TRASHFUTURE - Boats 2 feat. Zoe Gardner

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

Immigration and refugee issues specialist Zoe Gardner (@zoejardiniere) joins the gang to discuss Britain’s transformation from “quite a bit like Children of Men” to “just Children of Men literally.” We also talk about British columnist / politico Iraq War reflections, and a startup. 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 *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *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/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows and check out a recording of Milo’s special PINDOS available on YouTube here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRI7uwTPJtg Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, and welcome to this, what day is it, Thursday, free episode. It's a fucking free one, Mike. Milo. We're getting it free, can't. Milo is joining us from Australia. That's right. And we have Alice joining us from Glasgow. Hi.

We have Hussain joining us from just having eaten about 20 minutes ago. Yeah, it feels like Australia in my mind. I don't know what that means. I just miss Australia a lot. We're all in various kinds of Australia. I'm in sort of like Northern Australia. Milo's in Australia. Alice in the Northern Territory.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hussain's in Australia of the mind. I'm in Australia of the soul. And joining us is Migrants Raids campaigner, Zoe Gardner, who has been on the show, I think, now three times. So please enjoy your complimentary Prosecco. Thank you for having me. And I guess I'm in Australia of the horrible refugee policies.

Yeah. That's just regular Australia. It saves time. It's just the same Australia that Milo is in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really... It's so early. You're in it, but you're disagreeing with it, which is fair enough.

That's right. We're going to, of course, be talking all about the... I think the application of the Nationality and Borders Bill, the Tories' decision to take the... What Australia showed us was a winning political slogan, Stop the Boats, and put it on a big lectern. How are the Liberals doing, by the way, in Australia? Are they good?

Are they doing well? I presume they're still in power. Tony Abbey and Onion that time. How do you vote against that? Was it Barnaby Joseph? Like one of the Prime Ministers who had a trophy or something in his office with... It was Tony Abbey, I believe. Was it?

I stopped these on a boat. Oh my God. Okay, one of those is going begging now. So Rishi can get on eBay. If he's willing to pay the shipping from Australia. And we can just do it all over again. That's right. Yeah.

Before we do all of that. Guys, I stopped the boat. I'm working on my scene at it. As good as your Starmer. And of course, as well, there are some things that you might be wondering, are we going to talk about it? The answer is the sort of upcoming Trump indictments and Balaji Srinivasan's insane Bitcoin bet.

Those are coming in the bonus, which we've already recorded. So hold tight. And are we going to be talking about the decision that now seems to be... Oh, sorry, the opinion rather, that now seems to be respectable to hold, which is the Met Police shouldn't exist, and we're going to be talking about that in a future episode. So I wanted to start, though, by revisiting an old friend of ours, Mr. Brian, Mr. Brian Cuball Armstrong,

the man who decided that he didn't want to waste time at Coinbase, send pronouns, and having a safe space, now appears to have attracted the ire of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That's right. If you remember the documentary that we saw about Coinbase, where the sort of like central failing of it was watching this very bald man spend 10 minutes trying to pay for one donut using Coinbase. I feel like what happened is the transaction has finally gone through,

and he has just been instantly tackled by like five federal agents. Yeah, five federal agents wearing different alphabet agency wind grabbers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the same way that like the FBI will set people up with like a fake bomb and then jump them the second they go and like plant it somewhere, that like the latency time on that donut transaction was the only thing saving him from like whatever SEC charges he's currently facing. Yeah, in fact, his legal advice was just keep, come on, just slow it down.

This is the only thing keeping you out of jail. Just get your pin number wrong a bunch of times, you know. So he said, after years of asking for reasonable crypto rules, we're disappointed that the SEC is considering courts over constructive dialogue, but if courts are required, so be it. Which is tough talk for someone who sold a huge number of shares before any of these allegations were made public. That's extremely divorce court language there.

Oh, the wife has rejected dialogue. She's taking me to court. She's taking me to court. She's taking my crypto. All my aides jailed. Yeah, my wife's getting custody of the apes. So that's revisiting Coinbase. I think we can all issue a hearty good luck to Brian Armstrong in his fight for justice.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. What about commemorative Coinbase? Could that be a thing, you know, where you just pay for your petrol with a Princess Diana fiver? Probably takes about the same amount of time, too. No. No, no, no.

There's one other thing I want to talk about before we get into the startup, which is, of course, it is 2023, the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war. And wouldn't you know it, the maya culpas are flying thick and fast from some of the people responsible for promoting or spinning or planning it. They just seem to lack much maya or culpa more of a, wow, this went really badly. Who could possibly have, whoever let this happen really played a stinger.

They could possibly have predicted this. Many, many people, including me, and I was working with the considerable impediment of being 12, like I knew it was a bad idea. But like, strangely, they didn't listen to me at the time. Guardian leader entitled, hindsight is 20-20 when it comes to the Iraq war by me a culpa. Have you seen much of this only flying around?

Yeah, it's been difficult to miss. I mean, it's depressing, obviously, but it's also, it is hilarious, the sort of scramble to be the one who is redeemed by sufficiently quickly saying, oh, yeah, no, no, no, it turns out that was a pretty bad idea. Nobody seems to be really reckoning with conversations with the families of people killed or anything like that. Sorry, I'm such a downer when I come on your podcast.

You guys are funny around me, and I talk about horrible shit. It just means your brain is working. Yeah, that just means that you have correctly, it means you have correctly assessed the world around you. Yes, yeah. Yeah, but talking of like experts warning people about things going wrong, I mean, I wish that, yeah, people would listen to that a bit more often.

I mean, and we're going to talk about it later, but we've got a new bill before parliament that we're saying will make everything worse for refugees. They brought one in a year ago, and everything I told them would happen has happened, and it's just extraordinary. I mean, I guess we'll have to wait 20 years and see, but... And you might get like the person who is like

probably most responsible individually for migrant deaths is going to like do a podcast with Rory Stewart. I'm really surprised that no one has tried to do the whole like, they haven't tried to write some sort of column about how we had the Iraq war, and now we have the... I feel like someone has tried to, I was like, no, it just doesn't, it doesn't work.

