TRASHFUTURE - Amazon for Legends

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

This week, Riley, Milo, Hussein, and Alice discuss The Hut Group--an attempt to make British Amazon with direct sales of health goods, financed with SoftBank capital--and its yoked fifty-something founder. We also discuss the Owen Paterson affair in all its cynical splendour. And, of course, there’s a new song. Hope you enjoy! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo live dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Welcome to BBC Indiana. I'm your host, John Ocelot Mellencamp. This week, we're discussing the bin men. Well, back up a little bit. Sociologists and internet researchers recently published a report indicating that over 75% of internet traffic from Britain is related in some way to Facebook groups with names such as I Remember the Milkman and Mums Can't Do This Nowadays. However, the most prominent example and perhaps the most dramatic is the resurgence of nostalgic reflections upon Britain's garbage removal services colloquially referred to as the bin men. They arrive on scheduled days each week to remove your garbage. Sometimes they don't show up causing endless consternation. In fact, experts have estimated that easily

more than half of Britain's violent assaults are directly related to bin disputes. In examining archival materials, we've happened upon something even more surprising. A nearly forgotten pop music single that, despite having charted on the UK Top 40 in 1986, has not been played on any terrestrial radio station in the UK since 1989 at the absolute latest. Johannes vonk and the cloghead single Bin Man Rhapsody enjoyed a brief moment of success over 35 years ago, which would seem to indicate that this phenomenon, a fixation on a bygone time when the guys taking your trash out possessed superhuman strength and the honour of a ronin, is an enduring one in Britain. It may have seemed to have been lost to the ages, but from deep

within BBC Indiana archives in Switzerland County, we've procured a single extant copy. And so, playing for the first time since Thatcher's third premiership, please enjoy Bin Man Rhapsody by Johannes vonk and the clogheads. Remember when the Bin Man had a switchblade knife? Remember when the Bin Man made you run for your life? Political correctness, it has gone too far, but I can still remember when the Bin Man was hard. The Bin Man now are all tugs, in their air-conditioned dust guards. They try to say, I've been too hefty, what are you, some kind of, as LinkedIn left it? They hide behind, let me back bombs, while they're a disgrace to the uniform,

and you can take it straight from me. These Bin Men are what they used to be. Remember when the Bin Man had a switchblade knife? Remember when the Bin Man made you run for your life? Political correctness, it has gone too far, but I can still remember when the Bin Man was hard. Hello, and welcome to this free episode of TF. It is Riley, Alice, and Hussein and Milo. It's the free one. I was hoping I could buffalo you past that, but I once again did not. Trying to fucking buffalo me, what is this? That's not how they sound in Buffalo.

Organizing an intervention to take that bit to the woodshed that we have in the studio. It's going to be there with all the other old ones, gyds.com, everything else is just putting it in that cupboard. The long opening that we used to do, that's all out there. No, it is the free TF this week. It is the four of us, and we are here once again to talk about a few things. There have been some duins of transpiring in that crazy little town of Westminster. Sometimes, I think, is the fifth host of this podcast. As Laura Coonsburg called it, a very Westminster village story, but very important. Interesting. Starring Hayden Christensen, but weirdly coming out in 2022. How did that get made?

Yeah, these Netflix Christmas movies, a very Westminster village story. Someone moves to the small town of Westminster, and they have to learn to love again before Christmas Day. But fortunately, this local lumberjack is also having been grieving the loss of his wife for some years. This is what's going to happen to Owen Passen. He's going to have to move to a little village called Westminster and then find love again. Yeah, Westminster, Newfoundland. They say that to Fred West. Westminster is just... They do say that.

It's also, you could set a Netflix version update... Fred West burying people under the patio at the house of the parliament. I'm saying you could set an update of what's they call the Princess Diaries in Westminster and just call it the Diaries. Fred West would absolutely be like a former Redwall Tory MP by now, though. But he would have escaped disciplinary sanction, crucially. Oh, yeah. But before, we got some of that. We have a little bit of stories from Westminster village, a few updates on the strike waves that I think are very interesting to do with the gig economy.

And finally, we're going to be talking about a soft bank portfolio company, or a potential soft bank portfolio company that is run by a group of none other than the British legend. Amazing. Yeah. A company where the CEO's main thing to do is post shirtless photos in Ibiza. You love doing that. Right. I love that already. So we're going to have a lot of fun with that.

So why don't we crack on? I wanted to start, though, by offering the TF Salute to Homebuying Platform Zillow. Which has managed to single-handedly drive up house prices in the United States by engaging in algorithmic buying of all houses in certain target areas. And then realize that houses aren't perfectly liquid. And if you have algorithmic buying for a non-liquid item, then your algorithms are going to be easily fucked with and you will lose tons of money. Well, you don't want the house to be entirely liquid.

We talk about that a lot on my other podcast. I should make it more rigid. Anyway, so Zillow has done a little bit of an OYO thing where they have massively jacked up the prices of houses for no reason and apparently to no benefit, including to no benefit to themselves. Awesome. Oh, it's the machine that kills property markets. Yes, exactly. Great. Fantastic.

But unfortunately, I think what the machine that kills hotels was much more methodically built and just chewed through sort of two-in-three hotels. Oh, yeah, that sure was like the terminator for a three-star hotel. Whereas I feel like with Zillow, what happened is it's more like when you put like NOS in a normal engine and the engine just chewed itself up right away. Yeah, Volkswagen Jessa with NOS. And now it's just covered in sort of rubble and sort of bits. And so, yeah, congratulations to Zillow once again showing that if you just call something algorithmic management,

presumably what's going to happen is in a long enough timeline, it will just catastrophically fuck up. Yeah, well, it's the AI that's told to make everything paperclips, but instead it's making everything houses that you can't buy. Yeah, of course. Yeah, well, it's either that or the Zillow algorithm will like turn all the houses on its platform into like the house that looks like Hitler. Oh, yeah. What you should do is hack into the Zillow platform and just make it want to buy the house that looks like Dilbert.

And then all houses in America. That's Scott Adams' house. Yes. You can't buy the man. That's like the ultimate revenge against him is to buy his Dilbert house from under him. Has Scott Adams made a Dilbert NFT? Yeah, I'm going to check it up now. I wouldn't be saying that.

Could you check that for me, Hussein? Yeah, pull it up for us. See the numbers on this Scott Adams NFT. Dilbert NFTs do exist. There are two on OpenSea. One is... I involved Dilbert NFT. 551.4 Ethereum.

That's so much money. Dilbert and the dog smoking joints. Is it called Dogbert? Yeah. That's over two million dollars for the Dilbert NFT. So Scott Adams does actually have... And Scott Adams does still have the NFTs. So yes, there are two Dilbert NFTs and the highest price is 550.

