Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 524: Michael Marshall - Brexit & COVID

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

Interview this week with Michael Marshall @ Check out his podcast

FanDuel Casino's exclusive live dealer studio has your chance at the number one feeling, winning, which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do. Enjoy the number one feeling, winning, in an exciting live dealer studio, exclusively on FanDuel Casino, where winning is undefeated. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem?

Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly. Today's show is brought to you by adamandeve.com. Go to adamandeve.com right now and you'll get 50% off just about any item. All you have to do is enter the code word GLORY, G-L-O-R-Y at checkout. L-O-R-Y at checkout. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. recording live from glory hole studios in chicago this is cognitive dissonance every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way we bring critical thinking skepticism and irreverence 20 topic that makes the news makes it big or makes us mad it's skeptical it's political

and there is no welcome mat this is episode 524 of cognitive dissonance yeah and we you know so we had recorded this thinking we were going to have more time. Maybe we would need more time because we didn't know how long our guest was going to be, but our guest wound up filling up the whole show. So we would normally just introduce the guest here, but we just decided to maybe leave a space in case and we didn't need it because our guest is super awesome. Imagine that Cecil. Mike Marshall talks a lot. See, that's your gentle way. But mine is Mike Marshall. Yeah.

Try to get a word in that voice. He talked a little too much, but it was great. We had a great time. And that interview is coming up this show. So we hope you enjoy it. Here it is. I just handed this new ad read, and I apologize in advance. The guys are geo-targeting.

I don't know. Here we go. Hello. How do this morning? All right. Well, items without requirement of payment, i.e. free stuff, is smashing, innit? Yay, verily. Free stuff to get Randy Plonkers

in your flat wagon is the queen's knackers. Determine almost any singular item for half a pen's top of a gilly pound quid, i.e. 50% off. Metric. And then Adam and Eve is ace on the free stuff. I'm as gobsmacked

as you. Now wangle your shopping trolley and deposit offer code GLORY at register and get three lesser bakers dozen and smashing free gifts. A chuffed item for your banger, a randy prezzy for your fanny, and a third item you'll both be abso-bloody-lootly knees up for. And six free hot films. Horses for courses and whatnot. What's more, free post. So why not take a butcher's hook at adamandeve.com and use code GLORY, G-L-O-R-Y, or for code

GLORY at checkout at adamandeve.com. Can you Adam and Eve it? Aubergine chemist, pip pip, Bob's your uncle, tickety boo. Jesus Christ. So we are joined today by a guest, a guest we haven't had on the show in far, far too long. And a guest who is the only actual full-time professional naysayer that I have ever met. And I was thinking about this before we decided to have you on. By that, I mean about 20 minutes ago.

And I was wondering, like, is telling people they're wrong still considered an essential service? To answer that question, Mark. Yeah, it's an absolute pleasure to be on, guys. It has been a while since I was last on. It's been so long that civilization ended since the last time I was on.

That's how long this has actually been. So that's good news. I'm so sad. Things have gotten weird. Things have gotten very weird. This is not how I thought my 2020 was going to pan out. When you look at a year and you're like, were we having an election? Because you kind of forget for like long stretches of time that like Australia was just on fire like

an hour ago. And you're like, oh, I remember Australia. I don't care at all anymore. That was a big deal for a while. And that's kind of gone on. Oh, yeah. People keep thinking that Brexit, because of all this going on, that Brexit's gone on the back burner. And it has, but only in the sense that you've put it on the back burner and forgot about it. And it is currently on fire on that back burner. And you're looking somewhere else.

I'm sure that fire will sort itself out as that fire gets larger and larger. We still leave the EU completely at the end of this year. And this year was a short time period we had in which to agree everything about how our country runs. And then everybody had a month off. We've had the first five months, well, four months of the year off, given that we had January, the government basically went on holiday anyway. Boris Johnson was on holiday in January and large parts of February. And then since then, all we've done is Corona. And we haven't even been talking to the EU about Corona, which we should probably have been doing, it turns out.

Wait, I have questions already about the things that you've said. Did you say he was on holiday? Yeah. So Boris Johnson won the election and then took a little bit of time off. And then it was Christmas. Sorry, I had a little time off for that. Wait, wait, I just don't even understand that idea. He won the election and then was like, cool.

Yeah. I'm on vacation. Yeah, it was time for him to have a holiday. I'm actually one step behind you, Tom. He won the election. Do you guys not have TV cameras? Has anyone seen Boris Johnson? It's

disastrous. It's absolutely disastrous. But even then, he went on holiday. For how long? I think it was a couple of weeks he went on holiday. It was last year, which means it was a fucking century ago, so we have no idea. But what we do know is that he went on holiday to a swanky

villa somewhere that was paid for by someone else at someone else's expense. And he said, oh no, it was these guys paid for it. And they went, nope, we weren't paying for your private villa. Someone else that you aren't disclosing apparently paid for your private villa. And he hasn't told us who was paying for the newly minted prime minister of the UK to be on holiday. That's just one of those undisclosed deals that's happened somewhere. Okay, but he probably did say to his credit, scandal schmandle, and that does kind of absolve you. Yeah, yeah. He made some sort of half-assed allusion towards Greek mythology, and people would have gone, oh, isn't that cute?

Isn't he smart? Because he knows the occasional Greek word that he mispronounces and can't actually do if you really look into anything he says in any depth. But it doesn't matter because most people aren't going to look into what he says in depth. So everything is fine. Everything's absolutely fine. Yeah, so he was on holiday when the coronavirus thing started. The sword of Achilles is hanging over our heads, people. The sword of Achilles?

All right. That's great. Oh, man. When Hercules had those wings and he flew to his son. It's like Icarus mucking out the stables guys. This is what we got to do. We got to buckle down. What the fuck is up with that guy's hair?

Can I ask like a genuine question here? Yeah. And there's a genuine answer. There's a very genuine answer to what's going on with his hair because that's the look that he affects for appearing in public to the point where there's been video interviews with him where the camera's rolling before you start talking to him and he intentionally ruffles his hair up to make it look messy

before he goes on air because that's his persona. It's the, oh, just, it's, you know, disheveled, only just got here. Oh, Boris, you know, classic Boris. That's the persona that he has, you know, in the same way Donald Trump has the posturing machismo kind of, an ego kind of persona. Boris has the disheveled, only half prepared, but I'm sure he's really actually is prepared and he's just pretending to only be half prepared. That's the character he cultivates in order to hide the fact that he's done nothing, that he doesn't do anything, doesn't know anything, half asses everything and is half assed his way into running the country during a pandemic. It's fucking terrifying. How the fuck is that like a look somebody wants to effect? Like, I get it if you're like, I want to have like the bad boy

tussled just out of bed hair look if I'm like, you know, trying to affect the look of someone who doesn't get well. What is the advantage of looking like you don't care about your job when your job is the most important job there is? So I think the advantage is that people assume

that he must actually care and it must just be an affectation. Oh, it's that 4D chess shit. Yeah, it's a double bluff he's played basically his entire life in that if you are someone who isn't well prepared and you try and bluff

being prepared, you're going to get found out. But if you bluff being really badly prepared, people will assume that you were actually much better prepared than you appear to be. This is amazing. You can't be this badly prepared. And there was a fantastic story that went around

from one of the people who used to present the news here in the UK. And he said he did a conference. He did like a public event thing with Boris. And Boris turned up very last second before he was meant to go on stage was meant to present an award hadn't got a speech

and he scribbled down some random thoughts that made absolutely no sense at all to present to do a speech presenting this award and had some sort of

story about sheep where there was three parts to the story and he forgot the punchline of the third part and he delivered this in a shambolic way

and it was ludicrous but everyone thought it had some charm to it kind of thing he couldn't remember the name of the third part and he delivered this in a shambolic way. And it was ludicrous, but everyone thought it had some charm to it kind of thing. You know, he couldn't remember the name of the award and looked over his shoulder to see what the award was called and things. And it was like, oh, isn't this charming? But the same newsreader did an event a couple of years later with Boris

and Boris did word for word the exact same fucking thing because it was an act that he was unprepared. He just learned the script of being unprepared because that script is universal. You can be unprepared for anything as long as you are well rehearsed in how unprepared you are. Okay, I got it.

