TRASHFUTURE - Britain is the Second Most Powerful Country in the World ft. Emiliano Mellino

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Riley, November, and Hussein talk to returning guest Emiliano Mellino from TBIJ to discuss his recent investigation into abuses of the health and care worker visa by unethical bosses and other associated profiteers we've decided to replace most of our remaining health and care system with. Before that, we discuss the murder of several aid workers by the IDF, which has caused Liberals to stand and take notice that white people are also being killed. Also, we learn about Britain being the Second Most Powerful Country in the World. Trashfuture is on Patreon, at www.patreon.com/trashfuture 

INTRO MUSIC Hello everyone and welcome to this free episode of TF. It is- It's the free one! It is Riley, it is November, it is Hussein, it is Milo is still in Australia, and we decided not to wake him up at four in the morning. And instead, we are being joined by recur- now I would say, firm favorite recurring guest from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, it is Emiliano Molino. Emiliano, how's it going?

Well, thank you for having me back on the exploitation beat. I'm back on the exploitation beat. I have to report back on the exploitation beat. That's right. There's a lot of jobs in investigative journalism where it's like, we want you to investigate the nice stuff. Yeah, that's right, exactly. Why is everything going great in the world? They kind of put that onto Atlantic writers and stuff, there's a lot less investigation

happening there. That's it. Why don't I write about all the workers who are not being exploited? Yeah, we've... The nice Bureau of Investigative Journalism sounds like something that Henry VI would have come up with to cover his, like, love day. Record amounts of good feeling between Yorks and Lancastrians noted as scions of both houses walk through London, holding

hands and scowling in what seems to be happiness. ALICE It's a real thing, right? You see this occasionally, where occasionally some newspaper will be like, isn't there any good news, quite theatrically, and then be like, well actually, if you look at this one graph it seems like maybe production of certain kinds of Ferrero Rocher is up this year. And you go, great. RILEY That was actually... I actually did a newspaper in the 90s, I think I seem to remember, that was this strategy.

Like, there was a good news newspaper. ALICE Maybe that's what I'm remembering. RILEY It went under in, like, a month. ALICE This is how you know that we're on the bad timeline, right? Is that the newspaper designed only to give you good news is not a going concern anymore? ZACH I mean, honestly, I think newspaper that's designed to give you good news would be like a marketing gimmick for a sort of trick soda that folded in six months, like, okay soda.

Mm, yeah. I was gonna say, I was gonna do like a whole bit about like Good Future, the podcast that tells you about how everything in tech is going great, but that's a whole niche. Or at least they used to be. That's just a normal tech show. Mm, yeah. We all go kind of like Kara Swisher before the turn and be like, everything's gonna be great. This Elon Musk guy, he seems smart. However, I have some amazing news for all of you, and all of you listening. I didn't

know this, but the Conservative Party's official Twitter feed has just published some incredible information. Yeah, this is hot off the presses. We were just handed this right before recording. Yeah, I have, like, whatever podcast you were listening to, I have broken into it and I'm like, ladies and gentlemen, Britain is the second most powerful country in the world. Yeah. If you thought that the Conservatives were flailing going into this election, you would be right.

And you would be even more confirmed in that belief by the thing that the Tories just posted, which is a sort of collage of... I'll just jump in before you say that. They posted this in, like, hours after a Redfield-Wilton poll showing Labour even taking... if the King got a vote, Buckingham Palace. Right? Like, the Tories left third party after the fucking Lib Dems, basically. So this was their response.

And it's a beautiful collage of British stuff, right, which includes an F-35, a Eurofighter, the Red Arrows, an Aston Martin, two container ships, the King, and the, I guess, last remaining Tory MP Rishi Sunak. ALICE Yeah. As well as the men's football team that didn't... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mhmm. RILEY It also contains this very rogue image of

Christopher Nolan, right? And no one's really paid attention to any of it, but I'm just like, why the fuck is Christopher Nolan, like, sort of in the background of all this? It feels like very... It just feels like very out of place. I understand, but it's probably in reaction to, sort of like, Oppenheimer and the Oscars and stuff. But it's just very...

ALICE It's just love tenet, you know? RILEY That's true, yeah. Like, only in Britain could you make a movie like Tenet. And I agree with that. ALICE The tagline on this, by the way, is, Britain is the second most powerful country, and then in big letters, in the world. Which is biting like a Jeremy Clarkson bit that he did on Top Gear, like, a decade ago. Um...

I couldn't... Couldn't Britain just try a bit harder? I mean, just second? Yeah, we're number two, but we work harder. Yeah. I mean, really, next time, Tories, just try a little bit harder. Look, it's... I know this is a little bit led by donkeys, but it's very funny to be like, okay, well

hang on a second. You can fact check the shit out of this. You can be like, okay, the Europhyser was like a collaborative European project, the F-35 is mostly American, Christopher Nolan had to go to America to make all his money, Aston Martin is owned by a Canadian dipshit. Aston Martin is so funny, it's owned by a Canadian who bought it because he wanted to guarantee his son a seat in F1. One of twenty seats in F1.

Basically. We've all seen Drive to Survive, yes. I come by it honestly, my girlfriend's a legitimate F1 fan. Mine too. The ships are like, Panamanian registered, owned by a company based in Geneva, built in South Korea, like, the... Rishi Sunak... LILJAH We had a football team that won!

We had one that actually did win! ALICE Yeah, we did! And they're not important to be on the poster. Rishi Sunak, like, went to America to make most of his money, like Christopher Nolan did. LILJAH This is just, it is, this is like if somebody explained the concept of British soft power in the 90s to someone who was in a room that was swiftly filling up with carbon monoxide, and then in order to shut off the pipe...

This is like fucking exit bag rule Britannia, is what you're saying. In order to turn off the carbon monoxide into the room, what they had to do was replicate what they thought Britain had now in terms of soft power as it did then, basically. And you had 30 seconds and you just had to think of what you remembered as being kind of British. It is, I mean, look, it's a bit of Twitter ephemera. It's not gonna be remembered, but I think it should be, as just like... L. Certain things.

C. Certain things like... C. What we can think of. Whatever comes to mind. L. They like, lodge in your head, right? The thing that sticks with me is a Liz Trust banger, which is, in government I will be ready to hit the ground from day one. That's the one that sticks with me, and I think joining it in the Hall of Fame is Britain is the second most powerful country in the world. How do they settle on that ranking?

