TRASHFUTURE - He Steubs to Conquer feat. Brian Merchant

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

We bring ill tidings… a man with the physiognomy of Humpty Dumpty, except with billions of dollars and a grudge against Wokeness, has brought news of innocent venture capitalists being de-banked for the mere crime of committing securities fraud! That’s right, Marc Andreessen is finally free to say the word even louder than before, and he joins fellow Web 1.0 robber barons in coalescing around Trump part 2. To discuss this, we’re joined by friend of the show Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant), who has a new podcast with fellow friend of the show Paris Marx called System Crash that you should check out! Get access to more Trashfuture episodes each week on our Patreon! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

["The Stube Alert"] My Stube Alert went off again. Oh, the Stube Alert. And you're in the Stube Marine. Your neighbors were asking why the klaxons and flashing red lights were going off visibly out of all of your windows. It's like an air raid siren. You can hear it. Yeah. And you had to explain that the Google alert that you have for Greg Stubey

has gone off again. Yeah. Sarah Soda, Florida, congressman, Greg Stubey, long time friend of the show, hopefully future co-host. My Google alert for Greg Stubbe went off. I've gone back through it, there's a couple of things to talk about, but- Greg Stubbe goes off in Sarasota, people in London will have only 30 minutes to find cover. Well, Greg Stubbe did go off. Oh, he went off? He went off in the pages of Newsweek, if you'd believe it.

And not in a farty way, in an opinionated way. He went off in the pages of Newsweek, if you'd believe it. And not in a farty way, in an opinionated way. He went off in the pages of Newsweek. He's decided to start capping for the Department of Government Efficiency the most, I would say, Facebook way possible. For those of you who don't remember, Greg Stubbe is someone I've been obsessed with for a while because at the tech industry hearings a couple of years ago, he said to Sundar Pichai, how come all of my campaign materials go to my relatives' junk mailboxes on Gmail? We're well aware of Greg Stubbe.

He is, for us, the perfect American oaf. He is the guy who should be getting hunted down and arrested by the government agency. You were least aware had the power to arrest anyone over a series of scams. He's getting arrested by the Food Standards Agency. Exactly. Yeah. It should be somehow the EPA should be trying. He should be one step ahead of the EPA's shock troops. Anyway, my Stoob Alert went off.

He has decided to go to bat for the Department of Government Efficiency in the pages of Newsweek, which is a hilarious place to do it. Almost as funny as doing it in Time, a magazine owned by Mark Benioff, the guy who owns Salesforce, which basically is like, I'm supporting the Department for Government Efficiency, along with my friends in the Stop White Coat Waste Project. Oh, this is more of the like, woke biologists are investigating like, Beatles gender identity thing, right? Yeah, but, but, because he's Greg Stububbe and because he's the avatar of Facebook America,

he's like, the Department for Government Efficiency is going to tactically stop cruelty to pets in the government. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you want to control the production of coats, there is a guy you could read. Yeah. He's like, don't be cruel to animals, but there's a very pen farthing. Exactly. That's normally a left-wing issue.

But I think I have faith, right? Because as you say, there is a conservative trend of animal rights stuff in the form of like, this C-130 full of dogs and cats being flown out of Kabul. But I think we can push Greg Stubbe left, right? Daniel San Diego just got arrested, right? That means there's a vacancy in the UK's animal rights movement. I think we can get him over here, we can get him together with some hunt sabs, he's gonna stop showering, it's gonna be a fantastic time. Anarchist Greg Stoobie?

That's right. It's so powerful. That's his look. They keep, oh where's the leftist Joe Rogan? It's like no, where's the anarchist Greg Stoobie? That's my question. Yeah. Okay, so he says in the Newsweek article, uh, the National Institute of Health spending spree on pet abuse doesn't end there. A recent, it's the same thing. It's like, well, you know how it is. You buy one pass abuse and you're like, I could probably gotten like five more of these,

you know? Yeah. Well, they incentivize you with the multi-buy offers. The National Institute of Health is currently paying a lab in China over $2 million for unnecessary tests on beagles. Un for unnecessary tests on beagles. TROY Unnecessary tests on beagles. GARRETT Donald Trump Jr. and many others have criticized the National Institute of Health for force-feeding dogs large doses of experimental compounds until

they die in China. TROY I mean, yeah, I'm not thrilled with that either. I'm not taking a sort of like, I'm with her continuity thing and be like, actually, I fucking love force-feeding beagles until they die. That's actually girl boss to force-feed a beagle to death? Let's not pretend that you have to force beagles to eat stuff. If any dog will eat anything you put in front of it, it is a beagle. But I am intrigued as to what experimental compounds they're feeding them. And all these beagles are absolutely gone off new synthetic kinds of MDMA. They're all discussing business ideas,

rubbing each other's heads. We've stooped for a while before bringing in our guest because it is TF returning champion, the author of the Blood in the Machine newsletter and hosted a new tech criticism podcast with Paris Marx, it is Brian Merchant and we are here showing him the other angle of the JFK assassination. It's looking real good. Thanks. Thanks, fella. We want to get arrested by the Warren Commission. That's going to be our government agency.

No, Brian, always a pleasure to have you here. And we're going to be talking a little about some of the writing you've been doing on tech in the Trump era that goes just beyond like, Hey, this Elon guy seems like he's going to be pretty important now. Yeah. It's been, it's been a busy couple of weeks. I'll say that. And that's true.

It's just far, far shittier than that. Yeah. And we're going to go through that sort of, you've outlined a few points as to how we're going to go through them. Do we want to talk about one more Greg Stube development before we go on? There's been another one? Please! A double event?

It seems as if the Stube alums are going off quicker and quicker in relation to each other. Doobl Stube? Yeah, it's Doobl Stube. Now, this is an old Stube. I didn't think it warranted mentioning, but now that we've got another one, I feel like I can put it in. We've had a couple of noob Stubbs. We can have an old Stube.

A couple of months ago, US representative Greg Stubbe from Sarasota startled many with a social media post urging conservatives to boycott Stottlemeyer's smokehouse. Okay. This is the thing, right? This is the thing that I love about this particular kind of American. Had like, you know, the discovery of American never happened, this guy could have been a perfectly competent Bavarian village oaf called, like, Gregor Stoiber, and he would still be beefing with whatever the Bavarian local equivalent of a steakhouse chain is.

Yeah. Sausage not coiled enough. Yeah. Did not care for it. They are saying that this beer house says that the beer has gender? Ach nicht! Not only in the language, and beer's a boy! Anyway, it wasn't overcooked meat that turned his stomach, but a campaign sign at the restaurant promoting school board member Tom Edwards and Liz Barker for election. He says, calling all conservatives, boycott Stottlemeyer's barbecue. We can't have our money supporting liberals.

I guess it's Roger's Market and Mission Barbecue for the rest of our time. Somehow this man has could determine to fight on the stupidest possible front of the culture war every time. And I really liked that about him. It's amazing. He just, he's just like two steps by,

like he kind of gets the gist, he kind of gets what he's supposed to be mad at, but it doesn't compute completely. So he's just, he's the guy who's always late to the huddle. He's always just outside. This is a true treasure that you've found here and he's from Florida, so it's perfect. And now he has to go to Roger's Barbecue,

which just sounds like someone's uncle. Like it doesn't even sound like a restaurant. It's like pro evo ass name for a barbecue restaurant. Family guy references. Yeah. So with American dads. Yeah. They blend together in my head. Yeah. Better show, in my opinion.

Anyway, anyway, look, that's that's the Stube update. But yeah, I just I love seeing him. If you will, I love seeing him. Stoob date, if you will. I love seeing him filter. Stoob up your Stoob holes. I love seeing him filter the entire Department of Government Efficiency program through a Facebook comment filter and then regurgitate it in Newsweek. Which if I'm not wrong, isn't it owned by fucking the same people that own the Epoch Times?

Yeah, it is. Yeah, I thought so. Which is very cool. Falun Gong's Epoch Times Newsweek. This is what I'm thinking about the Bavaria thing. I'm doing like Stoobie before capitalism, you know? Well, you think that it used to be that like Stoobie was controlled the entire production process of just thinking moronic things.

And then it got like split up by capitalists and now we no longer as an artisan. I'm sort of like imagining a kind of idyllic pastoral scene with a bunch of Stoobies running around Bavaria or something, but then- It's cruel to keep Stoobies cooped up in conference, in congress. They need to be running free. Yeah, you shouldn't have an indoor Stoobie. Like, it's not ethical.

We need to go and sabotage and break out the Stoobies from Congress. This is what he should be doing. Animal Cruises germane to Stooby in that way, because they're practicing it on him by making him be in Congress. I just really love the idea of pushing him left to the point that we see him break out like a million mink or something from a factory farm. Yeah. He and a tidal wave of mink finally usher in communist America, a la hearts of iron

four. Finally, a mink wave. Alright, alright. I've got a few things I want to talk about. A few bits of news, and then we're gonna be talking, of course, about these articles you've written, Brian, which I think are very interesting. But first, I want to give a Neom update that doesn't feel like a Neom update, because it doesn't discuss NEOM directly.

Okay. This is something, something actually important has happened here, which is- You gotta read between the lines. Thank you, Milo. So you know how the US dollar is like super important? I've heard this, yeah. People love those dollars. Yeah.

People love dollars and China has long issued bonds denominated in US dollar. This is something that's pretty common for countries that have lots of US dollars to do, is to lend those dollars to other people who need dollars to buy things. Usually the most common thing priced in dollars is energy, oil, things like this. This was a deal reached in Saudi Arabia

a very long time ago that it's like, hey, you price stuff in dollars so that everyone has to borrow dollars to buy oil from you, basically. Like you need to have those swap lines. China has fucked tons of dollars. And they've historically always issued dollar bonds in Hong Kong. No longer.

They have now, in partnership with the Saudis, issued a dollar bond in Riyadh. Bricks moment. Yeah, this is a big bricks moment. And it's significant for a couple of reasons. Number one, the Saudis are going to be buying those bonds, but the Saudis are also going to be issuing bonds so that they can finance their gigaproject. They expect the purchases of these bonds to largely be China, which means that they're like, huh, it seems our plan to get out of oil hasn't

worked. We're going to need to just partner with whoever's going to support us in our crazy ideas. If you look at this from the Saudi end, it's even funnier, right? Because the Chinese end, this is like a sort of like surprisingly provocative move from what's been a really quite cautious administration. But like from the Saudi end, it's like, okay, we've run out of American and European money for Neom. What other superpowers can we drag in and bankrupt? And it's so funny to me the idea that one guy and his line might compromise not one, not two, but three financial centers. It's just, you're left with like South America at that point.

You're left with like Lula is the last guy standing because he was smart, he was the only person smart enough not to buy into the line. Well, the next guy they can go to is Kim Jong Un to send them North Korean troops to build the rest of the line for cheap. But the trouble is they can't get porn in Saudi Arabia. So that's not going to work. So basically, right? What's, what's going, there's a few things going on here. It's like, number one, if you issue dollar bonds, then you want to start controlling the supply of

dollars. You want to be able to deal with people at stuff that's priced in dollars without those dollars ever having to touch an American swap line. It's like tanks at tanks on the federal reserves lawn. Like this is like scary stuff if you're an American banker. Yeah. And part of it is also just symbolic, which is Riyadh basically saying we want to start selling oil without ever involving an American or an American institution or a friendly to American institution. And you know, part of what's

driving Saudi Arabia there is, oh, fuck, we need more money. We need more money to build our castle in the sky very quickly. So all very amusing stuff. This, this could lead, right? Because the thing is, I think a lot of people see this as like the inevitable, like apocalyptic scenario for for the US where it's like, we totally invert the world financial system and everything is like bricks now. And I don't think that's going to happen immediately, but I think this is a necessary precondition to that happening. And there is a vision of a very funny future in which the world financial system, the US's sole role in it is to issue these things called US dollars, which are primarily a trade instrument of China, and which, like, due to, like, fucked

structural reasons, still have to be green, say, United States of America, and have a picture of a US president on them. And that's the, like, ultimate global cuck maneuver, right,? There is to make, not just make your... You're watching the global economy from a chair in the corner, but you do have to be there. Yeah, you don't just make your haters your waiters at the table of success, you make your haters like your money printers at the table of success. And the US becomes like four dollar banknote printing machines with an economy vestigially attached to it. That's a very fun idea.

And the thing is, that's what happened to Europe, kind of. And so, if you want a vision of one possible future, it's all the dumb shit that we talk about happening in Europe or the UK, downstream of becoming a kind of financial instrument in certain countries. American star, man. Yes! No. Yes! No. Yes.

Is going to happen to the US too. I'm Keir Sturby. Yeah. Europe is essentially a big museum with a number of like, vestigial car manufacturers and a financial centre attached. What great cars though. Some of the best cars. Yeah.

Obviously that's casting way forward in the future from what could happen, but these more direct connections between just people who hold so many US dollars that they might as well be able to print them and places like Saudi Arabia sure would undermine American global monetary hegemony. Well, I mean, Trump's concerned about it to the point of explicitly threatening them that if they try and replace the mighty US dollar, which is a great phrase, they don't know of itself. The mighty US dollar. There's no better dollar. What are you going to take? Australian dollar?

Come on now. He's, he's, he's gotten back into tariffs. He's got a real fixation on tariffs at the moment. So he's like, if you try and replace the mighty US dollar, 5 billion percent tariffs on everything coming from China and Saudi Arabia, which I am. Hmm. Hmm. Thankfully we don't need anything that either of those two countries. No, no, no.

I am massively in favor of threatening Saudi Arabia. I've said this before, but preferably with military action. That is the only woke regime change that we can do. I stand by this. This is my like insane left opinion. I'm starting my own left wing, like splinter group where we're like war with Saudi Arabia now. Yeah.

Let's move on. I want to talk about like one UK thing before we move on to our main sector. We have one UK thing that we're going to talk about and one UK thing that we're kind of not going to talk about. So I'll start with the thing we're not going to talk about today. Assisted dying being legalized. I don't want to talk about it today because I want to give it more time.

And also, I mostly, instead of speculating about what it's going to be, we're going to be talking to noted Canadian, Luke Savage, and we're partly going to be talking about what has happened in Canada. So where it's gone very well. Where we can just be talking about it sort of more factually. So that's going to be happening

on the bonus episode this week. But the main thing I want to talk about, vis-a-vis UK is, and we'll go through this kind of briefly, because again, this is a thing that's kind of half happened and we'll sort of get into a connection. But at the end of it comes a connection with what we're going to be talking about more broadly, which is of course, Transport Secretary Louise Haig, just as she was about to unveil her plans for rail renationalization, which on this podcast we've condemned as fake false plans for rail renationalization. Just as she was about to start USSR II, just as she was about to open the oldest vault. Sadly.

Yeah, that's right. Sadly, it turns out Potemkin nationalization, you're walking around your nationalized railway, you tip it over and there's just G4S behind there. You're like, hey! Matthew- Hey! That sort of was the plan. She was forced to resign over a past conviction for fraud that was leaked to the media by M McSweeney, or if that's too obvious, Morgan M. Matthew- This was so obviously a piece of like, compromise,

and that's fine, the people involved in this don't care that you know that and want you to know that. The thing that's really bleak about this to me, as both, you know, a person who is interested in things in the United Kingdom and a colleague of Gareth Dennis, is I'm reluctantly forced to consider Peter Hendy doing the Assad who must go meme. That's right. Now, so what is, Louise Haig had some... When she worked for Aviva, her bag was stolen, she reported her work phone was stolen, and then found out that it wasn't, and had to, I don't know, get a caution for fraud. Some small thing.

It's such nonsense. It's some kind of really strange situation, that you look at it for two seconds and you go, okay, how did this even get to like, criminal proceedings? Why is it coming up again now? And the only answer to that is, at least for the second one, Labour Party internal knifing. Yeah. Labour Party internal rat fucking. And I just, I wonder what it's like for an American to hear that there is so much confected fake fighting and internal knifing in Britain. Like, ministers will be forced to resign over fake scandals that everybody knows about. It's like a joke knife. You have to pretend that you were really stabbed.

Every five minutes. I wonder how that feels to hear coming from a functional country. Are you talking to me? Yeah. I mean, I said UK politics is always completely incomprehensible to the average American. It's like cricket. For good reason. Yeah, for a good reason. The only thing that would be surprising is that ours is any more comprehensible. You can fire people at least in American politics.

Whereas here, it seems like what you have to do is find something that they did wrong 20 years ago and then create a kind of scandal around it. Yeah, you have to take long lens pictures from your office of them having a picnic in the sun and then sell that to the sun. We're gonna see in 20 years time somebody getting fired for like breaking lockdown rules 20 years ago. See, this is what is incomprehensible to the American observer is that we don't understand why or when it happens, but people do still have to resign and get excluded from politics. Even if it's for the stupidest thing imaginable. That does not happen here. This is just a, you get your seat, you're done. Even Matt Gaetz is still, he's been kicking around.

Oh gods. Yeah. He had to voluntarily resign. Oh, God. Yeah. He had to voluntarily. Busy week. Yeah. For that guy, you know. Well, you know, you couldn't sack him and leave him without an income. He's got a dependent Nestle. He's got so many dependents.

Yeah, many, many. He's got all these Venmo dependents that he has to send bucks to. What have my Fin Doms? What have them if I'm sacked from this job? In terms of the politics of this, it's very clear that it's like, yeah, the 10 pledges that Starmer made were gone. Those were replaced with five missions. The dashboard is gone. I don't even know what the dashboard was, but it's gone now, apparently. There were five missions. There was going to be a dashboard so the public could hold

the government to account over the five missions. The dashboard proved technically difficult to make, obviously. How are you going to wrap up every NHS Trust waiting list into like one needle that could be on gov.uk? The waitometer. It is, to me, unimaginable that anyone even thought that could be remotely possible. It is a classic, like like person whose only job has ever been the Labour Party being like, what if we get the IT guys to hook up a dashboard so that the people can monitor the government? That's got the buffins over the civil service. Yeah. It's just like an idea from like 2007. This is that's like, that's like,

like an Obama, Obama, like consultant came up with this idea. You'll be able to like log onto a website and see how good the government's doing. We're going to find a big tech to improve democracy or something like that. I'm on Keir Starmer's Trello seeing what the latest update profile is. I'm on his Trello and I'm seeing nothing, but I'm on his letterbox and I'm seeing a lot of activity. Time to vote him out. Just a billboard, like a billboard sized Kanban on the outside of Doubting Street.

Here's what you could do, actually, to make government much more transparent, which is there was a Japanese game show where there was a comedian who was famous for having a head shaped a bit like an eggplant, who was put into a room and then had filmed 24 hours a day and had to live exclusively on what he won from contests and sweepstakes. Oh yeah, I remember this. I think to keep the government accountable and to also stop it from spending so much money we should have Keir Starmer do the same thing. Film 24 hours in a room not allowed to leave, only subsist on what he gets from sweepstakes.

This sounds like Mr. Beast content to me. We just sell out to him, you know? NARESH KODE Yeah. GUS CLARK Yeah. NARESH KODE It's Code Lottery banging on the door of number ten. GUS CLARK Yeah. NARESH KODE Steven Mulhern called to number ten to make Keir Starmer try and swallow a penny or something to get a free packet of biscuits. GUS CLARK Yeah. Yeah. So that's the... So anyway, but the dashboard they couldn't do. And so what he's

doing... Someone who won a majority in parliament so big it is of historical significance, but the dashboard they couldn't do. And so what he's doing, someone who won a majority in parliament so big it is of historical significance on the majority of like one person, wouldn't you know it, is having to reset, and he's saying it's not a reset, we're just gonna replace the missions and the dashboard we couldn't do and we're replacing the missions with milestones. Oh, milestones.

2024 was practice. 2025 is gonna be a warmup. 2026 is gonna be a trial run. 2024 was practice. 2025 is going to be a warm up. 2026 is going to be a trial run. Exactly. Well, that's an improvement on Ed Miliband because he only had one big stone and they've got several stones. Yeah. He's read the book milestones by Syed Qatib and he's going to be doing, he's going to be changing Britain. No more sock halves in Britain. I was going to say, dashboard doesn't work is the handshake meme between Keir Starmer's Labour Party and that Chinese hire car I was given last week. So we're going to get into what he's going to do with transport.

And this is where I especially want to hear Brian's thoughts on this one. It looks like as a result of Labour Party weakness, who would have thought, it's now being mooted in the pages of the Times, which is by the way, just where all government stuff happens now. It's just in the newspapers. That's where people are hired and fired, just where all government stuff happens now, it's just in the newspapers. That's where people are hired and fired and scandals and all that. It's been outsourced. It's been out sourced in the newspapers where I think a number of reform or conservative

party insiders are trying to bounce Elon Musk into giving a hundred million dollars to Nigel Farage as a fuck you star payment. Sure. Yeah. Okay. So fuck you star payment. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Okay. So, fuck you, Starmer payment. Yeah.

This is about what he pumped into the Trump campaign too. I mean, Elon's been weaving his way into UK politics for at least what a year. He's been... Give or take. Give or take. Yeah. He weighed in on the riots and he started promoting memes. And I mean, this is to me, everything that's happened with Elon for the last two years is just you could not build a better case of just why we need to have a policy

that prevents anyone from ever becoming a billionaire. He's just the most obvious, noxious example of this. And I mean, look, he will do it if he finds the proper incentives and he thinks that it will benefit him materially in any way. That's the only reason he wouldn't do it is if he decides that it's not worth his time. I think the other thing is he understands triggering the libs as benefiting him directly because that's something he enjoys doing. He is. I mean, at least I think, but he has a firmer grasp in the US of how that works.

It still seems like how solid are we feeling about actual possibility that this will happen? 100 million pounds for reform UK. Is that what's being floated? So here's what I think. I think that Elon Musk has tweeted a lot about British politics, but he hasn't gotten directly materially involved like he did in America. And I think that also shows the fact that British politics is so brittle and so sclerotic. It's like Britain is politically like the island with the Dodos, right? We have any predator introduced. Yeah, yeah.

Yes. Any predator just completely decimates it. And so Elon Musk, I think, well, just not getting directly involved in UK politics simply by posting about it has become the most important person in UK politics, essentially. Yeah, I mean, and he can point to the fact that he did pick up his, you know, $200 million club in the US election cycle. So he did he did do it for real. He could like just the mere threat of waiting in has perhaps some political advantages to him and his allies. I mean, it really just sort of like boils down to whether or not he thinks it will be entertaining enough or materially beneficial enough to actually pull the trigger.

Okay, here's my take. A hundred million pounds to Reform UK. Obviously very bad. A hundred million pounds to Nigel Farage personally. Very good. Because Nigel Farage will absolutely fuck off if you give him a hundred billion pounds no way that guy is gonna continue the life of abject misery that he leaves that guy is gonna like buy an island we're gonna get like Nigel Farage like getting filler in Turkey we're gonna get ripped Farage on

the beach and then they'll all be flat they'll only have Lee Anderson a man who looks like he's he looks like he's got CTE somehow from a career in politics. He's, he's British stooping. It's just like bankrolling a Netflix streaming series of Nigel Farage spending the hundred million dollars he got from Elon. Yeah, we'll get lift too, where Nigel Farage pays to have it made and the whole film is like a gag where Kevin Hart has to steal Nigel Farage's money.

But then he realizes what a good guy Nigel Farage is and he can't go through with it. I think honestly, is Elon Musk going to give a hundred million dollars to Nigel Farage? I think, or to reform UK via Twitter UK, which would circumvent foreign donation laws. I think the reason it's in the papers is that I think party strategists are trying to implant the idea in his head to do that. Doing neuro-linguistic programming on Elon Musk is very funny. And I think that if he thinks it will be funny, he will do it. But also, it's that he figures, he has as willing allies as he could want in the Labour

Party, as willing as he could possibly want ever. They are desperate for him to like them. And yet, I think he knows he can probably get more enthusiastic cooperation from Farage, even though the Labour Party will try to give him everything he wants. Well, he does genuinely appear to think that Stalmer is like an actual dictator. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is Elon Musk is very stupid now. Also, his brain has been cooked by these politics. He really does have brain worms around culture war issues and the current sort of political landscape, which is, you know, all red wing, right meat stuff. And

so I think he needs, he craves that transgression and he's not going to get it by giving money to starmer and the late party. Or he's not going to get it by not giving a cartoonishly large amount of money to Farah. Yeah. It's like he, he is going to, because he's ultimately it's he will find that funny. And so even and that's the thing, it goes back to him being the being the perfect man for the moment, because he has whether he has understood it or not, he has embodied the principle that the dumbest thing is likely to happen. Yes. I mean, and he often makes it happen, right?

Like he's the he's the vehicle for it. And I just think that the biggest impediment will be, I think whether or not he just ultimately finds it below him. I feel like this could be very well be something he talks about, gets some headlines, like it tickles him a little but it doesn't really animate him to actually wait in quite enough. But I don't know, like my, a lot

of my Elon predictions have been wrong. We'll see if the department of jangling keys keeps him busy because possibly he just won't have the like mental capacity for it. We need to make British politics seem lame to get involved with, which it is. We need to make it seem lame to Elon Musk specifically, which is a different kind of lame that we need to figure out what that is. Yeah. Well, you know why? It's like Americans love using caricatures of Britain to make

political points about America. Right. Like they've been talking about, you know, the, the Rotherham grooming gangs or whatever in but Greg Stubbe probably knows about the Rotherham grooming gang scandal or like Operation Trojan Horse or all this shit. Right. Because this is a great, it's like Shakespeare writing about like Italian city states. It's a great way to like make your point about America without talking about America. And because Elon Musk is so involved at the surface level of all of these things, he is very concerned about all of the stuff in Britain that people,

right-wingers in America invoke to make points about America. So I think he will, that's the thing that would drag him into it. Once again, he is on a worldwide now globally politically empowered near the controls of the most powerful and wealthy nation the world has ever known on a worldwide now globally politically empowered, near the controls of the most powerful and wealthy nation the world has ever known, on a quest to try and finally find the cathedral and get rid of it. So I wouldn't be surprised if that brings him here

and he uses his like reality bending amounts of money that he's willing to throw at things he thinks are kind of funny and based to like, you know, basically try and buy the Reform Party victory. And you know what? And even then, even then, and he didn't get involved based on the fact that labor is already fucking resetting and they've been like, they've won a huge majority. They've been in government for a few months. They've done nothing. Everyone hates them. At this point, reform are already almost leading in Wales. Like he doesn't need Elon Musk's

money to probably at least like be a coalition partner with the Tories in the next government. He doesn't need Elon Musk's money to do that, but he's going to get it and he's going to be big and brash and bold. And it's going to be again, Elon's going to be credited with being in the right place, the right time and being an arising right wing tide that is lifting his terrible boat. You get a reform zeppelin. That'd be fun. Maybe you can crash that too. Anyway, we're going to talk a little bit about the articles you've written on tech in the Trump admin.

