TRASHFUTURE - TF: The College Years feat. Liv Agar

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

UK state media and its various grotesques have decided that the 'free speech crisis on campus' is more important than our abysmal covid death rate--and pretty much any other story in the media. To discuss this phenomenon, we've brought on friend of the show and 3-time guest, Liv Agar (Liv Agar). If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

And Nate can fix it if there's like a gap anyway. Yeah. They're making it clap. Nate can line up the claps. Nate, please tidy up my claps. Nate, please make my cheeks clap. I want to do a punch in. I didn't tell you I clapped very well.

I want to rerecord my clap. The ultimate trans mood is just being like, yo, do I clap like a dude? That's right. Because if you haven't guessed it. Do I clap good? If you haven't guessed it, welcome to TF. That's right. This is all going in.

The clap podcast. Hello, guys. The podcast where we start with a round of applause to synchronize the recording. Yeah. I have clap passing privilege. Make some random message board if I clapped like an AGP or an HSS. Doing an actual round of applause to sync the recordings would be very funny because it would annoy Nate so much.

Yeah. Can you sync up these 100 claps that we did? That's right. It was the round of applause cast. And as you can hear, it is myself, Milo and Alice, and we are joined for, I believe her third appearance on the show, Twitch streamer and all around Bon Vivant live posting live. How's it going? I'm doing good.

Thanks for having me back. Mr. Posting was my father. That's right. Mr. Posting lives in Florida. This is live posting. We are talking about so much, so many things today. We have some quick hits from the news. We have a startup, one of the dumbest we have ever talked about.

Oh, wow. We have Britain deciding to make laws based on stuff that was written in the pages of Spiked and also we have some rare good news. So just because we often end, I'd like to end on the good news. Does it contain potassium benzoate? It does. We're actually going to start with some also good news. Roof shit sandwich of a podcast today.

We're doing the shit sandwich. Good news, Green Seal is not in trouble. Okay. I was worried about them. Because they have contracted with one of the most predatory firms on Wall Street, Leon Black's Apollo, to receive $10 billion in not emergency financing. Oh, boy. It sounds like Lex Green Seal has been playing a dangerous game.

I love to receive funding for unspecified purposes, but what those purposes might be, whatever it is, it's not an emergency. No. Green Seal supply chain financing himself. The supply chain financing instrument on himself. That's right. City sources said this weekend that the talks of the Apollo primarily related to the acquisition of assets created by Green Seal, probably to do with Sanjeev Gupta, who we've talked

about before. What assets has Green Seal created? Debt. Oh, okay. Created tradable debt instruments. You can't sell them to Credit Suisse anymore because that whole circular financing debacle. So now he has to sell them. Now it's an Ovoid financing.

That's right. And also he's being audited by Buffin with his respect to his massive exposure to Sanjeev Gupta. The only cops we respect. Absolutely. Copying the notes of the Trash Future podcast once again. We are looking into what if a Swedish man was Italian? It would be so funny if the serious fraud office just started doing our bits also.

Well, this man can't be Italian. He's Swedish. Yes. So effectively, what has happened is that Green Seal is being investigated by Buffin to do with this Sanjeev Gupta link debt at the same time. It's trying to generate financial headroom on its balance sheet by engaging with Leon Black. Well, he stepped down because of the Epstein stuff, but he's still chairman with Leon Blacks

for Apollo. Again, a company that if it's dealing with you, it is picking over your corpse. I like to be incredibly non ominous man, Leon Black, from the firm Apollo. Nothing about that says like bad things will happen anyway. So what, but what I think is very funny is that because if you remember Green Seal has taken over payment, it's using its earned platform to get NHS workers paid daily instead of monthly Leon Black could be in charge of the NHS payroll, depending on what the assets bought by the Apollo include.

Great. Cool. Sounds good news. I love it. I love it when the payment plan for NHS workers is decided by a guy who only minutes ago, you had to describe as resigned because of the Epstein stuff. Not getting into what that Epstein stuff was. Yeah.

He used to be a hyoid bone physiologist. So anyway, I don't want to spend too much time on Green Seal because that's a little bit like deep lore, a little bit of that kind of thing. But it's very fun to see that all is well at the very obviously a good standard company that is not peddling some nonsense. Retiring to spend more time with his blowdarts on his country estate. And so Liv, I want to bring you in a little bit on this one. Right.

You're into dervishes and vulgar entertainments like 50 gags. This is Kier Starmer in his attempt to reinvent himself politically. Again? Yeah. Is he going to do the nae nae? Because if so, I'm all on board for labor. Yeah, absolutely. Kier Starmer is going to be doing the floss dance with the most popular thing you could

do in 2018. Kier Starmer is doing a shot for shot remake of the film White Chicks. Yeah. He starts playing Fortnite and doesn't realize that he's just campaigning two bots. Yeah, that's right. He hires Hillary Clinton's campaign advisors. He does not run in London at all. No campaign ads.

Yeah, no. What they do is they swing in the opposite direction and they do all of the stuff that Hillary forgot to do. And so all of the Starmer posters and signs are sent to Wisconsin. Wisconsin for Kier Starmer. So basically, so here's what's happened with Starmer as Matt Hancock has been now found to be guilty of acting unlawfully with regard to COVID contracts and the fact that they all got given to like, I don't know, like his friends from down the horse track.

So cool, by the way, that you can just get found guilty of acting unlawfully. Nothing actually happens, right? If you or I are found guilty of acting unlawfully, we don't get a newspaper headline that says, oh, you have acted unlawfully and maybe you should consider resigning, but like, fine. I love the idea of just like Matt Hancock's lawyer, Lionel Hutz, like showing up to this trial and just like his briefcase falls open. It's just full of like Apple cores and stuff. And then he and then he's like, my client only did this because he really like small

tables and chairs and a tiny furniture set in a small room. You don't understand. He did it for the kickbacks. No, so if he hadn't been bribed, he wouldn't have done this at all. Starmer says he will not be calling for Hancock to resign over the unlawful publishing of COVID contracts saying that calling for people to resign is not what the public wants. Time for some real opposition. They hate to see it.

To be fair, like I personally, I don't want Matt Hancock to resign for two reasons. Friend of the show. Yeah, reason one, friend of the show. Great guy. Second of all, like it's naive to think that Matt Hancock resigning would make anything any better because like, if I know anything about the Tory party, it's you. Okay, here's a little game for trash future listeners to pay at home. If you would like Matt Hancock to resign, write in and name me a less corrupt Tory politician

than Matt Hancock. The thing is right. We would get a politician as corrupt or possibly more corrupt, but in a much less whimsical way, like the corruption would not be related to tiny furniture. So basically what happened? And also it's like, yeah, Starmer being like, oh yeah, it is polls unpopular to call for the resignation of a minister during a crisis. It has been shown to be unpopular and that just means that Starmer's going to look at the polls

and be like, all right, public. Yes. Yes, sir, boss. Time to do the big corruption dial back and forth and looking for approval. Yeah. It polls unpopular with the British public because it polls unpopular with Tory voters, which is the entirety of the British public. Yeah.

And it's just that Labour is just being like, well, we tried trying to lead politically and that didn't work for reasons that we are not allowed to go into. So what do we just try to guess what the public want? And if you do that for long enough, then you just sort of look at what the public have voted for in the past and you're just like, well, they really like it. So we're going to be pro Tory and I know it's facetious to be like, oh, they just love the Tories. It's not that they love the Tories.

It's that they love market research. And if you've just sort of abstained from political leadership, then as an opposition party that's based on market research, you're just going to mimic the governing party because they won. People like them. They really did copy the Hillary Clinton technique. They really did hiring the same people. It's so cool that by like, yeah, the Labour leader who took office in 2020 is looking at

the 2016 Hillary campaign. It's like, we are going to model ourselves after this winner. This is like like Keir Starmer is like playing against the LA Lakers in the early 2000s and he takes the ball off Shaquille O'Neal and people start booing and he's like, oh, no, these guys really like Shaquille O'Neal. I better give them the ball back. We won't win on points, but we'll win a moral victory. That's right.

He's saying that also like he's trying to, I don't even want to go into his like big policy reset because mostly what he invented was like a very wonky instrument that's not easy to understand. That's like a kind of debt facility. He's calling this his 1945 moment, except in 1945, there was like a whole raft of like institutional creation in an entrepreneurial state. His 1945 moment in the sense that many people have died and we're now in the aftermath of that. So that's cool.

That's close at least. And he also said that when pressed on cannabis legalization said no. Because the Tories don't want to do it. Because it's a great evil, the cannabis, the wacky-backy, the marijuana. You can't be too careful with it. That's right. Yeah.

Here, Starmor smoked it once and it made him go all kinds of loopy. Yeah, he made a talk like this forever. It made my voice like this. Like a small Alan Partridge. Wait, so I know that was Partridge. I just did that. I think it's very important that we don't smoke marijuana because the dangers are that it can make you sound a little bit like this.

So I want to do one more thing on Starmor and then we're going to go into the startup. This was being interviewed by Sam Coates, who has from Sky News, who has one question he asked, which is are you actually predicted? Sam Linen Coates has one question, which is are you woke and do you think woke is good? And that's his journalism gotcha question. So, okay, Liv, I'm going to ask you this. Could you be leader of the Labor Party better than Kier Starmor? Are you a woke lady?

I think everyone needs to be woke in this current historical context. I think, honestly, no, I would be an awful politician. Well, okay, so we're going to take your answer, which is yeah, I think everyone should be woke. I mean, if Liv was the leader of the Labor Party and the British press were trying to gotcha, I think they would just say, are you a lady? And that would be their idea of a gotcha. Yeah, I would not be running. Yeah, Starmor says to this question, well, I am a...

And this is in response to Lisa Nandy calling Joe Biden a woke guy. Starmor says, well, I am a... What I think about President Biden is the values that drove him through his campaign and the values that he's putting on show as president, and I admire those values. I think it's a shot in the arm for global politics, a shot in the arm for politics here, and I'm a values led person, and I think that's what Joe Biden is. Everyone is values led. I love having values.

The value in this case is of tiny furniture, but even Matt Hancock is values led. Who the fuck isn't values led? How the fuck else would you formulate any kind of decision? There's nothing inherently good about values. It depends what the fucking value is. I will tell you who's not values led, and that's the theoretical homo-economicist that they base liberal policy on. Look, stop calling me that.

That is who isn't values led. That's someone... This MF is theoretical. You mean the Irish people that Chuck Schumer imagines? Did you know about this? Chuck Schumer has imaginary Irish working class friends, and he refers to them in his head for what they think of policy ideas. I was under the impression that homo-economicist was just another word for Pete Buttigieg.

He's somewhat transporticus now. You're right. Kirstarmer says, well, look, it's a values led person, and this bandying of words around doesn't help. I'm values driven. I'm values driven. That's the case. I'm a promise.

I'm values driven. I'm absolutely determined that we can do something to tackle inequality, to tackle insecurity, and that we can do that sooner. As we think, if we pull together as a party, pull together as a movement, we obviously lost very badly in December. So then he just goes into basically 2019 and 2024. Did you just stop the speech? Yeah, yeah.

So he asked a simple question, basically just asked, and asked the kind of gotcha question that the right-wing press loves, and he just goes into a stack overflow. It's a perfectly legitimate thing. I don't think Corbin would have answered this much better. I think if you'd asked Corbin, are you woke, he would have been like, I think everybody should be woken, and then start talking about knitting or something.

Whereas the correct answer is just like, I don't give it. Ask me a real question. That's a stupid question. It's so fucking annoying how none of them are able to just call out a bullshit question. I don't know what they think. Like, they think the public are sitting there, giving them points for like being nice to journalists.

The public hate journalists, bully some journalists. Hussain is doing that. Hussain is sitting at home, he's got a little tally. It's just so fucking stupid. It's just like, just tell him it's a stupid question, bully him, do a Bernie Sanders. Literally every time Bernie Sanders was mean to a journalist, he like went up in the polls.

Every time he was like, no, that's a fucking stupid question. You're a fucking stupid person. People were like, I want to vote for that man. Try that. So I think that yeah, he wants positive media coverage so badly that he will see a trap laid in front of him by a journalist, and then he will run into it being like,

I love you, look how good I am. I'll never challenge you, you can do what you want to me. I'll just let you, just like me. Incredible. They were like, well clearly Corbin was not liked by the media. So the problem is that we need to be liked by the media, problem solved. If they set a trap for us, we'll walk into them and thank them. There's nothing political about that.

They just disliked him on a personal level. That's right, because he wasn't walking into any of their traps. Exactly. Even though he was all the time. Yeah, constantly. But by mistake, not on purpose. Yes. And this is the thing, it goes back to what you and I were saying the other day,

that like when Kirste Armour won the Labour leadership election, we expected the rightward shift in the politics. What we didn't expect was how incompetent the handling of the press would be. That's the only thing we expected to improve. And he's somehow doing it was. How? How are you worse at the media than Jeremy Corbin? Honestly.

A well-meaning, but fundamentally not very shrewd grandfather. So I didn't want to spend too long on these. I thought we should address them. I have a startup. Okay. Now, I think, I think I'm pretty sure this was good. This was doing the rounds on Twitter quite a bit the other day. So I'm not going to have you guess what it is.

I'm still going to have to ask you guess how they're doing it. This is Euphoria LGBT. It is an app for trans people backed by Chelsea Clinton. Oh, no. I've just seen the face. Look at this video. Let me go back to the Zencaster so we can see the video. Back to back to famous, famous trans advocate, Chelsea Clinton.

So they say our mission is to empower transgender individuals to have agency Our mission is to empower transgender individuals to have agency and their gender transition by way of our technology. Specifically, central intelligence agency. So it's to have agency and their gender transition by way of our technology. What I would like you to guess is not what they do. I'd like to, I'd like you all to guess how they do this. I'm buzzing the big buzzer. Nothing.

No, it is something. It's just stupid. Do they have the machine from the fly and they put you in there with a pussy? No, that would be effective. It just turns you into a pussy and they're like, you're closer than you were. Yeah, you get like pussy like characteristics. Liv, what do you think? What do you think they do?

How do you think they do? Um, they give you really good advice for $10,000 a year. That is the closest answer. But there is so much more. Is the advice not good? Well, the advice, I think, I don't think the quality of the advice is, is bad or good. We'll get into it. So that's such a star morass answer.

I don't think the quality of the advice is bad or good. But the, what's an issue here is the quality of the advice that the prime minister has said that he will advise transgender people and I support that. But I also think that we could do more. Oh, so, um, in what way do they empower people? And also, I want to get this out of the way. They have made it clear they don't sell data or infringe on privacy. And I think you have to take statements like that with a grain of salt because if it's a lie,

then we know what they were doing and that's not interesting. And if it's true, that means they must make money in some other strange way. So let's just leave aside the issue of selling data. It doesn't really matter if they do it or not because they have a different way of monetizing. Also like selling, selling data about trans people is not that lucrative. Because what are you going to do? Get a list of all the jobs I don't have. Is it like, it's the way you pay for this is as like a pre-roll ad before your postie surgery?

Yeah, that's right. So the company is launching three apps. One is called, but it has been funded. Three whole apps. Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah. Are you mad, Jeremy?

Solus is one. Solus. Like solus, like S-O-L-A-S. Join me. Yes. So we're going to do a few rounds, I guess. Starting with Liv. What do you think solus does?

If it was solus, I was going to assume that it was some like turf thing to like, that like a turf was convinced that like trans people don't have a soul and that's what's wrong with them. And so it's to bring you closer to God. That's right. So you say this because it's a turf-hutty part. Yes. I actually know what this one does.

So if you want to skip me. Solus, is it that it enables, it combats transphobia by enabling trans people to be completely alone and thereby no one can be transphobic? That's right. No, no. So it provides information and resources to guide transgender people through whatever process of their gender transition they desire.

