TRASHFUTURE - Riley's Commie Book Club: Steal as Much as You Can by Nathalie Olah

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

This month's CBC features Riley in conversation with Nathalie Olah, the author of 'Steal as Much as You Can: How to win the culture wars in an age of austerity' forthcoming from Repeater Books. It's a work that tackles the supposed “golden age” of the New Labour era and the subsequent lost decade of austerity, exploring the myths and realities of life for young people working in the arts, media and culture industries today.   Get the book from the publisher here (available on October 12): https://repeaterbooks.com/product/steal-as-much-as-you-can-how-to-win-the-culture-wars-in-an-age-of-austerity/   Bear in mind that there are many, many more CBC episodes on Patreon, which you can sign up to here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* Guess who’s going to play live at The World Transformed in Brighton this September? That’s right, your favourite podcast lads. Buy a ticket here: http://theworldtransformed.org If you want to buy one of our recent special-edition phone-cops shirt, shoot us an email at trashfuturepodcast[at]gmail[dot]com and we can post it to you. (£20 for non-patrons, £15 for patrons) Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

Hello and welcome to the show within a show that you all know and love, or at least that many of you know and tolerate. It is another edition of Riley's Kami Book Club. You may have noticed that last month's was not on the main feed. That's because now that book club has been made free due to your many generous Patreons. What we're going to do is we're releasing it free on just the Patreon feed. So if you go to the Patreon feed, it's there, it's free, it's for you. But we're releasing this one on the main feed, A, so we can tell you that, and B, so we can introduce you to our fabulous guest this month's book club, Natalie Ola, who has written Steel As Much As You Can, which is out now on repeater. Natalie,

how are you doing? I'm doing well, thanks. How are you? Well, I'm never quite prepared for another person to be here with book club, because usually it's me sitting with a book for a while trying to make an hour's worth of talking notes. What I'm here to help you. Yeah, thank goodness. It's half the work, everyone, but it still costs the same, which is free. Anyway, so Steel As Much As You Can, as far as I can tell, is sort of two books.

It's 80% explaining why the UK's cultural spaces are dominated by the upper class, why this is happening specifically in the post-financial crisis and austerity era, how the ground was laid for this by the neoliberal project in Blair, and what aspiring young creatives can do about it, which is kind of the last 20%. How would you consider this breakdown? I think that's a fair summary. I sort of wanted to cover off both bases. I think when I set out to write this, I wanted to talk more about the causes, but then as I was writing about them, more and more ideas were coming to mind, and through the people that I was speaking to, there were lots of kind of solutions or ways of circumnavigating this that I thought

I also wanted to share with the people reading it, because presumably if you've picked up the book and you're reading it, you're somebody who's invested in this and you care about it. So any sort of advice that I had in terms of how to improve the situation and make our cultural institutions more representative would be the good and right thing to do. Yeah. I think when we say cultural institutions, we can mean sort of obvious things like the BBC, the Guardian, the ones we know we can win as well. I don't think we're, there's any point in trying to mount a progressive takeover of the spectator. Right. So sorry, when I said the cultural institutions, I didn't necessarily mean the

individual entities that are producing culture. I actually think that most of those are fairly resistant to change. Even at the most sort of like left wing end of the spectrum, you're still finding that these places like the Guardian, etc., and even at the BBC, they're sort of operating in a sort of centre-left space and they're very resistant to any kind of radical left-wing change. So really what I'm talking about is how we can mount challenges to the establishment, how we can create alternative media and alternative outlets that will allow us to discuss those ideas. Yeah. And I think this is where the subtitle of the book comes in, is the title,

steal as much as you can, get into that sort of towards the end where the theft becomes much more central. The subtitle is how to win culture wars, or the culture wars rather, in an age of austerity. And I think that's a very interesting use of the term culture war, which traditionally is used to refer to broad social causes with clear, you might say, progressive and reactionary bent. And usually it's about stuff like there's a vegan Monday in a university cafeteria somewhere that has, you know, Fox News shrieking about it up and down the coast of America, for example. Like that's how culture wars are traditionally conceived, but that's not how you've conceived of them here. This book seems to be much more

about almost like a cultural insurgency. We're broadly speaking, the centre-left and centre-right cultural institutions don't even know they're at war. Like they don't even know we're here, and we're here trying to build something else before they even realise it. Right. And I think that's a very, I think that's a really fair summation of what's happened. I think as well, the reason why I've used culture wars in that, in that way, as opposed to the more traditional use is that the stakes are just higher than they've ever been before. And we're finding actually that groups of people that once sort of were broadly aligned, so the sort of like the neoliberal centre-left and the left are actually radically

different, and we're seeing those differences emerge every single day with different issues. So I guess when I used the term culture was I was using it to refer to the kind of issues that are emerging every single day with regard to class and with regard to disparities in pay and wages, etc. That's very interesting because most of the time we talk about culture war, most of the culture war topics traditionally conceived, they tend to just be about superstructure issues. They tend to be about rather than say the very problem of Oxford and Cambridge, they tend to be about how many minority students are we means testing into Mansfield College or whatever, right? And so the culture war, letting class into the culture war turns it into an

insurgency because it's just never, well since then I don't know, 1848 and 1917 has very rarely been fought on those grounds. Right, well it's quite difficult as well to talk about class on those terms because traditionally class was delineated along lines of like where you worked, so you had kind of blue collar workers, white collar workers, and you had trade unions. If you remember for trade union, you were a member of the working class. Obviously those sort of those distinctions have kind of become more blurred in an age of sort of like the gig economy and freelance work, etc. So it's not quite as simple in terms of saying like who's working class and who's middle class, etc. So it became, it was quite difficult to kind of identify class

as a sort of an identity. And so the idea of a working class person being at Oxbridge is almost, was almost like an oxymoron because by the time you're at Oxbridge, you are middle class. But obviously that isn't true. We all know that that isn't true. You know, it's much easier to find yourself in kind of like middle class institutions or someone from a working class background. And I don't think that we should avoid having those conversations for the reason that it's quite difficult to discuss class. I think that we need to start talking more about class as a cultural identity. Well, this is also something that will, I suppose, prefigure discussions of tastes that come up later. But one thing I've noticed is that discussions of

class are universally decried as being in bad taste. Right. In effect. It's, oh, that's not an acceptable thing to talk about, because everyone's middle class now. So unless you're claiming working classness as a cultural identity because of what your grandparents did in the 70s, it doesn't matter how rich you got under that chair. The fact that, you know, you still, yet you still support Enoch Powell and you still have a bit of a regional accent makes you work in class. Right. Which is, of course, ludicrous. Yeah. And one of the hangups I've had in even writing this is that like, there's a shame in trying to like posit yourself as like a working class hero, which I'm not doing. But that's all part and parcel of the fact that it's been

stigmatized and it is taboo to talk about class. And I think that we need to change that. And actually, as soon as we start to change that, I think that we'll start to see radical changes in society and we'll start to see a lot more angry people. Because I think part of the problem by positing everybody as middle class, and the media, I think, has done a lot of Blair and Cameron's work for them in terms of framing everything as middle class now, is that it, it denies existence of a working class identity. And in so doing, it sort of modifies working class culture and it says it invalidates it. I think it doesn't so much deny the existence of a working class identity so much as it freezes

it in the 70s. Right. So there is a working class identity now that is, that is portrayed as a middle class identity. It's the middle class identity of the middle, all the middle class things of basically everything young people do in cities, which is like, oh, you're getting a coffee from a, from a, from a takeaway that has flat whites. Oh, you're using an oyster card. You're having hummus. This is not necessarily a working class activity. It would just been, it would have been seen as fancy in the 70s. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And so the fact is, from Thatcher, when Thatcher basically made it so that class was allegedly, that's why I'm talking about Epstein saying allegedly, so that class was allegedly

all about how good you were as a person. It was basically your financial outcomes were an expression of your fundamental moral worth. Then the idea that, that then your, your class was there, was therefore now an outcome based on your moral worth. And so discussing any kind of culture would be like openly discussing your own moral worth, which is then taken as distasteful because either you're envious or you're gloating or you're not in the right place. The only people who are in the right place are the people who have basically won the lottery, but have the decency to never talk about it or admit it. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So before we get into, actually into the book and sort of how the argument proceeds and focusing on some of the things you've actually written,

I want to sort of go a little bit back to some previous books, books no one in here has written. The first one is, and this is like a, I think a lot of lefty cultural writing has as a point of departure, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialective Enlightenment, specifically the chapter on the culture industry. And it's the book and specifically that chapter is a frequent topic of discussion on this show within a show because I think it's an important point of departure where the basic contention is that culture, when it is made as an industry will always then produce outputs that are shitty, repetitive and stupefying because that's what makes returns. It's a very safe investment to make the same movie again and again and again. And incidentally,

it's also very pro-systemic. So it's that making culture a capital product makes it essentially toothless. And that's an idea you explore quite heavily in this book as well. Yes. So I read the Adorno, I read the Adorno a few years ago. I thought this is really pertinent to where we're currently at in our culture. And then I put it away. And I didn't actually think about it specifically with regard to this book for the reason that I wanted to create a book, I wanted to write a book that was really readable and really relatable to everybody. You definitely want to put away Adorno and Horkheimer. Right. Well, exactly. Because I faced a kind of dilemma in terms of like, do I write a theoretical

book, which I think will be, will probably stand a better chance of being kind of respected by left-wing intelligentsia? Or do I try to write a book that most people who aren't as kind of heavily invested in this stuff as you and I are, because most people don't have the time to invest in these subjects, but couldn't sort of grasp the key ideas and look at it through the cultural lens of that they've grown up around and that they've seen would probably be a more effective way of arguing it. But I think that, yes, deep down I think that what I've tried to do is kind of bring those arguments into the present day and into our current kind of cultural context. And we'll explore sort of some, how some of those actually work as we get in.

Also, the other sort of other piece of writing I want to bring in before we get into yours properly is Thomas Frank's essay, Commodifier Descent, another Commie Book Club stalwart. You know, there are a zillion other pieces of lefty cultural writing, but I think those two, because they are about the failure of culture, of the failure of mass produced culture to fulfill any kind of revolutionary promise, I think there are a couple that I want to bring in as background. So here are some of the quotes from Commodifier Descent. Today, that beautiful counter-cultural idea endorsed now by everyone from the surviving beat poets to shampoo manufacturers is more the official doctrine of corporate America

than it is a program of resistance. What we understand as dissent does not subvert, does not challenge, does not even question the cultural faiths of Western business. The problem with cultural dissent in America isn't even that it's been co-op that absorbed or ripped off, it's just no longer any different from the official culture it's supposed to be supporting. So how do we feel like that co-op, not even that co-optation, but that exact identity of interest has made its way into our culture from the 1990s to Ed Sheeran? Oh wow, okay. There's a few things that I discussed. So I think one of the kind of main and slightly like one of the more kind of obvious reasons why this has happened, I think, is the

sort of the prohibitive expense of getting involved in any one of these industries and how that became exacerbated by the financial crash of 2008. So whereas once upon a time, you might have kind of liberal arts institutions that would be more open to bringing on working class people, they might have more bursaries available, more funding open to them, that sort of fell by the wayside, but equally as well, working class people themselves had to prioritise survival and had to prioritise it's going out and finding paid work that could keep themselves afloat. Obviously as well, we're a generation that rejected things like credit and loans etc, to the extent that our parents or like kind of Generation X and the Baby Boomers embraced them.

So there's that kind of like, there's that kind of economic argument for why that happened and why we had like fewer kind of left-wing and working class people sort of entering mainstream culture, I think over the past couple of decades. But more kind of more fundamental than that, I think, is that under the illusion of sort of endless growth that we saw in the 90s and in the early 90s, there was a tendency for the media to be far more experimental than it is now. They would take risks and risks in that context equated to kind of working class people. So we had, it's a kind of obvious example, but you know, we had people like Liam Gallagher, right, who was reportedly like, actually I don't know, I can say that because he's libelous, but like

got up to some kind of like, he was sort of like no good, but obviously he had a huge amount of charisma and was a very talented musician and rose to the kind of like highest ranks of our kind of pop culture in the way that the Beatles had obviously in the 60s as well. And I think that from the 60s until the 90s, what we saw was the media becoming more experimental and more open to working class insurgents. And what we saw post the crash was a sort of pulling up of the drawbridge sort of closing ranks and actually saying that we're not going to risk funding this kind of left field option, you know, somebody who got up in a cancer state in the south of Birmingham, for example. But we know that sort of like the art and culture

and music that's generated by the kind of middle classes, the people that have gone to private school and to Oxford or whatever, will probably appeal to our middle class consumer base, who we rely on for our kind of future prosperity. Also, there's a sense of we need to cast someone in this thing, we could either go on a large expensive casting journey or well, my friend's son, Benedict, he's trying to be an actor, so. Yeah, exactly. I think that's also true. But I think what is interesting to me about adding the class of the cultural participant matters as well into this equation is that it throws a bit of a monkey wrench in what Frank is talking about, where he's saying that it is because if you're going to be a punk band,

for example, that's specifically anti-systemic, the only way in which you can make a living from being that punk band is to be paid. And you see basically the only way to be paid is to be paid by capital. So you have to find a way to please capital. And so are we saying that bands like Oasis or music genres like Grime, which we've talked about extensively before in the show as well, would you say that even if they are in some senses pro-systemic in the sense that Thomas Frank is talking about, they still represent a kind of wrinkle in capitalist realism, a little tear? To an extent, obviously. But I think Grime's actually a very interesting example because Grime had a sort of huge fan base. This is something I write about in the book. There were

millions of people that were listening to Grime for decades before the establishment sort of allowed it in, before it started being played on radio one, before it started like before it's like main proponents started winning awards, etc. And I think that obviously the capital that is gained from things like being a musician come from the fans. So it's a more direct relationship with the consumer. Obviously you do need the hand of a record label or a sort of radio boss, etc, to kind of elevate that and to kind of reach a mass audience. But I do think that the kind of the relationship between like the producer and the consumer is collapsed. But yeah, I guess in that sense it does kind of represent a wrinkle in the sort of capitalist realism.

We love to put wrinkles in there. Right. So also before I get on to kind of two of the main thinkers that you keep coming back to, also I just so we can fully sort of flesh out kind of the theoretical machinery of what you're talking about. So we have our understanding of the ways in which neoliberalism, because neoliberalism is essentially a system where everything is based on risk aversion, where the risks that we're averting are the risks on returns to capital in effect. And producing culture when you're incredibly risk averse is going to produce very banal, but also very middle to upper class culture. From the experience of the people, from the point of view of the people experiencing culture, why do we think the films of Eddie

Redmayne, the music of Ed Sheeran and that fucking ball pit bar, what do they have in common and why do they suck? I think the thing that they have in common is that they don't offend the sensibilities of the kind of middle class establishment. That's the reason for their success. Brendan O'Neill. We should after this, we should get into why, because this is really the theory of why Brendan O'Neill has like a single digit IQ that just it flipped all the way background on the high score and it's zero again. This book fundamentally explains why that is. It's not libelous. That's not libel. It's vulgar abuse. It's different. Anyway, so we can say like, let's get into that idea. Why is it important for culture to be transgressive in that way,

even if we don't want to say the word transgressive, maybe we could say not pro-systemic? Right. Well, I think that, I mean, if we look back like the kind of the history of like 20th century art, art was always quite antithetical to taste. Generally, the kind of good taste. So let's define taste before we go any further. Okay. Yes. Yes. So I talk about taste and that actually could do with kind of clarifying it a little bit more. So what I mean by taste is sort of the styles that are, how do I put this? The way you talked about it in the book was the policing of what is acceptable in effect. What is it socially okay to say? That's on a personal level and then an institutional

level. It is what is most likely to be considered to be good. It's the policing and enclosure of the idea of quality by the upper middle class. That's what you say in the book. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And I think that it's like taste is normally a marker of being middle class. So you decorate your house in a certain way and it suggests to the world that you are middle class. You drive a certain type of car and it suggests that you're middle class. And art, art, the best art and culture that's been created over the last sort of 100 years was always really antithetical to that. And in fact, actually you could kind of take that tradition back much further. But for example, the great artists that we now look back on and

canonize from Picasso to Andy Warhol or whatever in their day offended the sensibilities of the middle class establishment. They scared the middle class establishment. And it was important that they did that because what they helped to do was kind of evolve our thinking about what constitutes art, what constitutes communication or literature. And we've lost that because our avenues of culture have become closer, more closely aligned with that kind of middle class sense of like what's good and what's acceptable. In a sense, really, a working class, when I say cultural revolution, I don't mean the kind that happened in China. When I say a working class cultural revolution would kind of reclaim some element of the carnival ask. Yes. Yeah. To explain

that concept because that's what this show is about. It's taking lots of these high-flown literary concepts and trying to explain them in plain language. The carnival ask is an idea that became very, let's say, that gained some common currency in academia from a Russian philosopher and literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin. And he was talking about it in his own analysis of sort of what like late medieval early Renaissance French writer, Rabelais, who was whose own writing was about the freakish and strange and the inversions of things. So carnival ask is a way to describe the turning upside down of social orders. The priest goes to the brothel and the beggar is a king, all of this stuff. The idea that medieval carnivals

were about these sort of these explorations of the weird in effect and that taste exists to suppress the carnival ask. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think as well that I think that though it serves a very valuable social function in that if we have what that is, and I'm happy to use the word transgressive, like if we have what that is transgressive, it doesn't necessarily, I mean, often doesn't endorse those transgressive values. I'm talking about things like Lolita, for example, or American Psycho. It's not that those books aren't an endorsement of the protagonist and what they're doing. But what they do is they force us as the reader to rethink our place within society. Are we complicit in capitalism? Are we complicit in a culture that allows for

the passing off of like abuse and stuff like that. And so they challenge us. They challenge us and they challenge our thinking and they prevent us from being complacent and thinking that actually everything is sorted and everything is fine, which is obviously the kind of precondition of like the end of history. For the last few decades, we've just assumed that like, actually, we just live in a nice and world. Everything is right and fine. We'll make a few tweaks to make sure that everything is fine. And what that neglects and what that ignores is the millions of people who've been struggling with like low pay, who can't look after their families, et cetera. And so then if you, if you disclaim, if you declaim the limits of taste to be a certain

thing, then you make it impossible for those people to express that, you make the cultural expression by those people difficult to impossible. Yes. And you also make it impossible to make any challenge to the middle class establishment, which thinks that it is the de facto like, or that it kind of represents reality. So in that sense, Ed Sheeran versus the relative chaos of definitely maybe, but then set up next to the very, say, plummy southern, sort of, you may say like, how would you describe, characterize Sheeran, wistful, but in a very non-threatening way? Yeah, exactly. The stakes are always very low in Ed Sheeran songs. Like, I've listened to a few of them and it's sort of like, we went to

the park and we like, nicked some vodka and it's like fine, but it's like, it's sort of like, kind of the extent of like, transgression that like most middle class people will have kind of experience in their like, fairly limited lives. At no point does Ed Sheeran talk about begging, stealing, borrowing. Right, exactly. You know, there's very little to do with cigarettes. Cigarettes and alcohol, you know, it's rather that his experience of cigarettes and alcohol is as something nicked in a park. Whereas for Oasis, the cigarettes and alcohol are what you do for 12 hours a day while lying on the floor. Right, right. Interesting. Also, I think it was worth dwelling on American Psycho briefly. I think that it is, it's very interesting because

it has had this double effect where it is firstly, a wonderful satire of not just the capitalist man at his most capitalist, you know, just using his resources and his relative prestige in society to do literally whatever he wants without any consideration of the consequences because he just can. I mean, he is a sociopath and he acts like a sociopath much as capital does. And equally, it shows how monstrous his own taste is because all of these things that are the signifiers of what is acceptable in the hands of Patrick Bateman become grotesque. On the other hand, a lot of guys read American Psycho and say, awesome, cool, I want to be like Patrick Bateman. So how do we account for that other than just

the fact that many, many people are very, very stupid. Right, exactly. Everyone who reads Patrick Bateman, everyone who reads American Psycho and says, cool, I want to be a finance guy like Patrick Bateman is very, very stupid. Many people are not, but all of them, they are. Yeah. So I have a very, very, very tricky relationship with American Psycho. I've actually interviewed Bret Easton Ellis twice. They've both been like quite fraught in kind of like quite interesting conversations. But I've also never shied away from kind of confronting him on a lot of the stuff that he said more recently, which is completely out of line with my beliefs. But I have a tricky relationship with it because the first time I read it, I was, I thought, and I still maintain

that it is a really impressive satire in the same vein of a modest proposal. And I do think that satire doesn't sort of work by halves. Like you have to, you have to go to the very extreme in order to expose the kind of like floor in an idea or the, or the horror in an idea. So for that reason, I like, I resist the kind of thinking that a lot of people use to criticise it, which is that it's, that it's sexist and that it's bigoted, etc. Because I don't think it is, I don't think that Bret Easton Ellis endorses the actions of Patrick Bateman. To your point about people who misread it, I think that the problem there is that we have a problem with society, we have a problem with a sociopathic tendency in young men, not that the

book itself is the cause of any of these things. And it's something that we discuss quite often because it frequently comes up that a lot of a lot, a lot of the people who are especially sort of the young men who are drawn to the alt-right or just who are drawn to joining libertarian clubs for whatever reason, like why would you join a capitalist fan club? You're in one by definition until you self-identify as a socialist, never mind. But what I'm saying is that these, is that they seem to be, I think what it is, is that because sociopathy is basically rewarded heavily in our society, their calculus of it doesn't matter that I wish I could quash my feelings, I wish I could quash my feelings of empathy as Patrick Bateman does. I mean, I think

that's why the fact that it has this double effect, I mean, I think that's one of the reasons it's been so enduring, that it is such a pinpointed satire of a tendency that is so pervasive that there are people who just don't see the satire because they love the tendency so much. Yes. And sorry, just one other thing I just wanted to add as well is that going back to your point of the kind of cultural reference points that he uses, so things like Huey Lewis in the news, what I really like about that book is that it actually exposes the sort of like horror of those kind of like complacent middle-class tastes. So, Huey Lewis in the news could be like the equivalent of today's like, I don't know, Ed Sheeran.

But that how there's something quite horrific or at least like disturbing in the complacency of those tastes and how they allow us to kind of feel like we have some proximity to culture and ignore our own complicit role in lots of other kind of very problematic systems. So, let's move on from that slide. I think that's basically it. I also want to move on slightly to continuing the vein of taste, but how Mark Fisher would think, because Mark Fisher is a thinker you cite frequently throughout this book. I mean, he seems to, we just seem to be citing him all over the place, but I think it's again, it's quite a right thing to do. How would we, if Mark Fisher's main idea is trying to, one of his many main ideas,

is trying to take the high modernism of the abstract expressionists or Adorno and Horkheimer or even like the Italian futurists, even though they sucked. Oh, come on, name me one person where Marinetti is their favorite poet. And then turning that into what he would call popular modernism, which is the potential of pop culture to be liberatory. Where does taste and satire fit in there? That's a very interesting question. So my main, my kind of entry point to Mark Fisher actually was more along the lines of, it was through capitalist realism, as I think it was many other people's point of entry as well. And was actually more on the kind of mental health side

of things and the use of kind of like corporate communications and advertising. So I didn't really use, in terms of kind of his critique of modernism, that doesn't really come into the book that much. And I'm probably not the, I'm probably not best qualified to talk about that. Look, I think if anyone would want you to talk about something regardless of how qualified you are, it would be Mark Fisher. Yeah, I mean, in terms of, so in terms, you mean in terms of like the satire in me saying that things like, I mean, I also cite things like train spotting, for example, you talk about those kind of works and how he would have conceived them. What I find very, what I find interesting about, about Mark Fisher is that he, the idea

of popular modernism, it takes the idea that culture can be, if you like, constructive, but it, it makes it productive rather than a chisel, because satire is essentially a chisel, it removes, it removes the bad. Whereas I think what's interesting about, and that's a lot of how we thought for a very long time that culture could work, where, especially on the left, because for us, culture was either big dumb movies made by big dumb studios that made people want to join the army, or something that was satirical and critical and had a point in a particular project. Right. Whereas popular modernism seeks neither to do neither of those things, and rather to explore sort of new, the new creation. So it is a way of media being progressive without

necessarily being critical. And so I think that what I find interesting again about this, and this is something I have sort of notes on towards the end, but I'll fuck it, I'll skip them up here. I'm not a prisoner of my notes. And I think this is sort of where it comes into the discussion of taste and satire, is that if taste is a limit, and satire is a way to attack it, we need to have something beyond it that we're making. And we can write political polemic books, and we can make political polemic podcasts. But ultimately, I think the culture war is won or lost on things like friends. I don't mean friends that you have in your life, I mean shows like friends. Because most people's politics is far more shaped by the show friends

than most overtly political things most of the time. And it's up to us, I think, if we want to steal as much as we know the main things you have to steal is the ability to make these broadly acceptable foundational things where people are learning and learning about politics without really realizing they are. Yes. So one of like, there's a part of the book where I talk about sort of what I considered to be a kind of high point in popular culture, which came sort of in the mid 90s. And it built on a tradition of sort of working class people, kind of there was a there was a real tradition from like the sort of 60s onwards of playwrights creating TV programming. And I've totally forgotten the name of the playwright.

Is it the one who went to Wickham Abbey? Oh, no, I can't remember. But like, for example, like Coronation Street had like had like had like respected playwrights, like often writing the scripts for it. And so this had kind of been happening incrementally. And you had organizations like Granada Television that were real champions of it and really sought to like seek out like the best talent north of the M25 and get stories kind of on TV screens that were about sort of everyday life and kind of socioeconomic ideas, et cetera, but told in a kind of narrative style. So they weren't like polemic and they weren't just kind of documentary format, but real storytelling. And I guess I guess it's sort of in the tradition of like kitchen sink or whatever.

But then in the 90s, what we saw was a sort of like a real mainstream tipping point in that. And we had creatives like Steve Coogan probably being the most famous. Steve Coogan is still satirical. But then people like Carolina Hearn, who was his contemporary, who wrote shows like The Royal Family. Now, I know you're not from the UK, so I don't know if you know the show. I don't, but hey, tell me and the sort of mostly American audience of this shit about it. Okay. Well, it was one of my all time favorite TV shows. I always say that it's sort of like on a par with like Harold Pinter in terms of it's like the quality of the writing. It's basically about a working class family and it's set on their sofas. And

you can really tell the quality of the script in that like nothing happens. It's, I think it was four series, four seasons, seasons not series. And the characters are always just sat on the sofa watching television and it's just their conversation. But through it, you saw a kind of like, it was a lens through which to look at like kind of like the challenges that the working class were facing, the way that the working class were being sort of presented to people on TV. And I think it was like a really seminal bit of television that should just be considered like up there with the best of like British playwriting. It was great because in the 90s, you had people like Carolina Hearn who was a sort of like, you know, not without her sort of like

personal issues. She was a working class woman. She was quite, you know, outspoken. But because she was a real talent and a real gift, she had a real gift. She was able to kind of ascend to the kind of highest ranks of the media and had a real influence on British culture. And that tradition was lost, I think post-2008. I don't think that you'll see people like Carolina Hearn emerging in the present climate, which is a real loss and a real shame. And it's also marks kind of an end of a really valuable tradition. So I think that in what you're saying that that would have represented the kind of solution that would have been the sort of like constructive arm of culture that was creating something more representative and more inclusive. And I think

I think Grime has done that. There's a whole other conversation around how Grime has been kind of appropriated by the establishment, which I'm probably not the best qualified to discuss. And like I say, my whole thing with Grime is that Grime has now existed for decades. It is essentially like a very old and like establishment genre of music. And yet Skepta won the Mercury Prize what three years ago. And even then there were people kind of touting it as like an emerging like an emerging genre. It's been emerging since 2003. Yeah. And like, I hate to say it because I don't, you know, I don't mind him as a person, but like Jarvis Cocker kind of like fist pumping the air and saying like, this is what David Bowie would

have wanted. And it's like, yeah, maybe like 15 years ago, Skepta was like in his late 30s, almost 40 or whatever. It was like, it wasn't the kind of like breakthrough moment that they were creating that they were trying to paint it as. And what really was happening is that if we had lived in a kind of egalitarian or like, or if we had a media that was more kind of representative, Grime would have been on the mainstream agenda decades ago. But what it was, it was the aesthetics of a breakthrough moment. Yes. Without any of the reality of a breakthrough. It was, it was a breakthrough moment for something

that already had mainstream success, but was being admitted to the halls of taste. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It was, it was appropriate for, you know, teachers to put on Wiley and turn around in their seats and say, Hey kids, I'm not so different from you. 100%. Yeah. So the other thing I think is very interesting here, I'm just going full off the reservation vis-à-vis the notes. Fuck the notes. The notes. I went on a bit of a tangent there as well.

Yeah. Hey, this is good. I want to think, you know, the one of the main ways that working class people have been represented in the media post the financial crisis is reality TV and game shows, which I think are particularly humiliating because what they represent, because in trying to represent reality, I think what a lot of these things that purport to be reality do, they represent stasis, but they represent stasis as it is experienced by the people who are casting, editing, show running, producing these shows who are almost invariably upper middle class. For example, a slight personal anecdote. I am sort of acquaintances with a man called Sir Peter Bazalgette who graduated from Cambridge with what he referred to as a gentleman's third,

then went on to found Endemol, which brought big brother over to the country, but then he was knighted for his contributions to the opera. Wow. Yes. Yeah. Right. So this is- Yeah. I mean, he comes from the Bazalgette family, which were the ones who like- Arthur Bazalgette. Yeah, exactly. It was the old saying was Arthur Bazalgette was knighted for bringing the sewage out of London, Sir Peter Bazalgette was knighted for bringing it back in, which is the fun little saying. Hey, where is it proudly? But what I noticed though is that this is a resolutely

upper class person who is creating cultural, what has become the dominant form of representing working class people on TV. And I mean, with this, he did this before the financial crisis, but it's become one of the main modes of television post financial crisis. Yes. And it is a fundamentally upper class art form. Yeah. And one of the things I always say about reality TV as well is you can never separate it from the kind of financial imperative of going on the show. That was something that came through on that Jade Goody documentary that was on channel four last week, or it's kind of

a series of like, this wasn't really- actually her motivations weren't to get famous, they were to achieve financial prosperity. Because actually, if you're faced with a kind of work culture that is completely constructed to discriminate against working class people, actually something like, you know, round to TV looks like a pretty quick way of circumnavigating. Love Island is stable-ish income. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter really how, so long as you get through the first few episodes at that point, doesn't really matter. Because you now have, you're now an Instagram influencer.

Yeah. You now have endorsement deals. Yeah. You've been freed from a sort of certain percentage of drudgery. So it's a completely economically rational choice for working class people to do. It's- and it is one of the few modes of expression that is open, and it also is ludicrously exploitative. This is not a mutually beneficial relationship. Completely. And I think that what we're seeing, and unfortunately it took three people to die, you know, three people to go and kill themselves for somebody to step in and say, actually, you know, we need, you know, for the trading, you know, for the standards

body to say, actually, we need to kind of change- Can you speak a little more about what actually happened there again? Yeah, let's do it. Because the American listeners probably have no idea what Love Island is. Yes, of course. Sorry. So Love Island is a reality TV show where sort of people in there, like late teens, early 20s, are taken to an island. I think it's Mallorca or Monorca, sort of 12 of them, and they have to pair off. And they'll go through different kind of like love dramas. And then the couple that stay together to the end and are voted by the public will win

£50,000. And so there were two contestants from that show who have subsequently killed themselves. And then there was also a- there's a show called Jeremy Kyle, which I guess is a sort of variant, like a British variation on like Jerry Springer or Ricky Lake, where one of the contestants, and I'm sorry, I should also add, I think that there's like a lot less kind of like, I think that there was a lot more kind of like theatrics involved in those two American versions of that show. I think that- Yeah, Jeremy Kyle usually just leans in really close and just yells at you. Yeah, yeah. There's definitely-

There's very little like topless fighting. Exactly. And one of the former kind of, you wouldn't even call it contestant, but like one of the former kind of people that have been on the show because you kind of go in and discuss your family's problems or whatever. He did a lie detector test to check whether he had committed infidelity, I think, and he failed it on the TV show and then a few days later he killed himself. Anyway, since then, the broadcasting standards body has stepped in and said that we need to kind of shut down Jeremy Kyle, so that doesn't- that's not on there anymore. But also we need to kind of improve standards of reality TV to protect participants. I've actually written

an article about this for the new statesman about how I just think that that's like kind of sticking a plaster on an open wound. Like the problem is with this, the programming itself and the fact that there is a financial imperative to go on these shows. So a lot of people that you saw in the Jeremy Kyle show, for example, probably can't afford to go to like pay for like personal therapy, et cetera. And it was kind of a free opportunity to get that, but the tradeoff is that you broadcast your problems to the world. And so I think, I mean, obviously it's good that people are trying to improve that or whatever. But then another thing that I think is quite important to discuss is like, is those TV formats that aren't as explicitly exploitative. So we're

not sort of pointing and laughing at people. But even when we look at sort of documentary filmmaking, and I've even gone as far in the book to say documentary films made by the likes of like Louis Theroux, you've got a very middle class presenter, you've got presumably very middle class people producing the show, directing, editing, et cetera. So everyone involved in the kind of making of the show is very kind of like middle to upper class. And oftentimes the phenomena that they're documenting is based in working class cultures or people from like very like marginal marginal communities. And there's something exploitative in that as well. So there's always kind of like a sardonic gaze that's cast upon people from working class backgrounds.

There is always an implicit, I think, and I look, I don't get me wrong, I really enjoy Louis Theroux documentaries. I even feel the same way slightly about Adam Curtis. Again, I love Adam Curtis. I will never say a bad, a thing bad about Adam Curtis. Stay tuned for why. Stay tuned for a while for why. But I sometimes feel that in watching the work of Adam Curtis and Louis Theroux, there is a little bit of a congratulation involved. Like you'll because one of the thing I always think of when I think of Adam Curtis' filmmaking style is one thing he loves to do is film large groups of people having fun while explaining why the world is a fundamentally fucked up place. And I always sort of wonder, is there a little bit of a message in there,

which is you, the watcher of the Louis Theroux documentary, Adam Curtis documentary, you haven't been taken in. You haven't been taken in by the thing that is either dragging you down or you haven't been fooled by the system. Yes, exactly. It's always as though they're naive. That you're presented with on screen is that is naivety. So I'd like to move on a little bit because there are a few things I want to hit and I'm conscious of time. I'd like to also talk about another thinker you quote and hear more as well as Mark Fisher, which is Angela Nagel, which many people would consider to be an odd choice. And you and I actually have a very similar interpretation of Kill All Normies, her book.

In brief, if you're not familiar, Kill All Normies is a book written by Angela Nagel a couple years ago about online culture wars and their culture wars in the more traditional sense between broadly progressive and broadly conservative about broadly cultural issues. And her book in short basically states that by being too self-righteous about things like using someone's correct pronouns, the left basically alienated the entire working class. Now that line of argument is an extremely reactionary one, as we've discussed before coming on. But the problem with Kill All Normies is that inside all the reactionary claptrap there is actually a pretty fundamentally good idea about culture. And the way I see it, you use Nagel to talk about an inward looking left that

hasn't managed to make progressive ideas fun and engaging. And so I'm going to read from the book now. What Nagel has characterized as quote transgressive art and culture in Kill All Normies, thereby employing that is also gratuitous, actually serves an invaluable role in creating a more critical and responsive society. That's because mainstream cultural output that shocks, scares, challenges and surprises us also forces us to participate and forces us to look inward and reflect in the emotional responses that it has created. It works in the opposite way of the very easy and digestible culture promulgated by today's gatekeepers. Yeah, so like I mean, like you said, using Nagel is was quite tricky for me. I don't agree with the overarching thesis of

Kill All Normies by any means. And I definitely don't agree with her kind of diagnosis of like the problem. I had to engage with her work because obviously she is the kind of, she's a very like kind of prominent voice on this subject. And I read the book and like you say, the one contention that I did find true and had quite a lot of resonance with me was the idea that the left had been sort of like, could be said to kind of have been too sort of sensorious. We could even say that our discussion of reality TV five minutes ago is reality TV is bad for all these reasons. But people like reality TV and us trying to, and what our conversation would feel like to someone who's probably not a regular listener to

this podcast is us being like, no more reality TV, wag the finger, wag the finger, that's bad, that's bad, that's bad. Yeah. I mean, I like reality TV as well. I mean, I've talked about this a lot, like I watch Love Island, like I'm as guilty of these things as anybody else. And the whole way that I've kind of approached writing this book as well, it's kind of inward looking like my own role in all of this stuff. But so one thing that I think that Nagel missed was that the left basically has been on not even on the back foot, it's almost been like in a kind of wilderness for a very long time politically speaking. So in terms of kind of electoral success and electoral gains. And so those who sort of support the left or whatever

had a kind of dual burden of trying to achieve establishment footing, which I think so many people have been really successful in helping me helping to make happen people like Owen Jones, for example. So kind of creating the left as a kind of viable electoral position. And also in the book I talk about, I refer to Stuart Hall quite a lot. And his concept of how the kind of overtone window had been pulled so far to the right under Thatcher that we couldn't conceive of a kind of left wing politics in reality. So I think that so it had a dual burden, it needed to create a kind of establishment footing. But at the same time, there's this kind of tangential movement on the right, this kind of the alt right, which is happening online and

predominantly among young people, that the left was also having to counteract. And it was almost impossible to do both. And I think that what the alt right did was it was able to kind of opportunistically filled the gap of like, we are the voice of the kind of like transgressive, rebellious youth, which it did very successfully. And I think that what we needed, what the left was kind of desperately crying out for was a style of delivery that was a bit more dissident, a bit more rebellious, a bit more exciting, a bit more kind of risky, I suppose. And I think that that's what we have seen with the creation of, for example, this podcast and Novara Media, and the voices that have come out of that, I think that they've done a really valuable job of

actually positing the left as not just this kind of like sensorious and like, and self-righteous thing, but also something that is like, it's just like, obviously right. And there's a whole load of like irony to be derived from that and a whole load of humor to be derived from that. And I think that you guys and the Novara guys and various others are doing that really successfully. Thank you. And I think there is, there is this real sense. And I think this is, this is what always spoke to me, I think about that again, much like you, it's like, you've the one good thing about that book is that it is true that young people want to be edgy, they want to be distant, they want to rebel. And if progressive politics is exclusively about

being well-behaved, and if we've exclusively gone to the side of establishment forms of taste, for example, we're just trying to cozy up to those, then what we have is a progressive politics whose cultural expression is exclusively seen in like self-righteousness about the movie Wonder Woman. And what we're essentially doing though, is that aiding, saying that a media monopolist is our best ally in the fight for a more progressive world. And so the problem is that, yeah, is that Nagel's diagnosis of this problem in particular is sort of accurate, but her conclusion, which is that we all need to get more transphobic for some reason. Right. I mean, it's an absurd conclusion to draw. But I think what we can do is draw a different conclusion, which is that we need to

make our cultural output more interesting, dangerous, rooted in people's everyday lives in less self-righteous and less theoretical. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So before I go into the actual acts of theft, there's one more line. And the thing is, like because I've gone up and down the notes, I don't have a cool clean lead in for this one. There's just one more line of this that I've sort of wrote down and that I've been thinking about for sort of the last 48 hours, which is that we have become tourists of culture rather than participants. And the idea of tourism rather than participation of spectacle rather than action of aesthetics rather than substantive change is one where I think you have in that one short sentence summarized what I've been

trying to say in an entire podcast. Well, I think I can actually... I'm not going to stop. I think I can give you a good segue from that last segment saying that... But so what we were saying is that actually the left was really lacking a kind of like an authentic kind of raw kind of exciting voice. That's what I think it was really lacking over the last few years and that kind of something that felt really like exciting and like tantalizing to young people who were looking for new ideas. And I think that's borne of a culture that allows a lot of working class people into it, that allows kind of insurgency, that allows kind of outliers of the status quo, people that you don't normally find walking in the halls of the BBC,

et cetera, to create cultural output. And what we have instead is rather than this kind of generation of culture, and I'm sorry, I don't mean generation in the kind of temporal sense, I mean, generating culture. Instead of seeing like a lot of like grassroots culture being generated, what we're seeing increasingly is culture of being framed in this kind of touristic sense of like culture now means going to a gallery and walking around and... Or it means going on time out and experiencing London in the way that the middle class and upper class owners of London want you to experience it, which is by doing very non-threatening things that all provide returns to capital, like going to the Hendricks Gin Bar on top of

Selfridges. There's a secret password to get in, it's books. Yeah, that's exactly the thing I'm railing against. I really don't like that kind of face of mine. No, I really, really, really don't like that kind of thing either. It's so fucking boring. It really is. It really is. It's the same thing. It's you're doing the same thing each time. There are only, because there are only so many activities that can predictably give a return to capital, and most of them are infantilizing. Yes, completely, completely. And also, but it also works in the same way as kind of like, it's not experience. I mean, it's experience

as consumerism. So it's like, you do the thing to say that you've done the thing. It becomes a kind of like stay simple. Listen to the TF episode on the experience economy that we did with Angus Harrison like a year and a half ago. I think I might have heard that. But yeah, so it's that whole thing. And that's why I think that culture has become incredibly stagnant. We're not seeing kind of, culture is normally the expression of a group of people who have a shared and collective identity. That's what culture has always meant. Ironically, that's the stuff that we go and gop at in museums. I'll tell you what, I mean, we still have a culture and it's still the expression of a

shared group identity. It's just the shared group identity of capital. We are, again, as Mark Fisher said, we are in the dream and capital is the dreamer. We're living in a world that it created. And this is its culture. The ultimate expression of capital is for working class people to have eight jobs, for middle class people to have jobs where they don't do anything, but they go and spend all of their money at a secret gin bar that's actually floating down the Thames and it's pirate themed. It's talk like a pirate day and we're serving grog and then you can shoot a little cannon with a fluffy ball. It's to be a baby basically, to be an adult baby. Have you seen the suspended dinner table? It's like a dinner table that's

suspended from a crane and you just eat your dinner suspended from a crane. Why can't I just eat my dinner? Why can't I just eat my fucking dinner? Right. There's a few of them dusted around London. Yeah. Well, it's constant newness. It's the theater of newness constantly without any of the substance because you're probably eating food that you could get at like, I don't know, fucking Carluchios, but it's just high up. Hey, what if this, but there? No, this isn't supposed to be the comedy episode. Sorry. No, I have to. I have to stop doing worked examples and I think that's what really it gets to me, right, is that is that this is the way to live in a city is to live as a baby unless you have a, unless you're a

super adult who has to have eight jobs. And this is why the culture that's experienced is so touristic because if you're a baby, you're not supposed to do anything. You're supposed to live in a little crib. Anyway, I also, before we close out, I want to talk about the acts of theft with which you close off the book. Okay. That you're how to do, how to do better. Right. What you, the listener, the reader, whoever can do the first thing, and this is one that I really felt is stripping elite institutions of their respect, prestige and revenue. Right. As a fellow denizen of the good old University of Oxford, I'd like to pull one of your quotes on the say, on same that really resonated with me and why I found the place so deeply, deeply poultry and

disappointing. Oxford was also one of the most culturally barren places I have ever encountered. Don't hurt him. For the privately educated University seemed less an exercise and wanting to genuinely understand the world around them and more an endless game of debate and one upmanship. The final goal isn't to establish truth or find solution to a given problem, but to simply win. What I witnessed were young people learning ways to confound anyone who challenged them through equivocation in an arsenal of quotations. And to me, these words express a kind of, this is me, Riley again, the kind of jammy mediocrity that seems to be replete through the institutions of the British upper class. Yeah. Yeah. And this is what you

see. I mean, it goes all the way up to, well, literally our prime minister who today got permission to pro pro parliament. And it's just this kind of like, it's, it's just a game of winning. It's just, what can I get away with? What can I, you know, Boris Johnson's political credentials are no better than yours online. And yet he's running the country. And he's just, it's just a, it's an exercise in kind of being a bullshit merchant. And that's what they school you to do. They school you to go out into the world and to be a bullshit merchant. Well, I always used to, I talk about, I'm sure this might be familiar to you is I, I spoke about this with some friends, which is that the main thing that you learned at Oxford

and presumably Cambridge is the Oxbridge trick. And the trick, and I'm sure you'll be familiar with this is, is that if you're presented with a quest, someone asking a question, you don't know. The trick is to change the level of analysis. So system, subsystem individual up to one where you can then ask a pointed question about a related thing you do understand and make it seem as though you have actually raised a very pointed criticism. When in fact, what you've done is disguise the fact that you know nothing about what you're being asked. Right. So these are all valuable lessons that I think anyone who doesn't go to Oxbridge should be listening to and doing them themselves because do what we say. Honestly, this is my whole thing is like, I really,

there were certain parts of my experience university that were okay, but like on the whole, it was quite a traumatic experience. And I was like, if I can take one thing from this, it's that the people running the country, the people in the highest positions of power are no more intelligent than anybody else. Like they are no more intelligent than you or I or any, anyone else. They've just learned these kind of skills to be able to kind of navigate those systems. And unfortunately, until we've, until we've overhauled those systems, which I hope we do, but until then, and in the meantime, and also in a way that will kind of like maybe expedite that process and get us there quicker, I think working class people or people from kind

of low, lower middle class backgrounds need to know that first of all, they need to know that the people that they're seeing on their TV screens are no better than them are no more qualified and no more experienced than them, that they've just learned the kind of tricks. They have a trade skill. They have a, they have a tradable skill and they're good at that one thing. So that kind of disarms them in a way that makes them non-threatening, that makes them non-intimidating because I was intimidated by them until I learned this. But that's why vulgarity is so important. That's why we go back to this idea of the carnival ask. If you walk up to, you know, Boris Johnson and you try to debate him on his terms on the,

with the usual assumptions of debate, which is that you're both coming at this to have an argument and find the better point of view. No. Well, you just make a big fart sound with your mouth when you see someone from Oxbridge or Eaton or whatever try to talk down to you, because that's what they're doing to you. Exactly, exactly. And so I was just like, and one, one thing that I could possibly, one helpful thing that I could possibly do is try to explain some of those tactics that they're using against people from low income backgrounds and tell those people that they can use those tactics back. We're stealing it. Exactly. We're stealing it. We're robbing these fuckers blind of all of their tricks.

Well, also, I thought the word steal was just quite good in and of itself, because it immediately sets the tone of like, don't accept your fate. Don't accept what you're told. Don't accept this kind of, this constructed reality that you're worse than any of these people that you can't achieve the same or that you shouldn't be in the same position or whatever, I think. In fact, this goes back to something I discussed on the previous Comey Book Club, where about the book, sci-fi book Blind Sight, which is my favorite book. Everyone should read it. Everyone should also read this one. It's my favorite fiction book, which is the concept of the Chinese Room. Are you familiar with this? Okay. So, see, if you want to do the Oxbridge

trick, you would have been, you would have not said no. You would have said, I think I've, I think I'm, I'm pretty sure I've, I've heard of it. That's the thought thing, right? You just do something very vague and then wait for me to give more information, whereupon I would say, yeah, it's a thought experiment by neuroscientist John Searle, where what he did was he said, what you, if you could, you could basically have something pass a Turing test, if what you did was you had a room and then the room was a little slot and in the slot was a person and that person had a code book, right? And someone would put through a card and he would read it, he would find the appropriate response in the code book, then he would give the appropriate response.

And if the code book was advanced enough and the person was fast enough at looking through it, then you could have a fluent conversation in Chinese with that person and they would never know what they were doing because the system has intelligence without sentience. It's not, the system itself is able to have a conversation with you because what we've done is we've taken the sentience and we've outsourced it to the code book. And so what you're then able to do is you're able to say, I don't speak Chinese, but I'm part of this system that speaks Chinese as a moving part in it. I think you have to see plummy Oxbridge types as nothing but Chinese rooms.

Well, yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think that, I think that as soon as you start to see them in that way, yeah, they just, they lose any of that, they lose their power, they lose that kind of charisma that we kind of, that is all that we give to them, you know, we, there was a documentary the other day about class and like recruitment or whatever, and the recruiters like, well, you know, the person who's been trained in interviews, like it's just more charismatic or whatever. And it's like, no, it's our response to that. It's actually like, it's a set of cues that we've been, that we respond to as charisma, but actually it just kind of like learned, you know, they're just like a 21, a precocious 21 year old who actually looks like a bit of an idiot

to me, you know? And I think that we need to like kind of like, we need to improve our like analytical capabilities and our ability to kind of like view things and see them for what they are. More fart noises. Right, exactly. I'm just, that's why I think like the best thing you can do is just be vulgar at them. Yeah. Transgrade, like throw taste out the window. Yeah. Refuse to treat them with any respect.

Yeah. Because they don't know how to deal with it. Yeah. Completely. They have been brought up from birth to be deferred to. Yeah. And if you just don't, then they have nothing. So I would like to talk about the second act of theft, which is about the idea

of dedication to one's employment as their whole life. So you could say, if you let your job run your life and you're essentially wasting your potential to improve your own life, because you don't always need to be the big genius doing 110% and going to every social event and all this, especially if you have the sneaking suspicion that you've got what David Graber would call a bullshit job. Instead, you should look at your job as enabling the rest of your life and especially think like things and culture you can make, things you can do and make. Exactly, exactly. So I think it's just going back to the idea of like,

you know, you are paid to do X amount of work for X amount of hours. And to think of it really strictly in those terms, you know, you wouldn't give away more product than someone had paid you for, so you wouldn't give away more time. So you work your allotted hours, you achieve your goal, you know, you achieve what your kind of your targets and what you're meant to be doing or whatever. But beyond that, your employer hasn't paid for any more. They haven't paid for anything beyond that. And the time that is your free time should remain sacred.

And you should be using it to create output that is sort of that kind of challenges the status quo. And I say all of this only for the reason that if you are someone who is wanting to create art and culture, music, literature or whatever, it's quite tricky to finance those things in the present climate. And so you may have to go and find a job. But finding a job isn't the end of those dreams. In fact, actually having a bit of financial security that means that your rents paid and it's covered off and you don't have to worry about that will actually,

I think enable you to have the kind of freedom to do more of the stuff that you love and you care about. On the next side, that's basically correct. Lord knows I'm familiar. So the third is steal. So I think that in this case, what I like that it's you are almost, you're taking back your portion of your life that hasn't been bought. Yeah, exactly. You're stealing back the portion of your life that is being stolen.

Of course, we could talk a lot about Marx and maybe look into a little bit more bits of life being stolen, but this is a much more immediately applicable piece of work. So you also, you have to say to steal the same exclusionary methods that the establishment that they use against you, if you have a foreign or regional accent, use it at work. So your colleagues understand you, but you're probably upper class English boss, for example, doesn't. Yes. This is quite a tricky one.

Obviously it's going to be quite hard to like, I should have like nuanced it more, I think slightly in the book of, because I've said to go and do this, and obviously you kind of have to get the job in the first place. But once you're there, and once you're in that position, I would really encourage people to kind of speak in there, like in their vernacular speaking, the accent that they grew up speaking in, or if they speak a foreign language, and there are other people in the office that speak that language, speaking to them in that.

And it's not just in kind of like verbal communication, but in all methods of communication or whatever, I think that it's important to kind of like create a sense of those, of that sense of community that you belong to and are a part of. And I think this became a real issue for AOC, and it's something she's talked about quite a lot with regard to what people call code switching. So Trump accused AOC of code switching in order to kind of like speak to her local kind of like electorate, and then switch into another mode of communication when she's kind of in the Senate or whatever.

So she'll talk in two different vernaculars, depending on her audience. And she responded by saying, well, yeah, that's something that people from minority and working class backgrounds have to learn to do from like day one, if they're going to get on. They have to talk one way when they're in their kind of like neighborhood and their community with their family, but then as soon as they want to kind of like get ahead in the workplace, they have to create a whole new persona for themselves. They have to act in a kind of like professional, but also kind of like very corporate way,

which is always defined by the middle class. And what I've really liked in recent years, in recent months is the kind of, is the political establishment in America's embracing of people like Cardi B, who makes like no secret of her like accent. Her accent is like part of her persona and who she is. And so it's just kind of, it's, and that I think is very threatening to the middle class establishment, I think that sense of like a demographic that has a very, very, very strong cultural identity, and that it's not afraid of displaying it,

and it's not afraid of showing it. So I think what I was trying to get at there was that the establishment has used kind of like jargon and sort of cultural reference points that are very exclusionary and have made working class people feel like they couldn't enter it for a very long time, but we can do the same back. You know, we can say actually our community is very strong and very powerful and quite, you know, and off limits to you. And I think that that will also help to kind of disarm the establishment and make them realize

that they're not kind of like the, the only ones. And here's your fourth, which is read and consume culture made by not simply about working class people. This is a huge one because like we were talking about earlier with the reality TV thing, right? It's people in positions of wealth and privilege to get to decide what's made, because they think they have a right to tell you what to do. And what we, what you're saying is to steal that right back by doing something completely unrelated to them. And that actually challenges them and that they make no money from. Yes, completely. And I think in terms of like, like literature, there's like a whole,

there's like several like alternative traditions, like the canon that have been. You're saying there's more than just Harry Potter? No. Sorry. I basically read Harry Potter. I base all of my politics on either on both the Harry Potter series and the art of the deal by Donald Trump. Every single, every single one of my politics is based on a combination of those two works. They're all my favorite books ever. I won't be reading replies to this. But I was thinking, I was actually thinking literally in the way that we construct history or whatever. And there's so many different strands of history, but like, if we're thinking of kind

of like an archeology and archeology is about our lineage and where we come from or whatever, we've got a job, I think, to kind of go back into the literature and find those working class voices that were kind of like maligned by the establishment and create an alternative history, one where actually, you know, it was working class voices who were telling the real and important stories of their day. And there are several kind of like publishing houses that are dedicated to doing that repeat, obviously being one, then like even like the New York Review of Books is quite good at doing it. Like they will, they've gone to great lengths to kind of like find lots of sort of more off the beaten track authors. And you can find a lot of working

class authors who were sort of ignored. So yes, I think it's a case of it's not just kind of in the present, but actually also kind of instating a history that's defined by working class experience. I think that's a really integral, really integral to kind of like creating a kind of strong sense of identity and a sense of pride. And we're going to fucking steal it. Prometheus style. Prometheus style, baby. Why do I feel like you're laughing at the stealing premise of my book? No, I'm not. I'm not. I like it because it's very energetic. And I think it's very, when I say energetic, I mean, it's, what I like about what you've written here is that it has

not just a sense of urgency, but a sense of movement and a sense of project. We're so often, especially sort of, as we got into the late 20th century, so much left writing was so theoretical and so removed from anyone else's experience that it had, it was sort of, it was sluggish and lethargic. And what I like about this book and why I keep coming back to the steel, the fact that the verb is the first, the first word of the title. And what I think makes it a worthwhile piece of reading is that it's much more active. And I think that's much more fun. Great. That was the sort of, that's what I had to do. That's nice to hear. Well, Natalie Ola, author of Steel as Much as You Can, now out on repeater books,

not now out now, out October 10th on repeater books. Purchase it early. Purchase it often. You can pre-order it from the repeater site, from Amazon. You can just light a bonfire in your backyard and do some smoke signals until someone in the sky sees that you're doing smoke signals that says, buy me steel as much as you can. Be like that Simpsons commercial where the kid says, buy me bone storm or go to hell. But instead of bone storm, it's steel as much as you can by Natalie Ola on repeater books. Pre-order it. So I've decided I've really gotten into the mood of Simpsons commercials. Right. Right.

But no, this has been genuinely delightful. Thank you very much for coming out today. Thanks for having me. Thank you.