Spooking the Markets (with Natalie Haynes and Stewart Lee)

Speaker 1 This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Speaker 2 I know, I'm putting them back. Hey, Dave, here's a tip.
Put scratchers on your list. Oh, scratchers? Good idea.
It's an easy shopping trip. We're glad we could assist.
Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 2 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play. Scratchers from the California lottery.
A little play can make your day.

Speaker 3 Please play responsibly.

Speaker 2 Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim. From wine country weekends to scenic drives through the Sierra foothills, fall is the perfect time to explore California.

Speaker 2 And there's no better way to do it than in a brand new Toyota hybrid.

Speaker 2 With 17 fuel-efficient options like the stylish all-hybrid Camry, the Adventure-Ready RAV4 hybrid, or the spacious Grand Highlander hybrid, Toyota has the perfect ride for any adventure.

Speaker 2 Every new Toyota comes with Toyota Care, a two-year complementary scheduled maintenance plan, an exclusive hybrid battery warranty, and of course, Toyota's legendary quality and reliability.

Speaker 2 Visit your local Toyota dealer and test drive one today so you can be prepared for wherever the road takes you this fall. Toyota, let's go places.

Speaker 2 See your local Toyota dealer for hybrid battery warranty details.

Speaker 2 Hello and welcome to Strong Message here from BBC Radio 4: a guide to the use and abuse of political language.

Speaker 2 I'm Armadinuchi, or if you're listening to the Spotify transcript of this program, I'm our manager, Uchi,

Speaker 2 and I'm joined this week by two returning members to this verbal hellscape. There is Strong Message here: Natalie Haynes and Stuart Lee.
Thanks for having us.

Speaker 2 We're going to look in a bit at the phrase, don't spook the markets.

Speaker 2 I think we all know why. But prior to that, I just want to drill down on Nigel Farage's extremely clear and fulsome apology.
Not really apology, but explanation.

Speaker 3 No, I mean, not really clear or fulsome either, to be fair.

Speaker 2 Not even an explanation. It was just a response to people asking him about reports of

Speaker 2 speakers' language.

Speaker 2 Well, we can explore what it was.

Speaker 2 His answer to questions

Speaker 2 about reports of of him allegedly at school in Douglas College, 40 whatever years ago, making persistent racist remarks, when asked directly if he'd ever racially abused anyone, he said, no, not with intent.

Speaker 2 When the reporter said, I don't know what with intent means, he replied, no, you wouldn't.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's a curious turn of phrase, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 3 So the problem is the interviewer who wouldn't understand the nuance

Speaker 3 that he's using when he says that he didn't with intent race.

Speaker 2 Yes, but

Speaker 2 it implies there are two modes of speaking there where you say things without intent. Yes.
And you say things with intent. But I don't know how you meant to say that.

Speaker 3 So you say things without intent because they're just

Speaker 2 words?

Speaker 3 Okay, right.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I think what Farage is trying to say to get out of it is that it wasn't his intent to be racist.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Even though he used racist words and made hissing noises like a gas chamber chamber and sang a George Formby song, which he had adapted to be racist.

Speaker 2 It is reported.

Speaker 2 Okay, it was reported by

Speaker 2 20 witnesses going back decades. So he is saying that it was just fun

Speaker 2 and it wasn't meant to be racist, even though all the content was about race and the people it was directed to were of specific racial minorities. Yes.

Speaker 2 It's not impossible to think that that could, you know, we've all been in situations where amongst your friends of different racial minorities they will use that language or allow you to use it in fun if you trust someone and know them you can discuss those things and use those words some people are even able to do it with an audience if they I mean Frank Skinner doesn't but Frank Skinner is a very good example of someone who takes an audience into his trust and is able to say anything

Speaker 2 in his reply to the reporter he did push the banter button which is look first of all i can remember what i said 49 years ago

Speaker 2 but i am certain it wasn't wasn't intentionally racist. Yeah, but you know what I hate about the word banter?

Speaker 2 It flashes me back to the mid-90s when the Stephen Lawrence killers being caught on video using those words and then Martin Bashir saying to them,

Speaker 2 So why did you say all those things? And they said, banter, Martin, harmless banter. I remember that phrase.
And of course, all of those people went on to have been

Speaker 2 associated with race crime. Yeah, but it is a catch-all word that is now used more and more by people as a ghetto for something that cannot be

Speaker 2 explained otherwise because it means that you're part of an in-group.

