely hostile to doing anything. So are you suggesting that the Prime Minister of this country calls the telegraph newspaper that he used to be a columnist for, he calls them his real boss? Correct. It's a joke? It's often not to tell the Prime Minister quite how much of what is a joke. But what he should have done is listened to the advice from the data people at that point and acted. He shouldn't have been listening to a bunch of pundits in the Daily Telegraph talking nonsense. The biggest crime of Boris Johnson's premiership, and there are many, which was that decision in September in October to completely ignore all of the scientific advice and to say, oh, no, I'm more interested in pleasing my back benches. I'm more interested in pleasing people at the Telegraph. And that's why he ignored everything. That's why he went for the Great Barrington Declaration idea that we can just forget about COVID, let it spread. Lockdowns were a mistake. Obviously, what I would have liked to have seen Laura Koonsburg challenge Dominic Cummings on there is the role of Rishi Sunakir. We know that in September, scientists were invited into 10 Downing Street. Two of them, Sinetra Gupta and Carl Hennigan were there. Basically, tell Boris Johnson, oh, we can all sage. We should go for herd immunity. They're often published in the Telegraph, by the way. Apparently, Sunak had a big role to play in them being at Downing Street at that point in time. I would have preferred Laura Koonsburg to grill Dominic Cummings about that than about whether or not this is just revenge. He's angry, but there you go. This is what I think should be the most damaging about Boris Johnson, the irresponsibility here. The lack of, I suppose, any commitment to public duty whereby what he cared about more was people patting him on the back than saving anyone's lives. Related to that moment is another allegation that was made in this interview, which is what many people think will end up being the most damaging part of that discussion with Dominic Cummings. He's actually at that point, it was a weird mix of partly, it's all nonsense, and lockdowns don't work anyway, and partly, well, this is terrible, but the people who are dying are essentially all over 80, and we can't kill the economy just because of people dying over 80. It's a very serious claim to make. What evidence do you have of that? Well, lots of people have heard the Prime Minister say that. The Prime Minister texted that to me and other people. When the inquiry happens and everyone has to give evidence under oath, like other things that I've said to you today, this is not just me saying this, many, many people will say under oath to the public inquiry if and when that ever happens that what I've said today is true. Now, when people ask Dominic Cummings for evidence, he often refers to that. So, there are other people who back me up in a public inquiry. It does leave you to wonder whether he's got some very close mate to agree on it, who are willing to tell the story as he remembers it. But in this case, Dominic Cummings has provided the evidence. So, we don't have to wait for this future public inquiry. This is a text from Boris Johnson to Dominic Cummings from the 15th of October. Boris Johnson says, I must say I have been slightly rocked by some of the data on COVID fatalities. The median age is 82 to 81 for men and 85 for women. That is above life expectancy. So, get COVID and live longer. Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital, 4%, and all of those virtually survive. And I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelm stuff. Folks, I think we may need to recalibrate. Now, everything about that message is fucked up. Every part of it. So, the first part of it, which is what is most shocking and which is what made some headlines on Tuesday because the BBC released a story on Monday night, was this idea of saying people are 82 and 85 so it doesn't really matter. Now, one, as we spoke about during the time, actually, when there was lots of, during that first wave when there were lots of people saying, well, this is just old people anyway, does it matter? We talked about how even if some of these people were going to die soon anyway, this was people dying somewhere where their family couldn't visit, they're struggling for breath, there aren't enough hospital beds, you know, a really, really, not particularly pleasant way to go. But also, this idea that COVID only kills old people or only kills people who are going to die anyway, it's not true. Now, a statistician, David Spiegelhalter, he's probably one of the most respected statisticians in the country. He tweeted in response to the leaking of this message. Did anyone explain to him that a disease like COVID that multiplies everyone's risk of death by a similar amount will leave average age of death unchanged but still be very nasty? Now, that's a super interesting point that I actually hadn't thought of previously. He's saying essentially what COVID does is it multiplies everyone's risk of death by the same amount. So say it doubles your risk of death in a year. This is a hypothetical number. That means it doubles my risk of death, it also doubles the risk of death of an eight-year-old. That means more eight-year-olds are going to die, but it's a huge risk to all of us. And as he said, it still gets incredibly nasty. The other claims there, the NHS was never overwhelmed. He doesn't buy it. Now, there is a backlog of 5.5 million elective surgeries now because of the strain on the NHS of COVID-19. You have NHS staff on the verge of quitting from stress. They've been working more hours than ever in tougher conditions than ever risking their own health. And we know, even though the government officially denied it, that many people died because they didn't get the care they otherwise would have received because hospitals were having to do triage. That means if someone doesn't seem, if it doesn't seem like there's a very high chance that that person is going to survive, then you don't take the risk of filling an ICU bed. In ordinary times, you might well send them to ICU. So it is not the case that the NHS was not overwhelmed. This is a completely ridiculous thing to say. Finally, folks, I think we may need to calibrate this. He's essentially saying we need to take a whole new strategy, dump the lockdowns. Let's go for the Great Barrington Declaration and let COVID rip through the population. And that was, I mean, a policy that we had on and off and on and off until January. Dali, I want to know about your thoughts on this text message from Boris Johnson in terms of the leaked text we've seen so far. This is probably, I think, the most disgusting, actually. Oh, absolutely. Because it really communicates to me the profound ignorance here. And one thing about ignorance is that ignorant people often don't know how ignorant they are. And that's incredibly concerning. Because if he genuinely believed what he was saying, we should be so worried because this is someone who, let's not forget that this isn't a historic event. This isn't something that has now been wrapped up. And we can reflect on the implications of this. We are still in the midst of this. We are still in the throes of this pandemic. And this is someone who believes that he knows better than literal public health experts, than literal epidemic, pandemic experts who will have been telling him at this time, who would have been telling the