TRASHFUTURE - The Emperor’s New Episteme feat. Jay

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

We have an opportunity to speak with Jay, a union organizer in the UK hospitality industry, about the ways in which that sector is particularly hostile to labour organizing and, unsurprisingly, owned by ghouls all the way up and down. But before that, Nate, Hussein, and November discuss Trump’s declaration about calling AI “Super Intelligence,” and the fact that he’s forced a bunch of tech CEOs to sign a half-baked manifesto about it. Jay’s union is Unite and you can learn more about it here! Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows NATE ALERT Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album and you can stream it for free here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello and welcome to Trash Jutcher. You're hearing my voice so you know what that means. It's me. It's November. It's Hussein. It's the alternate squad. It's the audibly depressed trio, you know? Just all going through sort of middle age at the same time while Riley is in fucking

Xanthay or something. Yeah, he was like, sorry, I can't be on this episode. I'm in a cab in Crete right now. Yeah, he's doing his Bundesfest stuff, right? I don't like... Shut the fuck up, Dickie Greenleaf. I'm tired of hearing about this shit. I mean, I was going to say that perhaps it's because, like, you know,

the summer is over and, like, autumn is upon us. The skies are getting great, but it's not. It's still hot. It's still really hot outside. That's cool. That's completely normal. And I'm sure that's normal and fine. It's really actually completely normal for me to be wearing my light jacket that I bought specifically for autumn, you know, for those, for those.

This is supposed to be, like, the best type of of year for like yearning and for like you know melancholy right it's supposed to be big coat weather yes you're supposed to have like scarf big coat no no it's medium coat weather it's not it's not big coat weather it's medium coat weather and like you know you've got your shoegays playlist right like it's supposed to be a thing but you can't do it when you're fucking like sweating like yeah yeah you're like your summer sundress girlfriend dumped you because you realize that you're a piece of shit and now you're like in the rain you're crying you're wearing like a medium weight jacket, you know, and you're about to go into the kind of long winter of the

sole way wearing big jacket and scarf, except now, all year round, you are having to wear the fucking Uniclo basics. It's fine if you sweat through us because we're garbage t-shirts. Yeah, and your ex-girlfriend is still wearing a sundress and it's just, and is hanging out with like a big ripped guy whose like shirt is still off and has been off since June. Yeah, meanwhile, you were expecting rainy weather and cold so you could blast through like Catherine Wheel and ride a little bit of my bloody Valens. You know, maybe a bit of swerved driver. And instead, you're just like, it's fully, it's fully shorts and boots weather and you

hate yourself. Yeah. Mm-hmm. It's trash. It's the dad combination. I'm, I like to think of myself and I'm with you too as the kind of like honorary kind of semiotically dad adjacent person here. And so that you're going to hear about medium weight jackets.

You're going to hear about probably our bowel movements, you know? Yeah. Yeah. You haven't sired any offspring, but it's not for lack of trying. But listen, I mean, there's, there's, there's, So what's the possibility that I could have the most mutually regretful relationship with the trans man yet? So let's not rule anything out, you know? Well, the thing is for today, mutually regretful relationships notwithstanding, we are looking at potentially doing, well, we could riff all day long, all night long about our main story for today.

However, I just want to tell people up front, there is actually going to be an interview segment. I had a chance to talk to Jay, who is an organizer working with Unite in the UK hospitality industry. he's got a lot of really great insights about why the UK hospitality industry, which is one of the largest employment sectors in the UK, is so hostile to unions. So that's a really, really fun interview, and I hope you enjoy that. It's just a real shame, right? If you want to get your, like, actual insightful thing out through Trash Future,

it does have to be behind a kind of, not paywall in the sense of you have to pay us, but a kind of like moral paywall of two to three minutes. A sort of pain wall, if you will. It's like, you want to share this with your relatives. and your bosses and like intellectuals you want to impress and they're on the suddenly we get on we're sort of like, I could have regret sex and have another kid. It's totally possible. Yeah, skip to the half hour mark. No, trust me, skip to the half hour mark. Don't worry about it. Don't listen to this first bit. I actually regret to inform you that I have an announcement,

but it's not that kind of announcement. It's more of an announcement that applies to our perception of reality, I suppose. Okay, good. I've been waiting for one of those. Yeah, yeah, this is the best kind of announcement, isn't it? It's like the Venomagna, Venomagna in Chernobyl, but it's like, oh, by the way, all of your ontological perception is wrong. What I want to tell you is something fascinating, which is that Donald Trump has managed to bully the perception of reality itself. He has managed to get tech guys to use his jargon because apparently the oath of office for the president of the United States requires you in your role to strive to imprint the contents of longing onto the alien world

and the subjectivity that sees through the abstract and therefore limited nature of mutually alien worlds of subject and object to understand these worlds by seeing their limitations as necessary conditions to their existence and thus by seeing through them allows the duality of the worlds to exist. I wondered why the oath of office went on so long at the most recent inauguration. That's actually George Lukash, but she used the thing, right? Lukash is the only way I could interpret this story.

It was the only thing that came to Mike. Yeah, I loved Star Wars. Because as a... Fuck! Yeah, I think George Lukash... gosh, if asked to define an alien music form, would pick a better word than jizz. But as it turns out, when you're the U.S. president, you get this special reward beyond the fact that you can pardon anyone for any crime ever so long as it's a federal crime. You also get a thing called a get out of ontology free card, which is why Donald Trump has decided that all tech companies have to call AI super intelligence instead.

This is like his third run at maybe I'd like to change the world, but only in a kind of semiotic way, right? We've had the Gulf of America. We've had Lake America. We were maybe going to turn Greenland into like another state and Canada into another one. And now on top of that, it's not artificial intelligence anymore. It's super intelligence. Yeah, everybody got all head up about how post-structuralism was just, you know, flying off on tangents. But I'd love to see fucking structuralists.

I'd love to see Clefax, Brooks explain Donald Trump and Lake America, Gulf of America. Sorry. These things require a different paradigm. These things require weird perverts with turtleneck sweaters, dreaming of ultra-prison. That's the only way you can interpret what he's doing. I have two theories. Maybe he's really being pedantic. And he sort of believes that like artificiality as a concept is sort of something that is sort of can be like socially informed and is therefore not kind of an accurate way of depicting what this is.

And super intelligent is much more close. The second theory I have is that he watched Steven Spielberg's artificial intelligence and he thinks the Haley Joel Alzman character is called artificial intelligence. and therefore he wants to create that distinction between like, no, if you ask for this, you're a boy. We're not going to make this boy. We're not going to make the boy. No, I think maybe, I have a third theory, which is maybe Donald Trump is a sort of covert helldivers fan.

And maybe this is the first step towards super earth. And he's not just going to be the president. He's going to be the super president. And everything's going to go, you know, war forever. But it's wild because he apparently appointed somebody for the Federal Trade Commission to be the head of the National Commission. on super intelligence and it's just sort of like, I don't think that's a good job to have.

No, it was the director of national intelligence. It was Jay Clayton. So I think he's genuinely like, Donald Trump is having to really grapple with the meanings of the word intelligence, right? But I'm also having fun with, yeah, the semiotics. I'm having fun with the specificity of language here

because, like, for one, I mean, it's the first time in a decade that I'm like, damn, I'm glad I tried and failed to do a PhD in comparative literature. But also it's like, this is getting to a point because Donald Trump is effectively the most, the closest to an ideal novelistic hero you can possibly have. Not because he's good or heroic or does anything positive at all. But apparently he's the only person who can forcibly apply his own interior subjectivity to

the contingent world and make it stick because everyone is like, well, he's the president. I have to do you know if I want government contracts for dog shit AI, whatever. You've got to say the word he says. You've got to make Google Maps. to change it to Gulf of America and Lake America. He can do that. So, like, this also implies, if you really want to do combat with Donald Trump, you also have to become well-versed in semiotics.

