TRASHFUTURE - Growing Pains ft. Emiliano Mellino

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

The gang discusses getting swole in a whole new, AI enabled way, Rachel Reeves' Wikipedia jaunts, and then TBIJ's Emiliano Mellino returns for the second half to discuss his ongoing investigation into abuse of the Temporary Agricultural Worker visa by farms and employment agencies. Emiliano's latest article: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-10-22/all-that-is-missing-is-a-whip-home-office-ignored-migrant-worker-abuses-on-farms Medical Aid for Palestinians: www.map.org.uk 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  *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *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/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello everyone and welcome to this free episode of TF and it is really yes and Alice you have been begging us to ask you about your sword. I have. Okay, this is unfair. I just happened to be holding a sword as we started the like pre-record for this. Yeah. Alice was just threatening you with a deadly weapon, right? Exactly. Exactly. I was just threatening you with this sword and you started asking me like, what's the deal

with this sword? And the deal with this sword is that it's a sword that a fan sent me. Was it a Sicilian fan? I mean, this is the thing. I don't think it was meant as a threat because it has my name engraved on it in Russian. It's not a great threat because it's like it's giving you the weapon. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But no, I don't know if they engraved this themselves or if they just had it engraved, but it has my name in Russian script and Sukha Bliet on the other side of it. They didn't kill the Sukha Bliet sort. Yeah, exactly. So if you break in my house, you have to confront the Sukha Bliet sort, which I just have.

And so someone asked me about this and I was like, yeah, I was just holding this. Yeah, super. I tweet an offer 50 grand to anyone who can kill you. Yeah. I'm going to be at like such and such location. I meet me at the sanitary or something. Yeah. Alice is going to be doing a boss rush of the strongest people that listen to this show.

No, when he's resigned for Jerry dates, a trans woman, but can't understand why she has so many swords. I mean, they should remake the always sunny, like Mac date so transactual episode is the thing because it was not like mean spirited by by any stretch of the imagination but I think our conception of the trans woman needs a bit of an update from even like the first season of Oisani, you know, a few swords in that. Oh yeah, they got swords, Jerry. They got them. So I just want to welcome you all.

To welcome you all. Massive pair of tips. Massive pair of tips and a buster sword. I just want to welcome you all to this episode of TF. Now that we're done, the putzing around from the front, I'd like to continue with the putzing around of the first half and then the second half. That is the traditional order of pots. This is in front, putzing in back. So the second half today will be Alice and I talking to returning guest, Emiliano Molino, about his ongoing investigation of the abuse of the migrant worker visa program

by various, sort of, you might say, unethical companies and so on. Serious, serious, man, serious topic. And in order to listen to it, you've got to get through some bullshit about my sword. That's right. However, first, if you want to, if you want to do that, I want to suggest, what if here's the thing, the four of us, what if we started writing MPs books for them? Because it seems like they could just copy and paste them from anywhere now. Trashuge Oil Warehouse SPAC bank ghost writing service. Yeah, we should do it, but they

should all be like mills and Boone romances. You don't know Listros' number. I'm not sure if it isn't like that. Yeah, that's not it. It's not out yet. It could be like that. I have never been more excited for a book. I will be queuing up Dressdor's Liz Trust for the Midnight release of the book. Dressdor's Dressdor's always all your favorite characters from Liz Trust's book. I'm wearing a bathrobe to go and buy the Liz Trust book. No, no, this is in fact, on labor news,

Rachel Reeves, punitive chancellor, has been discovered by the FT that she just copied and pasted a bunch of her book on the women who made modern economics from Wikipedia. Oh, no. What's a big area? You can find economics ads.

Wikipedia, the Guardian, like another MP, I believe, just widespread, widespread plagiarism. You can't be copying and pasting from another MP, a book which was itself probably copy and pasted. You're going to get like book BSE. Yeah, I mean, I think about this too, because like so many politicians write books. a book which was itself probably copy and pasted, you're going to get like book BSE. Yeah, I mean, I think about this too, because like so many politicians write books, no one reads some, they exist mostly as a victim for like book launch parties in Westminster. And this, like this can't be the only example. It would drive me insane, were that the case? This must be absolutely ubiquitous.

Wait, hang on, I've just realized what the MP's book is. Remember when we came up with the idea of Riley to Riley, the direct Riley read podcast that's only to be listened to by Riley read made by Riley? Well, this is basically like MP to Riley, the book that will only be read by Riley. They're just sending you, like you start getting really conspiratorial

about like MPs are sending you like coded messages because they know you're the only one who's gonna read this. Yeah, what we need is for Ridey read to become an MP and write a book and that it will complete the circle and we can all go. So Rachel Rachel Reeves interviewed about this said, I'm the author of that book. I hold my hands up and said I should have done better. I take responsibility for everything that is in that book But for me what I wanted to do is bring together the stories of these women And I guess you could say she brought them together from a variety of sources such as Wikipedia via the control C button It's just really it's just really funny that she's like doing this kind of performance of seriousness That's her deal now. She's like, you know, serious physical responsibility MP. And then for some reason, she felt the need to sort

of like have a book out to reinforce that, you know. And it's why, who's, who's right was depending on like whether or not Rachel, were you set a book? It's a book that could have been blank because no one will read it, except maybe. I mean, imagine it's more of like a, it's of like a PR attempt right so like the criticism being made of her Is actually like lacks charisma is kind of boring, but also like is really not kind of it's sort of more of the colder One of like compared to Kirstaama, which I think next next the Kirstaama anyone looks like a charisma vacuum. I mean that guy He's so charming. And so I imagine there's probably something related related to that, or just of your idea that,

like, well, if you want to project, if you want to, like, show that someone is both, like, a progressive, but also very serious about the numbers and, like, you know, things of themselves as, like, a part of a long line of women economists who also said austerity actually was really good and we should do more of it. That feels like that's the only answer to this. Well, she doesn't have a book out, does she? I can't. I want him to, I don't want him to write a serious political biography. I want him to go the Vince Cable, Boris Johnson, Tom Watson, I want him to write a thriller.