exact opposite of what he's saying right now. And he believes that he knows better than those experts, even though, frankly, I don't think he knows better than the average person. Because I don't think the average person would say something so absurd and so ignorant. But for me, what really, really took my breath away was the statement, I no longer buy the NHS being overwhelmed. Him saying that really tells me that he didn't have a single frank conversation with anyone working on a COVID ward. Anyone who has a loved one working as a nurse, as a doctor on a COVID ward, at that time will have told you that the system was overwhelmed. It was at breaking point. It made me actually think of earlier this year when we had Silas Webon, who was an A&E doctor working on the COVID wards. And his testimony, and he also brought the testimonies of some of his colleagues as well. His testimony of what it was like to work on those wards, it moved me and I presume many other viewers to tears. When he talked about not being able to give people the adequate standard of care, the standard of care that I'm sure would pale in comparison to the standard of care that Boris Johnson himself received when he went down with COVID. Silas talked about the mental health impacts, the trauma of having people die on him who didn't need to die, who he could have saved but couldn't because there simply weren't enough staff members and resources per patient. That mental health risk, that trauma is on top of the physical risk that medical workers were being exposed to, that healthcare workers were being exposed to. When we talk about the NHS being overwhelmed, or the NHS collapsing, we don't mean that one day you're going to wake up and there won't be an NHS anymore or all the buildings will have turned into rubble. What we mean is that the NHS will no longer be able to function as an NHS. It will no longer be able to give the basic standard of care to everyone that we could expect from a health service in 2021. It's full of overworked and underpaid staff who can't sustainably continue to work. It's not providing the standard of care that it is capable of because it doesn't have the resources to actually give that standard of care. The very nurse that treated Boris Johnson quit earlier this year. She quit because she said that her and all her colleagues are the nurses for the amount of work and the amount of personal toll that was going into working on these Covid wards, they weren't getting the respect and the pay and the working conditions that they deserve. So to have these healthcare professionals witnessing those kind of conditions in their workplaces and then to know that at that time their Prime Minister was so cavalierly dismissing and not saying that he doesn't buy their concerns. It's devastating. It is a new low and the fact that we don't have a healthy media or opposition to adequately take the government to task on that, it's almost as big of a violation as what Boris Johnson himself is doing. Why do you think the BBC is allowing Dominic Cummings to air his views just now? Who gains and who loses? I think on the most basic level, it's clearly of political interest if a former special advisor wants to speak out, if they're a former special chief advisor or whatever, Alistair Campbell, they would have done an interview with him after he quit with Tiny Blair. So I think basically if Dominic Cummings wants to be interviewed, any outlet is going to be willing to do it. Who gains and who loses? I mean, in a way, it depends what form these interviews take. So as I say, I think this one was focused too much actually on the morality of Dominic Cummings and the morality of Boris Johnson. And it was too much about this personal drama. I saw some pundits, such as Tom Newton Dunn, who's from now Times Radio actually, sort of say, ah, yeah, Laura Koonsberg did a great job to show the egoism of Dominic Cummings. And it's like, is that really the most interesting thing that came out of that interview? So I think there are lots of people in that Westminster establishment, lots of people in number 10 who really hope this stays just a story about this sort of interpersonal drama between two people at war. Because so long as the public see it as that, I mean, we don't have skin in this game, we'll stand back. So unless they focus on how those decisions were made and how those decisions cost lives, you know, I think it's probably going to be a stalemate in terms of who gains and who loses. Dominic Cummings clearly does want some attention. He also has some interesting things to say. Tomorrow Law with £5 says Boris and Cabinet are the very worst representation of this country. They are killing us and killing our standing in the world. They have to go. One eyed monkey is watching live for the first time and says, keep up the great work. The world needs you. And Andy McQuade of a $5 donation says expat in LA here being kept relatively sane by broadcasts like this, staying real and staying uncorrupted. Thank you so much for your donation from LA. We have just one more clip for you about the COVID section of that interview. I'm going to show you this just because it makes me particularly nervous given the moment we are in right now. Do you think Boris Johnson was therefore putting politics ahead of people's lives? Certainly he did. He put his own political interests ahead of people's lives for sure. That's a very serious accusation to make. Yes, but lots of people were in the room and saw the same as what I saw. That's why I've argued so strongly for why I think that MPs should take minus into their own hands and insist on an inquiry into all of this now. Now again, not telling us anything we don't know, but the reason it, you know, just hearing it repeated worries me is because we are again actually in a situation where Boris Johnson is listening more to telegraph writers and to his back benches than he is to scientific advisors. Now the scientific advisors are backing his decision to take away masks on trains and other scientific advisors are backing his decision to encourage people to go back into work. These are all things to please his Tory back benches and to please the telegraph. And what happened the last time he chose that group of right-wing nutjobs over the scientific advisors, it was really, really bad. So I am pretty nervous about what is going to happen next. Now moving on from COVID because there were some other interesting topics covered, we have just two more clips from that interview for you now both relate to the relationship between Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings and in particular Cummings role in making Johnson Prime Minister. If you felt he wasn't up to it as you clearly did, why on earth then was it the right thing to push him to be Prime Minister? Why was that the right thing to do? There are many, many people I know personally who I much prefer to see in number 10 but that wasn't a practical possibility for me. I also thought that precisely because Boris knows that in lots of ways he obviously shouldn't be Prime Minister, he knows that he needs help, he knows that he needs to bring in various people to help him. That also provides an opportunity to push the country in a much more positive direction. What you're saying, he was so useless that you were able to get him to do what you wanted? I mean partly, yes, or that he didn't know what he was doing but he did know that he needed help. But