TRASHFUTURE - A Tepid Bath of Startup Juice

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

Starmer, in a bout of what some people are calling “Extreme Popularity,” is relaunching his government after only a few months, despite winning basically a historic majority. He’s turning to the tried and tested policies, the old favourites - running government like a business, cutting the budget, and of course… a cop in every house. Also, we look at two Thiel Companies (Sauron and Orchid), and an exercise in public speaking gone wrong courtesy of our friends at 404 media. Get access to more Trashfuture episodes each week on our Patreon! *POPES/LAGOON SHIRTS STILL AVAILABLE!* We've got some extras of our recent shirts that can be purchased online and will ship immediately! Get them here: https://trashfuture.co.uk/collections/all *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I think probably one of the funniest things that I've seen in one of these weeks where decades are continuing to happen, is every Western government simultaneously scrambling to remove HDS from all of their prescribed terrorist watch lists before the prime minister ends up getting questioned by special branch. It's fine. Jelani has been reading Adam 2's sub stack. He's a nice man now. All right. So like, we're gonna, we're gonna build institutions. You know what he is, right? We're gonna do,

we're gonna do moderate pragmatic jihad through the institutions. And you know what that makes him? That makes him Islamism's first Fabian. Yeah, that's right. I thought you were gonna say he's jihadi Jerry Adams. Embracing the political process. Really funny to be like, Ahmed al-Sharif has always denied being a member of Al-Qaeda or of ISIS. I'll say this, right, in, as you say, one of the weeks where decades happen, we've seen the defeat and exile and shame of a hateful tyrant responsible for countless abuses and crimes against humanity. He is, of of course not going to be punished, but is going to be exiled, which is something. And we're in a kind of propitious moment where, you know, the next thing may be worse. It

may be, you know, power may be delivered entirely into the hands of extremists. I refer of course here to the election in the United States of America. Wait, so what was January 6th? Were the jet ski guys who like wandered around the Capitol building, were they the moderate rebels? The free American army. Yeah. Yeah. The free American army has spent seven years making gains around the outskirts of Baltimore before what like whoever was propping up the Biden regime just decided that they weren't interested in doing it anymore.

It wasn't worth having the warm water poured on Long Island. And so they're just like, fuck it. Bidens had positioned himself for many years as the kind of like a protector, but also guarantor of superiority of, you know, America's Delawarean minority, which, you know, there's a lot of kind of theological implications there about whether Delawareans are really Americans because, you know, they observe slightly different rituals. I think this is the kind of tendency to flatten it into a religious thing when actually Delaware is like largely a series of like complex clan allegiances.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, as they call them shell companies. Well, it's the, as you say, Milo, right? Delaware is a Shia state in a mostly Sunni country. And like that was also by design, right? Like when the imperialists wanted to make the US easier to rule. Are you suggesting that like Delaware is a kind of Sykes-Picot creation? Yeah, yeah. Sykes and Picot were drawing the lines in the Middle East. Sykes bashed a symbol behind Picot's head and then his pen slipped and he drew Delaware.

Here's an idea for you, Lawrence of Delaware. Yeah. Pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good. Yeah. And so it's what I think is really interesting. Everyone's like, oh, you know, Delaware is not the only Shia state. It's like, you know, Rhode Island is a Shia state too.

And it's like, that's in a smiley state. Like it's a different thing. They, they. Yeah. We followed the fourth Kailash. We, we fuck with the Aga Khan here in Rhode Island. Do we think this bit maybe has like grown slightly out of control? Although it is to me funny that Assad's going to have to go like live beside

Steven Seagal, Gerard Depardieu and Jan Marsalek now. Nightmare blunt rotation. What a poker night though. Maybe I can help you take Syria back. Well, the thing is Seagal's going to speak to Azad for 10 minutes and then start speaking with what he imagines a Syrian accent to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're saying Seagal's going to be like the kind of guy who goes to LSE in 2010, basically. Yeah, exactly. He's going to start calling himself the Lion of Damascus by the transit of Romney.

Ah yes. Anyway, hello, welcome to TF reporting from one of those weeks where Decades is happening. This week I guess it's the 2000s as we're toppling Middle East dictators. Yeah, I've been feeling a bit giddy actually because I've been having to like spend a lot of time on Twitter acting like I know what I'm talking about. You know, I've been getting into discourse and so that's been, you know been refreshing. So I'm ready to record a good comedy show. It's all the 2000s again. And guess what? Specifically, it's 2008 because one of the things we're going to talk about in a moment is the embattled Labour Party's plan to fix

British capitalism before they're swept aside by a coalition of two opposing parties, including the Conservatives. You'll never guess who the coalition party is probably going to be. But before we do that, I did want to just... Sometimes you see a story and you just decide it's just going to go in. I don't care about the theming. I don't care about what else we're going to talk about. It's just going in. Does it have a dude with a funny name in it? Yes, it has a dude with a funny name in it, but you're never going to guess what the name is. You know what else? It feels like something from the 2000s. It really does.

Oh, okay. A little nostalgia trip. Number one, this is all from a story in 404 Media. Jason Keebler, the editor of 404 Media, has been a guest on this show a few times. It's a great resource. I use it a lot. You like Jason? Yeah, I use it a lot for like background research and stuff But sometimes they just do a story so good. I want to talk about it directly This is about digital ocean, which is a data like a data company They had an all-hands meeting which for for media then got the recording of because this was an all-hands meeting that happened pretty much Right before the CEO Yancy Spruill quit like immediately after.

Okay, sorry. Right. Well, he had all that money from the from the dice. Yeah, of course. Naming your child Yancy. Yes. You know, like I'm gonna, this is looking at your newborn infant and being like, this really looks like a Yancy to me. To Mr. and Mrs. Spru-a-San Yancey.

You've got to have a compelling reason to go that far back in the name book alphabetically as well and like once you're at a Y you're like really almost out of ideas. That's a kind of last minute panic name. You're really concerned. It was either that or Zoolander. Zoolander, Zeppadee, Zechariah. After that you're like yeah you're into the drag scene. Zampino, Zebedee, Zechariah. After that you're like, yeah, you're into the drag. Zampino, it's more of a last name. I could have been called Zamboni. I could

have named my child Zelinsky after the president of Ukraine. Yeah, there you go. This isn't so much about an evil tech company as it much as it's about like a case of LinkedIn brain coming to life. You're telling me, you're telling me that Yancy Spruill has LinkedIn brain. Well, you can, how about this? You can be the judge. I would put forward that recording all of your meetings is Nixon brain. Well, so also by the way, listeners, if you've heard this already, please do not shout out your phones and ruin it for Milo and Nova. Just a bunch of people like shouting at their phones on like crowded tube trains

on their way into work. Oh, it's Yancy Spruill! I know what happened to him! Police is searching for answers today as a series of commuters began like chanting strange names. Yeah, putting both hands up for the teacher, frantically grabbing at your elbow like, please me miss, I know! We just don't know who this Greg Stooby might be. Greg Stooby, last seen with accomplice Yancy Spruill. Oh, the Stubbe Spruill scout. Gave it the old one too, the Stubbe Spruill.