The Unwoke Roar. Look, okay. So I mean, it's sort of something that's like desperately trying to make it like... People will literally start the Iraq war, but not fight the Unwoke Roar. Interesting. So I think Andrew Doyle, Brendan O'Neill,

if you're listening, put your strange gigantic heads together and please, please write this article. Absolutely. Alice, you mentioned the podcast with Rory Stewart. This really blackpilled me. This like a profoundly depressing experience that like so many people were like, oh, this is like, you know, a historically important document.

It's like a bipartisan sort of like reasonable compromise across the aisle with the guy who had David Kelly hounded to suicide and like a guy who looks like a fucked horse ghost. Cool, great. Yeah, so this is number one. I bristle at even anyone else describing a podcast as an important historical document, but we'll go on.

So what Alice is referring to, of course, is Alistair Campbell's cutesy little project with Rory Stewart, where they have a little bit of fun with the news called The Rest is Politics. Now, I put myself through a lot for the listeners. I read a lot. I watch terrible shit. I listen to terrible shit. I write it down to represent it to my friends and you

because you all seem to enjoy it for some reason. I am presenting you a quote from the podcast episode by Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart on The Iraq War that was transcribed in an article about the podcast because I refuse to fucking listen to it. You're not worth it. I'm sorry. But you did read the transcripts. Yeah.

I would do anything for love. I won't do that. This is what they said. For all those soldiers who were killed, who died, for all the other people who were killed and injured, for all the trouble there has been, I can make the case that a lot of the aftermath problems were created by forces who would be doing terrible things

elsewhere were not there and might even have been doing it there. But at the same time, I recognize that it's one of those things that you wish you could just put into the category of having it, excuse me, of it never happened. Damn, I wish we could have put that into that fucking category, Alistair. That is such a circummiticatory way of saying we shouldn't have done it. I'm not saying we shouldn't have done it,

but I am saying that in an imaginary world where we hadn't done it, that might be preferable to the world we live in, which is the world where we have done it. It's also completely like suspending cause and effect, this idea that the forces that we were fighting against in Iraq, whether that was the Shia death squads or Sunni death squads or Iran, all of those things, those would have just happened anyway. Why? Prove it to me. Why is that the case?

Why would there not be a causal link between us destabilizing the authoritarian government holding it all together? And keeping those things from being in play. Why would it just have collapsed on its own? Why would we have had to do anything about it? And even if we had, wouldn't that still have been better than doing it on what we knew to have been a lie? Does that just have no moral valence anymore?

And I know the answer is yes, because Alistair Campbell is a demon. But at least let me ask that. Yeah, and Iraq is being consistently among the top five nationalities of people crossing the channel in small boats. Like, would that have needed to happen? Well, we can go on, in fact, and we can say what Rentul said in his Not Mia, Not Culpa. Oh, fuck me. Jesus Christ.

Because I'm afraid the man who's combined Dracula and Renfield has said regarding what you said, Alice. I'm my own Renfield. I love my saying. I do not drink wine, that's recent. So no one, he says, no one can know what would have happened if Saddam Hussein had been left alone, parenthetically, going on. Yeah, that's like saying, the guy that I shot,

the guy that I shot, right, he could have turned out to be Hitler. We don't know, he could have had a full life. We don't know, right? And therefore, Your Honor, I haven't done anything wrong. It's like, no, the fact that you... It's like 30P Lee with the death penalty. Yeah, absolutely. It's a crime after having the death penalty happen to them.

Well, Saddam Hussein certainly hasn't. I'm going to read that again because there's a parenthetical that really is going to bake your noodle. No one can know what would have happened if Saddam Hussein had been left alone, parenthetical, although Bashar al-Assad's Civil War in Syria provides one analogy, suggesting that... The relaxation vein is in full effect.

Yeah, famously, something in which we have absolutely no exposure. The Syrian Civil War. Fucking Christ. The goal of these people. And so, you know, it's this idea of, well, we did it and clearly a bunch of bad things happened because we did it. But what if something worse had happened

and I kind of wish we didn't? However, it is crucial that me and everyone who agrees with me and all of my friends and everyone who thought we should do it gets a gimme on that one and every other thing, that we still have... We have to attach ourselves with vice-like claws to the public of this country, then we will never fucking free our...

We will never free them of our just terrible husks. We are inflicting ourselves on them forever. It robbed us of the potential failed son regime of Uday and Hussein. Imagine just like Rishi Sunak having to have a meeting with someone who's just got like a gold AK on the table. Like that would have been awesome. Yeah, YouTube president. But like the fundamental lie here, right?

The lie that they started telling before the invasion and that is they're still telling now is that this was not a war of choice, that we were not proactive about it. We were only reactive, right? We didn't have any agency here. And, you know, all of these bad actors, they're all acting, they would have acted anyway.

And hey, it's, you know, it's a bad neighborhood. Stuff happens and, you know, we were sort of... Our hand was forced. And it's like, you could almost forget that they, you know, confected a reason to invade the country and did it because they wanted to and felt absolutely no remorse about it.

Yeah, well, you know, what if they were going to do the plot of the Michael Bay film, The Rock? But the last thing about this, right, is just an observation as well. It's also from Ren Toul's column. He says, it also changed us in less obvious ways. And by us, I mean, we British. I don't think it has had as much of an effect on the Americans.

And that's actually got me thinking, like, in the U.S., you do not see nearly as many of the Iraq war cheerleaders still in public life. You see the columnists, yes, but you don't see, like, the Alistair Campbell equivalent still insisting on inflicting themselves in the American people.

