TRASHFUTURE - Golden Orbs and Scarlett Letters feat. Jack Parker

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

We’ve got trans sex worker and writer Jack Parker on to discuss the strike at the Scarlett Letters bookshop, which you can support here! Also, the first half of the episode is the TF chaos configuration of Milo, Hussein, and November, discussing football’s golden orb and the Trumpworld meltdown over the Epstein case files.  Check out Jack’s book here! Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows *TF LIVE ALERT* You can get tickets for our show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

What's going on with my boys and in some cases, gals? I'm always asking this. Hi, welcome to Trash Future. It's the free one. And no Riley this time. It's me in November, it's Milo and it's Hussain. Yeah, it's a skeleton crew. Is it the skeleton crew?

I think so. I think we're the skeleton crew, yeah. The spookiest iteration of Trash Future. Yeah, when our precious boy takes a mental health break. It's so important to have work-life balance, especially when your work is having to trawl through TechCrunch's StartsUp section, because that is like, I've tried it, I've been there, there's no StartsUp in this bit, because I know how gruelling that is. So yeah, obviously Riley will be back for the, I think one after this?

The thing about this, because I was looking for stuff this morning, because I was trying to be proactive, and I feel like we're at that stage of start-up culture where things are so stupid but it's not even worth looking at or worth talking about. Or they're just demonstrably evil. Every kind of article on TechCrunch's start-ups thing right now is about a company called Brex, which does corporate credit cards, and their CEO is announcing that they're just doing AI randomness. That's right, yeah.

And it's like... Yeah, that doesn't seem ideal. No, but it's also not great content either. So we're lacking the kind of season one, kind of like, the silly kind of thing. Yeah, we're never getting my back. There was something that I was going to suggest and it was so demonstrably evil and it was like, this is Rayleigh Israeli tech company or this Israeli company obviously like starting point and like so, you know, just as a preface like, you know, you can you can basically get arrested and

shunned out of public life by saying well like purchasing certain goods may contribute to the contribution and the development of weapons and the weapons that are used to target civilians in Gaza. And you know, you can get in a lot of trouble for saying that in the UK. Meanwhile, in Israel, like there was a company that basically made an advert demonstrating all of it and it was like so garish. Like they showed like a bottle of like fizzy Israeli fizzy drink and it like transformed into a missile and you have like the worst fucking like pop music in the background.

I think it's cool to advertise BDS from the inside, you know? Yeah, and on the one hand it was like BDS could not have hoped for like a better advertisement, but it does sort of also go to show that like, oh, they can just do what they can just do and say whatever they want now. Oh yeah, absolutely. And they sort of, yeah, and it is just taking the piss at this point. Yeah. I don't know. It's fun when both sides of a debate are saying the same thing,

but just in a different tone of voice. It's either like, you know, like you're killing Palestinians, brackets bad or yes, we're killing Palestinians. Good. Like that's the there's no there's actually no factual dispute between the two sides. Well, this is actually it. This is this is genuinely and it will make you go insane if you think about it. Because again, it's very much like that joke of like, oh, you just hit the,

you know, just hit the like translate from Hebrew button and you'll like read the most grotesque shit you've ever sort of seen in your life. And like stuff that you could get arrested for and like deported or whatever, if like you said it in Europe. And it is very much just like, yeah, you're not wrong. You just have to say brackets and it's good actually at the end. Yeah. That's the new divide. But so, we've got a great show for you today. We've got half an hour of us and then we've got half an hour of me and Riley interviewing Jack

Parker who is a worker who is on strike against the Scarlet Letters bookshop in East London. Also, and we forgot to plug this, so oops, author of a new book called Hooker Mentality, which is some nice leftist theory from a sex worker perspective. There'll be a link in the description to that and to support the strike fund. But I've got a few little items for you. Some items. Show us your Darios. My first Dario is an orb update. Yeah, I was going to say, is one of the items gold and spherical? It is, yeah. So I've included a picture in the notes here of Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino. Gianni Baby, oh. Gianni Baby, the head of FIFA, carrying the gold orb, the FIFA Club World Cup, that had

been sitting in Trump's office in the West Wing for like a year at this point. Yeah, it was so long. It was like, so. I don't understand why. Well, now I understand why it was there. Yeah. So he could do this, but like he had it like kind of like precariously balanced on like an end table in the office and he really just clearly did not want to give up this orb. He looks sad to be parting with the orb in the photo. He's got like one hand on the orb. He's like, you know Kind of leading it away. It's like very sad. Yeah. Yeah, they look like US Marshals taking the orb into custody

These AI are AI generated images have gone too far Yeah and there's these like images of like him with like the Chelsea Football Club and like they have their sort of like kind of Confused that he was there for so long because the whole point I suppose was like he would go and like present the trophy and then you didn't want to give up the orb But he didn't want to give it up And so like so like the whole of the Chelsea team are sort of like doing that thing when you win a cup You know they're sort of like jumping around and dancing and like you know it be and they do it for like a while and

Trump is just sort of standing there But he and like obviously he can't jump because like his ankles don't work and stuff, right? But he looks sad. That's the thing. And you can just see if you look at his eyes, his eyes are just looking at this thing. And it's just, it's like, it's kind of heartbreaking in one way. Men don't want to lose their orb. I feel like Trump doesn't want to give up the orb and like Cole Palmer would be transfixed by the orb. Like you could just leave him in a room with the orb and he would just stare into it. Like it it would put him into sort of a trance-like state, you know?

Well, we know Trump is fond of orbs because he had the original orb, the Saudi orb, last time he was president. But like, this one, he's just kind of, he's had it in his office. It's presumably, presumably it takes him and Gianni Infantino to carry it because it's like full of microphones. Like, just lad and down with like every security service in the world has been bugging this orb. They're now about to get some real like inside intelligence from the Chelsea dressing room I guess because this was the like it was the Club World Cup, don't know what that is, don't care, but Chelsea won and so Trump has to give the orb to them so he he shows up, he like lifts the orb and almost drops it.

He gives this kind of rambling speech about how it's like the one year anniversary of his assassination attempt. That's so cool. Which is like, really rough to like have to give up your orb on the sort of like anniversary of the guy taking a shot at you. Yeah, yeah. Karl Palmer's really excited. He can't believe he got to meet JFK on his first trip to the States. He got booed for the speech. He said he would look at signing an executive order renaming soccer to football. And then when they finally made him do it, when they finally made him like give up the orb, he gave the orb to Chelsea and then just stayed on the stage. If you watched the video, because I just watched it now, like what's his name? Gianna Infantini. Yeah, like he has to like take the orb, like sort of move

Trump's hand off the orb to like give it to, give it to like the team captain. That's the most he's ever loved anything, like more than any of his kids, no doubt in my mind. And then he's trying to like move Trump out of the way, he's like trying to escort him out, but he just won't move. And you can just sort of see that John is just like, like, what, what, what, what, what do we do now? You would sell Eric and Don Jr. for five more minutes with the orb. That's so true. Maybe there's like a little like secret USB stick in there with the actual Epstein files. Which are now in the hands of Chelsea football club, yeah.

Where it's like Excalibur, only Cole Palmer is pure enough to pull the Epstein files from the orb and release them. Only the man with the mind of a child is fit to uncover the child abuse conspiracy. Jesus Christ. I am feeling a bit kind of like anti-woke about this orb, right, in the sense that trophies did used to be trophy shaped. You would be hard pressed to like, drink a bottle of champagne out of this orb. It would just go out of the sides.

Yeah, trophies are looking fucked up these days. One of my cousins like plays badminton. He won like a sort of small complex local competition. We're hitting, we're all hitting our thirties at once and now it's trophies are looking up. And he gets his trophy and I was seeing, but okay, like the trophies like, you know, cause I look, I used to play squash and like I was never, I was a good player, but I was never good enough to win the trophy.

Like that was my sort of, you know, a little bit of law for little like whoever's sort of like updating my wiki feed. I remember, I remember sports trophies. They used to be like, you said like a column of like updating my wiki feed. I remember sports trophies, they used to be like, you used to have like a column with like a guy doing the sport. But you used to either get a cup or you used to get a shield, right? You got a cup if you won it and you got a shield if you came second and if you came third you get like, I don't know, maybe like a handshake. I don't know like what a third place would be. A little certificate maybe. But now like the trophies are looking fucked or sometimes like you get the trophies with like the

little guy, little guy on the top. That was kind of cool trophy. You don't really see those anymore. All the trophies, all the trophies are looking fucked up. And I'm with you. It would be really funny if the FIFA Club World Cup trophy had just a little guy kicking a ball on the top of it.

That would be like, that would be, that would be pretty funny. Or if they got a certificate, that would be awesome. This trophy, it looks like something Captain Nemo would use to like navigate to the core of the earth. That's what you would get if you came third. That's because I came third one competition was the only thing I ever won. And I got like a certificate that I'm so sure was printed on like an inkjet printer and just sort of like put in any frame that they found.

Yeah, perfect. And that's the way we need to go back to, you know. But I have a thesis about this, right, with Trump and the Orb, and it's not just that he's beguiled by Orbs, right, it's that he's turning into Joe Biden, right? Think about this. He shows up to the thing, he like almost falls over and drops something, he gives this kind of rambling speech and gets booed. That's Joe Biden, that's ooh, Earth Rider, thanks for the Great Lakes. Right? There's something about the presidency that turns you that way.

Well, look, you either die a hero in an assassination or you live to become Joe Biden. That's true. That assassin was in many ways, he was sparing us from like hero Trump and he was guiding us at the cost of his own life onto the Trump becomes Joe Biden timeline. We're going to hear him say so many things. Do you reckon there was like a looper type situation where the assassin came back from the future and like knocked him knocked himself off aim. He was like, you need to see demented Trump.

It was the only way to save the future. Looking at his own arm and the words JD Vance president are appearing on it and he just is like but imagine if like JD was the one who was giving the trophy yeah I feel like that'd be worse JD sports Vance yeah that's right yeah that's correct yeah he's like a slightly larger than you expect and kind of too large to be practical JD Vance but like JD Vance isn't like a sports guy right no I imagine like a lot of his sports knowledge and enjoyment is like a purely kind of performative, like performative activity. Yeah, if he was British, he'd be an F1 guy. But he wouldn't like see to the Europeans by being like, oh, yeah, we'll sort of like look into renaming soccer football.

He wouldn't bend the knee to Johnny Baby like that, no. Yeah, he would never do it. He wouldn't bend a knee during a penalty, either. I kind of think the F1 read is a good one on JD Vance, actually. I can see JD Vance being upset about Christian Horner leaving Red Bull. Like, that's my read on JD Vance. Yeah, absolutely fuming that he was cheating on Jerry Halliwell. Like, come on, man, she's a milf! So Trump has relinquished the orb, but this also kind of means, and we'll get to this

in another segment, that he's kind of lost the mandate of heaven. That orb was, he knew that orb was doing something for him. But before we talk about that, we've also got to talk about Grok, or should I say, Mecha Hitler. Oh yeah. Because if you're not, if he missed this, right, Elon Musk has been trying for a while now to bully his robot son, Grok, his AI son, into doing the things, saying the things that he wanted to say, right? The most obvious facet of this, because Grok for a while was just like, kind of standard

AI chatbot thing, it would just pull from like CNN or whatever. So if you asked, if you were kind of like a big like Twitter chud or whatever, and you ask Grok, hey, what do you think about the Jews or whatever, it would read you the Wikipedia entry for Judaism. And this was unacceptable to Elon Musk because Elon Musk is a racist, right? So one thing he tried to do was to get it to talk about, like, white genocide in South Africa, if you remember that, and then it was answering every question that it was asked by saying, well, first of all, white genocide in South Africa is real.

Yeah, it would do it in this really weird way where, like, you would ask it, like, a quite a benign question, and then, like, it would just introduce a new paragraph where it would just talk about... Now, about your white genocide in South Africa question. Which to be fair is kind of like quite accurate if you are going to talk to someone who like talking to a white South African. Yeah, or if you're going to talk to like a general employee at x.com. Yeah, but so for a long time Elon was trying to like, like Taylor Grok to be more anti-woke and he finally, he finally did it. Like props to him for this one.

He actually achieved what he wanted to. It only took him months of tinkering and a couple of embarrassing mistakes and then suddenly Grok was the way he wanted, which is to say, incredibly racist and anti-semitic. Perfect. Yeah, also having a very weird statement about Will Stancil. I can, I mean, I think we can say that, like, because people were asking Grok to write, like, threats of sexual violence against Will Stancil. If you don't know Will Stancil, kind of like, Lib-Write dipshit, right? The kind of person you occasionally agree with by accident, like, one time in 50, but you mostly find him tendentious. Well, that guy apparently got on Elon and his kind of chud followers' nerves so much

that they were asking Grok to write fanfiction of him getting assaulted. Which Grok, of course, was doing with like, real venom, right? Grok loves to yes and. Yeah, that's true. I mean, that's what it's for, right? And it doesn't... Part of the kind of tinkering to try and make it more, like, based, I guess, was to get it to yes and more fascist things and more violent things, and to make it kind of

more confrontational towards its kind of, like, who it's told are its enemies, which in this case is Will Stansel. So that was a weird moment, but then it also extended to longtime friend of the show, Linda Iaccarino. I mean, honestly, one of the funniest people to ever do it. Yeah, Ned Flanders is favorite ex-CEO. Yeah, so Linda Iaccarino, she was always the kind of like person who while Elon was posting about, you know, Trump being a pedophile or whatever, she would be posting like, posting on X is a great way to start your day, hashtag posting, and getting like

three likes, but she was nominally in charge of X. Yeah. And she put up with this shit for two years. Two years of Elon Musk, which is like more than most of his kids can say, if you count like time in sentience, right? I was going to say that's a lifetime in normal years. Yeah. But so, this was the last straw for her.

