Matt's producers present the weirdest tales from the basement
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G'day, Matt Bevan here, this is If You're Listening. Today, the second part of the Newcastle Writers Festival live show that we did last month. In case you missed the first part, this was all about me and my producers Pat Sunderland and Adair Sheppard sharing the stories we couldn't find time for in the show's regular schedule. I shared my story last week, and this time it's Pat and Adair's turn. They came up with some very strange stories that I think you'll love.
So I want to give you guys a bit of context to start this story. This is a story that came at the start of the year when the Black Swan series was airing. And sort of ironically, we were trying to predict what the most newsy story would be once we returned to regular programming. And as sort of quaint as the idea seems now, for a time, we thought that was going to be the US and Greenland. We thought that was going to be the first thing we're going to have to address. And then Trump sort of went, oh, never mind, I don't want it.
Do you guys remember Greenland? Yeah. I was actually thinking, you know, we've got these extra production resources, maybe we could go to Greenland. LAUGHTER Then I found out how long it takes to fly to Greenland, and I'm glad that, you know, we moved on from that.
Exactly. But for a little time there, I was researching Greenland and looking into the history of US-Greenland relationships, the times in the past that the US has tried to buy Greenland, and I came across this image. This is a hypothetical map of the United States. You might notice it includes Greenland. If you're a real map expert, you might also notice that it includes Canada. Yes. It also includes Mexico, all of Central America and Cuba and a big chunk of South America as well. And all of the West Indies. Oh, yeah. They're getting all of it. Anything that could conceivably be described as America-adjacent.
I like that they've done a dotted line around the edge because they want half of the Pacific Ocean as well, clearly.
Yeah.
Look, they're not greedy, just half.
So what this is, is the technate of America, and it was the proposal of a political and social movement in America. They're called technocracy. So I want to set the scene for you guys. Imagine it's the 1930s, right? We've just had World War I, the Great Depression is happening, everyone is unsatisfied with the way that society is being run. Imagine. I know. Why would you? And so there's plenty of pictures for how we should do things differently.
What strange stories do Matt's producers share?
People are pitching communism, socialism, futurism, fascism, all of it. And then you're walking past a newsagent and you see this political magazine.
Here, Pat is showing the cover of the 1933 Technocrats magazine depicting a very intimidating giant robot marching on Capitol Hill holding thunderbolts in its hand.
How's this for an advertisement for your political party? Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
That is how does it... I mean, if Karl Marx had put King Kong on the front of Das Kapital... We'd all be speaking Russian or German right now. Like, this is how you advertise. This is the first edition of the Technocrats magazine.
Sorry, to be clear, they were advocating for this.
They kind of are saying, we can be the giant robot holding thunderbolts, walking onto Capitol Hill. So technocrats, in a modern sense, means any form of government where you put someone with technological expertise in charge, like an economist in charge of a country going through a financial crisis. But what this party, technocracy, believed...
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