TRASHFUTURE - Panopticon :3 feat. Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

Cory’s back and in studio! We talk about the financial and legal shenanigans plaguing Elon Musk’s latest wheeze, reconfirm data centres in space are utterly moronic (part of said wheeze), and check in on the latest round of mawkish sentimentality being used to extend the surveillance state. Also we learn about a dot com bubble era startup called Cab Candy, which does exactly what you think it does. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! TF Merch is still available here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

All right, look, I'm aware that this is Neum epilogue part like one fucking million. But this shit is like Lord of the Rings. I can't stop. It keeps ending. And then there's another ending. And I need to emphasize to all of you. This is T.F. It's the free episode.

And we got Corey Doctor in studio today. Hello. I need to emphasize to all of you, all of you listening, that this is from an article in Dazine dated February 6th of this year. is the Royal Institute of British Architects President Chris Williamson, different Chris Williamson, has proposed linking nine northern cities in Britain and Ireland with a structure he calls the loop, a raised high-speed railway informed by Neum.

So they're going to build the circle, having built the line. Yeah. The line, the cube, the circle. The circle is going to be like a nice little ribbon around the Irish sea. Correct. obviously great weather all the time. It's a square with an infinite number of corners, really. How do you say our ambitious project that we're proposing as a sort of a thought experiment

is inspired by Neum if you want it to be anything? Well, it's a bit like, and we're going to have it in the metaverse. God, it says, described by Williamson as a manifesto to inspire and provoke, the loop would connect the English cities of Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bangor, Dublin, and Belfast. And like, I guess, I know that like when architects do these things, right, they're trying to make a statement. But if your statement is, we were inspired by Neum, what is your statement other than,

please can another government give us infinite millions? Well, it's a bit like when a well-meaning elderly relative knows that you're really into, say, Dungeons and Dragons and shows up with a bunch of miniatures for a different game. and says, you know, or like the horse piece from Monopoly and says, I saw you playing with these and I thought you'd like them. Of course. When I was reading this, I was like, okay, what, why? Why have you done this? And then it was like, oh, okay, Williamson's firm worked on Neum.

They are out of fucking clients. They have lost a big one. No, no, they're leveraging their experience. He says, maybe I've been too influenced by the scale, vision, and ambition of Neum's The Line in Saudi Arabia, having worked on the high speed stations running alongside the 170 kilometer long city for the last few years. What? Is he living in the metaverse? What the fuck are you talking about?

There never was a city. You never worked on a high speed rail. All you did was make fucking visualizations. That's probably what he means, though, because it's just like, look, you know, let's just like sort of be real here. Like the idea of building anything, let alone like public infrastructure in the UK is kind of a joke anyway, right? But like one thing you can do is be like, well, I had a great time. I'm in Saudi Arabia not doing anything, except for like making visualizations of which I could sort of make the train go as fast as I wanted. And I would like to do that in Britain because I'm

going to be not having a job in Saudi Arabia pretty soon. I also like the idea, too, that Saudi Arabia is the closest that anyone can come to playing SimCity with the infinite money cheat. And so now he's just like, well, I've got this idea I've wanted since I was a kid. What if you made a train run in a circle, but huge? And so why not? You know, why not? You think he's doing MMT? I think Maybe he's doing British Snowpiercer. Yeah, British Snowpiercer is basically the train is the only dry land and everything is wet. It's just like, you have to fight a way to survive. British Snowpiercer doesn't, sorry, spoilers for Snowpiercer.

British Snowpiercer doesn't disguise the fact that the children are working to replace the parts of the train that keep breaking, but they also did defund the guards with the bullets. I don't know, this monorail is more of a Scotland idea. So, but we in Britain should be as ambitious about our future as they were in Saudi Arabia. And it's like, should we? Should we be? Should we be that ambitious? I know we're an oil producing country, but not that much.

At present, the government seems to expect each city to compete for the same investment funding, but we need to encourage connectivity and collaboration. And yes, that's true. But I just go back to, why would you be like, you know what's amazing? That statue of Ozymandias that's towering above the desert, that wonderful, complete statue of Ozzymandias. Two vast and trunked legs of stone.

It kind of also implies it's like you would presume that it's going to be in either direction if this were a thing that was realistic. But then it's like that would seem to imply a lot of people would have to go way out of their way to get to where they're going because it would still be faster than network rail somehow. And it's like,

I'd like to get to Glasgow from Leeds, I guess. So I don't know. The train is sold out the way I want to go. So I've got to actually go to Ireland and come back. It's like when British Airways, if your flight gets canceled and they automatically book you. And it's like, oh, you're going to go to Diego Garcia first and then you're going to fly back to Heathrow. It's like, I realized you were just trying to get to Manchester. But it'll work eventually.

It's going to be like this circle line. You're just going to, you're going to think you can go all the way around. But you have to get off at Edgeware Road every fucking time. We've actually, look, here's the bad news. We've routed you to Tristan to Kuna. Good news. They are really looking to stop inbreeding there. So you are going to be very popular.

This guy basically was so happy to not get. fit inside a suitcase in Saudi Arabia that he just basically had like a duckling imprinting experience as soon as he got back to the UK and he was dealing with the inter-terminal train at Heathrowd. He's like, I've got such a great idea. Absolutely like this is this is human future right here.

We found a way to make, finally Ireland will be connected in a way that's meaningful. Although that loop only does go one way. It just goes clockwise. So you would have to stay on all the way back to let him and around. Maybe that's how he's going to be achieve those efficiencies he's talking about. You only can go in one direction.

Look, I'm sorry. I fired in here with huge energy. It's just when I read, and like, there's a lot of news going on here. We've got someone as a guest who's expert on, like, tech policy and so on. But I was like, no, I must address this because I need to contemplate the mind that says, I would like to put Neum on my public CV, please, as a sort of example of what we can accomplish. I guess we could accomplish a lot of what they accomplished in Britain. We just have to dig a big trench.

That would be saying, I guess, kill a bunch of people. That would be it. Chief engineer on the Tacoma Washington Bridge. Yeah. I feel like this is basically the logical endpoint of the kid who had the infinite money cheat in Sim City, whereas the people making the renderings were a different kind of kid with the computer who were at the same time making what you might describe as erotic spheres and cylinders in 3D Studio Max.

And so it's like, boy, in either direction, you wind up doing something you'll eventually regret. But in this case, it's like, people I guess are obligated to talk about it in the news like it's serious, much like Neum, so. And you know what? We all know that we were cursed by that old woman for not carrying water for her from the well, and now we have to talk about it also. Yeah, I

cannot wait to eat crow on this. I can't wait ride on the world's worst, I don't know, centripetal force thing, sort of reverse centerfuge, I guess. I don't know. I'm going to, I'm going to experience a lot of Irish weather. You know what? I'll be, I'm trying to think of those sort of like public shame tours where people like

I was wrong about a thing and they had to go like vlog from it or whatever. And so that's just going to, I'm going to live on the British Circle train like it is Snowpiercer. It'll be cheaper than rent. Yeah. What you're going to have to do. Because it's going to go, if it goes high and have speed and is constantly turning also, if it never at any point goes straight and is constantly turning.

I don't know. I haven't seen the detailed designs. Then you'll be helpfully separated into all of your particles by weight. You've always wanted to be organized by weight. Yeah, exactly. I'm seeking that level of efficiency in my life. You have to wear a compression suit to prevent bruising on one side. Oh, we actually have a lot to talk.

about today, but he's like, no, there's a, someone is dumb about Neum. I have a duty. I mean, have you considered that maybe he ate too much Tylenol and became very interested in trains? God damn. All right, RFK. Anyway, look, we got Corey in the house today. And what that means is, I've been wanting to talk about some new Elon developments that have to do with the ownership of technological infrastructure and all of this. But we had to do our traditional 10 minute sacrifice to and also I have a little bit of news I want to get into first. News item the first. And this is a little bit UK politics.

But Morgan McSweeney is out. I can't believe it. I can't believe that the revelation of the Epstein files in the United States has caused what seems to be political consequences in every country other, English-speaking country other than the United States, or at least mainly here. And Westminster Insiders are now talking amongst themselves about when Starrmer will fall. And it is, you know, some of what I'm using to think, like, okay, I guess this is what it was all for.

It was so a group of friends who were linked together by a common association with a friend of Jeffrey Epstein's at one or two degrees of remove could have a go at doing what he did in the 90s, but under a totally different set of political and economic circumstances and without a charismatic figurehead. So I guess this was predictable. Well, also sort of like everyone has seen the photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Vanelson apparently shopping for belts together. Like, that's just old hat at this point.

