TRASHFUTURE - First Buddy Down feat. Jacob Silverman

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

Jacob Silverman returns to the pod to talk about the breakdown in relationship between Musk and Trump, and the tensions that have always simmered at the heart of the Silicon Valley / MAGA alliance… but how it will likely remain in place after the extremely replaceable Elon pissed everyone off so much he was asked to leave. Also, Jacob went to the Bitcoin conference and found it to be a shimmering sea of weirdness. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! *T-SHIRT ALERT!* We now have ‘Say Goodbye to His Uncle’ shirts available for preorder, as well as a reissue of the TF ‘What If Your Phone Was the Cops’ shirts from 2018! https://trashfuture.co.uk/collections/all *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows *TF LIVE ALERT* We’ll be performing at the Big Fat Festival hosted by Big Belly Comedy on Saturday, 21st June! You can get tickets for that here! You can also get tickets for our show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

It gives me no pleasure to report that the All In podcast has fallen. Oh my god. It's worse than we feared. Jesus Christ. Shamath is having a midlife crisis and he's posting about his dick on X the Everything app. David Sacks hasn't been heard from in five days. This is surely the most consequential thing to be happening right now. People are concerned that David Sacks has gone full Mars-elect. Yeah. Look, what else could possibly be happening right now in the realm of trying to

understand the syncretic union of the political right and tech entrepreneurs, then the all in podcast has gone dark because Elon and Trump are fighting. Well, this is exactly what happened. And when I say exactly, I do mean verbatim what happened to the Call Her Daddy podcast, right? That was the big split between those two. Well, like, you know, that was the last bit. In many ways, All In for girls.

That's true. Yeah. So I'm excited to see like what the spin-off podcast of All In is going to be in the aftermath of all this. What happened then is that that's when Barack Obama and Brian Chesky from Airbnb got into a disagreement. The caller daddy stopped posting for a while. Yeah, during that they thought Dave Portnoy had gone missing for a week, but then they

realized they were only looking above five foot five. Now, welcome to this free episode of TF. It's the free one. It is the free one. Yes, we know some other things have happened and joining us to talk about them is Jacob Silverman, a, I believe, three-peat guest at this point. Jacob, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, you now get free filter coffee in the TF lounge and one complimentary biscotti. That's right. I'll take all the freebies I can get. I'm shamed. Just the single, the single biscotto. Yeah.

That's right. You don't, it gets given to you in like a little, it's like pre-wrapped and it's in a little bowl. They sort of glare at you if you take more than one. You're getting, when you come onto it, you can now get the experience of getting a flight that's about one and a half hours long. Yeah. Yeah.

The water is free, nothing else is. But Jacob, you've written a book that's going to be published in September called Gilded Rage that's all about this alliance between techno capital and the political right, sort of where it came from, its roots in San Francisco, the role of particular individuals like Shemath or Sacks or Musk. And I thought now that it appears to be showing some quite real strain in the form of the personal union of Trump and Musk, that it would be perfect to talk about like what's going on with this?

Where might it go? And other things you touch on in your book. Sure, glad to. I mean, the hope, of course, is that the book isn't totally stale by the fall. But I did try to write it, of course, with an eye towards the future and also an eye of like, how did this formation, this political formation come together? And even if it breaks in some way, you know, what does that mean going forward? No, of course. I mean, I think also talking about it breaking, right? We'd be talking about this relationship. I mean, it's not a new relationship, right? Like, but this relationship that's in its new form, in the context of now what appears to be prolonged civil

unrest in California, and the call now of the political right as well as people like Elon Musk, or Trump to just be like, yeah, send in the Marines, arrest Gavin Newsom, I believe is what JD Vance is now saying. To just escalate it to A24's Marvel's Civil War basically by choice because they think they can. Well we've all got a little grievance with Gavin Newsom so that one is perhaps more understandable. You're hearing about Gavin Newsom getting like put in front of a firing squad in a football stadium

and you're like, well, you know, like, unfortunately the worst president you know just made a great point. I think the funniest thing in that eventuality is if the Jobsworth San Francisco, like, local inspector who demanded that he get a mopsink in his wine bar, thereby entering him into politics was the guy who rounds him up. What a halftime show it would be, though. Total victory of the mopsync tyrant. Yeah, they want to arrest Gavin Newsom, the wine bar guy?

The guy who hasn't really followed politics, but was really into wine bars in San Francisco in the 90s. The guy who owns the lounge where all the furniture spells out the word sex over and over again? Him? This is true, by the way. This is all true of Gavin Newsom but if you look at true social right then Musk looks we're really

really supportive of Trump cracking down on unrest and marking it as a migrant invasion to be dealt with by the milk they've been dealing with this and I've tried to get back with my ex too it never works like you're just gonna hurt both of you really and you know I've now seen it suggested that the best thing to do rather than to... And maybe this is relevant, by the way, because Nova and I just talked about Antonio Scarrati's M Son of the Century for Left on Red. Yes, that's back now. It talks about all of the moments between 1919 and 1922, 24, where fascism in Italy

could have been beaten. And I think that it's, you know, this is, I don't know if this is one of those moments, but this moment of resistance in Los Angeles is being, of course, tut-tutted by the usual suspects, including one person who shall remain nameless, who's suggesting that rather than protesting, everyone should just marry an undocumented immigrant to get them a green card. Rather than protesting everyone should just marry an undocumented immigrant to get them a green card. Hmm Yeah, who knew that the reunification church was such a woke organization They can conduct a mass marriage. Yeah acts of mass resistance is still possible Yeah, I I mean they said the personal wasn't political but what did they know? Yeah So who's laughing now everyone who said that the reunification church was a CIA front?

It's clearly very woke and very international. Well, the CIA is woke too, you know. Yeah, of course. Woke guy going out and offering to marry Mexican women that he finds in the street. I mean, it's more likely than you think. Don't worry, ladies. I've got this handled. I mean, that was, you joked that that was a sort of cottage industry among the sort of sweatier, weirder, creepier conservatives in the years following the Ukraine.

Like immediately after the Ukraine war. It was like, marry a Ukrainian woman, she'll take whatever to get out of there. There were a lot of ads for that. Did they use those exact words? If you're browsing this page not to talk about it on a podcast, you know that you're not doing very well. You don't have much to offer, but know that you're not doing very well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't have much to offer, but you are a citizen of a Western country. This man, he have sleep apnea and jet ski.

It's best I'm going to get. He live in Columbus, Ohio. What I really want to focus on today is I want to talk quite a bit about that union, the strain that it's under and the collapse collapse of the Trump, or the seeming collapse of the Trump-Musk relationship, and what it could mean. Because it's not so simple, right? Like half of the people who are in like, inserted now with like real root access

into American government systems, now are personally loyal to Elon Musk. The vice president is personally loyal to Peter Thiel. God knows what happens when these people start like, pushing the levers of power on one another, not just to Americans, but to people around the world. Right. Yeah. I think the presumption that is just kind of a monolithic thing that this is Musk versus Trump and Trump already won. I mean, he, he maybe won,

sort of broadly won the first round in terms of being a better poster about all this. But as you said, you know, there are people embedded, of course, in high levels of government, but also throughout government agencies now and also with the kind of serious access to logistical and payment systems within the government that Doge was all about. And those people don't they may have a passing or sort of loyalty of convenience to Trump or alignment with him, but they are creatures of Musk or are there because of him or because of Peter Thiel or Andreessen Horowitz or sort of loyalty of convenience to Trump or alignment with him. But they, you know, are creatures of Musk or are there because of him or because of Peter Thiel or Andreessen Horowitz or any of our other favorite characters. Not so much because of Donald Trump.

