TRASHFUTURE - Entirely Too Much Critical Theory About Winnie the Pooh ft. Edie Miller and Alex Hern

Episode Date: March 29, 2018

So this is a funny one pals. One of our microphones finally died, so our discussion with Alex Hern (@alexhern) about Cambridge Analytica and Uber got totally drowned out in static (we'll be sitting do...wn with him again soon). Instead, here is presented what we could save - the garbagemen, Edie (@multiplebears), and Hern just sitting down and bullshitting about how the winnie the pooh universe is an analogue for modern politics, and how Edie triggered the entire internet by making baby clothes with gentle socialist puns on them (the horror!). Edie's company Lil Comrade can be accessed here for all your baby clothes/trashfuture merch needs: http://www.lilcomrade.com/ Also follow us on twitter - @raaleh, @hkesvani, @milo_edwards, and @trashfuturepod xoxo riley PS: this was edited down and salvaged before Nate (@inthesedeserts) joined, so we're going back to good audio quality next week

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey fam, you know whenever I do one of these pre-show introductions you can usually imagine that something's going slightly wrong. Well there's been a bit of a fiasco and one of our terrible mics that Milo and I bought last year in Edinburgh when we realized we only had three mics but had to do a show with four people and I paid 20 pounds for it including the XLR cable has predictably crapped out on us so what we have planned was a show with Edie who does our shirts and who owns Tiny Comrade which is a great company for socialist babies and the parents who love them and Alex Hearn who's the tech
Starting point is 00:00:42 features writer at The Guardian. We had them all together we were talking about like Guido Fox, we were talking about the company, we were talking about like a lot of fun shit and Uber and Cambridge Analytica and stuff. The bit that had the Uber and Cambridge Analytica stuff is completely static because of the terrible fourth microphone so we've we've sacrificed it to our pagan gods and we're gonna get back together with Alex over Easter weekend so we can have what will probably just be a more developed version of that story then so what I've decided to do is the bit of the show that we can save is the bit where we're
Starting point is 00:01:19 just like bullshitting about Disney characters and talking aimlessly just having fun and then talking telling the story about Tiny Comrade and its tales with Guido. Guido? Paul Steins. There's a bit this the static starts in a little bit about 75% of the way in so just be warned about that but I've checked through it it's pretty much fine it's just after that it gets pretty bad so we're gonna get full full treatment the full full hern treatment after this if you want I suggest you follow little comrade I think it's little comrade on Twitter I'm gonna Google this I really have to learn how to prepare a little bit
Starting point is 00:02:02 more yeah it's yeah follow E business at Tiny Comrade on Twitter buy trash feature shirts buy shirts for other people who are babies as well it's at littlecomrade.com anyways so we're gonna go into the episode now and then see you on the right there we go actually I'm such a feminist I don't go around telling women to smile I'm like hey baby you should frown the world is fucked okay so I don't know if you've noticed this but recently on Twitter chief secretary to the Treasury and noted genius Liz Truth has been trying to develop the children's cartoon of Tigger as some kind of ideological Godhead of
Starting point is 00:03:05 like positive bouncy conservatism and this is real she's doing this she has this idea that if we're all more like Tigger so we're like positive bouncy an individualist and tangentially export lots of cheese that's what she's into and then the economy will just be buoyed through Brexit by like sheer force of will and so I feel like we need to unpack the Tigger myth a little bit here because it's actually a really illuminative allegory for Tory politics just just not in the way that she thinks it is at all okay so the Tigger movie opens with the animals of the hundred acre wood building a home for EO so he
Starting point is 00:03:48 can make it through the winter Tigger bounces a lot and is looking around for someone else to bounce with him and he accidentally destroys EO's home with a boulder and so we already have Tigger's ideology of bouncy individualism being set up as antithetical to the aims of collective action and actually basically destructive to society as a whole the rest of the plot is just Tigger bouncing around like a fucking lot and isolating himself totally as a result and he tries to find another Tigger to bounce with him but there aren't any so then we reach this point where Tigger's own positivity and specifically
Starting point is 00:04:24 the moment when he realizes that positivity is totally misaligned with the world that he exists in is actually what's atomizing him and this drives him to a foreign breakdown this is a kid's film by the way so this is actually a little bit like what Riley discussed in his comic book club episode the other day I think because it's this kind of like positive individualist B.O. embossed conservatism that is actually isolating us from each other and from the causes of society's problems by turning them inward so anyway the way that Tigger overcomes this personal political
Starting point is 00:05:01 crisis is by forging friendships with the other animals and then they do a certain amount of control bouncing together this is the plot of the film but without him but without him like wrecking all of their lives which is a much better scenario so it's really a story of how we need solidarity to overcome the ills of individualism and have a functioning society and make it through the winter together so all I can take from this is that either this trust hasn't watched the Tigger movie all the way through or she's watched the Tigger movie so much or that she doesn't know how to do critical theory which
Starting point is 00:05:43 is definitely what I'm doing right now and then so I just wanted to ask you guys like what other kids characters are emblematic of modern conservatism Shinji Akari. Wiley Coyote definitely. Oh my god. No it's Bugs Bunny because he's a dickhead. Anyway they're all really good shouts but I'm sorry the actual answer is Kermit the Frog because he has the exact same speaking voice as Jordan Peterson. Fuck you for bringing Jordan Peterson too early. I think about Jordan Peterson like all the time.
