*UNLOCKED* Scaffold to Heaven

Summary

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TRASHFUTURE – UNLOCKED Scaffold to Heaven

Date: March 17, 2026
Hosts: Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nova (@inthesedeserts)

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Episode Overview

This episode, previously available as a bonus, is now unlocked for everyone due to its unexpectedly “newsy” character: the TF gang unpacks the bizarre and hilarious saga of “N Scale”, a supposed British AI data center champion that, in reality, appears to be a scaffolding yard propped up by government press releases, corporate hype, and the endless optimism of global capitalism. Along the way, they tie this story into the wider world of AI hype cycles, state-sponsored grift, and the surreal faith-based logic undergirding modern economies. Expect deep dives, deranged political backstabbing, and the uniquely British inability to even run a scam properly.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

I. Satirical Banter and Prefacing the Deep Dive

• 00:00–05:30
  • Hosts joke about the UK’s tradition of putting historical figures on money vs Canada’s wildlife-centric approach, riffing on “woke” outrage about possible changes.
  • Recollections of Riley’s experience at “Camp Adbusters,” satirizing utopian, anti-capitalist camps and their internal “gift economy”.

II. News Segment: UK Defence Scandal (“November Navy Ratfuck”)

• 05:30–13:35
  • Discuss leaked Cabinet minutes showing PM Keir Starmer’s awkward dance of trying to please American demands while getting overruled by "woke" ministers.
  • The Chief of Defence staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, faces career trouble over a sarcastic comment that infuriated Trump:

    “We don’t need an aircraft carrier. It's called Cyprus.” – (B, 07:35)

  • The hosts liken this political infighting to “Last Days of the Führer bunker” energy, bemoaning the UK’s tendency to manage international relations for domestic optics.

III. Tech Hell: Amazon’s AI-Fueled Chaos

• 13:35–21:08
  • Amazon’s attempts to “replace labor but intensify exploitation” by mandating AI tool usage among developers; layoffs accelerate as AI “efficiency” fails to materialize.
  • Anecdotes describe workers “feeding the efficiency machine” and executives' quasi-mystical belief in AI as economic salvation.
  • Satirical religious comparison:

    “By pure faith in this thing shall ye be saved. Your acts don’t matter.” – (A, 20:20)
    “They are Protestants!” – (B, 20:28)

IV. The N Scale Rabbit Hole: Britain’s “Homegrown” AI Champion

• 21:26–69:07

  • Press Release Reality vs On-the-Ground Actuality

    • UK government lauded N Scale as a “homegrown success story” to invest billions in a “sovereign AI data center.”
    • Guardian investigation revealed the “site” was actually a scaffolding yard with no visible progress.

      “Nine months before the project is due to be completed, it's still a working scaffolding yard.” – (A, 25:38)

  • Corporate Shell Game

    • N Scale is a recent entity—incorporated May 2024, owned by Australian crypto infrastructure landlords with a Norwegian JV.
    • Never built a data center before—merely bought or leased them, often for Bitcoin mining.

      “This company has never built a data center before. Not one, not ever, anywhere in the world. Never.” – (A, 30:19)

    • Nick Clegg and Sheryl Sandberg (ex-Meta/Yahoo/Vice PM) join board to give fig leaf of credibility.

  • The Microsoft & Nvidia “Investments”

    • Government trumpets “$2.5bn investment”—actually a non-binding “memorandum of intent” to spend money if facilities are built, not public funding.
    • Nvidia’s “chips” form the bulk of the investment; the circle is completed by the intention to buy Nvidia chips with raised funds.
    • Microsoft and Nvidia’s involvement cause N Scale’s valuation to skyrocket—yet no physical progress occurs.

      “All we did was say we would spend $2.5 billion with you IF you ever built the thing.” – (A, 32:47)

  • Financial House of Cards: Paper Valuations Enriching Investors

    • Multiple rounds of funding are justified by government press releases, causing billions in “valuation” to appear from nowhere:

      “If you’re in at the Series A at that valuation, your investment just went up 350,000%.” – (A, 43:57)

    • “Growth” exists only on spreadsheets and in OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) reports:

      “The cut is the appearance of growth. Right.” – (B, 74:10)

  • International Parallels: Nvidia’s “Sovereign Compute” Playbook

    • CEO Jensen Huang pitches every government the idea of a “sovereign AI”, invariably involving buying Nvidia hardware.
    • Similar puffed-up “domestic” national champions are created across the world—but only the UK fails to actually buy the land for its fake data center.

      “How many times have they done this?”
      “About 18.” – (B & A, 65:40–65:42) “The UK they picked a fake one as opposed to other countries where they picked real scams." – (A, 69:07)

    • Policy-makers lap up the story for good news and the illusion of tech leadership.

  • Security & Procurement Consequences

    • The government was setting N Scale up—potentially as the de facto monopoly provider of sensitive compute infrastructure—despite its total lack of capacity.

      “The government was in effect setting itself up to pre-purchase from a data warehouse that hadn't been built, on land it might not have owned, by a company... whose only proven operational capability was running a bitcoin mine in a fjord.” – (A, 81:55)

V. The Grim Logic: Everyone Benefits—Until Reality Intrudes

• 83:08–84:48
  • The government, investors, and N Scale all have incentives to keep the merry-go-round of fake valuations and press releases spinning.

    “Everyone’s incentives point in the same direction: pretend the thing is real.” – (A, 82:49)

  • The scam nearly goes public—planned IPO would have dumped the “scaffolding yard” story onto ordinary investors.

    “At some point, somebody is gonna need to build something... if anything is supposed to be different.” – (A, 84:40)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Satirical/Comedic Highlights

• “It’s a scaffolding yard with a bunch of guys who are like, ‘What do you mean our job is to stand here and not scaffold anything.’” — Riley (76:32)
• “We promised the government that we would use this scaffolding to build gods.” — B (30:57)
• “Nick Clegg’s on the board of so many venture capital firms and big tech companies now. He’s like, inescapable.” — A (54:25)
• “Too lazy to even do the scam properly, and it just unravels the whole thing.” — B (67:21)
• “If you own this scaffolding yard you are going to be like Mansa Musa. Right.” — B (70:01)

Summing Up the Hype Cycle

• “N Scale’s executives and investors get free press and higher valuations. The government gets to justify its program of non-investment because they can point to the wizard and say he’s coming, coming.” — A (82:49)
• “At some point, somebody is gonna need to build something or do something or make something if anything is supposed to be different.” — A (84:40)
• “The only thing that makes money, that the government is proactively like clearing the way for, is not buying scaffolding yards.” — B (74:43)

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Key Timestamps

• 05:47 – “November Navy Ratfuck”: British/US defense scandal, Starmer-Trump saga
• 14:19 – Amazon’s AI human-labor “replacement” turns into a bureaucratic nightmare
• 21:45 – Government’s N Scale AI data center press release
• 25:38 – Guardian discovers “AI data center” is literally a scaffolding yard
• 28:28 – N Scale’s actual incorporation, Australian/Norwegian background
• 32:47 – The “Microsoft investment” is just a potential purchase order
• 40:45 – N Scale is suddenly the UK “national champion”
• 49:44 – Nvidia’s investment is just more chips earmarked for the supposed data center
• 52:06 – Explained: round-trip investments, valuation manipulation
• 65:40 – This scam model has played out in ~18 countries
• 69:07 – Only in the UK did they fail to even buy the land
• 74:10 – All this produces only “the appearance of growth”
• 81:55 – The government sets up N Scale to be a monopoly, despite no operations
• 82:49 – Everyone “pretends the thing is real” to keep benefiting

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Tone and Final Thoughts

The tone wavers between razor-sharp satire, despairing exasperation, and methodical (if irreverent) analysis. The hosts lampoon Britain’s political class, the bubble economy, and the global AI hype machine—while using dark humor to highlight how politicians, investors, and the public can all be party to the same collective self-delusion.

The “Scaffold to Heaven” story is not just a British farce but a parable for contemporary tech capitalism: fake it, hype it, financialize it, and pray nobody checks if there’s anything actually there. In Britain’s case, the grand finale is spectacularly on-brand: they forgot to buy the land.

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For listeners seeking the core lesson:
Faith in “innovation” can be endlessly monetized—until someone checks the scaffolding yard.

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Transcript

[A]

Hi, everyone, it's Riley, who you're not really usually used to hearing as the bumper person, but today you can see perhaps that we have unlocked a bonus episode to the free feed. We've done that just because we think this one might be a little bit newsy. So we just wanted to unlock it so more people could hear it. So please enjoy how a data center that wasn't kind of drove me a bit insane. So see you soon. Hello, everybody. Welcome to this It's Thursday bonus episode of tf. It is Riley, It's Hussein, It's Nova. And I. Listen, I started Googling and I might have googled one too many times.

[B]

Yeah, you might have accidentally done some journalism and you might have fucked around and we might be about to break actual legitimate news on this.

[A]

Like little. Like tiny. Like tiny news. Like little news.

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

But something.

[B]

Something that's very us. And it's. It's all, you know, down to actually doing some research. So, Riley, thank you. You know, while you've been doing that, I have been with my friends in the sort of woke deep state, trying to remove Winston Churchill from various banknotes and sort of like statues and so on in order to replace him with the animals from the Wind in the Willows.

[C]

Yeah. I've also been running a counter campaign, but my aim is to replace the Winston Churchill five pound note with a pristine image of Evangelion Unit 1. That's a throwback for people who remember the time where I got quoted. No, I had a whole article made of me in the Daily Star because I had set up a joke campaign to replace the Winston Churchill statue with a statue of EVA Unit One. And when I was asked why this would be a better option, I said in my infinite wisdom that EVA Unit 1 has a more aspirational body type. And they printed the gigantic. And they printed that like verbatim. And I had like, people sort of getting mad at me, including this one guy who emailed saying, I watched Evangelion on YouTube and I didn't get it and I'm mad at you.

[B]

You accidentally. You said that Winston Churchill had been frame mogged and people wanted to kill you.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. That's right. Yeah, that's correct. I was there before Clavicular. And I want people to know that.

[A]

What do you think the armor Winston Churchill's wearing for protection. It's restraints that bend him to our will. Yo. Of course I like my. So for those you who don't know, like, four years ago, the bank of England ran Like a public consultation that said, hey, what do you want on the money? And people and an overwhelming majority of respondents said, I don't know, animals. They were like, okay, I guess we'll

[B]

put some, like, wildlife or whatever.

[A]

Yeah, we'll put animals on the money. Sure. Which, by the way, Canada does. We always have animals on the money.

[B]

Yeah. Because it's a normal thing for a country to do is to be like, we've got to put something on the money. How about some of the stuff that's here as opposed to a guy who died 800 years ago or whatever.

[C]

Yeah, but then in Canada you have, like currency that, you know, you have a coin referred to as the loony.

[B]

This is true. I'm not going to say that Canada is a hugely serious country, but still,

[C]

we need a British loony.

[A]

We need a British loony. How about the freaking Prime Minister?

[B]

Whoa. Can he say that?

[C]

There we go. I didn't know you got a gig at SNL uk.

[A]

Hussein, can I just stop you there? You can't say what you have in Canada. You have to say we. You are Canadian.

[C]

That is true. That is true. I do have that passport somewhere.

[B]

They're calling it the United Kingdom Kingdom's most crypto Canadian podcast.

[A]

Yeah, but so what Nigel Farage said about this is the bank of England is replacing Winston Churchill with a picture of a beaver on our banknotes. This is the definition of woke. And just I would love to create a compendium of all of the stuff Nigel Farage has called woke. We all know that what it really is is stuff that he considers to be unusual or inappropriate. But the fact that he uses the word definition for such a nebulous concept is very amusing.

[C]

It shouldn't be a beaver, but it should be British Minor influencer Bevo. I don't know if you guys are

[B]

familiar with Bevo, but it's not the definition of woke. The definition of woke would be replacing Winston Churchill with a picture of a non binary barista with pronouns and a septum piercing. Which we should do.

[A]

Yeah, we should actually do that, actually. Oh, check out this. Check this out. I'm about to be woker than you could even have ever believed. The definition of woke would be replacing the number on the money with a zero and making all the money worth nothing and having a gift economy.

[B]

This is the shit that they teach you at Adbusters.

[A]

I learned so much at Camp Adbusters. I swear to God, I don't know if this is like a false memory. I do think that they did issue a camp wide currency of notes marked zero to encourage a gift economy.

[B]

Oh, every story you tell from that place is a beautiful little gem.

[A]

It was so cool. It's like I still. My favorite one is when the guy was like, all right, everybody, take off your shoes. We're gonna learn to drive barefoot to save. G. Looking back, I don't know if actually that saves Kaz, but everyone did get barefoot.

[B]

Incredible.

[A]

After that. Bafflingly. We do have a couple news items to talk about. And then I've driven myself mad about N scale. So I'm sort of nova to take us away for the first item, which I have as November Navy Rat. Fuck.

[B]

Yeah, I was also going to highlight that you titled it that. So a little bit of sort of labor rights politics happening again. So you may remember that by choosing to not allow the US to do strikes on Iran from British air bases, Starmer made an enemy for life of Donald Trump. Well, he's now trying desperately to weasel out of this.

[A]

We should put that on the money. We should put that on the money to commemorate the labor. Right.

[B]

The weasel, the turning weasel, the reverse ferret. No. So they've leaked some Cabinet meeting minutes which would seem to suggest that Starmer, poor, poor Keir Starmer wanted very much to give Donald Trump what he wanted, but he was bullied and overruled by his own ministers, you know, who were too woke for it.

[A]

Would you say that this had happened just like with Peter Mandelson?

[B]

Yeah, I would.

[A]

Why?

[B]

And I think, you know, he was held hostage by the. By the wokes in Cabinet. And so that's just in the sort of normal cost of doing business. But also shoved in front of the bus is the Chief of Defence staff. And this is sort of a bit more unusual. This doesn't happen quite as often, but Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton has had leaked to the Spectator the fact that he said something kind of flippant at this Cabinet meeting, which is going to maybe end his career, because Trump is mad that we did not send one of our carriers and this guy Knighton said, we don't need an aircraft carrier. It's called Cyprus. Right. Which is a pretty good bit. It would have aged better had Hezbollah not managed to, like, smash a drone into Cyprus. But still. But they're punishing the guy for doing bits. And this is something that is just strikes me as kind of instinctive, flailing on the sort of labour rights parts, you know, the kind of urge to knife everyone in the back. That's taking some Kind of weird directions here. It's also, I think there's a Navy angle here as well, because obviously this is an RAF officer and the last guy who was a navy officer in the Navy are feeling a bit shut out and jealous, and they're being like, this planes dipshit disrespected our boat. And so now there are sort of sources close to Starmer saying that Knighton has lost the confidence of number 10 and he may well just get forced out off of this merely for being a bit sarcastic on the team's call. And you never want to hand it to a guy, but I think that much I will give him solidarity on.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, look, this is number one. This is the second issue in, like, the same week of Starmer being like, I'm just surrounded by these terrible advisors who keep lying to me and misdirecting me. It's like, you know, good czar who's being bullied by his boyas.

[B]

Well, also, it's like, if you put yourself in this guy's place, it's. You have to answer a kind of stupid question from one of Starmer's apparatchiks without ever getting sarcastic. And that's an impossible task for anyone, I would suggest. It's also kind of easier to fuck over the troops in this way because they have to kind of stand by the military advice they were given. And this is why this is a hatchet job, is because it would be, I think, vanishingly unlikely for the actual military advice to have been send, you know, this sort of carrier and this guy to have gone, no, I don't want to do that because I'm woke and gay and soy. Right. But you can't say that, right, because none of that's disclosable. And so this is a real, like, sort of, you know, palace backstabbing that is just bespeaks to me a sort of, like, Last Days of the Fuhrer bunker kind of mentality on Starmer's part.

[A]

Oh. I mean, and the other thing right behind all of this is that there's this, like, palace backstabbing to show support for a thing that Nigel Farage even has already realized is something he has to backpedal his show of support for.

[B]

I mean, if you want a real sense of the chain of command here, it's like the Chief of Defence stuff, the Prime Minister, Donald Trump. Right? And because Starmer has now been embarrassed in front of Trump, this guy is going to have to go.

[C]

Also, like, one of the points to recognize is that, like, Starmer sort of set himself out as being like a serious statesman.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And this is the consequence of it. To sort of paraphrase very badly. One of my favorite tweets is like, what did you think statesmanship was? Papers, essays, vibes. This is it. This is just statesmanship where unfortunately the person that you have to follow has no sort of sense of. Has no desire to sort of even perform the type of being a statesman and he's just openly stupid and you have to sort of go along with it. And, you know, this is the result, which is that like, you know, and it's also the case of like, well, you either have to sort of be all in or you're not. But it is like quite interesting to me how this is like the one issue where Starmer's like, inability to do anything actually probably like sways well with public mood.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Like, no one really wants to go to war.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Even like Faraj, when he was sort of pretending that like, oh, we should be helping the Americans and stuff, wasn't really convinced by it. So I don't understand why there's this pressure to sort of be like, I mean, unless. I mean, the only thing I can sort of bring it down to is this sense of wanting to at least pretend that the sort of so called special relationship still exists. Very West Wing brain. That's the only thing I can sort of think of as to like, why he sort of act like why Starmer is acting like he's already gone to war and lost, despite the fact that he hasn't.

[A]

Well, I think the answer is actually he has. Right. He's. He's gone to war against circumstances and he was armed with basically hope that the global economy would deliver the circuit the, the conditions for Blairism again. And then it didn't. And now he's lost. And you know, he also. The part of what has to deliver for Blairism is there needs to be a Clinton in the White House or plarism also doesn't work, you know.

[B]

Yeah. Because otherwise you find yourself sort of fielding the American president being like, hey, going to bomb the Middle East. You better fucking get in on this with me.

[A]

Going to bomb the Middle east also, you have terrible shoes. I'm going to order you a pair of size 13 floor shines.

[B]

Oh my. I've been thinking about the shoes thing all week. Jesus Christ.

[A]

I mean, to be honest, like, at least they get shoes if you're the,

[B]

if you're the head of Starmer's walking around barefoot. I mean, he's driving in a much more ecologically conscious way.

[A]

He's turned his normal car into something like a Prius by driving barefoot alone. But when I see this, when I see like blaming and backstabbing to try to show your support, like, what I find so weird is that so many things in the UK are done for a domestic audience. Right? Like there is a huge amount of, like the relationship with the eu, for example, puzzled the EU because all of it was grandstanding for Tory voters in Britain. It's why the Westminster bubble really even is about what these people think that like they want to appear like domestically. And everything is refracted through that lens. And it's strange to see it almost reversed where like what Starmer is doing is everything is for the performance. Everything is for an international audience of like one guy and his friend and his like cronies who are all waddling around in shoes that are three sizes too big. Yeah, it's very odd, but to me it's. It show. It's something that is flailing and as you say, nova like floundering and the final days of the Fuhrerbunker that maybe firing, maybe firing this, this. The Chief of Defense staff will turn things around.

[B]

I just looked this up, by the way. He's been imposed for 186 days. So a real like Tony Radican ensuring his successor gets a sort of Liz Truss tenure. Bruce Willstuff.

[A]

Oh God. I mean, a masterclass in running estate. Next thing, before we get to N Scale, I wanted to note and Amazon is having some issues that are kind of relevant actually to the N scale thing we're talking about. Weirdly, PC Gamer has the best headline on this quote. Amazon owns up to needing more human oversight over AI code. Unfortunately, it wants to do that with fewer people. So if you want to sum up the concept of technology replacing labor but also intensifying exploitation in one headline, there it is. It's right there.

[B]

Yeah, it's crazy how all of these companies are like tearing themselves apart. Not just companies, public services too baffling.

[A]

But basically what happened is Amazon's digital interest infrastructure has been increasingly fucked. But also they laid off like 10% of their corporate workforce. They're going to lay off more. And they've set an internal target for developers to use AI tools once a week at 80%. So they want 80% of the developers using AI tools once a week, which is being tracked. Like they are. It's a key performance indicator. They are monitoring.

[B]

And just like, no, you have to. We've Got the key logger on. You have to talk to Claude.

