TRASHFUTURE - PREVIEW: And I Would Build 1.5 Miles ft. Shanti Singh

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

...but I won't build 1.5 more. In this bonus episode, we bid a fond RIP to NEOM. The gang looks back fondly on our favourite megaproject as the Line's official plans are scaled back from 170km to only 2.4km (or 1.5 miles) by 2030. Then, we look at the emerging political movement of Grey Pride, and the plans that Balaji Srinivasan, author of the Network State, has to rebuild San Francisco in his image, claiming: "What Elon did for Twitter, so too shall we do for San Francisco!" Get the full episode on www.patreon.com/trashfuture 

Are you suggesting that the Ford versus Ferrari versus the same cinematic universe that Alex Garland's Civil War happens in? Which is... Yes. The... the versus cinematic universe. Yeah, well the thing is, the confrontation... The cinematic universes! The cinematic universes!

The confrontation between Ford and Ferrari at Le Mans precipitates indirectly the election of Nick Offerman as President of the United States, and then the events of Civil War. So yeah, I believe that. I'm trying to think of ways to work in, like, Alien vs. Predator and Kramer vs. Kramer, into the... Alien vs. Predator vs. Kramer vs. Kramer vs. Ford vs. Ferrari. Versus X vs. Sever. Whoever wins, we lose.

Weirdly Ford won. Yeah, wasn't expecting Enzo Ferrari to go out at the hands of the Xenomorph, but... And also, you didn't expect that Kramer won also spit acid, you know? No. spit acid, you know? No, no. It's a, and, and when, uh, when, when the Shelby Cobra had that second mouth, man, what a Trash vs. Future cinematic universe. It's Free vs. One? Yes. It is Riley vs. November vs. Hussein vs. Repeat Guest Shanti Singh.

Shanti, how's it's it going good good? You know it's I think the partial eclipse is kind of happening right now But I don't I mean it's not you can't really see it from here So this is this is really gonna affect my fantasy Mesa American ballgame Yeah, yeah the poor tents yeah Ten us chit-lan rough riders are gonna to have going to be caught in a point shaving scandal. When when it turns out when it turns out that all of the sacrificial victim hearts that they gave to the referee, half of them were cattle hearts. Just fudge the numbers. Yeah, that's right.

Anyway, welcome to the show. Given that Shanti is here, you know that at some point we're going to be talking about a little town on the west coast that is in the news more and more lately for being insane. The place where dreams are made. What city that might be? Who can speculate? Carson City. Azusa, California.

It's got everything you want from A to Z in the USA. Well they're actually building transit in Azusa where they're not really, where they're shrinking transit in San Francisco. Well, Shanti, the reason we called you today, well we didn't call you today, we got in touch with you a few days ago, that's how podcasting works. The reason we called you to well didn't call you today. We got in touch with you a few days ago That's the reason we summoned you the reason that the reason that we We got rid of all of the reagents that we put in our summoning circle to summon Mattie Lepchanski to talk about one weird of American City and then replace them with all the reagents

We put in the summoning circle to summon you to talk about another weirdo American City is Because San Francisco has been weird in its own new and interesting way, specifically as I would say the political tendency defined by replying to Balaji Srinivasan, whose book, The Network State, we have read on this show and who we've discussed at length in the past, so you probably know who that is, is beginning to gain, if not coherence, then enthusiasm and much-spilled ink as a political project. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like he's like, I don't know.

I wonder how much, too, like Balaji's like taking credit for a lot of stuff, where he's saying like, you know, this is like, he's saying California forever, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. That's Network State, and that like there's all these different, of course, all the projects that you guys have talked about like Prospera or Praxis all that stuff but yeah I think like there's

he's I think he's kind of latching on to that like pointing to a lot of stuff too that like maybe is happening with like that's me that's not really being done by him but maybe like his associates or something and he's just like see how our movement is growing. I did watch a little bit, I tried to watch some of the Network State conference on YouTube before this podcast, but I stopped, I was just encouraging too much brain damage. It's very funny to be like, you know, we're the hidden hand, I'm like basically the Moriarty of urban planning, and then the sort of master plan turns out to be get racist with it. Like, fucking what else is new, you know?

Yeah. I mean, it's like the same, you rip off Balaji's mask and it's just Robert Moses, you rip off that mask and it's just a racist guy. Yeah. Beneath this mask is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof, and the idea is more racism. Also- What is- Okay. ideas are bulletproof and the idea is more racism. Also, doesn't he live in Singapore? Okay, so this is where I can't, I've been trying to figure out, and can't quite figure out where Balaji technically lives, and whenever he's like, whenever he's on, like, he's got his sort of podcasting studio setup thing, but it could be anywhere, and someone told me he lived in Singapore. I do think it's a good idea to figure

out where these people live, in general, but the thing is, none of the answers are gonna be satisfying, because the answer is always the kind of, like, international non-country of wealth. Like whatever city they're in, it's always, like, intended to be, at least, this kind of, like, supranational 1% exclave from it, you know? You remember we, there was that um, on finance twitter there was this clip from an article circulating about Steve Cohen. Yeah of course I remember that because I'm huge on finance twitter. I'm a big deal on like weird finance twitter. More ironic after you guys follow me.

So uh, that is sort of true. So Steve Cohen, if you remind you, is the head of Point72. He's one of the wealthiest people in all of history. And any time he travels anywhere, because again, he also doesn't live anywhere, he makes sure that a group of consultants get sent out ahead of him to fit out everything he will see and everywhere he will stay. So it's exactly like his home and There's has a whole extra hotel room

That's just set up to be his exact 12 monitors set up office if that is the best example of the international Placeless country of wealth I have ever heard Yeah, any case really really sad and alien anything. Yeah. Well, I don't suppose any of those contradictions will be heightened any time soon. No, no, no. Ah, who would do that? Uh, anyway, so. What do you need twelve monitors for is my question. I've been resisting getting a second one for like, a decade at this point. Like, one of the stories about him is that his twelve monitor setup once allowed him to mount a defense against an insider trading charge, because he was like, look, I wouldn't have, I don't

focus on any of this shit. Yeah, he's like a, he's like a mentor, you know? Or he's like playing subway surfers on one of the screens in the corner. He's playing 12 instances of subway surfer at once. He's like a guy in the park playing 10 chess games at once, but instead he's playing ten games of Subway Surfer in a hotel room, while his family just goes about their business. ALICE The thing is, right, the gap between, like, me and this guy has seldom felt more acute, as me, my desk is too small to fit a second

monitor, this guy having having like, his twelve monitors carted around. The monitor gap is like, you know. But he's, he employs an entire company to do, he's basically just doing this for fun. He doesn't need to do any of this stuff. Anyway, I wanted to talk also about, um, one brief bit of British news before we talk about Neom, because my goodness, there's been some Neom news. Everybody's been getting blackmailed. Everybody's... you're all in so much trouble.

This is one of the things, right, we don't know whether this is gonna turn out to be like, a state actor or a non-state actor, but not for the first time in my life. I sympathize with MI5, right? Because their busy, like, daily bread diet of surveilling people, right? And like, cracking into their phones and like, overriding their civil liberties. They have to take a break from that to like, herd a bunch of MPs into a room, and then sit them down in front of a slideshow, the first slide of which is, don't send pictures of your dick to strangers on the internet once you get elected.

And I just, I really sympathize. LH- These, there is, that's the thing. There is nothing that British MPs love more than responding to an unsolicited nude picture immediately without any questions with. Okay. So for those who don't know, especially Americans, there's been a honeypotting scandal in parliament where the same person or people purporting to be either Charlie or Abby have been sort of texting male MPs being like, Hey, I saw you around the bar the other day.

What are your favorite state secrets, more or less. You know. That's exaggerated, but not by a whole hell of a lot. Some of them just like, sent nude pictures, and I dunno, maybe to their credit, most of the people who received the unsolicited nudes were like, well, this is clearly a honeypot, I won't be engaging further. However, and this is a quote, the Times understands...

This is why GCHQ and MI5 do the sort of yearly don't send pictures of your dick on the internet training, you know? The Times understands that two MPs did respond by sending an explicit picture. The reason why this got out in the first place is, is William Rag, who is not a name that I thought was real, like, got successfully blackmailed, and they got enough, like, compromise on him, for him to hand over a bunch of MPs and journalists' phone numbers, and then what that compromise is, or why it would be effective, is just not gonna ever be disclosed. So don't worry about it.

So, wait, what party is Billy Rag? Old Billy Rag the MP? Billy Bragg's Wario is a conservative, he's like a gay conservative MP, and like, he got blackmailed on Grindr, which is embarrassing, and then gave up a bunch of phone numbers off of it, which were then used for these kind of, like, cold calls. And now China, or whoever, question mark, has, like, adds two more leaves to the big binder of, like, MPs' genitals photos. LESLIE Well, maybe when the war comes, those are

gonna be the battle standards and everyone's gonna be too embarrassed. We've been here before! I mean, listen, if you're a state actor, right, and you're gonna do this kind of shit, I think it behooves you to stay on that level of immaturity. Just fuck around. I wanna see Medvedev post them on Twitter. Like, cut loose with it. Yeah. Yeah. It's the are you suggesting like that they should, um,

they should start doing schoolyard bullying to MPs? Yeah, basically. You know, this it's the, this is just a truism basically that now increasingly now, but always like the, your common British MP is basically a cattle person. They are nothing but just impulses mediated by varying amounts of alcohol for the most part, and are best understood as Prince George in the third Blackadder series, basically. ALICE Well, also, predictably, and to an extent

this is inevitable because politics is a small world, but it is also that Westminster is so deeply incestuous that all of these people are very very vulnerable to this kind of thing. Because there's, y'know, one degree of separation from William Rag to fucking the guy who is likely to respond to a naked picture with a naked picture, unprompted. What a great system we have.