TRASHFUTURE - The Line is Bored feat. Matthew Zeitlin

Episode Date: March 2, 2021

Finance journalist Matthew Zeitlin (@mattzeitlin) joins the gang to discuss the wild and wonderful world of SPACs, which is basically the of company that happens when the Line gets really bored and just wants to feel something. Think of them as loot crates for investors. We also explore the dark underbelly or London’s Scottish restaurant scene, and have a little fun with a startup. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome back to this episode of TF, that podcast you're listening to right now. It's me doing 10% more of the radio voice than usual. You're listening to Riley and the Gooch. It's always the Gooch. I think I invented the Gooch. Something you could say at the gender clinic. It's Riley, Milo, Allison, Hussain.

Inventor of the Gooch. Logged on. With our friend, finance journalist Matthew Zeitlein. Matthew, how's it going? Great. How's everyone doing? It's been high on the hog from inventing the Gooch, to be honest with you. The royalties are bigger than you'd expect.

Every time anyone does the radio voice, Milo makes several dollars. People cry out for Gooch content. They got the subreddit got really mad when the Gooch was taken off of OP in the Gooch. He now started Gooch Digital. He has like Legion of Skanks and stuff. Very furious when the Gooch got paywalled. Just for racist posts. The Gooch is full name is like Jonathan Gooch or ski or something.

He does like Gooch Pound Radio. With us today is Matthew and Matthew, one of your interests, one of the things that we've spoken about in the past as well is SPACs, those totally not South Sea bubble style companies where you don't know what you're investing in, but it's going to be good, but you can't know. Yeah. SPACs are great because they're like the mystery box of investing. A former Citibank executive comes to you, says, if you give me $10 times a thousand

or whatever, who knows what we'll do within the future? People love this shit. And it'll be good. It'll be fun. It's a way to make investing more like a loot crate because we haven't gamified it enough. People complain about how IPOs and stuff, they go public and they don't have profits or losing money. And I think what people are like, it's like, that's not enough.

Merely losing money is not what we want. We want there to be actual no business. We'll just figure it out later, but give us the money first. Line go stop. Everybody involved wants to stop being a business person, which rules. Yeah. Yeah, I put all this money into a SPAC and now I own 100% of the rights to Gooch. Yeah, that's right.

They invested in Gooch compound radio. Invested in Gooch? But before we do that, I have some British news. Oh, no, that's never good. Yeah, that's right. The labor party under new management goes from strength to strength. Oh, fuck it. I'm for some real opposition.

It's armor and the Gooch. It is polling at a towering 30%. Oh, huge. We love it. After this is for D chest, Riley, you don't understand because actually when you poll lower, that means you poll higher later when you get closer to zero and then you flip back around to 100. He's pacing himself.

Yeah. He doesn't want to poll too high too early. So a few things have happened that that are worthy of updating. Number one, the Liverpool mayoral race, the National Labor Party has decided to step in and suspend the in Liverpool, whoever gets the labor nomination for mayor is basically then crowned. Like it's it's one of these like where there's like a sort of controlled Tory opposition that's there just to get like booed and belted with generals.

Yes, the way everything should be. Of course, this is too good for kids. So yeah, so he was like, no, we cannot have he basically was a left winger, was a woman of color, was going to Anne Rothery, who's going to be the first woman of color to take up one of these like big devolved mayorships in the UK. She's on the left of the party and he was like, and the labor party was like, we need to reopen selections. Sorry, we have to re-interview candidates.

We're not re-inviting anybody. So that's just massively increased. I think. So funny. Right. This woman has an unblemish reputation, right? She is like genuinely a great candidate and the labor party's response has been, right, we can't have that when the labor the labor party mayor of Liverpool that she's following

on from was Joe Anderson, who was grotesquely corrupt and the reason why there's a mayoral election in the first place is witness intimidation. Oh, cool. We had Liverpool buddy, Seancey. So Matthew, being from... I've got ties to the fucking mafia mate. Matthew, being from New York, are you are you are all excited to see your history of Tammany Hall politics alive and well?

Yeah, this all sounded like super, super familiar to me. You know, as you know, lots of cities in the United States are largely democratic controlled and thus have this similar dynamic of corrupt insider versus radical left-wing agitator and usually at some point someone goes to prison, DC, Providence, buddy, Seancey. So this all sounded very, very familiar to me. It's actually quite comforting because in New York now, Andrew Yang is going to be mayor January 1st. Awesome.

The world's smallest man. Yeah. So whatever you guys are doing over there, you know, who am I to judge? Well, it's great because it's like we were about to get a mayor, we were about to basically get like a JB Pritzker in Liverpool and the National Party was like, no, no, no, you get a Rahm Emanuel effectively. So I'm excited to see what kind of, I don't know, like Cretan, who's a personal friend of like West Reading or whatever ends up getting nominated.

Just incidentally, this also destroys an all women shortlist, which is very funny. Can't be having those because it's your well, if it's a left-wing woman, then it's actually not feminist. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's the same thing like with, you know, Rebecca Long-Balian and Don Brunner, they weren't the feminist choice because of the brochilists who liked them.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. This is also familiar because Andrew Cuomo, one point here in New York State, set up a women's equality party, which was this like, you know, sock puppet group just to support him personally. I think Lena Dunham was involved in it.

I set up a group to support Brods. Exactly. You've got to get more ladies. Okay. So he set up a ladies night. In the UK, the women's equality party is just like a group of like turfs now, right? Gigaturfs. Yeah.

Gigaturfs. How many zeros on a gigaturf? Two. The same as the number of genders. That's right. So anyway, but because I don't want to spend too, too long on these news items, I want to go on to the next news item. This is, okay, I feel like even this has proved us very, very right because there's a budget

coming up, right? That's never good. I hate when being proved right, but it's never, we never proved right about something good. The headline is never like trash future proved right. Everything great. Fairness. We never, we never predict anything good because we're called trash future.

Yeah. We could be called something else. Hamstrung by the name. Yeah. The moderate improvements expected. Really? We really painted ourselves into a corner with nominative determinism here. Yeah.

A shadow minister, I can't remember what the shadow minister this was, but was asked about reports that the government is considering raising corporation tax and introducing a windfall tax on companies that have done particularly well out of the pandemic. So like if you're, okay. If you are neighbors with Matt Hancock, you may pay 1% more tax. Or like if you're Sainsbury's and nobody's going to restaurants, so everyone's just shopping at Sainsbury's or whatever. The government and ask you to pay a little more tax.

