TRASHFUTURE - Vibe Biopsy feat. Antonia Jennings

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

What is the economy going to look like at the end of the pandemic? Why is the UK government working hand-in-hand with private equity to even further concentrate the economy? Why does this app attempt to fire you for bad vibes? This week, the cast of Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum) join special guest Antonia Jennings (@tweetingantonia) of Rethinking Economics (@rethinkecon) to answer these burning questions. If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping.   *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ 

Hello Trash Future listeners. Nate here with a quick update. The following episode was recorded with Riley using an extremely tactical gaming headset. Hmm, hold on. I mean a headset. However, the levels were a bit off and as such you'll hear some noise that I wasn't able to fix. I apologize for any annoyance. As you know, I cannot control my children. Anyway, I hope you enjoy. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called Wilfred or Willie Johnson. Willie Johnson, baby. Yeah, congratulations to Boris Johnson and Kerry Simons for proving that rich people are some of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet for accidentally naming their extremely important

famous son, Willie Johnson. I love giving birth to a shitposter. Yeah, that's right. Proving your son is in fact a guy. Yeah. What I find really interesting though is like there you can I can guarantee you that there is someone who over the last week has posted a lol you called your son, Willie Johnson, and they're going to be called onto the BBC to like talk about the fact that maybe the NHS as presented by Virgin shouldn't be like grinding up the sick and to pace to feed to like the workers. And then like Guido Fox or like, you know, whoever's running Guido Fox at the time is going to be like, ah, they posted Willie Johnson. This sick junior doctor mocked the child of our prime minister. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, you know, I had I just had that horrible

minority report style vision of the future. So great. It's cool. Anyone who objects to the NHS being funded by anything other than like, you know, people like like 105 year olds doing push-up competitions or whatever, they're all going to get like their tweets like combed for the everything they posted in the last four days to make sure that like healthcare financing in this country continues to be distributed in the form of like, I don't know, flybys and boat donuts, another stupid shit. I just really want one of these doctors to like secretly be a weeb. Like for Guido folks to have to like doctors going to be like, there's all this strange anime on his account. I don't understand why he's like so obsessed with school girls with robot arms and stuff. I feel like that

would be great. This so-called Dr. Kasvani claims to have been turning babies Muslim. Welcome back to this free episode of Trash Future, the podcast you're listening to right now. We are recording live from a series of undisclosed locations that includes myself, Riley, we have Hussain. Also from an undisclosed location, Nero Neroish, Julian Assange's prison cell. That's right, that's right. We also have Milo equally undisclosed as to his location. Hello. Yeah, I'm really excited for Willie Johnson to grow up into a Chris Lowville type figure, except he is an emergency circumcision surgeon. That's right, that's right. And also joining us from another undisclosed location in sunny undisclosed location is Alice.

Yeah, doing huge Captain Tom tribute. Finally, we are very pleased to welcome Antonia Jennings from the Board of Rethinking Economics, who is going to once again breathe some sense into this silly discussion. Antonia, how's it going? Oh, it's going well, thanks. Thanks for having me. Oh, a pleasure. I can't believe we keep getting actual grown-ups on our show, where we just make jokes about the Prime Minister's son being called Riley Johnson. That's right, that's right. Before we go into it, Antonia, can you just mention a little bit of what Rethinking Economics does?

Sure. So Rethinking Economics, it's a UK-based charity. We are campaigning and working to kind of reform the teaching, but also the application of economics. So I guess we are challenging kind of the teaching of economics as a hard science with one particular worldview and trying to put forward the argument that it's obviously a model of understanding the world and the individual isn't this completely rational agent. GDP probably doesn't need to be deified and environmental breakdown is a little bit more than just a negative externality. So we're a student-led charity. We've got over 100 groups in, I think, 25 countries, which I think is in all the continents, possibly far the very cold ones. It's not

because they don't matter. There's no students there. And yeah, there's loads of different ways to get involved. And yeah, I'd really encourage anyone that's interested to go to our website, which is RethinkEconomics.org. And which will be linked in the description. I feel like the teaching of economics right now, as it is in Britain, is just that have you seen that meme that's like Austrian economics steal manhole cover, sell for drugs, wait for cities to replace the manhole cover. And then like, yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's completely ludicrous. And I guess our whole sort of theory of change is based on the fact that if we want the next generation's economy to be any different, then people who are studying economics who go on to

be journalists or civil servants probably need to understand the different ways of thinking about things. So yeah, it's a long-term campaign in that sense. In all seriousness, though, don't go stealing manhole covers in Austria. You never know what you might find down those holes. Also, I love the idea that we're finally like considering that the idea that the the economy isn't like an angry volcano that we have to throw people into to appease, but that is just sort of one facet of human activity. The line. Yeah, we look, more people go into volcano, more line goes up. And that's science, folks. But look, here's the thing. I have a startup for us to talk about today before we get into the meat and potatoes

of what we're talking about. So without any further ado, I would like to please have you guess what the startup receptivity and I'll give you a hint. There is no why and receptivity. It's spelled with an I. Give me a guess as to what this startup does. And we're going to start with Antonia. Oh, my God, it's going to be awful, isn't it? Receptivity. Oh, my God, it's probably some new startup to kind of capitalize and accelerate the charitable giving of like the most vulnerable in society for the NHS in some horrible, horrible way. That doesn't exist. But now you've summoned it into existence. Thank you very much for that. I'm going to throw it open to the floor. Who else has an idea of receptivity? Finally, a startup for bottoms. Okay, so wait, Antonia says it is

something to get the poor to give more of their incomes to the NHS. Alice says it's just like a guidance or like a platform for bottoms. I have an idea of it's a little bit left field, right? So it's an app where obviously it's an app they all are. But it's an app where like every morning you wake up with the sweet dulcet quotes of Recept here, but it's like a wellness app, but it's all recitation from Erdogan. So wait, it's like a version of calm, but for turning into an odd party member instead of turning you into like a mindful person. Okay, all right, cool, cool, cool. I like where you're going with this one. Milo, final guess before I start reading copy. I think receptivity spelt with two eyes is like a sorority girl last name. Like maybe this

is like a robot sorority girl that you could order for your house and it just wanders around the house and it said things like, like, yeah, me and Serena were like thinking about going to the party, but like I don't know if like Chad is going to be there. So I don't know if I'm going to go. Milo Edwards, you're doing an impression of his ex-girlfriend Caroline Callow. Yeah, subscribe to my only fans. No, that's the case. Real time blank for high performance organizations. Receptivity is the only blank analytics platform that delivers you the insights you need to continuously improve the productivity and effectiveness of your high performance organization. It tells you how badly you're getting owned on Twitter by like us.

Alice is closest. But it's like the it's like the born movies, like the CIA control bunker, somebody comes running in with like a printout they've torn off of like me, like spoonerizing the name of your company and a guy just looks at it and goes, my God. Antonia. It's like a Sarenos thing, but it takes part of your blood and tells you how much of you is currently corn. Antonia, I'm going to throw to you. What are you, what, I haven't given you this bit of the ad copy. What do you think receptivity does? Oh, I mean, maybe it's something to do with the fact everyone's working from home. So it's kind of trying to see how many loopholes you're taking from home. I don't know, maybe it's a wearable thing. Close. Really? Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm not

not wearable, but close. Who's saying last guess before I give the final clue. Okay. So it's so based on this and not my original idea, which I think is a lot better. It feels like it's a no, I agree with you. Your original idea is way better. With speech synthesis, this is going to become a reality. You can have a bedtime story from Erdogan. Right. It feels like it's a very like phrenology related device in the sense we're like, it feels like it's something that connects to like receptors in the brain and is designed to like create an AI version of yourself and then eventually replace you at your job. They're like the movie Simone with Al Pacino.

You're all, you're all circling the drain of this particular idea toilet. So it's time for me to give the final clue. Real time, no surveys, no nonsense. It doesn't add anything to know the real time, no surveys, no nonsense, starting with Antonia. Is it some kind of facial recognition software for job applications or something like that? It's as evil. Oh God, I don't know. I'm going, I know you said it isn't a wearable, but like technically a bomb collar isn't really worn. It's more like adhered. We like to think of it as more as being implanted surgically.

Oh, damn. I mean, does it, does it like spy on your employees? Yep. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Milo got it. Oh God. Receptivity. Receptivity continuously, continuously measures the key drivers of performance in your teams, groups or departments, such as engagement, collaboration, innovation readiness and the blockers of performance like stress and fatigue by analyzing several patterns in language from voice, email, messaging and more. Oh, okay. So like if you use the word bussy, you immediately get summoned into a performance

review. It's a, it's a positive vibes enforcer. This rules. Yeah, exactly. It's, it's all, all workplace communications are the subject of a 24 hour vibe check. Judge Dredd, I am the vibe. Yeah, that's right. A vibe biopsy. I prefer my thing where they just put a small explosive in the base of your skull. Well, I mean, the thing is like the modern corporate economy is basically like Simpson's Treehouse of Horror 2 where Bart Simpson like can just detect everyone's thoughts. And if you think a bad thought, he turns you into like a jukebox or sends you to the moon. Or it's quite similar to that, except instead of Bart, it's just your boss.

Yeah. And we're all wearing the Flanders outfit. That's right. That's right. We're all net Flanders. So it basically, if you send an email or an IM or whatever, what it does is it analyzes it constantly and how there's a dashboard that your boss can see that says which groups in the company might be talking about if they're not happy, if they're stressed, they might be using the UNION word. This is just Whole Foods' heat map of stores that might strike. That's the thing. That whole Amazon for the Whole Foods heat map, they have been using a less high tech version of this. They've been using surveys, employee satisfaction surveys,

to detect where people might strike. That's one of several variables they use. Some other ones are the income of the neighborhood that the store is in, and also stores with greater racial diversity are less likely to unionize. I think it was those three factors that they made their heat map of. Finally, woke union busting. Just fucking forcing a bunch of Armenians into a Whole Foods and not explaining why. What this company is promising, basically, is through monitoring not just emails and messages, but voice communications as well. Over phone, not bugging offices yet. Basically saying we can

determine what groups might become disgruntled. Well, the firm never says it's used to prevent unionizing activity. In fact, they say it's got some very progressive reasons for existing that we'll get into. In fact, I see no reason why if Amazon wanted to step up its union busting activities, they couldn't just get this or something like it. Any kind of employment tribunal, you can be like, oh, you claim to be unhappy, and yet your happiness index on all of these indicators suggests that, in fact, you were doing the Tara Reed thing of not complaining enough at the time. We did a vibe biopsy every morning. Before I carry on, Antonia, what do you think of this general tendency to greater workplace

supervision? I think it's gross. It just completely dissolves the distinction between the public and personal life, which is already understraining at the moment. It reminds me specifically on a few years ago, I don't know if you saw WeWork got called out because on their accounts, as one of the incomes or the profits, they had listed the vibes of the offices that they had. Obviously, they got called out for it, and then their value went down loads. We talked about the WeWork thing. They called the measurement community adjusted EBITDA. You thought that was bad. Here follows an excerpt, because I always do the research on this stuff. Here follows an excerpt from a white paper authored by the board and leaders of receptivity

and the globally prestigious security consulting firm Control Risks explaining how it works. The paper goes, the benchmark methodology for deriving the emotional meaning from human language is the linguistic inquiry word count model known as the LIWC. The LIWC was developed by James W. Pennebacher, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, an author of a book entitled The Secret Life of Pronouns. That dude must be the most left-wing person ever. Much of Dr. Pennebacher's work explores the connection between emotion, behavior, perception, cognition, and language with a specific focus on what he calls stealth words, or the small function words in our lexicon words, such as prepositions and pronouns,

which are seemingly invisible in day-to-day speech and to radar. These seemingly innocuous function words, such as I, me, you, he, for, it, of this, et cetera, play a crucial role in helping us understand identity, detect emotions, and realize intention, and also provide- I had one of the fucking Serbian Army shoots down my pronouns. They also identify as a surface-to-air pronoun missile. They also provide important clues about cultural and social cohesion. For instance, people who are highly depressed tend to use first-person singular pronouns like I more than people who aren't depressed. Well, I mean, it means the queen's very happy because she's always saying we.

That makes sense. Like, someone phones you up and it's like, I'm going to kill myself. And you're like, oh, no, they've used the pronoun I. They're probably depressed. After the value got wiped for the community, we work, had to change their name to I work. Hey, pal, no one should kill themselves alone. Get a friend involved. It's fucking bizarre that they're just like, yes, we've decided- We're all these people who are monitoring. We've decided to see if they're depressed by seeing what pronouns they use as opposed to asking or just trying to make their lives better.

No, pronouns. And they also say they tend to focus on issues and the present. So if you say something like, I don't have enough money right now, you can tell they're depressed because they use the first person singular. And also they're talking about the present. This is the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Is this work? I don't know. No idea. None of these tech companies are always dumb as hell. It's always ludicrous.

I would like to see a book called The Secret Life of Pronouns, in which it's just revealed that it and it's have just got a whole basement family. We read an article that suggested, we looked at a bunch of old newspapers and people were surprisingly happy because the newspapers used happy words on this podcast. And it was something that we thought was a name for, I think it was the Times. And now it's a startup also? Yes, correct. That's right. Amazing.

But instead of looking at words like abulient or chartreuse, they're looking at words like the. And too often forgotten. Before I go on to how this is a woke thing for some reason, who's saying, what do you think of this thus far? It's all insane. I don't even know where to fucking... That was a real trip going from a bizarre pseudo-linked in to this fucking book about pronouns. That's right. When you think about it, aren't all books about pronouns?

Yeah, I mean, whenever I read a book and I see the word vey, I just chuck it out. Sus. Yeah, that's right. I'm not here for this gender Marxism. Yeah. So also that's the other thing, right? Like identifying the ways in which, you know, British colonialism still has sort of roots and creating a very difficult time for like BAME people today. That's grievance studies.

But measuring how happy you are if you use the word and that's STEM. I always take the position that there are actually like three genders. There's girls, there are guys, and there are sword guys. Yeah, I'm depressed and people who use and are motivated and people who use yes and are into improv. So I now have a woke reason as to why this ludicrous startup should exist that they've claimed. So this is in an interview. So this is positioned as a risk management tool for avoiding reckless executive behavior or reckless like financial trader behavior by like monitoring them to see if they're overconfident, including about trades or monitoring your organization

for insider threats. More explosive in the base of the skull. Well, that's the thing. Both of these are completely legitimate activities. Like this is something that companies need to do, especially like... Yeah, it's the only time when you want to have to survey your workers is where we've put an economic system in place where like one guy can do a keystroke and accidentally destroy three banks. Yeah, like that's the thing. Like these kinds of tools are necessary.

But in putting myself in mind of the Amazon thing, they're potential for misuse and the sort of blithe ignorance of the executives behind those companies or not blithe ignorance, but sort of willful recklessness. I think the willful obtuseness about the risks of these companies, of the people who are their executives is completely ludicrous. So here's how they're saying it's a woke thing. So when Mike Durland, a board member of Receptivity, watched Senator Elizabeth Warren grill Ben Wells' logo CEO, John Stubb about the bank's phony account scandal at a 2016 congressional hearing, he realized that executives need a better way to understand the

cultures of their organization. What we're really trying to understand is what's going on inside of our organization. But they know what's going on. That was the problem. This guy was fooled by the world's worst wallet inspector. He said, where are people excited about what they're doing? Where are people collaborating and cooperating? But also, what are the things inside an organization that are causing resentment, stress or anxiety? Does he think that people caused the subprime housing crisis because they were acting out?

Well, what he says is he looked specifically at Wells Fargo, which had this cross-selling initiative called 8 is Great, where retail salespeople would be cajoled into aggressively cross-selling their customers more and more products until they got to 8. And then when they couldn't sell to their customers, they would just open accounts and credit cards and stuff in their names. Hang on. Cross-selling, broke, cross-selling, woke, trans-selling. Yeah, that's right. So essentially what happened was there was this directive that came down from on high that then created a do this or get fired position for salespeople at shops.

And again, this was completely disproportionately impacting in ethnic minority areas. They were just a small bank. And when you think about it, Bear Stearns really just had so much fucked vibes that they ended up self-harming. Trump with Bear Stearns was they had too many Stearns. It wasn't sustainable. So what happened then is the bank becomes engaged in additional criminal activities beyond just the normal activities of a bank in 2006, because this was after 2008 that they were doing this. Paranormal criminal activity.

Yeah. But what happens is that this company assumes that the problem is not the fact that upper management decided to do this initiative, but rather that people were acting out basically. It's literally just that you're being murdered. Well, they can't do that. That's illegal. They literally just believed all of these bank executives who said, yeah, no, we didn't tell anybody to do this. I have the other two examples of organizations he gives that were harmed by the bad behavior of people within.

The first one is the International Olympic Committee. You want to know what the next one is? The police. Okay. Again, I'm going to do one more round of guesses because I like making people guess. Antonia, starting with you. Saudi Royal Family. He just started like hacking up dissidents for attention. Anyone else? Anyone else at all?

Coldplay. Uh-huh. Who's saying? Who's saying before we go? No, I'm even. I'm just like my brain. When you think about it, I'll tell you about it. When you think about it, Coldplay have been almost as hard to dissidents. I'll tell you. The Weinstein Company. Wow. That was a real leftist.

Examples of organization harmed by the bad behavior of people within. It doesn't matter if the person doing the bad behavior is like senior management. But it's not even the senior management thing. It's that they knew. Everyone knew. It's basically, if you want to think about this in terms of Hans Blix and the weapons of mass destruction and convection, this is an Elizabeth Warren style woke dual use program that will be completely ineffective for stopping the actual excesses of corporate malfeasance because they're either intentional or being directed from the highest levels,

but actually is also dual use for fucking union busting. Should you want to do it? You know what this is? If you take this rationale at face value, trying to create a problem, trying to create a solution to a problem that only exists because of people lying, this is like devoting your entire scientific career to trying to find a vaccine for affluenza. I feel like to a big degree, what this really is is kind of like they're trying to find a vaccine to bad vibes. The whole proposition is kind of like, we just need to kind of get rid

of the people with the worst vibes. And yeah, that could be Harvey Weinstein. That could also be like people trying to make a union who also have bad vibes. So all of it is really just fundamentally about optics and getting rid of people who don't pose it like Instagram positivity culture. That's imagine like an interview with like Uday Hussain being like, God, we did not know that he was doing that. We're going to fucking, we're going to cure Harvey Weinstein's sex addiction, a thing that he definitely has.

Yeah. So yeah, it's just welcome. Welcome to like, this is the politics of sort of of third way is M of sort of a brand ice rather than dabs or, you know, whatever of the, let's regulate capitalism. If we make a better wallet, it can be expected that much faster. Anyway, so I'm going to bring this section to a close by saying, great, another completely ineffectual tool to take whatever money money money is left of Saudi oil parents by a bunch of venture capital firms that will do precisely fucking nothing, except maybe cause some injury down the line as someone decides to use it for union busting,

which it again doesn't say it's for, but it seems to be cried out to be used for that. But I'd like to move on a little bit. I would like to speak about the, the bailouts that are happening across the, mainly across the UK, but also some that are happening in the US. Antonia, an enormous amount of central bank money has been created to replace, you know, people's salaries to shore up businesses. The overall number of jobs has still fallen and many people have seen their incomes go down. So I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit about where that money is going and how these programs

are working. Sure. Yeah, there's a, there's a lot, there's a lot going on, but I'll try to give you. I was really hoping there wasn't. So yeah, obviously, you know, we've got this massive health crisis, part and parcel of that health crisis is an economic crisis. And similarly to the health crisis, the economic one is not going to be completely avoided. It's about minimizing its impact, right? So to that end, the government has announced a pile of loan schemes. We've got the furlough scheme, the Bank of England has a loan scheme too. And then creeping up the agenda is bailouts, but not much has been announced so far in terms of bailouts. So I guess with all of these schemes, the thing to kind of unpack or think about is,

are they sufficient? Are they fair? And in, you know, in the future, let alone by the end of this year, but in like five years time, are they going to look, are they going to look any good? And in short, I mean, as I'm sure you can guess, they don't really match up to any of them. You know, they're not, they're not, they're not fair and they're not going to look good. Yeah, I think the, the most interesting one to talk out and talk about at the moment is, as you said, the Bank of England loan scheme. So it's been set up for big business only to help with kind of short term cash flow. And so far, seven times more money has gone through it than to the entirety of the UK kind of small and medium enterprise sector. So we've had $11

billion so far. A prerequisite for receiving the money is signing a non-disclosure agreement. So we don't really know where the money's gone. Good. That's always a really good sign, I find. When like, you're like, oh yeah, everything's, you're going to love it in there. But before you go in there, you're going to have to sign this form saying you can never tell anyone. But like, the interesting thing is, well, depressing, I guess is maybe a better word, is that a few major companies are broken ranks and basically said that they've received money and used it to kind of pressure government for, you know, further help. And the best one is EasyJet, everyone's favorite company. It's accepted $600 million from the Bank of England.