Yeah, yeah, this that was their ticket in. But they don't give a shit about him. They want to reboot the operating system of the of the countries. Or so to hear them tell it. They want to close down the US Institute for Peace. Or in this case, they want to squat in the US Institute for Peace for two weeks smoke a lot of terrible weed Somehow infest it with cockroaches and then get cleared out. All right, so this is in fact what happened. Yeah, it's so juvenile I don't know. Everything is just pathetic here, of course, and there's no I mean the clowns have been in charge for a long time

But you know that that's just like sub-frat life stuff that you're hearing about happening at the US Institute for Peace. NARESH It's just, it's also like, these guys turning on each other and that becoming a kind of fractal, multipolar thing is gonna be very satisfying. I just hope that they haven't killed everybody else in California besides Gavin Newsom when that happens, you know, like before it gets properly death of Stalin. Can't wait for the Slobs v. snobs national lampoons comedy about the National Institute for Peace, where they've got to get around Dean Trump.

He doesn't like what they're doing with the National Institute for Peace. They're having a toga party and an inspector's coming around. They, so wait, you're saying that the Doge, the sort of zoomer Doge fascists who occupied the US Institute for Peace for a while, they didn't manage to clear their double secret probation and then the university put the snooty career bureaucrats back in place after all of their like research was deleted. Exactly. The Doge House. Yeah, they all died. Horrible. But you mentioned Andreessen Horowitz, Jacob, and this was passed to me by a listener to the show before we sort of progressed further into Musk, which was this isn't about Ben

Horowitz exactly, but it's the kind of thing that Ben Horowitz loves to do, which is he loves to make huge donations of kit to police departments, you know, because we talk about the alliance between techno capital and the authoritarian right. And you know, that this is also, it's not just at a federal government level or a state government level, it's also extremely local, especially in San Francisco and Las Vegas and Miami and New York. It's so boring to buy the cops all of their stuff and just buy them normal stuff. Like if I had that kind of money, I would be enforcing the silliest car you could possibly give a police department.

Well, the brilliant thing about his version, or used very loosely, is that he buys stuff from a Adresin Horowitz portfolio companies and gives that stuff to the Las Vegas PD. So it's kind of vertically integrated in that way. Yeah. I want to see the NYPD driving an up armored Fiat Multipla I found a bunch of used Pontiac Aztecs. You're gonna have to fit some lights on them Decorated like, you know board apes decals or something like that Just you see um, it's like you you get the instant like jumping when you see a police car reaction

But whenever you see a PT cruiser instead of a Crown Victoria. So in this case, Chris Larson, Ripple's founder, the cryptocurrency that was banned from trading for four years because it said it wasn't a security and then Trump got rid of the SEC and now it can be traded again. Ben Larson, to celebrate this, has made a $9.4 million donation to the San Francisco And I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason why I think that's the reason and I think a Harris supporter. But, you know, everything about him speaks techno authoritarian. And and Ripple in particular, like had a pretty vicious legal battle with this with the government, which I guess they ultimately won. But Larsen's been doing stuff like this for a number of years.

He has he has a there's a network of surveillance cameras that he basically subsidizes that the San Francisco Police Department sort of has that nicely asked permission to access, but they seem to get it all the time and he's been doing the same thing so he's really a pioneer here in a way of this like tech guy under the mantle of public safety and securing urban spaces just straight up subsidizing surveillance technologies for the local police. I don't even understand what the San Francisco Police Department needs a fleet of Bayraktar attack drones for.

I mean, they don't even have a serious fly tipping problem in San Francisco. I mean, maybe a wayward Waymo gets out of control, they have to switch to kinetic countermeasures. This Waymo's gone rogue. The attack drones are sort of like the Blade Runners, you know, they have to hunt down the other rogue AI controlled. You're just in that situation, like the guy who was stuck in the back of the Waymo that was going in circles and all of a sudden you call the cops and it turns into the last 10 minutes of Siriana.

So this is by far the largest one time donation I think we've ever considered said police commissioner Kevin Benedicto. Captain Thomas McGuire of the San Francisco Police Department said only this, we're going to be covering the entire city with drones. Oh. Yeah. Uh-huh. Mm.

Yeah. I'm not thrilled with this. Yeah. It's going to be like those fields in Ukraine that are nothing but fiber optic wire now. I mean, of course, all this stuff gets accepted or metabolized pretty quickly. But it's funny. I mean, less than 10 years ago, I think, there was a story about one of the first uses of drones in the U.S. by law enforcement was they were going after like a cattle thief or something like that in one of the Dakotas. And that was sort of turned into this

bizarre viral news story, but also controversial. What does this mean for civil liberties and stuff? And now, now, of course, it's just routine to say you're going to blanket your own city with drones. Yeah, of course. I mean, this is also the same police department that pioneered using paranoid tech guys ring doorbells in order to, again, turn every house into a site of surveillance. They're also the police department that wants to grab all of the information off

self-driving cars, as well as cover everything with drones. Again, it's moving in a different way. But Britain did it first, but America's doing it better and more. It's also, it's interesting you mentioned the Harris campaign in relation to these guys, because that always struck me as, in part, an attempt to, as Gavin Newsom has, try to like, corral all of these guys onto the Democrat side of like, tech authoritarianism. And that doesn't really

exist anymore. So, I wanna move on, though. Which is, what do we think, because I don't know this anymore, now that the girls are fighting, what is the market for Tesla? That's an interesting question, right? Because it used to be that your gen one Tesla customer was the European guy who's alarmingly bald, rimless glasses, named Sven, has the at-Sven.

Like 20% chance that guy gets killed in Neom, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well no, because that guy hates Elon now. So then for a while it was like, I don't know, like MAGA guys who were buying a Cybertruck. But now that Trump is down on Elon, I don't know who buys a Tesla. Someone who has a personal loyalty to Elon Musk, like the 3,000 Afrikaners that just got kicked off of an Air Force plane. Like I don't...

The Saudis. There's the quiet gadget gizmo dad. The one who doesn't even know that Elon Musk and Trump are fighting on Twitter. I find it so funny to me to imagine like a normal guy owning a Tesla and being completely unaware of all this. Like just driving through the world in like a swastika that you're not aware of. Like it's just normal to you. Getting the bumper sticker that's like, I bought this before he turned into a Nazi and

then getting a second bumper sticker and also before he started fighting with the president and just adding more and more bumper stickers. My massive It's the Hindu one bumper sticker on the back of my Tesla. Yeah, I mean, it's such a great thing for your car company when a sort of ordinary person who likes cars, you know, Milo, you like cars, thinks about it and says, wow, it's insane for a normal person to drive this. Yeah. That'd be crazy if a norm, any normal person drove this.