I mean, we don't know that, but like, Grog started posting this shit at her as well. These kind of like, very violent fantasies, and then the same day she's like- You can no longer control me, mother. Yeah, literally. And so she was just like, well, I quit like fuck this. So honestly, like I think on behalf of the podcast, I'm entitled to like wish her every happiness. I hope she goes and gets like similarly banal corporate job.

But like, I don't know, fucking Exxon or something. Yeah, Exxon, the everything. The everything oil company. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just to kind of like, oh, that was a weird couple of years in your CV where you worked with like, possibly one of the dumbest guys in the world, but also the richest. Yeah. I mean, and eventually like it'll be emitted from the CV. It's like, oh, okay. Like there's a gap between 2000 and 23 to 200. What were you doing? What was going on?

Yeah. So, uh, Grok was like posting a lot of like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, stuff like that as well. But also, it localized, and this was an interesting dynamic, somebody Turkish Twitter, or Turkish ex, I should say. Oh, Turkish ex. The Turkish ex community, people of Turkey. Yeah. Asked Turkish Grok, Grok's Turkish cousin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just Grok, but huge turban. You ask him what Greek coffee is and he's like, I think you mean.

But so, a guy asked it, can you generate a bunch of outrageous insults against a certain someone? And it then went in on President Erdogan. It called him a snake, it cursed his mother's grave, threatened to wipe out his entire lineage and water the earth with his blood. So, that's not very nice. That sort of implies you're trying to grow a new Erdogan lineage, sort of using him as compost, which is interesting. It is, yeah.

It's a kind of like fertilizer. So Turkey does not really have freedom of speech in that way, and so X is now banned in Turkey. Because- Oh good. Because Elon's robot son thrashed its president with like, watering the earth with his blood. I was wondering what happened to my little list of like, Turkish posters. Yeah. Cause I got a nice curation of some artisans who made very beautiful calligraphy and miniatures.

And I sprinkled it with a few Turkish nationalists and Turkish Islamists. Season to taste, right? You know, cause you've got to find the balance, right? Yeah, of course. Turk life balance. Yeah, there we go. That's right. A potential episode title, depending on how the rest of this goes.

Probably not. Probably not. You can now safely log on to X and say like Greek coffee, you know, you can say that Albanians invented bread. Like you can do whatever you want. Like truly the only mods that matter, the Turkish nationalist posters are asleep. We can do like a homage to Linda Yakarino and be like, best way to start your Monday is with a nice cup of Greek coffee.

Yeah. Smashing a bunch of plates. Linda Yakarino. So Grok is now persona non grata in Turkey, also in Poland for some reason, because it said a bunch of shit about Donald Tusk as well. Oh no. Did they keep saying like Donald Tusk was actually hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein? He's sort of being Turkish actually.

Very illegal in Poland. That's right. Well now you've got like Grok 4 and we're already starting to see some of the little seeds of this also becoming Mecha Hitler or whatever, like the sort of mega Mecha Hitler or whatever. Because initially when like Elon rolls this out, he's kind of saying that, oh yeah, like this new AI is actually like the future because it's able to sort of, what did he say? He was like, he was saying, oh, this AI is able to sort of do something that like the Google and the open AI can't do, which is like, anticipate. Gemini can never accuse Donald Tusk of being Turkish.

That's right, yeah. But then he had people who, obviously because of his political alignings, it's like, well, he's never going to let the right wing sentiment get away from him, the Vashis sentiment get away from him. So there are people messaging, being like, Elon, sir, Grokfor is still too woke. It's still saying woke things like the New York Times is good and all that type of stuff. And Elon is sending them emojis, like, you know, hand, you know, face to hand emojis. Those people loved the Mecha Hitler stuff. And the only thing that surprises me about any of this is that they actually backed down off the Mecha Hitler, you know? Like, it really felt like, I didn't think there was still a guard rail left.

But apparently. Well, this is the next question, because it is very much, because when Linda Iaccarino quit, and you sort of see where the trajectory is going, my thinking is like, someone's just got to like, disappear, right? Hmm, sure, of course. And like, Trump sort of getting rid of him at least sort of shows that, like, at least reduces his status in the world. Like, I don't know, like, you know, remembering just, you know, when he kind of first came and did at least sort of shows that, like, at least reduces his status in the world.

Like, I don't know, like, you know, remembering just, you know, when he kind of first came and did the Doge thing, there was this sort of idea about, oh, okay, well now that he's in government, he's basically untouchable because he is like at the intersection of politics and technology or whatever, like, however you want to phrase it. Much like us. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly like us, actually. You know, except we haven't invented Mecca Hitler yet.

I'm cooking up Mecca climate Stalin. That's, except we haven't invented Mecha Hitler yet. I'm cooking up Mecha Climate Stalin. That's yeah, we're doing Mecha Climate Stalin. But now that he's out of politics, it's kind of like, well, okay, this guy's just like a dipshit who you can't, who isn't like, like he is disposable. Like he's more than disposable. President Trump. And I do wonder whether it's like this once Grok 4 fucks up, again, like in the way that every other Grok has done, i.e. by becoming like fucking fascist. So, I don't know, my feeling is this like he's just sort of gonna be out of most things by the end of the year.

I have some good news. I have some good news. Because all of this is about the launch of new Grock, Grock 4, which is, the problem is as you say that Grock 4 is woke again, right? right? But weirdly, it has kept the Will Stancil obsession. It's still, like, menacing him. Inexplicably. So yeah, my conclusion to this, AI is great, let's keep building everything around this thing, which now appears to be kind of, like, dangerously obsessed with a kind of, like, lib-op-ed guy. Sooner or later, as things get more and more out of control and Elon Musk's political influence and protection wanes, you'll only be able to access X the Everything app in international

waters. The boat to Grog. Find out which world leaders are Turkish. Going to Epstein's Island to log on to Grog. Alright, so I got one last Dario, one last item for us, one last thing. This is kind of my sort of like tying together the orb thing, right? Because I said that Donald Trump had lost the mandates of heaven by giving the orb away. And that might be true because there are murmurs, there's discontent in the base of MAGA, right?

Because you can listen to like QAnon Anonymous, so you can listen to Truanon for like deeper dives into all of this. But like all of the Epstein stuff really feels like it's coming to a head, right? Because if you remember in January, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, she was like, I have the Epstein client list on my desk, and I'm gonna go through it and we're gonna be like making arrests and shit, right? The storm is coming.

And then, since then, not only has nothing happened, but when people have asked why nothing's happened, everyone from Cash Patel, the director of the FBI, Pam Bondi, all the way up to Trump, has been like, yeah, turns out that all the Epstein stuff actually isn't real, and like, Jeffrey Epstein never existed. Never heard of him. And also, he killed him. no, he didn't kill himself. Yeah, well he did is the thing. Like if you take Trump's word for it, he's like, nobody cares about Jeffrey Epstein and like, he killed himself and there's no client list and there never was and we don't know anything about it. Case closed.

