TRASHFUTURE - Montessori Arms Company feat. Priyanka Raval

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

For this week’s free one, we’re talking about a Thiel-funded startup to invent future guns that is apparently run by a 9-year-old. We’re also talking about AI Steve, the strange but 100 percent not made up story of a guy who’s claiming he’ll make an AI chatbot and represent its views in parliament if elected. However, we’ve also got an interview segment where Riley speaks with Priyanka Raval of the Bristol Cable about the parliamentary seat in Bristol Central that might flip from Labour to Green. Is there a lesson we can learn from this? Is this replicable? Does Labour hate every one of its voters? The answer to at least one of these is ‘Yes.’ Priyanka's interview starts at 34:39! Check out Priyanka’s work at the Bristol Cable here! https://thebristolcable.org/author/priyanka/ and become a supporter of the Bristol Cable here! https://thebristolcable.org/join/ 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   *EDINBURGH LIVE SHOW ALERT* We're going to be live at Monkey Barrel comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe on August 14, and you can get tickets here:  https://www.wegottickets.com/event/621432   *MILO ALERT* Buy Milo’s special ‘Voicemail’ here! https://pensight.com/x/miloedwards/digital-item-5a616491-a89c-4ed2-a257-0adc30eedd6d   *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *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/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I don't want to alarm anybody listening, but on the RapSnacks official website, the hoodies have sold out. I repeat. Oh my god. Oh my god. We cannot get RapSnacks hoodies have sold out, I repeat. ALICE Oh my god. RILEY Oh my god. We cannot get Rapsnacks hoodies anywhere. ALICE People advocate for degrowth and they don't understand what the consequences, they don't understand what it means. RILEY I reckon this is a classic case of hoarding, and like, the reselling market is actually where we're looking at. ALICE On like, Depop, on like, Vintage, you have like, Rap Snax Koolax. I think there is someone who is like, reselling Rap Snax merchandise, and that if you are

listening to this, if you can get me one by November, for reasons, that would be a hell of a lot. If you get one for November as well, but if you get one for me, for November, the month, as well as for November, the co-host of Try Future. ALICE This will never become confusing. GEOFF We come to this country because my father have all of his Flavour Flav hoodies confiscated by Stalin because of the evils of communism. ALICE Do not worry, we will be able to acquire the Rapsnacks hoodies on Vintage or Depop when they come in from the North.

My pure. My pure. The Vintage and Depop Rapsnacks hoodies are marked up by 500 to 400%. Das war ein Prozent. Everybody who does not have a hoodie from Zdussi, Zuparine or Palace, get out. How could you let this happen? Rastak's hoodies? We're not supposed to sell out! You were supposed to be monitoring Zibid's!

Whatever told you to do! The other world's screwed! It cuts to the outside. Sorry everybody, welcome to the show. We were gonna talk about the election today. We were gonna do that, but then we discovered how funny it is to say straight where Bran's in a German accent. Like, I lost a full, like, five minutes to shtussi with...

Shtussi? Shtussi? I think I said shtussi. Zupi. Zupi. Zupi. You has to mind shtussigepopped. Okay, alright, hi everybody.

Yeah, you put my shtussi hoodie on depop. We're gonna be talking to some like actual journalists talking about an actual thing. I'm so sorry for them and they're listening back to this. I'm so sorry. We've got a German journalist on and we're going to get him to list streetwear brands. But if any of you are investigative journalists, can you find out where the Rapsnacks hoodies are? This is the terrible curse of trash future, right?

You can get your actual serious journalism or your political message to a fairly broad audience, however, that audience also has to endure several minutes of discovering, the thought process of... thinking about Rap Snacks, the hip hop themed potato chips, looking at them up, finding out that they have a merch store, finding out that they have hoodies, finding out that those hoodies are then, like, sold out, and then elaborating an entire kind of Hitlerite streetwear bit out of that? RILEY So, we're gonna be talking to two reporters

from the Bristol Cable. Well, between one and two reporters from the Bristol Cable, depending on who's available. ALICE We're gonna be talking to an indeterminate number of reporters from the Bristol Cable. Well, between one and two reporters from the Bristol Cable, depending on who's available. ALICE We're gonna be talking to an indeterminate number of reporters from the Bristol Cable. RILEY We will be talking to a non-zero number of reporters from the Bristol Cable, towards the back half of this episode, all about what the local dynamics are of a seat where it is entirely possible Labour will lose for the first time.

Which will be interesting, to say the least. However, before we do that and now that we finished our wrap snacks bit. Mm hmm. Questionable. I wanted to say, hey, for now, I wanted to just jump us in with a few bits of election updates, and then we're going to do a startup and then we're going to talk to our friends in the Bristol cable. Great. So without going into too much detail in the manifestos, because to be perfectly honest,

we largely have... ALICE Yeah, there isn't that much detail in them, either. RILEY Yeah. I wanted to... Well, again, this is... NICCO Well, that's how they get you. RILEY This is the election that's being run by people who really don't want to be there or feel like they shouldn't have to do it. So of course there's nothing in there. People say the devil is in the detail and that's why I

will not allow detail into the Labour Manifesto so as to keep Satan out of proceedings. I think Satan is bad and I don't want to do business with him. I want to do business with people in the CBI. So the Tory Manifesto says the words, we will stick to the plan, take bold action, and then says the words, to secure the future of our nation and society, and it says that phrase. How many words is that? Well, this is the thing, because of austerity right now, you don't even need the whole 14 words anymore, you can reduce that down to seven.

But this is an obvious line- They got copyrighters in to punch up the 14 words anymore, you can reduce that down to seven. But this is an obvious line- They got copywriters in to punch up the 14 words. Yeah, to like, narrow it down, to hone it down to a mere seven words. But like- My Fuhrer, we have hired an advertising und branding consultancy. They say that this is too verdy. It's too long. Does not trip off the tongue.

