TRASHFUTURE - A Milton Keynes of the Mud feat. Gareth Dennis

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

We welcome Gareth back to the show to discuss something he recently discovered: a planned private city of a million people? in Cambridgeshire? Supposedly called Forest City One, and built entirely out of wood? Obviously this is never going to get built, but there are some... tendencies represented here. We also talk about recent profiles of Reform voters and the garbage UK media environment that has brought us to this point. Check out Rail Natter here! Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! *RILEY ALERT* Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! *HUSSEIN ALERT* Check out 10k Posts here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows *NATE ALERT* Lions Led By Donkeys will be performing live in London on 29th May and you can get tickets here! Also, Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album, and you can stream it for free here!

November recently is discovered, what I would say is some disconcerting news. Yeah, basically I've had a sort of a miniature climate shock in the most bourgeois possible way, because I'm going to Ireland and I was told, oh, hey, Ireland has a wine industry now. And I just shouldn't. My whole body just kind of revolted at that idea that, like, It's too wet. It's too cold. You can't do that.

But no, it turns out climate is doing it, and it's getting nice and temperate or temperate enough for sort of like whatever freak German sort of like hybridization grapes they want to use. And now you can get a bottle of wine made in Ireland. Okay. Look, English was bad news, right? I mean, English tends to be bad news when it shows up. But like wine production has to stop moving north. Yeah. I'm paddling out into the ocean with a.

like a thing of ice cubes to try and collapse the AMOC current immediately. I mean, the thing is, right, it's weird enough. I think it's enough of a kind of future shock thing to be able to get like an Irish re-sling, right? Weird is still that it's German, I think. When I was told this, I did say, you know, farmers are we whose wines are pledged to Rhineland. If you like that one, I have a second joke, which is. the worst part about getting an Irish wine so that it's caught.

Oh, come on. All right, so, yeah, just put that in the Patreon unsubscribe for any time you like. Well done. I'm looking forward to the rest of your set at the Backyard Comedy Club. Well, the other one, because I mentioned this on Twitter

and someone said, Chardonnay will come. So, oh. Hi, everyone. I hope it doesn't. That takes so much more warmth. And that's a really bad sign for the world. But hi everybody. Welcome to this free episode of TF. Sorry, it's a day late. There's been a bank holiday in the UK and we had the day off. Yeah, because of Karl Marx or whatever.

Yeah, you know, that or whatever, whatever it is that we're celebrating around this time. You're encouraged to not think about it. There's just a bank holiday in early May and one in late May. They're probably for the same reason. So today we have Nate, Nova Hussein, and we have returning champion, a man who has been, I would say, driven. And much as I often am, a man who has been driven mad by a white paper of a stupid project. So much so that he researched his own TF segment and just brought it to me. It's Gareth Dennis.

Hello, everyone. Yeah. I'm at the point now where I'm doing unpaid labor out of anger. Yeah, it's quite something. I look forward to getting into that. It's so TF. There's guys. There's weird forms of like neo-fascism.

It's all good. It's great. It's tremendous. The environmentalists are involved somehow. It's odd. It's odd. I look forward to getting into it. Yeah.

There's honestly my favorite part. Like any good community planned by tech idiots, it's full of tunnels. Ooh, okay. It's replete with tunnels. And when you find it where it's located, if you know your geography of the UK, you are going to laugh. I suddenly had this notion of like

weird crypto plan community guys being really into arcade fire because of their first album's first track being called Neighborhood Number One Brackets Tunnels. Yeah. Man, I'll dig a tunnel. Yep. I will. I sure fucking will. Win Butler to create planned community

east of Cambridge, apparently. No. So there are a few things I wanted to talk about first. one silly, one somewhat silly, one quite serious and rather upsetting. Oh, it's our beloved jarring shift in tone, making a long-awaited return to the podcast. And then this goofy shit we're going to close with. So the first thing, very funny, very short. Amazon recently announced a new feature, which is, of course, they are now competing directly with us.

Oh, listen, you step into the octagon. You better get prepared to have every load-bearing joints in your body obliterated by trash future. I think we can be clear about this. I mean, I was going to say we are, we are planning our own version of the Mac Gala, like, fairly soon. Well, I mean, quite frankly, like, we sometimes take a long time to get to the point, but I can't imagine we've ever been as bad as the AI generated podcast that do 20 minutes. It's like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, just fucking endless doom looping of, I don't even know what, like, uh. No, these are your only options now for podcasts. So us on like peptides we can't even pronounce or the TikTok AI voice, giving you

the best podcast you've ever heard about USBC to see cables. I mean, I would probably listen to both. Yes, yeah, you've got one podcast, the real shit that's basically about, it's basically every undiagnosed and who are only barely treated form of neurodivergence all in one room. And then the other podcast is incredibly erudite and articulate and to the point. And it's about, I don't know, is the weird Amazon brand weaksy better than the other one? I don't know.

I can't remember Blemtro, whatever those fake names are. Weirdly, I'm going to be on both of them. but I'm going to try and preserve a kind of firewall where I do a different kind of like tone on the Blemtreau podcast. Well, what's happening is, so Amazon is introducing a new feature. This was just,

this tickled me, where instead of having to read product descriptions and read reviews and stuff, they will use that information to automatically generate a multi-mic podcast about the EtGood's USBC charger. Oh, that's so cool. Raiveware sunglasses for men, techno, techware, house music, Bergheim.

Because the thing is, every product on Amazon is now a laughable and dangerous fake of something good you could get elsewhere. So this is, I mean, on its own, that's quite a good prompt for a podcast. That's quite a good thesis for a podcast, but then they're giving it to like AI, I guess. I feel like give humans one of those very strange accompanying images that they'll put together on some of the Amazon brand or like Amazon only sales things. Like I once saw you could buy hinges for like a shelf that you can fold up. But for some reason, I guess trying to say that the shelf

the hinges were quiet. They had a photo, a stock photo of a sleeping baby with the shelf, uh, the hinge superimposed on. It said reduce life noise. I don't like that. Reduce the life noise of your baby is like, no, thank you.

Hemingway had six words. I have three and it's a fucking terrible story. Yeah, I mean, like the most recent thing I bought off of Amazon was like a lens filter, right, for one of my cameras. Not expensive, not high quality. I don't need it to be. But I do kind of want to hear an hour to an hour and a half of content about it, maybe, because I know what it sounds like when a human podcaster is padding to fill time. I don't know what it sounds like when Amazon's in-house AI is padding to fill time. And I'm kind of, I want to find out. I'm additionally uncomfortable this, because this isn't

just treading on the trash future thing. Is that like, you're right? You're saying, It has a join the chat feature where the AI hosts take questions live. That's my thing. I do that with Railnatter. Fuck off Amazon. That's my thing. It's lens filter nata now or it's USBC cable nata. It's whatever it.

