Chapo Trap House - 490 - Meet Me in NEOM feat. Séamus Malekafzali (1/18/21)

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

We discuss new developments around Saudi Arabia’s increasingly bizarre utopian megacity NEOM with writer Séamus Malekafzali. We then preview this week’s Biden inaugural ceremony, talk dem messaging around checks and wages, and examine one of the Trump administrations final acts of general bizarreness in its Statue Garden of American Heroes. Check out Séamus’ substack here: https://malekafzali.substack.com/ And subscribe to the damn youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/chapotraphouse

What if we replace outdated urban services with new services driven by artificial intelligence? What if we built The Line? A 170 kilometer revolution in urban living. Protecting the Earth's most stunning nature while creating unmatched livability a home to all of us welcome to the line neon All I want to be is a chump. We need a problem to fix. All I want to be is a chump. Hello, friends. It's Choppo. We're back again. You know, over the course of this show,

I think a main topic that has come up again and again is that of the future. I like to think of myself as something of an expert on science fiction and the future that we're all going to be living in because that's the fact about the future is that it's where we're all going to spend the rest of our lives. Lately, we've been talking about what does the future hold for America, but I think it's now time that with the help of our guest

for the first part of this show, we look into the future of another country and the future of cities in general. Joining us today and collecting his two-time Chapo appearance challenge coin is our friend brother Seamus. Brother Seamus Malikovseli. Seamus, how's it going? It's going great, guys. Glad to be back on the program.

Well, Seamusus we had to have you on because like a couple years ago we we covered this topic and like you know it's been back in the news so i think it deserves a a redux i am of course talking about saudi arabia's city of the future niam niam the the it's basically like if uh muham Mohammed bin Salman wanted to do SimCity 2000 in the desert. That's pretty much what Neom is. But it was a couple years ago that we did an episode on it. So Seamus, could you just maybe remind us when Neom was first announced, what was being promised here about this glittering future city in the desert?

Well, in 2017, the then newly coronated Crown Prince, Mohamed Ben Salman, went up before investors and said that they are constructing a gigantic city out in the northwest of Saudi Arabia that would be 22 times bigger than new york city it would be um three times as large as lebanon larger than um israel um like just just a massive urban uh mega city megalopolis metropolis where science innovation, creativity would flourish, ingenious public transportation, just a city where every single important person would want to be. I think Matt even said in the last episode,

he compared it to a gulch, something along those lines. Yes, yes. It's pretty much exactly like that, except real and like a futuristic city. It's basically like a city that is larger than the entire state of Israel, 22 times the size of New York City. But it's also sort of pitched as kind of like a Saudi Westworld that would include things like an artificial moon, robot boxing, dinosaurs. And I mean, like, what are some of the other outlandish things promised by the Neom city of the future? Yeah, in those 2300 consulting papers

that were given off to McKinsey, there was animatronic dinosaurs, correct. There was the moon. There was genetic engineering of superhumans. When has that ever gone wrong i can't imagine um there were mech fights there was a glow-in-the-dark beach um there were flying cars um there were uh just this literally everything that i could even think of oh no sorry sorry there were drone armies armies and meant to give a live stream of outer

space in addition to the artificial moon and making all these different attractions. Like, just anything that you could possibly think of that a futuristic city would have in your imagination, that's what Mahatma Gandhi wanted to make real. And, you know, you wrote an article about

Neom on your sub stack, and which is why I want to get into it. But like, in it, you sort of make the point that like, of these amazing futuristic Tomorrowland like features, I mean, not necessarily all of them are constrained by, I don't know, scientific possibility of the present moment. Yeah, I mean, they they wanted to the things that exist that could feasibly exist and i do mean the feasibility is doing a lot of the legwork there but you know dinosaurs animatronic dinosaurs are within the realm of possibility i mean i think

there used to be a show in new york where like walking with dinosaurs that kind of thing yeah yeah yeah um weather seeding is still a thing that that exists like i'm not entirely sure what the process is for creating clouds i know it's possible to uh dissipate clouds yeah you can bust those there's cloud busting yeah yeah someone's not busting into technology you can cloud bust or cloud seed um like these kinds of things are possible but the issue is that you can't sell a city um on that alone you need to have something more at the table but the issue is that the Mohammed bin Salman went way over the line in terms of trying to market this and even essentially just created the city that it is impossible to make

and from what i understand for the wall street journal article that was released about a year ago the consultants tried to like talk some sense into him about um what exactly he could do um like when they told him that he needed to figure out like a street plan for his city he kind of scoffed at it and said there's we don't need any cars in neon because we're gonna have flying cars uh we're going we won't need cars i mean yeah flying cars is one of the like one of my favorite favorite tropes of like what the future is going to be like if you think back to like the the movies or science fiction that you know you read as a kid it was like the flying car was just one of those things that would be the stand-in

for letting you, the viewer, know that you're in the future now. Flying cars are one of those things. But it's an idea that if you think about it for more than five seconds, it becomes a complete disaster. There's absolutely no reason to have flying cars because all it would do is,

the idea is, oh, well, if you had a flying car, you wouldn't be constrained by roads, famously as they said and bought back to the future but like all it would do is if it became like consumer viable would be like the same amount of cars but just like in 10 000 feet in the air traveling at like 800 miles an hour so like imagine all the traffic fatalities happening but then after each car crash it would plummet several thousand feet to the ground. Yeah, it's not, I mean, you can't really say that anything in these consulting papers was really thought out much. It's really just, Mohammed bin Salman has somewhere in the realm of 300 to 400 billion dollars in the public investment fund of Saudiudi arabia and if you are given an insane

amount of money to draw up plans for what a gulf monarch wants you're not you're going to argue with it maybe a little bit if you actually want investing but if you just want to take the money you know why argue with it yeah just kind of let it roll with it and i mean like in all of these this wish list of things does seem like what a what like a teenager or like a child would come up with if you gave them $400 billion and said, build the city of your dreams. And it's like, yes, I want animatronic dinosaurs roaming the streets. what the PR people in NEOM are trying to kind of talk about and what Mohammed bin Salman himself wants from these documents, they're really on just two entirely different playing fields because the people in the videos that come out of NEOM social media, they're talking real vague terms about the quote-unquote city of the future,

talking about water preservation, talking about climate conservation, things that sound good to investors who want to just kind of sink money into something. But if you were to – Will it be Wi-Fi enabled? Yeah, yeah, just something stupid like that. But what Mohammed bin Salman wants himself, you cannot market to people really. And there's kind of this push and pull clearly with what, what someone wants and what the,

what the people kind of running the program want and what he really wants really kind of came to the surface a couple, I want to say a week or so ago when he announced the new, the line project. Hell yes. Yeah. I want to go. I love this shit

the city named after the thing they were snorting when they thought of it well i want to get into the line but like there there are other purposes for this for this city as well and like in the in the piece you wrote about it like i mean it opens with basically what begins with like an account of like the Bedouin tribes people living in the area of Saudi Arabia that would become this gleaming city of the future. And, you know, the fact that they're living there in the first place is a problem. But the fact also that they're living a sort of a lifestyle that is incompatible with the kind of SimCity 2000 arcology model that they want to build there. And there was a man who sort of took a stand against this city of the future. How did that turn out for him?

Well, Abdur Rahim al-Huwaiti, he was a tribesman of the Huwaita tribe. And there is a perception among very aristocratic, very upper-class people in Riyadh, places like that, that these tribes people are very backwards, very basic. The Saudi Arabia kind of blessed them by supposedly giving them infrastructure and cities when it's really not the case. They're literate. They live in towns um but they don't live in maybe they don't really want to live in these gigantic cities um and so yeah it's not the flintstones yeah it's like they're not mixing concrete for neom and a pelican or something

like that yeah it's completely not what is being i mean it's not even that it's not even that's what's being advertised to people who want to invest in Neom. What's being advertised to people who they want to invest in Neom is that this land, nobody lives on it. Absolutely no one lives on it. And that it's free for the taking if you want it. But al-Huwaiti, obviously, when these plans were drawn up and then they were announced, the land surveyors came in, Saudi authorities came in, telling people, okay, we're going to compensate you for the houses that you live in that we're going to tear down, but you guys have to leave. This is non-negotiable. Either you take the compensation and leave,

or you leave and you don't take the compensation. Abdulrahim did not take this deal. He recorded videos of himself to his YouTube channel, yelling at Saudi surveyors from his rooftop, confronting people who wanted to compensate people, confronting people who were calling his people illiterate. He spoke in poetry and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, talking about how, you know, there used to be honor in society, but now it seems like that's pretty much been lost. And eventually all of these kind of very public dissent, it eventually came time for him to pay for that dissent. So in April of last year, the Saudi authorities surrounded his home. So in April of last year, the Saudi authorities surrounded his home.

Finally, they asked him to leave. They were going to condemn the house, tear it down. And he refused to leave. And then there was a multi-hour shootout. And eventually, Abdulrahman was killed. There were videos of the house after it was shot up. And I mean, there's just bullet holes just everywhere inside the house. Like the walls are just peeling off.

There's debris everywhere. Like it was clearly very violent. And in the response in the Saudi newspapers was that there was this random wanted man who was killed in Dabok province that he threatened the security of Saudi Arabia. But of course, that was not the case. There was this big fear about this backlash, maybe not just in the Arab world, but outside the Arab world, considering that Jamal Khashoggi had been assassinated just a year or so prior, and that had created such a national outcry. They had attempted to pay off members of the tribe that al-Huwaiti belonged to. Some of the tribal leaders did take the payment and denounced al-Huwaiti publicly.

Others did not take the money and attended his funeral. He is the first person who has been killed in the pursuit of the Neon project, but he's not the first person arrested. There were several people arrested before him. And he's not the first person who has been harassed, who has been attacked for resisting this kind of project. And I think there's going to be way more of these in the future because there's something like 20,000 people who need to be relocated for this project and it's not exactly done yet. Once the robot gladiators

push them in there, they'll deal with all these recalcitrant people, I'm sure. They'll go to the new artificial moon, the artificial moon colony that they're also building. But you bring up Khashoggi and this becomes a very important part of this story because when uh you know neon was announced in 2017 this was at a time when um saudi arabia but specifically muhammad bin salman i mean could not be hotter in the international press i mean there

is this part of this huge pr rollout of just about a new modern saudi arabia and of course like we covered and we all remember when mbs got the full tom friedman treatment so like how did neon fit into this whole like new modern like fresh liberal cool saudi arabia that mbs and his people were pitching i mean the whole thing about neon is that i mean one of one of the main things that was advertised by neon was that it was going to have that MBS and his people were pitching. I mean, the whole thing about NEOM is that, I mean, one of the main things that was advertised by NEOM was that it was going to have its own autonomous court system. Aside from the Saudi judicial system that was so kind of notoriously penalistic. In the idea that Saudi Arabia used to be

this kind of old, outdated thing that nobody really wanted to touch and that investors wanted to invest in maybe a little bit somewhat more quietly, this was something that investors could potentially be excited about investing in, want desperately to live there. live there. Something about the quote-unquote new Saudi Arabia that would be attractive to not just rich people necessarily, but something that literally everyone who is artistic, who is intelligent, who has something to give to the world wants to be in. And that's exactly what Mahmoud bin Salman, the image that he wanted to bring to the world. But unfortunately, the image that he wanted to bring to the world. But unfortunately, Saudi Arabia had not really changed that much, really. So when, you know, road met rubber and Mohammed Salman was forced to, not forced, that's not the right word, but he felt that it was in the trend of his royal family's history

to continue oppressing dissenters. Eventually that image kind of fell apart for him. And you said like an independent port system, meaning that like, you know, to attract people to live there, you could import or bring things into Neom that would otherwise get you arrested for like witchcraft and the rest of the country? Yeah, so alcohol, maybe not drugs necessarily, but vices that you would not be able to indulge in pretty much anywhere else in the country, at least at the time that this was announced. There are some liberalization programs going on in the UAE, including in Saudi Arabia, but those are pretty slow moving right now. Arabia, but those are pretty slow moving right now. Theoretically, in NEOM, this could be essentially just like any other country

that you want to move to by 2030. So you wouldn't have to wait up for them. I would like it if in NEOM, City of the Future, drugs, regular drugs, still illegal, still get the death penalty for possessing, using, or selling them, but all future drugs that take

place in the future, likeke from robocop 2 or like that slow-mo drug from judge dread like in the neon city of the future you can do futuristic drugs there that are that are engineered in a lab in anything that is bright green or blue and that comes in some sort of a pre-aged file situation where it instantly is auto-injecting and makes a noise. Yeah. If anyone out there in McKinsey is working on the slow-mo drug from Dread,

please let me know. I would like to try it. So yeah, it's part of this PR rollout. But then again, then you said like, okay, then Khashoggi happened. And that, I mean, for not just Neom, but for the entire nation of Saudi Arabia and Mohammed bin Salman, that was, at least for, I guess, the surprising thing, for a short amount of time, a kind of a big wrench in the works here. It kind of fucked things up for them.

Yeah, that's kind of putting it lightly. kind of fuck things up for them. Yeah, that's kind of putting it lightly. So after Khashoggi was murdered, investors, media outlets, pretty much everyone that had kind of fallen to their feet to praise MBS were really not in the mood to continue doing that, at least for now, for theIPA Future at that time.

Because the Future Investment Conference, or Davos in the Desert, that was happening when Khashoggi was still considered missing, that second iteration. So it was still very, very fresh. And MBS was kind of preparing to find new investors for Neom at this conference. And then, I mean, his own kind of sadism kind of ruined that for him. He said there was a Financial Times piece that said that he said that no one would invest in Neom for years to come. that no one would invest in Neom for years to come. It really threw a wrench in it for a while,

and there was no IPO. They're planning to put Aramco up. So the Saudi Aramco. Could you explain what the Saudi Aramco IPO was and how it was going to finance the Neom? Yeah, so Saudi Aramco is the state-owned oil company, one of the most valuable companies on the planet, obviously. And the idea was that if you put it up for public investment on the stock exchanges, that it would bring in something along the lines of $100 billion for the Saudi public investment fund.

And I want to say the valuation, I don't have the numbers out in front of me, but I want to say it was somewhere around in the trillions. It was real gigantic. And so the idea was that you get the IPO, you get $100 billion basically guaranteed, funnel into NEOM. Maybe we don't even need the investment necessarily just for NEOM. But that got delayed because there were logistical problems. And so Khashoggi had been murdered. There was no IPO to fund it either way. What do you do? But MBS, being MBS, sees NEOM, no matter how implausible it might be, he sees it as his meal ticket. And so he starts building anyway at the start of 2019. And you know, starts building anyway, uh, the start of 2019. And, um, you know, just that month in January, there's now an airport at, uh, at Neon Bay. Um, they start developing it and it's kind

of slow and steady, but there are enough faculties in place by the end of the year for a royal palace, for a hotel, a golf course, banks, apartments, things that, very basic things that you would need for just people to essentially be there. And because people eventually started seeing that it was being built uh investors slowly started to come back because the heat had been dying down uh from the hit well yeah i mean like it just yeah it was pretty incredible when that happened because it just seemed to be like the most flagrant thing that they could possibly do to like eject them from the company of like you know considered like serious okay nations um but they weathered that like they just basically like were they admitted to it and then or they had to like sort of half-heartedly and then it's just been like a

year or two and it just seems like most people have kind of forgotten about it or they're just like well you know the money's there so i mean yeah time to invest yeah i mean saudi royals they knew that even before this i mean sa, Saudi Arabia had a pretty infamous reputation, but they knew that the money would always flow as long as it was still there and will always still be there. So all they really had to do was play the waiting game for investors to come back. The real question was, you know, maybe it's going to take a little bit longer than we initially anticipated, but really it didn't. It just took around a year. And now they're securing hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to

build, uh, Neom, um, from gigantic construction firms, even firms that had left Neom because of the Khashoggi killing came back because the money was so good. Like Bechtel is,

I believe one of them uh yeah and also um there was a there was a the name escapes me right now but there was a company run by a british lord that is designing um one of neom's projected four airports uh they're doing that now god damn it's worse than the it's worse than denver there. Jesus Christ. And probably even more apocalyptic than whatever's going on over there. It's, the money is there. The issue is, you know, is it going to be completed? Probably not.

But as long as Saudi countries are paying. They built one airport and then they used to have like Neom Bay. It's like they've done enough to like have it be like, oh, it's a place. It's happening. And you also mentioned like as part of, I guess, another aspect of this kind of

PR offensive that they're doing. You say in your piece that Neon Bay, or what's been built there, they already have a palace facility or something like that, is rumored to have been the place where Mohammed bin Salman and Netanyahu first met in person to, I guess,

like officially begin this kind of diplomatic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Yeah. So when the pandemic hit, construction kind of slowed to a halt. So what Muhammad bin Salman did was he just kind of refocused it around having just tons of dignitaries come there as like if you want to meet in saudi arabia you need to meet in niam so king salman niam meet me in niam so king salman um would have his cabinet meetings there um he uh yeah uh so he got the vaccine there he does all his medical tributes there. He vacations there. NBS hosted Mike Pompeo there. He flew like straight from D.C. to Niambi.

The Saudi foreign minister sometimes holds meetings there. that when Mike Pompeo got there to facilitate that meeting between Netanyahu and NBS because there was a private plane that was registered to people with Netanyahu that flew from Israel straight to Niambi and then left several hours later. I like to imagine the meeting between him and Netanyahu, they had a lot to talk about

because they're like, hey, this whole airport was actually based after we bulldozed the homes of several thousand people living there already. So, you know, it's like they got something in common. You hey, this whole airport was actually based after we bulldozed the homes of several thousand people living there already. So, you know, it's like they got something in common. You know, this is the nature of diplomacy. You know, this is how you bridge divides between formerly hostile nations. Yeah, I mean, he's learning from the best there. I can't say anything else.

