*UNLOCKED* 5000 Columbos feat. Gregk Foley

Summary

TRASHFUTURE – UNLOCKED 5000 Columbos feat. Gregk Foley

December 31, 2025

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Main Theme

This episode of TRASHFUTURE unpacks how the logic of digital capitalism, technological hype, and the revolving door between politics, tech, and the security state manifest in initiatives like AI-powered law enforcement tools. The discussion weaves through news items dripping with absurdity, the commodification of public sector 'innovation,' the chilling advancement of surveillance capitalism, and concludes with a humorous but trenchant call for a more honorable, even cinematic, model of policing.

Joining the regular crew is Gregk Foley, host of the podcast Bloodwork, to offer sharp commentary on AI, policing, and the failures of the Blairite political legacy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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Woke AI, the US Approval Process, and the President’s Ramblings (00:15–03:48)

• The episode opens with a satirical riff on political grandstanding about “woke” culture infiltrating AI and regulatory structures in America, riffing on Trump’s muddled complaint about state-level approval processes leading to “woke” data centers.
  • "Woke, it's got a regenerating health bar, got shields." – Hussain (00:41)
  • "We thought we took down woke, but then its health bar flashed and it got bigger." – Riley (00:45)
• The hosts joke about AI being ‘corrupted’ by exposure to progressive states, poking fun at technophobia and reactionary panic.

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The Deadening Repetition of History (03:29–03:53)

• They compare current political hysteria to the patterns of the 20th century, only now "being much more dumb about it."
  • "It does sort of feel like we're repeating a lot of things that happened in the 20th century, but we're also being, like, much more dumb about it." – Ewan Blair (03:31)

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Nonsensical Christmas Murals, Local Panic, and Symbolic Portals (05:09–10:14)

• Riley highlights a bizarre Christmas mural in Kingston upon Thames, featuring melting snowmen and animals – leading to confusion and over-interpretation by local Facebook groups, who conflate images of running on frozen water with ‘small boats’ (i.e., references to migration).
  • "There's clearly something political about it, but nobody knows what it is. If ever there was a slogan for our times, that's it." – Greg Foley quoting a restaurant manager (08:29)
• The crew mock British cultural paranoias: the 'woke' label attaching itself to anything, and the persistent inability (or unwillingness) to parse reality from symbolism.

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Ewan Blair, Multiverse, and the NHS: The Revolving Door of Tech-Policy Grift (10:49–22:33)

• Multiverse (founded by Tony Blair’s son, Ewan) emerges as a paradigmatic grift: a company first extracting public funds to 'reform' apprenticeships, now pivoting to AI training for the NHS by partnering with US data-mining firm Palantir.
  • "The stakes are so high... if we don't take the workforce on the journey, you add to the productivity doom loop and people will die." – Ewan Blair quote (12:47)
  • "Man selling monorail says only monorail can reverse decline of downtown district." – Greg Foley (13:21)
• The hosts debunk myths about outdated NHS technology (e.g., the supposed evil of fax machines), noting that digitization for its own sake can be counterproductive or insecure.
  • "Sometimes that is the best solution to a technological problem, is a fax machine." – Hussain (14:27)
  • "There are industries where making things touch-screenified and 'modern' actually makes services worse." – Ewan Blair (paraphrased, 14:34)
• Central critique: The problem isn't a lack of tech, it's the diversion of funding toward private consultants, under the guise of modernization.

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Palantir, AI, and Union-Busting (18:01–22:33)

• The Multiverse–Palantir partnership will train NHS staff to use Palantir’s AI decision tools, with government funds, raising questions about NHS worker consent, data security, and union-busting.
  • "Palantir is even helping the NHS absorb and like, absorb the impact of resident doctor strikes. You can use it to break strikes." – Riley (19:19)
• The group laments the cyclical nature of influence, nepotism, and public sector grifting by the political establishment and their progeny.

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Weaponized GeoGuessr: GREYLARK and the Absurdities of AI Policing (23:54–36:16)

• The featured investigation is Greylark’s “GeoSpy”: a tool that claims to geolocate any image using AI, marketed aggressively to police and security agencies.
  • “This is weaponized Geoguessr.” – Greg Foley (24:21)
• Hosts challenge the validity and ethics of such tools, relating their skepticism to perennial tech-for-police scams (e.g., ShotSpotter), cop puffery, and the dangers of automating police violence.
  • "Arguably, if it was within 20 minutes, maybe not that dangerous... No one lies more than the police." – Hussain (27:34)

Cybertrucks and Toy-Box Security (28:10–29:39)

• Tangent on Las Vegas police getting Andreessen Horowitz-donated Tesla Cybertrucks, lampooning the spectacle of 'innovation' gone absurd.

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Dystopian Outcomes, Accountability, and Evidence-Generating Machines (32:14–36:16)

• Serious points about AI tools automating or producing pretext for violence and error in policing, distorting ‘truth’ and allowing for the abdication of responsibility.
  • "It is an AI hallucination in real life... you have lived inside an AI hallucination." – Riley (34:06)
  • "Their utility lies precisely in their potential to destabilize the thing they proclaim to secure." – Greg Foley (51:35)
• Foley particularly stresses the move from finding evidence to producing evidence—through whatever means necessary—including AI hallucinations.

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5,000 Colombos: A More Honorable Model of Policing (38:13–42:19)

• Greg Foley advocates dramatically for "abolishing" AI-heavy policing in favor of a force made of 5000 “Columbos”—bumbling, persistent, personable detectives as seen on TV, upholding a 'gentlemanly' game of cat-and-mouse.
  • "I don't want 500 mrabs. I want 5,000 Columbos." – Greg Foley (38:57)
  • This evolves into a comedic vision: massed raincoat detectives, cigar budgets, and an erotically charged pursuit of crime and justice.

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GREYLARK’s Founder and Corporate Social Media Shtick (42:21–49:11)

• They mock Greylark’s “brotherly” Boston-born founder Daniel Heinen for his cringey LinkedIn, fake motivational quotes, and culture war pandering.
  • "Search that [quote], you will get precisely one Google result. Daniel Heinen's Twitter." – Greg Foley (44:47)
• Point made: These companies blend tech-bro hustle, surveillance capitalism, and online branding into a toxic but lucrative stew.

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The Inverse Dynamic: From AI Warfare to Surveillance Everyday Life (50:18–54:42)

• Greg Foley brings in the lesson of Israel’s “Lavender” AI program in Gaza: AI is mainly used to speed up target approval, lower oversight, and shift liability for civilian harm onto “the machine.”
  • "From what I could see, the real purpose of the system was to generate thousands of targets that could all be signed off in a few seconds with as little human oversight as possible." – Greg Foley (50:18)
• The hosts agree: the real 'utility' of these systems is not accuracy but producing 'credibility' for power to act, whatever the social or human cost.

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Closing Reflections & Recs (54:54–57:53)

• Greg Foley plugs Bloodwork, his podcast on the philosophy and history of violence, inviting listeners for collaborations on episodes covering cinema and theory (e.g., Michael Mann’s Heat, Schrader’s “Man in a Room” trilogy, or Tenet).
  • "For me, the podcast is the juice." – Hussain (55:51)
• Discussion meanders into movie fandom and the obtuse pleasures of Christopher Nolan’s logic.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "It's a future so close, I can taste it. I can smell it." – Greg Foley, on a sea of Columbos, (42:07)
• "Heroes deserve the most AI." – Greg Foley, mocking corporate slogans (47:17)
• "Mom says it's my turn on the surveillance machine." – Hussain, on the 'brotherly' founders (46:24)
• "The real utility of these systems is their ability to produce justifications for violence, not accuracy or truth." – (Summarized from Greg Foley’s remarks, 51:35–52:47)

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Overall Tone

Irreverent, incisively skeptical, and laced with dark humor, the episode bounces between mockery and serious worry about technological overreach in policing and policy. The hosts’ energetic banter merges with Greg Foley’s philosophical edge, maintaining the show’s trademark blend of the absurd and the analytical.

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:15–03:48: Satire on “woke” AI and political rambling.
• 10:49–22:33: Deep dive into Ewan Blair, Multiverse, NHS tech grift, and Palantir.
• 23:54–36:16: GREYLARK’s “GeoSpy”—AI spying for cops, skepticism, risks.
• 38:13–42:19: The case for 5,000 Colombos—honor in policing.
• 50:18–54:42: Israel’s Lavender AI, shifting liability, the danger of techno-justifications.
• 54:54–57:53: Bloodwork plug, closing meta-commentary on cinema and tech.

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For Listeners New and Old

This episode sharply exposes how tawdry, redundant, and dangerous our "technologized" future can be, punctuated by surreal moments, deep-dive analysis, and raucous suggestions for a world with less AI and more Colombo. If you want to understand why advanced policing tools aren’t just absurd but profoundly political—and why you should root for the detective with the cigar—this is one for the books.

