TRASHFUTURE - The Shawinigan Handshake

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

This week, we’re talking about a mental-health startup that’s even worse than the man made horrors you thought were beyond your comprehension, some particularly spicy UK legal news, and a simple request for people to be honest about what they actually want, politically. Hope you enjoy! Support the Sheffield JustEat riders on strike! Their fund is here and really, really needs your donations: https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/sheffield-justeat-riders-are-going-on-strike-pay-rise-not-pay-cut If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Milo has shows coming up in Berlin, London and Brighton. Learn more here! https://linktr.ee/milo_edwards *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). 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... Fuck, what was the name of our Sirius IR podcast? Oh, Jesus Christ. I hate the little button on the back of my head that I push every time we're done recording. Every time. Yeah. Well, welcome to whatever that podcast was. It was like narratives and like narratives and refuses. I don't know.

It's gone like so many leaves in the wind. Yeah. Like piss down the fucking dunny. It's gone. I have been spending a lot of time. I've been spending a lot of time sending Alice the titles of different IR essays. I don't know if you had done this bit before, but when you listen to those Sirius ones, it always goes things like, Hello, and welcome to the world this evening.

This is the world. This evening is a really good fucking name for it, to be honest. Yeah. It's like an economist ass name. And you're kind of like, in this podcast, we speak to fascinating people about the... I fuck... My brain is just not there because it's like one of those things that you really have to script, but crucially... Hello.

And you're listening to views from your window. Oh, the sicko's podcast. There's always this like fascinating people looking at global events that can be very overwhelming, but will shape our lives and our futures. And they're looking at those events through a lens too, which is how you know that you're really serious. That's right. So in this case, I remember what it was. It was Refuse of the Future, Challenges in Geopolitics from Metternich to the 20 Seconds. There we go.

Do you want to start again with Hello and Welcome 2? Yes. I will do that. Hello and welcome back to this episode of the rescue... Fuck. That's fine. Let's just leave it. Oh my God, dude.

No, I have to leave all of that in. Look, okay. Serious IR podcast. We are now present... My fellow serious scholars of international relations, we have been presented with a new development, a sui generis development in the development of the international sphere. Yeah. Dangerous escalation has happened in a multipolar sense. We are forced now to ask if reading a poem by Bono is considered in Russian tactical doctrine to be a nuclear strike.

Well, of course, Radhe, this is thoroughly out of the ordinary for the Irish government who are generally neutral on all military matters and previously have only deployed Bono in a UN peacekeeping capacity. So Bono has written a poem that was read by Nancy Pelosi, which essentially is... Why? Yeah, that's like putting... For what reason? It's like just being like a poem by Bono. Well, it can't get more annoying than this. How is the sentence going to end?

I love that one of the most powerful people in the most powerful country in the world is like your weird art teacher who is like brought in a poem from home that she thinks is really going to inspire us in these difficult times. My son Bono. Nancy Pelosi wearing a pair of dungarees. My mononym son wrote this poem. I think it'll really inspire you in your GCSEs. Given that she's reading poetry while presumably barred out on a secret rich people version of Xanax, she is getting dangerously close to being like soldier boy. Well, if she did crank that soldier boy, I would respect Nancy Pelosi a lot more. Well, now it's cranked that peacekeeper boy.

I would like to honor the people of Ukraine by saying you. So that would be it. And apparently, yes, it has been... Soldier boy has been badly affected by the no-fly zone. Yeah, because he's too fly. Yeah, that was the joke I was going for, but it helps when you explain the punchline for me after I make it. That's right. That's right.

That's the sauce. This isn't an ableist podcast. We're explaining jokes for people who are too stupid to understand them. The poem, of course, has been beamed into the Russian nuclear fleet and they no longer have a second strike. That's all right. I want to talk about a few things. We have got a startup today, but there are a couple of items I want to talk about first. Number one, you thought supply chains were returning to normal.

Yeah, they are not. Oh, no. Oh, no. Not my supply chains. No. How will I get my bono poems? We've already done this. We had the fucking supply chain crisis.

We called it correctly like we do everything else and then it was supposed to be done. We're just finished with it. You can't bring shit back in. I'm afraid the main villain from the second half of season three, which was supply chains, is now combining with season five. The writers of the show are on strike. So we have to bring back B-roll footage that can't be used and repurposing them. We're like 24. We're having to bring back old villains because we're running out of ideas.

So the reason that the supply chains are going to be turbo fucked again is that China is entering into a series of COVID lockdowns. So like Foxconn has shut down production. Have they tried doing nothing like we're doing? Well, you know what? We've tried having a vaccine that works. That's what's funny about the whole like the zero COVID policy in China thing. And people are being like, you get like annoying people online who are like, see, this is what China does when there are three cases of COVID in a city. And it's like, yeah, because they're fucking vaccine doesn't fucking work.

This isn't showing how good China is. This is like them covering for the massive fuck up they made by developing a vaccine that doesn't work. I'm definitely in like the Lib camp on this. I'm like, I love this shit. I love punitive lockdowns at any cost anytime anyone has a cough. I am that person that both of you are furious at because I will fully be like, oh, someone across town feels a bit ill. It is now illegal to go outside. Yeah, Alice is like, I've trained for this.

You were going on dates with girls. I was studying that. That's right. That's right. I was studying 1980s German firearms. Yeah. But yeah, like everyone I've spoken to who's living in China is like, dude, it's so fucking annoying living here right now. Like you just, everyone else in the world is just being able to do things and go to places and generally have a life.

I hope you didn't want to buy anything because like a car, for example, already got one baby. Oh, right. The worst one. Yeah. And the worst BMW, the most evil car company. Yeah, buy an exhaust for that car. No, I think Volkswagen is the most evil car company. That's true.

No, there are another couple of car invented by Hitler. A couple of things. NFTs, wouldn't you be surprised about this? A recent analysis of the whole NFT market has shown that monthly buyers dipped below 800,000 for the first time since its peak. The average NFT price has fallen by almost two thirds. Oh, no, but the how because they're so naturally valuable because they're like the pictures of monkeys. So now's the time if you want to buy an ape going begging by the dip. Yeah, absolutely.

That's right. So the entire market cap, in fact, of the NFTs has like overall has been like worse than cut in half. Unfortunately, it's still $10 billion. Great. Awesome. Also, like this article, which is published on one zero also shows that if you look at Google Trends, global keyword searches for NFTs are down by 70%. It was a fad. It was a fad.

It was always a fad. It was like a pet rock, except dumber and like much more expensive. Exactly. What effect is that going to have on racism? Because when people stopped googling the N word, that was a good thing. People stopped googling NFTs. What does that mean? Well, I think what it's going to mean is that we're going to lose a lot of dope swagness.

Oh, no. And they're still googling Frank Sinatra because that's another important factor. That's a callback from years ago. That's some season one shit, baby. We're talking a startup here. We haven't done a startup in so long because we've been caught up with talking about like stuff going on. I'm tired of it. We're going to talk about some stuff going on later on in the episode.