can you hear yourself say that? That the man that's Prime Minister who's been chosen by the Tory party and then was elected by the voting public, well it was great for me because he was so useless in some ways in your view that it meant that you could get him to do what you wanted. Well I think it's terrible for the country but I keep trying to stress you've got to balance up the different possibilities. Is that objectively a good thing for the country? No, it's objectively obviously ludicrous. That's why I've made the argument repeatedly for all kinds of political change and why actually it was a difficult decision in summer 19. We spent a lot of time calculating, maybe we should just let the Conservative Party go down the toilet, maybe that would be the best way out because then it could rebuild something new. Because why are we in the situation with this terrible choice between Johnson and Corbyn? But from a practical matter all our options were bad. Right, so it's like which is the least bad option? Well the least bad option seemed to be exploit the current situation to try and push certain things through and get the country into a better position. Who's us? Who's we? Well me and a network of people, some of us who did the vote leave campaign, some of us who did other things. How many of you, you make it seem this kind of secretive clique? Who? Half a dozen? A dozen? A few dozen maybe. Now that was the longest clip we're going to show you because I think that was actually a really extraordinary bit of television. Basically Dominic Cumming saying he and a coterie of 12 or 24 people intentionally used Boris Johnson as a puppet to try and achieve their aims in government. Now there often are small groups of people who say let's use this political party to get into government and do what we want to do. I mean new labor. They had a group of people, 12 or 24 people who were really in the know who were really shaping things. Thatcher had a similar thing around her. What's unique here is that Boris Johnson isn't part of it, right? So that's this group of people who have these aims, these instrumental goals. They're using the Prime Minister who's completely not abreast of any of this to achieve their ends. What I would have liked, again Laura Koonsberg to go into a bit more deeply here, is what they wanted because what Cumming's is explaining that it's a very instrumental logic. We had this aim which was to try and influence government to achieve these goals. What were the goals? What united that dozen or two dozen people, right? It says they were together in Vote Leave. Now Vote Leave, as we know, was a pretty incoherent group of people. It's people who wanted to control migration, people who wanted to take back powers from Europe. What did they want to do with that? And for me that is the big unanswered question with Dominic Cumming's. What he speaks about seems like procurement reform. It was this 12 or 24 people so motivated in the public interest to basically take over the top of one of Britain's political parties to implement procurement reform. It doesn't add up to me. That's what I would have liked to have seen grilled into it. Lots of people saying this is incredibly undemocratic. On one level I do think that I think it's clearly risky having a Prime Minister who doesn't have any sense of moral purpose himself. At the same time I do think you do elect a Prime Minister to select their advisors. I don't necessarily find this idea that advisors have influence as shadowy as some others do. We're going to show you one final clip from that interview. Again, this one is quite astonishing. This is Dominic Cumming speaking about how the row with Carrie Simons meant he considered toppling the Prime Minister. Literally immediately after the election it was already clear that this was a problem. Before even mid-January we were having meetings in number 10 saying it's clear that Carrie wants rid of all of us. At that point we were already saying that by the summer either we'll all have gone from here or we'll be in the process of trying to get rid of him and get someone else in as Prime Minister. But you've just said that within months of the Prime Minister winning the biggest Conservative majority in decades you and a few others from the vote leave campaign were discussing the possibility of getting rid of him. Days not months. Within days of the election you were discussing getting rid of him. Yes, well for all the reasons we've been discussing. He doesn't have a plan, he doesn't know how to be Prime Minister and we'd only got him in there because we had to solve a certain problem not because we thought that he was the right person to vote in the country. Well what kind of con had you just pulled off on the British public then if that's really what you think? Well it's not, I don't think it's a con. We try to solve very hard problems in the order that we can solve them in. There's nothing wrong with running an election campaign, presenting one thing to the public, saying he's the guy for the job and then days after the result comes through you then unelected officials inside government discussing getting rid of him. That's okay. Well that's I'd say that's politics. Darlia what do you make of this one because you know there has been probably the main response to this on Twitter and the one that Laurel Kuhnsberg is getting at is how undemocratic this seems. There was a coup being plotted from one of the Prime Minister's own advisers. At the same time I kind of feel like you know there's a lot of faux surprise there from Laurel Kuhnsberg because this is politics and I do kind of feel like there is a bit of a liberal ideology portrayed by especially people like Laurel Kuhnsberg where politics is about people who choose their guy who they really want to make Prime Minister because they think they are a good person instead of loads of people with their own interests who have their own political projects who are essentially using each other. It's not the gentlemanly game that Laurel Kuhnsberg wants to pretend it is. So in a way Dominic Cummings is just unmasking what politics is always like although saying that actually normally an adviser has more respect for their principal than Dominic Cummings does in this respect. I don't think Peter Mandelson would have said that about Tony Blair. What did you make of that clip that revelation that Cummings considered getting rid of Boris Johnson within days? I mean there absolutely is politics and Laurel Kuhnsberg knows it's politics. Everyone who's you know not even just within the political world but you know those who orbit it for whatever reason you know people who go to these elite schools that basically acts as sort of training grounds to become politicians or to become people who influence politicians you know all of these institutions that kind of satellite government everyone in those institutions you know media as well is included in that knows exactly how this works none of this would have been a surprise to them. I think the shock comes at you know you're just sort of saying this and I have to kind of act shocked in order to kind of maintain the appearance of integrity in my job. I have to say one of my favorite Dominic Cummings revelations was when he essentially reveals that Laurel Kuhnsberg's you know highly you know investigative sources were actually her WhatsApp chat with Dominic Cummings and then Laurel Kuhnsberg suspiciously stops