TRASHFUTURE - Bribecoin feat. Zeke Faux

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

Bloomberg’s Zeke Faux joins us to discuss stablecoins - specifically Tether and World Liberty / USD1 - which function now as the parallel financial ecosystem for dealing with states captured by right wing cliques. But first, we brainstorm a post politics career for Keir and check in on the state of toys in Hertfordshire. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows NATE ALERT Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album and you can stream it for free here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I knew this day would come and I didn't know how I would feel when it happened but you know what? It's been what? 11 of the best years in British politics where like Keir Starmer was my fucking friend, okay? And he fucking resigned.

I know. I'm sorry. I mean, listen, we're all going through it. You know, we're not going to have Kea Starmer to kick around at Five Aside Football anymore. But just know this, right?

Whenever someone in a sort of casual football setting goes in, studs up at, like, ankle level, he'll be there. Whenever an Uber Eats driver is crushed under the wheel of an SUV in North London, he will be there. There will be any time that anyone asks, can we do anything to prevent Israel from committing a genocide? and the British state goes, you are under arrest, the wind whispers through the trees and it whispers the name Kier.

Awe at Kewale, you know, like it's hail and farewell to, I would say, our country's greatest prime minister, if not, gracious human. And, you know, I don't know what we're going to be in a world where Kirstama

isn't an MP anymore, but the future is scary and ultimately we're going to have to face it together. And what's, What's that? I've just, I've heard the sound of some Ukrainians with very high, like, cheekbone structure, purchasing. You've got those Ukrainians are crazy.

Yeah, I don't know what's up with that. Yeah. Kirstama has resigned and on to spend more time in a sort of like John Wick running from the high table situation with various Ukrainian male models. He's about to engage the kind of Zulander protocol, and we wish him every happiness. Yeah, well, so, you know, what, I mean, the thing is, he's available. That's true. That's true. For what? Who knows? Maybe he'll get a cameo. Yeah. We can, okay, what if? Check this out. I know Farage doesn't have his cameo anymore

because they made him get rid of it because it was too, I think it was too embarrassing. But when he is hopefully run out of politics soon because of all of the stuff, some of which are we talking about a bit later with Bloomberg, Zeke Fox about Tether, USD-1, World Liberty Financial, and the profusion of stable coins. There's a beautiful, there's a beautiful subordinate close that around. Thank you so much. We can, maybe we can get Keir Starmor and Nigel Farage doing cameos to one another. And we can get them to kiss and we can make our own enemies to lovers.

Maybe he's, maybe he's going to start streaming. We don't know. I'm going to pull out the Lave just now and I'm going to say it's going to be a podcast between them too. It's going to be similar to the one that Ed Balls and George Osborne do. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm seeing. I don't think we're, I want to see, I want to see stream a kid.

I want to see him in the sort of like gamer. This is true. Because I feel like we've hit the ceiling on podcast now. I feel like the political podcast thing is kind of like, you know, not to sort of spell our own death now, but I feel like we, you know, we may, we're the last good one. Yeah. Yeah, we might, we might be cooked. No, no, no, we're, we're not cooked.

We're the, we're the, we're the thing that you want to be, to be cooking, right? and then everything after us, that's the Greece. You know, it's no good. Well, look, let me present to you an idea. Wait for it, because I've just come up with it now and debuting. Hassan, Hassan Pai Kier. I don't know why Keir Starmes said that the United Kingdom deserved 9-11, and I hasten to condemn him for having said it.

He's going to get jacked. He's going to get really tall. F's in chat. Yeah. Everyone's been saying, they want a. version of Hassan Piker that actually would hurt a dog. Many people have made up, they've gotten angry at the idea that Hassan Piker would hurt a dog when he manifestly didn't. My offer is too, that vocal minority of audience is mad that because

they think Hassan Piker didn't really hurt the dog. Kirstarmer getting a little bit like your kind of Kuiludes Michael Kane at the end there. There was that whole thing about why, you know, the liberals need their own Hassan Piker to like, you know, challenge the left. Why is, you know, Hassan Pai Kian not like a legitimate thing? Like, yeah, let him do streaming. Let him get into gaming. Maybe that's his passion, you know? Maybe, maybe like he's only been miserable and sort of like, you know, not doing anything except bad stuff as prime minister.

Because what he really wants to be doing is spending eight hours a day playing friend slop games and then like just kind of philosophizing. Holy shit, you know what? You know one of the other things is that Hassan Piker traditionally does date some very beautiful women and has them on stream with him. We could resurrect a four-year-old bit. I was just thinking about this. I was just thinking about this.

One of my favorite bits that we've ever done in the show. Now is your time to shoot your shot with Julia Fox care. That's right. That's correct. Let's do it. Yeah, this is his future. This is the future I want for him. And I fully believe he's going to be able to do it.

I thought it was weird when Kira Strammer started doing hot tub streaming. But you know, that's fine. Look, all right. Hi, everybody. Well, it's, it's TF. You know what it is. I've already introduced our guest in the second segment. But in the first segment, there are some things I want to discuss.

Now, I'm going to suggest we go in a little bit of a different order this time. Okay. Because I have an article that Hussein sent me that I've been wanting to talk about for weeks. And you know, I've never been a stickler for the kind of like purest structure of TF. You know, you're the captain, you know, like you steal the ship by wings. I'm the captain. you know what, we're beating to quarters just because it's breakfast. So, so this was, and I have some news.

And then there's, we got to do another left on Reddit. It's been years. Yes. That's true. That is legitimately true. So this is an article Hussein, you sent me. I can't even remember what I sent you. So this is actually the first time I've probably encountered it in like my own headspace.

So yeah, let's go. All right. So that's why we record in the afternoons and evenings because Hussein is born again every day in the morning and has to relearn everything for first principles. So this is, Regarding concerns that were raised by Hartfordshire's police and crime commissioner Jonathan Ash Edwards about a toy that was marketed to children. Okay. The toy is.

Oh, yes. Okay. Let's go. Let's fucking go. We're talking about, of course, the elected, I would say, leaders of the police in Hartfordshire. Sort of. Yes. PCCs are funny.

It's sort of like, what if we had like a heat shield for the police? Well, I guess the Hartfordshire police are not. not getting much heat right now. Maybe they're getting too much. And he's trying to distract them because he's identified the number one danger to children in Hertfordshire. And this is played completely straight. This is the most British thing that's ever happened is the butt face chester cheeks action figure. I'm sorry? Oh, sorry, I'll say that again. If you didn't hear me, the butt face chester cheeks. I'm giving you the link right now. Uh-huh. Okay. This is, uh-huh. And That is,

I, okay, so that's, that's, that's, that's a, that's a, that's a,

that's a, a, that's a, that's a, is wearing, like, overrear headphones for some fucking reason.

Uh-huh. Yeah. The ass is also, uh, confusingly wearing pants. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well,

I mean, in fairness, if, like, that's where pants often are is below the ass as well. Often they include the ass, yeah,

anatomically, it's fine. Strictly speaking, would that make them chaps? Or would that make them, like, thigh guards? Well, regardless, the police and crime commissioner

from Hartfordshire has decided to weigh in on butt-faced chest or cheeks. There's nothing else going on, you know, to really talk about, except the ass doll. Well, he says, as a police and crime commissioner and the father of police and crime commissioners, when I became aware of this toy,

I was immediately concerned whether it was appropriate for young children going on to say, this toy is a paedophile's dream. Okay, so, brus, I never left in many ways in this country. I mean, look, I'll concede that it's weird, right?

Like, this is not a sort of toy of my generation. And maybe that's not great in and of itself. Back in my day, we had megazords, and no one ever thought about fucking a megazardos. Nobody was fucking the bionicles, you know, at least not in my milieu. No, we respected, we respected

bionicles. Yeah, and the thing about a bionicle is it doesn't even have an ass, so like, what do you get? The thing is, right, I can see that this is weird. And I don't know if you read in the New York Times this article about a real YouTube 1.0 guy, this guy who started out as a lawn care influencer and kind of had his life destroyed by virtue of YouTube piloting him towards making videos of him being like weird with his kids. Not in a like criminal way, but in a way that was really deeply unsettling, right?

and like all of the kind of like AI generated or mysteriously originated like, you know, Elsa gate slop, all of that stuff. I guess if you wanted, you could articulate the butt face doll as being in sort of conversation with that, I guess. I wouldn't go like ban this sick filth now about it. I don't know who's who would buy it. I also think it's maybe a stretch to suggest that it's like pedophilic so much as just weird. Yeah, well, this is.

my first reaction, which was just like the sort of jump to it being, presumably it's because it's a toy marketed towards children. And because it's marketed towards children, but there is a, in theory, like a way in which you can like sort of stick your dick in there or something. That's how they've sort of put the two together. I don't know. That's the sort of check that every toy company has to make before approving any product is like, because you like, no. Because like, this is part of me is sort of just like, if you're marketing this, right? Surely, surely someone's going to say, hey, someone could stick their dick in them.

Maybe we should try and redesign it. Yeah, it's probably a bad design for a toy, I would say. You would sort of think that's the case. However, what I would say is that, like, I don't know, I guess you guys, like, don't really have any reason to go into toy stores. Although, like, there are a lot of adults for going. Like, when I went to Smith's for toys,

the toy store that, I guess, like, occupies a lot of British high streets now. Um, why I was, to, like, look for stuff for my kid. I was quite surprised by the fact that half of that store is actually creating toys for adults. Really? I mean, I guess that tracks. Collectibles, gunplay, like, all that type of stuff. Which suggests, like, the role of the toy store is not really for children, right? It is a universal store in which you can buy children's toys and you can buy toys for adults.

And this toy, the butt-the-butchick's toy sort of sits in the sort of, you know, between the two. I admit, I don't have any sort of, like, personal knowledge here. But my impression now is that, okay, so toys. of adults and that instead of playing with toys, what children do now is mostly get their brains destroyed by the internet, right? Yeah, I was going to say that one of the things that is very evident in children's sections of toy stores, the fact that so many of these toys are,

because I was like looking at them, I have no idea where the fuck that these things come from. There's obviously like a lot of Pokemon and stuff, but like there's loads of these things where I have no idea where they come from. And the sort of first time I came across like Italian brain rot, I was like, this is a bit. This is like someone in fucking marketing has sort of put some shit together and they're sort of trying to make toys of it.

I went back home and I looked up Italian brain rot. It's like this massive fucking franchise. It's worth like so much money. And it's just these weird toys that have been generated by like AI. And they kind of look really weird and some of them are sort of like, some of them I think look like butts as well. Like there's this real sort of obviously there's this whole fascination of just like turning. And so like these types of toys and like this type of like cheek toy,

this chest of cheeks toy is very much within that genre of like someone has created this shit with AI put it onto YouTube kids it's got like enough popularity for it to sort of be turned into toys for like exasperated parents who I'd probably try to get their kids to like the power rangers or whatever yeah please

please get off the like Roblox server where you're role playing the like Northern Ireland troubles right and play with something in real life instead I got you this AI slot or whatever I got you an action figure of your favorite character from

fruit love island that's shaped as an ass. Oh my God. I got you some feastables. Please like join me in the real world. And this is the type of stuff that like kids are, and it's really challenging because obviously like my, one of my anxieties as a parent is that like my kids coming up to an age where he's going to like start seeing this stuff.

And like I will not be able to convince him that like hand drawn Spider-Man cartoons are also like as good. It's not going to work. And so you've got this issue where it's just like, okay, like for lots of different reasons, to do with the future that is not good. The new types of cartoons are all this smoothed out shit that can be basically uploaded, uploaded very quickly and very easily

to platforms like YouTube and YouTube kids. And it doesn't matter how much regulation YouTube says it's going to do, this stuff will always break through. Because it's so absurd and because it's so weird, kids are always attracted to that stuff. And so you're going to end up having more of these toys, but also because it's so weird to translate, adults are going to look at this thing

and they're going to be like, oh, like, you can sexualize that. Because also, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm going to end my point here, but like, this is my sort of parenting corner where I get to, like, rant about this stuff. Which is, like, Riley just put a picture in the chat right now of like just an advertisement for Italian brain rot. And one of the figures, one of the characters in this is like this female coded character that's sort of like wearing a sort of ballet tutu. And it's like ostensibly a cappuccino, but like is, you know, I don't even know how to describe it. But what I can say is that, yeah, people have sexualized that. People have definitely sexualized that.

They've definitely like made porn of it. And this is and this is the stuff that we've got to deal with. And, like, I think a lot of this panic about these toys and the fact that, like, oh, you know, you could fuck the toys. It's that work. Well, I hate to say it, but you're probably going to be able to fuck most toys now. And that's, like, a real problem. There is a sort of, like, correct way for PCCs aren't cops. But, like, there is a correct way for anyone involved in policing to feel about this, which is, I suggest, Tommy Lee Jones at the end of no country for old men.

Just with how I feel right now, which is a kind of, like, bewildered, exhaust. I'm getting the impression that what this guy has done is instead gone, we should send like a SWAT team to arrest and kill. Anyone found marketing this thing. We should send a SWAT team to arrest and kill butt face, Chester Cheeks. Court and compromise. Look, we should take like the one-op police officer with a gun in Hartfordshire and we should be like, all right, your job is to kick,

just start kicking the door down at Smyce and shoot this thing because we think it's a paedophile op basically. But yeah, this kind of sort of, sort of, I think, smoothed over strangeness because strangeness is not, there's nothing about it that's inherently bad, obviously. Yeah, there's

something about this that's inherently bad. I think, I think because, because it's a lot of what is marketed to children now is so hyper optimized. I'll give you an example, right? You know what picky eating is a relatively recent phenomenon, right, in kids? But when I say relatively, I don't mean last 10 years.

