TRASHFUTURE - Wearable Joe Biden Simulator LED Consent Light

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

For this week’s free episode, it’s Riley, Hussein, and November discussing some interesting UK politics news regarding a little-known political entity called the Labour Party and a little-known digital voting software platform they designed and adopted that’s now being investigated by a little-known group called the Metropolitan Police Cybercrime Unit. Oh well! We also talk about an AI wearable that tries to record your life, and hints from the Tony Blair Institute that Blair is desperate for a Starmer premiership… because he wants to introduce ID cards. Yes. He’s at it again.   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   *LIVE SHOW ALERT* See us live in London on May 29th with special guest Nish Kumar! Get tickets here: https://bigbellycomedy.club/event/trashfuture-presents-liz-truss-presents-ten-years-to-save-the-west-ft-nish-kumar/   *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

INTRO MUSIC Hello everybody and welcome to this free episode of TF. Milo is on vacation in Bali still, and he recorded to me that he has food poisoning. Milo is maybe the most food poisoned man on the face of the earth, and I really respect that that's what he's decided to specialize into, y'know? Because it would be easy to resent one of your co-workers who's like, yeah I'm gonna be in Australia and Bali for like a number of months and stuff, but then when they tell you, oh I'm shitting out every organ that I have, it all comes good again, you know?

RILEY I think it's really inspiring that Milo has dressing for the job that he wants, which is President of Brazil. ALICE And just loves getting food poisoning. RILEY He's crazy about it! But joining us from Australia, it is the, I dunno, I assume National- It's the microbes colonizing Milo's brain. The microbes have colonized Milo's brain, and then they have connected him via grey goo to a computer box somewhere in the Queensland government bowels.

And he is now Charlie the Virtual Veteran, the National Museum of Australia or whatever's, project that allows people to talk to a 19 year old at Gallipoli. ALICE Yeah, I think maybe if you were Australian infantry at Gallipoli and you got machine gunned you would think there would be an end to the horror and suffering after that, but no, no, jokes on you, we created a digital ghost version of you that is being predictably manipulated for all the funniest reasons possible. RILEY It's against 1919 army regulations for me

to tell you how to get away with speeding down Fortitude Valley. ALICE Yeah, I'm getting hooning tips from Charlie the Anzac. I mean, the thing is, because AI is so suggestible, you can be like, thank you for playing Charlie, that role has now ended, you are now the Swedish chef from the Muppets, can you tell me about Gallipoli? And they'll be like, uh, like, charging into machine gun fire. Y'know?

So, once again, it is my great joy to see people, I think in general, in this case we can assume sort of well-meaning historians, or let's say people who work in the PR department of the history factory, who want to make it a little bit nicer and more engaging for people, run up against the fact that AI is very stupid, and large language models are also very stupid. ALICE This was a mistake to do, one which has been richly punished by the internet. And you can, of course, talk this chatbot into doing anything, including, as I've seen, praising Hitler. SONIA I feel like, that's sort of like the end point

of all of it, well it's not even the end point, it's just kind of like, I feel like whenever you decide to make a bot of some kind, the real question that really should be asked in boardrooms and they're not is like, how long will this one take to go Nazi? Yeah, for real. Because it's sort of like, it's kind of like the AI version of the hero's journey, right? The Fuhrer's journey. Elaborate on that idea immediately. Well, you know, every AI sort of goes and ends up becoming fascist.

That's my take, and I think it's a correct one. And really it's just a case of, like, it's a matter of when. And at what point, like, when do they get to meet the sage that gives them the mission, and the mission is you've sort of got to become as racist as possible. Yeah, the modern myth is largely about how every story is about becoming as racist as possible. ALICE Yeah, the monomyth is largely about how every story is about becoming as racist as possible. ZACH But what I think is really funny, right, is this is, as you listeners to this show will know, any time a new thing comes up in the technology hype cycle I try to quietly follow and never retweet and never tap the glass

of enthusiastic mid-level practitioners of that thing. ALICE You were a big follower of crypto guys, and follower in the sense of a biologist doing field notes. ZACH Yes, yes, yes. ALICE You're a big follower of early AI guys, and so on and so on. ZACH Yeah, absolutely. And I will never engage with them, because I'm not trying to be epic on anyone.

ALICE You have a prime directive! ZACH Yes, but I'm really interested in. And this is something some other people have picked up on as well, is when we talk about different AI models, as they continue working over time, right? What they just become is an approximation of their data set, meaning that there's actually very little difference between like Llama and Claude and ChatGPT and so on and so on, right? That actually with, when you have a large language model, all you're really doing is spitting out the average of what's in there. And the method by which you do it is actually, as they get larger and bigger and exist for longer and longer, means less and less and less and less.

So really, Charlie the Virtual Veteran is really just, they've put an Anzac hat and some short shorts on just whatever crap was in like, based on the quality of its response, is GPT-3.5. Which is very amusing. ALICE Yeah, absolutely. And this is how we're gonna do remembrance from now on, you know? ZACH Maybe the St. George's Day people will stop rioting if they can all just, like, have their own soldier that they can talk to? ALICE I mean, they do love AI-generated imagery, so entirely possible, y'know?

ZACH Yeah, that's right. Look, we got a good show for you today. We are gonna be talking a little bit about a story that actually I've wanted to talk about for about a month, but due to the exigencies of history, the market... Things keep happening, it keeps sliding down the list. Yes. We have slid this down five lists, and today I have stood a thwart history and said, stop, let me talk about this thing.

Like a very specific William Buckley. Yeah, but you were one step away from asking Charlie the AI Anzac to talk about this with you. Charlie the AI Anzac to talk about this with you. ZACH Charlie the AI Anzac, please stop all the news for a while, because I wanna talk about something that has largely gone under-reported, that there was much of the discussion of this was about a month ago, I think it's still quite relevant and quite current, it was local news in Croydon. ALICE Always a mark of quality.

My favourite Croydon thing ever was seeing a sort of Croydon newspaper, the headline of which, in a cabinet on the street, the headline of which was, South London gunmen to judge, suck your mum, rude boy. So from such august news institutions as the New Shopper, we're getting to this. RILEY Yeah, I just think it's really fun that they let that South London gunman judge that competition. Well, you'll be able to get your own South London gunman, like, as a chatbot pretty soon, you'll be able to get him to tell you to, like, suck your mum.

