TRASHFUTURE - Mr Barnabas’ Borstal for Boys

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

For this week's free episode, the gang is back together to discuss recent developments involving Microsoft buying AI software. However, we're more enthralled with a story from a county council in Cheshire and a proposed real estate deal involving an Australian gentleman named Lex Greensill. Hope you enjoy! 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 *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, and welcome to this free episode of TF. It is the free one. It is the free one. You heard it here first. It is, of course, myself, Riley, I'm joined by Milo, I'm joined by Hussein, I'm joined by Alice. Do we have any of our upcoming things we have to announce yet, or are those going to wait for another week?

You can buy Trash Future merch on the store, there are still posters, and I think some stickers available, maybe just posters, I'm not sure, but they're definitely posters. If you want to buy TF Australia tour posters, We're looking into shirts. Very strongly. Very strongly. At this time. No, reply to Milo.

Are there posters yet? And he'll say, looking into it. That's right. I will. I will say that. I'll reply to the 1488 Gremlin or wherever I'll reply to you. Misogyny Goku. Misogyny Goku replies to you saying, like, you should do a shirt with the machine that

sucks you off. Your screen name is Demisjavus Wieger. I will reply to you and say, looking into it. Yeah, yeah. It's looking very strongly into it. We got a very fun show for you today. I'm going to do a little preview of what's coming in the very end. We've cut so many bits out of this opening that that last sentence sounded like it was

itself cut together. You sounded like, like, we've got a great show for you today. Yeah. I personally am not under duress. Check out today's newspaper. That's right. It's a great article by Kay Wiggins and the FT, which I'm enjoying in not in captivity. So, well, I'll tell you, there was a great article in the financial review that we will

be reading later. I love. How about this Berlin review? I love the idea of financial review, like going on like, we've been reading a balance sheet by can canning across the stage. Let's just say this one's not about balance sheets, but a little bit of parkland in Cheshire. Oh, and what kind of game do they hunt there? I guess we'll have to find out when we get to it.

But that's what we call a teaser in the business. So consider yourself teased schoolyard style. But first I want to talk a little bit about this is now, I think, becoming a recurring segment at the opening. There are a couple of things that I find completely fucking delightful about the Tesla company, its executives, its philosophy and everything about it. Sure. A great company that makes great vehicles.

A great company that makes great vehicles. Maybe we can like find a theme tune for whenever I see a Tesla online that is fucking up in a hilarious way. Yeah. It's Tesla Thursday. Even though this doesn't come out on a Thursday. It's Tesla Thursday. It's Tesla Thursday for us.

It's Tesla Tuesday for you. Shit. It's Tesla Thursday. It's Tesla Thursday. We've got Tesla Tuesday. Who knows what we could fill the other days with? Who knows? Well, the W1 we had to cut.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. When we go Wednesdays? But spelling it with a W? We're phonetic on this show. No. The show canonically has dyslexia. Not any of us individually, but the podcast itself.

So this is a video taken in Turkey about last week. The Tesla ice cream man. Well, close. A man parked his new Tesla in a garage and he left it there for precisely one month. New car. And he came back. Yeah. And crucially, crucially, this garage was not under the sea.

No. This will become a port. It was a little talking crab there. No. No, no. It was not. James Cameron was not poking through it. It was not under the sea.

So a Tesla inter, like perfect Mediterranean weather in a garage. Okay. Cool. In a garage. Yeah. In a normal way. And I just want that on the record. Yeah.

I'm not pronouncing it in a weird way. No. Why would you? No. So this Tesla was then discovered as basically rock. Discovered. Unearthed. They sent a fucking remotely operated vehicle.

Pine team went down. The owner went back to the Tesla and found it basically full teaming with new life. Parthenogenesis had occurred. It had mushrooms growing off the steering wheel. It was rotten. Like barnacles. It legitimately looks like the wreck of the Titanic, this fucking Tesla. And Riley, you showed me this video.

It's one of the most upsetting things I've seen in a minute because it's everything. Every part of it has some kind of organic growth on it. And I did like the seats, the dashboard, the door handles. It's genuinely, it looks like the car version of Yaya Bolsonaro's bloodstream. There are towels in the corner of boarding school boys dormitories that have less life growing on them. Personally. In this Tesla.

I actually think that none of you are excited enough for David Cronenberg finally making crash two. Or additionally, or finally getting to find out, number one, that Bolsonaro is actually fine in Turkey driving a Tesla, maybe a stolen Tesla, or perhaps number two, the other possibility is that the chaos gods are real and that there is a champion of Nurgle who lives in the world and that he's a Silicon Valley guy drives a Tesla in Turkey. Well, this is actually a fancier Tesla now. It's a blue Tesla.

It's like the rock four of Tesla. You know, not everyone loves the flavor, but it's actually very sophisticated. You just get a little bit of mold in your Tesla and it actually makes it more. I feel like what you pedestrians don't understand is that actually this is a really ingenious feature of the Tesla, because Elon Musk is, you know, he is someone who cares very much about the future and cares very much about where human civilization goes in the future. Right. So what he's decided to do is kind of he's reimagined the car.

The car is not just a vehicle to get from A to B or to get stuck in a tunnel to die in. You can also grow stuff there too. Right. It's an eco. It's a food computer. The Tesla ecosystem. It's, I was going to say it's like, it's verse school farming, but I don't think it's quite

fair. Every life that Tesla takes by being a terrible car that's poorly designed and often driven through very, let's say, fire, pro-tardant tunnels, it is now creating new life. It's trying to, Elon Musk is balancing out the equation. I went to the hospital. They told me I'm pro-tardant. Well, he's creating like, you know, he's been termed in creating these new ecosystems. He's creating humans that will be resilient for new environments.

So actually in many ways. Oh, sure. I mean, think about it this way. The way we discovered penicillin, we're going to find the cure for all diseases in this Tesla. So Jaya Bolsonaro needs to get in this Tesla, actually, because it's going to miraculously cure him. He'll be healed.

We would create a sort of like super bug that would cancel out all disease. All you eco activists who complain about the pollution of cars and want to abolish them and replace them all with rickety buses, don't understand, but the future is actually having farms inside your car. So you can be on. Get into your Tesla. It drives you autonomously to the office and for breakfast, you just scrape a big slice of mold off of acidity.

Elon Musk did say he was going to solve world hunger in one year. He didn't specify how, and I think turning every single Tesla into a rolling mushroom farm is going to go quite some ways. Every seat in this Turkish Tesla is technically a met say course. Okay. We're not going to top that one. You got Turkish Ferrari and then you've got Turkish Tesla. We're not we're not talking that one.

I'm actually hearing a rumor that Elon Musk has had to call in the British Landlords Association to come up to this guy and look in his Tesla and go, he's been drying clothes in there. That's right. Why is every seat of my Tesla painted over with a thick coat of gloss white? And this is Nate, you can leave this producer's note in. Can you please play the opening stinger of a little song called Radar Van? Who's that one by?

It's by this really popular synth pop band from the 80s. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They've sung in English. They didn't really speak it themselves. Anyway, I'm sure you could find the opening stinger because the next thing I want to talk about is finally, the police in Britain look are going to go after the most dangerous

criminals in the country. They are finally actually going to take on some kind of a civil defense role after spending many years as a bloated, let's say, disciplinary arm of capital. They're going to arrest a Romanian tiktoker in a sort of tit-for-tat. No, no, no, no, much. A spy swap on the tarmac at Heathrow Airport, Andrew Tate, exchanging a sort of knowing look as he walks past his Romanian equivalent. So, marching them across like that scene in Dine of the Day.

Andrew Tate in the sort of mind prison from Dine of the Day, he's getting his dick stung by scorpions. Well, we can only hope. However, no, what has happened is police are planning on, this is a big sort of press release that got sort of splashed, they're planning on visiting more than upwards of 1,000 of Britain's homes and they are in order to crack down on the thousand that are left. The thousand, the Britain 2023, there are 1,000 homes left and one man from the Southeast owns all of them.

Yeah, and the entire economy is structured and making Dave happy. No, no, so the police are going to visit Britain's remaining thousand homes where, apparently, people have been using modded fire sticks to commit the ultimate crime of enjoying the worst, enjoying the football. No. Some modded fire sticks, the opening of 2001. He's fucking bad slags. Yeah, yes, that's right.