I mean, there's a couple, like Thomas Friedman, who's Fythe, for instance, is not, like, in The New York Times. But, like, I know where those guys are, though. The Bush guys are. They're all, like, the ones that are still alive, well, like, Rumsfeld's dead, the ones that are still alive, they're just off, like, on the board of Prospera or running a hedge fund or doing these.

They're not, they're not still insisting that they need to be important and prominent and political and public. We can't say what Rumsfeld would be doing if he was still alive. That is an unknown unknown. Yeah. Shusling more of his friends in the face. I mean, I have a theory about this,

and that's that, like, Britain has about five people in it, for the most part, and, like... Yeah. And yet, the fact that... They're all on this podcast. Yeah, exactly. But we have to feel like we're competing with the U.S. in the sort of, like, takes complex, right? Which means we are trying to sustain, like, a U.S. number of pundits

and columnists and stuff on a population that does not begin to equal the U.S.'s. And so none of these people ever go anywhere. That's why, like, there's... Everyone is seemingly a newspaper columnist and why they have these, like, eternal lives in print is because we can't afford to get rid of them.

Because, you know, we can't just reach in and pull, you know, a Barry Weis or whatever out of our educational system, because, you know, there's only a couple of them. We cannot allow a columnist gap with our closest neighbors and allies. We need to be built... We need to be, like, grooming the kind of the dipshits

of tomorrow, like Barry Weis, you know? And we're not doing that. And that's the real sort of, like, national security failure. So any exports you really have left? We're going to need some... We need to train up next... our next generation of toxic public war-ons. Where is our next Christopher Hitchens?

Given how pathetic a lot of the Iraq... the Iraq war cheerleaders' excuses are, I think they should start going with just, like, more entertaining excuses. I want to see at least one of them be, like, look, I really enjoyed Bravo 2-0 by Andy McNabb and I thought this was the best way of getting a sequel. I'm sorry I was hungry.

I pushed the wrong button. Mental health. With that finger error, I pushed... Yes, I meant no. I accidentally put a comma in no Iraq war. So, I want to add just a little bit of, you know, TF flavor to the proceedings before we proceed to talk about the bill, our main topic of discussion,

because I... boy, did I have a... it's actually a matched pair of startups that do something very similar, but that are annoying in two different ways. So, do we want to start with Sheef or Dish-Divvy? Both of these sound like slurs. Something you would get called in a Victorian novel, you know, like throwing sort of a wet rag

at the scullery maid and calling her a Dish-Divvy. We're going to start with our guest. We're going to start with Sheef. It's S-H-E-F. Is that not Sheef? I know it's Sheef. Oh. I thought it was Sheef also.

I thought it was Sheef also, but they provide a definition of this new word that they've created that's a portmanteau of two other words and so it actually is probably Sheef. Oh, no. I really hate that already. Does it have something to do with condoms? No, it actually does not.

Googling best condom at this company comes up. Who's saying? Sheef. Sheef. S-H-E-F. Sheef. I don't know. I mean, my initial impulse is to sort of say

that it's a new sort of leadership position for women. It is for women or at least it's marketed to women. The she certainly kind of gave it away. It always does. All right. Wait, so is it like Sheef? That almost, you were so close. Just take out that eye.

Sheef? Yes. Correct. So this is for women who newly cook. This is for women who cook? That's so tortured. So it is Sheef, but they're insisting on the long e because of the she.

That's terrible. Oh, this is not the most terrible thing about it. Not by a long shot. So they say Sheef, noun, one, a combination of she and Sheef, two, in honor of mothers and parents everywhere who do so much to support and nourish their families and communities. They could have done Sheef, which is kind of a pun on Sue Sheef. That would have sounded better, I think.

No, no. Well, so at Sheef, we're rebuilding the food system from scratch, redefining who can participate in the food economy and returning personal connection to the making food economy. There's something really funny about this to be like, imagine if women could cook. Like imagine if women were allowed into the kitchen and it's like at a professional level, sure.

But like, yeah, it is a very funny area of misogyny where it's like women should do the cooking at all times unless they're being paid for it, in which case they're obviously not capable of doing that and only men should do it. So women can only cook if it's unpaid. So this is sort of the, let's say, what they're saying they're trying to solve. So they say, at Sheef, we're rebuilding the food system from

scratch, redefining who can participate in the food economy and returning personal connection to the making, eating and sharing of food. We are. Don't say the food economy. We are an online marketplace for local certified cooks to connect with customers in their community and earn a meaningful income selling homemade dishes.

Local but mums in your area. Have they just invented a restaurant? No, no. It's worse than that. What they've done is they've gotten, there's not enough women in professional restaurants and professional cooking. Fine, right? Therefore, in order to get women into it, we're going to make

the professional cooking more like home cooking, which women already expected to do. It's so belittling on so many levels. It feels like an outdated take, right? That to say like, oh, the Shee version of something is like, that's belittling to say that women can be the Shee version of something and we can just be the thing. That feels like a 90s firmness take.

Why are they making me make a 90s firmness take? So this is, I'll add to this a little bit. It's not just reinventing a restaurant and it's not just bringing women into professional cooking by making it like home cooking. It's saying, what if we took the Airbnb Deliveroo Uber model and pushed it back up the value chain and what if we basically say, hey, instead of having a restaurant, we can do to

restaurants what Uber did to taxi services and have, again, women who were empowering, by the way, supply their own facilities, power, time, and then what they're going to do is they're going to cook the food and then it's going to be delivered by one of our delivery drivers and they're going to get paid per meal. So what we've done is taken the Uber Peacework model and it's like you look at Deliveroo and you're like, ah, I sure do wish

that more of the people involved in the producing and distribution of this food could be subject to the same working conditions as this and they figured it out. I wish it was called Delive Heru. I had another one as well. Uber Sheets. What if you took a restaurant and turned it into a rest restaurant?

I'm here all day. Excellent. The traffic just type of dust off my shoulders. Chief, hire us. Poacher turned gamekeeper. Come on. They say, more than anything, the power of homemade food comes from the love and care of those who make it.

