TRIGGERnometry - October 30, 2026


Budget Analysis, Mbappe China Furore & Midterms - Off the Fence

＂This Is the Age of Political Violence＂ – Dr Robert Pape ＂Dems Will Win the House but Senate Is Another Story＂ – David Pakman

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour

Words per minute

176.01

Word count

10,652

Sentence count

174

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

17

sentences flagged

Hate speech

38

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Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 hello everybody and welcome to this week's off the fence with me constantin kissin my trigonometry
00:00:05.760 co-host francis foster tom slater from spiked and winston marshall of the winston marshall show
00:00:11.000 gentlemen welcome back we have i would say two and a half stories for you this week we will talk
00:00:16.380 about the great british budget the gherkins uh and all of that good stuff uh interesting it's
00:00:22.980 been interesting watching it from the u.s it's kind of puts things into perspective we will talk 0.93
00:00:27.940 about Kylian Mbappe, the soccer player, as they would say here, who has triggered a Chinese
00:00:33.600 backlash for joking about Mao Zedong being a dictator. This was very offensive. And finally,
00:00:40.000 we'll check in from here in the US about the midterms. Tom Slater, why don't you take us
00:00:45.740 away with the budget? What have we missed? What are we going to come back to when we eventually
00:00:50.200 return to Blighty? Well, I wish I could say it was a particularly optimistic pitcher, Constantine,
00:00:55.860 but it really amounted to a whole lot of nothing if the most memorable moment from a budget turns
00:01:01.540 out to be a announcement on gherkins it would probably imply that it's not much to be said
00:01:06.480 about it but that's more or less what we've ended up with in terms of sheer volume this was actually
00:01:10.080 quite a big budget very long statement there were 98 individual measures which were announced which
00:01:15.620 i understand is a record but when it actually comes to meaningful change meaningful spending
00:01:21.580 it's pretty low i mean there was about seven billion of extra spending announced and therefore
00:01:26.080 seven billion of extra tax to be raised within it um but really this is the it was billed as the
00:01:32.020 steady as she goes budget which might capture it if things out there were quite steady if the
00:01:37.620 waters were quite calm but they're obviously not um and so essentially this is a stick your fingers
00:01:43.580 in the air go la la la i'm not listening budget i think is the best way to describe it um there
00:01:49.100 were a few eye-catching things there was the 100 pound payment to about 20 million households to
00:01:53.760 help people get through the winter and what are certain to be some pretty sharp increases in
00:01:58.760 energy prices as many people have pointed out that's going to be almost entirely wiped out
00:02:03.660 made insignificant when the energy price cap races in january and i think that's a good example of
00:02:07.520 what this budget does is that you've got a few sort of crumbs from the table as it were meanwhile
00:02:12.100 the underlying things about society about the economy are just totally untouched the fact that
00:02:17.340 We do have the highest energy prices in the developed world,
00:02:20.620 certainly where businesses are concerned.
00:02:22.300 The fact that we are now £3 trillion in debt,
00:02:24.860 and yet there is no serious attempt to pay that down.
00:02:28.220 Now paying more on purely debt interest payments
00:02:31.420 than we pay on defence, policing and justice,
00:02:34.240 combined easily north of £100 billion every single year.
00:02:37.160 Just dead money, just gone in terms of servicing our debt.
00:02:39.940 There's nothing in here which has addressed any of that.
00:02:43.000 And the latest route which has blown up, of course,
00:02:45.080 is that there's nothing in here which would address
00:02:47.060 and certainly no other announcements or indications from the government that would address this
00:02:50.820 ballooning welfare bill. I mean, one of the shocking statistics that is in not just the
00:02:55.700 budget, but obviously the accompanying assessments and documents is that when it comes to welfare
00:02:59.380 spending purely on health and disability benefits in the life of this parliament, that's going to
00:03:02.640 go up to 100 billion. And actually, the Chancellor John Healy and the Prime Minister have been forced
00:03:09.660 in recent days to admit that they will not make any cuts to welfare spending in the course of
00:03:15.140 this parliament having previously said that they might do it in a labour way which would presumably
00:03:19.340 mean not cutting it at all uh there were i suppose there was a few gags here then most notably kelly
00:03:25.220 who responded to john healy's very gracious announcement that he would chuck he would um
00:03:31.920 cut the tariffs on various food stuff including marmalade and gherkins i believe we've got a clip
00:03:36.460 of that knocking around somewhere it's one of the few brighter moments from this particular budget
00:03:41.000 The Prime Minister came in promising to reverse 40 years of neoliberalism.
00:03:46.560 Instead, we got 4p off gherkins.
00:03:50.680 Unfortunately, just like every other Labour budget, the headline story.
00:03:56.060 One of the few sort of funny moments from what was of a pretty grim day in the House of Commons,
00:04:00.700 but I think really sums up this government, is that when it comes to rhetoric, they can be quite strong.
00:04:06.300 Certainly, we were talking a few weeks ago about Andy Burnham coming in and saying he was going to rip up 40 years.
00:04:11.000 of neoliberalism and yet what we've got is a lot of tinkering around the edges to put it very lightly
00:04:15.540 obviously the question therefore is is this just um a holding pattern for now as he thinks about
00:04:22.480 maybe calling an election getting his own mandate therefore being able to do things that he would
00:04:26.820 currently be inhibited from doing but as we talked about when we talked about the conference season
00:04:32.440 i think there is just a fundamental timidity in this government that kind of stops them from going
00:04:36.480 too far in one direction or the other deep down i think they know that those fundamental issues of
00:04:40.400 debt, energy, welfare bill exist.
00:04:42.960 That's why they've got all these reviews
00:04:43.960 which are taking place into them.
00:04:45.060 It's why when pushed,
00:04:46.540 they look a bit shamefaced on the media
00:04:48.020 when the size of these figures
00:04:50.000 are pointed out to them.
00:04:51.240 But at the same time,
00:04:51.940 for reasons of pure politics,
00:04:53.260 they're incapable of dealing with them.
00:04:55.200 At the same time,
00:04:56.100 these dreams that they have
00:04:57.160 of a new social care system,
00:04:59.320 of reversing the Thatcher settlement
00:05:01.640 as they would see it,
00:05:02.740 is just kind of impossible
00:05:04.140 in the current fiscal climate.
00:05:06.320 And I think deep down,
00:05:07.000 I know that as well.
00:05:07.660 So it feels like we're doomed
00:05:09.120 to more of the same. 0.78
00:05:10.080 It's just, unfortunately, more of the same means an incredibly precarious position in which we're basically just in a competition with poor old France as to who is going to lose the faith of the bond markets first. 0.89
00:05:22.240 So when you get back, you've got all of that to look forward to.
00:05:25.180 But yeah, not a lot of positive news, I'm afraid.
00:05:27.500 a big thing i think i'd add is that john healy quit starmer's cabinet as defense secretary
00:05:37.440 specifically because he was not satisfied that starmer was spending enough on defense
00:05:43.800 and here he comes in with a budget and he's kicked this defense spending
00:05:49.720 aspect down the road till next year's spending review so this kind of whole uh holier than thou
00:05:57.080 move he did this last year it turns out to be total nonsense and i mean it doesn't take much