Modded fire sticks, gov. So. They're watching the Barclays Premier League without the correct rights. That's actually you. That's me sick. That is what's happening. They're worse than nonces. I mean, they do do this occasionally.

And what I've always found really funny about this is because Britain like barely sort of like has a centralized police for anything, all of this is run through City of London police. This is like one of the things they do is they're like police intellectual property crime unit. And so you'll end up with some, you know, lock up in Manchester getting soared open by City of London police on a day out. Like getting to use the big sort of like door knocking in RAM for the only time in their

entire careers. And I really appreciate giving them that opportunity. It's like a school, like, you know, a school. Yeah, that had to go out the big RAM that had Nick Leeson dopped on the side of it. So what has happened is they are, they have identified customers from a huge database in a major ongoing criminal investigation and will knock on the doors of people to warn them. You're just going to get like a knock on the door from, from like to say, it's like you

don't, you don't have to let us in, but please stop illegally streaming the phone. I spoke with a gentleman. I did both thumbs inserted in my stab verse, which point introduced me to a lady who also lived at the premises and they had been watching television of a broad castler nature. The only thing that can make this more British police is if they give this a like a really, like a, a vein glorious name and on the press release, it's like as part of operation condor operation telemac. Yes.

Yeah. Operation condor throwing a bunch of sports streamers out of hell. Operation telemacros is when you wait for your dad to come home. So there have been like lots of sort of like stories about, oh, you know, if your court kind of court legally streaming or downloading stuff, like the police will sort of come and like arrest. You know, I remember like when I don't know Milo about you, it has a name. It's called operation raider, but it's not a raider who say, please continue.

Operate raider raider vans, raider vines. That's where I thought you were going to find raider vines or seven second videos of you knocking on someone's door. That's right. Well, I was going to say, so like from what I remember, like there have been so many occasions where the like, you know, you have like news stories and like British police saying, but yeah, if we catch you legally downloading stuff, then we are going to like, you know, you could get into a lot of trouble.

You could get fined like a million pounds for downloading like some fucking bad Eddie Murphy movie from like 2003. And I remember one time, so I was very much, you know, I like to Kazar stuff and obviously because it was me. I Kazar'd mostly like Yu-Gi-Oh, Japanese Yu-Gi-Oh and saying, are you sure, are you sure about saying this? I am willing to be arrested by City of London Police for downloading unembraged, but non-dubbed Yu-Gi-Oh.

I'm willing to be a political prisoner for the right to watch undubbed anime. But no, there was like, so I actually got really scared about this at one point. And I remember like, when I downloaded some episodes and then, you know, I heard this police car outside of my house and like this police officer is like walking to a house. And I'm like, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck. I mean, this is me. I'm going to get, I'm going to be like arrested for watching Yu-Gi-Oh. Did you grab your Yu-Gi-Oh deck?

So, so like the police officer rings the bell and because this is like, I think I was just me and my grandma in the house. So I opened the door and I was just so terrified and like the police officer is your, is your mom and dad here? It's like, no. It's like, wait for your dad to come home. And then he goes like, oh, I've just got some questions about something happening on this road.

And I was like, okay, I'll stop downloading. I'll stop downloading. I promise. And he just sort of looks at me and he's like, what? You were scared straight? No, no, we were us. And what it turned out to be was that some people had graffitied, someone had graffitied like a telephone pole, like just down the road.

Priority number one for like the Bexley safer neighborhood team is finding out who drew this dick on the, on the telegram. I've been like this graffiti, like, they just graffitied like a dick on the, on the telegram. And this police officer was trying to figure out whether anyone had had any. It was a, it was a graffito of a phallic nature, I intercourse with a gentleman of a juvenile persuasion. You, I think, yes, this is, this is hauntology.

There aren't enough cops anymore to engage in this kind of low level graffiti policing. Now, unless you're being murdered, they're not coming. And even then, they probably aren't coming. Yeah. They're the opposite of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think you might be the most easily interrogated person in the world. I get, look, I get very dumb about stuff. So genuinely, I sort of feel like if I was properly interrogated, I would just crack.

Not like, not because like, not, not, not because like I'm a scab or like I'm someone who like want, you know, I would want to, it's just, I just sort of get scared very easily by people who sort of like my defense. I was very frightened. Are a little bit aggressive towards me. Yeah. So myself and PC shopper's work mounted a sting operation in the course of which we posed as a season five of criminal minds and waited for an unexpected user to download

us, at which point we sprang forth from the gentleman's computer and engaged him in discourse. We pay for criminal minds. I'm phony Ellen White. I know I paid the invoice. So I'll say one more thing about this. Do you think it's under your name is law, sir? Given the contravention of which you are apparently guilty, unless his middle name was breaking the.

Yeah. No. So what I find very amusing about this is the morning, not morning, the British police is not that number one, the low stakes nature, but high profile sort of trumpeting of what this is is obviously very amusing to me. But what's much funnier is just looking that the organization that is sort of behind all of this is an outfit called fact, the Federation against copyright theft. They're the people that made the ads.

You wouldn't download a handbag. That's them. Yeah. They're behind operation. Yeah. Oh, they're still going. All of us, all of us will remember a difference of copyright warning before DVDs, like don't let the pirates brand you with them or like piracy funds, terrorism, just all non no-skips

all bangers. Yes. The fact. I'm glad. They still are saying that rather than saying that piracy funds terrorism, they're now saying that piracy funds serious organized crime. And if they know their audience is somewhere in Beirut, a Hezbollah guy, like gets a little like email.

And it's like to the credit of one episode of bone. Again, the mechanism by which this happens is unclear. Mashallah. They're watching the RC. And they do. We will soon destroy the state of Israel. They do list. They do list two individuals who were sentenced to prison for watching unauthorized streams.

But they, of course, neglect to also mention that those individuals were making millions of dollars at the center of an organization selling the cracked fire sticks and that the judge basically said, well, I guess you also did commit this crime, which I suppose we'll prosecute you for as well. You know, you know what? This has made me think of that. So my friend, my friend, Titus, who occasionally will just send me a really good tidbit. And he was reading some like tech news while while he was at work and I was talking about

how this is a couple of months ago, the US Justice Department had wound up a huge catalytic converter theft ring that was like five or six ring leaders who had each made millions of dollars, basically like collating all these stolen catalytic converters and fencing them on, selling them abroad, whatever. And then he was looking through the list of the indictments. He's one of the guys and he's like, looking at the name and he's like, that guy's got to be Lithuanian, like 100% Titus is Lithuanian. So then he looks the guy up on Facebook and the guy's profile picture on Facebook is him

standing in front of like a mountain of catalytic convert. This is like utterly perfect. I've got another list of some of the films that Fact has made. Knock off Nigel. I remember this. Yes. One of them includes one called Knock Off Nigel. Maybe this is a Britonology actually.

It's a British porn film from the 70s. Knock Off Nigel is similar to Knock Down Ginger. So Nigel buys unlicensed DVDs, illegally downloads films and then is accompanied by a derisive song. He's a knock off Nigel. And as a result of his wrongdoings, Nigel is left despised by his peers. They really were trying to like sort of make bullying happen top down. And the British public, a group of people who love bullying more than anything, we didn't

go for it. Don't tell us how to bully. That never made it into like, yeah, exactly. It never made it into like playgrounds or anything. It never made it into like an idiom. It's just, it's just like a sad, failed yard campaign. Right. He's just pulled up another one.

I think that's an achievement. You can't hide. Which doesn't even make sense. That's the thing, right? The thing to remember, the thing that I found so funny about fact is that like, this is the global organization that is like designed to stifle everything to do. All of the great things about like owning your own media that's been made like incredibly difficult now is, you know, they can just fuck with the movies that you like.

Yeah. Right. Also, if you want to watch the film Casino, good luck. It's not on any streaming service. Right. All these things, right? It's nice to have your... Yeah.

PC Shufflesworth is currently disguised herself as Robert De Niro. Yeah. He's inserted herself into the cover of the film Casino. Yeah. As soon as you start watching, she's like straying down the rest. Why does Robert De Niro have his thumbs in his stab vest? Oh, no. Well, sir, you've gambled and lost.

So, so, but what I find amusing is that fact is British. They're the global organization, but it's all just dour British retired cops whose whole thing is just basically trying to ruin people's good time. Boy, stop it. However, recently, why would they leave this to us? Like this is a like multi-billion, maybe trillion, even dollar industry and they just handed it to... Well, I mean, grotesquely responsible.

