coe018_galkina.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:26] Des cultures of energy listeners were so, so, so, so happy to have you back with us broadcasting from Rice University in sound control, said Major Simone.

Speaker2: [00:00:39] I like that.

Speaker1: [00:00:40] Mm hmm. I think it works. We have a really wonderful discussion today that my co-host Dominic Boyer, carried out on his very own. Sorry, I let him. He got to do his own autonomous interview in London, no less. But it was really predicated out of this impulse that we have had, and we've been trying to follow that impulse to include more folks from the arts and in that vein, the protest community. So activists and activists? Yeah, activists, yeah, that's a nice term. But I kind of like protest community.

Speaker2: [00:01:19] They're protesting for

Speaker1: [00:01:20] Sure. So so we have a really wonderful conversation about how those how those elements can come together and really productive ways and also, you know, educational facts that need to be more widely distributed and how to use different platforms in order to do that. And some of this inspiration comes out of the group called Liberate Tape that has done so much kind of performance actions at the Tate Museum in London and a lot of it having to do with environmental consequences and destruction and using, you know, oil and dead birds and all kinds of things to really, you know, bring attention to people's awareness about the changes that we're seeing and

Speaker2: [00:02:03] Certainly to protest BP's sponsorship of the arts.

Speaker1: [00:02:05] Ultimately, yes, that's a big part of it as well. And that's the reason why they're doing it at the Tate Gallery, right?

Speaker2: [00:02:14] And and succeeded. And BP is not going to be sponsoring art at the Tate anymore. They're right there off the list of their major sponsors now. Right? So the interviews with Onaga kind of who's with a group called Platform London, and they are they've been around a long time and that was amazing to me. They had a whole earlier life that she talks about an earlier generation of activism that was focused on environmental issues in London. But I think especially since the the tragedies in Ogoni land in the 1980s, 90s and still today frankly became more politicized around oil issues specifically and does a lot of work. On the one hand, as you were saying with arts and trying to get oil and gas sponsorship out of the art world and to just draw attention to it, but also finance, you know, companies that finance, you know, tar sands projects and, you know, unconventional oil production everywhere in the world. And London is a finance hub for a big part of the world. So that work is especially important. They do a lot of like outreach, education and activists do a lot of events and and really interesting and inspiring group of people. So it was nice to have the chance to chat with them, even though you weren't there. And I'm very sorry about that.

Speaker1: [00:03:30] Well, I also wasn't there when you had an encounter with a turtle. So do you want to

Speaker3: [00:03:37] Share

Speaker2: [00:03:38] This turtle story? We're going to start a new segment called Cultures of Energy Saves Small Animals, and that's what happened this morning when I was on my run and I got to set the I got a I've got to set the what is it? The context a little bit that you know, it's now what does it may and it's so hot in Houston and so humid. So the moment you go out and start doing anything outside athletic, which could include just walking or standing, you were soaked within seconds. And and then so it doesn't take, you know, a high degree of exertion to like completely, you know, discombobulated yourself. And so I'm towards the end of a run. I am soaked. I am. My eyes are stinging. I don't know what's going on, and I see this small creature ahead of me on the road, moving slowly across it on the jogging path. And at first I was like, What is that? And then I looked, It's a turtle, and the turtle is about to walk off of this path and to walk onto a very active expressway

Speaker1: [00:04:33] Onto the Island Parkway

Speaker3: [00:04:34] Onto the Island Parkway.

Speaker1: [00:04:35] So, oh god, it was.

Speaker2: [00:04:37] So I came, so I came to an immediate stop. I did the ethical thing. I did not finish my run. I stopped right there and then and and nudged, nudged it around, immediately retracts in its shell. But I nudged it around and kind of pointing it back towards where I think it had come from, which was the the buffalo bayou. But, you know, then I looked at it and I said it came a really long way, right? It came up a long, really steep embankment. And I was like, How did the turtle do this?

Speaker1: [00:05:02] And what was her or his motivation for going up this steep bank? Like why? Why go that way?

Speaker2: [00:05:09] Ok, and this is the other thing this came to me only later. But the funny thing about this is as as you know, at the moment, you're like, I've got to say this animal. But then the next thought in my mind is, Oh, I remember from being a kid that turtles are, like, really, really dirty and are covered with, you know, microbes. And, you know, don't you remember? Did you get taught that turtles are particularly disease laden type of animal?

Speaker1: [00:05:30] I remember, I remember that. All I know is that Abraham Lincoln's saved a turtle from being tortured with hot coals by a group of bad boys in his youth.

Speaker2: [00:05:40] That sounds like a Mark Twain adventure.

Speaker1: [00:05:42] Well, I think it's true as much as we can trust any narrative of American history, but I don't remember the cooties on turtles. No, but I believe it. Well, anything that's been through the bayou cannot be hygienic, I suppose.

Speaker2: [00:05:55] So immediately, immediately, the the the helping instinct is offset by this self-preservation or narcissistic instinct to like, not like get catch anything from helping this turtle. So I sort of figure out how do I get the turtle back to the wetlands? Because it's not. I don't trust the turtle to not turn around and go back on the parkway again, which is again, I think, to intent. There's a real question of whether this turtle just wanted to end it all and whether that was also unethical.

Speaker1: [00:06:23] Yeah, it could have been a suicide.

Speaker2: [00:06:24] It could have been a suicide because it really had to go a long way to get to

Speaker1: [00:06:27] Where now I can picture it's a long way and going uphill and in the heat. And so you took it up in your hand and you hooked it like a football back into the bayou?

Speaker2: [00:06:36] No, I didn't. I was. No, it was too frightened to do that. I took off my socks and I grabbed it, put socks over each hand, picked up the turtle and walked it all the way back and plopped it into the bayou. There is my hero tail.

Speaker1: [00:06:49] That's that's pretty heroic. It brings a whole, whole new all new shade to your your questions about camping, too.

Speaker3: [00:06:57] It's it's utterly, utterly worthy of

Speaker2: [00:06:59] Ridicule, although there was a good impulse in there somewhere it got lost in a lot of a lot of human centric narcissism somewhere.

Speaker3: [00:07:06] Well, that's that's what we're up against.

Speaker1: [00:07:07] Yeah, but you can be rest assured that you're not going to come back with any particular interesting bacteria or viruses.

Speaker2: [00:07:15] I don't know. But then, you know, that's what I was thinking about. You know, did like, could it could the viruses have gotten through my socks? I guess time will tell.

Speaker1: [00:07:22] I guess it's good that the turtle didn't nip you because they can. They can snap a little bit. But maybe, maybe he or she knew that you were at some saving grace.

Speaker2: [00:07:31] Some level is trying to do a good, a good deed. Yeah. So that was anyway, that was my adventure from this morning.

Speaker1: [00:07:35] So based on your heroism of the turtle, I will have to tell a kind of reverse cautionary tale about an encounter that I had with a cockroach. Oh, probably a month ago. You know, I

Speaker2: [00:07:48] Was a cockroach in distress. So you saved

Speaker1: [00:07:50] Us? Well, not exactly. Cockroach in distress, it's saving a cockroach, I don't know if I've ever done it, I'm not saying I wouldn't, but I tend not to preserve them. There you go. This one was not saved, and I don't usually think of an academic office as a space of of sort of multi-species encounter, but apparently it can happen. So I was in my office and I was printing out a document like a just a piece of paper. I don't know a text for a talk or something. And the is rolling away and the sheet comes out and I grabbed the sheet off the printer. And sure enough, on one side is a clearly freshly slaughtered, smeared, large, yuck cockroach still wet legs strewn all over the place antenna everywhere. So this this guy had been inside the computer, inside the printer. And when the piece of paper got pulled up through the rollers, the cockroach got pulled up to the God to run through the laser drive of, well, whatever the whatever contraptions are inside this printer. But through all the rollers and then out the other side,

Speaker2: [00:09:11] We're going to have to do an intro to this intro where we say trigger warning.

Speaker1: [00:09:15] It was really, really grisly. It was one of the most gruesome things I think I've ever seen, and I did actually shriek out loud because I didn't. You know, the the side of the paper that I picked up was just a plain white sheet looked fine. And then I flipped it over to look at the text, and here was this mutilated creature. And now I don't know why it was in there. Maybe there's it's not like I sit there eating cookies over my printer, but maybe there's glue or something in there that or it was warm could have been the warmth.

Speaker2: [00:09:46] Ok, so now bring that story back around to a heartwarming, uplifting message so we can transition over to Platform London. Is the printer doing to the cockroach now? I don't even want to go there.

Speaker1: [00:09:58] I guess the printer is really testing, you know, this expression. I mean, you remember this from the 80s, like during the days of nuclear annihilation was, you know, nothing on Earth will survive the nuclear winter except for the cockroach. So the printer in this case is actually testing the fortitude and the outer limits of possibility of vital possibility for the cockroach as a species. So once they're able to handle the mechanisms inside the printer, they actually will be able to certifiably survive the apocalypse. Ok, that's my conclusion.

Speaker3: [00:10:34] I like that.

Speaker2: [00:10:35] Or or the Marciniak apparatus of man has become so deadly. Even the cockroaches can't survive it. And that Marciniak apparatus folks powered by oil and gas and coal. Right. And that's what platform Lundeen is helping to work against. Ok. Is that enough? I don't

Speaker1: [00:10:52] Know. That's great. I was going to say powered by Intel, but you're right. No, it got a segue way back.

Speaker4: [00:11:06] Ok, great.

Speaker3: [00:11:08] Well, welcome to the Cultures of Energy podcast, and I, you know, so happy to be here with you. We are in the platform London offices. It's a beautiful day in London. It's a splendid day in London. So it's a day that sort of engenders optimism and hope for the future. So I think it's particularly good to have a conversation about the amazing work that you and your colleagues have been doing at Platform London. Thanks so much for making the time to sit down and chat a little bit about your work.

Speaker4: [00:11:37] Thank you for coming.

Speaker3: [00:11:39] Ok, so do you want to start at the beginning and just tell us a little bit about how Platform London got started or how you got interested in it? I don't know which is the most relevant.

Speaker4: [00:11:48] I'll start with platform. Ok, let's see. Might, might bring in me at some point. Ok, cool. So, yeah, so platforms existed for the past 30 years, and it's always existed on a kind of meeting place between art and environmentalism and social justice and research and activism. So all these kind of things being brought together in a fairly interdisciplinary way. It started out 30 years ago with very much an ecological focus. There were some projects, for example, unearthing the histories of London's Hidden Rivers rivers that run down pipes. You can see there's a we've got a poster there from a local paper saying plan to revive forgotten river. So all that sort of stuff took place and kind of 80s and early 90s. And I think the turning point in platform's history was really ran. About ninety four and ninety five, where the group got interested in oil politics and the impact of British oil companies has very much to do with Ken Saro-Wiwa, who you might know was a Nigerian author and activist. And in in his last word, to be his last couple of years, he became a good friend of the of the group. And then, of course, there's lots of people will know. He was put on trial and eventually executed on a trumped up charge in Nigeria in 1995. So really, at that point, platform decided to kind of dedicate itself to the to fighting the oil industry to to kind of witnessing and trying to prevent the impacts that especially London's oil corporations have.

Speaker3: [00:13:39] Yeah. Can I ask just one little follow up about that? I mean, because often that story about Sahrawi one Ogoni land is often told through the lens of Royal Dutch Shell. Right. So it becomes a kind of a Dutch matter. But I think you're drawing attention to the fact that that British oil and British finance were really, you know, connected to this problem

Speaker4: [00:13:57] Too, of course. And Shell is actually a sort of half half British and Dutch company. So they have a headquarters right opposite parliament here in London. And as we found out through research that we've done since, actually, it's not just finance, it's also law, and it's also government links that help oil companies do what they do. So they will be bringing diplomats and ministers from the UK to help them sign deals, and they will be drawing on that kind of web of contacts that they have both in finance and government, in legal structures to enable know sorts of crimes that they perpetrate and to enable them to continue drilling when we know that they shouldn't really be continuing, Jolene because of climate change. And so my view worth mentioning when we started thinking about this kind of web of different relationships that enable the industry to operate, and we came up with this concept of the carbon web and that really kind of helps us frame the the the entire kind of big programme of work that we're doing around this. Because the idea is it's really hard to take on an oil company directly. And we know that, you know, 80 percent have already discovered oil reserves have to stay in the ground. And we know that this business kind of has to eventually stop. But how do you take on an oil company? Well, we're saying the way to take on Big Oil is actually to go through these different links and cut off the links between oil companies and government to, you know, shame governments for the ways that they enable the breaking through of oil frontiers to break the links between oil companies and finance, which is what the Divestment Do movement is doing brilliantly. Yeah. And also another project that I'm particularly focused on to break the links between oil companies and the cultural institutions that they're that they're sponsoring, because that's also a crucial part in their kind of general business plan.

Speaker3: [00:15:59] So when when did the the idea or the the model of the carbon web begin to? Take shape because you said you've been or the organization's been working for 30 years, which is amazing. Is it still the same people who are involved, some of them from the beginning or has has has the torch been passed to a new group of people who kind of reimagined what platform London could be along the way?

Speaker4: [00:16:21] Hmm. It's a good question. There's a couple of people who are still around from the from the very, very early days a couple of the founders. But it's very much kind of with several different generations of new artists and new activists joining the group. Lots of the tactics that we might employ and lots of the language that we might employ has has changed a lot. And, you know, for example, coming into really strong awareness of the fact that our our work is politically stronger. If what we're doing is echoing demands that are coming from communities that are on the front lines of oil drilling, that wasn't necessarily something that was talked about like that from the start, even though, you know, obviously the link with Ken Saro-Wiwa was kind of like that. But that's really come into the heart of platforms work. I would say, you know, in the past, in the past 10 years, really, that's great.

Speaker3: [00:17:17] And it seems, I mean, so much has happened in those 30 years. If you look back to, I don't know. Ok, so we're talking about the mid 1980s when you guys got started. I mean, that was still the heart of Thatcherite Britain and Reaganite United States. And there had been really kind of promising, chaotic, unsettling period in the 1970s when for a moment, it seemed like actually that would be when the transition was going to happen. But then they doubled down again on oil fossil fuel business as usual, and that we had to ride out 30 years of neoliberalism post-2008. Again, things are really interesting again. And you know, do you? Is there anything from those earlier iterations of what platform did that you find important to preserve as you as you think about what to do today? Or is it really a matter of OK, we need to confront the contemporary and pay attention to what's happening right now and develop our tactics on that basis?

Speaker4: [00:18:17] Hmm. That's a really good question. I kind of wish my colleague James was here because he's the one who's who's kind of like, Obviously, I am. I am younger than Typekit. I'm not quite sure what to do with you two. But but there are some things that are really echoing. Like, for example, in the mid-80s, the group, even though they were primarily engaged in kind of ecological work, and they were also tuning in to some of the stuff that was going on with Thatcher and the miners struggle. And they actually organized for some, for some support actions and some some fundraising for the strike funds for miners and whales. And this is coal mining we're talking about. And actually, in some ways, you could expect an environmental group to actually be fairly happy about that. But but but but that sense of kind of um yeah, of solidarity with the workers in the fossil fuel industry. I think that's that's quite that's quite important to to to to preserve and to draw on. And one of the things that we're starting to think about now is OK. So the UK's North Sea oil drilling is something that is going to have to be shut down eventually. And if you think about the kind of carbon budgets that the world really ought to operate on to stay within two degrees global warming, then then actually, if you calculate it, it's only really a couple of years worth of oil that we ought to be able to extract.

Speaker4: [00:19:48] It's quite scary, right? And at the same time, of course, the unions of the oil workers in the North Sea, like oil sea like RMT, they're not particularly up for discussing that for obvious reasons. So one of the things that we're kind of starting to work on now is how do you have that conversation with about what lots of people call the just transition? So, so a just transition for the fossil fuel workers? How do you have that conversation in relation to the North Sea and how you know, what can the kind of new economy, renewables, transport and so on jobs be that these folks will be happy with? And how can what is their agency in terms of in terms of making that happen? And we're only just starting to to kind of have those those conversations with a few different union activists. So. So there are some interesting echoes in terms of in terms of the history

Speaker3: [00:20:48] And also maybe some unlikely allies that could be forming there too. That's something I'd like to talk to you more about. You know who who have you found supporting your work? And we're going to talk more about what you're doing, obviously. But but who? Who else have you found? Maybe unexpected? Resonance with as as as more and more of the world is having to think about climate change, I mean, I think especially in Europe, I feel like the everyday citizen. If I can make a very broad, unsubstantiated assertion, I feel like the everyday citizen might have a have have be thinking about global warming and climate change on a more routine basis than say, they are in Texas, right? Are you finding that's working to your advantage in terms of generating support for your your interventions? Hmm.

Speaker4: [00:21:33] Well, it's a good question. I think we've quite often lots of the projects that platforms been involved in are quite often sort of trying to push the envelope of what you know, of, of the ways that people think about energy in the ways that people think about art, for example. And so we quite often find that something that we were saying, you know, five years ago is all of a sudden becoming really becoming really relevant or lots more people are listening to it. A good example is the oil sponsorship work actually where the platform has been thinking about oil sponsorship of major cultural institutions since 2002 or something like that. And but the campaign really picked up after 2010, when, you know, during BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster, you know, all of this oil is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and all of these coastal areas. Exactly, exactly. And all of these people have all these chemicals on their skin and in their experience, lots of the effects of that and at the same time taped. The biggest gallery in London is holding this big summer party in honor of BP, its esteemed sponsor, and inviting all these ministers and lords and various VIPs to this party.

Speaker4: [00:22:54] So, so in that in that moment, that contradiction suddenly becomes a lot more, a lot more visible right of what the what the museums and galleries do when they support BP. So that moment was a kind of big turning point, and that's also around about when Tate started, which is an art collective. That kind of. We've got quite a close link to. And that's so that's what six years ago now and six years on, Tate has actually dropped BP. I just pretty recently, right? It's really recent. And thank you. Thank you. And that's, you know, we can't say for sure that that's been precisely because of the because of the campaigns. And the official stated reason is that BP is stopping the sponsorship because of a quote unquote challenging business environment. But we'd like to think that actually the challenging business environment has to do with the protests and the court cases and the thousands and thousands of letters and other things that have happened.

Speaker3: [00:24:01] So part of what you're doing is helping to create a challenging cultural environment.

Speaker4: [00:24:05] Exactly, precisely.

Speaker3: [00:24:06] So, yeah, talk a little bit more about that, about why art? I mean, because there are lots of different ways because you talked about the carbon web and that has many different strands and maybe many different nodes in it. Why? Why art and and where do you see also your work going now? Post this tape intervention.

Speaker4: [00:24:23] Hmm. So we started focusing on this, like I said quite a while ago, and the thinking has really been developing. I think the best answer of why art actually comes from a PR handbook. I remember reading a few years ago that was published around about 2000, and it's a it's just a kind of, you know, industry industry textbook really for PR professionals, as in chapter in there by some folks from Shell Slash about their strategy, where they say that the the most valuable PR kind of asset that the company has a social license to operate. And this phrase is kind of really been picked up in the past few years by lots of people. And this social license, they purchase it, the companies purchase it from people that they care about from their special public, they call them. So that will be journalists, that'll be diplomats, that will be people who work in particular governments that they want to make and deals with. That will be NGOs actually like ourselves that will be current and future potential employees of the company because it's really important to have your employees on board. So it's all these kind of very specific elite audiences that they that Shell or BP or Exxon really care about what these people think. Right? And so what that what that textbook says and what lots of the oil companies realize.

Speaker4: [00:26:05] Is actually around about mid-nineties was that they really needed to buy the support of these people rather than necessarily, you know, kind of as much advertise their petrol to to people who are going to buy their petrol so people can buy petrol anyway. Yes. Whereas this is something that's going to actually be instrumental in them continuing to be able to drill. So so there we are. They're buying social licence by putting their logo on a gallery where they know these people are going to go and they can use the Tate or the British Museum in order to host this big party for all the people that they care about, for their staff or for their business partners, or for their law firms or whoever. So that's really that's really what what we're targeting. We're targeting the way that cultural institutions can enable these kind of untenable business models by selling them to these special publics. But the other side of that answer is really that cultural institutions to some extent are more accountable than lots of other ones, right? Right. So, so it would be so. So it's a lot more possible to have a conversation with Tate or with the British Museum about what what ought to be doing really as a public institution

Speaker3: [00:27:32] Because they have at least in their sense of their mandate, maybe their identity, this sense of of of ethics and values and morality and

Speaker4: [00:27:40] Existence, right? Exactly. You can play to that. Yeah. And if you're if you're a museum preserving the kind of object from significant objects from the past of a particular place for the future so that people can come and see it, then then then it's kind of runs really contrary to your values. If actually you're, you know, preserving all these objects from Egypt and then you're and then you're actually enabling this other company to go and build a gas plant in Egypt that displaces lots of people. Like there's there's there's very clear contradictions there in terms of the institution's values, and that's something that both grabs people's imaginations in terms of mobilising people to act on this and also or to make it easier for that institution to actually change its behavior because they're supposed to really act on some level on the basis of those values.

Speaker3: [00:28:28] So let me ask you a bit about your your your strategies, if it's OK not to not to give away any trade secrets or to progress, because I know the element of surprise can be helpful in some cases. But you know, you liberate Tate, which we were just talking about obviously favored, you know, performative spectacular interventions. You know, there are other people who would say, you know, it's about getting op ed pieces in the right places and getting people to listen to them. I mean, again, it goes, I think back in activist politics, back to the beginning is direct action. You know, the way to go or is it indirect influence that you want to be doing so? Do you try to do both or do you? Does does Platform London have one sense at one or the other is the more effective way to go after the the carbon web?

Speaker4: [00:29:18] I'm going to say something that lots of anthropologists say. I think it's more complicated.

Speaker3: [00:29:21] All right. Well, that's your own point to explain how it really is.

Speaker4: [00:29:26] I think what's what's really important? What's really crucial about the tactics in terms of the kind of fossil free culture work is that it engages with art on its own terms? Right. So what's really amazing about liberated is that these folks, these performance performers, go into a gallery and they do something that is recognized by the visitors and by the gallery itself as an artwork. Yes. So they can't, you know, it's a lot easier to dismiss if you go in and you wave a placard and you kind of shout something in it and it's recognized as protest and it's not recognized as art. But whereas let's say so, I mentioned that summer party right when we where BP invited all these people to Tate, right? Liberated an intervention at that where these two women walked in and they had they someone had leaked an invite to the party to them. So they actually walked into the party and these big kind of frilly dresses and then walked around the party, got themselves some champagne and then started spilling this kind of oil like molasses stuff from under the skirts and walking around the party like just smearing this oil stuff everywhere. And then they took off their shoes, donned some BP branded Mac and then started trying to clean it up with their shoes extremely ineffectually, all the while saying things like, Oh, it's a really tiny spill spill in comparison to the size of the whole gallery. When will I get my life back or whatever? Which are all things that the CEO of BP at the time was saying about the spill, which was ongoing? And this is something that, you know, obviously it's a it's a form of resistance, but it is also a form of kind of performance.

Speaker3: [00:31:23] Um, sorry. We'll just take that moment to acknowledge that, among other things, in our segment, we have the lovely home of Is it a betting studio upstairs? What is it?

Speaker4: [00:31:36] Yeah, it's a it's a betting shop. Yeah, yeah. So we get lots of sports commentary upstairs.

Speaker3: [00:31:41] So that's that's nothing. But also you have this interesting subterranean relationship to yet another aspect of market culture. So for what it's worth, anyway, you were saying

Speaker4: [00:31:51] So so yeah. So I'm so I'm so I was talking about the performance and the people who were at that party, lots of them, as the performance talked, talked to them afterwards were saying, Well, this is art, you know, this is performance art. So, so it's much more effective when you can actually engage. It is direct action and it is in direct action. But but it's but the most important thing is that it is art, it is performance, and it engages with that institution on terms that that institution is supposed to operate on. If that makes sense. As another example, there is a group called the The Natural History Museum and in the US who might have come across. Yeah, I'll introduce you to them. They're really great, and they're actually they're actually I think they're actually doing something in Houston

Speaker3: [00:32:45] Right about now. Oh, well, you know, the Houston Natural History Museum as a whole, like fracking, it's a wonderful exhibit. Yeah.

Speaker4: [00:32:52] So that's not nice. Yeah, precisely. I'll send you these anyway. So. So there they've actually set themselves up as a museum. And their idea is we are a museum of how sociopolitical forces shape nature. Right? And so they go to museum conventions and they set up exhibitions in these sorts of spaces and in kind of community spaces. And they they're intervening on the same thing, right? They're intervening on the involvement of fossil fuel corporations and fossil fuel interests and people like David Koch in museums, in the states. And they're doing it as a museum. And I think that's that's what that's the really the most important thing about these tactics. And similarly, for platform we are when we make interventions on oil sponsorship of the arts, we are doing so as an arts organization, right? So for example, we're organizing this, uh, thing called fossil funds free, which is a commitment that artists and arts organizations can take, saying we won't take direct fossil fuel funding for our work, right? And we're doing so not just as a kind of petition style thing, but we're doing so as an arts organization, organizing a community of arts organizations, right?

Speaker3: [00:34:17] Which is so critical. I mean, on the one hand, I think everything you were saying also reminded me of the work of people like the yes men, you know, who also kind of in through performance could inhabit these other roles. And the guy I was just telling you about the sort of his and his sort of performance as mayor, but he became mayor, you know, as a political actor that people could never figure out whether it was sincere or was a joke. Yeah. But in a way, that message seemed more sincere to people then than either of those other two positions. So in a weird way, the hybrid position was what people wanted to hear it was like. So in a way, it's like

Speaker4: [00:34:55] A reinvention of saying, you're right about that.

Speaker3: [00:34:58] So it's like a bit of a reinvention of protest in a way and finding new ways in through the cracks between recognizable categories.

Speaker4: [00:35:06] Exactly, exactly. And it's about also constantly, constantly trying to expand what you can do and constantly trying to push the envelope. So like last December, we organized something called Deadline Festival at Tate, where so previously most of these performances that took place by liberal state and also by other people within gallery spaces, there would have been surprise ones. Right? Whereas we thought, OK, we've done that before. How about we pre-announce something and we're going to say, OK, we're going to run a festival of public events, art debates, film showings, workshops, live performances, intimate and is going to challenge fossil fuel sponsorship. It's going to talk about the relationship between art and climate change is going to challenge Tate's colonial legacy, and we're going to completely pre-announce all of this, every single detail where exactly it's going to be, how exactly it's going to happen. We're going to produce this really glossy program thing. Um, I'm going to see what happens when they let us do it, yeah, and we had a lot of arguments and we had like a three hour long debate about whether they would let us bring some particular artwork into the into the hole. But but actually, they let us do it in the end, did they OK? So it's so it's kind of the whole process has been kind of thinking, is this possible now? Maybe not yet. Ok, let's try it right?

Speaker3: [00:36:28] But in a way, I mean, and this is kind of goes back to our idea of like the the unusual or unexpected alliances your work could generate or attract. I would imagine that there are people within the tape who really want this to happen, but maybe they don't feel like they can do it themselves. So I think you, as the provoca provocateurs around the situation, can give them the excuse to go along with it. Do you think there's some of that dynamic?

Speaker4: [00:36:52] Yeah, precisely. Absolutely. I mean, we end up speaking on panels and things with folks who used to or currently work for Titan, another and the other institutions sometimes. And they'll quite often say, Well, I'm not actually with Tate on this, but I and especially since it's been announced that the sponsorship deal would end, they would lots more people will speak up like that. And we also know that, for example, in the British Museum, there's a similar there's a similar kind of dynamic the the union that organizes within them, the workers within the museum. They've done the survey and it's something like sixty sixty six percent of staff don't think that the museum should be taking BP sponsorship. So it's um. So our role is partly just enabling these folks to kind of speak up or enabling them to at least tell a story about.

Speaker3: [00:37:49] Yeah. So what's your process? How do you come up with these ideas? I mean, do you have a collective process here in the house where you just brainstorm things and then go out? Or do people come to you with? It would be great if Platform London were to do this because it would be kind of cool.

Speaker4: [00:38:03] And I think it's it's always a mix. I mean, we work in lots of quite different settings and with what's quite different, audiences like James, who I mentioned before, I used to do this project where he would go and talk to investment banks that invested in BP and Shell about the risks of of the particular investments. Or another colleague has spent several years based in Egypt and supporting communities there who were resisting, um uh, gas related infrastructure that was being built by BP. And there's there's all these different sorts of projects, and it's really kind of depends on the project. But I think we very much think of ourselves as having capacity to kind of respond to and support, um, different sorts of struggles that are that link in somehow into this idea of London as an oil city with a kind of, you know, with responsibility both for the future in terms of climate and for the past in terms of colonialism and kind of linking things in around that. But we've also actually I haven't really mentioned this yet, but I've also recently started doing a lot more work around ideas of trying to imagine what a positive energy future actually looks like. Um, and that was really prompted by Doreen Massey, who put two people I'm sure will know who listened to the podcast and she was pulling together this. Her and several colleagues were pulling together this kind of volume on sort of what happens beyond neoliberalism and how do we how do we figure out how to manifest this? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Um, thank you. And so so we were invited to write a chapter for that about energy. And how do we how do we create a post neoliberal energy system and what what might that look like? And that's really prompted us to kind of think, OK, what are the positive solutions that we can push from? So, yeah, so the work comes from different places.

Speaker3: [00:40:12] So, so just what are you leaning towards? What are some of the things that came out of your discussions there?

Speaker4: [00:40:17] Hmm. Because it's a hard thing.

Speaker3: [00:40:20] I mean, it's what we're all thinking about, right? So no one has the answer, but it's something that is is maybe the creative challenge of our era. We just were talking to somebody yesterday, a ecological economist talking about de-growth. I mean, so that's right, that's one strategy as it is. And then there's, you know, green sustainability or something like creating a green, steady state. And and then there's, of course, the acceleration tests who believe we just push through and say, save everything through technology and so forth. But I'm sure you have had interesting thoughts along these lines.

Speaker4: [00:40:53] Yeah, I think we haven't ever had a discussion of like, um, an overall, this is our overall vision, and I think it's quite important for. For us to keep a sense of a kind of diversity of possible open futures, the things that we've kind of been coming up with and talking with lots of people about are the sorts of ways that you can take steps from, from the energy system that we have now into something that's more democratic and more sustainable. So for example, we've ended up being part of this campaign for London to start a municipal energy company. Oh, right. And which would both invest in renewables and invest in the housing stock in London because everything is extremely decrepit, decrepit and damp and horrible and lots of people have to literally tens of thousands of people are struggling with kind of making ends meet and making choices between heating and eating. So so we're pushing for London to set up a company that would provide to those folks and that would also invest in renewable energy. So. So I think what we've been imagining is a kind of mix reading, because there's no my sense is that there's no like overall solution that's going to that's going to work completely for everything. There's an island in Scotland to this tiny island where they've bought back their own energy grid and they're now gone completely renewable. And, you know, some places can do that, and some places can set up their own renewable energy cooperatives, which lots of places are doing. But not everything is going to fit every scale, and especially with the kind of scale of rapid transition that we really need to face climate change. We can't think, OK, everyone's going to put a solar panel on their home or everyone's going to join a co-operative, and that's how we're going to kind of solve the challenge. We need things that are larger scale as well, like kind of public energy, like municipal projects, things like that.

Speaker3: [00:43:03] Well, I mean, I think that's I mean, that's a great reminds me of the the the German philosopher and many other things. Politicians have unshared who really strongly advocated for municipal energy companies as an alternative to national grid systems, both for efficiency reasons, but also really for political reasons. Because because at that level, the city is kind of a scale of a density of humanity where what you do matters more than like an individual household's decision actually makes a difference what the millions of people in London decide to do with their energy at scale. But on the other hand, it's also responsive to to democracy and the true sense of the term in a way that it's really hard for nation states, let alone sort of transnational political entities to be.

Speaker4: [00:43:51] Yeah, exactly. And actually in Germany has been a great kind of wave of municipal public energy projects like Berlin recently had a referendum on the city buying back its own grid and creating its own kind of properly democratic India company. And that would manage the grid as well. The referendum failed by something ridiculous, like a thousand words. Not not. It didn't fail in the sense of the majority of vote voting against it. It failed in terms of enough people showing up, but by a really, really small margin. But the Senate in Berlin has now voted for something that you know, is not quite as ambitious as what the referendum was proposing, but it's still kind of on on the way there. And there's quite a lot of there's quite a lot of places in the states, I think as well that are that are doing this, I think. And yeah, it's political. Chattanooga. They've got their own. Yeah, very good.

Speaker3: [00:44:50] Yeah, yeah. Austin, Texas has made some moves in this direction. I mean, I think it's interesting to see at the urban city level that there is. So here's another question that do you see Platform London as part of a kind of international network of city level activist organizations that actually share ideas and and prototypes for change with one another?

Speaker4: [00:45:16] Hmm. I think we're part of lots of networks. Yeah, I think lots of this. I mean, we are this hybrid thing that's an arts organization and the kind of your more traditional campaigning NGO and sort of radical as group all at the same time. So I think we're all we're in all these different sorts of networks and academic networks, all at the same time. And it's I mean, it's a great place to be. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker3: [00:45:46] What gives you so you have so many different tools in your

Speaker4: [00:45:49] Toolkit, so to speak? Yeah, precisely.

Speaker3: [00:45:51] You can engage. Yeah, in terms of I mean, we're talking about the work you're doing with miners. Are there other projects like that that you're developing? In other words, it's spreading out from working with arts and public cultural institutions towards engaging other types of groups in change projects?

Speaker4: [00:46:07] Yeah. I mean, there was quite there's lots of different sorts of work and different sorts of publics like can after after the Invasion of Iraq platform worked with Iraqi oil trade unions because we had some experience in analyzing oil contracts that that different governments hand out to oil companies. And we basically assisted in analyzing the contracts that people like BP and Shell were getting in Iraq as a result of this new oil law that was that was being pushed through partly by the, you know, by the occupying forces and and the law was overturned in the end, which was very helpful for the for the for the unions there, although obviously they didn't manage to they didn't manage to actually retain control from the companies entirely. So there's that sort of there's those sorts of alliances and. We have a fairly long history of that kind of like trying to make sense of and trying to get out documents that show what exactly is going on with contracts between oil companies and and governments. There's that there's that finance work that I mentioned where we've been kind of analyzing, for example, frontier Arctic drilling for the purpose of getting those facts to people who invest in Shell and BP and saying, Well, actually, this company is lying to you, right? You know, and and then getting the shareholders to ask questions off of the companies to kind of prod the company away from from that frontier. So it's a big, big diversity of tactics, really.

Speaker3: [00:47:59] Have you had any things that succeeded despite your expectations to the contrary or conversely, things that you thought were going to work that didn't? Hmm. I'm always interested in what you can learn from failure as a generative thing for spinning a project forward.

Speaker4: [00:48:17] That's an interesting thing. Unexpected when recently the Royal Bank of Scotland, which is it was one of the banks. It was the bank that got the biggest bailout in the UK after the financial crash. And it also happened to be a bank that was branding itself as the oil and gas bank. And that happened. That was happening in sort of 2006 2009. So we started campaigning for RBS to to divest from its investments, particularly in the tar sands, but also in coal and other fossil fuel stocks and particularly project investments. So we we started that back then and we were with working with lots of student groups. And, you know, all these universities were kicking our butts off of their campuses and it was all very exciting. We took the government to court for, you know, because they bailed out the bank. They then owned something in the region of 80 percent of the shares of the bank. So they were kind of technically responsible for the investments, but they wouldn't actually kind of do an evaluation of all these investments in terms of climate change. That court case failed, and we we haven't really put lots of energy into that campaign for the past few years, although there have been there have been actions now and again in lots of other people who've been working on it. And then, yeah, all of a sudden, a few weeks ago, there's an article in The Guardian where The Guardian's find out that R.V.S has actually completely sold off its tar sands stocks for environmental reasons. Yeah, and majorly sold down on on its fossil fuel stocks. So, you know, 10 years on isn't

Speaker3: [00:50:05] Will change can take

Speaker4: [00:50:08] Exactly some time.

Speaker3: [00:50:09] So that's terrific, though.

Speaker4: [00:50:10] Exactly. But I think there's something there's something interesting in what you say about failure because there is a pressure for something that's kind of essentially a campaigning group to kind of declare, we want this one that we want this, we want that and we do lots of that kind of storytelling. And I feel like as movements, we're not necessarily as practised as telling stories about our failures. I think that's something that's something that we need to kind of think critically about.

Speaker3: [00:50:40] Yeah, I guess I don't know. I mean, I'm of two minds about it. I'm a kind of a relentlessly optimistic person, so I would be in the same position of wanting to say, Oh yeah, it's because we started on them 10 years ago. Finally, it nags them enough that they wanted to make a change. But of course, you never know really what what causes that decision. You know, they could also argue it well, you know, look at what's happening with fossil fuel stocks and, you know, tar sands or more politically complicated with the Trudeau government, what are they going to do with them? And the government's changed. But you know, I do. I think your point, your point is well taken, but I want to follow it up with a just to get your sense of things. And again, I know you haven't been at this for 30 years, but your organization, there's sort of 30 years of memory and history about this. I like to think that we are turning a corner in terms of mobilizing people and not everywhere and not everyone, but that more and more people are coming to care about these issues and willing to get engaged with it. And that's but again, as as a relentless optimist, I feel like I need to check myself occasionally and hear, you know, often you said, you know, talking failure. I mean, what do you think? I mean, do you think in your heart of hearts? Do you think that that that it's that you're picking up momentum with the work you're doing, you're seeing people get involved?

Speaker4: [00:51:59] Absolutely. I think the I mean, I think the divestment movement is a huge kind of step forward and has brought in lots of people, and I totally didn't expect that when it was just starting. I think what's also quite important to think about is, again, talking as an anthropologist slightly, but like how how language shifts, how we how we talk about how we talk about climate change and how we talk about energy and how that language has shifted over time. So I think one of the if I go back to the RBZ campaign example, the Royal Bank of Scotland campaign, one of the big wins of that, I would say, is actually getting it out, getting out the idea that banks are responsible for the carbon emissions and other other impacts of their investments because before 2006, there really wasn't that much talk about that. And then little by little, over the past 10 years, this has become completely normal. You know, there's the equator principles. There is all sorts of kind of banking sector responses to this idea, but it's also, you know, it is completely normal to say that, and it wasn't completely normal to say that back in back in 2005. Similarly, I think I feel that it's completely normal for me now to say I think BP and Shell need to be winding down right in the next few years. And and and that's kind of not necessarily completely realistic thing to say, but it should be a realistic thing to say. Yeah, right. And I think, yeah, I think those sorts of shifts of the sense of what's possible are really important and really encouraging.

Speaker3: [00:53:44] It's funny because I'm just to take BP for an example, which is very locally resonant. I mean, there was a moment not that many years ago when it almost sounded like they agreed with you. They were BP means beyond petroleum, and they had started investing in biofuels and solar and other things. And then we met once totally randomly, somebody who had worked in BP's, you know, renewables division who said they basically just scrapped it all. And this is back when oil prices were really high. Yeah, two or three years ago. And they just decided, you know, forget all

Speaker4: [00:54:19] Absolutely my favorite. My favourite bit of that story is the fact that BP, actually, if you look at the amount of money that BP spent on developing its new logo, which was supposed to make it look all green and the sunflower thing green and yellow, so anything and you look at the amount of money that I actually invested into developing renewables, they spent more on the logo.

Speaker3: [00:54:41] It's a nice logo. I mean, give them the credit for that.

Speaker4: [00:54:44] It's attractive. It's an attractive logo. But but that gives you a sense of what they were actually trying to do.

Speaker3: [00:54:50] Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, that's really encouraging to hear that that your general sense is that that you are getting more and more traction for what you're doing.

Speaker4: [00:55:01] And absolutely, I think in the in the art sector, that's really visible, especially out of that and BP are ending their their relationship. There's loads more people willing to to speak about it loads more artists and you can really tell you can really tell from from the way that this is shifting. You can really tell the sorts of power that those institutions and those sponsorships hold, because there will now be artists that will say, Oh, I'm completely with you, I'm going to sign on to this letter about BP or whatever it is when they weren't able to do so before, because before they were worried about their work not being displayed on tape. Right. And that's, you know, you can see how that sponsorship actually shapes, you know, even if you can't see that there's like direct censorship going on, but you can see how that sponsorship actually shapes the discourse on what you know, artists are able to say about fossil

Speaker3: [00:55:57] Fuels or whatever. Yeah, and it seems to I mean, for us because we we do a fair amount of work with art and artists ourselves, less with institutions and more with individual artists. But my sense is that a lot of artists are thinking about climate change right now and some of really incredible work on it and to it must be a good feeling for those people to feel like those golden handcuffs have been relieved that they don't have to, you know, they can. They can pursue their art. Maybe where they want to go without having to worry about, is that going to affect them reputationally? So they can't show in these fancy galleries and museums?

Speaker4: [00:56:32] For sure, for sure. I really hope so. And I think so. One kind of ongoing battle of ideas that we that we really have to win is we quite often when I'm talking about this work in some kind of public setting with like a bunch of students or whatever, I'll quite often somebody will put their hands up and say, But what about you? Didn't you come here on a bus, didn't you? The new use of fossil fuels to get here? Yeah. And I think I think that's a that battle of that frame is really, really important one right now. Because. Yes, people can take action individually by trying to remove fossil fuels from their lives. But we also have to think carefully about what, you know, the different forms of action that you can take and what they do. When you're an arts organization and your being sponsored by BP and you're lending them your credibility in a way and you're kind of selling public trust basically to that company. And if you remove that, that's a really different form of action than if you're, you know, changing your light bulbs or using fewer cars or whatever it is. And yeah, so so I think we have to kind of think carefully about and understand the impacts of these different that these different forms of action can have rather than thinking, Oh, but if you can't remove fossil fuels completely from your life, then then you can't remove them from it either.

Speaker3: [00:58:10] Well, no. But I mean, you know, I do take those because we always hear those challenges to like the, you know, activists who fly in planes to give lectures against climate change. And if they realize, you know, and the idea of the the hypocrisy of the activist subject, who also inhabits a world with really basic infrastructural reliance on intense magnitudes of energy? Yes, OK. But I guess what? I would want to say back to that and which I do, you know, when I am in a similar situation is, well, you know, there are there are ways to actually provide those magnitudes of energy, and they've been demonstrated to work in places like Denmark and Germany, largely on a on a renewables basis. You know, you you do like biofuel back up when solar. You know, there are places in Germany that are already generating over a hundred percent of their electricity. And in like Orkney, like we had, we had a great podcast with Laura Watts, who's talking about that marine renewable energy. So you look at that and you say, Well, we're not there everywhere yet. It is possible to do it and it opens new lines of then activism. Yes, we should be thinking about electric vehicles or something like that as an alternative to gas powered or petroleum powered vehicles. I mean, there are ways you can take the bus to your thing and not have to burn oil,

Speaker4: [00:59:27] You know, like, yeah,

Speaker3: [00:59:29] Because it's part of the the broader

Speaker4: [00:59:31] Complex. And I think what's quite crucial for me to say following on from that is the fact that I don't have a choice of not using fossil fuels while living in London has a lot to do with being sponsored by BP, because that's precisely why oil companies go to these spaces and try and kind of brand them so that that enables them to block meaningful climate action. And that's, you know, so breaking this link enables you to break the other links as well.

Speaker3: [01:00:05] Right now, it gets us back to the carbon web. So, OK, looking ahead, because I want to ask you about, you know, what would you like to be able to do in the future that you can't do right now, either because of finances or person power or whatever else might be or limitations or the political context as you're looking ahead at the next 30 years of Platform London, do you have? I know that's

Speaker4: [01:00:28] 30 years of my guys.

Speaker3: [01:00:31] But yeah, I bet the work you're doing is still going to be necessary 30 years from now, even though I hope we'll live in a much better world at that point.

Speaker4: [01:00:39] I hope so, too. I find it really hard to think of it again. If James was here, he might be able to paint a picture 30 years from now. But I think in the in terms of maybe not 30 years, but the next two years, I think I think I think those those conversations that I mentioned in terms of talking with trade unions and talking with communities about what it means to shut down fossil fuels is really important. I think for me personally, I would really like that conversation to also be international. So I'm from Moscow originally. I moved here 10 years ago, but I still have lots of links there and did research there and stuff and. In Moscow, it's kind of among lots of people who, you know, activists or whatever. People sort of assume that we have to eventually move off from an oil based economy because people know that it's not particularly good for corruption and various other things like that, but there's not really a kind of vision for what does a post-oil future actually look like and how do you get there? And what are the what are the steps? What is it post-oil culture look like? And so I think, yeah, for me, it's really important to try and develop those stories. But in international conversation, particularly with places that are for want of a better word, resource colonies, right? Because yeah, if you're in a place like that and you don't have a story to tell about, how are you going to get out of it, then it's really hard. Yeah. And it's also it's also our responsibility in terms of talking as someone who's sitting in London, right? You know, the UK has has a lot more opportunities to get off of fossil fuels whilst depending on other places being completely stuck on their oil or coal economy. So it's our kind of responsibility as well.

Speaker3: [01:02:35] Was that part of. I mean, again, more personal question why you got interested in doing this type of activism was that movement from from Russia to the UK. And, you know, looking back and saying, we really need to have this conversation?

Speaker4: [01:02:48] Yeah, absolutely. That's completely completely part of it. And I had a just a moment in 2008, I was in Moscow hanging out with my family, and lots of my friends here in the UK were at this thing called the Camp for Climate Action, which was at that point trying to shut down a coal fired power station. And they were having a really difficult time and being beaten up by police and everything. And I was in Moscow, and Russia was bombing Georgia at that point, including also, by the way, bombing a gas pipeline which my colleagues here wrote a book about. And I was there with these literally with these planes flying overhead, and I knew that they were going to Georgia, and I just felt completely powerless and felt completely kind of like, OK, what is my what is my position in relation to all this? So I think, yeah, I guess some of the reasons why, why I'm here come from that moment and from thinking, OK, how do I position myself in this thing that in relation to this thing that's going on right now?

Speaker3: [01:04:02] Well, let me just say again, the work you and your colleagues are doing is really inspirational here. I'm so happy to have found out about what you were doing. I know it's 30 years late, but so glad to be picking up the story now and to be able to watch it unfold in the future. Is there anything we didn't cover that you want to talk like any projects that you'd like to make sure people know about out there in the broader world of energy humanities?

Speaker4: [01:04:30] I guess one one thing, one small thing to mention is actually maybe as part of the whole, where are we going in the next few years? We've been talking a lot within platform and with our kind of allies here in London about to what extent the kind of activist circles or NGO networks or arts organizations, how they can kind of decolonize themselves because lots of the practice, both as employers and as speakers and as all these other things that we do, we in lots of ways replicate some of the oppressions that we that we're trying to fight against. And so

Speaker3: [01:05:16] Can you expand

Speaker4: [01:05:17] On that? So platform runs. One project I haven't mentioned yet is called Shake. It's a project. It's a young people led project, and people participating in it are primarily young Londoners, mostly people of color or people from marginalized backgrounds who lots of them are facing kind of precarious housing, precarious jobs, and they are just getting into activism or art. And the sheikh is really a kind of regular course and also a network for these folks to sort of skill up and kind of embolden themselves to make poetry, to make art, to make videos and other things. And one of the things that we're learning several years on after after starting this project is that for the folks, for these folks that we're working with, it's still quite hard to access work within within arts organizations and within within environmental organizations and lots. Of the concerns that's happening. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, precisely. And kind of educational inequalities and other things like that and unpaid internships and all sorts of all sorts of practices. And also that lots of the issues that these folks will care deeply about and we will be deeply affected by, like gentrification, for example, is not really something that that these sectors will properly talk about or properly take notice of. And so I think what we've started doing is platform and what I really want the sector as a whole to do is to make sure that wherever you are that you're actually listening to these sorts of front line quote unquote voices within your own place, as well as as well as kind of thinking, OK, people affected by climate change are somewhere over there going to go out to them. So I think that's kind of a challenge for ourselves, but for everyone else really as well,

Speaker3: [01:07:29] Because you begin to see that when you think about the complexity and the the scope and of energy issues and how energy affects literally every aspect of our lives and everything that we can do right you, you begin to realize that it is it is a whole social world that you're trying to transform, not just not just people get their fuel

Speaker4: [01:07:54] Source. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've mentioned this, which the London campaign, the campaign for a municipal energy company. And part of the point of that is to say, OK, we want we want our city and our country and so on to address climate change. We want to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. We want renewables to be installed. But actually, lots of people in the city actually can't afford to even pay for their energy right now. So if we make energy more expensive, if we, you know, some people will say, like get people to pay the proper price of the energy right, then that will fall on. Loads of people can barely afford it now anyway, and aren't really responsible for it anyway because they're living in an extremely kind of drafty old house and can't really pay the bills and can't really renovate the place. So. So it's kind of thinking through these these sorts of justice dimensions to our work, as well as just thinking about how to how to stop fossil fuels. Yeah.

Speaker3: [01:08:56] Well, again, Anna, or I should say, Dr. Bjorkman,

Speaker4: [01:09:02] Thank you very much to

Speaker3: [01:09:03] Acknowledge and and congratulate you on your recent PhD. Thanks so much for being with us and talking about your work, and we wish you the very best and hope you'll come back again someday and share share future, future tales of victory or even generative failures if it comes to that. But it sounds like everything's going

Speaker4: [01:09:21] In the right direction. Mm hmm. Thank you very much. That's been really interesting to chat. Sorry about the kettle.