TRASHFUTURE - Silencing Bronze Age Voices feat. Donald Campell

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

Riley speaks to Foxglove’s Donald Campbell about the campaign to prevent Palantir from working with the NHS, but before we get to that, we have to talk about… fictive elven graves. And real Bronze Age burial sites. And a man in Texas who’s willing to move heaven and earth in order to view anime. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! Learn more about Foxglove and support them here! RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows NATE ALERT Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album and you can stream it for free here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello and welcome to your free episode of Trash Future. It's me, November. I'm joined by Nathan Nussain. Hello. What's up? And our fearless leader, Riley Quinn, is once again absent, but we do have a pre-prepared interview segment with him in the back half of this episode where he's going to be talking with Donald Campbell, who is Director of Advocacy at Foxglove. So look out for that.

But before any of that, we have to talk about maybe the most important news event of the week. A Texas man is very, very upset. Yeah, so I found this story and I felt like it was absolutely in our wheelhouse for a variety of reasons, but you may have heard about this. If we had had the audio from this, it could have been a new sort of succulent Chinese meal. Instead, just the transcript. I think the audio is evidence in the criminal investigation, unfortunately.

I did actually listen to the audio link that says, I don't know if it was AI generated or a person read it on the Houston Chronicles website. It did such an awkward job of bleeping the swear words that I get the impression. It's an AI voice thing. I was so hoping that it would cut like radio lab would cut to the raw footage of this guy. So I decided instead, I'm going to read it. And then we'll just do our best. We'll see if we can put our minds together to in a kind of spiritual communion to figure out what it might have sounded like.

Yeah. Kind of audio death threat hauntology, if you will. So the paragraphs that are crucial about the story related to Texas passing and age verification law, the paragraphs read as follows. A Houston man faces a criminal investigation in Travis County for threatening the governor's office over what he said was his inability to watch anime online. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety. There's a couple of different ways this could break. One way, this guy is like Hussein's stronger soldier, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, this is, I did initially post this in the group being like, you know, solidarity with this man. But we don't know. This is my nuance hat. It depends. Am I going to regret this? Let's see how it goes. All right.

Per Travis County Court Wreckers, Joseph Roy Osmond, 35, also Haley Joel Osmond's wario, I suppose, is facing a third-degree felony count of terroristic threat against a public servant because of a phone call he made on July 25th, just after 1.30. PM. The case was first reported by Austin News outlet KXAN. 1.30 p.m. or the anime watches early morning. Yeah, I was going to say,

yeah, this is a crucial time of day for accessing anime, I suppose. First thing, I'm going to call up the governor's office and I'm going to threaten them. Well, yeah, like, imagine this guy's like routine, you know, you sort of like, get up, go back to sleep, wake up again, you sort of half brush your teeth,

you drink your first, like, monster of the day. You know, you might have like a little bit of breakfast and like you know you sort of like read some headlines and wherever you're reading it and then you just want to like that's your anime time like your good anime time is like basically between one to about three pm yeah and he's he's trying to lock in on his anime time and then the government fucking you know big tech locks down your anime and makes you like you know do the sort of scan your face thing to prove you're an adult i mean it's he's 35 years old also and one presumes he's probably been anime addicted since he was a young teenager or even younger and you know at that time, it's like, it's like delirium tremens. You go cold turkey off that stuff. It's not the substance being removed that kills you. It's your body's reaction to it, actually. What have we done to our society?

Okay, okay. So you are working in the Texas governor's office. You're kind of an evil person. You're a sort of Texas little Eichmann, right? But you pick up the phone. An online one, you have Mr. Fucking anime man. What is he saying to you?

He says, according to an affidavits, submitted by a DPS special agent, when Osmond called the governor's office and left a voicemail, he implored Texas officials to allow him to watch anime or else. Or in our sphere projection, I don't know which one of y'all sons of bitches passed this motherfucking bill to get this damn shit blocking my motherfucking anime, but you whole ass motherfuckers need to unpass this shit.

Osmond said, according to the affidavit, I'm a fucking stab every goddamn one of you, bitches. Unlock my fucking anime. Okay, okay, here's the thing, right? Like I say, this could break one of two, This could be like a man who admittedly has had his brain rotted by decades of anime watching, but he just wants to watch the fucking Apothecary Diaries, right? He wants his like homespun slice of life thing.

Fine. In that case, this man's a hero. Yeah, he wants to watch Aqua Vita. He wants to know what Roman baths were like. But the other possibility is that this guy is maybe like into some really kind of darker shit that we would not endorse in the anime of which he speaks that he wants them to block is something really kind of like, something that if it isn't criminal, it should be

criminalized, like, you know, attack on Titan or something. I mean, November, it's almost as if the journalist predicted this line of argument because as they pointed out in this piece, aside from the up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $10,000 that Osment is facing, DPS did not say which anime

Osmond was trying to watch or which service he was trying to use to watch it. This is wending its way through the Texas Rangers Department of Anime Appraisal before they can... Yeah, there's a guy in like the police service that is just sort of like arresting him because his taste is like how I would best describe it as like co-worker anime taste.

Like this guy's watching Jiu Jitsu Kaizen. Like fuck you. You can get this like you can get this fucking anyway. You don't need to sort of be like threatening people because you want to use this one streaming site that you're used to because you don't want to learn how to use another one and you don't want to like get a fucking Crunchyroll subscription. That's, you know, I feel like that's like there are two ways of reading.

One is that he's watching like the worst hentai you've ever, like you've ever, you can ever imagine. Or his taste is so basic. It's pedestrian. Yeah. There's a, there's a weeb in the like Texas police. There's sort of stuff. More on Crunchyroll subscriptions later. But I will say, do you remember that like era during sort of like 20s when every channel had like three or four different shows where it was like the cops bring in a consulting artist?

You know, it's like Dexter or science. or any number of these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In this case, clearly, I think what it is, is Texas Department of Public Safety, the cops that make you wear the fucking, like, boots and Stetsons to work, have put a real anime enjoyer in the office,

and this is, like, he's locked in. Well, that's what I was thinking is that maybe that the voicemail was a follow of being hung up on because they disagreed on aesthetic grounds because this guy called it, and he's like, y'all, I was almost done watching Macross.

Do you remember love? I couldn't get to the end of it. I want to know what happens. Listen, y'all, you got to understand something, okay? I vote Republican just like the rest of y'all. I'm a red-blooded Texan. I care about three things. They all start with W.