Labor has come out saying, no, do not raise corporation tax. Labor loves small family owned businesses like Sainsbury's. That's right. Yeah. And Amazon. Yeah. And so, and basically they say we won't, don't want to see any tax raises. Instead, Starmer says that the chance of the March 3rd budget is a chance to back 100,000

new British startups. Oh, fuck. Each more Wi-Fi connected than the last. Yeah. Yeah. Keir Starmer's a trash future patron. He's subscribed to the sync tier and he wants more whimsical reviews of startups. Invest in the Labour Party's back.

As the founder of a new British startup, a new podcast, I fully support this. I mean, this is just Keir Starmer once again proving that he is the poor man's Matt Hancock, which is quite something because Matt Hancock was leading the table of poor man's Matt Hancock for like a really long time. Keir Starmer is giving him a run for his money. Well, it's the, what I find funny is that Boris Johnson was able to respond to MPMQs by being like, what you're asking for is so paltry. He said the word's paltry.

We're coming out with much more. And so, so basically Tory, the, the Labour is going to whip a vote against Grazing Corporation tax. Incredible. And fucking amazing. They have some Tory rebels on their side like Phillip Hammond. Awesome. So good.

I love when all of the best people agree with me. I would like to say that I think what the Prime Minister has said about taxation is, is wrong. And what we've asked for is not paltry. There was no chicken involved at all. So I would like that on the record. Yeah. Isn't that awesome?

Right? Like the politics of Phillip Hammond, a man who has won every like factional issue he's been on the side of since 2016. Yeah. Cool dude. Absolutely. That's fantastic. That's, that it's like, no, we are going to make, what if we made the whole Labour Party

change UK? Yeah. What if we made the whole party out of Theresa May's bag man? Oh, fucking hell. So correct me if I'm wrong guys. So, so Rishi, Rishi Sunak is going to show up with his red briefcase. Yep. And soon as he's like, inside this briefcase, I have corporate tax hikes.

Yes. Yeah. And the, the ostensibly left-wing party leader is going to be like, okay, what if you put a spack inside that briefcase and took out the tax hikes? In fairness to Rishi Sunak, right? He's also going to do Ease out to help out too. Eat out to help out too, going to town on the pussy. Look, we are trying to raise every number in Britain.

That includes the R number. If you don't like it, there's the door. That's right. It's cool. Be in English. If you don't like dying, a corona virus should fucking come in, should you? I'm going to Boyz. He's five seven, right?

Oh, he's tiny. All right. Well, then I agree with him as a, as a fellow, as a fellow short king, he can do no wrong in my eyes. So my hands are tied. Yeah. I've got to say the logic is pretty watertight here. So I have no choice but to stand.

Other Tories who agree with, um, with, uh, uh, Starmer's plan include, start to a fucking sentence. Include Amber Rudd. No. Not currently sitting, but. Is she going to podcast with Flora Gale about this? She's got the horny vote. Wait, wait.

I know this one. I know this one. Amber Rudd is the one whose, whose daughter will tweet, you know, uh, actually, I don't want to say it. It's just too obscene. Yeah. That's right. Her daughter tweets sex stuff and then Amber Rudd's whole thing is, uh, you know, it's

not, you know, deporting, uh, you know, uh, many, uh, citizens who had the right to be there here to their deaths, but, but rather responding to her daughter being like, Oh, I bought a new asshole stretcher the other day with flora. That's not seemly. And then everyone in Britain loves it. Yeah. Yeah. Flora Gale would just tweet something like, I love having come in my asshole and then

Amber Rudd will tweet something like, I pushed you out of my vagina and then they get paid like a hundred thousand pounds a year. Yeah. It's so cool. We got to get them together with the conways. I think. Yeah. Yeah.

See what they can do. It is, uh, so great that their whole thing is a crude mother daughter act that, uh, erases the, um, you know, cruel. The aristocrats. Yeah. Mm. Awful. Just awful.

Except literally in this case. So that's, uh, so that's all, that's all very fun. It seems like there is just absolutely, and it don't, and again, if you think that, oh, my God, Boris Johnson is outflanking the labor to the left, it's like, no, he's not outflanking them to the left. It's that he's understood that patronage is the new model of politics and that's what he's doing. He's outflanking them to the knowing how to do politics.

It's outflanking them to the left, to the simple expedient of realizing that they're on a fucking boat whose steering wheel is locked to the right. Yeah. It's very easy to outflank them because they're the only ones who are ideologically committed to neoliberalism. Yeah. Or anything. Yeah.

The Tories aren't ideologically committed to neoliberalism, they're committed to power. This is why we've been saying for episodes and episodes, it's easier to do entryism in the conservative party and you should do it. Uh, anyway, I want to move on to the, uh, to the startup because this one is purely satanic. Okay. Uh, it is called Maple and it has nothing to do with Canada's snow and bother. Oh. It has nothing to do with Canada.

Shame God. It's going out for a stop up all your butt. So, um, Matthew, I'd like us to, I'd like you to start us off. It's called Maple and I'll even give you a hint. It's called Maple. It's a software as a service, uh, offering. Okay. Uh, it's called Maple, software as a service.

We actually had one of these, uh, in New York, it was a delivery company that went under. It's not that. Big, great cookies. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Maple, software as a service.

Some kind of like, um, I think it's a way of like, uh, uh, you know, surveying your, uh, the farmland that you've bought as, you know, kind of a low interest hedge, you know, interesting. You need to, you need to keep people off of it. You need to make sure, stay, keep on track what's going on there. And, uh, that's what Maple is. Okay. Uh, I'm afraid that is not what it is.

Milo, it's a software as a service. What is it? It attracts the value of the syrup that you have smuggled into the United States with the help of the prime minister. You can add. Just started with like fucking speedy Gonzalez, that's right. Speedy Kenz Alice. Uh, Alice, speaking of speedy Kenz Alice, slamming buzz dialysis machine software.

Uh, no. Uh, Hussein, last guest before I read another bit of their copy. Uh, I actually don't know. So I'm just going to go with something that spies on you at work. Uh, Hussein is the most is only a little bit right. He's only, he's only a little bit right, but we'll carry on. This is from, from an article in tech crunch about Maple. Much of our daily lives have been transformed in one way or another by technology.

Thank you. Tech crunch. I hadn't noticed. Cool. Um, and though, and through intentional, uh, efforts to innovate thanks to the advent of modern technology. Now more than ever, we rely on shared collaboration platforms and digital workspaces in our professional lives.

Yeah. And yet most of the changes brought by tech on our home and family lives seem like the accidental effects of broader trends rather than intentional shifts. Maple, the new startup launching today aims to change that. Okay. So it's a software as a service for your home and family life. Oh man. I don't care for this.