So, at an all-hands meeting at Digital Ocean in July 2023, the CEO intended to address an incident in which an employee at a Pakistani company that Digital Ocean had just acquired called Cloudways posted hashtag say no to LGBT hashtag proud to be Muslim on LinkedIn and then crossed out the Digital Ocean logo that had been turned rainbow for Pride Month. Okay, sure. We just have a homophobic affiliate now. Yes, we have a homophobic affiliate. And meanwhile, their Delaware delegation were like, those guys are Muslims. Yeah. The employee was not fired, but left the company of his own accord several months later. Here is

now Yancy Spruill addressing this controversy, trying to bring peace back to digital ocean with a relatable story from his life. They always say that this Yancy Spruill was a peacemaker. If I'm not capable of building this bridge, my name's not Yancy Spruill. No, yeah. Yancy Spruill was actually deployed to Damascus in 2011 to try to broker a piece between the Free Syrian Army. Yeah. He's now he's in Turkey being like fucking go crazy. Anyway, every time we leave our home, we have to bend our belief system because we engage

with human beings who are different than us in a number of dimensions. Oh, he's doing rally to restore sanity stuff. Spruill, who is a, he's a black American, tells an anecdote from his time working at Corning in the 1980s. Quote, I worked in the electrical engineering controls engineering group at this manufacturing plant in Wilmington, North Carolina, and not everyone liked that they were integrated in Corning. And then there was a particular person who I got off to a rough start with who'd been at the company for 40 years. And our manager saw this and talked to him and he

actually turned a corner and became a mentor of mine. I had a great relationship with him. He never invited me to lunch, never invited me to have a drink, never invited me to play golf even though we both loved golf. I came to find out that this person was a member of the KKK. And it was a very powerful message in learning from me that when we sign up for the values of a company, because we believe in that opportunity and we can bend as long as you don't break our personal beliefs and we can work very well together. Just like, yeah, I could work with a Klansman just unprompted as a way of like,

papering over the cracks here. Yeah. The guy leads a very compartmentalized life. Like I don't bring the KKK shit into the office, you know? That's in my high days and holidays. It's about work terrorist group balance, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lesson which HDS are currently learning as they occupy Syrian government ministries. God, do you think they're gonna, I wonder if they're gonna be HTS guys who are just

like, fuck, I just hate doing Excel. I hate doing YouTube. Yes, because they were Taliban. Like the Taliban. Yeah, exactly. There were Taliban guys like that. And the thing is, because like HTS is current like vibe is, we're gonna do like pragmatism, right? We're gonna gonna be all things to

all people. There's a necessary component of that, which is, you're gonna have to have shopping malls and concerts and stuff because most Syrians aren't Islamists. And so, if you think about the Americans and Brits who are in Syria right now, I'm talking about Syria again, sorry, I could do this for an hour and a half. If you think about the Westerns who are in Syria right now, the boots on the ground who are trying to like, you know, secure people's sarin gas stockpiles and hammer this into some kind of like, western-friendly government, the second wave, the first pair of loafers

on the ground will be the guys who build them the malls, the guys with the expensive European glasses who try and convince them, like, pitch them on Syrian neon. Yeah, that's the problem. Just like, okay, you might not want to work with the Kurds, but I learned a lesson a long time ago, this electrical engineering blunt in North Carolina that you don't have to be best friends. Yeah, with the Peshmerga is something I do in my spare time. And when I'm here at the HTS offices, I don't bring that energy into the...

Not loving that we chose the Peshmerga to compare to the Klan. Yeah, very different ideologies. Taking a strongly anti-Kurds position. That's what the KKK stands for. Kurds, Kurds, Kurds. I think what happened, Milo, is that's the first non-state actor military operating in the region you could think of, right? Yeah.

The fucking movie Turklandsman. Yeah, yeah, there you go. There's an idea. It's still got Adam Driver in it though. Yeah. Taking it away from you at the last minute. I like the idea of someone who joined HTS thinking it was a K-pop band and is slightly relieved that they're not doing like combat anymore, but is also not particularly pleased

about the spreadsheet. Well, of course, I could never support HTS as an AGP. It's going to be probably like four, maybe seven days before you can legally support HTS. Anyway, I think maybe we could say, if not the Peshmerga, perhaps ISIS. Because ISIS is still around. So functionally, Jelani is doing the like, well yeah, I work with the ISIS

guys a bit, but like, you know, they never really, they never really spoke about the ISIS stuff to me, you know? Like that's in the past, you know? But we learned a lesson from it. We both loved golf, firstly. Yeah. But look, we don't play golf in Corning. Yeah, it's like, well listen, we both love jihad, right?

But we don't take that to the office because what we're interested in is like, you know, trash collection in Aleppo. We're interested in getting those loafer guys here to tell us what kind of like an artificial moon they can build us. I'm really struck by the first pair of loafers on the ground, like loafers on the ground to indicate like Western, like parasitic, like reconstructions. Quarter zips deployed. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, so one employee said, perhaps I misunderstood what I've heard, but is management using an example of the KKK is something that would still be unacceptable for an employee to participate in so long as they don't connect that with the company." Several employees, including some who are Muslim and queer, pointed out that the implication that Muslim employees would inherently not support LGBTQ employees is also itself bigoted. They're not... Listen, maybe Yancy Spruill isn't the best diplomat in the game, right?

But he tries, right? He goes for it, does Yancy Spruill? They often say that of Yancy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, he's, he's adhering to the main tenet of, of like management philosophy, which is he's not asking them to do anything. He's not prepared to do himself. And to be fair, if he is a black American is saying he would work with a guy who's in the KKK, you can't ask much more of him in terms of commitment to the company. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, it won't surprise you to know that Spruill left Digital Ocean and is now working at a private equity firm. Spruill, when asked by 404 Media for comment,

said he did subsequently apologize for his remarks. So I just love the idea of saying like, yeah, you know, I'd work with a Klansman and immediately being headhunted by a private equity firm who like presumably heard that and were like, let's fucking go. Oh yeah. Let's put that to the test. Oh yeah, Yancy. Would you work with- Being headhunted by the radio host guy from Oh Brother We're Out Thou.

Yeah. Passive aggressive job offer is very funny. Owning the libs by offering them a job. Yeah. Yatsy Yatsy Spruill. So I do hope we'll hear more from him again, however, I think he's just gonna be quietly making money at a private equity firm from now on and not give it any more speeches. Although if he gives you more speeches... And the diversity of beliefs at that private

equity firm, you know, extreme, let's say, in One Direction. GARRETT Yeah. Speaking of a diversity of beliefs extreme in One Direction, why don't we talk about Keir Starber and his band of moderate rebels who have taken over... ALICE I was gonna frame him as Assad and be like, man, it's a bad week for, like, you know, dictators all over, right? GARRETT Yeah. ALICE Because he did kind of have a couple of things in common with Assad, namely, spending a lot

of time in London in a kind of professional like organization, you know, Assad was not a thermologist, Stahm was a barrister. About the same time too. Didn't make it any more obvious. Being an obvious pussy and crucially winning an election by Assad margins and then having power crumble out from under him anyway. Yeah, look, 2024 was just a bad year for incumbents, alright? And Seltzer says that Bashar al-Assad can still win.

He's electable if you vote for him, which by the way, you must. Yeah. Well, the thing is, a lot of the guys in HTS just really feel that, you know, the prices of eggs, petrol and milk haven't come down. You joke, but that's like a huge part of what happened in 2010. That was- That's off the Arab Spring. Like that was like all that happened.

Bidenflation caused one Tunisian- Bidenflation and also the corrupt bureaucracy reached back in time and then Muhammad Bouazizi's vegetable cart ended up like getting overturned by a police woman because he wouldn't pay the bribe and people forget it was a police woman as well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was because Assad went too woke. That's what the problem is. I mean, that was that was Ben Ali. But yes. Any case. Yeah. I mean, it's there's a lot of worthwhile economics work that's been done. This basically said that like the large inflationary waves have been going around the world in food prices since like the end of the financial crisis and especially like

the sort of ratcheting up of asset prices just basically like kind of caused the Arab Spring. Like that's what that was. Oh, well, you know, I'm sure that any of the future ones will just result in more like peace and stability. Oh, yeah. The next time it's going to be the moderate rebels for sure. Oh well. You know, I'm sure that any of the future ones will just result in more like peace and stability. Oh yeah. The next time it's going to be the moderate rebels. For sure.

