TRASHFUTURE - Busting Offsets feat Dr Jess Green

Episode Date: November 8, 2022

This week, Riley, Milo, and Alice join Dr Jess Green (@greenprofgreen) to discuss the concept of carbon offsets and how they’re not the foolproof solution to climate change that every huge polluter who definitely wants to keep polluting seems to think they are! Or maybe they’re just pretending to think that! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We’re currently in Australia, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Canberra: https://au.patronbase.com/_StreetTheatre/Productions/TFLP/Performances *BRITAINOLOGY ALERT* We’ve added a live show in Melbourne on the 19th of November in which Nate and Milo will present Britainology! Get tickets here: https://tccinc.sales.ticketsearch.com/sales/salesevent/79853 *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

This is all coming off the back of something Alice and I were talking about earlier, which is doing the TF No Flying tour at some point in the future and where we could go, realizing that outside the English-speaking world, our country with the most listeners is Germany. It's true. I don't understand it. Maybe it's like a form of vicarious entertainment for them that you get home from your job at the factory that makes precision machine parts and machines that make precision machine parts and instead of playing like precision machine parts, making simulator or whatever,

you listen to a podcast about a country where everything is terrible and you're like, oh, delightful. See what's going on in Britain this week. Can you know the future? I love that shit. I'm not happy. I'll be honest. I'm not happy that we're telling Germans who Matt Hancock is.

I don't like them having that base of knowledge. I'm going to take some time off of my job at the precision manufacturing parts from the precision manufacturing machines factory. I'm going to call Han, see if he's back from his fisting retreat and then take one of my six months of annual leave so I can watch Matt Hancock at SAS who dares wins. The cleaning staff have got to hate it when their venue is hosting the fisting retreat. It's fine. They're very considerate.

They put a top down. I think we could genuinely do a show in Berlin. The vibes would be so weird. So if you are German, if you live in Berlin, if you live anywhere near Berlin. No one German lives in Berlin. They're all Australian. It's going to be a higher Australian ratio than the Australian tour. Then let us know and bully Riley into letting us do a tour in Germany.

Oh, we've got a bully Riley. It's going to Berlin. It's going to be so hard. I think the no fly tour only counts if you take a boat. You have to go by kayak or canoe. I'd like to see the GoPro cam as you make your way to Berlin. Well, we're all kayaking into Hamburg, Harbour in order to do a live show around the various ports of northern Germany.

That's a trash future kayak tour. Come see us in the Helioglad Bay. Yeah, see which one of us fakes our own deaths in the kayak. So welcome. Welcome to TF. It's the free episode. The free episode. Miley going to say anything about that?

It's the free one. Thank you. Alice was referencing John Darwin. Yes. Is he from Hart? Look, the guy faked his own death in a kayak and then they got caught because he lived in the attic of his own house for like three months while they waited for the search to die down.

And then his wife got the life insurance money and they both moved to Panama and bought like a fancy apartment in Panama. And they got caught because they agreed to pose for a photo with the real estate agent in Panama, which went up on the website. And they were like, hang on, that's that dead guy. Who was checking Brit vibes? Yeah, I think because someone who knew her saw the picture, I think. And then classic British activity, pocket watching, right?

Being like this woman, whose husband has just disappeared in a horrible kayak accident, has bought a flat somewhere nice. I am going to like do a full Jason Bourne style rundown on her entire life and just found this like evidence of fraud very easily. So, so before we waste too much of our very esteemed knowledgeable guest time, I want to introduce for the first time on TF, but not for the first time in the Nate Bathae Extended Universe of Podcasts. It is a professor of the environment in general at U of T, Dr. Jess Green.

Jess, how's it going? Hey, how's it going, guys? Pretty good. Yeah, great, thanks for coming on. Got it. Looking forward to wasting more of your time as the episode goes on. So excited, huge fan. Very, we're all on this kayak trip together.

And we're all in like a sort of like a like a tandem kayak. Like it just keeps going back and all four of us are paddling. And we're just going to get, we're going to get into the harbor of Kew pretty soon. And we're going to buy a seapod and pose for a photo with the realtor. Yeah, we're going to buy something that's four times as expensive as that flat. Anyway, please don't ask about it. We're very excited to speak with Jess today about some of, I would probably think, the in terms of survival of the human species, most consequential things going on at the moment.

That's right. What are we, gay? I told you last week, yes. And we support that. We're going to be all about top carbon trading and all of the various ways in which how we've decided to manage pouring the death gas into the atmosphere. Oh, no, that doesn't sound good. Yeah, just gas.

Yeah, we're pouring the death gas in the atmosphere, but we've created some accounting metrics around it to try and. That usually contains death gas. Yeah. Is that a pretty accurate way of describing what's gone on? Pretty much, I mean, because we know that, you know, accounting for things always works. And yeah, so we just need more rules and greater financialization, because that always turns out well.

There's one thing I've always thought about climate change. This is a situation that needed more charts. Oh, yeah. And, you know, we're doing it. We're making it real. We're adding graphs to this. We're adding more graphs to this because the existing graphs didn't give me enough anxiety. We've brought in some more of them.

We've brought in guys who are like especially trained special experts at, you know, adding graphs to stuff and they're going to do a great job financializing at all. That's right. Yeah, line go up, man. Except the problem is that the line is the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That line, we don't want to go up. Yeah, it's just, it's the, for me, the whole like, like carbon credit trading scheme thing seems to be like, you know,

like a like a glacier calves off of some ice sheet in Greenland. And then we're like, yeah, but it didn't technically do that because you see, we planted the same tree 40 times and it did burn down. So, you know, that tree got planted. You see, if you see the graph, it's flat. So, we're good. Yeah. So, like, don't worry about the calving because we're like,

we're basically digging and filling in a ditch a lot to sort of counteract the effects of the calving. I think, I really like the idea of carbon offsets. This idea that like, okay, we've, we've omitted all this carbon, but we can make savings other places. So, it's fine. I think we should like, apply that to other aspects of life. And I think the best example I can think of this is Harold Shipman, right? Killed?

Woke King, Harold Shipman, sadly. Well, he killed a lot of people, right? But as a doctor, I think we can argue that he successfully did murder offsets because he saved a lot of people as well. And therefore, you have to play. See if it's good or not. Exactly. You can have, you have to like, plot this on a big chart and you can work out whether or not Harold Shipman was actually a bad person

based on whether his murders exceeded his life saved. He was the first man to participate in what would become a story tradition in British politics of seeing how much money you could save the NHS only at the cost of a lot of people dying. But before we get into, to cop stuff, we've agreed to, unfortunately, expose Jess to some Matt Hancock news. That's right. I'm ringing the little bell. If you were German, turn off the fucking episode right now. You don't, you don't get to enjoy this.