The thing is, I have the devil's tune too. He's so sort of like, clearly I think the reason why he hasn't written a book yet is because he's holding out for the elder statesman memoirs thing. After finishing his like five terms in Parliament, we build a giant statue of him and he puts out the I-Racken, he's gonna do, I do, I reckon he's going to do like a sort of like Obama dreams of my father type of thing. Yes. One of those things that you thanked

for my mother. Well, because he talks a lot about his dad building tools and how, you know, this, this informed his father, he never expands on that. My other idea, I had my father tools to my other idea I had for a book pitch could just be called the puddle. Drinking from the puddle, the collective puddle of British society. Everyone gets a set. We drinking from the puddle.

I'll look at the case, the case, the coot book. That'd be good. That'd be really good. Yeah. We're just in a pitch meeting now. That's the problem. The case, the case, theama cookbook. Yeah, that'd be good. That'd be really good. Yeah. Oh, we're just in a pitch meeting now. That's the problem. The Kirstaama cookbook. I like oiled rice with a bit of grated cheese on top.

I think that's a good, quick feel. Kirstaama, like Kirstaama young adult fiction series. That could be quite fun. Kirstaama's self-help book, you know, 12 rules for life from the Kierstarm. Starm the better, faster, stronger the Kierstarm is story. He agrees that you should make your bed every day, but not because it will make you optimize you as an individual, because it will impress your wife. And it will.

So, here is, I'm going to read the last line of the Rachel Reves justification here says, and if I'm guilty of copying and pasting some facts about amazing women and turning it into a book that gets read that I'm really proud about that, which is again, like number one, if plagiarism is a crime, then look me up. These books don't matter. Number two, the people who care about actually care about whether or not these books that exist to not be read, but just exist so someone can have written a book is a home or a police officer. She's right. Kind of about how books are sort of treated now. The idea that these books

are just kind of like props for your Instagram posts and stuff. She's not entirely wrong about that. And I will say in Matt Vane, but I will buy Rachel Reeves book and I will sit strategically on the tube reading it in the hope that I do appear on the hot guys reading books Instagram account. Something that I've been trying to do for many, many years and sadly, a dreamer is still yet materialized. As I was reading Rachel Reeves book, I neither nodded nor shook my head until I was sure what the prevailing Ape did of the book would be because that is the correct neutral position in which to read a book to go in with no preconceptions about what the book by Contained or whatever it was a good very funny to be like if I plagiarized a book it if that's a crime which I seem to think it is Then lock me up. So I want to talk about Lumen fitness. Welcome to the World

Smartest Fitness Studio. I'm welcoming all of you and the listener, the World Smartest Fitness Studio. That's news like a low bar, like the average, the average like intellectual level of any kind of fitness environment is not generally, and I say this is someone who goes to the gym a lot, it's not a place you go for the kind of intellectual discussion. Have I talked about my local gym on the show before? I don't believe so. Why not? Why not dox yourself? So my gym that I go to is called Legends. There are two outposts of Legends. One in Thai. I'm gulating your position between Legends, the Shalamaka Bab House, and the times we've said the

full mailing address of the studio. What if I want to say the full mailing address of the studio live again, because I want Canadians to send me Canadian sweets. I really miss Swedish berries. It just got a PO box. It's not that expensive. Plus, there's waif your anthra.

My gym is great. It's called Legends. There's two locations, one in Hackney one in Herringay and It's full of older Turkish men working out wearing like Gucci fake Gucci polo shirts and jeans and pointed leather loafers Just doing like the worst bicep girls you've ever seen really fast Yeah, sick. It's awesome and that's like an intellectual hotbed. Yeah. So that's the world smartest fitness studio, but the Lumen fitness in Dallas seems to think they've got it, um, got it cornered. Uh, they say, it's intelligence into the place where you work out your head. It's intelligent, interactive,

and individualized saying our smart fitness studio uses the latest advances in technology to deliver a one of a kind immersive workout that changes daily and evolves over time. What is your old sport? What are you doing by that window? I cemented your exercise. We're trying to think. Getting shot in the head to develop a myth redati style immunity. This is what paintball is. You know, now people are too powerful. So what the hell? I love a game of paintball at the weekend. Some of my friends, they had a group on. It was mostly 10 year olds. We destroyed them.

If JFK had like lived long enough to do paintball, he would have been fine. But it was bounced off. Yeah. Or he would have just maintained like an air soft guy level of situational awareness. And he would have always liked every threat. Yeah. Exactly. like an airsoft guy level of situational awareness and he would have always liked every threat. Yeah, if you know, if the CIA backed, you know, Cuban diaspora had access to paintball, they might have realized why the Bay of Pigs

was such a strategically doomed operation. seldom in a paintball match, do you get the air support that you need? You ask. We're gonna, I'm gonna talk a little more about Lumin fitness. They have cutting edge tech. Our studio harnesses the power of artificial intelligence, digital displays and object

detection to keep every workout fresh and engaging. Okay. We're going to get the like AI hallucination thing. We are like, okay, great, bicep curls or whatever. How many reps of these should I do and how many sets? And it's like, geez, 27,000. How many fingers do you have? Let's start with that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It says, we also automatically track your performance from reps and range of motion to equipment type in weight and progress equals rewards. You can earn Lumen coin, which I checked is not a cryptocurrency. So each coin. So fucking everyone does this.

Like the app that opens the door to my chain gym does that you know maybe not in this granular detail but since I never use it because what am I going to do like get a free sack of protein powder every three months it's like I don't care and I wouldn't care more if it was more personalized well it allows you to it allows you to like gift trial memberships or choose your favorite station in an upcoming class. So they're using airline booking logic where you have to, if you want an extra leg room, spin, spin cycle, you have to pay more. But I just want go Jim. I want to go to

the thing, do an hour and a half of pure cardio. No one is allowed to talk to me. The air conditioning is down to like minus 20 degrees. And then I leave. That's it. That's all I want from a gym. That'll the Turkish guys. Well, so far, all I've described is a gym that claims to do some technology and has a points program. Here's the part that I want to retire. Yeah, literally, yeah.

This is from like a Dallas Tech scene blog. Here's the part that I want to get miles. Yeah, literally, yeah. This is from like a Dallas-Texine blog. It says, inside Lumen fitness, every detail has been thought of to offer a unique experience. But Chloe, Rex, Emma, and Ethan are not the usual instructors you would find in a gym because they aren't even human. They're virtual coaches. It sounds like a dog. Yeah, Rex. even human. They are virtual. Rex sounds like a dog. Yeah. What

is that? Also saying a German Shepherd can't be a personal trainer. Not not even human comes quite close. I mean, the extra bodies, the people who work in the kids say what you will about the Excel bullies like their their their muscle mass is evident. I would trust the next cell bully to train me over a human. The new gym is, we're just gonna like leach a bunch of exo bullies behind the treadmills on a chain that's like just about long enough

to take a chunk out of your heel if you're not like going. No. Well, in this case, these are virtual coaches ready to guide members through every movement. By combining AI, motion tracking and object detection, Luminous design to get deliver a great full-body workout while members engage in a mission-based game such as filling a virtual cylinder with balls. I was my favorite game.

Can I not play like hard survival or something? I mean, the thing is right, this is a terrible way to like prevent injuries or whatever. It like it barely even works for Amazon. And now we're applying that horrifying surveillance tech to your gym as well, where you know, you lifting and stacking things for fun will also get the kind of like time on target stuff. Yeah. Uber Bartlers going undercover at my gym. He's pretending to be an ex-lobally. Disguised as a Turkish guy wearing like Gucci loafers, yeah. It's the same, it's the same hair dye, but then just with the jeans and the loafers, yeah. Just wearing the same like brown hair dye,

just like over the like upper lip and chest, yeah. So once members arrive for a workout, they're given an opportunity to pick their AI coach, which depends on whether they feel more motivated by a male or female voice or a stricter or more cheerful or laid back demeanor. I can't help it. I can't help it. I can't help it. Yeah, now I'm sort of back in the room. If you're telling me I can have an extremely

strict female coach, this is, you know, without joining a kind of Eastern block gymnastics program, ideal. So the white, if you want to actually imagine it, it's that every single person, instead of having going to machines you go through, it's you stand in front of an LED screen on a wall, like a cooler screen screen, which have, which are full of sensors that are basically spying on you the whole time. And all of the dumbbells and medicine balls and skipping ropes also have sensors in them. And so essentially, if the AI doesn't think you completed your movement properly, it doesn't go high enough, it doesn't count it as completed. But again, I don't know if we want to necessarily give that to a chat GPT. This is just techno gym. They had this in like 2000. They had those fucking electric machines

where you put the key in them and then it had like how many reps in the weight programmed into it and then it like did a motion tracking thing on your rep to see but just like with a normal basic compute like this is not what is the value at it is supposedly. Hey, I. Yeah, it's that the thing will talk to you as a very, you can turn up the strictness on your woman essentially. Yeah, I'd love to turn up the strictness on my one. So the studio's immersive environment is scheduled to change every six weeks. Like coming over from the pub after a few pints.

Well, 1970s working men's club podcast, you know, so the V.C. One of our guys turned it down. I'm alright. That's the former CEO, Brandon Bean was yeah, she Brendan on my bean to like to I increase my strictness level. Yeah.

Brandon Bean said that adding ecosystems called neon till I increase my strictness level. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. yeah. yeah. yeah. Yeah.. to be like, oh, you want like a kind of like a rough boxing gym experience, but you're too much of a pussy yuppie to go to one or even one of the ones that like deliberately tries to replicate that aesthetic in a sort of gentrified way. Fine, push a button, we'll play some like, you know, grunting ambiance into your airpods. And you know, the guy will yell at you. Yeah. Criminal graffiti alley was eventually prosecuted by the new Iraqi government,

but received only a fixed penalty notice. But yeah, that's the thing, right? They're saying, hey, the business model here actually is we want to have a gym, we want to be gym owners, but we don't want to employ anybody, so we just want a computer that's going to replicate that experience. But again, what you end up with is you end up with essentially a slightly more advanced version of just working out with a YouTube video, but that you pay for.

It's like so many things. So many things in like the, it's a post a post COVID, but as more things start to want to replace themselves with AI, the more the fewer steps you are between just paying for different types of YouTube video or Skype call delivered to you in an elaborate way. Yeah, it's a whole other little profession turned into something that you have to be self-employed and do it as one of five side hustlesles and then you get replaced by an AI anyway. This is just gimmick marketing because this is just a pure gym with like a YouTube video

attached. Like because most gyms that you go to now, barely anyone works there anyway. And like unless you pay for personal training, no one is going to come and like help you with your workout. But there's like a minimum number of people that you have to have working at a gym in case someone you're like drops a fucking 100 kilo barbell on the neck. So you can't get rid of the staff at the gym anyway, below the level that every gym already has. And no one expects staff to help

them with the workout at the gym, because they already don't. So this is just like a sort of a gimmick that appeals to guys called like Brendan Bean. Yeah. Listen, time was you could sustain yourself on entirely a career of personal training, like fifth place in bodybuilding competitions and some light steroid dealing. And now, you can't do that anymore, and it's fucked the economy. Now you have to have a podcast that unites all of those things about business success. So fucking like supplements that are 90% magnesium.

You get to become very flammable. It is true that reflection, right, that the jobs that are being that are most endangered being automated, that people are most keen to automate, are the ones that were already sort of 99% of the way there that were already sort of so abstract. You know, a bean said, we liken it to being more of an airline attendant than an actual coach. But I would say I was gonna get how the actual coach.

Well, airline attendants do like way more work than personal trainers do. Yeah,. Well, so airline attendants do like way more work than personal trainers do. Yeah, for example, an airline attendant will come over and tell you that they've run out of the chicken because everyone has ordered that and all they've got left is the fish because obviously no one has ordered that because no one would order fish on a plane. But nonetheless, they had exactly 50% of each meal. I had fish on a plane once. It was not a good choice. That plus like evacuating you from the plane if it's on fire, it's a real

sort of spectrum. You know, it's like the, it's like the joke, you know, my dentist can do it all from a simple cleaning to identifying my charge remains. So too with the airline attendants, like, you can, she can throw me a package of peanuts and also like evacuate me from a fire. I'm looking at like some of the pictures of Lumen at the moment. And like, I find it really difficult to describe in the sense that it feels like this isn't just a sort of situation of like we want to automate, we want to create a smart coach to automate and get rid of the personal trainer.

It changes the whole dynamic of what a gym actually is in work. And this trajectory has been happening for a long time. I would argue about a lot of it sort of like, you know, the death of like community gyms, the death of like accessible, you know, pretty cheap gyms in like, you know, Sissies and towns and stuff. It will, you know, the trajectory was always sort of heading

towards where I was like, well, if you can only afford a gym, if you're like, you know, fairly, if you have disposable income effectively, then then these gems are designed to sort of like optimize towards you. And perhaps before, you know, these were in the forms of like particular kinds of luxuries, but in absence of those types of luxuries, I mean, I don't know whether I've ever told the story on any of the parts about. I went, I very briefly had a membership to like a David Lloyd gem, which is like sort of, sort of like on the upper middle tier of like British. I think it's insane law.

It's not, it's not that classic, God, but it was just like, you know, I was, I was really, I thought that like after going to my shitty gym, like, you know, a nice one would sort of have more resources would have like, you know, more, you know, barbells and stuff like that. It had some of those things, but it was actually just like very, very poorly managed, partly because they were relinquishing so much stuff to like the various forms of technology, like, you know, not AI technologies, but automated technologies they were trying out. They put a bunch of personal trainers

on like very like crappy contracts and basically made them cleaners. You know, on the basis of that, like, you know, if you wanna like train your kind of, you know, dwindling client roster here, you also have to clean up the gym afterwards, and you can't ask for any money from man stuff. This feels like an extension of that, but it feels like it's one that heads towards, working out is not really about the idea of the community gym has gone,

you're not working out for like, to be a better member of society, or to be more functional as a member of society, you were doing this primarily for a very specific kind of individuation, very specific kind of optimising. Yeah, because your hobby is a women's slash gym. What's it to be on the hot boys reading books Instagram? Yeah.

I'm on their website, and there are three points have leapt out at me immediately. First of all, they have an app which you can track your fitness on, which I love. Second of all, their introductory offer, like a discount for membership is you get seven days for $25, which works out at $100 a month. So my question is how the fuck much does this normally cost? Well, that's the thing, right? They say this is from, this is from an article, they say, this is Bean, says, from day one,

Lumen Fitness was designed with two premic customers in mind. The end user who deserves a motivating and fun fitness experience and the franchise owner who wants to play a pivotal role in transforming how fitness and technology coexist. It's time for individuals and entrepreneurs alike to embrace a new era of fitness, specifically citing

its high-tech low tech low labor model. Oh, yeah, because franchising was the next thing I was going to bring up. We could open one of these. We could convert the trash shooter studio into a loom and fitness. Just a pun, we were going downstairs to record upstairs. There's a bunch of like grunting yuppies with airpods. Yeah, the Patreon is now $100 a month membership of the TFG. I feel like I feel like Jim with podcast studio actually is quite a good business model for like

at this time to happen. Yeah, it's I mean one of those is going to be the TikTok in guys can make their podcasts. If Brudog fucking has a podcast studio then yeah, yeah, you you know, you work out seven hours in or however long you have to work out in order to, you know, look like that. And then you spend the like remaining hour in the gym, doing your podcast about business. You spend the remaining hour like complaining about women don't appreciate how much time you spend at the gym, creating that body that looks like that. Yeah, if you like, if you go into the app and you break down the time that you're actually spending, it's like four hours Instagram selfies, four hours, like, well, like three hours

complaining about women, one hour podcasting. And then in between there, there's maybe like a bicep curl. So me and Tom have become obsessed with this guy on TikTok who calls himself Jim Skin, who is from Brentwood and Essex, and who is a white man, but it has had so much plastic surgery, he looks like the Turkish Chad meme. And he's like a kind of, he did a TikTok quants where he listed his hobbies

as women slash Jim, although I saw a recent one where he described his hobby simply as women, so I'm not sure what's happened to the gym, but I saw a video from him like yesterday where he's talking about how he is now running his own agency for people on TikTok to help them succeed. And he's filming himself walking down the street in Brentwood going like, so if you're big on TikTok, you want to take your

content to the next level, talk to me, we can work together. And as he's saying that he's walking into a cabab shop in Brentwood and he breaks off mid-sentence to go, cheers for the chicken-chish minutia. And just like sit down and just start eating a kebab, which is like, so he must have gone in there before and like ordered the kebab and said, I'm just going to film and take talk walking down the street and I'm going to come in and smoothly sit down and eat my kebab. And they're trying to put that guy, they're trying to replace

that weirdo with a computer, which I think fundamentally we can agree will never work. No, no, no, no one on that creative could ever be AI'd. However, I think that's pretty good for the first half. But now it's time for a jarring shift in tone. Well, Alison, I interview Emiliano Molino about abuse of the Farmwork Reveza program. See you in a second, people.

Bye. Hello, everyone joining us from the first half. It is the second half where I'm sure the order of halves. Yeah, no jumping from first half to third half for us. We recorded these so far apart, I may have gone into the first half with the same joke. So I apologize if I've done that. We are delighted to welcome back a now returning champion guest. It is the Bureau of Investigative Journalisms and Miliano Milino. Miliano, how you doing? I am doing well trying to stay sane as everything goes to shit. All we can do, you know? All we can do, yeah. Now, last time we talked,

we talked about an in-depth investigation that you've been doing for a while on the abuses of the temporary migrant labor visa program by, if not, farms then staffing agencies working with farms in the whole sector. And just a little bit of a recap, as I understand it, you can correct me if I'm wrong.

