TRASHFUTURE - Drone 9/11

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

On this week's free episode, the crew of Riley, Hussein, Nate, and November discuss killer robots, spooky stories about the Antichrist, an abortive coup in South Sudan, and more! Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows *TF LIVE ALERT* You can get tickets for our show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I'm really excited for next year's Glastonbury, where they have Al Murray, the pub landlord headlining at the pyramid stage, supported by Richard Kemp, telling more stories. Roy Chubby Brown on the main stage. Yeah, yeah. All of it's sponsored by James Dyson. Selling you on the benefits of anti-woke Britain. He can't sell you on Brexit anymore.

I'm a moderate liberal centrist. And what that means is we need to restore civility to Glastonbury by force, by sending in the army to just shoot at will, basically. GARETH Win Marshall, I am 27 year old conservative, my music festival yearns for freedom. ALICE I went to Glastonbury and my big blue rosette and my straw boser and everyone laughed at me, please drop a J-Dam directly on the chill out tent.

Yeah, they're hired. They're trying to get Gang of Four back together despite Andy Gill being dead because they want them to perform Heat Send in the Army, not realizing the point of the song. I love a man in uniform. I think it's just a really, there's something I've learned about good classical liberal politics, right? I mean, classical liberal, the liberalism of Locke and Mill and Hobbes, these guys, the school guys, the guys you learn in school, classical liberals.

Of course, the nice respectable kind of peaceable liberals. Yeah. Sure. Don't read about, don't read all of the chapters of them, but they're nice, respectable, peaceable liberals. And what I've learned is that if you're going to be a classical liberal in that tradition, if you found yourself sort of horrified by everything the Soviet Union ever did, the most important thing is that you have government sign off of every single piece of cultural production at all in case it interferes with important foreign policy commitments. Yeah. They're going to put everyone on the panel on, have I got news for you? They're going to put a shock collar on them just in case, you know, they ever say anything that's slightly

out of pocket. I mean, do you think that liberals ever kind of get together and sort of like put their head in the hands and go, oh, we're gonna have to kill so many people? Or is it like, is the beauty of liberalism that it's always a surprise to them when they have to like bring the hammer down? I obviously am getting to experience a little bit different because of just the place where I live now and the fact that there's like proportional representation and infinity weird parties and parties constantly merging and demerging. And so in our, even just our

local governing council, you know, the, the, the Contonal government, we have the, the radical liberal party. We have the social justice party, the central party. We have the radical Liberal Party. We have the Social Justice Party, the Central Party. There's also the real Liberals, which aren't represented here, but they're a national party. The continuity Liberals. They're so named, of course, because they don't agree with the Good Friday Agreement. Yeah. There's also the Green Liberals. And I'll give you an example of one of the things they did here. Many people who speak French may have encountered a very popular kids cartoon

from starting from the late 90s onward called T-Tuff. The guy who created T-Tuff is Swiss. He's from Geneva and he's obviously very wealthy now because it's like the world's most French language sponsorship endorsed thing ever. He owns a house. It's a big, he wants to sell it. It's like a villoped house, not too far from where I live in a relatively like mostly built up neighborhood. And the liberal party is launching a referendum to determine whether basically to call the plebiscite on whether or not this guy is allowed to sell his house. This is, this is small government. This is like, this is liberalism, you know, basically he bought a house and he wants to sell it and live elsewhere in the country. I mean,

he's a citizen in this country and he basically negotiated to sell it to the cities. They could turn it into a museum because otherwise it's just going to get bought by an insane foreign buyer and turned into like, you know, the fucking compound full of Hennessy and 0% taxation cigarettes. And so the liberal party has decided this, this can't stand because the market has to determine the price of the house because the city is apparently paying too much. So basically everyone's going to have to vote, well, people who can vote on whether or not cartoonist guys allowed to sell his house. And to me, I find that there's something so like in a way, because like a lot of the structural problems of a country like the United Kingdom are less here

and they basically can focus on the real problems of liberalism, which is like this insane fixation that like the markets got to decide all the, and also that like this cannot stand because of what we might describe as like the principle of it. If you resolve to be, to take the stupid as possible interpretation of something. And I feel like what we've seen in Glastonbury with basically everyone being like Glastonbury has to be... No, you can't nuke Glastonbury because they already said you were supposed to do that in 2017 to get rid of all the Corbyn followers, and now they're like, oh no no no, actually suggesting violence in any way is bad. Oh, the police are actually going to be investigating Bob Villain and NECAP.

This is why people join the police, right, is to go through old tweets and like old footage from Glastonbury to be like, is how much trouble can we make for this person? I just I think the thing that makes me feel better about this is you look at an artist whether it's an Ecap or Bob Velma or whoever right you know doing sort of like a chance that is supportive of Palestine and you look out at this like sea of Palestinian flags and you think what liberalism of the kind that wants to say, you know, this is unacceptable to broadcast on the BBC, we have to have the police investigate, we have to have the CPS prosecute this, is a kind of ideology that

is now at war with not just what a large amount of the British public think, but basically with reality. And it's not for the first time, I thought the same thing with a lot of the trans stuff, where it's like, you are trying to use all of the kind of repressive levers of the state that liberals are so fond of in a way that is just going to be ridiculous. So it was a bit in The Guardian, where what I'm going to do and air quotes, home office staff assigned to combating terrorism were briefing anonymously that banning Palestine action, prescribing them, was going to be like a nonsense because you would have to prosecute so many people. It would just be, you know, completely beyond the kind of system that's currently set up to enforce that. And if you get to the

point where the the intelligence community is kind of briefing against you anonymously to be like, yeah, we just can't do that. The thing that you want is not possible because too many people support Palestine and obviously recognise a genocide when they see one. I don't know where that leads other than to complete kind of electoral oblivion for liberals. And that might be worse, but it's not something that they're equipped to deal with at all. What we've seen with the right is that they've placed a solution to this, recognizing that

there are too many people to use the carceral state to punish them. So instead, they've become very fixated with deportations. Mass deportations is the number one is the only policy the right really has, but they have some sort of memetic obsession. It also poses this challenge to liberals because as you've mentioned, liberals are their fetishisation of institutions and they're doubling down on that as they all collapse under the state of their own contradictions and the fact that they were all farcical anyway. They're now having to, on the one hand, reckon with a reality that is very far removed from their obsessions and their fixations, but also dealing with a challenger that is a lot more vicious and a lot more violent and believes in the power of the state, but believes that the only way it can function is to be punitive, as punitive

as possible. And so, they're in a real pickle, because it's sort of like, well, the idea of these institutions being benevolent and we can present state violence as being very rational and reasoned. Well, no one's really interested in that anymore. It's the same thing on both sides of different shrinking constituencies. There are decreasing numbers of squishy liberals who want to punish you for your own good for being pro-Palestine. And then there are decreasing numbers, despite what it sometimes feels like, of right-wingers who want to punish you for their own pleasure for you being pro-Palestine. But as both of those constituencies shrink, they kind of concentrate and they demand more authoritarianism. What they're demanding is the total destruction, at this point, of what's left of the British

creative sector, except for it seems, the one guy from Blur. Mason- Yeah, because basically it's the same thing as it ever was, and you can see this with a lot of the homophobia and a lot of the transphobia as well, is having decisively lost the culture, and having lost what most people think. Mason- Do you recall in 2017 there was a band called Captain Scott that had a song called Liar, Liar about Theresa May and the BBC banned it, but it was like, I think it got to number four on the UK singles chart because of people buying the digital single. And like basically

