TRASHFUTURE - FCK GVT FCK BORIS feat. Eleanor Penny

Episode Date: July 30, 2019

We’ve all written something that was maybe a little over the top, though mercifully none of us has written for Quilette. This week, Riley (@raaleh), Olga (@rocknrolga ), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Alice @AliceAvizandum  join Novara Media’s Eleanor Penny (@eleanorkpenny) to discuss brain impresario Toby Young’s recent paen to Boris Johnson’s skull shape and neck thickness. It’s weird! It’s abnormal! It’s the state of things in British politics! If you like this show, sign up to the Patreon and get a second free episode each week! You’ll also get access to our Discord server, where good opinions abound. https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’ll be performing at the Birmingham Transformed festival on 8th August. Details to come in the next few weeks. If you’re in the West Midlands, come down to Brum for a night of delightful soup jokes. Get tickets here! https://ti.to/birmingham-transformed/birmingham-transformed-2019 *OTHER LIVE SHOW ALERT* Come see Trashfuture live at the Edinburgh Fringe! We’ll perform on August 10th at 21.30. The venue is Venue 277, PQA Venues @Riddle's Court, Edinburgh EH1 2PG. Tickets are £11.50 and there are a ton of discounts available. Get them here: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/trashfuture-live-at-the-fringe *SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT* Guess who’s going to play live at The World Transformed in Brighton this September? That’s right, your favourite podcast lads. Buy a ticket here: http://theworldtransformed.org If you want to buy one of our recent special-edition phone-cops shirt, shoot us an email at trashfuturepodcast[at]gmail[dot]com and we can post it to you. (£20 for non-patrons, £15 for patrons) Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

Can I just ask a really serious question? Yes. And I don't know if this could be a cold open, but I'm generally just interested. OK. How? OK, what is the? OK, so for you to jerk off to a picture.

Go on. Of a human body. Yes. Is this like a you specifically? No, just any human body. So like if I see, if I see an ass, I can make it work for myself, right? Sure.

Like how zoom, what is the the most it could be zoomed in for you to still? Well, for me, growing up, I think anything that you can see pause anything high definition enough that you can like seed like individual skin textures. No, no, there's no one for me. Like just here's the thing, like you can get pretty close to a butthole and still know it's a butthole, right?

Like you can get like you can get like tactical satellite image resuming right in on it and you can like, yeah, you can see inside. But you're like, yeah, you know what you're seeing inside. So you're like, this seems like a misuse of government resources. Yeah. Also, I think what you're describing Riley as a as a colonoscopy there. Congratulations to the new secretary of defense, who apparently is going to be using satellites to look at a new beach.

It just health and defense getting their red boxes mixed up in a comical series of errors. Oh, my God. There has never been a cabinet that is more likely to do like 1960s far shit. Yeah, this one is so excited. Well, I for one hope that like defense getting charge of the NHS means that they can just fucking shoot my dick and balls off

and just have done with it already. Hello and welcome again to Trash Future, that podcast you listen to. I'm Riley. You know me from many of the previous episodes. I'm back. I'm I've got notes. Order is still restored. Wang Guaidou is still out of the country.

We're in control here. I am also joined in studio by Olga. I fucked your brother, but you forgave me because you owe me money. Eleanor Penny. Hi, I'm Timmy and I'm still struck down the old well. Yes. Eleanor Penny is still struck down the old well and fearful. We all are of her.

It is the news story that's consuming all of our attentions. Well, earth burns and also by phone line. We have Hussein Kesvani from the wilds of the south of England. No, I'm in the Caribbean. And I I'm on an island with a special temple. You know, I'm here with Jarl rule. We're doing something special for 2020. Not only not only was I scammed out of a bunch of money coming to this island,

but I also got dead. Oh, damn it. Hussein, exactly three days ago in the middle of the night, texted me the words, watch this space. And and from the wild south of Scotland. Or as it will be known in the Boris Johnson Premiership, Northern England. It is Alice. Yeah, North Britain.

Happy to be here in hell. Folks, aren't we happy to be here in hell? Milo Edwards is on vacation in France at the moment. Being an Instagram thought. Yeah, being an Instagram thought. Just being weirdly muscular. He has a tiny head, but such huge muscles. What the fuck comedy is stored in the biceps.

Yeah, maybe Milo is Milo is doing a new thing where he's trying to minimize his brain to body ratio to make himself dumber. So he has fewer inhibitions. So he starts a new topic actually does like that's what brain force plus should do. Is it just increases your shoulder and shrinks your head? Yeah, it turns you into an orc. Yeah. I'm selling my idea for a drinkable lobotomy.

Why? That's just the kombucha that comes in the green can. It's a real ideal ratio called the earthworm gym. That's the sweet spot. OK, right, folks, everything is serious. We only have so many podcasts we can do before society collapses. So we have to make each one of them count. Yeah, we don't number these.

We're going to have to start numbering them backwards until like June's day. Oh, man, we laugh because we're worried. So I'm going to start out having a little bit of fun because, look, before we get into it, obviously, there are two Quillette articles that people have been telling us to talk about because they love race science. The people are Quillette, Quillette, Quillette. To be fair, our listeners do also love race science. They do love race science, but it has a punch line.

They, yeah, Quillette, it's the best the white race can get. Um, and so we're going to talk about the Boris Johnson Quillette article today. And then the Amazon Quillette article, that's going to be on the bonus on Thursday with Julia Jax. So watch this space, as Hussein said, before he went up to his mysterious Caribbean island. OK, so we're going to start having a little fun here. The startup is Bright Lume. Bright Lume.

As Lume is in, like, you weave, you weave on it? Yes. Well, Lume is in, like, from the shadows, looming over a small child. Both good guesses. I don't know why that, I'm the first thing that came to mind. Jeffrey F. Steep's stop being a hedge fund guy and pivoted to attack. I'm sorry, are we? OK, so it's like, in Sleeping Beauty, she had a loom, right?

So it's a bright loom, so it's like a glow in the dark loom, so you can loom all night. Is it, no, is it like a metaphorical loom? And party all day. Like, the loom of our days is, like, something you used to learn to code somehow. You're all, I'll tell you why you're all wrong. It's because this is the most vague ad copy for any startup I've ever used on this program. I have blanked out a single word. Wow.

Across, like, 10 different bits of ad copy. I've blanked out one word, and you still will have no idea what this thing does. OK, my body is ready. So here's the first. It's time to level the playing field. We are building an end-to-end platform that will allow any blank, big or small, to weave together its own version of a world-class digital ecosystem. Chiles.

Chiles. Any music festival set, like, hosted on a Caribbean island. Give that to us again, but, like, slower. It's time to level the playing field. We are building an end-to-end platform that will allow any blank, big or small, to weave together its own version of a world-class digital ecosystem, our integrated solutions, streamline operations, enhance relationships, and deliver amazing experiences.

It's Pete Buttigieg's new startup. It's the Pete Buttigieg campaign. Jeez, picture of a foot. It's the entire nation sending pictures of their feet all at once to the Crown Prosecution Service. I do like that we cut off the footchass at the beginning because that was before we started recording. So this is just coming out of nowhere, zero to foot.

