TRASHFUTURE - Gaped Britain feat. Dan Boeckner

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

This week, Riley, Milo, Hussein, and Alice join special guest Dan Boeckner (@DanBoeckner) of Wolf Parade, Operators, Arcade Fire, and the Bottlemen (@BottlemenPod) podcast to discuss a terrifying app-based labour market violation from Canada, some interesting UK political developments, and another–yes, another–British centrist political movement full of veterans of all the other failed ones.  If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Milo has shows coming up in London and Brighton. Learn more here! https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome to TF on its new home on talk TV because we finally needed a new right wing news channel in Britain. I'm always talking to the TV. I'm yelling at it. I'm saying yes, Jeremy Vine Easter egg should be in cigarette packaging. Everyone who watches talk TV also does yell at their TV. Like that's the main audience. Yeah, having two TV side by side, one playing talk TV, one playing GB news,

going totally insane. And your granddad's only falls in losses. Yeah, absolutely. I feel that way. Hello, everyone. Welcome. Welcome to the sit cast where I have recovered mostly. Yep.

And we also have Allison Hussain from isolation on the quarantine island. Yeah, the delegation from being a bit unwell. Yeah, I don't have COVID. I had COVID. I recovered. And then I got what I can only assume is like Britain's plague of wokeness. So I'm always coughing, but my coughs always sound like words like equity and justice. Of course, I have more and more pronouns every day.

But that's the thing. I'm always sick because I have the greatest plague of all, gender dysphoria. But also, so a cold. Yeah, what happens? You went into like an unventilated basement and we all got caught gender dysphoria. Yeah. Do they not vaccinate for that now? Reacting with horror when I'm diagnosed with gender dysphoria,

just incidentally at the hospital for something else. Yeah, you're just coming in wearing a dress. There's no easy way to say this, sir, or should I say madam? Oh, no. And we also, of course, you're going to have to get very into paradox games. I'm terribly sorry. I'm afraid you're either going to have to become a stacked baddie or get obsessed

with guns or perhaps both. And we also, of course, have Dan Beckner of the Bottleman and some other stuff. You've done some other things. I'd like to begin by saying you and I have never met before. Yeah, I'm here on the ground. I've put boots on the ground in the United Kingdom. Yeah, look, Canada has been calling for boots on the ground variously around the world.

And Dan has adhered to the call and has joined the Canadians taking up the no-fly zone. I've joined the International Army of Heroes to liberate Britain. Can I also say the amount of coughing and sneezing going on in the background of this episode is really atmospheric. I periodically just notice it is genuinely very funny. Just recorded in a sort of lazarette. Nate will probably edit it out as well, so the listener won't even get to experience it. You're never going to get know what it's like to record from the sniffledome.

I lived in the sniffledome for two weeks. Terrible, terrible, unimaginable things happened in there. Folks, everyone was sick, terrible party, very, very bad. Everyone sniffing. It is genuinely the worst thing that has ever happened in my memory, but I have got a dry cough and I have the sniffles. Are you excused from Ramadan due to being sick? I am actually.

That is a good thing. I've been excused for a while, but I've been known from my mum. Yeah, but also that still kind of like brings with it like religious guilt. Of course. So I have like the physical illness, but I also have the mental illness of religious guilt. So that's great, but it's like a funny thing to sort of just like. There is something in the Hadith about the Prophet partaking of a Lemsip. Yeah, he was like for lemon, say what you will,

but the lemon orange Lemsip packets, they do slap. You're not even supposed to feel guilty. Like there's a shit ton of Hadith that's like, oh, it's actually forbidden. Well, look, you know, and yet we both do it. Guilty about feeling guilty. I want to talk about some stuff. First, I like I'm not even planned to talk about this, but like, I feel like I'm kind of going insane at the,

it appears that there is being a this new right wing TV program, TV channel that's been launched by Rupert Murdoch a year after GB news as the end as though like. Imagine being Rupert Murdoch and being like, I need a TV station that's more right wing than the ones I already have. Imagine being the right wing TV networks B team. Is it competing with the existing? They're all kind of competing with one another because, and the thing is, I see this as part of the same constellation of activities

as the desperate, as this sort of, as the sort of breathless support for like Elon Musk to finally make a free speech Twitter, but we have free speech Twitters. It's fucking gab and all these other networks that are like the free speech network. And at the same time, at the same time, there's now like this thing. I've sort of cursed Alice by, by showing her this made me so angry, which is a new like sort of centrist movement is bubbling up because people are dissatisfied

with labor. It's the international brigades of centrists. It's time for your center, your centrist Blairite political party. Yeah. And so it feels like the only, it feels like there are these like, like the record of Britain is skipping and we're playing the same four notes again of we want to change or the record of the world in the sense of Twitter notes of things can only get better by the room. Yeah. Yeah. And, but like where is it? Britain has the same construction as like still Dre. You know, it's just basically like one very short looping melody.

Where like the problems don't get solved by like, for example, conservatives feeling marginalized by a kind of like they are vague liberal monoculture that they're just aware of, but not part of. So they just keep on starting news channels that no one watches because they just, they're just desperate to see some news that they like, but the only news that they really are ever going to see is news that pisses them off, because that's how that works. You've got to be the change that you want to see in the world. You have to be the news that you want to consume.

Yeah. They should all move to Russia. They'd love it. They could watch Piravi Canal news all day. It's like the most amazing shit. It's like Mr. Putin is great man. The Ukrainians must be destroyed. And also in Kastroma, they made the biggest pancake in the world. And at the same time, like the, the, the fact that like, I don't know, Starmer appears to have like sort of gotten what he's going to get out of calling the government scoundrels and, and sort of milking the party gate thing. These, these television channels, I welcome them, but I would call on them to go

further by taking a balanced view of the approach. I would encourage GB news to give the Labour Party a go. We could be reactionary. Well, like the thing is right, all of this sort of conservative oppression, silencing of conservatives, whatever, is so totally illusory that when you finally have a TV news channel or a version of Twitter that you can like say the unsayable and nobody fucking says it because no one is like as abnormal as you are. You just pick yourself up and you just have to start another one.