And I think before getting into the points that sort of the way you break it down, Brian, I think it's worth talking about the debanking scandal that's been largely invented by Mark Andreessen and the Joe Rogan podcast. And before we get into it, though, I want to say I do not want this show to become a record of every wild claim made by a clutch of technology company executives. Joe Rogan podcast. And before we get into it though, I want to say, I do not want this show to become a record of every wild claim made by a clutch of technology company executives. It's partly that.

I think it's worth looking in brief at this claim that Andreessen made on Rogan, that tech execs are being debanked en masse as a kind of political prosecution by progressives via something like Operation Chokepoint, which is that counter fraud thing, right? And what he does, right? Is he gets on Rogan and he says, I know 30 founders who've been debanked like Nigel Farage got kicked off of Coots, whatever, whatever.

Right. Yeah. For you know, reputational risk management purposes. And it's like, well, which executives were they? He doesn't say. But Andreessen Horowitz did invest in a lot of companies that did things that looked like they were selling unregulated securities for example Oh Right. Yeah. Yeah I mean, yeah These are companies a lot of them that were just doing fraud or were accused of doing fraud I really was interesting about this whole episode to me is that what Andreessen is doing is he's using

Sort of very classic sort of American conservative political myth making to sort of build like a right wing myth that for people to buy into about something that has happened for completely other reasons. Right? Like so Andreessen and his cohort did really buy into a lot of companies and were very more made big during the Obama administration that was kind of high times for them. Everybody loved the tech industry. Then it was still very unregulated, right? And that was a big part about Obama that

people sort of overlook was that he sort of brought them along and help rise his boat. He got to look like the futuristic candidate, and he also promised sort of not to regulate any of these companies. And so we got a lot of the companies like Uber and Amazon and Facebook that did all these horrible things over the next decade. But to somebody like Andreessen, when an administration like Biden's come along for all of its many

problems, you know, the FTC and the SEC and the DOJ actually starts prosecuting tech companies for some of the crimes that they were able to do, especially because the industry had been so unregulated for so long. And then we get this narrative out of Andre about how we're being persecuted. And he has to go even deeper. It's not just that he had a political falling out. He has to justify this narrative with something even more conspiratorial. So he invokes things like Operation Choke Point and deep banking classic right wing move,

like reappropriating a term that was used by the left or by liberals for a very specific purpose and then like applying it to the least victimized class in the history of the human race. In this case, most of the, cause remember also, A16Z was deep in the history of the human race. In this case, most of the, most of the, cause remember also, A16Z was deep in the tank for crypto. Very deep. So it's like how many of your portfolio companies

are just engaged in illegal security selling? Correct, they were, absolutely they were. I mean, and many of them were like on the brink of being prosecuted or were, or had actually, you know, been shown to do real, real crime. So this is very transactional. It's very A and B. He wants some. He wants. So what? A lot of these companies might look like they're doing illegal security selling. A lot of things look like a lot of things. Mark Andreessen's head looks like an egg.

Does that mean we should boil it, crack it open and dip toast into it? I don't know. But the reason I bring this example up, right, is not to talk about the ethics of, or minutiae of who should be debanked or who shouldn't be, because ultimately this is a thing is being clutched together as, you know, like having like a bank's risk department, risk management department stand in for the entire administrative stake is that it being used by Andreessen and then echoed by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and even fucking Melania Trump as well who was like, oh yeah, me and Baron were debanked after January 6th. Baron got debanked for being too tall.

But to be like- Can't get through the doors. Yeah, but they're now saying that, okay, well now we need to eliminate the consumer financial protection bureau. Right? So that's a story where Mark Andreessen kind of just makes something up on Rogan and then that ends up in the antenna of Elon Musk and his friends. And then all of a sudden, the bureau that like, if I'm not wrong, I don't think this happened at a state level, I believe

they were like directly involved in stopping Wells Fargo from just like defrauding all of their customers all the time. Yeah. Right. That bureau ends up in the firing line for the Department of Government Efficiency. And we talk about how to understand the coming reign of Elon Musk and his allies. I think this story is a perfect microcosm of what it will be like if Elon Musk and Donald Trump manage to not fall out with each other. I think it will be one of these sort of stories spun up after another.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Labor Relations Board, I think is the next one. We'll probably talk about that because Musk hasn't even really started the full-bore myth-making about that one. But this is the agency that regulates labor law in the US. And both Bezos and Musk and a few other companies that aren't tech companies are currently trying to get it dismantled like from the ground up. And I do. Yeah, I absolutely think this is going to be a pattern that we see. You know, the Andreessen thing is weird. I wonder if he kind of like jumped the gun a little bit on this one where I don't know if they, you know, wanted like another thing to have to do right now. So it'd be curious. I mean, Musk was tweeting it approvingly, but we're seeing like an awful lot of movement, you know, into the space that has just opened up and the more movement like this, I think it makes it more likely that things get chaotic

and they all start getting angry with each other, which would be incredible from a, you know, just an entertainment perspective. But it, yeah, this is this intersection of sort of Musk, his Silicon Valley, coterie and his hangers on and sort of the people who are already have access to a lot of wealth and power, but now have direct access to sort of these and these new levers in government, or at least this weird sort of play government that Musk has installed himself into. One thing you brought up, I think is interesting and it's another important thing other than just Elon Musk is going to like be, you know, in many ways, kind of Steve Bannon's greatest

success. You know, Steve Bannon always said, well, I'm a Leninist against the administrative state. Well, you know, if the Department of Government Efficiency manages to leave the kids table and actually do anything, which I think is a far cry from certain, by the way, far cry from certain. Yeah, coin flip at best. You know, that then all of a sudden, a lot of billionaires are going to be at odds with

one another because there are some billionaires- The girls are fighting. Yes. Some billionaires like some of the administrative state. Other billionaires don't like some of the administrative states so much. It's just going to turn into a like sort of mid-war Nazi Germany scramble for little fiefdoms. Bits of Russia have been like this before. We know what oligarchy looks like. The Gilded Age also.

All these guys will be fighting each other for scraps, but that's gonna be disastrous in its own way, but I don't know that it's necessarily gonna tear anything apart. Real billionaires of Beverly Hills. I cannot believe Jeff would say that. I cannot believe that. I'm actually shocked by that. I mean, yeah, don't don't go in that direction with reality shows, because otherwise you end up with Love Island and the last one of those for billionaires. Oh, yeah. So but the Gilded Age reference, I think, is we could have predicted all of this

by looking at the fact that there are entire companies built around getting people tables at Carbones in Manhattan. Like that, that fact alone could have just predicted everything that's happening now. But nevermind. And the Gilded Age getting teapot done. Yeah. You know, I was just going to say, yeah, so it is this mix, right, of just like naked transactionalism and a specific sort of part of the Silicon Valley apparatus.

It's no mistake, right? Look at the kind of guys who are in this new sort of Trump tech oligarchy in the wings. And it's not, you know, it's not the big tech monopolies, right? It's not Bezos or Zuckerberg. It's companies that are sort of, could sense that it benefits them to be positioned near the rungs of power. It's defense tech companies. It's guys who are co-founders of Palantir, which last go-round ran the software and the

tech for the first round of mass Trump administration deportations. It's a bunch of these big government contractors, basically. Musk himself makes a great deal of his money. Most of Musk's money is either in financial speculation inflated Tesla stock or government contracting through Starlink and SpaceX. So he's like a big sort of juiced up government contractor himself. And then so these guys that are surrounding him now and that are closest to the rungs of power are the ones that benefit most.

And a weird sort of, you know, yeah, the VC guys, like Andreessen, we just mentioned, he has a direct sort of interest in not having any of his companies investigated because he's so heavy into crypto and also into AI, which is going to face its entanglement of legal cause. All of this needs government support. We talked before about how the main thing that's going to make like that the AI companies want is they want the government to basically do huge

land clearances for data centers. The crypto people, they just want to hook the crypto up to the federal reserve. I mean, the defense contract, and again, Andreessen Horowitz has a whole vertical, they have a whole section of their portfolio, American greatness or whatever. That's just defense contractor. It's a whole little like parasite feast. It is. And the funny thing as well is that people like Sam Altman, Sundar P. Shy, Mark Zuckerberg, they've all realized that now they have to suck up to the guy that they all thought was

pathetic for 10 years. They have to suck up to the joke who they didn't invite to anything. And you saw some of the guys sort of recognizing this sort of early on and trying to smooth things over with phone calls or Zuck was the most pathetic saying that, you know, oh, he's a badass. Like Trump, Trump is literally on the record saying he wants to throw you in jail and he's and Musk himself as well. Like they're having to now like Zuck is now having to suck up to Elon Musk. All the Elon Musk also files.

I mean, Elon Musk also files a frivolous lawsuit against Sam Altman like every three months and now they're one of them's probably gonna work Because again all of this is conditional on he and Trump don't have a falling out Which is good that could happen for any reason any day at any day and Trump is a diva and he does love to fight He doesn't I mean he would be the best his guest episodes on real billionaires of Beverly Hills would be the best one Yeah, I am skeptical though. I'm a little I I don't know His guest episodes on Real Billionaires of Beverly Hills would be the best ones. Yeah. I am skeptical though. I'm a little, I don't know. I mean, obviously it's just anything could happen and these people are insane, but they

almost like sort of operate in this weird synchronicity or they kind of, they're like, they're not, they're like talking past each other in a way that to me kind of minimizes the likelihood or the capacity for a huge like fight to blow up in both their faces. They both are very sort of they're mutually parasitical. Like Trump recognizes that Elon has like untold wealth and untold sort of cache in these spheres that just kind of help them win the election. And he did like Elon is also very deferential, right? Like the thing that bothers Trump is when people go out and get too much of their, you know, own spotlight. And Musk has already had it for so long. He doesn't mind, you know, just, you know, praising Trump or,

you know, making all of his little projects subservient to Trump for now. Again, any of this stuff could change, but I just don't think we can bank on the idea that this relationship just frays so quickly. I want to move on from Musk though. I want to talk about some of the other things you highlight, which is the boom time for defense and surveillance tech companies. So you write, with Trump's promise to ramp up mass deportation beyond what he attempted in the last term, expect to see a renewed gold rush and dubious AI enabled surveillance tech and database system for tracking migrant workers and dissenters. Palantir was given contracts to handle such

work under the last Trump term, like we said. Oracle has been helping the Trump team assemble databases of government workers loyal to him. And Musk has already called for Palmer Lucky of Anderil to meet with the White House. So in sum, with the rise of anti-China sentiment, the US invested in Wars in Two Theaters, promises to execute mass historic deportations, expect the boom that already begun in defense tech to continue with an integrated interest in surveillance and administrative AI and for the men who most loudly back Trump's campaign to benefit. I mean, like, let's also like say, you know, Larry Ellis, let's go back to that, you know, it's assembling databases of like based at administrators. He has been, I think, one of the dark horse supporters

of the Trump campaign. He's not as flashy. He's an older guard, Silicon Valley guy. But he's been all in for Trump since the first go round. And he's been sort of quiet. I guess the media finds it less of a flashy story, so we don't get as many articles about it. But yeah, so the Project 2025 thing was supported by Ellison and his team.

And so for, I think, over a year now, before Trump even won, he's been using this software platform that's built by Oracle folks and working with the Project 2025 guys, explicitly those guys, to build these databases of people who they have deemed loyal. I mean, who knows? It's probably a piece of shit, like technology, right? They're using AI to try to gauge sentiment and then plugging in who's going to be a Trump supporter and who's not.

But it's still, I mean, if they try to use this, it could still be incredibly disruptive and stupid. But so yeah, there's thousands of names on the database as we understand it right now. And if you're not on these databases, then I guess you could be, if you're a government contractor, government worker, you could be fired in one of these purges. Yeah.

And yeah, like again, it's because it's an AI driven system, you have to be like, oh my, they're going to fire everybody from the, uh, a Nintendo family com fighting baseball lineup. Yeah, it is. It's, I mean, this is, I mean, when they're not using AI, it's like, what was Ramaswamy's idea to just yeah even and if you have an even numbered social security number you're fired if you're odd you get to stay and that's it so yeah that's the that's the level of tactical thinking that's that's it's very funny to be like I hate the left so much so I'm gonna do like an arbitrary purge of all these people is oh yeah that'll really that'll really teach the left the left would never do But also, with the social security number thing,

what they're thinking about is, well, the only way to change it is to make it so it almost doesn't work. And then everyone has to scramble to make it work. And all of those things that's scrambled, those will be the new processes. And everything that stops working, that will just be left. And then anything that it's supported will stop.