Roland Bart's, folks. Yes. Now, there was a guy who enjoyed big, strong guys. You know, you read Bart on wrestling, and you're like, yeah, I see why Trump is like this. I mean, I was going to say, if you want to take it to go into post-structuralism, like, I do think that Foucault and Trump would have similar taste in men, but I feel like for different reasons. I mean, I think the other thing is, right, why didn't Libs ever do this or why didn't the

left ever do this, right? Like, where was, you know, because the thing is, this is, I think, the ultimate example of making up a guy to get mad at and doing this kind of maga shadow boxing that happens a lot, right? Where I think conservatives imagined a lot more virtue signaling and a lot more kind of epistemic violence against them than ever really happened, right? And I think we need to make that real. Well, this also kind of implies, in this case,

that Donald Trump is epistemic violence in the sense of he is doing violence to epistemology. Yeah, that's too. He's just going to reframe the entirety of human perception. It doesn't mean anything anymore. No, I just, I think the thing is, right? And he, that makes him a great postmodernist, I suppose. But no, I mean, a lot of these people are like, oh, I'm, I'm like maga and shuddered now because I had to hear pronouns one time.

And that's basically equivalent to like the Gulf of America to me. So my revenge is justified, right? Well, I think we should, we should sort of pay that back in kind, right? And I think that the next woke president, whoever that is, whether that's AOC or someone else, should do all of this same shit. Like, we want to go back to and then surpass the era where McDonald's was doing, you know, ads about how, you know, about Black Trans Magic, right? Like, we need to have a president who is going to not be afraid to rename it to the United States gay force and you're not allowed to laugh at it. Yeah, I mean, what I find so interesting about this is that it is kind of like, the epitaph on a tyrant.

It's like when he cried, little children died in the streets kind of thing, except it's tech CEOs who get shangied into his office and have to sign basically a statement more or less of vowing to adhere to like AI safety. Yeah, it's crazy how this mostly seems to land on Apple

and Google, whether it's the Maps stuff or this. Because Trump called all of the like AI guys into his office, including Elon Musk, who I guess he's like best friends with again now. Or I don't know that relationship's like. But essentially, right, because of the cause for regulating AI, what Trump has done is gone, well, first of all, it's super intelligence. And second of all, these guys, they're going to regulate themselves, you know, voluntarily. They're all going to sign up to this kind of toothless, you know, charter thing, I think. And they're going to audit themselves. So don't worry. There was a BBC article about this, and I'm going to quote from it a little bit here where it says that during an address to the United Nations General Assembly last week, Trump said the word artificial made the technology sound.

fake. I mean, he's cooking. Like, this is, I think, America's greatest living semi-eatician. Like, it does do that, yes. What I find so funny about it, though, is that he basically, okay, the argument here, as quoted in this piece, is that tech leaders, if they adopt the term to placate Donald Trump, then that effectively means the United States can, as they put it, set the nomenclature, which already sounds like a fucking graduate seminar-ass sentence, let's be completely real here. You know, it's like, oh, you're doing a panel paper on. I don't know, like fucking Don DeLillo or something like that. You go back to Heggs, at the Department of War, another example of this.

And he's like, yeah, we're going to get all the beaders. Once again, it's the War of Semitians. He's drafted a battalion of Mikhail Bakhton readers. Like, this is happening for real. Yeah, we're going to, we're going to, like, get all of the, like, beardos out of the military. And then we're going to be, like, setting the nomenclature for the rest of the, you know, that's going to be key to our, like, war fighting capability. I mean, I think there's something to this,

where they've found to an extent that they can't change the real world as much as they might like, certainly with Iran, which is why I think this is most acute with Heggseth, right? And so what they've done is just really go all in on, well, we did change the signs. We did manage to change the signs. So maybe that can be the thing that we just kind of go all in on. And they're going to get absolutely massacred in the midterms. What I find interesting about it, I think, because we can begin into a broader topic here. Trump is obviously all in on building more data centers.

Like one of the most unpopular policies across the board. Everybody hates these fucking things. And that was the thing that I wanted to point out was that I found interesting was this statement in so far as we're also talking about the super intelligence thing, basically hinges on the idea that the danger of AI is that it's going to somehow is going to be able to, you know, more or less sentiently compromise the usage of dangerous weapons systems. And so like there have to be safeguards in place. But then it's to me it's like, well, no, but the actual AI. safety thing is the fact that data centers are horrible for the environment and for the power grid and for the social fabric of where they're installed and they pollute and they're loud and all of

this shit that goes along with them. And they're incredibly unpopular to which Trump says, having read about it, well, I mean, the summarized version is basically you're dumb and poor if you don't like them. But he says, quote, these big, powerful, very rich, very smart companies are going to be making massive contributions to communities. I mean, if they put some like Dora columns on, on the outside of the data centers, then I think Trump will be a big, big supporter. I have a, my own theory about this super intelligence thing, right? And it's very, very niche. But this thing of rebranding it to SI did cause a rush on dot SI domain names.

And dot SI is the top level domain for Slovenia, where Donald Trump's wife is from. All I'm saying is, you know, maybe the kind of hidden hand behind Donald Trump's actions is, you know, maybe it originates in. you know, maybe in Milania. Trump's family is like, we're going to buy up all the TLDs for Slovenia and sell them, and we're going to basically camp them. Yeah, it's just a pump and dump for like Slovenian domain names.

I will say it's heartening that the data center thing is so unpopular and that like regardless, I mean, I'm not going to say that it's every single person in America as opposed to it. But there's definitely a more spanning all of the weird niche kind of permutations of fucked up American political orientation. in opposition to these. Like, they are just that unpopular.

And yet, the goal is to keep doing it to, and as Trump calls them, well, actually, it was Jensen Wong who referred to them as superintelligence factories because he's already accepted the new episteme. The emperor's new episteme, I guess. Just glazing Trump immediately. Yeah, 100 fucking percent.

That's what it is. The other fun thing about this to me is, you know, I think it's more ironic to me, given how transphobic these guys are, is they keep changing the name of the thing, and then being annoyed that the reality doesn't match up with it. And whether that's, you know, the Department of War that can't win a war or the Board of Peace that can't enforce peace or go around the UN in any meaningful way.

And we just have these kind of abandoned and semi-forgotten efforts. And I kind of suspect that superintelligence is going to be one of them. Yeah, yeah, exactly. S-I is new pronouns and email signature. It's going to happen. Yeah, it's all just, for lack of a better word, vice signaling. Like, this isn't going to make, like, artificial intelligence any, like, more effective. I am very taken by that turn of phrase.

It's most of what they do. And, I mean, I think there is an instructive mirror here in that, like, you know, Democratic presidents, when they didn't want to or weren't able to do anything material, would just do some kind of com stuff, right? You would see it, like, you know, fucking trans awareness from the White House date or whatever, and whatever they didn't want to do anything material, right? So to that extent, you can say that virtue signaling, as much as it originates from Chuds, is like a useful criticism, right?

But, like, in this case, it's the exact same thing. It's, like, performative, semi-otic bullshit to distract from the fact that they can't get the things that they want. Yeah, I mean, exactly. I agree with you in the sense that calling something virtual, like, virtue signaling can mean something in the sense of a, like, a platitude or an empty gesture, as opposed to when the Chuds use it, which they basically mean, do you have any beliefs at all? That's virtue signaling. You just want other blue hairs, whatever, to like you. I was thinking about Novus point about the sort of dot-sci stuff.

