TRASHFUTURE - MIT Media Lab After Dark (Part 1)

Episode Date: September 24, 2019

So, what was MIT’s Media Lab actually researching with all that Epstein money? And why is it a Venn diagram of all the worst things in America in the last 40 years? Fronted by a neocon who helped the Contras and the Iraq War, headed by a bitchin’ surfer rave enthusiast tech idiot, and full of people inventing cursed SkyMall products. This week, Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Hussein (@AliceAvizandum) discuss this and so much more. Part 2 of this series will be coming out this week on Patreon. Sign up for it here and get access to our Discord server: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you want to buy one of our recent special-edition phone-cops shirt, shoot us an email at trashfuturepodcast[at]gmail[dot]com and we can post it to you. (£20 for non-patrons, £15 for patrons) Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

Okay. I don't really know how to start a cold open, but I'm going to try, which is that in the course of researching this episode, um, looking for, and this is a very serious episode to just like spoilers that, um, I found out that there is actually a direct relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and post malign. And can anyone guess what that direct relationship is? I can't. No. Please.

They all love G-wagons. Okay. All right. So, um, so the MIT Media Lab was the place where this very famous game was created, which was called Guitar Hero. I remember Guitar Hero. Yeah. It was a game that I wasn't allowed to have because music was Haram and any form of music was Haram.

And like, you know, so, you know, there's no way that I can listen to ACDC ever. Um, the French version of Guitar Hero, if you played it hard enough, let you draw them and put up with the proper Mahammads through sound and post Malone's whole like story of becoming was the fact that he learned how to play music via Guitar Hero, like his introduction to like learning how to make music, how to sample it, um, how he put his music on SoundCloud all came from this creation that happened in the MIT Media Lab, which was funded by Jeffrey Epstein. So in many ways, we wouldn't have had like contemporary SoundCloud rap music, let alone

lo-fi music or chill wave music or fast wave music without Jeffrey Epstein. It's the drill tweet, but replace drunk driving with Jeffrey Epstein. Post Malone is actually Jeffrey Epstein's monster. Hello, and welcome back to a very special two part episode of Trash Future, that podcast you're listening to right now without get it without any further delay. In studio, you have Riley Hussain, Milo, Nate and calling in. You have Alice. Hello.

That's right. It is the, it's the, it's the full compliment today. We're, we're here, we're locked, we're loaded, we're in your ears and we're ready to tell you all about that time. We got Epstein brain again, like we did last summer. Who's ready? I mean, to be fair, we do love a good Epstein brain. Yeah.

Excited to see what part of my mind this just destroys and leaves in ruins. Oh, my, my pineal gland is throbbing. Just never get, never get Epstein neck. No. How's your hyoid body? So for those of you who don't already know from the, whatever we title this two part series or the show notes, we're talking about the MIT Media Lab, perhaps one of the most fascinating academic adjacent institutions ever to exist.

So this is by way of introduction, this is from the 1987 book, The Media Lab, Inventing the Future at MIT. Incidentally, I'm always annoyed when people who aren't Mark Fisher try to take that phrase, who aren't even on the left anyway, by Stuart Brand, who you may know as the guy behind the whole earth catalog, the publication at the very center of the syncretic New Age early Silicon Valley movement in the 1970s. Isn't the earth catalog one of Gwyneth Paltrow's ventures? That's where you steam the earth.

Faced with the cacophony of media drift, the policy of the MIT Media Lab is to seize the design initiative and invent the future to deliberately turn most broadcast media inside out. Nicholas Negroponte would use computer technology to personalize and deeply humanize absolutely everything in every space, everywhere. That's the mission statement of sorts of this, of this organization. Well, that doesn't sound like it could be bad. No.

That sounds absolutely quantifiable and reasonable. Yeah, it sounds like it's just going to make ordering Gugas easier. I'm excited at the concept of media drift, which I presume is a remake of the third Fast and the Furious movie. What would that be? That was something that was being written in the late 1980s. At that point, what even is that? Is that someone being aware of the early internet?

Is that someone thinking about MTV? It's not reading National Review anymore, or the American standard, something like that. All of these kind of sclerotic, wholly political magazines that are dying off. I think that the idea to write something like faced with the cacophony of the media drift, the policy of the media lab is to set the design initiative, or seize the design initiative. It's something that you'd write if you kind of realized the same thing Guy Debord did, but were also a dumb ass California hippie with a double digit IQ. You were convinced that the cocaine in the bowl on your desk was never going to run out

because it's 1988? You're looking at a world that is completely mediated by images, sort of Guy Debord style, and you've said, hmm, how can we use this to sell Pringles? Guy Debord, brother of Ouija. Yes. So, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the... Riley has zero tolerance for jokes this episode. We're being serious investigative journalists.

Damn. No, no, no, this is a normal episode. It's just very dense. I'm Sarah Canig, and welcome to this American future. I was going to say, it's 1988, and you're trying to sell Pringles. Clearly, you got to make sexy Pringles man with a huge hog. That's how they modeled the Pringles can. Exactly.

It's a couple of chips and it's huge dick. So, Nicholas Negroponte founded this organization, or he co-founded it in 85. And if any American listeners find the name Negroponte familiar, Nate pointed this out to me. It's because he was the brother of John Negroponte, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Honduras in 1981 to 85. In Iraq, in 2001 to 2004, and then was the Director of National Intelligence for the U.S. from 2005 to 2007. Playing the hits. Oh, we love it. He needed to see it.

I can't get anything right. He's the ultimate... And not only is he the ultimate neocon in terms of his CV, he now sits on the board of a non-profit called the Leadership Council of Concordia. It's based in Manhattan. What? The Leadership Council of Concordia, obviously. I think that's something JRR Tolkien invented.

Which is focused on promoting effective public-private collaboration to create a more prosperous and sustainable future. The Leadership Council of Costa Concordia. Amazing. And also, he was one of 50 Republican grandees to sign an open letter calling Donald Trump a reckless threat to our national security. How'd that work out for you? He is a never-Trump Republican who's presided over two of the bloodiest American national adventures in the last half-century. Imagine the Thanksgiving dinner where, on the one hand, you have this one brother who's like, actually, I didn't know anything about the El Mazorte massacre. And on the other hand, it's like, I'm putting screens in everything. Awesome.

Yeah. Well, maybe with my technology, you will know about all the massacres that you allegedly caused. What if your toast knew what you were thinking? Yeah. John, what if that? Well, if the toast knew what John Negroponte was thinking, it would probably try to emulate itself. What if your toast could already tell you what Blackwater was going to be called in six months' time? It's like a vision of the Virgin Mary on your toast, but instead it's just like global design initiative solutions? Nothing to see here at LC.

