Commodification vs Financialization

Thanks to our Patreon members for helping to make this episode possible, and we're now available on all the major podcasting platforms. You can find more information at the links below. Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Comodification and Financialization. This is kind of a prologue to the Lake Capitalism series, and I've got some questions around this area. One of the key issues here, so Comodification is a very common term and core concept in traditional Marxism. So it's important to talk about what commodification means and then how is that different if it is from financialization. And I really didn't go into that distinction in the lecture series because I'm like, okay, that's kind of far down in the weeds. And where do you stop? Right kind of this. So this is kind of maybe a long footnote or a indenote or a prologue or something to explore a little bit, the background of commodification, how I think it's different from financialization and why I think it's actually a very different thing, although I'll talk about why that's arguable. So first, commodification, very simple concept, core to Marxist concept, Marxist conception of Marxism and Communism, all these sorts of things. And it boils down to the idea that what commodification does, it takes everything, every possible thing and turns it into something that can be sold into a commodity. So it turns it into an object or that can be priced and then put onto the market. And this has all kinds of knock-on effects. And so the classic example or a great example, if you will, is if I hate capitalism, I go, I hate capitalism. And then you will make a t-shirt that says, you know, eat the rich. And then because I hate capitalism, I can buy the t-shirt that says, eat the rich. And therefore my hatred of capitalism has been commodified and sold back to me. This is the magic of commodification. And this works across every aspect of our lives. And we're all familiar with this, of course. So commodities, people have been the whole core of the Marxist critique or one of the core features of the Marxist critique of capitalism is this impulse, this unavoidable impulse to turn everything into a sellable commodity. To give you an idea of the contrast here is a notion of vote. So it's municipal election time in France. And so right now people are voting. You're not supposed to sell your vote, right? It's not a commodity. You're not supposed to think of it as a commodity. It's an inalienable right in the theory, constitutional right, granted to you as a French citizen to be able to go out and cast your vote in the municipal elections or whatever elections happen to be on at the given time. So that you're not supposed to think of that. You're not allowed to sell it, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not that, you know, money doesn't influence elections, blah, blah, blah. However, it is this core distinction. And the old world, the pre-capitalist world, had just so much of your life and your experience and your environment and your society was walled off from commodification. It was either hereditary or by a consensus or through the church. And so there was all these other relationships that shaped your life and shaped your existence and shaped your outlook rather than the market and commodification through the market, which is the commodification is the tool that's used to bring everything into the market. And so instead of your life being dominated by personal relationships or historical relationships or communal standards or any of these sorts of things, all those relationships get subsumed into the market relationship and the technique for doing that subsumption is the commodification. And that's kind of the classic analysis. So there's nothing big or ground breaking there, if you will. However, what's missed, I think, often is the reverse side of this, although Marx of course talked about this, but we overlook this, is those things which cannot be commodified or not been able to present to the market are simultaneously being devalued. Right? They become uninteresting. They aren't promoted. They aren't considered important because they aren't marked to the market. They aren't presented to the market. They aren't commodifiable. And so you get both the dramatic increase in the importance and interest and power of things that can be commodified, which is a shocking range. And then a concomitant de-emphasis and sort of ridiculing or simply ignoring of all the things that can be commodified. So for instance, if one of my favorite examples of this is there's a Buddhist magazine or was, I don't know if there still is, there was a Buddhist magazine for years and years called Tri-cycle. And of course it was filled with ads for stuff to buy to live your Buddhist lifestyle, which always struck me as being the least Buddhist thing ever. However, because it has to be commodifiable to exist and to be exchanged into our system, it functionally is almost no other way to do it. And if there is another way, we're very suspicious of it. We don't believe in the guru relationship. We don't believe in the master teacher relationship. We don't believe in the communal, monastic relationship. All those sorts of relationships and guidelines and principles and teachings exist. They have existed for millennia, but we live in a society where it's either nominally available. But often we're very suspicious and led to ridicule. So if somebody says, hey, you can do this free monastic Buddhist retreat for a week and meditate and all that, you just have to know the people or you have to meet some criteria. We're like, oh, but if somebody says, and these were advertised throughout Tri-cycle, oh, there's this Buddhist retreat for a thousand dollars and you get only the best of brown