TRASHFUTURE - HQ Number Two feat. Adam Smith

Episode Date: November 21, 2018

Everyone loves a synergy these days (just ask Bill de Blasio). You can synergize the relationship between your phone and the cops, between public transit and the cops, between your home and the cops, and -- most importantly -- between your personal data and Jeff Bezos’ wealth. On this week’s Trashfuture, Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Hussein (@HKesvani) spoke with PCMag contributing editor Adam Smith (@adamndsmith) about Amazon HQ2's big money shit all over New York and Northern Virginia, and why it's going to make the city suck. Then, we talk about Adam's visit to the Smart Cities conference in Barcelna, the coming presence of 5G everywhere, and the shimmering hell they offer us. No, not that Adam Smith. Special note: Hussein recorded this from Jacob Wohl’s infamous hipster coffee shop in Brooklyn. Which is why you can literally hear people saying “eyyy, whattadafuck” in the background. Sorry! *COMEDY KLAXON* Come see Milo host a night of free stand-up at the Sekforde in London on 21st November at 8 pm: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-comedy-featuring-pierre-novellie-tickets-52410874336 Also, remember that your favourite moron lads have a Patreon now. You too can support us here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/overview Don’t forget that you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/. Get whichever slogan you want, but get the damn shirts!

This is the most professional this podcast has ever been. We now have headphones and cables and and all this, and we have still got one member calling in from a cafe who's saying how's the hipster cafe in New York so I want to so my my my aim of coming to New York was I wanted to go to visit all the sites. So my first my first location on my list was to go to Jacob famous hipster cafe where he where he where he's seemingly over his lots of these plots against the president. And I can tell you I can tell you one thing from my dispatch from my from my dispatch in America which is that it's 100%

true. Antifa super soldiers do meet up in these hipster cafes which litter around Brooklyn where they discuss about impeaching the president and replacing him with with Hillary Clinton forever. So all I can say is that Jacob Wall did own all of us and not only has he owned all of us with his insane logic, but he's also owned all of us with his insanely good skin care routine. Absolutely the man does look fluorescent. Oh 100% yeah. And I mean what's great is he saves in a lot of lighting bills around these hipster coffee shops,

which I'm assuming he owns now because he was so right by just standing in the middle of them and being radiantly oily. Yeah, I mean like all the real hipster I mean all I've got to say is that all the Antifa super soldiers are very scared of him. So that when so whenever he walks into one of these places, you just hear like some hushes of silence and that's about you know, so that's to show like what politics in America is like at this current moment of time. And until of course he hears one voice one voice in the distance doing a podcast that is ostensibly leftist, but actually mostly just talks about

which Evangelion looks the best in a bikini. I was thinking I was genuinely thinking about this the other day because like mods, mods it's even it's even zero to obviously right. Yeah, it's like that. I don't but what I was thinking about more is that like if we ever got in trouble with the law and someone found like the archive over trash you to stuff just like how ridiculous it would be to like think about all these kind of very serious journalist type people having to listen to like endless, endless conversations about like which Evangelion looks better in a bikini or it's like

all the other stupid stuff. I've never watched Evangelion because I'm actually a normal person. What the hell a guy household is. Yeah, it's all good. It's all fast. Speaking of the guy household, shall we get into the main content? Yeah, because we're all dudes rule. This is an old dude episode, right? This is all dude, all nude, all rude, all crude. I know unusually for this podcast is for dudes. All right, let's drop in the theme song and get going. Hello again and welcome back to TF. We're coming at you from the guy

household in Whitechapel. You already know what it is. My name is Riley. I'm joined here by Milo Edwards. It's me, your boy who's saying Kassavani reporting in from the Jacob Wall Hipster Cafe. Yep, I'm on my I'm on my US tour. I was supposed to it was supposed to be with a post Malone, but he just didn't show up yet. The coffee is a soup tour and we have Adam Smith from PC Mag, not the Institute with us today. I was too rebellious. They had to kick me out, but thank you. It's great to be here in the guy household, you know, it's because the Adam Smith Institute really is quite on PC. Well, that's the thing. I mean,

the Adam Smith Institute is a famously normal for normal people talking about how we just need to squeeze more millennials like flannels for the rest of their money and give it to billionaires. Absolutely. This is a very irrational. Like if you've read the wealth of nations, that's actually what it says. That's how nations are wealthy. And the theory of moral sentiments is actually just you open it and it says facts. Don't care about your feelings. They do not. I can confirm. No, I can. We can all confirm that. I once tried to have, you know, a long conversation about, you know, my sex life with the

third law of thermodynamics and did nothing. It's completely disinterested. So Hussein, you want to tell us a little bit about New York before we jump into the stuff that I've prepared? Yeah, I mean, this is my first time. So like everything here is just really kind of weird in a way that like I sort of love and I sort of pay at the same time. Right. So like, you know, the subway like sucks a lot. I think everyone knows all that stuff. I spent like, I spent like a weird amount of time in Coney Island last night because I took the wrong subway and I didn't realize. And when I was like, well, how was the easiest way

to get back to Brooklyn? And they were just like, yeah, you just got to wait. And it's like, well, how long do I have to wait for us? It's like, I don't know. This is like the person who's like behind the person who like sells the ticket, right? The funniest thing that happened to me about was actually in the subway stop near my place I'm staying at. And this is a story about you do do like because it's a very like alpha move. So I was I was heading back to my place after like going out. Oh, yeah, yeah. And at some point, I've got to tell you all about like the weird YouTuber party that like I ended up

going to my first night. But I was coming back from that YouTube party. And there was a guy who I was assuming was just like taking a leak on one of the walls, right? Which is a weird thing coming from London, but it's not like, you know, something that you would not expect. But then I realized that he wasn't taking a leak. He was he was he was he was, you know, he was inducing a leak. Well, he was doing what you're not supposed to do in no not November, which was that he was nothing. So it's the worst crime of all. So I was I was about to perform a citizen arrest on him because of this. And and he looked at