tweeting the committee hearing. So I think that you know this is something that is well known amongst those who hobnob with the powerful. I think that a lot of the British public know it as well instinctively even if they are sort of you know made to feel like that would be such a an absurd thing to think or a conspiratorial thing to think but I think most people do have a kind of gut instinct that you know there isn't you know that they they're what they say isn't what necessarily goes and I think that what this pandemic has also really exposed is sort of the influence of you know private companies you know the way that we've seen this pandemic basically be used and perceived of as some giant money-making outsourcing drive where people who own all these companies that are you know either close friends with people in government or places where people in government expect to go and work when their political career is over uh that you know the the the fluidity between them and and crises usually kind of show these connections Grenfell did the same but I think the pandemic did it in such a kind of uh all-encompassing way that we saw that this really was not a bug uh it's the feature that these kind of non-democratically accountable figures and institutions hold much more sway on what the government actually does than the public that that did elect them and put them into power. That's a good place to end the Cummings-Kunzberg discussion. We are now going to take a very short break for some quick news about Navarra Media. We'll be back in one moment to talk about Space Billionaires and Vaccine Passports. Let me ask you a question. What were you doing 10 years ago? Here's what I was doing. Give me a guarantee the minimum income, a bullish tuition fees, scrap all fucking debts everywhere. I need to send VAT, you're being fleeced. Sit down and get these guys to play that accent state. You see I met this guy called James, tall, very blue eyes, very smart and we started thrashing out our ideas each week from a community radio station in south London. That was how Navarra Media started and with the help of our supporters we've expanded from something of a two-man band to a team of dedicated staffers. If you're watching this video the chances are you've been a part of that journey and we hope we've been a part of yours too. 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I'm so glad they started that podcast during the student movement. Let's go straight to our next story. One of the surprise announcements from the government on Monday's so-called freedom day was that vaccine passports would be made mandatory for entry to clubs from the end of September. Now the announcement follows the government suggesting they had ruled out the idea of vaccine passports it also runs counter to many past statements from the Prime Minister. Starmer brought up those inconsistencies at Prime Minister's questions. Why is it okay to go to a nightclub for the next six weeks without proof of a vaccine or a test and then from September it will only be okay to get into a nightclub if you've got a vaccine ID card. Mr Speaker, I think the the Labour leader traditionally has a choice in the national crisis and that is whether to get behind the government and to be or to offer constructive opposition or to try endlessly to oppose for the sake of it and try to score cheap political points. Everybody can see that we have to wait until the end of September by which time it's only fair to the younger generation when they will all have been offered two jabs before we consider something like asking people to be double jab before they go into a nightclub. That's blindingly obvious to everybody. It's common sense and I think most people in this country understand it. Most people in this country want to see the younger generation encouraged to get vaccinations. That is what with great respect to the right honourable gentleman he should be doing rather than trying endlessly to score what I think are vacuous political points. Now following PMQ's Labour announced they would be voting against the introduction of vaccine passports for nightclubs. A Labour spokesperson said, we oppose the use of COVID vaccination status for everyday access to venues and services. It's costly, open to fraud and is impractical. Being double jab doesn't prove you aren't carrying the virus. Testing for access to venues would be more efficient and would give people and businesses more certainty. Now that position from Labour could be very consequential. There are already 42 Tories who have indicated that they will vote against vaccine passports and the Lib Dems have said they will do the same. That vote is expected to take place after the summer recess. So that's in September. Presumably that vote will have to happen early in September so that it can be implemented by late September. Darlia, have Labour here made the right decision? Vaccine passports are a bad and unnecessary idea. They're bad because it sets the stage for a huge infrastructure of data collection, of data storage, of tracking that leaves us extremely vulnerable to an even more empowered big tech sector, big tech industry, especially the linking of health data to identity has particularly worrying consequences when it comes to surveillance, privacy and the unaccountability and the lack of transparency of private corporate big tech power. What basically a vaccine database would essentially do is create this huge centralised database that tracks where everyone has gone at all times, what services they're using. That's extremely rich and empowering data. Whoever holds that data and has access to that data has a huge amount of power. The idea that once we've started down that road that we'll be able to control where it goes, especially if it's in the hands of private companies, it's laughable. I think it's very different as much as privacy concerns around the track and trace app are really important. This is a much further along step because the track and trace app didn't track location. It didn't track where you were. It didn't connect your track and trace identity to other more, your biometrics or your health data. It tracked connections, which has its own issues, but there's a gulf between those two different kinds of data collection. Not only are data leaks possible, but there are severe implications there of this data being potentially shared with the police, shared with the home office, with private corporations who will do with that data what they will. It will also re-entrench existing inequalities because we already have this issue of essentially vaccine passports already being in place for international travel where it's done in a way where the mobility of people from the global south is going to be many of whom are not vaccinated. If they are vaccinated, it's with the Russian or the Chinese vaccine, which is not recognized as legitimate by some Northern American and European countries. Obviously, the reason that the global south is in that position is because big pharma have patented the technology so that they can't be reproduced cheaply. Europe and the US have bought up a load of the vaccine supply so they couldn't be fairly distributed. There's already a problem of inequality of mobility as movement to the north from the south is going to be policed and managed and reduced through what is essentially, like I said, already a vaccine passport system, but an actual vaccine passport