rice. And it's a beautiful view and all that. People sign up in droves. The commodifiable part is a part we trust is the part we believe in is a part that becomes very visible to our society. I think one of the issues that is associated with the sort of almost global decline in the democracies of voting percentages. Why are people voting less and less and less over time? If you're out unhappiness with politics, they come up with all these reasons. And I would argue that, oh, not that those are all terrible, but I think more fundamentally, it's simply this. So far, we haven't been able to fully commodify the vote. It's one of these sort of outliers. And so the contempt for democracy, the suspicion of democracy, the lower participation rates of voting, the tension all around that, I think is just this. It's like it's being assaulted by a society in which if it can't be commodified or if it's for resuscamodification, we're, oh my gosh, like we don't trust it. We don't believe it. We hate it. There are so many forces that worked undermine it. So that is commodification. So you step away from there and you go, okay, now how is that different from financialization? And functionally, I mean, this is definitely arguable. So it is, yeah, you know, it's, maybe it's either this radical extension of commodification to its logical extreme or it's simply a new thing that's built on top of commodification. I would argue the latter, but I don't know if it matters that much. But the way I think about it and this is, you know, an analogy that I think is helpful is back in the day, you had the Catholic church and lots and lots of people went to the Catholic church. All your good Catholics say it's, you know, 17th century, 14th century, whatever. And those, that's commodification. Everybody goes, everybody's participating. Everybody's a member if you're, you know, in the Catholic West. Now financialization is the priest. And then the Catholic church, the priest delivered the mess in a language no one spoke and magic happened, right? So theoretically, this is all the capital. This is all the capital. So this is all the Catholic church. However, you have two really different modes of existing. And they're doing very different things, but people who are Catholics, Catholics, their whole life do not know. They don't speak the language that the priests are speaking. They don't understand it. They're not supposed to understand it. It's just magic happens over there. The priest take care of things and we go about our business. And so that to me is how financialization works. You need this underlying layer of people attending. You need all the people going to mass. You need all the commodification. But on top of that commodification, we're going to build something very different and quite unique. And as I mentioned, the key issues of financialization is to abstract just flows. It's to intervene and interfere in the, basically, the process of commodification. If commodification isn't going on, financialization doesn't work. Once you get commodification going on, ah, now you can kind of do this. You do this meta layer on top of the commodification where you go, okay, someone dislikes capitalism. So they buy a. t-shirt that says eat the rich. Great. Now this gives me all these opportunities to intervene, you know, one, as we know, to be the credit card that intervenes between the purchase of the t-shirt. So now I get to extract fees. Again, I've not provided a service or anything. I've simply inserted myself and extracted a fee to generate money. And so the idea here is when Marx and when I think it is somewhat different, when Marx talked about commodification and the word there, commodities a bit of a giveaway, the notion was something physical. In the German, it's very dinklish and very sacchlishum, I think that's right, sorry, apologies for the pronunciation, for your German speakers out there. And these have a slightly different resonance than just commodity because it's the sort of objectification or the thingification is the making something that is like a relationship or a pattern and turning it into a commodity, turning it into something that can be bought and sold. So but it is this notion of taking the physical instantiation or the market instantiation and then the selling of it. So that is the t-shirt. So the desire, the relationship, the feeling that's being objectified is I hate capitalism. The objectification is turning it into a t-shirt and then selling it back to me. To me, this is fundamentally different than interfering in that process. So first you have the process itself. And then you have from this objectification from this negative sort of wrong direction that you've gone, which is kind of a resonance in the German as well. What you end up with is an opportunity to then say, right, we've got something that's gone wrong, now we can make it even more wrong. We can build on the wrongness, if you will. So the objectification creates a new relationship or destroys an old relationship. And then we interfere in the execution of that new thing. And so what this allows us to do is rather than have to create a commodity rather than have to create an object, objectification, commodification, you see it's there in the language, it never materializes. It's a non-material invocation, which is why I love the example of the Latin speaking priest because in Latin, they're the mass, they're functionally doing magic, right there. They're recreating this moment in the Eucharist. And that process is what I think quite literally is happening with financialization. Is all of the subjectification, commodification is going on. And then so if you have a t-shirt company that's making t-shirts to exploit the desire for people to dislike capitalism or to live on that, then you can interfere