Honestly, I have to give credit where it's due right there. Because like that is in direct opposition to our leadership in the US, which is unprepared and not bluffing, just straight unprepared all the time. There's a sense that it's like, I want to half-ass everything. If I tell you I'm going to zero-ass it and I bring half my ass, I've exceeded your expectations. That is exactly it.

There is an actual brilliance to that, that I have to like, it's no good. It's morally bankrupt. It's not leadership. Like there's a lot of really significant problems to it, but like it's still orders of magnitude better than what we've got. So it's brilliant in, I would say about 80 to 90% of situations in which you'd end up being prime minister. It is not brilliant in a pandemic. You can't half-ass and fake preparation for a pandemic. Yeah, it's an absolute disaster.

It's a horror he should be ashamed to be employing, right? Like, I'm just saying it's brilliant in a strategic element, but like, it's so wildly selfish and that like the only person who wins from that is him. Yeah. And last time I checked, that's not how leadership works. Well, it is how leadership of the Tory party works. Oh, God.

That is how that party works, basically. The whole party is founded on the idea that if we all excel individually, collectively we'll excel. If we only care about ourselves and put as much effort as we can into ourselves and pushing ourselves as far as possible, and everyone does the same thing, everyone will be fine. Obviously, fundamentally missing that for everyone to be able to do the same thing, they all have to have the same advantages to begin with. You need to start with the same amount of resources as everyone else. Because if you start with nothing and you're there to drag yourself up, you're fucked. And the people at the top, having never started with nothing,

having started already with everything, course their way through life, thinking life therefore must be easy because I can do it at a canter. Yeah, because it's because they don't understand that, they do understand, but they don't want to admit that things like privilege exist.

They just don't want to admit that. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it completely makes sense. I got to roll back though, just for a second. And just, I mean, we missed you. We were going to try to talk to you right after the election or right before the election. You had a guy, Jeremy Corbyn, I think his name was. And then you had Boris Johnson.

Both of them looked like they were their pick for the prime minister seat. You guys don't directly vote for them. You vote for your prime, your, your, uh, members of parliament. And then that, that member, that group of parliament then will decide who the prime minister is. I have that correct, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, in principle, you're only voting for your local MP and once whichever party gets the most seats gets to decide who they put as the prime minister, the minister in charge. Yeah, and they had already decided, everybody decides well in advance

who they're going to pick, right? So it's not that there's going to be a switcheroo, not going to be like, excuse me, Jeremy Corbyn. I'm kidding. It's actually this guy. They don't do that, right? Well, they don't, but they sort of can. So in an election, it's pretty solid

that this is the leader of the opposition. And the leader of each party. These are the leaders of the party going into the election. And these will be the prime minister, whichever one of these, whoever's party gets the most votes will be the prime minister. But we don't vote for the prime minister themselves. We're not electing Boris Johnson in, we're not electing Jeremy Corbyn in, although it essentially is a proxy for that. But they are a member of parliament for their area. So some people are voting them in, right? Like, so they're a small group.

Yeah, exactly. So Corbyn is in London and Boris Johnson was parachuted, just dropped into a safe Tory seat in Uxbridge. So it literally genuinely was brought in. So he was the mayor of London previous to that. And you can't be, you have to be a minister in order to be prime minister.

So they just put him in the safest seat they could find in Uxbridge. Nice, I see. But you can do a switcheroo. You can't do it, it would be insane to do it directly after the election because you'd completely undermine everything the public just voted for. And the public would base it, you'd have almost immediately a call of no confidence in the government because how could you have confidence in a government who said, oh, this is the leader.

But as soon as you get in, we're going to change. But this is why we saw with Theresa May, for example, she won the previous leadership election because everybody else knifed each other in the back, including Boris, knifed Cameron in the back. And no, he knifed someone else in the back. And then Michael Gore knifed Boris in the back and took himself out. And Theresa May became prime minister because she was just the last one standing. But she was meant to be prime minister for a much longer time. But because her own party lost confidence in her, they replaced her with Boris. And he was

then prime minister going into an election. So he wasn't voted in as prime minister. He was only appointed prime minister from his membership because once you're in, you can change prime minister. But doing so theoretically comes with a political cost. In normal times, in a functioning democracy, it would come with a cost. And that cost normally is you have to then go back to election at some point because your party and the way you intend to lead the party

has not been voted in by the people. I see. So now, with the election that happened, with the election that happened that Boris Johnson became the prime minister, that just shows that England, that the UK, just like the United States, surprisingly leans right.

It does, but I think it also, there's so many factors into it. I think as a country, we probably do unfortunately lean center right, although center right here would be pretty left wing for you guys. Oh, I know. It's like super left wing. Yeah, go us. But the thing is the amount of sway the uh the newsprint media has in this country is incredibly uh incredibly high and in various newspapers will claim to be the you know the the sun very famously claimed that they won the election for uh for major uh when john major replaced thatcher i think it was or maybe it was when blair uh replaced major i forget which one but the sun has claimed victories in elections and And the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Daily Telegraph have huge sway,

particularly on certain demographics in the country. So fairly middle class, older leaning demographics. And those are the demographics most likely divorced. So we have a society that's quite heavily influenced by the press. And the press in this country very much leans towards the right anyway. And then we had Jeremy Corbyn, who as a figure for the left was much further to the left than Labour would normally be or had normally been in the last couple of decades. So people who were, who might've gone for a centre-left party looked at Corbyn, looked at everything that was being said in the far-right media and the sort of the predominant media about Corbyn, which was extreme scaremongering,

and said, no, thank you. And then we had a whole thing going on with the failure to tackle anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, which could have been very, should have been very easy to stamp out and wasn't dealt with effectively. And that put off people who would be in sort of the reasonable left, who might have gone for a vote for the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, you know, another leftist party. We have the real problem here as well in that we've got four or five parties who would identify as being fairly on the left of the spectrum. And the right of the spectrum, you've got the Tories. And occasionally you've got the Brexit Party and the Brexit Party was just formed from disgruntled Tories. And when the Brexit party collapsed, they collapsed into the Tory party.

