TRASHFUTURE - The Grand Old Duke of Leigh

Episode Date: July 14, 2020

This week is a rare all-hands episode of Trashfuture featuring Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum). On the docket today: the strange Bond-villain aspirations of Wirecard executives, a discussion of what the UK's covid-related economic stimulus has actually meant for regular people, and a delightful jaunt to the working-class property developer heartlands of Greater Manchester.   If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture   Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/the-bail-project   If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping.   *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/

So I before we before we listen to the theme song today before we start taking notes, as they say, I've just gotten an email from one of the newsletters I subscribe to deal book around. Okay, it's for it's for the show. It is literally for this that I subscribe to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Infections podcast group on. No, it's it's about like the financial markets. Infections rise earnings fall and stocks continue to go up. Oh, yeah, I saw this. This was the clearest possible articulation of line go stop. Yeah, this thing that we have previously thought relates to these things now totally divorced from them. I think the end of the end of that article, you can't actually see it in print, but the punctuation at the end is just the Tim Allen noise. Well, he didn't glow Michael York for your Infections rise to jobs fall, but the stocks go up.

Must be getting sucked off by a twink. Hello, welcome back to TF. It's full full coterie of the the garbage people today here to pick up the trash and throw it into a large bin. People of garbage, please. Yes. That's what Pog stands for. Driving the car and giving you a little wave. Hello. It's me, Riley. Hopping off the back of the truck to go and collect your waste. It's Nate and Alice. What's up? I love to like ride on the back of the truck. That's cool to me.

Yeah. And sitting up in front with me, the three of us just trying to get out of the car and accidentally poking one another in the eyes with two fingers. It's also Milo and Hussein. How's it going? I love the hillbilly wagon. I have this mental image of there's a loudspeaker on the garbage truck for some reason, and Hussein is using it to signal the call to prayer. It would be a mixture of like the call to prayer and like various songs from the Limp Biscuit Grace hits. Oh, I was going to say the call to prayer is absolutely crawling in my skin. Oh, my God. Do you think there is Islamic Limp Biscuit remixes? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I know that like when I went to Syria when it was good back in 2000 and like 2007,

I went into a shopping mall in Damascus and like they were playing, they were playing Hoobastank. Awesome. An amazing memory that like just, I think about it a lot as like the good. This is what they took from us. Just imagine going into a shopping mall where you have these like massive like photos of like Bashar al-Assad and you're listening to like the reason at like some outlet mall where they make like fake Reebok tracksuits. Bashar al-Assad in a huge mural where he's standing with the lead singer of him. So this, this, this is what the Iraq war was meant to accomplish. It was meant to defend this.

That's right. I want to tell you, I had an even weirder one and I may have talked about this on the show before. So forgive me for having a dad moment if I've said it before, but one time while I was on a forward deployment to El Salvador, I was getting breakfast at this little kiosk on the Salvadorian Air Force Base before we went out to go do like a more or less first show medical mission, which, and I'm not joking, the Salvadorian sort of approach to doing medical missions in rural villages is to first get the crowd warmed up with clowns. So there are literally practical clowns. That morning, getting breakfast, we were listening to like the San Salvador radio station and it started playing Jack and Diane by John Mellencamp. And I was just like, I'm in hell. I'm in absolute

hell because it's a song about Indiana by a guy from Indiana. And here I am in fucking Central America and it's like, little ditty about Jack and Diane. I'm just wondering like, what the fuck would a Salvadorian, imagine them being like, hell yeah, this is my shit right now. Salvadorians are all listening to send in the clowns on their walk. But yes, I actually have photos of the tacticals Salvadorian clowns. I'll share them with you later. Absolutely going to steal clown valor. Trained by French special forces for tactical clowning. So everyone has been sending us wirecard stuff. Our favorite startup that is from the late 1990s

that it turns out is almost entirely fraudulent because it is the fucking case wide open. We parked our big trash huge eye in their parking lot and moments later, fucking interpulse swooped in. Yeah, they're copying our homework. Yeah, listen to us. And they are there. They are, we are all wearing wires. We're all going into bank branches. We're all just seeing what's up. We're all big pussy bump and Sarah. That's right. So number one, solidarity with our arrested comrade, Dr. Marcus Braun. Yeah, we have to do a jail support. Bale fund links in the description. We're going to do a phones app to some really confused German financial cops crowdfunding a ticket to Argentina for Dr. Marcus Brown.

That's right. So all of the bail fund links in the episode notes will now be entirely going to trying to free arrested comrade Dr. Marcus Brown. Yeah, Marcus Brown instance project. That's what all of the Patreon is going to now also. Yeah, just so we need to get him out of jail because he actually won a listener contest to be our sixth Mike. Yeah, as they say in Germany, fuck the politics. But today we are talking about someone else. We are not going to talk about Marcus Brown because we know that quite simply, if you're serious about prison abolition, that has to include Marcus Brown. But we're not talking about Marcus Brown today. We're talking about someone else.

We're talking about Jan Marseilleck, a fellow Austrian who was appointed chief operating officer of Wirecard in 2010 and about whom some very interesting stories have been published by the Financial Times. He is the one who basically took a company that was again a relatively, you know, normal B2B company just chugging away in the back. I'm not saying like it was perfect. And then Jan Marseilleck fucked it all up. But he seemed to make it, he seems to be a source of a lot of the strangeness of the company. The Austrians, is it? At this rate, we're going to get a complaint from the Austrian embassy in London being like,

Milo, fucking not everyone here is some kind of like financial criminal sex pest, 90, 95% at most. So basically, he said that Wirecard is global aspirations and that the company is going to start a multi-year program of aggressive expansion internationally via third parties and outsourcing. Really making it difficult for me to get on my high horse about the Austrian jokes when you're like, I'm going to start a multi-year plan of world expansion. So early 2008, Marseilleck had a meeting in his palatial home in Munich to talk about a new project he was interested in, which was recruiting 15,000 Libyan militia.

Just guys being dudes. He wanted Dave Courtney's army of flat-nosed geysers. And in March 2019, that's when the FT reported that half of Wirecard's business was outsourced and the payment processing handled by partners that pay Wirecard a commission. Although a lot of the Wirecard information is coming from the FT because Dan McCrum has done some incredible reporting on it. So this is a quote from him attempting to visit some of these Wirecard partners in the Philippines. The FT discovered a retired fisherman in his family been used to learn that their house is supposedly the site of an international payments business. It's just like, I'm just a simple country Bitcoin miner. I don't know anything about

payments processing. I got to be honest with you Riley, there was a story about this in the sort of 2008, 2009 crisis point where a lot of the really shady private equity slash private hedge funds were revealed to be weird shell games and basically pyramid schemes. And I remember reading about one where a guy had been running what I want to say in the Bahamas. And there was somebody who was interested in visiting to potentially invest. I think I was like, I'd like to talk to your head of compliance. And so the guy running this pyramid scheme just grabbed some random Bahamian guy off the street and like an old dude in like a fucking button down dad shirt and a big hat. It was like,

here, this guy, he's our head of compliance. And the guy was like, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. And then they wound up being $3 billion in the hole in their pyramid scheme when everyone wanted to collect. So in a way, it's funny to me that this is the exact same thing, but it's just the 2010s, 2020s version is that it's like, it's a fintech payment processor as opposed to it's a hedge fund that will is guaranteed money so long as you don't scratch below the surface. Our compliance officer is 50,000 Libyan dudes with AKs. They'll be sure you comply. Oh yeah. Nate, I think I want to building on that idea a little bit, right? My hypothesis here, my hypothesis around Wirecard is that every major global financial calamity has a major fraud that's

revealed as the wheels begin to come off the car again. And so I think what's interesting to me is that the fraud in the late 2000s, early 2010s was these investment vehicles are basically Ponzi schemes. And the fraud in the late 2010s, 2020s is this company that's claiming to perform a non-investment service. That's actually purporting to do something rather than just own something doesn't exist. The rot is deeper and the fraud is more profound and the lies are more outlandish. Bad Lieutenant 2, destination New Orleans. You could in theory, protocol New Orleans, you could in theory run a hedge fund like from a house with a few people, if you outsource your back end operations. Yeah, that Fisherman's got like a Bloomberg

terminal in there. You don't know. Like that's in theory possible, right? But like, now the scam is just like, yeah, we're just, we've said that again, a large payments infrastructure business, which you can't just run from a house like requires lots of stuff is just like, you know, in some bemused Fisherman's house in the Philippines. I love just like the Fisherman is just like the drill tweet of like, please, like the budgeting like food $20 a month rent $50 a month Bloomberg terminal $10,000. Please help my family are dying. I mean, I love that we've gotten to the state where we are just doing the Blues Brothers bit where you go to the like registered address and it's Wrigley Stadium or something. Oh, yeah. The address of my payments

processing thing 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest. So now Marcel is wanted by Interpol, but he is completely vanished and is impossible to find. So I saw eyes opening. Yeah. Once again, we are parking the eye and the eye in this case is not so much like a literal eye, but I picture it as the triangle overlay that we put on the video previews. We're just like, we're all peering out of the center of that triangle in the parking lot in in Munich or Stuttgart or whatever looking for this dude. Cut forward to like three months time in the Austrian police are like, you cannot believe he was in the basement this whole time. It's the last place we search. If I'm not alone. So I number one, before I go on, if anyone was ever going to draw any fan art,

could you please make it the five of us piloting a giant beholder eye? Yes. A triangle also. Michael York. Yeah. If you have seen Jan Marselech, the Interpol tips line for their financial crime unit is available online. I highly encourage you. This is the one time where snitching is good. Every time that like, there was a whole couple of months or any time there was a story about Jeffrey Epstein after he was killed. They were like, by the way, the Samaritans hotline number is blah, blah, blah. That's us. But for the or someone you know has been affected by a wire card. Talk to you know, it's like one of those good man projects things where it's like,

talk to your friends about starting a dodgy international business. Men don't talk to each other enough. We have not always agreed with Jan Marselech, but it is in the greatest Austrian traditions to end your career in a basement. So basically, here's some quotations from the from the FT around Marselech, because he's fascinating. Remember all that love that has desire to recruit Libby and mercenaries? In general, Marselech is a very strange character. This is someone speaking of him. He has an extreme affinity for security. It is very mysterious. I could never tell whether it was real or staged. I mean, this is this is funny, right? Because like, it's blurring the lines

between just being a business dipshit who wants to be a bond villain and actually being involved in some like somewhat illegal activities other than just boring white collar stuff. The funny thing about this guy, right, is I'm going to jump to like the later quotes in the articles. We can understand what this is like his Neru jacket Taylor being like, yeah, I don't know why he switched to these. So what I what I really enjoy. Yeah, for many of those who dealt with him even closely, his motives remain unclear. Quote, he wanted to have influence and build networks, said one who speculated that Mr. Marselech's lack of formal education left him as an outsider in Austria and Germany growing up with a need to be accepted and to impress. Here's the quote,

the only thing he seemed to like more than having state secrets and being involved in all these surreptitious things was letting you know about it. He's Austrian Dave Corky. Exactly. I would just like you to know that all of these things I'm doing are very illegal. I have 500 illegal armed with chemical weapons in my basement. So Milo, you say chemical weapons. That's actually that's actually prefigures what comes next. Jesus Christ. Mr. Marselech turns up on wirecard business in London with a dossier containing specific details of how to make Novichok. We know too much, man. I don't like that this podcast in season three has just taken a turn into the extended universe of the Hitman franchise, right?

So with a highly unusual detail dossier containing details specifically on how to make Novichok, which he then showed to traders and speculators in an attempt to impress them. He was just showing people the 10 crack commandments, but for Novichok, this is just like when you were a teenager and you'd like to discover the anarchist cookbook for the first time and like you go to school the next day and you like show all your friends like you found the secret website where you learn how to make like petrol bombs and stuff. Yeah, it's that. But like if you're actually in the Illuminati, yeah, you can actually do it, which somehow like makes it even sad. I like this even makes it more pathetic because like I just imagine this guy as being someone who just gets very excited about

finding things online and kind of like cooks up these schemes that he has the money to actually do. There's a definite rule for me that as soon as you find your name in the same sentence as the word dossier, something is wrong very wrong. Dossier is never good. You never want to be described as carrying a dossier being mentioned in a dossier. Unless you're in the secret dossier for cool dudes about the social justice left trying to suppress. That's right. The organized social justice left. So basically what what a lot of this turns on is that he has a he is basically a works with the GRU, the Austrian Austrian, sorry, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service through an organization called the Austrian Russian Friendship Society. And that he base it. Yeah.

And so basically he used and used like money with that society offering sort of hundreds of thousands of euros to work for him and produce a report to suit his needs on the end in subject of rebuilding communities in war ravaged Libya. But Mr. Marsilek's interests were very different to economic development. One person working on the project says an email obtained by the FT goes, the priority for Jan Marsilek is to close the border, preferably via a 15,000 strong border police force that will be comprised of former militias. He was doing volunteer border force ships. It all comes together in his volunteer border force. Black Nose Geysers fucking minding the door of the country. You can't fucking come in a Libby address like that. You fucking soil it.

This could be used in his opinion with the national government in Tripoli as leverage against the power brokers in the east. Closing the border can be sold to the EU is solving the migration crisis. I mean, I'm going to be honest with you, Riley. I mean, you may have encountered this, but obviously there's a certain kind of like finance brain that leads people down these insane rabbit holes. I remember when I lived in New York, there was a story about a young-ish, like mid-20s trader or analyst at, I don't know if you've ever heard of Dmitri Baliazny, who's like a hard, hard, libertarian hedge fund guy. But this kid was working at Baliazny Asset Management and he got caught buying international trafficking levels of ecstasy over the dark web

to his apartment in Stanford, Connecticut. And it's like normally that's the extent of the crazy, but when it feels like Marcel is one of those people that he didn't get caught at that critical juncture where he might have been like, this is a bad idea. And so now he's on a long enough timeline, a finance career can reward your craziness to the point where you've decided you're going to be Nicholas Cage in Lord of War. I love to think that that guy wasn't selling the ecstasy, he was just one of those guys who's like, when I'm trading, I'm pinging. Yeah, personal consumption only. It's just vibing some stars. Yeah, no, this is so cool that we have a financial system that creates bond villains.