Speaker 3 The in-group is the group that has banter and it has its own special language often.

Speaker 3 And so it's a way of othering everybody else who's not in your special in-group, who therefore won't understand the nuance with which you use language that, if somebody else was using it, might be offensive.

Speaker 3 But when you do it, it's somehow different. It's so

Speaker 2 like it's like it's almost like it's a kind of crime-free zone when you want to buy banter. The

Speaker 2 banter area where you can go in and you can hurl abuse at anyone and anything. I think the idea of it being legitimate is dying away, though.

Speaker 2 I mean, my kids are teenagers and they do a parody of banter.

Speaker 2 They'll do something awful. They go, just banter, it's just banter, mate.
Just bantering, right? They do that, right? But also,

Speaker 2 what a lot of listeners won't know is Natalie was a great stand-up before she became a respected classicist.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 at the very least, the tallest comedian on the circuit at one point.

Speaker 2 what they talk about since been superseded by like Greg Dave. What they talk about now.
Yes. They go, young comics are going, yeah, I've been working on my bantering skills.

Speaker 2 I think, oh, don't do that. Because it will just create awful, viral moments where you're arguing with someone in the front row about how fat they are or something.

Speaker 2 You know, I mean, I hate the whole idea of banter. Well, I'm always suspicious when banter is raised as a reason, not just as

Speaker 2 a reason that, you know, JD Vance, remember about four or five weeks ago, there was a whole WhatsApp group of Republican

Speaker 2 Nazi slogans. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I love Hitler and all that. Which J.D.
Vance said, the reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes.
That's what kids do.

Speaker 2 But these were guys in their 20s and early 30s in jobs rather than from a distant past where people said that and thought it was fine.

Speaker 3 But that's weird too, isn't it? Infantilizing adults to that degree is a a really strange thing to do.

Speaker 2 Well, that's when the original, on the first Trump campaign, when the tapes of him with

Speaker 2 talking about, you know, grabbing by the person, they said, oh, that was banter. That was locker room talk.
That's right.

Speaker 2 Locker room talk is the sex banter. It's sex banter.

Speaker 3 Just to clarify,

Speaker 2 there's an event diagram overlap. So banter is non-sexual, but there is then sex banter.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but there's also, there's some banter that can be locker room talk, and there's also locker room talk that can be banter. Right.
But there's

Speaker 2 not the same thing.

Speaker 2 But I saw a clip the other day of Elon Musk on Joe Rogan's podcast, which is a place you can see. Well, this isn't going to end well, is it? No, I know.

Speaker 2 This thing's so promising.

Speaker 2 Elon Musk is showing off to Joe Rogan that he's invented a kind of bantering machine. Right.

Speaker 2 No, no, seriously. He was showing off to Joe Rogan.

Speaker 2 That he's got an AI thing going that can, if you walk into a party, this AI will look at your face, right?

Speaker 2 and then it will start doing a vulgar roast of you that's what musk kept saying it'll do the vulgar roast of you and then because it'll work out what you're like from looking at your face and the machine will do a vulgar roast of you and you can turn the setting up so the roast is even more vulgar it's going to be amazing it's basically creating a banter program so you'll go into you'll go into a place and elon musk's ai banter machine will go you fucking bold twat or something at you like that and it'll like so how many rainforests are being fell i know to feed this in order to replicate a bad compere from 1993 i know it was i don't understand it was a terrible thing to see because obviously that's what rogan thinks is funny anyway okay and also elon musk it was sad because you realize that behind the destruction of social media is just someone that wants attention and wants to be liked and he thinks if he invents a funny robot that can be rude to people everyone will want to be his friend i mean there is something desperate about somebody who wishes they were funny but isn't but can't and it does kind of

Speaker 2 does the jokes like when kids first learn about humor but can't get it right yeah so they say you know what's what's big and in a car purple you know it just doesn't make any sense but it has the rhythm of a joke but well that Ellen Musk does that yeah he does or he just calls you an idiot and laughs or a paedophile or whatever and then laughs harmless banter

Speaker 2 harmless banter I mean I'm really I think it's that's something we've got we've got to look out for we need to make in politics banter has already ruined comedy you can't have it ruining politics people People knew earlier than now that banter was a great get-out for things that they were otherwise convicted of saying and that were criminal.

