TRASHFUTURE - Billionaire Boss Baby Brain Genius (ft Alex Kealy)

Episode Date: September 6, 2017

Holy wow it's another Edinburgh episode. This week we sit down with returning guest Alex Kealy to discuss... The SMALT. Perhaps the dumbest product yet for the biggest non problem yet. And then, after the break we read choice selections from a book called Little Wins: The Huge Power of Thinking Like A Toddler, by Paul Lindley, the founder of Ella's Kitchen. Like all the best business books, it reminds us the secret to entrepreneurial success is to be so wealthy and well connected before you even try that you're basically guaranteed to succeed even if you constantly trip up over your own dick. Paul, please come on the show.

like a bad a bad James Bond shaken upon the start. Um, I mean, shall I crack it? Shall I? Shall I? And how quickly did Pierre fall to the, to the, yeah, before we started recording. So you're showing more restraint. Like, like, like a minute's more restraint. More is more. That's what I call, like, first, the first 50, the first 54 minutes of my show are as good as his. But it's the last minute where he just, he just wins. No. Oh yeah. Cause it's all, it's all such gold that I couldn't possibly put the mic down while I'm opening a cold one. Yeah. I feel the, the fridges that this Sainsbury's could have been working a little harder

because this is a cool one. Yeah. I think at best it's a chill one. Yes. Like that Michelin web sketch up. Was it provided? Give me one of your, one of those lager beers. My microphone has been off this whole time. That's good. I love that though. Is that just going to be weird pauses between two out of three of the conversations and is like a ghost that we don't. Yeah. Yeah. Probably. In case anyone's listening over the course of the Edinburgh festival, Milo has died, but has haunted my mixer. Oh yeah. This is now a ghost cast. But if you're here and I'm there, then that means that's the side difference, not ghosts. That's more like a Scooby-Doo thing, isn't it?

Unmask someone. Old man Edwards. It was late capitalism all along. You're unmasking me and it's just me underneath. You know what though? I think it turns out the mystery of late capitalism was the friends we made along the way. When Milo reveals himself to be under himself, that's just a comment on the like destruction of the private in the penulticon of social media. Yeah. The meaninglessness of identity in late stage capitalism reduced merely to a set of preferences and agglomeration of likes and a series of pictures of all of yourself doing the same pose in front of all the same monuments when you realise that you have simply become a walking cost and profit centre.

Anyway, shall we pass to Milo? Lovely weather. Well, there's no more sirens today. A lot of sirens and yesterday. And yes, and we'll be more sirens tomorrow. Yeah, I was editing the trailer for yesterday's one and there was like there were loud sirens in the street so I couldn't hear. So I paused it for a minute and then the sirens went away and I played the trailer again and there were sirens also on the trailer. Oh, shit. Inescapable. We live on the most crack street in Edinburgh. More accurately, our friend lives here because

we both live in hell dormitory. Well, he's staying here. I live in a hell dormitory. I mean, this is great in that I can see there's a discord ball game in the corner and that is genuinely an excitement to me that I've only played one discord ball game ever. That could be a good idea for a future episode, like Game of Discworld. I think so. This is a PhD student flat. I feel like that's why there's, you know, those guys know how to party. Ty Pratchett. Ty Pratchett's discord so he's probably the best satire series ever. Genuinely, very good. Although, I really hope that Ghost Milo doesn't continue haunting the, oh, good, he's back. I went to close the door. Oh, don't want to disturb any of these PhD students. Hard at work with any of our takes.

No, true. I mean, there is actually one PhD student in this flat currently working. So given that I could be evicted at any time, be good not to particularly push that button. So I think for all the all the fans at home and possibly our guest, Alex, welcome to Trash Future, the podcast about how the future is Trash and your shopping guide to the dystopia of late stage capitalism. Who I got with me? Oh, so we were confused. There was actually quite a clear finger point from Riley indicating that I should speak and I sort of was too polite to even agree to that. We'll let it out though. Yes. Hell no, we won't. Yeah. If you come to my show and add out the awkward silences, it does become a 35 minute show instead of a 35 minute show. It's a

very weird. My name is Alex Keeley. I am a comedian and maths tutor. But for this month, I'm primarily a comedian at the end of a fringe doing a predominantly political comedy show. And when and where can that be seen? And if someone wanted to find you on the social media, as all the kids call it these days, I think that is what almost all of the coolest kids are calling it. The great stand up stage on in the cloud. So my show is called is my name is Alex Keeley and it's called the art of the keel, which is a solid pun. If you're American and know the book well enough. And I found from British audiences, no, they don't don't know well enough. Luckily, I haven't found 5,000 pounds of fixed costs into a show where the pun is sort of like, ah, if you

like explain to it for 20 just atomic in the caves. And it's pretty sick. I really hope you're doing 69 shows. Yeah, I am doing probably 69 shows actually in the end, actually, including the Gascots. Oh, nice. Nice. Or at least 42. Right. 0.0. Good. Yeah. And I'm I am I'm Milo Edwards. You may remember me from previous episodes of this podcast, like all of them. Yeah. You can find me on Twitter at Milo Edwards or Instagram of the same. And I am Riley Quinn, the other host of this podcast. You can find me on Twitter at Raleh R double a L E H my ill advised Twitter handle that I feel it's too late to change. Never make a joke with the handle, mate. I'm just going to chip back in with Alex Keely. K E A L Y Alex. You should if you can't

do Alex, then don't. It's not worth it. It's not for you. I'll explain. I'll explain the surname, not the full name. I'm not a full name explainer. You can't do Alex. You're unlikely to get the article. Yeah, you're not going to enjoy my jokes about the heat of the universe that much if you're I told my mom about the title of your show. They're like, Oh, that this is amazing. And she was like, what? And I was like, so there's a Donald Trump book called the art of the deal. And I believe it's a reference. And she was like, she's like, it's too niche. My problem with you millennial comedians with your niche references. My show is my audience is a double filtrated, like kind of whiskey barrel aged audience. I love it. It's exactly what I want.

Well, you know, they say millennials could afford homes if we'd only stop getting audiences on toast every morning. Sirens right on cue. So we're doing something a little different for this episode than we usually do ordinarily as as as regular fans of the garbage men will know. We take a couple products and a couple of developments and rank them more or less between stupid and evil. But the old scale, the old scale. But today, I'm still going to grab a product from my shopping bag of late stage capitalism. And we're still going to, you know, probably rip on it. But then we have actually found the most incredible book. And it's it will change your life. I really want to sing the Book of Mormon right now.

It's called little wins. The transformative whatever secret to business success involved in thinking like a toddler. Beautiful. Yeah, the thesis of this book is actually copied it out here because I'm doing my homework. My proposition is that toddlers are some of the world's most creative, ambitious and determined humans. Their imagination, ingenuity and single mindedness are second to none. Their ability to disrupt a norm, execute a plan, negotiate a deal and routinely shit in their pants would put some of the slickest entrepreneurs and CEOs to shame. I'm guessing shit in their pants was a bit that you added in that was an editorial. I think it rightly reads between the lines. I think in an era of Trump, though, we now do have a president and CEO of a

company and country who actually probably does routinely wear adult diapers. Certainly certainly so emotionally, but possibly, you know, physically, I would like an emotional adult diaper. I think now I'm not sure how it would work. But that's like if you if you like accidentally depression everywhere, that it's like everyone's like fine with it or like everyone's if you like, it's like that it's a safety net for crying. But to be honest, the more I describe it, the more it's highly legitimate. And I don't I regret sort of staying is a kind of like yeah, we should all get emotional make a lot of money doing that. An emotional adult diapers. Yeah, we can sell it in one of those shops in London, the emotion, the totes emotional tote tote bag

that I saw which I wanted to kill. Oh, wow. Yeah, totes emotional because it's a tote bag. But like there's a phrase called totes emotional. And also, did it have an apostrophe in it to make that clear? Yeah. Yeah. Well, the thing is, I couldn't I was killing them at the time. So I couldn't they deserved the blood splatter made that the school of life. Now, given your ironically, it made you totes emotional. And but I've been less I've been less emotional. Given that you're on the land from a murder charge. It's interesting that you're broadcasting your location. I did. Yeah, I should have checked the subscriber level to the point of like, is that is it? You're remarkably unsketched by the sirens as well. Mainly the police, the police mostly. Yeah,

Chris is our number one fan. Can't believe I sting the other guys, you know, I can't believe this is the only politics podcast on police radio. I don't know why I've said that on police radio. So many crimes are going on solve because like the normal radio chatter about like, yeah, like suspect heading south on that one half hour that you have to commit a crime because that's the only time. Oh, yeah, exactly. It's like the purge, but with way more sort of nervous millennial. More, more purging. So I'd like to hop right in that extract that you read out was the most sickening thing I made a face of like pure sadness when you're reading it out. So you're not like a toddler, then? I mean, I don't know. We're gonna

get we're getting into it now. I'll let you get into it. Let's get into it. Before we hop into the toddler stuff, though, I want to introduce to you guys a product that might excite the toddler in you. I'm only going to give you the name and I want you to tell me based on the name what you think it is and does. Okay, it's a game we play every time because it's just such good fun and hasn't led to me kill myself yet. It might soon. It's called the smalt. The what? Smalt. S-M-A-L-T. It sounds like a product from the Simpsons, but an ill advised like Homer develops a new product that's made of like semolina and malt. Well, so when you smelt something, that's when you like but like boil metal down into liquid or is that when you hammer it together? What's

smelting? Yeah, boil it down and mix it together and then it becomes an alloy. See, you learn stuff on this podcast. Lovely, an alloy. Yeah, sweet. So I reckon it does that, but for food, it's like smelting, but for food. So a pen. Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Are you making a joke about like, oh, Alex is so ridiculous. He said that a late stage capitalism thing was a highly complicated description, but then actually a very simplistic product already exists from early stage capitalism. Yes. Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. Yes. Correct. Here's the beautiful thing. I'll give you a quick hint because this is just so fun. There's so much about it. It is Wi-Fi enabled and Bluetooth enabled. That literally doesn't

narrow it down in the internet of things age. That doesn't narrow it down in any way. I know. I'm going to read you the subtitle, which gives no clues as to what it is. Features mood lighting to set the ambiance and a Bluetooth speaker to play music. My God. Portable fuck dungeon. I don't play music while you smelt. Smelt. Smelt. Smelt. If I just say smelt a lot, then I'll get there, right? Does it shrink things? It's an excavation and no. No. Okay. So in the interest of giving more information about this, because it's great, we're going to lock down guess number one as a Simpsons B plot and an exclamation or pan. Yeah. Yeah. An exclamation. Yes. Out of pan. I'm going to read these next two sentences that may

make you, Alex, because you're not used to it, get up and leave and just sink your head into the table. Okay. Smelt is not just an amazing addition to your smart home. It's also a fun way to shake up the night. More than just a centerpiece and more than just a salt dispenser. No, no, no. Fuck. Smelt is a conversation starter and a great way to entertain guests. May imagine if imagine if you're someone where a small genuine is a conversation stuff that you can't ignite a conversation prior to a small. Is this, is it only there was something to talk away? Where does your salt come from? What is that? What is that funky Wi-Fi enabled salt dispenser perched kiketicially in the middle

of your smart home? You can't actually use this small to shake salt onto your food. You need your phone. What? Is this like a health thing as well where it's like trying to cut down the amount of salt and then it like biotracks you? I'm going to post this picture, but this picture says shake your phone, shake, pinch or pour all using your smart phone. Salting is so much fun with this small app. But what do you put? Sorry, do you have to hold both hands? Do you have to put it? You put it on the table. Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah. You know how I used to be able to use one hand back? Oh my God. And it syncs with your Amazon Alexa. Well, my God, Alexa dispense half a teaspoon of salt. And this company's worth like 3.2 trillion pounds, right? Is that, is that what?

Yeah, I think a full billion. Wait, no, no, no. I don't know what to believe anymore. I'm not convinced of the worth of WhatsApp. That's like tangible what it does. When you initially said it's more than just a salt dispenser, I was really hoping that was like a weird little description where it just wasn't a salt dispenser. It's more than just a salt dispenser. It's not a salt dispenser. It's a home cinema system. I think we can all agree. Sorry, it's an egg. Sorry. I forgot. So it's just like an egg. Yeah, you know eggs. It's an egg. No, it was never a salt dispenser to begin with. I don't know why we cleared that up. We fired the guy wrote the copy, but no, it's actually a useful way to spend. Hang on. I don't want to

overreact the pudding on this, but over salt the pudding using your Amazon Alexa. The full price is $200 US. Does that come with any salt? In Roman times, that would be a good deal. That would be a good deal. That's like hard currency, critical for maintaining your food stocks longevity. If you've got soldiers to pay, yeah, yeah, you know, you've got fields to make completely useless agriculturally. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, yeah. Hey, guys, dropping some carter drafts. How the podcast isn't as easy as the carter drafts. I'd say cartago de lenda est, but I think maybe San Francisco de lenda est. Yes. Oh, my God. We have this. We have to salt Palo Alto and I have, but how can you, how can you, um, the problem is that what is, what's the

like 21st century version of salting? What's an expensive thing that destroys their industry? Because they're not doing agriculture. What's like a Silicon Valley salting a virus? It's, it's literally just, you take a drone, it is still salting. Okay. Um, you put a smolt on a drone, right? And then say, Alexa, dispense one Silicon Valley of salt. A bit a lot of salt. That'd be a great deal of salt, but thank God. Um, but just, yeah. Can you make tech companies barren by sprinkling salt on them? They're staffed entirely by slugs who have terrible ideas. Right. Which, you know, I'm not left-wing enough to use that as a pejorative, but maybe they are. Maybe they are the center left slugs that we need to take down. Oh, man.

Yeah. Oh, shit. I forgot about slugs being one of those. We could melt the slugs. Yeah. I mean, I love melting slugs because I'm, I'm unclear. I'm unclear on that. I might be a slug, so I'm not sure I want to be melted. Yeah. I also feel like loads of like weird, um, like formerly it's like just London slang has been like kind of adopted by Americans who don't fully understand. Like, I mean, like, I remember melt was like an Essex thing to say. Someone was like a bit wet or like, and now it's become a, like, no, it's the, um, DSA. Is it Chapo? No, it's not Chapo. It's real politic that started it. Yeah. It got popular. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there was that, there was that, um, actually I did, I, um, when I sort of started following

the real politic guys on Twitter, uh, they all followed me back immediately, which was interesting because who the fuck am I? Um, let's expand on that. Who are you? I didn't know that this was going to be, I don't think it was going to be a confessional to biographical podcast. You just bring in two guests. I'm like, well, we're very redundant. This episode already explains himself to the world. The, uh, the, the reason that they sort of, they, they, they sort of were like all sort of paid close attention to me for a sec because I had like a byline in the new statesman in my bio and they were like, hmm, we did, we did just make fun of them quite a bit. The enemy of all this was the crows or something. Many spies have many eyes, but back, okay, back

to the salt really quickly. I just want to say one more thing about, about it, which is the great, the, the, the wonderful thing. Um, okay. One of its features is I got to go back to the app. This is the wording they used. Use the app as a hassle free way to dispense salt. A hassle free way to dispense. For the benefit of the listener, Alex's face right now. It's a beautiful thing. I just, it would be fair. Like I, I, you know, I often when I'm talking with my therapists, I'm like, obviously the deepest hassle in my life is condiment is like putting some condiments on things. That's the thing that I'm sorry, but there is like, there's literally more hassle. There is literally more hassle. What, what is the genuine benefit? I'm like, what is the actual

benefit of the product according to them? What is the actual benefit? They said they, they're saying it's hassle free. They're saying that it's, it like tracks your salt intake, but only from the small, so not your added. You have to take a $200 small everywhere with you when you're going to eat out. And if there's any added salt, and you have to go into the kitchen to make sure that they don't put salt in your meal. Or that they only use the small. Yeah. If you're using a small and like you've got, and you've got other people round for dinner. Can you like tag them in it so that it like goes, it's like, it's like splitting an Uber. You can split a smolt and it like adds salt onto their daily allowance. I didn't go the full. It's only half.

I should only be doing about a third of this small. It's not, it's mostly your small that we're yeah, like split wise, but salt is completely untenable. I'm going to read now one question from the Q&A. I'm going to try to get you, get you guys to guess the answer question. Can I put pepper in small? I'm going to say definitely no. Like, why would you even ask that? Get our, only if you buy the Pemepa, which is our sister product pepper, but with no E. Yeah, no pepper. Yeah, it's just Pemepa, right? Pemepa. If it's small, it's Pemepa, right? Answer. No, this smolt is only designed to track control and measure salt. Like, what? Like, can we ask if you can put cocaine in a smolt? Dispense one gram.

I'm going to here add in the clip from the Simpsons where Millhouse asks if the boxes in the box factory have ever had any candy in them? And the man who owns the box factory says no, these boxes normally ship nails. Yeah, so that sounds fun, right? Who wants a smolt? I mean, imagine if I get to a point in my life where I could genuinely afford a smolt, and that I'm mentally ill enough that I want a smolt. Yeah, it's a really, like, it's a good way. I think we should just like, because I think it's really difficult, you know, accurately diagnose like serious mental illness to the extent where we could just section everyone who buys a smolt. And it might save a lot of resources that could

be spent on treating those people. It's like an imperfect net, but as nets go, it would be okay. One of the better nets. Yeah, 80-20 principle, we're going to catch most of them. Yeah, you'd get a few crustaceans in there or something or other, but by and large. 20% sort of ironic. Like, we'd probably be on our browsing history now, you're in the net. Oh, I'm on your list. You're on a list. We'll be on a watch list. From doing this podcast, my browsing history is just garbage. Well, they think you're Zuckerberg from your browsing history. Definitely not running for president, guys. Definitely not. No way.