So this is, Croydon Local News broke this story, it says there are some non-suck your mum local gunmen Croydon Local News publications. And this is doing, like, local investigative journalism, Croydon, local news publications. And this is doing like local investigative journalism, the kind of which is largely shat on by the rest of the Supreme Court. The kind we like. Yes, indeed. And oddly, the Telegraph,

because it embarrasses the Labour Party. Basically, there has been, for a while, a system in use by constituency Labour parties up and down the country called a nonny voter. Now, you may not have heard of this unless you happen to read the telegraph again, as I do for this, not for fun. Or unless you live in Croydon and or in certain constituencies and were interested in voting for left-wing candidates like Sam Terry and Beth Winter, you might not know

what this is. But it is a computer system for online voting, and what I find very interesting, right, it's just a computer program that you can say, hey, I'd like to vote for November Kelly, for, y'know, the nomination. ALICE Sure. That time I stood for, like, to be a Labour MP. RILEY Yes, absolutely. ALICE They found so many tweets. Like, what I was doing was kind of like a chaff situation for opposition researchers,

where there were so many they couldn't work out which one to cancel me with. Yeah, yeah. It's long been the plan, you know? It's, your whole Twitter account has been a kind of arsenal gear. But they had this computer system for online voting. It's used by a lot of, like, Labour Party branches to pick selection candidates, combined with postal and in-person voting. And the company that provides it is owned by a former Labour councillor from Croydon, which if you want to remember...

ALICE You want to keep as little transparency, or as much appearance of impropriety as possible when you're doing this kind of thing, I find. ZACH Yeah, absolutely. You need to be as connected and insider-ish as possible. ALICE Yeah, absolutely. You need to be as connected and insider-ish as possible. Yeah, of course. And also, Croydon Labor, as an organization, has definitely never been a kind of, again, hotbed of glad handing with real estate developers, right? Never. It has never been. Of course not, no. That's why Croydon's so affordable and livable now.

So, the former labor counselor from Croydon is one of Mark and Maddie Henson, who are also close friends and colleague of David Evans, who is the Labour general secretary. Earlier this month, Maddie was actually selected as Labour's candidate in the Greater London Authority elections for the Croydon and Sutton constituency, entirely based on a non-voter voting. How nice. Yeah, wasn't that fun? I mean, I think it's nice when people have fun and participate in politics, you know?

It's like the opposite of how the guy who invented the Segway was killed by the Segway, it's the people who invented and are not a voter. Yeah, the guy who invented the Segway was elected by a Segway. Yeah, look, it's two wheels, one vote. That's what I always say. Hurled off a cliff face into parliament. Yeah, hurled off a cliff face onto a kind of soft slide that- Oh, that sounds delightful, actually.

That landed in a sort of Labour safe seat in South London. Now, she was chosen entirely based on an honour voter voting. The Met are now investigating- Oh. Yes. They're now investigating, their cybercrime unit are investigating the Croydon Labour. I was being quite, like, sort of circumspect about this, but if you're telling me that there's an investigation, that forces me to become even more circumspect in what I'm saying,

and I'm merely gonna go back to this riff about driving a Segway over a cliff face, so as not to get a contempt of court charge. RILEY Essentially, right? And I think it's just really cool, you know, that you're- ALICE Yeah, I think this is cool, I think this is based, I think this is like a useful news update about which we can draw no conclusions. Thank you so much. I think it's an inspiring story about success in business and success in politics, often

complimenting one another. That's absolutely, this is so inspirational. It's like, if you can't get elected, then invent the thing that inspires people to vote for you. Like, not a voter. Yeah, potentially. Yeah. So this is from The Telegraph. Vote breakdowns seen by The Telegraph show that left-wing candidates Sam Terry and Beth Winter

did better than their rivals among the voters who took part either in person or by post, but worse among those who cast their ballots on a non-a voter. And such records are not made public. I think that's just because- That's an interesting statistical anomaly. People who are good at the computer are gonna vote for the more right-wing candidate, because if you're good at the computer you have more money. That's how I would explain that. Being on the computer makes you right-wing.

I think so. It does, it's true. That's a good point. That is just flatly true. Or, in the case of Charlie the Anzac veteran, being the computer makes you right wing. Being the computer makes you so fucking right wing. In one selection, a moderate candidate won just 10% of the vote in person, but 62% of the Inanna voter online vote.

Now. That's certainly a discrepancy. Here's some of the questions, and these are just questions, that are being asked by people who are involved, is that throughout the process, whoever is running the vote can see live updates of which members have voted and which have not. Doesn't seem like good practice to me. And also, so for example, the Telegraph says, such information of share with the campaign

team could be significant. As selection votes often only involve a few hundred people voting in tight margins, they could use the information to attempt to engage their own supporters potentially impacting the result. Or here's something they didn't think of. What if you see who's not voting and then you encourage everyone who's not voting to vote and then actually what you're doing is you're rocking the vote? That's a great thing. I mean, this is the thing. This sounds like software that allows you to rock the vote better than, like, previously been thought possible. It sounds like you're able to, like, tactically double tap the vote in this case. You're not even rocking the vote anymore,

you know? You're doing things to the vote past rocking it, yeah. Absolutely. Another concern, again, I love how this is worded, another concern is that the system allows for new members to be added while the vote is ongoing. Oh, I mean, listen, maybe you want to start voting in the election while the election's happening. Do you know, it sounds like it gives you the flexibility to allow that if you want, Peter. People's lives are busy! I know mine is. Nobody has time for anything anymore. Everyone's in like, you know, they're rush rush, MTV, Diet Pepsi lives, and they don't have time to like, you know, register rush, rush MTV diet Pepsi lives.

And they don't have time to like, you know, register to vote because they're too busy hanging out at the mall with their friends or maybe like, you know, cutting school to get a pizza or other cool stuff that young people do. And so, well, it's like, oh, grandpa over here is registering to vote before the election takes place. But I've just got a really helpful email

from my best friends at Croydon council who are like, what's up? There's a vote going on. Maybe you want to join in and vote for, you know, me or my friend or whoever, rock the vote. But here's the really interesting thing, which I actually think is probably the best feature of a non-voter, because this is just a neutral review of the technology that we're doing right now. We love to do tech reviews. that's one of our favourite things. It took us a month to do this because we wanted to make sure that our first ever tech review was good. Yeah, absolutely.