That he's for us. Canst du dem Matt Hancock? Has he had a sick parkour get dropped? So, Matt Hancock, for those of you who have not been following, has a gross British man. He's a, he's a, the hound, lieber hound du conservative party. So Matt Hancock has decided to, in the wake of basically being

multiply disgraced for, who could even begin like this thing, obviously. Fucking in the office, things of this nature. Killing your nan. He's also not rage against the machine. And then also what, wait, does rage against the machine? Did they ever do a song that was like, give a four billion pounds of state money to a guy from the pub? Weirdly, yes.

Not very successful. It was sort of, it was, that's what Tom. Tom DeLonge had a weird phrase. Yeah. No, not Tom DeLonge. Tom Morello. Tom Morello, Tom. Tom Morello.

Yeah. Tom's like bling 182, very different vibe. What happened? What's happened is that? Killing in the name. Ah, there you go. So what's happened is that Matt Hancock, seeing his star has somewhat fallen in the estimation of the public, except for a few podcasters.

Yeah. Well, it's just the public with the intellectual elite. From broadcast to podcast to reality TV. That's right. Matt Hancock has decided to go to Australia at the same time as us to participate in the celebrity game show. I'm a celebrity get me out of here, hosted by I believe, Anton Deck. That's right.

Fantastic. Nice. He also got immediately suspended from the conservative party for doing this. Like right away. Yeah. You're supposed to eat a kangaroo penis secretly as part of the initiation ritual, not on live TV. Someone, the BBC got a fantastic quote from his constituencies,

conservative association chair, who just said seemingly apropos of nothing because they cut out the questions when they interviewed these people. I'm looking forward to seeing him eat a kangaroo's penis, which is, I think, one of the best pieces of feedback you can get as an MP from your constituency. I mean, Matt Hancock going straight from the, you know, the back room Tory deal making scenarios of the leadership contest straight into a bath full of rats, which must be a difficult, difficult transition for a bath.

Yeah. Crazy. So, but what is interesting about this though, it's going to be very funny. I don't know who's advising him, but this is off the back of going on another reality television show, which is he went on SAS Who Dares Wins. However, you don't get suspended from the conservative party for going on SAS Who Dares Wins. That's the troops, right?

And then so that, that's exactly. Yeah. So did Matt Hancock get into the SAS? Well, we don't know yet, but just for your benefit, this is as though, hang on, how can I compare this? It's as though like, Anthony Fauci went on Fear Factor. Yeah, exactly.

Anthony Fauci went on Fear Factor and also went on one of those shows where like, you get hunted by a Navy Seal. Could you be a Navy Seal? Yeah. I love the idea of the conservative party having, you know, very selective standards about which game shows you can go on, right? Oh, yeah. That seems.

If you want to go on a tipping point, that's fine. But we draw the line at bargain hunt. It's not dignified. Yeah. You can look, you can go on Deal or No Deal, but you can't go on Family Feud. It's too rival. No. So this is what Matt has said about going on, going on these shows.

But if you came on this for a discussion about climate change, don't worry, it's coming. But first, we have to talk about my Hancock. Matt has told the Whips in Parliament and he will use his time in the jungle to promote his dyslexia campaign. Amazing. Nothing, nothing, you know, says dyslexia, like being in the jungle, eating kangaroo genitals. He's like, I'm here in the jungles of Austria, raising awareness about dyslexia. Says Matt has always believed in communicating directly the people he represents.

So that's the argument, right? Which is, no, if I can get myself in front of the 12 million people to watch, I'm a celebrity, get me out of here, then I can raise awareness of dyslexia. But who in 2022 is unaware of dyslexia, is my question. Well, people who can't read all the articles about it. And they're the kind of people we need to reach. And who's like, you know what, I wasn't really aware of dyslexia, but then I saw this guy who never fully closes his mouth.

He's got kangaroo penis. He has a sleek bald head. Eat a kangaroo penis and just stare at the computer like a lot, computer, the camera, like a lost dog. And you know, now I'm going to care more about dyslexia. And caring more is clearly very important, right? Of course. That's definitely going to change things.

The worst part of eating a kangaroo penis was having to spell it. It's made me think. So he says, there are many ways to do the job of being an MP. MP standing for more penis, brackets kangaroo. Really just trying to like max out the kangaroo penis jokes. Yeah, absolutely. We've known each other a long time. Let's not act surprised.

Where better to show the human side of those that make decisions than with the most watch program on TV? To which I'll go back to something you said earlier, Milo, which is, yeah, this is probably showing a lot of what like conservatives do to one another before you get to be inside the wire, you know, but that's not really what they're trying to admit here, is it? You get a lot more insight from all of these sort of gory body horror that they do here as what might happen in the Oxford Union or fucking like conservative HQ or what have you.

But yeah, they just mean like, oh, I'm going to have, you know, fluts about in Australia and I'm going to be, I'm hoping that I'm going to be charming and everyone's going to forget their dead man. It's very funny that he did this immediately after sort of like pitching Rishi for a big job. Like he tried to get a ministerial appointment, got turned down. He tried to get the head of the Commons like Treasury Select Committee got turned down. And his third option was kangaroo penis. That was his like, his fallback, his safety school, as it were, was to go into the jungle.

The problem is, no one would accept him as a lobbyist because everyone fucking hates him and realizes that he's a fucking moron. And so he can't do the normal dignified corruption that most MPs do because he's basically boxed himself off for him by being too stupid. So now he has to eat the kangaroo penis. That's right. That is right. Well, at least he has a backup plan. You wouldn't want him to be completely out of work. That's right. It's a plan. Say what you will about Matt Hancock.

Jacob Riesmog would not be able to eat a kangaroo penis. And have to have his nanny cut it up for him. That's right. Yeah. I just think it's really funny that this feels to me kind of a whole story. Feels to me like an echo, like the sort of the farcical echo from something from like late Victorian Britain, where I kind of like lay about moronic Tory MP, sort of accidentally elevated to a senior office in state, gets fired from his from his job for like cavorting with a subordinate. But he primarily used that job to enrich his friends.

