TRASHFUTURE - Big Tesco Back Tattoo ft. Tom O’Mahony

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

Tom joins Riley, Alice, and Hussein to talk about how not even the tattooing industry is safe from the whims of AI-enabled tech disrupters, with hilarious (but troubling) results. But first, we talk about the ongoing quest in the UK political-media ecosystem to performatively misunderstand what a "ceasefire" is, and then we review a whole new slate of Neom developments and ask: what will be erected in the desert when all this is said and done? Tom's (recently award winning) podcast about tattooing, Beneath The Skin, can be found here. 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 Medical Aid for Palestinians: www.map.org.uk *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 *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/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello everybody and welcome to this free episode of TF. And you'll note that no one is saying anything in radio voice, which means that Milo is not with us this week. He's off at a special Kierstrahmer voice training boot camp. That's right, he's getting voice coaching to sound like Kierstrahmer. He's getting facial kiarization surgery, but they just are adding chin and jowl to him. It's like a form of muing, but instead of becoming like Vichad, you become the care. That's right. So centrist disorder, you look in mirror and you're astonished and horrified to find that you have principles. And, uh, however, sitting in for Milo today is Thomas O'Mahney, the host of the Beneath the Skin podcast, the, one of the hosts of Lions

Led by Donkeys, Good friend to all of us here in the studio and long time coming on the mic. How's it going? Oh, thank you very much for having me. It's a feels weird sitting here, but I'm very happy to be here. It's your own voice you're cutting if you do overtalk. Yeah, I just don't want to create too much work for myself. Yeah, I just don't want to create too much work for myself. You finally achieved supply teacher status, Riley, and actually deployed an on-ironic. It's your own time, you're wasting. Look, everybody knows that aside from wanting to have the right gravel for the garden, I just want the children to stay in line.

I'm the podcasting equivalent of like when the teacher rolls the TV into the room is like, okay, you have this now instead of a lesson instead of Milo doing bits, you have just the hired Irishman. That's right. I used to love lessons at school, we had the hired Irishman. Well, look, you have to hire them nowadays. Yeah, you can't just kidnap us in San Justino like Barbados. So I'm becoming gangs anymore. What's the well coming to you? It's because of woke, you can no longer press gang the Irish. And I think that's a disgrace.

Hey, everyone says British politics really went to shit when the threat of the Irish really fell apart. So, you know, all right, all right. So we are actually going to be talking all about tattooing today because I have found, well, I found one and you found another very us tattooing startups. I really didn't expect, I should have known better. I've been doing this show for years.

I should have known that the two of the various genders of startup we talk about, no surveillance tattoos, not yet, but some of the various genders have started up. We talk about no surveillance tattoos, not yet, but some of the other ones, right? They both, of course they would be in every single industry and why not tattooing. And when I read about my one, I was just like hit after hit after hit. They do everything that we like talking about. Yeah, you sent this to me the other morning when I was on the bus to the studio. And I was reading it just going

What the fuck who actually like taught this was a good idea and of course as I found out It's people that won't don't have any tattoos and to don't actually know anything about tattoos Hmm However before we get to all of that I want to do a little bit of news and then the promise neon update The the news of course that're going to be talking about is, it's all bad, because, well, surprisingly. Yeah, it's all bad. It's the, I'd say, the content not, performative, not understanding of things in UK politics continues

at pace. As an SNP motion supporting a ceasefire in Gaza is voted down whipped down by labor, of course, voted down by the Tories. What at the same time, the Supreme Court struck down the Tories, sort of, Rwanda deportation plans, causing the Tories to then say, well, I guess we're going to try to end the Supreme Court, which I suppose you could say also ends the UK's, what like two decade long experiment with having a Supreme Court? Yeah, 2009.

Yeah, oh, less. That's gross, then. Yeah. So all I'm seeing is the managerial wings of the two parties, yet yet again trying to hold everyone together along lines that are, say, unpopular among them, among, like, their more, sort of, let's say, impassioned committed supporters. And yet the center cannot seem to hold.

Yet again, the center is not holding. I mean, I do want to say, first of all, we have to acknowledge that probably our most easily cold shot has actually transpired now and Swella Ravenman is now out this home secretary. But this now does lead to the situation where the deal, the Rwanda deal has been struck down and the guy who has been told to implement it now, James Cleffley is more or less on record privately calling it batshit and is just going to do it anyway. So, you know, two great moments for principles in British politics.

The plan is to make a law declaring Rwanda a safe country to send. Yeah, which is not going to work, because it'll work domestically. You can make the Supreme Court pretend that Rwanda is safe, but you can't make the European Court of Human Rights do it. And so the noise after this is, oh, we should just like leave the ECHR. That's the sort of like the Leanderson Demandist, first of all, defy the Supreme Court and put planes in the air anyway. And second of all, leave

the ECHR, which would be disastrous and insane. And so therefore, maybe they're going to make a run at it. I don't know. We'll see how far the kind of like leash of managerialism extends. I mean, like to be fair, given the current revolving door of British politics, I think we're about two months away from the Tories trying to resurrect Oswald Mosley. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is basically what they did was they tried to create a cabinet of like,

you know, diverse modern Mosleys. They're doing, they're playing like the Yu-Gi-O Exodia cards trying to reassemble Oswald Mosley. And it's what we talked about last episode in the bonus about revolutionary conservatism right is that everyone is a revolutionary conservative and till it's still the revolution of conservatism starts looking at an institution that you happen to like, right? But the difference is, right, is that the conservative party is designed to facilitate orderly revolutionary conservatism. And so having done what they've done for the last several

years, they're now just going to then look at the European, the ECHR. They're already gearing up. You can see the column is sort of starting to throw this stuff at the wall to see what sticks. But saying, ah, treaty obligations, those were designed for a time when those were designed for a time of global instability, conflict, and mass migrations of people under increasingly difficult, say, conditions for production of food and the provision of energy in the developing world very much unlike today. Of course. Yeah, we why bother with them? Well, those were designed for times of black and white films

and people moving slightly too quickly because they hadn't figured out how to regularize the film speed yet. Whereas now, and our modern camera phone age, these things, you know, a passe. Well, it's, yeah, at the till, those were for when the height of comedy was sticking your head into a fireplace and coming out with soda all over your face. That was when those were designed for. It wasn't designed for our, well, that happened to era.