Yeah. I think well, well, this is, yeah, this is like the kind of thing that, I mean, it make, like talk TV sort of makes sense to the degree that Murdoch owns so many properties in like one building, like the shard that like he kind of has the space to be like, yeah, fuck it, we'll do a TV channel. And the TV channel like exists, I think in part to kind of be a TV channel, but also just to kind of like make viral clips, right? Like the intention is to sort of make viral clips, but crucially, as we sort of seen with GB news, because like none of them know how to do it. And crucially, like conservatives are always trying to like manufacture viral moments. Like right now.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we are, we were always trying to do that. Like they never kind of quite get it. So all the kind of, you know, they, with GB news, they invited people like Mark Dolan on and like, you know, the few others as well who were supposed to sort of be these kind of like firebrand, like Mark Dolan's whole thing was like, he would rip newspapers up on like, on like TV. I don't know if you remember that, that was his whole thing, right? Like a puppy. Yeah. And I imagine he got hired by GB news to do exactly that. But then when like that didn't happen, because you can't manufacture those types of moments, or like you sort of have to push yourself to like an insane level in order

to do that, you're kind of like stuck, right? I think what I'm hearing is we need a hype house. We need, we need Molly May and Tom Harwood and some other people in a big building. Live with Julia Harley Brewer. Yeah, that's right. You know what else is another example of this, of this sort of like conservatives getting what they want and still wanting more of it, because what they want is totally divorced from reality is all can totally divorced. Well, that too. It's all conservative legislation like the policing bill that just passed, which, you know, it changes like practically less than a lot of what people imagine. But the important thing is that it makes people think

that like, ah, if you protest, the police can hit you with a grenade launcher. And that's what they want. And when it changes nothing, they'll just pass another bill that says much of the same thing six months later. I think people getting exactly what they want and being completely dissatisfied of it with it is a defining characteristic of modern politics. Like we were just talking a bottleman about the architects of the victims of communism memorial throwing a public tantrum in the Toronto Star that it wasn't getting enough funding after the government has handed basically them and all of the people associated with them everything they ever wanted vis-a-vis Russia and, you know, where our public money is going.

But I want to sort of go on the talk TV sort of idea before we sort of continue on. I actually, while I was walking back here from physiotherapy, I saw a billboard and it was Piers Morgan, who has a talk show called Piers Morgan Uncensored because I don't know someone was censoring him. When was he ever censored? He has had four or five shows now where he can just say the unsayable and each time it's been mediocre. Yeah, the last time he had a show, he got so mad he stormed off it himself. That's not censorship, Piers. Well, but then what I found so insane about it and why I just... And this is going to be sort of something I go to in the next sort of little news hit as well,

which is just that these people are unable to integrate anything that happens outside their paradigm of how the world works because the ad portrayed Piers Morgan as half angel, half devil. To ask about this, yes. It said love him or hate him. I don't think anyone loves Piers Morgan. Who loves Piers Morgan? Who wakes up and is like, you know who I love? Piers Morgan. People who like him and agree with him don't love him. It's kind of like it's repellent. Yeah, it's like British media people love Piers Morgan. It's like Jeremy Clarkson loves Piers Morgan. It's like they're the only reason that a new centrist party like the Britain... It's not technically a centrist party yet. It's just a

non-partisan cross-party project. You haven't actually... So we're new Britain or whatever. You haven't talked about this, yeah. I know. I know. But we will a sec. But like that, all of these things only make sense if you live in the brain of someone who is so cloistered in the Westminster media bubble, that they think that these kinds of things are somehow meaningful and that you can launch a TV network based on the strength of people's feeling about Piers Morgan. Yeah. This is the thing about... This is also why GB News has broadly failed. I don't think it's due to just lack of technical prowess and everything. I think

they presented themselves as sort of being like an outsider channel. People who had sort of been rejected from mainstream media and they were going to say like the unsayable. But it was headed by Andrew Neal first and foremost and it was stocked with like ex-BBC people and ex-guide news people. And like the agenda was basically the same and they were just like kind of ripping off newspaper, like the stuff that they found in newspapers. And they had like loads of segments about like the BBC license fee and like, you know, the structuring of the Guardian and all that stuff. Like ultimately... And I genuinely think a lot of like the failure of this and also the reason why talk TV probably won't be as impactful as like people who are sort of afraid

of it think it is, is because I think when you set up like a media project in Britain and crucially one where you're sort of garnering for not like attention but acceptance, which I think is like key if you're going to be have any kind of media career in this country. Like various kind of, you know, you have to sort of buy into a particular worldview and you have to sort of like buy into the idea of like certain people and certain institutions and certain magazines and publications are like they have to exist within the system regardless of like how loathsome they are or like how kind of like egregious they are. Like they have to exist. And once you sort of take that as a precedent, like all you can really do is then try to keep reaffirming to your viewers

that, oh yeah, we're the outsiders and you're the outsiders as well. So just keep on staying mad. And it's like one reason why like the whole like libs of TikTok Twitter account is like more effective than most of like broadcast media even in the state. I mean, I don't know how like maybe maybe I'm wrong, but like it's kind of like how these types of like pseudo organic like things where you're sort of just getting outraged at like posts tends to be more effective than like these kind of TV channels that try to present a worldview that like just doesn't function. Yeah, because they can't be anti establishment because it's all the same fucking people. And therefore, just as you say, GB News is mostly a series of like workplace beefs from like XBBC