They're trying to make Neom into a place that, I mean, that was one of the original intentions. They want to kind of force it to be a place where everyone wants to go because they have to go because it's so close to everything necessarily. Because I think it's reachable from a lot of places in the world within eight hours or so. Yeah, if you want to go somewhere, if you want to have a meeting, if you want to have a corporate retreat, you come to Neom. It's already there. The whole thing is, yeah yeah they're trying to make neom a thing and really this whole story is just about they're trying to make neom a place they're trying to make something there uh where we're uh you know previously only uh just just you know people who don't matter live you know it's not it's not a real thing you know they not robots. They're not holograms.

They're not Cyberpunk 77. Yeah, it's just... I mean, the money's obviously flowing, but I'm not entirely sure just how successful that effort is necessarily going to be to make it something that literally everyone and anyone wants to go to

well i mean here's an issue that i was thinking about in pondering a city 22 times the size of new york um in the northwest corner of the saudi arabia the arabian peninsula how the fuck are they going to get like enough water to just like make it not just be a desert like i mean like how are people going to drink water or have water to like have a human population there well i mean in the concept art that they have of neom on the website they they're all there's all these lush greens and um i i assume there is going to be talk about like water preservation as a means of irrigating um as much as I've seen in my research, there really is nothing super concrete about it. But, you know, I'm assuming if you have enough money, you could just dig things

and you can just kind of hope that it works. Like, yeah, it's not exactly hugely thought out. It's kind of something that you kind of push off until later. Well, okay, as long as you're talking about things that are not hugely thought out. I mean, this gets us to, like, the latest iteration of the Neon Tomorrowland Future City idea

is that what was just announced recently is, you know, things are trickling in. It's like, you know, something's there. It's still happening. And if the idea about, like, this fucking megacity one

with fucking robot fighting and, like, hologram beaches and fucking flying cars wasn't enough for you they've just announced something called the line would be i mean i'm without exaggeration here this is a city that is 150 miles long that is just one single totally straight line that cuts across the country but the genius of it is that it's like there's no real depth. So it's just basically one long like commuter rail that unites this gigantic,

but very narrow, like, like just linear city. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to pause at a question. Do you will,

have you heard of the movie pieces? No, I haven't. Okay. Well, the tagline of the movie pieces is quote, it's exactly what you think it is. Unquote. When I, when I say it, when I,. Okay. Well, the tagline of the movie Pieces is, quote, it's exactly what you think it is, unquote. When I say it, I try to explain the line to multiple people in my life because people are asking about it.

There is no higher meaning, really, honestly. It is a city in a straight line. That is the gimmick. line that is the gimmick um the whole the whole thing it appears to be is that um it's 95 percent of nature is going to be preserved in the space that it is um fully pedestrianized no so yeah no one needs a car no cars no exactly car well is it because like things are just it's like it's it's just the same stuff the same amenities one after other, and then you're within walking distance of one segment of them? Or how does that work? Yeah, exactly.

It's supposed to be the most walkable city ever conceived of in that everything is going to be within five – all of your daily needs are within five minutes walking. The most walkable city in the world, isn't it like 150 degrees outside in the summer? What the fuck? Well, I mean, you got the weather sitting above it, so it's going to be cool. Oh, okay. Right. All right. It's going to be great.

The dome over the line will take care of the weather at a future date. Yeah. But of course, maybe you're thinking, okay, maybe not all of my daily needs can be fulfilled within five minutes. I want to get around. Okay. Well, MBS has a solution for you. The city will be travers fulfilled within five minutes. I want to get around. Okay. Well, MBS has a solution for you.

The city will be traversable within 20 minutes. Now you might say, how do you traverse a city within 20 minutes? That is 105 miles long. This, it would have to be a train that is 315 miles per hour. And there are no trains currently in service that are that speed. Maybe he means the other way like not not length

like width 20 minutes like uh we we didn't say the whole the whole length just the girth oh my god i'm trying like i i'm trying to explain it in a way that will like make sense just look up like if you're a listener at home just look up the line and you'll see what it looks like it is it's like if someone took a line tool in photoshop and like dragged it over a fucking like satellite image of like the arabian peninsula and just dragged it across it like that's it just the line tool that's what it looks like and and additionally one of the things that confounds me about it is that there's there's a space in the area that's talking about that's pretty flat land but inexplicably it goes through a mountain i don't know what the plan is for what happens when it goes through the mountain because it's supposed to be fully

pedestrianized are they going to dig through it are they going to blow it up entirely i don't understand why you couldn't just make it shorter. I'm not sure what... I'm truly and honestly confounded by what the thought process is behind this entire thing. I mean, Seamus, the thought process is, and I brought it up before, like, this is the real-life version of playing SimCity 2000. Like, this is exactly

what you do in that game. You just, like, use the bulldozer tool to just, like, take a cut out of a fucking mountain so you can build a highway through it. Yeah, you have a save file where you want to just see if you can try out doing a city in a straight line. But of course, MBS, because he has hundreds of billions of dollars at his disposal, wants to make this thing real.

Because he has all that money, he used the cheat code so he never gets the angry city councilman being like, you cannot cut funding on dinosaurs. You will regret this. Honestly, the fact that he's doing animatronics, he's not even trying to do real genetically cloned dino, Jurassic Park style real dinos. In fact, he's not even giving it a go.

He's immediately giving up and going to animatronics. They're not dinosaurs. Pathetic. Pathetic. I completely agree. They're not even dinosaurs it's fucking it's it's ridiculous but i guess i mean just i guess like overall i find like he's like right things up here like like how do you see this like because i mean it's it's i find it hard to believe anyone at a certain level really believes or buys into

any of this shit like if you're mckinsey you're just taking the money and you're like yes very very good very good. Very good, sir. Yes, there, there, there will be an artificial moon.

Yes. The line city. Brilliant. This is a vision of the future. And then like everyone else, like the money's pouring in, the contracts are there. But for,

if you are MBS, if you are like the, the, the Saudi government, like what's really going on here? What, like what are they like pitching to the world? Is it,

is this an idea of like, do they want Saudi Arabia to be something that like is a global destination and power after their fucking oil runs out or like is there something else are they just trying to like pitch themselves as like a modern futuristic place to live while also being like a fucking uh totally undemocratic like authoritarian monarchy yeah if there's one thing that revealed the real vulnerabilities in gulf monarchies it was the pandemic um because of trade slowing down of tourism slowing down to a near halt um gulf economies really took a really bad hit um something like i mean just in dubai which is a model city for what Niamh

wants to really kind of build itself on. Something, when the coronavirus first hit, around 80% of businesses in Dubai were expected to close within three months. They narrowly avoided economic catastrophe in the UAE by halving the size

of the entire government. Like, it's real shaky ground. And when fossil fuels eventually start to run out and climate change becomes kind of impossible to maneuver around, you need other ways of producing money than just oil. Tourism is vulnerable, but tourism is kind of the number two. It's really the only thing you can do if you are a gulf monarchy so saudi arabia is really trying to do that in some form or another

uh with neom i don't i what strikes me about kind of the production of it i don't think that the people really running uh the the construction project really believe it to be it's going that it's going to be this gigantic super city but mbs absolutely believes that it will be and because mbs holds near absolute power in saudi arabia he can continue doing it for as long as he wants and for the people for the investors who investors who are investing into it, it's really just kind of a money suck, and the hope is that at some point, eventually enough will be paid out back by the Saudis

that they'll get their money back, but they don't really care if Neom gets constructed. It's just, you know, you get money for it. I don't think, yeah. It's hard to pick like like tourism like as a replacement for like the you know global petroleum export um i mean like it could work like you know dubai for instance i mean like they have some coastline there and they're building more of it by doing those ridiculous fucking islands that like look like shit and are also golf courses

or whatever but like isn't the problem here that it's just like, as a tourist destination, like the climate, the sort of landscape, I mean, it's just, it's not like that nice of a place to visit. I mean, and I know they can provide all kinds of like insane, ridiculous luxury and splendor, of course, basically all underwritten with pseudo slave labor. But like this country or city itself, you can't do anything fun there

if you're trying to like attract a global elite clientele right yeah it's not it's not a perfect system i mean you have to remember that the initial genesis of the neon idea was that mbs was on google earth and he saw part of the country that kind of looked empty and he decided that he was going to build an entire city there. Okay. All right. Like there's no real thinking behind it except for that. And the PR people with Neom have tried to kind of retroactively find reasonings for

it. Dubai has somehow miraculously made itself into a major tourist destination just by sheer will of monetary force. Yeah. And the hope is that Neom will become like a Dubai 2. But the issue is that, you know, Dubai is Dubai. And when coronavirus happened, Dubai took a massive hit. Neom really isn't going to fill in those gaps. But it's kind of the only option that Saudi Arabia has

outside of maybe doing solar energy, but that really isn't enough. I mean, I guess just finally here, we talked about the Khashoggi hit and the fact that, I mean, I guess I'm not surprised, but it is pretty jaw-dropping how easily they've been able to just wait that out. And, like, everyone has just kind of forgotten about it.

And now with this new sort of, like, official diplomatic ties with Israel. I mean, like, it's just, like, how easily is it going to be for Saudi Arabia to, like, convince enough of the international press or, like like corporate leaders and people in government elsewhere that like they're just a normal country and like not one of the most evil places on earth i think it's sooner than a lot of people might think um back during right after the khashoggi killing you know there's a huge amount of negative press, obviously. But when this line city was announced, if you went to Reuters, the AP, Bloomberg, outlets that are very popular, they were talking about the city like it's a genius idea. This fully pedestrianized city with nature preservations. I mean, that's an amazing idea. The cycle resets itself very quickly. And I think the UAE and Bahrain got a ton of great press off of the normalization with Israel. I think if normalization with Israel

happens for Saudi Arabia, which I think is going to happen very soon, I think that might be enough to fully reset that cycle, at least with some people, at least with enough people that they can say maybe, maybe not publicly, because the key thing with the NEOM investments was that all of these contracts were announced as they have to, but when they were asked about it, they refused to answer any questions. They know that it's kind of toxic to talk about right now. But if you want that cycle to be reset, it'll probably happen pretty quickly, I think. Seamus, thanks so much for joining us.

The piece is Neom, the line to Oblivion. That is up on your sub stack right now. If people would like to subscribe or find more of your writing, where should they go? If they want to read this piece and any more pieces in the future, they can go to malikafzali.substack.com. N-A-L-E-K-A-F-Z-A-L-I.

We'll put the link in the bio. Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm sorry. Put the link in the bio. I'm sorry. The link will be in the description. You don't have to remember it. It'll be there.

Five bucks a month. It's going to be great. Brother Seamus, thank you so much for joining us again. It was my pleasure. Thanks. This is for you. This is for you. This is for you.

This is for you. All you have to. Go to the cost. Go to the cost. Go to the cost. Go you have to. Go to the cost. Go to the cost. Go to the cost. Go to the cost. Go to the cost. Okay, we are back.

Thanks again to Seamus Malik-Causselli. And now in the second half of the show, we are joined by our brother Virgil Texas, along with me and Matt. So here we go. It is Inauguration Week, everybody. Inauguration Week. And I got to say, um so here we go uh it is inauguration week everybody inauguration week and i gotta say always a good sign for the health of your country's democracy when the peaceful transfer

of power is accompanied with the phrase uh the capital will remain in a state of the green zone all week or until future notice when i when i brought it baby. When a good chunk of D.C. is literally the green zone now for the inauguration, yeah, things are going pretty good. We excited, though? We're looking forward to it? It should be a fun time. Most of all, I am looking forward to the country healing and coming together, which is going to happen.

I mean, unity and coming together is the theme of the inauguration. And then how could people not do it after they spent all this money and put it on TV for a week? How could people not come together after seeing that? I got to say, like, it's I think it's good because, you know, I mean, like there were there were, you know, people in Joe Biden's year who were telling him, I think the theme of the inauguration should be fuck Donald Trump and everyone who voted for him. But, you know, he decided to he decided to go in a different direction, and I think that speaks to his sort of maturity as a leader. Yeah, I mean, like all the people who think that he is drinking the blood of infants

out of a fucking pony keg every night are going to see Garth Brooks serenading him, wearing a dumb shirt where the colors are split halfway, and go, God, my God, I had this man all wrong. All I want to know is what that first dance is going to be, too. My money's on turkey in the straw. Yeah, there's going to be some good performances.

You mentioned Garth Brooks. I mean, he's a big name, but that is the unity choice there. He's a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. He's something for everyone. That's the olive branch to the MAGA, the red part of America, to be like, hey, look, it's Garth. It's Garth. He thinks Biden's president.

Can't argue with that. And then, of course, two seconds later the Garth Brooks's name will get added to the pedophile.xce spreadsheet it's already there he has already been and not only is he on the list he has also been arrested and executed and replaced with a hologram are there actual live performances because I know they're doing these zoom concerts oh okay That's what they've been doing for the past week. These Zoom concerts, which is featuring pro-Biden comedians and musicians,

which is available for you if your brain's healthy and you want something to watch. But I haven't seen any of it. I would imagine on Inauguration Day, there probably will be someone on a stage performing on the National Mall or something. But I don't know what kind of an audience

will be in attendance, though. Yeah, because these are the Democrats. They're not going to just have everybody out there maskless. It's all about following the rules. And also, there will be like 20,000 National Guardsmen there. I mean, yeah, that's going to be the audience. And I have been enjoying stories. And again, like I take every one of these stories

with a very large chunk of salt. But the whole thing about how like they're vetting the National Guardsmen for like seditious behavior activity because they just think that like it'll be like that scene in the Joker, sorry, in the Dark Knight atordon's funeral where like the the honor guard just turns their guns on um the mayor or harvey dant or whatever yeah i mean come on not outside the realm of possibilities people are fucking cracked i mean do they get live ammo to begin with or is it apparently they're not they're not they're not giving them they're not giving them the live ammo i don't know if you

want to tell the people that so that they could just bum rush the stage knowing the guns are empty every every fifth gun has live ammo in it so it's sort of like you know you're rolling your dice but you're also sort of diffusing the chance of the guns being turned on the state yeah you know we've said for a while now like but like the the big promise of the biden administration and i think like a big part of his appeal as a presidential candidate was the idea of just like you know back to normal but like back to normal implies like not just back to obama but i think truly the real promise is back to the 90s like back like back to the early aughts the 90s like isn't uh chris you brought up that uh will i am is going to be at the inauguration i mean that is that's going back to normal will i am for a second because nothing to me says like there is

no future than the presence of will i am back in the biden inauguration it's like we we are forcing it to be 2009 again no culture has progressed We're not acknowledging anything that has happened since then. It's Will.i.am forever. I'm having a real good time with you. Your brain just repeating that over and over again until the heat death of the evening. Tonight's gonna be a good time.

Tonight's gonna be a good, good time. That song literally is a fucking about self-hypnosis. All their songs are like, I'm having a good all their songs like i'm having a good time i'm enjoying myself this is the best time i've ever had this is a good idea this is going to be great this is all going to work out well for me 2000 it's 2009 biden is healing the nation everyone's happy there's nothing there's no problem there's no cause for alarm so yeah you've got you've got you got will i am of the black

eyed peas and none of the rest of the black eyed peas i mean where are they not even apple d app i hear that he's into q anon and that's why he's not allowed he's he they might he might actually have a suicide vest on and try to kill trump or biden so well yeah will i am is there representing like yeah like time stopped when like, Obama was inaugurated. We're going back to 2009. Even better than Will.i.am, though, is the one that was announced yesterday, which is fully what I'm hoping for,

to just go back to the 90s, purely. End of history. The last decade, baby. The last decade. And nothing is better evidence of that than the group, the new radicals, are reuniting and performing for the first time in 22 years, performing their anthem. You only get what you give at the Biden inauguration. You all remember that song, right?

Oh, hell yeah. The video made in the mall? Yeah, he's in the mall. Bucket hat. Yeah, it's a bucket hat guy and he's in a mall. And the video is kids in a mall just like wiling out having fun

and like the authority figures are like you can't do that and then like they're just having too much fun to stop it was kind of a we didn't start the fire

for a new generation yes yes it's exactly what it is and you know the famous but it also threatened physical violence

against Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson well that's what made it for a new generation no yeah they looked at we didn't start the fire and they said no not aggressive enough yeah physical violence against Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson. Well, that's what made it for a new generation. No, yeah. They looked at, we didn't start the fire, and they said, no, not aggressive enough.

We need genuine threats in this. On Wednesday, when Wednesday rolls around, you're on notice. Courtney Love, Marilyn Manson, Billy Corgan, you are now enemies of the state, and you will be compromised to a permanent end. The fucking U.S. military is going to kick your ass in. I mean, Courtney Love honestly should probably go to prison because of how close she is to people from the epstein island but i would like she honestly might end up on both lists like the but the democrats and the

q people's list of uh of criminals no but uh but they're sort of um i don't know there's a there's a grimmer thread to the inclusion of the new radicals at Biden's inauguration that I found out about the other day because people were sort of, I don't know, sort of just having some fun with it or poking fun at the idea because people, you know, it's kind of a corny song or it is such a throwback. And I don't know how vetted this is,

but somebody angrily denounced people making fun of the new radicals at the Biden inauguration because they said the reason that they're performing and that they're reuniting is because the song, You Only Get What You Give, was apparently what was referred to as Beau Biden's fight song during his battle with cancer. And that was his inspirational on-repeat anthem for, I don't know, getting chemotherapy or struggling with with, uh, yeah, cancer. So like that, that sort of inspirational anthem was, was, was Beau Biden's like personal song. And it has like a kind of an emotional like meaning and, and,

and purchase on, uh, Joe Biden himself. That's really burying the lead there after our japes that seemed harmless at the time were actually making light of this tragic event wow you know the thank you for reminding me joe biden that your fucking kid died it's been five minutes so i'm sorry i'm sorry we sent you 1400 checks as some sort of grim prank uh my son died are. Are the new radicals playing live or is it going to be another Zoom call? I don't know. I think that's going to be live because

that's on the day of and I think there is going to be people on stage. I don't know who's going to be in the audience, but I do think there's going to be a stage. It's just like the family members of Abigail Spanberger. Abigail Spanberger's uncle rocking out to the new radicals. Like during the convention when they would have people on the stage, but there was not really an audience.

I'm assuming it's going to be like that. And also Lady Gaga is going to sing the Star Spangled Banner. Then you're going to have Tom Hanks. They're going to have a special. That'll probably be the Zoom thing where you got Springsteen, Foo Fighters, John Legend, Justin Timberlake, Demi Lovato, Bon Jovi. When do the cuffs go on? At what point in the schedule is that?

They're just going to lower a giant cage from the ceiling. It's like the board game mousetrap at Bon Jovi. The reason why I ask is I think the new Radicals video, it should be a Zoom call. All the members of the new Radicals should be in different locations.

And instead of it being a mall, which is an outmoded concept, they should be shopping on Amazon. And it's a statement about how we all need to pitch in and stay at home and just do all our commerce online virtually now in order to beat this thing. I mean, honestly, I think

now is the perfect time to bring back that song after fucking 10 months of fucking pandemic quarantine. Just the chorus line, don't give up. You've got a reason to live. People need to hear that right now. They really do. How about this? You get what you give your country.

This is the update of the John F. Kennedy thing. It's like Kennedy. That's not what your country gets what it gives. I will take it as true, the thing about it being Beau Biden's fight song. Yeah, apparently it is. That's in Joe's one of his quote-unquote autobiographies but you can't make me not think it would be funny to watch joe biden said a single solemn tear while watching a guy in a bucket hat saying like a list of cultural signifiers of the

90s perhaps dare i say while wearing a bucket hat himself he should put the bucket hat on at the end of the performance, put the hat on his head like a crowning. They can do it like when Napoleon got crowned emperor at Notre Dame. I just want to say that they got this list of performers for the inaugural. They got Springsteen,

fucking Timberlake, Bon Jovi. And it reminds me of Trump's inaugural where I believe it was three doors down and a guy who could fit eight billion balls in his mouth. That was it. Didn't they have like a dueling piano? The piano act. The piano act where it was five guys playing a single grand piano, but like playing it like Harpo and Barks did where they're playing like they're sort of plucking the inside strings and playing it like a drum and shit like that.

Remember that? Do your foot out and do yes and then there was like a family band where little kids playing violins as i said at the time yeah the shapiro family uh music uh performance yeah it was it was it was all the mr showax champion the drinker no it's choo-choo the Herky Jerky Dancer. I remember we were watching that shit in a restaurant in D.C. And I felt that was my first real sense of my soul leaving my body during the Trump administration. It was just like watching this 12-year-old in a tuxedo playing the violin. And I just thought, this is like Kyrgyzstan-y state television. And I just thought, this is like Kyrgyzstan-y state television.

Just imagine that he finishes his violin song and then puts it down and then solemnly begins singing Tomorrow Belongs to Me. No, it's funny. Yeah, I mean, obviously thinking back to four years ago when we were in D.C. for Trump's inauguration. And then obviously, like, we're absolutely no chance that we even could go to this one, even if we wanted to yeah because of how good things went yeah i swear to god though if we did it's too it's too boring now democracy has solved everything don't even want to go and see the spectacle if we went on wednesday though he would have like probably a hundred times greater

chance of dying this time around than the last yep for a variety of reasons yes and i just gotta just sorry just like to circle back uh to the idea of cancer fight songs which i guess is the thing and i was just thinking to myself i've never heard what was my dad's cancer fight song and like it literally it was like she see shanties he was like he was ahead of the tiktok curve he was he would listen to sea shanties and like like he was ahead of the kick-tock curve he was he would listen to sea shanties and like irish folk songs on the porch so you know if i ever become president it's going to be one of those and it's gonna no one better make fun of it no you can't make fun of it you can't make fun of it because his son died okay that's what's just so grotesque to me about

his whole performance of like fake empathy it's all rooted in just this weepy fake emotional candor literally weaponizing his own trauma he's gross he's high-key gross joe biden or more weak more more accurately the people who control his body like a fucking ventriloquist yeah and oh yeah like uh you brought up the, the $1,400 checks thing. I know we talked about it last week, but like this has become kind of like, like the, the early controversy or sort of a blow up of the pre Biden

administration, because like half of, like basically half of people are just saying like, you stupid moron. It was always $1,400. Why don't you read the damn bill? Which is just like, okay, like, I mean, you read the damn bill? Which is just like, okay. You're a real sicko if you weren't surprised by that shit.

But I will even grant that basically they might be correct that it was always about fulfilling 2000 eventually if you read the bill or whatever. But that's not that makes them look worse not better. That's like they say this we were always planning to do this

we were all planning to you should see your faces this is a classic bit you've been you've been punked i think carl bear laid it out pretty well when he wrote that if you are a uh someone who follows politics on a granular level uh which is to say maniac whose brain is rotten, then you would come to the conclusion that, well, yes, of course, when they said 2000,

they meant the 2000 cumulatively after the Relegans passed the $600. If you are a normal person, maybe you had seen a clip of Joe Biden saying after that $600 had passed, proclaiming, we're going to get you $2,000. Or Kamala Harris saying we're going to get you $2,000. And you would think, oh, okay, I'm getting another $2,000 on top of the $600. I think that's the source of the controversy.

Or you might have seen any of the fucking TV ads in the Georgia Senate race where they were literally showing images of a check for $2,000 being like, this will be yours if only you vote. And this was after they passed the $600, after they started sending out the $600 checks. And there was a subtle but very calculated shift in rhetoric

after Ossoff and Warnock won those races, where before that, it was just like $2,000 checks. It's real. It's going to happen. And then right after they won, like Biden and other people around them, there was like this rhetorical shift where they just started saying, we are finishing the work of getting you $2,000. And that's what the $1,400 represents.

And it's just like, I just like the idea that they're just like, oh, like you fucking moron, you absolute sucker. You thought $2,000. What you thought? Like dollars what you thought like it was always fourteen hundred dollars you idiot what did you do just believe that you just heard

two thousand dollars and you were like thought that that would be like one check you fucking moron and it's just like they're probably right about that but like don't they understand how bad that looks to like the vast majority of people who aren't brain poisoned political sickos like that looks so fucking bad the weird thing about this whole debate to me has been how much it's gotten caught up in these number differences and how there's no like universal messaging of being like look we're we're in the treasury we've got our green visors on we're doing the numbers we're seeing seeing how much we can afford or even be able to do or what the economy

will bear. There's no reasoning among this. And so what you're left to conclude as a person is that they're just all trying to decide what they think you deserve. You know? That there's no actual back end of the math that is causing it. Basically, how much will it take

to shut you the fuck up? Has anyone made an argument for why $2,600 would be far too much or would have some deleterious effect on the economy? Well, yeah. The thing is, everybody will say that if they've decided that it's time to turn the tap

off. It's arbitrary, but Ron Johnson said no to $2,000, and then Joe Manchin but like ron johnson said no to 2000 and then like joe mansion said at first he said no to 2000 uh so they have these uh barriers i mean one of the big one of the reasons that the stimulus in 2009 was such shit was that fucking uh olympia snow insisted that it had to be under a trillion dollars because that was too big of a number it's all just made up they just pull it out of their asses that's just they like round yeah well two thousands rounder than 1400 way rounder that's that's three goose eggs not one yeah but it should need to be round low it can't

be round up it has to be it has to be you have to always be rounding down because that signals fiscal responsibility even though the you're just pulling numbers out of your ass if you give people two thousand dollars what's next three thousand dollars apparently no you can't that'll be the end of the world the the democratic party operates on the uh if you give a mouse a cookie principle of governing uh uh polis they love love talk they love talking about that book actually uh honestly it may be funny if they ended up stumbling ass backwards into some sort of UBI out of this just as a way to keep the fucking economy on life support. And then I guess as part of this other huge spending package that's being proposed, at least,

another part of it is a $15 minimum wage hike, which is good, but I'll believe it when I see it. And then even in the bill as it's currently written, it's like $15 minimum wage by 2027. Like, that's the time frame they're going on. And, you know, like, I'm sure it's going to, I'm sure, I bet that's going to get down to like $12 an hour or something.

But even that being proposed, like, okay, better than nothing, but even that being proposed, we're okay, better than nothing. But even that being proposed, we're treated to another round of like possibly some of the most brain-dead like discourse or like arguments against raising the minimum wage from like the econ 101 segment.

You know, they're like, it's just simple math. If you raise McDonald's employees' salaries to $15 an hour, then a Big Mac will cost $20. And who wins then? Nobody. Which would, you know, that would imply that if you cut the salaries

of McDonald's employees, a Big Mac would be free, which is, I think, honestly something we should consider because that would be like a universal food program. Well, I mean, it has to cost something because the bosses have to make money. But, like, if their labor was free, food program. Well, I mean, it has to cost something because the bosses have to make money. But if their labor was free, then they could really pass the savings on to you. Yeah, definitely.

It'll be a UBI in the form of a Big Mac per month subsidy for every American. See, the argument advanced by two kinds of people. College professors and TikTok investors. Yeah, yeah. Like a couple on TikTok. You must have saw that video this week,

but like the couple on TikTok who's financed their whole life by using Robinhood. And he's like, it's real simple. Here's my investment strategy. I buy a stock. I watch it go up. I wait till it just ticks down a little bit, then I sell.

It's like every stock I buy, just when it goes up, that's when you sell it. And it's just brilliant. We're definitely not living in a bubble or anything like that. As long as the stock market keeps going up, up, up, get on this train now. Traditionally, that has usually been an indicator

that the economy is on very stable footing when everybody is speculatively investing and highly leveraged. Yeah, you're right. Like econ guys and TikTok investors. And also, the perfect person who's opposed to a minimum wage hike

with well-sourced, well-reasoned arguments for why it's a bad thing to do and actually hurts the people you're trying to help are that entire contingent of guys out there who make 70 grand a year and think like elon musk is their colleague yeah you know what i mean no you must reply guys yeah exactly

like yeah like you think like once you crack like six figures like you're yeah you're you are a business genius and like you understand how the economy works and like you know you understand you can't just get you can't just raise people's salaries or or all the people who are like they work a job for twenty dollars an hour that they consider more skilled than a mcdonald's employee and they're like why the fuck they should they be making as much as i am instead of getting mad at the assholes who are stiffing them every fucking month i just i just don't see why that you would take that to the logical conclusion and just be like we shouldn't have a minimum wage or basically any labor law they do say that that is what they say that's that this they're just doing a rear guard action but when they feel that they could move forward

they try to dismantle this stuff so wait is this all just an argument that the wage should be even lower so that the big macs can be cheaper well also well the the more sophisticated version of it is that is that uh by putting a minimum wage you limit the amount of people who could get jobs so therefore you're limiting employment that's what they argue although there's no real evidence at all that that's what happens or it's just one of those things that like there's two lines on a graph and you point to it and say this is science because economics is so it's so real it's so real they had to make up their own nobel prize and you know like also there are everybody else because everybody else understood instinctively that they were full of shit and so they had to like make their own one out of like fucking

pie tins and said no we have a nobel prize too and eventually people are just like, fine, shut the fuck up. You have a Nobel Prize. And also, McDonald's exists in countries like Denmark that have something like the equivalent of a $15 minimum wage. They have more like a $25 minimum wage. Yeah, it's like a $20, $25 minimum wage in Denmark for McDonald's employees. And the

quarter pounder in Copenhagen is not like $50. It's like a dollar more though. Who cares? It's like a dollar more though. It's like, yeah, who cares? It's a dollar. How many Big Macs are these people eating? Why is that the index? I want to see the breakdown of your monthly budget here.

Because if you're spending clearly too much on Big Macs, if this is something that's threatening your pocketbook. Yeah, it's like, look, this stuff adds up. I mean, if I'm getting a Big Mac every 20 minutes, that extra 15 cents is going to drive me to the poorhouse by the end of the month. I get it. I get this shit coming from the small business tyrants, but the one that was balving me was that lady,

the college professor, who said, if I've got to pay my student TAs 15 bucks an hour, I'm just going to hire fewer of them. It's like you don't pay them. That's not coming out of your money. You don't hire them. That's not your money. What do you give a shit what they make?

Because if people who you think are lower than you socially and do a job that you don't respect, make near as much as you, then you have been disrespected. That's what people think. That's our delightful our delightful crabs in a bucket society where you you're only able to uh enjoy a sense of uh of worth if you know that it's it's only it's relative to somebody lower than you and a burger flipper should be lower than you that means they need to make less money i also think like especially like the the lady in academia or like people who work office jobs i think a lot of it too is their own like subconscious

or conscious guilt about the fact that the job that they're paid to do like they don't actually work like during a day like there's not even that much work to do like they just sit at a desk and pretend to look busy most of the time and they know that what they do isn't very skilled. They're actually stealing time every fucking day. And it's not socially beneficial either, especially in academia if you work in a fucking office. Which is all the more reason that they need to maintain the salary distinction as a validation of their entire fucking lives.

Well, I think we're meeting one. And something all of these people talk about is the idea that, oh, minimum wage jobs are for teenagers. They're for students. And they often brag about how, like, for one summer in college, like, they worked at a Taco Bell or something like that. And that's

their only, you know, point of reference. But it definitely shows how absolutely ideologically tainted our understanding of jobs is. People really do seem to think in this ambient sense in this country that your wages are like a reward for your virtue or something. and your productivity and like your your your value as a human being and not a what your boss can get away giving you in exchange for way more value than you fucking produce like the the 15 dollar uh burger flipper is still producing way way more than 15 an hour worth of value for his employer but that's not something that people even conceive of because if you thought about that

you'd have to think about the fact that you're getting fucking ripped off too and who wants to think about that when you can instead fixate on this imagined hierarchy of virtue that is that's delineate delineated in dollars and you can point to yourself and say i'm i'm here at least i'm not down there i think another thing that's going on here specifically in the backlash to this kind of thing among white collar workers is you know like the minimum wage jobs that they're talking about and shitting on, I would say that of the hours that you're doing them, I would say are unambiguously

a harder job to do than being in an office and sitting at a desk. If your job is sitting at a desk looking at a computer all day long, half of that time you're looking at fantasy football, you're fucking like, you're dicking around, you're pretending Well, that's where the physical labor of white-collar work comes in because you do have to get pretty fast with the clicker

to get off the fantasy football screen. Yeah, to minimize window. Yeah, back to the Excel spreadsheet. Yeah, minimize window. But what they're mad at is the benefit of the minimum wage job where if you're in a job situation where if you can lean, you can clean. That's a real job. You're busy every hour you're in a job situation where if you can lean, you can clean, that's a real job. You're busy every hour you're fucking doing it.

And someone's looking at you and making sure that you're on your feet doing a task over and over again that is part of the job. The benefit, at least in their mind, is that when the job is over, it's over. You leave it. It's done. You don't have to think about it. Whereas with most white-collar jobs, especially now, more so than ever, like with everyone working from home and working remotely, the job never ends.

There's nothing other than work. And you're never really off the clock, and you're never really out from under the thumb of productivity, a supervisor, the next fucking email, the next 50 fucking emails. You live in that constant state. Even though you're not, like, the work you're doing, you're not

spending every minute that you're being paid for working theoretically for the job, what the job requires. I think that they think that that's what they're being paid for, the fact that they can psychologically never ever leave the office or their place of work.

Okay, moving on to another thing. Did you guys see, this is like the perfect ending to the Trump administration. Did you see that Mike Lindell, the pillow crackhead, was visited the White House to advise Donald Trump about declaring martial law last week? mean who amongst us you gotta have to you gotta talk to some people sometimes

apparently the deal with that is that they just let him come in there and just say let him talk because the president likes him and then they just sort of walk him out and there was another okay he got it off his chest there was another there's another news article this week about how it was like further accounts of like, you know, the last days in the bunker or whatever that was talking about how Trump would be in a room full of people and have Sidney Powell on speakerphone and just say, Sidney, what are we going

to do about it? What are we going to do about it? And then she would just like just go off on a fucking tear and he would mute her on the call and start talking to people in the room being like, Sidney's crazy. Can you believe this? She really believes this. She really believes this. Is she wonderful, folks? Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. Then put her back off mute. Yeah, Sydney. Okay, yes. The Kraken. It's coming.

I was going to say, the photo of Lindell with the martial law alert plan was so funny to me because he was walking out. It was kind of crumpled in his hands were like zooming in being like oh my god is this the announcement that tanks are going to roll in during the inauguration and i found it just looking at the photo just as likely that he maybe asked trump to like validate his parking and he was just like yeah sure let me grab something for you just like wrote it on the back of the memo pages he had crumpled up like the wikipedia entry for what is martial law with a few things highlighted he was like here's the of a memo. The pages he had crumpled up were like the Wikipedia entry for what is martial law with a few things highlighted.

He was like, here's the plan, sir. Man, he must have sold a lot of pillows. Oh, yeah. He does. He does. And now the fucking thing is

it's expanded. There are sheets too now. And... I don't know about this one. And he's got... Like, there are millions of morons who want to buy my pillow to stick it to the lizard people.

I trust this man to make pillows, but I don't know about other sorts of bedding items. The thing about Mike Lindell is the guy has sold a ton of pillows and he's smoked a ton of crack. He did so much crack, and that's how he got up the idea of the pillow. One night he's lying in bed his eyes are wide open. They're bright

red throbbing veins in his eyes and he goes, I could sleep if I had a better fucking pillow. If I had a perfect pillow. A perfect pillow. If I had a perfect pillow. If I had a perfect pillow I'd be able to sleep. A perfect pillow. And he spent the next 48 hours putting one together. What makes it different? It's memory foam of some kind. I don't know. It's be able to sleep. A perfect pillow. And he spent the next 48 hours putting one together. What makes it different? It's memory foam of some kind.

I don't know. It's probably made out of fucking fiberglass insulation. Just asbestos. He probably goes into schools that are going to be closed because they've got asbestos in the walls. Just rips it out and stuffs it in a fucking pillowcase. Sells it to these rubes. Because these people don't care if it's good or not. He's the good man.

He's the good pillow man. They'll buy the fucking thing even if it's just literally making their face orange. I've never seen one in the wild, but for all I know, it's a sack with a raccoon in it that gently massages your head. They would buy that. They would buy that they would buy that i'm surprised more

business types have not gotten into the whole trump grift not tried to to leech off trump to to to drift off his momentum because like his audience will buy anything oh yeah absolutely oh they they they are because they think they're fighting it apparently the new what trump's planning to do is he's trying he's planning to do is he's planning to use the grassroots network of his Rube supporters to fund his presidential library, which is usually done with corporate donations, which is going to be a little harder for him now that he's anathema. So he's just going to get $2 billion in small donations to just build a giant fucking statue to himself that you can take an elevator into.

And at the very top, in the brain, there's just a big screen TV that plays on a loop the commercial where him and Grimace look out the window. Well, you bring up a giant Trump statue and Grimace and I guess the last thing I want to talk about is the executive order on the way out

the door. This had been percolating for a while. But Trump's idea for a national sculpture garden that is like our gallery of national heroes. And he released the final list of names for people to be commemorated in statue form. I mean, I doubt this thing will ever get built. But like there's like, you know, like there's like a hundred fucking names on it. It's like a massive list of fucking great Americans that are going going to be featured in this statue garden i vaguely remember this so he'd be his directive was to build a statue garden what in dc yeah it would be like something like something i don't know if that on the national mall but this was originally proposed last summer after the whole uh george floyd

protest wave and then the the statue uh attacks where people were pulling down Confederate monuments and stuff and he just decided, oh, you guys don't like statues? Well, actually, we're going to make more statues. How do you like that? Just pure ganglion reaction.

Oh, you don't like statues? Build more statues. We're going to build so many statues you're literally not going to be able to pull them down because there's going to be new ones. We're going to build them faster than you can pull them down.

Good luck. Eventually every American will have a statue. Every American will have a statue. It'll be like the National Gallery of Americans featuring 350 million bronze fucking busts. We're going to unleash

basilisks throughout the country. And they will eventually, of course, be torn down by rampaging social justice warriors, which means that in the future, everyone will be a statue for 15 minutes. You know, though, but I looked at the list of the national heroes that are going to be honored in Statue Farm, and I've got to say,

I was a little disappointed because they were chalk picks. You know, there are a couple names of people that I would like to deface in statue form, like William F. Buckley or Gene Kirkpatrick. But for the most part, these are like Miles Davis, Cy Young, heroes of sport, film, politics, you know, like just very standard great Americans. And even a couple that, you know, I heartily endorse, like Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville.

It's very serve for a dollar, can you name an American? Yeah. Yeah, it's very like a time life, you know, list of, you know, nostalgia for old people. And, you know, I was disappointed because it was Trump that there were no, like, fictional characters or not Americans or just people. So here's my guess. Here's my guess. Here's how here's my guess on how the list came about.

That like this, this took, you know, probably 12 hours out of his day. You know, when when the when the White House says, you know, every single day when they don't release a schedule and they're like, Mr. Trump is doing president work from dawn to dusk today. At least one of these days was just him sitting at his desk at the Oval Office, rattling off names for 12 hours straight while he has aides surrounding him with yellow notepads. know surrounding him with with yellow notepads and they just had to cross off the names of people who are who are foreign uh who are fictional who are not dead who are just like stuff like the lady at the store uh wife just people he knows from his golf club and it's just like yeah it's just like well just mr trump mr president sir just name people and you know he just did a lot of heavy editing on the list.

Yes, the nation needs a Stan Schera statue. In fact, fuck the rest of these. Make one giant Stan Schera statue. We were talking about it before we got on air, but this is my solution to the National Garden of Heroes and the statue issue.

There's one name of a living American who was not chosen to be in the Garden of Heroes and the statue issue. There's one name of a living American who was not chosen to be in the Garden of Heroes, but I think towers among all of them. I would like to see all of these statues melted down, just smelted in a giant cauldron, and then reformed

into a colossus, I would say, I don't know, ten times the size of the Statue of Liberty, and I'd like it to be a Mr. Martin Scorsese. But, as Matt, you pointed out, like the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty, you know,

aside the golden door. Give us your, yes, give us your poor, your huddled masses. The lamp is lit, you know, outside the golden door. There should be a plaque at the giant, at the Scorsese Colossus that said he was a cool guy who made only movies about cool guys who do cool fun things and are good and not bad yep yep in fact the statue should be of martin scorsese watching a crime happen

and giving two thumbs up yeah but you know what meant though and then when you said that i was like yes absolutely this is the that that is a testament to like i think the greatest living american artist but it's not just that he glorifies crime in his movies because not all you know people forget not all of his movies are about the mob what he really glorifies is toxic masculinity and that's true is what we need a monument to you know because i feel like you know it's going away and people need to be reminded you know toxic masculinity it's good it's cool it built this freaking country okay and it's not just limited it's not just limited to being in a organized crime you can do toxic masculinity if you're just an everyday average Joe.

And that's the kind of the forgotten American, the forgotten toxic American that Martin Scorsese and his films completely uncritically celebrate. That's why I am a toxic masculinity, because I watch those movies and think, wow, these are really well done films. They make me feel those emotions that cinema is able to evoke. And now I have these good, warm feelings towards these criminals, and now I think toxic criminal masculinity is actually awesome. Will, do you have the list in front of you, the statue list?

I have the list in front of me. Okay, yeah. I just want to say one thing about this list. If you really want to just sit down and entertain yourself for a few minutes, just start reading the names and imagining Trump describing why they're on this list. If you really want to just sit down and entertain yourself for a few minutes, just start reading the names and imagining Trump describing why they're on the list. Just going like,

ah, Vince Lombardi, we love what he did for the football. He was the best football guy of all time. Herman Melville, he wrote a great book about a big fish. We love him. Big guy. Big fish.

Big guy, big fish. The biggest fish. The novel about the biggest fish. No novelist since has been able to write about a Big fish. Big guy. Big fish. The biggest fish. The novel about the biggest fish. No novelist since has been able to write about a bigger fish. That's why he's number one. Herman Melville, he wrote the biggest book of all time. And no one's written a book that was longer. That's why he's there.

Or like Sojourner Truth. It'd be like, she told truth to everyone. No matter where she went, she was always telling the truth. She took a big sojourn and took a lot of truth. We couldn't take the truth that she said. I'm sorry. I gotta give it to you. I'm here for it. Yes. The fact that there are

I could be wrong though, but I did not see a single professional golfer on this statue list. That is kind of messed up. That is evidence to me that Trump was not very involved in this. There's a whole addendum that suggests professional golfers. Is Roy Cohn on the list? Yeah, I was wondering if you'd get Roy Cohn on there.

Yeah, is Roy Cohn on the list? I just want to ask questions. I just want to bring up names and see if they're on the list. I did not see Roy Cohn on the list. Yeah, sadly not. Because he doesn't have any loyalty. The whole ain't loyal. Is the Big Bopper on the list?

Oddly, yes, but not Jim Allens or Buddy Holly. I, you know, many people, I was actually a bigger fan of the Big Bopper than Buddy Holly.

I like it. Gentilly Lace, that was the song, that was the song. That was the one of all the songs. That was a good one. It's the Big Bopper, baby.

It's just Trump getting on the phone calling people, hello. It's the Big Bopper, baby. It's just Trump getting on the phone, calling people hello, it's the Big Bopper. They were shaped very similarly. They were. Just big briefcase guys. Speaking of that, I can't wait to see fucking Antonin Scalia's

refrigerator-shaped statue that they put out there. Antonin Scalia, but also Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Yeah. And there you go. He's he's he's yeah.

He's doing the work to heal the nation on the way out. They should make that one statue and it's like Quatto. Oh, yeah. We're like it's

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is coming out of the side of the Scalia of Scalia. Yeah, that would work. Turn on the reactor and then that was such as the reactor, Antonin.

Those are just... Bruce Bader Ginsburg, those are just people he vaguely remembers from the news. Yep. It's like, Mr. Clean, you're very good. Very good at reading.

William Devane for Gold Line. Is Jerry Lewis on there? He should be. I don't think he is, though. It's unfortunately not searchable, the version that I have. Well, it's alphabetical. It's alphabetical. The one I saw was alphabetical.

