TRIGGERnometry - James Bloodworth on the Evils of the Gig Economy

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kitchen.

00:00:10.660 And this is the show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they

00:00:16.180 know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.

00:00:22.860 Our brilliant guest this week is a journalist and the author of Hired,

00:00:26.100 six months undercover in low-wage Britain. James Bloodworth, welcome to Trichonometry.

00:00:30.860 Thanks for having me. It's so good to have you, man. Before we get into the interview,

00:00:33.900 just tell everybody who you are, how are you, where you are, what's been your journey through

00:00:37.660 life to this point? So I'm a journalist and author. My journey through life, well, I failed

00:00:44.420 my schooling. I failed my GCSEs. That's how journalism works, guys. Yeah, but you can all

00:00:50.820 do it um and then i went back to college when i was 23 as a as like a mature student um college

00:00:56.480 university then writing was kind of the only thing i was capable of doing um and so then yeah i did

00:01:02.340 this and and and i i enjoy it it's it's kind of the one thing that's kind of my passion but it's

00:01:07.960 also in my work as well which is cool and you kind of opened with a bit of self-deprecation but the

00:01:12.040 book you've written is actually incredibly important and we were just chatting as you got

00:01:16.200 here about the fact that left or right and you're left wing and we'll get into that a lot of our

00:01:21.460 viewers keep saying to us you need to get more left wing people on so we're glad you've agreed

00:01:25.440 to come on having said that i bet they're going to stop moaning oh no he's actually left wing

00:01:30.620 but it's good to have you on and i says i say i think your book is incredibly important wherever

00:01:36.440 you are in the political spectrum because some of the stuff that you talk about some of the things

00:01:40.760 that your investigative journalism uncovered, it's very serious. And it's a big problem for

00:01:45.900 society, especially going forward. So if anyone hasn't read your book yet, which I'm sure they'll

00:01:49.840 get after this interview, tell us what you did. What is the book about? What did you do? What was

00:01:55.420 the process? So in the end of 2015, I had this kind of idea of a book about kind of low-wage

00:02:03.820 Britain, about what was going on in the economy. So you cast your mind back to 2015. David Cameron

00:02:09.080 as prime minister. He was talking a lot about the economy is well on the road to recovery after a

00:02:15.400 long recession, record number of people in work, et cetera, et cetera. But behind the scenes,

00:02:20.280 it was a bit more disconcerting, the picture. So there was a big rise in the number of people on

00:02:24.520 zero hours contracts. There were a lot more people working in something that was being called the

00:02:29.000 gig economy. So Uber drivers, Deliveroo, riders, couriers, et cetera. And a big rise in self

00:02:36.120 employment. But it was a bit, the world of that was a bit murky in terms of whether they're really

00:02:40.700 self-employed or whether they were employed by these companies. And so I'd done many jobs like

00:02:46.000 that myself 10 years previously. So I wanted to kind of go back a decade later after this big

00:02:51.160 recession we'd had and kind of see what had changed in that kind of world of work. And

00:02:57.000 I didn't feel like you really got a sense of it from, you know, you can do your journalistic

00:03:02.600 kind of detours for you go on a date you go for to visit some kind of downtrodden town for like a

00:03:07.620 day uh you go and hang around like interview some factory workers for a day but i thought like i was

00:03:12.920 really kind of inspired by kind of the the immersive journalism that people like george

00:03:18.180 orwell polly toinby barbara ironreich had done before where you fully immerse yourself into that

00:03:22.660 world and then you can really paint a true picture of what what it's actually like to work in those

00:03:27.060 jobs live in those towns and kind of lead that lifestyle of the the so-called kind of precarious

00:03:32.580 in the in the british economy and what did you find well all sorts of uh all sorts of things um

00:03:38.540 i mean i was worried a part of me was worried when i set out to write the book that it might be

00:03:43.120 you know the first first place i got a job was an amazon warehouse and i thought you know this

00:03:47.620 i was worried that my book was going to be boring what am i going to i worked in a warehouse before

00:03:51.860 when i was younger um and i was worried it kind of is it going to be that boring what am i what

00:03:56.940 what am I going to write about? But the book pretty much wrote itself. As soon as I started

00:04:03.360 the work, there were so many kind of shocking things going on. Yeah, the book essentially

00:04:08.400 wrote itself. So I mean, my first job was at Amazon. I kept a diary every day I was working

00:04:14.660 there. And the first day I remember writing in this diary that the atmosphere of the Amazon

00:04:18.620 warehouse had the atmosphere of what I've imagined a prison would feel like. Which sounds kind of

00:04:23.600 like hyperbole it sounds like it sounds like um i'm exaggerating but it was um you know you were

00:04:31.060 you were given disciplinaries if you took um took days off sick even with notes from the doctor

00:04:35.520 you were people were given disciplinaries for taking too long going to the toilet

00:04:39.720 you had to go through airport style security every time you went on break or every time you

00:04:44.420 went to the toilet so you know taking off your belt your watch you had to be drug and alcohol

00:04:48.200 tested um there were all these kind of you were constantly monitored by and surveilled by uh by

00:04:55.400 the management you were underpaid so we weren't paid the minimum wage for half the time i was

00:04:59.860 working there one girl i interviewed was paid 62p an hour and it took her six weeks to get the money

00:05:04.320 back over christmas um there was all this stuff going on and my my as soon as i got in there my

00:05:11.660 my instinctive reaction was like why does no one know about this and then it became then there

00:05:17.280 became then there was kind of a zeal attached to the project to kind of tell the story of of the

00:05:21.320 stuff that was going on there and it was a similar amazon was the worst in that respect but there was

00:05:26.420 there was there were similar things that were true when i worked in social care in blackpool

00:05:30.080 when i was an uber driver in london and when i was in a call center in in south wales it was it was

00:05:35.140 um it was revelatory to me um more than you know before i told the story to anyone else it it really

00:05:41.600 like shocked me first of all and i'm listening to this and i'm thinking to myself how can they get

00:05:46.860 away with paying lower than the minimum wage. How can they possibly do that? It's surely not

00:05:51.920 legal, is it? No, I mean, it's completely illegal. I mean, there's several reasons. So on the one

00:05:59.120 hand, it's the agency who pays your wages. So Amazon management would be the people who we

00:06:03.380 dealt with for things like, you know, if you take a day off sick or whatever, or just productivity

00:06:11.100 targets, it'd be the Amazon management. But then you had an agency, an employment agency would deal

00:06:15.660 with the payroll things and they would put down the underpayment of wages to incompetency

00:06:20.440 which isn't an excuse I mean you're still breaking the law but most of the people we were working

00:06:25.960 with I was working with were migrants migrant workers so some of them couldn't speak very good

00:06:31.960 English so how are they expected to phone up payroll or whatever and the agency themselves

00:06:37.060 would just fob you off and say oh you know you'll receive the rest of your money next week or

00:06:41.440 whatever and just didn't expect to encounter people like undercover journalists and people

00:06:45.760 like me in there who would then tell the story of what was going on but it's um it felt like

00:06:51.400 there's a law there with a minimum wage but for some people in our society it exists mainly on

00:06:55.960 paper if that makes sense um and if you don't know what the law is because you've come from

00:07:01.080 Romania and you don't even speak the local language very well right you're not going to

00:07:04.680 know what the law is you're not going to have the ability to have it enforced on your behalf

00:07:08.560 And the other thing about the precariousness of what you talk about in the book is these people are under constant threat of losing their job for going to the toilet.

00:07:16.780 You know, what would happen if they actually start demanding their workers' rights?

00:07:20.740 Yeah, I mean, there's that. Yeah, the fact that you're dealing with the management is dealing with migrant workers makes it their hand feels weaker in a sense,

00:07:30.940 because on the one hand, they don't necessarily understand what the law of the land is in Britain in terms of employment rights.

00:07:36.700 when you get a payslip it doesn't say what the minimum wage is but it doesn't print the minimum

00:07:41.320 wage on the payslip which is one thing I've been saying that that would be a really easy change

00:07:45.940 the government could make to to make sure everyone knows what the minimum wage actually is

00:07:50.380 and the employment agency the the representatives of that agency were really elusive as well so it

00:07:55.480 would be hard to find them often hard to get hold of them um and yeah and they would just rudely

00:08:00.300 like fob you off if you if you ever inquired about your pay I mean the the girl the young

00:08:05.120 woman who was who was paid paid so grossly underpaid 62p an hour she told me it took six

00:08:12.340 weeks to get the money back from the employment agency and that was only because her mom was

00:08:16.520 phoning up all the time threatening to like go to acas um and yeah and she said she would have

00:08:22.860 been screwed and homeless if she hadn't lived with her mom um and yeah it just felt like um

00:08:27.620 they just didn't care and they were complacent in the in the sense that they wouldn't assume

00:08:32.540 someone like me was in the warehouse for a start and they know that those none of those people have

00:08:37.460 any kind of voice in in the media or whatever they're not going to be you're not going to see

00:08:42.120 some some kind of migrant worker from a warehouse in the west midlands in this small town of

00:08:48.740 which no one's ever heard of writing a column in in in the newspaper um damning their their

00:08:56.140 treatment at work you just don't really see that so i guess that's partly why it was allowed to go

00:09:00.760 on. And was everybody in the warehouse on zero hours contracts? Not everyone in the warehouse.

00:09:06.960 All the people I worked, we all were. So all the people who did the job I did were. So if you're

00:09:12.740 in a managerial role, you're not on a zero hours contract. But all of us, we worked for two,

00:09:17.480 there were two employment agencies. There was Transline and PMP. And all of us were on zero

00:09:23.220 hours contracts. So Amazon says, oh, we don't employ people on zero hours contracts. But no,

00:09:29.420 because the agency employs them on zero-hours contracts.

00:09:33.780 So this means, yeah, we worked like four days a week,

00:09:38.500 10 and a half hours each day.

00:09:40.360 And then I remember one Thursday we were told

00:09:42.940 the warehouse was going to be closed on the Saturday

00:09:44.700 just for maintenance, whatever that was.

00:09:48.300 And because you're on a zero-hours contract, that can happen.

00:09:50.800 So you're down, your wages are down kind of.

00:09:53.500 You lose 10 and a half hours that week.

00:09:55.580 So yeah, we were all on zero-hours contracts.

00:09:57.840 And for our American listeners and viewers who may not...

00:10:01.180 Hey, man, it's not just American.

00:10:02.220 We've got Malaysian followers.

00:10:03.660 Yeah, we're big in Malaysia.

00:10:05.260 We're going global, James.

00:10:07.440 But so for our international viewers and listeners,

00:10:10.280 what is a zero-hours contract?

00:10:12.160 And why do you think they are such a toxic thing to our employment?

00:10:16.580 Yeah, zero-hours contracts is basically you have no guaranteed hours each week,

00:10:20.620 but typically you can't get another job as well.

00:10:22.620 So with the company, you're employed by this company,

00:10:27.000 so you can't claim like social security you can't get another job um but you don't know what you're

00:10:32.800 working necessarily from week to week in terms of hours so one week you might have five be working

00:10:36.980 five hours the next week you might be working 35 hours um and it's you know it's not always bad

00:10:43.760 because i mean i i had a zero hours contract when i was a student i was a postman as well

00:10:48.060 and during like term time i would just work five hours on a saturday then during my holidays i

00:10:54.000 I'd work kind of full time. But the problem is many of the zero hours contracts are used to

00:10:59.700 basically control the workforce. So you have a sense where you have a situation where sometimes

00:11:07.280 people are just getting one or two hours a week and then they can't get another job at the same

00:11:11.040 time. They're constantly on call and they also can't sign on for social security. So you're not

00:11:16.820 making much money. You can't get another job. You're kind of in limbo really. And if you leave

00:11:21.180 your job if you quit the job you can't then sign on for social security because you've left

00:11:25.440 voluntarily whereas you know to get to get job seekers allowance say to get to get social

00:11:31.040 security you need to have lost your job kind of involuntarily you can't just quit and then go

00:11:35.820 go sign on anymore anymore so you get have lots of people stuck in this kind of limbo

00:11:39.680 where they're not getting enough hours not making enough money and then often the state has to then

00:11:44.780 subsidize that through like tax credits etc anyway um and yet you have and you also have this this

00:11:50.360 insecurity hanging over their heads where they're not they're not getting enough you know they don't

00:11:55.100 know where the money's coming from week to week payroll payout from boom 97.3 and alpine credits

00:12:01.740 is your chance to get some much needed cash back in your wallet what you need to do now is go to

00:12:07.280 boom 97.3.com to sign up so you can start making a hundred dollars an hour kick off your work day

00:12:14.320 on a good note

00:12:15.100 and a few extra

00:12:15.980 C notes.

00:12:17.220 Want some?

00:12:18.180 Sign up.

00:12:18.860 I love you, boo!

00:12:20.500 Approved by Alpine Credits.

00:12:22.140 Own your own home

00:12:22.820 and eat a loan.

00:12:23.480 Alpine Credits can help.

00:12:24.720 Visit alpinecredits.ca

00:12:26.280 On the plus side,

00:12:28.000 Amazon are very good

00:12:28.820 at paying tax.

00:12:30.060 Yeah, exactly.

00:12:31.180 So it's not as if

00:12:31.960 in our country.

00:12:32.780 Yeah.

00:12:33.120 Well, I wanted to

00:12:34.160 dig into that

00:12:35.100 a little bit later,

00:12:35.960 but tell us more about

00:12:37.220 you're working

00:12:39.160 in this warehouse.

00:12:40.140 You've got a device

00:12:41.440 like a bit of

00:12:42.400 like a mobile phone,

00:12:43.540 right?

00:12:43.740 or something like that a handheld device that's tracking your every movement it's keeping an eye

00:12:48.660 on how long you're spending working it's keeping an eye on how long you spend going to the toilet

00:12:54.300 it's keeping on all this stuff and it's all used to measure your productivity essentially right

00:12:59.180 so you're treated very much like a robot like a cog in the machine what other kind of things just

00:13:04.420 just for people at home because when you talk about you know you almost kind of we almost

00:13:09.080 glanced over this idea that you're working in this place and if you get ill and you have a

00:13:15.280 doctor who says James is ill and you call in and say I'm ill you are still being disciplined for

00:13:20.700 that right yeah so I mean that's crazy I mean that that is crazy right so what other kind of

00:13:27.880 stuff that is happening in these places that people don't know about yeah I mean the the

00:13:33.660 sickness policy was one of the most shocking things. So I took it, I was actually, I was

00:13:38.080 actually ill one day, you know, had a very heavy cold, tried to work through it. Then I wanted to

00:13:42.680 test out what the policy actually was. So the following day I phoned in in the morning, you

00:13:48.140 know, they said you had to phone in, I think it was three hours before I did that. And also said,

00:13:52.440 you know, I can go to the NHS walking center, get a note from the doctors if you need that as well.

00:13:56.240 And they said on the phone, you know, you know, that's fine. You don't need that. You phoned us,

00:13:59.360 you'd let us know then when i went in the next day this this amazon rep came around with a clipboard

00:14:04.260 um looking for me and you know said can you confirm you were you were off sick yesterday

00:14:09.860 and then he said you know i've been given a point for this it's like what's that a disciplinary

00:14:14.920 point if you get sick you lose your job and i queried it and said this doesn't seem fair because

00:14:19.880 i you know i was genuine i was still kind of ill when i was when i was there you could see this

00:14:23.720 and said about the doctor's note,

00:14:26.320 and he said, you know, it doesn't matter.

00:14:29.120 His reasoning was, you know,

00:14:30.700 this is what Amazon have always done.

00:14:32.600 As if, you know, it's like in school

00:14:33.640 where the teacher's like, because I said so.

00:14:35.620 It's like, it doesn't tell me anything.

00:14:37.860 That was the justification.

00:14:39.220 And there were also things like,

00:14:41.660 I noticed that every,

00:14:44.400 the beginning of every shift,

00:14:45.500 you'd have this like,

00:14:47.120 you'd have almost like a team meeting.

00:14:49.180 They'd give you like a briefing

00:14:51.380 before they sent you out to the warehouse.

00:14:53.720 and um they would uh they would keep talking about this thing called idle time like you're

00:14:59.160 clocking up too much as they call it idle time and it's like what what is this and then i was

00:15:04.620 i remember i was told one day you know you have too much idle time on your

00:15:08.420 on your device because it measures where you are productivity etc what you're doing and uh

00:15:15.220 it dawned on me you know eventually this is just the time you know you have like 10 minutes idle

00:15:19.600 time say during a shift and that's just a toilet break it's like because to go on the toilet to

00:15:24.680 the toilet we had two toilets on the bottom floor of this huge warehouse 700 000 square foot

00:15:30.320 warehouse two toilets on the that's like 10 football pitches yeah they always they always

00:15:34.820 boast about it being like 10 football pitches for some reason um yeah like a phallic like boast

00:15:40.520 and like the two toilets are on the bottom floor and you have to go down four flights of stairs

00:15:46.160 because there's four floors i was on the top floor and you have to go through security to go

00:15:49.940 to the bathroom which takes the airport style security so you know it takes takes time to go

00:15:54.580 through and uh then you know so going to the bathroom takes 10 minutes typically about 10

00:16:01.100 minutes and you're being given people are being given disciplinaries for idle time and it's just

00:16:05.920 taking bathroom breaks during a 10 and a half hour shift so you need to take bathroom breaks right

00:16:11.760 if you don't drink enough water you get a headache because you're doing you're walking 10 miles a day

00:16:15.260 um yeah i mean that that was shocking i mean you have you had half an hour break and then two 10

00:16:21.640 minute breaks um and by the time you get to the canteen on these breaks you're getting like 15

00:16:28.560 minute break for the for the half an hour break and then you get an extra five minutes for the

00:16:32.820 added on to the 10 minute breaks but you have about seven minutes break when you get to the

00:16:37.820 canteen through security and stuff so you're hardly getting any break time the productivity

00:16:41.740 targets were insane um i was i'm someone who goes to the gym who's relatively fit and healthy

00:16:47.160 and i was told the first week that i was in the bottom 10 percent of productivity and i was running

00:16:52.560 around this this warehouse you get disciplinaries for running even though you have to run to meet

00:16:57.220 your productivity targets and this whole state of affairs is is kind of is kind of plastered over

00:17:05.620 with this this verbiage this nonsense about you know you're not allowed to call the warehouse

00:17:10.060 it's a warehouse you have to call it a fulfillment center um if you yeah it's like a yeah i mean

00:17:16.720 it's like a cult and if you um i was already in the labor party so i don't need to um if you um

00:17:24.060 if you if you lose your job you're not fired or sacked you're released um well it sounds like you

00:17:28.800 are released from quite a bad situation actually yeah we used to joke uh or as we used to joke

00:17:33.820 you've been promoted to a customer yeah because you get called an associate right yeah and it's um

00:17:39.540 you're not workers

00:17:40.860 there's no workers

00:17:41.740 bosses or management

00:17:42.480 you're all associates

00:17:43.460 you're on the same level

00:17:46.500 as Jeff Bezos

00:17:47.120 yeah we were told

00:17:47.900 you know

00:17:48.220 like word for word

00:17:49.600 Jeff Bezos is an associate

00:17:51.060 and so are you

00:17:51.880 we're all one big

00:17:53.980 happy family

00:17:54.520 here at Amazon

00:17:55.160 on the first day

00:17:56.280 do you reckon

00:17:56.820 Jeff Bezos makes

00:17:57.720 62p an hour

00:17:58.800 well yeah

00:17:59.760 I think he probably does

00:18:01.560 well that's what

00:18:02.300 he declares anyway

00:18:03.160 that probably is

00:18:04.160 what he declares

00:18:04.620 to the authorities

00:18:05.540 well there's one question

00:18:06.860 I wanted to ask

00:18:07.500 why airport security

00:18:08.740 just to go to the toilet.