Again, under gig economy conditions who are technically, according to the 1099 forms they would file in California, independent contractors with no rights. Also, but women have been expected to do home cooking since for fucking thousands of years or whatever. What about this is supposed to be revolutionary other than just selling it? This also just feels like they're just trying to turn every home

into a ghost kitchen. Yes, that's the idea. Right? That sort of feels like the thing that's missing, which is like, when you open up the kitchen and you turn it into a place that makes things for money, then that is not a kitchen. That is not a home kitchen anymore by the very definition of it. And you can sort of wrap it up.

And the thing is like restaurants already sort of do this anyway. I don't really do delivery very much, but a couple of times I've been on. Like lots of like small restaurants market themselves as like, you know, home cooking places. So the only thing they also do is... But it's a woman who cooked it. Yeah. A woman cooks it.

So that's what makes it like brings back the sort of personal touch to it. It's because women have a personal touch actually. And also no employment rights. Yeah. No, no, no. That's a bit impersonal. Well, because you're working from your home. If they have rights, that's impersonal.

This is fucking founded by Sylvia Federici. Like... So they say, at chef, we're bringing the sharing economy to the table. Now, Zoe, you might want to hold on to something for this next sentence because I think it's going to be... It's quite a doozy. Okay.

We believe in, sorry, in providing our sheeps who are often refugees, immigrants and stay-at-home parents, the opportunity to make a meaningful income from their very own kitchen. Wow. Wow. Yeah, no, they're not just women. They're also refugees and that makes it twice as personal. In fact, this time it's internal.

When I see refugees coming to this country, I don't think of them as refugees. I think of them as sheeps. What is a refugee but a future sheaf? I really should work for the marketing department. I feel like they're missing out on a lot of stuff. I feel like an interview for it right now. Yeah, and I'm doing it from my kitchen.

But it's so random. Don't you realize this woman could be making you a tuna pasta bake next week? Sorry, Zoe, please stop. It's still like the ghost kitchen model because I vaguely remember reading when Mr. Beast was doing the Beast Burger thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I vaguely remember the article kind of being like,

the people who are sort of making these burgers are like immigrants and refugees. They sort of what they have worked for like other or they have worked in sort of other kitchens and all that's happened is that like the Beast branding has kind of gone on it. Mr. Beast gave 2,000 starving people a burger. VMOs is literally just like, okay, well, instead of having a commercial kitchen

where you have like lots of immigrants in a very small space making fast food, you can get women immigrants to their homes. And then this brings up another question too, which is like, well, it also depends on their housing and depends on how many people are in the apartments that they live in or whether those apartments have functioning kitchens that are necessary to... But Hussain, what if it was Mrs. Beast? You ever think of that?

I didn't. Okay, checkmate. So again, it's the same thing, right? Of like Uber frees the company making all the money from the cab rides from the need to own the cabs. Instead, what happens is the taxi driver or car service, the car service drivers then have to pay for the cabs and pay for the gas and pay for the insurance. It's the same thing where now, hey, you run your own kitchen,

you pay for your gas, you pay for your power, you pay for your insurance, you pay for your stove. If it breaks, you fix it. It's a way of having... I mean, it's quite... It's ingenious, really. It's a way of having a ghost kitchen without even having to invest in the fucking ghost kitchen.

It's making your workers all build your kitchen for you and distribute it throughout the city, which is evil, but ingenious, but evil. Sorry, Zoe, you were going to say something. I mean, I've probably forgotten about 12 things I was going to say, but I mean, it's just crazy because, yeah, I mean, Deliveroo, which is pretty much synonymous with the exploitation of migrant workers specifically,

and it's just taking that platform model and applying it to, I guess, like private chef or catering, home catering sort of model. What does this bring? And then they just sprinkle a few words, like woman and refugee on it to sort of make it sound woke. I mean, like, who falls for this shit? I can tell you exactly who falls for it.

Venture capitalists. Yeah, number one, Andreessen Horowitz fell for it. Also, once again, the storm breaker money being put to bad use. She has raised over $20 million since its founding in 2018, I think has raised more since. It was founded and it was founded by Alvin Salahy, a former White House technology advisor under Barack Obama, and the founder of Code.gov.

I love the WizKids. They're so cool. This is like Cal Penn's character on fucking designated survivor, is what this is. Before we go on to our main topic, I've got another one. Dish Divi, which basically does the same thing, but there was an article in TechCrunch where they interviewed the founder, Annie Terozian, and I just couldn't leave the quotes on the table.

Terozian said, I am now a busy working parent, and although I love to cook, we always have the dinner dilemma of what to eat. I have a mother-in-law who is also a good cook, and I kept thinking, again, this next words are quite a doozy, so do a look out. I kept thinking about how to productize what she was doing. Wow.

I tried to package up my mother-in-law, folks. I watched my mom caring for my family, and I just thought there's got to be some profit to be made in that. Rodney Dangerfield, boys. I tried to package up my mother-in-law. I simply love looking at my parents and the people I care about and think about how can I use them to extract goods and services.

Just seeing your mother-in-law preparing some home-cooked meal and just like a sailor marooned in a desert island, she just turns into a cash flow diagram. Yeah, well, you know, your mother can start by making really nice traditional foods that you kind of grew up with, and then when you realize that actually the real profits are in burgers, you can demand her to then make Mr. Beast burgers. Imagine a burger.

Yeah, I mean, I love the way startup people talk. I find it endlessly. I mean, even just saying like fucking the dinner dilemma that we face every day, just like most people manage this amount there. Every day in our daily lives. But this sort of is like it's just a couple of steps on from something that's totally reasonable, right?

