TRASHFUTURE - HyperCube feat. Seamus Malekafzali

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Terror has a new dimension. Alice, Riley, and returning guest, journalist Seamus Malekafzali (@Seamus_Malek) talk about the Saudi pivot to the third dimension. Also, Labour’s fabulous plans to fix criminal justice “by just using people from the town,” and Matt Hancock’s foray into NFT’s only about one year too late. Check out Seamus' Substack about Middle East politics: http://malekafzali.substack.com And also check out his Substack about obscure films: http://burntnitrate.substack.com If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *BERLIN LIVE SHOW ALERT* We're also doing a show on March 11 in Berlin! Get tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-in-berlin-tickets-525728156067 *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

You think anybody wants to ask questions? All they want is a clear conscience and a fat paycheck. I mean, I only done my shovel for months on this one. This was a great job! Why put people in it? Because it's here. You have to use it or you admit it's pointless. But it... it is pointless!

Quentin, that's my point. What have we come to? It's so much worse than I thought. Not really. Just more pathetic. You make me sick, Worth. I make me sick, too. We're both part of the system.

I drew a box, you walk a beat. Hello, everyone. It is me, Riley. I am here with Alice on this free episode of Trash Future. It's the free one. It is the free one. It's the slimmed down free one. It's the skeleton crew free one. And if you couldn't tell from the fact that we played a clip of the 1997 Canadian sci-fi horror film Cube,

possibly one of the best Canadian movies ever made, and that we're talking to Seamus Malik of Zellie. Hi, Seamus. Hi. We are talking about the new Cube. The new Cube that they're going to have in Saudi Arabia. Riley has been talking to me about the movie Cube, possibly you two, Seamus, for the last week and a half now.

He will not stop. He's Cube Pilled. I have been hearing about Cube, the film, from Riley for months, even before Saudi Arabia announced this project. He's obsessed with this picture. I saw it years ago when I was in high school. I thought it was an interesting concept. It did not reverberate throughout my life as a house with Riley.

I was overjoyed by the title of the sequel, Cube to HyperCube. I didn't see it, though. No, it's okay. The slogan of Cube to HyperCube is incredible. You're not respecting the Cube cinematic universe enough. The trailer for the movie Cube does not say the term Cube in it, but in the trailer for Cube to HyperCube, they do in fact say,

Horror has a new dimension. Cube to HyperCube. That's pretty good. Did they make a Cube 3 and call it Cube? No, it was called Cube Zero. That's so stupid. They already blew the whole thing by saying HyperCube. That's what you say when you have the fourth one or the fifth one, I feel like.

It would be the fourth one because the HyperCube is a four-dimensional shape. There you go. They were not expecting Cube to be as much of a success as it was, which I'm assuming. I don't know what it was. I don't know. Canadian standards? Was it a box office smash? It was no bond cop, bad cop.

I'll tell you that. My favorite Canadian buddy cop series. I was talking with Alice. What I did was I single-handedly psychologically obliterated you because we got talking about Ontarian stereotypes and you lost years of work that you've spent cultivating a kind of mid-Atlantic accent. You just went back to Ontarian.

You were fully speaking Canadian to me. I sounded like one of the fucking guys from Letter Kenny. It was awful. I was like, oh yeah, that's a classic fucking Ontarian stereotype they got Tom Fior doing. Not that bad, not that bad, but that's the exaggerated version. No, don't try and conceal this.

No, it was exactly that bad. We're going to be talking all about the Cube. I especially like that clip from Cube. What we're talking about is the question of how all of these seven strangers came to be entombed in this maze of moving parts that no one knows why it's there. Eventually, it's just proffered like, who cares why this is here?

It was just someone decided to build it and then if they didn't use it, then what would be the fucking point of it being there at all? There's no conspiracy, there's no cover-up, it's just the grand monument to the futility of everything. Someone built a cube and once you build the cube, you've got to put some people in that cube and that's what we're going to talk about.

Then if they go into a room that's not marked the prime number, they get taken apart by acid. I don't know if they're going to put that in this sort of cube. It seems like they'd be about walls doing like crazy wallpapers. It's not about that. I just want to stress, every time that we get a soft topic, like me and Milo get a soft topic,

you're like, if only I didn't have these goons, these morons, it would be a nice focused intellectual podcast. I would chat to my friend Seamus and we would have a sort of like, it would be like the FT, right? No, what you've done is you have done this by yourself by thinking about the movie cube. You are down here with us. You are the idiot also. Look, it's just another cube based room that I'm trapped in

and apparently this is the devilish trap in this one, is that I'm being my own distraction. Look, we're going to get to the cube talk in a little bit. We have some news to run through first. Some Britain's been happening. First of all, some Scotland's been happening. Yeah, we've got some Scotland, specifically, this is all about Kate Forbes,

who is running to replace Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister. At the time of recording, who dynamited her own campaign the same day she launched it by going, yeah, I actually don't support gay marriage or abortion or anything, pretty much. And like, if you want to be careful with those views and sort of like even like a centrist electorate in Scotland, which has now sort of been huge centre-left

by 20 years of SNP institutionalisation, this went down like a ton of bricks, which is to say badly as a ton of bricks would. And it's like one of her own advisers just was like briefing the press like, now she's fucked it. It's just over. Yeah, she's done. And this was like the right of the SNP

also managed to split their own vote by running Ash Regan as well. So beautiful, perfect. The one moment, the one sort of like crack in the armour when they could have sort of like exploited this and sort of driven the country rightwards and they've absolutely fucked it. And now the next First Minister is going to be

Humza Youssef, who's kind of like Scottish Kierstammer, like a bit more sympathetic and a bit less memorable, which is saying something. So to put this in a, to put this in, let's say a 1980s politics of Lebanon context, I guess what we're saying. So I guess what we're saying is that Kate Forbes is... How is it going to land this one?