They are wheels, women, and watching love Hina. I just love that spy family. No, so the thing is, this man, Joseph Roy Osmond, is possibly one of our strongest soldiers. and depending on the results of that investigation, as more detail emerges, we may or may not be running a kind of Joseph Roy Osmond Wright's Defense Project. Maybe we won't do that. We'll see. Or maybe we'll be doing so on second thought we do not in fact have to hand it to him. There is always the possibility depending on, and this being a kind of a relatively picky unlocal case aside from the very funny headlines, it's possible you might have to do like case library stuff, pay for like legal filing stuff to be.

be able to actually read the documents to discover what anime was so compelling that it produced death threats. Is this just a day ending and why in Texas? And people talk to each other like this all the time. We have Texas informants. I'm sure we can have someone go to the courthouse and sketch this guy. But this is like every median voter, he probably votes Republican, but also has it lifted truck that says only gay cops pull me over on the back of it. Like what goes on in his mind to affect his decision making? This man and his racist body pillow. I know. I mean, I'm guessing, I'm guessing. I don't know that this.

I mean, he's not going to sue me. He's in jail for fucking anime death threats. But like, come on. Anyway, I got to move this on because terrible news, right? I don't know if you're aware of this. If you're listening to this, there is a decent chance that you live in Britain. And I'm so sorry. Now, obviously, there are a few reasons to be sorry.

One is the fact that it's like walking on the surface of the fucking sun. But the other is that we have a new prime minister, things are getting a little bit different. And in a quest for sort of quick wins, big swings on policy, just early sort of victories, Andy Burnham has gone all in on a really killer idea, just really sexy,

I think, which is going to make it easier for you to cancel your crunchy roll subscription. Really? That's the big policy shift. That's the big policy. It's that. It's like if an item says 50% off,

it has to be 50% discounted. And that's what the people really care about, I think, is items. I mean, I will say that in the U.S., they did a very bad job of advertising the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But that was the thing that they would go after, like, the fact that it was impossible to cancel a broadband internet without taking a huge fee. The fact that, like, a lot of services basically made it impossible to reach someone to actually cancel a thing. I could see that being a quality of life improvement. You're the prime minister. And like, there's no jobs.

All the grass is dead. Like, everybody's sort of like dying of drought unless they can pay, you know, 700 quid for a used air conditioner. What's funny to me is that the person who did this in the U.S. who was the head of it or the founder of it, it's hard to describe because my brain's been melted, but who was deeply involved with it was in fact Elizabeth Warren. And that is, in fact, an Elizabeth Warren job to be like, they are overcharging me for Crunchy Rule.

But that's not really the president slash the president. Prime Minister. It's definitely like a, if Joseph Roy Osmond is Wario to Haley Joel Osment, then like a light energy warrior version of West Streeting, that would be his job. Go after that. Stress weeding, I have no idea. I'm stealing a joke from one of my partners here, which is really like a cornerstone of my whole career. But I did see West Racing say that since becoming Minister of Defense, he's faced more homophobia than he ever has in public life. And I just, I don't know why Andy Burnham keeps calling him slurs in cabinet, but I guess that is doing things a little differently.

Yeah, I mean, I guess to me, I saw some, you know, major headline things about, is it pronounced Thetford? Yes, yeah, yeah, Thetford. It's like this, like small town where once again, we have this sort of wave of programs, basically, of like sort of anti-migrant riots and trying to burn down like hotels and stuff. Yeah, some of them are kind of mad about the contrary roll subscriptions

as well. It's sort of an omnic cause in that sense. You actually find that the peak hours for guys congregating before committing acts of racist violence is between 1.30 and 3.30 p.m. And so if anime were deployed as kind of like a prophylactic, it could potentially... Politics is not a taxi that takes you directly to your door. It's a bus, you know, and you get on with the tendency. So the guy with the Inuyashir body pillow, he's there, you know, also fighting for that and also

the racism. I don't want to downplay the severity of it in the sense that it's terrific. And there is an extent to which, like, it's become kind of banalized, seeing it so often in the United Kingdom. Yeah. It's just completely normal now. Yeah. And at the same time, I have noticed what appears to be a quite silent and or non-existent response to it from the kind of people you would sort of hope would want to stand up to this or to talk about it to, you know, shape the direction of discourse, if you want to call it that. What I have seen is a lot of bullshit headlines from the usual suspects in the UK basically egging it on.

Yeah, absolutely. The Daily Express ran a headline about here's all the free shit migrants get, so on and so forth. Oh, that list, which was like, you know, if you come to this country illegally, the states will provide you with a toothbrush. And like obviously these fucking free riders coming over here receiving like a small bowl for cereal. It's like at a certain point, right? We've stripped enough out of this that obviously it won't work this way, right? Nothing will satisfy these people. But it's the same with some of the like prison reform stuff where it's like, oh, prison's like

a holiday camp now because look at this. You get a room with a door. It doesn't stand up to like a second's worth of scrutiny. But somehow it turned out that that was all optional anyway. And it didn't matter what the actual list of things was. People just kind of glazed over it and went, yep, got it free. Ferrari. Absolutely. I mean, and I just happen to know this, that for Asylum C Cruising United Kingdom, for every member of your household, you're given 49, a little over 49 pounds per week. You're not

allowed to work. You're basically in limbo. You're only allowed to live where they place you. And your case can go on for years, sometimes close to decades in some cases. There's also no guarantee that you're going to be granted asylum. I mean, they've sought to repatriate people to countries that are on the travel list for unsafe for British citizens to visit, for example. And to me, I guess, because I happen to know this, just of having worked with trying to help Afghan friends out, that there is no legal route, for example, for Afghans to get to the United Kingdom. No, no, like you can't want an employment visa because they don't, we don't recognize the Afghan government, the Taliban government, and you're not allowed to present yourself to British embassy to claim

asylum anymore. And they've made it a crime to claim asylum on British territory in, you know, mainland UK. It's one of those things where people will say, oh, well, I support legal, immigration and people doing things the right way, either not knowing or not caring that there is no right way. I actually asked a friend of mine to help, and he happens to know a classmate of his who went on to become until the government changed under Starmor was a senior government minister. And even he was like, no, I can't get Afghan friends of mine any help whatsoever. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, right, all of these people, right, who you and I, we might think that they're being immiserated, right, for no good reason to satisfy people who will never be satisfied.

But have you considered that 49 quid a month is eight Crunchyroll subscription? Well, 49 quid a week, but still like... Oh, sorry, eight Crunchy Rolls subscriptions a week? A week, yeah, for every member of your household. You can all find a way to relate to the emotional turmoil of original Evangelion. And under Woke Andy Burnham, you can cancel and reinstate those subscriptions as many times as you want while he tours the country talking about smack bomb, pee wet or whatever. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, doing kind of like weird throwback Gen X, Manchester nostalgia shit from what I can tell. And it's just sort of like, all right, this feels like soft power stuff to sell Britain as an interesting and dynamic place abroad, but not when you do it on yourself. You know what I mean? Like kind of playing these like wool over the eyes tricks for people.