It's been all over the internet. Like everyone knew about this. And it was just sort of like, when? it was brought up. It was either that's rude or like, oh, you don't understand real politics, you child. It's like, well, at some point, this is probably going to look bad. Every single one of you is going to have to pretend to be shocked at a thing that everyone knew. And it's like, I guess in a way, with McSweeney, I'm glad because like beyond the fact that like, I guess I should feel bad for whatever local council he goes to go bankrupt next. But like the degree to which everything about

McSweeney seemed to be, I'm here to own the left. I'm here to make sure everyone who was excited by labor under Corbyn dies. And like the fact that he's also kind of got caught up in this thing, you know, he's, he's implicated means at least there's going to be some degree of, well, whoever it is that they're paying to investigate every left-wing journalist in Britain is going to be out of a paycheck. And that makes me happy. They probably had to enter it. They had to do a deep dive on us. They're probably like, they seem to have some link between Swedish guys who are Italian. I'm really, I'm really confused. And it's like, I know. I think they're on the Saudis payroll. They talk about Neum an awful lot. They've got a lot. I don't know how many cast members

there are, there's so many voices. And so, yeah, like, you know what? I hope. Can we check if that South Africans working here legally? So, yeah, at the end of the day, like, fuck to Peter Mandelson, fucked to Morgan McSweeney and Keir Starmor. And it's just like, because also,

like I said before, none of this is like a grand revelation. Like, this was all known mostly publicly and like, surely the details were known, you know, within the sort of like Westminster not, not noticing circle. Well, you know what we can find out about this all on check this out i'm pitching okay gary linneker if you're listening i have a podcast pitch for you both morgan mxweeney and dominic cummings are available

you could call it you could call it the power behind the throne you could call it behind number 10 and then they could talk about all of the um bat shit completely left field nonsense ideas they had about running the country and then like 60 000 of like slightly more right wing dads than listen to um the Campbell Rory Stewart won, the rest of politics, then they can go fill the O2 arena. Come on. Spangali's Corner. Spangali's Corner. Perfect. See? Okay. Gary Lineker. Give me half a million pounds. I mean, like, but the thing is, is it to me, I don't necessarily know there's going to be any actual lesson learned here, but the thing that always struck me with these guys was it like the degree to which Mandelson and McSweeney and all the labor, right? Like, what is it? Labor First are so tied in

with the kind of like the people who are convinced that militant tendency still exists and it's infecting the labor, like, they haven't updated their conception of, like, who would have supported Corbyn and left-wing politics and labor since the early 80s. Even if, like, they're literally younger than me. It's like, you have to get jumped into being an old Gen Xer to be in the labor party. Like, you have to, you have to watch only fools and horses. You have to watch Citizen Smith. You have to care about that shit. And like, I just, it boggles my mind. It's like, that's, that's one side. The other side is like, instead of the sugar tax, what if we just put botulism and sugar drinks? Like, that'll solve the problem. Like, it's a psychotic.

It's like the politics of taking like the mosquito speaker that like annoys teens with a loud noise to like a much, much higher degree. And it's like that's the only ideas they've got. Okay. I have a, I want to build on one question here, which is I've now been gnawing at me since you said it, Nate. How would you get jumped into being Gen X? Would you get the shit beaten out of you with Douglas Copeland books?

I am the sole Gen X are on this call. I feel both seen and attacked. I mean, I think you have to be tied up with an old violent femmes cassette and then beaten with a with a Douglas Copeland book. Absolutely. I feel as though, like there's a specific kind of weird, like, right wing by default British Gen Xer who was like, I don't understand what it is, but the, like the tone, the can't of the people that wind up being in the circle, even if they're, you know, born in the 90s

or later, they all basically have to adopt this mode of Blairism. And it's sort of like people who probably were, you know, starting their political careers or either right during that era right after. and it's like, it's just so odd because like it never, it never updates. They literally are like, oh, I wonder when Corbyn was labor leader, like, oh, we have like the secret trot hunting mission. It's like, also I'll say it updated one time. It updated exactly one time.

And that was between 2003 and five when all of those guys needed to harden around support for the Iraq war. And so they all became totally Harry's placified. They all became agro. More agro than an American liberal offer. But it's just also very funny because like the thing that they like glomming on to this idea like the perfect labor leader and the perfect labor policy is Neil Kinnick. It's like, right, that would have been like glomming on to Joe Biden before he actually became president when all

he was famous for was constantly not being, getting the, the, the Democratic nomination. It's like, Neil Kinnick famously lost all the time. And it's just like, it's such a strange, like American Gen Xers, North American Gen Xers. It's, I feel as though like not quite as implicated, even if in the US at least, like statistically speaking, they're pretty right wing. In Britain, it's just this odd, I don't know, Riley, you've perceived it too. They're more condescending about it. And I mean, also, like, yeah, the being, like, basing everything around Kinnick and the people that evolved from him is quite a bit, like, as you say, being like, yeah, but

Biden is so good at giving tax breaks to credit card companies. And he shows up almost every, almost half the time. But, like, the various labor insiders that are now all over the lobby, just because they'll only ever brief against the powerful when the powerful have one hit point left, right? And they're all briefing, okay, well, Starmer's. done. And they say, oh, actually, the writing's been on the wall for a long time. You just didn't ask me about it. And I just hid it from you again. No one's saying, hey, why is the, why didn't anyone talk about that? And one, again, unnamed labor insider says, oh, it was done

when a U-turned on welfare cuts last year. And fine, sure. That's what all this was in service of, right? He was going to show purpose and resolve. And the purpose was largely to 80% continue the work of Rishi Sunak. And the thing is, like, it actually does take resolve because, but it's, it's wildly unpopular. Yeah. It takes resolve to be that. Right. You know, you have to, like, get up every single day and do things that you're a small group of powerful people like, but that you have to hear every single day that you are failing, that you can't fix anything, that you're, basically you're a sacrificial king, essentially. You know, you describe this, and I'm hearing the voice of an anthropologist I used to date in my head talking about how it's not until there is a secret is in the open that everyone can acknowledge that they know it. and that everyone feels this way

and that there's this kind of tipping point. I mean, I do think that what you're describing is an actual phenomenon. It may, in fact, be that they all secretly thought he was cooked for 10 months. And it wasn't until it was okay to say it, that they all said, oh, you think he's cooked too? I just think it would be so cool.

Okay, I'm going to propose a kind of job, right? It would be great if we had. Someone whose job is to go and find that out and then maybe write it down and then get that out to people. People. You see, if you had a parliamentary fesshole, they could just, each of them just in the fesshole, they could write it and they could see what other people think.

This is the thing they do. They do because there's like, but the fesshole is like what like various WhatsApp groups, right? And this is it because it's like, listeners of the show will know, but I have like parliamentary insiders as a result of like some certain connections that I will not say, but are fairly obvious. And the point is that like everyone knew from the start that this guy was completely cooked, right? I don't think, but also like everyone even who didn't know, you didn't need to have like these inside connections. in order to sort of realize that, right? Like, it was very obvious from the start. And so one of the very, one of the most of frustrating things

that has sort of been the case for the past couple of years has been the fact that, like, you know, everyone sort of knows what's going to happen. Everyone knows the circumstances in which Kirstarmer took power. Everyone knows sort of how we got to where we got to. But as with everything to do with British media, it's like you don't really get permission to save a thing until certain people who are deemed to be important

by the nature of where they sit in Westminster Palace for the most part acknowledges the thing that you reach like a conclusion you reached like years ago right and if you bring it up they'll yell at you or they'll block you or they'll sort of like say that you're stupid and they'll dismiss you and again like so much of it is incredibly condescending

and I also say this as someone who used to work in like various newsrooms where like in theory if you work in the same room as them you're like oh I have like a right to sort of say what I think is fairly obvious only to be told to go fuck yourself and that you're stupid and that like you don't know anything and you don't get the lobby pass so you don't get the discount on like the cheap food or whatever and so like what the fuck do you know?

And like this has been incredibly frustrating for the Starma administration because so much of the Starma government rather, because like so much of the incompetence and so much of like the kind of conclusion, you know, the thing that we've reached to now has been sort of so evident for so long because like none of them were particularly good. Right. Like I could, you know, I think there is this sort of sense that like

this was going to be like the second act of like or the third act. of new labour, rather. And by by which I mean that like there was this idea that, oh, you have these kind of like competent you know, operators inside who are, you know, but not necessarily the adults in the room, but they know how to sort of like do political strategy, right?

If like the problem with the Tories was that like they were too busy sort of like backbiting each other and they were too busy stabbing each other in the back, then the Labour Party would do the same thing but they'd be smarter and more cunning about it. But the thing is like all these people were fucking idiots, right? And it was they were idiots like right from the start. And like, at least with like the Tory parties, there was at least some sense of an idea.

logical line, even if that was sort of like fragmented and thwarted by like the post-Brexit consensus, like there was at least some degree of like ideological coherence, which was just not the case over here. What you have were like political opportunists who's kind of like only purpose was to sort of get rid of a faction within their own party. They achieved it successfully. And like the story afterwards. And again, and I want to just like make this final point, which is that like the thing that actually still isn't being acknowledged is like sort of, which I think is probably the most important part of the story is the eradication. of the left of the party

and the disingenuous ways in which that happened and has continued to happen and is still very much in place right now because to do that you then have to sort of acknowledge that like things such as I don't know like the kind of formal definition of anti-Semitism was kind of completely politically charged and also used

for like very directly political purposes and you know the best kind of way that you can frame that is that like they threw a religious minority like they threw like a religious group under the bus in order to sort of achieve this like Tatu's political, like,

you know, do you know what, do I mean? Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, someday everyone will have always

been against this. I don't think there will be against them because the fists of finger. Like, the British, like, they're so fucking arrogant

that they won't, they'll be like, no, actually valid. Like, Kirstarmer will get knocked with Kirstarmer in his whole fucking political project

will kind of collapse and they'll come on to like Sunday morning TV like a couple of weeks afterwards and say that actually everything they did was completely right and that they have no regrets about it.

They will not, they will not regret it Because the truth is, like, they lack humility. They kind of, like, they are driven entirely by ego. They are driven entirely by resentment. There is no semblance in that faction of the Parsi or indeed the Parsi as a whole. But, like, there is any appetite for, like, self-reflection or humility. Well, that would be toxic to what they're really supposed to do, which is maintain one half of the ratchet.

And the thing is, like, I'm now, on the previous bonus episode, I referred to Starmorism as identical to Epsteinism, right? where it is the continuing project of Epsteinism, where Epsteinism is where you manage decline, and we talked to one of his emails to Steve Bennett, saying it's better if things are in decline. Peter Thiel, excuse me. They've made it message to Peter Thiel that's like, you know, when things are in decline,

you can profit from it. This is pretty good. It's easier than finding bargains than to buy the collapse. And, you know, if you can think of political projects of managed decline that are taken on in different faces by connected associates of Jeffrey Epstein, you can see that Starmerism and Trumpism are just Epsteinism. It's the same ideology, just two different halves of it.

And, you know, it's a loosely connected group of wealthy insiders, many of whom are perverts, can profit from it. So Starmerism was Epsteinism. So was Clintonism, Blairism, Obamaism, Obamaism, Trumpism. Like the amount of Obama, high-level Obama policymaking insiders who were also all over the island, Mandelson was on the island. Fucking Trump himself was on the island. Well, also, I mean, like the degree to which Obama, like a lot of Obama's campaign,

people wound up helping Theresa May, like basically working for the Tory party. in Britain, like, it did definitely make this notion of that there's a certain kind of elite consensus. And I mean, it also implies that if Starmerism is Epsteinism, that like, are there going to be weird emails if there's ever kind of Starmer leaks where he's like, I see what you're doing Varg Fickerness. I think you've got some great ideas for Britain. Like, what kind of rabbit is he going down? Yeah. I think it's worth remembering, too. It's like Starmer was elected for the first time to represent Hoburn and St. Pancras in 2015. He was in 2015 because he was in the shadow cabinet. He famously resigned after the Brexit vote. You know, he basically, like, his role was

be like the people's vote person to kind of spite Corbyn in 2019. Like you remember the labor conference, he added the line about there's going to be basically a second referendum. Like there's so much where it's felt like he's always been kind of there to be a sort of foil or a spoiler. Then it's like, well, no, now you have to actually be in charge.

And it's like, you'd think that from becoming labor leader in what it was April 2020 until, you know, becoming prime minister in 2024, there might have been some degree of like, you do have to kind of have some notion of what you're going to do. And it's like, I guess the best way I can describe Starmers, and from my perspective,

it's, like, deeply unpopular 2005 Blair, who still won the election. It's like, fuck you. I'm to do whatever I want. It's like, but you can't kind of do that. I mean, my opinion, after 14 years of decline where people are like, we hate the Tory so much that we're actually going to throw out the default government, government party of this country. It's like, because things have gotten so bad.

And you're like, actually, they were all really good. Yeah. You're not going to, you're not going to win people. It's certainly not going to give you, I don't know, political mandate. He's reheated Blair from 2005, which is, again just like, Peter, stop, get off your computer and come help me. I don't care who you're emailing. But also like, who will be the inheritor of Epsteinism in the UK? Because fucking streeting has no, he has no friends. Al Cairns, he's in the Arctic. Nobody knows who he is.

I love the idea. Like, you have to have a basic level of friends to get invited to be Jeffrey Epstein Center Circle. It's like, West Streeting desperately wants to, but could never. Yeah. No, he's just too off-putting. Like, like, basically like the, basically like the fucking dark art circle of perverts like that guy is just too weird. But also like what I'm talking about Epsteinism, right? It's like what Peter Mandelson was doing every time he was invited to basically be in charge of the Labor Party was advanced kind of the same ideological agenda. And that's the left half of Epsteinism, which is this is as progressive as it's allowed to get, right? Before it gets it gets broken and then handed off to the people who are

going to make the actual political changes that push things further to the right. That's what that's what streeting is the candidate for. I think it's actually, I am going to start calling these people the Epsteinist political movement. That's streeting is the Epsteinist candidate in that sense. He doesn't matter if he didn't know him. That's the politics he's continuing. That's the politics he represents. And so, you know, this is, what are they going to do? They don't have one because the guy they chose to be their continuity candidate. They forgot to pick a guy who's like, at least, as you say, Nate, minimally likable. Yeah, I mean, the man is so funny because they're like, Oh, he looks like a politician.

He looks like a politician and also your dad. Does he? Remember in 2019? They're like, Starmer's got such great hair. He looks like a World War II RAF pilot. And then you hear him talk and he's just like, er, burlicks. Like, it's fucking John Kerry.

He's British Sean Kerry. Yeah, that's a great comparison. Yeah, we need British Harry, carry. But like, all things considered John Gary at least did something, Kierresterba just kind of appeared out of somewhere. You'll, you'll do. You'll do for us to fucking throw a spanner in the line. I want to move on to one.

So a little, a little more, a little more news. But fuck to the Labor Party. Good luck picking from your very narrow puddle. You know what it is? You force too many people to drink from the puddle. And now you do not have a deep enough pool. You drain the puddle. You drain the puddle, you fucking idiots.

You're supposed to not drink from it. That's where you get your people by not drinking from the fucking puddle. Yeah, exactly. The next people to do Oxford Pee can't spawn in the puddle. with you train entirely. So this is what I want to talk about as well. And I'm almost slightly annoyed. I had this bookmark to talk with you about

before they had a fucking Super Bowl ad. And everyone got mad at them. This is, of course, the newest invention from Ring, aka Amazon surveillance solutions. I want to quote from friend of the show and frequent guest Brian Merchants, Blood of the Machine blog before we get into it. This is article about the relationship between Amazon and Ice.

Basically the point is, there's more than one palantier in the U.S. It's just one also sells books. and it's worth knowing about books and also does all of the digital infrastructure for a huge amount of the services that you consume and is basically impossible to boycott. This is the selection of a larger article about Bezos, flattering and appeasing Trump, including Bezos is gutting the Washington Post. Again, it seems like maybe allowing this kind of ideological vertical integration as a throwback

to Hearst with maybe not the greatest idea, but let me read what Brian has to say. Amazon is providing the technical architecture to the federal security state, ICE, NSA, Pentagon, and many others. It is actively enabling the state to surveil residents of the United States and to conduct its ongoing campaigns of violence, including of American citizens marked as domestic terrorists, which includes an ever-expanding group of people like Renee Good, where community organizers, protesters, and legal observers. Tom Honen, Trump's borders are, has even called for the creation of databases of anyone opposing or interfering with DHS actions. So, with that

in mind, what if you got that, but there was also an AI-generated video about people finding lost dogs? So, have you all seen the Super Bowl ad? Yeah, well, and I saw them demo this at CES with Ed Zitron as well. So Ed and I walked the floor at CES and we walked down out of the hotel and into the lobby and into the conference area. And there was a special Amazon room that they had marked out for themselves. And there was a barker out front coming like going, hey, guys, I see your press badges. Come on in here. So we walk in.

We're kind of meandering around. Hey, how come there's this red liquid coming out of a sluice at the bottom? And, you know, we're wandering around, and we see the ring flagpole, which is like, it's like an extendable mast on a trailer that's like a 20-foot mast with a kind of ring-studded sphere at the top. It's always fucking spheres. I swear to God. It's a totally cool multi-paper shape. So we're looking at it, and this guy comes up, and I almost felt bad for him because he was like, I am the product manager for sphere. Do you, or for sphere, for ring, do you have any questions?

