If I Speak - 19: We’re boiling with rage

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

Moya has a big theory about why everyone’s on such a short fuse these days and Ash responds to a listener with a debilitating crush. Plus: science or magic? We’re going to Glastonbury! Moya will be joined by Shon Faye and a LEGENDARY special guest a live recording of the show, and will host two […]

hello gluttonous punishment you're back with if i speak i feel like we should come up with an audience name because at the moment if i speakers so if you have any suggestions can you send the audience names to if i speak at navarra media.com uh you can also send dilemmas there along with hopes dreams i've got it winning lottery tickets yeah i've got it gone okay the name for the audience is so the backstory of our name is of course the iconic jose marino meme right so i prefer not to speak if i speak i am in big trouble so we call our audience the special ones i love that although i feel like lots of our audience won't get that the special ones the thing is okay

if audience you like that name send in or tell us on social media or something like that I might even do a poll but if you think

we need an organic name invented by you and we can't foist a name top down on you tell us that too because we want to do this

we want to do this in a way that's conducive to our politics you know so maybe we need like a grassroots committee name anyway today Tell us that too. Because we want to do this in a way that's conducive to our politics, you know? So maybe we need like a grassroots committee now. Anyway, today on If I Speak, I've got Ash Sarkar with me. Ash, vibe check.

I actually feel really excited at the moment because in preparation for the icebreaker questions, it made me consider some of my favorite things in the world and that made me really happy oh then i'll definitely be flipping every single one of them round on you to find out what the story behind the questions um as you segued so beautifully there i may as well ride the wave what are your icebreaker questions come on give them to me okay it is time for our traditional icebreaker folks 73 questions minus, which means there's three questions because we don't have the time or the intellectual property rights. So question one, money and feasibility, no object.

What's your dream home like? Oh, do you know what's so funny? People ask me this quite a lot. It's a question that comes up among my generation and I can honestly say, I think because I'm bad at visualising things, maybe it's ADHD, because I'm bad at visualising things. Maybe she's born with it. Maybe she's born with it. Maybe she's neurodivergent. Maybe her traits are just exacerbated by the attention economy we live in. So now she has a diagnosis that might not have been given

20 years ago um because because anyway either way i'm bad at visualizing stuff um so it's quite difficult in a lot of homes i walk by i'm like i'd live there i'd live there because any home that looks like secure and big is nice i think i'm gonna nick one for my friend annie lord we were talking the other day about those big beautiful like open plan warehouse flats that you can get uh in maybe like lime house those those you know used to be warehouses for the docks and now one of those top floor ones that you get to look at everything I think that's gorgeous I love just like a big Victorian house with bay windows I think that'd

be fine too but I also like one of the flats i lived in where i was very lucky to live there was in kennington and it was just like an old it was council housing but there's a beautiful old council housing made in like the 1920s or something and it was like the taupe blocks but not how they're done now but just one of those you know beautiful balcony public communal garden at the back uh top floor i quite like a top floor and i'd love a house where i can have eaves in a little attic room any eaves for me would be great but i don't have a specific outline of my dream home and i also come from i think because i come from paradise so where i grew up was literally it's more about like the garden and the surroundings of the

community for me than the actual i guess the home the house i live in now is really nice i'd be happy to live here forever for example um but it's like where it's situated it was also so key for me i once lived in an absolute hovel in dalston but i was so happy because it was had everything i needed and wanted on my doorstep i don't know what's your dream house and are you in it um i really love the house that i'm in because it's a's your dream house and are you in it um i really love the house that i'm in because it's a victorian terrace house and that just feels very very london and i love it if we're doing the whole like money no object fantasy whatever i do love like those georgian townhouses that you get with like the casement windows and stuff like that and especially

if they've still got like the original flooring so you know that that's old wood and it's sort of like warped a bit with time but it's it's withstood everything that history's thrown at it like i really really love that but i think if we're saying like dream dream house right because i also said feasibility, no object. So that would mean that I could somehow live in Mexico City while still working in London. I think what I love about the modernist houses that you find in Mexico City, those modernist buildings, is the use of colour. People often think of modernism as just like grey concrete. obviously there's a lot of concrete but it doesn't have to all be gray so one of my favorite architects um is called uh Luis Barragan and he's sort of famous in Mexico for a lot of the most you know exciting colorful houses and monuments and stuff like that um and so you'll find in his houses a massive pink wall or really bright

blue or bright yellow, bright green, which when you've got the contrast of the concrete and an emphasis on horizontal lines, I just think stunning, stunning, stunning. And I also love in Marseille, an architect called Le Corbusier, who's like the father of modernism. He designed a famous housing block called Cité Radios. And what I love about it is that it's just this big fucking hulking spaceship rectangle made of concrete when you look at it straight on and then you look from the side and in the indents like to the windows they're all painted in like red yellow blue green and brown so from the side you look and it looks like a mondrian painting so yeah big colorful modernism is my is my shit and that's what i felt so excited thinking about question two what's your favorite train journey

so hard um that i've taken all that i want to do either that i've taken is one i've talked about briefly before which is a train journey from Vienna to Zurich in order to get a connecting train down to Florence and I mean every train journey I'm on I love because I love I think this is not like a revolutionary or original thing to say because like everyone loves a train journey everyone's like wow i'm i'm on my way somewhere i'm going to a destination but there's a long way to go so i can sit out the window and ponder and think about how much life is happening to me right now um but this train journey i specifically booked it like i went a certain route past innsbruck or innsbruck i might be pronounced that wrong. And it goes through the bottom of the Swiss mountains.