00:06:03.960 to get me triggered these days good thing but i i'm pretty livid about this whole thing i mean
00:06:11.180 a lot of people describing it as a nothing burger damp squib uh budget but actually i think it's 0.96
00:06:16.100 pretty enraging so as well as john healy being what i think is turned him out to a hypocrite 0.80
00:06:22.420 he's also a man who's put a budget through that shows exactly that he's never had experience 0.76
00:06:29.280 experience in the private sphere he's never run a business this guy by the way I looked into it
00:06:34.240 he it is two years before he went into politics in the private sphere he was a journalist at the
00:06:41.180 house magazine in Westminster and he was a PR communications guy basically he has no idea but
00:06:48.740 it's not just him, it's the entire cabinet. Of the 23 cabinet members, the average experience
00:06:54.700 in the private sector is under a year each. And it's kind of a joke what their experience is. All
00:07:00.960 of them, including Burnham, it's like, Burnham was what? Trade journalist at Baltic Publishing.
00:07:06.820 Shabana Mahmood was seven years as a barrister. Yvette Cooper was two years at The Independent.
00:07:12.220 Jonathan Reynolds, our business secretary, 10 months as a trainee solicitor, and he didn't
00:07:15.920 even qualify. So these are the people running our country. What do we expect for them to do
00:07:21.640 something? The neoliberalism thing, I have to address this because it really pisses me off.
00:07:27.720 Andy Burnham, oh, we've got to reverse neoliberalism here. This guy doesn't give a
00:07:32.020 damn about neoliberalism. For example, when it came to Manchester and this whole scandal around
00:07:37.220 Manchester City and the owners potentially being massively punished for their fiscal misbehaviour,
00:07:44.220 his response was I'm very worried about what this might mean for Manchester and you know
00:07:50.580 I was worried about these owners who have put a lot into Manchester sorry what is more neoliberal
00:07:56.220 than foreign owners coming in and buying up lots of property and buying community assets like a 0.96
00:08:02.560 bloody football club he doesn't give a shit about neoliberalism and this budget why it applies to 0.94
00:08:09.140 neoliberalism thing is if you care about neoliberalism what about the fact that we have 0.98
00:08:14.300 hundreds of thousands of people coming in not just illegally but legally undercutting British
00:08:20.460 people's jobs they they undercut the the the wages which suppresses wages if you care about 0.97
00:08:27.520 neoliberalism if you deal with the immigration problem that will raise wages that is the kind
00:08:33.400 of like it's kind of like the neoliberal blind spot I think for the left like they don't they're
00:08:37.920 So immigrants and immigration is such a protected class and a protected issue.
00:08:44.540 They can't realize the damage it's doing economically. 1.00
00:08:48.100 So that's sort of another aspect that completely wound me up.
00:08:53.460 But the thing that's really important is the small changes he has made
00:08:58.760 are going to be incredibly damaging to small businesses.
00:09:02.220 For example, he's raised the national living wage and the national minimum wage.
00:09:11.900 These incremental small differences, they're marginal at the daily level or the hourly level.
00:09:20.460 But at the end of the year, it makes a big difference.
00:09:23.020 If you raise the minimum wage, what that means is small businesses come the end of the year,
00:09:28.100 either the whoever's running the businesses is going to have to make cuts or take less of a cut
00:09:34.140 but more likely especially if you've got a lot of people working on a tight budget you're going to
00:09:39.620 have to make decisions like sacking people or like not reinvesting back into the business or
00:09:44.420 not hiring more people and this goes to show they have no experience not one of them has ever
00:09:49.960 operated a business run a business in the cabinet not least the chancellor and I think the damage
00:09:55.480 they're doing is gonna it's gonna play out and and there's been some amazing people speaking out
00:10:00.360 about this and even the mainstream uh medias talking about how it's going to damage their
00:10:04.380 business and how they're going to close down they don't understand this so for me it's uh
00:10:10.340 it's a an example of incompetence and it's also a the a kind of human another humiliation for
00:10:23.740 britain is just we're just run by people who have no idea what they're doing well what's interesting
00:10:29.960 is as well is if you i mean they never define neoliberalism but neoliberalism by it what they
00:10:36.420 mean is uh the government uh stepping back basically the state stepping back uh you know
00:10:42.820 privatizing assets allowing uh more private entrepreneurship etc and and the problem with
00:10:50.760 that is that even if you passionately believe in quote-unquote reversing neoliberalism I mean I
00:10:56.400 don't see any neoliberalism when I look around in Britain I see a gigantic state but if you wanted
00:11:03.100 to do that you're not in a position to do that because of the very things that Tom talked about
00:11:09.380 the humongous debt and by the way in the last week the government issued a tranche of bonds
00:11:16.980 at over five percent yield this sounds sort of abstract and academic but basically the government
00:11:23.840 yields the interest they have to pay people uh to borrow more money is now at the highest level
00:11:30.860 since the great financial crisis in 2007-2008 uh in one of these i think it was five-year bonds
00:11:37.720 that we're talking about but um perhaps you in fact check me on that with venice ai
00:11:42.620 but anyway the point is that if you want to reverse neoliberalism which a lot of these
00:11:50.580 people who as you rightly say Winston don't know what they're doing you're not actually in a
00:11:55.340 position to do it you literally can't do it because if you wanted to borrow more money to
00:12:01.240 take things into public ownership you'd have to start in a position where you can borrow money
00:12:06.340 and we are now in a position where effectively when we're coming up to a point where
00:12:12.200 borrowing more and more will mean paying more and more interest and that will just ruin the
00:12:17.340 whole thing even more than it's already ruined and i think your point was done about experience
00:12:22.880 and business like francis and i suddenly found ourselves running a small business and it's
00:12:30.180 completely changed our mindset about a lot of these things because we now understand
00:12:34.840 the thomas soul line that i love so much there are no solutions only trade-offs
00:12:39.560 You only really learn it through experience, I feel. Intellectually, it's not really that appealing an idea. But it's only when you realize that when you take away from here, you have to then compensate for it elsewhere and all of these things are connected. That's when it starts to make sense.
00:12:56.640 And I think I fundamentally question whether the people who are in charge of our country's economy actually understand what wages are and what they do.
00:13:08.760 I think to them, they actually just think of it as an issue of fairness.
00:13:14.620 They just think, well, people should be paid well, therefore we'll get to a position where we've got to now.
00:13:20.840 I think the minimum wage is now on an annualized basis over £27,000.
00:13:25.560 pounds so we've got a situation where you've got a minimum wage of 27 000 pounds the top rate of
00:13:31.240 tax kicks in at something over 50 you it's just complete madness uh that you have this situation
00:13:39.860 and all it's going to do is make running a business in britain even harder than it already
00:13:46.440 is and it is already very hard yeah and i think it speaks to this sense that the whole burnham
00:13:53.040 project is like a bit of a holiday from reality like people within that government it's sort of
00:13:58.260 outriders in the media are really stuck in this mindset that's still just about 1997 where basically