And yet it's heads. Stelios basically took home 60 million pounds in March. And there's been huge numbers of worker layoffs. And Stelios has taken to the media to say, regardless of this money, we're still going to go bust by the end of the year. And basically, it's a really sad indictment of what's going on. Because obviously, all of these measures are emergency measures, but they should be used as an opportunity to talk about what we want in the kind of medium to long term, right? And there were kind of indication of where we're going in the medium to long term. And like, even if you're a mad free marketer, and you think Stelios is worth 60 million, you should only even be able to think about accessing money from the Bank of England

or the government if you've exhausted every other means possible, right? And like, paying dividends of 60 million is just definitely not that like another class. Listen, I mean, what you've got to understand is that Stelios is Greek and therefore taking huge amounts of money out of a company and basically destroying it in the process as part of his culture. And we can't really judge him for that. That's right. He needs a stern German to tell him not to do that. Where is Channel 4 to do a like benefit scum show about these guys, incidentally? Where is the camera crew outside the gates of a mansion in like fucking Cheshire to be like, oh, we've already gotten 600 million quid from the government this year.

And yet you're going out again, maybe to buy crisps? I'm afraid that's us, Alice. Yeah, that is us as well. And this is this is this behavior of just like setting up a gigantic pipe from the Bank of England into your own garage. It's not also it's also not entirely limited to to easy jet. For example, private equity firms, I've noticed from an article in the Financial Times here, have now been on a buying spree, snapping up fucked companies and sectors for like hospitality, travel and retail that have been affected by the lockdown. And now more deals are occurring at a lower value than historically outstripped by only a period from 2005 to 2007. But this time,

without the sturdy mass credit bubble underneath it, with just no one having anything. I love private equity. It's such a necessary pass of our economy that we just have these guys who just kind of like go into companies, pay themselves, everything, fire everybody and then leave. That's a vital function. Well, if I have a little story here from the FT, which is that when Blackstone, a private equity firm, basically piled 40, 400 million euros of debt into a casino operator last autumn, so it could pay its investors a dividend. It then basically Searsaw, the casino operator, shut all of its sites. And now it is tapping. So effectively Blackstone is tapping the Spanish government scheme to pay its workers' wages.

And so... And it's coming Spain. Yeah, that's absolutely right. But this is the private equity model. And whether it's a sort of vulture capitalist like Blackstone or someone like Stelios at EasyJet, there is this... These loan programs have been designed in such a way that it's possible for executives, again, whether private equity executives or C-level executives, to just pocket the money. Yeah. And I mean, it's insane. If you take Virgin as another big example that basically they've applied for half a billion pounds through the Bank of England loan scheme, it hasn't been approved yet. But it's probably looking like it will. Virgin doesn't pay tax. Stem Mark's actually at least taken the lead and said, we're not giving out any loans or bailouts

to companies that sort of reside in tax havens. But Virgin more generally has been run in this typical post-crisis way in that it's just a vehicle for raising debt and taking that debt out to kind of pay shareholder dividends. It's not a productive thing anymore. It's a means to take out debt. And yeah, they have the audacity to apply for this half a billion loan. And if you think back to 2008, because everyone for better or worse is comparing the current moments to 2008, we did bail out the banks in a bid to help the private sector. And now, in our hour of need, commercial banks should be doing the same for us. They shouldn't be trying to profiteer. Well, the problem is that all of those bailouts sort of generally either didn't

take... The state either didn't take ownership stakes or it took ownership stakes of the companies that bailed out so apologetically that you'd be... It's easy to forget that the state sort of owned some of RBS and all the worst bits of RBS and then sort of aggressively sold it at pennies on the pound to try to get it off of its loan books. And now these same companies are failing to support the economy, causing once again the public purse to be tapped by like five guys to keep them in like, I don't know... Not the burger people. Stretch... What have they done?

Stretch pan leather opera pumps. Yeah. I mean, it's insane. And that's where this hindsight point comes in, right? So after we get out of this crisis, I don't know if you remember a few years ago, the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, released the 12 Years Left report around decarbonization. And basically we have 12 years to... 10 years now. Yeah. Well, 10 years. And this is my point, right? So in a few years... Then you know we're in the whale album.

Yeah. In a few years, that's going to be down to five years. That's pretty much around the corner after we come out the worst of the coronavirus crisis. And then we're going to have five years to decarbonize the economy at this unprecedented rate. And how is it going to look in hindsight when we bailed out, easy jet, didn't take any shares in it or didn't put any conditions on them to make sure they decarbonize fast enough? Sorry. What do you think this is? Soviet Russia, where the government is able to take control of a low of a budget airline and cause it to stop destroying the world? You mentioned climate. I think that's a salient point also just because we've seen...

Just for a couple of weeks, but we've seen what happens when everybody does all of the personal stuff that you can do to halt climate change. We stop driving. We stop flying. We stop going out. We stop buying as much stuff. And the drop in emissions has been kind of like fuck all. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it just points to the fact that this is a systemic issue and like, well, it's all very well that we use a few less plastic bags in the grand scheme of things. I don't want to say it doesn't matter because reducing your own carbon impact can start you thinking about why the systemic problems are right. But ultimately, as you said, we stopped driving cars. We stopped getting on planes. And there's been a drop. It's been

the biggest drop that I think we've ever had, but nowhere near sufficient to what we need. So yeah, essentially, it all has to come from government policy. I mean, Dems really started that ball rolling. And for that, we do have to give them credit. I just love the idea that we had all of those tweets that were like, nature is returning. We're the virus. And you pan the camera downstream slightly. And there's just a factory that only exists to throw raw crude oil into water. Yeah, well, because also there was all that great outpouring of love for, oh, there's that super fucking, super himbo Rishi Sunak is sexily changing the economy back

into something that's usable. Oh, he's outflanking labor to the left. And like, yeah, it's easy to outflank the current generation of labor to the left. But the fact that these programs are structured in this way, right? The fact that they are structured to be dividend friendly and averse to any kind of state ownership means that we are, and again, this should be completely unsurprising to anyone at this point, that the austerity addicted governments are basically unable and unwilling to take any kind of meaningful action about this. But instead, just to say, well, better get it back to the status quo, no matter how many lives we have to grind into dust.