And obviously about, you know, very, very funny. But also it's like not like completely out of the Trump playbook. Like there have been many sort of, you know, there are lots of documented cases in which like it's very clear that the Trump administration or their supporters were doing quite deliberate things in order to do like what were effectively pump and dump schemes on cryptocurrency, right? So much of the Trump political playbook is about sort of like using particular phrases and gestures, even hinting at them in order to sort of like pump up like the fake economy, which

sort of relies on people sort of saying the word or saying the line. So much of like when we sort of try to understand this moment in politics and culture and like the ascendance of the right, we'll sort of be like, oh, okay, so like they created the dumbest type of sort of alternate economy where everything runs on semiotics and was somehow able to monetize that and no one sort of like questioned how this work. And I sort of feel like the AISI thing is sort of like an extension of that. And like, I wouldn't be surprised if sort of part of the reason why it's being used, to sort of put it simply, like, I wouldn't be surprised if they were just trying to, like, hit the hype button once again. Like, they're aware that, like, politically, they've sort of hit

a ceiling of some kind. Whether they have, actually, I don't really know. But I'd like to think that, like, politically, they've sort of realized they've hit a ceiling. But they have this other sort of alternative sort of hybrid world in which many of their figures, or like their augmented world in which many of their figures have accrued a lot of financial power on the basis of just doing dumb bullshit. So it would make sense for them to be like, well, why don't we just do some more dumb bullshit and get like this senile old man to kind of just say the line and just see what happens? And so much of the AI economy is that. It's just saying the line or doing the bit and just seeing what happens. And most of the time has worked in their favor. I actually think,

though, in the case like this, I take November's point about facing down the midterms and wanting to, I feel like some of the stuff with the AI safety and the super intelligence stuff is meant to latch on to headlines to try to kind of stay afloat in some capacity or or or seem as though they're they're signaling something that's going to it seems like it's getting a lot of traction but I also am fully of the belief that this is just a thing that Trump said kind of blurted out and it got treated as a new writ yeah well I I don't know if you're aware of this but grok maybe talked him into the war on Iran they left him with grok for a bit to play with Grock and he asked it a lot of questions about Iran and was, I guess, convinced by it and told people

that he was convinced by it that it was so, you know, beautiful. This was after the sort of it wrote him a poem thing in the Oval Office, right? After that, the words that it's using are so beautiful. After that, they kind of left him alone with it for a bit. And I guess he got it to agree that war on Iran would be a good idea, you know? I don't know whether it told him it would destroy a race empire or what, but like, it just... Donald Trump introduced to the concept of Tardig and is immediately so shocked and revolved by it that he's like, I'm going to end the civilization. I'm going to use genocidal language because no one should burn rice like that. I didn't realize that they had left

him. That feels like a really dangerous proposition. Oh yeah. They'd live. Leaving Trump alone with a chap lot. Now that he's almost a lame duck, they're just going to make him an iPad baby, which I think is also that that feeds into why he's, you know, taking these sort of interesting dives into semiotics or doing rambling truths on truth social where he gives up. Donald Trump surprisingly well behaved at the White House correspondent's dinner because he's wearing his big headphones and has his iPad in front of him. He's like falling asleep on TV like in like over office press stuff now. He's doing rambling truths where he gives out Tom Cotton's cell phone number for slicing him in some way. It's I love that there's a handshake between Donald Trump and

MIA when they've been cited by someone they don't like to give out their enemy cell phone number. I mean, I hope that Donald Trump, well, I sort of don't hope that Donald Trump gets more sort of tinfoil hat 5G truther about this stuff, but because of the nuclear weapons. But I think, yeah, MIA could start a war with Iran,

but Donald Trump couldn't write a song like bad girls. That's true. That is so true. He certainly couldn't perform in the video, yeah. I mean, I think your point about corruption is like an interesting one, right? Because apart from anything else, This whole signifier and signified stuff, one of the only arenas where it's been able to work has been federal law, right? Largely because the Supreme Court has been like, yeah, sure, do whatever you want, right?

And this is going to lead to a real sort of like garden of forking paths situation, I feel like, where as soon as he gets out of office, providing it's not, you know, Vance or Rubio in office after him, he's going to have to be writing, he's going to have to spend the rest of his life writing different pardons for Jared Cush. the different stuff he's done. I guess for me, it's a small thing, but it's kind of, it's when this is indicative of where their energy is going, I agree with you that it feels like a kind of pure bunker moment before the midterms. They're so checked out. Like, they know it's going to be a massacre.

They presumably have the internal polling that tells them that it's going to be a massacre, right? Trump is going to spend every week getting impeached. And he doesn't, he's already miserable. everyone around him is already miserable. And so, you know, whenever he's asked about the midterms, all he can really do is kind of mumble something about how woke is going to come back or transgender will last forever.

He keeps saying things that are like inadvertently iconic, which is lovely. He also keeps trying to, like, I don't know ever you saw this, but like clearly someone has sort of said, but you've got to, like, do you got to mention Hassan Piker? Oh, my God. This guy has no idea who Hassan is. No. He has no idea what fucking Twitch is.

And so, like, he's on the podium. And I'm trying to, I'm going to see if I can find the quote. But, yeah, he was, like, trying to sort of, in lieu of, like, not being able to sort of remember Hassan's name. He was trying to, like, describe Hassan Piker. And he says, like, he's like a big guy. He's this. I was going to say, having, having, you know, Hassan Piker, who was a guest on the show,

was a friend of the show. Years ago, he came to our studio in London and we did a show with him. He's a very big guy. And he's jacked his shit. He's huge. He is, he is basically powerlifting Zoran Mamdani. How could Donald Trump. stand a chance against him.

He will fall in love with him. Yeah, exactly. He would fall in love with him from a first meeting, which is why it can never happen, you know? Yes, why they have actually kept him in the dark about Hassan Piker, because if he saw,

he would invent a reason why he needed to speak to him as a matter of national security, and then he would fall on all over him. Yeah, you would hear Donald Trump on his, like, engaging gay mode. You would see gay Trump come out and be like, well, listen, I don't know, I haven't looked into it. Maybe America did deserve 9-11.

him. Yeah, I mean, look, that's the thing. It's like, if Trump wants to conjure up a villain, Trump wants to hate someone, he has to find, like he always, he's quite, quite judgy about everyone. But if he finds somebody physically repulsive where he sees something he can make fun of

about their appearance, then they're sunk, which means no matter how much Mujaro and Botox, J.D. Vance does. Trump's seen, you know, horrible little, little sweat gremlin J.D. Vance. So he's never going to respect him. But if Trump had to be in the same, room as As Asa Sond Piker, then yes, like it would fully be you are witnessing a human's eyes

turned into big red hearts. Like that would actually happen. It wouldn't be a cartoon. He, he genuinely can't withstand the allure of a big jacked man who can tan. Yeah, we see it over and over again. And so, yeah, I feel as though yeah, they are sauceless. They're completely sauceless, but they're still, you know, years left on his term. And he can still, for the time being, define reality. Yeah. Many, many, many terrible things can and will happen. And we could all die. And it won't have been worth it and it should never have happened in all of this, right? And I would worry a lot about any kind of sort of post-Trump thing, any kind of post-Trump pull back to the left, just getting kind of corralled back into sort of like centrist damn shit again. But I am going to

await with bated breath the kind of last days of Trump write-ups, you know? If there is a book, I will buy it. If there is an article, I will read it. No paywall will stop me. I've been edged a little bit by the kind of Chud-Sygon article we read last time, right? The kind of last days of the Danube Institute. And seeing these people losing, even if it's to Libs, is so libidinally pleasing to me that I will be there for all of their, you know, crying. And this is what the sort of like, Libs online are sort of getting wrong because they're like still moralising. They're still yelling at people who like didn't vote Camelon 2024. They're still kind of like saying.

