TRASHFUTURE - Tip Drill ft. Corner Spaeti

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Ciaran and Nick from Corner Spaeti join the gang to discuss the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States, and what that means for the UK, Germany, and more or less all of humanity. Also, Alice Weidel isn’t gay, she’s just married to a woman; Cypriot Mister Beast enters a combat zone; and Peter Mandelson wishes upon a Monkey’s Paw. Get access to more Trashfuture episodes each week on our Patreon! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I was hoping with the inauguration for a real like Tom Clancy's death of honor type situation or I guess alternatively like a you know a designated survivor situation where you know obviously like you know a designated survivor situation where You know obviously like you know no more Trump no more Vance And it's the the guy who used to roll logs who Trump put in charge of the Department of Transportation He's president now, and we just get like four years of log rolling check this out check this out Pete Hegseth is not shown up to the inauguration because he fell off the wagon in the limousine bar And then it's gonna be Pete, you have to be president.

You're never going to be able to be president unless you can like defeat your drinking. And then we get like gritty president. Not gritty as in the fucking hockey thing, like a dark gritty president. Yeah. It's like a redemption arc. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You got like a kind of punished Hegseth. Yeah. Yeah. I really liked November's idea of the designated survivor who just does not meet the moment and just knows what they were doing beforehand. Like, I'm the head of fisheries. And every time they try to rebuild

the country, it's like, all right, but how are the fish doing? My first love is the fish. Look, I was born to be head of fisheries. I was forced to be president. I refuse to take on any more responsibilities. The fish come first.

But I will use all the powers of the office of president to pursue Greg Stubbe for his crimes against the fish. I mean, oh God, seeing the, I would say pretty carnivalesque atmosphere across the Atlantic right now. Carnival, you say? No, no, no, no. Listener, you don't, you don't need to know anything about what Milo's referencing. Is I have seen no end. I try to think, what's the differences between Trump 2025 and Trump like toward 2016-17?

He's going to do way more of the Hitler stuff, it seems like. Oh yeah. Like that's the main thing, you know, not to sort of detract of the Hitler stuff, it seems like. Oh yeah. Like, that's the main thing. You know, not to sort of detract from the vibe here, but it really does seem like point one on the agenda is all the Hitler stuff. Way more than last time, you know? Yeah. I heard a British Lib interviewed on the radio today, and he said, he's like, Trump is a

disaster. A lot of people are saying he's like American Hitler, but he's actually like American Stalin. And what he meant by that was worse than Hitler. I don't think you've got the order of who's worse correct there. Or maybe he just meant like Trump is going to pursue a policy of capitalism in one country. He's already disappeared Vivek.

There you go. Trump's photoshopping people out. Vivek was like hiding behind his massive son. I still got on the team, like I was at the gym and I was like, where's like, there's this like this little speck of like brown guy like behind. It's like they're so like, that's the strategy that every time someone like fucks up, we're just going to hide him behind Baron. You disparaged white people, get behind Baron.

You want to be visible, grow taller. Okay, you want to be seen grow taller. The more nice stuff you say about white people Vivek the taller a stool will give you. You must be at least this tool to govern. One of the things is the difference is obviously I think we sort of broached this in our discussion with Mike Isaac about a lot of the tech CEOs that are all queuing up to sort of, you know, kiss Trump's feet is that in 2016, 17, the mono party, I know the mono party on both sides of the Atlantic as well had not lined up four square behind just him as normal and the stuff he wants to do as regular.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were still outsiders. And you know, now that's very different in the sense that like, you know, JD Vance's wife is being dressed by Oscar de la Renta. You saw Trump kind of like making nice with Obama at like, you know, JD Vance's wife is being dressed by Oscar de la Renta, you saw Trump kind of, like, making nice with Sabama at, like, Casa's funeral. And so, I think, like, the kind of elite across both parties has made its accommodation and have just decided, oh yeah, this is normal. Which is not a great combination with all of Trump's people really deciding that what

they need to do this term is make him lock in on the Hitler stuff instead of just being a kind of weird musical theater Dilettante like he was last time. Yeah He didn't get anyone to play as an as inauguration last year last time last year last time this time He got his favorite band the village people. Yeah, he got everything. He got the ass this chap saluted him There we go. That's like a dream November would have. I hate gay Hitler so much. And like this is the thing, like day one he's done this kind of like declaration of war on like trans people in general and it's so humiliating just like adding insult to injury to be the victim of that at the hands of a guy who likes the village

people and like musical theater this much. And it's just kind of insulting, you know? Nelly and Snoop Dogg are playing at the inauguration. Cool. Oh hell yeah, Nelly's gonna play like Tip Drill or something. That's like... Well like this is the thing, right? Because one of the other things about the new Trump administration is, I saw this in the Financial Times. I saw like a senior banking executive get quoted as saying, oh, it's like, you know, it's like liberation, basically, because now we can say and then he said to slurs. So, yeah.

Oh, God. Sorry. I'm just I'm too fixated on the idea of Trump doing like the this like little dance that he does to the line. He does. like the line. He didn't really like do the whole thing, he did a little bit of one like on the move when the guy saluted him. But like doing this to the line, girl it must be your ass, or no girl it might wait, because it ain't your face, I need a tip drill. So, like. Yeah. Love it. Didn't he get like, at his first inauguration, didn't he get like three doors down thrust upon him?

Like wasn't that the only band who would do it? Oh my god. Yeah. Glow up. Cause that's not shit he likes, like three doors down being foisted on him is like an insult that lives in Trump's brain on parity with like Obama humiliating him at the Correspondence Dinner that made him want to be president in the first place, like it's just like, and on parasy with Obama humiliating him at the Correspondence Dinner that made him want to be president in the first place.

It's just like... And so he's determined to recover from that by getting, I guess, the one remaining village person and three new village people. Imagine how happy he would be if he got the entire cast of the chorus line to perform the entire musical for his inauguration. Folks, they brought the whole village out just for me. Something to look forward to. Every single person.

