TRASHFUTURE - Coal Mine Canary Story Hour

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

This week, we're talking the Metaverse, we're talking FB's valuation plummeting because iOS lets you improve your digital privacy by 1%, and we're talking the recent furore with drag queen story hours and how American fascists and British transphobes have been coalescing and continue to do so. If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ 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 *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Melbourne https://tccinc.sales.ticketsearch.com/sales/salesevent/75729 and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-tickets-389786119777). Canberra and Sydney links are coming soon! *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome to this free episode of TF. It is zero, it's the free one. That's right. We are, we've decided to go from inbox zero to Milo zero. So it's just Riley Alice and Hussain. I'm deputized to do the annoying stuff because otherwise it would just be like a podcast that's quite insightful and you need someone on here to do the annoying jokes. And so, you know, that's that's what I'm here for. Absolutely. It is it is those three is the three of us. Milo will be back next week or not next week. He'll be back this week and you'll see him soon. He's he's but he's doing well. He's being treated well by his captains. The air conditioning is on. The window is open and he's listening to his favorite song

in his beloved car. No, so look, we're all so the three of us are here. We're no longer recording on Zencaster. We have now received a generous stipend from the Meta Corporation to hold all of our podcast recordings in of the metaverse. That's right. That's right. We're all wearing business casual up top and none of our legs exist. That's right. Business casual on the top just fully nude, but it's not even rendered. So just torsos, floating in space, talking to each other. What are just a couple of crazy torsos trying to trying to make it in the world. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if Alice and I both seen this. I don't know if you have who's saying the meta now the only major tech company currently above its IPO price, which also to be

clear, not by much is that stock has been hemorrhaging, which is great. I mean, that's I mean, the great thing is like Twitter is now below it. So if you bought Twitter when it first were able to buy Twitter, you would not and you just held it. You would have now lost money because they've also never paid a dividend. You would have lost money buying like these big budget techs. As you should have done, this is your punishment for making the world appreciably worse for bringing Twitter into being and torturing hundreds of thousands of souls in eternal purgatory. What you deserve is to lose a small amount of money. It's kind of embarrassing as well. I don't know. I don't know if it'd be like one of those things I would like say in public

or like to impress a girl or something like that. I sort of just keep that to myself. Yeah. Imagine being like, oh, I'm a Twitter stockholder. Come on. I just I met Jack Dorsey and I really believed in his vision, especially when like the small family of birds that have been living in his beard talk to me. I met him at a retreat that where you hallucinate for nine days and shit yourself. Yeah. So the but one of the reasons right that meta is pushing so fucking hard on this metaverse stuff, because you notice they've also dropped a lot of the crypto things from it. It's now just sort of Microsoft Teams or Zoom. But like, yeah, yeah, it's PlayStation Home again. Yeah. It's it's fucking Habbo hotel.

It's it's a net. It's a like social space, I guess, where you have a little avatar. Well, no, that's it. That's all it is. And they have spent two point something billion dollars on this. Why not? And now and now it's cool. Like like Mark Zuckerberg, a man, a man with interest and more importantly, a man with organs is able to like hang out with warm, pulsating human skin, just like you and me. The one thing you can say about him is that his brain sends electrical signals and they're interpreted by his nerve endings. Boy, is that just like a normal guy. Noted, noted bipedal, Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So just like talking to, you know, like horrible

patents while looking at a JPEG of space, being like, wow, the future. What's really funny, though, is that so much of this is happening at my personal opinion, based just on on sort of getting a read of what the company is like, is that, as you know, Facebook is essentially provide services to ad agencies. Like that's mostly what they do, right? Is just user targeting to make, to make Don Draper obsolete. Your grandma racists. But also to make Don Draper obsolete. So you don't have to pay him to, you know, come up with. Because previously, if you wanted, if you wanted to make someone's grandma believe in QAnon, you had to like do a TV ad and a print ad and the print ad had to have very clever copy.

And that was all done by Sterling Cooper, Draper Price. Now, now that's just all handled through Facebook. So. Although the thing that's changed, right? The thing that sort of threatens Facebook's entire business model, which again, just very fun, like someone should teach these people like Porter's Five Forces is the thing that's threatened their entire business model is an iOS update that basically allows you to like click a setting that opts you out of ad tracking. Right. Yeah. And this, and this was like the sort of C mine that struck the good ship Facebook and has just like absolutely destroyed a great deal of its profitability overnight.

Ten billion is the number I saw. Yeah, it was something like 16 or maybe there's something else, but it was just like this kind of massive, uh, uh, like cut to its like stock price as well, right? Yeah. Because it was absolutely. You know how we joke about the racism button or the like, uh, the Brexit lever, what there literally is, is there is a Facebook profitability switch, but it's in the settings of Safari. Yeah. So all we have to do is it's, it's this incredible, what we've sort of done is they have massively over designed this whole thing so much in order to serve such a tenuous

purpose that has to be so involved in everything that like they've accidentally designed a death star kill switch into it that you can just, you can just go ahead and push it. You're listening to this on an iPhone. While listening to this, you can go ahead and reduce Facebook's revenue by a little bit if you wanted to. I think we should get that for more companies. It's not even like, don't like what this functionally does isn't don't serve me ads because they'll still serve you ads. It's not, uh, don't personalize those ads to me. It's literally just do not carry like all the shit that you have about me from one website over to another website. And that's the thing that has been enough to just completely decimate.

Yeah, because, yeah, because like Facebook's like, I had to go on Facebook like a couple of weeks ago because I have an uncle who just like only posts on there for some reason. The only reason anyone goes on Facebook is you have an uncle you have to communicate with. If you have an uncle or a grandparent, you probably have a Facebook account that like exists primarily just to like respond to like their messages. I had to go on there like recently to respond to my uncle sending me a birthday message. And I just like, I spent like a few minutes on there and not only did that like those few minutes really just feel like dystopic in a way that scrolling through your Twitter timeline, like it makes scrolling through your Twitter timeline

feel like, you know, feel like walking through like a garden of heaven. Just because of like how chaotic it is. And like, it's because it's like this weird mixture of like groups that you kind of followed when you were younger and suddenly because of like algorithmic changes and because of the way that they're sort of gaming algorithms, like they just kind of like come up, but they keep feeding you like all this stuff that you're like, not really that interested in. And maybe you can trace it back to an interest you had like a long time ago, but now it's something completely different. And because you're like so inundated with these ads that like the whole social experience of it, you know, even in its most minimal form of like,

I need to respond to my uncle or I've decided to like stalk the girl I had a crush on in like 2006 or whatever. You know, not saying that's me. I think these people are stuck by looking at the profile, not stuck in any kind of criminal sense. You remind me you're under arrest. Yeah, I'm a very dedicated wife guy. So I'm just saying this in very hypothetical terms. But you can't even do that. Like it disrupts the whole thing. It's like a very, it's a really weird experience just to be on that website. And like whenever I've seen massive stuff, which to be clear, like when they first released it, they kind of like released it on the basis that like, yeah, we know our platform kind of sucks. But like the reason why we haven't done like,

you know, sleek updates to is because actually we think that the future is virtual reality, web free crypto and so on. But the VR stuff doesn't really seem to solve or like even solve the problems that it has itself like pointed out. I don't know. Of course not. Why would you expect it to solve a problem in this day and age? Yeah, if there's anything we've learned on this podcast. But the other, I think like that's a good question to raise, right, is what was this all meant to do, especially now that we can see like the music stopped a little while ago, and we've been able to see who is and who is not able to sit down. The lights came on, we can see you's not wearing pants. No, no one can sit down because in the mess of us,

no one has legs. That's true. That's right. Yeah, that's true. They were fighting the musical chairs analogy. So what happened is, right, it's that Facebook fundamentally is a boom time business. It only makes it because all they're really doing is attempting to, all they can really do is respond to induced demand by offering a kind of, I'm not going to say snake oil, but let's just say a difficult to prove if it actually does anything advertising, right? Yeah, it's sort of like, is the economy good? If yes, please give me the company that lets you communicate with that one uncle, $10 trillion. Yeah, the uncle company. What we're doing is we're inserting programmatic ads into

the UK and America's valuable uncle communication space. But rotating a sort of metaverse uncle in my mind. That's the uncle's hate having legs. Yeah, the thing no one understands about Facebook, about matters, this is primarily uncle driven. But like the thing is, right, and this is mostly happening in the American Fed as well, is there's sort of, the ground is being laid for a recession to be triggered by through rate raises. So it's so cool that that's a thing that, again, they can just turn on and off. Well, and I thought this was some sort of like abstract economic force. Like,

no one can agree on what a recession is. It just happens due to mysterious laws of nature. And now it turns out that the central planners that we're not supposed to have can just give press conferences. They're like, yeah, we're kind of feeling like it might be time for us to start a recession. You know, when it's like, I don't know, it's a Tuesday. Time to go back to the old me. And by the old me, I mean 1929. Or any of the or 2008 or all the other times that has definitely worked for the better. I mean, if you think like the only time sort of one of these things really did work for the better was when there was massive worker organization that was able to like basically hold a flip lock

to FDR's head metaphorically. It is great if you're an accelerationist, which is something that we keep talking about on this on this broadcast, because like so many of the people operating these levers of power seem to be acting like accelerationists. And to me, going on TV and being like, as you know, guy in charge of all the money, I will be turning the money off to start a recession. That to me reads like someone who has been deep cover for 40 years, begging for the chance to start a general strike. And I love that for them. That's basically like like Powell's just like a Maoist third worldist who's just getting ready to collapse the American empire. So basically, and he got ratioed on Twitter when he said he

wanted to become a banker, if you can imagine that, but you know, trust the process, trust the plan. That's right. So basically, right, the way that this works, putting it back on the context of Facebook is that Facebook is even though it came from the sort of the boom years of sort of late Bush, right? Fundamentally, its business is a post 2008 sort of like cheap money, infinite growth forever driven business, if only because it is and massively it is until recently, it was a sort of advertising firm that was valued at gigantic multiples of earnings. And so what happened, what happens and as we get closer to a recession, I mean, people sort of already been panicking out of stuff like snap Twitter, you know, other other sort of various competitors in what is

essentially the digital advertising space. What has happened is these have sort of gone lower and lower and lower because there's feel less and less of food buying. Like, I don't know if you if I saw this headline, because I tend to look if in order to be able to talk about the economy, I tend to read a lot of really specific publications, like I read a lot of publications about that's talk about who's ordering what at McDonald's. It's like fast. This is the balance of labor on this podcast is you're the one who reads the sort of thing about pork futures or whatever. Yeah, that's right. And one of the things that you read, you read the sort of collected works of the two evil guys from trading places,

and then you just make a little note that's like, interesting, going to make some jokes about this. That's right. That's that's the formula, baby. Copyright can't do it. So it seems a very interesting science that Mark Zuckerberg is going to turn Dan Ackroyd into Eddie Murphy and vice versa. Yeah, with the metaverse. I've turned Dan Ackroyd into Eddie Murphy and I needed to use their legs in order to power the transformation. So one of the things that's happening in America is even with the sort of like very good job market is that rising prices and inflation have meant that, for example, McDonald's is noting a gigantic return to its value menu items. They're no longer

really selling combos. They're not selling premium items at McDonald's sort of all across America. And burglar strikes again. That's right. Americans are no longer asking for the chicken Big Mac please meal. Instead, they're asking for the policy Big Mac please meal. Yeah, they're at America. Americans have rediscovered the make is make a normal double cheeseburger like a Big Mac. Also, you legitimately did just do the explaining recession to Americans. Imagine a burger. What if it was a smaller burger? What if you couldn't get the air land and see anymore? Yeah, that's why that's that's what we're we're look the air land and see that's like a 2013, you know, infinite growth, infinite VC burger,

right? So sort of Obama doing a doing a long speech about how Americans should be able to order from the secret menu. For too long, Americans have been stuck to the value menu. No, right. So, so the thing is, is that also Powell even himself said, this is a bone chilling quote, we're seeing lower food consumption across the board. I mean, listen, you have an obesity crisis on the one hand, you have a starvation crisis on the other hand, you know, balances out perfectly. And the great thing is bed night neither of them are related to each other, completely independent events. Exactly. So and so with this environment, right, there is this desire to trigger a recession, largely because the idea is right, the theory is

if we if we go through the pain of recession now, then we won't have worse pain of uncontrollable price rises later. The problem is the last time we did that, a lot of prices just stubbornly rose when the answer to the recession was was to make money free. So I don't yeah, because economics is a fake science and that they walk around and act as if they're real scientists, although their models have no bearing in reality. So this is essentially like being treated for plague by the guy in the like beak mask who's like, listen, it's going to suck really bad when I insert this poultice into your anus. But have you considered that it's going to burn out all of the plague germs? And then we wouldn't say germs because I have a germ theory of medicine

is going to burn out all of the miasma. And then it doesn't because that's not how plague works, but you also then have plague and the poultice full of herbs in your anus. Look, God told me that he's going to yell at the demons through this herb poultice and we're going to put it in your anus. My name is Jerome Powell and this is my beak mask. This is trigger a recession. I mean, to be fair, to be fair, the sort of like fed suit with the like little American flaglip help in and the plague doctor mask would go hard as a combination. That's right. Well, I guess if anyone wants to draw that for us, yeah, please draw draw us as as Fed bankers wearing the do you see any plague doctors? Yeah. So the thing is right. A lot of

this is based on you say like the models don't work out. You're again sort of much closer to specifically right than you might guess. Like they don't just work in a very not working a very diffuse sense. But in this case, all of this sort of essentially trigger a recession on purpose to keep the economy from getting worse later is based on the Phillips curve, which only ever worked in the 70s. That worked one time and it never worked. Yeah, like chest hair, you know, or like big gold medallions. It's like it was in for a bit, but now you just can't do it anymore. Yeah, it's it's where they tried to do like a Paul Thomas Anderson boogie nights thing and they tried to bring back sort of 70s, 70s aesthetics. Yeah, but like that's that's the idea,

right? Is this is that is that this one model was the thing and it works one time. Economics is is fake. Incidentally, you know, the Nobel prize in economics isn't a Nobel prize. Like genuinely, it's not part of the Nobel request. It's something the Swedish central bank just insisted on putting his name on anyway. So, you know, parasites on real sciences scum. I mean, with I don't know why I'm so mad about that, but I really am. You can't call it a Nobel prize. Nobel Laureate in economics fuck off. Get out of here. And I believe I mean, if you want to talk about sort of economics being a fake science used to justify sort of enormous amounts of you might say just intentional infliction of pain on ordinary

people by I guess basically people who have to be understood as religiously committed to causing that pain is I can't remember goals, vampires, you know, things of this nature. Of course, people of this nature. Rishi Sunak is still citing still citing Reinhardt Rogoff a disproven paper to talk about why we need to reduce the national debt as a matter of urgency and so must like cut everything charged from the NHS, all that stuff literally disproven a decade ago. Yeah, he's playing. He's playing the heads. It's it's almost it almost to me. It feels like a kind of like religious incantation, right? Because George Osborne did it before first doing the round of austerity that sort of he was

responsible for in the coalition is he came up talked about this paper Reinhardt Rogoff. It was again this which basically just says that your national debt and your GDP have to be at a certain ratio or else like you're going to be trapped in a period of low growth, which I got a paper and we've a paper we've discussed before that like probably one of the academic papers in the field of economics with the biggest body counts, which is quite something. And like and just to see it come back again, just as an incantation that like a British Chancellor will say before inventing a new way to make life in this country totally unlivable, it's you know, it's quite quite something. I don't I don't like it. I'm not fond of it

really. But so like the other thing right is that this concept of stagflation, which is what we're in right now, right? Which is just when the economy doesn't grow, but there is considerable inflation, right? Because the traditional view of inflation, the one that the Phillips curve is supposed to describe suggests that like inflation happens when there is too much demand. People are borrowing too much money starting too many businesses. The economy is hot. Is that how you refer to it? Right? Yeah, people are grinding. They're grinding too much. Yeah, there is there is a lot wrong. And so and so they say, okay, well, that means we need to do like raise interest rates to increase the cost of borrowing to cool off economic activity. So

prices don't rise like crazy. And then they had to invent this concept stagflation, which is well, hang on a second. What if what if there's lots of inflation in the economy is not growing and that model of inflation, the sort of raise rates model of inflation can't really explain it. But that just because it's because it's because it's cargo cold shit. The stuff that you're measuring has no relation to what you're doing. And so you're just like, well, that doesn't explain it. So I guess I'm going to have to build a separate different control tower out of wood. Yeah, where I can that where I've also built a little button that says cause recession and it clicks and everything. Yeah. Yeah. No, I've got a splinter in my finger from the cause recession

button. And you know, like it just means it goes back to this thing that I think is super important to remember anytime you think about the economy, anytime you think about the production of goods is just to remember that that the price rises can come from increases in profit increases in labor costs and increases in non labor costs and all political activity in the last like, I don't know, I want you could say last 30 years, last 10 years, last 200 years, wherever you want to start counting has been about making sure that that third one that labor costs don't go up essentially, right? And we'll sort of come back to a great time to have a cost of living crisis. Oh, yeah, absolutely. For for sure. Speaking of the cost of living crisis, of

course, I mean, look, everyone's talking about how the energy bill, energy price cap is going to increase to what like 4,000 pounds a year for the average user to like apocalyptic levels. Blackpilled, Martin Lewis was on TV today, looking looking like very jacked and mad. And I was looking at it, I was like, he's giving depressing news, but like, I appreciate that he's going into his UK emissive my phase now. Yeah, Martin Lewis storming the treasury, appealing to the troops outside and then committing seppuku when they don't when they just look at him like what? Yeah, so but the other thing I actually want to quickly chat about first before we get into that

and all of the sort of associated industrial action around that, right? Because again, like, it's almost like who boy has there been some industrial action and there will be in future. Is that actually another essential service is going to rise massively in price? BT is going to raise the rates of its ordinary broadband package by 53 pounds. Going on the internet, it's bad for you. But basically, you can't exist in society without doing it. So you got to pay for it. Now you got to pay more. Yeah, no website is now free, less free than ever. And also, yeah, five years ago, you used to be able to say this website is free as a joke and sound

really smart. Now you've got to say shit like that every five to 10 minutes. That's the real stagflation. So the other thing is right is I just I'm just trying to remember what was it? What was going to happen if we took away the profit element of this and ran it as a public utility? That would have been communism. So that would have been communism. We would have been wearing identical jumpsuits and rubber boots. All of us would be denouncing each other to the party. There'll be big posters of Jeremy Corbyn everywhere. There'll be big red flags. And, you know, it would have been it would have been intolerable. So, you know, we thankfully, thankfully, we avoided that. Yeah. Thank goodness we avoided a kind of

descent into incredibly expensive and unworkable rickety infrastructure because, you know, that would that would be fucking terrible. You don't even get fucking rubber boots out of it. You try and buy a pair of rubber boots, and they fucking like cost you some absurd amount of money. Yeah, I was very surprised. I had to go to B&Q the other day, and they were like 130 pounds for like the standard issue boots. It's like, that's a lot. You have a bunch of jumpsuit costs these days. Ridiculous. Look, if we're going to do sort of free broadband for all, what are we going to have to do? Like

130 pound pair of boots for everyone, a jumpsuit for everyone, time 60. Just don't even consider it. We're better off with this scenario. My economy is stagflating. Can anyone find out why? Cost of living crisis, 50 quid. Internet, 50 quid. Yeah. Energy, 50 quid. Gigantic pair of Chanel rubber boots for every citizen, 5 trillion quid. It's like, no, I'm not going to spend less on the rubber boots. It's important. I don't want to spend less on them because then I'll just have to replace them later.