Fucking Pete Campbell from Mad Men in the Fuhrerbunker. There is a line of attack from Labour here, which is that this too is profligate spending, right? These seven words are still uncosted, and I think the opportunity is there for Keir Starmer to come out and say, where the Tories have committed to seven words, the Labour Party needs to use only one. A word which I am gonna say now. The cover of the manifesto is exactly the same, but the word change is replaced with something very different. "- Peter Mandelson, Morgan McSweeney, all of my best advisors, Luke Egghurst, they have said, here, we have only 70% of the racist

vote in the country. We need the extra 2%, so I am relaunching a bold new manifesto." ALICE. Kirstama says the word. It's like Yolotango plays the classics, you know? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keir Starmer starts talking like the Toronto woman with the insane accent. Mr. Sunak, if the business is true, and you left your mums in the hood, that is very sick to my stomach, fam.

You don't do that to your mums. Hold on, who's he going for with this? Is this part of the triangulation? Which is that he puts on the strange Toronto white people accent that everyone below 25 does? He's going for the Drake vote. Yeah. Now that's classic British when you think about it. Well, Drake would fund the Labour Party, he could get obsessed with it like Top Boy. Exactly, this is the thing, Drake has formed for this, like, six months to a year when he wished, when he wished he was from South

London, like, he could 100% get in on this. RILEY So, one thing about the Tory party though, is they have said, in the race to implement the cast review, both parties are like, God, we're gonna implement the cast review, we're gonna implement it right away, but parties are like, God, we're going to implement the caste review. We're going to implement it right away. But the Tories, because they're, as Starmor says, profligately spending on culture war nonsense and pulling rabbits out of hats, I'll get to that quote later. Yeah, we could do transphobia cheaper. Literally, yeah.

They also said, we will amend the NHS constitution, the Tories say this, so that recognizes every patient's right to request same-sex accommodation, and we will not allow the word woman to be erased by the health services, and words such as breastfeeding and mother will never be replaced by chestfeeding and birthing parents. ALICE I have been working in the NHS erasing the word mother, breastfeeding, and woman. My bosses know about it, but they say they can't do anything for fear of being called transphobic.

RILEY It is very amusing, again, it's like, this is, I've said before that, like, the Tory party under Sunak, as much as it's just like, a kind of elaborate torture mechanism built by Rishi Sunak for himself, or at least occupied by Rishi Sunak voluntarily for some reason. What if the guy in the middle of the panopticon fucking hated it? What if there was a Dark Eldar Talos and the guy was just like, y'all getting there. Yeah, what if that. Yeah, what if that. And Rishi Su... But it is the most online nonsense. It is,

what if the DeSantis campaign had actual power? To be like, oh yeah, all this stuff that nobody gives a shit about, that only internet-poisoned weirdos care about, we're gonna put that in the manifesto. Considering we want to govern for five years, we know we won't, we have, I don't know, what, like 80 pages? We're gonna devote a sentence to, quite a valuable 80 pages, to... Fucking chest-feeding. Something which has never been, the, you know, the NHS has never formally adopted, as far as I can tell.

ZACH Absolutely not. That went worse the morning I worked on Keir Starmer's campaign launch. So, um, Starmer, of course, he has said... ALICE He said, mm. ZACH Yeah. Well, not yet. He said that the Labour Manifesto is a serious plan, of quote, carefully thought through, and it's not. He said that the labor manifesto is a serious plan of quote carefully thought through and it's not about rabbits out of the hat. He's been listening to chapel

rung. Yeah. My bisexual girlfriend has taken me. We're taking a strong anti-magician starts. They have no place in our country or economy. N- no. We're dueling Starburst. I'd say, Starburst, like, I will buy a beer, and I will hold it by my side at the Chapel Roan show. I will not cross my arms in front of me, and stand against a wall, but I will not impinge on the girls, the gays, and the them-they dancing with their arms up. ALICE Because Labour has also promised to implement all of the cast review and kill a bunch more trans kids, this really is a heavy emphasis

on Labour is gonna protect the single most important, most vulnerable part of the LGBTQIA... whatever. Rainbow, the cishet boyfriend of the bisexual girl. RILEY Well, they're very vulnerable. SEAN Yeah, it's the most important part of the LGBTQ community. ALICE Out of respect for the queer space I was in, I did wear a jockstrap, but I felt very exposed.

ALICE No one thinks about the bisexual boyfriend of a cis-het girl, that's the real oppression. That's an energy, and it's one I haven't seen, like, confronted, and I think as a community, I think we need to do some investigation into that. RILEY So, he says, he says, it's not about rabbits out of the hat, it's not about pantomime, we've had enough of that. Enough pantomime! I'm running as a candidate to be Prime Minister, not a candidate to run the circus. So I guess

he listened to that episode. He listened to the episode we did a few weeks ago. I'm running to operate the circus fair and square. ALICE Yeah, the only thing that's gonna melt our brains more is if he gets elected and the first thing he does in first PMQs or whatever is make a reference to the Mesoamerican ballgame. It's like, we become aware that we're being gang-stalked by Keir Starmer. ALICE This is not a pantomime, and when I list my

manifesto pledges and the crowd cry, he's behind you, they're not referring to some kind of pantomime villain, but in fact, Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire is giving me its full-throated support, and who does coincidentally resemble a kind of pantomime villain. So the one sort of thing I'll say about the Labour Manifesto, which we will sort of go through in more detail in a later show, is I've seen like- It's great? Yeah, it's awesome. I support every bit of it.

No, it's the- it spends, an astonishingly small amount of money next to previous manifestos, which is... ALICE I saw a briefcase guy on Twitter right before we started recording saying that, like, it's quietly more radical than people are gonna give it credit for, and this is a victory for, like, ideas on the table, think tank stuff, and, y'know, the soft left stuff, and be like, this is stuff that we've normalized through briefing, and then you look at what it's supposedly normalized, and it's like, oh we're gonna do some pretend nationalization.

RILEY We're going to spend very little money, and it's like, if the problem you're trying to solve with your manifesto is, how do we reverse the effects of decades of underinvestment in public services, the only important question is how much are you going to invest in public services? That's it. Kirstam is doing night out right before payday stuff, he's going out with 20 quid in his wallet, he's giving his debit card to his mate and going, only hand this to me in an emergency. If I say I want to buy a round of shots for some guys I just met, do not let me have that debit card.