Is it, is it, is it like a Google calendar, but like for how long you spend on spend with your wife? Uh, that is more or less correct, Hussein surveillance, Roomba. That's right. I mean, look, it's his, it's his general tendency, but I think that like tech is sort of like heading towards, of like how every sort of relationship is going to be like be fundamentally transactional in nature. Yeah.

You get a screen time report, but for your wife and yeah. Is this like, you know, free me as a free product is like your wife, your kids. And then to add on, it's your wife's boyfriend, his girlfriend. Yeah. That you have to pay for. Yeah. My, my, my wife, uh, my, I've synced, synced my calendar with my wife's boyfriend. So, uh, we know, we know like exactly like, you know, what's going on and when I'm allowed

to be inside the house and when I have so doodle, here's the thing though, right? It's not actually a Google calendar. It's a Kanban board for your family, Kanban, where you're, you basically have tasks, tasks that are on cards and you can, uh, yeah, it's a Trello board. You can use the app to assign like, uh, your, your husband to take out the garbage. And he can use the app. Eating my wife's pussy. Yeah.

My wife's boyfriend's taking that one again. Yeah. Assigned getting pegged at 4 p.m. every night, right? You could, I could also use the app to like ask for help making dinner. I know there was like a joke about the wife's boyfriend thing, but like, this is the type of stuff that like polyamorous like people do, right? Oh yeah. Like sex, like sex spreadsheet.

I think I could hate them more, but so is this explicitly marketed towards the polyamorous community? No, not at all. It is marketed towards, uh, people who work in like ad tech and have children, but hate their children. So it's marketed towards the polyamorous community. Uh, so basically here's, here's what they say, our mission is to improve the quality of life for families again by making it so you don't have to like talk, I guess, uh,

if you don't like your family or your children, uh, you can use this. This is the app that's like, please email my wife. So I don't have to. Uh, so in its early incarnation, Maple's primary interface for parents is a list of various tasks they need to take care of during the day. During onboarding, Maple asks parents what they're typically responsible for in the household and then uses machine learning to build a customized schedule for getting those things done.

So really it's kind of a Trello board that, uh, tells you that bosses, both you and your partner around. This is so fucking great, man. It's satanic. It is. So is this like, uh, uh, a nagging wife as a service, you no longer have to tell your husband to clean the toilet, but also a nagging husband. It's a nagging partner.

This is the future that the social justice left one. Yeah, that's right. What I'm enjoying about this the most is that if this was, if this was for like business purposes and not for like the home, this is absolutely the thing Riley would try and make us do for trash future. Because we're a business, that's why Riley is the wife's boyfriend of the show. That's right. Riley would be like, no one's checking the app and I'll be like, that's right.

So has anyone here besides Hussein had a real job in an office before? Out of four adults, not have a single job between them. I for two weeks worked at a Russian company that was selling financial services over the phone, like a really low rent version of the wall of Wall Street. There were very few systems. Also, look, let me intervene here by saying that even though me and Matt worked at the same place for like a period of time, like it also wasn't a normal office in the way that you would conceive on Riley.

Riley has more of an experience working in a conventional office. I was going to say, like I've never used this shit before, but you know, my fiancee who's had real jobs, she used his trolley. What about a boyfriend? And the two of you, you know, you can start using this and in fact, they also have signed on partners and they're trying to use their API to sign on many more so that they can market to you in the thing that bosses you around. Oh, wow.

Oh, fuck. Yeah. All right. So your husband has cleaned the toilet and then you get like the toilet brush ads. Well, then you get curated third party partners. So for example, if you scheduled date night, you could book your babysitter inside the app that you scheduled your date night in. Okay.

So what? And then date night sponsored by kink.com. That's right. Yeah. I was going to say just a third come in. Is that a sponsored product? Or do you have to do that on your own? You have to.

You can also, you also, there's a, they've integrated a service for that. They've integrated back page. So this includes basically like high end direct to customer baby and toddler furniture and house, which we providing. That's not part of the kink night. So Mabel's parents today. To the adult baby community. They say Mabel's parents to partners today are representative of the kinds of businesses

that might make use of the platform in the future, but the founder has a much broader vision. He hopes that Mabel can ultimately help parents handle the responsibilities across a wide range of income levels. I always love when they say that. Fuck, you know what this is? You remember when Joe Biden had a stroke on stage and he was like, you got to leave the radio on so that the kids learn words and poor kids, they're not learning words because

they don't have the radio. And that's what this is. This is like going to spray words at poor kids. That's right. What I think is so how it works then, right? Is yeah, you have, if you've been assigned to take out the garbage, instead of being like, Hey, can you help me take out the garbage? You can tap your phone and then you get a fucking hologram of Joe Biden shows up like

the layer to be like, you got to leave the radio on. No, you tap your phone to ask your partner for help with the garbage, but also you'll get advertised a premium garbage taking out surface. Yeah. Which is like a really fancy bi holographic Joe Biden. And then at the, you get a, you get a daily review at the end of the day and you can hit a little button that says, I love you. Wow.

Wow. Okay. Or like, I appreciate you or we're a great team. Yeah, we sure are. Because that's, I mean, look, I can only say this, right? From, from the perspective of a relationship, I put up with a lot of shit. Do not project manage me. If you do that shit to me, I am gone.

Because right? This is, this is because when you let these systems into define your, define your life, the people making them are Patagonia vest Satanist psychos. And so you're going to talk like an inhuman monster who says to their like partner, we make a good team at the end of the day of a normal day of tasks. Yeah. Basically. What is a relationship except for a solid foundation for a small business?

That's right. Yeah. We're letting, we're just letting that into the family, but then this is the most satanic part. Okay. The most awful bit. The platform offers the user, users the ability to tap, to tap to help others out with tasks. Or these could be families who want to make a little extra money.

We're bringing back cottage industry. The startup. The startup has plans to eventually enlist other parents and to provide services. You could do some sewing. You could do any other things. I figured this shit out. I figured this out. This is, this is a bit on Twitter.

People say this a lot. These people saw a parasite and were like, that, we want that. We need an app here. This is what we need. It will unlock plans to enlist other parents to provide services. So rich dad, poor dad with a scheduling and advertising element and a gig economy. Pissed off my wife's boyfriend and now I have to go live with the basement guy. That's right.

Allowing parents to help each other at the same time. Great. Cool. Thank you, Maple. I'm very pleased to be allowed for, yeah, to have my scheduling app for when to take out the bins or pick up my terrible children from school. It's also a child rehoming service, I guess. And also a kind of like a fiver as well.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. And I guess like, and again, the rules of communication, interaction and so on, programmed by dead-eyed sociopaths. Yeah, absolutely. Just like they are in real life. So I want to move on just a little bit now to the wide and wonderful world of SPACs.

So SPACs we have talked about on the podcast before in general terms, but not so much in specific ones. Matthew, can you, we talk, we introduced the concept at the very beginning, but just tell me if my understanding is right here. It is a company that is a large pile of money and someone at the head of that pile of money will say, I'm a wonderful manager. I have fantastic instincts. But my history of starting great businesses.

I'm now going to list my pile of money on the stock exchange and sell shares in that pile of money for $10 a share. There are some more technical elements about warrants for further purchases, but let's just say $10 a share to make it simple. And then I go and I try to find a company, a private company, merge with them, and then they become a listed company. And WhizBang, we're able to trade shares in them without them ever having to make a pesky IPO that requires things like having made money in the past.

Yeah, that's right. You nailed it. Fantastic. So what are some, because you've been looking at this for a little bit. Now you've seen some crazy SPACs, seen some crazy stories. I've seen SPACs, people you couldn't imagine. What are some that stand out for you? I would say a good one is Virgin Galactic is a good one.

A really funny one that happened recently was, you guys may remember from Robinhood and GameStop, one of the companies involved in shutting down the trading on that Thursday or whatever called APEX. They're a clearing company. They are currently getting SPACed by the former editor of Cosmo Magazine and the owner of a hockey team. Getting SPACed is such a funny phrase though. If you look at a cover of Cosmo in 2003, they give you some instructions on how to SPAC

your boyfriend. He really knows how to do this. It sounds like something Alice would like. What did you get up to this weekend? I was getting SPACed for hours. That's right. The way Riley just moves fast. That's right.

That's right. That's a sex thing I wouldn't understand. Drawing a line under this sex thing. The other funny thing is that you said, oh, it's people who founded businesses before, CEOs and stuff. That's a huge chunk of it. Now it's just a way for celebrities to sell rights to hang out with them. Shaquille O'Neal has one.

Colin Kaepernick is starting one. Nice. Paul Ryan, you may remember him from trying to turn Medicare into a Maple-esque program. He's doing one. So SPAC is basically like, what was that app where celebrities kind of recorded the spoke messages? Oh, Cameo. Yes.

It's a very expensive Cameo. Or like the FireFest, or like the app that was associated with FireFest is a similar thing. The Fire app, yeah. Yeah, you book them to hang out with you. Just in this case, you give them $10 to what's called a blank check company. So in many ways, Jeremy Renna prefigured this with the Jeremy Renner app. But the thing is, at the end of this process at some point...

No, wait. You know who prefigured it? Matt Hancock, with Matt Hancock MP, my favorite app. Yeah, that's right. So it's because the thing is, you do, in theory, you do get a return on your investment once they merge with the company and then presumably the price will go up. So one of the biggest sort of stories in SPACs recently has been Shamath Palahapatiya, who we spoke about in the bonus episode with Shanti Singh last week.

This SPAC, CCIV, or Churchill Capital Four was... I believe that's Michael Klein. It's Michael Klein. I thought it was Shamath. No, he's had a Sophia. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, yes. We have some Shamath ones here as well. But no, this is...

He did Virgin Galactic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the Shamath one. This is Michael Klein, Churchill Capital Four, merging with a company called Lucid Motors. Now, Lucid Motors is a Tesla competitor where it says basically, Tesla's are insufficiently luxurious. Oh, great. Yeah.

So is this a car? Does it make even less cars than Tesla? Oh, way fewer. Yeah. I think it's made... How many cars have they made, Matthew? 20,000, if that? Yeah.

And they're not actually for sale yet. I mean, they're ostensibly supposed to go on sale, I think, in the third quarter of this year. Oh, okay. So they've sold zero cars. As far as I know. Okay. Okay.

Awesome. So basically, Lucid Motors is saying, look, we're going to make a much more luxurious Tesla at some point in the future. And if they were going to a file in IPO, they would have to disclose things like, by the way, we've never made money because in an IPO, you can't just say, our projections are that we're going to make tons of money in 10 years if you've never made any money. You have to say, you have to give some kind of past information to make an IPO, not so with respect.

You can just say, whatever. Yeah. It's a wild west. You can be like, I assume in 10 years, we're going to be the world's most valuable company. And that's fine. Fools and horses. Shit. This time next year, Rodney will be millionaires.

And so basically what happened, what's interesting about this, right, is the SPAC that was rumored to be merging with Lucid Motors was bid up to six times its value, right? Right. That's normal. That's a normal amount of your value to it. So basically, because basically with a blank check company, the way it works is buying a share, you buy 10 bucks of the blank check company money. So basically what you're doing with your by bidding that above 10 bucks is you're saying,

I'll give you 60 bucks for 10 bucks because I assume that this 10 bucks is going to go up in value basically, but until it verges, it's for 10 bucks. So that's basically what it is. It's like an IPO pop, right, where the company goes public and then it's like, we think it'll be 42 bucks a share. It goes way up. Right. So it's like you can get it on an IPO pop, but with scams.

Yeah. So what if an IPO was in a shape that was more conical, you know? So essentially, right? This spec for Lucid Motors would bid six times up to about 60 bucks. And then as soon as it announced that it had successfully merged with Lucid Motors, its value plummeted. Incredible. This is not what we would call a pump and dump, right?

Because... Because everyone's innocent. Because everyone truly believes, no, because no one is out here cynically knowing that this is worthless. Everyone thinks that everyone else thinks that Lucid Motors is going to be the next Tesla. So this is a false consciousness machine? Yeah, essentially, yes. It is the ideology machine that works only on the lizard brain.

What we've done is we've got investing in the fucking thing from men in black, but you turn it on yourself. So the only conclusion I could say is that no one I could come to here, Matthew, I didn't be interested to know if you agree with this, is that nobody was actually excited for Lucid Motors. Everyone just thought everyone else would be excited for Lucid Motors. Yeah, because we're seeing this thing now where for existing public companies, anything associated with electric vehicles, like a battery company or a car company, is just going

crazy right now. Tesla being the best example, but all the sub-Teslas. And so now it's like, what if we had a company that we could invest in for electric vehicles? But it didn't do it. It was just money that would later become electric vehicle stocks. People were like, okay, yeah, we'll pay 60 bucks for 10 bucks of that. Now people are coming down to the extent of like, but wait a second, I don't even like tulips.

Hang on a moment. Well, it's easy with hindsight to say it's stupid to pay $60 for $10, but you weren't in the room. Okay. We were really excited for those $10. Well, I mean, look, it's, you can say on the one hand, it's like paying $60 for $10. Also, which is true. Yeah.

Which it is. That is true. You are doing that. But it is also $10 that will sort of turn into a share of a company that you may honestly believe is worth more than 60 bucks a share. So it's not as stupid as paying $60 for $10, but in this case, it's very close. Yes. Yeah.

And in this case, they actually paid $60 for less than $10. Am I not right? No, they've paid $60 for $20, I believe, but that value is swiftly dropping. We don't have to get into this too much, but there's like so many ways in here in which just very, very rich people make money automatically. I would like to get into the ways, please. Yeah. I don't know if this is true about Lucid, per se, but typically the way these works

is that some of the earliest IPO investors, like when the company is just a guy selling $10 for $10, are hedge funds. And they have this deal where they can give the shares back and get $10 plus interest before the merger happens. And this is like automatic money. They're basically lending money to the Boeing check company, to the SPAC. And then also, they get the rights to buy shares in the combined company later. So you automatically make about 10% on your investment.

And then if it goes well, you can then come in later and make money after the merger happens. You can be like, I'll give you $10 for that $50. And they're like, well, I'm obliged that you're wealthy enough that I'm obliged to give you that deal. And that's what Mark said. Yeah, that's right. That is what he said. I'll give you $10 for that linen coat.

I love this idea that Richard Arkwright finally makes his slightly more efficient factory. And then that just, as the butterflies wings flapping in the exchange of now, the ideology has become so pure that we can say, well, this $10 is worth $60 to a rich person, or a poor person could pay $60 for this $10. It's actually... It makes sense to me. Is that about the size of it? Yes.

And the other funny thing about Lucid is that our good friends in the Saudi public investment fund are involved every which way on this deal. I believe that they're basically selling and buying the stock from each other at this point. Those guys are so sensible. It's always great news when the Saudi investment fund are involved. I believe what happened is that they invested in Lucid, the car company, and then Lucid sold itself to the SPAC at $10 a share. And then the other part of the way this works is that when these mergers happen, they bring

in big institutional investors to participate in them. It was called a pipe investment. They asked for the pipe. And then they invested in that at $15 a share. So they were trading money back and forth between themselves for something that's now worth $30 a share. And then it's everybody who got involved in this who isn't an institutional investor or Saudi Royalty paid $60 for $10, which is cool to put it that way.

Yeah. Interesting. And these are like the hottest commodity, right? This is the I think they're the more SPACs that have been in 2020. There are more SPACs than in any other year. I believe ever. Looked your absolute right. Both of those people are SPACs.

That's right. This is incredibly popular because who wants to wait until you've made money to be able to go public, cash out and move to Mexico. It's even better than that. You don't really have to have made money to do an IPO, but you do have to have actually made and lost. You do. You do have to have some income, which is then offset by your spending.

Yeah. For a SPAC, you can just nothing. It's good. You can just, you can just say, I think I'm a pretty smart guy. You can say, I'm thinking I'm a pretty smart guy. I'm going to go public. This company has a good vibe. You could take trash future public with a SPAC and we would less, we more than satisfy

the requirements. Yeah. We would actually satisfy the requirements for an IPO. I think you guys probably make too much money to do a problem. Your company is way too normal. So basically this, I just, I just think that's so interesting, right? The pure ideology that as soon as you have to confront owning a company that might do something at some point in the future, it plummets in value.

That's right. That's what you do. So I think Lucid is quite funny though. They're, they're, they're, they're, they're PowerPoint, which I have in front of me, which you sent through the other day. Matt, he was very good. They say they're trying to be post luxury. Oh yeah.

So this is like just pure California ideology bullshit about so like their entire thing is that like old luxury is like, you know, Tesla or Nate, Rococo, too much decoration, all that. And then like new luxury. It's just like a perfectly clean like slate wall, you know, we did, we did the stock market too hard and we reinvented Protestantism. Oh shit. Not again.

Post luxury consumers, they say, increasingly seek brands that align with their values. I feel like I've been hearing that for 14 years. Brands that are more enlightened, informed and inspired. And remember, this is what people were paying 60 bucks for 10 bucks for. They saw this from like, I'm in as a leading EV brand that offers a sustainable luxury performance and advanced connectivity. Lucid is ideally positioned to address the wants and needs of this new generation of post luxury customers.

The traditional luxury. They say status, opulence, opulence, materialism, indulgence and physical engagement. Post luxury is all about well being, refinement, experience, sustainability and physical and emotional engagement. So big differences in these, in these definitions here, you know. Yeah. I mean, you can just imagine the pitch meeting they had where like everyone's wearing their Patagonia vests and they're talking to the Saudi private investment people and they're

like post luxury materialism out. It's actually worth more if you don't have anything and the guy right, the guy in the entire time is thinking like, when can I go back to my five wives, my golden plated Falcons and like stop hearing this fucking Patagonia vests bullshit. It's like, I already told you, yes, my wife's the Saudi bugger place. Yes. I already told you, yes. Now leave me alone.

I want to go flying my fucking Trello for my wives. Yeah. Although the thing is right. This has kind of been a bit of a, a bit of a, an inflection point because all of a sudden the shares in the electric car makers, they've kind of fallen a little bit off their highs. Hmm. Oh yeah. And they basically trade in line with like Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin, stuff like that.

So of course, of course they've fallen off of it. Yeah. Well, it's basically, I mean, look, my own personal theory is that, and we talked about this in the episode with Joe Wiesenthal, which is that, yeah, everything basically is just becoming a cryptocurrency more or less, just different kinds of cryptocurrencies that just might not involve a blockchain. Well, I mean, GameStop has been up a lot in the last two days. It's like doubled or tripled in value.

It's like gone up a lot. And then there's this funny thing that happens, like when GameStop goes up, every other stock goes down. And so make of that what you will. Yeah. It's the chaos option. It's the sociopath stuff. Join me.

I have my own theory as to why that is, but I'm not quite confident enough to go into it now. Let's see. Here's a couple other ones. Oh, a blank check company formed by Reed Hoffman and Zynga founder, Mark Pincus. So two guys who've worked together a lot on very stupid ideas, they did the billboard political party. Oh, yeah.

We're in the future. They're merging with one of those VTOL air taxi companies. Another one. A different one. A classic combination of like Farmville and a VTOL air taxi. Did you see in Colorado that airline engine that just fell off, the housing just fell off? And so we saw from people's smart doorbells, footage of their yards just getting in and

dazed and flaming plane wreckage. Just that bit all the time. Yeah. It's gonna be great. I'm gonna force that. Absolutely. Wait. Yeah.

So remember, and remember, we talked about another VTOL taxi company going public via SPAC. That's a different one. There are two at least, if not more. And again, if you want to take a flying taxi company public, you probably wouldn't be able to do it via an IPO because you would need to have a... I ask questions like, do you own any flying taxis and do they work? Yeah.