Because like, I mean, there are like great, like small businesses, restaurants run by like, you know, migrants or refugee communities in all over London and they, you know, they talk about themselves like social enterprise type things, like within the same language. It's just like one little step further where people have said, okay, okay, that takes all the right boxes in terms of like appealing to, you know, woke demographics or something in London. But just make it just, just push it over so that it's horrible

and exploitative. It's just insane. Yeah. Well, but the question is they see all of these like, you know, can you like let's say cooperatively owned businesses or whatever and they say, how can Andreessen Horowitz profit by becoming a middleman here? Yeah. Andreessen Horowitz hates the shallow market.

Yeah. It's shoving, shoving some tech burn to the middleman's face. Exactly that. So, I'll go on. The reason for its success was that it was providing tools to take the boring business stuff out of running a business to help people focus on their craft. The boring business stuff, you know, like making a, like making the money off of the thing that you sell and not having to give 25%, 15 to 25% of it

to a platform that, well, it doesn't directly set your prices because it's pooling you with everybody else. It causes you to have to match everyone else's prices directly. And again, the assumption that like migrants or women, you know, they don't have those like clever numbers, business brains. They just want to get down to like, you know, the cooking of the nice nurturing food is all, ah, it's so patronizing. They just are one way conduits for love and then we'll unburden them

of all of that boring old money that they didn't need or want. Yeah, what if we just like commoditized and packaged up this authenticity and then sort of like, you know, removed it. Conduit for love feels like a great, like 80s stadium rock. That's a Richard Heismith song. Yeah. Nate, take a note of this. Conduit for love, please.

Let's have Richard Heismith do this. So basically the value proposition, they say this directly. They're like, we want to do for cooking what DoorDash did for delivery. Immiserate it. Yeah, obliterate it. Because yeah, they're just like, yeah, we saw there was another step in the value chain to like step back and precarize and burden workers. And again, this one ends like the chief bit ends.

Terozium has also been on the advocacy team leading the passage of California bill AB626, the California Homemade Food Act, which has paved the way for legislation around home kitchen operations into 44 cooking bills across 29 states since 2018. Oh boy. So the person who owns the company also wrote the law. Great. Right. Yeah.

Not a conflict of interest. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, that they're clearly the expert on home cooking and doing all of that. Hey, why would I ever break the law? I wrote the dang thing. So that's chief and dish divvy.

A real rager of a startup, I think, this time. Just a hearty fuck you to the owners of dish divvy. So far, Riley, you've put together an infuriating episode. I hope we have something nice and light following this segment up. If you were in this studio, you would see me frantically tugging at my collar, googling like hooning or something. Well, actually, I've got something light for you. This is quick.

My cousin and I decided to go and have a surfing lesson yesterday. And I got to meet one of a genre of guy I think exists primarily in Australia. Something I like to call the nature himbo. And he's just like driving us out to this remote beach like through a forest. And he's just going like, yeah, like the forest is like, it's really cool because like there's all kinds of like plants and like critters in there. And they're just kind of getting along. That's pretty cool.

And, you know, like he's completely shirtless while he's doing this. And he's like, you know, you just think like thousands of years ago, like before there were roads or like people driving on them, you know, they were just indigenous people in there just just eating stuff. You know, it was like their supermarket. So that's that's pretty cool. And he just kept saying that's pretty cool after everything. You know, it is pretty cool to be fair.

It is pretty cool. He's correct. This is one that I imagine he's also super ripped. So this is one cool guy. Yeah, he was he was pretty jacked. Well, that startup was enraging, but ultimately good fun. And yet now, of course, because we are talking about the UK's immigration, refugee and asylum system, it is time for another TF jarring shift in tone.

This is from a press release a couple, couple weeks ago. It says earlier this year, the prime minister made stopping the boats, one of his five promises to the British people. The stop the boats or illegal migration bill will fulfill that promise by ending illegal entry as a route to asylum in the UK. So what how does this fit together with stuff like nationality and borders bill? How does it fit together with, I'd say, like the political priorities of all of the the great and the good that we discussed so much like some of the people

we might have discussed earlier on who are very not sorry about what they didn't do in terms of the Iraq war. Can you just give us a little bit of table setting? Sure. Yeah. So this is a new bill that it basically it's it's it's the nationality and borders act part two Electric Boogaloo and with all the fascistic sort of implications of using that like term.

It's what it does is it says that anybody who enters the UK through an irregular route of any kind so not just actually on boats but in the back of a truck or employing any kind of deception in order to enter the UK or for example if the person trafficking them employed deception to get them to enter the UK. Anybody who falls under that category. Why? These are just chiefs officer. They will not they will have their asylum claim deemed inadmissible so they will not be

allowed to apply for refugee protection in the UK at all ever. So the difference between this and the it's predecessor the Nationality and Borders Act which became law just a year ago is that that that act tried to do the same thing but it said okay but if after six months or you know around six months we can't get rid of you then then okay we will actually examine your claim. And also if you're a victim of modern slavery or trafficking we will examine your claim and you know there were certain opt-outs carve-outs it's incredible to me it's genuinely is blowing my mind right the second that I'm talking about the

Nationality and Borders Bill as having had like humanitarian exceptions to it but that's where we're at now. This bill has no exceptions it imposes a duty on the Home Secretary to remove anybody at all regardless you know where they come from what they've suffered whether they're a man woman or a child and to detain them as well for a minimum period no maximum period but a minimum period of 28 days and then to remove them literally anywhere but obviously obviously it links up to the Rwanda scheme and we can talk a bit about that but like overall there isn't

the the systems in place to remove them to many places and it doesn't fortunately yet override the obligation on us not to remove somebody to a country where their life and safety will be at risk so people cannot just simply be returned to countries that they're coming from that where their life and safety will be at risk like Afghanistan Iran Iraq Sudan Eritrea and these are the main countries that people are coming from in the asylum system so they can't be sent back there they some of them maybe could be sent to Rwanda but for the rest of them it leaves them in limbo for the rest of their lives with never

any rights to any kind of status in the UK and even if they were to then have children in the UK those children would never have any right to any kind of status in the UK so it really is pretty much as grim as I can imagine but I say that with the caveat that you know I thought the Nationality and Borders Act was as grim as we would get and they can always always get worse so you know what's the space because what this is really about is so evidently runs counter to many of our international legal obligations it this is about laying the ground for having a big fight about it in the courts and then standing the next

election on the basis of withdrawing from those international human rights mechanisms that protect all of our rights so yeah. And the human rights lawyer in charge of the opposition seems to be somewhat missing in action with the main labor response being you are you promised to stop the boats the boats are still coming how have you not stopped the boats we would stop the boats more effectively essentially surrendering entirely the framing not just the framing but the the goals the methods surrendering whether or not this the this is a moral and just thing to do because we sort of decided