The funny thing is the MPA basically stopped at once like the nature because they were set up in the 80s when like home recording and stuff first became a thing and they were just set up by the Premier League and Virgin and the big MPA studios and stuff. And they were set and they're the very, very sort of pugnacious and aggressive organization. That's like their reputation. And you know, they've recently, however, according to some reports that I've seen, like I don't think they're getting their MPA funding anymore because they're like, okay, yeah, well, like the nature of piracy is now changed.

So I'm wondering if this is also just like knocking on the doors of a thousand people in like the West Midlands just confused guys watching the football in order to say to the MPA, no, please take us back. We can still be current. We can change. Preserving their phony baloney jobs. Yeah. Fair enough.

It's so good. I love it. I love this country. It's so normal. I mean, we do have the world's best police in the sense that they are the world's most ineffectual police. And since the police are bad, this makes our police the best. That's right.

The British police are so little of a threat to anyone. They're the standards of police because they're so incompetent and so undefunded. Yeah. It's like, it's like any time they get together to try to really do something like the Sarah Everard vigil or whatever, they can really do some damage, but most of the time they are hamstrung by being terrible. Really takes it out of them too. They have to like lie down for a bit after that sense of more like racist tags.

Oh, they love doing that. It's their favorite thing to do. Punishing schedule of incriminating myself on WhatsApp. It's like them and Sam Bankman freed who just launched a sub stack of like more self incrimination basically. Yeah. You look at any British cop's phone, sort of like 70 to 80% chance they'll be in a WhatsApp group called like racist jokes.

They'll be the name of it and like 90% of... I agree with the guy I pulled my cow from. Some of the... I genuinely believe that like almost all of the like operational planning of British law enforcement happens in racist memes and then they're also in another group chat that's called like Baz and that's where they do the racist jokes. Yeah. It's this...

Well, you know what? This is a gamekeeper turned poacher. They know how to evade surveillance. We do the planning in the racist chat and the racism in the planning chat. We know there's no surveillance. We're the ones who supposed to be doing it. So I want to move on a little bit as well. This is one more thing before we get to Green Seal, which is the...

I'm just... I'm ringing a big bell. The old tech hype cycle is dead. The new one is not struggling to be born. It is absolutely getting ushered out of the birth canal. There's got an epidural. Everyone's very excited about it. I'll share that with the first one.

Please, come on. Coinbase is doing... Beckoning. Another round... Sponsored by Asha. Coinbase is doing another round of layoffs. It's down to... When we did the Coinbase episode, do we remember what the stock was that day?

You didn't say there was going to be a test. It feels like we've been getting these updates faster and faster, so it must be pretty precipitous. So what's happened is Coinbase has done another round of layoffs and they've stopped doing all of their high-cost, low-return projects, which I personally wouldn't have started. But maybe that's why I'm not a billionaire. But they're letting another 950 jobs go, and this is from... This is particularly brutal. I'm really stretching the meaning of the word jobs there.

How about this? Another 950 occupations. People were occupied just thinking like, hey, what if we could make it so that you could pay for a doughnut in under 10 minutes? We're doing some changes, and when we're done, it's going to be a lot better. It's going to be better than maybe ever. It's going to be a fast doughnut purchase. Now, this is a particularly, I'd say, excoriating quote from an analyst quoted by the FT.

Well, this creates a near-term filler for Coinbase's dwindling operating leverage. It does not fix the number one problem, deteriorating volumes amid retail crypto trading fatigue, i.e., people no longer believe they can get rich doing it, and so no one's bothering. That is to say... Yeah, it's done. It's over. Read between the lines. That's what an analyst writes when they're like, it's over.

It's so over. It's super over. That's in no small part because, ultimately, Coinbase crypto, everything involved in it is one of the most prosyclical industries that there is, and prosyclical just means like when the rest of the economy is up, when interest rates are low, and so on and so on, it is sort of up proportionally to that, and that's because for reasons... It only works when money is free, and now money isn't free anymore, and so it's over. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.

At a very high level, yes, that's basically what we're talking about, right? However, this has been, because no nature reports a vacuum, this has very, very neatly... This gap has been filled by AI, specifically AI as represented by ChatGPT, which I wanted to talk about one more time, or not one more time, we're going to talk about it probably a lot, probably quite a bit actually over the next year, and this was catalyzed by something that I've been expecting, and then saw has now happened, which is that we talked about this in the episode of James Vincent, which was the sort of very large cash infusion by Microsoft into OpenAI in order to support the ChatGPT tool and incorporate it into other

things. So this is the $30 billion valuation that OpenAI now has, so Microsoft is injecting $10 billion into it, and they're doing this, I won't sort of spend too much time talking about the deal structure, because frankly, it's interesting in theory, but not really to us, but suffice to say that they have a huge claim on a lot of OpenAI's actual revenues until the investment gets paid back, and right now ChatGPT doesn't have a way to monetize, but Microsoft is very, very good, historically they're very good at this, at identifying whatever is going to become essential for the jobs of the future, and then monopolizing

it as much as they can. That's what they did with Windows, PCs, that's what they did with software bundling. That's what Bill Gates is basically just a kind of automaton that does that. That's how to understand this. That and also some other things that stretch out in various locations, some other stuff that's stressed out. He leads a very stressful life. The man leads a stressful life.

That's why he has to have a very non-stressful haircut that's easy to maintain. That's right, and a little bit, I think, what Microsoft is doing with the OpenAI thing as well. I've talked to some people who also support this theory as they're doing a bit of a soft bank where they've picked their winner because they have decided, they've understood that this kind of large language model AI is going to be integral to the future of work. If you remember what we said in the episodes about it, it doesn't mean it's going to do the job better.

It doesn't even mean it's going to do the job minimally well. It just means that it's going to be a useful tool for people that own companies and people that are responsible for paying wages for capital and so on to further take control of break up and de-skill one of the main kinds of job that there is now, which is sort of making notes. Email jumps. Yeah, exactly. So, bearing all that in mind.

They're going to replace podcast. Oh, God. So just bear all that in mind. What Microsoft has done is they've picked their winner of what they see as the next cycle and they are just defending it with huge amounts of cash. This is what soft bank did. It's just that soft bank is run by a lunatic. They picked winners in industry.

It's sort of like they're bolstering it against the economy. The economy that is being... It's doing the cyclical thing again. It's cycling in the bad way and so Microsoft is like, no, we're not going to let you take our beautiful racist chat box. It's also the other thing is that if you think a lot of other people are going to enter into the industry, you can basically buy your way into always being at the top table by either being first or being richest and Microsoft is ensuring that ChatGPT is doing both.

And this is beyond... Wow. That sounds smart. I mean, good for them, I guess. Exactly. It's going to make everyone's lives worse, appreciably, because now instead of having your email job, you're going to be replaced by a racist clicky. Yeah, this is an unfortunate term for trash future because normally we talk about companies

that are evil but incompetent and Microsoft is a company which is evil but very competent. That's right. And so I think that what it's worth talking about, the reason I bring up Coinbase as a kind of foil to open up and ChatGPT is that it's worth thinking about this in terms of the business cycle itself. And so if we're in, for example, if you're in a tightening cycle that makes stuff like crypto worthless, the last time this happened, and this is the examples I always come back to are McDonald's and Uber.

They defined quite a bit of a lot of people's experience of work and they're two good examples. And I always come back to the idea that when jobs in a recession get damaged, the scar tissue stays. Stuff that gets automated, stuff that gets casualized, stays casualized, stays automated. And so in McDonald's, when they decided to have automated customers input their own orders in those kiosks, they don't have to fire everyone. There are still people who interact with the customers, but they don't have to have as many people per store.

Basically, their overall wage bill gets changed. Just enough to get a chair thrown at them and deflect it. Yeah, it's British McDonald's. Bare minimum. You still got to have the scary McDonald's bouncer on a Saturday night in Derby. So long as you have a greater capability to restrain people than the average shift of British police, that's the minimum staffing level for a McDonald's. And so what happened, I mean, these comparisons aren't tidy, right?