at the level of the transaction. That's one kind of interference. Or you can just buy the companies themselves and create a meta entity that doesn't produce anything, it doesn't make anything, it doesn't sell anything. It simply exists on top of the company that doesn't make it this. So when you look at the black stones, black rocks, all these big equity, private capital firms, they're building a new shell around an existing thing that actually does something, and that's something that it does is the commodification. But these companies aren't actually commodifying that. What they're doing is they're creating a level that allows them to trade just the conceptual idea of objectification and revenue flows that they would generate as itself. Something that the markets can react to. And so it is this incredible extrapolation or sort of distillation of the perfection maybe of the concept of commodification that gets rid of the commodity, the object, all of that is almost completely alighted. Not quite completely alighted because this is why markets crash because one day they discover like oh yeah, there's supposed to be something under there, the 2008 financial crisis. Oh wait, you mean there are really houses in the world? Oh no, right? This is when the financialization meets the commodification meets the actual world people inhabit. And they're like, oh wait, wait, wait, there's houses. Oh no. That's going to be tricky. Right? Now we're in all kinds of legal and financial difficulties and the world economy collapses. So this happens over and over again because this abstraction still has this vestigial tie. They're trying to get rid of it. They're absolutely trying to break the land. I'm not making this up. I mean, they are literally trying to break this. So you know, I talked about Elon Musk before, but this is what he's trying to do when he says, oh, I'm not a space company. I'm a AI data center and space company. Oh no, no, I'm not that either because obviously the physics there are so ridiculous. But I'm a moon, I'm a moon come. I'm a Mars lander coming. No, no, I'm a moon coming. Right? The all reality. Right? So if there's, if it's completely untethered to any measurable, noticeable experienceable reality, now you've got pure. That's perfect financialization because what causes markets to crash has always been this linkage to the deeper level of commodification. And because that actually exists to a certain degree in the quote unquote real world, it exposes these double abstraction to the kinds of problems that we see. And so that's why as I mentioned before, is like the you has to be this continual moving target where I can't ever market to a market. Because when I market to a market where people have a clear sense of what things are worth and how they relate, this is the level of commodification. And like I said, there's nothing wrong with commodification in the sense of what we do need to trade things. We do need to share things. We do need to distribute things. This is the commerce issue, right? Like that it goes too crazy and that it destroys all the values that surround us. This is the problem. Always important to remember that one of the driving forces of Marx, he was a person of his age, was a real concern for the human. He was a functionally a humanist in many ways. And so when he says, look, all these other relationships are being destroyed, he meant not for the good of the humans. He's like, look, when you take a common field where people have been grazing for generations and generations and you enclose it and you commodify it and you make it ownership of it clear. And then you resell it to people. You've destroyed not just the access to the field, you've destroyed an entire pattern of human existence through commodification. And he thought this was really evil. And so he, you know, hence because it's bad for the humans, he wanted the humans to thrive and to be well fast forward, right? Like, okay, when you break all relationships, even the relationships with any conceivable reality, right? Now you have the untrammeled capacity to do financing, right? To do these financial markets. And at some point, as they always do, they reach this moment of apex where then people go, wait a second, this can't be right, this can't be true. The relationship is broken. And then it falls back and they go, okay, well, what is this really worth? And then it's remarked, like I said, the commodification occurs and it sort of reabsorbs it. And so again, right now we're in this moment where people are trying to press that out again. As I mentioned, when you tell me that you're going to be using fusion power to drive something in three years and everything's going to be great, see, this is where we're on the limits, right? Like, this is, this is the problem that AI is running into. It's a financialized concept. It has, it tries to have no connection to the world except the problem is it does. Like you can't do the data centers, just as one part of the example, without the power, without the chips, without then, and it turns out that they don't have the capacity to build it. They don't have the capacity to power it and it's not going to happen at least in the way that it's being promoted. And so it turns out that the companies that have big data centers are doing quite well in the companies that say they're going to build them are not doing well at all because they can't because it's a limit on the actual world. So again, the commodification, the building of the data centers, the running of them, the taking for instance, all the world's published material and then selling it back to us in the form of large language models, commodification, right? Financialization is all of the stuff that's been built on top of that to tell you, oh, it's going to be worth $1.5 trillion. Like this crazy number, I think open AI was shooting for like a trillion plus dollar IPO to say, oh yeah, and they generate something. Right now, they're claiming they can generate maybe $20 billion of revenue in a year. So a trillion dollar valuation, what is that? 500x 500x? Something like that. Anyway, so they're talking about a 500 to 600, 700x valuation. I mean, it's just madness disconnected from any real world constraint. And so that is where it changes. And when you see these just wild overshoots, is this attempt to escape? the limits of commodification. And I think this is where Marx's critiques run out. I think this is where the late capitalist idea comes about is because they go, oh, it's not that commodification has gone away. These fundamental critiques aren't still operable. They absolutely are. It's that where they've gone by extension because of the changes in technology and the changes of globalization and social reorganization has taken us to a place that was not predictable. Again, it's not that the fundamental insight of commodification has become wrong. It's just on top of that, this new thing has grown. And Marx's critique either doesn't account for it at all, or it just doesn't do a very good job of it, depending on how you want to think about it extrapolate it. But when you think about late capitalism, when you think about this new era of financialization, it's important to recognize this. That it is functionally an attempt to break out of the gravity well, if you will, of commodification because it's always this limiting factor on the imagination of generating infinite returns on zero input, which is our goal. We don't want to put anything in, and we want to take an infinite amount out. There's no amount out that we do not want. So again, why shoot for a trillion dollar evaluation? What is the point of having a trillion dollar evaluation? Well, it's more than $900 billion, which makes it good, which is more than $800 billion, which makes-- so there's no-- it makes no rational sense, except for the desire to begin. Zero input, infinite output, this is our goal. And you can only achieve that through the extension of the logic financialization to its absolute end point, which is no constraint in the world limits our ability to generate return. And that is going to go on forever. And never stop. And so this is the difference. With commodification, what you always encounter, or you're always dealing with, even when it's very loose, is you go, oh, there are all kinds of constraints in the world. Either there's only so much for instance, these days, oil. Who knew that was a constraint? What a shocker that is. So you have this massive backwardation in the oil market. By the way, word I love, backwardation, just as an example of the difference between financialization and commodification. So in commodification, you have an oil market where oil is bought and sold. And people who need oil pay a price and all this. So right now, the oil markets, if you want a barrel of oil today, you're paying like $141,150 or more, made up to 200, depending on where you are, for that barrel of oil delivered today. The financial markets over the top of that, while where they've gone way up, they're over $100 a barrel, they do not reflect that price at all. Which lets you know that the financial markets have become detached from the commodity market that theoretically underlines it. They actually have a term for this called backwardation, which again, I love that term, which means that the price is backwards from where it ought to be. It's like, how is this working? And it's because what the traders in the financial markets are trying to do versus what the people who actually need oil are so different that there's this vast price discrepancy. So if you're just trying to make trade and make money, that's one sort of trade. If you're trying to trade to get oil, this is a very different trade. So again, the financialization is going so far that the markets actually functionally now have two markets. Well, at least I'm going to have more than that. But there's this huge divergence between, again, this financial trading, market manipulation, interactions, all this versus like, oh, I need oil to be delivered to me because I run ships or I fly planes or I make petrochemicals. All that is-- these are different markets now. And they've really diverged recently because of world geopolitical events have exposed all kinds of problems, let us say, in the delivery of these goods. And so financialization hates this. It hates any of these constraints. Market dough down, that's fine, but not because of constraint. And so the continual appeal to overcome the commodity limitations to overcome, even if you think of that as like a social concept, like, oh, I hate capitalism, right? That concept gets turned into a commodity of some kind. Even that is a limitation. So I want not even a conceptual limitation. And so this is-- it's really-- it's-- I wanted to talk through this, by the way, to hopefully making a little bit clear, because you see what a strange, strange world this is. But if you don't have this concept, you don't have this distinction, then it's very easy to think that, oh, open AI going to an IPO makes sort of sense. The financial markets kind of make sense. The open AI does business. They sell things, people use chat GBT. They sell ads, and then they get returned. Absolutely not. That's commodification. That's the commodification of a commercial exchange that's been put into the markets, right? Which is that's been going on for the Romans were doing this. There's been going on for thousands of years. That's why I keep saying commerce is not the same. Marx's critique is that this had gone mad and that the commercialization of everything, the commodification, objectification