I think they are the Alps. They are the Alps. It goes to the bottom of the Alps and you just go past the lakes and the mountains. And it was midsummer. So they were at their luscious and most beautiful and green and blue. And the colors were so vivid. Every time I looked out the window it's just like a camera or my camera at least on my phone would never be able to capture the depths of it and there's almost a relief in that there is a real relief in knowing that your phone camera won't be able to capture it so take one video just for posterity and then put it the fuck away and just feast on what you are seeing and how alive you're feeling right now that was a really good train

journey but there's also loads of train journeys I've taken where it's like, like I remember going through Rajasthan in India and it's just like the ability to look out and just see everything at once and compare in your head, like in that area of like Northern India, what I noticed so much compared to Britain is how outside everyone is,

like life is lived outside. And I don't mean that people don't have houses, of course they have fucking houses, but like it's such a communal sort of like you're in the streets you see everything that's going on it's really exciting um or even the train journey that i took down to where was i going rome i think no no i was going to pompeii i was going from rome to pompeii and the queen died while i was on the train and i was like we got stuck as well outside for ages and i was just like you will never forget

where you were where the queen died which is on this very hot train where one of the carriages had broken aircon so we all had to be moved out of it in the middle of the like roman countryside the outskirts of rome uh going down to pompeii and you're just like soaked in this ancient history and then like this head of this really old institution had also just like perished um they're just such this perished there's just so many memorable train journeys i fucking love a train journey i could tell you about the you know the eight hour the journey that was meant to be four hours that turned into the most the nightmare journey from hell that i took recently back from glasgow to london which ended up going back to carlisle then i had to go to newcastle that's memorable for different reasons so there's so many i just i love trains and i love the stories you tell yourself about

who you are and where you're going and who everyone else is while you're on the train what about you i fucking love train journeys so this was a question that was prompted because I had to go to Edinburgh for work at the weekend. And there's that stretch between Berwick-upon-Tweed and Edinburgh, where you've got the sea to the right of you, which I believe is east, but never eat shredded yet um i i actually did well in geography gcse but like obviously all of that just like fled and i love that you i don't know why this happens but suddenly you are you don't just see like oh yeah i've crossed the border into scotland it looks completely different there's a kind of um you know rather than like smooth rolling hills there's a sort of ruggedness like you know all of a sudden and you can you know see heather and stuff like that and there's you know sort of like sprinkling of purple like you know across the grass that you can see and it just looks and feels so different like immediately um and i don't know if it's because my mind plays a

trick on itself and it goes ah you're in Scotland so you're looking for something to hang a sense of Scottishness onto but I am always really overwhelmed by that feeling when I take that journey um but I think maybe my favorite you know I think you're right to say that train journeys there's something inherently memorable about them even if they're not even if they're not um great like i remember getting a train from tangier to marrakesh overnight and it was um they wouldn't let me and my partner uh sleep in the same sleeping uh compartment so we're like we'll fight we'll just sit in the upright one and just it's fine like it would be i didn't want to miss out the experience of a long train journey with him so we're sitting there but because they were like you two better not be up to

anything like every half an hour they'd like shine a torch in our eyes like through the compartment glass to make sure we weren't up to any funny business so yeah there's like horned up for them to keep doing that oh my god i was like i was just like hey it's like these two these two keep an eye on these two yeah yeah like um so yeah every train journey is memorable but last last question would you rather live in a world that's really really really technologically advanced so teleportation faster than light travel that kind of thing or one where magic is real magic appeals to my sense of whimsy but also anyone who's read any sort of magic fantasy knows that magic is all about balance and i think there's so many people in this world who would not use magic as it's intended sorry i'm getting really serious about the philosophy i've just started reading you know if you said like use like the powers as intended that would

be fine they'd have gravitas but you have to say the word magic um i just started reading earth scene it's like any but any book in that vein teaches like Diana Wynne-Jones or even when Neil Gaiman gets all the magic. Like any sort of magic fantasy book is all about when someone upsets the balance that magic has in the world and how, you know, you still have to obey the laws of nature in some ways. Like you summon something, it means that someone else is getting deprived of something. You create something out of nothing that doesn't matter because it's not actually something out of nothing something else is being taken in order to create that thing there is like magic has rules and limitations same as everyone else and i just think this the individualism of our world means the way that we would use magic would be so damaging i think the client like it would be a scorched earth

immediately we talk about nukes imagine magic so i think i think our world is probably set up better to use something like teleportation um more responsibly as mad as that sounds i think magic is just there's just so much power i really i'm taking this quite seriously no good good it's you know it's a question that is meant to be taken seriously. I think I would choose teleportation and the technologically advanced because I do think overall that might do slightly less damage

because our world is set up more to have an understanding of that. Whereas I think if magic just came into the world, I just don't think we would use it responsibly. And I worry about, yeah, I worry. And yeah, I think let's go teleportation. Also because I thought people having access to magic, it really keeps you up at night.

I can tell. It's really bothering me thinking about it. I'm thinking about like, oh my God, imagine if like Netanyahu had access to magic. That was like, this is serious shit. Like don't fuck with the magic. Teleportation, however, I think there's more of a democratic balance

to the way that can be used. And I think, you know, those powers shared out almost. Whereas with magic. I completely agree. With magic, it's like, again, it's really individual. Like one person can hoard all the knowledge

or like you go to the magic school and it like the oxford of magics and only certain people allowed in there was teleportation i do think there'll be more of like a state driven here's all our teleport pods i think you're right like for me the reason why i choose technologically advanced is because every fantasy work shows that there is an uneven distribution of magic. So not everyone has the same access to magic. Whereas in Star Trek, which I love, I love watching Star Trek so much. The thing about the technology is that it's democratically distributed. And the point about the United Federation of Planets is that they've gone beyond scarcity. And they don't even have money and so there is a motivation of um you know intrinsic value to

