Our Thoughts on 2025

22:01Francis Foster:I don't think he's worked that part out. Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe. Yeah. But you also need women in order to have children in order to keep the West going. And in order to have children, most of the time, you need stable marriages. You need healthy relationships. That's how you build a healthy, functioning society. We've spoken about it on this show time and time again, that one of the major issues with the West is fatherlessness, the breakdown of the marriage, and in the younger generations, the fact that both males and females have a distrust of each other, and they're not relating to one another as they used to before.

22:40Well, Nick, is this your grand vision? Like basically saying that women are disgusting and stupid? How is that going to make anything better?

22:47Francis Foster:Well, I don't think people like him and those previous iterations of him, obviously, as well. And you see this on the left as well. I think what we have with the Gen Z generation is a lot of very understandable anger. And I did a live show with Andrew Gold at a theater in London. And one of the guys who came up to me at the book signing before the show, he said, I've got a teenage son and a teenage daughter, and I'm trying to pull my teenage son in from going to the right. too far. And I'm trying to put in my teenage daughter from going too far to the left. And that's kind of the society. I refuse to accept a world in which our daughters vote for Zoran Mamdani and Zach Polanski and our sons are watching Nick Fuentes and Bonnie Blue.

23:36Yeah.

23:37Francis Foster:Separately, not together, because that would be great content. You know what I mean? But that is, in terms of the influences that are prominent, that is the world we're heading in. And it is because people of that generation in particular are alienated, they're angry. Let's be honest, and we talked about this, I had a video on this talking about the phenomenon of Nick Fuentes, but more broadly. And our conversation with Nick Freitas, the main interview hasn't had huge numbers, but some of the clips are like millions and millions and millions of views because what he's saying is true young men add to that white men add to that christian men particularly in america they have been demonized for things that they were neither responsible for nor benefited from and they were told you're a piece of shit you've got male privilege you've got white privilege you've got this privilege when they actually didn't they lived in a society that was obsessed with promoting women, and actually just openly, callously, maliciously negligent of men's need for respect and opportunity and purpose and all these other things.

24:46Francis Foster:So that anger that exists in the young generation is totally justified. Absolutely. It's totally justified. But the question is, can they learn what all of us have to learn during the course of our lives, that when you are angry, that's good because you can channel that anger into positive action. Creating something, building something, uniting people. Charlie Kirk was so widely revered and respected, even by many people who didn't share his views, because that was the approach he took. Coalition building, having a huge impact in electoral politics, actually channeling things into productive action.

25:28Francis Foster:That is, I think, where this thing needs to go. And that is a battle. I think that's the next battle. If we've won the arguments on wokeness and net zero and illegal immigration, etc., which I think we have at this point, let's be honest, even in Britain, we have. Then culturally, that is the next big battle. I agree with you. I think what's really important when talking about the Fuenteses and the people on the right and the Polanskis and people on the left. What they do is they activate, in my opinion, the very worst of the male brain and the very worst of the female brain. And there's also the economic element where people feel that they have no hope.

26:09If they get a job, they're not going to be able to buy a place. The economy is becoming more and more degraded. It seems year on year. Not only that, infrastructure is crumbling, hopelessness, anger, resentment. So you've got these two people who are basically saying, let's throw the board game up in the air. And look, on the one hand, you go, that can be a visceral thrill, a rush. We saw it in 2020. You break something. You feel as if you're doing something. You feel as if you're sticking a finger to the man. But it's like when during the Brixton riots of the early 80s, where a lot of people, the Caribbean community came out.

26:53They were very angry. They had many reasons to be angry. You smash up the place where you live. Well, all right, you smash up the place where you demonstrate your anger. But then what are you left with? You look around your area, you go, well, the businesses are broken. People have lost their jobs. People have lost their livelihoods, their jobs, their businesses. Everything's in ruins. Eventually, you are going to have to build it back up again unless you want to live in a

27:23Do you want to go down these paths? Because I'm telling you, on that side, you don't want to end up there. And from my personal, and you've got experience of it as well, on the far left, it doesn't end well either. Or are we going to actually go, you know what? Things aren't great. We're in a really tough situation societally, economically, culturally. And are we going to do the frankly immature thing of throwing the board going up in the air and having a big tantrum about it, even though it ain't fair, or are we going to actually work together and figure out a way for us to live in a far more harmonious way and try and do our best to fix the problems we have in society?

28:05Because to me, that's the option, not that.

28:09Francis Foster:Well, right. And anger is addictive. And the righteous anger that people like to feel is why a lot of people argue about these terms, but the woke left, this is what it was about, giving you an excuse to be angry and unconstructive. And whatever is happening, the equivalent on the right, call it woke right, don't call it woke right, whatever. It's exactly the same. It's basically a bunch of people channeling people's anger into money and clicks for themselves. Because that's all that's happening, right? Let's be honest. Nick Fuentes, if you're one of his viewers, he's not taking you to a better place.

28:43Francis Foster:He's not trying to make a better America. And he won't. And likewise with all this other stuff. So, yeah, and that's the challenge because ultimately you're going to have to build things. And it's interesting because in the US, of course, the Trump administration is doing many of the things that people elected him to do. They're closing the border. They are doing their best, as we discussed, to end global conflicts. They are rebuilding America's manufacturing base. They're doing lots and lots of things to reset America's relationship with the world and with itself. And here in the UK, I think it's fair to say that the arguments on things like illegal immigration, the arguments probably on mass immigration in general, and the argument on just the cultural disintegration of the country, the crime, all of that stuff, they've been one.

29:36Francis Foster:Everyone agrees with us now. All the stuff we've been saying and people have pretended we're right wing for saying, now those very people are coming over to our side. because frankly, the country's got to the point, particularly the economic situation is really bad. But it's going to be a while before that turns around politically because there's not a scheduled election for the next three years. Unless there's the fiscal crisis that Alastair Heath predicted on our show in the next couple of years or the beginnings of one which leads to an early election, we're kind of stuck in the situation for a few more years.

30:14Francis Foster:and there's a few luxury beliefs that we have yet to let go. Net zero is one of them. There's still a lot of people who don't realize that it's economic suicide for no gain whatsoever. And the other one is, and this is what no one talks about, and I mean no one up to and including reform, is the gigantic unaffordable welfare bill that we have in this country. That as long as we continue to spend more money than we have and than we earn, we will remain poor which is what we are and I know so many people both in our space but also in the business world and elsewhere they're not leaving they've left they've left for Australia they've left for America they've left for the Middle East they've left for the UAE Dubai we are bleeding there is a giant brain drain going on in Britain that people some people don't realize is happening but it is happening.

31:10Francis Foster:And that, if you think about the scale of that achievement, to get hundreds of thousands of talented, creative, entrepreneurial risk-takers to leave a country like Britain, you really, really, really had to run it into the ground. And that's where we've got to. Well, and this is the worry for me, is that we have the politics of resentment, where we have the evil billionaires and millionaires. And we can have a conversation about tax. We can talk about that, the tax burden, et cetera. But the reality is those are the people who create wealth. They're the people who pay the majority of the taxes in this country.

31:49They're the people who actually keep the public services running. You get rid of them, you demonize them. Well, that's fine. But then what are you going to do when they leave? And they're leaving in their droves. And they're not just leaving, the next generation of millionaires, The next generation of wealth creators, the next generation of business owners are leaving because you have made it untenable for them to live in this country. We've got a 60 percent tax rate once you start earning a six figure salary. And the people on the left will be like, oh, boo hoo, boo hoo. All right. What about your consultant?

32:25You found a tumor in your neck. You're going to go and see your consultant, your oncologist. He's on a six figure salary. But if he goes to Australia, he can triple his salary. If he goes to America, he can call Drupal it If he can go to Dubai, he can earn whatever And pay no tax So what do you want your consultant to do? Do you want him effectively To be on a third or even a quarter Of what he could earn globally When he's probably got a family And he's got to pay school fees I know, they've got a private school, it's terrible Whatever

32:57Francis Foster:Why is it terrible? It's saving the government money I know It was a joke But yeah, but they're not involved in the state school system. And you go, you are forcing all those people out. They're talented. And you're bringing in 55 ,000 illegal immigrants a year at the same time. And you go, we cannot keep going down this path. And if we do, we're going to end up somewhere where no one wants to be ultimately. And one of the reasons I say we've won the argument is you've got the Home Secretary of this country, Shabana Mahmood. Yeah. I mean, she sounds like Enoch Powell at this point. I saw an article the other day saying that they're going to deport the children born in Britain who are born to illegal immigrants.

33:46Francis Foster:They will deport them with their parents, which if Nigel Farage had said that five years ago, they would have crucified him. So it's an extraordinary thing that's happening in that they are no longer pretending that illegal immigration is, people are concerned about it because of racism because you can't pretend that anymore. And more and more everywhere we go now, we have people coming up to us going, thank you for what you're doing, keep up the good work, etc. So, you know, in some ways, in the course of this year, I've said repeatedly that I've become an accelerationist. And I don't mean that I want the transition.

34:27Francis Foster:You know, we had this conversation with Jimmy Carr. He sort of meant by accelerations, he meant that you want things to happen super quickly. And that always is quite dangerous. I don't mean quite that. I just mean that I am happy that things have got so bad that people can't pretend that the problem doesn't exist anymore. Because I've concluded that in my opinion, most people in Britain or in any other country, frankly, they will not wake up and take painful action until inaction becomes much more painful than not acting. And that's kind of where we've got to. Yeah, that's exactly where we've got to, where you go, what are we going to do?

35:06What are we going to do? Because at this point, it just feels like we're on a cliff and we're in the car. And you know the cartoon where you're teetering on the edge? But the problem is we're teetering far more that way than we are that way. and eventually we're going to flip over and the car is going to fall into the ravine. Yeah. And it's just a matter of time before we go, are we actually going to wake up and start looking and taking painful yet necessary action to, let's be honest, save our country because that's where we are now. That's where we are. Or are we just going to be continually oblivious and maybe even with these disastrous tax policies put our foot on the accelerator?

35:49Francis Foster:Well, we will see, obviously, over the course of the next year. I mean, next year is going to be fascinating in that respect because the economic troubles that we've been concerned about on this show for a while, they may or may not materialize next year, but they could. And that would obviously change everything overnight. So, and then you come to the political side of a reformer currently leading in the polls. They've been doing well for this entire time. And it feels to many people like whenever that election happens, they are likely to win. You know, it's very early days. But then you go, you know, what about Nigel?

36:31Francis Foster:We've had Nigel on the show, Nigel Farage a number of times. I was asked actually, the Telegraph did an interview with me for a profile thing. And they asked me, everyone wants to ask you about Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage now. That's what everyone wants to ask. Not you, me. you know what I mean by that of course, of course that's what everyone wants to talk to us about and they said to me, what do you think of Nigel? I just said, I like him I've always liked Nigel actually in terms of as a person, I've always liked him and one of the things I've always really liked about him is he's very forthright he says what he thinks on the vast majority of things directly but the question is has he got the money to win the next election?

37:14Francis Foster:has he got the candidates to win the next election? That's something I've asked him repeatedly, and hopefully we'll have him on again in the new year. And the third thing is, if he does get elected, can he actually do the thing? Because nobody knows. With all respect to Nigel, who, like I say, I really like him. But nobody knows whether he can do it. He's never done anything like that before. He's never run a massive thing like the government. To be fair, neither had Tony Blair. Yeah. All his trust. All his trust. or Boris Johnson ironically did. He was the mayor of London, which is about as close as you can get.

37:50Francis Foster:But if and when Nigel does become prime minister, people think there are too many people who think that will be the answer. He's elected and then everything is solved. He's got a gigantic job on his hands if he is in fact elected. Gigantic. And it's not going to be easy. It's not going to be pleasant. It's not going to be popular at times. Some of the things they're going to need to do are going to be deeply unpopular as well. And that is hard. Look, there are a lot of people left and now on the right who want to criticize Nigel Farage and they say, oh, he's just in it for the this or the this.

38:32This guy was standing against the European Union and losing his deposit 25, 30 years ago

38:41Francis Foster:or whenever it was. He's clearly a man who's stood up for his principles, but there's still a difference between being a public figure and expressing your opinion and standing as a politician and running a huge thing, much of which, by the way, hates you, thinks you're evil, and wants to sabotage your agenda. And that's the civil service? And that's the civil service. Now, that is a huge challenge, which several people we've had on the show like Boris Johnson, like Steve Hilton, who was the advisor to David Cameron, List Trust will tell you the same. It's impossible to deal with, they found. So you've got to, that's a huge job.