And then because society won't collapse the next day, it will be deemed fine. I mean, that's basically, I think that's, oh, it's Britain. Yeah, that's Britain. That's also that's also Elon Musk's approach to Twitter, right? Which is just like, we're going to fire everybody because you can still access the app and post tweets on it. We're going to consider whatever that is to be fine. I think we also have to add the caveat that probably the most likely outcome is still that just all the money gets shoveled towards all of these companies and these allies and these billionaires.

They do their little projects. Musk does his calculations with Rameswamy and he makes some tweets or whatever. And then they either get tired of it, it gets hard to implement, and very little ends up happening on the scale that was promised. I'm not discounting their ability to cause a lot of havoc and to be malicious and do real damage, but I think we have to also keep an eye

to their actual level of competency. You know, like Twitter, Musk needed Trump to win the election in order to get advertisers to come back to Twitter, to come back to X because they had all fled. That company was failing and now they're coming back just because they have, you know, aligned to power again for really no other reason. It's still just as noxious and horrible as it's ever been, right? Yeah, it's like HSBC is like, you know what, I guess we're fine with promoting our like, you know, 3.6% tracker mortgage beside this live

leak beheading video. Exactly. Well, if it's going to, you know, grease the wheels. Look, lean into it! We're slashing the interest rate. That's right. You need a little bit off the top of your interest rate. Well, this guy's got a lot on the top. You also talk about court, but that's like the defense and surveillance tech spending boom. We talk about surveillance of government employees, more importantly, I think, as well as going to be surveillance of migrant workers. It's going to be you. We talked about Hoenn, Ton, That, Clearview AI.

That kind of thing is going to become, even if it's not Clearview AI, that kind of thing is going to become ubiquitous because everyone who has a like camera phrenology enabler for like tracking who's a natural born citizen is going to be queuing up in front of the White House being like mandate this for every law enforcement agency in the country, please. Yeah, absolutely. And Palantir does a version of this, you know, a lot of these defense tech companies do. So whether or not it's Clearview, it's going to be, you know, and again, whether or not it works, they're going to be paying for it and they're going to be attempting it. And in some cases, it's going to be even worse

than if it did work. And I think it's also important to note that Biden didn't end the Palantir contracts when he could have, They just kind of drifted through his administration. It needs to be said that he could have done a lot more to clear house and some of this stuff, he was just fine with the Democrats are just fine with having these kinds of surveillance tools when the spotlight's not on and it's not a political problem for them to deal with. So we just can't hear about it.

I suppose, again, the difference is one is willing to be much more nakedly transactional. And one's more willing to spend more money more openly, doesn't mind the head wants the headlines. You know, Trump talks about master deportation now as if it's something that his hand has been forced. He's like, well, we said we were going to do it. So now we got to do it. And it's so he's almost in a not a victim of his own success, but it feels like this he's got to really prove to his base that he's going all out on this.

Also you talk about crypto, which we've spoken about before, which is basically just the government is going to start putting a floor under the price of Bitcoin, which is what Bitcoiners want. Or at least that's the law that's been proposed. If it ends up getting signed, that's what will happen. The one I also, the other two I want to go into before we end is you talk about how to think about platforms and online media in the second Trump age and how a Trump administration affects the AI equation. I kind of want to highlight the second one, right? Because one of the, not so long ago, we spoke about the securitization of AI in America.

Where they're like, okay, well, just like it happened in Britain, same thing. It's like, we're treating this as a national security issue, which means data centers are going to be critical. We're going to do everything we can to build more of them everywhere. We're going to build anything. We're going to like hook up fucking new coal-fired

power plants to power AI. It's so important that we do that. You know, and he says, you know, we'll repeal Joe Biden's dangerous executive order that hinders AI innovation and imposes radical left-wing ideas and the development of the technology said the Trump campaign. In its place we will support an AI development rooted in free speech and human flourishing. And so what does that mean? Also sensitive to the fact that there's someone who's a kind of mini me president who has an AI of his own. Yeah, I mean, AI is gonna be a hard one to read because I think there's a decent chance that in the next year or two,

we actually see kind of a bursting of the bubble for, because just the market can't bear any more of this hyperinflated, you know, relative nonsense. But, and that would be- No, no, no. Any day now it's going to become God. I've been reliably informed. Yeah. It's either that or it crashes. So yeah, either we get God, you know, and Trump in maybe- Coal powered God. Coal powered God. Elon infused God. Grok can transcribe Elon onto the face of God. Grok did not exist.

It would be necessary to invent it. Grok is dead and into who you've killed. And you smell what the Grok is cooking. Yeah. I mean, so AI could well burst on its own. But as you said, there's an entire sort of incoming administration and state that wants to build even more of this stuff.

The EPA administrator is not really interested in the environment. He is interested in AI. That's his priority, is just green lighting as much of this stuff as possible. So yeah, we have maybe a situation where the bubble gets inflated by the state. I don't know if the state can come up with enough ways

to prevent that bubble from crashing. So it would be, I mean, if there's a tech bubble bursting in the first or second year of the Trump administration, that could be something that's pretty interesting to think about and definitely not out of the realm of possibility. But barring that, yeah, I mean, Grok is a good example. And I brought it up because it's so stupid and it's so useless.

It's like something that people occasionally accidentally click on when they're using Twitter. But I, you know, I have this hunch that Musk is going to try to find a way to operationalize it in the Trump administration. And that, I think little things like that are ways that things could get like messy and stupid if he's trying to actually, you know, suggest that, you know, he say replace some government workers' jobs with GROC. And you have bureaucracies that are sort of mandated to use GROC. I can't wait to get my driver's license renewed by at the hand of an anti-woke AI. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm so excited that everyone at the DMV has been replaced by Rick from Rick and Morty. So cool. But I think the other thing to write is that Joe Biden is that the Biden administration gave away so much to the AI industry through, but it involved the people that bought that the Biden admin liked that like Jake Tapper liked.

And that is the CEOs of the big res more respectable, quote unquote, tech companies. That means people like Sam Altman. That means people like Sundar P. Shai. That means like Zuckerberg even. Like these are the people who the Biden administration was more interested in dealing with. But the actual substance of what they're doing economically to try to accelerate the development of AI in America,

a lot of it is huge, gigantic subsidies to the CHIPS Act for like, you know, TSMC to build a fab in Arizona. Also, it was gigantic amounts of money for like, you know, for training as well for private companies. It's also opportunities to giving them opportunities to integrate their product into the US sort of procurement industrial complex, especially into the military. And then also a series of increasingly sort of harsh export restrictions aimed at China. And like, I don't see Trump not doing any of those. I see him doing it with different partners, but I don't see him stopping doing those things necessarily. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those things are just going to happen. I mean, OpenAI already has

a contract with the DoD. So there's already sort of further intermingling there. And I think the biggest difference when it comes to AI is just that any of the scant regulations or efforts to put up any kind of guardrails at all are going to be out the window. There's going to be like, yeah, a more aggressive co-mingling of the state. And it's, I mean, you know, Biden administration was in talks to just build data centers or, you know, allow the building of data centers specifically for AI. I bet we could see more of that happening. But yeah, now it's happening. Like that kind of thing will happen at least

with sort of, you know, Musk's sort of hand in the mix if he wants it to be, if he's there on that day, if he's not down a K hole or whatever. So he will be sort of involved in the political decision making. And I think, yeah, I don't think it scrambles the outlook all that much. There wasn't much that the AI companies were that worried about in terms of regulation in the first place. Because yeah, like you said, Biden was sort of giving him the green light on just about everything. And the only regulation that the AI companies ever wanted was like existential risk regulation, because that's the regulation that says if you build God, you have to make sure that God is nice to us, which is like, they barely care about that.