We are such a deeply cocked country. It's all the same energy. It runs through all of these seemingly unconnected things. The fucking clapping that you have to do, because if you don't do the clapping, you don't care about the NHS. But if you raise any questions about the way the NHS is funded or supported by the government, that's like being mean, right? And then the opposition... You have to support Captain Tom, but like a 100-year-old man, but not like any other 100-year-old people, because they're fucking letting people die in care homes. The opposition are just there to go like, oh, I'm sure you're trying your best. And then we have this allergy to learning anything or owning anything. The government is

like, oh, well, we have to give the airline hundreds of millions of pounds, but we can't possibly own it. That would be against the rules. It'd be communism. Milo, this brings back something you always used to say. We have to run government like a business, which means making huge expenditures for no return and selling off all of our assets and pennies on the dollar. Yeah, they're saying, like, they're saying, oh, yeah, that would be communism. It's fucking capitalism. The business fucking failed and we're buying it. It's fucking ours now. Fuck off. Have we thought... And I wonder whether like, I'm just becoming a conspiracy theory guy as a result of just being stuck in my house. But maybe the whole like clapping and getting old people to

like do lots of meaningless walks and push-ups is a way of like generating energy. Like this is going to be the government's actual like healthy energy plan. It's just going to be like getting people to like clap for a main thing. And that's why like, you can get arrested for going on like, for going on a second job, because your first job is the one where you're supposed to exert the most energy, right? So everything else becomes like secondary to that. I'm not saying it's powering a big dynamo. Yes. Smashing up to 2017. Captain Tom is president for life. He is incredibly jacked at 150 years old. No one can stop him. He just deadlifted 503 kilograms. So I have another example here of a private equity institution that's engaged in rent seeking on the

basis of, well, this crisis is going on. WeWork property investors has now raised 745 million in new equity on March 9. Oh, stick to your strengths. WeWork. So what it actually is, it's a joint venture between WeWork and a private equity firm called the Roan Group, which was set up in... Why are all private equity groups named, like they're really just rubbing our faces in it? Like you could have picked any like number of less conspiratorially evil-sounding names. Well, it's because... Blackstone or the Roan Group. Well, it's because like the vast majority of private equity is like... It mostly employs the sort of fourth children of like European Habsburg aristocracy. Hello. Yes. I'm calling from the Vienna protocols.

And so they basically have been... WeWork property investors has now spent millions of dollars repurchasing stores and then leasing them or selling them to Amazon. And just I get levering up debt on distressed real estate assets. But Antonia, we talked about a couple of dimensions, the sort of sufficiency. Who is it paying? So what else can we talk about about these sets of bailout programs? Sure. So, yeah, it's kind of sufficiency fairness and hindsight, or at least that's the way I've sort of been thinking about it. And I think, yeah, this sufficiency point is really interesting because the government announced this huge scheme. It's separate from the Bank of England loan scheme. It was going through high street banks to help small and medium-sized

enterprises. And that's exactly the camp that the Tories kind of claimed to claim to champion. And they set the terms for it and said, you know, it's going to be hundreds of millions of pounds accessible very quickly, et cetera, et cetera. And then basically what's happened is these... And obviously with that went a huge media song and dance and blah, blah, blah. And like what's happened as a result of that scheme is it's completely impossible to obtain the money for small and medium-sized enterprises. Less than fifth of applications have been successful. And that's mainly because high street banks have basically said as a requirement for getting the loan so that you, you know, SMEX don't default. Your CEO or your owner has to provide a personal

guarantee that they will be able to repay the money. And also the, you know, the loans are coming with unbelievably high interest rates. And I mean, you're just stuck in a catch 22 because if you own a small business and, you know, you're seeking, the whole reason you'd apply for this loan is because you're in difficulty, right? That's why people apply for loans. The fact that you then have to personally guarantee that you could repay the loan in a very short period of time is an absence. So yeah, nobody's actually accessed, yeah, access this money. And that's not to say that, you know, all SMEs need to be saved. As I said, kind of like with the health tragedies, all the health crisis is, it's unreasonable for us to say, you know, we want zero deaths from

corona. Like some of these businesses will go under. It's about the degree and the degree at the moment is far, far too big. And the trajectory, you know, like for the next 12 months is not looking very good. Well, if I could sort of spot sort of one common problem between the issues at the top, let's say with CEOs and private equity firms just taking the money. And then the problem at the bottom of high street banks refusing, imposing incredibly onerous conditions on lending listeners to this show will be unsurprised that I say the common problem here is the profit motive. The fact that we can only conceive of saving the entire economy by trying to prime the pump so it's profitable to do so. But the people who are actually able to either lend out

this money as the high street banks, or the people who decide sort of how much their workers get paid of this money, like this Stelios character from EasyJet, or the private equity firms who decide how much of this money goes into the businesses instead of their own dividends, you know, it's that it's that we're sort of trusting people who are just able to say, no, I'm going to keep it. Yeah, I love that we abolish the concept of a public good in the 80s, and then just kind of just kept on keeping on. Yeah, absolutely. And also, like, you know, this is a crisis, an economic crisis, I'm not trying to downplay that this is also a huge opportunity to redefine everything from executive pay, you know, how companies are

you know, workers rights within companies. And, you know, let alone environmental conditions. And, yeah, the government hasn't even, well, it's actually not talked about those opportunities, let alone even thought or, you know, taken a stab at any of them. Yeah, never, never waste a crisis. If the British government has a motto for the last few years is absolutely I like the way this nrub guy thinks. And, you know, I mean, I think what's what's that's why it comes to and I'm sort of going back to my private equity article from the FT, the chief executive of the private equity industry trade body invest Europe, a man, no joke named Eric de Montgolfier, his enormous gilded balloon, said, why should we be in a situation where our companies are

looked at in terms of their ownership structure, all companies should be treated the same. They're calling us much. Yeah, that's that I mean, that's the thing, the ownership structure is not it's not the problem. I mean, it's very obvious what it's very obvious when you look at the fact that a company like, like Blackstone can load up a casino operator with debt and then expect the state to pay it back. But also when you look at the at yeah, like we said, the banking practices of high street lenders, it's the same thing like all of the all of the companies through which the economic recovery is supposed to be channeled. They all have an opportunity to skim off the top. And of course, they all skim as much as they possibly can.

Oh, I missed that it was a casino. That's the funniest thing to me is like, imagine doing the private equity thing to a casino and a casino operator being like, oh, no, we have too much debt, we can't stop taking out more debt. Yeah, not so funny when it happens to you, is it? And you know, but like on the on the other end, right, I was also reading this article called called the 90% economy in the economist, which is unlike most writing in the economist, pretty good. It has its faults, but still this one article, I mean, the economist has many faults. But this one article was talking about how look if the if the recovery is managed in this way, we are going to come back to an economy that sort of is considerably more

consolidated, considerably less innovative, and considerably worse for pretty much everyone working in it, as more as more owners, such as those advocated for by Erecta, Mountbatten, Polo, Gentile, Falangismo, you know, to Habsburg, I wonder how he'd been doing since eating. These these companies like the ones that took over a deadspin, all of their there is less growth to go for. So they have to just exploit harder and and and exploit more exploit to yeah. Right. Like that that is essentially the direction that this this recovery is going. And it seems to be a again, we can't be surprised that the policy that the Tory government is doing this, right? Like that's like being surprised. You put a burrito on the floor and your gigantic

fat dog eats it. It was always it was always good. Why did they put it on the carpet though? That was so chaotic. That video hurt me. I'm saying you can't it's it's like we can explore the dynamics of how and why this is happening. But you know, you almost can't like there's their Tories. This is what they do. Like they're there. They're in government to do things like this. The best we can do at the moment, like Alice said about understanding the nature of gravity. Now that we've stepped off the cliff is understand the nature of sort of the tree branches that are bashing us on the way in. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it's going to be interesting to see what comes next because I think we're seeing quite a split within the Tory

party at the moment. You know, there's kind of the half that are gearing up for austerity mark two. And then the other half that's basically saying we need growth or cost and growth at the moment is going to come through investment and you know, probably the state potentially owning more stuff for, you know, us giving more loans to businesses. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see sort of which half which half wins, I guess. Coming back to our long held plan to do entryism into the Tories to advocate socialism. But the last last last sort of moment on this, right? Because I was thinking about this in terms of marks. And, you know, what we're what we're seeing is as sort of society crumbles, you're ceiling like it's the long history of capitalism

has been that of separating and decorrelating exchange value and use value. And what we're seeing is, again, the private equity model takes this to its logical conclusion by going into organizations, making them and making them non viable in order to just extract exchange value from them. What we're seeing is this tendency widening out in the economy and getting much broader and broader in the base. But what Marx failed to consider, though, was that there is a third line on that graph of labor value versus exchange value, and that is collapse. Yeah. Oh, yeah, of course, I forgot about the collapse. Yep, that's it. The clap economy is the new economy. His hidden is secret work, Das Klapital. Episode title. Before we carry on to

visit to visit an old friend we haven't spoken to in quite some time. Antonia, I want to give you sort of last word on the dynamics of the recovery section. I'm sure. I mean, I don't think I've got that much, that much more to add necessarily, but I just, yeah, would stress this point about opportunity, like we're all thrashing around thinking about what emergency responses we need, but those emergency responses are going inherently to pave the way for what comes next. So, yeah, the kind of recovery efforts and the reform efforts, hopefully later down the line. While I get that for a lot of people, their instinct is maybe to just support the government, especially in a time of crisis, like the devil really is in the detail, and nothing has been

attached to this huge amount of money that's been given out. And just think 10 years ago, I mean, it's very much in the public memory that we bailed out the banks, like now it needs to be reversed. Well, and I think the, if we want to say there's any sort of thing you can do about this, right? Remember that you don't elect politicians, it's one thing we've learned, you don't elect politicians, they do good policies for you. You join unions and through, it's through organized labor that you can actually begin to affect the way that these things happen. You're using a lot of very negative words here, like organize. The thing that you have to keep to remember all the time is that when the new deal was passed, that bare minimum of residualized and racialized sort of

bit of like an adrenaline put into the heart of dying capitalism in the 1930s, there was a very strong trade union movement at the time. And I don't think you can say that it would have happened absent that tradition of trade unionism. So you can still affect what happens with these bailouts. There are even like strike waves, rent strikes, strikes at Amazon and so on around America that are doing this and shaping the future that way right now. So what everyone has to do is just still fucking join a union, join the least bad union, and then try to make it better from there. Oh, I 100% agree with that. And I think there's a reason that none of the bailout packages, the large ones have really been announced yet. And it's because the government's feeling

the pressure of the public not being all right with these massive mad bailout packages coming with no strings attached when they work for these companies and they're being laid off. Union, union, union, union. Right. So I think we actually managed to conclude that on a bit of a sort of hopeful note. So now huge mistake there. So now it's time to talk about Toby Young. Yes, friend of the show. Again. With his new column, did anyone really believe what my wife wrote about me? Just my favorite, my favorite kind of spectator article. Just throwing out some questions. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing we talked about. I think it was you, my wife, who said that there's two genders of spectator articles, which are just like explicit fascism

and then just like marital counseling. Yeah, like I'm mad at my kids, I'm mad at my wife, or my kids are mad at me, or my wife is mad at me. Those are the yeah. Yeah. It's a man against nature, man against man, man against God. It's a spectator has a man against man, man against man, man against wife, man against immigrant. All of this is very tough. Too many guys. Man against the cultural Marxists. You know, this is the spectator. Yeah. I mean, I just feel like his articles wouldn't do well in the pronoun test, to be honest. So a little bit of background here, especially for American listeners. The spectator commissioned a bunch of brief articles by the spouses and partners of spectator writers to write about sort

of what it was like being locked down with them. Toby Young's wife was like, man, this fucking sucks. He's very annoying. He was, he was, he had, he like coughed twice and was convinced he had the coronavirus. And then remember, he wrote that article where he was like, oh, I'd gladly die for king in country. We talked about it. And the news is, I have coronavirus. Yeah, I was libs. And in fact, we, we learned from his wife that he just like coughed once and then spent a week in bed having a panic attack. Yeah. He's just, he's just doing like a 19th century damsel shit, just like taking to his bed and being like, I have had an attack of the vapors. I would be alone. So the column begins. One of the nice things about having a column in

the spectator is that I get a chance to reply to all the smears and lies published about me, which brings me to my wife's remarks in last week's magazine, powerfully, powerfully online sentiment. I think, I think there is like, there is a particular like form of chadness to referring to your wife as like a reply guy. Why won't my wife stop assing me? Yeah. Why do we torture this man by making him have a column in the spectator? Like he should, he should just be allowed to like roam free in a forest or something. Toadstoolmeister. This is absolutely what, absolutely one of these columns that just should have been a court filing, but accidentally cut sent to the spectator. The editor asked the partners of regular contributors to write a few

words on what it's like living with us during lockdown and Caroline was unbelievably rude. I can't enjoy the money, Shane. I was wondering what happened to my ex-girlfriend Caroline Callaway. Among other things, she accused me of being a complete hypochondriac, said the pandemic had sent my anxiety levels to the roof and ascribed my own life or death battle with the virus to a bed of shingles brought on by stress. So he 100% has not had coronavirus, right? We can agree on this. I think what we can say is we don't know if he has or has not had coronavirus. His wife's column certainly cast doubt on that. I believe women and in this case, I believe women especially

because it makes them look bad. What we're seeing and I feel like what we are about to see is a certain type of guy and it's like an evolution of the type of guy who believes full sincerely that they were in the front lines of the Second World War. So the new type of guy is going to be the type of guy who is 100% convinced that they had coronavirus and that they were on the cusp of death, even though all they had was the shingles. Yes, because we can't prove it without testing and you can't do that retroactively. That's going to be a guy. You're right. And you technically can't prove that a four-year-old didn't fight in the front lines of the Second World War. Yeah. Needless to say, this was mana from heaven for all the haters out there. So

this is a column that is addressed to his wife and then a number of his haters by name. Faze Young. Is his wife a hater or is his wife just like an accessory to the haters? His wife is a fake LA bitch. So Alan White, an online journalist who describes himself as the Lord Chief Justice of Twitter, posted a screen grab of Caroline's piece and the venomous comments came flooding in. Venting about him in public is a service that will put other women off, ever going near a man like this, wrote this trail, sub-editor of Time Out. And it's like, yeah. So Toby Young and his column, Toby Young and his anti-wife tirade in his Jeremiah ad.