things the intrinsic value of exploration which isn't based on conquest and actually the characters uh i mean or the races it's kind of race it's very speciesist um but the alien races which are motivated by conquest or by money, so like the Romulans or the Ferengi, they're seen as being less developed in some ways, as being more worthy of derision. This is what Le Guin writes about quite a lot. And actually, because I'm reading Earthsea after I've read her books which are sci-fi then there's a real contrast to the way the societies are set up and the possibility of what the societies are and like when you're reading leguin where it's like the technology is the thing that is the advanced

stuff and different to my world there is different types of society realized and there's you know there's still capitalist societies, but there's also fully anarchist societies. And the range of societies that you see are different and there's more possibilities opened up. It is more democratic in that sense. And the technology has changed what is possible. And they have created, as you put it, the intrinsic value of exploration, the intrinsic value of knowledge for knowledge's sake, rather now when it's all about profit and gain. Whereas Earthsea, which I've just started, is just about, I guess, individual quests and choice and journey, which is still very entertaining, but I would definitely choose technology. And we've now got a new axis, I guess, which is

magic versus technology. And let's work on that and make it into something where someone's like are you a wizard or are you i don't know what a techno what was captain picard yeah are you are you did a did a okay let's let's workshop that thank that for future apps let's move on to your big theory oh yeah it's my go in it um i've got a big theory that i have partly lifted credit where it's due three years ago i read this piece by clive martin who you might recognize his name he was the former vice and throw and throw can't even say the net word anthropology former vice king of anthropology uh and he would document stuff like lad culture in the 2010s

clive was like a very big influence on me wanting to get into journalism i remember um and but the piece i read most recently was in the face magazine and it was in i think 2021 and it was titled is britain entering an age of aggravation i think about this piece so much because Clive basically outlines this opinion that Britain is broiling with new levels of rage and violence. And he cites these different sort of outlets for it or examples, which both come from civilian quarters, but also come from the state. So, you know, like fights on a petrol shop fork or arguments in coffee shop queues and people kicking off at the theater or but it also ranges up to like knife crime and like the epidemic of violence against women

and he attributes all of this rage to and violence that we're seeing to the impact of austerity and like the device of politics from the top and he's not equating like a fight on the forecourt with what's happening to women at like such a high rate uh in terms of uh domestic violence or just like stranger violence but he thinks they're connected and i agree i think when you're out in public in britain there are these new waves of hostility and suspicion that you can feel emanating from your fellow world travelers that weren't there before. Tempers are much shorter, but I remember when this piece came out, I'd just been to a climate protest where I'd gone into a pub and three different people called me a cunt for having

a climate sign, just from sitting at their seats in the pub. And I also at the time was with someone who'd done some protesting recently and they had got kicked by passers pub. And I also at the time was with someone who'd done some protesting recently, and they had got kicked by passersby. And I don't think it's not a new thing that protesters are under attack, but this idea of civilians getting out their cars to kick people was really just stark and jarring to me. My hairdresser the other day was telling me a story about how they tried to give someone a book on the tube because they thought they were looking at it. Oh, do you want me this book?

And they were verbally attacked. They were like, they were like, you fuck this person like you fucking can't like just out the blue. I know just because they were like drunk and a bit aggy. It was really odd. And I've also noticed this anger in myself. Like when I'm out walking, I'll be like, fuck off in my head. Just like random strangers or the slightest thing, the slightest issue or obstacle in

my way is like, for fuck sake. There's this broiling rage and suspicion that I just have when I encounter people where I'm like, and I have to do the opposite action. I'm forcing myself to smile at people to try and prove to myself that there is a way of rebuilding these levels of trust and not just seeing myself that there is a way of like rebuilding these levels of trust and not just like seeing everyone around me as you know a threat or suspicious um but I can't work out whether that's just because I lived I've lived in London for 11 years and you just become an angry person when you live in London so my big theory is basically

that Britain is getting angrier and firstly do you agree and if so why do you think that is yeah so i was having a think about this because i was trying to in my head go well how would you prove or disprove this either way so when it comes to rates of violent crime like historically they're lower now than they used to be. So, you know, there was, and that can have, you know, little peaks and, you know, little falls like year to year. But the overall trend is that it's going downwards. Things which can have an impact on violent crime. economic reforms of the 1980s which really broke up and dispersed communities because when the factories and the pits closed people moved away and what was left was just sort of like you know hopelessness and a lot of men who were who were unemployed disproportionately impacted men um and that had an impact on violent crime um so it wouldn't surprise me if the consequences of austerity, increased sense of precarity, less of a sense of like permanence and rootedness and community have an impact on people being more violent or more angry or less trusting um so those are two things which i'm

trying to like square in my head is like how this theory sits against the overall downward trend of violence i think when it comes to what you were talking about like agginess that you get on the street and agginess that you get in random places. I maybe have like a really romanticized view of where I live because even if something happens like the other day, me and a woman collided into each other at the tube station and she fell over and she just went nuts at me. She was like, you're ignorant people like you need to be educated. And I was like, wow, the racismo all of a sudden. And I was like you're ignorant people like you need to be educated and I was like wow the racismo all of a sudden and I was like we just knocked into each other and she was accusing me of having broken her phone but like her phone was fine I think that I think she may have may have

had some some other things going on I think she may have been like a bit mentally unwell but even though that happened I still have this overall view of like, you know, I'm like wandering around my neighborhood being like, you know, ah, sun is in the sky, the, you know, birds are tweeting, the trees are swaying, you know, I maybe have a very romanticized view of it. I wonder if one of the things is proximity, which is, you know, especially when you live in in cities there's a sort of like cheek by jowlness like people are rubbing up against each other like it it causes friction and then when the media is trying to make you as angry as possible at people so you've got certain kinds of people who are held up as hate figures And those people are very often protesters or people who are seen

