Trashfuture

Middle East correspondent Seamus Malekafzali returns to discuss the possible closure of the Bab-al-Mandab strait by the Houthis, why an $80bn Saudi defence budget Saudi can’t stop them, and how the US and Israel started something they couldn’t stop if they wanted to… and how this makes every fake Sa

We got outpaced again on the life and times of Kim Guilfoyle! But mainly we're here to discuss the Reform Candidates who repeated 1950's slurs into a boom mic (legitimate concerns!) LOUDLY AND SLOWLY, and the life, death, and bankruptcy of our old friend Character AI. Who knew the "Elsa From Frozen

Musa joins us to discuss the recent controversies with Abu Dhabi, Man City, and why decades of underinvestment in the U.K. left us vulnerable to becoming the playthings of monarchies… also football. But first, we read an article about a perennial favourite subject: people incriminating themselves by

Hussein tried to conduct some shoe leather journalism at the beating heart of the Holborn & St Pancras constituency: this one Blank Street Coffee franchise by the station that always has an enormous queue. Sadly he didn’t learn anything, and instead we’ve decided that whatever happens in the by-elec

We have an opportunity to speak with Jay, a union organizer in the UK hospitality industry, about the ways in which that sector is particularly hostile to labour organizing and, unsurprisingly, owned by ghouls all the way up and down. But before that, Nate, Hussein, and November discuss Trump’s decl

We’ve got Blood Work’s Greg Foley on to discuss the… happenings, involving another permutation of a guy named Thomas, and some guys in masks, and the British criminal justice system, and also another recent happening in a farm field in Gloucestershire, and also an article about the post-chud ambianc

Hello everyone, In the past we've received requests to share the links to articles we cited in episodes. Since I'm getting a bit more involved in writing the episode scripts these days, I wanted to finally get around to doing this. If the articles are paywalled, I've linked a de-paywalled version (t

Riley and Hussein are joined by Hesse Deni (substituting for Nova who will be returning on Friday) to look at the unravelling of “A.I. safety” as a largely posting based discipline. Let’s all update our priors together and gesture at the crux of the issue. Also, Riley brought the most Ohio item home

It doesn’t come as a surprise that lawyers are using AI tech in legal practice, but British legal authorities and firms have gotten a bit wild: buying pallets of NVIDA GPUs to build their own data centres, submitting briefs with AI hallucinations of fake laws all the way to the point that judges hav

Editor’s note: this is something of an unusual episode, sorry! It’s just Nate and Hussein, but we’ve brought on journalist Nathan Akehurst, the author of the forthcoming book Along the Watchtower: Dispatches from Europe’s War on Migration. However, we have to talk about the Piddington referendum, th

We dragooned friend of the show Tom Walker to discuss the recent Will Gluck film ONE NIGHT ONLY, which can be described as an intended meditation on life in a fascist society that somehow instead just lectures the audience about how it’s better to wait for marriage. Abstinent Times at Ridgemont High

We temporarily pivot to America because we have the opportunity to speak with Charles Star, a friend of the show and a law understander, who can give us insight into just how much the U.S. Supreme Court has retooled itself to enable total right-wing capture. However, we also have a chance to speak a

We believe in the marketplace of ideas. That’s why we’ve made it so that Cory Doctorow responds point by point to an article written personally to him by a16z about why his Enshittification thesis is wrong. Then, in the back half, we talk about AI and LLMs as real technologies rather than mystical,

We get into a land of contrasts today - the far right grows in street power as Reform is suddenly exposed for the grifters and charlatans they have always been. Also, two very serious policy men have a conversation about party funding with one million hidden cameras. RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, N

For this week's bonus episode, Riley, Hussein, Nate, and November convene to discuss a number of topics: abject Burnhamism for one, a luxury block of flats in London making its very unsympathetic tenants live in what can only be called Scolding WeWork for another, and the story of a failed restauran

Bloomberg’s Zeke Faux joins us to discuss stablecoins - specifically Tether and World Liberty / USD1 - which function now as the parallel financial ecosystem for dealing with states captured by right wing cliques. But first, we brainstorm a post politics career for Keir and check in on the state of

Molly is back again, this time to talk about the right's war on Wikipedia—we show how Grokipedia was actually born of grievances fomented in two reports baselessly alleging liberal bias at Wikipedia, and died because Elon got distracted. Also, we uncover a general principle: right wing grievance mon

Libby and Charlotte from What’s All This Then join us for an all dessert episode featuring a new entry in the Kirk fund, an interesting new fraud defence, and some answers to burning questions about Britain. Also a shirt Riley saw returning from a friend’s stag do. Check out What's All This Then her

Phoebe Gates went to How To Rule The World class at Stanford, where apparently she learned to admit to potentially criminal activity in Slack. Repeatedly. Also, the network school moves countries, a FarmVille with perma-death, and Mark Zuckerberg has a go at manifesto writing. RILEY ALERT Check out

We talk about the death of Jason Arday and the culpability of our rotten-to-the-core media industry in bringing it about… and also a truly infuriating article about how a 17th century academic might not fit in at a modern “Pronouns University.” RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN

First of all: mea maxima culpa for having trusted the hated professional news media about a certain fictive elf's grave. We're endeavouring to do better. And in that spirit we've brought on Gareth Dennis, host of Railnatter on YouTube and the Trainsatlantic podcast. Somehow, Gareth has the ability t

Riley speaks to Foxglove’s Donald Campbell about the campaign to prevent Palantir from working with the NHS, but before we get to that, we have to talk about… fictive elven graves. And real Bronze Age burial sites. And a man in Texas who’s willing to move heaven and earth in order to view anime. Lea

We've brought on friend of the show and writer Ben Fogel to talk about the hard-right turn in Latin America, and the list of freaks is a mighty one: the gradient scale of Bolsonaro failsons, the Peruvian dictator's daughter, the fast food restaurant family crime syndicate, and many more. November is

Prayers up for our beloved Nova who remains unwell, but Devon is in the hot seat today filling in as we discuss how you can’t trust maps anymore, a report on the state of reports, and the future of education in a certain grafting market trader’s utopia. But first, we look at the outstanding white bo

Too much is happening at once. We've got repurposed Realdolls being pitched as AI robot teachers....or tutors, since supposedly the difference is crucial. We've got an eight-figure settlement in the case of eBay gangstalking bloggers and doing Jared Leto Joker pranks on them. We've got a wearable te

Once again, it seems like tariffs are going to slice the North American auto industry into ribbons while it simultaneously tries to make buying some of the only good cars in the world illegal. Victoria Scott from Tran Girlismo takes us through the decline of the American auto industry (for non freak

Friend of the show and Silicon Valley anthropologist joins us to discuss the cultural weirdness that has taken over Silicon Valley - what do you do to get noticed when your only route out of the permanent underclass is to make the same product everyone else is making? Go Crazy! Also, we look at the

Jensen Huang sold his leather jacket for charity… and we look at exactly what that charity is and does. Then in the second half, Nathan Tankus is back to discuss the ongoing plot to create an imperial presidency by Touching the Money like never before. TF listeners can enjoy a discounted subscriptio

We needed to up the chaos a bit so we watched the terrible 2021 film LOCKED DOWN with our good friends Mattie Lubchansky (of the No Gods No Mayors podcast) and Hesse Deni (of the Seeking Derangements and Trouble in River City podcasts)! The film is not good but who doesn’t love hearing friends torme

Kojo Koram, author of "The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs," joins us to discuss what comes next after the War On Drugs and how capital intends to colonise this new frontier… and why Brewdog is involved (again!) Before that though, we discuss Farage’s latest victim stunt and

Jason Koebler from 404 joins us to take us through how he turned his blog into a $100,000,000 a month money machine using fake dashboards, rented private jets, and a community of people who are desperate to defraud one another. We go into the murky world of “it’s scams all the way down” course bros

We're here. It's the final episode of Season 6, and as far as we're aware, the last Bones episode ever made. Today: Bones and Booth go undercover at a bowling tournament and accuse every single participant sequentially of being the murderer. Meanwhile, Angela discovers that not even active contracti

Ed Zitron and the TF Crew are on both your feeds this week to discuss the Softbank slide deck breakdown you’ve all been waiting for. It’s nothing other than the goose, and whether or not the goose was valued, and what kind of factory does a goose use to make golden eggs. Softbank Presentation here.

Quinn from the Failure to Launch (FTL) podcast joins us to discuss exactly how space travel became an adjunct to a racist chatbot. Also, we discuss the high water mark of chudness and what exactly Peter Murrell bought with all his SNP money. Check out Failure to Launch here! RILEY ALERT Check out No

We’ve got some serious issues: Iran is too real of a country to ignore, and Saudi Arabia is becoming a real country in that it suddenly can’t find $300m to fund the LIV Golf tournament in Louisiana. Because something happened regarding the thing that it uses to make all its money from? We also dig i

Josh joins us to talk about Peter Thiel’s bargain bohemian grove, an AI avatar company with a macabre and deeply stupid twist, and then we revisit old friend Knightscope Security to explore what can only be described as “police robot foot fetish fan fiction.” Check out the Worst of All Possible Worl

I can’t believe he’s gone… he had so many relaunches left in him. We reflect on the premiership of Keir Starmer and ponder what awaits this country under Burnham, before reading the poem that proves AI generated art is just as worthwhile as anything done by a human. RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No

We brought on Northern Irish journalist Lara Whyte to discuss recent events in Belfast, and the extent to which Musk-centric American far right internet garbage is becoming unavoidable. We also discuss recent updates to the anti-Starmer's-car twink arsonists! Check out Lara's work here! RILEY ALERT

Andrew, Riley, and Devon return for the penultimate episode of Bones Season 6! It's a fallow week at the Jeffersonian as Bones focuses on having fun with some dinosaur bones, leaving Booth to focus on forcing a confrontation with rogue sniper Jacob Broadsky. But this time, not everyone is making it

Britain inches closer to legislating a national bedtime for rowdy teens and there’s another ministerial resignation over an inability to make it 1942 again by science or magic. In the second half, Daniel Trilling joins us to discuss his new book If We Tolerate This, an exploration of how the British

We invited friend of the show David Z. Morris, author of “Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia,” to discuss his book and some recent developments in even dumber AI. But the truth is, most of this episode is about a tactical chud bespoke suit company call

Gregk from Blood Work joins us to discuss the recent wave of street violence in England and the three way fight for the soul of the English chud. But first, we look at a magic economy box, replete with 2001-vintage Super Troopers jokes in its corporate PR, that we are CERTAIN will make no mistakes.

The FT’s Rob Smith joins Riley and Nova to talk all about the explosion of an industry that can only be described as “private equity funded payday loans for plutocrats” and all the unique characters therein. RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here! MILO

It's the free one! We look at some correspondence from the Prince of Darkness and a company offering a great way to make your garden shed worth $160k. Then, Riley speaks with Gareth Fearn about the ongoing unfolding energy crisis, and how the British state has spent the last twenty years solving the

We’ve invited friend of the show Cory Doctorow back to discuss the matryoshka doll of Elon Musk’s corporate money-losing endeavours. We also had a chance to discuss that short story in Granta. You know, the one. Check out Cory’s work (and upcoming books!) here! RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayo

This week, the cast of Bones return in top form: Cam socieconomically terrorises Intern Wendell, Angela and Hodgins reaffirm their love in the face of a bushidoless baby, and Bones solves the case through some good old-fashioned phrenology! Outro: Okay Kaya - Mother Nature's Bitch

Our good friend Abi joins us to discuss the new EHRC guidance and the plan to spend billions of dollars on bathrooms. But first… we look to the skies. The truth is out there. In Doncaster. RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here! MILO ALERT Check out Mil

Dan Davies, friend of the show and author of The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind, joins us to discuss Burnhamism. Or maybe Manchesterism? It’s got to be an ism. It’s got to be the perfect mixture of disapproving of the problem and dec

Andrew, Riley and Devon finally come face to face with the notorious Backdoor Pilot. Bones and Booth are stumped when a murder investigation requires finding a lost treasure map- but fortunately, Booth knows someone. A son of a bitch with the Finder Power. Outro: Jay-Z & Kanye West - N***** in Paris

We’ve invited friend of the show and journalist Annie Kelly to discuss the recent far-right march in London, the online AI slop aspect of it, and the offshoring of fascist outrage content on Facebook to…entrepreneurs in the Global South? RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT C