TRASHFUTURE - Loudo Vapegaskush feat. Michael Fry

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

There’s a general election coming up in Ireland, and rather than just having us attempt our worst Irish accents, we’ve brought on comedy writer Michael Fry (@bigdirtyfry) to discuss it with Riley (@raaleh), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice @AliceAvizandum. However, we have to discuss a haunted water cooler app and an op-ed about market-based solutions for our incipient societal meltdown. You will enjoy this, we promise. Do not ask us to explain the title. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS.com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/  *COME SEE MILO*If you want to catch Milo’s stand-up on tour, get tickets here: https://linktr.ee/miloontour  *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We'll be hosting a live show debate on the topic of Elon Musk's status as 21st century Willy Wonka. It's 6th Feb 7.30pm at Hen & Chickens Theatre (109 St Paul’s Road, London N1 2NA) -- tickets are £12.25 and you can get them here:   https://www.unrestrictedview.co.uk/trashfuture-live-the-comedy-debate/

are we synced? We have been synced, yes. We are, as Justin Timberlake would say, NSYNC. Do you want a permanent position on this podcast? Well, Roddy, where are you going? Hello, and welcome back to this free episode of Trash Future, that podcast you're listening to right now. It's me, Riley. I'm in the studio with Milo. Hello. Good morning, everyone. Nate. Hello. Made it in late, as usual. Alice, in the black hole of Glasgow. That's true, yes. Oh, damn, we stole it from Calcutta and took it to Glasgow. The worst cultural appropriation. I'm synced. I am locked in, jacked on, wearing my podcasting track suit, and ready to fucking mispronounce some names.

I've heard that the end of January is the bleakest time of year in Glasgow is the bleakest part of England. Not England, Scotland, rather. Basically, I was just going to say, I mean, Alice must be podcasting from the darkest place in the human sphere. I have so much depression. It's incredible. Also, we're joined by humorist, comedian, and comedy writer, Michael Fry. Michael, how's it going? Oh, welcome to Trash Future with me, Michael Trash. Indeed. I do it all the time. So hello, everyone. Absolutely. You adopt a war name for each podcast. You're like,

we're all Riley Trash, Alice Trash, and so on. So it's basically the shitty irony podcast Ramones is what you're saying. Yes, exactly. Or alternatively, this is podcast code switching. Speaking of adopting names, my girlfriend told me something incredibly fucked up last night, so she's a barrister, and then barrister chambers, they have clerks who are the guys who organize, they take all the phone calls and they give people cases from the solicitors. And apparently, if you go to work in a clerk's room, most of them start when they're 17 or 18, you can't have the same name as any of the other clerks. And so she said, yeah,

so they only ever use their first names, and when someone rings up, they need to know who they're talking to. So you say, hello, it's James. And then they were like, I spoke to James. So there's this guy who works in her chambers who's called Joe, but everyone calls him Paul because when he came there, there was another guy called Joe, so he just had to call himself Paul. And then she apparently personally still calls him Joe, and he's like, can you please call me Paul? It's just easier. I need to forget that I'm called Joe. Did he choose his name? Or did they just pick one for you? I think he chose it, yeah.

So it's like equity. So Michael J. Fox is Michael J. Fox because there was already a Michael Fox. There was already a Michael J. Fox. So I'd like to start, I'd like to rock it off. I'd like to rock it off our podcast with talking about a startup. We're going to get into the Irish election a bit later and then a very silly article. We can talk about a startup called Ireland. Yes. Well, I mean, that's kind of how they tried to run it for the last, what, 20 years? Yeah. In 1916, a group of innovators got together. Very disruptive. Yeah. The startup of this episode is called Bevy. B-E-V-I Fox.

We just had Divi that you can't like... The listeners have, no, that's coming out in a couple of days. The listeners on the premium episode that's coming out in two days will get Divi. Speaking of Michael J. Fox, this is a back to the future ass episode. Bevy, B-E-V-I. What do we think Bevy does? Oh, is this an app for ordering beer or something? Yeah. Michael is in the right ballpark. So is it Bevy is in like a slang term for a ton of stuff or Bevy like slang for a beverage shrug?

So is it, it gives you like, it like aggregates coupons to buy drinks? Yeah. It's a group on but for alcohol. It's actually... It's a case for your phone that allows you, it has like arms that come out so you can hold a whole round of pints with your phone. It's actually an app, an app that in any situation gives you a quote from famous Labour politician Anirin Bevan. Great. Awesome. Yeah. Always appropriate to the situation.

No. Here is some of their marketing. We're on a mission to blank the future and so you can experience a new way to blank. Just gives you no information. I love to blank the future. Yeah. I think that would actually be a great idea. Just like eternal sunshine on the spotless mind but for everyone. If I was going to play Mad Libs with Tech Startup ad copy, I would say it would be finance the future to change the way you buy.

Something about financing. No. Michael was right when he first thought about beverages. Drink the future. Yes. What? Drink the future. Drink the future. It's been funded to the tune of $63 million and its valuation is between $100 and half a

billion but it's a ballpark sucking up a big thing of future for a straw. Just looking for $6 million more. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to say this is no blanking here but maybe you this will help you guess it. When Eliza Bekton and two of her MIT Sloan classmates learned of the Pacific Garbage Trash. Excuse me? MIT Sloan is gone.

Eliza Bekton and MIT Sloan. No, no, no, no, no, no. What if we know you're getting it wrong? Wellington boot. MIT Sloan is the school and the business. I know. That's so funny. It is.

That's so fucking funny. Just like a wife, wife, husband, sports. Yeah, it's the part of MIT where we all arrive in a Range Rover. Oh, I get what that means. Yeah. Yeah, the Sloan rangers at MIT. Yeah, networked barber jacket. So no.

The Sloan Media Lab where they've developed a barber jacket that grows carrots in the pocket somehow. So when Eliza Bekton and her MIT Sloan classmates learned about the Pacific Garbage Patch, they knew they had to do something to stop the sea. One of the less popular Christmas dolls. Early episode title contender, Pacific Garbage Patch Kids. When Eliza Bekton learned of the Pacific Garbage Patch, she knew she had to do something to stop the sea of plastic waste from growing.

But what? It would be impossible to guilt people into changing their behavior. Instead, she would have to design something so efficient and eye-catching that people would change their behavior voluntarily. Thus, the idea for Bevy was born. Michael, take a guess. Oh, my God. Is it a hose we spray beer into people's mouths instead of giving them a glass or a cup or

like a plastic? That would be so much better than what it actually is. This is an extent start-up. You colonically irrigate beer into the ass. I'm guessing because especially places in the Northeast, but in parts of the United States, have deposits on plastic bottles that you can get money back for. This must be some sort of like aggregator service where it makes it so you can get your money back for deposits, so it makes people recycle more.

No, that's a better idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They actually rent you the beer bottle using some kind of leveraged credit arrangement, which ends up in your house getting repossessed because you accidentally broke the bottle. Yeah, it's fucking, we're abolishing leech and liden. We're bringing trespass to moveables back by just like having a bottle you don't own. Snatch back from you. If you break the bottle or decide to keep it, you have to buy the bottle from them

at a value which they determine. Again, flash forward to this week's premium episode. We wanted to use design and technology to change people's behavior, says co-founders Frank Lee and Sean Grundy. We wanted to build... Excuse me? We wanted to build... My name is Frank Lee.

Collaborate with Mr. Grundy. Along with Chief Operating Officer, the Undertaker. I was going to go for more of like a Smith's lyrics vibe there. Well, frankly, Mr. Grundy. Check this out. We built a company to rent you a bottle. Check this out, check this out, check this out. We wanted to build a smart beverage platform powered by tap water and data analysis.

So you're not going to throw up, Michael. Oh, my God. It's like a soda fountain thing. Corporate social responsibility, Black Lives Matter is all I can say to that. Oh, my God. A smart beverage platform powered by tap water and data analytics. So it's a water cooler. Powered by tap water and data analytics.

It's just a joke we would make about every single startup we've ever done on this show. So I would like it if they were just like... Just went full mad and just started saying things which made us little sense, but were at least funny at like, we're a social responsibility startup powered by the Chinese. Yeah, China. It's Huawei. It's funded by Huawei. So we want to build a smart beverage platform powered by tap water and data analytics.

So what the company actually does is make smart water coolers, which hold four separate... Did they have smart water in them? No. They hold four separate flavors at a time. And are currently four separate flavors of water. Is it just water? Is it also like soft drinks? Oh, it's just water.

You just mix your waters. This is designed for you only, Riley. Mixing the waters. I mean, I worked at an office that had like free water, bottle, bottle, bottle, bottle. Just change the name of the room. It's a fucking bottle. All right, they had bottles of water you could get for free, but they basically put things where you could refill them and it would like have a counter

that would tick up to say like, how many bottles of water you'd saved, you know, you'd saved that year or whatever the fuck. And that at least sort of makes sense because it's just like nominally like a normal thing. But the idea that this thing is going to be... It's like, oh, you can have flavor water. This is by data analytics somehow. Like, what does this even mean? So, I give some more details.

The company are only... These are also only available for offices. You can't buy one unless you're a commercial property. And then you use a touchscreen interface to customize each drink and purchase flavor like sachets from the company. Users can request... Oh, yeah, because sachets are really good for the environment. So they basically invented Kool-Aid.

Yes. Users can request anything from plain cold filtered water to a blackberry lime seltzer. So users, they've created... That's the spectrum. A soda stream that's on the cloud. What's the opposite of water blackberry somehow? So...

We have extracted the carbonation from those freestyle soda machines. You just load the big box of syrup into it now. I mean, I honestly think you could just create ad copy that says that we've somehow done CO2 sequestration and we're using it to make seltzer and people would buy it. They'd be like, wow, I'm saving the environment now. It's that easy, apparently. And also, you can just get funding for whatever.

Here's how they... Oh, yeah, by the way. Just remember this. They've been funded to the tune of $63 million and are valued at like half a billion. Hell, yeah. I'm specifically looking at Michael for this one because he looks pained.

Yeah, why? Who's funding that? The IMF, right? Well, oddly enough, I've talked about this before. Soft drink bank. It's mostly Saudi Arabia. Yeah, they are huge VC funders and like... Yeah, ever since...

If there's one thing the Saudi Arabians understand, it is a fail-sun to be fair. That's true. I just love the... You have a society entirely obsessed with innovation. On the one hand, inculcating it in all of these startups and on the other hand, socially doing absolutely all you can to prevent any odds.

A local Saudi startup called B-Head, but with no E between B and H. So just quickly, how this actually works with the Saudis funding most of venture capital is when we had the crisis of the 1970s, then the Saudis were able to control oil prices, they suddenly obtained a ton of money, but then you couldn't invest that profitably

in normal American companies, all of which were going through a massive wave of crisis and financialization. Also, American interest rates were like 15 to 20% of this time. Yeah, there's basically... Yeah, there's nothing you could do with that money. And that's where Silicon Valley was born. And that's like the original venture capitalist firms,

like the Sand Hill Road Giants. They came from that era in the 1970s, investing Saudi oil cash into companies like Intel and stuff. You want to hear a funny story about Saudi Arabia too? Or no, it was like the chip makers and so on. In 1980, the median income in Saudi Arabia was about $10,000 U.S., which at the time was probably the equivalent of what? Probably about 5,000 or 6,000 pounds.

But back in 1980, that was a fuckload of money. I mean, that was not quite a yearly salary in the U.K., but it was significant. As I understand it, I want to say as recently as 2014 to 2015, the median income in Saudi Arabia is $8,000 U.S. And I don't know if that's because of... They've got a massive population now of people who are guest workers and that's counted, but I doubt it,

because I don't think they would figure those in their census. So basically, all of that money has not really led to better outcomes in Saudi Arabia. No. It's just led to Bevy. Yeah, exactly. They have too many people. Like, if you're an Emirati citizen,

you can get kind of free everything and get like a fucking Lamborghini Uber to and from everywhere to get your Dior belt, because there's only like 300 Emiratis. But like, there's enough Saudis. Saudi Arabia, though. But the Emirates is the same way, yeah. So I'm pulling us back onto Bevy, though.

So just remember, the reason that this exists is because of the crisis of the 1970s. This is just morbid symptoms. So here's how it saves the environment. Each Bevy machine can save an average of 30,000 bottles. Bevy calculates that it has saved over 10 million bottles since its founding. How?

Just write a number on the fridge, mate. Just do it. Who cares? Just get a fucking fag pack out and just write some numbers down. A billion? That's the number. Write it down.

Hey, we're worth that much money. Why not? Fuck it. You know what doesn't use bottles is like a water fountain? Yeah, just a glass cup? Like, just get a fucking dishwasher for your office and use glasses. Is it that hard?

It's called a tap. We've invented the tap, but it's Wi-Fi connected. We've saved 10 million bottles. Literally, if everybody over the age of 18 in America just refilled one bottle of water, that would probably be like 125 million bottles saved. Like, this isn't a big number. No.

Like, relative to the size. You could just give every American a dollar. And that would be not that much more than the investment in this fucking company. And that would do more. They could take that dollar and buy a plastic cup at IKEA and fucking refill it with water. That does more for the environment.

But we have to change behavior by doing this Johnny Ive design philosophy to it, where it's very sleek and it's very networked. If you make Kool-Aid, you're broke. But if a machine uses a special sachet to make Kool-Aid, that's the future somehow. Also, it's played it really funny. Alice, you pointed this out with the Johnny Ive.

We have to induce people. It's like, we can only change behavior using nudges and stuff that doesn't work. Yeah, we can only do design. We can only ever make Juceros to things. So, oh, if we want to hear about the Jucero element of this. You squeeze the water out of a bag. Please tell me that's what happens.

How? Okay. I'm going to throw back to Michael here. How do you think they have made technology an integral part of this product, which is a water cooler? I don't know. Well, you said touch screen. Is there like a fingerprint scanner that predicts what flavor you want?

Yes. Like a mood ring kind of thing. Yes. Sorry. Yes. Fucking excuse me. It's got an Irish scanner. It does for analogy on you. I hate to get racially profile for the water cooler.

It DNA sequences you. You get a 23 in me water flavor. So, yeah. Michael is absolutely right. Oh, my God. It detects Irishness and you're just like, what is this water taste of potatoes? I didn't say I was going to say that.

Did I detect that you're Italian? Would you like to drink this marinara sauce? So, the glass of Gabagool. Yeah. Yeah. It's like pure right hand. Term in your DNA is 99% British Isles. Your water is going to be gravy flavored?

Bevy has made. You said British, not Scouse. Bevy has made technology an integral part of its project. Product rather. Lee says that's even though, quote, it's not an obvious component of our business. You're making water cooler. Oh, yeah.

Hell fucking yeah. The IOT enabled devices are constantly monitoring use, keeping the machines as low maintenance as possible for office managers, and using diagnostic data they gather from machines, know what flavors are popular, and when they're running low, so they can notify a service partner

who then refills the flavors. You could have like a dial or something, or like an indicator that does that. Finally. You know how they do this with a regular water cooler is they make the bottle transparent so you can see when it's empty. Finally.

With your eyes, with your fragile human eyes. Finally, a job for Guy Fieri being like the flavor refiller. Well, even like a lot of office hours now have just filtered, chilled taps that have boiling or cold water connected to the tap, and it doesn't require fucking Wi-Fi. No. I mean, I just don't understand.

I mean, okay, if you make it Wi-Fi enabled or whatever, yes, there's a technology element, but that doesn't mean providing flavored water as a tech company. Yes, it does. Apparently. No, because sorry I didn't add hominem on a tech company. No, what you failed to understand is,

is that what technology company means is not that it uses any kind of technology. What technology company means is that it's a completely stupid and unviable business idea that will be funded by a bunch of fat guys from Saudi Arabia, right? Like a bunch of guys have eaten so much baklava

that their brain has actually melted, will invest a load of money in this and then they will invest more money in it the more money it loses. Because if it's losing money, that means people are rejecting it, which means it's genius. I mean.

Get argue with that. No. Uh, further, the company is using data to, and this is the bit you were right about, Michael, to analyze what flavors are popular and track trends based on geography, which it will use to design and launch future flavors. Plus, the machine's touch screen comes

to an Easter egg that rewards users with a badge when they have hit a threshold of saving a certain number of bottles. Oh my God, it has like games in it. Clients actually get really excited about it, said Lee. I love to be forced to participate in office water cooler four square. I mean, tell me I'm wrong here.