Speaker 2 People like...

Speaker 3 The Nuremberg trials would have been shorter, wouldn't it?

Speaker 2 All banter. Yeah, the Goebbels diaries.
Jim Goebbels saying, look,

Speaker 2 you've just got to be loud to get heard. Yeah.
Talking of the New York trials. This isn't relevant, but it's absolutely fascinating.
You know that

Speaker 2 the musical at Wilson, Keppel and Betty did an Egyptian dance around a woman dressed as a princess. That woman was a main reporter at the Nuremberg trials.

Speaker 3 That is a tremendous fact.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 Absolutely so. But resisting the urge to do the dance

Speaker 2 because tonally,

Speaker 2 it's not banter, it's a sort of.

Speaker 2 It's play. It's tomfoolery.
Yeah, tomfoolery.

Speaker 2 Tom Foolery's physical banter.

Speaker 3 You need to add this to your Venn diagram now.

Speaker 2 Locker room tomfoolery. I don't know.
I hope not. If Guy Fox had said it was just tomfoolery, I don't know what the problem is.
I mean,

Speaker 2 flammable tomfoolery

Speaker 2 but would it would it would banter extend to cover the toory councillor's wife who said that the migrants should be burnt in the hotels is that is that not banter because it's not funny enough i don't know if it's is it digital banter

Speaker 2 digi banter digibanter that's the kind of thing you like new words digi banter okay talking of new words then let's i think we've settled we've clarified the variage we're against banter that's what we've discovered uh new words here.

Speaker 2 We're going to look at the budget now to explain. We are recording this the day before the budget.
You are hearing this the day after the budget.

Speaker 2 I personally feel as if I've heard the contents of the budget for the last six months.

Speaker 2 And we're told that there's not going to be a big, major tax thing. There's going to be lots of small taxes.
So it's going to be a smorgasbord budget. A smorgasbudget.
That's the new word I propose.

Speaker 2 Smorgasburg. That's two words already.
Thank you. Thank you.
Or one if you're not listening to the podcast version, because the bit we've just done won't make this bit.

Speaker 2 But we went for the phrase of the week, spooking the markets, because the budget will rise or fall by how convinced the markets are that the economy is sound.

Speaker 2 And I keep hearing this phrase, spook the markets. I keep asking myself, it never used to be like this.
It never used to be that every plus and minus

Speaker 2 in the economy was determined by by how the markets would react. It's become the central defining aspect of what chancellors can do now.
Yeah, and it's so opaque and mysterious because

Speaker 2 I'm probably the most ignorant person here this, but I don't even understand really what the market is.

Speaker 2 Neither one of us, Natalie, said, No, you're not. Yeah,

Speaker 2 but you don't understand how the market works. No, I do not understand.
I don't think anyone knows how the markets work because they aren't.

Speaker 3 They don't exist. Because it used to be the stock market, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. And we all knew what that meant.

Speaker 3 That meant that people owned a share in a company and then you were like but now there are bond markets and you go oh okay what is that

Speaker 3 and the whole thing has gone kind of tumbleweedy and then it turns out that that is investing in the government right so the government is basically saying hey investors bet on the future of the uk

Speaker 2 and then you'll get some return for your money how the government budgets its finances is therefore dependent on

Speaker 2 something that is almost by definition erratic erratic and unpredictable. Right.

Speaker 3 Because otherwise there wouldn't be stock market crashes. Yeah.
It's because everybody panics. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 I've never been impressed by the markets in that, you know, for example, earlier this year, if you remember, there was a point where Rachel Reeves was seen being tearful in the House of Commons.

Speaker 2 There was a rumor going around it's because she had been sacked. So the markets did a nosedive.
Yeah. And then it turned out it was to do with personal family reasons or something personal.

Speaker 2 So the markets rallied in the case of the space of about an hour. so it might have been like herd cat was ill and that well yeah

Speaker 3 so why are we pinning everything on a group of let's face it really frightened men yeah really really irrational people yeah they're not with a kind of herd mentality of craziness yeah because you're right we've been hearing stories about the budget it might be this it might be that it might be this it might be that for months yeah now and the thing it is most like this year is the endless it might be this it might be that i think the professional term is clowning about the taylor swift album what do you know what i mean in which as we're waiting for it to come out, there are just loads of teenage girls going, there's a clue here.