These visas that sort of like migrant farm laborers receive, the National Union of Farmers, which isn't actually a union, it's a trade organization. Needs huge amounts of cheap, easily exploitable labor, and the visa is very tenuous, which means you can get kicked off of it and sent back home very quickly, and it contains very few protections against being exploited, and the organizations that are supposed to guard workers from being exploited by staffing agencies, they fall between a lot of cracks. And so we end up with people coming from other countries, finding themselves in impossible to pay off in dentures, living in moldy caravans,

trapped for sometimes days at a time without food or heat because they might get COVID and so on and so on. Have I missed something? When you pretty much summed it up, there's no point for me to do this interview now. You can just go on to the rest of your podcast. Thanks for having me on. No, I mean, yeah, I mean, you've pretty much summed it up.

I mean, I think it's important to, I mean, there's always been problems in agriculture. Agriculture's always been a high risk sector for exploitation from modern slavery and for all these things. But we haven't always had this visa. So the seasonal worker visa was created, was launched in 2019 off the back of, you know, as Brexit was kicking off, because there was this fear that the already existing shortages in the agriculture sector would only get be made worse by Brexit.

And so I start off as a pilot, 2,500 visas, and it's just ballooned over the years. This year could be as many as 55,000 visas being issued. And from the get-go, all the main human rights labor rights organizations are saying this is the way you've set the surface of disaster. It's gonna be a recipe for exploitation because workers are tied to these recruiters. There's only this year around six recruiters

for the agriculture visa and they're tied to them. So these guys decide whether they work, where they work, they sort of decide a lot of things. They have a lot of power. And they also decide what happens with their visas. These guys can, to some extent, revoke workers visas. So they have tremendous power. And you know, workers are living on the farms where they work.

Workers, you know, don't speak the language. So all these circumstances come together to make workers incredibly vulnerable to exploitation. And what we have found through our report, and we've now been, it's almost not two years since I started looking into this area, is that in fact, it plays out that way, workers end up getting exploited quite significantly. Workers have very few people to turn to, if any, at all, and very few mechanisms to try to get any kind of protection. And as we discovered in this most recent investigation, even when the home office was going

in and doing just very few farm inspections, and workers were raising complaints with them, raising issues with them, the home office did not investigate any of the complaints raised by workers. And like some really serious things that workers were saying, the home office did not investigate any of the complaints raised by workers. And like some really serious things that workers were saying, the home office did not investigate and did not find any solution for these workers. They didn't resolve any of the issues they were facing. And you, in the most recent piece, actually, that quite a bit has, I'd say, come up since we last spoke to you a few months ago, that there are, you've cited documents obtained

to freedom of information requests, documenting specifically exactly how workers are being exploited. And that the end result of this is Robert Jenryk, who was at the time in charge of immigration, said that there were no plans to publish any reviews of the scheme as they were, quote, of limited value, saying earlier commitments to ensuring the scheme protected migrant workers from modern slavery in no way committed the home officer producing ongoing reports in perpetuity as though producing a report on a program that was causing some of the you know the issues that you

bring up you know people confined to caravans people being having their wages garnished people being essentially like bullied and threatened by gangmasters, right? As though these two simply even look into this would be some kind of onerous health and safety culture bureaucratic red tapeism. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, there was, we should say that all, like, generic was saying this. There's a number of NGOs that were right into Generic saying, can you please do this review of the scheme?

In fact, the review had been promised by the government. They said they would do it in response to the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration. The sort of immigration policy watchdog had said, you know, this screen is high risk. We've seen a lot of problems with this scheme. You should publish a review and you should also a number of other recommendations that he made. You should do these things. Now, just to clarify, the independent chief inspector of board of immigration who asked the government to do this review, we're not talking about

some communist here. He is the former head of the military police. Right. And even, and even he's saying that he's incredibly frustrated with the government because they don't respond to his, um, to his rest, they don't, they don't respond to his, to his risk, they don't follow his recommendations. Even when they agree to them, they might be slow and not fully implement them. This kind of like legalism Tory versus the kind of like emergency stopgap kind of visa program that was just like forced through.

Yeah, I mean, what you find is that there's like a lot of, let's say like senior civil servants who, again, we're not talking about radicals here, but for example, the former independent anti-slavery commissioner, she was a former of senior cop. Even she is highly critical of the government now. She actually quit her post because of the government's immigration policy. So even those kinds of people, you know, senior civil servants from a law enforcement and military background find this government incredibly frustrating to deal with.

Find this government is incredibly cruel to immigrants and is not putting in any safeguards. But, you know, going back to our findings, like you said, we put NFI requests into the government for these inspection reports. We spent five months back and forth appealing the FOIs going to the Information Commissioner. They, the government didn't want us to have these reports. One of the incredible things in their response, we ended up getting the reports, but we didn't

get the farm names. Okay, perfect. This farm has been voiced by an actor. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It was blacked out within the shadows. You know, they put the SAS I bar across the entire field. Exactly. That's it. So, um, and the, the home office reason for not giving us

the name of the farms was that they said it would likely discourage workers from going to these farms. So all these farms, you know, we had some of the farms like 80% of workers were making complaints about wage theft, about bullying, about discrimination, and the Home Office says we can't name those farms because well if we name them, my God, people might not go to them. And we are a enabler of the agriculture system. So yeah, they did not want to be transparent about this. They tried to stop us from having this information and what the reports reveal are just some quite extensive levels of abuse of mistreatment. I mean, one Ukrainian woman told inspectors, so the reports cover 2021 and 2022. So this was during COVID.