But first, so many of our startups lately have been like Web 3.0 bullshit. It's very difficult to follow. And Web 3.0 has also just imploded. That's right. I think the metaverse seems to have been like every metaverse projects are crashing left and right. Web 3 seems to be more rug pulls than actual projects at this point. But I keep getting tweets from like very real people telling me cool project with like some weird coin or like synthetic character on it. What's really funny about the metaverse is that like it was a bubble driven primarily by people who didn't ever actually see it.

And at some point they had to. But all of these people would like read blogs or read the Wall Street Journal or whatever. And then eventually at some point they had to put them in a room with some poor fucker from meta who was like, here is the metaverse. And everyone realized at once that it has PS1 graphics and all you can do it is peel potatoes. Like from what I see because I wrote like something for the Guardian this week in the tech newsletter about this. And it was like this very sort of like critical like a kind of moderately quick because I didn't really have that many words. But like it was a moderately critical article about like the idea. I had to add all of those words about transphobia.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Of all the creative. Yeah. To add like three or four paragraphs about women and girls. Metaverse is a women's space. Yeah, I had to like submit them just to kind of get through the first edit. Anyway, look, um, yeah, like so I published this thing and like it was about the creator economy and it was basically just the idea of saying,

but look, the creator economy is just another way of getting more people to do gig work. Right. And if like anyone who does creative work or like is a creator on a platform, like that's fairly obvious. I then was like inundated with emails and LinkedIn requests from like various VC funds who are like doing quote web free projects to be like, Hey, would you like to go for like a coffee at this private club to talk about like the benefits of web free? Right. And they always, always find out. So yeah, just bring like your, just bring your theater masking cloak.

Um, no, because, no, because they would never do that. They wouldn't have a theater masking cloak party. But like what was really interesting or what I kind of like observed is the fact that, okay, all these people work in marketing. Like, and like so much of like the web free phenomenon is this idea that like in this, in this, in a kind of like an economy that's like abundant with content market, like marketing people have to like jump in on stuff really, really fast. So actually like it's, you know, where you sort of have this like untangible idea that like no one really quite knows how to describe.

You then got like marketing people who are very, very like quick to jump in on the stuff and tell you that this is the future. And I just sort of wonder whether like there is whether like how that sort of affected, um, like, you know, V could be kind of like faith in web free. Like just the idea that there hasn't been enough kind of real people to like believe in this or even want this to happen. It was just like, it was just like aggressively marketed to buy people. But like marketing people who, but marketing people who have to keep chatting out content. Well, we, the marketing will continue until the apes are all widely adopted by everyone. But no, this is a normal startup, nothing to do with web three.

It's just really fucking stupid. Does it make a product? Uh, sort of. Yeah. Is that product going on the computer? Yes. Okay. So, so we're back to sort of like season two, three, four kind of stuff territory.

Absolutely. It doesn't make a thing that you can have in your house, but it does make a thing. It's called deep well. Deep well in your house. You can crack under your house. Yeah. It's less useful than that. Deep well digital therapeutics specifically as it's just all therapeutics deep.

I'll even go one further. I'll give you the first line of the copy. Deep well unlocks the potential of blank to deliver widespread access to powerful mental health treatments at scale. What's now? What, what is something that would be really silly? Gaming. Yes. Correct.

Oh fuck. No. God, on a stack of Koran's, I did not read the notes for this. How the fuck did I get that right? Why? What? What? I always keep, I always keep the startups in a note and a different Google doc from the

one that we ever read. Alice, all you ever see is the word startup. Yes. Yes. And just off the dome gaming, the power of gaming. Yeah. You're too good at everything. I have, I want to like find out some more about this because I think that like the idea of using like

video games and mental, like it's not like an uncommon. I've seen, there are things that like, it's not like an unserious proposition to kind of think that like video games can be useful for mental health interventions. However, I have a feeling that this is an incredibly stupid approach to it. Yeah. They're putting mental health in Fortnite. Right. You could, you could.

It's a new kind of like plugin for Tekken where like instead of inflicting just physical health, you could also there's an extra bar where it's like mental health as well. You show them posts on an iPad and then inflict mental damage. Yeah. I'm using my special power in Tekken, which is reminding someone about their father. So here's the thing, right? Hussain, you are right. Like there is, I think there is like a case to be made that like you should be creative

with the way that you reach people with mental health. There's a non-stupid way to do this. I get the sense that you have not found a non-stupid way to do this here. Well, it's even, it's a little more, it's a little more sort of further on than that. It's the, they haven't actually made any games yet. Oh, okay. They certainly, they have a call out to developers that if you've made a game to submit it to them and they'll put mental health in it.

Oh, okay. Great. So it is like a plugin. Sort of like a plugin. I want to see him put mental health into some pre-existing games. I want mental health call of duty for... We're going to... This is so...

How are you, how are you doing today? Like seriously? Because it's honestly some of the missions we've been doing are quite high stress. It's call of duty with Prince Harry as like your main quest giver. There's a bloke here. He's going to check in on us. So... All right, Chops.

So essentially, right? They say that they, that you can, you can, they say, sorry, it takes one whole minute before Wilson, one of the co-ceos. This is an interview at Ed Gadget. Oh, the beach ball from Castaway. We're not together. We co-ceo. It takes one whole minute before Wilson drops the phrase, quote, digital psychedelics into

the conversation. Oh, boy. Okay. He's an evangelist for psychedelics with endless stories about Burning Man. The person therapeutics, he benefits, he's... Oh, one of those guys, okay. Psychedelic therapy was a starting point for Wilson and Douglas and they're looking to mimic their respective shift in calming effects of those substances through accessible digital

experiences. They're focused on alleviating a mental health crisis that was exacerbated by the global quarantine. So instead of, instead of putting Prince Harry in call of duty, they're going to put Ayahuasca in call of duty. You know what this is? This, remember, like there's those like YouTube videos that were like, this YouTube video will get you high because it plays at a certain frequency or whatever.

It's this. It's by Norwell B. Incredible. Yeah. Well, it may not be powerful as sitting with a macro dose of mushrooms in a couple of therapists. That's two dueling therapists. That's right.

They're going back to back in the mix. You're doing mushrooms, the two therapists. One's asking about your dad. The other one's asking about your mom. It might not be good for... It might not be one session, two sessions or three, but it's an adjunct therapy that's good for you. Literally every game is up for review from the DTX crew, from platformers to narrative

adventures to RPGs and shooters. And so the first games are due to start rolling out in 2023. Now, what I really caught me about this, right, is how they position their product. So they say, play, this is from their marketing copy. Play goes beyond entertainment. It is the power to transform our lives. And it starts with an epic game like yours. Why can't anything just be entertainment anymore?