Just fucking rubbing the Bloomberg terminal. There are a few things right to think about here. I think one of them is that, you know, all this like, it's not a coincidence that a lot of this neo-reactionary dark enlightenment stuff, so like Marcel X connections to the FPO, the Austrian far right party, or his like, yeah, or his desire to like externalize the European borders in Libya and things of that nature, you know, all of this dark enlightenment, neo-reactionary stuff keeps cropping up in the tech industry, right? I think that it is that's no coincidence. I think that's partly because the I will change the world through my heroic wonderfulness, which is so common to tons of these

companies is it really lends itself to that kind of like horrifying reactionary thinking. And the problem is the collection of capital in that area makes it possible for a young Marcel or Peter Thiel or, you know, a honed on that or whatever to begin externalizing all of these like psychotic reactionary fantasies and trying to make them real. The only thing funny about this is that like clearly Marcel X is like Austrian Dave Courtney. He's like, can't stop bragging about, you know, secret like secret documents that are incredibly illegal to have because he wants people to think that he's cool. Yeah. Right. I don't know. Like I can't figure out if I want to envision him as being deeply insanely psychotic, like a Bond villain or also just like Austrian

version of Jackass like, well, we got weave in drink this Mountain Dew, but actually it's got Novichok in it because it just seems so it just seems so out of left field. Like, you know, I recognize that if he was on Red Scare, I recognize that obviously the to cop a phrase from, I think it was current affairs. Like these are some of the creatures that capitalism creates, but obviously specifically the creatures that finance creates. But the one thing I would I would tie this to Riley is that I don't know if you recall this and it kind of I missed this when it was originally put out there, but back when people were actually paying attention to Richard Spencer, I remember, you know, him basically saying that your typical alt right guy is a 28 year old who works in IT at

like a new high like highly respected tech company. And I do think there is some crossover like, okay, fuck Richard Spencer, but the idea that dark enlightenment like eugenics libertarian shit is pretty common amongst tech people. And I feel like the thing is in finance is that as long as you you can, you know, make correct ish calls on fucking positions long enough in your career, you can be as fucking insane as you want. You can't be left wing at all and get away with it publicly. But you can be like right wing to the point of like, I eat nothing but chia seeds, and I'm training in a Greek temple for the final battle. And people be like, yeah, cool, this guy's a good asset to the team. Awesome.

Must have a great morning routine. I think, you know, fundamentally, we're being the classic woke justice left here, and we're canceling this guy for trying to give jobs to 15,000 people. He's just trying to tip the scales a bit. And second of all, everything this guy does, it really reminds me of the second Daniel Craig Bond film Quantum of Solace that made absolutely no sense. Yeah, we're going to find out that this guy owns like a futuristic hotel in the desert in Bolivia for some fucking reason. Yeah, like every all of it just seems sort of somewhat evil, but you can't really actually discern what the fuck the plan is here. It just seems like he's just doing stuff because it seems

cool and the sort of thing a Bond villain might do. And like, I don't want to take this off track. I just would say that the bring it back around with a point is that this sounds so insane. But I think you know this from from your research Riley that the more contact you have with actual finance people, the more banal this kind of insanity seems. Well, it's a it's a I think really because you can look at this on a system on a systemic level or on a personal level. I think you know it's important to do both on a personal level. I think this is just someone who is you know made deeply insecure by the sort of insane elitism of Austrian and Southern German society and who like reacted and who always felt like he needed to earn his place in any conversation

because he didn't go through all of the standard elite schools and you know and elite universities and so on that are quite common in this sort of rarefied bits of both of those countries. So I think partly there's like an inferiority complex that's constantly working itself out here and the result of which is I have so many illegal mercenaries at my disposal. I am definitely worth talking to for this Archduke or whatever. You have to look at this in the systemic level as well right and stop and don't and think about it in terms of wire card and what wire card is doing and how wire card was associated to all this because a lot of these at least the Novichok stuff was around trying to intimidate short sellers who they were like paranoid were trying to

short their stock and so you I think that the point I have here right is that the difference between wire card and a bunch of other like zero interest rate problem attempted monopolist startups and stuff is basically wire cards illegal because they didn't file the right paperwork to invent all of their profits. You know they didn't only one only two people are allowed to invent money and that's nations in Lex Greensill and he didn't sort of go through the right processes. He didn't get the massive expanded valuation whatever you know it's that is that these these things have to be understood as equally unsustainable. It's just someone like Jan Marsalak was sort of willing to sort of take the risks of working incredibly illegally

to try to keep his ever so slightly more fictional company afloat. God imagine the scene you're a simple country stock trader you know you're on your 14th pinger of the morning and you're trying to short sell some wire card stock and then suddenly there's a knock at the door and you open it to find a man with no neck whatsoever who looks like a penis that's been dressed up as the man from Del Monte guys listen son if you don't stop short selling the wire card stock you're going to be in for a club and you're like what and it's like by which I mean a fucking good idea. Your door knob is going to get dapped if you know what I mean. But I do I really do like this idea Riley that the problem here is procedural only that the

reason why this became an issue was because of you paperwork fudges and you know a desire to get ahead of the normal sort of gatekeeping mechanism it's like you can you can show up to people who want to short use apartment and fucking wield a buster sword and nobody has any problem with that but if you file the paperwork wrong then you're then you're in hot water. Well certainly that's the only thing that Interpol or like the German police care about for fuck's like. Oh yeah I mean we I mean I think that it's it's it's funny because I and it's it's instructive as far as I'm concerned because I think it it shows you the sort of thin veneer that how thin the veneer of civility and innovation and making the world a better place is on this

entire rotten industry and and also of course because yeah we're we're prejudiced against Libyans who don't want 15,000 of them to get good sustainable government jobs from working up a partnership between Jan Marseilleck and the GRU. I mean I think you'll actually find that the German government didn't have a problem with any of this it was just that Marseilleck didn't pay the import fees on the Esper to cast e-fritt on all those haters and so as a result you know they had to do their job they had no choice. There's quite a fantasy mood today. That's right. Yeah that's right a lot of Final Fantasy stuff. Yeah I got some deep lore on mid 90s Japanese RPGs and basically nothing else. So I want to move on a little bit though

from Wirecard. Funny as it is and it is certainly something we will be keeping up with as we learn more about it. Oh yeah before we go on actually one of the other things was that uh so Marseilleck owned a bunch of like cement factories in Libya which he had also bragged to his friends were being used as illegal staging points for like Russian covert Russian military operations through the process. So you're telling me that this guy disappeared and has not been seen? Strange. Yeah this guy who likes to whose main thing about him is bragging about all of the illegal stuff that the Russian government does for him. I love to I love to really incriminate powerful Russians and assume that nothing bad will happen to me. Despite what I've read in the dossiers which I

presume are made up. So this guy is fully a support column for like an expressway in eastern Libya now right? Who knows? They are finally doing something useful. Yeah you know who knows you know but hey you know what? Yon Marseilleck there are people who care about you please come home. So I want to move on though to the summer statement made by Rishi Sunak about how we're going to be tackling the coronavirus crisis. So professional. I would like to start by saying that it took six days to be proven right. All of our predictions from the previous episode unfortunately are being borne out by the summer statement which is essentially a gigantic giveaway to buy to let landlords through a vacation on stamp duty which for American listeners is a tax on property sales

that's paid by the buyer. So now houses up to half a million pounds will be exempt from stamp duty because he said one of the key problems of the coronavirus crisis is that house prices have fallen for the first time in eight years. What's the unemployment rate up to again? They can no longer be represented with a real number. Yes. You just you ask the national audit office what the unemployment rate is and they just kind of like shuffle some papers around and say you don't want to look at that. Look no line is allowed to go down whether that's the property value line or the line of coronavirus deaths. At this point I have a 20% of people in this country work for Yang Mars elect. For tax purposes we are all 15,000 Libyan men.