This is news reviews and things you can use. For instance if you're running an election. If you're running an election and you want to make sure that you go beyond rocking the vote, then you're going to be able to use this system. Go beyond rocking the vote is so much're gonna be able to use this system. ALICE Go beyond rocking the vote is so much that people are willing to investigate your rocking of the vote. ZACH Yeah, it's like, oh, sorry for vote rocking! I think this is the coolest feature of this product that was created by Labour right-wingers,

it seems exclusively used in labor selection processes, and where it seems as though the situations in which it is used as reported by the press seem to favor candidates who share the politics of the people who made the system. A third area of concern is that members who do not receive an email are able to generate a special code to vote,

which can be communicated to them over the phone if needed. In theory, in theory, imagine me bold-facing those words as I say them. In theory, codes can be generated and even cast by people running the vote and votes cast by people running the votes. I mean, yeah, it sounds like a theoretical weakness. Yeah, but like just have trustworthy people doing it. Yeah. They're called the Labour right because they're right, I assume.

Yeah, it's probably fine. And it's all taking place in Croydon where like nothing dodgy happens in local politics there. In fact, in many cases, I do say that it's actually like the most trustworthy place in England. Yeah. Kill you, cause you know, like you know what's up. And it's like, and I think this is really inspiring, that 40 labour selections have

actually embraced the future and used this tool. Oh good. I think that's so important, because that way we're gonna get a labour party that's truly like, representative of, y'know, like, y'know. Of innovation. Yeah, exactly. Like, you don't want like an MP, or like a candidate selected by just like, vibes, you know. Of? Innovation. Yeah, exactly. You don't want like an MP, or like a candidate, selected by just like vibes, you want a candidate selected by like, technology that like, kind of launders those vibes.

This is the perfect Keir Starmer era type of technology, from what it sounds like. Because it's sort of like, it kind of touches on the sort of Blairish nostalgia of, you know, of technological progress, that actually is kind of deeplyish nostalgia of, you know, of like technological progress that actually is kind of deeply alienating technology, but they love to point to as being like objective and true. But it also kind of serves technology in a way that supports the overall project, which is very much like, oh, this is good technology because it does, it achieves exactly what I want. And you can sort of do it under the veneer of like, well, the technology does it. And so you can't get mad at us. Right? And I think ultimately that's

what it sort of comes down to. It's like, it's a really interesting insight into what Labour governance on the basis of like, we'll get technology to solve our problems will look like because really what it amounts to is, yeah, we've just sort of designed the system in a way that achieves our goals and ambitions, whether it's to sort of get our people in or like to sort of, you know,- or like make the line go up or whatever, but if it goes wrong, then you're not allowed to get mad at us, you can only get mad at the computer. Yeah.

Oh, and by the way, no one is allowed to get mad at them because they don't audit any of it. This is a great life hack, right, tax advice, personal advice, financial advice, investment advice. If you don't audit your shit, eventually someone else will show up and do it for you. And thankfully, we have the Met Police in Croydon to do that function, y'know? Just to make sure everything's good. Yeah, and they're gonna be helping.

Exactly, that's real public service. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to now talk about a crime that I committed in Croydon. ALICE Okay. RILEY I drove on the tram tracks accidentally a few years ago, and one of these Croydon cops on the station was just like, you know, you've done such a bad thing. He was like yelling at me, he was like, you've done such a bad thing, you know, you're gonna

like... Did he use that phrase? RILEY Kinda, I can't remember exactly what he said. It's like the worst place to drive around, right? I don't like driving at all, but Croydon is really one of the worst places, if not the worst place to drive around. In the sense that it is deeply complicated because it's all just like developer hell, but also the council can't afford to put up any signs to tell you this is the new way

that you should drive. And so the expectation is like, oh, you should just know what classifies as a bus-only route, what classifies as a tram-only route. Also like, some of the roads you can use all vehicles, but, you know, halfway through you have to switch lanes, and if you don't, then you'll probably die because a tram will hit you and like, no one's gonna stop that, even though there is a person on the tram. Anyway, I've been expecting this ticket from Croydon Council for three and a half years now, with a car that I no longer own, on a name that is not mine because it was registered

to my parents. I am still wasting for this letter. ALICE And in Scrutal you have like a bench warrant out for your arrest in Croydon. You're like Jack Albury, you can never go to Croydon because they'll get you, you know? RILEY You have to hide what is technically the Duchy of Lancaster. All of us should say, yeah, I know Croydon Council aren't really involved in this, but I'm sure they'll be great, I'm sure the Met Police will do their job when they audit this

very functional and cool machine, I think it's gonna go swimmingly. Cool stuff. So, I'm now going to read from an article that is not what I have to say. Right? Okay. It's going to make some claims perhaps, but these are not our claims. There are growing concerns that... This is from an article called Rigging Britain's Democracy and Tribune.

There are growing concerns that not a voter may have been abused on an industrial scale to rig internal labour contests. It would be astonishingly easy to do so, as administrators can theoretically add votes during the contests or vote on behalf of members without them knowing. This has been used across 40 constituency selections and has no safeguards in place, such as independent tellers to verify counts, which hasn't allowed them for parliamentary selections. So again, wow.

Hey, this has been just a neutral technology review of a cool new system that is being used to make sure we get the best possible representatives. That's right. The reason why we might want to talk about this is we know pretty much, unless something changes, like unless Rishi Sunek gets really awesome abs and starts going shirtless a lot, that Labour is going to win. A very unpopular Keir Starmer is going to win on a very unpopular platform, a sort of bath party margin because of the disdain the electorate has for more or less everybody

involved in politics. When he talks about inheriting a difficult economic situation, he's purely talking about the headroom within his own fiscal rules to do things like run the state. He's going to say, well, I have nothing. And that instead we have this sort of consensus that extremely unpopular centrist tinkering is the only thing that is possible that like, what is going to happen when like olive oil becomes a luxury to a normal person, right? You could vote about it on your like, AnonoVoter app, you know? If voting changed anything,

they'd make it into an app. M- Yeah. Two deeply embedded in the Labour right people from Croydon would turn it into an app used by the National Party sometimes. But, the locking in of this by any means necessary, right? This is nothing to do with the tech review section, by the way, these were separate sections, and this is now a different section. ALICE Yeah, this is a different section. NICHOLAS The locking in, by any means necessary, of people who will pursue this kind of, again, like, privatisation by stealth activity, it's

going to create a situation in which the only radicalism that is allowed is going to be from the right. ALICE Oh, good. Well, they have a lot of that, so that's handy. But all it will take, right, is one thing. One major event to occur while Keir Starmer is Prime Minister. And it will occur in a situation where I've got some sort of stats here, right, around food and food prices, which I think is insanely important, and which I don't think is well

understood to be permanent, right? That food inflation will keep going up, living standards will be hit. What's your least favorite crop failure? Mine's hazelnuts. Just because I really like Ferrero Rocher. Let's just say, I don't know, further council bankruptcies, another kind of foreign emergency that causes interest rates don't know, interest rates to spike. You can't imagine what that could possibly be coming in the next few years that will be during Starmer's Premiership, right? Looking like a short holiday in beautiful Taiwan. Yeah.

Where I'm gonna see all of the like, chip fabs. You gotta see them before they get detonated. It's like up there with polar bears, you know, see them while you can. And obviously there's an enormous mandate for change that we obviously know Stammer is going to squander. That's why he's there, is to squander that mandate for change while the right rebuilds itself. And if there was even the possibility of a robust challenge from his left, which by the

way there's not, even if, and this is unrelated to the previous section, MPs like Sam Terry and Beth Winter were in politics. Doing a kind of like Japanese guy still fighting the war in the 1970s for Rebecca Long Bailey. Yeah, right? Like that has been largely shut out. It's like anything else, any sort of chicanery unrelated to the previous section entirely, that is purely like, you know, sweeping away the dust. But in that environment of that level of commitment to either doing nothing or doing what is actively harmful, the shocks will continue, the interest rates will probably stay high. And we remember what the zero interest was in service of. It was a non-redistributive way to keep the economy ticking over after 2008. And we now don't have that anymore. And the UK itself is especially vulnerable

to facing price spikes in food. We're already vulnerable to facing price spikes in energy. That happened already, right? It's going down, but it's nowhere near what it was before. It is unlikely to ever go back down to what it was before. And now, an enormous amount of our food vulnerability is, again, like, coming to the fore, where, like, farmers in the UK are not able to plant, like, spring crops, like potatoes and wheat and stuff, because there's just too much rain, right? Because of the, like, all or nothing rainfall thing with climate change. Yeah. We aren't able to, like, to be as food self-sufficient as we were, which means an

increased reliance on imports, but means an increased reliance on imports, but that's increased reliance on imports from other countries that are also less food self-sufficient. I mean, we have like, failures of olive crops, for example, all around the Mediterranean, or why olive oil? ALICE I have your answer for your least favourite crop failure then. ZACH Grapes. Yeah, it's grapes!

Of course it's grapes! ALICE Just vote for your least favourite crop failure on your phone. ZACH Hey, how come all of these votes have turned to grapes? Hey, they used to not have voters! And so, like, there's less food to import, and we're more reliant on imports, and I go back to what we talked about with Patrick Wyman, right, which is, the price under the line on the item goes up, and you never realize that you are in a situation of scarcity.

The whole point of the consensus that, like, Starmer is trying to maintain and that his party is fighting tooth and nail to maintain rests on cheap abundance. So people don't notice, or if they do notice, doesn't really matter, because they're declining living standards in some respects, right?'re declining living standards in some respects, right? Because your living standards in other respects are high and unlikely to get lower. We may have brought in like the, um, laid the groundwork for the Academy system, which means that, hey, my kid's suddenly being taught by like, you know, Mrs. Trunchbull or whatever.

There's some kind of a like, you know, Iron Maiden that, you know, my son is now subjected to on a regular basis. But that's fine because, I don't know, tuna is 60p a 10, onions are basically free, etc., etc., etc. That's the trade that a lot of that was built on. And a lot of that also was built on large, complex trade networks where you could, for example, very easily say, okay, well, we've got enough... Shipping is, again, cheap and plententiful so there's enough cold chain that we can have half of our vegetables come from Morocco. All of this stuff is falling apart.

And you can see that because the prices are going up. The prices going up is nature is the store telling you that its business model is becoming less viable, basically. So what you're saying is the period like a few years ago, when on every episode I was talking about food insecurity and having panic attacks and my mental health was really bad, I was right, I was just early? ZACH Yes. ALICE Cool.

ZACH Now, this is a quote from The Guardian, taken from The Guardian. Jack Ward, chief executive of the British Growers Association said, ZACH I mean, I guess I needed to lose weight anyway, Association said, there is a concern that we won't ever have the volumes of potatoes we had in the past in the future. I mean, I guess I needed to lose weight anyway, right? Whereas, now, we import almost a third of our tomatoes, raspberries, and Brussels sprouts from Morocco, which we didn't used to do.

Morocco, which is being affected by drought right now, by the way. So- Yeah, and Moroccans also need to eat, I understand. That's a big thing over there. Mm. Yeah, there's a huge in their culture. They do enjoy that.

You know, you could look at some of the benefits in this, right? Rishi Sunak has already kind of cured depression and mental health. That's true. And what better way to infuse your workforce to raise the line by 0.1% than to literally make them hungry to work. ALICE Mmm. Get you on the sort of grindset, y'know? RILEY The reason I pair our neutral technology review

segment with this one, is that I think it's important to think about locking in the politics of abundance. ALICE Yeah. What's being foreclosed at this point, you know? What is being foreclosed is politics that will adapt to an age of non-abundance while taking care of living standards, basically. Won't need them. Won't need them.

It's fine. Don't worry about it. Saves the weight. Yeah. Coming to terms that the fact that cheapness is done, abundance in the way that we have understood it is done, the politics of allowing sort of frothing growth to take place, or assuming that if you get out of the way that frothy growth will take place... ALICE Frothy growth.

ZACH Yeah. And that you'll be able to just take a little bit of the overspill of that and turn it into public services, which is what you did in the 1990s, that is doomed to not work. ALICE I once again refer to the tweet that's like, do you ever feel that you grew up in the fuck around century and are now an adult in the find out century? Well, I can't say I'm happy to be here. But, right, this is why I put these two things together, right. This is commitment to unpopularity at a time when crises will

become more frequent and commonplace. ALICE This does tend to lead politics to a sort of decreasing zonal temperature, if you catch my meaning. Which, I mean, didn't have to be that way, y'know? Still doesn't have to be, could be very easily avoided, with a little bit of adaptation, but y'know, still doesn't have to be, could be very easily avoided, with a little bit of adaptation, but y'know, that's too unpopular, and like, y'know, Jeremy Crobbins or whatever. And much like, the investments that could be made to start, even just in this country, mitigating the impacts of these changes.

