The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - January 14, 2026


PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Live Q&A


Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

175.69743

Word count

3,382

Sentence count

251

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

This week on Brokonomics, we have a live show in the main studio, hosted by Producer Samson and Editor-in-Chief Dan. We have a special guest this morning, Ron Swansea, who is probably our most requested guest ever. We talk about the state pension and how to fix it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.040 Hello and welcome to... it's Brokonomics isn't it? Yes, it's Brokonomics in the main studio.
00:00:06.560 So I'm doing this one live. That is not purely a function of just having come back after the break
00:00:12.420 and not having written a script or anything. It's because I really want to talk to all of our subscribers.
00:00:19.760 I don't know how many people have signed up. You see, I couldn't make it in yesterday and there's an important life lesson in this, you see.
00:00:25.220 During the Christmas break, the wife has a diesel. So I said to the wife, make sure you drive the car a bit over the Christmas break
00:00:33.760 because when it's cold, diesels don't like being left on their own. And she had a notion, right?
00:00:39.700 She thought to herself, I know, I'll drive the Tesla everywhere because that way I'll save a few pence by not burning any diesel.
00:00:48.360 And then when she tried to do the school run yesterday, the bloody thing wouldn't start.
00:00:52.420 So thank you very much for saving me money, Mrs Tubb. But what you in fact did is cause me to have to go to Halfords
00:01:00.300 and buy a battery recharger and spend the whole day charging the bloody battery so that you get backwards and forwards.
00:01:06.120 So a quick lesson for anybody who is not yet married. When you do get married, you need to stress the point about obey your husband
00:01:15.020 because it is simply too expensive to let these women have their own notions, right? 1.00
00:01:19.980 So with that aside, oh, also some other interesting news.
00:01:25.760 What was it? Right. I interviewed a guest this morning.
00:01:29.420 It's going to need a bit of editing and not much. I need to put some yellow boxes up at the bottom, fact checking, all that kind of stuff.
00:01:34.480 But I interviewed a guest this morning who is probably our most requested guest ever.
00:01:41.460 And I get like three or four people a day on Twitter asking me to interview this chap.
00:01:45.940 Anyway, I just have. And that will be the next Brokonomics, which will be going out next week.
00:01:52.680 But for now, let's find out if there is anyone in the waiting room.
00:01:57.520 And if there is, we'll have a chat. And if not, you can watch me play games on my phones for the next hour or 90 minutes
00:02:04.400 or however long I need to sit here.
00:02:06.460 So, Producer Samson, do we have people?
00:02:12.880 Anyone in the Zoom call, please raise your hand.
00:02:15.580 Oh, yeah. And the story about the diesel, the reason for that was I told the editors,
00:02:20.560 make sure you put the Brokonomics page up, right, yesterday in the normal slot
00:02:25.540 so that people know that I'm doing it live today.
00:02:27.640 And because I wasn't in and able to slap any of the young guys around the back of the head,
00:02:31.480 it didn't bloody happen. That's why I was telling that story. I got lost.
00:02:33.820 But I'm old, so I get confused easily.
00:02:36.040 Right. So, Samson, do we have any people?
00:02:38.460 All right. Yes, we do.
00:02:39.880 Oh, excellent. Right.
00:02:41.040 You are in the chat waiting and you want to ask Dan some questions.
00:02:44.460 Please raise your hand using the Zoom function and we can get to you.
00:02:48.640 All right. Let's find out then if this is working, if we have the technology.
00:02:57.100 We can start with...
00:02:58.260 Yes.
00:03:00.080 We'll start with Ron Swansea.
00:03:02.920 Ron Swansea. Is that the same one who came in for an episode once on pensions?
00:03:10.260 Might be. Maybe I'm confused.
00:03:11.600 Anyway, put on Ron...
00:03:14.460 Is that the same Ron that came in for the episode on pensions and stuff?
00:03:28.240 Yeah.
00:03:31.980 Return guest. Excellent. Very good.
00:03:34.780 How are you, sir? And what would you like to talk about?
00:03:37.480 Yeah, no, that was going to be the subject of one of my questions, actually.
00:03:44.080 So, yeah, no, things are interesting.
00:03:47.180 I've had a bit of a weird 18 months since we met in person.
00:03:51.980 And, yeah, I think we should do a follow-up episode on the state of pensions
00:03:56.860 because Rachel from accounts has certainly done some interesting, if not awful, things to the state of British pensions.
00:04:04.420 And my question was going to be, so we talked a little bit about the fact that state pension in the UK is an unfunded, unmanageable nightmare.
00:04:17.180 And I've had an idea on how to fix it.
00:04:20.920 Yes.
00:04:21.840 Essentially, I think what we should do is HMRC has the records for how much national insurance everybody is paid.
00:04:29.380 And as we talked about in the pensions episode, your national insurance contributions give you an entitlement to the state pension in the UK.
00:04:39.460 I think the best way to wrap up state pension would just be to commute all of people's contributions through NI into a savings pot,
00:04:50.560 draw a line under it and say state pension is no more, is your pot, manage it yourself.
00:04:55.120 That way, you get to address the argument of, oh, I've paid into this for X amount of years and I deserve something.
00:05:02.440 It's like, well, yeah, there you are.
00:05:03.760 There's your contributions returned.
00:05:06.160 You're no longer a drain on the working people.
00:05:09.960 And it also means that you can just do away with national insurance.
00:05:13.480 It makes it cheaper to hire people again.
00:05:16.300 What do you think about that?
00:05:17.860 Well, the first problem that springs to mind is that they don't have that money
00:05:21.980 because it's not like it's been collected all these years and put in a special savings account
00:05:28.280 and then used to pay out your pension.
00:05:29.840 It's been taken in and immediately spaffed up the wall on something else.
00:05:36.040 Normally sort of welfare and pensions and the NHS, they're the big free.
00:05:39.780 So it's not like they actually have that money available.
00:05:42.460 So if they were to ring fence it, it would have to be an accounting entry only.
00:05:48.720 And then ultimately you'd have to borrow it or print it into existence.
00:05:53.900 What?
00:05:54.680 But I mean, so I'll say the second part in a minute.
00:05:58.900 So, I mean, would you agree with that bit of it?
00:06:01.280 The problem is they don't actually have it.
00:06:02.660 Yeah, no, I completely agree.
00:06:06.700 But that's not really stopping the government from spending money now.
00:06:10.540 So I don't see that as a hurdle that they'd be unwilling to go over.
00:06:14.740 Yeah, I mean, they do have to borrow it, though.
00:06:18.420 Sure.
00:06:19.400 I mean, we're already in the zeitgeist where the government borrows money
00:06:23.000 to pay for things that nobody asks for.
00:06:25.280 I think if you dress this up with the right policy language and say,
00:06:30.540 you know, call it pensions fairness, it would be quite easy.
00:06:36.080 Because I'm very concerned that people, I mean, maybe even your age, Dan,
00:06:41.980 but certainly my age and, like, I'm sure Samson as well,
00:06:45.800 we're never going to see state pension.
00:06:48.020 It's just going to be one of those things that is just going to be,
00:06:50.740 it's going to be inflated into absurdity.
00:06:53.440 If you think about the fact that it's about £230 a week at the moment,
00:06:58.000 and, you know, by the time we all get to £70, Dan, for you,
00:07:00.760 it's going to be like £2,000 a week.
00:07:02.920 By the time I get to, you know, £75 or whatever it is,
00:07:06.100 by the time I'm allowed to get state pension,
00:07:07.860 it's going to be like £10,000 a week.
00:07:10.520 Well, yeah, but by the way inflation's working,
00:07:13.600 because you don't forget the triple lock means that it, you know,
00:07:17.780 I'm being hyperbolic, obviously, but, you know,
00:07:20.200 it's not unreasonable to think the way Labour are ruining the economy,
00:07:24.040 that inflation will go mental in the next three, four years.
00:07:27.480 Yeah, so I'll tell you what I would do.
00:07:30.020 I don't think they could make that work without borrowing the money,
00:07:33.520 and it would be quite a lot of it at this point.
00:07:35.540 So I'm not sure I'll go there.
00:07:37.100 What I probably would do, now I think about it,
00:07:39.760 is basically, so you have a scheme in the UK called salary sacrifice.
00:07:44.440 I'm sure you're familiar with that one.
00:07:46.460 But for any who don't know, if you're in a workplace,
00:07:49.420 you can basically agree to earn less,
00:07:52.440 and actually Rachel Reeves has just attacked this,
00:07:54.540 and that difference is then gets put straight into a pension pot,
00:07:58.160 which you can't touch until you're retirement age.
00:08:00.840 And it's as if you are earning less,
00:08:03.100 and therefore you pay less tax,
00:08:04.600 and so you can pull yourself below a tax threshold.
00:08:09.260 And it's tax thresholds that often stop people from working
00:08:11.960 or taking a promotion or doing extra hours and stuff.
00:08:14.560 So what you could do is just make that scheme much more accessible,
00:08:17.520 and you can do it at the point of your tax return,
00:08:20.100 or just expand that scheme so that anybody who wants to,
00:08:24.460 from any age, even if they're not with a company scheme
00:08:26.560 or something like that, can just say to the taxman,
00:08:30.180 okay, I'm going to pay less tax,
00:08:33.900 and that money is going to go straight into a ring fence pension pot.
00:08:37.900 And then it's as if you're earning less,
00:08:39.240 and then people could use that to pull themselves down below a tax ban
00:08:42.520 that would then make them more inclined.
00:08:43.920 Because if you've got somebody who's just on the verge of a higher tax ban,
00:08:47.020 they might be willing to put in all those extra hours
00:08:49.500 as long as they can keep below themselves, below that tax ban,
00:08:52.720 and basically pay the difference into a pension pot.
00:08:55.300 And that way you're encouraging people to put money into a pension aside
00:08:58.580 and then just give them some variation.
00:09:00.540 So, I mean, I've not thought about that one in any great detail,
00:09:02.620 but that's the first thing that pops into my head.
00:09:04.660 That would probably be a viable way of doing it.
00:09:07.540 Can I jump in?
00:09:08.380 Yes.
00:09:09.480 Yeah.
00:09:10.040 That idea is so good, it's already a real thing.
00:09:13.080 Oh, right. Okay. Yes.
00:09:14.740 That is how pensions tax relief works at the moment.
00:09:19.040 So, you can put in the lower of 100% of your salary
00:09:24.980 or £60,000 a year into the pensions environment.
00:09:29.440 And it does count as a reduction in your salary by doing that.
00:09:32.740 But I think what your...
00:09:35.220 Oh, sips and stuff.
00:09:37.000 Well, yeah, yeah.
00:09:37.760 So, a sip is a form of pension.
00:09:40.460 Right.
00:09:40.880 It's like saying like a Snickers is a form of chocolate bar.
00:09:44.060 But it does what I...
00:09:45.200 So, maybe the solution is to push that a lot more,
00:09:48.680 coupled with...
00:09:49.680 And make it incredibly simple for it
00:09:52.660 and run low IQ government ads pushing that. 1.00
00:09:56.840 But also say to me, by the way,
00:09:59.360 if you are, you know, picking age,
00:10:01.380 like if you're a millennial
00:10:02.700 or let's say you're currently under 50
00:10:05.320 or whatever it is,
00:10:06.080 by the way, you're not getting a pension,
00:10:07.460 so please start doing this
00:10:08.520 or whatever it is you do, something like that.
00:10:12.780 So, I wouldn't even give people the choice.
00:10:16.140 What you need to do to counteract it
00:10:18.080 is you need to increase auto-enrolment contributions.
00:10:21.500 So, instead of paying 13.8% national insurance
00:10:26.200 and 5% of your salary into your auto-enrolment pension,
00:10:30.780 what we should do is just...
00:10:32.100 We can just bin off national insurance
00:10:34.320 and increase the amount people put into
00:10:36.980 auto-enrolment pensions from a minimum of 10%.
00:10:40.500 So, you're...
00:10:42.500 So, because with company,
00:10:44.380 when you're an employee,
00:10:45.540 since George Osborne was in number 11,
00:10:50.940 this has been the thing,
00:10:52.100 you know, any employee
00:10:53.200 over the tax working threshold
00:10:57.180 has been eligible...
00:10:58.620 Well, you know, you get automatically enrolled
00:11:00.400 into your company's workplace pension.
00:11:02.860 Yes.
00:11:03.340 And you have to physically opt out.
00:11:05.400 So, inertia is the big driver behind that.
00:11:08.160 It's why it's a big success.
00:11:09.580 And, like, over 90% of the country
00:11:11.300 are auto-enrolled.
00:11:13.420 This is the way to fix this.
00:11:16.400 And because the money is invested,
00:11:18.780 you've got the opportunity to beat inflation through,
00:11:21.620 you know, you can either manage it yourself
00:11:23.240 or you just leave the fund manager
00:11:25.460 to manage it however you want.
00:11:27.400 But the point is,
00:11:28.240 you have actually a ring-fenced pot of money there.
00:11:30.960 My suggestion with this whole
00:11:33.040 sort of getting rid of the state pension,
00:11:35.640 the way it works,
00:11:36.800 is our system works fundamentally different
00:11:39.280 to a lot of other developed countries.
00:11:41.360 And other developed countries tend to do a lot
00:11:44.040 what looks like our auto-enrollment scheme.
00:11:46.960 But they do it at the state level.
00:11:48.800 And I just don't trust the state to do that.
00:11:51.320 I would rather everyone privately manage their money.
00:11:53.140 So, default to the state,
00:11:54.260 but have the option.
00:11:57.280 Yeah, default to the state,
00:11:58.420 but have an option to do your own thing if you want.
00:11:59.500 Yeah, we need to come up with a mechanism for...
00:12:01.020 Yes.
00:12:03.040 Well, I don't even think that.
00:12:04.800 I think we need to just find a way
00:12:08.220 of getting rid of the state pension legislation as it is,
00:12:12.180 but we need to find a fair break in how we do it.
00:12:15.060 And I think the longer we kick the can down the road,
00:12:18.480 the worse and the uglier it's going to be.
00:12:20.360 And I'm just trying to spitball ways to make it a reality.
00:12:23.560 Yeah, that is worth thinking about more.
00:12:26.020 And yes, we should have another chat before too long.
00:12:29.060 So, let's stay in touch and do something like that.
00:12:31.520 But I'm just where more hands are appearing on the screen.
00:12:34.660 So, let's have a chat with Samson.
00:12:39.480 So, thank you very much, Ron.
00:12:40.720 Samson, could we find somebody with their hand up
00:12:42.960 and make them appear?
00:12:48.760 I'm willing to take questions on economic, finance,
00:12:52.120 Warhammer 40,000, success in life and with women.
00:12:56.640 Whatever it is you want to ask.
00:12:57.840 All right, Sophie, you are up.
00:13:00.320 So, Sophie, what would you like to...
00:13:01.660 Yes, you're getting a woman.
00:13:02.700 You're lucky.
00:13:04.080 Good, good.
00:13:04.860 How are you, sir?
00:13:05.400 How are you, ma'am?
00:13:09.160 I'm doing good.
00:13:10.540 Excellent.
00:13:10.900 Of course, it's in my...
00:13:11.900 Do any of you people have cameras on your computers?
00:13:16.040 Because I feel like I'm talking to subtitles
00:13:18.360 in the middle of the night.
00:13:19.260 I've only got...
00:13:21.760 I tried to turn it on, but it won't do it.
00:13:24.640 I'm kind of...
00:13:24.980 I wonder if Samson needs to do something.
00:13:27.840 Oh, there we go.
00:13:28.560 Oh, there we go.
00:13:29.180 People have appeared.
00:13:30.640 There we go.
00:13:31.100 That's easier.
00:13:32.760 Sophie, what would you like to talk about?
00:13:33.980 I actually wanted to ask if you're going to ever talk about the AI bubble.
00:13:39.920 The AI bubble, yes.
00:13:43.460 I'm not sure that it is necessarily a bubble.
00:13:47.660 Now, a lot of capital has flowed in,
00:13:49.740 but the thing is, it is bloody remarkable, AI.
00:13:52.740 I mean, what you can do with it.
00:13:53.540 I mean, I use it all the time now.
00:13:54.800 It's absolutely sodding wonderful for fixing the wife's diesel 0.73
00:13:58.340 to making dinner to everything else in between,
00:14:01.520 preparing for a Brokonomics episode.
00:14:02.900 So, I mean, you can ask it absolutely anything, and it's brilliant.
00:14:06.020 And I spent last night, I've got this group chat with my mates from school,
00:14:12.940 and we've got whole loads of old photos over the years in it.
00:14:16.120 And basically, I spent yesterday evening animating them on Grok
00:14:20.520 and putting us in hilarious situations.
00:14:23.580 So, yeah, and it will probably have some practical effects as well.
00:14:27.080 And so, I'm less concerned with the narrative about the bubble,
00:14:30.520 because think about what happens if, let's say, one of these companies does fail.
00:14:35.760 Well, all that's going to do is release capacity
00:14:37.760 or then immediately be bought out by one of the other players.
00:14:40.560 So, I'm less concerned with the amount of money that's gone into it
00:14:44.000 and whether any of the valuations are toppy and whether they come down,
00:14:47.680 or even if one of them collapses,
00:14:49.660 because I think the total utility of it is just going to get snapped up.
00:14:52.980 I mean, what's your thoughts on it then?
00:14:54.720 Because I'm just not sure that, I mean, okay,
00:14:58.160 yes, valuations might come off and get shifted around,
00:15:01.340 but I don't see a world in which AI is not significantly bigger in a few years.
00:15:07.620 Yeah, I'm thinking it's not profitable.
00:15:13.480 It takes so much energy, and they're building all of these centers.
00:15:17.740 And at some point, right now, it's all venture capitalism.
00:15:20.660 So, it's, you know, investment, and we have this entire circular thing
00:15:25.200 with the NVIDIA paying for something that pays them back to buy the chips and so on.
00:15:32.200 And, of course, I can see, as an artist, I'm biased,
00:15:35.320 because I'm sitting drawing right now something that's not AI.
00:15:39.600 Right.
00:15:39.760 The thing is, though, on the profitable stuff, I haven't looked into it closely,
00:15:46.640 but I kind of wouldn't expect it to be profitable anyway.
00:15:49.720 I mean, you've got to bear in mind, like, Amazon,
00:15:51.020 they didn't make a profit until, like, 2022 or something like that.
00:15:54.980 The way these big companies work is they just roll over,
00:15:57.960 and before it even becomes a profit,
00:15:59.900 they just roll it over into capital expenditure and expand the operation.
00:16:03.020 So, it's not actually that surprising that it's not profitable.
00:16:06.840 It should be revenue generating.
00:16:08.820 And now you've prompted me,
00:16:10.740 I'm going to have to go and look to see if it is revenue generating.
00:16:13.960 And the revenue should be offsetting the cash cost.
00:16:15.860 I guess for the future.
00:16:17.960 So, maybe I'm thinking right now we have all these free options
00:16:22.020 because of all of the venture capitalism.
00:16:25.060 But at one point, they'll have to take subscriptions.
00:16:28.100 And some already do.
00:16:29.040 But these subscriptions are going to be way more expensive.
00:16:33.180 So, there'll be a point that there will be AI.
00:16:35.540 AI never goes away, but it'll become so expensive
00:16:38.760 that we'll have Disney and so on using AI,
00:16:42.400 but the ordinary person won't really be able to afford it anymore.
00:16:46.780 That's kind of my guess.
00:16:48.600 I don't know.
00:16:49.040 I mean, historically, tech trends have taken the opposite to that trajectory.
00:16:53.220 The cost has come down over time.
00:16:54.600 The interesting thing that Elon here has been doing
00:16:58.940 is he wants to sort of move the cloud into space,
00:17:01.240 which is kind of clever.
00:17:02.100 So, because he's got access to low orbital launch.
00:17:05.600 So, he can basically put data servers up in space
00:17:08.520 and stick a solar panel on top
00:17:10.560 and basically process it all locally,
00:17:12.460 which means his marginal cost of energy drops to zero.
00:17:15.600 He's just got the initial capital cost of getting stuff up there.
00:17:18.040 He's got a direct-to-consumer line,
00:17:20.060 and then that becomes highly scalable with virtually no energy costs.
00:17:25.740 So, I don't know.
00:17:27.100 I think somebody will find a model.
00:17:28.700 Obviously, ChatGPT, you do charge a subscription for that.
00:17:32.640 Grok, well, I think you do pay a subscription,
00:17:34.780 but it's the standard X subscription.
00:17:38.660 And Google will probably, I mean,
00:17:40.340 their whole model is based on advertising,
00:17:42.040 so I'd expect to do it.
00:17:42.840 And I don't know what Meta's doing or if they're even involved.
00:17:45.620 I don't really pay attention to that one.
00:17:47.300 But I don't know, I'm just less pessimistic than you are.
00:17:51.720 Yeah, but again, I'm biased
00:17:53.480 because, of course, I want it to go away
00:17:55.440 as I'm, you know, trying to do art.
00:17:57.500 And it's taking my opportunity.
00:18:00.600 It is astonishing.
00:18:01.700 You should use it more.
00:18:02.600 It's astonishingly useful.
00:18:03.880 Just next time you're going to cook something,
00:18:06.340 like, just point your camera at it
00:18:07.760 and say, right, how do I cook this?
00:18:09.220 Or fix your car or mend your sink.
00:18:12.920 I mean, it's just, I think it's bloody marvellous.
00:18:15.580 And I want a robot butler.
00:18:17.300 I want to know how to do it.
00:18:18.980 I want to do it myself, though.
00:18:21.120 Yeah, you do do it yourself.
00:18:21.880 I want to learn. 0.99
00:18:22.600 I don't want to become dumb. 0.98
00:18:25.040 Well, I think it makes you smarter. 0.99
00:18:27.200 I don't know.
00:18:27.760 I don't know.
00:18:29.160 All right, we have to come back to that.
00:18:31.560 We'll see how it unfolds.
00:18:33.540 But I want my robot butler.
00:18:34.960 If you would like to see the full version
00:18:36.700 of this premium video,
00:18:38.080 please head over to lotuseaters.com
00:18:39.740 and subscribe to gain full access
00:18:41.620 to all of our premium content.
00:18:44.960 We'll see you next time.