the BBC went out of its way to make sure that this didn't get played. I don't think it was ever played on the air except for on pirate radio, or if it did, it was definitely not in wide distribution. And it's like the song effectively was like Theresa May is a liar and she sucks. Which I mean, the idea that you can be like, okay, take that principle of people feel this way, but we're not going to let them hear or express it. Find whatever you want to say the BBC has some sort of whatever standard of impartiality. We all know that's horseshit, but I understand how they can convince people that this is true. But then it's like, take a mass news event and apply that same principle to it. Like

it's effectively being like giving the captain Scott treatment to 9-11. Like, no, it didn't fucking happen. And you're not allowed to talk about it. 9-11 will not be placing on the top singles charts in the UK this year. In fact, it won't place any year. It was not top events of the decade. It didn't happen. It's like, that is so undeniably horrible that it's getting worse and worse. To the point where you're seeing Mehdi Hassan's spinout magazine ZDio did a thing where they got an anonymous article by a guy who was a private security contractor hired from America to do the Gaza aid. And he was just like, no, the Israelis are just using it as a pretext to kill everyone. And this is basically a Blackwater guy being like, I'm fucking disgusted. It's that level

of bad, but then it's like every lever of state power in the United Kingdom says, you are not allowed to think that. It's illegal. It's anti-Semitic. And regardless of your opinions of calling for violence, even if it's against a military target, I mean, real with you, speaking as a formerly completely valid fucking target to get killed. I don't have anything bad to say. I don't disagree with the right to express that. And frankly, if you force me to pick a side, I'm gonna pick fucking the Palestinian side, obviously. The idea that you can suppress that, you can use like, that's not allowed to be said, that's not allowed to be thought, it's against the law. We're going to use the same law that we sent the dude to prison for about fucking

making fun of Captain Tom to go after like any band who expresses solidarity with Palestine. Like I don't see that being sustainable, it's just so farcical. It just isn't. It's the thing that this is the thing that's gonna like, it feels like the lever that's gonna break off in your hand. Yeah. Like it feels like this is the thing that the British government has decided must at all costs, like even if it like completely ablates its own capacity to repress, right, even if it like discredits

the BBC, even if it makes like MI5 useless, like whatever it takes, this is the thing that, you know, it has to be, and it has to be. Israel can do whatever it wants forever, fuck you. They wore off the paint on the racism button and also the lever of powers made out of 1970s bakelight and it hasn't survived the recent heat waves because they can't afford fucking air con in the control center. So it's just snapping off. But I think this is it. I think like the most cynical are sort of very aware of this. Like they're very like, and when I talk about the cynical, I sort of mean cynical. There's cynics everywhere, but right-wing

cynics definitely recognise what's happening in Gaza, but also the state response to that and the increasing use of authoritarianism is number one proof that you can just do that if you want to. I'm not even saying reform will do this, although I wouldn't be surprised. But there are lots of politicians across the board who are very much looking at this and being like, oh, we can use the state to just suppress people for whatever we want. You don't even need to explain the circumstances. They don't really even need to make sense. You can just do that. You can just use it. I think there are some people who are very invested in like kind of pretending, I would say, or at least kind of like their sort of like belief in like, you know, the

integrity of Israel or whatever is not entirely sort of driven by a love for it or whatever. I think it is part of it is very much like, oh, we need to sort of like preserve this at the moment, or at least sort of like let this kind of continue to derail because eventually like in the right hands, AKA my hands, like I can use it to sort of like, you know, create the type of sort of country that I want to. I think like, I think like people like Robert Jenrick are sort of like a good example of that. Right. Well, that's that's the shrinking wire thing, right? Is to be like what Israel is doing now today is what I want to do in like five, 10 years time.

Remember, that's exactly what Richard Spencer said. And that's also what people like Tommy Robinson have at least alluded to that the support for Israel isn't based on, in their case, it's not like the sort of Christian eschatology. It's here as a state governed explicitly on racial lines in which there is a supreme race who has rights and no one else does. And the state enforces that with boots, guns, tear gas, bombs, et cetera. And we want that too. We want a white ethno state like Israel. Now Israel's not like, it's not based on whiteness per se, but the same concept. It's pretty easy to transplant that. And yeah, I agree with you a hundred percent. Like they have to support the idea that it can do no wrong. Mostly, I think, like you were saying

Hussein, because it's like, that's how they would govern given the choice. And, you know, I think if we can segue as well into into Zoran here, right? Probably should probably introduce the podcast first. Oh shit. Right. It's Trashfuture. You know all about it. Yeah. You know what? The other day I was listening to like, I'm sorry to do it again. I was listening to like some podcasts on like Tortoise, like or something like that. And they didn't introduce like the show. They didn't say welcome to Tortoise. This is the name of the program until half an hour

into this hour long podcast. Hey, they're biting our thing. Many, many such cases. So don't, so don't feel, don't feel too bad about it. I feel like, you know, it is very much the trend now to sort of be like, introduce it like almost just, just to the point where it nearly finished. Yeah. Okay. Well, uh, hi everybody. It's trash feature. You know all about it Hi, if you're listening to it, you know, you know the stuff if you're new to it, you'll figure it out So I want to segue though into into Zoran here as well because you know what we are at the advanced stage Of sort of some of these similar claims, right? We have been doing this for a while and now the in the British state as we've talked about is perfectly willing to

Completely go to war against its university sector. This is the thing. You can kind of generalize this to a kind of global theory of outsourcing, right? Where if you remember we read the Palestine Laboratory, right? On Left on Red, which kind of posits, among other things, that one of the things that Israel is useful to capital for is a kind of test bed, right? In that it has this kind of zone of occupation in which it can test new technologies and methods of repression and occupation and so on. I feel like in some ways Britain occupies the kind of media lens of that, of Britain

is the kind of test bed for how can we make a nominal democracies media as repressive as possible in a way that excludes the left, right? Because anything that you're going to see targeted at Zoran was tried against Corbyn first. And this is the thing, I said this with some of the Bernie campaigns, the challenge for the American left is partially to see what happened here and why the left in this country has failed and to go, like, this is part of a media ecosystem with a lot of particularly American money and American ideas flowing into it, but not exclusively, that has been able to structure itself very successfully thus far to completely shut down things that are, you know, on the numbers, uncontroversial. Well, it also always felt with Corbyn like the goal was whatever the excuse you needed, they would find a way to provide a kind of, speaking of liberals yet again, top cover to say, here is why this thing that is obviously, like you just said, November, uncontroversial, why it's not just wrong, but it's immoral to support it. Here's, even if it's completely confected,

even if it's exaggerated, doesn't matter what it is, here's the reason why it is actually immoral to even allow this kind of politics to exist. And that's obviously very transparent. We could see right through it at the time, but like, unfortunately, sometimes it's just a matter of creating a kind of critical mass of dumb bullshit time wasting concern troll excuses. And that I feel as though, yeah, that Britain is absolutely, Corbyn aside, absolutely the fucking, yeah, like the, the, the testing ground, the sort of Los Alamos, white sands national monument of that shit. I Read in a newsletter today the restaurant that put Los Alamos on the map and I was like, I don't think it was that Actually, that's the British state's end goal is they have to drop a specially concentrated fucking thing to a kind of explosive

That's gonna turn just Jeremy Corbyn's allotment into trinitrite All of his marrows are gonna become trinitrite. They're gonna become radioactive glass But I want to segue briefly into Zoran here right as well because what's really I mean I say shocking It's just you know, it is it's typical but depressing is that a lot of the Democratic Party people like Christian Gillibrand are like again at a time when a lot of the Democratic Party, people like Christian Gillibrand, are like, again, at a time when Donald Trump is like, I'm going to take away everybody's Medicaid. The only thing that the Democratic Party seems to be able to do is be like, Zoran should apologize for what he said about Jews.