So you end up, the only time the right splits is when it has an ideological split for over a very temporary period of time. And the ideology ends up resolving to just anchor the right into a more right wing place, basically. And then it coalesces back together in time for an election, in time to fuck the split left, essentially. So I don't know whether we do really lean that far to the right as a country, but we've certainly vaulted that far to the right. And that's unfortunately the main thing. Yeah, I want to ask you about that piece,

because I'm wondering if there is an analog between our two countries in terms of like the disconnect between the general sentiment and who actually makes all the goddamn decisions, right? Which is the voters. So do you have a problem with young people apathy where young people just don't attend and don't vote? Yeah, yeah, we do. I mean, the numbers in terms of who votes is hugely skewed towards the older you are, the more likely you are to vote. And that was borne out by things like the Brexit referendum, where I think if you look at the demographics, every

demographic up until I think the bracket that ends with either 50s or 55, 60, something in that kind of region, I think it might have been 55. Every demographic below 55 voted to remain in the EU and every demographic older than 55 voted to leave. And yet we ended up voting to leave in a majority, even though the majority of the country is not over 55. So there's a skew in who votes and that massively drives what parties get delivered. And that then has this kind of feedback loop where if you are in your early 20s coming out of university with a massive saddle with a massive student debt, looking at the housing crisis and the inability for anybody to get anywhere near the housing ladder because of the spiralling cost of houses, and the governments

that get in after you voted do nothing to address those issues and only start giving more money in pensions and making it much easier for people who are much older and much more wealthy to stay comfortable. Then you're going to think, well, I voted and it meant nothing. So why am I even wasting my time? This government doesn't care about me. No government can care about me. You know, you hit on something that I want to touch on too, because again, I think there's an analog to our citizens. And I think it's interesting that it extends across the pond. And that's like, we talk about it. And I think I've done the same thing in terms of the people in their 20s. But the demographic reality is that it's also the

people in their 30s and 40s who are not showing up to the table. They're not showing up to vote. And we lay all of that blame on people at the beginning of their adult lives when the demographic reality is that people right in the dead center of their adult lives, the 30s and the 40s, because we have the exact same demographics issue. It's so interesting to see that it's the same. And what it's essentially led to is this same kind of like cult of personality, quasi-fascist right-wing bullshit taking hold. And like just continuing to give to the people that vote, which are these peoples in their 50s and 60s and 70s, even though the demographic reality is not to put the blame on the people in their 20s, but their 30s and 40s who are just not showing up. And I don't understand that. Do you have any sense of why that might be happening? Because the 20s is one thing, but the 35-year-olds are also not attendant, right? Yeah. So I think as you progress through your 30s,

the numbers of people who do vote do go up. They don't go up to the levels that we would want. I mean, ideally, you'd want everyone voting, and then we'd have a pretty representative system. But I wonder whether the apathy that affects people in their very early adulthood, in their 20s, that apathy is so ingrained now that it was certainly there when I was in my 20s. You know, the majority of my friends didn't particularly vote and none of my family voted. I don't think any of my family have ever cast a vote. Anyone in my, certainly my mum's side of the family, and I don't think my dad's side particularly either. So voting wasn't just, wasn't something you, generally. And partly that's because, I mean, I grew up in the northeast of England, which was traditionally a labour stronghold, mining communities,

that during the late 70s, early 80s, the Tories, the Thatcher government, made specific policies that were designed to cut off the safety net for miners because they felt that the mining union had too much power. And so there was a big miners strike. Miners were being essentially starved by the government, starved of work and starved of resources to pay for food. And those memories lingered on, certainly when I was growing up. So in the 90s, 2000s, nobody there would have voted for the Tories in their lives because that was the government that did that to us. So we will not vote for them. But what that means is

Lib and all that definitely getting in. So you have a safe seat, a surefire bet, you're not going to vote for anyone else. So we don't need to run our best people. We don't need to necessarily work that hard to make everything work around here. And when you have a local representative who is always from the same party in a governmental parliament that is usually in that time has been from the other party, people say, well, I voted Labour and this government did nothing for me, you know, or I didn't vote Labour, but I see Labour always get in. And yet the government, things around here are getting worse. And so people end up blaming their local representative, even though their local representative is not from the ruling party and is only having to sort of deal with what's been handed down from the ruling party. So I think you have that kind of

thing. And I think that's been embedded long enough that it was like that when I was in my twenties and I'm now in my mid thirties. And obviously I thought, but I imagine there's a lot of people who that apathy has gone from being kind of disillusionment into becoming habitual. And so you kind of end up graduating a class of apathetic voters who see no change in the system and another generation behind them, another generation behind them, and they all kind of get older together. So I wonder whether that's why at the moment, we're not seeing great numbers in their thirties and mid thirties and onwards, because they've just been bred through the system that disenfranchised and disillusioned them in the first place. So do you think then that like prior generations weren't disenfranchised and disempowered in the

same way? Because like, obviously like people in their fifties and sixties are voting. They probably, you know, like those people who didn't vote in their twenties, if part of the reason they're not voting in their thirties is because they didn't vote in their twenties. At some point that had to have a start and that's generationally go forward. But like the people in their fifties probably didn't just start voting in their fifties. Like they didn't just like wake up and start with. So like, at what point I wonder, did that disempowerment and disenfranchisement, what events precipitate that generational change to disproportionately empower the older generation and disempower the younger generation? Because I think that seems so much, Cecil, I don't know

if you agree, but that seems so much like what we see here. That analog is really striking. When we see the people here that talk about being disenfranchised, especially the younger voters right now, there's an idea that's pervasive that if they can just throw a wrench in it now, that you'll see change in the future. And there's never been any track record

of that actually happening. Yeah. That, you know, that if we do fuck the system right now and we buck the system and say, screw it, I'm not going to vote or I'm going to vote for fucking Jill Stein or some other fool, then you're going to wind up bucking the system

and changing the system because the system will say, oh, no, no, no, we really wanted you. We're going to change our mind. I want you back. I want you back. Like it's a dysfunctional relationship or something. And it's not like that. It's not like that at all. They're embedded and they're in power and one or two elections is not going to rock any of that. And so the apathy that we see over here is, I think, a little different. I think it's more, there's an activity of trying to actually thwart the system that's just as much of an abject failure as non-participation, in my opinion. Well, I think that's what we saw in part with the Brexit vote. That was that,

let's throw a spanner in the works and burn everything down. Unfortunately, part of the reason for that was that we had the incumbent government pushing for Remain. And so people saw the government that they were disillusioned with and the government that they thought does nothing for us. And they thought this is an opportunity to say no to that government. The enemy of my enemy, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, it's not even that because I don't think that it's hard. There were lots of different reasons people voted. And I don't want to minimize it and say, well, everybody who voted Leave was stupid for this reason.

Because it's not that at all. There's loads of different reasons. And some of them may have more validity than others. Loads of different reasons they were stupid? Lots of different reasons why they were stupid. They weren't all racist. It's just that all the racists were mostly racist. Only mostly racist. Only mostly racist. But we do know that lots of people cast their first ever vote

in the referendum for leaving the EU. And that says something. And part of what that's saying is people who didn't feel like they had a part to play or that there was a space for them in parliamentary democracy felt like this was their chance to send a message. And if you were a voter who had seen the same party returned election after election after election in your local area, and you just see your local area getting worse and worse, as you see in the Northeast and parts of the Northwest, certainly where my wife grew up, it's just been getting progressively worse,

even though it's had what would be normally a local representative who ought to be working for the poorest of people. It's had a government that isn't working for that. It's had a government who isn't set up for build a social safety net. It's had the government that was set up for everybody to look after themselves and we'll all be fine. So as you see things getting worse and you see the same politicians getting returned, I could see people saying, well, there's no point me voting in an election because I can only vote for the guy who's already in. He's the best that's on offer and he's already doing nothing. So why vote for him? But this referendum comes along and it's opportunity to say, you know what? Fuck you. You're asking me to do one thing. I'm going to do another. This is a really simple question. It's not, or people would see it as a simple

