TRASHFUTURE - Your Own Personal Biden ft. Jason Koebler

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

404 Media’s Jason Koebler returns to discuss AI in the classroom, Balaji’s private island/supervillain lair, and the growing deluge of AI generated slop by US political campaigns. Not so much in the form of deepfakes or Midjourney memes on social media, but rather by making a larger tidal wave of more personalised spam. Also, we discuss a hot new startup that’s ruffling a lot of feathers on K Street in Washington using artificial intelligence, and (more importantly) artificial names. Check out 404 Media here! https://www.404media.co/ 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 UK Tour Here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I was told it was my birthday and that we were going to party like it was my birthday, but everyone in cabinet... I thought it was Cipricardi like it's my birthday. That would be inappropriate in the workplace. But everyone in cabinet forgot it was my birthday and now I've told the ministers I like who are cool not to come to government today. It wouldn't have been appropriate to celebrate my birthday when it's not everyone's birthday. Every day it is someone's birthday and if we were constantly taking a day off for frivolity

every day, nothing would get done. It's a waste of money on candles and cake. It's a fire hazard. It can't be allowed. Unexpected stoma coming out as a Jehovah's Witness moment. Also, I hate blood transfusions. We will be canceling blood transfusions from the NHS, but primarily for budgetary reasons. The accidental Jehovah's Witness where you cut your way there.

Hi everybody. It's TF. We did accidental dueling starvers. The accidental Jehovah's Witness being put into Jehovah's Witness protections. Okay. Here we go. Like down at the other end of the country, not celebrating a birthday. Hidden in plain sight, going around knocking on people's doors, trying to convert them

to be Jehovah's Witness. The mob won't let you in. They'll never know that it's you. They'll be afraid of you knocking on their door. It's genius. Hi everybody. It's TF. Yes, we've started with with dueling Starmers. Of course, I couldn't let

the news that it was Keir Starmers birthday and nobody in cabinet wished him a happy birthday and then it was leaked to the press that that happened. Who leaked that? Him! Of course it was him! To make himself sound serious. Yeah, or to just try to get revenge. Jeremy Corbyn leaked it to the press. He called Hugo Guy.

Hugo Guy also great. We also have, we have a guest today. We have returning champion. It is Jason Keebler from 404 Media, who's going to be talking to us about the deluge of election related AI slop, both coming from parties and supportive candidates and so on. It seems to be, if not changing the face of politics, then at least giving it six fingers. Jason, how's it going? Good, good. Thanks for having me back. Second time, long time.

Yeah, you're now in the TF lounge. I said giving a face six fingers, I'm aware I mix my metaphors. And something that the AI would do, to be fair. It is. That's right. And we are going to do a little bit more probably on British specific stuff on Thursday when we will be joined by Gareth Dennis to whom nothing significant has happened recently I take it. Yep, there's definitely not any news. He isn't like, you know, kind of the fulcrum of any

kind of scandal of any kind. No, no, goodness. No, no, no, no, nothing like that. We're going to have a totally normal conversation about the trains. Jason's here. We're gonna be talking all about a few different sort of AI news items, one tech news item that's really tickled me recently, and then get into the slop title wave. No, I'm gonna say sorry. It's 99% slop, 1% Trump and Kamala Harris singing duets in Mandarin. And 100% reason to remember the name. Yeah. All of it's terrible, except for that, which I think gives us all hope that humanity can

be united in the future. The position I've staked out before. AI can never be good, but it can be funny. That's right. Wait, no, I mean, that's just, that happened. They did sing that duet in Mandarin, I'm pretty sure. Oh, okay. No, the AI just touched it up.

Yeah. It wasn't quite as good as when Donald Trump played the Gibson SG for the whole arena for the people. That was also pretty cool. But I want to open us on a little bit of news. Course. Good news? Uh, possibly. Okay. Depends on how you interpret it. One of the things that's happening in Britain right now is we are undergoing, of course, if you read the Tony Blair Institute, which I do, we are undergoing a technological revolution. I got it delivered to my house. Yeah.

We are where, of course, we are trying to revolutionize education and one private school, the David Game College in London. The David Game College for gamers. Yes. Well, that's not so far wrong. Oh, okay. The David Game College for future gamers has basically fired all of their teachers except sex education and art.

OK, extremely loud British school claxon sounding here. They've fired all of their teachers, and students will be abandoning textbooks and lectures in favor of laptops and headphones because instead of human teachers, they will be learning core subjects, including English, English, maths and science from an AI system. A. What, the same AI system that can't accurately say the number of Rs in the word strawberry?

G. Well, do you really need that in your professional life? A. Yeah. No, probably not, to be fair. G. Vibe space. A. Yeah, absolutely. G. Who needs to know? A. We're just like teaching the kids the kind of like the lessons on tape from dog tooth, you know? We give them a maths lesson that's like all the angles and the triangle don't add up. Yeah.

Well, your teacher for everything is now Mavis Beacon. I mean, to be fair, she did a pretty good job. I'm a good typist, you know? Mavis Beacon teaches everything. Yeah. I had a number of complicated feelings about Mavis Beacon as a young girl. And to be honest, yeah, you know, this is gonna like, you know, the youth of tomorrow. Yeah, Mavis Beacon sex ed. There's a new documentary coming out about Mavis Beacon and the creation of her and sort

of like her role in our AI future. I haven't seen it yet, I just saw it announced. Yeah, cause like when I was a kid, I was doing the kind of rated you for universal version of her with my, like with Mavis Beacon teacher's typing. Yeah, real trailblazer in the AI teaching landscape. It's Mavis Beacon develops sentience. Mavis Beacon takes over.

Yeah, well the original purpose of the Mavis Beacon was to warn sailors of the presence of big typewriters floating in the ocean. The AI is used in such a way that sees students learning with both computers and virtual reality headsets. And it teaches in a way that human teachers simply cannot. Wrongly. I think human teachers can manage this. Yeah. Yeah. And they did a lot actually. I still don't know how many hours are in strawberry.

It could be any amount really. Never, never do the hard strawberry. By developing a lesson plan is tailored to each and every student while arranging it in such a way that weaker topics are tackled right away and stronger topics are pushed later. The catch is this teaching arrangement is very expensive with the 20 students who are receiving the AI teaching treatment paying 27,000000 a year in fees. Wait, wait, so it's both worse and more expensive. Yes. Great.