Starting point is 00:06:18 I think about him in the shower. I write all of my notebooks. I've just written down Mr. Jordan Peterson. Mr. Jordan Peterson. Have you seen this line of merch that he's doing? Well he's holding an idea to do merch. Yeah no no I just saw this literally on the train here and I don't know whether this is actually stuff that he's selling or that somebody else is selling
Starting point is 00:06:37 that's affiliated with him but there's a line of Jordan Peterson merch that is just basically cleaning your room and it's like a tick list of things like get your life sorted and one of them for some reason is save your dad which is like creepily working. So he's just being the alt-rights collective mom. No he's their dad in a sense. Pick your shit up. Yeah help your dad.
Starting point is 00:07:03 The best Jordan Peterson merch would be I don't know if you guys remember from the show he did with Taylor Lawrence or she told us about all the shit that she was finding at the consumer electronics expo and one of the things was like a $10,000 thing that just folds all your shirts. That would be the ultimate Jordan Peterson tie-in. You know when you go to concerts like the esteemed band you might know is corn or disturb and you have what do you know them as? Has anybody else seen corn live?
Starting point is 00:07:34 I've seen corn live. I know them as friends. You know corn taught me that it was okay to be weird. You know like how you have like guys outside selling like fake merch? Yeah so Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris and like all the rest of these charts they're doing like stadium shows this summer in London where you have where tickets are like £125 a head so I recommend that we could make a really good side hustle because Edie makes t-shirts we should make Jordan Peterson t-shirts
Starting point is 00:08:06 but Jordan Peterson's name written in the same font as corn. Also spelled wrong. Yeah just spelled it slightly wrong. With the R backwards obviously. And no well because Toys R Us has just gone into liquidation with the picture of him. Toys R Us has just gone into liquidation right? That means that backwards R is open so we can just do Jordan Peterson but with the R backwards in the Toys R Us font. I love this idea that like for the last 40 years the backwards R has been verboten because Toys R Us own it.
Starting point is 00:08:37 Like fuck you. No you cannot write that letter. I think you'll find that Toys R Us is actually evidence of the Russian incursion into society. That's actually the Cyrillic letter. It's like Russia and Children's Lemonade stands are threatening democracy right now. Exactly they're getting in the kids while they're young to the action then. And we have a frat boy Edie. For the record I just opened a beer with my teeth. So I winced while it happened because I have seen teeth ruined like that.
Starting point is 00:09:08 I will be your dog. I've got a couple more years of doing it I think. So that's how Sam was sorted. Is watching the Tigger movie to learn about individualism? I'm crying after this. No no I cried all the way through and this isn't a joke. I first watched it when I was 15. Before I knew any of the political implications of it.
Starting point is 00:09:30 Now it's important for critical theory. I absolutely stand by that. But yeah I cried all the way through. Because it's actually a really sad film when he realizes that he's made himself completely alone. I do love how many kids films are just completely brutal. Jacob Rees-Mogg is the owl for sure. Well A obviously. But B because the owl's main claim to intellectual capacity is that he can spell the word Tuesday without getting it wrong.
Starting point is 00:09:58 And I'm pretty sure that Jacob Rees-Mogg is probably only one or two tries away from getting it. Also Robert is like a really... Jacob Rees-Mogg is a bit like they try to make a sort of human version of General Grievous from Star Wars. At least two fewer lightsabers. Well we don't know how many lightsabers Jacob Rees-Mogg has. I've said this before on the show. If General Grievous wore a top hat. Sorry it's gentleman Grievous.
Starting point is 00:10:28 And through fish at people instead of using lightsabers. I want to point out as well that Robert is like a really angry kind of get off my lawn Brexit dad. He's like the... Do you remember that video where the guy who worked for the BBC had a total breakdown and like citizens arrested a family in a car? Oh god. So Robert's like that. Robert's like canonically peace. So ironically rabbit is gammon but piglet is... Piglet is a snowflake.