Or things like... What's your plan for like when you spread flaming wreckage over somebody's front yard? You will have had to at least provided flying taxi services or things related to flying taxi services kind of a little bit. In this case, you can just tell a bunch of credulous rubes that you're gonna invent a flying taxi and then pocket all of the money and be off somewhere else by the time it doesn't work. Yeah.

So you know how when GameStop happened, people were saying, this is a populist uprising. This is people taking power over the markets. SPAC investors and GameStop investors are the exact same people. This is why Chamath got so in to GameStop when it happened because he knew that these were his people. But don't forget, SPACs are also the solution to many of SoftBank's problems because when we work went public, there was that whole thing where they had to keep saying, here's how we do business, here's what's happened to our business in the past, here's what

we think is gonna happen to our business in the future, and here's the basis upon we think that that's gonna happen. And when they had to give all of those facts out to the public, they had to just make stuff up. They had to make up the vibes-based evidence stuff. Because they need to make an argument for why they think their money is gonna go up. Yeah. Now they don't need to do that, which is a shame because we're missing out on some of

these deranged things like a Vibe Zeppeter. So well, we work, if you wanted to buy stock and we work and you were disappointed by the fact that their IPO didn't work, never fear. Oh, okay, great. They are going public via SPAC. Awesome. We work the company that's famously very well run and very well founded. I mean, I suppose they're kind of well run now that they forced all the insane people

out. Oh, no. But their business model is still crazy. And you know what else is going public via SPAC? Oh, the windows. The windows that tell you if it's raining. Yeah. Regular windows can't do that.

And so we've heard a few about a few other things. We noted on the bonus episode, Shermas Clover Health went public via SPAC and then it was identified in Hindenburg Research, who identified the problems with Nicola. Not people you want to get researched by. No. Who identified the problems with Nicola, the electric truck company that was built on nothing. The gravity-powered electric truck company.

Well, it was built on the top of a hill. Yeah. It was built on the top of a hill and then rolled down. They also looked at Clover Health and was like, well, a lot of similar things are happening here, aren't they? Why is this hospital on the top of a hill? Yeah. This hospital has to roll down a hill.

And yeah. So it seems like a market that is moved beyond the need, not even to have contact with the actual world of people making and doing things in an economy of some kind. Which has been our whole season two, season three thesis. It has moved beyond the need for it even to pretend that it has a connection to that. In terms of SPACs, anyway, I'm not saying all companies are like that, but boy, there seems to be a burgeoning sphere of companies that just don't even need to have a connection to anything that's actually going on in real life.

Which is very fun. Cool and good. Yeah. I mean, Matthew, what's your, what's my position on this, right? Is that when, when basically money, when money is free, the economy gets stupid and this is just an asset class instead of having to go filter through company by company to decide which one is stupid and with a weird like thing that forces them to be a little bit not stupid, even to pretend to not be stupid for like a day through an IPO.

It seems like they're like, no, we're going to have an entire asset class of stupid. I mean, what is, what does that sound like to you? Is that again, sound like it's the size of it or do you have a different take? I have to say Riley, you know, as a listener, I've always been somewhat skeptical of, of your kind of, you know, low interest rates, line goes down, profitability is dead. So we have to just gamble everything to make money thesis. However, this researching this phenomenon and that interest rates went up a little bit today has, has certainly made your view seem far, far more plausible.

I also kind of take the view, the, the more behavioral view of we have a lot of, you know, the SPAC boom, the meme stocks, crypto, sports gambling, it's all kind of this pile of money generated by people sitting at home, you know, their, their maple app has, has glitched out. So they're not taking out the trash, you know, they're not vacating the house when their wife's boyfriend comes over and they just, they have to do something. And I think these SPACs are just filling that, filling that void as much as, as much as anything else. Yeah, that's right.

It's a, with the, with the economy, you could say automated outsourced and abstracted enough, put on a hold by coronavirus, the line is just bored, basically, the line is just fucking around and finding out. Yeah. It's a bored, bored line full of bored people moving it up and down because what else they're going to do? Turning the big line dial and looking back to the audience for approval. That's right.

So they're, that's, I think that's, that's about where I want to, I don't want to sort of draw two sort of great grandiose conclusion about SPACs. I feel like they're just, they're a very weird thing that is symptomatic of the very stupid time that we're in. And again, like we said on the episode with Joe, I don't think they're like a, they're heralding anything necessarily, but they are, they do seem to be associated with really stupid shit a lot of the time. What if $50 was worth $10?

Or depending on how much you have money you have initially, what if $10 was worth $50? Yeah. Yeah. What if we just, what if we just sort of, you know, made up the number? Yeah. Just mark your own work. We're all marking our own work here at TF Acres. So speaking of, I want to move on to the final piece of business we have for today in front

of us. Okay. All over the TL several days ago, you couldn't get away from it. A man named Randall McDonald. Okay. Yeah. That's a name. The owner of Boisdale, a Scottish restaurant.

Excuse me? Excuse me? D-O-I-S-D-A-L-E. Yeah. Boisdale. Yeah. Boisdale. Boisdale.

Whatever it is. I don't care. Boisdale. Yeah. Number one, I don't care because I don't like chain restaurants, so I don't go to Boisdale. Is it a chain restaurant? I thought it was like a fancy restaurant.

Well, there are three. Yeah. It's fancy. That's the chain. As far as Riley's concerned. Well, you've got three restaurants, like one in Glasgow, one in like fucking London. No, it's all in London. Oh, no.

Don't worry. It is a Scottish. It is a very upmarket Scottish, a Scottish restaurant in London. Because it's a Scottish restaurant. Famously. Very good. No. Like Haggis and Whiskey and stuff.

It's popular among right-wingers because he's famously a... Because they're all like smoking cigars and wearing a fedora. Yeah. And eating completely tasteless food. We all get to that. So anyway, he wrote an article in the Daily Mail about how you have to reopen the restaurants because the hospitality industry is suffering. It was a relatively unremarkable article, not interested, not worth reading on here.

But because of the name, because his name is Randold MacDonald. Yeah. Incredible. I needed to know more about this man. So I did a little bit of digging and I found some old articles about him from 2017. And I found some stuff on the Boysdale website that was very interesting. So... My greatest enemy is the Homburgler.

He's an ancient Scottish demon. This isn't like a rap scene, as per thing. This is posh Scottish, where he just like... He sounds like Scottish Tory, which is worse. This is such a... Have you heard of the Homburgler? Y'all have had your tea, then, kind of shit. This is from an article in The Times in 2017.

Well, MacDonald is a proper posh Scott. He grew up of all places in Islington, which, again, is a classic Scott. Not that fucking weird. Not that weird. And then went to Ampleforth, the Eaton for Catholics, but his education ground to... Eaton for Catholics, in case you wanted to get double nons. Yeah, it's more molesty, allegedly. His education ground to a hold at the University of St Andrews, where he was kicked out on

three separate occasions before securing a medical diagnosis of being, quote, abnormally lazy. I should get one of those, fuck. That's not a medical condition. Again, it's like the SPAC investment. If you're rich enough, it is. Yeah, I gotta get one. How do you get kicked out of St Andrews?

What the fuck? Forget to iron your red trousers. I don't know. It's a repository for America's stupidest fail, sons. Like what do you have to do to get kicked out? What I like about reading about Randall MacDonald, right, is that the more I found out about him, the more I realized he is just the essence of a certain kind of just sort of, you might say, banal and repellent Britishness.

Because he also, in addition to this, he is also a collection of different eccentricities. So, for example, he's going to wear a lot of tweed, isn't he? Oh, that's this. No. Come on. It's way more than that, Alice. Because he has structured his entire life around living a protest against the ban on smoking indoors.

Right. Okay. And how does that? This man is, you know, we missed Roger Scruton, and we didn't know what we had lost when he died until now. No, I'm feeling like Scruton is so much more normal than this guy. Well, this guy is basically like, he had Scruton summarized to him once and then was like, ah, sounds good.

I know exactly what this dude's going to look like before I Google him. He's going to have the floppy hair, but gray. He's going to have a pocket square that's like, prolapsing out of his suit. Oh, yep. Like a sort of grid square shirt, probably. Wow. Yes, that is exactly what he looks like. Yeah, because I know this type.

I know the type of guy that I'm dealing with here. Yeah. He has a damn face like an overripe blueberry. So as the ban on smoking in public places loomed a decade ago, Boysdale, Boysdale, Belgravia became the de facto headquarters for the libertarian group Forest, which stands for freedom organization for the right to enjoy smoking tobacco. Yeah, because they formed to oppose Ash, which was the anti smoking group with Forest. The two genders, Forest and Ash.

So I think one of his definitely one of those groups, they were like, they really had to figure out what each word could like, they really like struggled to actually make the acronym work. This is such a fucking throwback to when the fronts of the culture war were like, telling me that I can't light up my fucking stogie in the weather spoons. Yeah. Well, I'd like to welcome everyone to the first meeting of people who like smoking indoors and are protesting against the unfair ban against smoking indoors.

We're not sure what the acronym is yet. And so I was like, oh, sorry, I'm actually here for the incel meeting. No, that's the same meeting. Just please stand on the left. So and what I find what I find very fun about this guy is he's a throwback to when conservative culture warriors just kind of cared about the one thing. Yeah, he's not. I mean, it's like early forage when he was like wearing a bathrobe and smoking.

Yeah, when they were like libertarians, as opposed to authoritarians, still authoritarian, but like the thing that they were authoritarian about was like the fucking nanny state is telling me that I can't blow cigar smoke in the young child's face. So McDonald, who smokes between one and six cigars a day? Of course. Between one and six is quite a range. It was incredulous that he couldn't allow customers to carry on puffing. So the large carry on puffing is actually a film from the 70s.

The large canary Wharf Boysdale host the cigar smoker of the year awards. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Can you imagine a more cursed event than the cigar smoke? The year smells of piss. The guest list for the most recent event last month included Kelsey Gramer and Charlie Sheen. This was in 2017 when he was more of a meme. You know, I found out a fun fact about Kelsey Gramercy. I feel like I need to share it.

Yeah, it got his wife's name tattooed on his dick. Yes, that was the fun fact that I found out and it has not left me all day. Actually, I'm going to disagree with you that Charlie Sheen wasn't more of a meme in 2017. You'll think you have like 2009. Yeah. So I guess he was still here hanging out with Randall McDonald. He was banging seven gram cigars. And Andrew Neil.

Yeah, and Andrew banging Andrew Neil. There you go. Before long, my conversation with Randall McDonald, we somehow get on the subject of age of consent laws. No, the other thing they care about. Who's going to build the roads? Come on, come on, come on. You know, you're on the tip of your tongue.

Matthew, come on. Save me here. It's something we talk about all the time. Think about Hawkeball. Blackface. That's right. Yes. That's right.

Wait, is this guy Dutch too? One of the Scottish Englishman was Dutch. Hello, it's me, Randall Van Danel. Before long, we somehow get on the subject. Before long, now it's going to surprise you to learn that I don't like bags. Before long, we somehow get on the subject of blacking up. I'm not sure how. Well, I say, have you ever gotten a cigar ash on your face?

Accidentally, it's combined with the moisturizer and created the kind of proto paint. I love that. I was on stage the other day, said McDonald, with someone who's doing a Ray Charles impersonation and he was blacked up. Why? I said, why? If you're a white bald guy and you want to impersonate Elvis, you put on a wig.

No one has a problem with that. It's completely ludicrous that you can't put on a costume and play someone else. What next? Will men no longer be allowed to dress up as women to play pantomime games? Oh, trans rights. Yeah, pre-figuring. The fucking woman face thing from the turf. I mean, this also is a very good example of the pipeline, right?

And about how there's a breed of kind of conservative guy. I don't genuinely think it gives a shit about anything related to gender who builds their identity on being like a turf, not because they are really kind of convinced by whatever the things that second-wave feminists are saying. Because they lost the smoking ban war. Yeah, because they can't smoke indoors and they can't do blackface. And this is sort of like the logical next step. So when you kind of say, what can men no longer dress as women?

Then the third eye suddenly starts opening and these guys force like, yeah. I'm not allowed to have my harmless fun, but these chaps can go into women's bathrooms and do whatever they do in there. Yeah, they put on blackface. And they're not even blacked up. And they're not even blacked up. And this was from a Boysdale event listing at some point in recent history. So before the pandemic, this special event was hosted by Randall MacDonald

and Simon Clark, the director of forest at Boysdale Canary Wharf. There were some 156 guests across 15 tables from the IEA, the Adam Smith Institute, Conservatives for Liberty, Women in Tobacco, Taxpayers Alliance, Women in Tobacco, the only women with clockier voices than me, the Institute of Ideas, the Manifesto Club, journalists from the Times, Telegraph, Wall Street Journal and Daily Mail, six MPs and seven several parliamentary researchers. And then dinner was served and speeches were given from guests from by guests from New Orleans where smoking was banded bars and casinos earlier this year.