I mean like last 60. And it's not saying it's never happened, but it exploded in prevalence because one of the things that triggers picky eating is exposure to something like a chicken McNugget out of the home before, like before a certain age. Can I just really enjoy? Can I just really savor the phrase exposure to something like a chicken nugget? It's not like Eric Adams would have said. That's an Eric. That's an, look, it's, I can't define what an Eric Adams phrase is, but I know it when you hear it. Yeah.

Exposure to something like a chicken nugget. Because what a chicken nugget is, is it is optimized to within a millimeter of hitting every single dopamine switch in a child's head and essentially addicting them right away. And so if you're not giving them something that is soft, salty, fatty, somewhat bland, then they will then start refusing. food that isn't that, almost because it's like they got given the food version of a fucking ecstasy tablet and burned out their like pleasure receptors. And I think it's the same, something is not

entirely dissimilar when you're talking about like the things that children consume and that like exhausted parents give them to consume because they're so exhausted that are optimized in the same way. It's not the weirdness that's wrong. It's the optimization

that's wrong. The only reason it seems weird is because something is optimized for what a kid will find totally addictive. And I mean, the butt-faced Chester Cheeks thing is, it's a bit strange. I don't think it's a pedophile op, but I... Probably not, no. But it is, it does, as Hussein says, seems to be part of like this way of raising kids now that is about just triggering their dopamine receptors so much that they're not going to be a problem.

And then, although on the other hand, you know, one verify purchaser on Smy's Toys.com, five stars, quality and value, did say great start to Christmas. Was that from a pedophile, though? Because in that case, then maybe the guy's onto something. It was from a pedophile. It was from a pedophile on Christmas. You know how this looks, right? No, I mean, just get your kids a fucking bionical, you know?

I mean, part of the problem is that, like, the only, like, good toys stopped being made when we stopped being kids. That's not me being nostalgic. That's just true. And so now because my entire generation, our entire generation, are like sort of terminally arrested development, we're still all selling them to each other. So the only good Legos all cost 700 pounds and are like on eBay and are four adults. Yeah, this is what I was going to say,

don't buy the fucking bionicles because they are going up in price on like vinted and eBay. And I've like lost various, I've lost like various bids for them. I'm getting really fucking pissed off. Don't do it. Fuck you. Go buy like Pokemon. Like Pokemon stuff is really. fucking gone like off the roof is kind of crazy.

So leave, leave that the bionicles are like a noble race. We sort of fought several wars. Uh-huh. Do not jack the price up of bionicles. I will redact it if you do it. There's a serious possibility that that means that in the moment of silence on Remembrance Sunday,

a decent proportion of the dads there will Loki be thinking about bionicles. And what they will be. I'll be wearing my, I'll be wearing, I'll be wearing my Lego Puffy. for our freedoms for our for our freedom.

Hussein will be wearing a Lego yellow poppy. It will be pissing off everybody and he'll say, I don't get while you're mad.

Yeah. Yeah. And Hassan Pikeir will condemn me. Finally. All right. I'm going to do a piece of news

and then I'm going to go into the thing. One of the things I actually did want to talk about and have one and two for about a week or so. Look,

we, everyone knows Neon's dead and gone. Right? But his soul is marching on. Well, its soul marches on in Riyat

with the, numaraba where, uh, if you recall, the king, you're like the big cube one, right? Yeah, yeah, the king was going to be like this religious artifact, I'm going to as king, build one better than God did and it's going to have like a ton of stuff in there like material goods that I'm really going to like, you know, sort of raise to a position of importance. I don't have to, you know, care about that anymore, but it's still gauche, let's say. Yes. Uh, this is Muhammad bin Salman. if you like doing, I guess, the Muslim equivalent of being like, what do you mean? I'll just get a blade helicopter the top of Mount Olympus. Then I'll be like the gods. So in this, there's some developments here in January, Saudi Arabia suspended construction of the new supercaba, the macab. Well, the public investment fund was reassessed whether or not, hey, should we slap God in the face? And more importantly, should we do it?

Do we have the money to slap God in the face? Is the real question to the Saudis. fully the actual question, do we have enough money to slap? What's the slap going to cost me? And hey, how can I care about that all of a sudden? Yeah, money, it seems like money is real, which I don't approve all of it's all. I don't like that. No, no, no. The Saudi is supposed to be the greatest lottery winners of all time.

And as we know, they've been sort of winding some stuff down because I guess it's possible for even that amount of money to run out if you are stupid and ambitious enough. Any case, when work stopped, much like with the line, all the groundwork and excavation and piling was already done. This whole thing's been a plot by Big Foundation. Oh, yeah. It's like, look, nobody else gets any concrete. Big, big earthworks.

Yeah, honestly, yeah, big piles. The hidden hand of Kamatsu Big Excavator, you know? What a poll. They assist that they're doing the whole plan, but the Big Cube completion date has slipped from 2030 to 2040 because they've realized, holy shit, we have so much stuff to host. We have the Expo.

We have the Asian Winter Games. We have the Olympics. We're not ready for any of it, and we can suddenly see the bottom of our wealth. Look, sometimes you just overbook yourself, you know? Like, that's fine. It's an ADHD trait, actually. True. Yeah.

So, but then in June, they were like, it's back. We're going to start again. We're going to start doing it again. But here's the difference. We're going to number one. And this is the, we now know what their plan is because they did this last week. Michael Dyke, the chief executive of Numeraba, he's out. RIPA.

I guess. RIP. He's gone. Headline, Dyke on Bank. So, and now what they've done is they've appointed a public investment fund, like banker, essentially, to run the whole thing. Dyke was an architect and designer, this new person, Sabah Barricade.

He was a rimless glasses guy. Yeah, sure. He was a British rimless glasses guy. He's gone. Sabah Barakat is in. This is like fucking transfer deadline day. This is crazy. I mean, honestly, like, it's.

it's really exciting to see like who's going to a Gellifu cognitive city in in Bhutan you know that I think they got they got the Barcelona guy who was working on Neon before he had to flee they got him in Kazakhstan to build the new network school I'm just excited to see what the season is I mean I'm less excited by the real thing so much as I like playing Hyper Project manager and then I'm thinking about how I

would have done it you know how I would have built the team the problem with Hyper projects is it's like all about the business now money is ruining hyper project. So Barricat is like, yeah, Baraket's a banker. He's at the public investment fund. And this is because part of how Saudi Arabia intends to deliver the new macab and the Numeraba and slap God in the face, public, private partnerships, they're doing PFI. Amazing.

That's never a sign of a state that's running out of money or sort of confidence and its ability to raise money. Well, it's like, this is something I've observed. in other countries and now, and observed in Saudi Arabia before, and it's a little bit of a vertical that's emerging, which is everywhere is Britain now. Yeah, turns out some kind of, some kind of

century of British humiliation. I'm sorry that it's spreading. Well, it means that Saudi Arabia is going to get fucking butt-faced chest of cheeks as well. They're going to have, I mean, if they're just starting private finance stuff now, they're going to have their own oasis in like two years.

to me MBS feuding with his brothers was Oasis in Saudi that time with Liam Gallagher locked all of his relatives in the Hilton emerged as like the only Liam Gallagher's high flying birds yeah um so basically they now have they put a banker in charge of a development project they've already like selling concessions in it to like Katari medical groups and stuff to be like okay well it's going to be a private hospital that we're not going to be able to just run at a loss for

ever in order to continue. This is going to be a strip mall that does fillers. Like, it's going to, they're going to do that. It's going to be in the shape of a cube and they're going to call it done. And we know they're going to do that because they put in a guy who knows what money is. Yeah, 100%. Cool. So, like, they're still going to be like, yeah, it's residential retail office, high-end dining,

high-end living. And all the usual stuff that's sort of the cruise ship and luxury airport lounge, they keep on wanting to build, but somehow failing to build. Mm-hmm. There's only so many Louis Vuitton stores that you can put on like one sort of like latitude mine, you know? The Numeraba, I think, okay, so the Numeraba said it was going to be able to fit 20 Empire State buildings. So let's see, cubic area of Empire State building. And if you think about the economic activity of the Empire State building and you just multiply that, then basically it's going to turn Riyadh into Manhattan times a billion.

Yeah. And look, no one's going to be able to make a super tall. Yeah, you could do 9-11 in reality. Turnabout is fair play, I've always said. I mean, if there are you Canadians that do it, because it'd be like, oh, you threaten us, we get to do it. 19 brave Canadian Michaels. It's not why they all have to be in wheelchairs. It's looking like the, if you look, take the average size of a Louis Vuitton store,

the Numeraba alone could fit 16,270 of them. Sure. Right? Yeah, it feels like a bit much. I feel like you got to have like a segue or a golf cart or something. I'm not walking. around that past a certain point, you know? Like, people who goes to luxury stores love to say things like, who I'm getting my steps in,

but a certain number of steps, it turns out, is too much. There's one piece of news I did also want to talk about, which is I want to go back to Jason Arde. And the reason I want to do this is several fold. Number one, in the aftermath of the time that the UK press got together and killed a guy again, we expected that they were going to be very defensive. and we got what we expected, number one. I have a few articles just from last week. They were published.

Ed West and the Spectator had an article called The Floydification of Arde's death. That's the most racist thing I've ever heard. Yep. Cool. Okay. Robert Colville in The Times wrote an article entitled We mustn't let Jason Ardei's death

put feelings before facts. And this is a slice from that article. If the publication of the retraction watch piece was the first moment that the heat could have been drained from the story, Ardey's death was the second. Instead, it became further inflamed. The good law project, without pausing for a minute, published a new open letter calling for a public inquiry and press regulation, arguing that, quote, there cannot be any doubt that racism lay at the heart of this story. Organizations such as Amni International. That's just true. Like,

this is how dare you have the temerity to be angry at us for killing a guy. And in fact, you're acting really like crazy right now and irrational. So organizations such as Amnesty International founded to defend freedom, demanded media censorship. We were even treated to the grotesque spectacle, which, okay, Robert Colville had actually one good point in this article, the grotesque spectacle of Alistair Campbell lecturing others about people being hounded to their deaths. Yeah, for real.

Yeah. I mean, okay, the hypocrisy there, I would say, is table stakes also who gives a fuck about Alistair Campbell, not me, right? I think it's sort of the thing where this is a sort of rearguard action, right? And I think all of the people who were most involved or most sort of sadistic or opportunist about Jason Arde have now moved on. I think it was interesting. I think it was instructive, not to say terrifying, to look at the Welsh Gender Service, getting bullied into just canceling everybody's surgery, just pausing the whole waiting list, right? You could see some of the same journalists on Twitter sort of crowing in each other's replies about, you know, great work getting this over the line or whatever.

whatever. And I think that's one of the ways in which this works is these people need their sadism so badly that, you know, it's never enough, right? It has to be this sort of continuous sort of drumbeat of it. And so to still

be on this, as Colville is, I think you have to view as like, as I say, like a rearguard action, while the rest of the press gets to move on to whoever they want to emiserate next. It's the rearguard action specifically, is as more information has come to light about Arde's life,

it turns out that he was also just being lied about at an industrial scale by all of these journalists. Of course. And I mean, like, I think there has been some of the sort of like instinctual reactions to be like, well, he, you know, didn't lie about anything, which I don't think is true. But it's like we said last time, I think he had a lot of, a lot of the, like stuff that sounded the most fake was the most grounded in reality. And there are just sort of like pieces of exaggeration or stuff that, you know, might be academic misconduct, but in a very sort of like minor way, becoming this sort of lever to be pulled on, right,

in order to sort of exercise this sort of like this folk devil, you know? And specifically, right, what they're doing, what West and Colville and Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times minds coming in from overseas, who wrote after a scholar's awful death, mistaken calls for censorship, which is just instead, which is right now, especially as it is being revealed

in more mainstream sources, right? It's now like able to be known that he was not this sort of pure liar that they said he was. That these guys are all able to force the conversation to be about press freedom again, right? Yeah, I think it's also interesting to talk about Nathan Kaufness

here, right? The guy who instigated this, the sort of self-described race scientist because he sort of now has, I would suggest almost overplayed his hand a little bit and the University of Ghentz suspended him from teaching for three months and he has immediately sort of gone in on the sort of university's chancellor for being a DEI hire.

But I think the notable bit here is that the US ambassador to Belgium has sort of intervened on a, no, Donald Trump says you have to be nice to this guy thing. There's now, so, so more than ever before, there is a kind of chud protective services in the United States. And I, you know,

obviously this is bad for any number of reasons. It's sort of an unprecedented exercise of state interference, which is going to have to be dismantled or worked around or ignored one way or another. But the fact of the matter is that this is now someone who is catastrophically

unpopular. And is having to, you know, sort of go to that sort of network for protection, you know, and not in the sense of, you know, as he might have it of, you know, they want to murder me or they want to sort of unpersonely, but just in a sense of a sort of refuge from people's, I think, valid disgust. It's like there is a 100% full employment policy for him. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Chud Wealtha. Like, you have to keep employing him. You might ask, why use U.S. diplomatic power to prosecute a Twitter fight. And one of the answers is because that's what J.D. Vance legitimately wants to use it for, one of the many things he wants to use it for. But also that by doing that, you also send a message, which is anybody around the world who is going to try to make their country resemble Florida, we will guard you from consequences for doing that. Yeah, like we've talked about this sort of fascist international many times. And I mean, I think

it's very tempting, especially doing comedy to try and reach for a sort of quick hit here, where instead of talking about sort of building a countervailing powers of that or something that can resist that, you engage in this kind of fantasy of, well, in a couple of years' time, the pendulum's going to swing back in a way that mirrors. We're going to see Woke 3, and we're going to see the most online left-wing vice president in history conducting twister beefs in exactly the opposite way. And it's not going to happen like that. It's funny to imagine.

It's like pleasing to imagine the United States enforcing woke by aircraft, but it simply won't. And we know that this stuff only sort of ratchets to the rise. And at best, at best, what you're going to get is, you know, John Arsoff or Gavin Newsom or Pete Buttigieg gets to be president. And you live in a world for another four years, eight years maximum, where the US ambassador to Belgium is not damarshing a university over posts. And you think, great, the adults are back in the room, right? Politics is good again. And it's not going to be. So I really

don't know, sort of, I would struggle to find much humor in this other than the fact that every fucking Nazi child from Knives out now has a praetorian guard of U.S. diplomat. ads around them to be like, you can't touch this kid, he's with us. Yeah. I say kid, the world's baldest fucking, like 30 something, whatever. I don't even know how old he is and I don't care. You are not allowed to be in any way inconvenience this 35-year-old haunted child. No, it's like forum mod stuff, basically.

Yeah, I mean, it's when you learn your political style from the internet, then there are a few things that you want to do. I mean, I think this goes back to even like how we talked about the original. sort of the original gang of UK journalists all treating Jason Arde like they're on Kiwi Farms or 4chan or whatever is you want to take the thing from the computer and put it in real life. That's why like they would gang up to, you know, like harass like Chris Chan or whatever, right? Is because they could be the well, this people, this person we think is all funny, we can actually start harming. And on the other hand, the my friend from internet, I will go.

and die for him in Benghazi or whatever, or I have a whole sense of one else to do it more realistically is the flip side of that. It is people who have come up through a different kind of clique system, one that is not defined by a party machine, but that is defined by influencers and

Discord servers and vague affiliations. I think that's also so interesting, right, because it's so sort of bickering, it's so infighting and so rhizomatic, right? There's a sort of, I think it's worth talking about Milo Yanopolis, right? Which not a sentence I say very often, right?

That Milo Yanophilus has been forced to come back to the United Kingdom, right, because of overstaying his visa, which is one of those immigration crimes that is sort of like barely even counted as crimes, but really for wronging Laura Luma, right, who has now been able to sort of use ICE to deport him at her behest and not just deport him, but like humiliate him with like a sort of like perp walk photo as well. this is like I struggle to even get the kind of shardinfreude out of that because that's a terrifying exercise of federal power by an individual particularly an individual that weird but it does mean that these people will not hesitate to turn on each other and I think that really is a trend that's

going to continue it's going to exacerbate especially whenever it is that you know Trump finally fucking goes out like Stan Chera and dies of like whatever you know next pandemic but I I just feel like any kind of politics that is against this has to be grounded in two pillars, right? One is sort of like actual normal human compassion for like everyday people, right? Which is part of the thing that all of this is, you know, built against, right? Is to become a person who is grounded in spite all the time. And the other one has to be a ruthless exercise of justice, not in defense of liberal institutions, but in defense of, well, the first bit, you know?

and you have to be able to make the pitch to people that not only is politics something that on the left is going to make your life better and make you part of a community that you're going to sort of feel rewarded in and safe in and valued in and is going to improve your life but that no one who tries to do this stuff to you and tries to impose this kind of feeling this kind of this kind of horror on you

will ever be allowed to do again. And exactly how you do that, I mean, is sort of a more vexed question. But, I mean, I don't think you've had a sort of clearer objective marker, if you like, than the way all of this has played out. I can't really think of a much better button than that. So I think let's speak with Zeke, author of Number Go Up, Bloomberg journalist. And sorry we put you in the same episode as the butt-faced Chester Cheeks discussion, Zeke. Anyway, we're going to be talking with Zeke about the kind of,

financial version, I guess, of the right-wing international through these stable coin issuing companies that have become so nakedly political in the last several years. Why all these guys have infinite money now? Essentially, yes. So, see you with our chat with Zeke in a second. So, Zieg, what I'm going to say what we do is, why don't you just tell us about Christopher Harbourn? Because we don't know anything about him other that he's Thai-based, crypto-rich from Tether and supported an agile Farage for his millions. Yeah, who is this guy?

So, yeah, he's a mysterious figure. He's kind of a mousy-looking 63-year-old. And his background when he was young is pretty conventional. He went to Cambridge. He was at McKinsey. He worked at Pepsi. Then in the 90s, he moved to Thailand. And from there, appears to have gotten into the jet fuel business, which eventually

made him pretty rich. His crypto connection is that he was an early investor in Ethereum, which was like the second big cryptocurrency that made tons of people rich. And he was a user of a crypto exchange called BitFinex, which is owned by the same guys as Tether. And back in 2016, BitFinex got hacked. and you may remember this story. It was later, the hackers were caught years later.

They were a woman who went by Razl Khan. She was like a really, you know, epically terrible rapper. And she actually only helped with laundering the money. It was her husband went by Dutch who had done it. Like from Red Dead Red Dead redemption? Yeah, Razel Khan had actually, she'd recorded some raps about social engineering, spearfishing. Yeah, it was truly pretty embarrassing for the BitFinex guys

that they'd had half of their Bitcoin stolen by this couple. But at the time, so these guys had got tons of their money stolen. Essentially should have gone bankrupt, but nobody was really regulating crypto back then. So they issued a ton of IOUs to their customers and either by being a big customer

or by buying up these IOUs, Harborne ended up with a 12% stake in Tether, this giant stable coin company. And now these days, Tether is like one of the most profitable companies in the world. And based on their internal valuation, that 12% stake would be worth $60 billion that would make Harbourn one of the richest guys in the world. So he has gotten into the news lately because he is by far the biggest funder of Reform UK. And it was also revealed that he had given Nigel Farage $5 million. And this was not disclosed.

Farage had said it was like a personal gift. So it didn't have to be. Is this kind of stealth British Peter Thiel but for one guy? This is what I think is so strange. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the second segment. We're talking to Zeke Fox, like we said at the beginning of the first one, all about Tether, because there have been, since we first talked about it as just like, hey, there's

this weird magic box that says, and no one's allowed to look into it, that it's full of billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of either cash or gold or U.S. Treasuries and stuff like this, but don't look. That is the kind of backbone of. of the crypto ecosystem. Yeah, the sort of the leak out of the lab, the bridge between crypto and like fiat currency. Yeah.

And it's backed by just a coterie of freaks and weirdos, including Brock Pierce, who we'll be talking about more later, because guess what? He's back in the news. Yeah, just this kind of weird paradox of something auditioning to be a kind of like central bank of a deregulated libertarian currency.

Which is, it turns out you need one of those. and I guess I'm glad they kind of figured it out from first principles. It's sort of like in this case, it's like the sort of branch Davidian reserve, you know, rather than the Federal Reserve. And one of the things that I think has changed is that since we talked about crypto and the alignment of the cryptocurrency world with quite extreme right electoral politics going mainstream, if you like, Tether has proven to be a absolutely central player in that story. and there are all kinds of different ways it has been doing so, whether that's through like the personal activism of the board, connections with Jeffrey Epstein, connections with El Salvador and the Buckele government, or connections with like Harbourn and Nigel Farage Reform UK, and I've stored numerous, numerous others around the world.

We want to understand how it went from this box full of nuts and gum that we've said is worth all these billions to now legitimately probably one of the most profitable companies in history per employee through this kind of. confidence game. So, Zeke, last time we looked at Tether, it was a box of nuts and gum with billions written on it in Sharpie. Now, it seems like they actually do have huge amounts of money. What changed and how do they get political? Yeah. So for years, the question was like, does Tether have the money? And it seemed like there was probably some issue there because they were not, it was, would be, it would have clearly been in their interest to prove they have the had the money and

they just weren't doing it. But still, the crypto people found it so useful that they can kept using it and Tether's magic box grew and grew and grew. And one thing that really helped them out was that U.S. interest rates went up. So when Tether initially was started, interest rates were near zero. So they were accumulating this big pile of money. That's the money that people gave them to buy Tether tokens that they could use for crypto trading or money laundering or whatever. But Tether had no way to invest that money safely because interest rates were so low.

Now with interest rates at like 5%, Tether can just buy U.S. which are like basically risk-free and turn out huge profits. So they're making like $10 billion a year. So a couple of weeks ago, Tether published their first audit. This is after like a decade. And they got KPMG with a big accounting firm to check over all their holdings and give them a stamp of approval. So it seems like if there was any hole before, they filled it in.

Yeah, we gave the KPMG guy a peek in the box. And he's like, yeah, there is money in there now. Yeah, and to me, that's pretty, you know, fairly reliable. Now, one thing that that has really helped them out, though, is that towards the end of the Biden administration, top officials were actually considering whether to bring a lawsuit against Heather, essentially whether to charge them with facilitating money laundering, like something that could have caused real issues for their operation. And under Trump, that's gone. That's totally changed. and the U.S. has actually passed a law called the Genius Act on, yeah, name to appeal to Trump.

You'd think this stuff wouldn't work. And yet it does. And this law contains a bunch of provisions that are favorable to Tether. And leading up to this law, Tether had taken a bunch of steps to try to get involved in Curry favor with U.S. politicians. So the big one was that in like 2024, in the lead up to the election, Tether sold like a convertible bond that gave ownership rights in the company to Canter Fitzgerald, which is an investment bank that's led by the Howard Lutnik, who's now the Commerce Secretary. And Lutnik became like a big advocate for Tether in public. Damn, that's crazy how that happened.

I don't think that should be allowed at pride. I don't. care who he is. So he was like the first kind of mainstream person to vouch for tether. And then he, Lutnik was a big fundraiser for Trump and was already sort of thinking about a future position in the Trump administration. According to people who talked with the tether executives, Lutnik was already talking about if Trump was elected, he would be able to kill any laws that might hurt tether. Now, another thing that Tether did was they invested $775 million in the streaming network

Rumble. Oh, my God. Why is it immediately that we seem to be, I mean, I say why is this? I pick the topics. But we seem to have the, I mean, just the return of the right wing grievance, alternate internet reality. It's like Chod's Twitch, right? Yeah, home to Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes.

And why this was, like, in particular, a good way to get in with Trump was that this money that went into Rumble helped pay out some of Rumble's investors who include Vice President J.D. Vance, former FBI deputy director Dan Bonjino and David Sacks, the venture capitalist who was for a time the, like, cryptos are. So Tyler does these things to getting good with the Trump people. This Genius Act, I mean, Congress can't get anything done. And they're like, what are the most pressing problems here in the U.S.? Oh, let's like debate ways to encourage stablecoin use. So before we go on, I actually just want to touch on a couple of things, namely what the genius, like, one of the things that cryptocurrency advocates have often said, they've demanded it, they've demanded it, is please regulate us, please regulate us,

because they want to be seen, I think, as safe assets that suddenly banks can start pouring money into. And for me, I think the Genius Act was that moment where at least Tether and other stable coins get regulated enough that they can start like doing more things in the wider economy and not just be used for buying like drugs and sending bribes. Yeah, it's like, dude, let me in. I'm a legitimate currency. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the really important thing to me about this is that most people who

use Tether probably do use it at like a crypto exchange. And the exchanges can themselves be regulated. But you can also hold Tether in your anonymous crypto wallet. And that's like that means that anyone can, in the world, can send Tether to somebody else without revealing identities on either side. And like you could be a terrorist. a drug dealer, if the cops ever wanted to investigate this, Tether wouldn't be collecting your information. And that's like really different to how banks work. And the Genius Act did not change

this. Like this, it basically allows this like status quo for stable coins to go on. And shockingly to me, after like years of investigating these Heather guys who are operating kind of like crypto pirates, the CEO of Tether came to the White House for the, Genius Act signing ceremony. He stood up, everybody applauded him. Trump said, I got you guys out of so much trouble talking about... He loves to talk about the bribe. He loves to acknowledge the bribe.

You should bribe me. It's great value. I'll get everything done you want. He'd issued... It wasn't just tether. He'd pardoned other crypto guys. He'd had... At the end of the Biden administration,

the Securities and Exchange Commission was suing like all the crypto companies is basically trying to end their business model. And Trump just, like, dropped all that. Now, a couple interesting things happened after the Genius Act passed. First is Trump had a guy named Bo Hines, who was like one of his top crypto guys. That guy went to go work for Tether. Before we do go on,

Bo Hines is worth taking a pause on because he is quite the character. He is a, he was like a, he was an NFL prospect. that I don't believe ended up ever getting signed out of North Carolina. Just enough to get, like just good enough of football to get the brain injury,

but not quite good enough to get the money. I think you're giving them a promotion. I don't even know if he had a big college career. But yes, football player, I think twice failed congressional candidate. As far as I know, only job really was working with his dad. And they donated money to Trump

And then Heinz, just never having any real crypto experience got appointed like deputy cryptos are. And after like all of these guys, getting into crypto when already rich, specifically having funded his entire campaign with his trust fund and with all of his businesses before getting a job in the Trump administration being co-run with his father. So this is a real go-getter. Trump loves big guys who hang out with their dads unless the reliance. unless they're related to him. 100%. Big, it's, I wish, I wish my son was like you, Bo. A big guy who hangs out with his dad but actually is good at football.

Yeah, he just wanted a big football idiot and instead he got like various of freaks. Yeah. So this is again, like another person who is absolutely person, not just personally loyal to Trump, which he is, but personally loyal to Tether. And Tether was like, oh, don't worry. Well, we're going to pay for the Genius Act fair and square, basically. Yeah, and my colleagues at Bloomberg did some great reporting on this that Bo Hines was basically like whipping Congress in favor Tether. Like there's, it's kind of, it hinges on

some technical details, but Tether wanted certain things in this bill. And he was telling Republicans, we care about Tether, you've got to keep these things in the bill. We understand why on one level they care about Tether, which is Tether found a very, very, very buyable, and that's around the world, group of politicians, or at least with all politicians in the UK, people who are interested in personal enrichment, which I think you can say, right? They found all of these guys. And then what they seem to want is things like the Genius Act. I mean, it's no surprise that Farage in the UK, probably from personal conviction and a love of crypto, the Christopher Harbourn gift was purely for personal security as a reward for delivering Brexit,

which is not related. It was for any or all of the narratives that he's deployed about it, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. It seems to me that Farage is trying to do, because you frequently find him lobbying the governor of the Bank of England, for example, you'll frequently find him making speeches in Parliament, basically calling for what appears to me to be a UK version of the Genius Act. Like, hey, they've got the bribery currency over there. Are we going to be left behind out of the exciting new bribery economy of the 2020s?

Yeah, all my friends get this cool, you know, cryptocurrency. Why can't I? Well, Farage going to like Andrew Bailey and being like, well, Trump's government gives him the bribery money. Essentially what I'm suggesting is that Nigel Farage conceives of tether as his bonestorm, yes. Yeah. But it's like the argument that lots of sort of crypto people, and I guess AI people also say,

right, which is when it comes to sort of, especially like, in like European countries, where they're still kind of like sort of slightly tighter and stronger regulation although not be it by that much which is that oh no this is like a sort of new emerging industry

that lots of other people around the world benefit from but you know you are keeping the British people poor by preventing them from using it there was that ad wasn't there the one that got a bit of controversy because they used it was like I don't know if it was AI driven

but like they sort of presented Britain as being this kind of like extremely poor country where like people didn't have like toilets and stuff. And the whole idea was just felt like, oh, you know, these people would be benefits so much if they had like access to cryptocurrency. And so it is like one of those tactics

where, and in the same way that like the kind of like emerging AI kind of whatever you want to call it, the industry sort of is sort of lobbying. It is very much this thing about like either you're kind of like, you know, it's a very classic like you'll be left behind but in this sort of broader macroeconomic sense. I think that was

it was an ad for Coinbase. Oh, yes. Okay. Yeah. And they love to do these ads where they're like, they start with some stuff that like a lot of people can agree on. Like, hey, the old financial system has a lot of problems. It's hard to get ahead these days. And then they're like, and the solution is gambling on crypto. Which I think is a real difference from AI. Like whatever you think about AI, like clearly it came out and like a lot of people started using it for things other than gambling. Whereas like crypto for you. years, they've been trying to find some use case that interests normies and just like striking out. Well, I guess what I'm, what I was driving at with the Farage thing is they've realized, well, hang on a second. We actually got our whole pitch wrong. Our use case isn't for normies. Crypto is by and four elites largely. And it's most enduring use case, as far as I can tell, has seemed to be different levels of bribe, right? Where I mean, at the beginning of the Trump administration, it was relatively crude where Trump would say, I have a meme coin, buy the meme coin, and the

meme coin crashes to zero, and there are two people who buy it. There are people who buy it smartly, which is, I am going to bribe the president now. And then there are people who buy it stupidly, which is Trump's amazing, I'm going to buy his coin, and then it's going to go up forever because Trump has never screwed anyone who, like, puts their trust in him. Right? That was like the first weeks. And only the first people, that first group of people got anything out of it. And then the scam has evolved, right? It's become much more advanced with the Trump family. We'll go back on to Tether in a moment.

With the Trump family now trying to release its own version of Tether, USD1, I believe it's called, which is managed by World Liberty Financial. Because fundamentally, you get way richer owning the bribery platform than you do doing a bribe and engaging in some kind of a business relationship out of it. So let's talk a little bit, shift gears and talk about U.S. and World Liberty Financial and what's happening with the sort of more advanced Trump family crypto grift because it's boys that grown up. Yeah. I mean, this is a wild saga. So World

Liberty, I think when it started, was really not so different than the meme coin. Like, they had no business model and Trump had teamed up with a longtime internet hustler who had once called himself the dirt bag of the internet. Another guy who was helping with World Liberty was a former pickup artist, like he taught seduction classes. And they raised something like $500 million selling world liberty tokens without any clear idea of what this would be. Now, once Trump won and gained political power, there was like a much higher class of internet hustler that wanted to do business with them. And one of them was CZ, who is the billionaire, founder, of Binance, like the biggest crypto exchange. And when Trump once, CZ had actually just gotten

out of jail, he pleaded guilty to this giant money laundering case in the U.S. Essentially, the case was that Binance did not care who was on its platform, wasn't doing anything to prevent terrorists or other criminals from using it. And CZ and Binance, behind the scenes, started helping World Liberty start like a real business. And that business was this stable coin. And so the Trump started this competitor to Tether, like you're saying, USD1. Now, why would anyone use a new Tether? I mean, the stable coins are all basically the same. There's not like a good reason to use one over the other. And in fact, you might not trust a new one because crypto companies are always getting hacked. Tether has sort of a track record of not getting hacked except for that one time by

the bad rapper, but that was like 10 years ago. So, now, who wanted to use USD1? It was CZ and the government of the United Arab Emirates. They were the first big users of it. They used it for this $2 billion transaction. So they essentially parked $2 billion in USD1, which you can sort of think of as like the Bank of Trump. That throws off interest income for World Liberty for the Trump's maybe like $80 million

bucks a year. So Binance helps them develop this product is the first user of the product. It's generating big money for them. And then surprise, surprise, CZ gets pardoned by Trump for this money laundering case. Yeah. And I mean, when we talk about the the Emirates, right, like the quid pro quos go much further because like the MGX, the Abu Dhabi like sovereign AI fund, the deposit you're talking about of two of $2 billion comes from the Sovereigni fund. And it comes, again, comes after Trump and Sheikh Tanoon personally talk about

prioritizing the Emirates for exporting chips. Right? So it's like, well, if you want to get into the fast lane for getting better access to processing power, then the best thing to do is use like, it's almost a bit like, remember like the idea about net neutrality, right? Where you're supposed to have an

internet where it doesn't matter if what I'm going on is Netflix or fucking Twitter or whatever. All the data is just data. You can't say, well, if you get Virgin internet, then we'll prioritize something else. You can get Virgin streaming better and Netflix will be throttled. You can't do that. But what it seems like, well, the reason to have the second kind of stable coin is almost like, well, yeah, you can use, it's no, money's no longer neutral. There's special money that gets you to the head of the queue that you can use. And the idea that there is this just like relatively neutral, at least in the way it's commonly thought about, money is just being completely demolished by the idea that, you know, well, you can pay in Trump

bucks, which are hugely more effective and also hugely more profitable to him because they just contain that bribe that you describe Zeke. Yes, like anyone who's using them helping generate money or the Trump's. And if you can believe it, even the most brazen part of this is that just before Trump was inaugurated, right as he was planning his meme coin, the UAE bought half of the World Liberty Company for half a billion dollars. And like I was saying, at that point, there was no stable coin. It wasn't clear like what World Liberty would do at all. And World Liberty has this like pretty convoluted structure where most of the money is going to the Trump's anyway. So it's like really unclear what the UAE is paying for, but they buy half of this like startup and that money,

big chunk of it goes to the Trumps. And a world liberty is also, uh, co-founded by Steve Wiccoff, who's like a, you know, super diplomat. His family got a big payout from that too. So just as this guy is about to take office, Wittkoff is about to become like a roving global negotiator. They take this huge payout from the UAE. And the most recent thing. that's actually happened with this because this was mid-last year is that the special bribe money has now, like in the last couple of weeks, been awarded preliminary approval to become an actual legitimate bank, which gives them an enormous amount more power and an enormous amount more security as well, because as far as I'm aware, this suddenly means that there is now a federal

guarantee, or not yet, but there's preliminary approval, which is a reason why it wouldn't continue, to there being a federal guarantee behind the big Trump bribery box. Yeah, and just like the existence of this is the conflict of interest, right? Like, Trump doesn't have to like lean on anybody. Just anyone in the, any business in the U.S. that might need Trump's favor, i.e., like that faces any regulations of any sort, like any business, will know, hey, there's this great way that I can, if I use Trump bucks, I can maybe get some points with him.

And if I don't, he'll know that I don't, you know? Like, just the existence of this option is ridiculous. Just by way of sort of bringing it all around, right? Because we're coming up towards the end here. I don't know how you get rid of this beyond just starting to jail people if and when the government ever turns over in the U.S. or grows a pair over here. I genuinely don't know how you get rid of the pernicious, second, basically entirely fascist monetary system that has grown up and entered its maturity and received all of this

political protection in the last 10, 15 years, well, people who are being marginalized by it and who had the power to deal with it at one point did nothing. No, I mean, I agree. I think you do have to. And whether any Democrat has the spine to do that, I highly doubt. I suppose like, and this is my very kind of pedestrian response to this, is like, you kind of need an opposition that can not only sort of understands what's going on, but can kind of explain it. it in a way that doesn't make people feel like they're going insane. Because I wonder how much of this is also kind of like a crisis of like narrative telling. And there's one way, you know, sort of towards the beginning of this episode, we're kind

of saying that one way that like this is sort of being sold to the public or being sold to like the idea is being sold as like a legitimate form of sort of exchanging kind of currency is to basically say, oh, look, like, you know, it's the system that is quite fun. And, you know, some people get it and some people like, you know, are sort of like not allowed to have access to it, but also it's being kind of regulated and we don't need to sort of explain that anymore. Like, I feel like anyone who tries to sort of understand what these types of crypto systems do, it is very, very easy to just feel like you're losing your mind. Like, I was also sort of feeling like, oh, like, there's all these layers that I just don't get. And so imagine if, like,

you are someone completely sort of like new to all of this and all the sort of weird and zany characters, you know, trying to sort of understand not only what this is, but why this is a problem. And the issue is that like whenever Democrats and whenever sort of like people who have kind of been oppositional to cryptocurrency have tried to do this, they often use terms of like, oh, it's kind of like, you know, it's a threat to democracy. You know, it's sort of ushering fascism. And that's all true. But I do kind of wonder whether sort of more simplistic narratives of like why this thing is just really, really bad. And the people who are sort of running it, like why they are just kind of plainly quite evil people is sort of necessary. I don't know. Maybe that's like a really

simplistic understanding of like what or a simplistic sort of suggestion of kind of like what needs to be done. I do think because crypto is so complicated and voters don't really understand it, don't usually have strong opinions about it. Like politicians face a choice. If you're a politician, you've got this choice. You could be for crypto and then potentially receive big donations from them, not have them fund opposing candidates. The crypto industry is like one of the biggest spenders. in U.S. congressional elections. And so is this like the hill you want to die on crypto when it's something that voters mostly don't care about?

Or do you want to cave on, you know, this kind of niche financial regulation issue and pick something else to fight about? I guess that's the challenge is all of that financial regulation was put in place to make sure that all of the things that the crypto people are doing. And these are the people we've been talking about for the episode, right,

aren't able to do those on either side of the sort of bribeer, bribey relationship. And the genius of it was, oh, that just applies to money, not money. And it's legal, right? I don't know. It's almost like the challenge, if you're someone who considers themselves a liberal, wants to live in a institution, in a society with sort of robust institutions, right? We talk about like the liberal state defending itself from the left and the right and how we prefer it when it does one of those things.

that this is a liberal state defending itself against the right. It kind of like, you have to get rid of the sort of special right wing money that they've invented for themselves. And that's the challenge to any politician now sort of looking at the various sort of the damage that's been caused globally by the Trump administration. How do you start rebuilding it or do you just like lock in all of the gains like a sort of centrist taking over usually does? how are you going to create a constituency to actually be against this stuff? It's almost like you need like a combination of FDR and a Lulag, which is pretty tall order. I mean, maybe the crypto guys have by aligning themselves so clearly with the right, they've really created like a potential enemy when they could have stayed sort of like a bipartisan special interest.

of, you know, just financial deregulation and a scamming free for all. I mean, listen, going all in on Trump has never backfired on anyone. And the short term advantages have always been great. Perfect. Oh, and you know what? If you think about it, life is just a series of short terms after the other. And so I think that should be completely fine. That's so true.

Anyway, Zeke, I want to thank you very much for coming and hanging out with this today. Zeke is the author of number go up, perhaps the definitive history of Tether. So do check that out. It's a great piece of writing. Zeke, is there anything else you want to plug that I've missed? No, thanks a lot. Always fun talking with you all. Yeah.

All right. Well, I will throw it back to us in the future past, and you'll hear from us in just a second. Bye, everyone. All right. Thank you very much, everybody, for listening to this free episode of TF. Thank you to Zeke. coming on. And you know what? I don't think I have a lot to plug. And I had food poisoning today, so I need to go back to bed. I'm so sorry. Get well soon. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening

to the episode. Subscribe to the Patreon. Whenever Riley is recovered from food poisoning, I am holding him at gunpoint, making him read another book with me and left on red will be coming back. So do not worry about that. That's right. November has begun the process of loading a flintlock pistol and I have only a few days until she's done. It's going to take a few days. But like, so please subscribe to the Patreon. When that comes out, consider like upgrading a Patreon maybe even. We'll try and be a bit more consistent about that.

Absent the fact that we're both going absolutely insane with sort of personal circumstances right now. And yeah, subscribe to all the other stuff, listen to all the other stuff. And do do the thing about building the politics of compassion and justice. and see you next time. Yeah. Bye, everybody. Bye.