So, that's the thing. I think one of my key sort of realizations in doing all this research is that, just as John Negroponte's entire life has been relentless killing followed by a brief bit of pointless PR, Nicholas Negroponte's entire life has been just relentless profit-sucking followed by a pointless little bit of PR. Also, Negroponte sounds like something an Italian-American would use as a racial slur. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, Negroponte, an architect and designer by training, found it easy to mix with chairman, directors, and chief executive officers of major corporations and government research offices. Very cool.

At the university, he's an exotic with the moves of a jet-set executive, but in corporate boardrooms, he's a prestigious professor. This is from the same book, this 87 book. That's a good con, though. Being able to be the bridge between these two completely different colleges of bullshit artists and just play the one against the other, that's very smart of him. I think I like him better than his absolute psychopath brother. I also just assumed that given the time this was written and given the business he was doing,

that anywhere he went, there was Jan Hammer music playing and he was wearing a pattern suit coat that looked like something out of Miami Vice. Yeah, 1985, just the aesthetic. It was pure vaporwave. He had an open-top Ferrari. Absolutely. The future of all I would have wanted. Snowboarding into the offices of J.P. Morgan on a trail of pure cocaine

and saying, do you guys know about screens? I mean, you guys want to surf. That's kind of, that's more or less what he did. Imagine cocaine was something called the internet. Facebook rapidly, well, here's the thing. Much like usual, you kind of pre-figure what I'm going to say. No, not this early. Not directly, but like in attitude.

So this is from the book again. Faced with rapidly changing technology, these corporate boards need to ask, can you peer 10 years along a trend line that might devour or starve all of your present cash cow products? How can you explore the moonshot technologies where entirely new businesses are born and die while ensuring you yourself don't die? And that's where John Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab come in. That's amazing though, because you can just silo off all of your dumb failure. Like Google does the moonshot stuff in-house, right?

Because they can afford to. But everyone else, we have this culture of having to fail 99% of the time and still make ever-increasing profits. So they just outsourced it to this guy in his cocaine snowboard. Don't forget all of his bright people at MIT who he gets to parade around as his exotic geniuses. Oh, of course. So let's quickly discuss how this works. Because right now it just sounds like a really stupid university department.

It's actually not. The MIT Media Lab is a research institution that also does teaching. And it's funded to the tune of $75 million a year. Number one, that's quite a bit. But additionally, it gets funding through Philanthrop, because the idea is it gets additional funding by tooling its research directly to the needs of the market. And so what it will do is it will say to these companies, look, you can subscribe to the Media Lab by paying a yearly fee.

And then you can use anything we come up with any way you see fit. Do you think those companies that subscribe to the Media Lab in like January and just never bother? And then by the time it comes to December and the things coming out for renewal, they're just like, I might use it. Or forget to cancel it when the free trial period is over. I for one subscribe to the MIT Media Lab because you get a nice tote. Or you just do all your innovation from the thumbnails and preview videos.

Who's saying surely they'd give you a diaper bag. I mean, come on, it's Jeffrey Epstein's funded project. I subscribe to the MIT Media Lab for the Sopranos, but now it's finished. I've just got all this shit with screens in it. And so what will happen is the idea is we are going to make these, instead of researching like normal academics do by looking into questions, we have companies come in and tell us what they need, and we try to make things that they might want.

And their list of subscribers is basically a who's who of the top consulting, banking and polluting organizations the entire world. We all subscribe for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. And then so long as they credit the lab, they can use any of the technologies without paying a royalty. So we'll actually link the list in the show notes. I've got it with me. I'll send it to you, Nate. And so this is how it was born.

We were saying, how can we remake the idea of an academic department? What if an academic department, but cool, edgy, corporate, 80s? So the lab today is basically just work material for staff writers at the Atlantic, the Democratic Party or the Tony Blair Global Institute for bombing children with laptops. So this is bombing children using laptops or bombing children who have laptops. Oh, both. It's a subject and a stem result. We've really drawn the laptops out of them and then they have the laptops. Briefly. They very briefly have the laptops.

Changing the meaning of a hackathon. Will these children be able to hack this drone before it kills them? For fuck's sake. I was like very like Basel Royale. Like if it was rebooted for 2019. Learning by doing. Learning by doing. Raytheod encouraging girls in the developing world to get into STEM. Exactly.

Amazing. So, who was saying you were saying? Well, I wasn't saying anything. You were basically saying that it makes you mad when kids in developing countries beat you in Fortnite. That's why you needed drone. Yeah, but that's just like me mad at kids generally. Well, we have to have a Tony Blair Global Institute for causing lag in the Middle East. The Tony Blair Institute for GGs.

Yeah, we dropped them. You know what? You know what? Just a bit of like a side smoke. They're like, there may not be like a Tony Blair Institute for like sorting out lag, but the Saudi Arabia, like the government of Saudi Arabia has actually invested a ton of money into gaming, like training centers and stadiums because of like, they're pissed off at like their gamers are at a disadvantage because of lag.

It's not a joke. That's actually like a thing. It's like that. Remember that game was really popular on iPhone like nine years ago where you just had to chop vegetables and it's like that, but you're beheading people. It's just a Saudi video game. So, this is from the Atlantic and it talks about the lab today. So, depending on where you look, the Atlantic goes,

you could easily mistake the famed media lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a robotics laboratory or an architecture firm or a computer programming office or maybe a hospital. So, it's a building. That's what I'm saying. But it's not any of those things, right? Like they don't do architecture or much programming or robotics, right? No. Well, they do all of it, but it's a cool building that looks futury.

The MIT media hospital, like, sorry, your grandmother is dead, but have you tried this new pillow? We've replaced your grandmother with this screen. So, I don't know why you're upset. Again, real things the media lab has done that will explore in the bonus episode. Oh, no. No, they actually did do something that's like replacing your grandmother with a screen. Oh, no. Amazing.

The truth is that it's the world's most interesting and hyper interdisciplinary think tank. And of course, the Atlantic would hyper interdisciplinary. Yeah. It's more interdisciplinary than usual. Damn. That's because they invite... It's a BDSM think tank. That's because they basically try to invite everyone, like from every genre.