I think that politics is about the exercise of technical skill to achieve a number of set ends that just are given to us from the heavens I suppose that are sort of spring on talk than us from the ground in this country the government is trying to stop the boats in the wrong way we need to go about it in a more sensible way we need to meet these boats half way across the channel and say look Britain is shit why do you want to come here honestly the continent is a lot better they still have roads that function give them a go so so it's a braver man and even then even then right it's a board of course guy on a speed

boat holding up a series of large placards of shit English towns they did they went and they they put up posters this has been something we've been doing for ages and you know we we pay for this to be done by the home office they put up posters in countries of origin and countries of transit saying don't come to the UK it's not that great I promise you they actually do this for real like satires dead I mean at least they're being honest you know what it's like one of the few things the British government does that is honest is saying don't come to the UK it's bad so so this is even even well

Starmer is agreeing with the substance but suggesting essentially that they have been a little bit reckless in its application the response is from braver man is I've presented and we voted on measures to detain and swiftly remove illegal migrants and this weekend I met with refugees who have been successfully resettled in Rwanda and seen the accommodation people will be using what has the Labour Party done with a shadow home secretary has gone on Twitter she's very good at using Twitter and this is at the same time of course as again government friendly newspapers I believe this was the mail said that

Starmer was instrumental in keeping what they called foreign criminals which were actually again windrush deportees who had been deported to their deaths in Jamaica from probably some shit they did when they were 18 I don't know or just all just were like accused of when they're writing this being you know the 70s or the 80s how the fuck do you know what they said is that he kept foreign criminals in the country and can't be trusted to get them out so all of this agreeing with the framing all of it all of this abrogate ab abdication of responsibility to oppose oppose on moral grounds to be somehow involved

in organizing against the fact that they are doing this is basically coming to exactly the same end exactly the same end as it would have been if he actually did any of those things if the result from the papers from the Tory party from the people he is trying to very cleverly steal a march on by agreeing with them before they can make castigate him for not doing it the same fucking shit is happening the same response is happening yeah I mean I think we have like a direct example this is one of those relatively rare examples in life where you have a direct example of exactly this same fight happening one year ago and

and labors failure to take a moral stance and to defend the right that we have in this country and around the world and that we've had for 70 years that anybody can come to us and say I'm a refugee any protection and that we will give them a fair and individual assessment of that claim right that that right which necessarily happens by people entering the country sometimes through irregular means was not defended last time and that has completely left the ground open now for that right to be essentially extinguished in this country I mean I say essentially to be completely it was essentially last time this time

it will be completely extinguished in this country because that fundamental right for anybody to come here and say I need asylum is something that that that Labour failed to defend and and that many advocates actually you know against the bill last time also failed to take us down on that basis and what's happened under this bill is that you know by talking about groups that are hated by society so that's foreign criminals by talking about young men by talking about Albanians what the government is actually doing is introducing powers that discriminate absolutely like not at all just

simply on a completely blanket basis deny the right to seek protection to anybody at all which just goes to show like please can this be the lesson for once and for all time that we should never try to equivocate on these moral values we should never accept that maybe the humanity of a young man from Albania is less so than of you know a child who comes from I don't know Sudan Ukraine better example right we should never give ground on that because when we gave ground and last time what happens is absolutely clear which is that they will sweep away all of our rights and once again I say you

know this is about having a fight about leaving the the European Court on Human Rights at the next election and those rights that are protected under that is not just the rights of refugees is of all of us and this is a project that's been deliberately pursued and it proves that we must stand ground for every single human right to human rights I mean it seems so basic and yet the human rights lawyer leading the Labour Party doesn't seem to have got the memo doesn't seem to have learnt the lesson and and obviously you know the government is at fault here and the government is the key antagonist here but there has

been a failure I think across the board in terms of framing the argument and and presenting this issue you know this isn't about small boats this is about the UK this is about what happens here this is about anybody who enters the country through a vast range of different means being trapped here in limbo having the same thing that happens to the Windrush generation happen to them being subject to the hostile environment having no right to work legally you know most of these people will stay in that situation for their entire lives they will be with no status in our communities for their

entire lives and obviously they will be subject to massive exploitation obviously this will be fuel for criminality across the country like work exploitation for anybody who doesn't have the right to work will be massively increased this is already a huge problem in the country you want to talk about so I know I was gonna say I was gonna say I think this is probably a good time to bring up one of the provisions of this bill which says we will deprive people who are coming here regularly of access to our world-leading modern slavery support system so essentially as you say about

making diminishing human rights for all of us basically implicitly saying okay we used to think that all slavery was bad now we are only willing to say some slavery is bad and as soon as you lose that universal then it becomes a negotiation of which slavery is bad they say anyone illegally entering the UK will be prevented from accessing the UK's world-leading modern slavery support or abusing these laws to block their removal modern slavery support is such a funny term as they are like calling a helpline and being like I'm having trouble with my non-slavery like the world-leading like modern

slavery is not that world-leading and you know we're still managing to try and exclude people from it I mean every smuggler and every trafficker must vote Tory I mean that's absolutely guaranteed this is I mean a fog horn to anybody who wishes to exploit and enslave people that hey if they're foreign then go ahead we will never protect them they're literally saying we will never protect the victims of slavery if they if you bring them to this country if you bring them to this country through deception they don't need to have anything to do with it they can be that you know absurdly