Like it's doing more for my mental health when everything is shit to just entertain myself. Why does it have to check in on me as well? This is the thing I'm doing to avoid being checked in on. A version of Elden Ring. Fucking leave me alone. Fuck off. A version of Elden Ring where it says, don't worry if you didn't beat this boss for the

30th time. Oh my God. No, I want to immerse myself like, you know, the real monster are the ones inside of us. Deepwell takes your already compelling game and harnesses the neurological hooks that make it engaging to deliver therapeutic treatment. Let your game lead the way to a healthier future. So this is from VentureBeat, a tech news site. And that's really funny.

I checked the press release that they sent out. The article in VentureBeat, boy, does it have a lot of similar words to the press release. Conceived in this COVID-19 pandemic. Deepwell's DTX enabled games represent a new tool to confront the widespread crisis. And this is where I wanted to pull it out that continues to threaten health care systems around the world. That's right. Instead of like therapy, we have prescribed you gaming.

Instead of therapy, we have prescribed you parts of I4. We've accidentally made you much worse. Yeah. We've prescribed you becoming a kind of esoteric fascist. No one remembers anymore. You used to be depressed, but now you can be a phalangist. Before we branded it as Hearts of Gold 4. I might be a Nazi, but I really care about how you're doing.

So you failed to take Stalin Gads. That must be so hard to do. The thing about Evan Romulus, he checked in on his blogs very often. Did you check in on your unit? Everyone hold on for this sentence that's going to annoy the piss out of you. That goes for listeners as well. As disparities in access to quality health care have persisted and worsened during the course of the pandemic, so too a forecast for the future.

The United States Department of Health and Human Services predicts that by 2030, mental health will become a leading medical concern. But again, they're saying, so play a game about it. Yeah. Basically. But not in a way that you enjoy already, which would be the reason why you would play it. No, instead make it sort of more onerous and medicalized and tick some boxes to say that you're feeling fine

in a way that like is capital M, capital H, mental health as opposed to things that might relate to how you're actually feeling. Yeah, now in those online shooter games, as well as there being a place in the squad for a medic, there'll be a place in the squad for a therapist. If any of your players are feeling down, they just come around and like... TF2, meet the therapist. Hey.

Yeah. Why don't we just take a deep breath? Remember that stress helps us cope with situations like this. It's like you have... If you hit triangle, you switch your gun, you switch it again, and you hit it a third time and you switch to CBT, which like improves your overall resilience. Falcon ball torture.

Deepwell is bringing entertainment and medical science together to build on the proven fact that video games can be good for you. I think this is the product of someone trying to stick it to their mother. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. It's grim though. I really don't like this one. What I also love about it is that there's no substance to it whatsoever.

At no point do they explain how they can make a video game that's good for your mental health. They do. It's just more like... Wasn't that funny? Oh, right. Yeah. It's about like, you know...

It's just like how to get a message to someone. It's like telemedicine that's less interactive. Getting teabagged by your new therapist. Yeah, that's right. My new therapist calls... Full of beauty, but like the death loading screen is just like, hey, why not take a minute and make yourself a green tea? Ooh, caffeinated.

But also like... Dwight D.I.'s now. To think about like that this is happening also while the U.S. has just decided, yeah, we're just not going to do COVID anymore at all. We've just like... They literally... This isn't just like people deciding to remove restrictions. The Congress forgot to fund vaccines or treatments for COVID.

They had to listen to that poem and it really affected them emotionally. Yeah. So like that's just kind of it, right? They're the people in charge of the COVID response in the country are just like, yeah, sorry, they didn't fund us anymore. So we can't buy any of like the monoclonal antibody treatments. We can't like buy more vaccines. That's cool.

They're just going to be like... Not only are they not vaccinating the developing world, they're also not vaccinating most of America. And that's a quality, baby. They believe in it. I guess so. But like, yeah, but hey, don't worry about it. We're going to have like a video game that like treats COVID at some point.

It'll be really... Well, the video games that will be very good at managing AD like collective ADHD. Yeah. You can see Dr. Mario. Of course, by the way. It gives you ADHD at the same time that it helps treat it, like cancels itself out. A nice neutral game. Of course, this is...

All of this spending is being cut for like getting COVID vaccines to uninsured people. So now COVID vaccines in the US just going to be very expensive. Unless like something is done to patch this whole, which I don't know if there will be. Maybe they will decide, oh, wait a minute, COVID is kind of still happening. We should probably get vaccines and treatments to people that we just failed to do, but also probably they also won't. Different things in the news now. Just to also bear in mind that like COVID, I think like in America,

there was a clip that was sort of going around of Ron DeSantis, who like yelling at kids, like who were wearing masks, right? Kind of just saying, but you know, this is COVID theater and like, you know, you don't need to do this anymore. COVID's over. Like why are you virtue signaling, et cetera. Like basically these extremely online terms like these terms. And I think that like in Florida and in Texas and I think in Arizona as well,

what's been very interesting is that like COVID hasn't quite disappeared, but it's become like a fully immersed cultural issue. And one, so like even if there was kind of like a reconcessed plan to like manage COVID or at least to kind of like provide vaccines again, I imagine that it would just, it would be shut down because crucially, like it's no longer really like a public health crisis with a cultural kind of attachment. It is very much like a cultural issue with like a public health attachment. Maybe.

It's very funny that the governor of the state like went into a school, probably to do some bullshit PR appearance, like, you know, read them a book while 9-11-3 is happening or whatever, but instead just like, you kids are fucking cucks. You're all virtue. You're all virtue signaling. Yeah, he uses the term and I was just like, wow, like the real pandemic is posters brain infecting everyone.

This is like bi-partisan because now you have Putin talking about how Russia is being canceled and how everybody who doesn't like the war wants gender freedoms. So it was, it was, it was both. It was, it was like, you can go and live in Miami or like, or Italy and live in your villa and have your foie gras and gender freedom. Meanwhile, the governor of the state that Miami is in is like talking the exact same way. So it's perfect. I can't, I can't believe that Rod Liddle is writing speeches for Vladimir Putin.

It's crazy. Enough of these gender Marxists. Right. It really is a triumph of the spectator writer. At long last, at long last living Marxism has triumphed without ever doing any Marxism. They are like the most successful political magazine. Yes. Yes.

It's like if we went off the air, all it went and became sleeper agents in the state. And then like 20 years later, the largest news source in Britain was like getting your dicksuck.com. Yeah. The prime minister was a Swedish Italian man. Exactly. Exactly. We wouldn't affect anything different materially, but all of our little fucking like jokes and goofs would be in there. I'm suggesting also that whenever this state that we sort of, you know, seize control of more or less, our greatest enemy would also be speaking the same language.

You have the same concern. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. So I want to talk a little bit about one more, one more item before we talk about events, which is, I don't know if anyone remembers. If you recall that some, some years ago, there was a politician called Jeremy Corbyn and he was sort of dogged by what were mostly spurious accusations of anti-Semitism. I'm sure it isn't most of his career. Well, it turned out, wouldn't you know this, that one of his top A's Laura Murray, who was spuriously accused of personally being an anti-Semite by Ian Austin, who was elevated to a peerage for his efforts in fighting anti-Semitism in the Labour Party by the Tory Party,

that an article he wrote in the Telegraph calling her an anti-Semite baselessly turned out to be the subject of legal action that she took on the basis that it was baseless to call her an anti-Semite. And wouldn't you know that she won like 40,000 pounds out of it? And extracted an apology from Lord Austin, both in, in form of the Telegraph's corrections, but also a personal tweet. Now, what she didn't do, what her legal team didn't do was to say, you have to put please retweet in there, which means she had worse lawyers than Jeremy Corbyn did. And what she also- Then Bradley's got a copyright. Yeah, and what she also, her legal team also didn't do was say, you have to keep the replies on. But what happened was, Ian Austin turned the replies off on his tweet apologizing to her, but not before one single glorious soldier of the left got in under the fucking wire and simply replied to him with, owned, perfect, greatest use of Twitter.

But like, if you think about this, right, this is going to cause nobody to reassess the situation, none of the principled campaigners, and the judgment found, right, that she was working hard. They had been legally admitted in the British court system that Laura Murray was working tirelessly to fight any anti-Semitism that was in the Labour Party. As we know, like this isn't like the courts aren't where these things are, if you'll excuse the choice of words, litigated. They're litigated in the telegraph. And so like having to do a correction that nobody but us is going to remember or notice is like a relatively small price to pay. Paying exorbitant amounts of damages is a relatively small price to pay because the damage has very much been done. And I think it is like clearly by this point, it's not possible to repair it. It's like the smear works and it just continues to. So all we can do on the left is just remember that this happened and occasionally dip it and be like owned.

Yeah, or like this you. That's the only thing we can do. We can only this. I think it's this is one of this go. The reason I'm going to talk about this is obviously not because I want to talk as you say, right? Not to imagine that like, ah, this will surely be a corrective. This will or to point out the hypocrisy of the principal campaigners against racism who haven't taken someone who again has been legally found to be a principal campaigner against racism into their ranks and all this stuff. But rather just to underscore that the most important that in relation to all of these things that are going on. Nobody else is going to remember it because everybody in Britain has a dog brain. Yes. So you must remember there. You're you're going to want to forget, but do not.

After any circumstances, allow yourself to forget. I mean, there's also just like and we know we me and Nate so talked about was with the Trojan horse stuff as well. Where a lot of this where a lot of this stuff is also kind of very tied into. Careerism and is tied into like the very small circles of like media and politics in this country and in London. So even when things turn out to be remarkably wrong and like I would encourage like listeners to like really read that correction. Because like in simple terms, it was very much just like every accusation that was made against Lord Murray was found to be entirely incorrect. And that there was evidence to support the con like there was evidence to the contrary. But like none of this is going to matter.

Like it's not to say that like none of this is going to matter because maybe like long time in the future it will. But it's to say that like in this current moment, even when even when these types of like even when even when these like obvious mistakes are kind of again, I don't really want to call them mistakes. But like even when these kind of like, you know, obvious fake accusations are revealed or when like Mr. Beaners are exposed or, you know, in the case of like Trojan horse where like, you know, an entire like, you know, structural bureaucracy is sort of shown to be actively discriminating against people. There are too many people who are like invested in the logics of that and like their careers are very much embedded into that for like any type of self reflection or institutional reflection to even be entertained as a concept. Which is to say that like the kind of like the I don't necessarily want to say fantasy because like that sort of dismisses all of it. But like the scale at which antisemitism in the Labour Party was presented and was utilized during the election. There were so many people involved and still involved in that for like various other grievances that have nothing to do with antisemitism. But like this, yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I'll sort of leave it there because like I think people know what I mean. But yeah, I don't want to spend too long on this either, right? Because there's little you can do other than just remember and just don't pretend that, you know, this organization cares about you. I mean, obviously they don't or whatever. But you know, congratulations to Laura Murray, a small sliver of good news. Yeah, financially at least. Here at here at trash future farms, we remember stuff. We don't really do anything else with it.

We just remember it with little custodians of memory here. Anthony Costa from blue remember him. Remember the members of JLS. We're pretty sure we could name at least one of them. Yeah, I couldn't because I'm not from here. So I wanted to sort of transition into transition into events. Riley, you only remember Canadian things. So it would have to be like, remember Jean Chrétien.

I do. Yeah, I do remember Jean Chrétien. I remember that Shawinigan and shake there. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's when he pushed a guy's face away. He was trying to like, you know, fuck with him. He says, hey, I gave him that Shawinigan and shake. Yeah, he was in the gay soul knows this guy.

I was very sleepy. Listeners, look up a picture. Look up a picture of the Shawinigan handshake. I'm amazed that you didn't name your Canadian politics podcast, the Shawinigan handshake to be honest. Now it's too late, isn't it? Yeah. The Shawinigan handshake is when you get jacked off in the gay soul.

That's right. I don't think it is. I don't think Jean Chrétien jacked that guy off. That's a different small Canadian town. It's the Fort Mac handshake. I want to talk about this, right? Because this is in other news of, you know, my hands are registered as a erotic weapon.

In other news of things are happening that have happened before. I'm going to cast once more back to Corbin, and then we're going to bring it back to the present day, which is that when he accused the Tories of being, you know, awash in, you know, money linked to various kinds of criminal Russian oligarchs. The response, of course, was should Corbin resign for this remark? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

And now, right? Once again, when Starmer said, going cap in hand from dictator to dictator is not an energy strategy. Once again, the same thing is being deployed against him, saying that's a very distasteful thing to say as we go see, like all of our friends in Gulf monarchies, asking them very nicely to increase oil production. Please do not point this out when we're currently, you know,

trying to do the embarrassing thing. Yeah. Stop it. There's nothing wrong with a good beheading. I mean, Kier Starmer has committed one of the great, well, you know, he's miscalculated once again, because what he doesn't understand is that if there is one thing that British people will fight for,

it's not really for like the future of the country. It's not really for their children. It's not for institutions, but it is in fact their cars. Kier Starmer is threatening the country with not being able to use their big cars. Yeah. Range Rover mom is ready to drive into the southern part. Kier Starmer ever shows up in Dartford.

Oh boy. He's in big trouble. The people's, yeah, the people's militia will be there. He's not welcome on the Elizabeth the second bridge. Kier Starmer banned from blue water. Can I tell you something very funny though, right? I don't know if it's going to live up to the Shawenigan handshake, to be honest.

British listeners might know this, but American listeners might not. Is that Johnson failed to secure commitments from the Saudis to step up oil production? I fucking love Saudi foreign policy. Yeah. He refused to convert to, he was like, I appreciate you, but like I am a Shia Muslim

and I'm going to stay a Shia Muslim. He's a Turk. Absolutely. He lost in his heart for Vienna. How fucking cocked are like US and UK? How good are the Saudis? The one thing that all of these sort of massive foreign policy concessions,

all of the just dumping money in there, basically building the country such that it would be run by people who so long as they were friendly to us could do whatever the fuck they want, supporting every fucked up thing they do, like getting into like being... Doing a naval blockade to enable their pet genocide as a favor, writing them off,

like hacking a Washington Post columnist apart with source, like favor after favor after favor, and then we try and call one in back and they're just like, fuck no. Listen, Jamal Khashoggi walked backwards out of the Saudi embassy in perfect health. How he then afterwards ended up in a suitcase is beyond anyone's explanation.

I respect the Saudis here so much, because like it takes so much fucking chutzpah to play us like a fiddle for this long, right? To just get like every single possible concession out of us and then when we really are over a barrel of oil, they're just like, no. Yeah, no, sorry. Fuck off.

We won't be doing that. Yeah, fuck off. Oh, awesome. Perfect. Yeah, just like it's... I mean, it's sort of... We were talking about this earlier, right? Like, oh, by the way, just before we go on,

you know what the UAE is doing with its energy industries? It's privatizing them. Not just its energy industries, but also its power generation capacity and its water production. It's privatizing them for some reason. That's like borderline suicidal. The Saudi thing here is I think quite canny

if like obscenely trolling. Fuck, that's more like Jesus. That's like reading too much fond mesis and like dynamizing your own economy. It's like they took a like... They have taken a... Essentially like this just... A Britain Pilled.

Yeah, kind of. They've taken an investor in... Argentina Pilled. They've turned themselves from like, a kind of just money generating machine, oil exporting kind of all this. They're turning themselves into Britain or like Colonia Dignidad

with some free market experiment. Yeah, great. Couldn't have happened to a nicer country. How are we going to be able to afford our white belts? The Saudi Air Force is going to have much wider, broader belts. Oh, you hate to see that. They're going to have so many more dates

in Baklava and the cockpits of the F-22s or whatever. I think every... Look, every American president gets to have one insane war against a small country. I think Biden should be against Saudi Arabia. We bring Iran back into the fold. Which we are sort of doing. We team up and we get the Saudis.

I don't know if the U.S. military is capable of defeating the Royal Saudi Air Force. I mean, that's a lot of Dior belts, you know? Those guys with their 2008 era shutter shade visors. It's great. Just like, again, it's just like it's... For some reason, they've taken... They've welded a Bugatti badge onto the front of the plane

so it falls apart when it's flying. It's somehow worse than the F-35. Yeah, I mean, as you say, this has led us to some strange bedfellows, right? Because now we need oil. And we need oil... I say we, I mean the U.S., the UK, Europe, whatever. I know that's perhaps fallacious to say we,

but I'm using a shorthand, fuck off, don't at me. So we need oil badly, and therefore we're going to anyone who has it. And this has led us back to Nicolas Maduro, who is the legitimate president of Venezuela once again. Crazy. I mean, good luck for the Silver Corp guys. Yeah, no, that's real awkward.

Trouble is we don't need silver. Right. There's just... Oh, the Silver Corp guys, they can just fly to Donbass and I'm sure they'll be treated very well. So, yeah, I guess... Juan Guaidó is now out of a job overnight. I almost feel bad for him.

No, I don't. I'm lying. I don't feel bad for him at all. Right, but also like Iran and the UK, like this intractable sort of prison, prisoner of swap situation seems to have become much more tractable. We found a way to pay them the 400 million pounds we owed them.

Yeah, but we got an ear in Austin's account. What's really funny, right, is that the debt that this is about, right, is we had contracted Britain had with the Shah of Iran to deliver like some amount of tanks. Then the Islamic Revolution happened and we decided that the deal was off and the Iranians still wanted compensation for this.

And so we've paid them something like 400 million quid. I think there was an easier way out of this and I'm remembering my contracts tutorials and I think the answer is, we simply send them a shitload of 1979 vintage tanks. Yeah, send them some chieftain tanks. Yeah, what are you complaining about? We have fulfilled every like contractual obligation.

A tank where like everything inside is made out of asbestos. What we're essentially doing is trying to repair. There's just this whole, the fact of this whole geopolitical alignment, that's realignment that's taking place, right? All of these axes of sort of alliance and enmity and some, so I'm not saying, it'd be ludicrous to overstate the case

and say we're now aligned with Iran, which is still like talking to Russia and everything. But it is like... I think it speaks to like how weird and how unexpected a person invading Ukraine was, that it's thrown everything out of whack to the extent that we don't really know where anything's going to land yet. And it has led us to these strange places.

And like sometimes history has a way of doing this. Do you remember the like week where Donald Trump almost reunified Korea until he got mad fucking Robert De Niro and then got bored and left? Oh, yeah, awesome. Love that. I took a very tough life. One of my favorite things she's ever done. I said, Britain now recognizes the fourth Caleb

and you're just going to have to accept that. That's why he didn't return on the oil because he's too sheer. But like all of these, if you recall, for sort of every journalist and think tanker, fucking from Thomas Friedman to the American Enterprise Institute to the Henry Jackson Society,

all of these organizations have, for as long as we can remember, right? They have been pushing the line that, you know, the foreign policy decisions made by the US, UK, et cetera, et cetera, are made on a straightforwardly moral basis. The big geopolitics switch has been turned to off since 1990. Yes, yeah, like there was a brief,

there was a brief sort of like pause in this when we had neocons, like, who were like, actually, no, this is good. We should take an exercise power in order to like, you know, have a new American Century. But that was very carefully like hushed back up again. And so you just had this whole sort of like media industry all crowding around with their backs

to the big switch that says geopolitics and being like, yeah, it says off actually. You can't look at it, but like, trust me, it does say off, there is no geopolitics anymore. Everything that happens is a straightforward moral test. And we certainly aren't doing anything that you could describe as like real politic or like anything like that.

The geopolitics button is in Boris Johnson's office, right next to the stop Brexit button and the racism button where all the letters have been worn off. Yeah, every leader of every country has all of these buttons and switches in their office, like a big like railway signal box. And they spend, yeah, they spend all day like shifting levers up and down and turning hand pranks

and pushing buttons. There's the shawinig and handshake button where if you press it and a robotic hand comes out of the wall and jacks you off. Oh, it pushes you away by the face. That's the shawinig and handshake, you fucking asshole. Yeah. Stop getting some of Canada wrong.

You're really going to have to rename the bottom. Yeah, but I'm hacking back a cock here. I went out for a jump scenario, bud. No. I hate you so much. Getting a shawinig and reach around. Getting jacked off and going, oh, fuck yeah, bud. So getting a shawinig and handshake in the bottom of the table.

Getting a shawinig and hand joke. So this is something we were talking about Alice earlier, right? That this is what we talk about. And this is mostly a product of like the Obama era, foreign policy, right? Where the US decides. Yeah, where like the president is a benevolent philosopher king, but like, I feel like you have to understand this

basically as you having been lied to, right? And not just by the media and not just by think tank guys, also by like the president himself at times. So it's like, no, I just like, I'm not doing, I'm not doing any kind of like great power shit at all because there's switches off. And of course, secretly he is doing the great power shit. He's just doing it to people and in places where, you know,

you're not going to see it or like it's not going to matter as much. Like you can, you can do a bit of genocide and Yemen or whatever. You can do drone strikes. Yeah, you can do drone strikes in the Horn of Africa. You can do like special forces raids in Pakistan, whatever. And this like worked for a while, right? In the sense of most people didn't care because like people are like beaten down, atomized and ignorant and somewhat racist

and all of this. Except now our boy, Putin has kind of thrown a wrench in this, right? By invading Ukraine. And now all of a sudden we have to do shit that's visible in a place that we're already like primed to care about. Like whenever Jens Stoltenberger, whoever else says that like the invasion of Ukraine is the first time wars been back in Europe since 1945. Like, yes, he's forgetting the Balkan wars because he's an idiot,

but he's also forgetting them because they're kind of like, they were seen at the time and they were treated as at the time as this like peripheral thing that you can kind of like, not really worry about that much. Whereas this is like now in the framework of like civilization or whatever. Well, I think the way I sort of see this, right, is that for a very long time we were pursuing this strategy, a strategy of confrontation, right? But massively undermining.

And again, I think that I believe that the strategy of confrontation was the wrong one to pursue, but that also it has been pursued badly. Yeah, because we kept sabotaging ourselves by lying about it. I think that's the thing, right? We tried to have our cake and eat it or rather NATO did. We tried to eat a fish and sit on a dick as the Russians would say. Exactly, exactly. And the eating of fish was like pursuing this strategy of confrontation with Russia.

Miami, they used to eat fishes and sit on homosexual dick. And the sitting on homosexual dick part was like then immediately backing down off of things and pretending as if we weren't being imperialist because that was the last thing that would ever come to our mind. And it's like, now we've been forced into this position where we have to like snap back to actually, OK, we are going to do real politics. The big geopolitics which is on, it is stupid and naive and facetious of you to complain about us going cap and hand to MBS or to Maduro or to anyone else

because that's how great power works and we're doing great power now and you're stupid for ever having thought otherwise. And I mean, it doesn't have to be that way, but I do kind of agree. Those people are at least being honest now and I think what's incumbent on us and this is kind of tied back to the like this you remembering shit that happened thing is that now that we're doing this, now that we've all sort of taken off our masks and we're agreeing that like, oh, NATO is like this geopolitical force that does have to act and think like an empire, right?

I think it's incumbent on us to go, OK, you can never go back to telling us that the geopolitics which is off again because we remember where we were when you just decided to come clean with us. That's exactly right. It's that they're because as soon as this is over, they're going to depend on you to forget, right? That whatever over looks like, it's going to be like, well, that's done with now and we can go back to being a sort of like moral international actor guided by first principles as opposed to like a great power

that is trying to counterbalance another. Yeah, absolutely. And if you want to even take this one step further, right? What I sort of allude to quote, unquote, when this is all over, right? You can sort of look at this not just in terms of, you know, imperial management. I mean, like, we're most sort of in terms of foreign policy, the main argument sort of since 2016 has been, do we do competent imperial management or incompetent imperial management?

And a lot of people went for incompetence. That was the biggest failure of the Obama doctrine was like... Well, there are pros on both sides, you know. It was to be like, oh, I've built this system that requires the gentle, deceitful touch of a benevolent, spy master, philosopher king. And then the game show host guy from The Apprentice inherits that job. Any time I think about that, that's just so funny. It's like a sort of much bigger, more constant, it's a much sort of bigger

and in terms of like, you know, its ability to inflict pain like more consequential version of what the UK like Labour Party did in the 2000s building all of the institutions that require a philosopher king. Trump actually kind of was a philosopher king. He's like constantly wrapped up in musings. He sort of had the presidency thrust upon him and kind of abhorred the office. He just, all he wanted to do was do his tweets and thoughts and he did and he was president out of a sense of duty, you know.

I think Trump is the closest to a philosopher king that America has ever had. Probably ever will have at this point. Yeah. And crucially like one, like the kind of most recent president who's like mythology sort of exceeds them in quite like an expansive and global way. I know that like people try, people try to attribute that to Obama but I think Trump kind of achieved that. Yeah.

Well, and also like, like Mithridhati's isn't so many Big Macs that he's now a mute. So I want to also like talk about not just the sort of, the sort of the transformation of obviously these imperial sort of management institutions into straightforwardly imperial institutions with geopolitical aims that are related to geopolitics. But you can also see it in how the world of investing is grappling with current events. Where I don't know if any of you might have seen this. It's almost as if those things are like linked to some part of ideology.

Oh, come on. That's crazy. On the subject of investing, I found it so funny when all of these like massive Western companies were having to queue up to sell billions of dollars worth of Russian assets that they had. But like we're not talking like retail companies or whatever that had like stores in Russia, but like get like British oil companies in America who'd bought up huge chunks of Russian state oil companies. And it's like, did you honestly think this was a good idea?

Like you could almost, you could ask the guy in the street, like, do you think buying some of a Russian state oil company is a good investment or do you think there is a massive political risk there that is entirely unpredictable? And like the average guy in fucking Dagenham would have been like, no, I wouldn't do that. But be like, what can go wrong? We signed a contract. Too fair.

It made all the people who did it rich enough that they could, you know, retire with their various golden boats. Well, I guess. Plus, as we've seen from Iran, contract law wins out in the end. We're going to get our chieftain tanks off of the Russian. They're going to have to learn how to make them first. The big mistake is the assumption that Putin loved treats enough that he wouldn't do anything too out there.

And the ultimate effect is that when Putin realized that treats weren't enough to live a fulfilling life that he wanted to have, you know, he wanted to have his Napoleon moment. Because fucking Jordan Peterson went to Russia. This is the thing that struck me about the analysis of this whole thing, right? Which is that there's like this massive lack of complexity in the way people think about it, where like NATO and like the West has pursued like a confrontational strategy with Russia in like in recent years.

But they had the treats guy before Yeltsin, right? Like that that was the time to like not do a kind of like corporatist raid on the Russian economy and kind of like hug Russia tight and bring it into some kind of like modern world consensus where it has like a proper functioning economy and institutions that work and so on. But by the time like Putin was being Putin, there was kind of no non-confrontational strategy available, essentially. They'd already made the mistake.