system would already further entrench that. Black minority ethnic communities are less likely to be vaccinated due to legitimate historic distrust of healthcare institutions. There are so many implications there as well, especially the idea I think Michael Gove said something like, oh, this definitely won't happen in the UK because the UK is not a paper carrying country. I would say ask that to any migrant that has tried to live in this country and get basic services since the introduction of the hostile environment. This idea of having to produce documentation in order to access service provision, although it doesn't go quite as far as hospitality and bars, but to access basic service provision, that is a reality for many migrants already living in this country. But I also think it's really not necessary. It's really crucial to look at who is actually pushing for this. It's not public health officials. The World Health Organization actually advises against vaccine passports. The institutions that are calling for this are big tech and increasingly authoritarian governments, like our own, who are despite saying that there's no plans for vaccine passports are actually on the side funding pilot schemes for vaccine passports. They're saying one thing and doing another, which doesn't help with the whole trust issue. The reason that they're desperate to pose this as a solution is because they are seeing big money signs. They are seeing this as building an opportunity for a big juicy data grab through building infrastructures of surveillance and data tracking that would have been unimaginable under any other circumstances. We know that big companies, that governments, use crises in order to force through systems and changes that would have been unacceptable. Otherwise, we've all read, Naomi Klein, we've all read The Shocked Doctorate, and I'm afraid that's what we're seeing here. There are so many other measures that we could implement that would manage this virus before getting anywhere near this extreme of measure. Things like continuing the public mandate of masks with like clear public health messaging and clear enforcement. Things like suspending intellectual property laws that stop global South countries from making and distributing their own vaccines, making a single effective vaccine widely available to everyone, supporting people who need to self-isolate from work. But those policies don't benefit big tech. They don't benefit big farmers. So instead, we're going for these incredibly elaborate and risky and highly problematic solutions and bypassing the very easy ones that actually could kind of help us, you know, help us equalize society rather than further entrench existing inequalities. And those solutions are kind of right in front of us. Agree with quite a lot of that, Darlie. This is going to be interesting. I've kind of changed my position on vaccine passport because I thought earlier it probably wouldn't be necessary because I thought by the time you'd rolled them out, we'd have herd immunity anyway. So it'd be a bit of a moot point. What's happened then is a Delta variant came along and because it's so transmissible, actually we would need something like 96% of the population to be vaccinated for us to have herd immunity. So it's probably never going to happen. That's from Adam Kaczarski. He's a modeler who's on spy M, the modeling group that advises Sage. So I do think we are going to have flare ups of COVID probably indefinitely. It's going to become endemic. We might have super vaccines that mean that we can overcome that eventually in a few years time. But I think this winter is going to be quite grim. I think there are going to be quite a lot of calls to close nightclubs, close social events. And to be honest, this seems to me something that could quite possibly keep those clubs open. And I kind of disagree that this will be necessarily this dystopian thing where loads of data is collected because there is already a vaccine passport. It's the NHS app. If you get your passport, you can, sorry, if you get your second vaccine, you can plug that into your NHS app, or you can register a lateral flow test in the NHS app, and then you show it to a nightclub. It's already being implemented in some nightclubs, just a minority of them. So I don't really get the dystopian angle. The nightclub doesn't register the person. They just look at your app. The app tells you or tells the nightclub that you've been vaccinated. This data is already stored on the NHS database. They know exactly who was vaccinated and when. That's why when you go to get your vaccine, they type you in. And that's on the NHS app. So I don't quite understand all the fear about it. And for me, if one thing can make going out and having fun possible and safe during this winter, or it's never going to be completely safe, by the way, make it safer than it otherwise would have been, I don't think the counterarguments are strong enough to dissuade me from thinking that's probably necessary, right? I mean, what do you make of those points? Well, I think that there is still, you know, the vaccine, the problem with the vaccine passport is that there is a more, more space for a stringent relationship between your health data and your actual personal identity. And also, I'm not sure that it is actually as effective because in Israel, we have been seeing, you know, I mean, there's a whole issue with Israel's vaccination program that they're not actually vaccinating everyone that's in the country. But, you know, with a high vaccination rate, using these, they had like, you know, these green passes so that, you know, nightclubs and bars, et cetera, would only have, they would have vaccinated people indoors. And if you weren't vaccinated, if you didn't have a green card, you would have to sit outside or you wouldn't be allowed in. And we're still in a situation where, you know, they are having to go back into a lockdown because it hasn't actually curbed it as much as we might think. And I think that, like I sort of mentioned before, before we kind of get to these forms of data collection and data storage, which, you know, the question is, who's going to design that? Who's going to own that? How is it going to be protected? You know, I think that there are, you know, many concerns about the Track and Trace app as well. But, you know, the Track and Trace app would not be as invasive as I think what is being provided, what is being proposed here. The question is, you know, first of all, what kind of infrastructure and what kind of system are we building and how can that be used in the future? But also, there are so many stages that we could actually implement before we get to that point. And it feels like we're going straight to the most risky, the most problematic and sort, you know, solution rather than sort of catching that low hanging fruit at the bottom, which we know from the management of pandemics, the management of viruses in the past, before any of this technology would have been available, were adequately managed. So I think it feels like the motive is somewhat different, because we aren't, we're having governments that are pursuing these solutions and, you know, big tech that are trying to sell these solutions to public health advocates and public health experts who aren't convinced of their necessity, given the risks. Instead of actually focusing our resources and pushing for the more simple, but more equalizing