TRASHFUTURE - The Brian Georgetown Massacre

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

This week, we learn the story of the Diapers dot com billionaire who wants to build a utopian city in the desert based on the principles of Georgism. Does this sound like The Line? Well, it’s been compared to it by the same credulous weirdos who love that, too. Also, a startup! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *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 Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, and welcome to this episode sink first. Oh, yeah, of course. I forgot. Sorry Alice. Thank you fucking. I will sink here with a drop of Timothy Dalton saying selling dope. Okay. Three, two, one, Mark selling dope. That's right. Let's have Milo saying three, two, one, Mark and then Timothy Dalton saying selling dope just as the cold open. Yeah, I think that'd be fun. Hello, and welcome to the TF podcast. It's that free episode. That is it. It's the free one. It is. Yes. It's free coming into your ears cost free gratis. Yeah, that's right. There's no you have not paid anything. You don't pay with money for this one. You may have paid someone else. You paid a tout to like listen to this. Yeah. Yeah, I got tickets to the trash future not live show. Yeah, that's right. Yes, it'll be different by the way from the live show which we did yesterday and which will be coming out as a bonus episode in a couple days. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I'm sure glad we forgot all about that.

But I was like, as is my want. I was watching from a gantry with a sniper rifle like in the movie Ronan. Yeah, one day Alice will successfully assassinate us. Unfortunately on every occasion up to now she's like got involved in some sort of Laurel and Hardy type hijinx like Drink of water right as I pull the trigger and there's like a beautiful perfect hole appears in the curtain behind him. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. This is like, oh, should have rolled more than one bullet. Hey, when this happens, I brought a single shot rifle from 1870. Oh, when I reload this thing in 20 or so minutes, you're going to be sorry. Yeah. Yeah, she aims a musket at me and then ends up like, you know, killing the bartender who's at a perfect 90 degree. Yeah, I drop the tamping rods down off the gantry and it like hits a guy. Hey, can you give me my tamping rod back? I'm trying to tamp up here.

Oh, no, I dropped my little cornucopia of gunpowder. Yeah. What do you need that? What do you ever need to tamp? How embarrassing. I see you've been watching Seinfeld again. Alice Seinfeld. Yeah, that's me. No, we got some stuff. Got some stuff to talk about. Oh boy, have we ever. In shortage news, much of the British press shortage news, I was like, oh, fuck no. I've got some shortage news because on my walk here, I saw that there is a festival of street art being sponsored by Squarespace happening outside Box Park. Fucking awesome. Hell yeah. I've talked about this on the Bottleman before. I think that shortage now has to be understood as like a stupid neighborhood.

Like how you have, yeah, exactly. Like you'll have different neighborhoods that have different traditions or whatever. This is our renowned Oath Quarter. World Heritage Oath Quarter. Yeah, the Oafie Kings and Queens. And to be clear, it's not that it was always thus. It's that it became like this at some point in sort of the last couple of decades. I don't know. I always like taking pictures of the street art sometimes as I come down here. You know, people like.

Oh, it's extremely new. It's a lot of fun. I think my favorite one still was someone who did a bottle of like Chanel perfume but wrote COVID on it where Chanel should go. Oh, whoa. It does make you think. Yeah, I thought, boy, would I love to own a piece of this. The one thing I miss about Facebook is the Facebook group, Thank Mr. Banky, which was a Facebook group where you could post, extremely, we live in a society art and graffiti that you found around the place in order to thank Mr. Banky for making it. So here's some other stuff, right?

In short shortage news. That was the shortage news. This is the shortage news. The right wing press has been in paroxysms of bewilderment that lorry drivers, of whom there is a national shortage, are now earning more than, you know, like architects and trainee solicitors. Well, one of the locus of this that's been very funny has been weather spoons because weather spoons have been having shortages of everything. And this has been like sort of caught in between two things. The FBP guys who remember that Tim Martin, the CEO of weather spoons was a big Brexit guy and are now sort of furiously posting, ah, how are you enjoying your Brexit?

Whereas on the other hand, weather spoons themselves put out a statement that said, oh, the reason why this is happening is industrial action because of the unions. And I'm sure one of them would have claimed that they were doing a strike if they're doing a strike, right? The case, the Unite put out a statement saying, yeah, no, there just hasn't been any industrial action in like warehousing or like HGV drivers. This is just a thing you've made up to make us look bad. Yeah, classic. Well, it's actually ironic that Tim Martin is a big Brexit guy because he looks like a perfect mirror image. He is like an oath-pilled AC Grayling who is himself an oath as well.

Yeah, like they look exactly the same. Like if AC Grayling was just about pints and not philosophy, he would be Tim Martin. Two AC Graylings guard the door, one only tells lies. Yeah. And the other only sells pints. Yeah. So what I've, what I grabbed a couple of quotes about this from the media and let's see, hang on. This is a media, but we hate those guys.

One supermarket boss thinks that increasing wages for drivers will result in inflationary pressures. Paying drivers more in itself isn't the solution as it is resulting in making and then making choices about their level of working hours and balancing reduced hours along with weekend working. No, the solution is to make prisoners do it, which is what we've been doing in the meatpacking industry. Yeah. Awesome. It will also create more inflationary pressures in the sector, which clearly no one wants. And this is what it gets very funny, right? This is where like now these people are all saying, please let us access the EU labor market.

And so we can hire, yes, we can underpay people. How are you enjoying your Brexit? I'm going to become an FPP guy when we like inevitably are like forced to rejoin on terrible terms. That's the one time when I will give like the like Libs some credit for this one because they're going to be having a fantastic time in the mansion. Oh, of course. It's going to look like fucking event horizon in there. You won't be able to move for like smug rejoin pricks just going, hmm, interesting. You claim to like want independence and yet you've been forced to rejoin the European Union.

It's just like great. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's also a day where I'll be like, yeah, fair place to the Libs. Well, it's what we're right about this one thing. But I mean, well, number one, right? It's what they're really saying the name of the podcast back to the Romani acts. Yeah.

They're coming out of the water tower for one last job. One of the crucial things they're saying is we this is none of our employees. Our economy works unless we could like systematically underpay most of the people who are doing the actual stuff, right? Yeah. And that's fine. Especially like also, not not even just that we do the exploitation, but that we have a constant like reserve army of labor that we can draw to make them do this shit because like, yeah, British people, it turns out mostly just don't want to do it. We don't we don't want to drive the trucks. We don't want to work in the abattoirs.

And without a ready access of like EU migrants or I guess people we just fucking conscript from the military or from jail. It's just not getting done. Well, the thing is there are people who are doing it just not at prices that supermarkets want to pay, right? So ultimately, it's, you know, it's there are people that it's it's it's simply like this is actually happening. It's happening in a way that the you might say the FBP liberals don't particularly care for, you know, because it's let's say not it's it's it's proving their point, but it's also denying them their treats. Yeah. Right. Which they hate.

They are fine. They are absolutely fine with that level of like, you know, labor of quite brutal labor exploitation so long as they get continue to get their, you know, custard. That's why we have to go back to it. At the same time, right, there is the sort of the threat that there's the constant threat of, oh, well, if we that we must preserve the profit margin at the same level. If we have to pay drivers more, that means we're going to charge you more because it's the same. And it's it's I don't know. It seems like there is a lot of consent being manufactured now for everyone to pay higher grocery bills and blame the truck drivers because, you know, the obviously supermarket's never make any profit. That's the thing is they just that every every cost and saving they pass directly on to the consumer.

Yeah. There's never any gap between those two things. But it's also, you know, well, so they said further before we move on. Well, to ease the pressure, we need the government to quickly allow us to access the EU labor market. Again, we need to be able to pay, you know, very low wages and to and the thing is the government is more than happy to let them do that with like putting truck drivers on a shortage occupation list. Yeah. You know, whilst the industry must play its part in increasing the driver pool through fast track programs and apprenticeships. So I'm very excited to have someone driving an HDV who's like had like the same level of training they give to contact tracers.

Awesome. Yeah. We're all HDV drivers now. Yeah. I want agency HDV drivers who have had like a one day like like moped training course. And they're like an HDV in many ways. It's like a big moped. So take what you've learned today, fellas, and go out there and get them. So I've got a I got a startup here.

In fact, I have two startups. I'll let you both pick which one you want. Oh, how come your mom lets you have two startups? Because my parents are divorced. Oh, that's right. You get one from each parent. That's exactly it. We got one called Alfie.

And one called hate that half a X. Oh, fucking hate that more. Oh, Riley. No, not again. I know what the second one is. So go to do Alfie first. All right. Let's talk about Alfie.

Everybody's talking about Alfie. This is from the company's letter to its shareholders. Okay. Our intention to focus on areas of technology which are challenging and finding solutions for areas which are disconnected and currently inefficient in the IT world where paramount for our delivery and positive growth. Along the way, this digital transformation consumed us with so many new insights which had to evolve without getting personal while still being able to understand the complexity

of human nature. Had to evolve without getting personal. Thank you, Banky. Our software program will forever change the user experience worldwide in front of any digital screen forever. Our philosophy to quote, live while you wait makes it a positive experience for everyone. Live while you wait. What do you think it is on a basis?

It puts you like screens like along a queue so you can just like fucking do some AR shit while you're like waiting to see a person at a counter. I'm sorry. No, that's far too useful. Is it like a special screensaver that's like the Domino's Pizza Tracker? Looks like your cancer treatment. Alfie is my cancer on fake. Oh no.

Is that good? Alfie's proprietary AI algorithm understands small facial cues and perceptual details that make potential customers a good candidate for a particular product. Oh, it's doing phrenology on your customers. Oh, yeah. Oh, boy. But where is the question? Oh, it's going to be bad.

It's going to be really bad. Is it online stores? Oh, no, no, no. It's out of home advertising. So it's like you're in front of a billboard and the billboard is looking at like measuring your skull and saying if you're going to buy the thing. You've got a Vodafone-ass skull, my man. Yeah.

To be fair, I do be saying that to people. Yes, that's correct. The new insult just dropped. Yeah, it's shaped like the Vodafone logo. Just like any wireless character and just like, yeah, you've got like fucking EE looking-ass ears, dude. You've got a big fucking O2 lobe at the front there. Well, it's an AI enterprise platform powering computer vision with machine learning models,

deep learning and edge computing to deliver the right content to the right person at a right time in a respectful and ethical manner. But the only place that's ever been rolled out is in the back of taxis in Miami and Belfast. I mean, two places that are so often mentioned in the same breath. When Pitbull said Mr. Worldwide, he was primarily referring to Miami and Belfast. So basically- I drive taxi in Miami and Belfast. It's in the back of Uber and Lyft cars.

There are little tablets, like Lenovo tablets, and you sit down and then they scan your face and based on like what vibe you have, there is some- You're telling me that an IBM computer is being used for racial profiling for the second time in a hundred years. I'm sure it's a higher number than that. Yeah, probably. I'm just excited for us to be like, as we restart the troubles, as the fucking second die of civil war starts, as you're being kidnapped in the back of a Belfast taxi, you will get

like served good insights about things that you might want to buy. Well, maybe the taxis could be an effective weapon in the troubles and you know, they can have a sort of like Catholic detector attached to the sort of phrenology thing to enable us to stop the RA. So, basically, here's how it works, right? It's a screen. It tracks you. It plays you an ad.

Cameras in the hardware monitor viewers' reactions to content in order to provide insights to advertisers. If I make a frowny face at the advert, it will try and sell me something else. Yeah, that's correct. If you're not enjoying this podcast, we know. So, start enjoying it more. So, basically, right? If you're an advertiser, you subscribe to the engagement data and then they'll like

your retinas as you look at the ad. They'll track your voice as you respond to the ad and then all that will be wrapped up and sold to third parties. And I think we can say, thank God that this is clearly horse shit. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Thank goodness. It is 100% stone bonka horse shit. Yeah, once a company says that we use a proprietary AI and machine learning model to, you know,

do some MacGuffins, you know that like, no, this is a story being told to investors. But in this case, the story being told isn't to soft bank. Oh. It's to retail investors. It's a meme stock. Oh, fuck. Oh, that's kind of sad, actually. So, they also say, they say constantly, but we respect user privacy.

We respect user privacy. We respect user privacy. And I think one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this, right, is that I think it really underscores the limits of what privacy is and how to think about it. Right. Because privacy, think about it that way, indicates that like, if Milo Edwards smiles at a KFC advert, then the orange marching band should not have any part of it. Father McFurphy doesn't get to know.

Exactly. He does not get to know. Why does this man who's come over here from London get to enjoy a KFC? Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. And so this, but that's like, that's how the conception of privacy works.

Right. But if they can research everybody and then make a conclusion that like people of Milo's head shape make a certain facial movement when they like KFC. Yeah. Eating KFC. It's a movement you do with your face. Then that's considered to be ethical. Have you ever noticed that like people with O2 shaped heads sit in the back of a taxi like

this, but people with the phone shaped heads sit in the back of a taxi like this? Look, what we can certainly say is that people with women shaped heads be shopping. Oh boy. Do they claim to be able to identify gender? Yes. Oh boy. We can always tell. We can always tell.

Yeah. But what I mean by the limits of privacy, right, is that this, I think you can say you have an instinctual preference not to be constantly a research subject being kind of studied so that you can be better manipulated in future, but privacy never touches that. Privacy says everything is fine so long as you're not identifiable in particular. And it's one of the reasons. And I think this kind of startup is a great example of why privacy is such a limited discussion to have.

So basically back to the billboards, they say these ad spaces can be fitted with technology capable of identifying facial expression, age, demographic makeup and gender of passing crowds. Hell yes. Yeah. It's gathering the data on you that like your t-shirt already has like, I'm a welder born in February who likes chicken. Yeah.

That's why the t-shirt started to come out was they're an early version of this. They were a fucking op. Yeah. Like a data set so specific that it is identifiable as you without saying that it's you. Well, let's just say that Canadians who are fans of Niagara wine and really like oysters and have more than one podcast, what they tend to like. What do we tend to like? That's not that.

That's not that. That's not identifiable. Wine, oysters. So basically they say, look, it's perfectly ethical for us to, you know, get distinguished because imagine right this, the implications of this if you're like walking up and the billboard just decides you're a guy. Oh yeah. And then yeah.

I'm in the bathroom and when I close the door, the screen on the back of the store door identifies me as a dude and like starts loudly like selling male products to me. Arctic Rush. No, I wanted Dove Pink or whatever it is. Yeah. I didn't want Arctic Rush. No, Link's Africa, anything but Link's Africa. So they say they can distinguish five mood categories between very happy and very unhappy.

Just what the fuck are you talking about? You fucking clowns. What do you know? What does that even mean? Like what do you think that like people pull uniform facial expressions when they're in a certain kind of mood? Yes. Even if the AI can identify the expression.

They work out that you use Twitter and it just inverts that. So the unhappier you look, the more happy they figure you are. So this is from an interview with, what is his name, Dr. Pereira, the guy who started this thing. Okay. I'm the founder of Alfie, which we recently IPOed in which with the debate about internet and data privacy raging on is actually a solution for many of the challenges advertisers face today.

It's a first of its kind AI ad tech company from digital out of home, for digital out of home displays from billboards and kiosks to TVs and ride sharing. They've only done the ride sharing ones. They had, they made $8,000 last year. Awesome. Yeah. You can call this the outer net because it identifies and interacts with a person outside based on a complete physical profile, but with complete anonymity.

Uh-huh. Yeah. That's right. And so brands then only pay for views that were seen by a human. So basically the more people look at your ad, the more you have to pay to Alfie. See, that's the one thing that I think could actually be like marketable there is that you like sell based on, sell like a billboard based on views, right? It's a billing thing, but they've then laden that down with a bunch of other shit about

how they pretend that they can identify your gender and your vibe. Yeah. It also doesn't make any fucking sense because most billboards, if you're taking that, I can see why they've only been able to do this in the ride share situation because you've kind of got a captive audience there. Whereas like most billboards are either at the sides of roads or they're in like high places in like crowded public places where this technology couldn't possibly tell if any one person was looking at it or not.

Like if I almost every billboard I see in my day to day life is something that I'm driving past. So are you suggesting me that some fucking camera on the billboard is like peering it through the window of my car and discerning what my relationship with that billboard is? Actually, this could be more successful is they just identify the make and like year of your car and the color and they like personality fucking type you based on that. Like, hey, this guy's driving a BMW. Yeah.

He's probably really cool. Yeah. Cooled by our stuff. Why every time do I go past to the fucking thing like the billboard starts selling me dick extension pills? Yeah. Yeah. Selling me condoms and Lynx Africa.

You're going to need these, buddy, for all the women you're having sex with. Hey, all men. Maybe it's 2021. Sure. Yeah. Pal. Buddy, old pal. Oh, my.

Go get that pussy or bussy. Anyway, so the last thing about Alfie, this is a Miami area rideshare driver who has spoken of the condition of anonymity. I've had it for almost two months and I haven't received any pay and haven't been told from Alfie how we get paid. Awesome. That's how you know it's a good, it's a very, very good company. Mr. Worldwide.

Anyway, so shall we talk a little bit about something else? If you can count to Quattro, you can actually summarize their quarterly profits. So shall we talk about something else? Because there's something that's been on my mind recently. Is it the dick extension pills? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Ever since I rode in your car.

So it's season three. We had soft bank and we're not leaving soft bank behind, right? No bank left behind. No. No, especially because soft bank is not a bank. It never was. However, I wanted to bring on a new sort of member of our cast of characters. Yeah, because the thing is we're on season four of Trash Ucher, the one in which we

argue that Britain is fake. And so because we're doing a new season, we got to have a new villain. That's just like drama. I welcome Trash Ucher saying Britain is fake, but I would encourage them to go further and say the world is fake. Well, that's sort of what I'm doing. Because I think Britain is fake is a great starting point, but I think things are going to get a little bit bigger, especially you could say Anglo-America, not a real place.