And I'm not like saying that. And I'm not like saying that they're wrong about, like, any about stuff, right? But it's more just like, okay, what you should actually say instead is that it's very, very funny to see these types of cry babies lose. And if you want to see them cry and lose, and if you want to, like, have a fun time on election night and for the next few weeks afterwards, you should vote for us, right? Because we're the ones who can give you that thing. Yeah, there is a great democratic campaign along the same lines that Trump did of these people are humorless scolds and they want to make you miserable. and the best thing that you can do is to trigger and own them. And I think that that became true,

most of all, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's neck just doing that, you know, which is part of why we've been on the Charlie Kirk Fund thing, is because in that moment, they decided, okay, well,

you know, we can institute the kind of Chud Reich, right, and we can scold everybody, and we can discipline everybody, and we can censor everybody who doesn't mourn our precious beautiful boy who's nature just did that.

And people fucking hate that shit, you know? Yeah, Yeah, and then now the courts are deciding that people were illegally fired for making, you know, Anodyne statements just laughing about Charlie Kirk's neck doing that. And they can't force people to like them. Yeah. And they really want to try.

Yeah. And you know what's funny? Before you went completely fucking insane, and I'll argue that he was always problematic. But Matt Taibi wrote an article in the 2000s about the great American spite voter. Yeah. About like the average spite voter being just sort of like a probably 30s to 40s divorced dude who's not in shape and it doesn't have a great job. And he likes voting when he votes for things that are going to make people like

Susan Sarandon cry. Yeah. Because it's funny. Like, I'm annoying these rich people who I don't like. There's a lot of people. And this generalizes to Britain too, who love cruelty, but also feel like their own feelings must be handled very, very gently. And to them being like, hey, don't misgender me or whatever is like shooting them with

a gun. But then so is, hey, don't post that about my beautiful boy Charlie Kirk. Yeah. And I was going to make a different argument that I think that you should kind of invoke the prospect of spite voter from the left where there's nothing to me. Like we want to see all sorts of changes and electoralism isn't going to get us there entirely. Like in a lot of cases, it's only just a very, very minimal step. But I will say you can at least enjoy whether it's in America or elsewhere. Certainly I can give you an example that brought warmth to my heart is when you think of Rod Dreher sitting down to like his fucking nice meal of oysters it is going to make Ahagau face about.

And then all of a sudden he learns that Peter Hungary has won. the election. He's out of his 100,000 euro-year job to write articles about Bulabas and like, oh, I saw a kid's weird dick when I was in third grade. And everyone was like, wait, no, I thought I had a sinecure for life. No, you got to leave hungry. Fuck you. We're taking away your job and your status. You have to go back to America where everybody thinks that, for lack of a better word, you're a huge fairy. Like, why are you doing sort of like weeb for Central Europe stuff? No one cares about you. Yeah, that's, that's gay and boring. And it's awesome. I'm so glad. I fucking hate that guy. And I'm so.

so glad he's unhappy. So you know what? Like voting isn't a huge time out of my day. I'll do it to make those people unhappy in addition to everything else. Well, this was also, this was our take on on Camala back in the day. This was our take on Biden before that. It's, it's, you know, been our take on all sorts of things is they're going to do a lot of the same horrible shit, right? But like, at the same time, you have to have some spite within you and consider how good it's going to feel for the chuds who are going to do all of that same stuff and also a bunch of worse stuff to eat shit. Yeah, I mean, what I saw in 2020, the videos from New York City of all the cops crying and people making fun of them, I was like, cool, I'm really happy. This is making,

COVID was fucking shit. The I kingdom at the time, you know, everything was problems nonstop, but I saw a bunch of cops crying and people making the Nelson ha ha voice at them. And I was like, cool, I'm really glad that happened. I saw a video of a dude in a wheelchair that someone filmed in the street in New York City being like, yo, you know, Biden won, I'm coming over. I got two bottles of wine, some condoms, some Viagra and some Coke. Like, that man is having a fucking great time. So am I. My favorite artifact of Chud America.

And Nate, I'm going to send you to send you this. And I'd like you to sort of play us out at the end of the episode with it. Of course. Is a video of a guy who is clearly grieving, right? And is deeply, deeply upset about Charlie Kirk and his neck just doing that. But what they've done is they've cut it. So it's just the breaths. And it's a.

beautiful, beautiful moment in American history. He is red in the face, wearing Oakley's screaming in a parking lot. It is, to my mind, a beautiful allergy for, for, you know, America, you know, the chudded America. Well, on that note, November, and I appreciate your professionalism in helping me segue. We're going to move on to segment two in which I have a drastic change of tone interview with Jay, who's a union organizer working in the hospitality industry in the UK. So we're going to roll that, and I hope you enjoy. Welcome to the second segment of today's episode. I am joined today by Jay, who is a union organizer working in the UK hospitality industry. Jay, thank you for being on the show. You've got a lot to talk about. And you've already informed me a great deal of stuff I did not know. So I'm really excited for this conversation. How are you? I'm living the dream. I'm absolutely glad to be on here. And just to talk a little bit about the hospitality industry in the UK in general and of course about sort of some structural trends.

and also just like the whole thing about bartending, I guess. Yeah, it's wild to me because I've been back in the UK a little bit for some work. And specifically, I have an interesting story when I read some of your brief because when, you know, I have a band and we were recording an album last year. We recorded in a studio outside of Brighton in like a converted farmhouse. And we stayed in this little town in East Sussex called Ditchling. And there are two pubs in Ditchling. It's a very small village.

There's like basically two pubs, a couple of like cafes and a pharmacy. I mean, there's, there's certainly smaller villages in England with no shops at all, but it's, it's small. Both those pubs are owned by UK pub conglomerate chains. Like you can, you know, I think, I can't remember the names, but you know, you download the app and it's the app. You can order via the app to your table. And it's the same as you'd use. There was a pub in Southeast London. I used to go to with a friend.

Same thing. So it's, there was this weird experience of like, oh, it's the Bukhalic country pub or whatever. It's like, yeah, but it's still owned by a great big chain that's probably. you know, financed by private equity. No, but that's exactly. Like, it's very ubiquitous in how like private equity works in sort of the hospitality industry, I'd say. So even if you do go to year old country village in the middle of nowhere, you will end up going to a pub, which is inevitably owned by just a massive chain. And that's kind of how it works, really. You know, back, back in the day, we're talking like maybe 70s, 80s, 90s before the break up of like the large brewery chains.

quite a lot of pubs themselves were freehouses or they're owned by the pub landlord but what has happened quite recently really really exploded during COVID and just after is the ownership model which pub landlords used to have was leasing they'd kind of like rent it from the brewery some pubs are also freehouse

but what we've seen is franchising so instead of like your pub landlord sort of having almost a deed to the land they do just essentially rent and they rent from a large franchiser sort of the same ownership was a McDonald's. It's interesting because I didn't know what a freehouse was before I moved to the UK and a lot of our audience is American. So what I'll do is I'll try to give my best attempt at

explaining what it is that you can tell me if I'm wrong or not. My understanding is the freehouse is a pub that is not franchised by a brewery to only serve beer or products made by that brewery. So rather than being like an affiliate in the sort of old model, it is just a pub business and they serve whatever they want to serve. Yeah, exactly. And then they'll probably have a deal with some supplies, but I might get some better rates. on like the kegs and the ails and the beers they're bringing in. But ultimately, they own the business. They decide what they supply. They decide what they stock. They decide what their money goes on. Yeah. And I guess to me, when I first got to the UK, I was aware of Weatherspoons.