And they're doing- Corporate social responsibility, Black Lives Matter. And so what they're doing. Close. Yeah. It's like, it's like a to-do list kind of. Yeah. But what if it was controlled by a startup?

What if it was a to-do list for a transition and you could build a, you could build your transition from a repository of over 700 goals, they say. And those goals, some of them are like fucking weird. There's a piercing section. Like- Oh. Get a piercing. Buy a bra for the first time.

Is there like get bangs and do winged eyeliner? Is that all of them? That should be, yeah. And the guy with the clip will be like, and what size naturals would it be? That's right. So, they've made a to-do list. And yeah, I think as far as I'm aware,

you could just get this to-do list from like a Planned Parenthood or whatever, if there's one around you. Oh yeah, all of this stuff, this is the glorious thing about euphoria. All of the actual advice, the quality of which is neither good nor bad, is from public domain. They've got this off of Reddit. Right. They googled how to be trans, and then they put it into an app

and gotten it funded by Chelsea Clinton. Yeah, that's right. Do one joke tweet that's in poor taste and will follow you for the rest of your life. Big milestone tick there. Yeah, yeah, I would say. Also, a lot of this, I mean, I haven't read this, but a lot of what seems to be on the to-do list is things that I feel like if you were trans would be just like fairly obvious things that you might like to do,

just because like the very nature of being trans is that you already have desires for your own transition, surely. I transitioned, but I forgot to buy bras, and now my boobs are everywhere. Oh, they're all over the place. They're just a Kimbo. It's the only way I can describe it. If only I'd been reminded that I needed to buy these. Yeah, go into it.

Go into the hair salon and you're like one men's hair. Oh, no, no. Thank you. I got my phone. One bitch heck up, please. But that's that's that's like that app is clearly a loss leader. They're not making money off of that one. Here's the one I think is really funny.

It's called bliss. Look, speed round, speed round live bliss. What does it do? Oh, um, bliss. It's a way to to activate your gender euphoria by giving you like a face app. What would you look like if you were more feminine? They have one called clarity, which you take a picture of yourself and it measures your gender. Amazing.

On a scale of one to ten, how gender am I? My phone calling me a brick is exactly what I need in the morning. Yeah. You used to be able to break your phone, but what if your phone break you? A self of self tracker to help measure gender identity and expression and attraction. I don't know what that traction. I don't know what that last one means. It just tells you whether you're hot.

It's a hot or not thing. It's almost worse if it's just doing positivity and it's just like always like, yes, you are fucking gorgeous. Like that's more insulting in some ways. This app will connect you to the world's creepiest men who will say you are the hottest woman they've ever seen live. You got your answer was right, but for the wrong thing. So, Alice, bliss.

What does it do? Bliss, bliss. Oh, it's it's going to be like you. This is shopping related. You can like order binders or bras or something. No, no, no, it is shopping related, but not that side of it. Milo, quick one. Is it an app that endangers the safety of the International Space Station?

No, if anything, this app would make it safer if it works because it gets you the fucking hormones. No, no, it is a revolutionary savings app. It's a savings app for the trans community. Your bliss fund is so much more than just passive savings. Every time you get a push notification, it's helping you move closer to being yourself. So again, that seems like nothing, but I think that's how they actually make the most of their money because what they're essentially saying is you put money in the bliss fund and then they invest it in something called a rainbow index, which I'm not sure is an ETF or just like a set

of companies that they invest in a rainbow index. So what's happened is this isn't really a trans healthcare startup. It's actually an asset manager. Because trans people have so many fucking assets to manage. Yeah, they were just sitting around going like, okay, who has loads of money? Trans people. Let's go after that. We're landing a big whale here.

I think it's more like there are many trans people and many of them need to have lots of money to spend a lot of time making goods and services. They might not be rich, but they have to sort of generate savings. And what if we took advantage of that? Frey on that. Yeah. Yeah, what if we prayed on that? Yeah, what if?

So they say this is from their Twitter. They said bliss is designed to make money from interchange fees and the assets under management, which are basically these are dollars that would have gone to Wall Street or credit card processors. And are still going to Wall Street and credit card processors. Because they're still being invested. I assume it. I don't know for sure. I don't know if it's an ETF or just these companies, but you're still investing that money.

And the deal with this rainbow fund right is that it's ethical because it invests in companies that say they're trans positive. Yeah, that do like a rainbow on. Investing in Raytheon. Yeah, Raytheon. Gay Raytheon. Yeah. So if Raytheon says it's trans positive,

they haven't made an indication that it's any other kind of social justice oriented. If Raytheon says it's trans positive, they've made no indication that they wouldn't invest in it. The CEO of Raytheon was quoted as saying that a lot of trans women are very good at video games, and that makes them excellent at controlling drones, which is why we actively try and recruit them. Very useful computer programmers for the next one. So I think that's very funny that it's like, yes, what we, it's like, yeah, we've identified this group of people.

What have we made? What have we got? Kind of didn't trick them necessarily, but what if we induced them to let us manage their money and then made like an app of publicly available information as a kind of loss leader? That would actually be a really funny bit if a company like Raytheon decided that trans women were like prior to naturally good computer programmers. And as well as recruiting trans women, they decided to make all of their existing programmers go trans. You want to succeed in this game?

You got to go trans like, but I don't want to. Yeah, this is the walk agenda. Yeah, pulling a gun on your program is just like put on the socks. Yeah, I expect that pussy binder on my desk by Monday. Yeah, that's right. So yeah. Welcome to Raytheon. Here are your cassies.

So yeah, I think it's very funny. We've basically got like, yeah, my pronouns are two and 20. So yeah, we basically got a kind of hedge fund by stealth. Yeah, cool. It's a passing hedge fund. This isn't even the first business of this type. The founder of Euphoria, Robbie Anthony, was herself a trans woman. What type of business is that?

A business. Yeah, I said above, you know, the kind of business that we talk about on this show. That's right. Previously, it was a co-working space, a build as a place to be yourself at work that had a proprietary cryptocurrency. It's an inclusive, it's a trans inclusive we work. A trans inclusive we work with a proprietary cryptocurrency. What about she work?

Yeah, what about that? Makes you think. Really does. Yeah. So Eastrogen and the cucumber water. This is a brief digression, but I once had a meeting with someone at that thing called the wing, which is like a we work, but only for women. And it had like, it has like, it has entirely like feminism themed decor and stuff.

It's real bad. And when I went there, they made me sign, they made me sign because I was a man and you're not really allowed in there if you're a man unless you're being invited specifically. They made me sign a declaration that I wouldn't sexually assault anyone while I was there. I'm like, yo, that's called the law. You signed an declaration at birth. Well, you know, like, well, you've made me sign the form. So I had my hands tied.

Yeah, there was a liability that's attaching to this that previously, I was just fine with. Yeah, absolutely. Oh my. Imagine the like sort of rapist samurai who is like willing to commit a sexual offense, but not to break his word of honor. Oh, got me again. All right.

So yeah, that's that's our startup. I thought that was quite fun. Very, very silly. And I love that. Yeah, they sort of made it what appears to be an asset manager. That's cool. Yeah, yeah, because people aren't there. No one is making money off any off trans people enough, I guess.

Hold on. I just got a notification on my phone telling me to buy more bras. Liberation. You can't spell transfer of wealth without trans. That's right. So I don't know if everyone here knows, but did you know that free speeches in crisis? Oh, I've heard that.

Yeah. Not again. Yeah. These days, they'll make you sign a form just for being male. Yeah, you have to sign a form saying sorry for building the modern world. Oh, is that me to sign a form saying I wouldn't sexually assault anyone, but it says on the bottom of here that I'm not going to be English. When did this come in?

Yeah. Just imagining a right-wing WeWork startup where every time you sign in, you have to sign a copy of the Magna Carta. So basically, what's happened is over the last sort of 10 years, in the pages of Spiked in the Times and other kind of periodicals. Other fringe crank periodicals like The Times. Yeah. Men's Health, stuff like that.

