TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Britainology 18: Poshness (feat. Charlie Palmer)

Episode Date: September 4, 2022

Okay, okay, maybe you've heard the term 'posh' or 'posho' when referring to fancy British people. You're aware that this country has a reputation for its class system. But what does it actually mean? To answer this question, we brought in TF founding cohost and knower of fancy tendencies Charlie Palmer to discuss. It's all here: getting ripped at 11 am on Dubonnet, wearing a straw hat every day at school, absurd nicknames, gibberish words for everyday items, and the profound sorrow of clinging to the cultural artefacts of feudalism. We offer one Britainology a month in addition to all the weekly TF bonus content for $5 a month, and if you desperately want more Britainology, there's also a second episode available each month on the $10 tier. Sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-additional-show-tickets-396915263237 and Canberra: https://au.patronbase.com/_StreetTheatre/Productions/TFLP/Performances *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, mateys, and welcome to another absolutely classic edition of Britannology. I've got some of the chaps together. I'm joined by Bethie, Nate Bethay, as you know him, known each other since Chouse. There was a cracking time at St Andrews, you know, I've learned how to speak this way. I'm joined by David Bedeal, who went to St Andrews apparently. It is time to talk about Britain's ruling class, the humble posho, the toff. People with no chins who begin drinking at 11am have dogs with girls' names and mothers with dogs' names, but what makes them tick?

And here to help us on this very special edition of Britannology is posho expert and original third Mike of Trash Future, Charlie Palmer. I've absolutely no idea why I've been invited to this, to be honest. It's quite offensive. This is all I am to you. This is it, right? Yeah. I'm absolutely delighted to be here, thrilled to be invited back on, and it's very nice to see both. Thank you very much. It's been too long since we've reconvened and had all of the people who are in some way tainted by Trash Future in the same room, so...

I know. I don't think we have. We've never met Alice, for example, in person, even though she's a co-host and has been a co-host for almost every day. I had no idea. That's weird. No, because she was ill when we were going to have the show in Edinburgh, I think, and she wasn't able to make it. And so as a result, yeah, because she lives in Glasgow. So yeah, we have not, in fact, met in person.

So it's rare, but... Alice is actually just me in a trench coat. Yeah, exactly. Several Charlie stacked on top of each other in a trench coat. In a 20-foot-high trench coat. Charlie just really brushes up on Wikipedia deep dives before he goes on any episode. Just be like, what do I do? The Tsar Bomba or something along those lines.

Yeah, fucking up the Tsar Bomba. It's my favorite bomb. So anyway, I know very little about the intricate details of British ruling class people. I've gotten better at recognizing accents. For example, I told Milo, because I have a house share next to me. People who own the place work for the foreign office. They're currently posted in Israel. They keep renting to Sesh House lads and lasses.

And from the accents, I'm picking up that these people are probably posh. And I asked Milo. And I was like, oh no, I could hear them laughing through the wall and immediately knew they were posh. And so it's like... I was waiting for you in the car outside and the door wasn't open. I could just hear posh girl noises literally through the door. It's genuinely like the way the Sims talk, like the Sims-lish,

but it's just posh Sims-lish. And I picked up on it. Oh, yeah. And she was like, I'm raw. I'm raw. There's a different tone. If you go to... I don't know if you've ever been to a pub in Chelsea.

No. I really recommend it. You know how you go into a pub most of the time? And if it's a loud pub, if it's full, you go in and there's a kind of background level of noise, which I'll do a bad impersonation of. You go in and there's a... Or even a...

If it's a really rat... You go into a pub in Chelsea and it's... And it's genuinely just a different tone to the background level of noise in the pub. And you're like, oh, I'm in a posh pub. Yeah. Absolutely. If you walk into a posh pub, you're just like...

It's like all kinds of tones that you and even I never use. It's absolutely extraordinary. Yeah. One of the best bits, I think, I've ever seen on... I mean, there aren't many good bits on Mock the Week, but I think this was Mock the Week where they were like... There was some footage of Prince Charles somewhere and they were like...

And we got lip readers to find out what he was saying and then the audio just cuts in and it's just... I think they got Hugh Dennis to do that, didn't they? And like a oddly funny... I think basically he's got a Prince Charles in the locker, hasn't he? He has, yeah. A bit like that, isn't it, Prince Charles? Yeah, that's it.

It's kind of fitting in a way because last night everyone saw that or many people saw that GB News clip where Lady Colin Campbell was speaking with her insane accent. Wild accent. And I realized, okay, she's born in Jamaica and everything. Yeah, so I think it was definitely Epstein. It was not a PA to fall. It was technically in a few fall.

Is that what the accent was? Because I wondered whether it was like really... Because there's like early... If you go back early 20th century and obviously like the royal family, there's loads of jokes about this, but like... There was this sort of pan-European aristocracy, which I think is still a bit true. I think so, yeah.

Yeah. But like everybody would marry like... If you were posh, a certain level of posh here, you'd go marry a Prince from Austria or something. And that would be the deal. So you ended up with this like... You know, hilariously like pan-European sort of semi-German accents going around. And if you're Princess Michael of Kent,

you have an SS major for a father and so it's just sort of like... No, it's a real German accent. Is that true? Your father was in the SS. She was born in Nazi-occupied Sudetenwan. Phenomenal. Yeah. But hey, you know what?

Bygones be bygones. Yeah, that's why she's so normal, I think. Yeah, you think of Princess Michael of Kent and you think a regular woman... Who understands normal things. ...with normal opinions. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think I feel like the royal family

are kind of a good place to start as sort of the ur-poshos. But I also feel like in some ways the royal family are less posh than some of the aristos. Like because the royal family, they almost have to be a bit more normal because they're in a position of prominence. I don't think that's true.

I think they've just got a good PR. Oh, maybe, yeah. I don't know. If you've seen that video that did the rounds of, like, Prince Harry Nazi costume, Pete Posho. Prince William absolutely off his tits doing weird dancing on his own,

somewhere in Valdez air on a skiing holiday. Pete Posho. They've all got that in the locker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Prince Andrew... Pete Posho. What a beautiful pizza express. Yeah.

The Posho's, they do love woking pizza express. It's one of the better branches of pizza express and they recognize that. If you go into woking pizza express, you will actually hear that kind of like... Yeah, I have not, I mean, I've heard people speak sometimes in sort of media job things

where I've heard accents that just seem like they've been preserved in amber. I'm not going to lie. But then invariably, that's not even the weirdest one. And for you, both of you, you have the ability to sort of like immediately pick up on little details

and suss out some of the tells. Whereas for me, like I can kind of tell at this point, I've been here almost three years, whether or not, whether an accent is kind of revealing about someone's background to some extent. But especially if it's regional

or especially if it's weird, like a super weird, super posh accent, I can't really tell you much more besides than like this person probably... There's levels as well. There's a level of posh accent, which is, because there's two ways you pick up accents, right?

You know, immediate surroundings based on kind of where you're from and immediate surroundings based on like the social stratum that you are educated in in particular. And when you're posh enough, where you're from ceases to be a factor. Well, that's true generally.

That's true for both of those. Like there's... But there's two kind of types. There's like RP English. There's Received Pronunciation English, which is like basically what I sound like and kind of what Milo sounds like. I meant that as a compliment.

I was trying to distance you from the poshness. I was like, I can't say what just... I can't just say what Milo sounds like because it would, you know, denigrate your roots. Exactly. That's fucking right, lads. It's what Milo sounds like.

All right, darling, be lucky. Which is so funny. I briefly interrupt you. Milo and I did a video gig in Liverpool and it was really funny because to me, Milo's accent doesn't strike me as being particularly like RP. Like it just...

To me, it sounds... I don't know, maybe in the same way that I have an American accent, I have a Midwestern accent, but like you've told me that at times I just sound really American to you. And I suppose... You sound very like CNN.

You sound extremely like broadcast American English. Yeah, in Midwestern English. And I guess I sound quite broadcast. Who years of broadcast experience? Yeah. What is this? Broadcast. We were in Liverpool and if one of us,

either of us went up to ask a question at like a hotel counter or like a concierge or something, if I asked the question, they'd be like, Oh, you're American. Where the fuck are you doing here? And with Milo...

No, I grew up in Tipperary. Yeah. Oh, I thought Scotland. Liverpool near Inverness. But Milo, by comparison, if he asked the exact same question, they'd be like, Fuck off, you fucking Southern cunt.

