TRASHFUTURE - From The Desk of Peter Mandelson feat. Gareth Fearn

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

We look at some correspondence from the Prince of Darkness and a company offering a great way to make your garden shed worth $160k. Then, Riley speaks with Gareth Fearn about the ongoing unfolding energy crisis, and how the British state has spent the last twenty years solving the problem they wish they had. 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 Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album, which includes the song used in this episode’s outro, and you can stream it for free here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

And now a reading from the desk of Peter Mandelson. Dear David, referring to David Lammy. As today is polling day in Oxford and I'm returning to London, I wanted to drop you a line personally about the appointment to Washington. Thankfully, the media speculation has gone away and I hope this was not too irritating to you. I just wanted you to know that if you were minded to appoint me as ambassador, I would make sure you never regretted it. Quote for a man embattled.

Like, hey, look, what's the worst that could happen? It becomes a government-endangering fatal catastrophe that just utterly never leaves the media spotlight. I will make sure you never regret it. Immortal words from a strange man. I really like the idea of using that phrase in particular because, like, obviously, there are so many ways to read it. And if you're like, I don't know, it comes across as a bit sort of like a thing a sex guy, I would say, you know? It's like you're never, you're never going to regret it. Try it once, you know?

That's right. But no, I mean, so I've been through the, well, like very, very quickly skated through all three volumes of the Mandelson disclosures. And it's crazy how much, there's kind of not much there. It's, okay, so he's kind of like mean about Starma, everyone's mean about Starma. It's mostly him texting the same three guys being like, oh, you were very good in the FT. Or, oh, you were very good in the Times or whatever. That seems to be most of Peter Mandelson's sort of like social output if you're going by his work phone. But the funniest interactions that he has, to my mind, are with Wesley Streeting.

Because, God, there's a generation gap there a little bit. There's a bit where Mandelson says, there's nothing of the John Moore about you. And Van Gogh does not explain what he means by this. And so West Riesing 20 minutes later has to text back being like, sorry, what? I had to Google this, which I also did because Peter Mandelson was referring to like a Thatcher era beef that he had to a guy who had no idea what he was talking about, like the end of the Irishman. I heard you privately finance houses. So wait, I haven't yet Googled this. Who's Joe? Like, I don't know who this guy is. He was like a rising star under Thatcher who got like

run out of politics because he touched the third. rail and tried to privatize the NHS. And this is what sort of Mandelson was saying to Streeting. And Streeting didn't get it. And now we do. It's all shit like this. This is another sort of curio here. West Streeting.

Screenshot of a Royal Mail Facebook post depicting the prime minister in a royal male uniform with the caption, did somebody say royal male? Peter Mandelson reacted with a heart emoji. and then West Streeting texts love this to a thing that he sent. How are these people, how do they not have Bath Party approval ratings with this like approachable man in the street way of communicating with one another and the public? What does the screenshot of the Facebook post? What could that possibly be communicating?

It is like a meme of nothing. What if Starma was like a postman because he delivers? Huh? Oh, God. Did somebody say royal mail? Yeah, I guess so. And the prime minister just shows up at your house. That's a service we offer now.

Love this. Oh, my God. So apparently the dark arts just consists of sending confusing messages to West Streeting and complaining to Pat McFadden about how Kier Starrvers as not doing a very good job within the impossible one he's been given. He's the Prince of Darkness. And he's just like, it's like such fucking in-betweener shit of like texting a guy they both know, and being like, yeah, that first guy's a cunt.

Sure. Incredible. Before we get into the rest of the meat of our show today, I wanted to read one other selection from, let's say the dampest dossier ever released. This is from 2024, just after Starmer's election. Here, hope you are well. You have got off to a flying start.

Sure has, buddy. Ready to hit the ground from day one. I was at a dinner with John Major this evening, and if you don't know him, I think good idea to invite him for a chat. Yeah, sure. Do you want to see this ancient loser? You're him. You're like him.

As well as being a very nice person, he's interesting and thoughtful. Just a thought, no need to reply. And then one week later, Starber. Thanks, Peter. Sorry, thanks, Peter. It's so good to be getting on with the job of governing. A million times better than opposition, M-Dash. You know that.

I'll reach out to John. He's a very thoughtful man. See you soon, I hope. All best care. Very, very funny. to have imagined Peter Mandelson as this kind of like string puller behind the scenes. If I got left on red by Kirstama, I would invent a new way of killing myself. It would be something like historically unprecedented because I would never come back from

that humiliation. World's first self-inflicted demnatio Memori. Can you imagine that like your best friend for a long time is like Jeffrey Epstein, right? Mm-hmm. Does he texts back, at least? And because Jeffrey Epstein texts, and he emails back, and based on the Epstein files, what we know is that he's a very diligent emailer, which is something that people of today or not.

Lost skills, yeah. And then your best friend, like, dies under mysterious circumstances. And all you're left with are people who you also email, but they don't respond to you. Like, there's a real tragedy to a certain degree with that, right? It is the end of the Irishman. Just like, Peter Mandelson lying in. bed awake at night, completely alone being like, oh God, I used to be able to get a text back from Jeffrey Epstein that contained like three cues at an exclamation mark that didn't belong.

But like he used to text me. I used to be someone, yeah. And I used to have like a buddy who texts me and now no one does. There's two possibilities here, right? One is that that's the case and that's funny. The other possibility is I think more plausible that this is a kind of like limited hangout, Right. And that on the on the sort of the work phone, Peter Mandelson texts fairly anodyne things. Anything spicy he saves for like in person conversations or at the least voice calls, right?

Because there are a few cases where he's talking to Streetsing and Streeting will get a bit too real with him. And it's like, I'm pretty certain I'm going to lose my seat. And Mandelson goes back to like a comms line of like, well, we need to understand about what the Labor Party is there for and what it's delivering or whatever. Right. So I think it's more likely that Peter Mandelso's. is like a face-to-face guy rather than a texts guy. But it is very funny to imagine him just getting like Stama seeing the message and immediately going swiping on WhatsApp to mute notifications forever.

I can't believe that Peter Mandelson is just the next victim of the male loneliness epidemic. Well, what it is is, I think it is generational again because Kier Stama is spiritually a zoomer in the sense that he never fucking texts sending one back. All right. Like, hey, I think let's introduce the show. Let's not be zoomers. Let's introduce the show of what we're doing. Oh, God.

Okay. It's Trash Future. Hi. It's T.F. It's Riley Nova and Hussein. In the second half of the episode, we have the second of our two infrastructure Gareth, not the second of importance, but the second that came on in the most recent chain of Gareth.

First among equals of infrastructure garraths. Yes. The previous interparas. It's Gareth Fern, who's at the University of Manchester. And he is going to be talking to me. And I know that because we've already had that conversation. He does text. Yeah, he does text back.

He texts back. Gareth Fern, diligent text her. Hey, if you're thinking of hiring Gareth for some kind of a tenured position, let me just say thorough planner. So I talked to Gareth in the back half about the ways in which the current way of conceptualizing and handling the ongoing two-sided energy crisis is, can I just shock you, not working very well? And a little bit of a performance update on how G.B. Energy,

has actually delivered because you remember it was a core part of Labor's Manifesto promise. We go into what is it actually done? Yeah, it was one of the promises. It was one of the pledges. It was part of the reset. It was one of the precepts. It was one of the aesthetic principle. Yeah, absolutely.