Starting point is 00:10:58 Piglet's been taken to China as part of an unspecified market opening as a result which Milo said. My question is... Eeyore is the Romaniacs right? At this point Ian Dunn is Eeyore? No I feel like... So are you actually asking me to do more analysis of the plot of this film? Is that emotional labor? Because what's weird about this is that I do have a literature degree and I feel a little bit like when your alumni call me up and go
Starting point is 00:11:28 So what did you do with your literature degree? And I'll be like wow! An awful lot of critical theory about the Tigger movie. Episode title right there. So your alumni call me up every Sunday because they want to get money from me. Business mindset and all that. And I always wonder what I should tell them in terms of number one, I don't have money to give you. And number two, I really don't want any of my money going to the Caledonian society.
Starting point is 00:12:02 And I'm pretty 100% sure that it's going to go there. So I think the next time when they call on Sunday, I'm just going to explain Evangelion to them. I was going to be like look, I'll give you the money but you've got to listen to my theory first. Anyway, Shinji Akari is actually a ball of piss. Anyway, no say that you've got an exciting new job in the Gucci gang. Controlling and you and your friends are controlling. I will donate £50,000 worth of quality money. I will donate £50,000 worth of quality money.
Starting point is 00:12:34 I will donate £50,000 to an ISIS affiliated charity of your choice. So I've been on the other end of those lines and I think the best thing to do. Because you know, you don't want to wreck the student who is frankly being paid living wage to call you up and beg you for donations. What you do is you give them a very simple command, which is I will give you 10 pounds a month and then you give an incredibly specific earmark on it. 10 pounds a month, but it can only be used for cutlery in the canteen because I just really want the students to have really, really good cutlery. And then the student, the student on the phone just gets to write that down and go like, yeah, sure, okay. And then someone in the accounts department stares at that and goes, is this, is this even possible? Because they can't legally take your donation if they don't hypothecate it to exclusively cutlery.
Starting point is 00:13:18 So what I would probably do in that case is I'd say I'd like to make a donation of £1,000, but I'd like to make a donation exclusively for recursive signage. I mean, I want to get some people fucking lost. You are running the risk of them going, yeah, fuck it. This guy's an asshole. We've hated him forever. Build a thousand pounds worth of signs and bill him. Yeah. And then I get the satisfaction of knowing that a lot of people around the University of, I don't know, LSE or Oxford, I guess, are just sort of walking. Yeah, what if you offered them like a really huge amount of money, but for something that they could obviously never use? Like I will donate a million pounds, but you can only spend it on clogs.
Starting point is 00:13:59 Anyway, shall we open the show formally? Sure. Welcome to yet another episode of Riley's Gonna Burp, trash feature. That's disgusting. When you make a wish, sometimes it comes true. Welcome to another episode. You said you weren't going to fuck up the intro this time and you just burped into your mic. I burped not into my mic specifically. I moved my face away from the fucking shit.
Starting point is 00:14:22 It was a respectful feminist burp. Yeah, it was, yeah. Anyway, so I'm going to say a welcome to back to listeners of the show, but how the future if we do not implement fully automated luxury gay space communism and buy shirts from little comrade is going to be trash. We have a quite a lineup for you today. We have some shit to talk about. We've got some. Well, basically just that we have some beers. I ate a sandwich.
Starting point is 00:15:01 My name is Riley. You can follow me on Twitter at Rala R-A-L-E-H. It's a bad Twitter handle, but it's too late to change it. Who am I with starting from my right like Tigger? Oh, God. Hi, I'm Edie Miller. I print t-shirts. And a long time ago, I also went to university with Hussein.
Starting point is 00:15:23 Where he, I have to say, he did a really great job as chair of the Young Conservatives for Anime Society. The poll IRL meetup board. I enjoyed queuing that up and just seeing the panic in Hussein's eyes. Do I have to deny this? Do I have to deny this? What's going to be the end of this? I mean, I was a committee member of the University of York Debasing Society, which is effectively the same thing. So it's not like that far from the truth.
Starting point is 00:15:56 And also I was very close to joining the York Freedom Society. Yeah. Because I was like, yeah. The Freedom Club for the George Michael song, Freedom. It's like, yeah, I love freedom. I love libertarianism. I'm going to cut it in. There's a 30% chance I'll cut it in.
Starting point is 00:16:08 But remember, this was 2010 and now... And libertarianism was cool. This is 2010 back before freedom also meant racism. Yes. Well, no, it still meant racism, but there were less YouTubers doing it. I'm at multiple bars and my shop is at Tiny Comrade. And if you wanted to buy a trash feature shirt, that's where you would go. Yes.
Starting point is 00:16:29 Buy a shirt. Please buy a shirt. I need to feed my children. We have three kinds of messaging here in trash feature. Yeah. Atrium. Yum batteries. It's a liminal and super liminal.
Starting point is 00:16:42 I'm not smart enough to do anything backwards, so I'm only doing super liminal. Buy a shirt. I am Alex Hearn. I'm a technology features writer at The Guardian. I, at the university around the bar, which is completely ideologically pure, I took everyone's money and I served them poison. But it also stopped me from doing, you know, the true love, which was conservative ballgames club.
Starting point is 00:17:04 It's like settlers of Catan, but all the white people win every time. I mean, Christ. No, now I'm now like the minute I sit down, it's like, oh shit, ballgames are, ballgames are awesome. Ballgames are fascist. Like, yeah, they are. They are the struggle. They are purely.
Starting point is 00:17:19 I think the only non-fascist game is Uno. Justify yourself. It's just it. I don't need to justify on my own damn show. Yeah. Do logic. Come on, Alex. He didn't expect there to have to be a self-part.
Starting point is 00:17:33 If you're not as logical and rational as me and Riley, then maybe you need to reconsider your life choices. Okay. So I actually have played the ballgame class struggle, which stems from the seventies is designed to teach people, designed to teach school students about communism. Okay. You.
Starting point is 00:17:52 My favorite thing about it is it comes with simple rules and complex rules. The complex rules are more accurate to the real relations between classes and society. Yeah. So for instance, in the simple rules, you just roll a dice and the highest number goes first, but in the complex rules, the complex rules just a transcript of desk capital capital.
Starting point is 00:18:08 I mean, pretty much in board game rule term in the complex rules, they're all Bill Mars rules just right now. I'm now proposing that we all get together at some point over the summer and play a game of class struggle. I mean, it's really difficult to get hold of though. There was a copy in, we found a copy in the part of them where I live at the moment.
Starting point is 00:18:29 And it was a, I think it was about 80 pounds. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it's just, it's rare. They only made it for like so long. And it's the only ideologically pure board game. That's also true. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:18:41 That definitely, definitely pushes the market value. But no, if you try and get a copy like on eBay or whatever, it's like you're going to be fucking. And if like Hussein, you were actually in the phrenologist for father's rights club, then of course you'd know that settlers of Gitan is the other only
Starting point is 00:18:55 biologically pure board game. Hussein Kizvani, I'm back. I haven't been on a couple of episodes. Well, you weren't on two of the solos and you weren't on, well, no, the one with the gaming is going to come out later next week. So I'm working on a solo, which is very exciting and better than Riley's.
Starting point is 00:19:10 So watch out for that. It's very, very entertaining. If like what I'm doing will work. Hussein's cam girl debut. The tips are going to be low because it's a fucking podcast. I'm naked. If you want to see more, send Bitcoin. Besides,
Starting point is 00:19:31 besides podcasting, I'm also an amateur like Yu-Gi-Oh! card player. Yu-Gi-Oh! is Marx's praxis. I think Yu-Gi-Oh! is definitely Silicon Valley liberalism because you're trying to sort of arrange and optimize a series of resources that you're deploying until much like Mark Zuckerberg is trying to do, you can build Exodia, the forbidden one.
Starting point is 00:19:52 That's what he wanted all of our data from Facebook for, so he can ultimately summon an ancient Egyptian god and then, you know, his dark personality, Dark Mark Zuckerberg will take over. No, no, no, you've got this wrong. Dark Mark Zuckerberg. Yu-Gi-Oh! uses Cambridge Analytica to predict the moves of his opponents based on which kind of pumpkin
Starting point is 00:20:13 they would be according to this quiz. Dark Mark Zuckerberg is actually Matt Hancock. Matt Hancock MP. Matt Hancock MP. Exodia, my friend. It's fucking Exodia right there. Matt Hancock MP is going to summon Exodia. I think he knows exactly what he's doing.
Starting point is 00:20:34 All of the fucking centrist, they're all deleting their Facebook accounts. Matt Hancock knows what the fuck he's doing. He's going to come to my utopia. Milo, you want to introduce yourself or introduce what we can hear of you? And then we can get into the content. Fun. Yeah, hi.
Starting point is 00:20:50 Yeah, my name's Milo Edwards. Currently located in Russia at the other end of what is a very dodgy internet connection. You can find me on Twitter at Milo underscore Edwards. And I've never played a game of Yu-Gi-Oh! in my entire life. Good. That's what I like to hear. I was feeling very alienated by that conversation, actually, because it felt like being nine years old again
Starting point is 00:21:12 when all of the boys wouldn't let me play Yu-Gi-Oh! with them. And then when I realized that, I realized that I'm the only person in the entire world who's ever not been cool enough to play Yu-Gi-Oh! I thought you were going to say that's when I realized I was female. I thought you were going to say... That's what I had my feminist awake. That's when I realized a woman in her mid-twenties
Starting point is 00:21:31 shouldn't hang out in the school. Hey, hey. Come on, guys. Mid-to-late-twenties. So now we've gotten... We got there at the end after having been relentlessly distracted. Alex is looking at a wrist that doesn't have a watch on it.
Starting point is 00:21:47 I left my watch on. No, we've always switched to smartphones, so eventually the next fake-time thing is pretending to pull a thing out of your pocket. Pretty squirming in the chair. I'm going to automatically check the time, but I'm wearing tight trousers. This is cute, actually.
Starting point is 00:22:03 I should point this out. I told my mum that I was going to be on the radio, and she went, oh, what station? And I realized, like, I didn't explain at all. How many of this worked? We don't know. We don't do that anymore.
Starting point is 00:22:21 I'm sorry. Welcome to the rude crew in the morning. Sam Bolton is now in the White House, and we're pretty much basically going to go to war with three different countries. You know, we will have to... Our backup for doing this show is going to have to be through potato radio or something.
Starting point is 00:22:37 So we are going to have to learn how to actually broadcast this from the trenches. I intend to just hammer out my articles in Bach on the edge of a tree, wait for someone else to pass by and read what I think about
Starting point is 00:22:53 the last tree Bach I read. In that case, your articles would be about what? Stone tools? Have they gone too far? Oh my God, caveman black mirror would be incredible. I guess I have fire, but what about too much fire? So I reckon
Starting point is 00:23:11 when the draft happens, we're going to... We'll go on the special journalist stream of the military. Cool propaganda. Yeah, so it'll be like propaganda laced good podcast content and Liz Truss will like
Starting point is 00:23:27 oversee it and she'll kind of say, I thought it was a great show guys, but you need to use the relevant hashtags. Liz Truss, famous for using very relevant hashtags. That's not the right MP, that's humble words. I'm really sorry mate. Hashtag Tories with attitude.
Starting point is 00:23:43 If I didn't win that out, that was going to be my favourite. Yes, this show which is famed for its accuracy and attention to detail. And then we wonder why we don't get sponsorship or picked up anyway. Okay, well I reckon she'll still be the one who's...
Starting point is 00:24:01 So Liz Truss at the moment, I read today that she is basically trying to encourage other Tory MPs to be more online because that's going to be the way that they're going to win the next election. Because incredibly she thinks she's good at it. Have you seen the motivation
Starting point is 00:24:17 for why she has started that? She fucked up and became a meme for her pork products thing. And that convinced her that she needed to be good at the internet. And now she thinks she's good at the internet. So she's done that, she's tweeting with hashtags. So she got owned and the most rational reaction
Starting point is 00:24:33 to getting massively owned is to be more extremely online. I feel like that's the second best Twitter strategy next to Peter Hitchens one, which is just not follow anyone. Not follow any form of linear time. Block everyone. Obsessively name search.
Starting point is 00:24:49 Do you remember... This is another university thing, but do you remember when I chaired that... I don't know if you went to that panel. The society that I actually did was part of. We chaired a panel that Peter Hitchens was on
Starting point is 00:25:05 because Yokelum and I used to invite Peter Hitchens all the time. And he just used to show up. And I'm going to actually dunk on a load of my very close male friends now, but I was the only woman who was high up enough in the society that it made them look good. If I chaired it
Starting point is 00:25:21 they were like, yeah, the last three were chaired by men. So do you want to do this? I get to sit there and kind of deal with Peter Hitchens. It was quite intimidating. He's a very nice man. But that is
Starting point is 00:25:37 just purely to cloak the evil, right? So I found out two things about Peter Hitchens from the one time that I met him because I wasn't a particularly political person for most of my university career. So I found out... First of all, that he tips well on the cam girls.
Starting point is 00:25:53 Yes. So he was at Alcuin College which was the same as my college. And I think he lived in the same building as me. A bit creepy. A bit creepy. So I've been thinking now that I could have been sleeping on the same bed as Peter Hitchens.
Starting point is 00:26:09 Even creepier? Yes. That's why you're so rational. Yeah, that's why I'm really rational and logical and I'm also an excellent phrenologist. Women are just intimidated by it, right? That's the problem. And he always tells a story about
Starting point is 00:26:25 how he was a proper Marxist and how he stormed into a lecture theatre reciting Das Kapital or something like that. That would be a long storm in. Yeah. You started a long way away or you didn't make it through linen exchange.
Starting point is 00:26:41 No. I'm going to rest control of the podcast because we do have an itinerary. That's true, sorry. We have a trip down in intellectual... Well, not stimulation, but something. Certainly not nothing.
Starting point is 00:26:57 We have your ears to fill for an hour because you're boarding your commute on probably Monday. And yeah, we're going to fill them with mental kisses. We have two main things to get through today. First, we are going to talk about
Starting point is 00:27:13 very regular blog, Guido Fox, and how it reacted to the idea that there might possibly be a left-wing child's clothing company. Not well. And then,
Starting point is 00:27:29 Alex is going to bestow some of his infinite... infinite wisdom on us. Alex looks terrified at that. I'm going to talk shit and hope no one calls me up on it. Alex is going to bestow some of his
Starting point is 00:27:45 infinite wisdom on us about the a lot of this Cambridge Analytica shit that's been flying around. Why I seem to be burping so much and also how Uber seems to have killed someone. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:28:01 I mean, we can see what we can do about it. You know, maybe we can add some sound effects. But first things first. I think that my mom will have stopped listening by now, so it's probably okay. Uber is disrupting the hitman market. What was the Bitcoin bounty on that woman?
Starting point is 00:28:25 We're AI cars are going to contract with other AI cars to murder the human overlords. That's how the cars universe started. I already told you there's a very good line in going down the group of critical theory of kids films.
Starting point is 00:28:43 It turns out that it's a lot more enlightening than you would think. So really Jordan Peterson is the intellectual we need for our time. There you go. I've done horseshoe theory again. I'm sorry. We should pitch this to like you know that you know that weird magazine
Starting point is 00:28:59 that like pretends to be like really intellectual but it's just filled with like right-wing dweebs. That's something that only you know about. I can promise you. Okay, so I'm going to pitch it to Quillet and get that Quillet money and then we'll use it to fund various left-wing players.
Starting point is 00:29:15 Our purchase of class struggle. By which we mean your track suit. I really want a track suit still. I want it still. I want... Someone get Radia to deliver your track suit. Maybe. But first, so
Starting point is 00:29:31 we've alluded to these t-shirts quite a bit. Edie, what are we talking about with these t-shirts? What is your relationship to the market? I heard you're a petty bourgeoisie in all the business. I am now, yeah.
Starting point is 00:29:47 I make things in my... A classic first date question. And some tankies are really mad. A lot of... My mom's liberal husband is very angry at me that Trash Future is selling shirts. I thought you were a communist.
Starting point is 00:30:03 And so on. So what I've learned over the course of this... My pirate stepdad. So have pirate come 19th century industrialist? So essentially, I set up an independent printing press and what I...
Starting point is 00:30:21 My kitchen. And what I have learned over the course of this is that genuinely nobody cares as much about socialist praxis as conservatives. They get really mad if they think that you're not doing it right. So, yeah.
Starting point is 00:30:37 I... It's very difficult for me to know exactly how to explain this. But basically, I had an idea in a pub and I'm kind of like an art person. Like a... I hate me too.
Starting point is 00:30:53 It's okay. I like making things. And I got two degrees and nobody wanted to give me a job still and that was making me feel bad about myself. So I reached a point where I thought I'm gonna do something else and sell stuff
Starting point is 00:31:09 and by while selling it, I'm gonna try and balance out the fact that I'm doing that with it. It being kind of stuff that has like tongue-in-cheek socialist values. So I set up a shop where
Starting point is 00:31:25 I sell kids' clothes with basically like cute kind of left-wing slogans on. Stuff like... My best seller is a teacher that says class snuggle. There's also a bib that says eat the witch that does incredibly well.
Starting point is 00:31:41 Toddlers against austerity. Stuff like that. The other kind of positive is that it really fucking winds up Lib Dems. They hate it so much. It's great. And that's always great for business. Whenever Lib Dem finds it and is really mad about it
Starting point is 00:31:57 and he's going, oh, this is Stalinism! It's like, we need to say toddlers who accept austerity as an unfortunate reality. Exactly, yeah. Toddlers morally but not materially against austerity. I love the idea that what Stalin really, really wanted
Starting point is 00:32:13 was to... Wait, do you reckon there's a similar like, but conservative clothing company for toddlers out there somewhere and there is like a bib with like hashtag Tories with attitude on it? There isn't, but there will be and when there is, I will know it's my fault. Sorry.
Starting point is 00:32:29 I love the idea that the most Stalinist thing you can do is go out and buy like, gentle puns for your children. Exactly, yeah. Precisely, yeah. That's what I find really great. So yeah, this is this is something that I'm doing now and I'm also going to... So I screen print
Starting point is 00:32:45 them myself in my kitchen and I'm also going to branch out into doing adult clothing and custom stuff. So Hussain, you can get whatever weird shit you want to print in on a t-shirt. Yes! By adult clothing you mean like a shit load of leather, right? No.
Starting point is 00:33:01 No, just stuff with the... Yeah, yeah, that is on the same website as the Tories. No, I want the opposite. So I want one of those like a chassis belt that says Little Comrade on there. What I like is that you could actually just make leather and have the same class snuggle slogan
Starting point is 00:33:17 on it. Daddy's Little Volcel. Class snuggle on the front and Cummys on the back. At a certain point Riley asked me if I felt like printing some stuff for this podcast because he
Starting point is 00:33:33 at the time I think I was probably the podcast only listener or something like that. I think he still might be. Well, you and Tom. Now, what happened when Guido Fox, Guido Fox, the guy from that terrible BBC series, yeah, what happened when Paul Staines leave from Kiss?
Starting point is 00:33:49 What happened when he... What happened when Logan Paul Staines discovered your company? A lot. Guido Fox, the website version of the phrase, a lot going on there. So... The West Staines massive.
Starting point is 00:34:05 I am still working another job and what was really particularly stressful about the day that this happened was I just finished like a really, really long day at my other job. And
Starting point is 00:34:21 my kind of screen printing business had been going really well much better than I expected in that people were buying things. And I wasn't really ready for the kind of the amount of attention that I ended up getting.
Starting point is 00:34:37 But yeah, I was just knocking off from my other thing and somebody kind of messaged me on Twitter and was like, have you seen this? Guido's got you. And I thought, oh, that was coming but... So then immediately
Starting point is 00:34:53 I had lots of angry conservatives in my mentions and just like... Gammon men. Gammon. But they weren't all men either because that's the thing. Like normally I'm very willing to call everybody Gammon because there's a lot of Gammon
Starting point is 00:35:09 around these days. Except here, of course, which is the Caliphate of Tower Hamlets. There's no Gammon. We're none of that's allowed. Yeah. More of like a... That shit's haram. The shwarma men. The shwarma men. Who mean no harm to anybody
Starting point is 00:35:27 except their cousin. The land she is. I'm going to diarise that in 40 years. Throw that back in your face you're saying. What happened is that Guido Fox had written a blog post because somebody had tipped him off. Somebody
Starting point is 00:35:43 that I know who it is. Oh, he has people everywhere, truly. I know who it is and I'm not going to name who it is on this podcast. But I do know who it is. But we've got them here. Behind the screen doors. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:35:59 And then he just wrote a blog post about this going like Corbin Easter. Under his tag, the loony left. He banned this sick filth. How would you curb that? He banned this sick filth. Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 00:36:15 Yeah, exactly. Down with this sort of thing. Yeah, because we can't be indoctrinating babies with anything. We need to indoctrate them with natural, you know, like through games about the free market. Babies who can famously read what's printed on
Starting point is 00:36:31 their own chest. Exactly. They're so good at reading that they can actually go back. And songs about a man who may or may not have been an egg who was reassembled by the king and a massive waste of public resources. It's another Jordan Peterson thing because in his book
Starting point is 00:36:47 he talks about how like he got stared down by a two year old and like one of the lines in his book is something, it goes something along the lines of like this two year old infant decided in that very moment in this playground that he's in with his kid, that he just didn't want to respect adults anymore.
Starting point is 00:37:03 And he just could tap into this really weird thing about like conservatives. Jordan Pearson got toddler cucked. Yeah, he got cucked by a two year old and now he has to give him his wife. Do we know the identity of this two year old? The two year old grew up to be
Starting point is 00:37:19 Albert Einstein. That's the thing, right? There is this weird ancient borderline, ancient Greek mania among conservatives who are probably keen to start handing out
Starting point is 00:37:35 the hemlock. That anyone who isn't going to be pushing some narrative of some very hegemonic basically white basically male, basically straight narrative is somehow corrupting the youth from what's natural as though
Starting point is 00:37:51 in like early druidic societies what it is, is they basically imagine that the past was the Flintstones and that it was basically the same as now but just with cars that you scoot along on your feet. Yeah, it's like they imagine that there is this
Starting point is 00:38:07 kind of natural society and that like men have always been wearing neck ties, it's just they used to be more raggedy. Like that's the great thing about capitalism is we got more clean neck ties than we used to have fucking Neanderthals. I know that Neanderthals and humans were divergent species. Apart from when Russians
Starting point is 00:38:23 watched the Flintstones, they think where did they get this technology? So I think that my preference for my kind of as if I have like a business plan, I do not have a business plan. Because you're a communist. Exactly, yes
Starting point is 00:38:41 precisely, yeah, it fucks with it a little bit. Have you ever listened to a J Shetty podcast? I have not CEO mindset. Yeah, I know and I hate that about myself because I keep thinking I keep thinking that possibly I'm the only
Starting point is 00:38:57 person who's ever listened to this podcast and then as a result decided to go out and have a CEO mindset instead of just being like that's a lot of shit. No, you are kind of our CEO mindset. You're appealing to tomorrow's teens in a very haphazard
Starting point is 00:39:13 way that's full of puns. Also, whenever Riley publishes an episode, he always sets it under the business section of Apple, so we always sharpen the Apple business section on iTunes. Yeah, because we want to make, if we can make even one CEO a little bit dumber, we'll destroy a little bit of the capital
Starting point is 00:39:29 stuff. Oh, don't worry, you've done that job with me. Higher more dumb, CEOs. And a good thing is that like every, so if I am having a slow week or if I feel like I haven't got as many orders this week as I need,
Starting point is 00:39:45 it's pretty easy at this point to just like say to kind of talk, DM a friend and say, can you leak me to Richard Angel or leak me to whatever Lib Dem counselor or something. And then I will immediately get a storm of people going
Starting point is 00:40:01 this must be so very ill and then and I basically the answer to that is don't buy it. The app that I use to manage my shop gives you a kind of dashboard overview of the last 30 days. Oh, you can see the Guido spike. Yeah, you can.
Starting point is 00:40:17 Yeah. Oh, it looks like his hat. Yeah, it does. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the conclusion to this story is all the haters who are are sort of trying to rip on Edie like all that's happening is like is like it just makes me stronger, baby. Yeah,
Starting point is 00:40:33 that's it. Oh, also a very funny thing was that he responded so I should also say thank you to everybody who responded to Guido's kind of like shitposting about me because loads of people
Starting point is 00:40:49 include that one of the funniest things was that loads of people including people who I knew for a fact already bought stuff from my shop were replying to his tweet as if this was how they'd been introduced to it going, oh my god, thank you so much. It's really this is great. Thank you
Starting point is 00:41:05 for introducing me to this really great shop, Guido. And purely for the sake of just making him as mad as possible. I feel like that's the future of streetwear. So do you know, like, do you know the palace? I know his palace, obviously. Yeah, I'm literally wearing it.
Starting point is 00:41:21 So like this, you know, so one of like palaces like gimmicks when they first started was that they were going to make like really low res skateboarding videos and just kind of do gorilla marketing as a way to get the brand out, right? This was like back in like the mid-2000s.
Starting point is 00:41:37 Whereas I think now we exist in a time when like if you really want to get your brand out there, you basically have to like basically just have to like stir up shit tons of outrage. A little bit, yeah. Which is what we're trying to do at trash future, our genius monster. Guido, we're selling t-shirts and we're communists that
Starting point is 00:41:53 must make you mad. But what I liked about this possibly the most was like his response because after he got he got ratioed like to shit on every time he posted this particular blog about me
Starting point is 00:42:09 and then he replied to loads and loads of people who'd said, thank you for introducing me to this shop just with the words power of advertising. So he kept doing that. So not just ones, but if you search like Guido's power, he just kept doing it over and over again.
Starting point is 00:42:27 Like and effectively it became a stand-in for like, I'm not owned. I'm not owned. I'm not owned. I've owned you by teaching you the advertising works. Those people on the left go like, yeah, advertising fucking works. That's why it's evil. I've tricked you into spending money on a business you like. You're the one that's owned.
Starting point is 00:42:43 He actually owned you because he made your business successful. Precisely, which is the ultimate own. Yeah, and therefore like you should just give him your company. So now that we've all learned how to have a successful business why don't we flip over and talk about how to have a scandal
Starting point is 00:42:59 ridden business. How to fuck your business. Make terrible mistakes in 2007 and don't correct them for eight years and then cover it up for another three. That's like, that is of course that could easily be like one of those new mindset books like
Starting point is 00:43:15 how to fail your way to success. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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