I mean, Jake, if you follow this as well, What do you think the market for Tesla is at this point? I mean, it's falling out there or the bottom is falling out very quickly I think I mean I think those the sales numbers that maybe was in Europe were down like 70% year over year So Europe and North America, it's all crashing in China as a lot of folks know They're kind of having their lunch eaten by BYD and the other Chinese startups, even though Musk has a factory there and sort of sees that as his future. So I just think we know that the company is built on

financial engineering and the carbon credits that are or EV credits that might be taken away by Daddy Trump. So I think it will all it could all happen very quickly because as you as you just covered on the cultural political side, who's going to want one? And we're already seeing the sales numbers cratering and the stock following, which will be fun to watch over the next year. Yeah. The other the other thing, though, it's not just the car company in terms of like Elon's empire, because it got so wrapped up in his personal relationship with the

government, right? Because for a very long time, his whole empire was based on subsidies on slow rolling lawsuits from like from the SEC, the environmental commissioner, whoever happens to be suing him at any given time, you know, sucking up, as you say, a lot of EV credits, like trying to replace the whole NASA launch capacity, which again, maybe it wasn't a good idea to outsource all of that to one guy who's done so much ketamine that he's just sort of constantly pissing a little bit like a vol. Yeah. Well, you can do that if you're an astronaut. I'd go into space, but in with one of those space diapers.

One thing I also had to add is like, I think with Tesla, it might be notable that it's a publicly traded company and like, you know, most of his companies are privately held. And I think when he folded X or basically sold X to XAI and all shares deal earlier this year, like that was one way that he kind of just took the money sink of X and put it in XAI. And there's no potential rescue, I think, for Tesla or not the same kind of available. Like he can't just call up the Saudis again necessarily or try to, you know, do a solar city to Tesla type deal.

This is the one company that's really dependent on how the public feels about it and how public investors do. So once that starts collapsing, I think it'll be, it'll be a big show. Oh yeah, Michael. And how much of how much of the value of Tesla's stock is propping up all the other stuff? Right. Right. Because all that's privately held, we don't know that. Like, for example, right.

All of the and this is this is very amusing to me. This is because it couldn't happen to nicer people. This is Apollo Global and Citadel are both been left holding the X loans that Morgan Stanley initially initially made, uh, where they bought them at 97 cents on the dollar like four days before he won and Trump fell out. Deals are my art form. Absolutely incredible. Yeah. Um, because like the,

the whole point of X is that it doesn't make it, it's a money pit. It's sitting on a lot of legacy technology It has very few advertisers as you say Jacob It was sold to an AI company that was capitalized also on the basis that like you're investing in someone who has a personal Relationship with the state right you're in your this is a great way to bribe you on Musk basically And now he's not fucking worth bribing it seems yeah Well, I think also with the kind of tech oligarchs surrounding Trump and with Musk himself, like the potential tension points or stress points were about contracts and subsidies and money, of course.

But some of these guys are perhaps a little more, I don't know, reasonable or less zooted out that they could survive some of those, you know, some of those setbacks. If you know, if Jeff Bezos doesn't get some contract for AWS or Blue Origin or whatever, he's not gonna throw a shit fit and sue everyone necessarily. But Musk is so highly leveraged and so operating on such thin margins

and so dependent on certain things that Trump is kind of constitutionally inclined not to like that once that tension explodes in the open, there's really there's no going back from that for him. It's just also like if you're like imagine, I don't know who this would have been at Citadel. Someone who now has been like locked in a basement by Griffin, right? You have just bought, I don't know, let's say a billion dollars worth of debt in Twitter, a company you know to be roughly worthless, not to make any money, et cetera, et cetera. You've bought that on the basis that Elon

Musk is not going to wear out his welcome somewhere that he refuses to leave. They're not letting you out of that basement anytime soon. I'm betting on Elon Musk being a really nice and affable guy that people get along with. I'm betting on him not rubbing up the wrong way a coterie of backstabbing, hateable freaks where he's already... Who you've seen on national TV just ambush people. They've decided a persona non grata.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, Donald Trump's never fallen out with anyone before. Yeah. I don't know, Donald Trump's never fallen out with anyone before. Yeah. I didn't see why that would be. It's like, I've never seen financiers get so much of the Trump stiffing his Polish builders treatment. It's just kind of like, oh, Trump's calling Elon for a meeting, but weirdly it's on the

cornfield? Yeah. He appears to have bought a shovel? I don't know. So this is actually a quote from your book, so I want to sort of take it to a little bit of a higher level. You say, we've never seen the American plutocracy operate quite like this. The richest person in the world spent the home stretch of the 24 presidential campaign providing a degree of public and financial support for a candidate unprecedented in the

annals of pay to play American engineering. Not since Howard Hughes secretly funneled cash to Hubert Humphrey, Bobby Kennedy and Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential election had an unstable, flamboyant billionaire industrialist deserted such influence on a presidential race. You talk about the influence on the race, we know the influence of on his governing, but then I think it's worth talking about the influence that might be left behind if that one particular personal relationship upon which the rest of it was built initially, or that came to symbolize much of the rest of it falls apart. Right. We've alluded to it earlier. Right. JD Vance being Teal's man, the Doge guys in the various offices.

But where else like how else might this not be so simple as just two guys who hate each other? Well, I think there's been a sense actually throughout this process that Musk is kind of almost a figurehead or at least a vehicle that some of the people around him use, not to say he lacks any agency or is hapless in some way. But, you know, he's a little bit late to the political process or this radicalization that overtook him over the last five years. He was a pretty kind of tepid centrist Democrat before and not really very involved in the political process. Whereas the people around him, like who you've mentioned, like Teal and Sax and the larger PayPal mafia are more kind of died in the world. Political animals have been doing this for a long time. And it did seem like, you know, some people have called Musk a useful idiot for for Trump or like sort of this person who who accepted a lot of blows from from the public and bad

attention. But in a different way, I think he was sort of a vehicle for those other tech oligarchs, some of whom, you know, maybe play the game a little bit better or with more subtlety at least. You know, they're able to draft Musk and draft off of his money and his cultural renown and his sheer ability to drive the news cycle. But when he's gone, you know, there's still going to be a lot of these same names around I don't think that the the blast radius will necessarily absorb a lot of them So they were like hey, Elon, we all take a turn getting in the Wicker Man Saks will probably say like I feel for you, man I feel for you, but you know, I think next week or whenever he'll be back tweeting. I don't know I just don't think anyone wants to or needs to necessarily fall on their sword

for Musk from the tech side of things. ALICE Because he's so widely beloved as well. GEOFF The thing about Elon is it's sad but someone has to appease the gods for the harvest, okay? Every year you gotta put someone in the wicker man, I said Elon, y'know? Somebody's gotta do it, somebody's gotta roast for the gods. NICHOLAS Yeah, so this has long roots for the, let's go back like at least several months

in terms of like where it came from, right? Again, the spectacular embarrassing failure in Wisconsin, as well as some of the personal disagreements over like H-1B visas, as well as just like things like, you know, Elon Musk being again, just like almost like a never Trump conservative, one of the last people who's like, hey, you increased the deficit by extending your own tax cuts. What the hell?