We all like to go to Iowa, don't we? I was the best. There's so much to do in Iowa with all the corn, just corn. Well, if you have a really big smolt, you can certainly spice up that corn. No, you cannot spice it up. You may only salt it up. You've got a smolt hanging from a helicopter. Anyway, that's today's buyer's guide. Buy a smolt if you want to have your rent paid in an insane asylum. Oh, my God. Okay, so like how on the scale of crazy things that you flag, where is that on the scale? Is that even anywhere near the most amount? Because to me, that's like, fuck, but is that just normal, yeah? I think the juicero is more insane.

Okay, just can we like have a, like, ah, could we just stop doing portmanteaus? Could that be a thing that stops? Like, the juicero? Yeah. What is that? I really want to keep our powder dry on the juicero. Okay. Wait, is it not happened yet? We haven't done it. It's actually one of the things that gave me the idea for the pod. But you saved it. Okay. We're saving it. Okay, cool. Off mic, you will hear a sort of mini earthquake from the Edinburgh area when I find out what the fuck the juicero is. So stay tuned for that. Stay tuned for Alex Keely's demise. Yeah, I've been having a really good Edinburgh, and I can't believe this podcast is going to be the thing that gives me that mental breakdown.

I've managed to avoid this fringe. I would like to see you do your hour of stand-up, but just as a complete rant about a shit product that you found out about, like, sorry, the show is off today. It's just going to be this. There's definitely a few men's I can cut from today to replace with a juicero and or small. Oh, absolutely. We could get them to fight. I think one of the key themes in this podcast that keeps coming up is that your internet of things enabled smart home is going to become sentient, learn to talk to one another. Your juicero and your small and your teforia and whatever will kind of begin to get to know one another, eventually fall in love and see you as the main barrier to the acting out of their

unnatural urges. Oh, so it's like, it's like her, but they'll actually kill us rather than like disappear into like, are you seeing her? I'm familiar with it, but I've not seen it. Yeah. Sorry to disrupt the overall negativity of the fun activity, but it's quite good. I enjoyed it. It's okay. Yeah, I heard it was good. It's good. It's good. It's a good little film. What really surprised me about the smolt, though, is that they're not trying to sell you their own salt to go in it, like special. So that's actually called smolt. Yeah. In smolt capsules, that's, it's not compatible. You can't get normal. So you have to put, you have to buy the small or pepper. You idiot. I have an experiment that I want to do now, which is I'm going to,

when I, when we publish this podcast, I'm going to tag smolt in it. I'm going to post it to small. I'm going to see if they actually take this idea. So the capsule thing, yeah. With, with pre-packaged $10 smolt capsules, you now puts, you can control of your dinner seasoning experience. Like different kinds of something like peri salt they can get like from then various other kind like some sort of this specify, you can't use any kinds of salt other than free flowing table salt. You can't use rock salt of any kind. It has to be free flowing salt. So you have to use bad salt. It's literally worse. It's literally worse than an eight pound, like an eight dollar grinder

that you could, the only one that was ever, the one thing that was good is my mom got a, my mom asked for Christmas for a thing, which I think was very valid, which was a pepper grinder and it's a little button you press the top and it automatically like grinds the pepper when it comes out. It's very convenient for when you're not for the table, just when you're cooking, because if you're trying to do things with multiple hands, that's fine. That's the furthest technical, the fucking Wi-Fi connected Alexa conspiratorial small. Well, even my parents got Icarus by those fucking pepper grinders because they, they had the ones We went to that verb. Yeah. We got a full core into the rewind.

I mean, as in getting, I can sort of, I can sort of understand, but it's like, we have to call you on that verb. We have to call you on it. Icarus who flew too close to the shore, which melted his wings, which are made of wax and feathers. So my parents had the, had the, had the put, have never heard it verb. I'm so keen to find out how this factors into pepper. Yeah. Well, they had the, they had the push button electric salt and pepper dispensers you're talking about for cooking. And then I don't know whether it was my mom bought it for my dad, my dad bought it for my mom, but they got those. There's a, there's a, there's another level up from that in technology where they're ones which they just sense when you turn them

upside down and they electrically grind the pepper. So theoretically it's like even more hands free, but they just broke like almost instantly. It's just like a terrible like, like that level of like gyroscope should not be in a product that cheap. And so they had to go back to the push button one. So really we did, we did genuinely find the limit went slightly over it and that, yep. Nope. Fucked. And so definitely the small is like way further. I'm doing a lot of gesturing right now, which we can come out on the podcast gesturing. The, well, that's the thing. I'm, I'm, I'm saddened that the thing where we seem to be learning from the Soviet Union at the moment is the hard left toleration of

antisemitism and extremism, which happens to work with its side of the spectrum, rather than the good thing for the Soviet Union, which is the whole like NASA spent $3 million to value a pen that could work under water and in the end the Soviets used a pencil. And that's like where like, could we like pencil our economy a little bit more, please? I feel like there's like loads of like basic shit that we could get on anyway. Yeah, I'll get the vomit. We'll get edited out, right? Well, keep, keep, keep the vomit in. Yeah, my permission to keep the vomit in our listeners love that sort of like nice liquidy squish of the vomit hitting the pot filter. Thanks. Thanks. This innocent gun lager bear

brood with naked golden oats. Oh yeah. Wouldn't want to be clothed gold notes. Absolutely not. That's, that's the thing. The main, I think the main foible of our podcast we've learned as we've looked at our, our three main co-hosts myself, Milo and Charlie Palmer, and every guest we've ever had is, is, is that there is a great deal of, I don't know, some hypocritical craft beerism going on. Yeah. I think, well, I like this beer. I, I would say that it's like a, like a, just like a nice, a nice lager, but they've gone to town. I think the main thing that it's craft about is they've just gone to town with the external design. But I'm like, yeah, you know, respectfully, you've provided me with this beverage. It's a very good beverage,

but it's not like, it's not, I don't even like craft beer. It's good. Feel free to rip on the beer. Like, I'm just complimenting, I'm complimenting the beer. Alex Keely, man of the people. Yeah. Just like fishing chips and beer guys. So, uh, how's everyone's world of live? Like, less, it's definitely less. I was starting from a good place. I'm having a nice time this month, but I am, is the first time when I've been like, I have to watch like a couple of videos in my show of Trump every day. And even then, now I'm like, well, maybe this is the time when I'll kill one. Do you reckon Donald's got a free smolt? I sent him one like he has, he only eats like McDonald's, doesn't he? He eats like a lot of McDonald's. He eats only McDonald's. No reason

he can't smolt it or, um, or, or well done steaks with ketchup, as we all know. And then I love that like right wing commentators look to his defense on the well done steaks, the ketchup thing. Because it'll be like, like Ben Shapiro, you know, Uber nerd of like no mountain. Um, as, as no mountain, no mountain, they want to feel tall. I remember that. That's an opera. That's like an opera picking, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And what he does, well, um, Trump actually wants to order something very hard to get done. Well, so we get a burnt steak with ketchup so we can see if his restaurants are actually doing a good job with a difficult dish. It's like, no, that's not, that's not what's happening. He's, he's like an, an old man child whose brain,

Trump steaks. It's my favorite piece of television ever, the Trump steaks advert. These are some of the best steaks. Believe me, I know. Steaks are my favorite food. Aside from McDonald's. And you can only get them at the sharper image. Okay. Can we clarify that his worst food thing though, like we all know how he eats pizza, right? You know, he eats heat with a dungeon full of sex slaves. Well, sure. But like specifically how he puts it in his mouth. On a boat orgy in front of the Boy Scouts. And then he lies about getting a beautiful letter from the Boy Scouts leader after the orgy and actually the Boy Scouts. There's a beautiful letter. That's kind of against, there's no badges for this.