So, they've had, from my limited research on this, they've had obviously computer scientists and visual artists, but they've also invited techno humanists and DJs and stuff like that for no other reason, but to kind of say that we're like a hyper institution, we're a hyper institutional. Well, it's like, if you are the MIT media lab and you're taking money from every major US health insurance, for example, then one of the things you're going to have to do is say, how can we provide better health outcomes to people without, say, nationalizing American health care?

And so, at some point, you run out of ideas and you have to say, I don't know. Maybe let's invite T.S. to see if he has any ideas. I mean, when you've got like Calvin Harris coming into the office to talk to you about the future or what technology is, I don't know, bro. I'm not saying all these people were on cocaine, but I don't see how you could run this thing without being on cocaine. I think it's like a weird genre, like the idea of like Diplo at the Oxford Union and stuff, right?

I saw Kanye come speak. Thank you. Very cool. It was pretty cool. He said Faustus, the beach should be $5,000. I was like, you know, you're right. He said Faustus should be $5,000. Faustus, not the play.

So, he said, I find that Goethe is highly undervalued in this economy and we should pay more. We should pay more. We should all pay $5,000 for a copy of Faustus. So, I've done some more research here and I actually have pulled some examples of the MIT Media Labs research groups for our perusal. Oh, good. So, a couple of these I've sourced from the Baffler, another couple from my own research. So, let's start.

The Information Ecology Group, their stated mission is the quote, seamless and pervasive connection between our physical environment and information resources. That's metal gear solid too. That's not a real thing. No, I'm afraid it's real. What do we all guess that they demoed? Well, you said information ecology. Do they like pick up into the informational trash?

Do they like clean off a seabird that's covered with informational oil? No, way less useful. It's like a giraffe but it connects to your phone via Bluetooth and you get to find out how the giraffe's doing. Less useful. Less useful than finding out how the giraffe is doing. Is it something that we've already done? Because I feel like it would be.

Yes. TakeoverTV, a system that quote, heralds a new era in bar patronage. It's the Weatherspoon's app. Fucking hell. No, not even that good. Where you can use your phone to vote to pick a new show. Damn. Free democracy to the people.

Remember all that stuff I read earlier about inventing the future and this could be a hospital robotics laboratory. This is what they've made. They've made an app that lets you vote to control a bar television. Thanks to cutting edge research at the MIT Media Lab. I can gerrymander the people in my local bar into making them watch storage wars. You're doing Russian interference on the bar TV election. We have managed to split the vote for dancing with the stars.

Just going into a pub during the Six Nations. Dancing on ice with the stars. Go into a pub during the FA Cup with a bunch of Russian guys and out vote and get it put on to like, I don't know. Sputnik TV. George Galloway show on Russia today. I got another one. I have a few of these.

The open agriculture group stated mission is the creation of quote, a sustainable food system using an open source ecosystem of technologies that enable and promote transparency, network experimentation and hyper local production. What do you think they demoed? Hyper local production. In your house. Yes, literally. Do they want us to eat insects?

Probably, but not in this case. What do you think they demoed? I think I know what it is. I'm not sure. I'd say if you think you know. Is it some dumb home green house shit where like you have to grow your own food? Yes. Nate for the buzzer.

It's Hello Fresh, but the box is made of glass and it's in your garden. Yes. Okay. The personal food computer is a table top size. The what? Is it a computer that's powered by potatoes like an Amish computer? It's got a potato battery. It's a computer only powered by tubers.

No. The idea is one day a guy woke up and said, what if I could download a potato from the internet? You want to download a potato? Click on some fruits. Just amazing. Yeah. So he's like, what if I could download a potato for the internet?

And so he set out to spend millions and millions and millions of dollars to design the personal food computer. I can't imagine what kind of use Jeffrey Epstein would have for this technology. Which is a. I'm just thinking about putting like a proposal to the MIT media lab right now to be like, I want to make a bit Torrin, but for vegetables. Like the black market in the Soviet Union. So the personal food computer is a table top sized hyper controlled environmental

agricultural technology platform. That's a plant pot. That's called a plant pot. That uses robotic systems to control and monitor climate energy and plant growth inside a specialized growing chamber with conditions that can be controlled and monitored within the growing chamber to yield various phenotypic expressions such as flavor or nutrition in the plants. So the idea is you could like dial up the nutrition and flavor and plants by taking close

control of their conditions. Guy Fieri in a flame shirt takes delivery of his of his personal food computer and slowly turns the flavor dial up to 11 or looking to the camera and going, yeah. Can you make these potatoes taste of ranch? Here's the thing. Guy Fieri won't be getting a personal food computer to make his to make his potatoes taste of ranch. Can you guess why?

Because Guy Fieri has been killed in a tragic accident. We have to stop this episode of trash you to bring you sad news. Guy Fieri's Justin, this is coming to my desk. No, it's the only problem is, is Guy Fieri won't get to make his ranch potatoes because this thing never even came close to working. So every time they demoed it, they would just go buy food from shops, put it in the computer and then heavily imply that it grew there. I can't say that it grew in there, but I mean, it's in there.

Poor research assistant is throwing dirt over there. It's like the MIT equivalent of like sticking a sock down your pants. What a terrible grift. No, it's the Soviet Union. It's officially the general is coming. So we're painting the grass green on the army base. It's the Soviet Union, but more expensive and worse. Yeah.

In this case, at least the, at least the grass was painted green. This didn't even do that. It's just, it's just an expensive box for a potato. So I have one more. I have one more. The fluid interfaces group stated mission is excuse me. It interfaces with your fluids. What's wrong with that?

Creating systems and interfaces for human cognitive enhancement. What do you think they demoed? Shitting and pissing and coming. It's, it's the big pool from minority report with like the pre-cog ladies in it. Uh, anyone else? The MIT media lab did actually develop the, uh, the screen technology from the, uh, minority report. Really?

But not in the cool way. It was a media, it was a movie effect in real life. You have to use a clicker. Um, what you are this group demoed the attentive you a pair of glasses that shocks your temple when you stop paying attention to your job. I remember that horse shit. This is like fuck. This is an end of season wrap up where it turns out that all of the,

like individual episode plot lines have been tying together and it's all been the, the dark hand of fucking aperture science behind all of it. Oh, that's right. That's right. It was a project of the MIT media lab. Yep. It turns out we were a Harvard experiment. You've, of course you had this planned the whole time.

