TRASHFUTURE - Tier Fun Operators ft. Nate Bethea

Episode Date: February 12, 2018

This week Riley (@Raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Olga (@rocknrolga), belatedly joined by Milo (@Milo_Edwards) sit down with Nate Bethea (@inthesedeserts) from the leftist troopcast, What A Hell of a Way to Die (@HellOfAWay) to talk all about the incredibly stupid ways in which the military uses technology - from the Strava fitness tracking app doing radical praxis by doxxing US military facilities around the world and tech-f*cking procurement nonsense. We then read a fawning article by the Adam Smith Institute's perennial trash thinker Dr. Madsen Pirie about Elon Musk's dumb space launch. Riley has another anger short curcuit. Follow us on @trashfuturepod

Nate. Gents, I think I may have lost you here. Give me a second. I'll edit it together so it looks seamless. Audio geniuses. I am an audio genius now. And so, and joining us from the ball. Yeah, this is this is Nate Bethea from hell of a way to die.

How's it going? It is a horrible rainy shitty Saturday here in London, which is very regular here in the caliphate of Tower Hamlet. Yes, we're in the no go zone of Tower Hamlet, where the alignment of Gucci gang and al-Qaeda in the Sinai have joined forces to ensure that women can only leave the tube station if they're wearing their supreme branded burqas. So congratulations Olga for like getting Copping Map merch. Raheem Kassam tried to warn us, but we didn't listen to it.

I swear I've seen this all briefed by Mike Flynn someplace. You know, there's a PowerPoint presentation all about the supreme branded burqas. No, he thinks that Palace is one of the pillars of Islam. So, but, you know, we're in one piece for now. Well, I'm actually not in one piece. I'm in Naruto. Well, I was going to say, I mean, I could introduce it where I'm recording from, but I feel you could just log on to the Strava app and you'd be able to find me right away

because clearly I can't go anywhere without tracking my fitness. That's a segue right now. That's a fantastic segue into our discussion of them, of dumb technology in the military. Nate, do you want to tell us what what's been happening recently with fitness tracking in the Strava? I'll put this with a little bit of a caveat. I was in the military, but a little while ago and when I left in 2014, fitness tracking technology had not become so ubiquitous to the point where people were wearing fitness

apps while deployed to combat, or at least I wasn't aware of it. But recently, Strava, which brands itself as a sort of Garmin fitness app that's open source where you can track your personal best and so on and so forth and share them online, very enthusiastically released its global heat map that showed the routes, etc., that all of its users are recording, I guess, whether they're aware of that or not, around the world. And perhaps unwittingly, they released this map which revealed the active fitness routes taken by US military forces who were deployed to bases that you might not know exist around the world in places like Syria.

No way. Exactly. And so for sure, I mean, I can remember almost nine years ago when I was deployed to Afghanistan, we'd run this perimeter route around the base. I found that exact base that I was deployed to and sure enough, Strava users are wearing their GPS units and running that same perimeter. But even more ridiculous, in some cases, some of these people were wearing their fitness routes while they were on patrol, perhaps to check their heart rate and how many miles

they walked while climbing up and down mountains to get into overwatch position. So not only could you see the perimeters and the street routes, all of the cross-section, etc., of these forward operating bases, but in some cases, you could see the sort of flower pedal of the foot patrols people were taking in those areas while on combat missions. We get the steps in. The Jay Shetty fitness method of doing 100,000 steps a day, never sleeping, not pooping in February, and meditating and doing all the business monk stuff. Exactly.

You're making sure that the Taliban know where you are so that the fight can be fair so that everyone knows that we won it because of our medal. We're not even trying to hide from the Taliban. We're not even trying to hide from anyone. We're the U.S. Army. It wouldn't be fair if you got in a firefight if you weren't hitting your target heart rate at the same time. So you got to make sure that on top of engaging with fire and maneuver, you're also getting

your macros and various sort of fitness things just to make sure that you're completely squared away. At this point, what is a combat deployment besides a chance to improve your physical fitness? It's surely not a way to win any conflicts because I think we've already gotten past that threshold. I think I know what it is. I think CrossFit just got really intense and we didn't notice.

It's like, I mean, this is going to sound crass, but yeah, it's like who doesn't dream of designing their own CrossFit workout that's going to be named in memory of them before they die? Oof, Morone. So what do you think, so this obsession with kind of like fitness tracking in the army, do you think? I keep sort of wondering like who do we, but do you think it's because of disingenuousness on the part of the company or just like, you know, so almost like sort of like tech fuckery

among to borrow a sort of borrow a phrase that you guys use on your podcast quite a bit. Just tech fuckery among sort of young soldiers. I honestly think it's the latter. I think that it's unintended consequences. I think for one, I'm wondering, in my experience at least, it's less common for there to be things like public Wi-Fi on these bases. So I would imagine that somebody brings something, you know, like a device like this, goes on deployment, they train, they wear it to keep track of their own things and then not realize

that when they get back or when they're on leave or something that they upload all this data then over time this has been aggregated. I don't think that, to be honest with you, the fitness obsession in the military is not universal. I mean, there are people who, in my experience at least, I would imagine there would be a small subset of people in the military who'd be really into this. But the majority would probably, whether they, I mean, some people deploy and they don't ever work out the whole time they're there.

Some people like they literally treat it as a life changing experience where they can get their best marathon time while they're in combat. It's a bizarre world. But I honestly think that this is just one of the strange tech not thinking your way through something. My wife is a data scientist and she's talked about this before that when you have Google do face recognition software that they just release into the world and it starts matching black people's faces with monkeys because they literally didn't test the program on

anyone who wasn't a white dude, you see that kind of thing happen. You're like, oh, we should have thought of that in advance. Same thing. We should have thought that maybe if we tracked people's every movements when they're doing fitness and we make it a public heat map, it might help people dox them and maybe dox the entire U.S. military, but it's hindsight's 2020, of course. I was reading something on Twitter when this kind of came out about, I think it was a journalist from the Verge.