Just transcribing Owens. Do you want to come over to my house and watch this tape of me getting dunked on? I also just want to give out a shout out right now to Alan White, who it was the guy who's made Toby Young this mad. So I think Alan has his thing as Chief Justice on Twitter. But anyway, he's the guy who's caused this meltdown. So congrats. He's been on the show before. Check out the Alan White episode. Yeah, well also, it's one of these things where I feel like Toby Young is the Washington generals and just like we are all collectively the Harlem Globetrotters and he just exists to just lose to us. That's all it is. Yeah, but don't forget the Washington generals got paid just the same.

You know, we are, we are, we are, we almost wonder if we're losing by giving him all this attention. It's part of the show. It's part of the balance, the dialectics. Before I carry on, I want to hand back to Antonia. What do you think of this anti-wife Jeremiah ad that's pointing out all of the reasons that people have said he sucks? I mean, what is going on here? Do they live together? Yes. Right. Are they, it's like some really crap version of the Kaleen Rooney, you know, Rebecca Voddy kind of. That's right. So he says, someone else tweeted, that reads like kind of a parody of, this reads like the kind of parody someone who

hates Toby Young would write. Why doesn't she leave them? Wondered London Lofty, a QPR fan? He just got tape of him getting dunked on. Yeah. It's like, it's like he's created an and one mixtape of just, yeah, people just effortlessly owning him. See, I'm not treated fairly. My mixtape entirely of other people's diss tracks about me. He's going for the Marshall Mathers strategy of, yeah, now find something to say about me. Another person added, not in the court, not a court in the land would convict her if you know Richard Innis, co-host of a podcast for first time dads wrote, do you think Toby realizes he's a laughing stock? But the next comment was,

the best comment of all was, forget about the NHS. I'm clapping for Caroline at 8 PM next Thursday. This is masochistic, right? It has to be. Who is he writing this for? Who is reading this, and finding it interesting? People who have wives and us. Well, also look, my longstanding theory is that most centrist columnist and spectator, in fact, all columnists really, especially centrist columnist and spectator writers, are only able to write about and to themselves. They would be much better served by just having like a dream journal or some like a diary and then getting a normal job. But they just can't, they have like a special process in their brain that means that they can't do anything except

for just constantly embarrassing themselves online. Imagine Toby on a normal job just showing up. Turning up at the office like, wow, that's pretty weird in here. Why does my postman have those big calipers on his bells? So when people react in this way to a piece of writing that's obviously intended to be funny, I often wonder whether they're pretending to take it literally so they can use it as a stick to beat me with or if they really are that tinier. Yeah, your wife was joking, man, definitely. All of these very specific suggestions of how just sort of annoying and shitty it's been, the fact that she wrote it in a lie, she was, she literally said several things that would make

it unbearable to be around. I don't understand where the joke was unless you were like, well, Toby Young can't be a piece of shit. So it's hilarious that he's been written as a piece of shit here. I think the funniest thing of this whole debacle is Fraser Nelson publishing that, just getting this thing back, putting out this quite lighthearted idea. Oh, what if we have the partners and spouses wrote about what it's like to live with them and gets back this blistering series of owns and is just like, fuck it, run it. Absolutely no respect for Toby Young and like child's configuration. During the five years I spent in New York, they used to depress me that so few Americans picked

up on the different ironic registers that Englishmen use in everyday conversation, rarely intending for anything to be taken at face value. If you try, you'll get arrested. A self deprecating remark, the purpose of which was to advertise just how sublimely self-confident I am, was often met with a look of furrow brow concern as though I was suffering from low self-esteem. You can't be self deprecating when you're actually pathetic or it just comes across as sincerity. I can't imagine anybody who looks at Toby Young and is like, this man cannot have low self-esteem. What a fucking chad this man has to be. That's why he's constantly naked. Oh no, he's constantly getting his picture taken while undressed. It's very strange.

Look, we're not going to shame anybody for having an only fans. I only ever see Toby Young from the neck up, so I kind of assume that he's like that head with legs from the mighty bush. That's right. On the other hand, an arrogant comment intended to send up the pomposity of Brits in general was usually greeted with stern disapproval. So basically, Toby Young has written an article about how his scurrilous wife can't be trusted, everyone online is being very unfair to him, and how everyone in America thought he was really annoying. Meltdown May, baby. I remember being on a plane about to land JFK on the fourth of July as fireworks are going off and saying to the man next to me how nice it was that Americans

still celebrated their conquest by the Brits. I was expecting a hoot of laughter, not a history lecture about the war for independence. I love that he managed to meet someone that annoying, like a fucking like a Hamilton guy. And yet he still managed to be the more annoying person in that conversation. I'm in the third row of that seat trying to fucking kill myself. Well, this is a Toby Young style, right? Where he's like, everyone thinks I'm a huge piece of shit, which is an indictment on them. Yeah. But in the last 10 years or so, it's begun to feel like that living in Britain, too. Spectator writers are particularly susceptible to being misunderstood.

Yeah, because we tend to make full use of these different registers and are almost never an artist, not unless it's after midnight and we've been drinking all day. What, Toby? What's up? Just constantly drunk. Just reminding me of a meme that I cannot read in full because I will be justly canceled from Four Chandes, which was jokes on you I'm only pretending to be and then it's just the R word. That is Toby Young's whole deal is I was actually being ironic. So I'm not open. Yeah, it's also like, that's just the pure, this is the purest psychology of the British columnist, which is someone who's like read about Hemingway having a drinking problem and that likes like drink an entire bottle of gin and be like, my wife's a piece of shit.