Dear listeners. That was like a picture of a foot. Dear listeners, post-feet will tell you where. Post-feet, if you bought the t-shirt, post-feet to the mailing address that was on the envelope. You could post your feet back. Please do not post your feet. I do not want to see your feet.

So they're evening a playing field. What playing field are we talking? What are some playing fields that desperately need? Evening. Eatons, I don't know. The Pokemon trading card game. Yes. What's a digital ecosystem? Give me an example of a digital ecosystem.

World of Warcraft. OK, now we're talking. Here, I've got a bunch of these, so I'll go through another one. Technology that actually makes operations easier also makes for happier, more efficient employees. I feel like it's so meaningless. It's actively sucking the thoughts out of my brain. Yes, it is.

Is it like HR software? No, it's not. It's just going to be for something like so fucking mundane. It's going to be like some sort of like coffee machine or something. Like, I think we... Wow, this thing that's not for us piqued with the email thing. Wait, wait, did you say it was a coffee machine? No, I'm just saying it's not far off.

Oh, fuck. It's not like you said it was. If this is worse than the email client, somehow. Breitloom doesn't replace your brand, it elevates it, allowing you to form a stronger relationship with your customers. Okay, it doesn't replace your brand. It elevates it. Yes.

I'm so convinced that if I just say it enough times to myself, like something will click. Is it like a mailing list software? No, Hussein was closed with coffee machine. Oh, fuck. What? A big billboard or something? Water?

Water at the office? But what does that... What does the coffee machine have to do with like connecting with clients? It's just so upsetting. Why does a coffee machine need an online ecosystem? It totally would, though. Like, that's the bread and butter here, is like consumer goods that connect to the Internet of Things to like buy your things. I'll give you another hint that's meaningful.

You know, when like 19-year-old like boy genius is like drone pizza deliveries to each other or some shit, is it like you can send coffee to like someone on the other side of the room for like no... Oh, okay, instead of paying your employees, you give them coffee. You pay them in coffee. And that's the play... The playing field is even because no one gets paid. I'll give you all an actual meaningful hint that isn't from their ad copy. This is a business-to-business startup.

That's not health. Like, it still could be anything and is nothing. Okay. Is it a service or a good? It's a... It is sort of both. It's a digital service. I knew you were gonna say both.

Fucking hell. Because everything's a service now anyway. So that's still not like... This is just a void. You've given us the void. Yes. This is... Pulling your enemies into the stratosphere.

Yeah. The startup this week is despair. Like the concept. Is it... Is it like... I don't know. Is it like Starbucks-funded dick-sucking machines? It's also Starbucks-funded.

Oh, shit. You're so good at this. This is something incredibly, like, incredibly illegal that they have to dress up. Is it like, we'll help you bury the bodies? You go into your Starbucks and it just prints child pornography for you. A fully integrated technology ecosystem unlocks powerful data that can transform customer experiences. Yeah, so I was right.

It's the Epstein machine. And you go into the Starbucks and it just... Yeah. The BrightLume platform provides a complete solution that drives adoption, reduces labor costs, increases throughput, and personalizes the customer experience. The drives adoption thing is sitting very uncomfortably in life. Yeah. What are they trying to adopt?

What are we adopting, folks? You know, so I'll say that again. Drives mobile adoption, reduces labor costs, increases throughput, and personalizes the customer experience. Okay, an offensive Italian accent. That does help elevate your brand, though. Like, just having a big sign-up saying, this business owned and operated by Italians. It's just a big neon sign that says, Gervani's.

Converting every Starbucks to a greasy Brooklyn Fatso place. Every Starbucks employs no actual grease. They're automated. And it does employ one Brooklyn Fatso. And consultants? Oh, my goodness. Yeah, so this is... What's dystopian about it is how meaningless it all is.

It's just a bunch of, you know, techno-babel Ipsum. But here's what's delightful about it for me. This is from a press article about Breitloom. An automated quinoa store called Itza has rebranded as Breitloom and has permanently closed its two San Francisco restaurants as part of its transition to becoming a technology company that offers end-to-end digital solutions to the restaurant industry. A representative for the company tells Eater San Francisco, Breitloom is currently negotiating lease termination with the landlord at its former retail space.

So this is a tax loophole, right, that it's just turning one company into another company that isn't going to do anything. Well, what it actually does, it's a completely automated restaurant that employs precisely no people. Didn't the Soviet Union invent this in the 50s? They still serve quinoa. Isn't quinoa also starving a bunch of people in South America and destroying all of their restaurants?

Yeah, we've destroyed their economy. So the idea is that they've created this concept for an employee-less restaurant and they're selling the concept? They are selling what it is. I'll explain. It's not that it's employee-less. They still have chefs. It's just the customers never see a human.

You just go in and you get an automatic bowl of quinoa. Wonderful. Whenever you want it. You must have quinoa. And they've patented this concept. It just funnels the quinoa into your mouth like a goose being fattened. Exactly. How did they know my quink?

Wondering and seeing the begging eyes of other customers. I've been here for four years. I've had enough quinoa. So this is basically the transformation of two restaurants into a multi-million dollar tech startup that allows you to operate restaurants with zero human interaction. They got VC for this, right? So Itza was founded in 2015 and at the time operated this chain of restaurants where customers didn't have to interact with employees.

It functioned like a vending machine or high-tech automatic with customers ordering via a kiosk and meals just appearing in cubbies and you would never see anyone who worked there ever. I made a joke about this on Twitter about drunk Brits and fully automated luxury communism having one thing in common and it's thinking PCORA come out of a fucking replicator. And now they've just, unbeknownst to me, they had actually done it the whole time. So what Starbucks has done is Starbucks has invested tens of millions of dollars in these quinoa restaurants to turn them into a tech company that now is completely automating Starbucks locations. Oh, good.

I love to abstract like the relations of production to the point where you can just be a small bean who must have anxiety and never have to talk to a human or think about where your shit comes from. And then you and another bunch of small beans get ground up and made into coffee. This is the perfect metaphor, though, because the replicator is literally a chef in a windowless room. Like that's the perfect metaphor for the whole thing. Yeah, but how will I grow up my coworkers? Maybe, wait, Olga, you and I were talking earlier about good reasons for terrible things. Maybe this is good because it means that men will stop chatting up baristas.

I don't think that'll stop them. The only thing funnier to me than the Trump guy thing of saying your name is like, I don't know, like MAGA Trump to make the barista say it is saying that to a machine. And that's going to happen. Oh, yeah. So that's essentially what we're dealing with here. Can I just remind you that a couple of years ago, Starbucks did the whole thing that was called Start the Conversation that encouraged their baristas to talk about race to their customers.

Oh, God. You remember that? Oh, my God. Yeah, there was like a whole marketing campaign. So now they're doing, they're really pivoting from like, let's get to the nitty gritty of Black Lives Matter to let's just not talk at all. It doesn't have to be either of those things. That is the most liberal thing, though, is to be like, it's really important for us to have that conversation,

I say, as I put on my noise-canceling earphones, so I never have to risk it. I love like looking at a computer and just being like, you know, it's very problematic that you're lithium ion batteries or neocolonialism in Africa. The computer barista will be like, be able to tell you about why coltan mining is bad, but it's still going to do it. Oh, man. And also, don't forget, Starbucks is also going to start tracking everything you do inside of Starbucks, it seems, so that it can know what to offer you. Yeah, I'll just tell you, I'm taking a shit.