It's interesting as well, right? Because we're seeing at the moment, there's some polling to suggest that reform now, maybe again washed, maybe facially. Like, they're slipping into third place. The Tories are coming back up because I guess people really like the idea of employing ex-Nazis as Kemi Badnock did. And it just strikes me that it feels like what we've done is we've just turned the two-party

system off and then back on again to see if we can get it working again. Yeah, and I found this interesting because having left the UK, I am not seeing as many of the headlines on a constant basis as I was before, but I didn't realize that, Raj's new approach was apparently trying to do, you know, we're going to deport non-citizen criminals to Seacot in El Salvador, or at least make the argument that we should deport them abroad. Yeah, I'm sure you are. Whatever. So this is actually kind of interesting because I dug into it and there's about 11,000 non-UK citizen criminals basically, but a third of them are actually awaiting trial. All on anime threats charges, turns out. Yeah, exactly. And for all of the,

there's a list, there's 23 countries on a list of what they call, because the UK government loves being subtle, they call deport now, appeal later countries where if you are convicted, I believe this is, if you, once you have served

a custodial sentence, or if you receive a suspended sentence, they will deport you first instead of letting you appeal your deportation, and they say, oh, well, you can just conduct your appeal from abroad. What I find interesting about this is,

some of the countries on the list are, there aren't very many people from those countries in prison in the UK. This is like Angola and Botswans. some of them there are the largest group of people of non-UK citizen criminals are Albanian citizens the second largest group is Ireland but Ireland's not on that list now I don't know if that's because of the law that basically you can live in it's not an EU you can live in the UK presumably I presume that's got to be the case I

don't think we're sending flights back of like Irish anime fans although but they do have maybe they do apparently do this to Canadians and Australians which is very funny to me like it's a fucked up situation across the board oh yeah in terms of my my sympathies, right, though, I will say the Australian deportation flight is probably lowest down the list, you know? But it's interesting to me because it's like, it feels, as you just

said, that Farage is kind of reaching to grab a headline here, because it's not even like that big of a problem all things considered. Yeah, it's really just, it's kind of a nothing. I mean, right now we have a huge prison crisis as well, which is something that the conservatives are trying to hammer

burn them on, this idea that like, you know, fucking sick cop killers might be released because we literally don't have the space to house them without sort of like squeezing them into a phone booth. Because the people involved were convicted of manslaughter. Yeah, exactly. Because the law says they can't just pick random manslaughter, people who've convicted of manslaughter and say, you don't get to get released when we release everybody who got convicted

of manslaughter. Like, I'm sorry, but y'all can't fucking get the case on them for murder if you think they did it. So one of the kind of worst implementations of like victims law formulations, you know, is be like, yeah, these guys killed a cop and, you know, they couldn't prove beyond reasonable doubt that they intended to do that. So, you know, they need to be sort of special protections for emergency workers. But so amidst all of this, there's no water, everything's on fire. There's going to be another heat wave, which is just going to be fantastic. And also there's no jobs.

So. Yeah. But there is special consideration placed upon British archaeological sites. This was so important to me. When I found this, I, I mean, I don't want to say I rubbed my hands together because given what J.K. Rowling does with that kind of image, I don't want to be associated with that at all. No, so there is, I fucking haze it here, dude. Like, the kicker on this is so funny, having read this in the script. So I'm just going to, we're going to, we're going to savor this one.

And listener, we want you to savor this one, too, because it really does say a lot about society, unfortunately. But November, do you want to take it away on this? Oh, yeah, let me just do a little reading series here. Harry Potter fans have forced a new multi-million pound power cable between the UK and Ireland to be relocated after complaining it would desecrate the grave of Dobby a fictional elf. I'm sorry.

I got to kill myself. Do you mean to tell me that there's people just walking around who have jobs. Like, I could encounter any day of my life, someone who is legitimately, emotionally affected by the prospect of the grave of Dobby the fucking house elf. Yeah, and I mean, you could probably do that on a weekend trip.

You know, you could drive from your extremely hiring job in the home counties to Pembridge here in Wales, and you could go and pay homage. You could bring memory stones, you know. I mean, because the thing is, right, There is a sort of beautiful current of spite in this country, right? You don't have to tell me about this.

I know, right? So the two guys who like cut down that one tree from Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves or whatever, right? That tree never did any harm to anyone, right? It was just minding its own business. It was quite an attractive feature of the landscape. That's true. We don't know that. This is true.

Everyone just like the tree didn't do anything. But actually, actually, I'm on the side of like the cutters. I feel like the tree really fucked something up. That's possible. Well, actually, you could make the argument that when a small child sought refuge in that tree from the hoodlum henchmen of the Sheriff of Nottingham, and then a random American guy killed them, and no one did anything about it. The tree was actually abetting a foreign criminal. So, if anything, the tree should be uprooted and replanted at a different country. But I'm just asking rhetorically, and I'm not saying this to incite anyone to do anything, which is always something that you have to say at the start of a very legal sentence, right?

But how is it that we as a country have the depth of sort of hate that we're like, the two guys will go and they'll saw that tree down in the middle of the night? And yet, the grave of Dobby the house elf remains unmolested, right? Like, no, I sought expert counsel on this because I never read the Harry Potter books because I was slightly too old, I suppose, when they came out, and then everything just seemed so weird about them. But aren't the house elf slaves? Isn't that the whole point?

They are. They are slaves. Yeah. But like in this particular case, I believe that Dovey, he's like liberated from bondage by Hermione Grange. I'm not up on the sort of texts here, I have to say. Yeah, exactly. You're not a haphist for Harry Potter.

Yeah. If you are, I feel like he's reconsider your life choices. There's not a lot more about the sort of like exact sort of Harry Potter cosmology, materology going on here. Oh, I would also say, too, that if you want to extend the metaphor, that's actually gets really fucked up because one presumes that then all the random wild hateful stuff J.K. Rowling says online

counts as the Hadiths. Yeah, I mean, she did try and do this. Do you remember the Anthony Goldstein Jewish Wizards? Yes, she did. Yeah, I also remember the one where she was just like, yeah, the everyone in the Harry Potter universe is shits wherever they want. And like,

it just kind of gets magically cleaned up. It's like, it's like Deuterre canonical. Yeah, it's, but so, Anyway, this article goes on. The character was laid to rest on freshwater West Beach in Pembrokeshire Wales in the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Fans of the wizard series come to leave stones reading, Here Lies Dobby, despite being asked not sue by the landowner of the National Trust because the

beach is an ecologically sensitive sight. So you're also, like, polluting a national park with your, like, wizard boy bullshit as well. Like, that's... I'm going to go out on a list. and say that leaving a threatening voicemail about anime is less harmful than whatever this is. I kind of think so, yeah. Unless it turns out to be problematic anime, in which case I rescind that, I never said it. Not to do the memory CV thing of like day one as president of Egypt,

I immediately order the army to blow up the pyramids, but like day one as Prime Minister, I immediately ordered the National Trust to like, bulldoze all of this into the ocean. The 430 million pound Greenlink Interconnector, which links the national grid to Ireland, was initially going to pass through the site of the grave, the project managers told the Energy Revolution podcast. Fans became aware of the plans after Ludlam pointed out where the 125-mile cable to County Wexford would go underground during a BBC interview. We did the shot, we finished, I went back to London,

and then they aired it a couple of weeks later, and we got hundreds of calls. I'm sort of speechless, genuinely. Like, what do we imagine the tone, the register of those phone calls was? because you have to imagine some are the full like unblocked my fucking anime. Yeah. Yeah. I think some of them, I think a lot of them are just like middle-aged people who I don't know how I describe them. But like I worked like, you know, in sort of retail for a very, very long time.

And the best way I can describe this is someone who would come into our store and complain about like a very, very minor thing. Like a cereal box kind of being a bit open because of just like, packaging and distribution. Like the plastic inside the box is fine. Yeah. The cardboard is kind of ripped. And they'll sort of come in and be like, oh, you can't like put this on the shelf because it's not, you know,

you can see that it's not like, um, uh, in condition to be sold and we're just, and we're just like, fine, whatever, just give it back and take another one. But then they'll spend the rest of the fucking day saying the same thing over and over and over and over. And every time they go on,

it's just like, it becomes worse because it's not just about the cereal box. It's about how they're treated by their, their family and society and like their grandkids won't speak to me anymore. My kids won't speak to me my grandparents my grandchildren haven't visited me in months. You know, the cereal box was like the only

thing that I was looking forward to and you've robbed that from me. Just because I believe in women's sex-based rights, you propose to do watership down to this beautiful pile of rocks that I made up as being important in my head. But this is it. I feel like, and this

almost ties into the sort of first or like the second section when we were sort of talking about like Andy Burnham kind of doing the sort of, you know, very minor gestures that don't really address like the broader issues facing the country. And also like the reform was of like, oh, there is a limit to how much you can just make your politics about you're allowed to be a cunt to someone else. Which is that like to an extent, well, they've all sort of recognised is that like the thing that animates so much of British culture and British life are minor grievances.

And minor grievances that, like, people can just get obsessed and obsessed and obsessed by to the point of insanity. Yeah. I do want to shout out this guy, right? Simon Lovelin, right, this project manager, because I think he may be the last normal person left in Britain. Yes. Lutlam said he did not know who Dobby was and became confused by the calls the company

received saying a colleague told him, apparently we're going to go straight through Dobby's grave. I said, Dobby, who's Dobby? I don't know Dobby. He's a fictitious character in a fictitious book. The whole thing is fictitious. What are you talking about? This is also another thing because in that article,

they also, the project managers also say that, oh, we came really close to, like, having to sort of install these pipelines or whatever. Like, you know, we came really close to, like, actual ruins. Like, bronze age ruins. Bronze age remains, like, actual grace. Yeah.

And, like, the issue, like, one of the sort of things about this country and also, And just like to sort of think about like archaeology and apropology and stuff is that like there is a real like lack of funding for this type of archaeological and conservation work in general. Like actually one of the things that like this country really has a shortage of, but no one really cares about are conservationists. And like people who like, you know, preserve things for a living. Sorry, sorry. Sorry. The only thing we can conserve is this like shit we made up from children's books. Yeah. And if you think about that, it's also to say, okay, well, like one of the sort of conditions, one of the sort of things that animates, again, not animates lots of British politics, but also the kind of bizarre things that we are all having to sort of like deal with when we're sort of told that, yeah,

you can't have anything good and everything's going to get worse. Is this idea that like, what you are sort of really competing against, um, as a political force are actors who really trade in like fantasies and illusions and are this imagined idea. And like, I know that sort of drawing the kind of like, you know, using Harry Potter and kind of like, I know that on the, surface, it's not sort of the same as kind of like the right-wing AI myths that sort of now plague politics and like no one really knows how to engage with. But actually like spiritually, they are kind of the same thing. They are both like these kind of very bizarre fantasies of what the UK is. Yeah, like that kind of like village green like sort of white Britain thing is

as real as Dobby the house elf, you know? And the thing that holds salius to it is that the fact they're like, okay, well like you don't have to do anything to fucking preserve like an imaginary elves. Great. In fact, if anything, you, get to actually pollute the environment in order to sort of show how much you care about this fiction fictitious character. The thing is, right, not to be like, you know, I see you enjoy heroin, perhaps I could entice you with some methadone here, but if you really want, if you must live in a kind of Tweed British children's book fantasy, right? You don't have to do the transphobic one. It's also weirdly the worst written off them, I think. You could, listen, you could be a Paddington

adult if you wanted, right? And I will not make fun of you on my podcast, right? I'm not going to like spend a lot of time losing sleep thinking, oh, there are people in my society who really, really like Paddington Bear. I'm not going to sort of be walking around looking at people thinking, is that motherfucker thinking about Enid Blyton right now. I mean, but it's effectively the equivalent of like stopping actual, I mean, something is getting built to expand the power network in the United Kingdom, like the rare instance of something. amazed we did that. The rare degree of some kind of infrastructure being built and it's basically being redirect.

It's not being canceled, but it's being redirected because of, yeah, of the ever-expanding imaginary of people who liked a book from the 90s and early 2000s and have never gotten over it. It's like the best way I could describe it is it's like if you were taking something equivalent where, you know, climate change is going to like destroy the East Coast in the United States, but you can't build a seawall to keep the ocean at bay because someone's built like fake stone Henge dedicated to the proposition that all of the actors in heated rivalry are actually gay. And it's like, you're never going to give up on this, all right? That's a bad society.

We're going to yell at their Instagram's nonstop being like, no, you can't marry a woman. Your character was gay. And also everyone's going to drown in like Boston because of it. I feel I feel so much for this, this poor fucking guy, Simon Mudlam, right? Because he's like, you know, obviously this is a fictitious character. What the fuck are you talking about? And he then, he then says, his colleague told him, no, it's very, very, very. very serious.