This is crazy. But the thing that kicked it all off wasn't any of that. It was actually the appointment of a NASA director who had donated to Democrats like two or three times before. Yeah. It's funny how this is the most vindictive group of people in the world who will like go back and see if you gave like $20 to like chase the wudan or whatever. Yeah, that one was a little bit weird to me because, you know, the guy also had some gambling issues,

at least in the past, perhaps resolved. No worse gambling issue than donating to Democrats. Yeah, and that seemed like maybe a bigger deal. But it also seemed like there were people that determined to get him out just to get to Musk anyway possible. And he was a Musk guy, right? And having a Musk guy in charge of NASA is crucial when you are running the thing that's trying to replace NASA and make it a private organization with its own

town. And again, like we don't want to talk about the other things. Even if this is a battle forever where they hate each other forever and the federal government becomes implacably hostile to Musk, that he's still, wait, how are you, Musk said even, well, I guess I'll just unilaterally stop sending American astronauts to the International Space Station. To which I believe Trump replied, well, maybe, or at least Bannon replied on behalf of Trump, maybe you should be deported. So this is where we are. NARESH And again, these are several men who are so good at emotional self-regulation.

ZACH Well, yeah, I just, I think here you just see the fundamental difference in dynamic between like, someone who has an unbelievable amount of money, and someone who is still at the end of the day, the president. Like Trump had that, I think it was a truth, he truth about like, oh, you know, I could take away his, his contracts. I wonder, I always wondered why Biden didn't do it. And it's like, yeah, I wonder why Biden didn't do it. But you know, as much as the U S does seem to need him and rely on him, Trump doesn't care kind of about

norms or procedures. So, I mean, if he wanted to, he can nationalize SpaceX or find a reason to put Musk in jail or kick him out of the company because of his drug issues. And then the new SpaceX under Gwynne Shotwell, the CEO who basically runs the company anyway, would probably

be a lot more amenable to what the government wants. So, I don't know. I just, I just feel like these aren't battles he's going to win. Um, with, especially with him being so conked out. Yeah. I think, I think the problem of having a cult, like trying to develop a cult of personality is that like, if your personality sucks, then you're really, that's like a really big gamble. That's why I've never gotten very far with my cult. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know. Starting a cult ball, your followers are losers and it just makes you kind of do it for a reason. Yeah, that's what happened. The other sort of odd thing about

this is that the sort of first shots of this war were started, well, just during a state visit from Germany. Yeah, so Merz was like in the room for this. After Trump said- Are you just going to let him say that? You can't let him get away with that, Donald. He's making you look like a big pussy right now. But no, he had to handle this as every European leader, it seems, has to handle Trump, but the funniest thing was Trump going off the cuff and being like, uh, it's the anniversary of D-Day, must've been a bad day for you. Um...

Um... Um... Um... Uh, no, we're no longer West Germany, we're the whole unified thing now. Um, D-Day must've been bad for you. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, Elon, I've always liked him, but um... But I think...

But I think he's too critical of the big beautiful bill, and Meris is just sitting there like... Just like, heisely, just like, you guys are still Nazis, right? Yeah, yeah. Some of the lines of the Trump lines in this interview are so good. Yeah. The big beautiful bill.

Elon and I had a great relationship. Everybody in the room was here when he had a wonderful send off. I had a great party for him. Like it's a funeral. Elon is going into the Wicker Man, say bye bye, Elon. Coins on the eyes, Viking funeral pyre. Yeah it's a funeral. Elon is going into the work of man, say bye bye. Coins on the eyes.

Viking funeral pyre. You know, I think also one thing he's so damn juvenile, Musk, that like we saw some of this before also with the Stargate project and anything involving Sam Altman that but not involving XAI, Musk has flipped out about so far. And it's like if he didn't have the resiliency of like a toddler, he'd be able to weather some of this stuff and still kind of get his and line his pockets

to an extraordinary degree, but he just couldn't last six months in that way. Yeah, that was the test. That was the test, is be the richest person in America, in the world, and maintain maintain the loyalty or maintain your relationship with a political tendency that's about preserving and enhancing the power of the already very wealthy. You have to be so personally repellent and so unable to see, you have to be so unable

to understand the context in which you're operating to do this. I mean, if there's any sort of series of events that has confirmed to me that Elon Musk as is and always has been a huckster, a pitch man, a front man, like you mentioned earlier, right? He does, he's barely involved with SpaceX, right? He's barely involved with anything that went well at Tesla. He's barely involved. His most, his greatest involvement is like, you know, trying to make sure that, you know,

Grok is rude enough and that it'll draw boobs that are big enough. This is his thing that he does. And then to see that he was so clearly completely disposable by everybody around him from the tech side and from the political side. There's example after example after example of him just of all this coming out, just fucking up, being strange, being juvenile, trying to like half shoulder tackle Scott Besson and then getting like punched in the face for it. Getting getting the world's smallest black eye.

Is that a separate black eye from the Scott Besson encounter? Do we know? We don't know exactly how we got the black eye. The black eye could easily have been because he was, again, you don't have to bang Stephen Miller's wife. Right. You just don't have to get into a throuple. I mean, you really don't, you really have to not get into a throuple with the Millers.

With the Millers. You don't have to bang Stephen Miller's wife although it is tempting. Yeah, you can just not do that. I certainly agree. I mean, though she does apparently have a YOLO tattoo on her inside her lip. That's what the Wall Street Journal said. Oh my god.

That's crazy. You know, it's funny because- What an interesting chica. In one very narrow sense, I think Musk is right that like, I mean, they didn't, they could have, they could have done some of it without him, but he was, his support was very important, but exactly as you say, it's it's kind of like that. It's kind of like that meme, like we can replace him in the aggregate or build him in the aggregate, you know, for Moneyball.

Like, I think the next round, they they won't really need him or they'll find ways to replace him. I mean, Timothy Mellon practically never leaves his house and donates 100 million plus to Republicans every cycle. Like there are other ways in which they can get super rich guys on their side. Replacing Elon Musk in the aggregate by just bringing in a 14 year old boy with no social skills. And then a very, very calm horse. And you know, he does the standard thing that happens when you're sort of disappointed by the political party that you sort of gave so much to, which he says, well,

I'm going to start a third party. The America party. You know, we've all been there before. A new centrist party. I hope he does it just for the experience of American Change UK, the independent group. Yeah. Exactly. Well, look, there's got to be a lot of Labour Party politicians fairly soon that are going to be out of jobs, and they love America.

So they can sort of go over as consultants and help Elon Musk start his new centrist party. Along the lines, with the sort of like, well they can be the abundance party, right? Yeah. Elon Musk, Stella Creasy, 2028. That'd be fun. I just saw Farage at Vegas. My sympathies. Do you guys? Oh no. That sounds like a line from a Johnny Cash song from like a fucked alternate universe. A suffrage in Vegas. How was our next Prime Minister, how'd he seem to you?