me while he was holding his junk. And he was just like, yo, what you're looking at. And I was just like stung. I was just I was just I stood there. I wasn't able to move. He was holding his junk while he was staring at me. And then it moved a little bit. And I was just like, Oh, shit, this is really weird. This is really weird. I just like ran out. The plot twist is this was Louis CK. This just goes to show how everything is contextual, because, you know, you thought he was peeing, but then to your horror, you discovered that he was nutting, which obviously bags his November. But if you'd have discovered this in January,

would have been completely the other way around. Yeah, this is what I was more outraged about. I was like, if you want to nut nuts away, but like bear in mind that some people here respect no nut November very much. And it's part of our identities. And please don't use my culture as a costume. No, no nut November is proud boy Ramadan. People with not allergies get very upset about no, not November. They're like, my culture is not a costume. You truly want to own the lips. You've not on Remembrance Day into a puppy. That's well, Jeremy Corbyn may have been wearing a puppy, but I didn't see any

cum stains on it. He didn't do a single come tribute. What the fuck? So we're going to get back to New York in a second, but I want to explore a concept that has just been dragging itself around my brain for the last few days. There is now a word that exists out there. I'm sure it's going to get defined in a dictionary at some point called a nano influencer. Well, the word is a nano influencer refers to a thing called a nano influencer signifier signified. It's all the same thing. And it is a term that's now being used in influencer marketing circles for someone who has a normal amount of

followers on social media. Usually about a thousand dish. What is the normal amount drive more than a normal amount? Wait, a thousand dishes and a normal amount of followers. That's a lot. That's like that's like relatively a lot. Like, okay. Next, most people on Twitter have like 60 followers. Sure. Like the vast majority of people indeed, but this is this is the term for someone with like, you know, about a thousand or usually it's on Instagram because that's a normal amount of followers for people who matter and they are and this is apparently the new frontier in digital marketing and I can't stop thinking

about it and it's this and it's this this passage that sort of leads that has been just sticking like a splinter behind my hippocampus with roughly 2700 Instagram followers. Alexis Baker, 25 had a relatively ordinary social media presence with photos of outfits and vacation spots filling her fee, but her online persona changed when she started posting effusive praise of products like suave professionals rose oil infusion shampoo. Hell, yeah, I love to be a professional clinic beyond perfecting foundation and concealer. That's American Psycho. It's a cool movie about a suave professional. Absolutely.

Yeah. That is actually the American Psycho brand of grooming products and loco coffee, a mix of cold brew and coconut water. Their lack of fame is one of the qualities that makes them more approachable. When they recommend a shampoo or lotion or furniture brand on Instagram, their word seems as genuine as advice from a friend because it probably is. He's only buy sofas from genuine people. I don't want to buy shampoo from fake people. Last time someone tried to sell me shampoo. I just said bought and turned away. Okay. Too many fake people have been trying to sell me. Shares longs and lazy

susans. I'm not going to have it. Okay. These people aren't real. They're bots. I would never have a lazy susan. I would only have a very hard working susan. A tremendous susan. The most incredible susan this America has ever seen. You won't even have to spin it to have access to all the spices. All I'm going to say is when susan was jacking me off in the mid 90s, she wasn't lazy at all. No further questions. What really gets me about this is that what's happened is normal influencers like Casey Neistat, who Hussein actually told me he met at this party. I've got my Casey Neistat. Sorry,

but I will say once this is done. Normal influencers. So stay tuned, folks. Normal influencers are basically because people think a million followers. Your common garden influencers. The kind of influencers we all know and love. Like Love Island people have become too expensive. Dr. Alex is out of your league. Don't expect Dr. Alex to tweet about your products. He's tweeting about like Teslas or something. I saw Dr. Alex at like some weird bar the other day and he went to the bathroom and someone really excitedly followed him into the bathroom, like just some other guy. And after they both came out, he like sat down next to his group of

friends and really loudly whispered, I got a picture of his dick. That's influencer marketing. That's what the people want to see. If you think about it, like every male toy that really is just a giant guy household. Someone getting a picture of Dr. Alex's dick, but Dr. Alex is such an influencer that on the side of his dick, it just says like vitamin water or something. But what gets me, what gets me about this right is that all of these influencers are becoming too expensive. And so what the advertising industry has done is it has reached down and to just sort of people's very normal quotidian connections with other people they just know

and monetize them. And like what and what that means essentially is like marketing. It's always been about spending money on products, but like think about this. It's like it. We started with movie stars advertising shit and then just people who are popular online selling shit and then podcasters selling shit specifically the Japanese restaurant near me. Akko. It's very good. That's another dinner for four for me and then but that that's gone down to just people. You know selling you shit like your family Christmas dinner is going to be brought to you by Butterball and every conversation that you have will just be two sales pitches just sort of aimlessly drifting past one another until everybody's side hustle is

just selling everything they can to everyone they know all the time using money that they make from marketing. But this all comes and you know that it's just rooted from the same people, same kind of people that like, oh, why are you spending, you know, five pounds on a meal deal? Why aren't you bringing food from home? Well, no, it's because it's going to get so bad that that five pound meal deal will be an Instagram post with a thousand likes as like something aspirational that you can aspire like that you can finally get if you work hard enough. Yo, being in love is great and I'm really enjoying being on on honeymoon with my fiance. Wait, no, that's not possible with my wife with my wife slash husband.