And I just imagine having to explain that to anyone else in any other country to be like, oh yeah, sorry, I actually work in like infrastructure in the United Kingdom, which means that I have to sort of obey our transphobic folk religion and reroute this thing around nothing. We have to disinter the corpses of Bronze Age people who were buried with respect in accordance with their traditions at the time because this crazy lady in a mold castle, wrote a book about how like slave elves

are really happy being slaves. Yeah, and if you say anything against her, she will throw a lawsuit at you, and you will be executed. In your sort of like dying moments as a sort of Bronze Age Britain, right? You're like, oh, I hope I have a good death and get to like go and sort of live with my ancestors

in the afterlife. And then they bury you on the beach and all of recorded history stretches out from that moment towards the National Trust having to tell people not to leave socks on a beach. because a fictional character from a series of children's novels

likes to collect socks and I hate it here. I... I may have told you this before, but my partner and I visited the Roman Bath Museum in Bath a few years back and one of the only, as I'm aware, the only accent example of British Celtic written in Roman letters,

but the British Celtic language is a cursed tablet. Basically is sort of the Roman equivalent of a complaint form, I hope that the last remaining memory of this time is this podcast and us cursing J.K. Rowling. Yeah, I mean, like, because I feel as though the people whose graves got disturbed because of the fictive slave elf could probably understand where we're coming from. And they would probably be on our, I'd like to hope they're on our side. Maybe that's problematic. But I don't know. I don't want, I don't, I don't want to Silas Bronze Age voices.

Bronze Age voices that are like woker on trans people than J.K. Rowling. that's that's I think your first half of your free episode of trash feature I'm sorry it's been a little bit Britain update that hasn't been a lot of tech or a lot of finance but listen like I you take Riley away from this he's the one who knows about this stuff I'll throw I'll throw something in tech related really fast as a treat and then we can move on to the second half I did it I damaged my body and my brain for this podcast I watch the 92nd dog's podcast that was made by uh God, God,

brothers, to promote this film, apparently actual, not AI, serious film, well, horror family film called the end of Oak Street,

where they basically had talking dogs doing a fake podcast. Yeah, that also made me want to, want to die. It was deeply,

deeply unfunny, but also, like, hideous because for some reason, there's some sort of weird tick programmed into it, where before the dogs

laugh in unison, they kind of swing their heads upward, and it feels like they're being pulled by Marionette strings. And I felt very disturbed. And,

like, even on 90, 90, 90 seconds, I still felt like my life flash before my eyes. Then I went through the comments, 99% of which are negative and the rest seemed like applause. Because you're serving up this slop from like an algorithm that's been trained on like exclusively live league videos of dog torture. And you're going, this makes me feel bad. It makes my brain sort of itch against my skull in a way I can't really articulate.

And I saw a lot of people whose opinions I agree with about AI being shit and this is terrible and they don't want to see this film now. But there was one guy. The username was Albert Iago who wrote every time they. laugh, I want to fucking kill myself. And I was like, yes, representation matters. Okay, so, yes, you can go and watch, like, horrible

AI slop of dogs. You can go and mourn Dobby. You can die of heatstroke. These are the things that you can do in Britain. But crucially, crucially, you cannot ever let anything get any better. And that's the trash future promise. So now let's hear from

Riley. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the and half from the first. I'm here speaking with Donald Campbell, the head of advocacy at Foxglove, a tech justice nonprofit, which is currently campaigning against the inclusion of Palantir in the NHS, among many, many other things, because I had been told quite reliably in the right-wing press and on X the Everything app that anybody who was against the inclusion of Palantir in the NHS was basically a pro-sepsis campaigner. Donald, welcome to the podcast and please help me clear that up. Thanks for having me on that to be here. So let's dive right into this like contention

that is really common on like the political right, especially that's made frequently by Lewis Mosley, the UK CEO of Palantir, that if you're against the inclusion of Palantir in the NHS that you are for the inclusion of sepsis in NHS patients. That seems to be the argument that they make. Yes, it's a very funny argument that he makes not in a good way. Fascinatingly for someone who runs one of the most kind of ideological and political Silicon Valley companies to then criticize your opponents for being excessively ideological and political is a pretty strange take. I mean, I think it's quite clearly an attempt to avoid what are very widely shared like worries around what it means to be giving Palantir a role across the NHS and the British state.

And, you know, this has even seen comments, I think, recently from a former head of GCHQ and things. So this is not some sort of highly partisan view. This is a company that very much shares Donald Trump's objective of global and unquestioned, unchallenged technological dominance for the US. And do you put a firm like this at the heart of your public services and therefore kind of open yourself up to the risk that one day if the Trump administration decides we want to turn the screws on these guys, we'll threaten to pull the plug. You know, you're then in that position of weakness. I think, you know, there are MPs in Parliament that have said we shouldn't be quotes at the mercy of firms like Palantir. So that's like a very, yeah, that's a very serious point. And then,

and then I guess we'll get on to this. But there's also a lot of questions around the very dubious claims that have been made that Palantir is supposedly delivering for the NHS, which it turns out just don't hold water at all. No, come on. So let's start with the basics, right? People know Palantir to be some kind of a data management firm. I think the common view of Palantir is that it is a surveillance firm. I think that sort of, misses elements of what they actually do. So let's explain what do they actually do. And I think that will also explain why the NHS itself was so vulnerable to their sales pitch in the first place. Yeah. So I mean their background, when Foxgloff started working on this issue quite a few years ago,

you know, they were very much known as a firm working in the kind of military and security tech space. So it was very surprising to see a company that at that time was known for its work in places like Afghanistan, moving into the NHS. What they also, offer to the NHS, again, everything with Palantir always gets a bit murky and hard to follow, but it seems to be a package of kind of data tools that supposedly help the parts of the NHS that sign up to them with things like scheduling operations, dealing with waiting lists, that kind of thing. So yeah, they claim to be a kind of platform that can manage or help the government entities to manage a range of kind of different sources of data and kind of pull patterns out of it and that

kind of thing. Yeah, it's a bit like one of the big projects in Doge over in the States was to try to take lots of different federal databases that were separate for honestly for a good reason and begin piping them together so that you can, for example, see if someone who's receiving food stamps is also on a list of undocumented people. Or you can look at, for example, someone's, if they have a disability, you can look at all sorts of other stuff about them. And it always seems to me like a way to multiply centralized control over people and give that to a highly politicized organization in the States. In the UK, it seemed always like they were able to say, hey, let's put all of this NHS data together. And then you're going to be able to reduce like operation waiting times