I'm saving money. Yeah. Are you familiar with the Vimes theory of Chanel rubber boots? Yeah. But like this is, it's sort of like, people always love to talk about that, that old Soviet joke, right? Which is, no, this isn't the store that doesn't have bread. The store that doesn't have bread is down the street, right? Yeah, sure. It's like, yeah, well, this is absolutely, this isn't the place where you can't get internet. You kept to call the other number to not get internet.

This isn't the place you can't turn on your lights. You have to call the other customer support team to not be able to turn on your lights. I think it's really useful for thinking about these, again, expanding interlocking overlapping crises where the prices of everything are just rocketing upward because there is this manifest inability to do anything about it. It's Mark Fisher's useful concept, I think of market Stalinism, which is the imposition of the market as a kind of market totalitarianism to bore away very silly phrase. And I think that's really the best way to understand it.

Well, if we're talking about Stalinism, would you like to hear another Soviet joke that I think is apposite? Yes, please. Okay, so there's husband and wife. The husband goes out to queue for food because there's food shortages and he queues for seven hours for bread and there's no bread. He queues for seven hours for beets and there's no beets. And in the line, he murmurs something about how communism is bad and two KGB agents grab him and say, you want to be careful, Comrade, you could get shot talking like that.

He just gives up and comes home and his wife says, oh, are they out of bread? And he says, worse, they've run out of bullets. If you want to talk about that, the example of that worked example of that in modern Britain is the Greater Manchester Police bringing back retired detectives because it can't hire anyone. Yeah, we're doing the plot of, what was it, new tricks, the name of that show? That's kind of cute. I like the idea of a bunch of like old guys who felt that they had retired being like, I'm being brought back for one last case. Taking out their tray of old-fashioned rolly cigarettes and their clicky lights. I don't know what the real term is.

We're finally doing something about the policeman look younger crisis in this country by hiring a bunch of 70-year-old detectives. It'll be like, what's that film? Anyway, okay. You just get burgled and all of a sudden your front room is full of guys in camel coats. Yeah, I don't know. Like young police officers who are spending all their time doing pronouns on their phones, they need older police officers to teach them how it was done back in the day. That's true. We're bringing DCI Gene Hunt back from retirement. I feel like what's going to happen is all of the police forces that do this, they're just going to be like all of those young whippersnappers. They are going to learn so many new slurs that

will be on the front page of the BBC in three months. Yeah, for sure. And then the detective in question, what's apt his colleagues with a slur for Malaysians that has not been in general use since 1923. It is unprintable here because it uses one of those characters that is not included in a QWERTY keyboard. Just spontaneously confessing to war crimes they did in Korea in the 50s. Yeah, it's going to be great to have just getting a bunch of police officers now in Greater Manchester who have unexplained ear necklaces. It's pretty cool. So back to the price rises as well. One of the things that this energy price cap is sort of going up and up and up and up. And the thing is, you might ask, what's the use of a cap

if it keeps going up? Well, it would have been up already. But Centrica, the British gas owner, their profits are also quintupled recently. Some of that has been accounting like trickery, but no small part of that has been high energy prices. Don't let anyone dissemble. We're paying them all of that money. Well, the good news is that that's going to trickle down. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, number one, is the guy who... What I actually see mostly when people defend this state of affairs is like, oh, yeah, well, you know what? Most pension funds are in actually invested in these companies. It's like, wow, boy, I'm sure I'm glad that the old of Britain are finally getting a win. Perfect. And they're not. They're not. They're just sort of

paying themselves out of the proceeds of them being robbed because it's like, I can pay my energy bills and then my pension gets a little bit higher, maybe. Yeah. And again, I say, you know, the old doing well is a kind of facetiousness. We have an episode coming up on sort of pension or poverty. But the other thing, right, is that even still, the concentration of wealth and the concentration of investors in a company like Centrica, means that you're fucking, I don't know, five shares in your pension or that you own through BlackRock or whatever. Even if you were going to pay in what you personally get out, you still have to pay the fucking executives. The idea that these things need to be in private ownership,

because otherwise it will create a kind of pensions crisis, is number one, you have to basically strapped a kind of bomb vest to Britain's elderly being like, well, if you deprivatize everything, then you're going to blow up your nan. Plus also, like so much of this money is just going to go offshore. So much of it is just like going into the pockets of people who aren't going to be able to spend it or want to spend it because of the fucking inflation. Yeah, exactly. Like you can't like, if even shit like food, right, that costing more means you're less likely to go out for a meal. That money doesn't go into the restaurant. That restaurant doesn't, you know, steal a lot of it and then pay its workers some. It doesn't like go anywhere.

And you might be wondering what Centrica is doing with all this money. I read their press releases. Centrica says it is very aware of this situation. I'm sure you are. It's conducting a shitload of like money filled pillow fights. Yeah. In between having like, in between firing rolls of 20s out of a mortar, the Centrica said it is, quote, very aware of the impact of soaring bills and the inflationary pressures on customers. It's aware of what's happening. It's listening. It's taking notes. Well, that's what they say is not far from that. I didn't increase your energy bill to 3,850 pounds per month. I sat my white ass down and listened and then also did that. There's some joke and

this about gaslighting and my brain isn't like working right now. So just like pretend that I did a really good joke about gaslighting. Wait, what do you mean? Gaslighting is way more expensive. You're saying you did do a really good joke about gaslighting. Your memory might be fading. So they've said, here's what they're going to do. They are going to invest 100 million pounds in customer service as well as hiring 500 more customer service staff to handle higher call volumes. We're going to hire more people to get cried to on the phone. Yeah, they're going to hire... You know what? I was going to say this is a joke, but I actually can see this happening where you have lots of utility companies and internet