Step one, Nicola Sturgeon was Moussail Sardra. Right. And then it fucking, it went from there, right? Kate Forbes, okay. So Kate Forbes is Haddad. And he's from... No, no, so it's what I found really most telling about this entire debacle, essentially,

is that all of a sudden there is this common sense opinion that has just appeared across British media and it's sort of center and right. A new opinion has been issued. Which is that a person of faith should not... Who gets to be a person of faith? White Christians. A person of faith with socially conservative beliefs

has a right to be taken seriously and should not have those beliefs exclude them from public office, otherwise that is somehow illiberal. Can be bad enough. The Equality Secretary managed to say that it's in the Equality Act that you couldn't condemn someone for their religious beliefs,

which is not in the Equality Act. So like what, Shamima Begum's going to be coming back then? Oh, I assume, yeah. But no, so... But like, it's curious, isn't it, how people of faith always seems to refer to people like this? And they've wheeled Tim Farron back out to talk about how like the water is making the frogs gay.

And it's like... But Humza, yes, of some Muslim. Isn't he a person of faith? No, no, that doesn't apply because he's like that his faith leads him to slightly more liberal positions. It applies if you're going to be trying to attack Kate Forbes though.

So, you know, just all of this is to say is all of these people are extraordinarily stupid. Do not have your best interests at heart. And even their gestures at liberalism, using the forms of liberalism are hollow, empty and vacuous. I do want to move on though, so we can get this little more of the fun stuff

and then to get into the Saudis, of course. Sheamus, how familiar are you with Matt Hancock? I would say my exposure to Matt Hancock, however unwilling, was the fact that I think he was very visible during the coronavirus crisis. You know, obviously he was one of the cabinet ministers for health.

And then I remember he was very unceremoniously, I think, resigned because I think he was cheating on his wife. Breaking the COVID distancing rules to cheat on his wife. Yes. Really big debate between the pandemic and then love, which is more important. And I remember that seemed pretty humiliating.

But he's back now, from what I understand. He's back forever. He's so back. He's back in a form that was sort of perfectly written for us, right? Which is... You know what, Riley, you introduce this. It's your discovery, please.

So Matt Hancock... Oh, this isn't just a discovery of me. This is the discovery of hundreds of people that sent this to me on Twitter. So thank you all. I appreciate all of your contributions. But Matt Hancock has finally done what we've been joking that he would do

for years now. And he has released an NFT collection. Yes. I am grinning from ear to ear. Yes. What are the NFTs? Are they apes? So the NFTs are...

He is facilitating the sale of NFTs to support Ukraine. And I think ultimately... And like this artist from Ukraine, which I think is like... I don't know if it's good to support him. That's like... Such a Matt Hancock thing, though,

is to like do broadly the right thing for the wrong reasons and in the dumbest possible way, right? Oh, yeah. So it's just that if you take something seriously, right? If you think that something is a good thing to be doing and you involve crypto in the doing of it at all, then you are at best sabotaging it and at worst insulting it as well.

So Matt Hancock, you finally released an NFT because that was the best thing you think that now, as someone who is a professional reality TV star, whose main job is getting just the most humiliated anyone's ever caught on TV because everyone hates him, including apparently the SAS who dares wins, guys. Yeah, he went on an SAS-themed,

a special forces-themed reality show, and now the contestants of it or the hosts of it are on Twitter going, God, I would have liked to have waterboarded him, which is an incredible review to get, I think. A great note to get back from the producers is like, oh, yeah, Barry Psycho from the SAS says he wished he could have give you a real kicking, you know?

Ultimately, right. This is someone who's gone from being a state minister, probably one of the most important ministries in the UK, to shilling NFTs. And that's just him now. It was always him in his heart. And this is also always this country. Ever since, you know, this sort of kind of conservatism triumphed

over Cameron's kind of conservatism, which was also terrible in its own way. This was always going to be the way they were going to sell off everything and then immediately go to, like, try and sell NFTs for the dumbest people alive. So, yeah, it's like, if you're actually, you know, a Ukrainian artist who's trying to, like,

support yourself, you're sort of, you're on the run from the country and so on and so on, like, just how to have this guy... Do not trust Matt Hancock. Do not, like, give any of your art to Matt Hancock or anyone who wants to make an NFT of it, but especially not him. No, just the absolute fucking pits.

So, just a little more sort of moving onwardly. A single extra piece of Britishness, which is Labour's crime strategy is out. Now that they're the government and waiting, they're trying to explain what they're going to do about all the problems. And one of the problems is people are very afraid of getting primed.

So, we're going to fix it. So, this is one of the five pillars of Labour that have been announced under Starmer. Yeah, you know, Charity, Prayer, Pale Convoy, I'm seeing. And one of them is... We're going to talk about them sort of more fully on the next episode on the bonus feed,

but we... So, one of them is, like, if we're going to finally have the fastest growing economy in the G7, can you believe it? A right-wing Labour leader saying, we're going to grow the economy. How on earth did they come up with that? Crazy.

Are we going to do it by stripping away Labour protections? Come on. He hasn't gone into nearly that much detail, but I'll tell you the thing that we're going to focus on just now before going on to Saudi, which is Steve Reid, Shadow Home Secretary, and by just as much of a fucking fascist

as Braverman or Patel or any of these people. Just a nice one. Sure. He said, today we have a far better understanding of the science of trauma, how a young mind damaged by abuse or neglect in childhood can lead to criminal behaviour and adolescence and adulthood, and we will create the best trauma-informed criminal justice system

in the world. What do we think of that concept, huh? I can't... This is a larger discussion that could probably take, like, four hours, but it's so deeply offensive how, like, therapy talk and therapy language

has so thoroughly infested our discourse and how we talk that it's not a specific, completely strict of everything that it means, and you can just use it to, like, promote the worst kind of criminal justice, quote-unquote, reform, and nobody really bats an eye to it or questions it or anything. Well, because what you want to do is you want to do crackdowns, right? But if you're fighting an election entirely on the basis of

we are two different media fandoms, essentially, we read different papers, we watch different news, or we like different stories on Facebook, but that's our engagement with politics, right? Then there are some people who are... who fetishize being nice and some people who fetishize being assholes, or as they would say, hard-nosed pragmatists,

