Tech
How Prankster Oobah Butler Convinced Venture Capitalists to Give Him Over $1 Million
Not long into his new documentary, Oobah Butler tells the cofounder of his newly minted company, Drops, that they should create a piece of luxury luggage that “looks like a bomb” and will sell for $200,000.
Immediately, I’m thinking his quest to get £1 million in 90 days might have come to an early end.
But I’m wrong.
Butler is a British prankster documentarian who is known for his stunts, like managing to get Amazon to sell its drivers’ urine as energy drinks or creating a fake restaurant called the Shed and gaming TripAdvisor to make it the top-rated London restaurant on the platform. His latest documentary, made for the UK’s Channel 4, is called How I Made £1 Million in 90 Days. Set in London and New York, it takes on the worlds of startups, venture capital, crypto, and what ultimately comes across as a lot of bullshitting, in the name of striking it rich quick.
Butler opens the film by saying, as someone who didn’t grow up with money and isn’t particularly motivated by it, he’s fascinated by the fact that people “idolize” wealthy entrepreneurs.
“It came from a place of wanting to understand why … everyone is so obsessed with money in this way,” he tells WIRED. “And I’m not talking about survival. I’m not talking about affording to exist. I’m talking about … being addicted to the making of money.”
His only rules for getting £1 million ($1.3 million USD) are that he’s not allowed to break the law and whatever costs he incurs trying to make it are his to bear. He employs several strategies to rack up the cash, including simply asking rich people for it (this doesn’t go well) and creating hype for crypto company UNFK by doing things like tricking bankers into committing crimes on camera. He also creates Drops, a company that makes news for its controversial stunts and then tries to capitalize on the attention by selling “very overpriced” items.
Butler seeks the advice of Venmo cofounder Iqram Magdon-Ismail, who quickly declares himself Butler’s cofounder on Drops and seems very enthusiastic at first, musing that the company is already “worth at least $10 million” just because the two of them are attached to it, and that they might be able sell out Madison Square Garden in a year’s time to tell their story. Their brainstorming session includes schemes for buying the first piece of land on Mars and selling the opportunity to name the “first branded species.” But after Butler suggests the bomb-like suitcase and a pair of “real life ad blocking sunglasses” that remove the wearer’s vision entirely, Magdon-Ismail temporarily ghosts him.
Butler then embarks on a memecoin adventure that goes south, before coming back to Drops and launching the “first legal child sweatshop in Britain in over a century.” He finds a loophole to avoid paying the child workers, reasoning that because he is filming the kids for the documentary, they are technically performers. His underage staff help him come up with marketing ideas to sell bespoke soccer jerseys featuring a fake religious cigarette brand called Holy Smokes. Though the clothing line gets coverage in GQ, Butler doesn’t sell anything close to £1 million worth of jerseys.
Tech
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Tech
A Billionaire-Backed Startup Wants to Grow ‘Organ Sacks’ to Replace Animal Testing
As the Trump administration phases out the use of animal experimentation across the federal government, a biotech startup has a bold idea for an alternative to animal testing: nonsentient “organ sacks.”
Bay Area-based R3 Bio has been quietly pitching the idea to investors and in industry publications as a way to replace lab animals without the ethical issues that come with living organisms. That’s because these structures would contain all of the typical organs—except a brain, rendering them unable to think or feel pain. The company’s long-term goal, cofounder Alice Gilman says, is to make human versions that could be used as a source of tissues and organs for people who need them.
For Immortal Dragons, a Singapore-based longevity fund that’s invested in R3, the idea of replacement is a core strategy for human longevity. “We think replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” says CEO Boyang Wang. “If we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.”
For now, R3 is aiming to make monkey organ sacks. “The benefit of using models that are more ethical and are exclusively organ systems would be that testing can be meaningfully more scalable,” Gilman says. (R3’s name comes from the philosophy in animal research known as the three R’s—replacement, reduction, and refinement—developed by British scientists William Russell and Rex Burch in 1959 to promote humane experimentation.)
New drugs are often tested in monkeys before they’re given to human participants in clinical trials. For instance, monkeys were critical during the Covid-19 pandemic for testing vaccines and therapeutics. But they’re also an expensive resource, and their numbers are dwindling in the US after China banned the export of nonhuman primates in 2020.
Animal rights activists have long pushed to end research on monkeys, and one of the seven federally funded primate research facilities across the country has signaled it would consider shutting down and transitioning into a sanctuary amid growing pressure. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also winding down monkey research, part of a bigger trend across the government to reduce reliance on animal testing.
As a result, Gilman says, there aren’t enough research monkeys left in the US to allow for necessary research if another pandemic threat emerges. Enter organ sacks.
Organ sacks would in theory offer advantages over existing organs-on-chips or tissue models, which lack the full complexity of whole organs, including blood vessels.
Gilman says it’s already possible to create mouse organ sacks that lack a brain, though she and cofounder John Schloendorn deny that R3 has made them. (For the record, Gilman doesn’t like the term “brainless” to describe the organ sacks. “It’s not missing anything, because we design it to only have the things we want,” she says.) Gilman and Schloendorn would not say how exactly they plan to create the monkey and human organ sacks, but said they are exploring a combination of stem-cell technology and gene editing.
It’s plausible that organ sacks could be grown from induced pluripotent stem cells, says Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at the University of California, Davis. These stem cells come from adult skin cells and are reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state. They have the potential to form into any cell or tissue in the body and have been used to create embryo-like structures that resemble the real thing. By editing these stem cells, scientists could disable genes needed for brain development. The resulting embryo could then be incubated until it grows into organized organ structures.
Tech
A Mysterious Numbers Station Is Broadcasting Through the Iran War
“Tavajoh! Tavajoh! Tavajoh!” a man’s voice announces, before going on to narrate a string of numbers in no apparent order, slowly and rhythmically. After nearly two hours, the calls of “Attention!” in Persian stop, only to resume again hours later.
The broadcast has been playing twice a day on a shortwave frequency since the start of the US-Israel attack on Iran on February 28.
According to Priyom, an organization which tracks and analyses global military and intelligence use of shortwave radio, using established radio-location techniques, the broadcast was first heard as the US bombing of Iran began. It has since played on the 7910 kHz shortwave frequency like clockwork—at 02.00 UTC and again at 18.00 UTC.
Over the weekend, Priyom said it had identified the likely origin of the broadcast. Using multilateration and triangulation techniques, the group traced the signal to a shortwave transmission facility inside a US military base in Böblingen, southwest of Stuttgart, Germany.
The site lies within a restricted training area between Panzer Kaserne and Patch Barracks, with technical operations possibly linked to the US army’s 52nd Strategic Signal Battalion, headquartered nearby.
That identification narrows the field, but it does not reveal who is behind the transmissions or who they are meant for.
The two-hour-long transmission is divided into five to six segments, each lasting up to 20 minutes. Each opens with “Tavajoh!” before shifting into a string of numbers in Persian, sometimes punctuated with an English word or two. Five days into the broadcast, radio jammers were heard attempting to block the frequency. The following day, the transmission shifted to a different frequency—7842 kHz.
Radio communication experts believe the broadcast is likely part of a Cold War–era system known as number stations.
The Return of the Numbers
Number stations are shortwave radio broadcasts that play strings of numbers or codes that sound random—like the one now heard in Iran. “It is an encrypted radio message used by foreign intelligence services, often as part of a complex operation by intelligence agencies and militaries,” says Maris Goldmanis, a Latvian historian and avid numbers stations researcher.
Number stations are most commonly associated with espionage. “For intelligence agencies, it is important to communicate with their spies to gather intelligence,” says John Sipher, a former US intelligence officer who served 28 years in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. “This is not always possible in person due to political constraints or conflict. This is where number stations come in.”
While the use of number stations can be traced back to the First World War, they gained prominence during the US-Soviet Cold War. As espionage grew more sophisticated, governments used automated voice transmissions of coded numbers to communicate with agents, Goldmanis says. Citing declassified KGB and CIA documents, he adds that number stations were widely used during this period, often as Morse code transmissions and, in many cases, as two-way communications, with agents reporting back using their own shortwave transmitters.
“Nowadays, you have various satellite and encrypted communications technologies,” Sipher says. “But during the Cold War and even before that, governments had to find ways to do this without being noticed, and broadcasting coded messages was one way to communicate with your assets discreetly.”
The apparent randomness of the numbers means they can be understood only with a codebook, Sipher adds. “Nobody can make heads or tails of it or understand what it says unless you have the codebook that can give you hints to decrypt the code,” he says, noting that such systems must be set up and coordinated in advance.
A Signal Without a Sender
While the likely origin of the signal may now be clearer, its purpose and intended recipient remain unknown.
Because the broadcasts are encrypted and designed to be covert, those details may remain unclear for years, Goldmanis says. The structured nature of the transmission—its fixed schedule and consistent use of frequencies—further suggests it is part of a planned operation.
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