It's very important. ALICE Rachel Reeves and the do not give me a cigarette under any circumstances no matter what I say t-shirt. Flipping through the Labour Manifesto, just like, why is this page after page of colour printouts of that meme that's like, when you get paid bi-weekly, two weeks, ice soup? RILEY Yeah, that's right. But in addition to attracting the sort of pond life of the UK political class... Oh, all of them. Love that song.

Yeah. There's one bright shining spot of hope in the British political firmament, and that is running, and in my opinion winning, getting the official TF endorsement in Brighton Pavilion. It's AI Steve and the Smarter UK Party. Or SMUC. It was Adam and Eve, not AI Steve. So, the Smarter UK Party concept, I think some of you might be wondering, what is the Smarter

UK Party? So, the Smarter UK Party concept is to create policies for the people and by the people who will then have 24-7 access to their MP to discuss issues, leave views, and give input on how he will vote. He, or should I say, chat GPT because AI Steve is actually, if you take away the curtain, AI Steve is Steve Endicott, a former Tory councillor and like Liverpudlian entrepreneur who has moved to Brighton Pavilion so that he may set up a chatbot that he intends to represent completely faithfully in parliament that you can input into the training data of. NICOLAS Why has he picked Brighton Pavilion?

Out of curiosity. ALICE It's such a Tory councilor vibe of like, oh they love weird shit down there, they like greens or whatever. You know, they'll probably go for this. NICOLAS Yeah, I mean, look. Do we trust, you know, this AI Steve more than the average green? ALICE No. NICOLAS No.

NICOLAS But it's close! ALICE Yeah, I had to think about it for a second. NICHOLAS So, you get 24-7 access to your MP, to basically talk to the chatbot, and it has a voice, you can speak to it. ALICE Mmhm. And so presumably there's like, no policies, because the policies are like, whatever you think. Like, it's always doing the public consultation for stuff, effectively.

RILEY So, what it is, is that you input what you want into it, and then its training data is what you input into it, which means that it will basically... Again, this is a vast oversimplification. ALICE Swarming this stuff with every person I know in Brighton in the first two hours, in order to get in early, fix the idea of trans rights in this fucking thing's head so that this weeping Tory is forced under protest of his own principles to be like, uh, maybe we shouldn't do the cast review, like, everyone seems to be really against it.

LORENZO My principles are compulsory veganism, more bus routes between Hove and Worthing bring back hanging. ALICE & TANNOY It's gonna be like that, too, it's gonna have this perfect mission. Which is great, right, because Britain, we never developed the European phenomenon that you hear about in Cornish Basie or whatever. KINNEY Bins!

ALICE Like, the big regime party that kind of contains everything, we've sidelined all that into the Tories with all their weird shit, and we never really did the insane technocratic centrist party thing either. But this one gives us our first opportunity to have a totally inconsistent policy slate. Not only will we do wokeness in the schools, we're also gonna re-invade the Falklands. So, I haven't told you the list of policies that so far have been... Oh, is it exactly like that?

Please tell me it's exactly like that. So I'll tell you in a second, once I tell you how they get derived. So basically, there's this whole idea, right, where it's like, okay, we have a receptacle where there's gonna be five thousand people who live in Brighton and Hove, who are recruited to share their opinions and shape policies, and then another several thousand validators, who are commuters travelling on trains from Brighton Station to be validators, who will then basically rate the policies in a scale of one to ten as to whether or not it should be adopted.

So the policies that are most popular thematically, so it's like if someone says, I think there should be more trans rights events, I think gay rights are good, those get lumped into LGBTQ rights generally. There are lots of problems with this, don't worry, I know them. We should bring back hanging for people who aren't trans. That's right! I've been pushing this for years! Then those validators will sort of rate the policies, and policies that get over a certain

level of rating will then be adopted to be pushed by AI steam. It's like Brighton train station Reddit, essentially. Or more accurately, it's like Twitch Plays Politics, but the Brighton train sta- Brighton train station, fuck me. So with all of that- L- MP for Brighton train station. M- Can I tell you the list of policies, you actually, none of you have seen this list of policies, that are currently being advertised as having been adopted by and for the people

on AI Steve's website. ALICE I mean, I kind of, based on my experience with large language models, I know that they tend to be very obliging, but they also get quite confused conceptually very easily, and they tend to, like, fold the wrong things together. So I look forward to seeing something like, y'know, all trans people will get, like, better bin provision. MW. Move the Cornwall Pastico from the outpost of Platform 7 to the far more centrally located Platform 3, where it will be close to the Itsu. RILEY. I think the idea is that the presence of the validators keeps anything too individually

weird from getting adopted. So instead, the policies are all policies that are from other parties, basically. These are all sort of coherent in themselves, but let me give you the list. Number one, cut university tuition fees by 50%. Number two, double prison capacity. Number three, compulsory... M-Sending students to prison. It's cheaper. ALICE Yeah, Foucault said a school's quite like a prison, so why can't we just send them to prison?

RILEY And actually, prisons these days have quite a good range of broadening education programs. ALICE I hate when you have, like, prison debt, and you have to pay your prison fees. RILEY I'm pretty sure that's a real thing. ALICE Yeah, in America. ALICE At least the States, yeah. But applying this to a British thing and being like, well, originally they said that the

like, 9,000 a year thing for prison was only gonna be for like, Wormwood Scrubs. You know, prestige prisons, but ultimately no one wants to be seen to be undercutting it. Sick of the Pentonville Wormwood Scrubs mafia in all the top jobs in this country. Where'd you go to prison again? I'm really really annoyed that Penten Scrubs just has every single important job. I actually went to quite a cheap day prison. My parents worked very hard to pay for me to go to prison.

I was in a category C open prison situation. Actually it was kind of more of a Montessori vibe. If you go to HMP Belmarsh, then you actually get preferential treatment to be accepted into penitent scrubs. Mmhmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why Assange went there. This is actually a great bit, Montessori prison, I think we've found what the beer is just

like. I think that guy Daniel Calife, like, escaped from one of those, didn't he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, David actually finds that stabbing helps him get a lot of the tension out, so we tend to just let him stab whenever he feels the need, and then when he's ready he comes back to lessons. Can I tell you what the policies are? Number one, cut tuition fees by 50%, number two, double prison capacity, number three,

compulsory national service, number four, four day working week. Wow. Yeah, because your fifth day would be doing national service. Yeah, exactly, it makes perfect sense. Instead of going to university you go to prison, instead of going to work, you go to national service. NICHOLAS Hold on, this is Corvée! ALICE Yeah, and it's all costed!