00:18:10.040 So they can't steal shit.

00:18:11.160 Yeah, it's concerns about theft.

00:18:14.400 It's purportedly concerns about theft.

00:18:15.300 See, this is how you know I'm Russian.

00:18:16.680 Yeah, I know exactly how that works.

00:18:18.560 Yeah, I mean, it's supposedly concerns about theft.

00:18:21.100 You know, if you treat people that poorly,

00:18:23.280 they're going to nick stuff.

00:18:24.420 And I can see the rationale of that.

00:18:26.400 If you pay 62p an hour,

00:18:28.020 you've probably got to nick stuff to survive.

00:18:30.180 So I know some people will say human nature,

00:18:33.880 whatever it is.

00:18:34.880 Some people don't.

00:18:36.020 They're paranoid all the time

00:18:37.240 that you're going to nick stuff.

00:18:38.040 So they have this security you've got to go through every time you go to the bathroom, yeah, or go and break or leave.

00:18:44.260 And what was the atmosphere like in the warehouse, the morale?

00:18:47.720 Fulfillment center.

00:18:48.560 Sorry, fulfillment center.

00:18:50.340 Were they fulfilled?

00:18:52.500 A lot of the time you weren't allowed to.

00:18:54.040 I mean, there was also a prohibition on talking to people you were working with.

00:18:57.520 So you had to do that surreptitiously.

00:19:00.060 uh the the morale i mean it was the atmosphere was like some kind of uh low rent kind of prison

00:19:08.120 or something it was um people just you people would not be there very long most people so

00:19:13.560 you it was easy to get fired so if you got six points you'd lose your job and you're getting

00:19:19.240 points for i mean some people got points because the bus was late the amazon bus bringing them in

00:19:23.780 was late so they clocked in late and then they all got given points for this for clocking in

00:19:27.780 like 15 minutes late you're off sick you get a point point for too many toilet breaks um point

00:19:33.140 for low productivity then you're on four five six points you're gone all the jobs are temporary

00:19:38.120 nine month contracts anyway so you you're not seeing people you see some people like you make

00:19:44.100 a friend and then a few days later they've just vanished and uh it's um they've been fired or

00:19:49.260 they've just quit because it's they can't can't stand it anymore so people just walking around

00:19:53.540 with these trolleys like drones almost just super tired uh your feet kind of extremely sore because

00:20:00.000 of the distances you have to walk you're not provided special footwear and it was um i mean

00:20:05.000 yeah i worked in a yogurt factory once and i worked in a toilet paper factory once and it's

00:20:09.660 like morale in those places isn't like it's not like a part it's not like some party every day

00:20:14.260 but this was this was something else this was um yeah it's just people who know they're being

00:20:19.780 exploited mostly romanian migrants who would on various occasions would compare it to me to modern

00:20:26.040 slavery i wouldn't use those steps because i thought oh that's a bit strong but they would

00:20:29.880 say no this is like we feel like slaves we feel like slaves just it was just um uh yeah it was

00:20:36.740 just completely like eye-opening i've never really seen anything like that in the uk anyway and what

00:20:43.180 responsibility do you think customers have who buy from amazon and you know and they go well it's

00:20:49.180 cheap i get the book that i want it's convenient um do we have responsibility yeah i mean i mean

00:20:55.540 of course i mean it's there are there are like a million there's like infinite ways to kind of

00:20:59.840 rationalize why it's fine well you know i need this amazon prime thing or i need this book like

00:21:05.980 instantly and i've done it before like i had amazon from like 2003 or some sometime around then

00:21:10.620 and it's um i'd be getting these super like these quick super quick deliveries not as quick as now

00:21:15.860 I would never really think about what was going on down the supply chain.

00:21:21.000 In the same way that 100 years ago, Britain had an empire and you have all this stuff being bought and sold in the colonies and benefiting British consumers.

00:21:35.940 And just don't ask any questions and it's fine.

00:21:38.380 But then when you start to delve into it, like as I did and as other people have, you kind of realize that this has consequences.

00:21:47.040 This kind of the speed, the kind of the cheapness, there's a cost to it.

00:21:51.460 And the cost is borne by people in these warehouses, people along the supply chain, who conveniently we don't hear from most of the time.

00:22:00.300 That was one of the reasons I did the book.

00:22:01.880 So we just kind of give those people some kind of voice and actually find out, kind of shove it down the throats of people who, you know, consumers who maybe don't think about this stuff in the nicest possible way.

00:22:16.920 And in the book, you don't just talk about Amazon. So tell us about some of the other jobs that you took on for this research.

00:22:23.900 yeah so i did uh i was social carer so like domiciliary care so that's like visiting house

00:22:30.840 to house in the town of blackpool um yeah so driving around in my car um you're kind of on

00:22:39.400 a zero hours contract again it's 20 minute care visits for elderly and disabled people typically

00:22:43.840 so uh you'd work be working from about seven in the morning till two with a two-hour break and

00:22:51.120 then four till 10 in the evening roughly um on a typical day um and yeah it's looking after people

00:22:58.560 who can't just hold hold on so you started work at seven in the morning and you finished work at

00:23:04.460 10 in the evening yeah you have a break in the middle but yeah oftentimes you don't take the

00:23:08.620 break because uh uh you can't get everything done if you take the full full break because

00:23:13.280 you have everything you have 20 minute care visits right you go to blackpool has a high

00:23:18.420 rate of health problems, MS particularly. So you have lots of disabled and elderly people. Lots

00:23:23.820 of people move there to retire. So they went to Blackpool for their summer holidays and they think

00:23:28.760 this is a lovely place to retire. So you have a high elderly population as well. So you have

00:23:34.780 lots of people also low incomes where their care is subsidized by the local authority.

00:23:40.300 You're visiting them. You're going, say, seven in the morning. You're getting them out of bed.

00:23:45.340 you're taking them to the bathrooms use the toilet washing them uh making them tea preparing

00:23:50.160 their breakfast dressing them either taking them back to bed if they're very you know if it's um

00:23:55.120 palliative care say uh or you're taking to the living room putting the tv their favorite tv

00:24:00.140 programs on whatever it is and giving them medication filling out the paperwork all of

00:24:04.760 this within like 20 minutes which is uh in practice almost never possible never achievable

00:24:10.540 it's very hard to do that within 20 minutes so then you and then say you do do it within 20

00:24:16.520 minutes you have 10 minutes then to drive to your next appointment you're not paid for the 10 minutes

00:24:20.380 so you're only paid for the 20 minute blocks of care visits so you're basically paid below the

00:24:26.100 minimum wage again because driving from house to house it's it's work time right you're in your

00:24:30.600 work uniform you're not doing other things you're you're going from workplace to workplace but you're

00:24:34.880 not paid for that so that answers the question i guess about you know are you working all this

00:24:39.520 time no because you're getting all these 10 minute breaks all the time and you're working

00:24:44.740 through your proper breaks because you can't do all of that stuff within 20 minute care visits

00:24:49.040 and that was the most so one care worker told me you know they're treat they feel like they're

00:24:56.520 treated like glorified cleaners no disrespect to cleaners but the level of responsibility you have

00:25:01.260 as a carer it's a different kind of job and you're basically looking after people who fought in the

00:25:06.620 second world war fought in the korean war and you're treating them like dirt because the care

00:25:11.360 system is screwed basically um so that's what i did in blackpool then i went to south wales where

00:25:16.980 i worked in a call center uh for admiral that was the least bad job i mean admiral made an effort

00:25:22.660 actually to make you feel okay like my book is i think my book is has more kind of credibility in

00:25:29.040 that when when a company does treat you well and does do things to make it a bit better the

00:25:34.000 workplace. I'm completely honest about it. I don't necessarily try and paint them as these

00:25:38.460 employers, as these demons. Admiral treated us fairly well. The job was poorly paid still. It

00:25:45.240 was very commission dependent. So if you didn't make your commission, you wouldn't have much

00:25:48.820 money that week. But they made an effort to actually try and make the workplace a more

00:25:54.540 pleasant place, which was in contrast to, say, Amazon. Then from South Wales, I came back to

00:26:01.160 london and i worked as an uber driver for two and a half months i think it's two and a half months

00:26:05.340 yeah and that was um again it was easier in some respects in that you you know if i don't want to

00:26:13.060 work one day i just don't turn my phone on um which is you know i don't have some boss like

00:26:17.560 on my case all the time uh but it was also it was very not very much like self-employment

00:26:22.640 despite the kind of because that's the argument really isn't it's flexibility gives you the

00:26:27.560 opportunity yeah right so it's not like that no so i mean there was again uber there was it was

00:26:34.300 coming back into a world where there was all this language which kind of blurred the distinction

00:26:37.940 between the reality and there was like the rhetorical universe and the flesh and blood

00:26:42.220 universe and the two were very very different so you know be your own boss we kept hearing from

00:26:46.800 uber on our induction day autonomy flexibility if the wheels aren't turning you aren't earning

00:26:53.160 all of this like crap um yeah like vomit inducing uh trash and then um but also and you know you'd

00:27:01.540 sacrificed for this autonomy you'd sack you'd um you didn't receive a minimum wage you didn't

00:27:06.780 receive holiday pay sick uh or sick pay or annual leave and um autonomy actually didn't really exist

00:27:15.020 beyond turning your phone on and off beyond long logging in and out of the app so we were told

00:27:20.180 during our induction you have this induction day at uber before you go out where they show you teach

00:27:25.560 you how to use the app etc and we were told by this kind of hip guy and like you know jeans and

00:27:30.840 and t-shirt um you know trying to you know like the sort of person i see around shoreditch or

00:27:36.220 hoxton like hipster i knew they were fucking evil like kombucha drinking uh hipster that you know

00:27:43.760 that we weren't allowed to pick and choose which jobs we did so whatever whatever job uber sends

00:27:48.400 you you have to accept it so that was the words they used you can't pick and choose what jobs you

00:27:52.500 do um which which that doesn't sound like self-employment you know if you're actually

00:27:56.600 self-employed that's what you do it like i'm a self-employed journalist if i don't want to do

00:28:01.760 a job i can say that that's not worth my while to do it based on the money or whatever we were even

00:28:07.860 told what we were allowed to talk about with the passengers in the back of our car so you're not

00:28:11.820 allowed to talk about politics uh religion or sport which um that is like all cab drivers do

00:28:17.700 talk about it

00:28:18.240 racism is not

00:28:20.480 on the list

00:28:20.920 you can still

00:28:22.400 tell a racist

00:28:23.000 joke

00:28:23.380 still do that

00:28:24.060 and

00:28:26.280 yeah

00:28:27.340 and if your

00:28:27.920 rating fell below

00:28:28.620 4.7 stars

00:28:29.720 you know

00:28:30.120 the customer

00:28:30.620 leaves you a

00:28:31.120 rating 1 to 5

00:28:31.900 stars every time

00:28:32.740 they have a

00:28:33.440 ride

00:28:33.820 if it fell below

00:28:35.680 4.7 stars

00:28:36.700 you would be

00:28:37.920 you could be

00:28:39.040 you ran the

00:28:39.600 risk of being

00:28:39.980 deactivated

00:28:41.160 so fired

00:28:41.780 all of the

00:28:43.480 shit it just

00:28:43.980 sounds like it's

00:28:44.620 from some kind

00:28:45.300 of novel

00:28:46.260 yeah

00:28:46.740 And yet, here we are, we are here in London, other people watching this maybe, using the Uber, buying stuff on Amazon, we're all buying these Primark t-shirts that are made by slave laborers, wherever they are, right?

00:29:01.140 We've all got phones that are made by Chinese people who are jumping out of factories because they hate it so much, with precious metals mined by slaves in Africa, whatever.

00:29:13.220 and on the one hand it's terrible on the other hand i don't see like literally as i i'm just

00:29:19.980 being honest as i see sit here right now i'm listening to all this and i'm going this is

00:29:23.280 horrible what can i do about it fuck all leave uber driver a tip nice big tip yeah yeah i mean

00:29:31.620 that is that i joke but that is actually um like one of the worst things about when i was driving

00:29:36.740 for uber is once you take out all your expenses you you basically earn just over the minimum wage

00:29:42.020 less than the london living wage so it was eight pounds something an hour it worked out once i'd

00:29:45.960 subtracted like you know car insurance for private hire drivers like 70 odd pounds a week three three

00:29:52.160 three grand a year which is quite high you know cost of washing the car regularly like valeting it

00:29:57.720 regularly so i mean yeah one thing you can do is leave uber drivers a tip even if it's just a few

00:30:03.400 pounds like every time you use it because they're not making enough money don't leave them leave

00:30:08.480 them five-star ratings unless i know unless someone was like really horrible as some real

00:30:12.660 reason not to leave them a five-star rating just as standard things like this can and also

00:30:17.820 when there's a court case going on now with um uber drivers uh like in the final stage i think

00:30:25.500 it goes to the high court where the drivers have claimed they're not really self-employed um based

00:30:30.760 on the things some the kinds of things i've i've told told you today um and uber's lost two court

00:30:37.680 cases and it's going to the high court and whether Uber drivers should be classed as self-employed

00:30:42.520 contractors or workers. So there's self-employed, workers, and then employees. It's like a mid

00:30:47.900 category. So they would then be entitled to the minimum wage and annual leave. And so I'd say,

00:30:52.980 you know, follow the case. And there are ways to support the kind of the trade unions which

00:30:58.640 are pursuing that case. Yeah, I mean, like if you just look into it, there are ways to offer support

00:31:04.580 to those drivers who are saying that they're not actually self-employed.

00:31:08.460 I guess my point more broadly, though, is I feel like that is something that requires

00:31:12.740 a systemic solution because, take your book, it's on Amazon, right?

00:31:17.820 And you've talked about the fact that you had to put it on Amazon because otherwise

00:31:21.120 no one would publish it.

00:31:22.540 Yeah.

00:31:22.720 So the power of these massive, and I'm not saying that as a kind of you're a hypocrite

00:31:26.840 kind of thing because I totally get it because it's a trap.

00:31:29.100 We're all in this trap.

00:31:30.000 these corporations have so much power now and they have such a hold over the the running of

00:31:37.800 our societies the market for these goods the market for these services the market for this

00:31:42.040 labor that we're all trapped in it and i and i guess the question is is there anything that

00:31:49.600 even at the government level we can do about it now yeah i mean i thought you were going to every

00:31:54.200 every every book talk i do there's always one person who uh says oh your book's for sale on

00:31:59.100 amazon and it's like they think no one's ever asked me that before yeah so i had like it's

00:32:03.340 this this brilliant like gotcha but no i thought you were going to do that no i was about to walk

00:32:07.760 out but i told you i told you man it's not what we do here i might we really just want to get to

00:32:12.560 the bottom of it and what i see and i think what a lot of people see you know andrew yang is a

00:32:16.860 presidential candidate in america who's talked about you know automation and the impact that's

00:32:20.940 going to have is all of this shit is trapping us into the system from which there is no escape and

00:32:27.340 And the problem, as Francis said very accurately, they don't pay tax.

00:32:31.780 So even the benefits of automation, of all of this stuff, of slave-driving Romanians to work harder and harder,

00:32:39.720 we're still not seeing the benefits of that as a society.

00:32:42.840 That's just going into the pockets of billionaires.

00:32:45.320 Yeah, I mean, Amazon's only in Luxembourg because geographically it's in the center of Europe.

00:32:50.460 It's not because of the tax.

00:32:53.360 That's their argument.

00:32:54.700 I'm sure they do loads of sales in Luxembourg.

00:32:56.620 It's a huge market, isn't it?

00:32:57.800 It's a great country.

00:32:58.640 Lots to do there.

00:33:00.900 If you're a tax advisor, especially.

00:33:03.420 Yeah, I mean, the Amazon, in terms of the book thing,

00:33:05.900 is the, so yeah, I get this question all the time.

00:33:08.900 And the first answer is that my publisher

00:33:11.360 wouldn't publish me if I said I'm not going to sell,

00:33:13.680 I refuse to sell it on Amazon.

00:33:15.480 They'd just find someone else to do it

00:33:17.280 because Amazon's the biggest book distributor.

00:33:19.440 If any book which boycotts Amazon typically,

00:33:22.680 it's going to bomb.

00:33:23.580 It's not going to,

00:33:24.080 because that's where most people buy their books now.

00:33:26.620 And, you know, the idea that it's hypocritical is also, it kind of falls down because authors don't benefit from this.

00:33:33.480 Amazon discounts heavily.

00:33:35.160 Therefore, authors are getting a smaller cut from those books discounted which are sold and secondhand books, obviously.

00:33:42.160 So you get kind of, I got screwed in the warehouse, then screwed by when I put my book for sale on Amazon as well.

00:33:48.960 And it's a case of, you know, with audiobooks, pretty much everyone gets their audiobooks from Audible,

00:33:54.820 now which is an amazon company so it's i mean a publisher cannot put a book on audible but then

00:34:01.860 just no one's going to see it or buy it you have it's almost a monopoly basically so you don't

00:34:06.880 really have a choice as a as a producer you know of of books and whatever not to not to put it on

00:34:13.800 on those those things and and yeah you see that kind of that creep into into other areas like

00:34:19.440 like they want to get into amazon and other companies want to get into healthcare now

00:34:22.620 they have all this data on us um they're also they're also you know with with google etc and

00:34:29.140 and ads they're also selling us things based on on data they have about us you know selling us

00:34:34.480 things almost you're you're kind of buying things almost subconsciously because you're you're being

00:34:38.880 bombarded with these ads that they've where from this data they've accumulated about us it's like

00:34:43.700 that isn't my area but you can see where it's kind of going oh we've had people on the show we had a

00:34:48.360 A good friend of mine, Pippa Malmgren, who's a former presidential advisor, has her own tech company now, talks about all this stuff.

00:34:55.080 But the question for me is, what do we do about the power of these corporations and the way that they're treating people and the fact that as consumers, I mean, you can tell people don't use Amazon, right?

00:35:09.380 But it's like saying to people, don't go outside, you know, as a solution to a particular – it's not going to work because of, as I said, the power that they've now accumulated, right?

00:35:18.160 So is there something that the government can do?

00:35:21.380 Is there something that, you know, do we need some kind of legislation in place to deal with these things?

00:35:26.960 Is there a solution that you think that might work?

00:35:30.080 Yeah, I mean, I don't think, like, consumer boycotts are the be-all and end-all of taking on these companies which treat people like this.

00:35:37.580 I mean, personally, I think one of the things that's missing in, say, the Amazon warehouse is there's no trade union in there.

00:35:43.820 I mean, if you had, if you have, this is part of a broader question of kind of the kind of death of kind of grassroots, like aisles of like working class democracy, whether that be kind of social clubs, whether that's trade unions, whether even like religious organizations, the kind of like, and this isn't necessarily a left wing argument.

00:36:04.020 So Edmund Burke, you know, the little platoons where you have these kind of small kind of organizations where where you can kind of have that democratic kind of forum like at a grassroots level.

00:36:16.080 And you need that in. You need to make it easier for trade unions to get into places like Amazon, because at the moment, if you go giving out trade union forms in the car, even in the car, this huge car park of Amazon, you're chased off by security film, the police are called just to give out forms to tell workers what their rights are.

00:36:31.900 Um, and if you, if you get, if you have workers organizing themselves in these places, government has to do less as well. So you don't need the government kind of constantly having to send people from HMRC to these companies because it becomes self, an organic self, self-regulating, um, thing. If you, if you have a union, which willing to, to talk with management, but willing to also strike when, um, when some of these things, you know, ridiculous things are going on in the, in these workplaces.

00:37:00.660 But you have to, I mean, empowering people themselves, the very people who work in these places is, I think, what we need to do.

00:37:07.700 Because if you just legislate from top down, if you just pass these laws, sometimes they only exist on paper because, as we talked about already, the people in those places either don't know the law or have no means to actually enforce them.

00:37:19.760 whereas if you get workers banding together and organizing themselves you can actually

00:37:26.720 you can actually take a stand against against some of this stuff but that's kind of the trade

00:37:33.760 union movement has been partly the fault of the unions themselves partly the fault of

00:37:37.400 legislation and the changing nature of work the union movement's been been declining for the last

00:37:42.600 kind of 30 30 almost 40 years i guess now and james when you were telling me this again and

00:37:49.240 you were explaining, it's really terrifying and it's very, very scary. Do you think that

00:37:54.200 we're moving towards that sort of future where the majority of jobs are going to be like that

00:37:58.540 and it's only going to be a select few that are actually protecting you've got workers' rights

00:38:03.140 as we compete more and more with China and all the other countries?

00:38:07.280 I mean, it's certainly possible with the kind of... There was a very good book I read recently

00:38:12.640 called The Globotics Revolution. And it was about kind of how we really failed... The last period

00:38:18.180 of disruption, like deindustrialization, say the 80s and 90s. I mean, I visited some of those

00:38:24.280 places in the book, say South Wales. We really failed to, it left such an appalling legacy in

00:38:30.180 many parts of the country. So in Blano Gwent in South Wales, you still have one in six people

00:38:35.820 on antidepressants, which is a legacy of kind of worklessness since the pits and the power

00:38:43.660 stations and steelworks were all closed, not all, but mostly closed very rapidly. And people didn't

00:38:49.300 get new jobs and kind of just stagnated and got ill and et cetera. And his argument, this book

00:38:58.140 argues that if we fail this time with the next big wave of disruptions coming in terms of jobs

00:39:04.420 being outsourced to say, you can get a Chinese graduate to translate a piece of work now for

00:39:10.720 you over the internet at a fraction of the price of what people are doing it for in Britain. So

00:39:15.280 these jobs are going, you have automation, robots doing people's jobs. And if we deal with this

00:39:21.220 disruption as poorly as we dealt with the last wave of disruption, you will have this situation

00:39:25.400 where there are kind of waves of middle class people thrown out of work as well. So you will

00:39:32.200 have this big kind of section of the population which is doing just unskilled work such as I've

00:39:40.560 done in the book, which is poorly remunerated. You lack kind of security. You can't get a house

00:39:46.140 or something or a mortgage on this stuff. And those people are typically very angry. And then

00:39:52.340 there's a political backlash from that, as we've seen. This book argues that Brexit is partly the

00:39:58.060 kind of the delayed kind of backlash to the last wave of the last disruption. So you have these

00:40:03.380 people in places like Sunderland, places like South Wales, where the industrialization over

00:40:08.560 a period of years has left these kind of angry middle-aged men, basically, who've not been able

00:40:15.720 to work, who feel like society has left them behind. And they've kind of kicked back against

00:40:19.600 the system with Brexit in the States with the election of Trump, places in, say, France or

00:40:25.760 Eastern Germany by voting for Marine Le Pen or the AFD in Germany. And it can only get worse if

00:40:33.380 more and more people are put through that kind of disruption. If it's the biggest section of

00:40:38.280 societies put through that disruption, the worse the political backlash will be. And you could

00:40:43.720 again see something like in the 1930s. I know this is always bandied around and several years

00:40:49.980 ago, people were comparing Trump to Hitler and all this ridiculous nonsense. But if there's that

00:40:56.340 much economic disruption, it's usually followed by nasty political extremism, usually the far

00:41:04.060 right and then followed by kind of stalinism and all this all this this crap as well so well this

00:41:10.440 is the thing is like we talked about andre young a bit earlier this is one of the things that he

00:41:14.280 talks about is that if you look at the election of donald trump uh the states that he won that

00:41:19.520 he really needed to win there were the states where four million jobs i think he talks about

00:41:24.100 automated away and it's only going to get much much worse now uh shopping malls are going to

00:41:29.720 closed, trucking jobs are going to go, as you say, middle class, like translation, a lot of legal

00:41:36.320 documents just get drafted automatically now or will be in the next 10 years. So it's going to

00:41:41.180 get worse. And this is why it has to be talked about and it has to be addressed. And it's not

00:41:47.440 just the right, like, you know, you talk about from the left, but to people on the right, I would

00:41:51.940 say as well, look at the Romanians who are working in the Amazon warehouse, right? They are the

00:41:57.700 reason that to some extent people are concerned about the levels of immigration because we've had

00:42:02.540 a lot of immigration and you know if we weren't creating these conditions in which most British

00:42:08.640 people wouldn't even want to work right you wouldn't have these people coming over here in

00:42:12.420 the first place so it's not a left versus right issue this is an issue that's going to affect

00:42:16.520 everybody isn't it I mean it's a huge issue can I just interrupt what's your day job Constantine

00:42:22.500 I don't have one.

00:42:23.300 I'm a full-time comedian.

00:42:25.340 And trigonometry.

00:42:26.460 And trigonometry.

00:42:27.360 I used to be a translator.

00:42:28.580 Yeah, I used to be a translator.

00:42:30.720 So give money to Constantine, basically.

00:42:34.840 Actually, before I stopped doing it, pretty much,

00:42:38.200 automation's happening, man.

00:42:39.960 Yeah, you put something into Google Translate,

00:42:42.040 it does as good a job as 90% of translators.

00:42:45.680 Really?

00:42:46.180 Yeah, for basic things.

00:42:47.780 If you just want to understand the meaning of a text,

00:42:50.740 it's enough

00:42:52.080 and it's only going to continue

00:42:55.140 so lots of people are going to lose their job

00:42:57.420 but let's talk about the political

00:42:58.980 side of this, when you wrote the book

00:43:01.180 it came out last year, right, 2018

00:43:03.060 yeah

00:43:03.640 what was the response to that

00:43:07.060 first of all from the companies involved

00:43:09.260 and also from

00:43:11.340 the wider public, politicians, etc

00:43:13.360 I mean the response from the companies

00:43:15.420 it varied from extremely hostile

00:43:17.320 to no response, so Amazon

00:43:19.480 just yeah it was extremely hostile so anytime i was on uh on on the tv or on the radio they would

00:43:27.080 um you know put out a statement first of all it was disputing kind of specific things you know

00:43:33.460 like james only works at amazon like nine days or something but it's like this is spread over the

00:43:38.500 the month so it's like in shifts so it kind of doesn't make any difference doesn't really mean

00:43:42.180 anything then things like you know we we don't have any we don't employ people on zero hours

00:43:46.880 contracts at amazon which yeah you get an agency to employ people on zero hours contracts then it

00:43:52.340 became about um you know james only wrote this book to get publicity like it's like it's not you

00:44:00.920 can't it's nothing you can prove or disprove it's just um you know james only wrote this

00:44:05.580 sensationalized stuff to sell books and like what can you say to that my job is to sell books but

00:44:10.940 that doesn't mean i'm making things up as i said when companies didn't behave like that i was very

00:44:15.060 honest about that and you as a journalist like your job is bound up with your the integrity of

00:44:20.920 what you write so the idea that I'm going to go and make stuff up and like put my whole reputation

00:44:25.660 on the line to to say that people at Amazon were afraid to go to the toilet just make that up

00:44:31.460 is is nonsense and it's all backed up by surveys that have been done of the workers in these

00:44:35.860 warehouses so a group called Organize did a survey of workers in the Rugeley Amazon warehouse I worked

00:44:41.200 and found 74% of people who work there

00:44:43.580 were afraid to go to the toilet

00:44:44.660 because of productivity targets.

00:44:46.440 So then when I find a bottle of urine in the warehouse,

00:44:49.420 a Coke bottle filled with urine in the warehouse,

00:44:51.440 because someone's been afraid to go to the toilet,

00:44:54.440 it makes sense.

00:44:55.700 It's not like I'm just making something up.

00:44:57.920 It's like you can see the situation

00:44:59.040 where why this is going on.

00:45:02.280 So Amazon, yeah, it's been very hostile.

00:45:04.740 They've not owned, as it were,

00:45:06.320 their mistakes, in my view. They increased the minimum wage for their workers in British and

00:45:16.820 American warehouses last year. But it was only after a slew of negative publicity from my book,

00:45:24.500 from the GMB trade union, Bernie Sanders did this big campaign against Amazon. Then suddenly they

00:45:29.860 realize that maybe they're not paying people

00:45:31.840 enough money.

00:45:34.860 Jeff Bezos

00:45:35.860 portrays it as

00:45:37.860 this great act of philanthropy on his part

00:45:39.880 when he's basically just been shamed into

00:45:41.540 doing it. Uber haven't responded

00:45:44.060 at all, presumably

00:45:45.900 because they'd say that they didn't employ anyone.

00:45:50.100 Admiral haven't responded, presumably

00:45:51.980 because I was

00:45:53.340 fairly generous towards them.

00:45:55.940 It kind of speaks for itself.

