TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Surely Britain Can’t Be Serious

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

For this week’s bonus, it’s Riley, Hussein, and November discussing: Masayoshi Son’s desire to create AI God (actual), Labour’s march towards total alienation of everyone in hopes of governing from the void, a bizarre profile of Keir Starmer in which he seems to suggest he has never read a book, and a very strange encounter with Reform UK’s argument that any negative press it receives is because of…crisis actors? Get the whole episode on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/surely-britain-107383001 *EDINBURGH LIVE SHOW ALERT* We're going to be live at Monkey Barrel comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe on August 14, and you can get tickets here:  https://www.wegottickets.com/event/621432 *MILO ALERT* Buy Milo’s special ‘Voicemail’ here! https://pensight.com/x/miloedwards/digital-item-5a616491-a89c-4ed2-a257-0adc30eedd6d *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Do we know if Masayoshi-san has ever committed sins? Like, that would seem to narrow it down. I mean, I wonder though if he's ever committed the sin of pride, because he seems to be sort of realizing that his life has been about nothing. I mean, it depends what religious tradition you really want to view him through. Right? Like, Masayoshi-san exists more as a metaphor than as an actual guy. It contains a spiritual truth.

Masayoshi song was a very good man, but was he God? Just sort of church of England, vicar, and Masayoshi song would be like, well, you know, a lot of people choose to interpret him as more of a sort of a metaphor. Yeah. Look, I believe that Masayoshi san sort of set processes into motion I guess the closest thing would actually be the like deist conception of God Masayoshi san set a number of processes into motion that by their own logic then culminated in the creation of another God

Basically nice of him to do that, you know Yeah, it was super cool of Masayoshi san to create God. So I meant that to be just like a quick moment, but I love talking about it. It's hard to do a quick moment about a guy who says he's going to create God. But who's crying because he hasn't yet. It's like, but the great, when I realized AI was out there, my greatest personal failure was that I have not created God yet. By the way, I'm talking, of course, it's because he saw it. We all remember, right?

What he does every day is he stays up for 24 hours sitting beside chat GPT, typing into it business idea and then calling his subordinates being like, we should invest in something that's like a hoverboard for moms. OK, all right. Thank you. We're going to go try that. Could you hoverboard for moms. And they're like, okay, all right, thank you. We're going to go try that. Could you do Uber for it? Yeah, I guess so.

Maybe. I have seen enough anime about people who try to become gods or to try and outsmart God to know that this is not going to end well for him. So what I will say to Mashiho-Shi-San is that if you see a Shinigami, like just when you're out, don't trust it. It's not gonna end well for you. It's gonna be... This isn't gonna end the way that you think it's gonna end.

It's gonna be very long and tedious. And at some points you'll be wondering, why am I doing this? Why... Where did this go? This was good, now it kind of sucks. But it's not gonna end the way... It's not gonna end the way it's not gonna end the way you think it's gonna end.

Masayoshi-san, you are not alone. The thing about creating God is that it can be kind of a boring experience as well. And what this strikes me as to him is that, like, he strikes me as someone who like doesn't have both the willpower or the attention span to really like be devoted to it. Oh, he's gonna get distracted by the next tech hype cycle, which is sad, because I'd like him to actually follow this one through. Yeah, and this is like my issue with the AI guys, which is that like, they're not weird enough. Yeah, they keep saying that they're gonna invent like a new cast of like AI priesthood. None of them have robes.

Like, they haven't thought that far ahead. Yeah, well, none of them want to invest in actually building building a cult because they're too busy trying to build hoverboards for moms and yeah or it's if you do build a cult the cult is like kind of low commitment and sort of very reddit the grays in South and San Francisco yeah yeah like kind of the closest yeah like effective altruists I guess mmm you have to put a little like e-ac in your Twitter handle fucking come on Yeah, there's the same level of commitment that you used to have to like a counter-strike clan That's like oh it all comes back to it's like you're only pretending to want to create God

You know come back to me when you've like when you've got a compound and you've written some like esoterra, right? I'm not interested in it till then. All right. So let's let's go back to the like look that's actually the Masayoshi song write in manifesto. All it says is we will find and build God as myself as my witness. I will I will climb the I will try climb the great tree of being like an Evangelion. I will find the Lance of Longinus.

I will bring about human instrumentality through chatbot. Masayoshi-san. This is not the weirdest manifesto currently running. So let's talk a little bit about the UK pre-election final. And I think if the polls are to be believed, then it looks like the bookies odds on the funniest possible thing happening, which is a Starmer Trump press conference have just become much, much shorter.

It's true. I mean, it's, it's, it's going to happen. It's, and I, I dread to think what nickname Trump is going give Stammer. Just like- Queer Stammer! I'm putting my money on Queer Stammer, I think is gonna be very funny. Just comes out there and like calls him the F-sler. Hey. I think I've got-

As a country, we just get like homophobically bullied by the president. They actually call it the gay knighted kingdom. And we're just like, I don't know what we can do about this, tragically. Or it'll be like him just comparing Keir Starmer to Boris. Right? Because he liked Boris, didn't he? So it was just like, you know, he'll just sort of say stuff.

I mean, it will just effectively be Trump like directly bullying Keir and Keir Starmer like sort of saying platitudes about the special relationship or whatever because he wants to be the Blair figure in all of us. I like the idea of like, he's a night. He says he's a night, but doesn't look like a night. Where's your armor? Where's your armor here, boy? Where's your armor? Little Lego man.

He loves me. He loves Donald. I think standing next to Trump does make Stammer look serious by comparison. And he's already said like today that he would work with the French far right if they get elected and probably more when they get elected because that's what serious government is about. So like standing next to a bunch of like right wing buffoons at G7 is a slightly less right wing buffoon is going to be like a very edifying thing

for him, I suspect. If I were Trump, I would have read everything out to Keir Starmer that Starmer has ever said about... Starmer is already having to walk back shit that David Lammy said two years ago. Correctly identifying Donald Trump is like, yeah, this guy's a fucking fascist, essentially. And Starmer's having, I don't essentially. Like, it's driver's... I don't agree. I will work with anybody who comes to my door.

No principles. These are my principles. And if you want, if you don't like them, I have others. But also, the other thing I'm enjoying as well is we have in this election campaign reached peak Russia. Apparently, Putin wants everybody to win. We have in this election campaign reached peak Russia. Mm. And apparently Putin wants everybody to win. He is so happy.

He just hopes like both teams have fun. He's out there for the love of the game. He's out there to see some like some good, clean, honest politicking, you know? Yeah. I mean, I thought I was being transported back in time when I saw that Oliver Doudon was like, oh well, there are five Russian owned Facebook groups that are encouraging people to vote for reform And it's like yeah, I don't know. I don't doubt it. But hey, how come they're beating you? Yeah, maybe it has something more to do with the fact that Nigel Farage was on Question Time every week for the last 15 years

You know, this guy was funny. Let's get him on to present Have I Got News for You, the kiss of death. Everyone who's been, every politician who's been invited on to present Have I Got News for You as a joke because they're so ridiculous, eventually becomes prime minister. It's genuinely like, like 100% chance of becoming like prime minister and like quite a Hitlerite Prime Minister, you know? Oh yeah. Have I Got News For You can only create quite... They can only create Hitlers. They have the like the Hitler synthesis device in that chair. They have a special dark matter technology that can just sort of take in sort of different kinds of atoms from around the Question Time studio and recombine them, but only into Hitler's. That's it. But also

right the, the other, like this is the Tories are also having to attack like labor at the same time and have said that the line now seems to be what they've settled on. And again, this is interesting because we're getting to see what the opposition to Bath Party labor is going to be for the next five years, which is essentially, you know, from reform being like we are... Why aren't you starting the killing? Why haven't you started the killing yet? When do we get to start the killing?

Reform, basically, if the Labor Party has taken over the conservative position, the conservatives are left positionless and reform is now their critic to the right, essentially. The Tories are left positionless, struggling. It's going to be a kind of, I don't know, a kind of tournament of the Nats to see who's going to take over the Rump Party, presumably. I mean, I think Badnock and Braverman have already launched campaign websites to enjoy their their pass up like like live Republic count after a Sarkozy popularity. But this is this is the attack from cleverly against labor, which is they are determined to have a permanent labor government and they are quite willing to distort the British political system to get that again, would hate to see that happen.

Yes, it's sort of revealing to be like you will never get another Tory government if you don't if you don't like, let us let us stay here now. that happen.