TRASHFUTURE - Gimme Some Wubben feat Laurie Laybourn-Langton

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

This week, we're speaking with IPPR researcher and friend of the show Laurie Laybourn-Langton (@Laurie_L_L) about his new book 'Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown' (co-authored with Matthew Lawrence). We also talk about a deeply stupid SPAC that JD Vance is hawking, and some other stuff about the whole climate thing. Yes, the guy who runs the SPAC is named Jeff W. Ubben. You can buy Laurie's book here (it debuts on April 20): https://www.versobooks.com/books/3702-planet-on-fire 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 We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *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)

Welcome back to the free one. It's me Riley and I'm the free one. I'm here with the free one. That's right. I am. It is trash future. I'm saying the whole name and not just the acronym for the first time in a long time. Also our acronym is the podcast that you're listening to right now. By the way, we call it TF. Misleads a lot of people into writing trash future as two separate words. Even people who are like huge fans of the podcast. I'm always surprised to see this when I'm deciding to be extra formal today because I am very excited for our guest returning champion. I believe his second time on the show. So we bid you good day. So I said good day getting his getting his pass for the club lounge with

free with free well spirits on from six until eight. It is Laurie, Labour and Langton author along with Matt Lawrence also lately of this parish of playing no fucking cards. No, Matt Lawrence because he didn't actually show you get fucking nothing. Well, no, it's like if you reserve to come on the show and then don't come on the show. It's like an air mile. You don't get the air miles. There will be there will be a cancellation fee that's applied. Yeah, he's barred. We will be sending Dave Courtney to collect that from Laurie and Matt both lately of this parish have written Planet on Fire a manifesto for the age of environmental breakdown, a book that is in fact much more hopeful than its title would suggest. So yeah, supremely more

hopeful and guys, it's lovely to be back again. And as a huge fan, I also had fallen into the trap of ways it two words or one. It's supposed to just be the one word. And I put an S at the end as well. A lot of British people do that. And to be fair, we do talk about futures contracts quite a bit. Maybe that's why. Trash futures is like going to be like our yearly conference, like the world transforms. We investigate possible trash futures and we have an array of speakers come in. I saw someone post a screenshot of a Bloomberg terminal suggesting that the that there was going to be a Dogecoin future, but that could have just been a joke. So I'm just looking at people posting photos of their Bloomberg terminals because you want to bloom. Yes, I

desperately want to bloom. He wants the Rick Owens Bloomberg terminal. That's right. Has a big droopy jacket on it. Yeah, that's exactly what I want. The other thing I want is to finally for all of us to start our jobs. You too, Laurie, by the way, you have a new job now as Dave Courtney's gardener. That's right. Yes, he appears to have posted some kind of ad putting out an ad for like a gardener to come and work on like an internship basis for his followers to come round and help him like top his garden so that it's ready for the party season. The implication being that like Dave Courtney's garden is sort of a public good because everyone is always invited parties. And so it's kind of like, you know, like fixing up the old swimming hole, like you go

down to Dave Courtney's house. He's refuting the argument about the tragedy of the Commons. Everyone wants to maintain Dave Courtney's place because it's Commonwealth. We've got a clean order come out of jacuzzi. It's been lying in there all winter. It's become a sort of sludgy consistency. Every time we do the Twitch, we have the exact amount needed to save Dave Courtney's jacuzzi. Well, anyway, by the top prize of the podcasting competition is exactly the amount of money you need to fix. I know I understand my fate. Yep. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, look, we're we're not just here to talk about that, though, although I am actually interested in possibly going and working for Dave Courtney's jacuzzi. Milo, you had no sleep. Yeah, that's

right. Yeah. No, so we are we are beyond us eventually going and working for Dave Courtney as his garden interns. Before that happened, Joe creator. Yeah, yeah, he is. I've got a few quick hits in the news. Then a startup. Then we're going to talk about the book Planet on Fire, and then we are going to read an article about the late great Prince Philip spiritual successor to Denzel Washington's hit film Man on Fire. That's right. First, the man and then the man. Actually, it's a Veltgeist on fire. It's a planet sized ghost on fire. It's world ghost. Yeah, it's Hegel. Hegel. He made these big, big, flappy clothes that you could buy. Yeah. And stop. Stop putting my interests together. Yeah. So this is the first news item. It comes out of the US, which is that

did you know that a labor shortage is forcing chains like Subway and Dunkin Donuts to cut hours, close dining rooms and push employees to work harder than ever? This is from Business Insider that they could pay more. Well, no, because that would mean the jobs would go away if they paid more. But there's a labor shortage. They could pay the people who want to maybe make they could automate it or maybe they could encourage more people to have babies. I don't see how they could solve this problem. They could make the money that they get paid more to make it a more attractive job to work. I don't know. I don't understand how this this is an unsolvable problem. It looks like the quick service industry has been destroyed by this stimulus.

That is right. Yeah. That's right. No. Well, RIP to Subway. Yeah. You can now only get a four inch at Subway because of the labor shortage. Yeah, that's right. So it says, I think everyone in the industry, it's not unique to Subway is struggling to keep stores open from a lack of staff. We had to bring back Jared. Do you know a labor shortage? One last job. No longer can we be high on the hog with non-pedophile staff. We had to make Subway an adults only zone. We've done the Suicide Squad thing. We've brought Jared back. We've even planted a small explosive at the basement. Subway Jared, but played by Jared Leto. That's right. So now they're basically refraining from opening dining rooms

because even though there's lots of customer demand, no one's willing to work for those wages. Isn't it part of the labor shortage also that people like line cooks have vastly disproportionately died of COVID? Well, I don't see how that's connected. Yeah, because they're in the Suicide Squad explosive in the base of their skull. If I remember correctly, the story people always tell about the Black Death that I believe Eleanor Yonega says is not quite true. And it's in fact very exaggerated about how like the Black Death caused actually standards of living to rise because it removed a lot of peasants from the labor force and their labor became more valuable. I think what happened is Jared of Focal,

the village pedophile, has been released from Yonegaul in order to fill the orders of trenches of mutton for the town's folk. Yeah. So one McDonald's franchisee said the stimulus check and unemployment are killing the workforce. That sounds like the opposite of what they do. Killing the workforce. Fast food franchise holders are up there with landlords in terms of people who, irrespective of their sort of their class position, just are made unpleasant by their job, right? Oh, for sure. Oh, boy, did I think you were going to say something that was going to be way more beeped out than that. I'm being very careful not to make any actionable threats against

named persons other than on the Twitch stream. Yeah, that's right. So legal if you do it on stream, baby. Before we move on, Laurie, I just want to turn to you. Your honor, it was poggers. This is something that we're sort of noticing, right? That there even though there's demand for labor, there is some wage stagnation towards the bottom of the pyramid. Yeah. Yeah. It seems to be a common feature that keeps popping up time and time again, and everyone is extraordinary perplexed about it. But I'm the same. I look at the stimulus package and I think this is inevitable that it will viscerate all these low-paid jobs and I just can't get my head around it. Can you guys? Yeah, no, I just, I think that the, well, you know what,

I mean, look, as someone who owns four McDonald's franchises, I need to make sure that I send my son to go to Bard College where he can study how to be a TV comedy writer and write a show about microaggressions. I mean, listen, like maybe if we're doing medievalism, right, and we're just doing Midden's Advent again, maybe the solution here is for subway former sandwich artists to form some kind of guild to advance their shared interests. Some kind of a sandwich journeyman, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If we could have some kind of system of sandwich apprenticeships, journeyman masters, perhaps they could have like a whole where they could like do business in. Yeah. Well, but then there'll be a big conspiracy that, of course, about the sandwich artists.

The mutton, the mutton shop. So it's not to pay the sandwich, the sandwich artisans their fair wage has brought has brought unto us these more who have not even studied the quadrivium. And yet they claim to be able to construct a sandwich. I doubt it very much. As Adam Smith said, seldom do two sandwich artists meets other than to concoct conspiracy against the public. I love Mercia. I love a trencher of lamb. I love good, good mercy in sandwich artists like if it's not yonder the drawbridge. That's right. It's be a simple. So that's but that's that one little quick hit up top. Number two quick hit. This is really fun. Did you know that apparently there were actually no dogged reporters and a scurrilous left wing

podcast involved in talking about the Greensill story for the last one to several years. Apparently the mail on Sunday is now floating a theory that actually there is the only way to explain David Cameron being exposed as a moron and a crook. The only way that the only way that this could possibly have been happened at this could possibly have happened is that a left wing element, a fifth column, a group of fifth columnists, fanatically loyal to the Kierstarmor of the Labour Party has infiltrated the civil service and forced David Cameron to try to get the British government involved in several pyramid schemes. I'm just imagining anyone being fanatically loyal to Kierstarmor, including Kierstarmor. Kierstarmor was like,

I don't understand this. Even we don't have five columns. We've not even got one column. Partridge. That's trouble with civil service now because of the creepy Sharia. They've got five pillars because of Islam. That's right. That is extraordinary to see the picture in the mail. Was it today the drawing of the monster? There's a picture of the mole. Someone has been paid to draw a picture of them. It's completely red and doesn't have a cap on a Corbyn star. With a big hammer and sickle. Yeah. Kierstarmor's hammer and sickle Labour Party. It's completely bizarre. It's this story that's being pushed by Glenn Owen primarily is the political editor of the Daily Mail, which basically just says all this stuff, this all of this sort

of ineptitude and corruption at the heart of government. The only explanation for this could be again, not that the Conservative Party as a sort of backbiting nest of the equally sort of criminal and stupid vipers, but no, we must be being betrayed from the inside by one of those Lefty Remainers civil servants. And I mean, if that that avails Kierstarmor to the extent of getting him to 29%, so that's really some leaking. Golf politics. To be fair, being the political editor at the Daily Mail is a very difficult job because you've got to think about your audience, right? You're writing for a group of people who have to be kept furious at all costs, but not too furious such that they have that massive stroke that they're going to have while

they're reading one of your articles. It's a difficult balance. They have to be just the right number of Muslims giving your house price cancer, but not one too many. Otherwise, all your readership is going to die of that huge coronary. That's right. Just very into the idea of like Kierstarmor as a sort of Fertile Glenn figure. What? I mean, every failing of the state is due to his network of informants. What's the voice? Every institution. Well, what if Kierstarmor was a Turkish man?

But the interesting thing is, they are welcome the Prime Minister's remarks, but I would call them to go further and consider encircling Vienna. But the Gulan comparison, I think is a good one. If only because of the many disagreements between Erdogan and Gulan, they actually overlap rather on quite a bit. Shut up. We already are changing the name of the group DM to a Milo said earlier. They overlap on the crucial issue of Vienna. Yeah. No, they overlap on sort of many issues, including like the role of Islam and Turkish society and so on. It's very funny then that if Kierstarmor is British Gulan,

it says in one of the articles that Kierstarmor himself provided the first major clue that there is a labor-friendly leaker in the civil service. They think a cabinet office, they said quote this from the mail on Sunday, ministers and officials have become unnerved by the way. Starmer kept preempting major policy announcements with his own identical proposals. Awesome. God, it's chess. Everyone's playing such an incredible game of chess. They're playing chess on the moon. I love that like Kierstarmor is like fucking

Mr. Bean or like airbot or something. Well, the stuff he's doing is so stupid that everyone thinks he's a genius. They're like, how is he doing it? He's doing the absolute last thing we would expect him to do. Yeah. He's being a better Tory than the Tories and it must be because he has inside information. I'm just, I'm so struck by this idea of like a starmarist deep state. I'm really, I really, really, really, really, really hope this works out because, right, there is something so bleakly funny about the ideas that the British state would not, as John McDonnell said, like execute Corbyn and McDonnell in football stadiums, but it might forgive Starmer for being too much of a hard like Corbyn.

He's too good at being a Tory, which as we all know, is the way to be a government. The army's got to step in. Something's got to be done about this starmarist tendency, which it's victories, you know, uncountable. I'm trying to count them. I can't. Oh man. It's true. Like, but what are the things is like, what this is basically done is now, if you're a daily mail reader, the Green Seal story, which is like, you know, this like tough that you probably kind of hate is wasting your taxpayer money. Well, what's happened now is the government supporting press is essentially run interference with the government. And like, and basically you can be like, oh, it's a mall in it.

It's a bleep. I've always hated moles, little blind cunts coming over here from underground, right? Our ground where British people should live, not moles. That's right. A bunch of interviews with like sad red wall voicers who are like, well, they said they were going to bring back the industries. They were going to build a consent manufacturing factory up here. They said those are going to start making consent again, but Shabbos, we don't make moles in this country anymore. Laurie, before we move on, I want to ask sort of how this was a Russian mole in MI6. What can we have one of our moles in MI6? What's wrong with British

moles then? I want to ask how this how this sort of little bit of very desperate and strange consent manufacturing strikes you. I think more and more with the Daily Mail editorial line, when it comes to trying to explain away these things as to why there seems to be this persistent messing up on the part of the government, it either it sometimes reeks of like a bunch of lads who are seven cans deep, who were just they're looking back to an old golden era and they're just trying to rekindle that. And they're looking over at the times who time and time again is sort of acting as this astonishing outrider almost to the labor body in going for the corruption element that the government is looking at. And you got these Daily Mail people just sort of

scrambling around this can smashing around all over the floor. And then coming up with this though, it's just it's just brilliant, right? But surely they did it for you guys. Yeah, I think so. They must have done. Yeah, there's actually a trash future fifth column at the Daily Mail. It was planting very funny quotes for us to read. That's right. Basically, it's Hussain is not here right now. He's at his job. The Daily Mail. Mischievous Saracen Hussain-Kazan. Glenn Owen takes off a Mission Impossible mask and it's just Hussain. I was very suspicious when that column started with height. So I want to do a really quick startup, which is I thought was quite fun.