I can't believe nobody would buy a two million dollar Dilbert NFT. Well, don't forget. A lot of the ways that the NFT prices get like that is that Scott Adams and like his other friends who are also probably crypto people just buy and sell the NFTs back and forth from one another. And so they just... Pay enormous amounts of money. And so then all of a sudden, because they've both transacted for it at that price, it's quote-unquote worth that. It's called wash trading. It's rife in crypto.

Scott Adams and Elijah would have a group chat. Is it genuinely called wash trading? Because if so, that's very much... It's not money laundering. It's things of first-to-send and wash trading. That's right. It's currency cleaning. I mean, it's not exactly what was happening with Zillow.

But like if you know that Zillow will sort of buy anything up to certain tolerances, you can just kind of inflate the prices of houses by just sort of flipping them through Zillow's system because as long as they get purchased, then that's what they're worth. So it's a little bit like a wash trade by accident. Yeah. It's just pretty fun. That'd be ridiculous. I don't know how to do laundry. No, I want to talk a little bit about Owen Patterson know this situation. So for Americans who may not know who Owen Patterson is, I'm sorry that that situation is about to come to a close.

If you don't want to know who Owen Patterson is, turn off the podcast now. If you're waiting to hear the results for yourself because you've taped the game, then go ahead and skip ahead about 25 minutes. The big Owen Patterson game. So that's right. Owen Patterson is a Tory MP who has been for the last couple of years embroiled in a lobbying scandal because he was paid a bunch of money by companies that happened to have one of which at least has happened to have really benefited from government policy in the last couple of years. Yeah. He was paid 500 pounds an hour to do nothing for a company called Randox. Yeah.

And then Randox. Oh, fuck the COVID testing company. I've used them. They suck. So everyone's used them even though they suck. Randox is the same company where the police had to quash a shitload of drug driving convictions because Randox had fucked with their forensic evidence. Okay, fine. Awesome.

I guess Randox is in our bed. Yeah, they're doing practice. That's so Randox. But like the pro drug driving practice. But so, yeah, they were awarded the contract for a shitload of COVID testing, including the COVID testing that you have to do to leave the country if you want to travel anywhere outside of the UK. Or return. So you have paid Randox if you've been out of the country, you know, some substantial amount of money. And the reason they got this contract that they're shit asses because they had bought this one MP.

Yeah. And that's what it cost basically was like a half of 100,000 pounds a year. And then all of a sudden it's not enough to buy Dilbert NFT. Yeah. You get not even a little bit of one. You can't even get like, you can't even have the Dilbert NFT with the conical hair for that. You can't even get like the Dilbert NFT for like a couple of weeks a year on a time share basis, like the cube for that. No.

So basically Dilbert NFT is at a storage facility. You may visit it once a year. But what happened essentially is that he was in this disciplinary process because of like it was basically uncovered. It was like you have very much fallen foul of the lobbying rules. He was about to be suspended. And so the Conservative Party said, well, obviously if the rules were fair, he wouldn't have been suspended. And we know they're unfair because he was suspended. And then basically a Chester J rule kiss that they are the Lobby Press and Labor Party have said, oh, you broke the rules.

You should, you know, you should live out your 30 days suspension from your fancy fake job. Anyway, there was a sort of a bit of a human cry about it. And now the suspension has been re-un overturned. So it's now back in action. Yeah. Because what the Tories wanted to do is replace the current useless disciplinary process with one that they controlled entirely. Yes. And this was a mistake to make against the pedantic might of Sir Keith Starmer.

And I welcome the lobbying and the payments for the lobbying and the outcomes of the lobbying. But it should have been done through the correct channels. Yes. That's sort of what he said. Oh, OK. Yeah. He found a thing that he did not welcome and it was the Tories controlling the disciplinary process. Yeah.

He has finally found after God knows how many years of abject cruelty, something to oppose. And it's just marking your own homework. Yeah. What I would say to Aaron Patterson is this. It's called corruption because it's corruption. It's not you eruption. It's eruption that all of us do together. And that's why we have to agree on the principles behind that corruption.

But yes, that is what the disciplinary process does, right? Like, that's the thing, right? That's why I think everyone who's sort of worrying. Now, I'll talk get to the end of this story sort of shortly. But this is one of the reasons I just want to get this in here. Well, I think everybody who's harping on about, oh, he broke the rules. The rules are being corrupted. The Tories are not playing by the rules or rewriting the rules.

The fundamental rules of how this country is going to be governed were written in 1980. And this is how you do it. You do it by horse trading and influence peddling because we've agreed that we're going to... We're just going to write down the different numbers and your goal is to write down the highest number you can, right? It's not that he was corrupt. It was that he was corrupt in such an incompetent and obvious way that it embarrassed the firm. And that's what you don't do.

Precisely. And that's when... So even though you joke, like a lot of the parliamentary standards... No, I don't. I'm talking to Milo. Even though you joke about... You don't joke at us. You're a serious person.

That's right. That's right. That's why I'm here on the slate cultural gap first. That's right. Yeah, this is... We're all... It's Michael Barbero, Michael Barbero, Michael Barbero and Michelle Barbero. And Craig Fishman.

You joke, Milo, but honestly, much of the sort of the rules around lobbying are to, yes, make sure that the corruption works in a managed and correct way and that it's all... It's not embarrassing. And the thing is... Controlled explosion of corruption. The rules were brought in after the expenses scandal, which happened under a labor government. And a lot of labor MPs and ministers were implicated in. Right?

A lot of the sort of standards in public life rules were brought in. David Cameron fell foul of these, for example, or almost fell foul of them. And every time this comes into the news, instead of harping on the rules, look at what the rules are there to protect, which is we just take it as read that a lot of what politics does is make space for private markets, say, randocks to impose 130 pound tax on all travel to and from the country, which is more or the more or less did, and then just privatize those profits. And the problem is Owen Patterson was just marginally too stupid to personally profit

from being a Tory MP, which is impressive. But speaking of stupidity, though, there's an extra sort of bonus level here because it's the stupidity in the way in which the Tories handled this, which was to throw their weight full square behind this guy for a good period of time, like a soul week of no, he's done nothing wrong. He is the victim of an unfair disciplinary process that we're going to reform. And then the second, the again, imposing stentorian voice of Keir Starmer went, um, they immediately dropped that shit.

And Owen Patterson found out that this happened when the BBC called him in Tesco. Yeah, that's what he resigned from a supermarket because no one bothered to tell him that they were hanging him back out to dry again. I actually don't even think it was Starmer. I think it's just the press sort of imposed one of their rare guardrails on the activities of the Tory party. The system works. Yeah, it's a balance of powers between between Tories that are elected with like 70% majorities

and constituencies, mostly of like decrepit racists and then the three guys that own all the papers. A couple more things. Number one, what he said upon his most recent thing he said upon resigning is very funny. He said, I will remain a public servant, but outside the cruel world of politics. So in addition to, yeah, he's such a master fucking pussy. In addition to being an idiot, he's also like resents that he got caught. He's taking a mental health day.