But what I also really love is the Cumberland sausage sandwich available in all boots retailers. But that's but that's just it. Like it's like it's the logic of capital is just monetize this stuff and it when it finds a new things to monetize it monetizes it and it's always been monetizing our relationships through like posting back and forth on Twitter or whatever. It's just getting so much more gaudy and obvious and it's selling bullshit. A coconut water of infused cold brew. It's like it's Valentine's Day is a scam has just become every day is a scam and we're living it. Well, that's the thing. It's like it's like brands are giving people money to pay to advertise products to other people who will buy

that most products with the money they get from advertising other brands. It's almost like you can make this much more efficient if just brands just gave everyone the products and then you just didn't need to pay for it. Oh, I've done a marks. But how would you sell that to a shell? We just give stuff away and in return we get pictures of Dr. Alex's dick. So what this is, it's a pyramid scheme. Ah, yes. It's a massive pyramid scheme and it's hilarious. The natural evolution of juice plus is like everything is juice plus now and it's like, yeah, buy this coffee. You'll be ripped, I guess. But buy it in bulk and sell it to your friends

who you don't have anymore because you're a pyramid scheme guy now and no one likes them. Pyramid scheme guys are up there with like problem alcoholics and problem gamblers. They're a burden to everyone. The only good pyramid scheme guy is the Pharaoh from UKO and that is Canada. Yo, you just that's transparent pandering to who's in. Oh my God. Yeah, and I'm going to make him buy my Egyptian God cards because my only God is capitalistic. Did you know that the Egyptian God cards aren't actually that useful in an actual match? So I've watched like endless YouTube videos about how God cards are really just a massive scam. Like the God cards itself is the pyramid scheme because they use like a whole

giant TV show to kind of really hype these cards up. And then when the company who made the cards were like, yeah, you can use them in tournaments now, all the kind of professional players realized that like they were completely pointless because they could get wiped out really easily because all of them had like zero defense points. So anyway, that's my story about how I tried to be a Ugeer influencer and made the whole community. God cards are the opiates of the dual. Well, I want to hear, I want to hear Hussain's Casey Neistat story. I mean, yeah, so like, so on the topic of influencer, so on my first night in New York, I got a text message from friend of the show, Taylor Lauren, that she was like, hey, you should

come to this party. And it turned out that the party was at Casey Neistat's new studio in 368, 368 Broadway. So I went there and it was just a really strange experience because who's Casey Neistat? Just for our viewers, listeners who might not know, just quick recap. Okay, so he's, so he's like the kind of daddy YouTuber. So he's the guy who basically made kind of YouTube culture happen, right? So every kind of YouTube style video that you see, where they kind of like daily like vlog their lives and everything, he was the, he was the one you kind of coined that. He was the one who was kind of like, yeah, like you can make content out of just like your everyday life and you can just make it just using a camera phone or

something like that. So he's like very respected in the YouTube community and like to be fair to him, he's done some really good work and like, he is a professional filmmaker by trade. So he doesn't really fit as a YouTuber in the same sense as like, you know, Jake Paul and stuff like that. He looks like a blind surfer. I mean, yeah, he wears sunglasses indoors. So like, that's the main, that's kind of the main takeaway from it. The event itself was like interesting because I didn't really get to spend a lot of time with Casey. And I really despise him about like YouTube itself. So one of the things that he's trying to work out on his studio is like, well, where does YouTube go from here?

Because there's so many people on the platform and they're making so much like similar content. And some of it is monetizable, but lots of it isn't. But how can you be like true to yourself and true to your form while on the platform? The thing that was really weird was like all the other kind of like YouTubers who ended up in that space too. So they were like much younger and they're the ones who were like, I was trying to have a conversation with one of these guys who was like a comedian. And like within five minutes, he like whipped out his camera and started like speaking to the camera like while we were like mid conversation. And it was just like this really bizarre thing because it was like, you know, he was looking for like this. And what I realized

was that he wasn't talking to me because he wanted to. He was talking to me because I was there. And it was the only place in that studio with good lighting. So, so, so we had like five minutes of formality where he's just like, oh, you're from England. That's interesting. And then he basically was just like, he just worked out his camera and he was like, yo, guys, I'm at 368. Casey Neistat. He's amazing. Check this out. Check this out. Check this out. It was just very bizarre to watch. And like all of it and like pretty much all the conversations with YouTube people basically went in that direction. So I presume that you did what any normal person would do upon being informed by an expert professional that this

was the only place with good lighting and immediately removed your shirt and began taking super hot abs pics. And then another thing was like some people were asking me, like, what do you do? And I was like, well, I edit a magazine. They're like, oh, really? Like, I don't really read magazines. I was like, okay, well, that's good for you. What's a magazine? Yeah, what's that? And then I was kind of like, oh, yeah, I do podcasting as well. And what was really interesting about that is that they're all like looking into podcasting. And they all kind of say the same thing about podcasting, which is that podcasting is kind of cool, I guess. And then they just walk off afterwards. Wrong. Yeah. So it's not cool at all. So it was a very

bizarre night. And YouTube is just very weird. But the thing is, over in this country, like, YouTubers are taken seriously. So one thing that I noticed was that in the UK, like, we still kind of see like people who do YouTube as kind of like a bit of a joke, right? Zoella. You know, they're kind of like people who most people know, like, you're pushing products or you're like, you're pushing services. And really what you are is like, you're an extended advertising campaign. Prisonfall is just a map. Enjoy these delicious. Generally, like, you know, YouTubers are taken a lot more seriously, which is which is probably why the whole like, you know, nano influence stuff is like really a big deal here. Whereas like, we kind of see it as a bit of a

joke. Like, I can totally see like why that would be like a monetizable option. Well, the thing is, I think with with the with nano influencers or what I'm basically calling brand driven Keynesianism, then every single interaction anyone is ever going to have is going to be exactly like what Hussein describes just now. Like, welcome to the future of all social interaction. Well, I think America's desperately tried to this is America's answer to peep show, isn't it? Everyone by Snapchat spectacles. Everyone records everything. You put it online. Channel 4 never buys it. And eventually you marry a woman whose brother writes terrible articles for the times. That's the future. We'll all live that dream.

