TRASHFUTURE - Chat, Is this Real?

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

We ring in the Carnation Revolution (more on that later), discuss the moral panic du jour in the U.K., and then cross stateside to discuss the group chat leaks of our close personal friend Mark Andreessen. Can’t believe all his courtier suck ups turned out to be snakes. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *TF LIVE ALERT* We’ll be performing at the Big Fat Festival hosted by Big Belly Comedy on Saturday, 21st June! You can get tickets for that here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

So I just want to open the show today by wishing a happy Canadian election day to all who celebrate the Canadian elections. It's the most magical time of the year. It's different from American election day, but in America they just call it election day. Yes, that's true. In many ways it's Canada's conclave. Can-clave.

Can-con-clave. There we go. Perfect. When they send up the red and white smoke from from Rideau Hall, that's how you know that a new prime minister has been chosen. When gravy oozes from the windowsills. Yes. So what we're going to be doing now that it's Canadian Election Day is we are bidding a

fond farewell to any satisfaction we're going to see from Mark Carney, hopefully beating Pierre Poliev. We'll leave a producer's space in here to do a little tick mark or an eh. A womp. Yes, exactly. And we'll leave the space here. Oh, wow. What a surprising result. Dabber in that cow. I wasn't expecting that. Yes.

Hostile PPC victory. Nathan Masuri at all ministries. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100% tariff on anything that's not Garfield-shaped pizza. Yes, that's right. So we're gonna be bidding a fond farewell to the one thing that you can sort of almost like Mark Carney for, which is embarrassing Pierre Polyev, because of course what he's actually promised to do with the country of Canada is to say, oh, we're gonna replace things with AI, we're gonna find budget efficiencies, we're canceling carbon taxes, he's gonna govern it terribly.

ALICE And to every nation is granted a stama, you know? And sort of like, few, a few other nations that are willing to like, recognize them. So I applaud Canada in joining its partner in the Commonwealth in having a guy who you go, well, at least it's not the other guy, and then he does all of the stuff that the other guy was gonna do. Yes. Exactly. So, you know, this is us bidding a fond farewell to that particular affect towards Canada.

I mean, we don't know. I could still, I could be like a diehard for the jokes about like, Carney shooting over the border from a technical. I think that could still happen. We don't know. We don't know what Trump's gonna do. And that's the real factor here. Look, would it be funny if the former governor of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, like joins the Axis of Resistance? Yeah, that would be funny.

We've got two possible outcomes here. We've got Mark Stahme, most likely, or we've got Al-Qa'anida, which is an outcome that we're hoping for, but it may not come to fruition. Just writing a nice letter to Mark Carney that just says, let this radicalise you rather than lead you to despair. Yeah. Well, look, it'll end in another 9-11, but like this time World Trade Center 1 will be known as like, like America's CN Tower. The Canadian way around on the 9th of November.

It'll be like that one image the Saudi embassy in Oslo have posted. But in reverse with the plane flying from the CN tower. 19 brave Canadians. Only Canada can actually pay back Saudi Arabia for 9-11 by flying a plane directly into the car. But just recover the cockpit voice recorder and you just get tab on that. Right. We get like, um, we just mail Mark Carney a copy of Syed Kutub's book Milestones, but just, you know, with some strategic word replacements, we then motivate, uh, you know, like 19 dissident Canadians and one guy who slept in to hijack a bunch of planes out of Billy Bishop and then crash them into like the Vermont maple industry. We don't need to learn how to land, huh?

There's more people in Canada than just Quebecers. Come on. They're the funniest ones. Yeah, that's true. You know what it would be? They would be like guys who grew up in like, Trois-Rivières or like other bits of like Northern Quebec or like T bits of like Northern Quebec, or like Tadoussac or something.

I'm nodding my head because I know, yeah. Became like mechanical engineers and lawyers, and then got disillusioned by like the prospects of what they could do in secular Canadian society. And then decided to fight the far enemy. Asel Kaida. Yes, exactly. And there'd be one guy who'd be like, oh please, kinda like a skee-doo, eh? Yeah.

Weirdly one of them, the whole thing would be organised by like, Mackenzie King's great-grandson. Sorry, that really got me. Alright, alright, alright. I wanna talk a little bit about the news. Which is, if you're in the TF office right now, you can see me setting off a celebratory popper. Remember, don't drink those. Now remember boys, don't drink those. That's all setting off a celebratory popper. Mm-hmm. Remember, don't drink those. Yeah. Now remember, boys, don't drink those.

That's all sniffed the celebratory popper. My, I'm horny. I need all my holes filled. So I'm letting off a celebratory party popper pop because we finally found a use case for a cryptocurrency. A cryptocurrency finally has developed an actual honest-to-god use case. Really? It's bribing the president.

Ah. Yes, that's right. As, of course, a Trump coin, the meme on the Solana blockchain that Donald Trump released when he was... Yeah, Trump's rug pull. We remember this. Well, it's un-rug pulled now. Rug push.

So basically, zooming out a little bit, how Solana meme coins tend to work is that the developers will keep a stock of them back and say, look, I'm gonna hold onto this, you buy it, and then I'm not going to sell this, and then I'm gonna sell it on a greed-like lockup schedule. I'm not going to sell this. Huge wink.

Wink bigger than the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry does every time it says anything. Yeah, and then if they do, so if they do that, then that is a rug pull because what's happened is you've put a lot of money into this and then suddenly what you realize is everyone's bought the original meme creator stash of coins. Yeah, you're like, you're left holding the bag for the hawk tour or whatever, or Donald Trump. Which, by the way, I think that's what that should be. What else would Hawkcoin have been?

It's a tax on enumeracy, like of course, yeah. Like what else was Hawkcoin going to have been other than what it was? It's about a meme. The first round of Hawkcoin billionaires. Yeah, it's about, it's anyway, that's beside the point. Imagine if people had generational wealth off of Hawk to a coin. Well, she does.

Well, my great-great-grandfather bought his Hawk to a coin. Well, that's me. I bought during the dip and I'm very sure that like my son's gonna benefit from that, right? Buy the dip, build an average. Hawk coin is not done. Yeah, so, any case. So with Trump, with his Trump coin, what you need to do if you want to actually make money off of something like that over the long term is you need to find reasons

to become relevant again so people are talking about you so that there's attention on your meme coin so that you can sell some more of it at a profit without crashing the value of the whole thing. You're killing the goose that lays the golden eggs when you rug pull it, basically. Yeah, sure. And you will do that at some point, to be clear. Yeah, and you get all that delicious goose meat. Yeah. Yeah.

So, what has happened now is the administration has said the top 25 holders of Trump coin are all gonna get to go meet the president, essentially, and presumably pitch him other business ideas. It's a consolation bribe? Sorry we rug pulled you, here is your opportunity to bribe the president some more. Yeah, but also that's a great strategy because he just listens to like the last person, so if you like time yourself properly, you could probably like save the world. That's an incredible opportunity. If I had gotten big into Trump coin now, I could, I bet I could flip Trump on trans rights. Single-handedly.