question. It's not all about I'll vote for you and will you do something for me in the future? It's do you want this? Yes or no? And when you've had a right-wing press stirring up hatred of the EU for such a long time, then people say, well, this government wants us to stay with this. I'm going to say, fuck this government. And so we had this kind of thing. So first off, let's just, let's just, for people who aren't in the UK, what is being in the EU offer you that not being in the, that, that is different from not being in the EU? Like what's, what does that offer you? Yeah. So there's a few things. Well, there's, there's, there's quite a lot of things. Um, but one of them is the EU is our biggest trading partner and we trade with them on a

tariff-free system, which means I think it's, it's, I don't have the numbers to hand, but it's a stupid amount, like 70, 80% of all of the trade that we do around the world is with people in the EU, is with countries in the EU. And leaving the EU means we can't get a tariff-free system. We've got to start putting tariffs in place because the EU is a member's club and there have to be advantages to being a member of the club. Otherwise people wouldn't be a member of the club. If you got to get those advantages without being in the club, you certainly wouldn't be in the club because being in the club costs money, but that money is an investment. You say we, we spend this amount and what we get back is we don't have to pay taxes and tariffs on the trade we do with you, which is pretty useful. And, uh, we say, well, does it cross that out? Is that worth

on a balance sheet? Is it more you're paying less in dues than you would in tariffs? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And those numbers are pretty clear. And that's just on that one particular tariff thing. Then we have the issue of if we are in a common block, we don't need to check goods as they come into the UK from the EU, because we all have an agreement that you checked on the way into the block. In the same way that moving around the US, you don't have to stop at the border of each state and declare what you're bringing in the next state in case it doesn't meet the regulations of the state or in case it needs to be taxed on the way in.

You don't need that crossing borders because you're part of the same system. They do that with the EU, which allows us to have a manufacturing plant in Sunderland, near where I grew up, which completely reinvigorated the economy of that area at a time when the government had been saying, fuck the Northeast, we don't want anything to do with them. You know, it's not our priority because everyone should look after themselves. There was a car manufacturing plant built in Sunderland that relies on getting parts that are made elsewhere in Europe that arrive at the door of that plant or arrive at the local factories nearby, which then turn them into a larger part to take into

the plant. And then cars roll out of that manufacturing plant and head off back into Europe to be sold. And the way that works really efficiently is the parts that come in from Europe don't need to be checked on the way in to make sure they are what they say they are because they came from elsewhere in Europe and were all part of the same block. So everything that was built, the parts for that were checked on the way into the block. Once they're in the block, you're in the club, it's fine. So you can get those parts to roll straight into the factory without stopping and get the cars to roll straight back out. And you have a seamless supply chain, a just-in-time supply chain, which allows you to kill off a lot

of overheads because you don't need to have a massive warehouse stocking loads of parts in case a lorry gets stuck for a bit longer than expecting and suddenly you're starved of parts and your entire factory is useless for a while. So you don't have to have this massive backlog of stored parts in order to make sure you're never going to be wasting time. You can just rely on things arriving on time because nothing's being checked on the way. That is going to break with Brexit because we can't make an agreement because we specifically have said we don't want to be part of that agreement because part of that agreement means you're not checking parts on the way in, you're not checking people on the way in. So if

you're an EU worker, you don't have to get checked on the way in because we're all part of the same system. And that was the red line for the government. Is that the sort of racist undertones? Is there a, because I know that that's one of the things that everybody was talking about is like, that, you know, that some people who voted for Brexit were doing it for reasons that were xenophobic and racist. What are those reasons? So I don't want to necessarily say their reasons was xenophobic and racist, although there were some racist arguments. And there were people who were saying, I voted, well, there were people saying I voted to leave the EU because I think there are too many Africans here. Literally, that's what they'd say. It's like, well, that's not going to

do anything. You know, there's too many Muslims walking around and that's why I voted to leave the EU. Then you fundamentally didn't understand what you were voting for because this will not affect that. And actually, what it'll actually mean is, because we are not going to have fewer needs for people, we're just going to have fewer places where those people can be coming from. We're going to have fewer people coming in from Poland, but we'll have more people coming in from India, for example, because we still got that need for people. So the people who did vote to say, I see too many brown people and on the bus, there's too many different languages spoken and I want out of the EU for that. Those people are going to get more of the

very thing they didn't want because they didn't know what they were voting for. And they were sold a pub on this. They were completely sold a pub. But there are people whose reasons weren't racist, but they were economic. And I can understand this. They were saying, I work in a factory, and so many of the people who work in the factory are Polish or Eastern European. And they're willing to come here and work for quite low wages. And everyone there who is from, not from Britain, who's doing that job is in a place where someone from Britain could be doing that job at a time when there are people who are struggling for work. And therefore they wanted them out. Obviously what they're missing is if you want people to, if you don't want people coming and being allowed to work for

lower wages than you're willing to accept, the problem there isn't those people. The problem is the people paying the wages. And so we just raise the minimum wage and say, you can't get away with paying people below the minimum wage or below the living wage. And then that problem starts to be addressed. So people saw a genuine problem of a housing shortage that they said, well, these are all going to immigrants. And actually the housing shortage is because the government sold off government housing and didn't build any more government houses. And suddenly there's a housing shortage. So people did see genuine problems in their communities, but they attributed the cause of those problems to the wrong source and therefore attributed an incorrect fix to those problems, which was stop the foreigners coming in and we'll be fine when that isn't the problem, really.

Okay, but to be fair to their argument, you'll have different foreigners coming. Yeah, we'll have different foreigners. But in fairness to them, that argument was not made to them. And when it was made, people dismissed it saying, oh, that's just project fear. That's just what they want you to think. Oh, and this has a, this obviously, this has a corona element that is beautiful because one of the jobs that we absolutely need European workers or migrant workers coming in to do is picking the food at farms, picking vegetables on the ground, potatoes, et cetera, in farms. And we don't have enough British workers willing to do that. And we actually had, now that we've had a whole Brexit thing going on, and also then the pandemic has stopped immigration anyway, because you're

not allowed to travel right now, we've got too few workers to actually tend to our farms and there's food rotting in the ground. And then the government went on a big campaign to try and get British workers to come and do it. And they asked for 50,000 workers and they got 10,000 workers and not all those 10,000 people turned up. And it was actually close to a few hundred people actually were willing to do the job in the end. A few hundred? I forget the exact numbers, but it was ludicrously low. It was comically low. So what did the government have to do do they put on a private plane to fly people from romania to the farms to pick the the produce so the government started doing

immigration on a person-by-person basis on basically a fucking private jet so like it seems to me like like a huge part of like this whole thing is like there's a global economy and there's there's global economic realities that are part of being like a part of an interconnected global economy and like what what the eu fundamentally did is it allowed us to have like broad term agreements and now you guys have to create individualized agreements over every economic category of decisions, rather than just having a broad base set of, look, these borders don't economically matter the same way, so we can do that. Now you have to do all that work individually because the broad economic reality is, or broad economic decisions are, are wiped out. Like.

Yeah. And we've got to do it individually. How the fuck are you supposed to even know what decisions you didn't have to make before? That's, that's exactly it. And the thing is, we've got to make those decisions on every single thing that needs to be agreed. So every different type of trade, what could possibly come up. But the EU is also very good at setting safety regulations and standardization. So you'd have a standardized safety regulation across the entire bloc.