There has been this ongoing crisis being sort of fabricated that there is, conservative students are under attack in universities, that they're not allowed to be themselves, they're not allowed to express themselves. Mary Weiss' latest effort, and this was a college librarian who quit because of the anti-white racism of being told that she shouldn't rap. Yeah, that's right. That is not a joke.

Yeah. College conservative students at university are being bullied by people going around and tying up their little bow ties too tight so their face goes red. And I think that means to stop. I think all of them need to be protected just in case any antifa knock them off of their comical penny farthings. So Liv, have you heard about this at all, this these fabricated free speech crisis that are sort of going,

that exist in the minds of Anglo-American columnists? Yeah, I was like, I guess I should have known that this was also like a British problem, but like literally any Anglo university, this has been a problem since like 2014. And I guess it's just never going to go away. Like this is the primary thing that universities do now. They don't like produce research or whatever. They just create like. They produce racism against white people, which is good, finally.

Yeah, that's why we love it. And they say we don't make anything anymore. So what are the world's leading producers of racism against white people? It's actually brilliant. The British economy is bouncing back by producing world leading racism against white people. So Liv, I want to know what's your sort of understanding of this going on on the other side of the Atlantic? Essentially that and I've mainly interacted with this through a like a conservative government.

I guess it's also the case in Britain as well. But just like the provincial conservative government in Ontario and essentially what they're doing is signing free speech like free speech procedures in relation to like public schools like public universities in which like make it much harder to protest. You know, if a professor is like, I'm going to say the word publicly and I'm going to like, you know, I'm like saying the word 101 class has been very controversial. Walks in, walks in, drops a big pile of books being like, welcome to saying the word 101.

You are not in high school anymore. This is university. Look to your right and look to your left. One of those people will not say the word. Sitting backwards on the chair, throwing a coffee of like, I don't know, Tantano Kong into the trash and going like, this isn't your mom's saying the word class. Right. Right everyone.

We are going to continue our work on G. Yeah. Um, I don't know. What is that I see in your notes, asterisks? Get out. I don't care. I'll give you credit for the class, but don't darken my door again. This is a place of learning.

Just all the students doing, oh, captain, my captain. Oh, the university of the future just professors who are just trying to say the word librarians, wrapping it every opportunity. Oh, yeah. This is what the, it is the librarian return to King Solomon's minds because they're like, perfect. A joke from the podcast we recorded before this. There's a film called the librarian return to King Solomon's mind.

So that's the context for that. There you go. Anyway, so right, like we know the actual real crisis in universities is endemic low pay, casualized labor, massive inequality of like vice chancellor salaries versus adjuncts. The fact that most universities are now just gigantic landlords and like, you know, younger academics are like sideline professionally and you know, often harassed and all this stuff. And we know that the free speech for conservative views crisis is made up

because we know that many of these academics who are complaining that they're like not being taken seriously or whatever, actually just have old views that don't stand up to scrutiny or at least like fringe enough where they're worthiness of inclusion in the academic mainstream is far from a foregone conclusion. The actual suppression of speech is like students are being mean to me and therefore it should be illegal. It should be illegal to at me is the big reach across the aisle between libs and conservatives, right?

It's like, you can be a tenured professor saying the most repulsive transphobic stuff. You can be invited to speak about that. But if a student or a group of students says, hey, this is kind of fucked up actually, that's a crisis of free speech. The amount of tenured profs that have just spent like hours of their day constantly just like quote tweeting and replying to their grad students or like grad students related to them, we're like, you should not be saying the word. And it's like, it's fine for us to be that online, but you have a job, an actual professional job.

Well, it's they want their students to have the same relationship to them as Kier Starmer does to the media, which is thank you for enlightening me with your brilliance and indeed dangerous thought. I am now, I realize I was wrong and I should always have taken you seriously. Quote tweeting people with the word. And the thing is, you don't go to university to like have differing viewpoints or have you go to university with you or challenge your views. The other thing is, let's not valorize university too much.

You go there to get your ideology machine. Yeah, you go there to make sure that you don't get like you reproduce the ideology. And if you reproduce the ideology enough, they stamp you a little piece of paper that gives you access to a better job. And also you can get really drunk during it. Yeah, to be honest, I would give British University more credit than that. And that in Britain, the primary point of university is to force their parents and get drunk and maybe have sex.

Like that is, I think, and that is genuinely how most people conceive of it, which is probably the healthiest way. So all of this stuff that it's a place for open debate or whatever, that is bullshit from every angle. It is all, it is, it is total bullshit. It always has been. Always has been. Can we talk about the question time?

Yeah, so I just want to say before we go on to that though, it's just like, yeah, so we are basically, we admit that this is not worth talking about whether the validity of this argument, because it obviously isn't valid and that this is just a fake controversy for the Tories and Papers, continue to rile up their base of retirees who like to scare themselves by imagining gender marks is corrupting their snot nose kids that they hate. Fakecontroversy.com. And because it's totally made up, there's no real way to fight back at it. It's like clawing at smoke.

So instead, I just have a bunch of really funny shit people have said about it. How are you stopping me from expressing my freedom of speech in the back of this cab? I'll shut up before I come back here and slap your tits. Start up before I come back there and protest you. That's right. You said something about question time. Yeah, there was an episode of Question Time this week, a deeply normal British television programme where they get politicians and celebrities on a panel and then have members

of the British public, the world's most normal people, ask them questions. And usually it produces meaningless political theatre, and this week was no different, but they had on... With Britain producing meaningless political theatre, I find that hard to believe. Who could have imagined it? They had on their reasonably principled Labour MP, Nadia Whitom and also the best Lib Dem MP Leila Moran, who... And they brought up this freedom of speech at university campuses thing,

and should it be a priority? And both of them basically said the same thing, which was obviously not, are you fucking insane? It's both stupid and also there's a global pandemic. What the fuck are any of you talking about? And then, what is this fucking name? I've forgotten his fucking name, the world's stupidest journalist. Any of them.

Mail on Sunday. That's not narrowing it down. You know the one. Hodges? Hodges. Dan Hodges was quote tweeting Leila Moran being like, I cannot believe she said that free speech shouldn't be a priority. And it's like, Dan, like what?

Like... She didn't say that. Yeah. You're just... Because like the thing is... She did say that and she's right. But also it's like the right wing press and parties indeed only interact with a version of the left that they've invented.

So you're never going to be able to argue with them because they're just being solipsists. Right? Yeah. It's all in bad faith. Oh, of course. It's just amazing that like you can actually sell it as a view that like the priority at the moment should be free speech on university campuses, which are closed. They're not open.

That's true. How can it be a priority? They're not open. Yeah. It's a Zoom call. Yeah. You're asking for free speech to be made a priority in Zoom calls. There's no freedom of speech because there's no speech of any kind.

So basically a couple more things. Like the reason that they like debate as the framing, right? Is that in a debate, you have to take both sides seriously. You have to be saying, I'm willing to be convinced that maybe the empire actually was good. And so that means you're never allowed to conclude that it was bad. You're never allowed to sort of draw any lessons for that. You're never allowed to finish anything because so long as there's one person with this, by the way, extremely like popular in terms of political and media power views,

as long as one person's willing to espouse it. Then you always have to take it seriously and you and you must listen to them. It's basically a way of them being like, it doesn't matter that like I'm not really a worthwhile scholar. It doesn't matter that what I'm saying is nothing to do with where the academic debates in my subject are. I want you to listen to me and I don't want to be judged on the basis of like how good my ideas actually are.

I want to be judged on how special I am. And I've prepared those ideas in the form of a rat. That's right. MC Stock and I'm here to say there's only two genders and a major one. And you know what? Trans women and trans men, the only two genders. And so here are a few facts, right? According to the difficulty, even the Times actually does have some reporters.

They did have to publish these facts, right? Because this was all based on a policy exchange paper that was and the policy exchange paper, the policy exchange, as you look back to our ThinkTanks restaurant, very right-wing ThinkTank. Okay. It's not an actual place like the Corning. No, I accidentally took all of my travellers checks to the policy exchange. And they based their research on a survey which was basically like, was very shoddy.

So it would like ask a deceptive or wrong questions like, did you agree with the... Do you like free speech? Did you agree with this event where Jermaine Greer was prevented from speaking at the University of Cardiff? But then it turns out she wasn't prevented from speaking at the University of Cardiff. So it's like already the research design of the paper that it was based on was shoddy. And also in terms of, okay, out of 10,000 university events, I'd like, I'd like, Liv, your best guess.

How many do you think were canceled out of 10,000? Oh, for like free speech stuff, I'm going to say two. You are too low by a factor of three. 1984. There were six out of 10,000 events have been canceled. And wasn't it the case that like, they were all canceled due to like, basically like room size concerns included? And one of them was in fact, Jeremy Corbyn.

So what happened was four didn't have permits to go ahead, which that's the real freedom I think we should be fighting for is the right to have an unpermitted event. Dave Courtney's illegal transphobia rally. I don't have a permit for any of these remarks. My favorite part of that is the idea that Dave Courtney would not himself be transphobic. He's just attracted by the illogicality. Dave Courtney, I fully believe this is not a transphobe.

I think Dave Courtney is probably very progressive. He just loves breaking the law. Yeah. And given how illegal they love making being trans, Dave Courtney's got to be fully on board. He's found the final law to break. So one was a multi-level marketing fraudster who was found to be hustling the students. Amazing. And then one was indeed Jeremy Corbyn who was moved into a larger venue.

Cancelled by the Woker RC, Jeremy Corbyn. The woke fire marshal has once again. So it's just nothing. It's just nothing. It's basically like the Soviets are around anymore to be our external enemies. So we need to invent internal enemies so we can continue doing McCarthyism. The hardest day of the woke fire marshal's career was when they were burning all those copies of Atlas Shrugged. Also, you're right to say that this is stupid to even point out because why fall into the trap.

But if you want to talk about free speech at universities, we're not going to talk about prevent at all. We're not going to talk about... We're not going to talk about that because that's a safety issue and that's different. Remember, in our episode with Abby last week, we did the Sartre quote, right? Sartre was talking about anti-Semitism or the anti-Semite, but what Sartre is making is a general point about bigotry. Never believe that the anti-Semite is unaware of the frivolity of their own wrong. And then at any point when they find themselves cornered with some kind of hypocrisy,

they will loftily declare that the time for talk is over, the time for action is now. So it's like with something like prevent, it's like, well, no, that's not a free speech issue. That's a safety issue. And if you're like, well, wait, but you invited a transphobe to speak and that's a safety issue to me. It's like, no, you're a snowflake. It's like, no, of course, of course, it's frivolous. Of course, it's pointless. It doesn't have to be more...

It doesn't have to be intellectually and morally coherent because it's about power. And at this point, they have so much power that they are literally trying to take over student politics, the last bit of politics where they're not dominant. Yeah, the least important politics. This is student politics, the kind of politics that even the left think is stupid. This is, they're basically, I don't know, kind of like spending 100,000 men trying to take a Dutch beach in 1946. With the best will in the world, and I don't mean this as a criticism of Milo,

Milo ran as Cambridge Union president, right? That's an example of student politics and how serious it is. Seth Namsangra wrote a very angry article about it in The Times. I want to turn back to our guest here. How does this all strike you as happening as something similar to or different from in Ontario? This seems pretty identical where it's like, you know, conservatives from like very powerful positions being like, well, we're being censored. The problem is that people are like saying that we are racist and they're using that word

to silence us from being racist. Like, you know, this is both like from a perspective of like conservative students, you know, like one of the most annoying type of person is like a an undergraduate who is in like polysci and their entire identity is being a young young conservative. And like those people are. Oh yeah, I ran into some of them. Yeah, it's it's real bad. We had the British, the English girl who like made TikToks about how good war crimes are.

Oh, fuck yeah. Like the young, the young trad is easily the funniest, but also the grimace. Alice wasn't also the way we found that particularly hilarious because she was in your mentions or Abby's mentions being furious at you. And then and then Kieran from Cornish Lady was just like, wait, aren't you the chick from the war crimes? We're good actually. TikTok.

Yeah, yeah. And then that was that was the continuation of an evening where I found a bunch of these like based trad zoomers, but they were all Swiss and Switzerland is the funniest country to be a trad for easily is being like, no, we got to go back to the to the fucking Alpenhorn. This is what you gave up. And it's just a cuckoo clock. What what is based on what is with like it's it seems like this this whole set of policies is designed to appeal to like based red-pilled zoomer trads and also their parents.

Certainly I have I have an account to recommend to you by the way. If you're on Twitter, I highly recommend following the account based Austria, which is one of these zoomer pills. But like what what they post are like photos of fucking Austro-Hungarian student fraternities where everyone has to wear a fucking purple fringed hat stuff. It rules. I love it. Larking nerds who get no pussy.

And then it's like this is what they took from you. And then it's like versus this is real masculinity. It's a photo of a guy in like fringed leather shorts. And they like contrast it with like a cool photo of like a frat party. It's like this is degeneracy or whatever. Like you're not running over anymore. That's what the free that's what the some of these free speech laws are going to end up with. It's like you if you want to have a fraternity, it has to be like a German dueling society.

Exactly. Yeah, my thing is right. Like whenever someone says like, oh, there's not enough free speech at universities, like you're cancelling people or whatever, immediately tell them that you're organizing a pro-ISIS event. Like that is like that is that should be your only response is to be like, yeah, I'm inviting Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to speak at my university. Yeah, we're bringing him back.

We're doing both necromancy and ISIS in one fell swoop, which I would imagine ISIS aren't big on necromancy. I'm not really sure where Islamic theology comes down on that, but I imagine not good. Probably not good. Yeah, I wouldn't think so. Fuck it. We're doing it. We're doing him.

We're doing him and Jermaine Greer one event. They're going to debate. That's right. Yeah, so the whole the form of the university and the form of the debate, both of those are terrible. They're not really worth defending. Yeah. Although I am going to be thinking about the Greer al-Baghdadi for a while.

Just al-Baghdadi being like, oh, why did you write the book about the pedophilia? And just being like, well, he's got a point. Like I have to handle it. And I think also, and this is an important thing to know is that like this, as we've kind of alluded to fundamentally misunderstands what university is like, because like I will level with listening to this podcast, like I was not a leftist at university. I was very much someone who found all of student politics completely annoying and thought they were all stupid, which is an opinion I still hold, but for different reasons.

And like even so, I thought that the debate club people were absolute reprobate fucking losers. Like anyone who was involved with the Cambridge Union, like at all, I was like, fucking loser, do not touch them with a barge pole, right? No, I was just aware of the Cambridge Union. I was an Anglia Ruskin. I did not. I did not inhale. And so like, yeah, the idea that like this is these people are in any way important or worthwhile,

like even people who are like not like woke or whatever at universities, they still don't like the debate club people that they still think they're fucking dweebs and losers. Yeah. They're nerds. It's same with based Austria. He's a fucking nerd. I'm sure he gets pushed around and shoved into lockers, like in university. They're at lockers there, but they made one.

Just to shove me into it. This is someone who was like, if only I was wearing a purple fringe hat, everyone would think I was cool. That's right. I look like a stripper from a nineties movie. But the thing is, it's the same thing here where it's the same kind. It's again, it is a deeply, it is a deeply unpopular generally idea that just wants to be taken seriously and that thinks if it gets the purple fringe hat of respectability

that it will be taken seriously is demanding to JK Rowling's new thing, the purple fringe out of responsibility. So a couple, a couple of fun things here. Matthew Goodwin noted Bibliophage has every time you call him, that is just as funny as the last time. That's right. I'm going to keep doing it. Says there's a long list of academics in Britain's universities who found themselves

marginalized or intimidated by fellow academics. Administrators are students. That fucking hat you've got on is stupid. Yeah, like trans people, trans academics, like black academics, you know, like actually marginalized people. Wait, no, no, not them live. Well, no, because if they push back against you, what they're doing is they're inciting a woke mob and that's a threat to safety.

And so that goes in the prevent category. That's one of the things because that's bad speech and we're trying to make that go away. Which is why over the past year, and this I love this sentence, a group of rebel academics who I can imagine are just some of the coolest people in the world. Absolutely. Some of Fedora.com's biggest customers. Begin meeting to share ideas about how to push back against this illiberalism. We work to support freedom in our universities and ensure they remain places where students can be exposed to a full range of ideological views and where academics are not punished.

And then here's the funny thing. Here's the second clause here. Or mocked for holding different views. Or mocked. Have you seen David Olasoka's hats every time he's like, you know, there's some racism. Just like 50,000 dads from the home counties descend upon his mentions. But nobody is seriously suggesting, oh, we have to defend his mentions.

No. Oh yeah, with particularly conservative students. And this is also the case with powerful professors, for instance. You have this sort of, you know, culture war, like free speech, sort of BS position. They have institutional power and authority. But the one thing that they don't have, and particularly with the conservative students, is that they look cool. That's the one thing they can't get.

Friends of the show Neil Folkson tried to like dox one of the like undergraduates he was lecturing for being mean to him. Yeah, because he's cool. He's like a cool young person who is saying he's wrong. And it's like, I can't have that. I need to use my institutional power to make these cool people not be mean to me. That is 1984. I will sit at the good table.

I have been the subject of a lampoon. I reject this wholeheartedly. There are a number of people calling me a boomer. Not sure what that is. Not sure why you're doing an impression of my old age. Yeah, your old age. Critics will say all of this is exaggerated, but a string of recent deeply flawed studies show down lopsided our universities have become.

Is it a Venn diagram drawn in crayon? This is very funny. He says, today only about one in 10 academics are conservative. Interesting. Awesome. Interestingly, all the... We absolutely need to make every university like Lucky Jim again. And that way we will preserve the future and people will stop laughing at us.

There was a really funny old tweet from this first year undergrad who was a Trump supporter and she wrote this atrocious essay. I have been trying to find that essay for years. Yeah, I can't remember. I remember reading it though. It's like an eighth grade reading level. I remember aspects of it. And she was like, to me, America means freedom.

And that freedom means that we will be not told what to do and you can... And it's like, it's like that. And she gets a low mark and is like, ah, punished for being conservative. Twirling, twirling, twirling. In a way, she sort of was. Just, you know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. We've talked about it on the podcast before, but it's the amazing like the conservatives almost getting it. And they're like, well, frankly, it's violence against conservatives that, you know, no smart people are conservative. And we need to look into why that is because all the smart people are ganging up on us by not being conservative. It also helps explain why many academics, researchers and students now say they

self-censor in their research and lectures and seminars, hiding their real views because they fear over the response. Again, the response is being mocked. Yeah. The response is not being taken seriously, which they want the government to step in and stop. Yeah. And if you stop yourself from saying something grisable because you don't

want to get made fun of, that's not censorship. You can still say the thing if you want to and people can make fun of you. That woman who was like, I'm being told not to rap. She was not biased. She quit out of the indignity of like being told not to rap. The indignity of not rapping. The indignity is on the other one here. It's absolutely correct.

Because there's one thing we know, right? There's nothing that makes people take you seriously more than when like the mummy government shows up and like swaddles you in her big skirts and says, right, no one is going to bully him anymore. Do you understand? It's not the stupid things that he thinks and his purple hat are not funny. I can see it. Some of you are laughing.

Some of you are laughing, but that's wrong. You look stupid now for laughing because that is a very cool hat. And I want you all to say it. I want you all to say it's a cool hat on three. I mean, this was the government's like previous project was a multi year quest to try and get people to take Toby Young seriously at the office. And again, against the backdrop of this, you know, if you want to be Muslim at an educational institution, there's a risk you might just end up on a government

watch list that you can't get off of. Oh, sure. Just have a bunch of MI5 agents just following you around. Absolutely. If you want, if you want to do BDS in university, nope, can't do that. You can't do any of that stuff. Yeah, the stands will absolutely come to you saying you have BDS. So no, none of that though.

That's not, that's not happening. What we are going to be doing is we are going to be hosting a seminar series with David Starkey and Nigel Bigger where they ask just what the, where the best trains were built from the empire and were the natives really thankful enough. There's another funny, another funny quote here because you know, the BBC always has to interview people on two sides of any issue. Of course, yeah.

They interviewed someone who was like, no, this is obviously ridiculous. This is a fake crisis. This is just another sort of kind of crackdown. But then the BBC interviewed Paul from Gloucestershire. Oh, great. I love Paul from Gloucestershire. I often turn to him for cutting edge analysis. He actually posts under the name of home counties, Muscox.

Paul from Gloucestershire said there was a problem with freedom of speech on university campuses. My son was treated dreadfully at university because of his beliefs and opinions. What were those? What were those beliefs and opinions? He was shunned, ostracized and even threatened with violence simply because he voted for Brexit and held conservative views. What were the conservative views Paul from Gloucestershire?

Conservative ones. Yeah, like the free trade, you know. Yeah, it's a, no, it is an ancient Hindu symbol. And I don't see why that should be bad. Yeah, no monetary financing of debt. That's a big one. Yeah. The fact you didn't notice it was reversed is actually sort of problematic on your position.

Yeah, you're just a huge symbol. Really, you know, I don't know how you expect to be in university without those kind of critical thinking. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'm a Hindu Nazi. Thank you very much. So he was shunned, ostracized, blah, blah, blah. If you don't have an opinion, which is mainstream, for want of a better word,

there are labels for you. Oh, labeled. Oh, were you also been mocked? Don't ever put me in a labeling situation. I hate it when the woke left get out a dimo label maker and stick stuff. Just call me an idiot. To my face. Paul said his son had been looking forward to having good debate at university

with people who had different opinions. Loser. Crack. Your child is a loser. That's what you need to understand. What you have failed to comprehend is that your child has a little shittic whip. And if he wasn't such a little fucking pussy, none of this would have happened. Thank you for calling in to BBC Radio 2.

Who goes to university looking forward to a debate? All the coolest people. I think it's right. It's just, you basically have been like, mommy government says you have to invite me to the party. It's the thing, right? Nobody who says that is looking forward to a debate. What they're looking forward to is winning a debate that they imagine in their head.

Because when they get a debate and they lose it, they're not happy. Yeah, that was right. You have done an ad hominem attack against all my terrible ideas. This is my favorite thing about any BBC discussion show because the BBC, God love them. Not only do they insist on having both sides of whatever the issue is, which is fine, off-comregulations, I guess. But they do this thing where they're like, well, we've had someone who knows what they're talking about.

So the only appropriate balance is someone who has no fucking idea what they're talking about and hasn't even ever read a newspaper. I once heard of a debate on the Jeremy Vine show where they were talking about having a four-day working week and they had a renowned Oxford economist on talking about why he thinks a four-day working week is eminently sensible and would make sense for our economy. And then they had just like some guy on to debate him whose entire argument was just like, well, I think that's Bollocks. We've got a five-day working week, so we should stick with that.

And he's like, well, yes, but you're not responding to any of my points. He's like, yeah, they're Bollocks. So, simple as. Yeah, so that's bit... That guy had a better strategy for dealing with questions than Keir Starmer. Yeah, so basically that's where we're at right now is universities are supposed to become soft play areas for kids who have had rollerbackpacks since they were three. And also, historians of empire who do shoddy scholarship and no one takes seriously outside

of the right-wing press whose whole thing is, don't make me feel bad about liking the empire. Yeah, there's only one kind of historian left and it is slap side of tank and calls it a great bit of kit. Yes, Dan Snow. Yeah, fuck, conservative politician, sorry, conservative like dad's phoning in the radio just like living in Rob Delaney tweets. Like they don't even realize it. They're like, my large son was mocked for his rollerblades.

And you think that's cool? Well, that's not Django where I'm from. Yeah, you think it's cool to slap my son's comically oversized lollipop out of his mouth? For shame. The university. Do you think it's fun to throw my son's sailor hat into a tree? Yeah. The university is supposed to be a place where he was going to be able to wear his

Regency period costumes to class without anybody commenting on them, except to say that they thought it was classy. Somebody threw his walking cane in the canal and I will not rest until there is legislation about this. Oh, man. You may laugh about what zero pussy does to an MF, but I have seen what it does to an MF. And I tell you, it's not pretty at all. So, okay, I want to move to our last thing, but do you have any final comments? Any final free speech on the free speech thing before I censor all of the free speech?

Because we talk about Uber. I'm very taken with the woke fire marshal and I'd like to submit that into the archive future bets going forward. That's right. Okay. So, I told you we would end with something good today. Okay. The court, the highest court in the UK has handed down that Uber drivers must be

classed as employees in the UK. Full benefits, full sick pay, all of that. This is a victory and that is good. Now, I say don't read too much into it because the main thing that was one is that a bunch of employees have been recognized as employees. And the last time I read Marx, it was that we are kind of wanting to abolish the boss employee relationship generally. So, but we have stopped them from pretending that it isn't happening.

Yeah. Briefly. Effectively. What we have done, we have briefly retaken some ground that was previously one in the 30s. Yeah. One group of people, but Parkour. Do you know what? It's still good.

Proposition 22 and. So, Liv, have you heard of this? I have and it's, you know, at some level, it's obviously good that Uber is no longer allowed to legally treat. It's like drivers is like, you know, car parts or whatever, whatever they were previously. I'm legally the carburetor. Yeah, like technically, you're all actually coffee machines for tax reasons. Technically, Lynn, your life isn't worth ensuring.

Oh, yeah. But, but yeah, it seems like we're winning things that we should have won 100 years ago. Like the fact that it has to be won again is a problem. But then obviously. Great victory for the liberalism of 1921. Yeah. Yeah. The Whig party is going to love this one.

It's a great word for them. The freesoilers are going to be absolutely hopping that. I don't know what, I don't know anything about the freesoilers. Don't get mad at me. That's just, that's just an old-timey. Freesoilers don't write in. That's just an old-timey political party I could remember the name of. How about this? The Silver Standard Party is going to be hopping that.

There you go. The Mason party. And also it's a victory through the courts rather than through organizing, which means very little worker power has been built here. It was, it's not like, ah, the left is back. Like, no, the courts basically, if you do an experiment 20 times, it's going to, there's a fluke result. It's going to come out one of them.

We got a fluke result, but Lord, it was a good one and good for every driver in London. Being, being a socialist lawyer does some good, but it's not the same as a mass movement or even a vanguard party. It's one of the few ways in which the British system is marginally better than the American system in that like the Supreme Court in Britain actually exists to apply the law rather than to be just like politicians who are paid to say a certain thing. Oh yeah, and for which they get rewarded with the like enemies of the people thing. But yeah, I think like as conservative,

ridiculously so as British judges are having them actually have to do the job for a long time before they can get on the Supreme Court, as opposed to just being the nearest freak show with enough gambling debts to make them pliable is something in their favor. Do you guys have, because I know in Canada, it's, you know, similar, we also have the Westminster system. Do you guys have like funny suits for your Supreme Court? Oh, they dress as Santas. Yes, okay, awesome.

Yeah, when you're in the Supreme Court, you actually have to sit on their knee and tell them what judgment you want. The funniest judge robes are all Scottish ones though, because they have like red crosses on them. So they just look like nurse Santas. It rules. So I mean, every judge on the Scottish Supreme Court has a different themed cape. There's like iron brew, buck fars.

A deep fried one. Yes, the cape has been deep fried. Here's the other. There's one really funny implication though, right? Which means that because every individual driver has been legally treated as a taxi cab booking firm, that it then subcontracts to Uber. All of that is below the VAT threshold for payment. But if Uber is one company with a lot of employees,

it retroactively has quite a bit of VAT to pay. Five billion pounds, in fact. Oh, that's not good. What a shame. Perhaps they could hire our accountant and they could claim their spare room. Yeah, hire Nick. Yeah, that's right. But what I think is very funny, right, is that if this transpires,

that means the British state will have gotten its hands on five billion pounds of Saudi money without needing to sell MBS a single weapon. Yeah. What do we think they're going to do with that five billion? Probably make weapons to sell the MBS. I don't know, subsidies for Raytheon? Like, maybe they'll invest it in the trans fund. We can think to spend this on other than an armed office

for the promotion of free speech at universities. They're going to make a technology that if you walk through it in your trans, it like beeps and it goes off. They're going to repurpose that clarity app and you're just going to have the door of every university seminar. Plus, Toby Young is going to be taser qualified. They're going to give Toby Young access to the GoldenEye satellite. Every one of those free speech weirdos at university

is going to be given an assault rifle and those like $40,000 night vision nods with the like four cameras. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They will still fire one shot and be knocked into a nearby canal. Yeah, exactly. Getting state funded regency outfits. I get a subsidy for my penny farthing that I ride to lectures. It's green transport.

They all get jaunty hats, but all of the jaunty hats are the odd job hat. Every single one of them gets a fucking ruby bridges level of personal security. They have like marshals around them to escort them to class from the house of Antifa. That's so fucking good. I'm looking forward to this. Yeah. So what the British state will do with five billion pounds?

What do you think they'll do? Write it up on a postcard. The problem we all live with by Rockwell, but instead it's just a like a 19-year-old gangly undergraduate wearing those black and white brogues. Yeah, they're going to give all the money to Matt Hancock's pub landlord, aren't they? Yep, that's right. They're just going to do some more. Well, possibly G4S.

The best case scenario is G4S. So what I think is very, one of the last things here, right, is Uber is trying to expand Prop 22 globally. They're trying to bring it to Europe. What if California law, but everywhere? And so what they've done is they've basically said they have their principles for gig worker rights because gig work is important work, but it needs to be protected properly. And why we couldn't do this, it's unclear.

The fucking like language of positivity there being like gig work is work, and we're therefore not going to pay you fairly for it. Yeah, because that would erase gig workers like other work. But that's the thing that is kind of the point they make is that gig workers are different. They have different needs. They have different needs from normal workers. They, for example, they don't eat or sleep, for example. They have to eat less food.

They don't need to pay rent. They don't have violets. They're actually more closely related to crabs. So they say, alongside operating an open... So they wrote this white paper for like circulating around European parliaments for, again, just a bunch of Hobbesburgs to decide like that they want their serfs to have fewer rights than they would have in the 1200s. Yes, it's more closely related to crabs.

I read this paper, and my jaw dropped, which was unrelated. My jaw is simply very poorly and weakly attached to my own head due to centuries of inbreeding. Alongside operating an open access platform, we believe good platform work, got good platform work. That's what they call it. That's good platform work, boy. Should be built around the following five pillars.

Oh, the five pillars. No, the other... No, Alice, the other five pillars. MCing, DJing, break dancing, B-boying and graffiti. That's right. Matt Hancock unironically believes those to be the five pillars of his life. Oh, he absolutely does. We need all gig workers to be doing the kid in play.

If Parkour is good enough for the Prophet Muhammad, it's certainly good enough for me. It's a great way to learn about Islam. It would be so easy to make Matt Hancock Muslim. You would just have to say that all you have to do is tell him to say this cool thing. Hey, Matt, this is a new Alexa skill. Say, hey. It means that startups of the future of our economy. Oh, okay.

You can actually get Amazon to invest another pound in great British businesses every time you say this phrase into your Alexa. And you should wear this hat while you do it. Check out this cool rug really close. You want to really get your forehead up to the mat so you can see the detail. See the fine British craftsmanship. That's right. So, alongside an open access platform, we believe-

We're giving Matt a free prayer rug as a pride. We will a tiny, tiny prayer rug. Yeah. You'll get a lifetime membership to this special enclosure in Mecca. Oh. We believe good platform work should be built around the following five pillars. Sorry, I guess every time. Muslim Matt Hancock is too powerful.

One. It's just destroyed the rest of this set. One. Flexibility, the freedom to choose if, when, where, and for whom, and for how long to work. Which when you phrase it that way seems fine, but when you remember how it all actually works is not. Yeah. You have the freedom to choose to work 18 hours a day for it,

but all you have the freedom to not do that. And face the consequences. You don't have the freedom though, to be paid for all of the time. No, of course not. No. You don't have, you do not have to be. You can choose to piss in this bottle anytime you want. Yeah.

But also, we're not going to force you to be paid for the time that you are waiting to take other people in the car. That is an imposition. To be paid for stuff. Yeah. Two. Protection and access to a broad set of reliable social protections and benefits. Do they have those?

You have to have access to them. Yeah, you need to have access to condoms. Yeah, it's like Freshers' Week again. Just handing out like things of condoms to the Uber driver. We will not let platform workers be dry-dicked. That's right. Giving out little sachets of lube. Fair and transparent earnings opportunities.

I love those. Those are my favorite. Yeah. They're very transparent about paying you below minimum wage. Yeah, they tell you how much they're paying you and that sounds... We're not going to say it's a lot, but we will be clear about it. Then let's see. Lifelong learning and development opportunities.

So they're offering courses from the Open University. Are they though? Are they really? Just in my off hours in between pissing and bottles, in between like consecutive 20-hour shifts, working for Uber, I'm like going to do a social studies thing. Yeah, you can take a class on saying the word. Yeah, in my Uber, in a car park at 3 a.m.,

doing a remote saying the word course. And voice, the right to be heard. Not in a union though. Oh, heavens. No, no, no. Well, that's because that's not your voice. That's someone else's voice. Oh, okay.

It would ruin the like family dynamic. Yeah. You need flexibility, access to benefits, transparency about earnings, lifelong development opportunities, and voice. And the hajj, and also it's a god. Yeah, that's right. That's so cool. And the thing is, right, like that's probably,

it could work because most European politicians are like, you know, even Christian Democrats. Yeah, they are, they're Craven Christian Democrats. They are like Hobbesburgs. There are several Hobbesburgs still active in European politics. Hobbesburgs are like cement plant, corruption, directives, bullshit like that. Or just like descendants of Mussolini or other,

or just, or like open Nazis. Like, that's like... Well, listen to Cornish Batey for the rundown on why European politicians are like this. That's right. Official TF recommendation, listen to Cornish Batey. Yeah, so that's, this will work on them. Oh yeah.

100%. If anything, they'll be like, can we take some of these out? We don't like this voice thing. I don't know what that means. It sounds... Yeah, that sounds modern. How about this? How about I get to join a dueling society like I wasn't as a youth

and you've got yourself a deal, Uber? Yeah, Uber is now running collaboration with based Austria. They say obviously pushing people towards... You got to fucking like horse carts. Yeah, so the call to action. Platform work is not a zero sum game with the right framework. Yeah, it's a one zero game with the right framework. It can offer a win-win to those who choose

to pursue it a fair wage access to that relevant benefits. You will get the benefits, but you'll get access to relevant ones. Yeah, the relevant ones. You will get healthcare a fit for something related to a crab. Yeah, every so often they like drain your blood out of you to use and making vaccines. And meaningful representation, but not in a union. But it's meaningful. Because all workers have different needs.

Some need to eat, others need to sleep, others want the hat, others want to take the course. Scuttle the sea floor, searching for nutrients and frozen hydrogen gas. Some of them, if you throw them in like a boiling pot, they won't feel pain. We hear the needs of the gig worker and those needs are to like apply their pincers to things and use them to bring food to their mandibles. And we're committed to that. They need to be served to Riley among other shellfish in the form of a platter.

Sorry, I really love shellfish platters. How should I take away lobster the other day? Shut up. The most Riley food. Shut up. I was good. I really liked it. For your benefit, Riley literally posted in the group chat a photo of the saddest looking

fucking crustace I've ever seen with the caption, take away lobster looking. So, yeah, it's like, yeah, we care deeply about the people who choose to work through our platform and don't work for us though. They work through our platform and also all of their needs are individual. It's not like they have the same needs and that those needs are opposed to our need. Everyone has different needs and what we're doing is we're coordinating the facilitation of them getting access to the kinds of benefits that they need to fulfill the needs they choose to fulfill.

That's the key point, right? That's why you've got to use this kind of very person-centered language of agency and stuff. It's because it's so atomizing, right? If everybody has their own separate needs, then there are no class interests. And as we know, selling everyone they have the same class interests, that's a form of censorship. And Toby Young is going to hit us all with a pave way to bomb if we try to censor anyone. Oh, he might be out of hit us.

Well, he's got to try. Yeah, that's right. We're too quick for him. He'll just get mad at his wife halfway through. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, so that's the episode. We've had a nice little range through a wild bunch of topics. CF for the college years.

Well, that's a good idea for the title. And in other news, I want to say, Liv, thank you very much for returning for your third-time appearance and now entering the Trash Future Director Circle Gold Points Platinum Plus Club. Yeah, you get a little set of furniture. It's like an investment scheme I can get into now as well. No, it's more of a lounge. Yeah, you get this coin. Riley starts DMing you stock tips.

Yeah. So basically like, yeah, you get led into the same lounge that like Patrick Wyman is in. You can hang out with him. You can hang out. I get a hundred Abbey Thorn. Yeah, you Patrick Wyman and Abbey Thorn can hang out. I get like a hundred Doke coin. That's actually, that's like what, 70 pounds now?

$70? No, it's less than that. It's like, it's like $49. Anyway, that's beside the point. So I want to say yes. Thank you very much for coming on and the lounge is now open. Thank you. Thank you for having me on.

And where can people find you on the platform, Twitch? It's at twitch.tv slash live posting. I also have like a solo sort of philosophy podcast now called Liv Agar, sort of like a pen name that's a little bit more serious than posting, you know, for slightly more serious subjects. So you can search that wherever podcasts are hosted and on Patreon as well. The philosophy is just a kind of posting. That's right.

That's absolutely correct. Yes, that's true. And Agar is something you can add to food to turn it into jelly. Yeah. It's used in a lot of molecular gastronomy. It's also used to grow cultures in a lab. This has been the things we know about the word Agar. That's right.

And don't forget, we have a Patreon. You can listen to it if you pay $5 a month. You can. We will also continue the things we know about the word Agar segment on those bonus episodes. If you would like to hear more from the Wokefire Marshal, subscribe to the Patreon. Yeah, the $10 tier will also include speeches from the Wokefire Marshal. That's right. All right.

I think that is Wokefire Marshal in conversation with Donald Trump, Kearstar, Alan Partridge, and Brian Cox from the Bandy Room. You're going to do... I used to be in the Bandy Room and now I'm a renowned cosmologist. It's crazy how the universe has all these kind of strange mechanics of causation that lead to these bizarre turns of events. But it really has been a wonderful life. Going to do any of the other ones?

No. Okay. Don't forget also listen to... Well, there's your problem. Masters of Art Domain, 10,000 posts. The bottle man. 90 other podcasts that we will collectively do. All of the podcasts because...

They're a thaiverse. We have become... Yeah, the napathai cinematic universe. We have become addicted to making podcasts. The extended universe. I cannot stop making podcasts. It's going to go on my strange addiction and it's just like I keep recording. I'm recording this now.

I cannot stop doing riffs. I keep saying our theme song because here we go by Jensen. It is. Even when it isn't. Well, in this case, it is. So we will see all of you on the bonus, which is an episode of Balthazar Speedboat, the riffing-only episode. Yeah, it was a Down Under edition.

Yes, with Tom Walker and Aiden Jones. Yeah. So if you want to hear... If you want to hear some people go, don't be a coward, then listen to that. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, see you there, people. Bye.

Bye.