NICHOLAS Yeah. Four day week at the army is also a great bit. Like, you're fucking on the front lines in Donbass, and then you're like, but I'm spending Friday going shopping with my wife at the Bluewater shopping centre. ALICE Just a kind of policy guy being like, I know it seems counterintuitive, but it does actually raise productivity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Modern, like, incorporate AI into the NHS. No VAT on private schools, but maintain Rwanda deportation flights.

We can deport some private school children to Rwanda? RILEY Support for LGBTQ plus people, and finally, scrap you less. ALICE Like... ALICE Driving my gay Mercedes to National Service. ALICE This is sick. RILEY This is, no, this is cool, what they have done, they have created, by accident, the median British voter. ALICE It's true, to be honest.

If you picked a guy off the street and stuck a microphone in their face, like, yeah, you could swing them in favour of most of this, I think. RILEY It's so funny that, in principle, one of the policies for someone who wants to be the MP for Brighton will be scrapping a low emission zone in London. Perfect. No, no notes. Well look, this is what people in Brighton care about, I guess.

As long as they commute to London. In a train? Makes sense. Are they hitching, like, a car from before 2006 to the train? I wish my train was less green. I wish they had like a diesel locomotive on the front of this thing. Yeah, I commute in my Hummer train. I've had a Hummer converted to run on the Southern Rail network.

That would actually be kinda sick. I wanna talk about one company that recently was in the news. It's called Mach Industries, M-A-C-H, and they describe themselves as a manufacturing company that deploys products to ensure American dominance. So we're jumping the pond. Yeah. Okay. So my initial thinking is this like, I wish it had a different letter in the middle of

that word, because it could mean quite a lot. It could be like a Mecca? Like building in Ava? That's right. That's correct. Yeah. Ensuring American dominance. It's like, okay,? That's right. That's correct. Yeah. Ensuring American dominance is like, okay, finally we're building a fucking Gundam. Finally.

We're finally doing it. Well, America's daddy-dom defense company is going to issue... Sadly, we lack imagination. Yeah. Well, the Chinese would never build a Gundam because it would be handing one to the Japanese and that's something they just won't do. This is American company, by right? Yeah, it says, headquartered in...

Well, that's what I mean. It would enable This is American company by right? Yeah, it says, headquartered in Huntington Beach, and backed by leading venture firms. Oh, same as the SEALs, I think. And also Hollister. We're an engineering obsessed team. That's why the Navy SEALs are always wearing that shit. Weird sort of like triangular nexus there. Doing some real power politics there, and being like, you know, Hollister founded like, 1987, Huntington Beach, Virginia.

Coincidence? Well, it makes perfect sense, because it's always so fucking dark in Hollister, and the seals always got those night vision goggles on, they're the only people who know what fucking colour the shit they're buying from Hollister is. Yeah, green, because of the thing, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Can we have the plotters theme from the movie JFK here, please? This one's never coming out, we're all getting assassinated for being too close to the truth

by extremely shittily dressed death squads. By a guy who's got a Pucka shell and ear necklace. Yeah, yeah, a Black Hawk helicopter is gonna crash into the side of November's apartment. Uh huh, yeah. And it's gonna smell terrible. Yeah, just looking at the Navy Seal Blackhawk being like, I know it smells crazy in there. In an unexpected way. Four American servicemen have drowned in Loch Lomond after an attempted Halo insertion from

40,000 feet. We're not sure what's happened here. It's being written off as a training accident. Four guys, like four American flag draped bodies with spiked blonde hair coming out the top. No, we are, there's Huntington beach, California. Okay. Sure. The two products we're investing heavily in are Viper, a jet-powered miniature fighter. Miniature? Like Hot Wheels? How small are we talking? Like a drone. And they have something called Redacted, which is a high altitude weapons platform, we'll share more about this.

You can't call it Redacted and not Redactit. That's not... The name was too cool for the general public. It's called redacted. We'll say, we'll share more about this information when we can. I, and this is when I realized this was a post responding to something. I, founder Ethan Thornton, one of the Forbes 30 under 30 and a Teal fellow, still like 21 years old, was working out of a dorm room 15 months ago. Today I write this from our 115,000 square foot factory, where I work alongside people I deeply admire to develop world changing

products for war fighting customers." Where a British colonial administrator finds himself on Pandora. I met a teal fellow. So, very good. The natives are there. Though I'm proud of our progress, the path ahead will be very hard. We're building an incredibly difficult company, and as with most startups, the chance of failure is very high. As a one year old business we've made many mistakes, but as part of our culture we work

to fix them, learn from them, and relentlessly improve. I'm more confident than ever that we can achieve our goals, and we'll keep fighting to deploy prolific and capable platforms to help fend off future conflicts. What, raising my hand here, they say keep fighting to deploy, have they deployed anything? RILEY Oh, they're fighting to deploy. They keep fighting to deploy. ALICE Okay, cool. RILEY No, they haven't deployed anything.

RILEY The fighting's supposed to start over there, once you've deployed it. ALICE No, the real fight is in, like, taking a bunch of Pizza Teals money, and then fighting to make use of it, in making Redacted or whatever. RILEY So, what happened? Ethan Thornton, age nine, was an MIT student fifteen months ago. ALICE Dear Mr. Till, I am a precocious nine year old, whose fondest dream is to see the enemies of our country obliterated with Redacted. RILEY Peter Till replies, how is your blood?

ALICE Yeah. So. ALICE Useful. RILEY is your blood? ALICE Yeah. So. ALICE Useful. ZACH Yeah, this post sounds very much like a we're learning and growing post, and that always is led to by something. Now, in this case, the reporting that led to this post, this is a company, by the way, whose original plan was, as far as I can tell, to make the battle rifle from Halo, because the main vision was to replace gunpowder with something made of hydrogen.