All that did was create huge moats around the existing AI companies, because it meant that no one else could build a model without submitting it for huge amounts of testing and so on and so on. Suddenly, it becomes very expensive to be a big AI company. So, you know, that it's to their advantage to do that. So, you know, even the small amount of regulation that there is is pretty pro-corporate. And, you know, the Trump administration, if it demolishes it, it's just going to be, yeah, it's much of a muchness. I think it is interesting, though, to see how it's like,

they're just letting the guy that did the version of the thing as a joke into all the calls with the people who've done the thing very much for real, which I think is no better than Sam Altman deserves. I'm glad to see that he now has to like, you know, carry water for this, this guy who he clearly thinks is a moron who he hates. I am pleased that that has happened to Sam. Yes. I mean, it, I mean, and Musk hates Sam Altman. Like he, I, it will be interesting

to see what, what ways he comes up with to try to crush, uh, open AI, uh, because he wants, yeah. I mean, he hates Sam Altman. He hates what, what, what became of open AI because he wants. Yeah. I mean, he hates Sam Altman. He hates what became of open AI. I think he's jealous that Sam Altman got all this credit. He got to be the guy who got to go around talking about AI on 60 minutes and all the podcasts and that Elon wanted to be that guy. And it's just going to be this, yeah, there's this vindictive streak. And that rivalry is going to play out in government, which is amusing to think of. The final thing that you mentioned is how to think about platforms and online media

in the Trump age. We don't have a ton of time left, but I'd love for you just to pray see what your view is there. Yeah, I mean, I just think that there's already been sort of endless chatter, right, about how the collapse of the standard journalism industry and the newspapers and their ability to exert any kind of influence at all has... Not in the UK? Yeah, exactly. It's like a mirror image where nobody took anybody seriously in the Times, op-ed pages or anything like that over here. But that's going to further erode. We had a

number of efforts to try to save the journalism industry, try to prop it up, and the tech giants sort of fought back and devoured those little upstarts and those efforts. So it's just going to be, I think, an even more chaotic and fragmented and splintered and with a few platforms that do rise above the morass. Like, you know, X is just slowly becoming a propaganda clearinghouse now, and that's only going to, you know, accelerate. We have like these little upstarts, Mastodon and Blue Sky, but it's almost immaterial.

So I think we do have a new sort of state media apparatus that's taking form. And one of the things that I kick myself for is underestimating Musk and it just seemed so brazenly stupid to so many people that I think we didn't pay attention to how much it was helping to concentrate power. And so, yeah, I think one of the things to keep an eye on is going to be how Musk wields X and by extension, these other platforms that are competing with or forcing

to engage with it as Trump takes office and has certain things he wants to accomplish. So I expect to see even more repulsive stuff on X in six months' time. Of course. Like we said at the very beginning of this segment, that's where the logic to attack the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that's where that came from.

That's where it gestates. It's a podcast clip is shared on X. So it's like policies are just going to kind of bubble up more. Politicians have always responded too much to social media and X, the everything app in particular, again, especially over here. But now I think again, it's one of these examples of a process that was 95% complete becoming 100% complete where this is just the entire process takes place on here. And there's no even pretending that you're not directly responding to just like, you know, stuff that you see on the

internet. I mean, that was that's every fucking like British political sort of spasm we get over here. That was the entire Ron DeSantis campaign. And now like that's the thing that's just lasted and merged into the government via again, depending on how long Elon sticks around anyway. Yeah. Anyway, I think we're getting to time here. So I want to just say, Brian, thank you so much for coming on and sharing some of your thoughts today. It's always a delight to speak to you. It is always a pleasure.

And yeah, can I plug my podcast, my very own podcast? Plug away. Yeah. Plug away. Yeah. So I've started a podcast with the great Paris Marx. It's called System Crash. And it's going to be a weekly show that digs into whatever the folks at Trashfuture don't

get into here. So you need both. Back off, Stoobie. That's right. You've got the Stoobie lane. We've got to find our own hapless Florida politician. But they'll interlock like the yin and the yang. So you need to listen to both to have a complete portrait of what's happening.

Stoobie boobies are our territory. Yeah, that's right. Stay out of Stoobinville. That's ours. That's our turf. Anyway, time to run. But once again, Brian, thank you so much. Check out System Crash.

Check out us later this week. Again, it's going to be a bonus episode. It's $5 a month. Also, I would like to do a Q&A for Christmas. So I don't have to do research for a bonus episode. It's $5 a month. Yeah. Also, I would like to do a Q&A for Christmas. So we, I don't have to do research for a Christmas episode. So if you have some cues, think of them and then we will tell you how to ask them so we may A them. Yeah. Yeah. We'll put something out probably on the Patreon or the discord, something like that. One of those places or maybe both of those places. I will talk to Nate, who will be the person who will know how best to do

that. Yes, that's right. And then he will communicate it to you, the listener. Via us. Via us or via the various text-based messaging services that exist. Think of queues. Just think of queues. Just think of queues.

Think of queues. Think of queues and in time you shall duly receive A's. I'm also in Taunton on the 14th of December. He's just in. He's just in Taunton. Yeah, I'm just gonna be there. He's just in. He's just in. He's hanging around. If you want to find me, yeah. I'm going to be like, what was that guy who,

if you found him, he would give you money or something. Oh yeah. I'm thinking of, it's like Jim Skin from TikTok. The like the Essex guy who wears like the Gucci tracksuits. He'd be like, okay, I'm in Romford right now. If you can guess where I am and find me, I'll give you 50 quid. And then he'd just give a guy 50 quid for finding him.

And then that was like the whole, that was the whole TikTok. Ah, Britain. All right. Well, anyway. It's like that, but me and you get a stand-up comedy. And you have to pay also. Okay. All right. The limits of that joke have been reached. We will see you on the bonus episode in a few days.

Bye everyone. Bye. bonus episode in a few days. Bye everyone.