Like it was so wild. Did you get some aggression? So much like more demonstrably. Not like open aggression, but like a lot like ruder to me than they were today. And it was funny because they noticed it. And I was kind of tuning out

because I'm just kind of used to it. I know like, if I go to the north, there is a high chance that people will be rude to me because of the way that I sound. But then it was when name picked up and I'm like, Oh fuck. Yeah. No, it was absolutely.

I've literally never had this. They just respect you as a tall man. Maybe you should try not being a cunt. Yeah, maybe. It doesn't happen everywhere. But yeah, Liverpool was really, it was particularly a bad friend. I always have a good time in Newcastle.

The Jordies are always game for art. Newcastle is great. Yeah. I do enjoy Newcastle. Yeah. And it's amazing that Newcastle hasn't built up more pent up aggression towards poshos who've been imported

because Newcastle is one of the like, so it's not that Newcastle is like a pretty decent university, but if you've been to a very, very high achieving school, Newcastle is one you can kind of cruise into. So it's one that ends up with a lot of like poshos who... Like relatively smart ordinary people and dimitonians.

Exactly that. Yeah, yeah. There's a few universities that are like that. Exeter's like that. Leeds is a bit like that. Edinburgh is like that. Oh, God, Edinburgh. I think Edinburgh might be the absolute poshow capital

that's great for a university. Yeah, these ones that are like genuinely quite difficult to get into unless you've paid an enormous amount to have a really, really phenomenal education, in which case you can do absolutely no work and just go to like, I don't know, Henley the whole time and then still cruise through Europe. We should talk about society events in a bit.

Actually, we should talk about Henley and stuff. That'd be good. Oh, Henley, fucking hell. Well, I don't know if you've got a rubric or you've got a show notes to go off of, but yeah, I was thinking about this recently that this was a phenomenon that I noticed that I have neighbors and it's a married couple

and the woman is like a BBC journalist and her father was a BBC journalist and the husband is a former British Army officer. They're both from Scotland, born and raised in Scotland. They have RP accents. They do not sound Scottish at all. You would never guess it. And Milo's like, do you realize these are posh people?

Oh my God, there's so much stuff to come back to because there's also another phenomenon in poshness and I'm sorry, we should come back to like first principles in a minute, but there's an amazing, very specific phenomenon among posh people, which is that posh English people, for some reason, Scottish aristocracy is seen as like more desirable than English aristocracy.

They love pretending to be Scottish. It's really weird. The amount of English aristocracy in Oxfordshire you'll see wearing fucking kilt. Yeah, and they'll claim it's their like family tartan because their great-great-granddad was like Laird of somewhere like very bleak in the Grampians. Yeah.

And they like, they all do. Laird of heroin, too. The single poshest English thing you can do is Scottish dancing. There you have it. It's like Scottish reeling. You will not catch Scottish people doing it. I don't think that's always true, to be fair,

but it is the single poshest English thing you can do. If you get invited to a Scottish dancing party, you know that every single person there is going to be posh and English and with like a couple of token scots. I'm trying to think of what would be the most, this is going to be an event full of like hedge fund manager people level of, because in America,

so much of it is tied to having money. And like there is the old money stuff. And I don't really know a lot about the old money stuff. And then there's obviously like more sort of nouveau-re-style things. But like to me, when you used to describe Scottish dancing to me, it's like, if someone's like, oh yeah, my kid's competing in a youth triathlon,

that screams these people have fucking money to me. Because that's just like a sport, for example, that no one plays unless they have a lot of money. And also like their parents are insane. Reeling to me almost feels like it wouldn't be the hedge fund managers. It would be like they'd be doing something more esoteric. Well, hedge funds are relatively new.

hedge funds are a new invention. You would be, you would maybe be a stock broker, or you would be a barrister, or you would be, you know, there's jobs, jobs that have been around for hundreds of years. Gotcha. So you might be like a merchant banker. You might be an investment banker,

but you're probably not doing high-frequency trading. I did, when I used to do corporate media stuff, one of the clients I worked with was a hedge fund in the UK. It was an American hedge fund with their office in the UK. And one of the things they told me when we were prepping stuff was that they were really unused to the idea of doing media at all because British hedge funds don't even have like a website.

Like it's such a closed shop thing. But I noticed that a lot of them, like the guy had gone to, I think he'd gone to like middle sex or something like that. Like he'd gone or, I'm trying to think whatever the other one was. It was, it was a university, it was like a Russell group university,

but it wasn't like a posh university, but like those are the people who were like running the office or like, you know, moving money or that kind of a thing. It did strike me that whereas if you went to like this pub on the corner, this is like on German street, where there was like a barrister's chambers nearby, those guys on the other hand were like extremely very, very, very fancy. You could get that vibe.

Yeah. 100%. And I think also there is, so I think it's interesting, should we go back to sort of first principle? Sure, yeah, let's do it. And talk about like, we keep digressing and that's my fault, but I'd like to hear that.

Talk about like where the posh has come from, I think there are lots of different, you know, articulations of poshness in the UK and lots of different kind of caricatures and stereotypes and characters and there's lots of different ways in which it manifests itself, but fundamentally it's all come from the same place, right? It's come from,

and this is where it will be totally alien to the to the US, French is it's come from the idea that actually the, you know, fundamentally the feudal system once decided who was in a particular social class and the people whose families used to be in that social class, the top one, the landowners, would quite like still to cling on to some vestiges of that authority, even though in theory we now live in a world where those,

those standards legally at least don't apply anymore. So it's about, and what that explains is the, the kind of posh preference for the traditional, like the idea is that stuff done properly is stuff done traditionally and everything newer than that is a bit uncouth and a bit improper and a sort of fake version. And actually the,

the tasteful way of doing things, the proper way to behave is how to behave 100 years ago, i.e. back when they had all of that power. So it's clinging on to that really. So it's sort of that it's really a, it's a tragic story rather than an aspirational story. It's like a, it's a story of like slow decline and desperately clinging on

to the kind of superficial vestiges of where the power used to come from. I think about this sometimes that, you know, to an American, you look at the fact that the house of lords exists and you're like, what a fucking joke. But then if you, it's like, it used to be that the king had to convene with the barons,

for example, to get anything done. That doesn't exist anymore. So the first, I mean, obviously the, the Magna Carta, which is the like, you know, obviously the kind of, it gets touted as the sort of founding document of English law and putting limits on the monarchy. And a great moment for democracy and all of that kind of shit.

But at the time it was like, there was pretty low bar for what delegation of power, or like, you know, devolution of power was going to be. Which was like, instead of it just being the king, it was the king and the landowners. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Which at the time is pretty revolutionary.

And I guess in a way it's just, because there's this joke back and forth, you know, about Americans and you know, there are things in America that are from the very, very late 16th century, but by and large it's all much newer than that. Especially the further west you go, it's really not in much more than 150, 200 years old.

And you're reminded that like, yeah, things seem archaic here, but if you contrast it with where it was, even just say 200 years ago, it's come a shockingly long way. But I think the thing that's different is that in the same way that like, do you really care about the Duponts

or the Vanderbilt's or, you know, all these things in America, it's like, well, they don't, you don't have, you now have new money, Robert Barons, you know, the Jeff Bezos, et cetera. But then you start to dig and you're like, well, you know, every, basically every small town or medium sized town in America

had a Carnegie Public Library because of Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie. You know, Carnegie Mellon University is this great, big research institution. It's because of him and his money, same with Vanderbilt University. You know, Anderson Cooper from CNN, his mother was Gloria Vanderbilt.

Like that aristocracy is there, but it's nowhere near as entrenched as here and there's nowhere near as many of them in a way because quite frankly, like what you get in the United States, and I presume the same in Canada too, maybe a little more Anglophile, but still similar, it's just so different than a place

where like you were describing, some of these titles and, you know, heritages have been passed down for over a thousand years. That's it, right? Like the people who did that in the States, I mean, sort of the people you're talking about, the original wealth came from, you know, a way of making money that sort of still exists.

You know, you get in, you do a railroad, you do a bit of oil, all of that stuff, all of that still exists. It's fundamentally common. The way of like inheriting a vast tract of the country from your father. Having peasants. If you were the eldest son,

and then just like taking that over and that being like, you're right. And that being the reason your family still has status is like wild, and there's a competitiveness about how old your family is, which is hilarious, because obviously everybody's family's the same age. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When people are like, I can trace my family back to the middle ages. I'm like, I've got some bad news to you about everyone else's family. Yeah, exactly. But it basically means like how long ago your family has been rich and powerful. Yeah. And that's seen as this like seniority,

which is very fun. It is weird where you're like, oh yeah, this is an elite that literally predates capitalism, as opposed to an elite in America that were sort of the first successful capital. No, exactly, yeah. It's very funny that you should bring up like the Vanderbilt since like 19th century money or whatever,

which in America is kind of the oldest money you've got more or less because... You have some people in like the original colonies in New England who were like earlier money, but by and large the big like the people who wielded power and who still have that kind of like high society influence is the 19th century. Yeah.

