TRASHFUTURE - Pop! feat. @theemilyaccount

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

Algorithm jockey and financial wizard Emily (@theemilyaccount) talks about how the Tech Boom, enabled as it was by overly restrictive monetary and fiscal policy, is starting to come apart at the seams. Was it a bubble? Is it popping? Too early to say, but not too early to enjoy a little schadenfreude! We also explore the nature and role of ARKK, the actively managed ETF beloved by redditors, and hated by the rest of Wall Street for all the wrong reasons. Plus, Johannes Vonk and the Clogheads return with a new song recovered from the archives. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). 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)

Welcome to BBC Indiana. There's a long-standing tradition in British culture. An entire generation of people believe that the TV licensing authority can determine if you've paid your TV license or not using only a radar-equipped van. But how did that van come into existence? And can it really detect illegal TV reception? The science is clear. Emphatically no, you cannot.

But why did it lead to a profoundly bizarre moment in British music history? In order to learn more, we traveled to London and spoke with record producer and music executive Crispin Heismith, brother of famous British rock musician and Tory Peer, Sir Richard Heismith. So what actually is a TV license? Well, I know it sounds a bit crazy to you, Yanks, but what it basically is is a license you have to pay to watch television. It funds the BBC. But as far as I understand it, there's no real authority for TV licensing inspectors

to gain entry to someone's home in order to determine whether they have or have not paid their license. Well, it's very British. It basically functions on awkwardness. They have no power to enter your home or to make you tell them whether you've got a TV or not. All they're hoping is if they come and say, we know you haven't got a TV license and we think you've got a TV, you'll be embarrassed enough to pay up.

And so as far as I understand it, there was a song that was relatively popular in the mid-1980s exactly to this effect about this relationship between television watcher and TV license inspector. It's a crazy story. There were some people high up in the Thatcher government who thought in the mid-80s there weren't enough people paying their TV license. And they came up with this absolutely crackpot idea to get people to pay up, which was to commission a popular pop song encouraging people via the threat of the radar detector

van that you had to pay up. Now, the problem they had was finding a musician to do it. Was it that people didn't want to cooperate with the government or that they thought the idea was just too, I don't know, corny? Exactly. Yeah. No one would touch it with a fucking barge pole. And we're talking about people who are absolutely cane to the eyeballs on the finest Colombian

shit, but no one was touching the steaming turd that was the Thatcher government. They went to every band in the UK. I mean, they went to fucking culture club. No one would touch it. People 42 told them to go fuck themselves. So then what did they do? Well, they worked out that what they needed to do was get in some foreign ringers to scab for the British music industry.

So at the time, there happened to be a very popular Dutch synth pop band over in the Netherlands. And they thought, these fuckers don't speak English. They've got no idea. These guys, I'm shitting you not. Johannes von Kloeghets recorded this track at the time none of them spoke English. They learned the lyrics by rote. They had no idea they were singing about the TV licensing authority. It is my understanding that the Thatcher government told them that the song was about boot polish.

That band, Johannes von Kloeghets, have long since broken up. But by chance, Jaap Ten Hoot, their former bassist, happens to live in the United Kingdom and we spoke to him. So Jaap, what was it that drew you to this song? Yeah, it's a really fucking crazy story to be honest with you, because at the time, the Kloeghets were just getting popular. We couldn't believe the success that we were having across the world and in the UK in particular. We released a song, Honkbaulhoof the Clash, all about the bass ball.

We never knew it would be this popular. But then we get approached by the British government and we think, Jesus, this is big. Okay, they tell us what they want to make a song. They don't tell us really what the song is about. At the time, we don't really speak English that well. So they give us these lyrics. We have to learn them. We're singing something about Radar Van.

We don't know what the song is about. We have no idea at all. And we're just singing it and then suddenly it gets popular. And then we find out that this song is about the TV license. I don't understand what this is. We don't have this in the Netherlands. Why would you need a license for your television? What for?

What are you watching? Child pornography? I don't know. Excuse me? Oh, I should clarify. In the Netherlands, you do not need a TV license to watch child pornography. By which, I mean, not pornography with children in it. That would be disgusting.

I mean pornography for children, which is educational, because they have to learn. Unfortunately, owing to some technical difficulties, we were no longer able to continue the interview. However, to round out this segment, please enjoy the 1985 hit from Johannes von Kahn the clog heads, Radar Van. Excuse me? Do you need to check if you have a television? We're sitting in a radar van, we're on your streets, we're investigating if you watch TV, we'd like to ask some questions of you over tea, but you don't have to let us in.

We're on your case, we're on your case, if you don't pay, pay your TV license. We're on your case, we're on your case, if you watch the BBC, we'd like to ask some questions. We're an independent body, not the BBC, our records show no license for that big TV. It's shown up on our radar, don't you lie to me, but you don't have to let us in. We're on your case, we're on your case, if you don't pay, pay your TV license. We're on your case, we're on your case, if you watch the BBC, we'd like to ask some questions. We're from the TV licensing authority, technically you don't have to let us in, no. I want you to pay for your TV.

Do you think that all these shows just grow on trees? You gotta pay, you gotta pay for your TV. You gotta pay, you gotta pay. We're on your case, we're on your case. We're on your case, we're on your case. Please let us in. Hello and welcome back to this episode of Free TF, where... Free TF?

No, they haven't learned that. You didn't learn that. Listeners, if you heard that and it excited you, un-excite yourself. Yeah, purge that from the record. That's a taster of what you can get on the bonus screen. It has to be that, actually, people don't subscribe to the Patreon, don't even know that that's something we do on the bonus feed. It is, because you do it on the free feed like three out of five times. Yeah, because you forget which one you're doing.

Shit. Idiot. So, if anyone wants to replace Milo... Do not email us. Yes, that's right, do not get in contact. Do not ever email me or tweet me. It is myself, Riley, it is Milo, it is Alice. And joining us to help us with another edition of TF Macro, which we'll be doing in the middle of the show, it is Citadel's very own, Emily.

Emily, how's it going? How are you? Very, very well, thanks. Excited to get into some of this stuff today. What the hell is TF Macro? You've literally never explained that. You just started doing it. Yeah, you've just been saying it, but you've never actually said what you mean by it.

It's where we talk about the economy. Oh, is that what it is? Exactly. That's real macro. Yeah, absolutely. We are getting into the micro foundations of TF. Yeah, I was hoping it was going to be something a bit like Veltcro, but like a TF branded version. Yeah, TF Macro.

Shoes you can take off and on easily if you're a child. It's right onto your pubic hair. It's great. That's right. May use you for carrying cheese or a packet of polish. So, we have a few news items today. Then a startup. Then we're going to talk about the damn economy and then an article.

Another week of no UK Labour Party updates. No real policy. Not interested. Aware more has happened. None of is surprising. Okay. Instead, we're going to talk about what Riley has to say about it not being surprising, but I would like to agree with him and say that he could go further and say that it is completely unsurprising.

So, instead, what we're going to do is talk about something that is about as important and significant as anything the Labour Party does, which is Dr. Seuss is no longer being taught at woke universities. Finally got Dr. Seuss. I was just about to get my degree in advanced Seuss studies. He'd already hit the glass ceiling. You're never going to become Professor Seuss. You're stuck at Doctor.

Yeah, he's reader Seuss. They have to do him like this. Assistant lecturer Seuss. Emily, have you seen sort of the... Are you familiar with Dr. Seuss? Do you find that he comes up often at Citadel? Yeah, we're constantly talking to Dr. Seuss. Yeah, that's right.

I speak for the HFTs. Buy Green Eggs, sell ham. Yeah, that's right. It's very funny to me, though, that this is going to be a bit of a feature of the show. We're going to start selling Dr. Seuss NFTs on there. Yeah, so what it seems to be is that every sort of conservative trigger the lids talking head in America has decided to be like, actually, I love Dr. Seuss.