vulnerable example of a person like it could be a six-year-old little girl and if their trafficker brings them to the country through deception they will never be able to benefit from protections against slavery I mean that is that is the level we are talking about there's no hyperbole in what I just said that is what we're talking about doing and all in the name again of the dehumanization of a bunch of like you know a 25-year-old Albanian men and that's the ground we seated. And what we talk about as well right the other side of this right there's

what happens when you come in but either you all I think it's always important to remember is why why coming in via an irregular route is so common is partly to do with just and I sort of bring this up sort of repeatedly it's partly to do with like airline travel regulations if you fly in from let's say if you if you are in I don't know Iraq and you get over to Turkey and you try to board a plane you take a bus to Istanbul and you try to board a plane to the UK they won't take you because if you because if you can't if you don't already have a valid visa which you can't get then it's the airlines responsibility to pay the

cost to fly you somewhere else and so an error because they don't know if your claim is going to be accepted an airline will not fly you if you don't already have a visa basically so if you want to know one of the reasons why people are coming via deception it's because all of those and it's not even like that's not even our rule that's a European level rule like there are a complex of rules some of which are ours and some of which are related to us that prevent anyone from getting here normally yeah and and just on that because it is the basics but I do get asked this it's like you know probably most of your listeners

are what British or American maybe yeah some German yeah so you basically haven't experienced what it is like to get a visa to travel to America or the or Europe or wherever for people from countries where actual refugees flee it's incredibly difficult and we we require visas for every country that might produce a refugee and and where there's a country that we don't require visas so last year we didn't used to have visas requirement for people from El Salvador and then the repression of the government in El Salvador increased and a few hundred people started making their way to the UK and claiming asylum

and we immediately introduced visa requirements on El Salvador so that specifically so that people could no longer safely and legally make the journey to the UK by taking a plane so it is impossible in most cases in all cases as a refugee to apply from outside of the UK for the paperwork that lets you enter the UK on a plane or on a ferry on the Eurostar like anybody else would do it and that is why people take these journeys and ultimately I do you know on a podcast like this like I shy away a little bit from saying like well the answer is say fruits like yeah sure the answer is say fruits but only on a kind of

like big scale right so sure we should introduce travel documents where people who are in northern France could apply on the basis that they would then enter the UK for the purpose of seeking asylum and enter our asylum system but ultimately any of these peace and health solutions will always leave somebody out and ultimately that is brings us back to the fact that we really do need to defend the principle that regardless of how you came to the UK you need to be able to apply for asylum and once you are established here and you have if you have family members here if you have connections here and that should be the

basis for the right to build your life here without being subject to these incredibly draconian policies in the hostile environment. What's really depressing to me is there is a strong liberal case for this and not only is there a strong liberal case for this but it's one that we have seen be made successfully. Angela Merkel did the big you know sort of like Schaffen wir das sort of like cultural shift in Germany. Germany took a shitload of refugees and as much as you know like blogs and

people might like cry about it it's been tremendously successful and it has helped a lot of people. German children are being exposed to flavour. Yeah for the first time and like you would think maybe that this would be a place where a lifelong human rights lawyer might be interested to show some leadership and maybe sort of like try to drive public opinion instead of being led by it but you know Keir Starmer is a coward and you know perfectly happy to sort of like concede that sort of that front to racism.

Well he's busy with the great scourge of life in the UK which is of course smelling weed on the street. Yes. We'll talk about that in the crime episode. And I think it also bears mentioning not only have we seen robust opposition to this succeed elsewhere and a sort of much more open and welcoming policy towards refugees specifically immigrants generally. Not just like elsewhere but like in lots of places and those countries have

benefited from it. This is like something which will like again this is an argument that I hate making right because the argument is the liberal case. Yeah it is the liberal case that like this will help our shitty economy right that like there are a bunch of people who want to come to this country and like live and work and spend money and make money and like all of that shit that shouldn't be the reason why we like allow or even encourage them to come here but it is also a benefit to us and like no one makes this case with like

any sort of degree of influence and it's infuriating. I actually like I actually like the potholes and I like this shit puddles and everything. So and you know and also if you make the country better then what are you going to do with all those posters saying the UK shit. That's true you have to take them down before. There's a lot of work. So I don't want to waste that money retrospectively.

I was doing a video with a refugee action the other week and was met a bunch of refugees and we were talking about how like just all the ones who are sitting in the asylum system aren't allowed to work and how they've been the one of the campaigns that they're doing is about allowing people who are in the asylum system to work and they said that kind of going back to what you were saying Alice like a surprising number of really right wing Tory MPs agreed to support this motion on the basis that asylum seekers are a burden on the taxpayer and so it was the weird it was like the weirdest like horseshoe

meme of like asylum seekers do actually want to work and actually you can sort of make a right wing argument for allowing them to work even though that isn't the reason why you want to allow them to work. Yeah I mean I obviously I mean I do support that campaign but I would argue and sorry to be nitpicky about this. This is just how I am I'm such a dick. You don't have to give asylum seekers the right to work if you give them a decision within a couple of months on that claim and then you know the

people who really need the right to work are the people who have been living here long term undocumented right. They're the people who are actually working in massive exploitation you know we were talking about exploited migrant workers with delivery and that kind of thing you know often we're talking about undocumented workers in those circumstances people who have no recourse to you know the very meager protections that exist for workers from exploitation in this country you know you report being exploited as an undocumented worker and you're the

one who's going to be locked up not your employer in fact your employer might get like a bribe in order to turn you in. So the people who need the right to work will be the vast way that number of people who are undocumented in this country is going to be massively increased by if this bill comes into effect and it will because look at us and those are the people who really need the right to work. I mean yes I mean obviously when you have a situation as you have now where people spend on average over a year waiting for an asylum claim and that's