So I have an anecdote about this. Both of you will recall a girl I used to date from California, whose maternal grandparents were both English and had moved to California in like the mid 20th century. And they were both very posh to my mind. However, her grandmother was posher than her grandfather and never ceased to remind her grandfather about this. Her grandmother's money were those kind of

aristos who no longer had any money, but were very posh and all the men were like army officers and whatever. And they kind of like lived in this sort of like ramshackle cottage that they couldn't afford to repair, etc. Whereas her grandfather's family were extremely rich factory owners, but who had made all their money in the 19th century,

which led her grandmother to consider her grandfather to be nouveau rich. That's the... But I think there's a sort of... And I think we'll touch on this with a lot of different kind of archetypes and stereotypes that we're going to talk about. But there's a sort of existential clash in poshness now, where there are some people who,

if you are super old money, but you don't have any money anymore, which is lots of them because like, you know, fundamentally fortunes rise and fall unless you're guaranteed land by the king and they're no longer guaranteed land by the king. So some of them lose all their money. That guy's dead.

That happens. So lots of those people, not all, but lots of those people in the absence of financial superiority will cling on to the old titles and the old circles their family moved in and, you know, all of that shit and really cling on to the trappings of poshness

to kind of as part of a sort of insecurity that they're actually losing the seniority they once had. But then there's, and you know, obviously what happens is like the younger the generation gets, the more everyone's like, being posh isn't exactly in at the moment. So there are loads of people who, you know, I know Milo knows who are,

who go into kind of stealth mode and there are various different, you know, you can do the thing where you just kind of moderate your voice a little bit. Or you can do the thing where you fully like change voice, change persona, change how you dress, change how, change what job you do, change how you hang out with, change your political beliefs.

But all out of this like insecurity about appearing to be like your parents. It's basically like a, it's basically rebelling against your parents, but taking the form of like, I am going to renounce all of poshness. The thing that's going to be interesting, because we're both still in our late 20s,

is to see whether those people who like are now a kind of living in squats in Deppford and like DJing twice a week. Also wearing a signatory. DJing twice a week. Will in 10 years just inherit an enormous amount of money, move to a big farmhouse in the country and go Scottish dancing a lot. And I think it's entirely possible that a load of them will.

And I cannot wait. Scottish dancing I do kind of want to return to because I felt like that was such a like amazing, like if there was a sector of people you wanted to avoid at Cambridge, you could not go to Scottish dancing and avoid a good number of them. I never went to one there for that reason. Because I remember there was a girl also,

but who we both know, who was at my college, who her only criteria for dating men was that they should be as posh as possible. And she used to go to Scottish dancing specifically to meet the most Hapsburg jaw motherfuckers she could possibly find. But I think this is a, because I think there's a, there's different types of,

because what we're talking about is snobbery here. We're talking about like, and that's a term that obviously gets thrown around an enormous amount. But I think the motivation for snobbery is never as active and deliberate as we'd like to believe. We never go like, nobody ever says like, oh, I'm not going to talk to that person because, you know, they're beneath me

and it might undermine my social status if I'm seen with that person. That's never the mentality. What the mentality is for a load of these people is like, I only know one way to behave. I only know one worldview, one set of hobbies, one set of conversational topics. And if I talk to somebody who doesn't share all of those,

I have no idea what to do. And I cannot hold a conversation with anybody who does not have these things in common with me. Dog racing, you say, is that a kind of pedophilia? Well, dog racing in a way is okay because you can talk about horse racing and it's the same. But if you can't talk to somebody about skiing, rugby, horse racing, Scottish dancing,

you know, whether you've been to the same places on holiday, you know, it's all of... Which school you went to. It's all of that stuff. Who you know in common, that becomes like a... So that becomes an amazing posh conversational talking point. Yeah. Is people going, oh, you must know Binky.

And then you're like, which one? Because it is this... As our Canadian friend would say, unique social microclimate. It's a bit like the mafia. Like everyone has these absolutely inscrutable nickname. Wait, Binky Constance or Binky Fingers? And he was just like, what?

But this is the thing, right? Like basically everybody, basically every person is the same. Like there's not like a genetic mindset difference between posh people and non posh people. Although some of them would like to think that there is. There's skull sizes. Fundamentally, everybody has this impulse

to hang out with people who are a bit like them in some kind of way, whether it's to share something in common, whether it's you have a similar view on the world, similar sense of humor, whatever. The problem is if you're raised in a way that teaches you that there is a set of rules that you have to live by in a way that you have to behave,

it coaches you towards a particular group of people that you have to hang out with for the rest of your life. And it's, I think, pretty difficult to break out of that because everyone else, by the time you're about 25, thinks you're a knob. So again, I think it's fundamentally quite a tragic story rather than like a malicious one most of the time. And I also found, again, encountering...

And I think it goes back to a bit of conversation we were having off-mic, where I found that a lot of the real hardcore posh shows that I encountered at Cambridge were like more kind of affable and easier to get on with than the mid-tier trying to be posher than they were people. And that's kind of what that girl we were just talking about was like. She wasn't even that posh, but she was like keen to marry up.

And as a result, was way more insufferable than a lot of the just kind of like bumbling posh shows. Was she sort of explicit about this? Was that like a... Or was it just like the people she hung out with were a bit like that? It was just kind of a powerful vibe that she exited. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

And she would like very explicitly... But she had that like real curse where like she was in love with all these guys who were like extremely posh who didn't even know she existed. But there were also a bunch of guys who were slightly less posh than her who were all in love with her who she was like, but they're disgusting. Wouldn't even look at them.

Genuine, genuine Jane Austen energy. Very good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this gets to the heart of quite a lot of this. Like the people who are kind of posh posh, where there's like, you know, just absolute social confidence and comfort that I think we've probably all met one or two people who are so posh that they...

There's no insecurity there. There's no like... There's just the genuine conviction that you're still the most important and powerful person in the room and everybody is sort of subject to you in some way. Which, you know, if you ask somebody, they wouldn't say that that's how they feel, but there's a little bit of that where they feel like...

And what that does is really powerful because it just means you can like... I bet if you meet Prince William, he can just walk into a room and he owns the room because he kind of actually on legal principles, if you go back, you know, the fundamentals of British land law actually, his grandmother does fundamentally own the room.

Yeah, that's why she wrote that book. But there's that. And then there is the opposite of that, which is there are loads of different groups of people who are trying to affect poshness. And there are people who are a bit posh, but have, you know, no longer got a lot of cash. And so the poshness is sort of all you got left,

all of that sort of thing. So the poshness gets dialed up. There are, as Milo said, the people... It's so interesting. There's a kind of... Well-themed... You know, the kind of adoption curve of what's like a sophisticated thing to do,

you know, like being on Facebook isn't cool now. But it was in 2004, for example. Exactly that. There's the same thing with posh stuff. For instance, being in like a member's club, depending on the member's club, apparently there are now like loads of clubs in Mayfair where basically all of the members are either kind

of Russian oligarchs or like Essex boys who've made a load of money doing whatever business they're in. And the people who think of themselves as like sophisticated old money posh English people have like migrated and they've moved out because they're like, that's not a posh place anymore. So you know, like if somebody goes like, oh yeah, well, fabric's dead now.

You know, there's no good... Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. The tourists have turned up in fabric now. There's like the reverse of that, which is that like this place is now too new and everybody who is not... Everybody who wasn't a member in 1600 is now a member. We've had to decamp from Boodles

and start meeting inside of Fabergeek. I think I'm filled with Essex people. See, I think Fabergeek's are probably quite new, though. Oh yeah, possibly, yeah. The Russian star was a bit... Yeah, exactly, that's it. It's a bit of a wide boy. The thing that gets me is dealing with this

with regards to when you live here and you look at, for example, property listings for rental or potentially like when you're like, I wonder how much it would cost to buy a place. And you look at the laws with freehold versus leasehold and how leases work and stuff. And the fact that you might legitimately in, you know, a part of London or another city elsewhere in the country

or a town, you might buy a home and technically you don't own the land that the home is built on because an aristocratic lord owns that land on a thousand-year lease or a 500-year lease or a 100-year lease or something along those lines and it has to be renewed. To me, I'm just like... The first time Milo explained it to me, I was like, you must be fucking joking.

Like if Duke Nonsington owns this land, like he technically is your landlord, even if you own the house, it's built on forever. He's like, yeah, that to me, it's not necessarily that's like a skeleton key to the social relations, but it's more like when you realize that there are people that because of hereditary titles own land and it's not just like, oh, they own a nature preserve

or a park or something. No, they own places where city buildings are built on and things along those lines. And huge amounts of that land is owned by the Crown. Yeah, the Crown of States. The Crown of States, the really big one, but like obviously there's other ones too. That to me, I feel like then you start to realize like,

okay, well, so there is still... It's not just like the descendants of people who still hold on to titles. Like there absolutely is still like a lot of the way or at least a portion of how... Because we never had our constitution moment, right? So our law is a mess. It's all just this fudge between the past and the present.

And to be honest, like, I don't know. It's only about you, Milo, but like, I don't think anybody really thinks about that. Other than the House... Is there anywhere Nate brought it up? The House of Lords is sort of lightning rod for a lot of that criticism. And like, if anybody talks about like,

well, they talk about two things and we should come to the second one. When people talk about like residual poshness in the UK, they talk about the House of Lords and they talk about public schools. Those are the big two. I mean, we're absolutely going to have to get onto public schools. I always find the House of Lords to be a bit of a weird

like kind of misnomer because there aren't that many hereditary peers left. They're mostly appointed. And they've been getting a lot of... They've been getting a lot of heat recently, haven't they? Which is quite fun. Because the Times did that big investigation into... And basically, well, I say big investigation,

somebody at the Times basically had the bright idea of looking up all the hereditary peers and working out where they all went to school. And it was like, there's, I don't know, 45 of them and something like 30 of them went to eat. Literally, most of them went to one school. The majority of them. It's absolutely exceptional.

And also, there's still like primogeniture. So it's still first born sons inherit their dad's seat in the Lords. And I think this is still true that if you have an older daughter, she doesn't get it. Well, what gets me about that too is that, I mean, if you look at the way the US Senate works, like it's very undemocratic

and how it's represented, but it's still apportioned by state. It's not passed down by hereditary title. And so, like in a way, the House of Lords, while it's not completely neutered, it still is a thing. It doesn't have as much influence as it used to have. And in a lot of ways, it's sort of over stuff

with like the Andrew Adonises of the world and stuff like that. But the fact that it exists and the way it exists, and like you said, there is still primogeniture and there is still hereditary titles, that to an outsider, I mean, it's like, for me, if somebody, you know, who isn't from America visits

and they mentioned something like, oh, I was in a store and I saw just a random guy just carrying a gun on him, like a holster and he just wasn't a cop. He was just like a person. I'm like, yeah, it's open carry shit. Like, I'm so used to it that like, I noticed it, but I'm not like freaked out by it.

You know, that kind of a thing. And it's just one of those things where it's like, I feel like if you grow up here and you're sort of like acculturated to it, you're like, oh yeah, that's how it works. But to me, like the concept of like, a lord owning like the leasehold on a property or the way that council tax works, for example,

they're like, oh no, you're going to pay your landlords fucking property tax for them. That kind of a thing, which I realize isn't hereditary or anything like that, but stuff like that, to you, you grew up with it. For me, I'm like, that makes no sense and is insane. And I feel like if you start divulging the details about public schools, I'm going to feel the same way.

Yeah. So I feel like public schools are an important part of the discussion because like, I mean, I think we've covered your kind of your stratospheric posture, your actual land gentry, like who, there just aren't as many left. Public schools are probably the best remaining way of entering poshdom.

Yeah. Should you wish to do so? Yeah. If you send your kids to a public school, you've basically elevated them to being posh. Because you know, there are ways that you can make a lot of money and there are ways that you can, and this goes back to the conversation about like

members clubs and things. There are ways that you can, you know, in this country start a business every so often, one of them makes an enormous amount of money. That doesn't make you posh. That does not get you into the places that posh people go, or when you go into those places, the posh people will go, well, isn't it a bit of a shame that places like this

are now filling up with people like that? Yeah. That is the case. We're going to have to decamp to this stone chamber. That is similar in the US, but I feel as though it's particularly that way in like the oldest cities in the US and places like in New England, places like New York.

Whereas, for example, like people who, like the sort of community around people who go to Stanford, for example, who go to private schools in California, like that is still California regional elite, but that is so new money compared to, you know, the people who like are members of like the union club in New York City and that kind of a thing. Yeah.

And the longest something's taken to build, the longer it takes to shake, right? And so there's a bit of that. But if you send your boy to Eaton, he's kind of there. Like there might be, I don't know, like the, depending on the kid and the people he meets, like I'm sure there are examples that, you know, people can give of like some kid who goes on a scholarship

to Eaton and ends up getting the shit bullied out of him because his parents aren't posh for five years. And I'm sure that happens. But I think probably most of the time, once you're there, once you spent five years with those kids and you meet those kids' parents and you meet those kids' friends and you go on holiday with those kids, you go to university with those kids,

you bump into those kids at work, you know, that suddenly that's put you in a, because that's when you make all your friends, right? So that kind of sticks with you, I think. And it gets you into the right university, all of that stuff. So I feel like that's where that, that's the entry point. And I feel like that's almost the latest entry point because I think actually, once you're at Cambridge,

for example, if you go to Cambridge, really divided. Like the people who went to the right sort of school in inverted commas end up hanging out, not even deliberately, just like that stuff in common thing again, with the other people who went to the right sort of school and the people who didn't end up going, Christ, this place is socially intimidating and terrifying. And I'm going to hang out with the other people

who find this place socially intimidating and terrifying. I mean, that makes sense, absolutely. There's like a fair bit of middle ground of people who will like hang out with both groups. But there's like, you get like, I definitely know this. Well, you were probably that middle ground quite strongly. Because you had a lot of posh roommates. Yeah.

Yeah, because I like, you know, I technically speaking, I was a comprehensive school admission to Cambridge, although like, I mean, I wouldn't go around saying that because it would be a bit taking the piss because I am very middle class, but like, I'm certainly not posh. I'm just kind of from quite like an ordinary middle class family. And I definitely noticed that like, there were weirdly like quite a lot of people

that I encountered at Cambridge who were like, hardly from like particularly poor or deprived backgrounds. They were just from like middle class families in the north, but like weirdly come into it. Or sometimes in some cases the south, but primarily the north, who'd come into it with this like, like bizarrely like aggro perception of all of these like, Etonian cunts

that they were practically going to have to like fist fight. And so like, weirdly, they would sometimes go into these social situations where they were going to have to meet a couple of Etonians with such a sort of like aggressive attitude that like, it would kind of like confirm all of their preconceptions about it. Whereas like, most of the Etonians I met were just kind of fine. Like, I mean, there were some absolute choppers. When they're bad, they're real.

When they're bad, they're really bad. But most of them just like, they want to be liked as much as anyone else does. Like they're kind of, they're not going to go around being like openly rude to people just because then didn't go to eat or whatever. Like that would be kind of a faux pas even in there. I mean, I have friends in New York who went to like Harvard and Yale and I will put it this way. You'll meet normal Yale people by and large they exist.

You know, like they're completely fine. Normal Harvard people, rarer. But then again, that's a completely different system because Harvard does, although it admits tons and tons of legacy people and it admits tons of people from private schools, especially in New England. It also does admit people from state schools around the country. So there is more of a mix of that. But I mean, also Harvard's a private school.

As I understand it, Cambridge, Oxford, they're not. Those are state schools. But there aren't any private universities in Britain apart from like one. There's the University of Buckingham shirt. There's also what's it called? The new college for the humanities. And I think there may be one or two others as well. MC Grayling on the mic.

But they're like jokes in the UK. Like the private universities are like no one goes. All of the elite schools in America are private universities, but very relatively few people who go to those schools go to private schools or what we call, you guys call public schools. Obviously that changes if you go to like the upper echelon Ivy League schools. But by and large, especially like elite schools or regional elite schools, most people go to public schools.

Whereas my impression is that is absolutely not the case here. And in fact, the more elite university you go to, the higher percentage it's going to be that people went to public schools. Either way, and this is some cracking, cracking Britannology here. Can I just, can I just correct you a detail on the public school versus private school vernacular? Because those are not equivalent. There are such things as private schools in the UK. Public schools are a specifically defined set of schools

that were covered by something called the Public Schools Act. Back in like Christ knows when. Early 19th century. So public schools are not even all the private schools. They're a specific old established subset of the private schools. And the reason why they're called public schools is because at the time, the really posh people wouldn't go to school. They would be taught by private tutors and governors.