Like, that's what it is. It's legitimately like you have to play Farmville to drink water. I've saved the memory to Bombadol. That's a little too jumpy. So it has, it's only obtaining more and more and more money. It's first round of venture capital two years ago. It was 15 million.

Most recent was like 40. Awesome. So I don't stop giving this thing money and one more thing before we continue. It's that the the company could seek expansion. The company is trying to seek expansion and well it is eventually looking at making a profit in 2019. Grundy says we thought about it.

We're considering it in 2019. Grundy says that the goal of profitability was more easier said than done, but he hasn't given up. The company's been around since 2013. They've spent now seven years trying to make a water cooler company profitable, something that has never been done before. For context, there is a girl who raised over $200,000

for the Fies in Australia by selling pictures of her ass. That is more money by an order of magnitude than these people have ever made in their entire lives with all those stupid ideas and all their Saudi Arabian investors. They're literally just like, God, imagine if you could come up with a business that makes a profit. Only like the world's greatest geniuses have ever managed that. Yeah, them and like every fucking plumber in Dagonham.

What the fuck is wrong with you? I legitimately think that there's probably, I mean, you can find in Cambridge, Massachusetts, you'll be able to find like Guido's water coolers that's turning a profit. Like it just drops, you call them and they bring big fucking jugs of water to your office. Italian water coolers.

It's the only big song way you can call them. Italian water. Yeah, every third entry in that thread I did of businesses that are obvious fronts for the mob is like Guido's water coolers. I mean, it's got the right soil mixture from the Niagara escarpment. These are Wi-Fi connected garbage trucks. Those are my fucking roots.

Okay, so I'm going to carry on slightly. This is now about one of the other founders, Sean Grundy, and it was too weird to not read because it involves Yao Ming. What? Yeah, so this is the bit in Parks and Recreation where as a joke, they have the dumb tech company just hire debt left shrimp to like shoot basketball

in their office. So basically, while commenting on the firm's future potential profitability, Grundy says that one of our goals is to become net income positive, so make a profit with series C. We don't like the word profit. Ideally, we'll be able to do it this time. Infinite chances.

Being on the wrong side of a rosy prediction is far from the worst place Grundy has been. For that, asking about his time working for an NGO in China, wearing a Gibbon suit, and meeting now retired NBA star Yao Ming at an event run by the Chinese Ministry of Forestry. Wait, he was dressed up as Gary Gibbon. It ends with Ming leaning down, sniffing his hair, and saying, I can smell that you were the Gibbon.

What the fuck? Actually, that's a mistranslation. What Yao Ming says, you smell like Gibbon. What? Yao Ming was in the group chat. What the fuck? He could smell that he was the Gibbon. I don't know what else you want.

Baby, I'm the Gibbon. Anyway, these people are so weird. I love just like Yao Ming just saying some Confucius ass shit as well. Fine, whatever. When your enemy is near, appear far. When your enemy is far, appear the Gibbon. I just, I kind of love this guy now because he is clearly like,

this incident has broken his brain and he's just gone to like, fuck it, this is shadow puppets. It all means nothing. He's Michael Scott. He's a rich guy, Michael Scott. Yeah, yeah, this means nothing. I will just like, I'll do a water cooler business that's never gonna make any money.

Why was he wearing a Gibbon suit? So I'm gonna transfer to the FAQs of this company. But again, I just, Michael, I mean, we're very used to hearing about all this stuff. We're immune to it. What is your overall reaction to the shit show that is this company? I mean, it's kind of, there's a lot of buzzwords in that like, oh, we're using data, but then you actually,

the fucking business. Well, you don't need data. What are you doing with that data? Are you selling the data on later on? Is there kind of like a weird kind of CIA database where they have people's fingerprints because of this thing? It can't be that valuable data. Who would buy the data that I drink a lot of Gabagool flavored water?

Our data suggests that 100% of people in this office are drinking water, suggesting that our business model is absolutely infallible. I'm waiting for them to close this loop with like the smart toilet that harvests data from your piss. Oh yeah, if they get rid of our water coolers, where are they gonna get their water from? Yeah, see the toilet? I don't think so.

So before we move on to Ireland, I have two of the FAQs from Bevy. So I always, again, the secret to these tech companies is you have to imagine what cues they think are FA, because it's always silly. So here's one. The pomegranate blueberry flavor of my Bevy machine has been grayed out. What's going on? We get this one a lot, folks. We have learned of a manufacturing issue that affects Bevy's newest flavor,

pomegranate blueberry electrolyte. As a precaution to all of the flavor of electrolyte. As a precaution to all of our customers, we have remotely disabled this flavor from being dispensed from all machines. Because all of the sachets are full of mold or something. Yeah, it's poisonous. Yeah. You just think it's a mold comes out.

This was literally the juicero, the juicero thing, where they were like one of the main reasons we're a tech company is so in case something goes wrong with one of our sachets, we can remotely disable your machine. Yeah, so the pomegranate blueberry electrolyte sachets have been cross-contaminated with the polonium 210 sachets, and we've had to withdraw them. Why does quick cue? Why does Bevy require an internet connection?

Answer. Don't worry. Even if your Wi-Fi goes out, a great start, a fucking amazing start. Why do you need this Instagram connection? Don't worry about it. Don't worry. Even if your Wi-Fi goes out, you'll still be able to drink water. Listen, you ask a lot of fucking questions.

I don't have to like crowbar open the front of this machine to get to the water inside. Is it time to crack open our water and feast on the goo inside? That said, we rely on the internet connection to keep track of when your machine needs to be refilled. Forget about having to break your back every time you need to restock cases of beverages. That thing that happens all the time. My back being repeatedly broken as I turn on and off the tap. All of these tech companies, they see the world like a scammy infomercial, where someone's trying to use a tin opener and somehow they keep burning their house touts.

Well, that's the thing, right? That's why I respect the Gibbon guy, Solomon Grandi or whatever, is because Hoopst among us has not been forced into an absolutely slapstick situation by capital. Clearly, having done so, he has just decided that, yes, this is clown world. Why not do clown shit? Yeah, he's going to become like, you know, slap chop fucking JML shit. He is the dang joker. Yeah, so bang, look how clean it gets this old penny.

So I'm moving us on a little bit. It's time to talk about Ireland, because Ireland has an election coming up pretty soon. Damn, Solomon Gronja. Ah, very good. Yeah, it's on the 8th of February. It's been a long time coming. We've used Brexit as an excuse not to have one for quite some time, and now it's like, okay, no, things are actually a joke,

and Brexit's kind of at the halftime stage. So we're like, okay, let's kind of fix our own problems before we use Brexit as an excuse. It's a halftime show of sorts. Yeah, pretty much. And I think number one, one of the most interesting things is the switch, where Leo Varadkar is now no longer in Fina Gale, but rather as loud over Radkar. He's now in the Green Party for League of Rising Marijuana,

as he is the loud PM. Gas prices in Ireland are up across the board, because Leo Varadkar has allegedly smoked all the gas. Yeah, so there was a question there the other night on a debate, where it was like, have either of you used illegal drugs, which is like a stupid question anyway. And Leo Varadkar said, oh, well, I did an interview with the music magazine 12 years ago, and there's my answer.

And everyone's like, well, nobody read that. So what is your answer? And he paused for like far too long. He said, yes, I've done illegal drugs. So I was like, okay. Yo, I'm very good not to specify and just say illegal drugs. I have smoked a drug before. Yeah.

But it was like something he'd done. Time to do exactly one drug. What if you'd only done one drug, but it wasn't like a gateway drug? It was something like, I've only done two CB. Like, yeah. Why do they why do they just like never do like, give an answer that absolutely owns like, oh yeah, I used to smoke heroin sometimes.

Wouldn't touch weed though. Yeah, as a treat. A little. He did it like, like the magazine he did it with was like a music magazine. It's one of those things that young politicians do to seem cool. And now it's come back and just bitten him in the ass. So, but honestly, no one cares. Sea shanty weekly.

But it's like, if there's ever an ad to tell people not to do drugs, it's that Leo Radker has done drugs. It's not cool guys. Just don't do it. So, look at him. Honestly, if it would take sort of the faux progressive fantasy politicians doing drugs to make it not cool. I mean, Justin Trudeau, he made blackface not cool.

Prior to that, it had been like just incredibly cool. Yeah. So when we say being involved in backwards, Quebec corruption. That's my favorite thing about every liberal PM, every Canadian liberal PM, where it's like these, they all of them fall apart with just some nonsense, low stakes Quebec scandal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were just really over leveraged in Jean-Luc de Bastard's fucking maple syrup

smuggling business. So, so like loud over Radcar, right, is he is portrayed as Ireland's progressive exciting new, new, new leader. Loud over Radkush. Loud over Radkush. Yes, correct. This is getting less and less, uh, screwtable with each like twist you're giving it. So he's, he's hailed as one of these generations.

Loud over Radkush. That is a Star Wars character. One more, one more. Loud Ovape Gaskush. There we go. We have changed all of it. Yes. So Loud Ovape Gaskush is one of these sort of faux progressives,

kind of like Justin Trudeau or like Emmanuel Macron, who is lauded as this like liberal politician in the age of populism, who just consistently fucks up and disappoints everybody. That's correct. Yeah. So, uh, I think people, what, what kind of made me realize that Ireland is kind of over the whole gay thing that we accept gay people is like, when he was actually elected, uh, there was this whole thing,

his party were trying to be like, oh, it's the first gay prime minister. And everyone's kind of like, well, we don't care. He's still a prick. It's just this whole thing where like, because his father's Indian as well, because he's not, you know, he's, he's mixed race and because he's gay, it's this whole thing of like, oh, well, maybe he's progressive in the same way that Joe Swinson over here was like, oh, I'm a woman. Just like Pretty Patel, for example.

That kind of way. Yeah. And it just, no, he's still a Tory. So, you know, can we, because I've, I've long pondered this and I suppose I could look in Wikipedia, but it's really hard to understand. So could we get the unvarnished version of like, if you had to compare Fiona Foyle or Fina Foyle to other parties in the UK or the United States, would you compare, are there ones you would compare them to?

Oh, it's hard. Fiona Foyle. I'll Scotland correspondent. Did I say that right? There's the, yeah. So it's Fina Foyle. Fina Foyle. Fina Foyle and Fina Gale.

So, uh, not Irish, so it is hard to compare them to anywhere else. I remember talking to, I was in France one time. I was talking to my host family and they're like, what are your politicians like? Have you got a right wing? We've got a left wing. I was like, no, we've nothing. We just have the centre and it's like, centrist politicians who pretend they're left wing, but really right wing.

If you know what I mean. So, Fina Foyle, Fina Gale are kind of like between new labour and the Tories, I would say. Gotcha. And then our labour party is just like the Lib Dem. So we're not like your labour party at all. They're just worse. It's the future of Labour Party and Johnson and John Jackson. I hear that your prime minister is gay, but what does his mistress think of this?

So, um, so some of the crises, the successive crises, uh, that progressive, uh, loud-o, vape gas, push, no, no, stop it. I'm having too much fun with this. He's overseeing, uh, the deepening and worsening housing crisis. He's overseeing a deepening and worsening AAD waiting crisis. And he's overseeing a deepening and worsening crisis with direct provision, which is where refugees in Ireland are housed, but then given 16 year old week, not allowed to work and then usually deported.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So all of that, like the direct vision thing is a legacy issue, but like a lot of the things Leo Roger says, you know, there's a lot of things wrong, but he'll say, oh, well, it was Fina Foyle who caused all these problems. And we're just fixing it, even though we've been in government for nine years. But we haven't heard that before.

Yeah. I mean, like the housing crisis is probably the worst one. I would say, well, it's one of the effects me. So it is the worst one. Exactly. But basically like, so they didn't, nobody built social houses for about 20 years. And we had a construction boom and a crash. So there was no houses at all being built for quite some time or very little houses.

There's obviously increased demand for housing and when young people are looking at stuff and they're just aren't any. So the prices are going up and up and up and up. And then we have the likes of Leo Roger offering like, you know, help to buy schemes. And, you know, this other thing called the housing assistance payment where it's kind of like, oh, well, here's money to go get yourself a flat. Get yourself something nice. Sweetheart.

Yeah. We're not going to actually build any houses, just pushes all the prices up. Amazing. So we're at a point where we've got in Dublin, we've got like London rents or like worse than London rents and like complete shitholes. There's no regulation on like, you know, what's in each house or anything like that. There's no inspections. There's nothing on the side of the tenant.

So everybody's kind of moving out to the suburbs, commuting two hours a day. And it's like just an absolute nightmare. And everything's so Dublin centric that you've no choice but to do that. The Celtic Tiger who came to T is so very... Right. I noticed that from looking at some of these things that it seems as though some of the, what you might call like social welfare things in Ireland seem more like what was under new labour in Britain.

And obviously Britain has cut so much of that that like it's become more right-wing here. But the housing crisis may even be worse in Dublin because there's just fewer houses and I've definitely seen like looking at prices where you'd be like, wait a minute, this like two bedroom flat is 3000 euros a month. Like it's insane. You just see these like ludicrous prices and it just doesn't... It seems like London is bad, but like there's just more stuff here. There is more.

And I've been looking for houses and that's what I'm going to plug in this podcast. Please give me a house. Basically, yeah, there's more. There's just more here and they're expensive, but like that's fine because you can eventually find somewhere. In Ireland at the moment, we've 10,000 homeless people. We have families living in hotels because the state, there's no social houses. So the state's like, oh, well, shit, we'll pay for a hotel for a while.

So we've like families of three, four children living in a two-bed. Yeah. Because there's like what like five million people in Ireland or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So 10,000 is huge. It's huge. Yeah.

I mean, that's like fewer. There's more people in greater London by the order of magnitude. I mean, it was like there's like 12 million or so in the greater London area. But I think one of the things also to say about this is that we have a housing crisis, but we also had a housing crisis after a construction boom because in Ireland, as far as I understand it, the construction boom was to build extremely fancy glass office space that for all of the tech startups that just doesn't get used. Yeah, tax evasion LLP.

And a lot of like tract housing too, wasn't it? Like a lot of hotels and things like that were being built during the boom. And it's yeah, we've developers and we've people in debt for like hundreds of millions of euro into this. So the banks kind of went crazy. We're lending everybody money to the point where people had like 110% mortgages. Like they were giving, like I had a piano teacher who bought a house aged 19, where their boyfriend was no security whatsoever.

So they were just handing this shit out. Like Leo Vragger himself actually bought a house at 24 and he was a junior doctor. And he said that in an interview recently and it was this whole thing where everyone's like, well, we can't do that because we're not fucking rich. But it's also like, but they were just handing houses at the time. Just imagining like an Irish Italian guy with a huge gold chain, who's a piano teacher for some reason, going like, yeah, I don't even try. I own four houses in a speedboat.

That's fine. Milo, you can't cross it. I kind of moored off the coast to go all the way. You can't, you can't cross it. Milo is showing the advanced stages of bung a bob for Big Ben to bung for Brexit. I've had a brain parasite ever since that episode. There was a book by an American journalist about the troubles. And one of the characters in the book was like a hitman for,

I think for the provisional IRA and he was an Italian immigrant, his family were Italian immigrants to Ireland. And I'm a really like, what a fucked up story. And also, what would that accent sound like? That was a real dude. I forget his first name, but Scappatucci was his surname. Yes, what a name. Scappatucci.

So I want to, I want to move on a little bit to talking about how you did, as Alice, you said earlier, nowhere in the world have we ever had an election between the two cloned Futurama presidential candidates, John Jackson and Jack Johnson. One of whom's 3% titanium tax goes too far. And the other of whom's 3% titanium tax doesn't go far enough. And it's currently playing in Ireland. Oh, don't blame me. I voted for Kodos.

So yeah, Fina Gale and Fina Fall come from very different routes and how they related to English colonialism. For instance, one of them briefly had a flirtation with fascism. Guess which one it was. So yeah, Fina Gale were basically simps for the British. And Fina Fall were all for constitutionally separating from England. But in the, especially in recent years, and especially I think, correct me if I'm wrong, when the Celtic Tigers seem to just give a bunch of shared infinite growth prosperity

based on infinite credit to everyone, they're now just kind of the same party. And because they pinned their electoral futures on being able to eternally prop up skyrocketing house prices and just sort of forgetting about the crisis of 2008 by jamming adrenaline shot after adrenaline shot into Ireland's fucking zombie economy by giving Apple like the ability to pay, I don't know, 20 Euro cents in tax every year. Apple owe us 14 billion Euro worth of tax that the government... So they lost in the European court, didn't they about this? Yeah, so Apple have to pay that back.