Yeah, that's right. I feel like it's been a while since we've seen something like that. We're going back to silly season, which is good, because we had actual insurrection for a while, and now we're back to this, which is very fun. I would argue this is more severe. Yeah, that's right. Mr. Potato Head was kind of like a little flavor of this,

and now we're into the meat. Now we're into, I am reading... Don't fucking dead name Potato Head on this podcast. That's right. The main consistency here is that it seems like the main conservative thing seems to be like, I'm going to show how much I love reading books for children and playing with toys for babies,

and it makes the liberals furious. There's two kinds of this outrage, right? There's like getting mad at something for children, or there's taking something that you own that works and throwing it in the trash, because my coffee machine company tweeted that Black Lives Matter, so I'm throwing the curry out of a fifth-story window.

Which is something a child would do. Yeah, absolutely. I have to defenestrate my coffee maker. Actually, I think this does infuriate the liberals because the liberals are obsessed with just different kinds of children's toys. There is definitely like, what I've realized is that whenever a conservative

gets furious about the woke left, there is a liberal somewhere doing exactly what they're imagining. Like, there is somewhere in America, there is a liberal mom who's like burning all of the Dr. Seuss books and like replacing them with like white privilege or whatever that fucking gumball is called.

The idea of what's going on is like, well, we're canceling Dr. Seuss shit. Alright, that's right. And the liberals love different things for children. They love Harry Potter, conservatives love Dr. Seuss. Tomato, tomato, pit mooks, potato. This is the dumbest front of our culture war yet. And I love it.

Are you sure that the next thing isn't the dumbest front of our culture war yet? I said yes. You say potato, I say do you want to put an X in that, let's call the whole thing off. Conservatives also outraged that they can no longer jacket to Lola Bunny. Again, in a children's movie.

Why are these people obsessed with products for children? I don't understand why the liberals want to get into my bedroom all of a sudden. I found absolutely every level of the Lola Bunny thing I found upset. First of all, the people were mad about it.

But primarily what got to me later was that A, that Lola Bunny was slightly horny looking in the first place. And B, that despite the fact that it was kind of ambiguously horny looking, they sort of made her less horny looking thereby admitting they deliberately made her horny looking

in the first place. The whole thing I'm just like, what the what the fuck is going on? It's been down here since Jessica Rabbit. And then the human pet guy said he'd fuck her. Did you see, apparently the post everyone was using about Lola Bunny, it was from an actual hentai.

They were like this is what they took from us and it was like a sexualized actual hentai. This is an actual example of misinformation in the media. And we need to like root out these sources of fake news. Did you see Snopes this week has just been like

yeah, no, we're just going to say that stuff is a mixture of true and false when it's true, but it embarrasses us. Yeah, Snopes here now basically Snopes is just a version of the society of the spectacle for people who desperately need working samples.

The website that you would go to when you were like in year 10 and you wanted to know whether or not it was true that one time a guy fucked a horse and the horse fucked him so hard he died. Did that really happen or not is now like, well, you have to put Kristen Sinema's

weird sort of the thumbs down gesture in context. Yeah, that's right. I think that's cool. I think I think all of that is great. Certainly America has a vital and forward moving culture that is going to produce a lot of great

shit from here from here on out and the UK is absolutely not in the same boat as that horse, which we'll be getting to a little bit later, but I just wanted to acknowledge the continued proof of my main thesis that basically it seems like

all of the cultural wars are not fucking like clap myself on the back too much, but what I really wanted to do here was say that once again, I have never been wrong about anything history has vindicated me. Yes, again. History continues to vindicate my position

history is a long process of vindicating us. Yes, it vindicates my position that conservatives just absolutely cannot get over how much they love children's media entertainment toys, etc. But because they are everything that they

experience their entire life filters the prism of fury that they cannot enter they must interact with Mr. Potato Head or Mixed Potato Head, but they cannot do so except by like seeing their culture as attacked by again these children's toys. It's also very funny

that very few of them like A. have children and also B. They're all both liberal and conservatives lamenting the lowering birth rate, right? Because like nobody else wants to have children that I can argue about what kind of books they'll

consume because merely because we've made it impossible for them to do that. I have every single Mr. Man book that I have combed for anti-white identity politics. That's right. All right. Let's talk about Startup.

Startup is of course called Starship. Yeah. We built this city. That's right. It's the bit. That's thank you. It is Starship. It is Jefferson Airplane whatever. Yeah. That's good bit. It literally were a thing.

Yeah, I thought so. No, Jefferson Airplane changed their name to Jefferson Starship or maybe that was the Simpsons joke. History has vindicated me yet again. This is what people get love to listen to on a podcast is three comedians

half remembering a joke from an earliest sitcom and debate. If only we had Snopes for this. Yes. Tell me if it's a mixture of truth and falsity. Emily, the startup is called Starship and I'll even give you the first line of their ad copy.

It promises a new kind of business. What do you think they do? I have no idea. I assume they're not an actual Starship. No, that would be a correct assumption. No, that would be useful to someone. Jefferson Starship were a real band. Fuck you. I was right.

History has vindicated me specifically. They are separate from the band Starship. Yes. A new kind of business. What do you think it is? Oh, I don't know. We're doing prison abolition by loading people into rockets and then we're firing those rockets into the sun or possibly

onto like off-world mining colonies. Starship's blank. Move at pedestrian speed. For a second, I thought you were going to fucking be like you actually got it. It's a delivery drone, isn't it? Yep. Milo got it, Emily, from your groan. I think you might have sussed it

during that sentence as well. Is it going to look like a tiny little version of the Planet Express ship from Futurama? No. It is very much like sleek. It looks like it was designed by Joni Ive in 2008. Basically, it is a sleek white plastic

jobby. They're inherently safe. They're inherently safe. It's fundamental to the nature of them that they're safe. They could not be unsafe. Safety third. They promise a revolution in local delivery. We believe our robots

will revolutionize food and package deliveries. An industry begging to be revolutionized. Offering people convenient new services that improve everyday life. Like not trying to unionize. Yeah, absolutely. So it was a company that was launched in 2014.

So your everyday life should already have been thoroughly disrupted by them. That's quite old. They've revolutionized an entire industry. Older than this podcast. They say it operates in several cities around the world, including Milton Keynes. That's no city.

Point one. So the self-driving delivery robot. They say Starship robots are advanced devices that can carry items within a four mile radius. Our delivery platform enables instant delivery, parcels, groceries and food and so on.

Now, you have to request that via a mobile app. Well, that's one of the whole other things, right? Yeah. It's going to be an issue at Milton Keynes. Absolutely. So you basically, you can order this thing. You go on to the little app and you're like,

I'd like some San Pellegrino please. Beep, beep, beep. Beep Boop. Starship, please. Pick that up for me from the Big Tesco. And then the little sort of Apple MacBook looking robot rumbles up to the Big Tesco. It opens up. A service worker places the San Pellegrino

and it closes it and then it makes the four mile an hour journey to your house. Cool. Hey, but it has an operating radius of four miles. So you don't have to be waiting an hour for, well, minus traffic. You don't have to be waiting an hour for your San Pellegrino.

I presume they go on the pavement, do they? Oh, they very much do. And one of the reasons that I wanted stuck in traffic behind the four mile an hour delivery robot. Well, one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this actually, so I'll sort of go sort of in various

orders, is that cities around mostly the U.S. so far, but I think this is going to probably filter out the rest of the world, just like happened with the auto industry's takeover of the roads in the early 20th century, which used to be mixed used spaces that weren't just for people driving cars.

Coming for the pavements now. They are. They have, these robots have now been given the same legal rights as pedestrians in Philadelphia. Which is to say none. That's not very many rights. Yeah. Yeah. So they said this is

right. So and basically all and all of these different companies all have robots that work to different standards, many of which are operating in the same cities and competing with one another for a space on the pavement. Awesome. It's like the beginning. It's like early railroads. It's cool. Oh, that's going to be ruled this out

in Philadelphia. Yes, indeed. No one learned the lesson from Hitchcock. Yeah, I'm going to say like your model of San Pellegrino is not making that four miles. Oh, don't worry because... It's been made an example of much

faster than that. Well, part of it having the same legal rights as pedestrians is that if you like kick or nudge the robot and it's determined that you are a threat, it will contact the police. It will unveil a fucking M134. Riley, do you know about Hitchcock?

