TRASHFUTURE - The Lithium Rush ft. Thea Riofrancos

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

Riley, Alice, and Milo look at the ongoing descent of the UK pundit class into embodying the global death drive, and take a look at a story of a certain kind of British Guy achieving apotheosis (spending £218 of Bolton Council's money meant for excluded children at the Spar in Praia du Luz in Portugal). In between, Riley talks to academic Thea Riofrancos about why "onshoring" mining is all the rage now that the world's security and energy orders have both been thrown into disarray. The interview with Thea starts at 23:16 and ends at 53:45! Read Thea’s article on mining here (paywalled): https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/07/renewable-energy-transition-critical-minerals-mining-onshoring-lithium-evs-climate-justice/ 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 *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We will be doing a live show in London on Wednesday, March 2. Get your tickets here! https://www.designmynight.com/london/whats-on/comedy/trashfuture-live-pre-election-christmas-spectacular *MILO ALERT* Milo has a bunch of live shows this month in both London and Prague. Check them out here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-show *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)

Well, we did it. We changed the name of the chicken Kiev at Sainsbury's. Finally. Yeah. Welcome to Kiev. We changed the name of the Russian blue cat to the Ukrainian blue. Yeah. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Beyond parody. The cocktail is now a white Ukrainian. Is it really? I have seen with my own eyes a sign taped over a cocktail machine that said white Ukrainian. Now for me, the terms white Russian and white Ukrainian have very different associations and I would be loath to use the second one. Feeling like a white Ukrainian.

Yeah. Yeah. Feeling like a white Stefan Vandera and what's what else is happening every day of his life. Stefan Vandera was feeling like a white Stefan Vandera. Yeah. I also got accused this week of funding and arming the as of battalion because I'm doing a benefit gig for the Ukrainian Red Cross. Mm hmm.

Yep. Why does that cross have all of the extra arms on it? Weird. Oh, sorry. I got confused. Yeah. The Red Swastika that only does Nazi age. I got confused.

I forgot what a cross looked like and instead. Yeah. We will give you emergency surgery, but we will measure your skull first. Yeah. So wait, wait, wait. Is he forgot what a cross looks like? You just kind of wing it and are like, I hope I stop here. Maybe I'll turn.

Okay. Try again. Hang on. Why is all this food aid coming in the form of a one pot meal cooked on a Sunday? We all, but yeah, it's, I feel like we've reached the freedom fries portion of the sort of. We're going to get real dumb about this. We're going to.

Yeah. Absolutely. We can't do anything. And so the only thing, quite literally, I have used the lathe to terrible effect because now it's been applied to foreign policy too, where the only thing we can do is the impossible, right? Yeah. The only possible level we can pull on now that we've used all of the sanctions is start

nuclear war with Russia. Yeah. Yeah. It's very funny. And I think, I mean, this is sort of what we're going to talk about a bit in the first because by the way, hi everyone, it's TF. Oh yeah. Hi.

It's Alice Riley and Miley. You know the score. And later on in this episode, I will be talking to Russian troops approaching the buttery garlicky sensor. I will be talking to Theo Rio-Francos, who is a professor at Providence College about mining. What kind? Like computer or rocks?

I forget. Same thing. Well, they used to dig computers out of the ground in my day. Were you talking about earlier the Arthur Scargill of the Bitcoin miners? Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Arthur Scargill of Bitcoin, whatever that means, construct your own bit.

Yeah. There he is. No, we, I think it's like, we, because, because sort of our every, the experience of most people of like politics and political events is just so isolated, alienated and innervated, but also like mediated entirely through like TV and the news or whatever. Just purely. Same thing now. Yeah.

Just purely this, it just a tidal wave of information bearing down on you. And all you can really do is be like, well, we're going to change the name of the frozen dinner. Yeah. Well, the thing is, right? You know how I said that like no one predicted the Russian invasion except for me and a couple of other weirdos, because nobody has autism really, because we didn't do enough MMR jabs and we didn't manage to give everybody autism.

Well, now the problem is that now the news has engaged a war mode and now normal people who should, you know, go home and be a family man are DMing me asking me, would I think about certain makes of UAVs and it's like, no, no, no, I am supposed to care about that. You're not supposed to care about that. Yeah. Why do I learn from the Ocint guys was there's an even deeper level of autism because some of the Ocint guys who like fully do this all the time, they didn't think there was going to be an invasion because they were like the Russian Ops sec was so bad and they were just

letting civilians come and take photos of all their convoys and stuff. They're like, you just wouldn't do this if you go to an invasion. And then they realized that the reason why they were doing that was because the Russian soldiers themselves had no fucking idea. Oh, yeah, they all had returned tickets, which is very funny. Incredible. What really shocked me, though, was not so much that they didn't know before they did it, but that a lot of them didn't even know they were invading Ukraine several hours in.

It was only when they started being shot at that they so lots of Russian soldiers genuinely thought they were defending themselves, having been randomly attacked on what they thought was a normal military exercise. Completely insane. I mean, and so it's I think it's unsurprising to think right that we that that the, you know, the this, this situation has been made sort of ever more, you know, sort of tenuous that to react to it just by being like, well, we're going to change the name of the frozen dinner.

We're going to pour out the vodka. We're going to, we're going to, you know, it's already called chicken here. It's going to be, it's going to be called Chicken Keeve now. I mean, that's the irony of it is that Keeve makes sense as a spelling in Ukrainian, where they have two different kinds of I. It doesn't make sense as a spelling in English, because that will just make people say it wrong. People will start saying Keeve, which is not the name of the city. They believe it's a Keeve Starmer.

But yeah, we've all gone insane, right? Because like as we've established, there is nothing that the UK or even really NATO can now do other than start nuclear war. Like our two options, having already done a shitload of stuff, like all of the like shipping weapons, training people, we'd already done that. And it's actually proved to be quite helpful. But right now, our only like options for what do we do about this humanitarian crisis are, you know, absent attempt to care for some of the like refugees and the general

fallout of it are either A, do nothing, or B, destroy all life on earth. And A is so intolerable to a lot of people that they're seriously pushing for B. It's really the two buttons meme is really sweating over this. I'm very excited if we ever get invaded by Russia and like the French in a gesture of solidarity will rename custard Krem English. Can't wait for that. Like there's a Krem. Yeah, that's right.

I think I was like, that's basically like something I've been sort of just racking my brain and I'm trying to not rack my brain about, to be honest, for the last like a little while of just the sort of I think it's it's like in it's related to I think it's related to that kind of weird weird sort of obsessive media parochialism that makes you rename the frozen dinner, which is that essentially like our political and media machine knows only how to perform a spectacle and they are entirely woefully unprepared to do something other than perform a spectacle to engage with real events that they cannot dictate the

terms of. It's so inward looking. I think British media has forgotten how to talk about or to anything other than British people. And I think this leads you to possibly my favorite tweet of the last couple of weeks, which is an FBP person saying, I can't be the only person who thinks that if the UK had voted to stay in the EU, this invasion wouldn't be happening. Yeah, because of that EU army that we'd be a part of.