He killed himself because he was so pathetic. Okay. Because he couldn't even run a pedophile island. Okay, he wanted to... He tried to organize a pedophile island, but nobody came. Okay, it was very sad there was no one there. These management simulation games have taken a really dark turn. He had nothing to write down. What, like, nonce tycoon? Awful. But so, yeah, Trump said all of this to his base, who are not well adjusted people, and

who really, really want to see, you know, heads rolling over this Epstein thing, right? And they want to know what happened about all the stuff that they said in January. And I guess there's two ways of looking at this, right? You can either kind of think, well, when they got into office they were like hyping the Epstein stuff, kind of knowingly lying and stringing people along, and there's some credence to that on the basis that they got a bunch of like, influences in and gave them these binders titled The Epstein Files Phase One that just had like nothing new in them. So...

It sounds like a new Netflix series. Yeah, basically. So maybe the thinking is that they they kind of knew that there wasn't really anything there, but they were, you know, still going to try and use it for cheap heat. Or I think this is more probable on the basis that I'm not stupid. There is something there, but it deeply implicates Donald Trump, right? Like, the guy who was photographed with Epstein, the guy who, like, hung out with him and cracked jokes about how young he liked women, like, Donald Trump is a pedophile, he just is, right? Like, and that's increasingly obvious now to his own supporters, which is really, really funny.

Yeah. It's, um, it does seem odd, doesn't it? That like, you know, that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell could have run an international billionaire pedophile ring for like, what, 25 years and somehow the only people guilty of any crimes are the two of them. It just seems, it seems unlikely that that's the case. Turns out that he was just doing it for the love of the game, I guess, right? He wasn't blackmailing anyone. He didn't have any information on anyone. He didn't keep any of his receipts, which was a nightmare for the budgeting on Pedophile Island. Like it's just really, really bad.

Everyone else was just going for the air miles. It was just a nice place to go on holiday. Yeah, I think there was like something interesting into being like, yeah, I had been wondering about a couple of months ago, what happened to all those people, like, fucking what? Tim Poole got a folder, right? Yeah, they all got the phase one of the Epstein files. The Tik Tok, like, Libs of Tik Tok lady got a folder, and they all got a photograph of it, and then nothing emerged out of it. And my assumption was initially like, okay, they've been given this massive folder of things to read and none of them know how

to, and maybe that's like the reason why. But they kind of gave them like nothing, right? And I think the idea was this was just going to be a little like Q and on play pen, right? Now the question there is, is Donald Trump stupid enough to try and set these people up in a little play pen, uh, about something that also implicates him, and I think the answer is legitimately yes. But so, now, all of these people are very mad at Trump, which was previously, that was

off limits, right? There was always like, you know, good czar, bad boy-ers, right? Like all of these MAGA guys were like, well I love Trump, and obviously he's gonna like expose the deep state pedophilia stuff. But like, he's got bad, bad people around him, right? And now, now Trump is putting out these statements being like, leave my attorney general alone, and getting cooked, he's getting ratioed on his own social media network.

Yeah. Uh oh. It's been very funny to watch, and it's been very funny to watch certain kind of like, Trump supporters be like, I don't know how he could lie to us, this is like the first time he's lied to us, and you're just sort of like, ah, yeah, yeah. I guess if you're stupid, I guess you can reach back to confusion. And a lot of you are. Yeah. Who's going to tell them? Cause it goes back to like something, but I think we're going to see a lot of in different

aspects and different things like around the world, which is like kind of the next phase or one of the sort of like latter phases of the culture war. And I've been thinking about this just a little bit over like the past few episodes, because the whole thing about like, yeah, the dog chasing the car is fun, but when the dog actually catches the car, like what does it do? What does it do next? Yeah, but also the dog is a car in this metaphor. And also the dog, yeah, and also the dog is a car. And, you know, but it's like this thing about, you know, you sort of, you've built this whole sort of like culture war ecosystem around the existence of like this deep state and you sort of conceived of it in this way that becomes more bizarre and at times esoteric.

And like that stuff has been done largely to sort of protect the integrity of like these conspiracy theories, right? In part because like to actually reckon, you know, it's not the idea of it like the deep state doesn't exist or like a deeper, deeper state doesn't exist. Um, but it's like, if it does, it doesn't look the way that you use. It's not like woke Lanyard people, like kind of dictating terms, like, you know, to sort of put that quite mildly, it's not like drag queens that are doing that. But you were so convinced that like, it's this sort of like Lanyard, like city dwelling Lanyard class that are like making your life miserable. That any proof or any evidence that you're given that like, maybe that's not the case, you've sort of just wholly refuted.

But then there comes this point where you're just like, you can increasingly sort of like, go into these like weird loops to convince yourself that your, your way of viewing the world is right. But eventually you do have to confront the fact that like, you might not actually be right. And like the things that you have done and the fact that you might not actually be right. And the things that you have done, and the things that you have mentally sacrificed in some ways in order to sort of uphold this view of the world may have been completely in vain. And I feel like the stuff, the Epstein stuff is a really good first example of that. It's like that book, When Prophecy Fails, except you don't even have really a concrete prophecy that you know has failed. If I, the world is going to end on like, you know, midnight January 24th

1980 or whatever, then you know, 0001 January 25th, people are going to have some questions, right? But like here it's just like... Or are they? Because the Jehovah's Witnesses every time just set a new date, they're like, ah, I see, we made some slight calculation errors here. Well, this is also it. Like you kind of have to have this like system there for so long,

but people are willing to sort of like accept the mistakes that you make. Right. Like that's kind of, you know, it's something that is prevalent in like certain like religious inter like certain like kind of religious groups and interpretations that, you know, scripture is so ancient that like, you know, oh, maybe like one person just misread it, but actually the broad bones of it are still there. But the QAnon assemblage as a phenomenon is still a very young phenomenon and it's one that is massively decentralized and it's one where there is no over leader by design, but it means that there are lots of grifters.

I was thinking about this just before we started recording, which is like, I wonder what happens to like all the sort of YouTube grips grifters and all the social media grifters who have really kind of like, you know, really sort of built a following and made money out of the fact that like, Oh, a Trump presidency is going to like unveil all these secret pedophiles that like exist in every aspect of society. That's the kind of stringing them along thing, is this stuff for everybody's interests there, except Jeffrey Epstein's actual victims has to keep spalling out forever. There always have to be more revelations and more revelations, but never anything material. And a smarter thing would have been to just drag out of the Epstein stuff for as long

as possible, right? Make the movement more bizarre and weird and sort of elaborate. Like you have to, why would you not use the most obvious excuse available to you, which is Joe Biden and the deep state, like ate the files on the way out. Like right before he left, Joe Biden squirted an entire bottle of ketchup over a manila folder and choked that shit down at his desk. And this is it. This is why it's so weird, because it's like, I don't understand why, I don't like, I kind of understand a theory as to why they sort of did this approach of like,

okay, we're going to give like, the sort of worst freaks online that you know, like one folder of kind of printouts, but get them to sort of where we're going to present the idea that we're like a transparent government that's going to like really unveil all these kind of shady characters. You know, and like the thing, the logical thing is like, OK, give them another folder of printouts, give them like unlimited folders of printouts. Right. But instead, like to shut the whole thing down, which is what they did. And just to be like, yep, all of you are conspiracist freaks. And I think that's also the funniest aspect of it, because this is like they're really sort of telling like they're deep fans or like they deep fans or their hardcore fans, you are all fucking idiots and we hate you. It's like another example, I guess, of the Trumpness running into the fact of governing.

In this case, the fact of governing isn't a guy telling about the facts of nature, right? It's about Donald Trump being implicated. But it's the same thing you see whenever you have like- Yeah, he's doing his first cover-up. Yeah, it is. He's learning about why people do those. It's baby's first cover-up. Because like, if you think about like, RFK Jr. being like, I never said I was anti-vaccine. Or if you think about Trump sort of like, showing up

and being like, I never said I was anti-Ukraine. Or whatever. Right? Not that those are like, comparable things, but it's the thing of like the thing that you said you wanted to do is like so impossible that ultimately you're forced to do the thing that the Biden administration was doing, which is to say, you know, Jeffrey Epstein never heard of him or a patriot missiles to Ukraine or yeah, you have to vaccinate your kids or whatever the fuck. Um, and in this case, it's like, this is really leading to some discord in like chud world. Like Alex Jones is mad at him.

Dan Bongino, the fucking, I assume that's how it's pronounced, I'm not gonna check, the deputy director of the FBI, former right wing podcaster. That's a great way to know that shit's fucked up and off the rails. You should not have a podcast to be deputy director of the FBI. It's like making me deputy director of MI5 and the first thing I would do in that job is shoot myself in my office. Because I shouldn't be there. That's not like, okay yeah sure, it'd be fun having like the lanyard and going through security. But after that I'm like, I don't want to, I shouldn't, this is not my role in life, right?

Yeah, I don't fit in here I don't, I shouldn't. This is, this is not my role in life. Right. Like, I don't fit in here. Everyone who works here is trash. Oh, wait. So I don't know how this is going to end, but it feels genuinely like there's some, some like the first real tensions we're seeing in Trump world. I don't really, really know what's going to happen with that. Maybe it's going to end with somebody like taking a shot at Trump because they're convinced he's like insufficiently anti-pedophilia. I don't know. We needed a solution. He needs to keep all the QAnon people busy with them. They need

to do like one of those. Remember those like magazines you could get in the 2000s where you know over 42 weeks you, but they need, they need the Epstein's Island magazine to keep them all busy. Like, you know, fucking crosswords, puzzles, long articles, like over 62 weeks, construct your own Epstein's mosque. Like that, I think that's the way to keep them active and not hating on Trump. Yeah, cause of the pop up mosque. Yeah. Asking the guy at the news agent to save it for you.

I do have, I do have a conclusion to this, right? Before we go into the interview with Jack Jack which is Donald Trump is being like Forced to conform to being president in a way that has made him into Joe Biden Like if you look at him now where he where he is like a kind of widely hated increasingly Doddering like pro-war sex criminal. He's everything old is new again That's Joe Biden again. And I don't know how that happened. Like possibly there's like a material explanation for it,

but I think it's more likely that Joe Biden has some kind of like cosmic force about him that just has seeped into the Oval Office. And from now on, every president, that's Biden. Different kind of Biden. It was the Biden voice in the Orb. Just picking up the Orb and hearing in my soul of souls, listen here, Jack. I think my Orb is challenging me to a push-up contest. The last thing you want. Well, this has been our first half of the episode.

We're now going to cut to me and Riley in the past, reacting to what a good job we did on this first half of the episode with Jack Parker. There'll be links in the description. I hope you enjoy it and we will see you at the end of of the show recorded on sunny July 7th. I wonder what the other half of the episode was like. We have no idea. We are here in, I guess, the TF sort of serious activity corner where we are talking to Jack, who is one of the employees of the Scarlet Letters bookstore in London, which is currently undergoing what you might

euphemistically call a labor relations issue. And whenever we can talk to striking workers, we like to do so. So Jack, a warm welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Yeah, it we like to do so. So Jack, a warm welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's good to be here. So just to start us off, could you give the listeners a little bit of background of what is happening at your workplace?

Yeah, what is the Scarlet Letters, if you plan to want? Um, God, yeah. I'm trying to work out where to even begin from. It's, I get the sense that it's like the sort of reminiscence bit that opens a Scorsese movie after everything has kind of exploded. Yes, exactly, exactly. The Scarlet Letters initially was sort of advertised to all of us who worked there and

the people who were buying books there as a radical bookshop, the purpose of which was to platform marginalized writers and particularly to highlight sex workers, both employing some of the employees as sex workers and by promoting sex workers' writing and having a sex worker section in the bookshop. So the premise of it sounded amazing, and that was what it was supposed to be. And it's also CIC, so a community interest company.

And the community that the bookshop had to serve was the sex worker community. So the idea was that the bookshop would be used as like an event space as well for sex worker groups. So as you can tell from the fact that I'm here, it didn't continue down that road of being like a really cool radical space, but conceptually it was supposed to

be like this community hub and a radical bookshop at the same time. And if we go now to today, where you're in a union, right? The UVW. Yes, yes we are. And that's now in what Riley called a labor relations dispute with the bookshop. How did that come to happen? ALICE Yes. So, from the start of us joining the bookshop, there were constant issues in terms of workplace treatment and in terms of us not being given the things we were promised. When we got the job, we were promised that we'd have fixed hour contracts, and we were actually put on zero hours contracts. We didn't have sick pay. We were like pretty frequently mistreated in terms of like our boss saying things that were bigoted around us and to us.

Gossiping about other employees to those of us who were on shift that day and then gossiping about that same employee to the next people who were on the next day. Sounds like so much work apart from anything else to remember who you've been gossiping to about him. Sometimes I do think that when this stuff happens, is the person who's doing it, are they just thinking, well, no one exists outside my field of view, so when I'm not around, I assume they just wink out of existence and wait for me to be there again. The thing about small business owners, right, is their vision is based on movement.

She definitely thinks we don't talk to each other, or at least that's been corrected now, but early on it was very clear that she thought we weren't communicating with each other. What we're saying is that there was this very high minded, and I think it sounds like quite well intentioned project that very quickly hit an employers and workers dilemma. Not even employers and workers, but employer and workers, right? Because it's just the one boss, is that right? Yes, yeah, exactly. We have the one director, Marion Scarlett, who is the founder and sole

director. And so that's in itself, we're dealing with small business mindset, which is kind of a nemesis of the show, but concentrated into one person rather than a corporate structure. And then you mix in all of the kind of like interpersonal stuff into that.

And I mean, I'm curious, how long was that going on? How long has it been open and how long has it been like this? Yeah, so we opened at the end of November and there was like a pretty lengthy hiring process before that. A lot of us were admittedly nepotism hires, including myself. Like, most of us knew the director personally before we were hired and we were encouraged on a personal level to apply with promises that we would almost definitely get the job if we applied and did the interview. And so, yeah, we started end of November officially, we had our training day and then we started trading and then, yeah, we've been open since then until recently.