And in fact, one of the membership criteria is around safety regulations, human rights regulations. You have to sign on to certain human rights and values in order to be part of the team, part of the club, which raised the standard of workers' rights. So that included things like maternity and paternity leave. And that's why we've got a fairly decent maternity and paternity leave. It's not the only reason. We might have done it ourselves, but we certainly had to do it

as part of the EU. Same with paid leave. We have a much more generous paid leave scheme than you guys get in America. And again, we might have done that voluntarily, but we had to do it to remain in the EU. So those kinds of things are now there for the government to start to pick a way out of. Jesus Christ. But not only do we need to make all these decisions on every single aspect with the EU, the other thing the EU does really well is the EU says these trade negotiations are a massive ball ache. You don't want to be doing them. So rather than Britain figuring out how they trade with America and Canada and Japan and every other

country in the world individually, so going through all of this hassle every time, instead, the EU will do that with those countries. So if you're in the EU membership scheme, then you can't negotiate individually with other countries. But the flip side of that is, you don't have to because they'll do it for you. And the EU being, therefore, a much larger block, way, way more people, means you get a much better economy of scale and you get a much better deal. So while you're not allowed to trade, Britain as part of the EU could not set up an individual trade agreement with the US, for example. We can do it, the EU will do it for us and you get to sign on these much, much better terms

than you could possibly agree because they're trading to way more people. Now we're leaving the EU, we have to do that trade negotiation with the EU, which means get an agreement on the EU side from the other 27 countries who all have to agree. And if one of them says no, then it doesn't happen, which means we now have way less bargaining power than Ireland, than Spain. So when Spain say, you know, Gibraltar, you've always considered that an English territory and the EU has always said,

guys, this isn't our fight. You're both members. You sort it out. Now you're not a member of the EU. So the EU is on our side. We're still members of the EU. So we're going to have Gibraltar back. Thank you. Otherwise, we aren't going to say yes to your trade negotiation. So we have way less sway than even the smallest. If you find the smallest member of the EU, Latvia or somewhere, we have less sway than them because the EU is a collective club. And if they all have to say yes, so they will represent the interests of every member equally in favour of the members over the person they're negotiating with. So we've got that, that we need to do with EU, but then we need to do it with every other country in the world. Because previously we weren't allowed to have these agreements with other countries,

so we don't have them. And now we won't have access to the ones we do have so we've got to do everything from scratch yeah and we've got to do that by the end of the year so fingers crossed nothing massive happens

in 2020 this is like picking up a game of civilization like midstream blindfolded with no idea what led you here

how the fuck are you supposed to do that and with a clock running, with a deadline. And the deadline's the end of this year. And with coronavirus, yeah. And then, yeah, so the coronavirus comes along and we've not done any negotiating before. This is a job I can do from home.

Yeah, exactly. You're going to have to. Yeah. So let's talk about the coronavirus. I want to talk about how the NHS is handling it. And also there was a story that came out, and it was from The Guardian. And it talked a little bit about coordination between the EU health and the UK. It feels like you guys are still, in some ways, working closely with the EU,

but you don't want to be part of it. It's like this weird sort of like UK wants an open relationship sort of thing going on. You know? Yeah, very much. So basically, we are still part of, well, we're on the way out

of the EU at the moment, but the EU said when this crisis hit that they would consider us part of the club still for the purposes of acquiring ventilators and the various other kind of pandemic response stuff. And you could see that as the EU being kind of generous and magnanimous. They could be saying, like, well, I know you're on your way out, but this is a massive issue we've got to pull together. The flip side of it is they could be thinking the UK is really close to us in terms of landmass.

And if the UK is totally fucked, then our efforts to defeat this pandemic are going to be so much harder. So it makes sense for us to loop that in. I mean, bear in mind that the EU shares a land border with the UK in Ireland. So if the north of Ireland was in the UK, out of the EU, and absolutely screwing up the corona issue, and the Republic of Ireland's in the EU and doing better because they had the kind of the EU collective bargaining kind of for ventilators

and stuff, that border becomes really tense. And that's a border that's already pretty tense. I've heard something about that. I think there might have been some rumbling historically. So one way or another, like the EU offered the UK the opportunity to stay in, in terms of stay involved in some of these conversations about pandemic and in terms of buying up ventilators, moving ventilators around the EU to where they're needed. And I know parts of the EU, I think Germany has actually been flying Italian patients to German hospitals in order to get better kind of treatment for them, things like that. But the UK had the opinion of, well, no, we're leaving the EU. So why the hell should we have to work with those bastards? No, we'll go it alone because we are a proud nation. We are the

Great Britain. We can do this alone. And what we've done alone is basically surpassing Italy as the single worst hit country in Europe. And if that isn't true at the time of recording, it is true at the time of this going out, because we're about 150, 180 deaths away from being worse than Italy. So that's what we've managed to learn. And Britain's, the government, when they were pushed on this, to say you were invited to be part of this scheme, why did you turn down the chance to have ventilators when you needed them,

equipment when you needed them? Their response was, oh, we didn't get the email about the scheme. The email was missing. Wait, for real? We didn't get your email? Oh, you know what? It must have been in my spam filter. The pandemic response spam filter?

Yeah. What the fuck? Obviously, this is a show where we hyperbolize and in conversation, know, in conversation, we'll fuck around and we'll make jokes. Just be absolutely clear. I'm deadly serious. They said they didn't get the email. That is not hyperbole. That is serious.

I love that because it also supposes that they didn't send an email, right? Like, hey, so this is like, like to Cecil's like comment about the, like, it's like, it's like leaving your, your, your house in a huff and then borrowing gas money to do it. It's like, what the fuck? This makes no sense at all. It presupposes that they didn't send the email. It also presupposes that they weren't sat in the meeting while it was being discussed, which they were. It wasn't just something that happened over email. Okay, but Jim was supposed to follow up and he didn't do it so like a hundred thousand people are gonna die

yeah yeah yeah that is literally true yes that's you know look i you said we had this on our list of next steps and i don't move past my bullet points on next steps so i didn't get the email my hands are tied guys guys. You can see. I mean, like, nobody likes a bureaucrat, but, you know, my hands, really, what are they supposed to do? Like, is this, like, just, like, essentially, like, government at its heart

agreeing that, like, government is just a social construct where we all agree, fuck you, you're on your own? Like, is that what's happening here? The UK government warfully underestimated how serious this was going to be. Massively, massively underestimated. They saw it in China. They ignored it. They saw it happening in Italy and Boris Johnson went on holiday. He went on holiday whilst it was happening in Italy. While Italy was in lockdown, the government was, Boris Johnson came back and was saying that

he was personally shaking the hands of coronavirus patients. He said that. While other parts of the world. But he never got sick, so that was fine. How did that work out for him? A few weeks later, he caught that really contagious virus that was going around. And ended up in intensive care. But who could have foreseen that though, Marshall?

There's no way of knowing. No way of knowing. Gosh. The other thing is the government initially ran a plan, which they were the plan was, and Boris Johnson went on national television, on ITV, one of the free-to-air channels here in the UK,

and said, there's a theory that we could just sort of take it on the chin and allow the virus to pass through the society in order to give us immunity. And that was their initial plan. Because they fucked up all the models. They didn't factor in how seriously transmissible this was. They didn't look at the examples of China or of Italy.

They thought, well, that's happening in Italy, but we're better than Italy. We can just sort this because we're Britain. We're exceptional. We can just do this. And by the time they realized that developing a natural herd immunity was not going to work, it was already way too late. They had a horse racing event, Cheltenham, the Cheltenham Cup, which is a big horse racing weekend. 250,000 people attended it after Italy was in lockdown. At the point where parts of Spain were in lockdown and Madrid was

suffering a crisis, the government allowed a football match to go ahead in which a thousand fans flew from Madrid to here in Liverpool. And a couple of weeks later, for one thing, I got the fucking coronavirus. Oh no! Lots of other people in Liverpool got the coronavirus because we literally imported corona at a time when these fans weren't allowed to go to stadiums in Spain. They were allowed to fly to our stadiums. And that's because the government decided, not our problem, mate. This isn't going to be that bad.

