TRASHFUTURE - The Shape of Things To Come feat. Seamus Malekafzali

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

Riley, Milo, and Alice are joined by our friend Séamus Malekafzali (@seamus_malek) for a Neom Status update. With the rollicking success of The Line leaving every industry the world over revolutionised forever, Saudi has added yet another dimension to the shape of innovation. But first, a reflection on the growth and role of vigilantism in the US and U.K., and a look at the dreams versus the reality of electric car producers who promise to change the world but still haven’t really made any… cars. Check out Séamus' Substack here: https://malekafzali.substack.com 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/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo live dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *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)

Alright, I'm going to crack us on. We're going to talk about some bits and bobs and stuff, and then we're going to come crack us up. We're going to come to Oxygon things as the free one is to Riley James Acaster is to me. I hate him. So I kind of like that. He's a charming fella. No, I don't hate why kind of I don't hate James Acaster much. I hate the Riley James Acaster bit. Me, James A. Cast, I don't have a James Acaster bit. Milo does. Yeah, that's what I meant. What's talking about the Riley James Acaster bit? Nobody knows it. It's actually Milo. I slept so poorly last night. No, we're going to crack on. Hello, and welcome to the free episode of TF.

Managed to irritate both of us. God, that is my specialty. Why did I hire? Oh, I forgot. Of course, I hired. I decided to work with someone whose whole thing is basically irritating me. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, because you know why? Because I'm an oyster and you know how pearls are formed. Irritation. Constant irritation. A little grain of sand in Riley's oyster. Yeah, it's me. That's you. It's the James Acaster voice in Riley's oyster. It's Riley Milo and Alice. And we are joined once again by, I think, four or five time returning champion, Seamus Malik of Zellie. Seamus, how's it going? It's going very well. As always,

thankful to be back on the Trash Future program. Great program. Icatec program. You get some kind of reward, I think, for being on the podcast this many times. You get access to hot and cold drinks in the TF exclusive lounge. Oh, that's like when you come on once. When you're hitting Seamus numbers, you get a comped upgrade. You get a free pour of off-label champagne, non-vintage champagne. You can get any well drink. Yeah, you get to get sucked off in the special Trash Future fight, Jim. It's unlimited well drinks and then a welcome drink of either champagne or a premium spirit. Yeah. That's no bad deal. Yeah, so thank you for coming on the show and claiming your rewards. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. No, we are talking to Seamus

today because we figured it was time to revisit somewhere we've talked about recently. Sorry, not that recently, but in the last couple of years, it's time to go back to Neon because, one you know it, the future is being invented and it's being invented in Neon Bay. And happy we are all about that. And there are some like crazy updates, but I don't want to sort of jump right into Neon because we have some home affairs stuff to handle first. So, Seamus, I'm sorry to expose you to a bunch of British stuff right off the bat. No, it's fine. I was in Pemlico for like a month. I gotta get in. I'm so sorry. We're going British. Yeah. British trash future. What if trash future was British?

What if that? No, well, the thing is, T.F. and all the T.F. guests actually are being extended an exclusive invite to the Winter Affairs Party, which is, of course, the Garden of the Kings Bull in 2 North Street in IG 118 E.T. I don't know where IG is the post. Yeah, I don't know. That's, no, it's fucking, it's Essex somewhere. It's like, it's like, that's like Northeast London. Like it's kind of like Romford sort of area, Ilford around there. Right. Well, we've been all extended this invitation to a Winter Affairs Party. Yeah, there's Ilford in Ilford. We're going to a Winter Affairs Party in Ilford to see DJ Skanks. Yeah, DJ Skanks, Mad Influence, DJ Quickbar. DJ Skanks from Legion of Skanks. Jerome Six,

Shannon Amara, O'Neil McDowell, hosted by the Range Rover Mum. O'Neil McDowell. Hosted by the Range Rover Mum. Oh, the mother of all the Range Rovers. Well, you remember who I'm talking about, right? Yeah, who tried to run over the protesters. Yeah, that's right. Colleagues of like, yeah, no, absolutely. Too fucking right. Wait, hold on. I, I, I've, unfortunately, I've been out of this sphere for a long time. Okay, okay. Was this person? No, I don't need, I don't need a full things. I feel like that would take up the entirety of the hour. Is, was this person made famous for running over

Extinction Rebellion protesters? Well, the offshoot of Extinction Rebellion into like Britain, but yes, she, she, she drove. Extinction Rebellion who were not. Yes, she drove into them in her Range Rover. I don't think she like injured any of them. She just like bumped them. But it was kind of a near run thing, like sort of like, you know, 50 millimetres on the gas pedals. The difference between her bumping somebody and becoming a right-wing celebrity and her being arrested for assaulting a police officer and becoming a right-wing celebrity. Yeah. And I think this, one of the reasons I bring this up, right, is that I think you can, number one,

is we're all going to this party, obviously. Obviously. Yeah. Because it's going to be the number one spot. Never miss a DJ Skanks gig, ever. Yes. It's Chico going to be there. Playing, playing in his home club in Romford. But no, the reason that I think it's worth bringing up, right, is this is, to me, this seems like. This seems like kind of, there seems to be this parallel process happening in the UK and US, where we take our right-wing vigilantes beloved by Fox News, the Daily Mail or whatever, and then they are turned into celebrities. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's like simultaneously very funny and very bleak that like in the US, you have a figure like Kyle Rittenhouse, who has now been sentenced to spend the rest of his life

making tactical t-shirts or like a Confederate flag up. Whereas here, the like the stakes are so much lower because Britain is sort of a soft play area that we have our equivalent, our Kyle Rittenhouse is just this lady who'd like drove her Range Rover into an old man. Yeah. You, Kyle Rittenhouse. Yeah. Oh, just a, an absolutely like a situation where what we've done is we've said, yeah, these, there's a career path for you because we are not going to take seriously the idea at this point that, you know what it is? It's a group of people have been removed from what are informally considered us, our people who are worth protecting the law applies to. An outgroup whom the law binds but does not protect. Yeah, no, absolutely. And so we're just

going to sort of like encourage this vigilantes and men, it's going to have no negative consequences in future because like, not to like undersell this, but she really could have killed someone very easily. Yeah. And it only by pretty much like good fortune that she didn't. And now she's doing, you know, club nights with DJ Skanks. Now she's doing what would have been a Vice Magazine big night out in 2008. But like, Seamus, I want to know, like, how does this, how does this trend right strike you? It strikes me as, I mean, entirely inevitable. I don't mean to go like, you know, Adam Curtis with the, you know, the social media age and digital age and how you retreat into finding heroes that have done less and less and less and less

as less and less things, less change happens. There's no real assessment you can make other than it's deeply upsetting, not in that I think it's emblematic of some massive shift right word, but just it's pathetic. I think it is a shift within the right to a more kind of pathetic politics. Yeah, not a shift right word in the sense like, not like, as in this, this alone would shift us toward fascism, but just yeah, the right wing is becoming increasingly more desperate for new figures. And the new figures that are coming up are, you know, I mean, I mean, they're Kyle Rinn now. I mean, there was like, there was like photos of his face splattered across every single page of him, fake sobbing, recounting how he killed three people.

Yeah. Yeah. It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing to have a fascist tendency that's so pathetic, apart from anything else. But I guess fascism is always pathetic. And that's the thing is that like, a win or lose, and they've managed to, you know, do both, they're still going to be like really cringe, I guess. Well, Alice, this actually goes back to something I remember you saying, probably a couple of years ago, which is that, you know, all nationalism at its core is wounded. Yeah, of course. Always has to be. It has to be. There has to be some sort of like betrayal, there has to be some sort of like enemy within, and there has to be a sense of like recovering something that has been lost. And in this case, what you have lost is the ability to

like drive into an old man. Yeah. Well, I took away from us was DJ Skanks. We're bringing him back. In the old days, you used to be able to drive your Range Rover over as many people as you wanted, but then the populists. It was to get to the front of the DJ Skanks. Exactly. Out of my way. I'm up, I'm off to the front left. But also the other thing, right? I think it's emblematic of an institutional change where there is an increasing demand placed on authority in general to manage this new outgroup and make them go away, whether that's Black Lives Matter, protesters, that's the police and extinction of all of the different police officers and extinction rebellion. There is another angle here, too, which is like America of only America

could have produced Carl Rittenhouse because his act of vigilantism was one that was so militarized and was so tactical, like he was claiming that he was going to be an EMT or whatever he had the AR-15. That's a wholly American tradition. It makes total sense for the British fascist equivalent to be motorized and to be a motorist. Like, if you think about like Pretty Patel doing pushbacks in the channel with like jet skis and shit, it's the exact same thing. We are basically a nation of aggrieved drivers. Yeah. And microcelebrities. Microcelebrities also. But the last thing I was saying before we move on from this as well is just that I think the other thing, I think this goes to what you were saying, Seamus, when I talk about an institutional

transformation in the right and the demands on authority is that official authority hasn't caught up yet to those demands. And so, vigilantism is, I think, basically inevitable. And the thing is, in Britain, official authority is doing its damnedest to catch up to those demands with stuff like the Nationality and Borders Bill, with the Police Crime and Sentencing Bill. The decision to declare Hamas a terrorist organization and put any supporter of theirs in jail for 10 years. Even things like the covert human intelligence sources bills, allowing police officers and intelligence agents to break the law, that's all very well. But like, until you extend it to ill-fed mums, there's always going to be vigilantism pushing it to that point.

It's a pro-milf policy and we respect that. I think that this woman should get a slot on like loose women or she should be given Jeremy Kyle's old show or something. And her suggestion to solve every problem should be some kind of vehicular violence. That would be awesome. I mean, it's basically what's going to happen. If five years' time, we're going to be laughing at you for having laid this. Yeah, she's going to become like... Prime Minister Range Rover Mum has once again run over a big trench full of dissidents in Trafalgar Square. She's legally changed her name to that. Viv Rook. Our Viv Rook in real life is going to be the Range Rover Mum. She does have a branding of Range Rover Mum and there's a logo of like

a woman with a slit up the thigh dress. Yeah. Because the Range Rover Mums are not only scary, they're also sexy. So that's why I don't trust you to talk about this or think about this at all. I would be an honor to be run over by such a fine specimen of a woman. I think, honestly, the Range Rover Mum is going to end up being like Britain's Megan McCain and she'll actually represent a real political constituency like the real Megan McCain. Like even if it's a flash in the pan, there's going to be another thing like this and another thing like this and so on and so on and so on. Yeah. And then that's the end of it. But I think it's what we're seeing is just this. The vigilantes that ends up getting celebrated

is I think the product of this institutional shift, this disjunct between the demands and the legal abilities of authority. But my goodness, in Britain, it is catching up much more quickly than it is catching up in the US. And yet the stakes are against so much lower. Much, much lower. Oh, yeah. I mean, we love, we're a nation of petty tyrants. Absolutely. That's all there is. We absolutely love. No, but that's look. Britain, I'm tired of it. I don't want to talk about Britain until the very end again. I want to talk a little bit about Rivian now. We'll talk about a normal country, the United States of America. And then later we'll talk about a still more normal country, Saudi Arabia. Yeah, that's right.

Geralt of Rivian. So Rivian, so Seamus, are you familiar with Rivian? I don't know if I am. Are they? I know that they're an electric car company. I think I want to say that the main thing that they were that set them apart was that I want to say they all came with like a frame and you could put in a new car like their new models. Is that what it is? Enthusiastically nodding like a teacher. I actually go. No, it's what I think more of the the more the bigger Rivian promise, right, was that we're going to do Tesla, but we're going to do Tesla for commercial fleets. And so it's going to be very cheap, very modular. Okay. And so they had to tie up with Amazon where they were going to give their Amazon said we're going

to invest $1.3 billion into Rivian, which then IPO'd recently at its value hugely spike to the point actually where Amazon's $1.3 billion investment in Rivian, again, this electric truck and fleet vehicle manufacturer, a bit like Lordstown, but I think it works a little bit better. So if you want to know, by the way, how much Amazon has made from its investment in Rivian, it owns 20% of the company and that as of recording, that would be worth about $30 billion, which is about as much as Amazon's 2019 and 2020 net income combined. Right. Fantastic. The economy is very normal, isn't it? I think it all makes sense. It's not like a sort of a

harbinger of anything bad that's going to happen. I'm not worried about it. Yeah, absolutely. So invest in this company. So Rivian, which again is made approximately, yeah, about a thousand trucks or so, is now worth $777 billion, or was it at least when it debuted? Awesome. Okay. I'm going to ask some clarifying questions here. Yes, please.

How many cars is Tesla built? Is there a number on that? Uh, some hundreds of thousands. Some hundreds of thousands, and Amazon made more... Is it in revenue or profit off of investing in this company than everything else that they ever did, if that's what you're saying? Not ever. It's a year. They made it a year. They made more in revenue.

Yeah. They made more from this investment. It's like, it's quite, it's quite wild. I'm just, all right. I mean, if that's the case, then good for them. You beat the system, but all right, man. There's about a million Teslas that have been made. So yeah, consider this, you know, 100 times as many. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So per car, Rivian is the most valuable auto.

And the thing, it's, people like to look at these sort of, sort of buzzy electric vehicle startups that like, I don't know, yeah, like put a battery-powered motor on like a red wagon, and then, you know, say, ah, we are reinventing the world, and then have it look at, oh, well, this is now worth 10 times as much as GM. That's insane. But like, I don't know, I think that's not quite the right comparison, because like, as sort of, as new fuel car bans begin to go in in some countries, all of a sudden, those petrol car makers may have some real stranded assets there.

Sure. Right. Like, so I don't think that's completely insane, but the idea is, the idea of, It's a particular kind of market stupidity to recognize that like, the electric car is inevitable because of climate change. And therefore, you should invest in electric car companies, but also to still invest in oil companies. Yeah. Well, in fact, one of the biggest, if there's- You've got to hedge your bets.

What if climate change doesn't happen, you know? Yeah. What if it just doesn't happen? Yeah. What if it just turns out- Yeah, it's like the Mayan apocalypse of 2012, you know. Yeah, what if every scientist knows, it's just like, oh, whoops. Oh, we were wrong about that.

Yes, you were wrong. Oh, we totally- If you want to talk about oil. It's actually fine. It's actually fine. We just had some hot weather for a few years, and then, you know, it's fine. So, the- That's my political platform.

Is what if climate change is just fine? Well, so they've been invested in. And again, you can see the biggest proponents of the electric vehicle surge. A lot of them actually have been fossil fuel consuming and producing organizations. For example, Ford was one of Rivian's biggest early backers, as well as the Saudi investment firm Abdul Latif Jameel, which mostly, shockingly, made its money from oil. And it's a hugely popular thing among Saudi investors, it seems,

is to put huge amounts of money into electric vehicles. Because I think they sort of- Because I think they know that they've got, or at least some of them know, that they've got a limited time left as being king oil. And so, it's very interesting just to see that this transformation of one thing to another that depends on things, for example, like public transit still being massively under-financed in much of the developed world, that depends on enormous and growing amounts of mining of rare earth minerals in Africa,

or on the seabed, or whatever, that the same people are still going to be behind it, and still going to be putting enormous amounts of capital into it, basically as something to forestall transformation, to a homeostatic force. Right, cool. Anyway, but the interesting thing as well though, is that they have massively declined in value since IPO-ing, because- Oh no, because that's bad news for, you know, like you have to tell Jeff Bezos.

So, wait a second, wait a second. So, Amazon made this giant, catastrophic investment, made a shit ton of money on it, and then as soon as they opened the books, everyone else looked at them and went, oh wait, this just doesn't work. This is stupid. It's so cool that one company can just have these huge effects. Yeah. So, what happened was, basically, they IPO-ed earlier this month at a price of about $100.

They spiked to $172. They're back down still over $100, but they're at about $120 some odd. Right, that's sort of where they're sitting now. So, they're still up from their IPO price, but they've gone, they basically spiked and have come back down to earth a little bit. But again, the market capitalization per car is completely insane, what you're actually buying is the intellectual property or the sort of total addressable market. But then, Ford pulls out of the partnership, and much of its buzz was based on the fact that

Amazon said that they were going to have all of their delivery vehicles come from Rivian. And we talked years ago about this. Those delivery vehicles are going to have cameras that monitor drivers that are going to have... All the drivers are going to be on live jasmine, which is going to subsidize the cost of shoes. Shoes on head in every case. And now, essentially, Amazon is exhibiting doubts over the battery life. So, will that partnership go ahead? I mean, will Amazon throw good money after bad?

Who can say? But what is clearly happening is that Amazon made a decision and then was able to just move the entire world around itself by just getting a wild hair, investing in this thing that now looks like it's sort of showing some doubts. So, it just shows that if you want to talk about the single most fucked industry, I don't know if it's tech in general. I think it's cars. I think it's automakers.

I'm just the most fucked-vibes industry in the entire world. Yeah, that's right. I think people need to make different investments. Jesus Christ. The most fucked-vibes was still carbon-moses, which was going to build the cop car of the future. It's weird given how building an electric car isn't particularly difficult. And there are people who are doing it fairly successfully. But all of the big investment always goes into the insane monorail guy in electric car companies.

Haven't Volvo started an entirely separate company that only makes electric cars and they just work and it's fine because it's a fucking Volvo? But no one cares about that. Everyone's like, no, I want to buy a car from the insane guy. Well, what really annoys me is how difficult, not how difficult, how easy but expensive it is to retrofit electric power into older cars. For instance, say you want a Citroen 2CV, right? Nice cool old 60s car, right?

Cost nothing to buy, even in pretty good condition. If you want one that's been converted to electric professionally, you're paying the upper end of the 20,000, maybe 30,000 pounds. And no one's going to fucking do that. There is no cheap, new electric car anywhere. And again, this is partly, there's a couple of things behind this, right? If you want to look at this from a product perspective, it's because some people like Elon Musk who made the initial decisions that structured

the electric car market as it exists now, they said, how we're going to do this is we're going to start at the top. We're going to create the extremely high-end market for electric cars. And then as we get more and more profitable, we're going to be able to extend that outward. Yeah, which is, it's stupid and backwards. And it also means that there are no second-hand electric cars either. And so you struggle to buy one even with like a pretty heavy subsidy.