as being on the left, people who are like, you know, pro-Palestine or anti-climate change, you know, they're held up as public nuisances. And I think that this is something which is really like deeply English, which is you can't and shouldn't do anything to i guess take on those who are in power right but you should be empowered to enact the death penalty for causing some kind of public nuisance um like we've got such a low cultural tolerance for nuisance or noise or disruption and so an obvious way in which that plays out and in a way that's been like totally egged on by the press is like how people treat like you know just stop oil protesters or like insulate britain like you know coming out and like dragging people around by their hair or like you know ramming your suv into them because

you've been told that these people are lower than vermin you know another example is like back in november when suela braverman was like whipping up all this hatred against palestine protesters um my mom who is like you know a south asian woman like you know in her 60s she got attacked on on the tube home because the figure of the pro-palestine protester was set up as a kind of as a kind of hate figure so that's one way in which it plays out which is you know media sets people up as hate figures and then if you are like white male middle-aged you feel kind of like deputized to like read the streets of this public nuisance but like another way in which it plays out is like so the area of london that i

live in like lots of areas of london is in the process of gentrifying and there's such a massive social cultural divide between the people who've lived here for a really long time working class people of color lots of people who are african and caribbean and the racial and class demographics of gentrifiers this is a story which plays out all around the country and uh i think this might have been last summer or the summer before um like a thing that happens every summer is that people set up sound systems right and they set up sound systems and they drink some beers and they like smoke some weed and i really fucking love it i'm like a sound system season baby i love it um and the neighborhood group chat was like popping off and people were like you know it

was like 4 p.m and people like i've you know i've called the police now have you done it like we should all put the complaints in now and i was like what the fuck it's the weekend it's a sound system um i'm not i'm not in the neighborhood group chat because i don't want i don't want people to have my number or like work out where i live but my my partner was like very politely but sort of saying like well isn't this why we all want to live here? Like this is the sort of like longstanding cultural identity of the place.

And he didn't call anyone racist, but he was sort of making it known that it was kind of fucked up for like white gentrifiers to like call the police on like black people running sound systems. And everyone fucking went for him. They like took his head off because the principal was like well you're they're causing a public nuisance so anything is justified so yeah that's a really

like long-winded way of not answering your question about is britain entering an age of aggravation because i think that there are like lots of factors but i think that low tolerance for what is considered a public nuisance is just such a big part of it and then we all go on holiday to like spain or italy and we're like oh my god people are having so much fun why can't that be us well like higher tolerance for public nuisance that's one reason i think i mean all your points are really good about this idea of public nuisance but i think this when i talk about this age of aggravation, I think it goes beyond anyone causing a public nuisance. I think it's just the idea of people existing around you in their own way.

And I think since the pandemic, there's been like a notable breakdown in the sort of like grace and respect we afford to other people. And I think also the polarisation like politics um has created this climate suspicion for example i was on a train the other day uh we love trains and we love trains we love trains and this was a really memorable train journey because i moved seats um and asked this lady could i sit there and she was like yeah and we end up in a two-hour conversation about like everything um and i won't go into the details because it's a private conversation that we had on the train but i think if we met in other circumstances or she'd known like what i do first or something like that she probably would have seen me viewed me with

suspicion or like i was about to judge her and like we wouldn't have been able to have this open honest conversation where i could make it clear from the get-go that just because you know i'm working a left-wing media outlet doesn't mean that I'm going to come in guns blazing and be like, this, this, this, I'm going to tell you this. Instead, we had a really great, just long chat about our lives and our beliefs in politics and stuff like that. But I think because we know that politics is polarised and everyone's kind of like, I think there's been an entrenchment of right-wing views. But people are really scared that their neighbor's going to judge them you know this idea of judge don't judge thy neighbor everyone judges thy neighbor now and i

think when we meet the neighbors there's this in need there's this preemptive sort of defensiveness the hackles are up like you know don't judge me you don't know my life etc etc i hear this a lot from people but i i think i think it also just extends to like the amount the time is tolerance it's tolerance but i don't think it's tolerance of public nuisance it's just tolerance and like empathy and compassion for other people around us that we just don't extend everyone's in the fucking way get out my way move out my fucking way like the rihanna thing you know everyone's in the fucking way get out my way move out my fucking way like the rihanna thing you know everyone's in the fucking way whether that's conceptually or whether that's literally and i just see this so much it's like at festivals people that you you know if you bump into once upon a time you just smiled and laughed and been fine now it's like dirty look or you're in a queue

and someone's being noisy and it's just like fuck off even though in the past you've been like woo and i i'm training myself out of like even thinking that because i think it's just such a dark-minded place to go to where everyone else around you is like just in the fucking way all the time um but i see this in other people and like people voice it to me and i don't know it's just this aggravation this low-level irritant and i i do wonder like you know clive martin said it's because of this austerity this vice of politics i also wonder if it is like the retreat i mean i think this is all linked like our economic world feeds down to all the social stuff but i think the pandemic as well when we were retreated to our homes and we had complete

in some cases complete control of our surroundings or the illusion of control for once now it's like you have to go and live in society again it's very difficult but then i see people behaving in ways which are fucking annoying like you know when you go to concerts for some reason tiktok trends mean that everyone's screaming why are you screaming why can't you just sing the words why are you screaming like this that fucking annoys me see i'm aggravated i'm aggravated and hot. I'm hot-headed. I don't know. I also remember like in the early 2000s, this sort of like trend of like, you know, TV programs called Grumpy Old Men when they'd get like, you know, Paul Merton

and like, you know, Jeremy Clarkson to just like complain about the things which annoyed them in society, which was inevitably working class people doing things. women or just women doing women things um so i kind of think that that's been a cultural mainstay for like quite some time and also like not forgetting that what happened in the early 2000s was the introduction of anti-cial behavior orders so the criminalization of non- criminal acts so if there were too many teenagers gathered looking suspicious that was a cause for the police to intervene in some way so i think that that that has been part of this like cultural

shift so when you're lowering the tolerance for what's considered a nuisance to people just existing or being around like that invites a culture of suspicion and i think you're right to think about what the pandemic did to us which is it made us mistrustful of other people because if other people got too close they were a potential source of infection that would put you at risk and your household at risk and your family at risk you know it's very much like stay back stay back and I remember I remember like in the in the very very early days where it was I think a couple of days before lockdown and what happened was that I'd gone to the office to collect a load of stuff so that you know when the lockdown eventually came I could I could work from home and there were these like

two two like young people in their 20s on a day and they had their feet right up against like the opposite hand pole so it wasn't just the opposite seat but the opposite hand pole and i remember telling them off for it and i remember being like you know there's a communicable disease around don't you know even though that wasn't transmitted by feet as far as I know. But there was something about it, which like, really riled me up. And I was just like, this is like a proximity and like a recklessness and a lack of consideration that I don't like. And it definitely made me aggravated. and you know the pandemic invited us to like really really really police how people were in public space and then it also created this idea that our homes were the only safe place over which we had like freedom and a sense of like sovereignty and thinking about how we negotiate between freedoms and public space it just became so so zero sum like it's this or this you know it's my rights versus your rights. And I think that

we're there in a big way, but almost every society has changed in some way because of the pandemic. Like, you know, you go to Spain and people say, oh, but people do drink less in the street than they used to before the pandemic. You know, some things never came back, but there was a pretty strong foundation of like conviviality and like being outside and like what it meant to be outside. So even though it didn't come back to being the exact same way as it was, like it's still a lot more like convivial and social and outdoors than the UK. But in the UK, it's like we have so much suspicion towards other people, like culturally, like, you know, we're very curt and twitchy people. And then we like added to that likey people and then we like added to that like as boys and then like we added to that like lockdown um and we we have a media culture

which sets up people as hate figures particularly if like you know they're seen to have a an inflated sense of their own morality that's why people really hate climate protesters and protesters of all kinds it's like you think you're better than me don't you yeah and therefore i should murder you therefore i'm gonna run you over with my suv uh yeah and i think the level of constant surveillance is also there too because it's like you can be judged jury and executioner on someone else's behavior via the little black screen in your pocket. Like if someone's, you know, someone's just existed in public or is annoying you in some manner and you're aggravated by that, either you can film it and it might be generally like abusive behaviour or something. I'm not talking about that here. I'm talking, but either way, you can film what's happening. You can film someone and capture it and then repurpose that

footage in whatever way you please. You can film someone and capture it and then repurpose that footage in whatever way you please. You can either present it as it happened accurately or you can attach it to, cut it up and attach to a narrative, not to be all conspiratorial. Or you can simply turn your phone on you and retell the story of how you experienced those events in the way you want,

entrenching your perception of how this encounter has gone and probably getting a lot of reinforcement validation for the way that you feel about it online. So, you know, you can be like, it was so fucking annoying. This person did this or that, or like this flight attendant did this and it was really irritating. And some people be like, you're a heinous person. Like, how can you treat a service worker like that? And some people are like, no, flight attendants should do this. Uber drivers is a good example of this you know the constant debate over my uber drivers talking to me it's really annoying i'm actually like neurodivergent and it's a bit abusive and there's like the camp

who are like yes this is totally valid and a great way to treat other people in this world and the other camp which is so horrified by the way that we've reduced language around accessibility or the way we've repurposed language around accessibility into underpinning these really horrible clinical ways of interacting with other people, especially service workers. So I think the phone element and the element of being able to film and surveil and then reframe a narrative, how you see it to transmit to everyone else for their approval is also quite interesting in how aggravated we are by people around you.

And also maybe in our heads when we're going about, there's also that element of like, how would this story be when I tell it? How will this story be recounted when I tell it to other people? I think content that is negative in flavour or we talk about something we're irritated by always goes so much further than something we're like this is amazing and I'm so happy about this thing and like oh I had this amazing day it's just less interesting that's why we talk about bad dates all

the time or or you know bad experiences with bosses because it just goes 10 times further and it's much richer for us to pick over difficult things are richer for our inner monologues i believe but there's a difference between content and conversation right so content that goes further is like this heinous thing happened to me and like oh my god like you know it is about stimulating the emotion of like anger or disgust or condemnation but when someone talks like that all the time they're the most boring fucker on the planet i'm like i don't want to be around you and i was thinking about this because my um my housemate just got back from a three and a half week chaos holiday so him and another friend who is like similarly a king of chaos i would say not similarly he's like the

the grand emperor of chaos and that's like one of the one of the great things about him and i think also he's able to be this way because he has absolutely no digital footprint whatsoever he's like um an american anarchist who loves nothing more than like street drinking and like fighting cops like he's just he's just a fucking hilarious guy so the two of them like went on this holiday where they were just like getting like fucking totaled every day and like on lots of trains and ferries and doing everything the long way and it was a combination of i think their openness to experience and also because they were like just two guys getting trashed which is sort of like you know it's like a catalyst for like stuff happening like when you're like that fucking

wasted just stuff will happen and so like my housemate came back and like you know it's me him and my husband having dinner last night and we were just like enthralled by his storytelling and we would literally be like another one another one us another story. And so like one would be this like crazy fairy that they got from Italy to Barcelona. And like, you know, the guy who ran the bar and like, you know, they didn't book sleeping cabins. So they like just slept out on the deck and like just tried drinking for as long as they could. Like the thing which made it entertaining was chaos, right? Like it was the fact that they sort of like took a risk of being nuisances themselves and also like were engaging with other people who

were nuisances on a basis of like yeah this is fun like let's fucking go how would that have been as content i'm not sure maybe like a podcast where it's like, yeah, telling wild stories, fine. Maybe it wouldn't do so well. It certainly wouldn't go so well, like in terms of the way in which the algorithm rewards outrage, but as conversation, as something to be around, like I felt like it was, you know, 1001 Arabian nights, but like on a ferry.