00:45:57.660 And the care company

00:45:58.820 you know of um they didn't respond specifically to um they just said something like you know we

00:46:05.100 we we do our best in a difficult environment we don't necessarily uh we don't necessarily agree

00:46:11.600 with agree with the representation of the sector that james has portrayed in the book but it wasn't

00:46:15.600 it wasn't kind of um that hostile or anything that was like one time they said this but it was amazon

00:46:20.700 has been the most hostile was have there been any politicians who took this as something to

00:46:25.660 to work on to run on to talk about yeah i mean i've i've been um i've always forgotten that

00:46:31.520 because most of that was last year i mean i've been um i did some videos with bernie sarnes in

00:46:35.420 the states um which is pretty cool we did some um we're losing we're losing viewers by the second

00:46:41.040 bernie sarnes socialism yeah so look neither of us is a big fan of socialism but this like i say

00:46:48.660 this is this is not a partisan issue this is an issue that's going to affect everybody

00:46:52.400 yeah so i mean we did i did some videos of bernie signers but then also i've got some

00:46:57.020 endorsements in my book from you know conservative um i can't remember who know but there are you

00:47:03.260 know there's conservatives endorsed my book i went to i've been to speak at like conservative

00:47:06.560 think tanks i also speak to uh pension investment funds businesses about this stuff so it's not

00:47:12.660 again it's not just it's not just being on the left that makes you want to see people treated

00:47:17.860 with dignity and and respect um and have some security in their lives i think that's a

00:47:23.380 the the book isn't a polemic it isn't like a i don't isn't a sermon it isn't a kind of

00:47:30.040 isn't something you read in the newspaper of the communist party of britain marxist leninist

00:47:34.760 it's it's it's kind of more a moral argument that um just because you don't go to university just

00:47:41.780 because you don't leave your the town you live you're born in brought up in just because you're

00:47:45.480 not say necessarily academic doesn't mean you're any less of a human being doesn't mean you're

00:47:49.520 you're you deserve to be treated in this way that people are treated often in the book it's um it's

00:47:55.840 very straightforward a very simple argument that i think anyone wherever they stand politically can

00:48:00.420 well unless you're you you you believe in the works of an rand i guess i guess it's um you

00:48:06.860 can you can buy into that i think he's a great writer to be fair

00:48:09.520 guys we wanted to tell you we're very excited to say we've got a new sponsor which is hello fresh

00:48:19.220 indeed we have hello fresh is a uk's leading recipe box service delivering fresh pre-portioned

00:48:26.180 ingredients and step-by-step recipes to your door it is the easy convenient way to cook delicious

00:48:32.800 dinners from scratch every single time. Choose your favorites from 19 recipes every week. They

00:48:40.000 have a whole range of options there for you, including recipes that are ready in under 20

00:48:44.360 minutes. There's family favorites, there's British cuisine, there's world cuisine, there's even a 550

00:48:50.560 calorie or under range. And that's a great thing because as you may have noticed in the time that

00:48:55.320 we've been doing the show, Francis has actually lost quite a bit of weight. So congratulations

00:48:59.300 to him on going from being massively fat to just being really fat. That's great. And if you want

00:49:04.920 to achieve the same results as Francis, keep eating lard. But if you want to be healthy and

00:49:09.520 slim like me, check out these extra healthy recipes from HelloFresh. Yes. I think that's good.

00:49:15.740 Yes. The fresh ingredients come direct from suppliers, i.e. they've been picked by Constantine's

00:49:21.700 family. You can tell Francis studied geography at a British school because he can't tell the

00:49:26.340 difference between Russia and Romania. Doesn't matter, mate. Same thing. Brexit means Brexit.

00:49:31.640 And the great thing is it's been pre-portioned for you. So there's no food waste, just like in

00:49:36.880 my home country of Venezuela. The great thing with HelloFresh is that you're going to be able

00:49:41.240 to choose from 19 different recipes every week. So there is something for everybody. You're going

00:49:46.900 to be able to eat with your kids. There's going to be no fuss. Dinner time is going to be solved.

00:49:51.740 Yeah, I really like the rapid box, which allows you to cook things in under 20 minutes.

00:49:56.340 But the great thing about HelloFresh as well is it actually allows you to open up your cooking range.

00:50:00.400 So most households on average have about six recipes that they cook regularly.

00:50:05.380 HelloFresh has up to 19, so you can kind of expand a little bit in terms of your cooking.

00:50:09.880 And, of course, they also don't have a fixed subscription, so there's no term.

00:50:13.300 You can cancel. You can skip weeks. You can change the size of the box.

00:50:17.540 You can change delivery address. You can do all kinds of stuff to suit your life.

00:50:20.840 to enjoy delicious moments head over to hellofresh.co.uk choose your box choose your

00:50:28.260 delivery slot and add your favorite recipes discover the easy way to get delicious dinners

00:50:33.560 from scratch and if you do that you'll get sick abs just like me hello fresh you're offering

00:50:39.200 trigonometry fans 60 pounds or four boxes to take advantage of that go to hellofresh.co.uk

00:50:46.440 enter our special code which is of course trigonometry and enjoy delicious dinners without

00:50:52.100 any of the drama so we've been talking we've touched on the left now so you're very much of

00:51:00.000 the left however you have had your uh your issues shall we say with some members with people on the

00:51:05.820 left where do you see the left at the moment and the way it's progressing yeah i mean yeah i kind

00:51:12.560 of fallen out with a lot of the left kind of persona non grata basically our face tattoos at

00:51:17.400 this point um in terms of in terms of say i wanted to be pursue a career on in politics or something

00:51:23.260 yeah that's that's not happening um but um why is that because hang on we've just been talking about

00:51:30.080 something that is you know the left should be absolute well everybody but in particular the

00:51:34.000 left should be absolutely outraged by and it fits their narrative of these global corporations who

00:51:39.160 don't care about the individual exploiting them and you come in and you expose them aren't you a

00:51:44.080 hero um i'm a bit of a troll online to be fair you wouldn't know about that i was i almost put

00:51:52.660 on my my strapline on twitter the other day like more left-wing in person yeah but but i'm no i

00:51:58.680 mean there's there i do have genuine beef i do have a genuine beef with with a lot of the left

00:52:04.040 over things like um a lot of it revolves around kind of foreign policy stuff so so when you know

00:52:11.200 years ago i lived in cuba for six months like 10 years just over 10 years ago um you know i saw all

00:52:18.960 kinds of things going on that i saw friends arrested for you know speaking out against the

00:52:23.520 government fired from the university in havana for for writing some mildly critical article about

00:52:28.460 the government people not allowed to leave the country without permission from the state not

00:52:31.920 allowed to move to different parts of the country without permission from the state uh you see what's

00:52:35.840 going on in venezuela now and these like a few years ago you have all these kind of people kind

00:52:43.380 of like fanboys of venezuela saying about jeremy corbyn owen jones it's the you know this is a new

00:52:49.560 model of socialism we need to pursue meanwhile oh god kill me now i remember i used to work

00:52:56.620 this blog Left Foot Forward

00:52:57.700 used to edit it

00:52:58.440 and I remember once

00:53:00.240 Boris Johnson was making

00:53:01.860 this announcement

00:53:02.280 he wanted to bring

00:53:02.880 water cannons to London

00:53:03.820 and we were kind of

00:53:05.400 writing this stuff

00:53:06.040 you know this is a bad idea

00:53:07.120 I remember Owen Jones

00:53:08.600 writing this stuff

00:53:09.420 for the newspaper

00:53:10.940 or tweeting

00:53:11.420 you know this is a disgrace

00:53:12.860 Boris Johnson wants

00:53:14.740 to water cannon people

00:53:15.500 in London

00:53:15.880 meanwhile

00:53:16.680 and he'd just written

00:53:17.460 an article about

00:53:17.920 how great Venezuela was

00:53:18.840 and meanwhile

00:53:19.160 they were actually

00:53:19.740 water cannon people

00:53:20.420 in Venezuela

00:53:20.980 protesters

00:53:21.600 yeah but it's very hot

00:53:22.740 out there

00:53:23.220 you need to be called

00:53:25.520 But apparently it doesn't count because they're Venezuelans.

00:53:30.940 And Syria, you know, Seamus Milne, Andrew Murray, all these people just, Assadists, support, you know, a million people being killed in Syria.

00:53:39.900 And they're kind of umming and ahhing about whether Assad's used chemical weapons and all this stuff.

00:53:47.400 That stuff is really sickening, I think.

00:53:49.780 But this is normal, right?

00:53:50.940 I mean, in terms of the left should be a place just like the right and like the center where people have different positions about foreign policy.

00:53:59.100 Yeah.

00:53:59.440 They have different positions about the Jews.

00:54:02.020 The Jews, right.

00:54:04.780 They have different views about different kinds of things.

00:54:08.100 Right.

00:54:08.660 And used to be like any party, any political movement, it's a broad church.

00:54:13.940 It's a coalition on the right.

00:54:15.300 You might have a Ken Clark conservative and you might have a Jacob Rees-Mogg conservative.

00:54:18.980 And then the same party, even though their views on Brexit, even though their views on many, many things would be completely different.

00:54:25.160 What seems to me to be happening on the left, as we kind of touched on, is there is this sense that there is one way.

00:54:34.420 And anyone who departs from that is automatically a heretic and they have to be exercised from the movement.

00:54:41.320 Is that accurate, do you feel?

00:54:42.840 Yeah.

00:54:43.140 I mean, so academic David Hirsch calls it the community of the good.

00:54:46.280 And if you think, if you're a heretic on one of these issues, if your thinking isn't aligned with the orthodoxy, you're cast out of the community of the good.

00:54:57.060 Unless you're Jeremy Corbyn and you secretly support Brexit, but yeah, you're allowed to stay for some reason.

00:55:05.160 Lifelong anti-racist.

00:55:07.640 But yeah, it's very much like that.

00:55:09.000 I think because being on the left, first of all, it's a hangover from Stalinism.

00:55:12.960 which Stalinism as a movement was it was very much like a like a teleological movement where

00:55:21.160 where you know if you're if you're wrong about like Che Guevara said once that you know he

00:55:26.640 wanted to nuke he wanted to fire a nuclear weapon at Miami because you're saving the lives of future

00:55:31.400 unborn children or something ridiculous it's um that's that's the I can't remember there I think

00:55:37.080 said it but it's anyway that's that's the mentality that you have to be ideologically like perfect

00:55:43.080 because you know it's a life and death struggle it's um you look good on a t-shirt though james

00:55:47.820 yeah um if if you're um you know if you're wrong about something it has these life and death

00:55:55.160 consequences so you know if you support austerity you're responsible for the the deaths of like 10

00:55:59.440 000 people or whatever i see people posting this stuff on twitter all the time you can't have a

00:56:03.760 you can't have a debate like that on those grounds because then you have to know if someone's really

00:56:09.840 responsible for the deaths of 10 000 people or the deaths the deaths deaths of future unborn

00:56:15.300 children you you obviously have to no platform them you like if that's you know you murderers

00:56:20.260 you can't have those people within civilized debate and once you start thinking like that

00:56:24.280 the same with no platforming you know no platforming feminists now some some kind of

00:56:30.960 Radical feminists are being no-platformed on the left because the people who are doing that see this as, you know, you're denying someone's right to exist.

