TRASHFUTURE - Universal Basic TSA

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

The gang looks at the ossified politics of Britain, now unable to conceive of responding to a once-in-a-generation permanent energy crisis with anything more than a one-off payment and "good luck, you're gonna need it!" Then, we discuss a startup that looked at the spate of school shootings around the country and said, "it is with a heavy heart that we must profit from this." 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 *MILO ALERT* Milo has shows coming up in Brighton. Learn more here! https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Look, I had a lot of fun attending the recent midnight screening of Morbius, but it wasn't only the film Morbius, which I enjoyed. I also very much enjoyed taking out my new girlfriend, Julia Fox, to one of my favourite Italian restaurants in London, Bella Italia, which is, they serve the highest standard of Italian cuisine there. And I think to go to anywhere more expensive than Bella Italia, would it only be excessive, but also it would be not right at a time when so many have sacrificed so much. And I'm not going to be parting like our Prime Minister. I'm going to be enjoying myself in a sensible way with my girlfriend, Julia Fox, who is very sexy, but not in a way that is trashy or over the top.

Yes, but what would you like to order? Can I please have a beer and a corba? Hello, hello, everybody. Welcome to this free episode of TF. It is the free one. I'm going to start saying it next time. Okay. All right. Give it a go. You can't do accents. Will it sound like Kweyludes Acaster? That's the question. Kweyludes Acaster, of course, is something that you will have, a bit you will have heard if you subscribe to the secret Patreon, if you don't tell anyone about.

Yeah. A bit you will have heard if you are subscribed to the Patreon, where you get to edit the podcast. Nate's been paying into that for years. I've got to say, I can barely walk. No, come on. Don't give it to him. Hi, everyone. It's TF. It's Riley Milo, Hussain and Alice. And Kweyludes Acaster. Don't worry. Kweyludes Acaster.

I'm going to fall off my yacht. What is he, Robert Maxwell? I'm having so much chem sex, I feel like two guys from 22 SAS have turned on. Listen, I don't know where those pensions went. I'm Robert Maxwell Kweyludes Acaster. The triple barrel survey. I was watching this documentary called The House of Maxwell. And one of the things I noticed about Robert Maxwell, because there's a lot of footage

of him in it, most perfect evil guy voice, they truly do not make them like that anymore. He had this like incredible perfect baritone and he was, he bought the mirror, right? The newspaper. And he was talking about it's, it's competitive, the sun. And at one point I forgot that he was talking about newspapers because he said, I am committed to putting the mirror on top of the sun. And I'm just like, fucking shit. What? That is something like, that is something like an evil guy in a Bond film would do, right?

Yeah, totally. No, it's what he is. Oh, it's fucking dying of the day. The big, the big sun mirror that they use. Yeah, you're right, you're right. Metal everyone. But with a strangely Mr. Burns style affect. Yes, that's right, American listeners.

Britain had a Mr. Burns. Yeah, but, you know, baritone. We got some stuff to talk about today. Can I interest you all in meeting our, our new, the new sixth member of TF. Quailo take us. That's right. Nothing jars me. I don't know what tone we're speaking.

I'm whacked off my tits. It's like in like, whenever this is a very, it's going to be a very me reference, but like when the white ranger and the original power rangers was released, right? And he, and he, and he takes off his helmet and under the helmet is Quailo daycaster. Yeah. Yeah. No, though, this is, this is actually a Seth Green stolen board ape folks. Oh, no, I bet he's not bored.

Now he's been kidnapped. That's right. I'll be an excited ape. That's right. So Seth Green, who you may remember as Scott evil and Chris Griffin, as recently purchased a board ape with the intention of making it into a, what appears to be a kind of gentle comedy about having friends in a bar, but you know,

To making into a sitcom. Yeah. Exactly. It's cheers, but NFTs of Apes. It's chimps. Yeah. And it looks fucking terrible. Not secure enough, Scott.

And I can only having actually watched the clip. I do love the kind of the whole culture that the NFT world represents tends to make things that are so bad, but also so deeply financialized that you can't tell if it was stolen on purpose because they just didn't want to go ahead and make the show, but is just hyping up the sale of this now famous ape. It is genuinely it has, we are in producers world at this point with that section of the economy.

I was saying this on Twitter the other day, but like NFTs is basically like first as fast then as tragedy, because it's one of the few things that like from the very beginning, anyone who's not a complete fucking idiot was like, this is the dumbest shit I've ever seen in my life. How can this possibly be real? And then it's like, Oh, a lot of people are going to lose their house.

And what's so weird about this, right? Is that he's, is that you claims that the intellectual property rights to the board ape that he had go with whoever owns it on the blockchain. And so then so it was, it was stolen in a sort of low effort hack, you know, enlarge your patrenus or whatever. And then he was like,

I'm always trying to enlarge my patrenus. He's like, I'd love to enlarge my patrenus. And so he clicked the link. I'd love it if mine could get hard. 14 loads deep. The problem was he didn't like in the bar where this sort of NFT like comedy is set. He didn't order the slurp juice.

So he didn't, didn't generate more apes. And that was the problem. I hate when I go out drinking and then I wake up with three identical sons. You know, you can use up to three quail eggs on a single A-caster. Let's quack on. It says, it says it's supposed to confer the IP rights, right?

So you can only supposed to legally be able to make the show if you also own the ape, but that requires a lot of stuff that's not on chain to do successfully. You might say you are depending on a third party trusted institution to adjudicate who has the right to use what in terms of IP. Maybe just thinking about it. And secondly though, the actual, if you look at the show, right,

the characters of the NFTs are walking around in that sort of, you know, terrible $5 animation style. But like none of them have the backgrounds, but all of these pictures are algorithmically generated. And the backgrounds are one of the things that are algorithmically generated. So what is just supposed to have a box around them all the time? Or maybe just maybe the whole idea is half baked horse shit. Well, I mean, they're trying to do,

they're trying to do Bojack Horseman with the sort of like humans walking around with like weird animals and interacting with them. No, because it's not, because in Bojack Horseman, like it's all because they're all like cartoons, right? This is kind of like a composite of like, Well, It's Muppets. It's Muppet Bojack Horseman with NFTs.

Kind of. It also has the same... Every word in the sentence you just said. It also sort of has the same principle as Digimon in the sense that like there are... Okay, alright, I'm listening. Yeah, well, yeah, there are humans, and there are like these digital things that they treat like humans.

I mean, look, I only like watched it. I didn't like listen to the audio. So this is like just me inferring stuff. But yeah, basically... I was saying you're missing out on a treat. It is bad Digimon. Yeah, so very funny. It's like, what if you combined how I met your mother with Digimon?

That's what it is. But also it was heavily financialized. Yes. Like what if it was how I met your mother plus Digimon, but you could like... You could sell the mother that they met. Yes. Yeah, and crucially part of Digimon lore is that

you can't sell your Digimon, right? Oh, so that's what it is. It's how I met your mother plus Digimon plus Barbary Corsairs in the 15th century. Yes. Where you could sell your mother to them if you wanted to. The financing of TV shows was always so stable before this. And now we make it even better.

Yeah, look, I always thought that a little more... A little more wild speculative uncertainty should be introduced into the entertainment business. Yeah. Speaking of wild speculative uncertainty, though, we have a little bit of Britain and then we're going to do a startup. Okay. So I want to...

There are two... I have a little thing and a big thing. I'm going to start with the little thing, which is that in the wake of... In the wake of the accountability lever not flipping to on, or at least not doing so quickly, in the wake of the party shenanigans, Labour has spent money buying ad space on Conservative home,

according to Pippa Surar. Awesome. They're like... People who voted for Conservative sometimes also like Kier Sturma. Consider this. Yeah. This is just Lincoln project shit. It's finally hopped upon.

We're going to try and make Tories feel bad where they live. This will definitely work. So essentially, the ad is basically, or at least what Pippa Kurar has shared, is a screenshot of Conservative home showing sort of algorithmic pop-up ads, or algorithmic banner ads, of just a woman standing in a surgical mask who's clearly a medical care worker.

And then it says, look into her eyes and tell her you still back Boris Johnson. To which anyone reading that will say, yes, I still back Boris Johnson. Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course I do. You know, what am I going to do? Not back Boris Johnson?

Of course I still back Boris Johnson. Thank you for reminding me how much I love Boris Johnson. It's very funny to imagine some guy who's currently wiping his car off a choir boy, going like, of course I'm back Boris Johnson. He's going to print this out and taking my steeple. He owns a steeple? That's right, yeah.

He's a modern guy who owns a steeple. He's the Tory membership. People who, and I quote from Ayesha, a group who have an average legal age of ghost. Yeah. So like, I don't know, what are you going to do? What you've done is, you have basically taken a whole pile of like Labour members money

and you have given it to Conservative home. Yeah, nice. In exchange for calling the Prime Minister a scallywag. When I saw it, I was just like, this is just like led by Dunke's shit, right? Yeah. Like the kind of projecting stuff on to like the houses of parliament or like doing those posters,

which like really amount to like, oh, Boris Johnson isn't trustworthy or like the Conservatives, they're devious and they hate like institutions, right? And you know, you could make the argument that, okay, like they're targeting a political crowd and like a political crowd where like there seems to sort of be some minor exhaustion about like Boris Johnson.

So like this is kind of strategically, it's like, you know, fine. But like, you're right, like number one, like you're giving, you're giving, you're giving money to the Conservatives at home. But like the second thing is also like the choice of that picture as well was the thing that really like I found very weird because like it's no secret that like all their readers pretty much like have absolute contempt for the NHS and everyone who works in it and like never gave a shit about them.

So like, of course they would like still back him because like why would they be in bed? Like for me, it was like, why, why choose out of all the kind of pictures you could have chosen or like all the things you could have picked up, right? Like, you know, grandmother's sitting alone or something. Like that seems to feel more effective. This is like makes no sense even by their own logic. Oh my God, someone, I just saw when you were scrolling through those

that someone who's a blue tick had quote tweeted it with epic trolling and I don't think they chose me. Epic. Yeah, I just... Kirstalmer's finally gone epic mode. He's Melbourne. It's the combination of that, right? Of deciding that what we're going to do is we're going to remind

Conservative voters that again, the guy who they get a lot of pleasure from like owning people on their behalf has owned people they hate. I don't get it. I very much look forward to Kirstalmer. So I would like to remind Boris Johnson that it is in fact the summer of Morbius. I mean, after Boris Johnson called him severe calmer, I think he has no choice but to challenge him to a fight. I think Kirstalmer needs to start taking our advice.

It challenged Boris Johnson to a fight. Talk about doing cocaine with Julia Fox at Soho House. This is the only way out. Labour should take out an ad at Conservative home showing a picture of Kirstalmer with Julia Fox being like, the Labour leader is shagging Julia Fox. Yeah, it's like an animated banner ad with a line of cocaine that goes across the page. Kirstalmer's head just goes all the way across following it.

The British people demand less Boris and Morbius. I'm still working on that, but yeah. I mean, it's incredible to see. I mean, because I suppose if you would, if you have, if you are so purely wrapped up in just media performance, then of course you'd think that led by Donkeys or the Lincoln Project or whatever is genius politics and that the thing to do is just shovel a bunch of money from your side on to the other side

to like make them to remind everyone what a scallywag the guy in charge is. And it's just really astonishing to see it happening in real life over here. I have something. Tories these days would rather consume media with Morbius and go to the cinema. Morbius! There we go. There we go.

All right, well, I think that's the end of the podcast. So what was that, 17 minutes? It's achieved its height, like it's over. So what was that, like four and a bit years? Yeah, 17 minutes. No, no, no, not by. We finally worked out what it is with the Tories. Finally figured it out. It's been a while.

No, so the other thing is like while this is all... I'm not making anything out of it. No, I do it. I'll fuck up. It's James A. Ketster. Yeah, that's right. So basically like while this is all happening and while this appears to be the only thing that we're going to attack the Tories on, the energy price cap has been sort of suggested that it's going to go up again.

Oh, that. But who uses energy? No, just honestly, I think everyone should just take a nap. Everyone should tighten their belt when it comes to being warm enough to survive. Yeah, have you considered possibly becoming a long distance runner so your temperature is always a little higher? You're triggered and you're owned by your energy bills going up 300% or have you considered that it's summer? That's right.

Well, I mean, what I can say is that a great way to save on your heating bill is to just like get mad online. Like that raises your blood. Yeah, so like maybe you should spend more time posting on the computer. Think about that. Yeah, you could put like a bunch of cup of water on your forehead and then it will boil. So essentially...

Boris Johnson has failed to acknowledge the summer of Morbius and also it's going to be the summer of Morbius. Big searches in energy prices due to his government. That's exactly what it's going to be. Thank you, Sirkeer. I'm so thrilled that you took time out of your busy schedule to come in here and talk to us today. I'm absolutely exhausted from railing my new girlfriend, Julia Fox.

And I do mean the double entendre there. Delightful stuff, Sirkeer. Well, thank you for coming in. My pleasure. So basically what happened right is that the energy price gap is going up. This is, again, well like wholesale. Gas prices are quite low just because energy tends to be... Well, it partly is because energy tends to be bought in like a lot...

Because basically remember, all of those small firms are out of business because they all bought energy on the spot market. And they couldn't have money to buy it ahead of time. So what it means is that, well, if the price spikes and you buy a lot of energy ahead of time, that means that it stays expensive for a while. But also like what are they going to do? Put the bills down?

When has the energy bill ever gone down? There's also like a practical problem here, which is that we get a lot of natural gas from the North Sea. Europe does not have a lot of terminals to handle like natural gas. We don't like have a lot of gas storage because we sold all of it off. Well, because why would you need to store it? Yeah, therefore, best we can do is like burn a shitload of it and just try and like sell the excess electricity we generate.

So, yeah, but it's not going to benefit you, the consumer in Britain at all. Oh, heaven's no benefit. That's not how it's supposed to work. Anyway, so with all of that happening, the Conservative government having said, no, we're not going to do anything about it. Go fuck yourself. You're on your own. Has essentially been once again forced by events.

A powerful message to voters. Go fuck yourself. You're on your own. But I would like to say actually, the government has gone a bit too far here. I would like to say, go freak yourself. You've got a tax credit. Well, the thing is that's more, that's essentially kind of what happened, right?

Because what we're seeing is a permanent price increase of like something in the region of like 800 pounds. Because the bills can, even if the gas falls, the bills can never go back down. This is just a reality of like, you might as well want to turn gravity off. So what has happened, right? Is that with the bill rising by about 800 pounds,

maybe a little more, keep that figure in your head, by the way. Just remember that amount. What we have essentially said is, again, and what labor has been agitating for is a big one-off windfall tax because they've all been taking excessive profits. And this was when the Tories sort of gave their logic for it. They said, well, it's because they're excessive profit taking.

There's not like any kind of innovation that they're engaging in or any kind of efficiency seeking. Again, it's never been that. They've never done that. But that's fine. Nevertheless, they said, we're going to tax them some billions of pounds and redistribute that in a sort of means-tested way so that no one gets less than 400

and then if you meet certain criteria, you can get some more than that. But let's just say the average person getting about 400, they're going to get 400 pounds one time for a bill that is risen by about 800 forever. That's dialectics, baby. That seems a trade offer. And I think the thing I want to emphasize, right,

is that they chose to do this. This is what labor has basically been pressuring to do, right, is do a one-off big windfall tax because we have to recognize that the amount of profit taking has been irregular. So please, you know, give them a windfall tax. And then the conservatives said, basically, okay, we're going to do that,

but we're going to also give them tax credits for investing in oil and gas in the North Sea, which is perfect because we really want to get to that two-degree world five years sooner. We do, yeah. But that essentially... We're going to get there first before those idiots in Europe. Yeah.

We're going to be warming far faster than the rest of Europe. You know, they wish they could warm as fast as us. That's right. Well, when they'll become warmer, which means that you'll have to pay less. So actually, it's a great long-term strategy. Yeah, it's fine. It's fine.

Oh, fuck you. Actually, you know what Hussain, you are right. I've got to hand it to you on that one. You've got us. Turning the big temperature dial back and forth. So what has happened is the entire overton window is between go fuck yourself, you're on your own, and maybe we should do a one-time tax and redistribution.

And both sides of the overton window are firmly in the realm of they don't do anything. Yeah. Yeah. What if we nationalized some energy companies to their structure? What if we nationalized that? Or even...

Oh, we can't do that. Or even just set a more aggressive price cap. Yeah, because we already do set a price cap. We already have state intervention in the market, just only the bad kind. Rather than putting the price cap up, people were already going bankrupt at the price cap they've already put up.

So why would you then put it up again? Well, I know why. Yeah. And the fact that labor has essentially been agitating for that and a vat cut, which would mean for one month the price increases halved, but then it's a full increase after that. Yeah, it's incredible.

I mean, it's like they're saying that it's hard to even... But the way that the Labour Party at this point loves to demand less than the bare minimum from the government, which I mean, okay, whether or not you agree with it ideologically or not, that enables the government to outflank you by doing the bare minimum. And then you can't criticize them

because they're doing what you've demanded of them, which is shit. Yeah. And then Rishi Sunak is on TV in a Superman costume because he's helping people. Yeah. And also crucially, if we learn anything from the COVID stuff, it's like when the bare minimum fucks up,

then Labour Party get the blame for it, right? So during the COVID, so Keir Starmer was one of the first that you came... Well, the Labour Party, they had the position of early lockdowns and all that stuff. Well, actually, it kind of flipped, didn't it? But I guess the point that I'm trying to make is that when it came to the furlough scheme,

I think that the Labour Party were trying to sort of advocate for it first. The Rishi Sunak was very reluctant to do it and eventually did it through gritted teeth, then sort of got made a saint because of it. And then when the furlough scheme ended and it kind of disorientated parts of industry, Keir Starmer got the blame for it, right?

It was Labour who advocated for this and they call themselves the Labour Party, but they're overlooking dying businesses and stuff. Ultimately, it's really that. They will argue for the bare minimum. The Tories will kind of give them the bare minimum plus a little bit extra. Labour Party won't really be able to respond to it.

Treat yourself to a different kind of yoga. And then when people realise they don't really like the yoga, they'll get mad at Keir Starmer. And I think that's a great strategy. He should continue doing it. I was very excited when I heard they were going to canonise Rishi Sunak, but I thought they meant something else.

And if you remember, right, this was originally a loan of £200 and now it's a grant of four... I just do not... I fully do not understand how on earth anyone on any side of the political spectrum could be possibly celebrating this as a win because, as you said, Milo,

people were already going bankrupt at this level. And if you get an £800 energy bill, an £800 increased energy bill, and I hand you £400 and say, don't spend it all in one place, wouldn't you rather have that than I hand you £200 and say, give it back? Well, exactly.

This country has Stockholm syndrome with the Tories, where we're so completely under the boot at this point that the government's giving me £400. They're like, all hail the merciful Boris Johnson because he is giving us £400 after taking £800 from us, but he could have given us nothing. So, you know, there is something to be cheerful about. It's like, no, there isn't!

The thing about the government is 400 quid per person is all they have. They're showing us their empty wallet. Like, sorry. Yeah, well, I'm sorry. I'm afraid there's no money left. If you don't have any more cash on them, they'll be rude to impose and ask them to go and find one.

Yeah, the government is sending you a Monzo request for your portion of the curry you had with Kirsten. The government is saying it didn't really have much of the wine, actually. Yeah, the government is pointing out they didn't have a starter or a dessert. Yeah, I've added an extra £20 because you did have a bit more than half a naan.

Yeah, that's right. You did take one of the government's chips from its plate, is the thing, and therefore... And you're like, but hey, at least the government is basically agreeing to pay for half of what it ate. It could have just walked out. Come on, that would never happen. You know, when Rachel Reeves says, right,

she says after this, well, this clearly shows that Labour is winning the battle of ideas. Oh, fuck me! I think the battle of ideas between two people who, like, the closest thing they've had to a thought died of fucking loneliness. Like, the battle of ideas!

Incredible! Talk about, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is fucking king. Like, in this case, it's more like, in the land of the blind, the man with the slightly better-trained dog is fucking king. Like, what the fuck kind of ideas have they had?

They've lost the battle of ideas. The idea they had was so shit that the government has managed to outflank them on the left. You're the Labour Party, you fucking cretins! What is wrong with you? The point is, you don't understand politics! Gizama's whole thing is that he's the guy

who understands politics! You ask the government to do something that's, like, very good so they obviously won't do it and then you can call them a cunt for not doing it! You don't ask them to do something which is shit and people won't like that then they can do

and then blame it on you! That's the dumbest shit I've ever heard! I'm fucking like, the battle of ideas, Rachel Reeves! How many lobotomies has this woman had? Fuck me! Oh, it's been the first one of those for a while. Seeing Quailude's Acaster just, like, pop out right at the end.

Rachel Reeves, let's clap on! I feel like Quailude's Acaster is, like, Milo's Morbius. The summer of Quailude's Acaster. That would be an interesting MCU edition. Quailude's Acaster. The living Acaster. That's just dark! I feel really good! The one thing I will respect the current iteration

of the Labour Party for is that they're really giving the Democrats a run for their money as the most frustratingly stupid Washington general's ass nominally progressive party. Wasn't the case also that they're trying to model themselves on that because they're still so insistent, but, like, the American Democrats are, like,

yeah, the current, like, the Biden administration is, like, the model that they want to emulate. Yeah, like, utterly doing nothing and failing. Like, I was discussing this with Riley before the episode off mic about how, like, Britain is, like, it's less cursed in terms of outcomes than America, but it's more cursed in the sense that

both parties are the Democrats. They're, like, they're both so incredibly frustrating to watch because, like, the Republicans, as evil as they are, are able to govern. Like, they just do things that are evil, but they are actually capable of doing things. Whereas in this country, we have two parties neither of which are capable of doing anything.

And it's somehow, it's worse. Like... Yeah, because our Republican Party is, like, a band of freaks and widows who are, like, dragging the second Democrats, the conservatives, around on a leash. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The thing I was thinking of as well is that

the Republicans in the US exist to govern aggressively for their, for, like, the interests they represent. Whereas the Tories just seem to exist to keep labor out and labor just seems to exist to promise it won't be too much different from the Tories. No, labor exists to keep the left of labor out. That's right.

The two parties there are essentially big door stops. I want to talk about a startup. It's called Evolve. It's spelled the normal way, but no E. What? Evolve. Evolve. No E.

No. How are you spelling it? That's just... Sorry, none of the second E. Excuse me. Oh, okay, right. Okay. It's only had the one E.

I see. That was very funny. I was just thinking... What? How are you... They're, like, doing, like, non-Euclidean English. No, so Evolve, but there's no E on the end, just the beginning.

Yeah, Evolve, the game publisher with the platform Stome. Yeah, that's right. It's like a Morbius strip. Come on. We're going to start with Hussain. It's called Evolve, and remember, there is no E on the end of Evolve. Good guess, Hussain.

Wait, no, hold on, hold on. I have something for this. E. E. That wasn't exactly what I had, but... Welcome to Hussain's thinking hour. All right, Hussain, let's see your answers. I'm sorry, must be in the form of a question.

I'm still trying to work it out. I mean, the only thing I can think of is that, like, it's some sort of, like, electric vehicle, and that's only because, like, it's like Evolve. That's a very boring answer, but, like, I can't... Yeah. Evolve. I'll give you a hint.

It's related to some stuff that's been in the news in America recently, and I want you to imagine the most cynical, perhaps evil thing you can, and then double that. It's an app that prevents school shootings. Electrified floors. Fuck. Yes, the lathe is vibrating with my power today.

I was with you on the school shootings. It's an app that prevents school shootings. I was thinking it was going to be like, you electrify the floors of the school, and then the second lockdown goes out. You just fry possibly a bunch of kids, but also the school shooter. Yeah.

So it's not exactly an app, though. Evolve. That would have been too practical, I think. So this company went public last year, has raised $400 million from a combination of Peyton Manning, Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, and Andre Agassi. Just a bunch of really smart guys. Now that's a mum's basement lineup I would listen to.

So they say, we will change the way you think about security. Visitors to your location should move quickly through security checkpoints at a seamless pace. That sounds like a really bad ad. You'd go down like a sidebar of a bad website, like visitors to your location really enjoy.

Well, you know, I'm trying to shoot up a school, and the banner comes down. You're actually the one millionth visitor to that school. Yeah. You're the one millionth person who's attempting to shoot up this school. You've got this big novelty check, and then that forces you to put down the gun temporarily

while you're confused. Yeah, and you get tackled by a bunch of teachers. Yeah, that's right. So what it is, is it says, traditional security screening was not designed for today's dynamic threat environment. Unlike metal detectors, manual bag checks, wanding, and other traditional solutions,

wanding, like a metal detector wand. I realize it's just a funny way of describing it. Evolve offers an innovative approach to physical security screening by maintaining the highest degree of weapons detection accuracy via AI. Amazing. Is it like a kind of vibes check thing?

Like it checks if you have bad vibes and that for whether you're a security threat. If bad vibes are a gun, which I guess a gun is pretty bad vibes. Oh, Alice, you say gun. So the Evolve weapons detection system combines powerful sensor technology with proven AI, security ecosystem integrations,

and a comprehensive venue analytics to ensure safer, more accurate threat detection at an unprecedented speed and volume. What essentially they're saying is, look, we've accepted that there is no acceptable political solution to this because Joe Manchin likes the filibuster, because that's the only thing that keeps him

being a mirror of West Virginia. And so what we're going to do, Joe Al Manchin, is we're going to have everything. What if the TSA, the thing people love interacting with, what if that was everywhere? Yeah, cool.

For example, what if to go to school, you had to, and again, this is true. If you bring a laptop to school, you can't have it in your bag because according to the Evolve system, it looks like a gun. Well, my laptop certainly does because I especially commissioned one that is shaped exactly like a gun.

And also functions as a gun. It also does not function as a laptop. No. It's primarily a gun. It's an educational gun. I've written the word school. That's right. Not in a threatening way, it's because

it's my educational gun. Yeah, I've actually, I've carved the entire text of pride and prejudice onto these bullets and I'm shooting people with them in a learning way. Who says, we want to change the way we think about security, blah, blah. So this is from the Washington Post. When Peter George saw news of the racially

motivated mass shooting at the top supermarket in Buffalo on May 14th, when Peter George saw news of the racially motivated mass shooting at the top supermarket in Buffalo on May 14th, which again, is two weeks ago, he had a thought that's often had after such tragedies. No, it's not. Could our system have stopped it?

Our system, again, not being the political system by which power is distributed and used by the state, but rather could our system, our AI enabled metal detector have stopped it, you know. Could I have stopped this by going on the computer? Yeah. Could school shootings clippy have said,

hey, you're about to commit a school shooting? Yeah. Do you need any help with that? Because that's the other thing, right? Why on earth would a metal detection system stop it if every single police officer ran the fuck away from the guy? Yeah, they confronted him and then were just like,

oh, wow, this guy has a gun shit. Go off to use that. What you've added is a very expensive sound effect that goes off in the background of a school shooting, of the alarm going off. We tactically interdicted a suspect who we believed to have a toy gun. Unfortunately, it transpired that the suspect

was armed with a gun of a real gun nature, and therefore we had to let him proceed. The police looked at the guy with the gun and the kid with the gun and they were like, wow, he's just like me. They're always having a go at cops for shooting a kid with a toy gun, but that's the safest kind of kid to shoot.

You can't go around shooting a kid with a real gun. He might shoot back. Very dangerous. I mean, that is basically what they think. They've got the health and safety conscious of the police. So Peter George, the CEO of Evolve Technology, which is quoted by the Washington Post, says an AI based system meant to flag weapons

quote unquote, democratizing security. Amazing. They've managed to come up with something dumber than the average police officer, which is AI. Yeah, what you've democratized is the experience of the TSA. Yeah, except dumber than the TSA

because it's a computer that's doing the TSA. Amazing. But that's the thing. There still has to be a guy there or else it's going to detect that you have a weapon and then you're just going to continue walking with your weapon. The computer is like, hey, stop that.

Do not. And so it says, do you need help with your mental health? The idea of this is Peter. This is Jay Stanley from the ACLU says, the idea of a gentler metal detector is a nice solution in theory to these terrible shootings. But do we really want to create more ways for security to invade our privacy?

Do you want to turn every shopping mall or little league game into the airport? That's the idea here is you cannot go anywhere. That's the vision. Because I was thinking about this. As soon as this happened, I was like, I wonder, is any sort of intractable political problem inevitably attracts one of two things,

which is blockchain or AI? We want to solve the Northern Ireland border issue with blockchain and AI. Just be like, what if we didn't have to address these irreducible complexities of having a customs border and also not having a customs border? What if we squared that circle

by just saying a wizard would do it? This is the US version of that. In this case, it's literally a wizard, a setup wizard from Windows 98. There's a light emission technique that uses underpins lidar to create images that AI examines it. And then they have signatures

where they train the AI to look for guns, basically. So they're applying the technology that self-driving cars are supposed to be using. This is going to work fabulously. I think what I find fascinating about all this stuff is that a lot of liberals in the US are guilty of, similarly, not engaging with the source material

in that every time one of these happens, the first thing they yell about is gun control, which, obviously, gun control would, at least in a limited sense, solve some of these problems because it would at least mean that there would never ban guns entirely in the US, but it would make people less able to kill

as many people as quickly. However, the gun nuts do have a point, but guns are not fundamentally the cause of this. There's a reason why America is the only country where this happens, and it's not because America's the only country where you can buy guns, because it isn't. There are loads of countries, particularly in the developing world,

where it's really fucking easy to get loads of guns, probably even some guns that are banned in America. This does not regularly happen in those countries. And also, it didn't happen regularly in America before, like, Columbine. It is a modern American phenomenon that is actually like, guns enable it to happen, but they're not the fundamental cause of it,

and I find it bizarre when people insist that they are. It's like, no, there's something way more fucked up going on here. I think that the fundamental cause of it, in as much as it certainly wouldn't happen without... I think that there are the fundamental cause of maybe 90% of the lethality of it. Yeah, it's not a reason to oppose gun control, but also I think people, like, the liberals are like,

well, people just can't be trusted with guns, and that's the only problem in our society. Anyway, time to dust off my hands and not look under the hood of America. Yeah, as you say, because the ideal is the mass shootings stop happening, or stop happening as frequently, and they never have to address anything else.

Yeah, of the incredibly like... Because a lot of what connects a lot of the mass shootings tends to also be people who are... Shitload of alienation, misogyny, racism, domestic abuse. Essentially, a lot of them are deeply radicalized either by sort of like white supremacy or incel shit. Yeah, I sort of... It's all of these problems that are intersecting,

but I think the thing is, it's certainly... I'd say the fact that you can get an AR-15 and a drive-thru certainly has dumped a lot of gasoline onto the fire. Oh yeah, it exacerbates the problem massively. But I think also it's amazing, because this has brought up some amazing things about the American cops, like, far from being unable

to not do violence when they shouldn't. They can't even do violence when they should. Which is a great... Again, if you bring the example of the British police, they don't do as much violence as the American police, but also, there was that guy, the fucking policeman who confronted the guy who was armed outside parliament who was unarmed and got stabbed to death.

He didn't run off. I'm not saying he was a good guy. He was still a cop, but that's the minimum you expect from a cop, even when you understand what cops are. It seems as though it is certainly a perfect storm. It has created this just enormous, gaping wound in American society into which step a bunch of guys saying that they'll solve it with AI and blockchain.

And we can trust all of them. Yeah, we're going to get an NFT of the school shooter, and we're going to put it on the blockchain, and that's going to solve the problem. When the system identifies the suspicious item from a group of people flowing through it, it draws an orange box around it on a live video feed of the person entering.

Oh, so if I enter the school with the ball from the Birmingham ball ring, and it will put the box... This guy's mental health is off the charts. It's drawing the Q-angle on each person entering. Now, isn't here AA7 is called an angle? It says it's only then that a security guard watching on a nearby tablet will approach for more screening.

But again, they already have the gun, and the security guard has already been proven to be ineffective. Amazing. So what the fuck is this doing? What's its function? Because if they have the gun and they bring it to the school, that's sort of it,

because the security guards and the cops have proven themselves to be manifestly unable and unwilling to stop it. So what you've done is you've drawn a little box around an eventual brother weapon. We're running hot today. Yeah, we are running hot, and rightly so. This might be a dumb observation,

but from what I understand, based on dipping in and out of the weekly school shootings that seem to be happening, it happens very rarely that someone will bring a gun into the actual premises and then fire it later. More often than not, if I'm not wrong. The shooter comes in and starts shooting

once they get inside the school. So if they're carrying the gun because they want to kill people in the school, then I don't know what are they expecting to do with this. Can you put it through the scanner first before you do your thing? You can see the desperation to avoid... That's the one thing about gun control being

the first priority, because I agree with Milo, right? There's all of this other shit that needs to happen as well. But the thing that changed my mind a little bit on that was the extent to which everybody in American media, everybody on all of the Republican Party and a decent proportion of the Democrats immediately started talking about

anything other than gun control for as long as they could, as loudly as they could. You have fucking Ted Cruz go on Fox and say, every school should have one door with armed guards at it. It's like, okay, fine. You have one door, there are armed guards at it. A guy with a rifle comes up, the armed guards run.

Now what? Well, the kids don't have exits. The armed guards, there'll be two armed guards every door. One will tell lies. One will tell the truth. And you've got to decide which one. And if you passed a riddle, then you get to do your shooting.

No, what I was going to say was that, again, I agree with Milo in the sense that, the idea of just getting rid of guns isn't going to solve the violence problem, because I think at this stage also, because the systemic causes of violence are so embedded, you may kind of... You can argue that reducing access to gun

might mean that you'll kind of get fewer casualties, and that's generally a good thing. The issue with the gun thing is also that you can rack up a lot of casualties in a short period of time, but it doesn't address the systemic things. What's been quite interesting... You get more car attacks too.

And American cars in particular are about the worst kind of car that you could try and run a bunch of people down with. Yeah, especially if you're driving a Tesla. Especially if you're driving a Tesla. If you're driving a Tesla, that's more of a... AI on AI crime. What I was going to add very quickly was

that if you kind of look at the responses, or if you listen to the responses that have happened after this attack, and you're right, they've avoided talking about gun control, and they've avoided really talking about guns, using the same... He was a psychopath, but this was just one radical,

and there are so many good gun owners, and we shouldn't punish them and everything. But what it kind of seems to imply is that the way in which the Second Amendment and gun accessibility has sort of been framed as the kind of pinnacle, sort of the moniker of American freedom and liberty, right? And it sort of is.

It's the only thing you get for living in America, right? Yeah, and the idea that, yeah, you can sort of go into any store. Last time I went to America, I went on a fishing trip, and I went to go to get some tackle, and the guy was asking if I wanted to buy a gun, and there must be ways to take it back to England.

And I was like, number one, I was like, okay, my name is Hussain, and I don't know whether you know that. But the second thing being, he's really keen to sort of sell... You've never shot a fish, Hussain. You ever felt the power of discharging a Magnum 537 into a chubb?

That's a Magnum 357. I don't want to get yelled at by someone with autism. A Magnum 537. Now, that would destroy a chubb. Yeah. A more than 50 calp is still... Do you want to obliterate a carp into its component parts? Yeah.

Do you want your shoulder and the carp to experience the same thing at the same time? Do you want to be sure that no Polish man will ever eat this carp by turning it into little more than mist? He really wanted to sell me this gun, and it was just really this idea, and I think it's, yeah, again,

it's really this idea that you're kind of... The freedom that you get, and the freedom that they sell, is the idea that anyone can buy this gun, and it means that you can bypass thinking about what it means to live in a free society in more systemic ways, right? The Second Amendment can be very conveniently used

to track from conversations about accessible health care, or education, or welfare, or very basic living standards. The idea that so much of America basically lives in poverty, and those are also places with incredibly high gun ownership. I'm kind of wondering whether the Second Amendment also is used in a very cynical way to be able to detract from having to have conversations...

Detract from having conversations about those actual systemic things which cause the radicalization, and thus creating this impossible cycle to break. Well, I think there's another thing. It's the thing to remember, is that radicalization and mental health are not two sides of the same coin.

These are different, because one is just a defuse and largely thought of as individualized, whether it is or is not, it's thought of as individualized problem. It's, oh, there are many people with deficiencies, they have deficient mental health, or whatever. But it's the actual...

The actual problem. The actual problem beyond just there are tons of guns around, because like Britain had a mass shooting, it had one last year. People seem to forget that. We had one here last year, but that almost never happens.

Yeah, but that's the thing. The question of magnitude isn't a side issue. If you can say, yeah, we had a mass shooting last year. When was the previous one? 2010. If you're talking about America, then it's like, oh, we had one the previous week. I'm not saying it's a side issue at all.

What I'm saying is that the guy who we had a mass shooting, I got to do our mass shooting, there's a lot of similarities to all the guys doing the mass shootings in America. He's on the same forums, he was using the same, he was talking in the same way, he had a lot of the same political ideologies. And so it's like, there is a...

There is a stochastic fascist terrorist issue, not a mental health issue, basically. And that stochastic fascist terrorist issue is massively exacerbated by the fact that you can get a gun very easily that is meant to kill large numbers of people. And again, sort of focusing back on what Evolve here says, one of the...

I get publicly traded, very valuable companies, sort of solution to it is to make everything into an airport, every six flags into an airport, every school into an airport, everything. But, you know, then this is... But like this says, well, what happens when you move beyond like looking for a gun?

Because it's not just a metal detector, it's not just seeking metal, it's seeking fucking whatever you tell it to seek, it will seek any signature, anything. So if you say, okay, well now, we're just gonna... Seeking the damn transgenders. Yeah, it could do that, it could do whatever.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, it's like if you want to think like in a world where, say, there's like a lack of access to like, say, trans health care, like if because of discrimination against trans people, yeah, you could do that with it. What you're doing is you're normalizing. People using this, right, there's very cynical firms

are jumping into the breach saying, let us surveil more. Let's surveil more and more broadly because the actual problems, which is again a combination of, as you said, Milo, a stochastic fascist terrorist movement and as you say, Alice, the fact that they, all of these people

have ready access to guns, if you're not willing to deal with either of those things, the only thing you can do is make everything into the fucking TSA. Yeah, and I think it's important that that's why, like, you know, like liberals in the U.S. I think are missing out in a big way on an argument they're making.

It's because like when you just say that guns are the problem, what you enable the right to say is like, ah, well, look at these countries where they have guns and they don't shoot each other all the time. And it's like, yeah, because unfortunately, it's not to make the proper point, which is that like, America has had an experiment with having guns and it's been proven that American society,

as it is currently constituted for the reasons of having loads of stochastic fascist terrorists, is incapable of being trusted with guns. The Swiss are capable of being trusted with them. Unfortunately, the Americans cannot. And the other thing, right, is that... Just a Swiss with your money. No, it's true.

Is that we, yeah, we, for example, what if it's like, all right, these are outside every protest now. So you're going to get searched. And because the thing is, a lot of people walking through these things are going to be fucked up by them. For example, if you're going to a protest and they,

I don't know, find something in your pocket or whatever, that's like, oh, we can arrest this guy now. We can harass this person now. Or... Found as you get, cause. Or perhaps we've, we have, we already have identified this person from their phone. We now know everything that they're carrying on them.

We know where they're going. We know all sorts of shit about them. And that is now, again, a bunch of data that's been pulled in. And no matter how much they promise that they're not going to tag a personal name attribute to a person, we know for a fact that that's not enough to fully anonymize someone.

No, but buddy, they promised. Come on. Come on. And so, and so essentially like, what you're, what you're now saying is, yeah, it's where people are just going to have to accept constantly being padded down by the cops all the time. And the people who are, this is going to stop

are people who we don't care about, who don't need to be stopped. This isn't going to stop someone who's decided they want to shoot up a school and they're going to just walk through it and then a little orange box will appear over the gun that they then remove from their coat and start using. So yeah, that's where it was before he took it out.

This little helpful orange box showed me. But what it will do is get a lot of people, pretty, especially a lot of people who are already over-surveiled and over-policed, pretty fucked up by the fact that this is just more over-reaching surveillance into their lives. What if we, yeah, what if we turn schools into penopticons?

Yeah, I'm actually going to do a start-up where we're going to fill all of the schools with bottles and cans, which will distract school teachers for long enough to enable them to be tackled by teachers who are apparently the only people brave enough to do anything about it. We have to protect our precious operator.

Man, the fact that, I mean, it's so dark, but I mean, the fact that the cops were like tasing the parents to prevent them getting into the school to rescue their own children, the fact that they, like, Chris Morris-style, locked the shooter in there with the kids and were like, well, we've contained it. Like, the fucking eight-year-old boy

on the fucking space station with the pedophile. Just, like, it beggars belief, like. And so, essentially, this thing, like I said earlier, also says Flags Google Chromebooks as weapons. So, for whatever reason, Google Chromebooks it always flags as weapons. You bet they do suck and you shouldn't buy one. Peter George, the CEO, said that, as for accuracy...

Flags trying to bring an explosive into my school, but I was just trying to charge my Samsung Galaxy app. This machine is flagged to be an absolute fucking weapon. As for accuracy, he acknowledges that the Chromebook has been an issue, but says the outcome is being improved. He suggested in the meantime that students who use a Chromebook might simply come to realize that they will need to hold them up in front of them on their way to school,

which is a small price to pay for safety. Incredible. Incredible. I mean, they already make students, like, have clear backpacks and shit already, so. If you're a student at school, why don't you simply wear kind of, like, makeshift body armor constructed entirely out of Panasonic Toughbooks

and hope for the best? Absolutely. So, yeah, this is a very anger-making, anger-inducing startup for me. Yeah, yeah, just fucking shit. Yeah. Boy, was that an episode that made me upset? What the fuck did we talk about?

Oh, boy. I can't believe that we brought on Quailude's Acaster and also that board ape, and neither of them really contributed to the substantive bits of the show. Yeah. Quailude's Acaster's going to be running the metal detector at your school now. That's going to be the...

Yeah, but he's going to be just as effective as the normal guy running the metal detector normally. Quailude's Acaster might actually rugby tackle the guy. I think he'd do better than the cops. Yeah. That's for sure. Quailude's Acaster's trying to fuck the school. Oh, legally, we cannot say that James Acaster does Quailude's

already. We'd fuck his wheelchair. That's not the point of the bit. It is just a joke. Legally, the disadvantage is it's a joke. Do you think what are you... One day is probably going to cross his desk. Cross his desk.

James Acaster's in train. As old as it is with Quailude's and episodes of podcasts to listen to. I hope people who don't know James Acaster understand that the premise of the joke is that... They've had a great episode, I think. Yeah. Is that James Acaster is the last person you could imagine

doing Quailude's. That plus Quailude's are quite a funny drug in general. Just any kind of like 70s party drug they don't really make anymore is inherently very funny. What needs Party 7 Acaster? So, okay. All right. All right.

So, thank you very much. Thanks very much for listening to the show. And we have a bonus episode. So, do check that out. It's five bucks a month and you get a second episode every week. Sheeple a pint and full of beer. This week, I'm very excited to say that we are going to be

revisiting probably one of my top three favorite characters of the history of the show. Jack Van De Klaaak. No, a real guy. Oh, okay. Jack Van De Klaaak. Yeah. So, do tune in for that.

It's going to be a lot of fun. I should say he's a man who is definitely alive. He's a man who's alive. He's not been built into a bridge. Yeah, that's right. He's in that oil barrel. He's listening to his favorite music. The AC is on.

Don't worry about it. So, we'll see you on the bonus episode for that. Anyway, bye everybody. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.