ALICE This was tried in a number of places. It's been a kind of... Like firearms are kind of a solved technology in that respect, because people tried this shit in the 80s and 90s, and if like, y'know, a bunch of large firearms manufacturers couldn't figure it out, then why is Peter Thiel's Blood Boy gonna do it? RILEY Like, what, do you think you're better than Glock? Come on. ALICE Yeah, I mean, Glock are like, so bullish on

metallic-case gunpowder cartridges, that they spun off a side business of horse semen. You don't do that when you're not winning, right? RIght. Yeah. You've heard of Glock, now try Cock. Thank you, Milo. Resisting an inside baseball trans joke there. What Thornton did, is he was at MIT, and then convinced a number of MIT professors, somehow,

to leave their posts and work on this project. And... Somehow was the answer... money. There was a guy called Eric Limpaker. Uh... Okay. His name's ridiculous, go ahead and laugh at it. Eric Limpaker. Prefer a nice fur maker myself.

Yeah. He, he joined, he was like the main guy, so. So Ethan Thornton was the charisma and the sort of college dropout who'd get the teal money. Limpacre was like, I actually know how to do this thing. And then they got Series A funding in October 2023, and then Limpacre was like, yeah, I'm gonna leave to start a new company, quote, bringing with me my existing team technology, prototype products, customer relationships, and revenue, they can keep the rest. Effectively, just, that was it.

This company was done. But what would you do if you were a seven year old who's recently been given, like, 20 million teal bucks and then 300 million more venture capital bucks? ALICE Well Jesus, you keep the grift going. Cause at that point, hopefully you know that you can't ever fail. Like, too much money is invested in you, so long as you like, you know, play nice, keep donating blood on schedule, you will basically be allowed to be like a loss leader. ZACH So, what happened right, was firstly, that

this is from Forbes, sometimes Forbes still does reporting, Mogs' giddy financing had been prefaced by a troubling, almost near fatal misstep. Months earlier, Thornton and another employee were almost killed while testing a mock weapon. Four former employees with knowledge of the matter told Forbes that Thornton was reaching into a blast chamber surrounding a hydrogen powered gun when the gas ignited, blowing up the machinery and sending a spray of shrapnel across the room, and this was far from the only such incident. ALICE Cool. Move fast, break things, turn yourself into the kind of capitalist Abu Hamza. Great.

ZACH Yeah, what we seem to have done is accidentally, by giving a kind of three year old access to teal bucks, and then removing the guy who knew how to do the thing, is we've created Akhme from the Looney Tunes. Basically. Yeah, sick. Watch this, Libs blows off both hands in a kind of combustion chamber. This is the shit that, like, villain from Iron Man 1 was doing, man. Or 2, I don't remember.

Possibly 3. Those movies kinda blend. I'm just thinking about capitalist Abu Hamza now preaching in front of LSE talking about the invisible hook of the market. Beyond hydrogen powered firearms that I'm quoting for the article here, work like pneumatic potato cannons, Mark and also sold investors on Prometheus, a mobile hydrogen generator that could be deployed in the battlefield. But there was no cost effective way to produce the aluminium fuel necessary. So he was just guessing. So this is the other thing I thought was very

funny. During a jet propulsion test last year, because when you might have noticed in the note that they wrote Thornton doesn't make any mention of hydrogen-powered weapons because the only guy who knows how to do that left. Now they're like, I guess we'll make drones, like autonomous drones. Nobody else is doing that. During a new eject propulsion test of their new drone last year, Thornton attempted to hold a drone down with his hands while it was at full throttle to help steady it for launch. ALICE This guy has an absolute death wish, and I honestly respect that, y'know?

Like, this man is walking around in a hitman level of his own design every day at work. Just everything is like one loose screw away from like, rocketing him out the roof of his own warehouse. RILEY Well he's only on like five and a half pints of blood at this point. ALICE and ALICE laugh. ALICE Having your decision making like, fatally impaired by like, regular blood harvesting.

RILEY He is the only CEO who follows Mr. Magoo rules, I guess? I'll just finish with this before we go into our conversation with the Bristol folks. On another occasion during a team meeting, Thornton compared Mox hierarchy to that of a cult. It has a leader, a clergy, priests, community leaders, true believers, and so on. A photo of a white ward showed the phrase, what is a cult, written on it, above a description of its various features, like communal living, all interactions together, birth, life, death, eat, breathe, sleep, and hive mind, true love for fellow members.

Employees rep- LORRAINE This is like a university prospectus. ALICE I was gonna say, I love a bit of environmental storytelling, y'know? Not only has this man been walking around trying to get killed by his own machines, he's also been leaving a bunch of audio logs, like cataloguing his descent into madness. D&J. Employees were perplexed by the analogy.

One said, wow, this is not what I wanted to be a part of before leaving. Anyway, that's a quick one, a quick little start up. ALICE Very funny. Very funny for Teal to be like, I'm gonna disrupt the woke and soy and gay defense industry. ZACH Well, I mean, he does think that, he's like the they them army. ALICE Oh I know, he's seen the Lockheed Martin pride socks, like I know.

But like... ZACH Yeah, yeah. He's like, we have to give an eight year old four hundred billion dollars to try to invent a new kind of gun. That's alright. Well, they're very imaginative eight year olds, you know. Alright, alright. Montessori Arms Company. Yeah, there we go.

Okay, there we go. That's a strong contender for episode title right there. Squeaking it in. Anyway, I'm going to hand over now to November and I in the future. Holy shit, future November? December? See you in just a moment. Hi everybody. Welcome to the promised part two of this episode where I will be talking with the Bristol Cables Priyanka Raval all about the local dynamics in a seat it looks like labor might lose and how to, I'd say, fight a campaign in the era of the thousand Kier Reich. So Priyanka, thank you very much for joining us on the show today.

Thank you, Riley. Good to be here. Yeah. So the Bristol cable is, I mean, it's a very good news source if you are in Bristol. I actually remember ages ago, years ago, when we did a live show on the merchant venturers and how they worship the hair and fingernails of a dead slave trader. The Bristol Cable was actually one of our prime sources. So I'm very happy to be talking to someone who actually works there at long last. Yeah. The merchant ventures wild story. We should talk about that another time.