His best line was, which didn't make it into my article unfortunately, but was something like, uh, you sent us woke, but we got you back, we sent you Prince Harry. What? What? Yeah. Yeah. Wait. Right. So brutal. You staying up at night thinking about Prince Harry's presence on American soil. He's been haunting us all. Yeah.

A little more on this, though. You know, either say, you know, starting new political parties or, you know, like basically, which is just like my signal group chat should be in charge of everything. I really thought we would have been. But it appears that I don't have as much direct authority really as I thought I did. NARESH And it's part of the long tapestry of finding out the hard way why it exists that way, you know?

And it wasn't because of secret wokes. NARESH I sort of wanted to ask Jacob this a bit more, but my sort of feeling is like, this is kind of... I don't know if this is the first first kind of major split between like the tech right and like what maybe like the populist right of government. It sort of feels like a situation where we, there was like a sort of some, perhaps there was like an assumption that, okay, like these kind of two groups can sort of, you know, they can sort of become a political force like by joining together and like the tech right will sort of like benefit from this administration joining together and the tech will benefit

from this administration that is seemingly willing to do everything or give them anything that they want to the point where some of them were sort of... When we talk about their sort of ideas of a charter city and everything, it kind of comes from that. We have a very particularly affable administration willing to depend on us. And I wonder whether this sort of split might, like does it highlight a sort of wider kind of split between these two groups and the right that are sort of in government, the sort of nativist right being like, yeah, these tech guys are weird and they sort of suck.

We can't really sort of give them any more than like, is absolutely necessary for us to kind of pursue our agenda. Yeah, I think it depends upon how much those, the remaining elements of those two sides want to continue working together basically, because I think there is still a lot of overlap and a lot of mutual interests. And like I said, I don't think Musk is personally important enough to some of these guys for them to say, okay, I'm walking out the door after him.

But you know, a lot, they share a lot of the same cultural and social resentments like against immigrants and homeless people and trans people. Yeah. Most of them do, you know, and in terms of getting the government contracts that they want and sort of AI-ing everything. I think even like a nativist Trump administration rule by Stephen Miller would give them a lot of that. So, you know, I think those fault lines still exist, but the Bannon types who complain about the tech guys and want must to be deported, you know, it's funny at times, but I don't know how much day-to-day influence they'll really have. So, you know, the opportunity for them to do

great evil together, I think, is still there. It's just kind of, it's sort of up to them to continue executing it. And I think some of them still want to. like Joe Lonsdale, Mark Andreessen, David Sacks, those folks. Oh, for sure. I guess my feeling was more just like, well, the question really is like, who gets to sort of decide what evil they do? And perhaps the sort of like,

what's happened is like the sort of nativist right in the White House, like, no, we get to decide the evil that happened in the scale of the evil. You guys don't get to do any of it with like any of that weird shit. You just like make the tools for us to do that and we might give you like a treat every so often. And I think there'll be some circling of the wagons like kind of literally

around Trump in terms of like who gets access to him and information and who does his special printouts and so that you know because Musk won't be there all the time and that is like the kind of the one advantage that the kind of institutional right nat nativist psychos have is that they can control access to him, I think a little easier. And I mean, if you look at also like the sort of the volleys now that Musk has been firing to try to keep his position, is he, again, maybe this was just like, because he's on so many drugs and he's sort of switched his approach to this like five times in the last 24 hours. Right.

He's gone from being conciliatory because the the the protests in L.A. To being like, oh, yeah, Trump's in the Epstein files, which I didn't know that was news. I thought that was just broadly known by everybody. Yeah. How many times have any of us posted a gif on X of like Trump and and Epstein talking from one of those parties? Like, it's not exactly a mystery. Yeah. He's literally quoted as saying, oh, but Jeffrey, I love to party with Jeffrey, but he likes him young and does Jeffrey, you know, literally younger than I do even.

He literally said that. But it's weird this this thing where it's like it's all of a sudden that thing becomes knowable by Elon and then like Mario Nufwall and like a bunch of guys in India called Doge Designer. Hanging out with Epstein and saying he likes him young is like hanging out with Jeffrey Dahmer and going very hungry guy. Okay let me tell you, don't hang out with him when he's hungry because he'll eat anything. He'll give you the odd Mars-a-Leg treatment you don't want. But it's all these things become knowable by a certain type of person who was totally inured to them before because they don't serve the purpose of animating grievances against

disliked people. Right? And of course, Trump truth is in response. The thing you say when you're the most innocent anyone's ever been, which is quote truthing a lawyer who was hired to lead Jeffrey Epstein's defense as his criminal lawyer nine days before he died. He sought my advice from months before that. I can say unequivocally that he had no information to hurt President Trump and I specifically

asked him. That settles that for me. Great, sure. Hey, Mr. Guy who's about to die in mysterious circumstances in nine days, you're not about to implicate the president, are you? No, no, no, no. Crazy. Why would I? Me? I would never implicate the president. Are you? No, no, no, no. Crazy. Why would I? Me? I would never implicate a president.

Me? Jeff Epstein, the financier. Yeah. Never would I do that. The funny thing also is before you move on, because I do want to move on because you wrote a really fun article about the Bitcoin conference. He tweeted that, which was like, by the way, they never found anything on me in the Epstein files right after he truth this. Just inspected the site of the new ballroom that will be built, compliments of the man known as Donald J. Trump at the White House.

For 150 years, presidents and many others have wanted a beautiful ballroom, but it never got built because nobody had any knowledge or experience in doing such things. But I do. Maybe like nobody else, and it will go up quickly to be a wonderful addition in keeping with the magnificent house itself. These are the quote unquote fun projects I do while thinking about the world economy, the United States, and lots of other countries, places, and events. It will be good, and maybe even great, depending on who is president." He's awesome. The thing is, right, as much as he's gonna kill everyone, he's gonna do that without a huge amount of relish. Like, obviously he is extremely racist and

extremely fascist and all of this, and he is gonna give the order to shoot into the demonstrations or whatever. But that's not what he wants to do. What he wants to do is to run the performing arts center, or to build a ballroom, because he is Earth's straightest faggot. I don't know how this man came to be the American Hitler, but I just, it could have been so different, you know, I want to go back with the time machine and not necessarily kill baby Trump, but like figure out where the inflection point is, where the art school thing is.

Get him to be a Broadway producer like he wanted to. Yeah, yeah. He should be the new head judge on Strictly Come Dancing. He should be like telling Sonyia from EastEnders, and you're cha-cha-cha not so good, okay, maybe. Maybe work on something a bit easier, like the American Smooth. I trust him on it. Just working out from first principles that Trump is transphobic,

not because he's a fascist, but because he's a 70-year-old gay man. I love that. It's like, look, he even says, it's like, well, I have to think about the world economy, the United States, China, Russia, lots of other country places and events. I still have a little fun deciding a ballroom. This is what I really want to be doing. And honestly, go off, like, you know, it wasn't, Milani wasn't doing shit. Those Christmas decorations were all him. Oh, a hundred percent.