How do they settle on... I have no idea. Why second? It's not the second biggest economy. You might as well say you're the first. We've gotta keep it plausible here, but second isn't even plausible. If you told me like, fifth or something, I would probably go down in my head like, I guess, maybe?

But like, second is... no, come on. Yeah, I mean, I think China might want to have a word. Yeah, I mean... Well, look. I mean, this is... I just... I want to see who this persuades. Which laboratory fed sitters? Like, you know what? Just like the kind of person to whom this is read meat, being like, China, how many

World Cups have they almost won and then choked in the quarterfinals? All right, all right. I don't want to spend too much time talking about the Tories on Twitter, but my goodness it's fun, but definitely someone do check on the design room. I think maybe... Someone got paid a stupid amount of money to make this. And let me tell you, it's a real, like, it's not well done for what it is. I also want to talk about one other thing before we get into some more of our news,

and then our main section. Well, this is an article from 2020. Amazon is now starting to sell its cashierless shopping technology to other retailers, offering them camera systems that automatically record what shoppers pick up and walk out with. This is a quote from JustWalkOut.com, the website they set out to market the technology. Since launching Amazon Go years ago, many retailers have expressed an interest in offering similar checkout-free shopping experiences to their customers." ALICE Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah, I remember these.

These are the Amazon ones where you just pick up the thing and put it into your pocket or whatever and leave, right? And it was very popular for a second because it already conformed with how most British people shop. SEAN Yeah, it takes out the step where you tell a self-checkout machine that various things are onions. ALICE Exactly, yeah. SEAN So this is, they go on, it says, we're excited

to now offer their ability for retailers to leverage just walkout technology from Amazon in their stores, and installation can take as little as a few weeks." So, as you alluded to, November, this was the Amazon attempting to break into physical retail, it was, and they attempted to do it with their trademark Amazon obsession with infrastructure and automation. ALICE It was like weird yuppie shit, all the stores were too clean, they were only in like London Bridge and Canary Wharf, and just kind of surrounded by very paranoid security, which kind of undercut the faith that they claimed to have in just picking up stuff and walking

off with it. Well, wouldn't you know it. Apparently. I don't want to alarm you here, but their system of cameras and sensors and AI models was actually 1000 people working in India. Cool. Surprise surprise. Hey, I mean, it's the classic, like, what if it was just a guy?

Yeah, we did this bit! We sold a t-shirt! We made t-shirts! We have several t-shirts! We sold t-shirts of this bit! It's fully that it's just like, a guy in another country that can pay less watching a surveillance camera of you putting something like, goo ramekins into your bag or whatever, and taking that off.

Mmhm. So... Wait a sec, wait a sec, wait a sec. Also, they said, in the PR thing for this, you just read me, that it takes like ten weeks or whatever for them to install this. Well, they have to install all of the cameras and scales on all the shelves for the just-a-guy to look at what you are doing, and then basically dress up as a robot so you clap with enthusiasm. Like so many things, right?

If you look at how they actually marketed this technology, and like there is both, there's a tech angle here, there's also an immigration and labor angle. The tech angle is you look at how they marketed it and they said, or how they explain this finding rather, it's sort of been known about for a while, but now it's blown up because they've decided to just, you know, shit can the whole project. They always said, oh yeah, 90% of transactions need like human verification and adjustment, sure, but by next year we're going to get that down to 50% and so on and so on and so on, because there's this in this constant faith that with more time and more data, more training and more refinement, you're going

to be able to do this totally over engineeredengineered, baffling, weird, stupid thing. ALICE This keeps happening, right? You keep ending up with human workers providing the training data for something that they can't train to do the thing, and it just kind of keeps on going that way. Or, as in this case, they just shut it down. ZACH Yeah, so you're always... well, it's so precarious, because you're always like, maybe today's the day it finally gets trained, and they don't need 500 of us anymore.

No, that's not gonna happen. Yeah, or maybe it's the day where they just decide this is over, and they don't need any of you anymore. On both counts, it would have been more dignified to just have the same person follow you around in the physical store wearing a cardboard robot costume, because at least they would have had to pay the minimum wage. LR. Well, and that's the immigration and labour angle, which Emiliano, we actually talked

a little bit about before the show, which is, endlessly, whether it's in retail, or whether it's in sectors heavily supported by people who would need to come here on visas, such as agriculture and care, across the political spectrum, there is this faith that at some point, we'll be able to automate a way of having to let in Johnny Forerner basically, right? That's right. At least in the seasonal worker visa, the visa for agricultural workers, the government's even said, and there's been like reports saying,

I don't worry, this won't last very long because we're just gonna automate it, right? We're just gonna get robots picking all the fruits. But it's like, I don't know if any of you, when you're trying to pick a raspberry, it's incredibly soft, it's incredibly delicate, and you have to do it at a crazy speed is one of the things that a lot

of workers found really difficult. You simply can't get a robot to do that, at least not with the current technology, right? Like the Boston Dynamics dog would absolutely massacre those hedgerows, right? And imagine in care, even worse. ALICE The Boston Dynamics dog has been detailed to wipe your dad's arse. Just approaching him at, like, maximum speed.

Flipping over and put this cold paw on his butt, you know? Terrified old people. You know? I mean, it's just, it's a horrific prospect, really. But, you know, it's not realistic, right? It's not realistic. We've talked about this before, we've seen products whose application was nominally gonna be in care, that were like, oh, this is the friendly robot that's not gonna terrify your

aged father. And then it just kind of doesn't quite work, we hear some PR from them, they get a shitload of funding, and then just kind of sink. So friendly or not, whether they're being pursued by the thing from Black Mirror trying to wipe their arse or not, it just doesn't work, y'know? And also, it's quite possible that a lot of these robots are actually more expensive than paying workers a decent salary, right? Paying them more than what you pay them.

Well, like, if the guy, like, a guy in the cardboard robot costume, right, presumably then has to live in Britain, like, commute to the store to follow people around in the cardboard robot costume, put, like, spend money, put money back into the economy, like, engage with the culture and fabric of life in this country in some meaningful way. Which he wouldn't, like, y'know, working in a call centre, or whatever. And all of those things, like, they have impacts, and we're just kind of like, no, we don't wanna do that either, cause that's too much work, y'know? And also, like, a UKIP guy might see him.

Exactly. I guess the question is, how comfortable would Nigel Farage feel living next door to a family of robots? That is really the real debate we should be having in Britain. So, we say RIP to Amazon's Just Walk Out technology, as we put it in the big bin that's labelled, turns out it was just a guy. Yeah, we hardly knew you. Yep. And, I mean, that's...

Although before we move on, though, right, like, there is... It is quite, I think, you know, a lot... Whenever I see something get automated or replaced with AI, or whatever, what it always tells me is that, if that thing is broadly accepted, it is, we as a society, or those people in power, whatever you want to call it, accept that the outcome of this doesn't matter for the people who it's happening to. And quality of life doesn't matter for the people who used to do it. And so, as like, one of the things I always worry about with West Street and getting really, really, really

excited about getting more and more automation into the NHS, is he's basically willing to... And the enthusiasm... I go to the gender clinic and a guy in a robot suit follows me around. And the enthusiasm as well, for having as much of the theatre of automation as possible, what it means is, you know, again, like the people who are the people who are doing some of the most important jobs that like you can imagine because like anyone can say, oh, I won't get sick.

Anyone can say, oh, I won't fall on some kind of financial hardship. Anyone can say that. But everyone is going to fucking get old. Right. But everyone is going to fucking get old. Mm-hmm. Right? And if you're going to increasingly to have to decrease the quality of care that people get when they get old, either by like hyper exploiting the people who are doing it, keeping them very, very far away and making them do it through a pair of fucking robot arms

that you're pretending are automated or just automating it and say, you know, just fuck it, let's see what happens when we let the Boston Dynamics dog wipe the ass. Like, maybe it will only tear off some of the asses. Right? You know, maybe it's... Yeah.

You're sort of like, your confused aunt has been, like, attempted to be guided gently back to bed by a big robot arm, but they've turned the strength up too high, and it's just like, power slam to through a building. And so it's in every case, right? The process of making sure that people pay for food from the Amazon Go store is not one I particularly care about. I don't own the Amazon Go store, it doesn't really affect me. But what you were alluding to again earlier Emiliano, this like, we want to automate it,

and if we can't automate it we'd like to put a robot arm between the person receiving the care, the person giving the care, the person giving the care, doesn't use the NHS, basically. I find that quite alarming. Quite worrying. ALICE It's all the same thing, right? It's more alienation, it's more layers between you and service, right? ZACH Exactly. I have another piece of news, to Tisca.

ALICE Oh, is this gonna be a jarring shift in tone? It is going to be a jarring shift in tone, I'm afraid. Which is, going back once again to Gaza and Israel. We had a 972 article come out, which basically confirmed a lot of what we said previously, about using AI to pick targets for bombing. And I mean, yeah, it's sort of like the grimest possible manifestation of the stuff we've kind of still been talking about, right? Is you use it to sort of like, provide this space of denial, this like, buffer between

you and your war crimes, right? Where you go, wait a second, I in this military didn't order these war crimes, it was this robot, and it's like an IDF drone operator wearing a robot suit. In fact, this is, what came up in this 972 article, Lavender, the AI system, it's actually worse than we said when we talked about it last, because what we talked about was essentially using AI as a random target justifier, but they are actually using the AI, almost unsynically, as a casualty maximizer. Which again, that is genocidal activity, that is a war crime. Yeah, it's like, prima facie, genocidal.

Yeah. Yes. And at the same time, there is news that's come out that they have, essentially, triple tapped an aid convoy, which had coordinated its location with the IDF, saying, we're going to be here, we're aid workers, please do not bomb our car, had the logo of World Central Kitchen on top of their car, and then... Which, with the best will in the world, is a pretty lib NGO, right? Like, José Andrés, the chef who founded it, his...

I remember him trying to get a Spanish government minister in trouble for supporting Hamas, like a couple of months ago. RILEY And then they bombed the car, they bombed the car that came to rescue the survivors of the first bombing, and they bombed the car that came to rescue the survivors of the first bombing, and they bombed the survivors of that bombing, and have said in turn it was an accident, which has then been echoed by the last remaining... Lyle- Partisans. Jason- Yes.

The last remaining Partisans and other mainstream liberals in Britain, but also has seemed to alienate a lot of erstwhile liberal support. ALICE It's been crazy, it's like someone has flicked a switch. Like, genuinely, the big public opinion dial has finally hit the point where newspapers and stuff are running cartoons of Netanyahu with blood on his hands, and stuff. And I feel like if you were in this space of recognizing that any of this might have

been bad beforehand, it's just gonna make you feel insane. Because now it appears to have happened to someone we care about. They got very unlucky in this case, in PR terms, because they killed, apart from anything else, this charity's entire security team, which is full of big buff white ex-UK Special Forces guys, who went there as aid workers, who went there as security for aid workers, and so now can be splashed across the Mail, to be like, check out these heroes who have been killed by Israel, right? ALICE Our precious spare operators.

ALICE Yeah. RILEY It really tells you something about who we feel solidarity for, as journalists. Because we've had now, almost a hundred, or around, maybe now more than a hundred journalists killed in Gaza and it's it's been crickets from our colleagues in the press here in the UK Absolute crickets right another another I mean the NUJ has done some stuff has called for some Investigations and so on but if you look at for example in France, which is no We're not exactly talking here about a country that has great politics on Palestine

in France a bunch of editors from, and reporters from several newsrooms wrote like a joint letter saying, you have to have investigations into war crimes against journalists in Gaza, and you have to allow foreign journalists in, right? And I also do wonder the extent to which like foreign journalists not allowed in

is exactly for this reason. And the, I mean, cause this is something that Hussein, you've mentioned before, right? Is foreign journalists aren't allowed in is exactly for this reason. Absolutely. I mean, because this is something that Hussein, you've mentioned before, right? Foreign journalists aren't allowed in, but that still doesn't stop Israel's boots on the ground from gleefully sharing the atrocities they're committing on a daily basis. In this case, what happened is they committed an atrocity against someone who, for lack of a better word, was seen by respectable white liberals, and I'm including the political classes in that,

to not be acceptable losses. That's the difference. Yeah, it's been a really weird thing to watch, as we sort of alluded to here. Partly because I'm not convinced that the switch is necessarily flipped. I was sort of going through, I was sort of going, when I was researching this, um, you can sort of see that some of the kind of defenses are kind of coming up,

but perhaps the change that's sort of taking place right now is where before the defense was always like, Oh, you know, these are brown people and therefore, you know, you can sort of dismiss them as being Hamas, right? You can sort of just them as being Hamas. I think they were really pushing it when they were sort of doing it at the UNRWA, but somehow that was still the line. But now you can't really do that. There's too much stacked against that for you to just sort of be like, yeah, the World Kitchen guys were also secretly harboring Hamas terrorists. That's just not going to happen. The sort of strategy that now SilverSword seems to be at play, seems to be like, well, we've been able to get away with so much already, so just sort of let this kind of pass through.

And so it's kind of, it's a real sort of test of how, I mean, I keep going back to the thing about what do you sort of do at this point? Because like, where interventions would sort of have been effective in terms of like suspending arms licenses or, you know, at least kind of like applying diplomatic pressure in a very serious way, that would have perhaps been a lot more effective, you know, a few months ago, like at least, right? Any serious country would be talking about sanctions at this point. But at this point it's just like, well, what are you actually going to do?

If the line is still very much like, Israel is our ally and we are going to support them. The kind of like, very mealy mouth response of, we're going to let Israel do its own investigation to this. By which I'm very excited to see what type of weird and very bad CGI rendered, you know, diorama they come up with to sort of suggest that actually the bomb was in the car the whole time. Like, you know, as a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket or beyond like, yeah, because this was it. I was just sort of thinking about like, this is sort of like, I keep going back to when

people were just having these really dumb arguments about the hospital bombing and how it was so obvious for like, no, this came from an aerial missile and there's only one side of this, this, this war that has access to that. And like the sort of hand wringing over the fact that, Oh no, these were actually missiles that were hiding in a hospital all the time. Well, they destroyed the fucking hospital and there was nothing there. There was absolutely nothing there and we've just sort of like ignore like ignored, like the people who actually have political influence have just sort of ignored that. And so it's kind of like, okay, well it's all well and good, but now you've sort of seem to have figured out that like, this state is sort of acting

in a very kind of like rogue manner that none of you people can control. And like, well, you know, you got exactly what you wanted, but like the you know, the optics of it aren't going to be great. But I keep going back to the thing about like, well, what do you want to do at this point? Like what, yeah. And this is sort of what I keep going back to. Yeah. I mean, the thing is like, I get the sense Israel, like any other state uses this kind of like Mott and Bailey system, right? Where it's like a series of defenses nested within each other. Where it's like, we didn't do this, if we did do it it was an accident, if we did it on purpose then it was like a mistake, and if we did it like purposefully then we, like,

you know, whatever, right? It's fine, we're gonna discipline those people, except we won't. And you can kind of see that that shifted in a couple more than it usually does. That's the only way you can tell what's actually making an impact here, is this kind of preparing the ground for a limited hangout of some low level dipshit, right? As for Israel to go, well this wasn't actually an authorized strike, maybe somebody just got a bit too trigger happy or whatever. Well, this is exactly right.

This investigation isn't just being prepared for the benefit of the US and UK, right? Which, the UK is the second most powerful country in the world, pretty important. Yeah. This investigation isn't just being prepared for their benefit, because I think that even though, let's say, cracks in the elite coalition that stands four square behind whatever Israel does, have begun to show, right, as more and more people,

I think, at the margins see this as becoming indefensible. But as you say, Hussein, the time for them to come across would have been three months ago. What they can do now is not as powerful as what they maybe could have done. The restraint that they could apply now is much less than what they could have done. God knows, even cutting off arms. But, right, much of these defenses, I think, are being prepared for the benefit of the ICJ because you're gonna be able to say, oh, no, what are you talking about?

In order for a charge of genocide to stick, we would have to be, there would have to be, say, commands coming from political leadership or senior military leadership, to target things like families, but actually what happened is we had an AI do it. And actually what happened is... Call this the, uh, call this the, I was just disobeying orders, you know? Yes, exactly! It is the, it's the reverse Nuremberg, it's I was disobeying orders.

Yeah. Um. I mean, this is the thing, like, this is another crack in the sort of coalition right, is, again, this is a question that I asked beforehand about this, and it continues to be a relevant one, do you want to have a system of international humanitarian law or not? Because the US does, in general, because it has invested a lot of time into building that system and stacking the deck within it in its favour, right? It didn't go to all that trouble of trying genocides in Africa and in Eastern Europe,

and sort of minimizing and covering up and exculpating its own war crimes, just for Israel to be able to say openly, actually, we love to do the war crimes, it's good when we do them. And so the tension there is, do you want to maintain this system which is deeply flawed and problematic, but has some concept of a war crime, or do you want, as Israel seems to, just to not? RILEY Well, I hope you're happy. Alger Hiss is crying in the corner.

Well literally, yeah. We built this whole system of international humanitarian law in order to indict our enemies and to spare our own blushes, and now you don't even care about it. It's just ungrateful. But like, what we're driving at, right, is this, again, this is the kind of frothing, rogue, quite, you know, bircherite, even like, or like, ultra reactionary elements, are taking apart these systems that are meant to support them, because they want to be unleashed to do whatever they wish. ALICE I am playing poker with like a rigged deck and I'm about to flip the table anyway.

GARETH Yeah, and like, this... one more thing on, you know, is on whether or not there are war crimes being committed. And this is what we talked originally about the South African, the ICJ case. One of the things that it's important to remember is, yes, we all remember from the Iraq war that powerful countries ignore international law when they want to. However, however, with stuff like formal judgments of war crimes, that has ramifications, that has ramifications for dealing with other states.

It has ramifications for dealing with private companies. All of those laws can be ignored, but it will be very very very challenging, it will be very politically difficult to, like, for example, I don't know, if you're David Cameron and you receive official advice that Israel is going to use UK supplied weapons to commit war crimes, even though it's far too late to cut off those weapons, to at least withdraw support when it's too late? ALICE Yeah, I mean, here in the second most powerful country in the world, this is the reason why the question, what is the government's legal

advice on supplying weapons to Israel, has not been answered, and will not be answered satisfyingly, is because there can be no legal advice possible other than, yes, of course they're using them to commit war crimes, and if you continue to supply them with the weapons, which had been before but are now killing, again, British citizens, you are probably committing an actual crime in Britain, as well. When we talk like it is easy to see how unflinching support for what is essentially a rogue US state, more or less in the Mediterranean is creating huge problems, I think there is nobody who, and just like the liberals who sort of realize all too late, that maybe they could have actually spoken out against this earlier, or even God help them if they're in some position of power or influence, use that power or influence to try to at least do what they could, right? They're realizing that too late. The people who

are in positions of power and influence, who are still keeping the faith, who are still holding on, they're going to come to that realization at some point when it is far too late, and further complications, let's say, to put it euphemistically, will have arisen. From, for example, I don't know, openly having supported a genocide that has legal implications. Yeah, and as far as the Israelis are concerned, they don't give a fuck, because what they want to do is establish facts on the ground, right? At this point if you think that they're gonna allow any Palestinians back into northern

Gaza you are dreaming. I think that they want to do the whole thing for the whole of the Gaza Strip, and yeah, it doesn't matter to them, it matters to the US and the UK to the extent of not only this but also whatever the next thing is gonna be. Whatever the next war crime, whatever the next war of aggression is going to be, what the kind of position is allowed to be. I wanna bring us around to our final section, something we've alluded to earlier when we

were talking about Amazon and the robot dog that wipes your ass, which is, Emiliano, you and your colleagues have conducted another investigation into what I would say is a vitally important for supporting your bottom level of your Maslow's hierarchy of needs pyramid sector, let's say, operating on hyper-exploited labor because we don't want to pay anybody to do it. And we want to keep the people who move here to do it more or less in some kind of a work-related prison. Is that overstating the case? Only slightly. I mean, people are, I mean, you say prison and it's, the metaphor is not that far off because the visa regimes do really trap workers in exploitive situations.

And I'll explain a bit more about what I mean by that. Basically the, you know, I was previously here talking about the seasonal worker visa. Now we're talking about the health and care visa. Again, like you say, Maslow's high record needs, you know, care and food, you know, essential things, but both are super high risk sectors for exploitation. They've always been super high risk sectors for exploitation. And the government faced with this situation and faced with labor shortages in both of these sectors, what does it do? It creates visas that tie the worker either to a recruiter or to an employer, meaning that the recruiter and the employer effectively have

control over their immigration conditions to an extent. If you leave the employer, if you leave the recruiter, you lose your visa. If the recruiter drops you or if the employer fires you, you lose your visa, you lose your right to stay in the UK. And that dynamic just completely expands the possibility for exploitation because you're giving much more power to the employer. So it does really create a kind of prison, like you said. And I would say that the difference between the care worker visa and the seasonal worker

visa, and we know we talked about all the exploitation happening between the care worker visa and the seasonal worker visa, and we know we talked about all the exploitation happening in the seasonal worker visa, I think the problem with the health and care visa is significantly larger, a different order of magnitude. And the investigation we did was based on the testimony of around 175 workers, but I'm very confident that this is affecting many, many more workers. And I think when the dust settles on this and we look back, this will be a crisis in

terms of the human damage that it's done. It will be on the par with Windrush and on the par with the post office scandal, the post office horizon scandal, quite easily. We're looking at hundreds of people who are being left in hyper-exploitive situations, in destitution, really very, very dire situations, and in debt, and broke, and scammed, and haven't been defrauded out of tens of thousands of pounds at times. And we say hyper-exploited, as you say, we've made to work for enormously long periods of time without breaks, made to live in sort of substandard accommodation, often overcrowded. And especially as the care sector is one that is dominated by women,

there's a great deal of sexual exploitation that has gone with this visa as well that comes up in the testimonies that you guys have gathered. Yeah, that's right. So obviously the most shocking, I think, of all the testimonies we gathered was of a woman who had been raped by her manager on several occasions. And another worker who was sexually harassed by her landlord, the landlord had been, the housing situation had been set up by the employer. So there was a connection between the landlord and the employer. And in both these cases, the workers didn't blow the whistle. They didn't blow the whistle because

of this fundamental problem with the visa. The moment you do blow the whistle, the employer can very easily sack you. And if they sack you, you can lose your visa and your right to stay in the UK. In the best case scenario, the company doesn't sack you, but then you blow the whistle to the home office and the home office then revoke the sponsor license of your employer, you can also lose your visa because the person sponsoring your visa no longer has a right to sponsor your visa. So they basically create a system that actually actively punishes you for whistleblowing.

And the employers know this. The employers often when other workers, for example, there was a Nigerian worker who was told that if he wanted to keep his job, he had to transfer from Scotland to the south of England, like 300 miles. And the guy said, well, no, I'm settled here now. I got no family, whatever. And they just sacked him and he lost his right to stay in the UK. Another worker who was working for four months without a day off, almost four months without a day off, when they complained about it, the employer threatened them. They said, if you have a problem with this, we'll just sack you and you'll lose your visa. And in other instances, workers were told by their employer, well, if you report us

to the home office, we're gonna lose our license and you're gonna lose your visa. So the employers know this very well, and even use the threat of this home office, this absurd home office setup, to stop workers from speaking out, to stop them from complaining, and so on. ALICE Like, some of the only jobs left in Britain sometimes are exactly this kind of, like, middle management of exploitation, right? It's like, these are like, growth industries, right? Between the two that we've had you on to talk about, where it's like, oh it's fine, you can just threaten these people with anything, and the way the thing is set up is designed to benefit you doing that.

No, I think it's not only exploitation, but also fraud. There's a whole level of fraud going on with this visa, that effectively the government has created, by creating this visa. So workers who are told, who are asked to pay recruitment fees, which they shouldn't be asked to pay, it's illegal to require to require someone to pay recruitment fees. Workers who are told, I know, to pay as much as 30,000 pounds to come work here, and to have a visa here, when they arrive, they realize there's no work, that the company that sponsored

them has no work to offer them, will not pay them anything. And so this is effectively a massive fraud. This thing of recruitment fees for a job that doesn't exist. And then these people are left high and dry. People that then arrive, for example, we know a guy paid 17 grand, he came here, he bought a car so he could do a job, he did the training, and the company didn't give him any work. A complete fraud! I have a quote, I have a quote here actually. This is about this guy. He says, Eshaan was promised 40 hours a week of work with Swan Care Solutions, and in return,

as you say, he bought the car, and so on. He visited the company's office in Wolverhampton, which was a single bedroom with nothing in it. There was just one staff member present, and he saw no company signs or branding. This is like the best way to be introduced to Britain, I think. Which is just like, to arrive in the most miserable town, and like, realize that you've been scammed, and also that the guy who's scamming you, lives, or at least is operating from a very miserable office that looks like an ideal male living space, and he thinks that he's doing you a

favour. It's the most honest way of seeing Britain, maybe. Like, really seeing the state with its clothes off, right? Well, second best country in the world, right? Yeah, second best country I ever had. Yeah. You know what you're saying, you're saying, actually, that thing about, you know, you're made to feel like they're doing you a favor, that actually happens quite a lot.