There's no badges for the orgy badge. No, you get a test result, but that's it. Yeah. So he, so, so guys, we all know pizza, the classic shape of a pizza, a triangle and then a little, you know, it's a sector of a circle. Yeah. He holds the pizza by the central corner bit and then eats the crust first. He puts it. Oh, is that pizza advert? He puts the crust into his mouth first and then keeps going to this. He, the crust is there to hold. You're there to hold the crust and then eat. And then you, you've literally, there's a functionally the pizza exists. It's, everyone has always said that Donald Trump is an idiot child and using that child thing in a segue into the next thing. But I think this proves to me that

actually Donald Trump is like, like, like an alien. You could, you could use him to child proof design. Like you give him a product that you think is foolproof. And then Trump has a crack at it and you suddenly realize, oh God, no, we didn't even realize you could fit that in your nose. We're hoping the red button has a child lock on it. Is that what you, you have to push it down and twist. Yeah, we put, we put the nuclear codes in this bottle of bleach. We think it's going to be okay. Look at him with his stubby fingers. Trump trying to wrapping both hands around the cap on the nuclear codes, fumbling to get them open. Well, speaking of child likeness and speaking of our collective wills to law, I was, I was the hiss of a cold one

being cracked open. A wonderfully cold, a cool one still. 27 minutes took me to the first one. I'm going to read out the nine core pieces of advice that Paul Lindley has for his baby secrets to success in business book. And I, when I, when I say them out, just, you know, jump jump in when you think that they're somehow a bit weird. Rule number one, be confident. It's easier said than done, isn't it? So it's like saying be successful as a piece of suggestion, like, you know, be tall, yeah, be good looking. Did someone, so a mate of mine recently met someone who's quite high up in bumble, and they were talking about like how to be successful on bumble. And the guy from bumble said, well, there are two rules, be good looking and don't be bad

looking. It's like, it's good to see the people in these companies are sanguine about the kind of world they're creating. We also remember that bumble is meant to be the like progressive, like feminist one of these. Oh, if anything, it's like the good bumbles, the good one. And that's still that tinder is literally Mad Max. And not like, not like the latest Mad Max, like the early Mad Max, it's like Mel Gibson, half naked, you know, do not become too addicted to matches being anti-semitic. Okay, so here, here, here is the, here's the list. Be confident, be creative, dive right in, never give up, get noticed, be honest, show your feelings, have fun and involve others. That's how you'd be successful in business, apparently.

Involve others, but not if you've not already got a patent. That is a key. Involve others in terms of, you know, borrow money from them and then declare bankruptcy. Ah, yes. I don't know about you guys, but nothing says having fun, like never giving up. Like I never, I never, it's every time I'm having fun, I'm always also aware of the need to wrestle against my current emotions of wanting to give up on something. I think some of these pieces of advice are contradictory. Ever, ever so slightly, almost, almost as though describes my sex life, you know, have fun, but never give up. Okay, like I'm sweating a lot now. I'd like to stop, but I've committed to this and the implied 10th piece of advice chafing is only in your mind.

Beautiful song. So I think my mind could actually chafe, to be honest. This is just the perfect, I think, summation of our modern hell economy, which is that not only do you have to, if you want any chance of ever, I don't know, retiring or enjoying any element of your life, you have to plaster yourself to an office chair with like a rictus grin, pull along your face by hooks. As you say to yourself, I just love Excel. I would, I would actually work here even if it weren't for the money, you know, it's just like, it gives my life like a real meaning. Oh yeah. What I actually would inspires me is being part of a team and building something bigger than myself, specifically the profits for a group of trans

national capitalists. Sure. Gotta make sure, gotta make sure that capitalists... More progressive than the gender normative national capitalists, to be fair. So, you know, that's better. Yeah, I remember once being at a job interview and the guy said, like, he was like, what would you say your skills are? I was like, I don't know, I'm like, I'm quite... This was to work in a bank. This was back in my, back in my early days before I became so woke. And I was like, well, I'm quite good with numbers, you know, can be reasonably creative, you know, something like that. And then at the end, he was like, I find it really interesting that you didn't say teamwork. And I'm like, well, it's not really a skill, is it? It's just like the ability to like work with other people without

like, it's like, basically, I'm saying like, I don't have like a really severe personality disorder. And I don't feel the need to state that in an interview. I find it interesting that you didn't mention that you want a sociopath. Because most people who work here... Most sociopaths would state that. So I'm just going to... Goldman Sachs, you don't have to be a sociopath to work here, but it helps. You have to be a sociopath to work here. And if you're not a sociopath, can I interest you in a reverse mortgage? So before we jump into our various chapters that we've picked, because we've done some fucking homework, I'm going to ask you guys a question that's posed by the book. What was it like to have a mind unclouded by nagging doubts and

the creeping fear of what tomorrow might bring, to feel pure excitement without being guilty about it, to imagine things without being frivolous, and to smile without having to try? What was that like? I think I was like Donald Trump's first week in office, wasn't it? That was basically... When he got in there and he's like, where do you get the stakes around here? That, I mean, what you said was a perfect anti-description of my personality. So I've never, I've definitely felt joy and excitement. I've never not felt guilty about it. No. I'm not even Catholic. It would make so much sense if I'm a Catholic, but I'm not. Alex, okay. It's when you find out that you're adopted and you're actually genetically Catholic.

That's how religion works, guys. It goes through. Does it go through the father or the mother Catholicism? I never know. I think it goes through the trousers toward the back. So what I think, what was it like to have a mind unclouded by nagging doubts? I don't know, because when I was a toddler playing with small cars, I would ask my parents how to do it right, and if it was okay if I didn't do it in a straight line. Oh, fuck, mate. Is that true? That is the funniest and saddest thing I've heard for a long time. Mummy, am I doing playing right? Am I doing free form creativity and joy correctly? If not, I can adapt. Just set me some targets. Circling around back to my sex life.

Never do a cult. At the risk of speaking too much, I'm going to bust through the first chapter that I've read and taken some notes on, and then we're going to hand off and we're going to go around, and hopefully by the end of this podcast, you will all be the brilliant brain business baby geniuses that we all are. Oh, shit. Yeah. So be confident what Mr. Linley notes most of all, is the theme of that chapter really is, if you have an idea, just do it. If you have an idea, just do it. Don't think about it. And don't think about how it's going to affect others either. And he says that there is an exercise where people are asked to draw the book. Trump has read this book. My man is literally like... He's not read any books, my love.

No, he's not. He's got a book on tape. Maybe he has assistant Spark noted it. No, he's the most. He has it explained to him by someone else. His assistant gave him the gist. I'm a busy guy. What has he got to say about being a toddler? Okay, so if you've got any idea, just do it. Great. Okay. That's all the time I've got. All right. I'm a busy guy, but I see those toddlers in preschool. They built great towers with blocks. They use only blocks. I need to use contracted. What are the secrets? I don't want you to tell me more about crane hiring costs. What I want is a 50 foot baby that can build this building with its bare hands.

So successful people, he says, tend to be those who, when they see something wrong, point it out. And when they sense an opportunity, I put this in bold, find a way to act on it. Okay. So find a way to act on it is actually doing a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting in that particular sentence. And there wasn't much intellectual heavy lifting to be done by this book. Guys, spoiler alert for the book, a lot of kids cartoons, a lot of little diagrams of children, stick children, if you like that. And weirdly looking like upset as I want to sign in my chapter, just had a stick child like, like crout in like the fetal position inside a box. It's like, wow, okay. You should have a business selling children.

This book's like a fucking Bernardo's ad. Like what? I'd say find a way to act on it. That doesn't just require a shift in attitude. It requires either a significant amount of capital or access to capital. Oh, God, I really have this new idea for a new kind of grocery store. I'm just going to snap my fingers and now I'm going to have a bunch of money to invest in it or the social capital or borrow money to invest in it. Depends on what the idea is. I mean, if the idea is like, dude, I could totally jump that fence, then, you know, you could do that without much capital,

enough capital to like buy trainers. You need a fence. Yeah, you need a fence, but you can you can steal a fence, borrow a fence. So Lindley goes on to say, like many entrepreneurs, I was giving up a secure and well-paying job as deputy managing director at Nickelodeon UK, the children's TV network. We started from the bottom and now we're here. Started from channel 25. Now we're here.

Yeah. So just like every, like it's the story, right? You know, every major entrepreneur, you know, all the way back to sort of Roman grain merchants who would, you know, stake their fortunes on a ship down to Africa gave up a secure and well-paying job as deputy managing director at Nickelodeon UK and the children's TV network. People say to me, how did you make the shift from like producing the wild thorn breeze into writing incredibly facile books about children's behavior? How did you how did you make that wild leap in your career? And there's a bit of a hint as to sort of how much preexisting success actually played a role

in the creation of the company in question is Ella's Kitchen. Yes. This is the guy who created Ella's Kitchen. For the author of, you know, How to Be a Billionaire Baby, Boss Baby. I'm going to call this Boss Baby from now on. We do live in the end, the end Boss Baby times, don't we? Before I settled on Organic Handy. Also known as the Boss Baby times. Before I settled on Organic Handy Baby food, I had gone quite far down the road on two other

business plans, both of which would have led me in very different directions and made this a very different story. So also, apparently the way to become a successful entrepreneur, like the way to actually, you know, own your own labor and not live a permanently exploited, alienated life is, again, to just have enough money to fail like twice for years at a time at great cost before you eventually succeed due to preexisting connections in the children's entertainment industry. It's a beautiful thing. I mean, it raises the question, why don't we all do it?

If he can do it, you know, why can't all of us? And then what I can, but that's because, sorry, my full name's Alex Keely Nickelodeon, my dad is, my dad is, my dad is, my dad is Steve Nickelodeon with Nickelodeon. Oh, right, right, right. Nickelodeon, I'm sorry. You're one of these, you've got that Nickelodeon dynasty. Sorry, for my stage name, I do take the Nickelodeon off because, one, it does imply connections on two. You get so many more kids coming for a political show. It's very difficult.

Oh, yeah. The classic, the son of Sir Edmund Hamburg Nickelodeon. Who actually, I feel really sorry for Jim Cartoon Network, that he's really doing some hard-hitting political stuff. No, I mean, the thing is Jim, has nothing to do with the network, either. It's a pure coincidence. I know.

Although, of course, Edmund Nickelodeon the first did make most of his money in the slave trade. That's how the name came about. But one interesting thing I found in my chapter on being confident is that eventually, the author of this book sold Ella's Kitchen, The Charming Hat, Cartoonie, Fun, Organic, Good Relationships with Healthy Baby Food Company, to a private equity firm called Hayne Celestial, where he then became... I love the use of the adjective Celestial in the name of a private equity firm. Where private equity firms are named after gods. They're all that great, they're all called like

Zeus Capital or like Poseidon Enterprise. They're all, they love to have a classical myth reference. It's much like all fucking cute, sea organic food companies are named after someone's kid, like Ella's Kitchen, right? I want to see private equity firms like Jennifer's Capital Investment. Jennifer's Pirate Capitalist or like Baby Food Companies called Vulture Enterprises. So this guy was then appointed Global Infant Toddler and Kid's CEO at Hayne Celestial. Kid's CEO. But then... That sounds like a new film, like the sequel to Boss Baby.

No, we don't, one was so much more than enough. He's grown up a bit and now he's the CEO. No, he's running a company like a kid would. Although more specifically, when running Hayne Celestial like a kid, it was the target of an ongoing class action lawsuit a few years ago for mislabeling a bunch of products as organic that actually apparently weren't... Oh wow, is that the same company? Is that the... Oh, right. It's the same holding company. I don't know if it's the same brand, but that's fun.

Incidentally, the sequel to Boss Baby was stuck in development hell for 30 years, so he's just a boss. He's just a boss. It's like a normal company. It's just like a normal company with a normal adult man. But it's like Macaulay Culkin made a Home Alone sequel now, where it's just like him waiting for a pizza. No, but it's just really sad. He still lives with his parents. He's 35. That's the real tragedy of the heart of the film is that I didn't love Boss Baby 3 after that one where he's a pensioner and he's still on the board and he comes into the office and he's like,

can I help out at all? And they're like, no, go home. You're chairman. That's an honor. You have voting rights, but you're not meant to be in the day-to-day management. And so no libel against Payne Celestial. That's just some shit I read. So I'm going to do the toddler takeaways from mine, and then we're going to move on to Alex's chapter. Toddler takeaway. Remember, any decision is better than no decision. As we learned in last year's referendum. Sorry. Is that an actual piece of advice?

If the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki taught us nothing else. I honestly think this is actually US foreign policy, but in toddler advice. The more you think about this, the more you realize more people actually do govern as though they have read this book. And next time you're taking a difficult decision, try, and this is all capitalized, EBT, Earth's best test. Flip a coin and see how you feel when it falls. You'll probably know in your heart that you want to invade Syria and do regime change when it goes the wrong way. Wow, that book took a really weird turn there. A weird hawkish turn. Is the thing, is the problem that we found that rubles only have tails on both sides?

Is that what, is that, does it explain a lot of Russian intervention, Russian action? Yeah. They have an eagle on one side and I think a horse on the other. So in a way. Both highly violent creatures, both highly useful for like military operate, like either an eagle, a symbol of like aggressive strikes or horse the crucial. No, I mean, true. The horse actually also has a shirtless Vladimir Putin astride it. That's the key. Weirdly pre-existing on the mint before his attack from 1982. And it's just like, well, it was all their money was minted in 97 because they had to revalue the ruble. I might have a ruble in my wallet. Hang on. Also, also, also like, I love, I love, I love the very diplomatic revalued and the actual

D value. Like, oh, we were just re, but where did it go? Oh, it went down. It did go down, but it's so revalued. It was revalued. It's not wrong. In 97, it was revalued up. So it used to be, it used to be worse. I hate it when facts ruin a joke. Let's hit me with the information now. It's happening. So I mean, well, it's, it's dropped a huge amount since like 2014, or that's gone up a bit recently. So it used to be about in 2014, it was about 50 rubles to the pound. Yeah. And now it's about like 70, but it was about 110 at one stage. But part of that is the pound being shipped. Yeah, part of that is the pound being shipped. We've helped out. We've helped out. We have, we have. And the dollars

crashed and the euro as well. So in the interest of, in the interest of time and making sure that we get, get Alex to the church on time as it were, you want to, you want to hit your chapter? Yeah, sure. Great. Well, I would say as a, as a, as a sort of warning to the listener, that I find that it's almost like that this book is a, a bullshit and that the extent, almost like the extent to which it's possible to differentiate between the advice. So could you, in one sentence, articulate the advice of your chapter? Yeah. Um, to see whether it really differs from mine. The advice of my chapter is, uh, instead of thinking about what you're going to do too much, uh, you should just start doing stuff. And then eventually I, you can, you know, also

have a company that, um, is affiliated with another firm that has some mislabeling scandals. And is named after a Greek God, crucially. My, like, my one's called dive right in and I find it difficult to like differentiate, uh, logically between the two. Do you think almost as though the core message of this book really is if you have capital already, you really can't fail. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If it, if it ain't broke for you, don't fix it like that. Um, yeah. So, uh, yeah. Well, the, the, the, the sort of, so mine's called dive right in. And, uh, I think it's just sort of about just, just getting on, getting on with stuff, taking the big risk. But there's a whole lot of like, there's a whole lot of kind of contradictory, but all it's sort of things like

you have to set your ambitions really high, but then don't set them too high. Like, uh, like, genuinely a lot of the chapter, a lot of the chapter seems to boil down to that. I'm like, that's literally like Aristotelian phronesis. It's like, like, stop repackaging a two and a half thousand year philosophy of choosing between an excess and a deficiency. Like that's the golden mean of acting like a toddler in business. And I think you can do the golden mean too much. I think has it like, you just do the, but get a balance to do the gold mean a bit, but not, you know, the golden mean meta-joke for the fans of bad jokes. If we've got any bad jokes. Or the fans of like niche Aristotelian references. I prefer if we were doing a more of a Hegelian

synthesis antithesis thing. All right. Each their own. I don't feel that Ella's kitchen would be on board with that as far as I can see. Uh, so the most, one of the most obnoxious things I've ever read was in this chapter where she goes, um, okay, with Ella's kitchen, the guiding ambition is very much the same today as it was when I first started thinking about the business in 2004. Since the early days, we've been talking about our goal of a billion tiny tummy touch points. What? What? Shut up. A billion tiny touch points. Tiny tummy touch points. I mean, that is something that is said in a trial of a paedophile. I'm sorry to, that is like, where did he touch you on your tiny, tiny tummy? It's horrible. It can cumulative individual

servings of our food eating around the world. So they want a billion, just say, do you know what? Billion tiny tummy touch points, billion servings. I've done it, done it in a few words. Billion servings. That's what you meant to say. Um, so, uh, it's also horrendously arrogant. Like a billion servings of your pro like, yeah, but also the specifying that they're tiny tummies, body positive guys. What about really fat babies? Well, don't you remember that bit from the social network where Justin Timberlake was like a million tiny tummy touch points? That's great. What about a billion tiny tummy touch points? I think that's my favorite bit in the social network, the social dark net. Yeah. They're like, they're like, sorry, could you, could you repeat that?

So there's another, there's another, I'm just trying to find the exact, here we go. So they talk about setting yourself goal date. So, so they're saying that one of the, and the virtuous things about toddlers is that they, they set themselves like ambitious, like difficult to achieve goals. And it's like, as opposed to adults that never do that either, but anyway, you are okay, fine. But then they say something, they say, uh, uh, what you need is a guiding principle around what you want to achieve. And then the ambition to pursue it in ways that may occasionally scare you. Like the baby trying to climb out of their cot for the first time, you have no idea if you're going to make it or not. Now it's not as a, as a, like just as an, as an analogy, I get that

it's a representation of ambition to try and climb out of a cot. But like that, that like would kill the baby, the cot suffered. Like that's like, you're, you're advocating an ambition that if succeeded is your own self annihilation. It's like, it's not, find another, find another analysis one. Toddlers have an innate knowledge of the fact that they want to end it all before they get old enough to read this kind of shit. Yeah. Yeah. That's the, that's the real message of never give up, which is that like as a toddler, you know that suicide, you've actually know the actual answer to life is suicide much earlier on the most humans. Um, dark. Okay. So it's, it's, it's, it's like, um, it's like, you know, you ever watched the Sopranos? The Sopranos is a frequent

touch point. Only season one, which I really should get around to watching. I love season one. But there's a scene in Sopranos where, um, where Tony has just loan sharked this guy's business into oblivion, right? This sort of sports store owner guy. And there's a scene of him lying on his pool table with a gun in his mouth. Um, and he's, and he's about to, he's about to finally achieve. Um, but then his wife comes in and he's like, hides it. It's like, oh, I'm fixing the, I'm fixing the lights. I'm fixing the lights. And you know, if maybe if, if he'd never gave up, um, you know, he would have actually followed through with his dreams. He would, he would have ruined a pool table. Difficult to eBay that.

Yeah. A toddler wouldn't care. No, no, true. True. So yeah, I think I'm not afraid of mess. I think, um, I think that's most of the, well, there was one other thing which I found very amazing, which was, um, there were comic moments too. One that sticks out is when I had the chance to attend the master's golf tournament with Doug Struthers, one of the earliest Alice team members and my closest partner. He bought into the business and investor, headed up our UK commercial and sales operation and later relocated to the, to run the US business in its early days. Doug had kindly invited me to the exquisite surroundings of the Augusta national golf course, perhaps the most beautiful setting for any sporting event in the world, but it provided an incongruous backdrop

for an uncomfortable conversation. We'd overestimated our US sales and ordered the packaging to match over compensating for the opposite problem we encountered in the UK, where we were seemingly always running out. Worse, we then discovered the material, how they're used by date, and we couldn't simply store it away and wait for the market to pick up. How bad was the problem? Well, as the golfers worked their way around our men's corner, we worked out that we had enough surplus material to cover the entire 6,800 meter length of every fairway on the golf course over four miles. We could also wrap the Empire State Building the leftover packaging and briefly consider whether a PR stunt might be feasible. So let's rewind to the beginning of that power

graph. There were comic moments too. You've misunderstood, I'm not the best comedian by any, I am in the mean, I'm in the bell curve, normal of the comedians at this August fringe, but fuck me, is that not a comment? You've misunderstood joke structure. It's one of the most, it's a boring paragraph. There were comic moments to business information. That's how you do jokes, right? You go, I've got this great joke for you. So our cost rose by 3.4%. It's quarter on income and he rose by 2.7. So that actually is a 0.8 collapse in revenue. Classic news slap. I'm going to have to take my children out of private school with hilarious consequences. I love that. I'm going to file that under conversations that

definitely happened. But it's the wacky analogy that he thinks makes it funny, but we could have wrapped the Empire State Building in it and we were arrogant enough to consider if that might actually be an option as a PR stunt. It would be like, why have you wrapped the Empire State Building in like, cut up bits of cardboard that say like carrot sticks on them? We're going to have to ask you to step away from the Empire State Building. Also it's a great advert. We fucked, we overestimated our demand. Let's advertise that on the most significant building in the world. That's like, we fucked it. And also another little takeaway from that. One of the other keys to being successful in business is have absurdly rich and well

connected friends who will invest in your company and stick with you through it even when things are going terribly because you fucked up. Obviously. That's another key thing about being a toddler actually is having a ruthlessly exclusive clique of only the most selected people. They do do that. I think the best, the frenesis thing, I think the best example is a toddler takeaway section because, you know, everything is terrible. Tiny, tummy, touchpoint takeaways. Yeah, it's weird that Ku Klux Klan haven't done better in people's eyes because that's highly illustrative. So you think they'd be smashing, they'd be smashing it, but people are

very negative. Yeah, but it's got a misspelling. They can have a like a Ku Klux kiddies section with like a with a with a crash but spelled with a K. Oh, boy. Keely's hoping this podcast goes out many months after now, which is uncommon to be close to the Charlottesville protests. It probably made actually fantastic. I'm delighted. So the toddler takeaway, there's a double bullet point, which says, we often think that we can't do things when the reality is we are too afraid to try. Don't intimidate yourself out doing something before you even have given it a go at the same time, except that you can't provide all the answers. Like what? That's not that's like, that's literally that is as like a clear a piece of

advice as use the force. Like it's not there's not it's just like go for it, but also sometimes don't go for it. Like that's that's like, use your judgment. Literally. Yeah, that's but you're not adding you're like use the judgment that you currently already have. We can't give you anything, any other framework beyond that. Yeah. Yeah. Toddlers once again, known for their moderation. Yeah, just actually very Aristotelian toddlers. They are always, you know, like, come on, mother, I love apple sauce as much as the next toddler, but let's not have in an excess or deficiency. I remember that passage in the in the in those philosophical dialogues where Socrates is talking about whether like a whether there's, you know,

if humans were in a cave, I know it's all played to think that humans in a cave and then the other person's dialogue just like vomits a lot on us for milk. Right. That's like, that's how that works. Right. It's really it's a credit to Plato that for a minute I was like cycling through my knowledge of Plato dialogues to be like, wait, does that actually talk about the cave? I can't remember the vomiting and milk is definitely in there. More of a symposium thing. I mean, have you read Plato's symposium because it's really not far off like it's like Plato's symposium involves them all talking about how gay sex is superior head to heterosexual sex because women are gross. And then they and then they all watch some slaves fucking on the table and then

go home to fuck their wives. It's a very strange. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. If only and this is what those white supremacists are protecting. Right. Right. Oh my god. So do you have a core takeaway from your chapter? I mean, my core takeaway is I wish to take nothing away from from from what I've seen. I guess my hot take is I don't really know what happened. I sort of read a lot of it. And I so I have it on a selection of PDFs. I could have you could shuffle it legally obtained legally obtained PDFs, legally obtained obtained, obtained non illegally with the permission of Poseidon investment of Olympus.net. This this this chapter was a bit like the fourth series of arrest development in that it was not good and was almost designed to be read at random.

Yeah. Is there a core message you think I guess the core the core message is like is do it but sometimes don't do it. That's like literally a fair summary. I mean, let's start keeping score of the three sample chapters or reading how many of them is the essential message really just do it but sometimes don't because so far it's two out of three. Two. Yeah. Like you're what I was like have we read the same chapter? It doesn't seem that we have but I was really scared that we'd read the same chapter. Did I go boss baby and forget to coordinate much like the politics of sexual consent. Do it but sometimes don't exercise judgment. Can't emphasize that enough really going to have to emphasize that judgment

in that scenario. And that's what you're going to put as the cold open to the podcast manager saying that. If we were recording the trailer still that would be that that would be that the raw credits line. The credits would happen and that would come on at the end before cut to black. Speaking of Milo. It's speaking of me. So I had the the have fun chapter. Oh boy. Oh lordy. I just I've written down some choice quotes. This this is one I enjoyed. After all, we're busier and work harder than ever. In this context, the idea of returning to the way we lived as toddlers might seem frivolous. And it's like, well, it does. Yeah, immediately. Yes. That is regressive to regress. That is, you know, that was one of the first sentences.

I'm like, I agree with this so far. Okay. Where are we going now? I hope there's not a Philip that changes this paradigm shift. I think it's like Prince Philip comes in. Yes, that was the classical reference I was definitely doing. Love, love Philip of Macedon. Well, he did actually hire Aristotle. So it all makes sense in a way. It all ties in together. Holler for my teeters in the room. Hey, John Knox, John Knox famous tutor for only 30, 30 minutes train from Edinburgh found a Calvinism. So it's like, I'll do that with my comedy altars. I've found like a different element of Calvinism with my theology. In this episode of trashy, should we go in a new direction as three white Oxford educated men discuss like modern technology

in relation to Plato and various other classical references? Okay, then we get we get into the meat of this chapter. There is a general suspicion that a group of people having a good natter and a laugh in the office aren't working as hard or doing as much as they should. Well, yes, because they aren't working yet. Those people are likely to be happier, more settled, less stressed because they feel able to have fun and express themselves because they're not doing any work. Like, yeah, I agree. I also am a lot happier when I'm not doing any work because it's not fulfilling in any way, filling out spreadsheets. The creepy thing that this implies is that sort of fun human contact. And, you know, just a general enjoyable life is not desirable

in itself. It's desirable in as much as it actually increases productivity. Right, right, right. Yeah. We can make more packets of carrot sticks if people talk about Love Island sometimes. It's like, it's like, guys, it's like this good life economics book that I read, which is talking about the necessity to envision Keynes' view that we would be at 15 hour working weeks with increased productivity at this point. But of course, we're not because of insatiable capitalism. Because the smolt, we all want to buy the smolt. Because of the smolt, we've got to get a smolt, don't we? Keynes did not predict that we could get as far and that we could fly as close to the sun as the smolt. He couldn't dream. I think the problem was that he misunderstood that the smolt

would be more preferable under high advertising than like eight hours of poetry with your mates. That's the problem there. There was the hope that we would just be doing poetry in our spare time. Imagine if Marx could know about the smolt. I mean, Marx thought that he'd be like, Oh God, the proletarian are never going to, yeah, no, no, no. He thought that capitalism would collapse because the spinning Jenny would become too expensive to produce. So I mean, if he had found out about the smolt, I think he might have broken his very mind. So having fun. Hot take on Marx there. And then he quotes, Brendan Boyle, play expert, make of that what you will. Isn't that a theatre critic? Like, I don't know. Sorry, I've gone for a pun there.

I've pun on the word play, which can both mean the choice exercise. It's believable that there's like a guardian play critic called Brendan Boyle. Yeah. Oh, most certainly. I didn't even clock you were doing a pun. I thought it was just some kind of like theatre critic trying to make his job sound more digital. I also want to clarify to listeners that that's the one time if a joke fails, it's actually good because someone's saying I didn't clock you were doing a pun. It's basically saying I expected better of you. That's actually the only time that a non laugh is a compliment. So I respect that greatly and enjoy it. That's good. Riley just made a horse noise. Love it. Yeah, so Brendan Boyle, play expert says, wouldn't it be so cool and transformative, whether that

means if we piped kids laughter into work offices? No. No, it would not. It would be terrifying. It would be like a horror film. Literally. Yes. Yeah. And also what work offices as opposed to what other offices? Yeah. Like the fucking shoe shop office. You might as come up with a tautology critique. Love it. Love it. I found this tautology to be tautology. Yes. I don't know about you, but I think that all of my Excel functions get so much more efficient when I'm like haunted by the tinned laughter of like distant psychotic boss. Can we can we can we pipe it into the background of this podcast? Psychotic boss babies support Metallica in 1997. Tiny tummy touch points. Yeah, really. Instead of the normal theme music, we're gonna use that.

Oh, wow. That's worrying. Well, and me also doing like two seconds of Timberlake. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, then right. So then it goes on to say one of the most important parts of the workshop, she says, she's quoting someone at this point, wasn't directly about how to listen to or look after customers at all. Instead, Emma would put out sheets of A3 paper, open pouches of Ella's kitchen products and ask people to draw pictures by squeezing and smearing the food around the page. Right. That was for a customer care workshop. And I refer you back to the earlier quote. The most important part of the workshop wasn't directly about how to listen or look after customers at all. It's like these people can't do reading comprehension. It's like it like they say that

like, okay, so this is superficially and also in reality completely unrelated. But if we say it's related, then it is basically like Trump saying that there's a million more jobs in America because of him and everyone could be like, no, it's not because of you. And he's like, no, but I'm president. So it is. How, how would like drawing pictures by smearing food on paper help you understand the customer? So have you seen that Charlie Brooker? There's a really good take down of like, there's what those two experts where they like, look at your poo. And then from that, they work out your diet. So it's like, oh, if we look at your poo, then we know that whether you're healthy or not. And then there's a section in it where she takes their diet and it

might be like gravy, you know, because it's one of those slightly sort of sneering middle class shows, gravy flavored crisps. And then they like put it in a big bowl and then mix it around. And then it's like, oh, it looks disgusting. Look what you're doing to your body because it looks all horrible. And then like, there's a very good Charlie Brooker bit where it's like, yeah, but you can take like foie gras and quinoa and stuff. You mix it in a big van. It all looks if you mix food in a sort of indiscernible van. It's disgusting. It's not, you've not made a point. Any about vegetables, if you blend it in, look at that cabbage with that raddit. It's like, much rather have a nice pie. Yeah, look at that very coherent pie that we haven't

crushed. Like it's very coherent pie of pure coherence. Anyways, this podcast is sort of coherent pie consumed via your ears. It really does hang together, doesn't it? Mathematically, pie isn't coherent though. Well, it's irrational. So I think that works. That's good. Yeah, I guess you can get the joke doctor to come in. I can't believe we haven't used him. We've been paying him by the hour. We haven't used him once in the show. Pierre is staying downstairs from this flat. We could stomp on the floor three times in some of them. I've done that in my flat. It takes a while, but he gets there. You don't have to be above him, but he's like an Uber away. He's getting that Uber. There's an app like Pierre,

but with no E on the end. No, but like one of the letters is like randomly capitalized for no reason. The problem with the Pierre app with no E on the end and only one R is it's mostly used by sailors to find a birthing point. Sure. And suicidal people. What else? Oh, yeah, right. So then this quote said, when we were getting ready to launch our dairy range, some of our sales team dressed as cows to pitch the products. Okay, let's just imagine that business meeting. Like they've gone to, I remember in the context of the chapter, they were like going to pitch that their shit to like a supermarket. And so like, you've got like people from the board of Tesco sitting in this meeting like, okay, what's your product? And these guys

wondering like, well, move there. They're in fucking cow costumes. And they're like, yeah, the pitch went great. And it's like, did it go great? Or did you think it went great? Because I feel like the guys from Tesco head office were sitting there like, are these like, wait, hang on. So are these the guys from Ella's kitchen? Or is this like the kids from the local special school that we offered a tour to today? Is this the, is this the upright citizens brigade? Are these cows not getting paid? It's like a PETA protest. Some people dressed as cows. But actually, you have to think about it with the other perspective as well, when those sales reps were sat down, and they're like, okay, great. So you're going to give us the charts and figures for Tesco

so we can go and like pitch the product. We've got some good, good sales data here. And like, I see there's no binder here, just a humiliating onesie. You're like, yep, that's it. It's like, are you going to give us, are you going to give us the figures? And they're like, move. And I'm like, what do you mean by that? And it's like, we mean, no. Yeah, you know, your dignity is worthless. Bow down before your God, because if you don't clown around, for our sake, for the entertainment of the sake of another group of executives, you all starve and die. Quick PETA digression. Did you guys see the thing about them putting a like chihuahua down? So there was some somebody left their dot or something. And it

wasn't in the time there's a point where if you leave a pet, I think they do get put down, but like PETA got successfully sued for doing it. For really jumping the gun, they were too stoked about killing a dog that they did it too early. No, because apparently it's what you would expect PETA to be, but I feel like I now know enough about PETA that I'm like, is there a stupid, yeah, then PETA believe that. If there's a stupid thing, PETA believe that. In today's PETA heart takes, this reminds me of the greatest PETA heart takes. That's not a recurring section, is it? I regret not listening to the podcast fully. We have a very surprising recurring section. We're going to use to cap this whole thing off.

That is genuinely a recurring section. But I saw a take from PETA once where they, are you familiar with PETA? Sorry, I thought you said pedo. I'm sorry, yes, sorry, that's not a bit. That is a problem that they've had. People just mishear it. We are a pedo. They're not even an advocacy group for pedos. They're just like, we're PETA. We are one. The personification ads are, it's like Hobbs Leviathan, you know, they all come together. When they did a collab with Speedo Swimwear to do animal protection in conjunction with Power Rangers, a Power Rangers Megazord of PETA, it only becomes when all the components come together in it. That's my Leviathan mini-take.

They hold up their hand and then to get their powerful sword, it's just some candy. Hobbs' tiny tummy touch points. Are you aware of Warhammer 40,000? Yes, I think I know. So I remember that this is a thing, but I don't remember what the thing is, so please say again. Okay, here's the thing I remember with this, is that they actually really mangled Warhammer 40,000 cannon because they objected to the... Let's not pretend that that's the problem here. A model of a chaos space marine, no, no, no, a model of a warrior of chaos, rather, Warhammer fantasy was a fantasy model, not a 40k model, was wearing fur, carved plastic fur. There was a representation of a chaos warrior wearing fur and they were like a brave chaos warrior

or a noble space marine or whatever wouldn't wear fur and it's like, you can't compare those two things. They're from different universes. One serves the ruinous powers and the other is on the side of the Imperium, which in fact is arguably worse than the empire of the old world because the emperor is like a space Nazi god who happens to be humanity's only salvation and Sigmar just killed a bunch of orcs with a jawbone. I have very hard opinions of Warhammer. What the fuck are you talking about? So let's clarify that it turns out my Discworld ref early in the show was like a kind of Mrs. Brown's boys level of like cultural reference and comparison to what just beautifully happened. Yeah, that is just like, I mean, I think, I mean, wow. No, but not with Warcraft,

Warhammer. It's possible to catch autism. Oh, that's a very good joke. Oh, no, sorry. They were objecting to the space wolves. But yeah, no, it's from the mighty Lehman Russ in Horus Lupricle. You can't compare Lehman Russ, one of the original Primarchs to Horus Lupricle, the arch trader. Come on. I never, I never thought we would have a moment on this ever. It's like, oh, no, actually, they were talking about the space wolves. I didn't really, I didn't really know that was where this episode was going. I think we might have to do an all we're still like about a third of the way through Milo's chapter. Sorry. Yeah, no, no, no, that was actually the end. I was the digression. I think I was the original digression boy. That was actually the end. Are there any toddler

takeaways? There were but I didn't know them down. I didn't realize they were they were they were very banal. Oh, you're gonna pull it up. I'm gonna pull it up on my computer. The banality of hope. The toddler takeaway of let's just make sure this is going back to the Peter thing might like my problem with like them criticizing warhammer 40k is not that they got warhammer 40k wrong is that they think criticizing warhammer 40k is a worthwhile thing to do. Like, oh, they read the warhammer 40k law and they got it wrong. No, why have you read it? It's like it's like it's like being like, I can't believe you painted someone that like it's like doing a portrait of someone with fur. I'm like, yeah, but it's not. I didn't go and kill a fox. It's like you don't know how

paint works. Like it's not how to paint a fox and then kill it. Yeah. Yeah. They're totally it's like they're totally unaware that wolf pellets give the space wolves to standard tactical Marines plus one. Sorry, but if if someone had just explained to Peter that they would have backed down plus one veganism. The fun thing about Peter is like what if you loved animals, but also loved objectifying women? What if both of those that's the Peter way, isn't it? All of the adverts are like, I know that you didn't care about the death of animals before, but what if this naked woman has a little bit of fur on her or no fur or a vegetable? Like now you're thinking about fucking the woman, but now also the animal like it's like the most but you put that box down.

It's the most bizarre objectifying like there's no I actually can't think they're almost like no brands that objectify women as much as Peter does. They put down their skinning knives to masturbate acts or links as you know, maybe not even though even even links and acts have gone like pomo ira on some of their adverts. Pomo ira. Is that a post of tomorrow? Yeah. Yeah. It's such a potlaysaw. It sounds like one of those niche like alt right protests. I've got I've got the last page of Milo's chapter up and it's pretty fun. I'm going to read to one of the toddler takeaways and one of the toddler watching smiles, which doesn't have any alliteration in it. And so clearly is watching smile. The third toddler takeaway is a bit of humor can go a long way,

whether it's diffusing tension or giving you the upper hand in a commercial conversation. Great. Remember that golf course anecdote, which was the thing is I'm still actually a bit dead from how good that that's how we intimate. It's a third figure that we didn't hear, which is we could wrap the Empire State Building cover this golf course, or I could make cement shoes out of them and drown you if you don't keep giving me money. Having fun doesn't have to be frivolous. It can be a central part of how you win. Grind yourself to death and the gears of industry. And I think you're adding sentences into this. I may be editorializing, but toddler watch and smile party political broadcasts are perhaps the last thing you would ever think could be fun.

Yes. Yeah, accurate. Yet the 2016 London mayoral election, the Green Party broke the mold with something that was genuinely attention grabbing funny and creative and handed them the victory easily. Sorry, I added the last. Yeah. Again, I don't know your listener. I don't know your listenership because a bunch of them will know that that is inherently a hilaricing saying. We'd be like, Oh, cool London is London. It's got a green mayor. I'm like, Well, no, no, it's we'd be likely great. He's great. We've been more like to have a mayor who is actually green. Yeah. And a mayor from the Green Party. Yeah. He's got this Tory party candidate has scurvy, but one the country. We have a giant

corn selling man. He's like, it's like literally the only charisma that the Tory party rarely have in metropolitan England. And we literally just all the Confederate monuments that were knocked down in the States. We shipped them here and elected them to everything. What did the what did the mayor say about the new like school meals program? He said, so interpret that as he will. It's a green giant thing in America. I don't know. I don't know what your listenership is. No one. It's it's it's it's wherever. I don't remember about the I think it was a thing in Canada. That's basically America. Sure. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, you know, how you have Spotify and Spotify premium, like Canada is America premium.

Yeah. It's like, you have to buy that. Yeah. Yeah, it's get by that for 1299 month. Yeah. Instead of no ads, it's no white nationalist. That's the thing that you have to like sit through all these white like you still get the great same great content with America. Same great taste every hour. Same great taste. Zero white nationalism. It's great. Less killing. Without but what do they put in the chemical that means that you don't have the taste of the white nationalists is maybe that's one healthy chemical. Yeah. Yeah. Canada no A on the end and just an R. Any any I'm I'm I'm sensing we we should move to our our final repeating segment that genuinely repeat. I want to know is what what are our final takes

on on on on the boss baby guide to being a billionaire? I think that like that it's it's it's like, so it's so bland. It's so caveated. And it's so yeah, genuinely, you know, in a way, I was before before I was going to before I was reading this, I thought there'd be like loads of like ridiculous things. There were a few ridiculous things, but like most of it was just like, it's just like, it's just like, if you got gruel but took more of the taste out, it's just like, it's just like, yeah, there's no, there's no actual frameworks or tangible advice from what I was looking at. I was just quite like, go for it. But do know when not to go for it. Like I was yeah, as a piece of advice, I was like, that's you've added

nothing. So it's it's it's it's Dickensian toddler advice. Sure. Yeah, gruel, but less good. But I'd be like, I don't need any more, sir. I don't need any more gruel. Please sir. Can I not have more gruel? And he's like seconds of gruel. I'm like, no, I don't I'm full, full, full, full boy. Like please sir, can I have some more gruel? And it's like, well, you must exercise your own judgment as to whether more gruel is really what you need or whether that will be the object of your own demise would have this gruel. Like, yeah, any final thoughts? Well, I mean, my chapter was just like fucking, you know, you won't feel like you're doing work if you're not doing work. And it's like, yes, I know that. Because like, it's like not doing work more fun

than doing work hot take from this guy. Yeah. But now that I'm back, I wanted to know, Milo, if you heard anything about our favorite super listener. Oh, yeah, our favorite super. Well, so basically, listen of Peter. How did you know even sexier even even sexier and somehow even, even more 1980s, a frenetic mean of sexiness between what little wins told us like boss baby bingo told us how to find our sexy super listener. Right. Yeah, imagine something between Pamela Anderson and Riley Quinn. It's Steven Seagal, who is, you know, a relentless source of great tidbits. So what we like to is close the episode every week with it with a fact about Steven Seagal, right, a man with a Wikipedia page

much longer than it deserves to be. And the Steven Seagal fact of the week for this week is that Seagal was granted Serbian citizenship on 11th of January, 2016, following several visits to the country, and has been asked to train the Serbian special forces in Ikea. My question there is, how shit are the Serbian special forces? Like, surely like the previous Serbian special forces or like other spec should be training like Steven Seagal has never been in the special forces. He's just played people who were by like, who else do they get like fucking Ross Kemp? I think Google have brought Robert Downey Jr. into work on a deep mind project, I think, right, because he's very good in those, in those films where he's an Iron Man, isn't he?

No, it's perfect. The Google defense, the Google defense contractor actually has brought him in not just to do their defense contracting, but also their wisecracks. Yeah, it's very good at both of those. Yeah, they've got they've got him in and they've got black Sabbath as well. So they're actually doing Iron Man before it was cool. So the Serbian, I thought there was a whole thing with the Russian special forces that Steven Seagal followed that exact script. He visited Russia a few times, got citizenship, trained the special forces, quote unquote trained the special forces, and then was still unimaginably fat the whole time. No, it's fine. I just, I just, I think we shouldn't be particularly worried about maybe

like Russian and Serbian military working kind of case of each other, because I don't think anything has ever bad happened to say about 100 years ago when the Russians and Serbs had a very close kind of military policy. I can't think of anything bad that happened for about four years. In fact, that that axis has never actually had anything go wrong, not 20 years ago, not 100 years ago. Maybe if Steven Seagal managed to get in an argument with the band Franz Ferdinand, that we would really have cause to worry. Do you think Scotland would really fight over Kapronos getting like a couple, I mean, cause a great rift for the fourth album was pretty bad. No, I love that. They'd be like, you say you want me to take you out. I'd be happy to do a batch.

The new Steven Seagal film called like take me out, where he invites various of the world's best assassins to quote unquote take him out. And one of them just takes him for a nice seafood dinner and never calls him again. And that's really, really hurtful. And then that was the emotional. What if, what if the real taking me out was the friends we made along the way? And with that, I think it's time to put down the microphone for a little other day. Goodbye, everybody. Bye.