He was working with the strumpets in a gym palace. Before then going to get trench foot, which at the time he would have done from like, I don't know, the Spanish Civil War or whatever. But this time he's from a reality show. And then going to like recuperate in Australia by subsisting on a strange diet of kangaroo penis. This feels like it's from the past. It really does. Like Matt Hancock, a man who should be wearing a pith helmet in most photos of him. I'd love to see that. Matt, the Matt Hancock running picture, but he's in a pith helmet. Perfect. Matt, come on. Look, we'll pay you 20 pounds to put on the pith helmet. It's a

better offer pound for pound than the kangaroo penis. All right, dyslexia on it. Look, another thing that we haven't talked about that I want to talk about a little bit before we get into the climate change cop activities. Again, a classic, classic TF thing is it appears that most of the economy appears as melting down. Oh, good. Oh, whoops. So crazy. Why? Why is this happening? I thought we put the like the adults in the room back in charge. Oh, oh, they're back. Well, actually, I think this is also somewhat relevant to carbon trading as well, right? Because it's, I'll tell, I'll say why, but I'll set up the intro here. Number one,

British economy melting down because we've raised interest rates again and everything just everything's an asset and you mostly make, and no one's had a wage rise in decades, but everything's an asset. You make money by deriving rent from assets. Then the only thing that makes it basically makes you more money is A, your asset appreciating in value and people being able to pay the rents that you're charging from it because they're able to borrow more credit easily. So what you're saying is we've like financialized and securitized and sort of renterized the economy to the extent that even the most adult, adult, ever adult, that like the most mature man in the world walks into this and can do nothing.

Yeah. Like a hundred and six year old from like Hokkaido or Okinawa couldn't do anything about this. Like the oldest person ever. And at the same time, this also isn't contained to Britain, right? This is in the U.S. as well. Like they've raised their interest rates. Some American listener being like, ah, stupid British. Oh, shit. Oh, no. Oh, no. This is Jay Powell. Fuck. Yeah, they raised they've just kept raising their rates because central banks have only one button, which is make the economy worse and they can only really do that. And they know that they're just going to cause a recession, which is going to cause lower growth. They know and they're doing that because like kind of even though central banks are supposed

to be independent, they're kind of enabling austerity and politics in the fiscal space, right? That's sort of what they're actually doing. They're not really there's there's kind in my opinion, there's sort of no such thing as a genuinely non ideological central bank. Yeah. 10 Downing Street calls the bank of England and they're like, have you tried pushing the make the economy worse button? And they're like, we've been pushing it. Have you tried pushing the races and but we've been pushing it. And this is where before I talk about like this is impact on tech companies and stuff, I actually want to like also sort of think like if we've sort of that when you treat carbon as an

asset, right? And carbon and carbon credits as assets, like what do zero rates do to those just? Well, the problem is that there's no transparency in the market and the rules that govern the value of carbon are basically determined by supply and demand. There's no central bank for it. So we don't know what people are paying for a lot of offsets. And with the exception of the EU's trading system, there's no way to regulate the value or the price. So if there's like a billion bogus credits floating around in the offset market, which is the case is not a billion, but I would say maybe 300 million, then if then they'll sell for two bucks a ton, which is the going price, because that's all there is. And if money and this comes back to, if you're going to base your

economy on just inflating asset prices and you turn carbon into an asset, what's going to happen to the hat? Are you going to like maybe have more carbon? That would be bad, it seems. Yeah, well, no, what you're going to have is you're going to have more credits, but they're not necessarily representative of the absence of carbon. The problem is that it's not an asset like dollars. I mean, yeah, we can get into the financialization and the abstraction of that. But what you're buying and selling is not an asset, it's the absence of something, which makes it even more complicated. So what we're basically doing is trying to build up the amount of absence, which is a kind of hard thing to wrap your head around. We've accidentally sent all of the central

bankers to philosophy school and they've all become existentialists. Unfortunately. In the context of like, but it's what happens when anything that has a tradable value that's fungible, right? And this trades on an exchange that has a clearing price and you can speculate on its value will always be affected by this, always, because they're all these things are affected by one another, they're all affected by the interest rates. And we have created a world that depends on that, whether that is whether that is our sort of like technical regulatory management schemes, whether that's employers, whether that's the sort of poll political consensus everything rests on in terms of house prices, all of it sort of the same. And so this week,

I just have like, because I follow a lot of earnings transcripts and I read a lot of earnings transcripts, a bunch like Lyft, Stripe, Cloud Kitchens, Open Door, Chime, a company called Dapper Labs. Dapper laughs as a branch. Gem message. Do they have very fancy lab coats? Actually, no one Dapper Labs does or did. Or it's Dapper laughs, but he's a dog now. Oh, it's fun and games on the blockchain. So whoops. It's all fun and games on the blockchain. It was a beautiful dream of pinstripe lab coats just for a second. Double breast. It would have been something as opposed to something on the blockchain, which is nothing. You can only wear a pinstripe lab coat if you're a scientist of more than 10 years, cool.

But all of these companies, including Messagebird, Cry, Delivery Hero, Pleo, all of these companies are doing... You're making at least one in five. I'm making up none of them. They're all laying off like 15% of their staff. It's cool how that's the entire economy now, by the way. And this is sort of ties back to my broader thing about how like, there is no adult who can fix it because no one has any jobs that actually produce anything anymore. You have a job where you work on a website. People have jobs that produce stuff now. They're just in Bangladesh and India and China. Exactly. Yeah. We have website jobs. Or they're in... They don't pay a living wage.

Like the custodians who are striking in Ontario right now because Ford doesn't want to give them a 1.5% raise. And all the jobs that are liveable, you're working for pinstripe lab codes. Yeah. At least you get a nice lab code out of it. You don't get anything, I'm afraid. So, but at the same time, I also looked at another earnings transcript. This is from like a major payment processor for online advertising. The CFO says, we're dealing with a pretty significant pause by advertisers, and that was not what was expected. I don't think we anticipated the broad slowdown that was going to occur in Q4, which was certainly worse than expected. And this is coming at the

same time where, again, because of Elon Musk's shenanigans, some of the largest ad buying consultants are telling huge, huge ones that represent gigantic portions of the market are telling their clients to not purchase ads on Twitter until the situation stabilizes. But at the same time, as huge amounts of the economy that were essentially just Sterling Cooper, just ad agencies, like Google. Not even just ad agencies, because this is happening in multiple places. If you look at mortgage lenders right now, for instance, they are also taking the root of, it's too weird. You have to wait, do nothing until it becomes normal again.

Which in Britain, you could be waiting a while. Well, exactly. That's the thing, right? All of this is predicated on, at some point, adults will make enough decisions that it becomes normal again. And no one really seems to be asking what happens if it just doesn't. Adults were making the decisions up to this point. That's what I think we should get children making these decisions. It's a five-year-old. Let's get like kid society going. But also just focusing as well on, because there are two kinds of the big tech companies, right? There's the ones that actually make a profit and do stuff, Amazon and so on,

Microsoft. And then there are the ones that either don't make a profit or if they make a profit, it's purely from advertising, like Facebook or Meta, Twitter, Snap, etc. Google, huge one. Because they're basically just online, they're online marketing agencies. They are Sterling Cooper. They trick you to thinking that they're doing other stuff, but they are online marketing agencies. That's it. But crucially, they're not very good at it. Well, that's what I wonder, right? Is in this time of plummeting ad buying, are we going to see like our brands that buy a lot of ads on social media other than just like,

I don't know, dropshipping or what have you, going to, or on Google, for example, we're going to see, wait a minute, this didn't actually change a lot of what we sold. We're accidentally A-B testing for the effectiveness of marketing. It's very funny. Yeah. Oh my God. The whole like welders who were born in January markets really dried up recently. And it's what so I think is so slightly worrying is that there are a lot of things that a lot of the modern economy has come to rely on that kind of were provided by flukes. And those flukes were provided by the fact that it was sort of fine if you were wealthy enough to just keep making mistakes. Watching mad men being like, wait a second,

these people barely do any advertising at all. They mostly just seem to drink and have interpersonal drama. We're going to have to go back to proper 1960s style advertising. You know, they're going to, every company is going to have to get Don Draper in and it's going to be, you know, they can't, they can't do target ads anymore. You know, it's going to be like a dodge, dick on dick, gay entertainment. Run it on TV. I know exactly why you've been thinking about Nate's homophobic like car acronyms again. Incredible. I like that we've just explained the context as Nate's homophobic car. It's something that he came up with. Yeah, Nate invented homophobia. I don't know why he did this and I wish he hadn't

have done it, but he has. So I'll sort of turn back to turn back, turn back to Jess as well. Right. Like have from the, like, is this something that like from the sort of keeping the earth alive, the melting down of our economic models, this is something that we sort of care about? I mean, yeah, like there's so, you know, there's, I love the, the, the British term that has been, you know, used to describe the state of politics and everything in Britain of the Omni shambles, which is like so, you know, polite instead of just like, you know, unmitigated shitshow. Run by a bunch of wank puffins. But these, yeah, these things are totally interrelated, right? I mean, all these, you know,

Adam twos is called this like the poly crisis, right? Is that, you know, we can't just deal with climate change and we can't just deal with, you know, economic meltdowns or, you know, this like crazy instability is that they're totally interrelated. And it, you know, remains to be like, I don't know, like what happens when Google can't sell ads anymore? You know, does that shut down sectors of the economy? Or do they get smarter at figuring out how to gather data and sell it some other way? But yeah, I mean, if people aren't buying shit anymore, then that seems to be kind of like a fundamental flaw in the shall we say marketing plan. Yeah, it's been a long time frustration on this show about how like so many of these problems

you could, if you weren't like sort of hamstrung by like insisting on doing things a stupid way, you can kind of solve a lot of these problems at the same time by doing the thing that's obviously sensible, like building a huge amount of green energy capacity, which, you know, like creates jobs, it drives down energy prices, which is one of the things that's trying to solve the climate crisis. And they're like, well, we can't do that. That's, that's the like amazing thing about carbon markets. It's like, let's make this totally fucking complicated rubo Goldberg machine instead of say, not financing coal plants anymore. Like, maybe we could do that. Yeah, we can't do that. That would be too easy in Australia.

Sort of built our entire economy, our entire society on the idea that we can sort of like buy and sell our way out of this and then refusing to buy or sell our way out of this is just it's perfect. It's so, so smart. And I love it. Well, we can only buy and sell things that are cool. You can't buy or sell anything that's uncool. I know what's not cool right now is the fucking atmosphere. You're still going for that job on Radio 4, Alice. And I'm here for it. I'm trying to get one into each episode. Never stop the grind. So we want to talk about like, about profit and about profits, emissions, assets, right? We are one true profit. Yeah, of course. We want to talk about profits, emissions, and assets. Then there's been a chart that's been

going around about a decoupling of GDP growth in developed countries. Conscious decoupling. Well, a decoupling in GDP growth in developed countries from carbon emissions. You know, you see a chart of like the GDP of Finland or Denmark or the UK or Italy or whatever and how the GDP keeps going up. The carbon emissions are going down. Again, I think there are also, and we see in the past, right, that in times of, let's say, great profit taking as well, emissions do also tend to go up. Let's say in the aftermath of the financialization of everything, emissions did soar. It was a great movie that. Eddie Redmayne, fantastic.

I can't help but see the broad-based almost 2001 level collapse in what appears to be the only sector of the economy that anyone has really much hope for. I can't help but see that as connected with emissions, but I don't quite have a clear picture of how and in what direction, I suppose. Yeah, that's fucking cheery. Yeah, I mean, like, okay, so decoupling. Yeah, I just think of cold play and what's her face, but. Agony's Paltrow, yeah. Yes, yes. We need to sell more jade vagina eggs. Oh my God, totally. That's, yes, that's totally, we do. We need to goop on the Grinch of the Agony. I'm surprised that Dr. Oz hasn't gotten in on that, you know? Like, I feel like that would be a good cause. Yeah, well, once he loses to Fesserman, I think that's likely, you know, he's going to try and like

really go and find himself and we're back to Don Draper again, you know? I don't know. I think we should put him in a fucking kayak and see how he does. What if your wife was a chicken? Like, so, yes, there has been decoupling. Like, if you look at, you know, the state of California, for example, like, they are reducing the emissions intensity of their GDP production, right? So, yeah, they're growing, but their emissions are falling and that's great. But again, it comes, you know, there is something of a numbers game there, right? Because like you can say, you know, their emissions are falling, but that doesn't account for all of the basically embodied carbon that they buy from China and other places and import and then consume. So those numbers

should be taken with a grain of salt, I would say. And I mean, is it possible? I think yes, because we have some technologies to help do that, but, you know, it's not politically feasible at this point. And that's the key issue. Could it be then that in fact, the broad-based collapse of a, let's say, rentier economy supported by a sort of system of central banks and governments that decided that redistribution was politically impossible. And so we're going to keep GDP growth going by inflating asset values. Are we suggesting that the collapse of that system may actually be somewhat beneficial for the future of the planet? Could it be? Maybe? Yeah. So this is the tricky bit, right? And this is where you get into people like the de-growthers who are like,

okay, well, we can't, we have to like get rid of economic growth because that's, you know, because it's a capitalism, right? And that's not entirely wrong, but it's also overlooks a whole lot of nuance, which is the fact that, yeah, there's a shit ton of people in very wealthy countries and obviously in the global south who don't have the basic things that they need to survive. And so to talk about, you know, not growing anymore is a real problem. Redistribution is, you know, obviously not on the agenda anywhere, really. We're just doing Malthusianism again. We're just like, well, you know, we have to decarbonize so you have to not eat. Right. Right. And especially, you know, or not reproduce, like, you know, let's not have the brown people

reproduce. That's a real problem. That's really what's driving. David Asenbro of all people keeps saying this shit. Like every time they get him on for anything environmental, it's like, oh, he's the nice, you know, the nice grandpa who like wants to help the environment and wants to help the like seals and stuff. And then you ask what he thinks about humans and he's like, oh yeah, everybody's got to stop fucking immediately. Which is the most British thing you can say. That's, that is true. That is true. First of all, you don't have to stop fucking. You just have to stop reproducing. They're different things. That's what's key. I mean, I think David Asenbro personally does not want you doing.

I think the degrowth thing is like an interesting because I think it's kind of like something we've talked about a lot where like, I think some people are like unrealistic about their expectations of like what a government can do about climate change or whatever. Well, they're just like, well, why don't we just turn the economy off? And then I mean, it's like, yeah, but that's not going to happen because people still want their, you know, stuff food to eat, etc. Like that's not. But what I think what's remarkable about it, because people say that like, okay, you can't solve the climate crisis without ending capitalism. And like maybe, maybe that is true. But like, they're not even doing the things that would be

quite easy to do within capitalism. Like, you know, a lot of the production that we do could just be done with like green energy if they, you know, built the capacity to do that. And it would just, you know. Yeah. Also, crucially, we are very much on the clock here, right? We don't really have the time for capitalism to sort of heighten its own contradictions enough to then be destroyed. And, you know, we as nice socialists then decarbonize. We have to do the decarbonization bit first, if not simultaneously. You wanted to build all those nuclear plants, what, when interest rates were as high as zero? Come on, who could afford that? The thing is, I just love building nuclear plants and I'll do it any opportunity I get. You know, I will build a

nuclear plant and I will apply for retroactive plants. That's right. It's easy to ask forgiveness and support that. Dude, you're Maoism, building a little nuclear plant in your back garden. Exactly. Exactly. It's like those little like terracotta pots full of seeds that you can do like gardening with by like throwing them onto like vacant land. It's the same way, but with neutrons, right? You just, you just do that. You just activate like some nuclear fission and then you just, you know, don't worry about it. Just bring your microwave over, plug it in and you're good. Exactly. Exactly. And so look, I'm sort of going off of, moving off of, I think the tech economy imploding part. So we haven't talked about Elon Musk's purchase of

Twitter yet. I want to see a little more of where it goes before we do a little retrospective on it. The only thing I will, because every time we, we, we go to say something about it, he does another five things, each one stupid. I think he should go on the jungle show. Oh yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine him and Matt Hancock together? That's a meeting of the minds. Matt Hancock would basically just choose to be his dog. They could learn so much from each other. Puppy play a sign. I'm not this British guy. He's really good at parkour. And he seems to always want to sleep at the foot of my bed, curled up in a little basket. The thing is also Matt Hancock, he has, you know, that could be a good buddy movie,

because Matt Hancock has something he can teach Elon Musk, getting pussy. Something Elon Musk doesn't understand, but Matt Hancock apparently, you know. But Elon Musk definitely didn't get the no busting memo from David Attenborough though. He's rich enough to support his children greenly. So he gets to bust. He has busting credits. It's a cap and trade. You get bust credits. You can trade them on yourself. Yeah. You got to go and sterilize a few of your friends, and then you get an abusting offset. It's like, hey, man, me and my wife, we're really trying to have children winding up to like a massive kick in the nuts. Yeah, that's right. I'm really sorry about this,

but like, you know, I just got out. But now I can have children. Although weirdly, in this highly financialized economy we've built, now that these things are freely tradable, my kick of you in the nuts is actually now worth thousands of dollars. Yeah, because I mean, hasn't Grime supposedly become a lesbian since leaving Elon Musk? So that's kind of an offset, you know. She's probably less likely to have any more kids now, so he can... Jay Powell has made it very expensive to get kicked in the nuts. A rightly sort of immediately setting up a sort of arbitrage firm, or not an arbitrage firm, but a firm that like immediately sort of like collateralizes people getting kicked in the

nuts and like forming those into like obligations. I wish I could get kicked in the nuts, but in this economy, I mean, come on. So the one thing I wanted to point out though about Elon Musk's plans is that the fundamental thing he's done is that he doesn't understand the company he's bought. He's surrounded himself with friends who don't understand the company he's bought. He's solving a pretend problem like all the guys that start right-wing tech sites, right? Like, oh, it's right-wing YouTube where you're not going to be censored. So obviously, it's going to be amazing. It's not amazing. They all stab each other in the back and like it falls apart or whatever. Gab, et cetera, et cetera, right? So they're trying to solve a bunch of

problems that don't really exist, that they've all created themselves. And what we've done is we've taken Greg Stuby and put a guy with all of his preoccupations in charge of running something for real, which he's not supposed to do. Why are my parents not reading my emails? Because those guys who think that kind of thing, they're supposed to have a do-nothing job, like in the House of Representatives, where they can do between running away from officers in the Department of Fish and Wildlife. But now the problem is he's not just able to get to the bottom of why his emails are going to spam, but he's also building a solution for why his emails go to spam. But because Elon Musk has what Bloomberg's Matt Levine calls the Elon Musk

reality distortion field, people keep giving him money because they understand that he can create bigger suckers to offload the investment onto. Yeah, it's not even like a reality distortion field so much as it is the weird guys in his replies who you've all seen. Those guys are like his only sort of marketable assets. This is from the Financial Times. Banks that lent $12.7 billion to Elon Musk for his Twitter takeover are preparing to hold the debt until they wait for the billionaire to unveil a business plan they can market to investors. They gave him $12 billion without a plan. Here you go. I'm sure you've got something. If you walk into a high street bank, you should ask for a small business loan and then say,

yeah, I'll come up with a business plan like a couple of years and just see what they say. I bet it'll be positive. I love that they're just going like, we're waiting for Elon Musk to work out how to draw a pyramid around this. We need him to find the next layer of the pyramid. That is why you invest with Elon Musk because he creates the layer of the pyramid under you and then someone else gives you more money. He's a pharaoh. What I think is very amusing though is just that he is African. They did just, they are probably going to incur huge losses. Oh yeah, of course. Probably? Almost certainly. They're going to incur huge losses on the billions of dollars of lending. Not only is Elon Musk a pharaoh, but he's one of the shitty pharaohs.

He's like Akhenatan. He's like on the steel and they're like, oh, this guy? Yeah. Why is this one erased? Don't worry about it. Failing pharaoh Elon Musk failed to make the correct offerings to the gods. Nile not flooding as much as it used to. Very low on silt, sad. Well, no, it was, I think he's... He's Peppy the second who oversaw the decline of the Old Kingdom in the first intermediary period. Peppy the second, one of the more cheerful pharaohs. I did not think that I had signed up for a discussion of the ranking of all pharaohs during TF2. They're doing business secrets of the pharaohs. In terms of the pharaohs, of course, you've got Peppy, you've got Bashful, Sneezy, and you know the rest.

But I think it's very viewed as like, I don't know how Elon Musk keeps getting people to lend him all that money. Alice, you advanced a theory. Yeah, I have a theory about this. Mine's more simple and more cynical. And I think that it's that Elon Musk has like a thumb drive with low Lisa Express like 11292009.wmv. The last email that Epstein sent was to Elon Musk. Like you might need this to secure investment in a stupid project. Change the world. My final message, you know? It's been a long time. I mean, how likely do we think that is? It's like just flatly blackmail. The problem is, if Elon Musk had a Lolita Express, then like the entire structured credit team at Morgan Stanley would be fucking vaporized into gamma radiation.

Like no one would survive a ride on his like Lolita Express to space. You know without a knowledge of consent laws on Mars. And you're only 70% likely to get completely obliterated when the rocket explodes. Yeah. So, you know, good luck. Bye. Thank you for the money. Legally speaking, the structure credit team at Morgan Stanley is not involved with Lolita Express. These people were more often leaders in business and politics as opposed to for all-in-backers. How about this? Instead of that, maybe like an entire plain load of people to Davos, rather than the structured credit team at Morgan Stanley. A TF apology to the structured credit team at Morgan Stanley. We're going to send you some like some lint chocolate to some nice

flowers, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The lint master chocolate is. I want to talk about cop now. Me, every episode of every podcast I do. I was going to say, yeah, we'd have Riley saying that. So, basically Rishi Sunak was like, I'm not going to go to cop so that the right-wingers in his party wouldn't think he was like, we a cap. Yeah. And then he was like, well, okay, I guess I have to go to cop because literally all of the constituency of the conservative party that matters, that used to be allied with the social conservative right to achieve its short term goals of like smashing unions and stuff, such as finance, insurance and real estate, desperately needs climate action to happen at this point. And so this is sort of an

inconvenience for people like Rishi Sunak who, in the immediate term, depend on balancing those two constituencies to serve the one interest that actually matters. Exactly. Yeah. And so, you know, this analogy, we came up with with these calming two horses. Yeah, calming two horses that you're chained to and are very edged. Yeah, that's right. And then we're also trying to calm down Genghis Khan. Yeah. Also, there's a fireworks factory that's just starting to burn down. Genghis Khan would have had to do some serious busting offsets. I think we can blame all of this on Genghis Khan, actually. Well, perversely, he did do a lot of carbon offsetting. Like he genuinely, he called the planets a little bit because he killed so many people. That is true. He was actually

a Malthusian. Yeah. Yeah. David Genghis Khan, Attenborough. Just into a David Attenborough, like shambling up, she's like, I am the scourge of God. Fascinating to see these horses weeping logistically across the Mongolian plains pulling apart one of my enemies. Let's talk about top. Jess, what are they trying to achieve? Who's going? What is it? What the hell is happening? Okay, I know, I would know. I know this is my first time on TF, but I'm going to put in a fangirl plea to call the name of this episode Busting Offsets. 100%. Okay, good. Who are we to refuse you, Jess? Awesome. So the COP is this thing. It stands for the Conference of the Parties. It's the thing that happens every year when countries who have signed whatever climate

change agreement, now the Paris Agreement meet to talk about like, how are we doing? How do we sort of fill out the implementation, review what's going on, make rules to kind of push things forward? So that's what the COP is. And over the past few years, since the Paris Agreement, people have actually started paying attention to it. So this has been happening every year since 1992, but because so it's COP 27, but only recently has mainstream media kind of started paying attention. I really like the idea of being like a COP hipster, like the way that people are for like old Olympics or whatever, whether like, you know, LA 1984 or wearing like a Moscow 1980 shirt, but instead it's like COP, you know, Cartagena 2000 or whatever. Oh my god, yeah, that would be

amazing. Yes, I love that idea. I mean, I'm sure there's probably like a tote bag from that one. Yeah, yeah, the COP in Cartagena where Michael Douglas had to rescue that woman who was kidnapped and find a big emerald. Just invented a new fashion trend here. So if you're on, if you're on deep up, if you're on, if you're on grailed or whatever, you know, look for some old COP merchandise, you know. Alternatively, if you are Balenciaga, make it and charge thousands of dollars for it. Balenciaga or 100% do that, yes. Sorry, Jess, please carry on. So this year, so last year, of course, it was in Glasgow. I'm sure you attended, Alice. Represent. Yeah, to yell at them a little bit, yes.

Really hard to convince people of global warming in Glasgow. Worst possible place. You say that it's positively tropical up here in these days. So, hmm. Nice. Whoa. See all the plastic, the sun cream, these parrots are driving me mental. Oh my god, I can listen to that all day. Okay, so, so what's happening? So this year, okay, just like out of the gate, things are not looking good. I mean, we knew that, like, environmentally, but politically, like, Rishi Sunak is going, but China's not going, India's

not going, Russia's not going, Canada's not going. Biden is not showing up for the ministerial, because he is under the delusion that if he trots around the United States, the Dems will somehow pull out the midterms. He's going to show up later. That's good on him. Wait, hang on a minute. Justin Trudeau is missing an opportunity to, like, put on a kente cloth and turn up and go, like, we must come together to resist. I'm not going to be the intuition that Justin Trudeau is going to do anything, but this is normally the kind of event he loves. I'm going to defer to Riley on that one.

You know, it's a strange one. I think, I think he's probably busy protesting one of his own policies, politely asking the Ford government to please not use the notwithstanding clause to break one of the biggest strikes in the recent history in the province. That kind of, you know, busy stuff like that, you know, that matters. Yeah, maybe, maybe shopping for some other pipelines, you know. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, he will not be coming. So first of all, so basically, like, there's a lot of major emitters who are not coming. Developing countries are all showing up because fucking climate change.