and then... And if you try and triangulate in between them what you end up with is this kind of, like, therapizing thing, or the kind of, like, primance... I would even think that this is the people who fetishize being nice. The problem is, is that they have to agree on the same policy. It's just, are we going to say that it's trauma-informed crackdowns

on everyone below the age of 30, or are we finally dealing with, you know, delinquency, right? It's the same thing. It's just, how are you selling it? What brand of crackdown are you selling? And in this case, right, what we'll find is that a best trauma-informed criminal justice system in history is the same sort of series of crackdowns, but the little thematic difference in it

is that they're finding ways to try and bolster the participation in the criminal justice system, like magistrates' courts and so on, without actually even putting any more money into the, you might say, oppressive state machinery. Like, they're like, what, we don't want to have to... Yeah, we want everyone in jail. We don't want to have to pay judges. Well, that's the good thing is that it's very cheap to just sort of, like, deputize the kind of people who hate their neighbors,

which is something we've talked about before. So, you know, basically everyone who owns their own home is over 50, and as white is going to become, like, a judge from Judge Dredd, because that's cheaper than doing, like, courts. And so, like, the new plank of this, the big new thing is, like, we're going to bring back ASBOs, anti-social behavior orders, but they're going to be different this time because they're going to be respect orders.

We're going to make the kids respect you, or else. Yeah, I don't know if that's, like... ASBOs kind of, like, fell away for a reason, right, which is that they don't work very well, even at their, like, claimed purpose of making the kids stop, like, hanging around outside Tesco or whatever. So, to try and do them again, but, like, more trauma-informed and also more sort of, like, respectfully,

like, it's a strange intervention. Yeah, I would say to say the least. So, I have a few points here. So, number one is they're going to also enforce parenting classes for the parents of young offenders. Oh, fantastic. So, in a speech at Middle Temple in London, so, by the way, also, this is a speech being given

at one of the, like, grandest buildings in central London, the minister said, the shadow minister said, we will expand the use of parenting orders so courts can require the parents of persistent young offenders to attend parenting classes. We'll support parents to steer their children's lives back on track before the crime in a young life becomes a life of crime, to which I have to say, if you're doing a trauma-informed approach

to criminal justice and your solution is to, I don't know if you're assuming that, yes, these children are often traumatized, to ritually and systematically inconvenience and humiliate their parents, then somehow I think that that trauma might find its way back down to the kids. I don't know.

I can't imagine that happening. Riley, you are making a lot of very baseless assumptions that somehow people who feel humiliated by their government, by their society might take it out on other people. And I think you may need to, like, step back and just, like, question why you think that. Maybe.

Yeah, it's not very trauma-informed, is it, Riley? Yeah. Because you know what else that is? That's cheap to do. That's really fucking cheap to do. You know what's not? Because it's going to be so shit. It's going to be a DVD.

Like, a cult worker puts on a DVD and the DVD is... Alice, that's more expensive than what they've planned. Oh, my God. What they've planned is volunteer good parents, go and give the bad parents lessons. Oh, my God. Imagine the kind of parents who, like, think of themselves as good enough parents to be like,

no, I will go and I will teach my methods. No, look, look, there was, you know, back in the days of the caliphate, you know, in the Darashidun Caliphs, there was a belief that the one who desires leadership should not be granted that leadership and must be forced upon them. Yeah.

And yet we seem to have forgotten this wisdom in this reign of quantity that we live in. So that's the... This is based on a trial from Croydon that says that this works. But genuinely, right, the simple fact of saying, oh, it's because the parents don't have enough skill, as opposed to the expensive thing,

which will fucking work, which is to build an actual society that these people can live in. No, that's out of the question. We can't be doing that. Yeah. We can't even fund the, like, guardrails. We can't even fund the, like, punitive elements

of that society anymore. Like, we can't fund the courts anymore. We can, like, we can't fund the, like, schools that, like, you know, have policies of, like, expulsion and truancy and stuff like that. We can't even do the, like, the punitive thing. So we're down to sort of, like, we'll just get people from the community to do it.

We're into, like, let's just replace the teachers with people from the town. And, you know, that's the same logic about the community punishment boards, right? And they say, oh, we're going to get... Just replace the cops with people from the town. What? Okay. We're inadvertently doing a kind of, like,

Tory communism, right, with a state so completely abolishes itself that all it can do is mandate... Ah, just do it yourselves. Just look out for each other. The examples that Reed used are teachers, social workers, sports coaches. Like, what the fuck, gym teacher are you going to get?

Like, he's going to be like, yeah, I've decided, I've decided that we're going to put this kid that won't stop walking up and down my street into a bronze bull and then have it set alight. The volunteer sports coach brackets unvetted is... You want to talk about a trauma-informed society? We're going to traumatize the fuck out of some kids.

Because that's... Most of what this is based on is the idea that what we can do is just... You know what it is? It's we've taken the phrase, it takes a village and we've sort of armed everyone in the village by deputizing them to, like, beat all the children. Yeah, and crucially, it takes only a village.

Nothing beyond that village. You know, the village will just sort of, like, organize itself autonomously. Like I said, this is a surprisingly sort of, like, left-wing communism coming out of the labour party. And finally, right, if you're talking about a trauma-informed justice system, maybe you'd be thinking about, huh, maybe finding ways to divert young people

away from the criminal justice system by, for example, making fewer things illegal. Wrong. Expensive. No, that's the one free thing they could do. That would actually bring in quite a bit of money. Oh, okay, sorry, different thing. That's the thing that we don't want to do because

it feels wrong to us. Like, decriminalizing drugs or whatever. So he'd say, he said, after, again, after, like, Starmer said he would support the decriminalization of cannabis, now Steve Reid has said, actually, no, we won't be supporting that. When asked when he supported Starmer saying this, Steve Reid said, I forget saying that,

I didn't say it, you can't proof it. And then when shown the clip, he just declined to answer and walked away. Beautiful. It's it. Yeah, and like his rationale for doing this, by the way, was like, I see the kids who are like traumatized by like gang wars and drug wars and stuff like that.

And when I think about that, I think it's important to like keep them in that situation as much as possible. Yeah, yeah. We can't legalize soda because so many kids are killing each other because of soda. If we legalize soda, we send a message that it's okay to drink soda. We should like actually illegalize more commodities

in order to encourage children into like entrepreneurship, like county lines. Right. I have a, it's always seized a canning facility that was bound in from Rotterdam. You know, kids are, kids are drinking, they're drinking Coca-Cola's, they're drinking Fanta. And he actually did say, by the way,

my experience of seeing kids die in the streets of South London because of her involvement with drug gangs and the fear and horror in their parents' eyes, and they met them afterwards, tells me we're not going to be legalizing drugs because I want to keep that fear and horror in the parents' eyes so they'll attend my parenting class with my friends. It would be, it would be unfair to repeal prohibition

because what about all of the people who got killed in like seasons one through four of Boardwalk Empire? You know, it wouldn't be very fair to their memory, would it? We've been down this kind of road before. I feel like things have perhaps somewhat advanced from at least in America, the idea that there were super predators rolling around that just needed to be purged off the face of the earth

and were completely unsalvageable. I guess the idea that the downtrodden are salvageable is an advancement. But you are just perpetuating a new kind of cycle here in which you are just inventing a new way to keep people down by finding new ways to make yourself feel good in a kind of paternalistic way. But without the actual requirements of a paternal figure

in which you try to change the circumstances of the person that you're caring for. That's like, like even within paternalistic conservatism, that faux ideological stance, there is at least that thinking, that base, and this is devoid of even that because to do so would be to imagine that there is a future that you are fighting for that is better and that is just not present here.

And I think that's because so much... Because Starmerism is ultimately a media management project and they understand that everything the Shadow Home Secretary does and says has to appeal to the same 200 syphilitic bigoted columnists, all of whom are to stand in for the hoary-handed sons of toil that sort of live up and down this country in the various sort of big Barrett housing estates.

Like, that's the plan. Hey, but those columnists must be really good at parenting considering how many of their kids have made it to become journalists. Or how many of their kids have grown up so fast that they leave the home as soon as possible. And ultimately, right? I mean, the way I sort of see the criminal justice plans of both of the major parties here, it's just...

It's both horror movies. There's just two different kinds of horror movies. I would see like the the Tory criminal justice plans are essentially a slasher horror film. It's just a thing... It's Jason. It's a monster pursuing you in the night. You know, it's going to hack you to pieces with a machete

for being cruel or sexy. I just know it's fucked up that Steve Reid said that they were going to make Jason real and like let him loose on teens. But the thing is the Labour criminal justice policies aren't Jason. They're the psycho nanny. They're taking care...

They're tucking you into bed so hard that you get choked to death, you know? You really need to like do a movie podcast just as a sort of escape valve for some stuff. My movie opinions? This is actually from a book I read a long time ago called The Worst Is Yet To Come that talks about the neoliberal state as a kind of psycho nanny.

It just stuck with me. Anyway, that's enough about Britain. I want to talk about a country that's on the grow, you know, the future. Saudi Arabia. Yeah, that's right. So look, my friends, before we start talking about Numeraba, where we're all moving, by the way,

we're all going to move there. It's going to be great. We're going to live in the hologram house. I want to talk about the new Neon ad. A new Neon ad has dropped. What are... This is... We are the only people in the world who are hyped for this,

but we are hyped for this. Okay, so, Seamus, you've seen the new Neon ad, right? Yes, I was subjected to it because I have tweet notifications on for the Neon account, so I get it straight to my phone. It's you, me, MBS, and then someone who's really hoping MBS isn't going to kill them. We're the only four people with that tweet notification on. Yeah, the guy who, like, made the ad and is really, really hoping

he gets to make a second ad or leave Saudi Arabia, that guy's really invested in how well this ad is. Seamus, can you tell us a little bit? To take us through the ad, what's the tone? How's it different from previous Neon ads that we've come to know and love? I mean, previous Neon ads had really focused on appealing to the investor class, the intelligentsia, as it were, talking about things that would be available to them

so that they could grow their business, that they could achieve their research dreams, as it were. It was appealing to a very specific kind of person. This new ad campaign, what is Neon, is absolutely directed toward the general public. They've always bombarded Twitter with ads for Neon since forever to raise that kind of awareness, but this is the first time where I think it's directed purely toward

a public audience that has no real... They're not scientists, they're not academics, they're not important, they're just you, they're me, they're Joe nobody. The tone of it's a little bit like MCU almost. There's a little bit of Marvel in the writing of like... Yeah, so that's precisely why it infuriates me, and I hate it. Riley messaged me a couple days ago, it's like, hey, have you seen the new Neon ad?

And I replied back, yeah, I hate my fucking life, man. That ad ruined it. I hate that this is like therapy speak. I hate that it's infested everything. This kind of jokey wishy-washy, oh, we know how crazy this is. It has infested everything. It's mind-numbing. It destroys every part of my...

I want them to acknowledge what they are, but also I like the sincerity beforehand, that you can't go back on it this quickly. Previous Neon stuff was like an investment briefing. It was more like Reddit-esque. I'm going to take you through what happens in the ad. It starts with one of the previous types of ads ending, which I think is a secret message saying the previous type of ad didn't work.

The sci-fi utopian one didn't work. We've bone-sawed that guy. His time is over. Now we've brought in the adorable MCU writer, and hey, you better hope that if we have another commercial that starts with this one ending, that you're not in the country, or you're already in a suitcase.

The guy who made all of the investment briefing ads, that guy lives in a bathtub in the Hilton now. It starts with an older couple, an older American couple, watching the original sci-fi utopian ad on TV, and the husband says, Noem, what's Noem? And then the wife comes in and is like, it's Neon.

And then it's just cut after cut after cut of people speaking every language in every country around the world, talking just about like, well, and you're saying it's going to have cognitive technology? Wow. Oh, there's going to be a... I can swim to work, incredible. It feels very like,

first of all, nothing can possibly go wrong is how it feels. But it also, it has the sort of like, MCU jokeiness, right? That kind of writing sort of like, yeah, it's got a funny name. Maybe it'll be fun. Check it out. Let's go.

Do not bring weapons. And it's like very unnerving to me in a way that the more financialized ones weren't, because those were just like, yeah, seems like a stupid idea. We're going to do it anyway, because we have infinity money. Whereas this one is like,

no, you shouldn't move here. It's going to be cool. It's going to be nice, actually. Imagine how nice it's going to be having some coffee with friends. I think it's more representative of, at least when I'm speculating, is a change in strategy,

as the deadlines for when Neum is supposed to be an actual veritable city. They haven't changed officially, but they're obviously way off track. There's a lot of... What? I mean, well, I didn't want to be the bearer of bad news,

but this is how it is. Like, if you go on Google Maps, obviously a ton of infrastructure that's gone up already. There's roads. There's all kinds of locations of chain stores. There's a lot of Dunkin' Donuts. There's palaces.

There are all these different places. But obviously, people are not moving there. Yeah, it's mostly worker dormitories. So the idea that there's going to be a million or so people, or a little less than that by 2030, is way off course. So now, the idea is that we have to shift

from actually getting people to invest and move here to primarily just using it as a PR strategy to increase the prestige of Saudi Arabia's image abroad. And I think that's what's part of it. Watching this feels like being a pet that's being lured into a carrier to get taken to the vet and put down.

Like, MBS trying to get me to move to Neon so that I can have a Dunkin' Chino. I don't know. Is there something sinister about this? You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment. Also, if you remember the circumstances of Neon's construction,

which we talked about with you, Shane, a couple of years ago. They killed so many people to do this. They have put bodies in the ground to ultimately, to what has come to to not sell me a Dunkin' Chino. It's the advertising campaign for a strip mall. Yeah.

I think 50 people were sentenced to some form of prison only a couple of days ago for opposing the Neon project. Again, more better when tribesmen. Some of those were death sentences. It's in a really strange kind of place in that it can't stop development because that would be against MBS's wishes.

They want to complete it, I think, at some point, even though completion for what they're planning is completely impossible. So they need to keep pumping this out and trying to, by the time 2030 rolls around, when Saudi Vision 2030 is complete, so to speak, that there will be something that they can show off to the world as, like, can you believe

that this is happening in Saudi Arabia, a country that only a few, like, you know, in the mid-2010s was off the radar of the world. It was a black hole information now. It's one of the world's great countries. Like, that's what they want to show off. That's why they've already laid the groundwork, the foundation work for the line already,

even if nothing else has gone up with it. It's a really... It's a horrible fuck thing, like, with actual... Like, we laugh about how absurd it is, but it is a real thing that has consequences for the local population that it is being built upon and investment companies, construction firms, magazines, like Vogue, they're all complicit in it.

It's... They are investing forthrightly into advertising in a very twee kind of way, a almost colonial project in the desert. I thought this too. I was wondering, like, the one thing it put me in mind of was, like, if you had displaced it in time, there would have been ads like this for, like, kibbutz. Absolutely. No, they're doing the same thing in Israel right now,

the same kind of messaging, maybe with that active development. But the strategy has changed to accommodate a liberal audience that is used to, you know, very broad terms, like, quote-unquote, girl power or, like, things of that nature. Did Muhammad bin Salman effectively utilize girl power when he sentenced protesters to death? You know what is also funny is that the thrust of this ad,

what it wants you to do is to Google, what is Neon? And the reason why I want you to Google, what is Neon, is because if you just Google Neon, Neon isn't the top result for Neon. The top result for Neon is like a cosmetics brand that has their name. And I can't think of somebody who they want to bone-saw more

than whoever has the trademark for Neon organics because it's kicking them off the top thing. And so you have to have what is Neon, which they've sort of SEOed a bit. Or maybe they're just trying to, like, subliminally suggest that they should be a Jeopardy answer. Either that or they're trying to, like, game Google search results.

And this is, Vision 2030 goes beyond Neon as well, right? I mean, it goes well beyond Neon. There are some things about Vision 2030 that are real and very sinister, like the creation of the sort of Indigenous Saudi weapons manufacturing capability. But then there are other things about Vision 2030 that are also very, very silly in addition to Neon,

as well as having a dark side, of course. And that is the new downtown of Riyadh, New Maraba. I love this one. They're just going to slaughter a whole new district, like Civilization VI. Yeah, the Nonsense District. Yeah, the Nonsense District, the, you know, the Bullshit District.

You can take a metro on down to the Bullshit District and you can do some silly bullshit. I mean, every city has one of those. It's just, you know, usually smaller. London, for instance, London's Bullshit District is sort of centered on Leicester Square. So we're just going to, like, expand that because you know what Leicester Square doesn't have,

is a massive cube. And Riyadh is about to get a massive cube. So think of it this way. We had the one-dimensional city. That's the line. That's been in done. Everyone lives there now. They love it. We skipped over the two-dimensional city because that's boring.

And now, Muhammad bin Salman in his infinite wisdom has finally created the first three-dimensional city. We're getting a cube. There's going to be a big cube in Riyadh. Finally. MBS said, true growth begins in the city,

whether in terms of industry, innovation, education, services, or other sectors. He's just talking like a weft person. He's so bereft of, like, any juice. Like, he doesn't. What? A rizzless map. If you look back, you know, in the videos

from, like, newsreels in the 1960s and 70s, there was Nasser. There was, uh, there are the Saudi monarchs. They had charisma. And now what do we have? We have nothing. We have no ideology that we fight for.

It's all about growth. It's all about, uh, cities are our future. What does that mean, dude? Tell me what to believe. You could believe that education is to industry as innovation is to services. What if you believed that?

You're primed for someone to get up and say, we're bringing the United Arab Republic back with, like, a U.S. number of stars on the flag. Everybody's getting in there. But instead, what you get is, uh, the 3D cities, the Neo Renaissance. We're going to put some, like, cool holograms on it.

You know, check that out, maybe. So what we have is it is supposed to be the world's largest modern downtown. It's going to be built around sustainability because they want you to forget that all of this is being paid for with oil money. And they are going to actually make Riyadh one of the 10 most livable cities in the world,

which is cool. The only way that Riyadh is going to be one of the 10 most livable cities in 2030 is if there are 10 cities left on the globe in 2030. Which could feasibly happen. Judging by the rate that we're at right now. Yeah, maybe. Fallout, Saudi Arabia.

I've been banging the drum for this for, like, years. Everybody at Obsidian is listening to me. They've closed the doors. They won't let me in. Josh Sawyer has blocked me on Twitter. So it will also feature this district. It will feature, um, an iconic museum. So I got, I wonder what, like,

brand they're going to watch it. Dubai has, like, 50 fucking museums that do nothing, right? They, like, what they do is they buy the name off of... The Louvre. Or whatever. Some shit like that. Something prestigious.

They build, sort of, like, a campus of it. It's very architecturally interesting. And no one fucking goes to it. There's no reason to. You can see influences, sort of, like, paddle boating around the outside of it all hours of the day. Well, what if you could walk around

the Dulwich Picture Gallery Riyadh? For example. Yeah. We've got, like, one massive thing in there, and we've just, you know, it rotates around, um, and, you know, that's what's for innovation. Also, I would say, they, in the

promo video that they've released for Numeraba, they heavily imply, number one, that there's going to be, like, autonomous transport pods, so don't worry, there won't be any trains. I saw the pods. Yeah. Yeah, I saw the pods. But, crucially,

it also heavily implies that there will be pod racing. Well, that's Star Wars Episode 1 on, like, hovercraft in Numeraba. Now, this, my friends, is pod racing. You know, I criticise Muhammad bin Salman for a bunch of things. I think mostly

fairly, but I'll forgive him a great deal of them if he makes pod racing. Hang on, the thing happened again. Just, I think that would be nice. I think that would heal us as a society if we had real pod racing. Hold on, I'm just... I have to...

Am I optimistic he's going to get this done in seven years? No, but you know, maybe. Look, none of this is all the setting in which there will be the cube. The centre of the Numeraba district with its pod

racing and its Dulwich Picture Gallery Riyadh. It feels faintly sacrilegious to be like, yeah, we're going to take this idea of a big cube that everything sort of, like, circumnavigates around. I'm going to do that, but this time it's going to have like a, you know, you're going to

be able to get a dunk of Chino in it. Seamus, tell me about the Mukhab. You know, before I talk about the Mukhab I need to bring forth the saying of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him. He was asked

what is one of the signs of the hour when the universe shall end. And he is recorded as saying in an authentic hadith that when you see barefoot naked destitute shepherds competing

and constructing tall buildings brothers and sisters, what have we seen throughout the last decades? And we continue to have our faces spit in. The Mukhab is a cube as advertised

which is 400 meters by 400 meters by volume it will be the largest building on planet Earth. It will be taller than the Empire State Building I believe that the number was like it could fit 20 Empire State

buildings into. Which is good, I mean what if there are 19 more and we need to protect them from something? What then? I didn't think of it that way. What if we need what if we need to protect the numerous other like Empire State

building strategic storage? What if we need to protect the Empire State building in his 19 twin brothers from a problem? He's being very forward thinking I agree. But he is not as forward thinking as perhaps

if we are all familiar with the work of the Nazi architects if you maybe saw the man the High Castle that program there was in Hitler's time they wanted to build the Volkshop

the gigantic dome with which Berlin's redevelopment program would be centered around it would be Oh yeah, it was going to have its own weather system because of how tall the dome was going to be because the condensation from people's breath would like form clouds

and rain back down on you. It would spit on you. It was a building that would spit on you. If you make a building with a large enough interior volume on all of its inhabitants. That dome alone which was so absurd in its dimensions

that not only could Berlin's wetland terrain not sustain it it was just physically absurd that dome was only measured to be around like 350 by 350 meters this is 400 this is going up and the plan is

is that it will be a sort of it will be an experience like none other in that there will be yeah. It will be the world's first immersive experiential destination you know how like when you go to a city and you're like I don't really believe it

or if you go hiking in Scotland and you're like I don't know I don't really feel immersed in this experience I love going to places to be immersed in an experience I love doing that personally well you haven't been able to you're mostly going to be immersed in like other people's

sweat. Well that's just the thing Davis until they build the macabre you will be unable to immerse yourself in an experience at any destination this is the first one. No until the macabre is built my life is basically forfeit I agree. It's quite transcendental when you think about it.

The idea of the macabre the great thing that my friend Justin who is a big fan of Avatar looked at it and he was sold on it because they had a projection of the magnetic mountains from Avatar on them the gimmick is that

you have this gigantic spiral structure inside of a hollow cube and on the walls of the hollow cube are projected all kinds of fantastical surroundings that create in a quote unquote an immersive experience I don't know if it's the same technology

necessarily but like you remember the Mandalorian how that was shot on with immersive kind of surroundings that were on a computer screen and that allowed it to be more realistic than a green screen technology might have been

I imagine it's probably using that kind of technology we're like digging a second Plato's cave within Plato's cave where we could live in the blue screen it's so it doesn't fully

first of all it's also the advertisement also has like ships floating around the place which I assume is part of the projection but that doesn't explain how you do that with walls they had a dragon in the concept video for this like there's just gonna be a dragon flying around

also it's in all state under the sea in a desert landscape or whatever but I don't know as well is that because these Saudi mega projects are really just some combination of airport shopping mall and then 5 over 1 urban mixed use development

like the only place in the world where you can buy a Patek Philippe and a Dunker Chino 5 but what it means is that they there are going to be flats in this spiral tower you can live in the work

from Warhammer 40,000 all the time you know the picture of Limmy where he's getting some light blasted into his face in bed exactly like that all hours of the day and night like the fucking dragon comes back round again and the worst part is

I assume call me a cynic that they're not just gonna put whatever they find is edifying on the inside of the macabre what they're gonna put on the inside of it is what people pay them to and so if you're lucky if you're lucky you get woken up

at 3am by like MCU phase 27 Iron Man banging on your windows if you're unlucky Matt Hancock NFT looming out at you this sounds like hell the capitalist version of

you hear those stories about how North Korean propaganda plays on the speakers and people's homes and you can turn the volume down but you can't turn it all the way off like you're doing that but for real in an environment that is inherently

hellish I don't it fills me with an immense amount of dread on all levels physical, metaphysical spiritual it is an act that is affronting

to any kind of religious clergy which I am now so sitting myself with especially like in a cube there is no god in this cube unlike the cube that exists in Mecca these are the two cubes that are battling each other

in the mines in Saudi Arabia it is a horrifying parody a twisted parody of the original cube but then ancient Arabian cities many of them had cubes and the next one is the one that survived so we're heading back to the time of ignorance

we're going back to many people in the Salafist community they were laughed at for saying that we were the age of Gehiliya and yes where are we now they are building new cabas

this they were right I wasn't expecting to have to agree with Isis on this one find drill, entirely proven wrong inside this sort of sacrilegious like new caba

this new god that they're building is going to be just hospitality, leisure and entertainment which is the same thing they promise in Niyam which is the same thing they promise in Trojina it's just different malls that's all they see that's the thing

I honestly think this is the ultimate you mentioned Pan-Arabism earlier right this kind of thing whether it's Niyam, whether it's Numeraba or the Makhab or whatever this is all the ultimate building WeWork and Greensill

and the big Karvana vending machine that's now empty, whatever that's something that a dying empire is doing to itself that's a society that is atrophying its own conceptual muscle tissue in order to just stay alive for a second longer and they're just

imitating it they are imitating the aesthetics of a desiccating corpse with all of this innovation shit it's a cargo cult right but like no Alice, it's not a cargo cult

it's a servant in ituring himself into Pharaoh's grave happily but like also doing that when the Pharaoh starts to look a bit sick he hasn't even died yet but the other thing

that strikes me right is clearly there is a niche for you know, I buy my Patek for Leap I walk next door to the Mercedes dealership I buy my Mercedes I walk next door to the Dunkin' Donuts and I get some Dunkin' Donuts, right

that exists, it's just it's called Dubai to a certain extent also, but like those places are successful for reasons this will not be one of which is not being in Saudi Arabia

Yeah, we were talking we talked about this briefly before before we recorded this Saudi Arabia is really in a position that it cannot escape no matter how much it tries

when you, when like the average jail you ask them what is your perception of the United Arab Emirates or Dubai or Abu Dhabi they don't think about Islam, they don't think about politics they don't think about the Emirates

they just think about partying they think about tall buildings it's a blank slate entirely they don't think about it but with Saudi Arabia, what is the universal thing that they think of they think of a I mean, let's just be clearly clear

they think of a backward society they think of a place of Roman property, they think of a place where religion is within everything and while Dubai is perceived as a place where extravagance is fun

and quirky and the police have Bugaris, that's crazy right? The extravagance that exists in Saudi Arabia is perceived as ornate and out of touch and beyond our Taki? Yeah, Taki, it's beyond our understanding

It's the like, it's the Trump Atlantic city casino to Las Vegas, right and yeah, I don't feel bad for the Saudi government on this respect, like you do 1-9-11 and it really follows you around, right?

No, I mean I think it's very difficult for Saudi Arabia to escape the fact that for a very brief period of time it was exceeded in its women's

rights situation by the Islamic state because the Islamic state when it ruled over Syria and Iraq allowed women to drive and that didn't change until like 2017 it's very difficult to escape

that kind of perception within a very short amount of time and it's definitely not possible with MBS at the hell of it now that he's blown his media tour all those years ago with Khashoggi. Yeah, you bone saw one guy and you're 9-11, 1-9-11

and now all of a sudden you're the bad guy merely because you sort of like run your state as an extremely conservative theocracy, everyone does that but you know, you bone saw one guy who works for the Washington Post and all of a sudden

you know, no one wants to be friends anymore no matter how much you pay them. It's fucked fake friends, you know what it is? That's what it is, fake friends. I think the other thing to think about here as well, right, is that Dubai fills a real role. It has an actual purpose that it serves. Yeah, it's a place to like

spy on people. It's a place to like kill, it's a place for Mossad to kill Hezbollah commanders. You try doing that in Saudi Arabia. Well, also it's not only that but it's a place for western real estate speculators to dump money. It's a place for money laundering to happen. It's a place

for Russians to go on opulent vacations and it's also a place where a British marketing middle manager can go and have a full-time servant. Dubai caters to all of these I think often quite dark elements of the human psyche. It does so in a very flashy

way but it serves that purpose. But Neom and Numeraba and the macabre and all this stuff is an attempt to look at the flashy surface with which Dubai soft sells the actual quite dark things that it actually offers and just sticks

to that. It doesn't do that, it does all of its own dark stuff as well but it doesn't offer that actual service. It has failed, it's imitating Dubai while failing to understand how Dubai actually works. That's my contention. Everybody is already invested and also

everybody is already invested in Dubai in the UAE as a place to be. You're trying to divert an already established market when they don't need to be necessarily diverted. It's a fundamentally

flawed strategy but it's the only strategy that they have because the only other strategy that could possibly work would be to remove the model entirely and have a different system and that's not going to happen. Oh hey, I recognize that way of thinking

from here where the only thing we can do is the impossible so we're just going to keep trying a bunch of dumb nonsense that's very flashy but has little substance. I love that the UK and another monarchy have some similar things in common. Before we

end, can I read you one review of the new Maraba development from an adjunct professor of architecture at Columbia University and a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf State Institute in Washington when he was interviewed by Arab news. This is Yasser Elshutani. Elshutani said

there is a tendency among western Arab observers to dismiss projects like this out of hand describing them as acts of folly. Once again, an interview that could have ended there. Yep, there is because it is. You may say that this is like crazy and unsustainable because it is. Yeah, but he says if we look at it objectively

it's much more than that. Having been involved with one of the teams that were invited to compete to deliver the project, I can attest that there is- Oh, this guy doesn't want to get bone sword, he doesn't want to get bone sword. Or he wants to get paid and drip in jewels. I can attest that there is serious thinking involved in such schemes.

Furthermore, it will provide Riyadh with a unique icon that will help make the city instantly recognizable among other world cities citing the Eiffel Tower or Sydney Opera House. I think the future angle of this when

these mega projects get a little bit further along and it becomes clear that the deadline is going to keep moving, that there is going to be an angle of, oh, people don't believe in these projects because of the residual orientalism that still exists in these societies.

They are skeptical of Arab development, of Gulf Arab presence in the world going up in the world and that's why they dismiss them. But no, no, anyone with a fucking brain understands

if this happened anywhere, this would be stupid. This would be mind-numbing. It's asinine by any metric. The fact that Saudis are doing this is just icing on the cake. No, I can see the future and my god, it's in the name of the podcast.

It's trash. My god. They're going to try and gin up Saudiphobia. Don't materialize that into existence. I'm touching this lathe and I'm telling you, they're going to try and make

Saudiphobia. From your mouth to Thomas Friedman's ears. Also, Thomas Friedman in the pod. He doesn't have anyone to interview because there's no driver. Just driving around in circles.

He's making fucking Tawaf of the fucking giant. In a pod. I was wrong about MBS. I've seen the developments in new Maraba and he's leading the new Arab Spring. I also just love the idea of comparing it

to the Eiffel Tower. Like, yeah, I love going to a cave and then taking a picture of my girlfriend that everyone takes under the macabre where it's like, oh, mo, I'm being crushed by the macabre. There is a possibility here, however remote, though, this becomes the sort of like

Dubai of last resort, because Dubai and and Karser and like, all the golf states really are tremendously vulnerable in a lot of ways. Water, for example? For instance, if a bunch of Iranian drones come over

and blow up all their desalination plants, then maybe the calculus looks a little bit different, and then maybe we'll be crawling on our knees to the big cube. Are you suggesting that there could be a Saudi-Iranian alliance in order to force people to take the cube seriously?

That's the much funnier paradox option. I'm just positing Saudi is like an unwitting beneficiary of a much more devastating war, but like, I like this idea too of like, MBS entirely out of friends going to fucking

like, all right, you got a cube I mean, we got a cube, you got like shit, you want to get done, so you know, maybe there's a deal to be made. We're going to end the Sunni Shia split with basically like a real estate scam. We're going to end the Sunni Shia split

by like trying to like revalue the Glenn Gary Shia. But also, El Shratani actually is not only full of praise for Numeraba and the Makab, he actually has one problem with it. Oh, okay.

Wait, this is mentioned in the Arab news piece? Yeah. Check this out. There's a criticism. This is why you can tell it's liberalizing. Planners need to ensure, he said, that this is not perceived only as an enclave for the wealthy and that it integrates the city at large.

It's not just to ensure that the district and the icon are accessible to everybody who wants to see it and that it's not just a commercial and profit-driven exercise. Fuck. What if it's too good? First of all, what if it's too good? Like that's a brilliant criticism.

Second of all, they've learned to do the thing that like Western sort of mega projects do, which is there's going to be one broom closet at the top of the Makab that is commercial housing and they're going to go check this shit out, it's inclusive.

And there's a guy up there who's just being tortured constantly because there's like holograms being beamed into his eyes. So that's the only problem that this guy who is trying to bid to like do some design work on the Makab can see with the Makab,

which is what if everyone wants to live there too much and like not a broad swath of society can afford to? That's the main problem with this thing. I'm not going to live in the pod. I'm not going to eat the bugs. But you are going to live in the cube.

You're going to live in the cube. Fuck. You're going to have your own dragon that's your friend in the cube. Modern Islam is about having a dragon that's your friend. It's about living in the cube. It's about being in a six over one that's 400 meters, a five over one rather,

that's 400 meters tall. It's about pod racing. I'm not going to be a person because I knew I would get in on the ground floor of like a sort of a happening and growing enterprise and a very tall building, a very tall cube. So with all of that being said,

I think we're probably about out of time for today. So I just want to say, Seamus, thank you so much for coming on and spending time with us today. Always a pleasure. Where can people find you if they're interested in reading more of your words about these various goings on? I have

a sub-stack about international affairs and I have a sub-stack about film analysis. Those I assume will be in some sort of info description. I also have a Twitter where I tweet more frequently about these kinds of things and keep up to date with all the goings on in the Gulf

Arab states. Absolutely. So do check out Seamus' sub-stack. I personally find it very useful. You know what Saudi Arabia needs to heal? It needs a local adaptation of Bad Cop, Bond Cop. I may have written this

when I was in high school. This is lore that will be unavailable to the audience, but I assure you I am not bullshitting whatsoever. Okay, number one, TM, anyone who's listening and wants to option Seamus' Saudi Bond Cop, Bad Cop script,

sorry, trademark copyright, you can't. We have the first refusal, TF Studio's first picture, Bond Cop, Bad Cop, Saudi Arabia. We are about to get a trillion dollars shipped in on pallets from MBS to make Saudi Bond

Cop, Bad Cop in New Mahabba. It's going to be amazing. I'm so excited. And also, I wanted to say we have a Patreon at just $5 a month. You can support our quest to make Saudi Bond Cop, Bad Cop with Seamus.

You can get a second episode every week. Also we have just forgotten to say that we do a Twitch stream on Thursdays and Mondays. Oh yeah, we do do that, don't we? Thursdays and Mondays 9 p.m. UK.

Twitch.tv. We've been meaning and forgetting to hype up this subsidiary of the podcast on the podcast for years. For several years, we have forgotten

to ever say on the podcast that we do this. So, check it out. You can see me, Alison, Devin watching YouTube videos. Sometimes Milo's on there too. Why are only a few hundred people coming to this? Because no one knows about it. Because it's like

after work drinks for us. Yeah, so do check that out. And finally our theme song is Here We Go By Jensen. You can find it on Spotify. Listen to it early. Listen to it often. Alright, I think that about does it for today. So thank you for listening and thank you to Sheamus. Bye everybody. Bye. Bye.