Transcript

[Unidentified Speaker A]

We are going to work it so that you'll have a one approval process, not have to go through 50 states in the United States. You know, you can't go through 50 states. You have to get one approval. 50 states is a disaster because you have one woke state and you have to do all woke. You'll be back into the woke business. We don't have woke anymore in this country. It's virtually illegal. But you'll have a couple of wokesters and we don't want to do that.

[Hussain]

Woke, it's got a regenerating health bar, got shields.

[Riley]

We thought we took down woke, but then its health bar flashed and it got bigger.

[Greg Foley]

We all have been there. We all have been there.

[Riley]

A couple wokesters left and we're not going to get 100% completion.

[Hussain]

Woke as a kind of optional boss. Yeah, it's so cool that this dementia ridden pedophile is president.

[Riley]

So what is he talking about? He's talking about getting data centers approved and he's saying that if you have to go through all 50 states, one of the woke ones is going to make your AI woke.

[Hussain]

I mean, this is the thing, right, with any president, whether you like them, you shouldn't or not. Right. The job kills them eventually because it's just too big and too weird and it just, it fries their brain. And ultimately, like this week, the week where everything is falling apart, you're seeing sort of Trump as a man on the brink. You know, he just, he should have, he should have stayed home.

[Ewan Blair]

I'm going to actually say that actually he's right. And I'm going to tell you the reason why. So I recently applied for a job with Zoran and I got it. And I'm on a project where I'm inventing, creating something which I'm going to exclusively reveal is going to be called mumdan AI. And the whole point is to make the AI woke. Right. And so when it goes to New York, we're going to corrupt it by making the AI woke and it's going to fry all the AI people's brain.

[Hussain]

There's something weird with this AI. It keeps trying to give me they. Them pronouns.

[Ewan Blair]

Yeah. Also if you use it, you become Muslim and that's kind of like maybe.

[Greg Foley]

We don't need the AI for that. Not again.

[Unidentified Speaker A]

Not again.

[Ewan Blair]

Yeah. So I love working on Ziran's campaign when my job is to use mumdan AI to turn everyone cheer. My boss knows all about it and he's smiling at me and nodding his head.

[Hussain]

I haven't I haven't done she yet, actually. So you know what? If I ever did do the comeback, I would have to sort of like, in the name of bipartisanship, that's what I would have to do. So maybe, I don't know.

[Ewan Blair]

I mean, you know, there's a lot of, like, ornaments and rituals, and that can be quite fun. But also, it does take up, like, a lot more time than, like, the Sunni version does.

[Hussain]

I gotta be honest, I was quiet quitting for a while.

[Greg Foley]

The thing that's got me wound up about this is that, like, I have literally, for a recent episode, just spent like, a week reading about, like, the Weimar constitution and Article 14 and the enabling act. And, like, say what you want about that stuff, like, there at least is some kind of a sequence or procedure. You have to go, I kind of impressively pulled that off. And then you turn onto this fuckwear, and it's literally a thing where it's like, oh, yeah, it needs to be just one state, like all 50, because it's all woke. So you just need, like, I see the brute force because of woke. Like, yeah, woke. Woke. Like, no, can't have the woke. AI woke states. Like, no. And it's like, this really is, like, second time as fast, isn't it?

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Hussain]

Mode Hitler.

[Ewan Blair]

I mean, yeah. I mean, pretty. I mean, pretty much. Like, I, I. You've sort of put it in more, like, articulate terms. But it is something that I was sort. I think about whenever I kind of, like, read the dang news, which is just like. It does sort of feel like we're repeating a lot of things that happened in the 20th century, but we're also being, like, much more dumb about it.

[Greg Foley]

But the second time in a row for Hussein. Like, you don't gotta hand it to Hitler. However.

[Ewan Blair]

You know what, say what you will, he was able to string a sentence together.

[Hussain]

You know what else we know? Another pattern from history we're repeating. It's not introducing the show at the start.

[Riley]

That's right. I wanted to do a little cold open to give a little spice to it.

[Hussain]

But let me just pitch something to you. Something I like to call the Hot Open.

[Riley]

The Hot Open, where I say something like, hey, welcome to tf, It's Riley Nova Hussein. It's a bonus episode. We are here with Greg Foley. I'd say first time, long time.

[Greg Foley]

Absolutely.

[Riley]

And the host of the new show, Bloodwork, about the epistemology of violence, epistemology.

[Greg Foley]

Economy, libidinal drives, politics, sociology, culture, baby, you can fit a lot in this thing.

[Hussain]

Fantastic.

[Greg Foley]

Thank you very much for having me. Lovely to be here.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Hussain]

Yeah. I would say that would be a good way to introduce the show, but we didn't do that. So, you know.

[Riley]

No, we didn't. It's a good. You know what. And then next time we'll see which one we prefer. So I found a company that I think is pretty aligned with a little bit of the kinds of things Greg thinks about. It can only be described as weaponized geoguessr.

[Hussain]

Fantastic.

[Riley]

Which is pretty cool.

[Greg Foley]

It's great. I love it.

[Riley]

But before we get there, I have a couple of news items, which is, did you know? I don't know. Maybe you did know, maybe you didn't. That some man made. Horrors beyond comprehension have emerged in Kingston on Thames in London.

[Hussain]

Okay.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Hussain]

I mean, it seems a likely place for them.

[Riley]

Yeah. Yes. The annual Christmas music mural in Kingston contains pictures of people melting into snowmen.

[Hussain]

I'm seeing this now. Yeah, it's got a bit Hieronymous Bosch. They aimed for Bruegel and they went past Bruegel and they hit Bosch, which is a, you know, easy thing to do.

[Greg Foley]

I don't know if you know how accurate you actually are with that point.

[Ewan Blair]

It's.

[Hussain]

I mean, I'm liking the kind of snowman with the three melting fur hands and also the fur top hat and the broken. A snowman with a broken nose. Dangerous character in Tinseltown you wouldn't want to fuck with.

[Ewan Blair]

Can I just interject in this very smart point to say that I really want Big John to say Hieronymous Bosch.

[Riley]

All right, Big John, if you're listening.

[Ewan Blair]

I mean, look, we have a. Connect the screen rock. Guys, if you're listening to this, can you please get Big John to say Hieronymous Bosh? Yes, and I'd be very happy if he did that.

[Riley]

So dogs are blurring into chickens. Humans are transforming into animals. It's full of grotesque. This full of dog has a backward.

[Hussain]

Tail for a head.

[Riley]

Yeah. Burning penguins. This feels portentous.

[Hussain]

Burning penguins is really, really good. You remember how it used to be, you know, before woke, when you used to sort of gather around with your family or grill penguins together, you know.

[Riley]

But you'd be shivering in the. Shivering from the cold breeze and toss another penguin on the fire.

[Greg Foley]

Can I just ask because I live in Kent and I'm not sorry about that. Is there something wrong with it?

[Riley]

Well, here's the thing. This. According to London Centric, apparently the most loud complaints by local locals in Kingston have been Coordinated on Facebook groups which suggest that the image of people running across a frozen Thames. So this was portraying a time where the Thames froze in the 19th century and people like had a big party on it.

[Hussain]

I'm pretty certain people in the 19th century had like, you know, pencils and stuff so they could like draw pictures of it. But I'm sure none of those exist still.

[Riley]

No, no, no, no. Of course. So you had to do this. So anyway, what happened is a number of people organized on Facebook to suggest that a picture of people at Christmas running across a body of water was supportive of small boats.

[Greg Foley]

That's right, yeah.

[Hussain]

Oh, okay. It's woke. It's actually been woke the whole time. Because typical migrants coming over here, burning our traditional penguins, they don't want you to know this, but in Richmond upon Thames, they're burning the penguins. They're eating the penguins.

[Riley]

Yeah. They use the Mum Dunn AI to make this woke mural.

[Hussain]

This is really good. I look forward to more forms of kind of migrant paranoia in the sense of completely disconnected from reality. Being like living in down the Thames in Henley, being like, stop the boat. About the boat race.

[Riley]

The boat race is supportive of the concept of boats in general.

[Hussain]

Yeah. I think we as a country will only be free from the tyranny of globalization when every single British person no longer understands the concept of a boat and believes that you die when you go in water. Like in gca Vice City.

[Riley]

Well, I'm going to say we're going to be like, when China destroyed its Navy in 1520, we're gonna be like, no more boats.

[Hussain]

Yeah.

[Riley]

We're gonna be like that.

[Hussain]

That well known event when China destroyed its navy.

[Ewan Blair]

Yeah.

[Greg Foley]

My favorite part of this story is the quote from the restaurant manager where he just says, there's clearly something political about it, but nobody knows what it is. If ever there was a slogan for our times, that's it.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Greg Foley]

Thank you to that man.

[Hussain]

Some politics is happening.

[Greg Foley]

Can't quite put it. The thing is right, if there is something political about it, but you're not sure what it is, like, I have two answers for you. The first one is, don't worry about it. Like, the second one is, maybe you're out of your depth, but in either case, like, you can just move on.

[Hussain]

I feel like I'm out of my depth.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah. Like the water's frozen. You can't be out your depth.

[Hussain]

Well, I'm looking at this and this man is wearing like a kind of Santa Claus hijab, which.

[Greg Foley]

That is my depth. That's Exactly.

[Hussain]

My depth used to be mine, but, you know, I got better.

[Riley]

We have appeared to have engaged in possibly. They've opened a portal with this, with this dark ritual.

[Hussain]

Well, you get enough penguins together, you know.

[Riley]

Yeah, yeah. Portal's inevitable. That many penguins at this point, it's not a question of whether you got a portal, it's a question of how many.

[Greg Foley]

See, this is the thing is that like one of the criticisms that people have is that the figures in this mural bear no resemblance to real British people in social life. To which I say I think the British flatter themselves, frankly.

[Riley]

We're much more grotesque.

[Hussain]

We've all got that one friend with the broken carrot nose.

[Riley]

I've been there three times actually. After this I'm going to go hang out with my friend who's currently mid level animorphing into a chicken.

[Hussain]

There's so many fur top hats, which to be fair, there was a time in British life when you could have said that. Just walking around, albeit in Camden, but still.

[Riley]

What like 2006?

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, can't wear them anymore. It's woke.

[Riley]

Yeah, that's right. We appear to have opened a portal in Kingston, but like you say, we don't know what the portal is to or why it's open. But it's clearly open.

[Hussain]

Okay, sure. Act accordingly.

[Riley]

Yeah, so, you know, be careful. We don't know why or what.

[Hussain]

If you feel out of your depth with any of this stuff, I feel like this sort of. Yeah, you were right. Like the short term survival advice is just keep it moving. You know, you're going to see a lot of shit like this in like the future until the AI bubble bursts. So, you know, for the next couple of weeks you're going to see some burning penguins on stuff. Just like head down, keep the headphones in, just keep it moving.

[Riley]

Yeah. So the thing is you're going to. If you don't do that, then you're in danger of trying to be like this says something about society and then trying to figure out what it says. And then you're going to be on Facebook complaining about small boats and burning penguins.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, maybe society has nothing to say to you on this point.

[Riley]

So I want to move on a little bit because it's time to visit an old friend, our good old friend Ewan, the son of Tony Blair. Blair.

[Hussain]

One of the all time sons, you have to say.

[Riley]

One of the. Like a son beaten only by the Hawn, the web guy.

[Hussain]

Yeah.

[Riley]

In terms of like overall sun power.

[Hussain]

Sun powered, kind of ubiquity, unwantedness by us.

[Ewan Blair]

Yeah.

[Riley]

The only thing you know what it is, it's like what Ewan Blair lacks in sheer son chutzpah of Richard Evans on the web. Just to remind everyone on the Web.co.uk is he makes up for and unfortunately utter ubiquity and a sort of significant place in our economy that is not just selling access to his father. So, because Ewan Blair started Multiverse, a company that was supposed to replace universities with apprenticeships and whose whole model was basically standing, was basically just hoovering up huge amounts of the government's apprenticeship levy that was meant to get people into careers, but instead just. Just keeping it.

[Hussain]

Oh, cool. My favorite part of any government policy is when some guy who's connected takes a bunch of it for something that everyone knows won't work.

[Riley]

Yep.

[Greg Foley]

You know what this middle needs? A man.

[Hussain]

Yeah.

[Riley]

Well, here's the thing, right? You know, you're not like, placing apprentices anymore. No one's hiring, so you got to pivot.

[Hussain]

Right, okay, sure. He's apprenticeships solved. Next question.

[Riley]

So now he is turning to the nhs.

[Hussain]

Oh, good. Okay, sure, yeah, yeah.

[Riley]

Blair, who runs the tech group Multiverse, not a tech company, but this. The credulous. I mean, the people who are actively promoting him in the Telegraph are like, oh, the tech group, Multiverse, not a tech company, just a way to privatize public capital, says that AI could successfully reverse NHS workforce productivity decline and ultimately save lives, they said. Blair said his company, which he founded in 2016, plans to train up thousands of doctors, nurses and support staff to use AI to improve services for patients, saying, quote, the stakes are so high, if we don't take the workforce on the journey, you add to the productivity doom limit loop and people will die. This is an adoption challenge as much as it is a technology challenge. You've got to start with the tens of thousands and then scale up to the hundreds of thousands of workers because everyone's being impacted every.

[Hussain]

Because the current government's attitude towards doctors and nurses is one of, like West Streeting saying, we will put you in a fucking gulag if you strike again. Right. And this not working. So really, I'm looking forward to, I guess, the army at this point sort of herding a bunch of junior doctors into a room. So Tony Blair's kid could be like, okay, so this is an iPad.

[Greg Foley]

Man selling monorail says only monorail can reverse decline of downtown district.

[Hussain]

The fucking doom loop bit as well is such a. Like, you know how on, like, any of my podcasts, you can, like, Guess which movie I've seen most recently or, like, book I've read most recently. That's fine because I'm an idiot professionally, but, like, you're not supposed to be able to do that for like, the guy who's putting, like, AI in the nhs. And the doom loop thing is such a fucking obvious buzzword, you know, It's.

[Riley]

A buzzword that refers to like, oh, it' productivity, doom loop. Because any time they spend catching up to their current, like to meet their current backlog, their backlog is just getting worse. But yeah, that's absolutely. It's. It's. Instead of saying like a fund an underfunding crisis, you can call it a doom loop because that sounds like it's something inherent to like the structure of the NHS itself. It's something faulty with it. It's not that it's being sabotaged, it just. It's in one of these things somehow. We don't know how it got there, you know. He says anyone who has the experience of spending time in the NHS is typically horrified to discover things are still down on pen and paper. Famously, there are still fax machines.

[Hussain]

I'm willing to get fully special interest about that and be like, sometimes that is the best solution to a technological problem as a fax machine.

[Ewan Blair]

Yeah, it is. Genuinely, it is. And there is research that sort of suggests that is the case. Also, there are specific reasons why those tech. Because the thing that I sort of get frustrated by is this sort of sense of like, oh, the nhs, it's really outdated and if it sort of became really modern with like, touch, like everything was touchscreen, then it would just sort of be better. Which, like, number one, there are lots of fucking examples like around to say to sort of prove otherwise in terms of like, I do challenge a lot of people to kind of think of a industry where things kind of became sort of touch screenified and like, services got better. I don't necessarily think that there really is an example of it, but also like, I know people who are doctors who kind of like, who have said. But yeah, like those fax machines, like, they still mostly communicate via email, right? Like, that is like the way in which it is a sort of modern organization in that way. Like, fax machines are kind of used for specific kinds of documents or to sort of, if there are stuff that just sort of needs to be sent immediately. It's much easier to sort of see stuff on paper. If you've taken handwritten notes, for example, it's quicker to use a fax machine. To sort of send that through than to scan it into a computer. And then your Adobe AI is trying to change everything and put fucking sparkly stickers over it before. I don't know. Adobe AI fucking sucks. They have so many issues with it. The point just being that those fax machines and those types of older technologies, they exist for a reason and they are sort of using the technology that they have to the optimal ability that it could. But also the idea that this is sort of a relic that shows how kind of antiquated the NHS is. And it's like, well, running a medical institution, especially to that scale, is like you cannot just sort of go in and techify everything. It doesn't work like that. Very similar almost to pilots, actually. And the way in which pilots still kind of use very old school methods, like checklist methods and stuff to sort of like, you know, allow planes to sort of fly safely.

[Hussain]

The desire to like smoothen it, right, to make it all an app.

[Greg Foley]

There are also like security. Like I'm just with you talking about planes, Hussain, you got me thinking about the planes is a very similar thing in terms of security. Like certain systems, you don't actually want them to be streamlined and made smoother so that anybody can walk up to them and use them. That could actually be a security hazard.

[Ewan Blair]

A lesson of like kind of modernization, so to speak, in terms of like, oh yeah, let's move all our information to the cloud.

[Hussain]

All of your information has now been sort of like hacked and is now locked behind some random.

[Ewan Blair]

Exactly. But also I think about the McDonald's near my house, for example, and the fact that they always had these very long lines because they have four of the touchscreen systems and only two of them work because no one knows how to fix the other two, as far as I'm aware. Right. And so it's just like, well, this hasn't made anything easier, it's made it more difficult. And also in this country we experience all the time the effects of that type of these so called technological upgrades, grades that exist so that they cut costs. I guess the point I'm trying to get to is that it's one thing to sort of make an argument of, okay, we want to sort of introduce more modern technology as part of a sort of expansive overhaul of the NHS in order to make it function better. But the actual what they're trying to do is just sort of be like, we want to integrate AI into everything. Not really to sort of improve health outcomes, not really to actually achieve anything other than to Sort of sustain the AI hard hype and make. And make money off the back of it.

[Riley]

You know, I'll say this, a couple things. Number one, the fax machine, it's a folk devil. It's a folk devil in the NHS that these people love to evoke.

[Hussain]

Absolutely.

[Riley]

Number two. So Multiverse, on Monday, in order to do this, has announced a major tie up with Palantir.

[Greg Foley]

That's right, baby, let's go.

[Hussain]

One of the other great sons, I guess, grandsons.

[Riley]

Yeah. Ewan Blair and Lewis Mosley, who we spoke about in the interview with Sasha on the Free episode, believe there could be. Things are about to change because of their tie up. Palantir has spent months introducing his software into NHS Trust and hooking up their disparate data sources. All trusts are being ordered to sign up for it for critical work by April next year. Multiverse's training for NHS staff will begin next February with the cost covered by the Government's growth and skills levy. So Ewan's found another pot of money to put himself in front of.

[Hussain]

Cool. That's. I mean, that's impressive, actually.

[Riley]

Here's the incredible set of sentences having. The technology is all well and good, but the NHS actually has to encourage its staff to use Palantir's AI tools to their full potential. Potential. That's where Ewan Blair steps in.

[Hussain]

Just a question, just a quick question. Is this popular with healthcare workers? Do they like doing it?

[Riley]

No, they don't.

[Greg Foley]

Not until Multiverse get involved.

[Hussain]

Multiverse's job is to be like, hey, so you know, Palantir, you know, the guys who are, you know, sort of deeply enmeshed in all the worst and sort of nastiest parts of the security state. Well, why don't you try incorporating, Incorporating them into your practice?

[Ewan Blair]

Us?

[Riley]

Hey? Pretty good.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And it even says, because it's the Telegraph, they're even like, Palantir is even helping the NHS absorb and like, absorb the impact of resident doctor strikes. You can use it to break strikes.

[Hussain]

Cool.

[Riley]

Pretty, pretty cool, yeah. I mean, the whole thing does. It does seem a bit like a heavy handed metaphor where they're like, the idea is for you and Blair to help guide NHS staffs through the steps required to get the most out of Lewis Mosley.

[Greg Foley]

I mean, like, I hope nobody here minds me saying this, but I find you and Blair sort of aggravating.

[Hussain]

Yeah. The thing is, we actually do tend to brief every guest before they come on. We must have missed that one.

[Ewan Blair]

He's actually funding Mumdan AI. So, yeah, that's gonna be a lot.

[Greg Foley]

We have to check with. The most controversial stance is. I mean, no, because my issue with you and Blair and the Blair family more broadly is that, like, first of all, we already have one Blair who's wandering around telling us that we're doomed if we don't get involved with, like, AI and digital id. Like, your dad already does that. And he is one of the primary reasons the world is in such a dire condition right now. And none of those are the reasons that you or your dad want to acknowledge, let alone talk about. So there's that. But then the other thing about it is that I was just thinking the other day, with Trump having MBS at the White House and Trump is literally pointing over MBS and being like, yeah, it turns out no one actually liked Khashoggi and it's kind of good that he died. And mbs is like, OK, great. Tony Blair has his entire job, for 20 years, has been greasing the wheels between Gulf states, monarchies and dictatorships and making them more amenable on a diplomatic stage. And he's completely redundant. And this entire project here with Multiverse with you and Blair is basically him coming along being like, I'm Tony Blair's son and I'm here to grease the wheels in order to get you in touch with Palace. Palantir and Palantir are just like, yeah, we're already fucking in the building. Like, we don't like, it is an entire family redundancy. And in terms of, like, sharing cost and, like, dead weight or something, like, the number one thing would be for you guys to just please, just go away and stop talking because you're not actually needed. And as a matter of fact, like, even without the Blairs, like we have, we're streeting the porcelain child, like, waiting in the wings just, like, to jump in and do it all. Like, you are not required. You are surplus to requirements. Go and enjoy your money.

[Hussain]

That's the thing. To them, it is essential. Right. In the same way as we see with a lot of other things where it's like, no. One of the sort of. Of unavoidable things. One of the points of doing things this way is so that you and Blair can get his money up.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's look for such a son as that to go unpaid for such a. So it would be a scandal.

[Greg Foley]

It would be.

[Hussain]

It would be horrific. I wouldn't want to live in a country that didn't pay you and Blair, oh, you know, potentially millions to do nothing.

[Riley]

Oh, yeah, because of course. Has company ever turned a profit? Absolutely not.

[Hussain]

Well, I mean, that's just because he's so, like, caring towards. Yeah, exactly.

[Riley]

He wants to give everyone AI training, I guess now, apparently.

[Hussain]

Yeah, and you're welcome.

[Riley]

He wants to shepherd Louis Mosley into the NHS to break the power of organized labor. It does feel like quite a fucking. I don't know if I could even call it a metaphor. It just. It's the literal thing. It just is the thing. It is, it is. It is just. It's galling to see it.

[Ewan Blair]

It's.

[Greg Foley]

You don't want.

[Hussain]

First is tragedy, second time is fast to be true. As often and as like, you know, as regularly as it is.

[Riley]

Yeah, like. Like we should have been done with the dads. We shouldn't be getting the sun redo performance.

[Hussain]

A guy who reads Marx one time and is like, you can predict everything that's going to happen should have stayed a joke in Hail Caesar rather than a type of person you actually kind of end up being.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's just like with the Epstein emails thing, it's like. I really thought it would be more complex than this.

[Greg Foley]

Can I draw attention to a certain paragraph that really pricked my attention? Yeah, I'm just going to read this. So far, at least, the market is buying what Mosley and Palantir are selling. Shares are up 2000% since the launch of ChatGPT three years ago, while UK revenues last year, last year hit 304 millions. So, first of all, did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending in 1976? Secondly, Riley, quick question. Do we have any knowledge about how Moseley's boss, Peter Thiel stake in Nvidia is doing?

[Riley]

Oh, I wouldn't worry about it. I wouldn't worry about Oracle.

[Greg Foley]

He didn't offload his entire stake in Nvidia maybe three days ago.

[Riley]

No. Neither did Masey Oshison. To be fair, that was just to invest in OpenAI again. That's, of course, the other thing about Palantir is, again, this, that the Telegraph article entirely allows slides is that Palantir is a meme stock. It's one of the meme stocks. It's like retail traders just ape into it, like wholesale. This is a thing that happened. It has been for, like, since COVID not just since the launch of fucking chatgpt, hey.

[Hussain]

But fringe benefit from this, we're all going to get to see a lot more of Alex Karp, aren't we? Happy about that?

[Greg Foley]

I love that he has a sword.

[Ewan Blair]

He's a sword guy.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's pretty good.

[Greg Foley]

They mentioned that in the article as well.

[Riley]

Mentioned it from the article. All right, all right, all right. I want to move on. I want to talk about Greylark, geospy, Weaponized geoguessr.

[Greg Foley]

Whatever.

[Riley]

So Greg and I have been talking about, like, a good topic for him to come on with, and I just, like, I stumbled across this company while following the posts of, like, well, following a chain of quote. The quote tweets of an annoying guy.

[Hussain]

Essentially, the best ways to do it, I would say.

[Riley]

Oh, of course.

[Hussain]

Guy powered research.

[Greg Foley]

You know, this guy is annoying, and he is a guy.

[Riley]

He's annoying, he's a guy.

[Greg Foley]

Both of those points.

[Riley]

His name's Daniel Heinen. He's from Boston, and he's created a version of geoguessr for cops.

[Greg Foley]

This is weaponized geogueser. I wish it was more complicated than that, but that is exactly what it is. Like, I really didn't think the revolution was going to hinge on that one guy. Basically, for the next six months, in order to thwart this technology, basically sitting in a room going, yeah, goat farm, Uzbekistan. Goat farm, Uzbekistan. Goat farm, Uzbekistan. Just to confuse this program that is literally. It's all hinging on this.

[Hussain]

At this point, we have to turn Rainbolt to the side of good, right? Like, if he isn't already. We have to get Rainbolt in the.

[Riley]

Look, we've identified that the Chapheart people. Our intel I mentioned, allegiance received is.

[Hussain]

Listen, we have people everywhere, and if you mention Mr. B. The gentleman Rhymer, right? Someone will reach out to you and go, oh, yeah, Mr. B. The gentleman Rhymer's woke. He's cool. And I'm like, okay, he's not cool.

[Riley]

Yeah, no, let's not start using the C word. Cool to be the gentleman rhymer.

[Hussain]

I will happily concede that Mr. B. The gentleman Rhymer and other sort of chat pop luminaries are like. Like, politically on the right side. It's a big tent, right? It's a sort of. Doesn't have to be. It's a bus, not a taxi. Right. It doesn't have to be a perfect coalition.

[Riley]

We don't have to sit near them. It's fine.

[Hussain]

No one thing works. It's gonna take everybody rapping at it from different angles to bring it down.

[Greg Foley]

Sending out the Manchurian Candidate activation phrase for Uncle Adam's.

[Riley]

So we're talking about Greylark, which has a product called GeoSpy, a weaponized GeoGuessr they say, say, enhance your investigation, you know, your investigations with AI powered location intelligence designed to help government and law enforcement teams uncover critical insights faster and with greater precision. And they also say they help enterprise investigations with faster, smarter. Location intelligence?

[Hussain]

Yeah. Location intelligence or knowing where stuff is?

[Riley]

Yes, they. They call it visual super intelligence or super knowing where stuff is. Yeah, like super by a of lot. Lot. I know where a lot is. But so they're. But they're. All their videos that they post in their social media show examples of using their platform. And again, it's videos of people using their platform. So I always am like, I don't know how much of this to believe because some of it's certainly possible in theory, but like, how much of this is hugely overhyped? It is, again, it's hard to say. It's not like we have access to their back end and, you know, we wouldn't know what to do with it if we did. But what they claim to be able to do is take a photo, any random social media photo. And the example that they use, or one of the examples they use is some drill wrap and be like, we can locate these criminals and then they take a tiny screenshot of the, of this drill wrap video and then they upload it to their program and then it geoguesses the whole thing. And they say, oh, we can do buildings. We can identify anything from tiny blurry pixels because our AI is so good. Again, I am skeptical. Yeah, take it with a boulder of salt.

[Unidentified Speaker A]

Yeah.

[Hussain]

Where's your kind of data for that coming from?

[Riley]

Yeah. And also, I think whenever we talk about these companies, we talk about them as though that what they're saying is plausible because it shows what they want to do and what people want them to do and what the market seems to like. So a detective at a large Metro police department said Greylark helped us apprehend a dangerous fugitive in under 20 minutes. This tool is unbelievable, a game changer for law enforcement operations.

[Hussain]

Arguably, if it was within 20 minutes, maybe not that dangerous, then also this is the other thing is especially like with everything, but especially in relation to product, product endorsements. No one lies more than the police.

[Riley]

Right?

[Hussain]

Like, you really have to internalize that. And particularly whenever they get cops to say, hey, we love this technology. This technology really works. No, it doesn't. Right? Like you can look at shit like, I don't know anything. ShotSpotter, for instance, for that, you know, like, Chicago spent millions on that and it didn't fucking work ever.

[Riley]

Oh, can I, can I give You a new example of that. That's like three days ago that was just been rattling around in my head.

[Hussain]

Please. Yeah.

[Riley]

So you know how Ben Horowitz just keeps giving the Las Vegas Police Department like predator. Yeah, the Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz. He is now deployed.

[Hussain]

The one with the normal shaped head.

[Riley]

Yeah, the normal head.

[Hussain]

Or it's like sort of the inverse. You know, it's got a big divot in the top of it.

[Riley]

So this is a press release. In a highly visible move blending innovation, corporate influence and public safety. Don't you love when a highly visible move blends innovation, corporate influence and public safety?

[Hussain]

I would say that that's one of my favorite things. And also I would express that with like three EM dashes as well.

[Riley]

The Las Vegas Police Department has rolled out the country's largest fleet of cybertrucks donated by Ben Horowitz.

[Hussain]

I listen, I support any tech bros project to make America's police cars worse.

[Greg Foley]

We have a lot of them lying around by any chance?

[Riley]

Yeah, well, they appear to say also. Yeah, it's like what we're doing is all those cops, they feel like Halo. It was in Vegas too.

[Hussain]

Yeah. Yeah, Vegas. This sort of unreality field extends to having a loop there and having cybertruck police cars there.

[Riley]

Yeah. So like they used to. They used to. Yeah. They donated a bunch of like drones, plate readers, just basically Andreessen Horo is just using Las Vegas as like the test bed for police technology. And now it's like, okay, you have the country's largest fleet of cybertrucks. You have the country's largest fleet of unintentional vehicle borne IEDs. Now does.

[Hussain]

Does a police car need to be able to like hit a curb without exploding?

[Riley]

Should a leaf be able to fall it without it catching fire? This is another example though, because like the Las Vegas Police Department now will just be like, we love everything Ben Horowitz gives us. We think it's great. So the thing they claim is back to the Greylark is that their visual intelligence platform turns photos into intelligence. No metadata required, which is great.

[Greg Foley]

There's one thing I want. It's security programs that work off of less information. That's really good.

[Riley]

Pretty good.

[Greg Foley]

Please have at it.

[Riley]

Geospy has enabled law enforcement governed agencies to act swiftly, determining the locations of suspects and. And criminals.

[Hussain]

They called it geospy.

[Riley]

Yep. Cool Geoguessr, but you know, more operator. What if Rainbolt was like wearing a skull neck gaiter and like a high cut helmet?

[Hussain]

Yeah. Sure, yeah.

[Riley]

What if Rainbolt was dressed exactly like the glasses guy from Sicario?

[Greg Foley]

One of my favorite things about GeoSpy is they've actually segmented it into three separate products. And I'm just going to read them to you now. Global search estimates the location of an image anywhere in the world, typically within 1-100km without needing prior location input. That's one. Now we zoom in a little bit more. Street search pinpoints the location of a street level image within a few meters when the city is known or specified. Now we zoom in a little bit more. Property search identifies the exact location of a building or nearby structure from an image provided the city is known. The whole time I was reading that, I was just thinking of Robin Williams in one hour photo. Just looking up from that family's photo packs and going, there's got to be a better way. Yeah.

[Hussain]

Oh, also the margin of error of between 1 and 100 kilometers. It's like, listen, we got you 100 kilometers away from whatever it is. I wouldn't lose any sleep over this.

[Greg Foley]

Sorry. You hate innovation.

[Riley]

Quick question. Has a police officer or federal law enforcement official ever been a dangerous stalker?

[Hussain]

Oh, I don't know. I mean, worry about it. How many stories have you read in your life about the police going to the wrong address by accident and then raiding that address and like, I don't know, driving an MRAP through a wall full of puppies or like, you know, killing. Throwing a flashbang into someone' baby's cart or whatever.

[Riley]

I don't, I don't want to cross promote too much, but that's exactly what, what took down Randall Weddell in London, Kentucky was they need. They didn't have geospy, so. Yeah, but you say they have these, like, these products and again, like this used to be available to just for people to use. And half the use cases that people used it for were cheating on geoguessr or like stalking someone. Yeah, exactly.

[Hussain]

Two equally dishonorable pursuits as far as I'm concerned.

[Greg Foley]

Concerned.

[Riley]

But they also have this article about why heroes deserve AI.

[Greg Foley]

Heroes deserve the most AI.

[Riley]

All police officers deserve a Tesla cybertruck in my opinion.

[Greg Foley]

Great big Tesla training to do whatever this fucking computer tells me to do.

[Riley]

Because also, by the way, it's another great accountability sync of just being like, oh, I went, I drove the mrap. Like what kind of. What you were saying, November is I drove this MRAP through this guy's house and I killed all of his dogs. And also him. And it was, it was the AI.

[Hussain]

It should have given me the right address, but it didn't. And so ultimately I'm blanking.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah.

[Riley]

And then just like the self driving car thing, it's like, well, you know, without AI assistance. Cops do that all the time. And it's like. Yes, but now they're able to claim that they're not liable for it.

[Hussain]

Yeah. And it's, it's just like frequency as well. It's like if this becomes a kind of standard investigative tool, then it's like all the time this will, this will go wrong, you know.

[Riley]

Yeah, it's just wherever this is deployed, there will be as many MRAPs as there are. There will be crushed walls and squished.

[Hussain]

It's like a distinct kind of dystopia where it's like you can now be killed because you' doorbell matched the description.

[Greg Foley]

You know, it's like one of those nature documentaries of the honeybees, like massing around a hornet to kill it, except it's just em rats going on someone's dog.

[Hussain]

Yeah, sorry. We parked 50 cybertrucks on top of you and your family. But in our defense, your car looks kind of like the car that we thought we were looking for, which turned out to be wrong.

[Riley]

Yeah, we were actually looking for a snowman with a broken nose.

[Greg Foley]

Sorry. There's cops like smashing through a wall going, you just got geoguessed.

[Hussain]

So jeez, GTA 4, right? The cop AI in that didn't have. It might not have been 4, it.

[Greg Foley]

Might have been one of the early ones.

[Hussain]

But the cop AI was as simple as get as close to the player as possible, which led to them accidentally implementing, ramming the car off the road or whatever. But now we're just doing that in real life and that's going to be fantastic, I think.

[Riley]

Well, you know what the way I see this kind of thing is? It is an AI hallucination in real life is what that will do. Because if the 20 MRAPs crash through your house, demolishing it because of fucking weaponized geoguessr, then what you have done is you have lived inside an AI hallucination.

[Hussain]

100 MRAPs, 25 each cardinal compass direction, right? All converge directly on top of my absolutely obliterated body.

[Greg Foley]

And then you turn around and say like, you destroyed my house. And they turn around and go, what house? And like, I wish I was joking about that, but like, so forgive me, I'm gonna go like so. For some reason over the past few years, for whatever reason, I have somehow become conditioned to approach a Lot of these products with the most cynical reading possible, don't know why that is. But like the way I look at a lot of AI products, there is a sort of tendency within the, within the use cases of these kind of AI products to operate in a sort of inverse relation with their proclaimed purpose or ultimate end. Whether that is like truth representation, understanding, informing, clarity, whatever. So like on these guys website Greylark, when they say law enforcement and intelligence agencies rely on it to geolocate photos for investigations and threat assessments, I think this will be used to generate evidence in his absence and fabricate threats. And when they say, say like corporate security teams use it to verify visual content tied to internal risk or asset tracking, I think this will be used for corporate espionage, sabotage and fraud. When they say in insurance and fraud prevention, geospy helps confirm the legitimacy of image based claims and detect suspicious activity, I say these will be used to penetrate deeper into and then widen the aperture of the space for denial of insurance claims. And then the last one here is really really important like when they say, and I find this kind of egregious, just to be quite honest with you. Journalists and open source investigators leverage its capabilities to verify the origins of media tied to breaking news, conflict zones or misinformation. And when I read that I simply wonder what the news would have looked like following for example the murder of journalist Shireen Abu Akla during the raid on Jenin refugee camp in 2022. And it doesn't exactly inspire confidence when the accompanying photo they use to tout this misinformation combating capability is what appears to me to be an AI generated image of a photographer in a pressed flak jacket in a non urban war zone.

[Hussain]

Incredible.

[Greg Foley]

Your mileage may vary but I have questions.

[Riley]

And to make it worse, the founder, like we said, please, is an annoying guy.

[Greg Foley]

Yes, this is true.

[Hussain]

This is. These are the two levels of analysis that you get from trash ej, you know.

[Greg Foley]

No, but like. And if I could just say one more thing, right? I don't know, maybe I am being overly cynical, but this is the thing, right?

[Riley]

I don't think that's possible when it comes to companies like this trying real hard.

[Greg Foley]

It's my first time guys. I'm trying to be friendly and sociable because like in the instance of verifying images, media stories coming out of war zones for example, there are already groups, right, like Forensic Architecture who have been doing hard work performing like geospatial forensic investigations using audio and shrapnel analysis to like meticulously Reconstruct the sites of, for example, war crimes and reassemble events as they happened. But their work has not been enthusiastically received by, for example, Western governments because the information that they uncover and the analyses, these analyses that they provide are not the kind that is sought by power. And therefore it just, it all just prompts the question for me. It's like, what is the actual function of this stuff? Well, it's fine.

[Hussain]

Listen, you might say from your painstaking investigation that the IDF appears to have parked 50 MRAPs on top of this hospital. However, our competing cop model shows that really, it could have been anyone.

[Greg Foley]

And then. But the other thing for me, right, okay. A few years ago, I was working at sort of like a small town department store and they were about to open with a fragrance department and perfumes and cosmetics and all kinds of stuff like that. And I stood there on the launching day and I was looking, looking around, I was like, you guys have absolutely. You're not prepared for what is about to happen when you open up in this small town with this new like high value goods department. I was like, you absolutely have not made the security preparations you need to do. Within the first three days, the same guy came in the morning three days in a row and chore the fuck out of the fragrance department. The second day they came out with a CCTV image of like, yeah, this is the guy. This is what he looks like. On the third day, I was stood there as the shutters were coming up. I watched this guy walk in through the building, pull the cap down over his head. And then apparently I found out the next day, before he even toured the store, he had gone over to one of the facial counters, booked, cooked himself a facial while chatting up one of the counter girls, and then gone and robbed the store and walked out and like, here's my thing.

[Hussain]

Dudes are so cool.

[Greg Foley]

Anyway, forgive me when it comes to like law enforcement and fighting crime. Like, I have a little bit of a kind of like old school kind of sensibility where I'm like, it's a game of cat and mouse and like, there's something. There should be some kind of like gentlemanly honor to it where it's like, I'm sorry, you have the cameras, you have like all these other things in the store. If you can't cast a guy, he just wants. Wanted it more like, I just think the idea that that guy could now, like, if you really want to catch a guy like that, get a Colombo, get someone like that. The idea that like that guy can now be rumbled because, like, let's say he's selling the stuff on Facebook, Marketplace, and then they upload the image, and then someone gets a corner of a house in the background out of a window, and they find him. I just find it ungentlemanly. It sickens me.

[Hussain]

Is it still police abolition if you want to replace the police with an all Colombo force?

[Greg Foley]

I don't want 500 mrabs. I want 5,000 Colombos. I want the cigar budget through the fucking roof. They're still cheaper than fucking Emirates.

[Hussain]

We will issue you the grubbiest raincoat anyone has ever seen.

[Greg Foley]

There's gonna be so many more things, and there are gonna be so many beloved wives.

[Hussain]

I would like the episode title to be 5,000 Colombos, please.

[Riley]

November. Look at the group chat.

[Ewan Blair]

I was also gonna say, this is also why, like, you know, many people are against Sadiq Khan in London. Cause they all sort of say that, oh, like, crime is sort of of gone up. And I'm not one of those people, but I'm against Hadith Khan when it comes to crime. Because what I do argue is that crime isn't honorable, you know, and it's all just very. You know, I always echoes Greg point, which is like, you know, there should be more honor in crime. There should be, like, you know, you should want to do the crime, but you should also want to sort of catch the criminal. And like, that want should be so, like, instinctive, if not even erotic at times.

[Hussain]

You should be involved in a complicated, kind of doomed Yuri situation with at least one of those Columbos.

[Riley]

Hussein, are you describing. Describing the plot of the movie Entrapments?

[Hussain]

During Catherine's intro, I was trying to.

[Ewan Blair]

Describe the movie Heat, but that also.

[Hussain]

Is they're kind of the same movie.

[Greg Foley]

I don't care how big or small the crime is. Every single criminal encounter between, like, criminal and law should be on the level of heat.

[Hussain]

You have a mandated diner encounter.

[Greg Foley]

Absolutely. In the department store cafe. If I see you in the fragrance department peeling off that security sticker, you're going down, getting a key.

[Hussain]

Accused of snapping the security tag off a dress at Primark and going, for me, the action is the juice.

[Greg Foley]

I can even remember. I can even remember the manager coming over to me and they're like, we need you with this blue permanent marker. All the security tags on the fragrances. We need you to put, like, a little blue dot on the stickers. And I was like, why am I putting the blue dot on the security stickers? They're like, because we keep getting robbed in the fragrance department. And I was like, so what is this going to do? They were like, well, we keep finding stickers peeled off and thrown on the floor. So at the very least, like, if we find stickers on the floor that have a of bunch blue mark on them, we know it's come from the fragrance department.

[Hussain]

So I was like, oh, this crew is good.

[Greg Foley]

I was like, so you guys are getting gone. You just want to find out how bad you're getting gone.

[Riley]

You know what? I think I figured out what they're looking at. You know what they're looking at us, the department store loss prevention department. Oh, this crew is good.

[Hussain]

Being sort of a fragrance Wayne Grove who imperils the heist.

[Unidentified Speaker A]

You need.

[Ewan Blair]

Yeah, well, you need. You need some type of like, Columbo character. But the Columbo character, like, is also. Is also sort of like Jeremy Fragrance.

[Hussain]

The spectrum of honor in crime and law enforcement extends from Colombo, on the one hand, the most honorable cop, to Wayne Gro, the most dishonorable criminal.

[Riley]

Right.

[Greg Foley]

I will be there, Colombo, because I'll come in and be like, yeah, just one more thing. My wife loves you. One more question. Your security department, what wage are they on? £13 an hour. Gee, you know, that seems very awfully low.

[Hussain]

5,000 Colombos approaching my location.

[Ewan Blair]

Location.

[Hussain]

I am delighted the future is so close. Ambling towards my exact location.

[Greg Foley]

It's a future so close, I can taste it. I can smell it. I can smell it.

[Riley]

We've deployed the Columbo rapid response Force.

[Hussain]

Unless we build 5,000 Colombo's future, I will.

[Riley]

I'll take that one. That one I'll take.

[Unidentified Speaker A]

May I?

[Greg Foley]

Please. Sorry, sorry to do a segue. I have a question to ask. Riley. Did you have a look, look at the LinkedIn page for the company?

[Riley]

I didn't look at the LinkedIn page. I looked at their. I read their entire blog where they're like, yeah, we started as three brothers living in a one bedroom apartment in Boston. So however annoying you thought they were, give it a specific Boston inflection, please.

[Greg Foley]

So when I was looking at this, I wasn't quite sure whether to not take it seriously or to be kind of terrified by it. And I'm still on the fence about that.

[Riley]

However, that's where we live.

[Greg Foley]

Absolutely. We. We are in that zone. Welcome. But I did. I went onto the Greylark LinkedIn. I'm so excited to talk to you about this because I went onto the LinkedIn, started looking through it, and I was wondering, you Know, should I be worried about this or should I treat it with derision that it deserves? Or is it a little bit of both? I'm going to read a post to you now that I found on the Greylark LinkedIn page from one week ago. And presumably November 11th, Veterans Day isn't just a date on the calendar, it's a reminder.

[Riley]

I see an M dash of the.

[Greg Foley]

Courage, sacrifice and unwavering commitment shown by those who served.

[Hussain]

Doing the Journey Sermon three today and.

[Greg Foley]

Every day we pause to honor you. Thank you for defending what so many of us get to simply enjoy. Now I'm not.

[Riley]

Wait, which every day. So Veterans Day is every day a great life?

[Greg Foley]

Absolutely.

[Riley]

Okay, good.

[Greg Foley]

But I'm not finished because that was. There was an image attached which had a quote from General Mark A. Milley. I'm going to read you that quote now. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for your sacrifice. Thank you for defending what so many of us get to simply enjoy. We are the home of the free because we are the home of the brave. Would anyone like to guess what I'm going to tell you now?

[Hussain]

I'm almost thinking that Mark Milley maybe did not say those words in that order.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, not true. Baby made it up. I have been on Google and I was using the quote marks and everything. I've been searching high and low trying to find any event in which General Mark A. Milley said anything resembling those words. I have not been able to find them anywhere. So yeah, made up, natural fake quote.

[Riley]

Also weird for like a sort of verified Twitter Elon poster to be quoting the soy woke gay general that didn't do January 6th because there are two.

[Greg Foley]

Sentences in that quote that are very distinctive. So I invite anyone who's listening to search for either. Thank you for defending what so many of us get to simply enjoy. Or we are the home of the free because we are the home of the brave, not land of the free. We are the home of the free because we are the home of the brave. You search that on Google, you will get precisely one Google result. Daniel Heinen's Twitter.

[Riley]

I mean this is the thing, what we really need is we need an image of like tactical rainbow rainbow just saluting.

[Greg Foley]

And I would just also like to point out one other thing I found on their LinkedIn. There were several things I found on their LinkedIn to be clear, but one that really stood out to me. One of the demos of their product was using footage from a recent far right mob attacking a migrant hotel in Dublin, which I thought was really, really funny because it immediately made me think about the British security services being like, oh, my God, guys, we can't find Tommy.

[Riley]

Is anyone seeing him?

[Greg Foley]

Oh, he's in Cyprus again, shaking a fist behind 500 MRAPs.

[Hussain]

The clumsiest Mi4.5 officer in the world who just keeps losing his number.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, one more thing, my wife loves Cyprus.

[Ewan Blair]

So.

[Riley]

Daniel Heinen, this is from his blog.

[Greg Foley]

Oh, good.

[Riley]

He says, at our peak, GeoSpy had 2 million free users and averaged about 120,000 searches a day. Many of my friends insisted I should monetize the free traffic and capitalize on the AI hype. And in Q1 of 2025, we'd completely sunset the public platform to focus on law enforcement and government applications. Some people asked why we made this decision and potentially forfeited millions of dollars in easy revenue. And the answer to that, of course, is they wanted to.

[Ewan Blair]

From.

[Riley]

Andreessen Horowitz is American Dynamism Division. But the founder of the American Dynamism Division is too busy, like, complaining about like, that. Kids get empathy lessons in schools. He says. When we first launched GeoSpy, we started as three brothers working out of a one bedroom apartment in Boston.

[Greg Foley]

Three brothers.

[Riley]

But now you look at like Daniel Heinen's Twitter feed.

[Greg Foley]

One brother, yeah.

[Hussain]

The other two brothers nowhere to be seen, airbrushed out of the photo.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, I just, I hope people understand what I mean when I say this. He has such a brotherly face.

[Hussain]

Mom says it's my turn on the surveillance machine.

[Riley]

And so now he just does, like engagement farming posts where he's like, all right, Daniel Heinen here. Red flags in a girl's apartment. Number one closing the floor.

[Greg Foley]

Who are you?

[Riley]

Number two. Number two. Not easily identifiable from any local landmarks. No. It says closets overflowing with clothes, pile of Amazon boxes, open food containers in the bedroom, any lamp from Target, a Nespresso machine. Tapestry, art and hair in the shower.

[Hussain]

In the bedroom is nasty work, to be fair. Like, he has kind of got you there in the apartment.

[Riley]

Apartment, Yeah.

[Hussain]

I mean, listen, it's not great coffee, but who cares?

[Greg Foley]

Like, honestly, as you're reading these posts, you need to picture the head of a regional police department reading these posts and going facts and clicking. Try a demo.

[Riley]

Just like, like 60 year old, like cop with like a million hours of overtime racked up and, you know, currently on paid administrative leave. Being like that is a red flag in a girl's apartment.

[Hussain]

I'm pretty certain this is 90 I haven't seen. I still, still haven't seen it yet. I'm 90% sure this is what the sheriff in Eddington is doing on his phone all day.

[Riley]

You know, and also he's. He has clearly told everyone who works for him to like post online.

[Hussain]

Yeah, for his bits. Which is, which is rough. You're kind of like a posting slave. You know, you're his straight man, effectively, you're his Costello.

[Riley]

So his Anastasia Sakurava, the director of operations at Greylark. You know, she's like posting a sort of like a picture, doing side eye, being like how I look at my CEO after he refuses to let me expense the SF Girls Weekly brunch. Then he responds with another one that's like, oh, the way my director of ops when her two week old account is getting more views than mine and it's like they own business trips.

[Hussain]

It's this cool, fun banter that's delightful. And this is certainly going to appeal to a guy with neck rolls on the back of his head that look like, like a sort of shrink wrapped set of hot dogs.

[Greg Foley]

And then he's then like replied to it with a post like quot post saying, boys, why are you letting her ratio me? And I'm like, man, do your job. I'm sorry. Like I said, three days in a row, chalk the fuck out of the department store. I see people that want it and are working for money and grinding and it's not you. Please. This is like me. I'm sorry. There's honor in crime. There's no honor in this. This is a dishonorable man.

[Riley]

He should cut off his top knot.

[Greg Foley]

It's so undignified.

[Hussain]

But the thing is, the Boston equivalent of the top knot is they cut the bill off your baseball cap you're wearing backwards.

[Riley]

No, they make you wear a baseball cap, but that completely flat. Yeah, it's not broken in.

[Hussain]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Greg Foley]

We've mentioned Boston so many times. Another thing from their LinkedIn was a post from the CEO and co founder where he touted their product's ability to locate a heavily blurred image of Boston Common within a mile. And he ended with a line saying blurring isn't a reliable defense anymore, which is just like. Yeah, thanks, man, that's great. That's really cool.

[Hussain]

Isn't Boston Common like, maybe I have a grotesquely inflated opinion of the size, but isn't it about a mile?

[Greg Foley]

Very likely. But it's very impressive nonetheless. I'm sure you'll agree.

[Hussain]

Oh yeah, I'm thinking about the end of like casino and forced forcing Boston Joe Pesci to wear a forwards baseball cap, making him watch as his brother is forced to wear a forwards baseball.

[Riley]

Cap, making him watch as his brother is forced to like wear a forwards New York Mets baseball cap.

[Greg Foley]

Oh my God. I've just seen he did a post where he's engaged in a farming and he said, what is something you can say to a VC and in the bedroom, which got 17 likes. And then in reply to his own personal post, he's then said, my partner is going to love you.

[Hussain]

Cool.

[Riley]

Yeah. Pretty good. Yeah. He's so cool. Yeah. No one has ever been hungry because you can always tell if you want, if they want the teal bucks or the A16 Zed Bucks. No one has ever been hungrier for the Andreessen Horowitz money than this guy.

[Hussain]

It's also, it's like specifically like Revenge of the Nerd shit. Like between this and like Alex Karp's sword, I'm just like being governed by the worst fucking idiots imaginable.

[Greg Foley]

I mean, if I could end with a slightly more serious point about this stuff. Continuing on from what I was saying earlier about this kind of inverse relation to truth and everything like that, all these kind of security, policing and militarization AI technologies for me, the benchmark of this tendency for me is still the lavender AI system that the IDF was using or is still using in Gaza, which was supposedly a smart targeting program to generate quote, unquote, legitimate targets for airstrikes. But from what I could see, the real purpose of the system was to generate thousands of targets that could all be signed off in a few seconds with as little human oversight as possible. When the question of overall decisionism can be basically abstracted out to a machine, which could be technically delegated as responsible, but also kind of deliberately and aspirationally rendered charges of responsibility or liability or culpable, practically impossible. So you get this kind of disattributed sovereignty where the machine made me do it. But then it's like, okay, so who, whose fault is in. It's like, well, not mine. The machine did it. It's like, okay, so who's running the machine? Like. And I think the best example of like the kind of weird space that then takes us into was like, I remember 972 magazine reported that the system had only a 10% error rate. But then later reporting 972 confirmed that the IDF's own numbers of killings in Gaza showed something like 80% of the people killed were civilians. So you're left with this dynamic where there's like a 10% error rate alongside a 90% civilian death toll. And no one even blamed thinks because like truth, veracity, clarity, so. And they've always been pulverized by a machine. And so as far as all this stuff is concerned, for me, like, their utility lies precisely in their potential to destabilize the thing they proclaim to secure. And whether they do that deliberately or just by being wrong, for me, like, it's almost beside the point. Whether this kind of stuff like works or not for me is almost irrelevant. And like, and, and I think Riley's absolutely like correct to point out that like this is ultimately just sort of like gesticulating and prostrating for Teal. But like, that is the game. That is the entire game. And like all these other things in the proclaimed goals and even just having like a pool quote like Mr. Detective from unnamed police department is like, yeah, this is great and we love it and we use it all the time. We caught a felon, like, whatever. Why try harder? Yeah, why even try?

[Riley]

Yeah, as you say it already, it already does the thing you need, you need it to do, which is be credible enough to allow the people who matter to go, ah, good enough. We can mete out violence in the basis of this. Absolutely. It's the same thing as that like, face search, clear view thing where it's like, yeah, you can take a picture of someone on your phone and be like, yeah, that person seems like they've been arrested before. You should treat them with like fear and suspicion. You know, it's, it's all good enough to, as a justification for what you wanted to do anyway, which is harass the people who've been getting harassed for ever.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, like it's a. Within, within the activity of policing, you know, like there is no, there is no search for evidence. There is like a pursuit of the production or generation of evidence, you know, and like, and that's what I mean, like tools like this, like, I don't view it as a thing that's going to facilitate greater accuracy or precision. If it does, that'll be incidental to the, to its actual like, primary function, which will be to, to generate evidence, to generate justifications and things for what police were already wanting or desiring to do. It's desiring production.

[Hussain]

Wait, you're telling me that this law enforcement is like criminogenic.

[Greg Foley]

Listen to blood work.

[Riley]

Oh, see, I knew this was the right, I knew this was the right company for you.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, I mean, it is, it's, it's wonderful. And dumb. Like, absolutely. I, I, that's, like I said, like, I look at stuff like this, and then, like, I really don't know whether I'm supposed to be, like, to be laughing at it or terrified. And, like, yes, even in the preparation. Yes, exactly. But, like, even in the preparation for this, like, for about a year ago, I went to see the Conversation, the, the Francis Ford Coppola film with Gene Hackman. And, like, I've had a lot of thoughts about that film because it, like, it animates so much my thinking, thinking about this kind of stuff. Because with the character of Gene happening in the Conversation, you have this guy who, like, he so deeply and intensely, like, understands the security and the surveillance world that he wants to, like, retreat into the private sphere, but even his private sphere has been, like, completely penetrated and corrupted by this space. And then the only way that he can kind of, like, preserve or have any kind of sense of privacy or personal space or interiority is to basically destroy everything. And I think that, like, so many people right now, like, struggling with that kind of stuff when it comes to surveillance like, that. Like, we're like, I would much rather not have to deal with and confront this kind of stuff every single day, but the only way that I could, like, reasonably or feasibly do that is to cut myself off from the world entirely and turn myself into a hermit.

[Riley]

Never post another picture.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, and it's absolutely maddening. And, and I don't have an answer for that, but it is one that I'm glad I've been able to at least enunciate it, because it really does. It drives me fucking crazy.

[Riley]

Well, I mean, that's basically, that's the promise of this show. Look, I think we're about hitting time here, so I just want to say, Greg, thank you so much for coming actually out today.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, it's been a pleasure.

[Riley]

And to suggest people go check out Bloodwork. Absolutely.

[Greg Foley]

I've got a little pitch here, basically. So, yeah, Bloodwork, it's a podcast exploring the phenomenon of this thing that we call violence, broadly construed. So political, economic, libidinal, social and other terms. It's produced by Thomas Omani, who some of you may know from Lionel, led by donkeys. And he's been doing, like, a really phenomenal job, taking my scripts and injecting them with sound drops and quirks, a little bit of theory, a little bit of philosophy, a little bit of history and so on. So we've already done, for example, like, an episode on Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmidt, George R. Gambon. We did a two part episode on the history of the car bomb, and I think depending on when this drops, we've got an episode about the history of the Attica prison uprising. And one thing, I would just sort of like, throw the bat signal out to the TF kind of universe. We do want to do a few more kind of like fun episodes, loads about, like, film, media, art or whatever. So if there's anyone listening who would like to do, for example, an analysis of Michael Mann's Heat through the lens.

[Hussain]

Of the critique of violence, I'm cracking every knuckle in my body at once.

[Greg Foley]

I'm so glad to hear you.

[Hussain]

For me, the podcast is the Juice.

[Greg Foley]

And if there is someone out there who would like to do talk about Paul Schrader's man in a Room trilogy, what they have to say about the function of violence and masculinity and the relation between the two, hit my line.

[Riley]

Are you gonna. Are you gonna ask if anyone wants to talk about Tenet as well?

[Greg Foley]

Absolutely. Listen, listen, I'm a Tenet defender.

[Ewan Blair]

Whoa, really?

[Hussain]

Wow.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Ewan Blair]

It's really rare to find someone. Genuinely. It's really rare to find someone.

[Hussain]

Not that we were in any way set against it, but this is like a masterclass over about an hour of how to win over the room.

[Ewan Blair]

I mean, I was also gonna say I was also cracking my neck when the portraitist stuff sort of came up.

[Greg Foley]

Oh, that's so good to hear it. But like, no, honestly, first time I watched Tenet, I was like, okay, I think this might be the dumbest film I've ever watched. The second time I watched it, I was kind of like, okay, like. And the third time I locked in, I was like, this makes absolute perfect sense.

[Ewan Blair]

You know what? Like, yeah, the cogs. The cogs are in motion.

[Greg Foley]

No, it does make sense. You just have to pay really close attention.

[Hussain]

You just have to lock in. Yeah, you have to lock in.

[Ewan Blair]

Well, this is. This is exactly what Christopher Nolan was intending, that you get off your dang phone. And the problem was no one could get off their dang phones. And so they were looking up and they were just like, oh, shit. Like, who are they fighting? Which is a question I still ask at the end. Like, who, who, who, who. Who are they shooting at? But, like, maybe we can.

[Hussain]

That one fucking sucks.

[Riley]

Sorry, Greg, please continue.

[Greg Foley]

Yeah, so I was just gonna say.

[Unidentified Speaker A]

Yeah.

[Greg Foley]

Patreon.com bloodworkshow you can find all the episodes. They're all free on there right now. And you can subscribe. We're on blueskyloodwork show. We're on Twitter and Instagram bloodworkshow. If you can't find us, then my suggestion would be go onto your social media site of choice, post a picture of your favorite celebrity or cartoon character holding a gun with the phrase, listen to blood work. Two words, blood work. Post that and myself or Tom will be along shortly and you should try it. It works. Also, shoot shout out to a guy called Burr on Blue sky who posted a photo of his own 9 millimeter with serial, serial covered over with a handwritten message saying listen to blood work saying, this is your final warning. I don't want to say that I'm encouraging that kind of behavior, but I will say if you want to get my attention, that works.

[Riley]

Okay, well, clear call to action. Check out Blood Work. Once again, thank you very much, Greg, for coming on the show. Thank you very much to all our lovely subscribers for subscribing, my lovely co host for being here. And we'll see you on the free episode on Monday.

[Ewan Blair]

Ish.

[Riley]

Bye. Bye. No, Tuesday. We record on Monday. It comes in on Tuesday. You know how it is. You know how it is. You're a subscriber, you know the schedule. Bye, everybody.

[Hussain]

Bye.