It's kind of like that. I think the first pub I ever went to was Witherspoons. And it was just like, oh my God, this is so crowded and horrible. I have to leave immediately. And, but I always thought it as a separate thing. And what I guess I didn't realize was there was kind of a sort of Witherspoonsification of, or Sponsification, if you want to. call it that of just about everything. And so I wanted to ask you because you've got quite a bit of visibility on structural trends and hospitality, pubs or otherwise. And I thought maybe some of those kind of larger insights of the industry would be really enlightening. Yeah. Well, one thing you're seeing in a general trend is, you know, year old pubs are sort of shying down. You're seeing it all over the news in the UK like, oh, small pub landlords are really struggling, all of that good

stuff. But what is not really being reported on is the fact that larger than you, are actually increasing more and more. So, you know, as you said, the crowded, busy weatherspoons, that is becoming more and more commonplace. And, you know, there's various reasons for that. But I'd say the biggest one is sort of economies of scale, is how I put it. You know, you have massive franchise. They probably are able to have better deals with their suppliers.

And then therefore, they're able to undercut all the pubs around them. So, you know, if I'm, say again, a small pub landlord and, you know, I get, I know, cask avail for 60 quid, but, you know, WebSpoon is able to get into four for 40 quid. That obviously will be going to be able to undercut me. Of course, people are going to go there. So you are having this massive transition from small venues to larger ones. And it's not just pubs as well. It's clubs, bars, all of that good stuff. Yeah, on the specifically on on pubs, I just remember reporting on this a little bit because in 2022 into 2023 during the energy crisis, I remember seeing news reporting about the fact that utility costs were.

you know, my, my partner and I are home energy costs probably doubled or tripled, but there was a cap on how much residential customers could have their rates increased. And there was no such thing for commercial properties. And so pubs were suddenly seeing 10-fold, 15-fold increases in their gas bills, for example, which was, you know, threatening to put a great number of them out of business. And I would imagine that those kinds of issues that you have in the UK apply also to other entertainment venues. And then you also have what I've perceived is, you know, you've talked about this with me a little bit, the casualization of laborers, your hours contracts, a sort of desire to kind of, it felt like create cogs. Everything is a kind of replaceable cog. And it just, I can imagine that working in jobs like that, I mean, I know how stressful it can be in a pub as a customer on a Saturday night. I can only imagine working it. And so the casualization and that kind of downward pressure on paying as little as possible and giving as little security as possible feels like it, you know, leads to a situation in which people are really atomized when working in these venues. I think, yeah, I think that's a great insight, really. Because, you know, the only variable

cost in a business at the end day, it's labor, right? So if you have increased costs, as you mentioned, like, electricity price increases, recently in the UK, we had a minimum wage increase, although I would not say that's a massive, massive factor and sort of the reason why this is happening. And to interrupt you really quickly, for people to be aware of this, the UK has a strange minimum wage set up where it's actually age graduated. And that was kind of a, I mean, America's got a terrible system too, but it varies by state. The federal minimum wage is quite low and hasn't gone up in forever. When I was in my early 20s, I worked fast food in America and I was paid $5.15 an hour. Now the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. But, you know, things are far more

expensive now than they were in 2005. But in the UK, you have a situation where, you know, people are, I believe, what is it, 21 is when you get to the maximum sort of, or it may, Is it older than that? I can't quite recall. Yeah, it's like 16 to 18, 18 to 21. And it used to be 21 to 25, but I think they put it down to 21 just being like, you know, you get all the money now. Yeah. And it's, and there has been an increase. But I mean, my, my impression for the, from the six years I lived in the United Kingdom was that hourly contract work is quite low paid. Also, salary job work is quite low paid in general. But costs have gone up massively. And so I could see this being both from the perspective if you were trying to run a pub, if we're trying to run an entertainment. venue, but then also if you're trying to make a living working in this industry, how precarious it would seem. And you've got quite a bit of perspective on this. Yeah. So I think precarious is such an amazing word to use, really, because in specifically the hospitality industry, the hospitality employees rely on something called a zero-hour contract. And I don't know if you have that necessarily in sort of the American system. But what it is, is you don't need to take shifts from your employer. So it's

very, very flexible. But also your employer doesn't need to give you shifts. So what ends up happening is you don't get your rotor. I have quite a lot of people I know who get their rotor on the Sunday for the Monday, so the next day. So they aren't able to plan the weeks out. And also the hours are so variable. You know, you could do seven hours one week, 50 the next. It's just all about the needs of the business. And because of this, you can combine it with another thing that happens quite a long,

the hospitalised industry. And this is also more on those larger venues. So when you said earlier about a cog in a machine, this is actually a perfect example of it. So you have casualized forms of employment. And a general trend I've seen in various places all over the country is the implementation of third party of rotoring systems, which then use an algorithm to determine shifts. And it's so imagine this, you only get your rotor one week in advance. You don't know if you're working the next day or not. And you don't know how many hours are going to be working.

And also at the end of the day, it might not even be your manager doing your own rotor. It's just an algorithm. When I worked fast food, we typically knew our schedule about a week in advance, but you could definitely get called in. I worked third shift, so I typically only worked Friday, Saturday nights and then other weeknights by rotation because I would come in. I think I can't quite recall. I want to say 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. because I was a full-time student.

But there were numerous times when we had really busy periods where I had to work more than that. And what I found in the U.S. is that for people who work, I was working part-time, but typically you'll hear stories of people who work full-time where it's quite obvious that shift. are being set up in such a way that the people are just under the cutoff for full-time hours, because, whether it's because of some employee benefits or if it's for like a pay bump for working more than those hours, for me, something that would be really shocking is both as a coworker or potentially as a, you know, in some kind of management role, the idea of the vetting, staffing,

etc., being done from the outside. It's sort of like you show up and they've just, you know, gone to the fruit machine and pulled the arm to just come up with some numbers of who you're working with or who's working for you that night. It is kind of crazy, isn't it? In some businesses, how it works, you set up a template and then it will basically generate randomly from there. So it can have someone due to final sign off, but most of the time that doesn't happen. There's some very famous examples of this being used. In the UK, there was an absolute slew of stories coming out of McDonald's because, of course, with zero hour contracts mixed with this hyper-casualized form of employment, you end up having such a power like imbalance between an

employee and their employer. In the UK, I, I'm not aware of whether or not this has happened in fast food, but unionizing stuff for food service, for small entertainment venues like this in the U.S. in my experience is quite uncommon. And what you're describing is familiar to me. But when I look back on it, I think, well, at least I had the understanding that if I got assigned a shift, I knew I was having an eight-hour shift. So I knew if I was working 16 hours a week, I was getting that paycheck that I was expecting every two weeks.

Whereas in this case, it sounds like you could have any number of things. And that sounds, yeah, really unpredictable. and also as if you were trying to create a situation where people were unable to or afraid to advocate for themselves in any way. No, 100%. It completely flips the power dynamic. So, so unequal. And it does generally make it super hard to unionize. Okay, let me give you a little example, right? Yeah. If you have a venue, which needs probably around 20 people, right? You're 20 full-time workers. What you can do is you can get maybe, I don't know, 100 people doing seven hours a week. So super casualized. They get one shift a week. And so what that means is you need to unionize so, so many people,

because of course in union tactics, we've got something called like a bargaining unit. You need half of that amount of people to go through statutory recognition. So when you have a large disposable pool of labour, or not doing that many hours, you have to get so many more people than you would normally would. And because it's very hyper-casualized, a word I keep turning back to, you end up having sort of very, very high turnover rates. You know, I've worked in venues of turnover rates 150%. Sometimes 300% is common. That's three new teams a year.