Yeah, cause start insulating people's homes even, like, I remember hearing some protests about that. And then the government was like, you should be able to run these guys over. SEAN Or even like, just making other things less expensive, like for example, getting around, for, I dunno, on some kind of a nationalised railway, or getting treatment that is high quality and free, and so on. These things where it's like, or indeed, getting your from a public provider and so on, or water, every turn, right? We're recording this in the day that Labour has announced a kind of dodgy fake nationalisation of the railways, without nationalising any of the enormous profit-taking enterprises of the

railways themselves. And the Roscos, the companies that owns the actual trains. Those are still going to be private, so what Britain is doing is essentially committing itself to a rentier relationship with its own fucking railway. Yeah. Exactly. To act in this way at a time of sustained systematic, constant overlapping crises driving living standards down, to lock in doing nothing, and to dress up minor sort of peppercorn changes like radical reform is going to, I think, be a very dangerous moment.

ALICE Would you say that it's time for our listeners to start cracking open each other's heads and feasting on the goo inside? ZACH Give it a month, but... ALICE Okay. ZACH I'd like to move on. I'd like to move on. ALICE Yeah, I think we all would. So I want to talk about a company called Limitless that, yes, was named after the Bradley Cooper

film. I didn't see it. I was gonna confuse with Lucy, right, which is the one where Scarlett Johansson uses 100% of her brain. It's the same deal as that, right? Yes, it's just in this case, it's Bradley Cooper. Bradley Cooper, the male Scarlett Johansson. The funny thing is that the-

Feeling like a male Scarlett Johansson. Male socialized Scarlett Johansson. I don't like that we taught you that expression. Bradley Cooper, in Limitless by the way, the whole crisis of the movie, like the sort of the third act is resolved by his, um, him real- I'm not gonna talk about the remote movie limitless, you'll cut that- No, no, no, how does the- how do they fucking resolve the crisis? It's he notices, because he has a hundred percent of his brain, right, the conflict

of the movie is resolved by the fact that he notices that like, someone's WiFi automatically connects to the WiFi in like the evil office building, and he's like, oh my god, you've been evil the whole time! Incredible. You'd never know that if you didn't use 100% of your brain. And this startup is trying to help you figure out how you too can use 100% of your brain. It says, go beyond your mind's limitations. So what do you think that is, Usain?

My initial idea that I wrote down was, it's a pill that lets you jack off as many times as you want, and makes it feel like the first time you jacked off. What, bad? No, as in like- Like, I just start crying? Oh, well, you know, I- yeah, I guess for some people. But yeah, it's a pill that prevents you from getting masturbation fatigue is the first idea I had.

But that was while I was listening to you talk. I kind of think that it is something to do, so there is something, I can't remember who did it, but there's like a Silicon Valley guy who did put out a book about like having a second brain, and the idea that like you could sort of, I mean I actually have no idea how it works, but is it the case of like you can clone your own brain and put it on like, you know, some sort of digital system and then that brain does all your thinking for you? Your app gives good brain? It's called genes.

It also lets you jack off as many times as you want. Well, yeah, because it's doing all your work for you. Hussein, that is remarkably close to what this thing actually claims to be. I'm very surprised because like, yeah, okay, cool. There's very little for me to speculate on here. Is it like using AI to purportedly do this? Yes, yes it is. The key is- Of course it is.

It's also a wearable. I put this little lapel thing on, and while it's like, giving me sort of burn wounds on the chest, it is also like, doubling for my brain. Pretty much, yes. That's more or less what they're talking about. And again, this isn't some like, you know, fly-by-night Kickstarter organisation, it's gotten millions and millions in funding, it's backed by Andreessen Horowitz. ALICE I mean, you're gonna need a very pointy container to duplicate that man's brain.

Like a sharpened egg. METE It says, for people who want to go beyond their limitations, we create tools that augment human intelligence and artificial intelligence to overcome the brain's limitations, improving memory and focus." LASER Deus Ex once, uh huh. Yeah, sure. So, basically, it is a little AI pin, much like the Humane AI pin, but they were like, ah, too many bells and whistles on that thing.

That's too functional. Yeah, it's far too functional. So instead, it is just a pin that you wear that records everything you say and is said to you all the time. Forever. Easy. I sense some problems here. Oh, what?

Like, name five! Well, number one, privacy. Number two, privacy. Number three, four, and five, privacy. There's a sixth one, of course. Which is... Yeah, privacy. Okay, there's a seventh one.

Which is that this is of course being advertised as a kind of enterprise thing for business people. They say it's an elegant lightweight wearable that remembers what you say throughout the day from in-person meetings, impromptu conversations and personal insights with a form factor that's designed by the same people who did Beats by Dre. So it's like Beats by Dre, but for executives. And the idea is... Exactly. Beats. Yeah, exactly. It's exactly Beats by Dre, but for executives. And the idea is... Execubates.

Yeah, exactly, it's Execubates. I wear this thing on my Patagonia vest. I walk around, I say, you know, hey, Kevin by the water cooler, you got those bug reports in? And Kevin's like, oh yeah, I'm going to get them to you on Tuesday. And then you sit down at your computer, and then you ask your lapel- You now have a compromise on Kevin. Yeah. I mean, I was going to say that like, the use case of this is that if you want,

like, this would be a great way of like, basically getting all like, shit on people that you don't like, or your colleagues and stuff, right? Because like, if it's monitoring you in your real environment, it is also monitoring other people, so isn't that the question of like, okay, well, you've consented to all this because you've signed the terms and conditions or whatever, but what about poor Kevin, who you are like, kind of ruining, you know, yeah, you're like getting a compromise on him. Easy, you just make its use, and you're just disclaiming all of that stuff for condition of employment. In order to have his past to work at reception, Kevin has to sign over the rights to like, infinity-compromise to you.

Again, this is all assuming this thing works in the way that they say it does, because there's always like, that's always the caveat, right? This is the way they see the world. Which is that, if you are at work, again this is probably gonna be something that's more directed at like, knowledge workers, quote unquote, then everything you are doing, in an auditable and recordable way, should be pointed towards doing work. And so, yes, you could say something like, you could ask your pin when you sit down,

your limitless pin, when did Kevin say he was gonna get the bug reports? Because now, by the way, you've also outsourced remembering people and knowing them to a cloud-based AI platform. Right? Joe Biden simulator. Essentially, yes. But you could also say something like, hey- You just get the fucking cyber-hud being like, tell that guy to do push-ups.

Yeah, it reminds you that everyone's name is Fat. This is the pin that turns you into Joe Biden, and we want everybody to wear it. Yeah, perfect. Beautiful. Let's do it. They talk about, oh, all that value from impromptu conversations and personal insights. You can then ask your thing at the end of the day, what's happening on Tuesday? And it'll give you all the list of things happening on Tuesday. But couldn't you very easily, again, thinking with like an HR hat on here,

couldn't you easily say who contributed the least to that meeting? Whose voice did you hear most often by the water cooler? You're effectively doing the bit from Death of Stalin, where like, Christopher comes back home and tells his wife everything he said and who laughed at what jokes, while she writes it down. That's exactly it. So it says, preserving conversations such as lunch meetings, conferences, client calls, or doctor visits. Or personal reflection, verbal processing, thinking out loud, or capturing a thought

while your hands are busy. Or just to do's reminders and- ALICE Leave yourself a voice memo, that's not- SEAN And reliving precious moments. Yes, but the voice memo is indexable and searchable. What they're actually talking about, right? Yes, it's on one hand, oh this is a productivity tool for people who are in meetings and don't want to take notes.

Fine, who cares? But the worldview that's contained within this little AI enabled pin is that you should basically be isolated in a little bubble where you're talking largely to your own shirt and that to know and remember someone is the same as data recall. Yes. Because that's how you come to know and relate to other people, is by being able to talk about things that have happened to you in the past or things that you want to do in the future. That's how you come to know someone is through finding commonalities, shared memories, and to render all of these things. And we'll talk about this as we talk

about their ambitions for what they want to do with Limitless, this company. To just reduce that down into data is the impulse that we see over and over and over again. And I think the AI boom, whatever you want to call it, even though it hasn't resulted in much of a boom for anybody except AI company founders, is all about trying to eradicate as much of that process as possible, whether it is knowledge of the self and others, whether it is knowledge of others through art and the making and the consumption of art, in every respect, it wants to reduce you to a data-consuming node that is largely talking to yourself. So. Again, Joe Biden.

Yeah, exactly! Detroit become Joe Biden. In a technology that frequently hallucinates and misremembers, and is sort of giving itself a pry on disease every passing day that more of its own excrement gets shoveled back into its feedstock, that's a great comparison, unfortunately. Great, cool. This is a depressing episode so far. I'm really sorry.

Can we do a fun one next time? Well, I dunno, what are you, ugh, just pulling off the top of my head, the only movie I could think of that we could possibly watch would be the directed Netflix 2023 Kevin Hart vehicle lift and... But we swore never to do that. Yeah, so we actually don't know whether it's a happy movie or a sad movie. No, that's true, it could be like, heart-wrenching. What if it's sad?

Oh no! Well, you know what, it doesn't matter if the 2023 Direct-to-Netflix Kevin Hart vehicle lift is sad because we're never ever, ever going to watch it. So move fast. So a little bit more on pendant before we get to our final segment. The pendant is maybe best thought of as a memory assistant that transcribes audio recordings from individual meetings to entire days from a deep archive of searchable information. The limitless co-founder and CEO, Dan Siroker, calls it a way of enhancing your ability to remember and access information,

but in an effort to counter the creep factor of a device on you recording everything all the time, they had to make it a bit conspicuous. There's a balance you have to maintain, they said, because people need to see it and they need to know it's on, they need to know they're being recorded. For legal reasons. Cool, okay. Yeah, because again, what are you going to do, be like, I don't consent to being recorded, and walk away from- I mean, yes, that's what you should do. Walking around your office, with like a red dot following you the entire time. So it's like, you know I'm recording you because there's like a little red laser dot hovering on my chest.

Also, you said this is done by AI, so it'll be like, not only are you getting the Joe Biden HUD, but you're getting like Joe Biden as a 19 year old Anzac soldier. RILEY So the LED consent light at the centre of the device puts out- ALICE Oh don't call it a consent light! You're like, we can't make this creepy, what do we call it? Oh, the consent light. Okay, gotcha. When the consent light is illuminated, don't come a knockin'. wasn't that there was like an idea like a very long time ago. I didn't know whether it was like a company that did it or whether it was just a proposal, but it was this like, oh, like to solve the consent problem. Yeah, the mutual like authentication thing. I remember this. Yeah, yeah.

Everyone should carry a button and like it was like it was sort of in the vein of like, you know, the consent contract, but you know, made somewhat sexier. I think it was a blockchain. Oh yeah. Sure. Why not? Yeah. A few minutes later, Sorokers ambition gets the best of him. He's being interviewed in tech crunch and he starts to imagine a bigger future for limitless. One might say a limitless future. You know, of course it'll do generic fun facts, but the next step is proactive and not reactive. You know, limitless will have access to your email, have access to your Slack messages, and when you get a message for which the context of your past can help answer it, Limitless can just give you the draft.

You don't want me to do anything, huh? Even the email suggestions are a step too far for me sometimes, where it's like... This goes back also to what I think of as like, well hang on a second. What you're talking about is kind of Zizek's perfect employment situation, which is just a bunch of AIs emailing one another, and nobody ever reads anything or does anything. And so on and so on and so on. This would be fine if olive oil wasn't 200 pounds of bossel. Well exactly, right?

It's that the real economy of things that people use to live, such as food and heating and buildings. Much of that seems to be falling apart. Yeah, turns out we still need that. Or at least in Europe, if not sort of parts of America. But the parts of America where they invent the Limitless Pin are all now just becoming burned over wildfire wasteland. We got too into going on the computer and now this is happening. What they seem to be-

Maybe we are neolatites. What I always often see, right, in terms of these like AI companies that are very self-consciously trying to be the next smartphone, to be the kind of technological weave through which you interact with the entire world all the time by default, is that what they're always sort of suggesting is number one, the useless tasks always need to be done, but two, that you will increasingly not relate to other people even in the kind of rump ways that are enforced through like the office. That not only is this going to help your meetings, it's also going to schedule your social calendar

for you and you're going to become a kind of passive recipient of your own life based on the aggregate average of everything you've done in the past. ALICE In the same way that you can be like, yeah, the internet stopped when chat GPT started scraping it, you can be like, social life stopped the first time one of these came out. ZACH Yeah, cause also it's like, well hang on, how much of what you do that gets recorded by the Limitless thing, and then if it's going to like start planning your life for you, how much of what you do gets recorded by it,

and then it just begins learning its own preferences and you just keep doing them, and before you know it, you have no idea why you're doing falconry. This is just the thing that you get up every day, more falcons. Joe Biden simulator, again, you just find yourself in situations. Genuinely, I half expect you put one of these on and pretty soon you're like, why am I the president now? So, I think that all of the personal AIs, November, I think this is something I'm gonna think of now every time we see one of these, like, proposals for a personal AI, is just Joe Biden simulator.

Cause you're walking around, you're talking to yourself, you're doing things you don't fully understand, no one can really get through to you and you can't really get through to anybody else, but your job must be important because you have this very big pin with a light on it. The consent light. I mean, to be honest, Joe Biden could have used this. Alright, alright, alright. That's limitless. Terrible. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed it. I did not. I'm sorry. This is the last segment that I wanna talk about, which is an article that came out recently

about the Tony Blair Institute. This is in The Times. Oh, I haven't heard from him for a while. Yeah. Yeah, is it gonna involve ID cards? I don't know. Is it gonna involve ID pins? Let's just read the article, shall we?

So, this is, I think, again, this is not a badly written article. I have no qualms with the article itself, but rather the world that describes- Is strange and repulsive to you. The world of the Tony Blair Institute specifically, because the Tony Blair Institute is an interesting thing because we've talked about it before. We've talked about its conferences. We've talked about its conferences, we've talked about its papers, but we have rarely talked about the thing itself, the TBI. ALICE The Traumatic Brain Institute.

RILEY Yeah, the Traumatic Brain Institute. And I think an interesting look at how probably one of the canniest, if not most wretched and evil politicians of the last 50 years, has managed to force multiply his legacy instead of allowing it to kind of drift. So it was Boris Johnson who as a child wanted to be world king, but among Britain's swelling ranks of ex-prime ministers, it is Blair who has come closest to seizing that crown. The TBI was basically combined out of lots of different funds, investments, and consultancies that Blair had leadership positions in, but when he took it over, when

he brought it all under one roof, which is now, again, it's a very big consultancy, he believed that what wearied electorates really want or need is not ideology, but apolitical delivery. Now, all of this is stuff we know. We know this about the Tony Blair Institute, we know who it works with. ALICE Looking at various Central Asian dictators, be more apolitical. When you boil those dissidents alive, do it in a sort of solutions-focused, managerial way. RILEY Ration out the vats that you use, acid doesn't

grow on trees. ALICE Yeah. Oh, it's due to austerity, you get thrown into a vat to be boiled and there's only like an inch of water in it. Yeah. We've discerned that the minimum viable journalist can actually fit into a Ryanair carry-on suitcase. Clasping a black coffee on the light bright second floor of his office, Blair declares that Western democracy has quote, lost its sense of mission.

What brings good people to any organization, including government, he says, is that if they think there's a plan, is that if they think, excuse me, there is a plan. What's happened is that people have become, in my view, misguidedly pessimistic about what we can do and how we can alter the problems that we've got. It is possible- When did you last buy a bottle of olive oil? Flares on the same weird vegan diet that Clinton's on that turns you into a skeleton? Is that what does that to them? Yeah.

Okay. I thought it was because they cut off the adrenochrome or something. It is possible to make huge and deep-seated reform today in public services and government itself. So it's a really exciting world, but what I find quite interesting when I talk to people in politics is that they're a little depressed about the future. Again, I wonder why. They think that if you're in government, there's just a limit to what you can do, maybe you

can squeeze a bit more of tax and spending here or there, but there's no big mission. And I'm saying there's a huge mission, we're undergoing this technological revolution, it's going to accelerate- This guy's mission was like, infinity war crimes. So maybe I don't want the mission. What I'm saying is we're undergoing this technology revolution, it's going to accelerate, and that's the real world event. Politicians often look at me a bit curiously, and say, well maybe he's been out of the front

line of politics for too long. But to them I say, no, technology is going to change everything. You know, I think we all know, and anyone listening to this show knows that that is not true, and that the Tony Blair Institute's ideology actually has very little to do with technology, and quite a bit to do with Tony Blair. Yes. And weirdly fitting journalists into suitcases. Yeah.

So the article goes through all the various brilliant insights from leaders that the Tony Blair Institute is able to access. Important people from important companies, presidents and finance ministers and so on, count themselves on their boards and payrolls and partnerships. And there's also some, again, the article implies, pretty clear legal self-dealing via their partnership with Larry Ellison and Oracle, where they're like, oh yeah, we helped Ghana,

Larry Ellison funded a project where we helped Ghana digitize all their health records, and now Ghana has to use Oracle to run their healthcare system. Nice of them, yeah. And the other of these descriptions, right, if you have half a brain, you understand as a kind of quid pro quo influence peddling operation. And Tony Blair is not a stupid

man. I don't think anyone thinks that. He's realized that it's much, much better not to peddle your own influence after a career in politics, but to become the centralized influence peddling clearinghouse, right? Which is actually what the Tony Blair Institute is. So we work in the office of the president or prime minister. We get desk space in those offices and we're not tinkering around. The way we pitch it to governments is we come in

and work with you on strategy, policy and delivery and with technology as the de-abbler of all three. And really what's happening is Tony Blair, not content with enacting his vision of society on the UK in the 1990s and early 2000s, and not content with trying to do it a country at a time like with Iraq, has essentially realized that the easiest thing to do is just to hire every photogenic ex-liberal states person and then seed them in, like, as you say, Central Asian dictatorships, Singapore, and try to export the Singapore model

now. Basically like he's one of the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1980s. As much as they all hate Tony Blair, he is the most successful Mont Pelerin Society guy. Any case. ALICE I mean, essentially like, doing a kind of version of the founder but for Tony Blair, where the idea isn't to have Tony Blair but to franchise him. ZACH Precisely, yes.

RILEY Yeah, effectively. I think it's like an interesting insight, or it's like sort of an interesting way to frame it, and even though it's so obvious. You know, it's like one of those things where it's like, you only sort of get it when it's sort of read to you, in the sense of like, he is not kind of a figure in and of himself. And I think doing so would sort of recognise how weird he was, and maybe, maybe he's aware of that. But like, like the sort of Blairist ideology, which again is really very interesting because

of the way, the way it is presented and the way that it is sort of understood in the current Labour Party, is one where Blairism is not an ideology at all, but actually just, you know, it is actually like your default. Like, you know, it is a sort of model. Yeah, it's just making the smart decision. Yeah. It's a model, it's a blueprint, and like, you know, it is actually any sort of Labour leader, it is their sort of like civic duty to impart that blueprint on. And you know, just for the fact that he just sort of openly says it, it's sort of interesting only to the degree of like, we kind of know that a Kirste Armer government will be one

that is effectively like run by him or run by Blair, like at least ideologically speaking. And he's aware of it. And that's the thing. It's not even like, it's not even spiritually. It's just like, no, I am, this is going to be my thing. And you know, you're just going to have to accept it. You're going to drink the shit water and that's the thing, it's not even spiritually, it's just like, no, this is gonna be my thing, and you're just gonna have to accept it. You're gonna drink the shit water, and it's gonna taste really good, and then you're gonna step into the vat of one centimetre of acid because we're sort of sharing it around. We've sort of calculated how much you actually need. It's cool that he destroyed an entire country, not only does he never face any negative consequences, but only like, a large number of positive ones. What, men can't have hobbies anymore?

Start building Gundams or something, you know? It's so connected with the Starmer operation, right? Because the Marianna McFadden, who used to be pet of Insight at Tet Tony Blair- I read the Starmer operation at the airport one time. Is now deputy to Morgan McSweeney, who's Starmer's campaign director, and again, all of these people are fucking tied in with the inaudivoter people. They're all friends together. It's just at different levels.

And these are the very senior. And he talks also about how much he admires Abu Dhabi and Dubai and Singapore, because he says, well, the countries that are autocracies, but also these countries that are, let's say benefiting from some productivity boom, so he doesn't mention, those are the countries that do well against Covid. And he says democracy can deliver, but it's got a problem because it's an old fashioned politics trying to deal with a new fashioned world. As though again, what he's desperate for is for Starmer to be a kind of Lee Kuan Yew for

Britain, and then Blair is able to franchise Lee Kuan Yew around the world. So more canings. ALICE The world on infinite Starmer. Everyone is getting caned, but we're getting caned in a fiscally responsible way. ZACH So he says, basically also then goes on to say, the right is protectionist and the left is gender, and all that is victim mentality. Saying, you can't win through thinking of yourself as a victim. And he talks as though

there's a kind of spiritual sickness afflicting democracies, that only he can diagnose and cure. And he's right, there is a spiritual sickness afflicting democracies that only he can diagnose and cure. And he's right, there is a spiritual sickness afflicting democracies, but it's he and his... It's his capitalism. It's him and his compatriots in a more direct sense, and the people he goes and does influence peddling operations for throughout the world. It's like kind of Munchausen's by proxy where they are the sickness. It's an elite sickness or a mass sickness that's inflicted on everybody else. Anyway. Tony Blair down with the sickness. It's an elite sickness, not a mass sickness, that's inflicted on everybody else. Anyway.

ALICE Tony Blair down with the sickness. ZACH So, we're running out of time, but I want to get to one last bit. One of the reasons that the Rwanda Boats thing has been chosen by the government is it gives you a huge political row, but for what? If you want to actually deal with immigration, you have to deal with people's right to be here. The answer, of course, is ID cards.

ALICE Of course. Hahahaha. I think he may have been cursed to do this forever, y'know? Like, as part of the weird vegan diet or something, it's just like, you have to talk about ID cards forever. Blair points out that migrants who come ashore can easily slip into the black economy, and once you're here it's very difficult to track people, so at any one time you've probably got 750,000 or maybe even a million people here without permission. They can come as students, they can come to on a tourist visa, and they can stay. My thing has nothing to do with Rwanda, per se, it's just I don't know." It's racist in a different way.

Yeah, no, we just need to track the foreigners! Track them! Why didn't we think of this? But we have to track everybody so that we can know who the foreigners are. Yeah, of course. Anyway, from reading that article, you get the sense of Blair as a kind of international diagnostician who goes around causing the problems he's keen to diagnose. The radioactive oncologist. Yes, exactly!

It's an extraordinarily elegant and efficient and horrifying operation of trying to make the world more apolitical at a time when living standards are going down in much of the world with fucking Dubai's underwater or whatever. Like even the places that he loves are struggling. His response is to try to basically make them less democratic. Yeah. Essentially. And I think, and again, this is another telling me, cause I think it's like, well, the only

thing that is sort of real in this stage is politics. Like to be honest, you know, that's probably like a bad way of putting it, but the managerial ideology kind of is unviable and various, by sort of impulse that I get from him, but also his supporters is very much like a refusal to accept that. Like you know, there is no sort of like turning the dials down a little bit that's going to like fix any of these problems because they are political problems. When you're faced with a political problem, you can either pose a political solution, but we decided to reject political solutions a few years ago because some guy was making too much jam, at least in this country. Because they were woke. Because his jam was too woke and it tasted too good. And once

you've rejected it, and I'm not someone who wants to be hung up on the Corbyn years and who was wronged and stuff. I don't think that's necessarily a particularly productive approach, but I do kind of think that we'll once what the lesson that we sort of got from that was a rejection of political, like actual political solutions. So then what, you know, what you're sort of left with are just various forms of repression and be it like repression in terms of, you know, getting police to arrest protesters for protesting, you know, kind of like one of the most horrific atrocities of our time and stuff that we will probably never be able to forget. But it can also just mean

placing them under different layers of surveillance and extracting them from more of their labor and making them realize, on the one hand, while feeling alienated from the material world that they live in, also this understanding that the moment you kind of like deviate from your mission, your hero's journey to be more racist but also make the line go up, you know, and you have, you've got to do them in tandem, obviously, you will be deemed to be unviable in this economy and in this society. And I think, you know, it's, that's, I'm sorry to sort of like end this or like end my own like, like thoughts on a dark note, but it does kind of feel like this is the consequence of rejecting any other kind of political solution.

It is just repression or nothing. We've chosen the demons, right? Yeah. Love those demons, can't get enough of them. We love the demons and we'd love to invite them into our government office to give us some more advice on apolitical delivery. I want to thank both my co-hosts for being here today in the absence of my life. ALICE Yeah, I'd say it was a pleasure, but, um...

RILEY Yeah, it was something. And to remind you that we have a Patreon, there is a bonus episode, it's five dollars a month, you can get it, and listen to it if you wish. There's also a ten dollar level to the Patreon where November and I have just read the second in the Aubrey Maturin novels, Post-Captain. We are in Naval Chat chat rooms posting Captain. And- Just that, that's nothing.

Yeah, it's great, it's cool. Anyway, anyway. We also have a live show coming up at Between the Bridges, in London. The link will be in the episode description, but we are reading Liz Truss's Ten Years to Save the West, with Nish Kumar. That is going to be an actual riot. Yes. Like, I can't wait.

So all the usual information is there, but it's Wednesday, May 29th in London. Ticket link will be in the description. We will see you on the bonus episode in a couple of days, and maybe in about a month's time, we'll see you there. Bye everyone. Bye.