‘Joey from Friends’ has gone viral for his lack of drive. This is what the world needs – someone who’s happy with nothing rather than everything

‘Nothing will come of nothing,” King Lear said. He was totally wrong, I’m afraid. The truth is, a lot can come from nothing. More specifically: great life satisfaction can come from doing very little.

You know who is well aware of that? Matt LeBlanc (AKA Joey from Friends), the king of 90s primetime TV. A TikTok featuring resurfaced interviews in which LeBlanc extols the joys of sloth is generating enormous enthusiasm online. The TikTok pulls from a 2018 interview in which LeBlanc gushed about how much he enjoyed taking time off after Friends and then cuts to a 2017 interview in which he said: “I should be a professional nothing.” Speaking to Conan O’Brien, LeBlanc explained: “Because I think I would like to do not a fucking thing. That’s what I would like to do. Just nothing. Nothing. Zero.” (Same, Matt, same.)

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

The Bear actor called Musk a fascist and an idiot after his reaction to a post from a rightwing account that claimed she was replacing Johnny Depp

Ayo Edebiri, the actor best known for her Emmy-award winning work on The Bear, has said she received “insane death threats” after Elon Musk shared a fake news report about her being cast in a film.

On her Instagram, Edebiri recalled the furore that met Musk’s reposting of a story by “Unlimited L’s”, a rightwing account with no apparent Hollywood connection or insight, that she was to replace Johnny Depp in a reboot of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

Large tax cuts for the rich, import tariffs, and the competing interests of Republican nationalists and the techno-right is a dangerous combination

What connects Donald Trump’s approach to trade, tax and government spending? Is there a Trumpian theory of economics – Maganomics? Trump, like most politicians, would doubtless reject any claim that he was following a particular ideological blueprint, but then, as John Maynard Keynes said: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

It’s certainly difficult to attribute Trump’s policies to the intellectual influence of any one strand in economic thinking. The most obvious frame is the dual one identified by Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, who describes it as a combination of economic nationalism and the techno-right. The former, represented by long-term Trump confidantes Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, wants to rebuild America’s traditional industrial strength behind tariff walls while deporting as many immigrants as possible; the latter, represented of course by Elon Musk, to engineer a great leap forward into an AI-enabled libertarian future.

Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant

La suppression du bureau de la cheffe scientifique de la Nasa s'inscrit dans la nouvelle politique de l'administration Trump, contre toutes les recherches liées au climat.

Entouré d’Elon Musk et de son fils, Trump a vanté les mérites de Tesla devant la presse, fiches en main pour ne pas se tromper dans ses déclarations. Une mise en scène surréaliste qui a réussi à stopper la chute de l’action, au moins momentanément.