So really, it's a kind of counterpoint to trying to bring back Oswald Mosley's, we need to bring back Buster Keaton then. We need to bring back guys dancing to Yacke de Sax, Hays is falling over, you know. Once you start bringing back guys, you know, where will it end? Bring back Ramsey's the second, that's what I say. Why not? Look, that's what we need to sort of the sort of the sort of the bloody

you did to get rid of front x is the c-poples have to make a return or alternatively will fix this or a palisine as well because it's a one-state solution but the state is egypt and like for on it he's perfect that is the solution we have it's gonna make everybody the most mad which is restore the pharaoh of the upper and lower kingdom and then have them also restore their like leventine empire. But we need to balance that out.

I think Iraq should be. So it's an ancient land claim, you know, thousands of years old. There's archaeological finds showing that there's an Egyptian presence there. We need also to then maybe give, I don't know, the neo-Babalonians a nuclear weapon so that they can counterbalance Egyptian influence. Many say the nuclear weapon is the chariot of the modern age. So they can counterbalance it. I've been listening to Tides of History again.

Yeah, you never hear anyone talking about, no, I can, I can memnon the great. We need to create a new balance of Joseph studies. is the feather equal to a drop from the puddle but on on if you don't drink from the puddle I'm at the devourer cause you get the other thing I was briefly mentioning these sort of Let's say developments in parliamentary politics. I was mentioning a emotion for a ceasefire in Gaza earlier. I was put forward by the SNP and 50 labor MPs, including Jess Phillips. Yeah, you don't have to hand it to her. She doesn't have a principle. She just has a very Muslim constituency and she doesn't want to lose her seat. Because then she'll have to write slightly different books. Basically, yeah. But you she'll have to write slightly different books.

Basically, yeah. But the thing, you won't get all the expenses and stuff. What the interesting thing about this is that you think that so much of a motivate in the UK is about this kind of respectable constituency electoral politics. Whereas you look at in Ireland yesterday, a country that has been very, very pro-Palestine for the past, like, good few years and there's a longstanding Irish and Palestinian solidarity, like, we fought a down-emotion to expel the Israeli ambassador yesterday. I just go to show that, like, how much of it runs so deep

underneath even the most, from the outside, like, charitable perspectives of like all the Irish government and parties like Sinn Fein are like sympathetic with the Palestinian struggle, but you won't expel the ambassador. Well, in our case, right, the what we had was a cease a amendment called to the King's speech calling for a ceasefire. Here's Starmer said, and I said, hang on, we're not going to vote for that. We're going to propose our own amendment to the King's speech in this regard, which will criticize, quite I'm quoting here, criticize how Israel has conducted a war, but stop short of calling for a ceasefire and instead fall in the line with the USA requesting four-hour humanitarian positive. Yeah, it is really should be able to try again. Yeah, it is. It's that look, you need, you might find upwards of four, five knives in the basement of a hospital, and then you have to like take four hours and try it again. But here essentially said,

that Starmer essentially said a ceasefire is not appropriate because it would freeze the conflict and emboldened Hamas. But if only we had some kind of like here Stammer impression just on deck. Sadly. Yeah. But the, to freeze the conflict would be beneficial at this point, surely. It would be, it would be a lesser of two evils. Yeah.

I mean, the ceasefire is the compromise position, right? Like at this point, because the Israelis have already gone in, and they're not leaving. So to just kind of like stay where they are, having already created this like massive humanitarian crisis in Gaza is, yeah, I mean, I care, it care sort of like accidentally correct that it's still going to have bad outcomes, but not for the reason that he thinks it is. Well, the issue here is that, so I mean, from what I understand, there's this sort of acknowledgement

that at this point, the Israelis aren't really going to listen to anyone anyway, right? So this, you know, whatever way this was going to happen, this was very much more of like a stake-curred position because like materially, nothing is really going to sort of, you know, whatever way this was gonna happen, this was very much more of like a stake-your-own position because like materially, nothing is really going to sort of, you know, they're not really going to change. So this was very much not to say that it wasn't important as like a signaling measure, but it wasn't, you know, I've seen some criticism like, oh, you know,

the label, like no, like the Israeli, the Ness Nihar who are not gonna listen to the label party in Matt's Y Kirst, Thomas position is actually smart. But really what it comes down to is like, he did not going to listen to the Labour Party in that's why Kirsta Amir's position is actually smart. But really what it comes down to is that he did not want to say the word ceasefire. So if you read what he's written, there's a lot of stuff which basically says it without saying the line. And it's not to say that this was the Labour amendment

was just as good. But what seems very evident is that he did not want to say the words I am calling for a ceasefire. And that seems to be the important thing because of the way that all of this has been spun. Or, you know, I don't even think convincingly, but like among British media types, obviously and then British political types, both of which are basically interchangeable to a two-a-degree. Saying ceasefire is really shorthand in this world for, I support Hamas completely, which is a really weird, because I think you're right.

Just a really clean audio. I support you completely. But look, I am shaking my head to show that I disagree with it. But the point being that the way that this has been spun ultimately means that, you can't, well, yeah, he's not saying the words he's foreign. Like one of the chronic criticisms is that,

you just need to say the word care, you need to say the word and the problem, it's the rule, it's the rule, have to do it. Yeah. But the thing is that like the reason why, if this is a kind of like a materially useless vote, if it's only a vote of conscience, the only reason why you would have it as a whipped vote instead of as a vote of conscience

is because you want to demonstrate to the US that you are gonna be a sort of like suitable, sort of allied leader who is gonna be able to like marshal the parliamentary party behind you for whatever bullshit they want you to do. And one of the main reasons, right, that they just keep rumbling through Gaza, turning it into like a, a, a glass desert, basically, right?

One of the only reasons that they're able to do that is because in the, in the UN Security Council of the, of the countries in, in Western Europe and North America, both the governing and opposition parties all agree that they should be doing that. If the, if that is, that is that is why the support goes so deep that it is universal all all major part. Well, and it also sort of exposes a darker thing, which is like, you know, so one of the criticisms that I've made and beds made in bad faith about the protesters is that, you know, they keep saying like they keep saying their sentence from the River to the sea.

And they're not saying stuff like we are calling for a two-state solution along 1967 lines, but even then we're willing to be flexible. Please don't get mad at us. I'm calling for a one-phoronic empath. That's what I'll be, that's what my placard will be saying this and the next process. So you just have to wear the crown, the double crown. I think maybe see copyright TM, that's what we're gonna do. For the next live show, we're all gonna wear the crown of the upper part.