people. Right. If you want to talk about also, you know, another sort of group of people that is completely unable to integrate a world beyond say the immediate concerns of like Westminster political management, but one that might have unfortunately some more impacts on the world and mind blood pressure. Yeah, I don't know if you all knew this, but Liz trust is trying to get us all killed again. Oh, cool. What's she doing this? Well, she made a speech called geopolitics is back. We're among other things. I think where she's she said, first of all, NATO needs to defend Taiwan as though it's a member state. But the second and second ouch. She also basically said that it's important that Ukraine rolls Russia out of all territory to restore status quo X 2013

this being the same Liz trust who does not know where Russian territory is after the time that Lavrov rolls her by being like, Oh, do you think that, you know, Moscow? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was awesome. I love the idea of just like every every time like Liz trust comes in for a meeting with like the Russian government, they're all like joking around for she comes in and we're like, No, no, seriously, I'm going to ask her if she thinks the moon is part of Ukraine. Don't laugh. Don't laugh. Well, she'll know something's up. The great Russian city of Salogorsk. That's right. Yeah. But but and then she also said that they're like she and I believe Ben Wallace have basically said we are. We are encouraging Ukraine to use British made weapons

proudly made in Britain to strike at targets inside Russia. The big Union Jack. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. That's what they should be given. No camouflage just vibes. Yeah. And so like the renditions of famous Brit pop album covers like airbrushed on the side. Mounting machine guns to the mini Koopers from the Italian job. Yeah. We're actually we're actually going to lose the Ukrainians the war by providing them with snatch Landrovers which will get blown up instantly. We're going to send the Range Rover mum. Yeah. But he says we he says we are going to keep doubling down. We're going to go further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine. Meaning also Crimea which Navalny has said he's not

willing to concede. It's not possible like practically. The trouble with Crimea is as well like you can you can have very valid disagreements with the way in which it was done. But it does seem to be the case that the majority of people in Crimea are like pro Russian like I like people I know in Crimea are like who are like liberal Russians are actively like it's insane how much people here love Putin. Like it's like actively annoying how much they love Putin. But like what that to me that actually like this whole like speech that Liz Truss gave right what it's actually to her what she's doing is she's engaging in internal Tory party management right. She is portraying herself as a Thatcherite figure who is tough

right who is going to do and say the toughest thing possible that you could possibly imagine and I mean a certain a certain amount of sympathy in that you can't fucking get up there and say okay we're going to litigate where the border of East Ukraine is and then we're just going to run the Cold War back again. Yeah but you also don't have to say you know we're going to park a challenger too in Red Square by the end of this year. This is why when people make foreign policy speeches they're vague. They say things like Russia must return to the negotiating table or whatever. That's why people say stuff like that to avoid saying stuff like this. I really can't believe I showed you Seinfeld and now this happens every other day. But no but what's

happening is she's because like I think it's like the Westminster system that Britain bequeathed to the world and its tradition of like putting someone who's just some guy in charge of say the foreign policy of the country. Now just some guy can be just some go and I mean that's that's cool I think. But right because because the system works in such a way as like you know you have to be elected with at the head of a constituency and then climb the greasy pole but like as a generalist forever and then you just get rotated around to have a go at managing like the farm budget then like in a foreign aid and then diplomacy or whatever you end up in situations where yeah like as a map in order to pander to 200,000 conservative home readers Liz trust is not able to metabolize

the fact that she is actually antagonizing a nuclear power. Yeah cool. It is and it's like think about that four of the five eyes 80 percent of the five eyes have a similar system where the person will be put what person will be put in charge of like diplomacy or the army whatever on the basis that they're friends with their other little coterie of freaks and just keep getting reelected in their Rottenborough and while they're doing that they also have to do like constituency bullshit as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's very funny that yeah to be like the foreign policy guy first of all you have to cut your teeth on silage regulation. You've got to be talking about cattle manure. And so and so like what you get right because of this this insane system

we now have as a matter of like as a matter that that is inextricable from Tory party management just trying to like a leadership bid among a selectorate of 200,000 retired pensioners she's basically like well I guess the best thing for me Liz trust is to yeah as you said Alice say to Russia so it will impress 200,000 retired pensioners in like the southeast. I am going to declare war on Russia we are fighting a proxy war through Ukraine we are going to park a talented tank on Red Square tomorrow and also while she's doing this is a threat Russia by the way. She's got to be like so Tuesdays Wednesdays Thursdays I'm going to like threaten to like sort of invade bits of Russia Friday Saturday Sunday I'm going to do like

speed bumps on the high street in wherever my constituency is bin collection. Vladimir Putin meet me in the car park outside Wimpy Burger and we'll settle this like men. It'll be so fucking funny if we made the Russians do this too if like Putin had to go back to his fucking constituency somewhere in the middle of Russia and just like I don't know do a like constituency surgery that would that would be great. I think she could combine both approaches and just you know advocate for the Ukrainians to do airstrikes on speed bumps that were that were elected in a hyperland slide. We're going to give the Ukrainians tried to fix their speed bumps but this is this

this last thing I'm destroyer cyclists I have I have a thing that is a cyclist with Bay Rector drone I have a thing that combines technology in Canada after this but I want to talk about one more thing or two more things this was sent in by a friend of the show former guest Rebecca Wilkes so thank you very much Rebecca it's two tweets from Labour MP and noted dunce Chris Bryant awesome he says tweet number one I see the Russian Federation is sanctioned 287 MPs today I haven't seen the list but I presume my name will be on it it will not stop me doing everything in my power to make sure Putin fails it is barbaric and illegal war in Ukraine nice next tweet one hour later what do you think I'm not on the list I see Charlie Elfik is on the Russian