solutions that are right in front of us. Well, I mean, in terms of the Israel example, they stopped using their green pass system in June because they thought mission accomplished. And now they've had some outbreaks and now they're meeting to discuss whether to bring it back. So I'm not sure that point stands, but also it's worth saying, even with a vaccine passport, you would still get outbreaks in nightclubs. So I'm not suggesting that if you bring in vaccine passports, you won't get any outbreaks in nightclubs. I just think you're quite likely to get less outbreaks in nightclubs. And given this winter is going to be about trying to control the size of outbreaks, especially when we're also having flu at the same time and hospitals are under pressure, I think anything that keeps those institutions open, go for it. I also just don't, you know, we do have the infrastructure for this already is the NHS app. Most people that go to nightclubs have a smartphone. I think you get into much bigger problems if this were introduced in pubs, for example, because lots of people go to pubs who don't have smartphones. But when it comes to nightclubs, I think the overwhelming majority of people there are going to be quite used to showing someone a document before they go in, which is normally just your photo ID to prove your age. So for me, it doesn't seem that big a deal. But we probably shouldn't debate this all night. So we will come back to it later. Dali, do you want to just I want to give you the final word on this before we move on to billionaires in space? So what I would say is that one thing that is different, because data is only useful. And I say useful both for bad ends and good, like primarily for bad ends. It's useful when it's connected in particular ways. And what we've seen with the NHS test and trace app or tracking trace app is that the connections between, as I sort of said, your identity and all of the things that might come, all of the other ways of marking your identity with what exact nightclub you've been to or what cafe you've been to or every grocery store that you've entered into. It's that connection of those data points that provides the risk, as it were. That is not as much of an issue. When you show your ID at a nightclub, that's not logged in a big database system that connects the fact that you've been to that nightclub on that day, and that you're also a female age, 28, who also has this Facebook profile and this Instagram profile. And do you know what I mean? So I think that there's a big difference really between showing your ID or even the track and trace app, which doesn't require you to, you know, you can put your NHS number in, but you don't have to. It can, you can just have your Bluetooth on and have exposure notifications on. Whereas in order for these vaccine passports to work, I imagine that it would have to be linking your, you know, location data to your health data, to your biometric data, to your personal identification and ID data. And who knows if it could also be linked to things like, you know, national insurance or other things. So I think that's where the risk comes here. And that's where it's kind of different to, to the examples that you mentioned. I said I was going to give you the final word. I'm going to just give myself two sentences. So I would say it could be connected to all of these things. It doesn't. So the most simple vaccine passport would just be the NHS app as it currently is. You show it to the bouncer. He doesn't log it. How ID normally works. You show the thing that says I've been vaccinated. You might have to scroll it briefly to show it's not just a screenshot of someone else's. Then you go in. The other potential is they do try and link it. Obviously it would be useful for them to know who went to what club so that they could trace any outbreaks. Again, potentially you could see that as being a slippery slope. I also think that lockdowns and closing venues is a massive restriction on our freedom. So I don't think it's unreasonable to prefer giving over some data to the government as opposed to having nightclubs shut. But I'm going to leave that intentionally open because we're going to move on now to billionaires in space before I go to a couple of comments. Saul, five pounds. Darlia is spot on here. Darlia, you've won over Saul. Red Baron with 10 pounds. Thanks for keeping going to our media. The news used to be more positive when Jeremy Corbyn was in power and I had hope but I can't be bothered with Tom Ellis with 20 pounds says I have to self isolate so you guys can have my beer money. Keep fighting the good fight. Thank you so much, Tom Ellis. We do appreciate and solidarity. You are one of the 1.7 million people self isolating at the moment. This is a bit of a shit show, isn't it? But you're doing the right thing. Tadeau Cantwell with 10 euros. I wonder how this passport will translate to visitors from outside the UK with different systems. Will NI accept the EU equivalent from across the border? Interesting. So how would this work in terms of tourist travel? That would obviously be a complication. As I say, it seems to me a manageable complication if one of the alternatives is closing nightclubs or winter. I'm not necessarily saying it is either passports or closing the nightclubs but I'm just saying I don't think that's an unreasonable statement to make. Final story. Nine days after Richard Branson's first flight to the edge of space, Jeff Bezos has left and returned to the Earth's stratosphere. Bezos's company Blue Origin, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk's SpaceX are all hoping to launch a new space tourism industry and these two flights are just two small steps in that direction. We're going to focus on Bezos's flight. So the run up to that launch to my mind was particularly dystopian. Let's take a look at a TV anchor fawn over the world's richest man as he prepares to take off in his penis shaped rocket. I'm excited. You know, people keep asking if I'm nervous. I'm not really nervous. Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, you're not nervous. I want to know what we're going to learn. Wait, Jeff, Jeff, back up a second. You're not. How is that possible, Jeff? I'm sitting here in New York and I'm nervous. How are you not nervous? None of us are nervous. We're excited. We've been training. This vehicle is ready. This crew is ready. This team is amazing. We just feel really good about it. How Dr. Riva was that? I mean, that face, that love. I mean, he clearly has had lots of filler. The whole thing is surreal. We're going to now look at the penis rocket taking off. D minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4. Command engine start. 