Like I was like, tell me another one, tell me another one, tell me another one. So yeah, like what our system of content creation rewards is not the same thing as conversations you want to be a part in not to get all deep and serious but i do want to push back slightly on this idea of being open to chaos as the means to being happier because i think a lot of the time chaos we we it's synonymous with the idea of drinking and being out of control whereas I think that is something I see a lot in like my friends and people I love and I don't think the idea of their their perception of chaos actually brings them like a lot of sadness and uncertainty and worry and what I want to pin down here is like

what he was open to was connection with people that were outside maybe his expectations and yeah it's it's like maybe flexibility for experience but i don't want to just be like we fetishize chaos so much we fetishize the messy person the xyz person but i know those people and like they all had to go into recovery and it was really long and fucking sad and i feel like i don't i feel like i experience life so much and i connect with all these mad mental people in a great way that's exciting but it's and it can be chaotic but can also just be about that idea of like being open to connection that you haven't planned for i guess i guess the reason why i use the word chaos it's not necessarily just about booze though of course like you know with these two lads on the holiday, it was a lot about booze. I guess by talking about chaos, I'm talking about not leading with, is this a threat?

Yeah. And I actually have like a crazy, like, you know, I would say a disproportionately big threat detector. And so I'm trying to find ways to like turn it down and like turn it off because, you know, I really enjoy chaos or i have really enjoyed chaos and i kind of i kind of want want a bit more of it i think that's that's the place i'm speaking from which is i want to have less of a threat detector i think you just define everything that's outside of your normal parameters of control as chaos and i think that's actually

something i think it's just about our definition of what chaos are next episode next episode but let's move on to our dilemmas because as always we've talked we've yapped we've yapped more than we were allowed to yap first dilemma do you want to read it out i do want to read it out so first dilemma hi i'm a 20 year old male uni student i have a close-knit group of friends who i've known for nearly two years but we've only become really close in the last year when i first met one member of the group i flirted quite heavily with him i didn't realize we would go on to be friends and he had a girlfriend at the time. The desire faded as we became platonic friends but since he became single again I've developed a crush. I don't want to act on it because we have a good friendship both one-on-one

and in a group and if it were to go badly I fear it would ruin what we have and frankly I don't think a relationship is likely to happen. With this in mind I want to stop having this crush and see him as I do the rest of my friends how do i do this or should i try to pursue the romantic path ash you know you know the drill you read it you gotta go first oh okay um i mean for me one of the like key bits of context here is that you're 20 and you're at uni and one of the great things about that time is the intensity of connection I feel very nostalgic when I read this dilemma because that feeling of like sweet sweet agony like ah hook it to my veins. It makes you feel so alive. Like, you know, you make your playlist, you feel your feelings. And I think that my advice for someone who's 20 and at uni,

I think it's a bit different from the advice that I'd give to someone who's like in their 30s. The point of being at uni and the point about being in this context is that you feel very intense things and what they settle down into you know not after two years of friendship but five years of friendship ten years of friendship it'll be different so I kind of think you don't have to be in a rush to stop having this crush you can let it move through you you can sort of experiment a little bit with what it might mean to act on it to like flirt a bit more or to like, you know, even raise it and say, yeah, I've got a bit of a crush on you because this is really the time to do that. You know, you've got a lot less to lose than where you end up a bit later. And I'm not saying you should, you know, fetishize being like really destructive within a friendship

group or, you know, let go of the sense of responsibility completely, but you're not going to be this unencumbered ever again. There's only going to be more, I don't know, encumbrances, is that a word? You know, even more more responsibilities even more things that you feel that you can't you can't disrupt or trouble and yeah now's the time to feel shit ash what advice would you give can i just say because i know so many people in their 30s who have crushes of this vein so i think it'd be useful to know what the difference in your advice would be as well to someone who's older because i know our listeners will be like bitch tell me the advice for me um okay so my advice would be um similar in the sense of going let the crush move through you um there's no point in trying to repress it the only way to deal with a crush is through you know you have to feel the feelings um how you act on it

would be a different consideration it would be much more about like okay well um can the context that you're in survive and recover from like a little period of awkwardness or a little period of you guys not seeing each other if if it doesn't go wrong um when it comes to like a declaration of feelings i would say really try and read the situation first before doing it um there'd be just a bit more emphasis on responsibility reading of the situation than there is for someone who's 20 and at uni but the fundamental thing is like let the crush move through you that still stands just thinking about the original i mean i love letter writer that you're listening to this at 20 hello hi i hope you're having fun because university can

be really fun but i promise you as well the biggest fun is yet to come uh so like ash says this is this is the most unencumbered you will be but it is also like you are young and you're at the beginning of your journey and there is so much else waiting for you out there too and you know maybe you will crush on this guy and you might tell him and you might reciprocate and you might end up being in a relationship for 20 years but you also might crush on him and in 10 years you'll be like who the fuck is that like i don't know who that is at all and you look at his instagram and he's lost all his hair and he doesn't look good with it like some men do because he doesn't have the bone structure and like wow that was crazy remember university when he used to fancy that guy because that's what happened to me

that's that's basically what happened to me um i think it's i think it's hard because like when you're in a crush you feel like you will never leave the crush. It's like having a cold. You can't remember what it's like to breathe unencumbered. Through both nostrils at the same time. What is it like to not fancy this person so much? And there's a peak of a crush as well when you just feel absolutely bonkers. And it's like you're fantasizing all the time.