No. What's going on with Hitchcock? Emily, do you want to explain Hitchcock? I don't remember the exact story, but I remember it was someone built some sort of self-propelled walking around robot and it was being hitchhiked around to various cities in the world.

Yeah, they were trying to get it. I think they were trying to get it from one side of the U.S. to the other and it had like signs on it. Like, please help me. I'm Hitchcock. Please help me get to this other place. Yeah, exactly. I got a bus. I got to get back to Japan.

So, Hitchcock. I think it made it all the way. Did it make it from California to Philadelphia? I think it might have done. Yeah. In any event, it made it to Philadelphia and someone immediately killed it. Now, I want to read you

the headline for this, which is Hitchcock, hitchhiking robot gets beheaded in Philadelphia. No, Philadelphia or ISIS. He was a Canadian robot. A cheerful hitchhiking robot who had crossed Canada,

the Netherlands, and Germany came to the U.S. and it got beheaded ISIS style in Philadelphia. Hitchcock was quoted as saying, ah, fuck bot. So, effectively, what we're saying is that

what we have now is a version of Hitchcock that works for a platform in Estonia. And it can call the cops. It will call the police on you. Oh, watch your company in Estonia. So, it's got a little MP40 in there. It was founded by the Skype guys

who they went on to found this company. Right. And I love that these companies that claim that they're going to disrupt everything, but they've been sort of trying to like roll out their stupid, you know, their little Guga for like seven years.

But they're trying to make it work anyway. Well, it's sort of one of these things, right, where it exists if you assume that like the pavements are just like self-driving cars. It exists if you assume that pavements are empty, that signage is completely clear and easy to understand, that curbs are level, and that people will

sort of flow around it. I keep reading new details about Hitchcock. And let me read you very quickly one section of The Guardian's Rise up on this. It was last seen with Jesse Wellens and Ed Basemaster,

two popular YouTube pranksters who took the robot for a drive around Philadelphia. Zella said the pair had dropped Hitchcock off at the side of the road as travel companions were advised to do so that the next person could offer him a ride. Sadly, that ride would never come.

Hitchcock was attacked between six and seven a.m. Basemaster denied any involvement and it then embeds a tweet from Ed Basemaster, which simply reads, I would never harm a robot, so please stop asking if I did.

Well, and then that's something we could all learn. That's the Basemaster promise. But we are sharing what used to be a human-only space with a bunch of delivery droids from competing platforms. Human-only spaces. I'm a turf, but for humans. I don't know robots in here.

Ed Basemaster is like our Sarah Connell. We got to go back in time and like get him to like be like, no, you have to kill this robot a little or you have to do a Poughkeepsie tapes to this robot a little earlier. I'm really interested in the fact that they have the same legal rights

as humans on the pavement. And I'm very excited for the inevitable. When this gets rolled out in New York, like the two competing Guido delivery robots that are like trying to get past each other on the pavement, but it's not wide enough. They're like, hey, fuck you, pal. I got the same rights. Giant flappy arms.

They just have regional accents. Absolutely. What I find really interesting about this is basically the roads have effectively been privatized by automakers and oil companies.

J-Walking is an imaginary crime. All crimes are imaginary, but J-Walking is especially imaginary. It is the direct result of lobbying by car companies because people would keep getting hit by cars and suing car owners which made owning a car just expensive. Yeah, they had to create the criminal

offense of J-Walking. Yeah. It seems like walking on a pavement and inconveniencing again, one of dozens of little coolers on wheels just zipping around you will very soon become also a criminal offense.

Or at least that's what they seem to be lobbying for. Yeah, it's very cool. I think that's so indicative. If you don't have a car, stay home. Yeah, absolutely. Pretend it's the pandemic forever. Yeah, absolutely.

This was raised to me basically by a friend of the show and host of Tech Won't Save Us podcast, Paris Marks where he says basically automobiles generally made this case for increased policing overall to keep pedestrians in check.

The companies having this ability to call the police just means that the laws criminalizing walking on the pavement or sidewalk if you're American will follow. Yeah, also probably the cops are going to start using them also. To cut police numbers.

No, you just like you call the cops and instead of a cop you get like a starship with a taser on it. Is there going to be a starship department in every police department around the world? Yeah, they're going to be like fucking dogs. They're going to have like a K9 squad car and they let the starship out of the back of it.

So because this is a self-driving, you know, bullshit bit of technology, right? Do you want to guess how long it took me to searching through their website to find the little asterisk bit that says

instantly? Yeah, well I knew where to go. I knew to go to the FAQ and did you know that there are going to be people who in case the starship gets lost or runs across someone that has a hard time navigating around will be able to take control of the starship manual thing.

So-called Blade Runners. That's right. So yeah, who shocked to learn that an autonomous delivery drone actually does have some element of a human pilot? It's just a guy. It's a guy. It's a guy.

It's a little man. There's a little man in the starship and he's pedaling it like a bicycle. So before I move on, I'll throw to you, Emily, what's your overall thought on this? I think we could do more. I think we could disrupt the service worker that puts the things in the little robot.

That's an industry that's very right for disruption. As well as I should be able to get my own little starship. That's right. You know, that looks like the Millennium Falcon or something. That would do really well with nerds. That would do. We could just reverse engineer

the plot of the movie Surrogates, the terrible, terrible film Surrogates with Bruce Willis. No, I think Philadelphia has once again, as in so many things, shown us the way. And that way is community-based

decapitation. Community-based robot destruction. Yeah, how do you decapitate a box on wheels? Philadelphia will find a way. It's a city in the world. Oh, my. So, yeah, I think that is such a

such a portent, such a horrible portent of things that are coming. Did you open up the starship that delivers to students just a bunch of bird entrails? Oh, no. How do you prevent people from stealing

the stuff from your starship when it's on the way 24 miles an hour? Well, that is an interesting question, Emily. I have an answer for that. It's that you need to have a mobile app in an authenticated order to unlock it. Or a hammer. No, but then the police will come.

Yeah. Yeah, the police starship will show up. Yeah, they're going to really prioritize the someone stole my San Pellegrino course. I think it probably depends what part of town it gets stolen. And to be honest, whether or not the police prioritize that. So what but what has happened, right?

Is lots of people, there are reports of people having like ordered ice cream or whatever and then their internet goes out. So there's just this little robot sitting with melting ice cream in it that they can't access. I do have some good news, though. And this is like some breaking news hot off the ticket here.

Dead billionaire. We got a dead billionaire. Everyone. Olivier Dassault, the French arms sort of arms magnate and MP has died in a helicopter crash. Oh. Helicopters were so safe. Yeah.

Also, when they when when e-VTOL electric drones start proliferating like I assumed the SPAC pricing suggested they would that's going to happen like all the time. Oh, yeah. Every billionaire dies within an hour. It's going to be a mass act of class

aside perpetrated entirely by stupid electronic vehicle companies. That's great. I'm all in favor. Right. So RIP to him pouring one out for that guy. Yeah. You think an arms manufacturer could source

a reliable helicopter, but apparently not. No, I guess not. So don't buy any weapons from his company. That would be my advice. You want to make sure you go to a barber with a good haircut. You don't want to have sideburns being uneven. This is no Dassault helicopters.

It's like Wiley Coyote and SMF just like the gun that blows up in your own face. Anyway, so last last little bit of Starship, they made the news last year in summer 2020 because they kept getting stuck in canals and water.

They would get stuck in canals and Milton Keynes. Very funny to me. I mean, I know I'm fibrous. No, I'm afraid. They're not even flying. We've talked about so many flying food delivery drones on here where they're like they're sort of enclosing a new area of the city that didn't have

like people using that much of it, like the air. It makes more sense. They're sort of enclosing an area that people are using. So it felt worth sort of bringing back. Do you want to be killed by a bottle of San Pellegrino that's like dropped on you from a failing flying drone?

Or do you want to get like your shin bruised when one of these runs into it? And then of course get tased by the police. For the crime of obstructing a starship, you have sentenced to being tased. This is much like the time I had to be

the translator at the Russian Robotics Exposition thing where they were trying to claim that Russian self-driving cars had the most advanced technology in the world and this self-driving car was about the size of one of these delivery things and literally I had to

be on stage doing this talk thing three times and all three times the self-driving car ran me over while I was giving this speech about what advanced technology it had. It drives exactly like a Russian. They nailed it. Exactly. Well, this was the fucking kicker because then I found out

that the self-driving car wasn't self-driving at all and there was a guy backstage with a fucking remote control doing it and the fucker was running me over. It's just a guy, always. So wait, are we saying that Russian self-driving cars when you were doing this are at about the level of sophistication as

every self-driving car that currently exists? Yeah. Yeah, more or less. Just much smaller. Yeah, it's just a guy. So therefore less likely to kill you and in that respect, better. Yeah, that's right. So every self-driving Lada in the works. Anyway, these already have there are 10 states in the US

that have specific laws granting the star basically drones such as those of Starships rights. Of course. Man, remember when like you could get a little quadcopter for very little money and it suddenly became illegal

to fly one anywhere because you would ram it into an aircraft or something. Well, not if you're not if you're delivering someone San Pellegrino. That's right. Anyway, so that Starship I very much enjoyed learning about that silly bullshit.

So moving a little bit on, I want to ask the question so this is aimed slightly at Emily. Where did all the infinite stock market growth go? We took it for the most part. The free money went away a little bit. The money got slightly more expensive.

But wait, what about Spencer Confidential 2? Stocks always go up. We'll eventually see Spencer Confidential 2. They're running my ass for these jokes for Spencer Confidential 2. I'm trying to tell them. They weren't any fucking jokes for Spencer Confidential 1. They're trying to...

I asked for a raise, but they said that 10-year treasury bills had gone up by 50 basis points and I now have to work for free. Mark Wahlberg now has to work on an internship basis for Netflix. I was engineered to dance next to a Honda Civic. What the fuck do I know about wise crackin' Boston guys? So we're going to go into this, right?

And also, sort of disclaimer up front, as fun as it is to joke around about the ludicrous state of our stupid economy. Also, disclaimer up front, right? As fun as it is to joke around about the ludicrous state of our economy and as emotionally satisfying as it is to see all of these... Good disclaimer. I'm glad it ends there.

Yeah. All of these charlatans businesses sort of, you know, go run into difficulty, let's say. It is irresponsible and premature to gloat about a bubble popping. But on the other hand, if a small rise

in the price of US government bonds is enough to shock, enough of a shock to, like, cast the viability of this, like, infinite growth, no revenue really needed ever. It just, the asset price just continues to take up. Yeah. Well, like, genuinely,

I don't think we need the disclaimer because this just situates us once again in the realm of history continues to vindicate us. It's a big vindicating ass machine. We fucking told you so. But because, like, it seems like the whole bet, right,

on sort of the continued existence of the economy as it has been set up in Anglo-America, was that we're going to innovate, we're going to incubate all of these hyper-innovative businesses that are going to transform it the way we live and interact with the sidewalk and...

Caramel waffles. Yeah, or whatever, right? Yeah. And that it doesn't matter if they don't make any money because they're all going to become these big dominant monopolists. And Tesla is still, like, you know, mostly a carbon credit trading company. It doesn't matter. They're going to be the car of the future, whatever. If the whole

economic model is, like, sort of rattled that much by such a small change, then how strong was that promise anyway? Right. Yeah. I can't believe that Meghan Markle would do this to the economy. So,

what are we to make of this, let's say, significant downward tick in the value of these companies? Yeah. I mean, stuff is getting smaller, but I think in the same way that everyone just fails up once you've made it past a certain point, like, no one will

actually get hurt from this that was making any money from it. One of the things that people like to talk about often with this, right, is the relationship between the price of you know, the price of these very flashy market, have well-marketed stocks,

whether meme or otherwise, and again, that are predicated on this sort of technological business model. They like to... The epic bacon stocks. Yeah. They like to say this is, like, connected to the zero, the forever policy of zero interest rate free money all the time. So, what happened?

So, a few days ago, though, and again, sort of looking at you, Emily, the US government debt yield went up a little bit. Yeah. Everyone is very concerned about their risk now. We are all of a sudden worried about inflation again. We're very worried about risk all the time, I suppose,

because I guess, you know, if you can't get free money, it's not worth investing at all. With the free money, right, it's the idea as well. I've put as much as I can in, like, you know, this zero return asset or whatever, or even if I put any in it, because it just basically keeps it safe or even gets eroded

by inflation if I expect inflation. And then I'm going to put the rest into, like, these moonshot bids where you know, almost, you know, it's a EV all-taxi or some dumb shit like that on the basis that, well, I'm going to put 100 million in and if it does a Facebook, then I'm going to become

like a fucking trillionaire or whatever, right? But then once for, once people start to get a little bit worried about inflation, they're sort of more reticent to buy US government debt, the interest rate that that pays goes up, and suddenly I can just get

1.6% or whatever, completely risk-free, totally risk-free. So I'm like, well, I should, I'm going to put a little bit more of my money in that, in that thing. And I'm not going to, you know, put as much, I'm not going to, like, take my 100 million of free money and just put it all on

black because I can just go get more if it doesn't, or whatever. And there's another thing that it does, right? Which is if you're Netflix and you're like, well, got a borrow to make Spencer confidential too, suddenly it matters if what you, it matters a little more of what you make is good because

the money you're borrowing to make Spencer confidential too, isn't free. Good job, Spencer confidential one was great. Yeah, but I hate when stuff, like, the quality of stuff matters. I was in shock, where is King Arthur 2 now, you know? Well, I don't want us, like,

overstate the importance of, like, this one number to, like, defining everything else in society because there are a bunch of guys on Twitter who do this and they're all weirdos. But what it does do is it just, it does make, like, it does make the bullshit

economy a little bit more difficult on a day-to-day basis. I think there's probably, I think there's a lot of people are looking for, like, a sort of downturn in the future, right? Like, as much as everyone's, like, super euphoric about everything going up all the time, I think people are more and more realizing they're like,

well, this is actually kind of fake. And so now, you know, people are like, maybe this has to end soon? I don't know, 2026 when the Fed funds rate rises from zero again. It seems like a place we'll never be in anyway. So I don't know why anyone's worried.

Time's never going to advance to 2028. That's right. The time we get there, they'll just lower the rate again. Yeah, that's right. We're already back in 2006. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, so I think there's another thing about this as well, right? And this is sort of, think about this as a mirror image

of the conversation we had with Joe Weisenthal a few months ago, where we talked about like the root of all of this or one of the roots of all of this is inequality, because if people have money to spend, the way you make money is by asset price inflation. But one of the things that has happened, right,

is, and again, this is sort of speculation, but that the COVID stimulus bill, one of the things it does is it does put a lot of money in people's pockets. And that means that people are going to be spending that money on stuff. You can kind of make money from selling stuff to people.

And I'm always very wary of trying to say, well, this one thing means this one other thing, and they have a very simple relationship of people have more money individually. That means that Netflix doesn't make Spencer confidential too, right? But I think, you know, as I understand it, these things are sort of

linked in a very sort of complex and sort of abstract way. The big money lever is somehow linked through like inexplicable piece of like clockwork gearing to the big spend number of Spencer confidential movies gauge.

Yeah, the actual reason they can't make Spencer confidential too is because Boston Asimov got decapitated on his holiday for the Delphia. And I think you can't talk about, right, the sort of, let's say, stumbling in the tech economy. And also, Emily, I think what you said

earlier is very important, right, that none of the people who've gotten rich from this already are ever going to not be rich ever in their entire lives. Yeah, you can't fail anymore after a certain point. Like Shemath, who we've sort of been talking about more and more on this show, he's like, yeah, I sold

off all my stakes and all my SPACs. So Virgin Galactic, he sold off all his holdings. He's made hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. Even after SPACs started taking a bath a couple of days ago, he's and the people left holding the bag wouldn't, you know

it, are the people who are like, well, this economy can only go up and those people are mainly like Redditors. And, you know, retail again, retail Redditors, who knows, like, I don't know what pick of a percentage of the market they are, but you know, that's dumb money,

the smart money, yeah, the smart money has gotten out or is getting out at scenes and then, you know, a lot of people are holding the bag. It's hard to feel bad for Redditors, though. Yeah, that is true. What would they have spent it on like Mound and Do and gaming PCs that

light up? Funko Pops. Oh, yeah, Funko Pops. Well, no, if they spend it on Funko Pops, you know what store you buy those in, mainly. GameStop. That's right, GameStop. So maybe this is how we're going to get it going. We're going to have to, like, pump up

all of the Redditors, like, ARK purchases. What about a Funko Pop of the Stonks guy? That's right. So, if you want to talk about this, like, the poster child in terms of companies for this style of the economy and one that has taken a real fucking

beating in the last couple of weeks is Tesla, right? And if you want to talk about, like, Tesla's relationship with Wall Street, how it's gotten bit up to this crazy level, despite not really making cars, and how, like...

Making cars is for suckers, okay? Every car company in the history of cars has been making cars and look where it got them. So, you guys are in the past. Yeah, that's right. But if you want to talk about how this interacts, I think, with, like, the financial markets in general,

then you can't escape talking about ARK. And if you want a diversified investment across Tesla, Roku, Shopify, Spotify, two animals of every kind from them, other firms that have never made money and aren't certainly vulnerable to suffer

from the same kinds of shocks as well. Like doing a CDO, but for the stock market. Like, what if you... What if instead of investing in one shitty company, you invested in every shitty company? Well, do I have a fund for you? Have you considered the ARK Innovation Fund, Milo? Because

it's a well-diversified bunch of equities that all go into complete panic when the treasury base rate rises a little bit. Oh, that's good. Yeah, it's important to have one of those, I think. So, ARK is an ETF.

They offer a lot of ETFs. The notable one is the ARK Innovation Fund, which is just the worst-named thing of all time. It's essentially just a basket of stocks, right? So, instead of buying all of these individual securities, you can buy

a share of ARK, the Innovation Fund, and you will get sort of exposure to these securities that are weighted in such a way by Cathie Wood, completely randomly. However she's selling that day. Wow, epic, though. So, basically, if you remember,

we talked about BlackRock a few months ago as well with George Perks. BlackRock is a lot of their, not all of them, but a lot of their ETFs, their most popular ones, the ones they're most sort of famous for. It's like, if you just want to buy every stock and you don't want to have to buy every stock individually. One of everything, please.

Yeah, excuse me. Mix it all together in a big jug. Like you walk into the stock market and you want to do the stock market challenge, where like, if you finish every stock, you get them for free. It's omakase, but for stocks. Exactly. That is specifically

for Quantian. Yes. So, whereas ARK, what they do is they're like, as you said, Emily, they'll go out and they'll pick the stocks that are most exciting. And they've been doing this since about 2014. And because they've been doing this since about

2014, right, this ETF, which is worth about 21.5 billion, I think that's just the innovation front. I think others are worth different amounts. There are several. There's ARK innovation. There's ARK genomic health care. Tesla's in all of them for some reason. Or at least

in more than one, which is just great. So, it's down 23% for its February high, but it's made like, I don't know, it's made hundreds of percent if you invested towards the beginning, obviously, it's massively beaten the rest of the market. Because if you remember, all of

that fake money has just been pouring into these stupid tulip companies. Great. Yeah. I like to invest in a broad diversified basket of different tulip companies. Because what? You're telling me that all the tulip companies are going to go bust? What? You're telling me

that every company that's working in the South Sea is going to go bust? Well, maybe one or two, but come on, once one company in the South Sea goes bust, that's less competition for the other South Sea companies. I don't think they'll go, as Emily said earlier, I don't think they'll go bust. But certainly, they have been

bid up to insane values on the basis that the free money party just carries on forever, right? Yeah. Bidding ridiculous amounts on Netflix to make Spencer Confidential 2 through 14. And a lot of people, and the thing is, it's

very popular with like, Redditors and Robinhood types who are all getting these stocks on the basis of payment for order flow. So, a concept that has been explained, and one might say, criticized on this podcast by us, other

finance Twitter people, but Emily, you would like to offer a defense of payment for order flow? I'm disgracing myself right now, but yeah, I think that the PFOP thing specifically was very overblown. So, you're a retail investor, right? You want to buy,

you went on Reddit, you have a bunch of crypto money that you got, and you want to buy some stocks. You want to buy a couple shares of Tesla. You don't really care if you're paying $100 or $100 and five cents, you're not terribly price sensitive, right? So,

normally when you send an order to a stock exchange, you pay a commission for your broker, because your broker is doing a thing for you, you pay them for it. Now, what Robinhood realized is that they could avoid that commission entirely by selling the order flow to your market makers. And the reason market makers

like that order flow is because it's very uninformed, right? So, your main risk as a market maker is flow that's unidirectional, right? Like, you don't want to get run over in one direction, because you'd like to end the day even if you could. And so, what

PFOP allows these firms to do is just, I don't know, is to fill your order internally with your own internal inventory. And from the perspective of your average, like Robinhood, retail investor, you end up with a slightly better price and no commission trading.

I was going to say, so basically, everyone who said, who has been crowing about payment for order flow is unfair, it's another situation of the man stepping on the toes of and screwing over retail investors. Again, the problem is not

the specific technical thing, it's the relationship of power. Yet again, the problems are political. Who would have thunk it? Could we have imagined here that the problems would fundamentally be about, like, political ones about the

distribution of power? No hair on the Good Future podcast. Absolutely not. Anyway, so people, like, love to basically love to buy these ARC funds and they love to do it on platforms like Robinhood or Trading212 or whatever.

And it's this active thing. It has been suffering a bit again because, like, one number changed a bit. And what I find really interesting, one of the things I find very interesting about this, right, is that, you know, we say,

yeah, it's got all of these, all these things that Wall Street kind of hates ARC for sort of a different reason. Oh, is it going to be a good reason? Do you think it is going to be a good reason? It's an even worse reason. Because, yo, you're invested in the stock market.

Why? Because you want to hang out with some dudes? Well, it's the opposite, in fact. Because there is a lot of derision of this. Again, fund that is basically built on the very correct idea, right, that a lot of the economy

is fake and marketing and they do, they're always on CNBC. A lot of the economy is fake and they've made tons of money on the premise now, whether they, I don't think they're even cynical. I think they truly believe like Tesla is going to fundamentally change the world with the 10 cars it makes a year.

You can genuinely invest in magic. Has anyone else put a car in space? No. Checkmate, Libs. A lot of the hate on Wall Street for ARC is actually just that Kathy Wood is a female and a lot of her portfolio managers didn't attend

Ivy League schools and work at like, you know, 120 hour weeks at rim buy side jobs. Well, to be fair, that is interesting. So I understand that. Yeah. So it's deeply revolting that they would be allowed to get near money without having played lacrosse at many private institutions and then

rearranging logos and PowerPoint slides for many thousands of hours. So it's like, we've forgotten how to do anything other than just like trade Tulips back and forth. Yeah, but you have to have gone to Tulip school. Yeah. They're like, oh, they didn't go to Tulip. They didn't go to the, they didn't get

credentialized well enough at Tulip school to be trading Tulips back and forth. Exactly. You can't get a Tulip state. Yeah. So what do you know? What are you going to trade the Tulip wrong? Yeah. Exactly. What if you don't get the right amount of guilders for this beautiful fractally

patterned Tulip? Yeah. I went to University Tulip in Groeningen. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's very funny that like people are mad at like this, this sort of type of business, this type of business again is not falling apart, but the luster is certainly coming off of it,

especially because the government's being like, we're not going to... Fuck, not the luster. We needed that. And people and people who are in this sort of, you know, like Wall Street elite class are being like, and the problem is, it's that they didn't as I wanted to do that, or at least

someone from my country club in New Rochelle. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if everyone finds out it's fake, like how am I going to make a bunch of money from doing this anymore? And I mean, Reddises did figure that out but no one cares about them, so. Yeah. My credentialism is going to be worthless if I'm getting

massively outperformed by like, you know, some former product managers and a lady, and then everyone's going to, and and not, so they've outperformed me for years and years and years. And now that everything they do, we've realized everything they do is fake,

they'll realize everything I do is fake. Fuck. Yeah. This is all fake. A woman can do it. A woman can do it. Milo, you exaggerate. Some of the people posting about like Wall Streeters, I see posting about art not so far from the truth. I mean, Emily,

is this your experience as well? Yeah. I actually, I would really love to see like a notable fund manager. Like, Stevie Cohen should come out as transgender. I want to know what happens. We've got to start force-femming Wall Street. I've been saying this. I've been saying this for years. So, Stevie Cohen and force-femming Wall Street.

You guys have heard the story. Yeah. Stevie Cohen did do this. Yeah. Alice, do you not know about that? Oh, excuse me. Oh, I can't believe you haven't talked about this. Emily, would you please introduce the assembled podcast? Yes. So, Stevie Cohen is like

this hedge fund manager guy. He got invited for insider trading at his first firm, Stat Capital, and so started a new one called 0.72. And a new story came out that one of the MDs at this firm was making one of their employees take feminizing hormones

and, like, shave their legs and, like, wear skirts to the office and stuff and, like, do awful sexual things, like, in the office, like, you know, with the implicit threat that, like, you lose your job otherwise. But, like, yeah, he wore them really far with it. Like, started hormones and everything. It was really powerful.

It's wild. Yeah. Jesus fucking Christ. And, like, everything at 0.72 is still going fine. Oh, sure. Oh, of course, yeah. And, like, if listeners of the show will remember, 0.72 is the one where they're like, no round art. Yeah. Square art only. I hate round art.

The show was right over the 0.72, so at night you still won. Yeah. Co-sponsored with fucking Archive of our own, I guess. Yeah. So, basically, right, and the other thing, so, on on ARC, right, they also love to go on

on CM. They've been doing this for, like, you know, like, seven years, seven years of their existence because they keep outperforming the market, just because of the way the wind is blowing, they would go on, they'd be like, I think Tesla, I have a pre-slit price target of Tesla for, like, $2,600. And then they'd be like,

oh, okay, why? Well, they're going to sell these amount of cars, they're going to become a number one in Europe by 2021, whatever, whatever, whatever. They hit their price target, but then, but for none of the reasons that they thought, and so they keep getting invited back on. And there's this really, really slick marketing operation.

I think, like, if you want to talk about, you know, tulips, is tulips don't become worth what they're worth without an incredible amount of ideological work going on, just in, like, the news that people read about how Elon Musk is changing the world,

how he's epic, and how, and also, on stuff like finance news that people don't really watch. That's where a lot of this consent kind of begins to get manufactured. And there are just layers and layers of just marketing. And a lot of this

marketing was, essentially, again, go as far as we're concerned, others may have a different opinion. A lot of this marketing goes back to largely creating consent for the sort of turbo austerity that was rolled out in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

You to the Tesla line, the turbo austerity. You were absolutely right about CNBC being pure propaganda. Like, I don't know that people realize that, like, on the floor of, essentially, every financial firm, there are just these TVs that are blaring, CNBC, nonstop, so everyone sees it. And

the barrier to going on CNBC is not, like, terribly high. So you can just kind of go on there if you work at some random place and say whatever you like about your stock. If you're a podcastor. Yeah, if you're a podcastor. They should have me on that. If you're a podcastor, they just let you do it. And then it just gets

broadcast around all of you. So you can just kind of talk it into existence, if you'd like. Talk whatever kind of price you want into existence. You can at least get people talking about something that are closest to the money in that case. Yeah, the cowards at CNBC refuse to have me

on to talk about which stocks Donald Trump would buy. There are also two guys in CNBC with absolutely amazing goatees and ponytails, which is the only reason to watch. CNBC is an absolute top network to watch for weird outfits and daring

facial hair. But I think the important point to make here is sort of what I'm kind of driving at, right? Is that the entire sort of fake bullshit tech economy has all of these things that are driving it. It has

the sort of long standing sort of zero interest rates. It has the sort of incredible inequality and the impossibility of like building a successful business by doing something. It has the being force feminized by your boss. I'm not sure why this is essential, but like, if we get Spence a

confidential two out of it, then put on the maid outfit. I have a correction on the feminization, by the way. I said he worked at 0.72, it was his old firm. It was mistaken. I'm making me put on a fucking maid costume. I'm just supposed to sell Hans.

We forced them to Asimov. That's right. Asimov now. So in addition to all of these things that are happening with the numbers, so to speak, there is also an incredible amount of ideological alignment

and propaganda and stuff that's happening at this fever pitch, this constant marketing that sort of kind of aligns everyone as well. There is a deeply managed process. Is it managed by one person or group of people? No, obviously. It's managed by

the very incentives of the system that it's in. So something like ARC, this basket of insane companies, it's inevitable. It was made inevitable. Once again, I refer to my tweet,

we are trapped in the belly of the machine and the machine is teaching girls to code. Yeah. It's like, it's emperor's new clothes shit, right? But it's like the matrix. It's like if you die in the matrix, you die in real life because your brain makes it real. It's the same shit where like, actually

investing a load of money in ARC in 2014 is like, none of it is real, but also it was a great idea. Really? If you start taking feminizing hormones to get better at stocks, unfortunately, you do then like, grow the tits in real life.

And the thing is, right? There's no reason that all of this couldn't, that these conditions couldn't change and things couldn't reverse even by the time this episode is out. A couple of helicopter crashes in the right places. A couple of helicopters dropping a little bit of money. But it's that

effectively, right? I think it shows the fragility and consensus based nature of the stupidest version of the economy that it could possibly exist. Yeah. And also that it's just built on certain assumptions

and that those assumptions can be wrong and you can get away with that for a while while people keep assuming them. But at some point, if someone goes, hey, what's up with these? Are these assumptions based on anything? That's when you get problems coming in. I just think that the fragility is mostly worrying in that, like I mentioned before, the only people that get hurt in a downturn

are vulnerable people, right? So I think that's the scariest part of all of this is like, if everything is really this fragile and everyone in America is already, most everyone in America is already living very precariously. Like, we're playing stupid games with like many people's

real lives. And again, it's like, you have to, if you go back to it, right? A lot of these inflation expectations that we get talked about are on the basis that the government is going to start giving people a lot of money. You know?

And again, I don't want to over-determine like one cause but it seems to me, right? There's this assumption that, well, inflation's gonna have to happen, they're gonna give a lot of money to people. So of course, the rational decision is, well, I need to bid up the, I need to,

we need to like put a hold on this. And then all of a sudden, all of those expectations sort of come crashing into contact with reality. And then, you know, then what happens here happens. Lots of things lose lots of value. And like Emily said, it's the people

least able to take that hit that are then going to take that hit. Yeah. Like the stuff that everybody has money, mine is worthless. You don't want that. Yeah. Absolutely. When everyone has money, then I have to get a special technology branded money. How will everyone know I'm

special if I don't have more money? Well, I need, I need a special rich person only money. Yes. Which comes in high amounts. Like you can't get change. No. You just have to buy more expensive shit. That's right. Anyway, I thought that was very interesting to look

at sort of, you know, the model, the model of the economy that this podcast was built to talk about finally getting a little bit shaken and shaken in a way that, again, will not hurt any of the people who are involved

in building it. But of course not. No. But nevertheless, at least it does seem to be coming into contact with reality. So before we end, I want to quickly do an article that I really have enjoyed reading. Because

Shoes by Raphael You could only do that one once. Basically, in fact, Emily, are you familiar with Lawrence Fox? I am not. Oh, yes. You know what? Just log off the call right now.

You don't need to know. Continue your blessed existence. Imagine if like what when you're the lesser Baldwin brothers that are all really big Trump supporters and make direct to DVD videos. Like your lesser Baldwin's

lesser Baldwin. Imagine it sounds like a fucking niche breed of bird or something. Imagine one of the lesser Baldwin's was turned into like a media darling for basically saying that he believes society has gotten to woke and now gets interviewed in the newspaper and on TV and stuff more

or less every day and every publication and also does things like eats really overcooked steak. He's a classic Lib Trigger guy and I bet you if Lawrence Fox

Dr. Seuss Yeah. I mean, he was the assistant in Lewis. I'm trying to think what the equivalent in he would be. Oh, it was one of the guys off bones. That's the kind of level of actor he is a bones guy. Yeah.

And so he what he has done is he has started a political party because the conservative party is too liberal for him on culture war issues. He said he has started a political party to start the culture war and he is running for mayor of London. Yeah, because the mayor of London

decides the outcome of the culture war. It's actually due to an old medieval law every year they have a parade and then the different cultures and then the mayor of London picks the best one. That's right. And he's never like Britain. Yeah. Because of wokeness. Exactly. Yeah. And the prize is exactly the amount of money you need to save

the community centre. So it's really So, uh, Fox writes in the telegraph, our sense of who we are, where we are and what we are is being undermined. Uh, Lawrence, can you draw me a clock, please? Yeah, absolutely. The wokes jazzy have taken

away my ability to draw a clock from memory. The woke brigade have given me out, Simon. Right. And this is the part of the article that I loved. Yeah. And Emily, you will see immediately the you might say equivalency

with American sort of like reactionary head bangers. As a small child, he writes in his announcement that he's running for mayor of one of the world's largest cities. As a small child, I always thought I hate when recipes start this way. You got to scroll all the way past the reactionary

shit. I thought you were saying as a small child, like as someone who was a small child would be well, hang on my yeah as a small child. I always thought that Britain was brilliant at everything. I still think that, but I used to too. Yeah, that's a little Mitch Hedberg action as a small child.

I always thought that Britain was brilliant at everything. I sat in secondary school being told stories of great battles and inventors, brave kings and wars that lasted a hundred years of hurricanes and spitfires dancing across the sky vastly outnumbered, holding fast against the relentless juggernaut of fascism

that had swept across Europe. Isn't it bad when a war lost a hundred years? Doesn't that mean you kind of suck at fighting a war? Not if you win. Yeah, we were winning for a hundred years. That's how much we were winning. Also, it's cool to think about. He says,

both my grandfather has served in the war, which basically makes him a veteran too. And I'm being deliberately flowering and rhetorical, but I feel it's important to confess just how in love I am with these tiny island splotches with a we call home and how immovable I am in that love. Basically, everyone's two grandfathers

served in the war, though. Like, we had full conscription. Like, both my grandfather served in the war. Like, what the fuck does that mean? Like, one of my grandfathers was a fucking RAF mechanic and spent the whole time in Sri Lanka. He had a great time. Like, what is your point? Horrible guy, though. Horrible guy.

Good God, that man. Fucking hell. So, I think what Lawrence Fox's point here appears to be, this sort of connects with all the stuff from up at the beginning, which is that Lawrence Fox was taught a version of British history in school that was from, like,

a boy's own version of history. That's from, like, a coloring book. Yeah, just William. Yeah, he was taught just William, his history. And he's now had to learn that that wasn't quite right. Just banned by the woke left. And so, he is... Just Wooksleyam now. He is running for mayor of London to try to make history

like he thought it was when he was a kid, when it was fun and not complicated or morally difficult. Bring back just William O'Kong. Falsely banned from our universities by the woke left. And what I really like about this, right, is that it's basically, I think, is the

kind of political equivalent. He is essentially running for office to legislate that Santa is real. Yeah, and he's right to do so. He's right to do so, Santa is real. Yeah, that's right. Who else brings the presents? Yeah, obviously.

Yeah, you were telling me, I mean, who else could fit down that chimney? Well, someone not magical? Well, post-modern neo-Marxists say it's your mom and dad. Yeah, they're lactose intolerance. So, what happened to the milk? Yeah. So, rational people like me, we know that it's Santa. Yeah.

And when I'm mayor of London, I will officially make it the law that Santa brings the presents and Santa brought them all and it was never your mom and dad. That's right. But it is so interesting, right, to me anyway, how, and again, this is published in, like, a major

barrage newspaper, which is that he's like, well, when I was a kid, everything was simple. If I'm mayor of London, I'll make everything simple again and fun. So, you can just say things like this. You're like, wow, like, our country used to rule, and then you could just say whatever you want afterward

and at least a few people will vote for you. Oh, I believe that Lawrence Fox running for mayor of London is going to cause Sean Bailey to the Conservative candidate to lose his deposit. Man, he's such a bad candidate, Sean Bailey. Really awful. Oh boy. I would almost rather have Lawrence Fox

than Sean Bailey. That would be very interesting to me. He would be kooky and he probably do less damage because he'd be more, like, stupid. This is exactly what people said about Boris as a mayor of London. Yeah. But then again, it would be quite fun. Like, how would Lawrence Fox go about, like, legislating

that Britain was actually always brilliant? It's, like, in London. Somehow. We're just like, via his absolute monopoly over the rates of parking charges, he will. Like, the dominoes, like, the small dominoes changing the amount you have to pay

to park a Range Rover on a street in W1 and the massive domino is, like, Britain was not racist, actually. And so, you see there's a little more of this because the other thing is, right, he says, the BBC absolutely refuses

to hold anything remotely resembling an open debate surrounding Covid policy and lockdowns. Leading experts in epidemiology and evidence-based medicine have been smeared in silence by our government. Evidence-based medicine. Excuse me. That's called medicine.

You fucking cretin. If you're describing some medicine that you're doing as evidence-based, that makes me extremely suspicious about how evidence-based it is. So, what I enjoy here, right, yeah, is it's like, yeah, we're not allowed

to have an, because, you know, all of these idiots love endless debate about everything, because that means that you have to take them seriously. And, like, yeah, like, I actually, you know, I think, you know, infinitely locking down off and on because we just, like, always wanted to, like, triangulate with the virus

or whatever kind of sucks as a policy. And we should go one way or the other. I would like to open a debate about whether Lawrence Fox got divorced because he's a dickhead or because he's really bad at fucking. And I would like it to go on BBC One. Yeah.

It has to go on BBC One. You have to be taken seriously. Exactly. I deserve my time in the sun. At what cost in these lives and livelihoods? Oh, he says that lockdown, all these lockdowns were based on, quote, dodgy dossier like in Iraq. He's basically

in Iraq. He's dead because of the COVID lock. Yeah. His argument here basically is that COVID the COVID lockdown was based on that is as bad as the Iraq war, which, yeah, he's right. Yeah, it's as bad

having to wear a mask. That's the same thing as being, you know, hit with depleted uranium and Fallujah. Yeah, I just don't. It just doesn't make any sense to me because like what do you just like what do they think happened to all the dead people

like what, like, did they just did Santa do it? Like, what is the what do you it's like, how do you deny something is like when it's literally going on right in front of you and you probably know people who have died from it? I mean, I think the real answer

is like we're in this sort of hyper atomized and alienated place that like just we all live, right? You can just like you can just be like, oh, yeah, that's not true because I all of my connection to everyone else is mediated by a spectacle

and I'm just going to look over here at the bit of the spectacle that I like that I think is good because it's the bit of the spectacle that says that I have to be taken seriously and I don't have to limit my behavior in any way, even socially, etc. Yeah, this is like denying the Armenian genocide while you're

being dragged out of your house by a Turkish soldier like it just makes no sense like while I've decided this isn't happening like what? So there is a whole areas of public discourse he writes have become mine fields where a wrong step sees your career in livelihood

ended overnight. So culture, baby. Yeah, he's going to fight it as mayor of London. Yeah, whereas his career was ended very slowly by him being a bad actor. So Emily, wouldn't you wouldn't you be so happy if Bill de Blasio finally ended cancel culture? I would love it because that's

my main problem with Bill de Blasio is that like people keep getting canceled in New York and he hasn't done anything about it. Which he should do, like, the mayor's office should be doing more about cancel culture. Is this the perfect epitome of like the endless right-wing self-talk shit, right?

Where they're just... I like how he gets really close to it too. He's like, well, the invasion of Iraq was like obviously flawed and like under dodgy circumstances. He's like, nothing else before that. However, once it happened in 2003. That was when lying was invented. Yeah.

Yeah, we were in like all that stuff about like Thuggy or whatever in India. That was all real. We invent... the government invented lying to like, you know, pursue monstrous foreign policy aims in around 2003. Yeah. Maybe he believes that terrible Ricky Gervais

film, The Invention of Lying, was a documentary. Yeah, perhaps. So... This is just the latest sad manifestation of an ever-present danger. The slow demoralization of the population fueled by the naval-gazing revisionism of universities. They refuse

to read Dr. Seuss in universities. And it means that everyone that the government can lie to us about how the past was bad and the present is good. In reality, it's the opposite. When I was young, people understood that a cat could wear a hat. And now they don't understand that anymore

because of council culture. I didn't say the thing about Dr. Seuss. I editorialized that in You see, we nearly got to the end of a whole article written by Lawrence Fox and he hasn't used the word woke yet. Oh, it's coming. Oh boy. Okay. There is a deep and genuine hate of

who we are and what we've done and like yeah, once you realize it, what's you hear about like the Mao Mao? How do you not have that? Such reflections now reached a crisis point where even mild patriotism is branded as racism. Oh, yeah, bud.

The old patriotism of being like when I was a kid, I thought Britain was the west of everything in the world. I'm still right. Anyone who disagrees with me is a fascist. Mm-hmm. All other nations are full of people that are just not as good as me. Yeah, mild patriotism.

That's what they call it. And I like this also. We have progressed from resistance to female suffrage and chemical castration of gay men in a darker and more fearful past where freedom of speech and elections by secret ballot have delivered us to some of the most liberal values on earth.

Basically, he's like, we would never be basically because of cancel culture, we would never be able to like stop those bad things from the past. I think that's what he's saying. Yeah, because like when you think about stopping women from voicing, this is the ultimate kind of canceling.

Yeah. It's a genuinely difficult time figuring out what he's meant there. And he makes a stupid statue point. As mayor of London, he would defend the statues. Personally? Yeah.

He can't defend any of them in the city of London because he wouldn't be the mayor of that. Yeah, he's got to climb Nelson's column. Deliberately or by apathy, our sense of who we are, where we are and what we are is being undermined. Yes, I believe it is.

Only if your sense of who we are, where we are and what we are is based on a fucking boy's own novel. And that's the thing that you did to yourself. Were you just asleep through every year of school past like five? Well, no, it's that what happened is Sadiq Khan

did this to him. I am being robbed of my sense of belonging, I say, taking the trepanning drill to my own frontal lobe. As mayor of London, I will reinstate my own sense of childlike wonder by policy.

The Whimsical Mayor got a new screen name for you, Riley. Thank you. Boris Johnson says there's nothing wrong with being woke and Keir Starmer takes a knee. We got it, we got it. To hard left BLM that seeks to undermine all the things we hold dear.

Remember when Keir Starmer took a knee in his office on the carpet and then just kind of like let all of that fall by the wayside. I was like, well, actually, I think that if you touch a statue, you should be punished with death, really. Yeah, absolutely.

They're so fucking embarrassing. I believe in the reverse of idolatry laws. Yeah, idolatry. You better build a gold statue. Sadiq Khan and his nation-hating cronies have their jealous eyes and statues and institutions. They want to steal all the statues.

Guys, why is everyone so mad about statues? Yeah, what could Sadiq Khan a kind of like moderate, milk toast, quite boring politician be doing or have about him that could excite people to these flights of rage? I wonder.

Well, Lawrence Fox answers that question with another question. Where does this desire to strip us of our history end? And I promise you, every word I'm about to write or say is in the article. Where does this desire to strip us of our history end?

Surely Queen Victoria, the epitome of empire and white privilege, should be torn from her plinth in front of Buckingham Palace to be swiftly replaced with a monument to either Greta Thunberg or Piers Morgan. What? Piers Morgan? What? Piers Morgan! This just goes to show.

The woke left. I fucking love Piers Morgan. They're so they're so off base with even like their attempted satire of like, oh, yeah, you all love Piers Morgan. Dude, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, Piers Morgan is a reactionary. Like, Piers

Morgan is one of the biggest cunts in history and you think that is- You should stand to be a big of a big cunt. Yeah, like what? Like, what are you talking about? Like, also like being robbed of our history, like, no! You were

robbed of your history before! This is people explaining history to you what you want is to live in a drawing. So, why are none of our politicians standing to defend us? I am living at the disrespect being shown to the sacrifices

of previous generations to defend our values. And so I'm pleased to- What values are they? Saying the word. Yeah. Yeah. It's the values are- English. Love the queen. Love the queen. Love a point. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's that. It's like, that's going to be the first law that Mayor Lawrence Fox will initiate. Anyway, I'm pleased to announce that I'm candidate to be the next mayor of London. I look forward to speaking up for those who are being dominated into silence. Yeah. He's

announcing his campaign. And also, I'm excited to inform the listeners of TF that I have a new job as a campaign coordinator for someone who I cannot say who they are yet. It's Brian Rose. I think things coming. Watch this the American jacking off guy. I am absolutely going to be

being very proud to be a major Lawrence Fox surrogate on the news. You know, Lawrence Fox is near a tandem. Yeah. I'm going to I'm going to go on CNBC and I'm going to talk about how Lawrence Fox should be mayor of London so he can defend all the statues and

somehow that's going to make the arc that's going to fix the arc innovation ETFs woes. The statue stocks are going to go through the roof. Absolutely. Big marble. Yeah. Right. Lord Elgin surging to the top of the stock market. That's right. He is so cool.

I'm absolutely going to be a Lawrence Fox surrogate and I encourage all of you to be Lawrence Fox surrogates as well. Yeah. Have a Lawrence Fox baby for the good of the nation. That's right. Anyway, we've been going for quite a while. We certainly have. I'm going to say number one

Emily, thank you very, very much for coming on here and talking to us about the economy. Thank you very much for having me. Where can people find you on the old internet? I am at the Emily account on Twitter and that's the only social media account I have.

I have an Instagram account also called the Emily account but please don't follow it. Do not follow the Instagram account. Do not contact me. Please do not follow any of us. All right. And also thank you all for listening. Please don't forget

the bonus episode on the Patreon this week. Bonus. And there you can hear some more of that. We are delivering on a long standing promise to our listeners that we've made ever since we first got Patrick Wyman on the show. We have finally watched

the Guy Ritchie King Arthur movie with him and Eleanor Yanniga, also friend of the show. Having a clump, simple as. Yeah. That's right. So do check that out on the bonus on Thursday. And Lawrence Fox is going to bring back as mayor of London.

It's when the king Arthur was geysers. And there was no trans geysers. They was all just geysers. It didn't matter if you were black, brown, white or purple. You was just a geyser then. That's right. I love sophisticated critical analysis.

Absolutely. All right. So that's happening. That's five bucks a month. You already know the deal. Link is in the description of the episode. Yeah. And also check out all the TF spin-offs. You got the Bottleman with Riley. You got Masters of Our Domain with me. You've got Hell of a Way to Die with Nate. You've got the James Bond podcast with Alice.

Yeah. That's right. There is an infinite number of podcasts to listen to. And you can invest in instead of investing in the stock market, you should invest your time in listening to podcasts and your money also.

All of the Patriots. They can only go up. I'm on CNBC right now. I'm telling you, this is the only way it's up, baby. All right. Thanks everybody for listening. See you in a few days.