You know? And so, like, this is someone who is, you know, number one, the Jeffrey Epstein thing, that's tweeted by someone who's a hundred percent definitely knows they're innocent, but then to immediately follow it up with the ballroom thing, it's like, yeah, I'm guilty and I don't give a shit. I'm designing a ballroom. I'm having a great time.

Yeah. Would a pedophile do this? Ask yourself. Yeah. And so, you know, this is, it's a, so Elon is, if you want to know where the balance of power is here, right? Elon is sort of spinning out, sort of having a world, a world beating social media crash out. Losing, losing their sort of like game of chess to a dog here. I mean, I'm also thinking about the Trump Epstein thing. If Trump is on Epstein's island or on his plane and being presented with younger and younger girls by

Jeffrey Epstein, but he's still gay and so repressed that it turned him into the president about it and he's like, no, no, I don't really want to. But for reasons I'm not gonna examine. Yeah, I mean, the whole thing, if. If we want to talk about the focal points of like this political arc, right. I mean, there, there are so, I always say there are always tons of places to start it, to end it, whatever. But I mean, I think the, uh, basically Elon seizing control without meaning to of the, um, sort of main way that opinion formers mostly talk to each other. When he carried the sink into Twitter HQ. The second focal point of his arc is the dramatic split with Trump.

But ultimately, I think what we've sort of talked about for the last sort of, you know, 30, 40 minutes is as sort of humorous as the individual bits of this may be, its significance, I think, is more and more personal and might herald sort of a slightly more competent brand of sort of tea light techno fascist sort of stepping into that role more quietly. And then Trump can just go on thinking about his ballrooms and won't have to fight with the guy. Yeah, it certainly it takes away that the daily fireworks of Musk being around and affecting the news cycle in a way that only Trump can. And so, yeah, it feels like once you sort of wipe away some of that, you still have

the same processes and people, as we said, embedded in all of this. And so that's where you get the kind of more competent day to day of techno-fascism from, I think. There may be a new ballroom at the White House, but there's no room for big balls. Well, that's just the thing. There is. There always is. Big balls is allowed to stay. Yeah, big balls is going to stay. He's got a high salary for a government employee.

I think that he got one. There are different rankings and he got one of the highest ones. So I think you have to salute him. Well, maintaining balls of that size must be quite costly. But you've written an article recently. I want to move on. This is still sort of about the tech fascist stuff. That's sort of our beat, you know? Sorry, everybody.

This episode of Crash Future is about the intersection of tech and fascism. Ah, God, again? Fuck. Look, I've got a few little fun tricks up my sleeve for Thursday, don't you all worry about it. But you've written an article, Jacob, about attending the Bitcoin Conference, which you've also as a sort of longstanding critic of cryptocurrency, you've been

attending crypto events for a while. Yeah, I have the damage to show for it. Yeah. Just give, can you give, I mean, I have some quotes from your article here that I want to read, but before I start reading your words back to you, can you just give us a sense of the sort of

carnivalesque atmosphere? So there's an annual Bitcoin conference, the biggest one put on by Bitcoin magazine, if you ever see that publication on Twitter and there's a foundation and all these associated organizations. And usually it's been in Miami and I went to the one in 2022 in Miami. That's where like Bukele has appeared before and where they've announced Bitcoin as the national currency of El Salvador.

The year I went, actually, Bukele canceled his visit to start his crack down that continues to this day. And, you know, it's a big spectacle with kind of all your favorite drifters and hucksters and their political sympathizers there. This last year was in Nashville

and that's where it really emerged as more more of like an overtly maga aligned event. And last year was in Nashville and that's where it really emerged as more more of like an overtly MAGA aligned event. And that's where Trump spoke and RFK Jr. and other people. But Trump did his big unveiling of himself as an orange-pilled guy. And that's where I think also he really started to understand in the way that he actually can, like how potent a form of political support and monetary support the crypto world could be. There was that moment during that speech in Nashville last year where Trump says,

I'm going to fire Gary Gensler on day one and the crowd roars and he goes, oh, you really don't like that guy. And he repeated again and they, they cheered again. You know, it's that way in which Trump the petty autocrat like understands the crowd, you know? In fact, I'm going to kill him. I'm going to throw him off the top end rock. Absolutely crazy. He had quit by the gansler, quit by the time Trump came into office.

But, you know, he knows how to push those buttons. And it was a really big, I think, turn in kind of the industry's political relationship. They were already pouring millions of dollars into the twenty twenty four cycle, mostly on behalf of Republicans from Coinbase, A16Z and others. But it crested with last year's conference. So this year was in Vegas, which almost seems like two on the nose. But 35,000 people supposedly attend. There are a fair number of, I guess, what you might call mainstream or kind of normie

Bitcoiners, but it's a lot of diehards, a lot of people, you know, everyone's selling something or has some way in which they want to make some money off whatever counts for the Bitcoin economy. And it's a weird conference because, you know, Bitcoin is sort of nominally about not really like equality of outcome, but at least like it's supposed to be for everyone and some kind of leveling force. Whereas the conference itself, of course, has like whale passes where you can pay ten thousand dollars and it's all about exclusive parties and stuff like that. And what really changed this year, I think, was while Trump wasn't there,

JD Vance was the keynote speaker and it was just so much explicitly a pro-maga event and like Trump had because Trump had saved them and had saved some of them literally from prison. You know, there are people there who have been pardoned by Trump and that sense of like thanks and deliverance was just omnipresent. Well, because I think that's the important through line from last year's Bitcoin conference to this one is last year was when he officially announced that the U.S. government was going to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve, basically saying, I will hold your bags.

Yes. Right. I will not let basically I will keep buying Bitcoin to largely inflate the price so that people who are holding lots of it can depend on me personally to keep them rich. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, the status of that of these, they've talked about a couple of reserves. I mean, the Bitcoin one and Impossible Crypto one with some administration connected tokens like Solana. But, you know, the two main themes really this year were that that

that sense of the government is going to be involved in the crypto market somehow. And also that corporate treasuries are the other sort of future for Bitcoin, that everyone needs to be like MicroStrategy and Michael Saylor and just start accumulating Bitcoin and debt at a fantastic rate. Oh God. I mean, you're Saylor. The Saylor appears to be, if you can imagine a man who has suffered like a cognitohazard where like a Bitcoin has taken over his brain like a fungus piloting an ant, you could do worse than Michael Saylor. I'll read your quote here. Saylor, the'll read your quote here. Saylor, the silver-haired 60-year-old executive who self-described religious embrace of Bitcoin

has catalyzed this corporate treasury movement, was one of the conferences chief draws. His keynote was standing room only, wearing all black except for a silver Bitcoin pendant that hung in his throat. Saylor emerged to rock star level applause, preaching a post-Cypher punk prosperity gospel under the unassuming title, 21 Ways to Wealth. urged a rock star level applause preaching a post-Cypher punk prosperity gospel under the unassuming title 21 Ways to Wealth. Acknowledging that he was used to speaking at top corporate executives and politicians, Saylor said he was now happy to be speaking to the people, bringing them the digital fire

of Prometheus. Quote, Satoshi gave you an idea worth half of everything on earth, the greatest idea in the history of the human race. Cool. Do we ever think that any of this is a bit hyperbolic? That's a new thing for Bitcoin. He's kind of incredible because, you know, he's gone hyperbolic and then some and just doesn't really care, I think, or just no, he's a little bit winking, but it doesn't really matter because he's pursuing it with utter seriousness. And he says stuff like that. I sort of turned to someone next to me like 50 percent of everything.