2, 1. Jeff is cleared to sound. Go, Jeff. Go, Mark. Go, Molly. Go, Oliver. You are going to space. That was the lift off. We can take a look at where the rocket went. This is a graphic from the BBC that shows the phases of the flight. So you can see here phase one, which is what we just watched. The capsule and the booster take off vertically. This very powerful rocket getting it super high. Then when it is super high, this is the technical term, the capsule separates and that's 76 kilometers above Earth and then continues to about 106 kilometers above Earth. Now, apparently people consider space to be 100 kilometers above Earth. That's called the Carmen line. So once it gets up there, then it's got to get back and the booster, that's the big rocket underneath it, that gets back and lands two miles from the launch pad and the capsule parachutes back to the desert floor. All very interesting. Also, a little bit grotesque, I think. Space tourism, if it does take off, will obviously be a preoccupation of only the super, super rich. A seat on the first flight with Bezos sold for $28 million. It turned out actually the guy had double booked. So he had to postpone his first flight. The seat was taken by an 18 year old. It's also probably not what we need when it comes to global warming. Now, Bezos' rocket is powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. So it doesn't have direct carbon emissions. It could be a lot worse. But creating those fuels does have emissions and even water vapor, which is what those fuels release, creates global warming close to the stratosphere because it hangs around there for ages. Richard Branson, who I mentioned in the introduction, his rocket is much worse environmentally because it's a hybrid. So half of it's or it's part and powered by carbon fuels. That's apparently 60 times more carbon intensive per person than a long haul flight. So while we're dealing with this problem of how do we limit or regulate normal air travel between countries, which is often socially useful, really difficult conversation, now we're going to have to do the same thing for the super rich flying around in space. Now, Bezos has a defense when it comes to the environmental impact of his rockets. He says, we need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space and keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is. It's going to take decades and decades to achieve, but you have to start and big things start with small steps. That's what this suborbital tourism mission allows us to do. It allows us to practice over and over. Now, the argument there is on one level coherent, he's saying, you know, you might not think that the super rich flying to just a little bit out of the stratosphere so they can look back at the curvature of the earth is a particularly socially useful thing to do, but it is this consumer product that is going to allow us to perfect the technology that will then mean we can do these solely useful things such as move heavy industry to out of space. The part that I don't get from that, maybe I'm not a good enough physicist or maybe it doesn't make sense is how would heavy industry in the outer space work because heavy industry is inherently heavy. You're going to get the raw material for steel, land it on the moon or a space station, then smelt it and everything and then drop loads of steel down in parachutes to the desert. I don't really get it. Dahlia, I don't know if you're an expert when it comes to space travel, but do you think the environmental story for why this makes sense when it comes to climate change, does it stack up for you? I mean, the whole thing that we're saying before about what is socially valuable about this, that is just the central myth of capitalism, that we need the profit incentive, we need power and wealth and resources to be centralized amongst a tiny few because that will trickle down to everyone else. Somehow the only way that the little people can have good things or have a chance of experiencing a good life is if they're trickled down on by people who are inherently better than them. We know that that's not true. When it comes to technological innovations, technological advances, the most revolutionary tech advances tend to actually be the ones that are funded and resourced by the public sector and made for the public, things like the light bulb, things like the World Wide Web are perfect examples of this. Whereas the kinds of technological advances that are made in the private sphere are things like the difference between the iPhone 8 and the iPhone 8 Plus or nifty new surveillance technologies that you can use to monitor whether or not your workers are slacking for a minute so that you can deduct that from their paycheck. This whole saying, let's leave the planet as it is, if a seven-year-old said that, if a seven-year-old said, why do we solve climate change by just hurling carbon-intensive industries into space, we would find it adorable and we'd laugh because it is laughable. Because it's being said by Jeff Bezos, we're all being forced to take this seriously and talk about it rather than actually talking about and implementing the real genuine solutions for climate change. First of all, the economies and infrastructures that are created by companies like Amazon are directly part of the problem when it comes to climate breakdown, as is the lifestyles of someone like Jeff Bezos, of the ultra-rich. While this seems super ridiculous, there is still the underlying logic of what he's saying is actually incredibly prevalent amongst climate policy makers, amongst governments, which is this idea that we can solve the systemic problem of climate breakdown by just continuing as we are and hoping for some kind of magical one-stop-shop tech fix. Sometimes it sounds as fanciful and ridiculous as this. Sometimes it's something like carbon capture, which is this idea that we'll have the technology to suck all the carbon out of the air by the time it gets too bad, which obviously it already is getting bad. It's a perfect example of, much actually like the vaccine passport, so I would argue, a way of dealing with crisis that does everything that it possibly can to evade the systemic and obvious solutions that lie in front of our very eyes in order to go for the most exploitative and the solutions that most entrench the existing inequalities that we have and actually using that crisis that is a symptom of the system that we exist in as an excuse to re-entrench that system. I also think that the investment of, Kate Crawford writes about this really chillingly. I remember reading this earlier this year and being and now that I'm seeing all this, it's kind of digging a lot of bells, where the investment of Silicon Valley billionaires of the ultra-rich into space travel is part of a genuine sort of judgment that a lot of the ultra-rich have actually made, which is that earth is kind of done. They kind of look at, have quite a good understanding of climate breakdown. It's kind of the sense that earth is kind of doomed, so let's sort of figure out where we can go when and what we can do and how we can deal with things when shit hits the fan. As fanciful as that sounds, I don't think it quite works like that, but as fanciful as it sounds, it kind of tells us about the ideological framework that these people are operating in and the extent of the them, us, kind of the little people versus us who need to be protected and who kind of deserve to have access to all these technologies that are going to keep us safe as we experience planetary crises, much like the COVID crisis over and over again. It kind of makes me think sometimes about how despite it clearly not being possible, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and elites will talk about automating the entire workforce. The Uber CEO has poured loads of money into trying to come up with driverless cars and realizing that actually no one actually can operate a taxi system and no one can actually replace the knowledge and the sort of instincts and the embodied understanding of their job, the way that an Uber driver can. But if we take the fanciful sci-fi to one side, it actually gives us an insight into