TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* What's Under the Line

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

For this week's bonus, Riley has read as much as he can stomach of the Labour 2024 book 'Taken as Red,' but we also spend some time discussing recent reports that the human cost of Neom is over 20,000 workers dead. Has that stopped British politicians from doing cosy photo-ops with the Saudis and shilling for the line? Well, what do you think? Get the full episode on Patreon here. *T-SHIRT ALERT* Two new t-shirt designs—Avignon Popes and Banished to the Lagoon—are available for pre-order on our website. Get them here!  *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)

I've never fancied gum But you know Worthy of discussion. Yeah, just it just doesn't there's something so Vibelous about gum unless you're like, you know on on you it drugs in which case gum is a kind of necessity But in day-to-day life gum people fascinate me I'm like it's kind of like it's like something you would give to a dog There you go distract your mouth with the sensation of chewing. It's something quite American too.

Like you can't chew gum without thinking I'm not cool enough and I live in too shit of a country to just be like chewing gum on the street. It's a bit like wearing sunglasses, you know? Yeah. Singapore have realised this. They're like, no Singaporean will ever be cool enough to chew gum. So we're just going to make it illegal. Sometimes it's nice to have a little like minty refresh, you know, minty refreshment from time

to time. You have a mint. Yeah. But the Kratik and Lenkas, this is like the lost platonic dialogue. Barely Socrates. I could have a minute. I cannot say why I prefer gum to mint. What I can, I can defeat Socrates on this one with the criterion of embarrassment, right? Because if you eat too many sugar-free mints, which are the only kind of mints you can get, and they don't tell you that they're sugar-free, there will be a little thing on the back of the package that's like, oh hey, if you eat too many of these in one sitting, and too many is like, I don't know, three, you will like shit horribly. Like, oh, insane.

Yeah, that's true. Well, another thing Socrates is very familiar with. Absolutely. Yeah, they handed Socrates a little package of like M&S, sugar-free mints. You'd have loved Hubba Bubba. Yeah. All right. RIP. Oh my, what?

RIP, you'd have loved Hubba Bubba. Oh, I didn't know. I want to get into today's episode where I originally planned to read Taken as Red, the book by, I believe, ITV journalist Anushka Asthana about... About all the ways we got owned by the dumbest people on earth. Yes, essentially. Taken as Red, the must read first account of how Labour won big and the Tories fell apart, basically. Sort of book-length treatment of how all of us lost a game of chess to a dog.

Essentially. Wes Streeting. Well, and also, we've talked about... Transphobic dog. We've talked before on this show about an excerpt from this book, and I thought it would be worth reading more of it. And it was. However, the second half of the book is just greatest hits of the news.

Oh, do you remember the news? It's like those Climbe Life CDs they sold in the 90s. There's a whole chapter on fucking Party Gate. Amazing. But it's a whole chapter on Party Gate that you could have put 80% of together from like looking at headlines. Now Together At Last In One Connection, best of the news. You can all of your favorite news stories of the 21st century and one eight disc set If you're real lover of the news and want to read the like headlines in narrative form

Then I recommend the second half of this book. Yeah, so what I've I have read it and I have pulled out mostly Observations from her about like people she's spoken with quotes She's received sort things quote-unquote sources told her, which you couldn't have guessed from headlines. This is the most word count book I think I have read since probably the Nadine Dorries one that gave me like a stomach virus. The last paragraph is just screw Corbin over and over again. Work and no play, make Kira dull, boy. Yeah.

So we're going to get to that, but there are a couple of news items I wanted to talk about first. One, gum pots still empty. No. Not... That's just an observation I had. A little parting of the kimono to what it's like to be me. Yeah. No, they want to talk about two news items first. One kind of silly and one emphatically not.

One kind of sad. Well, yeah, indeed. Before we get to this. Like regular clown and French clown. So as I mentioned before, and if you follow me on Twitter, you'll have seen me talking about this, a documentary on Neon by an undercover reporter was released, also ITV, was released last Sunday. We're in the pocket of big ITV.

And this documentary, again, considering like the country she was doing it in, like this documentarian, is incredibly brave to go to Neom, to go undercover among the workers' villages, the workers' encampments, and to then speak with actual guest workers in Saudi Arabia about the conditions in which they're working, and uncovered that... Good, I presume. Well, uncovered that more than 21,000 Indian, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese workers have died in Saudi Arabia since 2017, which is more, I think, than I had imagined.

An additional 100,000 people have, quote, disappeared during NEOM's construction. This could be local people who live nearby, also other workers, especially people trying to do any kind of organizing. Yeah. It's something that we've talked about before in terms of the clearances that were done in order to make room for Neon. But like we've, we've only sort of like talked in passing about the sort of presumed and now somewhat documented death toll of all of this. And the thing is, they love to move. Let's, uh, we hired a mob guy. We hired a guy from Staten Island to help you do this. No, but like,

it's sort of like, Neom is a great sort of vision of the future, right? In that it's stuff that is unremissingly depressing and horrible, and the people responsible will never face any justice except maybe if their own boss bone-saws them. But at the same time, it's also so surreal and at times funny that you're just like, oh okay, we've like, you know, bulldozed 20,000 people into an open grave in order to make, you know, like, a football pitch that's suspended between two, like, 200-storey skyscrapers. It's an insane thing to do. It is insane. And this is to confront the reality of Neom is to look at, I'd say, the extreme deployment of power by someone who I'm not afraid to call a madman. Like someone who I think you I don't mean not afraid to call, of course you can, what the fuck's he going to do, but

more like who is genuinely, genuinely a madman. And to see every single respected, to see every single, the vast majority of the quote unquote, respected and respectable people in energy, architecture, strategy consulting, if there was such a thing as a respectable. We've talked about this stuff going from everything from like football players through to like, I don't know, like video game streamers who are like allowing themselves to, you know, be, you know, sort of pink washing for Saudi Arabia or whatever. Well, I've said this before. I remember when Joe Biden said to Mohammed bin Salman,

you need to put the oil price down because we're pissed off now. And he was like, no. And I was like, what is the point of us giving them all of this shit that we do all the time? If they don't, if our client state doesn't fucking fucking listen to us the boss, what is the point? I honestly think the only good regime change we could ever do saudi arabia raposhmalt with iran Saudi arabia regime change let's do the good iraq war iraq war brackets good by invading saudi arabia We're gonna free all of those indians bangladeshis and nepolese people We're gonna we're gonna take all the men out of the little gold houses

and we'll put them to work. Yeah. Hey, yeah, they can they can literally build a castle in the air. Figure it out on your way down, perhaps. Yeah. And obviously, right, this documentary is quite harrowing when it talks to like individual workers about their situations. But also like what is so common, not just like Saudi Arabia, but in all Gulf states that have the kafala system is workers will find themselves in breach of various elements of their contract and getting fined like

months wages over over like showing up late once and so on and so on and being unable to having to pay penalties if they want to leave and so on and so on. It is no exaggeration to say that it is slavery with enough cover that an institution that is not minded to pursue action against Saudi Arabia has enough of a fig leaf that they can say, okay, no, they have a wage system and all that. MBS being like, what a country that develops apps have slavery. They're getting fined more wages than Mario Balotelli. I want to say, right, another thing that happened this year from October 29th to 31st, the dates is being recorded, is that the Future of Investment Initiative took place in RIA.

A very, very high profile CEOs, including of many British companies, the CEO of Barclays is there, as well as like the CEO of BlackRock, Goldman, Citigroup, the London Stock Exchange, Citadel, Ken Griffin. It's fun to go along to that as a serious financial guy. Like, ah, the mad king has some investment ideas for me to peruse. What will it be this time? Perhaps a dodecahedron in space? Yeah, well, I mean, if you're like, you know, Jakob Fugger or whatever. I'm sorry, what?

Jakob Fugger? Sorry. Been reading about history again, you can tell. This is someone who was funding Italian princes to go to war with one another. He was just a merchant. Oh, okay. It was just a bit of a name alert. The twinkle capital of his day.

And I mean, literally. Yeah, truly. You're happy to deal with a Mad King, right? Because they're very profitable. Spends a lot of money, yeah. Yeah, spends a lot of money. Good client. Spends a lot of money on big shapes.

Spends a lot of money on big shapes, and like, guns for money on big shapes and like a gun to the security guards that you need for the big shapes. So exactly. So it's these people that the Mad King is a perfect place for like, you know, the for major CEO to go if you're the CEO of like HSBC or Barclays, both of whom are at this conference, that's exactly where you want to be because this is the person who is doing the thing that is like a kind of reverse Tennessee Valley Authority where you are you are spending a huge amount of money to do public works that will accomplish nothing but except cause a

huge amount of suffering. Reverse utilitarian. I'm trying to increase the amount of suffering in the world. Essentially. I'm throwing more people in front of the trolley of the trolley problem. What if the trolley problem was just fine? What if the trolley track was 170 kilometers long? Looking at the trolley problem being like, if only there was a way to do both. We just have to reverse it.