00:14:04.360 the fundamentals of the economy are pretty good that really the only overriding question that we
00:14:08.760 we might want to address is ones of fairness is ones of what should the settlement be for social
00:14:13.560 care the problems are afflicting the economy and society are much more fundamental like before you
00:14:18.420 even want to get into an argument about redistribution or about public services what
00:14:22.680 they should look like obviously spending needs to come down but you need to deal with the
00:14:25.920 fundamentals the fact that energy is so expensive and the government are kind of slowly realizing
00:14:31.860 that they need to address this but at the same time they are at best deeply conflicted i believe
00:14:36.160 we've got a clip of one of these slip-ups that john healy made he made a few of them in his speech
00:14:40.320 when he was talking about the jackdaw gas field which was finally approved i don't know if we can
00:14:44.540 run this here but i think it's quite revealing last week my right-on-defend the energy secretary
00:14:48.580 opposed, approved
00:14:50.540 Very telling moment
00:15:02.940 Freudian slip, as you can see there
00:15:04.760 because of course Miata Fambula, the energy secretary
00:15:07.040 there, opposed Rosebank
00:15:08.740 she's opposed Jackdaw
00:15:10.680 and is also opposing Rosebank, which is the much
00:15:12.720 bigger prize, which is this oil filter which could be
00:15:14.780 much more transformative in terms of 1.00
00:15:16.720 energy supplies because she's a net zero nutcase i mean when under a previous perch at the new
00:15:21.620 economics foundation she said that you could get to net zero by 2030 she accused zap polanski of
00:15:26.360 stealing all of her ideas which is not a compliment uh but she seemed to interpret it that way um so
00:15:32.280 you've got these these fundamentals energy is too expensive without that we can't build anything
00:15:36.100 without that how do you expect to have growth and also that the size of the welfare state it's
00:15:40.680 clearly gotten well beyond what anyone say 20 or 30 years ago even on the left of politics i think
00:15:46.880 would understand as reasonable a welfare system which is not only that ruinously expensive but
00:15:51.220 does disincentivize work which does lead to just this generation of mildly anxious teenagers being
00:15:56.820 put out to pasture by the time they're 19 years old is clearly nothing that's defensible that is
00:16:02.940 is that really the kind of high point of human civilization as some laborites like to think it
00:16:06.620 it is obviously not um so this is the thing they burnhamism is like a kind of nice warm bath
00:16:12.500 like it's a kind of indulgence for the moment you can think oh you know all those big up rows we
00:16:16.360 were having about defense or about energy or about immigration or whatever we can just go back to our
00:16:21.860 happy place which is talking about social care and those and fairness and those kinds of issues but
00:16:25.940 the thing is it's going to bite quite quickly this winter is going to be pretty rough for a lot of
00:16:30.000 people the penny has already dropped that just more of the same is going is still a road to ruin
00:16:35.200 if you stay on this particular path and as always happens after the budget when you start to get the
00:16:40.960 responses not only the full office for budget responsibility assessment the kind of quango
00:16:45.120 charge with looking over the figures but also all of the various economic think tanks and what have
00:16:49.560 you pointing out i believe i'm right in saying we get venice double check if i've got this wrong
00:16:53.400 that in the next decade i think this is according to the ifs wage income growth is going to be as
00:16:59.440 it's going to be poor to a point we haven't seen since the 1950s when it comes to per person real
00:17:05.180 disposable income we're all going to be about two thousand pounds worse off at the beginning of the
00:17:10.040 next decade like more of the same means more of that means more decline means more erosion and
00:17:15.180 yet they just stood there pretending like things can only get better to put it in a slogan so yeah
00:17:22.080 i think they've just got their fingers in the ear in the ears basically oh well i don't understand
00:17:27.300 why all of you seem so down because i saw a clip of john healy downing a pint in a pub and he just
00:17:33.940 got it in one and it went viral so like i think i think oh i didn't see that oh maybe maybe i was
00:17:40.340 wrong yeah exactly this is this is what we're dealing with in british politics where
00:17:49.300 you know it's the lack of seriousness uh joking aside that really gets me well i
00:17:54.180 I remember watching that clip going, could you imagine anybody else just doing that and somehow it being a thing?
00:18:03.680 To me, like I said, he moved his tie as well, which I thought was precious.
00:18:07.880 Yeah, he moved his tie so he wouldn't get the beer on the tie and then he absolutely smashed it back.
00:18:13.680 Joking aside, I just had these visions of like Norman Lamont doing that or different Tory chancellors just smashing back pints.
00:18:23.920 But I think what's really interesting is what does this budget actually mean?
00:18:30.660 And I think what it means, and I've been talking to quite a few people in the know,
00:18:35.060 is that what we're going to get is a general election coming rather sooner than we thought.
00:18:41.580 Because Burnham and Healy have, by all accounts, quite a radical plan for what they want to do to the country.
00:18:49.900 They want to take us in an ever more left-wing direction.
00:18:53.920 economically and also socially. And I think they realize that they don't have a mandate to actually
00:19:00.120 carry that out at the moment. So what we've been given is a bit of a nothing burger in terms of
00:19:06.780 the actual budget this time round. But things are going pretty well for Burnham, if you compare it
00:19:14.120 to Starmer, if you compare it to the other political parties. Winston's already upset. I can
00:19:17.920 and folding his arms i'm seething you're seething i think oh it's actually going pretty well if you
00:19:27.340 look at what's happening to the other political parties the green party have basically imploded
00:19:31.440 reform have taken various knocks through scandals and whatever else uh the conservative party they
00:19:39.020 say they're back but you know it's like manchester united they keep saying they're back you go are
00:19:43.220 you really it doesn't look like it and then you've got the lib dems and no one really cares
00:19:47.820 about the Lib Dems. This, for me, is the moment for Labour to actually strike while the proverbial
00:19:54.880 iron is hot and call a general election in May, because to me, this is as good as it's going to
00:20:02.220 get for them. Well, I don't understand the logic of that, though, because surely, surely, if you
00:20:08.880 were preparing for an early election, what you would do is you'd find some way, you know, to make
00:20:15.940 kids you know you've already capped bus fares you capped something else you give a bunch of money
00:20:20.320 away and some big headline grabbing thing so that you could say you know we really looked after
00:20:26.100 people and we ended neoliberalism because we gave you two p off of whatever alpha pine and milk or
00:20:32.000 whatever something was this nothing burger thing it's like tom said it's the sort of cruising
00:20:37.660 budget but you're cruising into an iceberg and it just i don't see the logic of doing a nothing
00:20:45.400 burger budget and then going to and i heard some people talking about an election this december i
00:20:50.720 just i don't i i'm not seeing it right now but anyway uh you've triggered winston both on in
00:20:56.240 terms of economic analysis and by slagging off man united so let's see it from yeah not going well
00:21:01.740 well on either front though is it let's be let's be just on the election idea i i mean we're we're
00:21:08.080 in the speculative here but it seems to me looking at it more like burnham came in oh yeah i'll be
00:21:15.220 prime minister you know yeah give it a go yeah you know whatever i don't know what action that
00:21:19.020 was sorry but he comes in sounded like ringo and then he actually no it's a generic northern accent
00:21:24.740 it's perfectly respectable device i i respect that well done win carry on he came in and they didn't
00:21:32.280 actually look at the budget and then he sat down with healy and was like oh dear john and you know
00:21:37.460 they've looked at it and realized they can't do anything because they're hamstrung by their
00:21:41.080 ideology of on welfare and not being able to touch that their ideology on immigration not
00:21:46.400 being able to touch that and not but trying to upset their green uh base whilst trying to
00:21:50.960 balance an unbalanceable budget as tom pointed out with our debt our debt interest and um
00:21:56.000 and all the other so it seems to me it's it's just kind of amateur hour they they realized
00:22:02.620 they actually can't do anything and they don't know what they're doing and so then they made
00:22:07.080 the next decision is like right how do we not mess this up how do we not screw up the bond markets
00:22:14.020 too badly how do we kind of get through this and not screw up the economy and keep investment
00:22:18.660 coming in and i i see it as as that rather than as a a ploy for a upcoming an election am i wrong
00:22:26.820 i mean i agree with you potentials there i think because i i completely agree in surprise
00:22:32.460 imagine calling one now imagine going into particularly a december election how grim
00:22:37.900 the mood music is going to be i suppose and it is worth saying that andy burnham has said
00:22:41.420 including this week i don't know how more clear i can be on this i'm not calling an early election
00:22:45.680 read my lips no no no new elections um of course is even over the course of the past few months
00:22:52.340 is political gymnastics and new terms in relation to brexit and all manner of other issues would
00:22:57.340 imply you can't really trust the word that he says even though he does come across as somewhat more
00:23:01.300 matey and relatable that doesn't mean he's any less deceptive um but maybe this is as good as
00:23:06.640 it gets i suppose is the best argument you could say for it they are about 30 in the polls which
00:23:12.740 historically would be terrible for the labor party but in the new multi-party system ring could be
00:23:16.800 enough to make them if not the large certainly the largest party but potentially even edging
00:23:22.280 towards a um a majority of the seats if the votes fall in the right places and also it's by the
00:23:28.640 spring things are going to be markedly different i mean energy prices would have made that 100
00:23:33.140 pound bung look like nothing the energy price cap's going to go up in january i believe
00:23:37.000 most of the estimates are that it's going to be hiked by about 27 percent the specter of black
00:23:42.340 outs is never that far away because of the nature of our energy grid the fact that we have to rely
00:23:46.520 on the kindness of strangers and other countries to help us balance it at huge expense because of
00:23:51.120 how unreliable the renewable energy stock is and imagine trying to make the case of the country
00:23:57.360 after all of that um so yeah i mean it's really hard to see but he's got a he's got a menu of
00:24:03.120 terrible options i suppose i don't i really can't see how it's going to get any better than this for
00:24:07.280 him does that mean he's going to call an election for all the reasons you both say it seems unlikely
00:24:11.760 but maybe as bad as it is this is as good as it gets there's an irony to the gherkin sorry the
00:24:19.680 the irony of the gherkin thing is that the the this and a bunch of other tariffs he's removed
00:24:23.680 is because of brexit that we was able to remove these little tariffs and so if we were to rejoin
00:24:29.360 or do some sort of deal with the eu we'd have to reimpose those tariffs that he sort of saved us
00:24:34.240 whatever it was there's another important part of this that if you read his budget all the way
00:24:38.320 through you or you listen to him in parliament he's it's all of it is spun around oh the middle
00:24:43.920 east war the middle east war that's why all of this and that's the kind of their their political
00:24:48.480 that's his two years of PR experience kicking in maybe it was worth it and it's all the problem
00:24:54.780 at least and I don't want to sort of uh open the can of worms of another argument because I know
00:24:59.080 every week but it doesn't deal the underlying fact as with Tom as you rightly pointing out
00:25:13.020 this hundred quid bung it doesn't deal the fact that our energy prices are just through the roof
00:25:19.360 our household electricity is 3x what the americans pay uh industrial industrial electricity is 4x
00:25:25.720 what the americans pay 6x what the chinese pay it's not because of the war in the middle east
00:25:30.020 it's because we haven't got we're not talking seriously about energy yeah that's absolutely
00:25:35.660 the case that's absolutely the case um and it's worth saying by the way just um we've talked about
00:25:41.660 the bond markets a couple of times on the show and i think it's actually worth pausing on that
00:25:47.280 because the bond markets is a phrase that to most people sounds like some sort of weird abstraction
00:25:51.840 all that the bond markets really are are people that we've borrowed money from as a country that's
00:25:57.980 all that that is we borrow money from people to to spend on welfare defense and whatever um but 0.99
00:26:05.080 just to pay for the illegal immigrants staying in in um hmos or up and down the country because 1.00
00:26:10.840 you know someone's got to look after them make sure they have little mobile phones 0.98
00:26:13.920 that's what the bond markets are for just uh just as a quick uh contextualized fact check
00:26:19.800 i should say that that's not the only thing we borrow money for but it's the most important
00:26:24.920 can we check venice ai i mean venice ai will be rather unflattering to you i suspect in this
00:26:31.780 regard winston but anyway the bigger point i think and it's worth saying this when we it sounds like
00:26:38.080 If I'm a kind of a neutral viewer, a centrist dad watching this, and I tune into this and I hear Winston Marshall, the evil right-wing fascist, screaming about how these people don't know what they're talking about, you actually need to understand what we're saying here.
00:26:56.240 Andy Burnham said, I think this was before he became prime minister, that we can't just be in hock to the bond markets.
00:27:04.840 that's the equivalent of me borrowing the equivalent of my annual salary from somebody
00:27:11.480 so if you make let's say 40 grand a year that's the equivalent of you borrowing 40 grand from
00:27:16.220 somebody and then saying well i'm not going to be in hock to him by paying it back like where do you
00:27:23.420 think that leads as as an economic model and this is something that i think people really
00:27:29.600 fundamentally don't understand nearly enough bond markets are just people that we owe money to
00:27:35.000 and if you don't want to be in hock to them then all that will happen is they will stop lending
00:27:40.380 you money and then you're going to be in hock to some pretty bad things very very quickly in a way
00:27:46.840 that you really didn't expect so this point that we've been making throughout about being governed
00:27:52.340 by economic illiterates it's actually really important because ultimately there will be a
00:27:58.320 price to pay for this kind of approach and i think it's not only the fact that they're economic
00:28:03.520 illiterates i think it's the fact that basically they don't want to make tough decisions they don't
00:28:09.440 want to make tough decisions because they know it will be upsetting to certain people within their
00:28:16.820 voter base but also their mps as well and when you don't make tough decisions all you do is you kick
00:28:22.980 the proverbial can down the road. And really, this is all this budget is, is kicking the proverbial
00:28:28.620 can down the road. As a result, our debts are going to continue to increase. The economic
00:28:34.120 situation is going to get worse. People aren't going to see their lives getting materially better.
00:28:40.640 But they can claim that they're the good guys, that they want to deal with neoliberalism. It's
00:28:46.580 actually the bond markets that are evil it just it your analogy was perfect for it because what it
00:28:54.580 is is just failure to take responsibility for actions for the for the actions and for the
00:29:00.700 situation you find yourself is if you find yourself in the reality is we spend too much
00:29:06.060 we don't make enough we need to make cutbacks but we don't want to accept the we don't want
00:29:11.780 to upset the kids because they're going to have a tantrum. That's where we are now. And you can
00:29:16.300 keep doing it, which is fine, fine in the short term. But eventually, you're going to have to
00:29:23.240 pay the debt back or you're going to go broke. And that's where we are. We often talk about
00:29:28.600 Britain's economic challenges on the show. And Francis and I've been worried about it for a long
00:29:32.740 time, which is why we've been investing in gold. One thing a lot of people don't know is that gold
00:29:37.820 coins are legal tender in britain so if you buy coins like sovereigns which is what we've bought
00:29:42.640 they're free of vat when you buy them and for uk residents they're free of capital gains tax when
00:29:48.600 you sell so if you're in britain and you want to protect your savings with physical gold scan the
00:29:54.080 qr code on the screen right now click the link in the description or just go to pure-gold.co
00:29:59.680 slash otf to get your free copy of their guide to buying gold and remember always do your own
00:30:06.100 research the price of gold can go down as well as up and past performance is not necessarily a guide
00:30:11.100 for the future the site again is pure-gold.co slash otf and of course our second story for today
00:30:19.120 is Kylian Mbappe has upset a lot of people in China we're told or at least the Chinese Communist
00:30:25.380 Party by referring in a joke to Mao Zedong as the Chinese dictator Winston take it away
00:30:33.560 Yes, Kylian Mbappé, the French World Cup winning player and Real Madrid star has been cancelled from the whole country of China for offending the late prophet Chairman Mao, peace be upon him.
00:30:45.600 And it's not, I mean, it's not just the CCTV, which is actually the name of Chinese state television, funnily enough.
00:30:53.560 They are not playing all La Liga matches and anything related to Mbappé is now not being streamed on CCTV in China.
00:31:03.560 His face has been removed from ads in the Chinese Subway.
00:31:09.400 He's been dropped for three of his sponsorships, Chinese sponsorships.
00:31:13.560 Should I try and pronounce them?
00:31:15.020 It's going to come across wrong.
00:31:17.540 Yes, please. 1.00
00:31:18.720 Try to do the accent. 1.00
00:31:19.580 I want to see you cancelled as well as killing them. 1.00
00:31:21.540 Yeah, yeah. 1.00
00:31:22.040 So go for it.
00:31:22.980 Yeah, go for it.
00:31:24.400 Okay.
00:31:24.880 Good luck, everyone.
00:31:26.540 Don't hang.
00:31:28.520 Menyo. 0.99
00:31:30.440 And milk ground.
00:31:31.500 i think i got one of them there we go um and they've got guys he's lost 7.5 million dollars
00:31:36.660 in terms you can't what's there's a funny part of this story is that this uproar no one in china
00:31:41.260 actually knows what he said because he's been completely wiped from the chinese twitter so uh
00:31:47.940 i'm not i'm not going to succeed in pronouncing this why bull i think is how it's pronounced um
00:31:54.900 and you can't look it up on chinese ai models so chinese people don't know what the fuss is about
00:31:59.200 they've just been told that he has offended someone what did he do well he broke the law of
00:32:06.400 the people's republic of china on the protection of heroes and martyrs which is a legislation they
00:32:11.920 brought in a couple of years ago what did he say exactly well this is back in april and we have a
00:32:15.920 video which dino is going to kindly play from so you can see the offending
00:32:29.200 Chinese. I use it a lot with my friends online for the play. 1.00
00:32:59.200 oh
00:33:13.200 i couldn't help noticing i couldn't help noticing that while i was playing me winston
00:33:32.560 and francis were enjoying it and tom was sad still and not moving tom are you concerned about
00:33:36.480 spiked chinese uh sponsors uh dropping a very big market for us i will hear nothing said about the
00:33:44.720 great man i'll hear nothing i'm going to recuse myself i think it's because i think it's because
00:33:53.920 tom is the most british out of all of us do you know what i mean so i think
00:33:58.320 Not this again.
00:34:02.560 Go back to the blood test from a few weeks ago.
00:34:05.720 Yes, yeah, yeah.
00:34:07.760 Yeah, exactly.
00:34:12.020 But I think on both counts, yes.
00:34:16.900 Oh, my goodness.
00:34:18.740 Okay, so this spun out,
00:34:21.620 and Mbappe issued an apology,
00:34:24.980 but it wasn't good enough.
00:34:25.800 and China Media Group, behind the CCTV, which is the China state television,
00:34:33.180 we believe that Mbappé's outrageous remarks have harmed the Chinese people,
00:34:38.340 crossed the line and exceeded the scope of freedom of speech.
00:34:44.640 Not only that, Mbappé is a Real Madrid player and the club bears significant responsibility.
00:34:49.640 Therefore, we do not accept Real Madrid's explanation
00:34:52.200 that Mbappe never intentionally offended and asserted that players have yeah so that's what
00:34:58.240 they said uh oh yeah no asserted the players have the right to express their personal opinions
00:35:03.060 that's what Real had said they do not accept Real Madrid's attitude and so now this is probably
00:35:08.500 going to cost quite a lot of money for La Liga and Real because it's a significant income stream
00:35:14.800 it is not the first time something like this has happened you might remember Mesut Ozil the
00:35:21.020 arsenal player with the goggly eyes who had a great football chant uh well the arsenal fans
00:35:26.440 had a football chance oh zil your eyes are offside you remember that fella in 2019 he
00:35:32.500 called out the uyghur situation in um xinjiang and he was dropped from the team frozen out and
00:35:40.900 sold in the summer he said that was because of uh he described the uyghurs as warriors who resist
00:35:46.420 persecution and he says that because of that arsenal said we don't do politics of course
00:35:53.060 they then spent about five years taking the knee and doing blm um but they don't do politics when
00:35:59.100 it's anything to do with china this has happened in the states as well you've you guys had um
00:36:04.400 and it's kent on the show right we've actually just interviewed for him second time because
00:36:09.320 He's now identified as a woman and is trying to get drafted by the WNBA.
00:36:16.040 But in the original instance, yes, he raised the case of the Uyghurs 0.99
00:36:21.560 and was basically immediately prevented from playing in the NBA ever again. 1.00
00:36:27.740 So you're right.
00:36:28.600 This has been going on for a long time.
00:36:30.820 By the way, I don't understand.
00:36:32.760 Why are they offended?
00:36:34.580 He was objectively a dictator.
00:36:37.580 you might think that he was a great dictator
00:36:41.380 Mao described himself as a dictator in a 1949 speech titled on the people's democratic dictatorship
00:36:48.840 he openly embraced the label and um I think the PRC is still defined as a people's democratic
00:36:56.220 dictatorship so it's still and he's still it's still kind of a word used I'm not sure exactly
00:37:02.400 what was supposed to be offensive about it maybe they didn't like the the meme with the maybe that's 0.83
00:37:08.700 what yeah i don't know maybe it's because he was like i think he's a chinese dictator like they
00:37:12.860 didn't really know him who mbappe doesn't really know who mao is which is actually quite that's
