TRASHFUTURE - The Tortoise and the Harebrained News Heist feat. Michael Walker

Episode Date: October 23, 2018

It’s that time of year again: the leaves are changing colour and there’s a new centrist ‘solution’ (or, rather, investment vehicle) to the problems of both the news and politics. On this week���s Trashfuture podcast, Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Nate (@inthesedeserts) spoke with @michaeljswalker  from @novaramedia about the ‘slow-news’ platform Tortoise and Chuka Umunna’s new centre-right think-tank gig. You can catch Michael’s show TyskySour (and a number of other excellent Novara videos) here: https://novaramedia.com/category/video/ Mark your calendars: on October 30, we’re doing a live show in London. Get your tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-halloween-spooktacular-tickets-51361920888 Also, remember that your favourite moron lads have a Patreon now. You too can support us here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/overview Don’t forget that you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/. Get whichever slogan you want, but get the damn shirts!

Johnny Mercer developed breasts like an unusually young age and had one of those like creepy older boyfriends that everyone thought was cool at the time, but then everyone realized it's like a 19-year old dude who dates 13-year-olds and actually that's kind of weird. But then like he'd like come and pick Johnny Mercer up from school on his Piaggio moped. So everyone would be like, shit, Johnny Mercer is doing well for himself. Look at that beardy guy in the rain mac picking him up on that 50cc moped. He's doing pretty well. That early breast development is really paying dividends to him now. We were all mocking him before, but you know at this point he's going to start his own Tory party and none of you can be in it. It's going to have a sign saying no girls

allowed on the outside. It's kind of like the regular Tory party. Look, I'm going to give you one last chance at honesty. Did you insinuate my wife was a prostitute in the Plymouth Herald's comment section? This is so great. I didn't actually do it on the Plymouth Herald's comment section. It was on a different comment section. So technically speaking, it's so good because it's like he seems very defensive about the guy insinuating that his wife was a prostitute on the Plymouth Herald comment section because he's used the word insinuate, which implies that it wasn't an out and out accusation, but he's like reading between the lines. Like based on the less than decorous way in which you refer to my wife, I can only assume that you're referring to her

admittedly regrettable past. Come to the left. Your wife is a sex worker. That's cool, man. You know, we can. How many comments does a Plymouth Herald comment section get? Quite frankly, like was this just the one top voted comment or like was there a comet flame war going on back and finally upvoting it? Exactly. There's like, Oh, this is such an own. I mean, just really, really getting into it. Thousands of Kremlin bots on the Plymouth Herald comment section upvoting insinuations that Johnny Mercer's wife is a prostitute. It's like it's this most entertaining place on the internet. I mean, half the time, you know, you're hearing about Johnny Mercer's wife. The other half time you're learning about, well, I make six fifty, sixty, five hundred pounds

per week working from home. It's an amazing deal. No one knows about it. Johnny Mercer's wife is local mom. You know, the real thing is, right? Like they say that the Plymouth Herald comment section brought us all together. Really, I think actually what if the Plymouth Herald comment section is actually dividing us more than ever? But here's the thing, right? Okay. So I came to this late and I only saw Johnny Mercer's tweet in response to something that had been deleted. Did he ever link to the comment? He didn't get screenshots. No. So in a sense, he's just kicked everybody out onto like a wild goose chase to go through every comment section of the Plymouth Herald, trying to find where Johnny Mercer's wife is, is slagged off in a very roundabout way that

doesn't, that only insinuates. It doesn't directly declare it. Listeners. I'll say, we have a task for you. Alex Kealy. Yeah. Wait, hang on a minute. Maybe we're owned. Maybe, maybe this didn't really happen. And he's just like, he's like, yeah, some credulous ideas. We'll totally talk about this on a podcast. He just wants to drive up the page used for the Plymouth Herald. I mean, really, this is a viral marketing scheme for the Plymouth Herald. The dude he's replied to is deleted his account. He had an account this morning. I was thinking we should have, you should have DMed the guy. I don't know what the comment was, but he's deleted his Twitter. Oh my God. This is like, it's one thing for me and you to have this dispute, Dan,

but I will not have Jeanine drag through the mind. Dude, you can say whatever the fuck you want about me. Okay. Yeah. You saw if you insinuate that my wife is a prostitute and they play with her on comment section. Oh boy. Hey, once again, we're back with TF for another week for you. It's me, Riley. It's me, Milo Edwards. Surprised that we're doing introducing ourselves now again, randomly, because this podcast is organized. You can find me on Twitter at Milo underscore Edwards. I started introducing all this replying to Dan Mercer about, about where we can learn about his wife. What's his name? Johnny Mercer. Johnny Mercer. Who is Dan Mercer?

No, it's, it's, it's like when, when Johnny Mercer goes like beast mode and decides that like it's time to get revenge, he becomes Dan Mercer, a hybrid of Dan Hodges and Johnny Mercer. Fate worse than death. And then we have Nate Bethea. Sir extraordinaire. It's me, Nate. Really dropped my glasses at in these deserts on Twitter. And we have, and we have Michael Walker from Novara, host of Tiskey Sour on same. How are you doing today on this Friday night? The party night. The party night. I know I'm very well. It's the night. It's where we're here. There's a disco ball. I wish there was a disco ball. We should get a disco ball. Okay. I mean, I was expecting like a disco ball, sort of like a cocktail bar.

I mean, with our reputation as like 1960s playboys, like you really thought we were going to have like, I'll be here in like sailors. Exactly. That's what I was hoping for. Quite frankly, the first thing he saw when he walked in the room was Elon Musk and a tux. So I mean that does set the bar quite high. Doesn't it? Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Everyone's doing cocaine with John F. Kennedy because that's what everyone did in the 60s. Oh, for sure. That's absolutely. There was scarcely a cocaine party in like 1960 that John F. Kennedy was not at apparently. I love presidents. They're such cool people. I know huge at some point they transitioned from like out now white nationalists, slave owners

to sort of like American psycho juniors and whether that's like the model UN style American psycho like Obama or the like, you know, clownish American psycho like Trump. It's all that it was seamless. It was World War Two. World War Two was the dividing line. Look, all I'm saying is okay. If I'd have been at that party, JFK would not only have given me a hand job, but he would have sung Happy Birthday, Mr. President to me because he knows that I'm a better president than him. In fact, in fact, as part of being president every day is my birthday. As an aside, I have to say this because I know we go down the rabbit hole of American politics sometimes, but more often than not, it just is Milo doing a Trump impression. There is an American

politician who's insane. His name is Tom Cotton. He's a senator from Arkansas birthday. He likes to eat a slice of birthday cake every day and apparently he and his wife, his wife that he didn't know until he got married because the room the the the rumor is that it's a marriage of convenience, but I won't go into much detail lest we get sued for libel. Apparently they both were just avid fans of birthday cake. That's how they met like because that's a normal DC marriage like you like birthday cake every day for some reason. So do I get married. I love that being like. Hey, Libs, I bet you think you can only birthday cake on your birthday. Well, guess what owned is politically incorrect. You might not have health care, but this is freedom.

Birth cake every day birthday cake. I'm fucking tired. Sorry. It's the cake that comes out after you get birth to a child. So I'm just going to jump jump right into it. A Facebook famously great company has decided that what they're going to do in order to fix their terrible reputation is they've decided to sort of burnish themselves by associating with Nick Clegg. Seems like a fine idea. Yeah, we need to take on someone who's just uniformly popular to really boost our brand really, really trustworthy. You know sources say the decision to hire Clegg is not designed to be a quick fix, but a quote bold example that the company is committed to tackling Facebook's policy and reputational challenges. No, like you wrote a note on the Google Doc to this effect.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's very well suited to the job. So I mean, his role in the coalition government was to take a group of right wingers who are ripping off the British public and give it a sort of smiley liberal face. Facebook, they pay 1% tax in Britain. They're obviously screwing over the British public. He's there to sort of look like the legitimate face of Facebook. They know he's not popular in Britain, but I think they think in Europe, he might seem like a kind of reasonable guy. It's going to be good for him to be honest. I mean, he's going to be on a big wage. It's much better than being the failed guy who yeah. I was going to say, I mean, like, well, a brand with a huge problem.

What does Nick Clegg know about that? I can only imagine the one thing we can trust. Like this is what how this might actually be good is like Nick Clegg being hired by Facebook means that within a year somehow, Friendster is going to be the dominant social network. My space will just make this weird sudden resurgence. Absolutely. I think the Facebook isn't screwing over the bridge. Probably when you really think about it, because you know, they may only pay 1% tax a year, but they are giving the British public a golden unique opportunity to share memes about this soldier who saved a baby in this town in England. But no one will share now because you're all Muslim, you know, like the kind of stuff that my nan posts on Facebook.