We will only be coming to you through the lens of products you can buy on Amazon. And this is the only way podcasts are going to exist in the future. And in a way, that's a neat kind of ending to the medium is to go back to, like radio being like this program brought to you by, you know, fortified oats or whatever is to be like, yeah, this episode of Trash Future was brought to you by the fucking blembro electric blanket. Yeah. I just can't wait for people to start having like parasycial relationships with the version

of Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart that they get to talk about. The et-goods power adapter that bursts into flames as soon as you plug it in. The rest is travel toothbrush. There's another thing I wanted to mention, which is, of course, the FT has recently done a profile of reform voters asking them, hey, what do you believe? Oh, I'm sure it's good and normal. Well, it's almost normal because these people are the most median voter that has ever lived in all of history because they have what every median voter has. And I think this is instructive. and it's the kind of thing that will not be listened to by the sort of dead hand of whatever's left of Morgan McSweeney's inertial influence over the government.

It will not occur to them because they don't want it to because they have an agenda that they want to push and they use this person as a kind of tulpa. The person who could be genuinely moved by the Amazon product like podcast. The person who was given AI psychosis by the Blemtrow podcast. The person who is like listening genuinely sitting contentedly and listening on their commute to a podcast about insoles. I'm trying. I'm actually waiting to buy a t-shirt about the Et Goode's Insoul podcast for their live show. I feel like you could actually probably make that into quite a good show.

Yeah, this is the thing. It's like Novo's it actually is kind of quite a funny premise to a podcast here. It's just that they will be so earnest from the absolutely I will say everything you want me to say large language AI, Amazon large language model, they'll have missed that completely. But it could be quite funny to make an in-soul-based podcast.

Yeah, but it's going to be like someone who's really, really into it. Like, like, Feet guys who are really into feet as a concept rather than as like a kink. Oh, right, yeah. Getting radicalized in a kind of like Mondgreen sort of way where you become an in-soul because of podcasts

is like a really slight change with a really materially better one. Yeah, and then there can be like a moral panic because our young men are becoming insoles and, you know. It would genuinely, it would genuinely be better if we had like a fifth column of influences dedicated to giving young men foot fetishes

than what we have now. I already have the marketing angle. The podcast is called This is InSoul culture. Perfect. Professional at work, folks. Professional at work. Anyway, these are these median voters

that were profiled by the FT. They're very normal. They're just like really, they're really into like feet and insolves in particular. That could be the reform voters. We never know. Maybe they are desperately in need of foot-based content. Your average reform voter, like, as much as they believe in stopping immigration,

they're exactly as likely to believe in, like, I don't know, stipulating that people should wear sandals all the time. Oh, so they can see their toes. Like, they are, they are, this is a confused mishmash of just whatever has last been on their mind. Yeah, I'm a single issue ofosa, and that issue is the rabbit goo window privacy film. I mean, I'm not going to say that every single one of them has the crossover, but you do know that there's more than one person who is fully committed to barefoot is legal who also wants to machine gun small boats.

Like, that person exists in America for sure, but certainly in Britain too. Although I feel like barefoot is legal is less of a thing in Britain because it's wet all the time. Well, for now, until the same climate that gives us the Irish Givert's trammerer has us a sort walking around barefoot. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Until we have the sort of the Mediterranean climate of Bordeaux, you know, Eastbourne or whatever. It'll be

amazing though. I mean, about the wines will be good. Here is some opinions here. So this is Mandy, by the way, a lot of them say, well, the dividing line, or at least Farage says, the dividing line between reform and everyone else is that people who work for a living vote for reform and everyone else, it was either like some kind of green

family voting, Muslim scrounger. Yeah, this is, it's your typical kind of echo chamber type thing where like right wingers increasingly don't believe anyone else is real. or exists, but is instead just like immigrants and benefits scroungers and a trench coat? Yeah, well, all of these people, crucially, are retired or close to retirement age.

Yeah, that's the exception of one. Yeah, I was going to say, that's the key thing here. It's just people who are in manual, might be doing manual work. Yeah. But they're like the manager of a manual work company that they inherited and they are very close to retirement. Being retired makes you a worker in the same way that having been working class once makes you working class now, right? It's entirely a sort of cultural signify. Being having, being hardworking doesn't mean going to work. You can be hardworking and retired. Meanwhile, if you go to work and

you have pronouns, then, you know, you're basically on benefits. And remember, a huge amount of the people who are on benefits are also in work. Yeah. Anyway, we're going to go through it. Also, by the way, just a just a quick check. What's the single biggest draw on the benefits budget? Is it pensions? No. Actually, I think it's the flag budget for councils. Oh, okay. Uh-huh.

Cool. Yeah, it's... Sorry, I hate when I set you out for something and it turns out to be completely wrong, my bad. Remember? Well, it's the thing, though, because pensions aren't benefits because we worked for them, right? That's how it works, right? Anytime that the Green Party decides to add a new line to the progress pride flag,

it costs the country 30 billion pounds. I mean, it costs me 30 billion pounds, because every time Zach does that, I'm putting new flags together. This takes some bullshit. She can only sew, so quickly. He has like 20 feet wide at this point. So this is Mandy Mooney, 61 market seller. She worked as a hairdresser and her husband as a black cab driver.

30 years ago, wouldn't you know what? They bought a house for 30,000 pounds. For least they put a deposit on a house for 30,000 pounds. Crazy. So for Mooney, the biggest issue facing Britain is immigration, saying if we didn't have so many people coming and using our resources, that money would go to health care and the rest of it. A lot of people come to me and say they can't get the benefits that they need.

We're a small island. We're going to sink, which is I'm pretty sure she's being figurative. Why do her the favour? What if she isn't? What if she's just like if another person sets for, I kind of believe that we are the daytime TV floating foam map. And if another person steps on here,

we're just going to get pitched into a canal outside the TV studio. I'm very much of the belief that she's taking it very literally. And there is a theory where the government deliberately are bringing in refugees and immigrants because they want there to be too much weights about... Everybody moved to Northwest Scotland. It's tilting. It's tilting.

This is why the London-centric problem is like so desperate for this country and why I'm doing my part by moving to Western Scotland is there's too many people southeast. We're going to fucking bump into France. I mean, you joke, but most reform voters,

or most current reform representation is on the east. of the country, right? And when it comes to Britain, the east of Britain is sinking. That is actually true. The east of Britain is sinking. I hope that doesn't come back in a future segment. Yeah. Here's another one. Stephen Reeves, DJ, DJ, 60. Sorry, what? Hold on. He's a DJ. Steve Reeves and he's a DJ and he's a 60s years old. That's normal. Come on. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, sure. My, is doing my wedding reception and the DJ is like, yeah, and there's a 60-year-old man here. Yeah. So he says, Reeves is convinced that Farage is different for the rest. I just feel the country needs a change that in the cost of living is the biggest issue. People around here can't afford stuff. The last time we had anything built for the community was an 82. If you're white and you're my age, nobody looks out for you. And that's the core of the problem, right? Nobody had anything built for the community since 1982. If you're white in my age, nobody looks out for you.

It's taking that extra leap of like nothing has been built here since the 80s, probably because I'm white, I issue. And not because I'm 60 years old. and still have a young person job. Don't get earnest with it, but this is kind of, there is a tipping point here where, like, that there's an opening there that if you just draw back on the kind of the Fed bullshit, second part of that, you tap into

something. And we might get into it shortly, but like the current polling numbers across the party suggests that quite a few people have made that journey already. Well, the thing is, right, if you do that is like left-wing governance, right? If you do kind of like visible concrete, if you're all the time, like, at opening

of stuff being like, this is what we, your left-wing government are doing for you, and we don't really care whether or not you're white, but like, here's a new hospital, here's a new school, whatever. People do like that and people do respond to it. The only wrinkle is that they do tend to make it deeply personalist and go, oh, the God, you built the schools is all right, but everybody else hates me because I'm right. I just have to respond really quickly because the person said, if we didn't have so much immigration, we could spend money on healthcare, and it just happens to be close to my heart. I know you know this Riley, but many of you might also know this, that if you are not a citizen in United Kingdom, when you renew your visa, you have to pay an NHS surcharge. Does it go to the NHS? No, it goes into a fucking general fund. And you still pay taxes on income and national insurance and all that other stuff. Presumably taxes, you know, I know it doesn't directly fund the NHS, but it contributes to the budget, so on and so forth. And it's like, they literally have a thing to be like, fund our NHS with these fucking foreigners. And it doesn't even go to the NHS. So it's like, that's not really a foreigner's problem. Now is it?

What he says is, my son wants to be a carpenter and I want him through woodwork at school, but the school said we don't have the funding for it. It's ridiculous. Your agenda studies and stuff. That's the thing. That's been the sustained campaign that we have been talking about for years. And this is just it working. I love being a school administrator and spending the entire budget on like Audrey Lord instead of wood. Exactly. You can't do carpentry, but you can't be a carpenter. You can only be a carpenter. and you know what, it's not the same thing. I'm sorry, the whole school's made out of the progress pride flag now.

It's like the paperclip maximizing AI. Stop adding sexualities. But that's the thing. We joke, but this is the campaign. And these are people upon whom that campaign has worked, which is elect a government that doesn't, is never going to build a fucking hospital on the basis that the people who want to build hospitals also believe in things like civil rights.

This poor innocent kid who just wants to be a carpenter and then Zach Polanski calls the school and is like, demi-romantic, and they pull the fucking band saw out of the DC. I actually heard a story that Zach Polanski

went into a school and he saw a year eight kind of like little woodworking project and he sawed it in half. And he just stared at the kid and he gave the kid the devilish smile

as he saw the thing in half. Eye contact the whole time. This is, like Riley, this is the opportunity though, isn't it? Because you've got the two halves of the argument. You've got the nothing has been built since the late 70s, early 80s at the latest because of, you know, white racism. Okay, there's no point even bothering with the second of it.

But if you have a party that is willing to say, actually even through the 90s when our party labor, we're doing all the magical things and we don't want to say anything bad about that period, actually if you can say, yeah, no, nothing has been built since the 80s. And that's a major part of, and here is why that is, then there is an opportunity to pull back some of these radicalized people. And I'm not saying you're going to get everyone. By telling a story about what that decline actually looks like. You can pull people back from the brink. There is an opportunity to shift people away from the brink here. This is actually really good. I'll make this point really quickly because as you were sort of saying that, and I read the piece

earlier today, one of the things that I think is really evident among these people who have brought the narrative is also the fact that like they are very likely to spend quite a lot of time by themselves or they spend a lot of time online. And it's where like these types of narratives really kind of flourish, right? Very, very simple narratives that are mostly just like images. And if you've sort of bombarded people with enough images of like refugees coming in on boats and you kind of like bombard them images of like refugees and hotels and stuff. It is very easy to sort of construct this very, you know, very simplistic narrative of, you know, everyone gets a certain amount and, you know, the people who kind of arrive here, like get your amount of like whatever. Like it doesn't

work and none of it makes any sense. But part of the reason why that story is so difficult to tell is because of the complexities of the British state and also how it works. And also the fact that like no one really knows how it works. We have like a media that doesn't really kind of have explained that particularly well, if at all. Well, the opposite, that tries to confuse you about it because they want to, do you want you to be upset? And I was still very insistent on, like, quizzing party leaders on, you know, what if you were managing the economy, like a household budget, despite the fact that, like, even they

have sort of admitted, like, previously that, like, yeah, that, that's not how, like, it works. It is, like, partly that, like, media is wedded to this narrative because it, you know, informs some of the power they have. And without it, like, you know, I feel like they would really have to sort of think about restructuring themselves. But another part is also just like the targets for your kind of aiming towards are like incredibly, you know, people who have sort of benefited from society largely like probably fairly comfortable middle class voters who have never really had to interrogate how the system works. But also are likely to spend quite a lot of time on their own where these narratives really sort

of take hold because if you have no interaction with like your outside world or like, you know, you're sort of suck in your sort of siloed suburb, like you have no real incentive to actually sort of ask, oh, how do other people live? how do they relate to the world around me and everything? This is a narrative that is sort of built for people who are protected in suburban environments and who are trying to make sense of a world that doesn't really make sense, but don't really have any alternatives to go to other than simplistic media narratives. Well, let's test that with the next one,

which is a retired 67-year-old who started work as a bank clerk age 16 and then bought her own house a few years later with money she was saving from her salary. Cool. Says, I just want to give Farage a chance, really. Do I think it'll change? Not really. For Burford, the top top two issues are migration and welfare. There's too many people on benefits. Young people, we even have some in the family.

My partner's son, he's just 40, but he's never going to work again. He's already had six years on disability benefits. I hate my son-in-law. A classic of the genre. And also just the kind of general, like, pessimism and apathy, right? Of, like, well, I don't think anything's going to change. It's going to keep getting worse forever until I die. So I may as well have the guy who's kind of seems

like he's having fun with it, you know? Yeah, well, yeah, she says, and a reader of the Daily Mail and in view of GB News, Burford disposes the scale of immigration. It's just, it's such, it's so telling, right, that all of this stuff that we look at and we go, this is obviously repulsive. A lot of the people watching it and consuming it

and read it also find it repulsive. They just kind of, just immersed in it. And they're just like, yeah, it's supposed to make me feel miserable. I like it being miserable. Yeah, it's kind of that spite voter concept. That's sort of like, yeah, but this guy's pissing off the people that I hate.

he's making, he's saying the things that's going to get all of the, you know, the zone two dinner parties furious and upset and having fainting spells and all sorts of other like, you know, weird fucking things that they think about. And so invariably, it's like if the person is saying the thing that is perceived to be unsayable and, you know, standard political norms and you know that it's making people you hate mad. And let's be real, like, it's very easy to hate British politicians, particularly in the Labor Party right now. Oh, gotcha. You, I'm like I'm going to forgive it. But I'm going to say, like, you can understand how someone might get to that conclusion.

Well, she says, look at this, are populations falling? We need people coming into work. I'm not stupid, but none of us like to see them coming by boat. It's just the numbers coming in that's frightening. That's sort of like arriving at we should have like safe and legal asylum routes. Which we literally banned and made legal.

In order to placate this woman essentially, like her constituency. Yeah, it's like in order to placate this woman who wants safe and legal asylum routes, She's just been frightened by this machine that we talked about before. She's been frightened into wanting something to be done and for the government to do the only thing that it can do, successive governments to do this, which is crack down on every kind of legal immigration that there is, including safe and legal asylum routes, including, for example, what I always go back to, that if an asylum claim is denied, generally speaking, an airline will have to pay to fly that person back, which is one of the reasons,

one of the many reasons, why you can't just get on a plane to claim asylum, because They will let you because they don't want to pay to fly you back. And if these kinds of rules were changed, guess what we wouldn't have people drowning the channel. We wouldn't have people coming in on boats, which is what he seems to object to, right? She also doesn't oppose net zero, saying we've got to go down that road. When we get there, it will be a benefit to everybody. Anyone who thinks that the median viewer, the median person, the median voter has like a coherent political ideology of a bridge to sell you.

They absolutely do not. They'll literally be like, I want a machine gun in small boats, but also we need to renationalize everything, build 2.5 million council units per year and have his, like, we, and we definitely need to have legal routes to immigration for skilled migration. And also, I want to ban CFL and LED light bulbs and go back to the tungsten ones. Like, it never makes any fucking sense. And some of it is, you know, not always hand in glove with like what you'd perceive a right wing voter to be. But like, I guess also it's just a question of it winds up being evidence of just how dog shit the information, the media environment is because people wind up being like, oh yeah, I'm going to vote reform because

they definitely will build like Cruchav-scale fucking public housing units every year. Absolutely. It comes back to the point that I was making earlier. Like, you've got the two parts of the story. Like nothing has been built, no infrastructure, all public services have been dismantled since the 80s because of immigrants. And like that first bit is if like the conservatives, the Labor Party and the establishment media have no interest in actually explaining why that is because that's why they have power. They don't want to undermine that. So the only people talking about it currently, as I've said in past episodes for you guys, the only people painting a story that was coherent around that decline since the 80s was reform.

Now it's also the Green Party. And so that becomes interesting. I just happen to know a similar thing and I won't derail it, but it's looking like from polling that another insane referendum in the country I live in is going to pass was going to arbitrary limit the number of citizens that can ever be citizens of this country to 10 million. It's currently 9.1 million. And if it gets close. They're like, we're going to withdraw from all bilateral agreements and with the EU, which means 25% of our workforce suddenly can't work here anymore. And it looks like it's going to pass. Cool. Oh, so they're remining the bridges and tunnels, basically. I have no fucking idea, man, but invariably, like, it's the same problem. It's like housing is too expensive. Traffic is too

bad. Like, there's a lot of, you know, like, like investment around things to facilitate cross-border stuff. It's like, right, because this country is basically 90 years old except for, like, every person in this country is 100 years old except for immigrant workers. And it's like, but once again, a party has basically been like, here's the problem. We're going to fix it by weird, like, I don't know, census-based, uh, Malthusianism. And because they're the one saying it, all of a sudden, people are like, wow, look, you know, they're at least doing something about it. And I see these parallels between that and this shit. And I don't know, it's, it's just, it's distressing. We'll put it that way. Well, let's hear from Martin Davis 71 retired. I'm so often saying this. Well, that's all we do,

really. It's all of this. It's like I have the little do it for her thing, but it's just a picture of, picture after picture of Martin Davis, 71 retired. I used to have a, What would Jesus do T-shirt?

But now I have a WWMDS T-Shirt. What would Martin Davis say? You try and do anything in this country and like 71-year-old start banging on your window, trying to get in your house, like Day of the fucking dead. The podcast about the what would

W-W-M-D-S-E-S-1-Ratired, T-shirt is really good on Amazon. So he says, The cost of living is not a worry. He has private health care and plays golf three times a week. Immigration is a massive problem. Davis has reservations about Farage. He says,

I don't like him as a person, but I like what he stands for, and I think that's a big thing. I just feel like everyone's got so left wing now, even the conservatives, that we need someone to be strong against what's going on. But then he says,

his two biggest priorities are nationalizing water companies and continuing with climate action. Incredible. It's like, yeah, Guy who is like, you can't even golf for migrants anymore, you know? These are all made up as well, aren't they? These are all like a pastiche by the,

or these actual people they've found to reform votes. These are people. Oh, this are real. Okay, cool, cool, cool. Kevin Badnock is like, look at these dinosaur skeletons. We have no problem determining if they were male or female. And then it's like, God, everyone's so left wing nowadays. Well, because, because, right, it goes back to

the absolutely direct information environment that we live in, which is, if you said to Martin, Davis, what does left wing mean? He would probably say something vaguely homophobic and then he would, and then just say, and it's why nothing works. Yeah, basically. He'd be like, everyone's too woke and they're too concerned with woken. And that's why they don't just get the damn job done. Because that that is how you've been taught to think, which is that every bit of civil rights that's happened since the 1960s has been the thing that has been pushing down productivity and not the massive economic liberalization. And also that it's the right party and particularly, like,

Like, the fellow travelers of Farage, who have made it a point to obstruct successfully anything that might have alleviated that. Similar to here where the far right parties are the same people fucking blocking everything that would, for example, build more housing. And it's like, but that it's like, it's like, the connection never gets made. And it's like, it's the, it's the argument over gender. It's whatever the fuck G. G.B. News says, like someone, Cambridge is going to ban, I don't know, like saying white

male or something like that. Who even knows? And it's like, I mean, you can't call it. it blackmail anymore. If you're threatening somebody, you have to call it white male because that's the worst thing they can think of. The gender is part of it, but like it's so much of this

is just like these people are racist, right? And I'm not using that in the way that sort of, you know, right wingers accused left wing of doing of being like you just say that to stop conversations or shut things down, right? It's kind of the opposite. You can't change any of this unless you like acknowledge that

like these people have a deep seated baked in racism. They see, and probably not around them in their communities, but they see non-white people and non, not that they're religious either, but like non-Christian, observably non-Christian people. And they're like, those people shouldn't be in this country. They have no right to be. They can't, they shouldn't be allowed to be citizens. And whether or not they explicitly advocate for that as a policy, that's the thing, in my opinion that they see and they're like, here's what's wrong with this country. Yeah. And that that's the sort of like, you know, opening. That's the crack in the door that then gets like kicked through with like 50 billion hours of AI. generated content of like what people imagine Whitechapel is like. And it's like they live in, you know, upper dicker or whatever that doesn't have a school because there's no children. And everyone is white. And they're like, there's too many fucking foreigners in this country. Yeah. And also, again, it's like the classic thing of bunch of problems

diagnosed correctly. But there's been this such incredibly successful propaganda operation to suggest that the problem is civil rights. And there it is. So you get now the, your average median voter is like, I want every progressive economic change. possible if only those minorities weren't holding them back somehow. I hate 15-minute cities and I want the government to build micro rayons everywhere. Hey, Orania was a 15-minute city. We could tell them that. So speaking of Orania, I wanted to go into our final segment here that Gareth has used to drive

himself mad. Now, Gareth is sort of your celebrity shot segment where you are now, I would say, mentally a resident of Forest City one. Okay. You've gone into what I would describe as a research coma. And I want you to tell me, just as an entry point, what this sort of British attempt to make Solano County, California forever, has to do with Pathaka AI.

Yeah, which by the, yeah, which is an AI to create a podcast, which is a funny kind of tie into second one of the show. Right. So we have, you know, ever since MBS has kind of excited us with, with Neom's visions of desert utopia, right? I was way back in, within T.F. Cannon, back in 20, that was. We've obviously all been wondering, can the UK gain on this action? And I'm here to answer with a resounding, no, we cannot. But God damn, there will be some guys who will try.

Nobody can. Well, Azerbaijan, perhaps. But yeah, no, much like, much like Neon, this, I hope goes nowhere. But there's a little of insidious shit. Okay, so Forest City One, this is this thing. Forest City One is a... How to describe it? Sent a report to government recently trying to pitch yourself. It's next stage of pitch. A huge document being fronted by some guys, we'll talk about a minute. It's called Forest City One.

It's a proposed, privately led new city on up to 45,000 acres of rural land east of Cambridge, between Newmarket and Haverill. Developers describe it as Britain's first new city in over 50 years, with up to 400,000 homes and potentially one million people. That's right. One million people. This pitch. Join us in

mega city Cambridge. Yeah, exactly. This is like one million people like as an urban core is kind of like a central man.

It's like Manchester or Birmingham or Leeds. Birmingham or Leeds. Well, Leeds, it's the size of all of Leeds, right? This is a huge city.

I also have to add that as I realize this is one of those only elder millennials will get this, but calling a place for a city one, it's like,

no, you don't want to maim your city after an F-0 level, okay? The city's an F-Zero all look to Stopian. We don't want that. But instead, this is what we get. So the pitch, the pitch is like drenched in AI slop. Is that very right? Yeah, Riley. Okay, go on. I'll set to a little more table setting here.

So what they explicitly compare it to, in fact, if you say it would be the first new city in 50 years, they're explicitly trying to draw a connection to places like Milton Keynes. However, there was one crucial difference, which is they're saying, what if instead of Milton Keynes being a sort of civil society project that's led by the government, what if we recognize that this government has ambitions for lots of things to happen, but are hoping someone else will do them. And they're saying, what if that someone else was us? And we have a private Milton Keynes, your own personal Milton Keynes. Your own personal Milton Keynes. And they're doing so drenched in AI slop. With this Milton Keynes, you are spoiling us. Yes. Yeah. I mean, Milton Keynes has a lot of its own problems, but you're right.

It was founded with the idea of being, it was a public project. Yeah, so lots of AI slop. There are like pictures of like walkable spaces. They've got trams rather than cars and pods. So that's something at least. Oh, they have cars. Sorry, Gareth, they do have cars. Can I tell you that they have cars? Yeah. This is my favorite thing. They have cars because they are going to have modular wooden buildings. Yeah. They're going to have a strange covenant for buying and selling houses. There's an element of Georgism for some. Yeah, we'll get there. Hold on. Hold on. Sorry. The covenant in the wooden buildings is giving a little bit like M. Knight Shyamalans the village to me. Yeah, it's, I'm outside with AI generate stuff.

It makes you feel a little bit uneasy anyway when you look at it. You finally, like, escape from this, this planned city and you get out to the real world and it's milk and keens outside. It's this planned, covenanted, prefab, AI-generated proposal, just like Neon was never anything other than renderings. It is renderings. But it's renderings with the desire to enclose a bunch of space to make a private city. My favorite element of it, of course, is that they will have cars.

They will just be undercrown. Yes. Going through tunnels, boring company style. It's doing the boring company thing. It's retro, but like doing that in Cambridgeshire. Again, we're back to Irish wine. Wet.

It's too wet. It's a part of the country that floods every like five minutes. If anyone looks at it funny, it's made of like mud. You're going to bore tunnels through like wet mud and then go like drive yourself driving car through the mud caverns. And if you die, you'll be entombed in the bog. Imagine the future archaeologist finding the bog. bodies of Forest City 1.

Why do we have to say the downward revision of expectations? You opened up by telling me I was going to have a Milton Keynes of the mind and now you're telling me that I'm just going to drive a car in an underground tunnel forever. Yeah, you start out with Milton Keynes of the mind and you end pretty quickly at dying a bog, drown in mud inside a Tesla. The problems are the fact that the whole area is geologically cottage cheese will come back not just in the form of like the transportation issues because, yeah, there are other problems with, from an infrastructure perspective, it's not just people moving around. It's things like, I don't know, potable water become an issue as well. Go on it. But also like, because Zach Balanski wants to bring so many, you know, he wants to import the entire world to Britain when it sinks. It's going to make those tunnels even more dangerous. The way it's structured is worth talking about, right? As we said, it's belts on top of this cottage cheese. Yeah. Well, it is conceptually as well. Because this is, I mean, part of the, I would say, salesmen, let's call it, the culture of salesmanship and middlemaning that exists,

whenever there is a government that is sort of hesitant to do anything. And again, these people are not in it, but this is their go at getting legislation passed that will enable them to build a private city, a bit like Prospera in Honduras as well, or a bit like Solano County, California Forever, is trying to do by the back door and which Neon was able to do just by using state security forces in an absolute monarchy. And so they're trying to get the area declared a special economic zone. I wonder if we had like a book about those to talk about it. Ah, never heard of those.

Okay. Probably, I bet the person who wrote it has a pretty cool last name as a first name. But as they say, in the way they present this, they say instead of a business strangled by red tape, imagine a special economic zone where enterprises can invest, adapt, and expand at the pace of innovation itself, which I think we've learned recently, A, we don't want to do. And B, no one in Britain that claims they even want to do that actually generally wants to do that CFN scale. The good news is, right, if you do try to open the lab from 28. days later here because of innovation, right?

Soon it will be claimed by the mud, as all things will be. So you don't even have to worry that much because it's just going to sink. Future archaeologists, like the current archaeologists find the bog bodies with the nipples cut off. And like, ah, this guy was deposed as a king. Future bog bodies will find, like, guys with Gilles being like, they've removed the arms from their outer garments. What could it mean? I like the next line in that bump as well as fun. Because instead of concrete sprawl, imagine a genuine forest city.

where nature isn't an afterthought, but woven into daily life, to which I'm thinking, yes, via moss and mud and other such things as it sinks into the ground. Yeah, it's not just Milton Keynes M-Dash, it's M-Dashens. Yeah, there's a lot of M-Dashes in here,

I'm going to tell you that. Oh, boy. I don't say, that's mysterious to me. The company behind it is called Albion City Development Corporation, which is look at both the acronym, what acronym have they called themselves? Yeah, well, if I'm writing in, my notes here. Brackus, they called it ACDC,

the fucking losers. Yeah, that's right. It was founded by two guys. Joe Reeve, the co-founder of Looking for Growth, which is a campaign, he's, by the way, connected in, like, I wouldn't be surprised if he personally knows some of the Solano County people. Yeah, yeah, 100%. First of all, like, looking for growth is bullshit, because it's just two guys, and then

growth never fucking shows up. Waste of, waste of an evening. I wouldn't even bother. It was, I kind of like the Christopher guest version. And then the, it was also founded by Shiv Malik, who, in most of the copy on the website is referred to as like, oh, former journalist and, you know, and campaigner.

So, like, no, he was like a Web 3 entrepreneur for like seven years. I was digging through the CVs of both Reeve and Malik. And it is like, yeah, Malik is, was a journalist for a bit. And then appears have kind of been when you go, oh, he was a journalist. And we can use that to say, to like, say he's a value member of our marketing team. And then that's kind of been his career after that. Reeve, yeah, it's kind of like was a software guy and then went to Silicon Valley. It's funny that, yeah, Malik ended up in becoming like marketing guy for some AI firms.

He did crypto for a little while. And then now it's like, and yeah, now it's, he is the CEO at pathaca.com. Which is, it creates a podcast on any subject with AI. That sounds familiar. Wait a minute. It's yet another competitor to what we do, right? So, yeah, do you ever wish you could dive deeper into any topic instantly? Pathaka turns your urgent need for information into a full length, highly research podcasted an instant.

Just type a prompt, click and then listen. to Bethaka's host discuss your chosen niche for 20 minutes. That's what we do, but just with Wikipedia, you don't need AI for that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Can a podcast derail the entire episode to be like, actually when, uh, when you try to do service, the entirely built out of Wood City in Cambridge here and black mold is everywhere, that's when ACDCs black and black starts playing.

And, you know, podcast can't, they wouldn't make that connection. Malik, Malik's other big thing after he, when he realized, right, oh, my pivots need to pivot to where the actual money comes from. which is the state. He started something called the Intergenerational Foundation, a think tank founded, focused on millennial and gen Z

economic woes, saying you need a radical infrastructure reboot to avert generational conflict. Again, he came up with the idea of the Forest City during a pandemic lockdown. It's like in lockdown being like,

if only the 71 year old plumber and this 23 year old web designer could live in harmony together. Oh, they won't be living in harmony together because the thing about the Forest City one is as a privately owned city, they get to decide who lives there. Yes, one of the more

fucked up things about this. Big housing condo, big, big co-op board. Before we talk about that, I wanted to just point out, just to give you an additional flavor of the sort of vibes we're talking about is the two people who are very early on pinned to this as kind of like authoritative advisors

were Professor Tim Loonick, who's like a Sajajad Javid's sort of economic advisor and sort of did some stuff as he was sort of advisor to three touring Tory housing secretaries. And also, everyone's favorite Dame, Dame Patricia Hewitt, who you'll remember was suspended from the Parliamentary Labor Party over the question of political lobbying irregularities and was president of the Board of Trade in the past. So, hmm, I have a question. Yeah. Are any other prominent former Tory advisors, let's just say picking a prime minister at random from

the Boris Johnson era, involved at all, for example, speaking at the launch of the looking for growth campaign group. Yeah. Cominick Dummings. No, something like that. I can't, I can't remember. Yeah. Also, weirdly Z.

Yusuf as well. Do you remember that guy? Move out to Big Brain Torreville, everyone. Like, all of these guys are going to move out to like a city in, like, some mudflats to either like die or prove a very important point. Well, this is the other thing, right? And one of the reasons why I suspect this is just like plans, why this is British Neon, is if you are that guy,

If you really enjoy being kind of heterodox and big brain, like dinner party provocateur, right? You would rather die than move out of zone two. And without those people around you that you like to trigger, you aren't anything, right? And so then you end up in a real kind of waiting for growth situation. Because it's just you and like all of the idiots that are like you. And most of all, the people you have most contempt for in the world, your fans. just living in the fends together in a sort of wooden house, hearing the sort of Teslers underneath the floor,

sounds miserable. And I don't think it can ever happen on that basis. Yeah, exactly. The trajectory is quite clear. What this is is a grift, right? It's a big grift. And you can kind of get the feeling of that from, looking for growth,

Joe Reeves thing that he created, which had, you know, Dominic Cummings, a use of. Also, Ian Hogarth, you might have heard of him. He's currently chair of the UK government's AI, like foundation model task force, question mark. But like so these are all kind of the grifty type. But crucially, looking for growth seems to have pivoted away from what it was doing,

which was like planning reform, and into the world of doing viral videos of them clearing graffiti, cleaning graffiti off tube trains. Yeah. And they seem to be ramping up on that bit because that must be their... Yeah, because they can't leave London behind. It's too... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It looms too large in their imagination. Well, the people who they want to leave... This is, of course, also the classic, like, reactionary social plan, which is, well, this is for everybody else. You know, everybody else is going to... to leave London. I'm going to stay here. You can eye on things here. You guys, go live in the mud. You go live way steep in mud.

It's like, go live in this perfect planned city that sounds like it was something that like, you know, someone hallucinated after eating Ammonita Muscaria and Nisni Novgorod in like 900 AD. They're like, oh, a wooden city, but underneath it the sounds of demon machines are endlessly rubble. Welcome to City

17. You have chosen or been chosen to relocate to one of our finest outstanding urban centers. Here's how you get chosen. 40% are allocated to employees of commercial tenants. Oh, if you work for Mark Andreessen, right? In addition to all of the fringe benefits of having to listen to him talk, you may also get relocated to the technology bog.

Yes, correct, yes. My business, my job got a little to unwoke because the CEO got scared because he got like fucking mind-virized by right-wig influencers and now they're putting me in a bog. Yeah, yeah, the job perks, you know, went from, you know, something that might beneficial to AI tokens. Now you get to live in the like frontier fortress from the Revenant where everything is just like concentric wood, wood,

watch towers made of wood, so on and so forth. Doing like Ibanker stuff where it's like, well, the hours are pretty tough the first couple of years, but you're making like crazy money and you cloy your way up to being like, well, the hours are pretty bad and you are in the bog. But after a couple of years of it, you do start getting bits of oxygen. I mean, it's not sounding like suspiciously like being a worker at Bikinor, you know, where you like game by the disease scorpion, but you get your, you get your nicer flat if you grift a bit harder. So the other one, 30% based on merit and how they

define merit. Oh, we liked your posts. We liked your posts. Please come and live in our bog. I mean, this genuinely is starting to sound like like a parody, like the Soviet image in the 1930s imagined what capitalist Magnetogors would be. And it's like it's made out of wood and it Reisthalism in the bog. Please, please come and live in Nishny Novgorod. We really liked your post. And the other thing is, you're sort of like influencers. The people that like

these people consider to have merit also can't move out of London and wouldn't move out of London partially because they like it, but partially because they need to farm it for content, right? You can't do the kind of like, I filmed myself wearing like an England flag down

Whitechapel. And like you know, because of the Sharia or whatever. I was murdered. Well, it's like the Dubai influences who've gone out and they're like, like the ones who went out to the like the one area they've built of like Neo or whatever. And there was no one there and they tried to do Instagram stuff.

And it just fell in. I just went back to. Yeah. So what they have is they say for Mara selection, we're looking to fill the city with Britain's most ambitious families. Oh dear. What's that? It sounds like a really bad BBC free.

Like one like five episodes here. Brin's most ambitious families. where we're the most ambitious families and it turns like and they all fuck up their kids in like different ways. Yeah, because they lost them in the mud.

Entrepreneurs, researchers, engineers, builders, plumbers, hospitality staff, electricians, teachers, nurses, creatives,

doctors, cleaners, developers. It's just like, all of these Tory freaks thinking about who you need to

populate a sissy with being like, well, I played guess who when I was a kid. So probably all of those guys. We need someone with glasses.

How do you be, like I'm sure there is a way, but how do you be like an, ambitious plumber in this context. Well, to be fair, with Forest City One, I won't say much to be an ambitious plumber because they're going to need fucking plumbers there. I'll tell you that for enough.

I'm going to be the first plumber to like root pipe through completely loose like muds and sediment. Oh, and if you wanted to vote, by the way, early residents will become stakeholders in the city's success with input into governments and development priorities, but the city will be run by a development corporation that retains ownership of the land and then captures the value of the land as it rises in value. you just capture the value of the building. Oh, okay.

Cool. Yeah, it's easily morphing into this sort of like three-dimensional triangular shape. So it's basically ground around like ground leases, right? Yeah, it's turbo leasehold. It's turbo leasehold. It's just turbo leasehold. It's the, it's leasehold, but like they have a covenant on your future. Yeah, it's horrifying.

Also, you can't vote. Yeah, it's right. We're going to get this, there's more to dig. I want to just briefly sort of say something, though, which is listeners, you may ask, why the fuck is Gareth paying attention to this? it's obvious hoaxomists. It's obvious nonsense. It's not worth paying any time and attention to. The trouble is, it has an expert committee with, which has, which is like got 40 plus people endorsing these proposals, on which are some actual normal and indeed sensible human beings,

which is the thing that got me baffled. So it's like a real mix of all sorts. You know, good eggs like one of my former sort of anti-Hs2 paring partner, a sparring partner, sorry, Paul Pousland, who's a good activist environmental lawyer, and I think absolutely has his heart in right place. James Gleve is a really good transport planner. Again, someone else. else I've collaborated with before. Like, people in, like, there's lots of different people

who are actually good people, sensible people who have kind of been involved in this, which that's what got me puzzled. So I'm like, well, how have they got, ended up getting wound into this stuff? It's quite,

I think it's quite easy to do the sales pitch for these things and have that be quite, like, and then to not ask the questions, like, how are you going to get water for all of these people? Yeah. I mean,

Shiv Malik follows me on Twitter and it's like, like him and Jaree, follow me on Twitter, and have definitely, I've replied some of my tweets about it going, well, you could become one of the expert people. Come and have a look at the thing. So they are clearly out on the hunt.

I'm trying to change the bog from the inside. But yeah, as you say, there are so many problems. The infrastructure one, yeah, we've talked about roads and the fact that you'd have to build a complete infrastructure to make this thing work. Well, a lot of the bump, the promo bump claims that this new city would benefit from its proximity to Cambridge, you know, the gravity well of Cambridge's existing economic,

ecosystem, you know, all the research and industry stuff, but like, it has no connection to Cambridge other than like rural roads. So you, all that infrastructure, but also, crucially, if you have a city of a million people, they drink water and poop. Where is that infrastructure coming from, again, in the swamp? What are you doing here? This is a huge amount of infrastructure. You have to create from nothing. The other thing I wanted to bring us around to as well is that this is, of course, yes, you could say it's British Solano County slash California Forever, but in a way California Forever slash Salano County is a very British phenomenon. Yeah.

Because what they're doing is they're recreating something like Bourneville or like the body housing estates of the late 19th century, all of which were about tightly enforcing the morals of the people who were living there by and then trying to get them to stay living in the way that they actually should be living by like making their tendency conditional. Quakerism without the moral code. For example, let's say you're one of the 30% of people. people chosen on merit. You're an entrepreneur. Suddenly, you fall sick. You're not able to work as an entrepreneur anymore. Maybe you have to go on benefits. Are you still allowed to live in the city? What happens?