The very annoying thing in Twitter for me is that the list is all on a Ben Jacobs thing, and that asshole blocks me, so I can never fucking see it when people are posting the goddamn thing. It's very annoying. How'd you get to Ben Jacobs block? He told me he was a bitch, and it was funny that he got his ass kicked. All right, he was the guy who got his ass kicked. That was funny.

Is Ty Cobb on the statue list? Hold. Let's see. One of the greatest baseball players of all time. Ty Cobb. Ingrid Bergman, Charles Carroll, Johnny Appleseed Chapman. Charl Cobb. Ingrid Bergman. Charles Carroll. Johnny Appleseed Chapman. Charlton Heston is on the list. Hell yes. I do not see Ty Cobb.

Is Samuel Adams on the list? Yes, he is. Yes. Is he holding a beer in the statue? I bet he is. I bet it's like a tie-in. I hope the Heston statue is the rendering of him at the end of Planet of the Apes, like on his knees on the beach going, you maniacs, you blew it all down.

Oh, that's a name that Trump threw out when asked to name founding fathers. I would love to hear Trump's explanation to who Samuel is. That's the beer. It's good. It's delicious. I don't drink it myself. Is Jack Daniels on there? Captain Morgan, one of the greatest pirates of all time.

Helped us win the war. He did it. He did it. Helped us win the war. We won. I do love that the oldest person going back on this list is like basically founding fathers generation like 1770s except for Christopher Columbus who has to be on here

just to own people. There's already a shitload of Christopher Columbus statues all over this country. I don't think we need to include him in here. That's because like with most Trump projects this is going to be built by the mob and you don't want to piss them off. That's true. So you've got to put fucking cool. Well you got to Columbus. Why you the fucking hero? fucking... Well, you've got to do Columbus! Why?

He's a fucking hero! Is Sam Giancana on the list? I also, just looking through all these names, I can't help but just imagine these statues as the terracotta warriors that Trump will be buried with. Yes. Yes. These people will all awake in the afterlife to be servants of Trump

after thinking that they had lucked out and gone to hell. They'll find that they were rudely awakened. When does this thing open? I want to go see it now. It's never going to be open. It's never going to be open. He signed the order. Oh, yeah.

He put in the order. He put in the requisition order for it. It's in the order. Oh, yeah. He put in the order. The work order, yeah. He put in the requisition order for it. It's in the works. He put in the order. There's some New Jersey-based trophy supply company that's just like,

oh, boy, fucking sweating bullets. We're like, we need to put in an order with one of our vendors for a thousand tons of bronze. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. We've been filling orders

for bowling leagues for the last six months. Yeah, that would be the perfect style for all of bronze. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. We've been filling orders for bowling leagues for the last six months. That would be the perfect style for all of them. The bowling league trophies. You get to it and every single one of them is mid-pose, mid-rolling pose. I think it's funny that there's been this freak out over the past two weeks about, you know,

what the damage that Trump's going to do in his last few days in office. You know, he's going to declare martial law or launch nukes or whatever. And this is what actually comes out the door. The rambling statue list. And also, like, none of the names, like, there's no one on there that's, like,

really all that disgusting or controversial either. I mean, there's war criminals and stuff. Yeah, but, you know, whatever. That's just DC. That's almost, yeah, exactly. Like, I thought they would put Grant and Robert E. That's almost, yeah, exactly. I thought they would put Grant and Robert E. Lee on there, but only Grant. Or Chris Kyle or something.

Yeah. Wearing his fucking Punisher Kevlar. As a representation of, quote, great Americans, I mean, if you're just taking a survey of famous Americans, you're going to have some more criminals in there. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's going to be part of that.

They got Audie Murphy, though. He's a war hero. No William Calley, so hey, could have been worse. Sergeant York, is he there? No, probably not. I don't think they put Sergeant York on here. Bo Gritz. Actually, yes, Sergeant York is on the list. Elvin C. York, yes. But Gary Cooper as Sergeant York, not the real

Sergeant York. Well, of course. But Gary Cooper is on this. Oh, Gary Cooper as Sergeant York, not the real Sergeant York. Well, of course. But Gary Cooper is on this. Oh, Gary Cooper's already on it. Wow. Oh, no way. No, I'm sorry. I was misreading James Fenimore Cooper and another genius. What the hell, dude? I think Trump thinks that

that is Gary Cooper. That's his legal name. The guy from High Noon. Well, I mean mean i hope one day i can take my grandkids to see the uh the the thousand greatest americans in statue form or ideally to take them to see the scorsese colossus towering over the ruins of manhattan yes yep where it's like ozymandias yeah and every hour his voice booms out across New York Sound I think that crime is cool and I glorify it no no okay yes

like sort of like a cathedral bell he will remind you that doing evil and being a toxically masculine is fun and cool but every other hour of the day he just updates you on the TCM schedule of what's on tonight he's like the life and death of Colonel Blimp tonight 8 o on the TCM schedule of what's on tonight. He's like the life and death of Colonel Blimp tonight, 8 o'clock TCM.

Howard Pressburg, that wonderful picture. He's just rattling off. You've got movies like Stagecoach, John Ford's Stagecoach. Well, that's what we need. John Ford on the list. Alright, well, before we what we need. John Ford on the list.

All right. Well, before we go, we should take a moment to acknowledge and celebrate the birthday of one Chris Wade, ladies and gentlemen. Chris Wade, happy birthday, friend. Happy birthday to, I would say, easily the greatest producer

slash player in the podcast game today by far. Thank you. I appreciate it. Uh, and being, uh, unmuting myself and actually talking on this episode, that's a little gift that I'm giving to myself and also you,

the listeners, but I'm going to end this with a brief annual, uh, shout out. Uh, I'm going to channel my best Stassi and say, it's my fucking birthday today. My birthday, my birthday,, it's my fucking birthday today. It's my birthday.

It's my birthday. It's my birthday. It's my actual birthday. It's my idea of what my birthday should be. It's my fucking birthday. And because of that, you all have to go, if you have not already,

to youtube.com slash chapotraphouse and subscribe to the damn YouTube channel. We are very close to getting a... He wants his plaque! I want that fucking plaque. He wants the plaque. Give him the plaque. We are very close to getting a... I want that fucking plaque. Give him the plaque. We have great content there. We repost the episodes.

We have Matt's vlogs. We're starting to do best of the month compilations. The monthly best of comps. I'm very excited about those. We're going to be doing that. And some other new possibly partially animated things. If you are an

animator out there, by the way, if you do animatics and would want to maybe do one for some of our best bits and maybe want a little money for it, hit me up in the DMs because I would love content like that. I'm also going to start playing around with doing live streaming radio on there, making those 24-hour streams of

lo-fi, Chapo episodes to relax slash study to, I think I'm going to make one with all our movie episodes that just kind of plays on there, you know, stuff like that. Just playing around, having fun with it. I also just want to give a quick shout out to my beautiful team of YouTube helpers who have been helping me. That's Wagner coop at wags coop on Twitter. Daniel, who did our Best Of compilation, he's at Bevel TGR. And a big shout out to Jake, who has been helping me do YouTube back end since basically the moment we started the channel.

He is at Romcommy1 on Twitter. Please give him a shout out. He is going through chemo right now and could use some uplifting good messages from the gray wolves out there. All those guys have been helping me run the channel. We're going to hit 100,000 subs in 2021. That would be the best birthday gift possible for me.

YouTube.com slash Chapo Trap House. How many subscriptions do we need to go before we hit 100K right now? About 18,000. We're at 80. After listening this episode, everyone out there. Subscribe. We're at 80. After listening to this episode, everyone out there, subscribe.

We're hitting 100K tomorrow. Yes. It's free. Yes. I'm sure you can find 18,000 subs among the people listening. I'm very confident. I will also use this chance

to make my yearly plug for the other podcast I do with Borat Voice, my wife. It is called And Introducing, a podcast about words, about music. Every episode is about a different musician, usually told through their autobiography or memoir. We've had a lot of great episodes just in the past,

like Guided by Voices with Dan Beckner. We did Billy Corgan with Leslie Lee from Struggle Session. We're getting ready to do Frank Zappa. And then for the bulk of the spring, we're going to go through and do Every Band from Our Band Could Be Your Life. So that'll be a fun run through 80s indie rock. So yeah, check that out. Will's been on it. Matt's been on it. Felix has been on it. Those episodes are all great. You can check those out and introducing anywhere you get podcasts. If you've not heard of it before, you're hearing about it now.

Well, there we go. Thanks once again. Another great episode, but especially happy birthday to Chris Wade, the LeBron James of podcast producers. And, you know, perfect pairing with me, the James Harden of podcast hosts.

I'm fat, folks. I've been getting a lot of weight in quarantine. And I'm in Brooklyn now. All right, gang. All right, gang. Until next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Two steps back Two steps back Two steps back Two steps back I don't need the acid factories

I've got mushrooms in the fields