And so then when people are like, Oh, well, NATO should have done this. And it's like, no, like I saw a good tweet where someone was like, it's a shame that NATO gave Ukraine all those weapons, because otherwise Putin would have been forced to embrace the brotherhood of man. And it's like that is just Russia. It's just like the people assume that Putin is like playing. I think they're like wrongly kind of putting him in the same box in their heads

as like the Iranians who are kind of like boxed into a corner and actually have proven they're quite willing to come to the negotiating table at like all sorts of points in the past. And it's mostly been us who have like fucked it up. Whereas like, no, like Putin just has his own game that he's going to play and you can't really like nice him out of it. But that doesn't also mean that the West doesn't do bad and stupid things, but like two things can be true at the same time.

Yeah, absolutely. I want to talk about this thing right here with this transformation in ESG, this thing we've talked about before, right? ESG is like ethical investment. Yeah, environmental, ethical, sodium glutamate. Environmental social governance. You invest not just for a return, but because you want to generate an outcome. You know, it's all very like, you know.

I invest in the tree planting companies. I want trees to be planted. And I invest in the grass planting company because I want grass to grow. What makes grass grow again? I don't know. I invest in the boring company because I want Tesla owners to die. Basically, there is no sort of working... There are sort of various working definitions of ESG.

It's not a legal term. It's not a regulated term. It's basically a marketing term. But generally speaking, it's for investing that might exclude like fossil fuels or tobacco or weapons manufacturing. Now, given the news, right, analysts from quote in the FT said, defense is likely to be increasingly seen as a necessity that facilitates ESG as an enterprise,

as well as maintaining peace stability and other social goods. So... I know. I remember suddenly what makes the grass grow because we're doing ethical arm stocks. That's right. That's right. Oh, yes.

Biodegradable AK. That's what I want. So basically it means like, classing defense as an ESG category because like, even by their own standards, right? Even by their own standards of good guys and bad guys, right? Defense company contractors will generally sell to fucking anyone, right? Yes.

If you're investing in a company that's going to make like, you know, N-Laws for Ukraine, you're investing in a company that's also making bombs for Yemen. Sure. They'll sell to anyone it's legal to and also a lot of people it isn't. Hey, it's defense. It's not offense. Go on.

But like, all of a sudden, right? There's this rush. There's this serious consideration from like actual people like within like MSCI, some of these sort of like ESG companies that grant like organizations that will say, here's our ESG index, whatever, to bring defense contractors. Here's your like fund of stocks, yeah. To bring defense contractors in, right? It's being seriously considered at that defense contract.

I'd like to feel like BAE systems. It's being seriously considered at this point. And it's like... Yeah, British Aerospace ethical systems. It shows just as like the concepts that these sort of axes of alliances and enmities, whatever were sort of, you know, turns out they weren't straightforwardly moral. The surprise is nobody. It also turns out that this thing about ESG investing, like again, it is purely this

sort of marketing push, but also it seems to be to me a way for like people who invest a lot of their money, who read the news to try to make themselves feel better about the news. It's just a strategy of investing that tries to like, it's news anxiety relief. Sure. Well, I mean, I think you can talk about morals. And now that we are talking about morals, right? I think you can justify the idea of like, in particular, like arming Ukraine, right? I think you can go into that with your eyes open and you can say this may have, may very

well have all kinds of horrible consequences down the line when some fucking like, as are for right sector guy, you know, uses some of our very ethical syntax to blow up something in the West he doesn't like. I think you can still say like, this is less worse than us not doing it. I think it's just again, it's incumbent on us to be like, okay, but you have to, we have to like, remember that you said that at the time. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. If you say like, it is, it is a deal with the devil, right? To arm combat 14 or whatever. I wonder what that 14 stands for, right? But that's, that's a deal with the devil that could be anything. That's a deal with the devil that we are making. And again, we're going to be asked to forget. You're going to be asked to forget that that's what it is that we're doing.

We're making, yeah, we'd be flood Ukraine with all these weapons, right? We saw like the recent like import of all those weapons into Ukraine, like the 20 million rounds of ammunition, all these pistols, like rifles, all this stuff. Like that doesn't go away after this is done. And a lot of it is going into the hands of, yeah, people like Azov, Adar, C14, they're the main beneficiaries of what's going on here. Arming a fascist militia that happens to be incorporated into the national defense structure of a country.

Like, as though that won't have short run effects when whatever shape the Ukrainian state, because at this point, I think it's, I don't like making predictions, but I think at this point, you could probably say, at some point within the next four or five years, barring the unspeakable, there will be some kind of Ukrainian state, right? Sure. And that. And the people who are going to have a lot of power in it militarily and politically are going to be fascists, whose reason for existing has been conveniently very legitimized

by being invaded by Russia. In a sense, they're kind of legitimizing one another. And it goes back to this, it goes back to, I mean, legitimizing one another in a propaganda sense. There was never a way in which the Russian invasion of Ukraine would have been justified, but one incidental consequence of it is that like the denatification that was kind of a relief for the whole thing would still, I think, have ended up with the leaders of like IDAR and right sector and as often prison, right?

And so like, instead of instead of going to prison or getting disappeared, they're going to be like an even more important part of the armed forces and even more important part of politics. And that's, it's going to be, it's going to get worse in a lot of ways. And so the, and so what's, what, I mean, what a lot of the sort of the sort of the world's dopiest investors are trying to do is put a straightforward, well, this is, this is nice. This is not nice label on, yeah, flooding.

You get like a rain forest alliance thing on your Semtex. That's right. You know, soil association. And I think it's, this goes, it goes back to like the decision to the decision to like the decision, I think it goes back to something like where you say, right? Like the time to like to pursue a non-confrontational strategy with Russia was in the 1990s. Right. To not like, I don't know, humiliate your, to not humiliate and sort of strip mine the

economy of your defeated foe. Right. The time, and again, like I tend to think whatever results come out of a time when you're 100% hegemonic or kind of your fault at base. Yeah. 100%. They had so many options with Russia in the 90s. And equally right when, when it became time, you know, to take that mechanism of foreign

policy, that, that, that sort of delicate sort of mechanism that requires a kind of Obama style philosopher king, again, fucked up all the time, but sort of thought of himself that way to administer it. You end up right, you end up sort of say looking at the situation on the ground in Ukraine being like, well, there's this group of football hooligans because they were a football firm from Kharkiv called Azov. And, you know, we're just going to kind of arm whoever we need to because it's urgent that we take immediate action now.

And all of a sudden, right, these guys and groups like them are now completely inseparable from, from like, they're, they're now metastasized the politics there. Right. Don't like, you shouldn't, they're not currently dominant in politics, especially not in the way that they've been portrayed, especially not by Russia, but like they are there and they're getting more powerful and all this war does is make them more powerful. And again, at the very beginning in 2014, the decision that was, there was a, we went in and we said, they're what we have.

And so they're what we're going to work with. And, and this, the, because the big geopolitics switch was on all the time, we sort of made that decision just like we've made that decision with like every other group that we empower and then say, well, no more, no blowback from this. This is a straightforwardly ethical thing to do. And yeah, exactly. Like I think, I don't think there was a credible way of turning the Ukrainian armed forces into what they are today without engaging with fascists in some way and supporting fascists

in some way. I think that was a situation we were kind of boxed into. I think as, as you say, it was a decision we made with our eyes open. And it just, it makes me think a lot about Libya, right? Because I think Libya rose from at this same sort of combination of like a genuine horror at what was happening and also a kind of like grand geopolitical desire that then resulted in us arming and training some of the worst people in the country and one of them coming back to the UK and blowing up a fucking concert full of children.