the ideological framework that these entrepreneurs are operating in. So in that example, okay, they can't abolish the worker, but everything that they're doing is still looking towards abolishing the worker as a human being. So if we can't actually replace all workers with robots, let's just slowly figure out a way to just treat human workers like robots anyway. And ironically, it's not to come full circle. The way that Amazon workers are treated is sort of the most pristine example of where we can't automate. We will simply just dehumanize. That's very much full circle. You've done a brilliant segue to our next clip because the other reason why this is all a bit grotesque is because of how Jeff Bezos got rich, how he is able to afford this. And in fact, he made a joke after the launch about this. It's gone down like a cup of cold sick. I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all this. So seriously, for every Amazon customer out there and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart very much. Now, there was a lot of chummy laughter in that room. I imagine no one invited to that briefing has ever pissed in a bottle or shat in a carrier bag because they had to deliver so many parcels. They didn't have time to stop for the toilet. That anecdote is one from a driver from a bunch of drivers actually from Amazon. We're going to go through some of the ways in which Amazon workers have paid for Jeff Bezos to go into outer space, which is because he's collecting their surplus labor, he's exploiting them, and boy, does he know how to do it. I mentioned the drivers who are treated appallingly apparently. This is from the BBC. They reported in 2018 the number of parcels drivers had to deliver meant they worked over the 11 hour limit for drivers. So that's the law so they don't crash into anyone. And as wages were a flat rate, they ended up being paid practically below the minimum wage. Drivers also told the BBC to meet their targets. They would regularly have to break the speed limits of endangering themselves and others and resort to peeing in bottles and defecating in carrier bags. That is not the end of shoddy workplace practices. When it comes to Amazon, they have been taken to court by multiple women in the United States who have said Amazon failed to accommodate them once they became pregnant. Now, most of those cases were settled out of court. That's often what will happen with a huge company like this. I'm sure there were NDAs signed. The way they keep it this way, what does the boss want to do if they want to exploit their workers, if they want to extract as much value from them as possible so that they can ultimately fly off into outer space, well, they have to be viciously anti-union. And Amazon very much fulfills that role in 2001. 850 employees in Seattle were laid off by Amazon after a unionization drive, and they continue to spend millions on PR to fight unionization in the US. In the US, you have a vote in a workplace as to whether to unionize slightly different to in the UK. Dahlia, do you think it will be any consolation to those workers who've peed in bottles and shat in bags and lost their jobs because they got pregnant, that their exploitation has led to this man to have enough money to fly himself into outer space? I mean, it's the stuff of science fiction, right? It's so dystopian. And I mean, of course not. And the media is so compliant in allowing this cult of the Silicon Valley billionaire to be sort of promoted uncritically, you know, from Elon Musk being hailed as a savior for providing ventilators during the pandemic, which it turns out they weren't actually ventilators and there were barely any of them anyway, to, you know, Jeff Bezos being portrayed as some, you know, he's so rich because he's just such a genius and such a forward thinker, rather than there's just no bottom that he's willing to kind of hit when it comes to workers rights and the dehumanization of workers. And I think it's so, you know, and you can see the compliancy in the kind of media through the way that they're laughing in the way that, you know, these journalists have been treating and talking about and approaching him when interviewing him about this kind of fake space travel because they didn't go to space. They went in a really high plane. I just want to kind of point that out. But it's ironic that, you know, Bezos himself, who in his own sort of delusion of how much he can get away with actually said what journalists who interview him are probably too afraid to say to him, which is that Amazon workers from, you know, warehouse workers to delivery workers who are, as I said before, treated like machines who are precarious, who are monitored and surveilled and disciplined to the most invasive degree who are, you know, those are the ones that create Bezos' wealth, not him. And, you know, that wealth generation, not, it's not incidental. It wealth generation to that degree relies on those very conditions. Those aren't sort of bugs. They're not accidents. They're not just sort of lack of optimization. That's actually, you know, the very conditions that are necessary in order to produce the wealth generation that someone like Jeff Bezos is able to accumulate. One doesn't happen without the other. And yeah, if you were to watch the footage from this coverage, you know, you would think that this was just, you know, the most genius man who, you know, has developed some kind of incredible technology that has solved all of humanity's problems and not touched a fly or harmed a fly in the process of it. And now, you know, as a reward for that, he gets to fly into space. That's obviously not what is happening. But one thing that you won't hear, and one person that won't be interviewed, are those very Amazon workers who are peeing in bottles. And even if they're not peeing in bottles who are in their everyday working conditions, being treated like robots, being treated like less than human. Those are the voices that you won't hear in this kind of celebration of the Silicon Valley billionaire cult. I like that as a final sentence, celebration of the Silicon Valley billionaire cult. Let's get to a couple of comments. Monkey Island with a fiver. More than ever, Britain needs independent media like Univara Media. Loved your thoughtful Middle East coverage that allowed us to hear from Palestinians in May. Thank you so much. We had loads of really good guests during that period. Do check out those shows if you haven't watched them already. And Robert Winslade with five pounds. The best thing we can do for the environment is eat the rich, multiple birds with one stone potentially. Yeah, I won't say anything more about that. Thank you for watching tonight. Thank you for your super chats. We've been completely overwhelmed by all of the kind words and all of the support we've had so far for our 10-year anniversary fundraiser. So thank you so much if you have donated or sent a kind tweet. And if you haven't, please do consider going to UnivaraMedia.com forward slash support to start or increase a donation. Dahlia, it's been an absolute pleasure being joined by you on this Wednesday evening. Thanks for having me. Now I can't wait to open my window and stick my head out because I'm boiling hot under this light. I am exactly the same. Oh my god, you can see the shine on my forehead probably. Thank you again for watching. For now, you've been watching Tisgy Sauer on UnivaraMedia. Good night.