It was one of the eight immortal truths. It was a KPI, I believe. I'm excited to hear how that's all been working. I assume magically. Oh yeah. Well, so we're going to find that out in the back half of the episode. But first, I want to do. talk to you two about a company called Span that's making something called XFRA.

X-Fran. Span X-Fra. Span-X-Fra. Sounds like a cycling doping scandal. Let's go. I was going to say it sounds to me like a company that makes food for French prisons. Oh, that too. Yeah. I mean, similar amounts of sort of like illicit drugs concealed in both, I think. Yeah, it's both involved both also very meatloaf, very core. So, dope. Span XFra. And we are introducing XFRA, the distributed data center solution from Span? I have a question.

Yes, November. Yeah. Uh-huh. If you distribute something, let's say data, if you distribute it, isn't it no longer centralized? Yes. It's more of a distributed data net or a person web. Okay. Yeah.

It's like we took a circle and exploded into many other circles. It's now a distributed circle. That's sort of data centerant. XFRA is the first distributed data center using existing infrastructure. structured underutilized power capacity to meet expanding AI compute demand, which is great because like every time you build a data center, it's like Lake Tahoe gets four meters shallower and suddenly everyone in Nevada has to go without power. They appear to have salt. They've cracked it. Where has like existing infrastructure and underutilized power capacity? Is this going to be like,

yeah, we're just going to hook like a GPU and a dynamo to the back of like everyone's car? Like what are we, what are we thinking about here? Oh, you're so close. You are so. So, so, so close. I don't love that this is such a recurring feature of my life is saying something ridiculous. And then you're going, no, that's happening now. That's part of your life. And everyone's life. Yeah.

So it's an American company. Span provides like, this burger grill that's heated entirely by compute. There is a, there's a Welsh company that's trying to do that called Heeta. Oh, but that's not this. They're trying to do a hot water heating through that. But again, like, that doesn't, your hot water will then. have to depend on like AI compute loads that are going through the GPU. You have to sort of like you decide your burger's own level of done this by how much compute

you want to run through this. You keep trying to make like, you know, you're trying to cook your burger like rare, but it keeps coming back well done. It's because of how much heat is generate. Like it's all constantly generating. Just kidding. It's like a crypto rugpole happens in the middle of your your burger cooking and it just gets a heat spike that sears the entire thing through.

Not again. Sam Bankman Fried must have gotten out of jail. God damn it. I have to start dinner over again. No, no. Weirdly, that kind of actually is a little bit how Amazon employees have been incentivized to use AI. But we're going to get to that in a second. No, no.

So this is a company, Spam, they make smart power panels that allow you to, it allows you to modulate the amount of energy that you're using for the, depending on the time of day for the grid. It also allows Span to manage it. Like, it's basically a sort of sensible product. sort of. Okay, sure. So in the sense of like, if I have like solar panels on the house and I'm not going to be in, so I'm not running the like, you know, any, any devices, they can take some of that electricity and that's like seamlessly increase my electricity bill. Yeah, essentially. Okay, cool. Yeah. I love, I love sort of energy vamporism. Yeah, it's a, it's a product that kind of makes, you can see the logic behind it. I mean, there is, there is wasted power. We do generate power that we don't use. So I think it's important to be able to funnel some of that into stuff that we use to make things worse, I guess. So well, so they were like, hey, we're not in on the AI thing. And because that's a black hole at this point of money, everything has to flow towards it. So what if instead of using that to, let's say, make people's energy consumption slightly more efficient,

or even if they have solar panels, like allow them to sell back to the grid or like prioritize what they get from solar panels, whatever, whatever, What if all of that capacity was rerouted into data centers, or sorry, data exploded centers of data dust? As they say, it's designed to deliver gigawatts of new inference compute faster and cheaper than conventional data center buildouts. What's unconventional about it is that XFRA converts underutilized

behind the meter power capacity into high value compute, leveraging existing infrastructure rather than waiting for large-scale interconnects and centralized buildout. Translation. This is a lot of words. What are they attaching this to? What physical object is this going to be attached to in my life? Is my lawnmower going to have a GPU on it?

What are they doing this to? Translation, please let us put $160,000 worth of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs into a shed in your back garden. Oh, that's cool. What? Yeah. That's how much each one costs. It's just going to be attached to your house. Yeah.

So, okay, say for the sake of argument, right, I am an enterprise. burglar, right? And I've been through, like, your house, and I've burgled all of the nice wines, all of the, like, jewelry, I've taken your TV and so on. I'm loading up my van outside, and then I just happen to notice your humming shed of money. Yes. Full of the expensive machinery that everyone professes to want right now. Yes. That is being sold in often extremely opaque and shady circumstances.

And I'm just going to say, say I take my trust. crowbar or whatever, and I lever that shit off the side of your house and go. Does X for her, does Span or X4, like account for that in their sort of business model? Well, I think people are mostly honest is what they've decided. Like the march of dimes, but with like GPUs. Yeah. I mean, look, you never know, like the burglar in question might actually also have like a real investment in making the AI economy work. That's true. So he would see it and be like, while carrying all the sort of fancy stuff, from Riley's house. He would be like, no, I'm a member of this society. And the AI revolution needs to happen if I want my societies to transcend.

I just love this idea that like, I'm going to distribute my compute. Everybody gets a GPU screwed to the side of their door like a Mazuzza. You get a GPU. You get a GPU. You get a GPU. So that's the crazy thing though, by the way. You, uh, let's say November Kelly, American homeowner, because this is in America. Yeah. I have a conservatory full of server racks. GPU is running. Let's just stop you just making the rest of your house a data center.

You can go live in the shed, make your house a data center. Is that... Reverse center. You have no relationship with Span XFRA, NVIDIA, who's like partnering with Span XFRA

to like put these data centers in people's sheds. Oh, they just do it to my house. Well, so the Pult Group is the largest, one of the largest home builders in North America.

And they are working directly with NVIDIA and the end customers on this, not the homeowner. So you buy a rent a house that was built by one of the largest constructors in the country, and you turn up to this humming shed that's not yours, you're not allowed to open, someone will probably try to steal from you, and also that is a huge fire risk, because data centers are full of like things that you want to centralize, such as, for example, really advanced fire protection and security. This is literally a bit that the Simpsons did first, and by first I mean like 20,

fucking years ago. Yeah. Back before. 2001, they aired the smart house where all of the grinding machinery takes up Lisa's bedroom. So, fantastic. I love to live in my Barrett home that is technically a two-bed, but is really a two-bed and a data center. It might be really cool.

Like, it might be sort of very, like, you know, cyberpunky in the sort of... That's true. Yeah. But, like, you don't know what they look like. As with everything, I think back to one of my favorite anime, serial experiments. and how her room kind of expands and becomes like a big GPU as the series goes on. And I think to myself, that's pretty neat to me. So I don't get to use any of this compute.

Oh, heavens, no, no, no. You don't even, and you don't get paid for it either. What you get is you get your energy bills paid because it's taking up so much energy. So you just get your whole energy bill paid. But for now, what if gas prices go up? God knows what's going to happen. Also, your community, by the way, the reason that, data centers and other industrial forms of, um, uh, let's say power water and internet consumption

require completely different hookups to residential ones is that it is a qualitatively different use of power. So if everybody in the Palt Holmes subdivision has like the $160,000 garden shed that I guess as a do not steal please property of ball group on it, property of property of, property of Jensen Long's leather jacket. Do you do anything. Do not do not like accidentally, uh, like drive a car into it or any of the other things. that happen to people's garden sheds. No jimmying. Do not collapse in a storm.

Also, question. Riley, yes. Has it been, how's the weather been recently? Extreme. Has it been, has it been on the sort of extremely cold side of things?

I would say it's been, well, in the UK, in the US, it's pretty warm. Oh, warm. Warm. And these GPUs, do they also,

what's their relationship to, I know they're pretty extreme in either warm or cold. I'm going to have to look it up. Hold on. Let me just open. Do they like cause? Do they emit any, any, any, any cold? They do emit, they emit quite a bit of heat, actually.

Oh, okay. They emit heat. Again, data centers tend to have ways of dealing with that. Data exploded centers, data dust motes. What they do, data sheds, yes, thank you. No jimmying. Is they just use residential. water supplies, residential power connections, residential hookups, but they run industrial loads on them,

which I think will cause no problems and no externalities. In the next heat wave, when you turn on your tap and the water comes out, that's because the GPUs drink first. The GP, and then you look in the back garden and then there's just like, the garden shed that you've been told is not a place of honor. Do not look in this. It's covered in black spikes to deter you. It's just smoking. Yeah. So everyone really gets the experience of living in the West Bank. It's also everyone gets the experience of having the world's most inconsiderate flatmate who is also an industrial data center. So also like what happens if Span goes out of business?

All that happens is that you just have a lock shed of GPUs in your backguard. You don't own them. You're going to have to go like Ukrainian farmer mode in like 2014 and just steal those GPUs and put them on a trailer. Well, once those GPUs become useless, then you're really begging the robber to come to your house, You'll just like, please, please, please, please just take it. Take it. Take it. Yeah, steal the shed. I remember reading that and that'd beckstamp. Also, like, when a transformer like browns out or blows out, it affects everybody in the

neighborhood. And so if you have, because they say, oh, we're going to use existing infrastructure to try to end run the fact that there are no gas turbines for like seven years. What if we just use people from the town? And what happens is, all they're going to do is blow out all the residential infrastructure in whatever area they put these. You do live in the West Bank now. Or Kiev? Yeah. No, incredible.

Okay, awesome. Sure. So, yeah, there we go. I love the forbidden shed that takes all of my water and power. Can I tell us something, though? Uh-huh. This is still a trillion times more sensible than putting them in space. This is still, this is compared to the putting them in space idea, this is like the most

blue chip sensible. down to earth. Invest in Coca-Cola and forget your money's there. Warren Buffett-ass type idea. This is the pinnacle of reasonability to try. Yeah. There we go. Pretty good. At least, hey, at least it's in an area with oxygen. I suppose it's got that going.

What's the gravity in this shed? Is it about one? It's about 1G? Good. Approximately 1G. Yeah. That's right. It's got a troposphere. It already has. It will radiate heat out, which is bad for being near it, but good for the data. And it may blow out the existing residential transformers in the area, but at least it'll have wires. Well, the good news is that in winter, right, assuming the infrastructure can handle it,

then you will be able to be like, you know, asking grok annoying questions in order to increase the efficiency of your heating system. The funny thing is, the logic behind what you've just described is exactly the same as the logic. just hand out more North Sea oil and gas exploration licenses in terms of your input versus output on the heat coming out of your house or shed. That is identical logic. But I want to do one more AI thing before we start talking or why I start talking about North Sea oil and gas licenses. And of course, I want us to remember something. So we talked about ages and ages and ages ago, which was the claim I can't remember by who, some or other AI booster, that we shouldn't worry about the environmental impact of AI and data centers everywhere.

because the environmental impact of, for example, a living human novelist is much higher than an AI model generating a novel. It was Sam Altman. He was being kind of sarcastic and something needled him a bit and he was like, well, it costs a lot of energy to train a human, which is like, yeah, sure, but fuck you. I am one of those. Water and I'm a little biased, I suppose. I do like living. I'm aware that I have a carbon output by continuing to eat. This is worth checking in on, though, because you can only laugh. This is from Axios. It's worth taking with a grain of salt because it's vague and it could be someone boosting their. business, whatever, but it illustrates a larger trend of what we're talking about. An AI consultant has told Axios that one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees. I hope there isn't a plaque big enough for Anthropic to deliver to that person's office. Congratulations. You, you have,

it's one month as well. So also, just a little note before we go on. And please feel free to correct my math about this, but Anthropic just said that they're making now 47 billion in revenue, partly because they jacked up their prices, which we said they would have to do at some point, but also that was projected revenue based on the months so far in the year, which means that it's possible, if you multiply that half a billion by 12. Oh my God. Six billion of that number could in theory. Just from one office that was like, yeah, come and work here, infinite clods, right?

And we don't know who this could be, right? But it's very funny to imagine this as any of the big consulting firms as well. It's got, it's an AI consultant who's working with a company. I think it was, it would probably have been like there's a lot of tech industry blind items going around that it was Amazon. And that's why they took down their AI usage leaderboard. Yeah, you all won so hard that you've actually managed to make Jeff Bezos experience a financial cost. For the first time in like 15 years?

Now, anyway, I don't want to overstate the case about the impact of this on like Anthropics revenue. I don't want it. And also, it might not even be true. And also, I don't know how they're counting necessarily. It might not be so significant. But it sure is funny to imagine that more than 10% of that recurring revenue figure is from a company that just said, uh, open cloth.

Build me a new version of Amazon web services. Make no mistakes. Yeah, what's like everything we've seen has been employers trying to get employees to use this on the most ridiculous bullshit possible just to like for the sake of using it. And so that the cost of that going up, you know, ed's it from waiting in the wings to talk about the AI bubble, I think. Yeah. You know what?

He's not here, but, uh, you just please leave a chair for him, you know? His smile, his smile looks, um, looks below us, right? He's just there on stage and lights flashing above him. Is that good? And he's holding the little lever that says yes. It's a constellation whose stars seem to spell out the phrase, is that good question mark? You call it the Zitron. So, Ed, is that good?

Please write in. Is this good? I look forward to you opening an envelope at the next recording to be like, yeah, let's see what he said about this. Hmm. It's just a picture of him laughing. Anyway, so this is, I'm quoting from a few different reports here, but I've aggregated them. Nvidia and Uber have both said they're realizing the price of tokens may well outweigh those of plain old human. in brain cells. That's from Tom's hardware. Brian Katanzaro, NVIDIA's VP of Applied Deep Learning,

recently told Axios, quote, for my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the cost of the employees. Huh. Mysterious. It's looking awfully kind of bubbly in here, isn't it? Frothy. Frothy. Uber's CEO, Andrew McDonald said, we are struggling to connect the boost and the productivity of some workers with any company-wide impact. If you're not able to draw a direct line to how much useful features and functionality you're shipping to your users, then these token costs are hard to justify. This is where I fully am going to embrace the sort of tech Luddite label here, because this makes me feel good. I feel patriotic to be a human who eats food and digests it.

I'm feeling like ghost dog way of the samurai, you know, sometimes it still is, right? Yeah, like, if you're listening to this, good, good job. Good job being alive. Yeah. I invite you to celebrate by executing some sort of bodily function. Breathe, eat, sneeze. Those of your only two things. Don't tell us about any.

You don't tell us about any of the other bodily functions you decide to do. I support you, but don't, don't write in to tell us what you're doing. Yeah, do not write in. It's super important you don't write in. Unless you're Ed Zitron, Ben. Yeah, Zitron right in. Uber's CTO, Previnaaga, said, we went back to the drawing board because the budget he thought he would have is blown away already.

So that's a full year's budget blown away in four months. Just because, you know why? Because, again, Ed Zitt, just, I want to send Ed a sort of vindicated man badge, but the cost of AI, as it was being pushed to all of these companies, was hugely subsidized. It was gigantically subsidized. They were trying to do the Uber thing of being like, we're like infinitely cheaper than a taxi until you force taxis sort of onto the brink of non-existence, and then you're competing with an advantage, and then you can charge the same or even more.

Yeah, precisely. Except they were trying to do that against eating food. All knowledge work. Swan AI's Amos Bar Joseph posted on LinkedIn, but how proud he was, of his $113,000 bill from Anthropic for his four-person team, which is, again, one month of usage. Yeah, it's really, like, there is a certain, if you want to put a sort of positive cast on this,

it's like, oh, look how hard they're all thinking. Now I can put a number on it, you know? Well, it all, but like, that's $28,000 a month or approximately per person. Jesus. You're not paying your employees that much. Are they doing the work of 10 of them? I don't know.

It doesn't seem like anyone thinks they are. No, but that doesn't matter. It still seems futurey to these people. And the thing is, right, the reason that the, that the hyperscalers are doing this is that a lot of them are looking at going public soon. Elon Musk, remember, the whole valuation of SpaceX, we did in the SpaceX episode last week's bonus with Corey, a whole, the huge amount of their target addressable market is AI. It's an AI company that has a space theme. And so he's just first. He's not going to be the last because Open AI and Anthropic are also coming.

And they're also, they don't have Starlink to be like, no, we have a real business here. they have to show that they're actually profitable. Not just profitable, but growing. Yeah. Like infinitely. So it used to be that you could spend $200 a month as like a pro user for a seat. And then you could use like a $100,000 worth of compute. And they're just like, well, you can't do that anymore.

I'm sorry you fired everybody on the basis that you were going to be able to run your company yourself for free forever. Whoopsie Daisy. Sorry, Brian Armstrong are bad. I kind of feel like whatever happens, the days that we've just lived through are, of asking AI how many bees are in the name Jordan Peterson. Using it for that will only get funnier with time, regardless of what happens with it. It's a $64,000 question, quite literally.

So also remember, because this is coming after a time where companies have been measuring employee productivity in terms of AI use. Amazon mandating 80% of developers use AI weekly. We also know the stories about these internal AI leaderboards like at Amazon and meta that have all been getting deprecated recently as token costs have started to become real.

Because the thing is right. If I was stupid, I could very easily confect a left wing take that's like, well, so AI works, and therefore this is a huge inequity that we're about to see. As AI gets more expensive, only the ultra rich will have access to the machine that makes you smarter. The problem with that is that it doesn't. It really doesn't. And it just, if anything, seems to make you dumber. So there's a real inequity in that maybe soon, only the ultra rich will be able to outsource.

their sentience and sort of fry their own brains. Yeah, hey, you know what? Maybe Jeff Bezos try stopping having bodily functions, you know? Just send it all to the AI. This is the thing where ultimately, of course, you know, we always knew that these people would become transhumanists, not necessarily as a knock on transhumanism, but because like, you know, that's kind of a logic that the market dictates

is all of these things are externalities. And so sentience included. And this is where we get to like finally say, in earnest, the bourgeois are no longer human, but it's their own choice, you know? And it's, it's through shit like this, I guess. Oh, read blindsight by Peter Watts, everybody. And also, there's a very practical solution

to why everyone's going to have to go that way, which is that when the AI's in our houses use up all the water and you can no longer perform most bodily functions, you're going to have to, like, solve that problem. Well, the thing is, right, if AI fully just enslaved us all to work in the paperclip mines, I am going to get killed day one

because I'm going to mouth off to the robot, over here and be like, you told me that there were three Bs in Jordan Peterson, and then you highlighted a D and A, which wasn't even like in the right word, and then a capital P, and it's going to shoot me with the laser. So I have a little more about the AI leaderboards. Employees at Amazon were told this week that its Kiro rank service, which scored users of Amazon's Kiro developer platform based on their AI activity, have been taken offline. The decision came after the tool led some workers to sign AI agents to carry out needless tasks in an apparent attempt to climb the rankings, such as a bot that checks the weather every five minutes.

Why does my shed in my back garden sound like a jet about to take off? I guess someone's trying to climb the rankings at Amazon. Dave Treadwell, Amazon Senior Vice President. That's a name for the Peloton. Thank you. Dave Treadwell, Amazon Senior Vice President, told staff earlier this week, please don't just use AI for the sake of using AI. And the implicit, like, the silent second part of that sentence is,

I know we did tell you to do that two weeks ago, but apparently that was a mistake. Sorry, everybody. Yeah, by the way, Zuckerberg nodded in meta's top 250 AI users. Ouch. Incredible. Oh, no. Better fix that.

Yeah, the workers that got fired on the basis of a cost comparison that was false at the time is since it's gotten worse, larger driven by workers who are trying to avoid getting fired. Now, they're getting fired because companies need to free up money to pay their token bills to get worse work out of the workers the fake workers that they're just replaced with AIs, so they just fired the humans anyway. So it's the same thing,

just another justification. I wonder if this will have any consequence on the product. I can't imagine what that would be. Probably not, right? What? Like just like a hugely bloated, redundant code bases with multiple security vulnerabilities that are being sort of systematically exploited

by more advanced models. Yeah, basically. That seems unlikely. I mean, when's a bad thing ever happened? That's true. That's very true. Yeah. Also, this is also,

This is also because fucking executives are fucking herd animals. They are all fucking herd animals. Listen, I don't love that I live in the Find Out century as having been born at the end of the fuck around century. But at least I got to experience the 20 years where the computer was good and going on the computer was fun. Also, by the way, speaking going on the computer before we hand over to me and Gareth. This is today, Jensen Huang announced in Taiwan a new Nvidia PC that, quote, runs on AI agents instead of having a keyboard in mouse. Cool. Uh-huh.

Oh. Says, An AI supercomputer might become a common home appliance in the future in the way at home theaters, large televisions, lawnmowers, and dishwashers are not that unusual, saying, I could totally imagine someday there's an AI supercomputer in your house. It's running all your agents. It's running all your assistants. And they're doing all kinds of things for you all the time.

But like, no one's ever said what it is. Why, though? What things? Yeah, what thing? Because every time you're like, oh, yeah, I got open claw to like, you know, optimize my calendar. It's like, but that's just the same as the guy spending like a, like, a, million dollars a day checking on the weather every 10 minutes. Yeah, like, I can't.

Like, what am I going to do? Am I going to tell my sort of AI supercomputer, hey, go on my podcasts for me? Like, there's not a lot of kind of labor saving there that I would want it to do that I think it could do well or morally. And then what am I going to do with that time, you know? Like, it's this, I don't see the efficacy of any of this is a labor saving thing. Well, it's like, you want to, I guess, you have an AI supercomputer in your house that's yours. You then have the other one that's not yours. They're both humming. You don't have a keyboard or

mouse anymore. You just sort of talk to it. I'm like, I guess it talks to a version of your lawnmower and it works out like an efficiency maxed way for you to optimally cut grass at the price of only, I don't know, like $100 million. I guess in the society of this invasions, I won't have to go on podcasts anymore. I would just do it as a leisure activity because money wouldn't mean anything and we would all live in a sort of a post-scarcity future. Is this the sort of general idea? We'd all live in the data center. We'd all live in the big data center.

That sounds a little like inhumane, maybe. Like at that point, at that point, why not just take me out of the loop? Because I'm clearly like a big sort of externality on the two data centers that we've got running. Yeah, it actually, that would be if everyone could just, could we just vacate the planet? We'd move out of the house so that they can have it. I mean, the problem is that like... Sorry, this is the data center's room now. The data center, they need to be told what to do with the data.

So we need the AI to be in a place where it can start training itself, which I know everyone has been sort of pushing and it's been sort of resistant to happening. Once that does, then I assume we're going to have to start sleeping on the couch because the AI is using the bedrooms. And then we're going to get kicked out entirely. Yeah. I think what's happening is we are, the AI is saying, get a job. I've taken all the jobs, get a different job.

You can no longer live here and use my electricity. basically. So basically we're going to get cut by the AI. I hate my fucking AI, like, mum's new boyfriend. He's such a dick. This is baby Vera Rubin's room now. Anyway, look, I think it's time for me to throw to myself and Gareth, so we'll see you on the other side. Hello from the first half. It is Riley coming to you from the second half.

And I am here with another of our two infrastructure. Gareth's. It's energy infrastructure, Gareth, rather than transport infrastructure, Gareth. So this is Gareth Fern, research fellow at the University of Manchester, who studies, rather than trains energy infrastructure. Gareth, thank you very much for coming back and completing the duology of the infrastructure Gareths, which always has to happen within four weeks of each other. Yeah, thank you very much for having me on. I mean, I'm pleased, yeah, to come from the Council of Gareth down to see what I can, wisdom I can impart. So what are the things we've been talking about sort of today in the last couple of days, one of the reasons I think it was interesting to talk about

this now is the UK continues to have the highest wholesale energy prices in, I believe, the OECD. We are very expensive. Can I just check, have we built any of that extra gas storage yet that caused us so many problems in 2022? I'm assuming we did. We invested a large amount of resources to fix the hugely avoidable energy price spike that happened in 2022. Well, yeah, yeah, there was lots of talking about storage. There was lots of talking over the last 10 years about expanding storage, nationalizing storage, but no, none of that, not of that. I bet they forgot.

Yeah, yeah, just slipped that mind. It's just slipped their mind. Cool, love it. Excellent. I love to live in a country that can learn from its catastrophic mistakes. So one of the things that you've written about recently is that we're in a, what you call a two-sided energy crisis, And I want to talk about that a little bit in more detail with regard to some of, I believe it was Tony Blair's monthly rare intervention in politics that he made recently

where he talked about the need to scrap net zero, drill for North Sea oil, and damn the consequences because we need the gas. So that in mind, can you tell us, what do you mean by two-sided energy crisis and how's it work? What I mean is that there's both an issue of decarbonizing on one side and then an issue of like prices, right? and in addressing that, you know, there's this kind of, as the government has set, this kind of agenda or this target of like getting clean power by 2030 and like racing

towards that. And for them, they see that like doing that as quickly as possible makes things cheaper for people, whether that's industry, whether that's households, right? That's their kind kind of way of looking at it. The other way perhaps I think about it is that there's like a distributive like problem in the energy system in the first place. And that without addressing that kind of distributive problem, you're not going to get to like the real. benefits of like in low carbon, you know, renewable slash probably nuclear kind of system, right? So the main reason being at the moment that we have a huge amount of like gas still, well, a lot of gas still being used to set the price of electricity in Britain. And that not only means

that electricity is very expensive, as you said, both, you know, some of the highest in like the kind of wealthier countries in the world, particularly for industry, also for households. And so there's that, that a huge problem, which means, but that also means that people aren't going to switch over, from one to the other. Like, you're not as light as where a heat pump if electricity is like pretty expensive as well, right? You need one to be cheaper. Let's just really quickly jump back for a second

because some people might not understand what we mean by gas sets the price of electricity. And why that might mean that someone, there's intervention only on the supply side and nothing on the demand side. And now we have this just absolutely fucked set of incentives. Yeah. Yeah.

So gas sets the price because basically the way that our... energy market, electricity markets, I should say works, a wholesale market is called, is the sort of like cheapest sources that get used first, that's kind of makes sense, right? And then the most expensive source gets used last. And that is almost in every case now, because we don't have coal anymore, is gas, right? Natural gas. And obviously, as I'm sure everyone's aware, like, natural gas prices went up dramatically in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine. And obviously the recent like attacks on Iran by Israel and the US has led to a not as big, but still significant kind of spike in gas prices, right?

So that means that the most expensive, even if it's only for like a few percent of the total mix, right? Like that gas means that everybody else gets paid that price, which is great if you've got a wind farm that's not unlike a nanzah for wind turbine owners because all of the free wind gets charged out like it's sort of scarce and infrastructurally complicated gas. Yeah. So if you're not on a long-term contract with a fixed price, which is quite a bit of renewables are, but the ones that aren't are making a pretty deal at the moment out of this

really high price. And the intention of this was to encourage people to build more and more renewables and then crowd out fossil fuels. But of course, that's not how it worked. And I think we can go back to what you frame as a distributive problem rather than as a growth problem, right? Because the UK government is doing what it does best, which is it's pretending it has the problem that it wants to have. It is pretending that all they need to do is figure out the right growth formula, and they won't need to worry about the distributive formula. Can you go into what we mean by we have a distributive problem rather than a growth problem? Yeah. So the idea from Ed Beelband and Labor, which is not like entirely wrong, but it's probably like looking at the wrong way.

Well, cut his mic, cut his mic. Yeah, yeah. Is that in the long term, if you get to a renewable system, you're like a problem, and nuclear, I should say, like things will be like cheaper. And probably more stable at least. I mean, like, cheaper we can debate, but certainly, like, you're not going to have, you're not going to be as exposed to like massive fluctuations in oil and gas prices, right? Like, that's the idea. And that's, I don't think that's necessarily wrong. The problem is the long term could be like five to ten years away. And in that period of time, people have to like keep supporting you in doing this. And, you know, you need to kind maintain some sort of public legitimacy. And, you know, maybe not like put people's bills up when

you say you're going to cut them by 300 pounds. So I think it's a distributed problem in the sense that the way that we have tried to accelerate for like financially the growth of renewables has been basically by loading all of the costs of doing so, which includes the grid as well as the actual generation onto people's bills, right? It's not, so it's kind of socialized in a weird way through individual bill payments, which is like basically a regressive tax effectively. Whereas, you know, in the past, when we, in the sort of 50s and 60s when the electricity system was developed in the first place on like scale, it was done through sort of basically large, either treasury loans or like government bonds, right? So like a hugely socialised means of expanding the electricity system.

And I would say at the moment, yeah, we've got it heavily focused on bills, which means that even when you're losing some gas at the system, you're kind of increasing it in other ways, like the price. So yeah, it's kind of like the transition costs are quite inflationary, basically. They're being pushed onto people's bills in a way and the government are struggling to address that. Yeah, because it basically, you as a British person can't really decide to not consume energy and not therefore pay these energy bills. I'm going to quote from your from your article here on the two-sided energy crisis, where you say, in practice, the labor's project of decarbonization and electrification is designed around the ass of a parasitic energy

system, which historically sees the public as an irritation rather than the people they exist to serve. We now face the consequence of this historic mistake. The way I see it is, yeah, the public can't choose to stop using energy, but energy companies can choose to invest or not. And so anytime this very right-wing labor government, and most governments for the last 20 to 30 years in this country, when they come up against a situation where they can confront capital, which has a choice, or the public, which doesn't have a choice, again and again and again, they disadvantage the public because, as well, what are they going to do? Leave? Sure, you turn off your lights if you want, but this green transition is going to be funded

by derisking every energy investment we can imagine, and they're doing it by putting the bills onto the public, which means, I think, hugely undermining political support for Net Zero. I think that, and I think that's the problem that they're coming up against increasingly, like that, yeah, as I said, they promised to cut people's bills, they're going up. And, you know, weirdly, they actually, though, in the budget last year, there was, like, a sort of, like, recognition that that was happening in that they started to shift. One of the things they did to lower bills a little bit, which, yeah, bills would be high now if they didn't do this, was that they shifted the kind of old subsidy program, most of the costs from that into general taxation.

Now, as far as I'm aware, that's the first time the Treasury has done that for, like, 30 years. like it was always been anathom into the treasury that you should fund energy investment basically, electricity and so gas investment through general satisfaction. So that's the first time that's happened for quite a long time. So it does seem like even they've started to be like, yeah, we can't go on like this. But at the same time, wider changes. And at any time anyone proposes, wider changes. So for example, one thing that's been proposed, there was a kind of more, I guess, more radical proposal from Commonwealth, which was just nationalised gas plants, make things cheaper that way. And then kind of more middle ground proposal, which was to create what they call

strategic reserve, which is a bit about the kind of storage stuff that we start of talking about. Which, by the way, we've eliminated our ability to do because having an ability to do that was considered expensive and boring. Yeah. So, like, trying to do something like that is another proposal. These pros are on the table. And they get ruled out straight away, usually now by the government to say that they could damage investor confidence.

That's like their kind of buzzword, which is the kind of derisking idea, right? Is that we're now set on this path. We're going to, like, race towards this, like, renewable point in the future where things just become cheaper. and it seems like if we're going to keep doing that, and like I say, bills have gone up this year, they're going to go up again, but I would imagine in the last quarter of the year.

Most people estimate it will, a little bit at least. And then really, whether they go up more or less is dependent on what happens with Trump and Iran, which obviously we don't know. So, like, it's not a great outlook. My understanding is that even if the Strait of Hormuz was to reopen today, oil could keep climbing to $150 a barrel. Yeah, oil particularly, gas is doing a bit better

because US production is like been ramping up. So that's kind of took. the edge off it being so bad, but when you get to winter and then European storage isn't able to fill up, which is quite possible if this kind of conflict prolongs over the winter, then over the summer, sorry, then yeah, that's when you would probably start seeing like a spike in prices. Obviously, in the moment in Europe, like it's kind of summer, so people are using less gas for heating. Yeah, of course. So basically, right, what if we sort of do the, is that the broad table setting here is that in facing this very difficult problem, the labor government is having

the conversation it feels like it ought to be having, as opposed to one that reflects the reality on the ground, which is energy prices are high. The cost of making energy cheaper could involve either piling a huge amount more costs onto the public or confronting the monopolies that are in charge of energy. And when faced with the idea of these monopolies may not want to maintain monopolist status if we make it slightly less profitable for them, have then, again, turn to the public. They're already monopolies. They can't stop being. Like Southern energy can't decide we're going to be in the bakery business now. Energy is too expensive. We're going to be in the bakery or we're going to be in the energy business in another country. No, they're stuck there.

You can confront them because they can't move. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And the crazy thing is that it's all just so state controlled anyway. Like, it's not like it's anything like a kind of, you know, particularly for like, yeah, big networks and even retails, right? It's like hugely regulated, hugely state managed, like business, right? It's not like in anything like a free market or anything like that at all. It's minutes and millions miles away from that. So you're already basically telling them what their business model is and baking in a certain rate of return for them.

And it's kind of just like, well, why don't we just own it? I mean, we're kind of telling them what to do. We're kind of telling them what we want them to do. We're kind of like directing them down as bath. And the only reason I think we avoid, the only sort of advantage, I guess, from the government's perspective, is just that the debt. debt that they obviously have to take on in order to build stuff is sort of classed as private debt rather than public debt. And that's basically, it seems to be the only sort of like

advantage for the government to stab the system, right? That's it. Like, it just pretend, and it'll cost more money that way. It's obviously. It's as though there is, there are two energy departments. There's a real energy department, which is all of these companies distributed around the company. We call it something else. And then there's a fake energy department, which is the one that acts like it's terrified of the real energy department. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess the other aspect to it in terms of, definitely in terms of fear, and I see this from, particularly from Miliband and perhaps, like,

I guess he's like all the other Labor Cabinet ministers, they're kind of terrified of this imagined reform voter in their head. So for Ed, Miliband and his team, it seems to be that they're really, really, you know, committed to proving almost like the value of net zero or like certainly the Clean Power 2030 target in and of itself. I'd like, you know, fair play to him. He just seems to take climate change seriously, which is good. He doesn't pretend it's not happening.

So that's like certainly an advantage over a reform or conservative government. But he like seems to just be like constantly trying to like prove that this is like worthwhile like on its own terms rather than. And I'm thinking that he has to kind of win this like climate change argument versus reform. Whereas actually I would suspect that if he wants to win the next election, which I assume he does, just making the bills cheaper somehow. was a lot more effective way of him, like, you know, consolidating Labor's own support, right? So they're kind of, the legitimacy battle they're happening is also kind of different, right?

They're having this battle with, and this is where the Tony Blair stuff comes in, right? They're having this, like, stupid argument about licensing extra gas in the North Sea. It's not going to make any difference to anyone's bills. It's not going to make anyone's life better. The only, like, people who will, like, win from that scenario other than the companies that own the fields will be, like,

maybe some workers in Scotland, like, for a bit longer. They'll have work, potentially, you know, And that's it really. Like, that's the only, like, there's no, like, big public game beyond that. But that's what we've been talking about for four months because our press is stupid. So we have a four months discussion about something that is irrelevant, really,

to the wider picture. And I guess that sucks, like, you know, the government into that kind of debate, rather than, like, addressing something more substantive. Like, yeah, how we could, like, restructure energy to make it cheaper, basically. Yeah, it's a, the idea is, like, in so many things, the necessary condition of the British government is that it can only seriously engage in fantasy, right?

The fantasy that the energy market is simple enough that you just sort of hit a big button that says do more oil. And then the laws of supply and demand will make energy prices fall at the margin. This is oil and gas, which is, which is ludicrous. But because of the incredible cynicism of our political media class, they will only engage in these kinds of fantasies. And when you only engage in fantasies, the winner is the monopolists. And the winner and even then only in the short term, because the requirement. investment needed for like social reproduction of this system has been classed as I don't know effeminate essentially and therefore like unsuitable for a serious country. Yeah. This is the thing that Blair

is now doing. I mean, it's something he's incredibly guilty of and has been guilty of for his entire political life. Something he's gotten worse about, I think. And as his rare interventions have become less rare, whether he even knows this or whether he's sort of entirely taken in the sort of cynical lies. I mean, it's hard to know. It doesn't really matter. We are continuing to have the argument that makes, well, we aren't having the argument because no one's listening to us. But the people who can affect change are having the argument they feel like having, which is, should we do the manly thing of more oil and gas, or shall we do the nice thing of green energy? Well, totally ignoring that both of them require a different way of framing

the entire question as a distributed way. rather than a growth one, basically. Yeah, exactly. And if you wanted to do, like I say, I think there's some serious questions about whether you can even extract that much oil and gas, particularly gas, actually, from these new licenses anyway, because they don't extract from the licenses they already have. There's loads sitting there that they just,

it's not economical for the companies to actually extract, even when the gas prices this high. So there's that question. But then there's also like a question of like, like you say this, yeah, this kind of distinction between kind of these kind of, what's seen as kind of, and I guess, yeah, I guess Blair would kind of see it as like, oh, we'll do both these things. And the idea, I think they've also been claiming that, you know,

we can get the West Street. It's kind of followed him recently to say, oh, we'll get the tax revenues from gas. And it's like, guys, the ship has sailed, man. This is 20 years too late. You're just talking to each other. Yeah. And the only way you would have made this possible, the only way you could make that work if you really wanted to,

would be to nationalize the oil and gas fields. If you wanted to use it to, like, pump it into people's houses and sell them like natural gas at like half the price that they, the global, like, price or at cost price. The only way you can do that is, nationalize the oil and gas bills. And again, Blair or streeting, etc. None of them are interested in that conversation. And, you know, maybe you would, you probably even, even I would be skeptical of doing that at this point because there's so little value left. You just be taking on this

stranded asset. So there were very little avail, other than, in my opinion, would be to sort of slowly shut it down in a way that doesn't like complete disenfranchise everyone that's still worked. It's almost like you might as well do both either or neither because they will have the same result. What they do is stop political focus from landing in the right places, which is a distributional question, which they are terrified of asking. Yeah. Speaking of, the way that the labor government has tried to square this circle is, of course, G.B. Energy, right? Which is this body that is supposed to de-risk green investment without necessarily putting people's bills up. I sort of kind of know the answer to this, but just for fun, did any of that even come close to

happening? Not yet. No, no, cheap energy, I think, have had a negligible impact. Well, they have, although that's not true. They have helped the bills of some schools and hospitals. So it hasn't been absolutely nothing, but they have installed. They are in the middle of contracting, I think, people to install solar panels on some public sector buildings. So it's not been nothing, but yeah, it's not a world-changing, like, national energy company, like comparable to Vat and Fall or something like that. That was a tent-poor campaign promise. We are going to create G.B. Energy, and we're going to have this fantastic way to circumvent this distributional problem, which is who pays for the green transition, which needs to happen.

And we're going to have an end run around it by using a little bit of capital now to de-risk the huge investments that need to be made. Plus, we have like, you know, little marginal pricing for gas. That's going to make it all very, very profitable. These things together will be green energy transitioned in no time. And G.B. Energy, what they've accomplished this fucking long into the government this long is some schools and hospitals may soon experience lower bills because of some solar panels.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think they are also been tasked with them sort of supporting a kind of community energy rollout. But again, that's like, you know, several years. Yeah, maybe a few gig a lot of power. It's like the country that we are in is one that requires,

you have to govern it. You have to actually govern it. You have to actually do stuff. And again and again and again, we see nobody wants to confront that reality who's in power. Because if you want to confront that reality, you'll be kept out of power. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think I would say that I think I wrote last year, I think the way I sort of, what they're doing now is that they're almost trying to construct a public system in the shell of like a privatized one. So they are trying to like direct investment, as we talked about, intergeneration. They are like kind of, I mean, the one of the most amazing things in there, shocking things I tend to have been reading the last few months has been, I mean, it's not very exciting documents,

but about how they're planning like transmission networks. And there's all these like points where they go, yeah, I think we're going to do some long-term planning of like electricity grids. And it's like, what were you doing before? And like, fair play to them.

They are actually starting to do it. But it's like, what are we doing for the last 20 years? It's like, we knew we needed to do this for decades. And now the government has gone, maybe we should, maybe we should plan this out for the next 20 years or 15 years.

And it's like, wow, for the fact that we like we've got to this point, yeah, 15, 20 years of like, almost 20 years since the climate change act, right, into law that we needed to like cut carbon emissions. And now we've gone,

maybe we should plan the energy system. Maybe it's like, oh, I thought you were, oh, oh, you thought I was, I thought you were doing it. No one did it. Oh, shit. All right. Let me just open, Claude. Fix UK energy sector. Make no mistakes. Okay, that should handle it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So like when we talk about fixing the UK energy sector, it's great to have a way to conceive of these problems where you can understand what the minimum, let's say, minimum level of ambition for a solution is to be worth the paper it's printed on. So I want to talk a little bit about what would be the kinds of solutions that would be equal to the scale of the problem. So you can have a yardstick by which you can, if let's say the labor government says they're going to do something, you can be, okay, well, that doesn't confront these core problems. and therefore is we can dismiss immediately as something that won't work.

What's the minimum solution to even touch the sides here? The most important thing now is for them to make an intervention on energy, domestic, energy, and also industrial, to be fair, energy prices, and particularly electricity. Actually, when I say energy, I really mean the electricity. So, I mean, there's stuff like, I mean, I've already talked about a couple of things already, but like some way in which you separate gas from setting electricity prices is absolutely essential. And there's, like I said, there's a range of ways. There's a kind of more market-based way.

Or there's a more public ownership way. I would favour the more public ownership way. There's a halfway house in the middle with a strategic reserve. Either of these things, any of these three approaches has to be attempted. I think in the next few months or the next year. Because if we keep having a situation where, you know, energy bills are rising, the pressure for like a not only right-wing government to come in, but for a right-wing government to come in and like smash.

And even the good stuff that government's doing up is just, increases every year, I think. So for me, like the minimum thing in the first place is to make something to something. I mean, they could even just take a load of costs onto general taxation if they wanted to, anything like that. There's a range of different things they could do, but they have to, I cannot believe how, like, latched they've been about the people's energy prices. Like, like, the number one job of an energy secretary is to, like, keep on top of, like, domestic and industrial energy prices. And the fact that they've just hoped that that will get better is just bizarre. It feels like the number one job of this energy secretary is to keep the public sold on the current energy

system for a little while longer. Like, it's just, it's just, it's just make sure it's just get to the next day, get to the next week, get to the next month, get to the next election, keep people as bought in as we can and confident in this shell game. Yeah, and I just think the promise, like I said earlier, like I think there is, you know, in the long term having more renewables. And we're seeing this in Spain to some extent, does force, you know, you will start to force gas out of the system and you will eventually start to get lower prices. But you've got to take people with you in that, like, journey. You've got to show to people that, like, you're, like, interested in, you know,

that you see this as an actual problem. And also that you, I guess, like, yeah, as I said before as well, that you start making the electric option cheaper, right? Because there's no point getting to 2030 and having, like, 95% renewables and nuclear when no one's using electricity, like, if demand doesn't go up. Like, you want people to be, you want to be going, like, anybody who can switch to an electrified version of something, we ought to be like making it as easy as it possible for them to do that.

And that's how you actually like lower emissions, not just building the renewables, because if you build the renewables, but that's only 20% of your energy use in the country, you've not done anything. And it's like connecting those two things together. And that is going to require some state intervention. It's not going to be done solely by kind of market like indicators of prices.

Yeah, because the market won't do it because if you have a, I think there's this belief that if you have, a stranded asset that you're going to try to find a way to get out of that stranded asset, stranded asset being like a gas fire power plant at a time where gas prices are high and staying high and they can't compete with solar and you can't retool it to become a bakery, right? It's just a stranded asset. It is not worth anything. There's this belief that if you can just create the right incentives and people will just naturally abandon those stranded assets. That's not how it works because you have a stranded asset. Your job then becomes lobbying the government

to keep it producing, to keep sweating it, to keep that asset producing income for you. And that's what they've done. That's what they've done successfully by reframing the entire green transition to be, as it is now, about growth and incentives rather than a distributive problem about who gets to use energy, who gets to price energy, and who pays for dealing with those stranded assets. Because right now, it's the owners of those stranded assets are winning in every respect because the UK government is afraid that they might leave those branded assets, I guess. Yeah.

I mean, the gas power plants are the worst because they're subsidized anyway. They only exist because of subsidy, which we pay for out of our own bills. Like, that's the only means by which gas power plants survive. Because they don't, they're not turned on enough to justify, like, their own, like, economic, like use, right? But they have to, we do have to use them for the final 20% or 5% or 30% of it. So they are funded, what's called the capacity mechanism is like a sort of subsidy that comes out of your bills, which pays for them to not be used, basically, to keep ready.

to be used at particular times, right? And that's, again, so again, like, this is why I've, like, say, I've said before, we should just nationalize these power plants. There's only about, like, 20 of them left. Like, they can just be turned straight. You know, we can just take them over and say, right, we're running the cost. And if they refuse to do it, we'll say, well, we'll take your subsidy away from you and see how well you can function without it.

Like, how backwards is it that in order, that we have all these people who own these stranded assets and this, like, owners of these 20 gas power plants are largely keeping the UK energy sector fucked with the eager cooperation of the government, of course, and Tony Blair and everyone else. And we need to get them to leave those assets, but we're afraid of them leaving those assets while frowning. They have to leave the assets while smiling, basically. Or the rest of the energy sector, that secret second energy department that we have is going to also leave all those monopolies and then no one gets any power. That seems slightly far-fetched to me. Yeah. Yeah. And as I said, like, we have so much, like the state has so much.

I think I saw a blog by a guy called Adam Bell, who's like a kind of consultant and reminded about energy. And he put it quite nicely actually that we actually have more public control of energy, I would suggest. I think he's probably right. Then we've had it in like 25 years, like in terms of how much the state is involved and controlling, like and directing the energy system, definitely more than 25 years. Like I say, we've actually started to plan the grid through the state for the first time

in like 30 years, probably. So that started to happen at the same time as not having control of the ownership of the assets. And that importantly means you're not getting. the financial returns, right? So you're drawing in sort of investment, but then you're not like getting, you're not owning an asset. The UK is very government state, is very asset poor compared to other countries. So you don't have this asset. You don't have like the income, like, which is going to grow in the future because we're going to use more electricity in particular. So you don't have any of those things, but you are taking on the responsibility and the

risk and the downsides, basically. So you've kind of got this like system. And also we can basically put pretend that like this debt for these companies or for you know the money that you need to effectively borrow to build new assets is it's just not on the books right even though we're all on the hook for it like we're all on the hook for the networks we're all on the hook for the you know gas capacity mechanism like that's just an indefinite payment that we're going to keep paying to the future but it's you know instead of saying oh public debt's a bit higher we get to say oh well you know public that's less because and you know this is as we know not been a particularly successful strategy in reducing public debt in general so but hey what if it just starts working maybe it

I mean, maybe I'm wrong. And maybe I'll just suddenly go full renewables like tomorrow and everything will be fine. But it doesn't look like... I'm going to say, I do always cover it with in five or six years' time, maybe when this full renewable system comes, it will be like not as expensive or not as like wildly unpredictable as the current system. But again, there's a lot of money going into like, you know, the prices, the lot of prices in the last like contract round for the generation were very high.

They were like just, just below like what it would be. for gas at its current price in a few years' time when they come online. So, like, yeah, they were like marginally less than what are kind of the gas price, basically. so again, yeah, like even those costs, right, which have been relatively low in the last few years because of supply chain and labor shortages and all these sort of things are like edging, edging up as well. So even these kind of long-term planned contracting costs, it's going to be expensive, right?

You've got to build a whole new, like half a new grid and you've got to build loads of new stuff, right? And that's just expensive, whichever way you look at it, right? And, yeah, as you've said, the question is, how are we going to distribute those costs? And like this should be like a national project, right? It should be like, like this like in the 50s and 60s, this was like electrification, like primary electrification, expanding electricity across the all like households in the UK.

It was like a huge national mission. We spent like 2% of our GDP on doing it. And it was like seen as something that everybody ought to be bought into because it was going to make people's lives better. And we're in a similar situation. Like electrification for, you know, that removes fossil fuels from the air and from like the volatility of prices, like whether it's cars or whether it's buses or whatever.

like that will make people's lives better. And like people like Tony Blair, like coming like some sort of like old ghoul or something from like the swamp or whatever to tell us to sort of go back to the past. It's like, no, we should. And I guess Labor have sort of a lot of Labor figures of distance themselves from that analysis. They were like, no, they talk about it as national renewal, the government. And that's right. But they just need to start acting a bit more like it's this like major national project

that is going to like really, it's going to make people's lives there. It's going to create jobs. It's going to do lots of things if you actually attack it and do it with like the kind of energy that it deserves. Well, you know what? Let's see if they do that. I'm taking vets. Gareth, thank you very much for coming and talking to me today. It's always very illuminating. And where can people find your work? You can go to garrathirn.com and find all of my work. And that's all my academic and non-academic writing that I do. Brill. Well, I'm going to throw back to myself and my co-host in the future past. One second, everybody. Ah, thank you very much, me and Gareth. What a chat. I was there the whole time.

I just didn't think I had anything productive to add. You know what they say? When you can't say anything nice, you can't, you shouldn't say everything at all. You wanted to bully Gareth? You were like, no, no, no. In the cock chair. Shaking his head to show that he disagreed with that. Yeah, my AI stepdad agent that is going to kick me out of the house.

Thanks everybody for listening to this free episode of TF. Thank you to Gareth for coming on. There's a bonus episode. It's going to be out later this week. It's this topic I've been wanting to do for quite a while and it's got delayed for a couple of reasons, but we are hopefully going to be ready and raring to go. So do look out for that. And of course, also our intrepid producer, Nate, has created a band.

That band is called Second Holmes, has created a CD, a CD, a CD, a CD, called Find a Way to Hase. You should get it on CD. You might even to burn it yourself, but you should get it on CD. Yes. It's called Find a Way to Hayset. We'll have a link to the band camp. Yeah. And that's one of the other songs is going to be.

We're doing the whole tour through the album. Find a Way to Hayter. One of the other songs that you haven't heard yet is going to be the outro music for this one. So stick around, listen to that. And then we will see you in a couple of days. Bye, right. Bye, bye, bye, bye. but I'm where I'm supposed to be

I'm supposed to be witching hours with you and there's dancing tune wards away from inside my feet so light to me a piece of you with hate on your honest to faceless youth and I'll spin your circles and minds

so let me let me be your armor and pay for you Reap your war to beauching Breathing loading and being carefully But I'm our I'm supposed to be