I don't know. They don't know their name who like in 2014 and like brought this up to Strava like about their privacy policy and the fact that like so much data like was being given to them that it could lead to something like potentially disastrous. And what she said was like, she knew more about Strava's privacy policy of invaded. So when Strava was asked about this, when it kind of came out and was like a big deal, Strava kind of, as far as I'm aware, they dismissed it, right? So they kind of said, oh, it's just like a bug that we can fix.

They didn't sort of realize how big their fuck up was. And I sort of wonder how symptomatic that is of like the tech, like this tech bro culture or like the startup tech industry generally. Let's move fast and break things, right? In this case, it's move, move fast and break cover. Well, yeah, and to be honest with you, this, this, this is something that you'll see happen with, with other huge fuck ups that involve representation of the military, that if there had been someone who had had any proximity to this, who might have been like, hey, we

should check to make sure this isn't, you know, revealing things that might not want to be revealed. I mean, I, me personally, I, I guess at this point, I don't have much of a stake in it. So I think it's kind of hilarious. But someone could have said, Hey, this is maybe a bad idea. Like I'm seeing what looks like airbases in Syria. Like maybe we shouldn't, you know, have this area of the world released, but nobody thought of it until it was too late.

And I mean, on our show, we got a Facebook message from somebody basically right after Strava released the heat map. Like when they very, you know, just guilelessly put out their press release, like, Hey guys, check out this global map. And someone immediately texted us and said, Holy shit, I found the base I was deployed to and literally they, they hadn't given it in a single moment's thought before they did it. And now, you know, their name is forever linked with the app that docs is you and exposes

military positions abroad. It's, it's, it's, it's just, it's fucking hilarious to me. I honestly can't get over it. Um, what was, so do you remember any of the, any of the other, other locations, like where is the, uh, where the, where the U S has troops that they should, um, there are, you will find Strava heat maps in Mauritania, in Niger, in, uh, I want to say to some extent in other parts of West Africa, uh, you might find one in Chad. You can definitely find the outline of the little mini bases besides camp Lemonnier in

Djibouti. Um, uh, honestly, if you, there's a possibility when you think about it, that with their user base, some of this might be like, you know, gas and oil field workers in places like Algeria. But I know that, for example, a guy I worked with when I was in the army had spent a significant amount of time when he was in the 75th ranger regiment in Mauritania. So I know we have bases there, um, and there definitely are bases in Mauritania that show up on the Strava heat map. Um, and I would imagine I didn't dig in Southeast Asia, but knowing how many small little bases

there are in places like, you know, um, the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, I bet you you could find some of them there too. But it's anti-imperialist praxis, right? Like that's the ultimate conclusion, but like actually this is a very deliberate move to like destroy, to get like white chud bros, um, would be management consultants to just like destroy American empire and I'm all here for it. It's like, why read a book by max boot when you can just log on to Strava and know exactly what America's imperial presence looks like.

And how many weight watchers points at what it's worth? Well, you can like, you know, I'm pretty sure you can use Strava to like, um, quantify just like how effective, um, American empire in like 2018 actually is right. Like, you know, you can destroy it in real time and, uh, people can, you know, and you can gamify, you can gamify the destruction of Western imperialist powers. And that's pretty cool to me. No, I was just laughing at the idea that's like, you used to only have the numbers of the department, department of defense budget, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars

spent every year, but now you also can match that to numbers of calories burned and numbers of miles run. It's like, so in a way it's, uh, it's kind of a 360 perspective. I'm sort of imagining like Al Qaeda, like, you know, killing like a bunch of like us troops somewhere and then taking best like Strava watches. Oh, and then, and then there's like, definitely like a story how Strava saved a whole bunch of dudes because they started running in the shape of SOS. Well, like how like how this, how this for Al Qaeda operative became like the greatest

world, like greatest long distance runner. I'll tell you, there, there was a moment when I was deployed. I remember some, some friend of mine worked as an intelligence officer and he'd sometimes pull me in when they'd find ridiculous things in like data dumps and caches and such. And one of them, the more amazing things I'd ever seen was a bunch of photos. They pulled off a memory card from a digital camera of, I don't want to say, necessarily say Taliban, but Afghan or Central Asian insurgents in a training camp doing their morning exercises.

And it was obvious that they had adapted what had, they had probably at one point, some of them had been sort of auxiliaries or paramilitaries trained by the U S and they're like, oh, yeah, the U S guys, they do a good stretching routine before they run. So there's literally these guys up in the training camp doing exercises that we drill. Our soldiers on before they go and run, you know, to train, to do insurgent fighting. This is kind of amazing. It's like, you know, it's like in the 1980s, like we funded the Mujahideen, but we, what we didn't know is that we also got them super ripped.

I can just imagine it's like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, like everyone thinks he's dead and then he comes out and he's like massively, he's just like swole. Oh, of course. That's what it is. It's like the U S army doesn't just arm them. It also spots them as well. Come on, bro. Push one more, one more, you can take Mosul.

Just push a little harder. Well, it's like, oh, this is like American, this is American YouTube guy. I'm sure he's great. Just like all the rest of the YouTube people. They're all like American fitness bros who are just like, you can push it. You can go harder. Don't be weak. Don't be a pussy.

Do it for you. Do it for your country. And I can imagine that's like that's kind of how Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi like became like hench. Well, that's like that's like one thick boy. That's like how that's how people get radicalized, but it's also how people get radicalized by like CrossFit. Well, I was going to say the exact same thing that you literally, I mean, like you

could you could do a parallel investigation of extremism and radicalization with how people get radicalized into the sort of Clint Eastwood movie worldview of America's presence in the world by walk by doing CrossFit and like everything they do is about like break yourself off in memory of this heroic Navy seal. Like it really, I mean, it I'm all about fitness things that are unique, that get people motivated to work out more. But I would never in a million years do the organized American CrossFit because it's so creepy like military worship.

Yeah, here's the part of the show where I admit I used to do CrossFit. Oh, no, of course you did before that for the aesthetic for the for like the ethos around it as opposed to the exercises themselves. Why are we doing CrossFit because I was a mind over body because I was a fat teenager. OK, and you know, so did you have like a big like a small American guy like scream at you about like your worth shit? No, he was he was an Egyptian Christian with a really high pitched laugh. Oh, OK, did he wear like a tank top that was completely useless because the

nipples were fully out because it's so loose. I heard that's I actually I heard that's part of the new the new US military uniform is is a tank top that is so skinny that the nipples are like out on either side. It's also like it's also a spiked match. So it blocks the it blocks the nipple, but not the areola you want to get like it's like well, no, it's like what the what was it that the fit that that Mola Omar said to his troops before battle, you know, don't fire until you see the pink of their areolas.

We're a smart show guys. I'm just saying, I mean, I honestly, Riley, I get it if you want to do well, you know, Olympic weightlifting style things, those CrossFit gym facilities actually have more than one bar you can lift on. So it's great, but then you it's like you have to weigh. Do I want to get radicalized or do I want to just do a conventional workout because I mean, unless they give you after hours access to a CrossFit gym, you're going to find yourself peer pressured into doing lots of pull-ups

with an American flag behind you. Somehow it's just even as a Canadian level of CrossFit. Do they tell you about Zeno? I mean, as someone who's been radicalized by both ISIS and the alt-right. You start every sentence like that. What I can say is I CrossFit at least gives you more benefits because, you know, you get ISIS like you don't even like get the gun until like you pass the six month training course until you read the secret.

Yeah, and with the alt-right, like you have to like be able to recite all of Jordan Peterson's 12 rules of life while peeing with your pants fully down to your ankles and you're shirt fully up, both things that are very challenging and in my opinion, not worth it. So if you get like rip pecs and like really pointy, like razor sharp nipples to CrossFit, but I think I don't I think that's worth it. I think ultimately I think what we can include about the Strava is that we all actually are wearing one right now.

We're all wearing them so that people can tell where we are in the Caliphate. Holy shit, that's what it's going to be. So all the podcasters are going to wear Strava's so you'll know like where or where they're all recording. And then at some point someone will do like a heat map of London and in hacking like every flat will just be beating me up. Well, it's I think that the I can only imagine someone like Mike Flynn like

buying just sort of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Strava's on the basis that, you know, he wants to make sure that the that the sort of the American that the American army can look like sort of, you know, the G.I. Joe dolls that he still collects and keeps under his bed in the original packaging so they maintain their value. But the thing that he doesn't realize that Mike Flynn was sold all those Strava's by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in glasses and a fake mustache. It's for a second, right?

Isn't this I mean I could like I get my film plots completely wrong because the only film that I really understand is Pacific Rim. But wasn't this like essentially at the plot to small soldiers like, you know, in small soldiers like the old the old film they put like microchips in these toys to make them sentient and these chips are actually made by like the military, right? So I think the end of the movie is that like the military have to shut them down and because all the chips are in the toys, they can like, you know,

they can shut them down before. Okay. So obviously I've got that plot wrong. No, the movie is called Swole Soldiers. Oh, Swole Soldiers. Okay. Well, I'm just thinking that maybe you could this is actually like the continuation of Sun Tzu.

You know, if you want to deceive your enemy and make him think that you're stronger than you are, just make sure you get a lot of Strava units and then he'll check the heat map and be like, oh, wow, this is like a division sized force. I've got to abandon my position. I mean, it's like it's hybrid warfare, you know, fitness apps to fool the enemy into thinking that you're more powerful. If you if you did a Strava heat map of London, you'd find like loads of people

like running around like, you know, you'd find like loads of like maps of light around like Battersea Park and like Victoria Park and all that. And then you'll go to my house and you'll see like an unbelievable amount of light, but that's not because I'm wearing a Strava. It's just because I emit so much energy for like having never massed the bases before. So it's like I'm just so strong and so powerful. God, Mike Flynn wishes he could use you.

Yeah. Shall we move on to some other? The God Parts school is in Dartford and Ken. Shall we shall we move on to some other military tech fuckery? Well, I mean, you and I were speaking on Twitter and I told the story and you asked me to recount it here about this. The system called the bat hide is, of course, it's an acronym. I'm sure the acronyms actually contain nested acronyms within it just to make

it more confusing. But what it basically amounted to was when I was in Afghanistan in Southeastern Afghanistan in 2009, we had a system that was meant to it started out as a device that defense contractors sold to the military as a means of creating a registry of people, either people who were suspects or people who were applying for jobs to work for the coalition, like Afghan civilians that were applying for jobs, like cleaning the dining facility or working in the dining facility or working because you have day laborers and people that would

show up on bases and work three shifts a day or either be 24 hours a day. You've got Afghans working on these bases. And so this device was like a shitty Sony Mavica camera from the year 2000. It was this big, clunky digital camera that also had a fingerprint scanner. And the idea was that you would when someone would get enrolled, you would take a profile picture of them. You'd take an iris photograph, would actually get the camera really close up to their eye and take a picture of their irises.

And then you'd also take fingerprint scans. So that's how they're winning hearts and minds. I mean, it's it's unreal, though, because it was it was a piece of shit. Like for one thing, imagine trying to enter in someone's biographical data, you know, one after another with the texting mechanism from like a Nokia phone where you've got like one for a one one for B. So there's that. Not only that, but people in Afghanistan don't have first name, last name, the same way as people do in the West.

I mean, it's it's patronymic, but it's often like you'll have a name like someone's name might be like Han or Muhammad or something like that. Son of, you know, Daud Han or something like that. So trying to get a system where you can match people's information in a country where first names and last names aren't the standard. And you're asking American soldiers to type it in with a Nokia touchpad. You can imagine that, A, it's not didn't really do much. It didn't wasn't wasn't wasn't, you know, it didn't provide matches.

And B, it it was such a frustrating process that it would take 15 to 20 minutes to enroll a single person. So we'd at first this was started as a thing like, hey, this will make your process easier. But of course, like lots of dumb technology in the military, it became the purpose behind missions. And I'm telling you, I mean, I know, you know, friends of mine who are platoon leaders who'd get missions to go,

hey, go to this village and meet with the elders and get them to let you, you know, get everybody in the village enrolled in this system. So this thing would take hours, you know, 12 hours to do. It wasn't necessarily productive in any way. In some cases, people would come up with matches that were absurd, like literally a person in front of you would come up as a match with a dead body or someone who was a kid would come up as a match with like literally a child in front of you or like a 14 year old and he's enrolled.

And he's like, Oh, are you a 50 year old insurgent from across the country? Like it was absolutely absurd. And then even more so, a buddy of mine told me that the person who managed the enrollments like would get all the data, download off the cameras and enroll it in like the server, at least on our base was like apparently addicted to pills. And so like he just fucked up and enrolled for different regions of the country. So effectively, I can only imagine how many hours of, you know,

hundreds of hours of time was wasted, how much people's privacy got violated for no reason. And it all comes down to this idea that like the tech is going to solve the problem and then the tech becomes the problem. You could play a killer game of Snake. I mean, it's looking back on it like you just sort of adapt. You're like, Oh yeah, all right, it's our mission, you know, fucking enroll people in this stupid camera. But then it's looking back on it now.

I'm like, what a what an absolute nightmare. Like, not only is this just like a bizarre, probably illegal thing to make people do, it was just it was useless. Utterly and then so what happens is like they want to justify their procurement. They keep getting you to just like, no, we're sticking to this thing. We're absolutely going to stick to it. That is actually not even the most absurd one that I've encountered. I think the one that was the most insane was there was this, there was a problem.

And years ago, so in Iraq, they were dealing with problems where people in turrets of Humvees, like in the up turret of the vehicle would get shot by snipers. And by the time that people realized what was happening, they wouldn't have any idea where the shot came from because the shot would ring out and it might be, you know, in a city or a village or just people would all be facing different directions. And so whether or not this was a massive problem, I have no idea.

But of course, defense contractors want to make money on imaginary problems. So they create this thing that looked like. Do you remember the bumble ball? It was a toy for kids. It was kind of an American thing, but it looked like a like a round ball with weird little spongy divots and it like vibrated and bounced. You know what I'm talking about? I kind of sounds like a Wade Sachs toy.

They have them in the Michael Jackson video scream. If you remember that, they've got them all over the floor and like the spaceship they live in or whatever. I'm I'm dating myself. I'm like 33, but this this might be ancient history to most people listening. So it looked like that. It was a ball with microphones sticking out of it that they would install on the top of your vehicle.

And like if a shot rang out, it's supposed to calculate on its computer and tell you where it's where it's coming from, right? So this thing feasibly worked OK in in a vehicle. Like I don't know because I never was in one. But I mean, I would imagine it must have passed some tests. They're like, yeah, you know, it gives you a cardinal direction. It gives you a compass direction of like where a shot came from. So the defense contractors had his great idea.

If this works on vehicles, let's make a system that people can wear. Now, so the idea is you're going to wear a microphone and the microphone is on your body with a battery pack. And if a sniper shoots at you, it'll tell you where it came from. Except number one, you can't shoot back because if you shoot back, then it's going to tell it's going to be like, oh, shit, there's shots coming from you. Secondly, it also is predicated on the notion

that you're not going to, you know, it's going to tell you where it came from based on where you were standing and facing when the shot rang out. So effectively for this thing to work, if a sniper is shooting at you, you have to stand perfectly still, not shoot back and like wait for this TI-83 calculator to spin through its thing like up. All right. There it is. I'm getting shot at from over there. Well, that's that's because it knows again.

I think this is more Michael Flynn led procurement where he he's like, no, American soldiers are strong, American soldiers will stand firm and they will know when they are killed by the second sniper bullet where that bullet came from. I mean, it sort of feels as if like they've taken American sniper to be like an actual literal documentary. OK, so the first idea sounds like some bizarre version of like e-harmony. And then the second thing is literally like a device.

It's like, it's going to tell you it's raining when it's already raining. You're being rained on. What the hell is that? But these things literally cost like in the thousands of dollars per unit. And I know that my unit wasn't the only one that had them delivered. Like to the point where an entire company, maybe even the entire 700 man battalion could have been fitted with one. And so what happened is we got them delivered in theater

and like so many good ideas that, you know, could have paid for socialized health care or college educations in America. They just sat in shipping containers in Afghanistan and never got unpacked because who the fuck would use that? I mean, like for one, it's stupid. For two, for another, it's another heavy piece of equipment you have to wear when you already look like Robocop. I know who's going to use it once again.

I think this is another issue where we are. Well, we, you guys are once again arming the Taliban and they're going to use this to all get incredible at singing and then win American Idol. We love our Robocops. They are law enforcement. Oh, my God. Can we, can we slice that song in at some point?

Can we slice it? I think I think we need to buy these microphones and we need to sell it off as like a cool, sexy, new gadget. Like give it like a one word name with like that's a misspelled common word. Sing shot. There we go. Bam. So what is it? What does it do? I'm thinking I'm wearing it on me and I'm like who like to see

the direction of cat call that's coming at me. But you have to stay perfectly still until they tell you. A couple of guys drive along in a car and they're like, hey, smile, honey. They're like, stay perfectly still. All right, freeze up. Wait a second. OK, I think he's coming from right in front of you. I'm not sure that.

Oh, my God, it's that it's that giant muscly guy from Essex, the the American army is trying to reinvent the year. It's the take the A out. So, yeah, it's like it's like you got like a like a like a creepy police state version of your boyfriend of you have a creepy police state version of like LinkedIn or e harmony. Right. Well, I also for me, they're one in the same.

I only fuck off LinkedIn. Exactly. No, sorry. No, I get my jobs off of e harmony. No, we only fuck off Matt Hancock. Oh, yeah. Nate, do you hear about this? No, go ahead. Do you hear that Matt Hancock, the UK's minister for like digital,

has created an app called Matt Hancock that replicates all the functions of Twitter, but it's just branded as this MP design. So people in his constituency can get in touch with him, but instead it's just attracted all of left Twitter, which it posts on it constantly. See, we get most of our listeners through through actually our our posting on Matt Hancock. I met my boyfriend. That's one of those unreal things that like doesn't

surprise me at all, because it just seems that, I mean, I don't know if politicians have done similarly like flat footed tech things in the US, but I'm sure there's at least one. But any time that you try to juke social media to work in your favor, it seems like that's just an invitation to bring bring down, you know, a little bit of hurt on yourself. And I'm saying this somewhat distractedly as I'm registering an account on that Hancock dot com.

Join us on Matt Hancock. Um, join our filthy girl, the girl's DM on Matt Hancock. The boys DM on Matt Hancock is I can't wait to make it to do better for our community to work hard and then maybe we can all build a better Somerset or wherever he is from together. Girls DM on Matt Hancock. Yo, you think that you think Matt Hancock eats ass. So yeah, that's, but that's what struck me about the about this, the first,

the first thing this sort of weird insurgent e-harmony was that like it's used for both people who are working, all working on the base and also people who you want to keep track of, and there's there in the same database being registered in the same completely failure prone system. I can't see how that would go horrifyingly wrong. Despite the fact that I think we should probably acknowledge that, you know, it was just probably wrong to be doing that in the first place. It's hilarious.

They did it so badly. The one thing that you've come to discover anytime that you use information technology in the military is that, I mean, at the risk of sounding like some sort of Elon Musk fanboy or free market privatizer, what you discover is that what you find is that it's always like no bid shit that is somehow procured by somebody who's a retired military officer or something along those lines. And so the stuff hasn't been tested.

It literally goes from like concept to we bought it and we're delivering it to you. And you I mean, I don't it's hard to go without a visual, but there's just so much crap technology that gets defeated by the simplest things. Like we had this great big battle simulator that was like this integral part of the class I was in when I was training to be a company commander. Yeah, World Warcraft. It was like it was like like an automated GPS board game kind of shit. But the problem was they set it up in all these classrooms.

It was meant to be like a like a if you were like controlling the battle from the operation center, but apparently the contractor ran the wrong kind of cable all the way across Fort Benning, like all 50 miles of cable. So none of the machines could talk to one another. So it's just sat in the room with these monitors. We never turned on the whole six month. I was in this course. It was just a cheese string.

Ah, good. It's that's the thing is like it's when you have a when you have a defense department like that where like, you know, its budget is just constantly expanding and exploding. You're going to get situations where it's just like, yeah, fuck it. Doesn't matter. It doesn't even need to work. We just have to spend the money.

Who are we going to spend it with? I think let's spend it with our friends. I have like I just this reminds me of you have this massive bloated defense budget that's paying for all sorts of absurd things. But then you you push the button in the water fountain to try to get water and like ants come out or you have black mold everywhere in in barracks rooms. I mean, we did a full inventory of all the barracks in my battalion right before I got out of the army when I was stationed in Korea.

And the best way I can describe the U.S. Army in Korea is like it's like living in children of men. Like you have all this crazy future technology, but everyone hates their life and the future doesn't exist. So it's just like everything's broken and shitty, but everyone has smartphones. It's the way I mean, like it's unbelievably gross. The future that liberals won. Well, kind of.

So shall we shall we shall we dunk on the Muskin Egger? We can. I'm just wondering, should we? Yeah, let's get my little one. OK, OK, cool. We are alive and. Milo, when you say that you're on a trip with your girlfriend, are you implying that you found love unlike Elon Musk? I found love on on Elon Musk. Milo, you've been really quiet for the first

half of of this segment. Yeah, I mean, truly, truly the storyline of Rihanna's. We found love in a hopeless place, finding love on Elon Musk. Who is on the surface of Mars? So yeah, you've been very quiet for the first half of this podcast, but you've definitely been here and didn't just pick up the call now. I was just being cogitative, you know, or what I like. I like to observe and only really say something

when I've got a fully formed hot take. Yes, that's my style. Basically, Milo, basically, it's like every call me. Every guy who identifies as a cock old. Exactly. You can't be a cock old if you're a little sell. Are we shall we shall we talk Musk? Oh, absolutely.

That that opens itself to so many interpretations. I'm really excited. I'm inviting everybody to smell under my arms and we're going to talk about all of the things that we can tell. Nate and Milo, I'd like you to open up the envelope. So I've sent you that should be arriving about now and we're going to talk about it. Oh, yeah, this is Riley. This this envelope is just full of Pizza Hut vouchers.

Yes, to help you get laid, bro. Okay, okay, fair enough. So what we know is that Elon Musk recently launched his falcon heavy rocket into space, which not a euphemism. Yeah, no, not not a euphemism. It was all very literal. And Dr. Madsen, Peary, although I think he probably does use that as a euphemism, almost certainly.

Also, yeah, that's that's how women love it when you refer to their vaginas as space. So I can imagine that like Elon Musk would try and compliment a woman, but would have no idea how like, oh, yes, you you have such a wonderful spacious vagina. So it's a complete vacuum. I don't think it's abnormal to try to attempt a South or a South African accent and then just start talking like the Terminator.

I mean, I think in our minds, that's basically the space Elon Musk occupies. I bet Elon Musk is like terrible at sex, but then he like uses it, uses his like philosophy as excuse. He's like, I want to reinvent sex. All right, so Dr. Madsen, Peary of the Adam Smith Institute, someone with whom we are relatively familiar on trash future, having read his millennial manifesto a while back. Ah, is he he's you for the man, the millennial manifesto.

He's the author of the millennial manifesto and apparently this like, you know, love letter to Elon Musk, this this bust letter. He's written to Elon Musk, ass-eating Pioneer, Madsen Perry, Dr. Madsen me up fam. I thought the warning label on a pack of Xanax is the millennial manifest. No, that's the SoundCloud rapper manifesto. Anyway, fuck me up fam. Okay, so

the the successful launch of Elon Musk's Falcon Heavy whimsically sending off to Tesla Roadster driven by a space suited mannequin highlights a new group of players on the economic scene driving technology forward. They are the billionaire boys who use money made elsewhere to pursue interests on the cutting edge of exciting technologies. I mean, that's one way to describe people who do deep, deep fake porn. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those that says those are just words, aren't they?

There's like lots of words that are strung off on a page and they beat absolutely fucking nothing. No, not it's basically what the billionaire boys really does sound like a rap collector. I mean, my dad, I mean, billionaire boys club, billionaire boys club was the fashion label of Pharrell Williams. Yeah, Pharrell. Yeah, Pharrell Williams was going to launch us into space

with his amazing music. Didn't you pay attention? So all the secrets were stored in his big. Olga is actually the prodigal sister of the Coke. All the secrets are stored in his big fedora. Spiritual. But with this, I think she's a big fancy boy. No, I love the idea of referring to a grown ass old man as a billionaire

boy is that is this is kind of the core of Piri's argument. He says that these are basically a bunch of like excitable, overgrown teenagers who are using like their billions that they make doing boring stuff to do all the fun shit basically and he has a couple of examples, which I really, really the first one is just amazing. The first one I fucking love. Um, Paul Allen, who found co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates put 25 million of his own money to fund, you know, yada, yada, yada, um, another

space program who backed it not for a return, but to speed up access to space by private citizens. As a sideline, Allen also funds the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which is also can be referred to as the Rick and Morty writers room. But what gets me with that one is that Allen has backed a space shuttle program not for a return, but to speed up access to space for private citizens. I call me, call me cynical, but I don't fully believe what Dr. Madsen Piri is saying right here.

I'm not going to take that Xanax doctor. Well, I just asked myself the question, like if wealthy people can pay to go to space, like what, what do you expect them to do once they're there? I mean, is there really this captive group of people who are incredibly wealthy who are just like, holy shit, I've climbed Everest. Now I have to be in space. It just makes me think they must be something else. And I can't even imagine what they're going to get up to.

But like, it doesn't seem like a particularly safe course of action to be like, oh, it's billionaires. It's harmless. They won't do anything that if you want to know what they're doing there, just make them wear their straw. What they do on private planes is anything to go by. Probably fuck children. I think I said giving billionaires a lot of credit like during like what

during the 18th, 19th century, when like in imperialist Europe, like rich people used to go on like all these jollies to like remote parts of Africa and like South Asia and stuff. And we used to do it just because like just because they could like there's uncounted like documents of just like rich families who didn't buy any land. We didn't kind of like buy, you know, slaves or whatever. They just went because they literally had the money to do it. And it was like a status symbol, you know, and some of them, I guess,

would like bring back art or like, you know, stuff like that. So I guess in this case would be like, well, you can bring back moon rocks or in this case, it's like it's so Elon Musk and send his always fucking gets me cherry red. Why does he say cherry red? He's a rockabilly douchebag. He says he's so because he's a fucking nerd. He's obsessed with the Julek's colour chart.

Like if I had a time machine, I wouldn't go back in time and kill Hitler. I'd go back in time and bully Elon Musk at school because clearly what should have happened? It's like the American Psycho, where like they all get obsessed with the same colour of white on the business card, like bone white and like that's Carulian and all that show. He does that and he also has a David Bowie space oddity playing on the speaker and then his car of don't panic into the dashboard. So it's like like the like the like the plutocrats of like the ancient world, like they built triumphal arches and pyramids and whatever are

insane plutocrat. And I've also Matt Crisman on Choppo advanced the theory that our sort of towering monuments to our in our decadent society are the former's movies. I'm thinking actually no our monument to the sort of towering inequality of our stupid plutocracy is Elon Musk basically making a bunch of like epic bacon reddit references and sending his car into space in a way that makes people like like it on Twitter. I mean I love that notion that it's like oh I've I've launched this car with all these nerd shibbolettes on it. Never mind the fact that I'm going to crush unions and like my factories have

falling on people all the time. It's like yes Elon Musk is like he's my boss and he's my best friend so I'm going to understand when he kills me. Wait, hang on a minute at the Tesla factory is like an old silent film where like people are being crushed by heavy objects all the time and there's like ragtime piano playing in the background. Well I mean there was a recent headline about Elon Musk saying like if you vote down the United Auto Workers I'll build you a roller coaster and it's just like I feel like you could put an entire room of comedy writers together to come up with the the the most hateable billionaire on the planet

and they could spend you do like a doctoral research amount, doctoral thesis amount of research for it and turn around and just be like oh that sucks like he did it way worse just on the fly. Like nothing about him seems like it could be real it seems like it like it's being calibrated to make you hate him and somehow make the Adam Smith Institute and tech writers fall all over themselves for it. The billionaire the comedy writers would design would be more hateable only in the respect that he would also say Bazinga. Just you watch like there's like somewhere there's like some 19 year old who's gotten rich off of like Baroness Mone's cryptocurrency offering and you know is already you know going to like he's designing his own fucking space program

where he's gonna like like send little pumps like you know mummified remains. I'm assuming this is going to be in you know a long time after you know god rest I love a little pump. I'm going to even take it again because I don't even want to imply this this is a world where a little pump might die. I'm going to start again. Apologies for a little bit. But where he just sends like a fucking bottle of Xanax into space or whatever because it's like oh yes this is what I can do and it's going to be it's going to be this fucking this this cute scene nonsense that's just designed to pander to people or like you know what we'll eventually do which is when we make enough crypto when we have enough crypto kitties to start our own the trash future space program will send

up a bunch of white coke shirts into space. Can you please send me up there with a lifetime supply of fuel and a mirror. I mean okay so we joke about this but like what if there is the what if the I can totally see a future where people like like rich idiots will just literally send anything into space. So rather than like the internet of things will just have like the fucking like vacuous orbit of shit that you know fucking private school preppy kids decide to do on a day off. Instead of like throwing your shoes together and throwing them over a wire they're going to tie your shoes together and launch them into space. I said question will the jucero work in a vacuum. So this is but this is this is kind of something I've been I've been

thinking about right like on a slightly serious note right like the moment Elon Musk launched this rocket the era of even notional democratic control over space travel was over it's done it's now never coming back we are net with no space because all space future space program funding is going to be through grants to like private corporations congratulations the space industry is now the defense industry I mean it's the same thing now I and you know it's this this article kind of sort of praises Elon Musk for say oh yes when NASA failed to get us into space continually Elon Musk was able to do it we should trust the free market you know but this article also fails to mention that NASA's budget has been cut every single year since it actually managed to land on

the moon and so of course when there's massive amounts of capital it's being held by some dipshit who invented a way to buy porn securely on the internet and pay for shit on depop well of course he's just going to use all of his money to do it as a fucking lark but the only reason we even have space travel is so that he can have his fucking lark because we've defunded the possibility to ever control it democratically like it's gone and it's gone and it's never coming back and it fucking infuriates me until we have the trash huge space program then you're going to love it I mean I mean there is there is a point to that Patreon funded space baby but I mean very very there's that kind of very troubling notion which I guess the Adam Smith

Institute article is sort of suggesting eventually which will be like we're not necessarily talking about the democratic democratization of space travel in the sense that we have like government funded space programs with like objectives that go beyond kind of making quick you're not getting Logan Paul to vlog from space oh my god that's gonna happen isn't it well no YouTube like has demonetized all his videos right Logan Paul social experiment gonna open the air lock so Jake so Jake Paul won the battle of the pools the batman versus Superman of the YouTube world has been decided so it'll be Jake Paul that will be the first vlogger to vlog from space either that or like that like I want the pool to go to space purely because it slightly increases

the chance of them being eaten by space cannibals but I guess like the idea that the Adam Smith Institute is sort of putting forward is that like you know by giving space travel into private hands it will make space travel cheaper which means that anyone can eventually you know you don't have to rely on like governments to you know have objectives about what they want to you know what should be achieved and what the purpose of like this sort of travel is you know private companies can do that and they can make decisions better we're going to get Ryan air space aren't we like yeah you can go to Mars for 40 quid but you've got to stand the hallway and pay to take a piss yeah but then it opens up this question about like well when you give it when you if you do

give it's private I mean look eventually what's going to happen is something that we already knew from like the mid-2000s anyway which is our like Richard Branson is going to own space travel in the UK in which you know you will have a ship you will have to sit on the floor while the rocket goes up but you are allowed to read the Daily Mail which is great for me because I can't miss any of Simon Heffer's columns they're so good I all I read them when I'm reading them like when I'm half nude red and mad online wait mr Branson are you saying that your new plan is just to sue the NHS again no no no not just sue the NHS we're going to sue the NHS from space hey what does that mean for like jurisdictions is like if you've got like some like

go like when you've got like some crony loon you know who's who is trying to kind of like sue the NHS and you can't touch him because like technically he's in space and that's what I was thinking all taxes yeah so I think like rich people are going to go to space and they're going to do a bunch of shit that's illegal here first of all tax avoidance second of all slavery wanking oh yes slavery for sure slavery for sure first order of business back a republican senate candidate explaining to the press that the child was actually 18 in space year we talk about this sort of what what the motivations are and you know I've sort of hinted this but what Madsen Peary says is what struck me upon he was with several of these billionaires what struck me was very forcibly was how boyish

they all are bubbling with enthusiasm over new gadgets and ventures these are boys who can afford to play with very expensive toys and their enthusiasm is bringing forward the day when their toys become available to the rest of us at affordable prices yes because as we know with rich privately enticeable boys they are very very happy to be sharing sharing their toys with us but but also the idea that that's some sort of singular characteristic it's like it's it's it's solely based on your boyish enthusiasm that you become able to explore space as opposed to I don't know like not having to worry about normal people problems because as you described it you invented the porn currency in the 90s and so now things are just easy you and it and it's the and it's this

whole thing right where Madsen Peary is saying we have to wait for billionaires to have whims for shit before we get to have that shit you know so so the so it's like he's well he may be saying he's a libertarian but actually like this is what I think what really shows the ass of libertarianism is that it's all about kind of advocating slavish dependence on the on the whims of the already rich so you know it's he's saying oh yes we're free because we'd go to space because Elon Musk is doing it's like well no we're free to go to space because you know someone wants like flicked Elon nuts Elon Musk in the nuts when he was a kid and then told him he'd never go to space unless he invented a porn currency hang on a minute I really like the idea of Elon nuts like an Elon Musk but

who's controlled by the editorial team at nuts magazine guys I've decided to invest 400 billion dollars in big ass titties but but I mean I so living in in New York where we experience transit hell on a day-to-day basis and you see just how almost impossible it seems to make any incremental progress when somebody like Elon Musk shows up and says like they've already given me a green light I'm just going to dig a tunnel from DC to New York and it's just going to happen just because and it's like no thought put forth to I don't know maybe you might have to secure planning permission or maybe you know you might precipitate an environmental crisis when you just put your tunnel machine and dig a hole and not even you know devil may care about it and it's like take

that but that's at least on planet earth where gravity applies like what happens when you have that attitude in space where I mean you don't even know what I mean you're taking the same kind of risk with when they didn't detonated the first atom bomb they're like well it might set the atmosphere on fire and kill everyone but we know we got to test it out to make sure but at least all happened to a David Bowie soundtrack if we ever launched anything into space it would be like limp biscuits rolling right no no I told you it would be to down with the sickness and we'd launch we'd launch every copy of spiked into space which is going to be like our version of the the golden record on Voyager you know so alien we're going to get to read a Neil's platform

into space so we could never have it back so he basically said madsen period finishes this article saying the billionaire boys want to see tomorrow and are putting resources into making it come sooner and the rate of technological progress is accelerating because of their activities it's just fucking I think I thought I was going to be mad I'm just tired at this point that's because we've recorded this twice but but I also thought I love that idea that it's like progress and measure is measured in how nifty these things are versus like how it impacts the way life is lived by normal people who you know can't afford to launch cars into space on a whim and watching I mean you you see that these these inventions these things that these guys are just completely

off it about like they're they're so excited about inventing some new gizmo that doesn't even really make that much of a difference it just sort of it either sucks capital from something that had previously been you know empowering a group of people that might have a union or it solves a problem no one really cares about and I mean I get it okay they're launching a rocket that can land that's great but to be perfectly honest with you like I just don't know if that's the right problem to be solving and in the same vein that I don't trust Elon Musk to make decisions about anything certainly not from a guy who you know it clearly has his priorities kind of fucked up and I don't know I just if Elon Musk is the model billionaire I keep thinking to myself like yeah

but what about all the bad ones what about the ones that like we already know like like Paul Dacker like what about I don't know the Koch brothers like do you really want to give those people access to all the satellites in the world do you really want to give give those people the chance to just you're like oh yeah have free reign I don't know build a civilization under the ocean nothing can go wrong the thing with the Adam Smith Institute is that they don't think any about right so they think any billionaire is by and large good so he became a billionaire by being so good yeah because he was unique because he was literally a measure of goodness because they were uniquely talented and if they weren't uniquely talented and if they didn't have to do what they if they

didn't do what they had to do by ASI standards they wouldn't have gone to where they are now so they're kind of like they're very oblivious to or maybe oblivious because I don't think I don't think any of them are like like stupid I think but they deliberately like ignore these things I think Elon Musk might be stupid but like you know you know the chuds at the ASI might wear like stupid bow ties right and they may wear them while they pass builders on the street and then wonder why the builders laugh at them but you know I think they deliberately kind of ignore these very kind of structural problems because if they had to acknowledge them and they'd sort of realize that actually like the whole ideology but billionaires are great because they're boys who

can do jokes on YouTube and are sometimes like sometimes can tell a joke on Reddit so therefore like they must be fine yeah okay they also say that the reason why Elon Musk is the good billionaire is because not only has Elon Musk come from the future to save us but also because you know Elon Musk is a normal guy with normal problems like becoming the villain from Total Recall also Elon Musk is an African American what they don't realize is that Elon Musk's grand strategy is to control the entire flow of information much like the villains of Metal Gear Solid 2 with the sole point of capturing anyone who has memory of him when his hair fell out and erasing it forever all right I think that's as good a place as any to uh to call this one

that was a good site it was a good that was a fun one uh Nate thank you so much for coming on where can our listeners find more of you yeah if you're interested in hearing more about how the US military is something of a hell world listen to my podcast with with Francis it's called what a hell of a way to die we're on all the same channels as uh your your your great hosts here and thanks for listening yo thank you so much thanks for coming on um and yeah thanks for coming on and uh Milo uh enjoy the enjoy your day that you've just woken up early for uh you're saying an olga I know let's go get a drink or something exactly one glass of water right cherry red cherry all right later guys

bye oh so thank you