What do you mean? All wealth on earth. But he's never sounded more like kind of the head of a very sophisticated MLM scheme than he did in Vegas, where he's he said it before mortgage your house to buy Bitcoin. But now he's like laying out complex scenarios where everyone in the audience should do that in order to to pad his bags Yeah, he says everyone listening should sell or mortgage everything they have take every loan You can use it to buy as much Bitcoin as you can as much as possible

Sayler said he who has the most Bitcoin at the end of the game wins and I was Hungry, I was stopped by that line What do you mean the end of the game? Oh, when AGI happens, don't read that new thing from Apple. Okay. Okay, cool. Yeah, don't worry about the fact that LLMs are sort of dead end for finding AGI. Don't worry about that.

At the end of the game, what do you mean? When you die? What's quite fun about all of this is that anything he says you can just put what could go wrong at the end in commercial style and it's very ominous. It's always a good idea to invest all of your money into one thing but it's like that famous expression always put all of your eggs in the best basket you can find. And also leverage yourself to get other people's eggs and also put all of

those in the same basket secured against other eggs that you need to live. And crucially, it should be on the advice of someone who has also, whose current wealth depends on more people putting eggs into that basket. Yeah, you just have to really stake as much as possible on the idea that you're gonna put infinity eggs into that basket and the basket's gonna be fine. Yeah. And finally, it's spikes in value should depend largely on the ballroom guy. The guy who, whatever he's doing, anything else is thinking about the ballroom.

The guy who has two thoughts, uh, shooting protesters and ballrooms. Yeah. Who loves betraying and stiffing people. That guy. Yeah. Assume that he is going to be on your side forever. He's never going to throw you out. And that guy, that guy previously, when he had talked about that basket was like, seems like a pretty dumb basket. But now that you've got all of your eggs in there and you're trying to put more in, he's like, this is a really good basket. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, Jeremy Eggman has told me that this egg basket is really good. So I believe him. Speaking of, speaking of his capriciousness, in the time since we started recording, Musk deleted the Jeffrey Epstein allegation tweet. Censored. He's either too close to the truth. Yeah, he's either too close to the truth or he's like, oh my god, little X got on my phone. You know what my child thinks like? That was not me who said that. So clearly he has come back down.

Crucial detail about Elon Musk is that he is a massive pussy. He's a massive pussy. And I think he may have just realized exactly how fundamentally replaceable he is. Yeah. He had a moment of lucidity after the latest Bender, perhaps. So I want to read a little bit more, right, of the Bitcoin conference. Also, by the way, considering that we are talking about a sort of,

you might say, a man child running amok in the White House, it is very odd to me that the through line between both of these is Brock Pierce, because he starred opposite Sinbad in First Kid in the 1990s. I had to open with Brock Pierce. I mean, after I ended up at the Maggiano's that he rented out part of for the week so that Eric Adams could give speeches about Betsy Ross, you know, I was going to spend some time there. Yeah, you are all Betsy.

Everyone who owns Bitcoin is Betsy Ross, stitching together a new Stars and Stripes. Why not? What I find was really amusing, though, as well, is like, and again, because I think in opening this segment, I use the atmosphere, I use the adjective carnivalesque and I sort of use it sort of advisedly because you talk about a party sort of partway through the article. You say the open bar provided generous pores and the bathroom attendance

handed out free zins. Bone Thugs in Harmony came out for a performance, singing their song, First of the Month, a mid-90s anthem celebrating the day welfare checks arrive, as a group of women in cow costumes marched out carrying glowing signs that read, steak and shake accepts Bitcoin. Just a phantasmagoria of everything folded in all,

it's a little bit like we talking about the Savannah bananas baseball team, where it's just everything just folded in at once to one thing that's meant to be infinitely sloppable. It was so bizarre. I mean, this was at this daytime pool club at one that's normally like where people pay money and they hang out during the day.

And it was sponsored by a bunch of crypto companies, including Justin Sons Tron. But the main sponsor is America 250, which was supposed to it's supposed to be a nonpartisan nonprofit that's like planning government celebrations for 250th anniversary of the country. But it's kind of been purged of a lot of the Democrats, I think, and is now just sort of this extension of Trump's whatever patriarch celebrations he wants to do. So they were running the party and then, yeah, Bone Thug starts performing.

They were pretty good, I thought. But then the whole time they were performing, there are these six guys in white guys in suits who are standing next to the stage. I'm like, who are these guys? Like, are they crypto people? They they look like they're having no fun at all. One guy pulls out a cigar but like refuses to light it, even though you can smoke anywhere in Vegas. And finally, at the end, we learn like, oh, those were the Steak and Shake executives

who had to stand like three feet from the stage to just maunder their their new marketing thing. But Steak and Shake apparently is doing like a MAGA, MAHA pivot. So they now accept Bitcoin and they are using beef tallow, of course, to fry their fries. It too can take you 10 to 20 minutes to order a burger and fries. Well, it's like this is what we talk about. We talk about everything being folded in together into like the same, just the same pill you take over and over again, or the same pellet that you that you get from pushing on the on the panel, which is just like, oh yeah, Stake and Shake, they're RFK, they're Bitcoin. They're also anti-woke. They're, they're everything.

And everything is just a mashup of everything else. Because it always has to be this constantly stakes raising. Right. Well, literally in the case of Stake and Shake. Yeah. Where it's like, okay, well, Stake and Shake can't just be one thing. It has to be everything else. And everything has to be everything. And there's nowhere better than the sort of infinite wealth, completely unconstrained by taste. Or in as much as like, taste is how you would perform,

being like a respectable member of the upper middle classes of the WASP, a lead of the financial service providers of the last 40 years, right? The people who plan the economy. This is specifically anti that, but it's like an anti politics because it's not like you like steak and shake and they accept Bitcoin because they think it's a good idea. It's because they know that that's everything that like woke soy McDonald's is not, right? It's constantly saying we're not any of this stuff that we hate. McDonald's won't let me pay in stock options because of woke. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty empty social positioning in the end. It doesn't really stand for much.

Does anyone actually want to pay for anything in Bitcoin? Like even these guys, because it's so inconvenient. There's a funny moment at the conference that got cut from the article. But so there's this guy, David Bailey, he's head of Bitcoin magazine. He's now the other trend, as I said, in Bitcoin right now is that Bitcoin treasury companies. So David Bailey started his own called Nakamoto. Now they're the sponsor on top of the conference. So he's both running the conference and a Bitcoin treasury company.