Like, a lot of workers also... Yeah. Absolutely, people are put in that mindset, right? That, you know, oh, well without me you wouldn't be in this country. You know? That's what I'm saying. And so people feel in this very stock position, I mean, it really... One of the things that we didn't really,

I'm not sure if we drove across in this, in the piece sufficiently is like how it completely destroys people, like their confidence, their sense of self, you know, because you were, you know, this is the biggest investment they've ever made in their life. The big hope for the whole family, they're gonna, you know, you know, come to the UK where, the UK where wages are higher and so on

and create a better life for themselves and potentially for their families and their families back home. And then ultimately it's a complete scam. Again and again, this is what we see as well in the fruit industry. We would see people come pay enormous fees to recruiters for jobs that don't exist. And it always goes back to is, this is a problem of the government's own creation. It is because of the hostile environment. It's because these special bespoke visa routes are created to fill these gaps in the economy that used to just be held together by labor that came in under free movement. Again, it's not saying that we should have that these jobs should be exploitative and they should be done by Polish people or Romanians who are 20% less exploited. But what it is saying is that

ending that free movement and bringing in special bespoke tied to employer visa rules means that now they have added that 20 to 50% more exploitation. It's Victorian shit. The guy in the bed set may as well be wearing a large top hat at this point. I also want to talk about, because with all of these bespoke visa routes, what the government does, and there's a very British style of doing this, is you would have a big wink to the class of Aston Martin driving grifters whose whole job is they own 400 care worker agencies, all of which open

and close within a year so they don't have to file accounts, whatever, right? There's a big wink saying, well, here's the new visa regime, but watch out, we have a regulator, they're gonna... You don't want to do anything bad, or you're gonna get on the wrong side of the regulator, and with the agricultural industry... Yeah, you wouldn't want to mess with twelve GLAA inspectors. I think it's around 21, But yeah, fair enough. Same. Yeah. In this case, it's the Care Quality Commission, who again, their job all of a sudden isn't just inspecting hospitals, but rather being the oversight business, being the oversight body

for hundreds of recruitment agencies now, which as I understand it, they're not really equipped to do. They're certainly not equipped to do. they don't have expertise in labour enforcement, and I think actually at the moment, I think my understanding of the situation at the moment, is that they will just refer it on to another agency. Right? So they'll let... Ooh, DEFRA? Yeah, exactly, that's right.

So the, um... Yeah, just go to the Coast Guard somehow, no one else wants to touch it, they'd lose the game of musical chairs. Exactly, right? So yeah, go back to the O.A. who have 21 staff, or however many. But I mean, in theory, a lot of this goes back to the Home Office, right? The Home Office that's granting these sponsorship licenses. And in theory what should be happening is that before they grant the sponsorship license to the company, they check the company,

right? They do checks and balances on the company. One of the conditions of the visa is that there has to be a genuine vacancy. And obviously, in a lot of these cases, we realize there are no genuine vacancies. It's a scam. And they should be checking this. The home office should be checking this before granting the license. But it seems that they've been granting loads of licenses without actually checking this.

So a week or two weeks after we published the article, so last week, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration published his investigation into the health and care visa. And it was like a lot of his reports, an absolute bombshell. He also wrote a very critical report of this is a worker visa. I should also add that he has since been sacked from his position. And I would never suggest that somehow those two things are connected, that he wrote these critical reports and he was sacked.

I'm not suggesting that all of these things are connected. At least they weren't able to deport him. Exactly, exactly. I mean, this is the wild thing. This guy wrote incredibly critical reports of these immigration routes, of how the government's handled it and how the government

has basically created conditions for exploitation. And we're not talking about here, it's not Jeremy, this guy is not Jeremy Corbyn. This guy is the former head of the military police. And he's hugely critical of how the government has handled this. So as I was saying, so this guy published this report, the report looked a lot into what the government was actually doing in terms of actually checking, doing compliance work before giving these licenses. And this is the kind of stuff that he found. He found, okay, there's one inspector for every 1600 skilled worker sponsors. So for

every 1600 companies, there's only one. Not workers, sponsors. Sponsors, right? One my God. One inspector, right? The government granted a license to a company and gave it the right to sponsor 275 workers to one company. It gave them the capacity to sponsor 275 workers. Turns out that company didn't exist. Another company that only had four staff was given the right to sponsor a hundred,

oh sorry, one thousand, more than one thousand two hundred workers. Like, they had four staffs. ALICE So, literally, like, literally, us together right now could probably, like, import some number of workers who would be totally dependent on us for their ability to stay in this country, not give them jobs or anything, and just like, that would be it. There would be that much oversight. And pocket their recruitment fees, right?

Because this is the other thing, there's conditions that they don't care about. So for example, there's no condition that prohibits you from having a sponsorship license if you previously breached employment law. There's no condition for that. So we found, for example, that 44 companies or more than 40 companies that had gotten licenses had previously breached employment law and that they had judgments against them

in the employment tribunal, right? But there are other conditions that are very clear that you cannot have a license if you've committed this breach before. Like, so for example, if you had your main manager or one of your main managers has a criminal conviction, you shouldn't get a license. Guess what? A company that the independent chief inspector borders and immigration found that a company that had the main manager was a guy who had

a conviction, a seven year sentence for misconduct in public office. well, he was given a license to sponsor workers. And it even gets crazier when you know why he was given the seven-year sentence, custodial sentence. Because one thing we know the home office is obsessed with is immigration, right? And it's like making it as difficult as possible for people to come and and making sure people don't come on boats, and so on and so forth. Guess what this guy got a criminal conviction for? Okay, well... Yeah, go, give me a couple guesses and I'll tell you.

Surely not, like, whatever the offence is, like facilitating illegal migration or something like that. Yes, facilitated illegal migration while working for the home office. Jesus Christ. What always strikes me about the hostile environment is that it was never really hostile towards sponsors and people who wanted to profit by finagling the immigration system. It was hostile to the immigrants. The way that the actual enforcement regime is set up, they almost don't care if you bring in

1000 people and profit off their recruitment fees. They just want to know that as soon as they can hyper exploit those people, they want to know that the government wants to know they won't be taking public funds. And they want to also know they'll be so insecure. At the moment that they're found, not in patronage, they can then swiftly be removed. It is a system that is very, very, very... If illegal immigration is something you care about, then you would say you are actually being tough on illegal immigrants rather than the causes of illegal immigrants. And again, I don't want to, y'know, I'm a firm believer in open borders, I think that the V-

It's a stupid objection, but that life fails on its own merits. Precisely, precisely, yeah. That's one of the things that's so difficult to discuss when talking about how evil systems fail. It's like- Yeah, it's like, even by the things that you claim to want, it is doing a shitty job. Well indeed. The hostile environment is coming face to face with austerity, right? And like, having as thin a state as possible.

Because one of the things you find is, like, a lot of these mistakes, or, not mistakes, a lot of these, this chaos in the home office with this visa seems to be, at least from what the independent chief inspector says, just mismanagement and not having the staff to do the compliance work. Right? They used to do in-person inspections prior to granting licenses. But then the pandemic happened, so these became online. And then they also had like funding pressures. So doing them online is better than doing in in person, because it's cheaper. And so they don't have to do it. You know what we're talking about? We are talking about the American candy storification of the British state, basically.

Yeah, it's like, sorry you have been fired for whistleblowing, you will now be forced to leave the country, would you like to buy a box of Froot Loops on the way out?" GARTH And it's not just that the more and more parts of the British state are becoming like, you know, American candy stores, like these Potemkin businesses or regulatory organizations, it's American candy stores talking to one another! You know? The regulator doesn't really exist, the jobs don't really exist, the recruitment agencies are in a bed-sit in Wolverhampton, they're not really connected to many jobs,

the jobs that do exist- It's a fake country! I swear to God, you push on this stuff, a wall comes down, because it's just, like, set dressing. It's a fake country, but it is the second best fake country. The second best fake country in the world. That's gotta be the episode title, if nothing else. I hate it.

But also, right, we have set up this country, right, it has been set up in such a way, that low paid hyper-exploited labor is pretty much required. Again, it shouldn't be required. It should be set up a different way talking about it's on its own by its own logic. But there we go. It's that these systems fall over if they don't have hyper-exploitable people. And at the same time, they keep getting cut and cut and cut and cut, especially care sector mostly, right?

So that there's more and more of this work needed, but we're treating people so badly that if you look in press, and Emiliano, I've seen you comment on this before, if you look at how Britain is talked about in the newspapers of the countries we are trying to trick people into coming here from, they've caught on. Emiliano Pazescu Yeah, yeah. Alistair Duggan There's more countries. We just rolled the snake oil wagon down to the next one. This is what we did with the agricultural visa, now we can't get people for it! Not just that, it's happening with teachers as well, it's happening with nurses, there's

a whole bunch of- like, we're recruiting, Academy Chains are recruiting teachers from Jamaica, and to the point that Jamaica has a chronic understaffing problem, as do we, but we're making theirs worse, because all of... like, the second any of their new teachers graduate, we just, like, grab them over here to pay them slightly more in a much more precarious way. RILEY And it's something we're doing with doctors and nurses as well, right? Like, we are...

ALICE Yeah, absolutely. RILEY There are a bunch of what are called red list countries where there are shortages of healthcare staff. And there's a rule which is you can't do active recruitment in those countries, right? But, well, active recruitment means like, okay, you can't post an ad in a newspaper in Zimbabwe, right? Recruiting a nurse. But you know, this is 2024, you don't need to post an ad in a newspaper in order to recruit there. So people, they're still recruiting people from there. They're just not doing active recruitment, right? And we are

there's a there's an impact in these countries, healthcare systems. But obviously, like, the promise of pay here is much higher if you get paid. And it's always your lower people. Speaking purely selfishly, right? You can be as a self-interested person as you want. You can be the perfect homo economicus. I don't care if we mistreat the teachers... Luke That's not what they call Al Jahez.

Larsen And then I don't care if they mistreat the teachers if we're going to be hyper exploiting teachers, hyper exploiting teachers. So there's a turnover of like a one every two weeks and they're not actually able to like do the good service that they probably want to do teaching and care. These are vocations, right? They're going to, but we are stopping people from even doing a good job at them by treating them very poorly.

Just say nothing of just the fact that it is bad to treat people that poorly, but, ever the less, right? You'd be like, I'm not a student, I don't care, I'm not a child, who gives a shit? Uh, fruit, whatever, someone's always gonna pick it, or I guess they can automate it at some point, I don't care, I don't give a shit. I'll just eat burgers. Yeah, I'll eat burger.

Whatever. I don't eat vegetables anyway. I'm on the... I'm the last guy who follows liver King. I don't care. Uh, or you'd be like, uh, you'd be like, okay, well, uh, you're, you're, you're going to get old. You're going to get sick. Well, if you follow that guy, who's like trying to become a teenager again for some reason, but actually, um, there's a good chance you might not get old at all. So they've solved that problem too. Yeah. I mean, listen, living in Britain every year, you're going to get

a bit less old with the way the quality of life is going. It's like the Larkin poem, like, we shall find out, right? You are going to get old, odds are. And when you do, like, or if not before, you are going to need people to take care of you, it is in your own self-interest that those people do not despise you. Well, a lot of this feels like, and I'll try to make this point really quick because it's just something I was thinking about while Emiliano was talking, which is just like,

if you're in a situation where you're dealing with a lot of contradictions in terms of like, you're a declining state that needs stuff to care for an elderly population, but also a population that is getting a lot sicker. Basically, every factor in terms of determining the quality of life is declining. You need people to plug in those problems. But if you've got a political system that is insistent that immigration is a problem, that ultimately the you know, you shouldn't, that, you know, ultimately, you know, the only thing that you should be doing is like reducing migration. To me, it sort of feels like a lot of the sort of, you know, issues to do with, I mean, just for

like lack of a better term, like lack of a better phrase, but like the industries of like middle managers who are just like the most horrible cunts in the world. It feels like it comes out of the contradictions and more broadly, the British political, in terms of British politics, is being in consistent denial. Whether that denial is that you are the second greatest country on earth, or if you are the opposition, that you are the second greatest country on earth, but you just need some more reform to do it. Or like, you know, for people to believe it. And so as a result, will you end, you know, and whenever we talk about reform or whenever reform is talked about, what we are effectively talking about are let's add even more technology or more

middle managers or in more likely cases, both because the middle managers are going to have to sort of like, not even manage the technology, but sort of interact with it in very strange ways. And the people who are sort of being trapped in the gaps of that are the most marginalized in society. And that isn't necessarily immigrants. Those are also disabled people. Those are poor people. You know, we don't need to like sort of go through the whole list, but the people who sort of like have to sort of deal with this kind of like contradiction that is being all these contradictions that are trying to be resolved by technology that doesn't work and certainly doesn't live up to the promises that its creators are doing. And within all of that, the people, the way in which this system

has to keep on working, because it's the only way that people make money, because you can't really make money as a landlord anymore. And I don't know whether that sort of hits onto some of the things that you investigate, Emilio, because I remember last time you came on, the story that we talked about actually sort of had a very similar kind of like, the analysis was sort of similar, which is, okay, you are trying to resolve this problem by using sort of technology that doesn't work, but you're also in denial of the fact that like you actually do need people to actually fill in these gaps because of like, you know, the consequences of, you know, decades of like, you know, neoliberal politics. And instead of sort of like addressing that head on and addressing

like what is in front of you, you're instead kind of like just kind of being in consistent denial about like what the actual political problems are. I mean, 100% because there would be some really simple solutions here that could be put in place to resolve some of these issues, right? But there's such an obsession with immigration numbers. So I think even, I think it was today I saw a tweet where the government's kind of doing a, the home office did a tweet, which is like, oh, we're just amazing at cutting immigration numbers. That was like the gist of the tweet. We're like the best at cutting immigration numbers. Look at all these things we've done to cut immigration numbers. But what we know is that there has been a need for these workers.

And so there's been this huge expansion of these visa schemes. And at the same time, what are the policies the government announced that it's very proud to have to cut immigration numbers, right? One of the main ones was, well, we're going to make it so that care workers can't bring their families. Making it into the only visa, the only skilled worker visa that has that ban, right? Like punishing these people, like these people have been punished already by the setup of the system, we're going to punish them a bit more. Where instead of, because that, you know, that will guarantee them a cut in numbers and migration. Instead of thinking all the ways that you could fix this huge crisis you have, because

the problem is like you've created the visa, still huge shortages in, there's still a huge demand for care workers. You know, I think that there's still like more than a care workers, you know, I think there's still more than 100,000 vacancies in the sector. And you have all these workers that have been brought here, and not given real jobs, so it's like, you know, isn't there an obvious policy solution there? To put some of these workers who have been brought here and not given jobs, actually put them in jobs?

Where there's a demand? Since we have like a hundred thousand workers. That would be too easy, you know. We don't have time for these kind of theoretical, conceptual solutions, we gotta settle, buckle down on really practical things, like, I don't know, maybe make it even more humiliating somehow? Maybe you could wear some kind of siren that goes off? RILEY That's it.

All the more a cum scap, right? It is the theatre of cruelty, right? I wonder the extent to which that rule that, you know, health and care visa workers comping in their family members, if part of it is the theatre of cruelty. To say, well, you know what, we're not going to be too nice to these people. Absolutely. Well, I think that there's a pretty easy heuristic, right? Which is, the more middlemen and corporate structures and just unnecessary leeches exist on a process, then the worse it will be for everyone involved. And I mean, that's not just true for what we're talking about. One of the hallmarks of Thames Water, which we discussed in the last bonus episode with Maddie is that Thames Water, when it was privatized, was split into seven different layers of holding

company. And all of that was to avoid the business of maintaining a water system while creating an appearance on paper that you were maintaining a water system. Just like this. We are avoiding, we've created all of these like recruitment agencies that go to the staffing agencies, that go to the care homes, that outsource other, all of these different people who are trying to profit from the sector without actually doing anything

related to care, the more of those people, the more of those layers exist, right? That's it. Easy heuristic. The worst it will be. The worst it will be for the people who are receiving the care, and crucially, the worst it will be for the people giving the care. And that's the thing.

There are thousands, thousands of small care companies that are doing these jobs, right? So it also becomes incredibly difficult to monitor, right? When you have these thousands of companies doing it. What used to be the case? Well, it was the local authorities that used to have the responsibility for this work. But obviously things over time, it's all been outsourced. But yet, an obvious solution, well, why don't these things don't want,

and we insource this or nationalize this, right? It's an essential need rather than having this cacophony of small companies. Well, nah, that would never work. ALICE Yeah. SEAN We have to keep going with the American candy store thing, where a bunch of fake companies pretend to do it. Come on!

ALICE A series of short cons, tied to one much longer market shaped con. SEAN And then no asses get wiped. Basically. ALICE Yeah, exactly. And now you have to, like, lie there with a shitty ass, because of, like... because, like, I dunno, like, 50 people decided the country had to be that way. And if you wanted anything better, then you're a cunt.

ZACH And that's the thing as well, you were saying earlier, like, what if I frame this as being a selfish person, and it's like, well, that's the thing, like, what do you think the quality of care is going to be when the workers that are doing it are hyper exploited, are freaking out, you know, they're going to be deported, they're freaking out that they're going to be fired and not be able to pay their rent? Because obviously, the other thing is like, they don't have recourse to public funds, they can't get, if they lose their job, they can't get state support in terms of universal credit or housing or anything like that.

It's like how do what do you think the standard of care is gonna be when people are that exploit in their lives or that run down? Well I think that's a good enough question for us to leave it on because we're coming up to time but Emiliano I want to thank you once again for bringing your investigation to the show. Well thank you guys for for bringing your investigation to the show. Well, thank you guys for having me, for talking about it. These are important issues. And I'm glad that Trash Future kept.

Absolutely. And check out Emiliano's writing, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. There's quite a bit more reading to do here. I mean, I always feel like this is a little bit paltry, but is there some organization that if you feel the spirit has moved you, you would like to help out? Is there anyone doing anything to help these people? Okay. So obviously there are the unions in the care sector, the largest ones being Unison and GMB. Then there are a lot of front line organizations,

smaller front line organizations that provide what's case work support for these workers. You have Migrants at Work Limited. You have the Work Rights Center. You have the Worker Support Center in Scotland. And well, there's a few other small ones. There's like a little tapestry of organizations that are doing frontline support for these workers, which are all worth checking out and supporting.

So some links for those, those we mentioned and some we didn't will be in the description. And then otherwise, if the spirit moves you again, there is a Patreon for us. There is a second episode every week. So do check that out. There's Left on Reds. There's Britnology's at the $10 tier. You know all about the answer to that. Otherwise, I think we'll see you in a few days on the bonus. Bye. Bye.