If the house prices go up and how can any of these working class Libyan working class Libyan fighters like afford houses in London? So what else do we have? We also have massive expansions in apprenticeship schemes that allow people under the age of 25 to be paid like I don't know in gumballs. Can we get an apprentice? I think that's a thing that we should clarify for Americans because they may not be aware of this. In the United Kingdom you have graded a scale for minimum wage based on how old you are and if you are under 18 or you are in an apprenticeship, I want to say it's below 5 pounds a month or an out-correction. They wish it was 5 pounds a month. It's below 5 pounds an hour. It's 4 pounds 10 I think. It's around there. It's 4 pounds 10 I believe.

Yeah, so 4 pounds 10 at the current exchange rate is probably about $5.50 maybe $6 an hour which is less than the federal U.S. minimum wage and obviously far less than what most people would be earning. Sorry, I understated it because I'm very anti-Tory and so I have these assumptions that it's going to be that they're never going to do anything that you can live on. It's 4 pounds 15 cents. Okay, luxury. Yeah, so imagine if you're working a job as an apprentice or you're under 18 and the most you can get paid is basically $6 an hour and then if I'm not mistaken, it doesn't continue to max out or a correction. It doesn't max out as the full adult minimum wage until you're 25. That's right. Yeah, so imagine having an age-graded minimum wage in the United

States where you have to be a quarter of a century old before you're allowed to earn $7.25 an hour. That's what they've got in the UK and in a city like London, as I've made the joke on Twitter before, has Peoria Illinois salaries with New York City prices for cost of living. Effectively, yes. It's all very normal. Yeah, the situation that you're in is pretty fucking grim and the Tories only seem intent on making it worse. This is why house prices cannot be allowed to fall because the free market is very good until it does something we don't like. That's right. Until it does something that annoys your dad. That's right. House prices need to be kept artificially high so that people will work

at four or more apprenticeships at once. Baz is absolutely furious about the price of his static caravan in Clacton on Sea going down. No, I think Baz doesn't have a static caravan or Baz's static caravan is one of his four homes. Yeah, that's what I was implying. Also, he has a main home in the London commuter belt and then has two council flats that he bought in 1992 for like, you know, in like Baz League. Yeah, and then he rents them out to 10 people per bedroom and then says that I worked hard, et cetera, et cetera. Why do I need... I had a difficult time in the 80s. Why can't they breathe in mold? If they didn't want to live, nine of them in one bedroom between four beds,

they shouldn't have been Romanian, should they? So homeowners have, by the landlords basically, have a reduction or elimination of stamp duty. We have employers have tons and tons of money that will basically pay them to take on apprentices who they don't have to pay the minimum wage to. And then also we have a kickstart scheme where even if you're not an apprenticeship, the government will still pay you to employ young people. And then we have a job retention bonus, which could be as much as 9.4 billion pounds paid out to every company that furloughed a worker if they bring back all of their furloughed workers. So if you have a worker on furlough and you bring them back in the autumn, the government

pays you up to 1,000 pounds, so long as you're paying that employee 520 pounds a month. So basically, it's just there are a number of gigantic, basically string-free or almost string-free giveaways to companies that say, hey, if you follow the already existing law, we will pay you to keep doing things that make you money. So that's the first bit, where it's just a gigantic giveaway to the people who already own stuff to make sure that businesses basically stay afloat, house prices stay high, and so on and so on. I think the key thing here is, remember, like we said last time, this is because you need a way to get money to people and we need to make sure that that stays Tesco. We need to make sure that Tesco's remains

the way that money gets to a bunch of people. Well, where else are you going to buy your money, smartass? And I would put this out too, because you see this kicked around so often on various social media things, and even in establishment news, when Americans try to say, look at all these other things that other countries are doing, if only we had sane governance like they have in ex-countries, and they always include the UK on that list, I feel as though it's very, very important to establish, do not include us on that list. You don't know what you're talking about. If anything, what the UK has done so far for individuals is less than the US government has done, because to my knowledge, we have not yet... They've done more to protect people's jobs

by basically bribing their employers. They have not given people money. The closest we've gotten to getting money is they're saying, Riley, we'll get into this later, but basically, here's a voucher to go out to eat. That's it. The credit where it's due, the furlough scheme probably is something like a labor government probably would have done. They would have just done it. They would have gone onto it and come off of it very differently, but you can see why that makes sense, at least in the short term, to prevent massive change from happening immediately. It's just that what the Tories aren't doing is anything to try to fix the problems of the system that they're propping up. I disagree slightly on there, just that that scheme has been

effective. It's just been one effective part of a machine that kicks you in the balls. I feel like it's important to stipulate that everything about the response was done to keep employers solvent, not really to ensure that people's earnings or disposable income or even ability to stay afloat was in any way addressed. I fully buy that. I would concede what you just said, that yes, they did in fact do a lot to stop people from getting sacked, but also I'd point out that it's a very, very different system for employment and loss of employment in the US versus the UK because in the US, if you come to work and your boss decides that he just doesn't like the color of your eyes, he can fire you and you cannot challenge it.

I also love that that's always portrayed as a freedom-increasing device. No, because if you don't like the color of your boss's eyes, you can just quit. That will implement it. A few more things here before we get to what's actually going to most British people. What's also happening is we're doubling down on institutions we know are broken. It's like we're spending more than two billion pounds on more work coaches for the DWP, which are literally the only jobs that will come from this particular bit of spending. Work coaches is such a just a cursed name as well. Because what they're doing is they're there to try and ostensibly the job of work coach is to

help you spruce up for a job interview and really impress the local Sainsbury's or whatever. Just making you run up and down the town hall steps until you're ready to go for your interview to be a Libyan militia member. Actually, what work coaches do is they're there to try to reduce your expectations of what you deserve as a salary or also just to kind of like degrade and humiliate you. Yeah, effectively. Well, Alex, I hope you'll be coding up next. So the work coaches that so we're basically also the assumption through the whole DWP system, the universal credit system, don't forget is all the jobs are there. The working class just needs to be forced to take the jobs from the capitalist who are desperate to employ them. They just need

to be prodded off of their couches where they're watching their flat screen TVs and their Nikes. And they're not they're not doing their bit to keep my house expensive. So my house prices are going down because these layabouts refused to work in a piss factory. Well, we all had to work in a piss factory once, didn't we? I mean, not literally, of course, because the piss factory has only existed for the last five years. But if that's why they call me Barry Piss, because I actually own the piss factory and I need people to work in it. So let's just take a brief review of sort of where the targeted spending is going before we get to what's going to to people who actually like to everyone is big help, big help for

buy to let landlords, big help for employers, which I've calculated about sort of just like an over slightly around four billion pound or thereabouts, 4. something, 4.8 billion pound subsidy to employers, just just just for doing what they do, just for employing people that's like, please, please keep you know, yeah, it's a present just because it's Tuesday from the government. And then doubling down on lots of institutions that we know don't do anything. And also subsidies for lots of people to earn below what you need to live in most places that people live. So that's what we have on the one end. And then we also have something called the eat out to help out program, where for 13 days in August, you can get up to 10 pounds off a bill per head at

you know, the vibe is it's like a plastic book voucher at school. The government has put those book with booklets of subway vouchers through your door that then no branch of subway will actually accept a pound off of any Jacqueline Wilson. I don't know what you're complaining about. This is amazing. Oh, yeah. Look, listen, the Libyan militiamen in my basement are being very well treated. They each been issued this discounted Jacqueline Wilson. So learning about becoming a young woman. Yeah. So look, that's kind of that's kind of where we are with the with this. If you remember, our our prediction was this is going to be solved through massive and deepening inequality, increased increased sort of corporatism and state favoritism,

as it's it's it's seen as important to preserve all bits of existing order, whether that's making sure that unproductive companies stay afloat or making sure that house prices stay artificially high or whatever. And that's all going to be at the cost to you. You are to British workers and their actual working conditions and their salaries. It's that's I love to work in the Potemkin Village factory. So, you know, I think that's it's important to, you know, to understand that any time someone's like, oh, Rishi Sunak's a secret socialist or whatever. It's like, if you look even casually at what he's actually doing, then obviously that will be not not correct. It's so funny to me how just anything can be socialism now. Like, did you see that thing

that someone screenshot the other day on Twitter where it was like, two people complaining how all the big big corporations are doing Marxism now and the only way to get rid of all the Marxism will be to get rid of the big corporations. The Conker socialism, we must become socialism. Marxist going, no, don't do that. We'd hate that. I just remembered this amazing tweet about the 10 pound vouchers on the restaurant and it comes from it comes from Guido Forks' Tom Harwood. Well, he basically says that like, he in order to for the heat for the eat out help out scheme to work, I could go to a restaurant and buy a lavish

60 pound meal and get 10 pounds off, or I could go to three restaurants, one each for 20 pounds starter, 20 pounds main and 20 pounds for a pudding and get 30 pounds off. Well, this is the, well, this is the thing, because the people who were like really kind of excited about the Rishi Sunak stuff were all these like weird ASI people who like seem to be really oddly like into min maxing restaurants. I don't know if any of you guys have seen this, but they're like really, really obsessed with like, just like maximizing their restaurant experience, which includes like going to these high end places and paying 20 pounds for like a fucking trifle or something. Eating a dessert of an autoland drowned in fucking clotted cream.

These are the only people that are looking at the Rishi Sunak stuff and thinking, wow, he's not only like, no, he's not only kept the economy afloat, but he's also made it better by enacting like all weird version of what like a libertarian restaurant orientated economy would look like. I mean, it's basically like those people who you live their entire lives in airports and hotels and planes, because they're constantly traveling on miles and accruing more miles. It's like the weird miles freaks who like they purport themselves to be living this, like this hat cheat code life of luxury, when in fact they're really just living out a very dark and unintentional version of the terminal. Would you remember that George

Clooney movie where he's like an airport? Yeah. And they kind of look at that movie and they kind of think to themselves, damn, that's a cool guy. Well, I mean, it's hack to say that projection is the most powerful force in politics. But remember that the people who are most bonds are about means testing are the people who as soon as a government stimulus has announced like meagres, though it is for like going to get dinner, immediately begin like pulling out their calculator and figuring out how they can take the public purse for as much of a ride as possible. I love to go to Chiquitos followed by Nando's followed by pizza express, followed by five guys, followed by Bella Italia, just to get the absolute maximum out of my story.

That is being a rational consumer. You don't enjoy any meal. You just you pay the minimum possible amount and then take your take your business elsewhere smart money. Yeah. Rishi Sunak is making the mixed buffet great. That's that this is this is homo economicus is someone who's willing to like, yeah, just wolf down a soup and then start on like a cold mixed grill at the next restaurant over because they know that they're going to be maximizing. It's like the old joke about a psychiatrist being someone who goes to the theater and watches the audience. An economist in this case is someone who goes to Yo Sushi and envisions themselves as the conveyor belt.

See, I don't know if my joke is as good as yours, Alice, but in my mind, I was just thinking like those people who make it like a Guinness Book of World Records challenge, try to visit as many tube stations as they possibly can in the fastest time possible. But in this case, it's to going to every Toby Carver in the whole county playing fucking Mornington Crescent. But like in order to get some tax credits. And we have, yeah, but like also the last segment that we have here is one of these restaurants. It's so it's so delightful that this ties in so well, because this is this is the kind of thing that you bounce towards for one course, right? Yeah. Absolutely redlining the rev counter on

the vector of the XR as I attempt to make it to every single harvester in the Greater Essex area before they close it. I want to go slide cleanly into our third section today, which is just just another helping in our delicious mixed grill of a meal, all of which is being subsidized by the government. We started as a group of intrepid garbage people taking out the garbage. And now we're sitting down at a restaurant well-deserved the third in a day for a third course, because we have we have judicious judiciously, I think, avoided the counterfactual of what if Corbin were in charge because I think that is a question with a lot of you may have noticed he is not. Yeah. And also, it's a question with a lot of

obvious answers as soon as like one person coughed from coronavirus, every single like mainstream media outlet, including the BBC would be like, is it permissible to nuke Westminster? Yeah. The question the question is stupid, because the answer is, damn, it was weird that there was a military coup a week after that happened, and things just proceed as normal. So you turn on the TV and it would be like, there's no coronavirus in bossing day, but it's the woman saying it is holding an AK-47 and it's Laura Coonsburg. Laura Coonsburg just wearing a beret and like MTP would be, yeah, awesome. Yeah, so a big ISIS flag behind it. Yeah, the centrist ISIS. So look, we haven't done the imaginative Corbin thing because that's hack. However, we have to a little bit right now

because we're going to travel up north to hear a word from the Guardian's north correspondent, Helen Pid and her best friend, Andrew Twentiment. Sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, sir, please, please let us at least be accurate on our reporting, Helen Piss. Yeah, more like Helen Piss, actually. Helen types this article out on a whip it, but sadly, the whip it didn't have a DP. So basically, the basics here, right, is that Helen Pid sort of goes on these journeys around sort of the north of England, where in 2015 she'll post stuff like a terrible, no one here is speaking English, all voting Labour, of course. Solidarity to every Labour voter who saw Helen Piss coming, saw this fucking

dickhead Guardian fucking journalist coming. It was like, uh, no Hablo and Glace, no, no, no understand. Of course, of course, I'm not speaking English. Everyone's talking about something called gravy. I don't understand. I didn't realize that everybody in Alden was the Taco Bell dog. So basically what she does is she sort of goes around Lee and she talks to, quote, the real working class of the country, which kind of seems to about what they think about politics. And usually a lot of them say, uh, if Corbin was in charge, we'd be pandemicking and freaking Vietnam. We'd probably be having as bad of a time as they were. Freaking communist Vietnam over there. Anyway, fucking Venezuela. Am I right? That wasn't Danny's tweet of imagine when coronavirus

hits Venezuela. Okay, cool. It aged perfectly. So basically what happens is she, as it turns out, doesn't work very hard. I think maybe at her job, because she keeps talking to the same guy and the same guy. It's called inside sources. Yeah. So my inside source from 20 men's pizza. So basically she says, she writes in her, in her article in Lee town center on Wednesday afternoon, Andrew 20 men was on the phone sourcing and do ya sausage for her's artisanal pizza parlor recently opened at under 50% capacity. Classic working class activity. A first time Tory voter in December's general election, Rishi Sunak's hospitality package made him feel massively vindicated for switching his vote from labor. Can you imagine the state

we'd be in if Jeremy Corbin had been in charge of all this? He'd asked. Uh, yes, military coup. He doesn't eat. He doesn't even eat. He doesn't even eat pizzas. He just eats large. My fucking pizza restaurant would be a jam warehouse for the state by now. He would take the pizza restaurant and turn it into a gulag. We'd have no time to order a sausage. We'd be having to make our tractor factory, quote, his comrades also Jeremy Corbin eights and do your sausage. It'd be making us put fucking genders on the pizza. I hate when my pizza restaurant is taken over by transgender Hezbollah because we have elected Jeremy Corbin. I'd have to change it from 20 men's pizza to 20

mux's pizza. That's what Jeremy Corbin wants. So, you know, effectively, is he challenged on that assertion? No, of course not. Helen Pidd does not go on to challenge this, nor does she challenge. In fact, it seems in any meaningful way, the people who later in the article say Lee is being overrun by migrants. And though, well, she notes that it's 97% white. They all sound like the Taco Bell dog for some reason. Andrew 20 men actually came over from Libya. His name was Andrew 15,000 men, but they changed the island. 15,000 men being walked across the border by MI5 saying, oh, there's this guy. He's really impressive. The Grand Old Duke of Lee. He had 30,000 men. Episode title, the Grand Old Duke of Lee. So, so basically, she she then interviews

this guy and is like, yeah, this is great. This program make a real difference. And you know, again, prop I can't see any part of that. That's wrong. Like, yes, this will help a lot of businesses stay open. If that's your mission, then yes, this, this is a pretty good plan for that, at least in the short term. He's just like, yes, this does align with my class interest, actually. Yeah. And then when when criticized by this, even a little bit by people saying, wait, a is is the Andrew 20 men actually working class, he owns a business and his brother appears to be a wealthy property developer. B, how come you also interviewed him about the Dominic Cummings issue a couple like not one month ago and used the same picture of him for both articles?

Oh, cool guy. He just loves pizza. She loves the pizza that she and also like isn't the pizza that he makes like super gentrified stuff. It's like it's like it's like figs, figs, Parma ham and India sausage. And I've actually looked on the Instagram of this restaurant, it looks fucking tired. Yeah, it looks like the kind of place that it is fucked Euro vibes. It is like it looks like it does like seem like a place you would go on arrest on an ASI funded restaurant crawl to get a 20 pound pudding. Yeah. And it's the same chocolate pudding everyone has. Yeah. To be fair, fig and Parma ham and do your pizza is in fact what's in the Libyan paramilitary MREs. But the first ever pizzeria to be bombed out by an angry Italian

food commenters militia. You say that, but that leads us to my favorite part of this, which is that since Twitter found out that he had been interviewed twice in like as many months, and his brother is a property developer, they kind of like maybe said some unkind things on his review pages, which obviously we don't condone, right? We don't we don't condone giving this guy's restaurant a negative review. Your advisor is sacred guys. Yes, but the thing is he's in a classic working class move massively overreacted and he's done the thing that you never want to do. He started replying to the bad reviews. Oh no, he's debating owning them. To be fair, he was doing that before. But once people started trolling him

because of the Guardian piece, he got more and more unhinged. It appears that he had a couple of pints down the pub as one does when you're a working class northerner and then got on. Just decided to do the last scene from downfall with that in mind. I'd like to, I'd like to like, yeah, title Yodel Krebs, I would like to start reading some reviews and the responses that he left. He's getting so furious his flat cap just catches fire. Yes. So the review, two stars. Pizza is okay, expected better because they do seem to have an authentic pizza. And for all I know, this is a real review. Like it's not like, oh, you didn't

like Jeremy Corbyn merge, did you? A prick. It seems like reasonable enough. His response. They do. They do. Thico, do you mean we have it or they have or I haven't been here? Is this Diane Abbott 10 plus 19 equals point square root of 27. I was baking bread for the local people of Lee, a place neither you, your cronies or Jeremy have been to and now a vote lost because you want this to be a bully. This is what bullies do. This level of aggression to try and break us is abhorrent. This morning I was awake early with this bullying and worried about the threats to my family and haven't sat down once all day working to try and keep my business alive during the current situation. And you all still persist to trash it.

Okay. Wait, this guy is the scene from Goodfellas where the guy, the guy who owns the restaurant goes to Paul Lee to ask for protection from Tommy, but it's him going to Mike Gates about Jeremy Corbyn. I don't know. I know he's a good guy, but like, what am I supposed to do to fucking comes in a pizza place and gives it to stars? Come on. What am I supposed to do here? I love this guy. He's like standing a thwart his pizza parlor, his artisanal pizza parlor in Manchester as the city burns around him as anti-fuzz as risen up and countries racked by violence and civil war and just claiming that day his vault, you moan lay, but for this fucking pizza flipper. Yeah. Awesome. I mean, legitimately him just saying, how dare you question me given my

working class authenticity is not really all that different from Capstone is going to relieve this bait, this fucking pizza place. Let me read my favorite of these by the way. I've been looking forward to this, this one. This is, this is, this is a review by someone called Roberto Galena. Maybe Italian. Maybe this is Italian's mad at food. We don't know. But the review is two stars again, very sweet dough used in this pizza. I didn't enjoy it. I think it's too much sugar mixed with the flour. I see this very often in England, the taste is just too, too sweet. And then he replies, not a clue, Roberto must have been when you had your script half-dosed. We have a strict drugs policy and don't let methadone users in.

I'm sorry, this is king shit. I just changed my mind fully. But, but let me the best sentence. This has been with me all day. If you knew your pizza, you would also know the rules about pizza. Oh, the first rule of pizza club. Exactly. If you knew, if you knew your pizza, you would also know the rules about pizza. While you were studying the bad review, I studied the pizza. Yeah, chivalric rules of pizza. Yeah, exactly. Right. So he's, he is just having a fine day. Yeah, it's, it's just, Oh, I've got one more. Yeah, hit me, hit me, hit me. Two stars. And like, this is a recurring theme, right? Is that like, even before anyone knew who this guy was, all of the bad reviews are like,

man, the food was fine. Staff are fine. The owner said fucking dickhead though. So two stars. Staff were great, but owner was really unwelcoming response. Sorry that we could accept you as a person. I am usually quite, I am usually quite amicable about many topics, including freedom of speech and the right to vote. But is your only wish please send your current email address and phone number as it is a prerequisite Boris requirement. I was born at Catholic and working class labor. Do you have any religious views on that basis? Oh my God, he just like went full kind of post his brain. He's just sort of like, and like this one review, which like is fairly mild in comparison to the others I heard, but that was the one that like flipped the switch.

And now not only is he like, does he seem to be wanting to sword fight this person on the cenotaph, but he wants to do it because of Boris Johnson. He wants to do the end of Metal Gear Solid 2. Yeah. This guy has the energy of the ISIS sword guy. Yes. Yes. And because of Catholicism. I just love the idea that I mean, these are some of this, okay, it's obvious trolling, but some of it is predates the article and, you know, has a valid commentary on the state of the food or the service or the cost of it. And I just, even if you're having a bad day and you're angry, I don't understand

knowing that you're getting additional scrutiny, just getting on there and going full on. Okay. Once the lockdown is over, trash future live show in Lee, and we are absolutely going for a pre-show dinner at 20 minutes. That's right. I mean, we should just do a show in Manchester, man. We haven't been there. That would be a lot of fun. Well, also like, I just, I love that the sort of the implication of this entire article, right? There's two. Number one, she like Helen Pitt notes that the amount of universal credit claimants in the Lee constituency rose by 65% since the lockdown started. But no, we will not be talking to any of those people.