I think the Seasfire creates a perfect balance because it allows for a perfect, you know, a total feather equivalence of, there's the one word they all want to say and the one word that they don't. Yeah, well, yeah, I think the other thing too is that, I mean, one of the points, one of the aims of the Hamas attacks was to completely psychologically unbalance and expose all of Israel's politics and all of its policy. And it's kind of this thing. If you look at previous Israeli operations,

if I can use that word, they talk about having like two clocks. You have like a military clock and you have a diplomatic clock. And at some point the kind of the goodwill runs out in the Americans tell you you have to stop bombing Beirut, you have to stop bombing Gaza or whatever, and they do it. And now there's a real distinction where it's like, no, everyone is going mask off on the basis that like there's been a kind of profound psychological shock that's happened. They've done the vibe shift. Yeah, the vibe shift is absolutely happened. Yeah, I think the only silver lining of this

is that a lot of people are being made very, very sort of abruptly aware of exactly how nuts Israel is. I suppose this is sort of where I'm kind of stuck because not stuck, but I'm sort of confused about where this all goes, because the way that I think you're right in the sense of like thinking about previous operation

or like previous military operations they've done because of like how short these operations have been. The cycle sort of between like, oh, these people are really going at it maybe a bit too much to then like, you know, well, you know, now fighting's over and you know, this was just a limited operation. The fact that this is not going to make the sad movies

about how bad we all felt about it. The fact that this is not happening is sort of changing, seems to be sort of changing overall perspective, which is also why it feels like reading the stuff written by defenders of the IDF makes me feel like I'm going insane. Because you have to push raised boundaries, but whole thing about, oh well, the IDF are like a really precise military. And they would never-

Most moral army in the world. And they would never bomb a hospital to like actually bombing hospitals is good in some cases. Like the way that this has sort of been pushed to, but to me it sort of speaks to something much bigger, which is that, you know, for all the sort of postulation about, you know, why, why aren't like pro-Palestinian people talking about a two-state solution when they say this, they actually want to wipe out Israel, blah, blah, blah. Like really what seems to sort of be the case is being like America and Europe for the

most part have kind of accepted that like Israel doesn't want a two-state solution. Well, Israel wants to have everyone in Gaza move to Europe or America. Right. And the Europeans and Americans are saying, great, fine, we'll do it. Let's all participate in a process of ethnic cleansing, but much more directly now. Well, I guess like the sort of thing to sort of acknowledge then is that, well, you will eat, you know, even whatever happens, what seems to be the case is about what they have now figured out is in order to support Israel at this point means having to accept the humanity of the Palestinians

or the Gazans is just, they just don't see, they can't see that anymore. Like the only kind of like the Israeli internal line has just become external because it was always like that in turn, but also the American's into the certain extent like the British line has very much been the same, which is like, well, if you want to have a politics, that if you want to have a political system that is sort of US adjacent and therefore Israel, like adjacent to Israel, like at this point, the only thing you can do

to really rationalize what's happening, the only way that you can sort of really think about, like, or just sort of say that, like, this was the right thing to happen, is to sort of say, but no, the Palestinians were disposable people. And I think that's a really dangerous kind of thing to go. And I don't even say precedent

because it's kind of happened before. We've seen it in Syria a lot, but the fact that this is now very much in full, because I guess for people who weren't paying attention to Syria very much or had lost sort of attention, this is like a very acute and very visual case study of like, oh, this is what happens when you are just sort of deemed to be irrelevant for existence at this point.

Yeah, I don't think we've seen like even the beginning of this sort of like historical repercussions of this, because we're setting, I think you're right, that this area, you know, Armenia too, we're kind of like setting down a blueprint for what like what state craft is gonna be in this 21st century and yeah, to no one's surprised,

the answer is gonna be genocide, the same thing. If you assume, most of it, we're gonna, I'm readying the jarring change in tone, Bell, by the way. But if you assume, right, that in the absence of states having positive projects of what they can do for you, and instead only really able to say we can benefit you, but at the expense of someone else,

maybe we won't even give you anything. We're just gonna punish people we know you don't like or enrage them or whatever, at different levels. I mean, all of that is just, if that's just what we say that states do now, then what we were doing is you're saying, well, this actor with a monopoly and the legitimate use of force is designed to antagonize people that are not favored by the in-group.

That's it, right? Then I think that is what we've seen statecraft for and end domestic become, I think pretty comprehensively. Yeah. And the backlash to that, I don't even know what that looks like, but I think it's fair to say that in a month, Biden has squandered more, maybe good will isn't the right word, but I think he's done more damage to the US's reputation worldwide than Bush did in decades. It's insane.

And I think we could have accomplished that as well, but we were already in the toilet. Yeah, no, I mean, like, the Zoomers on TikTok who get like radicalizing themselves with a sum of bin Laden's, like, let it to America now. So that's great.

That's cool. Yeah, we're gonna get the weirdest combination of TikTok brain of, from the past six months of of people internalizing Ted Kaczynski's manifesto with Osama. Because there's nowhere else for them to go. There's always going to be these kind of like cranks. I mean, it feels a bit like minimizing the coolest sound of Van Laad and a crank, but he was a crank also. And if you're going to decide that like the acceptable bounds of discourse are, you know, one party that supports, you know, a humanitarian pause for four hours a day, another party that goes kill the bastards. And everyone else's day

factor a member of Hamas. Then of course some people are going to go, man, I should check out these Hamas guys. They might be onto something because both of these other options sound fucking terrible. And they're bringing back MLG NoScope montage as on Twitter. They just need like the college UD like hit markers. I'm gonna see, I'm gonna see an Assalam bin Laden video

on TikTok with like subway surfers. Oh, I've already seen it. I saw it this morning. Anyway, anyway, I'm now going to ring my jarring change in tone, Bell. And I want to talk about a company called BlackDot. Oh, Christ. BlackDot.

Yes. BlackDot. I mean, it sounds pretty frightening already. Sounds like some kind of like security consult to the like spies on journalists, you know? No, well, it is, I'll give you a hint, it is tattooing related. Well, I, that wasn't the hint you said

at the beginning of the episode. So that's, so I do know that. Like, given you a hint already, it's tattooing related. It's called black top. Yeah. Oh, fucking smart tattoos. Gives you like an RFID thing so you can get into your building

because the only application we've got for wearables at the moment is like, you know, key cards. No, because you said it wasn't a surveillance related thing and that kind of a surveillance adjacent, isn't it? I'm sure, I am sure there is a tattooing startup somewhere that is putting QR codes on people so that you can like scan to win your shop at Morrison. Funnily enough, that's actually been like

a really popular thing in the body mod scene for the past like 15 years as like people embedding RFA D chips like in their hands and stuff. Like I've seen some people like- In that show years and years. Oh yeah, it was. So yeah, I mean, there's like companies

that like get their employees' chips. They have like policies for it. It's really, it's really grand. Yeah, like people in the body, I've been inserting different types of electronics, like bio-luminous and stuff, so you can go and buy your overpriced coffee with your hand and apple pay.

It is a new immersive experience that elevates a timeless art. So if you were hoping that tattooing was insufficiently elevated. Wait, it's not immersive. It's gonna be some like augmented reality shit, right? If I look at my cool tattoo in Google Glass, then it like pops something up in AR, right?

That would at least be kind of cool. I'm afraid not. Yeah. Just think, and I know what this is think so much Lamer think reddors Maximizing comfort safety and hygiene black dot delivers an unparalleled immersive experience where art and science intersect Relax in a futuristic setting and work with a team who listen what's largely been off limits in tattooing such as fine art code driven in generative art rare street art and legendary cover art is now available thanks to black dots powerful new technology immersive it's not a immersive at all the tattoo robots yes i was got it it's it's you like put your arm onto the big robot. I mean, the gig economy tattoo arse.

That's just being a tattoo artist. Yeah. That's a spoused trick. Well, we're changing the way people get tattoos. The way tattoo artists share their work and the way tattoo experience feels for everyone. Because that's right. We finally automated the tattoo artist. Like, so people have been trying to do this for a long time and it's specifically people

who aren't really immersed in tattooing either as a tattoo collector or a tattoo artist. Or someone who's just an enthusiast is people have always been asking, oh, how can we remove the tattoo artist from the equation? In the same way that like, the current stream of like, oh, we're going to create generative art to try and replace the artist is like, essentially, it's like people who don't understand what tattooing is and just see it as, oh, this is a design going on the skin. Thinking, well, what are the extraneous parts of the cost analysis of this, of what goes into it?

And they're like, oh, well, the easiest thing to do is get rid of the tattoo artists, because all I need is a PNG and a machine that can do it. And it completely misunderstands tattooing as not just an artistic art or for but a holistic art form because you're applying it to someone who is in pain. Like Alice, you recently got a tattoo as well. I did.

And like the experience of like you have a machine that is designed to apply to design, but doesn't understand all of the variables that go into a tattoo. Like the simple fact that like a lot of people go and get tattoos and don't eat enough beforehand and then our risk of passing out is the machine just gonna like dig into your skin?

Like you're the opening of Quake 3. I'd like to get it tattoo then passing out the machine keeps going and then there's just like a line and then it continues on your further up your wrist. Yeah, I'm like the technical application that they've come up with this in terms of like the marketing materials. It's very similar to a style that's called like.work

where you create a design using small dots which I assume is a restriction of how they've built the machine in the same way that like C and C and like 3D printing work where it's like printed in layers and like how you do the actual application of a tattoo is like you do it in layers you do outline shading color fills and they probably do it that way but it's like one the tattoos are shit. I'll just say that. You don't like the Mona Lisa? Mona Lisa is an overrated painting. Leonardo da Vinci was a fucking hack. I will say that.

Size of a postage stamp too. It's not worth the, you know. Yeah, it should have stayed stolen, but essentially like this is like the tech VC kind of backed arena, trying to create a problem where there isn't one. They're like trying to derive extra profits out of an industry that is like almost universally

everyone is self-employed. So I can't imagine a shop spending like 200 grand buying one of these machines. They're not gonna have those in shops because I worked out a little bit more how this company works. Okay. And it combined so many themes together.

Okay, hey, they're plan is, and they have a lot of venture capital investment from, I believe, Grayscale, which is very funny because it's black dots. That one's for me. And this is, they said, oh, we've realized that no one can really use our machine safely. So instead, we don't have parlors, right? We don't have tattoo parlors.

We have tattoo studios. And we own the studios, and then you come in, you get a tattoo, and you get a tattoo from our pre-made list of designs that you can have. And so a tattoo artist will then submit their design, like Spotify, for example, to BlackDot, and then people can go and get it. So you just like sell flashes to them. Yeah, I'd like, this is how generally the tattoo industry

for the past 100 years is operated. Like in the 20th century, you had like people like Spalding and Rogers who were incredible artists and would design flash. You would order a mail order catalog, you send them money and you get an envelope back that has acetate stencils and a sheet that you can put up on the wall of their bestsellers. That's just how it's worked, but it's the licensing of the work where a lot of designs are building

on previous work, like people like, you know, Ed Hardy, Phil Sparrow, like really influential artists who like created a lot of stuff that's still being tattooed today. And they don't own that art and it's a legal kind of gray area because it came up in the past couple of years with the artist to design Mike Tyson's face tattoo when that design was used in the hangover two or three he brought them to court and said I owned that design you unlicensed replicated it from me and similarly I think it was might have been Jeff Hardy the wrestler and his tattoos were replicated in a WWE game.

And obviously he owns the essentially the copyright for his own image. But does he own the copyright and licensing deals for his tattoos that someone else has designed? Well, in this case, BlackDot says, don't worry about that. Oh, okay. So I want to say one thing also before we go back into the licensing and stuff, In this case, BlackDot says, don't worry about that. Oh, okay. Yeah. So I wanna say one thing also before we go back into like the licensing and stuff, they do say, oh, don't worry, where you don't need a person doing this.

Is this need to be a personal interaction? I just kind of like allow yourself to be put into the machine that presumably like restrains you, because you have to be like, you know, held still like to have the surface for the tattoo. Is like not monitoring you in any way. I mean, this is quite horny apart from anything else. Not intentionally.

No, but see, there's a great opportunity if you create the, if you create the empathy detector so you can sell it part and part with this machine so i was like oh it seems you're experiencing discomfort what do you like a cup of water a myersbar a kind of code i don't know i don't i don't even need the empathy detector i just need to like change this from tattoos to like a couple of other applications and i'm quite happy i can the machine recognize a safe word that is the question you can't risk that that within AI because it might be like, for the ultimate thrill, I have deleted the safe word.

I will now be turning you into paperclips. Yeah, we are creating showdown from Cybershock. System shock. So what they say, though, for how they're tailoring at different people is they say skin behaves differently in different parts of the body on a different people. Black dot was built to treat skin as the ultimate canvas. Worthy of masterpieces, enabling unprecedented detail

and precision. What they're essentially saying is, we'll do some test dots on another part of your body and then based on how that goes, then we'll use the right amount of ink of the right depth and so on. Fucking do test dots on me? Why do I have to, that you've made tattooing worse?

Like one of the things that's impressive about getting a tattoo is that you just do it, right? You just do it from scratch. You don't need to do a lot of bullshit tests on my skin in another area that leave me with a permanent little dot forever marking me out of the dipshit that like put my hand in the fucking device. Yeah, you're getting the fucking tattoo version of the gum jubar. So, they say it's a fast, safe and comfortable offering for more

possibilities for artists and tattoos seekers alike. Okay, first of all, the comfortable thing is flakering false advertising, right? Because unless you're changing what you're actually doing in terms of like tattooing someone, you're still like stabbing them a bun. Yeah, right. And like, there's also like, immediately a couple of like

technical problems with this one. How does it accurately measure for skin tone? Because any tattoo have a database of all the skin tones. Okay, so they just have a corpac... That's been bought by so many other stars, I don't even worry about those. But also, skin has different qualities. So say, I actually have, despite how tattooed I am,

I have quite bad skin for tattoos because I bleed quite a lot. Yeah, you've lovely skin. You don't need to show me your forearm. You bleed so much because you're so hot. Yeah, exactly. You know, I don't need the blood. Yeah. What you feel with liquid for. We're gonna take that blood out and replace it with the puddle. We're gonna take that blood out and replace it with the puddle. The only way you can prove that you're not gay. Well, on the skin thing is like, you, for the simple fact of like the thickness of your skin, needles are like quite finicky as well, so like depending on... I don't worry about that, they say.

Like, simply measuring it that, oh, you should only put the needle in X amount of depth to go into the epidermal through the epidermal layer. Like it's completely misunderstanding like tattoos stay because the artist can like do one stroke of the machine and immediately figure out, okay, this person's skin is a little bit thicker. I need to go deeper. I need to go slower in order to maybe induce less bleeding or bruising. And it's just like, yeah, let's do a machine that cannot gauge anything at all. But it has a pantone color swatch for every ethnicity. So you might be wondering, what kind of a person would, some kind of a tattoo crazed maniac would try to automate tattoos

Let me tell you about Joel Pennington Joel Pennington a man with exactly one small grayscale tattoo on his forearm that he got to market his tattoo company Listen as I won tattoo have a Bitch made so They founded a venture back telecom company in 2006 that he sold DeCisco in 2010. Then he founded a company called Slow Turtle, which provides custom wines to upscale establishments. On their website, if you go to slowturtle.com, it says notice, slow turtle is suspending operations indefinitely, so instead we can focus on revolutionizing the tattoo industry

Wine Completed completed it. It's a mighty bullshit completed next up tattoos slow turtle I actually just like send you a glass bottle with loads of grapes and so I was like just put it in a cellar or something leave It'll turn into wine eventually. I think it's just like I mean as a I'll like, as a wine guy, I can say the idea of custom wines beyond this sort of lowest possible level of wine is a ludicrous idea. There is no wine that is more custom

than, I don't know, one particular growers, Mar-San Rusan blend. You can't make it more custom than that. Like, you could customize the label. Yeah, I think it's a marketing thing largely. Yeah. And then some like, you know, some various, I won't say, Huxterism, but definitely not understanding.

If he's gone from fundamentally not understanding wine to fundamentally not understanding tattoos. He is, he's also Australian. He's a man made and allowed to anger both men, you, Riley. So what did they say for, for investors? It says the global tattoo market is highly lucrative and the industry is undergoing unprecedented growth. Black Todd is uniquely capable of satisfying the oversized demand for smaller, more detailed

tattoos, more over focus on predictability, atmosphere, hygiene, and minimizing discomfort. I imagine having a tattoo that's low resolution. I know you can blur a tattoo anyway, but imagine it's just working off of a fucking PNG that you've sent them in and would have. Like a 60 by 60 and you've just blown it up and got your all back. The thing is, there is actually a trend

of an emerging style. Well, it's not an emerging style. It's established style now called micro portraiture, which is like highly detailed portraits that are like super, super small. They won't age well because the way ink works in the skin is as it ages, it begins to spread in the lower layers of your skin. So the lines start to thicken. Something like this is just gonna look like you just like, got a gray marker and ran it across your arm. Well, what if I want that?

Then go to the tattoo artist and get it. So, why, why Joel? After his custom wine project, Slow Turtle, Joel took his interest in specialty drinks to Bellweather Coffee. A Bay Area startup focused on making roasting more accessible and easier to master. Bell-weather used a system of sourcing

roasting profiles from top rosters, uploading them to the cloud, and making available to their next generation rosters, enabling staff without training to bring roast to life, combining hardware software and cloud to centralize the art of coffee making. And we see this format of startup have an over and over and over again.

We've seen it in cloud pictures as well. Yeah, this is in cloud. This is like 50 coffee ones doing this exact thing, which is the whole idea being we have we have found a way to try to remove expertise from something mass-produced and make it worse, but fundamentally without understanding the thing we're trying to do as you have you have at every point that I have talked about something that it does. You have given a pretty detailed explanation of why it absolutely will not work or at least won't work well. This is going to send me, this man is going to send me into the after life of Montenegro so we are going to have coffee and talk about tattoos on how much we hate this guy.

And how much you've been flipping bricks for him. Yeah. So, Pennington took a page of the Bellweather Playbook and applied it to another creative medium, centralizing the art of tattoo. Do you wish that the art of tattoo were more centralized, Tom? I mean, like, look, as an industry,

that does mass-tax evasion. I don't think tattooing really wants to be centralized. However, at first, the concept was to play automated tattoo devices in existing studios. However, this quickly shifted as the maintenance requirements, training possibility and training process and possibility of operator error was too risky. Look, I made the tattoo gun that you can't use.

Look, as someone who has a lot of friends, it's an F-35 tattoo setup. And as someone who has a lot of friends who are tattooed It's an F-35 tattoo setup. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha is the right analogy. But it's like, what if you got someone at a supermarket who would do like serve you and, you know, bag your stuff up to run the automated machine, which is like, got my neck tattoo at Tesco. That's right. Which is a different job. Which is a different job, but like all it really serves is to sort of make the whole process more annoying. Like it doesn't really, but even with like the self service checkout, there is like an argument, albeit like an imperfect one,

to be like, okay, well, this can be more efficient at a certain scale, right? There is kind of a cost-cutting measure in there, and you can sort of understand the logic from that perspective. But I don't understand the logic with this one because there's no advertising as far as I'm aware that has said that, oh, this will be a faster way

of getting a tattoo done. It doesn't say that it will be a pain free way of, or like a less painful way of getting tattoos done. There's less discomfort, but I don't think you can really say less pain. I started from being again restrained by the mission. Yeah, but that's also like, well, no, when I think about getting a tattoo, like I don't, you know, the discomfort of like, what's the discomfort? Like you kind of sit on a, unless you're getting like a tattoo in a really weird place. To be honest, like yeah, it hurts, but it feels great is my opinion.

But it's like, but if it doesn't remove that element of like pain, then it's not really efficient. So what this is, what this seems to be marketing as is like, we want to put this big and pointless machine into your tattoo shop, into our tattoo shop. Into our tattoo shop. And your job is just to make sure it doesn't kill anyone. Hit the button.

Yeah, like pretty much, this is a machine designed by people that one don't understand to put it in a text, speak the end user experience of someone getting a tattoo. And also the reason to join the Yakuza. Yeah, right. This machine will be able to do your Hamas face tattoo. Probably not.

Will it be able to tattoo your club card number on your neck? No. But they fundamentally misunderstand like the reasons why people get tattoos. Like I have a lot of tattoos that I got because I thought the design was cool But it's also it's the experience of getting a friend of mine I think I mentioned merely on Dr Adam McDade who's a tattoo artist and Completed his PhD relatively recently about the holistic experience of being a tattoo artist is that like so much of it

Is actually like the personal connection you have with the person sitting in your chair and vice versa because like loads of my tattoos took like five hours if not more and like you're sitting there and like yeah you'll talk about a lot of bullshit but like a lot of tattoo artists will say that like someone will come to them and it's a kind of therapeutic form of experience that they're either getting something to memorialize like last love ones or something that's meaningful to them And like a lot of times like tattoo artists will have conversations with people that People don't really get to have with someone else and like part of it is your trap there with that person in the chair for like a couple of hours So you gotta talk about something and you better be be nice because they are, so permanently marking.

Yeah, but it's also, I mean, yeah, not to get too personal, it was important to me that I got my tattoo done by a woman, for instance, which would not be the same had it been done by a machine. And even if I kind of broke that seal of like, okay, I wanna get tattoos that are not important or symbolic, but just like,

I want them because I think they're cool and I wanna do some silly bullshit, right? I would still want to get tattoos that are like not important or symbolic, but just like, you know, I want them because I think they're cool. I want to do some like silly bullshit, right? I would still want to get my like cursive script next tattoo that just as big test go done by a person because that person would understand why it was funny. Yeah. And like it's just to bring it all sort of up one level. It right is that when we see someone who's who wants to take one of the ways in which people interact with other humans, it's like going to get a tattoo with someone or even like having a coffee made like, yes, that is an interaction that is alienated by the transaction.

That is an alienated commercial interaction. And yet around the edges of it, sometimes there still exists some actual connection. Sometimes there still exists the fact that someone knows you and you know them and this is the actual thing that enables it to work to be pleasurable, right? Is the connection, it's the person you're seeing, right? And it's happening around the edges of that transaction and companies like this say, what if it was all transaction? What if we removed the vestige of human connection from it because that's what these further fuckers want yeah they want they want to get a tattoo

without interacting with a kind of intimidating tattoo artist they want to get a coffee without a barista giving them like an eyebrow raise it's it is the the pushing away right of any kind of human connection even through the the alienated transactory. We managed to make getting a tattoo a lonely experience, one thing which I didn't think it could be. What also like to they fundamentally misunderstand like the technical innovations that have happened in tattooing in the past like 20 years, like the two biggest ones, well, three, like really in the past 100 years,

past thousands of years, really all you need is a sharp needle, a pigment that is then suspended in liquid and then you're off to the races, you can make it tattoo. The inventions of tattoo machines in 1897. Obviously X made the process more expedient. The inventions of like new pigments in the 50s like Sailor Jerry was very famous for the fact that he was the only tattoo artist that had purple. Like the fact that purple was a new color and like a hype thing in the 1950s just shows how slow this process was and over the past like 50 years or so you have like kind of on the back end is like you know mailing lists for flash tattoo clubs news network zines and really like the three most innovative things that have come out in the past 20 years are one wireless machines because You need you need a current for a tattoo machine to run and not gonna bog it down and explaining how a tattoo machine works

But it means that tattoo arse iron blade and down with like cables All you pods have been a Huge innovation because it means that you can just you don't have to spend time like painting flash, you make one mistake, you have to throw the whole cheat out, now you can just like blast through stuff and Instagram. Instagram has fundamentally changed how the tattoo industry works and how in all these cases, right?

When this is a good way, like we talk a lot on like stupid technologies, but you can see how like the invention of some of these things enables you to do more as opposed to the invention of these things which enables you to become like any other rentier, which is just to say, I am, which is to say theoretically, if this machine works well, which it wouldn't, anyone can have my design, it could be tattooed everywhere, but I need to extract rents for it, right? It's just what it's doing, is it saying, everybody is now alienated from the process.

We are standing in between every single transaction and the most successful people in the tattoo industry are going to become rentiers enabled by our platform specifically. But they say, what access will I get to BlackDot service as an investor? Are there any value ads? This is in their FAQs.

Yes, black dot will be making certain tattoo designs and collections available only to investors. I wonder what they are. When like, like this, it's kind of one of those things because there's always like VC back startups that like try and like disrupt the industry. And like even like today,

like loads of artists don't like say I don't use an iPad and use it as like a sense of pride so like I still do things by hand the old way. The fact that like tattooing without machines or doing like handpoked and traditional methods is like super popular at the moment is getting more popular because you have people trying to do like return stuff with tattooing. But it's like, this is tattoos, you know, like understood by someone who has worn, never gotten one, never talked to someone

who has like a personal connection to tattooing. And like a tattoo artist, a tattoo studio, it's like trying to make wine and never have never having seen a grape. Well, they say, they say that they use new technologies to drive forward a positive path for art artists and people from the bodies of canvas to tell their stories. The mission at BlackDot is to get new people

for a new way for people to get tattoos and provide better mechanisms for artists to sharing a compensator for their work and re-imagine it as a whole. And they've revealed a machine that now allows people to own tattoos as NFTs and are royalties for them. So I was going to save this. It was this sort of going to head to this territory because when they use the line, it will be better for artists,

I'm like, yeah, this is a fucking NFT scam. This feels like an NF. So this is the tattoo machine that the NFT guys whose apes are now worth shit are going to get tattooed onto them. And it's gonna be even more unique because it's going to be mixed with best skin and so that's why there's skins already been burned off by the industrial UV light.

Yeah, I was going to say like a getting a tattoo of your board ape is kind of useless because you're now blind. You can't see it. You can't even see it. Yeah, that's a real choose for the faultless situation. But people will see your cool ape and they'll be like, wow, I'd love that ape. And you'll be, and your, your, your only choice will be to cut off your flashing, like, sell its event for. So what, but you would never, before this, you were never able to get a tattoo of the

cover art of melancholy and the infinite sadness, the smashing pumpkins album. But now, you can. I, I kind of think that I could is the thing like the right click and save thing Continues with taking a photo of it to a tattoo artist and going can you like in literary walk 75 meters away from this studio and do that You could go. Yeah, you could show them you could show them the cool robot on that Lincoln Park remix album Yeah, I want that on my skin. Yeah.

Sorry, only the machine they just met the other. Yeah. I want to, I want to commemorate the best album of all time, which is the Lincoln Park Jay Z. Well, um, yeah. Well, they're reinventing it, but I want that, I want that like, you know, 10 inches across like as a back piece. Look, look, before, before we end though, I want to move on.

Which is, I promised a Neon update. I am so excited. You did. As someone who is a listener of the show, I am so excited to talk about the domicid on the planet. And we will be. So there's a few updates. We should get a sound effect for when Neon announces a new region. What a kind of like a Neon. Yes.

You know, Neon has announced a new region. A fifth region has joined Neon. Okay. What fucking shape have they decided to do this time? What bullshit are we on there? Okay, it's called Lager, first of all, thank you for asking. Okay. And I think, let me answer your question with a press release. Located in New York. I hate when that happens. Located in New York.

And steeped in history and mythology. Lager starts in the Gulf of Akaba and the coast. And it's alluring waters in the West and winds inland to form a magnificent natural valley, car between 400 meter high mountains that have been crafted over centuries from our venture water. What's the gimmick, though? Oh, because like every single thing in Neon has a kind of like bond villain affect, right?

Like I've seen the hydrogen plant, right? And it's, if that isn't foreshadowing for James Bond, blowing the fucking thing up, I don't know what it is. Every single thing is like this. What's the thing? I just love how much of a fan MBS is of I.O. Interactive because every single, every single neon update is like, oh, new Hitman DLC drops.

Sorry. Yeah, with a $4 billion budget, none of it was spent on railings. Every single balcony completely unfenished. There's a suspicious bald man with a barcode tattoo that he got off black dot wandering around. He has a very strange, mid-Atlantic oxen. Sorry, Alice, excuse me, let me answer your question

with the second paragraph of the press release. Thank you. Align with Neumstrategy to designate the majority of its land across its destination in the city's of the press release. Thank you. Align with Neom strategy to designate the majority of its land across its destination in the cities as a nature reserve. 95% of Lager will be preserved for nature and will combine innovative ecological design and construction techniques to convince her that development seamlessly blends into the landscape.

Does that answer your question? What nature! It's a desert! Nothing can grow there! Well, oh, sorry. I actually can't answer your question for real now. It's thanks three hotels. Oh, okay. So the thing about bond villains, right? This is specifically a Hank Scorpio city because what we've done here is we've created a city that would plausibly

have the hammock district. Like this is like you're in hammock mega city where it's like, oh, if you want to get a hotel, can I get a hotel in the line? No, no, no, you have to go to a hotel city you want. He's taking the, taking the polycule on a romantic holiday to Neum. So here's the funny thing though. Lages three hotels have been intelligently insensitively designed by world-leaning architects to complement the surrounding

nature, operate sustainably, but they only have 120 elegant boutique rooms and suites, but evenly between 40 keys at each. Well, that's because if you go to Neum for, you know, on a vacation, you'll see how incredible it is and you'll move in immediately, vacating your room after only a day. The hotel industry, too, is really like the last refuge of the scoundrel here, I think. We've talked about it before with like OIO and other stuff where it's like this is a real sort of like credulity gap sort of industry that's getting into here. It's a real Jamal Kashogi hotel, California situation because you can check out any time

you like but you can never leave. Your luggage can leave. You can leave, you just have to moonwalk. But also I love that there's a whole region of a country that is dedicated to 120 hotel rooms. Yeah, the hotel room district. What about this surprise thing? When are they going to invent Neon Robocop?

I, well, being dispatched to hotel district one, the funny thing is that's sort of what they think that they're gonna have is that there's going to be automated law enforcement of a quote unquote modern regulatory environment. That's from a different video, we'll talk about in a sec. Yes, yeah, I have some thoughts about that video.

So basically it's three hotels, one of which is like an adventure hotel that descends the Wadi like a staircase for high octane experiences in the surrounding areas. Don't Wadi usually flood? No, probably not. This is the polycule hotel. This is the one for the polycule. You have 40 rooms.

My polycule has been washed away in the flood. The second property. It did not happen to Moses. The second property. It's of a no of vibes, to be honest. Second property rises from the rock to sit prominently at the largest oasis. And the third is an immersive wellness retreat with a high tech reflective facade. Once developed, Lager will offer an extensive selection of refined experiences and activities, including fine dining and contemporary restaurants, wellness facilities, and infinity pools, which is like, can gulf monarchs not imagine something that isn't a luxury hotel, a fine

dining establishment, or a shopping destination? The captain's home in San Francisco somewhere. The Saudis have the same designer taste as Jeremy for agrens. Well, yes, basically true. It's also is also is kind of like this weird. Yeah, they they it feels very much like Essex new builds, but what if it was a we did the kind of like mega city hotel development, but like off of the coast of Essex, like if we did the kind of like mega-sissy hotel development, but like off of the coast of Essex,

I think that could really like bring us back as a country. That's the other bizarre thing, right? And this is, they have another one called Epicon that they just relaunched today. Which is, what district is that? I think that's at the beginning of the, I think that's also an hell for. Yeah, it's also in Lager, but it is 2,275 meter high crystal towers. Again, both hotels, but with 50 opulent residences, with nothing else, there was not a city around it, there's not a town, you don't wear to the people who work there live. You know the roads, right?

We mentioned this a bit ago in the first paragraph of the press release where you're like, these are sort of like so architecturally interesting, is Neom is basically a project that allows every architecture firm in Europe and the US to just like skim money off of the Saudi public investment fund. And you know, in order to do some like, you know some vaguely futuristic bullshit, and I'll

indulge all of their other shit. But the thing is, everything about Neon, everything about the line, everything about this has the kind of feel of an architectural sketch. And so all of the public services, all of the infrastructure, all of that stuff, what an architect would do in general is you design the big fancy building, right? You draw that and then everything else, you quite literally like sketch that in where you fill it in with some like, you know, some free imagery that you found online or whatever. And just the same with this where it's like, yeah, that stuff that's going to get handled, you know, that's the, we don't, that's not our department.

And that's an entire city built to that principle. Yeah, they're just buildings that are out of familiar in the desert. It's like, yeah, we'll finish it eventually. Well, here's the thing, right? One of my favorite details about Epicon is that the like, and it has a... My favorite detail about Epicon

is you can come see the two vast and trunkless legs. Yeah, we call it Epicon. It sounds like something that like, I don't know, Penny Arcade would have sponsored in 2003. I was a big fan of the review of this on rock paper shotgun. Again, it's, they just, they keeps, they say it is, people will be able to enjoy unequaled service. I mean, a transadental landscape, a place for free thinkers and free spirits, the starting point of great adventures. but it's just the same luxury hotel. Again, it can't-

I think about free spirits, I think about Saudi Arabia. Yeah. It's just the same hotels and resorts built again and again and again and again. But that's the thing, right? And this is what I want to move on to before we end, which is that Nehom has released another video, which is a construction update, right? They have updated on the construction-

and that's the thing, they are, they have enough money in that people will just go along with it. There are now tens of thousands of people who are in the desert in the northwest of Saudi Arabia, and they are building something. I would, yeah, I mean, this has the best chance to succeed of any of these like Sisi building projects, right? And absent the Saudi economy just collapsing overnight. So I would just love the idea if they just had bars from Chelsford out there as project managers.

Like, yeah, MBS, yeah, it's not going well. Yeah, we're sorry, you have a budget. We ran out of bricks. We need more steel, but we've plenty of slaves. Yeah, well, that's the thing. Wait, we talk about India's grand designs. You know, Kevin MacLeod showing out to be like, you know, Muhammad is, Muhammad is condemning himself

to an audacious building schedule. And, you know, I'm worried about how many slaves he's running through. What if the entire Neon project is the longest running channel foreshow and Kevin MacLeod has just been out there filming successive episodes of the most the best series of grand designs. You just have MBS arguing with his Wally for about there,

you know, like, yeah, I don't like the sky like there. He's pregnant and yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm moving into a trailer on the construction site of the lion. We have displaced, you know, she looks miserable. We have displaced, you know, the community miserable. We've displaced several native tribes. So, the video, right, it shows that construction is proceeding.

So they're digging a big, it's the construction of credulity. They are digging a big trench in the desert as though it will be filled by something. But that's the thing. They're now like, there are 60,000 construction workers there don't ask them what basis they're employed. There's several thousand more employees. They've invested 5.6 billion in building 10 residential communities to house 95,000 people.

Those residential communities, by the way, they are flat and blob shaped. They're not alike. Cool. Yeah, no, it's because those are for, you know, the peasants, right? Yeah, that's what the only thing they've actually built so far is they built a big hospital This has neon hospital on it. We don't know what's inside

It could just they we they have a mass spice. Yeah, they've they've built a number of Shipping container style temporary accommodations for workers in the desert And they've continued to dig the gigantic trench. Listen, there is a certain masculine urge when you go and see sand that you just want to dig a big hole. And I got to respect it. So, they say, Neon will offer the best. And this is what I think both caught Alice in my attention

is they say, Neon will offer the best international standards in relation to tax, regulatory, and commercial law. Yeah, that was the one bit that kind of struck me as relatively dark in the video as like, listen, it's going to be so liberta. You have no idea. And, and the thing is between this place and the, like, California one in Salano County, they're really like those are the two most likely big libertarian projects to succeed and I really don't like the Saudi government sort of like whispering in my ear effectively like you will be able to own a person here. You can do whatever the fuck you are. We're not looking into anything that happens. We will take like aogask level of tax off you and in return for you

being there, you want to get up to some really sick shit, you fucking fill your boots, you go for it. And so far, it seems, right? Like they're, like they're actually look into the contracts they've been awarded. You can find what contracts they've awarded for this. And they're starting to order, say, contract delivery for modular apartments for Neom. But that's just a, again, that is, this is just normal apartments that are just being built for like the upper level staff of Neom. What they're doing is in the service of trying to create

a kind of futuristic libertarian paradise, they're creating a much more formalized cast system, drawing people from all around the world and just putting them in knee up. They're basically creating a kind of heavy-handed metaphor for like, I don't know, like world system's theory, all in one place. Yeah, I mean, I kind of see, the way I see this going is,

you know, in say 20, 35 or whatever, you know, podcasting hasn't worked out for me and I've had to like sell myself into slavery or whatever and I'm a maid at neon, right? The work day there is you live in a kind of like shitty container village thing and you commute into the one tiny section of the line that got built that amounts to a big

shopping mall where like maybe 50 absolute pervert freak shows live. And yeah, you know, that's how it's going to be, that's as much as they're going to build. Yeah, Neal was just becoming the real portal to the lament configurations, like we have such worlds to show you. Anyway, anyway, I think that's all we have time for today because you have to go to a country music show, Tom. I do. You should check out Beneath the Skin, which recently won an award. Yeah, we recently won a Best History Podcast in the UK at the Independent Podcast Awards. We're a show we call it the history of everything, told through the history of tattooing. So we connect weird stuff like Russian prison culture during the Soviet Union. The we have an episode coming out this week about the weird cultural Russian imperialism in

Uzbekistan with the out body of the Altaiprincess and like loads of like weird stuff we have an episode coming up about a Gay Nazi who got sent to a concentration camp and then God out got sent back and then become a very influential tattoo artist and photographer so yeah, if that if that weird shit Sounds interesting check it out. And perfect. All right. Anyway, we want to thank you very much for listening today check it out. Perfect. All right. Anyway, we want to thank you very much for listening today. Remind you, we have a Patreon.

It's five bucks a month. You get a second episode every week. And also, of course, that link for medical aid for Palestinian is still in the description. So do donate to that as well. Thank you again, Tom. And we will see you on the free episode in a couple of short days. Hi, everyone. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye everyone. Bye. Start taking note.