The startup is related to our later topic. The startup is called App Harvest. Milo. Is it something to do with Farmville? Not Farmville, but Farming. I'm going to give that to you. The original Farmville. Laurie, it's called App Harvest. It's to do with Farming. What do you think it does? Like recycling the empty homes of all the British farmers that have now all gone bust. It's a fucking mouse. It does come under me farming and eating everything from the bottom up. It does involve repurposing large empty buildings, but no. I've had to buy a load of illegal Nazi weaponry from World War II to fire them off.

Repurposing your barn is like a dormitory for coders. It's nothing to do with farming, but they say our process for- You fucking said it was something to do with farming. But you didn't say anything to do with farming. And I said that I was lying. So we're doing a who's on first situation here. It is to do with farming. Our process, they say, is better for both people and planet. At App Harvest, we dream big and do better. We put words into action, nurture into nature,

tech into technique and gross into everything we touch. Tech into technique. That's pretty good writing. I really don't like that. I think it's repurposing empty farm buildings and using them to, I don't know, hoard the like torso and head mannequins that VR goggles are placed on when they want to sell them. How about like hooking up your tractor or your combine harvester and using the engine of it to mine Bitcoin? All of this would be good ideas.

No, they bring together great minds from Appalachia and around the world to transform the future of agriculture and plant the seeds for a better tomorrow. Is it like an app system that sort of like tracks your, like a period tracker, but for farming? Here's the thing. It's a very bad name because as far as I can tell, very little to do with apps. It's just sort of a technologically enabled indoor- It's interesting that all these companies just use sort of buzzwords. And actually none of them really do anything at all.

So what they've done is they have, they're based in Kentucky. They have been invested in heavily by JD Vance, the idiot who wrote Hillbilly Elegy. They went public. That's why he's allowed to write it. They went public as a SPAC. JD Vance left its board under a bit of a cloud for tweeting about the great replacement or whatever. He claims something else happened, some nonsense. And the, and friend of the show, Quantian says, basically,

they grow cucumbers in a big warehouse, but without needing to handle the details like packaging and getting them to consumer and somehow make a very large return doing this. Also, it's a SPAC that collapsed 44% after the lockup period expired. It fucking cratered. Now, I mean, if a bunch of people tell me we're growing cucumbers in that building and we made, I don't know, half a million pounds this month doing it, to my mind, the word for that is crime. Well, we've got one very large investor.

Here's the thing, right? This is actually looking at this, right? It seems like it's just a hydroponics facility that sort of likes to talk a lot about, oh, we're using AI. We're in the circular economy. And those people have used hydroponics to do crime. Smoking on that cucumber that killed Saddam. And I think it's important to note that, yeah, they're growing a lots of cucumbers and tomatoes

and trying to revolutionize the food system now. But when, and this is now a banner of time, probably Kentucky legalizes weed, they'll be, let's say, in an opportune moment to retool very quickly. But so what I think is interesting about this, rather, is actually its ownership. So after JD Vance stepped down, I looked into who else owns it, and the SPAC that took it public was called Inclusive Capital Partners. And it was formed by a man named Jeff Ubin. Excuse me?

Yeah, Jeff Ubin. Jeff Ubin. Yeah. Who used to be Jeff Ubin. Used to be in charge of Mr. Ubin. Yes, that's right. Who used to be in charge of, yes, the Value Act, which was a San Francisco-based hedge fund. And they were really, really sort of popular for being an activist investor who goes into a

company and then like basically does a bunch of crazy shit to it to make it worse to work for and more expensive, which is great. So, but he's basically had a change of heart. So Ubin says, yeah, he's had one of his trademark changes of heart, has founded Inclusive Capital Partners as a SPAC to try to like take public a company that was going to be doing social good. And he says, in 20 years, it's never come up to like social issues have never come up in any board meeting I've ever been in.

So that's interesting. And isn't it? I'm sitting there complicit in that trend, by the way. So he's basically said, I've been for my part as the manager of the leader of Value Act Partners, I have done my bit to make the world a worse place. Anyway, it's very important that I'm able to be, that I am leading the charge to fix it because democratization of finance, as far as I'm concerned, means me, but I'm nice, essentially. Okay, yeah, well, I'm sold.

The theme we pulled out from the notes here is me, but I'm nice, still being in power. It's like, oh yeah, you, yeah. Now, I still need to be in charge, though, at no point will I stop being in charge. Yeah, what would a green recovery be without Ubin? That's right, yeah. You're suggesting an Ubin-less green recover? We've got a bun in the Ubin here. Yeah, that's right.

And the Ubin is green recovery. So look, before I go on to other things that Ubin is involved in. Ubin things. As good as finger and many pies that have been baked in many Ubin. Laurie, I see quite a bit of this, right? People wanting to atone for years in dirty industries, sort of trying to then atone by making millions in a clean industry. So how does that strike you?

Well, firstly, I'm on the website now and I just, I can't get my head round. A, Y, it's app harvest because it's Appalachia. Yeah, there we go. That's why. And also app is a technology word. It's a double meaning, I think. Okay, okay. And then as far as I can tell, it's just, they're just, yeah, they're just growing a

load of things and I don't understand how any of this is in any way. It's just farming. It's just, exactly, it's just farming and they put app on the front and then the website is green. Yeah. Well, they say they have AI, although we've talked about something like this before. We've managed to make farming more racist. Egyptian pharaoh having like the floodplains of the Nile and the rich, silty soil being

good for growing crops, explain to him and he's like, and this is a tech company, you say. So they say that they have lots of these sort of technologies that they've built in to their company in order to make it smart and AI-driven, much like that fake box that claimed you could grow food in. Oh, yeah. The MIT Media Lab box. The food computer. That's the one.

This seems to be like that, but very, very big and it does seem on first blush to successfully grow food, but it is just a hydroponic inside farm. Yep. Something which has existed for a long time. Yep. It's usually for something cooler. That's right. This goes on.

This is an article from Bloomberg. Ubin's new venture is not only one of personal atonement. He believes the same dislocation between valuation and opportunity exist today as he did at the start of his investing career. Shareholder First Capitalism, he says, made businesses so good at maximizing profit that there's little left to squeeze. Shareholder First Capitalism or Capitalism. They didn't do that before, of course.

Back when Marx was writing about linen coats, it was all use value, baby. No exchange value here. Absolutely. He says, Shareholder First Capitalism has made businesses so good at maximizing profits that there's very little left to squeeze. That's what Marx said in Capital Volume 3. It has also left many of them ill-equipped to react to other issues investors care about. We've moved into this new era where stock prices are reflecting environmental and

social failings increasingly, even as their financial returns are okay. No, we're not. No, we're not. It's just not true. No one buys the stock of Shell, for example. Jeff Uppin, for example, does buy the stock of Shell. He owns, I believe, 5% of ExxonMobil. He invests on mobile.

ExxonMobil phones, they make mobile phones for his technology company. Basically, he invested in the company so that he would be able to sit on the board and tell them to reduce their greenhouse gases. I'm going to own you by giving you my money. Entry is... Yeah, he's trying to do entry as a nice man to a big bad company, and therefore, fix it by putting a nice man in charge, who also must make millions of dollars a year from this, by the way.

And so, Exxon, as a result of this, announced the creation of ExxonMobil low-carbon solutions, where it will invest as much as... Alice, is this happening earlier in the episode than usual? I'm sorry. Yeah. No, go ahead. Exxon also announced the creation of ExxonMobil low-carbon solutions, and said it would invest a whole 3 billion into the group by 2025.

And what percentage of the market cap is that? Oh, I wouldn't pay. I presume. Oh, I bet it's very high. Very high. Yeah. Billion, that's like the biggest number I can think of, reasonably. Absolutely, yeah.

And they're a small family-owned business, so... Yeah, the fifth, you consider... You're not the Uppin family. Yeah, by the Uppins. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and they want to reduce their greenhouse gas output by as much as 20% from their 2016 levels by 2025. So, Laurie, why did you even bother writing this book?

Well, yeah, I'm not really sure anymore. This is an absolute curveball for me, this Uppin guy. And App Harvest is a B corp as well, I've just seen. So, it means that they measure their social good, which I imagine is considerable, and not just marketing. Yeah, well, we're done. Yeah, so I'm done. And I'm, you know, to anyone who's listening to this, don't buy the book,

and just go Google Uppin, Jeffrey W Uppin. What's the... Do we know what the W... Jay Wuppin. Yeah, let's do it. It's the same word. It's just, it's just, it's just Wuppin. I'm not a W Uppin. So, here's the... This is not...

I'm not a double Uppin. This is not Jeff Wuppin's first green investment. Do you want to know what his biggest green investment is? I would probably be like fucking Lockheed Master. We talked about this company before. Oh, is it the bean shoes? Nicola. Oh, yeah.

Hey, it was a big early... It was a big early Nicola booster. Nicola make, like, off-brand Teslas that don't work. No. And normally, Tesla have the fucking market on that, but... Yeah. Well, they work when you roll them down a hill. That's right.

So, yeah, that's how Capital is reacting to the ongoing climate crisis, with a bunch of companies that are varying degrees of scammy. And we got here, so if you Google Wuppin and this Nicola company, I've not heard of that before, it's my fault. An early Nicola investor, Wuppin, says the startup went public too soon as it grapples with accusations of fraud. It doesn't look good for the lad, does it? No.

Yeah, if anything, I cared too much. Yeah. Jay Wupps. Yep. Yeah. So... I love that these guys can just move from failure to failure and wreck the planet, and the best we can do is, like, make fun of their names, which are very funny.

Capitalism failing to reckon with its own contradictions is definitely a very bad news for that Mr. K. Marks guy, who wrote that really pro-capitalism book, Das Capital Baby. Yeah, he loved it. Oh, yeah. So, that's the Wuppin moment. That's a classic Wuppin moment. Yeah, give me some Wuppin.

Yeah. So, I think give me some Wuppin is probably a pretty good episode title. Sorry, Laurie. I'm so sorry to do this to you. I'll change my name to Wuppin so that then I can get the best of both worlds. Yeah, it's like, no, it's like, you know, sorry. It's I've been, I'm rich, so I'm afraid I have to be involved. I created all the problems. I have to be involved in everything.

I will never stop continuing to fuck with the world. And it's going to be my half-assed climate change acceleration is going to be only be made worse by my half-assed climate change prevention. Yeah. Yeah, this is this is why Trump is my favorite billionaire, because all of his investments are just dumb guy shit. It's all just like I'm building a hotel. Every surface is going to have my face on it. Okay, there's going to be an elevator.

It's going to be made completely out of stakes. Okay, every single one well done. They're all going to have quotes in there about people that I hate. Okay, people, people who've said very unkind things about me. Actually, you can't imagine it, but they do, they do do that. And I'm going to have those on stakes in the elevator. My meat, my meat evader, I'm going to call it. And it's going to be, it's going to be beautiful.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, better than this fucking guy. How am I, how am I transferring the Ramadan madness to people around? The meat evader is what you get in exactly 9 p.m. So anyway, that is, that is app harvest. I don't want to spend too long on it, but just, I just that the story of Wubbin, I think is very, it's called the story of Wubbin. I think is very illustrative of what we're going to talk about, about your book,

Laurie, because the question is how is capital reacting and how should the left, such as it is itself react, right? And capital's reacting. Capital's bargaining stage of grief. Actually reading it on the front of the book. Okay, so the planet on fire, the story of Wubbin. Yeah, that's right. So I think that's why I sort of brought up app harvest.

The company itself seems, I don't know, fine, a lot of marketing around its tech nonsense, but it's not that unrealistic to hydroponically grow cucumbers or whatever. They have not managed to fail to grow a cucumber. Okay, I mean, so because of the fucking mouse, although again, if it's at some point released in the future, it's like, Oh, it turns out that like all those cucumbers, they just went and bought from Kroger or whatever.

I also wouldn't be surprised. Anyway, so I've got that kooky neighbor. Yeah, I got a few facts here. Did you know that the energy now used by Bitcoin alone is equal to all the energy generated by solar power in the world? I heard that and it black killed me so much. So every solar panel that's been built has basically now had its like generation capacity turned to something that has all exchange value, zero use value.

Now that's epic. Which is like only useful as an exchange value for buying art that does the same thing, but worse, drugs and child pornography. Not even that anymore. Different coins are used for those things now. Bitcoin is literally just- You could have drugs coin. Yeah, Bitcoin is basically just like owned by lots of institutional investors

and big companies now as a hedge against inflation. Drugs and child pornography both have far more use value than the other stuff cryptocurrency is used for. I've never bought either, so I don't know how. But yeah, do you really not use Bitcoin to buy drugs anymore? No, it's basically gotten too big and largely traceable. It's gotten too mainstream. Yeah, it's gotten too mainstream so people use other coins for that kind of thing now.

Bitcoin literally is just a speculative investment that's held as a hedge against inflation by institutions like Grayscale. Oh, but it's something that Elon Musk can tweet about being epic. So I think President Xi, most of these Bitcoin mining rigs are in China. Please satellite drop tungsten rods directly onto all of them. No, no, no. Riley, the repressive state capacity of the People's Republic of China can only be turned on Uighurs. But what this should illustrate is that there's this old thought experiment

about an AI that goes rogue and then only manufactures paperclips. It's this parable about AI where it's like, well... It's about Microsoft Clippy and what happens? The worry is that this AI will just keep going and turn the whole world into paperclips. The thing is, we already have that. It's just a social machinery. It's not lines of computer code or much of the social machinery is encoded in lines of computer code, but nevertheless, is that we have a distributed social machinery

that does just maximize paperclips in the form of exchange value rather than use value. It maximizes line, but as we mentioned in a previous TFC's and finale, the line is no longer connected to anything in any meaningful way. So it just maximizes line. So again, with that as a by way of introduction, can we talk a little bit about how we got here and why this is specifically a problem to do with social relations rather than one form of technology or another? I'm looking at Lori. We tell a story in a book, which is starting to be told more and more,

and it's about Easter Island, famous at least in sort of the Western cultural imaginary because of the head and torso statues that are on the island. And it's just like classic story in environmentalism, at least Western environmentalism, that if you look around at the Messara now, it can be ascribed to, as you say, us depending on bad technologies like fossil fuels, et cetera, but also our innate selfishness and short termism, right? And Easter Island purports to sort of sum that up perfectly because you had this island that's really out disconnected from it anywhere. It's a very long way from any continent.

And when Westerners first arrived in the 1700s, in fact, I think 299 years ago, the other day, they found this place with all these extraordinary statues with a civilization that they thought had sort of fallen to pieces. And a number of people still tell this story, have told this story in the last few decades that what had happened is that so unthinkingly, and because their technology is including the way that they move these statues to different parts of the island, had led them to unthinkingly destroy the natural environment upon which their society was possible. And they cut down all the trees, right? And there's a seminal moment where there would have been one last tree, but someone still cut that down. And then they weren't able to grow food,

and the whole society collapsed. And killed a fucking mole, though. Shade those cans. Moles died. It was a disaster. And I'll do this next bit as Adam Curtis. Very strange thing happened. Yeah. Well, the story was a sensation, and its authors became heroic figures. And it encapsulated the violence. It's kind of like a grassed environmental imaginary of, well, this is it. The Easter Island is a sort of a small island sized version of the world. And we've got in the same way that they couldn't escape from the island and turn on each other. We can't escape from this planet. However much you think you can, you know, go and set up shop on Mars, out on Mustangs.

But the problem is that the story is completely untrue. And actually, what happened was that the society developed a sort of steady state relationship with nature, had cultural norms, and other things that stopped the destruction of the environment. The trees weren't even that important for what they were doing. And in fact, what led the society to fall to pieces was the successive slave raids that came after that first Western contact and the smallpox that they bought, and then the sexual exploitation of many people on the island. And then the fact that it was taken over and turned into a sheep farm for a Scottish company. And those people didn't just do that for a laugh. They did it because they were compelled there by the huge global economic

systems that were growing up around that time and have dominated us to this day. But Laurie, where would they be without the Easter Island Railway? And I think this is a lot of very stupid people, like Jared Diamond, like to talk about these things as inevitabilities, tragic stories emerging from interactions of human nature and the environment around us, while sort of ignoring the social technologies that are at play driving them. So that in this almost deterministic, geographical deterministic view of the world, that basically is a kind of Malthusianism, a sort of a tragedy of this. It's not even that. Jared Diamond's just like Calvinism with that.

Well, he's Calvinism. Remember, just like, with ever I see Steven Pinker, I always remember, this idiot did a study on whether or not racism is going up or down in America on the basis of people googling the N-word. And Frank Sinatra. Whenever I see Jared Diamond, I remember that one of his big arguments in his book is that the world is the way it is because the Americas were easy to conquer because they're oriented vertically, whereas Eurasia was destined to succeed because it's oriented horizontally. What if people were googling the N-word because they were actually getting less racist and they

were looking for synonyms? I can't say that anymore. So this is always what I remember when I think of Jared Diamond, and it's a form of whiny Malthusianism that sort of ignores all of the things that are sort of inconvenient for it or not, fun for a geographer to think about, really. No, the irresistibility of geographic rights. And so there is this mode of thinking that I think must be issued, I think, by the left. I think that is not difficult for us to issue it. And we instead have to think about, well, we don't want to be Easter Island.

I'm sure it's lovely, but I'd rather not be that way. So we have to ask ourselves questions like, okay, well, what is eco-socialism? What is a green transformation? Yeah, and in the book, we're saying that the politics that have exploded out into the open over the last few years, which themselves are the sort of latest iteration of a number of movements that are coming together. And this explosion has often been associated with the concept of a Green New Deal. And that is an amazing, a genuinely amazing positive moment, one that we have to look at and be critical about in many ways, particularly in progressive circles,

but also see as a huge moment of opportunity and potential change. And what we're saying in the book is that to build on that agenda, to sort of widen and deepen it, you've got to then explore a range of deeper changes to our systems, to the systems that led people to Easter Island and the disaster that happened there, but then the systems that leading us to global environmental disaster. And that we have this extraordinary opportunity, it's demanded by the environmental situation, but also the horrendous social and economic fallout of the way these systems work. And we've got to be changing those systems. And there has to be this re-enchantment of politics, as you can see, they're already

starting to be, that begins to make these changes across a wide range of the social and economic systems that dominate our lives and are leading us over the edge on the environment. And in the UK, I mean, much of the sort of action on this is largely sort of the Tory government sort of trying to rearrange old spending and do marketing to make it look as though they're doing things, well, sort of handing as much money to personal friends of Matt Hancock or whatever as they possibly can. Listen, if it's not, if he's not green, why is his name green silk? Matt Hancock's pub landlord knows a lot about solar energy. And so for example, right, like they are recreating the UK, as far as I understand it,

they are recreating a new green investment bank. But the last time the green investment bank funded a major project, it was UK offshore wind. And then all of that, all that offshore wind was then immediately privatized and handed out at pennies on the pound to a private company. And in lots of cases, the private companies owned by other countries, state energy providers. Indeed. Yes. Yeah. And then shortly thereafter, it was cancelled out by a Bitcoin fund. Yeah, absolutely. Japanese now have got me building these big Easter Island stone heads. Great energy, I call it. Stone head. Stone head currency. And so stone hedge. So we can sort of understand sort of that's happening here.

But in the US, it's a bit of a different story, right, Laurie? It is. And we again, we should look at what the Biden administration is starting to talk about, has already achieved in passing one stimulus package and he's talking about with the next stimulus package as a significant moment. And I think it's, it's really easy to, you know, if you're in progressive circles, and particularly if you've been doing stuff around the environment to kind of got to the point now where anything is anything that seems remotely positive is just cannot be believed as anything is positive. And this is a really significant moment that huge amounts of money that are starting to be appropriate to the scale of the disaster

are being talked about. And that's a big positive. And another really big positive that we've got to bear in mind here is that that has happened partly because of the success of an increasingly mature and well-organized ecosystem of influence and in around the left in the US. And that we have to look at that and just take a moment to appreciate how those things have set up and how they work. Before then, we'll talk about it in a second, I'm sure, we dwell on all the horrendous things that still are nowhere near being done. Of course. I mean, like, I think, well, so when we talk about things like the amounts of money sort of that are being dedicated to these things, it's worth remembering what money is, right? It's, it is money and

finance are essentially a way of planning the allocation of resources and labor of identifying what, what projects get worked on to the point where if you hand someone a five-pound note, you are sort of, you are allocating labor to the purchase of whatever it is that you're buying, for example. Socialist explaining what money is. Interesting. And yet you receive money on paper. That's right. But I have something for this though, which is that like, I, I feel as if the future that's being sketched out here, and this is the thing that I'm slightly more cautious about, is one in which we are more successful at addressing the, the oncoming climate disaster, right? But it's only going to be within the framework of the same people exercising power,

like you have more or less a royal court, you have a natural party of government, and you have sort of various different advisors that circulate around it. And okay, maybe we've been successful at advising Biden that like, it's actually very good for his ego to be thought of as being progressive on this. And that's very helpful. And so he'll do it. And that's good. But I don't know that there's a challenge to power there in and of itself. I think, yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. And I would say that there are three tests that need to be made explicit that all of the, the potential success of this gets hinged on. And I think that by the end of this year, particularly with this UN climate conference

that's being hosted here in the UK. Here in Glasgow. In Glasgow. We're going to stab the climate. Yeah, if you're going to fix the climate, I would start there because that fucking sucks. No. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody's been destroying the climate and no, can't leave it until we find out what can't did it. Climate change for answers, Begbie. That is going to be the desperate last attempt of the of the British government to try and get

a result of that conference. I'm sure of it. But within that context, you could get this situation where there's a lot of black slapping, you know, America's back baby, a lot of people sign up to net zero targets. And those the three tests that I think need to be pushed are around consumption, they're around power, and they're around equality. And on the first one on the consumption, you, this is where you have to appreciate here that this is not just about the climate. That's one important subset of an overall global environmental emergency. And the kind of a nightmare scenario here is that we, there is this massive global decarbonisation effort, and it does bring along say countries in

the global south. So they're not just going and, you know, it's sort of a green imperialism that's ripping out parts of the global south. Say all that works as well, we'd still be screwed because we depleted all the soils and we're killing off all the biodiversity and all that kind of stuff, right? And so you have to ask yourself the question, this is the first test around consumption. All the things that you're trying to do to sort out this environmental crisis or whatever you may call it mainstream political leader, is that actually going to keep us within the safe environmental limits that we know we've shot over on the climate system when nitrogen with biodiversity and that kind of stuff. And there was a huge question there as to whether we can

basically, this is what the mainstream strategy is talking about, swap all the dirty stuff for clean stuff quick enough at all. And while also continuing to demand that everyone on earth has to have the same kind of consumption style life that, you know, you get in the wealthiest, most consumptive parts of America. We have to have our treats. And I'm very worried about anything that might threaten my treats. That's right. I am actually quite worried about that. Are you telling me that just as I start earning actual money, we're going to be not allowed treats anymore? Yo, what the fuck? I mean, the thing that I think about in terms of the power aspect,

which is the one that really interests me, right, is because we're doing Midden's advent here and because Riley has put the idea of the medieval period into my head, is I think about peasant rebellions, right, where something becomes physically intolerable for people to the point that being, you know, tortured and crushed to death is preferable. And they, you know, they rebel against their legal and so on and are duly crushed in turn. But then, you know, however many months or years later, you get the announcement that it has pleased his majesty to do the thing, to alleviate whatever, and everyone celebrates this as a successful reform, right? And I do worry that this is kind of the path that the left has taken, is that we have

articulated this thing that's intolerable, we have not been crushed, and the future that awaits us is all of the same people like this Waban guy, just telling us, yeah, well, you know, we now recognize this problem and we have been pleased to grant you a solution to it. Yeah, and I think the amazing foresight in bringing that example up in the context of this podcast has suddenly hit me guys, amazing work. But yes, on that, the power one, yeah, I think that's right, that the, we've been dealt a sort of positive card here from the science community that things have become so overly quantified. And there are huge potential problems with this sort of quantification of climate, particularly the climate crisis, and you kind of see this

potentially in Bill Gates's book, where he's like, you know, there are two numbers that matter, there's, you know, the amount of carbon that's going into the atmosphere now, and then there's zero, which is where it needs to get to. But in some ways, that is useful, because the proof is going to be in the in the horrendous global cooker pudding that's going to happen in the next number of decades, where a lot of this app harvest crap, you know, is going to, it has to start to bend the dial on the, the metrics that we're increasingly getting to measure the scale of the environmental destruction and the, the complete lack of desire to face up to power in any form, particularly within the context of economics over the last many decades

and longer is, you know, with the showdown is happening in many respects now, right, because the inability to, for example, to ensure that a lot of the standards on financial institutions to make sure that then investing in, in ways that aren't environmentally destructive. Anyone who's, who's has read half of a textbook about anything knows that if those are not fully enforced, or that we actually change the structural finance system, then the likelihood that happening is going to be very, very low. And that will come out every year in the stats that we've got on the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere. The thing that, the thing that gives me anxiety, the other thing, I'm sorry, I'm just going through

a list here like this. Give me more, give me more. It's the treats. It's the fucking treats. I like my treats. Everyone likes our treats and our system has been tremendously successful at balancing it to the point where enough of us get enough treats, enough of the time that we don't feel like something sort of this, this cataclysmic showdown is happening at all. I suppose that's where the politics comes into it, right? And the fact that this, this is not something that is simply going to happen automatically as the contradictions heighten like that, because there are still politics coming along. I have to do actual fucking work instead of waiting for shit to happen. I already told, come on, contradictions

heighten. Yeah, heighten, come on. So that's where the politics comes into it. I think that's where the idea of a sort of, you might say, organized left, such as it is, needs to keep these ideas front and center, right? Otherwise, that's, otherwise we do risk. Sorry, did you just make reference to the concept of an organized left? Yes, buddy, if I got some bad news for you, such as it is. It's got a mole. It's got a mole. Look, we've, Starmer's got, Starmer runs a tight ship over here on the left. He's already infiltrated. I welcome the moles, but I also think we need to balance the views of the moles

with those farmers, many of whom are Labour supporters who are anti-mole. I mean, that's my serious, depressive, pessimistic question to Laurie, who is, by all accounts, an optimist is, have we blown it, like genuinely? Did we blow it with Bernie and with Corbyn and whoever else? No, I don't think so at all. I think that there was always, well, one of these futures that we've been bearing on about, one was always going to be a story. I hope it's not the one we're going about on this podcast. Oh, I don't want to live in that one.

Yeah, one of the less trashy ones was always going to be that, you know, you, there was going to be a, there needed to be a group of people who smashed through the kind of stortifying setup of politics and particularly conversations about political economy over the last 10 years. And it wasn't just going to be outside events that were necessarily going to lead that to happen. And the next stage of that project is for it to sort of, is to mature into, and I think this comes from a generational perspective, that there needs to be a process of the sort of maturation of that project so that a lot of the ground that was opened up to discuss certain economic ideas,

we have to appreciate that that's there right now. And to look beyond, and I mean this with all sort of respect to anyone who's thinking different to this, that we've got to look beyond the sort of the people in the personalities that have popped up for the last few years and the pain for some people of certain defeats and stuff and look at how the sort of frontiers of discussion around what could change in the economy has opened up more and more. Now, that's not to say that it's suddenly this dreamland in which it's, it's, you know, rich pickings for everyone, but there's far more possibility that's in the air and far more desire to talk differently about the economy. We have to recognize that that was a, that was a huge victor on a part of

people who slogged over the last few years. The question now is how that gets taken and run with it, and particularly from a younger generation. So if you're at the beginning of your 30s, for example, of which there are now increasingly a number of high profile campaigners or politicians or people, podcasters, podcasters, exactly, you know, just beautiful people, very good friends of mine, many of them, they're wonderful, you can hear them, you can see them, they're around, they're campaigning for many different things, beautiful things. We'll see more of them. And in 20 years time, they will be about at the beginning of 50s, which is the age right now, that the average age right now of a top level political leader in Europe. And we could be

at a two degree temperature rise by that point. And I don't want to think about the idea of me and my peers as top level. Alice, can it be any worse than the ones we have now? No, Alice, we're going to put you in charge of the Hebrides. Alice is going to be in charge of giving out the badges for all the people who've done well. Alice, stop hoarding all the badges. You have to give those out. No, they're not for you. You scratched that one yourself. You can have one. Look, I think this is what we say, right, that the politics does

sort of come into it more directly there. And I think like my own pet theory, to be honest, is that the US sort of fucked it slightly less, if only because they left in the US did not come as close to taking power, which means that like the Liberals in the US didn't need to pursue a scorched earth policy, where it basically had to disavow them as, you know, the worst possible thing that could happen to the country. I think that's why Biden has sought an addition to wanting his ego stroked and probably forgetting where he is and why he's doing it, has sought certain limited accommodations. Whereas in the UK, because there needed to be a scorched earth to prevent the left getting back into power, there has been no dialogue really. It's just

that the Tories have kind of realized that, and this is a stat from Bloomberg. This is a stat about the US, but I think there's something, there is an equivalency here. This is the US energy secretary, Jennifer Granum, saying that there is a $23 trillion global market for clean energy products, and that's just clean energy products. That's not any of these other segments that you addressed, Laurie, right? Where it is being noticed by the parties of capital, formerly the parties of neoliberalism, now the parties of capital patronage, whatever you want to call it, the model we're in now, have noticed that essentially, if you want to do MCM, if you are finance, if you are planning the economy for the sake of capital, this is a great way to do it.

There is quite a bit here, right? So I think the question isn't, is it going to happen? I think the question is, who's going to be in what rooms, what decisions are getting made, who is going to benefit from that $23 trillion market, how much of it is going to go to personal friends of Matt Hancock? I think these are the kinds of questions. The answer may surprise you. I think these are the questions that I think are relevant when you're thinking about the economy and the green transition, not whether, but how and for whom. Yeah, and I think you do have to think of it in terms of monarchism, both in the sense of the important thing to these people is not like how it gets done, it's that they're still in

charge of it. And also about the Ursula Le Guin quote about how the divine right of kings seemed unassailable 200 years ago. Indeed. The divine right of kings is the name of my other podcast, it's me and the Fetlas. Laurie, I want to ask you about the Lucas Plan, which you discussed in your book. So the Lucas Plan, for those who don't know, was this amazing moment where I think Aerospace, was it an Aerospace company? Yes. Was, I should know this, I would just flip through my own book and have a look. Leftist hasn't read his own book.

So this is Matt's particular favourite, right? And he wanted to get this in the book, and I completely agree with him with this, because it's this amazing example of a company that was going to be sold off, the workers were going to lose jobs in the context of the huge economic problems of the 1970s and international competitiveness and the workers came around and said, hang on a minute, we think we can come up with a plan here that could be an alternative direction to what then became the classic playbook for what happened to British industry subsequently, right? Carving it up and setting it up. This is Hontology.

And they came up with this plan called the Lucas Plan, because that was the name of the company, and to in extraordinary detail planned out, the type of socially useful products are going to make many of them related to the environmental crisis and as much as it was understood at the time, cleaner technologies. A process for how those things are going to be manufactured, very detailed business plans, training schedules for how they would make sure that all workers were brought along with this kind of transition. And it was just an amazing moment that we had in the context of the sort of massive changes of the 1970s that gave us a taste of what an alternative direction could have been. Now, of course, the plan was ignored and people were sort of pushed away,

somewhat fired, et cetera, surprise, surprise. And it's become something that in the context of the current moment, people have thought about more and more that actually, we know we've got over here huge problems with how companies are investing, what they're doing, how they're treating their workers. And we know that having more democratic involvement with economy could be something that's hugely beneficial for how the economy develops, but also for the particular people within the economy itself. We know that the corporation isn't just something that we're told the stories about and creating value just for shareholders, that all of these other stakeholders are involved, all this kind of stuff. And so people are interested in this plan again,

and they potentially offer us a different direction that we could take things like the corporation and the way we plan our economy. So if you think about, like I said, you think about money, not just as money, but as sort of potential labor, labor in the planning stages, right, where you allocate this, there is that 23 trillion of addressable market, meaning 23 trillion of sort of work that could conceivably need to be done and planned and valued. The question is, is it going to be done and planned and valued by Wubbin? Or is it going to be sort of done and planned, executed, owned, and so on in this other way, right? And the point of political transformation is to understand a North Star. And that's one

of the reasons I think that this is a rare book about the dam environment that is not a Black Hill, because it's rather talking about what I think is a necessary component of any kind of left program, which is considering not just what we're working against, but what we're working towards in the context of climate breakdown. Yeah. And that's what we were trying to do. And in doing that, we were trying to draw on so much of the amazing work that has happened for a long time, things like the Lucas plan, if you go back further, but also all of the strands that we're starting to see now erupting out and attracting and even starting to divert mainstream attention. And let's go back, let's go back a little bit to when we were talking about the

politics and the contrast between the US and the UK. I think that the, because this goes to the heart of some of the things that we're trying to grapple with the book. The Green New Deal in the context of the US, I think provides extraordinary opportunity. It's been an amazing example of both breaking in a way that no listener of this podcast in any way will be surprised at the idea of starting to use politics to talk about changing systems. But it's also, this is key and under appreciated, I think by a younger generation, it's tried to talk about the environmental crisis in a way that isn't this sort of abstract preserve, doom laden preserve of sort of metropolitan elites. It actually can be connected to the lived experience of people who have been

disenfranchised by a lot of what's happened under neoliberalism. And I think this is one of the reasons why you're seeing the situation in the US in the context of Binance administration, partly, because things are so bad and so obviously bad. And it's, and there are so many ways that you can connect those things together to get people to understand how interconnected they are, that actually you'll be able to provide a really compelling, even more compelling left to gender. And one of my concerns here in the UK is that we haven't yet totally got that translation of the sort of amazing potential of something like a Green New Deal to then speak to all of the different ways people have been disenfranchised under neoliberalism. Now, I think that's, I think

that the components of that are there, but telling it on a scale and with a reach that it really becomes an attractive prospect, at least enough to create a power base to sort of shunt along the mainstream progressive party, you know, that's the kind of thing that we've got to grapple with. Obviously, in the context of then, the sort of governing centre right party not openly denying the science, you know, actually cozying up to it as a matter. So it's as that this is from, from Lori to the left, get your act together. So I think that's, that's a good place to sit. We need five years.

And to not piss off anyone who watches or is on question time. That's right. So best behaviour, no more sliver balls. I've just got a question about the people coming over here putting the ads everywhere. I just wondered what the panel thought about the ads. I just said, we got rid of the mulls, now we've got all these ads everywhere. So we wonder what's going on with them. We've been going a little bit long, but I found this article and I couldn't not read it. So we're going to read a little bit of it. Okay. It's from Project Syndicate, which is like a, it's basically writing op-eds to place in papers.

And the article is called a Requiem for the Stiff Upper Lip by Raj Prasad and Adrian Furnham. Yes. Yes. Perfect. Right. It's late, but I had to put it in. With the passing of Prince Philip on April 9th, they write, the United Kingdom may have lost its last exponent of the Stoic attitude that has defined so much of its modern history. No, it hasn't. Hasn't, you made that up. That's just a store. That's just, that's just ideology and you're just writing about ideology.

Nonetheless, other cultures have picked up the baton and modern society will always have need for those who excel at keeping calm and carrying on. I really hate how that's become a thing. It's so like, oh. So no, that's the, that's the, that's the header. Here's the, here's where we get into the details of it. If Philip's passing means we are, we will also be burying the iconic image of the British Stiff Upper Lip. Should we mourn that loss as well? What the fuck does that even mean? Why would, why would one guy who was 99 years old,

why would him dying mean that the concept of the Stiff Upper Lip, which did not exist anyway? Why would that mean that that is, this is like literally like, I have an article the premise unfortunately doesn't make any fucking sense, but I don't care. I'm soldering on. Let me just briefly interrupt you to point out that Raj Prasad, the, one of the two writers of this is a psychiatrist who was suspended for three months of plagiarism and is also the author of a book called The Mental Vaccine for COVID-19. The mental vaccine. There was a time when this characteristically,

characteristically British display of stoic resolve was widely admired. When the UK was the world's leading power, it seemed to owe its position to its mustn't grumble approach to life. Oh, sorry. So it turns out most of the guns. Yeah. It's, it turns out, yeah, this is like Jared Diamond with a head injury. And of course this attitude was on full display when you almost say with me now, Britain resisted a Nazi onslaught that had already swept over its European neighbors. But we fucking love grumbling. We always have loved grumbling. We spent most of the war grumbling.

That's right. So I mean, yeah, because what were you going to do? Like just tell the fucking like dive bomber being like, oh, did you assume my bombing pattern or whatever? And then off it would go. It's like, yeah, I'm going to spend the next 60 years telling everyone I ever meet about this in order to like tell them why there's only two genders. So anyway, here is, there is my favorite paragraph though, or my, my next two paragraphs are my favorite. In March 1912, the explorer, Captain Lawrence Oates joined a British Antarctic expedition

seeking to be the first to the South Pole. The mission failed and Oates begged his companions to leave him and save themselves. When they refused, he casually said, I'm just going outside and maybe some time. He never returned to the, no, no, no, no, no, that's, that's what they said. He said, and that's what the press printed for all we fucking know what he said was, I'm going to fucking kill myself. You don't know. They don't know. He never returned. What do you think of my impression of Michael York?

He said his last words, the Shahada, he never, he never returned to the group's tent, but his last words lived on stiffening upper lips throughout the realm. Yeah, that's what was being stiffened. All right, so stiff. Getting your upper lip stiffened by a twink. Getting your upper lip stiff.com. And then, okay, setting up that Prince Philip is like Captain Lawrence Oates because like, you know, he'll go to, you know, he'll go to like, I don't know, like, like a school to open

its new gym and then just call the students a slur that hasn't been used since the 17th century. He's a lot like Captain Lawrence Oates in that they're both fucking dead, but apart from that. Tell me how many whops there are in here. Here's the great, here's the great paragraph. It is impossible to imagine Oates' generation venting about anything with Oprah Winfrey. Yeah, because she wasn't alive. And even if she had been alive, they certainly wouldn't have let a black woman have a fucking TV show because TV didn't exist also.

It wouldn't have let a white woman have one. That whole generation, like Lawrence Oates was born in 1880. That entire generation loved spiritualists, mediums doing cocaine with your therapist, like all of these guys fucking love talking about their feelings. What did they think that Gothic literature was? Like it was, it was these like, it was basically just anxiety written down. But I love this, but Prince Philip's grandson, Prince Harry, recently did precisely that. So has the UK lost its claim to being the strong silent type?

God to hear brain article. I love this article. It's one of my favorites. Anyway, then there's some like a fucking phrenology bullshit where it's like a stupid made up Myers-Briggs nonsense about Philip being a repressor of his own emotions or whatever. You know, you're on. But the article ends. In the past, physical endurance, determination, and fortitude were the defining characteristics

of those who succeeded in staking a claim on the world. Yeah, it sure was, buddy. But today, success comes to those who can schmooze or promote their brand or schmooze a venture capitalist. Traditional masculine values are no longer revered and often outright scored. Being likable, something to which Philip certainly never aspired, again, due to the sort of constant stream of racism and sort of class and class contempt that was coming out of his mouth, has become the sine qua non on career success.

By contrast, oh, it's before his untimely death was known to be argumentative with the leader of the expedition, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, which would have been career suicide today. Cool. Thank you guys. Dude's never argued with that boss. Yeah, no, never. The Serves never did.

Great, great, great, great, great, great. Yeah, great, great column, buddy. I loved reading. I hope you loved writing it as much as I loved reading it, because I thought it was fantastic. Just a little bit of just sort of total just dumb bullshit to round out the episode. It's amazing how people get paid. Well, I mean, I'm pretty sure, right, that there's just a cultural war AI,

and it's a pretty low quality one that's just sitting there pumping things out, and these kind of, because we've got this was the Sarah Vine article this week in the mail, right, was about how Philip epitomized masculinity and how that has, you know, gone down the toilet as well. And we've got to stop, we've got to start ignoring the cultural war's AI stuff that it's kicking out all the time and just be talking about the economy, and particularly in the context of things like the environmental crisis as well. Absolutely. Economy only.

No, no cultural war bullshit. That is some CIA shit. We're talking about the economy. That's what he really said when he left that tent that day. Yeah, that's right. Sorry, coming in with the heat towards the end. What he actually said was, I'm going to become the Joker.

Yeah, that's right. All right. He did. That's why you never saw him again, because he became the Joker. Yeah, noticing it's gone long and the stream is going to start shortly. I want to say, Laurie, where can people find your fine book? They can, they can, they can find it anywhere.

They shouldn't, they shouldn't find it on Amazon. They should go to Verso books, which they can, they can Google, they can go on versus Twitter or to buy any wonderful independent bookshop, which I'm sure they'll be able to find outside their door. Indeed. And also, I want to say as well to Laurie, thank you very much for coming on and for sending me your book, which I enjoyed reading. My pleasure, guys.

It's always good to be talking to you. Indeed. We will see you at Dave Courtney's jacuzzi party. In Dave Courtney's jacuzzi. That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah.

And don't forget, we have a Patreon. It is five bucks a month for a second episode per week. This week, we read Vince Cable's taught sexy thriller to Nishkumar again. Oh boy, did I get mad about that book. It was a really bad book. It's a really, I got mad at the Nish. It was a bad book. Yeah, it was a bad book.

So if you want to hear us continue our bizarre tradition of reading the terrible books that MP's write to one of the country's more prominent comedians for some reason, then do tune in for that. But otherwise, like I said, Laurie, thank you so much to you listeners, planned on fire and manifesto for the age environmental breakdown. And we'll see you on the bonus episode in a couple of days. Bye.