But our government is fighting that ruling saying that, oh, we actually didn't give Apple a sweetheart deal. They don't owe us any of that 40 billion Euro that we desperately need. Cock me harder, daddy. I mean, I was thinking that Apple was going to do the route. I think it was Samsung that they got a court decision determined that they had... Pennies. Yeah, they stolen intellectual property to make the galaxy

phone basically from Apple by cloning the iPhone. And they paid their fine with multiple dump trucks full of pennies. Just like... Yes. Garbage cans worth of pennies because they're like, ah, fuck you, we're going to troll you. But I imagine Apple doing that. But the idea of the government saying, no, we don't want your money is just...

Well, it's because Ireland's economy is just based on there being lots of brass plate HQs there. That's it. So we've got Facebook, we've Google, we've Ancestry.com. We have all these drop-offs. Yeah. LinkedIn. We've all these huge tech companies that... Who the fuck was your mad.com?

I hate when I go to ancestry.com and I have to find out who's been doing big, huge comms in my grandma's person. Christ, no context for that in the show either. And to illustrate how close these two parties are, I actually have an article from the Irish Times about their shared policy on housing, which according to either party, they vehemently disagree with. But here we go. In the past few days, Fina Fall and Fina Gale,

one of which will probably lead the next government, have both promised to give first-time home buyers lots and lots of money, which as Michael said, has worked out well in the past and hasn't just pushed up prices. A key method is expanding help to buy. That's right. They have a help to buy scheme that's a huge boondockle. Bunga Euro to help a bugger buy a flat in Dublin. A scheme designed to stimulate house building because it only applies to new homes

and to help first-time buyers get a deposit together. So you could just throw out homes made out of cardboard because they're new. Charge whatever you want for them and then charge the extra of however much you get from help to buy. We're very gently pegging the housing market. It used to be that you could charge up to 250,000 euros I think for that house, and then I think they moved it up to 360 or half a million. So it's basically becoming more similar to ours. However, our help to buy was still worse because ours involved a variable rate mortgage for some

reason instead of a tax break, which this one is. Amazing. Absolutely incredible. So if we want to get some numbers, the scheme was found to have cost 206 million since coming into force in 2017, which is a huge number given the population. 41% of the people using help to buy already had enough money for the 10% deposit. We know that our help to buy was basically like a subsidy to one guy. Given that Ireland is a much smaller country, this must mean that it's an even bigger subsidy to another guy.

To less than one guy. You can only go to slight his dick. Michael. Yeah, that's what we've all been saying is we've been comparing it to the UK thing and being like, why are you copying the homework of the UK that's wrong? You know what I mean? Why are you doing that? And there was all these examples of they're showing average buyers, and they had this woman called Jane, and it was like,

Jane already owns her own land, and she pays rent of 700 euros a month. This person doesn't exist. Nobody's paying 700 euro in Dublin if you're renting an apartment on your own. But also, for this to work, for this health buy scheme to work, I just have to inherit some land. That reminds me, there was a thing like a sample budget for people from McDonald's, we're like, here's how McDonald's workers can balance their budget. It was like how you would earn based on McDonald's wages, how you would have a normal family budget.

It was like health insurance, $15 a month. It's just like, where in America do you get $15 a month helpers for a million-dollar deductible? If selling the policy requires an insane example that only applies to somebody who's been extracting peasant rent on their family lands, it's the 780s, then it probably is a good policy. I'm very excited for the new Irish government scheme, where actually they pair people up who aren't going to inherit land with wealthy people with no family, and then that solves the problem. Is this the Bridgend sugar daddy scheme? Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, we've just reinvented serfdom, but through like a harvester.

How's that? We're all going to inherit some very good land in Wales. I was trying, I was going to make a joke, but then I realized that if I try to pronounce one of the three suburbs of Dublin that I know the name of, it's going to come out completely fucking wrong, so I was like, I'll leave it alone. I'm sorry for roasting you for saying Fiona Foyle. The Irish language, it's like a built-in minefield, which I mean, maybe a good thing. You can suss out who doesn't actually care enough to learn about it. Jane, whose name had a C in it for some reason. So this suggests that the scheme is largely benefiting households at the higher end of the

income distribution, said the budget office. The scheme did not fulfill its original aims in an efficient manner, and it supported a significant number of transactions that would have taken place without the scheme anyway. So that's put too fine a point on it, but no matter what happens after this election, both major parties have basically promised to shore up this thing, which is doing nothing to solve the Irish housing crisis, because doing that would require admitting that the entire economic recovery that's taken place over the last 12 years now, since 2008, has been pretend. It's not doing nothing. It's giving a lot of money to like one half of one guy. Exactly. That guy's going to have such jacked legs. He will not be

skipping leg day. He's going to have like fucking quads made of pure cash. Michael, I was also wondering, you mentioned that people haven't built social housing in a while. I was wondering, was there a significant social housing building program in Ireland at some point? Yeah. So in the 50s, I think, like Finafall are using their history, because they've been in government the most over the last 80 years. So ever since the foundation of the state, it's been Finafall or FinaGale, sometimes with their Labour Party in coalition. And Finafall, at one point, did build some social houses. I think it was the 50s, and it's kind of that thing of like, they're looking at like, well, it's our history,

we did this or whatever. But actually, when they were in government last time, they didn't build that many, FinaGale even less, because there was no money in the country. Sure, of course. It's just, you know, it's all at Apple. I presume that if they do it now, it's probably going to be like, like poor doors, 20%, like lower cost rent units, but then everything else is market rate kind of thing. Yeah. Well, what's, what's coming in now is co-living. So you guys have a few, a few of these in London. Oh, fuck yeah.

Oh, no! So they have like one... Like looking pods, dorms and shit. Dorms, corporate dorms. If you grew up in Ireland, you're used to sharing a bedroom. So why not do it with someone you not related to? So they have this brilliant one. So like these capital companies are coming in. So these, you know, venture capital, I don't know what you call them, but they come in and there's a rent cap in Dublin of 4%, but that's slightly above inflation. So it doesn't matter.

You can just buy a property, it's going to get better and better every year. But they built, they bought this old building and they're going to make a co-living space out of it. And the building is called the orphanage, which I think is the most amazing thing. It's like, oh my God, some dumbass developer is coming in. It was just like, yeah, I was really inspired by the book Angela's Ashes. I love to like live in a pod in Athenryfield. Oh, fucking hell. With all the orphanage, there's an old septic tank. Don't open it.

Oh, Jesus Christ. This is literally like, what if you asked Alan Partridge to come up with it? This is like some Des Morte, Ireland and this shit, right? Like Bloody Sunday, perfectly encapsulates the frustration of a Sunday. That is the level of insight being applied here. I'm fucking, I don't know if I can do this podcast anymore. Yeah, I've had a stroke in relation to this. Why can't you just use the empty offices that only exist for tax purposes? We do actually have a huge number of empty buildings in Dublin that nobody's refurbishing.

There's no tax on unused lands. People are banking lands. They're buying stuff, waiting for it to increase in value and selling it off. We have huge numbers of Airbnb rentals that there's been no legislation on until recently. So there's been occasions where there've been more Airbnb than actual rental properties. So it's one of those things where I'm like, when I come to England, I'm like, okay, we're not that bad. And then I actually go through it all. I'm like, oh, Jesus Christ, we're so embarrassing. But it's weird to me because it's like liberals and centrists in the United Kingdom are really

fixated on the idea that Ireland is like the same. Ireland is what they want the United Kingdom to be. They're like, what is happy with the EU? Everything's centrist. We love it. But then you hear these things and it's like, it seems wild west capitalism way more. Like not to say that Britain isn't insane, but some of this stuff, if it happened at scale and Britain would raise enough attention that there might be some potential to address it, would it get addressed by the Tory government? Fuck no, but there would be a cry at least. And I'm going to say at this time, liberals are dogs. They only hear tone, right?

Like they love, if you're from like a kind of broadly like kind of sideline country, like fucking Canada or Ireland or whatever, like those kind of like cuddly Western places that never really do anything on an international scale, all you need is someone who like looks smart and it ticks a box like Lee Overadka. And they're like, well, everything must be fine there. Let's not look into that. Let's just assume that because the nice man is doing the politeness, that it must all be fine. And that explains the whole Keir Starmer campaign. How do they get the hop in the foam on the beer? We're going to MVP back into the European Union under exactly these terms of the European Union

lets us like create this horrifically and like unequal society, but then tells us who's a good who's a good boy? Who's a good society? Like, yeah, great. Joke, I don't know how I got these treats. Based on recent polling, it seems like neither of these two awful, ridiculous parties that have like are advertising that they have no solutions to any of the problems plaguing Ireland right now would actually find it hard to form a stable government without going into coalition with Sinn Féin, which they've refused to do on principle. We love it. Sinn Féin were formerly the political wing of the IRA and there's still

debate as to whether the IRA is still involved or whatever. But because we don't have labor anymore, so labor were destroyed in the last election because they went in with Finagale and cut things like... And they didn't debate Ben Shapiro, did they? They cut things like children's allowance and, you know, just really shit things that labor government should not do. So they basically got lib demified after, yeah, like 2015. That's what happened. Too long of the Irish people lived under the jackboot of children. Well, that's how they cleared out all those orphanages for people to live indoors, working for like, you know, fucking Apple. Don't look in the septic tank. That's all I'm saying.

To change when they're working for Cromwell and we're going to prove it. So basically, so Labour had the most TDs that ever had in the 2011 election and then went down to seven. So they went from like 30 something to seven seats or whatever. So they're not a thing anymore. So they can't be used. We've all these kind of disparate left-wing groups that can't really work together at the moment. We have the Greens who are kind of... That doesn't sound familiar at all. Yeah. And it's kind of... So there's no real left in Ireland. So we're left with Finafall or Finagale and whoever, whatever small party is silly enough to go into coalition with

them and get destroyed. So I mean, I noticed that they're all... I have a question actually. Yes, go for it. If like, obviously the centre has failed at this point, right? The left is disordered. Is there an incipient fascist movement coming? Because that's usually the next thing a lot. Yeah, not really, because like the fascists we have are really silly and stupid. So it's kind of like, yeah. So we have like these kind of real controversial, like they're just joke characters. They're not actual... They've kind of run in elections all

the time and go out on their phones and be like, oh, well, look, they got rid of the green post boxes. What was wrong with green? They're getting rid of, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it's like... Every green post box replaced by a mosque. That's the kind of shit we're seeing. Jeremy Corbyn points a post box. Mosque. But we have like this woman who is... I'm not going to mention her name because I don't want to

give her the air time or whatever, but she was a journalist at one point. So her name start with a G by any chance. Yeah. So she went over to Sweden at one point and was like, oh, well nobody speaks Swedish in Sweden anymore. Went into this kind of kebab shop and she was just like, oh, why are you all speaking English? Because they're like, oh, well, because you're speaking English. She speaks Swedish like, yeah. And there was just... That was our whole video. We had this other guy who said he was like the Ireland's most prominent conservative on Twitter and his account was locked because he was anti-Semitic. And he went into Twitter offices and he said,

can I speak to the manager basically? The woman at the counter was like... And I speak to the T-shock of Twitter. I can give you an appointment. Yeah, I could talk to him. And he's like, yeah. And he's like, oh, well, he's busy today. So he's like, oh, okay, well, I'll come back later then. And then when I tied, he was like, yeah, I confronted Twitter and everyone's like, oh, you didn't... This is what's great about Ireland having all of the fake tax brass plate official headquarters of all the tech companies is that everyone who thinks they're being shadow banned can actually go to the offices and complain. Yeah, that happens a lot.

So basically you've got like Caitlin Bennett, the gun girl and Connor McGregor. And that's the Irish fascist. She carries a hurly stick everywhere. That's the... I mean, there was a guy who did that, wasn't there? Yes, there is. I feel like we shouldn't... I'm always a little bit cautious about dismissing fascists as sort of clownish and fringe. But the one thing I wanted to ask you about on that topic, though, was that I've noticed that there was an attempt in the wake of Brexit being success here for people to try to kindle that in Ireland and that it seemed like it was polling incredibly

low. Like the idea of leaving the European Union was like 10 or 15 percent. Yeah, I mean, we're looking because we get all of your media, so we see everything you're doing and we're looking at what happened over... Define lucky. We're looking at what happened over with you guys and we're like, well, we're not fucking doing that here. And also there's a whole thing with... We're like, hey, we're looking at it and we're like, we love it actually. Stop pointing out how bad it is. That only makes my dick harder. But I think also you can definitely have a fascist movement that's fine with staying in

the European Union as well. We always made the joke about what if the EU turns into the racism EU, also known as the EU. Indeed. I'm just waiting for the Irish fascist movement. It's like, the immigrants have come over here and they've put spice into bag. I kind of have a spiceless bag. I'm just excited for this to go in the dumbest possible direction of fearing a foil, rediscovering their love for colored shirts and just being like... It's Fina Gale, the naughty ones. Ah, fuck. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, I thought you were made like colored shirts, like Wyatt Coke style. That would have been awesome. Yeah, that's the next generation of brown shirts is going to be discoteca shirts. I think from what I understand it, the Irish left is there and the Irish left is there with some good energy and ideas behind it. It's just not electorally organized and it's not ready to take power yet for a while because it's like it is younger both as a movement and the average age of the movement than most of the people who are actually proximate to power and so on. But like that there is something to build on here. Yeah. I mean, Fina Fall and Fina Gale, I think they're less than 45% of the electorate.

So everybody else, all the other parties in the Dall, which is our house or second house, sorry, it's our parliament. They're mostly left wing. So there's maybe one or two independents here, but kind of right wing, whatever. We've loads of independents as well. Smashing things with the hurly stick. Yeah, you've seen him. Oh my God, it's amazing. So good. But they like independence look after themselves. So they're not really kind of left or right. It's kind of like, I want to get a hospital down the road for me. So that's what I'm going to do

for you guys, that kind of way. So yeah, just the left, not organized, but most people kind of want if you know what I mean. So yeah, I've always like, I've always been really fascinated by Irish politics and that I'm not going to pretend I know much about it, but I've always got the impression that like Ireland is a country with quite like a rich left wing tradition, but also a quite a rich tradition of mad Catholicism and they interact in like really interesting ways. Yeah. But that's what I was expecting more than what I was going to say to you. Yeah. I love to like rebuild the limerick Soviet.

It was kind of that thing of like the Brits left. So we let the church in and that's kind of, we're like, oh, fuck, that was a bad idea. So we're kind of like coming out of that again, you know, you just, you have to get talked down to by somebody and if it's not a British person, it has to be like an Italian, I guess. Well, it's the Brits left. So they let the church in and now they've got, they're sort of fighting the church out, but it seems like all that's going to come in is LinkedIn. Yeah, James Connolly was right about like the Socialist Republic. If you do anything else, it's just futile and very weird.

So I want to, I want to move us on then slightly to our last, our last item, our reading series is going to be quite quick. It's a speed, it is a article unheard by Peter Franklin. So strap yourself, strap your normal belts on. Oh hell yeah. Always strapped on. God damn it. So what, what Sajid Javid should say at Davos, but won't? Slurs. It's slurs, it's slurs. Straight away. No, it's, it's none of that. Always open a speech with the N words.

Show dominance. That's not the argument. Do not actually do that. Do not actually do that. That is not the argument that unheard is making. No, he is basically, we have done this thing where we have had a columnist write a fantasy speech that they want a politician to say. And then here's what I imagine happened.

I want you to buzz in when you think that it would depart from what Sajid Javid would actually say. With those buzzes we all have. Yes. It is a great pleasure to be here at the World Economic Forum annual meeting. Better known as Davos, better known, Webster's dictionary defines world. This year, the theme is stakeholders for a cohesive and sustainable world. For a social responsibility, Black Lives Matter. Last year, it was Globalization 4.0.

Jesus Christ. What was 3.0? Well, 2.0. What's 1.0 was the British Empire, right? Shaping a global architecture in the age of the fourth industrial revolution. Honestly, where do they get this rubbish? Do they just write buzzwords on bits of paper and pick them out at random? Or is there a special machine?

A random balls generator would certainly seem to be involved. What does this mean? What does it say? You've got my attention. Isn't that Omegle? What does Davos speak achieve? What does it change? The reason for that is right here.

The reason we need change is right here at the resorts. The global elites from business, politics, academia, and the media. For example, unlike Sajid Javid, who was a CDO banker and now is the UK finance minister. Remember when ministers weren't going to go to Davos because it was too elite? Yeah. We're all here to talk about the world's problems as if they were nothing to do with us. As if the policy disasters of the 21st century weren't of our doing. As if the electoral backlash that we failed to see coming is all the fault of the voters.

West Wing, one guy starts clapping really slowly and then everybody starts clapping. We make high-minded speeches about an international rules-based framework, but what too many of our people actually experience is a system rigged against their interests, which is, yeah, that's right. When is this article going to get bad? Because I know it is. But the solution is to Chakramana. No, Sajid Javid wouldn't say that.

Oh, no, sorry. But I mean, the person who's writing for Unheard presumably would say that. In the first decade of the 21st century, economists spoke of a great moderation and end to the boom and bust cycles of the 20th century. Economists were they, Gordon Browns? We all know where that ended up with the worst crash that's a Second World War. Now, the left proclaimed the end of capitalism and the right worried that- We do be doing that.

We are always doing that. We didn't do that. What we said was, well, this is clearly fucked, which it is. We didn't say it was over. We weren't that stupid. We're like, yeah, they're going to fucking keep injecting it with as much fucking drugs as possible to keep it going, but it's fucked. And the right was worried that QE would unleash inflation.

No, that's not what they were worried about. They were worried about the camp of the saints happening. I mean, it's fair to say that keeping inflation as low as possible is a right-wing fixation, but I don't think there was- Yeah, there were some people who were like, oh, this quantitative easing after the crisis will cause inflation, but most people were like, shit's about to get really weird if you don't open up your checkbook immediately. Inflation concerns were at the top of the list.

It's only fun mesas freaks who really care. Everybody else on the right is full ethnos right now. I mean, don't get me wrong. There were American thatcherites, for example, like Romney, for example, who was like, oh, no, let the entire auto industry collapse. We don't give a shit. We'll be more efficient. But that was a fringe opinion.

I like to think very much of that photo of him and Trump, where Trump is just like, they're under really weird lighting and myth is kind of cringing. They're making me eat like turtle soup at some restaurant. Trump is just smiling. I think that tells you who won that particular outcome. You don't understand. When inflation gets really high, what happens is the stable boys go and strike and they ask for more money and then it really hurts your coffers

because you have to hire a bunch of these ex-military guys from Poland to beat them up and make them go back to work. And actually, it really impacts your ability to lease a new Audi. Oh, the Sussex Royal business plan. So the story of the second decade of the 21st century is the great zombification, a global economy that staggers on but doesn't respond to stimulus. Now, because this is unheard, the great podcast economy, what they've done is they appear to have more or less diagnosed the problem correctly,

but their solution is stupid. What doesn't respond to stimulus is such a fucking stupid deduction there because it's like, what stimulus? Like there was a moderate one in the US in the end of the 2000s. But the idea that there's been some great stimulus in the 2010s, like that's absurd. No, the whole point has been that they're like, no, let's just fucking, let's keep interest rates as low as possible and do as little cash injection as possible.

And just like, hope it gets solved somehow by water coolers? Tech, yeah. Yeah, LinkedIn will fix it. And it's just delivery. So who's to blame? Let's start with government. Yes, yes, let's start with them. Yes, I would agree.

Yes. They are the world's biggest debtors. So there's the term that word goes to be wrong. Is this going to be like a damn deficit article? I love to read Martin Luther's column in Unheard. They are the world's biggest debtors and people who owe money pay the lowest interest rates they can get away with. If there were enough productive uses for the world's cash,

interest rates would return to normal. But clearly there's a shortage of productive uses for the world's cash. But like we can turn to Ireland where Apple is keeping enough money in Ireland to solve poverty in general and yet they just don't. Wait, hold on. The problem in the problem... I have a question here, right? Inflation, like indulge me with a first year economics thing.

Inflation is when a currency becomes worth so little that you have a great deal of it that doesn't purchase very much. That's hyperinflation. Inflation is the general process of where... Okay, so how it works is that you have a certain supply of money, let's say, I don't know, 100. And then as you print more of that money, it becomes worth less relative to either what you're buying or more importantly, other currencies. That's what I mean.

But like if that's inflation, right? And also we have a bunch of this sovereign wealth that's sitting around doing nothing, except being extremely large numbers. But we're keeping our inflation rates low. How is that not in any meaningful sense just sort of gaining how we count inflation? Because Alice, if the number gets bigger, that makes the graph happy, which is good. I'm going to do the thing I did last free episode, where I do a little bit of boring economics, where a low inflation is good for capital because it keeps the value of capital high,

whereas high inflation, which allows the government to just magic away its debts, which it can do by printing money, is bad for capital because it allows... Just what Greece was not allowed to do. It allows debtors to basically pay back debts very cheaply, easily, and quickly, and reduces the value of those debts that are held by creditors. So it is a very, very progressive position to have high inflation. High inflation isn't necessarily bad if there's also a commensurate wage increase. And so for workers, or for people on like annuity income,

if they're getting money that's relative to interest earnings, that's good. But obviously for people who have huge wads of cash in their savings account, or in investments, it's not worth as much. Like, and I'm not as cooled up as on it as you are, but the idea that if you were working an hourly wage in this country, and you had wage increases to match high inflation, you wouldn't necessarily see as much of a... Assuming it was like say below 10%, you wouldn't see a huge squeeze on your purchasing power. But obviously people with huge amounts of money and investments are going to be frustrated.

That's my question, right? And I may be getting this completely backwards because I'm an idiot. But how can you say we have this huge supply of money that doesn't do anything unless inflation has kind of happened to you de facto anyway? Well, because according to Peter Franklin, what he wishes Saji Javid would say, it's basically be like, look, it's that inflation discourages innovation because it makes the eventual rewards less outsized. I'm thinking about it backwards, like the tail wagging the dog here, right? It seems like our obsession with inflation rates has allowed us to focus in on that.

Well, the consequences of, I don't know, what they're suggesting inflation would be have just kind of happened. I mean, to put it into perspective, you think about the extent to which people in the UK are completely locked out of owning homes outside of... A few live in low-cost living areas, maybe, but then wages in those areas are really low. You live in racism on trend, you're all right. But for example, I mean, in the 70s and in the early 80s, the government's sole goal was basically to get inflation down below 10%. And in so doing, by restricting the money supply, they effectively... They created a situation in which when this country had a population

of like 50 million, there were like 3 million unemployed people. It was the highest it had ever been. In fact, it fucked the economy so much that at one point in the early or mid-80s, the pound was worth maybe $1.5, which imagine... I mean, when it was below 125 people were freaking out here, but imagine it being that low. So they were fine with complete shock consequences as long as it protected capital investment. But in the opposite, basically, situations where inflation was high and wage increases were high, they were like, we'd rather call in the army than fucking let this continue. And that, I feel, seems pretty instructive without getting too technical there. That seems pretty instructive as far as how these governments work. If it's

shock deflation or shock restriction of the monetary supply, you just grin and bear it because everyone's fine with it. It's just what you got to do as a good citizen. But if the opposite takes place, if the value of accrued capital is threatened, then all of a sudden, they're like, we need drastic solutions that involve jackboots. And the thing is, and to bring this background to Ireland, actually, because Ireland doesn't really have the option to undertake any kind of monetary policy in any direction, it only has the fiscal lever to pull on. So that's why it can try to offer tax breaks, basically, to try to incentivize productive activity in your house building. But that never works because the tax breaks always essentially go to people who are

already wealthy, right? Yeah. So, carry on. Surely, that has nothing to do with the euro, does it? Yeah, it actually... Oh, sorry, go ahead. I forgot. That's been a constant thing that's been talked about in the example of Greece, in the example of, especially when Spain and Portugal were really economically shitty in the beginning part of the decade. I mean, they're not great now, but they were worse back then. The idea that you could inflate yourself out of a crisis, but you can't when you have a central European bank controlling the euro. And this is really important to make a distinction between the European Union and the euro. The European Union hasn't fucked over those countries nearly as much as the euro has. Indeed. However, I'm pulling us back on track

here. Because in Saadji Javad's fantasy speech, he says, yes, we are a shortage of productive uses of the world's cash. But the key question is why? I believe it's about the wrong incentives. We have made life too difficult for inventors. Oh, okay. We need Doc Brown. He wants Saadji Javad to adopt a pro-Doc Brown policy. Yeah, Jimmy Neutron has been forced out of business by Chinese competition. Yeah. And it's like, he says too easy for the hangers on, but then he identifies the hangers on as polluters and tax avoiders and landlords and stuff. But it's like, so hold on, you've identified the problem correctly, but your solution is Elon Musk? The water cooler guys. Dexter's lab has been moved wholesale to Hungary to do race science.

And then he says, if we had a better economy, Rick Sanchez wouldn't have to do this in his family's garage. He could have his own laboratory. He says, and then moving, I'm skipping a little bit. Listen, Morty, the incentives, they're poorly structured. You've got to understand. Yeah, god damn. So we've got this, then I'm skipping a little bit ahead where he says, and working class communities are in fact far more open to the disruption clause by globalization than the professional elites within their regulatory barriers. Suck my dick. The so-called knowledge class may be more open to the idea of internationalism, but in practice, their lives are lived within environments which are carefully controlled, if not closed altogether. For instance,

here we are in Davos, surrounded by a state of the art security fence and a no fly zone. We're better to extol the virtues of a borderless world. Unheard, everybody. Unheard. Hell yeah. We can't take in refugees. What if Sajid Javid was Amber Frost? Awesome. That was crazy. I can't keep that. Given what the Tory government has been describing as their state of policy relative to population size, I think Switzerland might take in more refugees in the United Kingdom. Yeah, fucking Switzerland. The normal country of Switzerland. Yeah, this is the whole thing of, and we have to respect the fact that when the working class of Britain voted for Brexit, which it didn't really, it was mostly middle class people,

they voted to be part of a global free trading system and have more globalization. Because they were elites, right? What if Sajid Javid had a podcast where he did irony and talked about the professional managerial class? That's the same argument, right? What if he had a woke parody sock puppet account? Ladies and gentlemen, there are two equal and opposite errors made about capitalism. On the left, the system is a flimsy construction about a collapse of the weight of its contradictions. Yeah, that's definitely an error. On the right, it's that the market is a force of nature, a fundamental property of the universe that only the mighty state can interfere with.

Neither is true. Given the chance, people will freely trade with one another. Okay. Okay, but also given the chance, perfect efficiency is child slavery. So if you want efficiency at all costs, then you've got to make some fucking concessions to child slavery. And if that is morally unsustainable to you, then maybe like, wow, maybe the natural state of capitalism isn't a thing we should be striving for. But the government says it has to make the rules that are moral, and we have to make those rules ourselves. And then this is the fantasy Saji Javed, like the people you voted for, here's what I wish they'd say, but I know they won't, because actually what Saji Javed's going to say is like, we're going to bring back the CDO market,

and it's going to make my friend Bill, for when I worked at like, I don't know, Deutsche Bank. He worked at Deutsche Bank, fucking Bill Ackman, or some of these other ghouls and the fuck. Yeah. And it's going to make one guy super rich. And then we're going to invent a new kind of poverty for everyone to live in. And that's what he's actually going to say. And I get more money to like, spend on polish for my shiny head. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're actually, we're going to take, we're going to take the homeless and we're going to put them into tranches and de-risk them. Don't ask, don't ask what that means or how. I mean, collateralized hobo obligation. I just keep thinking to myself, like,

if you just had a policy that says actually landlords are bad and we should organize things to reduce the number of landlords. We should parody redacted. We should parody redacted. Yeah. I mean, I just, yeah, great way of not identifying the problem. Wow. Yeah. In a bit of article for Mr. C. Mao. I like that we can have the thing of imaginary Sajid Javid doing Murray Rothbard stuff of what if we just had child markets, but not what if we parody redacted? Well, child markets to help teach children how to market. Oh, anyway, we've gone for a very long time. So I'd like to introduce my special friend,

Child Markets. So Mr. Markets, please. Michael, we've talked a lot and we haven't given you a chance to talk. So I was wondering if maybe if there's any big takeaway you think with regard to what British and American listeners, our primary audience, look at the Irish elections, what do you think should be a thing to pay attention to? Yeah, I don't know because it's such a mess in Ireland. It's kind of like, I don't know, because you, like, I think where we're okay is that we do, we don't have an extreme right. Do you know what I mean? So like, things are kind of getting yes. And it's, you know, that kind of way, but we were also just kind of paralyzed a lot of the time. So I don't know. I don't know if you should look at us as an example for anything, to be

honest, like, you know, well, it's an example for like, what would happen if the Lib Dems had their way, right? You can't stay paralyzed forever. Something does have to change at some point. Like it can't, it can't just keep doing this because this is making this is because the political system is in motion. And right now, the political consensus in Ireland among people who are potentially close to power seems to be to close your eyes and pretend it's not. Yeah, yeah, I would say so. I think like, once we get our left open run, and maybe something's going to happen. But yeah, it's going to be another five, six, 10 years before anything like that happens. I mean, I just did the napkin math and just took the 14 billion euros and five

million rough estimate of Ireland's population. And if you did the most regressive possible thing, which is just give everybody an equal cut of that and pay it out, that would be almost 3,000 euros per person. So the idea is like, like, with a population that small, like the legitimately, it doesn't take a huge number to make you to influence these things. But it's like, what will they not do that? The provisional or real Yang gang. Oh, man. Very funny meaning to secure in the bag. The Yang volunteer first. So I, I think that's probably about time for us. I want to thank all of you for listening. Securing the spice bag. Last minute episode title.

We'll see what we call it. Personally, you know what I want to call it. What? In which Nate says Fiona foil. No, I want to call it. Loud O vape gas cook. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. It does have to be that. Sorry. I was the guy who gets killed before me and numb. So Michael, I want to thank you for coming on today. You're very welcome. Thanks for having me on. Also, usual reminder, we are doing a live show February 6th.

It is going to be a debate in the format of the bench pair is coming in for it. We're very excited. We're all excited to get destroyed. He's going to plug all of our holes and we're ready for it. It's going to be in, in the formats of Milo and eyes, sort of what we're used to from university debating, which is we have, I am not used to it. You make a, there are three people on each side of a each side of a proposition to make a five minute speech. But I'll be the speaker and I'll have a gavel, which I'll use very liberally.

I found a gavel. Except in the middle, that's going to be a coffee table over the glass surface. Yes. Correct. Yeah. And you're going to, if you want to, you can also register to make a floor speech speaking forward against the motion. Do we know, do they know the motion yet? Yeah. Yeah. We announced it. The motion is this house believes that Elon Musk is the Willy Wonka of his day. Yeah. So if you feel like you want to come and make a floor speech, do start writing, but don't go over your time. No.

You don't want to go over your time. Don't make it too long. Anyway, also check out the Patreon five bucks a month. You can hear some of the episode we've been referenced. Some of the episode we've been referencing by accident is that what's already happened. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also plugs. Fourth of Feb. I have a smoke comedy at the Sekford, which should be a lot of fun. 21st and 22nd of Feb. I'm doing shows in Leicester. 21st is Pindos and 22nd is the working progress of my new show. And also 25th of February and 3rd of March, I'm doing works in progress at the Volts Festival in London. There's a link that goes to all of

my shows in the description. At GettingYourMiloEdwards.com. Yeah. Getting. GettingYourMiloWatched.com. Also, do you want to hear my takes and another guy's takes on veteran and military news from a left-wing perspective? You should listen to my show, What a Hell of a Way to Die, which is another show I did as a guest when I came on TrashFuture the first time. And now I've been eclipsed by TrashFuture. Now, I'm a niche, small-scale podcast. Well, the TrashFuture largesse just swallows everything. Everybody is plugging everything. You should listen to my other podcast with SissySkylinesYoutuberDoNotEat and Liam Anderson called Well There's Your Problem. It's available

on YouTube. It's also like wherever you get podcasts. We have a second Patreon episode coming out two bucks a month. Absolutely worth it. When is Alice not plugging everything? Is this the Patreon where we discuss Liam's van? Yes. That was fun. We invented a concept called the Pennsylvania Secret Service, which I am continuing to laugh about. We're absolutely going to get that on a shirt. Okay. I want one. All right. I think that's almost enough plugs. Michael, I know you want to plug that you want somewhere to live. Yeah. I'm looking for a house. Please help me. What otherwise, follow me on Twitter at BigDirtyFright.

Hell yeah, baby. All right. We will see you in a couple of days on the Patreon. Later, everybody.