Yeah, there you go. There's a GoFundMe opportunity. I was gonna say, because like this week there's been a lot of people saying, you know, like, oh, the US is like North Korea now or whatever, talking about various, you know, US security state things, yadda yadda, whatever, who cares? Well, this is actually the US being like North Korea, but in the sense of like, do you remember the first time Kim Jong-il played golf and he got 18 holes in one? Like that is, they're doing that kind of North Korea shit, which is kind of fun. Like Trump's like, if you buy, if you buy the coin, if you buy the meme coin, that's me, you can meet me. You can come to my house and you can meet me. Ronald McDonald won't be there.

The Donald Trump fucker fan contest? Yeah. He's going to do a thousand Trump meme coin fan contest? Yeah. He's going to do a thousand Trump meme coin holders in one day. There's going to be some guys from TikTok filming it all. What it has always historically been difficult to do in American politics, not in British, so this is another, I'm putting this in the hyper-Britification filter by the, folder by the way. Adam Curtis' hyper-Britification folder, by the way. Adam Curtis' hyper-Britification, yes.

Yes. So I'm putting it in the hyper-Britification filter, largely because British politics, as we've spoken about many times in this show, features very often giving money directly to lawmakers. And only half the time is it Guardian journalists, or mere journalists who are doing it. However, in the States, that has more often

happened through unlimited campaign contributions, through things like super PACs and so on. This is another point of convergence where through the cryptocurrency, the market has innovated a radical new solution to give money directly to the president and his family, which you couldn't just give you if you could assemble the bag of dollars. Let's say you got a big sack of like $20 bills and you wanted and the president was, I don't know, like, you know, some kind of a tariff madman, you would say, okay, I'd like a carve out specifically for my small HVAC business. Here's $2 million. Please do me a carve out. That would be hard to do. Right. You, how would you get into the White House with the bag? How would you find time in the president's schedule?

It would look bad. Right. You'd have to label the bag with something innocuous and certainly not a big dollar sign. This is why Michael and Del, the MyPillow guy, has not been the person that he wants to be in Trump's life. So basically, using the power of the blockchain, it is now possible to bribe the president in a way that he has, you know, he's set up an intake form, essential, an intake sort of pipe for bribery. Registrating my interest in bribing the president. Yeah.

And so now, if you own a sort of HVAC business or a series of HVAC businesses and you're worried about tariffs, you can just be like, well, I will buy enough of the Trump meme coin to go and ask him for a carve out for my business. And given how he's treated a lot of other industries, he's likely to probably do it. Cool. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. It's kind of like his equivalent of like Mr. Beast feastables, you know? It's like a way of monetizing the fan base.

Yeah, exactly. Trumpables. They're delicious. Don't look at the ingredients. Yeah, so this is definitely an example of hyper-Britification that we are seeing once again. We're a culture leader. I was just reminded that Trump did try to do a Mr. Beast feast-ables thing with Trump's steaks, right? Oh god, yeah, I forgot about those.

Yeah, years ago. God, that was rad. Look, there's nothing new under the sun. Clearly. It goes to show though that American politics is less classy, because you know, to was a great ad. There's nothing new under the sun. Yeah. Clearly. It goes to show though that American politics is less classy because, you know, to get a British politician to do some kind of lucrative government deal for you, you had to at least buy him a membership of the jockeys enclosure at New Market Racecourse, which was worth up to 1300 pounds annually.

All right. I want to move on. We have a big thing to get to after the next bit of news, but I don't want to let it go too long without talking, of course, about the sort of, I'd say, fake controversy about the Irish rap group, Necap. Yeah. Ah, yes. You have to say one of the easiest targets for this kind of monstering, being kind of...

I mean, listen, I'm always gonna support using British arts funding to do a kind of like anti-British paramilitary bit because I think that rules. However, it does obviously expose you to a lot of what is currently now happening, which is people trying to get them fired from their agents, banned from the US, investigated by the police in Northern Ireland and so on and so on. Yeah, so just to catch everybody up in case you haven't been following this, they were at Coachella in America, which is the place that matters by the way, so that's what kicked this whole thing off.

At the end of their set, they said, you know, Israel is committing genocide in Palestine, fuck Israel, free Palestine. Which, yeah. By the way, when I was... Of course. Yeah, pretty standard. When I found one of these reported on in the mirror, just sort of collecting some of the facts on it, they'd censored both fuck and free.

Look, they should have just said that Israel wasn't brat and that would have been a good way of angering everyone or making everyone nod in agreement. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you did the brat green and then photoshopped the sword of Islam onto it, that would be quite a powerful... That's just the Saudi flag. I saw someone once, like, during, like, the height of Brat Summer, do a Hamas flag with the brat green. And I don't know who did that. I don't know why it didn't go more viral than it did, but I do think about that quite a lot. Anyway, so they say, you know, fuck Israel, free Palestine on the Jumbotron.

And then, of course, the political media outrage machine, starting with Sharon Osborne, of all people. Yeah. Well, Sharon Osborne would never be party to some kind of outrageous stage spectacle. Just off the top of my head, like biting the head off a dove, biting the head off a bat, pissing on the Alamo. These are not things that Sharon Osborne would ever condone. No, of course. And then this led to demands for swift, sharp action against them, having, as you say, no of their visas revoked, but also it led to stuff from like two or three years ago, quote

unquote, emerging or videos surfacing of them, you know, again, let's, without being specific, sort of saying things that would be... Might be illegal based on our like insane anti-terror laws, right? I say might be because we don't know yet. This is the thing, right? There's this kind of latency to it, because clearly, and this is not the only example of this, on the contrary, there are a lot of people involved in this kind of current campaign to demonize kneecap,

who have noted stuff that they might have said or done before, and just kind of quietly filed that away for an opportune moment, and now it's been decided that this is the opportune moment and you get the kind of full-court press of everything they've ever done that might be controversial. Which I do think goes some way to explain why you, you Riley appear to be the most stressed man in podcasting Yeah, I was saying this Nova earlier I have the exact affect of James Brown but on a purely not on camera role Just from being that worried all the time feel bad

I feel bad. I hope that I wouldn't. At the start of every single podcast episode, Riley lays on the floor and we all have to chant Riley Quinn and then eventually his leg starts twitching and then as we chant louder and louder, eventually he gets up. Eventually I get up and I say, uh, we have to cut that. Every podcast begins with, ah, but we cut it out. I understand completely the idea that like you were living with a terror that every time one of us pops off a little too hard, that will be the thing that gets all of us together

on the front of the mail on Sunday. So I get that completely. With the ISS tweet, of course. Yeah, of course. But that's the thing though, that's a good example because, whether it's the ISS tweet or other fucking tweets that I've done, it's all the same online weirdos being like, I'm gonna screenshot that and I'm gonna hold onto it until I think it's useful. And a prime, prime example of that is transphobia, right?

The minutes after the Supreme Court judgment came out, you had the British Transport Police announcing their new search policy, and a bit after that you had the EHRCs thing. No way either of those exist that quickly without there being some kind of a group chat involved, right? Could that be foreshadowing what we're going to speak about after this, perhaps? Interesting. Why can't there be group chats about infrastructure? Or a group chat to be like, we should make a good train. Yeah, saying we're in that group chat to be like we should make a good train?

They're saying we're in that group chat. Yeah, I was going to say. Yeah, well, I imagine Nova's probably in more of those group chats, but like why can't those group chats be occupied by the people who can do stuff? Well, you got to join Rod Stewart's fill in the potholes group chat. I want to bring it back to kneecap though, right? Which is, so this group is the subject of this moral panic. It's being supported by every, you know, media and political bigwig,

largely because it has suited them for a long time to find ways to encourage people of being afraid of like pro-Palestinian or left-wing or woke or whatever terrorism at every turn. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And if your deal is like, we are going to use the aesthetics of terrorism, like, artistically, you're very well suited for that inherently. Well, I should say, we're going to use the aesthetics of what is selectively called terrorism to artistically, because one of the things about the application of these anti-terror laws is that they are inherently very selective as to what counts as violence, what counts as advocating for terrorism, and

so on and so on and so on. But to fit into that kind of paradigm very neatly, you know? Yeah, and again, are these three Irish rappers, are they going to be leading an armed rebellion any time soon? Are they going to be hurting anybody? Is anyone going to listen to them and hurt somebody? But the way they're being covered in the press, it seems like they are now one step away from re-bombing the Grand Hotel in Brighton just in case. Which in my view is frankly ridiculous.

We're gonna dig Maggie up and bomb her again. We're gonna dig up Mount Baton and bomb him again. We're gonna do it all. I like the idea that, well, we're in severe danger here of the band kneecap turning the peaceful area of Northern Ireland into a dangerous place. Well, that's the thing. For the first time. Robert Jenrick, the Tory shadow justice minister, said, he was like, well, why hasn't kneecap already been investigated under the Terrorism Act just for stuff they said about Northern Ireland as opposed to Hamas or Hezbollah.

Which is the thing, on the lesser of anti-terrorism legislation as it stands, they could well have been, right? And that's kind of, that is an interesting question. How was it that this was something that they were able to do without anybody making too much of a fuss until the moment when it really seemed like it could all happen at once. Right? Yeah. It's almost like the laws are kind of stupid. No one really cares until it suits them to care.

Weirdly opportunistic, you know? And I think there's an idiot reading of this, right? Which is, oh, you can do all of this shit about Ireland, but the second you talk about Israel, and I don't think that's it. Right? I think that this is just an opportune moment to leverage all of that stuff at once. Yeah. I think it's all of a sudden, they've gone to a place where Americans can understand them, which means that the British understand that, oh, these guys are to be hated and feared. It's also a question of getting big enough as well, because if you do this whole panic campaign and nobody's ever heard of them, then it's like, okay, so what, you found three Irish guys, fantastic. You know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. With a bar full of Boston cops being the most politically confused I've ever been, is get the Brits out, is followed immediately by a statement on Palestine. Like, wait, what? There's genuinely, like, if you read stuff about Northern Ireland, about, like, IRA fundraising in the US, so much of it was, like, guys who knew the Americans having to get the, like, radical organizers and activists to just shut the fuck up about any of the race stuff, because all of the guys who wanted to donate and give money were also insanely racist, and then all of the guys who wanted to donate and give money were also insanely racist. And then all of the guys who were actually coming over from Ireland were like basically

Maoists at this point. It's just like Jerry Adams grabbing you and shoving you outside of a bar in Boston to be like, don't fucking tell them about the anti-racism. I'm going to keep it on the dog trampolining stuff. But also, right, from what from what Jenrik has said, saying, oh, it's two-tier policing, which seems to be the concept du jour that won't fucking go away. And at what point is that, after like, weeks of riots off of the basis of that very slogan, at what point is that not a sort of like, pro-terrorism slogan, you know?

Yeah, well we can't possibly have a system of two-tier policing in Northern Ireland. I think it's very important that they investigate that immediately. I was going to say, wow, an Irish band supporting a prescribed terrorist organization. Is there some kind of minimum amount of like Fife, Drum and Tuba you have to have before you're allowed to do that? They have to be like lined up in an actual march before you can really... Like we sort of aligned to it. It's worth remembering what counts as incitement and what doesn't.

Right? This may seem obvious to point out, but you know, we mentioned we had this summer of anti-immigrant violence where we knew that we knew the kinds of dog whistles that were getting people involved in that, like two-tier policing, being one of them, for example. But also it's like, okay, well, the government's now publishing a league table of criminal ethnicities. Like, how is that not in sight? But it's also perfectly legal to call for the utter extermination of everyone in Gaza by the IDF, just so long as you do it from the space, from the protected space of an opinion column. Right? Russian mafia bringing in Big Sam as caretaker manager until the end of the season,

since they're losing out to Turkey and Albania. There's sort of like obvious answers to this, is this is you'll go insane if you try to search for any coherence in British counter-extremism strategy, because there isn't any and there never has been and there never will be. Not least because to confront that now is to reckon with lots of extremists who have a lot of proximity to the opposition, as in the official opposition, also the most popular party in the country, also many of the popular parties in Europe, some of whom are in government or who are about to get into government. And so, yeah, you're probably not going to see that anytime soon. But one thing I was thinking about while

you were talking about this was like that recent Louis Faroui documentary on the settlers. And it just sort of made me think that like the way in which you kind of get any sort of criticism about Israel as a society, and that's an important thing because a few years ago, I remember being told, we all remember being told that, yeah, you can criticize Israel without being anti-demestic. That's possible. And only to realize that, oh, apparently that's not. Apparently you can't do that anymore. One of the things about the kneecap stuff is that it's very clear as to its message in terms of who is saying you should fuck and it's not... It is very much a country that is recognized by the United Nations. It is very much a country and the government of that country.

To me, my thinking was, okay, the only way you can now get any criticism of this in any type of mainstream society is to get one of the few and dwindling beloved British figures to do something on that. So it's like, you need, I don't know, you need like, oh fuck, what's his name? The guy... You need Stephen Graham to do something on this. You need the guy from The Chase, the host of The Chase. Send him into Gaza. There we go. Yeah, you need to send, like, Duncan from Blue from Gatelic to Gaza. Maybe this can be like a career pathway, where once you've been, like, a kind of middlingly successful TV comedian in this country, instead of getting into, like, travel shows or transphobia, you can get into this, you know?

I wanna see Rob Bryant, like, in the West Bank, you know? Yeah, the third way. All I was gonna say is, yeah, like, send my Ajama out to, like, in the West Bank, you know? Yeah, the third, the third way. All I was going to say is, yeah, like, send my Ajama out to, like, go hang out with Hamas. I don't know. Like, but you've got, like, a dwindling number of, like, beloved British figures who are, like, constantly having to sort of, like, to-to-ver-line of what they can and can't say. But also that they might be the only people that can actually get, like, a semblance of,

like, what the world is actually like. I'm Emily Maitlis. I've had 400 B&H and I'm here interviewing Hamas. What do you guys really want? Have you considered if you must listen to a band named after a principal joint in the human body, but that's still a great British musical act to try elbow instead of kneecap? Instead of listening to the inflammatory and possibly illegal remarks of DJ Provi and his controversial friends, why not enjoy the post-Britpop styling of Manchester's

very own Guy Garvey, Pete Turner and the Potter brothers? There are 10 studio albums to choose from, none of which, as far as the government is aware, contain any controversial statements about Israel, British military activity in the 70s and 80s in Northern Ireland, which I think we should agree is better forgotten about. And instead, why not show support for a civil, positive, public-spirited progressive patriotism by listening to Elbow's hit song, One Day Like This, featured on the 2012 Olympics closing ceremony. Or further to that, you could try the song Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, which I think is one of the most family-friendly songs of all time.

And crucially has no elbow. No, he does. Yeah, yeah, sorry. It skips out the genitalia, which I think would have been a messy business. So, look, I want to talk about the groups, the groups of guys who we said for years, they are clearly all hanging out, radicalizing one another. My foreshadowing is coming to you. Yes, that's right. Yeah, Elbow. Elbow has gotten very woke on Palestine. At least one member of Elbow might be in a trans-Soviet group chat. I do believe that. This is from an article in Semaphore by Ben Smith, and it is very much one of those,

we were right, we were right the whole time, but all we get for it is a big ribbon that says we were right, and people we were right about are all empowered largely to do what they want. I haven't received my ribbon. I would gladly accept such a ribbon. Do you remember that bit in Get In, where Morgan Sweeney's cackling to himself as he orchestrates this harassment campaign of Corbyn, following him around the country, shouting at him about Brexit? I'm like, we said that was happening! Where's my ribbon?

Yeah. Yeah. Send me a ribbon, that's all I ask. I want a ribbon. So, what's described in this article is, I think Ben Smith, the person who was writing it, I think he is doing some interesting work, say, identifying what's going on, but I don't think he actually has understood much of the significance of what he's seen. What's described is a bunch of largely venture capitalists like David Sachs, Mark Andreessen primarily, right? Primarily, this is about Mark Andreessen, David Sachs, and then other guys from Andreessen Horowitz like Sriram Krishnan, who ran their London office for a while, getting together to create many overlapping group chats with names like

Everything Is Fine or Chatham House or whatever that they would then sort of, uh, pickle themselves in. Yeah. It's like, it's a sort of like, uh, coordinated action through the like, worst memes you've ever seen in your life. Yeah. Well, you can tell because the group names suck. The group names should be stuff like Cinema Bertie, you know? It should be that kind of weird. It should be based on misspellings of stuff that's been said in the group chat.

Yeah. So, also you can see them over time, or at least as it's discussed in a very few messages that are available, you can see them getting to, or at least as it's discussed, in a very few messages that are available, you can see them getting to a sort of insane reactionary position and having the number of people they think are actually human dwindle. We know that Mark Andreessen doesn't think that really anybody else outside his immediate circle is fully human. We know that. Well, because if he thinks he's human and if you'll be using his head shape As the baseline no one else looks human. That's right. Yeah, why do you keep the rest of your brains, you know?

So the only the only humans right it's Marc Andreessen He's immediate employees his friends and then a journalist and propagandists as long as they are largely Working in accordance with what they say. Everybody else has a mind virus. It could be the woke mind virus, it could be Trump Derangement Syndrome, it could be the CCP mind virus, which he accuses Balaji Sreenivasan of having. But crucially, again, this is a real smoke-filled room that's filled with venture capitalists who were plotting the direct downfall of democracy. Vape filled rubes.

Yes, that's right. It is once again, vulgar Marxism vindicated totally. Yeah. They actually are all getting together in a group chat and figuring out how to like, maintain control of the means of production. This is also by the way, going firmly in the hyper-Britification file. It is the politics of America being directed largely by group chat bullshit. Again, there's been a bit of that already, but just more to come. RIP Isabel Oakeshott. You would have loved to lose group chat.

Also, though, remember, a similar set of group chats was released in Britain, where again, a group of powerful people, largely plotted against democracy, or at least especially internal party democracy. Following that, I don't think it's a conspiratorial thing to say a small fraction of group chats were revealed, right? Oh, of course. And, you know, they were just slightly too dumb to turn on disappearing messages, and

now they're all like peers and senior bards in like the Labour government, right? There's no consequences for any of them. One was made a lord. I would love to be made a lord for posting good in the group chat, to be honest. Lord Everly of WhatsApp. So, this is, they say, last Thursday morning, a bit before 10am in Austin and nearly 11pm in Singapore, Joe Lonsdale, one of the co-founders of Palantir, had had enough of Balaji Srinivasan's views on China.

Lonsdale said, this is insane CCP thinking. Not sure what leaders hang out with you in Singapore, but on this you must have been taken over by the China Mind Virus." Mm. I love that these guys bicker so much, though. That is one saving grace here, is you're thinking, okay, well they're all in the room from network together, right? Surely that means they're all agreeing on how to fuck us all over. No no, no.

On the contrary, they all have inscrutable personal beef with each other over things like head shape. Yeah Not that different from our group chat to be fair Whenever anyone's like I'm sick of this like leftist factionalism because you know the right wing are united because that they win because they're united It's like no they win because they have structural advantages. They are as disunited and as petty as we are So Srinivasan we've talked about a million times. Srinivasan, by the way, one of like the architects of what is going on right now in terms of like the dismantling of the state, he responds, well, China has done a

good job for 45 years. Any analysis that doesn't take that into account makes it seem like the U.S. could have held it back. So, yeah, just to acknowledge China's done pretty well in the last 45 years. The Palantir guys in the group chat will be like kicked. You're griefing. You gotta get out of here. Mind virus, mind virus. You're an NPC. But then but Balaji is a real person to them because he's also was sort of wealthy venture capitalist. So they're just like, okay, you've been you've been you have an NPC mode for 15 minutes, then you're a real

person again. He's just put in the sin bin of the group chat. Yeah, so this is this is what they're what they're talking about. Another paragraph here. It was just another day in Chatham House, a giant signal group chat that forms part of these networks that began during the fervent early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and which have fueled a new alliance of tech in the US right. So this is, you know, this is this has been going on for a while. And I think it's no coincidence that this happened

during and after the COVID pandemic, which was a period of pretty unprecedented power for employees of large companies in basically the last sort of 20, 30 years, right? Where things like working from home became common. People, like people especially in IT jobs basically the last 20, 30 years, right? Where things like working from home became common. People, especially in IT jobs, got more control over the conditions of their work, wages were up.

It's no wonder that this is when these guys started getting radicalized. And this is something actually that I think is missed by the Semaphore article, which just doesn't talk about that at all. It just says, these guys were made to go inside and got addicted to their phones, which is, I think, half the story. The reason that they went this way is because all of these guys were also furious that the

government made it illegal for your employees to have to congregate underneath you so you could dominate them. And just because they would get sick and die from the virus. Guy getting slightly neurotic because he doesn't have any women he employs around to sexually harass. I think it would be really funny if any one of these guys had gotten radicalized in the opposite direction and you just had a CEO who started calling it the United Snakes of America. Yeah, he put a Euro sign instead of the E in CEO.

Yeah, yeah. Well, John McAfee was going to go that way, that's why they had him killed. So also this is like this is these are group chats that have like Ben Shapiro, Mark Cuban, Richard Hanania, the fucking like the skull shape guy. Any like public facing guy, anyone who does media like Hanania or like Shapiro, this should make it really obvious to you at this point that the stuff that they say in public, they consider they know perfectly where the slop, right?

Their existence, that just funds or keeps the sort of public prominence up for the stuff that they're really there for, which is to talk to Mark Andreessen. Yeah. Oh, and they, we'll get to what they all think of Marc Andreessen, but like the preview is everyone who isn't basically there's several kinds of people in these group chats. There is venture capitalists, Andreessen Horowitz employees and partners. If your group chat doesn't have these four types of person. And then it has like friendly journalists and podcasters who are so happy to be there that they're

just trying to gas up the rest of these guys, and then Chris Ruffo, basically. ALICE Maybe this is the thing with the rights more organised than us, because I don't remember ever having been in a big left-wing, licking Corbin boot group chat, you know? I don't remember seeing Jeremy Corbyn on WhatsApp any time recently. Well, there were some of those group chats which were again, reported on breathlessly as a sort of plot against democracy by the British press at the time. There was a group chat between- Outing myself as unpopular, but you know.

Well, there was a group chat between Corbyn's office, and then Owen Jones and other similar left-wing journalists to say, here's what we say on this. And then simply that mode of communication was breathlessly reported on for about two news cycles as the sinister plot against the British people being fomented on WhatsApp. Mason- Jeremy Corbyn is overseeing a left-wing bias in the articles of Owen Jones. Jeremy, sick Corbyn, laugh-reacted Owen Jones message. Yeah. If you rearrange all the letters, it could be made to say other things.

So, this is Lonsdale and Democratic billionaire Mark Cuban argued over affirmative action with Ben Shapiro, which is like, could you imagine a worse conversation where it's like Richard Hananiya posts an article that Hispanic people are apt to commit 23% fewer misdemeanors in a space that's painted blue. Mark Cuban follows up with the, why do they always go for thugs? Get lost chick meme to make a confusing anti-racist point. And then Joe Lensdale responds with a son and rat and kicks Hananiya out for being too woke.

Incredible. Yeah, that's really amazing. Richard and any did get kicked out. He did get kicked out for being too woke. Yeah, he's still something he was like, actually, the these skull shapes commit the least crime and they didn't like that. It was the wrong one. So it was it was because the other thing about these group chats and this is like

why the constant presence of Chris Rufo in them is, I think, instructive, is that they started in like 2020, right? And only in the, by 2023, were they basically just fully, almost cupilled just without like this sort of, kind of vulgarity of QAnon, right? Where they were like, they shared all of the same beliefs, like that the 2020 election was stolen. The reason Hananiah gets kicked Yeah. Where they were like, they shared all of the same beliefs, like that the 2020 election was stolen. The reason Hananiah gets kicked out is because they're like, Hananiah is like, again, he's like a sort of died in the wool eugenicist. He's a guy who's like, you know, promoted like,

you know, racial theories of intelligence, all this stuff. He is all like them, but he was saying, I don't know. I think probably democratic institutions are pretty important to preserve. We can still exert like a sort of right-wing revolution through them. And then again, Marc Andreessen was like, woke, gay, kicked, get out of here. It's the type of shit Lenin was doing back in the day. Photoshopping Richard Henany around the world's group chat and the up picks.

So the article goes on. The group chats aren't always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which the realignment towards Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated in an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right forum. The group chats wrote Sri Ram Krishna, one of the key organizers, said they are the memetic upstream

of mainstream opinion, which again, is I think one of the things that the author of this article gets massively massively wrong. All of these guys love to... Ever since the NRX stuff, I've been thinking about how these guys love to convince themselves that they're like mind emperors, right? And anything that, like, they're the ones who are like steering the culture, you know? Yeah, well, this is like, the author keeps taking this stuff

more or less at face value. He thinks these are like the, this is the idea forge, right? Where Mark Andreessen and his employees, a couple other venture capitalists, and suck up journalists and podcasters and Ben Shapiro and Chris Ruffo, all kind of decide, decide what's going to be thought of. What is the mainstream opinion?

And I think it's like, but he thinks of them as coming up with those positions, right? But the positions they actually care about, like, oh, the election was stolen in 2020, right? Stuff like that, or, oh, the COVID was a lab leak in China. All of that, all of that is just like the standard for the rightmost acceptable standard, further, right. Most acceptable mainstream opinion now, right?

They're not leading anything. All they're doing is attracting Silicon Valley to those positions that they were already eager to take. And again, this is not, I think, challenged at all in the article. The idea that this is purely reactive. It's structure again. Yeah. I know. But also that's not how radicalization works, right?

What's happening is these guys aren't coming up with the things that are going to be mainstream opinion. These guys are getting radicalized by their toadies and yes men. Mark Andreessen logs on to his like 100 group chats that he's in and just posts to all day for his hard, long day of CEO work. And then just gets radicalized by them. That's all that's happening. There's no mimetic upstream here of anything. Mark Andreessen is through these group chats, mimetically downstream of some shit that gets cooked up on Facebook.

Yeah. It's like JD Vance and his like discord full of twinks that's steering him, you know? Yeah. Again, it's like this podcast. Twitch plays Pokemon. Yeah. It's like the, but also they, like, I think they are exactly like Facebook pages in the Pacific Northwest circa 2020.

Ideological hothouses, radicalization goes really fucking far, really fucking fast. And you know, all over again, right? This goes back to something we were talking about with, with like kneecap and stuff. Just radicalization or extreme or extremism is something always that happens to progressives, happens to non-white people or foreigners, especially in the case of Britain, Irish people. It happens to some, and then the one sop you get to like,

oh, though this is what we're doing with everybody, is that it happens with non-influential individual right-wingers, right? But what happens when this group of extremely wealthy men radicalizes on opaque encrypted messaging acts to basically destroy the state is nothing, right? That's not, that's not extremism. That's not radicalization. It's not news, crucially. Yeah. Or it's news,

but it cannot be consumed by like the political institutions that matter because they can't see those, they can't see threats from the people that they're supposed to be serving. Again, vulgar Marxism wins the day. NARESH NARAYANAN Not to only be talking about this, but it is kind of important to me, but like, if you want an excellent example of the kind of invisible nature of elite radicalization, look at Transphobia.

Look at how beloved children's author is now single issue campaigner on this specifically in a very strange, obsessive way, and still doesn't get written up that way. Even when it's like, transparently obvious to anyone, looking at it from a completely like, not completely brain-rotted perspective. Hey, what happened to the guy who wrote the It crowd? What happened to that guy? Oh, I dunno, he got, like, you know, obviously radicalized and destroyed his entire life to just do this, right?

And there are so many examples of this, and it just doesn't register at all, and instead all you get is the kind of effect of someone someone like John Lithgow or, you know, someone else who wants to keep their career being like, well, you know, I think we should just bring the temperature down. I don't see what all the fuss is about, you know? I think like one of the obvious things is also like, and again, it goes back to like your, like the very first questions whenever you're sort of studying or thinking about counter radicalization, which is like, who gets to define what a radical is? Who gets to define what an extremist is? Those are such like basic questions, but like

who gets to define it as such an important thing? Because it's like, well, you know, you can sort of go through the same path, like, you know, so much of, so much of, at least like in this country and in the UK, like so much of, if not all of counter extremism, counter radicalization is sort of structured around anti-Islamism. That itself has had this extended definition for quite a long time to the point where it's very difficult to actually figure out what the people who are supposedly looking for signs of radicalisation, what they're actually looking for. One of the things that came out of this is the idea of the conveyor belt to radicalisation.

Lots of the things that have been described in relation to transphobia, other aspects of genesis racism and stuff, the ways in which these ideas are adopted are pretty much things described by current counter extremism legislation. I don't know what it's like in the US, but I can only talk about it in the UK in some European context. But nothing is really done to it. And not only that, but the people, groups like the Equality and Human Rights Commission, who are very, very quick to talk about the prevailing threat of Islamist radicalisation in this country, despite the fact that there is not really much evidence to suggest that's even close to as much of a threat as it was maybe 10 years ago, if you believe what the basic first principles were.

The point is that they'll just ignore what are very, very obvious signs by their own definitions. All of which is to say that both the vagueness of how an extremist is considered and how it's conceptualised works in the favour of these people. But it also makes reporting on them for people like Ben Smith. I don't know whether I'm giving him too much credit to say that it makes it hard. I don't think it does, but I can understand why he would become hesitant to define it purely because I imagine he's not that far removed from people who like signed up to at least some of what these guys are saying.

Yeah, I think that's probably true. But what really we're describing here is like in so many cases, the liberal state being unwilling or unable to recognize threats to itself from the elite right. Again, there's another dynamic here as well, which is a bunch of Atlantic writers get invited to these for a while. Guys like Thomas Chatterton Williams, he says, okay, well I was in a group chat with Andreessen and he said for this article, if you weren't in the business at all, you'd think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently, but they're not. It's this small group of people who talk to each other and overlap

between politics, journalism, and a few industries. And then Chatterton he, he after signing the open letter to Harper's Bazaar, being like awokeness has gone too far, right? A bunch of them were brought into one of those group chats at an early, at an early period. Well, Chris Ruffo was still in there. And then again, you know, they get into an argument about whether critical race theory should be banned. And the heterodox liberals are like, well,

I disagree with everything they say, but you know, I mean, we ought not to ban it. And then again, Mark Andreessen and the rest of his, like, fellow travelers, the ones who are willing to go say this far and no further, a little further than the sort of quote unquote classical liberals who fall for it every time. Right. All those guys banned out. You're out of here. But again, if you're like an Atlantic opinion writer and you know that like the richest ten guys in America are

plotting to Agreeing with each other that it's necessary to overthrow the government and largely eliminate democracy Do you just not say anything for four years? You don't yeah, you don't say well You only get to be in that group shadow on sufferings anyway By being the person who even if you are kicked out of it for being an NPC does not say shit to anyone? Yeah. Thomas not very Chatterton, William.

Thomas keeps it to himself, Williams. Yeah, so in February, Andreessen described the group chats to podcaster Lex Friedman, who's also almost certainly in them, as quote, The equivalent of Samizdat, the self-published Soviet underground press. Oh my god, these fucking nerds. In the soft-authoritarian age of social media shaming and censorship, he says, The combination of encryption and disappearing messages really unleashed it. The chats, he wrote recently, helped produce our national, quote, vibe shift. And then, again, another example of the author getting it completely wrong, he says,

The chats are marked by the sort of thing that would have got you scolded on Twitter in 2020, and which would pass unremarked upon on X in 2025. Ooh, my secret summer's dot chat where I can say the word. Yeah, well, later on in the article, they're like, you know, every group chat ends up about being memes in humour, and the goal of the group chat is to get as close to the line with being objectionable without actually tripping it, said Andreessen to Friedman, people will set their disappearing messages to five minutes before they say something particularly inflammatory. That's just the word. It's just before they just say the word, presumably.

Yeah. You were never being censored. You were just being responded to. The whole theme for me of this revelation that this thing that we definitely knew was happening was actually happening. It's gratifying to see that it was like reading the book Careless People. It's gratifying to see that it was we were right. It was actually happening. Gratifying in one sense. Yes. That the objection is purely is you, Mark Andreessen, were never being censored. Ever. No one has ever censored you. People have answered back to you. Right.

You and your fellow business elites have been driven completely insane by like a small amount of ability to resist you, whether that's by people not being able to like work remotely or people just being able to call you an idiot. And all of that, just all of these, this small amount of push completely radicalizes you into like a network state guy. It's not enough for me to be richer than anybody has ever been in the course of history. You all have to also like it. You have to love it.

Yeah. Right. You have to think it's cool. And I'm sorry, I don't, I don't think it's cool. You know, I will keep making fun of you. I will keep replying to all of your tweets with incoming message from the big giant head. Yeah. There was only one group chat name they had which I thought was a group chat name that we could have possibly had, which was the Matt Iglesias fan club. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That also briefly coincided. A tiny, almost asymptotic Venn diagram overlap there. Horseshoe theory real, but only for scoring points off of Matt Iglesias. Generally speaking, I think this is less politically insightful, right? Because all of these guys weren't just getting radicalized in the group chats. They were also getting, if you knew how to read what they were writing, you could see that they were just getting radicalized like this for a long time. If you tell me, hey, did you know that like, you know, Mark Andreessen is, you know, fully like a January 6 truth or do you know that he's like, you know,

Exactly with Balaji and dismantling the state whatever whatever. Yeah, we've known for years. Yeah, of course Right Ben Horowitz is trying to his former partner I'm sure is also in these groups is like trying to turn the Las Vegas Police Department into Judge Dredd because he's afraid of like a minority. Yeah. It's like what power level do you believe you are hiding here, dude? Yeah, exactly. The plot of Minority Report, but the title is a lot more literal. So this is, if nothing else, a fantastic insight into Andreessen in particular, because he's

unable to stop posting and arguing 20 hours a day. People who see him are just like, wow. I quote here, I've had a friend or source tell me in wonder that Andreessen was blowing up their phone. His hunger for information was astonishing when a participant in the group chat said, my impression is that Mark spends more than half of his life on 100 of these at the same time. Because he doesn't have a real job. Like he just kind of nods his head to giving people more amount, like, greater amounts

of money than they could possibly need or use. Well, yeah. He didn't even write any of those Stormbreaker books. That was his part, man. Someone who sat next to Andreessen at a conference during this period recalled watching with awe as he flipped his phone from group chat to group chat, responding and engaging with manic speed. That's really sad.

Again. Like, again, like you talk about elite radicalization, but like that's concerning, you know? Well I think manic speed might be the operative term here. Because he's on drugs. Yeah. I think, Nova, you were right with the glimmer comparison. I think there is an element to which I could now plausibly imagine Mark Andreessen being seen in the supermarket buying everything he needs for a carbonara, including the pan.

Like, it has that energy to it. In some ways this is like one of the most unhealthy things about being a billionaire, right, is there are no consequences for you, only for other people. So like, you can't ruin your own life meaningfully. I mean, you can make it really unpleasant, like, we've all seen that photo of Elon Musk's bedside table, right? But like, you can't destroy it in the way that you're never gonna, like, you're never gonna face the same consequences as, like, TV writer would, you know?

You're never gonna feel it. Like, it's just, the worst you're gonna feel is, I feel miserable all the time, it must be the fault of the wokes, you know? And it just drives you further into it. Yeah. Better do Katamon about it. Yeah. So, he says, they're having all these private conversations because they weren't

allowed to have the public conversations, uh, Andreessen told a fellow tech founder on another recent podcast. But they were having them, like, semi-publicly, like, anytime any of this shit leaks out about, like, oh, you know, I was hanging out with fucking Menchus Moldberg and Peter Thiel, you know? It's like, anybody with a, with like a brain could have guessed what they were saying to each other, the word, back and forth in sequence. I don't get this idea that Joe Biden was about to send in the fucking federal marshals, you

know? Yeah, well, if it wasn't for all the censorship, these conversations would have happened in public and that would have been much better. I'm just, I'm just, it's a really basic, basic thing. But if you say something racist and then like the most milquetoast liberal in the world says powerlessly, hey, that's racist. You're not being censored. You're being annoyed. Right?

Yeah. Well, it's the, again, we talk about being that rich as akin to like, you know, sort of cognitive impairment. Yeah. we talk about being that rich as akin to like, you know, sort of cognitive impairment, that you cannot distinguish between sort of material and immaterial things anymore. ALICE Well, there are no material things to you. These guys are sort of, the NRX thing is right in the sense that they have abstracted themselves above the kind of like, petty day-to-day concerns of the rest of us and the pigsty, but only in the sense that they only think in terms of their feelings.

And that hasn't made them better thinkers, it hasn't made them philosopher kings, it's just made them the kind of people for whom having their feelings hurt is mentally equivalent to being shot with a gun. Because on some level they know that's what they deserve. It's like a very simple sort of explanation, which is just like, the annoying liberals who say something publicly and they might get a response or two of us. It's like, hey, that's kind of racist. Maybe tone it down a little bit there, Chump. That might be the only level of criticism they really get. And I wonder whether if you're in a situation where

everyone tells you that you're amazing and you're really rich and you're really wealthy and that you're being praised all the time, even the smallest amount of criticism is enough to send you into a real frenzy. I wonder whether it's just that and whether... We've spoken about this in different contexts before, but the thing about Twitter and social media more broadly, being this tool that allows you to have proximity to people with power and influence that probably shouldn't have been a thing. That probably wasn't a mistake overall. But the point being that the celebrities who were also using them were also able to hear for the first time what some people thought about them. And it made a lot of them just go crazy. And during the early 2010s, it was very funny to see musicians

lose their mind over a one-star pitchfork review or something like that, but now it just so happens that like, okay it's like these insane billionaires who like are really really thin-skinned and also have a lot more power than like Halsey did in 2014 or whatever when she called for like a 9-11 of the pitchfork building. I have a great example of this actually and I and I have some deep lore here, and I'm trying to work out how to tell it in a way that doesn't throw my friend under the bus, but one of the things that made Graham Linehan the way he is now is, back in the day, way, way back in the day, there was an episode of The It Crowd that he wrote that had a trans woman character in it, right?

And it was a bit transphobic, right? In a way that, like, who cares? It's the kind of thing that, like, it's always it, right? And it was a bit transphobic, right? In a way that, like, who cares? It's the kind of thing that, like, it's like always sunny, right? You watch it on the rewatch years later and you're like, ehh. But so a friend of mine, like, replied to him politely on Twitter being like, yeah, I mean, you know, I like the show, fan of your work, it's just this one thing just, you know, rang a little bit, like, you know, wrong for me and it's like, it's a little bit hurtful. And he was very apologetic, right? And he was like, Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know that about like the trans community or whatever. And that I think sort of was the first step towards the carbonarification.

It's like, yeah, it's, it's the Domino meme where it's just like, this friend like tweeting Grableven, like the end point being Grableven has divorced, and then the bigger Domino which is Carpenter. Yeah. Genuinely, and because that's a completely normal interaction, but it's not one that you could really necessarily have had in the same way before Twitter. I'm okay, not everybody who gets that is going to kind of respond in that way. It's kind of an edge case, but I think if you're a billionaire, you're absolutely primed for it. You have no natural

defenses to that kind of criticism. These people replying to my tweets are nothing like my yes men that I talk to all day long. Many of them appear to be no men. Some of these no men are women. I've got to do something about this. Essentially, if you wanted to boil it down, that's a huge amount of what I think happened. And especially, again, it's like the person we haven't talked about here, of course, is Chris Ruffo is present in a bunch of them. Right? That guy, I think, not to develop a kind of like autogynephilia for fascism, but that

guy so clearly gets off on thinking of himself as a kind of s-fengali, you know? Like, it seems so satisfying to him to be able to be like, I'm pulling the strings to execute my evil plan of pushing on an open door. Yeah, so the Chris Ruffo stuff really comes up in the article where the signers of that open, the signatories, excuse me, of the open letter in the Atlantic about, you know, free expression and be nice to Barry Weiss, basically. Yeah. That's a good slogan. You could use that one. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the people who actually feel like Thomas Chatterton Williams, who

actually seem to believe that right wing lie on free speech, the flattening of everything into a free speech issue, but actually believe that completely incoherent idea. Right? They, you know, get into these groups and like I mentioned, there's a bickering, a little bit of a bicker between them, Andreessen, and Rufo about some critical race theory idea, where they're like, again, Rufo and Andreessen are like, it should be treason to teach critical race theory, and you know, Thomas Chatterton Williams is like, that goes against the great American experiment in self-expression. Oh no, we lost the guy who said that, like, reading books saved him from the depredations of hip-hop culture.

Indeed, right? And then Chris Ruffo is like, ah yes, this was my secret plan to wedge the sort of heterodox liberals away from tech and have them embrace the new right. Because again, as you say, November, this is the greatest open door pusher that has ever lived. But again, it's another example of how the state or like the establishment, whatever it is, is unable to see threats to it from its right. Is it wrong to look at the history of the Russian revolution and see a little bit of Leon Trotsky and Chris Ruffo? This idea of like someone who is being propelled by structural forces on some level is able to acknowledge those but still can't resist the trap of being like this is

my genius. Yeah well yeah because he because again Chris Ruffo's interviewed for the article and he's very very transparent he's like yeah what I wanted to do was I wanted to radicalize all of these tech billionaires but meanwhile it's like they're all doing it themselves. They've been doing it themselves for a while. You're just there. Chris Rufo speaking from his special train. Says we were going to lie about what it's like.

He's like, he just would post like, yeah, we're going to lie about what academics are doing so people start to hate and fear them as though he wasn't just inventing a new term for panics that have been happening about these kinds of things in America, for like, in the UK as well, we just sort of catch it from them, since, I don't know, forever. This is, as you say, the greatest open door pusher who just takes a reflexively conservative position on everything. The only thing he had then now, that his fellow travellers didn't, was that he realised he

could just be very honest about what he wanted, because these institutions can't see vexatiousness from their right. But yeah, no, it's, I think you're entirely right there, it's just really funny that people, like liberals particularly, are credulous enough then to go, okay, well, you know, clearly, his open critique of our institutions can't be right, because that wouldn't indict us. This man must be some kind of savage hypergenius. Yeah, yeah well it's uh I want to speak of savage hypergenius's new group name. Didn't see any mention of Dominic Cummings in any of these chats. That must have hurt. It must have hurt a lot when this article came out.

If you're Dominic Cummings and you're like oh I wasn't in the like genius accelerationist you, destroy the administrative state and woke ideology group chat, the one that actually did propel a lot of its members into positions of power and influence. He's actually part of another group chat, it's really important, everyone there goes to a different ideological school, you wouldn't know any of them. I think the key distinction is that Cummings both has like, shit chat, by like, even amongst these guys, but also I think that's his insulation is, I don't think he'll be hurt by this knowledge

at all, because he'll just be like, oh, well they don't recognise my even more superior genius. What I was gonna say was that, the sort of most obvious reason why he's not involved in any of these group chats is because he's British, right? And like his obsessions, at least from like when I read his newsletter many years ago, was partly like his own grievances that he wasn't treated fairly in like when he was in government and like he wasn't treated as the genius he was. But his obsessions are like to do with the British state. And so I imagine he's seen as like very kind of small fish compared to the big skulls in this group chat.

When Rufo then said, he says, yeah, a lot of these technologists, none of these guys are technologists. They're all venture capitalists. They're investors. They're gamblers. They're not technologists. A lot of these technologists hope that the centrist path is a viable one because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans. By 2021, people in tech understood that these people, that the centrist were a dead end, so the group chats exploded and reformulated in more explicitly political lines, which were a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely

and high impact new coalition partners." Again, this guy has to be like such a fucking hyper genius to figure this shit out. Yeah. But again, most of this, it's just Mark Andreessen's court specifically, where the people who are in them, he would just tell his employees at Andreessen Horowitz, people like Krishnan or Catherine Boyle, just be like, okay, go get me smart people. Bring me smart people from my court. But because we live in a world of total abstraction, where all of the value and the wealth is being

generated from fake internet burrito delivery companies, basically. The King's Court or the smoke-filled room or all this stuff that happens, it's happening in this totally alienated way, just where people on their phones not paying attention in meetings or sitting at home bitching at each other in a signal group chat. Right. RILEY But it is the same dynamic of, go assemble me some courtiers who will flatter my pretensions at philosophy. ALICE Yeah, Chris Ruffo being like, you know, but

the start of my plan was easy, because of my sort of deep knowledge of these institutions, wearing the jester hat and it's jingling the whole time. It's like, no, your role is to tell stories for an idiot that involves the use of the word nunkle a lot. Yeah. By mid-April, David Sachs had had enough with Chatham House, this group that was mostly Mark Cuban arguing with conservatives, saying, "'This group has become worthless since the loudest voices all have Trump Derangement

Syndrome. You should create a new one with just smart people.' Then he left the group, along with Sequoia partner, Sean McGuire, Tyler Winklevoss and Tucker Carlson. Cool. You have been added to Chatham House group chat, brackets, secret. Punished, punished Chatham, Chatham house.

Yeah, or again, it's like, okay, the over and over again, right, and we'll sort of come to an end on this. This is shown to be a way to, like all forms of radicalization, this is shown to be a way of constantly escalating and raising the stakes. And what these group chats I think are for is to keep the people in them excited about that process of constant escalation and stake raising. So if you're going to say, if you're going to, again, as the sort of tech right splits between people who are like, hey, the tariffs are going to impact my business and the people who are like, it's more important that we destroy

democracy, right, because that we create kind of neo feudalism or whatever. It's that these escalators only go one way, right? They only go up. And what's going to be the end result of, okay, yeah, a group of very powerful, influential people were, were conspiring together over the last four years, slowly getting radicalized by like one guy, the New York Times can't stop profiling. What's the sort of institutional response to that? It's nothing. Oh, institutionally, it's nothing. Okay. Yeah. Great stuff. It goes back to this theme that we've been talking about while we're looking at the destruction of various states, which is, can't see threats to their right. Especially if those threats are elite.

I hate it when the liberal state defends itself against the left, but I hate it even more when the liberal state fails to defend itself against the right. And curiously, it's almost as if those two things go hand in hand, and doing the one kind of prevents it in many ways from doing the right. And curiously, it's almost as if those two things go hand in hand and doing the one kind of prevents it in many ways from doing the other. Oh, I couldn't imagine that. That seems pretty far fetched. Anyway, things looking up for Sakir Starmer. Yeah. Well, I've got a little Starmer stuff that we're gonna, I mean, we've gone for time now, so I'm going to put that into Thursday's episode, but there has been some- A little bit of like pre-sizzle for the summer.

We can hear the people saying, please, we're so bored, we'd love to hear from Sakeir Starber. Really wake me up on a kind of like long Monday afternoon, you know? Perhaps he's got some great zingers that we would love to hear, we'd write it out day. He's gonna tell us about his favorite songs by the band Elbow. But there is one more thing I want to say about this, right? It's not just the states that is unable to see these kinds of threats, right? Who is the British state's number one partner for rewiring itself, quote unquote, in the age of AI?

It's the company that was founded by the guy who is like one of the loudest, like, oh, you have Trump derangement syndrome, get out of here for, you know, not denying the election result or whatever guys on the tech, right. It's Palantir. Those guys are all there. Right. We welcomed the if Andreessen Horowitz opens up an office in London tomorrow is the fact that like the founder and like head partner of this company, is that going to change the fact that he openly is involved in, you know, these, these like elite radicalization networks. Will that stop like us from welcoming, uh, Andreessen Horowitz,

reopening their closed London office? Absolutely not. I wonder if the office would be like a big egg. Yeah. That'd be fine. They should be in the gherkin. They could be in the gherkin. They should paint the top of it to look like Mark Andreessen. Yeah. That's how we can get them back. We'd have to change the shape of the London orb that we were going to build into more

of an ovoid. But we can project his entire head onto it. It would be like that city in South Korea that was going to build a Mount Rushmore of the great technologists that were from that city, so that they would try and move back to that city. Awesome. Awesome. I think it's time for us to head off.

It's been time enough for today. You'll hear more from Starmer's plans to rewire the state, quote unquote, from us on Thursday. In the meantime, on Thursday, that's gonna be when we record the bonus episode, which goes on the Patreon. But doing this show for seven years still can't nail the dismount.

Yeah, well, look, it's hard to nail the dismount. Also shows. TF Live. TF Live show, 21st of June at the Big Fat Festival. There's also Lions Led by Donkeys and Glue Factory that weekend. You can buy a ticket to all three, which is a slight discount over the cost of the three

individual tickets, if you want. Also, My Ireland tour dates are on sale. I'm doing Kilkenny Cat Laughs last weekend in May. I'm doing Dublin on the 2nd of June, Cork on the 3rd of June and Belfast on the 5th of June, where I'll be unveiling my big pro-Palestine banner and inviting every journalist in the UK to come and watch. Please get a ticket for those. Also, I forgot to mention this before Bristol. I have cooked up with some other people the idea of doing a parody of Question Time. And this is like an interactive show which will be filmed.

It's happening in Bristol on the 14th of June. Please buy tickets to it. I won't ask you what you do for a living or call you a nonce. It's like interactive in like a fun way. But you also have to be up for that. I chose to do this in Bristol because I trust you people of Bristol. Okay. Don't let me down. All right. That's right. All right. All right.

So now that we've done done the plugs, what you're doing again? Yeah, I'm going to be in Tromsø. There we go. Yeah. Malbark. Yeah, that's right. Uleanovsk. The Osuri River. Yeah, Durban.

Yeah, why not? Yeah. We're going to one day we're going to work. once we repeat a town name, we're gonna have to stop. You haven't, you've already mined Canada for that, you know? There's no, there's gonna be a yellow knife. White horse. Medicine hat.

Medicine, red deer. Medicine hat is great. Where is the fox at? It's Alberta. All right, all right. We gotta go. Bye everybody. Bye.

Bye. That's Alberta. All right. All right. We got to go. Bye, everybody. Bye.