Speaker 3 She's left a secret message here. She wore this colour on stage two years ago on in this place, and therefore it means this.
Yeah, and that's exactly what we're watching.

Speaker 3 It's like Rachel Reeves has had a slightly difficult day with her perhaps imaginary cat.

Speaker 2 Sal, and yeah, it means this.

Speaker 3 Does it though?

Speaker 2 Yeah, does it?

Speaker 2 That is modern, though, because when my kids were young, I had that experience as well.

Speaker 2 When a new album came out when I was young, you knew nothing about it. You might have heard the single.
It was a mystery.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there'd been a single

Speaker 2 John Peter.

Speaker 2 And then when it came out, it was really exciting. And you couldn't believe it, you know.
And it was the same with films, everything. You didn't know what they were going to be.

Speaker 2 They weren't teaser campaigns.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you'd seen a trailer if you'd gone to a film three months earlier.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but like with that, with that, Taylor Speaker, I mean, my kids were into, when they were young, into Ankle 21 Pilots.

Speaker 2 And when one of the albums came out, we had to drive around East London photographing posters that had codes on that would get them into this sort of online adventure game that that gave you a preview of the record.

Speaker 2 And that is what this budget's been like, isn't it?

Speaker 3 Yeah, but less fun.

Speaker 2 Less fun.

Speaker 2 Whereas if Richard Reeves had put clues all around the UK,

Speaker 3 budget of a showgirl, come on.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that would have been good fun. It would have been fun because we would have arrived at what the budget is without having to wait for the actual speech in the House of Commons.

Speaker 2 And when you look back at all political announcements when we were young, I mean, I was watching the BBC archive of the election 1972 or whatever. Oh, I remember just kind of turn up in a

Speaker 2 turn up in like a mini it was like a guy in a mini gets out of a minivan with a long coat on and the results are in like plastic

Speaker 2 i saw one i can't remember the i think it was like in the 1960s and it said and you know and bob here is with his team of uh of brain boxers and it turned to

Speaker 2 lots of uh you know oxford or cambridge students in their 20s but looking like 45 year old men with bow ties perched on desks that were about five of them and they were the ones who were going to kind of in their head calculate the percentages and swings and so on.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It was like a gentleman's club.
Yeah, like a gentleman's club.

Speaker 2 Or like when all we knew about the budget was that it was in a little case. Yes.
And it's a bit like the results of a tombola being read out, wasn't it?

Speaker 2 It has the feel of a teaser campaign for a major film.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, like pulp fiction with a mysterious case that has a thing in it, but we can't know what it is.

Speaker 2 Yes, because it used to be that these things were secret.

Speaker 2 In fact, there was one chancellor, Hugh Dalton, in 1947, Labour Chancellor in 1947, was sacked for leaking key lines of his budget to a reporter.

Speaker 2 That was regarded as a sackable.

Speaker 2 Whereas the last six months have been, we're hearing that.

Speaker 2 There might be tax rises on such and we're hearing. Because everything's done like a sort of focus group.

Speaker 2 You leak your plan, you see how it goes down, then you change your mind if the papers don't like it.

Speaker 3 But there's no sense, is there, that there's an actual kind of guiding principle to any of it. It's just like, is everyone cross with me? I'd better not do it.
Yeah, yeah. It's not

Speaker 3 loudest in denouncing me, then I shouldn't do that.

Speaker 2 It doesn't feel ideological or financial. It feels like just responsive to things.

Speaker 2 There was a kind of a loop in the last couple of weeks when it was rumoured that Rachel Reids was going to put up income tax.

Speaker 2 I think the markets quite liked that because it sounded like, you know, she was guaranteeing a certain level of income.

Speaker 2 Then because she was told by the Office for Budget Responsibility that the finances were slightly better than they had originally said, the rumor then went round that she wasn't going to put up income tax.

Speaker 2 So the bond market started going down, which added to the cost of interest repayments on government loans, which meant there was more pressure to put up income tax. So it was this kind of

Speaker 2 self-perpetuating loop where everything reacts to the last person who said something. Everyone reacts to whatever the last person said to them.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 The problem is that we we can't visualize the markets either like when i think of a market i think of the bullring market in

Speaker 2 crombie coats yeah for sale and and things that only sell tapes of alid jones and popular irish singers and stuff right wait am i going to be able to get a pair of second-hand paraboots exactly thank you good not in these markets you can't because they're just about ideas and the whole of the world of finance seems like that to me it seems like a mysterious ungraspable ineffable sort of thing my my son became when he was a precocious teenage used to go and photograph the city of London.

