TRASHFUTURE - Project Milo

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

We’re back in the saddle for another episode of delightful modern existence. The full cast of Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice @AliceAvizandum discuss a $100m-valued emoji service, the sudden disappearance of pro-EU groups post-Brexit, a Rafael Behr classic column from 2009, and an extended riff about the weird Xbox tween boy simulator called--and we are not joking--'Project Milo.' If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS.com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/  *COME SEE MILO*If you want to catch Milo’s stand-up on tour, get tickets here: https://linktr.ee/miloontour  *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We'll be hosting a live show debate on the topic of Elon Musk's status as 21st century Willy Wonka. It's 6th Feb 7.30pm at Hen & Chickens Theatre (109 St Paul’s Road, London N1 2NA) -- tickets are £12.25 and you can get them here:   https://www.unrestrictedview.co.uk/trashfuture-live-the-comedy-debate/

I'm recording locally. Let me start the call recorder to actually just be drawn. Actually, the call recorder is the call recorder isn't open yet. So give me one second. All right. It's running. It's running. All right, Alice, ready? Three, two, one, Mark. Hello and welcome to this episode. Fuck me. I'm gonna start it again. Okay. Hello and welcome to this week's free trash future. It's me, Riley. I'm in studio with Hussein who has to get off his phone. I'm never going to get off my phone, but hi. I'm back. I'm here. Shut up. Shut up, Riley. I'm texting. Shut up, mom. I mean, if Nate is podcast dad, but Riley is podcast mom, right? I can't pause it. It's online. Riley is podcast step, mom.

I was doing his best, but never listened to you. I also like somehow like noodle of a type. You never teaches me how to fuck. Podcast older step, brother. For real. Like I'm also older step, brother, but also older step, brother. I was gonna say stop touching my Warhammer figurines, but that was a better joke, Milo. Also with Milo. Hello. It's me. You'll be a podcast step, uncle. No, you're the you're the podcast, like dirty friend who's always coming by. Damn, coming by what? Fuck off. Podcast Austrian step, uncle. Okay, Jim, do you plan your life? But not in the basement. Can I please audition like four new co-hosts? No, no one would do this.

And also we have Nate on the boards in studio. Hey, so a weird, weird story. Back in August, I fell off my bike and got a concussion. My brain hasn't been completely normal ever since, although it's mostly recovered. And today I was like really running behind, but I was like, fuck it, whatever. And I'll get some work done. I'll lounge in. However, I got on my bike, I come in not looking at anything, not caring about anything. I show up like three minutes before this episode recording was supposed to start. And I was like, oh, do we have an episode today? And the look on Riley's face like, you motherfucker, I made notes, you piece of shit. So that's the kind of day I'm having. I slaved over a hot MacBook.

He's gonna get new co-hosts and we're all gonna like sound like Laura Koonsberg. Nathan, why am I not surprised? You piece of shit. Laura Koonsberg is going to be our new dad. Everything you do is going to have to conform to her definition of shitposting, which is just making the worst cringe content. Yeah, we're all posting cringe. Did we all see the fucking the Brexit cast video today? And also we have Alice, but let's introduce the Brexit cast again. The podcast daughter, I think. It's like the one, the one success daughter in a family of fail

sons. Yes. I mean, that's the expression goes, you know, all parents have, they have a, you know, they're certain habits and their emotional support eldest daughter. And that's what that's what Alice is to our podcast. That is what Alice is to me. Anyway, you're listening to the Little Women podcast. And also, Milo, it's not called the Brexit cast anymore. It's just called the news cast. Oh, we've gone back to the news. The goddamn news. Yeah. The endless onslaught of the news. It's so funny to me that they're renaming it newscast when Brexit is still going on. Okay. No, hang on. Let me start again. It's extremely funny that they called it Brexit cast in the first place, which is like the dumbest name, like all of the Brexit all the time. Are you

wondering what's going on with Brexit? We sure are. And then just changing it. Like, oh, we're bored now. So that's news. But Brexit is still happening, but we're just calling it news now. Yes. It's, oh, it's just the normal news. It's been, it's been accepted into the community of news. Oh, that video of it went around. All the little inside jokes of just being like, oh, yes, we're talking to a linguist in Brussels. She's laughing in three languages. When I listened to it, I was kind of like, it works really well if it was like a satire against Brexit cast, right? Yeah. Like it would have worked really well if this was just him insulting, like all the kind of in jokes and all the kind of just like the bizarre things. Because even

I've never listened to an episode of Brexit cast before, but like listening to that, it was kind of like, oh, this was really as like insufferable as people said it was. But then I found out that no, actually, like this is a live show. And this is more like a farewell to the good times. And, and it's all the like, and all the like fucking people in the audience go for it. Yeah. All the most like Lib Dem looking motherfuckers. And I'm like, seriously, this is like, this is your level. You're sitting here being like, this is the best thing I've ever seen. I love to have a social relationship with Katcha Adler. Look, I gotta be honest with you, right? So you, you, you would think from the reactions they get

that Andy Borowitz's stories in New York are universally fucking reviled. But actually, they're their most popular stories because there's that many dumb, smug liberal dads in America that like people read that shit. So I guess it's better to mention that this stuff is way more like we're the outliers, we're the exception, we're the aberrations here. Yes. And so what are we doing? We have to get our shut the podcast down. And so for the rest of us, I present to you all the name of the startup, Genies. Oh, no. I don't want to do this anymore. I want to go and be Andy Borowitz's intern. I'm a genie in a soft bank. Gotta rub me the right way.

It's worth over a hundred million dollars. Okay. Well, that does us nothing. It's a 3D prints denim. So what you're basically saying is that it hasn't lost enough money yet to be valued. As always. It's jeans for children. As always, I'm going to say. No one's ever thought of this before. As always, I'm going to say it's something phrenology based. Yeah. Who say it's closest?

Made by children. For children. No, wait, wait, wait. So is a genie spelled like jeans, like blue jeans or jeans like genetic material? As in rub the lamp. Genies as in rub the lamp. Okay. However, I'm going to give you the first clue.

The next human race. It's phrenology. It's phrenology. Yo, what's up? Oh, God, it's eugenics. Wait, is it like a thing where it matches your DNA to another person for like dating? It's the most powerful children. Think more frivolous.

It's a wine, like a wine service, but it matches based on your genetics. Yeah, for some reason. Okay, that would be good. Of course you'd say that. According to your genome, the microclimate you'll enjoy the most is. Look, I like Riesling, okay? And there are X, I'm not going to do this right now. It's hilarious though, because it's like Riley, like your family has lived in Canada for probably

well, like a hundred years. The idea that you're genetically adapted to Magra's carpet was such an absurd concept. Like if anything, you should be drinking some kind of potato slurry, but it's like a fermented by accident. I just love the idea of Riley just drinking a delicious German glass of Borussia Munkengladbach. Sorry. Wine has changed. Genetically.

Genetically code in bottle. Yeah, because the Canadian wine is so good because it got all of the recessive genes. No, I'm doing, shut up, I'm doing, I'm doing Foxhound, which is Solid Snake saying wine has changed. ID tag bottles to genetically controlled soldier. Okay, so if I don't drink a crisp bottle of shower, I don't know if to pop in the next 15 minutes. Okay, so number one, shower, I don't know if the bottle would not be crisp.

It does not have that acidity profile. So remember two minutes ago, and we were making fun of Brexit cards for being too dense and inaccessible. Now that I'm going to again, just condemn my co-hosts for not engaging with a content enough Hideo Kojima enough. I will say that genies is the world's first avatar agency. I haven't blanked out any of the words there because I know you won't know what that means. Oh, it's right. It designs your fucking second life.

Does it make you like a Bitmoji character? Yes, Nate's got it. You guys, oh, now it's happening. You get to be a nine-foot-till blue thing on a different planet. Remember, it designs your first sonar. Yeah, no, Nate got it. Remember when I said it's worth $100 million? For Bitmoji avatars.

Oh, it's not just Bitmoji. It's more detailed Bitmoji avatars. Why is it like, take your actual genetic profile? No, no, no, it's just, it's more, it's a little more cartoonish. Can I 3D scan your head? No, no, none of that. The character upload thing from FIFA 2004 is now worth like $100 million. More or less.

Does it at least have jerk out on the soundtrack? Anyway, it's not, it's not even that. It's just Bitmoji, but with more like Zoomer branding. So like more Gucci bum bags and then some like more facial features in bigger heads. So you're saying it's like girlfriends Zoom. It's like the phrenology menu from Mountain Blade, but quite a bit. Yes. Oh, God.

So, but they're not just a bit, they're not just some kind of competitor Bitmoji. They're an avatar agency. What do we think that means? Do you have to get signed? Yes. Like, and then they take down a cent of your avatar. No, Milo, you're kidding. Yes, that's correct.

Oh, no. It's an influencer agency. Well, are they like, do they kind of treat? It's an influencer agency, but they signed the influencers avatars. Oh, fuck, that's going to be virtual Love Island. Yes. Oh, I hate this. No.

Yes. No. I hate this. No. It wasn't about what avatar was anyway. Virtual Love Island. Avatar, yeah. I love the idea of paying.

So like having to get signed, having to compete for the privilege of being signed to get an avatar so that you can post cry- laughing emoji under any political post ever. And people just be like, yeah, this is somehow elite tier because I've got a really good Bitmoji. Well, it's like spending money on the Jeremy Renner app. So who they are signing is they're signing like Sean Mendes and Kylie Jenner and famous people and then they license, they basically they'll make an avatar that looks like them and then verify the avatar.

You know, something funny, you know, there was, I can't remember the name and I've never actually watched the show, but I've heard about it that like one of the top earners on YouTube is a little kid who reviews toys, but obviously like making a little kid make review movie videos like there's a lot of work and YouTube has rules and then also just like there's a certain amount of how much work can an eight year old kid do. So what they've done is they've basically created like a 3D rendered version of him and like higher voice actors that sound like him. So now they've built a brand that the kid doesn't even have to be involved anymore.

And it's weird. It's insane to me. I'm dead serious. Dead serious. I think when I find out that this applies to all YouTubers, Ian from Forgotten Weapons is just like an algorithm. The primitive technology guy is just a hologram. The primitive technology guy actually always wears a suit and goes around by helicopter everywhere. Uncle Punjabi isn't able to make his videos anymore because they fall foul of YouTube's child labor laws. I'm going to see Vmre info is like here's a quote. Here's a quote.

As the first agency to represent talent through digital avatars, we provide access to content and brands that allow you to earn revenue without needing to be physically present for your content production. So that's basically what I was describing. That's exactly it. It's an agency for that. Didn't they do this like 10, 15 years ago with Second Life already? Yes, but this is worth a hundred million dollars. It's weird to me. It's like if I had just been good enough at school to get into Stanford,

then I could have like made my eighth grade dream real, which is be like, what if people paid me to design rude versions of them on the WWF Royal Rumble fucking character? Hang on question. If you die in the avatar, do you die in real life? Does your brain make it real? No, it's just like getting kicked in the balls. So Alice, to comment on something you've said, it's not like Second Life. It's an avatar that's just for like iMessage or WhatsApp. Oh, okay. That's much worse.

So it's like Second Life, but it's much less functional. Yes, correct. It's like what if Second Life had no functionality and just was allowed you to sort of punctuate chats. So it goes on. Whether your top priority is on the court, in the studio, or on tour, or in the discoteca. Glad you said it. Your genie can represent your identity when you can't. And I mean, it's a version of Bitmoji, where celebrities have verified status, and also you can put on Gucci.

So the 24-year-old CEO, Akash Negam, said... That's a fantastic phrase, the 24-year-old CEO. No, he's 26 now. He's matured. This is from an article two years ago. Like the fine reisling. If God forbid, Donald, they do age well. Fine Borussia Mönchengladbach. I'm trying to change the lyrics from David Bowie's teenage wildlife from

as ugly as a teenage millionaire to as ugly as a 26-year-old CEO. But it doesn't quite scan. If God forbid Donald Trump bombs North Korea, you'll see your genie riding a nuke to North Korea. Oh, cool. What? Okay. This is Baladian.

Hang on, though. If this is for young people, why the fuck would it be referencing Doctor Strange Love? A film which famously young people have seen. Because the first iteration of genies was that they would act out news stories as you. Oh, like the Taiwanese news channel. Well, there was an app. It was like a Taiwanese or I think it was a Hong Kong app that

basically you scanned pictures of yourself and it made an avatar version that would like dance and do videos and things like that. But they could just turn that into a thing that acts out the news or whatever. I'm very excited to see fucking Fireman Sam beating the shit out of the police dog from poor patrol. I remember I used that Apple time and I set the video that it made. And this is a horrible song to my friend who speaks Cantonese. And she's like, it's a weird version of you, but the song you're singing is like, I'm a beggar.

I'm a beggar. I live on the street. And now you can do that. So, Taiwanese rapper. So, back to this. Says, this is genie's plan to be the next Buzzfeed. Your genie is the star of the show and the script is whatever happens in the world that day.

So, that was their first iteration as genie's was to basically make a hyper realistic Bitmoji avatar that acts out the news. The example that they went with was nuking North Korea. However, a thing that happened. However, now, now, they pivoted and it's an avatar marketing agency. I guess I just think about this that like, this makes sense as like a really small startup, like somebody's Patreon.

Like, you know, some people do sexy fursonas on Patreon. People could just do avatars for you. But the idea that it's valued that much is just really fucking with my brain. Well, here's what I've been thinking, because Milo made a joke about, like, someone, about a joke about Fritzl. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, who comes up weirdly constantly. Yeah, what this reminds me of is like,

so there's a game called VR chat. It's not really a game, but it's like, it's on Steam. And like, you can, you enter these chat rooms and like, you can kind of be a different character. So you can be anyone from like a jacked, like goofy to, it's like the really the most bizarre kind of virtual reality. The horniest player wins. Right.

And like, you can act out yourself, but you can be in this, be in this sort of like avatar. It's like Club Penguin. It's all fun until someone gets banned from saying the n-word. Except the thing in, except the thing in like Steam is that like, most of the people like in these kind of rooms, like, communities like build them and they create them and they set the boundaries and everything. So this is like a shitter version of that,

where you don't even get the virtual reality component of like, because when I think about, well, why would you want to be in an avatar? Like, I guess like the only real reason is so that you can like, fuck. That's like the only thing that makes sense to me. Well, the one thing I have to fucking hentai Jeremy Renner. The thing is, right. But like, yeah, actually like, I feel like that's like, a reason why loads of people really like these VR games.

That's why people were buying the stars on the Jeremy Renner app, was you could get to like, fuck and ultimately Jeremy Renner. This is just like a very restricted version of Star-Spangled Renner. To be clear, this, this company is like, these avatars like Bitmoji and so on are popular among like, Zoomers. Like, are they actually, or do they just say they are? No, it's one of the most popular apps to download on the store was the Snapchat owned Bitmoji. Like it is very widely downloaded and very popular among Zoomers.

This is unarguable. However, the fact is that this, the valuation of this company is connected to the fact that it is slightly shinier. It's got, and it's got some hype because they've, they've, they're, they're killer. They're killer of Bitmoji is we're going to have celebrities on it who can get verified and we'll partner with Gucci. Yeah. So for millennials listening at home, it's like Charizard.

So Akash Negam's parents gave him an ultimatum. This is from his Forbes 30 under 30 profile. Raise $3 million for your startup or stay in college. He chose to drop out and raise the money. What a choice. His first bet, well, we'll, we'll come to why that choice was later. His first venture alongside co-founder Evan Rosenbaum and a third co-founder was an app called Blend, a group messaging channel that raised 2.7 million and was hailed as the next

big thing, but then failed to gain any traction and died. Can we, can we, can we pause for a second, right? Because this is a, this is a trope that really annoys me. Is there like 24 year old millionaire being like, yeah, I just dropped out of college to start a business because I realized when I was a college, the college was gay. And it's like, this is like, it's so dumb. It's like, you know what? Maybe if you'd have stayed in fucking college, you wouldn't have started a business.

There was this fucking stupid. However, he is making an enormous amount of money. I know, but it's so stupid. He's only making enormous amount of money because of fucking Saudi Arabia is run by insane failed sons with too much money. Hey, he's making a lot of money. Yeah. He should have, he should have stuck at it and then like become

unemployable and got a podcast like real people. So it's the honorable path. Yes. So he's, he continues. We are all posting samurai. Akash Niigam says, the next wave of communication through avatars where people feel comfortable expressing themselves is on its way. Celebrity investors like offset from Migos have even used their genie to stand in for

at in for them for brand sponsorships. The avatar poses for photos instead of them. Suddenly now, I didn't say it, Jeffrey Epstein's house. That was my avatar. There was a convenient place to look. My avatar was a very convenient place to send my avatar. Some suddenly brands like the scooter company Bird were calling, we're calling Niigam trying to pay to get the genie's celebrity network to post videos of their digital avatars

riding birds on the day of the new scooter launch or Gucci partners with genies to let people ride their avatar, sell their avatars Gucci branded products. It sort of makes sense that if you're an artist or a celebrity or something, this is an opportunity to basically license things without having to deal with the frustration of stupid endorsement shit. Like where you have to go through the shoots and all the other crap they make you do. So I mean, I get why that would be popular, but I don't know. It just seems the idea of it being this much big business is weird and frightening.

When also people can just deep fake you into an ad, right? I mean, as soon as your commercial property becomes just like a cartoon approximation of you, like people can just pirate you into their fucking Chinese Dick's top of the net. Yeah, we're going to be seeing Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in every movie for the next 300 years, because like their genome has been sequenced now. What this is is like, it's a repackaged version of a very old way of making a lot of money, right? Which is like licensing, like so much of like the Trump empire is built on licensing when it comes to like buildings and when it comes to like tacit endorsements.

You know, like the, uh, the ACN teleconference phone, right? Was like such a big part of like the Trump like fortune and, you know, Is that Trump's Amstrad email or I don't even know about this. There's like loads of videos of it, but a lot of it was just like license. A lot of it was like, well, there's license for Trump name and like, you know, that's where kind of like the branding endorsement comes in. This is just like an updated version of licensing. And for celebrities, it's great because again, like as Nate said,

like you don't have to be there and like lots of celebrities don't like doing any of like the fucking press anyway. So this is like a great way of like standing in. But it's also, I don't know, it's like, it's a, I guess to them, like they're just trying to kind of build of like, they're trying to kind of like own rights to people, right? And it's kind of just a very stupid way of copy, like copywriting. The Trump telephone can handle over 500 lines, which means that you can speak to almost every branch of McDonald's in the U S simultaneous and find out once and for all where the hamburger is. The terrible sci-fi movie that this has become is we are now living in Simone with Al Pacino

before Al Pacino was himself turned into a digitized actor. It's great. Nobody saw that movie, but me. But what we, what we are, what we are living in is, you know, it's, it seems, it's, it's, it's, it's, it seems too like Baudrillard to like, it seems too on the nose as a Baudrillard comparison. I love to send my simulacrum somewhere. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's this, this thing where again, we, we, where capital, it works through abstraction. You know, it works purely as the inducement to consume or make, or make something. And the less you can have that, that at least for advertising, for capital advertising works in abstraction as the inducement to consume something or the inducement to do something. And the more abstract it can be, the more

efficient it can be, the better. So this is just essentially, as Hussein said, making celebrity endorsements slightly more efficient and slightly less authentic. That's sort of the real, baby. Yeah. We are, we are taking a blow torch to the concept of the real. Hontology. Yes. Yes. But I'll talk about that though. I mean, like if you're, if you're, if your goal is to make lots of toy review videos with a small child, if, if there's no difference between the small child reviewing the toy video or doing the toy videos himself and a 3D rendered version or an animated version of him doing it, then you can make 20 reviews and get all the YouTube monetization off that when normally you have the, the normal human physical constraints of

making a kid work. Do you remember Xbox's thing that they trialled, where they had a virtual child who would talk to you named Milo, actually. And like, listen, it wasn't a proud point in my career. But it worked, it worked about as well as you would think, because like, it just gave off such intensely nonce vibes that I think they just can't handle. Because it was too, it was too weird to just have grown people just talking to like this weird fake child. I've got to look this up now. I mean, it's 100% real history of the British parliament from 1600 to the present day. It was called Milo. It's real. You should look it up. It looks really uncanny now. It kind of did then too. So, but like, I think to, to bring this,

to bring this all together, you know, we, we are, we are living through the death of the real. Everything is an abstraction. I do remember this. Sorry, Nate, she's got it up on the screen. Fuck, yeah, I do. Because now, right, this is the whole thing when I lived in Russia, people would always be like, oh, your name is Milo. Were you named after the dog from the mask? And I was like, always like, obviously not. Whereas, why should have been like, was like, no, I was named after the fucking nonce cartoon from Xbox. That's so Russian to be like, oh, you must have been named after this gigantic media property. God, which is so weird. It looks like you.

It does look like it doesn't markably like you. It doesn't. I don't think it looks like Milo. I think it looks like it's got the same pointy chin. Go on the one way. We have to bully Milo into making the Xbox Milo, his Twitter avatar. It looks like if Riley and Milo had a kid. He's wearing, he's wearing an extremely American t-shirt. It's the kind of t-shirt you would only ever see in American childhood. He's dressed like, he's dressed like a soprano. Picture when he's like really angry. Where's the second one up? He's in front of an American house, but it looks like it's in the Kyoto countryside.

That's like older version. Okay. We are now, we are now finished talking about Project Milo. I'm sorry to like totally derail. It's him being consumed by tentacles. The Project Milo discussion is now coming to an end, please. Oh, I don't think you can decide that, Riley. Oh, God. The Project Milo discussion comes to an end now, please. Thank you. Yes. You're not even my real mom. So, to bring this all together, two points. Number one, nothing is real. Everything is Project Milo now. Yes. Project Milo is here to tell you to, I don't know, buy Gucci.

Also, Akash Negam grew up in Silicon Valley with entrepreneurship in his blood. His father, Pavard Negam, was the co-founder of Medical Website WebMD. Oh, amazing. So, that's why. He's the heir to the hypochondria fortune. Yeah. So, now a fake Kylie Jenner can endorse the fake colon cancer that you convinced yourself you have at 3 AM having smoked 14 dual parts. How did, how did his, this guy's dad make that much money off of a website that just tells me I'm going to die because my stomach hurts after I ate like six things of candy? Anyway, this is entirely unsurprising to me that, of course, that's why this is the guy who's doing

this business that, in all honesty, probably will be successful because it's doing something that unfortunately capital wants. It's just extraordinarily stupid. And I also, this startup was brought to my attention by listener Opinion Haver. That's O-P-P-I-N-I-O-N. Haver spelled the normal way 69. So, Opinion Haver 69, thank you very much for bringing that to my attention. If you do find, if you do find startups like this, by the way, feel free to share them with me. I love the idea that we'll have even better content curated by our fans. We'll just do shoutouts for them. It's like, wow, those are really deep article on the topic of the death of the real and modern advertising. Thank you, Bukaki Bukaran. We really appreciate it.

Yeah, Trill's an OVF center. It's a great article. Thank you. So, we're moving on now to Sadiq Khan. Sadiq Khan was interviewed in Citi AM recently. I'm going to go back to Project Milo. That's a lot more fun. Project Sadiq. Oh, Lord. The man who will say whatever you want. What if the Mayor of London was a 3D rendered boy that you could tell to do things? You would have about as much authority as the actual London Mayor. Well, that's a good episode title.

That should be Labour's next candidate after Sadiq moves on from the Mayoralty. It's just we're guessing Project Milo back. You can just vote for this boy who you can tell to do things. We're installing an animated swing in the fucking London assembly. So, Sadiq Khan was interviewed today on Citi AM about how he's going to be running for May or how he plans to govern and so on. He was quoted as saying, when you see a big employer like Amazon paying a miniscule amount of tax in the UK, the government should close the loopholes and they should pay their fair share of

tax in relation to revenues raised in this country. Now, like most things I say that start out sounding something reasonable, it would be great if the interview ended there. Oh, nice. Following the spectator formula. He's following the Stephen A. Smith formula. He wants to address this issue. But I think we've got to realise that we're a global city. We work in a global economy. So, to unilaterally impose taxes in one country could have unintended consequences

making them move elsewhere. No, we should just apply all of the taxes globally then, because if they're global companies, we should just have one global tax. The globe tax fees in the globe. Yeah, you can't like tax anywhere. If you don't believe in Australia, you don't have to pay the globe tax. He is saying this in the context of planning on asking Saji Javid to not impose a unilateral tax on tech giants operating in the UK.

What the fuck is this? What the fuck kind of cuck shit is this? The fucking Labour Mayor of London, like basically one of the few fucking positions that Labour Party still holds telling the Tories to be more Tory. Oh, you've been considering imposing a tax on big business. I, the Labour Mayor of London, suggest that you might be being not friendly enough to business. You, Saji Javid, former, the guy who did the fucking economic crisis, like you are now being two left-wing for my Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London's liking. Yes, this is a very normal news story, which I'm enjoying a great deal.

You know how bad you have to be to make me miss insane Ken Livingston? The man who most recently got famous for getting his foot stuck in a tube door because he like expected it to yield to him like he was being fucking commute of trains. Ken Livingston is like, what if the guy from UP was like really dark? Yeah, Ken Livingston, whenever there's like a bad news story that the stories want to bury, they're just like, get an interview with Ken Livingston. No, he'll do something anti-Semitic. He always does. Say the line, Ken.

He sucks so much. And yet, how were his policies better than this? Yeah, he sucked really bad, but he also made them build the overground. Like, what the fuck? So, Khan admits that when he first walked into City Hall, he, quote, didn't fully understand the contribution made by business to all walks of life. Did he say this with like a laser sight, just like dancing on his forehead? Is he being written by Matt Hancock? Kind of. Can't say that about business. This is an audio platform, so you can't see it, but I'm stretching my arms as wide as I can

to simulate like I'm hugging the biggest tree in the world, like the fucking gigantic red wood. And now I'm jacking it off because that's the fucking motion this makes me want to perform when I hear this idiot say this shit. Like, British business tax and the loopholes it allows means that like Amazon pays like 600,000 pounds a year in taxes on like tens of billions of pounds of revenue in the UK alone. It's absurd. Yes. And what British business, like, as he correctly identified mere paragraphs ago, a lot of these are just global businesses that have no British component other than occasionally employing people here and not paying tax.

All of the like distinctly British businesses is just Jim Twat in Oxfordshire who runs a shed making gollywogs. And Mike and Mike Ashley, who like was, do you remember, I fucking love Mike Ashley that time he went when there was that scandal over him, like not paying his workers enough to like afford bread. And he like went to one of his factories or warehouse or something to go around there and be like, no, no, it's all all right. Don't worry. I mean, to sort it out. And they have like a metal detector at the entrance and he had to empty his pockets and he just started pulling wads of 50 pound notes out of his pockets. And it's like, Mike, mate, come on,

head in the fucking game, no point, hire a PR person, even a stupid one. Projects Mike Ashley has been a widely reviled decision. I just, I just remember when we had to buy the travel case for the big mixer, we couldn't find one made for it on Amazon or on any of the other like websites. You could get one from Yamaha themselves, but it was like an absurd amount of money and you basically couldn't get it in Britain. It was also a moped for some reason. I would have had to have ordered it like to an address in the US and had them forward it. And I'm sure I would have gotten hit with fucking, you know, importation tax,

but we found a business in like Scotland that made travel cases like soft travel cases and they made it for us. And it was like super really great service. And I was just like, damn, it's weird to deal with an actual British business that A, that's good at their job, but B, that like is in Britain, that just does stuff in Britain, because invariably, whenever you buy, it's just like, it's some weird international conglomerate or it's like, yeah, it's like crazy Ahab's fucking, you know, tinkering shop. Anyway, long story short, we deep fried our mixer. I don't remember whether I've, we talked about this on a previous episode of this,

or well, there's your problem. I'm getting podcast blurring, but the one company that still makes leaded gasoline is in fucking like, yeah, it's in Hampshire. Yeah, we looked it up for an episode. But anyway, going back to this, we say that he, he is essentially saying that he sees his role as the labor leader of London to be the, to be the mayor for capital, because he's seen the, the Tories step out or at least step into a different kind of role. He's the mayor of cosmopolitanized capital, whereas the Tories seem to be what the, the government of financial financialized, like a financialized directly extractive, like warehouse owner capital Belgians at paintball capital. Yeah. So it's,

it's a what we, what we have here is we have a, we have a labor, a labor mayor of London, who seems to be promising to what guy, who is, who is his many for whom he is governing, governing the many shareholders of Facebook. Pretty much. Yeah. And also I would say too that he was never particularly interested in supporting the labor left and everything he's done since the election to include doing another interview where he said that labor didn't deserve to win doesn't make me feel as though he's worth going door knocking and putting up with talking to actual fucking British people, like knocking on their doors at random. You know, I feel like one of the things that I like about Rebecca Long Bailey and it's like I have mixed

feelings and I know we're kind of done for even talking about this is a commitment to like open reselection because it's impossibly difficult to get someone out of a position of power in the labor party, whatever bullshit they come up with. Absolutely anything, whether it's this, whether it's Joanne Lamont being like, ah, trans people are a kind of orc who are made in the birthing pits and then have to kill a man. Project trans. I think like Riley hits it on the head though when it comes to like Sadiq Khan, because this is very like, this isn't just a case of like a London mayor who's become very close to business in a way that's like inevitable when you like sort of, when you, when you were like a mayor of a big city, like we've seen that with

like Bill de Blasio, right? And I'm sure like, you know more, he's become very close to pretending to be Italian. I mean, all I, all I remember of Bill de Blasio is that when he was first like elected or like in the run-up, they were kind of like, oh, he's like this very progressive, kind of very leftist guy. Yeah, he talked about his son, don't I? And like him being black and like the risks associated with police violence towards him and then like the NYPD owned him. Right. And then when I was like in New York, like last year, like all that was kind of really being said was that like, he's just like a jackass who just... Also, I mean, something I would point out about New York City though, that I think as Beir's mentioned is that

similarly to what you were describing, what Milo was describing about how hard it is to dislodge people, Bill de Blasio won re-election to mayor with something like 25% or less turnout for the entire city. And of course there's a split vote between like eight different candidates. And we have a similar problem that basically when I lived there. Candidates run on a post, there's a closed primary, it's super restrictive, they make voting really hard. And it's one of these situations where people assume because it's this big cosmopolitan city that things are A, competent, and B, transparent. And they're not at all. Like it's the worst kind of machine politics. It's just interesting to me because we may not need to go into the full details on this, but

the London Mayor office is a relatively new creation. Ken Livingston was the first London Mayor because they basically, under Thatcher, the Greater London Council became really left-wing and activist. And so they basically, they just cut out all of its power. And so what Sadiq Khan can do as Mayor of London is relatively limited because really when you get down to it... More like Sadiq Khan. It's largely TFL and policing. Because everything else is the boroughs and their councils. But the flip side of that is that because it was Ken Livingston's baby, it's like designed as this kind of siege fortress against whatever dumb shit Ken Livingston said recently. And so that still holds good. There's still a giant... Why does this baby keep talking about

the state of Israel? I think the point I was trying to make was that like, I think, especially now that the Brexit lines are kind of fully established. Sadiq Khan's play is going to be that I want to reach out to this imagined kind of cosmopolitan group of Londoners who are much more aligned to the Liz Truss view of the world. Did you see the TFL things that went up on all of the train clocks and everything that's like, London is always open. It's sandwiched in between. If you see anyone suspicious, call the police to shoot them. If you see anybody begging, make sure you tell us so we can call the cops. Also, don't give the money, give it to the White Shepard Mission. I'm sure the White Shepard Mission does good work. But come on, man. Well, honestly, also on that

topic, yes, Sadiq Khan is saying, yes, London is open in a very particular way to either upper middle class or upper middle class people who are going to still come here from all four corners of the world to like, work in banking. Yeah, it's open to the affluent and the very rich, basically. I mean, like that is the extent of his cosmopolitanism as it is shown by this particular quote. Such a fucking pay to win MMO. Well, I mean, I live in Southern Council, right? And I mean, it's a labor council, Neil Kinnick voice, a labor council. And they're fucking demolishing council housing left and right to build, let luxury developers build shit. And just do a fucking 20% poor doors kind of thing. And it's like, every time I go running

in Burgess Park, I see these massive, massive fucking estates built in the 60s that probably aren't that well built, but could at least be refurbished or at least just held on to given the housing crisis in the city. And they're fucking they're all there's no lights on because they're all fucking being demolished. Those houses actually tend to be very well built. And they're being replaced with stuff that will personally enrich Jeff Fairburn because he cuts I will say some of it is well built and some of it is a lot of it's poorly maintained. True. Yeah. But also if I remember correctly, one of the problems is some of them is that and I mean, like this is a niche interest,

but some of them are built with this kind of like slab construction that's incredibly dangerous, because if, for example, you have a gas line explosion or something like that, it'll blow out the whole facade of a building. Oh, so they are they are not turning this into an episode of well, there's your problem about the road and point class. The first place I lived here in the United Kingdom was was an old council estate and its problem was that it was poorly maintained. It was actually like quite decently built and very sturdy, especially compared to some of the fucking shit around here. And the shit they replace it with. Yeah, this is shoddy as hell.

It's shoddy as hell, but it's very sort of veneered and it always has CGI designs of you know, it looks like a couple couples walking down a sort of unlabeled shopping street. Would you like to live in something that looks like 20 Nando's stacked on top of each other? This is and here's I'm going to go back to this article and where it says that he's one of the this is from the article itself. One of the most high profile clashes has been with the US tech giant Uber and as chair of TFL con enthusiastically supports the regulator's decision to revoke Uber's license, which sounds like something a labor mayor should do in the case of a tech of an tech monopolist trying to like exploit people's like precarity to

access profits out of them. And maybe a detail to point in here is that when Uber started up in London, it was paying salaries or paying wages to drivers that were higher in aggregate than what you would make as a black cab driver, which is like a super guild protected job. But now they have so many drivers on the roads that and they've lowered the fares for the cuts they get. So Uber drivers are oftentimes just like in the hawk for their fucking car leases. And it's absolutely like guild of black cab drivers and their symbol of the crossed gollywags. I just quickly chip in here with something that happened to me last night, which is that I feel like in this way, Sadiq Khan is like the perfect mayor of London because he

sort of encapsulates how pointless and meaningless most of the things that happen in London are. Like because for example, now my brain is obviously ruined by this podcast. So whenever someone tells me that their friend has started to start up, I'm always like, Oh God, what the fuck is it now? Because it's never something good, right? So last night I met this person, friend of a friend. She was very nice. And she started telling me about a friend of hers who has started to start up. And I'm like, and I'm like, please don't tell me about it. I don't want to know. I don't want to, I don't want to have to sit here and be like so many times before. Yeah. And then it turns out this guy is starting a startup, which I'm sure is very well meaning,

but it's a startup where it's an app, good start, where you can sponsor an individual homeless person through an app to get job skills training, to get a job, like sponsoring a fucking goat at the zoo. I love to have like a contact list. I love to get letters every week in like crayon telling me how the homeless person is doing as though that's the problem. So they basically model it on the same way that like middle class white people sponsor a kid in like if you yes, yes, quite. And it's also like, do you know what would be a real solution to homelessness? Having housing you could put people into, do you know what they're not doing? Building that. So back to the Uber thing. Some, and this is from the article again, may see the Uber tussle

as proof of an anti-business strand running through cons approach managing life in the capital, but he insists it's the opposite. But I became mayor, he says, there was a monopoly, but I believe in the market economy. And now we have not one, but a number of different operators, the market is working. Awesome. Thank you. I love that we have like 12 different competing cab operators, all of which are going bust or going gangbusters all at different times. So I never know who's where there's no joined up network for anything. It's all still pretty expensive, but they're all also trying to constantly undercut each other on price because summer venture capital subsidized and others aren't so that eventually they can get into

some kind of monopoly position. I love not knowing how I'm going to get somewhere six months from now because there are a bunch of competing bits of JavaScript on the front end of a bunch of Amazon web service servers that are like what paying people different kinds of poverty wage. I love to work for like all of these in different ways at the same time and like just be running all of these different apps on my phone while I run my shitty car into the ground getting paid in Amazon script. That's amazing. I mean, and legitimately, if they just paid their taxes, if they weren't, if the UK wasn't constantly cutting its corporate tax rate and granting exemptions to these massive companies, like as you said, Riley, they could improve. They could probably scrap all the insane

diesel buses that make London have the absolute worst fucking air pollution in Europe. They could probably expand TFL massively. They could do more overground. They could do more buses. More 24-hour buses. They could do more, expand the tube more. They're going to have to do like a crossrail ever. A north-south running crossrail at some point anyway. Like they could make it so the northern line isn't basically like literally if it was animals instead of people that would be violating fucking animal welfare codes. There are things that they could do but instead invariably like we wind up with people like Sadiq Khan who believe in the market and it's like we can present all these examples of how it's not sufficient and the response you get is like,

oh, so you're a Tory then. It's like, no, we just want better and we would like to be able to elect a Labour Mayor of London who doesn't get on TV and say Labour deserves to lose. It's someone who actually wants to improve the material conditions of people working in the city but instead it's just sort of like, he's like, they say I'm anti-business but actually I'm so pro-business. I just don't want bad actors. I just want to get rid of the bad business apples. It's like, it's like fucking Mayor Elizabeth Warren. All my films are feature Lawrence Fox. I'm convinced Sadiq Khan to buy, to build a new YouTube line. It's a really like Baroque shape that spells out controls on immigration. Do you want to know why we're going to lose the next election? We're going to lose

the next election because we've just done 40 minutes of metropolitan elitism and none of you have been talking about towns at all. I said I wanted a functioning bus service. You're wrong. Yeah, I was going to say also, to be honest with you, having taken buses in other cities while campaigning, yeah, it's really grim. It makes you miss London, the problems with London's transport network not withstanding because like in Crawley, for example, all the tickers that tell you when the bus arrives, it was like a flashback to New York City where none of that means anything. None of those tickers have any correspondence with when the train's actually arriving. Yeah, but now that was how either Crawley is open always and forever.

Yeah, Crawley is European, dammit. One thing to also to bear in mind, because I grew up in one of the outside of the city and we had one bus service, an Arriva bus service, which kind of covers a lot of towns and villages in this country, which like for the worst kind of London bus is like a million times better than the Arriva, like any sort of Arriva service. But every time I used to go to like council meetings or you go to like parish meetings or whatever, and you say, but look, like the one bit of transport that takes us out of this like stupid place that like prevents us from having to like buy cars and everything costs like six pounds one way, right? And they'll kind of say that, well, in London, like these things don't

work either. So imagine what it's like when we're kind of right. So like if like the most well endowed city like isn't taking active steps to show that like there are better things that we can do or like there are different ways in which we can arrange things. But it also kind of, it stops like towns and villages from doing the same thing. And I was going to say this because compared to New York City, London's bus service and transport network in general are like it's light years ahead. It's so much better. And I guess I don't say that to let London off the hook, but rather to say it can get so much worse. And if it gets worse, it's going to get worse under the supervision of an ostensibly left leaning or center left

leadership, because none of these people actually care. They're so distanced from it. And if this person even in a situation where you would think nominally in an incredibly pro labor region like London, they would have a reason to support these things that have pulled very popularly. Instead, he's turning around and trying to make himself like the Howard Schultz of the Labor Party. If that's where his priorities lie, what's going to happen when there's an actual challenge? Why couldn't you have something more like Liverpool where the mayor, Joe Anderson, is just like, fuck you, no more austerity. Yeah, that kind of rules. Yeah, we're just not going to do it. Because I think the channel through which austerity flows

is through, for most people, is through cuts to local services. And so this mayor basically saying, fuck you, I won't do it. I mean, we'll see how that plays out. I mean, I remember Liverpool did something kind of similar once in the 1980s. And it led to Neil Kinnecks, a labor council. So I mean, we'll see how that goes. Yeah, I mean, particularly in the South, there's a lot of like very like smug middle class politicking. And I think you see a bit with what the Greens do in Brighton, which is where they're like, they make these gestures towards progress. Like the Greens are like, oh, well, you know,

we envisage a carless society, but they don't do anything to achieve it other than just like make it impossible to park in Brighton. It's like, well, well done, you've just fucked over people who need to drive. Like you've not provided an alternative. And that's the same shit they do in London where they're like, okay, we're going to do these things to like make it harder to drive in London, but we're not going to like build a fucking tube line. Like fuck you if you live in all of South London. What we're going to do is what we're going to do is we're going to let the market fix it, which is clearly what Sadiq Khan wants to do. Which is why it costs 705 million pounds per mile of track in central London. Because when we let the market fix it, then

because where public transport is completely privatized, like Hussein was saying, is in towns. If you get Sadiq's argument that the market is basically good and the market should be applied to public transport, then what you're going to have is that we're going to have a London that where the transport is arranged, like more like where Hussein comes from. Or more like the MTA. We're just going to have leaks in the tube tunnels. And also, I mean, so when I point out that... Down there were my tube leaks. You said it's ridiculous how much money they charge, how much we wind up paying for all these contractors and subcontractors and such to do construction. But just bear in mind that New

York City, it's 705 million pounds per kilometer would be an amazing bargain considering that when they were building the second Avenue Subway in New York City, it wound up averaging something along the lines of 3 billion pounds per kilometer. It's absurd. It's absolutely absurd. Every British public infrastructure project is just that thing with the Chinese hitman. Every contractor hires another contractor until eventually the government is paying $10 million, but there's some guys being paid $5 to do it who has no experience and doesn't speak English. So I'd like to move us on nonetheless. Do the exact same segment again about Wigan for balance.

But these are the priorities of CityCon, someone who has decided upon which side of the toast the butter is. I still like my laser sight idea. I like that there's a parallax view guy up on a rooftop somewhere. Making him be centrist. Yes, I am very friendly to business. You may think I'm being unfriendly to business, but in fact, I'm being, if anything, more friendly to it. So all the hitmen that are chasing him are Jason Statham body doubles that look like Jeff Bezos. Yes, they're all Chinese guys being paid less than the living wage. So moving on to the Remain Mujahideen, which

the Remain Mujahideen, of course, is coming out to protest this the day upon which recording that Brexit happens. They're flooding the streets. It's like the Wolfrendum times a million. People's vote has organized multiple different protest groups there. It's like the Gilles Jean in here. Yeah, I just love to see a bunch of Remainers in the back of a Toyota pickup truck that has like a Soviet anti-aircraft gun in there for some reason. The UK does leave the European Union today on the day that we are talking to one another and several days before we're talking to you. And Big Ben isn't going to bong for Brexit because we didn't bong enough Bob for Big Ben to bong for Brexit.

No, that is Britain is doomed. Like Britain is genuinely like in some ways, I wish they had raised enough money for Big Ben to fucking bong because as stupid as it is, it would have suggested that the UK government at least wasn't a total pathetic joke that like the UK government could at least muster half a million quid for their stupid political gesture and they fucking can't. They can't even do that. Like, I mean, like I have this theory now that like Britain has become the dumbest country on earth because we have to forget that we were once the most evil country on earth. Otherwise, we'd have to start asking questions about how we got too incompetent to be evil anymore. We've stopped being evil, not really because we don't

want to be, but just because we no longer have the resources to do it on any meaningful scale. It's just like embarrassing. But what I'm focusing on here is that our future, our choice, open Britain, people's vote, best for Britain, all of these groups, all of these groups that I usually refer to as Jabhat al-Romein, they've just, now that Brexit's happening, they've just, they've packed up their political projects and they've gone home. There seem to be nothing, they seem to be saying nothing, doing nothing, beyond writing some op-eds in the new European. Jacked goofy. What do you have to say on this podcast? Gosh, guys, it's almost like this was the thing to fuck over labor in the first place. You know what the funny thing is? The really

bleakly joker moment is, is that in the aftermath of the election and us getting owned, somebody anonymously, a labor source, senior labor source, gave a quote to the press that said that Ash Sarkar had like gone to labor HQ that night, seen the results and walked out. She wasn't there and she could prove it, but the line was these people have literally joined our party rectus and walked away. And that's exactly what happened with people's vote. Labor went from leading in the polls to being several points under in the polls and then getting owned at all of these like former Lib Dem PPCs and so on, are just going to like walk away dusting their hands theatrically and saying, well, job done. You know, we tried our best.

The thing for me is that it's like, it's basically like these people, they just want to go to custard tart Valhalla, right? Like it's like, it doesn't, the actual actually remaining in the EU isn't what matters to them. It's that they made a big, a big, bold, big boy stand against it. And now they get to like keep their honor intact and like clutch their pearls. They're like, Oh no, I'm being torn asunder from my true love. Not only that, but they also managed to destroy Corbinism as a political project. So that's, that's a nice bonus for them. But now they don't have to eat jam tarts and who will be making that jam? Well, so the thing is, like, and that's also not to say that every like

marcher on the like anti-Brexit marches was just being like, well, time to destroy Corbinism as a political project. That's a really sad thing. No. So like, people like, you know, at Lynn underscore eight, three, six, seven, three, five, four, three, seven, like FBPE or whatever, like profile picture is a dog. Yeah. They're like an unfocused out of center picture of a dog. Like retweet. Yeah. Retweet. If you think the UK should be part of Luxembourg or whatever, you know, like these people, like they're, they're just passionately cosmopolitan. They just like being in the EU. They don't like the idea of right wing backsliding. They don't want this change. But what happened, what happened was is that like their actual passion for doing,

for this political project was harnessed by cynical chancellors like Alistair Campbell. And now that Brexit is gone, Brexit is happening. It's coming and going. The like all these bottom feeders that ran all of these like astroturfed organizations, like, you know, like our future, our choice or people's vote or whatever, they're just, they're just gone. Their political project is no longer there. And that's it. I think the other thing to notice is that tonight, when we leave the EU, it's 11pm, not midnight for some reason, there will be genuine sorrow from people who, aside from having like some personal connection, like worrying that they might get kicked out of the country, genuinely have developed this emotional attachment to European

institutions have just been taken for a ride by these absolute dickheads. And like, who are just now leaving them in the lurch. I think what's interesting, yeah, I was gonna say, like, what's interesting is like seeing in like the aftermath of all this, because there has been like a minor reckoning. I've seen like people who were kind of very pro-EU, and for them, like the kind of passion issue was like, we need to stay in the European Union, or at the very least, we need to have a relationship that kind of, that kind of like explores a more fluid continuation. European identity. Well, you know, and then it can mean like several things. But basically, I guess what I'm trying

to say is that like, they've all of a sudden sort of been drawn into this kind of political fight that I don't think that they really wanted to be in, where it was one which was like reckoning with like these very vague ideas of like what Corbinism is, to kind of like make these false choices between like, you know, there's a line that goes around with putting in terms of like a lot of FPP people in terms of, if you voted for Corbin, then you're complicit, but they're not really sure in like, what complicity actually means. And if you bring this up with anyone, they're kind of, you know, it's to say, well, okay, if you kind of contributed in label losing, because they were the only people who could have won in 2019, there was no other.

I mean, Owen Smith would have won a last night. There was no other outcome. So like, by not doing that, were you also complicit in like the Tories winning, were you complicit in Brexit, were you complicit in these new things now where like, Sajid Javed is looking to kind of restart austerity using kind of other words, but they won't answer those things. Or they'll kind of like, they'll be very hesitant to answer those things. So there hasn't really been a lot of clarity. And I think there are a growing number of people who have sort of realized that the pro-U movement was there were like, there was a lot of like bad intentions in that. Because they don't even have a point when they say that like, people

voted for Corbin are complicit. That's just not even, that's not even correct. Because like, Corbin was the person who came closest to threading the needle of like, keeping the Brexiteers on board. They still got him to push for a second referendum. And that's what made it worse, right? Whereas like, the Paul Embry people are wrong, but they at least have a point which is that like, you might have kept some of those people on board if you'd pressed the races in but they are probably right. It's not worth doing. Don't cry because you got what you fucking wanted. You got a second referendum and look at the result. And that's the other thing. I think I'd like to emphasize this thing about complicity that Hussein's bringing up, right? This is also

to do with their assumption that Brexite is somehow the fault of the left, not campaigning for it in the right proper liberal way. Because there is this widespread liberal belief, which is very strange next to their stated values of persuasion and compromise and rational debate, that the entire right is this unpersuadable lump in mass. And you have to just react to it. You always have to manage it and console it and sort of try to mollify it and try to just keep it from its worst excesses and that you can't sort of try to outplay it. You can't outflank it. You can't try to beat it. You can't protest against it. It can never be your political enemy. It's just this thing that exists that needs to be managed. And because Corbin didn't campaign for Remain enough, because we

didn't come around to the second referendum quickly enough, because when you did come around to the second referendum, you didn't say which side you would campaign on. You never joined up with us entirely. And you never joined up with our understanding, which is, well, we have to mollify the right. Join us so we can... And you're the only lever we can pull the left. We can't pull on this lever the right. But also, I mean, I would point out too that, I mean, you look at some of the just incredibly disingenuous bad faith things that have happened. When you think about people like Chuka Omona saying in 2016, after the referendum, or I think maybe before the referendum, like, well, if we can get rid of freedom of movement, then that's worth leaving the single market.

And then him being like, oh, no, Jeremy Corbin's shocking lack of leadership and inability to oppose Brexit is why I have to start my own shitty party and then join the Lib Dems. None of that all gets memory hold. And the narrative, I mean, I saw today as people being like, well, I blame Corbin and the goddamn lefties. And it's so transparently false. And I think that if you had allowed... I was opposed to Brexit, I certainly would have preferred the softest of soft Brexit to whatever fucking nightmare shithole we're going to get. But I think that if you had gone with what happened in 2017, and you basically said, the referendum result has to be respected, and we're going to find a compromise solution that is still Brexit, even if it's soft Brexit, you might have done

better. But I mean, I don't think you can look at what happened in the general election and say, you know, oh, no, we just didn't remain hard enough. I just don't think that's true. Yeah, but that's where we are. Exactly. And I think the point in three, custom talk, Griff. And I think the point that you made there, Riley, that all of these organizations, literally they shut down, they didn't even shut down now, they shut down before the election, like for example, People's Vote, when labor adopted its position, because otherwise they would have been put in the awkward situation of having to endorse Jeremy Corbin. And their whole, you know, modus operandi was finding a wedge with which to split support for the labor party.

The one that didn't was Best for Britain, which we talked about before. Well, fuck's sake, yeah, which ran a disinformation campaign to scuttle labor. Yes, which probably lost to Kensington. So, in conclusion, capitulating to these chancers was in retrospect a very bad idea, and the left is going to be loath to do it again, but they're going to try and they're going to take over the Lib Dems and run a spoiler party again later. And meanwhile, on the right, because Riley, I was struck by something you said about Brexit coming and going, we're just engaged in like a Trotsky permanent revolution. We just have Brexit now cannot end.

We have to be Brexiting forever. So that's going to be fun. This psychosis is never going to stop however many election cycles into the future will be fucking still relitigating it. It's just a maxim that we're all used to, which is that we're going to, this year is just going to be another version of 2016. We're going to be living in a 2016 cycle that is never going to end. I actually don't think I agree. I think there are some people who are, but I think there's people like run the news, but no, no, hold on. I don't think we are because like Alistair Campbell, he's shut down his organization. The government is talking about doing things now

that are going to be not related to Brexit, even though they might be related to Brexit. In fact, they'll be framed is not related to Brexit. My prediction is that those will be totally subsumed by it and that anything coming from the left or even from liberals will just be framed as bloody Ramoners trying to undo Brexit and talk down Britain. I feel like the only prism left for understanding politics, Dominic Cummings, is somehow Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, all of us, and we're just stuck with this. Hey, I can't wait until he makes like a thousand, let a thousand, Theranos's bloom in Dominic Cummings vision.

But I mean, I guess the point that I would make at the end of it is labor was in an impossible situation because a significant number of its membership, the majority of its membership is pro-remain. These organizations had tons of funding from shitheads who were both rich and opposed to Corbin, but also nominally labor-adjacent and they took a gamble. It lost massively. It sucked. The people who said this was wrong were correct. Fair play to them. They were wrong. They were right and we were wrong. I would say we never really took a hard position on it, but I think that if every single member of this podcast were to be asked, like if you could just snap your fingers and decide, we probably, I would assume, all would remain in the European

Union and they lost. And the problem is I don't know how you can go back and play that any differently because I really do believe that had they stuck to the 2017 line as just sort of dogged determination from the leader's office, then I think you would have seen an even bigger scuttling of the labor vote taken by the Greens and the Lib Dems. I think we were fucked either way and it sucks really bad. It's really awful. Yeah. Do you want to lose on second referendum or like remain and reform or whatever? Either way. I think the point I'm trying to make here is that all of these shitheads are gone now. They have a chat. They are here to have just given up because politics for them is just a debate. But they haven't though. There's a thing.

They'll be back in a great numbers. The point of this project is to destroy the left. It doesn't matter whether or not it's based on a real issue. The point of this project is they have now determined, they feel as though they have this moral high ground that they, and now that labor has lost, labor can't argue like it did after 2017 saying, shut up. We've got something that works. We don't have that argument anymore. So what's going to happen is they're going to be like, oh, well, root and branch. We have to undo this menace. The menace isn't Brexit. The menace is the left. But what I mean is that the remain project is now gone. It's good. These people aren't gone, but the remain project is going anywhere. I mean, fuck's sake. That shit's all

going to stay. Well, I was going to make this point, which is like the lasting legacy of this is that in the past few years, what we've had is an eruption of like a new pundit tree, right? And like a new kind of media like economy system where, and it wasn't, we shouldn't kind of like the irony of like the BBC slashing like tons of service stuff and like producers and stuff shouldn't be lost. And that's like the media landscape has changed. And like the people who have benefited from the last few years and will continue to benefit are these new generation of like reactionary pundits who have all been fueled by this kind of by the ongoing like Brexit wars. And again, like the people who have succeeded even in that

have been the people who have benefited from the destruction of left, right? What's Mr. Clapton Brexit going to do with his name now? I think that does speak to my point, which is that like Brexit is the only thing left now. And I think for like... Culture wars haven't died, right? The culture wars of Brexit haven't died. This is going to rebrand another... Yeah, I think we misstated when we were joking about the Brexit cast just becoming the newscast. I think that like the Brexit cast has just consumed the newscast, right? It's just like the news is will now just continue as like an avenue of Brexit. It is a continuation of Brexit

by other means. And it has to because it suits people like Dominic Cummings and it suits people on the like liberal wing who want a stick to beat the left with for it to continue on this sort of culture war basis. The next thing will probably be Scottish independence. And then God knows what after that, but it's all going to be Brexit by another name. Really excited for this new album from Huey Lewis and the Brexit. So I want to move us on to something just a little bit nice that we can finish off with. Nice. A little bit fun, a little bit light. It's the number 69, folks. And it is... God damn it.

And this is a vintage Raphael Baer column. Now, those of you who listen to our bonus episode where we read his 2006 Shoes column know that before 2010, Raphael Baer's writing was odd. Shoeless. He didn't wear shoes when he was writing and now he does. It was pretty odd recently. Like his most recent column was I had a heart attack and I think it made me like get over Brexit. But at least like that, he sort of knows what he's writing about now. In the pre-2010 era, Raphael Baer has a very interesting need to produce columns, but he never quite knows about what. Yeah. Here at Chateau Trash to Fugue, we grow our Raphael Baer columns in the finest microclimate to give them the

fresh finish on the palette that you used to. So a rare vintage up from the cellars. I have gone into the cellars of The Guardian and I have pulled out a 2009 Raphael Baer column. I've blown the dust off it with microclimate and I am opening up the cork and I'm ready to deliver to you a modest proposal at Alton Towers. Episode title. Honestly, like, fuck. This sounds like a famous five book. What if we simply ate the children? Ladies' hemlines are supposed to fall in a recession. Oh, wow. Oh, my God. A little bit of salissa energy to start us off. And so it makes sense that gentlemen's pants should get baggier. Excuse me? No, it doesn't. That first sentence is two things

that don't. Why is he using pants in the American sense? Or at least I hope he's using it in the American sense. No, he is not. Oh, no. It's an austerity thing. Just as the culture of an economic boon is, boom, is brazen and flashy, leading times demand sobriety and discretion. My two sisters. Sure enough. Last week, Alton Towers announced a ban on skimpy swimming trunks. Oh, no. No, this isn't what the whole article is about. Is it? Wait, wait, wait, wait. Alton Towers is like a theme park, right? Yeah, look at this one. Six flags for American listeners. The small brief style is not appropriate for a family venue, according to the

Pleasure Park headquarters, which is disappointingly not called Alton Towers Towers. Stop calling it a Pleasure Park when you're talking about kids swimming trunks. It's for adults. You could just fucking write anything in a newspaper in 2009. Johann Hari was still working. Fucking like Liz Smith was writing about how she hates her children and stuff. Any bullshit you wanted, you could get published. The implication is that, by the way, I'm not removing a single word from this. I've taken every single word Raphael Barris said, and I'm presenting it back to you. The implication is that public sensibilities are affronted by clothing that hugs the outline of

male genitals. What? A man in bulging briefs invades the space of other customers in a way his Bermuda shorted counterpart does not. So people keep telling me on the Victoria line, Sir, sir, please stop wearing that man song. We were just all, wait, 2009 had the Borat like Mankini been invented? Oh yeah, that was 2007 or even 2006 Borat. Yeah. But say outraged Speedo Packers, the offense cannot be located in this trunks themselves. Speedo Packers is a homophobic slur from the olden time. It has to happen. It has to happen in the prudish mind of the offended party.

And what authority does he or she claim to dictate what fellow bathers wear? Who hurt Raphael Barr? What happened? What did someone say to him, Alton towers? Well, why is he writing so much strange columns about shoes and speedos? After like 2012 or 2015 even, this would be a thing about like, I don't know how the trans women orcs are coming into the bathing spaces or something about the Burkini. But instead, this is just like that comes up. Oh, doesn't it? We've just defeated my entire point, which is this is a harmless nice little column about how weird it is that you can just see someone's dick. I just want to see some dick outline. No, no, he's in favor of dick outline is my

understanding. He wants to see that dick print. Exactly. Show me that dick, though. Yeah, just a hint of dick to get an interest. At first glance, this is a classic conflict of positive and negative rights. One person's freedom to wear what they choose competing with another's freedom from indecent exposure. It should therefore be possible to resolve the dilemma on liberal terms using John Stuart Mills quote unquote harm principle. Oh, Jesus Christ. I'm imagining him like me being thrown out of the park office at Alton towers as I read to them from John Stuart Mills. This is a man who's forgot he had a deadline. Applying Marxist dialectics to whether or not we should be able to see your dick is something

we would do. Should we have to wear huge linen coats to the swimming hole? I'm going to pitch in my like editors meeting like in 10 minutes because I have zero ideas. Does the sight of a male member bound in Lycra really cause enough injury to justify curtailing the civil liberties of its owner? Probably not. And then Raphael Baer says probably not. Speedos one, Alton towers zero. I love non-league football. In France, they've got the whole issue covered or rather uncovered by Republican doctrine. Everyone has to wear proper swimming costumes, which means Speedos for men. Ostensibly, this is for public health reasons. Shorts might be worn around all day and swim port bacteria to the water, but it also reflects a certain Gallic affection for uniformity.

The rule was cited in a case last week of a woman expelled from a municipal pool near Paris for wearing a Burkini, a head to toe costume designed to allow Muslim women to swim piously. So that's all he says about it. I hate it when I go to the French swimming hole and Jean-Luc du Pedophili has to check under my full skin to make sure everything's all right. This is what I mean about it being a more innocent time though, right? He just mentions this in passing. There's no like detail. There's no political point to that. It's just like noting a thing that happened in France where they have racism, which we haven't got yet. It's like, cool. So the Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Muslims with cartoonishly huge tits. So the individual's right to conceal

his or her body from public view is subordinates the collective right to a clean pool in secular society. Speedos to Alton Towers Zero. What? Wait, he just, I take it back. He in a sort of harmless noting fashion just advocated for like Nicarb bands and shit on the basis that you should be able to see people's dick. Wait, so this is like that. It's such a small amount of people too. I'll be honest with you. And then it comes. I want to see that dick. He's a dick south of Harambe guy. I will say that the French are really insane about this. I remember swimming in a pool in Paris and I had two old Speedos that were kind of worn out from when I was like a high school swimmer. And so like when I was a high school swimmer, you would just wear

multiple suits because like that way you weren't walking around with like transparent fucking uniforms because like they wear out when you're swimming twice a day, you know, six days a week. When your dick is big and abrasive. I basically had to like, the lifeguard was like, okay, I'll let you do it this one time, but don't come back. Like whether you have to come back with just one structurally integral Speedo, like they're that into it. Like they literally like, wait a minute, are you wearing two Speedos? That's against the rules. I'm like, but it's still a speed doesn't matter. They're really, really into it in France, which I mean, like does that? But somehow neither the liberal nor Republican arguments seem to accommodate the

essence part aesthetic part cultural of why Speedos are objectionable. See, that's the thing about a Raphael Barrichol of pre 2010. He takes you on a journey. You think that he's like really pro Speedos, but now he's like coming back round to the other side. I wonder what his actual like verdict is going to be on this. I want to see which way judge bear comes down on this. Oh, you sweet summer child, you think he comes down on one side of this question. Oh, because I forgot because you could, because you could publish anything, you could just like do a column that was like just asking questions as like a delightful little A pasty fat man in ill fitting swimwear transgresses no one's human rights,

but then it doesn't exactly kill him to wear something else. I feel like all civil rights debates should involve the figure of the pasty fat man in an ill fitting swim suit. It's like the man on the Clapham Omnibus is wearing an ill fitting Speedo. And frankly, he should see why everyone is served by his dressing more modestly, but that's the real problem with skimpiness. It isn't a question of rights at all. That's the real problem. The real problem is skimpiness. He just argues like a rights-based question for like 75% and he's like, ah, that's the thing. It's actually not about rights at all. Harry Potter and the real problem is skimpiness. Skimpiness is defined by the Oxford English

Dictionary as... But this is a very complicated way of saying fellows is it gates to wear pants? It isn't a question of rights at all, but of dignity and self-knowledge. No, that I ask Nothi say out on, as is written above the gates of fucking Alton Towers. You have to know how big your deck is and how it's going to print and make an informed decision about that. The great Enlightenment political philosophies were defined in reaction against conservative establishments and clerical oppression. They seek emancipation. What would Ayatollah Khomeini say about this? Well, he's a man who never showed any girth. So, yeah. Very true. Ayatollah Khomeini, very long dick, very thin dick, not very wide.

But that means they neglect the idea of virtue that constrains rather than liberates modesty, chastity, abstinence as a result. I say locking the cock cage around me. As a result, advocacy of these behaviors is monopolized by religious conservatives who can all too easily caricature liberalism as morally degenerate. So, he saw a fat man in a speedo and thought, why is there no liberal argument against this? No, no. He saw the sign at Alton Towers saying, please don't wear speedos. And then he imagined a fat man in a speedo to construct the liberal argument for it. It was actually a sign at Alton Towers saying, you can't wear speedos made of yams.

Just saw a sign at Alton Towers and said, no fat dudes. It's the damn British psychosis yet again. I've invented a thing that's completely imaginary, and now I'm furious about it. But he's not. Why does he say you're a fat chick on this sign and this thing of yams? I think you have to understand that the three 2010 Raphael Abert articles are just sort of a curious man just asking some questions. Just so happens that all the questions are very stupid. To write this new labor guardian produced such insane creatures. I swear to God. He probably got paid my last year's annual salary to write this.

I so much prefer this to fucking like two pages of Graham Linnahan, you know? So this ethical provocation has to be the first for a theme park like the Agora of ancient Athens. Wow, when no one was wearing pants to be fair. But with rides, but with rides and pitch and snatching chips out of pins. Now the Agora had that. Yeah, the Agora had the you could get the look of the log. I got a guy jacking it in a barrel. It was cool, man. Fast future life from the Agora. Alton Towers has posed an intellectual challenge to the foundations of liberal democracy. You could just say some incredible things before we have the fascism. I'm sorry for what I said. This article fucking rules. It's so good. This is something

I would write while I was high. What is the secular case for modesty in the age of moral license? Call it the speedo question. Here endeth. Wait, he ends the article? Does he actually say here endeth? No, I say here endeth. I mean, this is basically like, sorry. I'm just like leaning over. My brain has suddenly become very heavy. So I feel like in one way, this is the type of stuff I used to read on like Atheist forums. Like the kind of like new Atheist forums where they pretended that they were very smart because they memorized hitch 22. And they would kind of just like take these basically like ridiculous non-problems and extend them for like pages and pages of threads.

I would like the human pet guy. Right, yeah, yeah. But they would kind of apply it to things like the bikini and stuff like that, right? Sarah has 10 sweets, Ranjit has 22 sweets, but why wouldn't the liberals let me show my dick? Not to reintroduce Project Milo, but do you guys know about the human pet guy? Yes, I actually would like to not talk about the human pet guy. What I was going to say is that when like all the stuff about the bikini was happening, one of like the arguments on these Atheist forums were like, well, the bikini, like this pointless to even have a bikini anyway, because you can see the curves of the woman. So it's not the same as like a man wearing a speedo and you can see like the rim of his dick.

Like lady shapes with Alan Partridge. This is that in a column, but it's also just like an example of the liberation, the liberated like galaxy takes that occurred when like we weren't stuck in the like the same loop of the year. Raphael Bear being furious because he bought a bikini, it made him look nothing like Edwin Burke. On the one hand, I'm furious. On the one hand, I'm just like, I think this article is insane and I'm like getting an aneurysm over it. Well, on the other hand, I think to myself like, I want to go back to that time. Yes, the end of history. The real end of history is when you show up to your office, hung over a shit and you're like, fuck, I've got a deadline today. I'm going to write about my dick. You're wearing a speedo

because you couldn't find any clean underwear. It's funny to me because in the United States, speedos were never particularly popular. We've always sort of thought of them as like a weird thing that Europeans wear who are somehow gay somehow. Where do you put a gun in a speedo? When I was a kid, you'd wear swim trunks. But like, you know, when I go to pools in America or to the beach now, like kids wear much almost like cargo shorts, like almost like fucking Capri. Jinko bathing suits. They swim in Capris or in Jinkos. And obviously, in some cases, for like to avoid fucking sunburns and shit, kids will wear like actual shirts as well when they swim too. But it's the weirdest thing because in a way, it's like, that has nothing to do with

modesty or Islam or I guess maybe it's like a weird kind of American modesty. It's like somehow you have to, you make little kids feel ashamed that if they wear comfortable bathing suits, then like they're gay somehow. It's the weirdest thing. And so it's what's so strange to me about this is just like that you can find some bugbear to like attack over this, whether it's the Burkini is somehow, I don't fucking know, like this is somehow restrictive of civil liberties or like unhygienic or whatever. But ultimately, like, I don't think anyone's going to look at what France does with the way that it enforces these rules and be like, oh, no, this is this is a completely apolitical, just hygiene centric focus. It's because they hate

Muslims. Like, but you're missing the point of the article, which is that he doesn't care about any of that. No, he's just he's just saw a sign and had some thoughts because this is from before the politics came back. This is basically bathing suit yam future. This is your uncle rambling exactly what this is. Yeah, this is just because in the end of history, when the when history had still ended, this is what columnists did. And it's important that we remember that we have to have like a museum line that preserves the job of the columnist who just knows this things. I just just love the idea of like American weird, like puritanical shit going to its logical conclusion, which is that all kids have to wear neck ops because otherwise you're a pedophile from looking

up. That's right. Michelle hula beck. I was gonna say, yeah, that's that's it. So in 2009, we had when we asked questions about bathing suits, it was like, huh, weird. I wonder, I wonder what John Stuart Mill would say about my song. Now we have it's every everyone either has to be wearing any cob or no one can wear any. That's the strangest thing, right, is because he's referencing a real thing that happened in France at that time. The politics were happening. Clearly, it just it was meat for all of these people to just be able to ignore them. Le politique. And yeah, so join. So thank you for joining us in that retrospective on the just a strange era

in column writing. I'm gonna leave it a little while before I go back into the bear archives again, where I go back into the cellar and pull out another fine bottle. But I do hope you all enjoyed this particular very delightful find. Exactly. It's like a window into a time when like Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross were a thing. So simple listening to the future heads. So with that, I say now I'm listening to the trash future heads. I'm all right. Oh, God. So with that, I say thank you all very much for listening yet again. This has been trash future with just just the main cast and just the bad fans. Okay, so at the time of this recording, there are 17 tickets left for the trash future inaugural live union debate,

where we will be debating the resolution. This house believes Elon Musk is a real life Willy Wonka, where I will be the speaker. Milo Edwards will lead the government and helping Milo will, of course, be comedian Rajiv Karya previously on the show, as well as friend of the show, Grace Blakely. And on the opposition, Hussein Kesvani, permanently in opposition, will be leading a team comprised of comedian Emily Woods and friend of the show, James Meadway. And so if you can, if there are tickets still available, we will have the link in the description below. They may, they may not be. However, we will also be broadcasting the event on Twitch. So it is going to be on our channel, twitch.tv slash trash future podcast,

and it will be on Thursday starting at around 7 30 GMT. Now that's our stated start time, maybe a couple minutes later, but there will be something on the stream for you to look at. It may just be sort of some people milling around the upstairs of the hen and chickens pub in Highbury. So please do get some tickets to that if there are any left, or if they're not, please do tune in on the stream so you can finally see this age old question settled. Also, to a day is gang, gang, gang, gang, gang, gang. Fourth of the tomorrow, this comes out on Monday, right? So it comes out on Tuesday. It comes out on Tuesday. So tonight we've been doing this podcast for like, like, like several years. My brain is ruined. Today, the day of the

outcoming of this podcast, I will be hosting a smoke comedy with Mark Watson and Glenn Moore. That should be fun. Also on the 25th of March and the 3rd of March, I'm doing previews of my new show at the Vault Festival in London. I'm also doing Leicester Comedy Festival on the 21st of February and the 22nd of February. 22nd of February is my birthday. So come out to that. 21st is Pindos and 22nd is preview of a new show. And also, I'm doing shows and I'm really worried about these. If you live in Stockholm or Oslo, I'm aware this is a bit of a reach. We have Scandinavian fans. They sent us all that delicious at first candy. Yeah. If you live in Stockholm or Oslo and you'll know anyone who does, who might like to go to

a comedy show on the 10th of February in Stockholm or the 11th of February in Oslo, please do tell them because my promoters are not good. Yes. And if you live in another country, send us some snacks. Yeah, I really enjoy receiving the snacks from our Swedish friend. DM the show account for the address and like send us candy. Do not dox us. Send us kits. It's candy to be sent to us. Yes. And Milo is the new show called Project Milo, because if not, they should. So, and I think that's about it, except for me to say that our theme song is Here We Go by Jinseng. You can find it on Spotify. It's very good. Nate looks like he wants to say something. Also, please listen to What a Hell of a Way to Die. If you're interested

in left-wing perspectives on military and veterans news. And well, there's your problem. Yeah, listen to that. You were just on a second episode. I've been on two episodes now. There's their problem. You're listening to left-wing perspectives. You sure are. Anyway, Jonathan Racism. Anyway, I think that is about it for us. So, we will see you on Thursday. Bye. Bye. You