The West is fake. The West is fake. So as part of that, I'm going to be talking about a new technology investor on the scene. Because if you recall, when we talked about soft bank, we sort of spent a while puzzling out what exactly it... You know what it is based on what they say they are on their website or whatever. Thinking, trying to think a little bit more deeply about what they are and what they mean. In this case, our new season four pantomime villain is a different firm.

It's called Tiger Global. Don't be a global hyper-magnet. Yeah. Well, so Tiger Global is a very sort of prestigious hedge fund in the States. It is one of the, in fact, it is one of the Tiger Cubs. So Tiger management was a very sort of like a legendary hedge fund. It was sort of active in the 2000s, founded by a guy called Julian Robertson. I think you said Julian Tiger, which would have been a very funny.

And then many of the portfolio managers of that fund then left to go form their own funds. And those funds were called the Tiger Cubs. I see. Yes. And they've also named themselves Tiger. In this case, yes. Is it own Tiger Tiger? If only.

I would like that actually. I think that would be good if it owned Tiger Tiger. Well, because you would drive there in your car. It would be a good investment. Yeah. I'd drive to the nightclub Tiger Tiger. Yeah. Of course.

And have a fun evening. And then you'd say, hey, ladies, do you want to see a car? It's nice. Yeah. That's all right. No. And at Tiger Tiger, that would work. It wouldn't work at almost any other nightclub, but at Tiger Tiger, I'd back myself.

A car, like one with four wheels, holy shit, dude. So, so Tiger Global, you might have heard of the Tiger Cubs as well, because another one was in the news recently, a firm called Archegos, which was headed by a guy called Bill Huang, which collapsed because they invested too heavily in Viacom and it nearly brought down credit Suisse. You always hate to see a Tiger Cub get put down. Yeah. So, Tiger Global is like similar to Archegos.

It was butted. But instead of just investing in making sort of bizarre investments in equity markets, what Tiger Global is doing now, it is becoming a VC, but it's a hedge fund. It's doing VC shape and its founder is named, this is quite a fun name, Chase Coleman, the third. I see. Chase Coleman. Chase Coleman's son.

Yeah. That name just dumped my body off a yacht. Yeah. So, but what's, why are we talking about this? Right? Imagine having three generations of motherfuckers called Chase. It's not even a real fucking name. If you're going to give a name to three generations of a family, at least use a real name.

Then use one of those fucked up American surnames we're going to pretend as a first name, like Chase. I'd be happy to be called like Chase Manhattan or something. I think that'd be fun. Yeah. I'd love to be called Morgan Stanley. I've just found a picture of Chase Coleman, the third. He looks like one of the photos that that like a dead like re-pixelator throws out.

This is not a human man is the thing. No, he is not. He looks like a young Brian wrote his long-term partner, Lee Fixall, quits in 2019. No way. Oh, yeah. This is like one of those these this person does not exist. Also, why? Why are they in the Davey Mail?

Interestingly, as well, he, her, the mother of his of his wife. His mother-in-law, we would normally say. His mother-in-law was the leader of the Estonian War of Independence. Oh, okay. Well, that's usually a good thing. So that's fine because now there's a leader is a leader of the Estonian independence movement rather. Oh, and that she didn't fight in the war in the like teens, but boy was she is a popular

member. I was going to say, yeah, she was in fucking fun guts as army. Yeah. No, no. It's a picture of him from Bloomberg where it's his face superimposed onto a sparkly gold background with like sparkles in front of his just enjoying it. It's just it's quite hypnotic. No.

So anyway, that's that's terribly interesting. But what we're mostly talking about here, right, is it's sort of what it is that they're doing because you know, SoftBank said, you know what we're going to do? We're going to decide that we're going to use our giant amount of money. We're going to make the Saudis slightly less rich is what we're going to do. We're going to use our giant amount of money to make it so that if we choose to invest in a dog walking app or whatever, dog walking apps suddenly have to be worth a billion dollars because we're going to create what's called a huge moat.

So what Tiger management is done is they were like, wait a minute, I figured out if if your if your goal is just to place capital, if your goal is just to get money out the door as fast as possible and you don't really care what it is that you're getting it to do. Yeah. The KLF invest a million quid. Yeah. Yeah. So what they've done is millions, but yeah, it's sort of.

So what they've done is they've invested already this year in like like a couple, like some hundreds of startups with their fund because they invest in a new company every two days. They'll just take like a million or like I see. So you like they've got a big clock counting down in their headquarters, like Pacific Rim. Trash Futurehouse stressed all in black and against a black background in an advert, clicking their fingers, going every two minutes, Facebook and invests in a new company, right? So they can be stopped. It's not as big as the vision fund, right?

It's about, they have about 16 billion for venture capital, but what it's doing, you know, nothing really, I mean, what's 16 billion dollars versus the vision fund to be fair, the vision funds 100 billion was like earth shatteringly large. So this is quite big. And so like what it is that they're doing is they are, they say they're making their flywheel spin so fast that they are just placing money, placing money, placing money, placing money, placing money. And it's, you can sort of go back to, damn, I sure do love living in an economy where

we even gesture at the rational allocation of funds, of capital, of whatever. No, it's a, it may as well be like money pit investing. Yeah. Yeah. Like if you can, if you can go and if they're, because the whole game now is to try and just make it, because money is free, the whole game is to make not just as big a bet as you can, which was soft bank, but now to make as many big bets as you can. Didn't there used to be a thing where you had to like, before you invested in a company,

you had to like investigate it a bit to see what the deal was with it. I vaguely remember a concept like this. It had like a name. I don't remember what it was. It used to have to do it and used to have to do like sometimes even like a certain number of hours of it. Yeah. No.

Well, it's a shame that no such concept exists. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Crazy old outlets. I just say things sometimes. Yeah. So basically, right?

It's they, they've hired an army of consultants from Bain and company to just like, I don't know, tweak on, tweak on Adderall and like stare at financial statements for like, you know, 24 hours at a time before they sign another giant check. But like, you know, but it says mostly what they're doing is they've realized, and I think quite rightly so, they've realized that at this point, when, when we've been disconnected from the line for so long, and when most of these companies are just existing to never provide a service to anyone to just kind of exist and then go up, make the number go up and then just move the number around a little bit, that you don't really need to worry too

much about what it is that they're actually doing, you know. The Bain and company consultants are doing due diligence in the same way that all those private companies that are doing like coronavirus tests, so you can go on holiday. They're just going, yeah, it looks fine is the, I guess you're all good. So oh, look at the test. All good. Yeah. Here's your stamp.

Thanks for the 39 quid invested in some old TF stalwarts. In fact, remember a Divi? Oh, yes. The thing that would let you like break up bills and stuff. No, no, it's the way you could borrow money against your house. Oh, yeah. You could like rent your house back off to selling it. Rent your dream home.

Well, will you help you save for a down payment? You can then buy the home from us whenever you're ready or walk away with your house statements. A 14 year old Bain intern has just looked this over and just screamed yes immediately. And they've just done it. Sorry. Bain and company being staffed entirely by Serge Gansbaw. They're old enough.

We've also got a version of Jenny Craig called Calibrate. That's basically just a diet pill subscription. Oh, they're doing fucking tummy tea like an influencer. That's so cute. She's just out of a role basically. So the consultants are like, hell yeah, get me some of that shit. Like seeing a dog stand on its hind legs, you know. I love how they banned the diet pills that actually worked.

And so now you can only get ones that don't work. I think that's a step back for society. When they were giving you fucking speed over the counter so you'd eat less. Awesome. Because you've got to be high on speed, Anthony. I don't want to say it was a better time, but it was a more interesting time when you could spend your entire life balanced between being on Coke and being on heroin. Yeah, they give you cocaine over the counter.

Awesome. You could just like buy explosives anywhere. You could mail order a machine gun. Yeah, there were too many people starting businesses with their dentists. And that's why that had to end. Everybody was driving a car that would instantly kill them while like six shots of bourbon deep. It's like, yeah, just swaying.

Oh, Mr. Davidson, you've come in for your root canal. Might I share a line with you before we begin? So there's this. That's what I like about you, Davidson. You always speak your mind. Get in the chair. So there's this thing, right? And then there is like a fertility treatment that employers can offer to employees called

carrot. Is there another one called stick or like carrot? Yeah, using the big, using the big carrot shaped like cum baster to inseminate my female employees. Well, I think it's it's a health benefit, but for some reason that has to be a tech company. Cool. Yeah.

Do you know what cum does helps you see in the dark? So let's get let's get pregged up, ladies. Yeah. So it's with this, right? Like what are I'm not really like the financial press has been talking about it for some months now, right? I'm not really ready to say, well, here's what it means. But it certainly does seem like there is a kind of accelerating, an engine is accelerating,

but I don't know what it's connected to necessarily other than this air. Just like, I hear this weird screeching flywheel noise, but it's not turning anything because we disconnected in season three. You may recall we disconnected the line from anything anyone was actually doing. And so as a consequence from that, we've all these things that are just turning nothing. It's just it's just Bitcoin again, right? It's just like running a big diesel engine to make nothing. Yeah.

And I mean, like, look, it's I'm not going to say, right, that I have important Potemkin's to manufacture. And like, look, I'm also I'm not going to say, right? That Tiger isn't making money with the strategy. It's making money hand over fist. It's an incredible strategy. It just doesn't matter. Yeah.

Yeah. It's not one of these things where it's like, oh, and like all of the sort of sandhill road people, you know, they're what what they felt was this like where they felt like they had the aesthetics of this massively sort of new way of working this disruptive world, this move fast and break things thing. Right. All of those people are now getting very uncomfortable. They got uncomfortable with soft banks.

They felt that soft bank was a big dumb intruder in their world and they were partly right. But even still all of the dumb shit soft banks sort of blew up on it made money and all the other things. It's just that like it's sort of really it really sort of sticks in. It really sort of I mean, look, does it matter that it makes the entire sort of hierarchy and premise that right that like nothing can be planned. Nothing can be understood because if you try to plan, you're going to lose tons of money because human behavior is like give it to some genius in both senses of the word who

is just going to like essentially assign it at random in ways that are going to be incomprehensible to you. Like this is like a market God that has like priests and they're an elect and you just do stuff entirely through their intercession. Yes. Dominic Cummings needs to commune with some virgins and then decide how the economy is going to. And soft bank.

Soft bank upset those priests. Those priests came in and upset the old priests who were the sort of pinstripe suited bankers. Yeah. We moved in watch terms from like a gold Rolex day date to like a titanium Odomar Royal Oak. And now we're moving into like a Mickey Mouse watch with the hands that rotate. But that's like a fit bit. We're what we've moved into like an NFT of that Mickey Mouse watch that tells the real time.

But it also it's like so new priesthoods keep moving in. And in a sense it's the revenge of the old taking out jobs. It's a revenge of the old priesthood a little bit because this is a this is one of the most deeply establishment companies there is in this world. Right. This chase guy is actually a descendant of like the Stuyvesants like the guys who fucking all the wall street back in the day back in the day. So like yeah.

And you know what but what's what really I find very interesting about it right is that it sort of shows that there's nothing special about these guys. There's just as big an amount of money as you can have. They've sort of slowly realized that what you have to do is just push it out the door fast and just allow sort of you know and instead of being directed towards some kind of goal to sort of have human effort kind of randomly evolve and just sort of take on strange new shapes like you know Darwinia. But this is the thing we've actually finally come back around to like an ironic gift of

prophecy stuff like by this point if you were the right person if you were this chase guy like one of other like five other people you could start a hedge fund that says you know once a week I will go up on top of a mountain. I will cut open an animal. I will look at its liver and its kidneys and then based on that information I'm going to invest in a series of companies and the effect would be absolutely identical. Or Giri Capital. We've just had a business idea TM TM TM it's our idea you can't take it.

Next shirt. Next shirt I did. Guy like a contrast collar shirt staring over a massive entrails. All right. Did no one make that shirt? No. Unless you're one of the people we asked to make shirts. Yeah.

In which case still don't make it until we ask you to make it. That's weird. Okay. But you know maybe we will. Are we ready to talk about a little, a little, a little city. It's a little guy. It's a little birthday boy. Milo.

Did you know the diapers.com guy wants to build a utopian megalopolis? Rightly. Question. What's diapers.com? And also. I feel like the title can get away. Yeah. Yeah.

Listen. Thomas Moore and fucking Aristotle and play so and shit. Everybody's invented a utopian society in their time. Why not for the time that we live in, which is the extremely stupid one? Should it not be diapers.com? Yeah. Yeah. The guy from diapers.com.

No. Wait. Is diapers.com. Is this like a regular diapers thing or is this like an adult baby thing? No, no. This is a guy who's rich enough to have his utopian megalopolis profiled in Bloomberg. He was the CTO of Walmart. Right.

Yeah. Okay. I mean, again, sorry. I really hate to drill down into this so much, but why? What is diapers.com? That would be a place where you could go to buy diapers, I imagine. But that's so stupid. Like you wouldn't like, you wouldn't have like tables.com.

Oh, you want to buy or like, I don't know, fucking keyboards.com. Like that's this too general. So his first big success was diapers.com, which he sold to Amazon. Then he started a competitor jet.com and sold it to Walmart. And then he became like a big wheel at Walmart. And so what I think is it's almost cute, basically, what he's done, right? Is he said, hey, I'm going to, I've sort of, I have lived this very sort of charmed life. I have multiple hundreds of millions of dollars.

I know anyone I know really, as long as I want them to, will never want for anything. And then what I've done is I read a little book called Progress and Poverty. And then I came up with an idea. Oh no. No, not even Atlas Shrugs. No, we're playing the hit This Man. I knew you knew that I would recognize that title. This Man is a member of an arcane and dangerous sect.

One that was justly suppressed by the governments of it today. For its esoteric weirdness. This Man is a Georgist. It's so cute. And Georgism is a 19th century economic philosophy that essentially the boss and the worker are both on the same side being exploited by the one overclass in existence, the landlord. And the thing is right. If you sort of read a summary of Georgism really fast without thinking about it anymore,

you're like, yeah, that makes sense. The landlords are deeply parasitic. But wait, what about all the other stuff? What about, say, you know, actually working? It's like, no, no, the great thing is, goes Georgism. If we can just make the state the universal landlord and then everyone pays the state, then sort of all of the problems in society will kind of just be naturally fixed. It's kind of like the left wing equivalent of the right wingers whose only deal is a flat tax.

It's something that you've sort of agglomerated on. You've clutched on to one weird trick. And the one weird trick in Georgism is land and the taxing of land and the ownership of land. And what I think is really funny about this, right? I think we're sort of, you sort of see this in places like Neon and, you know, like, spoiler. Regular trips to Neon. This place is compared to Neon. Because it's also very stupid.

Yeah, well, because I'm living in both. It's very funny when people encourage a comparison where you have to be like, that's bad. You don't want to be like that. But what I think is really interesting, right? There's this. I think there's this tendency when things are in times of sort of great turmoil for wealthy idiots to go and create doomed intentional communities based on like one thing that they read one time. I mean, they don't have to be wealthy idiots.

I mean, a lot of the sort of like religious revivals, like the fucking Bund over country in upset New York that ultimately produced, among other things, Mormonism, like the shakers, shit like that. But like the movers, the Bay City rollers. But no, it's you're exactly right. Like it just like all of these guys realize something is wrong and they want to get out. But also they're egotistical enough that they don't just want to get out to their bunkers in New Zealand, which is much more practical until I stove the fucking hatch in with a gas. That's right.

It's like, no, I want to build society in my own image. I want to build it my way according to my crackpot ideas. And it's just so beautiful and so fitting and so perfect that this guy would be your just the ultimate crackpot ideology. They're stupid, but they also they have the instincts to know that something is up. They're like horses. Yes. So all rats on a sinking ship, I guess. And I mean, I think like it's it makes perfect sense that this guy's trying to build a George's,

because George's and kind of works in the world in the era of free real estate, but there's no such thing as free real estate anymore. And again, no, it doesn't work, but it's sort of you understand how you'd come up with it back then. But there's no free real estate anymore. So the idea to build a five million person intentional George's community to bring on a new era phase of capitalism is hilarious. The Brian Georgetown Massive. Episode title, please.

There it is. If you went into the desert where the land was worth nothing or very little and you created a foundation that owned the land, and people moved there with yeah and created and people moved there and tax dollars built infrastructure and we built one of the greatest cities in the world, the foundation could be worth a trillion dollars. You think we could get this guy to subsidize Black Hammer and their projects? Yeah, they deserve one another. And if the foundation's mission was to take the appreciation of the land to give it back to the cities

in the form of medicine, education, affordable housing, social services, well, that's it. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, that's how it happens. Yeah, the state is an organization that coordinates the provision of services. That's the main thing that it does. There is nothing coercive going on here. No, it just sounds like there's like a fight going on in the corridor.

It's like a little door slamming, a lot of tussling. Yeah, that's the class struggle. Yeah. Well, they're fighting, it's a Georgist battle. You know, the Georgists are fighting the Chardis in there. It's the monopoly guy and a worker beating the shit out of a landlord. The establishment fears this and it's Mr. Moneybags and like a big steel worker both rolling up their sleeves.

That's right. The wealth sharing that would come from the foundation, Laura says. Making off a lead shoe to hit the guy. He attends to build the city in the desert, mimics the way employees at startups are paid in stock. He says he's planning a city much in the way he'd launch a business for several months. Yeah, this guy, Mark, Laura, sorry, and a handful of colleagues have painstakingly brainstormed the new

municipality's official values and developed its logo. They did the hard stuff first. I want to see this logo though. What's he calling this city, by the way? Oh, it's called Telosah from the Greek Telos. Here it is, Telosah, and they are creating a more equitable and sustainable future. Oh, I love their renders. It's built on a fucking render right and it looks like fucking Naboo from Star Wars.

What I think is interesting, Ray says, look, in these plans, sometimes they've come from governments. This is where the Neon comparison comes from, but he's also been investing and he's basically been doing all the fun stuff. He's been coming out with the official font of Telosah. Sorry, hold up a second. I'm just scanning this article here. Why Combinator also tried to do a utopian city?

Yes. And they hired, the guy they hired to run it was the guy who created the website I Can Has Cheeseburger. Oh no. Why wouldn't you want him to be your non-democratically elected mayor for less forever? That lasted a year, by the way. I hate the Elon Musk segment of the economy. It's that everyone in it is so annoying.

I also do, though, deeply love the idea of some guys sitting around like, well, we're going to build the fourth Roman. The first thing we're going to need is a good font. So any ideas on the font? We're going to save four cents. We could call it Times New Roman. Yeah. So someone get me the guy.

Times Fourth Roman. Someone get me the guy who created Funny Junk. We need to build a city. We need to build the second Las Vegas. But also, here's another TF callback. Laura is the largest investor in Flying Taxi Company, Archer, which he believes will play a big role in his intentional community. My Flying Taxi is crashing.

I'm sobering up. Yeah. So if you know someone, you want to know, realize if someone who's planning a big thing is serious or not, ask if they intend to have everyone get around by flying car. And if they say anything other than, you're ridiculous, please get out of here. You'll know they're entirely unserious.

Basically, he says, look, if all we do is, land could essentially go, he says, from a barren piece of desert to a modern day city worth billions or even trillions, if only everyone wants to live there. And that's his big insight. Does it not occur to him that there are some reasons why people aren't living in the middle of the desert? And it's not just random.

It's not like a fucking Age of Empires blank map where everything starts out as desert and then you just start putting lakes and stuff in. Does he not realize that, for example, when the last time they built a big city in the middle of the desert, I don't know, fucking Las Vegas, there are actually major problems with Las Vegas that are beginning to become apparent,

like the fact they don't have any fucking water. Yeah, but if you do a Georgist city, then it's super libertarian, but also very caring. Everyone will be, like all of these problems will be innovated away. That logo does look like a butthole. It's the thing. We've got this wonderful logo of a ring of triumph

being held by two hands. It looks quite a lot like a big rotating anus to me. Yeah, and I mean, to be fair, compliment sandwich, the anus logo is good. There are a lot of other things that are problems, but the fact that logo looks like an asshole, cool. Yeah, so he says we have a chance. We have a chance to prove a new model for a society

that offers people a higher quality of life and greater opportunity. When I look out 30 years from now, I imagine equitism serving as a blueprint for other cities and even the world, and Telosa being a place of pride for all who live there. No, like best case scenario is it's like fucking free cities. Worst case scenario is this guy is just,

no, no, absolutely not. It's going to be like fucking, depending on your point of reference, either Dubai in that one video game, speck off the line or Dubai in real life, depending on like how bad things get in 30 years. Well, the comparison that I get, of course, is neon, right? Because he wants it to be pretty similar.

He says, look, we're going to have 50,000 people living in a circular neighborhood of 1,500 acres, and it'll be easily walkable, and then we'll layer 1,500-acre neighborhoods along that. And we're going to have all of the infrastructure underground, where I've heard that before, we're going to have like all of this smart infrastructure and pavements and basically going to be homeless.

I live in Telosa. I work doing all of the stuff that keeps everybody else alive in the dark underground all the time. Oh, yeah. It's going to be Logan's room. Yeah. Well, of course, they claim all of that's going to be completely automated. But again, it's like, yeah, oh, well,

there's going to be flying cars and robot bin men. That's going to be alive. Diapers.com presents Omalus. But what I think about this, right, is that Saudi Arabia, like they built the line. They actually were able to put a shovel in a ground and build at least elements of their dumb ass city. But I think because there's because I think this is a process

that's been happening for like 40, 50 years of the just degeneration of the ability of not just the American state, but basically anyone in America to do anything. This is basically just Bjarke Bjarke Ingalls design. Oh, fuck. He on it too. Yeah, it's him. This is basically just a name.

This is just a guy who got rich making two companies that just got bought by other bigger companies because they sold diapers or whatever. This is just him having fun with models. He might as well be playing Warhammer. This is just because these kinds of big energetic projects, they don't because it's all it is just a way to funnel money from rich rich idiots into the hands of designers.

It's like a big. It's like a version of the mound that claims to fight climate change. The mound did actually now that I remember it. Oh, so it's just the mound. Well, this is actually a call back to an even an even older generation of TF. I remember before talking about like certain kinds of rich guy ideas as being basically like having a really precocious seven year old

around all the time. Who's like, look, I've tried a city. It's in the middle of the desert. And it's all going to be underground. And the big man is a robot and everyone has flying cars. But somehow, because they're a billionaire, people are like, this man is a revolutionary. We have to take it seriously, I suppose.

Right. He doesn't explain how any of it's going to work, but I presume it will. He's rich. So it's like he says, as he talks about the details of Tulosa, he keeps running up against the tensions of his vision. He told his staff that he engines between his vision and reality.

He told his staff that he wants its initial residents to be socioeconomically and racially diverse. But he also knows that you can't just hire the population of a city the way you'd staff a startup. It's not a controlled city and it's not a private city, he said in one of the larger meetings, before musing that there must be some trick of planning to get what he's after.

If there's diversity enhancing secrets. He's inventing redlining. If redlining were not already a thing, it would be necessary for this guy to invent it. Also, I want you to know that I posted the Butthole logo in the trash future group chat. And a friend of the show, Masi Lubchanski, who obviously is not privy to this conversation

and just saw the logo in isolation immediately said, that's a Butthole. Once again, history has vindicated me. It's a Butthole. Also, he says he assumes that there will be a move-in day where all 50,000 initial residents show up at once and go through an orientation. That would be manageable, maybe,

if you were the Chinese state and not for anyone else. That's the thing, right? Because the whole point of this, he thinks, is to find a new way of living more equitably while being sort of carbon negative, living in all of these things, right? The idea that we're going to build a SimCity arcology in the desert in order to fight climate change

while New York is basically like realizing that it sort of has to be wound down as a going concern with public infrastructure is sort of ludicrous. It's almost insulting. Yeah, fake country. And yeah, no, fake. It's not real.

It's a series of scams built on top of other scams that's been persisting for 300 years. And finally, the line of credit has run out. Yeah, it feels very much like the townsfolk are waiting for the delivery of their white elephant, and people are starting to sort of look around and realize that maybe nothing's coming. Yeah, the emperor's new white elephant.

It's like when prophecy fails, but the prophecy is like having an economy. Yeah, or even it's not even having an economy, just the ability to do and accomplish things, right? Yeah, fuck that. The fact is, right? Who's doing stuff? But all of these sort of...

These dreams are at once like quite perturbing, right? Where there's this sort of slim possibility that the diapers.com guy might make himself a kind of suzerain of like half of Nevada by getting people like, you know, 10,000 people to live in a SimCity arcology. But on the other hand, it's like, well, wait, this is where it's worrying that it will happen,

but also it's like, of course it won't happen, and this is where the effort's going. Like the vision, this sort of so monomaniacally... The fact that it's the guy from the diapers website as well. Oh yeah, incredible. That these are the only people left who have sort of any freedom of action. You know, the state had his legs cut out from under it.

You know, again, 40, 50 years ago. You know, the financial apparatus of the country really just has to kind of keep... It's now blind. It has to just keep sort of feeling its way forward. And you know, if they try to... If there's any kind of sort of constraint put on the free fake money pump,

no, it all falls down. And like, yeah, it's just these big pools of money held by these guys who read like one book one time and then decide, well, I'm going to start a utopia based on my vision and I'm going to run it like I ran my diaper website. The only telling thing is that the one book that they never read that like gets them to start

an intentional community is capital. Wait a sec. What? I'm reading this and it says, I'm the asshole here? I mean, basically, like if you're a guy, if you're a rich person who like reads capital, you're essentially like angles, right? You're like factory owner,

sidling up to worker and going, you know, I think it'd be cool if you and the boys got together and just kicked the absolute shit out of me. And it's like, I want you to literally kill me. Factory owner on Reddit who's like, am I the asshole, my M20s workers are saying that I'm extracting their surplus labor value, but this is something that I've always done.

The last thing on Tiloso, right? It's moronic. It is the product of a mind addled by success in the stupidest economy we've ever had. This is the thing. Things are only plausibly real enough to be dangerous, to harm you. Like this is real to the only to the extent

that like it could lead to like 10,000 people dying, trying to eat sand in the desert, right? I'll say it's dangerous in one other way, which is that all of these sort of utopian, don't worry, we're going to fix it easily and cheaply and in a way that's like fun, right? All of these plans, what they serve to do is like they starve attention and resources from,

I don't know, let's build a flood defense for the subway we have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's, oh, we can't charge too many taxes or else maybe our software developers will move to Tiloso. It's like the hyperloop. It's just a kind of omnipresent. It looks like a promise of a utopia,

but it's actually a threat. The threat is I'm going to invent a community that's better than anything that was ever created by humans. And because I think a lot of media opinion formers and finance people and politicians and stuff are deeply stupid and craven, they always fall for the obvious trick. And again, that's partly their job, right?

They're Washington generals. They're supposed to get hosed by the globetrotters. It's just in this case, the globetrotters are also clearly moronic. Nowhere near as good a basketball. They're really bad at basketball. The Harlem globetrotters are in this case a bunch of ordinary guys

with below average hand-eye coordination. And the Washington generals are people who have been hogtied. I think that sounds like a pretty good place to put a little button on this one because you have to go to comedy, don't you? I'd have to go and do comedy in Russian. Ah, fun. What if you were gay?

Things of that kind. You can never get a laugh like that in English. Yeah, actually, to be fair. Are you performing for the count princesses? Russians would never laugh at that. If you were like, what if you were gay? They'd be like, oh no, what if that? I must go immediately to the sauna to become straight again.

Just naked other men. Yes, as straight as it gets. That was close then at the comedy show. Yes, whip me with those twigs, right on the ass. All right, all right. We're all going to go to the barnyard. God, I want to go to a barnyard. TF barnyard.

I want to go to a barnyard. I want to go to the gay barnyard at the straight hour. I just want to go to the barnyard. Get the studio a barnyard. We just have a spare room. There's a barnyard. Yeah, we hire a full-time Russian guy to just beat the shit out of us with twigs.

Yeah, that's right. Anyway, we're sauna angles. Thank you for listening, everybody, to this episode of TF. We'll see you in a couple of days on the bonus one. Yeah, the live show is coming to you from the city of Tlosa. Yeah, that's right. They needed podcasters and, you know, we really were coming to you from the diaper dome, the center of all social life in Tlosa.

Join us in the underground diaper octagon. They have, like, logistics, but the only thing that's equipped to handle is diapers in any direction. You turn on the tap, diapers. Yeah. You can shit yourself anyway you want in that city. It's a constitution. That's the one law other than no landlords.

That's the one law that they have, which is you can shit wherever you want. No landlords. Free shit. Yep. No gods. No masters. No landlords.

No big boy pants. Yeah, that's right. No shrink to strength. No, that's it. Not at all. Just feel a loose hole. All right. All right.

I got to eat dinner. You got to go to comedy. I do. Alice needs to go and buy another watch. I genuinely do. I'm going back and forth between these two. Okay. Well, so we'll do that.

We'll see you on the... I just got to go give a Lithuanian some money. We'll see you on the bonus episode. It's the live show. And then I won't see you for the next free episode because I'm going on holiday. So I'll see you on the next bonus episode after this coming one. So... I'm also going on holiday,

but I'll be back infuriatingly just in time to see you on the next free episode. Everybody, while I'm gone, I want you to treat Milo, Nate, Alice and Hussain with the same respect you would treat me. Oh, don't do that. No, no. Much more. Far more. Bye, everybody.

Bye. Bye. Bye.