TRASHFUTURE - The (Data) Centre Cannot Hold feat. Paris Marx

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

Paris Marx of Tech Won’t Save Us joins the gang to discuss his new limited series, Data Vampires, all about how data centers (shock horror) really aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and instead just act as gigantic drains on the resources of the localities in which they are based. Also, we discuss one year of western media and political cover for Israel’s actions in Gaza and its neighbouring states, and reflect on the people who revel in making “humanity” a more contingent condition than ever. Check out Data Vampires here! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/data-vampires-going-hyperscale-episode-1/id1507621076?i=1000672024900 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)

Hello everybody to this free episode of TF. It's the free one. Recorded from, it's really exciting, our new office on the Chagos Islands that has been given to us apparently for in perpetuity for as long as they are controlled by Britain So so long suckers on the shores of England We are chilling by the beach the only people there alongside 300 military personnel knowing We're always going to be very secure that NATO is going to be able to fly an F-35 to the bottom of Sri Lanka, where it is most crucially strategically needed.

I posted too bad about Ukraine and now we're based in Diego Garcia. Sorry about this. But that's fine. I've just eaten an endangered flightless bird. I'm enjoying this new tropical atmosphere. Oh, I'm sorry. Our guest, Paris Marx Marx has just parachuted in with news for us. Apparently the Foreign Office has gone woke and has given the Chagos Islands to China to apologize for gender. I cannot believe that this has happened. I'm so sorry I had to let you guys know this.

I know you've really been enjoying it over there. It's just nothing, nothing, nothing gold can stay, you know? Like I was really hoping to like continue posting from my anti woke Island fortress, but now Kirstama has taken this from me. Now you'll just have to make the move to the Falklands, you know, no controversy there. Yeah. Just, just like hang out with some like, what are they called? Like penguins? Yeah.

Probably. We're going to be like that Japanese guy who escaped Hiroshima to hide out in Nagasaki. Welcome. Welcome. Hey, that was just an opening, a little opening skit for you by the TF improv players. We're still in our normal place. Don't worry. We're still in England.

Too bad. England has never been a normal place. Well, yes, fair enough. We are here talking with Paris Marx, who is joining us to talk all about his new sort of sub-series of Tech Won't Save Us on the vampirism of data centers. Paris, how's it going? Yeah, great to join you again. Always fun. Yeah. And we're going to talk about a few things up ahead at the very beginning. Well,

a broad segment I think we could just call Strategic Relev relevance watch. Yes, that's right. A series of governments, including the US and several British governments across several different parties have agreed that that time that Britain just took over an archipelago in the Indian Ocean deported everybody and built a military base for the US was sort of illegal. And so a decision has been taken that will allow the military base to remain for 99 years. And however, the people that we forcefully deported, many of whom are just fully still alive, are going to be able to go back and the island will be administered by Mauritius.

Mason- The Telegraph, however, have led the charge on this hysterical idea that this is Kiyosutama handing a vital strategic asset directly into the hands of Xi Jinping. Which is a surprise to me. Well, because Xi Jinping is actually from the Chagos Islands, and they exiled him to China, and then he became... this is like kind of hero's journey type stuff, and he became president of China, enough to reclaim his homeland. The first president of China. He did get exiled, but within China. Anyway, the um... We were all concerned about Taiwan, we should have been looking at the Chegos the whole time.

Yeah, what does China want with some islands in the Indian Ocean? Questionable. I did see a post on Twitter.com, sorry, excuse me, X.com, the everything app, with the kind of like range as a circle, overlaid of an F-35 and a B-1 bomber, overlaid on Diego Garcia, this airbase that we've built on these islands, being like, oh well this is gonna be like, vitally important to like any future war with China, and Keir Starmer has just given it away, and like, even if he had, like, one of those circles barely reached China, I'm just like, okay. I just, I like the F-35 circle barely reaching Sri Lanka, which is like, okay, so here's

what we're gonna do. We're gonna fly an F-35 to Sri Lanka, whereupon it will either land or crash, because it's out of fuel. I just, I'm really curious about what kind of strategic mistakes you would have to make as Britain in order to fly an F-35 off of Diego Garcia. And so many things would have to go wrong for us in so many different ways that it's, yeah, I don't know. The right-wing press should come up with one of those like faux, faux woke attack lines

from like a sock puppet account and be like, Britain is giving up its only colonically latino airbase. MW- Well, one thing we are doing is the sun is actually going to set on the British Empire. LW- Yeah, I found that fascinating. MW- Yeah, we're finally going to lose enough, like, colonially administered enough territory that for six months of the year there will be a period where there is not a British territory in the sun all the time. We can pump those numbers up. And that little factoid is worth, I guess, like deporting a bunch of people for decades from their home, and like killing all their dogs and shit.

Once again, the French are better than the British because the sun will not sit on their empire, because they still own little islands everywhere. It's true. They outlasted us. They're still doing colonial violence. And we're just like, you know, because we're woke because Kirstama isn't as tough as Macron. Yeah. They just defended their control of New Caledonia, you know, I said to let Chegos go. Leave it to the French to be at war with Azerbaijan off the coast of Australia. Hearts of iron game getting badly out of hand.

I'm in Napoleon's tomb and hang on a second. The final page of his master plan was stuck together. I can't believe he set in motion all of those events in the 19th century that would culminate reading this like Napoleonic book and it just says, Le F-35A Joint Strike Fighter. How did he predict this? Yeah. The F trance sank. Otherwise, though, in strategic relevance watch on things that are a little bit less,

I don't know, cheery, which is, of course, we're recording this on Monday, October 7th, 2024. Yeah, the one year anniversary of what the fuck did you think was going to happen? Indeed. And this is like, you know, it's the one year anniversary of what the fuck did you think was going to happen. Indeed. And this is, like, it's the one year anniversary of the events of October 7th, Israel has now been basically committing a genocide in Gaza for a year, it's expanded its war effort up into Lebanon. I hate how people keep saying engaging with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

It invaded Lebanon! That's what that is. It has invaded Lebanon, it has bombed Yemen, it may yet bomb Iraq, it's already like, or Iran for that matter. Yeah, it's bombing Syria too. Mm-hmm. The whole spiral continues downwards, and I mean, one year on I stand by my analysis like on the day or the day after, which is like, I have personal sympathy, but like, this is an inevitable

product of occupation and the complacency that that breeds. And now the response from that has been, okay, we're just going to like, obliterate Gaza and then fight the war that we wanted to fight with everyone anyway. Yeah. And this is sort of following strategic relevance watch, right? Because remember what Starmer has been saying every single time. We've touched on this quite a bit, which is he loves to say, we need a ceasefire, and then take no steps at all, materially, to secure one. Right?

That is his, his bread and butter is to, much like Netanyahu does, much like Biden does, excuse me, with Netanyahu, is complain about everything and refuse to do anything because ultimately you agree with what's happening at some level. He's got a lot, he's got a lot on. He has to see Taylor Swift, he has to see the football, he's gotta go clothes shopping with Laura D'Alie, it's a busy schedule. ZACH Yeah, he's gotta get in that vac cube. And at the same time, right, it's like, well, who's actually doing all of this?

It's of course Amos Hoxdean, Brett McGurk, the sort of White House coordinator for the Middle East. ALICE Jake Sullivan. Like, the same handful of absolute fucking morons and perverts and hawks around Biden. Plus Biden himself, not to discount his instinctual Zionism, right? But at some point, some awareness is entering his dying brain that Netanyahu is playing him like a fiddle for this sort of like, on the 50th page of sheet music with a symphony. The bite and anger level has escalated to quit that jack, which is like, it's like a kind of off green color, you know?