why they're holed up in these hotels and they don't have the right to work that's absurd and those people should be given the right to work but the only reason why they would ever need it is because the system is so stupid and such a failure. But this also goes back to one of the things I was saying earlier right we've seen we've seen these sort of more humane policies to do with refugees and asylum seekers work well elsewhere and we have seen when there is opposition to it those self-same policies to demonize and exclude and exploit and so on

refugees and asylum seekers eat fucking shit all they have to be is opposed and so if you want to think of this in terms of party politics which I think we're conditioned to because of our media environment and because of the way that our institutions are set up they have sort of monopolized quite a bit of this power and excluded people from bottom-up participation so why wouldn't you but at this point this is why if you want to say who is the greatest enemy to progress or who's the greatest enemy to this being a humane and human place to live a place you would a place that you know you would be proud to be

associated with and so on and so on the greatest obstacle at this point is the people who are sitting on the button that says oppose this and refusing to press it for reasons of triangulation for the reasons that they believe that these beliefs their beliefs about these beliefs are that they emerge naturally that they come from the fellow feeling of co-nationalists and that they are not crucially the result of a campaign that is now demanding further satisfaction they do not and cannot see the ratchet. Yeah and I think that ultimately unconvincing as well to argue that you know

by tinkering around the edges and by a different kind of police patrol in France you're actually going to solve this issue the problem is is that you know the Tories have gone big and bold now with their suggestions this won't solve the issue but it will fundamentally change the picture right and what Labour's response is is completely lacking in any meaningful like getting to grips with what this problem actually looks like of you know look at it longer term people are not stupid they know that migration is not going to stop you look at like the climate catastrophes that are displacing more and more communities

worldwide you know it's this week we had that report that largely went ignored from the IPCC talking about how like you know we're basically not on track to even reach 1.5 degrees of warming this is going to cause massive displacement like people are always going to move and and that's you know that's out of being forced by climate catastrophe and instability and oppression but it's also just because that's what humans do and it's actually as we were saying before a positive for almost everybody involved right it's a wonderful thing that you know it's just a basic human thing that people will always move and

we need to have responses from the other side of politics that actually get to grips with it with a world of mobility and how can we make that look like something that works for us for our communities and works for the people who are on the move as well and works for other countries and takes into account the basic reality that other countries are real countries which seems to be lacking in this discussion entirely so on the one hand yeah you have this extreme like absolutely horrendous horrific extremism but is being matched by a sort of wishy-washy will pretend the issue away and you know and people

are not convinced by it it's ultimately not convincing that Starmas deal with Macron is going to actually fix this issue in a way that you know Sunax couldn't it's it's got to be a bigger more ambitious and more brave political idea that talks about how we actually manage mobility in a world where people will always move well all I'll say is we tried that once but but this goes back to what you were saying about the ECHR as well right and you know with that at the moment right the next election looks like it's going to return a Labour Party a Labour government more or less by default with a bath

party margin and by some point and a margin not seen since the Iraq war and if you know if you sort of do again commit the ultimate sin in Britain and remember a few years ago you'll remember that a fractious right a fractious Tory party and fractious right wing was united by a popular in-press demand to leave a super national institution which as you say this is going to create and so the only back control again and so yeah we're going to take it back take back control again take it harder the only thing you control the only thing that's different right is that it's just a different

institution and the only thing that's going to stop in my view unless again some other very unexpected thing happens but if things continue as they are the Labour Party by sheer default by not being the people that fucked up your mortgage or whatever that there's the only thing it's going to stop them from returning a bath party margin is going to be if the right unites around a take back control narrative on leaving a super national institution which they're preparing the ground for now and Starmer seems to be walking the fuck into it is funny though to imagine that because they're going to have to

start like I mean no one really ever thought about like these kind of agreements before before politics got insane whereas like the EU was always something that people did bang on about a bit but you can imagine like increasingly they're going to have to start leaving more and more niche like organizer like we're going to take back control from scientific international with we're getting rid of the kilogram we're going back to the fucking furlong the fathom the pound white sick of being bossed around by the world intellectual property office isn't it because the arguments that I have had

over the last few years and you're right that like this hasn't been on the radar that much but where people have been arguing that we should be withdrawing from international human rights treaties is on the basis like with the UK we invented the concept of human rights yeah okay I'm quoting right and and so we don't need these super national bodies to tell us what to do we can enforce human rights ourselves much better and then you come to the point where we're actually going to you know have the fight about leaving them and it is entirely on the basis that we want to take away rights under those conventions

so it's a very interesting flip here from having been like oh we don't need this international body to tell us how to enforce human rights we enforce human rights better than anybody to being like no no no we want to remove human rights from this despised minority group and therefore we have to leave these conventions well all I can say is in 20 years I'm really looking forward to Suella Braverman's podcast with I don't know Nigella Lawson Rory Stewart to whoever yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah she's doing a podcast with a boat and that's saying that differences

it's saying oh I wish that all had never happened but I think that probably about does us for today it seems like a good place is any to end so Zoe I want to thank you very much for coming on and bringing all of this knowledge today thank you very much for having me as always and I want a chilling reminder of things to come sorry for being the harbinger of doom as always I love to harbing yeah thank you for reminding us that things might be bad now but they could

and probably will be worse oh they always can be worth yeah that's the tf promise baby every episode that's what we deliver for you so again thank you very much for listening don't forget there's a patreon five dollars a month you can subscribe to it Milo has various dates in Australia you can find them on his website please the Melbourne comedy festival the 29th of March to the 23rd of April I have not sold many advanced tickets I can't stress enough how expensive this trip is please

he's waking up at five in the morning to podcast for all you people that's right so otherwise there's the there's the twitch stream it's nine to eleven on Mondays and Thursdays there is there's other things you know the stuff theme song here we go by listen to it often listen to it on Spotify listen to it early listen to it often and we will see you on the bonus episode bye everyone bye bye