Yeah. And then from the market perspective, you wonder why these things are going crazy like they are, right? Why a company that's made like 1,000 cars that lost $2 billion last year to make 53 cars is now the second most valuable automaker in the entire world, right? It's because I think it's the same, it's because I think it's the same thing behind a lot of cryptocurrencies, right? It's you get into it for the story. You get into it for almost the meme ability of it because you like the,

and because you like the look of the Rivian car. And in particular, like you make a car that you want to drive if you're a rich guy, so you make a rich person car. And what you, and then what we end up, like if they had never been a Model T, but they started by making like doosanbergs. No, if they never was a Model T, but they started by making the Homer. But, and I mean, look, the, I did, I don't know if you all saw, there was also the video of the electric Hummer, where it seems like there's this.

Oh no. Yeah, there's this thing that has to happen to like, I don't know, to have our existing public transportation infrastructure stay standing up, right? If you want to sort of solve any kind of problem, you're going to have to, at some point, like electrify that public trip, they electrify the cars or create public transport. We're not creating public transport, so we have to electrify the cars. And it's only being done in a way that seems to,

as you said, Alice, delight rich weirdos. So we can't possibly do anything that will work. All we can do is the impossible. And so we end up, again, having these companies standing up factories to place a Rivians factory in Illinois, right? As again, in another one of these sort of, you know, post industrial towns, they've said, oh, we're coming in, we're bringing in, you know, thousands of jobs and so on.

Of course. And, you know, once again, I mean, it's not saying that Rivians sort of will never work. It's just, it seems so far fetched the idea that by starting at these, at this top level, with these small scale, high top level, you're going to be able to disseminate this into a mass market, right? It seems completely back. I mean, Tesla's been at it for what, for nearly two decades at this point. And, you know, they're just now getting their, like, mid-price car.

And so it seems completely fucking bizarre to me. And the other end, right, where it also depends on a sort of the mass market bit, right? The bit for Amazon seems to, again, like, depend on this gigantic, underclass of easily exploitable warehouse labor continuing to cause a need for last mile deliveries to happen in urban centers. Yeah. And to use to order your basket of sex dildos on prime in order to get it delivered in an electric van. Yeah. I need those sex dildos now in an environmentally sustainable way.

Unfortunately, the sex dildo does run on petrol. Well, come on. There's no way to get the power needed to get me on. That's right. Doing the, like, cranking, you know, a petrol chainsaw engine, but, like, on a vibrator. A big ripcord coming out of the dildo. You've got to put one foot on the end and just really crank that thing. And now it's all gone.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Oh, my. Anyway, look, I think the electric vehicles thing is just, it's fascinating to me. It's going to be something. And the cliff is coming. Like, the total ban on new internal combustion engine cars is coming,

and nobody's fucking taking any notice of it, including large car companies, because they just don't want to. Well, they're making the Hummer. Well, that is true. The thing about an electric car is it comes in different flavors of rich guy. Yeah, exactly. Perfect. And, you know, with things as they are with people's livelihoods continuing to go as they're going,

I'm sure that we can expect everybody to make an investment in a brand new electric car soon, or at least for adequate public transport to be provided once that becomes necessary to get around but impossible to use. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Before we move on, Seamus, I want to sort of turn back to you. And again, this story of the car industry transforming from what kind of, you might say,

built a lot of the sort of industrialized democracies, especially North America, in the sort of Fordist model of manufacturing. It's clearly moving on to this weird, affective sort of elites only bit of luxury branding. I want to know sort of how you react to that. I mean, what you guys talked about before about how this is entirely, like there's an entire wide population of people that is walled off from, even if they want to make that transition, there would be completely unable to make that transition.

These cars are still at exorbitant prices to say nothing of the electric hummer, which is $112,000. And as Ella said, the cliff is coming with this. And the cliff is coming sooner than a lot of people may think. And I am gravely concerned. My main point of concern is that there is going to be a repeat of something like what prompted the Gilles Jean protests in France, in which people were in a sensibly in environmentally conscious move,

working class people were then told that to simply drive, they would be taxed more because of the nature of the vehicles they were driving. I think there are going to be more and more measures that are punitive in this way without actually doing the work to invest in public transportation, to invest in ways to actually make this transition possible, rather than the illusion of, they want the illusion of being able to do something, to be able to say to another meeting for the Paris Accords at COP 29 or whatever, that we're making all these measures, we're doing all these different things.

But in reality, nothing is happening. And you can push that net zero year end point off into the distance as long as you need to. Yeah. I mean, I think the real question to ask about any electric car company, when it opens a factory in some, you know, benighted town in Illinois or Indiana is, okay, when are the people who live there ever going to be able to afford one, like any electric car? Yeah. Maybe the manager, the factory can and like the manager, the guy who manages the manager, might live miles away and is going to have to either drive to work or walk.

So, yeah, exactly. There seems to be no plan to deal with that. All right. All right. All right. All right. Let's talk about the main event because most normal country of all, Saudi Arabia. That's right. We talk a lot about problems that have no solutions on this show, right? Or at least no solutions that are politically and it did solutions that have no problems. That is often another thing that comes up here. That's true. We do talk a lot. Well, I think Neon is certainly a solution to a non-problem or it would be if it existed.

An attempted solution to the problem of the fact that Saudi Arabia is a completely insane country with too much money. Well, that is actually a solution to that. They've paid a lot of designers and consultants a lot of money to do them some really cool renderings. Yeah. It's definitely reducing the amount of money they have. So, that's good. Not by enough. No, not by enough. But so, this is a little bit of a Neon update because things have happened in Neon. Two big things have actually happened. How should we start, friends?

We want to talk about the new Neon region. I want to talk about the line real quickly. We've talked about the line before. And if you're not familiar with the line, the idea of the line is you just have a sissy, but it's in that line. Yeah. No cars, not even electric because everything's walkable. Not until it becomes a giant like a berm for Range Rover Mum to drive over people in. Yeah, that's right. Because if you remember, it was going to have a high-speed train that runs the entire length of the line and has to stop only every 100 or so meters,

which is great for a high-speed train. But no, it's great. It's a really high speed for like 30 meters. So, Seamus, I don't know if you've seen this. They've actually claimed to have started construction on the line. I saw this. I read my Daily Mail every morning the latest news of the day. And I saw, you know, dipped into those little headlines. They had started work on the line finally.

