TRASHFUTURE - Honk If You’re Honu feat. Dr Gareth Fearn

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

This week’s episode is the first free one of 2024 and was recorded before the new year; it features Riley, Milo, and Alice discussing the UK government’s attempts to make schools officially practice cruelty to trans kids as a matter of policy. Also discussed: an AI startup that wants to automate the entirety of business from start to finish, and a separate segment where Riley and Dr Gareth Fearn discuss the state of planning and development the UK. Why is it so labyrinthine and difficult, and why does it serve the default UK line of ‘better things aren’t possible?’ All this and more, in this episode.   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   *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *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)

Hello everyone and welcome to this the first free episode of 2024 one you made it through another year. Yeah, you've watched the Hutonani and now you're here. Jules Holland is in the guest chair. Hello, Jules. Is it okay if I play a honky-tonk version of here we go by Jinseng and we all put our head in our hands and we go that yes that's fine. We've got a fantastic trash-shoot you're here tonight. We've got C6 Steve over in the corner. We've got Jamie Cullen. There's a whole like ecosystem of guys, like all living under one rock.

He only see it in New Year. He only ever seen a Hutonani related context. What does C6 Steve do the rest of the fucking year? I don't know. I don't know. What does Jules Holland do the rest of the year? Make noise complaints about his neighbors, which is ironic. Ironic.

Yeah, that's right. So congratulations to 2023 survivors. Yeah, we're not among them yet. We are recorded. We could all die before 2023 is out. And this could be our final message, which is potentially a really compelling idea. Do you want to do like the avan's latent of things, pardon?

Mass suicide, oh, probably. I don't want to do that one.ans latent of things, pop. Mass. Suicide. Oh, probably. Yeah. I don't want to do that one. Riley Poisoning the fine recult that he's passing around the table. What I do want to do, however, is say that this is going to be the first half of the episode. We're going to be talking about a few, just a few of the things

that have come into the Christmas period for domestic, sort of UK politics, news, do a startup, and then I'm gonna hand over to myself, and I will be talking to Dr. Gareth Furn about planning because every party, every political party, right? They say the thing that we're gonna do in order to fix Britain is we're gonna finally fix planning,

and that's gonna make all the investment happen. And we're what we're going to talk about with Garrett and I've already had this conversation. So I do know that this does occur is establish, okay, well, what would actually what kind of a plan of like a change to the way we plan towns and stuff. What would actually be enough to solve the problem that we've got. And I'll give you a hint, it's not, quote, unquote, streamlining this process. It's turning into an actual public service. So we're going to talk about what that looks like. I'm interested. I want to talk a little bit about a hearty further congratulations to Rishi Soonak for single-handedly a hearty further congratulations to Rishi Sunak for single-handedly making global fuel prices smaller and therefore ensuring that his promised to voters to have inflation by sitting around and just waiting for it to do so itself, we'll have more. He's been pumping oil out of his back garden. That's what people won't tell you about Rishi Sun.

He's been doing his best to fuck OPEC. Some backyard fracking. I mean, this is all like highly contingent on the Houthis and the Baban Mandap. So maybe fuel prices just go up a bunch, but yeah, for now, it seems that Rishi has like at time recording been turning the big inflation dial down. Yeah, that's right. But you're working with the Houthis. dial down. Yeah, that's right. But it is certainly quite interesting to see. And we'll sort of talk about this more in the coming weeks for sure. Just how much the global economy has been able to be disrupted by people who have been, let's say, on the receiving end of quite

a bit of Anglo-American technology, flown and dropped by guys whose combat uniform includes a white Fendi belt. Yeah, there's a few like pinch points on this international system of like trade and navigation we've built up, and this is a big one of them, you know? Yeah. Anyway, but I also, I think, one of the other things to consider is like, what we haven't actually learned, we haven't learned much about the global economy,

or at least the UK's economy, other than that, a very small number of companies are able to just capitalize on supply shocks to fuck everyone else. Basically, the way that our economy is set up, especially with our energy companies, is designed to look at supply shocks in the rest of the world and make sure we feel them 10 times as much as we otherwise could. Yeah, can we cut in a bit of Michael Gamble and Leia Kekstein? The art of good business is being a good middleman. Ta-da. So, I think this is what we have learned. Of course, it wasn't.

There's no evidence at all. Now that the inflation is now falling, we can look back on it. Zero evidence at all that any sort of more generous social security spending during COVID had anything to do with it at all, right? This was just fuel prices got more expensive and then nine guys were able to turn generational wealth into bunker wealth because of that. Five guys plus four more guys. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the burger chain got really rich and also four other guys.

Burger chain got so rich they added four guys. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They created jobs at five guys. We're not dead naming nine guys here. Well, speaking though, speaking of that though, I do also want to talk about one of the things that we've seen in the distance coming down the kind of legislative pipe we've talked about it on a few episodes, which is the new guidance that forces schools to be weird about gender with children has now been welcomed to the transgender half hour with Alice Gordor, Kelly and friends. Yeah, so this is kind of the like some total of the like effects of having ruthlessly but

incompetently politicized the HRC and a bunch of equality stuff is that now, uh, Kimmy Badenock has has sort of like announced a bunch of guidance of schools, which as you say, tries to sort of, uh, make life more miserable for trans kids in schools. But I think the main takeaway from this is obviously this is very, very bad. It's going to emiserate a lot of people. But it strikes me that we're dealing with the same thing as the Rwanda deal, where you're pushing up against the limits of this envelope of like what parliamentary democracy, as currently constituted, you can make happen within it, right?

And you're trying to deliver the impossible, right? The thing that they actually want to do instead of the admittedly shesy compromise that this is is, you know, I think it was Janice who said, like morally mandate transgender as amount of existence, right? And much like just putting people on planes to Rwanda, you can't really do that legally within this framework that we've constructed. And I think part of the point of doing this is so that you can like push further and further and further up against it. So that once you're in opposition as a conservative party, you can then say from the right, well, this whole envelope, this whole framework of liberal democracy or liberalism in the broadest sense, this is all fucked and it has

to go so that we can emisorate these people properly. And the thing is that's very compelling to people because the like, the strictures of that envelope, of that kind of liberalism do make everybody miserable, just not in that way. And we want to turn the insipient fascism into much more full-bore. Exactly, exactly. And I mean, the pressing question,

I said to any kind of like trans rights movement or anything like that is whether this is the time to, I don't really take a position on this, make like urgent, common cause with the liberalism because the liberalism has a lot of establishment power and people are very fond of it. And you have these kind of like weird soft tories who met like one nice trans person once and I like, well, I don't see why we should be doing the exterminate the brute stuff on them. Or whether you should be doing the more radical route, which is

this whole system of liberalism is fucked from the left. And that's more emancipatory. But in the meantime, I think it's, this is best understood as a drive towards a like an insurgent sort of like anti-democratic way of doing this. I think we can look at this as well in the, and we'll clarify what this is, what the guy, it's mandates, and it's not a law, it's guidance, and it's guidance that actually breaks a lot of laws, which is great. So again, the envelope, it pushes up against the existing constraints of the system that we've built. But before we get to the... Stop in a big envelope.

Before we need to get out of the envelope. Before we get to the actual description of the guidance, it's pretty much what you'd expect, right? No social duty to facilitate, no duty to facilitate social transitioning. So just like wearing a different school uniform being called the different name and so on. A kind of duty to inform parents as well as their children are like, LDPT. That's a lot. That the soul's safe and graceful of this is that none of this is statutory.

And schools, school leaders are cowards on this largely. But if you want to, you can ignore this. And I think some schools will, which ought to be good. But also, right, we think about, if we thought about like the roots of sort of specifically of English transphobia and how it kicked into overdrive in 2015, and what the function of all those columns was really, whether or not the people writing them knew that, was to get people emotional enough, to angry enough about this,

and to feel a sense of fear about this enough, that when it comes time to say, well, we need to repeal the human rights act so that the children will be protected from the roots, even though in many cases the roots are the children. Because human rights act has quite good branding, that's the problem. And we need to do that, right? They have spent the last eight years gathering that base of support.

Absolutely. And not just on this, like also on migration, also on like prison stuff, any number of things. And I think the push to like really do away with these things of like of liberalism of like getting us out of the ECHR and like repealing the Human Rights Act, that's the sort of much darker even than this path. And I feel terrible for the children, most of all, because like, if you're a school child in this country, you already go to something called the like business school's grind set academy, right?

Where they make you wear some kind of insane uniform and you know, in force. When you go to the hustlers academy, where the headmaster is you know, when you go to the hustlers academy where the headmaster is on your tape. You go to the hustlers academy and they enforce like Victorian rules of silence on you. You can't piss at any point during the day because it will disrupt your learning. But even if you could piss, you'd have to go into a specific bathroom. Yeah, we've made all of that a bunch more humiliating. At the end of that, you get out of it.

University is incredibly expensive. There are no jobs. And then on top of all of that, we're going to get your ass with the climate. I mean, it's. Well, I know, say the school might collapse on you and kill you, of course. Yeah, exactly.

So absolutely, absolutely miserable existence, even if you're not trans. School's not transphobic. It collapsed and killed all the children equally. But the other, the other thing of course, the like, the soul trans student escapes by being sent to the like special trans poor to lose outside while the entire school collapses. The other thing I want to note just going coming back to the guidance itself is how fucking weird it is.

Yeah, yeah, It is weird. One of the, one of the things it mandates is that if a student has a preferred pronoun, you can't, you're not being forced to use it, but also it would be bullying to use the wrong one so you should just always refer to them by name. It's weird. It's so fucking odd. Yeah, I mean, the part of it, part of the weirdness of this is, as you say, the compromise of not doing it.

Abolishing of pronouns in general. Yeah. Like not being able to do the stuff that you really want to do. I think part of it is also that the government here has been radicalized by some very, very strange people who have like imported wholesale, these like strange concepts of like, you know of their idea of what biological sex is,

for instance. So you have this guidance that is full of the phrase biological sex and reference to stuff that doesn't matter, would never come up, would never occur to anyone other than people who are already obsessed with it. I've always long thought this about all of this weird transphobia stuff. that, you know? Yeah. Well, I've always long thought this about all of this weird transphobia stuff. Is that the best argument against it is just how weird it is. It's just how straightforwardly just odd it is

to care that much about what someone else is doing with their genitals, how just like obviously perverse it is on the face of it. Like you can make any number of moral arguments or whatever, but I feel like the one that cuts through the most just seems to be just like, these people are freaks. They're so obviously freaks. Like, do we need to go any further than that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm sort of of two minds about this, because I know we've said before that the key to political success on this one is to be normal.

I don't think normal has to be strict normal. I don't mean that in a assimilationist way. I just mean that however weird and fucking queer and diverse in your presentation of it you want to get, it will always be more normal than anyone who is like, yeah, no, we need to be doing genital checks in primary school bathrooms. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So this is what my four-stater said, welcoming the guidance. She said, the most important takeaway is that the normalization of so-called social transition lying about children's sex is indefensible within a school environment, to which I just have to say, well, wait, why? Why? called social transition, lying about children's sex, is indefensible within a school environment, to which I just have to say, well, wait, why? Why? Why do you need to know that? Yeah, again, this is a woman who is like famous for being fired, which is an incredible

career sort of parlay there. And I just, why do they need to like justify themselves to you, mind your own business? Well, in the other note on this as well, right? We said this is a compromise position, because this is mostly, as I understand it, Jillian Keegan, the education secretary rather than Kemi Badenock. And now, because Kemi Badenock, it's interesting to see, like, Kemi Badenock is now being shown by the right of the party as like, oh, this is a big loss for her. Right, because she had to do the impossible, which is legislate the,

legislate like sort of 33% of the Tory, the sort of this specific kind of Tory dream, right, of everyone of Boys Wear Blue, Girls Wear Pink, everybody, there are no immigrants ever, and Trussonomics is back, right? Yeah, being a Tory minister is miserable because you just get sacrificed on the altar of some like impossible goal, whether that's, that you have to do like considerable shitty things to try and achieve

and then it doesn't work, like whether that's pretty batel or Suella Bravenman on like stopping the boats or migrants, or whether it's Camille Badenock on this, even the Dean Doris on the online safety bill, something else was involved. It was in the Dories though. Yeah, this is the thing, right? Because we did the live show and we read her book. And the only interesting thing in the Dean Doris' book is in the course of all this like sour grapes, of office gossip bullshit. She goes, oh yeah, by the way, Kemi Badenock is being groomed

by like a cabal of hard right Tory, like dark arts operators to run as like future leader based almost exclusively on like a transphobic culture war. And she writes that down and she's like, yeah, oh, and by the way, fucking MPs having sex on pool tables or whatever. So the fact that it doesn't interest in the Dendoras and she just mentions it in passing,

to me speaks much more highly of it sort of like, veracity, you know? Well, yeah, because I mean, we've talked before about how the stuff is kind of alienating to a lot of the electorate because it is, it is at the end of the day, free-ship. But it's also like, as much as like, it's not unusual for the Tory party to pick up on any culture war issue in order to like use it to push things further to the right.

It is quite alien to a lot of the Tory party who are just they're just right wing in a very different way like this isn't if the average Tory MP this isn't really what you got into being a Tory four. Like we kind of were alluding to it earlier, like a lot of Tories are like weirdly liberal about a lot of things because they're kind of like, yeah, big age, just don't pay tax. Like that is kind of like a strong Tory bent, like yeah. Yeah. Why love to be at the no tax orgy? Well, that's the marks where, right, is at the end of the day, the English Tories only enthusiastic about ground rents. Yeah. Like it has a bit of a,

like, and all of the most vocal terms are kind of like more like, like, liberals in the kind of, in the more American sense of being like, kind of second wave feminists who've like gone insane. And so, and that's like a really weird marriage, because most of those people aren't tourists. They're kind of more like bluerite labor people in the vegs. So it's a very weird, it feels very sort of American. Yeah, and there's some other stuff going on here too, with them. So Scotland has like now dropped the Scottish government and now dropped its appeal on its gender recognition bill. And because I have this like heterodox opinion that this is good because the gender recognition bill

is a waste of time, it was never gonna pass anyway. But the point of doing it was also to like push that sort of constitutional envelope in a kind of like orthogonal liberal direction of Scotland should be an independent country. Right. And you know, now that's sort of been abandoned. And yeah, I find the political division on that quite unusual. You have these S&P left-ish liberals and then who would determine a push this thing forward, having had this like really long bullshit parliamentary

like, like, passage with it. And then, and then you have like Scottish Labour, dismal as they are, going, no, this is not only will we not do it because we're like always pandering to Transphobia, but we specifically won't do it because we love the envelope. And this envelope has like Scotland and like the rest of the UK in together and we're not, we're not sort of tampering with that. We need to keep Julie Bertiel in that envelope. Exactly. Can't she cannot be released?

Exactly. Yeah. So it's, this is the thing. I, I, I sort of, one of the things about that bill that I sort of was against was I resented being made into a constitutional issue like that. And, and now it seems that I'm, I'm destined to be a constitutional issue like that. And now it seems that I'm destined to be a constitutional issue either way. And I think when the Tories are in opposition, as seems likely, and they're sort of like trying to do the, we should burn this whole system down because it doesn't work and makes every miserable from the right, that's going to be a lot more dangerous for me than whatever like legislation they're doing, especially when they have a labor government as malleable as K.A. Starmas is going to be. Yeah, because they are going to any outrageous claim they make.

I'm sort of putting my marker down on this. Any outrageous claim they make about a group labor considers to be unimportant, which is a very high number of people, whether that's ethnic minorities, LGBT people, the left in general, whatever you want. Anyone who isn't a core toilet vote a color toilet, almost everyone is that Starmer's instinct every single time is to say, well, actually,

I think you'll find that we are going to crack down harder. And he's going to try to outflank them for the right every single time. People have accused my government of being malleable. Well, Mr. Speaker, I Mr Speaker, if the Prime Minister thinks I'm made of such a fine clay, then I will repost to him by breaking myself in a kiln. This will be broadcast live on TV.

I will become so firm, I will become brittle, and I will have Rachel Reeves apply a fine bone china glaze to me so that I cannot be bent or moved in any way without shatter it. I think we can get Rochemitz to do this. No, but I think the thing is too, this speaks to the general arc of British Transphobia, where it's more dismal, right? The American culture war stuff, they've tried the Tory right have had these like daliences

with mass mobilization and like TERFs are always trying to like, radicalize each other to like, you know, grab people of suspicious genders and bathrooms and stuff. But it doesn't really translate the British mindset as much. I don't think. And part of the reason why is that like,

in the US, right, because you have this kind of like, interventionalist already radicalized, heavily armed in places, kind of like, movement ready to go. As a trans woman, I would worry about getting murdered, getting murdered, murdered. Whereas in Britain, I mostly worry about getting socially murdered. We have had an actual trans murder, right,

with the sort of like, consequent, horrible press around it. And that's thrown all of these people into kind of disarray. They don't know exactly how to feel about this, kind of like, maybe Matthew Shepherd moment that's happening. But meanwhile, they're all quite content for the government to sort of like look at, you know, a teenager who is who wants to transition and sort of hand them the service revolve with one bullet in a glass of whiskey, you know, and be like, well, just just do for yourself.

You know, we're not going to do it. We're not going to deputize anyone else to do it. Yeah, because we're repulsed by that to a point, like at least now, at least at the moment, we don't want to hear about inter-personal rather than state violence against trans people. One of the other things I think is sort of that I've noticed about sort of driving British transphobia specifically is how much of it involves deference and sort of people giving improper deference. Like, for example, a lot of people are like, well, I didn't have an opinion. I saw how poorly J.K.

rolling was treated. You know, or, oh, well, students should be obeying, you know, their schools. And, and you're able to, you're able to make this a kind of, you're able to make this an, you're able to shoehorn gender into lots of other Issues around hierarchy in the ways that they're commonly understood by people, right? You're able to say, well people are being it's I don't have any problem with it They're just so disrespectful or I don't have any problem with it Just children need to fall in line because how much of the how much that I think one of the most dangerous bits of

because how much of the, I think one of the most dangerous bits of the school's guidance is all about informing parents because it comes back to, well, parents should be in control of their children. And so I think that here, one of the things is there's less of a sense except among like the big vocal mouthpieces of this whole movement that there's like, there needs to be in some kind of like, you know, immediate political mobilization, and more of just a sense of tutting that people are not respecting their sort of social betters or people who they should be deferring to in the higher. Yeah, and as with the left more generally,

the only tool that they have for that is we need to make your life sort of like in the round more miserable, you know? That's why that's why it's in schools because there because in British society there are there are not a lot there are a lot of institutions that can compel you in very specific ways, but some of the only institutions that can compel you to like dress differently other than jail are schools. Yeah, absolutely. And so that's where the tool is to force people to be differential in the way that they want. And that's why I think it has this kind of resonance,

but the resonance is so prickly and resentful and not mass mobilized. Also, because as with the migration stuff, it's futile. There is a demographic thing happening. The government is powerless to stand a thought. It's like migration will increase. Trans people will continue to exist. And you can try and sort of like force those things not to happen.

But you're kind of like you're, you know, it's like forcing back the tide, you know? It is, it is, it is, the English governments have a long and proud history of instructing their soldiers to try and fight the sea. Well, yeah, I mean, I think you're right. You're completely right. Basically, if you want to make anything into a big social issue in Britain, you have to fundamentally make it about whether it's cricket or not. That has to be there. It has to play into that sense of social hierarchy, whatever. Because if you go to a bunch of, Britain is not a kind of pure, written, founded country in the way that America is where people are scandalized

by stuff in the same way. Like, you can't shock a bunch of Tory, back Ben Genpese by going, bad god, there's a bunch of boys in this school, dressed up as women, like that's just a rugby team at social. Like, you know what I mean? Like, that's not shocking to people. You have to like create this sense of it,

like undermining the fabric of society somehow. Yeah, absolutely. So we move on to a start-up or shall we talk about the new Tories losers, a palette cleanser. Yeah. Let's kick off the year with a start-up. We know the Tories losers caucus. It's like they're trying to create a sixth family that's socially liberal and as a constituency of exactly

zero. The socially liberal Tories are such sweet hearts. I can't wait for them all to like defect, like defect off to the Lib Dems or something on the past fractures. Immediately. You exactly listen, I, you know my feelings about Penny Morden, right? And I, I hope that she remains politically harmless for many years to come. You know, the, um, it is very funny though, seeing like after the experience of the last several

elections, seeing Simon fell, the MP for Barrow and Furnace, saying elections are one in the center ground, and after a divisive few years, the people have written are craving a calmer, more pragmatic politics. It's like, no, they're not. They want fun. They want the fun. And it's like, we're going to do no fun. We're going to be the end.

They're desperate for the fun to come back. If Corbin had had jokes, and he kind of does have jokes, but if Corbin had been like more of a Boris figure who was a laugh, I think we would be living in a kind of socialist utopia at this point. Yeah, I honestly, that is my most crying opinion that if Jeremy Corbin had had more of a like Bernie Sanders energy, if he'd have just refused to answer the stupid

questions and called people fucking creds live on air I don't know I think I could have gone differently should have listened to us should have listened to us about bringing the non-s detector into the comments it's going beat beat beat beat beat I'm sorry my my honorable friend is being beat tapped by the non-sutector. I don't, I can't retract it. It's the non-sutector. I'd like to advance that my honorable friend has dropped his pocket. All right, let's talk about Honeu and then I'll hand off to myself in the future past. They can call you HONU. Yes. Yeah, it's HONU and they're calling me HONU.

That's right. What do we think? Come on, hit me. HONU, HONU sounds like the name of an individual robot to me. Yeah. Like a Sony iBone. It sounds like something his name would talk to me about and I wouldn't be completely listening.

But Boston HONU. Boston HONU Boston Hone. It's actually a new paradigm that will underpin an AI first economy that's also entirely new. Oh, fuck, if it's a new paradigm, I feel bad for making fun of it now because the thing about me is in my daily life

I can't get enough paradigms. Yeah, a big paradigm head. I think sometimes if someone's too into paradigms it can be a set, it like show that they're kind of a bit right wing. Okay. A lot of paradigm heads are right wing, but I don't accept that that's determinative. So, no, it is the next generation of business, they say, we built on AI and inspired by human passions. We sit at the forefront of what is possible. Sorry, inspired by human passions. We sit at the forefront of what is possible. Sorry, it's inspired by human passions.

Yes, inspired by human passions. I love to begin to find. You know, human feelings. It does really like it was been by me. I've been inspired by human passions. That's where I'm all are. But I think there's a more important issue here, which is that there is a paradigm,

shall we share shifting. The vibe shift, this is the vibe shift, though. Well, this is they're trying to do another one, which is their pioneering a new paradigm that lays the next generation rails for autonomous agents and transforms the entire economic ecosystem. If Corbin had like got up at the dispatch box and said, like, Mr. Speaker, vibes of facts, the vibes have shifted again, socialists utopia. And transforms the entire economic ecosystem into a smart connective tissue.

But we will forever transform how all businesses work with Honeo Autonomous agents working in symbiosis with humans at the right time and place. It's like the universe conspiring to make your business the best it can be. Like, again, there's something about the way this is written and I can't quite put my finger on between human passions and the universe conspiring to make your business better. It's just kind of like someone has read a lot of VNM banks

before sitting down to write this. I think the universe conspiring to make your business the best it can be is kind of one of those, an extension of a kind of multi billion year wigazin that a lot of AI people have, which is that the moral arc of history may be a billion years long, but it tends towards justice. Well, it tends towards making your business. It tends to, well, it tends towards technological singularity. So it's like they say their argument basically is that,

well, if there was enough hydrogen in the universe that it eventually collapsed into other elements and eventually out of that arose life and eventually out of life arose sentient life and sentient life inevitably created AI, which means that God is real. He just haven't invented him yet. And he's there to make your dropshipping business way better

and more automated. Yeah. I'm thinking about the climate again, sorry. Yeah, there is no God but alarm, shoppify us as profit. So the, this is called the OS for an AI first economy. The idea is that in order to make a business, you need people. What if-

For now, Mr. Chopper? Exactly. What if you can make an entire business that's just AI agents, mostly working with one another and other people's AI agents? Oh, so it's like an ant farm of bullshit and you just look into it and be like, oh, that's just probably making money. Ant farm of bullshit. Are they the ones that did the cover of Smith Criminal?

So, CEO Imad Riatchi says the idea for Hochu was inspired by watching his father build a small business while he was growing up. He said he saw his father make many preventable mistakes and eventually realized, this kid just like watching his dad start a business selling like printer, tone or some shit like that. And he's like, yo, this guy's a dumbass. Why hasn't he built an amp farm? Yeah.

His spreadsheets are all over the shop. This is his ROI ratios are fucked. Imagine, imagine like inspire, imagine being this kid's dad. And then you see he's like giving interviews. And he's like, yeah, my dad was such a fucking dipshit at running a business that I thought that like predictive text could do it better. This is in an interview with Pre-Seed now. There's very little information about this business other where otherwise. I just thought it was interesting because the drive, right, is

it's the same drive that happened with like, you know, the steam loom, right, which is to create more things more quickly, automate more, and the more things are automated, then the more value the people who own the automators take. So the play here is to automate everything and then claim the value from all businesses, or at least all back office functions. Something, something about the tendency of the ray of profit is something. Yeah. Riyatchee says he sees a future where highly autonomous businesses are built on top of the infrastructure. But remember, like we never talk about economic planning, right?

It's just that you can never talk about a planned economy, even though we do live in a planned economy, it's just the planning is slightly decentralized. The envelope again, you know? The back of the envelope, like calculations, you know? Please stop writing on the back of the envelope, like calculations. You know, please stop writing on the back of the envelope. It hurts. And so what you're basically saying is, look, we want to, and this is something we've even saw in the Henry Kissinger article, the goal here is I want to build an infrastructure

that seeds a huge amount of economic planning to an AI. Yeah, you'd like stake as much of this, teras territory out as you can ahead of time, as you say. Building a high level autonomy into businesses is really going to pave the way towards the democratization of business creation and entrepreneurship across the world. But does what? Well, basically what's stopping someone who, like, let's know a subsistence farmer, for example,

in West Africa, what's stopping them from also living like the head of HSBC is that it's too difficult to recruit a human resources department. But if that person is able to create a business just of AI agents, then what's gonna happen is all of the people who are, that the world will become a perfect meritocracy

where everyone is ranked by their ideas because all execution just Happens via autonomous agents and so long as you're good at spinning them up and instructing them and you have a good idea Then we will actually live in a kind of Libertary in utopia of constant contracting alone subsistence farmer who employs an HR person so that he can play it, complain about the hours his boss is making it, my work, but his boss is also him. Yeah, I do all of my banking with Kenyan subsistence farmer. That's a good standard. I feel this is very important because I'm an entrepreneur,

but I feel like creating and running your own business is a form of expression, and I'd like to give many people that voice is possible. It's vibes, it's all vibes. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone should have the chance to be a kind of like bullshit entrepreneur. And this is the thing, right? The way that these guys live as, as like startup people in like the Bay Area or Miami or whatever, it seems so shit. Like, like, serious at times, but also like deeply, deeply miserable. And I don't just mean, in terms of being crammed into some tiny apartment and then going out to do coke with VCs,

and then eventually one of them gets stabbed in a just like, colloquial bullshit thing. Now, what I mean is that the whole lifestyle, even the successful ones, right, to say that everyone deserves the chance to live like fucking, I don't know, Mark Zuckerberg, whatever. So I've seen the way Mark Zuckerberg lives, and it looks fucking awful. What if I don't want to? What if I don't want to like turn my subsistence farming podcast

into sort of like an international bank so that I can go by sort of like survivalist bunker and Hawaii? Well, I think the other thing that they're saying, right, is that is that a business, whatever it is, the ultimate form of self-expression, I sort of like survivalist bunker in Hawaii. Well, I think the other thing that they're saying, right, is that, is that a business, whatever it is, the ultimate form of self-expression, the ultimate form of self-actualization is to be a CEO. And so long as-

Jeff Bezos, the most self-actualized man in history. I mean, you might believe this of himself. I actually, I mean, that is a man who is, of all of the CEOs, he is the closest to Buddha nature. But he says, bold. We'll be moving towards AI first businesses, which paved the way for an AI first economy. And I see a world not very far from today

where a non-negotiable chunk of GDP is created by entirely autonomous businesses. And so the next way, the idea is, you can create a business without employees just by having agents. We've got the car on this highway, right? And we're pretty certain if we just take our hands off the wheel, listen, it's been going far, and it's fine.

Someone will probably invent cruise control like as it's being driven. Yeah, don't worry about it. And they say when you're building autonomous agents or autonomous businesses, you need to optimize for a certain objective. And it's going to be very interesting to see the governance shifting a bit and having

stakeholders have much more of a say in the value alignment with what these businesses are trying to create. I don't know when stakeholders have a say in the value alignment person. This whole thing reads like it's been written by an AI. I'll say that. I think this guy might have already AI'd himself out of existence. Maybe he isn't it. Maybe it's like a blade run situation where he doesn't even know he's an AI.

Well, and so the, yeah, so we have the AI creating the other AI is they're going to take over the economy. But I just find it very interesting that the ambition expressed here, right? The ambition is, look, we could have the entire competitive economy, just have no people in it. And instead, just see those in stakeholders, and with this dream of a perfectly frictionless, humanless, it's like an assembly line or like a clean room with only robots in it. Yeah. And also, again, as with all this AI stuff,

it comes down to like, in so many cases, it's like this is the thing you could just do with a computer before. This is like these guys who have businesses to like, like in so many cases, it's like, this is the thing you could just do with a computer before. This is like these guys who have businesses on like fucking like red bubble or shopper fire, whatever, where they just like put a load of drop shipping stuff up for sale, where they get a percentage and then they just list it on other websites

where people end up buying and then they just make money for doing nothing just by like hosting a website. What did it be? The essentially economy was run on that logic. Well, you get a lot of t-shirts about welders who were born in July. I'll say that. That'll be the only form of clothing.

The army will wear that. That will be the uniform. What about food production, all this stuff? AI, and how do you get it? You influence it. You interpret it. You know how to tweak. A secret priesthood knows how to talk about it.

Oh, yeah, we're going to go agnostic. Yeah, if you go down with the secret priesthood again, well, that's the thing. If you want to, if you could, I think you can link this company and that Henry Kissinger article from like, well, later, earlier this year from our class, we're like 10 pole, which is, and that's what, because this is what, this is the practical application of what that would look like, which is we, it's, this is, this is someone saying, you wanted to hand over control of the economy to computer, okay, hand it to my computer, or I'll build the computers you can hand it to, and then all of a sudden, instead of just

it becomes about how well can you interact with the distributed God? Basically, that's the, I'm not saying that's what's going to happen and saying that's the bleakest. Yeah, the economy, yeah, it's a little computer, is it? Yeah, it's not a shop. It's just a computer. You don't go to a shop, there's just a computer down the street and you go and log on.

The distributed God loves me because it gave me a t-shirt that says don't mess with a welder born in January. And though I know, and though I neither know how to weld, nor was I born in January. Just to be a God loves me this, I know, because chat GPT told me so. It's a mysterious act of divine love and grace. And I myself feel that I'm one of the elect in this. Anyway, anyway, I think that's all for Honeu for today. AIO, me with Crapat GPC.

Anyway. That's all for Honeu for today. I'd now like to hand to myself in the past, from my perspective, but the future of your perspective or a little talk about planning. I'm gonna talk about Blalley. Hello, everyone joining us from the first half of the episode, it is just me, Riley, this time. That means it's time for another interview with an academic who actually knows what they're

talking about. As opposed to us, you know, vaguely guessing, doing a gear storm or impression. Sure, Milo probably did the Georgian Peter Griffin thing and he seems to like that one. So we're leaving all of that. We're leaving childish things behind us in the first half. And instead, I'm going to have a conversation with Dr. Gareth Fern, who is at the Environment, Education,

and Development Faculty at the University of Manchester, who has, among others, written a new paper called Planning for the Public Why Labor Should Support a Public Planning System. And one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to Gareth today was that every single party has, in every sense, promised, we are going to change Britain. We're going to resolve its productivity crisis. We're going to solve its afford crisis, we're going to solve its

affordability crisis, all these things by finally streamlining the planning system. Now, we've always tended to leave those things to the side, knowing intuitively that they're horse shit, but not necessarily knowing exactly why other than that they're being sold by, I'd say, career charlatans. So to now help us understand what planning reform that would be worth the paper it's printed on would look like, easy sentence there, it is Gareth Furn, Gareth, welcome to the show. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Gavin Miao. I hope I can bring the level of decor and sort of a student as the uselter of the beginning. It's a lot to have up to. So, let's hear your best Georgian Peter Griffin. No, no, no. I've been practicing all day, so yeah. So, so, as I said, right, it costs enormous sums

of money to build anything in the UK from a wind turbine to a section of train track. And much of that, I think, is commonly believed to come down to our frankly insane planning system. And I can also say, as a big fan of techno, that planning frequently ends up closing my favorite venues, and meeting I have to travel further and further out of town in order to access the music that I like so well.

And I think, going back to something I was saying at the beginning, we encounter whenever we look at these assessments of the UK's ills drawn up by people who often have no desire to fix them, so they say they will fix the planning system and everything will more or less write itself from there as private investment is unleashed, which has been held back in by red tape. And the universal fix for this, mostly on the Tory side, but also somewhat with some exceptions on the labor side, is to quote, streamline our inefficient planning system. So can you please tell me and our listeners

a little bit of what our planning system is looking like now, why people think it might need streamlining and how some of the ills that we experience are related to the what I find to be a frankly Kafka-ask nightmare of bureaucracy, but private bureaucracy. Yeah, so I think, I mean, yeah, that's sort of project of streamlining planning is something that's been going on for about 40 years, and it gets bought off every maybe five or ten years as a kind of project. Usually, when there's a crisis of some sort, or there's some sort of economic slowdown,

everything's that reason you said, that kind of outline idea of like, yeah, we're going to unleash this market that's all hidden away and has been hitherto not able to produce housing or infrastructure or whatever it is, right? And they've actually tried to do that in the last maybe 10 years or so, and I'll give you that's created some of the problems we've had now. So ever since the consumer's going into 2010, they've been trying to find ways to kind of stream one planning. So they've done so through national planning and policy was incredibly slim down from the previous Labour government in 2011-12.

They've introduced what's called permitted development, which is, or extended, sorry, not introduced, extended permitted development, which is basically where you don't have to go through a full planning committee to get a decision. On a site, but into things like converting offices to residential, which is in turn led to lots of very poor quality housing particularly in London. So, stream on, you know, something they've been doing anyway, but what they've also been doing, and this is probably speaks to the problems and the sort of mess that we have at the moment

within planning, is also cutting significantly financially the budgets of planning departments. So 50% plus cuts to the most planning departments, it's the biggest hit area of local government because it doesn't, you know, it's not something like social care which you, as much harder, which you have statutory sort of obligations to and also that you, you know, obviously councils are less and more reticent to cut back on. Planning has taken the brunt of the sort of public sector, local government cuts, which is the biggest cut section of the public sector as well. It's the most cut bit within the most cut bit. That's also not just in terms of overall funding but also in terms of paying conditions for people

who work in planning. And really actually also perhaps most dramatically has been like privatization of planning. So that's like planners to this RTPI which is the professional body for planning. They kind of every few years do a report on the planning profession and a few months ago their reports said that we've now got over 50% of professional like planners work in the private sector. They don't work exclusively in the private sector. They often work with the public sector as well. So they'll work on a contract doing policy for a council,

and then they'll work on another contract or another team at some point later in the future, putting applications into planning departments. So all of these kind of things, I think, and sort of deregulation, the privatization, and also the sort of austerity, basically. All of these things have kind of combined to create a lot of the, like some of the problems you talked about at the beginning, right? Whether is in housing, whether it's infrastructure, whatever, it means that the basic stuff that

the planning system, even as it's currently constituted, is supposed to do is very difficult, so making a plan, for example example which you would think is quite a basic task of the planning system. Like most plans are going to be out of date in a year or so in the UK like most local plans like 70% so like that just that basic ability to be able to do those kind of functional things even like the things even from a really near liberal perspective right of actually delivering planning decisions quickly, most planning decisions like 70% again were delivered within the government's time frames 10 years ago. And now it's like 20% because there's just not enough people to do the job.

Like it's pretty straightforward what that's happened. Like it's not a new development. Sorry, it is a new development. It's not something that's been happening for a long time. And just to understand as well, right? Like what we're talking about is this is an explanation of the profusion of developments like one famously in Greenwich that had to then be torn down

because it was, I'm not understanding is that it was kind of given quite slap-dash approval that didn't actually meet any of the other requirements of the area, or developers building buildings where they're able to wink and nudge at other planners saying, oh yeah, there's going to be half affordable housing. And then they're all sort of, it's either a K-fabe, or quite simply, the developers are managing to Buffalo, the sort of stretched thin planning staff, so that they can once again have like, and do like in some of the bettercy developments

with like the sort of insane sky pool, you know, they're able to have affordable housing that's still like 750,000 pounds for a two bed flat that's accessed via a poor door. You know, you can see that in all of these senses, things are getting approved that have sort of no, either no basis in law or no basis in common sense. And I think you can very squarely lay it at the door of what you're describing.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's like, that kind of speaks to a kind of relative and increasing weakness of the public sector in this regard, right? So it's not to say, like, and I certainly don't want to say this. And I don't think many of the authors on the paper that we did would, a people did would argue that the planning system was great 10 years ago, right? Everything was fantastic. And all the developments that were done that were fine, et cetera. But there was at least some capacity to contest

or to shape decisions even with that kind of more limited, even within the kind of new labor years. There was still some potential for that to happen. But now, like the idea that the, you know, the only real times that we see, and this is probably the genesis of like the sort of current debates about business and business and such like that, is the, the other time that you really see regularly people who are able to actually oppose a development is often very wealthy people in the sort of like home cowboys or something like that, trying to pose housing development. But when it's a working,

what is stopping a piece of railway from being put down in their constituency? Yeah, that sort of thing. Whereas, you know, when you see like, I mean, I live in Manchester, various like kind of working with us communities trying to oppose various developments that they think can kind of be disruptive to area. Obviously, they just get ignored right most of the time large. So, we've got ourselves in this position where the former people are kind of foregrounded as a problem and there's the kind of main problem and main issue that needs to be sort of bypassed, I guess, within planning,

where it's actually what simultaneously happening and indeed perhaps the reason that certain things don't use that kind of language is because actually a lot of the time developers are getting that way. And they are certainly in some way, certainly in like big cities like Manchester, London, like they certainly are getting their way. And they certainly are producing things, whether it's like you say,

shutting down nightclubs, or which appraisers not always developers, but it can be led by new developments. And then people move in and then they want the nightclubs shut. Like, yeah, that process, I think, is an outgrowth or is at least, I think you can say at least very much intensified by the weakness of like planners both in their kind of quasi-du just for roll, but also in like the actual process of making a plan and actually doing the hard and complicated work of like working with different people in the community, right?

Which just take time and it takes money. And if you don't have that, then you're already starting from a very difficult position. If you're at least more progressive in your sort of aims for a city or for a regional one. Yeah. So I'd like to talk as well about what you describe mostly in the paper is what an actually functional planning system would look like, right? Because you talk about, I think I like the talking about this because I like to understand what a plan that is actually worthwhile would look like.

And some of the points that you hit are to actually revitalize and reprofessionalize planning as a public sector activity, which to me speaks to a lot of kind of minimum requirements for any solution to the hollowing out of the UK public sector, whether you're talking about teaching, whether you're talking about the rail industry, like anything that we frequently talk about, in all senses, we've decided to stop hiring

and stop paying people and often so people aren't working in it. And to be able to act as a public sector body, you need to have people and you need to have people who are qualified. Like, I'm also put in mind of when we talk to yet another Gareth Davies about the goings-on and third council, where some basically people from the town had to engage in asset management, working against sharks from the city in Mayfair, right? You're not gonna be able to have a local government that say invests in the market

that doesn't constantly get taken advantage of unless they're hiring those sharks. I think it's the same thing with planning. We need to hire more qualified to not put too much on it, sharks who are able to actually significantly check developer ambitions. Yeah, absolutely. I think not to get too much into this, but I've

obviously have worked in a few different planning schools, universities. Universities aren't training people as planners, right? There's plenty of people still being trained, still fairly popular degree for young people to do so. And it's like a professional qualification in most cases. There are people being trained as professional planners, but then most of them go and work. And I think a lot of them are being trained professional planners, but then most of them go and work. And I think a lot of them are being trained with a kind of public set to ethos because most of the people training them

work people who worked in the public set to years ago, usually. So in terms of younger people, that is happening, but then often then what they do is they go and work in a consultancy, right? And there are some consultancies that do about work with others, but that is a very different ethos. It's a very different way of thinking. And yeah, it's actually not always,

it can be quite an, if you're not like, this is necessarily about the highest performer, for example, we can't, should be really unstable career like in terms of contracts. And moving from one place to the other and that kind of thing. So yeah, and I think that for me is what opens up this, as I sort of should have been for,

is that it's both lacking the capacity to actually do the, so there's a consequence, the public sector lacks the kind of capacity to engage in the more complicated work of, not just like signing off developments, but maybe like designing an area or a locality that's like well connected, or has like good community infrastructure, or has like GPs and all these kinds of things.

Has that kind of, those kinds of things can be factored in, which increasingly doesn't, it's harder to do in terms of making a plan, the spatial, both in the sort of sense of mapping out where things go, and it sounds very simplistic, but just be able to do that properly, as well as policies and what you want to prioritise

in an area and things like this, right? And as well as policies and what you want to prioritize in an area and things like this, right? As opposed to just being like, oh, well, we hired the three best people at Cities Skylines and we're hoping that they'll be able to create a functional community here. We also, we talk about revitalizing planning as a profession and making a public sector that can be adversarial and be challenging as well as actually just get stuff done. And also talking as well about, you talk a great deal about democratizing planning.

That means ensuring gains from plan are equally distributed, and that right now, the planning profession, Shock Horror, serves largely to serve the interests of the extremely rich. So I'd like to just sort of take a step back and ask, how exactly does the planning system right now sort of just consistently give returns

to the people who are already very wealthy, and what would a more democratic distribution of gains from planning actually look like? Yeah, well, I would say that the gains, and I guess, really an important point to mention when talking about planning any, a lot of the sign is that, like, what the planning system is and can do, even, you know, both ideally and in its current form. It's often attributed to be able to do things that it can't do,

or it's often given too much priority and reasons things are working, right? So for example, like why the UK isn't building so much infrastructure? Well, it's because the government gave up on public investment for 10 years. That's why we don't have good electricity infrastructure, that's why we don't have good train infrastructure, etc, etc. Like that's the core reason and like planning is then usually excuse for why those things haven't happened, right? So I think it's important just to firstly kind of like, and that would say the same in terms of like wealth and in terms of gains of, you know, people we have to make money off land basically. You know, the reasons for that happening are much more external to planning. It's obviously with the financial crisis, quantitative easing, all these kind of background economic conditions,

right, that are driving land prices up, particularly, and obviously, like, you know, speculation from, and the planning is part of this. I'm not trying to say planners on part of this, particularly in terms of signing off, like, off plan, sorry, um, uh, by to rent, like, huge apartment blocks and things like this, right, like obviously planning is part of that. But that's the sort of driving thing. What planning can do there, even within this kind of, uh, limited context, and I guess we could try to say planning and local government,

what widely, is through trying to capture some of the gains that are being made, right? And presently, that happens through what's called, which a lot of people probably have heard of in planning, if they've heard of anything, which is called Section 106, which is usually a negotiated agreement between a developer and a local authority to either provide sometimes money

but often it's like social housing, or affordable housing, or even sometimes it could be like a park or something like that. It's the agreement that the developer will pay for or even produce one of these things in order to offset the kind of impacts of that development. Now, the problem with that system, in some cases it can work, but in a lot of the time obviously it can be negotiated down, or it can be offered from what I understand.

I think there's maybe a BBC documentary, but there's this Kansas property festival, councils turn up there, they try and get into national investors come to the city. Like this happens every couple of years, I think. And you know, one of the things that you can say is like, you know, half kind of off the record. Oh yeah, well, you know, maybe the central mosques won't be as bad or something like this. And you know, this is probably also a function

of state is competing with each other as well, right? To try and attract him, but like global investment. So it's kind of flexible, right? And the government of, and then they said the government introduced 10 and 15 years ago community infrastructure levy, which is basically a bit more rigid, which councils can set out. And now they've introduced another levy or the framework for another levy recently, the lead research legislation. So they seem to be trying to make that a bit more solid. And that seems to

be, I mean, I guess I saw moving the right direction, but it still seems that like this money is either often just going, maybe just going into, sometimes if it's money in terms of like it's just going into councils because they need the money anyway, so it's not necessarily what's going to things that's needed. It's kind of a stealth tax, which is good, fine, but it doesn't do the thing it's supposed to do. And so it gives, I think, it gives central government a way to say, hey, we're doing all of this stuff. And then local governments frequently have to like,

not deliver the thing in order just to deliver other things in a minimum level. Yeah, well, it was designed at a time, well, yeah, I mean, the first, the section when I say it's comes from 9.90. So it was designed at a time when it's not exactly like, local governments were amazingly funded them, but they were a lot better than they are now, right? It was based on an idea that we hadn't completely destroyed local government. I assume so. So now when you've got, you know, central one is additional to like full local government funding, maybe that's, you know, not a disaster. But if you, you know, these community levels as well, but when you've taken so much money out, putting this money in doesn't make a huge difference I don't think. So yeah, what we call for our paper was more like, I know that you just would even work for

developers as well, right? It's not some necessarily some radical sort of position that's used in other countries as two. Either we don't go into all the specifics because there's like a few different versions and it would have taken up too much time to debate them all. A view of the land value tax or land, a more clear kind of percentage land value capture system for like any sort of development or at least any development over a certain scale or value,

where you sort of say, right, you know, this is how much you get as a land owner. And what we're talking about particularly is what's called planning game, which is where the value that you get from land's turning from what it was before into, when it gets permission, it usually makes land more valuable, right? So it's how you capture some of that game.

Some of it can go to developers find, but actually we need to have a much clearer sense of how much it goes to the public. And that makes them a redistributive effect. And we're not being georgists here, crucially, because we're talking specifically about land value taxes to offset problems created by high land value. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's capturing that rising land value for the public because it's not creating that wealth by doing anything like the interest getting in the apps. And this in we're saying that planning

is just one way we could possibly do that. Yeah, I mean, through land value captures specifically as something you could do through planning. Land value, we talk within the paper about property, like reforming council tax and property tax, which is obviously a local government thing. So yeah, that's a kind of wider issue, I think, to do with it. And again, this comes back to planning in its political space, right?

Obviously, and this is why we took Tawi at the paper towards Labour, because obviously the Conservatives never get it, and they're the people that they're the people that are slightly Labour are going to do it either. But obviously, any of these kind of planning reforms would fit within, only make sense within a wider shift in like government. And, you know, an actual, you've got to want to redistribute wealth basically. And obviously, at the moment,

we don't, what we do, but, not that much. I'll say this. And someone who was writing a paper targeting labor, you probably can't say that they're unlikely to do it either. Let's just leave it at that. So the other thing we talked about, though, is making the process of planning more accountable, right?

We're capturing the value, but also it's a democratizing the gains, but also democratizing inputs. And this is not about just allowing more veto players in just, but rather allowing, as you say, for example, much, much more consultation. So can you talk about what you think a better consultative process would look like? Or have I missed, have I missed portrait you? I would say more like deliberate evil democratic, I guess, in the sense of like, you know, consultations as they use now can be kind of like quite box sticky. And I don't, I'm not really sure. sure if you're not like often quite an elite thing, I think tickle

millions and a lot of issues like it's, you know, it's, it's for like established groups and stuff to sort of debate things, which you know is fine, whatever. But I guess I would say that like, so and this is probably important in terms of like the sort of opposing view or the proposal reform from the more near the broads, so you think tanks is that we move towards a more regulatory system rather than what we have at the moment, which is very discretionary, which means that decisions taken at people's judgement discretionary, either elected or public officials. To a more regulatory system like they have in the US where it's more rules up front. Now, the reason that we have local plans so important was because this was a compromise

made in 1990 to allow some of that more regulatory approach in whereby the plan is the sort of defining allows developers or anyone else to look at something and go, okay, well, this is what we can do here. These are the things we're allowed to do. These are the things that can go into encourages do, etc., etc. That's kind of the idea. So for me, like the kind of democratic aspect enhancing really is in that bit,

is in that bit of that's where the work can go in. That's where you can have these kind of antagonistic discussions about, and obviously local officials and elected officials and the public can then decide what it is they want to do. And then obviously the cost and benefits of doing that, right, if you don't want to build on And then obviously the cost and benefits of doing that, if you don't want to build on your housing, okay fine.

But then what's going to happen to your school, or your area, if people can't live there, or your family can't live there, etc. So I think that is where you have a better democratic opportunity. But again, I was kind of emphasised before, that requires work, because that requires not only like, the process of developing those plans and policies, but also requires like, actually,

you've got to actively go and find people to get involved, because you know, people are just walking into planning meetings, you know, it's only a certain type of person who tends to do that. So that requires like, I can say if you're really, a reason of also isn't work to actually do that properly. And you know, in the past, like, there have been sort of reasonable attempts to do do that properly. And in the past, there have been reasonable attempts to do that, they've not always been perfect,

but it's not like that's some sort of unfathomable process. I know, again, other people in other countries do do this. So it's not like possible. This comes back down, I think, to building public capacity, which is in order to go and get people, as you say, you can't just wait for them to come to you because the only people who are constantly paying attention to that and coming to you are either landlords or insane, like, you know, Tory-land-owning nimbis who want to stop trains being built if you get my meaning.

Yeah. So how, and this comes back to, as we say, actually making the public sector work again, which is going to require, as you say, actually hiring people, actually giving them a remit to engage with the public and do things in the public interest, which is so far away from where we've come from, or maybe really ever have been in quite a long time. And this is where I think we wanna come to, come back to what otherwise is suggested to fix the planning system by the mainstream parties,

which is to streamline it. Really, what you're saying is needed is a significant bulking up, but to make it better rather than to make it disappear. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think what's developed, and this is actually prior to the coalition, and so I think this was happening in the late-bit too, which is the... Yeah, I would say, it's kind of like, there's a lot of bureaucracy,

but a lot of it's very... It's kind of box-thicking, right? A planning process becomes more box-thicking, which is in the sense of like, okay, we have to do this thing, we have to do this review, we have to do this assessment, we have to do that, and that kind of goes on forever. But like, that's actually not, I mean, I've sat and watched and, you know, researched and analyzed several more pull-like different planning decisions. And actually, like, you know, it's almost like a bit of a sharan sometimes. Like it's like they go through the motions, but what decides the issue is actually just to do with, you know, you know, say I'm fracking, for example, like, yeah, there was lots of like technical issues discussed about noise and pollution, all these kind of things, but

the end of the day, like it was the fact that there was clear issues with the process and that people in the area worried about it, and that's eventually why they ended up rejecting it. Right, and that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. I think that's perfectly reasonable. People have some standard disagreements about what can be done with land, and I think the problem with the, I don't think there's an easy way out of that, but what I don't agree with is this very near-level perspective that you can just hide those things away and

just pretend they don't exist and just come up with a way of bypassing all of those antagonisms, right? And those real disagreements, like what you need to do is try and think of a way to have those more constructively and in ways that we can, you know, some people will lose it the end of the day, but I think we can do that. And we can't just pretend those things don't exist because then obviously all that happens is that, you know, it will be the developers that win. So effectively, what we're saying is a bulky and powerful planning system that's able to actually stand in the way of an influence development.

Great, when do we get one? Effectively. I think it's what I say about the importance of actual plan making, I guess, is that you know, if I think if you had better and more substantive like plans and you're able to do it in a more sort of inclusive way, then it would be a lot easier to turn around to people and say no or like to you know, either people objecting for like sort of trivial reasons, right? Like if it's like say the kind of archetypal nimb in the home cow is, if you've had a sort of, I don't know, a wider discussion in the kind of wider region, so you could, you know, we talk about regional planning in that,

that's a huge problem that we don't have that I think in the UK, but or in the wider county, in the case of say, I don't know, obviously, sure or something. Like, if that has then led to a set of principles about how much housing needs to be developed, and like that's been sort of developed as a policy and as areas, you know, you talk about areas that you would like, it's happened and you have to discuss that not on an individual basis, we have to discuss that on a regional basis or a county basis, that becomes a bit of a different issue, doesn't it? Because you're not just arguing about whether this one thing can happen. And then if someone comes in and rejects this to housing, you've had this like two-year planning process to plan making process,

well that's tough, like unless they've got a really good reason. I think if you're just doing that to people without that basis, that's when it becomes a lot more fraught and a lot more, yeah, a lot more like, a lot more like, well, I guess they have some basis for saying that they're just being stomped upon, right, rather than they're being some sort of much stronger foundation, democratic foundation for you to have to say, well, I'm sorry, but you're just going to have to put up with this inconvenience for a period of time. So I think before we end here, I want to talk about another thing that is, I think, a real important motivator to deprivatize and re-regulate planning. This is from your planning and climate section, what you say.

The problem of flooding is emblematic of the privatization and deregulation of planning. A focus on simply adding additional housing units as resulting in developments completely unsuitable to the changing climate. And the annual site of people being ferried away from their homes and dinghies should make it clear that the planning system desperately needs to be referred towards a public system that has the right skills and resources to act strategically. And I mean, I think that's the vision I think we can leave ourselves on, right, which is we talk all the time on the show about whether or not something is going to be

enough to deal with whatever crises are going to come down the pipe. And I think we can just say for any reform of the planning system, will this meaningfully stop people from being put in dinghy's when their homes are flooded, or will it allow developers to profit off of homes that will one day be required to be emptied via dinghy? Yeah, that's right.

I think that's it. We can set that up as a metric and as a test for all future proposals. I think I might actually, yeah, we could go a long way with our list. And it's the patented trash future dinghy test. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. That's all we need, actually.

I don't know. We've wasted half an hour really. We could just start with the finish with that. Anything less, not worth the paper it's printed on. So I think that about wraps up this half episode. But, Gareth, I just want to thank you so much for coming and talking to us today. I've found it very interesting to be able to have much more

evidence from my contempt of people hand waving that they'll streamline the planning system. I always knew it was bullshit. I'm glad to know why. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure and thanks for inviting me. Thank you, great.

Thanks. All right. Well, I'm going to hand back to past, well, past for you, future for me of the TF team for the sign-off. Bye, everybody. Oh, well, thank you very much to Dr. Gareth Fern for talking to me. What a conversation. I didn't have much to say, but it was great.

Always a reliably great time. We talked about an academic named Gareth. That's true, actually. It was named garrif? That's true. Actually, 100% hit right on academic name. If you are an academic named garrif, and you want to be a podcast. Yeah, it's anyone called garrif. You could get garrif gates on. Get garrif future.

Anyway, anyway, you go. We have a Patreon. It is $5 a month to subscribe. However, we're going to keep saying this. It will be more expensive if you subscribe from within the iOS app. Subscribe, not from within the iOS app, or it will cost more because we'll see how antitrust goes, but Apple is trying to leverage its market power. So please do not do that.

Tim Apple will take some of your money if you subscribe on within the app. It's like from like March. If you have an existing subscription that you've subscribed before, then it shouldn't increase. But if you subscribe, I think it's from March. This is Google information, but they're going to put like a 30% search on it. So our recommendation is subscribe directly on the Patreon website or through other apps you make. Anything else you want. So yeah. Aside from that, I also want to say thank you very much for listening. We're looking forward to another year of being in your ears.

So, we will see you on the bonus episode, which was a balthazar that Milo and I just recorded earlier today with Tom Walker and Demi Lardner. This was my fourth podcast of the day. Yeah, absolutely. So, we will see fourth podcast of the day. Yeah, absolutely. So we will see you in a few days. Bye, bro. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. you