TRASHFUTURE - As A Large Language Howitzer,

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

For this week’s free episode, Riley, Milo, Hussein, and Nate discuss the recent news that ChatGPT has both dropped its official guidelines around working with weapons systems and also entered into a partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense. This is notionally to help reduce veteran suicide, but as Riley indicates, there are plenty of combat uses that are probably going to get integrated, even (or especially) if they’re bad. We also do a quick UK politics check (did you know populism is over in the UK?) and discuss a Spectator article yearning for a Tory government willing to change everything back to imperial units. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello everybody, welcome to this free episode of Tia. It's the free one. That's Milo doing his thing. That's right. It is Riley, Milo Hussain, and Nate. Hello. Nate. Yeah.

Joining us from hell of a way to die. Yeah, I am part of the Trash Future cast, obviously. But yeah, I'm actually here in my official capacity as another podcaster because there was a DOD slash military related topic. And Riley said, hey, Nate, I know that normally all you do is get mad at us for talking too loud or too quiet, but because you come on on and talk about some military stuff, so. And then get mad at yourself. Yeah, get furious at myself.

Yeah. This bitch can't even fucking talk. God, my sync point is shit. He's talking about weeb shit. I do Marine Todd voice when I'm editing. That's the style I get feedback from. That's true. We all talk to each other in Marine Todd voice.

We got a few things to talk about today. A few news items, as we said, something in the DOD. And then we've got our option of two readings if there's time. Choose your own adventure. Trash Future Edition. Well, you, the listener, don't choose your own adventure. No, you get what you're fucking giving. You hogs.

You drink the swill that is poured into your trough and you'd be glad of it. We will be choosing the adventure and you will be going on it with us. Which is kind of like a regular book, I guess. No, so the first segment, though, I wanted to do a little bit of British politics, which we'll be doing again in the future, which is in the context of having watched a clip from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Which is in the context of having watched a clip from the World Economic Forum in Davos, where some British, sort of like senior British journalist, was discussing the country as now having, quote unquote, gone through its populist moment.

That's now finished and over. Oh, okay. And that the election that's coming up will be far less consequential because both of the parties are relatively business friendly now ignoring the um you know the let's say uh strong whiff of populism as these people understand it around sort of you know the um rwanda bill now passing the commons and going to the lords well drowning asylum seekers isn't populism that That's just sensible. Yeah. And again, with the concept of the will of the people being sternly invoked by Rishi Sunak, again, very amusing that this the guy who was who was enforced on the on the on the country through basically a coronation by by the people for whom Britain's most addled home county's racist, that was not a limited enough electorate. Guys, I know I'm not your real dad, but we can be friends. I can look after you. Look, when your mum's away, we can go bowling.

We could go drown the asylum seekers together. Wouldn't that be fun? Just like old times. fun just like old times yeah so in in this environment there were a few things i'd noticed um that were just on the the collapsing britain chronicles yeah chronicles of ridiculous yeah the first of which is that royal mail remember royal mail oh i know a lot about royal mail oh my god we do we send a lot of t- t-shirts. Yeah. I have to interrupt really quickly with Royal Mail. If it's okay, Riley, to tell my quick Royal Mail side, I bought some stuff from a guy and he was normally, nothing was different than the previous way of shipping his audio equipment,

but somehow Royal Mail decided it was undeliverable. And because his return address was his incorporation address and not his home address, there was a strong risk it wasn't going to come back. It wasn't going to be returned to sender and i was like but this is ridiculous you delivered stuff from him same way a week ago no problem why is it undeliverable what's going on and they're like well sorry it's illegal for us to intervene now that it's been called undeliverable it's going to our national undeliverable office in belfast and you can figure out a way to get it from there and it's just like a national unmentionables office so what you're saying is that if you can't if it's deemed undeliverable without a delivery attempt it has to go to your black site across

the irish sea on a boat yeah it has to go out of royal mail's like legal jurisdiction to uh to egypt where they will be interrogating listen so we're going into the royal mail undeliverable black side yeah that was the point. It feels like every British institution I encounter has a black site, like an illegal detention site somewhere. It's like Veolia has the bin man black site where if you've overfilled your bins one too many times that's the only place you can... You get black bagged

and taken to the bin man black site. Tipped into a wheelie bin upside down. So, Royal Mail... You should have saw what you're fucking recycling. Which, by the way, we was... Royal Mail, You should have sorted your fucking recycling. Which, by the way, was... Royal Mail, which was privatized. Yeah, it was.

At a huge discount. Which was basically... Again, that's good business, by the way. Any good business, if you want to run the country like a business, you take your infrastructure, your back office and your stuff that works... And you fire sell it. You pay on the dollar, then rent it back. Yeah, and also, here's a really clever thing they did.

So they got Goldman Sachs to manage the sale, the IPO sort of thing of Royal Mail. And then who bought a huge amount of Royal Mail stock at a 50% discount? Look, who can say? And it's all legal. Anyway, Royal Mail is going to need a taxpayer bailout. Oh, good. Yeah. Oh.

But it was going so well. Is the black site too expensive to run? Yeah, all of the money that they get from reselling grey market audio equipment that's meant for us specifically, it no longer apparently is able to support. It's a good example of another great British institution that went woke and got broke. Yeah, that's right yeah they went woke by deciding to give jobs to woke boat drivers boat like boating crews to ferry all the undeliverable post across the irish sea for some reason so so right it will require a bailout because it is no longer profitable for it to maintain its minimum service

levels after um a huge amount of cost cutting that has now happened for years to maintain its minimum service levels after a huge amount of cost cutting that has now happened for years to deliver dividends to investors. Oh, great. Crazy. Yeah. One of the interesting things that I noticed just because of dealing with Royal Mail stuff with shipping parcels recently is that they now charge you extra to drop off a parcel that you've metered yourself, which to me is like, okay, thes postal service has its foibles let's be real but it's still a nationalized it's one of the rare national things that's not privatized in america but to me i was like but surely it costs more to have the posty fucking pick your shit up and take it i don't know why but now they charge you i want to say like an extra pound

to take stuff if you've if you've pre-metered it yourself and it's just sort of like i so i've noticed these weird little things happening with it but it's just like once again it was privatized what in like 2013 2010 2012 2013 okay so yeah like basically a little more than a decade ago and we're already in oh no we got a bit bailed out territory well it's that basically what so the way it works for americans listening is that the royal mail is a private company it's owned by like it's owned by some international group called International Delivery Services or something like this. Well, it's publicly traded, right? Yeah.

It's a publicly traded company that's majority owned by a conglomerate that does this kind of thing. But it has specific legal obligations to deliver mail a certain number of days a week. And basically it's

it is saying like either we have to make the service worse or we have to significantly raise prices which we've already done by the way and that's not even to say right how much uh royal mail is used by like essentially by amazon to kind of free ride it's the post you have to have it it's like it's so insane it's like it's like saying that like i don't know like like the police has ceased to be a profitable enterprise or like the i don't know the army has ceased to be profitable the nhs has ceased to be profitable it's like we said that with water essentially we say that with power in certain parts of the country we say that with like phone service in certain parts of the country like it's not

supposed to make money it's supposed to do a thing. I would also point out, like this is a thing that you see in places in America. Like I know friends who live in Oklahoma have experienced this, that there are like red states in America that have cut budgets in the sort of like Grover Norquist style,

Republican insane, doctrinaire way. And now public school, state school only meets four days a week because they literally can't afford to have kids in school every weekday. Oh good. It's four-day work i yeah that's right they've gone away yeah exactly they adopted the preston model and fucking lot in oklahoma so i in a way it's like i could foresee that sort of thing happening where it's just yeah more slow degradation more more reduction in

capacity but yeah but as you said earlier riley like it's the same thing because i'm experiencing the sharp end of thames water and they apparently build sewer pipes out of fucking candy glass hence the one that collapsed you don't want to end up at the thames water black site my friend i was gonna say isn't that just yeah they they can fucking waterboard you the a13 beckton turn off well you don't want to smell like that but thames water is another example of this you know that that it's like, oh, no, they do make money. They just dump it all into shareholder dividends and no reinvestment in capacity whatsoever. And so it's like, yeah, well, cool.

Fair them while they're dumping into the ocean. Yeah. But hey, you know what? We're all going to get a chance to invest without the burden of ownership when we get a government bailout. A friend of mine, when they privatized Royal Mail, and this is possibly the most Cambridge University story of all time,

was pissed drunk and realized that the shares were going on sale at midnight. And he spent his entire student loan on Royal Mail shares because he was like eight pints deep. And then woke up in the morning and remembered what he'd done and was like, oh, fuck, oh, shit. And then opened the share account and realized that he just doubled his money overnight and was like oh not so bad after all actually okay fine yeah well maybe this was a huge scam hey wait a minute yeah but the the other sort of um piece of like and again put

this in the context right of this sort of um davos assuredness that britain is now through its populist moment. Populism, again, as these people understand it, which is that, hey, by the way, the services are still going to get worse. We're not funding it. In fact, we're going to have more bailouts. But the idea that there is no longer a kind of channel through electoral politics, just talking about parliament only, for those things to go into means that it's now safe to do this again, which I think is ludicrously stupid.

Well, another way to look at it is that for them, the threat's not been neutralised. The idea that the populist moment is over is more that there's no material outside force that disrupts the kind of political system that exists, partly because the parties who are in contention for government are just very willing to adapt and adopt the populist policies anyway right so like only if they're pushing rightward though they're not entirely incorrect i think it's just like well look populism is when you solve the problems and pragmatism is when you don't solve them but in like a sensible way i would also say that it feels like they will

adopt them either in in in letter or in spirit so long as they are right-wing ones but there are also positions political movements you know uh policies that are supported by significant majorities in this country that they will i mean renationalization is a great example that they're like no sorry we won't do that we won't be we don't care if you want it the one time you wanted something was brexit and that's the will of people the rest you can fuck off and it's like xl i mean americans maybe yeah yeah the xl bullies are being sent to sort post at the royal mail black site that's the news if you don't pick up your post they're gonna feed it to a dog called hitler's revenge that kind of

implies that they're taking all the xl bullies from england and putting them on boats across the irish sea like a fucking spanish armada yeah which is like toxic fart that's gonna be the border between northern and southern ireland i just say that's why that's why actually in 200 years there are going to be so many like irish and scottish people who have dog it's like why i have black hair you know anyway what your ancestors fuck the dog I think it's the opposite I think Scottish toddlers are gonna become immune to XL bullies they're gonna become the strongest like it's gonna be like the rats in a barrel thing like the Scottish are gonna build the strongest toddlers of all time so and they're

gonna become a menace the next thing I want to talk about of course Rachel Reeves also at Davos and in the next bonus episode, we're going to be talking... I'm sure that was an electrifying speech that everyone was really excited about. Jesus Christ, yeah. We're going to be talking a lot about some of the AI madness at Davos,

but this is a little taster of Davos. As someone who's been concussed numerous times, I was going to say representation is so important when I see labor politicians give speeches. So Rachel Reeves has said that... This floored me when I saw it. Do you know... What podcaster floored by Rachel Reeves' speech?

Ordering in perfect English. Yeah, yeah. Orders in perfect Swiss at Davos. Live Davos reaction. White woman shot Swiss. So here's... I mean, I was astonished to see this. But remember, what would we say is the single most successful showpiece

conservative policy of the last 14 years in terms of maximizing the stability of the government that's enacting it? Would we have said maybe it's Liz Truss' cut on top rate taxpayers? Is that what Rachel Reeves is suggesting that it is? No, that's what she wants to do. In terms of actually cementing Tory power, you've got to say like doing Brexit. But that has actually been incredibly toxic to individual Tory administrations. But in terms of keeping the Tories in power in general, great move.

to individual Tory administrations, but in terms of keeping the Tories in power in general, great move. Well, I mean, they kind of cracked the whip on their own parliamentary party to get rid of any MPs who would have dissented. No, it is Rachel Reeves has looked at the last 14 years of Tory government and has looked at Liz Trust

and has said, we need to give this another go. We're going to give Trustonomics another go. What the fuck? We're going to cut taxes. She said, Ms. Reeves vowed to ensure that, quote, success is celebrated under a labor government as she outlined ambitions to ease the burden of Rishi Sunak's multi-year tax raid on workers and hinted that tax cuts for top earners are on the agenda as she attempts to recast labor as the party of economic growth. Like, why? Like, I mean, look, I do think there's too much dumb focus on, like, what you're doing with tax of people who essentially earn, like, sort of, like, upper middle class incomes, when there's, like, huge amounts of tax at the top that you could be going after,

which is huge amounts of money and is so popular because everyone hates those guys. But, like, why would you be talking about a tax cut for people on 150 grand a year? Why? Well, because she wants to... This is, again, a quote. She wants to focus on all working people and that includes those paying the highest 45p rate,

which is like 2% of the country. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. So what... Yeah, I was going to say, because people forget how the median income is quite low here. And I mean, you could have made the argument a little while ago that cost of living was

also a lot lower, so it didn't matter as much. But now that's not the case at all. What's interesting to me about that, I mean, okay, isn't there, is it 150 or 120? 125 is the new threshold for the higher rate of tax. And she, and that includes, and you know what, according to Rachel- And there's also the phase out of the individual allowance too so there is like there's definitely a thing where people if you got like you said got above a certain like into the 150 ish range they might find themselves earning less once they had or earning the same when they got a raise but at

the same time it's like as you said previously that's such a small number of people so like who are you trying to placate with this when it's like, okay, we're aspirational Britain aside. Yes. But like, you can look at the math and be like, well, it does kind of look like only two in a hundred Britons earn this much. reaction when asked a question to just answer in that way, to say things that are essentially distinguishing you from someone who is not dangerous, to give the sense to the people at Davos that Britain is safe, basically. And the idea there, the fundamental principle is that Britain is now safe. It's safe for Davos. There's never going to be anything that happens here that makes the Davos people either uncomfortable because, you know, all the Davos people tend to be quite good liberals, quote unquote. Right. But also, there's wither and die, that at the same time, the same conversations are being had to woo people to bring in the same shrinking amounts of money to come here. And the imagination is there will never be a political reaction against that ever.

Never. That will happen. I would also say, too, that something that I feel like as an American, I pick up a lot here is that America obviously is, you know, there's a horrible cross of living problem and there's a lot of like really serious, just like quality of life issues. But in many ways, you can buy your way out of the collapsing state and the collapsing infrastructure in the United States in the sense that because of a variety of things to include how taxes work there, you can live in a community with great roads and great

schools and all this shit, even in a city a state city state county country where many people live in in abject misery but in in this country in the united kingdom it feels like they're gambling on the idea that no every single person who lives here is going to be subject to this increasing ever increasing shitness and that's never going to blow back there's a pothole on downing street i fucking guarantee it like there's no you cannot escape how shit this country like you can't like like like it doesn't matter if you live in a postcode where the median income is a half million pounds a year like if you call an ambulance it's gonna take a fucking hour like you know if you go to a and e it's gonna take forever if you you know your sewer might collapse i don't own my home but like there are people who live on our street, have been dealing

with Thames Water subcontractor shit-suck trucks that are getting paid easily a thousand pounds a visit. Not their workers, but the contractor billing Thames Water to suck sewage basically from their manholes in the back garden, through a hose, through their house, smelling the place up multiple times a week. And you can't escape that. And so that's the thing it's so interesting to me about this is that like when you think about the numbers of people

who are experiencing like the life conditions getting worse here and they're like oh no no no we we need to focus to make sure that this tiny tiny subset of the ideologically they feel comfortable it's like right but they're probably not british and like if they are going to come here it's just to buy a 18th home to do fucking money laundering in. Or they're going to buy a piece of the post office because they know that, a Royal Mail,

because they know that it's going to, that the free money tab is going to get turned on. I'm going to go and live in the Royal Mail black site. So anyway, I have always had a fascination with Belfast.

So anyway, that's all the Britain that I sort of have the time or stomach for um i want to talk to uh the new and improved chat gpt that has decided to delete the part of its terms of service that says it will not ever be used for any kind of military application oh okay that's cool just removing that just taking that out this was this was uh written up in the intercept um and it's this is this is from the intercept it says open

ai this week quietly deleted language expressly prohibiting the use of its technology for military purposes from its usage policy up until january 10th its policy included a ban on activity that might has a high risk of physical harm, including specifically weapons development and military and warfare. And now what they have done is two things. Number one, they've deleted that policy. Number two, they're now working with the US Department of Defense next day. And they said, no, no, no, no, don't worry. Don't worry.

We're not developing some kind of an autonomous killer drone. No way. Chat GPT drone would be hilariously ineffectual though what i want though is chat gpt drill sergeant like listen up maggot as a large language model i cannot tell you that you do push-ups like you eat pussy but that is in fact what you're doing how on fucking earth milo has remembered one of my stories yet again, where I, there was this insane Sergeant Major hazing these lieutenants that were about to go to ranger school. And he was just like, man, what the fuck kind of bullshit was that? You don't even use those muscles when you fucking,

you can't even do that right. And he's that, that's just lodged in his brain. It's going to replace an important childhood memory. Well, that now we've automated him. Um, I use one of the things that i saw reading the article that you that you linked to riley was then talking about using this specifically to to parse information for stuff like uh translating source materials analysis things of that nature but like if my you know brief phrase with fucking around with chat gpt or any indication like the degree to which it just wholesale fabricates stuff when it doesn't have the answer or it tries, but it's so off. To me, I think about this, like, I don't know if this is, it's sinister, but also it kind

of, to me, seems like an opportunity for them to waste more money on a thing that like just will not work. And you and I, all of us know the thing that brought me on the show as a guest and then, you know, eventually led to me becoming a co-host and the producer was other military technology that i'd seen in real life that fundamentally did not work but that they had dumped a ton of money into procuring so i'm interested in like how they foresee this because on one hand there's like you know reams and reams of stuff that has to get processed when they would for example do like intelligence collection at least and then that's you know i only saw it a

relatively small like low level but you imagine that much higher levels tons more stuff but this thing kind of i don't know like my my story about using it and asking it to cite cite books uh about a historical figure and it just made up all of the titles like i'm interested in how this would be envisioned to work because clearly as like a as a as a like a weapon system like a like a like a drone a uav something no that's i just i i cannot foresee that doing anything besides just being a disaster but i could foresee them using this for a system a passing that kind of muster until it got to the end user and then it's still a disaster but then it's in deploy like it's it's in. We've used this bug to intercept audio of Iranian military training.

We've had it translated by chat GPT and then it's just like, you're doing push-ups like you're fucking and you don't even do that right. So, well, you may say that, Nate. However, I have a quote from a deputy defense secretary here saying that AI is part of a comprehensive

warfighter centric approach yeah they're fighting the war fight sorry uh fight warring centric approach innovation yeah we're in the fight war with the warfighter that secret that defense secretary lloyd austin and i have been driving from day one i'm concerned that it might have given uh lloyd austin some kind of terrible i was gonna say lloyd austin is actually ai now because his corporeal form is currently in a hospital. Stone cold Lloyd Austin. Yeah, because he's dead and they pretend that's not true. So, right.

Out cold Lloyd Austin. They say there's a lot of good there in terms of how we can use large language models to disrupt critical functions across the department. And again, I think the idea that OpenAI seems to have, right, is that their showpiece, and I mean, this is such a stupid guy showpiece thing to have, is that we're going to use AI not for fight warring or war fighting. We're going to use ai to prevent veteran suicide uh-huh okay we're going to build the computer from her yeah yeah but it's going to be like don't worry those are just fireworks yeah prevent veteran so something that i think never gets mentioned um unless it's you really dig into the weeds of analysis on this, is that when that number that would get cited often of 21 veterans commit suicide a day, the overwhelming majority of those

veterans committing suicide are in the same demographic that is also the most predisposed to suicide in America, and that is white men over the age of 55. So there is, don't get me wrong, if you look at the sort of like tranches across age, economic status, demographics, like, yes, being a veteran puts you at a higher risk for suicide in every age bracket. But if you were to look at that averaged out 21 a day, the overwhelming majority of those would be people who would also be at risk for suicide, even if they weren't veterans, just in terms of sheer numbers. And so I am kind of curious, because a lot of times that overlaps with deaths of despair.

A lot of times that overlaps with social isolation. And on this show, we have seen doodad, knickknack sort of ai solutions to things that are just like what if what if your your boss made you talk to an ai to help you not be depressed at work i kind of wonder if that's if they've just bought the same marketing that's almost certainly exactly what's happened because again it is what we've done right is we've we have the prince harry mental health talk to your chaps approach to mental health which basically says that why is the mental health veteran that what basically says that mental health issues are the product of sort of bad

thoughts that just have to be countered by someone else by someone talking to you with a kind of end in mind some blokes have gone mental. We need to bring those blokes back to health because honestly, the number of blokes from the military who've gone mental is mental. And we need to, we're going to bring in open AI. It's going to talk to those blokes.

It's going to check in on those chaps. It never sleeps. It never eats. It never rests. It just is constantly checking in on blokes. That's right. But again, it's... Not in a gay way, although that's fine if it were to do that i don't think it's capable of having

a sexuality being as it is a computer as a large language model yeah um now again the as a very big boy language model as a bare language model um our area is open ai yeah so this is this is like one thing right and this is the marketing, right? Which is the, no, we're not making, we're not sort of creating, let's say, automated weaponry. What we're doing is preventing veteran suicide and also exploring ways to synthesize intelligence. But the problem is when you actually know how AI is used to synthesize intelligence in war, and I've done some looking into this as well

what it actually it does is it is the ai system becomes almost inseparable for example from the artillery system so if you have a drone if you have drone spotted artillery right what will happen is okay let's say you're an artillery crew you have drone spotting right you have a certain number of times you can fire before you have to move right yeah and and so what the what the to guide that with ai what you're essentially doing is having the calculation of where you're go of your shot correction that kind of happens in in between the drone and the artillery crew and and the gun itself will automatically correct right i would be horrified at the idea that the gun would automatically correct just because of i mean just thinking about real life applications but so what you're basically saying is is this

envision sort of uh a drone that kind of functions as a spotter yeah and that is able to tell them yeah okay like it like what you call an observer yeah i haven't done my because this is like the thing that i'm most worried about. Having secretly been in the military in Canada and done some ops, done some black ops shit. Having spent a lot of time in the Donbass with my wolf name. The gun's correcting itself, meanwhile we're having a rip. Yeah. So, any case, how, but then you say, oh well, no, that's not an, no, that's's not part of the weapon that's part of the spotting but if the spotting is so integrated into the weapon then you're saying

oh we're just doing intelligence synthesis when what you're really doing is in effect you're you've more or less automated a gun yeah i mean i i'm thinking about this kind of a thing at the end of it like you're gonna have to you number one i think like the kind of skeptic thing not saying it's not happening but rather looking at that application like that also introduces another point of failure into it also let's be real like if if this becomes integral and this kind of specific example then like the the obvious solution is for them fucking shoot the goddamn drone down and then make these motherfuckers do math because they're not they don't normally don't have to do that um i love it it's that the teacher is like you can't use a drone on the test because why don't you don't have a drone we have got excellent plan

we are going to force americans to do math they have only been to school three days a week and it was paid for by wendy's mostly they were calculating number of burger natures you could fit in child i'm just imagining i'm just imagining this idea it's like oh no like well but if you've automated the gun does that mean that like there isn't the capacity for like a crewman to come up and pull the lanyard and fire and so basically it's like oh no the wi-fi got severed between the drone and the automated gun it's like i realize that is also known as how the israeli military did its border wall but i don't think it's a very good idea. And this kind of implies, because I mean, thinking in my mind's eye of like how an automated thing would work, to be able to fire a howitzer and then reload another one is going to be bigger than an autoloader in a tank. So it's huge. I'll tell you this. Sergey Nikolayevich, I have very good news for you. The American artillery gun has gone volk,

which means it will not fire on us if we black up, which fortunately we already have, just for fun. I mean, like, I realize this stuff might exist and I might be just kind of spitballing and I could be very wrong here, but I'm just thinking about it. I'm like, to me, I don't know. It's just like, after having used radio systems that there's like oh it's super

secure tactical it is like and it doesn't work and we're literally texting because it's the only way we could fucking communicate like this sounds like a disaster this sounds like a fucking nightmare i mean integrate it as a as a as a a thing that you know that gives you an additional capacity fine but like the idea of having it all be kind of one thing that has to work together that's the funny thing the thing that makes it not an automated weapon system is that a guy still has to pull the lanyard, because otherwise OpenAI would be building automated weapon systems, which it does not want to do. Yeah, you don't want to do that.

And again, it's not necessarily even OpenAI themselves that's doing this kind of activity, but there are other similar AI companies that are offering this service largely to the Ukrainian military. Oh, good. Dialing in the artillery in the Gibbo group chat is a very funny idea. Just be like fire for effect and everyone's replying with like the penis picture.

I mean, you know that that's a thing that happens in troop group chats already. Fire for effect and everyone drops a dick pic. It like that's been done like that hypothetical example like someone listening is like oh yeah that was that was us last week it was laughing anyway splash coming in three two pictures of loads so this is the but if you want to think about like what this represents right it to me it represents it represents the ongoing like the ongoing hollowing out now of the parts of the state that we don't like yeah artillery crews the backbone of the fucking state yeah exactly fuck those guys but the the whole idea and again when i was watching um i was watching all the speeches

at uh sort of panel events at davos one of the um other uh sort of panelists was this guy mike rounds who's a republican senator from south dakota who was again saying like yeah the inventor of the bullet we're very excited to sort of introduce ai throughout the american health care system like the whole promise now, and this is happening both in the UK and the US, is just everything inconvenient, every inconvenient person you have to deal with, whether that's in a part of the state that helps you or a part of the state that blows people up, is just getting hollowed out. It's a sort of, I always sort of see a kind of the incorporation of AI into things as a kind of throwing up of the hands and saying

well i guess we'll just sort of pray to the machine spirit about it but you've made this point before riley and i think it's a really good one which is that it doesn't have to be as good as a human it just has for the sort of deciders and and and sort of big power brokers it just has to be passably not shit enough to allow everyone to kind of kayfabe suspend disbelief and then it becomes the thing that decides and you know it's like i i've encountered this i don't want to list off the various indignities but i've encountered this so many times lately with things where automated systems fail and like this massively complicates a process that wouldn't be complicated if it just could be if if a human was the first oh yeah if you've ever dealt with every parcel delivery you will know

this pain where there is not a single person you can speak to all you can do is email their ceo and and that's the that's that's the dream, right? That is the dream represented by AI, which is that the only person is the CEO and he or she is able to just exercise their will via a series of talking computers. We're finally going to make CEOs earn the fucking, like, you know, 10 million pounds a year that they earn by responding to 15 million emails every day

with people going, where the fuck is my parcel gun? Before we move on, the other thing I do want to sort of go back to is, I never like to say AI is always bad for everything. There are some things that it's effective at. Spotting artillery seems pretty effective. However, the concept of sidling into creating what is essentially an automated field gun is I would consider

to be very, very worrying. I mean, I would say like thinking back on experience with stuff like this, that if you had something that could, for example, take out the initial confusion factor, or even just having something that you didn't require a person to be piloting it all the time, because that's the thing with the kind of, people talk about drones in the military but but but this may have changed but i doubt it just because you think of the size of these things typically when you have what they call uavs on unmanned aerial vehicles they're either very very large and they're like basically small small planes being piloted remotely from fucking nevada and they're you know they're huge or they are like

way beefed up and way more expensive toys that are being used at the lower level where someone has to be trained up to pilot it and is constantly piloting it and like for example i remember the ones we use were susceptible to like really susceptible to radio interference for example it's where you just get the most autistic guy in your unit and you give him an ipad and then you're like figure it out brother and so uh what i would say is basically like yeah if you have a thing that then it can can competently function without having to be at someone's job you could see how that would be useful but i am i'm very weirded out just because like i don't know having encountered this so many times with with stuff both in in the military and then also later as this stuff proliferates in the civilian world, where it's of, it's, it's, you're only going

to be one skill. And this isn't just for the places we're talking about. This is going to be for everything, which is how well can you get the thing to, to spit out what you needed to spit out with the fewest number of corrections that will be required. We're going back to a back to basically a medieval church, but instead of asking God to produce sort of coordinates or respond to complaint emails. I think the top rate of tithes is too high.

Feels though if I were just like the lowly backbone of society, the individual artillery crewman, I would be very uncomfortable pulling the lanyard on a howitzer and firing a round that was completely targeted by the computer because as milo said i mean like if all this has been brought to you by wendy's how do you know that that drone hasn't just been programmed to spot i don't know a dairy queen that's for some reason in a combat zone and obliterate that shit and you're like oh yeah you know try turning over the blizzard now asshole my or my subaliznaanya. They have destroyed our Dairy Queen.

There will be no ice cream cups for the men today. Yeah, exactly. We didn't realize that Dave Thomas would somehow rule supreme, that Wendy's would simply exert its will in a way that... Weirdly lit pre-Goshen, like pointing and looking directly into the camera, yelling about the Ukrainian Nazis destroying the beautiful Dairy Queen. So I want to move on.

I want to move on to a new city that is being built. It's not Neom. Oh, it's a new Neom. It's always new cities being built. That's right. This is a city within a city, actually. Imagine a city within a city Imagine a city within a city It's really sad because when you first Introduce these it's always like

This is like some Jorge Borges Italo Calvino shit and then it just winds up to suck It's always just annoying and bad It's always like what if you lived in the airport lounge Inside the line We're building the stick It's the vertical city I'm sorry.

I'm too excited about this. The 10th Neom region was announced, but I'm planning on talking about it on the bonus episode. Milo, it basically is the stick. Okay, awesome. It's the line, but into the ground? Like 1,000 sub-basements. You've conquered the world of business you have you know infinity money

you know we've created the the most luxurious destination for you know influencers around the world and it's like you get to live in hell yeah we took the world's deepest cavern down there we'll cover it on the bonus episode alright don't worry we are going to

talk about the um subscribe to the fucking page all i will say is this i was kind of like on the fence and i'm gonna say it again on the bonus episode i was on the fence about whether neon was back yeah right we're on the line i was i was like they haven't thought about something as cool as the line in a while they thought and then they were like coming back with like their new food city and they're like and their stage for like robot violinists and stuff I was like alright this

is coming back and now with their new aquarium I think it's called the stick they're fucking back they're cooking again this is like when someone posts like a like a video capture of like you've given up on role-playing games decades ago but they're talking about like final fantasy 29 or something like that and it's just like this is the kind of stuff that

gets mentioned yeah it's so back and i'm so excited to talk about it all we need is a badly cgi'd video of michael owen giving you a tour of it and we're ready no this is a different city this is remember prospera oh the is, remember Prospera. Oh, the fucking, the one in like Panama? No, the one in Honduras. Honduras, yeah, yeah, you wrote it down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Prospera has decided that it is not sufficient,

its sovereignty is not sufficiently fragmented and has started a new sub-city within it. A pop-up city has started within prospera okay all right called vitalia vitalia everyone is called vitalia so the invitation is to come and build the city of life I see where you fuck is it like is it someone saw seeing where you and is it that just most cities well they saw that scene? A scene where you fuck? Isn't that just most cities? Well, they saw the scene in that second Matrix film. He doesn't know. What's the city where you don't fuck?

And that city is actually down like... Oh, Zion in the Matrix. That's it, yeah. They saw that and they were like, what if you had a city but for sex? Uh-huh. Sexual city. What if you had sexual...

Sexual city. Yeah, yeah. I guess the vatican was supposed to be the no sex city but then they had the banquet of the chestnuts yeah what if what if you had a sissy where you could fuck everywhere everywhere else is illegal but this one place what you basically come up with is like the plot of the musical urine town but for sex basically sure why not um a combination of you're in town and like that movie sleepers uh no vitalia has invited you to come build the city of life it's not for vitali and it's not italia right and it's not a city where you can fuck i don't think many of the people there are going to be fucking that much join the first 200 residents for healthy co-living and co-working.

We're starting a two-month pop-up city on the island of Roatan to make death optional. Fucking what? That's an incredible end to a sentence. Like, up until that, this could have been the blurb for just, like, any WeWork,

but, like, now we're cooking. What if there was a WeWork that was a sissy and you weren't allowed to die in it make death optional is fun though because it implies that like they're not making death the thing of the past like you can still die if you want but there's an option to not which is a fun hinterland to be in so we're gathering 200 residents and 500 visitors in and near the prosperous semi-autonomous jurisdiction uh-huh i mean i don't know if 700 people is really a pop-up city i mean i feel like a pop-up hamlet conference yeah oh yeah pop-up village perhaps

i'm sorry now i'm just thinking of like a game for really nerdy precocious children where it's like pop-up pirate but instead of a pirate in the barrel that you stick the fake swords into it's hamlet fake it's hamlet the danish prince so vitalia.city is a movement to start a longevity-based network society uh-huh we've talked we just have a normal society no i'm afraid we're having that we're having the one on the Caribbean island of Roatan that is in the other city that's kind of illegal, that was declared unconstitutional by Honduras, that's now the subject of a big lawsuit where basically that Brian Johnson, the strange man with the weird face. Brian Jonestown yeah the one who looks like um the one who's taken so many anti-aging treatments he looks like a haunted doll he is a celebrity in this in this pop-up city conference awesome okay that's good i mean at

least at least 150 years ago when weird americans went to central america to create like their idealized vision of society like they wound up getting fucking executed by the british for i don't know piracy like i'm thinking of william walker and the you know the the kingdom of the golden crescent or whatever the what they call the uh filibusters you know when a guy from tennessee for some reason was in charge of nicaragua but this is just i don't know this is just we work this is just like i don't know trying to like hunger games we work and it i don't know, this is just WeWork. This is just like, I don't know, trying to like Hunger Games WeWork. And I don't know anybody who would be attracted to this.

I don't know. It's just, it's so parochial and boring, but also weird. Let me tell you. They have decided to accelerate the process in longevity biotech, fostering drug development at warp speed with four months to get to market instead of 10 years of testing to make death optional oh okay so well so death is death is sort of um it's optional but it's a possibility it's a distinct possibility oh boy take this pill will it kill you you know i one time i one time made the mistake of picking out of act of generosity

picking up a hitchhiker on the island of hawaii who it turned out uh was a a disgraced former chiropractor who said he could do stem cell treatments and blinded a bunch of people with his weird injections he invented um and he was completely insane and said that he was a former chiropractor it's just such a funny like even in the world of chiropractors they were like nobody you're too weird and quacky yeah he he basically he's like i want to share you my art and it was just this incoherent fucking pamphlet and he said he was going to build a city floating in the middle of pacific that was powered by the nuclear effluent from the fukushima disaster and also he said the holocaust didn't happen and that guy had a more cogent business plan than this well that guy

that guy would be right at home here um Yeah. He might be there already. We don't know. Vitalia is not just an intellectual exploration but a call to action. All residents are also builders and are encouraged to set ambitious goals. They've built builders, Valhalla. They're all there. Everything is cash in hand.

That's right. We're immortal. We don't believe in gods. We're no masters. What we've done is we've built heaven on earth none of us will ever die everything's cash in hand

we're outside the reach of the tax man build whatever we fucking want supported by pitch competitions crowdfunding and legal advice

oh they're gonna need that a battalion I'm just imagining again like a rogue colony of builders basically doing fortnite non-stop on a caribbean island

just like you know it's just like illegal extension at a right angle to an illegal extension it defies gravity an international coalition force has to be sent in to finally defeat the rogue builder colony so battalia's program is structured into four bi-weekly themes first longevity and human improvement right at least that makes sense right they say bioscience health care economics and so on sure the next one exploring the social aspect of cryptocurrency technology this is a life extension conference and you're like ah crypto we gotta have bitcoin involved for some reason people still doing this this is like going on about Betamax in 1998.

I forgot to include this, but Rachel Reeves' other big thing from Davos was a big meeting with the COO of Coinbase being like, we encourage you to come to the UK. Awesome. Yeah, perfect. Let's bark up that tree again now ai and technological progress a deep dive into the potential of ai solving the problem of modern life in nearly all areas of industry that focus on the broader implications of this technology

this includes an 80-year history of ai the final technology the final technology yeah we built god and so that's the final thing. I see, okay. Yeah, every other technology will be invented by the AI. We won't understand it, and we won't need to, because we're going to be the Eloy, basically. But also, like, what was the AI from 80 years ago? Because there's, like, a cuckoo clock?

Well, I think they were probably talking about, like, the Turing Letter. Like, the initial, like, idea that there could be this thing. Wait, oh, I'm sorry i i didn't realize it was serious i'm too fucking stupid and i've never read a book so i do apologize we built the final thing of all god himself and now he's bent to our will but it turned out we had to build one more thing because he wanted an extension well you know what when god tells you to build an extension even if it's illegal do the same thing as the gun crew when the drone spots the fucking Dairy Queen let it rip. He wanted cornice in.

I told him it had gone out of fashion, it was a pain in the ass but he was quite insistent. God insists you pebble dash his paradise. God wants to live in a fucking terraced house from Britain in the 60s. Benefits include healthy food available brian johnson's breakfast is going to be on offer brian johnson's breakfast um that sounds like a

dandy warhol's album i'm sorry like what well you've made a right brian johnson's breakfast why would the day that's very funny the dandy warhols would have made an album that was essentially the called the brian jonestown. Because they're like in a fucking feud with them. They hated them. They hate each other. Yeah. So, healthy habits, including saunas and cold plunges with accountability partnerships. What?

Someone will bother. You've not been doing your time in the sauna. You just went to the sauna. You didn't do the cold plunge. Come here, big boy. I'm telling. Self-experimenting. Can this just be an orgy please like is it all

just cover for an orgy for like a weird sex party like this is what a linkedin orgy that's it does it feel it feels like it feels like this wants to be a sex thing but it's because it's not it's like the most uncool thing well oh i hate the sauna accountability program i hate it when my uncle sends a letter and says oh be sure to have two of the biggest men on the island drag him into the sauna and then hold him down in the plunge pool i suspect my speedos will come right off it's sort of like the the the the converse of hussein's previous statement like you have in fact created the city where no one fucks. No. Yeah.

This also includes self-experimentation and self-clinical trials, including gene therapy. So, yeah, you can... We've got this great chiropractor from Hawaii. He's going to help us out. Yeah, we're... It's finally, you're going to be able to do, like,

the race transformation therapy from Die Another Day. Yeah. Oh, there's one other thing. I remember I Googled that guy's name, and not only was he a disgraced chiropractor but he was the landlord of an apartment building he never maintained and it collapsed into the ocean i'm dead serious awesome that is pretty sorry sorry to distract with my asides but that's who i envision as the look

overseeing clinical trials he flew in from his floating city in the middle of pacific powered by the nuclear affluent and he's helping build whatever this is yeah look this is why one of the many reasons why i always love a nate drop-in because we learn something like the chiropractic hitchhiker and it makes my life better for hearing so um montessori school thomas pinch and novel ass montessori school is available okay i'm just kind of an unassuming guy and I just encounter these fucking people and they start talking to me. I can't help it.

It happens. 100% crypto economy available if you want. Okay. I mean, that doesn't really make sense. We will harbor renegade life scientists, artists, biotechnology engineers and entrepreneurially driven community of people who cherish you know you're losing your eyesight to the chiropractor that's a renegade life scientist i mean it's just one of those things where it's

like that's that's all i can think of when people bring this stuff up i don't know what it's supposed to conjure but to me it conjures up like the like i don't know the what is it the first element of umberto eco's thesis on on earth fascism it's like the sort of cult of the eternal like forgotten knowledge all knowledge is finite like you know healing crystals mixed with the gospels kind of stuff like that's what this seems like to me and it's like it because i've encountered it in real life and it can be these can't be very dangerous people it's like i i just i'm like i don't want to be stuck on a fucking island that's hard to get to with these people. Like I've seen movies about this and they typically involve Rutger

Howard as like a professional killer. The thing to remember also about like Prospera, the thing that's like putting this on is that it is a sort of piece of like, it's a strange sort of piece of directly administered stateless empire overseen by a Habsburg and a bunch of like Latin American Ayn Rand acolytes. But see, that's the thing is that if it was a Pynchon novel, you would at least have the fake British invasion band called Sick Dick and the Volkswagens with their hit single,

I Want to Touch Your Feet. And it's like, we don't get nothing is funny about like, it's unintentionally funny, but nothing is like, it's not quite that absurd. It's just, I don't know, like, I don't want, it's unintentionally funny, but nothing is like, it's not quite that absurd. It's just, I don't know, like, I don't want to sound like a broken record, but it doesn't quite reach that threshold. It just sounds annoying, but also very unsettling. So I want to finish up with reading an article. And like I promised, we can choose our own adventure with this one. Not you at home, don't write it.

Yeah, you don't get to choose your own adventure with this one um not you at home don't write it yeah you you don't get to choose your own you get to watch the twitch stream live gaming of the choose your own adventure book would you like to would you like to hear about andrew tettenborn's article in the spectator the tories have messed up the return to imperial measurements or that's a good it's a good start it's gonna take some beating or would you like To hear Sam Ashworth Hayes Write in the telegraph

Let's let Amazon Run the NHS To cut waiting lists I think I feel like Imperial Measurements Is gonna be funnier Yeah I feel like

That's a funnier one Yeah What sucks is that I know that for Thematically for our show We should pick the second But we gotta hear the first We gotta hear the first

We gotta Only these feckless only Rishi Sunak's feckless Tories in name only could screw up the unfuck-up-able return to Imperial measurements which should have been a triumph yeah tried to get a

Q bit of MDF the other day didn't even know what that was I'd brought my son with the widest arm span along as well to get a good deal. I was like, it's like you're not even familiar with the works of the pharaohs. I tried to buy a cubit of MDMA. Your dealer just giving you a pill that's your entire arm span. Maybe take half first and show you feel me.

It's pretty strong stuff. It's a very posh dealer as well. No, let's talk about this. Cheers, writes Andrew Tettenbaum. Cheers to you, Andrew. You will soon once again be able to buy champagne and wine in pint bottles. Winston Churchill's favorite measure. Also, that wasn't Winston Churchill's favorite measure.

Winston Churchill's favorite measure was enough to kill me minus a little. Surely he would be drinking like a Nebuchadnezzar of champagne. Winston Churchill's favorite measure was enough to kill me minus a little. Yeah. Surely he would be drinking like a Nebuchadnezzar of champagne. Winston Churchill's favorite measure was, I don't recall. His favorite measure wasn't a pint of champagne. It was 10 pints of champagne. Yeah. But also, wine bottles have always been the size that they are.

Well, they used to have options to have smaller ones. You can buy a half bottle of wine. Has been the size that they are Well they used to have options to have Smaller ones Why can't you just decide I'm weird and British and I want a 568 Milliliter bottle of champagne But a half bottle of wine is a little Smaller than a pint The only thing I would welcome No one has ever done this The only thing I would welcome in terms of changing

The measurements of how we do drinks in the UK Is related to my love for Australia. I love that there are so many options of beers you can get in Australia. A schooner is the perfect amount. A pot, a skooey, a long cock, whatever. That's not what's being proposed here.

I'm from a country that uses imperial measurements and I don't understand what this weird like... Wine is not British. Making wine in Britainain is a relatively recent development we've always imported wine so it's always been an international measurement so it will be possible for the first time since an overbearing common market essentially put an end to its practice in 1973 this is very good news and i'm certainly looking forward to drinking my first pint of fizz the ideal unit for one person over dinner jesus christ drink it out of a pint glass you stole

from a pub too just just just do it yeah no one of those ones with a handle on it it's gotta be yeah um but but look further and any satisfaction may well vanish in much the same way the bubbles in your celebratory glass might in the same way as your wife does due to your drinking problem. In the same way the bubbles in your celebratory glass might if you put it down too long. How this whole affair of reintroducing imperial measurements has been handled is a horrible sign

of a flailing Tory administration that has lost its way. Bringing back imperial measurements is a horrible sign of a flailing Tory administration that has lost its way. You bringing back imperial measurements is a horrible sign of a flailing Tory administration that's lost its way, you fucking cretin! You can't complain that the stupid policy that they're doing for no reason hasn't been done properly. It can't be done! Also like, you still use imperial measurements for stuff like miles per hour and distance,

like it's such a hodgepodge here in the first place. Yeah, you buy a pint of beer any pub like it's so we i don't know like i get it i intellectually i get it that it's like grasping at this vision of lost imperial glory and whatnot but it's so stupid and petty and who cares like are is it really gonna make people's lives better if it's like oh cool like like you said i buy mdf and it's one inch thick instead of what 25 mils like who fucking cares even though compulsory use of metric measurements in that twink even though compulsory use of metric measurements may have played a large if subliminal part in the brexit saga this is not an end to it it has merely become a small piece of gesture politics i hate the gesture how come they had a brilliant opportunity to bring back pints of

champagne and yet they did just gesture politics with it crazy how did this become gesture politics i was excited for the meaty life-changing proposition of bringing back wine sold by the pint that was going to have a real impact on people's lives outside the fairly rarefied area of still and sparkling wine the corpus of mandatory metrication remains the corpus of mandatory metrication fucking mars va Vulture album. Right. We still have the requirement to deal and count in metric units with everything else essentially for play only. That's right. You should have a soft

play area economy, Andrew Tettenbaum. Fine. Like, who fucking cares? No one requires you to do fuck. Like, you're a columnist. You're a green grocer. You don't have to measure stuff out for people. If you want a pint of wine, you can pour yourself one in your house

and then deal with the consequences later. So if your butcher weighs you out a pound of rump for old time's sake, he must make it clear that any imperial units are for information only and less conspicuously marked on price labels and the like. For those of us who fought to get rid of nonsense of this sort Units are for information only and less conspicuously marked on price labels and the like. For those of us who fought to get rid of nonsense of this sort as one of the great dividends of Brexit, this looks like a piece of serious shortchanging.

I buy meat from a guy, not like just a guy on the street. There's a butcher up the street from us and it's been there forever and ever. And if I ask for a pound, I just get a pound. I typically, if I ask for a pound, I also get a diatribe. I'm like, this country's going to the dogs kind of thing because fucking i'm american we use imperial units but like it's not as a no one's no one's jumping in and fucking doing like a disclaimer he's not allowed to say this like no one they have a woke blue-haired eurocrat who says that who gives you the metric. Yeah. I think you made 400 grams. Approximately.

Yeah, Donald Tusk is running the butcher on Old Kent Road. Yeah, exactly. So, all of this is a betrayal of what should be the Tory principles of freedom and nurturing existing institutions. The conservative case for leaving the EU is sound precisely because of the principle of the absolute supremacy of law, relegated parliament, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. My brother in Christ. The need to steamroller anything seen as an obstacle to the creation of a single market out of the way required the state to intervene to forbid us from using the system of weights and measures

that we had grown up with. Who do you mean we? But you fucking use stone for weight. Who the fuck uses that outside of this goddamn country? And I guess probably in Ireland. They use the metric in australia they use it in fucking russia they use it in canada my impression was that so you can just sort of say what you want like you can go to most places no no no no no a blue a woke ursula von der leyen because like the market i go to which is run by like turkish turkish guys guys they have they like they advertise

all their sort of like meat and fish in kilograms but when people go to the counter there's like a good amount who'll be like oh can you give me a pound of this and they'll just be like yes that's what they'll say they'll say yes they make all the meat halal obviously you know to

troll around but like this sort of feels to me as it's like no you can pretty much go anywhere and use whatever type of like measure you want i don't understand this feels like the complaint if it is a sincere one because it is coming from the spectator and this is just the section where it's just like yeah just like kind of complain about something that i've invented a thing to be mad to be mad the spectator is basically britain's complaints department for columnist give me a foot of cheese you figure out well also but also for like you know this sort of like old guy who is like the only sort of constituency of people who

did probably like vote because they felt that they could bring back imperial measures not because they're nostalgic about it but because it would annoy people well yeah because that's the thing this effectively what they want is everything in this country to go back to all imperial so they can just make it annoying for every other country that uses the metric system it's like do you think people are so fixated that they that they're dependent on british stuff they'd be like oh damn oh the brits win again it's like no one cares may i read the next paragraph yes please It need not have been like this. The government could perfectly well have announced this Christmas that all metric compulsion in all matters of trade, including the trade of champagne, was to cease immediately. It could have been put forward that as a natural consequence of Brexit that the country should return to its pre-1973 situation.

That isn't why we use metric! Every cunt uses it! The only countries that don't are America and Myanmar! Like, we're gonna form an economic union. It's gonna be us, the US and Myanmar. Yeah, I like those

geezers over in Rangoon. They know what's fucking going on. I tell you what, you can get a foot of rice, you can get a cubit of rice wine, and it's a good time. I like a good junta myself. What I think is really funny, right, is one of the core

elements of what you might call state formation, right, that when states formed as they currently are out of like the feudal patchworks of land holdings, one of the main things that happened, that's the difference between states and pre-states, was the introduction of commonly understood weights and measures in a territory. Which means if you're in France, whether you're in Brest or you're in Avignon,

a kilogram is a kilogram. Like that is one of the major parts of state formation. And what I think is so amusing is that with someone like Andrew Tettenbaum, who's like one of these like, you know, wacky economists, it's sort of just without really understanding what they're doing in advocating for kind of like to throw the state formation process into reverse what do we have a lingua franca for yeah why on earth is the woke eu forcing us to deny the existence of phlogiston

all right every object contains fire within it and if you ask nicely enough it'll come out so what if the buddhist monks in myanmar are self immolating in protest because you know how much petrol they used to do that a fucking gallon as god intended so such a measure would have shown a government that knew where it was going apparently to 1972 yeah at best it was and you know you know what you know i'm sorry to interrupt but i gotta say this you know how i know it's bullshit because

no one is fucking saying undecimalize the currency they won't fucking go all out they won't actually do the real thing because they don't want to memorize they don't want to memorize that shit they don't want to learn what the fucking shillings and whatever like like it's like hexadecimal for your pocket money like no they won't do it it's all kayfabe so well he says uh switching to fully imperial measurements wouldn't even have involved a logistical difficulty after all electronic scales are just as happy in metric and imperial. So why did this not happen? We're told that in a public consultation, 99% of people said they were fine with metric units, but that consultation certainly doesn't appear to have been widely publicized.

In any case, the result of any such exercise depends on the questions you ask. If it had quizzed respondents directly on the essential issue, whether people should be free to deal in imperial measurements who knows what the outcome might have been but that's how what it is right now you can go anywhere and you can basically use whatever type of measurement you want and it will broadly be fine like there will be certain times when maybe it's a bit tricky but you can can, for the things that you want, you can go to a pub and be like, can I have a pint of wine? And the guy will look at you in a really weird way, probably, but will still give you a pint of wine.

Yeah. Right? I want a fucking brace of baby bells. Bring them to me. You're getting angry at something that you have already. You can do this. Nothing is stopping you from going down to the pub and asking for it. You can live your life this way. You can go this. You can... Nothing is stopping you from going down to the pub

and asking for a bottle of milk. You can live your life this way. You can go to a pub. For some reason. You can go to a pub and ask for a yard of wine or whatever the fuck. Like, I don't understand

what you're angry about. I'd like one football field of cider, please. Okay, this is the last paragraph. With people like this referring to, like, Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak in the background perhaps it's not surprising that on issues

of principle, like the right to deal in the measures you prefer should play second fiddle. Regrettably Regrettably, whichever power whichever party is in power the technocrats are in charge I love that this guy's principle is just like being a lunatic

like no, we should make stuff complicated and difficult we should get rid of a system like the the argument for not bringing in metric measurements in the first place was like i'll be annoying for people to adjust to but we're now in a world where everyone has adjusted because it was like 50 odd years ago and so it would actually we'd go through the annoying adjustment period again in reverse in order to create a system that's less convenient. Perfect. Anyway, I think that's all the time we have for today. So I want to thank you for listening.

Remind you that there is a Patreon for $5 a month for a second episode every week. That's right. And to check out- You can hear about the stick. Yeah, you can hear about the stick. And to, you know, check out Milo in Australia, you can go to his website for his various tour dates. Oh, yeah, there's so many tour dates.

Also, Brighton on the 3rd of March. Really need to sell some more tickets for that. Yeah. And other than that, I think we'll see you on the free one. We will see you on the free one. The bonus one. The bonus one. All right.

And also, there's Britanology and Left on Red. So, you get lots of bonus content on the patreon for five dollars yes so there's a link in the show notes for that if you want to sign up we did ali g this month we did all right that's right all right all right anyway we'll see you in a few days everybody bye bye Bye.