I think we could do like a where are they now? What have they done in the last two years? How have they landed their reputation this month? Yeah, it turns out they found a length of Edward Colston's intestines. They've dried it like jerky. And now they're worshipping that like a god. Yeah, no. So look, we, one of the things that were reasons we're talking about Bristol is that there is one seat in sort of at national politics, Brighton Pavilion, that the Greens basically

have planted themselves in and will be and sort of don't end up really losing. The places where labor, it looks like, are most vulnerable from the great, well, from really anybody, is the sort of second seat that is always being sort of looked at as possibly going towards the greens. And if there is going to be an election where that might happen, it is probably this one.

And not to, nothing's for certain, obviously, but this is the one where there's the greatest chance. If you want to still think about parliamentary politics, and I don't blame you if you don't, it looks as though Bristol could give a model of how labor might be challenged. However, one of the things we're going to dive into today is the specific local dynamics that make Bristol such a difficult area to win for labor. I mean, they've lost the majority on the council. The directly elected local mayor has basically dissolved its own office in a fit of self-destructive unpopularity. I think it was something to do with an airport. And the labor MP for Bristol, Thangam Debener, is, I would say, quite incredibly

personally unpopular. So Priyanka, do you want to take us through why they're suffering in Bristol and how that's particular to Bristol and how it might be generalized? Yeah. I mean, it's smart to see how many... There are so many eyes on Bristol Central at the moment, nationally across the country. It's kind of weird. I mentioned earlier, at the cable, I don't know how we are going to cope with our newfound relevance because our four MPs in Bristol at the moment, now it will be five. They all occupy cabinet positions. It's going to be a really different ballgame if Labour do get in. I think that is why Bristol Central has attracted so much scrutiny because it is the one, it's like the chink in the

national armour. It's interesting because we had local elections so recently in May and we really saw the party political dynamics that were happening in Bristol and why certain... In the local elections, the Greens became by far the largest party in the council. They were only too shy of a majority. Labour were second, but they did lose a lot of seats to the Greens. Tories in our city are the smallest party in the council. I guess people do look to Bristol as this place of really fucking national trends often. What we saw in the local elections, I think, was an expression of huge frustration

with the Labour administration. That's so multifaceted. One of them is the personal kind of unpopularity of Marvin Rees. I think when he came in, there was so much excitement about him and just steadily people became more and more disillusioned. It was so many excitement about him and it just steadily, people became more and more disillusioned and it was so many things. You mentioned the airport, but I think that was just one of the, this is about Bristol airport expansion. But actually that was not even Bristol City Council's responsibility. That was North Somerset Council's responsibility, but he initially was quite in favour of its expansion and people rightly called him a hypocrite because how does that align with our net zero

pledges that Bristol City Council had made? In the end, he did a bit of a U-turn on it. But without getting into all the local specificities of that,, I think in a broad brush sense, Marvin often did this thing where if something environmental would come up, if there was an environmental case or actually he used it quite a lot to a level where it became a bit irritating, he would dismiss most campaigners as being white middle-class Nimbys who didn't care about working people. Even when these campaigns would come from Acorn or working-class communities or people who were struggling with the cost of living. I think that became a bit tired as a backlash. His engagement with reporters was always very dismissive. I think in the media in Bristol, he kind of wrote off in the same

kind of vein. He didn't even let the Bristol cable come to the press conferences that they were running during the pandemic. He's had a bit of a bullish way of going about politics. As you said, this has resulted in the mayoral referendum, which saw him scrapped, which saw the whole system scrapped. So now we have the committee system. I've gone on a huge tangent now. Rain me in. Jason Vale I think what we see with the whole story

of Marvin Rees and the sort of, not just a one term mayor, but a one term mayoral system, one of the greatest political achievements of our time. You called the Mayfly mayor. But what we see is not just discussed with the national labor party, which I think is a factor, but you have a lot of missteps made by labor locally. Constant missteps made by labor locally that the? Constant missteps made by labor locally that the Greens appear to have been able to capitalize on, I think. Yeah. That's a great way of putting it. I think the most recent example is, I don't know if this reached national news, but there is a tower block in Bristol, it's called Barton House and it's probably

one of the most recent shit shows. One of the biggest shit shows I think I've seen from this council where the residents of this tower block were basically evacuated in really panicked, urgent circumstances. People were just told, leave the building now, no prior warning, not a clear plan of where they were going to go. It was because they said that the building was unsafe to live in. These people were then decamped into sleeping in their cars or community halls or local doctor surgeries. They were then put up in hotels in really awful conditions, in the rooms that maybe formerly, which are not paying guest quality rooms. They're the rooms that maybe homeless people were housed in during the pandemic. The way that they were communicated

with was so bad. What the future held, why they had to be evacuated in such stressful circumstances. Being left for months in limbo, only to be told a couple of months ago, oh, sorry, yeah, we've done some checks and actually the building's fine and you can go back in, is the kind of simple version of this months long saga. And it was just such a monumental mishandling. And I think the way that Marvin dealt with people and other members of Labour was just really shocking. But it is where I think having been on the ground for that story, green councillors were able to come in and be a bit more of a voice for people

and step in in a way that Labour hadn't. But I think also that's related to something else with Labour where, and you know, this is happening nationally as well, is that they're losing the people of colour vote, right? And there are a huge contingent of, you know, like the Somali population in Bristol is particularly significant, especially in the east of the city and Muslim voters as well across the city. And not just Muslim voters. I mean, I really do think the issue of Palestine is something that has really alienated labor to a lot of their voters. Well, the whole point, I mean, the whole point of what we see

with labor doing nationally, and I think some of the examples you've given of how labor has behaved on a local level in Bristol is to say, we have taken power. What are you going to do? Vote for the Tories? There is no other option. So we're going to evict you and oops, sorry, that's a mistake. That's a whoopsie on our part. Again, what are you going to do? Vote Tory? Don't think so, asshole. And that attitude, I think, is one that holds people in profound contempt. And it's essentially a gamble that... And again, in intellectual terms, it's a great gamble, which is that this country is designed to be profoundly anti-democratic. And so the high handedness of its rulers really

hasn't come down a lot since Charles II, if you get my meaning. Yeah, I've been thinking, is it just huge complacency? I mean, in Bristol, I know... For example, to go back to Bristol Central, Thangam Debenhair, who is the Bristol Central Labour MP, won huge majorities in 2017, in 2019, even when we were such a Corbyn heartland during those years. Thangam did manage to win. She still got a majority of 28,000 votes, is it just a complacency resting on their laurels? Mason Fiery I see sort of nationally at least, them as a party of kind of petty authoritarians, which again is a, it's a real, that's a very sort of British tendency. And you know, this is, it's the sort of five years between 2015 and 2020 was a break from that

where some democracy accidentally got in. And it accidentally was representing people's priorities. And so MPs who are part of that clique of petty authoritarians, such as the MP for Bristol Central, people who are much further to the right of the party, people who were more likely to see, for example, social housing as something that is given from beneficence and maybe taken away as a privilege. These people were swept into power despite themselves. And I think the story of Marvin Rees, the story of so many labor councils of lifetime, sinicured politicians who are depending, for example, as you say, on...

Who have an idea that there is a vote that the people of color represent who will just come and show up for them no matter what. And I think it's based on contempt. I think it's based on a huge entitlement. And I mean, I think it's... And it's based on a huge entitlement. And it's based on the idea that I personally deserve this job for life. I personally know what's best for these people. And I personally will dole them out hard medicine. And I personally will also give them beneficence. The comparison to the sort of Jacobian period is... It doesn't come from nowhere. And so I think what we talked, what you sort of alluded to it a couple of ways is sort of the greens being at least big enough from a baseline in Bristol that they're able to

go up to people who are suffering from the local labor council. Again, I think the important thing to note, by the way, as we sort of talk, as you mentioned earlier, all eyes being on Bristol as like the one place where it's like, oh yeah, it's going to be like labor 500 seats reform, 40 seats, Lib Dems, 20, Greens, two Tories. That this is going to somehow be extrapolatable to the national context with just at the seat level. But what I think it's important to draw out, one of the reasons I want to talk to you today is like, no, actually, it goes so much deeper than that. It goes so much deeper into the local dynamics than just mere disgust with labor at a national level being played out in a place where there are lots of hippies, there's long standing opposition to Tesco opening up on Gloucester Road and so on and so on.

That was one of the galvanizing political events of Bristol in the last decade, right? People organizing to stop Tesco opening up on Gloucester Road. Yeah. I was there. It was like the Battle of Waterloo, but on Stokes Croft. But broadly, right? There is an assumption that progressives in general will just be able to ride national trends. And what we're really talking about here is there are events that are particular to Bristol, whether that is events that have created a politically mobilized sort of Green Party in ways that it's not politically mobilized elsewhere. And there also have been like labor have been actively driving people away, but their sense

of entitlement that I think is replicated in every other seat and council across the country that they control has meant that they are driving people into a viable opposition. Yeah, exactly. And well, one thing I did want to say though, is that I've seen a couple of these articles. I don't think we should attest too much to this kind of like, or maybe it's just a bit of a tired cliche that I think people are like, oh, well, Bristol is this kind of, you know, bohemian radical place. And so obviously, because of its kind of mythic radical nature, it's going to have a green surge. And I think sometimes that is frustrating as a person born and raised in Bristol, but also as a local journalist of like,

no, there are real and tangible reasons why greens are doing well here. I mean, one, for all of Marvin's rhetoric of, oh, the Greens are just white middle-class, out-of-touch hippies, that actually the Green Party, especially in local councils, presented a much more diverse set of candidates than Labour did. Candidates who were very much of the different communities that there were in Bristol. Now, as it stands, all the Labour councillors are white and all the Green councillors are a much more diverse set of people in terms of race, class, backgrounds, everything. I think that matters and that holds weight. I think, as I said, Labour's stance on Palestine, I think also in terms of how Labour have been communicating on the ground. I mean, right now,

my colleague, Matty Edwards, who has been reporting on Bristol Central, he has managed to get interviews with Carla Denier, even though she was just stepping off the train from that kind of seven party interview debate that she'd done on ITV. The Greens are making time to speak to local politicians. They are saying yes to all the various hustings that have been organized by local groups. Their leafleting is probably a bit excessive and they are spending a shit ton on Facebook ads. But I mean, all I have to say is I just think they're doing better at communicating with people. And also this is a place that was a huge Corbyn heartland and a lot of people who have very real well-formed socialist leanings and Greens are speaking to that more than labor.

I think it's also important to remember that as a smaller party, the greens can kind of be anything to anyone anywhere. So the greens in Bristol can be quite different from the greens even in Brighton or Stroud or North Yorkshire or other places. It's not to say if you are living in the UK, then you should go and just sort of vote. Take the little switch in your brain that said, okay, put a tick beside labor that you might have had for a few years, flip it to green. Just do that. Because there are some places where like, there are some areas and some places and also in some bits of like even their manifesto, like the green party is far from perfect. And you know, they have a tendency in some places, especially in like, wider, wider parts

of the country, by the home counties, they can be a little bit like Tories, but who took ayahuasca and grew dreadlocks and white dreadlocks to be clear. And so it really, I think it goes back to really trying to correct this tendency to see everything in terms of national politics. To see the Greens as the new good guys, not necessarily. And to see Bristol as inherently more progressive, like a monolith. I think there's a tendency on the part of London-based commentators, and I say this from my house in London, to look at the rest of the country when they're thinking politically in terms of parliamentary seats. And to see those seats is kind of billiard

balls. They have different colors and they're all kind of basically the same. And they just sort of knock into one another and they interact at that level. Right? And to think, oh yes, there will be... And yes, will there be a national swing to the Greens? Probably. But in terms of taking seats, I think what we're talking about here is that relies on connecting with local issues. It relies on capitalizing on labor screwing up in particular ways. Now, also, I have no doubt that if you were to look at any sort of sinecured labor run seat in the country, you would find ways in

which they have behaved high-handedly with local journalists. You would find ways in which they have been dismissive of the concerns of their constituents who aren't property developers. I think you would find a lot of this. It's just about how those missteps get capitalized on and how those can be turned into local energy first, and then ultimately national energy. I mean, that's how I see it. And that's what I see one of the problems with, as you sort of alluded to, people talking about the election in Bristol. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, we had like Owen Jones come to do a talk at the Bristol Cable a few weeks ago. We'd actually booked

him before the election had been called, but then obviously the chat was so interesting because we could talk about the election. Obviously he's running the We Deserve Better campaign, which is asking people not to vote based on just the parties, but actually the individuals and the policy platforms they're running on. And to look at people who, or to raise money and throw support behind people who are running on say like nationalization or higher taxation on the rich and those kind of more left-wing policies. He vocally threw his support behind Carla Denier and had done a video with her that morning. He had tried to speak to Thangam and I think Thangam's press secretary had kind of had shooed her away very quickly. So she couldn't, Owen Jones couldn't get

to her. It's like the entire political class of this country saw Boris Johnson steal the phone and hide in the fridge a couple of years ago and was like, yeah, that's just how we're going to do everything from now. If you steal the phone and hide in the fridge and we all do that, one of us is going to get elected. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's just crazy. They're just so worried about doing an Ed Miliband sandwich fiasco that they've just gone radio silent and it's going to shoot them in the foot. Yeah, I don't know. He did a piece in The Guardian, which I thought was quite good in terms of why

Bristol Central could swing to the Greens. But it is funny, I do think people draw on these, the Tesco Riots and Bohemian Bristol Central, I think you called it. The Tesco Riots were in 2011, we also pulled down the statue of Edward Colston two years ago. There's a lot in Bristol's repertoire that make it subversive, yes. But I think, yeah, as you say, there are very specific local things. So I think what is happening in Bristol Central, you know, the context is that all the wards that make up Bristol Central have gone to green councillors. So yes, it's a labour constituency, but all the councillors within it are green. I think that shows you that there is something about the local dynamics that the Greens are managing to capitalise on. I think the population of Bristol Central is predominantly young people, 18 to 35 year olds, who are very concerned

about renting and the cost of living and think that the Greens will do more for that. I think the Greens are doing more for the environment when it comes to local issues like resisting the Bristol Airport expansion. I think in terms of, there are other local issues which are under the Labour Council, all the public toilets in the city were closed and it caused a public health crisis, especially amongst homeless communities. It was an issue that especially Acorn, which is a really vocal union in the city, who are interrupting council meetings with demands every other month, it seems. They have managed to take the Labour Council to task and been very poorly engaged with on it. Down to the Labour push to close down Bristol strip clubs. I think

a lot of very anti-sex worker rhetoric was coming from Labour. I know that's an issue which is important to young people in Bristol Central, which actually has pushed them now green. I know someone that Mattie spoke to just said that Thangam Debener has abandoned everything that she previously used to stand for from Palestine to workers' rights to Bristol strip clubs. So yeah, I think that shows you the breadth of local issues that are really galvanizing people in Bristol Central. So look, I think what we're talking about is a number of characteristics that can and are replicable at seats around the country. But it won't be so simple as just looking and waiting for it to happen, assuming the local Greens will be, you might say, providing

a kind of democratic alternative to the profoundly anti-democratic labor party. And that ultimately, if they lose, good, they deserve it. They should lose in more places. And that I think if we think that the country, not just demographically, but with people's actual concerns, if labor are moving into the place occupied by the Tories, then they're going to lock themselves into the same occupied by the Tories, then they're going to lock themselves into the same problems that the Tories have. The only issue is that they're going to lock themselves into a coalition that's going to probably last quite a bit longer because few of their habitual voters are ghosts. So as always, it's an uphill battle electorally for

progressives in this country. And I think Bristol provides a kind of template that is repeatable, but it's not so simple as just wait for a place to get more progressive, hope there's a fight against D'Atesco and the pulling down of a statue, and then wait for the nationalization to roll in. Yeah. I think what's specific to Bristol is that there is no one worried about needing to vote tactically in case the Tories win. With that pressure relieved, it does become do I vote Labour, do I vote Green? Then it becomes even easier to vote Green because as you say, there is so much that Labour is doing nationally to screw themselves over,

which has really shot themselves in the foot. The kind of place that Bristol is doing nationally to screw themselves over, which has really shot themselves in the foot. And the kind of place that Bristol is, the amount of candidates that were deselected here, like friends of people that we all know who were deselected from standing for Labour because of this authoritarian right-wing pull in the party. Well, look, they needed to get their jobs for their friends from London. Exactly. I love looking at the back of hand, Stukes Croft. Nowhere rocks like Radcliffe.

Yeah, exactly. It's embarrassing. But it's like, Labour alienated themselves to a massive supporter base in Bristol. And yes, that is true, the country over. But I guess there have been so many spectacular local failings. And yeah, the Greens do benefit from being in opposition and so it's easier to kind of be the one calling out. But just in terms of presence and what they've said and what they've communicated on local issues that really matter to people, they've done a really good job of capitalizing on labor fuck-ups in Bristol Central.

Well, as we enter into the glorious Imkerium, then I suppose, unfortunately, there will be lots more fuck-ups and it's down to progressives to actually capitalize on them. Exactly. So, Priyanka, I want to thank you so much for coming and talking to me today. Thank you. Thank you very much. From Bristol on the Mount. Yes, that's right. Finally, a podcast appearance puts Bristol on the map. Not famous for anything

else before that. It's so overlooked. I think the Bristol cable, fantastic news source if you live in Bristol, near Bristol, or just care about Bristol. Or if you think some of the things in Bristol that are happening or have been happening might actually just be nationally important. You mentioned the pulling down of the Colston statues, but there is a lot more. So I do recommend checking out the Bristol cable and chucking them a fiver if you are so inclined. Yes, please do. I mean, a fiver a month and then you're a member of our cooperative and that's how we're going to build a truly radical alternative to local media.

Anyway, thank you for listening to TF as well. And don't forget, if you have a second fiver, a fiver American, so actually more of a 460-er British, then you can throw that to our Patreon also, which exists. However, I urge you to do that to our patreon also which exists However, I urge you to do that for the Bristol cable first. All right. All right. Well, thank you again Priyanka Thank you to my co-hosts from the first half. Thank you for listening. We have a live show in Edinburgh on the 14th. It is More than half sold and there is still quite a while to go So you really should buy tickets if you want to see us in Edinburgh on the 14th of August, not just any 14th. We will not be there on

every 14th, just that particular 14th. Okay. I've gone on the outro for long enough. We will see you all in the bonus episode in a few short days. Bye everyone.