00:00Quite a few of the reviewers of your book just assumed that it couldn't be anything but satire about late
00:07-stage capitalism.
00:09And it certainly has some pointed and absurd and funny moments, which you can't really talk about any of this
00:15or work without.
00:17But a lot of it read to me as quite earnest.
00:21Is it a critique of capitalism at all, or is it a love letter to its quirks and possibilities, or
00:27both?
00:29I mean, I guess the way I see it is that capitalism is neither good nor bad.
00:35It just is a fact of human life.
00:37You know, commerce, manufacture, it's sort of what we've been doing since we lived in caves and we're making tools
00:46and swapping them for other tools.
00:49I mean, one of the things that happens in the book is that they fall out of love with kind
00:54of corporate culture.
00:56And I think for a lot of people in my generation, I was born in the mid-80s, that happened
01:02around the 2008 crisis.
01:04You know, all the time that we were growing up, the thing that we were told was, you know, the
01:10thing that you were told you were supposed to do with your life was fulfill your potential.
01:14You know, it was all conceived of individualistically.
01:19There was no sense of, like, your country needs you, or you've got some kind of duties or responsibilities.
01:25It was just self-fulfillment, self-realization, the individual.
01:29And part of that was, you know, get as high up, if you're a sort of talented person, get as
01:35high up the ladder as you can.
01:36And then I think, I mean, one of the things I really remember from before the financial crisis, I mean,
01:41people who live in Britain might as well, is there was, I think, in about 2005, 2006, there was this
01:48very popular campaign called Make Poverty History.
01:52There were kind of millions of people signed up, all kinds of celebrities were involved.
01:55And the idea was that we were becoming so affluent and our prosperity was increasing year upon year and would
02:05do so forever, that we would actually abolish poverty and it would cease to exist for this first time in
02:11history.
02:11And people really believed it, you know, and I think that gives us a snapshot of the mindset that we
02:18all grew up in.
02:20And then the 2008 crisis happened.
02:22All of that fell apart.
02:24I would say it also gave birth to the kind of politics that Alistair and Jacob were talking about earlier.
02:30But one of the things it did was break lots of people's belief that the economic system was going to
02:37deliver for them.
02:38And in many cases, they're right.
02:41And I think that fracture of belief is playing out to this day.
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