TRASHFUTURE - Who Fired and Rehired Roger Rabbit feat. Rusteen Honardoost and Nora Meek

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

We spoke with Nora and Rusteen from IATSE, who are on strike against the degradation of their careers by generative AI. But first, we speak about the purchase of Twitter (bad investment) and right-wing police abolition in the UK, in the form of a new company marketing how good they are at impersonating police officers. 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* Check out Milo’s show at the Fringe here! https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/milo-edwards-how-revolting-sorry-to-offend Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello everybody and welcome to this first of a two-parter episode of TF. And I bet that second part is going to be a real home run. Yeah, you know what? I will bet you any amount of money that we have an enlightening and interesting conversation with two striking animators. I think you'll win that bet. Yeah, that's right. Hey, if you want to take that bet, do write us. And we will bet you $10,000 that we have an enlightening conversation with two very pleasant animators named Nora and Rustin that's going to happen in the back half of this episode.

Unusually specific. But you could reverse the bet, you could take out some lightning bets. Yeah. 26-way parlay that involves one of the sort of nodes of which bounces off the idea that the back half of this episode is a really interesting chat about AI and its use in animation. Yeah. The rest of the bet is all about basketball still.

This is like totally out of left field. They don't even have that in basketball. Hey! All right. All right. Like we're, we're going to be talking about that in the back half, but we're going to do a little bit of news into company profile upfront. We've been talking about Elon Musk quite a bit recently because of

like specific things to do with him. This is why I want this segment, I want this to be the last Elon mentioned for a while. Oh, I mean, listen, anytime I talk about Elon Musk, I want it to be the last time I have cause to mention him. Yeah. So seven banks, this is the Wall Street Journal, and this really tickled me because I don't know if you know this, but do you know what would have been a better investment than giving Elon Musk money to take Twitter private? LLOYD Taking our bet about the back half of this episode because you would only lose $10,000. C The only worse investment than that, as long as records are being kept for major banks,

was buying Florida condos in 2006. Okay, sure. So like, you had a worse time if you were in the movie Margin Call, basically. Yeah, yeah. Like the people at the end of Margin Call, who are being sold all the worthless stuff, those people, we know that those people exist to get margin call too. NARES Well, cause all of these banks loaned Elon

the money to buy Twitter, right? GARETH Yeah. NARES And now, they're seeing him, and this is the thing, right? As much as, we've talked about how Elon's gotten himself in trouble with very powerful people before, and seemingly to no consequence, right? If you wanted to, like, complicate the narrative that, like, everybody is just willing to kill now, Boeing has a wetwork team, uh, like, HP has a wetwork team, unusually wetwork. M- Someone's made a deal with those orcas. L- Yeah, exactly. But like, Elon Musk, like, if I'm a bank executive, I'm sitting there and I'm watching him post-Greupers in order

to cheat me out of my money, which he has borrowed from me. You see him on Twitter being like, if you don't want to advertise with me it's because you're woke and soy and gay, and you just think, that's my money. And in fact, now that money is worth a lot less. Thank you, Elon. Um, Ford, you don't want to advertise next to my griper. Have you considered that you have pronouns? I think your bank has your money may not be worth as much, but it's also less gay. So in many ways, you're afraid to kind of money laundering service,

but for making your money, like more chats, less of it because of like deflation. That's a business idea. Don't, don't, don't take it. Yeah. Listen, listen, if you give me your money, right, I will do this. I will open up a lemonade stand outside the RNC and I will be like, I will make your money not gay. If you give me a hundred dollars, you will get $10 back, but those $10 will be certified Chad. So there's going to be Chad bucks. I'm going to give them some Chad Ian money and I'm going to be laughing. You can do one to one.

One or like all the way to the bank, the bank of Chad, where I will be depositing my earnings. Yeah. I think it's a Frank. the bank of Chad, where I will be depositing my earnings. Yeah. I think it's a Frank. It's one Frank to one dollar to one pound. This is the, this is what it's all going to be. Yeah. Cause like they're all Dina guys. They're already all primed for this. The currency exchange thing is going to work beautifully. You know? So can I tell you something even funnier though? right? It's not just these banks in theory that are like, oh, fuck our profit margins. Why did we, why did we invest in like the epic poster? How could this have gone wrong? We thought it was cool and he was not.

Well, that is, that was a big part of it. So what happens usually, right, is if a bank that provides a loan for this kind of takeover, what they would do is they would like finance it, take the fee and then sell the debt to someone who would be like an asset management company who would then like own and own the debt and sort of benefit from the servicing of that debt. However, the banks have not been able to sell this at all. You say Twizz's, Twizz's debt is like a stranded asset. Well, I mean, and it's stranded largely because of the behavior of the CEO, because it cannot make money while Elon is replying to Libs of TikTok.

Have you seen my latest gripper? Like these frogs are my friends. I bet they're going to make a Ford pronoun and not a Ford gripper. Nowadays. I like that we have very divergent Elans and both of them are wrong. Like mine is just flatly is like too South African and yours is like sort of verging on Keir Starmer. I'm not even going to try for my own dignity.

I'm just going to, I have, I don't, I don't have that. You know, I have an Elan. I have it. I just staying in my head. I've created a gripper that I'm going to mail to the Ford motor company. The emerald man in Angola. I call upon it to go further. I've created a gripper that I'm going to mail to the executives of the Ford motor company

and ask if they will be willing, if they would sign off on the gripper to start advertising with us again. So basically what happened is if a bank writes a loan, it has to have, you have to have like certain like loan to asset ratios, right? And if you have bad loans that you can't sell, then you have to hold assets to service those loans on your books, which means that like it's a doubly fucked. If you have a bad loan. You can kind of like poison a bank with this as we have seen historically. Yeah.

So it's like what's happened is these banks have eaten some like sushi that's been left on the roof of a taxi all day. Essentially. Agent 47 sort of like leaving the scene of like bank of America. So what's really funny, we could talk about who the investors are in a sec, because that's very funny. But basically, right, so all of that is meant that in at least one case, this was reported on in the Wall Street Journal, a Bank's, Barclays, mergers department has had their compensation

cut, like the individual bankers. So, wait, you don't get a bonus this year, because of Elon Musk posting. ZACH How many M&A guys from Barclays, do you think, are on Twitter just being like, don't fucking post the frog, don't fucking post the frog, please get Ford back, for the love of God. ALICE Are you suggesting that there is a throughline between Elon Musk posting about losing custody of his kids and the price of cocaine in East London.

BD I am absolutely suggesting that there is a direct through line, but probably in New York, but yes. It's a little bit, it's probably like, you know how a small rubber ball does exert gravitational force on the earth, right? It's negligible. But it's not. ALICE Yeah, yeah. A Flaps its wings, a bird tweets, Elon Musk tweets. What happens here is it is slightly easier to get a table at Carbones in Manhattan because the guys who would be booking them, yeah.

Get a bonus this year because their bank has a stranded asset in the form of like one social media network that its owner is trying to turn into a Nazi bar. Uh, so basically once the bankers were paid their bonuses, 25% of Barclays like managing directors left the firm. So this is, yeah, the Twitter loans have been hung for longer. So a hung loan is when you can't sell, than every similar unsold deal since the financial crisis for which the research firm PitchBook has records. I've said this like many times before, but like Twitter forcing Elon to buy Twitter is like, maybe one of the worst things to have happened, but also one of the funniest.

Yeah, absolutely. Just all, and because the thing is, why, if you're a bank, right? Masterful gambit, sir. Like, it's like a Mexican standoff where everybody misses and shoots their own foot. It's insane. So, but the thing is, right? The reason that they're doing this is that the banks, if Musk ever takes another company public, like Neuralink.

Yeah, namely like SpaceX, right? That would be the big thing. SpaceX or Starlink, mostly. They want to be able to be like in on that deal because I think they've probably correctly said, or they've correctly understood that being involved in SpaceX or Starlink would probably be quite profitable. Yeah, well those are two businesses that have successfully kind of firewalled themselves from Elon Musk. Well, Twitter is the sin eater. That's the thing, right?

Twitter is like, SpaceX have developed a new heat shield in the form of Twitter because like he's not telling them like, I'll put a Tesla on this rocket and like, you know, fire it into deep space or whatever anymore because he's too busy posting. Oh, you'd better not be giving this rocket pronouns. I've told Libs of TikTok to come and work at SpaceX to make sure you don't give the rocket pronouns. That went a bit like Liverpool for a second. Like, I just have to do Keir Starmer.

I can do one accent and it's Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer from his time in the fab four. Look, basically Elon Musk, once again, what he's done is he's made it so that a bunch of banks are subsidizing his posting habit. Like a bunch of banks- God, I wish that was me. And not just a bunch of banks, a Saudi royal? This keeps happening.

He keeps pissing off people who we know have bone-sword people for less, right? Like he keeps fucking with people's money. You know who else? Diddy. Who will rid me of this turbulent South African tech mogul? I just said P Diddy. Sean Combs. Sean Puffy Combs. Invested in Twitter. Oh, that was a terrible decision. It's the second worst thing that has happened to Diddy this year. a terrible decision. It's the second worst thing that has happened to Diddy this year. So yeah, it's like the losses apparently are continue to be staggering because he's just being too epic. You mean Linda Yacarino's latest it's all happening on X the everything app tweet hasn't turned it all around for them. Prince Al Waleed praised the visionary

purchase as quote, an excellent leader to propel Twitter's great potential. However, the Prince could have cashed out and gotten a windfall at that moment, but now his $1.9 billion investment is worth just 630 million. I love to lose $400 million on, on Gropers. Oh, so no, no, no. 1.3 billion November. 1.3 billion. I'm so sorry. I love to lose. 1.3 billion dollars.

Yeah. But look, the 63 million that's left is like the straightest 63 million in the world. So that's true. The like 630 billion Chadian Franks left in Twitter from that Saudi prince. Remarkably unwoke. Finally. Finally. We're not going to have like a gay money. So, so this is, uh, I also like, like, I love the wording of the wall street journal article here. It says in the interim, certain of Musk's public comments and tweets have made a sale of the debt more difficult at Mitsubishi finance group. Musk's rant against advertisers in the fall prompted

anxiety among us executives at the bank. Not long after their Musk after his comments, they downgraded the bank's internal credit rating of the loan and kicked the debt into special situations, which typically handles the finances of bankrupt or distressed companies. A spokesman said, MUFG has had several constructive conversations with Mr. Musk and his leadership team. We anticipate reaching a positive outcome regarding repayment. I would love to be like the three American and like five Japanese executives at Mitsubishi financial group sitting in a room with Elon Musk just asking, okay, what is your plan to untrigger the advertisers? And he's just like, we're going to make a streaming show for Libs of TikTok. We're going to cat-turd and Libs of TikTok are going to

make a streaming show for Libs of TikTok. Cat Turd and Libs of TikTok are going to make a streaming show. Yeah, no, there's not really any way out of this for him, which is gratifying. You know, well, there is, well, there is like, there are probably ways out. Well, there's one. Elon, if you're listening. But again, the problem is that he's so addicted to the, to his own platform and like a very particular way of doing it. But it's like unfathomable to him because like the thing, and I don't know whether like how true

this is like on a broader scale, but my understanding is like, look, Twitter didn't collapse and that's like a big win because for a long time we were like, yeah, this thing's fucking collapsing. We need to go to other platforms, et cetera. It didn't collapse like, you know, fair fucks to the sort of the engineers that were left. This thing can still work. It's still kind of got like sort of dominance in the social media, like, thing. Like it needs kind of someone who can just run it properly. But the problem is, is that because he insists on still running it, despite the fact that like they made the kind of performative,

oh, Elon's just going to like run technology and like Linda Iaccarino is going to do everything else. He's still very much just like, I want to be in on this all the time. But because he's like constantly getting high on his own supply and getting like gassed up by all the worst fucking people on there, he's never letting that thing go. And so there is actually only one way for him to get out and like, it does involve a suitcase and maybe some tools. A bag lunch. Smug.

I mean, this is the thing as well is that like, I don't want to leave Twitter still. I am also like, a kind of stranded asset here, and that I don't want to move to like, blue sky or whatever. And I do think that ultimately it, or something very like it, will survive Elon Musk, just because it's like, too good of an idea not to. But in the meantime, he's locked in there with us and he is like making himself measurable. And all we need to do is just say, oh, I really miss, I really miss when like the Ford pronoun would advertise on here, you know?

We fully have broken his brain because he learned for the first time that he isn't popular and it is just like destroyed him. Yeah. Well, before we go into our interview with our own animation, I want to talk about a company. L. Yeah, I had prior knowledge of this one because you sent it to me and it ruined my entire day. I was pissed off for the whole evening. C. What do you mean? What are you pissed off about, about my local Bobby, a private security company that is trying to fill the hole left by local

police forces collapsing. Yeah, with distinctive police-like uniforms. And this is the thing, the unspoken thing about the whole security industry in this country and particularly in London where seemingly every city block has its own private security firm, is that ultimately the service you're providing is, we will get as close to impersonating the police as is legally allowed. It's just that I think this is one that is unusually forward about it. So, my local Bobby, I mean, it's my local Bobby, and they're...

This is like, FAL- The police officers were nicknamed Bobby after Robert Peel, who was like, instituted public police against private ones, it's insulting, it's like, you know. This is my local Bobby there. Also they walk the acronym, and this is like pure fallout. The acronym of like their patrol areas is B E A T lower K S. It's like, oh yeah, would you like to have a local Bobby TM on the beat TM? So they say our mission is simple, but powerful, creating safer communities and eliminating

the fear of crime. We have quickly become the UK is most effective security services provider by staying true to these goals and implementing a, this drove me insane, right? A broken windows strategy. Oh God. They're doing broken. They're doing the broadly disproven known to be quite racist and used to like harass minorities and poor people. Well, that that's a feature for someone employing a private security company rather than a bug, you know? Yeah, of course. It's they're going to be like, oh yeah, that, that thing that's widely discredited, we're going to be doing that. Uh, and because we're, we're employed by the business improvement Improvement District, which

is like, for those who don't know, a kind of shadow council for an area that is designated as needing business improvement. Yeah, it's like, what if we just gave, like, sort of control of your area to, like, the Chamber of Commerce, essentially? Exactly. And then those organizations, they will hire my local Bobby. When you think about it, the Hanseatic League was kind of a business improvement district. Yeah. So they say, our journey begins in the Stradbroke Drive area of Chigwell in Essex, where our

first beat laid the foundation for a future operation. By working closely with local stakeholders, we successfully transformed the neighborhood into a safer place. What do you think that could possibly mean? Probably shooing various teens out of public spaces. By working closely with local crotchety old business owners and daisy enthusiasts, we've successfully shooed Dennis the Menace out of Stradbook Drive. Since those early days in Chigwell, my local Bobby has grown organically into a full-service security company. We manage

18 residential beats, 13 public realm beats, and a variety of guarding assignments for prestigious clients, including McDonald's, Pandora, Dunham, Arc'teryx, Aspenall, Salt, and the Bank of Egypt. Our team has expanded to include over 100 fully SIA qualified Bobbies. Basically, most of them are like ex-cops, eight detectives on our prolific crimes team and a dedicated operations team. I have some thoughts about the prolific crimes team. Well, in the first two years of their operations, the prolific crimes team achieved 7,644 offenders detained, half a million pounds of stock recovered,

10,000 intelligence support shared and 48 successful prosecutions. That's mercifully, I guess, not a lot. It strikes me like it's still like too many private prosecutions. As we've seen with the post office, right? Any kind of private prosecution is just like the injustice factory. So let's just pause here for a second. And I think it's worth explaining, especially to American listeners, what is a private prosecution? This is a slightly deranged aspect of British criminal law.

So normally what would happen is if you were arrested for a crime by the police, then it goes to the Crown Prosecution Service, which is part of the government, that a prosecutor will decide whether or not there's enough evidence to charge you with it. If they do, then you go to trial. Sometimes, either on a statutory basis for organizations like Royal Mail had, or sometimes by applying for it individually, just anybody can bring a criminal prosecution. And so clearly that's what they're doing here, is they're applying for a private prosecution for, I guess, shoplifting or whatever. Yeah. So the prolific crimes team mostly deals with shoplifting, which we also know to be like

a huge moral panic that when pressed on, right, retailers admit, oh yeah, this is actually, it's at sort of normal levels. Yeah. But essentially what this means is that you can sidestep the whole criminal justice system and you have a kind of like parallel prosecutorial authority, which is profoundly sinister. You can sidestep the criminal justice system. If you are like the business improvement district, me as the kind of Hanseatic league that has like an Arc'teryx store in it. Like I can, I can say, right, these fucking lands next

can like arrest you and like prosecute you for shoplifting. It's essentially yes. Right. And that it's a, this is like, they're very like sort of like flowery cod pieces are allowed to like ban you from from Arc'teryx. You shoplifted your last windbreaker. Yeah. That's the last thing you hear before this vihander chops you. Yeah. So I don't think we should let these guys have like flamburgers, you know? I think it's, it's, it's a real shame that we've allowed pike and shot to proliferate. Yeah. I accidentally scan like a one item when I'm buying two, I leave the store and beheaded instantly by a whole board.

And look, it's the, they wear Hawberks. So they look like the King's men at art. Yeah. I mean, functionally, these kind of are Condottieri, right? They kind of are like Lanznachter. There is a sort of like a non-public use of force going on here, which I think we should be tremendously disturbed by. Sorry. Last one.

As I scan a bottle of ketchup as onions at Tesco, I turn around and I'm facedown with a tercio. I mean, everything, everything about these guys, whether it's the Bobby's thing or the beats thing, or the fact that they look like police officers, they look like cops. Every, every security guard in the country is trying to do this and trying to get as close to the line as possible. And I think this is one of the things, I have a specific beef about something they claim to be doing that we'll get to in due course. But every aspect of what they already do is something that a state that wanted to preserve its monopoly on the legitimate use of force more carefully would already have cracked down on.

Whether that's like, oh, the cars have like Battenberg markings on them, or they have flashing lights, or they wear like a uniform that looks quite a lot like a palette swapped evil police uniform, or they carry handcuffs, right? All of this stuff, which is all stuff they're already doing, is stuff that at some point, a government that was serious about public safety would be like, no, of course you can't fucking do that because people are going to think you work for us. Yeah. Well, it's the, it's basically what they're offering is a universal basic post office

scandal with some conditieri that are less likely if they like stop working for my local Bobby to try to take over running the city directly than like Francisco's Forza. Yeah. I should also say that this is owned by and kind of a subsidiary of a like sort of private investigations firm, which as we know have never been involved in like anything sinister obviously like ex coppers doing like, you know, private detective work has never led to any scandals in public life. You know, let me just look at my PDF files here.

No, but so basically, hold on a second. I think I have a voicemail I need to get into. So, the other thing, right, is they're officers. They call them officers. They just call them officers. Use laws which allow anyone to make an arrest if a crime is happening or has happened, and use reasonable force to secure the perpetrator. Yeah, well, this is the same for anyone, right? Like, security guard is not in any way a, like, meaningful title in terms of your ability to detain someone, right? You're just making a citizen's arrest, which like any of us could do if we wanted to, right? We could decide to become volunteer border guards, right? We could, if we saw that like a crime in terms of like theft or

like violence was happening or about to happen, we could use reasonable force to like detain someone, right? And that's the sort of statutory basis for all of this. But also, just crucially, not just any crime, it has to be a crime of like either theft or harm against the person. So it couldn't be like drug dealing, for example. You can't make a citizen's arrest in that case. But they don't get like super clear about that. They seem to want you to think that they can. One of these narratives has them confronting a shoplifter

and saying, I am arresting you on suspicion of shoplifting, which might be technically legally true, but the form of words there, I would argue, is perilously close to impersonating a police officer. We're not saying it's impersonating a police officer, but it looks quite a bit like what a police officer would say. So their prolific crimes team offers covert patrols in plain clothes to identify offenders, to manage persons detained for shoplifting and gather evidence, obtaining witness statements,

evidence gathering by way of body worn cameras. We're building towards the one that made me like lose my shit entirely. It says pace compliant, which interviews of suspects under caution, which is basically for Americans, you have the right to remain silent. It's that, basically. Yeah, so you can't do that, right? And if they have been doing that, I would suggest that there probably should be serious legal consequences.

Yeah, because isn't that technically like taking a prisoner? Yeah, well it's not so much that, it's like it has no legal force, right? You can't interview someone under caution in a way that you claim is like, PACE, by the way, is the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. You can't claim I'm interviewing you under caution and this caution has any legal force when the caution on a statutory basis is a police officer can do this. You're just saying the words, right? And if you're saying the

words to someone in order to question them and receive answers that might incriminate them, tell me how that isn't like itself, like impersonating a police officer, right? Like if you're using the words, you do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense, etc, etc. Right? To someone that you have detained, you're clearly trying to make them think that they're being interviewed under caution. You're claiming that you're interviewing them under caution, and you're not. You're just talking to them. Like, it's on the face of it to me, this seems catastrophically, like stratospherically illegal. And I know the security industry authority, which is meant to be regulating, like, both their employees and them, is a really toothless regulator. But this really seems like something that needs to be investigated either by journalists or by the SIA or by the police, because this seems like really to be crossing a line to me,

if that's something that they are in fact doing. Can I tell you, some journalists did investigate it and I've got some of their writing in from the hard-hitting Daily Mirror. Wow, okay. It says, a man wearing bulky clothes darts out of M&S, I've got some of their writing in from the hard-hitting Daily Mirror. Wow, okay. It says, a man wearing bulky clothes darts out of M&S, triggering the alarm. Hot on his heels are Sean Carrigan and his colleague Ant, wearing casual clothes to blend in with the shoppers.

We are arresting you on suspicion of shoplifting, Sean tells him, brandishing handcuffs. They march the suspect back to M&S, where astonishingly, he unzips his coat to reveal four jackets, blah, blah, blah. This is a straightforward shoplifting with no additional offenses, Sean tells us, once he's taken the 42-year-old suspect's details. The value of the item is over 200 pounds. The M&S might want us to prosecute, and they'll give him a lifetime ban from their stores.

Sean might seem like a police officer, but he works for a private company whose team's patrol town centers. Yes, he might. Might and T. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He might seem like that. Anyway, then it says, we joined a TMI patrol

after TMI is the parent company, after economic think tank onward. Last month, urge ministers to recruit 19,000 more police officers to restore community policing. So it's like, we went on a PR tour with the people who are trying to privatize that particular function of the state. We went on a ride along with the land. You can't go on a ride along with just some guy. On the onward thing Tangies of a Sebastian Payne thing, right? Yeah.

No, that's a Will Tanner, different one. Anytime they try and do anything like, for instance, the handcuffs, right? Like there's no like statutory basis for that. It's something like theoretically, if you wanted to, you could handcuff someone, your citizens arresting, if it was reasonable force, which this even this may not be. Right? Like it just the mention of PACE as well. It's like it's not it doesn't stand for like the some dickheads and criminal evidence act, you know, like and functionally that's what these are. I think in some ways it's it's a good thing that there isn't like a sort of statutory basis for

security guarding being a distinct activity you still have all of the like Responsibilities of just anyone right and it really seems like they're trying to push the envelope here And I think that's something that the security industry is always trying to do But I think this is like like I said, I think it's unusually forward right and I think it's something that really needs to be like curtailed. We really, they really want to do volunteer pedophile rings. This is really where it goes. It is just like, we're going to set up militias all across the country that are all going to be voluntary pedophile rings. Just like falsely accusing, falsely accusing a guy who has like four Arc'teryx jackets of being a pedophile. Well, no, I actually made a mistake because I was supposed to say voluntary pedophile

hunters, but I actually said voluntary pedophile rings. Yeah. That's way worse. So that's way worse. Number two, it brings up a lot of complications. Number one, it's like, you think, if you want to think about science fiction, right? I think a good example of science fiction to think about is like cyberpunk 2077. You know, what is this, where is like, this is the story of like trauma team of corporate security guards having the power of life and death and that being sort of fine. What's the first step to that? It's this. You want to talk about police abolition. This is right wing police

abolition. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I agree completely, right? And I think this is the one of the things that's troubling about this is that they're using the kind of like semiotics of public policing, right, as a kind of liberal institution, whether that's like the uniform, or like the the cars or the name Bobbies or Beats or whatever, to conceal like functionally trying to supplant it. And I think the thing that I always kind of worry about with with police abolition is that you may get it but not in the form that you want, right? I think the the thing that I always kind of worry about with police abolition is that you may get it, but not in the form that you want, right? I think the thing that's more likely to occur is this, right? Is that you don't have like even the sort of pretense of a like sort of non-partisan

public service anymore, because instead it's just like, you know, the Glades has a SWAT team. That mall in Orpington has like a mortar setup. Yeah, I joined the Glades mortar platoon. I'm part of the Westfield 22nd Airborne Division. But like the article says, they just go, they repeat the press release. It's journalistically terrifyingly bad. This is the thing, you don't even have to be a cop to get the like cop bootlicking article,

you just have to seem a bit like one, you know? I think it articulates something that what these people are interested in as journalists is like the appearance of strength, right? Says, well at first the powers that be were concerned that a private company was walking around carrying handcuffs and actively detaining shoplifters. That's the job of the police, they said, and we said it is, but it's not being done. So we'll step in." Sean, it was a backward insecurity stresses, we're not vigilantes.

We're not trying to replace the police. We have a great relationship with them in the CPS. Police want to arrest shoplifters, but their system means... I would consider these relationships that they're attempting to be a form of infiltration, to be clear. I have a great relationship with this ant's brainstem. Yeah. Their most significant contracts appear to be with like business improvement districts, right? It's like Vauxhall One, the BID for Vauxhall. They say, we have long been at the

forefront of initiatives aimed at improving the area's business landscape. Our collaboration with My Local Bobby is a natural extension of their mission to foster a thriving and secure business environment. A key component of the initiative is community engagement. My local Bobby Vauxhall won in the Safer Business Network." God, Safer Business Network is a chilling name for something, right? I've just been garrotted and dropped in the river by the Safer Business Network. "...will collaborate on various initiatives aimed at educating the business community about safety practices, including coffee mornings, engagements, and regular updates on local security issues." Yeah, so they're doing like community policing stuff as well, right?

And they're not wrong when they say that the Met doesn't have the resources to do this anymore, but they're not, it's all kind of crocodile tears, right? It's not regretful that like, you know, austerity has led to this because they're clearly, you know, able to make a great deal of money off of it. But I think it also like, it reminds me a lot of, obviously in the context of the riots, but the thing that Douglas Murray got in trouble for a couple of weeks ago, or not in trouble for because he actually faced no consequences, but some mild criticism where he basically justifies and gives cover at the very least for the rioters, where he says,

well, if the police and the British institutions don't sort out the problem, and he he believes this very vague, then like, you know, it's going to be up to the public to do that. And obviously like the impression was like, oh, like he's kind of condoning the riots, which like we can't technically say whether that's kind of true or not. But this sort of feels like a more, more kind of realistic actualization of what that actually means. Right. The line where the justification that this volunteer police give to the reporter being

like, well, if the police aren't doing their job and we have to step in. Obviously, the end point of that, well, there's not really an end point of that because you can just always say that, well, the police aren't doing enough because they're not acting as swiftly as the public expect them to. And there's no system of accountability either because again, it's like a private police thing. But anyway, the point is being that this, but like this sort of feels like a better actualization of the type of police or the type of like action that people with very, let's say kind

of like fascist adjacent sympathies have. I'm trying to be very careful here, but like, how about this? You want to see two tier policing? Here it is. Right. I'm trying to be very careful here, but like, yeah. How about this? How about this? You want to see two tier policing? Here it is. Right. Here it is. If you're a business improvement district, then you get a police force.

You just get your own private, like cop. Yeah, you get one. And you know who's not going to have to like consider whether or not like someone is actually breaking the law if they're like just holding up a sign that says like, you know, free Palestine in the business improvement district, a security guard. Yeah. And this is the other thing is that like all of this is pitched at the level of like this is what we think we can get away with. Right. And if you want to introduce that acknowledgement of like, well, we don't think that police are like, you know, turning

up and doing, doing anything, then the potential there is for that to like slip into any number of other things that may be fully extra-legal. And I think that's always going to be a risk with any private security company. If you don't trust the police not to commit misconduct, why would you trust a private company anymore? In fact, I think you should trust them far less. And just in general, I find this all profoundly sinister. And it's something that, like, I think the other sort of outcome of that judgement that, like, oh, well, the police don't care, right? Is that they're not going to investigate whether or not misconduct is happening, whether or not these uses of force

or whatever are justified or reasonable, unless someone actually directs them to do it. And I think that's something that should be done, right? Well, I think we can say, my local Bobby, a chilling portent of things to come on a beat near you. Christ, I hope not, yeah. However, I think it's high time for us to go into our second segment, where we're going to talk to Nora and Resteen,

all about AI and animation. See you there. Hello everybody. Thank you for coming back from part one to meet us here in part two. It's weird that we're doing an intermission now, but I hope you're all, you know, back from the lobby refreshed and everything. Have one of those little ice creams and those small parts. Yeah. Yeah.

Hey, you know what? Maybe get a little sweet and salty popcorn because we are here talking with two IATSE members, two YATSE world champions. It is Rustin Hohnerdust and Nora Meek, respectively an animation writer and storyboard artist and writer, to talk about how organized animation workers are resisting the studio's attempts and big companies' attempts in general, like Netflix, etc., to kind of foist AI on them and everyone else. What that actually means for the industry and how they're fighting

back. So, Rustin and Nora, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming and speaking to us today. Hi. Hello. Hello. So things aren't good, right? To start off with, right? No. Entertainment is sort of just squeezing everyone at the moment. And that has been coming around the bend since before the onset of AI, for sure. They're trying to figure out what's the minimum amount of content that we have to make in

order to justify people signing up for our streaming services, and they're gonna try to figure out if they can get by with zero, I think. The minimum viable Netflix, where it's just sort of a vibe that you have in your house that you pay, like, you know, $20 a month for. You need an excuse to start a Netflix and chill. So they're hoping that I'll get that. You just turn it on and it's like a 1960s Hanna Barbera cartoon. It's just a stationary background. But before we get into the actual discussions here, I was very skeptical of what AI could do when it does get an leashed animation.

But then I watched the, I, my mind was changed when I finally saw the trailer for the cartoon Space Vets, which was produced by German streamer Pantaflix as wholly owned subsidiary Storybook Studios, which is a studio based entirely on generating shows of AI, which is itself a wholly owned subsidiary of a German company called Black Mars Capital. You can't be calling a company that anywhere, I think, without me raising an eyebrow. Germany! It's giving wholesome. It's giving family friendly.

Yeah, I really like it. We love to do wholesome family friendly entertainment under the auspices of the Black Mars Corporation. Yeah, I love to see the prequel to the prequel to the prequel to Call of Duty Infinite Warfare. Yeah, we're gonna find out where Ghost got that cool mask, you know? So I sent around the trailer to Space Vets, an entirely AI generated show about vets in space, after seeing a press release because honestly subscribe to like PR Newswire keyword AI the fucking gut busters keep rolling in and we see again like as animators how would you describe like this newest attempt to do your job entirely by asking the computer to do

it? I mean it go ahead I mean you see this stuff and everything is just so like herky jerky and like none of the characters seem capable of like expressing a single emotion. It's a little depressing that somebody would think this is good enough to share with the world, let alone be worth millions and billions of dollars. Yeah, I would say it's acceptable for like, diegetic background, generic, like a show that characters on like a live-action show would be watching in the background of some kind of like show, but I wouldn't actually put a human being in front of it. If I was writing a story about an actor who has really fallen to the depths of their career, I would have them be involved in a show that looks like this.

That's the sort of act one, establishing the stakes for like the sequel to that Nicolas Cage movie where it's like, I'm voicing the space vets. The vet in space vets. But that's just a brief note, right? But can you just give us a brief outline of exactly what's going on with the IATSE negotiations and how specifically studios are trying to use AI as a kind of threat to the workers and a sort of false promise to people who like actually watch animation?

Yeah. I mean, it sort of starts out with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. They went on strike for a lot of things, including protections around AI. And when IATSE went up to bat, they have these 13 Hollywood locals that don't include our local anymore. And they went to bat for a lot of things, including safety on set and better working hours and being able to patch a big hole in our health and pension. And so AI wasn't chief among those worries, but for a lot of, I would say, minority groups of crafts in IATSE, they kind of got the short end of the stick on that kind of lack of focus on AI. And now Local 839, which is the animation guild, is up to bat. And we are full of creatives and artists and people who would be directly impacted by AI,

and that is sort of our chief concern in negotiations right now. So we're really lucky that we are able to negotiate our own contract with the big studios, the AMPTP, and that's one of our members' biggest concerns right now. Because it seems like the working conditions aren't great for all the reasons you identify, but this is the kind of existential threat to your jobs, right? What we've seen are various CEOs and executives at the animation studios very much touting what the future of AI in animation can accomplish Whether or not that is a true statement of what it can accomplish is up for debate but the intention of definitely trying to scare people and also fundraise is Obvious with so many things, right? It's like the, it almost doesn't matter if the AI can

do the job better. It certainly doesn't matter to them. Like it doesn't matter to the people who made space vets, right? Because it looks terrible, but it's like, it's not something that they care about, right? Well, it's, I'd say it's what it doesn't matter. Even if it is, even if it's not capable of doing the bare minimum replacement task. What it is, and this is again helped by all of the people who like to hype up its quality and who like to hype up that, oh, it's so great, it's going to kill us all.

Awesome. All of that is to massively talk up the powers of this thing. And then you can use that as a negotiating tool. If you're capital, if you're the studios to say, hey, we've got this thing that can replace you for free. So you have to accept worse working conditions. And I often wonder, you sort of touched on this, Rustin, is like, is this just... This seems to me like it's actually a kind of a hoodwink, right? Being perpetrated on the unions by the studios. Or not being perpetrated on everybody by the

studios, excuse me. Yeah. I mean, everything that they're talking about, like, you know, even Space Vets, yes, that's real, but everything else is still very much theoretical. Jeffrey Katzenberg, former, you know, CEO of DreamWorks is one of these big guys, but he also thought we would all be watching Quibi and that Joe Biden would be president, so I don't know how much I trust, like, what he actually predicts the future is gonna be. all be watching Quibi and that Joe Biden would be president, so I don't know how much I trust what he actually predicts the future is going to be. He didn't enjoy 50 states of fright?

Like, all those great Quibi originals? I don't think I can remember. He didn't enjoy Murder House Flip, another Quibi original. All I remember is the golden arm and how I wish I had an old golden arm. So this is, in fact, I have the quote here. Jeffrey Katzenberg said AI could probably eliminate 90% of jobs saying in the good old days when I made an animated movie, it took 500 artists five years to make a world class film. I think it won't take 10% of that. Literally, I don't think it will take 10% of that three years from now.

So when Katzenberg is talking about making a world-class film, most probably I'd imagine he's talking about like Toy Story or something similar. Right? Yeah. So what he says 500 artists, five years, what he's talking about presumably, and I sort of defer to you two on this, he's talking about drawing the cells or even like using computers to create the assets and move them around, right? Yeah, exactly. The actual animation process of, you know, creating every frame of movement is very time consuming, especially in 2D animation. And so that is a part of what Katzenberg is talking about there. And you can wonder, like, what does he mean when he says 10% of those people, Is that some of those people might be like, in his vision, some of those people might

be like prompt engineers and their whole job is just, I write prompts for the computer to say, please give me Shrek, but like fighting Iron Man or whatever. And then like 45 other people whose job is to say, okay, well, Iron Man has three heads, so I guess I have to like, try and redraw this. And then I'm getting... This has produced some kind of like unfathomable horror from beyond the void. It's like injuring my brain to look at. I'm just gonna like, kind of draw over this and then we're gonna like show it to kids.

We've accidentally summoned a great old one. Yeah, all you need after that is to pay for some like office therapy or like a counselor service and then you know, you've got it, right? That's the new pipeline. And that's the fun aspect of it, right? There's this sort of like lie that's sold where AI is kind of touted as just another technological innovation that's going to help automate a lot of processes and make lives for creatives so much better. And that is the ultimate reversal of AI. I

mean, it's true that no technological innovation has taken work away from workers and given them more time and money instead. But these technologies of the past, they were replacements for hours of labor, but this is actually a replacement for creativity. We're not looking at tools that do problem solving. Like, how can I make this move in a way that's believable? How can I simplify this character so it's easier for me to animate? None of those problems have ever been, well, how can I make something that is educational and thinking and feeling and fun to watch? But AI now says, I'm going to solve that problem. I don't give a shit about your other problems that you care about, animation workers.

I'm going to solve the whole problem where you have to be there and be creative and give your heart to this animated program for children to watch. We're going to solve the problem of you needing to continue to be alive by suggesting that you cease to be alive, essentially. You can save a lot of money on your grocery bill if you're not eating. It's the same logic. Sure.

That's a real loading screen tip. What does loading for life save money on groceries? No, but we speak a lot about AI and the drive to replace the creative industries with AI on this show. And one of the things I always come back to is that what makes these good products, let alone good things to work on, is that fundamentally the creative industries are communicative. It is the process of either the animators communicating with one another, the director communicating with the viewer through the art, the animators also communicating with the viewer through the art.

I have an idea of how to draw this character so that they will be simpler or more evocative or whatever. You always remember, all AI can ever do is approximate how someone else did it in the past. All it can ever do is say, okay, well it's very good at making sort of Shrek and Iron Man, you know, kidnap Spider-Man. It's sort of, except it's always going to fold in like unexpected and wrong details and like all of these models have all inevitably been trained on like stuff, a pretty like horrifying body of stuff that's all been like, you know, stolen and abstracted and harvested from everywhere else. So, like, aside from the sort of various, like, intellectual prophecy implications of that, I think the implications of, like, you ask it to draw, like, you know, Shrek fighting Iron Man, and it draws Shrek fighting Iron Man in a way

that sends you to the therapist, you know? Man, I was traumatized by, you know, a realistic moon appearing on Courage the Cowardly Dog. I can't imagine what kids are looking at now. I feel like the PTSD is just kind of coming down the line. I've seen quite a lot of it because I hang out with my kids, by which I mean my nephews. It's not a weird thing. I just want to clarify. Just recreationally hanging out with some kids. Whose kids? Don't worry about it. kids, by which I mean my nephews, it's not a weird thing. I just want to clarify. Just recreationally hanging out with some kids.

Whose kids? Don't worry about it. Yeah, I recreationally hang out with my nephews and I watch cartoons with them. But like, I don't know whether you guys remember that there was this really wonderful, bizarre like Mark O'Connell story where he wrote about like those YouTube streams and like those kind of weird 3D rendered stuff. Yeah. Where like. Oh, Finger 3D rendered stuff. Yeah. Where like,

Oh, Finger Family and all that. Yeah. And it would sort of begin as like normal, that, you know, it would look like, well, it would look like Shrek fighting Spider-Man, these really bizarre things, but because they could basically be created by anyone, like you just kept getting weirder and weirder stuff and like some of that stuff ended up being like very, you know, inappropriate for children to watch. But beyond all that, it was just like, no, this is

just kind of, none of it makes any sense. And it's like, none of it's coherent, but it all just happens at like a faster and faster and faster pace. And like when I hear about some of the, what animation studios and industries are trying to do, and even like beyond all this, because like the YouTube stuff is kind of weird, but if you look at like some of the stuff where AI is definitely being used, or at least like automated processes are being used in like the production of cartoons at like a very fast rate, like you can find a lot of that on like Netflix kits, right? You can find a lot of it, especially in like the South Korean cartoons that are being made. And it always seems to kind of, it's all really fast. It's all really kind of like smoothly rendered.

Again, like there is sort of a lack of real coherence, but the speed sort of seems to be the driving factor. And like, to me, it kind of feels as if like what you're sort of doing is creating like perpetual, it feels like background music, but it's not really, it feels like perpetual sort of like background animation that is sort of designed to like just keep your child or keep a child like sort of occupied by, you know, infinite amount of color and sound and like that can't be helpful either. I genuinely think it might be less dangerous to raise a kid on like live league videos. I, I, I like, I absolutely, I genuinely like agree with that because like, and again, it's

like a theory that's very much in development and kind of, I think about it a lot in relation to like, like about being about to become a parent. But it is very much just like this stuff can't be good for you. And like the idea of that kind of formal animation studios are kind of seeing AI and seeing this AI technology as like a useful way of kind of perpetually making this type of incoherent content, which is just designed to sort of sedate children effectively. Like that to me feels, I think it's like, I was thinking about what you were saying about like how all the sort of the way that these AI tools are sold are like, oh, this is going to be able to enhance your creativity. It's going to make, it's going

to be like creators are going to find it really useful at like automating processes they find boring and kind of focusing on the stuff is interesting. But it's like, well, if that's the case, like why is everything just like, why, why does everything sort of get towards just like the speed, like the fast production of everything and the production has to be faster and faster and faster. You can flood the market with it. And that's kind of the workflow that I imagined the studio heads want, right? Exactly. You work on like, you don't work on like one show, you work on like a hundred shows, you spend 10 minutes on them each.

And then it doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter because it's children's stuff, right? Like so much of his children's, I'm sorry to go into rant about this, but yeah. That's the big, that's the big threat in, in that's unique to animation, right? I talked to a lot of, you know, people in the business as we call it call it, by which I mean rubber tire manufacturing. I mean the industry of motion picture. And people go, well, AI can't make anything that I would want to watch.

I would simply not watch it. I am a cinematographer. But the thing is, for animation in particular, and children's content, we don't have the luxury of having clients or consumers that are very appreciative of the human element of storytelling, right? ALICE It's really like, sort of, critic brain six-year-old being like, this is reductive, you know?

I really need people to start, you know, putting the headphones around their pregnant bellies and making them listen to like, YouTube essayists and video critiques. But until that happens, you know, we don't have a highly critical audience, and kids, parents think that they could change or monitor what their kids are watching in the best case scenario, right? In most scenarios, they don't really give a shit what their kids are watching. And kids' behavior online is just unpredictable in a way that algorithms have have accurately been able to capture. It also strikes me that if you're in the business of like making, you know, very very fancy like feature films for adults and you don't think that this stuff is going to

percolate upwards as the kids who have grown up with this infinite fire hose of slop aimed at their faces grow up and become consumers of adult movies and stuff, I think you're kind of kidding yourself, right? Yeah. What we're basically saying, November, is that you're predicting the rise not of the Disney adult, but of the slop adult? Yeah, absolutely. I think that-

The iPad babies are growing up and they will become adults sooner rather than later. And no one knows what's gonna happen to their brains. It's terrifying. If you think the Marvel and Disney adults are a problem, wait until you get the Super Wings adults. They're gonna be insufferable. The fucking Paw Patrol adults, man. If you think those are bad, the space vets adults, y'know? We're all gonna be old, and

the people taking care of us are gonna have been raised, if we're not, like, careful, if we don't, like, crush this now, on a diet exclusively of this shit. Which is just really a really grim thought, y'know, you'll be like, 80 years old and be like, oh, I remember when you could get, like, water out of a faucet in your home. And they'll be like, okay, let's, let's get you to bed. Let's get you to bed. If humanity is still around in 80 years, someone will say back in my day, we had skivvy toilet. We used to watch skivvy toilet. It was actual culture, not like this. Like opera was considered to be like low entertainment back in the, at the time. Like, you could be like,

Yeah, my grandma was really like, you know, she's into stuff like Bojack Horseman or whatever. It's really inaccessible. Yeah, I'm a finger family adult. Imagine sitting down for 11 minutes of your life and staying still. I can't fathom it. Yeah. Hey, I'm going to go on a date later. We're going to watch a whole quib. We're going

to try and marathon five quibs. But also what you said earlier about making them listen to YouTube essays in utero suggested to me that like a baby is born opens its mouth and its first word is just the cinema sins ding. That's all we need. We have to train our future, our future army of, of, uh, of film critics. Snobbs. Absolutely. Listen to kill James Bond if you're pregnant or wish to become pregnant. Uh, but

what I want to ask as well, and you know, you may not know, you may not be able to answer. Have you been asked to work with AI? I have not been asked to work with AI in any of my animation work. I did, I have heard talk of using AI in various studios, execs bringing it up as a possibility, execs bringing it up in pitches, look at all this great stuff we were able to generate. Doesn't this fill you with ideas of how to execute

on the idea, that kind of thing. But it hasn't come up, at least on my end as a writer. When I was working at Nickelodeon, we got this email sent out to us by the parent company, Paramount, and it was, guys, check it out. We've got some stuff to show you, some approved use cases. And I realized what the first threat to animation workers working on like broadcast and theatrical was. And it was having my work fed into a data set to be trained on. Paramount very clearly showed us that they were working on a means, I think they called it protecting their IP and also, you know, being able to, oh, there are a lot of buzzwords

around creativity and amplifying, you know, creativity of our workforce, right? But that just meant that they were using a program called Runway ML to train on their IP that they had already had. So they're feeding SpongeBob, Rugrats into these programs, and then ostensibly being able to call them copyright free, because that's our copyright. You know, this is trained on our safe IP, and we'll be able to generate things scot-free. No one will be able to sue us now. But of course, all of the money that comes from whatever is used, or generated, or made cheaper,

that's not going to come down to me who was writing on SpongeBob Universe shows and that kind of a thing. So it's taken from me before I've been asked to actually use it. I mean, this over and over again, right? What you're saying is essentially this is... You see it in terms of executives pushing it, executives love to talk about it. And then most of what they actually seem to do is they don't make anything with it. This is the story again and again and again and again that I see. I see it in press. I see it echoed with you guys. They don't make anything with it. They just take stuff with

it. They use it to try and create a kind of homunculus Nora that can, at the whim of an executive churn out, what if Spongebob went to college or whatever? What would that look like? And because what if Spongebob went to college? That's a network executive note. That's a studio executive note. Hey, why don't you do one where Spongebob goes to college? Because what they always say, and this is what they said, it seems like saying this press release of this email that you're talking about, Nora, right? Is, oh, we're going to amplify the creativity.

We're going to take away the boring bits. But it's like, no, that's the boring bits to the executives. The boring bit to the executive is having to wait to get someone to actually do the thing that they like, which is the thing. Oh my God, the C-suite are iPad kids too. Yeah. They're all, like we talk about like, you know, CEOs being basically like sociopaths, right?

Um, you know, and, and then being essentially like, I don't know, like less sentient. Like sociopaths with like higher attention spans, you know? I think, I think- No, no. You really hit the nail on the head that like the only people who see the creative process as or the animation process as boring are the executives because they see everything like an artist having to draw the pencil that Spongebob is going to use as something that's boring. They can't imagine a different, a way that a pencil could be funny,

you know? There's somebody whose entire job, they're an animation timer. And what they do is they take every frame of animation and time out exactly how long each frame is gonna be on screen for. And that can have a huge impact on how funny something is. You know, if you miss that timing by just like a couple of frames, you can kill a joke entirely. And that's like the number one use case

that they're always talking about AI for, right? Is handling that in between animation and the timing of the animation. So these people just genuinely don't understand what they're involved with. And I think they are trying to just churn out as, they wanna be able to churn out as much stuff as possible because they have no idea what's actually gonna hit.

They don't wanna tell Nora what to work on because they don't know, you know, maybe Nora's idea, maybe it won't get a billion views in the first episode, you know? But if we make 10 different shows, maybe one of those will hit. And that's, I think, what their end goal is. The goal, as always, right, is to remove the loop of another human between the network executive and the studio executive and the outcome of being able to say, oh, we've drawn a pencil in SpongeBob's hand. Now time it in such a way that it's funny.

That's the dream is to have that generate the output. But what's so clear to me, and this is whether you're looking at the executives of universities or education companies, whether you're looking at the executives of any creative industry, music labels, even fucking major engineering firms, people whose job is to manage people who have a vocation fucking hate what they're managing. It sounds like no, nobody hates creative industries more than the people who are trying to destroy every creative in the world. Just going to work as my job as an executive in the cartoon factory, sitting in my car

thinking, God, I fucking hate cartoons. How else would you explain it? Relentless incompetence. To be fair, as a writer, I can say writers are very annoying. So I do have a minor amount of sympathy there. I want to go sort of go back to like the industry and the task they're looking to push this on. Right?

I think we've alluded earlier to like that I've seen it written in press that if this battle isn't won, then this could be the last contract where the studios just say, okay, the job is now correcting the mistakes of AI. So you're all on piecework contracts now. We're going to pay you by the cell to take out Iron Man's third head, basically. Or we will pay you by the prompt that you can engineer, or we'll pay you by what you can submit to our big model for a piecework salary. Even if it doesn't work, they can fundamentally change the nature of the relationship of the studio and the animator. What do you think of that idea that if this isn't one, this could be the last contract?

I mean, if it isn't, then it will fundamentally change animation for all of time, right? Because you were alluding to this at the beginning, which is that maybe this can't replace truly these creatives in every meaningful way. But it will be enough of an excuse to remove enough people that our jobs become so, so, so much worse. And we kind of start seeing American animation and Western animation fall to kind of embody what we see animation now in other countries.

Japan has a very tenuous relationship with its workers in the animation sphere. And they're seeing a lot of early deaths and overwork because... And then, of course, there is a labor shortage now because people just don't see the point of entering the industry of animation over there. And we see that replicated a lot. So I mean, it might just mean that, right? Because I hear a lot of people say, you know, truly can't replace, you know, everyone. And even if that's true, it can be used as enough of an excuse. The most recent tech disruption that the industry had was the invention of the streaming services,

right? But now we are several years into that and the industry has figured out, oh, this doesn't really work. And now they're trying to rebuild what they had destroyed. And I think the real fear of AI is that they're going to use that to, again, quote unquote, disrupt the industry. And it's only going to result in destroying everything that has been here for like a century now. And then maybe in 10 years, they're going to realize, oh, this doesn't work. We need to go back to actual creative work. But then

it might be too far gone at that point. Industry disruption gives me PTSD. I hear that buzzword and I'm just like, God, how much disrupting do we need, please? And then this is why the CEOs really see themselves as the creatives, right? I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna disrupt everything and people are gonna give me money for all my disruption!

You can't just keep disrupting eternally until the end of time. It's all disruptions all the way down. ALICE It's just, it's really grim to imagine, like, Western animation, if you like, as a kind of lost technology and being like, you know, I showed my grandfather an animation sale of like, Bugs Bunny cross-dressing and asked how he would make it and it's like, we don't know how, we don't know how anymore. Like all the, the only rabbits we have left are just, are just the genders they were assigned at birth. We don't know how to cross them anymore.

It's a bunch of like fucked up AI rabbits, you know? Yeah. It's look, we can't, we can't cross-dress the rabbit, but we can give it three heads and have it fight Iron Man. Um, and look, look, the other thing, right. cross-dress the rabbit but we can give it three heads and have it fight Iron Man. The other thing, right, is that if you want to look at what a lost art is, all you have to do is ask how many trains are built in the UK where it was basically decided that it no longer makes sense for us to have a rail industry. This is fully something that can happen, right? So, if we're concerned about this not happening, which I think we should

be, what do about this? What can be done? Laura? You can write your local congressperson, I do believe. I'm gonna write my local congressperson and be like, I want American security and dominance in the sector of cross-dressing anthropomorphic rabbits to remain strong well into the next century. We must not allow the Chinese to develop a rabbit. It's America's greatest invention.

I kind of believe what's on the list, you know, like we got to look, it's really important that the, that the human height cross-dressing rabbit is from like 1930s New Jersey. It's super crucial. Sorry, please. So as you were, right, we can, there's political pressure that can be like heaped on to mostly like probably California Democrats to support. Yeah, right now in California, AB 1836 and AB 2602, preventing the use of a deceased person's voice and prohibiting AI replica contracts that don't state intended uses are two on the bill, right? Two on the docket that you can call your state senator and express your support for right now because it's a two-pronged fight,

right? We're fighting from the governmental regulatory sense and then also from the sense of the workers too. And that is to stay behind the workers is to keep your eyes on the contract negotiations coming up and give them all of your support because really, ultimately at the end of the day, companies don't want you to believe it anymore, but your dollar actually does matter and people at the helm of these companies do actually care whether or not people are buying into their subscriptions and all of that and making it clear that this is not something that you want and you want,

you know, actual, real creative work done by real creatives. ALICE What's that thing? I want fewer cartoons made by people who are like working less hard and treated better, right? MIA Yeah, and I want them to look like shit, and I'll like it! ALICE I mean, yeah, kind of. MIGUEL The solution that comes to my mind is that we can never let Miyazaki retire. We have to get him to be, we need to get Studio Ghibli to be operating at the same level as AI.

We need like the Ghibli stuff, but we need it fast and we need it now. Hussain, are you suggesting like that the American government requisition Studio Ghibli and then use the Defense Production Act to like, you know, just force the production of high quality hand drawn animation at the rate of like battleships in 1942. That's right. Which is, which is effectively kind of what Japan has right now, because I think there's like an interesting case of them because obviously like the manga, like the anime industry is like so kind of, it's like supported by the government and everything. And like, um, there's been a real pushback against AI because like it basically can offer, it could upend this like

industry that has been kind of fortified. But one of the solutions that, or one of the things that like the anime artists are trying to like push back on is like, well, we can't just keep producing at the rate that we're sort of currently expected to. And so they kind of want AI to come in just to make their lives easier. And so that like they're not dying as much. All I wish is to say that like perhaps the Americans need to imitate the Japanese model and get animators and like be kind of like massively supporting hand-drawn animation. And I'm kind of half joking about that, but I'm also not. I don't know.

Unfortunately, the Japanese anime industry is a very tough place to work. I mean, yes, as Nora was saying before, like there is partly a labor shortage there just because people are seeing that it's not worth the physical toll it takes on you. Exactly. It's why there's a labor shortage of teachers, thinking about just like other non-creative industries in the UK. Exactly. It's why there's a labor shortage of teachers in the UK.

But this is, I was sort of half joking, but it does kind of highlight the thing, which is the broader issue being like the kind of the use case for AI among lots of kind of people in the creative and or in sort of industry people who run kind of creative industries is we just need more stuff. Like it is, it is the only way to kind of keep producing more and more and more and more stuff because the flip side of that logic is like, well, if you get want to get humans to keep on producing more and more and more stuff, like that's going to take like a physical toll on them. It's going to take a mental toll on them. It's not sustainable for any industry. Like you can't, you know, I, I'm, I'm, I, my position is degrowth, but for animat, but for animated products. Yeah, I'm absolutely. The

truth is we don't need more animation though is the problem because kids love watching the same shit over and over again. Right. You don't need. That's the thing that's kind of the most annoying about this is if you made one really good movie, like, you know, Incanto is being watched like way more than anything else on Disney Plus every single day. Why not just let the people who make Incanto spend their time and make something that's great, and you will have something that will literally live forever rather than a piece of AI trash that nobody is going to watch. I totally agree. And I think that's sort of where the problem is, is like the demand for like more and more stuff. And I think this applies to like the sort of implementation

of AI across the board is like, it can't go in any other way. Like, yeah, there needs to be less. That's my position. There needs to be fewer things. Just big handshake thing between person who loves animation, person who hates animation, there needs to be less animation. Look, Nora, Rustine, I think that's about all the time we have for today, but I want to thank you two so much for taking time out of your schedules to come and talk to us about what's going on animation. It's been a real delight.

Thanks for having us. I'm glad we came to the conclusion we did. Less animation, faster. I'm looking forward to our futures. And also, don't forget, this is a free episode. There will be a premium episode in a couple short days that you also can listen to for five of your American dollars every month. So do check that out. There's also going to be a new Left on Red coming down the pipe and the $10 tier November. And I are going to do like one. We said, we said we were going to do something that wasn't Aubrey Matron. We weren't entirely telling

the truth. We're going to do something that's all events have developed, not necessarily to other books as advantage. I'm like Bill Clinton, like ask, I said, I wasn't going to do another Aubrey Matron book. Please define Duke. Yeah. But we like Bill Clinton, like ask, I said I wasn't going to do another Aubrey Matron book. Please define Duke. Yeah, but we are, we are going to do one more Aubrey Matron book. Then we're going to do I am son of the century. You want us to talk about the sailing ships. You know, deep down that what you want is Riley November to talk about the big ships.

So that's what we're going to do. And I think other than that, we are going to see you all a few days on the bonus episode. So once again, thank you to Rusty and Nora. Thank you to you, our listeners. Thank you to my co-hosts. And we'll see you later. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

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