Are you or have you fallen foul of their more? Are you no longer elect? Do you no longer get to live in this like, you know, Garden of Eden? It's frightening. And then, you know, other infrastructure as well, you know, things like schools, library, sports centers, they would all be owned by ACDC spits and then leased back to the public bodies like the NHS. So, so it's okay. So the N. So the N. is then on the hook for what, like a million people, five, six major hospitals? What? What? What's, it's just, it, it's, well, okay, it's incoherent, sure. But it's also deeply sinister. Yeah, absolutely. It can be seen purely as, as I think a, a bit of a Hail Mary power grab that's probably a bit too stupid to work. But at a time where, I would say there's a

great deal of appetite in the British state to allow building to happen so long as it's going, because there's a big opportunity to bull those planning regulations, but there's not a big drive to, like, improve standards or invest in anything. If someone comes along and says, what I'm going to do is I'm going to, more or less suspend democratic rights as I see fit, create a kind of meritocracy of my own design. I'm going to do a megalopolis in the mud. I'm a muddolopolis.

And we're going to do a development corporation, which worked great with Stephen and Charlo, Milton Keynes, all these other places. Don't pay attention to the things. fact that is under my control, not like some kind of accountable political control. It's utterly a top down affair, which is like, you know, Malik and Reeve get parliamentary buy-in to basically get a fiefdom. Yeah, yeah, that's, that really is essentially what we're talking about. Like, this is what they are doing is hoping that there's just a little bit of that William the

conqueror juice left. You can be like, oh yeah, can I get this, can I get this sort of AI enabled barony outside of Cambridge? I mean, really, you talk about appetite. The words I'm more worried about is the appetite of government is one thing, but the desperation specifically of this Labour Party. This is where I'm worried, like, and I thought there was merit, worth us, I shouldn't use the word merit, give them everything we were discussed. It was worth us describing this because of what is about to happen to the Labour Party or what the current parliamentary Labour Party is about to do to itself. There is a gap, it's no coincidence that the plans have been submitted in, you know, with this local election series of elections coming up that's going to result in chaos, because this sort of

crazy plan might be the bollocks that they end up grabbing desperately to try and, show that they're doing something radical and different, which is, you know, cause for concern, I would say. Yeah. And, you know, again, like you say, this is a desperate moment for principalless morons. Yeah. And there is any reason to think that they would pick kind of whatever, given that we know what happened with like end scale.

But, hey, you know what? Throw the dice because you may just get made into like whatever the Gile version of a lord is. Yeah. Yeah. Still a lord, I think. So, yeah. You might say, well, there is a need for houses. Like, why are we...

Okay, yeah, this is obviously sinister and stupid, but does some element of it have merit? Well, for me, like a key part of this story, as you guys have pointed out in previous TFs running back into the ancient past, particularly the one with Danny Dorling that you did a while back, which really good on this, but also of the other infrastructure, Gareth as well,

is the idea that there is really a housing crisis existing at all. It's not that clear cut that there is one of those, and, you know, particularly by Yimbi types, you scream about that thing. But there are about a million empty homes in the UK, right? And handing the free money cheat to developers, as I sit here surrounded by unfinished homes from a private developer that went bust, by the way, that's currently my, has been my life for two years. Handing the free money cheat does not solve that problem. Developers are not going

to endorse this. They're not going to endorse something that results in reduction in house prices. They're going to want something that brings them more values, why the National Federation of Builders, the House Builders, is super keen on this. They're like, who, that looks nice. So, crucially, the key point is that building new towns and cities, it's totally unnecessary. We're we have enormous volumes of like gray and brownfield land, you know, like abandoned or like semi-derallet land in our cities, particularly in the north, by the way, as well as a lot of really stupid low-density suburbs that we can and should like incrementally densify where railway stations and stuff are. So we could be doing this stuff. You know, there are potentially

half a million homes could be built on large greyfield sites, although we have the potential to do this. And crucially, they already have the infrastructure. They already have the trains. They already have the sewage and the kind of the potable water infrastructure. So it's, it's necessary to do these huge new cities anymore. We don't need to do that stuff. We have so much derelict land. The question then is, oh, well, why doesn't that happen? You know, why, it's because it's politically messy, developers don't like it because even though they get grants for it, land remiation is risky and expensive. And crucially, and this is what comes back to Super TF territory, is it's not very appealing for private investors. You know, the AI slot renders are much sexier.

They're much better at driving investment, driving the interest from private equity potentially. and also you get that initial land value boosts. So the speculation part of it, which by the way, this absolutely is land value speculation. No formal plans. It's not even clear where this thing is precisely going to be built. And yet there is all this online speculation going on that's scaring people,

that's changing the way that land value is sitting. You know, new towns and cities require so much new infrastructure and, you know, resulting in much more loss of farmland or crucially like marginal land with high biodiversity value and all the construction carbon as well from building the bloody thing and all that infrastructure. We don't need to do it.

There are better options, which is why this thing just completely exasperates me, right? And if you are going to build these things outside of existing cities, we've got a lot of World War II airfields hanging out that you can just go and build on. There's still lots of those.

It doesn't need to be that like all borderline out of business carting track. You just convert it into a town. It's fine. And what we conclude with, I think, is it comes with the fact that this is all renders is just so uniquely British because it's like, hey, we want growth,

but we really just want to do renders. Do you mind if that's a, enough for you to please pay us 900 million pounds. Yeah, even this comes up against the fundamentals of Starmerism, which is we want to talk about, you know, we want growth, but we refuse to build anything. We refuse to do anything that might create that growth. Yeah, exactly. Look, I think that's probably all the time we have for today because we're running to a bit of a schedule. But, Garrett, always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you for bringing me this awful, awful city. You're very, very welcome. Crikey, yeah, listen to, um, listen to Begayette, solve crimes. Listen to, to no mores,

go and get hold of an album that should have been released by Second Homes and 10,000 posts is out there to listen to as well. I was thinking what can I plug besides that? I really haven't been up so much other than that. But thank you, thank you nonetheless. Yeah, listen to Railnatter. Yeah, check out RealNatter. Definitely a great place to start.

Riley, Riley, you were kind enough to offer that for us to change the outro music for this episode to a song from the album, Find a Way to Hate it by my band Second Homes that has just released today as we were recording. So we are going to, I'm going to drop a song, another one that Saffin wrote and sings on that I like a lot. And hopefully if you like it, there's a link in the show notes and you can buy it. And I'll link to everyone else's stuff. You know, we don't do that enough.

We don't plug the links enough. We got to have more links. We need more blue texts. We need more. Links in the description. More fucked up URLs when the, when the hyperlinks don't work. We need all that. All right.

All right. Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye. Nights when collared its head houses the streets where your mother lives They threw her out and they built you a threat Fatal attractions and workplace harassment Between nothing and unpaided

Tried to a little stream the racists Andcocta can know They didn't wipe their teeth with Uncaught with talking powder and pills Your hatred is with me made from your body And you're starting to let it spin And you're starting to let it spell And you're starting to let it spell