TRASHFUTURE - Entirely Too Much Critical Theory About Winnie the Pooh ft. Edie Miller and Alex Hern
Episode Date: March 29, 2018So 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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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,
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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...
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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,
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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.
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,
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
how to fail your way to success.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.