Corn pop is being deployed to a US forward operating base in Cyprus. Corn pops range if you overlay it over Diego Garcia. Swim all the way to Sri Lanka with a rusty razor. But he can't get back. So, but like, look, these guys, and Brett McGurk, the thing to always remember about Brett McGurk is he looks a bit like Biden's good son. And like- Just an extremely senile Biden thinking he's talking to Bo, his dead son, and being like, yeah, sure, whatever you want.

Like, if only Brett could have looked like Hunter. I mean, the one who annoys me the most, right, like, McGurk is like, a sort of criminal. Likewise Amos Hoekstein, who was in the IDF, and you would think maybe should therefore recuse himself, is Jake Sullivan, the guy who writes endlessly about how much imposter syndrome he's feeling. The thing that I remember him writing was when you get in the room where you're deciding US policy on this stuff, you think, is this it? Surely there must be another room with people who know what they're doing.

And it's like, I would rather have a thousand Henry Kissingers dripping with blood than this fucking dipshit being like, Oh, this gives me anxiety. Yeah. Also, isn't he the guy from avatar? A nine foot tall blue guy advising Joe Biden. But these guys, no matter how many times, you know, Starmer and co want to talk about, Oh, the necessity for a ceasefire. It's fundamentally Netanyahu, these guys, Biden, whatever, but the primary role of this

close circle of just bloodthirsty lunatics that has surrounded the US president just again shows how little we matter. But on the other side of this before we do move on, right, because I wanted to talk about this a bit, but to mostly focus on our other things, is I don't want to read too much from that. Genuinely, I'd like to say shocking, but it's The Observer, so very little about it can shock me at this point. The odious Howard Jacobson article from The Observer, which is what they chose to do to memorialize the event, which is essentially print an article saying, this is all blood libel

with a picture of a baby, like a baby doll covered in fake blood. The observer is fully printing Pollywood shit. Where he says, I don't accuse the BBC and other news outlets of willfully stirring race memory of the child killing Jew of the Middle Ages, but we don't have to mean harm to do it. We can wreak havoc just as well by being lazy or letting our unconscious to the work of thought by dipping into the communal pile of prejudice and superstition and letting it pepper up our reports. Events don't make it on television through a camera lens alone. What we see is only what an editor chooses for us to see, but somewhere underneath the rubble is the truth, but closer to the surface is the drama."

I mean, somewhere under the rubble are a bunch of dead kids! I was going to say, but choice of fucking words and math is kind of like, fucking hell. Yeah, I didn't read the whole thing, but Jesus Christ like to say like the plain facts of this that like the IDF is killing children is like at best indifferent to the prospect the fact that that's a bad look the fact that that engages with a bunch of like antisemitic tropes is You would think maybe slightly Incidental to the fact that they're doing the thing, right? The problem there is like very clearly with the people doing the killing,

you would hope. The argument here is basically that like what like BBC segment producers have assassins creed into 13th century like Anglican anti-Semites. Essentially just a kind of like epigenetic anti-Semitism. Yeah. It a kind of epigenetic antisemitism. It's sort of been interesting to chart his responses to this because I remember when I, this is maybe like a few months into the post October 7th, like invasions where he goes onto Newsnight and he basically says that like, he acknowledges like what's happening, but he's just like, his argument then was the BBC shows too much of like Israelis committing war crimes, right? So his argument then was not the denial of it, but just like, oh, the BBC keep like broadcasts too much of it.

And they're not broadcasting the other side and like didn't need to define any of that all. Like the clip is like available on YouTube and it's really like remarkable to watch. But what's been interesting reading like parts of this piece a year on is that that he's now gone from a tacit acknowledgement that the Israelis are... He wouldn't say that they were war crimes, but they were in Gaza and that they were dropping bombs and fighting. But at the time it was like, well, we need to eliminate Hamas. So the fact that he's now gone with, well, they shouldn't broadcast anything at all and saying any of this, like evokes a medieval antisemitism that no one else will ever understand. And therefore you just sort of have to listen to me rather than kind of engage with what

is actually happening in front of you, which is not a uncommon argument that a lot of the people who are sort of still making the case for Israel and aren't sort of being honest about it are saying, because like, it's not to say that I respect the people who are sort of still making the case for Israel and aren't sort of being honest about it are saying, because like, it's not to say that I respect the people who are very open to being like, I think Israel should just sort of wipe out everyone in Gaza and like fuck Muslims and all. Cause like, I do think basically the only argument you can make for this is an inherently Islamophobic. But he sort of represents this kind of other bizarre, very Labour like current Kirstam or Labour Party is a generic thing, which is like, they are sort of more concerned with being seen as good people. They want to still be seen as

like, they want to be seen as the victims, but they also, above anything else, they want to be considered to be like, morally coherent. Yeah, there's this spectrum of like, trying to sort of like, grapple with this, which at one end is this Observer article, the other end is the like, John Gantz thing that we may have seen of, like, this pose of like, kind of studied nihilism, of like, oh well, a plague on both the houses. But also like, one thing I'd recommend people reading, there was an, again, this is a Guardian thing, where I think there's a show called Couples Therapy, and like, one of the sort

of person who hosts it is an Israeli, like, psychologist. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And she sort of interviews a Palestinian kind who hosts it is an Israeli, like, like psychologist. And she sort of interviews a Palestinian kind of client of hers that was on the TV show. And if you read that interview, there are sort of, it begins with this thing about, oh, we want to sort of like, you know, we both have sort of have historical claims to the land. We both want to live in peace, et cetera, all that stuff. But as you read towards like the middle of that interview, where it starts discussing like, okay, materially, how does this work? Right. And the Palestinian client says, well, I kind of envisioned this

as being a shared land between two peoples. And so it recognizes both Israel and power. Like there are people who will disagree with that position and they will sort of say that it's too liberal. It's too sort of like forgiving to the Israelis and so on. Fine. That's not the point here, but the, the interesting and the sort of very telling part of it is the Israeli therapist who then kind of says, well, actually, I don't want that. I want a Jewish state because we will only feel safe in that type of thing. And so it's sort of the moment you sort of start talking about, okay, materially, how do you think this will work? So whether it's like the sort of very failed idea of a two-state solution or whether it's just these sort of platitudes about like, oh peace is possible, but we need to sort of get rid of Hamas and everything.

It completely disengages with like the material realities. And I think what we've seen over the past year, and especially as the atrocities have become worse and undeniable, is either a mix of people just refusing to engage with what is happening materially and like just parroting the lines, or sort of going towards more and more bizarre arguments to really kind of still convince themselves that they are like morally righteous people when the argument, the only argument you can make for sustaining what is going on is an inherently orientalist Islamophobic. The Arabs are like inherently violent barbarians. We have to keep killing them forever. Otherwise they will do October 7th to us times a billion.

And no journalist is willing to sort of like, like no mainstream journalist is really willing to confront that truth. So what do you do at that point? I don't know. The piece of that that can like never be discussed in the media and in like the Western narratives is the reason that Israel has to keep fighting these wars is because all of these groups are formed, you know, around opposing the fact that it is an apartheid state, that it is not allowing, you know, Palestinians to have a state or to live equally in one state, which I think a lot of the left would prefer. It's just been shocking to see how this has been able

to continue for so long, and even to compare it to what we recently saw with Russia and how quick we were to condemn them to say that Putin was a war criminal, all this kind of stuff. And we still can't even do those very basic things with Israel, and I feel like the further and further it goes down the track, the more you question. Well, you know, we question anyway, like all these narratives that come from these Western countries.

But like, you know, I don't know. I don't know how people buy into any of this shit anymore. It's also particularly insane. Yeah. I think it's less about even buying in and more just, it doesn't matter if you buy in or not, because what I was sort of getting at with talking about like McGurk, what I was getting at with talking about even mentioning the Jacobson article and Hussein, what I think you illustrated pretty comprehensively and powerfully is this is the exercise of raw power.

And anyone who says anything other than an immediate ceasefire supported by depriving Israel of its ability to continue waging its genocidal war is essentially just saying, I'm fine with the killing of Arabs. I'm fine with the killing of all Arabs, non-combatants, anyone who happens to get in the way because ultimately, that geopolitical consideration or that racial consideration, because whether you're... Regardless of which side of it you're coming at, the fundamental defining question of the last year has been, are Palestinians human? Are Lebanese people human? And it's going to eventually be, are Yemenis human? It's been, are Yemenis human for a long time? And the fact that the UK has continued again,

arming and training the Saudi Air Force has said, no, we don't think Yemenis are human. We don't think Palestinians are human. Another very telling thing, and I'll be very quick with this as well, is the current position that the UK government has in relation to Armenia and Azerbaijan, right? David Lammy diving onto that for no reason whatsoever. It is funny to see someone recreationally dive onto a hand grenade. But I think it's also very telling because it's just like, well, the pretense about like

the British sort of supported the Armenians, which you sort of would feel like, yeah, this is the general position that any government would take for like lots of geopolitical reasons. You know, this sort of makes sense. And it's kind of like coherent with the idea of like, I don't know what you want to call it, like liberal internationalism, whatever. And then, but you know, but ultimately like the argument that sort of been made and the way that David Lammy has sort of like explained that is very much also this record or this kind of like tacit admission on their part, but the British government's position is like, well, the Armenians aren't

really people, like they're not a people. And I think that's a very telling like position for what we are going to be seeing a lot more frequently, particularly among peoples that do not have states and who are, who's like existence is already sort of like called into contention. The thing about the current situation in Israel is that it gives a lot of permission to other states who have also been dealing with these questions to basically be given carte blanche. Because again, the thing that this has done is really upended any idea of a liberal world order

that was already being dismantled anyway. But I think people were saying initially, well, Putin's the one who's gonna threaten this. But no, it happened to be like Netanyahu and the fact that we just love giving him money, despite the fact that he pisses everyone off. We love giving him money. It's like a multipolar consensus now between Putin and Netanyahu and thus Biden. It's just a thing you can do either side of the thing. But it's like any people who just have contentious territory, like I'm thinking about the Kashmiris

here, but you know, there are lots of other examples of this, like their sort of status as you know, people's who at least they're like, you know, their claims to nationhood are sort of tacitly recognized. Like that doesn't really exist in here. It's put like a lot of people in a lot of danger. And the idea that, and the fact that this isn't being recognized sort of more broadly is a very, very scary thing. If we want to talk about scary, I think it's worth even, you know, our next segment was

going to be sort of, you know, some pure ha-has until we got into our discussion about data centers. But I mean, in the context of what we're discussing, right, Palmer Lucky, to remind our listeners, is the CEO of Andoril, a Peter Thiel funded defense tech company. One of the first to be Oculus, like VR headset. He used to be there. He invented a virtual boy and then Mark Zuckerberg, as we all know, desperate to try to be in control of a hardware bottleneck rather than just like being the lowest on the value chain for data. Right?

The inventor of project Milo, Palmer Lucky. So Palmer Lucky, he gave a speech recently at Pepperdine University that I wanted to talk about and I wanted to talk about what his company is doing. Because this is someone who is, if you want to know who's looking at this world and saying amazing, it's not just Brett McGurk. It's not even just Netanyahu. It's not even just people in those quarters of power. It's people who looked at general dynamics and were like, and Raytheon, and we're like, we could be having fun doing this. It's not just people with real names like Brett McGurk. It's also other people with

real names like Palmer Lucky. This entire thing feels like a coma hallucination. On Tuesday, Pepperdine University lives a Malibu University, just one of the most cursed, like a place where some just awful ley lines have converged. A university in Malibu. Live streamed a conversation between weapons merchant Palmer Lucky and the university's president, Jim Gash. No. Yeah, you can laugh at his name. It's hilarious. What are these names? It began with a trailer for Anderil, Lucky's defense firm, and ended with him declining

the gift of a leather bound set of Lord of the Rings books because he couldn't fit them on his motorcycle. Oh my god. Is that why he turned them down? I didn't realize that. Dressed in a neon Genesis-y Evangelion jacket, draped over a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt. Alright, I'm listening. We're saying I'll wait for your reaction. Lucky explained why wars happen. Quote, war only starts between nation-states when one

or both sides misunderstand who's going to win the conflict. If both sides understand who's going to win, it's very rare for things to proceed to violence, because the weaker nation, knowing full well they're going to lose, says, okay, I'm going to capitulate and give you what you want. Sorry, did this man walk here from 1910? What kind of mustachioed Austro-Hungarian staff officer thinking is this? I was going to say, did he walk here from the fucking Delian League? When the Serbs realize the array of artillery we have, sort of like, set out against Belgrade,

they and their Russian masters will certainly, y'know, yield to the Kaiser. Of course that means no one ever believes anything. But he says, and that's why it's important to have peace through strength. Which of course makes sense if you're Palmer Palmer lucky and what you want to do is increase your small amount of DoD contracts to a very large amount of DoD contracts. And I hasten to add that everyone who's ever written some fawning profile of him as a sort of renegade genius or a simple oddball is basically doing his work for them by making the DoD procurement people very aware of who he is when they get told for the millionth time, Hey, can we please stop soul sourcing all of this stuff to Ray Theon or General Dynamics? They're

like, Oh, I know a guy I read about him in Wired. He's an oddball. And I digress. Yeah, he wears Hawaiian shirts. He's into anime. But actually right by being like, oh, peace through strength. If you're an arms dealer, that makes military action more likely by increasing the total number of military factors in the hands of a mix of people who think like Palmer Lucky." And of course, you know, the defense contractor would say this. And, you know, he also said, and this is the thing I think is worth talking about, right? He says, societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting

violence on others in pursuit of good aims. Of course, this guy isn't in the warrior class, of course. He's just, you know, like, this is a nerd, right? We let the nerds get too big for their, our boots. And now they're just- Now he's walked here from Sparta. He's like going back in time. Later in the interview, doesn't he say he's part of the warrior class, though? I was like, dude, come on. He says, a quote, you need people like me who are sick in that way, don't lose any sleep.

You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. I've been playing Hearts of Iron for like nine hours every night. Yeah. You need sickos like me who will defend you from the Franco-Azeri conflict in New Caledonia. You need people like me who are sick in that way and don't lose any sleep making tools of violence. And the thing I wanted to really drive at, in addition to him trying to borrow a little bit of valor there, like, oh yeah, me too. Yeah, by people like me who are tough enough to design the tools of violence.

People like me who are tough enough to own the company to tell other people to design the tools of violence. But what I'm talking about here as well, his main thing that he has over Raytheon and General Dynamics is that he is a huge proponent of totally autonomous AI and weapon systems. Not saying that they're not proponents of it, but because it's a smaller company, he's been able to push that further forward faster saying, quote, there's a shadow campaign being waged in the United Nations to trick Western countries that fancy themselves moral into not applying AI for weapons or defense.

What is the moral victory in being forced to use larger bombs and more collateral damage Western countries that fancy themselves moral into not applying AI for weapons or defense. What is the moral victory in being forced to use larger bombs and more collateral damage because we're not allowed to use systems that can penetrate past jamming systems and strike precisely. And it's like, again, if we're thinking about this world that is more multipolar, where more people are basically unhuman because it is either emotionally satisfying to do that as an occupier who wishes to det detest and fear the occupied party or just just geopolitically convenient right then you know what he's this is a world in which

he's saying okay let us just remove the last even shred right because we always talk about AI I'd never like to talk about AI as being this thing that is going to be a kind of qualitative shift a qualitative shift. When you apply AI to something, you're taking away the last 2% of the human that was ever involved in it. If you're doing AI for copywriting, the stuff you're doing is like, it was basically written by humans who are acting like AIs. It's not saying that humans are going to be more moral, but rather the explosion of precisely targeted killing that can happen in a world where you might say human-ness, considered equal human-ness, is a contracting rather than expanding phenomenon,

is terrifying and enraging. Yeah, well I'm pleased this man is brave enough to ask the question of what if you put a landmine on a Roomba. Yeah, but like being really like warrior cast about it, you know? Yeah, but like being really like warrior cast about it, you know? Yeah, of course. But it's like such bullshit, right? Because like, you know, Israel is doing all of this stuff. It claims to be doing these like precision strikes, but is dropping 2000 pound bombs

like wherever it can get away with doing so. But then we also know that it is you at using these like AI targeted weapons. There was this story a few years ago in the New York Times about how it put this like gun or whatever in Iran to kill a nuclear scientist and it was just like the AI had to figure out when to do it. It was not like controlled by a human. So like these things are already happening. Like, you know, US or UK allies are already doing it if not, you know, our own countries anyway. Yeah, I don't know his whole thing about like the UN is trying to stop the moral, you know, the Western countries who see themselves as so moral as not adopting this stuff is just like, I don't know. It's like wild and conspiracy theory, like in my

mind. Well, again, it's like what it's saying is, you know, get over any, harden your heart O'Farrill, get over any qualms you might have about programming a drone swarm to kill every quote unquote combatant. And by the way, we'll know they were combatants if they were killed because they were killed by the drone swarm, which is only programmed to kill combatants in a town that we would very much like cleared of quote unquote combatants. And crucially, you have to pay me a large amount of money to make the drone. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Well, I've got to convert all these Roombas. Yeah. And so Lucky is also like trying to, I mean to... Anderil is also trying to do so much dumb shit. So this was sent to me by Wartakes on Twitter. So, hat tip to them. But that... And now, Anderil is trying to redo the constantly doomed... And this will take us into our next segment, I think, quite tidily. It's time to redo the constantly doomed future warrior program. Yeah. We're finally doing Future Soldier shit again. We're gonna- I mean, it makes sense for Palmer Luckey, to, y'know, the Oculus guy, to be very into the, as far as I can tell, never really practical yet attempt to just give

you a combat eyepiece monocle type thing. ZACH Of course, because this guy has to wink at his fascism. He needs to say, it's gonna be like Starship Troopers, but the book. He says, we're gonna make the infantry headsets that featured in Robert Heinlein's 1950 Starship Troopers novel, being very careful to say, novel. We're doing the novel. Yeah. Uh huh.

And again, this has been a thing that, like, various, I think more or less every military in the world has been trying to do for 40 years at this point. It's bad! It never works! Sometimes it's mixed in with stuff like, oh we're gonna do like, powered exoskeletons or whatever the fuck, but yeah. We try to keep making our soldiers into the Starship Troopers novel, but they keep being the soldiers in the Starship Troopers movie, what the fuck?

But basically, one of the things that Lucky says he wants to do is he says he wants to, again, use AI, because he wants Department of Defense contracts. He says he wants the wearers of this system to be alerted to incoming threats picked up by air defense systems even when outside visual range, enhancing soldiers to give them all the vision and power Superman has. Cool. ALICE At least when, like, the nerds who developed Napalm did it, they were boring lab coat guys. I feel like with this and the Kissinger thing I said earlier, I'm really going back to a

1960s nostalgia for the war crimes, but like, Christ, at least they weren't this annoying, you know? Yeah, we're gonna turn our soldiers into Superman, they're gonna be terrified of Kryptonite. They're gonna have to hide their true identity. But ultimately, right? The thing he's saying is unique. That's different from how Microsoft delivered it in 2021 is that, oh, it's not going to cause like them to like have headaches and seizures and shit, but also

it's going to have AI in it. That seems like bare minimum, not going to cause seizures. Yeah. It's not going to cause seizures. Yeah, it's not gonna cause seizures and also all the like tactical situational information it feeds you is gonna be slightly but plausibly wrong. I would say if I was a soldier and someone handed me this new headset and they were like, it's not gonna cause seizures, I would have a lot of questions that are technically answered by what they just said. But again, like it's going to be like, okay, well, either you can wear a big computer on

your back or of course we can build data centers near every combat zone. That's not going to be a vulnerability at all in any future conflict. Yeah. The military bases are just like big data centers, you know? Yeah. Well, with your connected to Diego Garcia via Firefly. So let's talk big data centers, you know? Yeah. Well, you're connected to Diego Garcia via 5G. So let's talk about data centers. Keir Starmer is set to announce the creation of a 10 billion pound,

quote unquote, AI data center. Crucially, we should say there's no such thing as an AI data center. It's just a data center. But it's for AI now. So it's better, you know? That will bring 4,000 jobs to the Northeast of England, and which is being funded by Blackstone. Not BlackRock, Blackstone, they're different.

And this is all very exciting. It's a huge part of the new planning reforms being pushed by labor, which are basically, okay, we're gonna class data centers as critical national infrastructure, so they always get built. We can overrule anyone who says we shouldn't build them, and we can build fucking tons of them,

because we're absolutely going to need all the compute we can get. We're doing compute mercantilism. We're We have to locate compute in the country so that we can build the future. We're not going to put homes in the green belt because people are not happy about that, but we'll stick data centers throughout the whole thing. That's right. And of course, on that particular data center in the Northeast, 4,000 jobs. Well, it turns out that 2,700 of them were going to be indirect and not employed by the project itself. And another 1,200 will just be

temporary construction roles. So a hundred, maybe a couple hundred jobs will be here. Yeah. Are we gonna train anybody who lives there to work in a data center? Oh, so most of the jobs at a data center are outsourced security guard. Oh, okay. You get a few to swap the servers in and out, you know, but. Yeah, sorry. Two guys who are plugging things in and unplugging them and then 40 security cards. And don't forget the couple janitors probably to clean things up.

Yes. Contracted staff not employed by the data center, but employed by agencies. I exaggerate with two guys to plug in stuff and unplug it. But the vast majority of the economic activity enabled by data centers is nowhere fucking close to the data centers. And I think that's one of our ways into this. It's something that you could explore quite a bit

on this new podcast series that you're doing, Paris. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's, I don't know. I feel like I started to hear these stories a few years ago about the impacts that these data centers were having in communities. And like, you know, for a bit I was like, oh, that sounds bad for that specific community.

But then I started to hear about like so many more in so many countries around the world where people are getting fed up with these things. Because like, you know, as you say, these major tech companies or these companies building these data centers come to town and they're like, we're going to give you all these jobs. We're going to give you prosperity. We're going to allow you to have this innovative economy because now this tech thing is going to be near your run-down community that lost its industrial base years ago and is looking for jobs for your people.

And it's like, oh, this sounds great. Let's give them tax breaks. Let's give them all these incentives to attract them. And then they arrive and it's like, OK, there's actually very few jobs here. They have massive energy demands or very significant water demands or both. And in some cases, when they start to build out a ton of them, like I was speaking to people in Northern Virginia, where there's even this kind of eerie sound that comes from them

from the kind of big fans from the cooling and stuff, that if you're close enough to one of these things, like, you know, it can really affect you. There are all these negatives and all these downsides that come with it. And then it's like, why are we building these in the first place? It's for generative AI. And it's so these companies can keep like collecting all this data on us to like, you know, target ads at us and target product recommendations and shit like that. And it's like, is this really what we're sacrificing?

Like all of these resources and all this shit for it. Like it doesn't seem like a good trade off. And I feel like more and more people are like, this doesn't make sense, you know? Yeah. If we're talking about the UK, especially, just go back to what you said about power and water. We are, of course, a country that has impeccable, robust power and water infrastructure. Yeah, we're going to be the first country to have a shit fueled, a shit cooled data center. Yeah, we're going to be the first country to have a shit-fueled, a shit-cooled data

center. Yeah, it's going to be so good. Somehow my emails are going to get Salmonella. We're not sure how, but it's going to happen. We talked before, and I know you mentioned this, or you are going to mention this in your series, Paris, but about how Elon Musk opened up a sort of hyperscale data center in South Memphis, basically being like, oh yeah, we can't get enough power from the grid right away. So we're just going to have like nine

methane generators driving around the place so they don't have to register. This is what a data center does. It plonks itself in the middle of your locality. It steals a huge amount of things your locality needs. It takes up not just space, but it takes up also like, as we say, it takes up a connection to the power grid, which again, in the UK, our power grid is very old and very bad. And connecting to it takes a long time, it is difficult, and can have huge impacts on the stuff around you.

And not to mention the water, right? Because local councils and the central government are so eager to have the appearance of economic prosperity and they want stuff being built, then it's just like these things will be rushed through and then wouldn't you know it, your power's gone, your water is being, you know, your shit-filled water is being rerouted so you don't even get the bad water. The water is full of shit and the portions are so small.

Essentially. And the companies using these data centers, guess what? They're not going to be located in Blythe, which is where this one they were talking about this being funded by Blackstone is being built on, by the way, hilariously, the former British vault factory, which was this like startup that got a huge amount of government funding. I love that. Incremental scam center. Yeah. It's like the cursed lot on the high street, you know, it's like a failed barber

shop and then it's a failed vape shop or whatever. It's like this, but with like a multi-hectare site. Light industrial area. Yeah. It's haunted server racks. It seems like a kind of Y Combinator for sort of crackpot failed ideas, so Y Combinator. We built this data center on an old I see Nibiru ground. Ooh. Why the British vault factory? Why no one's been in there for upwards of eight months? The guy, the one guy working,

they're like changing the servers over and he hears a voice that's like, leave this place. And there's like shit coming down from the ceiling. There's shit coming down from the ceiling. It's like, no, this shit is just from the water network. And then like, the ghost of the CEO of British Vault just still wanders the halls. Guy's not even dead. He's dead.

Yeah. He's more of a memory. He's wearing a chain of lithium batteries that were never manufactured. He's constantly catching on fire. I would have loved to power your car, Adam. Aborted CEO. It's so cold here in hell where all CEOs go when they die. I could have created so much economic opportunity for you, Anon. I could have been part of the warrior class.

But local governments basically try to do this, right? And the funny thing, not the funny thing about this, but of course, is that Starmer tweeted a picture of himself with the CEO of Black Rock after meeting with the president of Blackstone. He's in a get me Henemore type situation. Now listen here, Mr. Starmer, you're going to have a meeting with this man from Blackstone. Be sure not to confuse him with the other man from Black Rock. Now I know you're going to mix this up, Strummer. And I've got a system that even you cannot fail to understand.

By the door with John Gray, CEO of Black Stone, I have this album cover from Sly and the Family Stone, which I've colored black, which I will now hang here. And with Mr. Fink, the boss of Black Rock, I have, of course, Seminole Rock Band, Sly and the Family Stone, with one of their albums, Colored Black, which I shall hang here. Even you can't screw this up anymore. It was a very confusing meeting.

I'd like to call into question some of the ways that this company is managed. The other funny thing of course is when this was happening, he was in New York with Varun Chandra, the Hukloit guy that now like never leaves his side. So we'll be talking a little bit more of course about Hukloit when we next speak with Ethan, which I think should be pretty soon. I like working with people from Hukloit because it's a weird fucked up name that you can't confuse with anything else. Mr. Stalmer, your 10am meeting with Hachette and your 11 a.m. meeting with Yakult have both run into your Huclote meeting.

So let's talk a little bit about data centers because you know Paris you've alluded to some of these right? There have been backlashes against data centers and like across Europe and Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Dublin, different parts of the states as well. Basically saying what we've always said would happen which is when you build a data center, power and water become huge issues for the cities that have to then host them. Yeah, exactly. And just to add to what you're saying, you're seeing it across Europe.

You're seeing it in South America, Chile, Uruguay, places like that. In the States, of course, in Mexico, Singapore. It's really all around the world that you're starting to see this backlash to the construction of these data centers. And a lot of it comes from because there're these massive hyperscale data centers, like they have tens of thousands of servers in these massive warehouses, the size of like

several football fields, if not, you know, many more than that, right? So they have huge energy and water demands in order to power these servers, but also to cool them down. You know, even in the UK, there was this story a couple of years ago that I believe it was in West London, they were like, we can't build any more homes for the next little while because these data centers are using so much energy. And over in Ireland, which is one of the hubs of data center construction in Europe, 21% of all of their electricity now goes to data centers, which is just ridiculous to think

about it. And in the winter, they have these amber alerts where the grid operator has to be centers, which is just ridiculous to think about it. And in the winter, they have these amber alerts where the grid operator has to be like, everyone watch your power usage because we might run out of power and have blackouts. Yeah, Palma Lucky's using it. Exactly, right? It's just wild to see these impacts.

And so it's no surprise then that you have these groups and these communities in so many places where these data centers are being built now starting to push back against them and say, we are not okay with building these types of infrastructures in our communities because sure, we're being promised all these wonderful things, you know, all this innovation that's going to come and all these jobs and whatnot, but that's not what actually arrives. And instead, what you have is this massive demand on the water system and this massive demand on the power grid where, you know where you have this risk to people being able to have enough power in some communities.

In others, it's like other businesses that seem more essential. There's stories in the Nordic countries where bakeries and stuff can't set up because the data centers are using all this power. Or of course, talk of not being able to build more homes because there's not enough power for them. Or in a lot of these countries, there's also talk about the impacts then on climate targets, because you have all this extra energy that is then needed to power these data centers. And so as you're bringing renewables online

to try to displace the fossil energy that you're using, you're actually finding that you need to keep the fossil energy online as well and use those renewables to power the data centers that you're adding, because there's such a huge energy demand there. And so, you know, we see in Ireland, we see in the United States and many other countries where this is happening, where, you know, we know that these countries were not going to meet their climate targets anyway, but now they're much further away

because, you know, they need to power the data centers and it's just so ridiculous. You know, this is, if you want to talk about the people inside the Labour Party who are pushing this, I mean, Peter Kyle, you know, Mr. Sikandmans, from like the tech industry, is one of these people who's saying, yes, we're going to update national planning policy to reflect the importance of data centers to make it so localities cannot overrule their construction. That's so wild. Yeah.

It's so like powerfully British though, to be like, well, no, you can't build things in general unless they're bad. In which well, no, you can't build things in general unless they're bad. In which case, yes, you can build them. Under any other circumstances, it's very difficult to build something unless it's really bad. In which case, oh boy. But it's like, that's one of the things that the activists in Ireland are pushing back on too, right?

The fact that you have these massive tech companies that are moving in and these local authorities are basically being like, yeah, you can build your data centers here. We don't really have many planning rules. And the activists are like, this makes no sense. These massive tech companies don't even need to deal with the national government and national standards for building these data centers. They just go to these small counties around Ireland

and be like, we're going to build this massive data center here. And the county is like, OK, I guess. And then even in the UK, you see there was this story, what was it, like a month ago or something, where Google was like, the UK is going to fall behind and be left behind in the AI race or whatever, unless it builds a ton of new data centers

and passes a law that says that we can use all this copyrighted material to train our AI models and treat it as fair use and not seek repercussions for that. It's like, what is going on? But Paris, have you considered that Google may have given a number of front bench MPs some very good vouchers to spas near London? Have you considered that? Have you considered that potentially they got half off a second pair of trainers at

JD Sports? West Street and got free tickets to see Roy Chubby Brown. I love how your corruption over there is like, you know, in the, in the U S it's like, oh my God, or they're like putting hundreds of millions of millions of dollars behind these candidates and in the UK it's like, oh, we got some Taylor Swift tickets and like some tickets to this game. It's like, oh yeah, how quaint. One thing, I mean, yeah, one thing we're good at as a country is being twee. And I imagine

that also extends to like the corruption element as well. Yeah. Why didn't we just put a fat stoof on the data center and have done with it? I'm sure people never catch on fire. But, but Peter Kyle kept on saying, right? He says one of the key infrastructure challenge we have with the future is going to be managing compute power and all the data storage that needs to happen for a modern economy. And again, we know what's happening here, right? Which is the Labor Party being the party of business has to anticipate and bend over backwards for what Google or Amazon or any of these companies want. But that whole idea of what a modern economy is just gets

defined and it just gets defined. And then the terms of the question of, well, what is in a modern economy? How come a modern economy needs to have all of this like incredibly intensive compute power keeping either directly or indirectly, keeping fossil fuel power online, right? To say we're simply too far behind to become a world leader and we're behind in building data centers. He could have essentially just read out the Google press release from a box at Leicester City or whatever. And we talk about power consumption. So I have some numbers here, which is the UK, 1.4% of our total consumer electricity demand is used by data centers, but that should be about 10% over the next decade. So it's going to more than quintuple,

which is again, fucking enormous. Yeah. Yeah. Are we hugely expanding the capacity of our renewable energy, uh, electricity or, or, um, the grid itself? Thank you for asking that Milo. We are going to be de-risking private investment pursuant to our fiscal rules. Cool. Okay. Good. Excellent. Answers all of my questions. That sounds great. Yeah. Very appealing. Yeah. You know, I think, you know, we're worried

about our crumbling overseas territory holdings. I think we could, we could merge these two issues. I think we should be opening up data centers, you know, uh, Chagos islands, Ascension Island, Tristan, Dacuña, Falkland, South Georgia. We could have data centers on which the sun doesn't set. But additionally, right? What's the government announcing at the same time? Is it is announcing, so it doesn't have to turn off any fossil fuel sources. It is of course announcing 21.7 billion pounds going to subsidize the private development of carbon capture clusters on Mersey side and Teesside.

Are those gonna do anything? Thank you so much for asking November. No. We have a lot of experience with carbon capture over here in Canada because of Alberta and yeah, it does not work. I was kind of hoping it would on account of I have to live here and it, um, you know, I would like it if it was, you know, didn't get much warmer. Have you tried buying a ticket to Mars? Uh, you know, I would like it if it was, you know, didn't get much warmer. Have you tried buying a ticket to Mars? You know, that's an out. I mean, yeah, we could, we could try hashtag occupying that I guess.

You know, we need to make sure that Kamala Harris doesn't win in November though, because if that happens, we're never going to Mars according to Elon Musk. So we're all going to be too busy doing woke and we won't go to Mars. Too woke for Mars. We'll be barred out and just laughing while pointing our guns and at our closed doors. You would much rather be on the Kamala Harris mission to Mars than the Trump one though. Like the Kamala, like you, you need to be zanned out for that journey. You want to be on the ship to Mars going like, yeah, go to the fucking planet. Whatever. You don't, you don't want the Trump version of that. Yeah, I kind of do. But

yeah, the Trump generation ship where it's that photo of him with all the hamburgers. Just that's the first thing you see in the slide. There's going to be like 80 years of this shit. Eating slowly decaying hamburgers. Yeah. The whole way this is going to work is these carbon intensive and electricity generating methods that are not going to be phased out because any renewable capacity we build is going to data centers. A lot of data centers, in fact, will connect directly to renewable energy sources and keep them from ever going on to the grid at all. Awesome.

It's like a way to block renewables from ever actually displacing fossil fuels. It's brilliantly elegant, at least. There was this interview that Eric Schmidt gave last week where he was basically like, we're not going to meet our climate targets anyway, so we may as well build all these data centers and put all this energy in the AI and hope that it solves climate change for us. I was like, oh great, I love this bet that we're making. The worst case scenario is that you get like what, a lot, like a bunch of like shot by shot remakes of Miyazaki films.

So like, that's cool. Something for us to watch as we like hurtle over the abyss. Well basically yeah. Like you know, that's it. It's like, you know, as the world burns, you'll just get loads of like these kind of pastiches and you know, remakes that, you know, don't satisfy anything, but you can point it in and be like, oh, it's like the film that I saw when I was a child. The AI guys are so cool. Like they're suggesting that we plagiarise our solution to climate change. Like, like it's like, it's 4am the night before your essay is due. Like you're

completely fucked. You're like, what if, what if we just knock it into chat GPT? How do you solve climate change and hope for the best? Yeah. And of course chat GPT's answer is more chat GPT. In conclusion, climate change is more chat GPT. In conclusion, climate change is a land of contrast. Yeah. Eric Schmidt's answer then is more chat GPT because what if China does it? So we have to build more data centers.

What if China makes Pistachios of Miyazaki films? That could cause a lot of problems. Yeah. I mean, look, you think chat GPT is scary. What about China GPT? Let me just leave you with that. So true. I mean, Milo, you joke,

but that's essentially every single Eric Schmidt speech. It is, yeah. Amazing. Another current sort of battle against the expansion of data centers at the time of recording, that's the top of the headlines at least, is about the village of Abbott's Langley in Hertfordshire. Not far, Milo, I believe, from where you grew up.

Yeah, I don't know. Probably not. I think it's near where my girlfriend grew up, I think. How far is Harlow from anything anyway? A 31-hectare plot used to be a field grazed by cows that produced milk for the Ovaltine factory that has been bought by Greystoke Land, a property developer that is going to build a hyperscale data center the size of dozens of US football fields with Angela Rayner already beginning the process to overrule the local authority. So funny that they've specified how many US football

years it would be. Yeah, I saw that. I editorialized in US because I didn't want to have ambiguity. So it's like already Google might as well just be governing directly. If we go back to their report, oh, the UK needs to not fall behind, needs to build data centers, needs to relax all restrictions on the use of copyrighted material. And isn't it great? Google, we're going to be able to use AI as a second independent reader in UK double-read cancer screening systems, which again, we know there's evidence now that that doesn't work very well. It makes it worse

at detecting outcomes, not better. Oh well, can't win them all. Just have to use it for everything else and maybe we'll find something useful for it. And maybe that thing will be stopping climate change. Yeah, why not? Maybe. The reason I keep going back to these things like the Google document or like what the UK government is doing is it is another clear example of just being told to fuck off when you want to exercise any democratic control over what happens to you or in your name. It's like, oh yeah, no, we need this data center. Why?

Well, it's going to bring a lot of economic opportunity to the area. Is it? Well, no, not really. But it is going to use a lot of power and water. What's it going to be used for? It's going to be used for improving things like AI cancer screening. Does that work? Not really. Yeah. And also the big American tech companies are doing it. So we have to do it right.

It's interesting that, like, you know, I feel like I haven't been following the UK politics so closely, but I feel like St Starmer is like, you know, we're going to revive the economy and all this shit. And like, there's such a huge focus, you know, on this, on this area of it, on like, how do we attract the American tech companies, get them to do more things in the UK? It's like Ireland already did it. Yeah. Exempt them from taxes. That's what you got to do. The impression that I sort of get is that it's like, because like one of his sort of key goals of trying to secure a second term is like economic growth at all costs. And they sort of said that during the election, but it's also like, again, it's very much

about like the British tradition of short-termism. And so it's like, well, we're not going to like grow the economy. We've been short-termists for years and it's been fine. And we're going to keep being short-term forever. That's our long-term plan. And well, basically, yeah. And it's because also Vittorius did the same thing, right? Because they were the ones that were sort of courting open AI. And as far as I'm aware, they're still building the whole big open AI campus in King's Cross,

right? And the idea was really just like, oh, well, these guys like nebulously like tech, like the kind of places where we can drive income quickly, I suppose. Because like the finance sector, as far as I'm aware, in like London is sort of not really expanding in London, like in a lot of cases, they're sort of moving out of it. And so the Sisi or like London for so long has sort of relied on that and also relied on like booming property prices for like overinflated crumbling houses. And considering both of those things are now sort of either in decline or at least stagnant. It's only sourced for like an economic growth injection, either comes from perpetual Taylor

Swift concerts, or like courting AI companies to presumably make AI Taylor Swift like a permanent fixture in London. That's the dream, isn't it? We could have hosted her on that orb. We could have hosted her on the mound, you know? I want to finish on something fun. This is an article straight out of Britain's Rod and Todd version of the press, and we're going to read it.

It is by a guy called Adam Hart, and it is entitled, Shhh. My Dad was a Tory MP, why I didn't tell my friends.' magnificent. I love it already. "'What does your dad do?' is a question I have dreaded in my adult life, and my invariable answer, he works in property, was deeply misleading. But I told it to myself it was not completely untrue, because he worked in a property, it just happened to be the Palace of Westminster. Already we're getting off to a very strong start. I saw this article promoted by some serious journalist with the kind of idea of, this

kid can really write, by the way. He worked in a property. Amazing. Yeah, of course. I love the idea that this was going to be like, which is not a lie, because he did also have a massive property portfolio, as many Tory MPs do. It wasn't always this way. When Dad was first elected in 2010, I was 10 years old and didn't understand what it meant. Seeing his name plastered around the county on election boards was fun. On car journeys with friends, we played the Simon Hart game, the aim being

to guess how many of his election boards we had passed on the drive. In my under 11s cricket team, I was known as Simon Hart's son. I felt a certain amount of pride that my friends knew who my dad was. And it's the implicit message throughout the article is like, I wish people still treated me like I was under 10 years old. Yeah. Yeah. And also it's like the more serious message, of course, is I wish it was still 2010 and the Tories never did anything or that anyone affected by what they did just never really disliked them for it or people associated with them. But also very much a sense of I wish I was still under the age of 10. That was easier.

There's way less colouring in my life now. The number of crayons I'm using has like dropped precipitously. That's a choice. You can still do colouring. I'm doing it right now as we're recording the show. I'm having a lot of fun. You can still do that. I just want to clarify, you can still do it.

Anyway, please continue. The early years were wonderful. I visited parliament for the first time when I was 12, ate on the terrace and watched PMQs before meeting the PM himself, David Cameron. Wow. This guy could write, huh? It's a regular Woodward and Bernstein. God, he must have paid a lot to meet David Cameron for lunch.

These were also my first years in secondary school. I was open about dad's job where in history we reenacted the battle of Hastings and I found myself charging across the playing fields, wielding a blue vote Simon Hart election board shield. If politics came up in the classroom, I would simply say he was conservative and that would be it. But as the time rolled by, sometimes teachers probed further. This is the turn of the article where it's like, ah, we have taken the call. We have we have the call to adventure out into the real world.

We are no longer under the age of nine. And people sort of know that. The real world has been secondary school. Yes, exactly. Doesn't get nothing. And there was teachers prying about what my dad does for work. Yeah. Implicitly, of course, the woke teachers. What does your dad think of X or

what's his policy on Y? I never had a clue. So I'd ring him to find out. I didn't mind. I was flattered people cared. Sorry to interrupt, but presumably like because he's going to a local school, their dad, his dad is probably the MP. It's tough to say, but I think yes. I think Simon Hart did live in his constituency. Right. Okay. Yeah. I don't think he was a rotten burrow, but I'm happy to be corrected about that. Say in my mid also it's like what teacher is going to be like number one, very funny to be a teacher and be like, Oh yeah. Little piss boy. What does your dad think about my fucking wonder? I think as a teacher, they kind of tell you not to do that with the kids. Right. Yeah. You can't call your students little piss boy. Yeah. It's like, it's

like having Tony Soprano's kid in your school. You're going out to him like, listen, I want to talk to your father. I'm having his bound. You think he can help me with this? You know, maybe someone at the constituency office can have a bit of a word with this guy. The cloak of naivety, though, that protected me was wearing off. Teachers began asking about things like

austerity, airstrikes in Syria, or universal credit. Why is it always teachers, by the way? Well I guess it's because when he wrote this article he didn't want to be complaining about teenagers. Uh huh. That's a little bit too Tory MP, you know? Yeah, exactly. Teachers began asking about things like austerity, airstrikes in Syria, universal credit. But by far the most common question, often asked in front of a full classroom, was, does your dad travel first class on the train? And what we're about to

hear is like eight years worth of staircase wit, where he says, yes, I'd reply wondering why 650 people traveling to work comfortably attracted so much attention before adding smugly after I began to get older. And you're welcome to join him at Port Talbot station at 530 on Monday morning. Cue the outrage. Whoa. What? The play, the play you have to, he has to get the train from the place that he represents.

Yeah. But he travels comfortably. The other enormous change of the 2010s was technology and social media. When dad was first elected, I didn't even have a phone when dad was first elected, you were nine. Do you know what people thought of him? I'd have to go to his. When dad was first elected, you were nine. To hear what people thought of him, I'd have to go to his constituency office and open the post, which was a method of contacting your MP then, just as much as an email. But it wasn't because it was ye olde 2010. It was because you were nine.

People had phone. I had a phone because I wasn't nine. By the mid 2010s, everything was online. At first, usually reading through the comments. It was online before you were just a child. You don't remember because you were six then, but it was. Yeah. This is so funny because like he just sort of jumped over the fact that email wasn't is a thing. And so, and it's not like an uncommon thing, but it's like, yeah, you were just like, he

was a generation that sort of went from vaguely knowing what the mail was to like, oh, now everyone just WhatsApp's each other. These kids, man, they don't remember MSN messenger. I will fake them remember. Yeah, they never went through retrenches. At first, reading through the comment section on dad's Facebook page was funny and insults were usually lighthearted. Quote, as an MP you bat at eight and don't ball was a favorite of mine.

It didn't last. Comments became personal and nasty. The kinder gentler politics happened and all of a sudden it wasn't just baffling cricket analogies. They were asking me things about stuff my dad actually did. Yeah, and people were angry about the stuff he was doing. Suddenly the comments on my dad's Facebook page were a lot more silly mid-on than cover drives. In June 2016, while I was revising my GCSEs, Jo Cox was murdered outside her constituency surgery. At home, the powers that be reviewed our home security but failed on account of the public footpath that runs past our door. So we fitted a panic button in my parents wardrobe as well

as a motion triggered alarm. The first night the alarm was in operation, a badger walked past and set it off, summoning the police to our house at first night the alarm was in operation, a badger walked past and set it off, summoning the police to our house at three in the morning. And yeah, that's the only time it ever went off obviously. I mean, to be fair, Dory MP probably trying to get rid of the badgers as well. Maybe he dangered the badger lobby. Oh no, Simon Hart.

He felt like Al Badger was after it. Simon Hart, one of the main things about him is that he is a huge fox hunting and badger call proponent. Yes. There you go. It was. It was the badgers who were trying to get him.

He's angered the animals of Farthing Woods. He was for over a decade, the master huntsman of the South Pembrokeshire hunt. Christ. Imagine getting taken out with like a makeshift bow and arrow by like the characters from the Red Wall books. He was the chief of the country. Also, he says, by the Theresa May snap election in 2017, I was in sixth form and elections were tiresome and horrible.

My parents worked around the clock and had no capacity to think about anything past the election date. Again, they did that the last time you were just nine. Election boards were also vandalized and stolen regularly. And this is what I want to bring up, which he does not mention Adam Hart, is that Simon Hart was, you might've heard of him last, unless you're a Fox or a Badger. And when in 2019, he posted a sign that was defaced with swastikas and a message about him being like, Simon Hart, you know, vote Simon Hart and underneath someone wrote, will

kill your nan and like burn her house or whatever, something like this. The Nan killing I remember. The Tories did kill a bunch of people's Nans and a bunch of Badger's Nans. Yeah, that is true. They did kill the Nans, but he posted this, this picture being like, Oh, I have such a hard time. Every, it's so hard being an MP. Basically I'm Joe Cox too, uh, with two swastikas.

And then that message about him being shit. Forgetting that two years ago he had posted to make the same lame complaint using the same sign minus the swastikas. So it's like either... Well now the evil miscreants had come back and added the swastikas to make their point even clearer. They've got more Nazi. Just a beautiful way of winning an argument to be like, by the way, the Tories will kill your nan and by the way, I'm a Nazi. Yeah. Getting the sense that I'm losing the argument and just busting out the Nazism as well.

It looks like he defaced his own sign to get pity. But this article is all because, right, because otherwise he would have had to put the previously defaced sign back out. And unless he ran out of signs, I think that's pretty unlikely. I can't believe they spray painted blacks rule. Yeah, essentially. This whole article is about the abuse that MPs gets. It hurts the children as well. How terrible. And I died a social death because no one would like sleep with me because I was the son of a Tory or whatever. And it's like the person you're talking about was involved in a minor scandal about this, about building one himself or allegedly building one himself. He didn't have a good argument as to why he didn't, as to why the swastikas were on a

previously vandalized campaign site. So when university came around in September, I adopted a tell no one approach. I couldn't help feeling uncomfortable that my friends knew how much money my dad earned, or that a mistake in his work or personal life would be broadcast to the country. Perhaps more importantly, dad had gone from having an interesting job to an embarrassing one because he was conservative. There seemed to have been an erosion of respect for MPs spearheaded by organizations like Momentum. And when I read that sentence, I felt like I was having a heart attack rocketing back to 2018.

I'm so sorry that a Momentum badger assassinated this guy's dad or whatever, but like... Jeremy Corbyn and his legions of highly trained badgers attacked this man. It feels like this is another article that time traveled from 2018. Like, where is anyone getting off saying this guy is a worthwhile columnist? It's very funny to be writing about a period where, like, the Tories have been in government for however many years and were, like, running the country into the ground. And they're like, there's an erosion of respect for MPs. Where could this be coming from? Presumably the opposition. There's no way that the current government could be doing anything to affect the level

of respect that the public have for MP. Within weeks at my university, my new approach was vindicated. I downloaded dating app. Within weeks of arriving at university, you downloaded dating app. For the first time, I found hundreds of profiles that simply read, no Tories, fuck the Tories, Tories don't swipe right, but I wonder what these people's reactions would be if they discovered my dad was a Tory MP. I don't know, they probably wouldn't swipe right on you.

Would I be cast from the dating pool, forced to denounce my old man before entering a pub? I wonder what reaction no labour on my profile would have drawn. This is a guy, it's been so long. Does he say what university this is? Because unless it's fucking like, SOAS or Goldsmiths, I find the premise that if you're a Tory you couldn't get laid inherently implausible It does not say does not in fact also there's plenty of people at size and goldsmiths whose dad is a Tory MP They're just also hiding it. No. No doesn't say oh yeah Cardiff University No, it's Cardiff University was it for his journalism masters. It doesn't say where he went

You know masters in journalism and then wrote this. That's very funny. Fascinating. It doesn't say where he went to his undergrad. Also, I like this idea that he's basically making himself a kind of struggle session, like cone hat that he puts on before he goes into the pub and is like, well, I guess you all hate me, I suppose. And then just assuming that that's why that nobody wants to talk to him, like for reasons

other than that. Students posted ads for houses on Facebook that often read, join our fun loving group, three super sociable history students looking to live with people in other courses. Preferably clean it up for nights out. No Tories. That's not even Tory as a party affiliation, that's Tory as a vibe. A vibe which I might add this article embodies quite well of the whiniest little cunt in the world.

Another time somebody asked who the secretary of state was for Wales in our course group, another friend answered that cunt Simon Hart in the classroom or lunch area conservatives were the butt of endless jokes, the fodder for angry students fiercely competing with each other to prove their anti-Tory credentials. Imagine you are Simon Hart and you have to proofread this for your kid, because this is his Sunday Times debut, and you're just reading about how much everybody hates you. My father's crime? Working for a legitimate democratically elected mainstream political party.

And nothing else. Yep, that's right. Seeking sympathy is of course not my aim, but rather is to reveal the toxicity of our politics. And again, like the other, this is the last thing I'll read from it because it's just the usual standard shit from here on in. In the autumn of 2022, I finished my masters and my dad became Rishi Sunak's chief whip. After 14 years in government with a party hell bent on tearing itself apart, his workload was phenomenal. He worked 15 hour days, leaving home Sunday afternoons and spent every spare moment on

the phone to someone. Permanent dark rings formed around his eyes and he picked at his nails constantly." What the fuck did he see his chief whip? My dad started looking like the protagonist of a James Elroy novel. I think he's basically still cool though. It's also very funny to be like, oh, oh, you think my dad is bad. You think my dad is evil. Well, actually, my dad was doing 15 hour days at the evil factory just to put food on the table

for us taking out the mouths of orphan children and badges. It's also like just like, cause if you're chief whip of Rishi Sunak's conservative party, you know everyone you have to blackmail. You know all the blackmail on everybody in know everyone you have to blackmail. You know all the blackmail on everybody in case you ever have to use it. He must have gotten fucking like secondhand PTSD from reading those folders. I swear to God. Yeah. He's got the compromise that made Peter Andre perform at the Tory party conference.

What do they know about Peter Andre? At midnight on the date of the election, Dad arrived at the count. The announcement was due at four in the morning. And rather than waiting under the glaring lights of the sports hall, he retreated to his car where he spent the last four hours of his political career alone in a pitch black rain swept car park, preparing to lose his job on live TV. And it's like, God damn. Makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it?

Yeah. God damn. It's just like, oh yeah? Well, my dad was crying in his car. He was so sad. Yeah. God, this is like, oh yeah? Well, my dad was crying in his car. He was so sad. Yeah. What was the car? Not mentioned. Look, that's all Adam Hart I want to give a voice to. In fact, probably all the, the only Adam Hart will ever read. Oh, you think that we're not going to be rid of him for the rest of our fucking lives.

I was going to say when someone decides to become a columnist and their father is, sort of has a blue link on Wikipedia They often just have a quick go at it and then they try something else How many gold stars do you give him for his first column? I give him a three pieces of macaroni art stuck on the fridge out of five. He could have been more whiny and And self-victimizing. Could he? Look, there's always room for improvement He hasn't even had any children that he hates yet. Yeah. Paris, how many exaggerated hands brought to the face to mine crying out of two? Do you give that column out of two? Yeah. It's like two out of two. It got to be. Yeah. Two hands up.

In the traditional out of two ratings. I was thinking two thumbs up, two hands crying on the face. Any, anybody else buckets of popcorn, any rating system you want to use. Four thumbs down. Yeah, that's right. Out of three. I started out with two thumbs down and then I went for a short swim in one of our many beautiful rivers. One wept in voxel Astra.

That's right. No way that guy was crying in a vohall Astra. Yeah, that's right. No way that guy was crying in a Vauxhall Astra, Riley. Come on. It's not even got a leather interior. We got it. We got to get going. Paris, I want to thank you so much for once again joining us

today. I do recommend everybody check out the Tech Won't Save Us mini series on data centers to have an expanded version of the conversation that we had in the middle of the episode today. Great to join you, as always. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Thank you for listening. Don't forget there is a Patreon. You can join it. Five dollars a month for a second episode every single goddamn week. Thank you for listening. Bye. Bye everybody. Yes. Thank you. UK tour tickets, my website,

The Rome cast, things of that nature. Right, goodbye, thank you. ["Rome Cast"]