One Ukrainian woman had COVID, she was in a farm. She was confined to her caravan during this time and they didn't provide her with any medical support or any food. She said she was starving throughout the 11 days that she was isolating in her caravan and she got no help from her recruiter. There was another guy. They just like wold her up like fucking Edgar Allan Poe. That's like that's it. That's it. And you could even hear the heart beating. And another guy pulled his own tooth because he was an identical care. You know, in another farm, you know, we had dozens of people that were complaining in this farm and this report about mistreatment. One of

the workers said that the manager shouted, and I quote here, I'm a pure blooded English woman, I will stay to live here and you will go back to your poor countries. That's actually a line that really leapt out at me from the reporting, which is we talk about, you know, where's the enforcement, where's the enforcement, where's the enforcement, and I think we are thinking about it, and or to ask, excuse me, to ask those questions, where's the enforcement, and as we're thinking about it, like those inspector generals, like these people who are wondering why this scheme

seems to not be complying with the laws. However, what we're not, but this, if you like, that's looking at the scheme based on its fig leaf, right? If you look at the scheme based on its fig leaf, right? If you look at the scheme based on what it's actually doing, then the enforcement is that woman. The enforcement is that woman who keeps the workers threatened, who reminds them constantly of their precarity, and who has been sort of given a kind of racial and ethnic puffup

by, you know, a combination of the right wing press and Facebook groups. You know? She talks like GB News or like a Facebook post, which is in itself, I think, really revealing. Yeah, this is, if you want to, this way, why we come back to like, well, what's purpose does stuff like culture war actually serve? The purpose culture war actually serves isn't just a distraction from other things, the purpose culture war actually serves is to create a very useful us and them between a one favored section of the of like of people who are like working on farms say

and to create a kind of divine or ethnic or genetic or whatever mandate for the hierarchies that it intends to enforce. And so I keep thinking, and since I've read this article, I've been thinking for a few days about this woman who would have been so consumed by sort of spiked smugness and rage at the same time, as to shout the kind of thing that would, let's say, in a proper, like, quote unquote, liberal, not as big a liberal, but a, a liberally managed system in as much as we live in a, basically, a kind of, like, neoliberal state. You know what I mean?

The kinds of things that are supposed to be excluded from that. And I think it goes to show sort of how thin and powerless those liberal enforcement mechanisms are on what is essentially a series of improvisations designed to get hyper exploitable foreign workers in so that they can then be unpaid and shipped off. And that system needs its shock troops and that shock troop is that that screaming woman who I cannot stop imagining. I mean, the thing is that there is, you get a sense that there is a very real environment of impunity, right? There is, there is, because workers can only be here for six months, right? Going, like the normal mechanisms turn force you rights, and let's be honest, in the UK, you have very weak mechanisms to enforce your employment rights. It is pretty easy to exploit somebody because, first of all, the the UK, you have very weak mechanisms to enforce your employment rights. It is pretty

easy to exploit somebody because, first of all, the statutory agencies that are supposed to protect you are underfunded or ineffective, right? Like we showed here, the inspections did not result in any investigations. The algae did not result in any investigations. The gangmasters in labor abuse authority, the body that's supposed to be doing enforcement and agriculture and in modern slavery issues, their budget this year or the last year they published accounts was six million, we're not their budget, sorry, their home office funding was six million pounds, which is less than what the home office spends on stationary imprinting and publishing, right? So they spend more on pens and paper than they do on enforcing, on this body, it's's most enforced modern slavery.

And then you go to the employment tribunal, which is mostly what you're being eventually told to do by employment tribunals. It will take you year to years to get any result out of an employment tribunal. So for workers here for six months, it's not an avenue, it's not an avenue you can realistically take, especially also if you don't have, you don't speak the language, you're very unlikely to be in a union, and there is no legal aid, there's pretty much no legal aid for employment. There's virtually no legal aid for employment since obviously since Cameron and the reforms on legal aid all these years ago. So there is really what you're

going to do. You're going to go without speaking English to self-represent in an employment tribunal against your very rich farm employer. It's impossible. So there is this environment of complete impunity. And then we also saw it. So we also, besides looking at the reports, we also spoke to some workers who were working this year. So the reports covered 21 and 22. And we wanted to see if these problems is problem of lack of enforcement, this problem of exploitation, we're still happening this year. So we spoke to a group of Latin American workers

who were working at this farm called Hegrove, which is in hairfordshire on the border, some of it on the border with Wales. And things got so bad for this group of workers, many of them from Latin America, that they ended up going on a wildcat strike. Now imagine being, you know, things getting so bad for you, you're them from Latin America, that they end up taking going on a wild cat's strike. Now imagine being, you know, things getting so bad for you. You're in a foreign country.

Don't speak the language. You don't have any union support, but things are so bad that you go on a wild cat's strike. Imagine how bad things have to get for you to go on a wild cat's strike in a foreign country where you don't speak the language. So I have some of your writing on the wild cat's strike. So I'd like to focus on that for a little while. This you say nearly 90 Chileans, Peruvians, and Bolivians join the unofficial strike at Hague Grove for three days. Of them 30 continued for nearly a week.

Icelated in the British countryside far from home and with visas and jeopardy, many eventually went back to work without having secured their demands and dozens of workers have since then left the farm. Each worker is now being charged the true value of their plane tickets, but other conditions have barely improved. Now, referring to the true value of the plane ticket, that is a practice of travel agencies to say overcharge workers for plane tickets that they then have to pay back. So, you know, this is just like in dentures, then. Yeah, in this case, the farm paid for the original flights and then asked the workers to pay it back. then chose them. Yeah, in this case, the farm paid for the original flight and then asked the workers to pay it back. And initially, the workers were being asked to pay 1,500 pounds each, which would be deductions

of around 250 pounds per week. The farm would guarantee only 32 hours a week, which would put your earnings at about just over 260, which means that if you were earning the hours of the farm guaranteed, and then you had to also pay back the plane ticket, you would end up having only like 16 pounds a week after the deductions for rent and other things that the farm also makes. And that's a rapper handsaw. And it's all a rapper handsaw. And I guess my question is like, we spoke to you about this before and you know it was sort of much the same and

There seemed very little hope for any of this improving Is that still your view and you know what possibly can be done about this? Oh, God. Okay, so but can I get back can I get back to that and I'm in the second I want to mention something about the can I mention one of my something before on on the strike as well Which is linked to the impunity point. And then actually, I'll get on to your question, Alice. So these workers, actually, obviously, they were quite well organized. They managed to organize their own WorldCat strike. Things got really bad for them. And they're also quite smart because they recorded quite a bit of what went on.