Yeah, but it's going to measure like the quantity and quality of your shits and like recommend diet advice to you. It's going to like target products to you based on like, shit analysis. That's going to have Jillian McKeith sitting down there with a microscope. Oh, my, my, my. We love bright loom, folks. But what I like to think about this, right, like it's just another example of how all of that disruption that we laud is being so great is really just another way of reducing labor share of income because his jobs are automated. The essential human element of the job gets dumber and simpler.

You go from making a burger to pushing a button. Yeah, like all of those meal delivery robots in Berkeley that are just driven by guys in Belarus. Or like the fact that you can't see, you can't see the Starbucks person means that like. Sorry, I just had a really dumb moment being asking myself, how do they get to Berkeley? Yeah, they just they just drop them in by air like fortnight. You have to find a robot and drive it around, kill the other robots. Yeah. Oh man, it's like it is the version of Ender's game we deserve.

Hmm. Yeah, I mean. Yeah. Awesome. Ender's game was the end. Yeah, I was about to say. Yeah. You know, so but like the as labor gets more invisible, like how many steps away from it?

Are we just saying like, yeah, for an extra $5, you can hit the shock button and shock an employee you can't see. This is precisely the bullshit underlying the whole like emotional labor that people are forced to pour into their jobs a lot of the time, especially if you work in the service industry. It's like it's like a very kind of thin pattern of like humanizing the company ethos. And we're about people power and like empowering you to have the best day possible. It's like though this is this is the step before you are ground down for dog meat and replaced by a robot. I have a semi serious take about this, which is that's so transparently absurd to people that it made it into vines like things like hi, welcome to chilies or whatever come from like a a class unconscious realization of how fucking weird it is.

The server has to pretend to be your friend. I have no idea if I even believe that or not, but I did just say it with my mouth. So I mean, I think it's something I'm always, you know, very uncomfortable with. It's like, it's probably miserable being on your feet all the time. You please don't pretend to be happy. Are we just challenging the concept of hospitality? Yes. Yes, we are.

We are a program podcast. I'm just labeling the conversation. This is how we treat our listeners and this is how we want anyone to treat their employees. It's just to call them hogs and scum and to humiliate them. They love it. Yeah, we're going to do the quinoa funnel like force feeding restaurant. That's going to be our new venture. We're going to make everyone into human foie gras.

But don't they have a chain in America called I think it's called Jake's last resort where people are mean to you on purpose and you go. Yes, but it was ripping off a place in Chinatown in London where they would just like that authentically. There was also a place in Toronto called Jack Asters. Interesting. And it was very similar. The wait staff was supposed to be mean to you. I don't know if that's a kind of emotional labor because I like to use that for myself and put it in my post. I like to put that energy right back into myself at like 2 a.m. or self-flagellating.

That kind of thing. Oh, we love it. But anyway, so the other thing about this that I think of is like tools like this, not only did they make the labor process completely invisible and devalued to most people, sort of allowing people to think of themselves just as consumers, but also it allows bosses options to like track different elements of like order fulfillment so they can know exactly how many, how many times you're pushing the button that grinds the coffee or whatever, contributing to the Amazonification of like the vast majority of jobs where work takes place in a state of total surveillance.

The only thing that surprises me about this is knowing how horny all tech guys are, that they didn't make some kind of barista like guinoid. Like it's not sexy is the thing. That's the only thing that surprises me. Yeah, that's the last thing we have to add back into this. We don't know that for a fan. That's true. We don't. It's fake.

Maybe you'll be very, very attracted to the funnel of quinoa. I don't know. Maybe they will replace the emotional labor element by getting like making a guinoid that looks like flow from progressive auto insurance who asked you about your day. Yeah, and we'll say MAGA Trump when you say that's your name. So that's Breitloom. I still don't fucking know what it is. Yeah, that's my main concern.

Yeah, I went away and then Googled it and read stuff and I still don't understand what it is. Think of it as a series of software that together will automate all of the ordering pickup and fulfillment of a restaurant. So it's you go in with an app on your phone. You're like, I want a coffee. You hit the button and then it facilitates that order going through getting made and getting delivered to you. I don't care about any of that. So I'm just going to assume it's still a loom and you just weave things on it. So it's basically just follows the ethos of the Juicero because you can do exactly the same thing by going to the barista and being like,

I want this kind of coffee. Except in this case, the barista has been fired and there is no barista. It's the Barnes and Noble where you don't pay for anything or like the Amazon grocery stores. I feel like it's one of those apps where we'll find out in like five years time, but it's been sold to like Peter Thiel to like build his like fucking military mechas. Yeah, it's just it's scientifically calibrated to find out how young your blood is. And like if you're particularly young and just drops a trap door underneath you. Okay.

Well, speaking of dropping a trap door, I'm going to drop a trap door for us to the next portion of this episode. Wonderful. Yeah, that was how we like my segues. It's like portal. It's exactly like that. To all of our 20 year old listeners, I did just reference a video game. The cake is a lie, nerd boys. Hey, Alec, what do you think about that?

I touched him on a tweet the other day and he didn't acknowledge it. I feel like he doesn't like me anymore. You're just cyber bullying him by this point. Since I'm the one in the same city, I worry that he's going to do the deranged fan thing on me. He's in London now. He's literally in London and he hasn't asked me to hang out once. I'm so upset. Alec, get your shit together.

He was terrifying. I was rootling through his bins and he didn't have the courtesy to ask me in for a cup of tea. Now he's not within stabbing distance of me. I'm entirely on board with bullying Alec. Alec, get your shit together. Alec, get in touch with Olga. Hang out with her. She wants to hang.

It's this or 12 rules for life and I still think that this is marginally better. A ringing endorsement. Am I turning boys into in cells with my powerful sexual energy? Yeah, because usually it's the opposite. Alec, Alec, write in. Tell us if Olga has turned you into an in cell, link twice. Oh my, I bet he regrets ever listening to this show. Yeah, just, I mean, I like that we're getting more and more targeted until the point where we're just bullying individual listeners one by one.

You will just get a person's fresh future. New Patreon tier, where we will bully you. Olga will sexually humiliate you. This is definitely a kink thing, right? Like this is definitely sex work on all of our parts. Speaking of, speaking of a kink thing. Oh no. I have in front of me.

Oh please no. Excerpts of cometh the hour. No. Cometh the man. Cometh Toby Young. Oh no. The extremely horny and strange and a bit fesh. Quillette article.

Those things always go together when there's fash. Like they're never like sexually normal. He just accidentally shows up with a pair of halibut. A glass house is my friend. Well, ouch, but yeah, true. If we keep kink shaming Toby Young, I'm going to leave. Fine, let me verify. The way in which they're sexually abnormal or whatever is a way that reflects their politics, which is to say licking boots and not in the good way.

So. Before we continue, I just wanted to say I still like the idea about like Toby Young was one of the names of Jeffrey Epstein's phone. And it was probably accidental and Jeffrey Epstein was actually looking for young Toby. And that's the story about how Jeffrey Epstein ended up at Toby Young's stag do. Toby Young doing a piece about how why Epstein doesn't call him in the friendship myth. He could literally be the last friend that Epstein has. He only would reach out if people would connect. I'm sorry, I'm going mad here.

Is this true? Yes, as far as we know. He was in the leaked bit of Epstein's black book. Like the butler who leaked it circled the names that he thought were involved in like child abuse shit. And Toby Young's name was not circled. So to be clear, he's just he's just in the phone book, right? How is it somehow impossibly an insult that you're not so good there? You're not invited to the real party.

Jeffrey Epstein won't invite you to his party. That's his next spectator column. Jeffrey Epstein didn't invite me to his to his parties. They looked really fun though. It was a really interesting building. I would have loved to measure it. I would have loved to measure it with my giant calipers. It's like the imagine being the kind of person where the only only vindication of your character you've gotten in recent years has been so violently popular and unpleasant to be around.

A convicted pedophile is like, well, I mean, Toby's fine. He's nice, I guess. Yeah, he's all right for a bit. A little of him goes a long way. He just keeps talking to the kids about their skull shape. Okay, so Toby Young has written an article about Britain's new Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Shoot me. And proud we are of him.

Entitled, cometh the hour, cometh the man, a profile of Boris Johnson. So before we go into the article also, congratulations of course. How does he spell it with an O or with a U? Because that will be important later, I think. Well, I think we have creative license. But I also like to of course congratulate Boris Johnson on becoming UK Prime Minister because you have to respect the office. You must respect the office. Absolutely.

I've put some scented candles. I'm ready. I love respecting the office. I've already sent him a picture of my feet. Olga's gone full vibes recently. It's this Marianne thing. It's rubbing off. She's also just got a lot of like extra mental space recently and I've told her to just like do more vibes.

Figuring out my vibe. Were we coming in an entirely crystal based podcast? Absolutely. We're going to replace the microphones with crystals. They have memories. Just a big Tibetan salt crystal over the microphone. Nobody can hear anything. Everyone's complaining.

They think it's terrible, but the vibes are amazing. But before we go into the article, yes, we also have to respect Boris Johnson's cabinet, which as far as I can tell is all about how he's about giving people second chances. It seems like the vast majority of everyone in Boris Johnson's cabinet either was fired from a high ministerial position or at least strongly rebuked for breaking the ministerial code. Yeah, but it's a diverse bunch of people who have been fired from being ministers is the thing. And so if you don't like that, you are racist. Yeah, of course. So diverse. I mean, there are people who've been accused of fraud.

There are people who've been accused of, you know, mismanagement, misconduct in public office. I mean, like, what more do you want? It's a total smorgasbord. It shows me that Boris Johnson's only crime is that he's too good of a friend. The real hero in the story is still Harry Cole. Why are we not? Yeah, Harry Cole's dedication to journalism, his willingness to undergo every personal humiliation under the sun. Look, guys, I for one would love to have a friend who looks at me the same way as he looks at the man who stole his wife.

The problem is Toby is that Harry Cole, Harry Cole's great is about to get cucked again because Toby Young is just stealing on Boris Johnson now. Well, I found the most fascinating account today in the replies under a Harry Cole tweet called Islam. I love every story that starts with that. Yeah, Islam a cat, which is like the two poles of great posting cat gifts and virulent racism smashed together in the Large Hadron Collider. And coming out with like, it's a cat, but the cat persona is also a Muslim but in an Islamophobic way. So I can read you one of the posts. This is the Boris Johnson voter. This cat voted for Boris Johnson.

This is his base, right? So it's a gift of a cat pushing another cat down a ladder. And it says, is Haram for, see it does, the icon has cheeseburger speak still, is Haram for other men to gaze upon my wives. Islam a cat put wife number three in safe place in case the window cleaner sees her. And so it's all like that. But it's all like Pam Geller Islamophobia, but done in the icon has cheeseburger thing and it's the most cursed account on Twitter. It's extreme like boomer posting because like we think about this ages ago. Oh, yeah.

Well, they all have personas and they'll be like a musk ox. Lots of like middle-aged conservative men like love to pretend to be ducks on online. Yes. And they will talk to you and they'll be racist, but they'll be racist as if you've just met a duck in the park. And the duck is like somehow quacking the N word. And that's kind of what- Wait, so is that a way to, is that a loophole in to just be allowed to say the N word in their eyes? I don't know.

Because when I was doing a story about this, I was asking them like, do you think that it's okay for you to use these words because you're pretending you're a duck and ducks aren't bound by the same rules as humans? And the answer I got backwards. No, it's a valid question. And the answer I got back was quack, quack. And that's what I mean. But I mean, you were owned by that. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's when I had to give this man, this duck, my wife. It's one of the things that's going to really confuse future archaeologists. Unearth real to real recordings of this podcast and be like, apparently. I just wonder whether the cats and the ducks inform the racism or it's just like, oh, I can only draw cats. I can't really draw cats. Oh, no. These are pictures of real cats. Yeah, they're real cats.

There's another one here that they got suspended for briefly, but it's still up of a cat like reacting to a Christmas tree. And it says, what the fat-toir five exclamation marks. That's clever. You got to admit that's clever. Nazi Islamophobes, clearly followers of, and this is like the Zanu-P.F. libel thing. It's too dense a pun. Tommy Catty Robinson is breaking Islamocat flat and erect Xmas tree. This is hate crime.

Someone phone at Sadiq Khan. So wait, are they- Why not Sadiq Cat? Come on. For fuck's sake. The Boris Johnson's base really does want to, and maybe that's it. Boris Johnson's base wants to break into every Muslim home across Great Britain, but when they do it, they just want to erect a Christmas tree. And then make a really dense, impenetrable pun about Tommy Robinson if he was a cat somehow.

But Sadiq Khan, not if he was a cat. Yeah, this is like goofy. These are Nazi furries, but they were born like 10 or 20 years too early to be furries, and they can't quite get their head around it. Like 30 years too late to be Nazis. Yeah, exactly. Man, really born in the wrong decade here. One year old who wears a hat. We're not even getting into the huge wealth of creative material in the just ordinary non-persona-crafting racist who happen to have a picture of a dog as their avatar.

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Like our podcast, Scurrilous Producer. Yeah, it's like someone saying like, talking about how like Islam is a threat to the West, and it's just like a cute poodle in a bow tie. And it's like, I have no way of emotionally processing this. Just racist pets. Yeah. Okay.

So also, back to Boris Johnson a little bit, back to his cabinet. This is actually him. Like this Twitter account is operated by Boris Johnson. Oh, interesting. It's not liable. It is entirely true. I believe this uncritically. So fortunately, our precious boy Matt Hancock is still at health and he's still ready to impart as much positivity, encouragement and content and content to the country's health system as he can, but no money.

We also have Liz Truss and at Department of International Trade who will be spreading her total enthusiasm for utter horse shit around the world. And then we also have Preeti Patel who was stripped of her ministerial post after I think she attended a timeshare presentation in Tel Aviv. And then we have Gavin Williamson. But this government entirely backing BDS there. Surprisingly won't. We have Gavin Williamson who, and I think he's in education. He was sacked as Minister of Defense for leaking a bunch of national secrets because he was too dumb to realize he shouldn't. I love Gavin Williamson because defense was like his dream job until Prime Minister and he's just brought his old stuff with him.

Because day one, he was like, oh, we should have military in the schools. We should have military, like entirely military schools to teach young people how to military. Absolutely. That's me though. I don't transfer my skills between jobs. I'll just keep doing the same thing as last time. So this is very relatable to me. Also, he's a snack.

He's super fucking hot. Although he thinks he's Macron though. Do you remember he had, there was this story that leaked about him having a pet tarantula or something that he kept in a terrarium on his desk? And you just know that he was sat there in the Ministry of Defense thinking about how fucking clever he was with this little fucking spider being a Bond villain, just a total wanker. Clearly you haven't read any business books. That's the first key to success is that you have to keep... It's just having a tarantula on your desk to inspire fear in a civil service. If you have the tarantula, you have the upper hand in any negotiation because they don't know how many tarantulas you have.

It's like Dazzle Paint, but for negotiations. And who else to... My favorite one though is that he cucked Michael Gove by giving him the chancellery of the Duchy of Lancaster, which is meaningless. He's a minister without portfolio, so he has to go to all the meetings, but he has no power. And then my favorite of his appointments... So many of these people are like... There's been like points in their career where the whole British press and like everyone in the country is like, hmm, seems like you've done a thing that's evil. And then they're like, in my defense, I was simply being stupid.

And everyone's like, have another position of power. Absolutely baffling. That's why I say the way to understand the British Tory party is only as Instagram people. They're all about failing forward, learning from their mistakes. All my losses as lessons. Yeah, they're all their losses as lessons, Instagram business people. But then it turns out that they're just selling Herbalife. I wish that they were more like YouTube.

And we would just get like tearful videos in like entirely white unadorned rooms about why I'm no longer associating my brand with James Brokenshire. So now that I think we've done that, I want to really talk about Toby Young's insane article. So this is the first of two articles that we'll be reading this week from Quillette. Like I said, second one, the Amazon one will be in the bonus episode. So come at the hour, come at the man, a profile of Boris Johnson, written, of course, by Toby Young. I first set eyes on Boris Johnson in the autumn of 1983 when we went up to Oxford at the same time and he was speaking at the Oxford Union. No one has said went up to Oxford in decades except for unbearable people, like except for unbearable Toby Young types and Fedora people. When I went up to Glasgow, yeah.

Yeah, because that's, this is, this is what they would have said like in Brideshead Revisited Times. Oh yes, well I went up to Oxford and I got sent down. None of them even have the dignity to be communists anymore. Like if you're going to do the Brideshead Revisited thing, at least be a deep cover agent for the KGB is all I'm saying. It's up later, it's up later. So here's the first, this article peaks early, but there's a lot of really wonderful stuff coming after it. So this is the peak. With his huge mop of blonde hair, his tie, a skew and his shirt escaping from his trousers.

I'm sure that's not all that was escaping from trousers. He looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Which is just the fucking sexiest thing in the world. Not Alec Fullerton. No, Nate, beep out his name. We have to stop redirecting people to his Twitter account. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something. He can't help himself with the phrenology, can he?

Not for a second. Come on, it's Quillette. They have a minimum of phrenology. Straight to the skull. They just edit that in if you don't write any. You open the doors to the Quillette office. It's just like 16 identical men and identical skin, sort of tumbling each other's skulls. Welcome.

Yeah, it's like a massage train, but you're measuring everyone's brow ridge. Yeah. Oh, you know, when you walk into a office and they have to register you, so you sign up in an iPad, and then they'll measure your skull as well. Absolutely. They love it. Sometimes you get dropped into a shark pit. Well, of course, if you have the brain pan of the common slob.

Yeah. You don't have the like ridges of knowledge and rationality, or the neck back fat rolls of like assertiveness. A fucking thick neck. He's got a fucking thick ass neck. Why? He's neck. Fuck it.

Boris Johnson was barely dressed, giving a speech for the Oxford Union, looking like he was begging to have a coronary, and I was fucking stiffed up. It's like he has the physique of like a divorced dad buying flowers for his already disappointed new girlfriend from like a garage at 3 a.m. Yeah, from a petrol station. And Toby Young's like, oh, damn. Maybe she'd like some charcoal briquettes.

Well, the thing is, like, if we could change the context a little bit. I've never been that girlfriend, ever. Just so we're clear about that. If we could change the context of this article just a tiny bit, it would be a nice love story. But instead, it happens to be about these like right wing ghouls who just adore authority figures. If only this was gay.

Like I say, it's always the bad kind of licking boot. Yeah. It's like, if this was, if they were just in love, as opposed to in love with authority, this would be much better. Yeah, it needs to either be 30% less or 80% more gay. That's my attitude to everything, in fact. So I'm going to go back to this because this paragraph rocks. So I'm going to, I'm going to start again.

Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick ass neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche's uber-mench about him. This was syphilitic and insane. And like having all of his estate taken over by his sister. You could imagine him in Lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest. Do I have to?

Yes, you do now. This is the prime minister now. And we have to respect the office by picturing him in Lederhosen. Honestly though, just would like to say that, that's a really basic comment now I regret. No, no, no, say the thing. I mean, just the idea of like, I mean, it is kind of cool that a man is being so openly objectified.

No, what we're not going to do is sexualize Boris Johnson. I'm into that. That's more objectification than Theresa May ever got. You're actually making him do emotional labor by sexualizing him like this? The other thing. I mean, this is just how extremely online I am. But I remember reading that first sentence and having no thought

but the literal sentence, wow, extremely Aryan. And it's because I do, like, all appearances in the country not withstanding, especially appearances on this podcast. I am quite careful with like comparing people to Nazis because there are actual Nazis on the street and so that's a meaningful comparison. And so I'm not comparing Boris Johnson to a Nazi. Yeah, that's our job.

I'm just asking the question, is Toby Young comparing him to a Nazi? He's just so faking hot like the kid who sings Tomorrow Belongs to Me at the end of cabaret. And Nietzsche himself spent most of his life in a dark room throwing up. And so in that capacity, it is similar. This is like the Oxford Union.

Yes, exactly. It is a lot like the Oxford Union. You do spend a lot of time in a dark room throwing up. It's just the dark room is called the purple turtle. Glasgow Union is like that, but without the advantage of like any of the class networking pizza gate stuff. So it's just Tory Wanks doing all of the same argument things

and then not doing any of the creepy stuff. It's terrible. So back to the article. I demand more cults. Yes, more cults. That's the activity. You could imagine him in Lederhosen wandering through the black forest with an axe over his shoulder

looking for ogres to kill. And I don't think he would have found any because there aren't any ogres. So he Toby Young is just imagining a big, thick-ass Boris Johnson wandering around the black forest aimlessly forever trying to kill an imaginary creature. The same combination, the state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coil strength of an almost tangible will to power.

Will to power. He says will to power. It's just Will it so much. That's not weird. Why are you being weird about it? It's just we're saying he's very Germanic and he's sort of an ubermench. We're talking about it because he has the right skull shape, you know?

And all of that together gives him a will to power. I don't understand what you're talking about. And also this isn't metaphorical flair on the part of a florid writer. Toby Young has attended eugenics conferences and talked in favor of eugenics. He is actually thinking he is a superman. In what he understands to be a Nietzschean sense.

We love it. So, he began to advance an argument in what sounded like a parody of the high style in British politics, theatrical dramatic self-series, when just a few seconds in, he appeared to completely forget what he was about to say. He looked up, startled, where am I, he asked, and then asked the packed chamber which side he was supposed to be on.

Toby Young is the original Rube for this act. And like, it's always been stupid, now it's finally wearing a little bit thin. But, God, if it doesn't make sense that he was just the original fool for this. Yeah, it is. Yeah, where am I? I don't know.

Befume harmless, really. Well, this develops. I'd been to enough union debates at this point to know just how mercilessly the crowd could punish those who came before them unprepared. And that was particularly true of freshmen who have mastered all the arcane procedural rules. Some of them dating back to the Union's founding in 1823.

Who's a model, by the way? Yeah. But Boris's chaotic scatterbrain approach to the opposite effect. The motion was deadly serious. This house would reintroduce capital punishment. It's always this house would reintroduce the fuck off. Almost everything that came out of his mouth provoked gales of laughter,

like how he appointed that new home secretary who would introduce capital punishment. This is the last bit. The rules of formal debating in these kinds of universities and institutions are all about training the sons and daughters of the rich to not give a shit about what they're saying. And to be not an argument.

Yeah, exactly. We had an episode on this about how debate is fake. And how the whole point of this article is that Boris Johnson doesn't give a shit about the rules which are supposed to teach you how not to give a shit about things, which is just like mad endorsement of the huge class deference in the society

that essentially the argument for him holding the highest office is like, wow, he really powerfully doesn't give a shit, does he? Let's let him kill poor people. Brilliant. This seems like a sensible way of conducting our affairs. To say I was impressed would be an understatement. Again, because you're an idiot.

You basically say, wow, I was taken in by someone who got my nose. And he's had it the whole time. To say that I was fascinated by these jangling keys. That's the thing, Boris Johnson still has Toby Young's nose like to this day. Yeah, that's the compromise that he has on him. He thinks he has his nose in a drawer somewhere.

He was on the other side of a sofa and it seemed before my very eyes like he was going down an escalator and yet no escalator was there. This is my other favorite part of this article. A few years before arriving at Oxford, I had watched the television adaptation. It didn't start going up again.

Fuck you, Toby, learn the language. Learn the language that no one uses anymore. When I was there, if you had said things like going up to Oxford, you would have gotten yourself flicked in the dick. I love that you're using... The framework of mocking people for referencing how they went to Oxford. To reference how you went to Oxford.

That's just the podcast sector of the last. That's the essence of Riley. Aren't I a stinker? So, a few years before arriving at Oxford... Oh, by the way, guys, this whole time Riley has been measuring his neck. Guys, did you know Riley went to Oxford? No, I've been going to the gym a lot. I could tell by his neck.

My neck has got bigger as I've been going to the gym a lot. The fact that he's wearing laterhosen. Number one, I look fucking great in laterhosen. Post-laterhosen pics, to be honest. Back to this. The only thing that touches a nerve is the Canadian wine stuff. Don't you dare. Wait, is Canadian wine good?

So he thinks there's a microclimax on the Niagara Peninsula that makes Canadian... It's factually provable! It's the result of the lake in the Niagara Escarpment, which is the ancient lake shore. The most Riley thing I can imagine is explaining this to Sven Markvart. God damn it. So, a few years before arriving at Oxford...

The most Riley thing I can imagine is just him alone in a restaurant with no people and no surface sipping on a glass of Niagara and wine and my throne to himself about microclimax. Why do I do this, Yo? To get owned mercilessly by us. A few years before arriving at Oxford, I had watched a television adaptation of Bride's Head Revisited, Evelyn Waugh's Oxford novel,

I love when he reuses words in the same sentence, and had been expecting to meet the modern-day equivalents of Sebastian Flight and Anthony Blanche, larger-than-life devil-may-care aristocrats delivering bomballs between sips of champagne and spoonfuls of caviar. I mean, the problem is that... Those people do exist, they just all now become trans and drop out before ever going to Cambridge or Oxford.

And then come on podcasts. So, it's great, we love doing that. But the reality was very different. Warm beer, stale sandwiches, and second-hand opinions. Lots of spotty students, all as gauche as me. But in Boris, though, it was as if I'd finally encountered the real Oxford, the Platonic ideal. While the rest of us were works in progress,

vainly trying on different personae, Boris was the finished article. Plato also a guy with a very thick neck. He was an instantly recognizable character. Plato was ripped. Yeah, no, Plato means broad shoulder, doesn't it? Yeah, that's your classics content, with Milo out for the moment. We do know that this whole entire article is basically

just like a verbal version of a Ben Garrison cartoon. Yeah, where he draws Trump with the muscles. Yeah, it's just... And it's like simultaneously both horny and not horny enough. And like guns are written on his arms. Yeah. Just in case. He is carrying a giant axe that just says, like, patriotism.

That was Gladstone's thing. So I'm glad he's trying to rehabilitate axes from the radical liberals. So, Boris was the finished article. He was an instantly recognizable character from the comic tradition in English letters, a pantomime toff. Yet at the same time, fizzing with vim and vinegar, bursting with spunk.

Oh, God. Just more gay. I demand more gay. Yeah, please. Make it gayer, because it's at a weird middle ground. It's the uncanny valley of gayness. It is. That's exactly what it is. It's like boring heterosexuality or whatever. A little bit gay, a little bit interesting. Kind of gay, kind of interesting.

This amount of gay, horrifying, and then actually gay, wonderful. It's this amount of gay. I can get down with the uncanny valley of gayness. Wow, that's hard to say. It's the uncanny valley for lesbianism. The uncanny valley. Sign me up, Sailor. It's the fact that this is intense homoeroticism

in service of intense homophobia. It's supplemented into the worst shit you can imagine. Well, again, I think the thing to remember is that Toby Young doesn't seem to be in love with Boris Johnson so much as he is in love with power, and Boris Johnson just personifies power. No, it's not love. This is very much lust. Yeah, he's in lust.

He's horny for deportations and austerity, because he wants to piss off people that make fun of him on Twitter. Kind of shifting into like a Hans Faller the novel, basically, is what it is. He wants the fascist patriarch to tread on his incredibly thin undeserving neck. That's the kind of vibe. I am fully wide right now.

Fascism is always this kind of hyper-masculine-masculinist thing twinned with romantic sentimentality. It's always been that way. No surprise, but also still very funny to say that he's full of spunk. He was a cross between Hugh Grant and a silver baccalaureate. Oh, boy. Again, it's like other people can read this. Yeah.

How are you not embarrassed? How does this not start with Dear Diary? Dips of house. I never thought this would happen to me. Boris now. Boris Johnson has certainly engaged in some pretty egregious behavior during his climb up Britain's greasy ball. A litany of sins.

It's an uncanny valley. It's not a greasy ball. A litany of sins. A litany of sins that would be enough to end the careers of less gifted politicians. He was sacked from his first job as a news trainee in the times of London in 88 when he was caught making up a quote. He went on to become the Brussels correspondent of The Telegraph,

where many of his stories with the EU's hair brain bureaucratic directives, new regulations governing the curvature of bananas for instance, fell under the heading too good to fact check. Much like Trump, I'm glad that we have progressed out of the woods of pretending this stuff was true into now these people actually saying what they have always believed and being like, of course it was made up, grow up. It's a fun story.

Yeah, exactly. They're taking the attitude towards real things that have a real impact on people's lives. To someone at a nerd convention going to Star Trek and be like, excuse me, but there was a fourth red shirt in the scene behind you. How did you get back onto the ship or whatever? Yeah, it's a stupid question and I won't answer it.

On one level, I prefer this. It's more honest now to be like, yeah, now it's undeniable. Of course we've been lying this whole time. It's kind of your fault for believing us. Yeah, so you can eat. Any attempt to fact check these people on what they say is the same as asking a detailed question at a nerd convention. Don't bother, it's just embarrassing.

Just laugh in their faces. The currency at hand is not truth and fact. It's like loyalty and disloyalty. And so by fact checking them in appropriate scare quotes, you're just providing yet another test of loyalty that people can rally behind. Everyone's in the mob. You kick up to Boris only.

When Boris stood as the Conservative candidate in the London mayor election in 2008, his Labour opponent and his campaign team dredged up everything quote unquote offensive he had ever said or written, which was an embarrassment of riches. No need to employ any opposition researchers. It was just in newspaper columns and magazine articles for anyone to find. I liked that Ken Livingston then got the brain disease where he said all of those things himself.

Yeah. But Boris has always been immune to this line of attack. To take the most notorious example, in a telegraph column in 2002 with the visit of Tony Blair to the Congo, he wrote, To which country? Congo. One, Pongas and Rwanda, which admittedly borders,

but I know I am being a nerve. You're checking the right. Yes, I am awarding him Pinocchios on this. I do have a point here, which is, I said as much on Twitter that we all heard those quotes, that and instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain. And they're both extremely racist, but I also felt like they were both in-character Boris.

Whereas the leaked one where he was being briefed as Foreign Secretary about Leo Veradka and said why isn't he called Murphy like all the rest of them, was offstage Boris and is actually, I think, a personally meaner kind of racist because it's not bluffing into being some kind of a comic buffoon. Yeah. I would say what he said in the telegraph

probably still has more harmful consequences. Oh, sure. Yeah, it's just also more performative rather than revealing of any kind of personal feelings. Not that that matters. But does that distinction matter, yeah. Well, I think the distinction matters. Why are we at a point where we're deciding

which racism of our Prime Minister is better? But that's not my point. It's that in order to understand the kind of charlatan that he is, it's worth understanding when he is putting the act on and when he is being the person that he is in private, which I would suggest is considerably more evil now that he has like a finger on the nuclear button or whatever else. And almost like the stuff that he says in public

is playing into this idea of a buffoon that's like really helpful to him at the end of the day. I completely agree because I think that that's the debate that's been raging over the past few days, right? Like whether or not it's useful to call Boris like a authentically racist ideologue in the way that he approaches politics or whether he's just kind of using, like,

whether he just knows that... Whether he's an opportunist. Yeah, whether he's an opportunist and whether he knows that saying blatantly, egregiously racist things will play to a gallery and allow him to tack to the hard right in the way that he tacked to the kind of soft liberal centre of the party in order to get elected London mayor. And the point is that, like, it can be both.

Yeah, it's both. Like he will happily eject certain parts of the kind of... Of his, like, personal racism in order to, for instance, get elected mayor of London. But, you know, it doesn't... Because it doesn't trouble him because, like, his worldview isn't challenged by kind of talking up to the gallery

of the more liberal press in the way that he has absolutely no problem talking up to the gallery. Yeah, it's switching from pandering to the evening standard to pandering to the cat that pretends to be Muslim. Yeah. So this is how Toby Young interprets it. Even by the less racially sensitive standards of the time, this was inflammatory,

but Boris claimed to be, quote, satirizing neocolonialism rather than expressing neocolonialism sentiments himself and got away with it. His references to watermelon smiles and picatinny's didn't stop him from winning in a city that is 55% non-white. Yeah, it's almost as if there were some kind of, like, structural things that made that easier to, like, win. And it's also, and it's almost as if, like, minorities don't have,

like, ethnic minorities aren't, like, less likely to vote. Yeah, like, there was some kind of systematic attempt to, like, stop ethnic minorities from voting. No, no, that sounds ridiculous. I'm pretty sure they just appreciated what was clearly a satire of neocolonialism. Yeah, because Boris was jokes, right? He was banter.

So this is, and I think, but I think this is, this is something that I see constantly all the time whenever we talk about this kind of thing, which is that the Toby Young's and the Brendan O'Neill's or whatever, not that we read Brendan O'Neill anymore, we just prefer to write our own, is that they see this not in, like, whether, what they authentically see this whole thing as

is not, frankly, not important to me. I don't know and I don't care. But how they portray it is that everyone on the left is prudish. They're a little bit too scared of the icky things I'm going to say, as opposed to actually concerned with, you know, substantively concerned with justice. You know what it is? It's politics unleashed.

So this is, in fact, what he then says. It is this Saturnalian streak in the British character that Boris appeals to and helps explain his popularity with ordinary voters, like the guy who has this Islamophobic cat. George Orwell, George Orwell expands on his theme. Contrasting the unlettered masses with the sanctimonious, quote, Europeanized intelligentsia in the line in the unicorn.

Wow, sounds like fucking Orwell fucking sucks, actually. This is why, like, throughout, like, whenever I'm editing a piece or, like, going through a submission in-box or anything like that, whenever I see an Orwell quote, especially an Orwell quote at the top of the piece, I just set myself on fire right there and then and give up immediately.

Submit to Novara with all your favorite Orwell quotes. So here's the quote. My favorite Orwell quote is just a list of names he gave to MI5 of suspected communists. Pithy, yeah. Straight to the point. My favorite Orwell quote is, hey, baby, those legs go all the way up.

So just confusing him with pop-punk band, the Orwells. So here is- They're canceled, did you know that? Really? Yeah, okay. No, the Orwells, I took one of them home, but, like, not to have sex with just to see whether I could-

We're talking about this on Balthasar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The drummer, right? I'm not sure. How do you know? Anyways, but the point is, and then Rajiv texted me a picture of their- a Wikipedia page.

They're fucking canceled. What? For being too rational. Too rational. Yeah. Maybe someone saw you taking them home. They must be underage. Yes.

Dive to the Wikipedia page. If you want an image of the future, just imagine Olga sitting on a human face forever. Here's the George Orwell quote that he's going to spell with his tongue onto your clit. Why did you even say- That's not something you should do. Do what?

Just- Never mind. I'm gonna go with the quote. I've been trying to get the quote. Let's not get bogged down in technique here. Yeah. Look, we're post-truth guys. One thing one notices if-

I've heard that excuse before. One thing one notices. One thing one notices if one looks directly at the common people, especially in the big towns, is that they're not pure tentacle. The common people are all like the sun. They are blind to yourself. They are inveterate gamblers,

drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to body jokes, and probably use the foulest language in the world. Once again, Orwell is like everything else on this cursed episode, not gay enough, because he has this weird fetishization of like the parochial English worker. And it just is, again,

not quite gay enough and slightly uncanny. But the other thing, right, is that this kind of dedication to like parochial rudeness. It's foul workerism is what it is. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's like, Oh, well, the workers like to say the n-word,

so you're a liberal elite if you don't yourself, you know, painted on the back of your Bugatti. Like I do, a working class landlord. This just serves to embed him in the public imagination as a stock British character who many people still feel an instinctive affection for, the lovable rogue, the man with holiday in his eye. What?

Yeah. What? With the holiday in his eye. That's a normal expression. I think Toby Young invented this expression, because I think Boris Johnson is his muse. This is like, Boris Johnson is... He had a sense that there was a word in there before holiday,

and he just kind of had to cut it out, replace it with anything. Seek for Caribbean Island. Britain's veteran political commentators are, for the most part, pessimistic about Boris's premiership, his lack of a majority, the Byzantine complexity of Brexit, trying to win over the soggy center,

well-being blocked by paroch. The soggy center is also something you do when you go up to Oxford. All of this adds up to a grim reality check that could see him as the shortest live Prime Minister in the UK's history. But when I hear these prognostications of doom, go fuck yourself.

I cannot help thinking of another Prime Minister who entered Downing Street in a moment of national crisis with the odds stacked against him. No, no, no, no, no! I can see it coming. When Winston Churchill succeeded Chamberlain in 1940, those members of the establishment thought he'd embarked on a foolhardy course.

What hope did Britain have holding out against the might of the Nazi war machine? Yet he overcame these doubts about his leadership, in part because he succeeded in bending reality to his will. With the use of his podcast, which he had with FDR. There's a lot of talk of the strength of the will here. Almost as if the Second World War was some kind of contest of wills between nations and between folks, if you like.

Yes. How are you spelling forks? Oh, with a V, but that's like the car. Like the car, which was invented for people. That's why it's called that. Ordinary people doing ordinary working people things. Ordinary regular people, definitely. So it's just so hilarious.

It is just absolutely fascinating to me how people will refuse any reality other than one which paints like mundane incompetence and an utter refusal to like countenance reality as some kind of like tub thumping over bench attempt to overhaul the world. Boris Johnson gets knocked down, but then he gets up again.

You're never going to keep him down. Of course, Johnson is so ripped that he is going to bend reality itself. With his neck alone. Strip to the waist. Toby Young's oiling him up. One iron girdle. What is considered completely impossible one week becomes possible the next.

Through sheer force of personality. Through sheer force of personality, Churchill was able to change the narrative and persuade people that military defeat wasn't inevitable. This is like Ursula Gwynne's quote about how living under capitalism seems inevitable, but so did living under the divine right of kings. But from the other side of like those fences they use in preschool to keep toddlers in the same place.

It's a superpower possessed by those rare individuals that come along once in a generation like Steve Jobs combining bottomless self-belief. Steve Jobs in here as well. And thinking that Steve Jobs was one. The guy who tried to beat cancer with juice cleansers. Okay, no, but I'm sorry. Did it work?

Steve Jobs wore turtlenecks and Boris Johnson's neck's two fucking thick. Two fucking thick for a turtleneck. It's a superpower called a reality distortion field possessed by those rare individuals that come along once in a generation like Steve Jobs combining bottomless self-belief. This is like when Scott Adams the Dilbert guy gets a little bit metaphysical and says that he's going to like hypnotize you into having orgasms or whatever. That's a deep part, but he did do that and you can google it.

Combining bottomless self-belief, exceptional cognitive ability and spellbinding charisma. Boris is one of those people. From the moment I first saw him, I felt I was in the presence of someone special. You know people do keep saying that about Hitler. Like in the primary sources, I forget the name, but there's this Belgian fascist party leader

who met him and said that from the moment he saw him, he felt he was in the presence of history or something. So it's very good and normal that we're bringing that back. He was not wrong. No. I mean good diplomacy is saying that about literally every leader you made. That's true. Someone capable of achieving great things.

I guess saying it feeling like you're in the presence of history is a really potentially open-ended compliment. Yeah, I tweet that every single day. I've never quite been able to dispel the impression. It's like when my ex-girlfriend is asked to describe me and she says that I have a lot of qualities. It is true and it is kind of a compliment. Like how would you describe our time together?

Significant. Impactful. Very. Never a dull moment. Yes. Hi everybody. I think that about does it for the free episode of Trash Future Podcast for this week.

If you want more of this shit, you have to pay us, you hogs. Yeah. If you want the other Quillette article. Yeah. And we say slurs. Oh yeah. But which ones you'll have to tune in to find out. We are woke, so we only say the slurs that apply to ourselves.

Which is mostly me. Oh Alec. So as ever, we've got that Patreon. We've talked about that before. But the other things to remember is that we are going to be at Birmingham transformed on the 8th of August. So please do come to that. It's going to be not Milo, but Alice.

Milo will be at the end of the fringe. Where we will be two days later. But where Alice will not be. Paradoxically. So if you want to come to Scotland to see me, get fucked. Cause like, we're just trying to like structure this in the most irritating and counterintuitive way possible. Yeah.

This is like CrossFit. It's muscle confusion. But for where we are in the country. And also that's the 10th. The link's in the description. And also don't forget, we are going to be at the world transformed. As will, as will Eleanor, I believe. Oh, uh, no.

Oh what? No? No world transformed? No, no, no. Just listening to this, you've opted out of it. No. I'm done. I'm done.

Yeah. Once was enough. It's a science conference. So it's just happening at the same time. The world measured. Well, I think we should, we are going to bring like a phrenology bust onto the stage with us and just have it sit there like Davis or any skulls. I want Eleanor to plug what she's got coming up, but she's laughing too much.

Sorry. I will be at the, at the sort of national world transformed doing some stuff on conspiracy theories. Are they all true? Yes. Excellent. Especially the ones about pyramids. I was going to say, can we get a statement that pizza gate is real?

Is pizza gate real? Um, pizza gate was the friends we made along the way. Exactly. Thank you. Also, I'm taking my show. If then today I'm a fringe every day at 4 30 p.m. at monkey barrel, please come. Oh yeah. And, um, is the patreon at 3k yet?

Um, the patreon is one away from 3k. So at least one person listening to this, um, subscribe to the patreon so that we can pay me instead of just having me be an intern for something that I can't put on my CV ever. Um, yes. So do all of that of those things. Come see us wherever we are. Um, looking forward to seeing all of you in Birmingham in Edinburgh and Brighton. Mail pictures of your feet to the studio.

Whatever. No, whoever. Mail pictures of you. Just take a picture of your feet and mail into a random address. Stick them up around town. Stick them up around town, you know, this is our new thing. There's a website with a post code generator. So just generate a post code and send your feet pics back.

It's the auto dialer from the Simpsons, but for sending. I'd like to be famous enough to be on wiki feet. Please. Thank you. Yo, so this is, I should say that that is probably illegal. Yeah. If you post your feet to random people, please don't say it was our idea. The most cursed wiki feet thing though is to have a wiki feet page that's like critical

of your feet, like Brie Larson's. I'm actually only verified on wiki feet. Okay. That thing I said about posting your feet to random people, don't do that apparently. The thing I read about Brie Larson's wiki feet page was that somebody described her feet as looking like she had been barefoot kicking telephone poles. Wow. Okay.

We've started the episode on feet chat. We're ending the episode on feet chat. Welcome to trash feature. The podcast about the future has nice feet. Anyways, I'll talk to you later, everybody. Bye. Bye.