It's a fever. It's a fever. It's like a fever. Like, oh my God. Like, oh, everything's like you're fantasizing all the time and it's a fever it's a fever it's like a fever like oh my god like oh everything's everything's like about this oh oh they've dm'd me again oh they've liked my photo on instagram um yeah your nervous system is on fire you know what i mean and it's it's like it's fun it's fun wallowing in that unfortunately like it feels unbearable but in like a good way um do you actually want to stop having this crush or well we all want to when we're crushing it's like when we think there's

no way out we we say we want to stop it's like do you actually want to stop uh or do you actually want kind of permission to either say something or just kind of like explore those feelings further because in this letter you haven't said anything about him like not reciprocating or not flirting back uh you haven't said anything that would imply that he's not being receptive to this like sort of behavior it takes two to tango usually with a crush um there's usually some sort of like egging on but you also don't think a relationship would happen do you even want a relationship or do you just want to you know jump his bones that's another question what would happen. Do you even want a relationship? Or do you just want to, you know, jump his bones? That's another question.

What would happen if you just end up hooking up? I don't know. See him as a rest of my friend. How do I do this? Should I try and pursue the romantic path? Mm-hmm. I kind of think you should give yourself a timeline. You should give yourself like two months. And if in two months, the crush is not abated, you haven't been icked out, you haven't started crushing on someone else or found someone else that actually is less complicated and satisfies those feelings that you're having, then maybe have a little chat.

Maybe say, you know what? I kind of fancy you. And there's a tension between us. And I don't know what I want from this, but I want to tell you because it's not going away. That's my advice. I think that nothing will change in two months unless something changes. And the reason why I say that is because like,

okay, this can sound incredibly pretentious, but I think it's from, I think it's from Anthony and think it's from antony and cleopatra is she makes hungry where most she satisfies the more you're in proximity to this person the more you want them and the thing that will change that is like distance and maybe you meeting someone else like within the context of that distance and separation you've forgotten a key thing here ash university two months god that's a lifetime it's some holidays eight weeks there's a lifetime when

you're 20 i mean you might still be hanging on the same city but i'm just saying it's a summer holidays and i feel that there will be distance there that you can create yeah i mean and things might things might be very very different in those two months if there is that distance. I just sort of think that, yeah, like fucking roll the dice. You're 20, roll the dice. I'm sorry. I'm just thinking about this. Cause I'm like, I've never in my life really heard of like a good, uh, it's like this, we talked about spots recently, spots, solutions for getting rid of spots. It's the same thing with crushes it's literally just time i'm afraid it's time and either you end up you know telling your crush and something happens and it might blow up your life or it might not or you end up not saying anything and it fades because

the crush was born out of something that wasn't substantial enough to like last um but there is no other way through but time there is no quick fix there is no pseudocrime pseudocrime is a myth it's just a placebo there's no pseudocrime there's no pseudocrush there's no pseudocrush and on that note no ashley's over you what is on that note i was like on that note where's your telepathy you said you were telep telep telepathic no i said i aim for telepathy no okay the the reason the reason why the reason why i um i long paused uh was should we just cram in another dilemma okay we can i meant to finish yeah we can fuck it why not

guys guys we're back guys we just tricked you into thinking we're going but we're coming back okay let's do another dilemma let's do it okay shall i read it out read it out so quickly no no we're not doing tiktok 1.5 speed i'm gonna i'm gonna respect our audience ready we're doing a double uni dilemma because we've decided we need to feed y'all we need to feed your little youngins a little bit more so dilemma two hoping for some help with this complicated friendship breakup dilemma i have a friend i met at university she's always been wonderful and introverted so despite having established our friendship at uni we maintained a close one-to-one friendship after for most of the time

i've known her she's been in a relationship with a great guy a year and a bit ago they introduced me to this guy her boyfriend's best friend and housemate we hit it off immediately at first my friend was really excited about it but after my new relationship was clearly serious, the friend became really distant. She left if I was in the room and stopped replying to me. I continued to try and ask her to hang out, but after a while it came to a head and we had a direct conversation when she said she didn't want to be friends anymore. She said the change in our dynamic of our friendship because of our boyfriends being best mates is irreversible and she can't see how we can have a friendship it was also because it's triggered her anxiety so badly she said it was fine because we would still see each other in group settings this made me very

upset i didn't have any choice to accept it but to accept it it's been a year now we both live with our boyfriends in the same house we still that's not answered we both live with our boyfriends we still see each other in group settings and i feel very uncomfortable the friends are really lovely but this is exacerbated by feelings my feelings of being an outsider but most importantly i miss my friend i don't know what to do we've always been in each other's lives but this feels like a shitty settlement i'm also still hurt and not sure going to her directly and asking friends again might just make it worse what do you you think? What the fuck is your friend on? What's going on here?