And yeah, the delegation from the Seychelles are showing up wearing their waders that they have from last year. Exactly. With the like water slightly higher up them. Exactly. I think it was Kiribati that did a, like a few years ago, they did a press conference underwater, which was... Oh yeah, I remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so the big fight or the big kind of focus is going to be on what's called loss and damage. And this has been on, like, on the being discussed since 2014. And basically, the idea is that developing countries want compensation for losses and damage incurred

by climate change or caused by climate change, both in the past and into the future. And developing, developed countries... Wait, so hold on. The vibe here is all of the people who are actually being most affected by it are going, can we have some, like, some help with this? And the biggest emitters in the world are ducking their phone calls? Yep. Pretty much. Amazing. Pretty much. Fantastic.

Not only that, there's a, just a fight about whether loss and damage is going to be a separate agenda item, which is like an important thing in terms of, like, once something gets on the agenda, you can't get it off and you have to report on it every year. And developing countries are like, we want this to be its own thing and developed countries do not want that. So we haven't even agreed so that, so the COP starts on Sunday and there's still not agreement about what's on the agenda, which is not a good sign. People say that it is bad that Russia is not attending this COP conference. People say that Vladimir Vladimirovich is not doing his part for climate change. But I would suggest that he is

actually incurring a large amount of carbon offset by ensuring that large numbers of Russian population die in Eastern Ukraine. So one of the, one of the main priorities as sort of, this is some stuff that you've written recently, I think in the Washington Post, you have an article out talking about, like, what, what they have kind of aligned on and are trying to do is to more or less double down on carbon offset markets, right? Yeah. Carbon offset markets and carbon trading. So like, basically 30 years, it's been the same shit, which is developing countries are like, we need help to develop cleanly and we need help.

Increasingly, we need help to adapt to the effects of climate change. And yeah, developed countries have been docking their phone calls and instead say, let's financialize this and trade it. And that's basically been the thing that everyone can agree on. Because when you financialize and trade it, this is, I think this is sort of true of really anything, right? This is also true when you like financialize public services, like for example, the NHS, right? How you introduce like fake markets in there and so on. Oh, that is good. Well, what happens is that you are able to create a lot of movement, but that the movement

doesn't really connect to much. You're able to sort of, you're able to look at... It's like a dipping bird. Yeah, you're able to look at, well, the dipping bird does connect with the water. You know, you, it does do something. But when you financialize something heavily, then what you're able to say is, what if we did this and it didn't cost us anything, and it looked like we were doing quite a bit, right? It's a sort of, it's a way to just create the illusion of a lot of movement. And again, that's not just true with what we're talking about carbon offsets and stuff.

That's also true with fake privatization, sort of privatizations of public services. That's true with like financialization of say like the housing market, right? You can have huge amounts of value increase that ever actually ever building a new house, for example. It's a way of making things look like they're changing. Well, actually, they're in many ways staying the same, but please carry on. And then everyone is really, really busy like making that look like something's happening, right? And so, you know, the carbon markets that were created in the Paris Agreement were created in 2015 when the agreement was signed, but the rules weren't actually finalized until

last year. So for seven years, you had, well, I mean, there was a sort of inter-agnum with COVID, but you had, you know, thousands of people attending the COP to like negotiate these rules for a thing that, you know, may produce some marginal reductions. But as Alice pointed out, the clock is fucking ticking, right? We don't have seven years to like decide how we're going to do this. Luckily, this is in the hands of like international institutions, which are famously very speedy about this stuff, even when they're like trying to be like, even when they're not trying to delay and obfuscate and all of this, even when everyone's pulling in the same direction, you know, that the result is always something that's very fast and very unified and makes a

little sense. I just got back from the UN where every member of the General Assembly took turns hitting me in the head with a hammer. I mean, it's true, like international institutions are really slow, but it's only because governments are dragging their feet. Yeah. Right. So. Also, I wanted to ask you as well, right, is that we have, we have, we seem to have like different kinds of offsets where we have offsets that can be traded between countries, but we also seem to have offsets that go on highly financialized markets, like that where you can, I can, if I have no intention of ever emitting carbon, purchase a carbon offset because I believe it will go up in value. You can like trade fractions of planting a tree.

That's my understanding anyway. Yeah. I mean, so that's the thing. It's insanely complicated. There's, there's kind of three different trading mechanisms. One is just between countries and that's not only offsets. It's like, you know, South Africa could say, we're going to pay for China to electrify its bus fleets and then count that towards South African reductions. So that's not even an offset. That's just kind of like a mitigation activity. They're called. But then there are these offsets. There are some that are traded between countries. Very boring horror movie that there are some that are traded between countries and then there's some that are traded like on, on what's called the voluntary market. So that's like private. So if,

you know, Morgan Stanley wants to go net zero, then it can pay for trees to be planted wherever or methane capture and, you know, Namibia and say, look, we're net zero now. Great. Yeah, right. But the problem is those, those voluntary markets are, are self-regulated. So which works great. Really good. Oh yeah. People, people are always like honest brokers about these things. Right. Because what everybody really cares about at the end of the day is saving the climate, not making money off of transactions. What would be their incentive to fudge it, the huge amount of money they could make? Yeah. And that's why we put it in the hands of the people who's like sole training and,

and motive is to make as much money as possible on these things. See, my, my exposure to this, which is often through, through startups, such as like flow carbon and others, I also suggested that it's, I wanted to know if this is something that is actually true or if this is just something I've seen in weird startups, the idea of actually like tradable carbon offsets where I can purchase a carbon offset. If I have no intention of emitting any carbon ever on the basis that I believe will go up in value and then sell it to someone who will eventually want to emit some carbon. But that's something a lot of startups seem to be trying to do. Yeah. Which is dumb because there's no cap on offsets. Right. So like,

you know, that's predicated on the idea. I mean, yes, maybe they will increase in value over time, but it's predicated on the idea that there's a finite supply, which is not true. Because like, basically you can sort of offset anything. And that's kind of one of the things that they're going to discuss at the cop is like, what kinds of activities now are legit to be considered an offset? Like, is it? David Attenborough is kicking you in the nuts. We're making it real. Right. Right. Like, if we go from like, coal to natural gas, is that really, are those saved emissions really an offset? Or is that just something we should all be fucking doing anyway, because climate change? Well, it's the, it comes back around to that, to that question of quibbling

over an accounting metric. Well, the thing that the, it's almost like arguing over the map when the territory is rapidly changing. Arguing over the map and being like, why are the corns of this map getting wet? And why is this other corner on fire? Well, eventually those two corners are going to meet and I reckon those two problems are going to resolve themselves one way or another. That's right. Yeah. Don't worry about all the stuff between them. I genuinely saw a photo from Australia a few years back that was a have your wildfire plan ready sign that was partially submerged by flood water. Oh, no. That's a plan. Yeah. That is a plan, right? An extremely like 2007 ICANN has cheeseburger ass photo right there.

So effectively, right? What we have is we have different kinds of offsets where you can, where as a country or a company, and then maybe some small minority of them that I'm sort of more familiar with because they're affiliated with scammy startups. That's why I sort of, I thought it might be, I brought in the interest rate thing because I've seen them used as assets before, but it seems like that's not the majority of how they're used. But that we have these two kinds of offsets, country offsets and then voluntary offsets, but that there's sort of just no one is really, you're saying, oh, I bought this many tons of carbon and someone can show you some accounting logic as to how me digging this ditch and filling it in a bunch of times or

how me like not turning my car on for a day is going to allow you to turn your car on for a day. But all of this very clever accounting. You kicked my car in the nuts. All of this very clever accounting is sort of an argument that's happening while the ice is calving off of ground. I have a question here, which is, say we're still handcuffed to this forever. Say we still have to do markets. And that's the only way that we can resolve this is cap and trade and all of this. If we had to do that, what's the ideal like in a perfect world, but for that, how would we regulate this? That's a great question. And basically what you would do is you would make a market that

acts like a tax. So you would have, I mean, assuming that you set a cap, a reasonable cap, which is a big assumption, right? You would have a reasonable cap. You would auction all of the permits. You wouldn't give them away for free because that's just giving away free money. And then you would limit offsets or ban them all together. I think we should just get rid of them. And then you would require to take care of the speculation problem that Riley is talking about. You would basically require reconciliation every year. So you couldn't buy them and then bank them for like 2050. You'd have to spend them that year. And that's basically a tax. So essentially what you're doing is you're saying the only way it would work is that if it was

actually, as you say, made as a kind of like an asset that you'd purchased at an auction, but an asset that expires. So effectively what you're talking about is an option. You're talking about like, yeah, you're talking about like an option, if you call or a put. I mean, I wouldn't say it's, yeah, with a price caller. I wouldn't say it's the only way it can work. I think it's the way that reduces the most gaming and will change behavior the most quickly. We're going to ban monster energy. That makes sense within the logic of what your energy offset. Yeah, you have to go to sleep. That does genuinely make sense in the context of what you're talking about, right? Where what we have is a system that allows for unlimited

pollution, but also you could feel good about it, basically. Right. And the other point is like, going back to what Alice said is like, we need to reduce emissions to stay on track. We need to reduce emissions 40% by 2030. So we shouldn't even be doing offsets. 2050 is not what we need to be focused on. We need to be focused on decision making in the next five to 10 years. And so offsets is just kicking the can down the road. Every sort of time limit whenever we talk about climate change feels to me like because I get terrible anxiety about it is like, no, we need to have this done by 30 years time and 30 years time is in six months. And if you think six months is far away, six months was yesterday.

There will have been 12 prime ministers by the time yesterday happens. Yeah. Yeah, I'm actually really wondering, I would love a year of the four prime ministers. I know it's unlikely at this point, but I mean, come on, Matt, come on, come back. If he wins, I'm a celebrity. Yeah, just sort of like Rishi said, like in Downing Street, like Matt's out there in the jungle while I'm in here. Every day I'm getting weaker and he's getting stronger. I mean, you know, he could be Britain's Vespasian. However, he's not locked in there with the kangaroo dicks. They're locked in there with him. So I want to say, Jess, it has been an absolute delight to have you on the show today. Thank

you very much for coming on. Amazing. Thank you for having me. This was so fun. Absolutely. And thank you to our listeners for this free episode. As a reminder, of course, there is a bonus episode. It is $5 per month. In fact, I can tell you what the bonus episode is going to be this week as we already recorded it. We read Ian Duncan Smith's thriller novel with Nish Kumar. It's the worst one of these we've read yet. And that is our promise to you. By far, it was the worst one. Yeah. And the good thing is, if you listen to that episode, it acts as an offset and you can go and read a good book afterwards and feel good about it. That's right. So saying like Bravo

2-0 by Andy McNabb. I'd say, yeah, if you would like to sign up for the Patreon, now's a pretty good time because you're going to get to hear me. You're going to experience, you know what it is? I read that book. Please make it worth my while to have done that. Yeah. Offset, Riley reading that book by giving him money. I don't know if they've come up with brain damage offsets yet. Yeah, they did. It's Patreon. Yeah. It's a podcast with Patreon. Yeah. That's what that is. But so that's happening. And then finally, at the time of recording, there are 30 tickets left in Sydney, possibly less now.

So by the time you're listening to it, almost certainly less. Yeah. But that Sydney concert will be like two days away and two days away is already six months ago. So what a time we had. Yeah. And of course, if you don't attend the Sydney concert, you can use that as an offset to attend the one in Canberra. Yeah. That's right. Where by the time this comes out, I think I mentioned this on the Boney Island Whitefish. We booked a venue in Canberra that has a small stage and a very big stage. And we are in the, I would say, unenviable position as now having sold some more tickets than will fit in the small stage area. Yeah. And of course, Justin Trudeau is not coming, which is really going to like fuck

up the whole sort of agenda. Yeah. He's actually going to be protesting the show. Also, actually, just an admin thing about Australia is if you are attending the shows in Australia and you would like to purchase limited edition tour merchandise, there will be posters, t-shirts, stickers, et cetera. And you can buy those, but due to boring Australian government regulatory reasons, we can only accept cash. Some might say this is very stupid because it encourages tax evasion, but for some reason we will not be able to accept card payments. To be clear, we are not evading tax. We are not evading tax, but someone could in theory. We are not evading tax, but the system seems stupid and designed to encourage that.

Anyway, all of that being said, thank you again. When I called the Australian Tax Office about this, they said they did not know. Yeah, they literally said, oh, you should probably call the government about that. They were like, well, it doesn't come up for us very often. I'm like, wow, what do people normally call here about the weather? All right. All right. All right. We got to get out of here. We got to let Jessica, we got to let you go. I got to go to dinner. Yeah. So thank you, everyone. I'll set this episode. We're going to leave for Australia tomorrow when this comes out. We'll have left for Australia a few days ago by the time this comes out.

Yeah, which is six months ago already. Six months ago and just next year. Your chance to stop the trash future boys from going to Australia may already have passed you, you know, and now you just have to adapt to them being in Australia. Yeah. So get your evacuation plans ready. Exactly. How's your trash future plan ready? Trash future merch table that's submerged under water. It also on fire. All right. Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye.