TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Da Crazy Hawaiian Goes to Riyadh ft. Jacob Silverman

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

  Jacob Silverman joins us to discuss the decades long Saudi operation to buy influence in the West in all its gaudy spectacle. Also - Sam Altman protests that he all that creative work fair and square, Rachel Reeves belts out a three word chant, and Power Slap is a sport of geopolitical significance. Get the whole episode on the Trashfuture Patreon! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

A fond goodbye to Andreessen Horowitz from the UK. Aww. Is he not going to write any more books? That'd be a shame. According to documents obtained by Sifted, Andreessen Horowitz's arrival was the culmination of five years of courting by the Department of Business and Trade under the Conservative government. It's like, please, we actually love your extremely pointy head and we have like a team of

like British service industry specialists who will be like around to polish it all the time. Well, we're prepared to dedicate all of the king's horses and all of the king's men to putting you back together again. So the VC firm announced it was closing up all of its shop in the UK, which was basically going to be because the UK was crypto friendlier under Sunak than the US was under Biden, right? But now that Donald Trump is in office, there's no reason for there to be an Andreessen Horowitz office in the UK with the founders quoted as saying the optics mean a lot to us, particularly for the American VC. A person familiar with the wider situation said they all they came

here really to make a point to the US. The US was crypto unfriendly at the time and the UK said it was set at a regulatory roadmap. I love to be the kind of thing that we can, we exist as a threat to Joe Biden. Just to be like, listen, if you don't like it, we can, we can go to, I guess, London. Yeah. We are like a, a rebound. We are a partner that exists to make the ex mad. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So five years of just like sucking up to Sriram Krishnan by like Department for Business and Trade people under a Sunak followed immediately by like Trump gets in. It's like, okay, we

love you. Okay. Bye UK. Bye. We never intended to do any business here. Anyway, this was all just like we got pulled. Andresen Horowitz, rug dust. And we won't be the first and we won't be the last. We have been hawked to it by Andresen Horowitz and he did not even spit on our thang. This is something the British people cannot accept. So whoopsie daisy. It turns out that much vaunted arrival of a global venture capitalist to the UK was nothing to do with us.

It's so pathetic that there was like a bipartisan consensus in our government to be like, oh, if we just like, if we lick enough boot to here, maybe they'll take us seriously. The whole time they were not, it turns out, taking us seriously. And meanwhile, the Chinese are doing the same thing to them. That's so fun, you know? It's all like a little human centerpiece. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I, for one, love being a plankton in this food chain. I think that's the coolest one to be. Yeah. But we're not gonna be plankton any longer, because as you know, if you just apply the right policy mix, plankton can grow into a whale. And this is the theory of Rachel Reeves, who at the meeting of the parliamentary Labour Party earlier this week, reportedly entered chanting, growth, growth, growth, and clapping. Banging clipboard.

Growth, growth, growth, growth. clapping. Bangin' clipboard. Growth. Growth. Growth. This is weird midsummer type cult shit to be clear. Like, why? Why are they doing this? Why are there chants? Why is any of this happening? Yeah, picking a virgin from somewhere in the UK and like, walling her up inside a big wicker man but that's made out of agreements about the debt ceiling or whatever, and then setting it alight to bring it across. It was an easier task because they had to find a virgin in a room containing the parliamentary Labour party. So you just see, you kind of cast around a bit and you just like...

We've got a rich supply. We'll just pick one statistically, you know. I mean, this is one of the things I wanted to talk about really in this segment. You both have kind of prefigured, which is almost religious dedication to the economy as a kind of, as a throne without a king that is sort of treated as an object of reverence, worship and terror that you believe you can affect almost mystically. And as things work less and less, as growth continues to be anemic, we haven't pleased the sky god, we haven't cast enough people into the volcano, then the, I don't know,

demonstrations of loyalty to the economy as a sort of deity concept have gotten louder and more obvious. And I think just chanting growth to try to get people excited so they can excite everybody else. So if every, because if everybody just believes in Britain enough, believes that growth will come, believes that investment will materialize, you know, then we can summon the cargo. So I had a question here, right, about this, which is, is it not kind of generally thought of the growth as something that's stimulated by like investment? Yes. Okay and that investment right that has to come from like one of two places either

the government or the private sector and it's not gonna come from the government that's all that's all correct right? Yeah our theory the theory that is that is that has run both this government and honestly conservative government since Boris Johnson minus Liz Truss has been that if you have the exact right calibrated de minimis amount of government investment, you can create a tipping point where private investment will then flood in. So it's called, it's like de-risking crowding in. There are lots of ways to refer to it. But the idea is if you just make 5% of the investment, the private sector will come up

and come in and fill up the rest because you've made it attractive enough. It's kind of like siphoning petrol out of a car. You've got to suck on the tube enough to get the petrol to flow out and into the government's car. And so what we're trying to do is suck on that tube just the right amount so we don't end up swallowing a lot of petrol. Unfortunately, Rachel Reeves is currently passed out from swallowing a lot of petrol. It's not going terribly well, but we're confident we can get the balance right.

We can kickstart the economy if every patriotic Brit goes across to France and siphons one jerry can of gas and then brings that back to Britain. Zut alors, my rhino is empty. What happened? As an example of this growth agenda right now, like right now, as we speak, Rachel Reeves is giving a speech standing in front of an MRI machine for some reason. Saying that they're- Just trying to siphon the magnets out of him. Sell them on the black market. I mean, you probably get a lot of copper wire in an MRI machine. Yeah, I would imagine. Yeah, saying that they're gonna do, like they're gonna back a third runway

at Heathrow, right? And this is like a great example of, well, we're just gonna let you do whatever you want so long as you pay for it and we're just gonna hope that the number goes up because of that. Which if you look at how well everything's going in this country seems like maybe not the best idea, but... Yeah, so this is, this is before this, earlier this week, she made a pitch to MPs saying, will growth come easy? No. There are no easy routes. There are always reasons for government to say no to things. Over the past six months as Chancellor, my experience is that government has become used to saying no. That must change

and we must start saying yes. Now is the chance for us to shout about that potential in the brighter future ahead because nobody else is going to do it. So what happens is if you have any company that's like, can I take all of the money out of the treasury? The new sort of yassified government is going to be like, yes. Yeah. Of course. Or more accurately, we won't stop you from doing anything. And I mean, the thing is, right, there are different ways to pursue growth.

There are levers you can pull that will have fewer externalities and higher propensity to grow things. Like Like for example, if we invested a huge amount of money in the, I don't know, actually building of hospitals and schools and homes, that creates lots of construction jobs. That also drives down like the prices of assets. These things are good, right? But that also is expensive and difficult. It's hard to get the private sector to crowd in on it. Or it's hard to get the private sector to crowd in on it. Or it's hard to get the private sector to crowd in on it in ways that don't create huge problems down the line like with PFI.

Exactly. Because what they want from that is, say, I don't know, access to all of your like NHS data or whatever the fuck. Or they just want to have you in a PFI contract where if you want to change a light bulb, it costs 10,000 pounds. You know, that's that's also that's also the case. Pretty reasonable. And so the other thing you can do is you can pull levers that are easy to pull, but have minimal growth impacts and high externalities.

That's things like ripping up climate change measures, right? Like blocking a third runway at Heathrow, that is ultimately a climate policy, whether you want it to be or not, you know? That changes the air quality in London, that means more flights will come in and so on and so on. I'm not saying, even then, I'm not being like, never build anything. But if that's what you're going to do, okay, well, that's going to have climate externalities.

You're allowing people to build a third runway at Heathrow. That's going to be like some building, I guess, it's going to bring more people in. Okay, tourism. Is tourism the industry that you really want to grow? Because that has other kinds of all kinds of externalities. Or generally speaking, you are just cutting regulation. Then again, we know where that approach to growth gets us, which was 2008. You cut regulation and cut regulation so that the financial sector can keep growing forever for free basically. And then you end up with 2008. The biggest externality of building a third runway at Heathrow is a bunch of people who own property in Hounslow are all going to start supporting reform. Nodger Fowler is going to be leading a protest

of the landlords of Hounslow or whatever. The other plan that they have is the Oxford-Cambridge Silicon Valley arc, right? Of saying, okay, well, we have lots of universities and lots of science parks here, so we're going to try to have lots of tax incentives to build here. And again, that's going to benefit in many ways the owners of assets, that's going to benefit the very wealthy. But we know that even if that does succeed, which is not guaranteed to, we know what building Silicon Valley did in the States, which is it turned San Francisco into like an unlivable hellscape, you know?

Yeah. I'm looking forward to us also, if this is successful, which it won't be, having this kind of even larger industry of horrible fascist VCs. I think what this country really needed was a founder culture. Does Rachel Reeves think that Britain can learn from Donald Trump? She says, yes. I think we need to do more positivity like Donald Trump. He's doing so much positivity right now. He's doing wellness.

He's moisturized. You know, he's having a great time. He's thriving. He's flourishing. She refers to this as boosterism. And that's also just what Boris did. That's what Liz Truss did. That's what Risi Sunak tried to do.

And it's it's been the strategy. Like nobody's ever been in number 10 being like, I think British business is shit and should fuck off, right? Like, it's all been boosterism. That's just kind of like baked in, but it doesn't do anything.