I was not able to find any imagery of this whatsoever. I do believe it because I do not believe they released any real schematics of what it could look like. So, feasibly groundbreaking anything could count. I also don't believe what I'm gravely concerned by is that I believe they were starting work in the mountains, which would require them drilling through the mountains, which is something that I brought up in my article on the subject and also on my appearance on Chapo Drap House in which I was concerned, gravely concerned that a project meant to preserve something like 95% of nature extended so far into the Saudi hinterland that it required

drilling through the mountains, which I think we can all agree by any stretch of the imagination when we talk about preserving nature that does not count. What we've done essentially is as Mohammed bin Salman is playing city skylines in sandbox mode and has decided to just yet take out a huge slice of mountain. Yeah. And then he's going to fill that slice with the sewage water. Absolutely. I love the line so much because it's just like, you know what, cities are usually approximately kind of circular in shape. And the reason for that is it means wherever you live in the city, it's not that difficult to get to another bit of the city. But you know what,

for the sake of it being cool, we're just going to not do that. This century is established practice of building cities in this way. We're throwing it out of the window, not because we've actually innovated it in any way or we think our design is better, but just because like... Well, they do think their design is better to be fair. Yeah, they're just wrong. Yeah. So here's what they've said, right? They've said we've actually done this and also they've done another thing that a lot of scammy tech companies love to do, which is announce indications of interest. And the biggest one here is they've said Oracle, sort of computing software company Oracle, has shown interest or is not committing necessarily,

but is looking to put itself in one of their like super major data centers that they're going to be able to run because the city is a line because you can't run a major data center anywhere else. A guy just sprinting down a rack of servers a mile long. Awesome. Oh, god, oh, god, oh, god. And I mean, this is, this thing, this is true for, this is true for the line. It's also true for their new city, which we'll talk about, their new shape based city, which we're going to talk about in a sec, which is their building in Neon, which is they keep saying, ah, this will enable all of these wonderful industries. But so far, the company they've announced... Something very thin, very, very long.

The customer... Any industry like that. They've announced an actual sort of thing for if someone is just doing something that requires a lot of cheap real estate to do. That's about it. We've got like a fishing rod factory. We've got like a pogo stick factory. We're looking into a barge pole factory. Anything thin and long, you can make it in Neon. It's the perfect, you cannot have a wide factory. You want a wide factory, you can fuck off to Riyadh with that, my friend. So what's happening, right? And because there's more hints though, they're coming out as to how they're organizing Neon, which is

they're going to, which is that they're going to be company subsidiaries of Neon, right? Which a company subsidiary of a political entity does seem a little bit... It's going to be a company town, if you will. Oh, it's the British government. Yeah. But they talk about, right? They keep saying things like we're on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and cognitive solutions to resolve impossible paradoxes. And Neon, they say, they say impossible paradoxes, which is the data. So I did Nathan Bali, right? There's like, what's going on? But Neon is in Saudi, but make no mistake, it is also in the world.

Yeah, technically, yes. No, I agree. We are definitely in the world. It's going to be in the world in Dubai, the little microcosm world. They're going to have to draw a little line on the Saudi Arabia part. I think we're recording, well, there's your problem. I can't remember who said it. I think either it was Liam or said like the AI doesn't exist. Like, no, these things are... I mean, we all know that they're buzzwords, but I troll through these videos, through these reports, through these forms. And no one has ever been able to explain to me what artificial intelligence entails in this respect, like what processes... Just that AI will automatically do all of these things, which don't need AI to...

Oh, well, it's when you live in the line, when you live in Neon, what's going to happen is an AI will tell you, it looks like you bought a fishing pole. Would you like to buy a pool cue? Yeah, that's right. But also, the other question is, why does the city need to be laid out like that to have AI? Why does it need to be a line to have a big data center? Is that you want to run one wire? When you're formatting a wire, all right, when you curve it around, it's automatically like one millisecond. It takes longer. Should I run one line? It's like Tron, all right? It's mostly... All of this is an aid of like better latency for gaming.

Yeah, that's right. They're going to get a bunch of gamers and professional influences to move out there, to talk about how good Call of Juicy plays. That's literally all they want. But I'll tell you what, they've actually started building on the line before we want to make a good Counter-Strike map. The new thing is... You're right, it would. They're building... Remember we had talked about the infrastructural spine that runs underneath the line, where all of the impossibility... The tunnel where all of the maids will work, yes.

Yeah, all of... Yes, but all of the impossible contradictions of the promises of the line versus reality, they all live in the tunnel. Well, that's a good place to keep them, because then they'll almost see them. So they're building the tunnel right now, apparently. The chubs in the original sense. Yeah, they are building the tunnel. However, their innovation is they're not starting at one end and building to the other end. They're starting at both ends and building to the middle, thereby saving time.

That's not actually... The channel tunnel is going to say that's what they did with the channel tunnel. Yes. Yeah. That's not an innovation. You just... You've been doing since the beginning of construction. You simply double your construction costs and halve your time. That's... Yeah. It's genius. Amazing. Look, we are running out of time to get the line in place, right? Yeah, of course. I want to talk about Oxygon.

Oxygon. Shamus, what is Oxygon? Oxygon, a region of Neon, is, as it says, a region of Neon that is in an octagonal shape, seven square miles in diameter. One half is on land, the other half is in the sea, as a fully automated floating port, which will be the largest floating structure on planet Earth. Why not? It's the line... The line... Why not?

The line... The title of it was stupid because it was translated into Arabic, not as al-kad, but as the line. Oxygon is less of a stupid name because it is transliterated into... It's not a real English word, so it's transliterated. Okay, but they also have to use a letter that does not exist in formal Arabic in order to transliterate it. It's borrowed from Farsi, the chah. Sounds different. Now, I really want to emphasize that this is probably the most reasonable idea that has been suggested for Neon so far.