companies and stuff who are like, yeah, we've invested in a bunch of people who are specialists in mental health and they're going to talk you through what's going in your mind right now and how you just need a positive mindset to stay warm and be energized by your ideas. That is 100% going to happen. They're going to get Steven Bartlett. Yeah, basically. It'll be Hustleport. And I was thinking about this actually today in relation to that quote, the Liz Truss quote from a long time ago, where she was talking about delivery freedom fighters and really disvalorizing the idea that having these gig economy jobs

is really, really good and really, really... It's a sign of a healthy economy. And I can really just imagine that under a Liz Truss government, which I think is the most likely outcome of the conservative leadership race, that we will see of a government trying to, at least campaigning, trying to market the idea of having free jobs as being the default that we should all accept. Absolutely. We all have the same 24 hours in the day and we all have the same seven days in the week now at this point. And if you want to talk about the political reaction to all of these massive price rises, it seems like it is my sort of personal theory that at the moment, labor, as we talked about in the last episode,

still ruling out nationalization, still ruling out any kind of major price control. They've said their approach is regulation. They haven't said how they're going to regulate differently or better, of course. But what they have said is, look, we're going to cut that on energy bills. We're going to cut small business rates. And then we're going to buy, make, and build more in Britain. Essentially, we are going to do nothing. Yeah, we're going to do vibes. And we're going to do vibes. And it is my sort of crackpot theory. And I have sort of maybe 15% confidence in this. Enough to place a long shot bet is that the idea that's going to make it

take over is going to come from the Tories just because they're going to be in a position where they do need to actually govern. Much like the COVID furlough, ultimately was pressure put on the Tories by the unions and McDonnell and everything. And I do a little thought experiment, right? Which is, if the Tory policy is suddenly shifts and becomes something that will actually move the needle in some way because they have to, again, not because they want to make the country a better place to live or anything, but as a simple concession to keeping it governable, you know what I mean? And then what will the Labour policy do? Will they sit in where they were and say, no, that we are continuing to be sensible? Or will they claim they were

something slightly more, maybe 2% more generous than the Tories the whole time? And I don't know which one is slimy or being ideologically committed to some nonsense that won't work because you've been unable to extricate yourself from 1997 or just deciding that you have surrendered all of the initiative to the Conservative Party because the Britain keeps voting the Conservative Party in, so what you have to do is be at most like them so they might accidentally vote for you at least a little bit. Or to be sort of so devoted to this or to be purely reacting to the Conservative Party. I don't know which one is more slimy, but I sort of don't know really, I don't know how they're going to react because I know they are going to react. They are completely incapable

of acting, of course. And I mean, if you want to talk about this, I saw this cropping up around the sacking of Sam Terry from the front bench for the temerity of joining a organized labour movement. It was so funny that he had to come and try and triangulate and go on TV afterwards and say, well, I think Keir Starmer was doing the best he can, even though he just fired me. Yeah, again, the absolute, just absolute... The kind of cuck shit that you have to do to stay in the Labour Party. But basically what happened is Sam Terry, who replaced young Michael John Gapes as the MP for Ilford, joined workers on a picket line, made some posts to social media, appeared on the news, was sacked. Again, they didn't... The Labour Party predictably has said,

oh no, no, it's not because he went and associated himself with scary unions, it was because he made up party policy on the fly. And the funny thing is... Rachel Reeves do that. You know what the funny thing was though? You know what the party policy he made up on the fly was, which was that public sector workers should get a real terms pay rise. And the party said, well, here's the thing, you made that up on the fly because, well, we haven't committed... They have committed to not letting wages fall, but they haven't committed to increases in line with inflation. Which is therefore letting wages fall. It's like they're trying to negotiate with the idea that a number that's different from another number has to either be bigger or smaller.

It's like, maybe there's a third kind of relationship it can have. So they're trying to negotiate with themselves, which is even funnier. It's like, well, I'm willing to compromise on nothing, but on the other hand, you have to give me something here, so let's do nothing. It's like, oh yes, okay, look, that number is bigger than that one, that number is smaller than that one. What if we added imaginary numbers into the mix? Would you be willing to get a root i pay raise or a reduction indeed? It's like we talked a little bit about the weasel words, hedge language, and middle managerism of labor. And I think it is perfectly summed up by saying, well, no,

we committed to no lowering in pay, but we didn't commit to raising pay enough that it wouldn't be lowered de facto, as though that's fucking meaningful. Great. Fantastic. I feel like my brain is leaking out of my ears. And that, you know what? That's their crossfit. That's the idea. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This is the thing, isn't it? Because again, we spoke about this on the last episode, I believe, but just like anyone who's sort of generally been keeping tabs on this stuff,

which is like the best faith reading that you could do at the moment is to basically kind of say that like Kirstar Moe, like all the labor party is so kind of terrified of like the past. And by the past, I sort of mean like the 2010 election when the Tories like ran the austerity playbook the first time. And it was like extremely successful in terms of like framing the country at the time and how they sort of considered the economy bearing in mind. But like the, the Tories still kind of like blamed immigrants. They blame poor people. They blamed like, you know, the whole like welfare scrounger thing was very much like a headline, a very common headline at that time. But the idea that they had basically framed the very office out, you know,

the state has been so charitable to people who didn't deserve it, that we now need to sort of like cut back on everyone needs to sacrifice for the good of the economy, because the economy is like a household, you know, a household budget or whatever. And, you know, it was incredibly successful as a marketing strategy in 2010. I don't think that necessarily applies now. I definitely don't think that like even Tories kind of kind of, you know, are sort of criticizing Rishi Sunak for basically playing that playbook again. But for whatever reason, the labor party is so terrified that like it will decimate them. And I guess like at the same time, also believing that like in, in, in purging like what's left of like anyone left in the party,

they also have to purge any idea that they're entertaining their policies, regardless of like how, regardless of like how effective or useful they might be. So as a result, you then have this like weird situation where the labor party are kind of like proposing things that they sort of no don't work, but they are afraid of like obsessing, you know, the Essex Basis who are going to be affected by like all this shit happening in the same way that everyone else is. And, but are also kind of really hostile to anyone who is pointing this out. I don't know. I guess it's like, we spoke about this in the last episode about how it's just like for them, it's all just vibes at this point. And there's something we didn't talk about in the last episode though, right?

Which is let's take, let's take this idea on its own terms, right? This household, this country's a household budget thing. You need growth before you, growth in the economy, before you can tax it, so you can spend on stuff. We know this bullshit, but let's just pretend. But while facing this level of a cost of living crisis, if you assume that growth has to come from economic activity, but if basically the power companies are sitting on an enormous amount of, on an enormous sort of cost increase in other economic activities, then like, okay, well, hang on. Don't we need people to be going to the shops? Don't we need people to be buying cars? Don't you need to be making cars? No, no, no. We evolved past that sort of thing in the

80s. Now, the economy is primarily about being on the computer. Well, now, yes. Well, that, yeah, you should do, yeah, the Labour Party's radical policy will be everyone should start a podcast, which I say like, yeah, base, base kiss. Yeah, we are warriors by having like multiple podcasts each. We're atlas holding up the UK on our shoulders by having multiple podcasts. Because, because all of our, all of our podcast money from the patrons like trickles down, it reenters the economy because, because Riley spends it on, I don't know, wine and cheese. Yeah. And I recently bought like a pair of boots. So that I'm thinking about buying a pair of boots. So next month, the economy is going to benefit from the purchase of one pair of sweet boots.

That's how you win the Nobel Prize in economics. You save the economy by buying a very expensive pair of boots. I'm going to make a sort of like very Nobel looking graph. It's like inflation on one axis, number of boots purchased on the other axis. By one, by Alice, by one person. Yeah. When it goes up by one, inflation drops to zero. I make a competing graph where on the x-axis, it says inflation and on the y-axis, it says when, when you're, when, when you're not. Yeah. Exactly. We're not down. Exactly. I mean, that money goes to, you know, international space station support technicians, repair people, astronauts, to replace the astronauts who have been killed, people who have to maintain the rockets to put the astronauts in

space. When you think about it, this is really a sort of like, it's an act with deep economic repercussion. But I want to like go back to this thing, right? This is, because the problem is, is that by allowing these, these processes to occur. I mean, also, I think I looked at a, a chart breaking down Britain's GDP. We are, this was not going to surprise any of you. You on with me or you listening at home is that we have by far the highest amount of rent extraction as a portion of GDP. I think it's like, I seem to remember it being about 17%. This is like a half remembered figure. Don't, I mean, do quote it at me because I'm interested remembering, but I'm going to check between now and when this comes out. And, and this is,

I think, another way of all of these privatized utilities are just other ways of extracting rents. And what rents do is essentially depress other economic activity. And so the idea that you need to, you know, foster growth growth growth in order to, you know, have a society that, you know, functions. Well, at the same time, doing nothing about the kind of what I would refer to as kind of a, an expanding multi-sector crisis in rentierism means that you don't even believe your own fucking policy. Yeah, but also like it's, you know, even the household debt thing like kind of falls flat on its own terms when you bear in most of like, there was a news story that came out today at the time of recording in which like, often the countries like energy

regulator was like said, but oh yeah, like we know that this is going to be a catastrophe and we are looking at like solutions to like mitigate or like minimize the damage. But then they sort of admit it that in order to do this, like it will kind of increase consumer debt as like a result of that, which is to basically say that like, it will kind of get people into like the solution that is being proposed. And the one that comes through like the labor parties, labor parties like strategy, which is like, we'll just regulate them or we'll use these regulating bodies more is we're just going to put more people into different forms of debt, right? And that will be like a pro-growth policy that will also solve this problem. So we don't really need to think

about anything else, not least like, you know, and definitely not anything that like, you know, needs to structurally change in the long term to prevent something like this ever happening again. Yeah, just like increase, increase that debt on that credit card, maybe. Well, debt to the second sense. What is it was called debt to and when you think, whoa, and when you think about it, right, like, let's, let's go back to that three part anatomy of a price, the profit, the non labor costs and the labor costs is debt is a probably one of the most powerful forms of disciplining the labor force that exists other than a guy with a big stick. If only because what it means is again, we had to take away that guy's stick is the other thing

because it costs too much is that the when the labor forces is when you have enough people in personal debt, it means just like how having bad benefits is a act and where visualize benefits is a fantastic labor force disciplining tool. So is essentially debt, which is kind of the cost version of bad benefits. It forces you to continue being productive. It means that time you might take in order to find a better job with better conditions, you're not doing because you need to service your debt. It means that that you're not might not leave your job in case like you you risk find not finding another one potentially because again, you make everything much more precarious and like dependent. And so it's a I'd say like the and so one of the one

of these solutions, the one that I'm sort of worried is going to be the Tory solution. I mean because they tried it already right by making the the grant before it was a grant that's coming out in September. It was a loan is through the extension of personal credit. I mean that's one of the that was their main solution. If you recall to the housing crisis, it was to expand massively expand the amount of personal debt that people were able to get into in order to have get a roof over their heads. So I don't and so if they are completely committed to defending the rentier economy of the UK, which I think that they are and if the Labour Party are completely committed to also defending the rentier economy of the UK because they don't see themselves

as needing a democratic mandate to govern. They see themselves as needing permission to govern essentially. Then I see like the rentier economy is going to be untouched, but because social reproduction does need to keep happening, the lever that they can pull as you say Hussein is personal debt is a great one for them to pull because no one has an option but to get into debt if the option if the other options are nothing. Yeah, so before we before we we sort of close here because I see we're running low on time and I did have one other thing I wanted to discuss. Hey, Alice, remember the times that you said, I am a canary, am I the looming crisis? Am I the looming crisis? Yeah, all of these things that I love to say, you sort of you pull

the string in my back and I say one of these these phrases, yeah? Mommy, mommy, I want the talking Alice for Christmas. That's right. That's one of the phrases. Yeah, that's right. We finally, finally, the UK has its own you know, we couldn't just have the homegrown transphobia, we needed to like bring it in extra transphobia from the US. Well, that's not what it is, right? It's a dialogue. It's a dialogue between the cultures of the right in the US and the UK. The US right wing is getting our transphobia and the UK right wing is getting the US's sort of street crank, if you like.