And if you're thinking of a venue of like 20 people, that's you're hiring, firing 60 people a year. And it sounds like that just lends itself to creating an environment in which if people did try to unionize, the sort of management apparatus is uniquely prepared to suppress it or to, you know, make it as difficult as possible. Oh, 100%. There's so many good examples.

of businesses doing exactly that. So there's three really big main unionization campaigns going on within hospitality. There's a Kimton Clocktow hotels. There's a Rock City and there's Norwich Theatre Royal and Playhouse. And there's been reports coming out of those that are in use of them bringing in specialist anti-union HR firms. There's also a case. It's called quarantining. So since you have these hyper-casualized models where you can basically just change the rights out how you want to.

Yeah. Of course, your HR department will have a list of who they suspect is a unionized member. and not. And they will put unionized members or people they suspect are being union members together on certain shifts, but they won't put them with non or people they suspect are not union members. So they essentially quarantine the workforce. And so basically to limit the possibility of people being able to interact with one another, lest it spread. This sounds like kind of the way that that would happen in places in the US, but in the UK, at least there is more of a, I don't know, say tradition, but like labor unions are at least more common.

I think it's a case of, well, when you say it sounds like quite American, I would say, yes, it is actually quite an American system. Because so zero hour contracts are a relatively new thing. Well, they've existed for a while, but their implementation is quite new. I remember them being a discussion, a point of discussion and debate in like the 2017 and 2019 general elections. It is a really interesting thing. In the UK, you only get employment rights if you work for a place for over two years. So if you don't do that, and especially in hospitality venues, like, I mean, who's going to work in a bath for like two years straight, right? It doesn't really tend to happen unless you're in a management position. It feels like if you work in that industry, you may continue to work in that industry for years, but it's less likely that you're going to work at the same place.

Yeah, you're going to be hopping from venue to venue. Yeah. So in that regard, like, even if you are, you know, you work the better part of a decade doing this unless you spend at least two years in that role, you're not going to have the same protections. No, 100%. It does also happen in UK. do close down venues if they get too close to unionizing. There's a really famous case in Glasgow. 13th note, it's a music venue, and it was shut down and it's cited the union and its workers went to an ACASH tribunal, which is sort of like the UK's employment law body, and they won. I wish I could speak more authoritatively about how it works in the United States,

but I know that given the current administration, for example, seeking redress through labor law stuff is much more difficult, but you hear similar stories that, yeah, much like this kind of quarantine approach with employers, that you're describing. If a franchise becomes unionized, then they just shut it down. And I mean,

it's good to hear that the people at 13th and it were able to win. But it also sounds like what you're describing is kind of the norm, that level of hostility. And I know you've been organizing on your own,

so I'd love to know about your personal experience. Yeah, cool. So I guess I've just got to explain a bit about my union. So I'm with Unite, which is the largest private union

in the UK. I think Unison's the biggest public one. So kind of just brass tax, what is a union is, well, what is a union? It's almost like a legalized version of class warfare, which is a bit of strange way of putting it. But it's a way of going with your co-workers, you come together, you join this larger organisation, and it gives you more rights in the workplace. And so that's kind of the main principle. And it's also really worth remembering that the UK actually has a very strong tradition of unions. But hospitality is the

third biggest private sector in the UK. It's gone one of the lowest unionisation. It's one of the lowest unionization rates basically unheard of. Yeah. So how did I get involved with it and sort of my experience of unionising? So a bit of an interesting one. I knew a friend. I've been involved in political activism for a long time, basically all my adult life. And one of my friends from sort of a group I was in, he had managed to unionize his

hospitality venue, one of the first in the area to have unionized ever. And I was at a pub and I was having, you know, I was at a celebration party. I was having a few drinks. And I ended up talking to his project work. So the guy who is in Unite, his whole job is to help people organize. And I got Chan to him. And in a few months later, I got a management role at a venue. And I was in cahoots with him.

And we basically just said, why not? Let's do it. But I imagine that at a certain point, it becomes a little bit more difficult to keep that a secret for management. 100%. But that's why in hospitality, since the employers are so anti-union, you basically have to set up your own inspiring. So how I did it, for example, is we do something called a mapping the workplace within unions. I don't know if you heard of that term before. I haven't. So I'm interested. So what it is, is you'll sit down with your guy and you will try and get as much information about your workplace as

possible. So how many people work there? What kind of hours do they do? You know, how close are they with management? You go through each single plate person that works there. So I was quite lucky in the fact that since I was in a management position, I had access to a lot more information than I would of just being a worker. And so we went through this list. We went, okay, they'd be good, they'd be bad. They'd be good. They'd be bad. We drafted up properly. And then after that, a big part of it is just speaking to your colleagues, right? If there's a guy, and I know he's quite left wing, you know, he talks about Palestine on shift. And I'm like, okay, he's pretty chill. He's probably going to have a good opinion of unions. You know, I say to him, do you want to go for a cigarette

around the back. We go for a cigarette. I started asking, how do you feel about unions? Since I'm his manager, he's kind of, he's a bit like, oh, I don't know. And I was like, how do you feel if I started one? And then bobs your uncle. And you just do that. Right. Nauseum. That's, it's really funny because I mean, I've so far removed from the stuff at this point, but like I had, you know, friends a long time ago who worked in things with, yeah, what you're describing a spycraft. And I don't have any personal experience with it, but it does sound like you're almost going to like recruiting sources in a way. And it's fascinating because it's like you're up against like a ha-ha-style nation state and you're having to, yeah, you know, go about a way to not get compromised.

Yeah, no, it, to be honest with you, it was actually very fun. Well, yeah, because you fucking hate your bosses. I mean, come on. I worked at stake and shake. I made terrible wages. And like, you know, I never got a raise. And even when I worked third shift, you were supposed to get more money, but I never did. It never got processed and there was no way to advocate for it. So if there was some way to stick it to management other than what we used to steal food, I would absolutely have done it. No, 100%. And that's, that is what is about sticking it to the man because ultimately at the end of the day, your employer

is there to explore you. Like, I'm not going to go on a whole Marxist spill, but, you know, it's simply that. You provide your labor, they take the little bit off the top. You know, that's how it's worked time and more. Yeah, and in the case of a lot of places, what I experienced, and places in the US that don't have state minimum wages and

go off the federal minimum wage, they're like, we'd make you work for free if we could, but the government says this is the minimum we have to pay you, so that's all you're getting. Like, this is an opportunity for you to, like, not get screwed over as badly if you can at get rest some control. A hundred percent, you know, and especially in an industry which has like loads and loads of young people, there is no better time to like be politically active and engaged in your

workplaces. And I mean, that brings me on to another point, right? The only reason I was able to get as far as I did, because a little bit of context is I managed to start, we've got the most members of any hospitality union in the south of England. Like it got, it got very big. Well, congratulations, man. That's awesome. Thank you.