That's very specific. It's very close to the Michael Gove dream, which is just marry a woman who writes terrible articles for the times. But I want to move on from brand driven Keynesianism to another thing that's recently happened in New York that might make Hussein's commute, maybe not maybe not quicker, but certainly more undignified and maybe in a box because as we all know, you said that implied that like people want their communities to be quicker. But as a second option, they wouldn't mind them just being less dignified. The problem with my group at the moment is that it's slow, but also too dignified. People salute me as I go past them on the platform. I really hate being welcomed on to this old Victorian coal train

with a goal with his silver trumpets. People doff their stove by pats to me. Okay, okay, okay. It's whatever I said, but you know, flip it the right way around. But Amazon's HQ to as we know has taken a big money shit all over Queens and DC. There isn't much evidence of it there now, but Jeff Bezos has indeed picked a place to make his new manner of which he will be the little Lord. Did you see what de Blasio said about it? Oh God, nothing good. I imagine it was extremely funny because basically de Blasio was like, I'm going to bring up the quote now. But it was like the biggest, it was like just the biggest, like the weirdest possible thing you could say one second. I'm just going to bring it up. Okay, so what he's one of the weirdest possible things was

Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York said he was willing to change his name to Amazon. The only good thing to come out of this is that Andrew Cuomo has been ruthlessly humiliated himself. So then he would just be like a weird trivia actor rivers quote. So just like one specific river. So what de Blasio says is that while Walmart has been systematic in its aggression toward labor and small retail, Amazon is quote, in Amazon is quote, part of the true American economy. What the fuck does that mean, right? Amazon patented a cage for its workers to be in so its robots wouldn't kill them. How is this the American economy? That is actually the true. That is the true American

economy. To be fair, it's not wrong. Is it like the true American economy is like everything. It's like that. It's like the wire. Like that's all like the true. Actually, to be fair, like mayor de Blasio that way round is like mayor of New York, but de Blasio mayor is a character from the wire. So this is completely absurd, right? Now Amazon has promised 25,000 new jobs each to the to the cities and it's promised $5 billion in various investments that we made in them over two decades. Of course, this is complete nonsense because the tax subsidies that have been promised to Amazon by New York are already actually estimated as high as a $4.6 billion subsidy, one billion of which just goes to Bezos huge. More for Jeffrey kisses.

That's an old character. Kisses by Jeffrey. I'm a nano influencer now. What I do is I tweet out on my private Instagram account all about the suave kisses shampoo from the Kisses range by Jeffrey. This is the culmination of a year of just humiliation of state and municipal governments who've been falling over themselves to just like to give to be am to have Amazon sort of set up in them. I want Amazon to fend on them. Yes, actually that is the best that is. I didn't think of this that is the best comparison. They want to be fendombed by Amazon because they want to give up control of most of their public works. They want to be told where to put their new infrastructure developments and they just want to give over all of the money that they possibly can. They're like,

oh yeah, raise the rents, raise them another 40%. In many way, giving Amazon a massive tax break is the biggest buying a girl panties on her Amazon wish list of all, right? And so it is the culmination of this national humiliation and then it was revealed that they're these locations were picked for a few reasons. They're already rich. They already have lots of infrastructure. They already have a very sort of affluent professional base and Bezos owns like 25 bathroom mansions in both of them. Bathroom mansions? What are the mansions that contain 25 bathrooms? Oh, right. He owns 25 bathroom mansions, like just gigantic bathrooms such that you could like live palatially in them, but the whole house is somehow a bathroom. This is the ultimate

mansion because I can shit anywhere I want. As opposed to Amazon workers who can't shit anywhere, like please, please, may I shit in one of your 25 bathrooms? This is becoming the Joe Reagan experience. Like what if you had to imagine, but like you're just shit in any room? Like every room is about that's dude. That's like ultimate luxury. I mean, really, you can't shit in any room. It doesn't have to be a bathroom. It's just if you've got the balls to do it. Any room is a bathroom. Dude, if you do DMT, you could shit anywhere. Yeah, you could shit in space. Right. So fine, but it's been this culmination of a year long humiliation where they have just tripped over themselves to get finned on by Amazon. And there and essentially

what Amazon, what Amazon's already doing is it's turning these places into company towns, right? Where it's Seattle tried to institute a tax on companies working, earning sort of more than a certain amount on per employee to pay for a solution to its bad and growing homelessness problem that was in part created by the high rents created by the tech sector that Amazon was instrumental in torpedoing. So good luck to New York doing anything now that they've essentially handed the reins of control over to, well, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Kisses, what swole Jeff Bezos and his dog. Amazon is going to get New York is going to be getting renamed to Bezley Hills and there's nothing we can do about it. Bezley Hills. I want to be more like embezzling Hills. Am I right?

Because the tax is right, but damn it. Nate, Nate, put it in. I knew it was going to be bad. I didn't put the sound. I didn't intend it to be good. Put the sound in. But look, here's the thing. We can talk forever about how, you know, Amazon comes in and runs your city. And then all of a sudden, all of your history textbooks feature the great and wonderful deeds of the Pinkerton Strike Breakers, right? We can talk endlessly about that. But one of the things I kind of want to focus on is like, if you concentrate all the power and wealth in one country, in one city, as we've learned from London, that city will start to suck. Wait, but London's great. You can go to like a ball pit where they're playing

Daft Punk's hits using a live orchestra on any night of the week for only £15. I can go to a club that will play Toto by Africa for 24 hours because memes are real life now and that's the only enjoyment I can scrape from my existence. Oh man. Oh, that's so believable. No, no, that's real. That exists. God damn it. We live in hell. We live in hell. It's their lies, but they're entertaining lies, except nothing's a lie anymore. Because these rich tech assholes, these rich finance assholes, they all like the same terrible shit. This is the example of your friend Milo who, what did he go see?

Oh, it was the joke. I mean, yeah. So one of my mates next week can't come to a show that I'm doing because he is going to the hits of Daft Punk as performed by a live orchestra. And I'm like, this is like an event that was designed by Markov chain. It's not like no one actually wanted to go to this event before a computer-generated marketing algorithm decided this was an event people would go to. And now people are because people are like, gee, that sounds like an event people would go to. I should go to that. And these are the sort of well-educated professionals whose whole lives have been sort of spent in institutions just overachieving by the rules, who then sort of go on to sort of be complete and hedonic drones for the rest of their natural

lives. And, you know, that they need a ball pit. They need a candy-themed cocktail. They need a detective-themed bar where you're not allowed to order until you crack the case. Yeah. I love a detective-themed bar, but where the case is like a really harrowing one. Like a dismembered body in a suitcase. Because of conservative cuts, detective-themed bars just actually get rolled into the police. And you just need people to try and solve crimes desperately. Right. But this is like New York, welcome to becoming like London. Yeah. You've won now. You're going to get the shittiest aspects of London. Yeah. In addition to having a metro system, which works according to like a lunar calendar.