I think someone has serious... I think your friend has some serious issues with maybe control is what I'm kind of getting here. Like she wants to control the dynamics of the friendship and the idea that you now have a relationship to someone her boyfriend's connected to that is outside of her control and you're outside of her control having this relationship with someone else as well um has really set off her anxiety there's something there about control um and i have i've had you know some similar situations where it's like a

connection to someone else who's been a mutual and then has become like a friend has sort of people's control issues about not having direct you know influence over the way that relationship is conducted so there's definitely something to me here about control and she you say she's directly communicating with you but she's not apart from expressing her it's poor communication done directly because she's expressing a decision she's already made without really unpicking why she's made it um and really her feelings about it and she's like it's changed our friendship you know irreversibly it's changed the friendship because she's changed it she had you she was the one who changed the way your friendship has been conducting she started ignoring you she started leaving the room there's something going on with her but she's externalizing

to everyone else and taking herself away from the blame i've got a theory go on theory up okay right this is a theory and it stems from an observation that i have had and also have have been complicit in myself which is sometimes when women fancy men they introduce them to their friends and there's sort of a bit of like a vicarious erotic thrill to doing that and then if it becomes something um serious and real and most importantly he's not rejecting the person that you introduced him to there can be a component of jealousy and envy. And because we live in a culture where jealousy is so, so frowned upon, like it's not, you can't really look it in the eye without feeling that it makes you a bad person or a weak person or a morally compromised person. You repress it and you try and give it different names. So you say, oh, it's like, you know, our dynamics changed.

You're like, oh, this is like triggering my anxiety. But I think there is an element of erotic competition and jealousy. I don't think that this person maybe is someone you should be friends with. I understand that you miss them, but I don't think that this is necessarily someone you should be friends with. Not because they felt jealous, right? Jealousy, human emotion. And I think that like, you know, some of the most refreshing conversations i've had with my female friends is when we're open about ways in which we feel jealous of each other or envious of each

other because there's some honesty there it's when someone is um feeling a sense of like ownership feeling a sense of like jealousy or competition and is making it your fault that i don't think you should be friends with that person yeah and i it your fault that i don't think you should be friends with that person yeah and i think even if she doesn't i think you are kind of right you i think you're kind of bang on the money with the erotic competition i think even if she doesn't directly fancy this guy in an overt way that she's conscious of there is clearly something here about competition and her being the center point on which everyone's revolving around and that's no longer true when the the you know the relationships become parallel um and the

the men involved and it's stuff she obviously hasn't worked out or been able to communicate to you uh as well and i think one of the tests that i find which is quite good which has always comforted me is that any time i think i felt erotic competition with my friends or anything like that which is very rare luckily because of the way we're set up my instinct has always been to double down on like the love i'm expressing for my friends and the love and the way that i talk about them becomes like even more glowing so that makes me that makes me feel really comforted it's like pull them closer pull them closer Like, do not go down this path because it will end poorly.

And it will end with you, you know, again, relying on the validation of like some random fucking man instead of these wonderful people around you. But yeah, erotic competition is something that, erotic competition comes up a lot because we live in, we live in a society that pits,

well, pits women against going to do that even you don't fancy someone erotic competition is such a fucking thing um and you will be thrown into those dynamics more than you realize because as you say we don't get to talk about jealousy a lot and actually this is very relevant because charlie xcx has just released an album all about well among other things but like which focuses a lot on the idea of like being a woman and grappling with jealousy particularly in the music industry but also in general this idea of like being competition with other women and how as a woman you know you're expected to like instantly like everyone and be nice to everyone but

you also feel like these deep feelings of a deep awareness of the competition you're thrown in and how you're expected to sort of like passive aggressively outdo other women and you can't talk about that because to talk about that would make you an absolute bitch well yeah and also you can't say hey i think you might be jealous of me because that sounds mental yeah that's like the one thing we can never do is accuse anyone else being jealous of us it's like the the thing you cannot say is like i think you're jealous of me i think there's jealousy here um because then you are bigging yourself up to be someone better than even though you have to wait until someone says it about your situation you have to wait until someone goes um i think they're jealous of you and then you've got to go no no no yeah no because we can't talk openly about how everything around us is geared to make

us jealous of each other everything around us is geared to make us jealous of each other. Everything around us is geared to make us feel like, you know, whether you're het or whether you are queer or whatever, it doesn't matter. You're still thrown into competition with other people, whatever gender you are. But with women, there's a particularly heightened one when it comes to sexual competition. And yeah, I see that, you know, like the way we talk about stuff. And I just find it funny that like, you know, sometimes when this happens, particularly like when there's a sort of like complicated thing about like women and men in friendship groups

and there being this sort of like, you know, an erotic connection being expressed through like, I want to set you up with someone else is that that's very, very difficult for men to perceive. They just sort of, they often don't get it. and when i've like described this to like some of my male friends they're sort of a bit like you know they're a bit like scooby-doo they're like yeah they're like what it's like well you know someone's clearly sometimes it is totally like uh altruistic and it's like no i want to set you up because i think you get on really well and sometimes there's this thing of like as you say vicarious i see you as an erotic object and i'm gonna put another person in front of you so i can kind of live through that but if you don't reject her i'm gonna feel like shit yeah which is all plays into it um we should do like

a psychological warfare special like all of the like weird little dynamics and tricks and, you know, bits of weaponry. Yeah. I mean, that would be revealing some of the ugliest parts of myself. So maybe if people want that, they'll have to pay a large amount of money to access it.

That should be the vault episode. And we should have like, like okay you can get this but it will self-destruct after one listen and you will have to pay like 100 quid yeah yeah yeah if you want access to the vault all right should we should we wrap it up there yeah let's fucking do it oh right so enthusiastic let's fucking wrap this up you're like please free me from this torment let me go i was excited i love i love i love beginnings i love endings because it means a new chapter is starting i like the juicy juicy middle oh yeah this is what this is why we work though ash because we bring uh what's the word not competing complementary complementary perspectives

anyway i've been moyla mcclain you've been i've been Moira Lothian-McLean. You've been... I've been Ash Sarkar. And what has this been? This has been If I Speak. See you next week. I think I know how you feel. It's so confusing sometimes to be a girl.

Girl, girl, girl, girl. It's so confusing sometimes to be a girl How do you feel being a girl?