Hello and welcome to this month's edition of Riley's Kami Book Club, but we've taken it and we've twisted it because instead of just

me figuring out frantically how to talk about one book for a whole hour by myself, which is

really, really, really, really hard. Instead, I am here with the expert on this month's book,

its author, Peter Fleming, who is a professor

at the University of Technology, Sydney, and author of The Worst is Yet to Come, a post-capitalist

survival guide. Peter, how are you doing?

I'm very well, thank you. Thank you for having me on your show, Riley.

Oh, no, no worries.

It is a genuine pleasure.

Usually we, well, usually, a lot of the time, we're a bunch of goofesses who talk to, you know,

a bunch of other goofices.

And instead of, you know, talking about real stuff, we tend to go on extended riffs about like soup or how the first slaves were Irish or, you know, all that kind of nonsense.

Fantastic.

Today we are talking about, we're talking about very serious stuff.

And to kick us off, I'm going to ask the question that's on all of our minds.

Why is the popularity of the adult ball pit in London a sign of things to come?

Well, I think it's a very, very symptomatic trend, us wanting to return to being children.

You know, we can't escape our jobs.

We can't escape the city.

I lived in London for many years and the sense of universal emiseration is very, very difficult to escape. And so where do you escape to when you've got nowhere to run? Well, you begin to imitate patterns of life that were once deemed to be freer. And being a child, being a child is one such activity.

So I see it as a kind of mimesis, a repetition of a, you know, a psychoanalyst would say that you're repeating.

You're repeating something that was always initially a trauma, but it's been recast as a moment of freedom.

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