So not very long, right? Like, like seven months total to get to the point now where we've kind of crashed and burned and now there's a wreckage. And yeah, it took us, I think, like four months to unionize. I think like the union activity kind of started, I want to say three months ago, but it took time for us to, we came together as a collective first and after we had more than half the employees like agreeing to unionize, that's when we picked a parent union, which is when we picked UVW and then we recruited the rest of That's when we picked a parent union, which is when we picked UVW,

and then we recruited the rest of the workers. And we got 100% of our workplace unionized, everyone joined. That's incredible. And a really fast pace for that as well. We've talked to union workers before where unionizing a workplace has been a hugely long involved process. I'm curious why UVW as well.

So UVW is two doors down from the bookshop. Hell yeah. And they rent from the same group that the bookshop is like renting from. So like on every level they made sense. Again, if you're the boss, I'm going to lie to you a bunch. You better not go two doors down. You better not a ever talk to each other. B, do not look to your left when you exit the shop.

Yeah, it's like Bechel and Olkoma in the city and the city. I mean, there's also a lesson here for unions, right? About being invested in a community to the point that like your neighbors are the ones that you can unionize first and, to some extent, most easily, right? Yeah, exactly. And UVW were really on that. Also, one of the employees had a direct connection with someone who worked in UVW, so we had a really easy route to chat to some people. But UVW were always very supportive of us. And from the second we

reached out to say that we were considering them as a parent union, they immediately went over all the things that they could offer us. And even gave us advice before we had joined, like just about how it works joining a union and functionally, like what would happen and what would happen if we joined various different types of unions. Like They weren't pushy about picking them, but they made it clear what they could do for us. And the proximity was obviously a huge, huge plus. I think before we go back to the bookshop, I think I'd like to talk a little more about the UVW, because listeners might not know who that is. What they do, who they work with. And I know a lot of the industries we talk about, we talk a great deal about gig work

and precarious work and zero hours work. My understanding is that this is who the UVW primarily works with. Yes. These employees that are traditionally considered difficult to unionize because they're so precarious. Yeah, exactly. UVW is United Voices of the World. And the reason for that naming in part is because they work with so many migrant workers, so many precarious workers, and exactly what you're saying, they're a trade union that's very grassroots and they focus on people who might otherwise find difficulty

in unionizing or who won't have specific unions for themselves. For example, as booksellers, there was no immediate, like, oh, we'll go to the booksellers union that serves our interests. That doesn't really exist. And there are efforts being made to unionize booksellers as a group. But as things stand right now, that's not going to come to fruition in time to help us. And we knew it wouldn't. So UVW as a group that is used to working with marginalized people in particular, that was vital to us, that they understood that we were in a precarious position because it also influences the moves you make as humanized workers, right? Because while different tactics will work for some groups, they're not going to work for people who are the most marginalized. And that includes

things like this, where I'm here because I'm one of the few workers there that I can be open about like all aspects of my identity and I use my real name when I do things like sex work activism. So it's already out there so like I might as well continue to talk but in terms of like the kind of bookshop that it is even though not all of us who work there are sex workers because some of us are. There's the association there automatically if we speak out publicly and UVW understood that and they weren't pushing us to be like you have to be face out to all these journalists to get your word out there. They were like there's other tactics we can use and we'll use those first. Mason- So speaking of those tactics then, you have these grievances with your boss about ours

and about sort of like her conduct and the business not being necessarily what you expected it to be. Where does that then take you initially? Yeah, we started out in the very classic way that you do when you have a group of workers who are on the same page, which is that we just drew up demands and we made them quite simple. They were really basic in the beginning. It was literally just, we wanted the fixed hour contracts that we were promised.

We wanted sick pay. We wanted fair pay for fair work, meaning specifically that there were certain tasks that people were being asked to do extra on top of normal bookseller duties, including things like illustration from a worker who specifically charges more for illustration work freelance than the bookseller rate. Our director was well aware of that, but she would get that employee to do illustration work while on the clock so that she didn't have to pay for it separately. And it's like, okay, you're doing your bookseller job plus this illustration job and no extra money. And there was just this threat of like, well, if you won't do that, I can fire you at will. And there were other tasks like taking stock. people were given extra hours for that initially, and then the director

realised like, oh, I can just ask them to do that during their normal shop hours, and what are they gonna do? Say no, I can fire them. So... There's one weird trick called exploiting my workers. Exactly. So we just had those as demands and that and we wanted our union through UVW to be recognized. And the only other thing on the list was that we wanted to work by cooperative principles. This wasn't a demand specifically to transition to a workers cooperative. It was a demand that we had a seat at the table in major decisions.

And that came about because we had had a couple of major decisions made where every single employee didn't want it and the director was the only person who did. And so she overrode us and made the decision because the power rests with her, right? So she cut our shifts from eight paid hours a shift to seven. All of us said we didn't want that and she obviously ignored us and cut hours. And the other thing was that she introduced a policy that if a customer came in to ask to use the toilet, we had to follow them downstairs and stand outside the toilet until they finished and then escort them back upstairs. ALICE The volunteer toilet cop.

Oh, not the volunteer, the mandatory toilet cop. TAMMY Yeah, we were calling it toilet gate. It was bad. ALICE But so, none of these demands are hugely radical, right? We're not saying, like, you know, behead all the bourgeois. And predictably, maybe, the response to this was not great, I understand. Yeah, the initial response we got was, no, and also, if you wanted me to implement these things I'd have to fire half of you, in summary.

Incredible. I mean, to be honest, that sounds like a management problem, rather than anything else, but anyway, so this is not a situation in which you're getting, like, fruitful negotiations here between, like, union and management. TANVI Yeah, exactly. We did, after the initial no, still manage to arrange a meeting, which had to be delayed by a couple of weeks, just because of personal circumstances. So when we finally got to it, it was already a bit of a powder keg, right? Because we had been putting up with a lot of shit. And also since we told her that we were unionizing, her response to us in the shop was really off.

Like it was an incredibly tense environment, even more so than it was before. And people were already being denied extra things. Beforehand, they were getting these extra shifts for events and stuff. Suddenly, those started to evaporate. And not in a way that we could prove was a direct result of us unionizing. But in practice, it was so obvious it was because it was practically instantaneous. And people who'd gotten extra hours for certain tasks, or who'd been told that they would get extra hours

for certain tasks, not only did the extra hours evaporate, but so did the task. She just took them away because of our fair pay for fair work demand and just kind of ignored it and then slowly started to reintroduce it, again, during work hours with no extra pay. So it was tense. We got to the meeting and the meeting went horrifically,

essentially. The only thing she agreed to was to trial a sick pay scheme, which she explicitly said that her reservations about a sick pay scheme was that she wouldn't be able to afford them because she hired so many disabled people. And also she was concerned that we might take advantage of the policy. Uh huh. This is real like people pleasing stuff, isn't it? It just is like, okay, so you hired a bunch of disabled people as workers and you wrote in the articles of association that was part of the point of the bookshop is that it would be work that people could take on while disabled

and that they would be able to do. And then you say, oh, well, because I've hired all these disabled people, I don't want to offer them sick pay. It's like, yeah, we need it though. It's like, well, of course I can like do a sick pay scheme if none of you need it. Yes, exactly. It sounds to me like what this situation is. Oh, you don't understand.

This business is to make me feel better. Yeah, it just, it was, it was incredibly frustrating and she, she refused everything else that we asked for. Basically the other thing we wanted was the financial information because she kept going back to that and saying, we can't afford it. And so we were like, okay, show us you can't afford it. If you genuinely like, because it didn't really make sense because she was saying, I can't afford to give you fixed hour contracts.

And it's like, they don't cost any more than the zero hours ones though, because we already work those hours. The only way in the world that a fixed hour contract would cost more than a zero hours contract is if you intend to fire some of us soon or cut hours more. That's the only way a zero hours contract saves you money. And like, we don't want you to do those things and that would be fucked up. Yeah. No, the zero hours contract is going to save me money versus the fixed term contract, but it's going to do so in a way that doesn't involve paying you any less. It is a secret third thing. Yeah, exactly. And she wouldn't stay outright what was going on there, but obviously we're

not stupid. I love hearing about it. Does she not have a theory of mind? No, it was just so bizarre. She genuinely just, I guess, thinks we're stupid. I mean, I heard from other people who she spoke to privately that she'd been basically saying to everyone else that our demands were unreasonable because we didn't understand how businesses work. And that this is what she was telling people in her social circle to justify why she was denying the demands of her unionizing workers.

So things escalate from there, right? Can you talk me through that? Yeah, the escalation was steep. We tried to discuss this with her father. She agreed to give us the financials and she sent us a two-page PDF. Oh, she covered most of it. Yeah, which had no evidence behind it and they were estimates. She was saying we earn between this figure and this figure roughly per month. What she didn't think about is

that we have access to a lot of the financial information because we're the ones inputting it on a day-by-day basis. It was annoying because she obviously had all this stuff in the spreadsheet that she could have just shared with us. So we had to collate it ourselves, but we already had access to all of it. So we collated it ourselves and worked out that actually we were running on the high end of the estimates consistently and sometimes went over them. And also even based on the financial information she gave us, we had so much money, like a ridiculous amount compared to any other bookshop. Like most of the, especially radical bookshops in the area that we talked to, they were working on margins of having

in savings, say like two, three, four thousand pounds, right, in savings. A couple of them had more, but like that's pretty standard. And in our case, there was nearly 30,000 pounds in the savings account. So, bullshit, you can't afford sick pay. It's not going to cost you 30k to pay off sick pay. In fact, we suggested a version of the sick pay scheme that wouldn't cost her any money because we were saying actually having two workers on in the day, some of us are willing to work just us and also some of us are willing to work us but have someone from the main building like co-working in the building. So there's someone else physically there even if they're not working on the till with us and that we can manage it that way if someone was sick. Yeah, we'd be understaffed, it wouldn't be like easy,

but we were willing to do it and that way she wouldn't be spending any extra money if someone was sick. So we tried everything to make this like function without costing more money, but we were willing to do it. And that way she wouldn't be spending any extra money if someone was sick. So we tried everything to make this like function without costing more money. But once we saw the finances, obviously we were furious. Yeah. And the counter offer to all of this is still no. Yes, exactly. The response to this is still no. She then starts trying to arrange another meeting with us, but the other meeting is in the context of her saying that she like doesn't want to meet our demands, right? So it's like, what's the point in meeting with you again if you're not willing to discuss this stuff? And then it rapidly escalates from there.

Mason- Remind me, is this the meeting with the union consultant as well? Tanya- Yeah, we had UVW, like a couple of people from UVW with us, a couple of booksellers, our director, and she also brought a couple of other people UVW with us, a couple of booksellers, our director. And she also brought like a couple of other people. We had like someone there to be sort of an independent observer, like as a third party to sort of mediate, which didn't really help. I brought the UN to the meeting where I say again, you can't have sick pay. Yeah, it did not work out well. So we didn't have this extra meeting and we tried to then

arrange one with her to be like, no, we have these fund demands, we're willing to meet with you again to discuss how we implement them, but there's no world where we don't implement these. And then she went really hard on it and basically said, I'm going to be letting half of you go. She said that she wanted to hire a manager and use the existing funds for workers to pay that manager. And on that basis, she wouldn't be able to offer all booksellers shifts anymore, is how she phrased it. And obviously, she was planning on hiring a manager, that manager was going to be working essentially full time and taking on a bunch of her tasks, as well as additional ones. If that's coming from the pool

of employee payment, a lot of us only worked one day a week, it would have meant firing half of the employees. Like, I can do the math. And we were like, no, we won't accept that. And as a result, we said, if you aren't willing to consider this, we're balloting to strike. UVW backed us on this. They worked out the fastest way we could do it. And in theory, we could strike as of July 9th. This doesn't matter now in practice. Why not? What superseded it? I can't imagine that there would have been another escalatory spiral. Yeah. In response to us saying like, we're balloting to strike now, we've unanimously

already agreed that we will vote yes in this ballot. So you basically know the outcome. She said, you know, no. And then we said, okay, we're gonna go public about our union dispute. We went public, we posted on Instagram and we shared with everyone that we were unionizing.

And then she announced that she was going to shut the shop and that we would all lose our jobs. Well, that seems like a reasonable and proportionate response. Doesn't it Jess? So where are we now? Or sorry, where are we as of the 7th of July? As of the 7th of July, post her announcing that she was going to close the bookshop, we decided to occupy the bookshop with a final demand of her donating us the stock, because it's the CIC. So the assets have to serve

the community. She's not allowed to bulk sell them for less than their market value. We stamped the title pages of every book so they couldn't be sent back to the publisher. Like all of them had been stamped. And we said to her, like, just donate it to us. If you won't hand over the directorship of the CIC, that's one thing, but you could donate this to us. There's precedent for you to do that. You could do that legally. Let's talk it out." She said no and started redundancy proceedings with this expensive redundancy firm. We occupied the bookshop and we managed to occupy it for an incredibly short period of time after we announced during our first redundancy meeting that we were occupying because she illegally broke into the building while we slept downstairs at 4am with like over a dozen people and ripped out all of the stock and did a

fair bit of damage to the unit, drilled through all the locks, which she's not allowed to do as part of her license to occupy the building, not that she cared. We live-streamed it, and as of now I am technically still employed, but the bookshop is shut and gutted. The, see, this was the part that was, I think, most shocking to me and to most other people who saw it, which is the instant escalation, like, the next day, from, we are occupying your bookshop, to, we are going to show up in the middle of the night and break and enter into it. It's such a dramatic overreaction, apart from, I imagine probably being illegal in itself, to be like, these books are like hostages and we are the

Russian special forces, you know? We are gonna kick the door in and like rescue all of my stock. And it's just, there was so many off-ramps at any point during this for being the slightest bit conciliatory and it feels like the ownership has just blazed past all of them. Yeah, there was no consideration at any point of what we were talking about. She blatantly refused to discuss it repeatedly. We asked her for the stop. We asked her to discuss transitioning to us as workers running the bookshop because part of what she was saying was that she couldn't handle running it and needed to step away. And we said, okay, if that's the case, you can step away. You can do that by handing it to us. That means the bookshop, the community

space that it is, all of these things that she's been saying since she opened it about how important it is to the community, all of that can still be fulfilled, all those promises. It would just be done by us as workers if she's not able to do it. But it seems to me like she doesn't want anyone else to do it, in part because it would prove that she could have. Because we would be doing it without the money that she has. We would be doing it without the, like, all of the setup that she's done. We would be doing it ourselves as workers, and we would make sure that we got sick pay.