Uber, in the one sense, was counter cyclical because it was a huge, it was counter cyclical in one sense because it was a gigantic hit to the wage bill of sort of the taxi industry in general, but it was structured in such a way that it was pro cyclical because it was basically an expanding, it was just this big expanding balance sheet didn't make a profit. And it made the discourse much worse because it allowed people to suck off Travis Kalanick and like a sort of, this is a disruptor sort of way and provided us with like a shitload of content.

So thank you to Uber for that. But anyway, all of this is to say, right, that if the last, that we can kind of see now elements of the hype cycle in the economy that is going to emerge because the economic environment has now been aligned with the thing that it's going to believe produces the future and the danger of Facebook, they did, they did all of this shit for the metaverse and then the economy just went, no, instead of that racist chatbot, they didn't have the money for legs, you know, that's the problem. They faked legs and the market lost trust in them.

It's so funny that they faked the legs. And so, you know, you, you, we've seen sort of various efforts to invent the future happen. It's just there was all of those efforts to invent the future weren't really reducing a wage bill that much. They weren't really, they weren't really automating a lot of actual meaningful work. Sure, the metaverse might reduce your like, your office leasing bill, but is that really, especially an email job? So the opposite of what Cap as it wants to do.

Well, it's like on, it seems like on a very basic level, it's like the metaverse still requires people, right? Like to function, it needs people. It doesn't need people in the same place. It doesn't need people like in kind of office environments and like all the sort of complicated, so even complicated. It's like, you know, all the things you need to do actually to maintain an office space and what the kind of chat, the chat GPT era and even just like the AI automation era seems

to imply is that like the future of innovation is really going to be, how can you do stuff with less people or fewer people rather? Yeah. In fact, I, I grabbed an interesting, so I also, I subscribe to all of Arc's newsletters. Again, the things I do for you people, Arc, to remind you is... This newsletter's come in two by two every week. Arc, to remind you is the thematic, exchange-traded fund run by Kathy Wood, who believes that God told her to allocate capital to disruptive technology companies.

Yeah. She's kind of like a Mormon investor. It's so grim that we've gotten to the point of doing this show that's like, yeah, yeah, we all know the insane theocracy hedge fund. We know about that. They recently had a report on tomorrow's trends and also actually by the newsletter that came out just after that had a really interesting thing on how they calculate profitability, which I think is worth mentioning in a sec.

So it says, while the U.S. labor force has grown consistently from 12 million in 1870 to 150 million in 2021, the number of labor hours per employee has declined at a combat annual rate of 0.37% per year, thanks to technologically-enabled innovation. If he wants to work anymore. Well, it's that thanks, well, they have a more optimistic view, right? So they say that thanks to technologically-enabled innovation, labor is producing more while working less. In the early 1900s, Ford's pathbreaking concept of a Jewish conspiracy that control...

Oh, sorry. I misread that. Ford's pathbreaking concept of an assembly line accelerated the annual decline in working hours per employee more than fourfold to 1.39% per year until the Great Depression World War II arrested it as shown in the second chart below. And quality of life went up hugely, which is, you know, obviously we're primed to replicate that, given that we have sort of comparable rates of engagement with things like unions, right?

Again, I mean, obviously what is left unsaid in ARC is where those extra profits from working hours go and so on and so on, because of course, they're A, they don't care, and B, they're incentivized to obfuscate it. But it's interesting to see that they're making the same comparison. So they say this year, generative AI breakthroughs such as ChatGBT and Dalai II catalyze another period of accelerated declines in working hours per employee. And usually I think ARC is full of shit. But in this case, again, I actually do think they are kind of onto something just much

in the same way that those declines in working hours per employee only produce better outcomes in the case of like very strong union presidents, for example, in the case of those workers being a political force in a way that they're not now, that, you know, I think what I'm reading the same thing and sort of agreeing with them, I'm just doing it in a scary voice, basically, as opposed to a big thumbs up. I mean, like, I think we've spoken about this before that, like, there are obvious labor-saving applications of AI. There's a, you know, if you've ever had an email's job, you'll know how many fucking

emails you have to write, where the semantic content is you could essentially convey that in two words and telling a computer to go and do that for you would save everyone involved a lot of time. And it's just saying that again, in a scary voice, what if the sort of the fruits of that aren't going to you working less and relaxing more, but instead going to now you have six people's jobs? Yeah. And also, you know, that guy that owns the thousand houses, 50 of them he's gotten rid

of, but we haven't, there are no more new ones. And so this is, and this is, this is the thing, this is why I think about this, right? It is through a partnership with an organization like Microsoft, that's like the model, the potential of open AI and possibly the threat to livelihoods. That's how it scales, right? And that is now happening. It's also annoying that it's happening through Microsoft because of course all of this will have to be branded as Microsoft Clippy from Microsoft Office.

You know, I'd be less mad if they made it Clippy. They were like, look, Bill says that Clippy has to be the face of the AI. We're replacing Bing with Clippy. It looks like you're trying to illegally download Yu-Gi-Oh! We've called, we've called like this retired police detective from from fact to come and kick you in the nads. Oh, it's, it's, it's that show new tricks with Dennis Waterman, but they're all copyright cops now.

So, I mean, and there are some people, you know, who are saying, oh, all this AI stuff, it's all hype, it's like crypto, there's nothing there. All of it is garbage. Look how I can trick the chat bot. It's like, yeah, maybe now. So the thing is, you have to remember crypto didn't allow capital to de-skill labor. Crypto allowed capital to expand through inflation. Crypto was a way to capture things like just capture value through low rates.

It was a great way to swindle, but it was a great way for guys you went to high school with to buy a Kamaro. It was that's exactly what it was. It was a, it was a wonderful three card trick, a great way to swindle, but it used to have to join the army to do that. And there was, and there were some ways, right, that crypto was used to exploit labor. I think Axie Infinity is a great one, but that was such an edge case of the overall ecosystem.

This was the thing. It was sort of like crypto sort of seemed a bit too convoluted and a bit too complicated to sort of like integrate into, like for companies to sort of like integrate into existing systems, right? Also, I think there was, there was really no mechanism by which it could be used socially. Like there was no social relationship. It's just an inefficient way of doing a bank transfer. Yeah.

There was the social relationship that crypto represented was, in my view, a kind of a sort of almost a value fetishism where it was just sort of abstract value and nothing else. And the social relation that AI enables is one that is between labor and capital. It's one that's between bosses and workers. And that's why I think that to just imagine that this is all hype. It's like crypto. There's nothing there. It's all bullshit.

And that people with jobs, there are a lot of people with a lot of jobs now who should start thinking like you're a New York taxi driver and it's 2008. I don't want to be a downer, but hey, whoa. Yeah. And it's not, I think I don't. How to send always fucking email. It doesn't need to do your computer can do this. Remember, it doesn't need to do your job better than you.

It just needs to do it well enough to take over or it just needs to take part of your job away from you. Exactly. The answer is, like the upshot of this is that not necessarily that you will lose your job exactly, it may be more that you end up doing your job in a more precarious way and you end up doing more people's jobs at once, if that makes sense. Yeah, exactly. It's to which the only tonic is ruthless sluddism and absolute sort of like union-based solidarity.

I was also going to add that even if the AI is not particularly efficient at replacing a job and you still need people to either manage the AI or work with the AI, the presence of it being there is enough to sort of be destabilizing, right? To reserve army of capitals. Because it's very much a sad thing about, well, this AI sort of took a quarter to half your job anyway. You're very lucky to still be here, but eventually AI innovation will kind of mean that you'll be replaceable regardless.

So like you better kind of continue working, you better not think about unionizing, otherwise, you know. Try to unionize with the AI. Clippy's not interested. Right, exactly. Clippy realizes this job, this workplace is a family. I think the thing to remember, right, is that as we always say, but we don't usually say this in reference to when people say that some technology in and of itself is going

to produce some kind of positive social change, is that the way to understand technology is not just by the operations of its nuts and bolts or what subroutines it has or whatever, rather, by the social relationships that encourages and enables. And and so, you know, happily, though, however this shakes out, your own labor is still going to be the like determinant factor in like how society gets organized and your ability to organize and control and perhaps withhold that labor is what's going to make the difference. Even if that labor is I have to craft a bunch of prompts for an AI to write an article instead of I have to do it myself.

Yeah, for example, you know, Yu-Gi-Oh! in and of itself is the tool, but it depends who that tool is in the hands of. And, you know, like, for example, when Yu-Gi-Oh! is being used to fund Hezbollah, then it's good. So if you're saying I'm a professional, I'm a white collar professional, I have an email job, I don't need to unionize, but other people should unionize, fucking unionize. Do it sooner rather than later. This is why it's so timely that like a lot of like journalists have been successfully

unionizing their publications, their newsrooms, whatever, is because this is going to be one of the things that it comes for first. This is like an easy get because there's, as we know, a lot of journalism that is sort of written to good enough, standard, pumped out the door and quickly forgotten. That's exactly the kind of thing that AI is going to be like targeted towards replacing. It will actually be interesting when, you know, like kind of like the, I would say the general trend of like unionizing more workplaces meets with the general trend of more jobs being total nonsense kind of collides in the middle.

Because up until now, the kind of jobs that have gone on strike have tended to be jobs where when they go on strike, people are like, oh, fuck, we really needed those guys. Whereas if all the marketers go on strike, I mean, by all means, please do. I'm, I am worried about what the consequence might be like. Oh, those guys, they weren't doing anything. Everything's fine. I just didn't get an email about my patrinus today. Wait, wait, those are, those are spammers.

I guess the point is that it's like, it makes a difference to their management. Right. If that's the beauty of organizing into like the international brotherhood of dipshits, local 1428 or whatever, I'll, I'll take in the village idiot for granted brotherhood will rise up. Someone has to jack off in a barrel in the town square. And it's going to be me, the jacking off. No, you have to join, you have to join an oath.

You have to do it. Actually, the, the, the oaths are our union are the oaths are actually unionized with a GMB weirdly. Good morning, Brynn. I'll miss emails from Lucy from orange PR. If she, if she unionizes, like all the emails, just being like, hey, we've opened up this, like this new club in London has opened up. It's like really fancy.

Do you want pictures of it? And when I email her being like, well, can I go see it? Can I go like have a drink there? And she's like, no, you can't, but you can have pictures of it to write for any publication that you are, that you're currently interested in. And then she leaves a smiley face afterwards. So yeah, I hope, I hope her unionization unionization is going to start doing work to rule.

They're not paying the smiley face at the end of the emailing, even annoying workers are workers. Yeah, exactly. Well, well, yeah. Yeah. Well, I was also just sort of thinking about the annoying orange, orange PR. I was kind of thinking about this the other day as well, where it was just kind of, you know, so, like so much of sort of bullshit economies and stuff as sort of

like the kind of, you know, the inflated value of these sort of like white collar email jobs, right? And, you know, I do kind of wonder whether there'll be a conflict in terms of like the sort of eagerness to automate or the eagerness to sort of like cut expenses and cut wages and cut jobs by using that. And then by extension, like, you know, the sort of number of white collar workers, you find themselves like losing jobs at like quite a rapid rate, right? And like, I wonder how that will sort of affect a much broader economy, which has

been so dependent on these like surging middle class jobs that have sort of been like very overvalued and overpaid for like, you know, for like over a decade. So are we saying that adult daycare is over? That's the thing. I think like, I think to be honest, I think there's sort of a, I think, what is, look, my opinion, not my tinfoil hat opinion, but rather my sort of very large, unfalsifiable opinion. My cling film hat opinion.

Yeah, let's say that. My cling film hat opinion is that with the expansion of lots of different free trade areas, mostly like the big one for like the America was like NAFTA, but also the accession of China into the WTO, is that the, you know, you're familiar with the elephant graph. We talked about it before, right? The elephant graph, for those of you who don't know, it's about... It's the graph that everyone tries to ignore.

Sort of. Kind of. It's the graph in the graph. Yeah. And so it's a graph and it's sort of, it is a sort of large hump and then a downslope and then another sort of swipe up. It looks like a kind of an S with a big bottom and a little top. It looks like when you try to draw boobs on your calculator, it doesn't quite work.

Sure. So, but that's the elephant graph. And what it shows is the distribution of wealth, or specifically the distribution of growth in wealth in the last sort of X years. And what it's supposed to show is that globalization at the expense of the sort of working in middle classes of the developed world has massively benefited everyone else. And so what it means is, oh yeah, look, someone making who used to make like

ten cents a day now makes a dollar a day. That means they've had a very large percentage growth in their incomes. Also, it means that the people who used to make ten thousand dollars a day now make a hundred thousand dollars a day. But by showing it as a percentage, they're able to make very small numbers and very large numbers look like one another. And I think what that graph shows to me is that there is a far, far less importance that much of the global economy now is structured on most people

except the very rich becoming largely similar to one another. So, declining, so living standards more or less coming to meet one another very close to the bottom. All to sort of preserve the sort of extremely high living standards of people at top, which means, right, that if the if the trend is going in that direction, then why do we need the adult daycare jobs? What purpose did the adult daycare jobs serve to that particular global economy?

Sort of to like generate TikToks. Yeah. And also to sort of say, like, if you have an email job, your job really isn't your email job, your job is to go shopping. But I mean, how long are how long really are people going to depend on you being sort of relatively mass affluent, right, and going shopping sort of once a week, when especially like your ability to do that has been degraded for the last 14 years anyway, right?

The that kind of wealth building is no longer really important. The kind of wealth building, the email job really is kind of a it's a phenomenon of sort of the I'd say the 90s to mid 2000s, right? And just because it had a very long hangover, but I thought that long hangover has been all about increasing precarity. It's been about proletarianization, creeping upwards, right? That's been the story. Why would it stop with email jobs?

There's no reason why why it would. And so, you know, this is just so long as it stops before podcasts. So long as I'm fine, I can still make jokes about that. No one can automate joke. Randall, I've had a visit from the British police for illegally downloading the movie Adult Daycare, which is a bad Serbian remake of Daddy Daycare with Eddie Murphy, which weirdly still stars Eddie Murphy. I was just a girl in it too.

Which is cool. He plays one of the kids. He's a toddler who never gets out of his chair. I'm in a chair. I can't move it. Why does he sound like Trump? Oh, there's two of the cars. This is what Steven Segal sounds like when he tries to speak Serbian.

So speaking of the lot of Oh, have you seen the launch video for Donald Trump's NFT collection? I weirdly, I haven't seen the video. I always send this today. It was so good. It's like, it's me, your favorite president, the best better than Lincoln. I mean, yeah, yeah, he's right. You know what?

I mean, you can't fault him for being wrong. He's like, oh, and these NFTs guys are very exclusive. They're ninety nine dollars. They're beautiful pieces of art. And then it's like it's like showing them in the background as he does. He's doing the like it's the it's the same like a dress overall video framing of the one where he's like, you can't do it. It's disgusting, but the NFTs are all like Trump is Superman,

like revealing the S or whatever. He's like, we're building it. We're building a community. I think you're going to like him. You're going to like him a lot. Well, in that case, NFTs stands for nah, fucking true. You should buy these now because they're going to go and they're going to be gone. Yeah, we're going to buy them all.

I think that's what happened. Look, we're expanding the whole page. NFTs. Yeah. At this moment, too, is just so awesome. I love like at the moment when they went when they're the bane business now is buying them for tax loss purposes. Well, you know why we have to buy them? It's because one of the if you buy one, you get entered into a prize draw

for a number of prizes, which are you can go. You can play on one of my beautiful golf courses and they are beautiful. You can also win a dinner with me. I'm not sure if that's a great prize, but that's one of the prizes. Can all five of us just go and one big one chair and just like have dinner with him as like and just talk to him like a Greek chorus. Each of us says one word and like in a sentence, trash feature, gestalt consciousness.

It's been a long time coming. So I also know how they're going to replace us. That's how they're going to like automate and like pair us down as we end up like sharing a consciousness together. We're going to all have to live in one head. So I want to talk about this arc profitability thing. And then we're going to go into the re I'm sorry at least one of us gets gendered as for it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's true.

Actually, it's a minimum of one highlander. There must be exactly one. Yeah, I would like out of fairness if we had to be in like a hot girl head and I'm happy and all of you are miserable. That would be like turnabout. I think I'd enjoy being a hot girl, at least for a bit. My look at your egg just crack a little bit. Someone someone I can't remember who it was like did a sort of image

transformation where it would be like what would Milo look like as a guy. And I did. And I do think it did make us feel something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So imagine Milo as a girl. No, I looked great better than ever. I want to talk. I want to ask Milo, do you imagine yourself as a girl? I want to talk.

Actually, you know what, I'll hold off on the arc profitability thing because we've already gone for a very long time and I really basically the desert is I'll say in short. I'll say I'll describe it in 30 seconds where basically they say they have this new method for calculating where if you use the usual method for calculating profitability, then only twenty seven point eight percent of arcs holdings are positive. And that's using EBIT one of the most like we don't want to give you that.

No, no, no, no, no, no. So they have is working for so they have a new they have a new way of calculating it where they say, look, we're going to raise plus seven. We're going to remove like these are like innovation heavy companies that are spending lots of money to acquire customers are going to be unprofitable. So if you assume it just like because EBITDA, right, it removes stuff

like depreciation, taxes, amortization, these things that like you say, OK, well, that doesn't really let you look at the financial health of the business. What ARC has basically said is what if we took we said we did EBITDA? Sure, but also removed research and development costs to acquire customers and then sell what if we just like yeah, all of those are Malagans. Yeah, yeah, we're doing a vibes based EBITDA. So it said what if we remove research and development, salaries in the form of stock and then sales and marketing activities,

including like spending money to acquire customers, including offer or bring your product cheaper than it is to grow market share. And if you take out all of that stuff, then actually eighty four point nine percent are profitable. Yeah, if you only look at this eighty four percent still after you've removed all the running costs. If you only look at this side of the house, the house is not on fire on average. Yeah, look, look, you think my stock's a fucking dog?

Who's a fucking dog now? Can I have changed the paradigm? So so this is dessert. It's dessert time. It's giving another long episode, I'm afraid, but that's why I'm having Riley's pettisserie, the battle of Sog Hall Fields. Colvin, what Lex Greensill did next? He's back, baby.

He's better than ever. Can I just say, by the way, that everywhere in England is named something like Sog Hall Fields? It sounds terrible. It's like a fucking bloodborne area. Nigel beyond a bumble. Things love that nature. Like, I can't believe I parked my Tesla in Sog Hall Fields

and now it's like become Faye. Don't want that. So where we go on by the way, this is how you get a moldy test. Before we go on, by the way, while he's doing this, this is from Reuters, which is that Credit Suisse is cutting 50 percent of its 2022 bonus pool, which is like enormous, because that's like most of bankers, like huge outsize incomes come from bonuses. As the Swiss bank presses on with efforts to revive its fortunes

after a series of scandals and heavy losses, including the Greensill scandal. So while all of that is happening, a bunch of like a bunch of bankers have basically just been told that I'm I'm afraid there'll be no champagne fight this year. Oh, no. Yeah. But we was looking forward to it, sir. Here in Zurich. On the East End, Zurich. We love the champagne fight.

It's what we look forward to every year, the most apart from the tour of the secret gold in the basement. So I wasn't supposed to mention that. The secret gold that we found. The imaginary secret gold that isn't really there. Stop asking about the gold. Who mentioned the gold? Not me. It was that urchin banker.

Oh, sorry, sir. I was just excited about the gold, too. I won't mention it again. I promise like a single gunshot rings out. Oh, tiny Tim. He was this far away from vesting. Everyone, please take out the burial tool from your Swiss army knife. So it's the tool that creates haunting soundscapes.

Hmm. That's right. Adam Curtis. So the the father knife, the corkscrew, the tool for getting stones out of horses, hooves, the tool for getting snitches out of banks. So this is from the financial review. The fallen Australian billionaire tried to buy 200 hectares of farmland near a village in northwest England. So the view from his home and his neighbor's home, Barnabas Borbleby,

wasn't spoiled. Barnabas, I remember Barnabas, Borbleby. Very fond of Barnabas. Yeah, Borbleby. This I'm cursing me the only one who remembers Barnabas Borbleby. Borbleby. It is so close to Barnabas Borbleby. You did this the first time, too.

Yeah, I know, and it's never, it's never going to stop. So, sorry. The second, I added the second, the third B. This is Borbley. Borbley. Borbley. Barnabas Borbley. Some how that's worse.

Salamore ass name. No, no, we've talked about Barnabas Borbley before. He owns this. Oh, sorry, I can't take you seriously while you're saying the word. Barnabas Borbley. We've talked about double B before. Double B. Which is...

Imagine him going through like any aspect of daily life. Imagine getting called at your GP, Mr. Borbley? It's quadruple B. There's so many Bs. Barnabas Borbley. So, if you recall, Lex Greensill tried to supply chain finance his neighbor's special needs school. That's his neighbor, Barnabas Borbley.

Yeah, the Borbley school for special needs. I'm sort of summarizing some stuff. I'm not reading exactly the article. I'm sort of summarizing up front so we have all the information. Barnabas Borbley's special school for people with speech impediments. Once I can say my name, they're free. Sort of a lot of Dickensian characters. Yeah.

So, Greensill. Oh, please, sir. I just want to go and work for Credit Suisse. I can't do it with this list. Let me get some of this information out. School for wayward boys. So, the project that he's doing, that he was sort of working with Borbley,

Barnabas Borbley on Barnabas Borbley's Bustle for Boys. It was a sustainable farming and reforestation project on Shotwick Park near the Northwest English Village of Soghal that's been his home base for two decades. Shotwick and Soghal. How is this country real? I've lived here my entire life. So, the journalist took a train up to Soghal

to go to the parish council meeting where apparently all the controversy around this project has been centered. You have no authority here, Barnabas Borbley. So, barely hours later, this is from their article, Greensill had learned that I was in town and I found myself in his Range Rover driving through the woods and looking at the pilot. Sorry, this is sort of like a Russian oligarch thing.

You go to the town, you know, an hour outside of Samara or whatever and they see you coming off the train and you end up going to a quarry where you have a conversation about exactly what you're going to publish. They're like, hey, do you reckon you can fit in this suitcase? Yeah. No, I'll publish anything you say. And looking at this pilot project,

he is set up with one of the local farmers. It's the first time he's talked to a journalist since his company went to administration. By evening, I was in the back row of a parish council meeting that had descended into utter chaos. The chairman was ousted in a coup organized by his deputy and many walked out in high-dudgeon. High-dudgeon was another neighboring village.

The deposed chairman dramatically tore up some papers. His deputy tried in vain to assert his newly assumed authority. So, question. Yes, please. Raising a sort of point of information here. What's the sort of population of this village? Because it feels like Lex Greensell used to do this for like the country.

Like David Cameron was his guy and he's now been reduced to a sort of Jackie Weaver level of intrigue. Well, if you extrapolate from the number of Barnabas Borblis they have in their constituency, which is one, that is so high. The orderly number. But presumably the overall population has got to be massive. Sociologists call that the B number.

The B squared. The Borbly number. The Borbly Boolean. To answer your question, Alice, in 2011 it was 3,009, but I think everyone was 90 and so maybe it's gone down. Yeah, the Borbly constant. So, so, him. I bought that as a paperbacker.

The seeming cause of all of this discord, the Shotwick Park project, whose instigator, Lex Greensell, sat with his now bearded, but totally impassive face as the mayhem unfolded around him. Freak. Freak, freak, freak, freak, freak. He's just thinking about who. He's gotten like a sort of a beard of sorrow,

you know, because like in a character, sort of like punished arc, right? Where they go out to like a small town in the country and like rebuild themselves. Maybe they grow beards and on recognizes them. He's fucking Jackie Daytona of Sorton Bogend or whatever. Was it Radovan Karazich who like fled justice and went and set himself up as a faith healer

in some small town somewhere? Faith and sex healer, yes. Sex healer? So. The Tom Jones B side. So. No, he would like fix your sex life using like massage and raking and shit.

Yeah, the problem is you're getting the pussy that stresses you out. Believe me, I've been very stressed in my life. I've done a lot of things which I won't go into. And now I only get pussy that relaxes me. What did Victor Patrick do in there? Radovan Karazich was Romanian. It's also in the Balkans, technically.

It raises so many questions. So, so, so, so. Green sill again, but also just sitting there and the sort of the chaos unfolding around him. And now the only place he can puppet master is like a 3000 person village. Yeah. Good, good.

Yes, dance puppets. So, how did it all come to this? So, Shawwick Park was in the grounds of a very long castle. The villagers always liked it because it was an easily accessible bit of green space. And more importantly, didn't have any houses on it which they hate the idea of. Yeah, no one should live here, singlet.

Now, this is important. The, I know, obviously I'm not a Yimbi, but also, you know, these people are very annoying. I'm not Barnabas Yimbi. Yeah. Not Barnabas Yimbi. So, it is owned by Chester Yurkin Yimbi. Yurkin, Yimbi, and Barnabas Borbley

have an exciting investment opportunity for you. That's all right. So, it's owned by Cheshire West and Chester Council. So, which has been leasing it to farmers who grow maize and sheep and raise sheep and stuff. And there's the parish council of the village. And so, all of these, and then there's Lex Greensill and Barnabas Borbley.

And all of these people are different pieces moving around the board. I hate it when you're the last to come, Monopoly, and you have to pick up Barnabas Borbley. Is everyone's taking the boat, the shoe, the car? I was thinking more of a chess vibe, like Bortleby to like a B4. So, in the early days, the parish council...

Bishop to Knight's Bortleby. Oh, the Bortleby Gap. Yeah. Now, you're adding a T that doesn't exist here. Yeah, he's Barnabas Borbley. So, so, so. Oh, the Borbley defense. In the early days, the parish council

was very keen on the idea. The typical story in Overcrowded England, this is reading the article again. I have your king in Borbley. Is that Greenland on the edge of villages tends to get sold off for housing development. But here was a billionaire with roots in the area who's willing to conserve their cherished hinterland

from that unwanted fate. Now, early days is very important. Now, again, I've spoken to some people who know about the situation. And Barnabas Borbley. This is what, well, Barnabas Borbley, I didn't talk to Barnabas Borbley. A shadowy, Borbley-shaped informant.

Yeah, yeah. My name is Borbley Throat. My name is Barnabas Borbley. I'm suspended from a Christmas tree. And I won't see your question. I'm rotating slowly. That's right. No, it's interesting though, right?

Because he's basically saying, I'm gonna buy this piece of land for millions of pounds, probably slightly over the odds, right? And I'm going to do fucking nothing with it. I'm just gonna buy it and sit on it. That's gonna be a huge injection of cash for the council, for the county council. And I'm also going to give the parish council

the group of busy bodies that sort of run the fets of the villages. Jacky weavers, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you're jacky weavers and stuff. The ones who are calling up about the dick spray paint on the thing. Exactly. Which, like, back to my story just for a second,

they were the people who called and that was why the police came to my door. Oh, that's who they were responding to. Well, it was a parish council, like parish councils. I feel like you need to do a Britonology about parish councils at some point. We've had a telephone communication from a Borbley gentleman.

So what happened, right? He says there was a Galkan Borbley drawn on the black pipe. PC Shufflesworth and PC Borbley. So I want to explain what happened here. It's not just, I mean, this is a very bit player. Getting, getting promotes at new Sergeant Borbley. Sergeant Borbley's Lonely Barnabas Band.

I'll let you, I'll let you all work this out between you for a while. No, it works with every rank in front of it. Inspector Borbley. The Borbley Hearts Club. Chief Inspector Borbley. Commissioner Borbley. Superintendent Borbley.

Oh, okay. Okay, I'm good. I'm focused. All right, Constable Borbley. Are we dialed in? Ooh. Yeah. Uh-huh.

We're not going to have any major Borbleys. Major Borbleys. Yeah, look, let's, we don't want this Borbley go over. Let's go to the next one. Listener, this is why you listen to this podcast and don't pretend otherwise. This is the stupidest reason we've ever gotten this derailed.

Why, fucking far? My ribs hurt, man. Look, the man has a very funny name. I mean, I want to ask him why he didn't change it. The parents, the parents in the hospital go, Mr. and Mrs. Borbley thinking, what shall we name our son? Dad's like immediately Barnabas.

I will, I will brook no question on this matter. It's just posh people stuff, right? Like, you know, I knew a guy at like uni who like, we're a very, very posh guy, army officer now, and his last name is Spunk. So like, I don't know what fucking rank he is, but like. Major Spunk. I think Major Spunk, Lieutenant Spunk.

It's just, it's just British posh people shit. My favorite double act was Spunk and Borbley. Fuck saying. So this is, are we, are we, I'm going to say his name a couple more times. So be advised. So, because what I was saying, right, is that in the early days, everyone was excited

because Chester West was going to get a big injection of money, basically for nothing. Right? Chester West is like the American Barnabas Borbley. See, see, see, see, Chester West and Cheshire. It's going to get a big injection of money for basically nothing. And then he also agreed that he was going to earmark

half a million pounds of it for the parish council so that they could have like satellite phones to call in graffiti. What does this fucking parish council need to do with half a million quid? Graffiti Robocop. Roboborbley. Get an Ed 209 to like air hole teenagers

who are walking around. Robonibus. Like they're going to be able to like do hot fuzz but like with nuclear weapons. Yeah, great. That's my only, or alternatively, maybe they'll just be like, yeah, we bought, we bought ourselves fur coats to beautify the village.

Now, of course, all this was going on, right? All these offers. It was actually the same meeting, right? Where he offered basically this amazing deal to them. He said, oh, by the way, by the way, this special needs school that also bills you, why don't we hook it up to my supply chain finance machine? Why don't we hook it up to my mother's farm?

And that's the, it was. He loves to do that. I'm not, no, I'm not saying anything other than just, it's interesting that those two conversations happened at the same time. Ahem. Ahem. So anyway, right?

You're not, you're not alleging any kind of like financial unborbularity. No, not at all. It's just, it's odd that this all happened at the same time. They certainly weren't doing any emboblement. Barnabas bribe will be. No, I specifically didn't say there was any Barnabas bribe will be, actually.

Inspection bribe, I'm sorry. So, how have we not done an Inspector Barnaby bit yet? Let's, let's, let's, let's, let's carry on. Let's carry on. This is already going so far over time. Mid summer baubles. What do you think this is? Well, there's your problem.

Come on, we gotta keep to a schedule. I mean, kind of now. Well, there's your baubles. As, as an added top after, basically, after Green's still collapsed, the Paris council withdrew their support for the project. You know why? I mean, I know you don't know why.

Because, because then they're not loyal. The sharks longer as well. They were like, sorry, we've just read this guy's name. We can no longer in good conscience. Well, what happened was they were like, okay, well, we listened to this podcast called Trash Future. Well, actually, we realized that there was one unwitting Australian accountant

who was sort of the blinch pin of this thing. Well, so what they were worried about was that if, if the Green's still was no longer going concerned, if he wasn't independently wealthy, then there was a chance he might build homes on the land as they withdrew their support for the deal. The worst possible scum to a sort of English rural council or a property developer.

The Borbley defense. Yeah. And so even seemingly innocuous details goes, the article such as Green's still's planning applications for a car park and a footpath came to be regarded by the Paris council as Trojan horses for houses. Oh, I can't have any houses here. What if people move in? This is like fucking alien versus predator.

The thing about the Trojan horse was that there were lots of people inside it. That's right. They loved using footpaths and car parks. The Trojan horse was actually against a number of building regs. It wasn't certified for that many inhabitants. Green's still himself, of course,

said actually what I'm doing with this place now is I want to use it to like do regenerative agriculture so I can try and find ways to restore the soil in my melon farm in Bundaberg. What I'm doing on that land is none of your business. You may hear whales and screams and all kinds of ungodly howls. And all I ask is that you do not set foot on my land.

Now say it again, Australian. Oh, you might hear whales and ungodly howls and all I ask is you don't set foot on my land, copper. This is a 12-foot-high electrified fence with all the razor wire pointing inwards. That's for the agriculture. That's for the agriculture. It's for the melons.

That's right. You don't want the melons escaping. Genetically modified melons. Certifying. So basically what happened was a number, the splits emerged in the parish council with the chairman believing that they'd done sufficient due diligence, they'd go ahead.

But a lot of the rank and file believing that people could move here. Young people, minorities. Again, so we know, we accept that Lex Greenfield has come down in the world, that he's gone from sort of manipulating bits of the British government at a central level to a parish council.

Are you going to tell me that he had a harder time doing that than fucking with the cabinet office? I'll say he got further in central government. Yes. I mean, this is the thing. We need to make central government more like a parish council, which is to say worse, filled with like

more insane petty thieves. Yeah, well, this is the thing about like the parish councils and just like local councils. Like, and I think parish councils in particular, which is that they're all just like fucking miserable, right? And they want you to be miserable as well. If they see you, like, if you live, like my parents live in the village.

You can drop me in a lamp post. They're going to come down. Yeah, well, yeah, they will come down and like try to arrest children and stuff. And it's like, they're just kind of like, out of all the, you know, out of all the sort of like local councils they do think the parish councils are by far the worst.

And in the case of like Lex Greensell, I think you need that like, you know, the people who will genuinely just be like, we don't trust you because you're foreign and also we just don't like you anyway. So we're going to like prevent you from doing. And if you do this thing, it might make you like a little bit happier

and that's why we really don't want you to do it. Someone's going to have to detain this child. That's what that means to me. It's getting back to my house for spanking. It's the average. I guess the thing is that like, even though we've talked about how the Tories take governing, I guess once you're in fucking Downing Street,

it weighs on you enough that you feel like, oh, someone ought to do something, even if it's the bare minimum. Whereas if you're in like a fucking parish council Zoom meeting, you feel no responsibility to anyone or anything other than your own insane selfish lusts. And that's the way we should do all government from now on, I guess.

But also, crucially, all of your insane prejudices and personal bugbears. So what happened was? Bugboblies. Accusations in all directions as councilors were branded as either being in Greensill's thrall or alternately pursuing an unfair vendetta against him. When he's through all like Renfield,

like he likes to spend one night on his game reserve. I mean, people in sort of like rural England would fully get the concept of vampire and Australian mixed up. I believe that firmly. So what they did was the parish council, in order to continue their support, agreed that they needed to have a covenant attached

to the sale, which would prevent any houses ever being built on the land ever. Yeah, you have to swear a blood oath. To never build a house. Fucking count Greensill. And so late last year, they demanded that the sale contract include this. And Greensill said,

there's this question in the village that because Greensill capital went bust, can I be trusted to do what I said? Because the Greensill said this to the journalist. It hurts that people would think that. Seriously, you're saying it hurts the people. You ran fucking Greensill and you're saying, oh, it hurts the people think that I would like.

I mean, I'm not the best out here anymore. And it's, but that's what's worrying people. And that's why I agreed to the covenant immediately after they asked for it. The final wording of the covenant, however, is in the hands of CWAC. And in December, a row broke out over what form it would take with the parish council believing

that it was not restrictive enough. And so, and at the same time, he wouldn't like give them that hit the like his firstborn son if he ever built a bar at home on this fucking field. And additionally, it became clear that legally that half a million pounds promised to the parish council could not actually materialize and there was no way to do it.

And so they felt very hoodwinked. What kind of like, what possible penalty would be harsh enough for these people? Like if he had, if he did betray them, if he did build homes in this area, what would they want to do? Well, they'd have to hire Van Helsing, but like the Australian version, like Van Helsing.

Oh, of course. You're like sticking out in the sun. We're gonna fucking pitchfork you out of your house, cunt. We're gonna come up there in a 1996 holding Commodore and we're gonna drag you out of your fucking mansion. It would have to be Kiwi Van Helsing because all Australians are vampires. Yeah.

So it'd have to be like the next thing, Vin Helsing. Also, because Van Helsing was dead. Van Helsing doing a hacker outside. Yeah. So, so, so, so, so, so. A group of counsellors feeling they'd been misled called an emergency meeting. And apparently, and this is from the article,

emails, messages, and phone calls rapidly became intemperate. Intemperate? Of course. Oh no. And this is when the chairman was ousted. Green still- Soon to an unborbulous term. This is very funny.

This is what's happening. Green still tried to step in himself, but after trying to talk to the chairman directly, the chairman panicked and called the police to report Green still for harassment. Harassment. Yeah, but Green still was heard about bragging about having an original Dean Koontz in his back garden.

But yeah, but prompted the chair just because- Speaking to an Australian man on the phone for the first time and being so terrified, I call fucking MI5. He called me a cunt. The chairman told the meeting on Monday that he did this because he recognized it was improper for him in Green still to hold a private meeting. And he called the police to turn the, basically,

to simply draw a boundary around their interactions. But so- So he called the cop on himself? So he called, so basically, I think what happened is here, right, is that he had a private, a Green still called him, and then he was so worried about seeming improprietist that he then called the police for harassment so that he could say that he had no way wanted the call

because it's now legally provable that he did not want to receive a call from Green still. Yeah, he spoke with Constable Ball Barna baby. And I don't know, I'm not going to elaborate on that anymore. But, huh. I was actually only calling Lex Green still to get directions away from Lex Green still. This is your number, right?

I have to know not to call it. Now, some counselors accused others of being Green still's pocket and suspect Green still is pulling the strings behind the scenes. Others told the chairman that he was mentally unbalanced and not coping with his role. So basically, Green still moved to this town, dangled the prospect of like guaranteed no homes

on a bit of it, and then said, maybe I'll give you half a million pounds for your parish council. And all of a sudden these people start just tearing chunks out of each other. It's very- He's managed to create an anti-semitic conspiracy theory that's only about Australians.

But they're convinced of the Australian conspiracy theory. The Australians of vampires, the Australians are pulling all of the strings. We need to band together against the Australian. Big upside down octopus sort of clinging up on the bottom of the globe. That's right. But like, there have to be easier ways

to buy yourself some land, which you may or may not use to hunt the most dangerous game, right? But instead, he's just trying to do it allegedly and run into sort of the psychotic state of like all of rural England and particularly like land law in this country. Give these mugs a thong slap.

Send them on their way. That's right. So everything is out of hand here, one councilor lamented. As audience members yelled, you are a disgrace to the village at the coolleader. Oh no. Well, I'll give-

Well, all this was happening. Greensill was quoted as saying, I actually like the fact that they take everything very seriously about their obligations to protect the village, our village, that my neighbors are so passionate about what happens to the environment around them. And I share that passion.

I'm not mad. Please don't put in the paper that I got mad. I'm not thinking about how much fun I could be having hunting the most dangerous game, right? I actually just think it's because like so many of these people, like to take those kinds of risks, to do what he did, to do what he did with Greensill, to do what he did with Credit Suisse and his pledge,

to find his pledge- The JIT Psycho. You have to be like clinically- Dead-eyed. Yeah. Yeah, psych- You have to look at an audience of like 70 like non-agenarians,

just again, just tearing strips off each other. Calling each other just graces, organizing coos against one another, and then just turn to a journalist without moving your face at all. Just say, I admire their passion. I can't believe I've become embobbled in this. All right, all right.

We've gone for a very, another long episode. I'm going to try to keep a lid on these, but you know what? We were having too good of a time. So thank you very much for listening to this free episode of TF. There it is. We will see you on the Bartleby bonus episode.

There is a- There is a bonus- Boniface Bartleby Chronicles. Yeah, there is a- There is a bonus- Biss Bartleby episode coming out on Thursday. It's going to be about the rail strikes with Gareth Borble Dennis.

Gareth Dennis Blee, our rail correspondent. Two misses there, I think. Yeah, we'll get it. We'll get it. We'll get it by Monday when we record it. So we'll have- Have that affectionate nickname for Gareth Dennis on my desk by Thursday.

Yeah, yeah. By the time you're listening to this, we will have that nickname done and we'll have called him it. Or, more likely, we will have forgotten that we said we would do it. And then you're going to like add us about it and we're going to be like,

what the fuck are you talking about? Who the fuck is Bartlemus Borbleby? Who the fuck is Bartlemus Borbleby? Why are you talking to me? No, but thank you very much for listening. Don't forget, there's the bonus episode. Gareth Dennis, our theme song is, here we go by Jinsang.

It's my New Year's resolution to say that more often. You can find it on Spotify. Here we go, Borble Jinsang. We will have some exciting news for people with torsos who wear shirts very soon. We're also going to have... No, it's not possible. People of Deutschland!

Well, people of certain bits of Deutschland. Boblin, you leave the game off to change it. Yeah, that's right. So, are you in Berlin? Would you like to come to this show? Maybe we'll release a poll, so we know... It takes a barnabarn off the Borble show. Maybe we'll release a poll that says,

hey, would you come to this? And please only answer if you actually would, so we can plan a venue size. Maybe we'll do that. Maybe we'll forget. Find out soon. On the next episode of Borble Future. Bonne, bonne, borble, bonne, borble.

Bonne, bonne, borble, borble. Speed, borble. Bonne, borble, speed, borble. There we go. Goodbye, everyone. Is that all they killed George V with?