TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* I'm The Opportunist That Stepped Up

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

The cast reads the tea leaves of British politics as it recoils from the return of the infamous hat man himself, George Galloway. We also discuss an AI music startup and some new updates on Jan Marselek, who is living in (sort of) disguise as an orthodox priest?   Get the whole episode on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/im-opportunist-100021847   *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We still have tickets available for our live show in London on March 13! Get them here: https://backyardcomedyclub.co.uk/event/trashfuture-live-podcast/     *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I think asking the police to be more heavy-handed, he knows that it's hard to get them to do that directly, but he's kind of playing for the papers. And then, of course, because it's a speech in front of Downing Street announcing more funding for prevent to basically crack down on campus progressivism. Well, it worked so well the first time. Well, it's basically just, there are Muslims, they're caring about stuff abroad. That stuff abroad is sort of coterminous with a protected group here. We're just going to basically allow them to stand in for one another whenever we want to, right?

The protected minority. And therefore, we can continue with all of the crackdowns as we see fit. Kirsten Armour then of course immediately agreed with the Prime Minister. Of course. Right away. Did he call on him to go farther? He said that Sunek was right to condemn unacceptable and intimidatory behavior, saying he was abused in the street just this week with protesters screaming at him, you're not human and calling

him Sir Kid Starver. I just, kid's time, I'm just like reposting his own own. This is great. They were very mean. I think it was unraistable of George Galloway to send out two separate letters. I think one strongly worded letter, as we know, is intimidation enough. Two strongly worded letters suggests a taste for excess. And it's going too far. I for one, if I received two strongly worded letters, I would go lock myself in a cupboard. I would be so fearful. They'd call me Sophia Stalmer.

Simply for having a clean shirt, you get abused by children. Oh, he's such a fucking dweeb, man. I don't know, we don't talk about this enough. He's just the biggest problem with Kierstarmer. Everything else aside is he's just like, he is only electable because of the precise circumstances that he currently exists in. Like, everything about this man makes Michael Foote

like look like a charisma magnet. Like, it is insane that the exact needed evolutionary circumstances have come about that Keir Starmer is going to become Prime Minister. A man with the personality of water-based porridge. So he's a... You know what it is. He is a creature that landed on an island of which he now happens to be dominant. And the island is...

Liz Truss made everyone's mortgages quadruple. But he is like a fucking like a like the the choose your own Coke machine that's been dropped onto Sentinel Island. Like he's like just by default is the center of attention. Anyway, anyway, so look, this is all going sort of background, I think to I parcel with like the people ofyle and deserve that. The choose your own Coke machine. I'm doing like grandma code. Do you know the why the choose your own Coke machine?

So this is, I could enjoy a half tango and half Coca Cola. A half Dr. Pepper. Oh, I don't know. What's another Fanta? Him not. Tango Him not to be. Tango is not a cocoa, that's a Pepsi brand, but it doesn't matter. So look, right, the Galloway I think is best thought of, right, just sort of bringing it all back, right, that in these relatively impossible circumstances where there are, as you've sort of alluded to earlier, Hussain, people being, I think, like, radicalized

by what they're seeing, right? People are being, and not just sort of along racial lines, as like the Galloway campaign kind of implied, right? Lots and lots of people are being sort of duly disgusted by it. And so we have this, we have just this guy who exists as a wrench in the system, which I genuinely have two minds of because this system requires a wrench. It's too bad that wrench happens to be a guy who's 95% pilled, basically. I'm 95% pilled.

I love a huge majority, but not a total. I love a bath election result. Because when you keep circling the wagons around the permanent center, right? So, November and I a while ago did a left on red series about like the whole idea of security studies. And what it means to, as a politician, make something into a security threat and the study of like that phenomenon over time. Yeah, it turns out they love it. Yeah, they love it.

Can't get enough of it. But the one thing, one of the key, I think, most interesting takeaways from the sort of study of security, your securitization, is not securitization like making a thing into a tradable financial instrument, like making a thing a security concern, is that, yes, every politician, every public person who has some kind of political power has kind of a conceptual button called security issue that you press when you have no other good options for dealing with a problem because you just say, this problem is existential.

We must defeat it by all means necessary. So we're going to deploy the bombs or the guns or we're going to surveil it or whatever. He wants every man, woman and child in this country wearing a hat, whether they are bolding or not, whether it suits them or otherwise, regardless of the type of hat. Right. And the more you press it, the more brittle your system becomes. And so in endlessly responding to breakdowns in the, I'd say, legitimacy of all of that

which is going on, let's just be broad, right? To endlessly press the security button, you leave cracks. And these are cracks through which... These are cracks into which anything can crawl. And we can talk about, I think, Galloway as a symptom of an extraordinarily weak polity because it is someone who is, you know, basically an opportunist, but nevertheless, he's the opportunist whose name is beside the I don't want the genocide box. Which is- I'm not the step opportunist, I'm just the opportunist who stepped up.

How come you summarized what I said so quickly and in one phrase? Because I sit back and don't say anything for a minute, I'm charging, and then I cast, and it, you know November cast or limit break. Yeah All right. All right. All right. Look look I'm I want to go right into our startup for today. It's called boomy Now usually don't don't boomy Lock myself in a cupboard that you'll be sorry Yeah, this is you know roomies Wario Yeah I found that very distracting. I'm gonna go and lock myself in a cupboard and then you'll be sorry.

Yeah, this is, you know, Rumi's Wario. Yeah, so, yeah, so, now usually the other three wouldn't know what this company does. However, however, in a break with tradition, because I wanted them to see what it was, I've given them the name of the website and they've been able to explore some of what the Make music with boomie AI and unleash your creativity songs sound like. Yeah Let me tell you not good. No, it unleashed my creativity. All right. I have to say it sounded it sounded more like Recognizable music than I expected. Mmm. Particularly like the vocals and stuff, but not in a way that was good.

It's supposed to trick you into thinking you're listening to music. What I kind of wanted to do was to try and rip off, here we go by JinSang, and start like playing a version of that that was just slightly wrong. DRM free, Here we go. Exactly. That we finally won't get copyright strikes on YouTube. Yeah. There we went.

Yeah, that's right. But sadly, sadly, I was not able to make this work. I was enjoying the names of like the songs and the bands. There was a band called the Crunchy Mangoes that had been invented, which I'm intrigued as to what that would entail. So basically it is a company that was started in 20... Well, it was... The founders have been working more or less in this space since 2014.

And it has been... Then this company was started in 2019, basically to make AI generate music, right? But then after the... In the wave of interest in generative AI, after the sort of chat GPT launch, then it got popular. Now, the business model of Boomi AI isn't just like the Google Music Generator, which is, you know, a similar premise. Like you type in, I don't know, the Beach Boys, but, you know, replace the guitar with farting and it will sort of do kind of something more or less. It's gonna be like farting in a bathroom.

Like a lot of reverb. Yeah. More or less like that, right? Bumi is a different and altogether more cynical business model where they say, okay, create original songs in seconds, even if you've never made music before. Seconds. In seconds. Yeah, because you can just be like, I want a version of Here We Go by Jen saying that sucks. Yeah. Submit your songs through our API to streaming platforms and get paid when people listen.

Yeah, I mean, this is a whole thing of like, you see TikToks occasionally of people who just like claim to make stupid amounts of money by like AI generating things, posting them to like social media, whether that's Spotify or TikTok or whatever, and just like raking in money off of it. And I think it works that well, but it, I think fundamentally it speaks to AI's role as a kind of garbage dispenser, right? And particularly when you're dealing with a, you know, social media or an app or something that has a shitload of garbage on it already, it's going to make all of the ways in which it's terrible much worse. We've talked about Spotify before particularly and the ways in which it's terrible for artists. Well, this is going to make it much more terrible

for artists because not only are you going to have to put stuff out more often and it's going to have to be like, you know, you're going to have less control over it, but also it's going to have to be more like the music AI makes and the music AI makes sucks. Yeah, well, because we talked about sort of stuff that's adjacent to this before when we talked about Spotify, because there are lots of people who make, all of the people who make loads of money out of Spotify are musicians. They're people who do stuff like they make 16 hour white noise playlist that then obviously get listened to a lot and for a long period of time.

And because you can make lots of them quickly, you can actually make quite a lot of money out of Spotify's payment system, which if you're a musician making music is extremely un-lucrative. So this feels like another step in that. It's the same cynical way of monetizing something that sucks. But we talk about AI not just as a cynical. Any I think large enough algorithmic company will be a garbage dispenser It's just that it will be a I kind of tripped over the fact that I just said it and I didn't really occur to me on a weird phrase

Garbage dispenser is just like why would you build this? Why would you would have why if you put this into my sink? Why would you build this? Why would you? Why have you put this into my sink? Turn it on and just buy us garbage as you're out. We've reversed the polarity on your sink garbage disposal. Although actually, We're disrupting the bin industry. Yeah, it's sort of like a Coke freestyle machine that only does garbage. For reverse bin man.

I mean, the thing that I was... You're just throwing a sack of garbage into your house. Remember when the reverse bin man was hard? I mean, the thing that was- Well, I thought that is actually a plot line in The Sopranos, where like Richie April just has the guys dumping garbage, and they're like, oh, we thought you wanted your garbage back.