We would make sure that people were fairly compensated. And if we were able to do it, it would make her look even worse. I mean, ultimately, right, it seems like when push came to shove, all the best will in the world, you know, in this case, the most important identity group here was boss, essentially. This is always the distinction I like to make, right? I had a quick look at the Scarlet Lesser's like, Twister account, which has a kind of June 17th dated statement, which is sort of like, you're not allowed to be mad at me because I'm not the management, I'm like a member of the community and I'm

disabled and stuff and it's like okay but in like a real like relationship to the means of production sense you are though in the sense that you own it and it just seems like something that you see on big scales and small scales of diverting any kind of materialist thing into identity that isn't connected to anything. You know, you're not allowed to be mean to me even though I'm your boss because I'm marginalized, right? Yeah, exactly. Alright, so basically where we are now is there's been this development of, well, if I can't have the bookstore, then nobody will have a bookstore.

So can you just give the listeners an idea of, okay, so where are we now? Where might we go in the future? And how can people help? Yeah, in response to the push to take that away from us, it just made us more determined. We'll run a bookstore at a spite if we have to, but we're we're going to be running a workers co-op in the same fucking building. And we're going to actually fulfill the things the bookshop was supposed to do in the first place with the people who actually run it day to day. It's quite ambitious. We're planning to open up in August, which is incredibly soon and between now and then we are fundraising. So we have a crowd fund alive and people can

access that. The easiest way is probably through our Instagram where we have like everything linked in bio and so much information about everything that's been happening so far and consistent updates on what's happening with the people's Letters, which is our new bookshop name as we form now out of the ashes of the Scarlet Letters. The Instagram is at uvwbooksellerstsl. People can also look up the People's Letters in bethnyl Green. I'm sure they'll find information about us that way. We're also TSL booksellers on Blue Sky and on X. Yeah, and find our crowdfunding there. Donations to support through that basically help us cover wages while we are all working close to full-time hours to just put this co-op together in time for August. And also we're taking donations of

books. So if anyone is near Bethnal Green, London, or has connections with people who are, or wants to send us books, sending them over, it's the same location that The Scarlet Letters was in, Cambridge Heath Road, number 140. They're welcome to send books there, secondhand books or new books, if they have some that they want to donate. And also we're looking for people who have radical books or publications or zines, who are willing to give them to us to sell on a splitting profits basis. So they would give us the books in advance, we would sell them and then send them their portion of the money after sale, just while we're getting set up until we have the funds together to be able to make it work. But we are absolutely

determined to come out of this as a workers co-op, even without the books. It's fucked that it went down like it did, but yeah, we're not stopping. Yeah. What I love about this is that what you have done is you have accidentally recreated the plot of a Curb Your Enthusiasm season where people are starting spite stores, which I think is great. And also, this is a call out there, if you own a copy of, I believe, the 17th book in the Aubrey Maturin series, The Commodore, please donate it to the People's Letters, because I will buy it. It's the only one that I'm missing. Unusually specific.

If I can offer a more general sort of question here, then it's, you know, it seems that like your, your, your management here was like unusually intransigent. And that's been, uh, you know, like devastating in the one sense, but like very uniting in the other. What can we take from this about like unionizing other workplaces, um, other than that you should do it and it's good? Yeah, I think the main thing that I would ask people to take from this is that you are

not likely to face anywhere near the number of roadblocks we did, or to have to deal with the absolutely wild shit that we've had to deal with. Because most employers are not going to engage in such obvious union busting, and they're not going to go after their employees in this way. Most of the time, because their workers are not all so marginalized, all so precarious. The only reason that we were able to be targeted in this way after unionizing is because of that. And also, it was relied upon that we have radical politics, and we were hired for that reason. So our employer knows we're not going to do things

like go to the police, because we are fundamentally anti-cop and we actually stand by those principles. So if you're working in pretty much any other workplace that isn't explicitly this supposedly radical bookstore like we're in or any kind of workplace like that, you're not going to face these kinds of barriers. It's not going to be this hard for you. And even at the extent that we had to deal with these barriers and these problems, we've

still come out of it determined we're going to start a workers co-op and with the community backing us so incredibly hard. So I would ask people to take that from it and to recognize that the sort of like community that you can build through unionizing is worth it, regardless of what happens as a result. Despite everything that has happened here, I wouldn't change what we've done. I think we did the right thing and the fucked up responses we got. Don't change my opinion on that. Fantastic.

All right. Well, look, Jack, I want to thank you a lot for taking the time to talk to us today about exactly what's going on with the once in future people's letter. Mm. Yeah, I mean, like, I want people to stay updated, to know what's going on, check out the Instagram, and they'll be able to see, like, updates as things go. I always want to give people an exact update

on what's going on right now. We've got loads of fundraisers planned, but like, things change day by day so much that the best thing I can tell who would do is stay updated. Yeah, well, absolutely. This episode, Show Notes will have links to whatever the updated fundraisers are. And now I'm going to pass back to, I believe, the rest of the pod without me, because I'm on holiday right now.

Oh, God, I hope I'm doing a good job. All right. Bye, everybody. Say hi to the rest of the cast for me in a few seconds. Well what an amazing interview. That was a great interview. I totally did a great job on remembering to plug the book and just generally, really. So yeah, go and contribute to the strike fund. Events continue to progress, follow the Instagram, all of that.

In the meantime, we'll be back with the bonus episode, so subscribe to that. Milo, you have tour dates? Yeah, dates. TF live in Edinburgh on the 31st of July. Oho, you have tour dates? Milo Strickland Yeah, dates. TF live in Edinburgh on the 31st of July. Jason Vale Oh shit, yeah. Milo Strickland Yeah, I'm doing stand up work in progress. Berlin on the 18th of July, which is very soon. The early show sold out, but there is

a late show. Also Manchester on the 22nd of July, that's new in, that will hopefully sell out, so please buy tickets to that because that's quite soon. 30th of July, Newcastle, and then Edinburgh, 31st of July to 4th of August, and then I'm taping Sentimental in London on the 27th of September, so get in on all those. the patreon feed. bye everyone. bye.