00:56:39.100 When you frame things in those terms as this kind of struggle, black and white struggle, this binary struggle of good versus evil,

00:56:46.900 then it becomes very easy to just then completely like de-platform, completely kind of like exclude people from the community of the good.

00:56:56.280 Or in states where that's the ruling ideology to put them in prison and kill them.

00:57:00.960 I mean, that's what happened in the Soviet Union.

00:57:05.080 And again, you don't need to compare, you know, exaggerate and compare our current situation to that.

00:57:10.940 But there's a way of thinking, which in such kind of simple, moralistic kind of teleological terms where history has this end point and you've got to do, what's a mere human being who's excluded from the debate if we're heading towards this glorious socialist future?

00:57:27.520 that way of thinking has permeated

00:57:30.760 kind of thinking on the left

00:57:32.860 I think in sections of the left

00:57:35.000 at any rate

00:57:35.860 and why do you think that it's come back

00:57:37.780 because the way you're talking

00:57:39.120 it's my mother's from Venezuela

00:57:41.560 and that's a sign for everybody

00:57:43.720 who listens to the podcast

00:57:44.940 or watches it to have a drink

00:57:46.280 but why has it come back

00:57:50.640 because you think surely it's 2019

00:57:52.320 we should have seen

00:57:54.160 that these systems don't work

00:57:56.240 They just simply don't function.

00:57:58.760 Yeah, I mean, I guess it's politics.

00:58:00.980 I mean, we talked about reasons why politics is kind of chaotic right now.

00:58:06.480 I mean, you have these sections of the population heavily disenfranchised.

00:58:11.300 I think, though, on the other hand, I think that, and there's also, I mean, other authors, Jamie Bartlett, for example, who writes a lot about tech stuff.

00:58:20.340 He can talk about things like why societies become more polarized online and the online arena, whatever.

00:58:27.840 But I think politics has taken on a kind of religious hue, if you like, again.

00:58:33.800 So it's become much more of a surrogate religion, or as Nietzsche called it, a degenerated Christianity.

00:58:40.760 So you speak to people who are really enthused by Jeremy Corbyn.

00:58:44.740 And what they'll say is, they'll say, oh, you know, Corbyn's giving me a reason to get up in the morning.

00:58:51.500 Jesus.

00:58:53.800 But they'll say this to you.

00:58:55.480 They'll say this to you, you know, since Corbyn was elected.

00:58:57.040 You hear this all the time if you go to, I can't go to these things anymore.

00:59:00.900 But if you go to a momentum thing or whatever you speak to, especially some of the older people, it's like a religious mania.

00:59:09.760 It's like he's given them something to get up in the morning.

00:59:12.080 and for many people this is you know they get that from from religion but many people on the

00:59:18.440 left get that from the socialist movement so oscar wilde said i think that you know he said

00:59:23.440 that the problem with socialism is it takes up too many evenings well for some people this is

00:59:26.880 why they like it yeah it's because it gives their life a meaning because they don't have things to

00:59:30.580 do in the evenings they get to go to a meeting they get to feel like they're they're changing

00:59:34.320 the world um and imbues them with a certain morality as well a sense of we are the right

00:59:38.860 we are on the right side of history. We are doing something good. We care about other people.

00:59:43.200 Yeah. And so like, personally, I'm kind of an absurdist. I think life has no meaning. I think

00:59:49.080 it's, you know, a big kind of follower of Albert Camus. I think life essentially has no meaning

00:59:54.720 beyond which the meaning which you create for it. And that may not have any intrinsic value in

00:59:58.660 itself. But some people can't accept that. You know, some people need that kind of that feeling

01:00:05.660 that life has some purpose to it. And I think most people probably do. But I think because the

01:00:11.380 world's become more chaotic, seemingly in the last, say, decades, since the recession,

01:00:17.120 with the disruption in work and things like the rise of disruptive behavior from Russia,

01:00:25.420 the war in Syria, all of this stuff, when the world's chaotic, you see a gravitation again

01:00:31.680 towards these certainties of whether it's religion

01:00:34.060 or whether it's a surrogate religion,

01:00:36.300 such as, say, communism.

01:00:37.780 Well, it's interesting talking about socialism,

01:00:40.000 what you were asking,

01:00:41.000 why this ideology is resurgent to some extent.

01:00:44.180 I was trolled by some American socialists on Twitter

01:00:47.860 a few weeks ago by the time this comes out

01:00:50.340 because Carlos Maza,

01:00:52.440 the guy who got Steven Crowder banned off YouTube,

01:00:55.520 he tweeted out saying,

01:00:56.880 be gay, be socialist, no platform bigots.

01:01:00.960 and i retweeted it and i said i grew up in a socialist country in the soviet union and you

01:01:06.820 would have been put in prison there for being gay so how about you just notice that you live

01:01:12.280 in the freest society in the history of the world and be grateful for that uh and a bunch of his

01:01:17.420 followers came and it's all like teenagers really yeah it's all teenagers it's all very very young

01:01:23.700 people and i think partly that is because there are some genuine problems that you and i've covered

01:01:28.360 on the show a lot, which is if you're a young person, you can't buy a house. You're not going

01:01:33.340 to earn property. As you talk about your career, you're not going to have a career necessarily.

01:01:37.820 You're going to have jobs, but you're not going to have a career. You don't know what you're going

01:01:41.860 to be doing 10 or 15 years from now in terms of work. You don't know whether you're going to have

01:01:46.120 a job. You don't know whether you're going to have income. So it's an economically and financially

01:01:50.340 very unstable time as well. And I think that's one of the reasons that some things make a comeback

01:01:55.820 because it's hard to say to those kids, well, capitalism is great

01:01:59.880 because it's not great for them, you know.

01:02:02.360 So I do think that these issues, which is why I'm so glad you've come on the show,

01:02:06.720 these issues need to be talked about in a rounded way.

01:02:09.940 You can't – look, we've had Toby Young on the show a couple of times

01:02:12.760 and I like Toby and I think he has some good ideas.

01:02:15.100 But, you know, when he's just talking about capitalism as a thing

01:02:18.540 that's going to save everything, well, no, it's not.

01:02:20.840 There are going to be people who lose out massively.

01:02:23.220 And these things need to be addressed.

01:02:25.220 But one of the things I wanted to ask you about is one of the things that's happened on the left, it seems to me, is that I guess I feel like a lot more of them would care about those people that you've written about if their skin color was the right color and if they were trans or if they were LGBT or whatever.

01:02:42.740 And I get the sense that we've become hyper-racialized and hyper-sensitive to all of these things, and that's driving a lot of the narrative on the left.

01:02:50.480 Is that fair to say?

01:02:51.120 well i think it's it's basically the the decline of the politics of class in a way in the i think

01:02:58.900 it's people think even people ostensibly of the left um are basically liberals in their thinking

01:03:05.840 about class so they think that's kind of been even though they may again they may kind of pose

01:03:11.820 as leftists or whatever they're not really bothered about exploitation in in the that sense

01:03:17.640 in the sense of class.

01:03:18.620 So they behave as if that riddle has been solved,

01:03:24.180 the riddle of class conflicts has been solved.

01:03:29.260 And they behave as if society would be fine

01:03:33.820 if in the Amazon boardroom you had 50% men,

01:03:36.820 50% women, and 12% ethnic minorities.

01:03:40.320 Never mind what went on further down the chain.

01:03:42.480 As long as it's representative,

01:03:45.700 then we've kind of solved that.

01:03:46.900 one trans board member, you've kind of solved this problem. And this kind of attitude kind

01:03:55.460 of permeates a lot of what passes for left-wing politics now, even from people who purport to be

01:04:03.560 very radical and very left-wing. They actually want to keep the basic structure of society in

01:04:08.620 place, just make it more representative. And I also think that its identity has become this,

01:04:14.840 like identity many of the people in my book many many men particularly in my book who felt very

01:04:23.160 disenfranchised there was like an identity crisis going on beyond uh things like deprivation and

01:04:28.700 material poverty it wasn't just it wasn't just material poverty there was there was kind of an

01:04:32.820 identity crisis going on so to be like a man say several hundred years ago your identity may have

01:04:40.980 been defined by say fighting in a war or you know not that this isn't necessarily i'm not saying this

01:04:45.560 is a positive thing or you know working in a in a steelworks or a factory or something as a

01:04:51.040 producer someone who did things somebody went on adventures somebody made things someone who even

01:04:55.120 you know killed things it's um again so provided for their family yeah and and a lot of it revolves

01:05:00.360 around the the status of providing supporting children supporting supporting your wife etc

01:05:04.720 and then that's kind of passed away to some extent and we've kind of said that you know

01:05:12.880 that doesn't matter because you can derive your identity from being a consumer so no longer based

01:05:18.720 on what you produce no longer based on where you go what you do who you protect or whatever you

01:05:23.040 support but now it's just you know your identity is derived from what you buy and this has proven

01:05:28.800 you know insufficient for lots of people people they're still people very unsatisfied it doesn't

01:05:33.460 feel like you know you may be able to to dress or you may be able to dress in the attire of your

01:05:38.960 favorite celebrity but you've still got to go back to the your your bad job the next day you've still

01:05:43.500 got all these social problems around you etc and but at the same time i think for middle class

01:05:49.220 affluent middle class people the world of kind of identity politics that it's all just it kind of

01:05:56.000 in some ways i still think i think it's not really beneficial to them either but i think

01:06:01.300 it plays into this kind of narcissism this narcissism of small differences so you know

01:06:05.580 i identify as you know you see people with their with their strap lines on their twitter profiles

01:06:10.360 you know what they identify as and it's it's just like like so what so fucking what it's like it's

01:06:15.800 just this this narcissism of small differences where you split the differences smaller and

01:06:19.380 smaller and smaller and it's just a form of hyper individualism where you're separating up into

01:06:23.980 smaller and smaller groups which to me is is left being left-wing is about universalism is about

01:06:29.260 coming together to fight for kind of common, for common aims. And that seems to me to be the

01:06:35.480 opposite of that. It's about the narcissism of small differences. It's about these ideological

01:06:41.560 wars against all these different smaller factions, whether you're, you know, whether you're a TERF or

01:06:46.560 whether you're pro-trans or whether you're, yeah, all of this stuff. And it's, to me, that's just an

01:06:54.960 extension of of near what's called neoliberal politics there's not really much that's left

01:07:01.020 about that at all to my mind anyway well i'm offended anyway good to finish with a bit of

01:07:06.080 toxic masculinity there from james just outing himself as a typical straight white man punching

01:07:10.720 down yeah at poor people who i don't self-identify as a fucking rabbit or whatever it is and that

01:07:16.480 sounds you can hear james is the entire trigonometry audience standing up and giving

01:07:19.800 you were standing in a race.