Yeah. And that's the thing. It's like that's where the more of the FINDOM comes in, right? Which is that New York is now investing in its public transit infrastructure to make way for Amazon's entry into the city. Why did it need to wait for Amazon? I couldn't have just done it. I'm sorry. Am I supposed to answer that? I don't know, Riley. I'm not here to give you answers. I'm here to make jokes. I don't understand things. That isn't my job on the podcast. Don't look at me when you ask big questions like that. The truth is, the truth is obviously they could have, but they didn't because the whole point of neoliberalism obviously is the transfer of public wealth to private hands. And the best

we get out of it is like you can get a hot dog delivered by drone. Fantastic. Wasn't that like the type of thing that they used to like torture David Blaine when he was in London? Well, they delivered a hot dog to him by drone. Yeah, they flew it up just outside the cage. They were flying up like burger meat and hot dogs outside his glass box because he was starving himself for 40 days. But wasn't that glass box thing like over 10 years ago? Surely no one had a drone. Well, it was like on a remote control helicopter, you know, for what it was. It was a bunch of highly violent Palestinian terrorists flying kites with hot dogs on them. With ropes tied to fence.

They know we can't eat pork. It's aggressive hot dog flying. And that's why we had to shoot them all. Right. So anyway, you can get your opinions on Amazon's HQ2 from everywhere. We all know that the tax subsidies are galling, that the public sort of like frustrations have been humiliating for the entire public sector and workers as a whole. And that sort of all of our elected political representatives have essentially just betrayed our trust like for the 40th time. But I think the real thing to worry about here is that it is going to take the last vestiges of a sort of affordable or interesting or cool New York and just tear it the fuck away and replace it with a pizza express or whatever you have.

I mean, this is the thing. So everyone I've spoken to who lives around here is like, yeah, like Queens is like probably like the only cool place left. And the fact that they've now chosen this is like even like even just like one of the places in New York where like most kind of like of the original communities still exist. This is basically like disrupting the whole thing. Right. So yeah, like I went to I went to like a small protest out when the Amazon news was announced. I went down to Queens by accident. I took the wrong subway actually. And yeah, they were kind of the same. But yeah, this is just going to be the biggest shit show. And like there apparently were plans like build all these new developments around here specifically for

Amazon workers as an incentive for people to kind of say, okay, I will come work at the Amazon factory if you if you like massively subsidize my housing and healthcare and stuff like that. It was just this is just classic Amazon, just classic Amazon, because it's like you read stories about like how Amazon does something of critical ostensibly good, like, oh, investing in, you know, young children learning to code so that when they grow up, they can grow up and then work for Amazon. It's exactly the same thing. We're going to come and build more houses exclusively for Amazon workers. So if you want to have a sustainable means of living come and work for the mega corporation, because what else are you going to do with your life now?

Yeah, absolutely. You know what this is? This is this is we're essentially like we are we can see the future being built. And essentially what it is is the version of the Simpsons time stream where Homer travels to via the broken toaster, where Ned Flanders controls everything. Yeah, but I don't see a problem with this. You know, I for one greatly enjoy eating my three square prime meals a day and being a loyal prime citizen. And then on the day before I get married to my fiance, having my dad have sex with her as part of prime an octa. You were sitting on that one. Well, that's the thing though. Also like remember in 12 years, the world's going to end.

And so like what the reality is of our lives is going to be we're all going to work for one or another division of Amazon and our wages are going to be paid on the basis of how much we can shill various products from that division of Amazon to people who work at other divisions of Amazon. And eventually Jeff Bezos is just going to not need to pay anybody. We're just going to live in dormitories. So I will agree to become one of these nano influences for Amazon. If I'm only ever required to sell those incredibly specific like computer generated sweatshirts that donate for me, like I am incredibly sarcastic and I don't suffer fools because it's all about being a white man who knows Latin, who was born in February thing.

I'm like a bit too specific and that's way too coherent for a predictive text sweater. Yeah, it'd be something like, yeah, I'm a Virgo. Yeah, I eat sand. What of it? Yeah, that's a lot. Who doesn't eat sand, Adam? Come on. There's two general. Oh, yeah. Anyway, so that's that's that's that's our particular slice on on Amazon, which is it's going to suck for all the reasons you're all familiar with already, but spare a thought for the fact that it's also going to make New York unbelievably lame. Anyway, yeah, move to London in it. So Adam, you recently got back from Barcelona's Smart Cities Expo. Yeah, so I was in Smart City Expo. It was sort of in the middle of Barcelona.

What a Smart City Expo is, it's essentially business pitches for what your city could be if all of technology was sort of turned up to 11. So everything that all the buzzwords that you know is like Internet of Things, connected devices, self-driving cars, 5G, all of that, the blockchain, the blockchain, the blockchain, which is actually a series of interconnected scooters that you use instead of a rail network that that I tweeted out in jest and my mum thought was serious and applauded me on it. So don't worry, we can walk there. It's only five blockchains away. But yeah, so that so that's the Smart City essentially pitching the future in a way that is ostensibly good for people and in reality, just really good for businesses.

Okay. Yeah, so you said it's this city that's based on hyperconnectivity and this Expo was just show different companies showing their vision of what that was. Yeah, like how you how large companies will work together with government to develop urban planning and make traffic more efficient. So technically, it's green energy and managing resources so that global warming doesn't fuck us as bad as it's going to. And that's it, yeah. So these are the ostensible reasons, of course. Yes. Because when tech companies and governments work together, we know what happens every single time. Well, yes, it just builds into it looks like Robocop. It looks like Minority Report. There were

pictures like proudly displayed on screens like unironically where it's like your security camera on a bus will immediately be fed into the police, something that is actually being pitched in London to like get developed. And it's things like the cars that you drive will be immediately tracked. So the like local government will know your location at all times, which is terrifying if you just want to get to your job in with like five minutes faster. I'm just going to go onto the top deck of buses holding up signs saying buy my coconut milky pigs. I know you're watching me, you hoax. You're micro-influencing the police. We've got a shiny new cap for the police and that's it. And then why are we only setting this

to cops? So and again, I think listeners, listeners to the show will be sort of unsurprised to hear essentially this theme arise again, which again and again and again, which is that the smart city, which is just basically a city-wide network of sensors connected to different stuff and stored in various databases and so on, is ostensibly about data collection for optimization and service delivery. But realistically, it's about wealth collection for the private companies that actually own it. Yeah. So it's predict. So like one of the facts that they proudly portray is that it's predicted that it's going to be worth $1.2 trillion to like essentially seed AI into every public infrastructure that we have by,

I think, 2030. That goes up to like $3.6 trillion. But of course, where does all of that money go to if it's not because wages haven't increased in like the past 20 years, like we're still living under this like veil of austerity and all capitalism. So like that money just gets put back into more tech companies that then have to pay nano-influences to buy the products so that they can just live in this city that has become too smart and too expensive to get them. It's digital gentrification and we should all be concerned. Just imagine living in a sort of like weirdly technologically advanced but still ancient realm called the veil of austerity. It's what you wear at that wedding day on the prime wedding day. Oh, God. Side-eyeing your fiance's dad over your veil of austerity.

So one of the things you brought up with this earlier was that as these technologies get developed and as these tech companies are just sitting on more and more hordes of cash, you said that you got the feeling that it was just existence for existence's sake. Now, I don't think you were trying to like talk about existentialism. So what do you mean? So it's the things like the only reason to, or one of the reasons to put AI and 5G and all that sort of stuff into cities is because on one level, it is something we want. Like we all want Wi-Fi on the tube because having to connect, we all want 5G on the tube because having to connect to Wi-Fi at every station is inconvenient. But then once you have 5G everywhere in London, a large company

is going to say, well, why aren't we using this in order to track a ton of stuff so that we can collect data from it? And it's just that the fact that these technologies are existing for our slight convenience can get built up so quickly into essentially more mass marketing. It's like it is interesting is if when I go to a new city in Europe or something, that I can use Google Lens to look at a national monument and get some information about it. That is cool. That is helpful. That gives me information. Google then will use that to market to me like socks from Germany that I can't buy anymore because I've left in the week. But still, it's just kept that kernel of information. We saw you checking out that kid.

One of the perfect examples of this is one that you brought up, which is one of the ways in which Google is trying to integrate with the NHS. Oh, yeah. So Google essentially made an app that was essentially to send notifications to a particular hospital in London and at USAI and everyone thought it was really exciting. And then it came out like, I think it was actually yesterday of time of the recording. So what the 15th maybe that Google had just scraped the private information from like 1.6 million patients that then could use for marketing. And a lot of people came out and was like, this is a terrible idea. This is a model Google said that it would not integrate. I think it was called the Stripe app or something. Stream. The stream app with its deep mind AI.

But Google did it anyway because Google is a too big to fail company that can do what they want. They can take whatever fine is going to be levied at them. And like even if it's that 2% of their profit margins that GDPR is going to bring, because the end result is more is more power, is a stranglehold that they can just have over our lives to a greater degree. And because the next logical step is nano influencing sick people. God, I really love being a hot Instagram thought. But what I also really enjoy is chemotherapy. And with this link, get 50% off chemo in nano influencer marketing, chemo therapy to bald men as an excuse for being bald. That's actually why Jeff Bezos is so desperate to develop is to cure the baldness.

This is just the man who wants to cure baldness. Now we all have to suffer. But he went about it such a wrong way. Just didn't know what to do. Why couldn't we just have made to pay socially acceptable? We wouldn't have to deal with this. Amazon's first bookshop was just all about hair care products. And it's just spiraled uncontrollably. Right. So it's actually just very funny to me, imagining every like bro-y bald personality is actually just being a cancer sufferer who's who's too who's too proud to let everyone know like Joe Rogan just battling for years. So Google is sort of deep in this space, right? Because they've sort of privatized a big section of Toronto.

Yeah, they opened like a smart city essentially section under a company called Sidewalk Labs, which I think is part of their like big alphabet mega conglomerate. And developers and people that worked for it is then eventually dropped out because Google couldn't, Google could not confirm that the data that collected would not would be anonymized. So Google would just be collecting a lot of information from you anyway that could be used directly at marketing. And again, that's that's just where we are. There's a like similarly, there's a place in the Netherlands, which has a ton of 64 microphones in all of its street lamps so that it can be sent to police officers. Like the development of these technologies is so insidious

under the banner of under the banner of keeping the peace that eventually either becomes to a build a surveillance state or be market to you further or or ideally both. Me sidling out to a street lamp going buy my coconut milk, you pigs. I know you're in there, you hoax. The last thing that you remember when you get when you black out from like trunjans is whatever hashtag is written on the baton. Well, I think here's the thing. Like we know like like Amazon is going to make New York suck, right? Because in part it's because big decisions made by data based companies are like inherently conservative where if you're trying, if you have a smart city and you're looking at football traffic to try to decide what your

next restaurant is going to be, you're going to look at what's currently popular and then you're going to just do that. Yeah, it's self perpetuation. So like a few months, like maybe a month ago, Amazon had a big story that the AI it was using to hire people was sexist because all the data it was built on was from society, which is sexist we live in that we live in famously. And like one of the things is like night like 90% of the world's data has been created in the past two years. Only 1% of that has been actually analyzed. And the pitch is like, oh, what imagine what we could do if we can unlock the other 89% of that data, which is basically the pitch of the movie limitless. And that just results in drug running and nosebleeds or the movie Lucy where everyone

disappears into ethereal space. Limitless resulted in a stunning performance by Bradley Cooper. I will not see this movie maligned. Yeah, now he's a talking raccoon. So look where that's going. Now, but that's the thing, right? If 90% of the world's data has been created in the last two years, only 1% of it has been analyzed. Essentially what we're saying is let's live between 2016 and 2018 forever. Let's just keep living these two years. Let's keep all of these trends. Let's stay listening to 69. Let's continue. Let's continue having the relentless avocado toast cycle where it's, you know, either delicious or a cause of poverty. And let's just never change anything. We're going to be completely static because there are going to be sort of sensors and

AI algorithms largely balancing our entire lives to make sure nothing ever changes. Yes. The Truman Show plus Groundhog Day, essentially, and like everyone. Yeah, forever. If that's the movie pitch and like you and there are people that will argue and to some extent they're right. They're like, oh, yes, but the more we get this data, the more we can do things like, say, make traffic more efficient so that, you know, climate change happens slowly, which is good on the surface, but it's just a bigger equivalent of banning plastic straws when what we really need to do is change how capitalism works so mass polluters don't happen. Like, and sometimes like the data just doesn't get listened to. Like there's a famous thing that

there are so many air pollution like monitors in China. They're everywhere, but no one listens to the data because the truth is so inconvenient. Thank you, Al Gore. So they just keep on going because what uses the data if you don't want to listen to it or if it's so limited that, again, as you say, it exists in only these past two years. Yeah. And that actually almost leads me to want to go to the Bristol Dome or as I've titled it on this Google Doc, Dome Me Off Bristol. So yeah, so one of the ways that like Bristol is marked as like a foremost smart city for having things like a data dome, which is just a large building with 4G and with 5G and 4K screens that can be used to show data from like social logical mappings and how to develop a city. So

then this is the thing because smart cities are still so in the future and people are pitching this so much. The thing that makes a smart city so smart is the potential to develop further smart cities within the city that is already smart. It's incredibly smart. I just love that they're pitching Bristol as a smart city, a city in which the police have tased the same black man who works for them twice accidentally. Yeah. Their problem isn't that they need more data. Like that's not the problem there or equally if the Bristol basically has a problem of sort of poverty and chronic underfunding of services and by sort of creating a big data dome, they're able to see it and say that they're working on it. And it's like, look,

we have a graph. This is no one has anything. Yeah. It's like the issue is in Bristol, let's say for example, is bad housing and the measure that is being praised for and that should be taken and I am not making this up is designing a frog shaped air humidity sensor. How can it be shaped as fog? Does fog have a shape? Like a frog. Like a frog. Yeah. They said fog shaped. I'm like, well, that's too, that's too meta for me. It's just a cloud of nanobots that just don't worry. It just analyzes the ambient humidity of your house. It doesn't, it doesn't swarm into you, take you over and turn you into a zombified super soldier. It will never do that. Trust us. It's like someone just like Homer Simpson trying to explain to a child

what the cloud is like. Well, Lisa, it's like a kind of big fog in which you can upload all of your data and child pornography. Wait, why would Homer be having child pornography? I don't know because the Simpsons don't age. They're running out of ideas. Also, that's a pretty, that's a pretty good Homer. Thank you. That was worse. Yeah. And just the icing on the tape that project is called the damp busters pilot, which of course it is. It sounds like a program, like a company that does like damp proofing in like Solihull or something. And they're like, we've come up with a clever pun for our vans. Cause we, we bust damp, but we also hate the Germans. So it's kind of two in one really. So, so this whole smart city initiative essentially

enables a local government to sort of take a bunch of money from Facebook or Google or damp busters. Yeah. When your house is damp, it's really moist. Who are you going to call damp busters? Well, you don't need to call them because they're always listening. I'm going to mock that because I want it to be the preview. But right. And so they can essentially come in and they can say, we're going to provide everyone some trivial service, whether it's something that we could generally regard as good, like 5g on the tube, no matter where you are in the network. That's actually good. Like we should aim for getting that. But the problem is, any company coming in to provide that is always going to get back something more valuable than

they've given. Yeah. It's the, it's the big political equivalent of like signing up to a nectar card. Like yes, you can get a marginal discount, but your data is so much is worth so much more. And in the UK, this will happen like incredibly passively. Like it will just, it will, like companies will exist in just a greater degree that they do now in places like that don't have the same data protection laws, like places like China. It just will build into the surveillance state that people do and rightly fear now. And it's no, also you can't forget that austerity creates this because austerity creates under delivery of services and then smart city people come in and say,

we're going to use sensors so that with your current budget, you can deliver the needed level of services. By the way, we know everything about everyone now because even, even this isn't so much smart city, but it's within homes. Police have started seizing Alexa recordings to prosecute people. Oh yeah. So that's fucking incredible. But yeah, Alexa, you're my lawyer now. That's Alexa client privilege. But yeah, it's, and it's weird because again, Amazon isn't denying that those recordings exist. It's just saying it's not going to hand it over to the police. And that, and that's, this is again, the issue of having a political problem that is marketed as an economic problem.

Yes, it is a good idea that the police should be able to respond to crimes better, but it's forgetting that in America, what that means is a lot more people of color will get murdered by the police because it hasn't changed the incompetency of the service, it's just made the problem more efficient and faster to get to. It's like, that's it. It's, I've always thought this, it is, is essentially most of modern life is a machine designed to kick you in the nuts and like sort of liberal, liberal governments and the, in the tech giants have looked at this machine and decided that they can make it run on green energy.

I've also just had a realization, which is that this is just like the major key version of Black Mirror. If Black Mirror is like, backseat, what if your mom was a phone? This is like, hey, is modern life getting you down? What if your phone was the cops? Oh my. So who's saying we haven't heard from you in a bit? Anything? Do you have any opinions on this? I think some people are built to live in smart cities and some people are built to live in rational cities. And in a rational city, we have 5G calipers, which means that you can get very precise measurements of all the women whose skulls you measure on the tube. The caliper data is immediately uploaded to your phone, where it's then analyzed all mass.

So we know the racial composition of any given tube car. And if there are too many Irish, you're actually going to be able to change your travel solution in flight. Well, Anna immediately notifies the cops of any criminal Italian brain pass. I mean, I mean, as a serious thing, like, so obviously I'm in New York right now and like one of the big differences obviously is that when you take the subway, you don't actually get any, there's no Wi-Fi, right? There's basically no Wi-Fi in the majority of the city outside of like Manhattan, like even like specific areas of Manhattan. So like this place is far from like a smart city for the most part. So one observation that obviously I made is that like when you're

waiting 15 minutes for a subway, like having Wi-Fi, you will literally do anything in those 15 minutes to go get your Wi-Fi, right? And I think this is kind of where I feel like there's like a big broader like culture shift that's going to like happen soon with like what's the nature of these smart cities, whether they are kind of dominated by places like Amazon or whether I, you know, my genuine thinking is that like healthcare is really going to be the first frontier for this, you know, because as you were kind of saying, like even even if like there's a couple of like things that I was observing before I left in the UK and one of them which was a press release what I got was like a very cheap kind of private health service.

So basically they said for like £10 a month, you will be kind of like covered on like most things that will take you ages to get on the NHS. And it's like £10 a month is like an absurdly low price for like private health care, right? But if you read like the fine print of that, what they basically say is that like, you know, all the data that you give this company and they're like, you know, this is a tech company. So what they do is that when they initiate you into the service, they'd be like, you know, come in for an hour and we'll basically take as much information from you as we can, we'll kind of keep it in our systems and that way we can tailor the best kind of health care to you, right? Now, we know what's the big danger about the big

danger is that like if a private company owns your data, and you're signing this paper on the premise that like you want to have like good health care without the NHS wasting times, like you won't really consider what that data is used for. You know, and I'm sure this is reiterating like what you guys have been saying, and I've been struggling to hear sort of, which is just that like, yeah, we're going to be looking towards like smart cities are really going to be ones where like, yeah, the barriers to access are going to be a lot less and they're going to cost a lot less. But the consequences of giving that data is going to be like far higher. And that might manifest in terms of like, you know, big companies dominate in particular

areas of cities, as will probably be the case in Amazon and Queens, or, you know, big kind of big private health care, like being the number one competitor of the NHS and like people opting for that type of service without thinking about like one of the consequences of like having so much personal data to this organization. That's actually a really good point that you just make because you mentioned like the physicality of handing over the data of signing the paper. Like as you walk around a city, you don't constantly sign contracts to say that like the traffic camera can take a picture of your face because under things like GDPR, you have a legal right to that image, you have a legal right to be forgotten, but

no one's really know how any of these laws are going to be implemented. So your consent is essentially just walking, is just walking around, is just living your life. And even if you can manage, even if they do manage to find that way to sign that contract and to get you a sense like legal rights over your data, what are you going to do? You're going to like Facebook already has 500,000 pages of data on you that you can get if you want to, but no one does because no one has a big galaxy brain enough to actually comprehend all of that data. And that's why we keep having think pieces about things like, I got all my data back from Tinder and this is what it knows about me and everyone's shocked and we just do that again every two years because it's still shocking and

no one knows what to do about it. I would just like to say on the contrary, I do make people sign contracts all the time, but that's just because I love business. And I love being Patrick Bates, then, who is famously a business person. Another cheery episode, guys. I know, I feel energized. I'm like, hell yeah, the future is great. My house is the cops. My mom is the cops. My phone is a phone. And my friend Dave that I've not seen in years is selling me like coconut blood for some reason. That's cool. I just imagine you saying all of that, but in joking makeup. I am an agent of nano influence. I just influence things. You know how I got these scars? Instagram. You know how I got these scars? Sign up to tortoise to find out.

It's not about the money. I just did it for the likes. That's it. That's the only way to beat it. We all have to be Joker. Unfortunately, like the dumb guys that post on Facebook all the time, they were right. They were right. We were wrong. That's the ultimate embarrassment, embarrassing own of all. Is this the last episode of the podcast? No, it's just then we're going to act. Right now, I think the the Twitter bio of the podcast says we're a podcast about success in business via self-belief in crystals. That's just going to be unironic at this point. Is our business cooking meth? Is that what that's going to be? I didn't think of it that way, but sure. I guess that's the only thing left.

Anyway, so before we depress ourselves anymore, Milo, you want to tell people about something that's happening soon, right? Yeah. Next week will be this week actually. It'll be this week, this Thursday. Just say the number. It's Wednesday, the 21st of November. I am hosting a comedy night, which I host every two weeks at the Seckford, which is 34 Seckford Street near Farringdon Tube Station in London. We've got a great lineup. It's me, so obviously good. Pierre Novelli, friend of the show, and TV star. Also, Jamie Fraser, Pope Lonergan, and Charlie Dinkin. So it's going to be great. Please do come and support your boy. It's completely free. I'm glad that those last three have slanted on their feet after resigning as

Tory Junior Ministers. And Adam, where can people find you on the internet? You can find me on Twitter at AdamNDSmith. Is it your Twitter handle at ASI? If you have any criticisms with anything I've said, please tweet the actual Adams Smith Institute. They will be happy to hear it because they just like the human contact. They actually do study you. That's what they're there for. You are separate from them, but they're like, we must have an institute to study this man. Otherwise, don't forget you can always commodify your descent with a t-shirt from Lil Comrade. Maybe you could get the Bristol Data Dome written on it. I think Edie's having some kind

of sale for Christmas as well. So do get your orders in, buy shirts early, buy shirts often. And as ever, thank you. That's a little micro influence a bit. As ever, god damn it. You know what I want to do? I want to be a micro influencer, but like be one of those guys that makes t-shirts where the nipple holes are exposed just really popular. Yes. And they have like a Yu-Gi-Oh logo on them for some reason. Edie, Edie, can we make one of those please? Can we make the episode title Yu-Gi-Oh is a pyramid scheme? We'll see. We'll see what Nate. Nate usually names them as these like

bleary-eyed and trying to go to bed just after he's done editing them. All right, Hussain. We'll see what your father says. Thanks. So thanks also to Jinseng for the use of our theme song. It's called Here We Go. You can find it on Spotify. It's very good. Anyway, that's all from us in the guy household, but from our guy household to your guy household. Good evening. Have a really guy evening. Bye.