Yes. Yeah, exactly. The kind of like mobs is what we're getting. And we had an example of this. I think we're getting a weird kind of like what about the children thing, which is very interesting because as we've spoken about many times on this show, this country and lots of people in it have a complete disdain towards children and children just being around. So it's kind of been interesting to sort of like in a very, very scary way, it's been very interesting to watch like this weird triangulation of people basically trying to kind of like balance their very obvious dislike of children and their, you know, and them not wanting to kind of give children any kind of like resources to have a happy life with like,

oh, actually, I care about you. I mean, I care about your safety, but in a kind of like overtly sexualized way. Yeah, exactly. Like the children are, you know, woke snowflakes, but on the other hand, we do have to protect them from drag queens or groomers. So here's the situation is like listeners in the US would be well familiar with drag queen story hour, this thing that sort of crops up on sort of, you know, the various sort of bits of the right as the panic du jour. I think I don't really understand and would not really fight that hard for absent the fact that it seems to be this nexus of sort of incipient domestic terrorism. And what I've noticed it's prompted is a lot of outlets to and journalists for a lot of very

respectable liberal outlets to start using the phrase, the trans question a lot. Yep. Yep. That's happening. New statesmen were the one who broke the seal on that one. Whenever that's used as a suffix, you know, you're in for an interesting conversation. Yeah. Am I the question? Because I don't really want to be the question. I myself, personally, have never administered a drag queen story time. But, you know, now I've got to be responsible for this shit. Yeah. And so essentially what has happened is this drag queen story hour happened. And I mean, like a sense like the purpose of it is, you know, just to basically have a kind of pro LGBT, like youth story group. And I think the kind of social theory of change

is just that if you make LGBT people sort of a normal part of someone growing up, they don't it's just more sort of reflexively accepting. I buy that theory of change. And I think it's basically a good one to have. It seems I mean, I would have benefited as a child from knowing that like you were allowed to be transgender. I think that would have been cool. It would have been helpful. Yeah. Not I don't know how much like a drag queen reading to me would have done that, but it's you know, it's something it's fine. Yeah. It's it's like pantomime basically, but with an added sort of message of like social acceptance. It's very, it's very funny, by the way, that like some of the articles now responding to many of the criticisms like, wait a minute,

you all hate drag queen story hour, but you love taking children to Panto and they're like, yeah, because Panto games are funny, not super sexy. Yeah, because the thing the thing about Panto is that it teaches children the kind of lessons that we want them to learn, which is be racist or a man in a dress is funny. Yeah. And as opposed to a man in a dress is funny, but in a different way. And so this is it's to see all of me in a weird position vis-a-vis drag. So this is what we said in the telegraph about it. It says about a dozen parents and young children were seen dancing with a drag queen in Redding Central Library on Monday. Very sort of cop talk to open up. Yeah. So you and the child gentlemen have been

the male impersonating gentleman. Yeah. Yeah. It was seen dancing with several children, gentlemen. We're trying to bring this back, the female gentleman. The female gentleman was telling a really important story in dancing with several gentlemen between the ages of three and six. Again, against a din of chance from outside the venue. It was derailed when two mothers who infiltrated the class stood up and confronted the drag queen. They shouted, and this is something Alison, you and I talked about briefly. They said, you're allowing child grooming to take place. This is disgusting. Haven't you heard of autogynophilia? The internet is leaking. And these two things have mixed, right? There's this sort of like a dialectic is happening here

where the extremely online kind of British transphobia, which involves posting a lot and knowing what autogynophilia is, or it's supposed to be, has mixed with the American style of the right, which is to get inside stuff and yell and at some point escalate to breaking windows or whatever else. Yeah. And I just like, just the imagining someone in real life saying the phrase autogynophilia, like to mean the thing as opposed to referentially as we're doing now, it just, it feels so weird like someone like, like recording their Twitter replies on a tape and playing them. It's just, it's very hyper real. I'm never going to stop thinking about Eugenia Nesco's play, the rhinoceros, which is about fascism and the rise of fascism,

primarily through the lens of absurdity, right? And it's something that seems like less and less funny every day, the idea that like someone, someone sort of spontaneously turning into a rhinoceros is up there with someone turning into the kind of person who says, you know, do you know what autogynophilia is? To actual people, like to real people and does not experience any sort of feeling of embarrassment. Because it's, this is just like someone saying, actually the Rwanda plan is discouraging human trafficking, which I think is very bad. The concept of autogynophilia, that's not a real idea. That's just something that you say online to make people not mad at you. Like it's, it's not an actual thing that has

semantic content. It's an idea that exists purely in order to tell a story about another idea. It doesn't have, it doesn't have any bearing on the world as it exists. It's purely this conversational idea. It is, it is, it is empty. It is a category. It is empty. Well, the thing, the other thing is, and this is my thing about being the crisis and about being the canary is that one thing I think we're all sort of aware of on some level is that both in the US and the UK, in fact, worldwide, transphobia has just sort of been selected as the catalyst for any number of right-wing stuff. You know, like, and of course it's, you know, Ben Shapiro or whoever else, whoever the sort of cultural leaders of any sort of

right movement are, Tucker Carlson or whatever, they're, what they want is their numbers and they're willing to chase that. And so if they find something that goes over well, like, you know, drag queen groomers grooming your kids, then they'll just sort of do that to death, possibly quite literally. And so just sort of this, this transphobic movement encompasses people who have very weird ideas about any number of things. And it could have been any number of things. It's just this happened to be the one that got traction. So I saw a lot of the videos of the protesters outside Reading Central Library being held back by the police and a lot of them are sovereign citizens. A lot of them believe in like Magna Carta, believe in like this sort of

unrestrained sovereignty of the Queen personally over anything else. A lot of them were anti-vaxxers too. And that's, you know, that's one of the things that has even that sort of fallen by the wayside, because now this is the new hotness, the new shit is to, uh, shouts about groomers. So great feels great. I think we also spoke about, we spoke about this like a while ago about like this was, this was going to sort of be like an inevitable like point, right? I think Riley brought up, someone brought up, I feel like it was Riley, who'd basically kind of said, but like once the, once the kind of like cove, once the vaccine stuff, it's kind of like, uh, minimized all to the point where like it wasn't this kind of like big contentious issue that people could,

like, rally support and kind of crucially money around. Um, you know, they would have never, like, basically, I think the argument that was made by someone was that like the end point would inevitably be pedophilia. And this kind of that weird, you know, the, the weird situation with basically you could, everyone is being, everyone is accused of being a pedophile. Which is going to get way worse with monkeypox too, given that it's something that is now being sort of overwhelmingly pinned on gay men. There's like a few things that have happened. There's the monkeypox stuff that's happened in the UK. There's like the, um, the stonewall ruling that happened quite recently. Um, and that's, and that's being spun as like, you know, this victory for

like, you know, people who are, you know, basically for TERFs. Um, yeah, there's a couple of, there's a couple of other things that the vaccine stuff still hasn't gone. Like it's still very much fair. Um, and I think, um, someone from the BBC, uh, from someone from like the, who kind of like monitors this information, um, put out like a very interesting thread, uh, either today or yesterday where they were looking at this confluence. And what they sort of realized was not that like white nationalists were just jumping on the bandwagon, but they had sort of been waiting for this moment for a long time. And they had like, like been in these telegram groups where these white nationalists are kind of just like, well, look, now they're all sort of like, you know,

now, now that like this kind of panic about grooming and pedophilias happened, uh, we're getting like a lot more emails about people who like, you know, they say that, oh, we don't agree with everything you say, but like, you know, you were right about this stuff and we can use this to our advantage. That's, that's, that's what a red pill is. That's what radicalization is, is you, you find some like, uh, social issue that makes you uncomfortable enough that you then sort of maneuver to a place where you can become a white nationalist. So what you're kind of seeing is this like mass radicalization and there's no other word for it, even if like, they deny that this is happening, but it's also kind of tapping into these, these very ancient,

well, like these very like old fears, um, that are held by like lots of different groups in the country, um, you know, surrounding like, you know, child abuse and Peter and like, you know, again, like, as we've mentioned, you know, there is kind of, there is like a documented or like a very badly documented, but there is a history of like, you know, um, elite, uh, and kind of institutional child abuse in this country, right? Like it is not something that like people who are serious are denying, but what is happening now is that like people can tap into those fears, um, and then manipulate them in ways that are like productive to effectively fascistic causes. Yeah. Well, I mean, so in this case, what happened is that they yelled a lot, the police kept them

out, which to me is like, it's an improvement on the US where the police at some point have like, led them into the library in order to facilitate this. I think that's one of the things where I think queer theory kind of is sort of neglects some things is that there may be sometimes letting the police do their sort of pinkwashing stuff and genuinely believing that they are a sort of like supportive institution does have benefits and you do have, you can't totally sort of abdicate a theory of the state and state power and state violence. However, uh, it's going to get worse. It's going to get a lot worse, uh, before it gets better, if it ever gets better, especially, I think, you know, you can say that the, um,

the question always with the police is, is, is when are they going to do their jobs versus when do they think that they have to bravely disobey the orders to do their jobs to do the right thing? Exactly. Yeah. It's a question of like, I, I, I read a very interesting article about, uh, very interesting. I say about a queer theory of the state, uh, that I think is, is worth reading. Uh, I don't remember who buy, but, uh, essentially the gist of it, you know, I had a lot of problems with the gist of it is that like, at some point you need to engage seriously with the idea of power, um, uh, because it is already being used against you in ways that would have seemed unthinkable even, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, maybe not 20, but,

you know, at this point, um, well, I think just to, just to close it out, then we can say, uh, to all the, just to close it out, we can, we can talk about the Hadley Freeman tweets. Yeah. That's what I was going to say. I, I, I love Hadley Freeman. Yeah. Uh, the, the fucking Woody Allen innocence projects, the, um, Roman Polanski should be respected for his work project, uh, guardian journalist, et al. Hadley Freeman, who's tweeted, how is it a manufactured route? I imagine quite a few people are genuinely confused as to why liberals are all of a sudden insisting it's totally wholesome for children to be entertained by men dressed as female parodies. Well, hey, you know what? I hope you like who you're, uh,

now working with. Uh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. This is, this is the sort of the soft end of something that the other end has a telegram group full of white supremacists. Well, like what's also interesting, like looking at like that group, like is kind of the ways in which some of them are kind of like in denial that they are in those groups and they weren't answered. Like when people bring this up, they like refuse to answer like any of the questions and they kind of just, you know, it's all like the sort of like bad they've shit that we've seen with like, yeah, well, we saw it in my 2019 election as well. Um, and like the people who, you know, like that, you know, son reporter who, uh, I don't know if I can name or not, but

like used, uh, uh, like who used the sources from an actual far right group and like has never, uh, never had to answer any questions publicly about that sourcing and still has a very well paid job. Um, you know, and, but, but you also have like some in who are kind of much closer to like Hadley Freeman and your Julie Bindles and stuff who are like much more open in, um, embracing like people who have like identified either with being far right or autistic or at least being very, very sympathetic with it. So you've had like, you know, uh, British, uh, and American, like, you know, uh, you know, turf writers who have been like, well, yeah, I don't really agree with like Chris Rufo and, uh, James Lindsay about like, you know,

all the other things, but on this, they're like on the money and like, I mean, like for fuck's sake, like J.K. Rowling, like basically endorsed, uh, Matt Walsh, sorry. Right. And Matt Walsh was kind of openly said that, yeah, I have like fascist politics and I'm not ashamed of it. So like at this point, you know, even like whether, you know, I feel like at this point, even the mask off moments don't really like the soul consolation, the soul consolation of this for me has been seeing when someone who keeps the mask on, someone who like, likes that kind of liberal respectability in their transphobia, like has to talk to one of their fascist influences who has the mask resolutely off because those fascists very much enjoy ripping the other ones mask off.

And so you have a lot of conversations where, uh, you know, someone will sort of ring their hands and go, well, you know, I don't agree with you about white nationalism, but I really, I never thought I would be agreeing with you about this. Uh, and the white nationalists just go, yeah, yes, you did. It just goes to show that you can, uh, you, you can, uh, you can, uh, meet people at different political spectrum. That's right. That's right. We need a new political consensus and have a cup of tea with them and be on their podcast and earn the money, which I think is a really good, that's right. Uh, anyway, anyway, I think that's probably as good a place as any to, uh, chill importance of things to come. That's right. Hail ants, uh, aunts in this case, uh,

that they're from the, also from Facebook, rotating an aunt in my mind. Uh, so thank you very much for listening to the podcast and thank you very much to, of course, my co-host for being here. Don't forget, we have a Patreon. It is five American dollars a month. You get a second episode every week. You get a second episode and the economy gets some boots. Yeah, that's right. We're going to buy boots for the economy. Um, and also, uh, dates, there are various dates. Like to call it trash future gives back. You know, we are, we have our Edinburgh show on the 26th question mark. 26th. 26th. The link will be in the description for this. Also, Australia, our first Melbourne show is sold out. Uh, however, we are, Australians really

like to see the podcast trash future. It turns out. They do. Uh, but there are other shows in other cities in Australia for sale and we are looking at the possibility of adding a second Melbourne show. Uh, so do be on the lookout for that. Uh, I think in all other news, it just falls to me to say thanks again and we'll see you on the bonus episode. Bye everyone. Bye.