Yeah. He's going to have a break. What they threatened him with was 30 days suspension. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, I think what happened probably is he was told to, he probably knew that if he falls in his sword, then he gets like a, he gets the Matt Hancock job based. He gets the fake job where he gets to, you know, tour different production facilities. And he takes Matt Hancock's UN job.

That would be right. Fucked. He's going to be the UN tungsten cube guy. Yeah. He's going to regulate the tungsten cubes. So look, I mean, anyone thinking trying to think about the rules here is a complete mark because every this is just how politics proceeds in this country. Where if you're a member or of or associated with the jockey club, which by the way, his

wife was, but what happened? Is there nothing in this? Is there no corruption scandal that doesn't in some way go back to tiny men riding horses? It doesn't go back to tiny tables and chairs in the very small clubhouse. We could afford a Tory MP for sure. Right. Not a good one, but we could get one. Ted Walter MP who starts like, why is my brain lobbying for us?

I kept wanting to say libeling. I'm like, no, that's not the word. That's not think Milo think lobbying for us to get special exemptions for podcast businesses. We could do that. You know, we get like a grant every year. We all get a plank for what we want. So you like you want less tax on BMWs. I want like.

No other death penalty for stealing the catalytic. That is, that is right. Decide my petition. Yeah. I want the thing they gave Daniel Craig where they made him an honorary Navy commander. Yeah. They're saying, what do you want out of our tame Tory MP? It's the Evangelion, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it always comes back to that, but of course I'm a man of principle. I could probably ask for two things. I mean. Yeah. Well, I know. I've never, yeah, I've never, I've always set my ambitions very low.

So I think the Eva is kind of like it for me. Yeah. For me, it's purely just going to be like, I want lower import duties on shellfish. Basically. Yeah. You want, you want specific like import licenses for fancy sparkling water. Or, or I want to like, I really want to be a campaigner against the sort of river pollution that when they started doing, they went up in the polls slightly.

And then, and then I'm, and then that will improve the quality of Britain's shellfish. Okay. I have one thing that like feels mundane, but could actually probably like coming to think of it could actually tear the country apart, which is that I think pub should serve coffee. Like I was out the other day and I like, for whatever reason, I had to like go to a pub and I just wanted some, I just wanted, I like, wanted some caffeine. So I asked for like some Red Bull.

There was no Red Bull. They had like the only kind of non-alcoholic thing that he had was like the J2O. So I was like, do you do coffee? And the guy was like, yeah, we do. Like in this really sort of aggressive way. And I was just like, would it be too much effort if you made a cup of coffee? And he was like, yeah, it would be. And I just kind of awesome.

Right. So that's my thing. I feel like publishing. Where's your puppy? Right. Probably should serve coffee and like he should be the one to make them do it. Yep. Well, I think we just have to pick our tame Tory now.

Yeah. So if Tory, if any Tory MPs are listening and you want to like offer your services in a discreet way. You know what it is, right? It's like a couple more things to say on this, which is that he, his wife, a sort of tragically committed suicide a couple of years ago, when this sort of was all kicking off and his first response was by trying to hold me to even a minimum standard of behavior that's designed to facilitate the sort of strip mining of the country by, you know, me and my friends.

You have caused my wife to kill herself. He's neuro atypical. That is literally what he said. I'm not going to use the my wife drop. I'm not going to use the my wife drop. I'm not. This is like a weird, like a different kind of wife guy. It's a kind of like, but I mean, is that not the, is that not simply like the, the probably

it's like the most thing you ever, it's one of the most egregious things I've heard and like every time I hear it, I'm just kind of just like, what the fuck, but what? What? Yeah. The audacity, the audacity that like to come out with your fucking like notes app apology and it's just the Homer Simpson writing down dead wife is just it's so fucking insult. Say what you will about the curvy wife guy. He would never, he would never do that.

Respects his wife too much. The beans dad would stoop to that level. But also like it's how on, I think it goes back to his, his statement after, after he quit, right? Which is just all of this is a massive imposition to him and the entire world is against him. He's climbing up on his cross, but what he's actually done, right? Is he's dealing, he is dealing from the bottom of the deck in poker, but he forgot he was playing poker.

That's what was happening. I'm surprised he didn't reference David Amos. I'm surprised he didn't go. I am being terrorized and it frankly murdered. All of the cancel culture stuff, which like is a catch all for so many things. I was like, I was like waiting for him to take that angle and he didn't. There's the woke culture warriors of the standards committee. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, here's the thing. Joseph Fritzel and now they're trying to cancel me. Well, I was wondering when you would work that into an episode. Yeah. Here's the thing I'm saying. There's a lot of days left and a lot of column inches to fill. Let's watch the telegraph and see what they say.

All right. Another thing I wanted to talk about as well, a little bit more on sort of strike actions and gig economy stuff. Instacart in the States, the gig workers collective is called for a boycott, which I think meshes quite nicely in how and why they've done it with our discussion about go puff last week or on the bonus episode. Because Instacart, if you don't know, especially if you're British, is like one of these shopping services.

It came before all the your groceries and 30 minute services, but it's more comprehensive where what happens is someone goes to a normal shop for you. That's not like one of these guerrillas hell warehouses and then just picks a bunch of stuff out for you and brings it to you. And there's a whole genre of Twitter post of like sort of urban liberals being like, well, when you get a man Instacart or they always replace stuff with the wrong things and fantasizing about beating their servants. Yeah.

That's why I want a guerrilla. Yeah. So guerrillas and their money. But if you recall, right? I don't know if you haven't listened to the bonus episode. A lot of what was driving the strikes at action at go puff was how the company used its own insane disorganization to justify not paying people because it grew ridiculously quickly, did not really build in any processes for making sure it worked.

And then anytime it didn't work, the employees sort of had to pay the price for it. Now Instacart is in a sort of a similar situation, but in sort of its own situation where what the gig workers collective who is by the way calling for a boycott. So if you're in America, do not use Instacart. Yeah, but continue to post about how unsatisfactory your experience with them is. Oh, that's to annoy Riley. Yes. That's two different things.

Yeah. You didn't make not being up to your high standards of where Riley can see it. And always blame the gender of the Instacart delivery. Yes. Absolutely. That's it. Well, that's not crossing a picket line. So when you get a when you get a female Instacart person, she always confuses oysters with

other shellfish. Classic James. Ordered Vadois got Perrier sick of this. Bubbles too harsh. So basically, right? What one of the things that's driving this at Instacart is it's a much more established company with a lot more with a lot more infrastructure than say gopuff or gorillas or whatever. And less stupid name.

One of the, yeah, I guess it's sort of more related. One of the one of these sort of the strikers has said, look, over time, the situation started to deteriorate. We want the stuff we had before we just want it back referring to things like automatic tipping payment schedules. The way that the app would say verify you that you were still working and so on, it's that things have actually got are starting to get worse. Right.

And what we've been talking about this economy, but we've been talking about this with Google and Facebook now meta and gorillas that these towering edifices are sort of the there's in a way it appears that for everyone who doesn't matter, the experience of them is the experience of them is now getting worse and worse and worse. Right. And regarding algorithmic management, they've said, even when we provide photos of deliveries, Instacart can lower our rating, which prevents us from seeing good offers for weeks or deactivate us from the platform entirely.

Instacart's inability to properly dropped off those groceries sarcastically Instacart's inability to properly an Instacart deliverer. Well, there's your groceries, I guess Instacart's inability to properly investigate customer complaints should not be result in blame being unfairly placed on shoppers. And it's something where you you've tried to algorithmically manage everything as much as possible. So your company only has to have a few developers as your full-time employees. And then over enough time, you sort of pull enough out of it and you try to do enough magic

that it begins to fall apart at the edge. Cool for a kaplunk again dropping off. Yeah. And that these these platforms get huge bring everyone on them and then just stop working but they don't have to keep working because you're already on them. What are you going to do? Do something else? Yeah.

Yeah. What are you going to do? Buy your own groceries? Are you going to go to a shop and talk to a guy? Why? Because you want to fuck that guy? Yeah. Yes, us.

You're going to say to a guy with your normal human mouth, oh, I don't like this brand of bottled water because I find the bubbles too sharp. Yeah, I'd say that with my normal human mouth. I say that all the time. That's my vocal warmup. The bubbles are too sharp. The bubbles are too sharp. Perrier.

Perrier. It's how you work on your clothes. It's why my plosives are always so good coming into a record. Anyway, so but writers. Writers also frequently complain about being deactivated from the platform, right? Because it's all ratings based. And so customers frequently will give you a low rating for things that aren't your fault or the platform will request that you take a selfie of yourself at random intervals,

completely random intervals throughout your like being at works. They know you're still available every three seconds. Well, it's something like, you know, I mean, the concept of surveillance capitalism is I think a stupid and empty one. But it's certainly there is a lot of surveillance going on. There's a lot more sort of constant and say personal. There are fewer places to hide from it. Do you think that Instacart is trying to turn its writers into IG baddies?

Is that what it's about? They're just being like, you should be feeling yourself. Try some different angles. They penalize you if you take a selfie and it doesn't like follow the rule of fads. Well, what they penalize you for is if you accidentally take a selfie and you take a picture in your pocket, for example, when the when you're prompted to do so, which is relatively common, right? Yeah.

Then you'll get deactivated. Technically still a selfie. Well, you'll get deactivated because they'll think it's a fake one. And then there goes your job. That's not a real pocket. So you'll have to. So you will have to essentially be unemployed for a little while until a company that's trying to employ as few people as possible and have them only be engineers

decides that it made a mistake. Oh, what the fuck? Man, this, the world's fucking sucks. This is something. Has anyone said the future is trash? Yeah. I was going to say, it's not something we often say on this podcast. No, we only refer to it by the initials.

Yeah. Because again, the good future podcast. Yeah. TF stands for the future and we love it very much because all of us know how to take a selfie. Follow the rule of fads. Anyway, it's, I just, I really, I really noticed that right because it seems sort of so similar to what we've been talking about in terms of how these platforms don't just

donate everyone's lives. And then the services they provide either as like places to get work or places to get work done for you, that they don't stay static. They degenerate. And I think we're in a period of accelerated degeneration, which is pretty cool. Don't we all love it? Do not buy from Instagram. I think it's great when my job just sends a little alert to my phone.

It's like, yo, you post hoc? Yeah. Look, we don't know what goes on in the well. There's your problem group chat and quite frankly, we don't want to know. So anyway, that's that's the, that's Instacart, a little bit of British politics for you. I want to talk about our main topic for today. It is a company that is very funny. You might think of it as crappy British Amazon.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So British Amazon run entirely by legends. Oh, awesome. Yeah. I hope that they have like a techno band or something. Oh, no, it wasn't like an EDM group. You know those guys in Brixton who had like,

Shout out to his family. So these are different guys, different type of guys. These might be of play.com. That was like a crappy British Amazon from back in the day. I don't think it exists anymore. Rady's hopefully typing it into a browser, but this is this is 2000s British ephemera. It was bought by Rakuten, which is a Japanese buying and selling thing.

No, so this is a company called the Hut Group. Are any of you guys familiar with the Hut Group? Yeah, they employ Han Solo for a while. Thank you. Thank you very much. No, it's the Hut Group, bottom line up front. It is a protein powder and soap and handbag and makeup vendor. Oh, it's full service.

Yeah, you know what we sell? Substances. What kind? Doesn't matter. What format? Any. The stages of realizing you're a trans woman. Like, you start off trying to get bummed.

And then slowly like, well, maybe a little makeup. Maybe a pack. Then you circle back around again. You get back on the protein powder. That's right. This is basically just describing Devon's like last five years or so. It's protein powder, soap, handbags, makeup. Then you get into washing.

Several hotels around Manchester. Get into staying in hotels around Manchester. It's based in Manchester. Weird time in my transition, I'll be honest. It's based in Manchester airport. Okay. Recently got 730 million pounds from soft bank, but it's one particular technology division that powers the selling of all this direct to customer

nonsense. Oh, I have a website. Well, Alice. Yes, they do have a website and they have a machine for building websites and that's a tech company now the machine that kills website ingenuity. Well, that's to be seen ingenuity is their technology focused division that in it's what it's supposed to do is bring brands into the direct to consumer space.

So direct to consumer basically is like you can go to coca-cola.com and order a personalized thing of coca-cola that says, you know, Milo or, you know, BAMF or whatever. Whatever. Yeah. You could order a coca-cola that says share a coke with a milf. Yeah. You wanted to, you know, and so this and that's direct to consumer sales

basically, right? Where there is no retailer. You just buy it from the company directly. Yeah. And that's their whole thing. Right. They're a holding company that owns all these different brands, hundreds of different brands, like glossy box or my protein store or whatever.

You get enough waxes. You'll end up with it. And then it's all sort of held together by this so-called tech platform called ingenuity. Ingenuity alone is valued at over four billion pounds by SoftBank. Well, they always get those numbers right. So I don't even worry about that. The thing is they've, they tried to IPO once in 2011.

We'll get to why that failed. They failed because they were too good. Some would say this. Oh boy. Oh, those people are very invested in the company. SoftBank. Here. SoftBank went to these guys like, yo, pick yourself up, King.

That's your shoulder off. All your losses was less than this. And they were leading to this moment where we give you $750 million. Well, so they got their capacity built by $730 million, but they were already in the publicly traded markets. They IPO'd in 2020. Now, SoftBank now has an option to purchase and spin out ingenuity, multi-billion pound deal.

Now, the thing is, of course, that as the more people learn about ingenuity, which tends to be very opaque. They don't talk about it very much. They definitely don't share a lot of numbers about what it does. Let's just say it's stock prices now below its IPO value. Anything can happen in, because the markets are very stupid and unconnected to reality, right? But let's just say that things are not looking good for

crappy British Amazon, yet another embarrassing SoftBank debacle. And in fact, I looked into this. Amazon. I know that none of you remember the names of people from SoftBank except for Masayoshi-san. Mr. Masayoshi. Thank you, David Cameron. But the person who engineered this deal, this investment from

SoftBank into THG, was a man called Akshay Naheta, who also engineered SoftBank's investment into none other than Wirecard. Oh, a company which... Don't Google it. It's great that he still has that job. And he's just, he's bad in a thousand. After merely one international scandal. Well, this is merely a national scandal.

That's right. Yeah, you're going on... Listen, sometimes you just take a bad beat. It's fine. It's rare to see a situation where homies lift each other up and are willing to look past each other's mistakes. It's much like the share video of investing. I feel like the left are so obsessed with cancelling people for

making the slightest of digressions. But it's actually refreshing to see that there is a different political energy in one that constantly has faith in your homies because of who they are as people. You're saying I'm the only one who's obsessed with cancelling people for digressions. Well, what's wrong with having a British Amazon offering? It's good.

It's what our grandfather was thought would die for. If you go to British Amazon, you log on there. You can buy jelly deals. The only fools and horses. What else is British Milo? Boat polish. Whatever you want. So delicious, delicious boot polish.

They do ship worldwide. They're sort of a British technology success story. And it's all this direct... So instead of being a channel for other things, they tend to be... They deal directly with clients. So they'll provide infrastructure services for someone else. But then as a service,

then or they'll sell brands that they own. I have to log on to Amazon, Britannique to buy yet more DVDs of the Mrs. Browns boys. Well, they started out in 2004 as an online CD and DVD store based in the Channel Islands to avoid tax. Basically is Play.com. That rules. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Also one of my DVDs from Gerns. I love to buy a PS2 game of 13 from British Amazon. So this is... This was from 2016 in the Manchester Evening News about THG. As Europe's fastest growing online health and beauty retailer, its sales continue to grow. Come on, reword that.

Fastest growing. We had two customers. Now we have four. Rapidly both here. Riley, no, you're getting too mad. You're getting mad at digressions within the thing you're reading from. I took the use of the word grow twice in one sentence. I've become very closely attuned to that.

And there's certainly no sign of slowing down. I met with founder and chief executive Matthew Moulding at the group's... The inventor of shapewear. Yeah. Well, at the group's brand new one meter, one meter squared, one million square. The group's... Matthew Moulding rises from this box.

Matthew Moulding. Come, join me. Is in some sort of like illegal under the Geneva Convention solitary confinement. Damn it. Matthew Moulding who pisses, shits and shaves out of one bucket. Christ. Work with animals. We get sued by him.

He's like, hey, I have two buckets. A meter squared. So one million square foot warehouse in Warrington. What is that in meters? Oh, that's a million times bigger than I thought it was. Energetic and laid back molding is obviously proud of the new site. Energetic and laid back molding. Yeah, that's pretty fun.

It's like something an estate agent would say. Look at the top of this wall. It's got energetic but laid back molding. But Mr. Moulding, it was dual aspect. It's very small but someone says it's cozy. You can tie a box to see through. It's six aspect. I'm fucking crying.

Oh wait. Nate's gonna love this one. Oh wait, children. So they say it's created a thousand new jobs for local people and with plans to further the business to grow further, there will certainly be more jobs on the way. With such impressive growth, I'm keen to know what he puts his success down to.

City on the grow. So this, yeah, this is basically like Mr. Burns writing his own campaign questions. Yeah. I think it goes to show as well, right? Mr. Moulding, how did you get so good? Well, yeah, more or less. That's the only way that THG has really ever been covered. And because it goes to show, right,

that client journalism isn't just something you do for number 10. It's something that's deeply, it's rife within the business press as well with how business gets, it's covered in a very fawning way. And that's also, a lot of that has been involved in both Warrington and Trafford councils, loaning THG, a combined billion pounds, or quarter of a billion pounds rather, or so over the years in order to keep expanding.

British, British Indiana, it's exactly the same thing of funding a big scam factory that comes to town and promises you that it's gonna bring a share of the jobs. The thing is, right, is it actually does do the things it says it's going to do mostly, right? So for example, it is a place that sells makeup and it sells the makeup it says it sells, and it's thought of as being pretty good, right?

It's just that you don't get multi-billion, like, pound valuations from SoftBank if you're just a company that has a big warehouse with a bunch of beauty brands. You have to be something that will fit into SoftBank's vision of a totally connected, automated world. You have to be a guy who lives in a tungsten cube. Yeah.

But also, you know, every big investment bank, the entirety of the British sort of investment banking world was sort of gassing them up on their most recent IPO. And the more that sort of people have seen of the way this business seems to actually work, the more it just seems like there isn't much there. There's a profitable and successful direct-to-consumer goods shipping concern,

but this idea that it is also a tech company seems to be sort of farcical. As we know, a tech company is sort of a strange concept, right? Like, oh, I have a... Yeah, it's a company that has a website. And it just seems like they're very much leaning into we're a company that has a website and email. They're very easily sort of portrayed by sort of a sympathetic press

as being quite revolutionary and uplifting the standards of improving the lives of everyone around the world and so on and so on. Well, actually... Yeah, this guy used to have to work in a one-square-meter office and now he's got a million of them. Yeah, it's like Minesweeper. He's slowly working his way outwards.

And so when it was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2020, it was the largest IPO on the exchange in seven years. And it's a huge part of the Northern powerhouse. He's a big Tory donor. Boris came to visit his warehouses. Like, this is... Bloody great cube you live in here, chap. Fantastic stuff.

And he's been paid over a billion pounds for like share performance incentives. So this thing, this company, this has sort of erode its way into the heart of things. It is core to these different processes. It is held up as a shining example of what Britain can do. And then when you actually open up the hood, it's like it's just a drawing of an engine.

Sure. Rightly. Sure. But tell us about the legends. We're going to talk about the legends. So, number one, he's a bit of a kind ledge. So Matthew Molding... He's a mental health guy.

Matthew Molding has also like said, oh, we're going to give a million pounds to charity to support people in coronavirus. And again, like, the press just started, basically started sucking him off about it. So who is Matthew Molding? Milo, I'm going to show you a picture of Matthew Molding. That's him.

He's pretty jacked. Yeah. But like weirdly defined sort of like biceps and triceps. It looks like he has one massive vein going down the whole length of his arm. He does have a bit of that physique that you get when, you know, you've been doing a lot of a certain drug. Yeah.

Well, I think he's got the physique... Protein power. It's creatine. Yeah. He's got... Makeup. He's weird old guy. He's been eating lipsticks.

Lipsticks every day. And now he has this physique. So to tell you guys what we're looking at, it's a man, a man clearly in his fifties, who's like that weird kind of old guy ripped, where he has... He's not that old, is he? But he doesn't look that old.

Yeah. Yeah. He's kind of, he's kind of got a bit of a like party Brian Rose thing going on. Yeah. That guy could be 35. And I wouldn't not believe you. But he...

This guy drinks his own piss. Sure. Imagine that being the thing that gets us there. He's like, what else are you going to do when you're locked in a one meter square cube? He's got this special kind of ripped, where it looks like loose leather, like leather of varying looseness pulled tight

over a sort of rip of like... For a mannequin. Yeah. His abs upset me, because he has like an uneven number of them. He has like a seven pack. And it's just sort of like stretched his navel in one direction quite strangely.

His abs look like the Olympic rings on their side. Yeah. So he started out as the... He started out working for phones for you. Oh, that's where I got my phones from. Cool. Well, they were for you. Yeah, for me.

Yeah. So he started working at phones for you and became the finance director along with his colleagues, John Gallimore and Darren... There's no me in phones for you. And that's what the team here believe. And Darren Rajana.

And those three are still big wheels at THG Now. So in 2004, they started selling CDs and DVDs from the Channel Islands. But then in 2009, they sort of... They were ranked number one

in the Sunday Times TechTrack 100 and had not just owned TheHut.com, but which now offered a broad range of lifestyle products such as clothing, beauty, entertainment and electronics. It also required other sort of British brands that sound like Ottomanopeic, such as Zavi, for example,

and transformed into a thriving, leisure and entertainment-focused, online-only retailer. Now, things did not always go smoothly at THG. They intended to float in 2010. And here's a little more legendary behavior for you. After it was sort of shown

that they had massively inflated their EBITDA, sort of like giving themselves a higher sort of valuation by the markets than they sort of deserved, the judge in the case didn't charge Darren Rajana, but said, quote, I find that Darren Rajana has allowed some responsibility for an atmosphere within the finance department

which has allowed fraud to flourish. As an example, Rajana's conduct was criticized in that judgment including, quote, a bonus of 50,000 pounds had been awarded to Mr. Rajana, but was paid into the financial controller who was fired's bank account

to hide it from Mr. Rajana's wife from whom he was undergoing a divorce. Awesome. Yes. Awesome. So just a company, a British Amazon run by divorced EBITDA guys. I wasn't defrauding the shareholders.

I was defrauding my wife. If that's a crime, then lock me up, okay? My wife. You know, I do have that on an actual drop. Let's say it. My wife. The other thing is, in addition, because these guys are proper legends,

in addition to their things like my vitamins, my protein, my wife, my skin store, or Look Fantastic, or these other various... Skin store. It's all makeup and skincare stuff.

It was going to be like for serial killers. Still with. They also have decided to like buy a bunch of luxury properties such as the Hale Country Club in Cheshire, or King Street Townhouse Hotel. So basically they also own all of the like places in Manchester

where footballers go to cheat on their wives. Yeah. That's right. Pretty cool. And there were some complicated issues of like transferring properties back and forth between the company and molding, and of molding,

borrowing against shares in the company, which by the way also happened at Wirecard, and just basically him just being a massive, like a massive champagne chugging legend, while sort of living on top of this creaking us emblaz of various crappy direct-to-customer brands you've never heard of. Now.

Is it still creaking? Oh, very much so. I'd come to my new small plates restaurant. It's called creaking assemblage. So here's another couple of things, right? Is that there's a million strange things about it rather than one big strange thing. So take for example,

when you acquire a company usually add its value to yours. So there's a company called Claremont Ingredients. It was valued at 61.1 million pounds, which had really high margins at the time of acquisition, very small number of employees. And it is, they have very few R&D focused employees.

They appeared not to like be, because a place that does like research and development will have incredibly valuable patents, and then you'll buy it, and then you'll own those patents, and there's the value. But if it's a place that just does a lot of turnover of stuff, right, then what you're getting is you're maybe

buying some extra capacity, but you're not like buying a market, right? And so what will happen is you might say, oh, well Claremont Ingredients maybe sells a lot to THG, and THG buys it, and what they've done is they've kind of bought their own money. But then you can still tack that on to your company and say, well, we're now that much more valuable,

because we bought the assets worth this much. It just goes to show that like thinking stuff is worth certain amounts of money is really just like you write it down and is what you say it is if someone signs it off. Like so long as something will transact for something, it's fine. It's worth that much. Everything is NFTs basically.

It's all just different NFTs of stuff. Right, and you say our company isn't worth that, but if you look at our collection of Joker Ape NFTs, which also we, but by the way are worth tons, because we paid tons of money for them. That's called a related party transaction, by the way. Don't ask who we bought them for. But so THG ingenuity is the main star of the show, right?

Because anyone can start a direct-to-customer warehouse company, a direct-to-customer makeup company, right? But you know one can have the platform that all the other ones go on to. And so what the prospectus, their IPO prospectus sort of mentions is that they've also bought several advanced recycling companies around Manchester. You remember advanced recycling, right?

That thing that's totally real. The parkour of recycling. That scam, the scam that steel companies love in particular. It's oil companies actually. Ah, okay. Podcast is hype. I haven't looked into these exact advanced recycling companies, but they are like advanced plastic recycling companies.

A carbon offsetting platform. Oh, awesome. Arrow Films, for some reason. Which they're using. Arrow Films is in erotic. Like the cult film studio based in the UK. Oh, Arrow, right, is in, okay, right. I got you, I got you.

Yes. I thought he was getting into porn, because that would have been exciting. Yeah. I would have respected that. All of this goes, comes together, right? Because he's like, okay, well, we want to offer, we want to take all of these different discrete small companies,

stitch them together into one big tech offering, and then just say, well, we're bolting this capability on and bolting that capability on. And much like these companies that grow wildly through being invested in, if you just be like, well, you work for me now, you report to this guy, then what happens is this, again, weird creaking assemblage of different businesses

that have just been like thrown together like a snowball, and then you just plaster the word tech company on it, and then open soft bank buys it. Which they've shown every willingness. Correct. Yes. And they've still said, even after it's taken an absolute pounding in the markets,

they're still saying, yes, we're still willing to do it. I assume because it's like an end zone dance, or they're just like, we don't need the money. We just want to force everyone to use this crappy product. It's a, it's a Brewster's million style situation. I mean, that was really the best way to explain soft bank. But also Jeremy Corbyn, we're back and ready to do it all over again. And right.

It's because like soft banks vision, of course, is they want everything to be direct to customer. And ingenuity says we can manage every element of that relationship. We can make your website. We can localize it. We can handle your billing fraud, protection, warehousing. We can, we can do your influencer marketing, which is like how he originally started the platform.

We can, we can actually bring your influencers into our big warehouse and use and like do all their little movies of them using whatever direct to customer product. And then afterwards we can help them cheat on their wife. Yeah, that's right. And that's basically what they say, right? So how you be, how you turn a sort of relatively, relatively successful direct to customer marketing company

like THG into a tech company is you start launching websites internationally. So they go, hey, well, I'll sell skin market or whatever. You can now buy that in, you know, Vietnam. And then you take that website national and you do all the, you know, Michigos related to making that happen. And then they'll do is they'll start working with someone, say, for example, in 2018, they use this thing called language connect

to translate their services, right? Then they bought it, rebranded it as something called THG fluently. And now it's part of the THG offering. And all of a sudden this little office of translators in South London is now part of a tech company for some reason. Well, isn't this also a sort of consciously trying to ape the shit that Google does? Where it just, if it doesn't have a capability,

it just buys a company that does. Correct. And so, you know, it creates Google translate. But I'm assuming the quality here is much, perhaps cynically off me. It would seem potentially that a bunch of legends have sort of created an organization that is somewhat worse. Yes.

Because I think in no small part because it's British. And so it's got to be a bit crap. Don't like it. It's at all. Don't like it. We've bought the door so we can show you where it is. Love me film. Love me.

Love me warehouse. Ate me wife. Because so much of it is just done like, oh, we, we've bought this thing rebranded it and now we've stuck it on to all these other stuff things, right? And, you know, they've said, oh, and they love to talk about, well, our clients include Coca-Cola and Nestle and Perker and Gamble and Walgreens and Disney and Microsoft and all this.

These, these things that would love to go direct to consumer, but can't really. And, but then if you actually look at what they're doing for some of these organizations, it's much less impressive. So like, for example, are they working with Coca-Cola? Yes, they are working with Coca-Cola, but only to sell the MILF Coca-Cola. Only to sell cans of Coca-Cola, you can write MILF on.

For years, for example, people have been drinking Coca-Cola, but it was not accessible to one group. MILFs. Today, that's going to change. And, and so, or like Toblerone personalized, right? Like, imagine dragons begins playing as Don Draper announces that you can get personalized Toblerone. Or, or like, they've announced lots of partnerships where

like, just the websites never materialized or stuff like this. Like, the only funny thing you can do with one of these is order the name of the thing spelled wrong. Like, share a Coke with Conk or order a Toblerone. Right? Once you've done that, and I don't deny that that's funny, right? But once you've done that, you're never going to do that again.

So it's kind of a self-limiting market. And yeah, it's like, how many customers, so you can ask, like, this, we have this, we've created this illusion for ourselves, right? That these great British startups are going to do all these wonderful things. But really, this is just sort of a, a sort of a tax dodge CD company that sort of kept on convincing people it was more than it was.

Until now, it's like, it's, it's, it's now being looked at like the next Google or whatever. And just absolutely is sort of fucking up at every turn. Shall we do a direct to consumer design your own trash future shirt where we give them a basic format and then they can type in something like, what if your Toblerone was a milf? Yeah, what if that? And then all get a solid gold house because the hogs love it so

much. And I mean, this was, and the other thing is, right? It's another classic British thing. All their reviews on Glassdoor, which is where you can go to review like professional jobs or whatever. We're like, which they also own, which is one, we're like one star until about 2020 when they started asking their leaving employees, please leave us a good review on Glassdoor.

But so this is from before they started asking that. They said, this employee said departing, THG is not a tech company, no matter how hard it tries to badge itself as one. Most of what they claim is hot air and it's all exaggerated promises, which it can't fulfill. THG is really only an online retailer that figured out it could make a few extra quids selling its pork's use of a tech infrastructure.

So this is stuff like data centers and like low value add stuff as well, like payment processing. If you're not already one of the big payment processors or infrastructure, if you're not already Amazon, it's like this. It's like this or like these things that are sort of so low value, but you've just what you've done is you've done all of them kind of crappy more or less because you're a British business.

So this goes on to other companies and pretend it's an expert company topic constantly talks about how ambitious, innovative, dynamic and leading it is, which becomes quite laughable when you see it from the inside. Ambitious. Yes, but capable. No, a tech company without any systems or processes, which can barely deliver internal demands, let alone service

external companies. This is a company run by by huge egos with I want more stuff attitudes. Well, yeah, because like because you're basically say we have this with this barge of crappy services, none of which we've done particularly well, but which we do all of and you're and you're trying to go to Coca-Cola and be like, hey, can you give us your entire infrastructure, please?

I want to be able to order it's a Boba Coke. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I think like that's where it's where Britain. It's the kind of business that we generate certainly because we've entered into the I guess since 1980, it's been inevitable that we would enter into the stupid phase of our economy. It's very Instagram Tory, isn't it?

It's a Vibes based business. It's the perfect business that will eventually get an office in the Alien Dick building. Oh, yeah. Well, I think it's approved by Michael Gove, of course. Yeah. The big old repository that they're building. We're going to find out on Remembrance Day.

We're going to find out if that gets approved. Awesome. Awesome. What's the best way to remember the fallen and to find out whether or not London gets a big new penis? Change it from a tulip to a big poppy in honour of Remembrance. Oh, God. They'd go for that, wouldn't they?

The review concludes, I'm convinced that quite soon a big company that uses ingenuity will realise that they've been sold a pipe dream and it will come crashing down. There's countless promises we've made to you as an employee too. You've been told so many times what the exciting and great things that will be available soon, but nothing ever materialises. I think it's a house of cards that one day crumble under the falsely inflated promises it's made and which can't actually

support. So, a THG, I think you are something of a microcosm of the entire British economy. Uh-oh. Yep. Well, if we can judge by like soft banks like, you know, record, I think you'll be fine. Yeah.

Yeah. I think it's going to be clear sailing to Ibiza with more novelty oversized champagne for Matthew Moulding and his cool friends. I'm very sure that this is the only time we're ever going to talk about this, this very soon to be successful company, and that we are about to eat our own lunch. I think that's probably exactly what's going to happen.

Could soft bank be wrong? They have a talking dog. Yeah. They might, I mean, they might, they might be able to, what they probably need from my sounds of it is a, someone who is good and well connected in public policy. And there is a Tory MP that I have a feeling or a formatory MP who might be looking for a new tech adjacent job.

So. Why don't we do it? Never seen ever. I think we could have Hancock. I know. I think maybe maybe Owen Patterson and Matt Hancock should share the job. Yeah.

Yeah. One of them plays by the rules and the other one is a wild card and gets things done together. They'll be unstoppable. Matt Hancock, I would love working in this. This is such a Matt Hancock company. It is a perfectly Matt Hancock company. If only because I just want, I just want the Hancock Patterson

buddy cop move. I want, I just want that bright. It's Matt Hancock and Owen Patterson. Come on. Tango and cash, but it's Matt Hancock and Owen Patterson. That's what we want. Matt Hancock would exactly be the kind of guy who would be very impressed if he received a bottle of Coke,

which said Matt Hancock on it. Yeah. And then he'd be like, a great British tech company made this possible. Starsky and cock. Matt Hancock and Owen Patterson are like the renegade cop duo, but they've got to be cleaning the streets of somewhere like really kind of like irrelevant like Derby.

So shots fired at Robert Smith, who will almost certainly be listening to this episode. Oh, I love Robert Smith. Oh, here we go. Matt Hancock has claimed members of the public go up to him in the street and thank him for keeping them safe. So yeah, all of us. I just read that.

I was handed a bulletin anyway, sprinting across a city block and across the street full of speeding traffic to thank Matt Hancock. Honestly, I'm not even joking. If I said if I saw you would do you would do that. You'll be running like the fucking Terminator and Terminator 2 with the fucking arms up. I saw Matt Hancock. I would want to speak with him so badly.

Riley turning liquid and slipping through a sewer grate in order to meet Matt Hancock. Yeah. And that liquid. I really want to have lunch with Matt Hancock. I think he has lovely bubbles. I think it would be fun to have lunch with him. I just want to hear his opinions on everything.

Oh, yeah. What do you make of sparkling waters, Matt? I think he would have an interest. No, I don't think he would have a particularly smart answer for that. You're going back from interesting. But I think it would be interesting to hear what a sort of God's perfect moron thinks about anything. Yeah.

Anyway, that's all about all that. Matt, what do you reckon happens inside the Large Hadron Collider? I bet he's got an interesting answer. Matt Hancock, do you believe, do you think there's like a God? What do you think we go and we die? It's proof of how shit journalism is in this country that no journalist ever worked out that at a press conference you could just ask Matt Hancock a weird question

and he'd probably give you like a several minute answer. Throw him a wild one. Matt, how warm do you reckon the average dog poo is? He'd be so flustered. Matt, how close do you think you could get to the surface of the sun? Matt Hancock, how long, if I give you a paperclip to trade, how long before you could get it up to a house and what would be your strategy?

Matt Hancock, sell me this pen. Yes. Perfect. Amazing. No notes. That's the question to ask Matt Hancock if you need him. Perfect. Ideal.

Yeah. I think Paterson could lobby you to buy that pen. I don't care about what I want. Paterson thinks about anything because he's just an idiot. He's not God's perfect idiot. No, exactly. He's a less interesting idiot. Exactly.

He doesn't have the perfect spaniel brain. Yeah. Anyway, I think that's about all we have time for today. So I want to thank you all for listening to this episode of the podcast and remind you that we have a bonus feed. It is $5 a month. You get a second episode this week. We are going to be talking about Brew Dog and the bonus.

So do check out. Also, I am going on tour this month on the 23rd. I'll be in Birmingham. Do you want to see Milo's car? Yeah. Do you want to see my car? Fuck the show. Come for the car.

Leave before the comedy. 23rd, Birmingham. 24th, Liverpool. All the dates are selling very well except Liverpool. If you live in Liverpool, please come to... It's the biggest venue of the... You've got to stop posting photos of yourself reading The Sun with a giant crown.

Oh, shit. You've got to stop doing that. The love of page three girls that I think is causing this. That is right. Lucy Pinder has blacklisted me in Merseyside. The 25th, Manchester and on the 26th, Nottingham. If you're in Manchester, I would buy a ticket like now because that one's almost sold out.

Well, here's the thing. It's the smallest venue and it's the one that's selling fastest. It's the most monkeys' poor tour. Why don't you just cancel Manchester and Liverpool dates and get the biggest venue in wherever is between them? Wigan. Yes. There we go.

Equidistant. We're doing it in fucking Wigan. Yeah. Perfect. No notes. Yeah. I have a live show. Oh.

Tuesday. Yeah. I have a live show if you're listening to this. Yeah. Star of Kings. My 10K posts. Me and Phoebe Roy, who is also on Masters of Our Own Domain. We are doing the first 10K post mini live show

at the Star of Kings. It's at 10pm. It's a free event so you can rock up, but like I would say rock up early. And if you're very nice and you're not weird, I will write you a handwritten post. Cool. Sounds good.

Handwriting a Donald Trump classic. If you find me on the street, I will hand figure you out a Bitcoin. I will write you a description of the perfect sparkling water bubble. I think I'll just like, I'll do like, I'll work out a little hash by hand and then I'll hand you that piece of paper and then you can cryptographically verify it. There you go.

Yeah. It's a little one-time pad that you can spread. Exactly. It makes sure an NFT of a bottle of Badwall. Anyway, we'll see you all soon. Milo and I are very hungry and have to eat. And Alice, you have to eat. And you're saying we all have to eat as normal humans.

Yeah. Yeah. I actually do actually. I've got some, I've got some food. We're all normal humans. We consume sustenance and then excrete it. Consume the meat. Yes.

That's right. It's very relatable of us. We are, we are consumers in the sense that we consume food. Yeah. Absolutely. All right. Bye everybody. Bye.

Bye. Why are you doing this? You know what? Let's just get going. Let's just get going. One minute. Bye. Let's get going.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Political correctness, it has gone too far. But I guess you remember when the pit man was hard. Ah, in French it's called the guy from Publ. It's been a long time since you were tough, but now they're all soft. Hmm, what happened? Where is the pit man?

Where is the collection? I remember when I was young and the pit man always used to come and lift that stupid over his head. Things on how they used to be when the pit man came and talked to me and then he'd go running and shove another's brain. Remember when the pit man had a switch play knife? Remember when the pit man used to fuck your wife? Political correctness, it has gone too far.

But I guess you remember when the pit man was hard.