He didn't say anything! He didn't say anything. And I feel like if he, all of the things Trent to put words in his mouth, he's been basically treating the question both with contempt and also giving it a very, very considered and measured answer. He's extremely good at communicating. And I'm going to be honest with you, since Kirsten Gillibrand is technically my Senator, wow, she has fallen off even worse than she was bad to begin with. It's like previously the less bad Senator of New York because Chuck Schumer is the other one. And yeah, it's nuts, man. I mean, this whole like they've just invented this fake quote about him saying globalize the Intifada. It's just like, all right, guys, I feel as though this point has been made

by so many people and I'm absolutely plagiarizing and I don't even know who from whom. But two months ago, it was like we needed Joe Rogan from the left, someone who can energize young voters. Then Zoran Mdani gets basically like the first time I think I've ever seen turnout for the 18 to 24 bracket higher than any other fucking bracket in an election. And they're like, kill this man, fucking turn him into ash, cast it into the ocean, turn him into Trinitrite. Like it's wild to me.

It's insane because it's like, no, we want someone who will excite people, but with bad ideas because they think everyone's fucking stupid. They think everyone is a moron. Get excited about Pete Buttigieg. Get excited about, what is it, Alyssa Slutkin being like a poverty, I learned in the CIA that poverty is a national security threat or whatever. Yeah.

We're going to have to deploy an AI enabled drone to destroy poverty. Wait, no, no, no, I don't like what the drone is targeting. It should target something else. It may make it target the flat screen TV store. Fuck. Yeah. Poverty is a national security issue because that's how I made it. Should convince all these sources I ran who just stopped talking to me for some reason. Why did they ghost me?

It's really unfair the way people talk to each other online these days. Call out posts about a bunch of mid-level Chinese officials. Yeah. Uh, this, this and I have brothers. I just disagree with their conduct on Twitter. So he's a, he was a low stress kind of guy. I don't know. Yeah.

The democratic party said, Oh, we need a Joe Rogan of the left. And there's a low stress kind of guy who's currently sitting in prison right now. I'm sorry. I have to, I have to, it's, I'm a stress free kind of guy. Excuse me. All right, all right. We have, we have a bunch of stuff to talk about today, a bunch more stuff to talk about today.

November, you actually were like, can we, can we talk about the fact that they keep on automating the jobs of war fighters and precious operators and fight warriors. Yeah. As the trash future war nerds, as the Alyssa Slotkin of the podcast, who was like, I consider podcasts to be a national defense issue. I saw this long article and I was like, this is kind of perfect for us because it is a way in which international relations and tech and specifically startups are making everything much worse and also maybe ensuring that the way in which we get killed in the future is going to be that much more horrifying. So many Israeli startups. I looked into a bunch of them. There are so many. But before we get

to that, I want to do one quick piece of news, which is this is one of these other ones that was sent to me one trillion times. And I'm very pleased. I was I was happy with everyone who sent it to me a trillion times. Basically, this is the guy who started the company, Jane Street, one of the four founders of like this high frequency mathematician trading firm on Wall Street, former employer of Sandbank, Manfred before he went to go start FTX. And now I believe runs a profitable cigarette trading organization. Oh sorry, not cigarettes, because they're not allowed anymore.

Packets of mackerel. One ounce packets of mackerel trading organization. So that guy, Robert Granary, it has turned out that he accidentally funded a coup in South Sudan. Oh, okay. I mean, I think it's important for us to keep up with the various like coups that there are in the world. And this is, this is definitely one of the types of coups that there is.

Here's the difference, right? Mark Thatcher wanted to be a big dog, right? He wanted to be a big dog. He wanted to be able to like be a kind of, you know, power behind the throne in Equatorial Guinea. Robert Granieri is so gormless that I genuinely believe he did this by mistake, which is really amusing. On the sort of sweeping spectrum of coups, from Mark Thatcher to the attempted Venezuelan coup, which ended with a bunch of ex-Green Berets getting face

down on the street in Venezuela while one of them pissed themselves and the person rolled downhill towards his own face. Where's this? Is this closest to that? So basically, much like the Equatorial Guinea coup, no boot ever touched ground in the country that was supposed to be couped. However, like the Silver Corp coup, it was stopped very easily before anyone could do much of anything because everyone involved seemed to be kind of stupid.

However, the funny thing is that the two guys who were doing this, one of them was a Harvard fellow and World Bank economist and his, I believe, brother who wanted to buy AK-47s, Stinger missiles and grenades to topple the South Sudan government. How do you know you're doing a coup with someone who went to Harvard? Don't worry, they'll tell you. You're like in a warehouse trying to buy Stinger missiles and he's like, oh yeah, so why don't I go to Harvard? Um, you know, it doesn't even really relate to anything he's saying.

He just likes to get it in there. First we should seize the newspaper. We called that the Harvard Crimson, where I went to university. Oh, where'd you go to university with? I have no idea. So look, I don't remember. I don't remember anything. So Jane Street co-founder Robert Granieri concedes, admits he did put up the money for the coup,

saying he was duped. This emerges from the US prosecution of Peter Ajak, the Harvard fellow who was accused last year of scheming to install himself as the president of South Sudan. He's lawyer said in a statement, Gruneri is a longtime supporter of, of human rights causes. In this case, the person Rob thought was a human rights activist, defrauded him and lied about his intentions. I'm a human rights, a human rights activist needs so many stinger missiles is my question protect human rights obviously this question last asked by like the CIA inspector general in like 1985 last asked by the CIA inspector general in 1985 before he burst out laughing

yeah yeah visibly doing jerking off, why would a human rights organization need this many Stinger missiles? Oh yeah, well, why does the CIA director need a spinning bow tie? Yeah, that's also what the baggage security people were asking themselves at Heathrow when MI5 took that guy fucking get checked in for his flight to Libya. It's the wacky security services. It's the tier of operator above the Pennsylvania secret service. Yeah. I've thought for a long time that podcasts have kind of robbed the intelligence community of its wackiest potential guys.

We could be doing like operation mincemeat shit right now, but you know, instead we're doing this and I think that's a great shame. We could be the office cutups. Yeah. You wouldn't. That's the problem is that you can't have a, because, because of a variety of things, but podcasts primarily, you know, Gust avocados wouldn't actually become a CIA agent anymore. He would just try to be the next Joe Rogan, the Joe Rogan of the not left. Gust avocados would have made a great Bill Simmons.

I would have loved to listen to him talk about basketball. Granieri is a longtime supporter of human rights causes, as I said. Federal prosecutors in Arizona, excuse, sorry, I don't think they're related. There's friends. Charged Peter Ajak and Abraham Keach with conspiring to illegally export arms to their home

country, but both pleaded not guilty. While prosecutors haven't said whether the defendants obtained several million dollars for an attempt to buy military grade weaponry Ajax lawyers pointed to Granary in a recent filing saying he was vital to the plan. The lawyers accused authorities of selectively prosecuting two black men, even though the support came from Granary and Gary Kasparov. What?

I'm sick. POC, personal chess. Yeah. Kasparov can reasonably say that any law in America derived from any law in England doesn't apply to him because all of history before 1500 was invented by the Vatican. Yeah, that's true. A lot of work. I will say, I know that Garry Kasparov was insane, that he was on some very, very strange

politics, but I didn't realize that this is how it manifested. It's this and transphobia, which happens only all the time. Weirdly. Despite Jane Streets' dissents in the industry, Granieri kept a low profile, I guess until now. Until this very moment. The firm's success has allowed Granieri to pour money into other ventures and causes. I love what he's supported. Basically, he'll support any cause Garry Kasparov tells him to. So he just channels money into

Garry Kasparov-backed causes. I would love to have a pet rich guy. Are you kidding me? Like, to be honest, I even get like use him to do a coup, you know? Like if I had a pet billionaire, I would be like, all right, what's the country I want to coup most lowest stakes? Let's go. Yeah, absolutely. You know, new government and a ruber by the end of the week. I'd be like, all right, what's the country I want to coup most lowest stakes? Let's go. You know, new government in Aruba by the end of the week. We're going to install those two strange twins as the joint heads of state of Aruba. It's going to declare independence from the Netherlands. The Da Vinci boys are going to be in charge now.