And like, I was like, I wasn't going to bug you, but, but since you asked, uh, where does the ring data go? Like, tell me about your ring data is, is do you make it available to law enforcement? Do you require a warrant? Uh, and he said, well, why are you asking about that? And I said, well, you know, I wrote about ring based on coverage from Jason Kebler and Joseph Cox and the four, four people back when they were motherboard about the fact that ring was giving cops data from your doorbell, even if you were.

asked them not to and claiming otherwise. And also they were organizing cop street teams to market ring cameras where they give you like 10 free ring cameras to the, like Abercrombie. Yeah, like they would go to like the East Bumblefuck Police Department and give them 10 free ring cameras and say, have a community meeting and give away 10 of these and then everyone will get them and talk about the neighborhood safety and so on. And Amazon called me up. Amazon's PR people called me up and shouted at me about writing about this because it was a filthy lie and not true. And then later on had to admit that they were doing it. So tell me about your ring flagpole.

What's happening with your ring flagpole data? And he was like, well, I'm not sure. And I'm like, well, so is it end to end? That really fills you with this video you're taking me that presumably has a bunch of AI built into it. What's happening with it? And he was like, I was like, is it end to end encrypted? And he was like, it definitely is. And I'm like, so you can't access it without me.

And he said, well, yeah, I can. I mean, they told me that that I wasn't allowed to. And I'm like, no, I'm not asking whether, like, as a matter of policy, you, the project manager are allowed to look at the video for ring cameras. I'm asking whether Amazon has the keys. And he's like, I don't think we do. And I said, but look at the lost pets demo over there. How are you doing the lost pets if you can't decrypt the video? And he's like, well, you're asking me a lot of technical questions that I don't think I have the answer.

Hold on. Hold on. I don't think I believe this. Are you saying a project manager didn't understand the technical details of what he was in charge of? and who was sent out to grab people wearing press badges at CES and say, gentlemen, do you have any questions? It's just like, hey, do you have any questions? The questions I'm prepared to answer are, how many dogs have you reunited with their owners? Why are you so awesome? I have to admit that I hadn't watched this until you put it in the show notes.

And, I mean, it feels like a really, really like, hey, we got Paul Verhofen to direct a parody Super Bowl commercial about this thing. because like the sequence of like put out an alert and then all of a sudden has the animation of all the ring cameras in the neighborhood being activated to become like you know like the the white flight panopticon basically like it's horrifying and I look at it like also the AI

it's like obviously the video quality has improved a bit but it's still so uncanny when you watch it like that is that actually because I got the impression it's totally AI really you can tell you can always tell the dogs have got six paws well in this case it's that AI shots tend to have the same

kind of camera movement when they're focused on a steady object like the back of someone's head, they will be slowly zooming in. And it's cuts of, it's what it is, it's almost like Wes Anderson-like symmetry, but like randomly generated from garbage, not like the vision of a annoying guy. And then that's followed by a slow zoom in.

And it will always be the same thing. I mean, if you watch the ring commercial for the commercial of Ring for Dogs, which will explain a little bit more of in a moment, and you start looking for those AI hallmarks that are on every single AI video, then you will start seeing them everywhere. Just to start with that one, you'll start seeing it everywhere. It is rife in this. This is an AI generated ad.

I don't think they hired more than one actor to be in it. I mean, when I saw it, the first thing that crossed my mind is it did feel uncanny in the sort of AI, sort of like realistic video, but something's wrong with it. It was like, yeah, when there's an alert, you push button and every camera will look for this person who fell backwards holding a huge rock on a glass bridge. We're going to find out who did it. We're going to identify. Well, do you remember like 10 years ago there was a kind of, there was this moment where DNA stuff was everywhere in Britain. So you had cops doing genetic testing. Yeah, it's called

dogging. Yeah. Why cut that out, right? Okay, fine, don't cut it out. Leave it. So like you had you had cops doing genetic testing and gathering, like cheek swabbing everyone they pulled over. You had like 23 and me doing cod eugenics and telling everyone they were 18% Viking. You had, uh, what's his name from Watson and Crick running around and telling everyone that they had the wrong size skull. And then to kind of deal with the backlash, they were like, we've got a killer app for DNA that no one's going to disagree with. We're going to dust the dog shit on the council estates. And we're going to go after the antisocial prick that doesn't pick up after their dog because we will have DNA profiles of all the dogs. We'll get the epithelial

from the inside of their large intestines as they shit out the poop, and we will use that to dust for dogs. God damn it. That is so fucking stupid. And that's what this is. It's like we have the CCTV backlash. It's the new set. We found a cuddly thing to do with it.

It's finding lost pets. And I mean, I think, which I think it was, Nate, you said it was a very Verhoven idea, which is this like schlocky image of like, again, not real dogs being, you reunited with not. real children, just a kind of endless pastiche of something that's supposed to make you feel vaguely good in order to create the kind of ice can see everything that your house sees. But also like the kind of the weird like head-up display sort of like green, you know, like green

LED sort of thing looking where like the box that identifies the dog named Milo that's missing looks like it's like what? He's like a fucking Apache helicopter. You're going to acquire. Like we're going to get rid of this bastard dog for good. Like this is just so uncanny. Like I, I genuinely, I saw this and I'm like, this feels like a really on the nose parody. This feels like the, the, what is it like the sons of con guy? What is it like that? Azerbaijan logistics guys who make those fake AI videos about like we're going to power the world with shrimp oil or whatever. And it's like they can't, they, they, they, they, they buy the thing. Like when they have AI figures, like AI 3D, I guess models based on actors. So it's like Timothy Shalame is like leading this like,

like he's in charge of a mining rig for some reason. Like, it genuinely felt like it was done as a parody. I cannot believe this is real, but it is. So I'll read some of the press release. Ring has expanded Search Party for Dogs, an AI-powered community feature that enables your outdoor ring camera to help reunite lost dogs with their families to anyone in the U.S. needs help finding their lost puff.

Since launch, search party has helped bring home more than one dog a day. And now, this feature is available to non-ring camera owners by the Ring app for the first time. So yeah, still come into our walled. Prison garden, of course. And, you know, hey, it's a community responsibility, by the way, to we can help each other out. Not by ever leaving our houses or coming into contact with each other, but just by allowing data to be sucked up into like AWS's, you know, cop database, essentially.

Ring has been doing this since the earliest days. So Rings launch marketing included a kind of next door style service where they would just tell you police blotter data from your neighborhood and adjacent neighborhood. and maybe the next neighborhood over in very sensational terms, you know, a man whose pigment is darker than you would think belongs in this neighborhood, seen looking at parcel three blocks away. And they encourage people who are not ring owners to get the updates

as a way of knowing about the crime in your neighborhood. I'm reminded of, so we spoke with a South African journalist a couple of years ago. And one of the things she talked about was that this is a longstanding service in like gated communities in South Africa. It's just, it feels a little bit imperial boomerangy in this case. But it goes on. Before search party, the best you could hope was to drive up and down the neighborhood

shouting your dog's name in the hopes of finding them. Now pet owners can mobilize the whole community and communities are empowered to help to find lost pets more effectively than ever before. That's why we believe it's so important to make this feature available to anyone who shares a lost dog post in neighbors, which makes sense if you think about it for a second. But then you remember, wait a minute, a dog that is owned by a family will have a caller. The caller will have a name. Often the caller will have a phone number. Often the caller will have a fucking air tag.

Yeah. And so the idea that this is some, because if you, let's say, if you, if you're just tell the family, oh, the dog was kind of spotted, someone still has to go get it. Yeah. Like, someone still has to go get it. So if it's wandering around a suburb in the time it takes before it gets. I don't know, eaten by a coyote or something, depending on where it is, or a mountain line if it's in L.A., that window or hit by a car, that window of time, you're not really benefiting that much from the ring cameras because, again, in all of their AI generated promotional material, someone is still bringing the dog back to the family. Well, yeah. They're not really moving the fucking needle on the thing that they're claiming to be able to do.

It does make Lassie movies a lot shorter because once Lassie gets to Timmy in the Well, everyone knows what's up. Yeah, Timmy also is an air tag. Well, I mean, I think about it. Yeah, like you were saying, I mean, it still depends on someone sort of receiving the dog Amber Alert on their phone from the ring camera saying, like, go out and get this person's dog. It's like, I mean, I'm sorry, but like, I haven't lived in America at a very long time, but I did grow up in America.

The part of me is like, most people are going to get them like, no, fuck off. Or I'll shoot it. Also, it's like, why would you go, you go get the dog that you're on everyone's ring camera. It's like, vicious dog thief captured when you were just trying to be a good Samaritan, you know? Missing Rottweiler. named killer spotted on your backguard. Oh my God. Imagine, this to be fair, this service would actually be useful in Britain because it would just tell you in like 30 XL bullies all with the same grandparents have wandered into here.