And without that kind of commentary, you know, where would the discourse be? I will also say this, if Nick Clegg is going to work for Facebook when assumes he probably has to move to Silicon Valley, right? Yes. So in a sense, Facebook, as much as we hate it, has done us a favor by taking Nick Clegg out of Britain and forcing him to move to California where the time zone difference will be so obnoxious, it'll be very hard for him to weigh in on anything in real time here. Actually, that's actually an unexpected bonus of of Nick Clegg becoming Microsoft Clippy to Facebook. Yeah. Well, so the thing about I kind of the way I felt about this story was that like Nick Clegg is like, you know, a very flawed politician. But I mean,

he's not going to be like morally the worst person at Facebook. Like Nick Clegg is kind of like, I feel like if you met him, he'd probably be like reasonably nice. I don't feel like he's a bad person, but I just don't understand why the fuck Facebook needs Nick Clegg. I don't understand like who Facebook what how massive was the line of cocaine that they did before being like Nick Clegg, we need to get Nick Clegg. And it's like, why he's a politician, he literally doesn't have just just get him on the damn phone. He's going to come out of retirement for one last job. Well, I mean, basically it's one of these comms things where it is just it's just influence peddling, right? We're all of these sort of cushy comms during appointments,

whether it's Chuck Romano getting appointed to his nonpartisan partisan fucking think tank or James Harding starting his like, you know, fake news group home or whether I might say fake news. It's a fake news. Yeah, it's that it is a fake group home for news or I didn't understand that sentence, but let's just move on or or Clegg home for news. It makes sense. Oh, now that you've said it, I trust him more. It's not the way syrup thinks. It's all it's all just influence peddling because they hired him because they wanted to like be able to work with the European Commission after Brexit because like they don't think the UK is going to be an important market, probably quite rightly because after Brexit, then we're not going to share any more memes about

like the remainers and Muslims working together to establish a caliphate in your nann's garden. Hell yeah. I mean, I should probably clarify also that like my I don't think my Nan knows when she shares things on Facebook. So my Nan isn't actually like very offensive, but I think just like accidentally shares things a lot. Like there's a lot of other just random shit mixed in there like Tuesdays for picking flowers comment on this if you'd like to buy 15 t-shirts and you're like, what? I don't know. Did she insinuate Johnny Mercer's wife as a prostitute? It may have been her. It may have been her. She does spend a lot of time on the Plymouth Herald comment section. My Nan just feels very connected to the goings on in Plymouth

and she likes to give people her opinion on what's happening. I mean, I think if Nick Clegg is going to be the new sort of global head of comms or, you know, again, essentially just like a guy who's got like Michelle Barney's phone number more or less for Facebook, then maybe Vince Cable should take up the similar role for the Plymouth Herald comment section. Oh, wait. Hang on. The real social network. Vince Cable is like the Winklevoss twins of the Lib Dems because Vince Cable really invented the Lib Dems, but Nick Clegg says he invented the Lib Dems and like made all the money from it and now works for Facebook. That's exactly what I was going to say. I'm just interested though, because I assume this is going to be like an

advisory role because I mean, it's going to work like two hours. Yeah, it can't be like George Osborne at the fucking Black Rock. It can't be that he's going to be in a role in which he's actually going to be directing Facebook's comms in any capacity beyond like what you just described, a role, a dexful of people who are important in Europe. Yeah. Well, it's like it's going to be their lobbyist, right? Yeah, exactly. It's going to be the guy who puts on a sort of sensible face for what they want to do. Absolutely. So like, Junko Junko, what are you using? Bebo, get out of here. So like when I've got the website for you, when like, so it's not a sales, it's not going to be like you guys have you heard of Facebook? I just would love to see that happen

though, because I'd love to see the inept performance that would take place if he actually came into that role. But instead of it just being like a two hour week thing like you're describing, he's like, no, I'm here to represent Facebook. Like I'm going to direct comms at Facebook now. Let me tell my previous successes in British politics. Absolutely love it. If like Chris Leslie got hired by Uber and all he ever did was like going a hot air balloon over London with like a big banner trailing his promo code over it. Oh yeah. So it's a vague tangent about Facebook competitors. When I was at a well-known sixth form college, they made us like, yeah, I mean, which is the thing apparently, I often tell people like, which I don't know why I chose

not to name it. It was like weird. Like it's like a secret. I went to Hills Road, sixth form college, which is like, it's like renown. It's like, it's like, well, people who like are into schools, which is like not a lot of people. It's like, it's like, it's like pushy mums know about it, because it's like would comment on like newspaper articles. It's always like, it's always like an independent article and like eight levels. I was like, and again, the best state school exam results in the country, the Hills Road, it's like one of those. Where is it? North London? It's in, no, it's in, it's in, uh, it's in Cambridge, but I commuted there. Yeah. Milo's trying to say he got really good grades in college. No, I go read one, the

postcode lottery, which is exactly before the show started. Milo was insisting he was the only person in the room who was never a nerd ever, but I don't know if I can believe that. I was definitely like a, I was definitely like a book learning nerd, but I was never like a like weird online, like anime nerd. I was never that kind of nerd. Oh, hang on. A new challenger approaches. I've always been here. The same is just silently considering what we were talking about. I've always been here, but my headphones were on and I was just listening to like better podcasts. You're listening to the Romaniacs being like damn like the Romaniacs and Pod Save America and, and, and my, and my favorite podcast cereal season two, of course, the best version of cereal

who's saying it's just been sitting here just silent with his fingers, tented, just nodding, occasionally stroking, stroking the trash, future cat may or may not be a badger getting back to the subject of my excellent A level results, which I was in full in a bonus episode of this podcast down to down to unit scores. Yeah. So the sixth one college that I went to, when I was in, I think lower six, they, they, like the college it people invented like internal school social network. They did a mad Hancock called the inner tube and they, and it was, we were made to all sign up for it. Like they would literally like deny us access to like our college email accounts and stuff until we had signed up to like the Hills Road, sixth one college social network,

the inner tube. I don't know if it still exists. If you, if we have any listeners who are at Hills Road, sixth one college, please let us know if it still exists. And they were like, and that was the moment I stopped being a feminist. Exactly. Yeah. Because of some people on the, on the Hills Road inner tube comment section who insinuated some very unfortunate things about my waifu. That's where, that's where we all cut our posting teeth. Have we, have we talked about the, have we talked about the guy who has apparently insulted about MP's waifu? Yep. Yeah. We've been talking about it the entire time. You have your headphones on because you just wanted to hear Sarah Kanick's voice talk about both. You were too busy. You were too busy listening

to like John, like John with no H, Favreau, like talk to Kamala Harris about their great comedy show. We're going to be, we're going to bring dignity back to American politics, but we're going to like swear a little bit while we do it. And everyone's like, damn, this is groundbreaking radio. So guys, you heard of his, you heard of his thing called Brexit. Here's a pretty big deal. I said, you know what we should do? We should go on a march. No one's thought to do a march to start Brexit. Why don't they just freaking march? Yeah, especially with their dogs. I'm really excited. We're getting so off topic. Yeah. We're having serial, serial season three. Sarah Kanick investigates who it was that insinuated that guy. Then Johnny Mercer's

wife was a process. She on the Plymouth Herald coin session. She's like interviewing all the people who work at the Plymouth Herald, people who comment on there. That's when it has a moment of like a piano key playing and silence. She's like, when I comment on the internet, sometimes I want to talk about other people's wives. Why do I do that? I'm not sure, but sometimes I just get on British websites and I pick MPs off Wikipedia. The twist is that the comment section is run by Discus, which manages lots of different comment sections or different websites. And they've got like a, and they've got a base somewhere in, they've got a base somewhere in California and they've

got some other ones like scattered around the world. So these guys who are monitoring, and I think one of them is based in India, right? Which was where, because there was a piece that came out a few months ago about how Discus was basically facilitating all the far right commentators on the internet. And these are like, and news organizations use software like Discus because they are not liable for stuff that happens because they can say, well, Discus is a different social platform. So we have no responsibility. So it's like, it's a real way of like shirking away. I think like Gino Fox uses that, but like a bunch of like really the telegraph uses it. There's a bunch of like, you know, the places where you expect all like the right wing,

kind of fascist garbage is usually used by Discus. The only people who like take responsibility for the comments that they have in their comment for it are like, surprisingly, the mail online. I used to get very angry Discus comments on my student journalism articles. Yeah. People have listened to the show, I think. Yeah. By that, there's one weird tanky guy who went back and read all the articles I wrote when I was a student in order to get mad and prove that it was a waste of his time and it's like you could have just not read them. So last week, there are a few things, a few things happened. Princess Eugenie was married. The taxpayers footed a two million pound bill. All the rough sleepers were cleared out of Windsor

for the same for the second time in a year and we received the notice of another royal baby, but in the exact same week as that, the universal credit rollout has continued and is now leaving. We talked to Kimberly in our last episode. There's a conspiracy theory. Universal credit was cut so that we could pay for Eugenie's wedding. The sum's that up. The new royal baby is called universal credit. As I tie another piece of red thread across this huge poster board, I think what sort of highlights to me is that it seems as though the great and the good of our society have just completely forgotten that other people are watching their pageantry.