[A]

Serious. This is a, this has become extremely common because this is downstream of the fact that like 80% of executives think that AI makes their job easier. 5% of people who actually do something in like a knowledge work field think the same. And so the executives need to force people to use these terrible tools.

[B]

Yeah, and this makes sense whether like we keep feeding stuff into the efficiency machine and for some reason we're not seeing efficiency from this. We're going to have to use more people to make sure the efficiency machine works so that we can lay off people faster.

[A]

We have 90 guys whose full time job is to watch the efficiency efficiency machine. We can't wait till this starts working.

[B]

I sometimes think the kind of Claude vending machine story was a bit kind of pat and, you know, designed to make it seem cute and everything. But the kind of contradictions of that vending machine being played out across Amazon is really funny.

[A]

I mean, I know some people who work in like various companies and they tell me, yeah, they're being tracked, they and but what they do is they log in to their AI tool once a week, right? And they type, hey, give me a recipe for cupcakes or whatever and they go back to doing their job as normal. And then the company they're working for gets to say, we've increased AI usage among like key people by 30%. Like it's a real thing that's actually happening as they're trying to clod store the entire economy. So anyway, if you remember as well, their internal tool called Kiro caused its first major outage in 2025. We talked about it at the time. It deleted a whole live environment because it was trying debug it. So this is from PC Gamer.

[B]

No bug.

[A]

Hey, you always say the safest computer is one that you don't build. Dave Treadwell. This from PC Gamer, senior Vice president of Amazon's E Commerce Services team is reported to have said to employees over email, quote, folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently. You are Amazon. You are the Internet AWS is just most of it now.

[B]

Oh, I kind of, I forgot for a second that they were that, yeah,

[A]

it's not just a store, it's quite a bit more.

[B]

Or it's barely even a store anymore. It's a sort of, it's sort of like an Internet. It's like it's web services carrying the carcass of an online retailer behind it.

[A]

It's A TEMU reseller was one of many TEMU resellers plus web services and a movie studio that I remember what the movie studio was once called before he got married. A loss leader for Jeff's sex life. So anyway, the briefing note from this week's meeting reveals now that junior and mid level engineers at Amazon will require senior sign off for any AI assisted changes. So the efficiency machine has created several new bureaucratic steps because it's so unreliable it keeps breaking everything.

[B]

Fantastic.

[A]

Awesome. I love the future.

[B]

Through how gritted teeth do you have to make that consideration where you're like this thing that we're reconfiguring everything towards, we're making everyone use. Yeah. We don't necessarily trust it to touch anything because it will fuck us again.

[A]

And if we go back on it

[B]

it's like, oh, we fucked up. It's called Amazoo now and we can't change it back because Kiro changed the name on everything.

[A]

Yeah, we now have to pretend that that was on purpose or else everyone's going to think we're not going to be among like the cool hyperscalers. We're going to have to work. Everyone's going to know that we fucked up. But that's happening everywhere. It's just mostly reported on at Amazon. The FT said this Amazon laid off more than 30,000 employees since October 2025. One long standing employee paints a particularly damning picture saying quote, day to day it just feels untenable. Our workload is increasing and the number of problems to deal with are just piling up. Some managers know that this is the case, but executives just keep pointing to some bigger AI picture that's as yet undefined.

[B]

No, no, no, it's fine. Kiro is going to iterate and eventually it's going to learn that it doesn't have to delete the whole live environment every time it wants to try and fix it.

[A]

And if it does, maybe it has a plan we don't understand. Kiro moves in mysterious ways.

[B]

Doing some Kiro mysticism.

[A]

I'm becoming a Kiro Sufi.

[B]

I mean this is, this is functionally what it is, is mysticism. Right? And I think it would be more honest if you sort of like go into these executives offices and instead of the kind of strange inner light compelling them to be like, no, we got to, we got to feed more shit to AI. They just had the sigils out, you know, they just had some like tomes, some like big braziers full of candles.

[A]

I mean I do, I do think that There is a little bit. I think the mysticism thing actually has carries quite a lot of conceptual weight. I actually think you could point to the release of ChatGPT in 2022 as a kind. If you imagine that like the religion of the sort of global north is the worship of mammon and capital. You could imagine, I think the nailing that the 2022 release of ChatGPT is a kind of 95 theses moment where

[B]

you remember the AI priesthood thing. We read the Henry Kissinger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They should have been more literal. They should have demanded like ropes, you know.

[A]

Well, because what these executives, if you think these executives, like C level executives or sort of heads of department or whatever are sort of various levels of priest of the cult of capital and Mammon, what the AI revolution promises is by pure faith in this thing shall ye be saved. Your acts don't matter.

[B]

God, they're Protestants. It's Protestant. Yeah, I'm not thrilled with that. Do we have.

[A]

The cult of Mammon has created Protestants in the form of AI True believers, I'm afraid.

[B]

Welcome Protestantism too.

[A]

Yeah, We've invented neo Protestantism.

[B]

Oh God damn.

[A]

Because normal Protestantism was not sufficiently obsessed with like wealth. Capitalism now has Protestants.

[B]

It has, it has the kind of shared thing of like self exculpation, you know, God knows my heart so he forgives me for that DUI type thing.

[A]

Yep, yep. I'm afraid it's all Protestantism. And we're about. I guess what we're going to talk to next talked about next N scale is. Well, let's see where it fits in in the sort of whole Protestant Reformation sort of story. Cause I'm pretty sure we can find like a prince bishopric that it maps to.

[B]

Oh yeah. I mean this is. I'm looking here at the notes. We've got like eight pages of this. What you've written is functionally like a short seller report for us.

[A]

I had a lot of fun doing this. So the following is from a 15th of January press release by the government. One that I think we actually talked about when it was released last year.

[B]

Yeah. But in a kind of like, you know, news. You turn leaving the house in the start of the disaster movie kind of way.

[A]

Quite. Yes. Oh, oh. The government's investing a lot of money in this thing called N scale. Well, time to go to my job at the, you know, stock market. So here's the press release. One of our leading homegrown success stories. N Scale. So bury that in your mind. Right. Like take that front in Mind our leading homegrown success story. N scale committed to delivering a two and a half billion dollar investment to support the UK's data infrastructure over the next three years, deepening their commitment even further. I have also. This is one of my favorite lines. Put pen to paper on a contract.

[B]

Yeah. I have the concept of a plan

[A]

to build the largest UK sovereign AI data center in Loudon, Essex by 2026. It's another key concept, sovereign AI. The site is expected to be up and running by late 2026, unlocking more than 750 jobs during its construction and a further 250 permanent roles.

[B]

Makes sense for any state to be like, if you believe that this AI shit works, you want Brit GPT. Because that way regular ChatGPT isn't transphobic enough.

[A]

Yeah, true. Regular ChatGPT doesn't have the bangs.

[C]

Well, ChatGPT normally is kind of supportive and it's encouraging, but Brit GPT is patronizing and it reminds you that you're still a piece of shit.

[B]

The maximally discouraging AI like you put

[C]

in Brit GPT, that you just want a simple pasta tomato recipe. And it's not only sort of calling you slurs and also demanding that in order to get the recipe you have to post a picture of your genitals.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

It also says at the bottom, I hope that you bought The Tesco owned brand 55p spaghetti.

[B]

So we've seen the kind of fallout of AI on mental health. Right. But it's always been the kind of very florid kind. You know, it's very. Enables kind of delusions, you know, really sort of like heats people up. This is going to be the first one that feels like dunking your head in a bucket of cold piss, where it's just going to like. The mental health effects of Brit GPT would be like absolute unipolar depression.

[A]

The first AI that doesn't give you psychosis, but depression.

[B]

Yeah, there's no up, it's all down.

[C]

Don't like it. There's the door.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

This is the press release, so keep that in mind. I now want to read from a recent investigative piece in the Guardian, which is good and tells one part of what I think is a much larger story. The government announced the project in 2025, part of a plan to turbocharge the economy. Reports say it will be three times as powerful as the fastest computer in the United States. The global top tier for AI infrastructure.

[B]

Yeah, it can call you a slur like infinitely faster than some kind of American chud like Grok or whatever.

[A]

Oh yeah, it is able to. It reaches backwards and forwards in time.

[B]

It can non consensually undress you before it's even like known who you are.

[A]

So the press that releases announcing a gleaming supercomputer on the outskirts of North London depicts a glass and concrete building rising from a tree lined street. By the end of this year the artist's impression is supposed to be reality.

[B]

Feels kind of weird to build our sovereign AI in Essex, but then again, maybe that's the kind of most spiritually truthful place for us.

[A]

Yeah, we've, we know what it is. There was one British person whose personality was used as the template for Essex GPT and it's Tom Skinner, Bosch Bosch GPT Boss GPT. Oh, it's Bosch GPT. It doesn't give you depression, it tries to cure your depression by going for a walk. But then it doesn't have legs.

[B]

Hate when my sovereign AI moves to Dubai.

[A]

Oh, of course, of course the Brit sovereign AI would move to Dubai. Well, it's on its way back now anyway. But when the Guardian visited last month, there was no sign of it. Instead the 4 acre plot in Lauten was a depot stacked with pylons and scrap metal under a corrugated roof, while flatbed lorries drove in and out stacked with poles. Nine months before the project is due to be completed, it is still a working scaffolding yard.

[B]

Maybe it's doing some of the scaffolding. That would be authentic. You know, I love the idea of talking to Bosch GPT and it's like whatever you ask and it's like, listen, whatever you want to talk about, you made £12,570 last year, right? And you don't have to report any more than that. It's all cash in hand.

[A]

Brit GPT is the world's first large language model whose hardware comes with a little slot to put in bills. That's how you buy tokens. It only buys tokens in cash. But land records appear to indicate that N scale has not yet been registered, had not yet been registered as the owner of the site over a year after it claimed to have purchased it. N scale could not say whether the company owned the land and could not give a date on which the purchase had occurred.

[B]

Well, they had put pen to paper on the contract and once you put pen to paper your goose is basically cooked, like you're done, right? And sometimes people get ADHD or whatever. Don't ask me about the Art for Shadow Die. You know, like I've, I've Sometimes tasks just get past you and maybe sometimes you take a lot of government investment, like, you know, two and a half billion dollars or whatever, and you forget to do anything with it.

[A]

We'll talk about, like, the investment in what they received. It's a bit more unusual than that, but they did receive a lot of endorsement. They received direct endorsement by the government in January of last year as this homegrown hero, this most exciting AI company in Britain. And at that point they'd not purchased the scaffolding yard that they said they were going to build the supercomputer on. And also they didn't make before. What a sentence.

[B]

I mean, I guess it has to be somewhere, but, like, it's weird that

[A]

it's a scaffolding yard. It's weird that it would be anything but. Also, they only filed for planning permission to build the thing the day the Guardian sent them emails saying it was investigating them.

[B]

Oh, God. Oh, fuck. Okay, yeah, no, that's really.

[A]

It's very much the energy of. Of someone being like, oh, do you have. Have you prepared for that meeting? You're like, yeah, yeah, I did everything yesterday. I'm just gonna make a couple edits, send it over to you.

[B]

Sending the tutor that deliberately corrupts attachments and being like, I don't know what happened. I guess I'll just have to send you it again, like, you know, a couple of days after. Meanwhile, you are furiously timed, or the

[A]

great horror for anyone in a white, like a professional job, I guess, soon to be automated, whatever is when you say, oh, yeah, I've been working on that. I'll finish it up and send it over to you. We're like, fuck, I have to start it. You open the document you're supposed to work on. You've requested access to this document?

[B]

Yeah, no, it's very similar.

[A]

This is what they were like, oh, fuck, we forgot.

[B]

Holy sh.

[A]

Was your job was to build the supercomputer? I thought I was doing government relations. No, I was doing government relations.

[B]

We didn't. Sometimes you forget to assign a. Build the supercomputer guy. In fact, sometimes you forget to assign a. Buy the scaffolding yard guy.

[A]

Yeah, I don't know what they were doing. So anyway, N Scale was Only incorporated on 29 May 2024 with initial share capital of $2.100% owned by Archon Energy of Australia, a company that used to buy data assets and lease them to cryptocurrency miners. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. So they Only filed accounts in early March again after the Guardian started sending them email.

[B]

We didn't think you would check Limited.

[A]

Honestly, it was like, oh come on, why don't you go stop some real crime llc.

[B]

This has been so funny talking to like Ed Zittran, particularly where we've talked about how much of the sort of AI bubble is just sort of this facade. They didn't really bother with the facade. And it's like after the sheriff comes by, they start building the facade of the town, you know.

[A]

Yeah, like this is going to be a theme that runs through this whole thing. So anyway, it's weird though that like every time a big data center announcement is built because by the way, N scale is also involved in Stargate uk, the other most extant thing in the entire world. And I don't mean to say like this happens every time someone tries to build a data center, but it seems like a lot of these high profile, record breaking data center construction announcements, like when Meta was like, oh yeah, we're going to build a data center the size of New York City or Stargate or whatever two just jumped to top of mind. It's always hype, it never really materializes. It's true for Stargate in Texas as well, by the way. But this is weirdly inept for a company that professionally buys data centers, leases other data centers, has a joint venture with a modular data center company that fell through. They claim to be building 1.3 gigawatts of capacity around the world, but they in fact have never built a data center before. Ever. This company has never built a data center. Not one, not ever, anywhere in the world. Never.

[B]

Oh, okay.

[A]

They have bought them, they have leased them, they have added to them, but they've never built a data center.

[B]

Guy who does not really grasp the concept of the thing not already existing when he says he's gonna build things,

[A]

it's like, hey, I'm supposed to build a supercomputer, right? But the place that I bought is a scaffolding yard. Who do I call?

[B]

Hey, you get all this scaffolding out of the AI data center.

[A]

Can you guys, can you turn this

[B]

scaffolding, can you build God with this? Could you scaffold Gods, please? Like we're kind of on the clock, so like, you know, anytime.

[A]

Yeah, we forgot to do it. The Guardian's asking around. Do you mind?

[B]

We prom promised the government that we would use this scaffolding to build gods.

[A]

So top to it, I guess anyway. But let's also look at this claim. This is back to the Guardian, by the way, I'll tell you when I get beyond them. The government's announcement said N Scale had, quote, signed a contract to build the supercomputer by 2026 and it was investing. So N Scale was going to invest two and a half billion in the UK's economy. N scale said it had already bought the site in Loughton. So it said it had bought the site, was lying, and promised 750 jobs would be created by the building of the supercomputer.

[B]

Yeah, weirdly, all scaffolded.

[A]

Look, we knew we'd take some. There'd be some scaffolding involved. We didn't think it would be this much, but this is sort of important and you wonder why the government didn't catch it. So back to the Guardian. The contract the government was referring to appears to be a contract between Microsoft and N Scale. According to an N Scale spokesman, the government said it had no mechanism to audit the two and a half billion dollar investment, which may well include equipment and capital funding, but was not a former contract, rather a memorandum of intent.

[B]

So what you have here is a kind of piece of tracing paper on which has been drawn in crayon the like old Windows logo.

[A]

Maybe that's the new money.

[B]

I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna announce this as a like solid gold 2 1/2 billion dollar contract.

[A]

It's like you wrote, you drew the Windows logo on it, you drew a stick figure of the king on the back and then you wrote 2 billion in the pound sign and you're like, this is, this is money.

[B]

Now I have a question, right? Because initially I thought this was two and a half billion pounds of the government's money, right? It was two and a half billion dollars of Microsoft's money. I can sort of understand the government not catching this. That's just like getting kind of tricked. Fine, it happens. What does Microsoft think about this?

[A]

Well, Microsoft. So basically Microsoft said. And all we did was we said we would spend two and a half billion dollars with you if you ever built the thing. Like we commit to buy two and a half billion dollars worth of compute from you.

[B]

So essentially they went to Microsoft and they were like, if we can take this scaffold in place, buy it, which we still haven't done, and then build the supercomputer on it, then you'll give us two and a half billion dollars worth of investment.

[A]

That's.

[B]

And Microsoft said, yeah, okay, sure. They took the print out of the email saying, yeah, okay, sure. To the government. And the government went, holy shit, Microsoft's gonna invest two and a half billion pounds or, like, dollars in, like, our sovereign, our blessed economy.

[A]

November. I hate to say, yes, that's exactly what happened, but, yes, that's exactly what happened.

[B]

Jesus Christ.

[C]

A celebrity likes one of your posts and you sort of. And you think that, like, they're best friend now and no one can tell you otherwise.

[A]

Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, I'm boys with Rob Delaney. I met him once, basically. Yeah.

[B]

That's so embarrassing to be that desperate for any good news or any investment that you get fooled by the sort of tunnel painted onto the wall.

[C]

Rob Delaney actually did say that if I could build an AI supercomputer, he would invest £2 billion of his own money into it.

[A]

And so we should get going. I know a scaffolding yard that doesn't currently have a supercomputer on it. Maybe we can start there. But this raises a lot of questions I'm going to walk through answering. Namely, how did this happen? And more importantly, why did the government let it happen and who benefits? I can answer most of them and make some educated guesses for the rest. So we're going to kind of move beyond the Guardian article a bit here, which is mainly about, hey, this company doesn't seem to exist. And the government seems to have misrepresented how much it does exist and then never audited it, never looked into it. They could have checked the land registry. Like, it was public information that N Scale did not own this land. But no one checked because no one wanted to. Like, why ruin a good headline? So this is the corporate history of N Scale. N Scale starts the life. Starts life as the brainchild of two Australians, former miners. Not like we're all former miners, but former people who mine. Josh Payne and Nathan Townsend. Payne is our main man here because Townsend left a couple years ago. Hilariously, this article was published in incorporated magazine on March 9th of this year. So, like, two days before it was revealed to be kind of nothing, this former coal Miner messaged a CEO on LinkedIn. Now his AI startup is worth $14.6 billion. He got a LinkedIn success article written about him in Incorporated magazine.

[B]

Wait, wait, wait. So you're telling me that these guys, they came out of a mine, saw daylight for the first time in however long realized, sort of apprehended instantly. The world around them is based on scams. Those scams are focused on pretending that you can build, go, and then went, oh, these are all like, Fucking business success idiots. If I just message them on LinkedIn, being like, hey, can you endorse me for building God with scaffolding? One of them will do it. And they did.

[A]

You've missed a couple steps, but again, more or less, right? Yeah, you've missed a couple steps that you have no way of knowing about yet. But, yes, that is basically correct.

[B]

Again, I feel like I'm doing well

[A]

in the tutorial groove, basically, before launching. This is from Incorporated magazine. Before launching n scale in 2024 and moving from Australia. Again, none of these people are like, hey, how come this thing launched in 2024 is like the UK's sovereign data provider? That's weird.

[B]

It's, like, really funny to be like, oh, I've been doing real work by accident and I've accidentally figured out that, like, instead all of the money's in fake work. You know, I've just been hewing coal out of the thing to kill the planet with. But instead, we can kill the planet way more efficiently by doing less.

[A]

So this is. This next sentence is sort of, I think, one for Huss, designed in a lab for Hussein.

[C]

Ready to go.

[A]

He worked in coal mines where long shifts left stretches of downtime he filled by reading entrepreneurship books such as the Four Hour Work Week and listening to podcasts.

[C]

Amazing. Amazing. Yeah, great.

[B]

Ah, this is everything Evil comes from Australia. You know how all of the chuds, like, claim that now they're Nazis because of the, like, Gen Z boss. In a minute, Australian women in the office thing. Well, reverse of this, right? I am going to institute the red terror because of the existence of the Australian coal miner CEO Secrets Diary podcast. Motherfucker who has moved from, like, one method of destroying the environment to the other.

[A]

He actually had a. He had an interim method of destroying the environment before he settled on this one.

[B]

Of course he did.

[A]

So, Eve, the first business he started was a recruitment platform that connected construction workers with jobs across Australia, which is how he got wealthy enough to then. Because this happened during the cryptocurrency boom, to buy distressed data centers that were near sources of renewable energy and then lease them to bitcoin mining companies. So he was a land. He was taking up renewable energy capacity from the grid to lease data centers. He was a landlord for bitcoin.

[B]

Basically, this is the worst coworker energy I've ever seen on a human being.