Speaker 2 He liked the weird buildings and stuff. And he'd go into the foyers, these buildings, and he didn't know whether they were open to the public or whether they're private or whatever.

Speaker 2 It's really hard to even understand what loads of them are. And they've got names like the guild of whatever.
And, you know, you can't really figure it out.

Speaker 2 He went into one of the finance buildings and asked the bloke what it was. And the guy, the security guard, said, come and see this.

Speaker 2 And he took him into a room where there was a massive fish tank with a strange jelly-like egg in it, like a shark's egg or something. And he let him hold the egg.

Speaker 2 And the creature that lives in that egg decides on the interest rate

Speaker 2 that's what it's like that is what it's like but you you say that in jest yeah but it's actually true i was reading in tim shipman who was on a couple of weeks ago in his book uh out about the last 10 years when it comes to the his reporting on the the liz truss mini budget that caused all the trouble.

Speaker 2 Apparently, what was the key factor in them having to decide we've got to junk what we've just said in the mini budget, sack the chancellor, do a complete U-turn, was

Speaker 2 that Britain's pensions industry was on the verge of collapse because of something called liability-driven investments, which apparently is to do with how pension funds invest on risk.

Speaker 2 And the mini budget was talking about spending so much money without guaranteeing any income or any cuts to make up for it that it was on the verge of collapse.

Speaker 2 But the frightening thing was, according to Tim Shipman, no one knew how these things worked. So it was all coming as a surprise to them.

Speaker 2 So one senior civil servant was quoted in the book saying, nobody, including the governor or anyone at a senior level, had ever heard of these things.

Speaker 2 And Liz Trust was quoted as saying, I literally don't know anything about it. Literally nothing.

Speaker 2 So the first they were hearing about it was when the Bank of England said, there are these things called liability-driven investments and they could crash our pensions industry.

Speaker 4 If you love to travel, Capital One has a rewards credit card that's perfect for you. With the Capital One Venture X card, you earn unlimited double miles on everything you buy.

Speaker 4 Plus, you get premium benefits at a collection of luxury hotels when you book on Capital One travel. And with Venture X, you get access to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide.

Speaker 4 Open up a world of travel possibilities with the Capital One Venture X card. What's in your wallet?

Speaker 2 Terms apply. Lounge access is subject to change.
See CapitalOne.com for details.

Speaker 5 Hello, it's Ray Winstone. I'm here to tell you about my podcast on BBC Radio 4, History's Toughest Heroes.
I got stories about the pioneers, the rebels, the outcasts who define tough.

Speaker 6 And that was the first time that anybody ever ran a car up that fast with no tires on. It almost feels like your eyeballs are going to come out of your head.

Speaker 5 Tough enough for you. Subscribe to History's Toughest heroes wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 2 Tomorrow. That's how uncertain everything is.
And that's why it is an exact science. In that people are sort of...

Speaker 2 It's a sort of weird...

Speaker 2 It's not quite a fiction.

Speaker 2 It's a system of guesswork and... predictions.
It's a way of measuring confidence in something rather than in measuring the thing itself.

Speaker 3 But only if you allow for the fact that everybody involved in it is basically experiencing the same mass hysteria. Yes.
Yeah,

Speaker 3 which I don't find reassuring.

Speaker 2 But when you said it's a way of measuring, the markets are a way of measuring confidence in something. That's the first time I've understood really anything anyone's said about this whole thing.

Speaker 2 Should we just leave it at that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 A way of measuring confidence in something. That's necessary for everyone to just believe, isn't it? It just almost comes down to that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but as if only if you allow the fact that everybody involved in it is basically experiencing the same mass hysteria yes yeah you know yes yes which i don't find reassuring yeah

Speaker 2 when you said it's a a way of measuring the markets are a way of measuring confidence in something that's the first time i've understood really anything you anyone said about well those whole thing should we just leave it at that yeah yeah yeah a way a way of measuring confidence in something that's necessary for everyone to just believe isn't it it just almost comes down to that

Speaker 2 or that thing about the mass hysteria and panic would it be better if instead of calling it the markets, we called it the children?