00:37:17.840 quite something actually worth talking about because i think a lot of people don't know who
00:37:21.940 mao is and and this i think he's a chinese dictator he's a chinese dictator but he's not 0.98
00:37:28.060 just any chinese dictator he's one who as dictator was responsible did he talk a lot of shit 0.99
00:37:35.840 he talked a lot of shit he talked a lot of shit but he didn't get banged but his people got back 1.00
00:37:41.680 to the tune of 80 million i mean the top figure is 80 million killed and that's by 1.00
00:37:49.360 a guy called chen yizi um uh who who lived in exile in the states he said
00:37:55.180 he thought there was at least 80 million killed under Mao but you had Frank de Cotter on the
00:38:00.320 show right recently it was a great episode I really recommend it and he said at least 45
00:38:06.280 million killed so you got between 40 and 80 million 45 and 80 million killed under this guy
00:38:10.820 so I think he's in the running to be possibly the most evil man who's ever lived I mean if
00:38:16.940 you're going just by death count certainly certainly up there and Mbappe doesn't really
00:38:22.220 not really sure who he is that's isn't that funny it's not weird that we don't like we talk about
00:38:26.940 hitler the whole time and and now this guy people don't who is he or starting for that matter
00:38:35.820 what's interesting is uh style i was just thinking about it in the russian context because it's it's
00:38:41.580 something that i know so joseph stalin is this is kind of scary but other than vladimir putin
00:38:50.140 joseph stalin is the most popular historic figure in russia and if you talk to people who who who
00:38:57.740 are fans of the j-dog what they will tell you is we we like him because there was order and they 0.61
00:39:05.420 don't they wouldn't even necessarily dispute that he was a dick this is what i don't understand 0.83
00:39:09.820 about this whole thing like how are you getting triggered by someone calling chairman mao a 0.96
00:39:14.780 dictator when he was obviously a dictator now you might think that he was the right dictator for
00:39:21.640 china at the time but like this is a level of of i just boggles the mind and i think what this
00:39:29.700 entire story is it's kind of a microcosm of what has been happening vis-a-vis china for the last
00:39:36.120 20 or 30 years where people didn't realize that chinese money came with chinese restrictions
00:39:44.320 about what you could and couldn't do and what you could and couldn't say and eventually we've now 0.50
00:39:49.380 got to a point where the influence of Chinese money on American universities on Hollywood etc
00:39:55.960 as such that actually there's a restrictive culture Francis and I were watching I can't remember
00:40:00.380 what podcast it was but a fairly big podcaster here in America last night who says who they're
00:40:07.940 talking about taiwan uh and then he says it and then he corrects himself to say chinese taipei
00:40:14.860 you know the things like this are already you can kind of see it getting into the culture
00:40:20.200 and those things aren't happening by accident because that money comes with certain power by
00:40:26.700 the way the man city story that winston referred to earlier is exactly the same when you take
00:40:31.000 billions and billions and billions from other countries that inevitably comes with obligations
00:40:37.680 It's why probably most of us have an instinctive hesitation to borrow money from anyone, actually, because you're like, well, I can borrow this money, but it probably comes with some sort of, you know, strings attached.
00:40:50.840 Everything tends to come with strings attached in that way.
00:40:53.360 um what you're seeing here is that a lot of western companies and businesses and sports
00:41:01.580 leagues and entertainment and everything relies on chinese money and you're going to inevitably 1.00
00:41:07.900 i think see more of this yeah oh absolutely and by the way the chinese the ccp are notoriously 0.99
00:41:14.900 thin-skinned i mean they've banned uh memes of winnie the pooh because you know people joke 0.95
00:41:22.140 that Xi Jinping looks like Winnie the Pooh so you now on Weibo and all of these social medias
00:41:28.180 you can't actually do the make the meme anymore and what I find really interesting is on the one
00:41:35.260 hand this is a very very minor thing that Kylian Mbappe has done it's incredibly minor and really
00:41:41.500 it would have passed without comment but what China or the CCP rather have done is actually go
00:41:46.960 this is what happens when you talk badly about us in any shape or form no matter how minor
00:41:55.380 we will pull your funding we will hit you where it hurts in the pocket so play by our rules or
00:42:04.720 you live without our money and what that does is that really does engender a sense of
00:42:09.820 these companies because they know that they have become more and more reliant on the money
00:42:16.680 and what they will do is they will do anything in order not set their chinese partners because if
00:42:23.520 they do something if they withdraw their money for something as small as this what are they
00:42:28.440 going to do for something bigger when you actually criticize them legitimately all their policies
00:42:35.840 no absolutely and it's also clearly points to the complete nonsense a lot of the predictions
00:42:43.440 that were made during what was often called the kind of period of opening you know china being
00:42:46.560 welcomed into the wto the sense that it was going to obviously its integration into global capitalism
00:42:53.920 and the hope that this would lead to china changing that it would become not just more
00:42:59.280 prosperous but also this would put it on the road towards liberal democracy or something if anything
00:43:04.080 the world has ended up with um capitalism with chinese characteristics insofar as you have so
00:43:09.120 much of this um potential economic and therefore cultural and political clout being wielded by
00:43:15.200 china which may have happened anyway just by didn't know how large the um market is given
00:43:20.000 the fact that it is the challenger would-be superpower but um this is something that was
00:43:25.200 eminently foreseeable and there have been so many cases of it now and the fact that it tends to
00:43:28.480 revolve around sport i think is really fascinating because there are so many leagues there are so
00:43:32.800 many sports which obviously for now china is a very important market to them with the man city
00:43:37.680 example we also have foreign state ownership of so many key football clubs in this country and
00:43:43.500 across the world and as much as Andy Burnham doesn't want to be in hock to the bond markets
00:43:47.100 he's totally fine about being in hock to Abu Dhabi if you've noticed by any of his comments in the
00:43:53.380 wake of the Manchester City cheating scandal just the fear that that money will be pulled out not
00:43:58.940 just of Manchester but also all the other projects with which UAE money is going to be underpinned by
00:44:06.140 so we put ourselves in this position once again i mean it's i have to say that when i first saw
00:44:11.360 this scandal can't be think footballer cctv scandal is it carl walker up to his old tricks
00:44:16.540 again as he was during lockdown thought it was maybe something around that but this is actually 0.84
00:44:19.580 something very very serious and it's something which clearly china is the most impossible to
00:44:25.820 ignore example of this there have been so many people who now have to issue basically groveling
00:44:29.240 apologies but it's of a peace with the fact that in pursuit of other aims in pursuit of economic
00:44:36.580 growth in pursuit of foreign investment and what have you you're allowing entire league sports
00:44:42.360 even societies to be sort of infiltrated by the dictates of dictators effectively and unwinding
00:44:48.400 that is going to be a really important thing to particularly as we are now in this era of kind of
00:44:52.540 great power conflict to the point where we were and competition to the point that we weren't you
00:44:56.300 know even 10 years ago so a taste of things to come as humiliating as this was but the fact that
00:45:01.080 not only Mbappe had to apologize La Liga has to apologize the fact that it was talked about in
00:45:06.020 terms of the hurt feelings of the Chinese people I mean if something this mild is enough to trigger
00:45:10.600 them to that extent then this won't be the end of it surely and also the fact that you said it's
00:45:17.240 sport it's actually a really smart ploy to make because the CCP know that Kylian Mbappe is one
00:45:23.560 of the biggest football players in the world an internationally famous footballer Real Madrid are
00:45:29.200 the biggest football club in the world La Liga is one of the biggest leagues in the world they know
00:45:34.840 that they can make the headlines all around the world just by doing this and it's a real flexing
00:45:42.780 of their muscles and the fact that the Real Madrid La Liga Kylian Mbappé have capitulated
00:45:51.200 completely shows in many ways who has the power in this instance it's a very very smart ploy by 0.96
00:46:00.080 the ccp i've got to say there's a couple other offshoots to this story firstly i forgot to 0.94
00:46:06.800 mention that they've erased him from all the football games so you can't play as mbappe now
00:46:11.880 in any of the chinese football games uh but there was a interesting response from chinese people on
00:46:19.420 twitter uh it looks like hong kong based twitter so they don't have it within the the chinese great
00:46:25.800 firewall but people like oh look so what we can like criticize napoleon now or like we can
00:46:31.320 criticize george washington now yes you can you can criticize them it's great welcome to the west
00:46:40.400 another thing about kylian mbappe now i don't want to annoy francis here because i know you're a big
00:46:48.760 Marine Le Pen. Sorry, you're very anti Marine Le Pen and your staunch defense of her last week.
00:46:55.120 I don't want to trigger that. Open that can of worms. But Mbappe is a guy who several times come
00:47:01.940 out against Marine Le Pen, against Rassemblement National. You know, we can never leave our country
00:47:07.320 in the hands of these people. It's really urgent. We hope that everyone will mobilize and vote for 0.96
00:47:11.780 the right side. This was in the 2024 election. So this is a guy, you know, who has that sense
00:47:17.740 of urgency with someone like le pen but look at him kowtowing with an actual an actual truly evil
00:47:25.840 dictator and there was another aspect of this is that you have some cambridge professors coming
00:47:31.240 out defending mao so this is something about britain and i remember of course diane abbott
00:47:35.840 when she was on whatever andrew neal show was saying that arguing that mao did more good than
00:47:41.780 harm i mean how can you and when we have that again now these china these uh cambridge professors
00:47:48.340 they're probably the same sort of people who end up forming a labor cabinet and and and labor
00:47:53.500 budgets um you know who are sort of green party economists these kind of people uh they're doing
00:47:59.880 this defense and i i just sometimes feel like i'm living in a parallel world like how how can you
00:48:04.580 who would dare do a defense like this it's very strange to me it's kind of it shows the
00:48:11.780 the power and the failure of education in the west i think as well as the um authoritarian 0.57
00:48:18.920 nature of china well it certainly shows all of that but also it just shows the amount of money 0.74
00:48:25.100 that they now provide to western sports leagues and businesses and i mean kylian mbappe effectively
00:48:31.960 didn't actually do anything wrong whatsoever what a what he said was factually accurate and more
00:48:37.080 importantly he was joking about a meme about him he didn't mean any disrespect by it um but the
00:48:45.260 reason that both his club and his league that he plays and have to apologize is otherwise the 0.63
00:48:50.900 chinese will take out whatever billions it is that they spend on it and the reality is uh killing
00:48:58.960 Mbappé you might say well you're killing Mbappé he's a you know a gazillion footballer he could 0.97
00:49:03.260 he could stand up to this cancel culture and whatever and he actually could but all the people
00:49:09.580 that work at Real Madrid who clean the toilets there or mow the grass or do whatever they are 0.90
00:49:15.400 the ones that the Chinese Communist Party is effectively using as hostages against him against
00:49:22.360 real madrid and against la liga because they know that that's who will be hurt by with the withdrawal
00:49:29.220 of chinese money from their league and from their team and so ultimately this is it comes back to
00:49:37.080 the bond market conversation we were having when you take money from people it has consequences
00:49:43.420 and like it or not you're going to be in hock to the bond markets if you take money from the bond
00:49:48.500 markets and you're going to be in hock to the ccp if you take money from them uh and therefore i
00:49:54.500 just like to say i look forward to next week when we all have to do a massive apology um about this 0.73
00:49:59.620 because it turns out that some advertiser of ours isn't
00:50:06.580 no no but i'm also proud to announce that after our apology our incoming sponsorship with webo
00:50:15.600 so yeah positive negative well fantastic stuff negative winston uh keep keep a hold of yourself
00:50:26.800 uh final story from here in the u.s for this week is of course the midterms uh we've been
00:50:38.180 traveling around we were in new york we've been to michigan and we're now in austin and headed to la
00:50:44.700 for i think will be arriving there on the day of the midterm results coming out
00:50:50.020 and it's been fascinating watching what's been going on here
00:50:54.600 oh absolutely so we have been in three states already and it's just talking to a broad range
00:51:03.520 of people and this is a story that is absolutely dominating in america believe it or not it's not
00:51:09.800 the Gherkin budget that people are talking about over here or whether John Healy can down a pint
00:51:15.620 in however, no, 22 seconds or whatever it is that he did. It's actually the midterms. And if we can
00:51:23.100 get the cow sheet odds up, please, Dino, what we can see here is that the Democrats, the chances
00:51:30.120 of the Democrats winning both the House and the Senate is 68%. Now, obviously, this can change,
00:51:39.340 etc etc but what we can see is the MAGA movement has been severely hurt at the moment now look
00:51:50.400 polls have got it wrong time and time and time again maybe they've got it wrong this time maybe
00:51:56.660 prediction markets have got it wrong but we have seen that things are very very much in the balance
00:52:04.260 And one of the things I find really interesting is this, is you go to people, oh, who's going to be the next democratic leader of the party?
00:52:13.760 Nobody has a clue of who it's going to be.
00:52:16.500 Some people will say AOC.
00:52:19.180 Some people will say, oh, maybe it's an outsider like Josh Shapiro. 0.50
00:52:23.100 Other people go, well, it can't be Josh Shapiro because Josh Shapiro is Jewish. 0.71
00:52:26.620 Therefore, Jewish, he's connected with Israel.
00:52:28.680 And you're like, isn't that a bit anti-Semitic?
00:52:30.320 And they went, never mind, let's not focus on that.
00:52:32.440 but it's really fascinating as to what is going to happen at this point it's really in the balance
00:52:40.000 because if the republicans lose the house and the senate that is it's it's going to really damage
00:52:49.200 trump's ability to push through the changes that he wants to implement in his final two years
00:52:54.880 well not only that but he's going to spend the next two years not only with the massive reduction
00:53:00.660 and his ability to do anything, but also fighting off all sorts of impeachments, investigations,
00:53:07.320 probably prosecutions, etc. And the entire thing is, you know, obviously, we don't need to open
00:53:14.180 the can of worms of the Iran war, but he has also been able to do good things too. And the ability
00:53:21.120 to do those good things, particularly on, you know, stopping illegal immigration, etc. has been
00:53:27.140 because of the dominant victory that he had in 2024.
00:53:32.620 People forget now what it was like.
00:53:35.400 We were just recounting this in an interview we recorded
00:53:38.660 with Stephen Crowder when we talked about the fact
00:53:42.820 that we were sitting here in exactly this position two years ago.
00:53:46.940 We were in Texas about to fly to Los Angeles
00:53:50.360 on the day before the election.
00:53:52.780 And everyone here in Texas was going, what are you doing?
00:53:55.400 why are you flying into into into california there's going to be riots when trump wins
00:53:59.760 etc and when we got there trump won he won the house he won the republicans won the house the
00:54:06.900 senate he won the popular vote and the electoral college and i remember sitting down the next day
00:54:13.120 with rob schneider and adam carolla and there was this mood of like everyone's accepted this there
00:54:19.040 are no riots it's clear that america voted to go in this direction and there was a lot of hope and
00:54:24.680 optimism at the time which is just completely disappeared to the point where today as we sit
00:54:31.180 in austin texas it's very likely that texas will have a democratic senator and one other thing i'll
00:54:38.060 say uh is i mean some of the ads we were preparing for a couple of interviews so we we stuck on the
00:54:45.440 tv and you can watch youtube on the tv so we're watching a few things to prepare for our interviews
00:54:49.520 but we we were not locked in with our youtube premium account so you're getting served
00:54:53.680 local american youtube ads and the ads he i mean if you think british politics has become
00:55:01.760 dirty and personal oh my word it's like james tallarico wants to take your children and
00:55:08.620 transition them and it's like literally like that and then the and and it's exactly the same the 0.86
00:55:14.680 other way like ken paxton uh uh loves pedophile you're like whoa whoa but that is the i'm not
00:55:22.260 exaggerating i'm genuinely not exaggerating like the way these debates are being had here
00:55:26.940 is vicious it is absolutely vicious right now and one of the other things that is fascinating that
00:55:35.200 we don't have in the uk this is uh the the upside the positive trade-off of us having the most
00:55:40.740 expensive industrial electricity in the world and absolutely no ai involvement whatsoever in terms
00:55:47.300 of infrastructure is data centers have become a gigantic talking point here in america and we
00:55:54.580 drove past one when we were in michigan i don't remember if i mentioned this before but uh the
00:56:00.820 the guy who was showing us uh around he said i we said how many jobs is this going to create for
00:56:06.900 for people and he said i don't know how many jobs it will be inside but they're going to need a lot
00:56:10.560 of security jobs, because that is the level of feeling towards data centers, not only because
00:56:17.900 they're eyesores, but because they consume and drive up the price of electricity. There may be
00:56:22.720 water issues. And actually, if you look at certainly Democratic Party advertising, I mean,
00:56:29.200 data centers are effectively being talked about like their big oil, you know, 20 or 30 years ago,
00:56:35.300 These are the most evil people in corporate America who are about to do something terrible in your backyard.
00:56:42.680 And actually, what's interesting is concern about data centers is, at this point, a bipartisan issue as well.
00:56:49.980 So there are lots of interesting things that will come out of this.
00:56:52.580 But as Francis said, very, very likely.
00:56:55.700 I mean, I think our CalShields, we showed that 92% of the Democrats will take the House.
00:57:00.320 Everybody sort of priced that in already.
00:57:01.980 very possible that they will take uh the the senate as well although david packman uh the
00:57:08.940 left-wing commentator who we just had on the show that episode will go out um tomorrow he actually
00:57:16.800 said that he thought it was not as likely as people were saying and to francis point i mean
00:57:21.820 he made the point about democratic uh i think he he he just he's i think himself jewish and he just
00:57:27.920 said yeah uh some of the the candidates to potentially lead the democrats you know i really 0.78
00:57:32.820 like this guy this guy this guy but i just think uh a jewish person can't be a leader of the 0.65
00:57:38.000 democratic party at the moment which i thought was uh very telling that he is someone who was
00:57:42.740 very careful not to offend his own side in our interview but that i thought was uh quite revealing
00:57:48.840 one extra thing which i'd be interested to hear you two perspective on is the amount because we
00:57:55.180 knew that there were obviously the economic turmoil the cost of the pump the fact that whereas
00:58:01.340 it seemed like trump had primarily got elected for a domestic agenda which there are significant
00:58:05.720 wins on particularly if you're talking about closing the border that iran in particular but
00:58:09.780 not exclusively was always going to be hung around his neck the question is was it going to be an
00:58:13.180 albatross or a medal and it does feel at this point it's probably going to be the former um but
00:58:17.540 also one thing that i detect even in a lot of the kind of right of center relatively friendly to
00:58:21.520 Trump commentary is that these concerns about corruption at the very high level of the Trump
00:58:25.420 family seem to have crept in even amongst Trump voters in a very real way to an extent that has
00:58:30.060 quite surprised me because everyone remembers that when he was actually originally running I
00:58:33.740 think for the nomination let alone the presidency you know prior to 2016 where he would have this
00:58:38.480 line where I know the system's rigged because I used it myself but there's been an element of
00:58:44.400 maybe continuing to use that whilst being the commander-in-chief the way in which those around
00:58:49.160 in the family and so on have been able to use their plum positions as kind of international
00:58:54.520 top level diplomats to get some pretty tasty contracts in various parts of the world has
00:59:00.220 added to that kind of bad smell around the president you do wonder again without wanting
00:59:06.220 to reopen an iran argument or without wanting to make this a purely about foreign policy like if
00:59:11.040 he had just really drilled down and focused kind of exclusively on not exclusively but largely on
00:59:17.020 those what ailed america domestically cost of living price of eggs as i always like to bang on
00:59:20.820 about closing the border getting on top of wokeism that whilst there was that was always going to
00:59:25.580 generate a certain level of backlash it wasn't going to demoralize his own base which which
00:59:30.120 seems to have been the consequence the knock-on consequence a lot of the other decisions that
00:59:32.980 he's taken so yeah i'm not sure if you've detected any of that corruption stuff but
00:59:35.640 that is that sort of crept up on me that is an issue which is quite surprising yeah if you talk
00:59:40.620 to people privately even people on the right it basically just they just there's no dispute that
00:59:46.640 Everyone sees that that's happening, effectively.
00:59:50.120 Other than people who will go on TV and publicly defend it,
00:59:53.780 most people are at this point just go, it's happening.
01:00:01.460 Winston, final word from you?
01:00:04.520 I guess we will know when we speak next week
01:00:08.620 about what the results are.
01:00:12.400 Indeed, we will.
01:00:13.020 I don't love speculating, but we'll see.
01:00:16.640 He doesn't love speculating.
01:00:18.340 He loves getting triggered and offended.
01:00:21.320 All right.
01:00:21.720 Fantastic.
01:00:22.900 Well, we will see you next week when no doubt we will all be triggered by something.
01:00:26.860 Have a wonderful week and thank you for watching.
01:00:30.120 Thanks, guys.
01:00:30.840 Bye.