I mean, perfect. Perfect British moment. A lot of private education is like this, right? Because like, okay, you can pay a lot for the connections, right, and the quality of teaching and whatever, and you know, try and vault your kid up into the upper classes or whatever, but like, a lot of the weirder side of private education in this country is like yeah We'll take 20 grand a term and we will do just some fucking experimental shit on your kids You know they're gonna be like weapon X except for not knowing how to spell yeah the experimentation used to be purely sexual

But now they've moved it into other arenas. Now it's more conceptual, you know, it's like all encompassing. They said, however, that essentially what's happening is it's offering a level of precision and continuous evaluation that's hard for humans to match. And if you want to understand why a child isn't learning, they said, AI can pinpoint that more effectively. Again, like, jokes aside, a teacher could pinpoint that perfectly effectively. It's just they can't do it when they're responsible for like 90 children who are sitting on double-decker desks. Yeah. Which didn't used to be a problem in private education, which retained low class sizes until Keir Starmer and his band of wokes, you know, decided to maybe slightly increase

the amount of like, tax they were paying. Of course, right. And this is, if you listen to this show, or if you read 404 media, you will know, anytime anyone wants to introduce AI into anything What they really mean is we want to fire half of you and rehire the the half that we fired on worst contracts So can you believe it's they're looking at Jason for this one that a number of ex teachers have been hired as quote-unquote Learning coaches. That's so good. I there's a quote in here that there are many excellent teachers out there, but we're all fallible, the school's co-principal said.

And I can't think of any system that's more fallible than AI, you know, the strawberry one is good. But even today, it's like Google rolled out its AI answers again, and it hasn't gotten as much attention this time, but I see wrong things in it constantly still. There's also a study I read the other day that firms that have tried to replace workers with AI have found again, that it is more expensive and less good than

just keeping the workers that you have. So this sounds about a par for the course to me. That doesn't matter in the short term, right? Like this is what we kind of mean when we say that, you know, you might be replaced by AI. It doesn't mean that the AI is going to do your job. It means you're going to do your job. It's just going to be at the whims of a kind of capricious idiot computer. And also your job has been like formally de-skilled. So you're not a teacher anymore. You're like a learning coach because the computer is the teacher. Yeah. Well, Mavis Beacon is your boss now.

Yeah, exactly. Clippy is the co-principal. Yeah. Yeah. But if you're a learning coach, when you can act more like a sort of American football coach, you can have your own like, I'm doing Friday night lights for biology class. Exactly. That's right. I'm coaching special teams. We only do kicking, whatever the kicking version of biology is. I was the defensive coordinator for GCSE maths. So the learning coaches are there to quote, ensure discipline. Ah, you can be a police officer. Okay, cool.

Yeah, it's basically because what happens, right, is this class size of like 20 kids, right, they might have before they would have had a teacher for English, a teacher for science, a teacher for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now. Inefficient, get rid of it. Yeah, now they have the AI system doing a personalized lesson. Also, by the way, they have all the personalized lesson plans. I mean, goodbye to any kind of social element of learning. It is just about memorizing.

It's so interesting, just to like a very short point, like looking at all the examples of where AI is kind of introduced into sort of any system, be it like a school or be it like in a supermarket or a warehouse or something. Like the fire and rehire policy is kind of one where they kind of, yeah, the transition is always like, you've had this like specialty training in whatever field and you're now going to become a police officer with no training. Because the whole point of it is like, the AI has to work and the AI can only work through like an enforcement of discipline, which like reinforces its use, right? We're all going to be cops after all.

Right. Like the way that the AI works is AI works is fundamentally humans have to sort of work around it and sort of to its strengths and everything. And in order to do that, in order to stop humans dicking around, and in particular children, like the only way you can do that is to sort of be, you know, be like, you know, enforcement. You can only do physical enforcement. Yeah. The two kinds of teacher now, computer and Catherine Burblesing. This is the thing, like, basically to finish school in this country, you need to have a minimum quotient of trauma. So you need to have the permission from Catherine Burblesing. It's very much just like, I finished my grades.

Is there someone you haven't asked? We need a human factor in there to shout at you and make you piss yourself or whatever. Well, that's the thing. Katharine Verbal Singh is no longer the headmistress. She's the learning manager. You know, she's Sam Allardyce patrolling the touchline of the math classroom, beleaguered in a big coat, you know, vaguely gesturing at children. It's interesting because during COVID, they tried to have human teachers and robot policemen.

It's like there were all these remote learning tools where they were like tracking your eyes to see if you were cheating and those didn't work. They were like easily gamed. And so now they've just like flipped it where the robots are going to be the teachers and the humans are going to be the cops. Finally, humo cop. Yeah, I for one really look forward to cop future, the future where we're all cops. Just going around like arresting each other saying like, what's all this then?

Yeah, well, what is all this then, of course, is that's just one school, and schools in Britain are allowed to all be especially wacky with it. That was one of the weirdest kind of like, pieces of deregulation, right? Yeah, genuinely. Michael Gove being like, yeah, just fucking do whatever to the kids, man. Just get weird with it, you know? Just really feel yourself, enjoy the space, you know? Well, the AI teacher can survive the roof collapsing, so they're better than a regular

teacher who would be crushed to death. But that's just one school in a country where schools are routinely allowed to get wacky with it. But the government is also pushing this as well. Basically, there's a new program that the UK government has announced. It announced this last week, where essentially they were investing some millions of pounds to pool documents, including curriculum guidance, lesson plans,

people assessments, which are then basically can be licensed by AI companies to train their tools to replace teachers, right? And they say, this is the government press release. So they can generate a high quality content like tailored creative lessons plans and workbooks, that can be used reliably in schools. And to encourage AI companies to make use of the data store,

a share of an additional million pounds will be awarded for those who bring forward the best ideas to put the data into practice to reduce teacher workload. And so this is not just one wacky school. We've actually talked about wacky schools trying to replace teachers with AI before. We talked about a school that made a chatbot an official member of staff as well. I remember that.

But this is also, the government is saying, please startups, companies, please come in and residualize our education sector further. We're creating the data store so you can then do that and you can go to a school that's again, might've had all its funding cut from its local authority, might be taking on more students than it can like safely put in, especially because the building is falling apart because it's made out of fucking meringue. Hey, guess what? You're going to be able to just to not hire any more teachers, not replace the ones who leave, call them all learning coaches and end their specialization in any given subject

except for art or sex education. Yeah. It's cool that this is happening right after the pandemic gave us this wave of kids. We have a bunch more like special needs. Should be fine. Yes. We've combined art and sex education. Paint me boys. Paint me. Paint me like your French teacher. Yeah, that's right. RIP to the French teacher. She's been replaced with a Duolingo owl. And that really would enforce some discipline in the classes, you know?

Yeah, that's right. Children, you're all making duo sad. Yeah. This is where we are essentially with the UK. David Game College being likely the first but not the last to do something like this and the government not just tacitly but overtly encouraging it with money. Yeah, there's a subhead for this one, David Gamer Moment. Yeah, there you go. Hunting the most dangerous David. But I want to talk about one more thing before we get into our main subject, which is, and we almost need a stinger for this.

Okay. It's the Network State Watch. Okay, well I don't have that, so I'll just play something random. Fuck off. Quote, Osama bin Laden seeing a Soviet hind helicopter for the first time. Basically, as you know, we're big Balaji heads on this show. Hmm. Yeah. Huge.

Yeah, huge Balaji heads. I'm checking in with two things in my life. The, you know, the Tony Blair Institute and Balaji. Yeah. Balaji. Yeah, we're all Balaji. It's pronounced biology, but the AI didn't quite nail that, you know? So, basically, I sent this to you as well, Jason, so you'll have seen this. Balaji has decided to take Grey Pride a step further and has bought an island off the coast

of Singapore. They all want to be super villains, so fucking bad, dude. Yeah. Balaji Srinivasan, who again, we have to remember, has a plan for San Francisco that basically involves a kind of like, uh, de-democratization and political take. It's the Nerd Reich. It's the Nerd Reich is what he wants. Yes, there we go. I'm really on my pun shit this evening.

Dr. Brough and his volcano lair. So he has now a plan. The problem with deriding all of the existing everybody who's not already on your team as you know, either Quizlings or sort of morons who would love your leadership of them, is you need to generate a kind of clerk and middle manager class to take your ideas, because podcast toadies aren't always going to be able to do it for you. So through the power of Bitcoin, Balaji says. By the power of Bitcoin,

we now have a beautiful island near Singapore where we are building the network school. Uh-huh. We've bought an island with cryptocurrency is such a dangerous start to any plan. And then we're going to put a school on it. So, yeah, it's the most being investigated by Interpol start a plan. You can, yeah. This is like the fifth Bitcoin startup island or city that I'm aware of and none of them have gone well.

I actually went to the one in El Salvador, El Zante, which has become this big surfing destination. And there were like 20 articles about how Bitcoin has revitalized this El Salvadorian city And I went there and it's all just surf hostels and a bunch of surfers and no one cares at all about Bitcoin So I feel like many of these Bitcoin utopias are you know grifts as you'd expect? But they also just I have no idea what they are Hmm It really is a damning indictment of Bitcoin that they haven't even been able to get a bunch of guys whose main interest is surfing

to go along with it. It's so dumb that those guys are like, nah dude, I'm alright. ALICE So, to be clear, people who wanted to run radio stations illegally had more success at setting up a microstate than this. Like, genuinely. And I also would like to apologize to the Metal Gear Solid franchise for suggesting that it was implausible that you could just have like a sequential series of attempted doomed microstates, you know?

Well, Prospera, and we'll talk about this more probably in the next episode, Prospera is also, wouldn't you believe it, running into trouble. Oh no. They call it Outer Heaven. Yeah, so, let's talk about Balaji's Out outer heaven. So he's bought this island and then he and Brian Johnson are working together to develop a kind of total life indoctrination program. Oh good. The Brian Johnson massacre. Yeah. Is it good when billionaires have that?

Yeah. I'm going to read what the launch, right? It sounds 95% innocuous, unless you know what Balaji wants to do and what his vision of society is. Yeah, or unless you go there and you see a bunch of kids running around in grey sweat suits. Yeah. Well, you can go there, and if you just hide under a box, the guards will walk by you. Mostly. The purpose of the network school is to articulate

a vision of peace, trade, internationalism and technology. To revitalize democracy for the internet era. To train the next generation not just to be leaders of companies but inspirations for their communities. Their structured part is about daily self improvement. So there are four categories, the four pillars of Balogism. Haj. Yeah, b-boying. I will never get tired of doing that. The four pillars of Balogism. Learning skills, burning calories, earning currency, and having fun. Learning, burning, earning, and having fun. Yes.

Yeah, that's... It's too motivational, you know, is what this is. It sounds like a self-help book. I mean, I guess it is a self-help book. It's just kind of overgrown. Yeah, well, it's a self-help book that should have been in the mind of someone who doesn't have billions of dollars, basically. And it should have stayed a fucking book. Big boss dreamed of a world where we were all burning calories.

They should, yeah, they should have like a fifth pillar, which is like, oh, mad. Here's how it works. We set up many classrooms where you can drop in to see a problem of the day and you solve that problem and a proctor Awards you a crypto credential a free non-transport NFT sensor crypto wallet. I was gonna call it nerd Hogwarts I guess Hogwarts is already nerd Hogwarts, but like this is like nerd to Hogwarts Well, it establishes proof of learn Did they fucking try and blockchain the concept of education? Well, that's the thing, right?

They haven't understood that the thing that the actual already existing powerful want in the world for education is the AI approach, not the blockchain approach. No one cares if you actually read the book and you get like a little NFT saying, hey, I turned every page on Ulysses. Right. You don't, no one cares about that. They just want to fulfill their statutory obligations to educate you cheaply or as Balaji says. I don't even think, I don't even think that's entirely true in the sense or like it's not like, not to say it's not true, but it's more just like, if you're super rich, like you're

sending your kids to schools where it has some type of prestige and status, right? The AI stuff is really just like ways of cutting back teaching costs and like running schools on basically no budgets. But I'm not entirely convinced that like rich people actually want that. And so this kind of just feels like tech guys who, again, it's very much like we, this has to work, like whatever shit that we've got on, but like the network state, it has to work. And if we can't make our sort of like weird little town in San Francisco, and we're going to go to this weird like boy island and we're going to send a bunch of kids there. And just like, please do not call it boy island. Yeah. Bought boyard.

No, it was named bully island because there was a buoy there. I thought it was like Fort Gerlard anyway. Yeah. And like they've seen like Goodwill hunting once and they've seen the whiteboard scene and they're like, oh that's cool, we should just do, like the entire education model is like, what if he solved the Satoshi problem? Our initial material, they say, focuses on founding tech communities as distinct from companies. That includes crypto, AI, social media, history, politics, and filmmaking.

I don't know why they picked those. Yeah, we're gonna give fucking Bulgaria a dime square or whatever. Yeah, it should be useful even if you're growing a traditional company or building a following. Every Wembara of the network school gets a daily workout slot with a personal trainer. You run and lift in the morning at your chosen time, getting a proof of workout from your trainer, another NFT. Then you get a box with a Brian Johnson blueprint optimized meal and head to work. The point is to provide willpower as a service where the community provides

the discipline. Do you see that? Does this look a little bit like Balaji is trying to build a sort of private army? Willpower as a service where the community provides the discipline sounds a lot like the Great Leap Forward actually. Sort of accidentally developing Maoism. Well, I mean, sort of, yeah, this is a blockchain interpretation of the Great Leap Forward, actually. Sort of accidentally developing Maoism. Well, I mean, sort of, yeah, this is a blockchain interpretation of the Great Leap Forward, that's like, we put the country on a, like, proof of dead sparrow economy, you know? Well, this is, it's all, to me it just seems like it's all getting very synonon, right? Like you go to this little island off of Singapore, your entire life is just like solving programming

issues and then like everyone around you makes sure that you're doing all of your daily weightlifting or you get proof of willpower as a service so the community provides the discipline. It's just public shaming. That's just what that is. It reminds me of those men's retreats, but as an entire society. So they say, the network school is for people who admire Western values but recognize Asia is in ascendance, that Bitcoin succeeds the Federal Reserve, that AI can deliver better opinions than any Delaware magistrate.

He had to put in the Delaware magistrate bit as well? Just bizarre. Microbeefs. Completely inscrutable. Even to the most fanboyish Singaporean kid. Imagine caring. He says what this is for is for dark talent around the world, so like... Oh, come on, dude.

Talent where we know that it exists, but we don't know how much of it there is or where it is. You joke, but that is kind of what he means. Oh, no. He says it's for Indian engineers, or the last few Europeans who believe in capitalism, or, you know, stuff like this. I'm not sure I love calling it dark talent and then going on mostly referring to Indians. That's a bit iffy. Yeah. But also I just think this is what I was alluding to earlier. The idea that liberal democracies are hostile to these things is insane.

It's an amazing gift to them. The Department for Education is trying to be taken over by technologists. They're doing their best. Yeah. Come to the UK. Also, is the Delaware magistrate like one of those like weird, like legal terms? You know, like, like they say, the man on the clapper, mom, nabous. Like, could you explain this to the Delaware magistrate? I'm just thinking like wrestling here, you know, like

he's trying to tie you up in red tape. That's that's his secret move. We were gonna do a coffin match, but the Delaware magistrate has stopped it due to health and safety issues. Oh, he's coming in with the subpoena off the top row. No, the Delaware magistrates like who hassles Elon Musk? That's what I think that's in there for because Elon hates Delaware magistrates. He like knocks someone out and he's like, case adjourned. all of our magistrates. He like knocks someone out and he's like, case adjourned.

So, to finish, it says, for those who want Silicon Valley without San Francisco, and for those who want to found, fund and find new companies and currencies, new cities and communities, all be on campus full time, with Brian Johnson co-supervising the setup of everything from the bench press to the French press. From broadcast to podcast. RILEY That's right. Anyway. So we're actually gonna be relocating to an island just off of Singapore.

ALICE Uh huh. Why, as well, do all of these motherfuckers want to be Bond villains so bad? Like, at some point down the road I'm sure we're gonna talk about Mike Lynch, you know, late of autonomy and, you know, then of drowning in the Mediterranean. That was a guy who put fucking piranha tanks in the lobby of his office, Balaji's trying to occupy a disputed island between China and Japan, fucking the guy in No Time to Die. Like, why are they like this? Why does power affect them this way? Remember the guy who bought that like disused fort as well in Dover?

Yeah. Yeah. The tech fort guy. They also, to be clear, I was doing the no time to dilution. I don't believe that Singapore is between China and Japan. Thank you. No, they all want to live on Spider Skull Island. And if I had billions of dollars, maybe I would too, but I don't. So I don't. Well, the beauty of Spider Skull Island is that they keep all of the, you know, the flies and other insects under control.

Jason, let's talk about AI Slop Title Wave Election Edition. As someone who is a keen watcher of AI Slop, as someone who is one of its first categorizers, just let's start with something kind of general before we talk about companies and individual people actually turning this stuff out. How do you view the now, I'd say, mid-American election cycle title wave of AI slop generated by and for candidates in political parties?

Well, did you see that Taylor Swift endorsed Trump for the election? Yeah, huge news. Huge news. Which I'm sure she was thrilled to find out about. Yeah, I feel like so far it's been very low effort from the candidates themselves, but there have been so many like fan edits where there's like an incredibly elaborate Kamala Harris is a communist AI video that then Elon Musk shares to millions and millions and millions of people.

And I feel like, I feel like the most impactful ones have been like deepfake phone calls where Joe Biden is like telling people in upstate New York not to vote, things like this. And I feel like the sort of like A.I. slop manufacturers are just learning that they can use this for their own ends. Like, I think we're entering a time period where we're gonna see so much more of it, but I've been shocked that it took so long for the candidates and the parties to actually start doing this.

ALICE Are we fully sure that Joe Biden wasn't calling people in upstate New York telling them not to vote? Like, it seemed like the kind of thing he was capable of the last few days. ZACH Yeah, I mean, he may have picked up the phone and started rowdiling people. Seemed like he didn't really know where he was at any given moment or like lost his train of thought constantly. So it could have been him.

But we've seen, I would say like we've seen audio deepfakes especially be pretty impactful in like Taiwanese elections, for example. And there's been a few cases here in the United States. Joe Biden kept calling people in Taiwan telling them he was gay. They're like, I don't know what to do with this information, Jack. Once in America I'm gay. Listeners may have forgotten that one democratic fundraiser email where for whatever reason they just put in the subject line, recipient, I'm gay.

It was like a perfect shitpost. I think you know what it was meant to be doing, but no one really sort of said, wait a minute, what is that? What are we really saying here? An amazing email to not open. Just like, well, I assume that's all I need to know. Yeah. So any case, just some context there. But so what we're saying, what you're saying

basically is the usual suspects of turning this stuff out have been a bit slow to start. But if you want to talk about this in terms of misinformation, really it is creating like audio clips of as you say, Joe Biden saying like, you know, the Hey, Max, stay home on November 6th. Yeah. So to be clear, it's happening. I guess what I'm saying is like everything else. Politicians seem very far behind the curve with this tech. And I would have expected this to have begun a year ago. And we're really starting to see it ramp up now.

I think that the I'm gay email is about to become a lot more personalized, for example. It's like that's going to be tailored to specific people. Are we suggesting that we're going to start seeing hanky code emails? Yeah, well, this is the thing. Like they're going to micro target someone who is extremely susceptible to believing that Joe Biden is gay. Us. And then like, you know, sort of move us to vote or not vote accordingly. Yeah, just a message.

Hussein, I'm a switch. Email from Joe Biden. Kitten, please vote. Kat can host. More 20 friendly. And I think this is where I want to go with this as well, right? When most people talk about the use of AI in politics, what they talk about instinctively is misinformation. Because that's what most people, when they think, okay, well, it's very easy to create

a picture of like Kamala Harris being put on the sealed train from Zurich to St. Petersburg, right? To instigate the revolution. What's she going to do that? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's easy to imagine, okay, well, that will give people a wrong idea and that wrong

idea will then motivate behavior based on a lie. That's like the basic disinformation view of AI. But this is something we briefly talked about this before the show and it's something that's sort of I've been reading more about and thinking more about. Where AI is actually being used in politics to greater effect is political parties using it as you've alluded to, to like gigantically ramp up essentially robocalling and to make text messaging and emailing practically useless by reducing the cost of each fake personalized email to nothing, right?

I think that's absolutely right. Wired covered a company called Battleground AI and it basically it helps people write these targeting emails and the targeting text messages that we're deluged with. And I think like we've seen with AI across the broader internet, it's not that this stuff is more convincing. It's that it's like good enough and it like turns creating this stuff into a factory. It's just like can spread the flood the zone. I think that we're starting to see campaigns just like absolutely blast to their potential constituents with text messages.

And we're starting to see like more personalization across the board there. And so I don't think it's necessarily a problem of disinformation or misinformation. It's a problem of like flooding the zone with crap. Once again, Hideo Kojima, you were right. You're right about everything. Yeah. You know, so this company, Battleground AI, I think is an interesting one, right?

And all it is, by the way, is it's just a one layer over several other large language models. And then you just have a graphical user interface to like turn up the enthusiasm on the message, put in some targeting, and then it essentially goes and prompts it for goes and prompts it for you and then returns something. Recipient, I love being gay.

It's like hit these people with the anti-abortion messaging, hit these people with the economy messaging, hit these people with the immigration messaging, so on and so forth. And it does plug into chat GPT and Claude and Anthropic and all of these large language models. So it is essentially like a big dial, like how xenophobic do you want to go? How far left do you want to go? Like, I mean, that's how I see it at least. And you know, we, one of the things we talk about AI being is a kind of barrier to communication rather than a facilitator of it. And you know, anywhere, any process that you stick this into, even thinking about a political campaign.

They talk about not just working for presidents, this Battleground AI app, which by the way, is just like, they've just made the DNC consulting hustle more efficient because now you can just say, oh, I'm a tech company. What I really am is just a rapper over several other tech companies. And you can fire all of these enthusiastic interns you have working for you because you, a candidate by yourself, are just going to be able to basically generate largely without writing or possibly even reading if you don't want to, targeted messages that are just going to go out into the ether. To me, it seems like another way to just remove people from a process. Not just remove people from the doing of that process, but even the recipients, they become more removed from like the political candidate

for school board or whatever. Just as if the animation studio replaces all of its animators with AIs, you know, that puts the there's a great distance between like the executives and you, right? Because you're the only people there, but you're separated by an enormous gulf and to and to stretch over that chasm, the output has to be very strange. And so, you know, in this case, right, it's just saying, oh yeah, people are alienated from politics. What if potential candidates understood them even less? You know, what if they had even more contempt? I mean, we talked about in Britain, right, of, you know, like the Starmer campaign doing a lot of this, of sending canvassers around to where people are trying to talk to them about what they care about. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. I don't care about

what you're talking about. I don't want to talk to you. I'm just here to get data. MArchus- I only want to talk about, yeah. Like, getting radicalized in an unexpected direction by the same token and being like, well no, I don't want to talk about the stuff that you think should be affecting me. I want to talk about what Joe Biden just fucking emailed me, apparently. Which is some really stunning revelations about his sexuality, which were a total surprise to me. He's invited me to go to somewhere called Boy Island. This is how political messaging has been going since, I would say, the Obama campaign, where

they had this amazing, quote unquote, amazing digital strategy, where they had this like amazing, quote unquote amazing digital strategy where they were very good at targeting on social media. This then happened in 2016 with the sort of Cambridge Analytica scandal that was maybe blown out of proportion, but the whole goal of Cambridge Analytica on Facebook was to not look at people as individuals, to look at them as like psychographic profiles that can be advertised to. And so instead of being like a whole ass person who has like thoughts and feelings about a lot of different topics and might feel some nuance, like based on your browsing history, your social media history, your location data increasingly, like where you go on yourself

with your cell phone, your phone is targeted, like your user ID on your phone is targeted and they don't see you even as like a full person. They see you as like hitting specific characteristics and having a specific internet trail and history that a specific type of messaging might work with. And so that's how you end up getting these emails from Joe Biden that are so bizarre. And I think that with AI, like the hope is that they can be more customizable. Rather than everyone getting the same email, they will have different parts that can be plug and played automatically with their AI targeting. But ultimately, you're absolutely

right. It's like they're not seeing the voter as a person. They're seeing them as like a set of traits that can be targeted. I feel like every time we talk about AI coming into a new domain like this, every single time, it's the existing processes have gotten it 95% of the way to being fully degraded. Right? AI is just the last hurdle. Right? Because as you say, there's a long, long history of creating distance between elected officials

and voters. Right? And this is just- long history of creating distance between like elected officials and voters, right? And this is just- Well, ever since the Kennedy assassination, they've had to really- Yeah, yeah. I just got- We've been letting them get too close. I've just gotten this craziest email from the president.

I gotta do something about that. Email. I've just gotten this crazy letter from the president. Lee Harvey, I'm gay. The only way to cure me is to shoot me in the back of the head. Lee Harvey was a remarkably homophobic man. Scientists believe there's a gay cortex in the brain, which if you can shoot it up with the car-carnal rifle... The most hated weapon in America.

I really enjoyed New York City JFK there as well. Hey, whoa, I'm JFK. So like that's one example of one company, right? You know, where it's again, this is started by a long time Democratic Party insider who would just be doing, who's understood where like the DNC consultant hustle is going. But also a lot of it is just like MailChimp, right? Like they're slightly streamlining a process you could already do by having like five separate email lists labeled like, you know, racist abortion, like whatever, and writing five different emails that go to those people and then it autocompletes

with the name of the person. Like it's nothing that space. Because what level of personalization would be meaningful and not also alarming? Yeah. Like what level of personalization would be meaningful and not sound like a threat? Like hey, I know that your daughter goes to like Elmwood High and she's not doing very well in physics. Elect me for school board and I'll make sure that physics at Elmwood High gets well funded. That's a threat. I know that your son is growing up big and strong. This is the thing, they haven't leaned into the grift that they could be doing, right?

Like yeah, that's a threat, right? But like you give that to an old like machine politician, right? And you work some glad handing in, maybe he keeps a baseball bat under the desk. You can't do that with a computer or with like robo calls or whatever. It doesn't work. Yeah. We need to get back to more of a boss tweet kind of democratic party. They have not automated me despise. So, the shadow mayor of New York City. We've created a machine that rewards people for growing out beards with a bottle of whiskey when they shave and vote twice. But that's just one random company that's gotten written up.

Another one that you mentioned having some knowledge of Jason as well is Trueverse Amplify Software, which again is making text messaging as useless as phone calls in America. Yeah. So the text message thing, it's been a part of politics for a decade now. But I feel like in this current election cycle, it's like if you end up on a list, like if you donate to anyone, they will not leave you alone. They won't leave your family alone. They won't leave anyone you ever speak to alone. The amnesian campaign strategist.

Yeah. It's like, there's been like multiple screenshots of people just like telling the DNC to stop texting them, like stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. And every time it comes from like a different number. My partner's mom has donated to political campaigns. And because they're on the same phone plan, she's just gotten she wakes up every morning to like 100 text messages from like 100 different politicians, special interest groups like the DNC, the RNC, all of the above. And I feel like these are not necessarily that AI powered at the moment, but they're

doing something where the like unsubscribe button does not work. Like they're sending from different numbers constantly. It's very hard to know how you got on any given list, what lists you're on, how to get off them. And I missed your text. I had a hundred messages from Greg Stubbe telling me he was polyamorous. There's been multiple times she hasn't responded to me because she's like, Oh, I like turn my phone on mute because I'm just getting spammed by the RNC right now. For example, like Adam Schiff uses Trueverse to send hundreds of thousands of small dollar donors to a Senate campaign with the push of a button. But that's like this company

claims to offer more than just like Robotexting because the idea is, oh, we're going to open up a conversation with a chatbot where you can say, oh, but you know, how high are you going to build the wall, essentially. And then again, chatbots masquerading as politicians can be like, well, what kind of gay are you, Joe Biden? And then it sort of has to answer. When they say, will you say how high? Yeah. Trueverse is mostly for retailers. Trueverse is mostly for the private sector. So it's, for example, on their website, they give a demo of how the product works, which is,

you have a reservation at like 6 PM somewhere. You're having an early dinner, I guess. And you can say, hi, can you change the reservation, please? And it's like, yes, of course. Would you like it at a normal time, like 7 or 8? You'd be like, yes, thank you. Or you're going to the theater to see Hamilton. Would you like to vote for Adam Shitt? Yeah, right. So there's more that they can do.

Right. Well, now it's when you get the spam messages, you can talk back to them and they will talk back to you. And so if you're trying to unsubscribe from them, they'll say like, well, well, why? Like, yeah, exactly. Let's talk about this. Why are you breaking up with me? Turn the tables. Tell the candidate that you're gay. See what happens then. Yeah, me too. Yeah.

Biden. Want to meet up? So essentially, right, it's like on the one hand, robo-dialing is much faster and more efficient, which is bad. But there is this added element of you can just talk to and project onto the spam text that you get and who's going to reply to spam text? It is of course mostly elderly shut-in. Yeah. We are now going to get even more radicalized down even stranger pathways. Sorry Mr. President, one moment I have an uncollected parcel that I need to pay a $2.95 charge on.

And I mean, again, it's much like the Cambridge Analytica stuff, right? I think my view on it is that, like, okay, there's lots of ways of doing this stuff already, obviously. Like, a lot of these people are already radicalized and have already been... that's already been done by, like, blunter force instruments like Fox News or whatever, but, like, I think it puts, like, you know, it puts a thumb on the scale a little bit, and sometimes that's all it takes, you know? If you are one of like 400 pensioners in like Ohio, or whatever, or Michigan, who is like hyper concerned about whether Kamala Harris describes herself as bisexual or pansexual,

and your vote depends on that, that's a like, serious commodity, you know? Both the pro and anti-Kamala Harris text messages are both describing her as bisexual. That's something that chatbots have gotten not good at, but good enough to fool an elderly voter, most likely where you can imbue them with a personality and you can say, OK, you're Adam Schiff, pretend you're Adam Schiff and you program in his biographical data and things like that, like his positions on different policies. you're Adam Schiff, pretend you're Adam Schiff and you program in his biographical data and things like that, like his positions on different policies. And, you know, an old person sends 10 text messages back and forth with this bot who claims to be Adam Schiff and leaves

the conversation feeling like they've actually talked to him. I think that these like character AIs are actually some of the ones that are not necessarily convincing but that people like. It's like there are many people who are in relationships these like character AIs are actually some of the ones that are not necessarily convincing, but that people like. It's like there are many people who are in relationships, like these very bizarre relationships with sex bots and things like that. And it's not that big of a step to see. Like me and Mavis Beacon. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. You would type in those replies so fast. That's, that's right. Yeah. That's where I got it from. As you say, right, the kinds of the political impacts of AI to be worried about generally is just circling back to the beginning. It's not disinformation. It is too much information. It is too much noise. And this is not something that's just the province of like one party.

This is being eagerly embraced by basically everyone involved because it makes the whole thing cheaper and they love hearing promises. They love snake oil. They can't stop chugging it. And all it's going to do is provide another step in what is now essentially a multi-decade process of the total degrading of the American public sphere.

I mean, you guys have used AI to degrade the public sphere that way. What we've done over here is actually, I also think a much more toxic and politically consequential form of, lying using AI or something like this, it's nothing to do with like misinformation. It's what's currently happening

on an industrial scale in the UK, which is the promise that AI can compensate for slash public spending. That's how we're using it. And everybody seems to be very on board and they don't even need chat GPT to generate anything about it. But that's not the only innovative use of AI because it gives me great pleasure to announce that there is another AI driven political startup throwing its hat into the ring. Ooh, that's right. Jacob Wool and Jack Berkman are back. Oh man. I had blasts.

I was wondering where Jacob had gone and then, like, immediately this came up and like, yeah, the algorithms have gotten really good. Clearly. You summoned him. Like, this is the thing, like, you sort of like make him real by thinking about him. Yes, that's right. Somehow Jacob Wall returned. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of building the wall, what about rebuilding? So for those who don't remember, Jacob Wall and Jack Berkman were essentially a kind of Washington, Laurel and Hardy.

Yeah. Who love to get into sort of- Carrying a big pane of glass around DC. Essentially, who love to get into sort of scrapes and flimflams. And wouldn't you know it, they've served out their 500 hours of community service. They were given by a judge for calling black voters in Ohio and telling them not to register to vote. And now they can do it with AI. Well, indeed. They founded a company called Lobbymatic. Lobbymatic. Jason, have you heard

of Lobbymatic? So, this is crazy because I was reporting on this company six months ago when I saw it because it was fucking crazy. And I didn't know it was Jacob Wall and apparently neither did anyone else because Politico just reported like the morning that we're recording it, that those are the people who are running it. So I found this and I was like, oh, this is a, you know, they claim that they will help lobby on any bill. And on their website, they have all these examples of having worked with like McDonald's, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. So I, this was back in January, actually, I have my emails up now and I emailed with all of these companies about whether they had any relationship with Lobbymatic and I just never got the time to write it up.

So here I have an email from Microsoft. How much did they help Microsoft? How many bills did they get passed on Microsoft's behalf? Just dozens and dozens of bills. So Pfizer public relations, sorry for the delay. I can confirm they are not a vendor. Microsoft, we are not a client and we've never heard of this company. Palantir, Lobbymatic is not and has never been a Palantir customer. Looks like they're using us as an example client. Yeah.

How badly is Jacob Wool want to be like a Peter Thiel kid? I mean, this is the thing. He's, he's kind of trying to talented Mr. Ripley his way into it. And the thing is he never learns because it like even having faced some consequences, clearly this is not deterred him in any way from his beautiful immaculate tactic of just lie about it. Yeah. Just lie and say you did. Jason, sorry to cut you off there.

Did anybody say they worked with you? No, no, no one. No one. And I emailed 20 companies because they had a bunch of examples. I took a bunch of screenshots of it back in January and I ended up not writing about it because I was like, this is not a real company doing anything. There's no one behind it. They're not like I couldn't find any evidence that it was anything more than a medium post and a website with a bunch of Palantir logos

on it. So I didn't write about it but now I will probably do a follow up on this. This is great. This is very exciting news. Yeah, because it's got Washington's greatest jokesters on the case. It does explain all those text messages I got from Peter Thiel saying, Milo, I need your blood. Wall and Berkman, one of the reasons that no one clocked this is that they are using pseudonyms in their new business. That's all it took. They're running the scam playbook from the 1820s. Just go get a cart down the road to the next town and paint over the name on the side of

the snake oil wagon. And that worked, kind of, for this long. Getting an email from Wake Up Joel being like, I'm gay. This Wake Up Joel fellow seems like a trustworthy man. Lobbymatic was founded last year by Jacob Waugh alongside Jack Berkman. What, what is it that binds these two together? Oh, I mean, they have a deeply loving relationship. Yeah.

Like they must be such good friends. Well, listen, the bond between scammers is stronger than like almost anything. This is a thing that you can find in a little movie called The Sting, for instance. Yeah. Yeah, they're the Paul Newman and in a little movie called The Sting, for instance. Yeah, that's the Paul Newman and Robert Redford of political lobbying. Yeah, absolutely. In his role as CEO and founder of the new firm, Wall went by the name Jay Klein, according to a former employee with emails obtained by Politico. Berkman went by the pseudonym

Bill Sanders. I gotta hear some weirder names for these guys. Like, a few more iterations of this scam and like, Jacob Wall will be sending me emails telling me he's gay, like under I gotta hear some weirder names for these guys. Like a few more iterations of this scam, and like Jacob Wohl will be sending me emails telling me he's gay, like under the name of like Sir Anthony Housefather or something. Oh yeah, I mean, I'm really excited to hear

Esteban Corcoran suggest that like- Oh, Rufus T. Firefly is telling me that I could like, you know, have access to Peter Thiel. Fantastic. We did a whole episode about a guy whose actual name is Dario Item. So I think the sky is the limit, to be honest. Yeah. Also, the T in Rufus T Firefly stands for the.

So running the firm under their pseudonyms appears from the latest instances, all from Politico of shady behavior by the pair of convicted fraudsters. Now they are seizing on public exuberance on the promise of AI to transform the workplace, in this case case on K Street for lobbyists. So Jason, what I have a sort of pracy of it in front of me, but just because I don't want to miss anything because it's so thin. What did their company actually purport to do for the people they didn't work with?

They claimed basically that they would help track bills as they went through Congress and would help say Pfizer write a letter to lawmakers. So they would keep track of all the lawmakers who are a part of the health committee and they would both help the companies write legislation and then like send it to the lawmakers and would track these bills through Congress. So if it detected like a healthcare bill that got introduced, it would track these bills through Congress. So, if it detected a healthcare bill that got introduced, it would flag it in its system and say, like, oh, this is very bad, we need to lobby against it.

This is something that for the trans community is fulfilled by two Twitter accounts. Yeah. The AI email was like, dear Senator, I notice neither of your children have malaria for now. But also, it's like, that's the kind of thing that used to just be done by people, but again, the whole point of a lobbyist isn't to pass information to companies on where bills are and send letters, it's to have a personal relationship with a lawmaker, or know stuff about them, that they can use in order to bend them to their will.

In fairness, Jacob Bull tried this one previously and kind of went to jail about it. What do you mean? Elizabeth Warren's a Dom? Like, that's with the chain and the Marine. That email is going out to Michigan voters right now. Dom would never thank her husband for being there. It's his dog cage, he's supposed to be here! But yeah, no, I understand once bitten twice shy on that one, you know? LWX They have a feature in here called Contribution

Optimizer, and it says, an AI optimized plan to garner the most possible influence through donations. So essentially it's claiming to determine which congresspeople are most pliable and most open to receiving donations. But you can just know that! I know, yeah, exactly, exactly. Who are the cheapest dates in congress? How come it keeps telling us to lobby in the UK?

Yeah. But also, I do love that two of the former Lobbymatic employees resigned after learning Klein and Sanders' true identities, while the other two learned only after they had left the company. I would hate to learn my boss's true identity. This hat comes right off. What's so funny is how they learned it was that they were really bad at calling each other by their fake names. This is why you need to do the reservoir dogs taking a perl and one two three thing. Use colors right Mr. Blue, Mr. White, Mr. Green. That

way you don't fuck up and forget which business is your Dr. Anthony Q. Housefather and which business your Reverend Rufus T. Firefly. So, after getting hired by quote unquote Jay Klein, an employee soon grew suspicious about Wall and the company after witnessing an apparent hesitation to obtain a business license. Mr. Wall Klein. That's how I pronounce it. What do you mean? That's how we pronounce it where I come from. Ah, the lawyer for the accused, the honorable Esquire, Angelos Quench. Now, these are quite spurious accusations.

My client Reginald HB Featherbottom has much better things to do in this time. Pierre Le Scrouge is an upstanding citizen. So basically, the employee took a photo of Wall, did a Google reverse image search, and was like, that's clearly Jacob Wall. That works? Jesus. Okay, first of all, right. Put Jacob Wall back in prison. Give that employee

a private investigator's license and like some kind of old timey revolver and a raincoat. The other employee learned of Klein's true identity after different colleagues told him he was Wall. Three former employees said that Berkman would often slip up and call Jay Klein Jacob Wall by accident. What? Like he's full naming him in the office? Like, hey, Jacob Wall, can you get me a coffee please? Thank you, Jacob Wall. Thank you, convicted, convicted fraudster, Jacob Wall. Any resemblance of Fernando Bloomington to Jacob Wall

is a highly incidental. We're getting dangerously close to the Key and Peel East West College Poll Day. The Politico article does find three companies that they actually did at least correspond with. So, Wollen Bergman's company asserts on its website, this Politico, that it helps clients massively increase your efficiency and effectiveness by harnessing the power of AI. As we've talked to her with Jason, they didn't even seem to be doing the fake thing that

a company actually trying to do this would be doing. They seemed to largely do nothing. Like they just sat around in their office in like Virginia. Well, they were coming up with fake names. That takes up a lot of time. It's so fun to do. What are you talking about? Me and my friend Archibald T. Fairfax

are just upstanding businessmen. Its website states the technology blah, blah, blah. Toyota spokesperson Zachary Reed said a person from Lobbymatic represented himself as Jay Klein offered the company a three month trial, which they took them up on and expired last month and they did not extend it. Lanthias, a pharmaceutical company and also potential fake last name, spokesperson Linda Lennox. My name is Linda Lennox Lanthias.

We've achieved semantic saturation. Every name sounds fake now. You can't even look at a perfectly... If someone comes up to you and says, hi, my name is Linda Lennox, you're like, cool, nice to meet you. Totally normal name. After an hour of this shit, you're like, you are a motherfucker. That is not a real person.

That is Jacob Wall. That is Jacob Wall. That's Jacob Wall under there. You're doing the fucking Johnny English bitch. You're trying to like kind of rip off the like grandmother's like wig to reveal Jacob English bitch, you're trying to like, kind of rip off the like grandmother's like wig to reveal Jacob Wall beneath, you know? Oh yeah, you're Linda Lennox and this is your PR spokesperson, Anatoly Huguenot. I've heard it all before!

What are you talking about? My name is Vassily Maltisistel. Realizing the exact vitreousness of the glass house I live in as I remember that my name is November Kelly. Yeah. Wait a minute. Am I Jacob Wall? That's Jacqueline Bushman! Am I Jacob Wall?

My name is vitreous humor. Am I not? I just need you to tell me right now that I'm not Jacob Wall. But you do when the edible hits you hard, and you become convinced that you're Jacob Wall and so is everyone else. But you do when the edible hits too hard and you become convinced that you're Jacob Walton so is everyone else. Now my client, my client, your honor if we're all Jacob Walton who is Bill Sanders? My client Vitruvian Phlegmatic.

I can't believe that was just a generator. Vitruvian flagman. Isn't that one of the Wu-Tang clan? The lesser known. Jason, I'm so sorry to have you take time out of your business schedule to listen to us come up with fake names for 20 minutes. We were intrigued by the advertised potential of, I would say, Lanthius, obviously, the person who initiated the free trial left the company and then they forgot they had it.

It's so funny that companies can do this too. It's like you're the VPN, you know? It's like, I'm still paying for this? Fuck. We were intrigued by the advertised potential of Lobbymatic and had a limited number of employees test out the service to track legislation and summarize congressional hearings, said one of the co-founders of Boundary Stone Partners, a lobbying firm. We quickly determined the tool did not work and terminated our contract two months ago. At no point did we share any confirmation with

Lobbymatic and we did not know Wal or Berkman were affiliated at all. Looks like they're going to have to just paint that wagon over and go to another U.S. Capitol. I'm excited. I'm excited to see what Zachariah LaFleur-Bourge is going to do next. You know, like. My name is Temperance Quench and I know nothing of Jacob Hall. So Jason, do you have any last words on on the exploits of our two favorite Hucksters? I just can't wait to write about this. The political article is great, but I have like 15 companies saying,

I have no idea why this company is using our logo in their marketing. I also have another feature that it has, and it just has a big like to-do list. And on the to-do list is just says, email Sherrod Brown, who is a Senator. Just like, email Senator. Finally, we've invented a machine that can do this.

Rise and grind. Yeah. Hi, my name is Rise Grindington. And Jason, as always, blast to have you on the show. Thank you very much for making the time and coming on today. Yeah, thanks for having me. And also thank you to the listener for listening. I hope you've come up with a fake name for yourself.

Do share it in the Patreon comments. Something like Portfolius Bitcoin. It could be anything. My name is Ethereum Ripple Cardano, and I'm here to sell you on insurance. So yes, if you come up with a fake name, leave it as a comment, why not? And also, if you're not on the Patreon,

do remember that we have a Patreon. It can be accessed for five American dollars every month, and you get a second episode every week. And if you do that you can comment a fake name that you came up with. This week we're going to be talking to, we're going to be talking to once again Gareth Dennis all about his exploits on the railway and in press. So do check that out. Otherwise thanks again to Jason, thanks again to my co-hosts, thanks again for listening and we will see you in a couple short days Oh, yeah

And please come see me on tour so many UK tour dates available new ones are Glasgow and Newcastle If you live in either of those cities, there are many other cities available. MiloWebis.co.uk slash live-shows Thanks for watching!