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40:39In under a minute, I know exactly what is actually going on. Try it for yourself. Click the link in the description of this episode or go to freespoke.com slash trig to search freely and get the whole picture. Download the app and subscribe for 35 % off Freespoke Premium with our link. That is freespoke.com slash trig. And that's, I don't think that's what, I don't think people understand how having a civil service that is captured or whatever way you want to describe it, that will not implement policies that it does not agree with. How that means that ultimately democracy is compromised. Because you can vote for whatever party you want to get in on whatever policies they may have.

41:31Left, right, centre, it doesn't matter. But if the people implementing the policies refuse to do so, or what they do is then they drag their heels like a dog dragging itself across the road when you're trying to give it a walk, ultimately you're not going to be able to do the action. And at that point you go, well, we don't really have a functioning democracy.

41:55Francis Foster:Look, the counter argument is you need a civil service because if you change ministers every three months, which increasingly every party does, you have to have some level of continuity. Of course. Right. But but we have got very far from the idea that the job of civil servants is to implement the elected the views of our elected representatives into policy. Look, the hint is in the title. You are a servant. What does a servant do? They carry out orders. A servant doesn't go Oh actually you know what I disagree with that Because I believe in X, Y and Z No That's not your job Your job is to carry out The instructions of the minister To the best of your abilities Yep Well one great hope for reform I think is They've got James Orr on board Former guest of ours Good friend of ours James is like A high caliber human being On every metric He's a great man He's a great mentor to young people.

42:56Francis Foster:He's a great leader. He's incredibly smart. He's incredibly sensible. He is not an extremist by any stretch of the imagination. And he's now heavily involved. They've got Danny Kruger to defect from the Tories. I'm sure next year we'll have more positive things happening for them as well with his involvement and others, of course. So that's exciting. That's very exciting as a possibility of a party that's actually going to be prepared to do something. Of course, we talk about reform. On the other side of the political spectrum, you have the emergence explosion onto the scene of Zach Polanski,

43:36Francis Foster:which I find simultaneously inevitable and also mind-boggling at the same time because this is a guy who is speaking about stuff that people care about. Of course he is. But... but with very little substance as far as I'm concerned. Of course. But to me, the problem with this and people like Polanski is they're not the problem. They're the symptom. They're not the cause. And part of the cause is the fact that we are economically illiterate as a population. We don't understand economics. We don't understand... We don't even understand basic financial products. You stop the average person on the street.

44:18You ask them what APR is. They wouldn't be able to tell you. They won't be able to really tell you how credit cards work. If you buy a hundred quid pair of trainers, how much are you going to be paying off every month? And the reason is, is we don't teach people about that. So we're raising this generation of young people who are economically and financially illiterate, which makes them incredibly vulnerable to the nonsense, in my opinion, that Polanski spouts, because it sounds good. And if you don't understand the basics of how a country is run or how a business is run or how money is made or created or finance and wealth, then of course that's going to sound good.

44:56But that is really on the education system and that's on us.

45:00Francis Foster:Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. And by the way, I don't think we wouldn't want people to take away from this conversation that we think like we always knew everything or even now we know everything. But I just think in the process of a having the conversations that we've had with people and educating ourselves about this stuff. And also, you know, there's 12 of us now at Trigonometry. We have a team of 10 people working with us. And once you are in that position, you have a responsibility to make that work, to make sure that it works as a business. And in the process, you really understand the Thomas Sowell line of there are no solutions, only trade-offs.

45:40Francis Foster:You're constantly making decisions. And we can tell you, as effectively a small business, what happens when the government jacks up tax rates on small businesses? We will not hire as many people this year as we otherwise would have done. That means that there will be fewer jobs in the country. Now, you multiply trigonometry by a million small businesses, what do you get? There are today millions of jobs that have not been created simply because of the fact that the government is making it harder to run a business. to say nothing of the fact that, look, there are plenty of people like us who've left for other countries.

46:20Francis Foster:Chris Williamson, our friend. Yeah. He's a good example. He moved to America, hasn't looked back. Zuby, who we've had on the show, raised in the UK. I went to school with Zuby, went to university in the UK, started his career in the UK. He's moved to the Middle East. And we could go down, business owners, et cetera. So if you do that over a period of 10 years, there are literally millions of jobs in this country that could have existed that do not because of the government policy. Exactly. And millions in taxable revenue. Of course. Millions? Billions. Billions. Billions and billions and billions because of just that, because of this idea that anyone who's financially successful is a bad person.

47:04Yeah.

47:04Francis Foster:But that's what that's basically the Zach Polanski message. And I had one of his people when I went to cover the protest in Cobra, we didn't put it in the main thing because we just thought it would distract, but people can find the clip. There's a journalist from the Sussex byline, I think it's called. And I said to him, so what have you found here? And he basically started banging on about neoliberalism at a protest in which there was just like families going, we don't want 600 illegal immigrants in a camp in our small town. Because they're infiltrated. Their brain is rotten with the shit that they've been fed about how it's the bill billionaires.

47:40Francis Foster:We are worried about the people who fly in on private jets, not the people who come on illegal boats. Really? Really? You're worried about them, are you? Because that's not who I worry about, nicking my phone in London. No. That's not who I worry about when I'm walking home at night late. It's not the billionaire on a private jet. It's not 600 billionaires being moved into a camp in Krobera that gives people their concerns, right? Do I think billionaires should pay taxes? Yes. Do I think they should pay a lot of taxes? Yes. They already do, by the way. And demonizing them further and chasing them out of our country, it's not productive.

48:23Francis Foster:I'm not a billionaire. I will never be a billionaire. I'm perfectly content with that. I pay a lot of tax. I'm perfectly content with that as well. But the effect of pushing all of this narrative through our society is detrimental. And that's why we're talking about it. That is, of course, why we're talking about it. And people go, oh, it's about left versus right when they talk to me. Oh, you say this because you're on the right, or you say this because you're right wing. And I think we both come to this from the same point of view. I don't care about left versus right. I care about what works.

49:00because I want my country to be successful. I want everybody to have the best possible chance of making something of themselves, whatever that is. And however you want to live your life, I want it to be the fairest place with the best public services, et cetera. But we know that these ideas are bad. They don't work. They haven't worked. They've been proven time after time after time not to work.

49:26Francis Foster:And they're not working now. And they're not working now. So that's why I push back on them Not because, and we do, not because we're, you know We hate the left or the left Or evil, you know, or any of these things It's like, no, it's economically Disastrous And when you have policies that are Economically disastrous They are going to impact the poorest The most, that's what happens That's what happened in Venezuela With communism, everybody who was rich And had money, left Or, if they didn't, they stayed And they insulated themselves from the catastrophe as best they could, which is the same thing that's going to happen here.

50:04And that's what we care about. Does it work? If it works, brilliant. Implement it. If it doesn't because it's a crap idea, don't do it.

50:13Francis Foster:It'll never take on, mate. No. And on that happy note, it's been a pleasure doing this for another year with you. Absolutely. With our amazing supporters. It's been a great year. you know I always tell this story I don't think I'm not sure if I've told it publicly about the girlfriend you had when we first started this whenever we used to complain about the state of the world and get upset or this was happening and she would just go look guys everything that's bad for the world is good for trigonometry and I'm afraid to say we've had a great year and next year is probably going to be even better you know it's weird but I do feel like we are starting to make like I said winning the arguments that's where you start, then it has to take political shape.

50:57Francis Foster:I mean, that's what happened in the US. The election of President Trump is a consequence of the fact that the arguments were won, right? So hopefully that will happen here over time as well. We're going to keep doing our best to talk to people, have debates. We haven't even talked about some of the great interviews we've done this year, whether that's Deborah Francis White, that debate, or lots of other things that have been fun or crazy or wacky. we've still got some amazing episodes to come out from our America trip but it's been a great year we thank everybody for supporting us for seven and a half years now, that's how long we've been going It's been a hell of a trip, it's been a hell of a journey and I loved every minute of it We're going to kiss We are going to kiss, but that's only for Substack so check us out there The exciting thing is what we've got coming in they're coming down the pipeline, the new ideas we're going to be implementing, the new content that we're talking about, I'm already excited about.

51:58Now, the guests that we're going to get, they're going to be even bigger, they're going to be even better. So I can't wait for 2026, and we're going to see what the world is going to bring us. I'm sure it's going to be delightful.

52:09Francis Foster:Merry Christmas, everybody.

52:31We'll see you next time.