Speaker 2 So, as in, you know, the budget obviously went down well here, but we're still waiting for the reaction from the children.

Speaker 3 The histrionic children.

Speaker 2 The histrionic children.

Speaker 2 The worried children.

Speaker 2 We'll be hearing about the children in Southeast Asia this evening, and then tomorrow morning, the children in America will be waking up, and that's when we'll hear from them.

Speaker 2 Would that explain it more? Yeah, we'll explain it better. Would we do that?

Speaker 2 Especially if small hysterical children were were sent out to explain the market's response. That would work really well.
Yeah. With like a jam all over them and stuff.

Speaker 3 Just running around screaming because they've had too much sugar. That's basically the vibe.

Speaker 2 I can't remember what it was I said that kind of explained everything.

Speaker 2 A measure of confidence in something. I think that's a real breakthrough, though.

Speaker 2 I think you've actually achieved something. Thank you.

Speaker 2 I never understood it before. No, what I should do then is take out some kind of patent or copyright on that.
On that phrase. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then ask people if they want to buy into my ownership of that phrase good idea yeah and then when once enough people have bought into it you'll be a market i'll be a market and then i can i can

Speaker 2 go public i can go public and sell yeah what i don't know what i'm selling am i selling my understanding i'm selling my understanding of how markets work yeah i'm selling that yeah and then when that reaches a certain critical high i can sell my shares in it yeah at a profit yeah and then watch

Speaker 2 as other people

Speaker 2 degrade confidence in the second-hand idea of Armando Inuchi understanding the market.

Speaker 3 Are you talking Armando down?

Speaker 2 Because the last thing you want to do is spook me.

Speaker 2 That's another word that gets bounced around, and it's spook.

Speaker 2 Like you were an elite racehorse and at any minute you might suddenly shy or just from a difficult fence or just scarp her off in the wrong direction. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the markets are sort of, well, they're jittery, aren't they? Yeah, the jittery markets, always, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 But the only thing I know about racehorses, because obviously, like Stuart at Grip and Birmingham, and it's not a big thing there, it's from the adventure of Silver Blaze.

Speaker 3 So, all I'm thinking is that we just need to like paint one of your legs and then we can pass you off as a different, as a different person, a different satirist, and it'll all be fine.

Speaker 2 Okay, do I have a handicap?

Speaker 3 I was gonna say, you've just agreed to that really easily. I thought it was gonna take more persuasion.
We're just gonna paint one of your legs.

Speaker 2 Oh, okay, that's fine, great. I'm glad this has gone well.
I'm glad we were so well. Andy Burnham

Speaker 2 was actually criticized for saying, you know, we shouldn't be in Hawk to the bond markets. And I don't think he was saying, just ignore what happens.
I think he was trying to argue that

Speaker 2 this is a strange position we've found ourselves in,

Speaker 2 where we're having to adjust

Speaker 2 or influence our economic decisions on the day-by-day

Speaker 2 noise.

Speaker 2 that comes from the markets.

Speaker 2 And I don't know whether this is something, even though we've compared the markets to screaming

Speaker 3 frightened children is there not part of us that are also in unintentionally impressed by someone if they say they're from business yeah oh no no no no i don't think so because i always hear the word business whenever and honestly this even happens in my head when i have to log on to my business account just cost me not to do it then i always hear the word in the voice of sam the american eagle from the muppets business Like that.

Speaker 3 Every single time. So whenever anyone says it, I'm going, business.

Speaker 3 Every single.

Speaker 3 It does make it really hard to respect the political.

Speaker 2 I think of my grand saying that a dog has done his business in the gut. Also good.
That's what I always think of when I think of business.

Speaker 2 But I think politicians, when they hear the word business or someone who's from business, they feel they have to

Speaker 2 take notice. You're right.
They think if they can get the approval of business, then it's it's it sort of legitimizes something.

Speaker 2 And of course, one of one of the things that turned everyone against Boris is when he said, fuck business, wasn't it? Yeah. Well, you have to bleep that out, but he said, F business,

Speaker 2 when business was worried about Brexit. So E, we've established, is quite complicated.
Yeah. Although you've got nearer to British.
I've got nearer to it. I have that special.

Speaker 2 And we'll put the link up

Speaker 2 online if you want to buy into my understanding of the markets.

Speaker 2 But in tandem with that, politicians then try and use a language that has an attempt to simplify what they are doing.

Speaker 2 So they talk about the broadest shoulders are going to have to bear the burden here,

Speaker 2 the pound in your pocket,

Speaker 2 there's we're a labor budget with labor values, whatever that means now.

Speaker 2 That attempt to kind of encapsulate it in a phrase that sounds understandable, sounds familiar. Yes.

Speaker 3 But it's not super familiar, is it? That sense of those with the broadest shoulders have to carry it. And you go, well, where is it? Is that.

Speaker 3 Are you referencing Atlas carrying the weight of the heavens on his shoulder? Okay, fine. And then, like, Heracles, Hercules comes along and holds them for a while.

Speaker 3 So, okay, that's two people now then I can think of who are going to pay taxes. Who else has unusually broad shoulders?

Speaker 2 Cockney spives.

Speaker 3 Okay, yeah. So, people in the 80s.

Speaker 2 People in the 80s.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Great big shoulder pads.

Speaker 2 I have very broad shoulders, actually.

Speaker 3 Okay, so Stuart is volunteering to pay tax alongside Atlas.

Speaker 2 They put an electric charge through

Speaker 2 for some medical reason, and I had a disproportionately I've got much more bone than the average person and it's much heavier than the average person.

Speaker 2 I know that's an excuse that fat people make, but I've got really, I've got massive like dinosaur-like shoulders. You are genuinely big bones.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and I've got a my skull has got about twice as much bone as anyone else's in it. Right.
It's all like, no, there you are. Well, this is useful.
I'll do it. This will keep you safe.
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 3 So you can shoulder this burden literally and metaphorically.

Speaker 2 Millennia from now when the aliens arrive arrive and and start excavating our burnt-out radioactive world yeah and they come across a big boned big skulled fossil yeah they'll know that it was me they'll say listen to this this is that this is what a stand-up comedian yeah looked like it's it's not a reference to um

Speaker 2 marxist economic theory i think we're there to be careful quoting that yeah that's too recent for me i can't help you yeah

Speaker 3 i just don't know have the romans left britain then i don't know all right it was a very roman in the classical era.

Speaker 2 People who wanted to become emperor would, or who mounted a code, started putting coins out with their face on it.

Speaker 3 They could put your face on a coin.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that was seen as a way of making yourself legitimate. Definitely.

Speaker 3 And it gets you round the issues of not having enough money as well. So Rachel Reeves could try this.
You just essentially... you adulterate the metal of the coin.

Speaker 2 So when Mark Antony needs to pay his troops and he doesn't have any money, he just puts out coins with less silver and everybody is getting paid it and you can still trade it i'm not saying this is guaranteed financial advice from me i'm not trained just bringing coins you know what i like about that though in a world of abstractions you're talking about actual fungible well now people talk about cryptocurrency i've got no idea what that is what's a non-fungible token it's a token that can't funge or that has no funge I think has no funge.

Speaker 2 Or hasn't been fun yet. Or hasn't been funged.
It lacks. Funge-deficient.
Let you call it that. A funge-deficient token.
Then it would make more sense. I miss funge.

Speaker 2 There used to be loads of it didn't i

Speaker 2 you never see it anymore do you like white dog shit and it's all gone

Speaker 3 yeah part of the 70s yeah

Speaker 2 the summer of funge kids today don't know what funge is

Speaker 2 they think you're making it up when you tell them about it

Speaker 2 alas that is what's happening things have been made up and we're all falling for it i mean i don't really understand

Speaker 2 what a lot of what some kinds of money are now or how they are generated.

Speaker 2 I mean, crypto for me sums up what I've always felt about the markets, which is it is this nebulous thing that you cannot touch. Yeah.
Isn't it just a confirmation of that? Yeah.

Speaker 2 It is faith, isn't it? I promised to pay. It's so an obscure positive.
Yeah, but there's so's a pound. No, I promised to pay the bearer the sum off.
That's what it said, isn't it?

Speaker 2 So even what we understood as physical money was a contract, wasn't it? It was just a symbol of money.

Speaker 3 I guess I find it easier to comprehend like one level of abstraction.

Speaker 3 So I used to have you know, a silver coin, and then somebody replaces it with paper, which says this is worth the equivalent of silver coin. That I can understand.

Speaker 3 The bit where there are a bunch of people somewhere, but I don't know where

Speaker 3 doing something that I don't fully understand, but I know it creates loads of carbon emissions to create mysterious kind of meta-currency which changes in value relative to regular currency.

Speaker 3 But I don't know how

Speaker 2 or from what cause.

Speaker 3 And then that's suddenly a thing that you can talk about as though it were real.

Speaker 2 I'd love to tell you, but you would have to pay me.

Speaker 2 I'd have to invest. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. And that's for all anyone listening to that.
You know, if you want to sign up to my currency substack.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I'd like to buy myself a cryptarm.

Speaker 2 A cryptarm.

Speaker 3 If that's possible. I'd like to invest in one cryptarm.

Speaker 2 Cryptocurrency sounds like a word that you would have made that you would have made up. It's pointing at me.
I know, but it's a real word. It is a real word.

Speaker 2 Just looking at budgets past, everything tends to fall on whether the press or the media can identify certain taxes and give them a label that sticks.

Speaker 2 So, as well as the petrol tax, there was at one point the pasty tax. Pasty tax.

Speaker 3 Yeah, very hard on the touring comedian, of course. It was, yeah,

Speaker 2 that was complicated.

Speaker 3 We were sustained by groceries, aren't we?

Speaker 2 There's something about the temperature of the pasty, didn't it come down to that? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Whether you could buy it, eat it cold or I can't remember.
So you were taxed wherever

Speaker 2 degree temperature per degree. Per degree.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Any things that should be taxed? Well, I think you should tax nostalgia at the moment. I think if people were encouraged not to be nostalgic, a lot of our immediate problems would be wiped out.
Right.

Speaker 2 I don't know how you quantify nostalgia, but then that doesn't seem maybe the people that are involved in the markets could do it. So they seem to be good at quantifying abstractions.
Yes.

Speaker 2 I mean, we'll come up with a scheme, come what may. Yeah.
I think speculation should be taxed. All right.
Because

Speaker 2 not only that, but I think it should be used to supply energy. Yes.
I think.

Speaker 3 Okay. I would tax noise because of where I live.
I think if you have a car or a motorbike that makes us over a certain decibel level, you should have to pay per decibel over that.

Speaker 3 And then all the tax should be. put aside and used to buy earplugs for people like me.

Speaker 2 Or to make felt roads. Yes.

Speaker 2 Yours is a better idea felt roads

Speaker 2 i will march under this placard reducing the noise uh problem at one fell swoop uh oh and leaf blowers are illegal did i mention that they are illegal now all right in my budget that i'm making yeah yeah a budget is just about money it's not about all law

Speaker 3 so if someone's phone blowing leaves they are arrested if they are using their physical body to blow on a leaf that's all right well if they use anything mechanised, they're banded.

Speaker 2 Thank you for listening to Strong Message Here. I'll be back next week.
All of our previous episodes are available in our feed, so make sure you're subscribed on BBC Sounds. Goodbye.
Bye. Bye.

Speaker 1 Hello, I'm Robin Inch.

Speaker 1 Sat next to me is Brian Cox, but I don't want him saying anything yet because I am so excited by our new series of Infinite Monkey Cage, where we're talking about timekeeping, brain-computer interfaces, fusion.

Speaker 1 We're talking about the romantic and sexual behavior of monkeys and clouds. But most importantly, Brian, what else are we talking about? Eels.

Speaker 2 We are, aren't we? Eels is one of the most fascinating programs, if not the most fascinating. Eels.
I don't really want to talk about anything else, to be honest.

Speaker 1 So, basically, there's a new suit of infinite monk cage, but on Brian Copter's advice, don't listen to any of them apart from the episode about eels.

Speaker 2 It's because we don't know much about them. Don't tell them that.

Speaker 1 Listen first on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 5 Hello, it's Ray Winstone. I'm here to tell you about my podcast on BBC Radio 4: History's Toughest Heroes.
I've got stories about the pioneers, the rebels, the outcasts who define tough.

Speaker 6 And that was the first time that anybody ever ran a car up that fast with no tires on. It almost feels like your eyeballs are going to come out of your head.

Speaker 5 Tough enough for you. Subscribe to History's Toughest Heroes wherever you get your podcast.