100%. Times person of the year, the moderate rebel. God, I remember that. God, yeah. Keir Alstama. The moderate rebel. So anyway, anyway. Interestingly, you know, I'm concerned that the even more moderate rebels that are associated with Hyatt al McSweeney

have begun to make ground in the areas between Liverpool and all the way down to Birmingham, in fact, and the embattled premieres. Shabassaw, I curse. Okay, there we go. We have encircled Stoke-on-Trent. Your days are numbered. Warrington is already in our hands. Surrender now.

Yeah. Basically, labor figures, this is talking to, I believe, the Guardian. Labor figures from a broad range of faction, from Tony Blair era veterans, Starmer allies and other lawmakers on the left of the party, say that the mood is low and labor MPs talked to by Bloomberg, say they were surprised by how poorly Starmer and Reeves were performing, questioned whether they even had a plan for power or a way to communicate it, and some have begun to loudly speculate after a bumpy landing of Starmer's relaunch speech last week that Starmer and Reeves... Which relaunch was this?

Oh, this is the relaunch that wasn't a relaunch. Okay, okay, sure. I mean, let me just put a marker down now. I mean, obviously this couldn't happen to a nicer set of people. And obviously, like, setting up this kind of cosery of backstabbing freaks around them will lead to some backstabbing, and already has. I will put down the marker now. Starmer will not last five years until the next election, or four years or however long it is.

It will be some other Labour, like, freak show. But it will not be Kirstammer. Sorry, the doorbell has just rung twice. I need to go open it. Oh, sure. It's the postman. This late? Yeah.

No, this is definitely an affair. It's like Assad's like security forces, you know, who are being taken out one by one. Yeah. Who must go? Assad has already retrained as an every delivery person. You can always go back to the ophthalmology, you know? You're just like, Oh Christ.

Yeah. Just like the real, the real question, right? To look at governance in Syria after the fall of Assad, better or worse? Yeah. Can you read the top line for me? H T S. Well, you know, hey, labor needs someone who's used to government, who's able

to deal with lots of your labor party candidate and Darlington. And they're just straight into the house of lords. Lord, Lord Assad of Aleppo. This hardworking former NHS doctor. Yeah, yeah. He's going to be, he's going to be ophthalmology sarrar. Well this is the thing, it's like Jonathan Ashworth, right? Even when you get rid of these guys, you never really get rid of them. So this guy's, he's gonna be on like Syrian TV for like, you know, the next two years.

Yeah, they start having balance requirements for some reason. Well yeah, because of Jilani having, you know, read a bunch of like lib stuff, he's like, you like, we have to have a Syrian BBC and all that that entails. Not through about the Syrian Jimmy Savile, we've got to have them. We're going to have two Syrian equivalents of the movie Scoop, two Syrian movies about the Prince Andrew interview. We're going to have to review those as well. I'm afraid we're going to have to review the Syrian Prince Andrew movies. Why is Syrian Ruth Wilson doing that voice. Yeah

She's putting a more of a Lebanese accent. She's not pronouncing her cues. I've got a I've got her interview the Hashemite King Apparently he's been nodding. It's like Jimmy Al Savile all over again and his catchphrase. Yalla. Yalla. Yalla Well, I Check out the I believe bonus episode where we reviewed Scoop with Hesse, if you wanna get that. Anyway, it's basically, as you're saying, November, it is being not just mooted by you, but mooted by other Labour insiders that, yeah, fucking- And not just by me, a powerless dickhead, but by actual backstabbers.

Yes. Starmer and Reeves qualified backstabbers. Starmer and Reeves not gonna survive to the next election. Raising hand, has Peter Mandelson been given his, like, important sinecure yet? Because I know he was lobbying for, like, ambassador to the US, and then he didn't... Nothing really seemed to happen with that, and, you know, I feel that this is a very buttery flight of stairs that's being presented here. I mean, it's... I think this is...

Everybody is agreeing right now. Everyone's agreeing this right now, by the way, because... And we talked about this when we talked about the farmer protests. What Keir Starmer has been trying to do is what every British politician has been trying to do for quite a while. Again, like so many things in this country, you can put it start at different dates. You can start it after the financial crisis. You could start it after like the sort the Cameron Osborne coalition modernizing Tories failed to fix British

capitalism. You could start it in 2001 when like, you know, like political... And faith, the political system largely collapses. You can start it in... Well, you can start it with Thatcherism, right? Sort of resetting British capitalism in a way that you can't do twice, right? Like you, you buy enough adrenaline to keep you going. It's so funny about the farmers though, that like after years of attempts, decades of attempts to like find an issue that cuts through and for once they do, and it's not me, which I'm very grateful for, I'm glad that it's, it's not trans stuff. What it is, is Kirstama is doing white genocide against Jeremy Clarkson. That's the thing that gets people very animated.

And I like, that's very funny to me. Kirstama kills farmers. There you go. It's all there for the taking. He's doing like Rhodesian, like sort of post-Rhodesian early Zimbabwe like displacement of Jeremy Clarkson. Wait, fuck, no, that's what Assad should do now that he's left power. He should do the Syrian version of Clarkson's farm. Like, Assad's oasis. We're gonna see him on the big fat Christmas quiz of the year or whatever and he's gonna

be like, okay, listen, I know he's in the news a lot, but is he funny though? Keir Starmer's mission, like all of these other prime ministers before him, has been you have to fix British capitalism because we're not like increasing productivity, we're not increasing returns. And you also, people aren't bought into British capitalism and you have to fix it. But the complication is you can't change anything. You can't really reform it. It was reformed once by Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson, and it can never be really reformed again. You have to make this reformation work. You can't even reform it in a Thatcherite direction, which is what Liz Trust tried

to do, because it's like now so unsteady that it won't bear the attempt anymore. Yeah. Well, it's essentially it's it's giving someone a shot of adrenaline, but it's more like stabbing them basically with a syringe. Yeah. Because also like that, like so many things, like you could only do so much thatcherism until you run out of the state's money. There wasn't really anything left for Liz Trust to back up what she wanted to do.

And so what happens, and I think is really interesting, interesting is a bit of a stretch, but what I think is remarkable is that when Keir Starmer... The long Starmer of it all has been... Starting as basically Continuity Corbin, which we always knew was a lie and turned out to be a lie, whatever. And then slowly, slowly, slowly as he gets closer to power, becoming more and more like an old labor right guy. Fine. That was always the plan. The whole point was to make sure Morgan McSweeney keep... The whole thing is a blade of armor around Morgan McSweeney's fake job. Fine. And as he gets into power, then he begins with a set of plans. He runs in a manifesto

that is insufficient, poorly targeted, but meaningfully distinct from what the conservatives were going to do in a couple of ways. Nothing better, just different. He had a slightly different plan. Yeah, sure. Things like fake nationalizations. These are things like massively turning up the amount of money that he wants to use to de-risk investment. I mean, it's almost a little bit like John Sonian in some ways, but regardless, right? This is what he does. The longer he spends in power and he hasn't

spent very long in power, the more he has to relaunch what he's doing. And the more it just begins looking like Theresa May's campaign. ALICE How many different relaunches have we had now, and what forms have they taken? Cause we started out with missions, and then we had pledges, and now we have plans, is that right? ZACH Oh, sorry, yes, that's easy mistake. No, we had pledges, those were lies.

ALICE Okay. ZACH Okay, sure. ZACH Then we had mission-driven government, and then the missions were hard. And so we've changed the missions to have milestones. And the link between the missions and the milestones is the three foundations. Okay. I see. Yeah. I'm getting it. I think the best way to understand this is that Keir Starmer's not so much relaunching as he's doing what Hollywood does and he's making multiple versions of the same movie in the same year. Like we've had Olympus has

fallen and now we're getting White House down. And you're like, this seems suspiciously similar to what we had before. So, so what I'm getting here is, you know, that, that image of like the Christian Trinity that's like God is the father, is the son, is not, you know, in a triangle. Uh, so the missions aren't the pledges, but the pledges are the, the sum of the like missions and the, the, the, the milestones. So we have the milestones. Okay. Yeah. Oh yeah. Sorry. The mile. We forgot about the milestones. The milestones have a number of first steps associated with them that will help deliver the missions, which will support the foundation. I think that's what it is.

We're supporting the foundations. Where are the pledges in the works? So the missions are below the foundations, just to be clear. So the pledges have all been lies. Looking at the foundations and being like, I've hit some cowboys in through it. Yeah. Well, indeed. The problem you've got is your foundations are at the top. That's what's happening there.

You see, they're being supported by these relatively flimsy missions and milestones. Well, I mean, look, honestly, I wouldn't put these missions or milestones in the structure at all, but in any case, they would certainly go on top of your foundations, which traditionally do go in the ground. Ed Miliband understood that. He had an obelisk. That's the thing. The Ed stone, the missions, the milestones,and understood that, he had an obelisk. So this is, that's the thing, like the Ed Stone, the missions, the milestones, all of that. It's just imitating the Tony Blair pledge card, which worked one time in 1997. And then, and then even Tony Blair took the card idea one step too far.

They say you do cards twice in this game, once on the way up. They are going to try to do ID cards around. Of course they fucking are. Yeah. OK. They've never not been trying. They're trying to do ID cards for proving your age at like pubs. And then that's their thin end of

the wedge. But nevertheless. Right. So the foundations are national security, secure borders and economic stability. Again, nobody has tried to do that before by then delivering economic growth, becoming a clean energy superpower. Take back our streets. economic stability. Again, nobody has tried to do that before by then delivering economic growth, becoming a clean energy superpower, take back our streets, have opportunity.

Obviously, you can knock out a couple of those pillars instantaneously by doing the Clarkson White genocide. He's the one standing in the way of the green energy transition and also probably some national security stuff. So just knock that out in an afternoon. So this milestones, he says, starmer sets out six milestones designed to give the British people the power to hold our feet to the fire. They are DJing, uh, B-boying. Hodge. We're going to do this joke anytime there's a numbered series of things. I'm never going to get sick of it.

Yeah, absolutely. And we're always going to mix the two of them together. And it's always going to be like my favorite thing that we do. Hire real household disposable income and GDP per capita by the end of the parliament to make the UK the fastest growing G7 economy. So that milestone undercuts the previous mission. So number one, building one and a half million homes in England and fast tracking planning decisions on infrastructure projects, putting the UK back on track to achieve 95% clean power by 2030. That's different from the mission.

Meeting the NHS standard of 92% of patients in England waiting no longer than 18 weeks for elective care, getting 75% of five-year-olds ready to learn when they start school. And my favorite one, a named police officer for every beat. I mean, that's gonna be fun, right? Like, not just because everyone will have- As opposed to fucking Agent 47 who does it now.

Yeah, the PC is The Void, who is our current nameless police officer. Fucking Daniel Craig and Leia Cake. PC XXXXX. If you knew my name, you'd be as clever as me. I think this is a boon for us specifically because it means that the studio will have a named police officer that we can then make a kind of comic character in the show in the same vein as our accountant. So we can, just anytime he drops by, you know, you can be like, oh, you know, that's PC Shufflesworth.

That's PC Shufflesworth, of course. Yeah, PC Shufflesworth. It's like aufflesworth, of course. Yeah, PC Shufflesworth. It's like a children's show, you know, like Balamore. So yeah, the old named police officer for every beat though thing is, again, like, that's just the kind of thing that, like, Theresa May wanted to do. It's the kind of thing that Rishi Sunak wanted to do. I'm also trying to think about how overworked that, like, particular named police officer will be. Like, That's dangerously close

to the one person left who runs Britain. Ultimately right. What we get back to over and over again, when we look at the people trying to govern Britain, is that the governance of this country is purely managerial and it's managers largely talking to managers, and those managers, some of them manage contracts that are other organizations of managers with a couple of people who do things. And so there's... I always think about the moment where British capitalism got put on rails and the British state became unreformable was when broadly speaking, state employees stopped being able to do things like manage a power plant or actually drive a train, right? Or fix a train track or all of these things or build something, right?

We sort of replaced a largely skilled state labor force with a state labor force instead that has one skill. And this isn't just like... Which is, as you say, managing. Managing. And that's not just civil servants. That's like elected politicians as well. The e-tray exercise. It's one large e-tray exercise. And so of course, the only solutions they can think of are managerial ones, which is we need to have more and different, better targets.

We need to make sure our goals are smart or whatever. It's interesting too, because in order to keep the lights on, both literally and metaphorically, we had to have the smallest possible number of remaining state employees who actually did things. And then we can tell that we hate it because we just refer to them reflexively with this kind of contempt of frontline workers or essential workers or whatever, whether that's nurses or whatever. And it's like, no, the NHS isn't supposed to have nurses because it's a public body. Those nurses should by rights be employed by some like, you know, rent seeking middleman, right? But you know, the NHS should be an organization for procurement managers. Those are the real people.

Yeah. Clap for procurement managers. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, this is the, what I see is, I see management gimmicks that are along a series of largely, like management gimmicks that if you can just tweak how the email is basically, you can fix British capitalism. It is purely symbolism acting on symbolism. Well, I'm pulling all of the levers on this control panel and none of them really seems to be doing anything.

So I might as well like pull them harder. Well indeed. Yeah. I'm in the Fisher Price Playhouse, but it's the government. I mean, kind of, yeah. How many man hours do you think are spent in Whitehall every year on typing the phrase, I hope this email finds you well? Like, just like back and forward to each other.

If we want to talk about Whitehall for a moment, we talked also about like Starmer deciding to embark on his plan of basically KPIs to reform British capitalism without changing anything fundamental about it that's been about since 1980. The joke about the big Kanban board on the outside of Downing Street looms closer to reality every day. But in his mission to do that, he has again created only enemies, no allies. If you, by the way, you want to talk about the farmers, my partner's parents are like small town, older conservative people. They were wearing support the farmers pins last time they were

seen by someone of our generation. So of course that's the issue that's cut through. It's created a base, but that's only because they love Assad. Yeah, Assad seen in Somerset with a combine harvester. But, you know, but what he was choosing to do is of course, declare another enemy saying quote, too many people in white hall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline and have forgotten. The nasty metaphor work that kids sensual deep bath run, run yourself a nice sensual tepid bath of managed decline. Now don't add too many suns because they're going to be difficult to scrub off the bath afterwards. Just add a moderate amount. No candles. That's a fire hazard. And make sure to stick on something relaxing, but not too relaxing like the shipping

forecast. Make sure to enjoy some royalty free massage music. So he says, too many have forgotten to paraphrase JFK that you choose change not because it's easy, but because it's hard. I get that when trust in politics is low- JFK was talking about going to the fucking moon. You were talking about like stopping people's nans from dying outside A&E on a four hour ambulance. Wait, can you see the shrinking of ambitions here?

Someone just described to me essential bath and now I'm hard. I get that when trusted politics is low, we must be careful at the promises we make. But across both Whitehall and Westminster, that's been internalized as quote, don't say anything, don't try anything too ambitious, set targets that will happen anyway. And I mean, you know, Mr. Set targets that will- We're going to do these, these like moon shots and then the moon shots of like kids know how to read at some point. Imagine getting slagged off by Keir Starmer for having a lack of ambition and being too comfortable with tepid solutions and managed decline. Like how fucking tepid and unambitious

do you have to be that Keir Starmer's like, oh this guy's a bit wet. Bit of a fucking wetter I've heard this one. So I'm going to let Josh Whitacombe here. The civil service is full of wetters. Just really enjoying the huge amount of government expenditure that went into building Keir Starmer, that glass house. We embraced the risk because if there was no jeopardy and no resistance, no blockages or impediments for us to remove, then sure as night follows day, that would be a sign that we're not serious about delivering real change. And of course, the blockages and impediments that he is wanting to remove are, it's not, let's just say this, it's not circle. We've got to remove this blockage. We've got to remove this blockage from this tepid bath.

Why does no one find this inspiring speech rising? It's a plug, Kare. It's a plug. It was JFK who said, what was this blockage and impediment doing in my tepid bath? This has now set him against the civil service with the head of the FDA union that represents 20,000 civil servants saying, quote, this is frankly insulting to those trying to deliver and lead our public services. Starmer, of course, immediately walked back his comments, but we can see a little bit of what he...

I like the tepid bath. Perhaps the bath could stand to be tepid a when I said that it would be acceptable for someone in the KKK to work in the civil service So what are some of the things he wants to do to try to because like obviously, you know The government in the UK as usual is not going to deliver the the milestones the foundations the missions Let alone the pledges. Wait, what? But they've spent so much time setting those out. Surely they must be high up the priority list.

Well, so those things have to change. And of course we found out exactly what Pat McFadden wants to do in order to change the civil service. He will pledge to make the state... Oh, okay. Okay. Just listen. Remember how we always said the state has to be like a business. The state has to be like a business. The problem was... Yeah like a business. The problem was we were making the state... Sell all its assets. We were making the state the wrong kind of business. We were making the state a business like a McDonald's franchise, an airline leasing company. Yeah. Businesses that make money and are consistently successful. Yeah. But also of course, that unlike a state do like kind of one thing or one kind of category

of thing and do so in order to make a profit usually for investors. Pat McFadden said, okay, well that's not going to work. We have to decide what kind of business we want to run the state as. And he says, this is what we're going to do differently. We're going to run the state. And maybe we're going to run it as a McDonald's franchise. Everybody is now an employee. Some of you will learn to be qualified to use the grill. A lot of people are going to be like, everybody is now an employee, some of you will learn to be qualified to use the grill. Everybody's going to get the employee discount at McDonald's is up and down the country. Just a kind of mandatory McDonald's badge with the little rank pips on it.

And our overlord will be a terrifying clown. King Charles is undergoing the surgery as we speak. Queen Camilla is going to be the Hamburglar. And of course, Prince William as the hated Grimace. Sadiq Khan will remain Mayor McCheese. We've got to keep Andrew away from Grimace. So, Pat McFadden will pledge to make the state quote, more like a startup as he launches a hundred million pound fund.

Oh Christ. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Great. Move fast and break things. Which startup Pat McFadden? Which one specifically do you want to make it more like? Oh Christ, okay. Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah. Move fast and break things. Which startup, Pat McFadden? Which one specifically? Do you want to make it more like Juicero? Maybe WeWork, perhaps? It's really, really, really funny to put the entire country on a move fast and break things

footing given that we already do one of those, but it's not the good one. The British state is like a bag of juice. The civil service are too weak to squeeze the juice from that bag, which is why I need to build an apparatus of some kind to squeeze the bag so that we may get at the juicy goodness within. I mean, weirdly, this is the same thing as Elon Musk's bullshit Doge department, right? It's we're going to we're going to turn the big efficiency switch on and we're going to be based in epic.

The arc of history is long, but it bends towards Venice ruling the world. Let me tell you what they're saying. Pat McFadden is saying the government's going to encourage tech firm workers to join the civil service for six to 12 month tours of duty to work on the national missions. Would you like to do a kind of national service conscription term in the tepid bath? Yeah. Won't you join me in the tepid bath of the civil service? I did four tours of death for you can't fucking say shit to me.

You want that man. When we reformed agricultural regulations. This is a little bit, I think, right? So number one, he's clearly, Pat McFadden has looked at the US and by the way, he has had good things to say about Elon and what like Doge is doing. Of course he like, do you think Pat McFadden knows who the fuck David Sachs is? Right? He just says, Oh, he doesn't know who David Sachs is. He just says, Oh, they've made one of the early investors in Facebook in charge of like one of the technology departments. He doesn't see that. Oh, they've made one of the guys from the All In podcast in charge

of making sure that the government pumps the crypto bags. He doesn't see that because he doesn't know or doesn't care to know, doesn't want to know or is not interested. He doesn't see that's what's happened. He just sees, oh, the US has successfully lured in a bunch of genius like venture capital people to make the government more efficient. I compare the govern like a startup Pac McFadden plan a bit like Neom to the USA's Abu Dhabi or like Dubai of tech guys in government, where it's like we've looked at that. Oh, there's tech

guys in government. Are you suggesting we're trying to like colonial violence returns to the metropolitan? We're trying to put loafers on the ground in our own country. I think we might be trying to get to get some g lets on door kickers, basically, in the civil service. Sure. Because we always talked about the point of Neom, the thing that made it so ridiculous is that as a concept, is that it was MBS looking at Dubai and saying, how can we create something that's like Dubai in Saudi and looking at the fact that it has unusual buildings and lots of shopping and dining and doesn't see that it's no, this is a place where you can just like

launder money, right? This is like a cargo coal stuff. It's backwards. So it's yeah. Crown Prince. We're going to need a PF Chang's. And we're going to need to build one that's double the size of the one in Dubai. London is already a place where you can launder money. Famously. So it's one of the things that we're one of the last remaining things we're good at in this country.

It's just that we've reached the kind of limits of where that can take you economically. So basically, what Pat McFadden is doing is he's, again, much like MBS looked at Dubai, he's looking at the US and saying, oh, we have to get startup guys in, not understanding that the department for government efficiency is for like a way for Elon Musk to like get rid of most of his lawsuits by making them illegal. Right? We're going to do Vision 2030 on Britain. And finally.

At long last. Finally, we're going to control the like Sharia hardline establishment of this country and modernize a bit. You know, WWE is coming to London. So it says, he says crack teams and problem solvers will be deployed to improve public services and support the delivery of the plan for change. We are going to get robbed fucking blind off this shit. There are going to be Mercedes with every door open dumped outside every airport terminal

in the country in six months time. Made up of a mix of people working in partnerships to drive change with digital and data skills, policy officials and frontline workers. They'll be given the freedom to experiment and adapt, adopting the test and learn mindset of Silicon Valley. And they're going to say, well, they're going to start with family support and temporary accommodation. On temporary accommodation, we want them to begin by looking at how we can reduce costs and on family support, they'll be looking at how family hubs can increase the number of disadvantaged families that they reach. We're not going to dictate

how they do that. It's like a bank manager being like the money moves around the banking system very inefficiently. So what I've got in the people who are very efficient at moving banks money around efficiently, they're wearing these ski masks, which I assume is for efficiency reasons. And I've just walked them into the vault. Yeah, I'm not going to interfere.

I'm not going to second guess because obviously, like my own management hide bound perspective is going to stop me from seeing the genius of what they're doing. So, you know, they appear to be loading the money into some kind of like souped up car. And we'll see what happens with that. So he says instead of writing more complicated policy papers and long strategy documents, this government will be setting teams a challenge and empowering them to experiment, innovate and try new things. We're going to put a slide in the home office. You have to always come back to that question of, this is about reforming British capitalism. And their plan to reform British capitalism, having imitated successful companies as

governments, they love to, since Blair, imitate whatever companies are successful in that era. And that created a bunch of things like, you know, the horizon scandal. That's also created outsourcing scandals. But, but, but, but Riley, yes, all the companies that are successful in this era are either monopolies or scams. Uh huh. Well, the government's a monopoly and it could also become a scam. Also, oh, I'm looking forward to scam government. Like you go to pay your taxes and they just like empty your bank account.

Getting a text from HMRC saying you have like £2.80 to pay on your taxes and you click the link and suddenly there's like ransomware on your computer. Big spinning kiss. Yeah. The DWP has got pictures of you wearing women's underwear and they're like, you're going to have to pay them Bitcoin. So ultimately, right, this is the plan, as it always has been, is to reform British capitalism by imitating whatever the most successful private, according to them,

private companies are doing. And if you can just grab a little bit of that magic startup juice, you'll be able to squeeze it from the back. Yeah, you'll be able to make a country. Squeezing startup juice into my tepid bath. Yeah. Like your kind of bath salts. Like if we could only put the bath bomb of innovation.

If only we had the matey liquid of efficiency that we could squirt into the bath of government. This is of course accompanied, you know, we say, Hey, what if we get like the Irish brothers liquid of efficiency that we could squirt into the bath of government. And this is of course accompanied, you know, we say, Hey, what if we get like the Irish brothers who run Stripe to have a go at running the department for education for a while, see if they come up with anything. Yeah, that's right. This is also accompanied with a spending review where they're going to again, make everybody compete for a smaller amount of money. I'm also thinking that like the, the Stripe brothers doing it is like such a pull because like

you've run out of British entrepreneurs. Like who aren't tax exiles and who don't hate you for like white genocide in Clarkson. Yeah yeah Dyson's with the farmers now. You fucked it with Dyson. Dyson's with the farmers. They're fucking the Wetherspoons guy, Tim Allen or whatever. He's with the farmers. Yeah Tim Allen. Tim Allen or whatever, he's with the farmers. Yeah, Tim Allen.

Tim Allen. They're all out in the country, diddly squat far with the fucking Eighth Route Army. Tim Martin and James Dyson have joined Jabhat Al Clarkson. They will no longer negotiate with the British government. So is that at the same time, right? They're saying this is going to be a tight spending envelope. So the plan is reform British capitalism by adopting the aesthetics of crack teams of startup problem solvers without any more investment than we have now.

Okay. Yeah. I know this is my favorite thing that the British government does, right? Because they go like, oh, well, basically we're paying a lot of money to private companies right now for all these services, which are shit. So what we're going to do is we're going a lot of money to private companies right now for all these services, which are shit. So what we're going to do is we're going to reduce the budget for that even further. And then we know that a private company will swoop in and say like, yeah, we'll do it for that. And then they just won't do it. So we'll go from like paying too much for something that's shit to paying like

slightly less for something that's just not happening at all. But that's better. But the difference is that the difference is we're going to have managers who are from the most fashionable type of private company now, or we're going to adopt the management philosophy of the most fashionable types of private company now. I didn't think the 2024 version of hire more women guards would be hire more gilet managers, but that seems to be where we're at. At the same time, Rachel Reeves is bringing in private sector experts to advise on how to get the best value for money from a spending review exercise, which when I saw this written about in the Financial Times, my jaw dropped when they said that the next spending review

will not be a Whitehall echo chamber. I'm determined to do things differently and to maximize the value of every pound, the spending review will be a zero based budget. Zero based. I sure hope it isn't. That is something that if you don't know, a zero based budget is something that a company does when it's realized that the amount of money it's spending on like printer cartridges is having too much of an impact on like its profitability and bottom line. It's not something ordinarily that a healthy organization does.

Oh good. Yeah. Okay. I mean, if nothing else, you have to acknowledge that the British government is not a healthy organization. So at least we've gotten that far. But this is a bad sign, if you see it in a company. Absolutely, that's a bad sign.

This spending review is basically, let's say this, if your company is doing something where it's like all of a sudden you have to bring your own pen to work, that is usually the kind of policy that follows a zero based budgeting exercise. Great. Bring your pen to work day. Let them see what you get up to. So anyway, you put a marker down November earlier. I'm going to put a, you put more of like a mission marker down. I'm going to put a milestone down. Sure. Okay. Yeah. And then we'll get to the foundation. Oh, naturally. The foundation is that British capitalism is going to be successfully reformed by the next guy. My prediction, my milestone is that within the next six months, we're

going to like have kinds of kindness too, made only a footage from the Starmer and Waheed Ali's apartment. We're going to have that. I love that I've referenced that enough that now I've got you doing it too. It's a good movie. But we're going to have that and it's going to get leaked to friendly journalists at the Times by whoever in the Labour Party decides that Starmor is now just too embarrassing because he keeps on relaunching the party and the next person is going to bring it.

If you fuck around with the little fiefdoms enough, if you do this zero-based audit, this extremely cringe audit, and say, you know, I don't know, the Home Office, for instance, is spending way too much money on staples and it's fucking the entire government budget. If your home secretary is politically influential and wants to keep their reputation and thus their staples budget, you might find yourself at the victim of some like backstabbing. And again, the whole belief is we just need a better manager with the right management philosophy. And all of these people believe themselves to be a better manager. So knives fully out.

The next manager is going to bring the management philosophy that is going to solve this impossible problem. By arranging an amount of, I don't know, water, for example, that's too small to fill up a bucket, they're going to arrange it cleverly enough such that it fills up the bucket. It's easy as that. Yeah, well, milestones first, then missions, then foundation. And then it's more water in the bucket. Coming into the last 10 minutes of a chess game in which your

opponent has every piece and you have one Rook, a King, a Ferrero Rocher that wandered onto the board somehow and being like, it's fine. I have the skills to manage this. Essentially. At a certain point, it like sort of transcends anyone's managerial skill because there's a structural issue caused by previous things that have happened. We've eaten too many of the pieces of Ferrero Rocher checkers because they were too delicious. I would fully, yeah, no, do not play Ferrero Rocher checkers against me. This is a trillion dollar idea for Ferrero, by the way, if they want to like, you know, take me up on that. Think about this, who's the one who's going to be willing to flip the board and start

playing that game? Fucking... The ambassador. Big Chungus is here to stay. It's Nigel Farage. The most probable next prime minister, unless he dies in some kind of like dirigible accident. That's right. Run over by Jeremy Clarkson in the world's longest tractor somehow, in the case of Misadventure. So, I want to talk about one more thing before we finish which is I think a company that I've been let's

say bombarded with with people saying hey you should talk about this. I have suffered an artillery bombardment of people sending me that Washington Post article about Sauron the home security system company. Now number one. Yeah the fact that they called it Sauron just table stakes these people are both like evil but also extreme nerds. Talk about a fucking zero based budget. Yeah. You have to hope that one day the working classes of the world rise up and shove these people into the lock as they belong.

Yeah, indeed. Yeah, yeah. I fucking it's like Palantir as well. It's like, well, read another book. You say it's like Palantir. It's all funded by the same people. Like all of these Lord of the Rings companies are all funded by Peter Thiel and his friends. It's all indirectly Peter Thiel. And this is just a sign that Peter Thiel is getting worried that his Dracula's castle is going to get assaulted at some point.

Well, when we're all being hauled off to the secret interrogation black sites because of information that's been posted about us on second breakfast. Yeah. But also there's a few ways to talk about this and I'm choosing an angle that involves us talking about this comp, this article and another company that is backed also by the same VC, Kevin Hartz with a Zed who's not the star of the movie lift. I believe it's a different guy. No, he's, he's many of him stacked on top of each other. Kevin Hart's vehicle.

Yeah. So, but that's another company invested in by Kevin Hart's who's close to the Palantir. Right. And that company is called Orchid. Why are they so fucking self-seriously like evil and sinister? Well, we're going to see about it. They love doing this show. But these two companies taken together, I think are indicative of something. But let's read. This is Natasha Tiku's article in the Washington Post regarding Sauron, the home security system company.

In the future, she writes, your home will feel as safe from intruders as a state of the art military base. But not very. Like a bunch of junior employees at my home are walking off the job with crates of ammunition. It depends on where the military base is, who it's being run by, what the political situation is in the country at the time. In the future your home will feel as secure as a US army base in West Germany in the 80s, like filled with weed smoke. In the future your home will feel as secure as was Fort Bragg, which is definitely people going in and out. Uh huh.

Yeah. It was sort of like autonomously Sauron running a like coke trafficking operation through my house. Hey! Cameras and sensors surveil the perimeter, scanning bystanders' faces for potential threats. Drones from a deterrence pod scare off trespassers by projecting a searchlight over any suspicious movement. A virtual view of the home is rendered in 3D and updated in real time, just like Tesla's digital display. And private security agents monitor alerts from a central hub. This is the vision of home security pitched

by Sauron, a Silicon Valley startup boasting a waiting list of tech CEOs and venture capitalists as customers. So first of all, right off the bat, I'm reminded of the first Purge movie. To be like, you have your central home security system controlled by an iPad that allows you to wait out the chaos in safety. I'm so glad that these people are scared, by the way. You know, as much as I fear it's not going to last, I'm still glad for the moment, you know? It's quite, it's quite like anti-dogging act here, isn't it? That's the thing I can see it having the biggest impact on, to be honest with you, it was just shining lights

on and stuff. If you wanted to like, dog in a CEO's driveway, that to me is praxis, you know? It's not the kind of praxis that I want to be too closely associated with you, but if you want to start like swinging in parked cars outside like a big pharma, your house, that's, that's something, you know, the weirdest form of activists. So hearts and co-founder Jack Abraham said they were driven to start the company after incidents in their homes in San Francisco's Presidio Terrace, an affluent gated cul-de-sac once home to politicians such as Nancy Pelosi. So we know like, not very safe.

Yeah, no, granted. Yeah, yeah. There's a criminal living in Nancy Pelosi's house. It's Nancy Pelosi. The greatest danger, of course, living near Nancy Pelosi's house is if you're like walking on the street and then you just hear Paul driving behind you. Just like get taken out by him doing some like liquored up Tokyo drift shit. But.

Yeah, you might just get implicated in insider trading. Cause the stuff you heard over the fence, you know. I love the implication that Nancy does her insider trading by screaming down the phone so loudly you can like hear it nearby. Yeah. Yes, I already told you. I have insi- By Nvidia.

What did I fucking say? By Nvidia, I have insider information about it. No, what are you talking about? No one can hear me. I'm in my Renault Clio. If I didn't give insider trading tips to the Deaf Investors Federation, would I be Nancy Pelosi?

That's a rhetorical question. You know the bit in casino where they get their wives on the phone so the FBI has to decide that the conversation isn't pertinent and turn off the recording devices? It's like the inverse of that, trying to have the most pertinent conversation you possibly can. Hart said the security system failed to alert him and his wife when an intruder rang their

doorbell and tried to enter their home late at night. So what home invaders ring in the doorbell? Number one. A polite one. Just to let people know. It's like, Hey, are you busy? You know, from a home invasion? Do you have time? Can I pencil you in? Consider it home invaders? Statistics from the San Francisco PD from October show that property crime and car theft has, guess what, dropped after a brief uptick. So that whole thing.

It's because they got rid of the woke DA, you know? So now, you know, now crime is over again. But also like the falling crime rates since the 1970s, interrupted by a tiny blip just after COVID. Guess what? They're back down again. And the homicide rate sits at a five-year low. The data apparently has done little to appease the public's fears,

which also just goes to show, right? That like, what do we talk about when we talk about like the failure of incumbent governments? It's the failure of the economics profession as a whole. It's that guess what? The data does little to appease the public's fears because what people want is very often not related to headline data.

People don't want high economic growth. They want to have fuel in their car and they want to have food on their table. Just like tech CEOs don't actually care about crime rates. They want to live in a parallel universe where they don't have to acknowledge that anybody else exists other than to like in the moments where they're being directly served. We had this kind of social experiment not to prosecute criminals, and that led to open air drug markets and things of that nature, Hurt said. Open air drug market makes it sound quite kind of nice. You know, like it's like it's a farmer's market, but for drugs.

Oh, I know. I know it's more expensive at the open air drug market, but the stuff is so fresh. There's little clods of mud on the crack. I love it. I just, you know, it's so nice just to get it from source. Hart said comparing the sense of lawlessness to New York in the 1970s.

And again, I think that's important to go back to. Yeah, in the sense that it's like a kind of a moral panic because you saw some scary Instagram videos, but also I get like fear of crime and crime are not really correlated in any meaningful way. And yeah, all these people also have much more reason to be scared than just like average person as well. I mean, I wonder if they're very willing to sign up people, especially. You have a lot of nice things and you're aware of that. And also you have some awareness maybe of the fact that like the way you got those nice things is wrong and comes at the

expense of the people who are maybe like using the open air drug markets. And I think it was inevitable that like something would happen that CEOs would start hiring personal protective details, which guess what? LinkedIn's flooded with jobs for like paying ex military guys $400,000. I've been applying for all of them. I've been willing to falsify any number of military records. You got the medals to back it up. Yeah, of course.

Absolutely. I was a colonel of the Greek Air Force. I was a colonel of the Greek Air Force. I was the only Ottoman Janissary to also be a colonel in the Greek Air Force. You was the only Ottoman Janissary to also be a colonel in the Greek Air Force. You gotta let me be. Any chassis of Amazon. CV like a minor British Royal. Yeah, I was an Ottoman Janissary. I was a colonel in the Greek Air Force.

I'm a Prince of Andorra and I was in the Waffen SS. Anyway. I didn't know she was Canadian. Not Canadian, Ukrainian. Yeah. So it was inevitable that something would happen that would lead to rapid upticks and a desire for security among tech executives. They talked about it for a long time. They love to sit down at dinner and think about like, OK,

when do you shoot the pilot of the plane when you get to your farm in New Zealand? Yeah. What kind of bond collar can I put on these mercenaries to make them not betray me? Yeah. And that's all quite fanciful, thinking big, expressing fears, but not acting. And there's more and more acting. And there are more and more of them

are going to get more and more secretive and live, I'd say, more and more separated lives from the rest of us. And it says in Silicon Valley Circles, the article says, these fears have inspired entrepreneurs to reframe commercial tech tools such as drones and facial recognition technology as a solution to safety woes for individuals. They've raised $18 million in funding for the executives behind Flock Safety, which we've discussed Palantir, obviously, and some of the backing also comes from Hearts' firm. So let's shift focus now to Orchid. So typically, embryo pre-implementation testing scans for only alarming abnormalities and

then a doctor selects the nicest looker. This is not that. This is an interview with the CEO of Orchid and Wired. Again sponsored by the same VC firm. This is something that Noor Siddiqui, CEO, tells me quote, has been on society's mind and sci-fi's mind for a generation. A first of its kind picture of every baby's obese genetic destiny. Right now. Oh great. They're gonna do eugenics again. Cool.

Yeah. This one's gonna be a podcast. Aborted podcast. I would have loved recording podcasts. Yeah. I could have done so many riffs with you. Yeah. I would have faved your reply, Anon. We could have hung out after the show and I could have said, thank you for listening, Anon. I would have laughed at your sadist ophthalmologist joke, Anon. Right now, Orchid calculates each embryo's likelihood of one day suffering from any number of more than like 1200 diseases and conditions and so on and so on. So in its early days, 12 billion in funding, but with 40 IVF clinics across the country, they have thousands of customers, including, again, several big name

figures in tech. Noris Hideki says. It's like so cool that tech CEOs can like select for the traits of the kids that aren't going to talk to them in 20 years. Yeah. But we now live in a world where every baby can be genetically blessed. Health doesn't have to be a random genetic lottery at birth. But with a cost of like 2500 American dollars per embryo and screening and a single round of IVF involving potentially dozens of embryos, this is of course again, a sort of a promise for the rich that it's like, hey, you can do eugenics

to yourself and like the embryo phase as a class. And then you can also hide behind these giant walls as a class. And then you can also hide behind these giant walls as a class with deterrence drones. Yeah, I have all these deterrence drones to... I also have a thing talking about that. You can have all these deterrence drones to protect my genetically different kid. Yeah. At what point do you see as like, oh, well, this is... The anxieties of the ultra wealthy, the people who are like... Some of the few people who are like really actually profiting from the current situation are such that they're basically trying to hive themselves off, as they've been doing for a while, right?

This is just hammering the accelerator, trying to hive themselves off into a different reality. Yeah, it's nothing new. It's just like Galt's Gulch. Galt's Gulch, rather. It's like Ayn Rand shit, it's like wealth separatism, and it didn't work then, it's not gonna work now, and I hope bad stuff continues to happen to more of them. Solving my disloyal mercenary problem by selecting embryos and breeding my army of genetically

massive adult sons. Like, every son I have is to be like the giant of fucking Kandahar and then no one's going to come on my New Zealand farm. I think, I fear Donald Trump may already have done this, but only for Baron. That kid's like seven feet tall and still growing. It's nuts. Yeah. Scout that child for the NBA immediately. Yeah.

And I mean, look, you can get quite fanciful and you can even say, okay, well, you know, if you are going to be a law unto yourself, living in your fortress, and what is your dream is to live forever and to control your offspring, to control your environment, to control the environment around your environment. It is yet another extension of control, control, control. But what I think was very funny about this, the amusing thing about orchid is that Norse Dickey says that they only need about five picograms per cell in an embryo sample, which is a really, really tiny amount. More tiny than any current screening. Did she say this in a weirdly deep voice while wearing a black turtleneck?

Hold the phone. From both a chemistry and a computational perspective, we had to invent new things to make it so that you can recover the whole genome data. The interviewer then says the absolute whole thing, all not three billion bases or whatever, to which she says 99.6% coverage on average. The interviewer says, I must now ask a question I've been dreading and I'm sorry in advance, so here goes. An inevitable question about Theradose and Elizabeth Holmes, to which Noor Saddiqi says, that is such a mean question to ask. Oh, my feelings.

Yeah. Oh. It's uncivil to be like, hey, does this shit work? Yeah, well, no, she, of course, if I were the interviewer, I would have anticipated that if I made a direct comparison to Elizabeth Holmes, she would have said, hey, it's sexist to compare me to Elizabeth Holmes just because I'm another young female tech founder, as opposed to being like, hey, you're saying you invented a bunch of new technologies, you're not explaining how it works to do a basically impossible thing that a lot of very rich people want. Are you sure that you've done that? But nevertheless. Damn, damn interviewer. Your parents should have done embryo analysis on you to find out

that you were going to turn into a snake. I trusted you, dog. I say what unites these two companies in addition to their support from the Teal Fund and Kevin Hart's, they share a rapidly growing preoccupation with the utter stratification of the rich in worlds entirely apart from the rest of us and basically as part of this new Gilded Age. These are things that like Rockefeller would have done if he had the capability to do so. I think it's also important to remember that the thing that brought an end to the Gilded Age wasn't just time. It was like several panics and depressions, several world wars. It was, yeah, it started with depressions in the late 19th century, 20 years of attempts and failures at progressive reform

throughout the early 20th century. It really only ended with the capital destruction of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War. That involved a tremendous upheaval. That's what brought the last Gilded Age basically to an end and ushered in what apparently was like the 30 unusual exceptional years of like rising living standards for some chosen insiders. Back to the article about Sauron. Sauron is targeting homeowners at the high end of the real estate market, beginning with a private event during Art Basel, Miami beach. Uniquely fucked vibe there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our target market of fat guy on boat with Instagram models will surely be signing up. So Hartz said his motivation to move into home security was watching progress beat ahead in areas such as self-driving cars, debatable, while once promising visions of domestic life such as the smart home language. Big tech companies haven't deployed tools such as facial recognition as aggressively as Hartz would like. And Hartz is also imagining more aggressive countermeasures saying, what about a machine that could take out a bad actor with a bullet or something? This was the bit of the article that really made me like laugh out loud while reading because I'm

just like, yeah, yeah, cool, man. I want the fucking CCTV camera that also has like a Glock and can just like shoot people that it thinks are suspicious I mean just like taking out the every guy the one time he actually finds my house Yeah, I mean that that is of course the dream, right? That's the dream is why can't castle doctrine be automated? You know, why can't it be, you know potentially lethal to go on go in my home because guess what the people who will be shot by Accident they don't really matter, right? Yeah Let's go. I'll get to be on another company. You know, cause that's how it works. It's either that or of course it's, Hey,

it lets just all adjust to the reality that like, you know, some people's houses have deterrents pods on them because they're scared of everyone. And because they're scared of everyone because they rightly so, because they, they understand that an increasingly brittle state stands between you know their hoarded wealth and everybody else's you know meal essentially we've gone a little long so I'm gonna end it there and I'm gonna say thank you to my co-hosts for being here thank you to you for listening and a reminder as ever we have a patreon is a

second episode every single solitary week. That's right. Every single decade, a new episode. Yes, every decade, a bonus episode. And you can find that on Patreon. It's five bucks a month. There's some good stuff there. You also, if you sign up, can send us questions. We will ask them. There is a Google form now. So think of some questions and then ask them to us your pals. Yeah, we will a your Finally your cues aid by us. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. We will assad your I don't know what cube would stand for Yeah, send them in send them in. All right. All right, so we will see you on the bonus episode in a few short days. Bye everyone.

Also Brussels and fucking Rotterdam on sale on my website. If you're in those cities, buy the tickets. Amsterdam on sale soon. Okay. Bye for real now. Bye bye. Bye. Bye. Thanks for watching!