Now that the secret's been revealed, it's time for me to talk like this a lot. You know, cause I don't know a Harvard guy. And I, well, the experiment is going well. We flash back, we flash back to the original, uh, the original genesis of the podcast Riley taking me for coffee on Broadway market and proposing we do a leftist, a leftist podcast about technology. And it's like, there's a pit, there's an image from that day from a CCTV camera and it's like computer in Hans and then on the table, 500 meters away is

that Jeffrey Epstein over the top of the newspaper. Yeah. It was an in and out and Gizlyn Maxwell was there. All right. So that's the last one. Okay. No, sorry. I have one more.

I have one more. This last one is how about the accepting massive donations from and giving sweetheart deals to Jeffrey Epstein long after his multiple convictions for sexual assault, leading to the resignation of hotshot director Joy Edo working group. Can anyone guess what that one does? I believe his name stands for jerk off instruction Edo. Yeah. Um, so to understand the, uh, the story of Jeffrey Epstein, the media lab, we go

back to 2012, uh, and the Atlantic's masturbatory article about the media lab and new director, Joichi Edo. Joichi Edo was a venture capitalist who is also a college dropout former rave impresario scuba instructor and cyber activist who has just taken over the lab. He sounds like Garth Marengi. Well, this is very impressive. Impressario plus actor. I don't, I don't understand, but I do know that they love these people because I

get, I think when you, when you just have to keep proposing solutions to a problem where we know what the solutions are, right? Like we know that we can make the world a better place. We just also know that we can't have like this ridiculous level of inequality that comes about from this ridiculous like relationship of production. You just have to keep proposing new ideas. So you can say, wait, wait, maybe this won't work. Maybe this won't work.

Maybe this won't work. We have this, uh, uh, scuba instructor who's hired a bunch of like a pedophile and then a bunch of DJs to come in and solve health care. Damn. Well, there's still make sense to me. No mask. Yeah. Yeah.

Scuba diver pedophile little. 500 meters away on Broadway market, us having coffee. He looks over his paper. Elon Musk looks through a screen. Yes. It's awful. Good to play. I just like the idea that this had come at a slightly different time and joy to his

life. And he had started the potato box while he was a rave impresario. Yeah. This is the idea you have in a smoking area. The strains of the happy Mondays at the Hacienda project going like, Hey, well, you know, like when you have a job, you know, when you have a job interview and, um, no, like the, you know, yeah, um, wait, and you're asked like, you know, what, you know, give me like, you know, some ideas of what you have for this job.

And you've not come prepared to just anything that's off the bullshit. And I can just imagine like joy to just being like, um, what about a laptop that grows potatoes? Hey, just like, whoa, shit. I didn't think about that. Well, and he's like really sleepy because he was just at a radio. And he's like, man, I wish I had glasses that would keep me awake. I keep thinking about this in the, in the context of that initial article that was

written in the late eighties. And so I imagine every single person that was a decision maker at the media lab is all, they all talk like Keanu Reeves. There's like, whoa, I know kung fu or something to that effect. They had this like really just, I was just remembered that they had this like really bizarre idea of, you know, like the robot dogs that were really popular. Oh, yeah. So there was an idea of that.

Like you would have an alarm clock that operated like one of those robot dogs were like before like 10 minutes before the alarm is supposed to go off. It would, it would go off your like, you know, say you're a bedside table and it would hide somewhere in the house. And in order for you to turn that alarm off, you would have to go find where this kind of alarm dog had hidden. $75 million a year. Yeah.

And it gave us this, did you know that that one gift of the year in 2011? What company wanted that? Yeah. The clocky. It won gift of the year in 2011. Clocky? It's a clock that runs away from you as a metaphor for how you're wasting your entire life. It was an MIT media lab project.

It won the 2011 gift of the year award. This is how we're spending the money. This is how we're spending the money. What the fuck? How did you end up on Jeffrey Epstein's plane? I was chasing this clock. It led me straight on there. But imagine if you are on his plane and everybody else there is a hedge fund guy or is a former

president, not naming names or like something like that. President, not naming names. And you're like, hey, what did you do? Well, alarm clocks. Alarm clock, but it runs away from you. Yeah. Oh, me? I'm a scuba diving instructor and rave impresario.

To understand the story, so we have to go back to Joe Edo. He said, we're going to be thinking about how we innovate, how we work together, how the space is laid out. Incidentally, Joe Edo, one of the things he did was he made sure that the new building was entirely made of glass. There's no privacy anywhere except presumably in the toilets. I love being fried to death by the sun in the name of working together. It just makes you work harder.

Yeah. You're being just gently cooked and you never have a moment to yourself. That's the kind of thing that makes the Atlantic say that you look like a hospital and a robotics lab and the other things. He says, I want to folk and also like when General Electric comes in, they need to see everyone doing a lot of imaginatizing and ingenuity, ingenuitating and imagineering. They need to see all that stuff. They need to know where their money's going.

They need to see you in the research group, which is called Lifelong Kindergarten, playing with blocks. Again, one that exists. They have a research group called Lifelong Kindergarten. That's every research group. This would not be like entirely out of the ballpark if they had just decided, oh yeah, we're going to make umpa lumpas real and hire them. This makes so much more sense if you imagine all of these ideas being said in a toddler's

voice as they're explaining to their mom the cool idea there. Well, we're going to build, it's like a computer. It's a computer, it's a computer, but inside is potatoes because sometimes when you use the computer, the computer, you get hungry and there's no potatoes. So we made like, it's like a computer, but it's potatoes. I mean, I do hate it when my kindergartner is Donald Trump. Folks, folks, it's a computer. We're making the best, but we're making all of the computers.

Inside, inside, folks, it's not a computer. It's potatoes. I'm just struck by the idea of Joy Issa wearing a big purple top hat and issuing golden tickets to see the media lab. I mean, yeah, you're going to be a pimp for a second. You can ultimately envision them deciding that they need a chocolate river for some reason. But there'll be a chocolate river. No, that is the fluid dynamics research working group.

I just imagine Jeffrey Epstein is like, well, if any children get stuck in that tube, I can take care of him for you. Jeffrey Michael Jackson. Yes, you have seen speaks with Michael Jackson voice at this point. It's a pedophile accent. Well, I mean, there's that, or you can also be like, I'm trying to think what else he would sound like. If he doesn't sound like Michael Jackson, then you also have to imagine him with his famous, you know, symposium dinner line. So what does that have to do with pussy? No, he just sounds like a New Yorker.

I'm walking here. What's this got to do with pussy? Oh, I'm flying over here. I'm imagining over here. What do you think this is? National waters? Get out of the way, you govon. Wait, hang on. The MIT Media Lab basically is Whabistix. Yes, it is Whabistix, the fake company that Chris Maltesanti tries to pump and dump in the sopranos. Meanwhile, at Jeffrey Epstein's hedge fund, we're pushing Whabistix.

So, yeah, it's whole thing. Literally, yes, his whole thing was just pushing Whabistix. They're just pushing Whabistix on the American economy. So, Edo says that he wants to focus on how we can enhance positive serendipity throughout the media lab. What the fuck does that even mean? Well, that's why all the walls are glass. It's a terrible rumcom from the late 90s. That's why all the walls are glass is so anyone can walk into any research group and just start ingenuitizing.

So, yeah, and you can always see Tiesto from every angle. That's really amazing to me. And better. I always thought MIT was like this top tier engineering school and apparently it's just surfers on Kwayludes. It's the Kwayludes Panopticon. So, wait, hang on. MIT Romney. Just an idea for a bit.

Good. I don't know where that's going. The Mids Media Lab and they're developing good weed that's not too strong. So, the Media Lab, this is back to the Atlantic's article from 2007 and what Edo's theory of it is, is different from other departments because it runs in corporate partnership and philanthropist-directed innovation. The theory is, we'll have no trouble marketing whatever it is we make. Everything is made by combining this great interdisciplinary group with all of our corporate members. They've got these great...

Sorry, go ahead. But that's the main concern of a research lab is having trouble marketing what you make. Yeah. Shouldn't it be useful? Maybe? No, well, because the market tells you if it's useful, but then if all your professors are doing grievance studies, then none of that's marketable. Okay, that makes sense.

Remember when Insulin was created? That was sold for only a dollar, but if this was created in the Media Lab, then it could have been sold for quite a bit more. What we're saying is Insulin realizes they have to tailor individual batches of Insulin for all the 150 genders and there's two damn many of them now and that's why it's expensive. Look, the Insulin only costs a dollar to make, but it actually costs $100 to put it in a Insulin for Becky bottle like Coca-Cola has. Insulin could have been...

There's like an Insulin for girls product. Insulin times were expensive. Insulin could have been a much more successful product like the Furby. That made way more money than Insulin. Men's Insulin, so no one thinks you're gay. Men's Insulin, 100% pussy free. No, it's Insulin, but the commercial is when you put it in, just a bunch of women start chasing you.

The box has like that steel tread passing on it. His blood sugar is so regulated. Injecting a long thing inside you. I don't know. To me, that sounds pretty like... Our corporate members have great ideas, Ito said. I want these people not just to be giving their money, but to feel like they're part of the team

and that also includes philanthropic donors. None of them have ever had great ideas. That's what they need research institutes for. There's going to be some guy from General Motors sitting there going, whatever we made the cars do better. That's a great idea, it's fantastic. Wait, the MIT Media Lab just exists to design the homo. I mean, yes, I mean, literally yes.

So, I just want to say that I was watching that scene the other day. What was I? The homo was not a bad car. It was the car for the average man. Right. It is not a bad car, the bubblegum, the bubblegum like dispenser. Pretty good. Pretty useful.

The Cucaracha, a classic song. We're reviving the homo, the official car of TF. I don't think that's true. I think the official car of TF is the one from Crazy Vaclav's House of Automobiles that no longer exists. Put it in H. We're all putting it in H. Well, let's put it in H and then fast forward back to 2019.

So, after it emerged that Jeffrey Epstein was convicted for a paedophilia in like 2007, 10, whenever, Edo and other lab employees then took a lot of steps to keep Epstein's name from being associated with the millions of dollars of donations that they continued to allow him to make. So, he would use his influence to meet with faculty members, give input on projects, and to entice him to contribute further.

And he was always accompanied by two young models that female media lab staffers would engage in conversation on the off chance that they were being like held there. So, Jeffrey Epstein being very regular. Very dark. I'm just imagining Jeffrey Epstein's like presumably adult models that he brought with him just being like.

If you're Jeffrey Epstein, you're going to presume that that is the standard is like presumably adult. Again, I think you don't understand how much impunity being a billionaire gives you. So, one of the things I kind of want to pause here, Rhett, right? Why do companies and billionaires all put so much money into this thing if it just pushes out dog shit? Why?

It's going to be something really sinister, isn't it? No, I don't know. Operation Gladio stay behind working group. I mean, look, I'm going to say this because I think that even though the MIT media lab is sort of bizarre in upon itself, it's not the only institute that kind of operates this way, both in the US and here as well.

Why I was surprised about obviously is that for a media lab it doesn't really do a lot of media projects per se. Even though like fun fact, like Jonah Peretti, who was a CEO of Buzzfeed, got his training from the MIT media lab. So, he came up with like the whole notions of like super virality and stuff in that place. Wait, he invented HIV?

Yes. Yeah, that's what I'm asking. When people were saying that it was made in a lab by the US government, this is what they meant. Yeah, they envisioned like, you know, these kind of scary like bald headed, sunglass like people, but it's actually just like one very nerdy guy,

an oversized sweatshirt. So, he learned something that made Buzzfeed sort of successful, but Buzzfeed is constantly saying that it's always losing money. Well, yeah. Well, it's like every other media company, right? So, I'm trying to find like what that keeps puzzling me is that I keep trying to find

why capital keeps putting so much money into this thing. Why, or I guess it's the same question that these failures keep just being, we can't get rid of them. I have an answer for this. We can't get rid of these tech companies that never go anywhere. We can't get rid of this.

Alice, what's your answer? We talked about Necroponta going back and forth between like being an MIT guy at companies and then being a company guy at MIT. To my mind, that's all it is, right? Is that these are all in a very real sense con artists, and they're all playing short cons off each other in a big circle.

And that's kind of like, that's the fucking mitochondrial activity of late capitalism is all of these idiots trying to defraud each other. Why don't you give me some money for my potato box that doesn't work? So it's a company that doesn't make any money. I have a kind of theory on it, which is more about media itself,

because the way that the MIT, the way that these types of institutes work is also like, as the bullshit has kind of dominated, so is the most bullshit industry in the world, which is public relations, right? So like, I get emails from PR companies all the time, which are either promoting some form of weird crypto shit or some sort of weird invention that is bizarre,

but it doesn't actually serve any real purpose. As kind of Christmas for PR people is coming, I'm seeing things about... I can't even... I can't even come up on the top of my head. The alarm clock that runs away from you. It basically does something that snaps the hyoid of your enemies.

No, that's a good invention. I would buy that. Wait, which one? All of it. An alarm clock that runs away from you or like a light bulb that's connected to Bluetooth for some reason. And I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that with MIT Media Lab, they really liked coming up with these things that could get loads of press attention, right?

They liked the idea that they could come up with a weird kind of potato-powered computer basis for like, oh, this is like a self-sustaining ecosystem that can like provide food for the future. We see that a lot with like... We see that a lot with like vegan... We see that a lot with like vegan food production now, right? Like the idea that since kind of, you know,

as kind of veganism has become more popular, the tech sector have been coming in and like looking at ways in which they can build like self-sustaining, you know, vegan like food production and stuff like that. And like MIT Media, you know, you were talking earlier about like the Atlantic and how the Atlantic was just like writing endless amounts of kind of praise about...

PR for them basically, yeah. Right, and I looked back when I was like researching for this episode, like I was looking back at like 2005 to 2013 and almost all the press comes from like two places. It comes from Business Insider and it comes from the Atlantic, right? So like, even though this is bullshit and even though, you know, even though like, as we know, if anything of use,

like it's a very long slow burn process where you accept that there's failures, right? At a time when PR agencies and PR companies are looking for publicity, like these types of institutions, they actually want the failures to happen. They would rather that you have like some bullshit like technology but it has like a really interesting or like bizarre strap line.

Yeah. It basically feeds into this really weird regurgitating ecosystem. Yeah, I think with the MIT Media Lab, it's one of those things where like, if you're trying to develop cutting-edge technology, you expect there to be things which are like boondoggles or which fail. The moonshots thing.

Yeah, but what you don't expect is for there to be things which, to like any person with any degree of common sense, we're obviously never going to work and obviously just like the idea of like a toddler on LSD. Like there's no, like imagine if you put your car in for repairs and they're like, oh yeah, we're not really sure what's wrong with your car but like leave it with us and then you come back and then they're like, well, we've not been able to fix it yet

but we have been trying things. One of you tried and is like, well, we all stood around it and just came on it. You're like, well, why would you do that? They were like, I don't know. We're just, you know, we're free thinking. Yeah, we move fast. We break things.

There's a bunch of potatoes growing in the boot now. Yeah, that was from our like fluid coalescence department. I mean, that's really just like pipped my ride, right? So I have my theory about this. My theory about this also is like, it's kind of like Hussein's. It's that this is basically marketing but it's also kind of like Alice's because this is everyone marketing to each other all the time.

It's a pyramid scheme. Yeah, it's a pyramid scheme. Even though the companies are worthless, they know that some idiot will pay more for it than they've just paid for it. So in a way, it is a good investment. It just so happens that they're inventing like a mood ring that connects to the internet.

Like it's pointless, Chachkes, whether they're the dumb ass ideas or yeah, the Chachkes. But also the dark side of it as well is that it allows all of these either just giant pools of capital or like parasitic billionaires to just continually launder their reputations. You know what it is?

You know what it is? It's running a money laundering outfit through the back of the left aureum. So back to Epstein. But Epstein didn't just make donations. So this is from the New Yorker. He directed them as well. So in the course of 2014 and 15,

remember those years people, according to emails and sources, we see an ambitious plan hatched by Edo and Epstein together to obtain contributions from Bill Gates and Leon Black in one message to Edo. By the way, all of us are happy. If any of us die, it wasn't suicide. Every time we're talking about Leon Black, I always...

My old phones are intact. I have no intention on kneeling. So in one message to Edo, Epstein wrote Gates would like a write up on our one science program for Tuesday next week. Yeah, but he probably wrote it with a bunch of fucked up cappers or lesses and stuff because they leaked his emails

and the dude could not write for shit. No, he couldn't. He had extremely like your dad typing a text message energy. Or just he was like a very random scene guy. It was almost as though he was typing with one hand. And so the MIT fundraising director added, if Jeffrey tells you that Leon or Bill would like a little love from MIT,

we can arrange that as well. Right, so it's just... I want to turn a phrase. You were saying that this is like the operation gladio research group. Yes, and it's all true. Fucking propaganda, do I? But it invents like a dipping bird.

Yeah, it's like we have connected like the... And this is where it gets to real operation gladio shit. Although the lab ultimately secured the $7.5 million from Gates and Black, Epstein and Edo's fundraising plan failed to reach the still larger scale than they initially hoped. Epstein had suggested that donations from Gates and Black

could be matched by the John Templeton Foundation, which funds projects at the intersection of faith and science, but never materialized. You have to have a lot of faith to be doing science like that. I'll tell you that. Jeffrey Epstein got money from Bill Gates and Leon Black to give it to a rave impresario so that he could do it to find God.

And then still not enough money, so he wanted to like try and get some more out of the Wallet Inspector Foundation for dubious ideas. That was what the future of the Lolita Express was going to be. Like, what the hell could they have been researching? What the hell did Bill Gates... They wanted to go to fly to heaven and fuck God, and that's all there is to it.

That's what it is. Wait, hang on. You can't prove me wrong. This is the praxis video, but just for research. It's like, yeah, we built a telly tubby, but the screen in the belly plays a video about what if a computer was a potato? That's science.

Somehow that's God. To find God, sorry. What the fuck were they... What project were they trying to fund? These billionaire international waters. This scuba diver. They're getting money together from this institution that's like the Catholic Church's research arm.

Wait, do you think that Jeffrey Epstein and Co actually murdered God because he knew too they had that he knew about what they'd been up to? Turns out God killed himself in jail. Talking to people with force, bitch. This is even dumber, but do you think that Jeffrey Epstein and Co embezzled money from this shit? I don't think they needed to.

I think he had money that generated money from extorting stuff already. I think this was just a way of buying legitimacy. These things, these dude ads and such, that they were researching, none of them amounted to anything. And so it's just so strange that, I don't know, that it would go on this long and nobody was like, wow, this is fucking weird.

But I mean, I guess the elite world in which, you know, a billionaire pedophile who has symposiums about pussy and also own a research department at a huge, extremely exclusive institution. That's how he can get the research symposium about pussy is by like this fucking tracksuit clad moron being like, you know, actually I fund all of this shit at MIT. So you have to have conversations with me

even though you're ostensibly a smart guy and I can say, well, what does that have to do with pussy? I mean, to be fair, the original symposium about pussy was of course, Plato's symposium. And very little has changed. That was really a symposium about boy pussy. Well, I was going to say. And about regular pussy.

Let's just, let's just identify that. But Riley, Riley complains if Milo makes the Bernie Sanders joke, but really, Jeffrey Epstein had dinner parties with elites with like thinkers and great academics and he literally asked them about, first about gravity and then was like, but what does that have to do with pussy? So it all sounds like a very, very normal person. Steven Pinker had to be like, oh, wow.

That's Steven Pinkerson. Steven Pinkerson. Jordan Peterson. So it corrupts you. It takes your energy. But it's cleaning your room really mean. I want to go back to Joy Edo. So Joy Edo is also a massive performative liberal.

So here he is in Wired saying some nonsensical horseshit about how communication strategies evolve over time like organisms. The same tools that fueled Trump and hashtag Gamergate also gave the Parkland teens the tools they needed to inspire students across the country to walk out in protest over lax gun regulations. That sustains my hope.

And I see the Me Too movement also using the same new versions of these methods to begin a long path to ending centuries of patriarchal power. A sentence that he wrote only a couple of years after he took an anonymous meeting with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to hatch a plan to get Bill Gates to pay them to find God. So I'm just going to point something out here.

Adam Keis voice. Do you know who that sounds like? Who? Justin Trudeau. And you know what? You know what we found out about Justin? A man who just is addicted to sniffing shoe polish and keeps putting his face too far into the jar. He has a passion for costume.

He's a penchant for the theatrical. Yeah, so you know. I had no reason to believe that my good friend from Quebec Jean-Luc du MIT Media Lab was involved in anything untoward. Oh, no, I'm sure that Justin Trudeau did blackface on three separate occasions because he kept losing, like, trivial bets

with a friend of his from Quebec. With his Dutch friend. There was a girl he really liked who had a kink and she could only get turned on by men who looked like Jafar from Aladdin. So we are, nevertheless, Joy Edo, of course, resigned his position and has left and I'm sure is going to just have to make do

with a lucrative consulting job somewhere. He's going back to scuba instructor. He's going back to the ring. Look, if you have an island right there, I mean... Wait, hang on. Imagining a Jason Statham movie 10 years from now where, like, there's a new... They need him to come out of retirement

because the MIT Media Lab has forgotten how to develop a telly-tubby that tells you who God is and they go up to him and he's on some Thai island teaching kids to scuba dive. And then, like... We need you to listen, I'm retired. I don't do that anymore. So I've developed my last dookie.

So what would genius founder of the Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, say about this whole snafu? Nicholas Negroponte made the following comment regarding Epstein and his association with the Media Lab in a recent crisis meeting of the institution. Does it begin? Who, boy? It does not.

Mistakes were made. It begins with the opposite of anyone saying who, boy, or mistakes were made. If you wind back the clock, I'd still say you should take the money. If you wind back the clock, it runs away from you. After he said, if you wind back the clock, I would still say take the money,

he went on a bizarre tirade about he, a rich white man, had used that privilege to get to know 80% of the world's billionaires on a first-name basis. He went on to say that he and Jeffrey Epstein frequently rode in Epstein's private jet where they spoke passionately about science. It was through these interactions,

he said, that Negroponte warmed to and began to trust Epstein. No, you say the opposite. Epstein's jet is passionate. Never do that. Because he continued, that is what allowed the Media Lab to be the only place at MIT that could afford to charge no tuition, pay people full salaries,

and allow researchers to also keep rights to their intellectual property. Like the clock that runs away. So he confidently and enthusiastically recommended to Joy Ito that he take Epstein's money a decade ago and keep doing it no matter what. That's fucking... You know what this is, actually?

This is the only thing in favor of Joy Ito morally is that he asked, right? Like, Jeffrey Epstein, several years after he was convicted, Joy Ito was still like, I don't know, sus enough about it to be like, hey, should I take this money

from this convicted pedophile? Yeah, Nicholas Necklin, Nicholas Necroponte was like, yes, because that's the only way an educational institution can support the people who are researchers and students at it. Sure, we might have taken money from this criminal who might have exploited women and children

across the world, and sure, it might not have led to any research gains, but in the grand scheme of things, if we hadn't done it, nobody would be able to answer the question that I find truly important, which is, what does any of this have to do with pussy? We live in society. Just come out wearing Joker makeup. Yeah, they all are.

We live in a research society. Like, his answer is this was, how do you think all of you fuckers got paid, and he's not wrong? He's not wrong, but equally, that brings up, like, yeah, we are now in a scenario where

there are, if you are in a public school, it's like the end of Saving Private Ryan. Nicholas Necroponte is like Private Ryan all those years later, and he's standing in the ceremony in France, but there's all the

gravestones, and he just looks at the little running away clock in his hand, and he goes, I hope it was worth it! But, if you think about this, like, school funding in America is now to the point where

like, high school math teachers have to buy graphing calculators, like TI-88s, the expensive ones, for their students, and you can't not because the courses are designed around them. And here, they're saying, look, the only way we can fund research is if we're, like,

best friends with this convicted pedophile. Well, I'm sure that Jeffrey Upstein would have loved to have funded some public schools. I guess the thing about it is that so much of this stuff is, I don't know, comical and insane, but a lot of it is also pretty much in line with how other research institutions

operate, and so in a way, this is just like a, you know, Hall of Mirrors clownhouse version of what all of this sort of shit is with the way in which they seek out billionaire philanthropists to fund things and do many projects. He's just the only one there

who actually gets what they're doing. Like, if anyone in that room was stupid enough to believe him, that, I mean, was stupid enough to, like, kid themselves that the Media Lab or any other think tank like it wasn't taking money from just people doing

the worst eyes wide shut stuff. You know, that's not really on him. I mean, there was a movie years ago with Gene Hackman, and I can't remember what it was called. I never saw it, but I do remember the preview, like the trailer, and there was this whole thing about how Gene Hackman was this rogue

doctor who was running this cancer treatment lab, but they were doing, like, unauthorized experiments on humans, on homeless people, and in the preview, he was like, well, if you could cure cancer but you had to kill one person, wouldn't that make it worth it? And I was thinking about the exact same argument. It's like, well, if you had to take billionaire child sex money, but you managed to make a clock that runs away,

isn't that worth it? And also, and don't forget guitar hero, they made guitar hero as well. To be fair, the clock that runs away, I think is a great infection. It's extremely we live in a society. Like, if Dali was alive today, he would have invented that clock. That is the clock.

Melting clock that runs away. It's great as an art department, I guess. A metaphor for our human condition. It's great as a didactic conceptual art department, but not much else. So Negrepante's comments clearly stunned some of his listeners. A woman in the front row began crying, and Kate Darling, a research

scientist at the Media Lab, shouted, Nicholas shut up. We've been cleaning up your messes for the last eight years. Yeah, but she's mad because he said the literal sense about... Who is this that's outside my house yelling he's been cleaning up your messes for the last eight years? Fuck off.

I mean, in a very literal sense, in that he probably does like shit himself. All over the glass walls and everything. Yeah, because he's an old person who spent his entire youth just on mind-bending drugs, not in a cool way. But he's just stopping the

gravy train. Do you think that if they hadn't taken money from Epstein that Leon Black say was going to be an upstanding beacon of moral virtues? Or, for that matter,

you know, IBM. The company that helped Hitler do the holocaust more efficiently. Yeah, you can't take a research project and do like a research initiative with, I don't know, some Swiss bank called Gold Teeth Storage

LLC, and then say, oh, this one guy. We have no idea what this gold came from incorporated. I agree with you, Alice. They're all bad. It's just Epstein is loud. He's loud.

He's the loud. All of the other ones were smoking mids, but the MIT Media Lab just had to smoke that loud. Swiss banks, Reggie. They got too high and now everyone can see what it is that they did. Well, here's the thing. Now I might be about to cancel myself here.

With the whole taking Epstein's money thing, I feel like what's really bad about taking Epstein's money is going around and saying, oh, this great guy, Jeffrey Epstein, gave us MIT all this money. You should trust this guy. But if you're not doing that, there's an extent to which I'm like, I mean, obviously this lab

never made anything useful. But let's say they were like curing cancer or some shit. I'd be like, yeah, fucking take the cunts money. Don't give him any credit. Whatever. Like at least he's not spending it on fucking kids. There's like a part of me that thinks that I sort of understand the more like nuanced arguments about not taking it. But it also sometimes feels a bit like morally

high-handed if like you could do something useful with it, which in this case they weren't. This absolutely feels like you could make a compelling argument if any one of these things did something with any utility. But this is basically the joke about like the U.S.

military is like, how do we stop this volcano from erupting? Let's dump suitcases full of cash at it. We haven't stopped the volcano yet. Here's keep trying. Now you're sort of making the same argument that Harvard professor Larry Lessig makes when he says that accepting Epstein's money is okay. So he says, well, I think that universities should not

be the launderers of reputation and I think that they should not accept blood money. I believe that if they are going to accept blood money or the money of criminals. That's an incredible sentence. They should only ever accept that money anonymously. At least a university

would be able to do what they do while avoiding the mechanism through which a great wrong is forgiven. But the problem is, and this is my response to you a mile out, is that people could just fucking pay taxes. Yes, we could for instance, change

the system of how universities are funded. Yeah, but just on the basis of this, I think you can say, oh well, it's just doing it anonymously so it wouldn't launderers reputation. But the problem is, it did. Even after he was convicted, a convicted pedophile,

his association with higher academia meant that all of these his public reputation wasn't laundered, but his private reputation among other elites was completely fine. What was that line that Joi Ito said, if Leon Black needs some love from MIT,

right? It's a way of just letting these people buy favors from institutions. And those institutions might not be public favors, but it just means that he gets to do more of what he wants to do. I mean, I'm not saying that we should only take money from good billionaires.

No, because there are none. It's just that this is a particularly egregious example. I think I'm not even sure if truly... I mean, obviously, Jeffrey Epstein is just an insane aberration that the modern world has produced. I don't think he is an aberration. But what I'm saying is,

in the sense that I think actually probably the majority of billionaires have ruined more lives than Jeffrey Epstein. That's probably true. It's just that Jeffrey Epstein did it in a way that's particularly noticeable and particularly because of the current climate of people rightly saying, hey, we should pay more attention to sexual assault

and stuff. It really touches a lot of the right nerves at the right time. But I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of billionaires you've never heard of who have just murdered millions of kids in Africa through shit that they've done. It's the personal involvement, right? It's his island. All of these people are talking about meeting him.

If my company gives some coal miner black lung or whatever, I never laid a hand on him, right? And it's, I think, sort of bringing this all together. It's that institutions like the Media Lab. We say, what's this for? And this is sort of by way of wrapping up.

This is what they do. They're marketing. They're PR. They're just they're selling the idea that the present arrangements of things is great. And it's great because we have an app that lets you vote on what we have on the TV in the bar. It's just an advertisement

for everything being great as it is because if it wasn't this way, if we didn't have these billionaires and these companies funding all of these, you know, geniuses getting together, then we wouldn't have the great things they make. But let's also go back to the lab's goal as discussed in the 1985 book,

to use computer technology to personalize and deeply humanize absolutely everything in every space, everywhere. We joke about... I feel very humanized by the MIT Media Lab. We joke about how they were a total failure because every individual project they undertook

accept Guitar Hero and Amazon to be ink for the Kindle. They have been a complete failure. They're laughable. And yet, I can't help but notice that we live in the world that Negroponte foresaw. You know, he only ever said what Capital wanted to hear

and it's not success for any individual person, but rather, it's a successful marketing operation for Capital and the ruling class in general. We're living in the future the MIT Imagineered and marketed, even if they didn't build it because they're moronic fuck ups and everything is the cops and we also all live

in a glass building funded by pedophiles who never seem to face that many consequences. And that baby's running away. That baby's called society. It's a grift. It's a bunch of short cons strung together and Negroponte will, of course, tell them what they want to hear and then what they want to hear again

and the world just evolves around it and all of the people on the top of this, it gets steered without any individual person predicting or understanding anything. Oh boy. So what if we had a Roomba that was like the cops?

For more of what Alice just said, tune in for part two of this episode. For me going off. Where instead of exploring the sort of deep societal sickness that has produced the MIT Media Lab and indeed

that the MIT Media Lab advertises, we'll just be exploring some of its stupidest ideas. So sign up on Patreon. This episode will be coming out in a couple of days. We're doing the MIT Media Lab blooper reel. Up next. The deleted scenes. The clock just runs into one of Jeffrey

Epstein's model assistants. They spent years trying to develop the real-life version of Flubber. I just love the idea of Jeffrey Epstein having a really horny Ibo. Like a regular sexy Ibo. A regular Ibo off the shelf wasn't good enough.

A sultry Jessica Rabbit Ibo. Awful. Now he gets sued by the estate of Jeffrey Epstein who are like, he may have been a pedophile but he was not into bestiality. Jessica Rabbit is human. We'll get your facts straight. Also, Jeffrey Epstein may have been

a pedophile and a sex offender but he would never be associated with a product like the Sony Ibo. All right. So we'll see you on the Patreon everybody for part two. Bye. Thank you.