Thank you. And the only reason. that was able to happen was because our employer were being dicks. They're being so awful. You know, there's this whole theory about like critical points, you know, there's, there's a point where people feel so angry they do want to do something. And it's just being in that workplace and knowing how people are feeling and what your employer is doing. So when it comes to SpyCraft, it's not just about learning about what your colleagues are doing, although that is very important. And it's good to know what your colleagues are doing anyway. We're all people at the end of the day.

but it's also good to know what your employer is doing because we managed to find out that there was going to be a frown rehire scheme by the end of next year. And so, of course, when you tell someone, hey, your job might be at risk in a few months' time, you know, that suddenly motivates them a lot to help you sort of stick it to the man. And so you basically have to do this while not transgressing whatever rules the employer's put up about what you do on the clock. you have to kind of like skirt just short of the line. Yeah. So in the UK specifically, in a workplace, you have a recognized union. But if you're building one, if you're one of those pioneers, you are unrecognized. So quite a lot of workplaces have stipulations in your contract about unions, you know,

only be able to doing it in an appropriate time and out of work hours. So what you need to do is, or how I did it was, you know, you set up a secret WhatsApp, you do meetings almost every single week outside of work. You know, you put up union material, but you make sure not to do it on shift or you get someone else to do it for you. Maybe someone who's in the branch, but not in your employment. As in so a union member who is part of your union, but not your workplace. Gotcha. It was basically stuff like that.

Because of the type of venue I worked in, it was, it's quite artsy. So staff were allowed to write over things. So in that case, you could also put up a bit of adjut prop every now and again. Yeah, it's fascinating because I wasn't super. super active in it, but I was a member of the union when I was a graduate student in the city, University of New York. And in New York state, striking is illegal for educators. Really? In lots of states in America, public sector employees striking is completely illegal. And it's either charged with the crime for it, particularly in states in the South. Even though it's legal in the UK,

it's still going to influence a lot of people to not if they're worried that like at the first instance, they might lose their job and they have no recourse because it's like, well, you still have bills to pay. Well, exactly, and that's kind of what your employer relies on, right? So in the case of, you know, I mentioned three different campaigns earlier, the Kempton clocked out hotels, Rock City, and Norwich Theatre. But, you know, there's been cases of the union reps or union members that every single one of those are being fired. It does happen.

Yeah. Of course, it doesn't extend any further than that, but you're still losing your livelihood. And, of course, if you're working already in very precarious conditions, and you obviously cannot afford to lose that job. So at the end of the day, that's what your bosses are relying on. Yeah, and I was thinking about this. This is kind of a metaphor in some ways because much like I would prefer to live, if I had had the ability to live in council housing in the United Kingdom, I would have done it because even if I'm dealing with the council, there's problems, at least there are certain rules where it's like if your landlord is just some dickhead who, you know, lives in Australia and owns a row house and does whatever he wants, then like you have your only recourse is going is to putting the onus on yourself to fight for your own rights out of your own pocket, losing money, potentially losing your home. And similarly with this, it's like when you're in a situation, if there are employment abuses taking place, if you don't have the structure. of a union or some kind of support.

Perhaps you can seek some redress if you are unlawfully fired, but it's all on you to seek it out, you know, on your own dime with your own time, like, at your own risk. There's no one to support you. Yeah. And so in this case, I understand why, like, given what you're describing, the people being, management being hostile, being overtly hostile, like, why that would drive people towards seeking some kind of solidarity. But at a certain point, you have to announce it.

And then management's aware. And then you take that risk, like you've just described of them being like, we can lose this franchise and fire everybody. Well, exactly. So, yeah, that's something called going live in union speak, which is when your employer finds out if there's a union or when you decide to put forward your demands. So, of course, the whole point of joining a union is getting better workers' rights within your own workplace, right? So for my one, it was guaranteed hours, protection from third party harassment and climate provisions,

which is a bit of a strange one. And I think it's kind of important to go over specifically why those issues. So guaranteed hours, of course, zero-hour contracts. We had one of our members go from being able to pay their rent to barely being able to afford it to eat within the span of a month while still working. Protection from third-party harassment. We had one of our members get assaulted on shift and nothing was done and it was buried by the management. Wow. Yeah.

And these abuses are very common within hospitality as well in the UK. Yeah, I was thinking about that that if you're working in something, you know, specifically related to entertainment, you know, after hours, young people, alcohol. Hall involved, like, not to turn it into a big joke, but like, Britain's the only country ever been in my life. I'm six feet tall where I was just walking down the street on a Saturday night and like a girl came up and punched me. Like, people get drunk and they act crazy. And it's like, if that's your job dealing with it all the time, like you're going to be exposed to it. Yeah. And it's like, what happens if you get hurt? What happens if, you know, like you're unsafe at work? And can you rely on your employer to, you know, make sure you are safe, which quite a lot

of the time they don't. And that brings me on to my last point, which is the climate provisions. You know, we had two people get heat stroke while on shift during the recent heat wave. Oh my God. Yeah. And that's going to get more and more common. Yeah, no kidding. And so it's a big issue. It really is.

So, of course, with all these issues going forward, you know, when we went live is sort of when we decided to make a campaign of those issues and go public. The reason we went live is we had multiple people fired in one day. And when they, so of course, in the UK, you've got legal right to ask for a trade union representative if you're pulled into any type of meeting, any disciplinary. I coached my members before they went in. I said to them, say for it to be adjourned and ask for a trade union representative. They asked for that right.

They were denied it, fired on the spot. Presumably that's against the law? Very illegal. Gotcha. Gotcha. And so what happens then? The union will support those members in going to an ACASH tribunal or some kind, getting some type of legal recourse.

But because, of course, they've worked there for less than two years. They don't actually have rights from unfair dismissal. that's where the big payoffs are. So this is how your employer can get away with it. You've got statutory rights and employment law, right? So, you know, Trade Union Labor Relations Act 1998, you are able to have accompaniment, you know, and statutory law is a day one, right?

It doesn't matter if you work there two hours or six months or two years, you know, you're still allowed to have those. So those are the type of things that are protected, and that's what makes the union particularly strong for workers who haven't worked there for two years. Gotcha. So yeah, that happened when we went live. And then because these businesses, especially larger venues, are actually very well connected in the local area.

There was a whole media shit storm afterwards. You know, local press was going out. It was all happening. We had, we've been, like I've been talking to the comms team at Unite. We've been putting out press statements, all this good stuff. So when you go live is basically when shit hits the fan. Yeah. And, you know, your employer now then goes to.

war. And it sounds like you've been involved in this and now you're in the largest group in southern England. What has been your experience with these going live? Like have there been times, for example, when they, management just is just like, okay, cool, I guess we're unionized now? Or has it been universally hostile? Like, what's, what's that been like? Universally hostile. Gotcha. They've, they fought tooth and nail to not let this story out. And also, you know, it's quite a large organization. So, you know, it's not just a hospitality workers, it's, you know, more so. And every single internal statement, they didn't mention a union once. They, you know, do their best to bury the story. And so, but then they were also,

with the hospitality workers, you know, more people are getting fired. Conditions are getting worse. The atmosphere in the venue is an all-time low for the workers. The tactics used by employment or by your employers are many. There are many. And so you mentioned that, across the board, you feel as though that people are more willing to get involved because of the things that they experience just in the workplace, like the day-to-day and dignities of how they're treated by management. But you also spoke to me about something I found really interesting, which was that on top of the just obscene profit extraction taking place, you know, when you think about the kind of PE side of ownership, there's also a lot of, well, you just follow the thread of which

PE group owns the next and so and so forth until you happen upon like, you know, sort of human rights villains and just general like the most anti-social sort of anti-human kinds of labor exploitation or just, you know, a kind of, you know, financialized cynicism. It's like the pub industry version of, you know, the PE firms in America buying trailer parks and just like tripling the rent kind of thing. Like it's basically ghouls. And even if you work for ex-friendly neighborhood pub, it's still, you know, the sort of bottom tranche of this financialized chain. Yeah, ghouls all the way through.