You guys can sort it all out. But does Boris Johnson, are there any doctors in the UK? Yeah, and they're fucking livid. I mean, seriously, even here, we have an absolute buffoon who's running things. I mean, he is,

it is the most clown shoes ass shit you've ever seen in your entire life. Every day, Donald Trump gets on the TV and he says things that you literally cannot believe someone would say aloud, let alone the president of the United States saying them aloud. But he at least has a whole slew of people

that have to, after he speaks, correct what he said. What I don't understand is how did it get to the point where you're doing all this stuff? Was there no one there saying, hey, this is fucking stupid, guys? And then or was there just a complete level of inaction? Well, so the government has a scientific advisory group. And I forget what the exact name is. Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, I think it is. It goes by the acronym SAGE.

And all the way through, every single... We've been having daily press conferences with one member of the parliament of the government. And every single one of them has said, we've been led by the science. We take the right steps at the right time to ramp up our capacity when we need it, because we are led by the science. And the science is coming from this advisory group. But what's kind of crucial is there isn't such a thing as the science. It depends which scientists you listen to. And if they've all got different models and they've all got different ideas, if you look at a span of scientific papers and a span of scientific models,

and then you seek out the one that already agrees with what you wanted to do anyway, you can then say, well, I was guided by the science. And of all the 15, 20 scientists I spoke to, the one who agreed with me is the one I was guided by. And so one of the big scandals that came out a little while ago, I think it was last week, week before, a couple of weeks ago, scandals that came out a little while ago, I think it was last week, week before, a couple of weeks ago, was these SAGE meetings, which are meant to be very high level, scientific, objective, apolitical meetings of just scientists sharing the scientific data. You know, the chief medical officer for England, the CMO for Wales and Scotland, they would all be there. Well, the chief medical officer for Scotland and Wales were there, but they weren't allowed to ask questions unless

those questions were submitted in writing. But someone who was there and who was on the panel and was allowed to ask questions at any point was Boris Johnson's lead advisor, a guy called Dominic Cummings, who's responsible for, in part, the Brexit vote. He ran the Vote Leave campaign. So a lot of the stuff that came out of Vote Leave was Dominic Cummings' master plan, essentially, his ideas, his strategy and communications. He's on the panel. And what leaked in reports in the panel was that he was asking a lot of questions in this supposedly apolitical panel. Now, if you have someone who's already quite a controversial figure, who is very closely tied to what the government already wants to do,

and he's involved in asking questions and leading and being part of the discussion in that panel in a way that other scientists, well, actual scientists, because he's not one, you know, actual scientists aren't allowed to be on there. You are muddying the waters of that impartial scientific advice because you've thrown a dickhead into the mix who's not there because he's an expert.

He's there because he's representing what the government wants to be true. At least he's not spitballing, shooting fucking Clorox in your veins, though. Like, I mean, at some point there's this saving grace and it's that you don't have somebody who's such an absolute buffoon he thinks you can stick fucking UV light in your body

and kill the coronavirus. No, you are far worse than us on that. I mean, that's absolutely true. Oh, I guess that would be why you're number one in Europe and we're number one in the world in terms of coronavirus cases it's like it's our buffoonery fucking system like we're just like

we're setting the fucking curve for buffoonery do you guys have protesters? well we didn't up until you guys started to have protesters and then we had a protest the number one American export is culture. Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. We are in the same way that, you know, um, you see spikes of, of, uh,

coronavirus infections a couple of weeks after a major kind of, uh, gathering in, in a certain place. We see spikes of dickheadery a couple of weeks after you guys start being pricks. That's kind of how it goes. We are catching that and developing that particular disease just a little while after you. Very soon. You're going to have a bunch of assholes marching up and down the street with fucking long guns. Guaranteed. Real soon. It's going to happen. It's going to happen.

God, it's ridiculous. We have a whole slew of people here in the United States. Different places. Actually, different states too having their own protests, which is, it's just insane. It's just the dumbest shit ever. And then to have a conversation with those people.

My favorite is to watch the conversations that the reporters have with them. And these people literally have no idea what they're doing or why they're doing it. They're just mad. They're just upset and they just want to be mad and then probably eventually die. So the thing is like, they're mad at the wrong thing. Like there are like really great legitimate

reasons to be furious with our government right now over their like gross mismanagement of the pandemic. The pandemic is like people's lives are disrupted in ways that they don't have to be disrupted if we had managed this better. Like, that's the thing we should be like, taking to our cars. If we're going to take to our cars and honk our horns and like be angry at our government, like, I actually think that's perfectly legitimate. The government has done a horrifyingly bad job. There's still not available testing here. You know, that's criminal. What's the testing situation like there? So the government, the testing situation is fantastic. So for one thing, I don't know anyone who's had a test and I don't know anyone who knows anyone who's had a test,

but the government set a target, which I think during March was going to be 20,000 a day initially, and they went nowhere near that. And so they said, well, by the end of April, it will be 100,000 tests a day. And as April rolled on, they were getting to 30,000, 40,000 tests a day. And it was brought up in an interview or a press conference, I forget which, and they put to the minister behind it, you know, you said you're going to get to 100,000, but actually you've only done 23,000 tests yesterday. And you're supposed to be at 40,000 at this point of the month. So how come you're not doing this? And what the minister said was, well, the important thing is we had the capacity for 40,000 tests. So yes, that's the important thing at all.

It's not the important thing. It's not the important thing at all. It's like saying, Tom, you did no work yesterday. No, no, that was his genuine answer. So Tom, you did no work yesterday. Well, yeah, but the important thing was I had the capacity to do work yesterday. That doesn't fly. It's very much about what you actually did, especially when what you're meant to be doing is testing people if they have a deadly virus. So he wasn't being sarcastic. No, no, that was a genuine response. And the government, because that's it. That's it. That's the thing that can happen here is they can either be sarcastic or not. And you have to decide whether or not. And so it's a little more difficult, but he's just being, okay, he's being honest.

Go ahead, no, continue on. We just keep moving the goalposts. And so they needed to get 100,000 tests done by the end of April. Otherwise they missed this arbitrary figure, admittedly arbitrary figure that they said, because we should be way beyond that, really. We should be testing the fuck out of everyone.

And it's the only way, test and trace is the only way we can do this. But they looked like it was getting towards the last week of April and they were still in the sort of 40,000, they weren't near the a hundred. And so it didn't look like they're going to make it. And then it was announced on the last day of April, they made it to 120,000 tests. And that number was made up of the 122,000 tests. It was made up of 73,000 tests that were completed and the rest were tests that had been sent to people. And they said, so we've made it past our target of 100,000 tests

carried out. And that's only true if you include carried out in the same way that a postal worker carries the parcel out to somebody. That is not a test carried out. That's a test being conveyed. It's a test being, you know, posted, but it's not an actual test in the sense that nobody has been tested. You know, those people have not been tested. So the government just flat out lied about the number. It was actually 70 odd thousand. They said it was 122,000. And it's like saying, you know, I have been on dates. I have dated hundreds of women. Well, I say that what I mean is I've sent out Tinder requests to hundreds of women and any day now they'll all come back in and then I will definitely have dated them.