Anyway, he comes up on stage and he says, we're going to set a daily record for number of Bitcoin transactions done on the Lightning Network. And people cheer or whatever. This is right after Vance spoke. And someone brings up one of those little point of sale terminals and he tries to use his phone or something to do a Bitcoin sale. It does not work. You can never use it for anything. There are thousands of people, some of whom got up at like 5 a.m. to watch Vance watching and he just goes, well, that's a whiff, guys. I guess you'll have to do it yourselves.

And apparently they got to the record, which was like, you know, four thousand. Not that impressive, I guess. But without the without David Bailey, it never works. This is one of the things, right? I've been talking and thinking about Bitcoin for longer than I care to think about all at once, as have many of us on this podcast, hosts and guests included. Unfortunately so. And one of the things that's so striking, and this sort of started happening last year,

it's only continued this year, is that a few things. Number one, Bitcoin's value, quote unquote, because it's a very thin market, it's actually not very widely traded, is at all time highs. But the number of people who are actually transacting and owning it is actually smaller and smaller and smaller. This is a small group of people trading back and forth to one another, bidding the price of their asset

up and up and up and up, because they have the confidence now that they're pretty sure that the president is on board with it. And he's Mr. Follow through who will definitely do what he says. But they have completely they have they've just all of the utopian ideal stuff about Bitcoin obviously was always alive in the beginning. We knew that like clear, right? They're not even bothering with that anymore. They're just like, it's way less Bitcoin makes us all the same. You know, you can get around the corrupt banks, whatever, and way more have fun being poor. Right. This is this is the whole the whole thing now is have fun being poor.

Me and my like, you know, small other people, group people who trade this asset back and forth with one another are making ourselves incredibly rich on paper. I mean, how does that strike you? Yeah, I think, you know, the narratives that they've had over the years about Bitcoin, it's a store of value or it's going to be a currency or whatever else, which have generally been based on this ideological foundation that's largely right wing libertarian. And as I say in the article, like the right wing libertarians and cypher punks have just been kind of gently pushed out, maybe. I mean, they're still there, some of them. But now that the big money is in Bitcoin and the big money is corporate balance sheets and the government, that

original ideological motivation, I think, is gone. So, yeah, you have a return, I think, of just price watching and have fun staying poor types because they have they have really nothing else to sell. And that's why I think that's why Saylor is such a good sort of figurehead here, because he just has an attitude of sort of mindless accumulation and that you have I mean, I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing.

I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing.

I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing.

I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. conference who've been like not legally allowed to enter the country before like Justin's son or the CEO of Tether, Paolo Ardoino. And Paolo comes out introduced by Brandon Lutnick, one of the canonical sons, his US banker, inherited the position of his father, who's Howard Lutnick, was then celebrated. And again, it's like not only is he being personally celebrated, but right now the genius or guiding and establishing national innovation for US Stablecoins of 2025 Act is now also wending its way through Congress trying to be like, hey, it should be more... Given what crypto people have always been begging for, which is enough regulation to seem legitimate, but not so much regulation that it would stop the main use case of Tether, which is like money laundering and, you know, gambling, basically.

Yeah. I mean, no no one it's amazing. Just like no one cares about the corruption stuff. They could not be bothered. I saw Arthur Hayes walking around. He was recently pardoned. He was on some panels. I mean, Paulo walked right by me and just as like a guy who spent way too much time thinking about Paulo and Justin Son over the last few years, like it was crazy to see

these guys in person. And Justin Son was also up on stage and then he met with Ross Ulbricht and they met with everyone. But, you know, brazenness is the term I always refer to. And like, that I think is the characteristic that defines this sort of new world. And it's just like the criminality and corruption is all in the open. It's okay. It's cool. No one really cares. So, you know, I never thought I'd see these guys in the U.S. But but there they are.

And they're, you know, they're central to all this. Yeah. I mean, if you like connecting all of these things together, really, is what we're talking about the beginning. And now it's the the ongoing transformation of the state into just open season. Right. It's the the the fun guys who you like, if you're rich, the fun guys who you like are in charge And they're going to let you and your friends kind of do whatever you want So long as you're not personally too repellent that they can't stand to have you around. It's it's it's a Friendsocracy. Yeah

We don't have to get deep into it, but I mean SPF fell kind of because of his own dealings but also he pissed a bunch of people off, including CZ who helped kneecap him. And, you know, he kind of got kicked out of the club. Yeah, again, for being personally kind of unpleasant in many ways. Or, you know, it's this it's the same thing. It's like even like Adam Newman going back in time all the way to WeWork, right? Like it's all these people who are five percent too stupid or personally repellent to maintain positions of incredible power and authority

that I can't imagine possibly fucking up. Anyway, anyway, look, Jacob, the book is out in September. Where else can people find you before then? Or when will they be able to preorder Gilded Rage? It's available for preorder now. That helps me enormously.

So if you'd like to do that, please do it. Bookstores everywhere. Yeah. Out in the UK and US from Bloomsbury. JacobSilverman.com. Still on Twitter and Blue Sky and all that stuff. So thanks. Yeah, perfect. Well, Jacob, thank you very much for for returning to the show.

Enjoy your biscotti. We have some t-shirts to plug as well. Do you have a torso? A torso. Do you want it covered? Is that all of you that's left? Yeah, it's hard to tell with how my camera's positioned right now. Were you, did you get into a Waymo that was summoned to be ritually sacrificed in Los

Angeles? Are you only a torso? We have the garment for you. That's right. Two t-shirts now available. We are reissuing the first t-shirt we ever made that's got higher quality printing and a better blank. It's a nicer t-shirt now. And I will say that the actual t-shirts we use for these are like really comfy. Like I like them a lot.

For a second, I thought you were doing like a little guessing game there and it's got a better blank. Yeah, right in the eyes of... Yeah, oh, sure. The other one is, this one, the other one was my baby. Incomprehensible. Completely inscrutable.

If you want the experience of walking around and people look at your shirt and go, then... What? If you're a fan of Ian Duncan Smith's book, The Devil's Tune. Yeah, please buy a shirt that's a reference to that, and a threat that a guy makes to the protagonist of that, which is, uh, he better do what we tell him, or he can say goodbye to his uncle. And we all thought that was so funny that six months later, there's now a shirt. Oh. So, do check out the shirts.

By the time this is out, this is going to be tomorrow. There are still some live shows coming up. Yeah. We've got a trash shoot in London on the 21st of June. That's right. Trash shoot in Edinburgh on the 31st of July. I'm also doing this week, Bristol on the 14th, Saturday. Please come to that. Lots tickets for that still because it is a massive room. Also refugee action on the 14th, Saturday. Please come to that. Lots tickets for that still, because it is a massive room. Also refugee action on the 19th. I've got Berlin in July as well. There's lots of things happening. Please come, especially refugee action. Yeah, yeah. You'll be able to find me in Berlin as well. I will be walking around. Riley will just be there. I'll just be there. I don't have any stage time

booked. I'm just hanging. Anyway, all right, that's enough. End matter. Once again, Jacob, thank you very much for coming on and thank you all of you for listening. We will see you on the bonus episode, which all being well, will be some more goof-em-ups with Josh Borman. So, we'll see you then. Bye everyone. Bye. Bye. you