TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* They Call Me Mister Cupp

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

It's a bonus episode in which we assess some of the recent trends now that the dumbest crypto guys are in power, creating meme-based US government agencies, and AI valuation is abysmally high with no actual delivery of a value proposition in sight. Get the whole episode on Patreon here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *TRASHFUTURE LIVE SHOW ALERT* We will be live in London at Between the Bridges on Sunday, November 24! Get tickets here. Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

When Skydio, a young maker of drones based in San Mateo, California, sent a customer proposal in 2023 to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, its Chief of Staff Mike Gennaro forwarded the email to VC Ben Horowitz. "'Which deployment are you looking to do?' Horowitz wrote back. "'Whatever you want us to do, Ben,' Gennaro replied." Oh boy. Okay.

So it's cool that these guys are all friends and they're just like, yeah, whatever the drone guy says. Yeah, yeah. Just, Ben Horowitz should, it's's the police department's priorities are going to be set by the civilian government and also the rich guy that moved here. He'll just also get a direct ability to set, like determine what the department buys and what it does and so on. Horowitz then donated some millions of dollars to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department's foundation to purchase Skydio drones for the department. Skydio praised the LVMPD's choice to adopt its X10 drones and quote, driven by the ambitious vision of making Las Vegas the safest community

in America. Of course, this is Ben Horowitz's vision to make Las Vegas the safest community in America for him. And Las Vegas is already a kind of theme park, you know, it's already extremely heavily surveilled and extremely heavily policed, and it's got like five years of climate left anyway. So it's just like sprinkling some drones over it is just, you know, it's seasoning, you know? These drones can finally get rid of the main scourge of Las Vegas. 1940s wise guys Frank Sinatra is fucking on notice yeah they got a drone on a sea just just you will live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension but it turns out in this instance the man-made horror is an Elvis impersonator getting hit with a hellfire missile

I'm being pursued from the skies, mama. HAHAHAHA He actually did say that. I imagine. HAHAHAHA I'm too fat to run. I gotta get to the Elvis mobile. Gotta get to the Elvis mobile. That's where my benzos are, mama. HUH

Nixon would never have allowed this. I gotta call Richard Nixon and ask him to get the drones off my back. Oh, well, what are we out on this Elvis drone thing? They're attacking Elvis with drones. He's our proudest son. We've got to do something. They're attacking Elvis with drones. Who do we have in the Vegas police department? Henry, what do you know about this? So Horowitz and his wife Felicia have also paid to, for example, expand and improve the police department's gym. Cool. Yeah, they're going to be buff.

We gave them like a pull up bar in exchange for like killing all of their overseen personages. Also Felicia Horowitz is probably the most drag name I've ever heard just out of nowhere on this part. Experts and advocates on police accountability told TechCrunch that police foundations tend to bypass the typical procurement process that can include public meetings, a city approved budget and potential bidding period to give competitors a chance. Now, TechCrunch primarily focused on like the anti-competitive nature because it's a publication largely for people

in the tech industry. But you could also say, that's where someone who has the opportunity to say, hey, don't do this at all, maybe. To raise, for example, objections, legal challenges, to stop this before, instead of trying to stop an ongoing program, to stop a considered procurement is much easier. And so using the foundations, very wealthy individuals can just say, I want the cops in my area to have hellfire missiles and I'm gonna give it to their benevolent foundation.

I'm gonna donate hellfire missiles to the policeman's ball and that's just how that works. There's lots of old cops out there, they can't even afford hellfire missiles. They've been on a job 40 years, they retire. Where's their hellfire missile? A gold watch and good luck. Kids, you're gonna be going to the cops, old folks, home handing out hellfire missiles.

So one of the general partners at Andreessen said, what Ben and Felicia have done in Vegas is a masterclass of philanthropy and impact. I hope it catches on in cities across America as a model to bring great technology to public safety and bootstrap the process. But again, what also they do is they take a company that they've invested in and then they basically like give someone else money to make a purchase from that company, making it appear as though that company is selling more organically than they are. But additionally, right? Additionally, as like making the company look better, it's also just like more futile, more directly futile than we might be used to. Andriessen as well purchased a vacant lot nine minutes down the road from Horowitz

and by 2023 emails show that Horowitz had begun emailing the chief of police on a regular basis with suggestions about products the police department could buy and soon donated like a million dollars for new computers as well as money for ice machines and cappuccino machines. This is so easy to bribe and it's pushing on an open door anyway, but like, at some point you might want to think about some kind of budgetary resilience against this kind of like monorail salesman shit, right? No! That's the other thing that Andresen Horowitz needs, anywhere it can,

it needs to be like testing and proving its new products. Because sure, sure, sure. You can just... If you're a defense tech contractor, you just have a great big black budgetary hole called Ukraine that you could just throw stuff to and begin proving it as its concept. Right? You have that. But if you're trying to do this with police tech, arguably quite similar, it's difficult to do if you're trying to sell to other domestic consumers. So you need to just do this. But basically, decide that the police department are now your sworn retainers, which like-

ALICE Yeah, do like a kind of charm offense of Pick A City, where they have a beef with their coffee machines or something and be like, I am your new king. I've got you like a cappuccino machine. You're welcome. SEAN This is the funniest bribery I've ever heard. Tony Soprano has sent you another cappuccino machine, sir. All right, let's have one long black before it goes down to that homeless shelter. Cop drinking out of a really tiny cup. Yeah.

One of those like glass latte glasses that's like conical, you know? Just like every cop in the station having like really camp coffee. And they're like, where did this fucking cappuccino machine come from? Don't worry about it. It's pumpkin spice season. Yeah. Now, the thing is that these are all bribes together, right? It's to give the police department like, hey, do you want a bunch of free drones you can

use? Yeah. There's a truck coming up to the precinct, right? It contains like 15 Nespresso pods and 100 drones. And you got to open them both together. Yeah, because that's the thing, right? It used to be that all of the overflow equipment coming into police departments was like surplus military equipment. Guess where that's all going now? All of those toys are going to Ukraine. What happens now is that the new

toys are now coming from defense tech, which is spent, or public safety tech, pretty similar, which has spent the last couple of years trying to close that gap and trying to also get in on all the bongs from Ukraine. I think maybe, I've got, an idea is crystallizing for me here where, you know, everyone, you know, the boomers all over the English speaking world,

they want the youth to be doing military service, right? But then increasingly, you know, the whole war in Ukraine is being fought by drones. So what if we took inspiration from the Gerard Butler movie Gamer, brackets 2009, and we got youth to be flying the drones all over and then they can use their gaming skills, but also get the military service that will make them not woke. Yeah, that's right. It's the thing, you can do your military service from home pursuing Elvis impersonation Yeah work from home pursuing Elvis

Look a lot of people been doing that for a while We've got to get the Elvis pursuers back into the office Look great new ideas for how to trap Elvis are only gonna be come up with like casual Conversations in the hallway with the free saw of an in-person meeting. I'm starting to think these pursuers aren't really holding my tail, mama. I think I just logged in and moved in the cursor and watching Netflix. I think I could rest even for a moment, mama. I can let my guard down. So when he moved there, he gave them all that stuff and then started connecting with portfolio companies, donating like a bunch more money so the foundation could purchase more things from

other companies. Again, like how this happens as well, again a lot of this is media, right? Creating these ideas that police departments are desperate, like just like teachers need to buy school supplies for their own kids. Cops are starting to like buy their own guns or whatever, so you need to be able to donate a gun like to the police via these foundations. It is just used by venture capitalists to like pay for their own shit. In this case. Really, the street gangs should have the money to shoot each other.

But, you know, they can't afford that anymore. So we have to dip into our own pocket. It's kind of just the ACF. Skydio proposed to the police department a suggestion that it would put drone docks on every school. Like every school would be a combination school and drone launch pad for the police department. Horowitz emailed Gennaro, I thought we just wanted this for the 11 neighborhoods with the we referring to the both the police

department and Horowitz as one entity. No no no. Why did they bid the schools too? That's not what we asked for. Hey, remind me what it's called when there's a union between capital and the state's use of violence. When that union becomes, yeah, exactly. It's the department for government F efficiency. Yeah, that's right. You can't sweat efficiency without an F. It's true. Several of them. It's not to say, yeah, well, Hey, good luck getting your chat chat GPT to tell you how many though. Yeah. At least three. Joe Biden asked how many there are. It's also not to say that that hasn't been happening for a while. It's just that,

hey, we're at the stage where Ben Horowitz is just referring to himself and the police department as one week. I like that. The gap between my bit Andres and Horowitz being the people who wrote the Alex Ryder novels and the plot of the Alex Ryder novels is gradually narrowing to like a not imperceptible degree. Like we are eventually going to get Ben Horowitz in the plot of an Anthony Horowitz novel as the villain and I look forward to it.