So the idea was anybody who had the money could go there. They were established all the public. Wow, anyone who has that much money can go. That was new vorice at the time. Imagine going to a school where you mix with other children. Yeah, rather than having a governess. Yeah. I've hired a French pedophile who will educate you.

I have one where you could, when you could pool your resources and hire a whole school of them. Yeah, that's right. In the United States, there is, there is like the kind of old money elite tier, what we call private schools. When we say public school, that means state school. When we say private school, that means anything that's privately educated, like private education.

Like what the words mean. Yeah. The thing is that a public school is still a private school. And like if you referred to one as a private school, people wouldn't say you're wrong. But there's a nuance there that like it's kind of hard to pick up on. And I appreciate the explanation because yeah, like I feel like it's sometimes I cheat by just saying privately educated

because that at least kind of gets the point across as opposed to all of like the nuance that's there. It's kind of expanded now. Because I mean, there are like technically is literally nine schools, which are public schools and you can look up which ones they are. Yeah. But like it's also expanded to like some of the bigger and more expensive private schools are considered to be public schools

by association. Yeah, the schools themselves wouldn't claim, but like if you say public schools, it conjures up a sort of general catch. Whereas like, I'll just run down the list for you in the United States. Like all of the Ivy League schools, I can't remember all the names, but like they're all private. If you think of any regional elite school,

like and people might laugh, but like even the small elite liberal arts schools or like the bigger schools, like say Stanford or University of Southern California or Washington St. Louis or University of Chicago or Northwestern or any of these like elite schools and New York University, for example, every single one of them is private.

Not a single one of those is public schools. Yeah. University of Chicago, you'd think that's a public school or a state school because it sounds like it. No, it's private. Whereas like UC Berkeley, UCLA, those are actually state schools, but they have a kind of upper echelon

sort of like reputation. So they're treated like elite schools. Got it. There's almost no elite schools in America that are not private institutions with enormous like multi-billion dollar endowments. Yes. It's insane.

See, I sort of thought they were all like that. The distinction between like UCLA and Berkeley and the rest of them I hadn't picked up on at all. Yeah. And you will find some schools that have like really, really good reputations that are state schools. A couple of would be like the University of Virginia

or I don't know, like off the top of my, obviously, UCLA, UC Berkeley is one of them. There was a time when the University of Wisconsin or UT Austin were really considered great schools. They've been destroyed by horrible Republican governors. So it's not really the same. But like, yeah, that it's just a completely different system. Like I remember somebody pointing out to me that in the UK,

although like for example, Oxford and Cambridge are state schools, you know, something like 7% of adults in the UK were privately educated, but a significant number, a much larger number of them were who go to... Winbridge is about 40% people who went to private schools. Yeah.

And the journalism as a profession in the UK is like 52% privately educated. Columnists, apparently, according to an article I read by Gary Young, more columnists as a percentage went to public schools and then to either Oxford or Cambridge. There's actually being a columnist that still follows Premogenitor.

Well, let's talk about that because I think it'd be good to cover what these schools are like and why they have the impact that they have. I remember reading Raw Doll's memoir, which is a book for kids when I was a kid. Boy. Boy.

Yeah, when I was like 10. I remember him talking about the public schools. His mom was like, you can go to one of these and one of them involves wearing a straw hat and he was like, yeah, fuck that. I don't want to do that. Ah, Harrow.

I think he went to Marlborough because he didn't want to go to Harrow. I think lots of them used to have straw hats. I think the one I went to used to have straw hats back in the day. Harrow, they still wear a straw hat all day, every fucking day. I didn't meet a single Herovian at Cambridge.

I think if you went to Harrow and you're going to Oxford, you have to go to Oxford because you're too weird. You're too weird even for Cambridge. Well, Cambridge was like the basic distinction because you're going to schools that send enough people to Oxford and Cambridge

that Oxford and Cambridge have like separate reputations in the eyes of the school. There's a type who goes to Oxford and a type who goes to Cambridge. Because you're sending 20 a year to each. And so it was very much like Bullington vibes went to Oxford, white tie, cocaine,

genuine hatred of the poor. The nerds went to Cambridge. Got it. And that was kind of, look, that's a loose. Some cocaine. It's a loose distinction. But basically these schools, and I went to one,

I went to a 600 year old all boys boarding school, which was wild. And some of the teachers are older than that. I'd love to pretend that I hated it the whole time, but like, I hadn't been to any other schools. It was just school. I still have friends who went there. Of course I do.

Of course, of my close friends. At that school with Charlie in his year. Yeah, that's actually, there are a couple on there. It's weird. It's weird. I kind of get it. A bunch of my really close friends,

when I was a new lieutenant in the army going through training, I made friends with a bunch of guys who went to the Citadel, which is like a private military academy that still commissions people. Not everybody who goes to it becomes an army officer,

a military officer, but obviously most people who go through it do. And so like, I get, like I have no experience of going to a military academy. I'd never want to, but I knew lots and lots of people who went to it. So I get how that can happen.

We're like, oh yeah, I make friends with somebody. And then I get to know their friends and we get along and stuff. And then I know weird, you know, ephemera about the institution because it's been around it. Yeah.

It's such a like weird level of knowledge about the sort of like incredibly like internecine history of Winchester College and the things that go on there. Right. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how that works,

because I think that would be fun. And then we should talk about some of the words that were exclusive to the school that we used. Oh yeah. Okay. So let's talk about the fundamentals and then let's get on to like the fun stuff and like the really daft shit,

because that is great. And so overall, I kind of remember starting at that school and the school does two things, absolutely brilliantly. Either way, it's an amazing, amazing school in terms of does it turn out kids who have like ambition?

Are they articulate? Are they confident? Are they, you know, curious about the world? All of those things. It was, and look, I don't want to generalize because this was like a, the school I went to was definitely

had a reputation as being like the nerdy one. So, you know, in loads of ways, we were like taught to have interests in stuff and taught to like pursue them. And all of that stuff was amazing. Like we could put on plays, like our directed plays that I just put on with like a friend.

And like there was a big theater that we could just use and stuff like that was incredible. You know, I was 16 and doing that. It was awesome. So there is some of that that are like a very basic educational level. It does amazingly well, but it does two particular things as well.

The first thing it does is it tells you your special. They tell you your special the entire time, which has lots of different effects. It has the effect of raising your bar of like what a reasonable accomplishment in life would be. Because everybody who is, you know, all of your friends' parents have done amazing things or horrendous things,

but like, you know, they've achieved in with a capital A. Horrendous things on a national level. Yeah, exactly. Or a global level. Equatorial guinea coos, this sort of thing. Or even a global level. And my brother's year was a guy called Mario Ho, whose dad was Stanley Ho off of Macau

who like owned Macau, which is cool. And he wasn't a criminal. He's imported legally. He is not a criminal. He isn't or wasn't. I think you might have died now. Because you've had to like go through an interview

and several interviews even. By the time you get there, it's very easy to convince all of these 13 year old boys that they're absolute geniuses and they're with loads of other geniuses and that they're going to go on and do special things. And being told that the whole time works as a kind of carrot and a stick.

You don't want to be the one that lets the side down. You want to like go do cool stuff with your life. And also it's motivating because you're told that you're special and you're a genius and the sky's the limit. So you're like, maybe it is. And you know, then they get people to come do talks at the school. Like David Attenborough came and gave a talk at the school.

Ian McKellen came and gave a talk at the school. You know, the royal family might, you know, probably understand what they were saying. I mean, Prince Edward would just like turn up occasionally and like, oh, Prince Edward's in today. And it just like, there's just an exposure to the elite very broadly defined that instills a lot of ambition in those kids and like assumes a level of achievement.

At my school, we had an address from Keith Mills of the British Olympic Committee who opened his prize giving day address with who it was just after we'd won the Olympics bid for 2012. So this was, I think this was about 2006 maybe. And he went, who here likes the London Olympics logo? And then no hands went up and he went, well, I like it. That's amazing.

I might have one to one up you. My wife was in high school when, if I remember correctly, went in the beginning of the primary season for the 2000 presidential election. And at the time Al Gore was still the vice president. He came to her school and he asked what we call a convocation where you have like everybody together in like the auditorium or whatever.

All right. How many of you brought guns to school today? Needless to say Al Gore kind of a dickhead. But yeah, that's actually like a high end fucking guess coming. The only thing I can think of a people coming to speak to us when I was in high school was like once a year, a cop would come and tell sob stories about don't drink and drive. But like that's basically it.

Did not. I did it and now I'm divorced. Yeah, exactly. I went to high school of like 3,600 kids and yeah, it's just very different experience. Did not meet Ian McKellen. But if I had, I would have been like hell yeah, Gandalf. You keep rocking on.