Just, yeah, 100% gul. I think it's, yeah, it's important to note. Like, if you work at a hospitality venue, there's a very big chance is part of a franchise chain. That franchise chain will be owned by an investment firm. That investment firm is owned by another investment firm. You've got Lane Pubco, which owns various sort of venues. that is owned by Punch Pubbs, which is owned by Fortress Investment Group, which is a New York

City investment firm, which is owned by McDala Capital, which is the sovereign wealth fund for UAE, which then owns a section of Novalpina Capital, which then owns NSO Group. And I'm pretty sure you've talked about NSO Group before on a show. Yeah, we've talked about, we've talked about Pegasus about the Israeli spyware company or the software that's used every kind of human rights and privacy violation. You can think of it's kind of the same phenomenon as if you have a lot of things around the world. I mean, I keep bringing back America, but this is the case elsewhere in the world, too, where retirement things are invested in exchange traded funds and, you know, people's investment is the only way they really can't invest for, or rather do retirement savings through their employers

into contributions into, you know, market-based funds that invariably are going to invest in, yeah, like climate change villains, human rights villains, you know, the Israeli tech industry, whatever you want to see it. It's like, but you don't immediately think, you know, X pub down the way is immediately linked to that. Yeah, contributing to it. Yeah, like, you work there, you buy drinks there. And it's like, oh, yeah, well, this is going to like, you know, the toddler bone mashing machine development team or whatever. Yeah, orphan crushing machine. Like, here's another good one, right? So Green King, which is also another one of, like,

those pub co-chains who are mentioning earlier, like these large pub conglomerates, it runs over 2,700 pubs and is owned by Hong Kong's largest property developers, so CK asset holdings. And that also owns and operates the largest natural gas pipeline in Australia and the funbary in water. See, this is funny because there's been times

when we've looked at these where we just, we will play a game on this show where we just start pulling, who's your supplier, like November, who's your supplier for your gas and your apartment in Glasgow? And then we pull it up and like,

it's two-thirds owned by evil investment company and then one-third owned by like the Ontario T-shirts pension investment fund or something like that. Like when you start pulling at these threads, is it's always surprising. But yeah, the idea of it, that basically huge property investor or property management company in Hong Kong and property developer,

it says, yeah, you know where I think we can squeeze a little bit extra margin? Pub's in the UK by just screwing workers over more and charging people more for pints and in general, just making things harder. And wealth extraction and more wealth extraction and more wealth extraction. And it's like, I'm not trying to be simplistic or oversimplifying.

But like, we've had this joke before on the show that sometimes the vulgar, Marxist explanation of things is the most accurate. And then you look at this and you're like, wow, that sounds horrible. So yeah, I mean, in that regard, unionizing and clawing back rights and protections for yourself and potentially with enough leverage being able to maybe facilitate them divesting from this shit, who knows? Like, it's possible. But it's not possible if everyone is this atomized worker just like very much fearing that management is going to target them next. Yeah. So I guess my big thing I want to say is, you know, if you're listening to this show,

talk to your colleagues, you know, join a trade union. You could be working somewhere, which actually does contribute to the orphan crushing mulching machine. And there's, you, you've got to fight against it. You know, we are a generation of people that have been left behind, especially young workers. And the only way you can take political power back, well, is by unionizing and organizing economically. And yeah, so I mean, if people want to get involved, what should they do? They should join their local trade union. So, you know, for example, I would personally recommend not biased at all, which is Unite. It's the largest growing hospitality union as well.

We have members all over the country. We've got branches all over the country. So if you end up joining, come to a branch meeting. You'll meet tons of other people trying to do exactly what I'm doing in their workplaces and they'll be there to support you. And there are so many people. Like Unite is one of eight organizations in the UK of over a million members. It is massive.

And they have a lot of resources to help you. So if you're a listener of the show, you work in hospitality, just join up, talk to your local project worker, and you'll have so much support. What's really, really great that you're out there doing this, and I really appreciate you reaching out. I'm inspired by it because it's just like, it is a risk. And I'm glad that, you know, you and your colleagues are not just like, ah, fuck, I just got to, you know, survive until I win the lottery. It is really, it's like that solidarity is really inspiring. So thank you for doing what you do, man. I appreciate that, man.

We're going to go back to our regular programming of the hooting and I. hollering and I hope the listener has to come away from this interested in unionizing or at least better informed about it. So thank you. Thank you. That was a wonderful interview. Thank you so much, Jay. Thank you to my co-hosts for helping facilitate this. But I'm going to say something really quickly before we roll the thing you talked about November, before we talked about breath noises. Hussein, you sent me something. And this is a little peek behind the curtain. Hussein sent me a picture of two airmen with carrying assault rifles next to someone in a fur suit.

Something about... He said Burnham's Britain would, you know, this person is saying 10-10 would wear a fur suit on base again. Here's the thing. I don't think that this is in the United Kingdom, maybe it is. This is the US Air Force.

I can say that for a fact. It's the US Gay Force soon. Because Hussein, I need you and understand something. The US Air Force is so full of weeps and furries. It's not even funny. So I found out a bit more because I saw this while I was searching for something else. And I was just like, I need to put this into the group before I forget. And as I was like reading the comments.

So what, so the furry is a US serviceman works within the US Army. This is a British base. American airmen on the US base in the United Kingdom. This is what those guys and those vans were trying to get to, you know? Yeah, they wanted that for suit. They wanted, there was a tactical year if happening and they needed to get there. Fur to you. Because presumably Pete Higgs-ev is like banned all the fur suits, right?

And it's sort of like made sure that none of the woke shit is sort of in America. So all this stuff, all this woke stuff is probably. probably happening. I'm sorry, if you try to ban for a suits in the U.S. Air Force, they're just going to activate Norad. That's seriously going to lead to a... I mean, this is a thing, right? This is going to lead to a kind of deep state, like, a kind of Turkish level of like army deep state formation, except it's going to be like deep yiff, you know? I'm going to be honest with you. The US Air Force has, uh, because it's the very, very new branch of service that, I don't know, there's all sorts of reasons for this. They have strange sort of ceremonial things that they kind

of like try to ascribe ceremonial importance to. And one of them is, something like Order of the Sword. And they walk around with what can only describe as the Buster Sword as part of like some kind of like an Air Force ceremony. It is absolutely real. Hussein, if you Google US Air Force anime swords, you will see what I mean. So yeah, I'm just going to say this. We have to end this episode.

We're going long. But thank you so much, November Hussein. Thank you, Jay, for being the interview guest today. Absolutely. Please enjoy this beautiful symphony of chud noises. But before you do, if you want to listen to some good noises, some good music, Nate, your band has an album out. I do have an album out. Yes, I have a band called Second Homes. Our debut album is called Find a Way to Hate it. It's available on streaming everywhere. And if you want to

purchase it on band camp, that helps us a lot because streaming pays very, very little. We also have side projects that everyone in the show does. Obviously, we're well aware of no gods, no mayors, kill James Bond, be gay, be gay, solve crimes. Remember, Begay do crimes, but solve crimes as part of the show's title. You've got 10K posts. Riley's got, no guys, no Trouble in River City. Milo's on tour right now. There's all sorts of things out there. But, but yes, I would like to feature my band. So thank you so much for that November.

And thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you to enjoy the new episteme. I hope you enjoy superior intelligence. I hope we all enjoy wearing a Unicloid basics t-shirt outdoors with no layers over it for all year round. Yeah, actually, I'm completely fine. I've got the dad outfit, like, sort of basically for the rest of my life. Thank you so much for making time. everyone for listening to this episode. We have a bonus every week on Patreon. You can subscribe.

Four pounds 50 per month gets you one bonus per week and lots of other content as well. And until next time, please take care. Enjoy the new ontology, I guess. And we'll talk to soon. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.