PAUL ENGLISH LIVE #132 · Broken Toasters, Fixed Communities: Repairing Food, Speech,and Sense

Broadcasts live every Thursday at 8:00p.m. uk time on Radio Soapbox: http://radiosoapbox.com

In this lively three-hour edition I open with the clocks-about-to-change chaos and a bit of studio mayhem, before settling in with Eric for a wide-ranging, cheeky catch‑up that swerves from timekeeping and sneezes to surveillance-laden insurance apps, older vs newer cars, and the slow hollowing‑out of our high streets. We also touch on online creators and free speech workarounds (Cockney rhyming slang, anyone?), and the perennial question of how to speak plainly without getting throttled by censors. Hour two welcomes Thomas Anderson from Germany. We dig into his Repair Café work, practical skills across generations, and the structural squeeze on farmers—subsidies to leave land idle, supermarket leverage, and how communities might rebuild local food systems (from allotments to direct farmer–household contracts). We explore grow‑at‑home ideas like chufa and sunchokes, and the case for indoor growing. In hour three, Monica Schaefer joins to wrestle with self‑censorship, how to reach different audiences, “learned helplessness,” and why clear, courageous speech plus real‑world action matter if we’re to repair not just toasters—but our food, towns, and culture.
 

• 'Rumble (show simulcast platform)': https://rumble.com
• 'YouTube (show simulcast platform)': https://www.youtube.com
• 'Repair Café Foundation (community repair movement Thomas mentioned)': https://www.repaircafe.org/en/
• 'Girlguiding UK (policy discussions referenced)': https://www.girlguiding.org.uk
• 'Club of Rome (context for environmental policy debates)': https://www.clubofrome.org
• 'Bayer (parent company of the former Monsanto)': https://www.bayer.com
• 'Starlink (rural connectivity noted in the episode)': https://www.starlink.com
• 'Leo Kottke (artist briefly featured/mentioned)': https://www.leokottke.com
• 'The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (context in music discussion)': https://www.thebeatles.com
• 'Chufa / Tiger Nut (crop referenced)': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyperus_esculentus
• 'Sunchoke / Jerusalem Artichoke (crop referenced)': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helianthus_tuberosus
• 'Aquaponics (method referenced)': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaponics
• 'Cooper Alan (song referenced)': https://www.cooperalanmusic.com