And the principal speaker was no, no, no declare. We've had our struggles with the cigar smoke. They have the principal speaker was BAFTA award-winning film producer Stephen Evans, who veered off his prepared remarks and started referencing Shakespeare Churchill and George Best before finishing with a confusing rallying cry. Enough is enough. Just some of the one of the most British events I've ever heard. Just everyone getting drunk, rambling off course.

Everyone who works for the same blob organization of conservative propaganda just crammed into a Canary Wharf chain restaurant, getting furious that they can't smoke inside. Anybody who like had a big thing complaining about, you know, the fucking DSA convention not clapping or whatever should be made to sit through that event so you know what the competition is. Yeah, that's right. You can see over to your left.

You got people from the IEA in the center. You got people from the Adam Smith Institute. We find ourselves here in the center of the not having sex community of East London. In Canary Wharf. That's right. I mean, I just, I just find this disturbing because like, it just shows how, you know, American cultural hegemony, you know, extinguishing, you know, dissident local cultures,

like why would a Scottish person even think to, where would they even know about blackface from? Like, I guess, I don't know. I mean, I mean, he went to, he went to a Catholic boarding school. Yeah, I'm sure there's seven there. And like, I feel like there is a, there is like a cardinal role. For how strong of this year we're doing to kill a mockingbird. Yeah, there is a fantastic production of Tan Tan O Kong.

I think there's a cardinal rule that if you are to like try to understand certain British personalities, what you have to realize is that they never actually like emotionally developed after secondary school. So everything we do is sort of like consistently referenced around this idea that, or this kind of identity that they had formed in secondary school or in boarding school that they just haven't been able to kind of grow beyond. A sixth form ass country. Yeah.

Is this because of, you know, certain, you know, traumatic events that happen that then stop your emotional development that may happen in a single gender educational environment. Some of us become podcasters. Yeah. I mean, like I went to an all boys school and I feel like a lot of how I've ended up in my career has been very, that has been like based on that experience in some form. That's right.

What are you, what is that? 800 boys, a bunch of Catholic priests and a castle in the English countryside. What is that? A freaking podcast? That's right. What do you say? What do you call an act like that anyway? That's right.

So anyway, that was, that was Randall McDonald. A man I find very amusing. A figure who I feel like. Friend of the show. We are beginning to lose guys like that to politics. Yeah. He's like, he's a British Stooby in some ways. You know what else he is?

He is a chat pop ass man. Well, I agree in the sense that we are losing guys like Randall McDonald, but I think a lot of that is like down to like if we, if you think about what makes him so interesting and intriguing is the fact that like all his kind of grievances are these very small things that he gets obsessed by the idea of like not being able to like put on blackface and to smoke inside. He's like very kind of quaint and almost like even charming. Yeah.

The preference. Whereas I feel like now, like I feel like those grievances are there, but they're all wrapped into this broader culture wall thing, which is just kind of really odious. So you can't be a guy who just wants to be allowed to smoke inside without being mad at university campuses and mark like cultural Marxism and transgender people and like, you know, secret pedophiles and all that stuff. Like there's too much.

It took out cranks. Right. Culture wars. It's rot loss of our cranks. He's really embraced too much. He actually cares about these issues. And you know, most of them don't, but this guy actually does care. Genuinely, right?

This is this is a cross cultural phenomenon because they're like theoretically working class semiotic like basis of this. The equivalent of that guy is non hunters, right? Is the volunteer pedophile hunter and those guys also like they used to have been just like, yeah, I'll get in the fucking AOL chats, pretend to be an underage girl and then like put a guy in a headlock outside of McDonald's. And now they're all like a fucking George Soros or whatever. Politics has ruined our cranks, give us back our cranks.

We must protect the cranks. Give us back our harmless, innocent, stupid, stupid men who would just like put a guy in a headlock in a McDonald's car park or complain for an hour about not being able to do blackface. Or yeah, who have their like, you know, what a huge dark money funded campaign to be just about something very silly. Give us our dumb asses back. Give them back. Give us Greg Stuby should be smuggling coke and exercise equipment.

And Randall McDonald should be focusing purely on like a campaign to be allowed to use like a disallowed tartan. Yes. Yeah, this guy needs that kind of activity or else it's just going to get into politics. Often they ban from being too racist. That's right. Anyway, we have the same thing happen in the U.S. where like everyone who thinks, you know, who thinks that like our current system of weights and measures or whatever is a, you know,

a British conspiracy. Yeah, Lyndon LaRouche. Lyndon LaRouche couldn't be like fucking like even in fiction. Boom. How couldn't be like he'd be a Q and on guy now, right? Yeah. Yeah. All those guys are now like Republican party like committee men and they're like in their

excerpt. It's just they, we lost, we lost these cranks because we didn't do enough outreach. And what I'm saying is we need to like preserve the next generation of cranks for the left. We need to reach out to these cranks. We need to tell people like, fuck Starmer. The real opposition is telling people, no, every orchestra you've heard in your life has been slightly mis-tuned.

Hemtrails are real. The fucking like the CIA is shooting you with a gun that makes women not want to have sex with you. Any number of these things. That's right. They are doing that. We've got to own this territory. Otherwise, the right will.

That's right. Yeah. Anyway. I'm back smoking in pubs. That's right. Left wing position. That's right. That's quite a cool left wing position.

It is in my eyes. I hate to say it. But in order to preserve our beautiful cranks, I have to say it, bring back smoking in pubs. Sure. Well, at this point, whatever it takes to unite the country. But at this point, I noticed we've been going on for quite a while. So let's say Matthew, thank you so much for calling in today. Thanks a lot, guys.

So this has been a lot of fun. And I'm going to go into my local pub and light up. And if I get dragged out, I hope you guys will spend the next episode. Oh, yeah. According to me, we will basically we will start a free speech Soviet Union. Oh, absolutely. We will start an entire political movement in the UK to get you out of jail because you're a prisoner of conscience.

That's right. At this point, also, yes, it falls to me to say thank you for listening. Don't forget to subscribe to our Patreon five bucks a month. You get such wonderful episodes as the other ones we do. That's right. The one coming in a couple of days is another TF macro with with FinTwit Heavyweight, the Emily account. So I'm going to do a shameless plug.

I have a new podcast out with Abby Thorne and Devon. It's called Kill James Bond. It's about why James Bond's a dick. We have a Patreon. You should give us money. Give us money. I need money. Yeah, that's right.

Alice needs to buy more masks. That's right. More so. More surgeries. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And yeah, listen to the Bottleman. Listen to Masters of Our Domain.

Listen to 10K Posts. Listen to... We are addicted to starting podcasts. Listen to We Have a Way to Die. All of those. Yeah, we're... Well, that's that's it. I guess we're just addicted to doing echo praxis.

I just won't face it. I'm addicted to pod.