So he also, in addition to funneling money that causes Casper of jetbacks around the globe, he also helped build a casino resort in Mississippi and was the largest backer of Nikki Haley. Just, muscle confusion. Yeah. So basically Ajak was a child soldier in Sudan in the 90s, resettled in the US, studied at Harvard Kennedy School, returned to Sudan as a World Bank economist, and then was an opposition activist who sought asylum in the US.

This is weirdly like a Metal Gear Solid character backstory here. Oh, totally. Sudan is a world bank economist and it was an opposition activist who sought asylum in the US. This is weirdly like a Metal Gear Solid character backstory here. Oh totally. Yeah all of his weapons are DNA coded to him. Attorneys for both men have signaled in court that their defense is going to be that US officials actually supported the plan, whereas prosecutors say that no, the State Department said in October 2023 that it wouldn't fund plans for non-democratic regime change. So the two brothers decided to go ahead anyway, but with private backing. So, uh, yeah, it's like they, they, if they

just waited like a bit, like a little bit, uh, they, they would have done that. Anyway, it's all about timing. Yeah. So they were, the two were arrested. This is very, this is the last detail of this. Then we're going to go on to the drones. They were, the two were arrested. This is very, this is the last detail of this. Then we're going to go on to the drones. They were arrested while inspecting all of the weapons that they bought, which they kept in a warehouse in Phoenix. They were just, they were just basically standing in a big room marked coup evidence. Anyway, anyway. All right. Let's talk drones because they have been, there is basically, we are in the midst of, in my view, genuinely an escalatory spiral right now. Oh yeah. And not just that, but also a kind of generational change in warfare. Because

thanks to Russia, now there are two test beds for military technologies, Palestine and also Ukraine. So you get one that is by force and one that is sort of by choice and you can test different things there because Ukraine needs a lot of stuff to fight the Russians with and also there's a key detail about this. Ukraine as part of the kind of like westernization, modernization thing was always very, very keen, like very Ukrainian politicians are very, very keen on the idea of being a startup nation, right? And this was one of the things, one of the big talking points with the EU specifically

was to be like, we can do all of the like innovative startup stuff, but we can do it cheaper because we've, you know, we've got Moxie, we've got get up and go and you don't have to pay us as much. And so now that the, you know, the war has been going on for this long, that has turned very quickly into militarized startup nation, which is one of the worst things I can imagine and the results are predictable. Yeah. A place where very quickly proliferation of death dealing technologies will happen. Yeah. And I sympathize because what else are you supposed to do? But it's the sort of like downstream consequences of this we do not know yet. Yeah. And what we're talking about specifically, the arms race we're talking about specifically,

is an arms race around autonomy. That is to say, a drone that is able to move to an area, select a target, and do something to it, whether that's follow it, kill it, whatever else, without human intervention. At the moment, so this is a good definition. As the AI-enabled drones in Ukraine span cheap consumer drones embedded with a chip and software based on open source AI and constructed in people's garages, to sophisticated consumer models backed by companies

like Andoril or Shield AI, but the basic principle is the same. In the simplest definition, an AI-enabled drone is one where certain core functionalities have been replaced by AI, taking over from a human always having to have control over it. And this, by the way, is from one of the executives of that company. All of these interviews are always ads. Always. Of course. Yeah. Ads and kind of wish fulfillment. Yeah. The difference between this and something that auto retargets artillery is that

you just launch the drone, you tell it what kind of thing you want it to kill, and then it and other drones around it, at least according to the claims that are being made, will then autonomously go and do that. Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned the kind of claim-making here, because I think that's a key part of this, is the claim is that these are already like, extant and working, or at least working well enough to be used, but because of the war and also because of the kind of, like, secrecy inherent to this stuff, and also because it's, it's sort of, like, beneficial for any business selling these to kind of try and

obscure it if they don't work as well as they're claiming to. We don't know, right? This is not something that you have a lot of, like, clear evidence about, at least not in public. One of the things I'd point out, too, is that obviously what this sounds like is like a take to the eighth, tenth power, the same kind of concept behind something that's like a heat-seeking missile, if that makes sense. Basically, it's not quite autonomous targeting, but if it works, then it follows a certain thing, looks for heat signature, and more or less chases it. And you could see this, but getting far more complex with these technologies having developed and miniaturized and become way, way cheaper to produce because of consumer products and

things like that. But the thing that's weird about it for me, I guess the thing that immediately came to mind when you were describing this and I was having to visualize it, is that any kind of fail safe to stop a thing like this from going really, really off target and fucking things up and just being an absolute nightmare is immediately a thing that would be weaponized in order to try to defeat it by the adversary. Like in the sense of, okay, some of the early, early drones they were testing out at small levels in the US military. If you basically sent the same frequency radio signal to that

thing as what it was transmitting on, it would lose signal, just fall out of the sky. Now, that's an obvious weakness. That's stuff that's no longer... Those things aren't fielded anymore. They don't exist anymore, and so on and so forth. But that's the kind of thing. If you have a failsafe... Well, these things are autonomous. And obviously, you can't publicize and probably can't even really add in very many kinds of failstakes in this regard. You are creating a thing where you're just like, oh, well, I'm going to offload the consequences to the computer. And I'm just, I don't know, man, I'm weirded out by that idea because I think that in the

kind of situation we're describing here, these are even in Ukraine, certainly in Palestine, the area that would be considered the sort of frontline and or combat zone is not far at all from civilian areas. And I think that it plays into this recent trend is just worsening of like, oh yeah, well whatever, fucking civilian casualties don't matter. Cause that definitely seems to be the mentality that has like emerged out of this century so far. Yeah, absolutely. I feel very much kind of like free cursor to the first world war vibes. We're litigating what war is going to look like for the rest of the century and what the baseline expectations for that are. And because it's coming about through frontlines that are in Ukraine that

are kind of static for a long time, and you reach this kind of stalemate, particularly here we're talking about electronic warfare, right? About jamming different drones and then trying to defeat that by having drones that are trailing a really long fiber optic cable to a drone that just has an AI in it and has no external guidance. And it's kind of both sides trying to solve that problem simultaneously and kind of innovate technologically there is going to lead to much like, you know, changes in the First World War against some of the same problems led to, you know, some of the rest of the horrors of the rest of the 20th century. And so, yeah, this is just one to be accounted amongst them. And this is also something that

the Russians are doing for the same reasons. And, I don't want to suggest that it's something specifically Ukrainian, it's just this is the way that things have shaken out, that it kind of has necessitated this like extremely dangerous and irresponsible development of new weapon systems. Whatever I think about stuff like this, you think about, well, what's the force multiplier here, right? In the first world war, something like shells filled with mustard gas are a huge force multiplier because suddenly, one shell doesn't just kill the people it explodes on or if you're wounded, you don't come back to the front a little while later, you're fucking gone, right? That's a force multiplier for artillery.

I think that the first world war, I mean, the official interpretation of events is that there were huge advances in mobility and certainly there were huge advances in weaponry that lent themselves to defensive warfare, but the things to overcome those for offensive warfare, they developed by necessity, sometimes from about 1914 to about 1917. You know what I mean? Yeah. These kinds of things, you can see that the... We've already had UAVs for a long time, but they were things that were enormously expensive and required, trained people to

pilot one of them. And they still weren't always... Their success rate was quite marginal in a lot of ways. And so you can understand the idea of like, oh, make it autonomous, make it massively miniaturized, make it all... Whatever. But in a very breezy, almost like, you know, ad copy taken straight from a press release statement have been like, oh yeah, we've gotten these things that are meant to, you know, effectively cause mass casualty events. They destroy military vehicles, large amounts of explosives or munitions, so on. And we're going to make them completely autonomous.

Yeah. And we taught the robots to kill. This will be fine. And not only will this be fine, but because this is the kind of like, you know, thing that things will now regress to, the new baseline, this is now, it's gonna trickle down eventually that's like every human conflict is gonna involve like your autonomous drones. These guys all read Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible, but they read the AI summary of it. They're like, oh, this war of sentient kill machines is really good. In every case, the incentives on the actors in these conflicts, especially Russia and Ukraine is more and more autonomy. Because you have a shortage of manpower and material.

And it's like the more autonomy you can push into these things, then there's slightly more advantage you'll have. But that's also the case. It's not just those guys also. It's like the US Army is racing to develop all this stuff as well, especially through contractors in Palantir and Anderil and other such organizations. Where again, the incentive is everyone is trying to have the least amount of human control

possible. Because that is where you get, according to this logic, I see if it bears out, the greatest combat advantage. So inevitably, because we're on this escalation path, and everybody involved has agreed this is good. If we put any guidelines, if we try to curb this, our adversaries will not curb this and inevitably beat us. I don't really see how we don't end up in a place where entirely autonomous drone swarms kill someone who was, I don't know, described by a prompt engineer.

Yeah, but there's another aspect to this, right? Which is how much of that is wish fulfillment for some of the people involved? There's a quote in this article that I sent you, Riley, from the CEO of one of these like Ukrainian drone startups who's like, oh yeah, airport security is like basically like over because it's, you know, it's like last generation stuff. The future now is why wouldn't anyone when this kind of gets out, because it's like easy to do, why wouldn't

any terrorist group just kind of send like, you know, some swarm of drones at an airport, right? And people aren't going to notice that until after drone 911 happens, right? And I don't necessarily rule out the prospect of drone 911, but we should say that the person saying that is a drone salesman, right? That's an articulation of, like, my thing is gonna work so well. Yeah, you want to make sure you do your drone 9-11 first before someone else does it. Well, it's basically like, yeah, it's extrapolated, but it's the same idea, sort of like, guy who runs like a third tier budget flight school in South Florida, like our school is so good, you don't even need to learn how to land.

It does sort of change the nature. Well, it changed, like, I think the point about this type of warfare and the sort of pursuit of autonomy is also one, like it's deeply anti-human in the way that all of this really is. But it is one which is like, and you know, again, like to go back to the Palestine laboratory and all the stuff that we talked about about Gaza is like, well, we've already sort of been conditioned or like lots of people at least have been the attempt to condition them to be like, yeah, civilian casualties are number one aren't real, but also like, even if they are real, it's fine because that's just how war is now, right? Like, you know, children die all the time and, you know, vulnerable people like die all the time and, but also

everyone's a combatant. So like, they are like, I think like one of the sort of long-term effects of like, what's happening in Gaza will be is that like, the idea of like a civilian that is not engaged in combat and is therefore, and therefore should be protected because they are not sort of like a combatant. That basically is gone. Right? Everyone in some form will sort of be defined as a combatant by enemy forces, like regardless of like their own positionality, whether they've picked up a gun, whether they've sort of like engaged in any violence or the second aspect of it is like, and my question more is like, okay, well how the pursuit of autonomy also means like, how do you sort of define a war sort of being over?

Like these instruments sort of feel like what they're perfect for is a sort of like state of perpetual war. Right? Both of those outcomes are tremendously desirable to say, Anderil, you know? Yeah. And if you are a traveling drone salesman, who's going door to door and being like, Hey, would you like to do your 9-Eleven before someone in Russia does it? I'm just a simple country 9-Eleven salesman. I don't know if you, I don't know if there's town really is a good enough for a 9-Eleven. Seems like more of a fancy New Yorker thing. Yeah. good enough for a 9-11 seems like more of a fancy New Yorker thing.

Yeah. See the guy who tried to sell 9-11 in 1993, he was liked, but he was not well liked. Muhammad, Ada was not a famous man. His name was never in the paper. She's she's 9-11. That's right. That's correct. I just think, I just think it's, um, it's really funny how Seth MacFarlane and all of his shows always puts in so many show tunes. He just loves the 9-11 man. So I read local news periodically and something that I've noticed is that it was pretty uncommon 15, 20 years ago to hear of gang warfare, especially drug gang warfare in Western Europe involving stuff like assault weapons, right? Like AK-47s or MP5s or UZIs.

That stuff existed, but it was pretty uncommon, relatively speaking. I've heard of recent gang shootouts happening right across the border from where I live in St. Julian and stuff like that, where people fled and left behind their whatever weapons. And they had AK-47s. And I'm not saying it's a one-to-one linkage here, but when you've got no natural terrain features stopping you, blocking you from an ongoing war zone where weapons are being dumped into it, those are going to get lost and spill out and enter the black market. Oh yeah, of course. Of course. And I think like in the incident in the Badaqla in Paris in 2015, it was, I think it was later determined that a lot of those weapons had come in from

Syria, for example. And so when you talk about this kind of a thing, like it only takes one of these things being, you know, sold, filched for it to be a massive, massive risk, a massive problem. And also one thing I point out too too is look at how much everyone's like experience with traveling, everyone's experience of like getting around in the world got worse post 9-11, post 7-7, post like the fucking Atocha bombings, like all these things. Like, you know, it used to not be common to go in train stations in Western Europe, for example, and see fucking like armed military or like massively armed police. Now it's everywhere. By the same token, that Ukrainian guy who I was talking,

his solution to this is, well, eventually, whether it's, you know, before drone 9-11 or after drone 9-11, people are going to realize that the only thing to do is a total AI enabled surveillance of everyone all the time. But also drone 9-11 happens, it could very easily also be accidental. Yeah. This is the thing. As you say, it's a huge kind of proliferation risk, right?

And all of these guys absolutely want it to be, both on the basis that they want these things to be accessible and easy to use and easy to make and easy to sell, but also in order to sell your kind of counter-UAS stuff, right? In order to sell your kind of like counter UAS stuff right in order to sell your surveillance system and so like if you're if you're you know one of the big players in this if you're Andrew you are making money for both ends of this right because you are selling the drones you're selling the drone defenses and you're like Well, not only am I the only person who can prevent drone 9-eleven I'm also the only person who can allow you to do drone 9-eleven to your enemies

and I'm also the only person who can allow you to do drone 9-11 to your enemies. And so this is kind of the desire and, you know, as you mentioned to say, and this is kind of like international humanitarian law, the laws of war such as they are, right, of having a, you know, someone who is defined as a civilian, someone who is like, or to combat, like someone who is like, you know, permissible military target and someone who isn't is very much a dead letter at this point. And this is like autonomous weapons. There is no international law about them. There is no convention on their use, but it kind of doesn't matter in the sense that like, yes, it would be great if people got together and like passed a convention in the UN General Assembly about this, but they won't because they're talking to, you

know, Anderil et al. And also because there's this they're talking to, you know, Anderil, Edel, and also because there's this kind of general feeling, you know, across like particularly NATO of like, well, we are going to have to fight World War Three sooner rather than later, and we are going to need all the help we can get because, you know, declining populations and all of this. And this is why the kind of like Eastern border states of NATO have all withdrawn from the Ottawa Convention, which bans the use of anti-personnel landmines. And that's why Finland is going back to making conscripts just carry a bunch of mines around in the woods.

So there's really no incentive for anyone who, and I think this is most people, does not want to get killed by an AI drone. There's no vote there, right? If you want to hear the most UN sentence ever, it's in the same article that we are reading. It says towards the end that to combat this threat, the UN has decided to move from discussions to negotiations. Great. Fantastic.

Thanks guys. But also one thing I'd say too is the distribution of responsibility here in the sense that like, even if it's not, even if this is, you know, smoke and mirrors and ad copy, when you kind of create this notion, this argument that the targeting, the sort of pull, pulling of the trigger is being done by a machine with the autonomous decision-making, then it's like, what are you gonna, are you going to put the quadcopter in the Hague? Is it going to fucking be like a frowny face quadcopter in the ICC? Like you can effectively absolve humans of responsibility for it. And I'm not saying that's the technology would actually deliver that, but the line of argument,

you can already see the alibi kind of getting, getting, getting assembled. It's also like, it's really beneficial to the ways in which AI fails in the sense that like, we know that AI hallucinates, we know that AI gets stuff wrong. The way in which you're deploying this, right, is, you know, if you're if you're fighting your kind of like more conventional war you say, okay, here is the front line is this box on the map go in there and kill everybody wearing like a, you know, green uniform, right? It's gonna fuck up, but that's kind of like, you know, it's not great, but you can work on that. If you're doing this for something other than that, if you're doing this, if you're using this for like ethnic cleansing, right?

If you go and say go into this, you know, grid square and kill everyone of this ethnicity, right? You don't necessarily need that to be precise, and in some ways it's a benefit if it isn't, you know? Like, a genocide doesn't operate successfully by being very, very precise at identifying who is in the targeted group. It works by killing that many people that, okay, there's some people who you didn't want to kill. It doesn't matter, right? Like, you know, in 1917 the Turks weren't going through being like, well, I am dead

certain that this person is Armenian, right? It's because it's a sort of like, it operates on a different level. It operates on a community and an ethnic Armenian, right? It's because it's a sort of like, it operates on a different level. It operates on a community and an ethnic level, right? And so this is going to do the same thing. And, you know, whether it's the kind of stochastic, whether it's like drone 9-11 or whatever, the ways in which AI gets things wrong, the ways in which AI fails and hallucinates are all things that benefit that. And it's all kind of a feature rather than a bug. So it's saying that AI doesn't work as we often do. It doesn't work as it's claimed to.

In this case, that makes me feel worse rather than better, if you follow me. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because I mean, it's not that it's made like a fucked up Miyazaki-style illustration of the Hamburglar. It's that it's made a decision to, you know, fire a bullet or a 40 millimeter grenade or a hellfire missile or whatever it is at something or, you know,

suicide drone something. And like all of that is taken out of the hands of any kind of like accountability. And it's so sort of integrated into industry as well, where it sort of gives you, cause it like, it's obviously like not to the same scale, but we see this like currently we're sort of seeing this in workplace environments where AI is like constantly, constantly fuck up when it comes to like recruitment or it comes to internal processes of how companies work and where that's sort of relinquished to AI. It's making mistakes all the time. And there are lots of stories of people who are just like, well, you know, you tell your boss that like something's sort of gone wrong or the AI, like, you know, even in like things like, you know, sort of like

tech and coding and everything, you'll tell your boss or like, or your line manager that, hey, like the code that the AI keeps kind of making me do is like wrong. And they'll say, yeah, but you still got to do it because like the AI has already been integrated. The company has sort of like restructured around the fact that this AI has been integrated. You have no choice but to sort of follow it. Now like take that, you know, extend that logic to like warfare, but also just like the expanding security state and the fact that, yeah, it will constantly fuck up and it will It's the missile gap. It's the missile gap again. Yeah. It'll kill a lot of people and it'll imprison a lot of people and it will make everyone's lives worse, but like particularly for like people whose

lives are already shit. And what you'll be told is like, well, it's too late because you know, that's, that's how, that's how we got to do things now. I fucking hate it when AI enabled Grammarly declares it a free fire area. Before we move on, I want to read one more quote from this, this article. This is another one of the drone company owners. I have a suspicion that you've predicted which one I'm going to use. We didn't know that the Terminator was Ukrainian, Federician jokes, but maybe a Terminator situation is not the worst thing that can happen? I feel like he hasn't seen the first Terminator. Because I have. At the first Terminator, Arnold

Schwarzenegger plays the Terminator, just like he does in Terminator 2, but he's not saving the tween boy protagonist. He's just fucking murdering people, sometimes naked, bursting through walls and shit. How can you be safe in some city if someone tried to drone kill you? It's impossible. Okay, you could use some kind of jamming of radial connection,

but they can still use some AI systems that know visually how you look and try to find you and kill you. So I don't think that the Terminator in that movie is the worst outcome. If this weren't ever started, then we wouldn't have the type of weapon that is easy to buy and very easy to use.

So yeah, he's like, look, you know what? Sometimes you just have to accept the little Terminator. I mean, someone else could just do it as a human. Sometimes an Austrian bodybuilder will travel through time completely naked to whip your ass, to shoot your roommate while she's getting nailed by her boyfriend, among other things. And that's just life. I mean, he's, the last sentence is right in as much as it is Russia's fault as the kind of belligerent here for creating these conditions, whether it would have happened anyway, I don't

know. But I don't think that means that I have to be thrilled that in like a few years time, I get to go outside, like open my front door and a woman who looks exactly like me gets killed by a hellfire missile across the street because somebody didn't like my posts. Like, it's, it's... All of this is terrifying, and you should be terrified by this. And this is all downstream of whether it's Russia, whether it's Israel, whether it's the US sort of like bankrolling Israel, downstream of like a very conscious choice to just keep doing this forever, right?

And this, I think you take that to the kind of right-wing fantasy, the camp of the saints thing, the idea that like, well, you know, we are going to be white genocided unless what we do is just do what Israel is doing now forever and we make that easier and easier and easier. And the sort of like, salutary lesson from Israel is that that doesn't work. Like you don't stay safe because there's always some kind of human ingenuity that will kind of like overcome that. You can't kind of keep mowing the lawn forever as Israel called it's kind of like, you know, terror occupation of Gaza. And so ultimately this, this doesn't

work either, but it is going to kind of kill a lot of people horribly in all of our futures, which I'm not thrilled about. You know where we're going to see it next in my view, it's not going to be in another battlefield. It's going to be, Anderil has said that what they want to do is this. They've built all of the infrastructure for this. Because what Anderil has said is you don't need a wall, you have a virtual wall. The virtual wall is like constant AI-enabled drones doing recon, spotting people crossing the border, and then deploying ICE to go get them. It's like all you need to do is swap out that camera with a gun or a grenade and then you have a

Totally autonomously militarized border wall that kills anybody it thinks is an illegal immigrant It's dangerously plausible and not just in the US as well You look at like European border policy or indeed British border policy now as a separate things Yeah, the only thing that's that's keeping that from happening with British border policy is an unwillingness to invest in the drones because we still think that maybe the volunteer border guards can do it. If we wanted to talk about right wing fantasies though, I know we're going a little bit long, but I really felt we would be remiss if we did not talk about the world's least on drugs man getting,

and I can't believe I'm going to say this phrase, dog walked by Ross Douthat. Look, I'm surprised also. So I feel like really quick thing before we go into the article, conscious of time, Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist. He's the sort of teary-eyed, scare quotes, good conservative who is always basically like, what if the bad thing was actually good, but actually

I don't support the vulgarity? Rust out that whole story was he went to Harvard, of course, and wrote a book about, oh, against irony or whatever. My Harvard classmates are just, everything is irony. Everything is, and it's like, I believe in sincerity. And like, he has basically traversed the young conservatosphere to get to this point. And he's been at The Times for like, well over a decade at this point. He's been around forever. There was a time when he was just sort of treated as like a diversity hire. But like now the New York Times editorial board and it's corporate owners, the family that owns it, got radicalized by the 2020 protests

and decided that they fucking have to basically bring the world of children of men to America. So it's rapidly becoming just the Times of London. And doubt that weirdly, I think he actually believes the dumb bullshit that he says, which puts him in an interesting position in 2025. Because he was and always has been opposed to let's say the lunatic fringe and the kind of like anti-human, anti-classical liberal, if you will, elements of Trumpism and like the American right and all of its antecedents. What I think is really funny about this, so I sum this up sort of similarly, but in a different way, is this is two guys who spend approximately 45, the last third of a 45 minute interview

scaring each other about the Antichrist and somehow one of them wins. Peter Thiel looks like shit. Like fucking shit, dude. All that money and all that like, you know, blood harvesting machines that the other weird billionaire does, that guy at least has like, he looks, he looks like a jacked middle-aged guy in the same way that like Danny Elfman looks jacked as

fuck even though he's like 70. But Peter Thiel, the best way I could describe seeing this interview man is he just looks, he looks like he does believe in transhumanism. He's like, I want you to turn me into the cartoon lemur Timon from The Lion King. Well, what he looks like to me is, because yeah is okay, look, number one, he's on a lot of uppers. Number one, number two, he's dressing mostly monochromatically. He's speaking at you at great length. He is an older raver, I'm afraid. He is an older raver and he is having a weird conversation with Ross here. So I want to read a little bit of it to give you the idea. Yes, it is. Two guys have a conversation about whether or not one of them

is the Antichrist and the one he asks is the Antichrist. Can't give a straight answer as to whether or not he's the Antichrist. You should you should be able to do so. I'm going I'm pulling a little few snippets out here. Teal says this is a conversation I had with Elon back in 2024. Imagine being a fly on the wall in that conversation. And we all had these conversations. I had the C-steading version with Elon where I said,

if Trump doesn't win, I'm going to leave the country. Then Elon said, there's nowhere to go. And then you always think the right arguments to make later. So two hours after- I thought he was going to colonize Mars. Well, is that he said, Peter Teal said, wait a minute, Elon, but what about Mars? If you actually say there's nowhere to go, you don't believe in going to Mars anymore

because 2024 is the year where Elon stopped believing in Mars as a political project. It was supposed to be an alternative. And in 2024, I made Elon understand that if you went to Mars, the woke AI would follow you to Mars as with the socialist US government. Let's fucking go. I was wondering where to put my faith and it's in two places, the woke US government and the woke AI. Yeah. And so it's like, yeah, it's just like, yeah, I'm afraid you have to, you have to

abandon your dreams of going to Mars because it's not realistic. Perfect. Right there with you, Elon. But then it's like, because it's not realistic that you'll be able to escape the phantoms that you conjure for yourself. Yeah. If you go to Mars, Rocco's gay basilisk is going to follow you. It was at a meeting with Elon and the CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, that we brokered this. I fucking know Demis Hassabis. He made really good video games for a bit and then went to do this.

Wild. So, Demis said to Elon, I'm working on the most important project in the world. I'm building superhuman AI. And Elon responds to Demis and says, well, I'm working on the most important project in the world, taking us to Mars. Demis said, well, you know, my AI will follow you to Mars. And then Elon went quiet. This is like two kids being like, oh, yeah, well, I have lasers.

Well, my car can go 120 miles an hour. Yeah, I have lasers. Oh, yeah, well, I'm made of mirrors. So your laser bounces off and hits you, actually. And it says, it took years for that to hit Elon, and he didn't understand until 2024. The woke AI will follow you. The socialist government will follow you. And then maybe you have to

do something other than just going to Mars. This is the tone and tenor of the conversation, right? Where this is not really Peter Thiel having some kind of meaningful discussion with Rost Douthat. Rather, it is Rost Douthat as a perfect empty vessel, allowing Peter Thiel to explain the strange, cracked out cosmology of the world that he inhabits. And unfortunately, to tie it back to the previous section, he is funding so many projects to beat the ghosts in his head. Right. All these guys think that taking these superhuman amounts of drugs can apparently make them achieve like ultra sentience when it's like, no, you're just going to wind up like the Zappos guy. You're just going to like die

in a house fire after like huffing fucking whipped cream, even though you're worth a billion dollars. Like it's insane. But I don't know, man, like this, these are very unwell people. It's funny in a, in a dark way, but like, unfortunately they have enough money to buy up political projects and make everyone's lives worse Nate thank you for accidentally plugging the most recent episode of no gods no mayors. We also talk about this Later on later on now that says I think you'd prefer the human race to endure right now if you want No, let's just say all right

It's what they call a softball question famously because softball is insanely difficult to right. It's it's what they call a softball question, famously because softball is insanely difficult to play. It's called it's it's insanely difficult to play if you've done so much ketamine, you've forgotten how to walk and so many amphetamines that you've forgotten how to breathe. That probably is true. Yeah. I bet I bet. Okay. How about this? A different kind of Olympics, not the enhanced Olympics, the fucked up Olympics, where it's like you give all of the sprinters the same amount of like whatever Peter Thiel is on to see how far they get World's toughest game of softball work It's all women who could fucking bench press Peter Thiel and Ross doubt that in one throwing the hardest fucking softball pitch That's completely within regs and it's like these guys

I mean, it's just I'm loving the idea that like they can't be normal under no circumstances. It's just, they have drugged themselves out of the ability to pretend to be normal. I've talked before about how like at a certain point, there was a certain number of US dollars or purchasing power equivalent that you can have and have access to. There's a certain amount of power you can have that is not negotiated with anybody else or is negotiated with such a small number of other people that insulates you so much that it has to be compared cognitively to getting kicked in the head repeatedly by a horse. Oh yeah. It's like the money force field basically gives you the bends. Your blood starts boiling

from nitrogen and shit. It you just like, you, it's so strange to watch. So I'm just gonna throw this out there. If I asked any of you three the question, in a New York Times interview, that was gonna be seen by a lot of people, where your goal is to be like, I want people to understand what I'm thinking and begin to empathize with my beliefs

so I can have more converts. And Ross doubt that, someone who desperately wants you to seem normal says you'd prefer the human race to endure. Right. You wouldn't pause. Right. Right. Big winks stomping on your foot. Like, here's where we coach you to say yes, absolutely. And Teal is like,

yeah, I don't know. I haven't an opinion. My lawyer has advised me I don't have to answer questions that may incriminate me. Yeah. Teal says, uh, doubt that you're hesitating. Teal. Well, I don't know. I mean, I would.

I would. You're still hesitating. Teal. There's so many questions implicit in this doubt that should the human race survive? Teal. Yes. Doubt that. Okay.

I finally got the answer. I was looking perfect. We did 30 takes and that was the best one. You want the human race to endure. I'd be in favor in a general sense, but like, you know. And also he's like, he said Pete Teal also says, but I'd like us to radically solve these problems. Things like, you know, growing, growing uh, which is like, look, I don't just want to upload my consciousness to an AI. I want there to be immortality.

I want it to be handed out by, by income. I want to be the emperor from 40 K. And he, I swear to God, he already looks like the emperor from 40 K. I was gonna say, I love how this is visual. He looks so normal, um, and trustworthy in this interview. He's definitely not like a kind of every muscle in his head and neck kind of visibly tensing. Yeah. It's like he looks like the emperor from 40k at the time when 40k is set. If you're a 40k fan, you'll know what I'm talking about.

10,000 psychos a day sacrificed to Peter Thiel. But I'd also like us to solve these problems. And so always, I don't know. Yeah. I'm a transhumanist. The idea that was this radical transformation where your human natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And then he was like, you know, I know, obviously if you're going to be transgender, that's like, why bother? Of course it's different. Yeah. That's like, no, it's not big enough if you're going to be transgender. It's like, it's not a big enough deal

You should try to like replace your entire body. He's basically an Italian futurist He's like you should turn yourself into an immortal car rather than just be trans. Do you imagine yourself as an immortal car? Yeah Yeah, well, I do certainly I Mean shit, okay So the then they have this discussion with the Antichrist, which I think is the pièce de resistance of this interview. It's like that meme, I hate the Antichrist, I hate the Antichrist. I hate the Antichrist so much. Because Pizza Teals' whole deal is like eschatology for Silicon Valley nerds.

The woke AI and the socialist federal government are going to usher in the Antichrist. And so that's why we need to have like a king and it has to be me and it has to be forever. Yeah. Cause you know who the alter- he proposes the alternative to him being king is? Any guesses as to who he proposes as the alternative? I don't think you're going to guess who it is. Greta Thunberg. Yep.

There we go. Greta Thunberg. It's him or Greta Thunberg. Yep, there we go. Greta Thunberg. It's him or Greta. I know that's intended to be like, you know, an option that makes him seem very favorable, but it has just the opposite effect. I'm willing to do it. Maybe she can be the benevolent philosopher. That's fine. She could be the good Antichrist.

So basically the idea presented here is that the Antichrist takes power over all the world, because remember these guys are both also incredibly Christian, but in a deeply heterodox way as well. They are incredibly Christian in a way that has been utterly filtered through the U S empire. Right. They are bullied. They, they are Christian in the sense that actually what they're worshiping is like the state and capital and doubt that is too, but doubt that it's like a, I oppose abortion. And I think if you have an abortion,

you should feel bad about it as opposed to like Kevin Williamson who's like, if you have an abortion, the state should kill you. So like doubt that Christianity is a thing. He talks about a lot, but in Teal's case, like it's like some kind of weird syncretic, it's basically like Silicon Valley guy on drugs cow die.

I mean, I've seen, this is not my term, I'm taking it from Boltzmann Booty on Twitter, but this is, I think, quite perceptive. Look, this is just the world we live in. We have to cite people with fun screen names. I love citations. Like I said, I absolutely love it. I think it's very important that we talk about the great thinkers of our age. Who described this as soy transhumanist right wing Christianity. And that's just it.

It's also like, it's also there's another, there's another Twitter thinker who, who I can't remember the name of this. Also it's two dumb bitches telling each other exactly. The idea is right that the Antichrist gathers all things under them and then administers a lack of freedom. The Antichrist as how you would have imagined the Soviet Union to be in 1976. It's one world government. It's LaRoucheism. It's Bercherism.

Is that the Antichrist is going to not be a wizard of technology. This is what Douthat says. I want to suggest a middle ground between these two options one of them being You know the Antichrist is this charismatic powerful figure or the Antichrist is a sort of quite sweet seeming Person who just wants to make life better for everybody, but you have to give them control You know eco Antichrist I says it used to be the reasonable fear of the Antichrist So I just love that the reasonable fear the reasonable fear of the Antichrist. So I just love that. The reasonable fear of the Antichrist was as a kind of technological wizard. And now the reasonable fear is someone who promises to control technology, make it safe and usher in universal stagnation.

Teal says, that's more my description of how it would happen. I think people still have the fear of a 17th century Antichrist. We're still scared of Dr. Strangelove. Doubt that. But you're saying the real Antichrist. We're still scared of Dr. Strangelove, doubt that. But you're saying the real Antichrist would play on that fear and say, you must come with me to avoid Skynet, avoid the Terminator, and avoid nuclear Armageddon. So basically, all of what we just said earlier about this prospect of a proliferation of fully autonomous drones killing people on the basis of whatever tech guys think or whatever particular armies

say, whatever, whatever. That makes us supportive of the Antichrist. That the reasonable fear of the Antichrist is one of us. It also throws in a different dimension if you follow the logic from the previous quote in that article that the Terminator is by definition Ukrainian. So is the Antichrist, I guess. You finally make it to Mars, you're free of work, and then the Ukrainian Terminator lands. Yeah, exactly.

Ukrainian Terminator lands and is just like, give me pronouns. He extirpates all of your medical staff and is like, no, only medicine is in the banya. You are going to get hit in the ass with a burst branch and that will heal all your ills. Yeah, it's banya and soup. Look, we're going long, but I have one more, one more little bit, which is Teal's version of history. It's a little, it's a bit of a sort of wig theory of history, but that centers on Woodstock in 1969. He says, my telling of the history is that in the 1970s, the hippies won. We landed on the moon in July of 69. Woodstock

started three weeks later. At the benefit of hindsight, that's when progress stopped and the hippies won. And so, we have environmentalism, pro stagnation, and so on. Again, you don't want to just be like, Peter Thiel, here's where you're wrong. But it's not like Woodstock happened and then everyone decided to stop building stuff. It's that Woodstock happened and then the Six-Day War happened and then OPEC restricted the supply of oil and then there was an energy price shock that created the financialization of everything. Also, I would say, too, that the hippies themselves said they didn't win, and a lot of people who are adjacent to it said they didn't win, because Nixon won in 1968 and then expanded

the war to Cambodia in 1970, and then won again in 1972 by a massive margin. So, that reaction in America, which my argument has always been that it is just white America reacting to the civil rights movement. But like, the hippies didn't win. The idea that you can point to the hippies and say they won is such a, it's like, cause we have fucking Earth Day. It's like, cool man. Any other things happen since then? The hippies won because some of their ideas are still popular among people who have cultural power exclusively.

Yes, people in Cleveland did not like the Cuyahoga River catching on fire, even if they vote Republican. And nobody who has anything serious to say about, let's say contemporary American history would derive that conclusion. It would be like, oh, Woodstock. It all changed at Woodstock. I think it all changed at Woodstock 99. Exactly.

Yeah. Because Limp Bizkit told people to tear shit up and give me something to break. And yeah, I mean, it actually all changed for policing of the future. Yeah. Anyway, that is the, the, the teal doubt that interview, there's a lot there, but I wanted to pick a few highlights. Plus we are running very long anyway. So I think that's all we've got for today. But number one, I want to thank you all for listening as ever. Number two, there is a Patreon as per usual, there will be an episode on that Patreon.

And I'm going to be posting a lot of stuff there. So if you're interested in that, you all for listening, as ever. Number two, there is a Patreon. As per usual, there will be an episode on that Patreon later this week. November and I are now reading the next Aubrey Maturin novel. So look out for that. Desolation Island. It should be a fun time. I've started. It's so good. It's so awesome already. I'm loving it. And also, I said this on a bonus episode, but I want to say it on a free episode as well. And now the poll is actually going to be published. We are considering coming to Canada. If you were living in the United States, you need to tell us that you have to actually

really for real be honest, if you would actually come to travel to come see us in one of the cities of Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal, because that will help us find appropriately sized venues. Please do not tick unless you really mean to attend. Think about the costs involved in doing so, because we will be making a financial decision based on the information you provide. So there's all of that. Milo Edwards is variously around, you know, his website. You can check him out wherever he might be. Right now he's getting precision bombed at Glastonbury. So I think with all that being said, we will see you on the Patreon episode

on Thursday. Bye everyone. Bye. Bye.