It's the same. It's not the same thing. Like, so, so your testing situation is an, our testing situation is a, is a goddamn nightmare. I have a, I had a family friend a family friend died of coronavirus Friday. Oh, shit. And her husband did not get a test for coronavirus until Wednesday. So he died on Friday and he could not get tested

because being in the same household still was not until she was admitted to hospital and then she passed very quickly. But until she was admitted to the hospital And then she passed very quickly, but until she was admitted to the hospital, that was insufficient to meet the guideline to get him tested. And of course he's positive for it. You know, he's,

he's very sick. So like this, the testing standard is a fucking nightmare here. And I am sympathetic as to why that like causes people to lose their patience. You know, like if you're not going to do anything proactively to change the situation,

I am, I think the Cecil's point, like the people protesting are fucking knuckleheads. But that sense of like, we're just not doing anything. All we're doing is turning off the spigot and then like standing around staring at each other. What is, what is the the rest like what is the general feeling in the in in britain about this like are people are people unemployed in the same kind of mass numbers are people starting to boil over here there like they are here yeah it's it's starting

to bite a bit but in fairness there was a couple of things the government did do which were which were significantly useful one of the things they did was announce a furloughing scheme where workers, if a business couldn't afford to keep a worker on because they aren't making any money or anything like that, instead of sacking that worker, the government said, you put them on furlough leave and we'll pay 80% of their salary up to a certain amount and for a duration of time. With the idea being that once we get past this issue, those people are able to come back into work and hopefully not have this massive shock to the economy of mass unemployment and therefore businesses shrinking as a result of that and this kind of feedback system. So that has helped with some people, although it was

delivered in such a way that was not particularly useful. So it was delivered basically by the public demanding something be done. And then the government figuring, like answering that one thing, answering that question. So what about all these people who'd be laid off? You can't just let them go without an income. Okay, well, we'll sort this for an income. What about self-employed people?

Okay, we'll sort that. Well, what about mortgages? How are we going to cope with the mortgages? All right, we'll sort that. And so it was literally sort of day after day. You're three steps ahead of us. Yeah, it was. It was very much the government by public demand, basically. And the problem with that, obviously, is that you're all tactic and no strategy because you're always just reacting to what everybody identifies as a need because you didn't do the work to identify the need yourself. But the other thing that can be quite tricky is it actually can lead to the confidence

in that government going up amongst people because they will see we needed this and the government gave it. We needed this and the government gave it. They see questions being answered and demands being met, you know, and needs being met. But what they don't see

is that the government should have predicted those needs because otherwise you put in place a fix, which has got a massive hole in it, which creates another need. And you just, you're constantly doing that. So that's a massive issue. And I think that's kind of- That still sounds utopian by comparison. In comparison, it sounds better. We're just like, there's a need. Okay. Well, if it seems like we're doing that much better than you,

I'll give you a story that will show you that we aren't doing that much better than you. And you may be better than us on this. So the numbers that we see every day, the deaths of coronavirus, these numbers that have become the new reality to us of just seeing numbers rising on a daily basis and going from being terrified at those numbers to being completely blasé and blind to those numbers because they lose meaning because it's all kind of regular that you're seeing these kind of tallies of deaths. In the UK, these numbers were looking better than other parts of Europe. And then after a while, people start to

ask the question of what those numbers were. And you'd imagine those numbers were the number of people who died of coronavirus because that's what they say they are. And that's very much what we need to count at the moment. But instead, those numbers were the number of people who died of coronavirus in hospital. And we weren't counting people who died of coronavirus not in hospital. So we didn't count people who died in a community. And we didn't count people- Okay, but they were on base. So it doesn't count when you're on base. They didn't count. We didn't count people who died in care homes. We didn't count, therefore, the elderly people who died of a virus

that disproportionately kills elderly people in places where elderly people are in near contact with other elderly people. And so there are care homes here in Liverpool, not far from where I live, just down the road, where something like three quarters of their intake, three quarters of people living there have died of coronavirus. And up until last week, those numbers were not being added up. So that's not as bad, right? But up until last week, those numbers were not counting.

The government just didn't count them. And that can only be either incompetence to not know and not know how to check or kind of spin to make the numbers look better than they actually are. It's staggering that this was going on. And this was actually put to a government minister on television this morning, where they said, you know, Boris Johnson said people around the world are looking at the success of Britain. And what really is this so much a success when we see our numbers are much, much worse than other countries? And how do you explain that?

And the government minister, a guy called Grant Chaps, said, well, the issue really could be that we in Britain just might have better statisticians who are better at working out how many people have died than in those other countries. So British exceptionalism even stretches to counting dead people. We're just better at that than other countries.

And that's why there's all these dead people. In Italy, in Spain, people are walking down the street, stepping over dead people, not noticing that they're there. Britain, we'd have spotted that dead person. We'd have counted it. That's why our numbers are high.

That's the only reason they're higher. Well, at least your PM isn't advocating eating poison. That is true. Besides British food. Yeah, and it's probably advocating that. I don't even think the British advocate eating that. It's just a grudging acceptance that that's all that's available, Cecil.

I mean, to be honest, we haven't heard from him. We've barely heard from him because he was on holiday. Because he was sick. And then he was sick. He was in intensive care. He was recuperating. Then his partner gave birth to a baby. The partner recuperating. Then his partner gave birth to a baby.

The partner he left his previous wife for gave birth to a baby. He is still planning at some point to go on paternity leave as well. It's like, God, you've got a fucking pandemic going on here. All of that sounds utopian. Like, I'm just saying, like a leader who doesn't show up,

that's the kind of leader we need right now. We need absentee leadership. Yeah, that is true. What you need is for somebody, what you need is for a very attractive model to contract the coronavirus and then fly directly to Mar-a-Lago to take one for the team,

to do her patriotic duty. Because we know for a fact he cannot keep his hands of women in his vicinity, whether or not he has consent to touch them. I'm not even saying the model has to lead him on. She can just stand there and he will do the rest for her. The one saving grace over here, and I don't know how familiar you are with what's happening over here, but the one saving grace over here, I think, is that the states have some level of autonomy and have been

in several states under some pretty good leadership, some leadership that's really shown that it can handle this sort of crisis and has acted in the best possible way it can, even in some ways without the support of the government and in opposition to support of the government. So it's been, some states have done a lot better than others. And I think specifically Illinois has been, I think, pretty good. There's some things that are just bad, but everybody's doing this for the first time. So it's hard to Monday morning quarterback some stuff, but really genuinely, there's been a bright spot here, especially in Illinois.

We acted on it early and we've been paying a lot of attention to it. So, but yeah, like Tom said, though, it's still hard to get tests and it's still hard to, the antibody test is going to be the one thing I think that's going to change everything. Yeah, yeah. It's the moment we get,

we start getting widespread antibody tests, then we can have people who, like you say, you had the disease. If you get the antibody test, you say, great, well then just go back into society, you had the disease if you get the antibody test you say great well then just go back into society you know

and then you get your little 666 mark and you go off into society and you do your thing and then you come back and you know the thing is is the people who don't have it

they need to isolate and be much more careful than the people who do who've already had it the problem is they're not going to we just change what's that?

the problem is they definitely aren't going to if you and I have had it and we're allowed to go back out because we carry our little kind of passport that says, yeah, we're fine, everybody else, and I can understand this, if people who are on the breadline, people who can see their jobs going away and they think, well, if I just get the virus, I'm probably going to be all right.

I think I'm not in a bad situation. You're going to end all right. I think I'm not in a bad situation. You're going to end up with COVID parties. You're going to end up with a real boom. So yeah, it's going to help, and it's also going to hinder. It's going to have to be very, very tightly managed. And God knows how well that's going to be done in different places. And different places, I imagine, will do it better than others. So far, the science is not definitive at all about whether or not having had corona provides immunity to a second infection.

Like the WHO has come out and said there's no reason to believe that you can't get it twice. Well, I think there's no evidence to say that, which I think that's the WHO being very cautious about their use of terminology and that we haven't got good evidence that it will give you long-term immunity because there hasn't been long-term for immunity. It's not old enough to have long-term immunity. though right or some similar product right is that yeah i get an antibody test and i had coronavirus and i returned to work and i'm immune like but i may not be immune for two months i might not be immune for six months i may not be immune for i might not be immune at all so like set policy based on an assumption of immunity that that may or may not exist and may or may not have a fucking timer on it.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Seems like a really fucking dangerous thing to do. Yeah, we'd need to be absolutely bulletproof or as bulletproof as you can be on that before that was the case. Although it happens that my colleague at the Merseyside Skeptic Society and on Skeptics with a K podcast, Alice Howarth, is a working researcher who's got a phd in cancer research and now works in infectious disease and so she's been talking quite a lot about how these tests work and how the antibodies work and how things are likely to be and uh she's been quite useful to talk to about this uh and one thing she was saying is that of virus in this family we've seen

lots of these viruses you will develop immunity and that we haven't seen any evidence any any reason to think that you wouldn't get immunity from it yet. But the problem is we haven't had long enough to figure that out. Although, I mean, it was emerged in China in December. So it's had six months. We aren't seeing huge reinfection with people there. Some people have tested positive having had it before and then been on a retest. It looks like what actually was happening, it was dead parts of the virus still knocking about their system, having been killed by the immune system. And that was what was triggering the test.

So there is some quiet positivity that immunity should be possible. Natural immunity from having had the disease being one thing, obviously the thing that will be the real magic bullet will be developing synthetic immunity, having kind of created a virus that can give you much, much better immunity than just having developed it. But you'd imagine that enough people had it in January, that if there wasn't a four or

five month immunity around the world, we'd start to see those places exploding again where things have locked down. And maybe the fact that we haven't been seeing that is some signs of positivity, but for the time being no one knows anything and you can't make any policy until we're based on something pretty solid. Part of the reason it might not re-explode is because of the lockdown, right? It's just less, you know,

part of it. Who knows? There's just so much unknown around that aspect of it. That's? There's just so much unknown around that aspect of it. That's why those immunity passports, I am so sympathetic, especially in places that don't have the kind of social safety net that even you described in Britain. Here in the States, it's like 30 million people at least are out of work. There's a lot of places where people can't even file for unemployment, and unemployment is a pittance against what you would have made at your job. It's actually, it's actually designed to be significantly less than what you would have

made from your job. And there's a government backstop right now to a portion of that, but still it's, it's, it's poverty inducing for sure. It's the same here in the UK. And when, before the furloughing scheme came in, there were lots of people whose otherwise fairly comfortable jobs had to let them go. And then they found themselves on universal credit, which is kind of the unemployment benefit. It's the benefit for all benefits, basically. So your unemployment benefit,

your child benefit, your disability benefit, it all kind of comes from the same system, universal credit. And it was a disaster when it was rolled out it led it was rolled out i think last year the year before it led people to have to go six to eight weeks without any payment at all um some of those people didn't make it six to eight weeks and there's there's actually a death toll to the the late rollout and how long it took for people to actually get recompense that way and there's been a system that's been fraught with ill design and cruelty that may or may not be intentional in the sense of it's trying to be punitive into dissuading people

from being on universal credit. And it's been that way since it was first rolled out. And there were ministers who lost their jobs over how badly it was rolled out. But then we saw all these people who would otherwise have been in comfortable jobs having to go for universal credit.

And we saw this rush of stories in the media saying, well, how are people meant to, supposed to live on just this small amount per week? Isn't this ridiculous? And it's like, yeah. And there's been people saying that for literally years and you didn't listen to them because they were poor and you thought they deserved it.

You know, you thought they weren't as smart as you. But now we've got someone who was, you know, doing a marketing manager's job in an agency who's been let off and they're suddenly on a pulp as pittance and they're saying, well, this is ridiculous. No one can live on this. I said, yeah, they, they couldn't live on it before, you know, all of this. And they certainly couldn't live on it without the reserves of, of savings you may have or the house that you might be in and that kind of thing. Yeah. So people are waking up to that at least. Wait a minute. Being poor sucks. Yeah. Nobody told me. I wish somebody would have let me know. So whether people will remember that message when we come back from all of this, who knows whether we are even in a position fiscally as a country to do anything about that position fiscally as a country to do anything about that um when we come back from this also we don't know um i i'd like to think this this experience is in some way radicalizing people to see the problems in the system we already have yeah um hope so and i i just think people are

doubling down in the systems that in what they already believe i feel way more radicalized to be further left than i than i was and I was already fairly left to begin with. So yeah, if we don't all band together and storm Richard Branson's private island, then I don't think we've gone far enough. Well, Marsh, it was a lot of fun talking to you today. Thank you so much for joining us. We hope to have you on much sooner than we had in the past here since the long drought we had with no marsh. We're looking forward

to talking to you in the future if there is a future. So thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure, guys. Always good to catch up with you guys. And yeah, stay safe, eh?

So we are not going to be reading patrons this week because Tom is, Tom took the week off this week and we're recording this a little early. So we are not going to be reading patrons this week. We promise to do it next week. We do still want to encourage you to become patrons. Please, it means the world to us if you're a patron.

So we ask if you are a fan of the show or if you just started listening to, if you've been listening to us for the 10 years we've been doing it, we ask you, please go to patreon.com, become a patron of the show. You get a ton of extra content. Tom is putting out an audio version of the blog

he writes for his boys. We have a full extra hour of content almost every week from our live stream audio that gets given to patrons in MP3 format. And we still do on occasion do some extras and some other stuff for the patrons. So we just want to thank everybody who is a patron and we encourage everybody to become a patron. We will read all your names next week, we promise. We want to thank Michael Marshall of the Merseyside Skeptics. He does a wonderful show called Skeptics with a K. You should check it out if you haven't. It's a wonderful show.

Very smart people on that show. Very, very funny, clever people. You should check it out. And that is going to wrap it up for this week. So we are going to leave you, like we always do, with the Skeptics' Creed. Credulity is not a virtue.

It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypnono babylon bullshit couched in scientician double bubble toil and trouble pseudo quasi alternative acupunctuating pressurized stereogram pyramidal free energy healing water downward spiral brain dead pan sales pitch late night info docutainment. Leo Pisces. Cancer cures. Detox. Reflex.

Foot massage. Death in towers. Tarot cards. Psychic healing. Crystal balls. Bigfoot. Yeti. Aliens.

Churches. Mosques and synagogues. Temples. Dragons. Giant worms. Atlantis. Dolphins. Truthers.

Birthers. Witches. Wizards. Vaccine nuts. Shaman healers. Evangelists. Conspiracy. Double double speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands.

Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. The opinions and information provided on this podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. All opinions are solely that of Glory Hole Studios, LLC. Cognitive dissonance makes no representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information and will not be liable for any errors, damages, or butthurt arising from consumption. All information is provided on an as-is basis. No refunds. Produced in association with the local dairy council and viewers like you.