Absolutely. We would send the Eurocore. And also because Vladimir Putin is pissed off at us because we left the EU apparently. Yeah. Like what? I mean, you see like that you see sort of articles in like, you know, like coming up saying, ah, well, this it's a now there's also proof that like the Russians were behind Trump and Brexit and all this.

And we talked about this already, right? If they supported it at all, they were pushing on a fucking open door. But like we're just using all of this to relitigate all of the all of our favorite media fights of the last 10 years. Well, at the same time, there is an actual humanitarian crisis going on. Well, there's actually a lot of actually humanitarian crises going on. There's one that we're like for like, you know, for to be honest, pretty racist reasons, the refugees have a more purchase on, say, the sympathy of countries

that can provide them refuge and fucking and pretty Patel's department was like, yeah, they can come here if they can pick fruit. They can come in three months. That's been so funny to me is that like every other country, every country in the EU has been like often quite explicitly. Oh, well, these are these are white Christians. Therefore, we will absolutely they're not like other refugees. We will open every door for them and Britain, however, stands alone.

The last bastion of the cry laugh emoji still going fuck off with full. The British right are consistent in much the same way as the American right are inconsistent because they defund everything except the police and the army and the British right are like, no, that's left wing. You have to also cut the police and the army. We also apply that to refugees. Even when they're white, we still don't want them. It's it's it's baffling, right?

Just having the courage of your own awful, awful convictions and being like, no, still don't want to fuck off. Yeah, you get your idea. If we want to think about like having the courage of your convictions as well, it's become very sort of instructive in the last week. I mean, since we last recorded, we are recording this on Thursday, the 5th excuse me, on Saturday, the 5th of March time of recording. There is still a world to receive this.

So yeah, but but it's I think that some of the most shocking things, right? Have been the extent to which the people pushing hardest for well, I mean, at number one, thank God, the people pushing hard further hard for a no fly zone, which again, it's what is it? It's a zone. It's like a no parking, right? It doesn't have the congestion charge. It's like a little bit. Yeah, it's like half a war.

It's like a war, but goods. It's going to be camera enforced. And the Russian planes will get a ticket every time they fly over. And we're doing the you less. Yeah, that's right. I'm always going to use this SU 35 have a Euro six. But right, but that's where it seems like it's the it's the pundit class and the sort of liberal idealist sort of wing of British politics, right?

Who are seem to be most keen best exemplified by Dan Hodges. Britain's greatest, most powerful brain. Once again, speaking about having the courage of your stupid ass convictions, a man who took to Twitter and went, OK, well, we should do we should do a no fly zone and we have to do something and this is something. So this is the something that we should do. And and when someone in the way, well, many people in the replies went, OK, but if you do a no fly zone, you're going to have to enforce it.

And if you enforce it, you're going to have to like shoot down Russian aircraft with, I guess, British aircraft. So so would you do that and credit to Dan Hodges for engaging with this? Just immediately went, yes. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's the same thing with fucking this with Jutes Joe Swinson, right? There's this weird thing.

There's this there's this brain slug attached to British liberals that makes them I think that makes them sort of. So let's put a swing zone over Ukraine. And they need to where I feel like they have this sense, this this sense that they need to prove themselves that they're arred, right? That they're arred bastards. Yeah, it like they all of them want to be like impressive and tactical. And all of them want the troops to tell them that they're like being serious.

And but like the military doesn't want to do this, not least because it would start World War Three, but also because like it makes no military sense. Like there's there's no reason in recording. Yeah, as yet, there's no real reason to to do it. Like it's still, yeah, given the Ukrainians a load of planes and they're letting them base themselves out of Poland, which is kind of giving themselves a tactical advantage. And also like the Russian planes are having to fly low

because they don't have any guided munitions. So fucking Ukrainian farmers are shooting them down with all the little toys we gave. What sensible RAF officer would ever ever want any of their planes flying over like Ukraine, where we have given every farmer and every farmer's mum every kind of man, portable air defense system, we can hand them. I think what this sort of comes to, right? It's not just about like, you know, tweets and articles. It's about this.

It's about this thing, right? Where that where it's we've seen it happen sort of so many times before, where the Western sort of where like Western like liberal politics and press goes into, you know, war hysteria mode. And again, that's not to say that nowhere else doesn't, right? Like if Russia has done that in a much worse way, but we when we do it, like you can see that there is this idea that like things that the considerations of, well, we need to get, we need to find off ramps.

We need to get this conflict stopped as soon as possible becomes just people competing with one another to see who can talk about escalation the fastest. And I'll tell you what I'm reminded of, and this is going to seem strange initially, but I'll explain why I'm reminded of QAnon. That's because... No, I believe I get what you're saying. Because QAnon is a group storytelling project where the whatever narrative sticks is the one that one ups all the others the most.

That's why I always say like it's the reason that they said that all like, you know, these Democrats were satanic pedophiles, isn't because they have worries about trial trafficking. It's because satanic pedophile is the highest stakes you can make it. Yeah, absolutely. It's not like, you know, Trump is mobilizing the deep state against these people. It's like Trump is actually having them secretly executed in Guantanamo Bay, because that's, you know, it one ups the thing.

Yeah, no, I totally, I get what you're saying. I think you're right. Yeah, and I think all like situations like this, you know, they play into like a lot of people who are like less politically cynical desire to like that we should be doing something. And a lot of those people have like a quite uncritical engagement with it. And they see that quite a lot of Ukrainians are calling for a no fly zone, which is like understandable. It's obviously very emotive for them.

But like that surely you should be thinking about this a bit more if you're a newspaper columnist. Yeah, well, because I think they see themselves as just it goes back even to like a lot of how we were talking about how they see themselves and ideas, right? They're just, well, they're just putting stuff out there. And if it's not a good idea, it'll get defeated in the marketplace of debate. They don't see themselves as a no fly zone of debate. They don't see themselves as manufacturing consensus. And what they've and the scary thing is they have done that successfully.

Like there ain't going to fucking be one. I don't know why. But like that's the ultimate endpoint for the British press, I think, is trying to manufacture consent for the impossible. Like if you tried to like, if you got every British columnist on board was trying to blow up the moon, right? That would be more likely to happen as a result of them writing about it. Yeah, it's a combination of that and like Caitlyn Moran being like, I don't,

that's the other thing, right? It's just like with coronavirus. It's so, I think it's all sort of stitched together in this way, right? With COVID, right? The standard liberal response in the States was, I want Fauci to blow my back out. I want him to, I want him to like, you know, bust on me. Give you a honey.

Yeah. And now it's the same people are being like, damn, I want Zelensky to like, you know, eat my asshole. I mean, I'm trying to, I've been trying to think about how I would explain Caitlyn Moran to a non-British audience for a while. And I posted this, but like the best I could come up with is that we as a country just kind of use her as like a professional 14 year old that we just keep around, I guess. And she's in this kind of like stratum, right?

Of like former working class women, like Tracy Ammon or like Julie Birchell, who have like worked their way into the media class. And are now allowed to stay there on the condition that they say all of the right things, which are tremendously weird things, and look every day a bit more like a fucked bird's nest. And in Julie Birchell's case, talk like this, like a talking character. Yeah, that's like a fascinating energy. I actually like, Tracy Ammon is also like so fucking weird. I met her once because I used to go out with someone who ran an art gallery.

And she specifically came over because she wanted to talk to us, and then proceeded to like not say anything and just kind of like stand there, like being really, and I'm like, why did you come over here? And then I was whispering in my girlfriend's ear being like, can I ask her if she's Banksy? And she was like, you cannot do that. I was like, no, but it would be really funny. But what I want to say, but even bring it to Caitlyn Moran thing is you can see like,

it's just these untenable situations getting more and more tense, and then just these intensely personalized sort of reactions to the news. It's like, I like Zelensky. He makes me horny. We're going to rename the name of the chicken frozen dinner. Yeah, you know what it is, right? It's that the British media class copes very poorly with powerlessness and realizing its own powerlessness.

And that's why they're all like, oh, we can't just do nothing. Because they're in an almost unique position in Britain of 2022, where they have not yet been forced into a situation where they've not been able to do anything before. This is like a totally novel sensation to them. And for that, you know, they have a little bit of sympathy for me. Yeah. Well, it's yeah. And also all of this kind of like a banning of like Russian stuff that's going on,

is like really put a bad taste in my mind. Oh, yeah. Like cancelling fucking like Russian ballets and shit. Like the extent to which like everyone I know in Russia is like completely terrified of what's going on and their own government. And like it's like a very weird stance to take. If anything, like having spoken to quite a few friends in Ukraine and in Russia, the ones in Russia seem more fucking terrified than the ones in Ukraine do.

The ones in Ukraine have like a kind of sense of unity and like they're fighting for something. The ones in Russia are just like completely despondent. I mean, I'd be a lot more scared that like the FSB was going to kick my door in or whatever. Then. Yeah. Some of my friends have literally been threatened by the FSB have come to that house and threatened me like do not say anything about this. It's genuinely very frightening. The extent to which it turns out there is just a big refreshing switch in Putin's office,

I guess, and you just turn the dial all the way to the right. You can clearly see across the British media and political sort of firmament, everyone trying to sort of make this about their own thing, which only I think makes the world a sort of in as much as they might be successful, which is, you know, even though they're creating super majorities of like polled support for these kinds of things, like, yeah, we can hope they won't be, and the sum total of that, right, is that they can't escape their boxes. It's why you see articles being pushed now. It's like, well, why hasn't Corbyn denounced the war in Ukraine?

It's like, well, no, he has. Why are you asking about him? He's one MP. What we need is an airspace in Ukraine that's restricted to women and girls. Maybe I should start demanding that Vladimirovsky comment on every bit of British politics. Why has Vladimirovsky not denounced Boris Johnson's birthday party? That's what I want to know. If there's any Russian politician that would, it would be him, on the basis that it's like birthday parties are decadent. Yeah, exactly. Like, this is gay.

You should try working in mine, Bitcoin or otherwise. You can see this as well, right, where it's like being totally enveloped in this spectacle means that we can only engage in spectacular responses. It's like a tape player that's like unwound on one end, and it's just spooling down back in on itself. Yeah, and it's just sort of, it's because like Liz Truss, right, is like, yes, I think it was going off the dome. I never thought that a Tory girl boss could be a threat to global security,

and I was wrong about that. Yeah, yeah. I think it's also, it's weirdly like highlighted something which I've been going on about for a while, which is how like Russian people's imaginations differs so much from like the reality of what Russia is like. I mean, we talk about like Britain and America being like decaying sclerotic former empires, but my God, Russia like turn it times a hundred. Like the extent to which like all their trucks have been falling apart because they haven't been used in five years and like the tires have rotted and all this shit and just like

none of their soldiers know what they're supposed to be doing. Meanwhile, Ukraine, it turns out, is a nation of just terry pay. Every man, woman and child is like, I will drink the blood of the invader. And so that all of this stuff are kind of about like a no-fly zone or whatever. It's like kind of, I don't know, the Ukrainians are kind of giving him a shlacking to be honest with you. So I think like if you want to talk about trust, right? It's her comments about like regime change, sponsoring saying, yeah, if you're in the British army, you can just go do freelance or whatever.

Again, like clearly unbriefed, just again, trying to perform for a spectacle of domestic media consumption without really understanding that anyone else is going to see it and can act on it. Oh, the gym guys. I loved the Sky News report on the gym guys. We've had the gym guys. Just a bunch of big beefy dudes who were just like, yeah, I've got no military experience, but you know, got to help them out.

And people who do have military experience, this leads me to my favorite BBC article where they went to a collection point where people were like handing in like body armor to transport to Ukraine. And they spoke to an Essex military surplus dealer who asked to be known only as a wassa. And what was it was in the course of sending fucking desert, desert uniforms to Ukraine. Yeah, the desert bog. Yeah, absolutely.

So I'm, if the Ukrainians like survive for any, any even greater length of time, it will be solely down to the force of like Essex military, surplus guys. Yeah. Well, we're going to talk a little more about, about definitely an interesting type of British guy after my conversation with Thea. See you in a sec. Thank you, past Riley for that wonderful introduction.

Hi everybody. It's me, Riley, from before, you remember before the podcast you were listening to. And I'm speaking with Thea Rio-Francos, who is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College in the States, and who writes on extractivism, climate politics, and the left. And she recently had an article in foreign policy that I really wanted to talk about. That was all about the on shoring of mining, right? The on shoring of mining operations, especially to do with the metals that power

the alleged upcoming electric vehicle revolution. And when we were talking, and she mentioned, I think it's an an under discussed, under theorized, under thought about bit of left politics, and especially, of course, the resistance to extractivist, often very imperialist and hawkish as we'll talk about capital, and one in which actually some victories have been scored for the good guys, so to speak, in the last few years. So Thea, thank you very much for coming and talking to me today.

Thanks for having me. So I'm just going to start us off, right? Because what do we mean when we talk about on shoring versus off shoring? Why are these minerals important? Can you just give us a bit of the lay of the land? Yeah, there's so much to say because there's so much about the past few decades of global capitalism and political economy that are like smushed together in this on shoring phrase, and in thinking about so called critical minerals.

So I think just to step back a little bit, I'm sure listeners are familiar and you're familiar with like the hegemony of neoliberal globalization, right? This is the hegemony we've been living under for the past couple of decades in which it was taken as a kind of article of faith that the best way to organize the economy is to send production, whether it's extraction like mining or whether it's factories, just send all of that to wherever it's quote unquote cheapest, right? Wherever labor is cheapest or nature is cheapest, wherever it's most economically efficient, wherever there's so called comparative advantage.

So these are kind of like the principles of neoclassical economics that undergirded the Washington consensus of neoliberal globalization. And that, you know, all of our economic elites, political elites, foreign policy elites were totally happy with that. They promoted it a lot. And this is on both sides of the pond, right? In the U.S., the U.K., the European Union, we're all avid fans of neoliberalizing and globalizing economic production.

Then all of a sudden, kind of, I mean, if you weren't tracking this closely, it would seem like a very sudden shift during the pandemic or, you know, in the past year or two, all of a sudden elites are like worried about supply chains. They're like, wait a second. We have created this global economy in which production is spread out everywhere. There's a lot of spatial dispersion between the beginnings of production, whether again, it's mining, logistics, factories, and where things are ultimately consumed. In addition, there's some quote unquote vulnerabilities built into what's called

just-in-time production, a wonky phrase, but it just means you keep inventories and costs as low as possible so that not a cent more is spent on anything and you maximize profits, right? So during the pandemic, all of this suddenly seemed like a problem, right? It seemed like a problem that certain places were where protective equipment was imported from, and there were snarls in those supply chains. It also seemed like a problem that inventories and stocks of certain essential goods were quite low. And elites started talking about like, maybe we should, we in the global north, to be clear, in the US, Europe, UK, maybe we shouldn't have sent our production everywhere else in the world.

Maybe we should bring it back, right? And I also want this to resonate a little bit with the kind of Trumpian moment, with the Boris Johnson, you know, with this sort of idea that like, we need to be great again, again, underscore we as the global north. And so there's a competitive and geopolitical kind of logic here, but a lot of kind of trends and patterns came together in this idea that we are losing the global economic game. Also, there's a lot of vulnerabilities and lack of resiliency, and we should bring everything that's important back within our borders.

And so this is a change that unfolded over time. And like many changes that we're currently witnessing was accelerated by the pandemic, but proceeded it and also sort of over determined. But we're seeing it play out, I think, most concertedly at this moment around what we could call the supply chains of green technologies. And green technology is another piece of jargon, but a useful one to know, are technologies that purport to save us from climate crisis. And I say purport, not some of them do save us, some of them are just speculative and whatever. It's a mix, it depends. I'm not against green technologies, but we should sometimes be wary

when things are called green or clean. These technologies like everything else that I just mentioned, like fast fashion, like food, whatever are produced through these global supply chains. And but what's kind of interesting about them is that we think of these technologies as green or clean, and they also do have their role in mitigating and transitioning to a mitigating climate crisis and transitioning to a renewable energy system. But like everything else under capitalism, they begin with appropriation of nature in the extractive frontiers of our world system. And I think it's that kind of dissonance between the fact that they are climate saving technologies potentially, but have lots of environmental and social impacts,

especially at that point of extraction where the minerals to make them are exploited, that kind of should call our attention a bit as climate advocates, as environmental advocates, as leftists, and to kind of think about that tension. And the last thing I'll kind of say here, I'm throwing out everything at once, but we'll put it all on the table, and then we can dissect a bit, is that as I sort of started to mention, Western, quote, unquote, governments, US, UK, Europe, are increasingly seeing these supply chains, the ones that produce electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, etc., these green technologies, are increasingly seeing these supply chains as, in their words, critical or strategic

to geopolitical dominance, right? And they use this language very explicitly. And so the question why are they seeing this critical, but maybe even also as importantly or more importantly, like, what will applying the security and hawkish lens to green technologies do in the world? What will it achieve? What work will it do? And what kind of consequences might it have? We talk about the state sort of pushing outward to sort of find an imperial expansion abroad, but I think that what sort of brings this together, what makes it a kind of modern imperialism of just a place chasing the front, capital chasing the frontier, is that I sort of tend to see this, right? As the main thing that modern imperialists are interested in doing, they've understood

that in an age where everything is financialized, you don't go to Iraq to get what Iraq has. You go to Iraq to mine the most valuable resource of all, which is the US Treasury, right? And when we talk about, you know, giveaways to companies, whether you know, they're tax payers, giveaways, or sort of money printing giveaways or whatever, you know, they're kind of, they're doing the same thing. They're just, they're just, they've found a new frontier, which is in deindustrialized America, a place that is wrecked, right? That they go in and for the end to sort of go about unwrecking it a place that, you know, they wrecked when they left, they can then feel free to mine the Treasury or the public purse as much as they want, because you don't need gold, you just need

dollars, because you can, you know, borrow against those, you can lend them and so on and so on. So I sort of see, this is how I kind of see that relationship between, between sort of the imperialism finding new frontiers in this sort of old heartlands of the Metropole, because it doesn't care where it is at our capital, is it just needs, it just needs a frontier, it just needs a place where it can draw value and it's realized, hey, we don't need anything fucking real, we can just change the items in the balance sheet and the Treasury is happy to help us do it, whether it's in Iraq or Ohio. And that's also something I want to go on to now, right? We've talked about like these, these industries sort of in, in the abstract, right?

But I think people who are sort of clamoring for the on-shoring of, you know, for example, lithium mining, right? There's a whole lot of PR around this is, oh, this is great, this is clean. And we're assuming that mining in the global north will by necessity be more responsible than mining in the global south, even though it's the same countries doing it. And like Canada, for example, it has a Canada, we say, okay, well, we're going to do, you know, mining in Canada, and it's going to be more responsible because it's in Canada. I think that's hardly true, because it's a Canadian company that tried to, I believe, flood a Romanian town with arsenic, so it could mine gold from a nearby mountain. It's a Canadian company that rewrote Bolivia's

mining code so that like there would, they could reduce royalties paid to like, you know, the local government to like less than 4% of what they ought to have been. You know, I mean, it's the idea that these are going to be more responsible just for being in the global north is, you know, on its face absurd. But could you talk a little bit more about like, what people's fantasy of onshore mining is and how that's sort of created by the industry itself? Yeah, I think that the like apotheosis of how absurd this discourse is, but and also like the real world implications of it, is this idea that not only is our global north based mining companies like more, quote unquote, responsible than like Chinese companies or companies in the global

south, and also that like operations based in the global north like mining in global north is like it's so fat, you know, just like prima facie, sorry, wrong one, prima facie, like more responsible than mining elsewhere in the world, right? So, so that's like one version, but like the worst version of this discourse and the Canadian stuff reminded me of it, the Canadian mining companies are very good at this, is that mining companies, the companies that pull gold, copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, everything out of the ground to make a variety of technologies, but including the quote green technologies, that mining companies are climate saviors. They have been like working on this discourse for a while. It started, I think,

and don't I don't worry, I will get to what mining is actually like, but I just want to I just want to layer on this one other piece. So, you know, for a long time, and I studied this in Latin America for like over a decade now, mining companies have had confrontations with local communities and movements. And in those confrontations, they have tried to kind of like play up their responsible community, environmental, blah, blah, blah, like clean water, like, like sort of bonafides, they have said, like, we're good for the environment, we're good for the community, we're good for the local. So at the local level, they've been working at this kind of corporate social responsibility discourse for a long time. But what's happening now that is interesting is

that they are projecting this like what well beyond the local community in policy circles, you know, it with broader publics and saying like, because green technologies like electric vehicles, lithium batteries, solar panels, etc. Because all of those technologies begin with mining, that means mining is good for saving the planet and mining companies are climate saviors. And then this gets very twisted, because this framing is extremely productive for them, and allows them not only to frame themselves as like good for the environment and good for climate change, because they're going to produce the EV or there, you know, they're part of producing the EV. But they also then get to frame protesters against lithium against copper against all of

these mines as bottlenecks. And this is the literal language used. And also, if I can jump in now, not just as bottlenecks, but also as threats to the national security now, because they're standing in the way of transitioning away from fossil fuels that are, you know, coming from elsewhere. Yep. And I have an academic article I'm working on now where I call this the security sustainability nexus, this idea that like somehow security and sustainability are the same thing. And anyone that opposes either of them, right, is like, is like not standing in the way to climate action, but national security. It's a very productive set of discourses. So again, like leftists just be on alert for it. But let's, let's talk a little bit about what mining is

actually like, and how it maybe would or wouldn't change if it's expanded in the global north. So mining is, you know, I think it's safe to say, one of the most one of the top like three, if we wanted to rank them most destructive economic sectors in the world. And it's hard to rank because fossil fuels, which is kind of its own sector overlaps with mining, right? Fossil fuel extraction is a form of mining. This is clear with coal, but we could apply this to, you know, any, any type of fossil fuel extraction is a form of mining. So, you know, we might want to single out fossil fuels as being number one, most destructive because local impacts plus planetary warming, but any other type of mining is also up there as the most destructive. And it is,

I mean, I just encourage listeners to go on Google images and look at what a modern contemporary large scale mining operation looks like. And, you know, you're not going to necessarily see pictures of like destroyed wildlife or whatever, because what you're going to see is a place that has been totally converted into a mine. And so all evidence of like natural habitat or human communities that might have resided there previously is kind of wiped away. And instead, there are pits that are hundreds of kilometers wide. I mean, they're just, they're hard. I've seen one of the largest copper mines in the world in Chile that she could come out to mine. I think it's the largest open pit copper mine, or it's number one or two. Anyway, and it's like, you

can't even see it all at once. It's hard to describe. Like I was standing on the precipice of it with like an on an official tour. And it's like just too big to take in all at once. And the trucks, that move material in and out are too big to even describe. They're just like so much bigger than normal trucks, right? So just to get, so what it does is it massively displaces habitats, communities, in order to like dig enormous holes in the earth that expose all sorts of materials that are normally subsurface to the air, which results in all sorts of like weird oxidation and acidification and all sorts of strange processes that can contaminate soil and water. In addition, that all sorts of chemicals and chemical agents and reagents are used to mine,

but also to process and refine, which further contaminate soil and water. In addition, that there are many instances in which entire towns or villages are forced to move and relocate. So they're dispossessed of their land and their former livelihoods. And then we could just go down the list because there's so many impacts. And I also want to just say, because in addition to all these like biodiversity, local livelihood, community, water and soil and air contamination, what we might call localized impacts, there's also climate change impacts, right? Because, and I want to underscore this because of this idea that mining companies are going to save us from climate change. All of this runs on fossil fuels, right? If you go to a mine site, you will just notice

tons of generators, tons of trucks, tons of diggers, like what are those run on? Some of them are converting their operations to be renewable, which is kind of an amazing, just let's not even go there because like whatever, the idea that that makes it like impact free is crazy. Like even if this was all done on renewable energy, it would still be bad because of the scale and just like the devastating effects of mining. But for now, it's also runs on fossil fuels. So actually, the mining sector is itself like an important contributor to global warming. And so this is what mining looks like. And then layered on top of all of this is like the additional injustice, which is that the places where mining tends to occur, not exclusively, but like overall and in a

pattern, are places that are what we might call sacrifice zones, that's language that activists use, right? They are places that are already marginalized, often they're places where indigenous people live or where other peasant communities live that are marginalized from political and economic power in the world and in the countries where they reside. And so they are kind of sacrificed. So there's this total inequality between where the resources are mined and then like through those complex supply chains that we talked about earlier, where those commodities ultimately end up and who actually benefits from them, uses them, consumes them and profits from them. Like there's an inverse relationship almost between whether you are affected by the extractive

frontiers of technological production and whether you benefit from that technological production, either because you consume it because you own the Tesla or because you're Tesla and you profit from it, right? And so we have to just keep that in mind. And that is what it looks like now. And for good reason, and it's obvious and also but important and inspiring that this is the case, there are tons of really valiant and militant anti-extractive movements around the world, including on the frontiers of green tech, right? So including around lithium and copper and cobalt and nickel that have resisted the expansion of this frontier. And despite the extreme asymmetry between those marginalized communities and their movements and these multinational firms and the

governments that are behind them, despite that asymmetry is such a critical choke point. Like if a community can blockade with their bodies or with their placards, with whatever they use, a mine, they can force that company to the negotiating table or they can just stall it or sometimes best case scenario actually is that they scare off investors. So investors just deem this too risky, the project is abandoned and the community wins that way. So I do want to emphasize that there's a David and Goliath piece here. It's not all just about elite designs. It's also that there's real grassroots resistance at these frontiers. So I'll pause for a second. I want to just sort of let that sink in and then we can talk about like, how would on-shoring change this

picture? Would it change this picture or not? That's the question that I tried to address in the piece, but I think knowing like the status quo anti is important. And so I think to come just to the real nub of what we're talking about here, we've talked about sort of the way that the extractive industries are linked with imperialism, the way they're linked itself with climate change, the way that it's sort of almost like a three-card Monty, where you think, oh, we're taking the sort of the fossil fuels out of the supply chain, but actually no, we're just putting them somewhere else less visible. How does on-shoring sort of propose to change that? Let's get to the real sort of nub of the issue. Yep. So a couple of key things. On-shoring is not, underscore is not,

picking up extractive operations, the lithium mining in Chile, the copper mining in Chile and Peru, the nickel mining in Indonesia and Philippines, at Russia, the cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. So these are some primary like exporters and exporters of these minerals currently, right? So it's not going to literally pick up those operations and like physically trot them over to the global north. Those operations will continue, they will expand. Every single existing extractive frontier in the global south, especially those related to the energy transition, are expanding, right? Like those governments are being pressured by firms to give them more land to extract, right? So the expansion of global south not

only continues, but it increases, it intensifies. I want to just flag that because this is not about reducing extraction and it's not about literally relocating it. It can feel that way, but it's not. Okay. What is it then? What it is is the extraction of the global south continues, all the inequalities and injustices that attend to that continue. They're only changed through resistant grassroots resistance and progressive policymakers there. But what happens in the global north is that new extractive operations set up shop. And how can we have like just more? Well, because I mean, this might seem obvious, but just again, it's like worth stating the demand pie, like the overall demand projections for these minerals, especially again, the ones

related to the Teslas, to the solar panels, to the energy transition stuff is growing, like orders of magnitude, hard to keep in your brain, some of these figures. The International Energy Agency predicts a 4200, that's 4200 percentage increase in lithium demand between 2020 and 2040. They wrote that in 2020. I'm sure that they'd actually go up with that prediction at this point because lithium demand is like unprecedented through the roof, the prices are through the roof, the share prices are going up, it's total boom times. So in a boom, more and more projects are brought online, our finance are invested in, are permitted in order to sell to this growing market. And so you can have more in the global south and new and more in the global north,

and there's plenty of demand to kind of stop it up. So I wanted to clarify that. So we have more total planetary mining is the end is the sort of upshot here. And then there's a second question. So we know that mining in the global north doesn't mean less injustice in the global south, it just means injustice in the global south, plus new injustices elsewhere, closer to home. And we also know that, as I mentioned earlier, that the way that this on-shoring is achieved is by giveaways to corporations. So we also know that it doesn't mean that progressive things aren't necessarily happening in the global north. And then let's go to literal on-shoring in the global north. So we know how it happens, we know it doesn't make it

better in the global south. But is it maybe better than in the global south? Meaning, even if mining continues to pay us elsewhere, is the mining that happens in the global north and the supply chains that that is feedstock for more responsible, more environmentally rigorous, more ethical even, right, fewer human rights violations. Can we expect that of mining in the US, Canada, UK, and Europe? That's the argument. I don't want to say that there's no difference between mining in the global north and south. I think one thing that could be said, and this just shows you how low the bar is, is that probably more people will be, would be killed in the global south versus global north in relation to mining. And what I mean is exactly

as literal as it sounds, like Latin America is the number one place in the world where land and water defenders are killed, either by governments, by paramilitary and security things, by the private corporations themselves, by organized crime that is paid by the extractive industries, by whatever assailant. Number one place in the world, Latin America for people that are resisting extractive projects to be killed. I don't want to downplay the carceral state in the US, which kills plenty of people, but I don't foresee quite as much killing within the US with these onshore mining operations. But I would say just about any other downside of mining will be reproduced in the global north, right? And in fact, I took a really close look,

because I was open on this question, like I try to be a materialist, I try to be an empiricist, like I want to look at what's actually happening before jumping to conclusions. I was ready to, I was open to believing, I'll put it this way, that mining regulations and the environmental regulations related to mining are better in the US and Europe and UK than in Latin America, Africa, South Asia, right? I was open to that. The more I looked, the more I was not convinced. I don't, again, I don't want to make too broad a statement. I'm sure that there are some better regulations, better enforcement. There's certainly more state capacity and money to enforce these things. And there's less asymmetry between corporations and the state compared to the

global south. But the regulations are not as good as one might like. And I'll just give like just two examples. In the US, the law that regulates mining that happens on public land, which is just a side note, interesting, a lot of mining happens on public land in the US, federally owned land. The law that regulates that, and so that regulates a lot of these new lithium projects that are coming online, dates to 1872, which should ring two bells. One bell should say, that's a really old law, it's probably not adequate to contemporary mining, like large scale mining is totally different than like late 19th century mining was. But the other bell that it should ring, I'm going to pause myself. So the second bell it should ring is that 1872 was like

the moment of like one of the like high points of like genocide against indigenous people and a westward expansion in the US, right? So our mining law is like part and parcel of settler colonialism in the US, right? It is not only not designed to protect communities from the ravishes of mining companies, it is also designed to encourage mining as a form of territorial expansion. So in your article, it concludes like with what is to be done, right? And in addition to like some, in addition to sort of some things that are sort of, I think obvious from what we were discussing, right? Like how we said earlier, it's like, well, this is what's needed to save the world if we also want to hold like car culture, for example, constant, right? That you know,

you say in your article, it's like we have to, you have to push for a politics of say mass transit, car free cities and so on. But also that, you know, the fight for global justice in this respect is at the same time a fight for indigenous people's rights. So this is enforced right to community consent. And again, as a Canadian, I'd be like, boy, do Canada love violating that. But indigenous people's rights to prior consultation and consent, but also moratoriums on on sort of sensitive, mining and sensitive ecosystems as well, right? And that these things sort of, it's a complex problem with complex causes. And so the solution is complex, you wouldn't immediately think that it's both sort of strengthened sort of rights and support and

solidarity with indigenous land defenders would be a, would be one of the tools in a tool kit that also has more mass transit. But it absolutely from what your article says is, and I find that to be very convincing. Yeah, I think, you know, given especially the theme of this podcast, like the main takeaway is that there isn't a technical or just purely technological solution to this problem, right? It's not like we can just mine better. We also have to mine less, mine in different places and think about the, the role of mining in broader supply chains, right? I am all for coming up with technologies at both ends of the supply chain that are less, you know, environmentally intensive, right? Like there surely are somewhat better ways to

mine things, right? And better ways to regulate that mining, right? And there also are like battery designs and car designs that need fewer resources, right? So I don't want to say I don't care about the tech stuff or the engineering stuff, but I think at its heart, this is a political economy problem, not, not a technologically narrowly understood problem. And what that means is, is two things. The only way to get better outcomes is for the people being harmed, the communities at various parts of the supply chain, to have more power to resist that harm and to transform it into something better for them. And also that everything's connected, right? So what drives so much mining is not some like exotic feature of global South landscapes. It is

the fact that commodity resource frontiers are like endogenous. They're like internal to the overall mode of production and consumption, right? So what happens upstream in the language of supply chains, like all the way at the attractive node is really driven by what happens downstream. Like what kind of transportation system, what kind of energy system, what kind of energy transition is being designed by corporations and policymakers. And that reverberates all the way back to the mines in Chile and elsewhere, right? And so I think in order to understand what drives mining and its harms, we have to have a supply chain and a sort of global capitalism view, which then, of course, in terms of our solutions means it's not a tech fix. It's about changing

power relations everywhere that, you know, there's leverage, right, to do so. And also about a deeper rethinking about like how, what kind of energy transition and knowing that there's more than one way to transition to renewable energy. And one way is to preserve everything about the status quo and swap in solar for oil. And the other way is to take this as a critical juncture and an opportunity to change much more about the way that we in the global north live, so that it's less resource intensive. Absolutely. I think that's as good a place as any to call it. Thea, I want to say thank you so very much for coming and hanging out with me today. It was really a pleasure. All right. Back to me in the studio later. Wow, that was so

interesting. I learned a lot about mining. Great stuff. Yeah, Milo and Alice, you guys stay pretty quiet for that. I didn't I didn't want to like interrupt really. I just had nothing to add. No, no, you really covered everything I would have said so perfectly that it would have felt I learned a lot about mining. I know a lot about I assume it's non specific. Yeah, absolutely. The extraction really. That's right. Yeah, we're going to we're going to talk a little bit. I read an article. I think we need a little bit of a little bit of a palate cleanser. Oh, after that interview, I mean, we got into such detail that like really, I think we do going to take a hell of a sore back. This is basically an article about a classic guy,

a classic type of guy, a man called Regency fellow, a man called Robert McGinnis, who was the owner of various like sort of children's homes and sort of school like schools specifically for children excluded from mainstream education. British guy, owner of a children's home. Interesting. Yeah, I'm getting a sense of the kind of vibe of this guy. My fucking like inland empire thing is going off here. Okay, it's not you've not seen this article. No, give me your spidey sense. We have to absolutely have to take that out. What I would suggest, what I would suggest is cut that into perfect silence or like some kind of sting and then just to you going, we have to

take that out. Yeah, perfect. So no, this is from a this is a guardian article. And again, we're reading the article more to think about the content of the article, not to make fun of the article itself. Revealed money for educating excluded children in Bolton funded bar owners social life. Okay, I thought this was going to go in a different direction, but instead it's just regular ordinary corruption allegedly. Yeah, is he like is he like a sex parties guy? Yeah, no, no, no, no. He's like bar owner in Bolton. I'm going to show you what he spent the money on. Is there a jacuzzi at this bar? And then you can tell me what it is. You can tell me what kind of guy you think he is. So basically the owner of it. So the children's home has been

shut down for serious and widespread failure now, but he spent thousands and thousands of pounds borrowing from the charity. That was like, because how it works in Britain for Americans, right, is that if there are kids who've been expelled from school, right, they still have to be educated. So they end up going to special schools, and the council pays huge amounts of money to those special schools per place. Right. So it's actually very, very lucrative. This was slightly an improvement on our previous system of putting them in prison. That's right. Oh, yeah. So they spent thousands intended for educating marginalized children instead on drinking foreign trips and his pub business, which later failed. I know what type of guy this is now. Yeah, Alice

what? Legend. 100%. He's a fucking ledge. He's a boozy ledge. Sorry, how was this man not elected as a Tory MP in 2019? There is 100% a file photo of this man stood on top of a bus stop mooning the police. No doubt in my mind. The picture in the article is of him just sitting in a Lamborghini with the door open, wearing a white shirt and light jeans. Yes. Yes. Do we have the shoes in there too? What's the shoe situation here? I'm feeling loafers, you know? I don't think we saw the shoes. I'm feeling very shiny, very pointy loafers with the jeans, but I, you know, that's what I imagine if he's a barefoot guy. You can absolutely, you can absolutely like just project your own either very pointy or very square toed shoes onto

Robert. Yeah. No, the Essex man likes a like a tassel loafer like a Russell and Bromley, no sock, crucially no. I mean, it wouldn't be from Russell and Bromley. It would be from a shittier store than that, but like in that vein between 2015 and 2021, one and a half million pounds was paid by two local authorities to a community interest company run by Robert McGinnis to provide vocational training to children from ages nine to nine to from years nine to 11, which is ages 14 to 16. Profits from the CIC should, like by law, have benefited the community. Instead, McGinnis, a Lamborghini driving plasterer turned failed public landlord. Lamborghini driving plasterer. That's a hell of a corporate car for a plasterer, isn't it?

Loaned his bar business a hundred thousand pounds in the CIC, which now that it's gone to liquidation, it's unlikely to pay back. Okay. So I know we're going to do an episode about the charity sector at some point, but I find it so funny that like we have regulations for how you can spend money as a charity and then we just don't enforce them at all. You can just do what you want with it. And then the charity commissioners just like, oh, I'll go on then. Yeah, and now I assume this chap is to be trusted. In this case, it had to be the press investigating it and then several local authorities taking it on their on themselves to look into it. Great. So he also spent thousands from the CIC bank account on his own social life,

including trips to Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Thailand. No, like probably like going to like, like, I'll be Thailand. I think probably going to like CoPP or CoSemWe or whatever, like going to a full moon party. Yeah, sure. So that's definitely the impression we all just formed just now. What I love about this kind of guy is that they're so dumb. They're smart because they do stuff that's so stupid. Like just like, I'm just going to buy myself a Lamborghini out of this charity bank account. And like, literally the people who order charities like, well, no one could possibly be that stupid. This must be above board somehow. It must be for the kids. He's bought all of the kids

a little Lamborghini. Like I genuinely right. I think this is a point of divergence that we have with the United States. And I've talked about my theory of like American grifters and scammers where I love the American guy who like gets busted by the kind of law enforcement that people forget that they have. Like they get a no knock rate. The fishing game. Exactly. We don't have any of those. Like none of our regulators are like technically cops and the cops don't give a shit. So my TV license. Yes. So that's my position is every little thing like TV licensing or charity regulation or whatever. Just arm all of those guys, please. I think this would work out very differently for this guy. So here's some of the itemized things he spent money on.

Give Javelin stuff. Like a defensive anti-tank weapon. Yeah, absolutely. So you get hit with one of those. You're fucking improving the standard of your school. You know what I'm talking about? More than 2000 pounds went on Airbnb stays in a single year and almost 5000 was spent on pub furniture. 182 pounds, 78 pence. To be fair, that was quite small amounts of money for the things that was so that's what makes it so funny. Yeah, which is like a total of 182 pounds, 78 pence was spent in a branch of spa in Praia de Luiz, Portugal. Awesome. By buying tops, a shovel. So powerful this kind of guy brain that they're on a holiday in Portugal and they're like, time to go to the spa. Absolutely. Pick up some groceries.

Do some frauds at the spa. Well, also, isn't that where Madeline McCann went? That is what I was alluding to. Yes. Yeah. Oh, I see. Yes. Okay. He's got to buy a big sack. Just shy of 280 pounds was spent in 2019 in a single artist in Bakery in Manchester. Oh, does he basically just had the cherry? It was just like, I'm going to pop round to spa. Won't I pick up? Pick up some sausages for the barbecue. Absolutely. Yeah, I was doing a barbecue for the kids in Praia de Luiz. Yeah. We drove to Portugal in my Lamborghini one at a time. We're doing a Madeline McCann vigil. What's your problem with remembering Madeline McCann?

Okay. What's the issue there? I think to be honest, your own callousness is showing in the tone of this investigation. I badly want this guy to brazen this out in exactly this way. You know, you can't prove beyond reasonable doubt that I wasn't buying those arses and donuts for a child that I just had with me. Those kids loved the Lamborghini rides. Okay. Improved their day. No end. The Guardian has seen evidence that the CIC's bank account was regularly used to pay staff and contractors working on the renovation and running of a pub called The Printer's Apprentice, a bar restaurant in York City Centre. It opened in February 2020, a month for the first lockdown,

and went into liquidation later that year, owing almost half a million pounds. That's what's going to really piss off the people of Bolton is that all of this money was being funneled into Yorkshire. Now that's a real sectarian device. But like just the idea that like he's just spent 4,600 pounds in pubs as well, just on this car, just getting around it. It's got to learn how to drink a night. Go buy a child a pint of Stella. No, it's only cider that you can buy them. Tenants if they're feeling fruit. You can buy them cider. That's all. But also, free payments from the CIC account included 680 pounds for a pub employee who

successfully took McGinnis to an employment tribunal for over 7,000 pounds in unpaid wages. And he paid back a tenth of that. That's the economy. But then he paid the legal advisor 5,000 pounds to help him avoid also out of the Lamborghini. Yeah, absolutely. So what were the kids doing? Were they just sitting in like a porter cabin in total silence or what? More or less. Well, this guy does like donuts around them in a Lamborghini. He's like, if you can learn how to, you know, hoodwink a local authority out of money for educating you, then maybe you could get a job in the Lamborghini donut business. Yeah. When dumb people get involved with the law,

it's always so fun. That reminded me of, I used to date a girl who's a divorce lawyer, and she told me a story about a couple who were getting divorced. And the total value of their cumulative assets that they were trying to divide and argue over in court was about 2 million pounds, and they managed to spend a million pounds on getting divorced. Oh my God. Just because they were arguing so much, and it's like, this is like rich people brainworms. So basically what happens, right, is he tried to open a school called Stanley House, which was going to charge like up to 40,000 pounds to local authorities per year to educate kids expelled from mainstream education. That's a significant amount of money, no less.

Like that's some serious private school money. But the thing is the council pays it, because anything that's government procurement always is like incredibly inflated. So it's a yeah. It never opened after inspectors found numerous problems, including an electricity substation easily accessible to children and no outside space. Got to learn a bit about electricity, isn't it? It's called physics, mate. Yeah, this is also a large hole in the wall left by Javelin. Off-stead decline to comment on this. Well, apparently, what you do with one of these, right, is you just never register it

with off-stead, but you charge the council anyway. So it's a school, but not if anyone's asking. So you roll up to the gates of this and you're like, is this a school? And a guy's like, who's asking? Depends. The Vedeve column has come under attack from Ukrainian special off-stead. They've been given a needs improvement rating. I mean, Spetsnaz is kind of like an off-stead formation too, linguistically. Right. Yeah. One of those initialisms. Yeah, absolutely. But the other thing that's really funny is that...

Yeah, the spice Nazis. He set up a company with his dad called Drink Me Dry Limited to run the pub. Suck Me Dry Limited. God, suck me off limited to run the pub. Gettingadixuck.com. Why was it called this? Because these are legends. This is why.

I mean, okay, but why does he name his whole company? Suck This Base Dry Limited. Adult baby burping. Well, the thing is, it's because... So he creates these pub companies. And this is just classic stupid guy stuff that's like, as you say, sort of spins around again and becomes sort of, you know, instrumentally smart. Or it's like the liquidator for Drink Me Dry, the company that owned the printer's apprentice, a bar restaurant in York that failed immediately.

They drank at Dry Finance. Oh, the community, the foundation, 100,000 pounds. But then also to 50,000 pounds to AMG Properties Limited, which is run by his parents. Just great. Awesome. It's the guy who was a guy, just pure parasiteism on every respect. No zero chance that they've named that AMG Properties after the souped up Mercedes, which is like a powerful this type of guy energy. Oh, absolutely.

It's like, yeah, yeah, I've spar as the McLaren of supermarkets, and it's the only place that I shop at. That's right. Exactly. Yeah, I just thought this is just such a perfect encapsulation of a certain kind of just British fucking weasel. And also just like British local government who are like, time to give this guy money seems trustworthy.

None of them have any money and they give all of the money they do have away to this guy. There's no way that you meet this guy and are A, like this man has any interest in educating children or are B, like this man seems competent and trustworthy. Like zero chance. Like you would have to be the biggest mark of all time, which unfortunately describes almost everyone who works in local government. Yeah. So I mean, you know what?

They they all let's you know, they all can they can just go on rides in the Lamborghini together. Fuck it. Why not? Hmm. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is this is the thing we all missed a trick.

We all should have been Lamborghini fraudsters. Yeah, that's right. That's that's who this country is by and for. And yeah, everybody else. We're putting up a Lamborghini driving school for disadvantaged kids. I'm going to need eight million pounds for the Lamborghinis. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

All right. All right. I think that's that's about it for today. Hope you're all I hope you're all I'm going to take that. You learned a lot about mining. Absolutely. When I was by my two sort of, you know, I'm a Cretanist co-host, finally shut up and let me just have a serious conversation.

Cretanist co-host. One of us only lies and the other one not only tells truths. That's right. I'm not from Crete. Yeah. I'm also not from Crete. That's right. Yeah.

Oh, God damn it. I hate being in a riddle. Never put me in a riddle. So thank you for listening. Don't forget we have a Patreon. It is a classic $5 a month for a second episode every week. These two don't know yet, but I've planned a real a real humdinger for next for this week's bonus episode.

So do check that out. Anyway, I'm going to be interviewing the As of Battalion about their new role investigating British schools. That's right. That's right. So see you in a few days. The As of Stead Battalion. There we go.

You got, you got there by the, you squeaked it in by the end of the episode. You figured it out. Yeah. Yeah. I ain't got an episode title. Yeah. There you go. All right.

All right. Bye everybody. Bye. Bye. Fuck, I want an off-stead special forces patch now.