The Shire

So how do we get from where we are to where we need to get to? What are those two or three most important steps we need to make?

And please use the words Shire, Hobbit, Mordor, and Mount Doom.

Exactly.

So what's important is that whenever we make payments, we don't all do it the same way.

Goldie, how about yourself?

So I'm Ryan Goldie on X and Ryan Goldie on LinkedIn.

And if you come look for me at the Shire, I'll be talking about settlement with checks over an entropic blockchain with Carolyn next week.

the eye of Sauron will be upon you from Dario I'm sure bad references aside you'll find me at SY Taylor on all of the socials screaming into the void at brainfood.xyz and of course at tempo.xyz and you will find a lot more of this show if you are watching on YouTube and you hit like you leave us a comment if you're listening to the podcast leave us a review leave a comment it really does help us and we hope for this conversation you will share this show regularly Carolyn thank you very much for being on the show

You know what I mean? Like a place you just want to hang out, feel like it would just be a nice place to put your feet up.

Kind of like the Shire.

You know what I mean? Totally.

I feel like you kind of want something like that.

Yeah.

I mean, I really feel like

it is pretty nakedly like the Shire.

You know what I mean? Where it's just the idyllic place where...

Tolkien was surrounded by that.

So how does that play into the novel? Well, I think in the scouring of the Shire, you see that clearly, that the four hobbits come home from victory only to face yet another skirmish, another war, but this one has come home to the Shire itself.

And three of the hobbits decide to take up swords.

Frodo and his companions had suffered from both physical and psychological wounds, and then they returned to a Shire that has been transformed while they were gone.

Their once peaceful, idyllic home has been completely changed by brutal industrialization and capitalism, which inflicted scars on both the people of the Shire and the Shire itself.

organize a resistance against Sharkey's men who've taken over and industrialized their beloved little village.

And the fourth Frodo decides not to.

He talked about it literally as going to Valinor, and maybe there would be healing for him among the elves in Valinor.

So Tolkien had spent part of his childhood in a small hamlet outside Birmingham called Sarhol.

In this landscape, there's mills and there's fields and quiet countrysides, very, very Shire-like.

He later pointed to specific memories from that time, like the old mill and its miller, you know, whom local children had nicknamed the White Ogre because he wasn't very nice, his raw material that resurfaced years later in his own fiction.

Along with that, as Birmingham's industry expanded, that same countryside was swallowed up whole within just a few years.

So, you know, Tolkien would have seen this happen as a boy.

So a lot of biographers like to point to the loss of the emotional root of the Shire and the industrial devastation that threatens in his stories.

You know, you talk about cutting down the forest there, Isengard, you know, the shire being burned and all of this stuff, the sweetness and the innocent, you know, being lost as people move on.

You know, it's really easy to make that connection.

He's the founder and conductor of the 21st Century Symphony Orchestra.

Well, we've reached Mount Doom and we're waiting on some giant eagles to take us back to the Shire.

Remember, you can get in touch with us, email techlife at bbc.co.uk or you can WhatsApp us on plus 44330 1230 320.

Today's Tech Life was produced by Imran Raman Jones and presented by me, Shiona McCallum.

Yeah, the one I'm thinking of is Tales

from the Shire.

Oh, great example of what makes a bad cozy game.

Cause yeah, like you think the world feels real cozy, but you just have nothing.

Yeah.

until this thing happens i'm like wow that sounds awful

yeah and i i haven't played it but if i've heard correctly you can't even like just go to bed early and say fuck it i'm skipping the day oh that sucks yeah i don't know that sucks No, it just, Tales from the Shire was absolutely, like, they're like, oh, and I feel like that's, I feel like we've had a lot of real Lord of the Rings duds lately, where they're just like, let's throw money at the Lord of the Rings IP, and then we had that horrible Gollum game, and we had Tales of the Shire, and they did a remaster of War in the North, which is fine, but, like, it doesn't really feel like that much of an improvement from the original War in the North, for how much they're charging for it.

Yeah, that, is that out? Yeah, it's out.

You will see so many things that give you an unrealistically positive vision of the past.

And so many people imagine that before the industrial age, we were like hobbits in the Shire of Lord of the Rings.

And yet, unfortunately, this is very far from the case.

J.D. Vance, our own vice president, recently on the Joe Rogan podcast, among the most popular podcasts in America, like so many other people, made the comparison between the AI revolution and the industrial revolution.

So I want to go in the next like 20 minutes or so over some of the specifics that you bring up in your book and let's start with the family.

So, you know, I loved, I loved your Lord of the Rings analogy there.

When you read the Lord of the Rings, especially when you talk about like the hobbits in the Shire, you have all of these children running around playing games and having fun and you have a happy husband, happy wife, and they go to these parties and they celebrate.

But that's not what life was like for most people.