Hello, Bob. But also, if this had been proposed by any other coastal city in the world, New York, DC, Cairo, Alexandria, et cetera... The three of the three genders. This would be one of the dumbest ideas you've ever heard in your entire life. It defines all reasonable expectations for what a port is reasonably supposed to be. There is no reason for it to exist, but probably has the most possibility of happening at this current time.

Well, it's because at least with the line, they were never able to articulate why it needs to be a line or what it would do other than just sort of be a place where you could innovate, unlike... Sure. That's why they needed all the AI because there was no actual I going into the design. Oxygen has a purpose that's intelligible, which, as you say, Shamus, it's supposed to be a port. It's supposed to be a port that is supposed to bring in the blue economy, which is a term used by economists to... For example, there's the green economy where you're building on land,

cities that exist on land to become environmentally sustainable, to bring in some sort of equilibrium with the nature around them. The blue economy is similar, but it's for the sea. Therefore, I guess in theory, yes, a floating structure, one that is not nailed down, one that is not anchored to the sea floor, one that can have its gates open and let in ships and other wildlife, that is sustainable. Yes. However, the issue is that there is a reason why there has never been a floating structure of this size before.

What? Because it's stupid. I mean, just think about it for like five seconds. Yeah. If there anything goes wrong here, because it's not only an automated port, but it's a gigantic thing where everybody lives on this port. A lot of people live on this port. Yeah, it's going to be like a Disney Drive times a thousand in there naming the streets,

because everybody who works on it is crushed by a container. Well, it's also crucial for exporting the fishing rods and barge poles that they're going to make in the line. If we're just talking about there was an explosion in the Dubai port, about a year ago, I think, a little less than a year ago, if you can imagine any sort of disaster befalling this, the entire thing is put into jeopardy. The reason why they put things on land is they're doing it for a reason.

The thing is, though, this is a huge subsidy to the world's struggling disaster movie industry. Really, we haven't had a new kind of disaster movie since we've done volcano movies, right? But in terms of engineering shit, we had Titanic. That was like 1912, whatever, who gives a shit? Basically, after towering Inferno, we kind of ran out of ideas. But now we have all of this shit to give people ideas of, what if the robot AI container port floating on water goes wrong? Mark Wahlberg in the octagon.

He stopped 9-11. He simply stopped this. Listen, listen. Sometimes, sometimes. The atomic bomb is floating away. And Neon's going to ask for a single Boston PD homicide detective to come to the port to investigate a murder. And then that murder's going to unravel a whole series of things

at the same time the port starts sinking. Oh, that's actually pretty good. Boston has a confidential too. Copyright. Copyright. That's us. I was just built to sell harness and then they made me write scripts to Mark Wahlberg. Now I've got to investigate a fucking murder in Saudi Arabia.

So here's what they say about octagon. No, I can't. I'm still thinking about the Mark Wahlberg in Saudi Arabia thing. He's paired with like a hard bit in my heart, but it's good like partner. No, I'm just doing this now. The Saudi robotics, Asimov. So what we said, what you have, they say that octagon being a sort of a shape-based port, right?

They did one shape, did a two-dimensional shape. It's a shape-based. Does any other port just not have a shape? Well, it's not that globulous. No other port makes its shape as a core part of an identity as octagon does. I'm not sure that's even true because I feel like ports are traditionally built with like seawalls in such a way like in a very deliberate shape so as to contain the elements. It's not called the square port.

That is true. So there are seven sectors that octagon is going to sort of innovate in, enable innovation in, where you couldn't do it in a less regularly shaped place. Gaming, streaming, pick up artistry. B-boying, MC, and DJ. No. So industries are sustainable energy, autonomous mobility, so self-driving cars. Water innovation, so in inventing, yep, there's waters right there.

You couldn't get it unless you were on it in a shape. You have to be floating on it and living while floating on it. Unless you live among it, how will you innovate it? To enable, you have to be living on a big barge 100% of the time, all the time, and you want to innovate in water. You can't go to it. We're doing finding neon. Sustainable food production, health and well-being, which again, all of this is necessary,

technology and digital manufacturing, and modern methods of construction all powered by 100% renewable energy, right? I love the idea of the Saudi ruling class talking to you about health and well-being, some of the unhealthiest looking motherfuckers on the face of the planet. That's right. Listen, Jamal Khashoggi, that was a wellness intervention gone wrong. They were trying to do coughing on him and it got a bit out of hand. Did lose a lot of weight.

What's one thing that's true, right, is Oxagon appears to be mainly series of 3D renderings, just as the line was mostly 3D rendering some YouTube clips, and then now a big trench that we'll never get built on. And they love to talk about how they love to talk about how they are. We are building on all of our principles from Neon, and it's like, well, the principle... Like there's no principles to build on, yeah. Yeah, the principles to build on are, again, like saying things,

saying things like all communities will be walkable, like in Neon, or via hydrogen powered mobility. So that's famously very stable, I assume. Again, another part of it, another part of the Mark Wahlberg maybe falls into place. Yeah, one wire gets into it. Why are all of these cars exploding during the car chase? Oh, that's because we filled them with hydrogen. Yeah, they're all mini-Hindenbergs.

Yeah, so we've... And now don't yell at us. I'm sure that there's probably some... I don't know anything about hydrogen-propelled cars. I'm just aware that... Why would anyone yell at you? Those are the implications. Yeah, well, the principle of Neon is that it's a line,

and an octagon is eight lines, so it's eight times better. Yeah. They're just knocking it out of the park here. Perfect. Yeah, it's going to have a fishing pole factory. Yeah, I'm very excited for their next... The octagonal baseball stadium that's in the center. I'm excited for their next project,

which is going to have a 3D element, where it's going to be like a prism. Let's talk about that with my friend, Mary, the other day we were talking about, are they going to go for a cube or a cone of some kind, maybe a sphere? Well, the reason we already had the sphere in London, remember? Yeah. The weird thing. Oh, that's an orb. But there's no innovation going on there.

I'm sorry, excuse me. Also... Saudi's already had an orb. The reason it's an octagon, I will believe this to my dying days, that MBS was trying to figure out what weird shape to do next, and he was listening to Joe Rogan. Yes, I think that's probably true. Also, if you want to talk as well about millennial, let's say, country rulers,

making insane decisions based on tech hype, look no further than the fact that El Salvador is now creating a Bitcoin city on the slope of an active volcano. Of course it is. I saw that in the notes, and I thought, this has to be a joke that Riley wrote. It's like... No, no, it's real. No, it's real.

That metaphor is a bit on the nose, isn't it? Because the finance ministry is a big crypto guy. And then, after this is complete, on opening day, he's going to invite a single Boston police department detective. Yeah, that's right. I don't even speak foreign Spanish. He's got an airdrop into the volcano. That's right.

That's what we're doing. We're just building... We're building like Mount Pompeii, basically. But everyone's really excited to be in Pompeii. Or we're building the completely imaginary... It's all just different colonial dignitads. Just some of them are going to get more worked out beyond 3D renderings versus others. But it's all just essentially...

It's all just these intentional communities. Whether it's the intentional community of a prince who dreams of... Instead of being a net technology importer, being a net technology exporter, and figures you need to make cities in funny shapes to do that. Or whether it's a... And also, not finance minister, president. Naya Bukele being like, yeah, El Salvador is going to...

We're going to create a new kind of flat tax city on the slopes of an active volcano. This is such an amazing act of hubris. The idea of building a cryptocurrency city on the slope of an active volcano is such a powerful metaphor for cryptocurrency in general. But crypto people are so stupid that they're like, yeah, it's cool. Anything could happen.

But when I say active volcano, I don't mean it's currently erupting, but like... No, not yet. It is a volcano. We have to wait for Mark Wolvos to get that. But that wouldn't have stopped them. Well, initially. It is on the side of a volcano.

There is geothermal activity and it does like vent steam a lot. So I wouldn't... And it's not inactive. Let's just say that. A not inactive volcano. And again, they've said, well, it's going to have... It's going to be a full-fledged metropolis with residential and commercial areas,

restaurants and an airport, as well as a port and rail service. And the thing is, you need to have a city that's built like a circle with a big plaza that's shaped like the Bitcoin symbol in the middle. In order to... Actually, true, that's what they're going to do. Well, they're not going to actually do it.

That's what they're saying they're going to do. In order to have all that, you need to have it powered by cryptocurrency on the side of a mountain. No city has ever had that before. Yeah, that's right. Well, because all the geothermal activity will power the cryptocurrency. That is the plan, yes.

Oh, fuck! Plenty the elder mining Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. Plenty the elder in favor of this idea because the outside, we were in president you see the photos from the launch event of the city and he clearly understands the aesthetic

that the idea evokes in your mind. Saudi Arabia is playing to this car commercial type vibes when they announce oxygen and the line and all these other things and it doesn't work in the same way that it should. They should be embracing every level of absurdity that they're going for. Yeah, absolutely. Well, because they're trying to make...

They're not trying to make... Saudi, you're right. They're one generation behind in terms of advertising insane doomed boondoggles. So, say insane doomed boondoggles a few times for my place. We'll just... We can cut it and you can make a drop of it. And they're doomed doggles.

But it's right, these insane doomed boondoggles are supposed to be fun and epic and they're supposed to be kind of a joke. It's not supposed to be... It's not supposed to look like the first few minutes of iRobot anymore. That's over. That's from like 2012.

It's all supposed to be a big joke. And I think Bukele gets it. I think that... It's something chilling about a president who finds the idea of crypto to be almost funny. Well, I think really what's always striking to me though about these different ideal communities, whether it's the Georgia city in the desert,

whether it's the crypto city on the volcano, or whether it's the various different shapes that MBS is trying out in the desert. Yeah, your three possible start locations in the trash huge video game. What always strikes me about that is they're always claiming that they're going to build these cities to do things that you already do in normal cities,

like have a job and walk somewhere and go to a restaurant or whatever. Not die. And what's so striking is I think it shows this, especially among the powerful, just a complete lack of imagination where they're saying, well, we want to do the thing that we've always had,

but we can only do it in this completely fucking insane way. All we can do is the complete impossible to continue perpetuating what is pretty normal. Like you can have a data center wherever. You don't need to have this. Yeah, it's a little bit of a refinement here if we can only do the impossible in pursuit of the ordinary. It's great.

Yeah. There is definitely, I think, I think there's a pretty significant difference between what is actually being attempted in the Middle East and what is just being purported by Saudi Arabia in particular. Like Egypt, for example, proposed the new administrative capital that is just a little bit south of Cairo.

Also features an octagon. Also features an octagonal, the largest military headquarters of any national army. Because they had to go up from the Pentagon. Five sides, yeah. That's literally true, yes. The point of it is, essentially, they made it pretty low-key.

They built all these gigantic things, but their point of it was, essentially, to relieve congestion on Cairo. Because it's a very big city, going to become even bigger. But the reason why it's actually being built and the reason why it's actually going to come into fruition is because CC plans to actually live there and inhabit there. And he means for it as a means of actual power

to prevent any sort of protest against his rule. Because no one, aside from the elite and the intelligentsia, is going to live there. And you can't have a tower in the square if there's a tower in an octagon. Exactly. And Niyam, it's got all the gigantic structures. It's got all the big plans.

But even though King Salman, his mind is essentially vacated at this point, King Salman may hold his cabinet sessions there, and there might be meetings between Mike Pompeo or whatever there. But they're not going to move the whole thing from Ria to Niyam. It's purely to generate revenue and to generate PR and to ostensibly move toward environmental goals and to project Saudi power.

But soft power is not, it exists inside your mind. And from that perspective, it's very hard to extract. Your mind makes it real. It's real in your mind, but it's not physical. It's not measurable in terms of revenue or, it's not concrete in that same way. If you die in the octagon, you're going to drown. The octagon is sinking.

Sorry, you are dead. What I mean to say is, you will die in the octagon. You're going to sink pretty much 100% death rate. Yeah. No, but I think that's quite perceptive, right? That Saudi's mission, I think since, I don't know, for the last, I don't know what, like 40, 50 years or whatever, especially sort of that sort of really turned up

ever since they decided to become a San Francisco in the Arabian Peninsula, is this idea that it is, as you say, shame is an effective ploy. The idea is to change how everyone thinks about them by imagining what they would be excited about if it was announced to them. And it's so true that it's so obvious.

It's so obvious that none of these announcements are ever meant to do anything. They're just meant to cause the reaction to the announcement. And that's it. Exactly. And I mean, if you want to think about, like, if you want to be cynical about it, right, which of course I do, is you'd say,

well, even beyond all of that, right, if you want to look at what Saudi Arabia needs to do is they need to constantly tell a story about how they're central, just like the automakers who are trying to, like, make an electric Hummer, they're trying to say, well, as the world transitions to a new form of energy,

presumably, we are going to remain central to it because all of the green innovation is going to come out of here. We're going to invest in Rivian, this company that made, like, five cars. We're going to imagine the octagon that's going to make shipping completely zero carbon. But at the same time,

we're going to try to make sure that no progress gets made at COP, like which the Saudi delegation is famous for doing, right? It's, to me, it suggests it is a deeply cynical thing where it says, instead of looking at the very difficult things that need to be done, what if we all imagined a fun story where we all got to get everything we wanted

and play with some fun toys at the same time? It seems to me to be, to serve that purpose for them, to be not just PR for how you feel about Saudi, but PR for Saudi saying it is still very important that our economy is very sort of buoyant, that everyone continues to give us lots of money because otherwise, we're never going to get to develop the triangular prism

that is going to invent, like, a new kind of carbon capture technology that you couldn't have invented in a city. The thing is, the triangular prism is going to have to be invented in the triangle. And you also have to remember that, you know, kind of building off of that, Saudi Arabia gave one of the longest estimates

for when it was going to become net zero carbon emissions amongst the world. It's only superseded by India. It's like 2060s, right? 2060, that along with Qatar, Nigeria, Ukraine, Russia, China. Um, try, can you feasibly, and this is not meant to be, you know, kind of a metaphysical thought experiment,

but can you really foresee with a concrete vision where you will be in 2060, what job you will have, what career you will have, what the world will be like in 2060? I can foresee it. I'm going to be the head of imaginary at the rectangular prison. Prison, I mean prison.

Yeah, it's a new prison that they're building in Neom. They finally, they finally built a rectangular prison. It took this, it took Neom's free, like sort of very lax planning laws and division of MBS in order to build the rectangular prison. In 2060, I will be 69 years old, nice. So yeah, no, I don't rate my chances of pretty much anything. The point is, is that Finland is suggesting,

you know, net zero in 2030. While European countries 2035, 2040. These are things that administrations, even though the long-term can plan for, they have to make electronic promises for, that have concrete plans for. Saudi Arabia, when you are suggesting something that is 40 years in the future,

you have a lot of wiggle room to put things off, to make a lot of announcements, to continually say that you are moving in this direction, you're almost there, you're on the path to getting net zero, you're on the path of becoming this renewable energy powerhouse. If only we had a little bit more money, if only we had a little more soft power, if only we had a little more attention.

Then we could finally get here, because we are, you know, the most fossil fuel-elite economy on this unplanned earth, one of the most. Wouldn't you want that to happen? Don't you want that to happen? Don't you want to give us the resources that you want? Why are you denying us the resources?

Why are you not believing in our drive? Why would we be announcing all these things if we didn't have that drive? It's a really pathetic, awful game that I wish like, like what Riley was saying about how they're meant to evoke in a reaction, if it was purely to evoke a reaction, then, you know, you pay attention to it, but you kind of like scoff at it.

But, you know, people are being evicted from their land in order to build this thing in Neon. People are, people have been killed by the police for refusing evictions. They are drilling into mountains in nature, because they are caught between the impossible promises of an insane person, true psychopath in every sense of the world. And, you know, you're being paid to do something, and you can't not do the thing that you were being paid to do exorbitant amounts for.

Yeah, it sucks. World, world, world sucks. That's what this podcast is all about. Yeah, at least we have, at least we have... Sorry, Shem, it's your own The Good Future podcast. This is the wrong one. Yeah, you were wondering why you were doing this. Oh, this is a new Spence episode.

I woke up and I, no, it's the right one. This is actually Sponcon for the line, so we're going to need to retake that bit. This is a podcast that we do as a piece of performance art where we imagine a world in which climate change isn't just going to, like, go away. Yeah. Where we go, oh, what if it actually does just get worse

and we actually do something about it? The Oxagon... It's just a little silly thing that we do. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, with the Oxagon on the line, all that works, and then it's great. Yeah, sorry. Anyway, I think we've gone for about time, so I want to say, Shemus, thank you so much for coming and hanging out again.

As always, it is an absolute pleasure to have you. It is always a pleasure to be on this wonderful podcast with all these wonderful people. Do you help yourself to a mini quiche on the way out? Absolutely. If people want more Shemus, where can they find you? If they truly do want more Shemus, they can go... More Shemus, they cry.

You can go on Twitter. I am at Shemus underscore Malik on Twitter. I have a sub-stack where I talk about international affairs, Malikafsaleed.substack.com. That link will be in the description of this episode. We will be linking. And also, if you like... I don't know, if you like my persona,

but you do not like anything that you heard on this podcast, I have a sub-sec for film where I talk about obscure film, burnt nitrate.substack.com. Go to that too. So, if you want to hear all about your favorite movie about the train pulling into the station, check out the sub-stack. They actually had to film that in the line. It's perfect for it.

You could film train pulling into station one, train pulling into station two. A single Boston police detective has to stop that train from pulling into the station. That's right. You could do the spin-off series, The Station Master. You could do all kinds of great things in Neon. At the line, with train pulling into state.

Now, I don't know exactly what film you could make in Oxagon, other than that Mark Wahlberg one, but I think we're going to come up with some good ones. Anyway. Sort of Battle Royale UFC. Oh, that's right. Perfect. Anyway, if you liked all of this,

don't forget that we have a Patreon. Five bucks a month. You get a second episode every week. It's not the free one. This week, we subjected Nish Kumar to Robert Peston's book. We subjected all of ourselves to it, to be fair. I subjected myself to it. Ah, Roberto Pesta.

Once again, Riley is the only person to have read a book. Again and again. And again, it's going to keep happening. This is why we have a podcast with a one literate person. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I have to. I can't be exposed to them too often. Anyway, it's time for us to eat dinner,

and we're going to see you on the bonus. Bye, everybody. Bye.