01:07:21.800 Not big fans of identity politics on the show.

01:07:24.560 But this is the conversation that needs to be had, man,

01:07:28.200 because the differences between the real left

01:07:30.880 and the real right are much smaller now

01:07:32.700 than the differences between these woke people

01:07:34.600 and everyone else because they're fucking mental.

01:07:37.140 They've gone off the deep end.

01:07:39.460 My favorite moments with them is when, like I said,

01:07:41.980 my mother is from Venezuela and I've had relatives

01:07:44.800 who are journalists who I speak to and they go,

01:07:46.880 well, you know, I could disappear at any moment.

01:07:49.140 and they then come in and lecture me about Venezuela.

01:07:54.120 It's wonderful.

01:07:55.320 And on that happy note...

01:07:57.080 And in no way it makes me want to wrap a chair around their face.

01:07:59.560 Anyway, and on that note...

01:08:00.880 You should do that sometime.

01:08:02.080 I would totally back you on, man.

01:08:03.740 Thank you.

01:08:04.440 Well, it'll be the last ever episode of Trigonometry.

01:08:06.620 Right, okay.

01:08:07.360 So the question that we always finish with is the same question.

01:08:12.020 Do you want to give it, Constantine?

01:08:13.320 Yeah.

01:08:13.760 What is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society

01:08:16.620 that we should be talking about?

01:08:19.140 I would say, I mean, some of the things we've covered already, I would say the kind of identity

01:08:24.500 crisis, particularly among men. But in saying that, I don't mean to exclude people from that

01:08:32.320 conversation. It's not a case of, so you have people who talk about this in a way that does

01:08:37.320 exclude others. So it's not a question of just white working class men. I think there's generally

01:08:42.980 an identity crisis in terms of what it means to be a man in the 21st century. I'm going to be

01:08:49.120 looking at this in another book, in a forthcoming book at some point. I hope when I get around to

01:08:54.600 doing that. But I think if you look at rates of suicide depression amongst men in especially

01:09:01.480 working class areas, those things tend to be very high. And that debate tends to be sidelined

01:09:07.200 because upper class wealthy white men have done very well in our society at the expense of other

01:09:15.980 groups very often, particularly women, particularly members of ethnic minorities. But just carte

01:09:23.040 blanche talking about privileged white men, it's another way to give those people who,

01:09:29.560 in terms of the class system, sit at the bottom of that system, give them another kicking.

01:09:33.660 And I think there's a profound identity crisis at the moment amongst many young men, particularly

01:09:39.180 in America. You see the rise of these movements, the incels, the kind of men's rights movements,

01:09:45.600 which some of that is quite toxic some of that really does play up to the toxic masculinity

01:09:49.860 label that's applied to it but you know i'm i'm someone who's on a socialist social democrat

01:09:56.600 socialist still i like i like to look at the causes of these things rather than just saying

01:10:01.760 you know these are deplorables or bad people i want to know why people are gravitating towards

01:10:05.960 those movements why there's this this big rise in kind of so-called involuntary celibates and

01:10:11.440 people who just feel that they're completely alienated from say the dating world from from

01:10:15.760 from members of the opposite sex from society in general and i don't think we're i think there's a

01:10:20.920 big reluctance to talk about that no one wants to talk about why so just to kind of finish i guess

01:10:26.720 with with the incels say it's easy to just talk about oh they're just losers they're just they're

01:10:32.120 just you know losers who just can't find a girlfriend can't can't get laid you know you

01:10:36.520 whatever. And maybe that's true, but why is this phenomenon happening now? Shouldn't we try then

01:10:42.300 to get these people socialized so they can meet members of the opposite or the same sex?

01:10:47.220 You know the program, they're men, man. They're men.

01:10:49.460 Yeah, it seems to be a very dismissive attitude towards people. Yeah, and I don't think this is

01:10:56.460 healthy at all. And again, I think that's another of those things where just painting it in a very

01:11:01.020 moralistic thing of there's just these bad people, these deplorables. You're just storing up even

01:11:05.760 more problems for the future and even more of a backlash when these people are just left to kind

01:11:13.480 of rot, essentially. Yeah. Well, it's a crisis of meaning because if you take that meaning away

01:11:18.600 from people, they will find their own meaning one way or another. And if you don't give them

01:11:22.980 access to meaning that's healthy and fulfilling and supportive of society, they will find a way

01:11:27.960 to sabotage society. They'll find some kind of meaning or some kind of group that fights against

01:11:33.520 whatever is in existence yeah i mean we see i mean we see this um like the rise in say like

01:11:40.500 like people are attracted to say islamism like extremists extremist kind of um islamist politics

01:11:46.920 um leaving the uk to go and fight for the islamic state again it's it's a search for meaning it's

01:11:51.940 it's a it's a it's a search for kind of meaning in a world where you feel you feel alienated from

01:11:58.420 in a society you feel alienated from in a society where you feel like you're going through this

01:12:03.140 existential crisis, you can't see any kind of meaning to it. And it's manifested in something

01:12:07.660 extremely negative. There is no solution, a complete solution where you create the perfect

01:12:12.020 society. And you see it again with, but we look at that. I mean, we look at that and we assess

01:12:18.540 why these people are attracted to this thing. But then when it comes to why people are attracted to

01:12:23.620 say, go down this path of hatred and this disillusionment and negativity in terms of

01:12:31.420 in terms of young Western men.

01:12:36.180 It's not white.

01:12:37.060 It's not white men.

01:12:38.800 It's a mixture of ethnic groups.

01:12:41.840 But living in the West,

01:12:42.820 why they're going down this dark path

01:12:44.820 typically on the internet.

01:12:46.220 We're very dismissive of it.

01:12:47.760 At least mainstream media

01:12:48.680 is very dismissive of it.

01:12:50.040 And, oh, you know, just screw them.

01:12:52.200 They're privileged.

01:12:53.800 It doesn't matter.

01:12:54.480 But it does matter.

01:12:55.460 And we should not just let people

01:13:00.100 rot on the margins.

01:13:01.420 because it comes back to bite us in the end.

01:13:03.440 I agree, man.

01:13:04.420 Five years from now,

01:13:05.260 we could see an army of incels

01:13:06.500 just with keyboards on the streets.

01:13:08.640 Yeah, absolutely.

01:13:09.660 But the plus I'd be,

01:13:11.040 we'll be crap at fighting.

01:13:12.740 That was my point.

01:13:13.720 They're going to be smashing the matriarchy

01:13:15.560 with their keyboards.

01:13:17.500 All right.

01:13:18.120 And so thank James.

01:13:19.440 It's genuinely been a wonderful interview.

01:13:21.220 Incredibly illuminating.

01:13:22.280 If somebody wants to find you on social media,

01:13:24.320 on Twitter, on Instagram,

01:13:25.620 where would they find you?

01:13:26.960 So I'm on Twitter at

01:13:29.400 at j underscore bloodworth

01:13:32.240 and I'm on Instagram

01:13:33.280 at james.bloodworth

01:13:34.480 Instagram's the more

01:13:35.880 you'll find me more

01:13:36.800 on Instagram nowadays

01:13:37.560 because that's the more fun side

01:13:39.240 more silliness

01:13:40.140 more fun

01:13:40.740 I'm trying to get away from

01:13:42.480 Twitter can be quite toxic

01:13:44.000 I find

01:13:44.460 whereas my Instagram friends

01:13:46.340 it's all about just

01:13:47.120 screwing around

01:13:47.780 and having fun

01:13:48.980 so yeah

01:13:49.900 so follow James on that

01:13:51.220 buy his book

01:13:52.020 Hired

01:13:52.520 it's a great book

01:13:53.640 and very interesting

01:13:54.260 as you've seen

01:13:54.880 James

01:13:55.400 a lot of interesting things

01:13:56.440 to contribute to this debate

01:13:57.600 as always follow us

01:13:58.820 at TriggerPod on our social media.

01:14:00.740 Don't want to make this outro too long.

01:14:02.800 Francis and I are both doing shows

01:14:04.400 as comedians in August,

01:14:06.420 so you'll know about them

01:14:07.380 if you regularly watch the show.

01:14:09.080 And we will see you in a week from now.

01:14:11.020 Absolutely.

01:14:11.660 And please, please, please,

01:14:13.000 please tell the word subscribe.

01:14:14.800 We are now on BitChute

01:14:16.100 if you prefer to go on to BitChute

01:14:17.820 or if that's a platform you like to use.

01:14:19.900 Also as well,

01:14:20.840 leave us a nice review on iTunes.

01:14:22.460 It really does help.

01:14:24.160 And thank you very much

01:14:25.180 and we'll see you next week.

01:14:26.320 Bye-bye.

01:14:28.820 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - September 01, 2019

James Bloodworth on the Evils of the Gig Economy

Episode Stats

Length

Words per Minute

Word Count

Sentence Count

Misogynist Sentences

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript