Everybody's Miserable

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Hello, and welcome to Strong Message here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

I'm Amadinucci.

And I'm Helen Lewis.

And this week we're going to pick up a phrase used by Niger Farage, which is, everybody's miserable.

Are you miserable this morning?

Am I miserable?

No, I'm actually genuinely looking forward to this.

You've ruined the tone already.

I always think, because you're occasionally asked, are you a pessimist or an optimist?

And I always think, well, pessimism is just, there's a greater chance you're right if you're a pessimist.

So we're going to look at the trend in political speech to either top up or top down our state of being.

But before we do that,

what have you been up to this week?

I have been to see the new production of Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Jamie Lloyd, starring Tom Hiddleston and Haley Atwell,

which is two hours, just under two hours, of just the most high-energy, faintly camp disco nonsense.

But I took my husband, who's not a great Shakespeare lover, he's slept through many of the finest Shakespeare productions this country has to offer, and he absolutely loved it because he nailed down what Much Ado is in its purest form, which is the first iteration of that enemies to lovers rom-com which is now the staple of huge amounts of romanticy and other fiction and it's you know two people who sort of fancy each other but also find each other really irritating forming an alliance is is a really compelling story.

The weird thing about it is.

It's like a Badenock and

Jenrick, that sort of thing.

Eventually they'll just think, no, you know,

I hate the way you chew, but no, but we're meant to be together.

I suspect that might be more Robert Jenrick and Nigel Frage, may follow that later.

We belong in one party together.

We can't hold ourselves apart any longer.

I'm all in favour of doing what you like with Shakespeare.

I know there are lots of purists that say you can't touch this, but

from the moment his plays were written, they were cutting bits here, adding bits there.

And he was borrowing from other sources, stories, and so on.

It's all part of, that was all part of the culture to take what there is around, to do a magpie pick of what looks good and then add your own inimitable talent to it.

Yeah, I mean, the thing that that everybody talks about is Nahum Tate's rewriting of King Lear to have a happy ending, which I think may be possibly a bridge too far.

But when the theatres reopened after being shut under Cromwell, Shakespeare was the one that they kind of brought back as a kind of, oh, he's a banker, you know, he's existing IP, they said to each other.

But they turned things into kind of operas and they put people on wires and, you know, and they just did mash about.

Oh, yeah.

Well, this week I've been mostly hoping against hope, but I have also been reading a tremendous book called Heresy by by Catherine Nixe.

It's an account of all the various competing gospels that existed in the first 100 to 200 years AD, competing stories of Christ and the account of how most of them were banned.

And we've arrived at the four that were decided on by, I think it was Emperor Constantine.

But she's looking into all the other gospels that were around and that were very popular.

And I'm only raising all that because it has a description of something that I don't think we have looked into.

We've looked into politicians' speech, we've looked into language used by journalists.

One body that we haven't looked at the speech of is parrots.

And Catherine Nixon does an account of, it was very much life of Brian in those sense.

There were so many messiahs around.

And she talks about Apsethis, a second century prophet, a mystic from Libya, who was so keen to be recognized as a god that he trained his parrots to flap around him saying, absethis is a god and then his neighbors gotten on to it and in revenge trained his parrots to squawk abscess having caged us compels us to say abscesseth is a god and then they crucified him i was saying very much the era of having to make your own entertainment yes wasn't it just competing parrots when you said that's really interesting parrots are it's their version of siri

well but it made me think about the fact that one of the critiques of the large language models the artificial intelligence models Oh, I'm so glad you've took us back up to date.

Oh, well, let's do bring us bang up to date.

Is that they are what people call a stochastic parrot.

And stochastic is a brilliant word that I only learned about six months ago, but it's a kind of word for, you know, chaos, the things that are kind of, you know, or making something has a kind of chain of chaotic links.

So they talk about stochastic terrorism, which is basically that, you know, it doesn't seem to have any real origin.

It's just followed down a link of other, you know, other people's thoughts and words.

And stochastic parrot means essentially the way that large language models work is they make very good predictions about what word will follow each previous word.

Like I said before, it's like a very complicated spell check.

Yeah.

Autocorrect.

Yes.

But that's why people call it a parrot, because it doesn't have the level of originality.

It can only ever remix what's already on the internet.

So it really is the ultimate demonstration of garbage in, garbage out.

If it's been trained on bad.

Yes,

and to train it and to perfect it and to

make it much more able to mimic human thought.

Of course,

the races now want to feed AI more and more content, which is why a lot of people in the creative industries are saying you can't just, it goes back to the whole copyright thing.

You know, we own this property.

You know, these are our ideas.

You can't just feed it to an AI machine so that it starts coming up with novels even better than ours.

Well, it could probably churn out very formulaic novels that would be as good as the bottom 20% of bad authors.

I think that's something that worries people.

But the one that's been circulating around is obviously Google has gone, like everybody has, very heavy in on AI.

And someone had asked it, is beef kosher?

And the Google AI's response was, it depends on the religion of the cow.

But you can see that like all the constituent parts where that's come from.

But it's just ended up just getting it's no, no, I don't think that's how religious purity laws work actually.

I suppose this is the opportunity that I wasn't planning to mention if our producer Gwen, if he is happy for this, and if he's not, he can always cut this bit out.

But he's just told us that he fed into a transcription ai he wanted transcripts of a nigel farage speech and uh um liz truss speech it transcribed the farage speech and it refused to do the liz truss speech it it it just stole and went this does not comply with our terms so liz truss's language actually broke ai

finally this is how we resist skynet we just we just deploy liz truss we she's elected to every leadership position across across the world perfectly it's mad but it might just work i think it's I think it's worth a try.

Well, that sounds quite an upbeat way to deal with a potentially terrifying situation, but we have to make a correction.

We have an email from A.

Cheffy, which says, hello, both.

Like you, I used to instinctively pronounce the bad in Kemi Badenock's name as well, bad.

But she addresses widespread pronunciation in a video interview last year when she was running for Tory Leader.

Her first little batchy rounds with Fade, she explained.

There is no bad in my name, she said, although this person adds, in non-compliance with BBC impartiality guidelines, there is, of course, definitely an Enoch.

Right, so it's bad.

It's Badinoch.

It's Badinoch.

Right.

I also have to make a correction because last week I described Cyrillic as the Russian language, and a lot of people with a very strong interest in ninth-century saints pointed out to me that it comes obviously from Saint Cyril, Saint Cyril and St.

Methodius, who were Slavs.

And they translated the Bible, this is from the Encyclopædia Britannica, into the language later known as Old Church Slavonic or Old Bulgarian and invented the Glagolitic alphabet that is now in its final Cyrillic form, still used as the alphabet for modern Russian and a number of Slavic languages.

Oh, that's what that is.

There's a Glolitic Mass, isn't there?

Is it Kudai or Janacek?

I can't remember.

John Peel introducing a band at Reading.

This is a Glolitic Mass.

Yeah, but there we go.

So

for 9th century language nerds, please enjoy reading more about that at your leisure.

I didn't expect when we sat down to do this that our first 10 minutes would be taken up by discussions of 2nd century saints and ninth century

Eastern European language originations.

Well, there you go.

That's the wreathian mission of the BBC right there.

If you didn't want to learn about old Slavonic, you've come to the wrong place.

Yes.

Which brings us very nicely to Farage's speech, Everybody's Miserable.

And this picks up on a point that we ended with last week.

the advent of miserabism,

the sheer proliferation of politicians who seem to get good headlines and a good response in the crowd and you know in the media by doing life down by saying everything is terrible nothing works it's the american carnage that trump brought to the white house in his first inauguration speech there's the american cpac uh rallies that we're going on this week with quite a few british politicians coming on and not saying what they would say in the uk but saying to an american audience how terrible britain is and agreeing with everyone else saying how terrible the world is.

Have we just gone fool miserabless?

Well, the interesting thing is, I would have normally said, yes, that Nigel Farage was genuinely kind of an upbeat politician, but his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference was: you know, he said we had optimism in the late 1980s.

Frankly, we had it much to the 1990s.

That's what we have to recapture.

And frankly, being led as we are, I mean, God, doesn't Rachel Reeves just make you want to reach for the cry tissues?

Now, can I just say, have you ever heard the phrase cry tissues before?

Is that an established word?

I don't know.

Could I have some tissues, please?

What would you like?

Would you like the cry ones or the wiping up ones?

Yeah, would you like that?

Anyway, but there we go.

So I learned a new phrase.

I mean, his was a sort of meta-miserabism in the sense that he was criticising Labour for being too miserable.

But also the Tories and austerity, and because he talked about really the last few decades.

Yeah.

And yet, strangely, you know, he has to go to America

to say that about the UK.

Well, it's interesting because I've started to see some real pushback.

Obviously, we've got local elections coming up

and Welsh elections in which reform are predicted to do pretty well.

So, both Labour and the Conservatives are very alive to the threat of Nigel Farage.

And you have started to see people take him on in rather tougher terms than perhaps you previously had.

For example, Kier Stahmer said, you know, he wasn't in the Commons for the Ukraine defence announcements because he's too busy sucking up to Putin.

And so that language has kind of got harder about him.

Stephen Flynn, the SNP, called Reform Putin's Poodles, which are pretty tough language.

Yeah, I just, I think it's interesting how he's trying to manage being a kind of global leader, Nigel Farage.

And he's all over the place.

He's in America pretty much every day.

He's literally all over the place.

Well, if you look at his new register members' interests, you know, he's got donors paying for him to travel to the inauguration, for example.

So he's in a really interesting place where, at one level, he's a constituency MP for Clacton, but he's also living this sort of like by night.

He is a kind of America-facing culture warrior.

And it's a very interesting, you know, so he'll turn up to the commons when that sort of suits him to make a set-piece speech, but he's almost sort of, I think, he feels he's sort of too big for the commons because there he's just one member of a party with only a handful of MPs.

But outside, he's this guy who can draw massive crowds at a rally too big for Clacton as well.

And I think it's picking up on you know the performative politics that does the round zone.

The fact that it again, it's not what people do, it's what they say, it's getting the headlines, and which draws you inevitably to more and more extreme positions.

I mean, each iteration of Farage's parties from UKIP to Brexit Party and a Reform Party have gone into slightly more extreme or prepared to talk about subjects that five or ten years previously

people would have been uncomfortable.

They're rather like, you know, in the Farage

cinematic universe, Farage's parties are rather like, you know, each reboot of the Batman movie, which is they're increasingly just get darker.

Grittier.

Grittier.

I wonder if that's true.

I'm trying to think about whether or not that's true.

That's interesting.

Because the thing is that the rest of the writers sort of moved around him.

He was now one of the milder ales on sale at SAPAC.

But his, you know, the UKIP manifesto was obviously about the referendum and getting out of Europe, whereas now

his main talking points are immigration, climate change.

He's very sceptical on that.

It's the old right talking points that he's adopted.

One of the UKIP manifestos had Make the Circle Line Back Into a Circle Again, which I I just thought was a sort of really wonderful.

They do know the tube map isn't actually like that underground.

No, but it's that extra bit that goes off to Clemson Limpy or whatever is very annoying.

But I just thought it was a sort of wonderfully random thing to be concerned about.

I don't know how many votes there are in it, but there we go.

But also, it's his contention in his UK speech before he got through to the...

This was at the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship Conference.

Yes, yes.

This was the European rounds he was in before he got through to the final.

He was ranting against Rachel Reeves and her pessimism and and there is some truth in that in that the labor stance after the election and being very very plain speaking about how terrible things were may actually have affected business confidence and affected the markets and and there was a sort of six-month vacuum before any budget announcements were made and it sort of draws your attention to how important language is when used publicly, the things you say and the fact that Starmer originally was talking this dark kind of,

you know, things will only get marginally better.

You know, his campaign slogan was, you know, well, what can you do?

You know, that kind of don't expect fireworks because we ain't got any.

That thing actually has backfired in that it's dampened confidence, it's dampened, yeah, meanwhile, have dampened expectations, but it's actually had a knock-on effect and confidence.

So he's now Reeves and Starma are now trying to reverse that and sound more optimistic about the plan for growth and what a glorious 10 years it's going to be.

I thought of you when Kirstan was giving his statement on Ukraine and the fact that he's going to pay for a boost to the defence budget by cutting foreign aid.

And he said this was a very difficult decision.

And I thought, no, it wasn't.

A difficult decision would have been cutting the triple log.

Something that would have caused domestic howls of outrage.

What you've done is upset 50 MPs here.

50 MPs, charity workers of the UK, but mostly people who receive the aid internationally, who are not voters.

Yeah, who who don't have a vote in Britain.

I thought that was

a very classic example of the non-difficult, difficult decision that we've talked about here previously.

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I was going back to think about what speeches and what moments in politics there were optimism.

Barack Obama's 2008 Yes We Can campaign,

which was a speech he made after losing the New Hampshire primary, which is very interesting.

I had a moment, a personally low moment for him.

He made against Hillary Clinton.

Yeah, he made a very upbeat speech.

But that was, you know, that was an interesting because that came amid the financial crisis.

It wasn't a particularly actually happy time.

So it's not just that people make happy speeches when things are good.

And the other one that is kind of, you know, massively lauded is Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign in 1984, which is what's known as The Morning in America, which is a really fascinating campaign ad because it's shots of dawn.

So that's the idea is that, you know, things are getting better.

And he talks about the today more men and women in America than never will be going to work.

And then he talks about the number of people who that day will get married.

And there's lovely shots of young people looking happy and building

a home.

But what I suddenly realized when I watched that was he's talking about essentially the experience of being young in that.

You know, who doesn't love watching little babies

come out and people having the happiest day of their lives on their wedding day?

And that's the bit I think I would love to see what the political scientists say about this, about the aging of the electorate.

You know, we all, like both America and most of Europe, these are aging populations.

And is that, you know, Tony Blair said he wanted to make Britain a young country again.

Yeah.

We're not, none of us are young countries, you know,

here in the West.

So is that why we're getting more and more doomy messages?

Because as you get older, you get more worried about losing things.

And the future isn't necessarily something you look forward to with kind of uncritical optimism.

Is that the plan then?

Is that to speak in language that they think will connect with the most reliable voters?

And people know that as the electorate gets older in age group, they turn out in larger and larger percentages.

I remember one Labour politician who shall remain nameless, but is a current mayor of London, telling me that when he was an MP going canvassing, you know, it's the last day of the election.

You've got lots of leaflets.

You've got one hour left.

On the left, there is some student accommodation, halls of residence, and on the right, there is some sheltered housing.

So which one do you go for?

You go for the sheltered housing because they're the ones that are most likely to vote.

And he said it was as simple as that.

You know, he wishes it weren't.

But

politicians turn towards the ones who will vote.

And actually, I mean, my,

you know, I haven't tested this theory.

See what you think.

But my theory of why more and more people are feeling left out is that for the last 20, 30 years, certainly in the UK, political campaigns have been geared much more forensically at those who will make the difference.

You know, the marginal constituencies, the Middle England, the, you know, the white van man, the ones, you know, a couple of hundred thousand who will shift their vote and that will make all the difference.

So it's meant that policies and campaigns and messaging has all been focused on an increasingly narrower and narrower, but much more vitally important section of the electorate, which means, you know, over the years, more and more people are going to feel disenfranchised in that either they didn't bother to vote because they weren't feeling appealed to, or that whoever they voted for didn't get in.

So you have a larger and larger proportion of the population who feel

this just isn't working for me.

And micro-targeting as well, you know, particularly through the rise of social media and digital adverts.

Yes, that's made a complete difference, I think, to that whole approach, which is it's now no longer focusing on one set of the electorate, but actually

a sophisticated spread set.

But again, those picking more targeting on the one or two political views that, if you agreed with them, would prompt you to vote.

Yeah, I think it's really hard.

Sometimes people don't realise that, you know, the ban on ivory sales, for example, was something that was pushed extremely heavily on Facebook a couple of years ago, but it didn't really rise to the level of the kind of national conversation.

And I think people were, because animal cruelty really exercises people and it is a very emotive message and it did move people.

So you're right, maybe that's about the fact that people are being carved up and there's a reluctance to articulate a kind of broad vision, which could be a more optimistic vision.

Yes, and I also wonder whether that is because we just don't do that sort of thing.

We don't sign up to things wholesale.

We don't, you know, to vote for a party is to sign up to a whole set of values and policies.

And there might be some you like and some you dislike.

We're much more used to now choosing our own playlist as it were of principles you know so it might be you know mine might be like climate change you know democracy protecting democracy uh poverty or someone else's it might be housing tax and i think that link between a voter and a party that historic loyalty has gone yeah and going back to what you were saying about the younger generation i mean they've grown up entirely in a system where you can choose whatever you like.

It's unusual to be asked to sign up to a whole bundle of things when you don't agree with half of them.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

I wonder how that plays out in other electoral systems apart from ours, because, you know, we obviously have a system that's designed to deliver strong majorities for one party.

But it's focusing more on maybe single policies.

You know, it was stop the boats, get Brexit done.

Davy, you know, he came out of the election as a victor, a very optimistic campaign because he was, you know, diving into into sludge and coming up smiling.

He was in the Knowles House Party campaign.

That's right.

And then, but stressing just a couple of policies, which was social care, environment, you know, river pollution.

Treat a relationship with Europe.

I think when it works, optimism is incredibly powerful.

I mean, that first Obama campaign in 2008 felt genuinely transformative.

Obviously, then for the people who didn't like it, kicked off an enormous backlash.

I mean, I broken record on this, but I think that the thing that people misunderstand about Trump is that him being funny is just so key yeah so key to diffusing the threat but also to making him entertaining yes um he's a strange one he's an optimistic pessimist in that he will say with great relish what is wrong with america you know what you know the fires it was all yeah yeah multiple diversity

taking over uh the economies old biden you know we used to be a great country now we're a basket case unbelievable unbelievable you know carnage really talking down america but at the same time,

culting it in this, but it's going to be beautiful, you know, in 24 hours.

You won't believe how successful it will be.

It's like, and other politicians who have tried and ate that, they don't have the gift of the optimistic vineyard around it.

I mean, Liz Truss, I did something which not many people have done.

I went back and looked at the transcript of Liz Truss's speech when she became Prime Minister.

Oh, right.

Because she says, what makes the UK great is our fundamental belief in enterprise and

We show grit and determination.

So flash forward,

not very much actually, because it wasn't that long ago, to her speech this week, where she talked about, you know, Britain is a failed state.

The current establishment in Whitehall and Westminster is only the latest iteration of Britain gone wrong over the past few decades because Britain isn't working.

Which she says, obviously, in America and not to UK audience.

But I mean, my hunch about why she does that is that she is talking to an audience, and maybe has herself become the audience, who only really consume news about Britain through the filter of X, Twitter as well,

where it is a constant diet of shoplifting videos, gangs.

As we saw this week, AI generated photos from an alleged riot that, you know, just that was all just completely made up.

Yeah.

Basically, crime, grooming gangs, and offences against free speech.

It's just this constant diet that is pumped to parts of the American right and you sort of think let me take you to you know siren sester on a weekend or you know or like Edinburgh during the festival like there is much to do about nothing or read a book about heretics but they genuinely do sort of think that we live in sort of an apocalyptic third world hellhole yeah and unfortunately politicians like Liz Truss are willing to go over there and sell that message to them because it's what they want to hear because they want to hear Britain's terrible and what everyone in Britain wants is somebody like Trump and you've got Trump, aren't you lucky?

Aren't you brilliant?

She said she's going to set up a new communications network, network, which I'm very much looking to and very much enjoy looking forward to.

Is it going to be as good as the Matt Hancock app, which is one of the great technological advances of the 21st century?

I'll Matt Hancock you later.

I sent you a Matt Hancock.

Did you not get it?

No, no, no.

Left on red on Matt Hancock.

Matt Hancock's gone down.

She says, we are going to establish a new free speech medium network in conjunction with our American allies.

Who's the we here?

Has she got a backer?

I mean, Kemi Badenot was saying that she wants Britain to have its own version of Doge, but she wants it to be more radical.

So I think, you know, there is a.

I mean, this is one of my kind of abiding obsessions at the moment, but there is a high level of America-brainedness

on some members of the right that has seen them, I think, drift away from the median British voter.

The audience they're speaking to is one that wants these tales of miserabilism because they want to hear that Trump is brilliant and everything is great under him, or the other leaders in that mold, like Javier Millai of Argentina or Giorgi Maloney of Italy, You know, these sort of strongmen leaders are what is needed to get a grip on these failing states.

And then sunlit uplands are coming.

Yeah, and you know, she's going to set up a media organization.

It will take on the British Bashing Corporation, which is what we call the BBC.

Right, but you've just said that Britain's living in a dark age.

So who's cornered the market in British bashing?

Or is she like, you know, one of those people who does she have various voices in her head?

Who's this wig that she's talking about?

Anyway.

Well, maybe should we end by saying, what's your favourite thing about Britain?

Let's be optimistic.

I know you said you're a natural pessimist.

Well, you see, I think we're a genuinely open country.

We are open-minded.

I know that goes counter to much of the political discussion that's been going on the last 10 years about borders and so on.

But I still think we are a generous and open-minded country.

I'm sure someone will say, yeah, but there is racism and whatever.

But, you know, in comparison with other, even European countries, I think we're comfortable in our diversity

I just think it's funny to me because you always you know get attacked as being a kind of lefty London you know if you live in London you're by definition suspicious and not really British but there's just so many things I like about Britain I mean I reserve the right to complain about it all the time but not even to get into the sort of George Orwell you know nuns bicycling through the mist to Sunday service yeah it's genuinely just I just feel like every day you should think about how lucky you were to be born there's lots of countries that would be worse hand to be dealt than here and I'm kind of fascinated by the fact that it's constantly told that the left are sort of traitors and hate Britain.

And then you get Liz Truss going to America to tell us that we're living in a dark age in a failed state.

Exactly.

Very, very strange set of contradictions.

Anyway,

we can't unpick the riddle of Liz Truss's psyche at this time.

If someone else can, then please send in the solution.

So before we go, are there any other phrases that you came upon this week?

How about KMT?

KMT, what's KMT?

There was a little phrase this morning that civil servants, or I think people in her party perhaps, have become very frustrated with Kemi Badenot being late, that they have coined a phrase which is KMT, which is Kemi meantime, to describe her own special time zone that she carries around with her.

Also, we're not to pick on Kemi, but she did make a big speech this week at a think tank about foreign policy, in which she started off misquoting the right-wing thinker Irving Kristol, saying, you know, a conservative is just a liberal who's been mugged by reality.

She briefed the speech overnight, and people said, actually, his quote was neoconservative, as someone who's been a liberal been mugged by reality.

And two sentences later, Kemi Badenot went on to say she wasn't a neocon.

So she managed to invoke one of the kind of great conservative thinkers wrongly and then use him to argue against the point that he was making.

Yeah.

And the weirdest thing about that is that there's a kind of corporate comms issue, which is that there were lots of people pointing that out overnight because they pre-briefed that speech and she didn't change it because presumably she was on Kemi Meantime.

Kemmy Meantime.

Yes, I once, when I first met my in-laws, we went on a holiday, a travelling holiday.

We were going all round South Africa, and it was quite a detailed itinerary.

I only found out years afterwards that they were always telling me the time that we had to meet, but they were lying by 10 minutes because I was always 10 minutes late.

So they just gave me...

And I,

each time they gave me was actually 10 minutes earlier than we needed to be there because they knew that I would take my statutory 10 minutes before getting there.

Unfortunately, it's completely completely ruined once you find out about it because you start mentioning it.

Well, Kenny meantime thing, the American equivalent of that is sein washing.

Oh, yeah.

Have you heard of sein washing?

Oh, yeah.

All right.

Which is what people in the Trump administration do once Trump has said something completely extraordinary, like we're going to build hotels in Gaza.

They then seinwash it by going, what he meant there was there are tremendous opportunities within the whole region for investment and infrastructure.

You know, hotels may be one part of all that, but he didn't actually mean he was going to open it as Trump Gaza.

So that would be mental.

That would be crazy.

Of course not, yes.

Yeah, so Sainwashing.

So look out for more of that.

Okay.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message Here.

We'll be back next week.

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Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Hello, I'm Robin Ince.

And I'm Brian Cox, and we would like to tell you about the new series of the Infinite Monkey Cage.

In this series, we're going to have a planet off.

We decided it was time to go cosmic, so we are going to do Jupiter

versus Scepter!

It was very well done that, because in the script, it does say in square brackets, wrestling voice question mark.

And once we touch back down on this planet, we're going to go deep.

Really deep.

Yes, we're journeying to the center of the Earth with guests Phil Wang, Chris Jackson, and Anna Ferreira.

And after all of that intense heat and pressure, we're just going to kind of chill out a bit and talk about ice.

And also in this series, we're discussing altruism.

We'll find out what it is.

Exploring the history of music, recording with Brian Eno, and looking at nature's shapes.

So, if that sounds like your kind of thing, you can listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage first on BBC Sounds.

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