So I, you know, there's all of this shit repeats itself. And I just, the only thing that I would ask really is for like enough honesty about it as we've seen, as we seem to have had this time, right? Because I think people made the calculation that like by and large, the British public didn't give a fuck about Libya. I think they're probably right. I don't think that's true about Ukraine. So it's more difficult to just sweep it onto the carpet.

But I would rather that if we're going to, if we're going to do the thing of like, okay, we're going to have sort of like a position on Libya, a position on Ukraine that requires us to work with people who are not nice and that this may come back to bite us, that we should at least say so at the time. Yeah, or play it. The fact that there was, that was always a possibility. We know now that that was always a possibility means that like, I think retroactively it's possible to get much angrier about all of the shit that we did and then lied about.

And I think further to that, right? Like we, it goes to show, I think, how little we actually care about the places that we intervene in because I'll tell you this for fucking free, right? As soon as whatever this is, as soon as there is a, say, Ukrainian state in place, whether that is after sort of some period of an insurgency, whether that is after some kind of cynical compromise or whatever that'll like allows people to rearm and then the problem's not really solved. Whenever there is one of those again, and yeah, and like, you know, whatever normal

politics is resumes, then we're going to just leave this place flooded with weapons. We're going to leave it in the hands of newly empowered fascists. We are going to just leave it to their devices so long as they continue to ally against us. And I mean, the people who I think we are going to abandon are Ukraine's ethnic minorities. We're going to abandon their sexual minorities. We're going to abandon religious minorities. We may abandon quite a few more people because we, with our straightforwardly ethical foreign policy, decided that this was something that we sort of had to do and that, you know, we

are, and that when this is all over, we're going to be done with it. And there is going to be no, there is going to be sort of, once the crisis is over, once, you know, once it sort of retakes its form, whatever that form is, I'm not going to say what form that's going to be or when, right? You know, there is no plan for dealing with these people because I think they're people that we prefer dealing with. Yeah. And I got help them if the Ukrainians end up in the fucking EU because all we'll do is

the same thing that we've done in the Balkans, which is build them a nice like aluminium and brushed steel and glass building in the centre of whatever their capital is that's called like the Institute for Price Stability, that like whenever anybody suggests doing any kind of social welfare program and EU bureaucrat just fucking like whips the back of their knees with a baton and then nothing else, everything outside that is like whatever dirt roads they can scrape together. So great, fantastic. This is going to go so fucking well.

Here's what we can offer you. We can offer you Semtex that we've made ourselves feel good about supplying and that's it is the thing. There's nothing else. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the complex part of it, right? I don't think there's like, I don't think there's as we were saying, there's anything wrong with the strategy they're pursuing currently. It's like what they're likely to do afterwards.

That's the problem. But that still doesn't make because I think there are a lot of people who are like, oh, well, like, you know, we should just let the Russians roll in there and do what they're going to do because that's kind of the pacifist strategy, which is effectively advocating for like a kind of like Vichy France wasn't so bad type situation. Like think of all the lives that will be saved by having a Vichy France. And I think there's a kind of there is a kind of moral cowardice in that of being like, okay, so you basically believe that there's nothing worth fighting for.

And like people, people shouldn't be allowed to defend their homes because like someone might get hurt is kind of like, I think it is it is like it is a fucking pale streak of piss of a moral argument. But however, if you are going to give them a load of guns and help them defend their homes, which I think is the right thing to do on balance, you know, you do that does leave you with some obligations afterwards. I think I think the thing is if you do take that line, especially on the left of being like no war, but class war ever, this is I would rather like just fucking leave the Ukrainians

to it. You know, good luck. Have fun. Or not even good luck is like Ukrainian should surrender because less people will die that way. Yeah. Like again, I think it's I disagree with it as you do. I think you can make that moral argument.

As as with fucking NATO, I just wish you would actually make it instead of like dancing around it pretending like you're not like it's not something you have to address at all. Yeah, 100%. Anyway, like it like you can't fucking like bullshit me on like everything that's ever happened in the world has been NATO's fault. Right. Just fucking say the thing that you believe it's all I ask on both sides, say the thing

that you think would be like necessary evil here. Anyway, I note that we've been going for a while. So I think I'm going to say once again, a bit of a bit of a somber ending to this one. Remember deep well. Do you want to talk about come for like video game company from earlier? Oh, yeah. Those guys were fun. Yeah.

They're going to hell. The Ukrainians with their mental health. That's right. Absolutely. So I think that's going to be that's going to be it for us for today. But thank you for listening. Thank you for tuning in. Don't forget we've got a we've got a bonus episode every week.

It's five dollars a month. Wait a second. This was the free one. It was. It's the free way. It's been the free one. Yeah. I put you on your fucking back foot.

You bitch. Yeah. We got we got plugs, baby. You gave him the Shawinigan handshake. That's all right. He wanked me off. Yeah. We go.

Listener, do not be deceived. I did not wank Milo off. Well, then it wasn't a Shawinigan handshake. April 20th in London, there will be a TF live show. Remember the TF live show that was canceled because Nate and I both had COVID. Well, it will trash huge of rides again. No, it'll be canceled because we all get like Havana syndrome. Yeah.

Or like whatever the next wave of COVID is. Yeah. March 27th. I'm in Berlin doing my new show. That's soon. That's going to be like, as you listen to this, that's going to be this weekend. So come to that if you're in Berlin. If you're not in Berlin, hey, maybe get a flight.

Backyard comedy club London May the 1st. I'm doing filming my old show, Pindos, finally, actually this time, I've threatened to film it a number of times before this time I actually have genuine professionals who are not going to fuck it up. Yeah. That is right. It's cursed. The show is cursed.

But it's happening. Tickets. All these links are on my website, which is in the description and April 17th. I'm going to the worst city in Britain, Brighton, to do my new show, Voice Mail. So do come to that. It's being organized by the show. Tom Allen. I like that sort of for your worst city in Britain, you've chosen what is generally

thought of as a sort of well to do pretty town in the south. I think that's going to turn a lot of people on to us. No, but Milo's hatred of Brighton really comes because it's difficult to drive in. That's part of it. I wasn't lying to you. That's part of it. I thought it was mostly general sort of like lib demness of it. I also associate it with my ex-girlfriend's family who were really dreadful.

All right. Okay. Yeah. That's part of the lib demness. With all that being said, I'm going to thank you very much for listening. Don't forget to subscribe. Do all that stuff that Milo said. Fly to Berlin if you're not in Berlin.

Absolutely. We will see you on the bonus episode in a few days. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.