sanction list but not David Lambie or myself or Stephen Dowdy MP you get the feeling the Russian Federation is a bit incompetent yes I this brand of tweet fucking rocks because Russia has sanctioned a bunch of Canadians recently and Justin Ling made the exact same tweet why am I not on the list I'm important it's like yeah like a an opposition MP from Wales whose main thing is that he like can't stop posting he's like why I posted so hard at confusions do you know that Chris Bryant has banned me from ronda well we will see how he likes it when he cannot turn up in the novice beers you will not be seen in Varone any time soon mr Brian yeah we're doing a coal mines of the world festival and it's actually happening in Magnetagorsk sorry Brian you're you're allowed

to come persona non gratin ulyanovsk just like just just the desperation to be part of something important and and I think it's it's it's like obviously it's tragic that Liz trust is threatening the continued existence of life on the planet but it's almost doubly tragic that chris Bryant wishes he could be doing that and could be that important run the record chris chris Bryant just seeing like London getting nuked first and Cardiff remains untouched and he's like this is typical London centric behavior from the russian government why don't they know what a threat I posted them with my posts that's right Cardiff should be a primary target yeah that well that's that I did stop making any more like bvc mid-budget dramas yeah and that's not because we don't like Cardiff it's because

we recognize how important Cardiff is well personally me personally yeah that's right uplift Cardiff the top of the targeting list yeah uh Leninist on yes we must destroy vodka revolutions Cardiff some of their craziest nut jobs are from this place all of Britain's hardest bastards come from Cardiff and they're all they're all flying out to Ukraine that's right um no I want to talk about something Canadian briefly uh Dan yeah Dan you're Canadian yes yeah sure yes why not probably have never met yeah I guess whatever I mean not before this week see myself more as a citizen of the world after having spent just over 48 hours in London so yeah also Milo that's actually true as of this week that's what's made it such a nice week is that Dan and I had

never met before that is true I never felt this this sweet kiss of each other's embrace I know that's right it's been magical uh trickle of sweat on the small of your back Riley got me a scarf I got him a dry machine slash sequencer we went out for some really good screen well for some an incredible dinner uh on Tuesday we're going out for another incredible dinner tonight yeah right after going to the British Museum twice in one day that's you're pre-declaring incredible out soon Tim Hortons is coming I know it's going to be incredible because it's my favorite restaurant it's always incredible I see but yeah I do have got it yeah I've got to say Bella Italia does have some like really good options these days it's not Bella Italia it's pizza express you should know

the dress it's like Canada it's fucking awesome I saw a restaurant up the street that's just called pizza pizza and that's that's kind of stealing Toronto Valor I can't I'll get a piece of flavor pizza then what's with all these toppings and that no I'm going to Noble Rock later and I'm very excited about it no uh the restaurant that we're talking about today is of course called Freshi with two eyes like you ready in last name what are you what's Freshi like Dan it's like a shitty salads and shitty juice it's like um it's you know how like Sweet Green has been able to present itself as like kind of a tech company Freshi has decided the Canadian Sweet Green has decided it's kind of a tech company now too but not just because they have a website so this is

from ad age Freshi the Ontario based restaurant famous for its real foods I'm sorry what famous famous for its real comma fresh foods a real fresh no nft foods here not real fresh not the the foods are real fresh they're real and fresh how would you describe your food well first of all allow me to say that it's definitely real so if you could write that down and put that in the paper please this is not a Potemkin restaurant no all of those people behind the counter over there they're not cutouts they're actual people well well hang on hold your horses hold the phone Milo has been testing a new system by the name of Percy hold on just let me first context one of the biggest conversations about labour and and and service work in Canada is that no one wants to

work anymore apparently no one wants to work anymore I'm all gone out for a rip never came back they've gone for a collective rip yeah they've gone hacking darts everyone in Canada is hacking a dart behind every building no one is at their job universal basic darts yeah they're on their dart break yeah that's right everyone's everyone's tooling around in the snow machine uh they're they're hacking a dart yeah they're going to daught food that's right that's right they're they're playing the very fun Canadian game of let's see how far we can drive my car out onto the ice oh yeah very nice dead as you know this is a real Canadian game yeah it's also um it's also an upper peninsula thing in Michigan uh my friend Randall once drove his car out onto the lake and

then a blizzard came in and right after he had done a hit of hit of acid and he was like well I'm fucking stuck here until the sun comes up yep it's the real pioneer spirit I feel like people don't really don't understand what a scumbag country Canada is it really is like it is the entire it is like as much as anyone in Toronto will like to tell you that oh this is kind of like New York but if it was run by the swiss or whatever no Canada is a country of hicks this is what piss people off when uh when uh Rob Ford became mayor of Toronto is that is that you know not that he was racist or corrupt or any of those things it was that he uh he just peeled the mask off you know it's it's it's yeah okay so anyway this is in terms of a country of hicks this is our version

of sweet green uh and yes as we say no one wants to work anymore um there's everyone's been too coddled uh because of participation trophies etc etc etc well now when a customer goes into freshy and approaches uh the now completely cashierless system they will encounter Percy yes stuff by pigs what now here's my question to all of you dan i think you know the answer to this one so i'm gonna ask you to hold back i was relying on Alice for that one really yeah what do you think Percy is okay because i'm i'm sure you can imagine like percy is one of two things it's like clippy it's but no it's it's the other thing that it could be uh it's a it's a kind of like automated checkout but it also can give you a shawinneken handshake no no not automated

just comes out let's see i'm afraid not automated folks is that you do it yourself no you're missing the other thing that all of these companies actually do if they're not automating something there is someone taking your order where's that person foreign country correct so it's like so it's like uh in pacific no it's not even like pacific room is it because they are actually in the machine um they are in nicaragua oh perfect yeah where uh the minimum wage is three dollars and 75 cents yeah nicaragua nicaragua on the lake yeah supposed to a microclimate it's called mesoclimate as well so um why do i feel like if you earn three dollars an hour in nicoagua you're probably better off than someone who earns eight pounds an hour in britain because britain is

britain is stupid we're 750 in canada yeah i mean when you consider how much more expensive these places are it's embarrassing how but our minimum wage isn't that much higher um so but it freshly typically hires a server paying 12 to 16 bucks an hour uh in ontario's minimum wage is now 15 bucks and this was reported to the toronto star is quote saving the company 10 dollars or more an hour oh well not great 10 dollars or more i'm sure that that's being passed right onto the consumer but still right they say what they say um paul hughes the chief business development officer at freshly this is back in that age um when speaking about the technology said just like with uber eats skip the dishes self-checkout options and other emerging ordering cashier

technologies freshly is always looking to be an early taster and adopter of new tech solutions but what's the tech solution it's just a guy it's having a guy as a guy that's technology you know it's just using the phone it's just a guy it's the interface between you and the guy yeah it's yeah they like they've developed wage arbitrage as a technology and they're using an ipad and that's makes them that's they're now a tech company like sweetgreen that's right um and i actually did i went it took some finding to find their actual website the high percy company that has developed this uh technology quote unquote the technology of getting a call center in nicaragua where the wages are very low right uh so the company so freshy said this percy's global workforce currently

has employees in several countries including canada and we will continue to hire qualified talent in any city state or country catering to the market markets needs mr international everywhere we cannot be stopped also i'm trying to stop it implying that anyone criticizing them is saying like i don't think nicaraguans can be a cashier at fresh he's like we believe in them and we'll pay them the minimum wage that's right do not insist yeah wait for that jurisdiction of the minimum wage where we are that's right uh they say said the god uh freshy went on to say it's not about replacing people or jobs or about lower pay or working conditions again those are just byproducts of what we're doing we just mentioned those four things just to

say how we're not doing it it's about creating jobs in nicaragua well you not want to have them to have jobs in nicaragua um they say it's about a labor shortage across the restaurant industry most restaurants in north america offer rewarding jobs that pay above minimum wage no wrong yeah please go on i'm sorry i yeah no i worked in food for at nice restaurants and i worked at places like fucking freshy and they have never offered rewarding jobs nor do they now less so now and the idea of and they say well we don't the reason again like that a lot of people want above minimum wage probably is that uh number one that's the labor market bitch number two uh the other issue is the costs are kind of going up everywhere and so you know to say well we're

going to respond to that by uh you know outsourcing everything to nicaragua again like yeah that's the labor market but this is also where why we have things like politics where we expect to be able to say use collective action to stop things like this from happening well it works so well in every other industry you know there's never been any problems with all the other things they outsource to countries thousands of miles away yeah of course and yeah it also it's it's like another one of these um another one of these things of saying well we don't want the people who are working for us that enabling our company to you know make money and it's uh uh it's you know relatively like um stable developed high high earning uh country with its high levels of social reproduction

health care all this we want to make sure that we don't the people that we're working are working for us that they don't have that so that we can uh you know put the boot on them better and so they're like well we'll just have someone call in from nicaragua and then slowly slowly what happens is um that these yet that the demands for higher wages are are are responded to in kind and again this is actually like a conservative talking point right that if you have high wages then they'll just outsource the jobs and like so many conservative and to be honest liberal talking points uh it only sort of works if you don't finish the thought which says okay well how do you stop them from doing that well the truth is they'll just fucking outsource the

jobs anyway yeah wages don't have to be high yeah true oh well yeah why don't get about this though is that like if you walk into like most fast food places like a mcdonald's or a burger king whatever in the uk yeah they don't really have any cashiers anyway they have maybe one or two but everything else is the ordering kiosks which are like automated they don't rely on someone in nicaragua and well everyone knows how to use one yeah there's just a guy in there there's a guy in there who's like you touching writing it down really flat yeah yeah yeah don't you move don't you move Pablo they need the illusion yeah well and the thing is what you know when that happened mcdonald started rolling those out in its restaurants in response to the recession

because major shocks in the economy tend to and there's a paper on this that i read a couple years ago major shocks such as that in in the economy they tend to produce transformations in the labor market that are sticky so at a time when say it's very cheap to borrow money but expensive to pay workers then what you do is you replace labor with capital by automating things and then what happens is as the economy recovers those jobs don't come back they just stay automated or they stay de-skilled or they stay otherwise sort of alienated from their final product and so what you caught the constant refrain you hear from the automate and outsource people is that yes times are tough yes we're cutting work to automate people or outsource

them but what this is going to do is free up employees to take on more rewarding and creative tasks like unemployment yeah yeah like uh getting really into uh pressure cookers and where to buy them because you never they never specify what those fantastic pressure cookers and where to find you never you never you never specify what that more rewarding creative work is at a freshy and in a sense what they're trying to create a taboo in is saying well wait a minute maybe there isn't actually a lot of rewarding and creative work in a service industry because or at least in this kind of the service industry because the jobs themselves have already been designed to take any say relationship that you have with the salad as the creator of the salad out of it

to make it a standard product so there's no room left for you to be creative anyway unless you're fucking solving a customer dispute when i was let go from freshly i was so disillusioned i went straight out and bought a pressure cooker but then one of my nicoagruent colleagues reached out and taught me to make a fantastic persole in it um i mean with all of this i have the about us section from persi their website which was hard to find hi i'm persi how can i help you understand me better fuck you don't fucking speak to me you corporate i help you understand me better let's let's hear persio tell me a story my human language you don't deserve it the frustration and fear of not knowing if enough staff will show up for shifts on any given day is real

yo the struggle is real and sometimes you just don't have the spoons to be an assistant manager some days and that's that's where that's where i come in i ain't got the spoons jerry the frustration and fear of not knowing if enough staff will show up for shifts on any given day is real an understaffed restaurant is not just disappointing for customers but dangerous for restaurant owners in the survival of our entire industry dangerous for restaurant owners and understaffed restaurant is dangerous for everyone in the building yeah because you're working just as hard an understaffed any understaffed workplace in fact if you're working say with your hands with tools with fire and knives is not not not like kind of like pesky danger where you might

lose a finger we're talking about the real danger which is like franchise owners maybe not being able to buy a second Mercedes exactly you might have to remortgage that boat yeah i'm speaking as someone who lost an entire fingertip in a coffee grinder because of understaffing well yeah but think about how many Mercedes that could have been if you added up i know it's true i was thinking about my boss the whole ride to the hospital i hope he's okay yeah percy helps restaurants focus their limited staff on the highest value work again why are there limited staff and restaurants could it be that uh maybe they're just not paying it down there's a pandemic yeah because there's no people can be that they don't want to be screamed at by a uh but just like a socially uh

maladjusted little tyrant yeah like that like that like that like my new restaurant little napoleons the petty all the getting yelled at of being in the marines without any of the other qualities of being in the marines yeah you don't even get a gun they don't even let you hold the gun you do get a knife though you'll retract your foreskin and use it to salute percy you will we we are what we have done is we don't even get to fuck the pressure cooker you've given you a mustard gun and that's what you can use with with this is my mustard gun without it i am nothing yeah yeah when when they're hazing in new recruits at freshy they do tend to like piss on them and make them drink cooking oil and stuff like that but it's character building actually makes you a

better server percy is a sassed software as a service technology platform aimed at helping the restaurant yeah helping the restaurant industry through its biggest crisis ever staffing again it's i love i just love how like yeah like we say capital swoops in to replace labor by reframing the crisis as no one wants to work anymore but we can like use a little gizmo to try and you know circumvent the demands for a better life a little gizmo and several hundred thousand nicaraguan people who absolutely will not be allowed to emigrate here oh no no no no no yeah but going back to it this is why i find bizarre is that like what surely it is still more expensive at and it's it's obviously more evil but it's also more expensive to buy a bunch of

teleconferencing equipment and get nicaraguans to serve people when you could just get a compute like this is one thing where like the computer version of doing it actually works like it's really simple you just have a kiosk and people use it works for other why would they not do that but i think henny's more expensive yeah i think also it's the um surely in the long term it's cheap the thing is fresh he has a higher long term it'll be underwater in the long term who gives a shit we'll be at this point with liz trust in charge of the foreign office we'll be lucky to be underwater in the long term nicaraguan is one of the few places it'll survive yeah um where uh where no it's that that persi is a different company right that's been

has its own call center and its own technology stack you hire you hire you buy persi terminals and you get access to persi's global labor force correct it's like a bloom bug terminal but for burgers for a for a saloon burger thank you my love yeah the bloom buggy later persi this bloom burger's got to taste fucking terrible uh can you imagine michael bloomberg eating a burger no i can't did was there a video of him trying to eat a hot dog i've seen a video of him eating ice cream yeah just like am i taking out a knife and fork and attacking a hamburger yeah you've been watching so much Seinfeld man i did once see my dad eat a big mac with a knife and fork wait tell me more about that right now i think he was quite sick at the time i think he found it

easier that way but i did find it funny nevertheless it's not even the funniest utensil be the big mac but the funniest utensil is um why i was gonna say chopsticks no i was gonna say chopsticks but i think it's one of the rice spoons that you get sometimes yeah oh yeah i like the way my brain is like a filing cabinet where it's like oh that's a funny story oh no it's quite sad actually i miss filed so persi there about us section goes on is named after the reliable and easy to plead eager to please tank engine from thomas and friends isn't that yeah copyright infringement of some kind in the estate of the red light and the persi art and is designed to alleviate the restaurant industry's labor shortages by creating a dependable and human

solution to the ordering cashier persi the one they in mew in that tunnel like a casco da montillado and when he was and then from in his cage he was able to direct the flow of traffic at the train yard didn't they wait hang on a minute why is this marketing copy written in the style as though it's a thrush medication like he's sure to alleviate me the freedom yeah exactly yeah like pouring a bunch of blue liquid over my persi listen ebs they've just done a find and replace on like the canister and juo at absenteeism is the disease of persi is the cure absenteeism is inflaming the urethra of the restaurant industry it just shows a restaurant industry is one big urethra just it just shows a restaurant franchise owner running through like a field under a blue

sky wearing all white yeah there are all these areas of the persi that are glowing red and then this blue liquid just courses through the door of the restaurant and that's actually seawater it's just the owners burgers smiling at them you know so unlike a kiosk or pre-ordering app which milo you noted which removes human jobs entirely persi allows for the face-to-face customer experience that restaurant owners and operators want to provide their guests by mobilizing a global eager workforce half heard that is a global ego workforce yeah people people don't like it though have you ever heard like when you when you fucking phone up customer support and you have to speak to someone in like india or whatever who like english is not their first

language it can be difficult to discuss like that and it's not their fault why the fuck should they have to learn english to talk to you about your fucking internet in dagonum like you know but like it's not it's not a satisfying experience for anyone because the people who made this will never ever fucking go to fresh eat and talk to a nicaraguan to get a salad they will never eat there they will never have this and and the other thing is you know who this is a great experience for if you're the if you're the petty tyrant that owns the fresh eat franchise you don't want to replace the various people that have to be nice to you with the computer that doesn't care you still want people who have to be nice to you you want humans that you can order around and

control it's just the the market for humans that you can order around control and bully like you're a marine drill sergeant but without the physical fitness that goes with it yeah that's now very expensive here in andos we're excited to partner with live jasmine so it's not about replacing people or jobs it's not about lower pay or working conditions it's about a labor shortage across the rest it's about all those things but it's about so much more most society and our ways of living young people the backbone of retail yeah as opposed to the elderly who are the duodenum of retail or franchise owners who are the tibia the urethra of retail yeah that's right the cloaca of retail young people the backbone

of retail are unable to play the their flexible role in the workplace today so the backbone is not flexible enough in retail which is young people young people are kind of like a backbone and like if they work in the retail industry they will be fucked by the time they're 35 literally yeah they won't be able to bend down and tie their shoes so um so the the young people are the young people limber up says percy by accepting a lower wage do a crab walk yeah invest invest in some velcros you know the young people are unable to play their flexible role in the workforce today the backbone due to more options and daunting financial pressures so let's have more options they've got too many options more options yeah what what option they don't say what they are

i love it when a website starts by saying in the good old days children with small hands we used to clean the backs of the steam loom but now they have too many choices and children don't want to work anymore yeah more options like sitting at home and getting your four thousand dollars of biden bucks every month no questions asked chimneys are going unswept everywhere automation is on the march in every industry they say retail platforms like amazon have taken humans out of the sales process uh i hate when they say humans it always makes the skin the back of my neck yeah it's really not really yeah play something mobs like a burg would say yeah uber eats in other food delivery services make location irrelevant and reduce consumer interactions

by pressing options on a phone no they don't location is so relevant you have to get hot food from a place to the place where it's going to be eaten without it getting cold what location is critical what if what if the pizza delivery truck cooked the pizza in the truck and you order that's a good point yeah what if i i used to love because they they immediately that like delivery and stuff like came out over here or like door dash in the u.s they immediately developed this in russia because like russia loves to adopt stuff super fast but they didn't really have any like any of the underlying infrastructure so you had all these guys they were just like dragging them in from us bekistan and being like you're going to carry a box full

of pizzas now but the trouble was none of these guys had eaten a pizza before i remember like one time we ordered a load of pizzas now it's funny and this guy i mean the poor fucking dude just showed up and he'd carried them all sideways under his arms like every single one it's like we're like oh yeah you've not you don't know what a pizza is do you buddy i do you know what fair enough is it like whatever yeah well you know what yeah fair enough can't be mad at him yeah um it's a it goes on retail is a vital part of our lives it shapes our neighborhoods and communities when retail succeeds customers and communities win too and again that's why it's very important that uh all of the remaining jobs in retail are done by people we can pay a pit in another country

but definitely definitely if they try to come here and buy stuff from the place that they work they will be arrested yes otherwise they might drive wages down unlike what they're doing now by being phoned in well they'll be arrested by a cop who's an ipad on wheels every canadian just like goes to bed and all the activity in canada is just like we we've outsourced the deputy prime minister we've got like a ukrainian nationalist from nicaragua who's yeah nicaraguan sex robot fucking my wife simulacra fuck that nicaragua is the only real country amen every everywhere else is be it's like a project of nicaraguan labor it's it's so interesting to go on to uh central american youtube and look at the comments huh yeah i mean nicaraguan

invents honduran dog people honduran dog people yeah of course um look with our remaining 10 minutes i wanted to talk about something we alluded to earlier the britain project i hate this so much you introduce the children to the britain project i don't want to introduce the intellectual successor to project milo uh alex it's an intellectual success as a project runway it's an intellectual success as a change uk the independent group it's an intellectual successor to the sdlp new labor all of these things it's it's not yes a political party it's a collaborative political project it's a political riot thank you milo uh the gist of which is to bring back centrism and i guess we call anti-populism yeah finally public sphere as was kirstar

he's the most centrist man who's ever lived milo if he were actually centrist which is where most of the british population are then he would be doing way better than he's doing right now let me read this to you that's an interesting logic a little mission statement here uh we are as a political crossroads the current direction of travel propagated by populist politicians undermines our collective sense of who we are as a country and where we are going and what we stand for it actively threatens the independence of our national institutions and promotes the tolerance of lies and dishonesty as the norm reasoned rational rules are back when was there ever rational debate it's never they've never had it reasoned rational debate about gender sorry

is being stifled our shared patriotism is under threat and the politics and decisions it's being encouraged just not in a way that you like domestic order milo i really think you're practicing the politics of division right now on the politics of division we like the politics of multiplication here both our sense of community and any common purpose towards a common goal the britain project wants to wants to arrest this development oh that puts the common good first leaving no britain behind now i'd like you to try and just throw a few names out saving private britain who do you think might be you know involved

in so i know so i'm gonna give the most obvious high profile name which is rory stewart but i invite the rest of you dan you can just say any other party affiliations they may have had in the past because i know you might not be as familiar with these freaks as we are okay who else yeah as al is asked who else do you think is involved in the britain project have we got any returning change uk angela smith we do for her even a prominent one third consecutive centrist so we're not getting any subri no no is is is swinson back no it tons of also rand libs dems though um yeah lots of people who kind of look talk and act exactly like joe swinson but there's one there's one kind of terminal political loser who is involved in this who we are missing

which is a moderate tori who was purged in the upper and the run up to the 2019 election it's david gark david gork he's back founder of gorker the name the man whose name is hax the man whose name rhymes with fun um there's also a guy in here called lord oates the adventure of cereal former collaborator of lord hall lord just reading some names here we've got a guy called garvin brown how many how many hours in there oh also there is uh as far as i can unless nicola horlick the inventor of horlicks uh and sherry norton there appears to be one black person uh who is leading who's on the governing board guess who it is yeah guess who it is guess who the one black person they chose is is it like quasi-quarantine no it's no he's

too political he's involved in a political party right oh okay it's it's yeah who's saying guess who it is is it is it chukka uh no no okay how about it is trevor phillips oh of course okay oh fuck yeah oh fuck okay all right good good good good good serious organization very serious organization yeah i just do you love that a new new centra new set not a party yet but and but it has been very much supported by tony blair this is from i'm i'm one thing i'm reading trevor phillips as bio on the britain project i find out here that he um is a non-executive director of a behavioural science consultancy called mind gym join me mr charse i hate learning about these people i hate that i hate that i've created a jail for myself whereas a job i have to know about all

these people i'm doing frontal lobe curls in the mind gym mind rowing which i got a good one i was just looking up a baron a baron lord baron oats um and in 2010 the daily telegraph listed him as the fifth most influential liberal democrat wow but that's not easy but that's not all uh but that's not all he studied at marlboro college and the university of exeter where and i'm quoting wikipedia oh he's a stupid posho right one of his best friends was tom york who went on to become the lead singer of the band radiohead that's fun a friend of tom york his final citations college and exeter university is the most powerful posh dumb guy trajectory you can possibly have this guy this guy this guy garvin browns canadian incident no he's for one thing he's he's the

distiller of jack daniels uh but also yeah mcgill university uh university of british columbia ubc look yeah like baron baron oats 100 was in a flat sharing clappum at some point in his life we've got philip collins uh who was the chief speech for collins for tony platt from genesis yeah who was also the chief speech writer for tony platt yeah garvin brown is a literal billionaire who inherited 50 some odd percent of the jack daniels fortune from his death that's why every tony blair speech begins with drum fills oh this bio is pathetic sorry this is monica harding uh a short bio monica stood as the liberal democrat parliamentary candidate nisha and walton in the 2019 general election and achieved an 18.5 swing against the incumbent foreign secretary darwin

rob the largest swing in the country okay did you win did you did you win i assume so yeah based on the wording of there i assume so it's the largest swing in the country wow anyway that's why she's working here and not as an mp um the brin project is a group working cross party lines said tony blair in a speech a couple months ago though headed by behind party lines so headed by lib dem monica harding non-partisans though headed by a lib dem monica harding it will organize a conference in may so this conference is coming up and we will talk about the conference we want this conference we're gonna go we're gonna go we're gonna stand outside and lick the windows no we're gonna be we're all all of us all all five of us plus dan are gonna be

parliamentary candidates uh for when they turn this from like a think tank into a party we're all getting press accreditation from gyds.com we should run as uh just basically records and be like you guys aren't centrist enough we're the true centrists within and against the britain project denouncing them as sellouts and you are all you're you're insufficiently revisionist yeah that's right we should like move them and shake our heads whenever they kind of like come close to making like any kind of decision or statement of course you have not gone through enough evidence collection processes to come to this decision real centrist some of some of their parents weren't even blue on wikipedia we want this conference to be an opportunity for people to come together and

set it a broad direction for the future of britain but all of these people are so far from any kind of meaningful political power but so costed that they have no idea what it actually what is actually happening in britain it's real loser shit you can be an actual billionaire and still be riding with these fucking nerds this is like a really good way of like bringing us back to like the first section right because like the view that these guys have of like politics and like the word and that like the country and the people in it um are kind of like they're all sort of less like reinforced and they're reinforced by like people that they kind of follow and they read and again like in the same way that like the talk radio but the talk tv guys and the gb news guys are still obsessed with

like establishment media and like what they have to say and crucially like the approval from establishment media like centrists are very much the same right um and you know so in that way like their worldview is not actually like that different from and i wouldn't be surprised if like they kind of look at like right wing media and like the expansion of it and they're just sort of like oh this is kind of what the country really thinks and we need to respond to that so our politics so if they say that like labor is too left or kist armor is too woke and like we have to take that at face value and not imagine that actually like they might be sort of reinforcing their own sense of victimhood or crucially like setting up traps that a labor party that they have always disdained

like cannot resolve right and and i was just gonna i mean just like the last thing which is like you know and it comes back to the 2019 election and like everything has happened afterwards and crucially like a thing that we've spoken about a little bit but like something that i'm always kind of noticing whenever i kind of like read about this stuff which is that like regardless of what happens and regardless of like the effects of like Tory policy and regardless of the effects of just like just the state of you know the country at the moment um for so many of these guys like ultimately have to kind of believe of a decision that they made in 2019 and crucially like all the efforts they made to sort of undermine uh the Corbyn shadow government and crucially to undermine like the

activists who were in labor at the time like they have to kind of continually morally justify that was the right decision to make um and as a result they've sort of ended up in this kind of weird i don't even know what to call it but it's just like this kind of weird circle of reinforcement that they can never really solve but crucially i keep kind of ask myself now like is this really a thing that they want to solve well i think it's that they they know the answer they want they don't like they'd have no way to get there so they keep changing the vehicle that they're in right but they yeah they keep like changing turkish ferraris yeah the the only the top news story on the news section of the britain projects uh website is the text of a speech given by tony blair

i have a quote from it i have a quote from it uh that that speech he says he actually says this in the speech for too long paul um for too long politics has been all about politics not ideas well he opens that speech by saying that there is a gaping hole in the governing of britain which i think we gotta plug it queenie mike gapes is the only man it's gonna take a lot of people to plug that hole to be to be clear as well uh as we end he does the breadth width and depth of secure starmas bussy is a gaping hole in the governing of the britain the british government's goat see agenda all right operation goat see yeah the government is more gaped than it's ever been dan and i have to run i do want to add he does dam star he does dam starmer with faint praise but

it's very clear he's like organ orang against him but dan and i have to go like immediately my partisan politics has the flared base necessary to plug britain's hole thank you thank you for listening for everyone thank you for i think it's going to be a primo episode so thank you for subscribing to the bonus it was a primo episode means i can say gape britain again yeah that's right that's right i mean we know we can even title it gape britain and that'll be crypto crypto gates uh so we'll see you soon bye everyone all right