because of it. But you're never going to be able to not work with us again. Because you're, because now we control everything. And if you say we don't want to work with you again, we don't want to work with you anymore for whatever reason, that you're not going to be able to just have your data back because it's all in its different proprietary format that's very much controlled by Palantir. Like, that's how I understand it. That's what they offer,

why it's so threatening, to be honest. Yeah, so certainly I think that, you know, there's a committee of MPs in the parliament here that's warned about two committees that have warned about Palantir's role, but the technology committee, you know, had warned that, yeah, it's a bit like one of them's compared it

to kind of a subscription service and that there are a lot of dangers of what's called lock-in, which is once you've kind of brought them in, it's then very hard to get them out because, yeah, everything you've built on top of their tools is lost alongside that. So I think that's definitely, yeah, a concern that you're not building anything you get to kind of continue to own and maintain and you can't so easily take it elsewhere. And, you know, Palantir obviously dispute that. But a lot of the evidence seems to point that way. I think in terms of the kind of scale of their ambition, there was an interesting moment where

during the kind of inquiry into COVID that was running recently. Louis Mosley, who's the kind of regional manager for Palantir in the UK, went along to that, or it gave evidence to that in which she suggested, I think, that the UK government should have a kind of common operating system for the entirety of government. Now, he didn't go quite as far as to say, this should, of course, be run by Palantir, but right, you get to see a sense of the kind of scale of their ambition that they want to be running these platforms that could sit across a huge range of public services and data. and yeah, when it comes to the worry over, will they then, yeah, share information from the health service

with, you know, parts of the home office that are looking at deportations or whatever. You know, I think he was quoted in the observer as saying, you know, we would do that if we were asked to do it by a democratically elected government. So, yeah, it's definitely a worry about where this data could end up being funneled to once this into the hands of the firm. Yeah, because it's always, we would do this

who were asked to by a democratically elected government. Never mind what comes after that, you know. Yeah, never mind sort of the, I would say quite awesome power that, now, again, in theory, right, the awesome power this would hand to the state, I don't also want to be like, oh, they're so scary and so powerful. We can't give anything to them because they're so powerful. Because in fact, when you're talking about these kinds of companies, you always have to talk about what they say and what they actually do. What they say they want to do is quite frightening for that reason. But what they can actually do appears to be in some ways much more limited. So the, because several NHS trusts have brought the foundation data platform. into their operations. And the Palantir has done its thing where it sends in its forward-deployed engineers who are all, I'm sure, operators and very tough and very soldiery. And then they begin stitching data sets together in whatever way they see fit. Then suddenly you have this platform where you can access it.

And then what they turn around and say, look, at all the trusts that are using us, using data that they already had, just looking at it in a different way and managing it better, they were able to, you know, hugely improve patient outcomes. And I think that almost comes back around, by the way, to why the NHS was so vulnerable to their pitch, which is, oh, actually, you already have what you need to improve patient outcomes. You don't need more investment. You just need smarter data management, right? But did it actually work? Yeah, well, this is the really interesting development in the last couple of months or so is that, yeah, they've got these lovely sounding figures that have been helpfully provided to them by the government and that Palantir executives use very frequently, as have ministers recently, so that the most kind of commonly used one is, look, among the NHS trusts that have adopted this tool provided by Palantir's federated data platform, there have been 110,000 additional operations carried out, which sounds great. But it was always a strange figure because there was never any detail or a breakdown provided

for it. And there was never any context given of, well, how are the trusts that didn't adopt this getting along? Because on a very basic principle, how can you say it's an improvement if you don't have that kind of comparison? So, yeah, Fox Club managed to obtain a breakdown of that data, and it showed that a third of the trust using the tool actually saw fewer operations happening. So already there's then a question there of, okay, if the number is going up, then it's thanks to Palantir, but if it's going down, it's someone else's fault, presumably. And then on top of that, there was this change made to the NHS England website.

They have a kind of methodology page behind these figures. And they said they added something to that sometime around May June this year saying, we can't. actually establish cause and effect for this claim, which is a pretty huge, you know, admission. They're saying this is a nice number, but we've just kind of picked it and it doesn't really stand up. And then astonishingly, I can't really get over this. The head of NHS England, the entity responsible for that figure was in front of MPs and said, yeah, you know, well, I wasn't sure that stood up either and I kind of raised some questions internally about it. And you're like, you're the chief executive of NHS England. Should you not be checking they're getting

their sums right? Also, surely, the question you'd raise internally about it would be with yourself because you're buck stopped with you. There's no management you can go to. Exactly. It's astonishing. So, yeah, the kind of whole case for it has fallen apart. And, you know, even some of the maybe the outlets and the people that were reporting, the more kind of favorable lines have started picking up on this as well. So yeah, if you get to the point where it's like, you know, Palantir wants to say, yeah, we may do some horrible stuff, but look, we do great things for the NHS. And then the second part of that falls apart. And it's like, well, maybe your tools aren't up to all that much, then that's, yeah, that should be kind of, I think, game over for the

contract and for whether the government decides to extend it next year. Yeah, I mean, I think there's this belief. And I think part of it is also prompted by, again, this Palantir's reputation as a big dangerous company that, oh, they're so good and they're so efficient. You know, that, well, we need, we need to enlist, almost like, oh, we need to put on the one ring so that we can save the NHS. like we were saying, it's like, it's just a bit crap, which is kind of the thing that I can't get over here. So I have a quote in front of me here from NHS Greater Manchester's chief data officer who told the Health Select Committee last year, we could match anything that Palantir FDP can do and that, in fact, it can take five minutes or more to run a basic query on that system.

So there's this belief. Well, anything government will make or like that NHS digital will commission that it could own is necessary. necessarily going to be crappy next to this awesome, powerful, slick, fast, luxurious, all-singing, all-dancing private sector solution. And it's just remarkable to see, like, that idea take hold so much that, as you say, the teeth of NHS England says like, oh, yeah, that seems to be kind of crappy. And I have some questions about it, but ultimately, it probably, come on, it wasn't, it's not like we made it. It was made by people who are good. It's partly this just huge lack of confidence in the public sector that it can do things well. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and that, you know,

that NHS Greater Manchester point is really worth emphasizing. And you'd have to hope that our new prime minister who's been working very closely with them in his previous job would be listening very closely to what they're saying now, which is, yeah, and it's not just NHS Greater Manchester. I think there is some NHS trust in Leeds as well, for example, who have said something to the effect of, you know, at best, this is maybe as good as the stuff we're using it already. But in fact, it might mean we lose capability if we adopt Palantir's tools. So there was definitely like a big difference between maybe the trust that have already developed their own stuff and the trust that were at a very kind of low bar that they