of everything, had started to swamp all other relations. And this is what he thought-- this is why I thought it was a historical force. He said, this has been around in history, but for some reason, earlier in history, it didn't become the dominant thing. And now all these other relationships are being crushed on all the forces that restrained it like church and aristocracy are gone. And so now we're moving to this new world where this commodification, objectification, is the mode of being hard to argue that he wasn't correct about that, right? Like he didn't get everything right. Boy, he got this one right. And now as we keep going, it's like, ah, but what he didn't see is that, oh, the next phase-- oh, there's a lot of stuff about what was coming that he didn't get, which is fair. Lots of predicting the future always a bit tricky. But this he definitely did not see this extrapolation of going, oh, like what really is upsetting about the real world is that it limits our ability to maximize our return, our infinite return. And so if that is the case, well, let's forget it. How can we get rid of that? And the way we can get rid of that is through this magic logic of endless, endless financialization. And this is why the digital world pretends-- it's not, by the way-- the digital world always pretends that it doesn't have financial-- it doesn't have material constraints. This is the big idea. Like, oh, data just flows, right? I don't know. It is this world of the dematerialized. Oh, it's just in the ether. It flows through space like all this. And it's like, oh, and I think this is why the data center thing, I think it's so fascinating, is because it's all the sudden. It's like, oh, wait. There are-- it takes a lot of stuff to make this go. And when you try to ramp it up really fast, it turns out that, no, we don't have that much stuff. It's a real physical constraint in the real world. We just can't build it. We don't have the energy. We don't have the infrastructure. We don't have the chips. We don't have the people. There's no part about this that we have in the actual world. And so you can say on paper, as OpenAI originally did, you're going to build a trillion dollars worth of data centers over whatever, 10 years. But it turns out now they're not going to build any. Because which is a bit of a switch, by the way. But this has not slowed down their plans at all, by the way. It turns out you can decide not to build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of data centers, and still pretend like you're on the track to have a trillion dollar company blah, blah, blah. It's all hilarious or disturbing, depending on which part of this you sign up for. But it is clearly not wanting to admit to or embrace any possible limitation. Or you see the same thing with SpaceX is also trying to run towards some sort of IPO. Because basically they're running out of money, so they have to do something. And the something they want to do is get other people's money. And if banks won't give it to you and sovereign well funds, don't give it to you, then you have to go to the public markets. And Musk said, oh, never go public. Never takes SpaceX public because it's reporting and all that's too limiting. And you get tax problems and all that. So we're never going to do that. Never, never, never. Why is he doing it all the sudden? Well, he's doing it all the sudden because they need money. Because it's basically because it's not working. Again, if you mark anything to market, it's a sign that something is wrong because you never want a market to market. And one of the things they're like, oh, we're going to make again, same thing. It's just like open out. We're going to make X amount of money because we're going to sell Starlink satellites, services to everybody on the planet. The only downside of that is it turns out that the everybody on the planet who has enough money to afford a Starlink satellite is fairly limited. In fact, it's really, really limited because most of the people who have the money to afford a Starlink satellite have access to Wi-Fi wireless, high-speed internet. They have access. Like having money in the modern world is associated. So what you're really trying to do is the cell is service to people who don't have access, which is a fairly large market, right? Don't get me wrong, this is back to the thing. Musk has built really successful satellite-ish launching company and sort of a pretty successful like digital communications company, but that's not, see now we're back to commodification. And that's no good, we want financialization. If you commodify, then you get a 10, 2015 times valuation. How much revenue do you make, what are your costs? We can figure it out and we'll give you some money. Mostly we would be happy to just be a billionaire, but if you want to be a trillionaire for some reason, which makes no sense, but anyway, we'll be a trillionaire, infinite return for no input. You have to have magic. And the magic, just like the Catholic priest, is to speak in a foreign language that nobody understands and say, don't look behind the curtain, but all of a sudden we're reproducing the blood and flesh of someone who died a long time ago. And it's all good, right? And that is the same process functionally. It's like, oh, we're just going to tell you a story. And if you believe it enough, and if you don't ever connect it back to requiring me to produce anything in the actual world to demonstrate the truth of this, like a Mars colony, which is now whatever 15 years behind or 10 years behind schedule, or a moon colony, which also problematic, or data centers in space, or whatever it is, that is the thing over the moment, then I'm OK. But if I'm required to actually reduce it to commodification, like take that one step down abstraction, it all falls apart. And so this is the strange, strange world we find ourselves in, is where the commodification step, which was alienating, and objectifying enough, and disorienting enough, has now been superseded, been built on top another layer that is incredibly powerful. Has all these shaping forces is impacting our lives in very real ways, in the ways we discovered in the late capitalist, discussion late capitalist series. But in this bizarre, never, never-land way that we can't get our fingers on. Because when we do think about it, I think our tendency is to basically think in a very traditional Marxist way. Because of course, he was, or the Marxism in general, was the big critiquer, not the only one, but one of the big critiquers and influencers of our thought. So when you read historians or economists from a previous generation in particular, they understood what influenced by had this concept of commodification. So we encountered all the time. We sort of like, oh, yeah, I get that. That makes sense. And it does make a certain intuitive sense, because we shop, we buy, we understand. Our desires are sold back to us. All this makes sort of a reasonable, kind of palpable sensibility that we understand. But financialization, it's really very difficult to get your fingers on this kind of sensibility. Because it is very few people, by the way, there's almost nobody who participates in these markets. Not because of lack of money. It's just because nobody understands them. Most people aren't interested in them. So it's very, very-- it's a tiny percentage of the population. Again, the priesthood, if you will, who speak the language and have access to the magic that allows them to try and do these kinds of things. And their impact is huge, but the logic is both basically inaccessible to us and the reality that disconnect from anything. And people go, well, this doesn't make any sense. And then people, well, you don't understand the markets, blah, blah, blah, blah. On one hand, we don't. That's a reasonable critique. But the real critique is, no, you are right. It actually makes no sense. And the only justification that's ever given for it is, oh, but it produces money. So I must be right because I produce money. Notice until it doesn't. So you're right, right until 2008, or the SNL crisis, or the Asian financial and currency crisis, or the oil crisis. So it turns out that, oh, it makes total sense until it doesn't. And it does this repeatedly, and has done on. So I'm like, how many-- that's a good question. How many major financial crises have there been in my lifetime? I'm thinking, I can think of seven right off the top of my head. And so you go, OK, that means in every five years, six years, we're hitting a major life-threatening, financially life-threatening global economic problem brought on by the fact that, no, it turns out that it didn't really make sense ever. And so when you think, wow, this doesn't make any sense, you are correct. And you do not need to understand exactly what's going on to know that it doesn't make sense. So don't feel bad about that. But because it is a reality. When you have absolute sequence of major financial meltdowns and the seizing up of the system over and over and over again, it's something is wrong. And that's something that's wrong is the system itself, is the financialization impulse itself. So this to me is the difference between commodification, which is a system that's been going on since time immemorial. And it's just as Marx was arguing. And I think we can all agree, has become the dominant mode of interaction, so much so that, again, anything that can't be commodified tends to become invisible or threatened or attacked because we just don't trust it. Has now trans-mogrified and produced the super layer of financialization, which is relatively new, because the technology and the global reach that necessary to do this has not existed, banking infrastructure, financial infrastructure really didn't exist. This is the utterly new level. And it's bizarre and misleading, as we talked about in the entire series. But it is fundamentally related to commodification, but I would argue somewhat different. So hopefully, this long footnote makes it slightly clearer why the world, again, is so alienating and odd. But what happens between the commodification and the financialization, which is that bizarre level of abstraction that tries quite specifically to cut any necessary underpinnings that would restrict the possibility of having, again, minimum, minimum input, which is to say zero is the goal, maximum output, which is to say infinite returns. I have a company that makes $20 billion in revenue, doesn't make any profit. I think I should be able to offer that to the markets at a trillion dollars. And I'm not even making that up. Like I'm losing money, but I think I should be worth a trillion dollars, which to say we should all do that. We should all take ourselves to the market and offer ourselves for $1 trillion. And then people say, well, but if you get it, then you are worth a trillion dollars. And it's like, no, that's the mistake. And this is where we're running out of the capacity to absorb the kind of complexity and bizarreness and alienation. And so at some point, we'll hit another catastrophe, another big male down, and then who knows what happens after that. But history will tell us this will all go away at some point because historically speaking, everything always all goes away at some point. So commodification versus financialization related, commodification is necessarily, but I would argue not the same thing. Thank you very much. Thanks to our Patreon members for helping to make this episode possible. And we're now available on all the major podcasting platforms. You can find more information at the links below.