Yeah. It's just, yeah, it's a different world, honestly. And it's more than the like, yes, we had great teachers who taught you very well and all of that stuff. But more than anything else, it's like the expectation level that's set and also all of the ceremony around it. And you know, you've been in the army, you get how that stuff works. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The formula of it, the pomp and the ceremony and all of that stuff is designed to make you feel like you're somewhere important doing something important. Yeah, you convey the importance by the fact that like there's this lineage or there's this history. Exactly. This is a thing that so many people have gone through and that kind of a thing. Yeah. Exactly that.

So there's definitely an element of that. But also then you're just around a load of other kids who also think like that. So it's this very kind of cocoon space where everybody is like that. And then it kind of pops you out the other end. And then you've got all of these like contacts for life. And it's already becoming like, you know, I sort of didn't see most of the people I know from school for years at university while we all went off various parts of the country to be students

other than the ones who were at the same university, which was a few. But now kind of in the world of work, there's like things turn up where I'm like, oh, I need somebody who's an expert in this to come and talk to me for a work thing. Oh, I could call that friend from school. I think he's doing that now. And you start just now. And I think actually the older we get, the clearer it'll be. You start realizing, oh, this is how the network works.

This is how it works. It doesn't work because like we all put hoods on and go to meetings. It works because just like, you know, a lot of people who are now very increasingly high powered in places. And like that's the case. That's useful. There's a structure. And then you've got this other structure sort of on top of it.

It was funny to me because I remember encountering in my old job, encountering one time I was at a thing where I was taking pictures for an event. And this guy came up to me because he recognized like the company that I was working for and was asking about some investor thing that I knew nothing about. And I was just like, I don't really know. But people who handle venture capital stuff like, I don't know if you know anything. He's like, oh, yeah, I know that guy. I went to school with him and like Groton or some fucking place,

like some private school in America. And so it was like, it was like elite guy recognizes elite guys name and now they can email each other. Whereas for me, I ran into one of my complex mating dance. I ran into one of my middle school friends at that company and it was both like, what the fuck are you doing here? Like it wasn't like it's like you really like very, very different. But it does like, so I do, I work for an ad agency now.

And I was like floundering around a few years ago trying to, I thought advertising sounded like a fun thing to do. The people sounded fun. The work sounded kind of fun. It is as it turns out. But when I was first trying to get into it, I was like, I was in a crappy job earning very little money, like people with working with people who are bad at their jobs,

my ambition proper like 95. Everyone clocks off, goes home. That's it. Let's do another bad job again tomorrow. And so I was like, I kind of want to be somewhere where like everyone's a bit pumped to be there. And you know, there's a bit of motivation and everyone works a bit harder and you know, because fundamentally whether or not I'm doing something valuable, I'd quite like to kid myself that I am.

So have you considered starting a podcast? Like every man I have considered starting a podcast. Have you considered starting this podcast? I thought long and hard about it. But where was I? So yeah, so I was trying to get internships and things in ad agencies. And I only really realized in hindsight, because like on paper how wild this was,

because it seemed really natural at the time, a friend of mine's girlfriend worked for an ad agency. And we were just like at the pub. And I didn't even ask. She was just like, look, if you want an internship, I can probably get you an interview. You can probably get an interview. And she like got me an interview.

I had an interview with this guy and he didn't want to hire me, but handed me on to somebody else in a different department who did. And I got this internship. And she was the girlfriend of a friend I knew from school. The guy who interviewed me the first time around had been not just to the same school, but the same boarding house as me. He was the age gap was small enough that we'd had the same house master

of the boarding house. Like the same guy had been running the boarding house when he was there as when I was there. And you go like, look, I don't think I'm shit at my job. I think I'm good at it. But there are plenty of other people who would have been good at it too. Who don't get to do that. Yeah, exactly.

And it's just though these tiny little moments that actually I think lots of people don't even think about. And there's this justification that people do where they're like, oh, well, yeah, but if I hadn't been good, I would have been found out. And you're like, yeah, that's true, but there are loads of people who would have been good. Yeah, no, absolutely.

And when I think about that in the U.S., that absolutely exists. It's way more intense in New England than in East Coast stuff. But it exists everywhere. Anywhere there's like a regional elite center, that kind of thing. It exists. The only difference, I think, is that there's perhaps less of a culture of boarding schools outside of, say, New England. Like where my wife is from in Rhode Island,

there's a ton of boarding schools, but it's less of a thing outside of it. And also because the U.S. is such a big country, it's not like there's just a small list and that applies to everything. Like there's just more going on. There's more regional centers, that kind of thing. But I think the system, the concept, what you're describing,

100% the same. That's pretty universal, I think. It's just the channel it goes through here is a little different. I think that some of the cultural peculiarities that you guys have talked about, those don't exist at all. And I think that's more because it's like ossified stuff from centuries of this being a thing. Well, there's this whole thing that British people just love

like sniffing each other's bums when they meet each other and like working out exactly what stratum of society is. But I suspect, again, that's true in loads of different countries. 100%. It's just the form that it takes. Yeah, it sort of is. But the extent to which British people do it

and the rapidity with which they do it is incredible. Because I was talking to an Australian friend the other day and he said it's interesting because there's such a hierarchy of universities in the U.K. because people don't go to their local university here. Yeah. Or like people going to high achieving universities don't go to their local university, they go wherever in the country.

So that means that this hierarchy establishes itself nationally. He said in Australia, it's very different. There are more posh high schools than there are in the U.K. but most people go to their local university. So basically, you know, the way in London, people ask, oh, where'd you go to uni? In Australia, they ask where you went to high school because that's a better tell than it is here.

I mean, here it is like if you're a super posh, you can ask about schools. It only tells you something if you went to one of about 15 schools. Because the only place I've seen school boys wearing straw hats in my life was in Brisbane, Australia. I have not yet seen it in the United Kingdom because I haven't been around any of the towns where these schools are. But I will say also in the U.S.

one of the things that you might find interesting about this is that if you look at like elite companies like the hedge funds and tech companies and stuff like that and you look at who they hire, they hire people who went to Ivy League schools, people who went to extremely like elite liberal arts schools and then randomly people from universities in the local area. So like if you want to work at like a Google analog or something like that, then like if you can't go to Stanford, you can't go to UC Berkeley,

you can't go to UCLA or USC, then go to like a community college or like a state university near there. The chances are way better if you're getting a job there than same with like in New York City than if you were trying to like get hired from where I'm from from Indiana. If you want to do the elite shift from Indiana, go to Chicago, for example. People hire things, you know, again, it all comes back to this. Like this is the principle upon which everything we've talked about is based.

People want to hang out with people who are a bit like them. Yeah. And I read there was a piece that Derek Thompson did in the Atlantic, I think last year, which was really good. And he did this whole statistical study of sports. And you know how like people always for grad recruitment jobs, for high pay, you know, for the classic kind of high achieving routes, banking, law, all of that stuff.

They say they like having sports on your CV, on your application. They like people who've done sports. And they say, look, that's about drive. It's about routine. It's about teamwork. It's about all of that stuff. And then you look at the... It's about showering.

He asked people for this piece which sports they valued the most. I know exactly what you're going to say. Rowing, sailing, all of the shit that you can only do if you're super rich. 100%. 100%. And it's just... And I'm sure they don't even realize they're doing it.

It's just a little dog whistle for like things that you have in common with other rich people. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Like you don't play field hockey competitively in America unless you go to like a private school, for example. Yeah. Or like you said, crewing, that kind of thing.

Yeah. That stuff. Very, very much so. Well, I got to ask, say in the last, say 10, 15 minutes, I want to talk if I could get from you guys some anecdotes about types of posh guys. Yeah, great. Because I know that our audience is going to love that shit.

Should we quickly cover some Winchester words first? Because these are great. Your audience are going to love this. I think... I don't know. I don't want to speak for them. God knows I'm not one of them. But there's definitely a...

I think there's a demand for this, which is that... Where I went to school is such a unique social microclimate as our Canadian friend would say. That there is a lexicon of words that are only used at that school. To the point where there were like traditional ones. And literally you can buy a... They're called...

So this is for my school in particular, but I think versions of this exist in other schools. I think it was just very formalized in my school because as I said, it was the nerdy one. They were called Winchester notions. Notions was the word for like our words. And there were kind of old fashioned ones. Like in theory, you were supposed to call a bicycle

like a bogel. That was the name for a bicycle. One of the school rules was no bogels in St. Michael's passage. Stuff like that. Which St. Michael wasn't very happy about actually. But the new ones that we genuinely used for five years. Because partly because it's socially exclusive in the particular type of person goes there.

But also that it's socially exclusive in that it's a boarding school. So you don't go out. You're hanging out with only each other. So you've this sort of like evolution of language that happens across the whole world. Happens in isolation, in like a bubble. So there are... So there are words...

I'm sure it is. Yeah, that makes so much sense. But there are words... And you're the arme is full of in Britain. Surprise. But there were words that exist. And I couldn't tell you how these came about. And some of them were genuinely quite useful.

So like there was a word... We used the word gove. There was a word gove. The closest analogy I can think of for gove was like give a shit. If you just say give a shit, you'd go gove. And something could be a gove. If it wasn't worth giving a shit over, you could gove something. It could be a verb.

Like, oh, I'm going to gove maths would be like, I'm not going to go to my maths lesson today. And so that was a thing. If something was good, it might be nays. N-A-I-Z-E. But to have a nays was also to masturbate. So read into that what you will. Yeah.

So there was... The best thing you can do. We also had a... We had our own sport. Winkies. So this is... So you know about Boris Johnson sometimes talks about like the wall game or the field game.

So Eaton has two sports, which is incredible. We had one. And fives as well. Well, and we played fives. Yeah, but they have specifically Eaton fives. They do, that's true. But we had a sport called Winchester Football or Winkies for short.

Or our game with a capital O and a capital G. And it was basically like a sort of mad combination of like tennis football and rugby and God knows what. Where you had to like kick a ball backwards and forwards. You were only allowed to kick it once and you had to kick it over your opponent's line. And you kicked it and then it was there to kick it. But you could chase it down.

This is like fucking Calvin Ball. And then there were scrums for some reason. And everybody got broken ankles in the mud. And it was honestly so much fun. But I think literally nobody alive knows every single rule of Winchester Football. It's absolutely wild. There were some people who did know it,

but they all died at the Somme. Yes, I think that's true. Which in many ways was the world's biggest game of Winchester Football. I think they may have sent some people to die at the Somme. Yeah, well, no, it's funny that you should point that out. Just I was thinking about this. In the US Army, you have like a rain poncho.

And there's a thing that's technically called a poncho liner. It's a nylon down blanket, basically. So it's nylon, but it's got like down and it's sewn up in pockets. And it's typically worn like, it's designed to be worn as a liner of the inside of your rain poncho. But really what it wants it being used as your blanket when you're in the field and you're sleeping bag in like a Gore-Tex shell on a bed, et cetera.

And yet the word we call it, people call it, is called a wooby. And I have no idea where that comes from. I think wooby is kind of like a baby talk word, like a kid's word for like a safety blanket. But I'm not sure. But like if you talk to anyone who was in the army, in the US Army, you talk about some called a wooby. They know exactly what you're talking about.

But if you're in this like socially insulated place where like stuff develops totally separately from how it does in the rest of the world, that happens and stuff can take on. And I think that's just a superficial emblem of how like an entire culture can develop in isolation to the rest of the world as well. The reason why I bring it up though

is because it's such a childish word and it's bizarre. Like as an adult, I should feel weird saying it. But because like it's just the thing that we got used to. I don't because I'm like, oh yeah, I have to remind myself like, oh yeah, well that's not nothing that civilians know, for example. And it's just one of those things where it's like,

yeah, I can see how, especially if you do it at so young an age, starting at 13, you really do wind up kind of like inculcating this sense of separateness and specialness and otherness and stuff like that. And you can see how that then like perpetuates itself. My favorite one before we move on to the archetypes was we're running out of time, aren't we?

My favorite one was there was a term rel, which was for somebody, which was sure for irrelevant, which was if somebody was rel, if they were like, there were like 120 kids in a year group. So you like would know all but about five kids in your year. And there were like the same kids who like nobody would quite know those guys and those, those guys were rel.

But you could become, it was such a phenomenon being rel that you could become like famously one of the rel kids in the year. And you could become almost like a bit of a celebrity because it would be such a running joke that you were rel. And at that point you would become rel known. I'm having my mind blown here because it's just, I guess it's like, I went to the junior high that was like

where I lived by, and then I went to the high school by where I lived by. So there were private schools in Indianapolis where I'm from, but like they were all religious. Like they were all like Catholic or Jesuit even, or Episcopalian. By the way, that still is a thing here. So the bulk of these are like Church of England schools,

but there's almost like a separate circuit and a separate kind of parallel hierarchy among like Catholics, for instance. And if you think you're being nonced at a regular public school. Oh boy. Oh boy, go to a Catholic one. And like the Catholic schools until very recently were almost all taught by monks and stuff.

So, but there is this whole like the schools like Downside and Ampleforth, which are like the same, but for Catholics. And if you're Catholic, you'll go to one of them. And that forms its own like separate parallel society that carries on through life as well. It's absolutely wild. Just guys who encounter each other at a drinks event

and then say, oh yeah, do you remember the housemaster and then both give each other a thousand yard stare. And then move on. Where I'm from, there's a ton of like, because of the Ohio Valley, there's a ton of German Catholics and you're like Western European Catholics who migrated there.

And so people go to... German Catholics is old school. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's like schools like Cincinnati, St. Xavier or Berbuff, Jesuit where I'm from. And then like the sort of apotheosis of that education in the Midwest is to go to Notre Dame University or maybe go to Catholic University of America

or something like that. Or I think Washington and St. Louis is also Catholic. Catholic University of America sounds made up. Oh no, it does. It sounds like a Walmart school, but it's actually like a legit school. But it's just weird because once again, that's like a regional subset,

but it's such a small... And like the thing that binds it is not necessarily that it's like an elite status thing. It does confer a certain elite status, but primarily it's that your family is really religious. And that doesn't... I mean, I know that does exist here, but it's just not as prevalent.

No, it's not. I mean, here I think even being Catholic is more of a social signifier than it is a religious thing. At least for posh Catholic. My friends from middle school who went to Catholic school was because their families were extremely religiously observant Catholics.

It wasn't... I think that's true in lots of other countries too, actually. Yeah, well, that makes sense. Yeah. Well, clearly though, we have to move on to the guys because you've talked about the... Yeah, the types of guys.

...streetonians and... We've talked about streetonians a bit, haven't we? Yeah, we have done a lot of streetonians. I mean, it's worth it. It's worth it. I mean, there was a guy in my college at Cambridge who had been to Westminster and had been expelled for roofing himself

in a fit of adolescent experimentation and then very much became a DJ. Yeah. I think he stood as actually a DJ. Yeah, that does happen, doesn't it? Yeah, and they'll do things like you get itonians who are like... They're really embarrassed that they went to Eden

or they'll do things like they'll refer to it as slough comprehensive. Yes, they'll talk about it as like, oh, well, I went to school like near slough. More like near Windsor, mate. But it becomes sort of all-encompassing. It becomes... And I think it must be deeply anxiety-inducing

for somebody to be one of those people who's been to Eden and then spends their entire life trying to disguise that. Every element of their personality, their voice, their fashion sense, their interests is all fully designed to try and reclaim some sort of street cred. Usually while in every material sense, actually embracing it.

It's like a very weird tension. They'll still go skiing with their parents. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They'll just be wearing like a full palace tracksuit while they're there. Not while they're with their parents. No, because I think there's a load of people who have different modes.

And I think this is true of loads of people who are... I think this is probably true of loads of people who are from less privileged cultures as well. People who have a distinction between their home life and their grown-up life end up having this sort of dual personality that I think comes out with a lot of the Poshos too. The only thing I can think of that's comparable to that

is you will notice that people who went to Harvard who are weirdly embarrassed but also want you to notice they went to Harvard will be like, they went to school in Boston. You've seen... We do that with Oxford and stuff here. That's the thing that happens. Milo and I have done it on this podcast over the last hour. Yeah, we'll be like,

oh, when I was in college, they'll always say when I was in college, when I was in college, and it's like... People do say that in American English, but also they don't... The way that it's phrased, it just feels like back in college, when I was in college in Boston or something like that,

and it's like, well, which university in Boston did you go to? Oh, well, I went to Harvard College. It's just one of those kinds of things. You do pick up on it when you're around those people for a while. I find myself a lot saying at uni and being vague about it because I think when you mention Cambridge, it's gonna get a reaction.

And even if it's not a negative reaction, you just sometimes can't be asked to have that conversation. Sure. Yeah, and for me, it's like, well, I just say uni or university because we would say college in America, but here if you don't say that because college means something different.

So I went to Indiana University Bloomington. It's not exactly an elite school, but it is like the flagship university of the university system. So in Indiana, it's like, oh, well, you went to IU. That's at least sort of a thing that people recognize. But here it sounds like... You're a regional elite in Indiana.

Yeah, no, I would have had to have gone to Notre Dame for that, I think. But it's one of those which would have been weird. But I would just say that does exist, but I think another thing too is that it's not for a school that's like your middle school and high school. It's for your university. I feel like having that experience of like,

well, here's this thing that I'm... It's both like a status symbol and also something that I'm sort of feel as though I have to hide. It's very different when that's like, I don't give a fuck if people know where I went to high school. Like who cares? But you're very, very young when you're going through this.

And so it's just kind of... I feel like it is a little different when it's your... If you start at 13 and finish when you're 18. I think that's right. Starting at 18. That's it. I'm trying to think who else there is. So I think there's a distinction between...

Are we talking about like... Where's the Clapham guy? We're talking about... But that's... So there's a... That's kind of like the polar opposite of the Strytonian. 100%. So that's...

But that's also part of a sort of broader phenomenon. I think there's... Me too. A bit of Touchruggle on the Common on Saturday. Yeah. It's been a tough week at JP, mate. It's been a tough week at JP. Exactly that.

Honestly, me, you and John T. Just chucking a ball about. Throw an egg around, mate. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Couple of birrios. Yeah. And I'm going to go and meet Clotilda for a drink.

But there's a distinction, I think, between like... There's definitely... A lot of the ones who seem a bit less posh are often people who have... Who had... Or are better at hiding it. Or often people who had some link to London growing up. So London, necessarily, you just had a bit more independence, a bit more exposure to the world.

Sure. While you were growing up. In particular, in London Day School, public school boys are very different. Yeah. It's much more like, yeah, I started doing ket when I was 13. Yeah, exactly that. That's they're much more likely to be Strytonians.

Even though they won't actually be Strytonians. They know what to wear to Henley, but they know what to wear to a big warehouse rave in Walthamstow as well. And they wouldn't be... And they wouldn't be fully out of place at either. Which is an amazing skill to have. Yeah, sure. But there's those guys.

And then the people who tend... The people you can spot from a mile off tend to be the ones who grew up in the country. Because when you're posh in the country, you properly... You just don't see anybody who isn't posh. I haven't. Yeah. You might have seen the video.

Maybe in a shop. Gap Yar. Yeah. The guy says, just like Fulham. Yeah. And like, yeah, it's a powerful... Yeah.

Most of the like the Clapham legends are very much like outside of London people. Yeah. I mean, like one of my friends who's like pretty posh from Bristol and went to a public school in Bristol. All of his friends from public school live in Clapham now. Yeah. Whereas it's the closest point to Bristol. Whereas I think a lot of the posh people who grew up in London

at least ended up with this sort of idea of like, what's cool. Sure. And like a lot of them are still super posh, but they probably live in Hackney. So it's that, I think. Or they live next to me in Clapham. Yeah. It's different aspirations.

Yeah. They probably live up like... There's quite... They'll live up Camberwell Grove. Yeah. That sort of, you know. The Camberwell, the... What do you...

How do you say it? Clapham to Camberwell. Axis is spreading towards Peckham. And then you also have... Because you have the Goldsmiths campus in New Cross, it's also there too. And so... Yeah.

Well, Peckham is very stritonian. You will get a lot of them down that way. I think also... And then amongst older poshos, you have sort of interesting... Oh, yeah. You've got the real... You've got your horse people

and your country pursuits people. And then you've weirdly like... I'm really... A kind of poshos that I really love is like, elderly Kensington poshos, who have kind of slowly become aware that they're now surrounded by oligarchs. Yeah.

And they drive a Volvo from 40 years ago, because buying a new car would be gauche. Oh, yeah. And wear like corduroy's that are almost as old. Yeah. And this is very like... There's this weird like aesthetic love for having things that are shit.

Almost as a symbol of how rich you are. Like you have a townhouse on Belgrave Square, but you haven't renovated it ever. Your suit's falling apart, but do you know who the tailor was? Yeah. Yeah. Like he's dead.

That's why I can't get it repaired. Yeah, you can't... They don't make tailors like him anymore. Incredible. No, that's right. Yeah, he died in the Boor War. Yeah. Exactly.

There's a... You know, I think there's a sort of insane... I don't know where this comes from sort of psychologically. Just this idea that like actually like spending your money is a terribly superficial thing to do. And actually what you should just do is sit on it and then die. Yeah.

Oh, I mean... And a lot of those people are also drunks. Like a classic. Oh, the posh drunks are amazing, because obviously like the real structuring and formalizing of your social life, which happens when you're a certain level of posh, there are kind of rules for drinks parties

and rules for dinner parties and rules for your Scottish dancing events and the opera and the balls and like the all... You know, when you're a certain level of posh, your entire social life is like structured around these events. And so it can just become a cover for this like insane drinking that nobody calls you out on, because it's just like formal event

and everyone's being very polite. And like some guy is literally... He's literally had to go and throw up and he's pulling a bottle of Jack Daniels out of his sock. And the farmers at that dinner party we went to one time. Oh, God. The posh farmers. Oh, yeah.

We went to a party with some posh farmers. Well, agricultural college is amazing, because those kids were fully like... You know, that's still like families who still own the land, right? Yeah. So those are insane. Absolutely insane. Talking about tractors.

Like morons as well, because they haven't gone to posh school and gone, I will be curious about the world to fulfill my ambitions. They've gone, well, I guess dad will leave me the farm. Yeah. Because I'm really obsessed with the drinking thing, because I feel like there's a certain class of like,

if you meet an English person who sounds a bit posh and they will have a drink before 12 noon, like they are absolutely stratosphericly posh and you should ask them more questions. Like, I mean, Princess Margaret was famous for like getting on the beves at like 11 o'clock in the morning. But there's also this like... Her and the Queen Mother would just drink all day.

But there's also like a formal occasion that you can use to excuse it. Like, there's part of you that can sort of laugh and go, haha, well, it's 11s, isn't it? Yeah, it's lunch. Of course, you have to have a bottle of jubilee. They might even go, well, if it's good enough for Princess Margaret,

well, I suppose we should start now. My brother, and I think this might be a good thing to close on, I used to do business with this guy who was like a big, big like hedge fund investor guy who I won't name, but who would like, he would get up very early to work because he was like the market and whatever.

And was probably like had a very much like divorce in the post type situation going on. And one time my brother phones him up and he's like, oh, how's it going this morning? And the guy's like, well, not brilliantly, to be honest, Matthew. And he's like, why, what's up? And he goes like,

well, he's like, I got up at 6am, had a bit of the old shakes, like cracked open and gin and tonic and the wife took exception. It's not been speaking to me all day. It's the ability and Boris Johnson is the king of this. We're not allowed to show emotion because these like rules of behavior that we've been set for hundreds of years don't allow us to.

So we have to like, you become amazingly adept at like passing something off as a joke. And in the end, it's just part of this like great tragedy of poshness where everybody's sad and everybody feels like they have to cling on to the things that probably didn't even make everybody happy in the first place.

So it's basically all quite sad and I actually feel quite sorry for lots of them. And one final archetype, which may be one of the most depressing is posh army officer guy who like army officer guy, kind of a broad church, but posh army officer guy either I'm going to do a short commission for four years

and then get a job at JP Morgan or whatever, or that the much weirder kind is like, my family have been army officers for 400 years. I'm going to become an army officer and I'm going to die in some kind of valorous way. It's definitely, it's a type of, and particularly when you read Wikipedia articles

about World War Two. And like, and we talked about this on the forklift. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fucking H Jones, just like stratospherically posh man who was like, I am going to die in a cool way. I think it comes from just like lack of exposure

to any danger anywhere else in your life. So you have to go seek it out. That's what the like posh dead devil thing comes from. It's why there's a Phil Wang bit where he talks about why people in the West watch horror films. He's like, nobody in Syria saw the Babadook. Did they? They're like,

that's the thing we have to like force ourselves to feel fear because we actually genuinely don't know what it feels like. Yeah. Well, this has been very informative. I call him the Babadook, call him die. She hates that. I still feel like I, like I've got so much to learn,

but at least I have like a little bit more of a vocabulary with which to understand it now. I think you've come a long way. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I'm going to be ready for a Yankee. All right. This one's actually all right.

You should come for dinner at my club. He's actually quite good chat. He's like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll get Toby and Prunello down. Majority yoga bomb.

Did you realize being posh meant living in 2001 for the rest of your life? Oh, it does. Oh, yeah. Oh, hell yeah.