One of the things they recorded was their recruits were in Chile when they went to recruit them in Chile. Their recruits in Chile was promising that they would earn the equivalent at the time of between like 400 and 500 pounds a week. And like I mentioned, that wasn't happening. They weren't earning 400 to 500 pounds a week. Always has a pretty enticing offer. The other thing they recorded was when one of these, you know, these scheme operators,

these recruiters that are licensed by the government to effectively recruit people on the scheme, sponsor visas, and in a way also work like semi-enforcers of the rules of the scheme, even though in practice, enforcement is very poor. So during the strike, one of the managing directors of one of these recruiters, called fruitful jobs, went down to the farm during the strike, and effectively threatened the workers, told them that if they continued to strike, their reasons would be revoked. They would be revoking them the next day.

And at one point during this conversation, where he's telling the work above, if you continue striking, we'll revoke your reasons, he also, there's a woman that's complaining about her working conditions, what's happened to her, and he interrupts, there in says, do you wanna go home? Shishlin, and other bits of that kind of behavior. So also, the guy who's supposed to be ensuring that the rules are being followed is also

threatening people with revoking their visas, and also being quite, well, how would you describe that behavior? Telling woman, do you want to go home, Shush, though. That's a big stuff. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,. And basically, like, there was no questioning involved. Everyone on that select committee was sort of like very content to let these guys pat themselves on the back and go, yeah, no, we're a good example of like a self-regulating industry. Yeah, and they said that only 1% of workers complain. And then it always says, we find from these,

from these inspection reports, obviously the numbers much higher. We saw around 100 workers raising welfare issues with the home office, or sorry hundreds of workers raising welfare issues with the home office. And it was about nearly half, 44% of all the workers that were interviewed raising some kind of welfare issue. So clearly the issue is much higher than what either it's higher, they're getting more than 1% of complaints about exploitation or not all workers feel confident or comfortable reporting these things to their scheme operator

because obviously as we've seen some scheme operators will threaten with a broken your visa if you go on strike. And some of these, you know, that one of the people that you cite as making that sort of threat is one of the managing director of, as you mentioned, Alice Fruitful Jobs, the guy Justin Emery. And the workers say, the workers told him, and again, this is from your article, it says,

workers at Heygrove, it told Emery that they were scared of supervisors at the farm. It told the Bureau, this is you guys, that they were not given waters here at the day and were shouted at to pick faster. They didn't hit targets from any mistakes. They said they'd be forced to take unpaid time off. One worker was pushed to the ground by a supervisor when the wheel of a van he was driving

at stuck in the mud. A worker said, Hey Grove said it is not found any evidence of shouting intimidation or discrimination by supervisors and that water was always provided and said that farm picking targets are not used to punish, but to identify high performers who could be offered additional hours. So we looked into ourselves and we found that we're great.

But, you know, again, this is not even innocent, not even no wrongdoing, but actually, you know, we're proactively good at this stuff. I mean, the punishment thing is so common across farms, something we found in our other reporting, the way most farms, one of the standards ways farms will punish people for not picking fast enough, for sometimes for speaking while picking, sometimes for having a phone while you're on the field, the way they punish you

is by forcing you to take unpaid time off. So if you're set to work the next day, they will cancel that shift for the next set and for the next day. And you can't work and if you can't work, you can't work. And if you can't work, you can't earn. And you know, a lot of these people are coming with debts. So they need to earn in order to pay off their debts. A lot of people are coming here still supporting family back home. So they need to earn in order to support their family back home. Let's remember that these farms will charge you for accommodation, will charge you for electricity, will charge you for gas, for washing, for all these things. And obviously, in this case, also charge you for the flights.

So it's really important to be able to earn, but that's how we punish. And this is, you know, we found this in our previous report, and incredibly common practice. It is one of the main forms of disciplining workers in these farms. It's all the stuff, it's all the like punishment stuff from a zero hours contract without any of the fig leaf that you would have over it. And like a lot of other jobs where it's like, oh, it gives you flexibility or whatever. You know, it's just nakedly.

Yeah, and initially the scheme had up for zero hours contracts. And over time, there's been, and this goes to your question about reform. Over time, there's been a reform. So they got rid of zero hours contracts on this year. They instituted a new rule, which was that farms have to guarantee 32 hour minimum contracts after a guarantee at least 32 hours. But what happens? There's also,

there's always a way around that. So in the case of the workers that came from Chile and Bolivia and Peru, they arrived and they weren't actually put to work for, in the case of Julio, one of the people we cite, you know, about a week and a half before she actually got in a work. So that week and a half, she was not being guaranteed those 32 hours. So what they do is they just make you start later, and the guarantee will start later, but she still has costs to cover when she gets here and she's not being given any work.

The other way they farm from my get around, that is by firing you, they all simplify you, and then you gotta find a work in another farm. So again, that 32 hours doesn't apply then, right? So with every rule, so let's say, like reform of the scheme, there's a loophole to get around this scheme. And it gets around the rule every day. I show more and more like lemon. You know, ultimately, right? The reason that there's no reform of the scheme possible is that it exists

inside the hostile environment, right, and that never went away. Is that any scheme that ties your continued existence in the country to your employment with a specific employer, you're going to be exploitable. And there are some employers that are going to be less likely to hyper exploit simply because they are hiring people who aren't

Who aren't basically like racialized? They're hiring people who aren't necessarily vulnerable? Maybe they're hiring graduates, right? And then those people are yes They see the very sort of cozy side of the UK immigration system. Oh, cozy such as it is and but that the hostile environment really is for people who are being yelled at, I am a pure brother to English woman and you will go back to your poor country. That is who the hostile environment is supposed to attack, who it's hostile to. And it is only because of that hostile environment that these kinds of outrageous behaviors are enabled. But also, we can think like, okay, well, what's we can ask what will labor do as a kind of, as which would be because it's being treated as a government and waiting by most sort of the press and political commentators, right? What

will labor do? As far as I can tell, they haven't said much, but I also do know that, you know, what's Starmer, who's Starmer giving speeches to? He's giving speeches to the National Farm Union, right? He's he's talking about, because he grew up on the border of Surrey and Kent, between Surrey and Kent, that he is the the the country side in his DNA. The disputed border area between Surrey and Kent. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the hostile environment thing is key, right? Like it's so many of the workers in these reports also. Again, in the home office, This is what the workers told the home office is that they were being threatened to be sent back home If for example, they didn't hit targets, right? So there's like a cutout we have in our in our story We we kind of did a little cutouts of bits of the of the reports if people could see for themselves

Well, what was Clearly written down in these reports and there's a worker from Nepal who had paid 6,000 pounds in recruitment fees to come to the UK and work on this scheme. He said that he was very stressed by the targets. Again, he said that if he doesn't pick fast enough, he'll be four stake days off. And he said as well that he'd been threatened to be sent to Nepal if he got four written mornings for not meeting picking speeds. And there were other reasons of this throughout the report of people being Threaten if you don't pick fast enough you will be sent back. So you know the hostile environment plays a key role in again in the system of disciplining these workers to make them hit targets to make sure that they don't speak out

You know, there's obviously the the for example to make sure that they don't go on strike because that the threat was will revoke your visa. It's key there. Another element of the hostile environment, which I think we don't talk about enough, is this issue of non-recourse to public funds, which effectively means that on a lot of visa types, if you end up unemployed, if you end up having any issue, you don't have the right to get state support, right? You don't have the right to benefits. So one of the big problems of the scheme is that, as I mentioned earlier, people will come, come expecting six months of work, they'll be fired quite quickly, and then we'll be left without work and without earnings,

and with no way to pay back their debts. And because they have no records of public funds, they can't get any state support to survive. And because there are rules in this scheme, for example, that you should be transferred to other farms of the work run rise up in your farm, but that rule is not being adhered to. Workers of no guarantee of income. So many workers coming here,

expecting six months of work, don't get six months of work, don't get six months of work, don't get transferred to other farms to get work when work runs out, and then do not get any state support when they're left destitute. And people are being left destitute without the state support that I or others would be entitled to because we're in different kinds of visas, or immigration status. That's like a key part of this whole, this whole hostile environment thing. These workers are put in a position of being as whole, of this whole hostile environment thing. These workers have put in a position of being as vulnerable as possible

through the hostile environment. It just strikes me that apart from anything else, apart from the moral outrage of this, it's just like, even it's self-sabotaging on its own terms, that if we need these people to do agricultural labor to have props picked, then regularly tricking and exploiting them

and then just assuming that's like a bottomless resource, it's just like, it's stupid apart from anything else, surely. I mean, that's, I think, you know, you mentioned last time as well, how I'd mentioned in one of the articles that one of the farms that we were covering said that, yeah, we had one British person work here as a picker that was back in 2017 and they quit after a day.

The whole system informs readily admit this. In fact, as part of their lobbying, the whole agriculture system will collapse without these workers, without these migrant workers. That's why the Vizals was expanded to 55,000 a year. What happens now is, and this is just a kind of general observation, is that recruiters go to a country, they cause a mess, and then they'll go on to the next country and recruit from there the next year. Right. So this was the first year that they were recruiting from Latin America in any kind of scale. Right. We'll see if they continue to do so next year because obviously these workers went on strike.

And that's what we want. When we last spoke to you, we sort of, the three of, that we all talked about this. And we said, there's no way they could keep recruiting from, for example, South Asia, right? And then, low and behold, they had to move to South America. The thing we said would happen happened. And now it's going to happen again. It's quite likely, right? Because they stopped, because there were all these problems with recruitment fees in Indonesia, they stopped recruiting from Indonesia. They almost completely stopped recruiting from Nepal. There's very little recruitment from Nepal, also because there was this issue of recruitment fees. And so yeah, they just keep on finding other

boards. I mean, I guess maybe eventually they'll run out of countries. When we last spoke, it was Ukraine and Nepal were the countries they were recruiting from. And it seems like they have had to go elsewhere and they will have to go elsewhere again. And before we sort of wrap up as well, I want to sort of pull it back to a look at the broader macro picture here, right? Which is that the UK farm agricultural industry is only sustainable if it has cheap, hyper-exploitable labor. That cheap, hyper-exploitable labor is not keen to be hyper-exploited.

And so the UK farm industry can basically go to each region once. And at the same time, what does that look like? What that looks like is... Pulling the snake oil wagon into town, you know? Yeah. But what that looks like on the other end for people buying food, that looks like relatively cheap prices compared to what they could be, which means if workers weren't hyper-exploited, the cost of living would presumably go up, which means wages would have to rise.

And so effectively, hyper-exploitation is not, and cheap food is not just food policy, it's also social management policy, it's also wage suppression policy. It also, you know, it allows for, you know, the wage to be so low because then food is cheap, then social reproduction can continue. It's basically taking that contradiction of needing to have these low wages, but with otherwise expensive to expensive cost of living, and it forces that contradiction onto other people elsewhere in the world, by bringing them here and then treating them badly and then throwing them away. That is what the effect of that is. That is how that puzzle piece fits into the larger puzzle

of the UK's economy and social reproduction machine. And it won't work. And I should say this is not the UK is not unique. I don't want to kind of excuse places like Spain, Italy, Greece, where this sort of exploits, there's also among this level of exploitation of agricultural workers. I think what makes the UK unique is among this levels of exploitation of agricultural workers. I think what makes the UK unique is that this is a visa specifically for this, and the governments completely involved all the way through, but tries to look the other way. So I think that's what makes the illustration here quite unique. I think that's probably all we have time for today, but Emiliano, thank you so much for joining us today

Always a pleasure to talk to you though about a very grim subject I'm glad to be your grimness or one of your many grimness correspondents Thank you Yeah, and also thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to this free episode Sorry if you're listening to it on the day it comes out. It's a little late We had to coordinate with various calendars, but I think we can all agree. It was worth it. And to remind you that after you've donated

to medical aid for Palestinians, which is, of course, going to be linked in the description, there is our Patreon for a second episode every week. This episode, this bonus episode, this week has already been recorded, and I wasn't on it, because I was on holiday. So I can't speak. I can't speak.

Yeah. I think it was fine. Thanks so much. So we will be seeing you in a couple days on the bonus, or otherwise see you next week on the free. Once again, Emiliano, Bureau of Investigator of Journalism. Thanks for joining us. And we will see all of you soon.

Bye. Thank you. Bye. Bye! you