For the third inauguration, I guess. And then she said she tried to melt just to see how an ice cream felt and I melted in six. That's a quote from the musical A Chorus Line. Anyway, look, look, look. We have Nick and Kieran from Corner Spade here joining us. We are going to, in addition to talking of course about the inauguration of President Trump for his third term, because he also won in 2020. This is actually his third term. He was secretly governing in 2020. That's right.

We're governing on that, yeah. For this next Trump inauguration, we're also going to be turning our attention over to Europe, something we've been meaning to do for a little while, and look at all of the Euro Trumps that are appearing throughout the continent. Yeah, all the ways. Not here, of course. All the ways in which like Europe in particular, but across the world, people are trying to kind of grovel to Trump and control Trump and like offer Trump things that he likes.

Euro Trump is such a powerful idea. It's Burlesconi. We love to get up in the morning, dummy folks. It's Burlesconi, I was about to say. Yeah, we love to have a glass of milk, don't we? Maybe a cheese sandwich. It's not Trump unless it comes from the slur region of, I'm going to say Serbia. I feel like slur would be a name of a place in Serbia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But before we get to Europe, I want to stick to the US for a little bit,

just because that's where the stuff is happening. I noticed there was one sort of thought that I felt could be completely inescapable, which is the self-congratulation of very rich people who are finally comfortable voting Republican because they have been able to what, free themselves culturally from the shackles that like, being a lib makes you a good person or whatever. You mean getting a divorce? Yeah, America's entering its divorce era.

It's been kind of like, all of these guys are going, well, it was a rough four years of having to pretend that I liked my kids, but now I can just kind of, I can lock in on whatever the fuck I want, which is pretending to be good at video games, saying the word, any number of fun right wing divorce dad activities. Every room a man cave. We're going to make America into a Reddit male living space. So for example, one of the co-founders of Airbnb, Not Chesky, the other one, you know, does, again, you know I don't like to do Twitter review unless it is very worth it, has written, I have a confession to make.

I did a bad thing. Something the younger me would hate myself for doing by the way This is all line breaks like it's a fucking like shell silver steam. So he's actually doing I've got a confession Yeah, so he says I'm late to the party on this but today we stop hiding the truth from our close never Trump Her friends that we support a party that isn't gonna run this country Into a ground etc etc etc and then talking about how great RFK is Oh, he's gonna like you know free us from vaccines or whatever and the language that he uses and that then in all of the tech People coming out of the woodwork including a guy who started a company called like blounce which makes like you know children's storybooks

Or whatever right like an Austrian right-winger. Who's yeah, I found it blounce which makes children's storybook. It's called blunge excuse me They're all talking to each other as though they have just come out to their religious conservative parents And they have a chosen family of like reactionary billionaires. It is the level of self-congratulat- When you're using that language from the position of, yeah, I'm a billionaire and I'm tired of you oppressing me by like, you know, your vague disapproval. It feels so fucking whiny.

And I am compelled to say that all of the like junk bond touting corporate Raider Reaganauts that like comprised a huge part of the GOP money base in the 1980s would never be caught fucking dead. Like, oh, you're being mean to me. No, that's not that's not the greed is good shit. That's not even where Donald Trump comes from, you know, and he's a very whiny man, but he's whiny in a different way, right?

He's bitchy. I guess I guess the last ditch of kind of-Trump or anti-Republican thing right now is, they can't make people not think that they're weird and annoying, right? So long as there's some kind of vague personal disapproval, all of these people are going to drive themselves insane over it. And that's kind of nothing, but it's still more effective opposition than the Democrats, personal disapproval, all of these people are going to drive themselves insane over it. And that's kind of nothing, but you know, it's still more effective opposition than the Democrats, so.

So you know, what we now have, essentially, right, is a normalized and much more extreme Trump in the states, declaring, celebrating his inauguration by doing his little hand dance to YMCA. Announcing mass deportations. Announcing mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, basically like declaring transgender people to be un-people. Well, this is the deal, right? Like, TikTok, back in.

They them pussy out. They them dick out. She her dick out. He him pussy out. You know, I hope you're happy with that, arse of the deal, America. My 4U screen decimated. It's all just the village people now. It's like it's the Twilight Zone episode of like there was time now

before you screen. I think that, you know, the US military for a long time has lacked a camp salute like the British military has. So I would like to see Trump introduce the YMCA hand gesture as the new salute. That's what they should do. And they know when you meet each other in the corner. You gotta do the full Like quick and snappy and like a military way like Click your heels together. You know you got to do it like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier guys It's gonna be like a respect Properly my rank Yo they're playing YMCA

Private! Your trousers are not assless! Where did you get these non-regulation asshole trousers? I can't see you hole, Corp Hole! Private Hole! Your hole is not private! Your hole belongs to me and the US government. But what he does, he does this list of terrible things and then also does two crypto rug pulls simultaneously. What do you call an act like that? It's a hawk toot toot.

I was trying to hawk toot. Hawk toot with a two instead of a two. Everyone please just tell me that was a good joke. Two hawk toot tok, two two hawk. That's right. Eagle, two hawk, two haw speed run. Maybe then. But it says, my new official Trump meme is here. Remember we talked about how he started World Liberty Financial or with his son's sort of World Liberty Financial, right? And they were going to be, yeah, it's going to be the future of decentralized finance, the future of lending. And then immediately on his inauguration day releases a series of family themed coins,

all of which spike again, when I say spike in value to like $60 billion, I don't really mean that they were ever worth $60 billion. And once again, the financial illiteracy of our journalist classes is fully on display here. As they're like, wow, he's now worth $60 billion. It's like, that's because there's no one buying or selling it, almost! ALICE It feels so surreal that this presidency, for all I know is gonna end in nuclear exchange or Trump getting executed on the White House

lawn by the woke US military, is beginning with the YMCA revival and crypto rugpoles. It's like first as farce and then as tragedy. Yeah. Biden and Trump having some like, jewel of the fates shit on the White House lawn. Biden being like, there's one thing you forgot, Mark. And then opening his jacket in the suicide vest, like, oh, I actually forgot too. It's weird that Biden showed first reformed in the White House right before he left. So of course, the market obviously reacted instantaneously because if you're going to

trade Solana memes, then basically you just try to be the first into a thing and then sell it before it crashes. It's a very quick... It's like an express kidnapping, but for pyramid schemes? Yeah. It's a very, very... It's like a drive drive by Ponzi scheme. A very fast pyramid.

Yeah, it's kind of like a stalagmite. You know, it's like really. It's like, what if the the Irish guys that built the pyramids, what if they all had rocket boots, essentially? Preach, brother. They say the Trump coin reached a market cap of 13.6 billion with its fully diluted valuation soaring to 67 billion. And then all sorts of graphs of his net worth come out.

It's like, wow, he's worth like $70 billion because 67 of it is in Trump coin. You cannot, something is not worth something if you can't sell all of it. You can't sell all of it, it's worth that much. It's worth how much you can sell it for, which isn't $67 billion. That's a lot of big words to say that you're jealous

of the most successful man in the world. Yeah, that's true That's actually true. That's thank you. Thank you for keeping me honest Cafe in New York, I know opens. We are no card. We don't trust the banks. We only take Trump coin You're still mad about that one place It's every place I'm curious was there bar Keith bar Keith Bar Keith and Schiller Promenade. Oh yeah. Wait, is that the one that takes Bitcoin or some shit? Yeah. They do a good radler though. They make it fresh with actual lemon. I like that place.

They're just tricking you. They're one of the places in Berlin that has those stickers that say, like, with the Bitcoin symbol on it being like, stop wars. Oh my fucking god. Somehow? That's the most coherent ideology you can expect in Germany, I think. on it being like stop wars. And it's just like with the fucking god. That's the most coherent ideology you can expect in Germany, I think. It's like the coexist bumper sticker, but written with the symbols of different cryptocurrencies. It's like Cardano, AVE, Polygon.

So this is British Bitcoiner and podcast host Peter McCormack, founder of What Bitcoin Did, sharply criticized Trump's move, saying, Trump coin is embarrassing. This is the opposite of what people voted for. It's like, no, it's not. It's exactly what people voted for. They voted for rug pulls in YMCA and unimaginable cruelty. Yeah. This is from the crypto podcast.

This is a place of dignity. Trump coin is a fire. And also, you know, the last thing, because we're going to talk in more depth about the various crypto rug pulls on the bonus episode this week. I've already spoken with TF crypto correspondent Molly White, and I did get the date right this time, as opposed to that last time I announced Kieron was coming on two weeks ago. That's not the only rug pull where Ryan Fournier, who I don't know if you know, is like one of these like lower level MAGA people, chair of students for Trump, either launches or

is handed a pile of a coin called TikTok. Because again, meme coins work by just something. It's literally the currency of attention, right? Everyone's paying attention to TikTok. So you buy a coin called TikTok because other people are paying attention to it and will buy it on the hopes that they can offload it to someone else later. It's like, it's, it is gamble. It is gambling just with an on attention. Ten and a pile of TikTok coin or starts it, which is made by the way on pump.fun, uh, which is, okay. Oh, I know the person who runs pump. I met him. I made him a Christmas anyway. And, and his mother was like that.

Is this a real job? He was like, he seems to make a lot of money, but I don't understand. Yeah. Well, well, well anyway, he was implicated in this in the launching of the tick tock coin. Nice enough. I'm sure I wouldn't have pegged him as a crypto guy. I feel like normally crypto guys, you can really spot them. You know, spot them, you know? They exude a vibe. It's normalization again. Yeah. Well he's a crypto picks and shovels guy because he doesn't do any of the coins, he just makes the infrastructure for other people to make the coins. Yeah, the gold rush you sell pump dot fun. Yeah. Just a hundred years later you're like why is the main university here named pump dot fun university and it's like oh there was a whole Robber Baron arc, don't worry about

it. Yeah. I'm protesting the Pump.Fun wing of the library because of how many degenerate gamblers it put into the poor house. Yeah. Oxford University must rename the Pump.Fun biology laboratory. So anyway, Ryan Forney, a chair of students for Trump, has this huge pile of TikTok coin made on PumpFun. And then immediately, as soon as he sees the price go down, he controls all the liquidity, he just sells all of it, which is unethical if not downright illegal. But what happened is he said then,

no, you don't understand. I literally, I thought the price was gonna go down, so I sold all of this coin that I kind of made. I don't know who wouldn't do that, which is just saying, no, no, no, it was pumped, so I dumped. Yeah, it's a logical thing to do. I pumped. When you pump, you have to dump.

What are you talking about? When you pump, that's the fun. And then when the pump is over, it's not fun anymore. It's more like a sort of circular argument where it's just like these coins exist in order for you to do pump and dump schemes. Yeah. And so doing anything other than that kind of runs counter to the objectives of these coins in the first place. And therefore it's not illegal because you're doing the thing that it's designed to do. It

just looks illegal if you were doing it with an actual currency. It is if you made the currency and hold all of the liquidity. Or at least it's unethical. I mean, it does sort of feel like there's a very sort of thin line, but again, I go back to like, walk to Iran so everyone else could fly. And seemingly she was like ahead of her time in terms of like figuring out what the economy was going to look like for the next four years. Well, I like also you did a pump and dove in your defense and his defense after is, I was too stupid to realize I was engaged in a pump and dove's key. The Wayne Hennessy defense.

All the Alex Jones defense of like, I ate too much chili and therefore it messed up my cognitive sense of being. Is there a dump dot misery? That's me between 10 and 11 a.m. every morning. That's right. The one time is impossible to work with. But I want to begin to cross the Atlantic, right? Yeah, so do a lot of Americans I feel. The UK side of the story of course is Labour, the Conservatives all arguing about Trump and should we accept Trump and everyone says well yes of course we should.

The only person who seems to be having a very difficult time with that over here is of course Peter Mandelson, the man who has been given his dream job. I don't know why this was his dream job, a British ambassador to the US. Maybe he went there at one point and the ambassador's residence has a really nice bathtub or something, but it's all he's wanted and he had to claw and scheme and plot to get this job and now he's gotten it and Trump hates him. Which is weird because you think they would bond over the mutual friendship with Jeffrey Epstein but instead...

I don't know maybe their dicks touched once or something just just had a bad vibe at a Jeffrey Epstein orgy just saying yeah I don't like this guy yeah for many years I've been I've been climbing the buttery staircase of British politics in order to feed my water burger addiction. Finally my dream has come true. This is the only gay guy I don't like. Get him out of here. I don't want him being ambassador.

We're going to make him stand behind Barron. No funny stuff. We're going to accept Peter Mandelson as ambassador from the United Kingdom, but we're going to be fucking with him constantly We're gonna be playing pranks on him. We're gonna treat the UK ambassador embassy like it's the snooty frat house We're gonna put him in the YMCA, but we're gonna give him a letter that's not in the acronym And he's got a figure out cube it's the hardest one to do. You got to do it in midair. All right, shall we see him try?

Jump, Mandy. Do it for me. Peter Mandelson gets to be the ambassador to the US, but he has to do the plot of The Running Man starring Harold Schwarzenegger. Ask him the voice, too. The really funny thing about this is that the previous ambassador, for some reason,

Trump really liked her. And she had this reputation as being like the Trump whisperer because they got along quite well. And weirdly, it's not difficult to get along with Trump for a certain kind of person. You just have to find that person. And that kind of person is now like a strategic national asset for every country in the world. It's like we're going into the national oath stockpile. We need someone who's the perfect balance of like a kind of caddy flatterer. Yeah.

Alan Carr, British ambassador to the US. And so, you know, it's like what we have done, this is something you mentioned a few weeks ago when we were first talking about like the about the UK between Europe and the US, is we picked ourselves up by the lapels and chucked ourselves out of Europe, hoping that there would just be a kind of warm Atlanticism for us to kind of just sink into. Yeah. Catch me, catch me. And then it occurs to us that Trump still kind of likes Elon Musk and Elon Musk has gotten like radicalized against

Keir Starmer specifically so uh now now we have this idea that Trump's like well I hear that this guy's Hitler you know I hear that he's very unfair it's a free speech and I don't like him uh and it's just like okay well what a brilliant plan this was you know and the guy whose job is going to be trying to make the diplomatic relationship work. Well he's trying to make a big queue right now. Yeah, if anything one of the only people in the world Trump dislikes more than Keir Starmer. The British love a queue. He's gonna have a great time. It's kind of this perfect starboard because he can't not put Mandelson in that job until Trump rejects him because of like weird Labour

Party nepotism and internal politics. So it's like he's a prisoner of all this in so many ways. Oh well, we should make the guy who eats the Chinese food the ambassador. Big John. Trump would respect Big John. He loves the big guy, right? And so consequently, again, the national strategic big guy stockpile has dwindled terribly. This guy has got an incredible relationship with China.

He understands China and he says, Bash. You see him everything he says, Bash. I say hello, he says, Bash. I say, Bash, Bash. Great guy. And we say, Bash, Bash. And we say, Bash, Bash. I'd love to see Trump on the Big John Chinese sit down.

I think it'd be like one of the most revealing things. You know, Kamala was invited to go on the Big John Chinese sit down and didn't actually go. That's why she lost. She should have campaigned more in Romford. She lost the blue orchid. Weirdly, it's about seven electoral votes, but it's perfect 50-50 swing. Yeah.

They uncovered a little bit of the Constitution that said one patch of Romford that is now the blue orchid Chinese restaurant is technically a state. It's all to do with the War of 1812. We're all technically American citizens. Yeah. Sawed that double tax though. I'm paid in cash in hand. Anyway, I want to talk about Europe.

Kieran, Nick, what the fuck is going on in Europe? And please, please, can you start by giving our listeners an update on the political future of Cypriot Mr. Beast? Yes, yes. My boy. What's his name again? Phidias. I Phid his name again? Phidias. I, I. Phidias. We love Phidias. So Phidias is his political career is he's the first independent MEP from Cyprus,

a country that sends six people to the European Parliament. What he is in practice is he's a man who cyber stalked a Mr. Beast alike, a Mr. Beast adjacent person into meeting up with him, making a video and hugging him, and then made his name by trying to use Japanese public transport for free. Much to the dismay of Japanese police who do not speak English or Greek. Yeah, Phidias has just kind of stumbled into the parliament, mostly because his YouTube career was failing and just seems to respond politically to whoever is the top comment on his like ex posts, which is usually, it's usually Elon Musk or Andrew Tate.

I was going to say that's kind of transparent, but then Twisted Blue Checks really kind of fucked him up. Yeah, especially because he'll be like, I put the poll up to see what we can do a special investigation in the European union and you people voted for the trans problem. I will put a special on boy. Yeah. So it's just like he, like one of the wildest things that is seeing them, he's like doing like, I guess like direct democracy through Twitter. I believe it's Twitter, right? And it's tick tock as well, right. And it's TikTok as well. Yeah. Where it's just like people who are clearly not Cypriot citizens, first

off, probably not in the European union and just like right wing normal ex users will just then go and kind of, you know, vote for these polling things. And he has like, he's part of all these really bizarre committees in the European union. So that then of course means that he has access to then, you know, put in like special reports and be a full-time MEP. I guess also the thing too, to remember that then that's like no one in Cyprus votes in the European Union elections. And he kind of just like got in by the fact of they have a historically low, uh, um, like voter turnout, uh, traditionally. He is, he is a strange man. Like politically it's hard to put him down. I think he's actually have historically low voter turnout traditionally.

He is a strange man. Politically, it's hard to put him down. I think he's actually a dungust because he will just go along and be like, here are the foreign committees I've joined. I've joined the Middle East committee because it's close to my country of Cyprus, sure. I've joined the American committee because I'm interested.

I've joined the China committee because it is the future. I'm like, oh, okay. Man, that's a weird thing to just say in Brussels. I don't think you can say that I like that his my favorite element of his vibe is how everything that he says feels like it kind of like year three school report This is an Emmy this is why I love Europe the, there are so many political institutions where like, you just win for showing up. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's the most participation trophy as like, political system that I've ever heard of. He became a politician via a Mr. Beast style competition, which just so happens to be the European Parliament elections. I made a thousand people politicians overnight. He genuinely ran from one end of Cyprus to the other to get votes and made that a video. Can be logistically complicated. I shot by someone in the RAF.

I still think that like one of my favorite hideous moments was when he was an election observer in Georgia on behalf of the European Union. And it's like filming people just like getting into fistfights in wherever in the middle of rural Georgia that he is. And he's just like, you know, nothing bad happened. Elections went perfectly fine. You know, just, just. We even saw a cool fight. Yeah. He was like, he was filming this old woman come in like, yeah, first photo of the day. And it's like a woman who was born before the Russian empire collapsed. She doesn't actually know that it has.

Hey, they're probably voting over who can be Chinese the first. Which box do I take for Xar? A cheer goes on from waiting voters. Arriving in Georgia, like, no, it's fine. Do I take for Czar a cheer goes on from waiting voters? Arriving in Georgia like, no, it's fine. I just didn't think it would be Chinese. Yeah, this is the, uh, this is our best, uh, in Europe, but I want to talk more, in fact, about Europe's spluttering economic engine, the Franco-German relationship, starting with, of course, Germany. I'm going to read a little bit from The Economist. In the blue corner.

It is a bitingly cold evening in Bautzen, a handsome town nestled in the Oberlausitz, deep in the East German state of Saxony. The spirits are high at the election stand of the hard-right AFD. Quote, our land first because we love Germany, proclaim banners in the party's trademark bright blue. The mood inside the party is really good, beams Frank Frank Pesco who sits in Saxony's parliament. They took 39% of the vote here in last year's European election and we struggled to find any local not planning to vote for it. At the national election in February, Simon, a 20 year old says, the left calls us Nazis,

but we just want a normal life. And this seems to be how AFD is, I would say portrayed. I don't know if it's ignorantly or deceptively or whatever, that it's like, oh, no, this is, how can they be far right? People just want a nice life where we deport everyone of a certain skin tone or darker to the tune of like, Anna-Lena by Honk and DJ Huzzi. This is like when you read a footnote where it's like, in German, the word normal can also mean Nazi.

I mean, it's like in German, the word normal can also mean Nazi. It's just the sense of like, you know, the traditionally the Nazis, you know, wanted everything abnormal. They, they were very much against normal life in Germany as, as, as, you know, everyone knows. But I think it's kind of always like a bit of both in this scenario. I mean, especially like, you know, I feel that then a lot of like English language journalists can kind of do the thing that German idiot journalists do. They're like, we sent someone to Trump country.

And it's like, you're going to... Bautzen is a former economic powerhouse of East Germany. An economy that doesn't exist. And of course the city is completely in ruins. And there is of course a bit of truth with the sense that people in the East voted overwhelmingly AFD for obviously the migration reasons, but since reunification the East has been heavily exploited by the West. Wages are incredibly low there. There was a thing for the longest time called the Zolli Funds, which was money that then West Germany was still giving to East Germany to rebuild that

were just recently gotten rid of. I think they're trying to get rid of them this election. But you know, 30 years after the wall fell, there's still like a special fund for East Germany. There is no industry there. They have like a life expectancy 10 years lower than the last. So there is a bit of this truth to this, but also at the same time too, like the AFD is getting bigger everywhere in Germany. The AFD is the second like highest polling party in Germany in like Nord like Nordrhein-Westfalen like in the west which is also a post-industrial area. The AFD is also quite powerful in in in in there as well.

They also did quite well in the elections in Niedersachsen which is another state in the west. In like the metropoles I guess they're quite unpopular, but I mean, even in Berlin, they do quite decent. So I think that there is a bit of then like, yes, of course, the economic shock of East Germany, any party that then kind of comes and says we're going to then do something different can be appealing to these. This is also traditionally an area that then still voted for Die Linke for quite some time. And the CDU was also probably the second strongest area.

But then since they had been under CDU governance for such a long time, a lot of these voters from the CDU kind of then like flock into then the AFD in the East. Fast forward to now and like the post-migration crisis, you know, in quotes and such, the AFD has really kind of just normalized themselves as then we want to do like yeah like the migration thing is very much at the front of their party policy this year. They've been going around Germany and I mean also kind of influencing the European Union on a greater level with just like lying about migration which is a normal thing I think now for everywhere. The economy for them actually really isn't as big of a deal as they kind of like try to

make it out to be. So it is really the sense of that they've created a general fear within Germany around migration for like more or less like three years because they didn't really grasp COVID very well. Like their post COVID numbers kind of sucked, but they are, it isn't the sense that people want normal, like, you know, oh, we want normal things, this and then that if they did, they wouldn't vote for the AFD. They're a hyper libertarian party. They like the, the, the, uh, the want normal things, this and then that if they did, they wouldn't vote for the AFD. They're a hyper libertarian party. They like the the the the culture war bullshit. People who are in tune with the AFD kind of don't pay attention to mainstream media, typically as like other right wing landscapes. And they've driven

themselves insane over migration, woke bullshit and these other like non-existent sort of issues in Germany. And they're pulling currently like at like 22% nationally. So you can't even just blame East Germany for that alone. Yeah, the numbers don't add up. This high polling can't just be East Germans. The thing that I think they've, they got to quite early compared to like a lot of other parties

in the rest of the world even is like green backlash stuff. They hopped on that super quick, which Germany was ripe for because Germany has always had this very like, you bring your own bags to the supermarket, you have to buy an electric vehicle, you have to recycle the cans kind of attitude to green transition. They want me to bring my own bag to the supermarket, but they won't let me bring the one with the swastika on it. I'm reusing a very old bag, but why would I buy a new bag?

This is bad for the environment to have this very old bag. We, we, uh, we kind of talked about recently on a podcast, but like there is this real crisis, particularly with both AFD and the CDU of kind of admitting that they think that green energy is a little fruity or whatever, but then not acknowledging that they can't go back to the cheap Russian gas. There isn't really a way to get that going again.

I suppose this is one of those things you realize, oh, that doesn't matter, right? Because you're actually doing almost as like an entertainment force, a political party as an entertainment provider is you are saying, hey, you don't like all this green energy makes you, you think it's just a little bit like sensitive and it sort of activates your inner bully. Guess what? We'll get the fuck rid of it. And then the people are entertained and you know, you kind of do your best and then you don't really deliver it. It doesn't matter because you know, you've, you have triggered the lib. There's also like something to be said, cause like two of the things that sort of have come up in this episode really pertain to attention.

And the idea of so much of politics recently, but also I think the thing that will be really definitive throughout the states and also in Europe, and in the UK as well, will be how political reactionaries, populists, whatever you want to call them, how they are able to manipulate attention. And the ways in which the people who are the parties that seem to be able to manipulate attention and the ways in which like the people who are the sort of parties that seem to Be able to do it well have sort of recognized that like you can sort of use low attention spans and

Anger especially like anger channeled online to make yourself like not accountable for anything But also like you never have to sort of fulfill any of your promises right and you can also be really successful at it You know what people like from the AFD? They like that like one of their local parties goes around heavily migrant areas putting like airplane leaflets in. Yeah yeah that was in West Germany too by the way that was in Kosgua. Yeah yeah so it's even the thing too of like like the AFD is kind of and I think that that's a very good thing to point out with the AFD especially they kind of

do this thing where um which is kind of interesting for Germany because you can like, you get in serious trouble for it, but like the attention that they get is for them, like them breaking the law all the time. Like they're constantly, you know, didn't like, uh, they're always doing stunts. Yeah. Like a certain Mr. Uh, like a, yeah, like a certain, like a certain YouTube.

And it's not like, it's not actually that far fetched in the sense of like, I think the thing that people, the big figures like MrBeast have done, but it's not to say that he's a pioneer, but it's more just like, well, the main system of communication that everyone is tied to is one that also incentivizes consistent and perpetual novelty. And also, as this whole TikTok thing showed, lots and lots of people are so addicted and addicted and are so like, they believe that they kind of need these platforms that can hold their attention in like these 10 seconds, 10 second or like 20 second jumps because,

you know, in a lot of cases where the people who were complaining about the TikTok ban when they thought it was going to be more permanent, like the thing that they said is like, well, what are we going to do without it? So there's like, there's this very interesting sense of like dependent on this type of system that rewards continuous novelty and political parties, in some political parties, that are very able to like indulge that. And what's also very interesting is that the parties that are not able to do that really have no fucking idea what to do, because they can't really win on any sort of economic arguments. They can't really win on any international arguments.

Like the British Labour Party is a very good example of this, right? Like they can't really win on any sort of economic arguments. They can't really win on any international arguments. Like the British Labour Party is a very good example of this, right? Like they can only sort of abide by a very stringent playbook that like keeps fucking them over and they're going to keep wondering like, why does this keep happening? Well, you know what they can do is they can try and fail to be entertaining, right? With the example of their like strange body horror video of anthropomorphic animals announcing like different means tested school lunch policies or whatever, right? It comes up, well, it comes off as very weird, but I think the final point that I'll make on this is, well, the stunts at work. And in general, you think about the things that people are really entertained by, even non-politically. It's stuff where people are embarrassed, where

people get, that they're observed and judged. A lot of the content that goes viral and I think sort of very much has like a political tinge to it is one where like you are sort of shaming people like lots of different things. I think like, you know, the sort of abundance of like Andrew Tate style misogynistic content is a very good example of this. And I think it's just like you have political parties who are just kind of like on the right

who are very aware of this impulse and also recognize for like, as you guys have mentioned like, you know, they don't really give a shit about economics anymore. They don't really give a shit about like actually fixing things materially. None of the far right parties are actually like promising the people that they are saying we're going to get rid of the immigrants and make your life easier, but not actually sort of saying how they're going to do that. Oh, the AFD is the AFD has a plan. Absolutely. It is, it is to break German law. But still,

I mean, like they've this thing too, is that then it's like, I agree to a lot of points about the, I guess Germany is a bit different of an ecosystem because of how Germans interact with social media is not the same as the UK or the U S like it is like Twitter's not a thing really here. Not that it was, uh, you know, popular before Elon, but after Elon it's been even less so, I mean, I guess in right wing circles, but they've also like kind of done the kind of Trump branding to where they're also very proud of being like stupid. The like, you know, they they're like one of their one of their election posters has a guy with the shirt and it's like the slogan says,

finally, I can say what I want again. And then his shirt says hashtag schvarkalp, which in German means like weak minded. And he's like proudly like standing there like laughing. And yeah, it's a T-shirt they might have made you wear in Germany at one time. Yeah. I mean, to an extent, like, yeah, because we talked about the deportation tickets they're handing out to presumably terrified people of color in Karlsruhe or whatever. But like the real gambit was the fact that it was like, we handed out to 20 people here and becomes a new story of Germany wide and a bunch of people just kind of like nod in

agreement with us. And the CDU wants to do the same policy, you know, which is even like the thing too is that the AFD has also like moved the Overton window of all the parties now to as far right as they probably historically have ever been minus, you know, a little period in between, but you know. Yeah. And they also like, AFT is very good at spinning like a lot of these kind of like German, very German World War II memory lock kind of stuff. Like Alice Vidal, who's the head of the party got in trouble once for calling East Germany, middle Germany or central

Germany, which can't do that anymore. So like, yeah. But that definitely, there's definitely like a non zero number of guys who read that story being like, Oh, you can't say anything anymore. Like I accidentally call East Germany, central Germany or whatever. And like, and they're going to throw her in jail because of woke or whatever. You can't even, you can't even call it Koenigsberg anymore. What I'm learning here is that actually Cyprus is ahead of the curve because they already have a Cypriot Mr. Beast politician.

But this is what Germany is crying out for. It's going to be like, I gave 20 immigrants plane tickets like soy face. That's what they're looking for. I retook the Sudetenland. You know, that's yeah. Haare animal. It's elect Jeremy fragrance to the bundestag My father died the thing to remember about Germany as well is that the soundtrack to the creeping fascism is schlager

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. Do. Like like it's it's the most bizarre thing seeing Alice I don't like I mean you do have members of the party like Björn Höcke who does like Practice his Hitler shit in the mirror You can tell he has gotten in trouble for quoting Goebbels and used to write under the name like land off laddig For the NPD's like like newspaper the NPD being the like the actual Nazi party that you can legally call them a Nazi party um, but Alice Vardel kind of like tries to do in a similar vein of this whole thing of like Oh, like, you know, they're not going to do this and there's just videos of her He just yelling like they're not gonna take our schnitzel and like you can't take it seriously

because Really? It really is exactly that it is it is it is blasting like some guy named like, you know, DJ DJ harry cock or whatever like, you know Let's do to knock knock Fucking my York or whatever. I don't know bullshit song. Have you heard about this guy DJ Harry cock Play my next inauguration actually great Next inauguration, actually. Great guy. K-O-C-H, folks.

K-O-C-H. And it is, it is this thing too, because they like, they do like, that for them is German culture that they want to preserve. And I know that then people have, I talked about this like on a recent episode of Corner Spatii of like, people I think like to have a, you know, even on the left, like a rosy-eyed view

of like how Nazis liked culture. They were still like morons in the 30s, you know They hated anything that they saw as like degeneracy It's kind of similarly to with how this is and like I think here unexplained on the episode that it was like This is like the Nazis were kind of the equivalent of just like oh well like in in our modern age would be like just Guys who thought like Van Halen was like really cool in terms of like the like difference of time Yeah, you know, it seems sophisticated now, but they were advocating for music that was just like 10 years older than jazz. Yeah.

And I love the song YUM. That song. But it's in Germany. All of this is soundtracked by like a DJ that includes an accordion. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like songs about like, you know, like like being like playing cowboy in Indian with your lover or whatever It's corny. That's a specific song There's I know walk of walk I know walk of snake

Did not do not Friday of Montag Joanna There's one unfortunately named Schwarzen, Natasha and that's what they all want to bring back. They just want that. This is what Germany is going to. Their fascism is soundtracked to like the fucking number one for three weeks in the German charts was an AI generated song called Oh, fell in a talahoon. Yeah, yeah. In a talahoon, which is a racial slur for an Arab German. Yeah. Jesus. And it was in the style of like maybe more of a kind of an older schlager, but schlager nonetheless.

Yeah. Let's let's talk about Alice Vidal before we do finish off with our reading, which is crucially important that we get to the reading today is so important because it is one of the biggest stories I think of the last year. Alice Vidal is the leader of the AFD. This is from a profile of her in the FT. She does not fit the stereotype of a right wing radical. She's married to a Sri Lankan born Swiss film producer Sarah Bossard, with whom she has two adopted children in Switzerland. After graduating she spent time as an analyst for Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt and later wrote a doctoral thesis in the Chinese pension system.

And you know, I think this is a bit, you know, naive from the FT is being like, oh hey, this person who appears to be culturally genteel, who has a lot of the markers of intelligence, like, or culturedness and is in touch with things that we do not consider to be vulgar and also is a lesbian, you wouldn't expect this person to be a right wing radical. And it's like, well, no, you just what you're mistaking is like you are mistaking things you recognize in someone like you would consider to be normal. Right.

You're mistaking that for someone who is not then going to be, you might say, either extremely personally ambitious enough to start, you know, let's say referring to East Germany as middle Germany or, or who is simply a good person. You're mistaking these things for one another. Yeah, it is it is quite funny though When it's like do you do you hate vogue boy? Do I have the lesbian in a multiracial relationship for you? It's not what you expected new hit aside from all the gentle we know that also bullshit about being educated or whatever But that one detail is unusual. It's sort of international, like we've got gay Hitler and Trump, we've got lesbian Hitler and Alice Feidl. So, you know, I'm excited to find out about like bisexual Hitler. And

then it's ready for them. One last point to her biography that then I think is also quite interesting that the FT didn't put in it is that maybe they did, I didn't read it, but like she was bankrolled by the CDU for a while, like to do her like, her, her, her. She's a, she's a, to kind of hammer home about like the AFD is not necessarily new politics in Germany and like if the CDU wins this election, which they will, it's not a good thing. Like she is a CDU politician. Yeah, the only reason that she went to the AFD is cause her advisor for her PhD was like, Like if the CDU wins this election, which they will, it's not a good thing. Like she is a CDU politician. The only reason that she went to the AFD is because her advisor for her PhD was like,

who was a member of the CDU was like, oh, hey, there's a sick new cool party. You want to come with me? And he was one of the founders of the party. CDU is cucked. We got to go to, we got to go to this cool. So her politics are incredibly normal in Germany, unfortunately. Like, you know, it does this whole like, you know, oh, wow, can you believe this? But it's like these people, like most of them within the AFD have been.

I mean, they're the the party with the highest percentage of of PhDs in there. Like, yeah, like German. It doesn't matter, though, still. But it's this idea that like bullshit or not PhD. It's still like a like the idea that like, oh, can you believe that they're, you know, well educated? It's like, yeah, like I've met a lot of fucking completely stupid people with PhDs especially in this country because every year There's a scandal of someone plagiarizing their thesis or some shit

But yeah this this like whole kind of background for her and this and that and that is like very very very very normal Within the AFD as as November said least racist German white German lesbian Hello you do hear me it's it's me your cousin Marvin Marvin Hitler November said, least racist white German lesbian. Yeah. Hello. Hello. You do hear me? It's me, your cousin Marvin. Marvin Hitler. You know the new party you've been looking for? Well, listen to this.

That party you used to like is going to come back in style. Yeah, it's mostly accordions, but they're saying very right-wing stuff. It's not coming out in the mix, you gotta listen to it. Yeah, so asked to explain the apparent incongruity between her private life and her party's opposition to quote gender and woke ideology she said I'm not queer I'm just married to a woman who I've known for 20 years. This is actually just a coincidence. I tripped and fell and landed with my tongue in her pussy. This is totally normal. Germany gets like the early nineties anime dubs thing where the clearly lesbian couple are just called cousins.

So one senior party official put it, she's gay by biology, but not by political conviction. Unlike Donald Trump. She's going up there on the podium and be like, I not by political conviction. Unlike Donald Trump. She's going up there on the podium, be like, I didn't choose this. It is not a choice, of course. I think you also like you also get that looped up, like, because I think there's so much like cultural confusion there as well, because a lot of the times with gender when referencing the right in Germany is this like stop trying to make me speak the woke German is a lot of like what these right wing grievances are.

They banned gender speak in Bavaria, which is hilarious for a country that has gender. Okay, we're choosing D or dear. We are just choosing fun and it's a neutral one. You know what? Everything is boys now. I have to agree with the anti woke crusade if it came in the sense of having one article in German, alright? It doesn't make it easier for us. Come on. You don't need these. They have made all of the things masculine, but now the book is gay with the bookcase. It has become vogue.

No! My non-binary book, goddammit. I'm Reichein woke, I'm gay Hitler. Yeah, like you can imagine the amount of shit that happened to like Bud Light, but when they find out that beer in German is also Das, like that was the same kind of like backlash is. Hate to say that. What we can kind of, if we want to draw these two segments together, sort of US, Germany,

I think what we're finding in both is ever since sort of the various political upsets of the 2010s, the official, if you want to say vibe shift, right? The vibe shift that has happened is that all of these people- You're shifting the gender of the word vibe, which is also coming back in style. Vibe is a word in German for a whore, by the way. Yes. yeah. Oh my. Okay.

But these, that shift, it's even called the vibe shift, is that these people, the political tendencies they represent, all of the powerful have sorted out all of their lingering questions and doubts about whether or not they should be sort of fallen in behind Foursquare,

and those questions have been resolved to, yes, they're fine. We can work with them. It'll be great. March in. You know, like the firewall of parties refusing to cooperate with AFD. How long is that going to last? These sort of widespread sort of condemnation of Trump, the differences between the first inauguration and this one. It's a universe of difference, right? Of the respect and deference that he so craved

that is now being shown to him. And with someone like that, going back to Trump specifically, for whom respect and deference is so important, so personally important, who knows what kind of difference that could make to someone who is so personalist and arbitrary in his rule? And again, a lot of people who are like, you know, AFD bigwigs, they also crave, you know,

looking to Kieran and Nick for this one, respect and deference. And it seems as though the ground is being laid for them to have it just as it's being laid to give it to reform. In the UK, I mean, now we're saying like, okay, we're throwing up our hands, we'll have another grooming gangs inquiry because like all of the people who we used to think were political poison have asked for it and we kind of have to do what they say because they're insiders now. What we have witnessed is a great insider making of people who were previously at least kind of outside. Yeah, I mean, like the conversation when Trump got elected, like he's been inaugurated now,

but the conversation was not like, there was no condemnation. There was no like America's gone to hell in a handbasket that you expect from Europe last time. It was all just like accommodation. How do we work with this? How do we make him happy? And this is like the cultural equivalent of it. The more material equivalent is just like speeding up construction of those LNG terminals and like the Atlantic coast. But like- On one last note with the Trump thing, I think one of the very, you know, kind of going back then to the CDU on this is that then there is a general, like the party of Maco that then was like praised for so long internationally as being like a kind of like liberal conservative party, overwhelmingly likes Trump this time around. There was no, like there was always kind of like these like pockets within the CDU of like, oh yeah, like we think he's cool. But the general overwhelming attitude within the CDU, the incoming government is that Trump is not only like, will they work with him? He has the politic that they like.

The head of the CSU said this yesterday that he thinks that the way that Trump does politics is great. He has a good attitude. The head of the CDU, Friedrich Manz, who will be the next chancellor of Germany is going to send him like a love letter apparently to the inauguration. So, um, this is also the thing too, is that regardless of the AFD and the super far right. Also like the Maloney ization, I guess you can say of like Europe has also made

Like of the like general like historical conservative parties has also made this easing up to Trump not even just like oh we have to Do it. It's like they're they're happy about it. They're stoked. Yeah, it's great. So they want anyway That's all we have time for but I want to thank Nick and Kieran for coming on today and sharing some of their Europe Knowledge with us. Where can people find you guys on the internet operation glad.io greatest six zero ever spent Where you can find corner speedy on anything that you download podcasts from operation glad.io if you can't spell spadey Which is you know, that's right. We are the biggest idiots in the world for naming our podcast Like no one has the extra a. Let's have a primarily English speaking podcast, have some letters and sounds that don't really occur in the language. German person explain what a spade is to another German person in German.

I was like, oh, we fucked up so bad. Just on a on a on a on a quick little note, and I'll send this to you guys because we did talk about the AFD a bit. I wrote like a little bit of a little bit of a Just on a, on a, on a, on a quick little note, and I'll send this to you guys. Cause we did talk about the AFD of it. I wrote like for the show for our show, like a full election overview thing. Cause Germany has elections coming up. If the discussion about the AFD interested you, you can also take a peek at that. I'll, like I said, I'll send it to the, to the gang or I think you can

maybe find it on our website. I have no fucking clue anyway. We'll link it So that is all I have to shout out is just like if you if you would like to read rather than hear our voices About the German elections, you know, there's also that all right. Well, Milo your usual dates are on your website Yeah, please especially less the Comedy Festival 9th of Feb Glasgow Comedy Festival 12th of March and also, Glasgow Comedy Festival, 12th of March, and also all the Australia dates are on sale in March and April, so get after those. All right, well, the plugs are done. It's time for four more years, I guess. See you on the bonus episode in just a few short days. Bye, everybody. Bye!