If you rolled this out in Britain, if you rolled this out in Britain, it would have nothing to do with dogs. It would be like, we will find this fucking bin thief and we will end his life. Like everyone will activate it all the time when their bins got moved without their permission. Like, you can just force it to think that a wheelie bin is a dog. And then, you know, you've got the entire rose activated. So anyway, look, this is probably one of the more horrifying of a very horrifying set of Super Bowl commercials, uh, including things like Coinbase and so on and so on. That's a good timing for a Coinbase ad, actually. It's very pets.com at the Super Bowl to have a coinbase ad like the weak, you know, crypto is going to zero to, you know, it's, it really is the

Super Bowl tech curse. And I mean, honestly, you know what? If you are Brian Armstrong and This is the time to raise your head above the parapet to celebrate the $3 million that you got in 2014 from, hold on, Jeffrey Epstein. Just because of, I remember this, Corey, but I wonder, Riley, do we have time to do a really quick potted history of that because Pets.com and the Super Bowl and what was it? Oh, 2000 or 2001? Yeah, we got time. It was just before the crash. Yeah. Yeah. So I vaguely familiar, but I was in high school.

So that was like the first dot-com boom and like when the, like the really ridiculous. no due diligence on initial public offerings and like it all fell apart. Yeah, yeah, they bought out the Super Bowl. The dot-coms that were all dust in like months bought out the Super Bowl and bit each other up to crazy amounts. I mean, the thing that we forget about the first dot-com bubble was how much of that money went into marketing and how many marketing vehicles there were? It wasn't just buying like Facebook targeted ads.

Like you had magazines like the industry standard that were 300 pages long and 200 pages were clay coat, four spot color, full page ads, or double spreads, right? Like, it was full employment for printers. It was, it was amazing. That's so funny you say that because my brother is a little older than me and he had a subscription to Wired around that time. And I remember you're saying, well, yeah, like mega high budget, glossy ads the whole way through. But it was all for, I don't know, like, I can't even remember the names of these businesses. I mean, like, obviously Yahoo and pets.com. But like, there were so many others that just, yeah, like, our, I had a startup then and our venture capitalist funded a company called cab candy that was going to fill taxi

trunks with candy and then you could you could you could call a cab and get candy at the same time my god this is so fucking stupid is that drug dealing is that just euphemism for drug dealing well it's I mean it's basically it's basically door dash right but just for candy and just in cap sorry sorry there's this startup was it founded by something someone who was bigged? I just, I love the idea. Does someone get big? It doesn't start a company.

DoorDash, deliverer, like, obviously there's a certain specificity. You get what you want. That's very different and a lot less sorted than like a cat pulls. Yo, you want a handful of candy crap? It's stoner food, right? It's just stoner food.

It's also a great setup if like, you know, you were if you were not. I was trying to like figure of a joke for it, but actually it's like, that's the first thing comes to mind, but I guess back in those shoes, we're like, no. Hey, kid, do you want some candy?

Free candy white fan.com. Jesus Christ. What a, what an economy, honestly. Hey, it's always been fun in the economy, it seems. Let's talk about our Elon items before we pack it in. This is our main segment that we've got to 45 minutes in. We're so good at this. Not much to say about Elon.

So, yeah, he seems like a normal businessman. Let me just open up the last 15 years of new. Oh, my goodness. So, look, here's the thing. I am, I'm not going to say I'm tired of talking about data centers in space, but I have noticed that data centers in space is joining a pin that spies on you and everyone around you in order to like tell you what your appointments are as the thing that everyone in AI seems to be coming up with. It's a sort of, I don't understand. I mean, I kind of understand why they're all coming up with data centers in space because they need to solve the huge negative externalities that data centers cause. They need to deal with the fact that land and power are expensive.

They need to imagine a world in which all of this is free. And so the data center in space lets them do that. Just like the spy pin, like the humanoid pin or the friend or whatever other thing. The nipple torture. Yeah, the nipple torture allows you to imagine that your, that AI will be as ubiquitous as just computing. Like these are all things that let an executive imagine what they want to imagine. It's just I wish they would have some different ideas. But there's been this sort of cornucopia.

announcement from Elon where he declared that SpaceX will be purchasing XAI, where XAI has already purchased X the Everything app. Did X the Everything app become the Everything app, or is it still just bad Twitter? Did it become the Everything app? Well, I use it for nearly everything. I mean, if I could shit into it and fuck it and eat out of it, I'd never leave the house. If you could buy groceries with it. Yeah. If X the Everything app could pull up to the spot with a trunk full of candy and I could just reach into it and grab a handful. To be fair, if you post right, X the Everything app is a great way to get someone to do that. I mean, I will admit that because I no longer am a regular X.com user, I missed the data centers and space thing.

So I've got some questions when you get into it about the practicalities of this. Oh, I'm sure it's, can you conduct heat in an airless environment? Well, it's famously, the thing that you do if you want to, have the heat leave of vessel is you surround it with vacuum. We call that a thermos, and it's the thing that you use to make sure that your hot things cool off very quickly. Nice. You know what?

Hey, works for gazpacho, which I assume started hot. I mean, you start with piping hot tomato soup. You put it in the thermos. Delicious gazpacho. So does it really come down to the fact that they're just sort of like, well, you can get better access? Like you can have constant solar power in space and it's cold in space and they haven't thought about the negative zero pressure, zero gravity thing?

Well, it's not that zero pressure, zero gravity. It's the lifting a lot of shit out of the gravity way. They're like maybe someday we'll figure out a way to turn Regolith into stuff, which is a thing no one knows how to do. And then we'll just turn moon dust into solar panels. But until then, every gram costs infinity. Yes. And we've got to get infinity grams of solar panels up into space.

And then we have the thing that is like 300 degrees Celsius on one side and very cold on the other side. And we have no way to circulate that temperature within it because it's full of vacuum. And that's just like for starters. Oh, and also all of the data has to traverse the only electromagnetic spectrum that we have, which has other users. Also, I was thinking to myself, I'm like, all right, data centers typically like have like fiber trunk stuff. That's kind of the way that they get lots of data. And I'm no genius, but I have run Ethernet cables before. And I feel like running an Ethernet cable to space would be pretty challenging. Running fiber lines how in Ukraine and Russia, they're like flying drones on miles of fiber optic to prevent radio jamming.

You just keep that going longer. And then you've got a space elevator. What if you just like, well, what if you just plugged one extension cord after another and after another and after another? Just don't ever get the double extension cord with the mail plugs on either end. That's very dangerous. So like, the other thing is just even going back to the basics of it, would you generate more power for data centers by having them in space than it would cost to lift everything up into space,

including keeping the solar panels maintained and changing other graphics cards when they burn out. It depends. Do we have free energy in this universe? Anti-gravity device? What if there's a localized gravity storm that you could take advantage of?

I mean, highly localized. I think, you know what? We'll do like Elon does in every IPO he does and just be like, maybe a wizard will fix it. Maybe a gravity storm will happen. Perhaps you know what? perhaps somewhere there's like a Zepham-Cocran and then we're just going to get warp technology.

Well, the total addressable market is all the photons emanating from the sun. Perfect. I love this idea, too, that it's like, I don't know, maybe there's a certain magic amount of ketamine you take that when you watch the first 10 minutes of gravity, you're like, that looks awesome. I want to be in that all the time. That looks sweet. Do you get to hang out with Sandra Bullock? Cool. In space underwear.

Yeah. So this is slightly out of water, but that's all right. say, while launching AI satellites from Earth is the immediate focus, Starship's capabilities will also enable operations on other worlds. Thanks to advancements like in-space propellant transfer, Starship will be capable of landing massive amounts of cargo on the moon, thereby establishing a permanent presence for scientific and manufacturing. Factories on the moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites

and deploy them further into space. And it's just that an announcement that contains the words, Factories on the Moon, was used to justify it ongoing, one and a half trillion dollar valuation for SpaceX, that really all of this is about making the horribly awful finances of XAI disappear. I forget, did you guys have Adam Becker on? We have, yes, it was delightful. Did he do his riff about even if you detonated every nuclear warhead on Earth, it would still

be infinitely more habitable than Mars? Yes. Because it would have oxygen and water. Like, the fantasy about, I mean, look, I think we should do science on other planets, but the fantasy about establishing colonies on other planets as a backup for the planet Earth is so fucking bananas. I mean, I know that this is a very pat observation,

but I would love to just stop fucking this one up before we start taking on that other challenge. Once again, I, you know, not exactly an expert on this, but I seem to recall, like, beyond the solar radiation, this is just like the total lack of oxygen and water, there's also the kind of like difference in gravity. this would just be detrimental to human beings relatively quickly. And you're like, well, no, you need to spend like four years in space and then go live on a planet that also sucks. And it's like,

I feel as though like there's so many things that you'd want to have solved before you're like, we're going to have like a path to profitability for building a factory on the moon. Like genuinely, you listen to stuff. I'm like, I don't know how credulous you have to be. But, and maybe you could say, okay, well, it was convincing when Philonius grew said it. So Elon Musk kind of looks like him. so at the end of the day, like, maybe he's got a good idea. But, like, I keep looking at, like, doesn't it take, like, with the times that spacecraft have gone to, gotten to the moon, certainly with astronauts in the 60s and 70s,

like, doesn't it take, like, multiple days, like a week to get to the moon from Earth? Like, it doesn't take, like, a really long tie. I think it depends on the relative orbits. There's a very good book about this, a city on Mars by Zach and Kelly Warner-Smith, about the sort of biology and physics and practicalities of setting up colonies elsewhere. One of the things they point out is that, this fantasy of moving the industrial stuff that people don't like off earth is Jeff Bezos's fantasy. He wants to put us all in giant ring habitats and then turn the earth into a wildlife preserve.

And so to do that, he's destroying as much of the wildlife as he can so that he can get into space and stop destroying wildlife. God, it's all burning the village to save the village. Yeah, exactly. See if Landau Calrissian had gone bald, he'd be this evil. So this is from earlier in the press release, because I want to talk a little bit about the acquisition of XAI. SpaceX has acquired XAI to form the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on and off Earth. With AI, rockets space-based internet direct-to-mobile device communications and the world's foremost real-time information and free speech platform. This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book.

AI, AI writing. That's AI writing. AEI generated the shit. Every rocket ship needs its own social network. Yeah, obviously. Clearly. Every rocket ship needs its own like snarky chatbot that will like regenerate an of you wearing dental floss. One giant leap for man. God, one micro bikini for mankind.

One giant leap for man. That's a tremendous question and I really appreciate this. You asked it. Fuck you, Neil. You suck. It also makes it look like the way this press release is worded, it makes it look like combining these companies was always the plan. Because this is always what Elon does, right?

He stumbles into like crisis after crisis that he improvises his way through solving. And then turns around and says, Tadda. Look at what I did. I bought this social network on purpose. And then he sort of was forced to buy it. And the thing is, right? I don't think people remember that he was buffaloed into buying Twitter by a court. He didn't have an intention, right, to roll a social network up into an AI company,

up into a space launch company. He just has his shells and the shells have money. And he has to keep moving all the money around between the different shells. Like, he's done this before with Solar City and Tesla. He is the all-time master of running across the river on the back, alligators without losing the leg. I mean, you get to do that until you can't anymore. You got one.

You got one. Yeah, you do. The second one generally happens pretty quickly after the first. But he received a huge amount of funding from third parties to buy Twitter. And for a while, I mean, we used to joke on this show that it looked like we might get the J.P. Morgan and Saudi Public Investment Fund present micro blogging platform. But then a few of the things happen. Most importantly, what happened is Elon started XAI because there was all the AI furor slash

GROC. XAI bought X, which was, again, a way to take a bunch of people who wanted to invest in, like, the based AI company and use that money to pay back the people that loaned in money to buy Twitter. It's not a Ponzi scheme or a shell game if one company buys the other. It's a shell company. Yeah, it's a shell company game, quite. So you didn't lose money on X because someone wanting to cash in an A on the AI hype bailed you out via XAI. But now XAI is losing money faster than X ever fucking did because they keep on building deal. diesel-powered data centers.

Well, you know, their mistake is they plug the GPUs in. As Ed Zetron has pointed out, the fastest way to lose money on a GPU is to plug it in. Yeah, just plug one in. Play a game on it. Just, you don't need the thousands. And according to a report from the information, XAI has told investors that the first nine months of 2025,

it burns through nearly $10 million, $10 billion, excuse me. And so because SpaceX is scheduled to IPO later this year, possibly at $1.5 trillion, lull, you could partly, you could like, use some of that AI hype, partly some of that grand unified theory of Elon Musk to invest in all of it all at once. But ultimately, you would use that IPO to make XAI's losses vanish. So did Saudi Ramco ever manage its trillion dollar IPO? I forget where that ended. Did they have it? They had an IPO, but it wasn't for everything, as I recall. So here's an interesting thing about

Musk going public again. He hates running public companies. Oh, yeah. Right? Because he's subject to disclosure and he's subject to all kinds of things that he doesn't like very much and also shareholder votes and things that just drive him crazy. That's why he took Twitter private again. He is very much in the mold of the coax. Charles Koch used to give these talks where he'd be like anyone running a public company is cocked in soy because you have to do what the investors say and you have to tell them what you're doing and you can't pursue your unitary vision and think long term and so on. And I think Musk imbibed it. It's quite amazing to see him voluntarily saying, okay, well, what I really want to do is take all my pet projects as well as the one,

the Tesla thing. And I want to make them all one big public entity and then make myself accountable to an SEC that barring prohibition on elections in 2028 will almost certainly be under Democratic control, you know? Yeah. I mean, it is strange, and I suppose indicates that he is making the best of a limited set of options, I would guess. Yeah. Yeah. He's, uh, running across the river on the backs of alligators and not losing a leg. You know, and so he is throwing out all of these buzzwords like Cardashev level two and things like this. And he's like, well, all this is. Cardishav.

A Cardishav two level civilization that can harness the sun's full power with a Dyson sphere, that kind of shit. He's been playing Dyson Sphere project. I will admit that I, this went over my head. And I wasn't sure, was this like him trying to cop some sort of like anthropology jargon? Or is this more like, I stole a thing from Robert Heinle? sci-fi. Oh, of course it's fucking sci-fi. It's test-real shit.

Yeah. It's just sci-fi-tascal shit. Literally, the total address on Margaret is all the photons leaving the sun. Yeah, that's what he means. That's what he means, yeah. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to bring up before we move on to, let's say, some recent brushes with the law in countries that still have some rule of... I just lived out the most I ever did.

But you know what? Fucking, I don't care. If a country is going to fuck with Elon Musk, I will wear the fucking pussy hat. I will to mark my dog. dog to the wolf horrendum. I don't care. Yes, exactly. You're going to fuck with Elon Musk. Good. Exactly. You'll vote for Mayor Pete. He has to promise the way he's going to fuck

with Elon Musk first. Yeah. He has to be really specific. This podcast are now all dedicated shooters. We will absolutely ride or die for Manuel Macron somehow because they rated X everything apps offices in Paris, which I mean, you know what? Like I said, whatever. But it is still funny that

something has gotten in his way that like a government did something. Before we get to that, I wanted to talk about one of the thing, which is what is SpaceX doing other than just replacing NASA as a publicly owned space program? SpaceX is trying to make Elon Musk a core player in communications infrastructure via Starlink. And the thing is, SpaceX is probably the most competently run of Musk's companies. And this is also referencing Jason Kebler, second Jason Kebler mentioned in the show. So take your spreadsheet at home, take a drink, do whatever you need to do. But SpaceX is the

most competently run of Musk companies because it's not partisan political. political, he's not on the surface. It often flies into the radar. And so Musk is building a monopoly in certain types of communications, war zones, ships, planes frequently, rural areas, places where even in the UK, right, there are rural, there are some deep rural areas, or by parts like the Scottish highlands, like isolated communities, where something like BT can say, we don't feel like maintaining the unprofitable lines to these areas anymore. We're going to have a deal with Starlink where you're still going to get your statutorily required internet,

but it's going to be provided via this third party. The British state does this all the time. Doug Ford did it across Ontario. Yeah, with lots of stuff. So basically, he is monopolizing this thing that's only going to become more important. And so merging other things

with it, merging like the content business with the distribution business, it's weird that there is kind of a strategy there. It's just clearly one that he stumbled on. And it's not the one that he wants you to think about. I have to say, it could not be worse timed, though, because this is the moment in which everyone in the world is saying, oh, shit, we can't rely on America to be a neutral technology platform. And that's where we get to the next section,

which I know Nate really wants to talk about, which is, you know what? The French, they fucking, they did the thing. They were the first mover in, hey, what if we just started arresting the Elon Musk people? Look, all right, Maya Colpa. I'm sorry, Manuel Macron, a few years ago when I said that you were Jupiter in the sense of going to Jupiter to get more stupid or I was wrong. This is actually cool. I appreciate that you guys did this because at the end of the day like being serious for a moment, like some of the things going on with like the abuse imagery on Twitter. Like it's horrifying. And it's like the response seems to be, you know, basically deal with it. And or like, ha, isn't this funny? Wow. We never saw this coming. And it's like, I just, I don't know, I, beyond the all

the kind of manifold shady business practices, Riley that you've described and just in general, like the ways in which you would think that someone would not have been given this much leeway, there's an extent to which it's like, I don't know, like, if this is flat out fucking illegal and, you know, most European countries to do the stuff that X will do on demand or Grock will do on demand. So like, good. I'm glad. Fuck with them. Like, clearly America's not going to. I applaud your sentiment, but I'm skeptical of it as like a kind of political move. I think that if you look at what a company run by someone who's a lot more normal, but like, like Apple has done in response to the European Union. Like the European Union's made a very minor demand of Apple.

They said, you have to open up your app store. And Apple's first answer was right. We will do that. We allow third-party app stores on our platform under the following terms. Every app store will have to be licensed by us. Every app they sell will have to be licensed by us. We will charge junk fees in excess of the 30% fee that we currently charge. If we detect that your phone is outside the European Union for more than 21 days, we'll delete all of your apps and data. Also, if we delist an app store, a thing we can do at any time at our discretion with no appeal, we will delete all of the phone. We will delete all your apps and data. And then the European Union said, that does not comply with the statute. And they're like, okay, we're just going to stop selling phones in Europe. And then everybody laughed.

And then they said, okay, we are going to sell phones in Europe. We're going to file like 16 pretextual appeals in Ireland, a place where we will never lose a court case. And we'll drag this out for 10 years like Meta did and Google did with the GDPR. So I do think that France has a move here, but it's not suing Elon Musk, although it'll be very funny to arrest him when he came to France, if he ever came to France. I think for, you know, contempt, because he'll never show up and then they'll get the contempt order and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think what they could do, Article 6 of the Copyright Director from 2001 makes it illegal to jailbreak a phone, makes it illegal to jailbreak an app.

They could just say, we are withdrawing your ability to use our courts to shut down European firms that compete with you. And then someone could make an alt client for Twitter that blocks all the slop and blocks all the ads and lets you use Blue Sky or Mastodon and read the tweets that matter to you. So you could kind of go from one to the other. you know, it is the most fucking prodigy compi serve-ass thing in the world that you have to be on the same network as someone to send them a message.

It's just like, you know, 1992 called and they want their networking paradigm back. And that would directly deprive him of ad revenue. It would directly deprive him of users. It would make user migration a lot easier. It would really kick him in the dongle. And if they want to fuck with them, really fuck with them.

Make it legal to Joe Break Teslas, which is much funnier than just like, you know, giving the finger to people in cyber trucks, make us so they go to a mechanic and they get like all the software upgrades, all the DLC, all the subscriptions for free, and all that money stays in France.

And that would really deeply fuck with them. And this does not require them to compel Elon Musk to do anything. This only involves them doing things that are firmly within their sphere of control. It's almost like there's two sides to this. There's the, it is right and proper to impede Elon Musk in anything. thing specifically, but also there is this much larger thing. And I think this is something that, again, European, the non-American specifically countries are realizing a lot of Europeans who just thought, oh, well, we can just rely on Oracle and AWS and all this stuff. We'll rely the people who do the ring camera.

We rely on those people to supply all of our technical infrastructure, not just applications and phones and consumer products, but things like databases, things like back end, things like routers. Tractor firmware. Yeah. Remember when those Russians stole those tractors and sent them to Chechnya and John Deere brick them? Well, that's great until you realize that, like, in the same way that Trump ordered Microsoft to shut down the ICC and the Brazilian court when they pissed him off, he could order John Deere to shut all the tractors off in your country. You know, I do think that this is like the moment where it's all happening. And it's because of something November said, which I think is the smartest thing anyone said about this geopolitical situation, which is Trump is playing a card game rigged in his favor and he flips the table over because he resents having to play it. And as a result, the kind of polite fiction that you could trust American infrastructure, because if they used it parochially, they would do it in like a denialable and measured way and not in this like kind of gross, you know, hair on fire, everybody gets freaked out way. That's over. And it's been, you know, it's been, it wasn't Trump that invented this, right? Like you had the Snowden Revelations convincing everyone in the world, hey, maybe we shouldn't have our fiber ends terminate on either the Atlantic or Pacific coast and then be bridged through America or the end of.

SIE is spying on everything. You had the weaponization of dollar clearing under, under Obama and under Biden as well as under Trump. You have the Argentine vulture capitalist taking the Argentine national assets from New York under the order of a New York court. Now you have everyone going like, do we still use Swift? Do we still use the dollar? Ethiopia has revalued its currency in Renminbi or revalued its debt in Renminbi. And so you have all these countries all over the world saying like, we just don't trust America as a neutral platform anymore. They weaponize their infrastructure. for geopolitical ends. And, you know, like Trump has just made this extremely urgent.

And I think has brought about the beginning of the end of the era where people trust it. And it's in IT that we can do it. It's hard with fiber, right? Because the problem with fiber is you have this order end square problem where if you want to connect 200 countries with direct point to point fiber loops, you need 22,000 fiber loops, right? It's hard with currency because you need like deep liquid markets to do pairwise transactions between 200 currencies. It's kind of easy with IT. You just need like a project on a Git server that does. Office 365.

Wait, like, Gid's owned by Microsoft. No, no, GitHub is owned by Microsoft. Git is just like a standard to find open source piece of software where we all just like work on it the same way that we just have like a single international practice of structural engineering that figures out the load stresses on ceiling choice. You'll have a single software engineering discipline that figures out what makes a good piece of office software that's secure and runs or firmware for a tractor or whatever. And it's so easy.

All it would take is number. 10 Downing Street, just saying, we're just not going to use Twitter anymore. We're just going to get off of Facebook. We're going to... We're going to Massadon. We're creating a Macedon. You're thinking too small.

What they should say is we're going to legalize jailbreaking Twitter. What I mean is, we're going to go to Mass. It's easy enough. You could do that literally right now. You don't have to even make a call. You can just do that. You just, you need a phone.

That's it. I mean, the real radical thing they should do is kind of be like, we're exiting Twitter and we're going to, we're going to actually reinstall the Matt Hancock app, and that's where we're going to have official government. Hey, it's British. It's British. I was going to go to a different direction.

They're going to, like, you know, the way that Silicon Valley companies are constantly, more or less poaching British software developers over, like, they're going to do this in reverse. They're going to get Myspace Tom out of retirement. He's going to create new Myspace for Britain, and that's going to be the social network. I mean, it'll be rebranded as MySpace Captain Tom.

Yeah. That's right. The thing is, one of the reasons that suddenly there is, I think a willingness on the part of European countries to take direct action against a favored American technology firm actually is because the need to protect children is a strong driver of political action. Yeah. It's not an abstract demand.

And it's almost like Elon Musk could have had everything. All I want to say is that, like, for the French of all people to sort of like go after pervert. Really, like really should just make you think about, like, if they're sending a agenda on for you because you were a pervert. Like, that, that should really make you, like, have a, have a,

have a, have a, have a little look at yourself. But yeah, it's like, he could have had everything. He could have maintained his total dominance over the main political communication system

that most countries are still hardwired into, but he just had to be so oppositionally defiant that when they were like, hey, you should probably put some guardrails on your, um, on your AI to make it not violate, like the one law that we really,

actually do care about. He was like, no, legacy media lies. And now like, it seems as though there is, again, I'm not, I don't like to do too much prediction, but it seems as though he is encountering meaningful political resistance where once there was not that much. Whoops. Whoops, indeed. I guess to me, like to be, to be more serious from once, I suppose, I think it's just that like at the end of it, Twitter obviously became something very different, but in general with social media, like most people who use it tend to share stuff from their lives and that's kind of what's encouraged. And I think that like even outside of the politics of sort of like the de-mystificate, the de-the-the-de-leged defying of Elon Musk being revealed as just a complete idiot versus all

of the PR hype of, you know, world's smartest man that you'd see everywhere a couple years ago, I think that like the average person, regardless of how plugged into it they are, can understand. And it's not meant to be the may be patronizing or talk down to people. But like, if you, you see friends sharing photos of your kids, you may have shared photos because I don't because I'm a very young kid. And by this point, by time I came a parent, it was already obvious that like these shit was getting weird. The idea that like at any time, a photo that you share can be turned around to

sexualize your kid and to humiliate, to humiliate, with the intention of humiliating, bullying, frightening you or them can be done. And it's basically just by typing in a prompt. Like, that's, that's horrifying. And it's like, I feel as though people will look at that. And regardless of whether or not they still think Elon Musk is, you know, basically like actual Ozzymanias, they would just like, that's disgusting. That's, that's atrocious. And so it's like, I guess to me, like, I, I will fully admit that I don't follow the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, bit by bit of this. I am kind of surprised that it's taken that long. And I share your sentiment has saying that like, I can't believe it's the French who did it first. But like,

I think even, you know, French people, like, regardless of like the weird sort of culture in France, sort of like, well, this person is an artistic genius. So therefore all that stuff doesn't count. Yeah, you should have gotten Polanski to speak out for them. Like, it's still, it's just like, I think anyone can understand this. Like, it's, it's atrocious. And it's, it's indefensible. And the fact that like, the response has been the same kind of, from what, as I perceived it, the response has been like, the kind of denying it. I mean, like, oh, it's the woke lives or whatever. It's like, I don't know, man. Like, we can see the pictures. It's, it's disgusting. And so, I don't know, like, it's kind of, it's kind of like Milo-unopolis syndrome in a way.

I mean, maybe this sounds like a ridiculous comparison, but like, what was the thing that really, like, the straw that broke the camels back with him was him trying to be arch about child sex abuse where it's like, sorry, this, you're not, you're not, you're not in a comedy gig in the United Kingdom, okay? In America, some people are kind of fucking weirded out by this shit. It's like, it's like, it's like the one line. Yeah, it's the one line. Like, stop fucking crossing it. Stop fucking crossing it. And yet. Well, I mean, there is something about billionaireism that is about like that I refuse to allow

anyone to tell me to do it. Like I will, I, rather than being told what to do in even the smallest and most petty and meaningless way, I will move heaven and earth. And that is kind of the billionaire ideology. Speaking of on billionaireism, I just want to go through because I have a couple of the highlights of some of the legal actions that are being taken against Musk and X, the everything app lays your glory, soon to be a subsidiary of SpaceX. By the way, did he plan that? Because if you're the UK or France or whatever, and Musk is trying to take over your communications

infrastructure by like saying, hey, I provide all your rural internet now because I can basically make the economics of it work. All you need to have is me having a backdoor into everything. When SpaceX completes buying X, then you're going to have a criminal charge against one department of the company where the other one is providing all of your rural internet. That to me, that to me, me doesn't make a huge amount of sense. Do you remember when he was like, I'm going to call the website X and Peter Thiel said, it sounds like a porn site? Mm-hmm.

We're not going to call PayPal X. He got his wish, I suppose. I'm going to have a coup and I'm going to oust you as CEO. Like, this is a guy who cannot learn his lesson or has always secretly wanted to run a porn site. So I want to focus on a few countries, but there are many taking action. So Indonesia, Malaysia, Canada, Australia, India, numerous U.S. States. That's just to name a few.

Brazil have actually long been before the first. French, they've long been the Chads in the War Against Musk's Empire and X specifically. If you recall, like, they just fully shut it down for a little while a couple of years ago leading for Elon Musk to kind of sort of call for the murder of the judge that was involved. They're declaring that XAI is the co-author of any material produced by Grock, meaning that the traditional way social media is governed, which is, oh, I'm just the neutral platform. All this stuff isn't really me. This is just people coming up and yelling things. It's like, no, you're now, if it's, if the chatbot's involved, you're a author, which means that suddenly, according to Brazil, Elon Musk's company is co-authoring a lot of

illegal material. In Europe, so UK, France and Spain, the other one I focus on, the UK is taking a privacy route by the ICO. So they're saying, well, you must have used a lot of personal information to build GROC and therefore generate all these obscene images, but also a safety route by the Online Safety Act, which is like, hey, did you take precautions to stop this from happening? Elon Musk has bragged, no, we have not taken precautions because that's soy and cucked and woke. there is a criminal investigation in France that we discussed and great deal earlier. That's actually for a few things. It's been going on for about a year.

There was partly for algorithmic manipulation and Holocaust denial. Mecca Hitler. Yeah, because the Mecca Hitler stuff, Grock was denying the Holocaust for a bit. And then the creation of non-consensual sexual images and child sexual assault material stuff, that like massively ups the political priority. And the most funny thing about this is that they're also calling for Linda Yakarino to come who remembers Linda Yakarino? It feels like it's from a fucking decade ago.

She's not CEO, right? No, she's gone. Yeah, she's gone. Some call her the most consequential CEO in history. The EU and Spain is considering banning the platform entirely. And the Sanchez government is actually the most vocal and cognizant of the fact that is actively dangerous to remain on U.S. domiciled tech platforms in general. So he's the one who's, Spain's furthest along on this.

And then the EU as a whole, sorry, this is a lot of information. The EU as a whole is finding them 120 million euros broken into several things. One of them is for deceptive blue checkmark designs, which is actually funny because the Republican Party, which like the Republican Party's official communications account went through page by page and tried to do like a McDonald's getting sued for hot coffee thing. Which again, what was the real thing that they should have been sued for, by the way? They were using that. We'll talk about that in more detail later, but that was a justified lawsuit.

But they were like, oh, they said this is a deceptive blue check because people will think that Mario Brothers is real. That's ridiculous. Look at this nanny sadism. And it's like, no, it's because people will think that's the official account for Mario Brothers. Anyway, so part of the trademark case is a no-brainer, actually. The consumer protection went on blue checks. The other one is, yeah, blocking research or data access and then non-compliant advertising. They haven't touched the child abuse material because that's kind of weirdly, that's actually more properly the preserve of national governments than the EU commission, generally speaking. So this is, and that's just a few places. Canada's doing shit as well. Like, there are a lot of big markets are seem to have, just like with Starmer.

It's a little bit than all at once. And this could very easily all fizzle out, right? Like, they could hold Elon in contempt and he's just like, I didn't want to go to France anyway. It's all gay. It's gay there and not in the cool way. And then, you know, Linda Yakarino comes and embarrass herself in front of the Lisei Palace. And that's kind of funny, but it goes nowhere. That's a distinct possibility.

But it also seems more possible than it was three weeks. weeks ago, that there is coordinated action against one of kind of the most, at least annoying American tech companies. Of all of those, the one that I worry about is the Brazilian intermediary liability stuff. Because the one thing we know from like recent internet policy history is that when you say intermediaries are liable for user conduct, large intermediaries just say, okay, we're, we're going to eliminate whole swaths of user conduct, primarily user conduct involved with people who are already marginalized. So think about Sesta Fasta, where we said, okay, you mustn't traffic human beings for sex on our platforms, which is a thing that I think all of us

would agree is a thing no one should do on platforms. And immediately said, great, all consensual sex workers ban. Yeah. And then all the smaller platforms that catered to sex workers couldn't get insurance, couldn't get data, couldn't get server hosting, and they all disappeared. And so I really think intermediary liability is a bit of a monkey's paw. And, you know, the airing on the side of caution is just a strategy every platform takes when you create intermediary liability. liability regimes. And large ones like intermediary liability regimes, like Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg keeps saying, let's get rid of Section 230, which is the American Intermediary Liability Rule, because he can afford the compliance. It's like it would be very

much better for me. No one else will ever, I'll never get tombed. And I'm never going to have to buy another fucking Instagram because there won't be one, right? I'll just, you'll just have to build things on top of meta platforms. Well, how about this? Can we rank as a, as a group and all our listeners think we can agree. Number one strategy, keep issuing arrest warrants for Elon Musk and Linda Yakorino. Just keep every,

every country summoned them to court on the same day so they can't possibly attend all of them. And then suddenly, he's wanting as a contempt charge around the world, even in fucking Greenland. The island with only penguins on it, the trumpet tariffs on. Yeah.

Oh, he's got to get to Tristan Dekunia somehow. Second Tristan Dekunia mentioned in the episode. Penguin contempt. Fill in your pingo card, take a drink. Anyway, I think that's all we have time for today. But I want to say, Corey, thank you very much for coming out. Oh, you know, you guys are some of my favorite podcasters, although I don't tell anyone, but I like No Gods, no, mares so much now.

It's like listening to Trash Future, except afterwards I don't feel bad about global politics. I just laugh with my parissocial buddies and then think about an oaf. That's right. Well, I know you're going to be in Britain a little bit more, so perhaps Corey and No Gods No Mayors soon. Stay tuned. And thank you, of course, to our lovely co-host and producer stepping in for another great episode. And for you, the listener, listening. Don't forget, there is a bonus episode every week.

You get it for four pounds 50. This week, we know what it is because we recorded it already. It's, we watch the Melania movie. I'm so sorry. I feel bad about having watched it. All we ever do is just acquire psychic damage in order to entertain you, the listener. Oh, if you were in the theater, well, I was watching the Melania movie. You would have heard me taking like damage over time.

But you would have heard you would have heard me suffering like poison damage like in small amounts for like an hour and a bit. Anyway, thank you very much everybody. And we will see you on the bonus. Bye. Bye. Bye.