[A]

And he never built a data center. They only bought distressed data centers, including in Norway, which is their only current operational data center, by the way. That's what he did is he sent a.

[B]

Imagine if a Norwegian guy was Australian.

[A]

He sent the LinkedIn message to one of the wealthiest guys in Norway, the CEO of Aker Energy, like, hey, why can't I take this data center over? We can use it for God stuff.

[B]

This is why you should always check your message requests, because sometimes it might be an Australian man asking you to endorse him for the concept of Lutefisk.

[A]

So basically there's the Australian energy company that is really the landlord to bitcoin miners that's now data centers in Australia, or was. Then there's the Norwegian company, which is also in partnership to build Stargate Norway with Acre Energy.

[B]

This is absolutely a case of sequentially chasing the bag, right? And as the sort of capital hunted around for some bullshit that it could make the new frontier, it has been sequential banks. First it was crypto and. Well, first it was sort of like, you know, dot com, regular dotcom shit. Then it was crypto, now it's AI and this guy has been chasing after all of them and it's paid off for him every time. How could you not be a scammer in this market? We are idiots for like having any basic sense of morality. We could have been coining money.

[A]

All we needed was like, we just needed to have a data center.

[B]

We did this thing, right, of like chasing whatever the current thing is and rebranding our company as a way of following it cynically, as a joke to open the podcast with, right? Remember the week we became a SPAC oil warehouse. If we had done that for real, we would be trillionaires right now and the government would be meeting with us, going, trash future spac. An oil warehouse seem like they've got their shit figured out. We're gonna loudly trumpet their credentials to everyone.

[A]

Honestly, oil warehouse would probably float right now. I think they would come, see, I mean, we could be like, we would be walking in head to toe Viberg boots. Nothing but Viberg boots. Oh my God, a gown made of Viberg boots.

[B]

You've been looking at Viberg Boots, haven't you?

[A]

I haven't. So the British version of N Scale, which is N Scale Global holding, it is only incorporated on 29th May 2024. So this homegrown AI champion is an Australian Norwegian joint venture that doesn't involve any British people and consists of a fucking P.O. box, basically.

[B]

Oh, rack off me fucking smorrer, Brod.

[A]

So Peter Kyle from the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology meets with N Scale, the N Scale CEO.

[B]

Yeah, just a regular Ordinary homegrown Australian Norwegian accent I detect on January 8,

[A]

2025, five days before the AI action plan I quoted on January 13. And that this. This AI action plan name checks him multiple times. The only other organizations meeting with Kyle are like, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI.

[B]

Oh, my God, they did. They did the Assassin's Creed 1 social stealth. They folded themselves into the center of a group of monks and just walked past Peter, Kyle's sort of mental security.

[A]

It's incorporated on May 29, 2024, with no presence in the UK. Eight months later, it's one of our leading AI companies.

[B]

Google, Microsoft, OpenAI. One Australian Norwegian man. Yeah, these are the greats, the titans.

[A]

And also a lot of this is actually well covered in Computer Weekly as well.

[B]

My computer, way more often than that.

[C]

You're like a supercomputer.

[A]

It's a homegrown computing superstar, like I say, only it's British subsidiary of an Australian Norwegian venture with a board of directors based almost exclusively outside the company. And also, it never grew, built, or did anything here. And the funny thing is, each time Net N Scale is name checked, it goes for more money and its valuation goes up.

[B]

Yeah, of course it does, because the government, like the government that issues the money, is putting out something being like these guys. Solid gold.

[A]

Yeah, genuinely. And it goes further than that, even. But N Scale gets like, six days after that speech, they go for a Series A funding, and now they're worth, like, $600 million.

[B]

But a series A funding for what? Because they haven't done. They haven't bought a scaffolding yard, which you don't need hundreds of millions of pounds to do.

[A]

Oh, of course, this is because they're eventually going to need a lot of money to build. God, and nobody wants to miss out. But also, if you think about it,

[B]

they haven't even decided where they're gonna, like, park next to the building where they build.

[A]

God, they haven't even got the park. But, like, the way to think about this is that, like, everyone putting in that money, right, that $600 million valuation, which meant that they must have gotten a couple hundred million.

[B]

It's like, I'm standing in front of you and I'm like, listen, give me $150 million, and when you do, I will do the coolest, like, triple backflip you've ever seen in your life. Now, I might look like an overweight podcaster who's never done any acrobatics in her life, but just trust me on this one. Me and my good friend Peter Kyle will back me up on this. Right. I can do this. And you just have to believe, right. I am up there with some of the greatest gymnasts in the world. And then I guess you give me the money and I go, okay, I'm gonna start considering how to do the backflip.

[A]

Yeah, essentially, yes. But the great thing is if you're in at the series A, at that valuation, then based on another series of announcements, the government made their investment in your backflip went up and I'm not joking, 350,000%.

[B]

Okay, so I have a question.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Assuming that not everyone involved in this is completely stupid, what you have created here is a free money generator through the simple expedient of. I don't want to say fraud, I don't want to say scamming, I don't want to say lying.

[A]

Optimism.

[B]

Yeah. Through extreme, some would say delusional optimism. Right. And just this is a very useful thing until people figure it out. Until like the Guardian comes knocking. And this is really funny to be like what we've done is we've got a kind of perpetual motion machine, so long as nobody looks at how it works, essentially. I wonder if this bears any relationship to the broader AI market.

[A]

I don't think so.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

I didn't check.

[B]

Well, I don't know why I was raising my voice like that then. It's kind of anti fanatic now.

[A]

Don't imagine. Don't imagine it would. I'm not going to bother checking though. I assume it doesn't. Sam Altman seems honest.

[B]

The thing is. Right. I can imagine, right. If you had invested a lot of money and you were getting sort of free money from this, you would then have a very direct material interest in ensuring that everybody thinks that like, like this company can build. God, I can do the triple backflip, whatever. Right. And you might sort of really, really seek to obscure any information that it can't. Again. But you're telling me there aren't sort of parallels to the sort of broader economy?

[A]

I mean, what are the odds that there would be.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Does lightning strike twice? Come on.

[B]

Well, especially like it certainly doesn't have the same purported business, you know, the same purported claim. I'm certain it doesn't involve any of the same people.

[A]

Sorry, egg on my face. Because I'm afraid all that, my flippancy, I think, might have been incorrect. It does involve the same people actually, and it is actually bears an enormous resemblance to the broader economy and indeed the sector. Because I just saw what I put in the notes and I guess forgot about for a moment. Which is September 2025 after Tech UK the following article is written on CNBC. Days before they raise again at 2.2 billion, AI startup n scale came out of nowhere and is blowing away Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Wouldn't you know it? Yes, I could. What are they going to the odds he's involved in this too.

[B]

I have a question.

[A]

Yes, please.

[B]

Which may be defamatory. You are Jensen Huang, right? If you are someone who is in on the sort of big version of this, right. Are you investing in this, in this sort of smaller scale version of the bubble, knowing that it's bullshit, but it's bullshit will sort of further your bullshit? Or are you sort of in that position because you are oblivious enough to really be a true believer?

[A]

I think it's actually weirdly both.

[B]

I fucking love capitalism.

[A]

We're going to get to why in a minute and this is sort of part of where we're drawing a few things together, I think. So this is the article. September 2025, Tech UK, CNBC N Scale finds itself at the center of the action. The hottest market on the planet, artificial intelligence. And it has close to 700 million in fresh capital from Nvidia, the world's most valuable company.

[B]

At this point I might buy the scaffolding. I might put a building up.

[A]

To be fair, you know, there's an incredible arbitrage opportunity, realistically that everybody missed, even the world's most sophisticated investors, which is. Okay, you now know, right, that they have publicly claimed to have bought a site in Loughton. You could find out what site they've claimed to buy through a foia because they would have had to say that to the government to like get into their AI growth zone. Right? You would then see, oh wow, they're claiming to have done all of this. They now have all this money, all this riding on the supercomputer in Loudoun. I see they haven't bought it. I would like to purchase your scaffolding yard please. It's like, it's like you let the google.com lapse, just like, well, I guess I own google.com now. I'll sell it back to you.

[B]

Gazumping something that is, you know, meant to have like billions of dollars invested in it.

[A]

You should like, honestly if you have a multi billion dollar company, you shouldn't be able to get gazumped Britain moment.

[B]

You know, such things just happen in Essex property markets.

[A]

It's a remarkably quick rise for a company that wasn't even around when OpenAI kicked off the generative AI boom with ChatGPT in 2022. At that time, what's now N Scale was part of Archon Energy, which was established a year earlier to provide infrastructure for cryptocurrency mining. Again, nobody was like, hey, is it reasonable that they're like a national champion?

[B]

Yeah. Is it reasonable to ask the question, what infrastructure did they provide? Because it seems like mostly they just kind of like let out the infrastructure.

[A]

Yeah, they bought infrastructure from others, then leased it. Like all they. They were landlords, genuinely. Microsoft headlined the UK announcement committing 15 and a half billion dollars of new investment to computing equipment, saying it plans to work with N Scale to construct what will be the UK's largest supercomputer in Loughton. Remember, remember that for a moment. So when it goes live in Q1 2027, it will generate 50 megawatts of AI capacity, scalable to 90, said Nscale. Microsoft President Brad Smith said on Tuesday, no one can make that kind of capital investment unless they've got somebody already committed to spend the money once the work is complete. And that's the role we're playing.

[B]

It's like, yeah, you couldn't do this kind of impossible bullshit unless you had this from us. You know, maybe that should be a warning sign.

[A]

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed on Wednesday that the chip maker had $683 million equity investment into N Scale, saying, we convinced ourselves that N Scale could be a national champion for AI infrastructure in the uk.

[B]

I think that's a bit of a Freudian slip, you know, we convinced ourselves, yeah, genuinely, genuinely.

[A]

It's genuinely strange phrasing also, by the way, the investment from Nvidia was in the form of chips and the investment from Microsoft is another investment informant of intention to purchase compute capacity. So, like all that, by the way, that 15 and a half billion at the time of Tech UK last September, which was the big tech Summit in the UK, we were saying, oh yeah, we're going to have 30 billion pounds of investment from international tech giants. A bunch of it. Was this a bunch of it centered on the scaffolding yard? Yeah. So, so much of that, of that announcement of huge investment into the UK was the scaffolding yard. That's where it is. So Nick Patience, AI practice lead at the Futurum Group, told cnbc, yep, great name at N Scale is, quote, a key part of Nvidia's push in the UK market and an acknowledgement by the government that it has to do something to get a generative AI infrastructure built here, which has been a long slog. And eight days after this article is published, N Scale is mentioned several more times. The Tech Prosperity Plan valuation raises again at 1.1 billion instead 2.2. That happens later.

[B]

$1.1 billion. Like more money than you can kind of readily imagine for nothing.

[A]

Well, scaffolding yard. An idea to.

[B]

An idea to maybe buy a scaffolding yard. Yeah.

[C]

The imagination of it all. Yeah.

[A]

Correct. Yes.

[B]

Going to Dragon's Den, right, And going, I want to buy a scaffolding yard so that I can build God on it. And they give me a billion quid and then I don't buy the fucking scaffolding yard.

[A]

You know what, I'm in. But By March, the 2.2 story was they raised 2.2 billion for evaluation of 14.6 billion. So by March they're worth $14.6 billion.

[B]

Economic activity that this healthy business does, right? It sort of raises huge amounts of investment and then does nothing. And the point of valuing a business is to be able to like, check, check the homework. And it's almost as if, right, all of these people have just been marking their own homework time after time for years.

[A]

And more than that, the investments that Nvidia was putting in was in the form of money that was earmarked to buy Nvidia chips.

[B]

Oh, my favorite shape as a circle.

[A]

It just round tripped the money right on through there. And the UK again was announcing round trip financing of our quote, unquote sovereign AI champion that was mostly Norwegian and Australian as some kind of huge investment in and vote of confidence in the UK as an international destination.

[B]

Don't worry, British people, the economy is saved because big thumbs up. These Norwegian Australians want to run an investment laundry, essentially, yes, Through a scaffolding yard. They are too lazy to buy, more or less.

[A]

Yeah, that's basically the shape of the it.

[B]

I can't get over. Why wouldn't you just buy the scaffolding yard? This is the real stumbling block for me, right? Is like any other country, right? You run this scam and yeah, sure, it deflates eventually, but here they didn't even run the scam.

[A]

Keep that in mind. Do keep that in mind. But before we get there, this is from TechCrunch. This is around the time this giant raise 2.2 billion to value it at 14.8. The raise was supported by Goldman and JP Morgan, whose involvement has been interpreted as IPO preparation. And not without reason. N Scale CEO Josh Payne told the New York Times, his company would seek to go public as early as this year to generate even more capital again, for what? Who knows?

[B]

Just going public to be like, yeah, it's ThingCorp, it's lit. We make the stuff. We make. God, maybe, I guess at some point, but we do that off site. No, you can't see the site isn't going public. Meant to invite more scrutiny of the sort that was, you know, ostensibly done and then mogged by one Guardian journalist with a phone.

[A]

I think they thought they would just figure it out. Alongside its funding and plans, the company also announced. Get ready for some throwbacks. The company also announced that former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, former Yahoo president Susan Decker and former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg are joining its board. Yes.

[C]

Gang are back.

[B]

Let's fucking go. So is there a way to understand these, if not as like, lobbying? Right.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

We reinvest a little bit of the billions of sort of fake money that we have for no reason into paying a kind of generous salary for Nick Clegg to do fuck all.

[A]

Nick Clegg's on the board of so many venture capital firms and big tech companies now. He's like, inescapable. I get sent because I get sent.

[B]

Do you think that if I reached out to Nick Clegg being like, listen here, you lying piece of shit, I want my student loans back. Given that he has potentially a hookup for infinite money, he could divert some of that my way?

[A]

Yeah. What if it's like, hey, instead of, could we say that we're building the AI supercomputer on Nova's student loans where they once stood.

[B]

Listen, I'll fucking buy a sort of square foot of land in Scotland on one of those, like, you get to be the laird of it websites. And you can build God there.

[A]

Yeah. Really tall and really thin.

[B]

Yeah. You know, thousand mile high, one foot square. God, I will give you. I am prepared to sell you the exclusive rights to do this for. I don't know what I should. Like, only a couple of million pounds and that's a bargain.

[A]

It's the God that if it falls over, the entirety of the UK is destroyed. But this is where. So we're going to have, like. Where's Jensen Huang coming in with all this? Right, Because. Because he's super important to the story in a way that Guardian doesn't really pick up on, because Sovereign Compute is basically his idea. Oh, by the way, why you go public is because everyone who's invested so far needs exit liquidity so everyone who's put in money at these various raises needs to foist this now in the general public so they can profit from the hype, essentially.

[B]

Oh, okay, then that needs to be a second order rube.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

And that's you and me.

[A]

Yep, that's us. And also like, like pension funds that invest in this stuff and so on.

[B]

Oh, fuck. Yeah. No, your pension doesn't exist anymore because you invested in. You invested all of the pension fund in. Not a scaffolding yard, by the way.

[A]

This is the kind of thing that Rachel Reeves new pension rules would encourage your pension fund to invest in.

[B]

Yeah, because it seems like growth.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And this was. But all of the thing is like, we know like one way that to stimulate growth, which is public investment. We don't want to do that. So we're going to try the one that we know doesn't work, which is let businesses do whatever they want. And whatever they want is scams. Especially now it's only scams, basically because that's the only thing that turns a profit in the sort of year of our Lord rate of tendency of the rate of profit to fall 2020.

[C]

I was also sort of wondering whether like part of it's not to sort of say that the government was sort of hoodwinked, but. But they've been very adamant about trying to sort of get the AI revolution to happen quite quickly. And when Starmer came in, I think one of his first initiatives, or I don't know what you would call it, but he was basically saying that construction on data projects and data centers would be fast tracked to avoid NIMBYism. And I wondered whether this was sort of an effect of that approach which was just like, well, you have this company where you have these guys who apparently have a company that doesn't really exist and have not built anything but by the strength of like vaguely worded emails and being able to convince this new government that, oh yeah, we're going to be able to like build you the supercomputer in Essex and it's going to have like an Essex accent and everything. They were just like sort of willing to oversee, like, how does this business, like overlook. How does this business work? Because, you know, and I think again, like, it reflects a broader sort of problem with the AI sort of industry in that number one, it doesn't really exist. But like as much as it does exist, it is kind of people hyping each other up and convincing themselves that they are about to embark, they're about to sort of get the thing. And convincing enough people who are dependent on that to just look away from what they can actually see, which is just a bunch of scaffolding on the floor.

[A]

When you want to talk about who benefits. The government, of course, benefits from nobody asking questions about this thing because it validates their narrative for another day. This is all they really care about because they govern by press release. But I want to talk about. So basically we've established what the financial incentives are, which is every time the UK says we're going to. We re endorse N scale as like our sovereign compute partner. Basically. The only thing they've. They've never endorsed anyone else as a sovereign compute partner. Only N Scale, then N Scale re raises money at a higher valuation and their endgame seems to have been to go public. We also know they've never really done anything that would justify any of those valuations other than just get mentioned in press releases a lot. And the scaffolding yard is still a scaffolding yard. So where does it. Where does how, where and why does Jensen Huang come into this other than just speaking at conferences? Some of this is conjecture. I'm hitting the some of this is conjecture alarm.

[B]

But make the conjecture detective arriving on the scene.

[A]

So Sovereign Computer is basically Jensen Huang's idea. It's one of the ways he thought of. Of inventing a public sector facing business line for Nvidia. And he thought of it in late 2023 and then spent 2024 largely touring the world telling different countries they needed a sovereign compute capacity that would have to buy Nvidia chips.

[B]

Fuck. I just uncritically accepted it as an idea earlier. But like. So he sells you the idea of like, no, you need Brit GPT. Right. Claude is not transphobic enough. You know, it's probably going to turn into Claudina pretty soon. So like you need some kind of like British chud AI capacity and then uses the kind of designated firm that's going to do that, which is not going to do that because it's a stupid idea. It's impossible. Because you can't build anything in this country.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

To increase the value of his own investments and then exit that and stick it on everyone who's stupid enough to invest when it goes public.

[A]

I'd say I 95% agree with that. I think a lot of it is just to create more customers for Nvidia. And then Nvidia just gets. Not get. Because it's with him. He's like, Nvidia is so rich and is that it does almost doesn't matter if those companies go public or not. That's kind of for the other investors. What he cares about is now a bunch of countries that have access to money. Printers have an infinite need to buy Nvidia chips forever.

[B]

This is parasitical.

[A]

Yeah, 100%. This is where I'm saying I'm kind of going beyond existing reporting on this.

[B]

But for that last bit to work, right, for them to, you know, for the UK to be buying Nvidia chips forever, they need to buy the scaffolding now.

[A]

So we will get. This is. There's a. I'll get to that part in a moment because we do get to that.

[B]

Just like a gang of leather jacketed assassins heading to Norway right now.

[A]

So he said in late 2023, every country should have its own AI system trained on domestic data, aligned with national values and built using local infrastructure. And this is something that technology ministers around the world repeat almost word for word, like 80 to 90% word for word throughout Europe, throughout the Middle East, South Korea, Canada, it gets. This statement gets repeated. And countries that aren't the US and aren't China start picking domestic AI winners to be their sovereign compute partner. And in 2025, when he comes to London, what does he do? He says, alongside Starmer, and Starmer sort of endorses what he says. AI is a technology and also an infrastructure. And the AI remains the. In the UK remains the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure. The UK needs to be an AI maker, not an AI taker. And these kinds of things also get said by Peter Kyle, right? At no point did like Jensen Huang go meet with Peter Kyle and say, here's what to say, right?

[B]

No, he doesn't need to. This is a fucking mind virus.

[A]

So like I say, the concept of a sovereign AI in the UK policy mix didn't come from September 2025. It came from sometime in 2024 when Matt Clifford was writing the AI action plan. But Matt Clifford would have been either knowing Jensen Huang or embedded in the same circles as Jensen Huang and so exposed to the idea that Jensen Huang was selling. And what's better in a national AI action plan, because you don't really know what it's going to be as well, I guess we should probably build some data centers, which is basically every national AI action plan. And there's one game in town for buying chips to build data centers, which is fucking Nvidia.

[B]

And it's so, so funny to make yourself more dependent on Nvidia. Using the language of like sovereignty.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Because what you're doing is you're essentially a local company will purchase an American chip to rent compute capacity largely to American companies. And that's sovereign, I guess.

[B]

Yeah. Whereas if you wanted to do something that was actually sovereign, you would be like, we are going to have to do the incredibly expensive thing of public investment in some kind of like, like competitor to Nvidia.

[A]

Yeah. Unthinkable British chips, you know. Yeah. Prawn cocktail, they could call it, they call it crisps. The crisp maker. Prawn cocktail, awful. Thank you. But basically this concept Huang more or less invented himself basically becomes mimetic one. He endorses and he profits from enormously. He dumps chips into N scale. Right, to like juice it to get it moving. And the British government couldn't stop supporting it because it was the success story they desperately needed and wouldn't have gotten any other way.

[B]

Yeah, of course it works. It's sort of exactly what any government wants to be able to tell people. Sovereignty sounds good. You know, investment sounds good. We're not spending any of your money. It's like this nice leather jacketed man is coming along and he's going to help us invent British gods.

[A]

And so remember what he says, right? He says, we convinced ourselves that N scale could be a national champion for AI infrastructure in the uk, which basically is just. They were like, ok, you, you'll do. You're now going to get chips dumped into you. Please don't forget to buy the scaffolding yard. That's the one thing you have to not do.

[B]

Fucking typical that they went looking for this in Britain and they still had to get an Australian.

[A]

But like the circular round trip investment, what it does, is it basically for free or for the cost of chips, supports the British government continuing to double down because they keep announcing that. You just keep announcing about it because it's good news story after good news story which is quite hard to come by.

[B]

And so long as you're like building something, so long as you don't forget to buy the scaffolding yard, at a certain point you're in too deep and the government is too. And I imagine it's probably quite difficult to get out of it because you're like, no. AI is the constant kind of excuse machine of like, no, we're going to build God with it any second, any second. Keep throwing money at it. Right, right. And that all works so long as you buy the scaffolding yard and you put a shed on it. With a sign that says, God inside may be seen.

[A]

God inside. Don't look. No, look. Oh, my God. We built the caba.

[C]

Like, at least buy a portacabin, you know?

[B]

Yeah, genuinely.

[A]

But they've done this in several countries. They pick a NEO cloud provider, say it's the perfect national champion and invest in it. Then desperate governments follow along, you know, desperate for good news.

[B]

How many times have they done this?

[A]

About 18.

[B]

Jesus Christ. Wait a second. So you're telling me that not only are we not getting sort of AI sovereignty, but we were your 18th call.

[A]

You're not high on the list.

[B]

That far down. Just like. Oh, fucking. I don't know, like, is it called Britain?

[A]

Yeah, we'll. We'll try there. But like, this is being repeated in the EU and Israel deal with a company called Nebias. You can look this up. Nebias spun out of Yandex, weirdly, the Russian, like Facebook alternative, whose founder denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine and so got it, lives in Israel and got his sanctions removed. So he again gets an investment from Huang, gets talked up at quasi official events. Huang gets trotted out, re endorses them. And then, by the way, Nebias is entering the UK market too. So we might even get the Duff Beer thing with different vats of just Nvidia chips coming out of the same pipe.

[B]

Hopefully they can at least put a shed up, you know, because if they're doing this in Israel, then right now Iran is kind of like wasting missiles blowing up empty data centers on the kind of auspices that there might be something in them.

[A]

Like, for example, Indonesia. Their second largest mobile telecom company is called Oradu Hutchison. Again, they're the sovereign cloud provider for Indonesia that Nvidia has invested in. This is happening with Softbank in Japan, because remember, they're a telecom company first. And Germany, it's happening with Deutsche Telekom. And France, it's happening with Mistral.

[B]

This is like some kind of of Avengers initiative of scams. You know who else likes a tasteful leather jacket is Nick Fury.

[A]

But can I tell you, the uk, as far as I can tell, is the only one where they forgot to build the thing

[B]

that is so perfectly typical. I feel proud to be British. Too lazy to even do the scam properly, and it just unravels the whole thing. Jensen Huang's like shopping for an eyepatch right now just to order a farm. And one Australian man with a Norwegian accent is ready to ruin it for him by just being too fucking lazy to buy a yard. Off some scaffolders.

[A]

So it's like why do we keep.

[B]

Why is it right that if we're counting patterns, if we're doing patent recognition, why is this the second time we've found that the UK economy is being premised on a single Australian man whose shit doesn't work?

[A]

We shouldn't keep relying on that guy. Maybe it's like a proto Indo European myth thing like the divine twins or something like this.

[B]

We keep looking for our Australian Cinderella.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Like the one Australian who is going to fix all of it.

[A]

Well, so in the UK it's the one Australian man. In India they call him the far traveler. Hittites actually referred to him as the mysterious spinner. It's really interesting. He always comes from far away is the thing about him. And he, and he engage. He comes from far away and he engages in a trade that always involves a circle which is interesting. Knew I could work a proto Indo European reference end.

[B]

Why is this guy on the sort of panel of hieroglyphics wearing what appears to be a leather jacket which is

[A]

like a crocodile leather jacket. Awesome. But yeah, so there are lots of these. Just that the UK they picked a fake one as opposed to the other countries where they picked real scams.

[B]

Scams. Economy wins again. The UK is uninvestable at this point, but it's only because like so much of this is short cons that you can't run a long con here anymore.

[A]

It's like Con City. So anyway, let's go back to the Guardian article. So what are the prospects for it doing anything that it says? Asked how the site would create 750 jobs, n scale said it didn't know how this figure had been calculated. Land records appear that N Scale has not yet been registered as the owner of the site. Over a year after the claim purchase, nscale could not say whether they own the land at this point. It could not give a date on which any purchases occurred. So they may not, they still may

[B]

not own it now that this is out. You would hope because of the gazumping that we discussed that this would be an impossible thing to do.

[A]

It would be I imagine quite expensive because you know that they have a couple billion dollars and they do quite need it.

[B]

Yeah. If you own this scaffolding yard you are going to be like Mansa Musa. Right.

[A]

Like this is the most expensive request access to document that has ever occurred in history.

[B]

We have accidentally made one Essex property owner like titanically rich overnight.

[A]

So Enscale has filed Planning permission to build the supercomputer during the last week of February, after the Guardian started making inquiries.

[B]

How do you file planning permission for something on something you don't own?

[A]

Uh, well, I would think that that

[B]

would be a planning. A planning application they would have to reject on the grounds that, like, you can't build God on someone else's house.

[A]

The funny thing is, you know where this was originally reported was in Essex local news after the January announcement. After the January announcement, they were like a local group got together to start filing objections to the building of the data center, only they found the planning permission hadn't been submitted. So there's nothing to object to.

[B]

You know the movie in the Loop? They do some cheap pathos by trying to juxtapose the start of the war in Iraq with an MP's constituency work, where a very kind of, like, area man, styled Steve Coogan, is trying to get his MP on the phone about his neighbour's wall collapsing into his garden. Right, Those guys, the real versions of them, just unraveling this kind of immense financial disparity, let's say.

[A]

I mean, again, in Britain, it would be a planning application dispute.

[B]

Of course it would be. Why wouldn't it be? This is a perfect thing of, like, world enveloping financial bullshit brought down by area nimby. And honestly, I salute them for it. You don't want to, but they are providing a valuable service.

[A]

It's like they got Captain Tom, they got fucking ensconced.

[B]

There is a hidden hand in this country that serves to expose the worst abuses of our system and it's people who object to local planning permission applications.

[A]

But that's the funny thing, they tried to object, but there was no planning permission.

[B]

Yeah, that's what they found. So just here's the thing, just object to everything. Just go to your local council, whatever it is, scroll all the things, start objecting at random.

[A]

Honestly, who knows what you'll uncover? Yeah. So by way of sort of summarizing, right, what did N Scale get from the government? Well, it was included in multiple AI growth zones, which basically mean the government proactively clears planning hurdles for you.

[B]

Yeah, if you try and jump the hurdles, yeah.

[A]

You do have to apply, though. N Scale is named in several. So Stargate UK in the northeast, which so far is nothing. Cobalt park, which is an existing business center, and then Loughton, which again is a scaffolding yard. It also gets branding as official AI provider to the government or a sovereign compute entity, which is again, something dreamed up by Jensen Huang. But this is super important for its economics because Nvidia, the government and N Scale team up to invent an entirely new category of business called a sovereign data services provider or whatever. Sovereign compute provider. Not an American company like coreweave, that's not beholden to the interests of the British government or a US subsidiary of a big tech firm, but a British national champion. So think of this when you think that Jensen Huang invented this idea, sold it to policymakers, invested a few hundred million into what he was able to turn into a monopolist in the category he invented, and now it's worth 14.6 billion because of course he invented compute circuit. The only problem is they forgot to build.

[B]

And the government's role in this was to nod all of this through, perhaps maybe at some point suspecting that an enormous amount of money was going to traffic through this and not even ask to get in on the scam, because that would be too much like a nanny state thing to do.

[A]

Essentially.

[B]

Yeah, we didn't. The government didn't ask for a cut of this.

[A]

Well, the government. Well, yes, the government's cut of it. Well, actually, I explain what the cut is now.

[B]

The cut is the appearance of growth. Right.

[A]

Genuinely, yeah, that's what the cut is. Because if you look in the most recent OBR reports and to two most recent OBR publications, they'd say that post financial crisis growth in the UK averages 0.5, but they estimate it will rise to 1% for a number of structural factors, including underlying trends, including the rise of artificial intelligence. You need stuff like that. So the OBR has something to look at to say, hey, look, look, artificial intelligence is growing. It's generating all these billions and billions of investment in growth feeds itself.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Because then the only, the most rewarding, the only rewarding way to invest into the UK is to do some shit like this. So you get more growth on paper. But the growth is entirely, can only ever be illusory 100% because nobody's, nobody's like, I'm going to invest in like a real business in the United Kingdom that does something material. Because the only thing that makes money that the government is proactively like clearing the way for is not buying scaffolding yards.

[A]

Quite. Or not building on land in the northeast for the thing that's called Stargate, that's never been built. And remember, like, the government loves to announce how much investment's coming to the UK because that makes people optimistic. Microsoft announces it's going to invest two and a half billion 30 billion. But how much of that is just a promise to purchase compute from a UK company using American chain? Where's the UK in this? Other than just the place the chips happen to be located? Nowhere.

[B]

This also really contextualizes the kind of briefcase laborism thing of like, you know, how will Stancil, right, in a sort of past life used to be of the kind of mindset of like, the numbers are up, so why are people mad at Biden, right? Like, I threw pennies at this homeless guy and he's mad at me, even though he's objectively better off, right? So the labor impulse to be like, growth is up, right? There's significant private investment that we're sort of clearing the way for. And anybody who doesn't feel better off is kind of cheating, you know, is sort of like, must just be, you know, maybe they just want us to do more racism. So we'll do some more racism, we'll do some more transphobia, right? But like, nobody's feeling poor, right? Because they just don't understand the technicalities of this, right? Well, you look into the technicalities of this, this, and it's scams.

[A]

It's a scaffolding.

[C]

Scams.

[A]

Yeah, it's a scaffolding yard with a bunch of guys who are like, what do you mean? Our job is to stand here and not scaffold anything.

[B]

The kind of dunning Krugerness of the kind of purported experts in this going, oh, no, we're the sort of serious finance people. You can't do public investment because that's against the kind of fiscal rules having been played like this and playing themselves like this.

[C]

I mean, and this is also like, one way of looking at it is being played, but the other way of looking at it is everyone is sort of mutually benefiting each other. If the sort of goal is just to sort of show that there is value on paper and not to ask too many questions about it. And so the AI industries and this company included, the infrastructure and the actual building of stuff doesn't matter. What matters is that they can sort of project some sort of sense of value on paper. But that also applies to the government as well. Whenever you talk about, about whenever the rare times when sort of government ministers have been asked, okay, what is the AI revolution that you want? You're investing all this money, apparently into AI technology. What do you actually want it to do? Is the objective that everyone just organizes their shopping lists on there. Now do you want them to sort of like, what do you actually want them to do? With this stuff. And they just don't know what to say because for them it's ultimately just like AI. New AI, good AI is going to show on paper that we're growing. It's going to fix the economy.

[B]

We're back to Amazon again.

[A]

We're back to Protestantism, essentially.

[C]

But even with Amazon, there's at least this idea that, okay, it's a company that's so big and does so much including things that are somewhat material, that you can at least sort of say that, okay, yeah, Amazon are going to build roads because they have the money to do that, or they'll sort of redo. They'll kind of build a new post office or something. They'll do something material, even if that's bullshit. The thing with the AI industry is that no one actually really knows what they're supposed to do. There's just a lot of hype and a lot of hope and faith that they will get the UK and get other countries out of their slump. And so there's an incentive almost to look away from the reality of it. Because what do you have then? You have government ministers visiting a building site with scaffolding on the floor and not really any idea of what to make of that. Right. The story undermines. And so the story is like. The point I'm trying to make is basically, I think one of the ways to understand this is ultimately both the government and AI industries are basically playing the same game. The game is very much about projecting sort of fake money or money that is projecting wealth that is only valuable on paper. And this has been an inconvenient way of someone who did a follow up, who basically followed up a phone call and it was just like, hey, isn't it a bit weird that this plot of land that has nothing on there is worth like, I don't know how

[A]

much you're not supposed to follow up phone calls because then that collapses the whole thing. Because ultimately all of the labor, right, belief, I think when they want to tell themselves that they're good is that when the growth happens, then they can be expansive, like Tony Blair. But they need the growth to happen and they need people to believe in it first. And everyone has to believe hard enough. And if you believe hard enough that God is coming, or basically Protestantism, then we get to. When we get to be good, we get to be nice, but we can't. But let's also say, right, let's say N scale actually built the data center, God forbid, and that the investment they were supposed to do in any way real. There are tons of tenders that exist out there on find a tender, you can find them to supply compute to the government. And every way the government positioned N Scale was that it was a sort of preferred supplier in all but name. It was the UK's sovereign compute provider. So what if you're the mod? What if you're.

[B]

Jesus Christ. The security implications. We just handed all your data to like two Australian men who have an empty shed.

[A]

Well, thank goodness we didn't because there was nowhere for it to go.

[B]

But I mean that's almost kind of better in the sense that they can't do anything nefarious with it, because they can't do anything with it.

[A]

But like I guess we could write it down and put it in the scaffolding yard. We could just write down a list of everything about us and mail it to the scaffolding yard.

[B]

Get done for breaking and entering because you don't own the scaffolding yards.

[A]

So genuinely, what if you're the mod, right, and you're handling. Or what if you're handling sensitive data on UK citizens like you're the nhs, you need to. You will be pressured, presumably to use the sovereign compute provider of choice. That's what I think. All the other analysis, including that of the Guardian, kind of missed because N Scale was being set up up to BBAE Systems. Because BAE Systems wins about 16% of contracts at the MOD, which is way more than any other individual supplier. And those contracts, 96% of them are non competitive procurements. Not because the government says BAE has to win, rather they win because they're the quote, sovereign defense partner in their decades of national champion. Designation means the government simply has a structural preference for them.

[B]

Yeah, and BAE might build the sort of AFV that like wiggles your brain apart and gives you Havana Syndrome Syndrome. But at least they build it, right? Like at least there is a tangible thing that is giving soldiers brain damage. Right. And at least BAE have been around for more than two minutes, so people know that they're not just two Australians.

[A]

Yeah. And the idea right here is that BAE Systems in the government were co created the modern mod. The intention is that N Scale and desit co create the modern D sit and how it procures, I cannot be more clear about this. The government was in effect setting itself up to pre purchase from a data warehouse that hadn't been built on land that it might not have owned by a company whose only proven operational capability was running a bitcoin mine in a fjord. And they were setting them up to be a sort of unofficial national monopoly at the indirect behest of Jensen Huang, who endorsed it in every turn round, tripped his money through it a few times and it just made him richer. The monopoly for all of this was granted in all but name before the monopolist had even demonstrated any capacity to supply the product. It was being granted a monopoly to sell.

[B]

This is Riley.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

They should give you a Pulitzer or an Order of Lenin or something for this.

[A]

But think about this. Everyone's incentives point in the same direction. Pretend the thing is real. Because as you were saying, Hussein, right. N Scale's executives and investors get free press and higher valuations. The government gets to justify its program of non investment because they can point to the wizard and say he's coming, coming. And we get loads of renderings and task forces and plans and so on.

[B]

It's comp stat. It's like compstats. And as a kind of structural thing, as like a kind of strategic national priority or whatever. Right to be like we're not even going to go through the motions of checking. Yeah.

[A]

Because if we did, we might find out that nothing's there and that ruins what we really wanted to get out of it, which was press release. Because when you are a scammer, and by the way, I'm saying that about the UK government, right. When you are that and you need to continue selling people on the wrong on this idea that non investment is necessary, that's the scam I'm talking about. The merry go round just has to keep going one more rotation. You figure out how you're going to get the next rotation on that rotation. And so if you get the press releases, if you get the obr, great, you're fine. You'll figure out the rest tomorrow. And everyone is just incentivized to all work together without needing to coordinate. And they're all incentivized to lie a bit. Be a little too optimistic to say, oh, we can build this in nine months. Doesn't matter, we haven't bought the thing yet. The merry go round goes around for just one more turn. Then you figure out the story you need to tell tomorrow. And again and again and again. And remember, like I said earlier, N Scale was hiring underwriters. They wanted to take this scaffold yard and press release public and foist it on any sucker who'd bail out the original investors. That was the play.

[B]

I am speaking directly here to the United Kingdom government in the person of Peter Kyle and Keir Starmer. If you think you may have been a victim of fraud, you can get Advice by calling 0300-12-32040.

[A]

But like, here's the thing. At some point somebody is gonna need to build something or do something or make something if anything is supposed to be different.

[B]

No, they won't. They just won't. We again, we're sort of. We're where the only thing it's possible to do is the impossible. Or in this case, the fraudulent, the non existent.

[A]

Or at least put up a scaffold.

[C]

Maybe that was it. They couldn't find anyone who could put up the scaffolding because they're either like crypto guys or they're too woke.

[A]

Yeah, all the scaffolding guys stopped scaffolding because they just started investing in crypto. Anyway, I drove myself insane with N scale and I've driven you insane with N scale.

[B]

This is happening everywhere.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Apparently in your country, if it is not the uk, this is still being done by basically, basically the same people. It's just we were the only place too stupid to follow through on the like next step of the scam.

[A]

Can we have the outro be Rule Britannia please?

[B]

Uh huh. Can we get. Can we have the outro be Dire Straits money for nothing?

[A]

Anyway, thank you very much for being a bonus episode subscriber. I hope I haven't driven you mad.

[B]

You've driven me something, I think different than mad. I feel. I don't know. I don't know. I. I don't understand anymore. I feel something. Yes.

[A]

Yeah, we definitely knocked a little feeling loose. Look, but thank you very much for listening to tf. I hope you enjoyed this magical mystery tour through a bunch of stuff that mostly didn't happen.

[B]

Well, it's like jazz. It's about the scaffolding, else you know it by.

[A]

But before we go, I want to make an announcement from a little parallel universe. A municipal gay.

[B]

Solve crimes.

[A]

No, different way. One fuck. Well, there's your problem. No, a different one. No.

[B]

10,000 posts.

[A]

A municipal universe. Because in April 25th and 26th, Maddie Lybchansky is coming to London and Nova, Maddy and I are going to do three shows in two days of no gods, no mayors. And all of us have secret plans to like really jazz up the shows. So it's gonna get real baroque.

[B]

We're gonna get so stupid with it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I cannot wait.

[A]

If you are in London, the ticket link will be posted soon, possibly by the time this episode comes out. So please do. If you want to come see us perform three shows of no Gods, no mayors? We're gonna be doing that in London on April 25th and 26th. So, anyway, thank you very much for listening, and we will see you on the free episode. Bye, everyone.

[C]

Bye,

[A]

Sam.