Okay, new theory. Toby Young isn't real. The Heston Blumenthal just decided to do a bit like a parody of a spectator columnist and it's gone too far. It's gone out of hand. Has anyone seen them in the same room? I used to marvel at all the people sifting through the columns of Taki, Rod Little, Douglas Murray, James Dellingpole and me. Just a coterie fucking pipsillers. I'm signing citizens. A suicide squad. Every week. A suicide squad. Desperately looking for things to be offended by, suspecting they were just malevolent trolls hoping to get us into trouble. They're also all children, by the way. All of them are sort of just mentally still in high school where they're worried about being gotten into trouble for saying

something naughty, but like they can't because the principle is actively hoping they'll keep doing that. But it's begun to dawn on me that just as that they're just completely unversed in the tonal variety employed by mischievous hacks like us. The tonal variety employed by mischievous hacks like us, like when Taki was like, yeah, the fucking Wehrmacht was brave and cool. All of these guys have one tone. I don't know why they think that they get irony as a thing, right? They have one tone and it's this, aggrieved. Yeah, like if you're saying that you're like some kind of like, you know, a puckish sardonic commentator, then you're just repeating all of the outrages that people have said about you

because they didn't get your sort of sparkling wit. I'm afraid you're not. No, you're just not. I love to do extreme irony by just like flatly saying, my wife lied about me and now a guy called like Steve Gunt is on Twitter saying, damn, this Toby Young guy is a fucking asshole. No, I noticed that we've been banding this back and forth a bit. I want to throw back to you, Antonia. What do you think of all of this so far? Where do you think Toby Young sits on the irony register? I think he just comes across as a deeply sad man. And I think, you know, he's obviously really scraping the barrel with kind of lockdown column topics as well. Like what is even going

on here? He was like quite annoying at home. His mom noticed, wrote an article about it, then somebody, his wife, but go on with the fringes. And then people online commented and said, you know, oh, you know, that's not very nice, Toby. And now he's writing an article saying, oh, no, that's not exactly how it went. And I am quite funny and ironic. Like it's just, it's so boring. He's like, if you gave drill a frontal lobotomy, you would just get Toby Young. Yeah. When it comes to their own conversation, it's the same dull note of plotting sincerity all the time. And they assume that we must be the same. Again, don't sign your tweets. It is, it is, it's hacked to say projection, but projection. Yeah. Consequently, when they read

something that seems to cast one of us in a bad light, such as Caroline describing me watching her slave away at the household chores and saying, we seem to be managing really well without our cleaner, they are genuinely offended. It's called project management. So he's, so just to be clear, he's not helping, but he's saying no, she's fine with it. Yeah, no, it's a DS thing. And that's fine. Yeah. So here's the final, the final paragraph. I love playing Nintendo DS with my wife. I have kept the entirety of this article because it's too funny. In fairness, it's difficult not to be complicit in these clothier confusions. A good bit of alliteration there, Toby. Part of the bond that we call them is have with

our readers is that they understand us, even if most other people don't. And that's the thing. Toby Young doing little monster shit. Well, that's the thing. We don't have readers, Toby. Your readers are just us. Yeah. And the thing is, unfortunately, we do understand you. It's knowing that they're in a small minority that makes the relationship special. That's right. And we play to that by being outrageous in a camp, hammed up way. Hold the fuck up. Toby Young, camp is, that's going to stick with me all week. When in his life has he ever done anything that you could describe with the word camp? Did he ever go on a hike? Just imagining, just imagining like the Nuremberg trials where they're just like, if we were doing a bit, it was camp.

And we just play up. We play up. Do you think you would walk like that if it was not camp? There's a complicated systems of torn registers that we are using here. And we play up to that by being outrageous in a camp, hammed up way that we know will drive our critics round the twist and add to our readers' amusement. Yes, no, you're wrong because I wanted you to call me a dumbass. Anyway, Caroline's squib was very much in that vein, and it seems to have worked like gangbusters. I, the master troll have been out trolled by my wife. My wife and I worked in perfect harmony to basically make me seem like a sort of slacking shithead and a completely awful partner. And it was to own you by point making you say

what a dumbass I am. I know like the main takeaway here is that he's obviously bullshitting, but I can also entertain a world where he does actually sit his wife down in this bizarre lockdown situation where she's already stressed looking after their kids and being like, look, I want to do this bit and I need you to own me. So you have to own me. So then I can tell everyone that actually I wasn't owned and that they were owned and it'll be really funny. It seems like a very Toby young thing to do. And I don't know whether we've just fallen for the bait or whether we actually have... So he's like our joker too. He's like the joker to our Batman or maybe vice versa. We need each other in the kind of dark night universe that I can't under

up. I think that's right. He says his readers understand him. For better or for worse, we do. His readers are probably also like the same types of people who like we dunk, right? And then they were like, oh, well, actually you don't get sarcasm. You don't get irony. So actually I own G. His readers, his readers don't understand him because they don't understand themselves. Toby young and his readers are playing into a mutual delusion of grandeur. We are the only readers of Toby young that truly understand him. Everyone else is consuming Toby young columns as they are projected onto a cave wall. Only we face the light that generates them. I was about to make that same joke. Only we

inhabit the land of Toby young forms. We understand the ideal Toby young and his ideal wife. That's right. That's right. That's all. We are all wives of Toby young today. That's to which all Toby young strive to be and to imitate. With this poll, this is the platonic form of the Toby young column. In infinite, just infinite resentment and sort of petty anger directed every direction. So with that being said, I want to say, first of all, thank you very much to Antonia for coming on today. It has been a pleasure to talk to you. Everyone check out Rethinking Economics. It's going to be in the description. It's been lovely being here.

Yes. And you know, we have some shirts. They have been restocked. So the email address for that is going to be in the description of the show. You know what it is. You know how to get them. And the quicker that they go, the sooner we can keep doing even more designs with more artists to create more trash future collapse. Yeah, like a big Toby young head as you are actually owned. Yeah, a full a full Toby young fursuit. That'd be cool. Brendan O'Neill body suit with inflatable head. Oh, speaking of the St. Brendan's Day debate, May 18th is actually St. Brendan's Day. It's going to be happening on twitch.tv slash trash future podcast on May 18th. It's May 18th. We're going to have two teams. It's going to be

moderated by Brendan O'Neill. And then the government is going to be Brendan O'Neill, supported by Brendan O'Neill and Brendan O'Neill, opposed by Brendan O'Neill, supported by Brendan O'Neill and Brendan O'Neill. So definitely do come to that. Yeah, a star studded cast. Yeah, a star studded cast. There's seven Brendan O'Neill. And yeah, I think aside from saying that our theme song is here we go by Jinsang find it on Spotify. Let's do it early. Let's do it often. I think that's all all she wrote for today. Listen to where there's your problem as well. Listen to Hell of a Way. You know what it is. Never read anything written by our various wives or girlfriends.

It's all lies. Oh yeah, do you speak Russian? Listen to my Russian podcast. It's called Tumach and you can find it on all the fucking podcast things. That's right. That's right. Antoni, do you have anything else to plug or just rethinking economics? No, I think yeah, just check out Ori and yeah, thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure. My pleasure. All right. See you on the Patreon on Thursday, everybody. Bye.