A Milton Keynes of the Mud feat. Gareth Dennis

Summary

TRASHFUTURE: "A Milton Keynes of the Mud" feat. Gareth Dennis

Release Date: May 6, 2026
Main Theme:
A satirical and critical exploration of the surreally dystopian proposal to build a massive new privately-run "forest city" outside Cambridge, blending AI-buzzword urbanism, British land speculation, and the ongoing dysfunctions of late-capitalist society. The episode also examines voter behavior, right-wing media, and the psychic toll of a decaying political system, all viewed through the show's signature blend of absurdist humor, critique, and exasperated wit.

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1. Episode Overview

This episode centers around a proposal to create "Forest City One," a city of up to a million people in Cambridgeshire, posited as Britain's answer to Silicon Valley billionaire new town fantasies like NEOM or Solano County's California Forever. The hosts, joined by returning guest Gareth Dennis, dissect the financial, political, environmental, and cultural absurdities of this scheme. Alongside, the team riff on recent news, survey the "median" reform voter, and pull apart Britain’s increasingly weird collective malaise.

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2. Key Discussion Points & Insights

A. Opening & Climate Dystopia Jokes (00:16–03:33)

• Climate change gallows humor: The episode opens with the gang reflecting on the surreal advent of Irish (and increasingly northern) wine industries as a sign of accelerating climate change and the larger destabilization of normalcy in Europe.

  "My whole body just kind of revolted at that idea that, like, it's too wet, it's too cold. You can't do that. But no, it turns out climate is doing it..." – Zach (00:24)

• Recurring motif: Unsettling future shocks manifesting in everyday phenomena.

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B. AI Podcasting Satire & Media Critique (04:14–10:18)

• Amazon’s new AI podcast feature: The panel lampoons Amazon moving into autogenerated podcasts about their product range, highlighting the ongoing commodification and dehumanization of media in late capitalism, as well as the rise of "AI hosts" with live chat features.

  "Instead of having to read product descriptions and read reviews and stuff, they will use that information to automatically generate a multi-M podcast about the Etguds USB C charger." – Riley (05:46)

  "This has a join the chat feature where the AI hosts take questions live. That’s my thing. I do that with rail natter. Fuck off, Amazon. That’s my thing." – Gareth Dennis (07:34)

• Meta humor: Self-deprecating jokes about the commodification of their own podcasting niche.

• Escalating to the absurd: The crew indulgesi n an extended bit about "insole podcasts" and the kind of distinctly British pathologies of niche, product-driven content, riffing on parasociality and influencer excess.

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C. The British Median Voter & Media Narratives (11:08–31:35)

• Breakdown of FT voter interviews: The hosts analyze Financial Times profiles of "reform" (right-populist) voters; nearly all are older, retired, and comfortably off, yet have grievances centered on immigration, benefits, and a sense of cultural dispossession.

  "All of these people, crucially, are retired or close to retirement age." – Riley (12:36)

  "Being retired makes you a worker in the same way that having been working class once makes you working class now." – Zach (12:51)

• Media-induced malaise and confusion: The crew observes how the right-wing press and TV have systematically sown confusion, fear, and a "spite voter" mentality among Boomers and pensioners.

  "It's kind of that spite voter concept... but this guy is pissing off the people I hate... and let's be real, it's very easy to hate British politicians, particularly in the Labor Party right now." – Shiv Malik (23:07)

• Contradictory ideology: Many self-styled "fed up" voters simultaneously want renationalization, public housing, and climate action—alongside virulently anti-immigrant policies. The hosts see this as both a product of a broken info environment and a symptom of left/center political failure to offer any consistent narrative.

  "Anyone who thinks that the median voter has a coherent political ideology, I have a bridge to sell you. They absolutely don't." – Riley (24:03)

• Psychic damage of media environment: The conversation underscores the frustration of trying to reason with an electorate largely inoculated against facts by years of propaganda and isolation.

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D. The Forest City 1 Proposal – Dystopian Urbanism (31:35–58:05)

i. Forest City One Basics (31:53–34:37)

• Urbanist vaporware: Gareth Dennis introduces "Forest City One," pitched as a futuristic, green, AI-driven Milton Keynes outside Cambridge, but conceived as a private "special economic zone" development with up to a million residents.

  “It’s called Forest City One. It’s a proposed privately led new city on up to 45,000 acres of rural land east of Cambridge... with up to 400,000 homes and potentially 1 million people.” – Gareth Dennis (33:11)

• Core critique: Unlike state-founded new towns, this proposal is entirely speculative and extractive—intended to privatize land at gigantic scale, lock out local democracy, and enforce "merit-based" residency.

ii. Design Absurdities & Tunnel Fetishism (34:37–36:38)

• AI-generated slop & magical thinking: The project borrows aesthetics and logic from Silicon Valley render fantasies and Saudi NEOM—the proposal is heavy on visualizations, tech talk, and hollow promises about trams, modular wooden buildings, "Georgism," etc.

  “My favorite element ... they're going to have modular wooden buildings. They're going to have a strange covenant for buying and selling houses. There's an element of Georgism for some reason.” – Riley (34:56)

• Tunnels in the mud: Perhaps most absurdly, Forest City One borrows the Boring Company trope of putting all cars in deep underground tunnels—despite being planned atop some of Britain’s wettest, least geologically stable land.

  “It’s a part of the country that floods every, like five minutes ... You're gonna bore tunnels through, like, wet mud and then go like, drive yourself driving car through the mud caverns. And if you die, you will be entombed in the bog.” – Zach (35:57)

iii. Governance & Social Engineering (41:38–49:50)

• Private city as grift: The development would be run by a corporation (Albion City Development Corporation, "ACDC"), led by tech/crypto/AI washout types, with connections to ex-Tories and technocratic philanthropists.

  “Crucially, Looking for Growth seems to have pivoted away from … planning reform, and into the world of doing viral videos of them clearing graffiti… because they can’t leave London behind. It looms too large in their imagination.” – Zach (44:25)

• Entry by "merit": Only 30% of homes would be awarded by "merit," 40% to employees of big commercial tenants, etc., equating, as the hosts note, to a revival of Quaker-like paternalism (or feudal barony via tech). Residential stability, democratic rights, and basic services are all at the discretion of the city’s corporate owners.

  “For merit selection, we're looking to fill the city with Britain's most ambitious families." – Riley (47:26)

iv. The Pointless, Sinister Pointlessness (49:50–58:05)

• Infrastructural farce: Gareth highlights the unsolvable problems: water, sewage, transport—all in a fenland swamp with no established infrastructure and no political accountability. Just grift and land speculation.

  "If you have a city of a million people, they drink water and poop. Where is that infrastructure coming from again? In the swamp. What are you doing here?" – Gareth Dennis (50:29)

• Distraction from real crisis: The need for actual public planning and use of existing land, not speculative new towns, is repeatedly emphasized. The "housing crisis" is overstated to suit developer needs—what's needed is densification and the political will to use brown/greyfield sites.

  “Building new towns and cities is totally unnecessary when we have enormous volumes of grey and brownfield land… Already have the infrastructure, already have the trains, already have the sewage…” – Gareth Dennis (54:32)

• Final assessment: The project, like many contemporary UK policy initiatives, is best understood as optics-driven vaporware and a symptom of an exhausted, desperate, and principle-free establishment.

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3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "My whole body just kind of revolted at that idea [of Irish wine]… it's too wet, it's too cold. You can't do that. But no, it turns out climate is doing it..." — Zach (00:22)
• "It's like no, you don't want to name your city after an F-Zero level. The cities in F-Zero all look dystopian…" — Shiv Malik (33:37)
• "They will have cars. They will just be underground. Yes. Going through tunnels. Boring Company style." — Riley (35:28)
• "You start out with Milton Keynes of the mind and you end pretty quickly at die in a bog, drown in mud inside a Tesla." — Zach (36:31)
• "Anyone who thinks that the median viewer the median person, the median voter has a coherent political ideology, I have a bridge to sell you. They absolutely don't." — Riley (24:03)
• "It’s all of these guys who are going to move out to a city in some mud flats to either die or prove a very important point." — Zach (42:55)
• "If you have a city of a million people, they drink water and poop. Where is that infrastructure coming from again? In the swamp. What are you doing here?" — Gareth Dennis (50:29)
• "Even this comes up against the fundamentals of Starmerism, which is, we want growth, but we refuse to build anything." – Gareth Dennis (57:32)

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4. Important Segments & Timestamps

• Climate change & Irish wine: 00:16–03:33
• Amazon's AI podcast feature satire: 04:14–10:18
• Median reform voter discussion: 11:08–31:35
  • Contradiction of political views: 24:03–29:22
• Forest City One segment (main subject): 31:35–58:05
  • Description, satire, and critique of the project: 31:53–36:31
  • Neo-feudal governance and "merit" system: 41:38–49:50
  • Infrastructure impossibility: 49:50–54:08
  • Political implications and critique: 54:08–57:43

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5. Tone and Style

• Language: Irreverent, sharp, densely referential; alternately sarcastic, exasperated, and bleakly funny.
• Approach: Blends satirical banter, informed critique, and affectionate in-jokes about UK urbanism, media, and politics.
• Atmosphere: A sense of collective exhaustion at British society’s inability to meaningfully address its problems—a kind of dark farce.

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6. Final Thoughts

The episode lampoons the UK's penchant for "solutions" in the mold of tech dystopia and land speculation, ultimately exposing Forest City One as a new generation of privatised, AI-washed folly—a "Milton Keynes of the mud." The hosts mourn the erosion of a functional public sphere and mock the increasingly bizarre psychic coping mechanisms of an anxious, confused voting public. As ever, Trashfuture simultaneously makes you laugh, and wince.

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Featured Guests

• Gareth Dennis: Infrastructure and rail expert, brings urbanist technical depth and withering analysis to the segment on Forest City One.

Key reference points/ further reading:

• The "California Forever"/Solano County new city plan
• UK housing "crisis" politics
• NEOM, Prospera, and global new city privatopia projects

For listeners:
Even if you haven’t followed every absurd UK infrastructure announcement or Silicon Valley utopian grift, this episode delivers a caustic, funny, and illuminating window into why Britain keeps ending up here—and what’s at stake if we don't start asking better questions before giving away another million acres of mud.

Transcript

[Riley]

November recently has discovered what I would say is some disconcerting news.

[Zach]

Yeah, basically, I've. I've had a sort of a miniature climate shock in the most bourgeois possible way, because I'm going to Ireland and I was told, oh, hey, Ireland has a wine industry now. And I just.

[Riley]

Shouldn't.

[Zach]

My whole body just kind of revolted at that idea that, like, it's too wet, it's too cold. You can't do that. But no, it turns out climate is doing it, and it's getting nice and temperate or temperate enough for sort of like whatever freak German sort of like hybridization grapes they want to use. And now you can get a bottle of wine made in Ireland.

[Riley]

Okay, look, English was bad news, right? I mean, English tends to be bad news when it shows up. But, like, wine production has to stop moving north.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah.

[Zach]

I'm paddling out into the. Into the ocean with a. Like, a thing of ice cubes to try and collapse the AMOC current immediately. I mean, the thing is, right, it's weird enough. I think it's enough of a kind of future shock thing to be able to get, like, an Irish Riesling. Right. Weirder still that it's German. I think when I was told this, I did say, you know, farmers are we whose wines are pledged to Rhineland, if you like that one. I have a second joke, which is the worst part about getting an Irish wine, is that it's caught.

[Riley]

Oh, come on.

[Zach]

All right, so, Joe, just put that. Just put that in the Patreon unsubscribe form anytime you like.

[Gareth Dennis]

Well done.

[Joe Reeve]

I'm looking forward to the rest of your set at the backyard comedy club.

[Zach]

Well, the other one, I. Because I mentioned this on Twitter and someone said chardonnay will come, so. Oh,

[Riley]

hi, everyone. I hope it doesn't. That takes so much more warmth. That's a really bad sign. That's a really bad sign for the world, but. Hi, everybody. Welcome to this free episode of tf. Sorry, it's a day late. There has been a bank holiday in the UK and we had the day off.

[Zach]

Yeah. Because of Karl Marx or whatever.

[Riley]

Yeah. You know that.

[Safine]

Or.

[Riley]

Or, you know, whatever. Whatever it is that we're celebrating around this time, you're encouraged to not think about it. There's just a bank holiday in early May and one in late May. They're probably for the same reason. So today we have Nate Nova Hussein, and we have returning Champion, a man who has been, I would say, driven as much as I often am. A man who has been driven Mad by a white paper of a stupid project. So much so that that he researched his own TF segment and just brought it to me. It's Gareth Dennis.

[Gareth Dennis]

Hello everyone. Yeah, I'm at the point now where I'm doing unpaid labor out of anger. Yeah, it's quite something. I look forward to getting into that.

[Riley]

It's so tf.

[Gareth Dennis]

There's guys, there's weird forms of neo fascism. It's all good. It's great. It's tremendous. The environmentalists are involved somehow. It's odd. It's odd. I look forward to getting into it.

[Riley]

Yeah, there's honestly my favorite part. Like any good community planned by tech idiots, it's full of tunnels.

[Zach]

Ooh, okay.

[Riley]

It's replete with tunnels. And when you find out where it's located, if you know your geography of the uk, you are going to laugh.

[Shiv Malik]

I suddenly had this notion of like weird crypto plant community. Guys being really into Arcade Fire because of their first album's first track being called Neighborhood Number one. Brackets, Tunnels. Yeah, I'll dig a tunnel. Yep, I will. I sure fucking will.

[Riley]

Win Butler to create planned community east of Cambridge. So there are a few things I wanted to talk about. First, one silly one, somewhat silly one quite serious and rather upsetting.

[Zach]

Our beloved jarring shift in tone, making a long awaited return to the podcast

[Riley]

and then this goofy shit we're going to close with. So the first thing. Very funny, very short. Amazon recently announced a new feature which is of course they are now competing directly with us.

[Zach]

Oh, you listen, you step into the octagon, you better get prepared to have every load bearing joint in your body obliterated by trash.

[Riley]

Future.

[Zach]

I think we can be clear about this.

[Joe Reeve]

I mean, I was going to say we are planning our own version of the Met Gala, like fairly soon.

[Shiv Malik]

Well, I mean, quite frankly, like we sometimes take a long time to get to the point, but I can't imagine we've ever been as bad as the AI generated podcasts that do 20 minutes of like just fucking endless doom looping of I don't even know what like.

[Zach]

No, these are your only options now for podcasts are us on like peptides we can't even pronounce? Or the TikTok AI voice giving you the best podcast you've ever heard about USB C to C cables.

[Shiv Malik]

I mean, I would probably listen to both.

[Zach]

You've got one podcast.

[Shiv Malik]

The real shit that's basically about. It's basically every undiagnosed and or only barely treated form of neurodivergence all in one room and then the other podcast is incredibly erudite and articulate and to the point. And it's about, I don't know, is the weird Amazon brand Weeksy better than the other one? I don't know. I can't remember. Blemtro. Whatever. Those things are weird.

[Zach]

Weirdly, I'm gonna be on both of them, but I'm gonna try and preserve a kind of firewall where I do a different kind of like, tone on the Blemtro podcast.

[Riley]

Well, what's happening is. So Amazon is introducing a new feature. This was just. This tickled me where instead of having to read product descriptions and read reviews and stuff, they will use that information to automatically generate a multi M podcast about the etguds USB C charger.

[Zach]

Oh, that's so cool.

[Riley]

Bravewear sunglasses. Stylish for men. Techno techwear House music. Bergheim.

[Zach]

Because the thing is, every product on Amazon is now a laughable and dangerous fake of something good you could get elsewhere. So this is. I mean, on its own, that's quite a good prompt for a podcast. That's quite a good thesis for a podcast. But then they're giving it to AI,

[Shiv Malik]

I guess I feel like give humans one one of those very strange accompanying images that they'll put together on some of the Amazon brand or Amazon only sales things. Like I once saw. You could buy hinges for a shelf that you can fold up. But for some reason, I guess trying to say that the shelf, the hinges were quiet. They had a photo, a stock photo of a sleeping baby with the shelf, the hinge superimposed on it said, reduce life noise.

[Gareth Dennis]

I don't like that.

[Zach]

Reduce the life noise of your baby is like, no, thank you.

[Shiv Malik]

Hemingway had six words, I have three. And it's a fucking terrible story.

[Zach]

Yeah, I mean, like the most recent thing I bought off of Amazon was like a lens filter, right. For one of my cameras. Not expensive, not high quality. I don't need it to be. But I do kind of want to hear an hour to an hour and a half of content about it. Maybe because I know what it sounds like when a human podcaster is padding to fill time. I don't know what it sounds like when Amazon's in house. AI is padding to fill time. And I'm kind of. I want to find out.

[Gareth Dennis]

I'm additionally uncomfortable because this isn't just treading on the trash future thing is that like Riley, this has. It has a join the chat feature where the AI hosts take questions live. That's my thing. I Do that with rail natter. Fuck off, Amazon. That's my thing.

[Zach]

It's lens filter natter now or it's USB C cable natter. It's whatever. We will only be coming to you through the lens of products you can buy on Amazon. And this is the only way podcasts are going to exist in the future. And in a way that's a neat kind of ending to the medium is to go back to like radio being like this program brought to you by, you know, fortified Oats or whatever is to be like, yeah, this episode of Trash Future was brought to you by the fucking Blemtro electric blanket.

[Riley]

Yeah, I just can't wait for people to start having like parasocial relationships with the version of Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart that they get to talk about. The ET Goods power adapter that bursts into flames as soon as you plug it in.

[Zach]

The rest, the rest is travel toothbrush.

[Riley]

So there's another thing I wanted to mention, which is of course the FT has recently done a profile of reform voters asking them, hey, what do you believe?

[Zach]

Oh, I'm sure it's good and normal.

[Riley]

Well, it's almost normal because these people are the most median voter that has ever lived in all of history, because they have what every median voter has. And I think this is instructive. And it's the kind of thing that will not be listened to by the sort of dead hand of whatever's left of Morgan McSweeney's inertial influence over the government. It will not occur to them because they don't want it to, because they have an agenda that they want to push and they use this person as a kind of tulpa.

[Zach]

The person. The person who could be genuinely moved by the Amazon products like podcast.

[Riley]

The person who was given AI psychosis by the Blemtro podcast.

[Zach]

The person who is like listening, genuinely sitting contentedly and listening on their commute to a podcast about insoles.

[Riley]

I'm trying. I'm actually waiting to buy a T shirt about the Etgudes Insol podcast for their lives.

[Joe Reeve]

I feel like you could actually probably make that into quite a good show.

[Riley]

Yeah, this is the thing.

[Gareth Dennis]

It's like Novo. It actually is kind of a quite a funny premise to a podcast here. It's just that they will. It will be so earnest from the. Absolutely, I will say everything you want me to say. Large language AI Amazon large language model that they'll have made. Missed that completely. But it could be quite funny to make an insult based podcast.

[Joe Reeve]

Yeah, but it's Got to be like someone who's really, really into it.

[Shiv Malik]

Feet.

[Joe Reeve]

Guys who are really into feet as a concept rather than as like a kink.

[Gareth Dennis]

Oh, right, yeah.

[Zach]

Getting radicalized in a kind of like mondegreen sort of way where you become an insole because of podcasts is like a really slight change, A really materially better one.

[Joe Reeve]

Yeah. And then there can be like a moral panic because, you know, our young men are becoming insults.

[Zach]

And you know, it would genuinely, it would genuinely be better if had like a fifth column of influencers dedicated to giving young men foot fetishes than what we have now.

[Shiv Malik]

I already have the marketing angle. The podcast is called this is Insoul Culture

[Gareth Dennis]

Work, folks. Professional at work.

[Riley]

Anyway, these are these median voters that were, that were, that were profiled by the ft.

[Joe Reeve]

They're very normal. They just like really, they're really into like feet and inside, like in souls in particular.

[Shiv Malik]

That could be the reform voters. We never know. Maybe they are desperately in need of foot based content.

[Riley]

Your average reform voter, like, as much as they believe in stopping immigration, they're exactly as likely to believe in like, I don't know, stipulating that people should wear sandals all the time so they can see their toes like they are. They are. This is a confused mishmash of just whatever has last been on their mind.

[Zach]

Yeah, I'm a single issue voter and that issue is the rabbit goo window privacy film.

[Shiv Malik]

I mean, I'm not going to say that every single one of them has the crossover. But you do know that there's more than one person who is like fully committed to barefoot is legal, who also wants to machine gun small boats. Like that person. Ex in America for sure, but certainly in Britain too. Although I feel like barefoot is legal is less, is less of a thing in Britain because it's wet all the time.

[Zach]

Well, for now, until. Until the same climate that gives us the Irish gewurz trammer has us walking around barefoot.

[Shiv Malik]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Until we have the sort of the Mediterranean climate of Bordeaux, you know, in Eastbourne or whatever. It'll be amazing though. I mean, the wines will be good.

[Riley]

Here is, here is some opinions here. So this is Mandy, by the way. A lot of them say, well, the dividing line, or at least Farage says the dividing line between reform and everyone else is that people who for a living vote for reform and everyone else, it was either like some kind of green family voting Muslim scrounger.

[Zach]

Yeah, this is the, it's your, your typical kind of echo chamber type thing where like right wingers increasingly don't believe anyone else is real or exists, but is instead. Just like immigrants and benefit scroungers in a trench coat.

[Riley]

Yeah. Well, all of these people, crucially, are retired or close to retirement age.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah. Exception of one. Yeah. I was going to say that's the key thing here is these people who are in manual might be doing manual work.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Gareth Dennis]

But they' like the manager of a manual work company that they inherited. And. And they are very close to retirement.

[Zach]

Being retired makes you a worker in the same way that having been working class once makes you working class now. Right. It's entirely a sort of cultural signifier. Being, having. Being hard working doesn't mean going to work. You can be hard working and retired. Meanwhile, if you go to work and you have pronouns, then you know, you're basically on benefits.

[Riley]

And remember, a huge amount of the people who are on benefits are also in work. And they're in work.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Anyway, we're going to go through it

[Zach]

also, by the way, just a quick check. What's the single biggest draw on the benefits budget? Is it pensions?

[Riley]

No, actually, I think it's the flag budget for councils.

[Zach]

Oh, okay. Cool.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's.

[Zach]

Sorry, I hate when I set you up for something and it turns out to be completely wrong.

[Shiv Malik]

My bad, remember? Well, that's the thing, though, because pensions aren't benefits because we worked for them. Right. That's how it works. Right.

[Riley]

Anytime that the Green Party decides to add a new line to the Progress Pride flag, it costs the country £30 billion.

[Zach]

I mean, it cost me £30 billion because every time Zach does that, I'm putting new flags together. This takes this bullshit.

[Riley]

She can only sew so quickly.

[Zach]

Yeah, it's like 20ft wide at this point.

[Riley]

So this is Mandy Mooney, 61, market seller. She worked as a hairdresser and her husband is a black cab driver. Thirty years ago, wouldn't you know it, they bought a house for £30,000. They put a deposit in a house for £30,000. Crazy. So, for Mooney, the biggest issue facing Britain is immigration, saying if we didn't have so many people coming and using our resources, that money would go to health care and the rest of it. A lot of people come to me and say they can't get the benefits that they need. We're a small. Is going to sink. Which is. I'm pretty sure she's being figurative.

[Zach]

Why do her the favor? What if she isn't? What if she's just like. If another person sets foot. I kind of believe that we are the daytime TV floating foam map and if another person steps on here, we're just going to get pitched into a canal outside the TV studio.

[Joe Reeve]

I'm very much of the belief that she's taking it very literally. And there is a theory where the government deliberately bringing in refugees and immigrants because they want their to be too much weight.

[Zach]

So about everybody, everybody moved to northwest Scotland. It's tilting, it's tilting. This is why, this is why the London centric problem is like so desperate for this country. And why I'm doing my part by moving to western Scotland is there's too many people southeast, we're going to fucking bump into France.

[Gareth Dennis]

I mean you joke, but most reform voters or most recurrent reform representation is on the east of the country, right? And when it comes to Britain, the east of Britain is sinking. That is actually true. East of Britain is sinking.

[Zach]

I hope that doesn't come back in a future segment.

[Riley]

Yeah, here's another one. Steven Reeves, DJ60. Sorry, what?

[Zach]

Hold on.

[Shiv Malik]

He's a DJ60 Steve Reeves and he's a DJ and he's 60s years old. That's normal. Come on.

[Zach]

Yeah, okay, yeah, sure. Doing my wedding reception. And the DJs like, yeah, and there's a 60 year old man here.

[Riley]

So he says Reeves is convinced that Farage is different from the rest. I just feel the country needs a change, that the cost of living is the biggest issue. People around here can't afford stuff. The last time we had anything built for the community was in 82. If you're white and you're my age, nobody looks out for you. And that's the core of the problem, right? Nobody had anything built for the community since 1982. If you're white in my age, nobody looks out for you.

[Zach]

It's taking that extra leap of like nothing has been built here since the 80s. Probably because I'm white, I assume, and not because I'm 60 years old and still have a young person job.

[Gareth Dennis]

I don't want to get earnest with it, but this is kind of. There is a tipping point here where like that allow that there's an opening there that if you just draw back on the kind of the Fed bullshit. Second part of that, you tap into something and we might get into it shortly. But the current polling numbers across the party suggest that quite a few people have made that journey already.

[Zach]

Well, the thing is, right, if you do that as left wing governance, if you do kind of visible concrete, if you're all the time at openings of stuff being like, this is what we, your left wing government, are doing for you. And we don't really care whether or not you're. But like, here's a new hospital, here's a new school, whatever. People do like that and people do respond to it. The only wrinkle is that they do tend to make it deeply personalist and go, oh, the guy who built the schools is all right, but everybody else hates me because I'm white.

[Shiv Malik]

I just have to respond really quickly because the person said if we didn't have so much immigration, we could spend money on healthcare. And it just happens to be close to my heart. And I know you know this, Riley, but many of you might also know this, that if you are not a citizen of the United Kingdom, when you renew your visa, you have to pay an NHS surcharge. Does it go to the nhs? No, it goes into a fucking general fund. And you still pay taxes on income and national insurance and all that other stuff. Presumably taxes. You know, I know it doesn't directly fund the nhs, but it contributes to the budget, so on and so forth. And it's like they literally have a thing to be like, fund our NHS with these fucking foreigners and it doesn't even go to the nhs. So it's like, that's not really a foreigner's problem now, is it?

[Riley]

What he says is, my son wants to be a carpenter and I want him to do woodwork at school, but the school said we don't have the funding for it. It's ridiculous.

[Joe Reeve]

What are the agenda stuff?

[Riley]

That's the thing. That's been the sustained campaign that we have been talking about for years. And this is just it working.

[Zach]

I love being a school administrator and spending the entire budget on like Audre Lorde instead of wood.

[Shiv Malik]

Yeah, exactly. You can't. You can't do carpentry. You can't be a carpenter. You can only be a carpenter. And you know what? It's not the same thing.

[Riley]

Oh, I'm sorry. The whole school's made out of the Progress Pride flag. It's like the paperclip maximizing AI Stop adding sexuality. But that's the thing. We joke, but this is the campaign. And these are people upon whom that campaign has worked, which is elect a government that doesn't is never going to build a fucking hospital on the basis that the people who want to build hospitals also believe in things like civil rights.

[Zach]

Poor innocent kid who just wants to be a carpenter. And then Zach Polanski calls the school and is like demi romantic and they pull the fucking bandsaw out of the dc.

[Joe Reeve]

Yeah, I actually Zach Polanski went into a school and he saw a year eight, kind of like little woodworking project, and he sawed it in half and he just stared at the kid and he gave the kid the devilish smile as he saw the thing in half.

[Zach]

Eye contact the whole time.

[Gareth Dennis]

Riley, this is the opportunity, though, isn't it? Because you've got the two halves of the argument. You've got the. Nothing has been built since the late 70s, early 80s at the latest, because of white racism. Okay, there's no point even bothering with the second bit. But if you have a party that is willing to say, actually, even through the 90s, when our party, Labour, were doing all the magical things, and we don't want to say anything bad about that period, actually, if you can say, yeah, no, nothing has been built since the 80s, and that's a major part of. And here is why that is, then there is an opportunity to pull back some of these radicalized people. And I'm not saying you're going to get everyone there by telling a story about what that decline actually looks like. You can pull people back from the brink. There is an opportunity to shift people away from the brink here.

[Joe Reeve]

This is actually really good. I'll make this point really quickly because as you were sort of saying, and I read the piece earlier today, one of the things that I think is really evident among these people who have bought the narrative is also the fact that they are very likely to spend quite a lot of time by themselves or they spend a lot of time online. And it's where these types of narratives really kind of flourish, right? Very, very simple narratives that are mostly just images. And if you've sort of bombarded people with enough images of refugees coming in on boats and you kind of bombard them, images of refugees in hotels and stuff, it is very easy to sort of construct this very simplistic narrative of everyone gets a certain amount and the people who kind of arrive get your amount of whatever, it doesn't work. And none of it makes any sense. But part of the reason why that story is so difficult to tell is because of the complexities of the British state and also how it works, and also the fact that no one really knows how it works. We have a media that doesn't really kind of explain that particularly well, if

[Riley]

at all, or the opposite, that tries to confuse you about it because you want you to be upset.

[Joe Reeve]

And I'm still very insistent on quizzing party leaders on what if you were managing the economy like a household budget, despite the fact that even they have sort of admitted pretty previously that, yeah, that's not how it works. It is partly that media is wedded to this narrative because it informs some of the power that they have. And without it, I feel like they would really have to think about restructuring themselves. But another part is also just the targets that you're kind of aiming towards are incredibly, people who have sort of benefited from society, largely, probably fairly comfortable middle class voters who have never really had to interrogate how the system works, but also are likely to spend quite a lot of time on their own, where these narratives really sort of take hold. Because if you have no interaction with your outside world or you're sort of stuck in your siloed suburb, you have no real incentive to actually ask, oh, how do other people live and how do they relate to the world around me and everything? This is a narrative that is built for people who are protected in suburban environments and who are trying to make sense of a world that doesn't really make sense, but don't really have any alternatives to go to other than simplistic media narratives.

[Riley]

Well, let's test that with the next one, which is retired 67 year old who started work as a bank clerk, age 16, and then bought her own house a few years later with money she was saving from her salary. Cool. Says, I just want to give Farage a chance, really. Do I think it'll change? Not really. For Burford, the two top, top two issues are immigration and welfare. There's too many people on benefits, young people. We even have some in the family. My partner's son, he's just 40, but he's never going to work again. He's already had six years on disability benefits.

[Zach]

I hate my son in law. A classic, a classic of the genre. And also just the kind of gender general, like pessimism and apathy, right? Of like, well, I don't think anything's gonna change. It's gonna keep getting worse forever until I die. So I may as well have the guy who's kind of seems like he's having fun with it, you know?

[Riley]

Yeah, well, yeah. She says. A reader of the Daily Mail and in view of GB News, Burford opposes the scale of immigration.

[Zach]

It's just, it's such. It's so telling, right, that all of this stuff that we look at and we go, this is obviously repulsive. A lot of the people watching it and consuming it and reading it also find it repulsive. They just kind of Absolutely. Just immersed in it and they're just like, yeah, it's supposed to make me feel miserable. I like it being miserable.

[Shiv Malik]

It's kind of that spite voter concept that sort of like, yeah, but this guy is pissing off the people that I hate. You know, he's making. He's saying the things that's going to get all of the, you know, the Zone 2 dinner parties furious and upset and having fainting spells and all sorts of other like, you know, weird fucking things that they think about. And so invariably it's like if the person is saying the thing that is perceived to be unsayable in standard political norms and you know that it's making people you hate mad. And let's be real, it's very easy to hate British politicians, particularly in the Labor Party right now.

[Zach]

Oh, gotcha.

[Shiv Malik]

I'm not gonna say, I'm not gonna forgive it, but I'm gonna say, like, you can understand how someone might get to that conclusion.

[Riley]

Well, she says, look at this. He says, our population's falling. We need people coming into work. I'm not stupid. But none of us like to see them coming by boat. It's just the numbers coming in that's frightening.

[Zach]

That's sort of like arriving at. We should have, like, safe and legal asylum routes, which we literally banned and made illegal in order to placate this woman, essentially, like her constituency.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's like it's in order to plac. Who want safe and legal asylum routes. She's just been frightened by this machine that we talked about before. She's been frightened into wanting something to be done and for the government to do the only thing that it can do, successive governments to do this, which is crack down on every kind of legal immigration that there is, including safe and legal asylum routes. Including, for example, what. I always go back to that if an asylum claim is denied, generally speaking, an airline will have to pay to fly that person back, which is one of the reasons, one of the many reasons why you can't just get on a plane to claim asylum because they won't let you, because they don't want to pay to fly you back. And if these kinds of rules were changed, guess what? We wouldn't have people drowning the channel. We wouldn't have people coming in on boats. Which is what she seems to object to. Right. She says she also doesn't oppose net zero, saying, we've got to go down that road when we get there. It'll be a benefit to everybody. Anyone who thinks that the median viewer the median person, the median voter has a coherent political ideology of a bridge to sell you. They absolutely don't know.

[Shiv Malik]

They'll literally be like, I want to machine gun the small boats, but also we need to renationalize everything, build 2.5 million council units per year and have an. And we definitely need to have legal routes to immigration for skilled migration. And also I want to ban CFL and LED light bulbs and go back to tungsten ones. Like it never makes any fucking sense. And some of it is, you know, not always hand in glove with like what you'd perceive a right wing voter to be, but like, I guess also it's just a question of. It winds up being evidence of just how dog shit the information, the media environment is because people wind up being like, oh yeah, I'm going to vote reform. Because they definitely will build like Khrushchev scale fucking public housing units every year.

[Gareth Dennis]

Absolutely. It comes back to the point that I was making earlier. Like you've got the two parts of the story. Like nothing has been built, no infrastructure, all public services have been dismantled since the 80s because of immigrants. And like that first bit is if like the conservatives, the Labour Party and the establishment media have no interest in actually explaining why that is, because that's why they have power, they don't want to undermine that. So the only people talking about it currently, as we've, as I've said in past episodes with you guys, the only people painting a story that was coherent around that decline since the 80s was reform. Now it's also the Green Party. And so that becomes interesting.

[Shiv Malik]

I just happened to note a similar thing and I won't derail it, but it's looking like from polling that another insane referendum in the country I live in is going to pass, was going to arbitrary limit the number of citizens that can ever be citizens of this country to 10 million. It's currently 9.1 million. And if it gets close they're like, we're going to withdraw from all bilateral agreements with the EU, which means 25% of our workforce suddenly can't work here anymore. And it looks like it's going to pass.

[Gareth Dennis]

Cool.

[Riley]

Oh, so they're remining the bridges and tunnels, basically.

[Shiv Malik]

I have no fucking idea, man. But invari, like it's the same problem. It's like housing is too expensive, traffic is too bad. Like there's a lot of, you know, like, like investment around things to facilitate cross border stuff. It's like, right, because this country is basically 90 years old, except for like Every person in this country is 100 years old except for immigrant workers. And it's like. But once again, a party has basically been like, here's the problem, we're going to fix it by weird, like, I don't know, census based Malthusianism. And because they're the ones saying it, all of a sudden people are like, what? Wow, look, you know, they're at least doing something about it. And I see these parallels between that and this shit. And I don't know, it's, it's just, it's distressing, we'll put it that way.

[Riley]

Well, let's hear from Martin Davis, 71, retired.

[Zach]

I'm so often saying this.

[Riley]

Well, that's all we do, really.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah, it's all of this.

[Riley]

It's like I have the little do it for her thing, but it's just a picture of picture after picture of Martin Davis, 71, retired.

[Shiv Malik]

I used to have a what would Jesus do? T shirt, but now I have a WWMD s T shirt. What would Martin Davis.

[Zach]

It's like, you try it. You try and do anything in this country and like 71 year olds start banging on your window trying to get in your house. Like Day of the fucking Dead.

[Riley]

The podcast about the what would WWMDd71 retired T shirt is really good on Amazon. So he says the cost of living is not a worry. He has private health care and plays golf three times a week. Immigration is a massive problem. Davis has reservations about Farage. He says, I don't like him as a person, but I like what he stands for. And I think that's a big thing. I just feel like everyone's got so left wing now, even the conspiracy conservatives, that we need someone to be strong against what's going on. But then he says his two biggest priorities are nationalizing water companies and continuing with climate action.

[Gareth Dennis]

Incredible.

[Zach]

It's like, yeah, guy who is like, you can't even golf for migrants anymore. You know, like these are all made

[Gareth Dennis]

up as well, aren't they? These are all like a pastiche by the. Or these actual people they've found. Who are these are people. Oh, these are real. Okay.

[Shiv Malik]

Badnock is like, look at these dinosaur skeletons. We have no problem determining if they were male or female. And then it's like he's like, God, everyone's so left wing nowadays.

[Riley]

Well, because. Because right. It goes back to the absolutely dreck information environment that we live in. Which is if you said to Martin Davis, what does left wing mean? He would probably say something vaguely homophobic. And then he would. And then just say, and it's why nothing works. Yeah, Basically he'd be like, everyone's too woke and they're too concerned with wokeness. And that's why they don't just get the damn job done. Because that is how you've been taught to think, which is that every bit of civil rights that's happened since the 1960s. 60s has been the thing that has been pushing down productivity and not the massive economic liberalization.

[Shiv Malik]

And also that it's the right party and particularly like the fellow travelers of Farage who have made it a point to obstruct successfully anything that might have alleviated that. Similar to here where the far right parties are the same people fucking blocking everything that would, for example, build more housing. And it's like, but that, it's like you said, I mean it never gets, the connection never gets made. And so like it's the, it's the argument over gender. It's whatever the fuck GB News says. Like someone Cambridge is going to ban, I don't know, like saying white male or something like that. Who even knows? And it's like, I mean, you can't

[Riley]

call it blackmail anymore. If you're threatening somebody, you have to call it white male because that's the worst thing they can think about.

[Zach]

Like the gender is part of it, but like it's. So much of that is just like these people are racist. Right. And I'm not using that in the way that sort of, you know, right wingers accuse left wingers of doing, of being like, you just say that to stop conversations or shut things down. Right? It's kind of the opposite. You can't change any of this unless you acknowledge that these people have a deep seated baked in racism they see,

[Shiv Malik]

and probably not around them in their communities, but they see non white people and non. Not that they're religious either, but like non Christian, observably non Christian people. And they're like, those people shouldn't be in this country. They have no right to be. They can't, they shouldn't be allowed to be citizens. And whether or not they explicitly advocate for that as a politician policy, that's the belief. That's the thing, in my opinion, that they see and they're like, here's what's wrong with this country.

[Zach]

And that's the sort of like, you know, opening. That's the crack in the door that then gets like kicked through with like 50 billion hours of AI generated content of like what people imagine. Whitechapel is like.

[Shiv Malik]

And it's like they live in, you know, Upper Dicker or whatever that doesn't have a school because there's no children and everyone is white. And they're like, there's too many fucking foreigners in this country.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And also, again, it's like the classic thing of bunch of problems diagnosed correctly. But there's been this such incredibly successful propaganda operation to suggest that the problem is civil rights. And there it is. So you get now your average median voter is like, I want every progressive economic change possible. If only those minorities weren't holding them back somehow.

[Shiv Malik]

I hate 15 minute cities and I want the government to build micro rayons everywhere.

[Riley]

Hey, orania was a 15 minute city. We could tell them that. So, speaking of Orenia, I wanted to go into our final segment here that Gareth has used to drive himself mad. Now, Gareth, this is sort of your celebrity shot segment where you are now, I would say, mentally a resident of Forest City One.

[Gareth Dennis]

Okay.

[Riley]

You've gone into what I would describe as a research coma. And I want you to tell me, just as an entry point, what this sort of British attempt to make Solano County, California forever has to do with Pathaka AI.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah. Which by the way. Yeah. Which is an AI to create podcasts, which is a funny kind of tie into second one of the show. Right. Like, so. So we have, you know, ever since MBS has kind of excited us with. With Neom's visions of. Of kind of desert utopia.

[Riley]

Right.

[Gareth Dennis]

I was way back in. Within TF Canon back in 2017, that was. We've obviously all been wondering, can the UK gain on this action? And. And I'm here to answer with a resounding no, we cannot. But goddamn, there will be some guys who will try. Nobody.

[Riley]

Nobody can.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah, yeah. Nobody. Well, Azerbaijan perhaps. But much like Neon, this I hope goes nowhere, but there's a lot of insidious shit. Okay, so Forest City 1. This is this thing. Forest City 1 is a. How to describe it? It sent a report to government recently trying to pitch itself its next stage of pitch. A huge document being fronted by some guys. We'll talk about a minute. It's called Forest City One. It's a proposed privately led new city on up to 45,000 acres of rural land east of Cambridge between Newmarket Haverhill. Developers describe it as Britain's first new city in over 50 years with up to 400,000 homes and potentially 1 million people. That's right, 1 million people.

[Zach]

This pitch join us in megacity Cambridge.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah, exactly. This is like 1 million people. Like, as an urban core is kind of like a central man. It's like Manchester or Birmingham, isn't it? Right, Birmingham or Leeds? Well, Leeds. Leeds. It's the size of all of Leeds. Right. This is a huge city.

[Shiv Malik]

I also have to add that, as I realize, this is one of those only elder millen millennials will get this. But calling a place Forest City one, it's like, no, you don't want to maim your city after an F0 level. Okay? The cities in F0 all look dystopian. We don't want that. But instead, this is what we get.

[Gareth Dennis]

So the pitch is, like, drenched in AI slop. Yeah, Riley. Okay, go on.

[Riley]

I'll set to a little more table setting here. So what they explicitly compare it to, in fact, Gareth, you say it would be the first new city in 50 years. They're explicitly trying to draw a connection to places like Milton Keynes. However, there is one crucial difference, which is they're saying, what if instead. Instead of Milton Keynes being a sort of civil society project that's led by the government, what if we recognize that this government has ambitions for lots of things to happen, but are hoping someone else will do them? And they're saying, what if that someone else was us and we have a private Milton Keynes? Your own personal Milton Keynes.

[Gareth Dennis]

Your own personal Milton Keynes. And they're doing so drenched in AI

[Zach]

slop with this Milton Keynes. You are spoiling us.

[Joe Reeve]

Yes.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah. I mean, Milton Keynes has a lot of its own problems, but you're right, it was founded with the idea of being. It was a public project. Yeah. So lots of AI slop. There are, like, pictures of, like, walkable spaces. They've got trams rather than, like, cars and pods. So that's something at least.

[Riley]

Oh, they have cars. Sorry, Gareth, they do have cars. Can I tell you that? They have cars.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah.

[Riley]

This is my favorite thing. They have cars because they are going to have modular wooden buildings. They're going to have a strange covenant for buying and selling houses. There's an element of Georgism for some reason.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah, we'll get there.

[Zach]

Hold on, hold on, hold on. Sorry. The covenant and the wooden buildings is giving a little bit like M. Night Shyamalan's the Village to me. Yeah.

[Gareth Dennis]

As ever with AI generated stuff, it makes you feel a little bit uneasy. Anyway, when you look at it, you

[Zach]

finally escape from this planned city and you get out to the real world, and it's Milton Keynes outside.

[Riley]

It's this planned, covenanted, prefab, AI generated proposal. Just like neon was never anything other than renderings. It is renderings, but it's renderings with the desire to enclose a bunch of space to make it private. C. My favorite element of it, of course, is that they will have cars. They will just be underground. Yes. Going through tunnels. Boring company style.

[Zach]

Doing the boring company thing. It's retro, but like doing that in Cambridgeshire again. We're back to Irish wine. Wet. It's too wet.

[Gareth Dennis]

This is like.

[Zach]

It's a part of the country that floods every, like five minutes. If anyone looks at it funny, it's made of like mud. You're gonna bore tunnels through, like, wet mud and then go like, drive yourself driving car through the mud caverns. And if you die, you will be entombed in the bog.

[Riley]

Imagine the future archaeologists finding the bog bodies of Forest City 1.

[Shiv Malik]

Why do we have to say the downward revision of expectations? You opened up by telling me I was going to have a Milton Keynes of the mind and now you're telling me that I'm just going to drive a car in an underground tunnel forever.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah.

[Zach]

You start out with Milton Keynes of the mind and you end pretty quickly at die in a bog, drown in mud inside a Tesla.

[Gareth Dennis]

The problems are the fact that the whole area is Geelong. Technologically, cottage cheese will come back, not just in the form of, like the transportation issues because. Yeah, there are other problems with. From an infrastructure perspective, it's not just people moving around, it's things like, I don't know, potable water become an issue as well. Go on, Nate.

[Shiv Malik]

But also like Zach Polanski wants to bring so many, you know, he wants to import the entire world to Britain. When it sinks, it's going to make those tunnels even more dangerous.

[Riley]

The way it's structured is worth talking about. Right.

[Zach]

As we said, it's built on top of this cottage cheese.

[Riley]

Yeah, well, it is conceptually as well, because this is, I mean, part of the I a salesman, let's call it culture, the culture of salesmanship and middlemanning that exists whenever there is a government that is sort of hesitant to do anything. And again, these people are not in it. But this is their go at getting legislation passed that will enable them to build a private city, a bit like Prospera in Honduras as well, or a bit like Solano County, California Forever is trying to do by the back door. And which NEOM was able to do just by using state security forces in an absolute monarchy. And so what they're. They're trying to get the area declared a special economic economic zone.

[Zach]

I wonder if we had like a book about those to talk about.

[Riley]

Ah, never heard of those.

[Gareth Dennis]

Okay, probably.

[Riley]

I, I bet the person who wrote it has a pretty cool last name as a first name. But in the way they present this, they say instead of a business strangled by red tape, imagine a special economic zone where enterprises can invest, adapt and expand at the pace of innovation itself, which I think we've learned recently. A we don't want to do and B no one in Britain that claims they even want to do that actually generally wants to do that. CF n scale.

[Zach]

The good news is, right, if you do to open the lab from 28 days later here because of innovation, right. It soon it will be claimed by the mud as all things will be. So you don't even have to worry that much because it's just going to sink.

[Riley]

Future archaeologists like, like the current archaeologists find the bog bodies with the nipples cut off and they're like, oh, this guy was deposed as a king. Future bog bodies we'll find like guys with gilets being like they've removed the arms from their outer garments. What could it mean?

[Gareth Dennis]

I like the next line. The next line in that bump as well is fun because instead of of concrete sprawl, imagine a genuine forest city where nature isn't an afterthought but woven into daily life. To which I'm thinking, yes, via moss and mud and other such things as it sinks into the ground.

[Zach]

Yeah, it's not just Milton Keynes M dash, it's Mudson Keynes.

[Riley]

Yeah, there's a lot of em dashes in here, I'm gonna tell you that.

[Shiv Malik]

Right.

[Zach]

Boy, don't say that's mysterious to me.

[Riley]

The company behind it is called Albion City Development Corporation, which is, look at, put the acronym. What acronym? If they call them.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah, what if I've written in my notes here, brackets, they called it acdc, the fucking losers. Yeah, that's right.

[Riley]

Founded by two guys. Joe Reeve, the co founder of Looking for Growth, which is a campaign he's by the way connected in like I wouldn't be surprised if he personally knows some of the Solano county people. Yeah, yeah.

[Zach]

First of all, like Looking for Growth is bullshit because it's just two guys and then growth never fucking shows up. Waste of, waste of an evening. I wouldn't even bother.

[Riley]

It was. I kind of like the Christopher Guest version. And then the. Also founded by Shiv Malik, who in most of the copy on the website is referred to as like, oh, former journalist and you know, and campaigner. No, he was like a Web3 entrepreneur for like 7 years.

[Gareth Dennis]

I was digging through the CVs of both Reeve and Malik and it is like, yeah, Malik is. Was a journalist for a bit and then appears have kind of been. When you go, oh, he was a journalist. And we can use that to say, to like say he's a value member of our marketing team. And then that's kind of been his career after that. Reeve, yeah. Is kind of like was a software guy and then went to Silicon Valley. It's funny that, yeah, Malik ended up in becoming like marketing guy for some AI firms. He did crypto for a little while and then now it's like. And yeah, now it's. He is the CEO at Pathaka AI, which is it creates a podcast on any subject with AI. That sounds familiar. Wait a minute, so it's yet another competitor to what we do, right?

[Riley]

So yeah. Do you ever wish you could dive deeper into any topic instantly? Pythaka turns your urgent need for information into a full length, highly researched podcast in an instant. Just type a prompt, click, and then listen to Pathaka's host discuss your chosen niche for 20 minutes.

[Gareth Dennis]

That's what we do. But just with Wikipedia you don't need AI for that.

[Shiv Malik]

Yeah, exactly, yeah. Can a podcast derail the entire episode to be like actually when. When you try to do service the entirely built out of Wood City in Cambridge here and black mold is everywhere. That's when ACDC's black back in black starts playing podcasts. Can't. They wouldn't make that connection.

[Riley]

Malik. Malik's other big thing after he realized, right, oh my pivots need to pivot to where the actual comes from, which is the state. He started something called the Intergenerational Foundation, a think tank founded focused on millennial and Gen Z economic woes, saying you need a radical infrastructure reboot to avert generational conflict. Again, he came up with the idea of the forest city during a pandemic lockdown.

[Zach]

It's like in lockdown being like if only the 71 year old plumber and this 23 year old web designer could live in harmony together.

[Riley]

Oh, they won't be living in harmony together. Because the thing about the forest City one is as a privately owned city, they get to decide who lives there.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah, this is one of the more fucked up things about this big, big

[Zach]

housing condo, big, big co op board.

[Gareth Dennis]

Before we talk about that, I wanted to just point out, just to give you an additional flavor of the sort of vibes we're talking about, is the two people who are very early on pinned to this is like, kind of like authoritative advisors were Professor Tim Lunick, who's like a Saja Javid sort of economic adventure advisor and sort of did some stuff as he was sort of advisor to three Tory housing secretaries. And also everyone's favorite Dame Patricia Hewitt, who you'll remember was suspended from the parliamentary Labour Party over the question of political lobbying irregularities and was president of the Board of Trade in the past.

[Riley]

So I have a question.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Are any other prominent former Tory advisors, let's just say picking a prime minister at random from the Boris Johnson Johnson era involved at all? For example, speaking at the launch of the Looking for Growth campaign group.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah. Cominic Dummings. No, something like that. I can't remember.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Gareth Dennis]

Also, weirdly, Z Youssef as well. Do you remember that going move out

[Zach]

to big brain Toryville, everyone, like all of these guys are gonna move out to, like a city in some mud flats to either die or prove a very important point.

[Safine]

Well, this is.

[Zach]

Is the other thing, right? And one of the reasons why I suspect this is just like plans, why this is British neon, is if you are that guy, right? If you really enjoy being kind of heterodox and big brain, like dinner party provocateur, right, you would rather die than move out of zone two. And without those people around you that you like to trigger, you aren't anything. Right. And so then you end up in a real kind of waiting for growth situation because it's just you and like all of the idiots that are like you. And most of all, the people you have most contempt for in the world, your fans just living in the fens together in a sort of wooden house, hearing the sort of Teslas underneath the floor. Sounds miserable. And I don't think it can ever happen on that basis.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah, exactly. The trajectory is quite clear. Like, what this is, is a grift, right? It's a big grift. And you can kind of get the feeling of that from, you know, looking for Growth Joe Reeves thing that he created, which had, you know, Dominic Cummings, Zir Youssef also Ian Hogarth, you might have heard of him. He's currently chair of the UK government of AI, like, foundation model, task force, question mark. But like, so. So these are all kind of the grifty type. But crucially, Looking for Growth seems to have pivoted away from what it was doing, which is like planning reform, and into the world of doing viral videos of them clearing graffiti, cleaning graffiti off tube trains.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Gareth Dennis]

And they seem to be ramping up on that bit because that, because they

[Zach]

can't leave London behind. It's. It looms too large in their imagination.

[Riley]

Well, the people who they want to leave. This is of course also the classic like reactionary social plan, which is, well, this for everybody else, you know, everybody else is going to leave London. I'm going to stay here, keep an eye on things here. You guys go live in the mud. You go live waist deep in mud.

[Shiv Malik]

It's like, go live, go live in this perfect plan city. That sounds like it was something that, like, you know, someone hallucinated after eating Amanita Mascari and Nizhni Novgorod in 900 A.D. they're like, oh, a wooden city, but underneath it the sounds of demon machines are endlessly rumbling.

[Zach]

Welcome to City 17. You have chosen or been chosen to relocate to one of our finest outstanding urban centers.

[Riley]

Here's how you get chosen. 40% are allocated to employees of commercial tenants.

[Zach]

Oh, if. If you work for Marc Andreessen, right, in addition to all of the fringe benefits of having to listen to him talk, you may also get relocated to the technology bog.

[Riley]

Yes, correct.

[Gareth Dennis]

That's right.

[Zach]

My. My business, my, my job got a little too unwoke because the CEO got scared because he got like fucking mind virused by right wing influencers and now they're putting bog.

[Shiv Malik]

Yeah, yeah. The job perks went from something that might be beneficial to AI tokens to now you get to live in the frontier fortress from the Revenant, where everything is just concentric wood walls, watchtowers made of wood, so on and so forth,

[Zach]

doing like I Banker stuff, where it's like, well, the hours are pretty tough the first couple of years, but you're making crazy money and you claw your way up to being like, well, the hours are pretty bad and you are in the bog, but after a couple of years, years of it, you do start getting bits of oxygen.

[Gareth Dennis]

I mean, it started sounding like, suspiciously like being a worker at Baikonur, you know, where you like game by the disease scorpion, but you get your nicer flat if you grift a bit harder.

[Riley]

So the other one, 30% based on merit and how they define merit.

[Zach]

Oh, we liked your posts. We liked your posts. Please come and live in our bog.

[Shiv Malik]

I mean, this genuinely is starting to sound like a parody. Like the Soviet Image in the 1930s imagined what capitalist magnetogors would be. And it's like it's made out of wood and it re. Establishes feudalism in the bog.

[Zach]

Please come and live In Nizhni Novgorod. We really liked your post. And the other thing is you're sort of like influencers. The people that these people consider to have merit also can't move out of London and wouldn't move out of London partially because they like it, but partially because they need to farm it for content. Right. You can't do the kind of like I filmed myself wearing an Ink England flag down Whitechapel and like, you know, because of the Sharia or whatever, I was murdered.

[Gareth Dennis]

Well, it's like the Dubai influencers who've gone out and they're like, like trying to. Like the ones who went out to the, like the one area they've built of like neon or whatever and there was no one there and they tried to do Instagram stuff and it just, it just fell back. Went back to. Yeah.

[Riley]

So what they have is they say for merit selection, we're looking to fill the city with Britain's most ambitious families. Oh dear, what's that?

[Zach]

Is this a whistle?

[Joe Reeve]

Sounds like a really bad BBC Free.

[Gareth Dennis]

Like five Most ambitious families.

[Joe Reeve]

Most ambitious families.

[Shiv Malik]

And it turns out.

[Joe Reeve]

And they all fuck up their kids in like different ways.

[Riley]

Yeah, because they lost them in the mud. Entrepreneurs, researchers, engineers, builders, plumbers, hospitality staff, electricians, teachers, architects, nurses, creatives, doctors, cleaners, developers.

[Zach]

It's just like all of these Tory freaks thinking about who you need to populate a city with, being like, well, I played Guess who when I was a kid, so probably all of those guys.

[Riley]

We need someone with glasses.

[Zach]

How do you be like?

[Joe Reeve]

I'm sure there is a way, but how do play? You be like an ambitious plumber in this context.

[Gareth Dennis]

Well, to be fair, with Forest City one, it wouldn't take much to be an ambitious plumber because they're going to need fucking plumbers there, I'll tell you that for nothing.

[Zach]

I'm going to be the first plumber to like root pipe through completely loose, like mud and sediment.

[Riley]

Oh, and if you wanted to vote, by the way, early residents will become stakeholders in the city's success with input into governments and development priorities. But the city will be run by a development corporation that retains ownership of of the land and then captures the value of the land as it rises in value. You just capture the value of the building.

[Zach]

Oh, okay, cool.

[Joe Reeve]

Yeah, it seems to be morphing into this sort of like three dimensional triangular shape.

[Shiv Malik]

So it's basically ground rand, like ground leases, right?

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah, it's turbo leasehold. It's turbo leasehold.

[Riley]

It's leasehold. It's just turbo Lease. It's leasehold. But like they have a covenant on your future. Yeah, it's horrifying. Also, you can't vote.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah, you're so right. There's more to. I want to just briefly sort of say something though, which is listeners, you may ask, why the fuck is Gareth paying attention to this? It's obvious hokiveness. It's obvious nonsense. It's not worth paying any time and attention to. The trouble is it has an expert committee which has got 40 plus people endorsing these proposals, on which are some actual normal and indeed sensible human beings, which is the thing that got me baffled. So it's a real mix of all sorts. Good eggs. Like one of my former sort of anti HS2 sparring partners, sorry, Paul Powsland, who's a good activist, environmental lawyer and I think absolutely has his heart in the right place. James Gleave is a really good transport planner. Again, someone else I've collaborated with before, like, people in, like. There's lots of different people who are actually good people, sensible people who have kind of been involved in this, which. That's what got me puzzled. So I'm like, well, how have they got and ended up getting wound into this stuff?

[Zach]

It's quite. I think it's quite easy to do the sales pitch for these things and have that be quite slick and then to not ask the questions like, how are you going to get water for all of these people?

[Gareth Dennis]

Or Yeah, I mean, Shiv Malik follows me on Twitter and it's like. Like him and Jaree follow me on Twitter and have Defin replied to some of my tweets about it going, well, you could become one of the expert people, come and have a look at the thing and like. So they are clearly out on the hunt.

[Zach]

I'm trying to change the bog from the inside, which.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah. So I don't know. But yeah, as you say, there are so many problems. The infrastructure one. Yeah. We've talked about roads and the fact that you'd have to build a complete infrastructure, like to make this thing work. Well, a lot of the bump, the promo bump, claims that this new city would benefit from its proximity to Cambridge. You know, the gravity well of Cambridge's existing economic ecosystem, you know, all the research and industry stuff. But like it has no connection to Cambridge other than like rural roads. So all that infrastructure. But also crucially, if you have a city of a million people, they drink water and poop. Where is that infrastructure coming from again? In the swamp. What are you doing here? This is A huge amount of infrastructure you have to create from nothing.

[Riley]

The other thing I wanted to bring us around to as well is that this is of course, yes, you could say it's British Solano County, California forever. But in a way, California forever. Solano county is a very British phenomenon because what they're doing is they're recreating something like Bourneville or like the, the Peabody housing estates of the late 19th century. All of which were about tightly enforcing the morals of the people who were living there by. And then trying to get them to stay living in the way that they thought she should be living by like making their tendency conditional Quakerism without the moral code.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah.

[Riley]

For example, let's say you're one of the 30% of people chosen on merit. You're an entrepreneur, suddenly you fall sick, you're not able to work as an entrepreneur anymore. Maybe you have to go on benefits. Are you still allowed to live in the happens or have you fallen foul of them or are you no longer elect? Do you no longer get to live in this like Garden of Eden? Right.

[Gareth Dennis]

It's frightening. And then you know, other infrastructure as well, you know, things like schools, libraries, sports centers, they would all be owned by ACDC Spitz and then leased back to the public bodies like the nhs. So it's okay. So the NHS is then on the hook for what, like a million people? Five, six major hospitals? What? It's just, it's, well, okay, it's incoherent, sure, but it's also deeply sinister.

[Riley]

Yeah, absolutely. It can be seen purely as, I think a, a bit of a Hail Mary power grab that's probably a bit too stupid to work. But at a time where I would say there is a great deal of appetite in the British state to allow building to happen so long as it's going because there is a big opportunity to bulldoze planning regulations. But there's not a big drive to like improve standards or invest in anything. If someone comes, comes along and says, what I'm going to do is I'm going to more or less suspend democratic rights as I see fit. Create a kind of meritocracy of my own design. I'm going to do a megalopolis in the mud. I'm going to do Montepolis and. But we're going to do a development corporation which worked great with Stevenage Harlow, Milton Keynes, all these other places don't pay attention to the fact that it is under my control. Not some kind of accountable political, political control. It's utterly a top down affair which is like, you know, Malik and Reeve get parliamentary buy in to basically get a fiefdom. Yeah, yeah, that's.

[Gareth Dennis]

That really is essentially what we're talking about.

[Riley]

Like this is what they are doing is hoping that there's just a little bit of that William the Conqueror juice left. You can be like, oh yeah, can I get this, Can I get this sort of AI enabled barony outside of Cambridge.

[Gareth Dennis]

I mean rather you talk about appetite. The words I'm more worried about is the appetite of government is one thing, but the desperation specifically of this Labour Party. This is where I'm worried. And I thought there was merit worth. Us shouldn't use the word merit given everything we discussed, it was worth us describing this because of what is about to happen to the Labour Party or what the current parliamentary Labour Party is about to do to itself. There is a gap. It's no coincidence that the plans have been submitted with this local election series of elections coming up that's going to result in chaos because this sort of crazy plan might be the bollocks the. And that they end up grabbing desperately to try and show that they're doing something radical and different. Which, which is, you know, cause for concern, I would say.

[Riley]

Yeah. And you know, again, like, like you say this is a desperate moment for principle less morons. Yeah. And there is any reason to think that they would pick kind of whatever, given that we know what happened with like N scale. But hey, you know what, throw the dice because you may just get made into like whatever the gile version of a lord is. Yeah, yeah.

[Zach]

Still a lord. I think so.

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah. You might say, well, there is a need for houses. Like why are we. Okay, yeah. This is obviously sinister and stupid, but does some element of it have merit? Well, for me, like a key part of this story, as you guys have pointed out in previous TFs, running back into the ancient past, particularly the one with Danny Dorling that you did a while back was really good on this. Also the other infrastructure, Gareth as well, is the idea that there is really a housing crisis existing at all. It's not that clear cut that there is one of those and you know, particularly by yimby types who scream about that thing. But there are, there are about a million empty homes in the uk. Right. And handing the free money cheat to developers as I sit here surrounded by unfinished homes from a private developer that went bust, by the way, that's currently has been my life for two years. Handing the free money cheat does not solve that problem. Developers are not going to endorse this. They're not going to endorse something that results in reduction in house prices. They're going to want something that brings them more value. It's why the National Federation of Builders, the house builders is super keen on this. They're like, woo, that looks nice. So crucially the key point is that building new towns and cities, it's totally unnecessary when we have enormous volumes of grey and brownfield land, you know, like abandoned or like semi derelict land in our cities, particularly in the north by the way, as well as lots of really stupid low density suburbs that we can and should like incrementally densify where railway stations and stuff are. So we could be doing this stuff. There are potentially half a million homes could be built on large greyfield sites, although we have the potential to do this. And crucially the they already have the infrastructure, they already have the trains, they already have the sewage and the potable water infrastructure. So it's not necessary to do these huge new cities anymore. We don't need to do that stuff. We have so much derelict land. The question then is well, why doesn't that happen? It's because it's politically messy. Developers don't like it because even though they get grants for it, land remediation is risky and expensive. And crucially, and this is what comes back to super TF territory is it's not very appealing for private investors. The AI slot renders are much sexier, they're much better at driving investment, driving the interest from private equity potentially. And also you get that initial land value boost. So the speculation part of it, which by the way, this absolutely is land value speculation, no formal plans, it's not even clear where this thing is precisely going to be built. And yet there is all this online speculation going on that's scaring people. It's changing the way that land value is sitting. New to towns and cities require so much new infrastructure and you know, resulting in much more loss of farmland or crucially like marginal land with high biodiversity value and all the construction carbon as well from building the bloody thing and all that infrastructure, we don't need to do it. There are better options, which is why this thing just completely exasperates me. Right. You know, and if you are going to build these things outside of existing cities, we've got a lot of World War II airfields hanging out that you can just go and build on. There's still lots of those. It doesn't need to be that like all borderline out of business karting track. You just Convert it into a town, it's fine.

[Riley]

And what we conclude with, I think, is it comes. The fact that this is all renders is just so uniquely British because it's like, hey, we want growth, but we really just want to do renders. Do you mind? If that's enough for you to pay us £900 million?

[Gareth Dennis]

Yeah. Even this comes up against the fundamentals of Starmerism, which is we want to talk about, you know, we want growth, but we refuse to build anything. We refuse to do anything that might create that growth. Yeah, exactly.

[Riley]

Look, I think that's probably all the time we have for today because we're running to a bit of a schedule. But, Gareth, always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you for bringing me this awful, awful city.

[Gareth Dennis]

You're very, very welcome. Crikey. Yeah. Listen to. Listen to bg. Solve crimes. Listen to your gods. No mares. Go and get hold of an album that's just been released by second homes and 10,000 posters out there to listen to as well.

[Joe Reeve]

I was thinking, what can I plug besides that? I actually. I really haven't been up to much other than that. But thank you. Thank you nonetheless.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Zach]

Listen to Rail Natter.

[Riley]

Yeah, check out Railnatter.

[Shiv Malik]

Rail Natter. Definitely a great place to start. Riley. Riley, you were kind enough to offer that for us to change the outro music for this episode to a song from the album Find a Way to Hate it by my band, Second Homes, that has just released today as we are recording. So we are going to. I'm going to drop a song, another one that Safine wrote and sings on that I like a lot. And hopefully, if you like it, there's a link in the show notes and you can buy it and I'll link to everyone else's stuff. You know, we don't do that enough. We don't plug the links enough. We got to have more links. We need more blue text. We need more links in the description up URLs. When the. When the. The hyperlinks don't work, we need all that.

[Gareth Dennis]

Right?

[Riley]

All right. Bye, everybody.

[Shiv Malik]

Bye.

[Safine]

Bye. I am barely an ounce I can breathe and whiten my teeth with and co with talcum powder and pills Night spent coldly golden and lonely surrendering My favorite will the color is these strains and the marks to their train well, I'll take what I kill but the marble is brittle it's heavy as auto and I'm starting to let it spill and I will cut flowers to bring I love her with all I can Water and plastic feet But I can't give you what you need. No I can't give you what you need. No, I can't give you what you need. Run to your house it's the streets where your mother lives they threw a route and they built your friend fatal attractions in workplace harassment between nothing and uneven tied to a little street Tired of everything waiting for the years to spin. Where you pick up tasteless neighbors are racist and co and you can cut the flowers to breathe and we'll them with all you can mean you'll give them all their plastic feet I can't give you all you need and there are kind of flower in me and I will love you at all I keep I water and plastic feet I can't give you what you need. Can't give you what you need. No I can't give you what you need. No, I can't give you what you need. I'm just a big part of a little man a night on my thing Petals flowers and silhouettes make you pull your strings. Make you pull your strings and I'll make you pull your heart strings. You are more than ounce they can breathe in and whiten their teeth with uncut with talking powder and pills. Your hatred is with me. Made from your body and you're starting to look Let it spell and you're starting to let it spell and you're starting to let it spell.