And that there is an extraordinary amount of awareness that this state of affairs cannot possibly hold. Does Eugenie even know that international hackers are watching her jack off? What? Do you not remember when international hackers claimed to have a video of you jacking off? I remember that. This was like three episodes ago. You know I push a little button in the back of my head that resets my knowledge as soon as you put down that. I've got to bounce again. Even though I'll always be here. The new episode came out. The new episode of cereal just came out. He's just downloaded it. He's got to go and listen to it. But it seems like the fact of these things happening in the same week. Obviously, it's not that it was scheduled,

but it does. It does seem to say sort of. I don't want to. I'm not trying to bum myself out here, but it does seem to say that like this, that the problems that we've been highlighting in our show that running out for themselves. Yeah, I agree more or less. It does seem like we're kind of in like the clownish cartoonish phase of thatcherism, Reaganism at this point, like some of the things that are just taking place and happening in such a way like with such a lack of self-awareness that I think you were highlighting. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting at here, right? It's like, I feel like we have at some point, and it was this wedding with it's sort of endless celebrity guest list with its taxpayer bill sort of at the same time as the sort of callous disregard for

like every other person in society. So, you know, Ariana Grande could congratulate, you know, could congratulate, you know, Eugenie on her wedding. Did she? I don't know, maybe. I fell that down. I like Ariana Grande. She wouldn't do that. I don't know. I'm just the first famous person I could work on Universal Credit. Is she? Oh, shit. Never mind. I retract my comments on Ariana Grande. We've talked about this before how Ariana Grande only became cool after her concert was blown up. Like she was never cool in any way before this, but just by being the victim of terrorism, suddenly people like, this Ariana Grande person is really cool. It's like, not really. It's like that Banksy. Yeah. No, but when I,

someone blew up Banksy, that would be pretty cool. I'm not saying do it, unless it was actually Banksy and he would be the ultimate Banksy. Banksy feeds himself through a shredder. No, but like, what I guess what I mean is like, it's weird. We've, at some point, we have crossed the border from like last days of Rome to all of our water is coming through decaying lead pipes last days of Rome. That was all of Rome, actually. The lead pipes thing. I guess I just, I look at that and on one hand, I'm like, I'm the class. What do you want from me? The things can last a while. You know, fucked up shit can go on. I've got a very good mark in my classical civilization. I love it. Okay. I think what I love about Milo is that as

the comedian, he once he makes a joke or something, he has to constantly make reference to it throughout the episode. It's sort of his thing and now he knows he's his look of resignation on this face that he realizes he's doomed to make his own a level jokes throughout the entire episode. We're going to be hearing a lot about a level. He's going to be punished for lost VA to module three just just like these people continuing to like the royals continuing to sort of have their very showy parties and celebrities continuing to sort of attend them and so on. It's just them as the more and more this goes on like this is I think what they are sort of trying to defend their privilege by saying, oh, we do something for you and you

even and even happens like with with billionaires as well, right? Like Bill Gates just went on the Ezra Klein show in Vox to say basically that like the booming population of Africa is the world's biggest problem and that the challenge is that Africa most quote quadruple its agricultural productivity to feed itself. That's very daunting and the health system is sort of far worse in most African countries than than in other other poor countries around the world. Their agricultural advice largely broken down. Government resources are low because the level of taxation is low and level of corruption is high as though this is just a naturally occurring thing and we need a we need a billionaire like Bill Gates to sort it out.

They're not convincing anybody that they're sort of worthwhile anymore. I think the mask is really slipping. Is that is that really a problem with Bill Gates or is that a problem with like colonialism and capitalism since like the 1600s because like Bill Gates, I think to be fair to him is like try like, I mean, you know, he's a billionaire, which is not good, but like he is at least trying to do something as flawed as it may be. Whereas like, I mean, like, yeah, the problem with Africa is obviously like hundreds of years of fucked up colonialist shit, but like it's not much that Bill Gates can do about that. But the thing is, it's the existence of billionaires and royals that keep these

countries like this. The fact that they sort of that they can exist in this enormous level of privilege. The existence of the British royal family does definitely not affect Africa in any way. I mean, it definitely did 200 years. That's what I mean. But like not now. Yeah, but I do think that like the contrast is pretty stark there. And also the there's a subtext to people saying, wow, there's just too many Africans. What are we going to do? Like, the world can't take this many Africans in the future. It's like, whereas if this were reversed into a situation in like in North America or in Western Europe, it'd be like, wow, a baby boom, what economic growth we can look forward to. Like, there is a frame to this that

is inherently prejudicial against the developing world and against Africans in particular. Yeah, there's an unspoken racist undertone. It's pretty spoken. He's not advocating population control, though, is he? He's just saying that this is, he's saying everyone else solve poverty apart from Africa and there's going to be more Africans in the future. I mean, the thing he ignores is the fact that the places where poverty has been reduced to the places where they were most successful at resisting the Washington consensus that all his body is imposed on the rest of the world. So the reason poverty is reducing now in Africa isn't because of Bill Gates, it's because of China. Oh, absolutely. And moreover, which is rich

because they ignored, yeah, all the advice of his buddies. But I mean, I think, I think agnosticism about what the Bill Gates Foundation does is, is fine if he wants to treat malaria like, yeah, that's great. But, but if he wants to present himself as the person who can solve Africa's problems, that's kind of offensive. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because even like, no matter how good a billionaire you were, you're never going to be able to solve Africa's problems on your own. I mean, that's kind of an insane task. I mean, it's like a, it's like a mad, it's going to require like huge governmental level, like infrastructure for people. Here's the thing. And this is, this is something I said, I said earlier. This is,

this is truer now than I think it ever was. Is that all is that most is that all journalists think they should be comedians. A lot of comedians think they should be politicians. Politicians think they should be in tech. And then the tech guys also think they should be in government. Yeah, absolutely. Like, I do not think I should be a politician. I can't clarify that enough. As you will know from the fact that I didn't do politics A level, but I did succeed at A level was in another area. Maths actually. Maths was my best A level because I'm a fucking. So now as a mathematician, he can tell you that maybe the population in Africa is just growing too fast and we need to

solve it somehow. I'm practically tapping away at my steam powered adding machine. And I can tell you that yes, indeed, if you add more Africans, there will be more Africans than before. I will say one thing though that because I've noticed this line of argument. I used to live in New York and I had a friend who worked in finance and you know, brought me along one time when he was meeting with an organization he wanted to donate funds to. And specifically, they ran a school in Tanzania, but they also provided like medical care. And I mean, he had been interested in seeing this, he'd seen this video, they put forth, he wanted to meet the people and they were in New York and they met with him and in

conversation, I just remember these women, they were both women from the United States. They devoted their lives to living in Tanzania and working. But at the same time, the commentary they made about like, well, when we offer medical care, we basically insist that women have to take birth control before they're allowed to receive medical care. And like that attitude being there, I was like, I was like, hold up now. I mean, I was just so taken aback because they just said it in a very kind of matter of fact way. And that attitude, I think what Bill Gates is alluding to like, even if it seems relatively benign in the context of this, like it's just, it's, it's billionaire trying to, you know, use billionaire powers to

solve Africa as productive. Exactly. But I do think that they're, that it's indicative of a much darker and worse strain of thought because of the fact that like, there are people who literally think that like, you know, that that should be the goal is to reduce the pop, not to slow population growth, but literally to like reduce the population or just to, or just to, you know, engender development. So it does so that a growing population isn't a problem. You know, it's quite simply like it's, which is strange isn't it? Because like you have this argument that permanent growth is what we need. Otherwise the world stops, but then I was like, but not too much growth there. We don't want that. It's like, uh, wait, are you telling me this whole

system is racist? I never could have believed that. No, no, no, no. Well, this is where you get into this is a classic one of the things where it's like, this is a real problem, but like the, where the right talk about it in the wrong way, because like, yeah, population growth in general is a problem because like there isn't an infinite amount of the planet and there isn't an infinite amount of resources and obviously like climate change and everything like that. It's just that when people talk about population growth, what they really mean is a lot of brown people around these days should probably do something about that, but they don't think about it as like, as a whole, like, ah, yes, maybe there needs to be a way of thinking about like it's sustainable living for

the future. When societies develop, like population growth isn't even a problem. Because once you become a middle income society, then your population will probably stabilize or shrink. Yeah, that's why it literally isn't a problem population. Everyone goes full Japan. It's like, it's that's, but that's like, that's, because that's, that's like what that's why I think like the gates and the Royals and they all have this in common where they've all identified a problem that their incredible privilege is the solution to whether the Royals, it's like, oh, well, we keep the traditional live. We sell commemorative plates and all this. So they haven't identified any problems. Well, they don't, but like their boosters do, you know, it's like, ah,

well, that's what we do. We perform this service and if we don't get to live in a gold house, then then this service won't be performed and the society will be worse off. The Queen just wants to wear dough pass hats. We got to get the Queen decked out in supreme. If there's a level in which I can relate to the Queen is on that one. And Bill Gates is like, well, I need to be a billionaire because I'm showing that it's worthwhile because look, I'm using all of my billions to create sex bots so we can give them to Africans so there won't be any more African. Sex bots. Bill Gates actually did say that our libel lawyer said it's okay for us to put that out there on the air. Bill Gates likes sex bots. He said Japanese waifu pillows were good, but sex bots are where it's