We will be talking to the real people that Labour needs to win back, which are pizza tyrants. Just, just, yeah, like, like, yeah, that we need to win back. Like, I was going to say real blokes love warm, carling and sweet pizza. Imagine working for this guy. Well, and that's the thing. We can't, Labour cannot, has to make sure we never focus on winning back or winning in for the first place, the people who work for this guy. No, we need to get small business owners with severe anger problems. My favourite reply to any of these reviews, and I didn't see the review, this was a reply to, because I don't care, but like, he just replied to one of them, Jeremy Corbyn, xx.

I mean, Jeremy Corbyn xx, the collaboration with Jeremy Corbyn is going to have to pay this man because he is morally opposed to the extent to which he is living rent free in his head. I mean, speaking of like rent free in heads, but also just people getting mad online, like, when the article came out and people like, you know, yeah, there were people dunking on Helen Pitt, but there were some people who like, like actually just questioned why number one, she would be using like the same source, but also why like, even as the principle of like, how can you talk about working class people interview, like this guy who runs a bougie pizza restaurant and who like, definitely has assets and has a brother who is very openly like,

you know, buying and selling assets. I came out as a property developer to my parents when I was 17. Which he responds about like, the left are trying to cancel this guy and cancel this pizza restaurant. Which is just kind of like, which is indicative of like, where punditry at this point or like, where even like journalism at this point is going, where it's one where everything is basically like, a culture war where everything is canceling, or any like, it's not even about, you know, because this isn't really, I don't really want to talk about cancel culture and stuff. It's just one where like, any kind of like critique over how this issue is framed and one where it is like, as Riley kind of mentioned, you know, this isn't kind of like, like socialist,

stimulus, this is a stimulus package, which still like, extends the existing stress of inequality, like even further, and like, no one's really addressed this and is this like, well, if you address this even a little bit, that's a cancel culture issue. And that's on, that's on you. So like, you know, and I don't know whether it's like, just defending a source or defending a pizza restaurant that you seem to like, because you like, she also tweets about how she loves the pizza over there. So maybe she's just really into like sweet though. I don't know. Hussain, I got a question for you though. As a professional journalist, if you had gotten caught using the same source that you were clearly friends with and misrepresenting them,

and then doubling down and being mad online about it instead of even just letting it go and not making yourself the center of the story, how do you think your journalism career would have fared? I mean, I definitely wouldn't have gotten away with it. That was one thing. You know, the thing is like, you know, you use sources sometimes that you are kind of friends with and you are like, or that you sort of know, like, I haven't used anyone by like really have a, you know, a deep relationship with, but people who are like, I know I'm friendly with, I'll like use for quotes or whatever. But you kind of like either you sort of like say, you contextualize it in a way where it's like, okay, we're talking about this

particular issue, or they are an expert at this issue because of like, you know, having written about it independently for a long time, etc. This I think is like a completely different situation where like, you're not talking to like a random small business owner, you're not talking to a small business owner that you have a professional relationship with, and they're talking about like the package in the context in which, you know, of which like the report is trying to like look at its impact. You know, this is someone who clearly not only has like a very, a much more, a much deeper relationship with their source, but it's also one where, and I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is that like she's willing to overlook stuff

when people ask her about it, by deflecting that on basically saying, oh, this, you know, this is a you problem as in this is a you problem on the reader rather than me as a writer judging which sources and which quotes are kind of like useful for this topic. I don't know if that makes any sense, but what does I mean, it's to me, it just struck me that it felt like the point of this article was to just do some more knife twisting about like Jeremy Corbin bad, you know, imagine if Corbin was in charge, we'd be doing gender Venezuela right now. And but the fact that it was so hand-pissed and so incompetently done, and that it's coming from the Guardian doesn't strike me as anything surprising. But then obviously you look at it, you're like, is this,

this is just what the Guardian does. They've got rich asshole, sock puppet guy from the north to be the authentic working class. And everybody else is a damn university student politics, Looney left. Yeah, it's just, yeah. To see it in your face like this, like it's, it's so beyond parody. The guy they got is basically pizza drill. Like it's just, it's so mind-blowing to watch. And I think there's like a couple of things I'll be, I'll be quick about this. Like the first one is that like, kind of obviously interesting parts of her story are just not really addressed, but they are on the page. So even like the, even the context of like the quotes about, you know, immigrants taking jobs and everything, like, which is evidently is like

untrue, but it's also like, well, why don't you interrogate that idea some more? Because that might be, you know, that might be an example of like very bad government messaging, or as we've spoken about for the past hour, like that could also be like the effects of the existing kind of stress of inequality, which is upholding like, well, which is like prioritizing like bougie, bad pizza shops over like everyday workers and especially key workers, right? That's something that she doesn't address. And then the second thing is like, okay, well, even the framing of like, you know, because she's, she's trying to frame this as like a working class, like, how are the working class or how are like working so-called working class, more business owners,

you know, how are they like responding to the stimulus package? But then she also says that like, okay, well, this person also kind of is very asset rich as well, which isn't, I don't know, like, again, it's one of those things where it's like, as like, NASA, as like, as like, Nathalie said on Twitter, you know, it's, it's, it's an idea where like the working class is like an aesthetic or it's a identity rather than any sort of any sort of introspection on it being like a sort of an issue of social relations, right? No, I mean, I at least 100% see it that way. And I don't know. It's also part a great deal, I think, of the country's sick building syndrome,

fucked vibes, is that like, statistically, okay, maybe most English people are not like this guy, but the only ones that matter to elections are the pizza tyrants. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think there is part of also a kind of demoralizing effect of continuing to live under these conditions where, you know, there is this, there's this feel of, well, politics isn't really for me, doesn't really do anything for me, and it can't be made to do anything for me. And the only people who can really expect anything better are the working class pizza, quote unquote, working class pizza tyrants, who, you know, who are then sort of just consistently bombarded with

messages about, you know, being scared of immigrants and that your university age children who you hate are going to come do social justice to your, to your Christmas lunch. And, and, and just this idea of getting of the, of your world gets smaller and scarier and smaller and scarier, and that you must in turn become more a proactively aggressive and proactively aggressive. And that this is just, I think it is, it is a symptom. Now, Alice calls this sick building syndrome, I think you can understand it as the long term collapse in the horizons of what is possible or what can be hoped for. And where some people are responding with learned helplessness, because they've been beaten into the ground by universal credit sanctions and things of that

nature. And then the people who actually are still getting the scraps of what's, of what's being handed down here, right? The, oh, you, we can keep your, you know, debt leveraged business and, and, and alive for another two weeks, if you just like promised to love us forever, is that the, the short, the shrinking of horizons and the pressing down of hope, engenders in them of kind of, you know, anger. And that if you want to talk about sick building syndrome, I think that's what I mean. I'm just so fucking bored of these people, like just constantly giving airtime to these idiots in fucking national papers, whose entire argument is like, well, yeah, everything's fucked. But imagine how fucked it would be if Jeremy Corbyn is in

charge. It's like, do you understand how stupid of a point that is? Like, and journalists are going like, yes, indeed, what a point. Imagine what it would be like if Jeremy Corbyn was in charge. I don't know, fucking better. Like, what, like, what, how could it be that everything is completely fucked? And still the default assumption of these cunts is that it would be worse if Jeremy Corbyn was in charge. Like, how it would be worse for them. But also that was eight months ago. Like, it's over. Like Corbyn's not in charge. Everything that's happened that's bad and fucked up in this nightmare is in this country right now. It's because of Tory incompetence. It's because Boris Johnson was too busy, like, you know, eating birthday cake and fucking off in the Bahamas and

never attended a single sage meeting about the fucking coronavirus crisis until it had already hit. Like, we saw the big, we parked our fucking tent on the goddamn train tracks. We saw the train coming and we're like, oh, it'd be fucking terrible if Corbyn was in charge. Just like, let it fucking happen. And the thing that kills me about it is that rather than addressing this, you'll see no fucking decline, no, no punishment of the Tories in terms of people's opinion, because every vehicle for receiving information in this country is nonstop just jacking itself off about like, we really dodged a train from that Corbyn guy, didn't we? As the train is running us over. I mean, yeah, like the other day, I literally had a conversation with someone about a

particular Tory policy that they were moaning about. And I was like, well, you know, it was like in the Labour manifesto that they were literally going to do the opposite of that. And they were like, yeah, but they wouldn't actually have done, would they? And I'm like, okay, so the evidence that we're dealing with here is that we're under a Tory government that has done the thing you hate. And there was a government you could have voted for that said they would do the opposite of that thing. And your perspective on it is, yeah, but they probably wouldn't have done. But that's what I'm talking about, about a reduction in... Yeah, like a lot of these people had a Labour government for 10 years. And you might say,

we might well say, that was a different Labour government, that was new Labour, they were fucking households. But a lot of people took the lesson from that, that, oh, well, it doesn't fucking matter who wins, because they're never going to do anything that materially benefits. Misa, who cares? Yeah, I mean, if you want, if you, I think that if I was to sort of try to provide a kind of a skeleton key to the sort of weird ongoing resentment of someone who now hasn't led the Labour Party in quite some time, it was last electorally, last electorally viable more than half a year ago. If you want to connect that with anti-mask protesting, anti-vax stuff, if you want to connect all of these things together, these sort of weird lashes out of

aggression that you can't really understand, I think it is the crushing of the idea that anything can be better. And it's the filtering of everything, whether that is, I should wear a mask to stop from getting sick or infecting other people, or I believe that the last person who said that things could be better was lying to me, it is cynicism. It is universal, pervasive cynicism. It is the belief in the fundamental rottenness and inevitable rottenness of you and everything around you. If you want to get blackpilled, the answer is that they're right. Now is the time of monsters, right? Why not be a pizza tyrant? The world's gonna fucking boil in 10 years anyway, who gives a shit? Oh, yeah, you know, on the same... Have a nice time, like,

abusing your stuff, trying to get your unduja or whatever, because trying to make the world materially better for anyone is a fool's game. And why are you trying? Yeah, I'm not that far along. I think that it just means that... Look, I try not to talk too much in the language of morality. I try to confine myself mostly to the language of material things and things that are, and the relationships between those things. But I think if I can slip myself into a little bit of moralism, I really do think, or even just in a virtue sense, the best thing you can do, I think, is to remain... Is to continue doing the best that you can to try to do the best that you can in the smartest possible way. That is... For me, I agree. That is a religious

obligation, actually, to do that kind of that positive despair of being like, well, we're going to ride the wreckage down on this one and just kind of fucking try to triage all of this shit. But I think it's a totally cohesive and coherent worldview to be like, no, we're all fucked anyway. So why should I give a shit? I'm going to start rolling coal, because that benefits me and I like it. Yeah, it's cool, actually. Rolling coal in the vector on my way to the harvester. I just have to say, I think that it's very easy to get fed up and to throw your hands up about it and just be like, all right, there's no point. But I do think that these people wouldn't be melting down so hard if you hadn't touched a nerve. And the nerve is that we are governed by

a group of people, and I say governed, I don't just mean the Tory government, I mean, just the way in which information is processed and distributed in this country, that have the thinnest skin you could possibly imagine. And all it takes is a fucking Google search result or like a Twitter search to reveal how incredibly lazy and incompetent they are. And I know that we don't have that this isn't, you know, the replacement for organization and pushing back. But I have to say that if all it takes is to Google search results, and a couple of fucking reviews on a restaurant to make people melt down this spectacularly, it kind of makes me think that a lot of their, I don't know, universal hegemony that they project

on being the real knowers of politics and culture in this country is such a, it's a house of cards, and it will, and it'll, it's not, I don't think you can overturn it instantly, but I definitely feel like a lot more people that I know have come to the realization that the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times, the Daily Mail, the Sun, that it's all basically the same people, they all go to the same fucking spectator garden party together, and that you can't trust them to have your back. Or to even report reality. I don't agree, though. I think that that kind of fragility, I think that the thing that makes you log on to your TripAdvisor and make you be like, Oh, Jeremy Corbyn, that's not a sign of weakness,

maybe personal weakness, but in terms of your like class position, that's a sign of strength, that you can see shades of the fucking jackery in people that the cops are brutalizing and who are not doing anything back. To me, that reflects a position where you are so used to getting everything that you want. And the way that you have been taught to maintain that is that the second anyone threatens it, even in the most trivial ways, you start screaming and screaming and screaming, and you don't stop until the thing doesn't exist anymore. That's worked remarkably well for, I don't know, the last two, three generations of politics. Why stop now? Bad news for Krebs and Yodel, I have to say.

Okay, so I want to actually take that moment to just, I think, end on a note of slight ambiguity, if that's all right with everybody. Yeah, I wasn't going to let you end on a note of positivity or optimism. Yeah, so that's the vibe. But look, hey, a little bit of a philosophical end to what was supposed to be a bit of a fuck around episode. 10 years of climate left. This always happens. Hey, but hey, look, I want to thank you, number one, for yet again, tuning in to this here, this here podcast, just a simple kind of number one, fucking Picard over here. Yeah, number one, number one, number one. I cannot do Michael York.

Using the sex teleporter to go to three different microclimates, I can get 10 years in each. That's what I don't want you to know. They want you to go to a gay Toby Carver. Got like fine, fine, finally aged twinks, important for the Niagara Scarlet. I love the Michael York impression. It is the Michael York bit is such a straw. Get him on. Michael York and his radioactive gay wolf. If you want to hear the origins of the Michael York bit and many others, we've got the Patreon. That's the episode with Connor Souther from Podside Picnic.

So do go check out the episode where we talk about Logan's run and two impressions of Michael York for an hour. Check it out. Watch our Twitch streams. Also, we have a D&D stream. That's going to be Thursday's 9 p.m. British time where we do bits such as what if Riley had a spear that made anyone you hit with it, Australian. That's right. What if I had that? Oh, and the other thing is we haven't talked about this enough, but we have a bunch of spin-off shows that we just put onto the Patreon, including Britonology, where you can hear all about why we keep talking about Dave Courtney. The Boney Island Whitefish about season five of Bones.

Yes, which is me and Andrew Law from Buntavista, and Alice will be on it this week. So look out for that. That's right. Doing The Girl in the Goop. No, it's The Goop on the Girl is the episode title. I will make this joke 700 times in the course of the episode. We also have 10K posts, which I'm not even sure is a TF spin-off, but it is tangentially related. Yeah. I mean, until Riley buys my podcast and makes it part of the TF empire or something,

until then, there's a 10K post. We've got a new episode coming out soon. And well, there's your problem. Also, technically, a TF spin-off. Yeah, I guess so. All right. I think that's enough plugs. You know about the t-shirts. Buy a shirt. Donate to Bale Funds for Dr. Marcus Brown. Yeah. If your name is Yodel or Crap, buy a shirt. We've got to get Marcus Brown out. All right. I think that's it for us. Later, everybody. Bye.