were coming in from. But yeah, exactly, this kind of reputational thing with Palantir. I mean, that's one thing you have to accept that they are very good at or do seem to have been very good at until now is marketing and lobbying. You know, they've had huge influence operations, you know, infamously hiring Peter Mandelson's lobbying firm and continuing to be a client, Paul. He was ambassador and still held a stake in that firm, but also there's been this kind of revolving door with a lot of the relevant parts of the civil service. So just recently, the FT Financial Times, revealed that

the current kind of top civil servant in the Department for Health and Social Care before being in that job a couple of years ago was working for a firm that was in Palantir's partnership for the NHS firm called Colonel Farrar. And until the FT noticed that, that would have all just ticked along as normal, but because of that and because people ask questions, she's now recused yourself from involvement in the decision. But there are many, many more examples of this kind of stuff,

of people that are going into Palantir or one of their linked companies and then into the NHS, the Department for Health, or kind of vice versa. So, yeah, it's extensive. Yeah, and I mean, I think that goes quite a long way, really, to explaining why it was so, sticky. I mean, you can say Palantir's greatest, their greatest skill is actually not stitching data together. It's placing friendly people in decision-making roles. Yeah, certainly, yes, I think that,

and I think the level of kind of engagement as well, the kind of access they have to the UK government. So yeah, you know, the other kind of pretty well-known example going back to Peter Mandelsohn is when Kira Stormer became prime minister, he had made his first trip to Washington, D.C., And I think the second place after the White House that he visited was Palantir's headquarters alongside Peter Mandelson. And that trip was arranged by the embassy that Peter Mandelson was running at the time. And meanwhile, he was still holding a stake in the lobbying firm that represented the company. So it's incredibly, it just feels like everywhere you look, there's more of this kind of thing. And so they have this inside track, but then there's also an outside track, which is the story that's minimized is that this is a bit crap.

And the story that is told again and again and again is, and I'm actually reading a telegraph headline here. Burnham set to ditch Palantir from NHS. I don't think he's actually made a decision yet. It's to just the telegraph trying to gin up some controversy because Burnham never awarded any contracts to Palantir when he was mayor of Greater Manchester. But the subhead is left-wing critics have called for a deal to be axed over U.S. tech giants work with Israeli defense forces in U.S. immigration. And that does two things. Number one, it portrays an objection to having an organization at the heart of the caring function of the British state that has helped with some of the greatest repressive and operations in recent years as being somehow silly or

illegitimate, but also that it says, well, they only don't want it because it hurts their feelings, essentially, not that there are non-ideological concerns with its functionality, with the possibility of vendor lock-in, right, or the possibility that because it's so politicized, an American administration could just switch the whole thing off. But I want to go back to that first thing, right? Which is it's always assumed that the ideological case against Palantir is a ludicrous one, and it's someone putting their political preferences above like the needs of sepsis patients to not have sepsis. But let's talk a little more about why that's actually not ridiculous at all. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, if you just pick a few of the entities that Palantir has contracts with,

they're responsible for some of the worst abuses that we're seeing going on at the moment. So they famously got a contract with ICE with Donald Trump's, you know, immigration paramilitary force called, I think, Immigration OS or something like that, which helps to investigate and locate people for deportations, you know, and this is a, I don't think it's particularly controversial or politicized to say that ICE, that everyone is deep, you know, almost everyone is deeply alarmed. By the way ICE has behaved in terms of shooting people dead and removing people to these kind of completely off-the-grid kind of facilities and so on. They also, in quite a high-profile way, Palantir signed a big partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense in early 2024 that they said

was specifically to help with their more related operations or something to that effect. So, yeah, I don't think this is some sort of niche position to say, should we be worried about a firm that's comfortable being involved in operations such as this? Yeah. And that's even kind of, in terms of Alex Karp, their CEO in the U.S. quite often almost seems to sort of wallow in it. I think it's a legitimate question to say, is that the kind of firm we want involved in highly sensitive patient data? Yeah, especially because what Palantir often says, and this is, you know, this is as they usually say, oh, no, if we're a customer of the NHS and we're stitching all this data together in the NHS, and then another democratically elected government comes in and wants us to stitch a bunch of data together somewhere else, and then says, hey, let's kick everyone. went out who's an immigrant with a disability, they say, we won't do that. Promise. Swear to God. There's no way we would do something like that. And they're asking you to trust

them when they have this track record of having, I think, only paper thin separations between things like that and the things that they do for these other clients, IDF, ICE and so on, all the time. Right. It's just, that's their, they just say, trust us. We wouldn't do something like that. Yeah, exactly. And I think they do always seem to quite heavily fall back on the, the position that they will do stuff if a so-called democratically elected, they sometimes use the term liberal democracies, which seems a bit, I think the ship may have sailed on that one in some of the countries that they work. But yeah, if an elected government and a liberal democracy asks us to do this, then it's not for us to question the decision of a democratically elected

government. And that obviously takes you down quite a lot of dangerous roads when you look at, yeah, what that actually means in reality. Yeah. And I mean, some of the other dangerous roads are not just about supporting what a government comes in and might want to do that involves huge, let's say, overreaches. Let's go back as an example, right? The Blair government, when they reimagined, say, the home office, right? We spoke about this act in the show a few years ago with Daniel Trilling. They reimagined the home office as something that was going to be a very powerful enforcement

body and then just said, okay, but we are doing this, we're going to give it a lot of very fine-grained power to deport people, but we're going to assume that no one else is ever going to have access to this big deportation engine and that, you know, this is always going to stay in the hands of nice liberals like us, whether you think they're obviously, we wouldn't call them really nice liberals. That's what they thought about themselves. Much of the same thing seems to be happening here, especially with what Starmer was doing, which is, well, this will never fall into any, like, a democratically elected government will never be a liberal and authoritarian, will never ask it to do something else to go further, to create more state power, to interfere further in people's lives,

to advance the ability of the state to cause, frankly, havoc. And it again just seems like you're being asked to make the same mistakes again, right, that you will never have to face something like this in the hands of an illiberal government. No, exactly. And I think that kind of concern over what you're opening the door to, if not today, then down the line a bit, is something that it does seem some other European states, while not perfect, are much more aware of. So just in the last few weeks, we've seen the French government saying they don't want Palantir working with their domestic intelligence agency. The Spanish government has warned state-backed companies, I think, or state-owned companies against signing contracts with Palantir. So yeah, exactly. You're making

a decision that has these kind of long-term consequences, and that's where the British government really needs to be thinking about it. Yeah, what could the next government do with these powers and also in what ways are you putting the UK kind of further under the thumb of the US in bringing in a firm like this that priorities are so clearly elsewhere. You know, they didn't, Palantir didn't

set them, so you never see this in their advertising. Oh, we set ourselves up because we really wanted to help the NHS or a range of these things. It's like they have big billboards in the US saying we build to dominate, right? It's all out there in the open and it's surprising that people are so happy to overlook that. And one of the things that is also, again, I can't say Palantir wants to dominate, but Peter Teeter Thiel has been quoted as saying is the NHS should be privatized. So it's like we're, you're going to hand an NHS kill switch to a company that is very, very

nakedly political and whose founder has very openly political ambitions. And it's a kill switch because once they're in, they can't leave. And who supports a particular outcome for the health service itself. You what I mean? Yeah, exactly. I mean, you get onto Peter Thiel's views on the NHS. I think he famously said the NHS makes people sick. And then he said, British fund us for the NHS as a case of Stockholm syndrome. So he's not a fan of the NHS. He's also said he doesn't think democracy and freedom are compatible. So yeah, he certainly crossed quite a few lines with some of these very on the record opinions he's got. So where are we now, right? Because we are coming up to a break clause.

in the contract where we can say, you know what, Palantir, we don't think you're giving us a very good service. We're choosing to terminate this contract. Any damage that you do by removing yourself now from the trust that have been working with you is better than any damage you'll do tomorrow from getting involved in more trusts, making their information coalition systems kind of shitty, but then keeping your arms around them. So what are the state's options and where are the pressure is coming from. So yeah, I mean, in terms of timeline, there's a kind of what's called a break clause in the contract with Palantir for the NHS Federated data platform next year. So in 27, but the government has said that it would need to make the decision by December this year.

So yeah, they balls very much in their court on that one and they really need to be moving with that as quickly as possible. There's an interesting kind of thing about Palantir as a side point, wanting to kind of have it both ways on this one, because they will often say, oh, no, there's no lock in. You can very easily take your data and go elsewhere. But at the same time, they'll try and suggest that, oh, if you try and get out of the contract at this stage, it will be a disaster for the NHS because you'll be withdrawing this terribly important tool. So I think there's an interesting question about which one of these things is true. But certainly, I mean, like you've mentioned, there are a lot of, there are a significant number of NHS trusts and

boards out there that have said they have their own tools that are working better, despite a huge push from the government to try and get as much adoption of this as possible, it's only being used by about, it's not being used by all the NHS trusts. I think it's being used by about two-thirds of them just now. I think the level of use that there is is incredibly uneven. I think I read something saying that a significant number of the trusts using Palantir's tools didn't seem to have logged in for the past year or something.

So I think, great. Yeah. And when you look at the numbers for some of them, you know, Palantir will talk a lot about, oh, we've got this great tool for helping with cancer, diagnosis or treatment. It's being used by two trusts. So a lot of this stuff isn't, yeah, that's why it's a really important moment, I think, now because it's not very deeply embedded at this stage. There are kind of local alternatives that have been developed.

Again, the Technology Committee of MPs, that's a cross-party committee, has said, there are plenty of other alternatives out there in terms of data processing for the public sector. So I think, yeah, now is a really important time for the government to be looking to those alternatives, looking to the very good examples that have been developed kind of in-house and the NHS and really working on how they move over to those other options so that they can exercise the end of the contract with Palantir as soon as possible this year. And the pressure to stay on really does seem to be coming from the usual suspects who are making these claims like, oh, left-wing firebrands, want to virtue signal how much they hate Trump more than they want to. to get operations done. And I wonder, as the chorus of voices saying, not just that, but also it's shit, are those voices getting drowned out?

Can you say where you see this thing going, right? Is Burnham making noises like he does want to sort of stake a claim here to say, fuck off Palantir? So I think the first thing that's worth saying is that this supposed chorus of extreme left-wing voices, possibly the one entity that has done the most to expose how ineffective Palantiris, Palantir's tools seem to be or how the numbers don't stand up has been the financial times.

They've done a huge amount of reporting just saying, look, these figures don't really stand up. The claims that are being made for how great Palantir's tools are don't hold water. So, you know, that's a kind of hard-headed look at what's this really delivering or what isn't it delivering. And similarly, like a lot of the criticism in Parliament has been cross-party, you know, significant questions about Mandelson's relationship with Palantir came from the Conservatives as well. So I think it's much broader than Palantir and their supporters would like to characterize it as being. I think in terms of reasons for optimism, I mean, Andy Burnham has said, you know, that his agenda for government is about devolution and about the effectiveness of making more

decisions and putting more power locally. And if you want an example of a kind of top-down, unpopular solution that's been imposed on the country, or at least on England, in terms of the NHS, then Palantir's Federated Data Platform is a very good example of that. And he's had colleagues working very closely with him in Manchester who have come up with something that they say works better. So it's an important moment. But yeah, you're right in that there's a very big pushback coming from Palantir and their fans to try to kind of characterize what is actually a very broad-based concern and objection to Palantir. It's also very widespread within the NHS and within medics, for example, as well, you know, the British Medical Association passed a motion last year saying

they didn't think Palantir was the right partner for the NHS. So it's very broad-based. It's coming from a lot of the experts in the health service, both on the medical and the data side. So yeah, I mean, you can never say for sure, but I think it's a more optimistic moment for perhaps seeing an end to this contract in the NHS than we've had in the last few years. Well, I think that's as good a place as any to leave it.

Donald, I want to thank you a lot for coming and talking to me today. And if people want to support Foxglove, what can they do? Well, they can visit our website, which is foxglove.org. UK and they can sign up to our emailing list there as well if they want to hear more. Those are probably the best places to start. Perfect. See you in a second, everyone. Magical.

Amazing interview, Riley. Definitely love to have heard it and been present for that. But, you know, we were all sort of in respectful silence for that. So thank you. We were deeply mourning Dobby. It's a recursive thing for us. Yeah. And we'll continue doing that.

But we have a Patreon. If you subscribe to it, you get a bonus episode. And we will be very grateful for your custom because we think we make a good product here. And it's a pleasure doing it. We also have a bunch of things to shout out. I mean, November you've got no gods, no mayors. You've got big, self-crimes. You've got Kill James Bond, all excellent shows.

In Infinity Podcasts. Yeah, it's like you should check out 10,000 posts. You can check out lines led by donkeys. You can also check out my band, second homes. Our debut album is available on streaming as well as on band camp, which means we make $0 from it, but it's very convenient. So please check that out if you're interested. Yeah, do all of that and we'll see you next time.

Bye everyone. Bye. Bye.