at. That's where the world needs to be for development to take place. Absolutely. Everyone needs to fuck robots and then the entire human race can quietly die off. That's the epistemology of the show when you get down to it. Everyone has to fuck robots. Yeah, everyone has to fuck robots and I'm interested. Yeah, everyone. It's, hey, it's like the police, like all of a sudden, like instead of, you know, massively over policing, sort of like low income areas or whatever, the police bust down like nightclub doors of guys, like in hats, trying to do magic tricks for girls and be like, hey, you have to fuck a robot. It's the best form of contraception. Yeah, absolutely. It is. What fucking a robot are trying to do magic tricks to fuck people? I do think that if

there was a thread tied us together, though, that the grotesqueness. I mean, I know, right. I was doing my American equivalent of my A levels. Yeah, we had this essay question about there is the American equivalent of A levels. Don't be fooled listeners. Except no alternatives. And if you absolutely want to accept no alternatives, you need to go to Milo's a quick six form college, the best one in Britain for the amount of money you're trying out for the energy. You hear that every everybody, every listener Milo went to a really good sixth form and his dad actually drives a Ferrari, but it's in the shop. You can't see it. So I guess the point at the point here is that talking about this contrast, like the grotesqueness of the the

contrast of poverty in the in the UK, in the developing world, this absolute like myopia when it comes to being able to understand like why these resources aren't being allocated correctly and then looking at someone like universal credit, which is just an act of want and cruelty at this point. He's just my Milo talking about like grinding to get ahead in your career, instead of just grinding forward and like never getting ahead because nothing gets better. Like that's basically a welfare policy in the UK. Like just continually obviously terrible getting worse and worse and worse. It's a wealth. It's a welfare policy that has been reduced to an Instagram meme. Well, yeah, but the thing about it is, is it much like much like this current government,

it just grinds on forward, never advancing, never getting better, often getting worse, but with no end in sight. Apparently, yeah, and it doesn't even do what it says out to achieve. Like all these things are like supposed to save money and they never do. They always just like create problems, which end up causing more money and they even buy its own logic. It's almost like they're not really trying to save money. They're just trying to be cruel. The thing it does is it lowers wages. So it's very good for the capitalist class, because the whole point is that if you make those guys again, yeah, I know. So it hasn't actually lowered the welfare bill because you have to waste shed loads of money on all the

administration and all the people who tell you that you're fit for work when you're actually about to die in two weeks. But it's really good for workers to undermine workers rights and to lower wages if they know that if you lose the job, you'll have to accept another one in a week. So it basically gives you, there's a big argument sort of like in Sweden in the 70s of like the trade unions, which is to say that if you have high welfare benefits that gives workers quite a lot of power in the face of their employers, because if the employer screws them over, they can go away, have six months on a similar wage as they had before whilst they're looking for a job, and if an employer is going to screw them over, they can say, no, I'll take a different job.

So this whole point, if you make it so that the only way you can possibly survive with any dignity at all is to take any job that you're offered, then obviously employers can treat you like shit. That's how you become a podcaster. Because basically what that is, and that's, I'm going to tie it together again, is what you see when you combine all of that together. It is something like, like, like Chuck Romana is like fake think tank that he's making 500 pounds an hour to do, or Nick Clegg's like role as the, you know, the phone, like the rolodex for Facebook, or even like, even like, you know, the, the, the Royals whose job is to wave, you know, this is just ruling class solidarity. All of these people have class consciousness,

and the only people who aren't allowed to have class consciousness is the working class. Everyone else all basically works together to shield one another and and and keep that position intact and keep everything more or less frozen, and then we're all going to die in a boiling ocean in 10 years. But I mean, Bill Gates can be a respectable, smart person and go out and, you know, smart as in, as he's perceived and say, wow, maybe there are too many levels, but nobody, nobody's out here saying there's too many fucking Royals and too many fucking weddings. How do you even keep up with them? I mean, quite frankly, as an outsider, I mean, like, it just seemed like weddings do statistically lead to more kids. So I mean, I,

sure, but I mean, I didn't go to more gay weddings. That's what I want. Royal babies have a really big carbon footprint. That actually is probably true. No, I mean, it is true. That's undeniably true. Richer babies have a higher carbon footprint than any other babies. Despite having tiny, tiny feet. It's very selfish of them, really. Yeah, that's the problem. They're all wearing size 13 Jordan carbon shoes. But if we're talking about how all the news is going too fast, don't worry because James Harding, former head of news, the BBC has a solution to all of all this shit

because I think you know a lot of the problems we're talking about everything we're talking about, you know, it could be solved if only people knew the real truth and didn't keep falling for this danged fake news. Can we insert the bit from a few good men here where it's like the truth you can handle the truth? I don't know. I'd say there's a 40 percent chance. Nate does that. I mean, I might just I'll either do it or I'll just leave your instructions impotently in the podcast when it doesn't happen. But we'll see. We'll probably get away with that. To even advertise it as a counter to fake news. I thought the whole point was he was head of news at the BBC and he was like, God, there's just so much going on. I'm overwhelmed.

Yeah, I only want to do five stories a day. That's more or less so much news. I mean, it's a bad job to take on if you find an abundance of stories overwhelming. That's right. Time I get to it. It's more like old some are right. We're talking about a we're going to replace Milo with a tropical fish be. We're talking about tortoise was a start. I start up that is finally solving the problem of news. We finally fixed it because it's not as though there are a million fucking. We've solved news by making it smart and outside the filter bubble startups already and they definitely have changed the media landscape themselves. There have been and they didn't. Because as we know, the first startup to try

and solve the news was Huey Lewis. Anyway, fine. Fuck it. It's not been a good episode. Let's not lie to ourselves. Don't pretend that's the worst thing I've said, Riley, because it isn't. I didn't get the reference. I just want to apologize to Michael. It's a terrible 80s band from the US. Yeah, people don't listen to the lyrics, but they should. This startup is essentially saying that there's too much news and people can't make any sense of it. And if they can't make any sense of it, they won't make informed political decisions. And once again, the problem of our current say crisis of liberal democracy is that people are just too damn dumb. They don't. They don't. They're too dumb or they're not well informed and there's too much news

or too much fake news. And if we can solve the news, then tortoise, this startup, thinks that then democracy will go back to how it was in 2015, more or less. It tortoise is a very apt name because it's the kind of idea that would be come up with by someone who is over 150 years old. I mean, I guess something that I'm struggling to understand is that for one, I like the point you just made here that like, go back to that paradise 2015 when everything was perfect. It's like, because basically we talked about this before on the show that like the last gasp of an era when you could pretend like politics was over. And now that all of a sudden, you know, there's these, these, these cataclysms have taken place,

you know, in Europe and in the United States. Also, it's forcing people to attend to the fact that there is actually like something is not right with, with neoliberal, the neoliberal consensus. But I mean, to me, I guess the thing is that if the idea is that the news has to be better versus like the massively billion dollar value disinformation platforms, not being sick, those need to be stripped of their power. That's my argument. And like the idea like, no, there should just be better viral news being shared on Facebook. It's like that doesn't actually make any sense because like until you take away the conduit by which disinformation is being spread, which in this case is, you know, a very cynical kind of like weaponization of,

of the internet and of people's gullibility and of like the ubiquity of these platforms, like until you can do something about that, it doesn't matter. Like because your comment here, the love child of Ted talks and the economists, like no one's going to fucking share that. They're going to share like the racism site that's like written in Macedonia or whatever. Oh, absolutely. The Roger Federer magazine. That also wasn't your comment. That was, that was how it was described by the founder. Oh fuck. I'm saying yeah between Ted talks and the economists. It strikes me as like, there's a universe where people hear that and they're like,

oh, that's a good idea. Like that's definitely not the universe we live in. And like, like that to me is beyond the point of parody. I'd be like, wow, Riley, that joke's a little bit ham-handed. Like try a little harder next time. I don't know. Maybe it could work. I mean, Vox, it sounds a little bit like Vox. I mean, I think they should have just sold it as that, which sort of like, if you want the liberal take on stuff. I mean, it's not a terrible website. It's not a terrible podcast. I mean, like, I don't really back it politically. But I mean, if they do it right, they could, I mean, it's, the whole launch of it was a bit cringe because obviously they tried to make out

that it was, there was this huge sort of like grassroots desire for this by doing a platform fundraiser. But I mean, obviously they'd lined up quite a few people who were going to donate a K before it happened. It wasn't, you don't just get people like, oh, tortoise, that sounds cool. A K, I'll donate that in the first hour. There was a slightly convoluted way by which it was launched. A donation is eight K and the price for this dodgeball composition is exactly 8000 pounds. Why? I've got me an idea. I mean, it's very confident. It's going to be pretty dry. But I mean, yeah, you could just cut the cut to the chase and just have a law that means that 25% of news stories have to be instantly deleted.

So there's a quicker way of cutting down the amount of news that everyone's overwhelmed with. Extend that to tweets and you've got me on board. Like Logan's run, but for news. When they get too old, taking news stories behind the barn and shooting them in the head. But so the site was this site and it basically is just a website with a comment section. Is that there's somehow the love child of TED talks and the economists. Yeah, another platform on which I can make continuations about Johnny Mercer's wife. And it's sort of here's basically what the what the deal is. They do five stories a day

and they're and they don't do breaking news. They just do news analysis. So it's an op ed site or maybe it's like a written down podcast. Well, that would be great. I would really love to have that. Yeah, but they do neutral analysis. They do a political they say analysis where they do the best ideas from both sides, which is again, obviously insane little bit of internment camps, a little bit of welfare, but not too much and the site. But it's like we talk about funding. It was funded by eight investors initially who were all like CEOs and like and and sort of like hedge fund people. And so it even and then it says despite not being aligned to any party,

tortoise media will have a strong point of view for instance on brexit. They promised to have a point of view, but also you know what their point of view is going to be. It's going to be like well actually if you look at the figures brexit will make the UK this much worse off and actually will cause a tail back at the M5 tunnel or whatever. And it's like it's as though the government said yeah, you don't need a slow news channel to tell you that there's going to be a backup on the M25 and then they're going to cite the government, which is the most reliable source, then say, good job everybody. We finally fixed the news. Now I assume the problems will solve themselves. So I'm going to get Nick Clegg back from Facebook

and you can be the prime minister. It's been sorely missed already. One of the things I'm wondering is what is driving this anxiety about the news on the part of this elite class? Like is it the stories are making me upset and thereby they must all be fake or is it the fact that there is a lot of disinformation being circulated via social media for example and that the sort of the obsolescence of the gatekeepers that previously existed in the media environment now creates this situation in which people are able to spread disinformation far more easily. Like is that the anxiety? Where's the anxiety? Like people are upset about these good things the government are doing like universal credit. We don't like that. We want to go back to those

good old days when the Olympics were good. Like you know what I mean? Because that's invariably what it comes down to. It's like it's like Danny Boyle did such a good job. The Olympics were so that the ceremony was so uplifting like Britain was perfect in 2012. Let's go back to that. They want to groundhog day 2012. But I know what's your take on that? I mean, I think it's I mean, there's also just a mundane explanation which is that you used the business models broken for the traditional news and then this is the new one, right? So everyone's cobbling around for a new way to to make this work. And so the news media is no longer financially sustainable because people just go on the internet and no one buys a newspaper that used the people buying a newspaper

for news used to fund the investigation section. But now they have to cut their losses on the news and that will be provided by people on the internet and then they provide the comment. I mean, it's a very cost efficient way of making a website. So if you look at something like Vox, what they did is they got venture capital money and then they built out an organization looking at what is the media environment now will hire the 20 people who do the actual relevant things instead of having the hundred people who do the stuff that doesn't make any money, which is if you're a legacy organization. So I mean, that's the that's the sort of banal business studies explanation. I mean, they sound like their centrist who want everything to go back to 2010.

But the other is 2010. Good evening. Good wife Edwards. I mean, those guys had a lot of high hopes for Nick Clegg as deputy prime minister. Yeah, that probably was the happiest moment for those guys. Yeah, it was it was like it was politics without politics. It was like we had a sensible, like center right guy. We had a an opposition that was willing to compromise and between them all stood an apolitical political party where the leader lead guy looked like Hugh Grant. It was completely perfect for them. Yeah. I mean, God, it's an interesting one, isn't it? Because as much as like we know all about all of the terrible problems which existed

still then and all the reason we're in the situation we are in now, it does still feel a bit like Halcyon days, doesn't it? Like like David Cameron is such a cuddly figure compared to like the out and out Mad Max style conservatives that we have now. But it's the other is he was he in the in the film. He is the sort of the o-fish dupe of the villain because I don't think David Cameron is smart enough to be evil. I think he's basically just incredibly entitled and very dumb. But I think native. Maybe it was fucking a pig the next minute. If I was if I was to answer your question, I would say it's because these people believe them, believe that there is a set of apolitical

facts and it's the job of the voter to get informed about these apolitical facts and then they will based on these facts evaluate the political non fact positions put forward by political parties and then they will vote for the one that accords most with the facts in their dream world. There is one party that gives all the facts and then everyone dutifully votes for them and they get a hundred percent of the electorate and the problem is that politics want to live in North Korea. Me too. Politics is libidinal. It does. And the reason I'm saying we need to fight all this fake new shit or we need to all this fast news. We need real analysis that gets to the facts is because they're scared of the fact that it's libidinal because it means

they can't manage stuff with a priest like claim on truth anymore. Well, I mean, and you you raise this in the notes too. That's the idea that it's it's fund raise. It's it's providing access for people who can pay what two hundred and fifty pounds to be able to get to that. Yeah, we will get to that effect. Effectively, it's it's clearly an elite offering for an elite consumer and the elites in my opinion, it seems like are upset that as you just described, like the bad humors of the classes that shouldn't have a vote are disturbing the ambiance and they want to that to go away. And so there must be a solution that doesn't make the elites uncomfortable in any way whatsoever. And it's we need to get better and more invested in facts. I mean, I realized what I just said

could literally be like with a couple of tweaks be something Alex Jones would say. But I mean, in a sense, like this strikes me as an elite offering. You know, got the voice. I don't I don't. I know too much news. We've got to stop all the news. It's killing the babies, the royal babies turning the news game. Well, the frogs were first and then the news, you know, I'd love it if the news was gay. That would be so much better. The news should be make make the news gay again. Exactly. Yeah. Episode title. Wait, well, you could get Donald Trump to say make America gay again. You could convince him in some like roundabout way that that's the right opinion to have like that. That it's possible

if you get the right people in the Oval Office, it would take like maximum three hours. 20 minutes, 20 minutes. If you compliment him, he will do anything you ask already. He's basically come on side for the Saudis being like, no, I don't think they killed that guy just because they put his portrait up on a hotel. Literally, there's going to come a moment like this. This is, I mean, I hope that we could talk about that to some extent about some of the elite. I realized that we you've done all this work to prepare the episode, but then also like some of these insane things that have happened that show like the venality of this sort of elite media class and just the way that people in power are reacting to it. Vice what it was say five years ago.

But to me, I'm just laughing because Donald Trump, there literally is going to come a moment when his his explanation is just going to be like that. The guy, he just didn't actually exist. He wasn't real, but like even though we know about string theory, the guy might not have ever existed. News him going into that constant. He wasn't a real person. We are getting close, dangerously close to that point. Like a disgraced like children's musician is just going to be blamed for hypnotizing the entire musician. Magician is going to be blamed for like hypnotizing the entire country into thinking Jamal Khashoggi existed. Well, it's not the reason he believed the Saudi foreign ministry. So he was very firm. He was very firm about it.

It's like, well, that was easy for him. He just he looked into my eyes when he said we didn't kill the guy. If you compliment Donald Trump on his business sense, you could win a kind of poker against him with just all red cards that aren't related to one another. Oh, literally. Like I swear to God, he would like put the village people in the cabinet tomorrow if one of them said that he did a very good deal once. No, he would have that. No, he would he would appoint like he would appoint the police one to like be the the justice secretary be like no. I saw the American one just to remind everyone that that woman isn't a real Native American actually, but I've got the I've got the actual offering of what you get if you sign up to tortoise

let's hear it. First you have a daily edition, which is for your smartphone, which is good, because you know we know we're all staring at these phones all the time. I don't know if you guys noticed effectively a slow news feed at 11am in London and 6am in New York with five key pieces breaking down the important issues of the day. Let's just explain the time difference in London in New York. In case you weren't familiar with the idea that things are time is different. Look, this is one of these facts that they have to highlight. They're introducing you to objective facts. This is one of them in there early. This is one of many facts. It seems like people are being like, wait, no, but like 7am in New York is 7am in London because it's 7am. I'm not falling

for this. Second, a daily editorial conference running from 6pm to 7.40pm, which will be called a think in. Hell yeah, think din dot com. Who's that you get to go if you if you give them 250 quid? Yeah, for 250 quid a year, you get to be a member and go to the newsroom, which is kind of a patron to well. No, it's it's it's like a make a wish program for nerds where like you get to go see the news getting made. But I mean what happens if you have you've done all of the work to prepare those five news stories, the only news stories for the day, but then like there's another 911 or something like that. Like what breaking news? There's no breaking news. So the 912 it's like so basically on their website. They just like put a big red banner. We'll get to that tomorrow. No,

it's like that time yet. It's like everyone goes to like Willy Wonka's news factory and you know that the news of loompas or whatever. They're like, you know that water founded of Malton news. Yeah, there's there's the news of loomba is sitting there typing up a story like his cryptocurrency, the the next disruptive force to come out of silicon. So I have to I have to ask and I realize you've done the investigative work here. Have they unlike tortoise exactly have they have they prepared any examples of what their news stories are going to look like? Like what are these five golden tickets that you're going to get every day? Two goes one cup. Where are they now? Yes, the team will prepare a set of tortoise notes for every thinking, which will offer a guide on the

topic being discussed. And whether it's cryptocurrencies or Marvel movie franchises, we will offer a tortoise take at the end, an opinion informed by what's been said. So is their big takeaway is their big takeaway that they need to be branded like a fast food franchise, like change nothing of the model, just like give everything cutesy names. I mean, like that's that's exactly it. I love also how they just like describe things in very like overly detailed way to describe the fact that it's just like a very obvious and normal way of doing anything like we will provide an opinion that is informed by what has been said. It's like it's never been done before. I don't know what the panicking ministers in the thick of it say.

Well, certainly we will take into account all of the things that are said and say something which reflects the things which other people have said in that time. Thank you. No, it's a theme park. It's a theme park for people who fetishize like it's a theme park for liberals who fetishize sort of truth and facts in the West Wing. Don't give the liberals truth and facts. Come on. Sorry, they fetishize capital T truth, capital F facts. Okay, all right. It's such a postmodernist. Again, actually. This is not the left I signed up to. Scientific socialism, baby. Oh, no, I spent way too much time with way too much Baudrillard.

Well, I mean, when you talked about this with tortoise, like I thought it was going to go in a very direction that there was going to be some kind of chintzy thing that's like the, you know, there's a golden turtle on every story that proves that it's fact and not fake, because like what is the thing that's making this objectively better other than the fact is like no, we should give us your money and not some other group. It really is anything differentiating. Look, it's because news is basically like people's friends from like high school posting blue lives matter memes replaced the news for most people. Very true is that the news has then metastasized to other industries and other business models to try and stay relevant.

So so ver it is basically like breaking news plus Twitter and the and the and tortoise is basically the NY Times op-ed page plus Chessington World of Adventures. Great reference to Chessington World of Adventure as someone whose entire career is just loving niche references that that really that warms the cockles of my heart, but that's what I mean. It's so they're just being like, look, it's not enough to do this anymore. We need to let people in to like, you know, to see us like distill the facts from the fact Jews we need, or we need to like, you know, show that it's a real it's a real verified verite fact and I'm a Lebanese soldier club musician, so I should be able to tell. Yeah, I mean, I just look at this

and it's just strange because it doesn't seem like it's like it was a new model for news. That's basically the exact same model, just like slightly rarefied and also like giving themselves a really small workload every day. It's like we get only the most important five stores. It's like, which also means we don't have to do that much work. It sounds like a great place to work while they're funded, but I don't know if you want to like get a mortgage while working. It's something that we can get behind. It's doing almost no work. No work at all. Yeah, exactly. Hell yeah. Hello. I've always been say Hussain, you like you have something to say. How many y'all heard of Brexit? Oh man, I you know what if we had enough facts, we wouldn't

be doing a Brexit. Yeah. So just like just like all like James Harding basically wants to create UBI for like his friends in media and wants everyone to see them sort of, you know, working away. Chaka Ramana also now has his own sort of UBI for Chaka Ramana as he has now the director of a of a new think tank. So just like thank God we finally got a news organization that was going to cut through the bullshit and give us just the facts. We now have a think tank that finally is going to get above the partisan rabble. Thank goodness. Amazing. You climb into the think tank. You do think in and then you write the summary of the things that have been said in the think tank. My favorite think my favorite centrist think tank is the gatestone. It's cheap.

Oh, very sensible, which is very sensible and very logical and rational think tank who have never they were the ones who basically pushed this myth of like the of the no go zone. Oh, right. We're right now. Yeah, for sure. The famous no go zone that we're currently in the Sharia police are currently watching us. Actually, why chapel is a no go zone from the point of view that you might very well be run over by a sort of 23 year old British Asian guy who's spent like money from his dad's restaurant on a BMW M5 and he's driving it around at like 6,000 Rebs for no apparent reason around the area. I think this happened. This happened to me like this almost happened so many times. That's why I'm being so specific. This almost happened to me

the first time we came to the new place and like the first thing I said tonight was like I almost got hit by a car. Yeah. Happens to the best of us. Well, I'm just laughing because another centrist think tank. The first thing that came to mind was I have a particular fixation on watching Yasha Monk get owned online because he's constantly saying some of the dumbest shit out there. And I know if you notice this, but you know, he represents the was at the Tony Blair Institute for International, whatever. So already he's really he's got he's the bar set quite low, but he made this commentary about about Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil being the exact same as the Mexican president-elect. He's like, wow, a slide towards populism and authoritarianism on

the same continent. It's like that Mexico and Brazil aren't on the same continent. They're not on the same fucking continent. Literally, one's in North America, one's in South America. So it's like the guy who apparently when I think progressive think tank in the UK, I'm also I'm like people who literally don't know what a map looks like, but are here to tell you that we should go back to 2012. That's why they should watch more. Apologize if Watson exactly because nothing else I'm away from that knowing where the continents are. Some people say that the politics is bad, but I'm just watching for the map. I don't have access to any other maps. So I've got the I've got the article in front of me of

Chuck Romana announcing the think tank for which as a director, he's making £65,000 a year, which based on his work requirements is £500 or so an hour. I'm really glad that he's pulling that in because we wouldn't want someone like that to have to go on universal credit or something because he's one of the best our society has to offer. So this month, he writes, the Progressive Centre UK, a new think tank and network of progressives to which I have an appointed chair launches with the explicit aim of connecting progressives from the UK with the latest ideas and experience from around the globe on a new social network. We're calling the inner tube the Plymouth Harold comments section.

It's fashionable to claim that progressive politics has been in decline across the western world since the global financial crash of 2008 that progressive politicians don't know what they stand for anymore. And the parties of the far right and far left have been resurgent. It's not fashionable. It's true. So it's progressive because I know I know I know I'm not supposed to talk about truth. Small tea truth. Yeah. I mean, the bit I really love about this is he goes on to say there is a generation of politicians mostly in their late thirties and forties leading the progressive charge internationally. It's like I looked up his age. He's 40. So it's like nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Politicians mostly in the late thirties and forties, some of them MPs for boroughs in the outskirts of capital cities like nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Many of them in their early forties, but some of whom in their late thirties, because I do hang out with people younger than me. And you can't say I don't. I love that the whole thing is like, yeah, these, this new crop of politicians who are fucking sexy as hell, by the way, these guys, huge dicks, just like trailing on the floor. Two things I want to throw in really quickly, because for one thing, for American listeners who may not be as familiar since we do have a lot of American listeners. I don't know why,

I don't know why. Plymouth Herald. Plymouth Herald. So Plymouth is a city in the south of England. So Chuka Amona is sort of a legacy Blairite MP. Correct me if I'm wrong here. And you might want to give a little context on him that like he's been fighting against the Corbinism because in Britain specifically, because Americans don't realize there's no such thing as primaries here. Basically, once you're an MP, if you're in a safe constituency, it's a meal ticket for the rest of your life. It's UBI for Chuka Amona and Chris Leslie. You'll always get reelected. And so he has been a thorn in the side of Corbinism because he's basically, he wants Blairism. He wants the Clintons, basically the British equivalent forever

because it was his meal ticket and clearly he's not going to have that under Corbin. The British version of the of the Clintons is Neil Hamilton and his and his and his weird wife. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because they fuck. I was going to say we don't have a British version of the Clintons because no one in British politics fucks, but they definitely he fucks. That's the problem. I think isn't it the problem that a lot of people in British politics fuck too much, right? Like all like all the like the like the like the like the sort of Obama staffers and and and Hillary staffers and stuff like no, they never do like they go into hypersleep for most of their lives. But the problem is like the British MPs like like they just they keep like

like they people keep finding condoms in the House of Commons. And I guess like that's good because they're using protection, but like ultimately who want MPs to be breeding. We don't want no MP. We don't want them to give the House of Commons in my opinion overpopulated and is unable to sustain his current, but so he writes the debate in the UK has been stuck along two tram lines, the battle between the hard left and so called centrism in the in the Labour Party, too often framed and claimed by allegiances to leaders of another generation. What on earth do you think he possibly mean? Well, the next bit, so later he says, they often get lumped in with the leaders of the past, but the big difference between this

generation and the early, earlier generation of progressives is that their politics has been formed in a post-crash world. I mean, like Chaka Ramune, the crash happened in 2008. So he stood to be leader of the Labour Party in 2015 and he was saying, you know what we need to do? We need to be a we need to be a party that's pro austerity, that's pro capitalism, and that rejects any kind of redistribution, rejects any kind of public investment. Like he didn't learn anything from the crash, give the people what they want. I mean, he's his politics because he isn't even a legacy Blair. He's his politics. Why he's he's got a problem. No one likes him because his politics moves every two years. So there's no one. He doesn't have

a grouping around him who actually want him to be the leader of the party. Just like streetwear. Yeah. So he in 2016, he said, sort of like, if we have to leave the single market to get rid of migration, we should do that. And in 2017, he's like, we have to stay in the single market at all costs, even if it means overriding democracy. In 2010, he was elected as a left wing candidate as part of Compass. So he's all over the fucking place. Wow. So I think the idea that he could have learned anything from the crash is, is ridiculous. Well, he learned some of us learned we couldn't get promoted in about 2016. And that's when our politics changed. Well, I mean, the reason I bring that up is just because progressive in the in the American context

is used as like a means of either trying to not go full socialist, like for politicians who want to be like, don't worry investors and hedge funds. I'm not actually socialist. It's also a means of like putting a bandaid on the fact that liberal is like basically used as an insult amongst conservatives. And so it's weird to see him saying progressive because like, if you're actually looking at unless you're saying, okay, progressive, but only going so far as to not threaten capital, then like that doesn't actually make sense. Well, that is what he's that's what he's saying. But it's just weird to see that word kind of used as like, as a means of not basically saying, I'm not socialist, don't worry business people, you know, as a salve, because like it's done in

the same way in the US, because people are afraid of socialism and also because being a liberal is like, you know, it's basically own the libs. It's an insult. The liberals are perpetually owned. I don't think he's trying to reassure capital. I mean, I think capital are already pretty reassured at Chuck Romano. By using progressive, he's trying to say, I'm not Tory. Yeah. So progressive just means not Tory in this context. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. Well, it's what I what I what what this article does is one of my favorite things that centrist do, however, I love when they do this, is he says that this is a new generation of politicians respects the achievements of the wave of third way leaders in the nineties and naughties, but recognize that times have

changed, which requires modern solutions to today's problems, right? Where it's basically what he's saying is we can't agree. We do need modern solutions to today's problems. I like this guy. So first, you need to download the policy. Incredibly generic download Matt Hancock MP. Yeah, absolutely. Start there. But what I'm saying is that he's doing the thing where he's like, everyone who's saying they want socialism is forgetting that Tony Blair did sure start basically and that center and centrist do this all the time. We're like, no, you have to respect the Tony Blair quite a few achievements. So don't ask for anything better. We're going to keep sure start. Yeah, I will make it universal. I suppose. Yeah, exactly. And it's like it's like no, but

I'm trying to make sure start universal. You're you're you're you're ruining the art that Tony Blair did because they can't see Paul ultimately for them politics is personal as about their personal career. It's about showing how great they are and how they can be their own little play acted West Wing. Yeah. And they say, you know, it's like when people say that, you know, that music is the space between the notes. And in many ways, the real sure start is the Iraq war because it's only because of the Iraq war that you can appreciate sure start as much like if Jeremy Corbyn just read it sure start, it wouldn't be as good. It'd be like if they bought back the doors, but Jim Morrison wasn't on heroin anymore.

You just wouldn't it wouldn't pop. I mean, the Iraq war is actually why sure start gets such good PR. Exactly. That's what the whole there's a whole generation of politicians who had to dedicate their lives to talking about sure start, sure start, sure start to try and change the conversation with Iraq. And people like Chagramana think that like politics is all about doing one sure start and one Iraq war because you can never just do good things. You have to be sort of managing heterogene and heterogene and homeostasis, right? You have to be you have to be managed. You have to do an Iraq war. You have to do a sure start. You have to have to roll up policing, but you also have to say the police have to like, you know,

play football with all the kids that they're terrorizing. We didn't make it clear at the time, but Saddam Hussein was going to block sure start the whole WMD thing. That was we admit that was a lie, but that was it was an honest white lie because what he was actually going to do was yeah, like I'm just saying it's going to close. Yeah, mobile training facilities there for people who are going to go and disrupt all early childhood education and social democracies in Europe. The man had a plan. We had to stop it, right? I mean, you know, ah, damn, seems like we should respect Tony Blair and by extension Chagramana much more. I learned something today, guys. People aren't reading their kids enough. The only solution

is to have the police arrest every child and read them 10 books to 10, 10 books at double speed, one in each year, like real business leaders and one from each side of the divide like to kill a mockingbird, but then also mine camp. The Turner Diaries and playing in the dark. Oh, and the Diary of Anne Frank, but also like Jake Paul, my story. I also just look at this, this whole thing because the story here is he has a new think tank, but like part of me also is wondering whether or not it's just indicative of how insane the political class in Britain is that it's like, oh, this new thing tank to find that missing center, the center that we've lost, the thing we want to recreate the completely chocolatey side, the delicious core outside

of all the candy shell. And we ignoring that's what I should have called it. Now I want to be a centrist, the gooey candy center of politics. I'm not so hungry right now. I'm willing to abandon socialism. No, it's 65,000 pounds a year for what amounts to, yeah, like 475 or 500 pounds an hour. Like that's just so bonkers insane. And it's like, that's the buried lead in the story. Like Chuka Mona looks at this and says, well, we need to re-establish the center because clearly all these other attempts to be centrist aren't working. But like to me, to my eyes, I'm like, you do realize how much of a prick that makes you look like, right? But like, you're taking more money to, you know, in a great big scheme to rehabilitate

politics that has failed. And you're also getting paid what five times the median salary in this country to do it. Like it's just for very little work. Yeah. I mean, the salary thing is really the most damning indictment of Chuka Mona because he's not even prepared to like work a couple of extra hours a week to make his salary 420 pounds an hour. And for that reason, we know that he doesn't really care. He'll never start an electric car company, for example, because his brain doesn't work that fast. But also the, the, the, the, the other thing is, right? Like he said, we need modern solutions to modern problems as though the problems we have are particularly new and not the same problems we've been having for a long time to which we know the solution.

Or is there the solution we were proposing was the spinning Jenny? Look, no one, no one's saying that being poor isn't a problem, but now you're, you can be poor and have Instagram. We should thank capitalism. So actually the lives are owned. I'm so poor that I can't afford a fast enough internet connection to put a shitpost on the Plymouth Herald comment section. Not a problem we have here, just in the other place. So he goes on, just because others on the extremes may not agree with the politics of people like Justin Trudeau, Jacinda, what's her last name? Ahern? Jacinda Ahern. Or Pedro Sanchez in Spain. Does not mean that these activist politicians and thinkers,

a group that includes me, yeah, I didn't catch this, but yeah, Mike, you're absolutely right. This is him positioning himself as potential. You can't call yourself a finger, can you? Oh, you fucking cannot. Yeah, I suppose that's the kind of thing that Centris put in their Twitter bios. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm a thinker, thinker, gin enthusiast, tea addict. Fluentant sarcasm. No, no, that's a virtual Texas. And that's also real though. And then no too much about trains. Oh, Gryffindor in the outside, but Hufflepuff at heart. Oh, God, I just, I just skieved myself father, father to two kids, occasional dog washer.

Although I did just realize I saw rugby on Sunday's side note. I did a heron in Yorkshire. I did just realize though that if you were to see someone that someone's Twitter bio be I'm sorry, it's just into Ardern. I'm so wrong. Jacinda. Okay. I literally, I remembered her last name based on how it looks and not how it sounded out. I had the wrong letters. Okay. Oh, but wait, isn't she cool though? Cause she's the one wet. Well, not exactly her is cool, but like the someone, someone phoned up to actually clarify. Wasn't it how to spell her surname? And they phoned up like the office of the prime minister. It was like a journalist writing a piece when she became prime minister and she ended up getting

put through to the prime minister. She's like, yep, that's how you spell it. She's like only in fucking New Zealand. Right. So, but so he says a group that includes all these activist politicians and thinkers, including me, chakramana hire me. I'm the sandwich board guy for the think tank have no politics for ours as a politics that promotes individual human freedom, but understands it relies on a strong pre collective provision in an active state to be realized, even though all of them have actively worked against the creation of active states. We believe in reciprocity, which requires an inclusive economy that rewards those who work hard and play by the rules. Well, caring for those who can't support themselves. You know,

that saying work hard, play by the rules. It's it's basic again. He's showing the ass of his thought here, which is that he that he believes in pure capitalism because that's a capitalist thought to have, which is that there is no natural rate of unemployment. There is a perfect market that can be found. There is a problem that can be solved and that we eventually can reach like social provision of services level zero once we correct all the market failures. I mean, also the whole point is if he's saying what separates these guys from the third way is that they recognize politics have changed since the financial crisis, you can't just then rip your lines from people from the third way. I mean,

this could have been said at any time in the second half of the 20th century. For us, the politics promotes individual freedom, but understands it relies on strong collective provision in an active state to be realized. That's just Tony Black had said that. Yeah, you need you need to change the lines if you want to convince us that you have a different politics. Yeah, houses of politics that believes in going to parties and doing cocaine with models strip us. I mean, it's largely like an aesthetic movie. That was a really good JFK. I didn't think you are getting better. I was gonna say your Massachusetts Irish is getting better.

I thought that sounded like a bugsy Malone like an actor. Well, you haven't heard his, you never shoot me alive. I was like, yeah. He sounds like a duck that gains Indians. What I was going to say was that like, it's kind of just like, it's another like centrist aesthetic movement, isn't it? Right? It's one that kind of says that you should like our appeal is the fact that we look like we're normal. We look like we have ideas. We deserve authority based on how we look. And Chuka Munna really is that guy, the one with the expensive suit and the perfectly collared shirt and all that stuff, right? It's not like Jeremy Corbyn who wears an oversized but still

very good track suit. Those are my favorite. I think I might have mentioned this before. My favorite ones are like, Jerry Corbyn, because he's like going into his house, Jerry Corbyn, he's like, do you say you're a socialist when you live in a £700,000 house? And he's like going into his house, which looks horrible. And he's also like dressed as though he's just been playing the fruit machines at Weatherspoon all morning. They're like, this man, a millionaire. Yeah. And I think that's like, honestly, when I was looking at all the stuff about this party, like that was the only thing I was thinking. There wasn't really anything that was worth critiquing, right? I have no policies. I've actually looked on their website.

They have nothing. It felt very glib. And like, there was also that news that like one of the guys who is like going to be one of the head honchos of the organization has like massive anger problems. That's why I had to put him in charge. So there was this anecdote where he basically like broke, he broke a flower pot on a BBC set and then got really mad at the cleaner who was trying to clean it up. Holy shit. He's fucking Silvio playing poker in the soprano's when what's his god? Scott Gismonti is trying to sweep up the cheese from underneath his feet, and he gets really pissed off. He's like, you want the fucking cheese? You want to sweep the cheese? I'll start a fucking centrist think tank. If you sweep the fucking cheese, I mean,

I just love the idea that you're constantly trying to dress up unpopular politics over and over again. But why is it not working? We've reinvented it for the 21st century. And it's like and it keeps pulling in like the teens. What's good is that they never have new ideas. They have capital N, capital I new ideas, which are the same new ideas that they've had since the 90s. They've had one new idea and they just keep retreading it. Privacy is welfare, but it's a gift. Here's even an example of a centrist progressive achievement. Pedro Sanchez of Spain released an eight point declaration with fellow progressive Emmanuel Macron of France in July in which the two pledged to work together on immigration seeking quote a migratory model

based on solidarity and respect for human rights on eurozone integration reform of the EU. This is the same EU that is like facilitating the creation of open air slave markets in Libya. If anything tells us that this is purely I think as Hussein correctly points out purely an aesthetic rebrand of the same shit that's been happening constantly. This is it is they're calling the EU migratory policy humane and human rights based. Yeah, I mean it's you made a point here Riley in your in your previous comment that like what this basically seems to indicate is that they're looking for a kind of centrist solution that ignores that central solutions in every single one of these countries has bred some kind of discontent that's manifested in like an extreme right politics.

Certainly talking about Canada or talking about Italy or talking about Spain like it's just looking at how the situation in or looking the situation in Italy for example like on one hand it's like yes they're part of the EU but like they're also basically pulling people out of immigrants out of communities where they've been for decades and forcing them into like concentration camps. I don't know I'm not worried about that. I mean there's no history of far right politics in Spain or Italy so I think everything is going to be fine. Right and so it's a for I think what we can we can we can comfort ourselves with the idea that this think tank is going nowhere that essentially its main output is going to be I don't know an

extension for Chuck Romano's house and much like tortoise. I mean we're talking about these things not because we think the things are going to be progressive but because they're symptoms of broader put up a podcast every week. Let's be real no one cares. There's well okay I chose them because I think their symptoms are broader liberal psychoses which is that which is a complete sort of fuck up of causality where they think okay the problem is is we haven't articulated our same idea in the right way so we're going to keep recrossing the eyes and redotting the teas you know meanwhile you know the plane is crashing and there's one parachute left. I mean also if you've got loads of money you can make loads of organizations really easily

that's why you get that's why you get new ones all the time yeah if you've got millions of queer then why not make a progressive think tank and get chuck a 65 grand. Well so if you want to I just bought on a Tuesday I could turn on babe station or new progressive think tank no I would I would absolutely. Babe station is a progressive think tank actually that would be amazing if someone made a babe station think tank like it's like I think it would probably do a lot better than the progressive think tank but I mean they're all hot chicks who are scanty and they only have Nokia 3310s. I will say though in your video that's you crowdsource ideas is you call in and you talk to your plan about like like a flat tax plan to like a girl who's like oh yeah tell me more.

Well I was just thinking though that like in your defense really this I have seen this covered in various outlets you know on the news here or on on on social media and it's like I think the fact that this is in the news in the first place as opposed it's just more a symptom of the insularity of the class that this represents. Oh yeah no it's just nobody like like Miles said nobody cares if there's anything they care about they're like oh what a fucking prick guys getting an additional insane salary to do nothing as opposed to this grand statement about how we're going to find the middle road like it's just it's not it's the journalism equivalent of white coke shirts it's like it's like a vanity project that like no one is going to buy apart from these people's

friends and then like it's I would 100 I would still buy a white coke shirt. I mean yeah I mean I'm sure that in the end we're spending our Patreon money on a subscription to tortoise in order to read whatever insane wank they're churning out because we're going to do a live podcast when we are cashing our 250 pound newsroom visit privileges. Oh yes absolutely fun trash futures going to the thinking so this is what I was thinking like you've got to pay to go into their newsroom right and as someone who's worked in several like newsrooms they're the most fucking boring places like they're super super boring places right but basically I want to see how the news gets made yeah like okay if you want to like see how the news gets made like so here's what

happens right you go through a very long process getting like a badge where they'll spell your name wrong then you go up some more escalators I mean you'll just see like a bunch of very tired people when you're near junior honcho when you're a junior honcho and you tight you know and you'll see a bunch of these people just like typing right that's all they'll do and if you look at their screens you kind of think like as someone if you know if into a newsroom you might think they're like oh like the news you'll think that the news is like the fucking newsroom right the Aaron Sorkin they think it actually has a theme song yeah right so you go you go up the escalators to like this weird music and you have like a bunch of like kids running over saying something's

happening on twitter something's happening on instagram like someone that's in the Johnny Mercer's life. No this is the thing incidents like that are the only time you'll get like loads of editors around the screen when something so fucking stupid happens about like people need to see it but doctor I am Johnny Mercer's wife but like a normal day in a newsroom is basically just like a boring office job where you don't want to talk to anyone let alone someone who's like paid for the privilege of coming into like your place of work and the thing is like at trash future we don't even charge people to come in mainly because the windows are so thin it wouldn't matter anyway. We over here like weird star bros having conversations about what

they're going to disrupt. It is really funny that our our office is in a startup incubator because that's where we found space. We're in the lion's den but if you come to the trash future studio you get to sit on the new casting couch. Don't ask why the cameras just don't ask why the camera that should be actually part of the debate me to your patreon is you get to do a trash future office visit. Riley I mean I guess I'm all about I'm all about new revenue streams but you do realize that assuming that really annoying people with money won't take you up on this is a dangerous proposition. If someone wants to annoy me by paying us I'm not that worried. Yeah it's reverse fendom. I'm looking to get reverse fendom okay and sign up to the foot fetish

tier of trash future. We send you picture rotating picture of feet. Could it be ours? Who knows? All right we're massively over time here lads. So I'm gonna say Michael thank you very much for coming in. Where can people find you if they want to hear more? On Navarra media or on my twitter at Michael J S Walker. We have trash future live shows coming up. There is well actually it's one. It's on the 30th of October. It's at the Sekford on Sekford Street in it's near Farringdon. Come to that it starts at 8 p.m. You can buy tickets online that there will be a link in the description. There's also a facebook event which you can find if you find it. There are still tickets available right? Yeah there are still tickets available. There's also like

we have a facebook page like that if you want because we put the facebook events on facebook We don't really do facebook because we don't want to associate with Nick Clegg. Yeah also if you want to make me a happy man I'm running a cool stand-up comedy night at the Sekford on the also there the same place on the 24th of October with friends of the show Olga Koch and Alex Keely doing sets. It's going to be a great night of comedy. That is free to get in so. Oh fantastic. If you're a cheapskate and you'd rather not pay the £5 comes to the live show come to this which is free. Yeah good cool. And also as ever we have a patreon you can subscribe to it on the five ten or fifteen dollar tiers for normal or you can do the twenty five dollar

debate me tier where you can have a rational conversation with Hussein on the casting couch absolutely watched over by Elon Musk in black tie so why not come up why not commodify your descent with a t-shirt from a little comrade you can get the facts printed on it with a capital T capital F if you're like me or a postmodernist or if you're a scientific socialist like Michael you can just have a list of all the facts you know printed on it I'm sure you would be happy to do that I'm really big t-shirt and finally as ever thank you well by fact it's a five a day maybe about five five on each side oh my god they're working on it's one of your five a day basis glad we snuck that last bit in there and yeah you can always also find our theme song by Jin

saying it's on Spotify it's called here we go it's all one word it's extraordinarily good you should listen to it let's go and live our lives once again as we ever do until the gypsy curse is lifted