TRASHFUTURE - Trashfuture (Re)Wrapped ft. Dan Boeckner

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Dan returns for another look at Spotify - in the last year have they paid artists more, or have they channelled excess profits into an investment in AI defence technology “for the defense of democracies” whatever that means. Also, a startup and a truly astounding article. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello everyone welcome back to this remembering what day it is Thursday free episode was coming I tried to preempt you by doing it first it is of course myself Alice Hussain and Milo and we are joined as as ever for our annual what's Spotify up to episode the second annual what's Spotify up to episode it is Dan Beckner co-host of The Bottleman with me and of many musical projects including operators hello a upcoming solo album Dan how's it going I'm good how is everyone how is it on the in there on the rainy island it's so normal dude it's having a normal we'll have what haven't we'll have no great time oh yeah great

yeah you ever hear about this it's a pretty normal island but before we start here I want to I want to just pull up TF film corner the reviews of Paul Verhoeven's Benedetta are in I'm so excited dude yes wait what is this well so and Mark Kennedy of the AP has said a giant nerd has said in his stupid nerd voice like yes that's the point of it that's why you go and see a Paul Verhoeven movie the fact that you have compared it to show girls in a convent means that I am now going to spend the next six or seven months of my life watching it every day absolutely AP stands for please don't

put my head in that toilet it's really long P yeah that's right but I love this is it says Paul Verhoeven gives us a nonsense with Benedetta ten to ten for headline writing ten to ten for headline writing zero to ten for shitty opinion nonsense again yeah like truly though you don't enjoy on as many levels as we do like it has idiotic take has there ever been a Verhoeven movie where like the the cinema press has gotten it right though like has that ever happened no no and like the one that he's gotten like the the worst reviews for is also my favorite show girls and that's a movie which the bad reviews were essential to

making good because only Paul Verhoeven and Gina Gashon knew they were doing it on purpose yes nobody else knew what that movie was about and even though even though it came at the cost of destroying uh what's the name's career Christine Berkeley or whatever her name is yeah uh Elizabeth Berkeley it was worth it because uh you got a great movie out of it yeah she could never go back to save by the bell after that no the only one the only it's it's people enjoyed Robocop but enjoyed it for the wrong reasons and then he was like no you're you don't get it no anyway it's uh mark mark Kennedy probably would have a better time watching the uh board a p yacht club uh series of shorts where the nfts are now

starring in uh a short film where they say stuff like uh nfts are worth more than Paris do you mean that city with the awful tower i think you mean the eiffel tower yeah the awful tower that's great that rule so hard it's really good it's so cool that what this this thing now is a it seems like it's a whole and i hate that we keep coming back to it and i promise we're not going to talk about it that much but it's this whole universe of things where it's like just for the is there some kind of a Verhoeven element to it where it's supposed to be this just abject you know Riley you don't think it's cool that there's a whole series that's kind of like uh sort of like uh rick and morty direct-to-video rick and morty with an ape

whose catchphrase is fuck you don't think that's cool oh is he allowed to fucking say that oh it's the the apes of the witcher yeah i'm looting every time i hear the apes say fuck well it's it's a look you can't censor what's on the blockchain no that's true if nfts are an elaborate performance art bit i am forced to take my hat off to them if this is if this has been a big prank then they got my ass that's true because i am mad about nfts we are all triggered and we are all alone there's the thing about us i think the lazy i think the lazy lion character like i there's the only clip that i listen to um who has this like the the lazy lion character has this kind of like african i don't want to say i i i really don't want to say it like the african

accent right which means nothing but it's a broad african accent but yeah right but but when you listen to it really closely what you realize is that this is the only type this is like an impersonation that a white person would do of an african accent like it sounds exactly like that i can't i can't i can't explain the intonations but i'm i'm like 90% sure that this is a white person doing an african accent like that would be a reheated version of the like racist knuckles memes from like the year earlier right but also what i was going to say was that this just reminds me a lot of like you know those kind of like those like flash cartoons that people used to do or they also used to make like people do voices and stuff and that those voices were done by just

like people who were making them at home this is a flash cartoon like yes yeah that's it that's all it is a version of leisure suit larry that has cost millions leisure suit larry had more production values than this and maybe a one one thousandth of the cost yeah like it's like it's more here at hero's quest dragon quest there is a slow producersification of all of this stuff where you wonder what the financial engineering underneath it is but the resultant cultural products are just thinner and thinner and worse and worse until now it's like oh yeah we've done a stick death animation it costs 30 billion dollars yeah and your only options for entertainment are this or the sort of like mainstream um so that just happened comedy yeah you can now watch cowboy

bebop in the format of um so that just happened the marvel cinematic universe stick figure stick figure um uh series i am going to say that actually the netflix cowboy bebop is not as bad as everyone says it is um it is not it is not as bad as people say it's like says it's like say it is and like you know yeah it's not it's not it's it's bad but it's not as bad as people say it is yeah it is well yeah well this is finally the schism that destroys the podcast this is this documentary now it's in the same look uh but look all with all of that behind us uh i want to say no i want to talk about this for like two three more hours hours wayray excuse me what's what is wayray that's how this is actually yeah i have to i have to go and kill the president now what is

what is wayray wayray w a y r a y well uh don't worry i'm before you guess i'm going to give you the first line of their cut marketing copy i mean to give you more than i usually give you thank you thank you it's very kind actually i'm going to give you two things okay all right christain uh the i'm sorry i'm just i'm feeling very generous it's christmas we wayray says we are an industrial deep tech company with a relentless culture that sets us apart an industrious cult tech company it's something that like makes you do crunch better by like firing a laser at your skull if you try and move away from your computer i don't know uh so uh deep by the way am i right was like right about that not exactly uh deep tech by the way for people don't know it's when you're a company

that like solves the complete like creates a new thing other than just taking something and applying it i'm not used to just be called a company i think i used to just be called tech let's just tech so now deep tech is where you like create a new kind of like neural network and then a normal tech company created a new kind of ape well a normal tech company will take that new kind of neural network and use it to solve a problem so deep tech is like actually inventing the new stuff the other thing all the other companies are just different kinds of middlemen um anyway uh and the second hint i'll give you is that it combines two kinds of startups that we've been talking about a lot recently all right like none of us remember anything

yeah that is true i don't have a memory anymore way ray i'm like when you take the hard drive out of a computer and like you can use it but if you shut it down like nothing will be stored all right all right all right encro chat way ray um okay right um so that right they're building they're building something um it is uh they're actually building the Havana syndrome gun that would be that would be fun uh who's saying way ray provides two things we talked about a lot yeah again i don't you use tell me this as if like um we have a memory i forgot we were recording today a day that we always record on so um way ray uh okay okay i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm just gonna throw out i'm just gonna throw out something holograms yes no serious what i'm a i'm a very i'm

a very stupid guy who just said a word hessane is at one with the vibe yes holograms absolutely correct holograms what are they doing with those holograms making doing doing doing doing a bit doing a big hologram of ray romano sorry i just wanted to say that before i forgot it i just want to say uh doing a big hologram of ray romano dan they're doing uh they're doing like virtual powerpoint presentations uh broadcast into uh conference rooms so like a boring about a hologram of a boring guy oh a boring a boring guy just goes help me only be one can only hope but like he does that as a joke and you have to pretend that it's funny yeah otherwise you get disintegrated so it's a guy you're saying you have to sort of

react to a star wars reference by holocaust yes yes also your workstation is now the like turret from uh fucking uh like the millenium fork and it's like moving you around and shit every so often every time you close a pit every time you close a window a guy tells you great job kid but don't get cocky and you have to laugh you you've you've uncovered an element of this hate you so much dude i i'm gonna shoot you with a gun in real life i you can't keep doing this to me there is a big physical workstation that is involved in what this does awesome it's so they say it's the it's the the metaverse on wheels oh fuck it what why why would you put the metaverse on wheels it doesn't exist this would all yeah this would also like this would also

pre configure the idea that like the metaverse like is we know what it is so sorry i crashed my car into your son i was inside a big ray romano hologram i was i was inside a localized version of the metaverse yeah which was mostly ray romano advice it was kind of weird so is it like an is it like an office on wheels a boardroom on what it is i'll tell you i'll tell you what what it is it is a new kind of car uh uh that and they the car is called the holo gractor i really hate that that's that's a first draw fucking name you i'm mad now you go back to this homework is of a poor standard you go back and find a proper name for the car and what the company actually does right is it's mainly a hologram technology company and what they do is they

project they're very good at projecting holograms onto planes of glass which means they can they're basically an ar company augmented reality we're just gonna say onto planes like they just love distracting violence just like yeah fuck them yeah so i'm sending you all a video yeah of them beaming a spooky ghost into a cockpit to crash a plane yeah absolutely so the what they're saying is they can put this on the hood of a car which basically turns driving into like a race mission in grand theft auto where you like have a little line you should follow we've been heading this way ever since they started putting like heads up displays in cars but i still hate it and it's a great way to like kill a bunch of people well yeah because it's a sort of thing like there are enough

people now who just do whatever their sat nav says without looking around them but if you put it into the car where it's like there's a big red line that you're following along the road that's gonna make that even work it's just gonna it's gonna turn driving into the scene from the simpsons where homer starts a reactor meltdown and just the the people on fire look like clowns like that's going to be driving so automotive they have three use cases automotive it's like grand theft auto and that's the hologractor but also they say yeah you can also do transportation heavy machinery so like you can get a little info thing that's like when you're you know using your back hoe it can be like a back hoe here for 30 points and turn it into a little game oh no but also you can set

holographic ar smart glass could be personalized to individual users syncing to their devices to show upcoming events in their calendars and other items of interest while displaying general information like traffic flow through the city or points of interest like landmarks or retail stores so they show a cityscape and in the cityscape is someone looking out of a window and out the window you can see traffic flowing and where the traffic is flowing well there's like a green line and where it's flowing badly you see a red line oh so it's like google maps it shows well no but only for traffic you can physically see oh okay all right so great so like oh is there traffic there or not allow me to consult my heads up display oh all those cars that are stood still one behind

another there's a red line they must be in traffic yeah correct yes amazing i love that and also though it shows an ad for helicopter tours and then it highlights one of the buildings for some reason i assume suggesting that you could 9 11 the building with the helicopter because it's vulnerable that's this glowing weak spot how does okay so did they say anything about how they intend to prevent you from like killing every child in a five block radius with this because you're like on your phone but too much while you drive oh wow oh oh alice do i ever have an explanation does it highlight the children and go 30 points garanga yeah no absolutely yeah so the hologractor is the first car designed around true ar technology and a new ride hailing business model true assault

rifle technology the seamless connection of the virtual and real world offers greater safety comfort services and entertainment the three-seater car so it's three seats it has a third seat in the back seat half a feet multiple so everyone so everyone in the car can see the windscreen which is cool yeah and forget the fact that that's stupid like just ignore i love i love so much about these technologies is okay so uh first of all you're going to do is ignore the fact that it's stupid and accept the premise that we need to do this thing that's obviously stupid so you know how before you could get five people in a car well it's not epic so now you can only get three and they have and they have to help you drive so like you you have a you have a driver you have

a co-driver you have a door gunner and they're all up front yeah it's it's i love this it's like yeah we've we've projected the halo warthog onto your car so that you can feel cool um but no they say it's the first metaverse car for ride hailing so what hologractor says the business model they enable is having a bunch of guys elsewhere in the world sitting in little car pods uh driving your car for you wait a me playing truck simulator but i'm actually driving a truck fantastic fantastic um it says it says oh no we accidentally connected this truck to tom walker's stream oh no so it's it one of the ads is inside my metaverse on wheels i don't have to make small talk this has been it's like the funniest possible way you could do this would be to just do it and then not announce

it until like months later and tom walker finds out to his horror that he's been in an ender's game sort of situation where every time he veers the truck to the left he just kills 50 people yeah so it's that if you're so basically yeah we will free you from having to talk to cab drivers by putting them in a warehouse like several countries away and driving your car for you great you won't you won't have the black cab drivers locked in a warehouse driving like where the fucking fours the steering wheel turning over their shoulder to another black cab driver who's doing the same thing going you see he's immigrant save now but because it's in the metaverse right uh they're saying oh also you'll be able to like play little

games while driving uh because you won't be driving you'll just be sitting there i someone will be driving by remote control for you i i hate how fucking soy this all is but with vr remote control a single qualified driver operates the hologractor remotely from a compact driving station you're still saying holograck passengers relax in the comfort of having a professional driver control the car will also enjoy incomplete privacy but it's like wait a minute the comfort of having a professional driver control the car over an internet connection many miles away what could go wrong yeah i mean it just depends on me an amateur driver driving the car what just because i'm in the car no no no i want a professional guy

doing this over an internet connection yeah all it depends on is eight cameras a bunch of lidar sensors in an internet connection not going wrong yeah a guy who if this car crashes will be fine and they say uh that passengers can then enjoy personalized ar content while riding um they say the car uh i love to be a whistleblowing journalist getting one of these and then my ar content just goes shouldn't it leak those documents fucker and get and as i get driven at 70 miles an hour into a concrete overpass i can imagine now there's going to be a like we're aware of the moral hazard of having people who aren't in the car driver car they have no stake in it not crashing so we've made it like the matrix and if the car crashes um the machine injures the driver of the

car also in exactly the same way as the passengers are injured like a big fucking sledgehammer just swings out where it hits him in the eye so you're saying basically it would be kind of like the f35 that like the little driving pod would have just shit that would fly off and horribly injure the driver exactly yes i just like the idea of people putting this much energy into into building the metaverse and then endangering people by making them go physically somewhere else right like is a novel idea of the metaverse is that you're traveling without traveling like well i think the whole idea of the metaverse is uh we we ran out of ideas and don't want to be constrained by the physical world anymore yes but we're still gonna put you in a weird three-seater

car controlled by someone remotely and possibly smash you into an overpass the metaverse yes yeah but you get to do it while looking at while watching like your board ape show that you can watch because you own one of the characters yes yeah and at that point they'll have been doing the the firefly type dialogue so they say hologractor learns your roots habits and preferences it can even anticipate your next trip using data tracking and content shared with the car via the app that means that every time you step into the car it spies on you but it's good actually well it's it's night rider they're giving you a really annoying version of night rider uh that is just actually a remote control guy yeah yeah yeah yeah right hello michael i am being paid three dollars

an hour please there's also gaming yeah we all we all love singing in cars regardless of how good we are no now it can be an interactive game uh uh in hologractor a karaoke game of being james cordon the doors are locked yeah the karaoke is available it's an online game to passengers available and mandatory yeah well it's available for you but yeah there's there's a guy who has just sitting in again probably in a a warehouse in a country where where you have fewer rights than an uber driver regarding employment driving you around from your board ape yacht club party to your um well what could it be oh yeah to your see driving you around while you have your meeting in like a space station with mark zuckerberg who's wearing an ape costume yeah this could be fun

actually i think though that the driver of the car like the remote control driver should choose the uh the karaoke so you're just like in this hell where every time you get in a taxi you just have to do albany and carry on exactly you're like i don't know the lyrics to biliana platino velichka you know sorry i have been doing what's a new pussycat for every ride i've been doing i think we could you could really drive someone crazy with something like this right like it could be a real phone booth situation where it's like you're trapped in the car but maybe that's the thing is all the metaverse and and nft guys have to get this car right and then get it they can just sort of drive around kind of forever being slowly driven mad by guys forcing you to

sing what's new pussycat for days and days and days hmm yeah i just i just want to put everyone who owns a board ape nft in in a room with an actual ape and just see what happens you know presumably something similar yeah if they like apes so much why not meet an actual ape a couple of lives yeah and then i'll just i'll i'll rattle the room a bit throw some stuff in there just see what happens you know yeah but i mean look this this this whole them it's it's very interesting i think like to see at least from my perspective is sort of you know someone who follows this kind of thing to see the um to see sort of the meta the whole metaverse concept just spawn ideas like a fungal fruiting body and just you can just i think it really it should be one of google's

creation really i think you could see the the the whole metaverse thing as a kind of fruiting body on the um on just the the dead the dead carcass of a productive economy right it's it's not that it won't flourish or even thrive fun guy thrive right but they thrive on decay yes and this is this is what that is quite literally what if what if we monetize the rot yes yeah uh yeah it turns out very profitable yeah can't can't fucking do anything until this guy locks me in a room with this eight ideas there's so much there's so much rot i'm making money hand over fist here so much of the thought of monetizing the rot earlier ideas is a pretty generous description of what we're we're learning about here i mean also i always like to say as well like the idea of

say i don't know having uh more having things that are helping you do things as you look through a glass like i thought i'm against holograms or anything but the fact that i'm not hologramophobic okay so my best friend's a hologram why do you hate holograms riley let's deal problem with them for a palpatine look the fact that like if you think about this right any time there is this this one of these tech technologies that gets developed right these these deep tech things right what the fuck is it always for it's for new kinds of ride hailing it's for a it's for like an ai enabled drone a smarter missile it's like we've we've got this really limited range of things where like any kind of real improvement in your in in your life is actually coming if you are someone

who is like using ride hailing and calling in a missile strike or whatever just one of these companies was like we're gonna make shitting less of an ordeal i'd be like i'm listening right but it's you can get some ar content as you're shitting that actually kind of brings me to want it to our no our talk you know that no don't not that don't worry this brings me a little bit to uh just discuss this spotify year on um dad anything to listen to while you're shooting it's look it's been a year since we last had this conversation in fact since our first conversation and can you just confide to listen that we haven't spoken to each other in the meantime i don't know anything that we're gonna say no um and when spotify wrapped hit last year and

spotify wrap said to me sure are listening to a lot of that one thing i was like yes shut up um we a lot of guys called either like defamed or like mike bronx yeah that's right oh i i loved snts by defamed yeah that's right yeah you have you heard uh 20657 yeah by jack charles that's right creases van de volks yeah stop owning me no um i demand it no um look uh it's spotify wrapped uh there's been a lot of updates with spotify this year uh dan i just want to quickly ask spotify i assume with all that's been going on they're massive sort of their growth and listeners and stuff they are paying you more yes uh that would be no no i have not my last uh my last royalty statement from sound exchange i think i got 100 us dollars

for like a fairly decent amount of streams so no they're they're actually they're not they're not paying anymore um uh damn it i was really hoping spotify would be good now yeah now that they're profitable so weird that they're not so well i i think i may have solved the mystery here i think i've found what they have spent the money on which is that uh the money they pay to founder daniel ek the bad daniel they put a billion euros um towards funding more deep tech moonshot project so sorry that's where it's gone it's gone to funding more deep tech moonshot projects they must have like i'm sure once they're done funding deep tech moonshot projects they will fairly compensate the people who you know make it possible for them to fund all these

things yeah of course just Riley think of all the great songs that are going to be written by people riding around in the holo gractor being forced to do karaoke because it's somehow tied to spotify's weird like plagiarism uh algorithm data gathering algorithm i mean imagine if the Beatles had had the hologram imagine and look like for a second just imagine if you had like you know the perfect band that were able to kind of produce music based entirely on spotify's algorithm and perhaps like so for like you know in order to relate to an audience you know you should give them an aesthetic maybe they can be apes that like play like guitars and drums and stuff well yeah like that band the monkeys they could live like that other band gorillas they

could live in the big floating castle and like do like collaborations of rappers from time to time think bob be pretty cool perfect ideal so most recently in fact uh ek has pledged uh to he says he has got this is this is this is this is pretty pretty pretty astounding all of that money that people are paying spotify to listen to e g a wolf parade um that is going to a his investment company called prima materia which has now invested a one tenth of its investable capital in a startup called helsing which kills vampires uh well it says they're working on as he vampire deep tech they heard the monster they saw the monster mesh was streamed so many times on spotify and they're like we need to do something about this monster

giving you access to the film van helsing yeah they give you augmented reality inside draculas castle so you can see where to go where not to go uh common pitfalls oh yeah look it's basically look it's sort of more of a zork strategy guide than anything else okay no so helsing is oh boy it is a european defense ai firm they super lin oh no this is some twunk whole shit right here okay now i'm on board so yeah uh so basically it spot one of the reason it's spotify obviously has to like as an organization as we know sort of takes in a certain amount of money and then repurposes that to other things some of that goes into daniel eck which he uses to invest something goes into him yes so it goes right it's a big pipe that runs into daniel x

ass for the money right the coroner you call it yeah look if you know an easy way okay tell me about it but until then you can shut the fuck up yeah this is what i was saying earlier about deep tech right like because it's another deep tech ai firm which is creating trying to push the envelope forward or at least that's what the state admission is but like think about what that actually gets used for it's personal cars space travel missile defense very very little um very little that sort of could be said to be useful make shitting better yeah um guy in a turtle neck comes out on stage for a keynote and says how much of your life do you spend shitting and fasting too too much hours hours a day on average um so they say their their software platform

quote processes data from some different sensors around a battlefield so like or you know because generally things now are covered in sensors drones tanks people battlefield clip it seems like you're having a battle yeah from multiple sensors directly in vehicles and systems provide an integrated view of the operational environment with the aim of faster and more accurate decision making so basically what it allows you to do in quote kinetic scenarios i think i'd love to be in a kinetic scenario yeah um that's why you're using the uh the the xbox connects what it does i like being on the right side of a kinetic scenario if you know what i mean wait is a kinetic scenario is a scenario just like a

politically correct way of saying a heated gamer moment well i think it's more of a politically correct way of saying um turning someone into a pink mist with a bomb from a drone okay all right that is pretty that is pretty kinetic it's pretty kino if you ask me yeah yeah so uh so what they say is uh they will turn unstructured sensor data into quote information advantage but only for democratic governments information about that i mean for democratic governments awesome they've never been a bad democratic government wait so they are they including rusher in that for example no they're specifically say oh this is gonna be yeah this is specifically they're saying oh yeah we need to uh bolster the arsenal of democracy basically against threats from russia right so

they're giving it to israel also then oh i i think they're very much going to be doing that yeah and it's like this is the kind of stuff where i find it interesting even on its own terms because like okay i'm not gonna stand here and say that i genuinely think that rusher is a democratic government but like can you prove that they're not right like what are you like like as in like yeah like we kind of we kind of know that they're not but like technically they hold elections and people vote in them yeah it's not a one-party state how come how come yeah you invented spotify and like you have some like you know european friends like are in helsing and you're friends with government why do you get to decide they've invested in this company they're giving a kind of

battlefield clippy but only to the good guys they actually benefit rusher in the if you are a russian a russian troop like sort of uh chest deep and a frozen trench in in denetsk you will not have to worry about your boss being clippy yeah i mean to be fair to be fair to the russian troops before before clippy they would probably prefer to have like an assault rifle that was manufactured after 1970 or like any of those things yeah um to be there by choice see the whole the whole thing here right is the is is you know that so much of that money going to spotify is now just turning into again another one of these tech companies whose whole job is manufacturing paranoia about like you know nato's enemies and also saying oh yeah we're going to decide who's a democracy and who's

not we're going to give this tech we're going to give battlefield clippy to the democracies and also it's like for example would helsing serve the uk given now that protest defenses come which such as being too loud during a protest come with a 51 week custodial sentence if you commit a protest defense you go to jail for just under a year which means being too loud for example is that a do we do what where does that sit on helsing scale it's because it's right as you say my oh like as as much as a lot of like you know freedom house or whatever like to say out russia a backsliding or an authoritarian state or whatever it's like well yeah but why do you why do you choose why why do you like you you helsing you mr spotify and you're freaking friends

in the european foreign policy blob you just get to say well all the spotify money is now going to who i consider to be the good guys the way you the way you decide is at the end of the year you get a little notification that gives you an email and it tells you how much democracy you've been doing yeah do you get it to get a battlefield wrapped right tells you that the more that you would just hit by was funded by twinks listening to kim petrus or whatever twinks listening to kim petrus dm me yeah but how would actually how the technology itself works right is usually right what this went for example the saudis um well like you know bomb a wedding in yemen now are we giving this to them because they're pretty democratic almost certainly we'll be giving us to that

oh yeah definitely we're gonna give it to them but like can't know like candidate with la v's we're gonna make them promise that they don't use it domestically on civilians okay and they'll definitely keep that promise yeah to be fair to saudi arabia they tend to prefer to use their weapons on civilians outside saudi arabia let's just small business so what they know what they so what what happens right is ordinary in the ordinary course of events you would need to get someone from the us intelligence services or someone connect to us intelligence services to say we think that there is a terrorist in this wedding in this terrorist training camp that happens to have a clever disguise as a wedding and then why am i imagining a cia guy

showing up to a wedding like a stripper grab like i hear there's a terrorist in this wedding and he starts like pulling off his cia uniform they've they've disguised yeah they've got like they've got like an ed sheer and cover band uh playing like they're very very sneaky these days and then and then that gets passed up to the saudis and then a british person goes and loads the bomb onto the plane and then like a saudi guy takes off drops the bomb and says great i've hit the target that was based on this you know supposition now what they're doing is they're streamlining that supposition into a um into a technical process where all of these battlefield sensors are there doing much of the same thing basically right so you don't so you don't need

the british guy oh no that's our whole economy yeah see see see yeah see see see see now i don't know whether it's good or bad because we've yeah we've automated that one british guy whose job is to say yeah whatever you want drop a bomb ai ai is replacing british people uh critical critical support sorry that's my yeah that's my position on it torsten rail the ceo and co-founder of of helsing torsten rail the inventor of the train torsten it's r e i l said we founded helsing with the convention conviction that liberal democratic values are worth defending and that artificial intelligence will be an essential capability to keep us safe unlike authoritarian regimes democratically elected governments have a special responsibility to their citizens

the use of technology needs to be based again riley what what country what city and what country is it based in oh it's um uh berlin berlin germany right that's yes yes it is based in germany okay just wanted to check what we're hearing about uh authoritarian regimes from a guy named torsten yeah and and they say right this this again there's this idea right with that liberal democratic values are worth defending there's this idea that the liberal democratic values that you claim to love so much are being attacked by quote authoritarian countries outside and who are bad and out there right that there's no rot here you know we we need to use ai to defend ourselves from russia because they're not a democracy and therefore they hate us because we are a democracy and we're

like that that's it's the the foreign policy um i said the foreign policy ideas of the tech guy and a brookings institution guy are completely identical and i think there is this long-standing assumption um among sort of i think a lot of you know um especially i think there's a long-standing liberal assumption that these guys are uh the the tech people are sort of more more progressive than the old like fucking you know um the hawks of the eisenhower era but there is just when it comes down to where they put their money the kinds of things that they they fund the kinds of things that they uh espouse in congressional subcommittees like zuckerberg for example is they are exactly as hawkish precisely as hawkish as uh you know fucking joe mccarthy for example you know what

you know it doesn't scare me at all uh a weird fusion of tech and weapons manufacturing that unlike unlike its predecessors actually sound yeah dan is just been assassinated yeah dan said you know what doesn't scare me at all and then there was a complete silence this guy's scared of everything you know it doesn't scare me and then we heard the sound of like three silenced gunshot wounds hello this is uh this is dan uh nothing nothing scares me uh can please continue yeah this is the real dad i've not been replaced how's it going dan vekno from from off races uh uh super well enjoying living in my liberal based democracy here uh no i what doesn't you know the fusion of uh tech companies and weapons manufacturers with like plus ideology

is terrifying that's terrifying because even even like general atomics like those people don't have an ideology they just make you know no but now the arsenal of democracy is coming back democracy itself isn't but the arsenal is oh yeah that's right but also the in the arsenal of democracy now what's it doing is it's taking all it's taking those decisions of where to drop the rest of the arsenal of democracy and it's taking them out of the hands of the people who would like get so scarred by doing it that they get havanna syndrome right you know great and yeah it's it's being oh well uh computer says put bomb here and the spotify guy invented it and well i like spotify wrapped so i guess i'll this is you were in the top 0.5 percent of

bombers of yemen this year if you like operators have you considered tier one operators and deploying them to lebanon lofi beats to bomb lebanon yeah well it's the torsten rail continues the use of a good name the use of technology needs to be transparent and guided by ethical standards set by us all you all got the memo where by us all we voted on us all what the ethical standards used to um held that being held up to the technological use are right oh yeah we're all voted on what was and wasn't a democracy you guys not vote on that did i uh so when i take just do whatever you want that i kind of did that as a joke because i assumed everyone else would take something sensible but no one else the thing is because susan sarandon told me to i wrote in

bernie so um i might have i might have fucked up here sorry just ticking bernie sanders on every form i'm given regardless of bernie sanders sex bernie sanders email address bernie sanders bernie sanders is sort of agenda to be fair our uh man it's it's like montreal alex a leftist mayor our democracy rating drops by like two points and then we are just auto glassed by like orbital lasers that's what i mean but yeah when you when you go back to a girl's place and her pussy is just bernie sanders well are you gonna eat me or not i need to know this is a matter for the american people so are you going to eat this pussy oh we're back to that but no i've done it in a while you know so anyway i look at that's quack on this this it's it is it is just as i think with a lot of

what a lot of the major tech platforms are doing is they're all just sort of turning into one another so like one of the things that um in fact we talked about this on on a recent episode of bottleman dan one of the things that happened with spotify is that it now has a tick tock functionality and youtube has a podcast functionality and and spotify wants to make video podcasts aka youtube so and it's all one all connected yeah and they all have a fucking um twitter spaces slash clubhouse functionality as well where spotify is like oh what if we turned podcasting into the green room which by the way is a clone of clubhouse and it's just it's um like we we know a sort of we know the theory of the of the platform right which is that what they're trying to do is

they're trying to monopolize as many interactions as they can of every type as they can the more people interact with another through the platform the more money they make but that means is there are so fucking few new ideas right it's just oh there's a self-driving here's here is five different kinds of self-driving car none of them work all of them just involve a guy here is 12 different versions of clubhouse that thing fucking everybody hated i should probably use this uh opportunity to announce my green room space should greater macedonia include israel come and check it out and is it enough of a democracy and how much of a democracy is it so which end of um of helsing should it be on should it be sensing or sense does any one real

one state solution and it's everything's albania that's right one state solution for the whole world but that's it's if you look at what else like spotify is doing right it's a all it's becoming youtube youtube's becoming spotify there seem to be very few ideas left and how people actually interact with technology other than just how can we come up with a how can we come up with something that lets us bomb nato's enemies more effectively how can we come up with something that allows us to like move like like um reduce the rights of laborers below that of even uber at this point and then just and then then the rest of it seems to be uh yeah incorporating a way to make flash games worth a billion dollars yeah awesome yeah which is like different levels

of exploitation isn't it like you know and when you have like when you have like uh kind of like tech economy create like you know there's uh one of the things that like i've been very interested in recently it's just all the tech people sort of really kind of going all in on like the notion of the creator economy right and the idea of like everyone should like have side hustles as like creators youtube as podcasters and so on like it's a huge thing on like linked in and like the economist like blog section or whatever and so much of it is just like rooted again and like this level of exploitation and this idea that oh we can replace like resumes with uh you know with by forcing people to like produce content and in some cases you can see that where

like you have supermarkets i think there were a couple supermarkets in the uk where like if you wanted to like apply for a manager job you also had to show that you were good on tiktok or like you had to like go make tiktoks and stuff as well um and you can kind of see like where this is all heading to and like the reason why like these tech guys like are so kind of obsessed with this idea of you know the creator economy being the main means of liberation is largely just because well number one you kind of keep you need you need people to like keep producing stuff for your platforms to be valuable anyway and part of that is also like convincing them all the time that like their content is like really worthwhile and that it has value to it and like you know if like

the standard model of creating content isn't um reaping the rewards when you sort of like create this entire different infrastructure which is where i sort of think that like nfts and stuff come in i think that's like a bit of an oversimplification but like the broad basis of it is the same which is ultimately when you have like an exploitative economy anyway there's no kind of for them it's like well this is where the kind of foundations are solid so all you really need to do is like reinvent stuff you just need to like make things look better or you need like user interfaces to look cleaner like there is no incentive to innovate because they're kind of like foundational models are already like set in stone and there's no intention of like for that to ever change

i think like the same type of narratives are sort of you know very evident when like they kind of talk about their conception of decentralization but that's like a different conversation well i think that's absolutely right i think that it's um a lot of the innovation is just a and as they use especially see this with Spotify how they're just in trying to invent new ways to steal users from other platforms where it's like we've sort of the actual innovation is just um paying musicians less and charging people a flat rate to listen to everything and then just reaping the the the difference between that and then you just have to keep getting people on and keeping people on everything everything every new feature they roll at everything

new they try is just another face of that everything they say and everything they do it's just the platform economies all have the same plan and i mean if you want to know their first idea was their best ideas like like you know uh was uh getting people used to the idea that um music has no inherent monetary value and should be available to you all the time whenever you want all of it but what does have an inherent monetary value is uh is a a computer that says it's okay to launch a missile at russia because they have dodgy elections yeah oh this picture of an ape yeah that's right but that is actually that is actually what's valuable because that's where there's a lot of shit being produced is uh is giving the actual trigger pullers um

if they're the automated yet yeah giving the giving the trigger pullers the id df well the computer said to pull this trigger so that's fine it's not really my responsibility my officer he's a computerized ape and besides the only the people the only people on the other end of this trigger pull are people who's are countries that have dodgy elections sometime anyway what happened in florida in 2000 i can't remember like not even really people yeah yeah absolutely i mean that's just sort of your your black mirror thing right like as you just stop you you operate so hard that eventually you stop being able to perceive people as people but like yeah no absolutely yeah yeah that's it look shall we shall we do a quick a quick little article to close ourselves

out oh this should this should be nice and light and should like make us all feel better as these reading series oh yeah okay yes great yes yes i'm not not gonna investigate further fantastic i okay i hope it's something by toby young can you leave me a few minutes to find the same article yes absolutely no it's a different one i'm sorry this one i bet this one will also be nice we adopted oh yeah two brothers this is in the cool that's nice that's very very socially reversible um yeah good yep eight years later we gave one back excuse me sorry just say say that last but again we adopted two brothers eight years later we gave one back oh fuck oh yes it's the brit it's the insane british woman yes let's do it let's go let's fucking go like you return

eight years later you return when i saw when i saw the interview i assumed that adopted someone in like a month later they were like this kid is like too problematic we can't handle it like his needs are too complex and i was like okay that's like a bit weird but i can kind of edit but eight years eight eight years no sometimes the bad vibes take a while to kind of you know reveal one two three four five six seven eight why do bash deadbeat dance his personality is your fault you've parented that child for eight years you're like yeah i've fucked this so bad like when you have a save on a game that there's no point even reloading like you've done it you've done so badly that you're like i've just got it i'm just gonna start again sometimes you've got to accept that

like a Libra moon doesn't get on with a Pisces Sun and that's okay that's right so they i don't actually know whether they are compatible please don't yell at me like if you're into astrology when you when they say that they take him back to where did they put him in like an orphan wheel like what well we didn't talk about it okay they say Eleanor Bradford writes we probably don't fit the image you have in your mind of people whose child is taken into care oh that's already very racist yeah well we are not alcoholics or violent or drug abusers that's already very racist and very classist yeah yeah to be fair i think they're probably mostly being classist because when i used to date a girl who did a lot of like uh child protection law and stuff the vast majority of

people having their kids taken into care in this country are very much white oh sure but like definitely a real class um so she says yeah but it says yeah there's yeah we're not any of these dirty pores no of course he says yeah we're educated middle class adoptive parents adoption began as a dream for us but turned into a nightmare and your middle class people love to have something that begins in a dream and ends in a nightmare they love that shit they love to go on holiday and they i say they we love to go on holiday and then have that dream turn into a nightmare we love to adopt a kid and have that dream turn into a nightmare everything else in the Alps and then Jean-Michel Baster exactly exactly like that's a whole genre of British entertainment is middle

class people start with a dream and end in a nightmare you know what happens to like working class people when their dreams turn into a nightmare no one gives a shit because that's normal yeah exactly this is this is someone of the like ah it's chart as a dream turn into a nightmare that's the premise of a very horror movie also by the way well yes oh yeah yeah drag me to social services yeah we were introduced to our two boys on my birthday we met them for the first time they greeted us by saying hello mom hello dad and we became an instant family and they were permanently placed with us just before christmas notice the word permanently because that ain't true why does this have the energy of this remarkable young man when we realized we couldn't have

children of our own it seemed that the adoption route was meant to be this was a way we could make a difference we're matched with two brothers who are about to be separated age seven the older brother would have remained in foster care well the three-year-old will be offered to adopt for adoption but we adopted both the first five years were full on fabulous i think we ticked off everything from the national trust list of 50 things to do before your 11 and three quarters which fucking sucks is britishness seeing how much they got from every activity from climbing trees to dancing in a stream was a joy my mom said that our boys were her only grateful grandchildren and they valued every present even if it was second hand but back when they were nice pliable urchins yeah they

had they had low they had low expectations and she liked that you know you could just get them any old shit look an eight-year-old you can fit an eight-year-old down a chimney most eight-year-olds 11 12 depends depends yeah that is just a tricky bit when i was a small kid my nan used to regularly take me to like a really a really uh grim like a kind of like a like a convenient store but it was called mr saver where you could buy like all kinds of cursed artifacts like it sold everything from like milk to bb guns like these kind of stores existed and i used to think this store was like awesome my nan used to spend like three pounds in there on me and i'd come away with a bunch of things that would horrify my mother i'd be like yeah maybe i wasn't urchin maybe that was my

personality no no this happened to me too uh with exact the exact same thing the store that sells like a fucking like off brand james bond cap gun that's like branded as like jame bond agent zero seven riley has found it on on google maps it is still open in harlow and out that the picture in the front of the shop they're selling fishing nets and also a big carpet i want to know this is british culture i love to go to my regular shop normal goods yeah that's right well also like it we talk about like you know like i got children being taken into care and stuff and yeah it is i would say it is something that is primarily um done to working class people by the state yeah rather than you're going hey join this kid yeah because this is

and this is partly through you know like enormous prejudice on on behalf of like the organs of the state that deal with this and also from the fact that like the we've sort of made the decision as as a society to like force people to live lives of chaos if they don't have uh if they don't have like you know the the same like you know requisite class markers etc oh sure plus things that we've like imposed on them in order to like cope with it things like alcohol for instance uh where you know it really does like devastate the family to the point where you know you might not be able to take care of children safely but it's something that you've uh you know been led to use because of you know any number of like environmental factors or whatever and i mean

the the strange thing about this article actually is right is that it is a tour through the ways in which the british care system functions in functions like a part of the british state that's designed to interact with the uh undesirables that the british state sort of decides to fuck with very much like the home office in that respect yeah where what they what they what they say right is they say the major difficulty started when the elder boy started secondary school he was not offered the enhanced transition arrangements that are routinely offered not being off the enhanced transition arrangements despite us having a meeting with the school to explain his background didn't occur to them to put in there put him on their list of care experience children etc so this

is then a there's a story of the litany of failures of the system to like give this family the support they need because they have a they have a they have a kid who is troubled for like the reasons that we talked about right and and and from that lack of stability that's essentially imposed by the state the state fails to deal with it yeah i don't think we're going to get into precisely like the precise details because one of the things that would probably be unpleasant about being this kid is having your foster mother of eight years write about all the shit that's wrong with you in national media oh yeah i didn't even think about that one um this is that's worse she was just she was just trying to set him up for like a media career and i think

that he's going to be a very talented right wing columnist like i think she's actually done him a favor yeah you can kind of see why this woman has been like immediately accepted to the breast of britain's blue ticks because she is a perfect solipsist much like they all are well and and so this there's this this constant sort of failures right and then as she says the only support came from an experienced social worker who is assigned to us not because we were adoptive parents but because we were also respite foster carers taking in other children aside from our two boys so that's what i was like wait a minute so you have there are these you've decided just that you're going to create this sort of large collection of your child children yes yeah yeah absolutely um

and well this is going to milk the cows like we spent all our meetings talking about our elder son since the children being placed with us for respite care were much easier to manage and it's like again like yeah so it's like well uh we we do we do love taking in children but this one's being a bit of a bother uh so we put him back into care he's in his fourth home going into his fifth and now he's had a fucking national newspaper called and written about him by uh ellenor bradford thank you great god the god the british character huh but the the key thing here about this as i remember it is less like we can't take care of this kid anymore right because like as grim as it is i do think there are situations where it's like not good but sometimes necessary

for parents to be like we cannot do this and therefore like it's better for this kid to have a chance of going somewhere where they they will get the care that they need than just being stuck with us and us resenting them and them resenting us right that's not the controversial aspect to me the controversial aspect to me is writing about it in a national newspaper and writing about it in a national newspaper with the tone of and you're not allowed to get mad at me don't ever fucking get mad at me for this because if anything i want you to sympathize with me and my struggle of how difficult it was for me to to put my kid back in care just mentioning the day that she had she adopts the children is uh her birthday she was like it was my birthday i mean

you know where there we had him right from there yeah i got a bad birthday present yeah adoption service wrapped you adopted tickets and you gave one back unusually uh is it there you were in the top 0 0 0 0 1 of child give backers i can see that now i can walk in the door and leave my bag on the table before i had to lock away my purse hide the key and stash my bag safely upstairs our home is a happy place we have the time to read to our younger son a bedtime story a luxury that had gone by the wayside to be constantly dealt with follow-up from the behavior okay your younger son right he's he's three when this is written um oh no he's he's gonna be old now right so he's 10 he's 10 okay when he asks where his brother is uh you're gonna say yeah we took him back

well here's the he went to live on a farm not this one a different one yes here's the thing Bradford has anticipated someone saying that and she said oh the younger son is actually fine with it he thinks it's a good idea great okay yeah i'm i'm i'm fucking sure huh uh-huh uh-huh but this is like regardless of the difficulties of the uh the difficulties involved in fostering especially fostering an older child and the fucked up way that the british state treats kids who are put into care then taken out of care the lack of support that you get generally that's all a massive indictment of the british state yeah but the fact that she has decided i'm going to write about this in a national newspaper and i'm going to write about it in

a tone that says you have to be stoked about it is pure british madness absolutely oh yeah yeah it's also i mean it's also just like catnip for a particular genre of british media that love to do these types of stories right where they kind of know that the person who's like writing it is going to kind like is going to like receive a lot of heat and is going to receive a lot of criticism and like public you know being publicly shamed and all that stuff um i i this is just like a half-baked theory but i really do think in the same way that so much of british media has these like very weird um micro industries that it really relies on stuff like um oh well it's not like it's kind of magician adjacent but it's not quite there it's uh like something like that's a columnist

magician adjacent magician adjacent person person that's all right yeah well i don't know what school they went to um uh no like uh you know like person like personality readers i think that's like a very british like yeah called read a tabloid character um i think that these types of people fit into that genre i sort of disagree i don't think this is an example of like uh like throwing someone to the wolves in the sense of we're gonna get a bunch of people who like uh will go uh i would never give up my kids in the replies i think this is entirely for the kind of like daily male reader who hates their child no i i totally agree that's sorry like i'm i'm been very bad at articulating but no i absolutely agree like it's if they're not it's not they're not there to kind of like get vitriol like

to kind of fall to invite vitriol they are like there to sort of like normalize something that is like truly insane but something that is broadly accepted among a particular class of like upper middle class english people mostly um but yeah just like upper middle class like british people for whom like these very weird habits and behaviors would be so strange and absurd and like just gross to most people but like to kind of fortify that particular class structure um you need to kind of like have that go through do you know i'm does this make any sense like i think it's less of a and i think it's less of a class structure thing and more just of a of a british a british public intellectual thing of um just hating everybody around you especially your kids hating your

children humiliating your children and also sort of the decline in being able to send them to a boarding school uh where they're not your problem also yeah i guess also assessing the idea that like ultimately children like you know don't like in the same way that like you have a society that just hates children and young people and like you know young millennials very much the idea that oh you know you can kind of bleed as much as you want but like we ultimately have the power and that means that we can literally send you somewhere else and shun you for the rest of your life if we choose to do that so what you're saying is it's kind of uh it betrays a deeper power fantasy on behalf of the middle-aged british columnist oh yeah it's a pendulum swinging between the

british upper middle classes who who uh now hate children has swung from uh liking children but too much i definitely think that was like after reading my article i definitely think there was probably like a home county's like parent who was like oh i wish i could do this with my kid but unfortunately i gave birth to them i wish i could do this to my kid but unfortunately he's 45 years old named tom newton dunne all right all right um i have no idea how old tom newton dunne is i do i do i do i do think his mom would like try to return him if possible he's 40 he's 40 he's 47 very close that's not bad yeah well done thank you anyway i have won this month's guest tom newton dunne's age you know what most months it's the same but you gotta look out for

whatever month his birthday's in because it will change that's right uh anyway look uh i think we've we've gone we've gone about far enough uh in this little journey of ours uh so uh dan thank you very much for coming on i i wonder where people could hear more of uh maybe if they were like boy i sure love that riley and dan i wish alice who's saying and milo weren't there yeah people were always saying this about i am always i am actually always saying this yeah i guess they could check out us on the bottle man i guess they could yeah what what a ringing endorsement they could uh help sort support uh liberal democracy and rules-based order by uh listening to any number of my bands on uh spotify and protecting the world from uh authoritarianism

dan's always singing about democracy yeah bringing it to the donbas and authoritarianism a real and useful concept the thing the thing about dan is that when he was in ukraine uh in the soviet era all of the intelligence operatives of the kgb respected him for reasons that we're not going to get into we were all just really good friends you know keep your eyes open for my new project uh bandera boys coming out soon and don't forget there's a bonus episode of this podcast five bucks a month for a second episode every week all right so with all that in mind we will see you soon yeah bye everyone bye bye