TRASHFUTURE - Money Touchers feat. Nathan Tankus

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

Jensen Huang sold his leather jacket for charity… and we look at exactly what that charity is and does. Then in the second half, Nathan Tankus is back to discuss the ongoing plot to create an imperial presidency by Touching the Money like never before. TF listeners can enjoy a discounted subscription to Notes on the Crises at this link! (also just FYI the link is live regardless of what the site displays) Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows NATE ALERT Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album and you can stream it for free here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hi, everybody. Welcome to this episode of TF. Nova is still being re-educated in Andy Burnham's small plates rehabilitation camp. They do things a little differently there. We recommend, of the brainwashing hypnosis programs, we recommend three small ones, and then one large hypnosis program if you think you're really deviant from Northern Thought. So it's once again, it's me who's still. and Maddie. How is everybody?

You just found another trans woman to do it. Well, it's, I'm actually, I keep making the joke that it's like, oh, you just found the other trainee, you know. But the real reason why I'm filling in for Nova is that I dropped the dime on her. So I get to take her place. You know what it is? It's like in Afghanistan where if you wanted your neighbor's Poppy Field, you just be like, oh, that guy's Taliban as hell.

I see him doing Taliban shit all the time. The U.S. Army's just like, yep, all right. I said, I said it to Andy Burndham. That's his name. Well, as of today, we are entering day one of Britain doing things a little differently. The Manchester and we all live in Manchester now, greatest Manchester, in fact. Manchester by the Wii. That's right.

Manchester is Bayal of we. Andy Burnham, great new slogan for you. You can use it. That's free for you. We're going to do a sort of more focused episode about what Andy Burnham says he's going to do now that he's in power. But in the second half today, I'm actually going to be talking to Nathan Tankus, a repeat guest, an expert on the plumbing of how all the stuff happens and how that has been attacked and politicized. We're going to be going through some of the, let's say, some of the

strange things that are happening in the U.S. at a federal level. But before we get to that, and a little bit on Burnham today, he's made five promises. He's made five, and they're my favorite kind of political promises. He will. Number one, end in fighting within the party. By which way?

Does he have really long arms and he's going to separate everybody? He's just holding him apart? It's going to be hugs. He's going to separate and he's going to hug. The old hug is separate.

Yeah, and if I don't know how, it's not like he's going to, it's not like he's going to like get rid of anybody, it seems. He's just going to shuffle the cap. Hey, you know what? I would love to see a leader also

who would get elected and be like, I won't. end in fighting within the party. I would never do that. Yeah, it's like, this is, yeah, every single British prime minister since, what, like 2012 has promised to end in for 2015, maybe is promised to end in fighting within the party, but you're the think you can do it by force of personality instead of, I don't know, understanding that these are like, you're, it's like saying, I will convince this train steam whistle to stop

whistling without dealing with the underlying head of steam that's been building up. maybe they could begin, they could stop the infighting by beginning outfighting. Yeah. By like, you know, creating any separation between them and the choice and reform on like anything. Well,

look, they could get some inspiration from Trump in that regard and the UFC White House fight, right? Like so in the, in the Downing Street Garden, they could sort of set up a little dojo. Okay. It's a lot smaller though,

right? There's not as much land there for them to put the big, the entire device from content, act out there. It sort of have to be like a sumo ring and there'd be like questions over like whether you or know whether it's like pads or no pads, ghee or no ghee. Also, sumo's foreign so we need to have a British

version of sumo. That's true. I mean, British Sumo is just two very pissed guys in the pub who like try to fight each other in the back and they both miss and then they start kiss. This actually happened. Did I ever tell you the story about have I ever told you the story? Every time. Every fucking time you say this actually happened. You're about

to just, you're about to relate to me. and Maddie and the listeners like a situation that you were in that got filtered through the special processes in your brain that meant you reacted to it like I don't think any other living person

possibly could have conceived of so Hussein tell me this actually happens to a backroom pub sumo match go though there's a lot of talk on the show about Hussein having like being in like Mr. Bean situation I submit he's been living a sort of

Oliver's travels lifestyle. Yeah, because I feel like, I feel like a lot of the time with these stories, I'm more of like the observer. It doesn't really happen to me that much. You know, you're going to an island where horses could talk? Yeah. Yeah, one time, Hussein was tied to the ground by a bunch of little people and he just tried to discuss Evangelion with them.

Yeah, well, I would sort of submit at that point. But what I was going to say was that this sort of happened a couple years, maybe a year ago. Um, my wife and I were coming back from like an event in town. and we were walking back home and there's a pub on our high street. And there were like two guys who were kind of fighting each other. And they were both really pissed. And one of the guys tried to punch the other one. He missed.

But because the other guy who was about to get punched was drunk, he like lost his balance and fell on the ground, right? So we sort of like run across the road to try, try help him. And the guy, like, as he's sort of waking up, he's just like telling us to fuck off. He's just like, get off me, get off me, get off me. And we were like, all right, fine. we'll wait here until the ambulance comes. Meanwhile, this guy, like, gets up and he starts, like, hugging the one who was trying

to punch him. And it turns out they're actually, like, really good friends. And they just wanted to, like, they weren't even really in an argument. They weren't actually agree with each other. They had made a bet. And I'm not sure what the bet was, but it did. But it basically was just like, yeah, I bet you couldn't knock me out. And I think it's a really funny situation because actually, you couldn't get knocked out, right?

Like, the punch did not knock him out. It was the fact that this guy had sort of, like, lost his balance for... You know, this is actually very much like Sumo in that there's like a lot of pre-end post-amble and a lot of ceremony and explaining what's happening and very little actual action. Yeah. So basically what we're saying, we're going to have

British Sumo, which is a traditional sport called I bet you can't knock me out. And they're going to do that on the Downing Street Garden to end in fighting within the party. Number two. So I think, Maddie, you mentioned we could do outfighting. Yeah. But he's also said he's going to end point scoring.

Oh. I guess by playing a very defensive game, he's going to park the bus. No one's going to score. I guess. How are you going to judge the fights if there are no points? Well, yes, true. We just watched probably six weeks of like God punishing those who park the bus.

And that's his lesson. That's the lesson he takes away. End point scoring. And end point scoring. No more. So he's going to have his cabinet is going to be a raid, like in a six person pattern too deep, up against Downing Street, preventing anybody really from getting in.

Number three, set out direction that is distinctively labor, that's in quotes, by being us, that's also in quotes. Manchester, by the we. Yeah. That's right. The curve on is. Okay. Yeah.

Wait, sorry, I set out a direction that is distinctively labor by being us. Yeah. Which Keir-Starmor didn't do. That's, okay. Cool. Is there like an aphorism not missing here? Because I don't know in Britain. Yeah. distinctively labor.

because labor has only ever been one thing. It's never been a whole bunch of different stuff. And each of these things has claimed to be labor. But he's just going to be, it's going to be vibes. Four, return power to people across the entire UK and also be a pro business leader. No one has ever been. We have had attempted pro business leaders in the UK, I guess, for the last, what, God knows, 50 years.

But really, other than Thatcher and Blair, no one succeeded in being a pro business leader according to everybody's own standards. Pure capitalism has never been attempted. Yeah. We had pure capitalism for four years from 1980 to like 84. Cool. And then it started falling apart, I guess. Return power to the people and be a pro business leader.

Are those things in conflict with each other at all? Or what do you think? Well, people, business people, he'll return power to business people and other power to other people. Maybe he'll play that song. He'll play Renegade Master for everybody. which I think is a song you maybe could have heard in Manchester at some point. At some point. You know, so if you're a bit...

I mean, again, all of these things are completely, you know, incoherent. But his promise to bring back good vibes, I guess, to British government without really changing much. I'm just excited to see a former mayor get a shot on the world states like this. Check out of no custom mayors. Yeah. Well, I just, I just think it... The sort of the premise of that show that we do, it's me and to other people. The premise of that show is that the mayoralty is that the mayoralty.

is sort of an insanity catch fence. So it's very interesting to see when somebody escapes. Well, the thing that Andy Burnham's was a strange mayor, though, because he was a minister before he was a mayor. Oh, I see. Like he was, he sort of, he bided his time as a mayor saying, oh, I can be, because the whole point of being elected to Britain, a system that's designed for people to hate it and fail them

and expose them to the vagaries of global capitalism, right? Like, Britain is like uniquely exposed among North Atlantic democracies to, or liberal democracies from quote unquote, whatever you want. It's uniquely exposed to like global financial markets. And so everyone hates it. And so the way that you get elected is by saying, I hate Westminster also and I'm different from them. I do things a little differently here.

That's what Andy Burnham did. He's like, well, I'm going to govern Manchester as a locality. And then what I'm going to become as the mayor of all the localities, which is going to be different from somehow than a prime minister. I guess I'll have to devolve some power. So, you know, let's just say Andy Burnham is not the guy. so far vindicated, but I'm not here primarily to talk about Andy Burnham. I wanted to make another very fun announcement before we move on, which is I'm ringing the big Charlie Kirk woke fund bell. This was sent to me through the Discord. Thank you everybody in the

Discord for keeping me updated with the Charlie Kirk Fund for woke public servants who did not like him. A Polk City firefighter will receive nearly 200 grand after she was fired for online comments made about the killing of Charlie Kirk. Her name, Alyssa Furry. No comment. She is a Polk City firefighter paramedic who made several posts and comments on her private Facebook page, including, I choose not to celebrate, but also not be sad. And today in America, we interrupt the assassination at a college who bring you news of a shooting

at a high school. Furry deleted her post and deactivated her account in the same day after once again, a co-worker dobed her in with the fire chief. She was put on leave in September 16th, fired October 24th, and then just last week has been given $200,000. Sick. I will say about just real quick, Alyssa Furry, I feel like the suit would melt if you were near a fire.

Those things are mostly plastic. This rocks. This is good. I don't understand. Why are you dropping the dime on your firefighter coworker for not even, it's like the least offensive, a manageable thing you can say, right? like this is like almost it's not like oh hooray he died or anything right well because it was like a the whole kirk thing it was like a week of like fever that we all had that we couldn't say anything

it was very strange yeah it was it was everyone like a lot of people in public offices were terrified that it was like oh this is the moment this is the moment now yeah and then reacted as though like fucking stormtroopers were on their way and it turns out that no no they weren't what's happening is we're funding every owner of a co-examined Bumper sticker car that works in the public sector of the United States America. That's great. A glass of wine that you can see from space. Yeah.

I think there's something like really interesting about this in terms of like how the people who were like pretending that they sort of support this Charlie Kirk, like what they actually thought Charlie Kirk was and what he represented. Because I remember that weird period of time when he was killed. And like in the sort of following days afterwards, like one of the things, and I mentioned this on my other show, 10K posts, but like it's something that I think about. lot is just like the influences who try to sort of jump on this bandwagon and like there's this one guy that I know from like just like media appearances and stuff like when I used to go on to like radio

to do like you know, little sort of talking head bits and there was like this influencer guy who used to come on to one of the BBC radio stations that I was on. And his like whole thing up to this point was like he sort of goes to Ibiza and he asks like drunk women sort of inappropriate questions about like their body count and all that stuff like kind of gross stuff but like broadly sort of just like things that were sort of there to grab attention. But when Charlie Kirk died, he like pivoted his content to be like really, really political. But in this sort of sense of like Charlie Kirk was there for free speech and like, you know, his message was that like, you know, you should be allowed to talk about anything. And so that's why like I'm going out on the streets

of London to ask people what they thought about Charlie Kirk. And like it's quite funny watching the video because he like uploaded all the footage and most of the, most of the stuff he got was just people being like, who's Charlie Kirk? Like, they don't actually sort of know who he is. Or they sort of think that, oh, he's just like this American guy. It's sort of sad he got shot. But like, I don't really have any opinions up than that, right? But there were a few people like along those lines who were really trying to sort of like present

Charlie Kirk as being this like neutral free speech actor. And we obviously knew that wasn't true. But there was this period where I was just like, oh, like, there are enough people who don't know who this guy is that like suddenly there's this opportunity to like reframe him as like the ultimate free speech guy, right? But actually what these people wanted and what they were really sort of gleeful for when he died was like, oh, this is a great way of getting people into trouble, right? Because if you can get people to like say things that are like a little bit disparaging about Charlie Kirk. And obviously there are a lot of people who just like don't shut their mouths online and are sort of, you know, just sort of went to town with it.

Like we talk a lot about how Charlie Kirk is probably like the most disrespected far right and disrespected person in the world. right? His death has just sort of become like memes upon means upon memes like no respect whatsoever. Turning point as an organisation is basically a shell of itself. We're all just waiting for Erica, Erica, what's his name? Charlie Kirk. I was going to say Erica Trump, but there's

Eric Trump and there's Erica fucking what's her name. We're waiting for Kirk. Erica Kirk. Yeah, well. My brain's It's a patronymic. We're waiting for Erica Kirk and Eric Trump to also be like we've been impregnating. It's been impregnation.

by J.D. Vance. We're just waiting for that to happen. And so it's sort of like this guy kind of died for nothing, but like his whole purpose, which was just to sort of like own the libs and then get the libs arrested, like just hasn't worked. Like the opposite has happened, which is that like he's getting the libs paid. We're making the big live laugh love sign and they don't know what to do about it. And I think this is also like so interesting in terms of like looking at the state of the right and just like this kind of weird sense where they sort of are aware that like, you know, the curtains are closing and they're not quite sure what happens at this point. And I think it's this really interesting just to observe,

just like the fact that these kind of a guy that they had really hoped would be a sort of like martyr in which they could sort of cast into his own image just would just has, they have no control over it. Well, can I give you some other good news in terms of like lib, uh, let's say the, Lib laugh love. The Libs having a field day, which is, I mean, this is us too. This is us and the libs kind of are sort of aligned on this one, which is the Hivate brothers getting arrested the same week that Alyssa Fury got paid. So we're going to be following that as well. But there's actually something I wanted to talk about before I switch over to me and Nathan, which unusually I haven't actually done yet. So I can't do my in the future past little thing. You can say your whole bit is

destroyed. I don't know. I also know that's only amusing to me, but it's very amusing to me, so I won't stop doing it. So this is another piece of news I want to discuss. Leather jacket. worn by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang sells for just under a million dollars at Sotheby's charity auction, CNBC. Well, on Friday last week, after 65 bids, one of Jensen Huang's pre-worn and signed jackets

sold at auction at Sotheby's for $960,000, higher than the pre-sale estimate of $40,000 to $60,000. Is he dead? My first thought is, did he die? Uh-huh. He's alive. Did he die in the jacket? Is this the jacket that took over Jensen Wong's mind like the green goblin?

So he wore the jacket in 2023 at an event at Foxcon in Taipei, Taiwan. The original retail price was only $10,000, a lot for a jacket, but not much compared to $960,000. The high price for the garment is that is a sign that collectors are looking to bid on artifacts and collectibles from the artificial intelligence boom. I just wanted to say one of the things that people said after the Great Depression is, hey, when like sort of corporate executives, become like, you know, public figures and like your taxi driver suddenly is like, oh, hey, here's what I would invest in and so on and so on. You might be in a bubble. It's sort of an indicator of a bubble territory.

It's bad when a bubble starts getting lots of sub-bubbles, or I call them sub-bles. Like it is just that casino scene in the big short, right? Where it's just like, we're adding things on to the bubble where it's like, yeah, we're paying a million dollars for a jacket now. So the response to this sale surpassed even our highest expectations. Sotheby's head of modern collectibles, Brom Vachter, said an statement. Pretty good name.

He said he added, Don't ask about my grandpa. So Sotheby said in a statement that proceeds will go to a philanthropic initiative in support of the Edge Institute, which is a nonprofit dedicated to innovation. So you may be thinking, Ah, Riley's going to move through a few more news items

than on to the interview with Nathan Tancas. Not so. Because do you remember how I said, just now, really, I said the Edge Institute. Yeah. Did you ask, what the fuck is the Edge Institute?

No, because I know that the Edge Institute is a philanthropic initiative in support of innovation, which I love innovation. Huge innovation fan. I'm a huge innovation fan. I'm using a computer right now.

Honestly, if we didn't have innovations, then we wouldn't have anything for Jensen Wong to inflate the value of his jacket. That's pretty obvious to me. I think so. This charity auction,

in support of the Edge Institute, I was like, okay, well, I have to find out what the Edge Institute is. And I can tell you, according to their, um, what they do is they say, Edge City, the Edge Institute, which runs Edge City. Everyone there is edging. Everyone there is very, they're very edgy. I do not go to Edge City because everyone's about to punch me and come.

And I don't know what each person is. They're just, they're just daring each other to say the word. Yeah, the, um, the common greeting is edgy or edging and they look at you. And you have to answer the same. Yeah. If, if you're different. then you have to fight. Orga,

come done. That's true. Well, it's, it's like that British sumo wrestling match. So, they convene people

working at the frontiers of tech science and social innovation and pop-up villages across the globe. And it's actually part, this will be interesting, it's part of the zoosoloo ecosystem.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Thank you so much for asking. We bought a zooselow? Uh-huh. Susalow. Zuseloo.

It is the, That's the pop-up city movement started by Vitalik Buterin, the guy who came up with Ethereum, or the guy who, let's say, is widely thought of as the guy who came up with Ethereum. It got started with a gathering in Montenegro, which means, by the way, Vitalik Buterin is now canonically a mayor, because he was the mayor of the first Edge City. They say, Edge City is a society incubator, an IRL lab of experimentation for new ideas, tech, culture, organizations, all dedicated to accelerating human flourishing. Do you think this is a good, charitable organization?

to donate the proceeds of a ludicrous rich guy purchase of a jacket to? Oh, God, I know what they've done. I know what they've done. So you know how like Burning Man for all of its insane faults to begin with was at some point an art project and then got like overrun with like Silicon Valley types who like just want to like put on like a headdress and run around on drugs in the desert. They've made Burning Man, but it's just business. They've eliminated the art part.

Finally. Finally. It's Burning Man where you can wear just a zip up, like a zip front sweatshirt. Is she like incredible? It's a burning man where you don't have to be embarrassed to wear a Gilles to it. Exactly. So our annual flagship pop-up village in Heldsburg, California, is co-organized with the

Esmeralda Institute, a new permanent village just 90 minutes north of San Francisco. They have great wine there, Helsburg. This month-long gathering. I know. Don't. I'm upset that this is good wine land and they're putting tech idiots on it. They're growing ideas with it, which I think. is terrible. No. This month-long gathering served as a prototype for our vision, helping us test new ways of

living, working, and thriving together. Why create spaces that support this type of experimentation, you may ask? Well, you were about to ask that, right? That was going to be your question. Because the systems that shape our time, M-Dash, institutions, norms, governance structures, M-Dash were made for a prior world. Ones that worked in the past are now rigid and slow-moving, unable to evolve to meet the opportunities and challenges of the current moment. Mind-numbing sentence. It doesn't mean anything. By creating these micro-execis, You know a micro exit? I know what a macro exit is.

That's when I leave. Yeah, well, a micro exit is like you can sign out of normal society for like three to four weeks at a time. It really is burning man. Jesus Christ. We create space to experiment with new systems, technology, and practices. What works in these experimental environments can then be shared with broader society, shaping a brighter future for everyone.

So Jensen Huang donated his jacket sale. The proceeds from it went to a network state cult thing. They're finally, okay, cool. this is the first time in human history that someone's built, say, like a city on a hill for everyone to go look at and think about how cool it is and then make society reflect that that they see. Which is a good understanding of power and how it works and how it's a... Yeah, great. This is from one retrospective of an edge city event. Like, they have them all over the world.

They have them everywhere. But like the California one's the flagship one. Okay. There were movement classes in the morning, lectures and workshops throughout the day and dinners and parties to the evening. There were no ground rules as far as what programming was allowed. and events covered everything under the sun. There was more standard fair conference talks about people's work, but also sessions on animal telepathy, fertility, regenerative farming,

acro yoga, and the aptly named Kids at the Pool. I don't know what that last one is. Is animal, you skipped right over animal telepathy? Is that talking to animals using your mind, or is it animals talking to each other using their minds? You know, they didn't go into more detail. They just left it.

They just left it at animal telepathy. We're like, well, we assume you know what this is. We're doing the men who stare at goats again, but this time, worse and stupider. This time, well, this time,

instead of being funded by the government, it's being funded by the sale of proceeds of the sale of Jensen Wong's jacket. So they say,

what gets built at Edge City? I actually looked into this. Only two startups have emerged from Edge City, one called Constellation and one called AMI. Both those startups are related to building new AI models,

and both of them have been invested in, but neither of them actually have a product released. Sorry, this little flyer that you posted here. Uh-huh. It says New Towns, colon, Esmeralda and

Galefu Mindfulness City, which sounds like a Zelda location. Galefu Mindfulness City is a version of this in Bhutan. Cool. I want to go to Mindfulness City. Where the grass is green and the girls are calm. The other thing about this, by the way,

is that the whole thing is funded by a venture capital company called Long Journey Ventures. And the sale of one jacket. The sale of one jacket. So basically, again, The charity that the sale of Jensen Huang's jacket funded is something that is also a venture capital investment pipeline thing. So they've paid for a VC's deal sourcing pipeline with a charity auction.

That's cool. I love it. I love it. It's awesome. I bet that money couldn't be used for something better. So here's the other thing. Here's the other thing. Okay.

Has the Edging Institute build a permanent city? Well, Esmeralda is supposed to be that. So Edge Esmeralda, it's a pop-up city that, quote, works with the Ed Esmeralda Institute. So there's the Esmeralda Institute and Edge Esmeralda. The Esmeralda Institute is also a non-profit, trying to prototype a new way of life with a city 90 minutes north of San Francisco like no one else has ever tried to do.

They even read Palo Alto by Nalcahury. There also is something called the Esmeralda Land Company, which is a private land development organization that the Esmeralda Institute does free press for in the guise of philanthropy, owned by a woman named Devin Zoygel who used to edit Peter Thiel's Stanford Review.

We did this already, like 100 years ago, to take photographs of horses better. Whatever, it's fine. Zoygel, a 31-year-old software engineer raised in the heart of Silicon Valley, this is from the SF Chronicle, arrived in Cloverdale two years ago with fanciful renderings for a village

of upward of 600 new apartments and homes in the city at Eastern Edge. She named the city's Esmeralda, and in Cloverdale's tight-knit town of just under 9,000 people, The idea stoked excitement and alarm. This summer, Cloverdale will begin formally considering Zoigel's Esmerelda development proposal, an idea that has already consumed two years of public debate. Whether a long-dormant 266-acre former industrial mills site along the Russian River

should become an entirely new walkable neighborhood with housing a hotel amphitheater, shops, and cafes, playgrounds, parks, and trails. This all seems lovely, right? But she owns the company that owns the land. This isn't even the first company to consider this brownfield parcel for like a rich person retreat. Just a few years ago, it was re-owned for a wine country. resort and golf course. It just fell through because they couldn't clean it up well enough.

I'm looking at the renderings because I need to see them. And they're just like, like, and they're, and these people's like greatest, wildest dreams and imagination, it just looks like a fucking country club or like a fancy hotel or like the Getty Villa or something. Yep. It's just such a lack of, this is the future to you? Well, hey, you're what Devin Zoyle said. What?

I don't look like the typical CEO of a development company. I'm proud that I'm different. Mm. Doesn't seem to be creating anything different. No. So what happened, basically? She just looks like some lady. All right, whatever.

Is that Jensen Wong sold his jacket for a million dollars and donated the proceeds to an organization that is among other things, primarily concerned with the traveling circus of Silicon Valley people who are promoting, among other things, yet another network state style land development, which main concern right now seems to be saying, hey, we can have this thing that Devin Zoygle, wants to make, who's also, by the way, connected to the Peter Thiel network, we're going to actually have our traveling edge Esmeralda thing happen there to promote that it's like a reasonable thing, that it should be rezoned and then it's valuable for developers. So it's basically, it's a real estate value inflation play sponsored in small part by Jensen Wong selling his jacket for charity. These people truly cannot. All they do is invent stuff that already exists, right? Yeah.

Like, we all make fun of like when they come out and they're like, we've invented. sailboats again or whatever or like we've invented the city bus. But this is just like reinventing robber bar and shit over and over and over and over again. I just, it's so, how stupid do they think we are? Relatively. Okay.

Yeah. You know what? And to be fair, I'm pretty fucking dumb. So in case you were wondering, by the way, if anything specific came out of the various edge cities, this is from their blog. The village was hard to describe because it wasn't any one thing. The activity of the village was in principle, not something that

have been planned in advance. Each event came to be because someone who was attending the village decided that there was something inside of them that wanted to bring into connection with the community. An aggregate that meant the whole experience was merely an amalgamation of what happened to be alive for the 1,200 attendees at any given moment. Living in the moment. It's just describing people being at the same place. It's describing a conference.

Okay. Instead of giving them millions of dollars, I'm making a proposal here. Jensen Huang redirects your jacket money to the following. The jacket's already gone. Jensen Huang sell your shoes or pants or both and give me the money. See, shoes go for two millions. Gens and sell your used underwear. Yeah, sell your used underwear, Jensen Huang, and also your shoes can be one million each because there's two of them.

Right? Pants, two million each because there's two legs to the pants. So that's $4 million right there. And I will use that seed money to construct the village from the prisoner and send every one of these motherfuckers there for the rest of their lives. Hey, Maddie. Have you been watching the prisoner? Riley. And I was texting about it.

And now I'm talking to you about it on the show because I'm watching. the prisoner. You know what's a cool show? The prisoner. They gave me $4 million to remake the prisoner. How about that? Okay, perfect. Jensen, if you're listening, and we know you are. And we know you are. We know you are. Four million for a remake of the prisoner or one million for sponsoring like a kind of self-directed Montessori summer camp for like millionaires. Which do you think you'd rather want to do? I mean, I know what he'd rather want to do, but one would be cool. As someone who actually went to a Montessori Arts summer camp as a child, because it's sort of like where you furloughed your gay child in the year 2001.

This is like that, but at least there, I was like learning life skills by teaching 11-year-olds how to weld. And here, you know, nothing's happening. Well, they're making a lot of interesting pre-product startups.

They're making a lot of interesting money. Well, they also really missed a trick because if you had Charlie Kirk's jacket, then imagine what you can do with that. Well, you could clone them probably with the blood from it. All right. I think with that,

it's time for, it's time for me to talk to Nathan a little bit about the threats to the plumbing of the world. Which is pretty. That's right. Hello, everybody from the first half. It is Riley in the second half. Joined for, I think, the third or fourth time, Nathan Tankus from Notes on the Crisis.

Nathan, fresh off your odd lots appearance. How was it doing the second best show in our genre? It was fantastic. You know, they've got a fancy new studio where you can. documents the craziest hand gestures that you've ever seen three Jewish guys make. You're happy. You can have quite a fun time with that video. You can see my tattoo fully visible on it.

So I'm talking about all these tactical things. And I've got this crazy tattoo. You can't quite read, but you know it's crazy. It was a great time. And also, of course, thank you for coming back on. If you're not familiar with Nathan's work, he writes a great deal about the mechanisms through which the Trump administration has attempted to take control of certain elements of the United States federal government that are really supposed to be a million miles away from politics.

Things like if the federal government grants a state money to do something and the money shows up in their account, the Trump administration is trying to take over the mechanism that allows the money to stay in the account, therefore undermining the concept of what makes money money. and we've spoken about this a few times, and it's worth almost having a retrospective on that what you call the Trump-Musk payments crisis of 2025 and the sort of the long tale of touching the money, basically. Trump and Musk touched the money a lot. A bunch of things could have happened that didn't. A bunch of things did happen, and a number of other things have now been, say, fatally undermined. I mean, I think the perfect example of this whole sort of doge effort that

encompasses things outside, maybe what those literal guys were doing, is the current cyclospora lettuce parasite outbreak, because Doge cut a team that was monitoring this particular parasite from 11 to three people on the basis that there wasn't a cyclospora outbreak going on right at that moment, and therefore it wasn't in the media and buzzy and headlining and so on. But what they did was undermine like the future resilience of certain things that you might want. And even if you're a capitalist might want. And a lot of what we're going to talk about is the things that are not as obvious as like cyclospora funding or like general medical research funding, but like stuff like the very underpinnings of the economic plumbing of the state. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a

great way to put it. And I think, you know, for me, a comparison that I made from the very beginning of the Trump must payments crisis, which we'll get into, I think really is the thing that you should keep in your mind first and foremost. because the model for everything is that Elon Musk bought Twitter and he eviscerated a whole bunch of teams, he, like, you know, knocked down a whole bunch of the infrastructure that they had and then went, great, things didn't immediately collapse.

Ergo, we didn't need any of that stuff. And, you know, the thing about Twitter is, you knock down the resilience in Twitter, you make Twitter gradually worse in all these ways. You know, inveterate posters like you and me suffer, but ultimately it's not the most important thing in the world. But a guy like Musk learning a lesson like that, oh, all these white hats, you know,

telling me all this infrastructure that we need and how important it was and blah blah, blah. Well, they were all wrong. I could like unflow shit and it would be fine. It's essentially his mental model for everything. And when you knock down the, when you take that same approach to Twitter to, say, the federal government of the United States, States, and you knock down all this redundancy and resiliency in the system because of things

that on happening right now and your proof that it was fine is that things didn't immediately collapse, then you're going to see growing things like this happen where we're all having diarrhea now or all this all this other stuff and stuff that's less, you know, sexy isn't the right word for diarrhea, but less in your face, let's say is diarrhea that is happening a thousand full over all these

different elements of the federal government and then things that were funded by the federal government. And we see it play out and we're going to continue to play out. I mean, we're going to be having Doge-related outbreaks or crises or

something's going to break that's going to cause a lot of damage. Like, 10, 15 years out, and it'll be like, oh, yeah, this is another Doge thing that we didn't quite catch, even as we were trying to reconstruct the federal government or whatever. You know, I was talking to some people recently, and it's like, in a lot of ways, a Democratic administration that rolled back 40% of the damage of Doge in their first term would be a wild success. Like, that would be really impressive to just to be able to work back 40% of the damage. and there are just a million things like this and it won't be predictable what breaks next or exactly when it breaks,

but we do know that a bunch of stuff is going to break over the next 10, 15 years because, yeah, teams went from eight to three guys. There was one guy on it and he's the only person who knew why it was important so he couldn't justify why his job was important. He was fired and then like three years later, you know, every building that's like above 100 stories

collapses or something. And it was like, oh yeah, he produced the tungsten alloy that went into the steel beams or whatever, you know, just whatever it is. It'll sound like the most nothing thing in the world and it'll be very important.

Whoever we speak about this thing, as we spoke about it a few times, we tend to speak in terms of possibilities, contingencies, risks, things that should have a non-zero chance of happening, suddenly gaining non-zero chances of happening. The last time we spoke, I think we talked about how close the world came to a generalized financial crisis during the impoundments crisis, where suddenly the U.S. government appeared to politicize the question

of which bills it would pay because the actual mechanisms, the plumbing, if you like, is the frequent metaphor used, had become politicized. And it was looking as though the federal government may start making choices about, say, which treasuries it will pay the interest coupons on, thereby destroying the global financial system, because again, the person who's directing most of that, Elon Musk thinks, well, I can try it. And if it destroys the global financial system, I'll just reset it and it'll be fine. But it doesn't understand that the thing he's breaking, just like with cyclospora cutting that team, the thing you're breaking isn't just, oh, I caused an immediate financial crisis and then fixed it by restoring it. My bad, everybody. It's that these things are social. They're about

belief. They're about, say, if you buy a treasury bill, you never have to worry about the, about the coupon being paid, right? And suddenly, if you have to worry about the coupon being paid, that changes a social fact. And so that's more abstract than they cut the team monitoring for the parasite and now everyone's pooping. But it is incredibly damaging that this was even considered, right? This is something that should have a zero possibility that was given a non-zero possibility during the Trump-Musk payments crisis. Yeah. I I mean, I think even bigger than that, which I think we also spent a lot of time talking about,

is just these people being idiots who don't know what they're doing. Like the bigger possibility, the biggest danger, was simply that you had some 20-somethings who downloaded Deep Sea and were like rejiggering COBOL code based on Deep Sea and didn't barely understand the cost of the business logic. Certainly don't understand the decades of business logic that have accrued in these systems and breaking something

that they didn't know how to fix and them breaking things enough that payments simply stop being processed by the federal government and if payments stopped being processed by the federal government like wholesale, all payments would stop being processed.

It's, you know, not just the federal government, it would be like a global social implosion within a matter of weeks because it's just think of all the payments that work off. Suddenly no one's getting social security suddenly no state local governments are getting or are getting payments. You know, no treasury pay, as you pointed out, you know, the treasury bonds, treasury securities,

which in a lot of ways would be the easiest to quote unquote fix because the Fed can step in. But like all these other payments where you can't locate who you need to pay and you have to engineer a system on the fly, it's insanity. It's just total insanity. And they really did risk doing something like that that would have, you know, And even if you do something where you can fix it in a month, like, what happens in American society when no payments are coming out of the federal government for a month? Or what happens if no one is 100% confident that the payment will come? Yeah. You know, even after. What's funny about that is it seems like the answer is kind of nothing right now.

You know, we'll can talk about this more later, but like the ability for what I've been calling, you know, the conventional wisdom processor, like conventional wisdom to hold. For decades, we were told, like, any little thing would scoop, would, like, spook global financial markets and, like, have everyone are running for the exits. And if anything has disproved in that, it's this where, like, I mean, Trump could go on television to the Reagan bit of, like, there's going to be a nuclear war in five minutes, and, but, like, be serious. And, like, the financial markets, oh, they'd be, like, a little sell-off.

It'd be, like, you know, the stock market's down, like, 1% on the word that Trump plans to announce a nuclear war tonight. But like, you know, Taco, Trump always chickens out. Like, he's not going to, he's not going to go for it. So it's fine. This is something you've written. I'm officially declaring the Trump-Musk payments crisis over. For now, it appears we are settling in for a long, drawn-out, and still ongoing

impoundment crisis, along with a constitutional crisis over executive authority. But that notwithstanding, the extent to which the Trump administration has backed away from abusing the payment system is because they think both. impoundment and targeting enemies can be accomplished with more familiar tools that are less dangerous to wield. What the Trump-Muss payments crisis has illustrated is that our payment system is incredibly fragile and subject to enormous abuses, which is true, as we say, the markets did not bring about the worst, significant damage was done, and high-latency damage that we won't be identifying for years, and that damage will also be very geographically dispersed. Like, for example, Doge cut a program

that was researching how fast shrimp could run on like underwater treadmills. And Elon highlighted that. He was like, this is stupid. This is like a woke waste of money, jobs programs for scientists, whatever, whatever. And it's like, well, no, that's super important to shrimp farming. And so if the United States is suddenly unable to produce as many shrimp domestically, then shrimp prices around the world would probably go up. Right.

So that one thing could have high latency, geographically dispersed damage that's difficult to trace back to it, right? And so it's like this fragility and these abuses are so widespread and so subtle that they are very insidious and will be, it's always, the important thing is to always trace it back if you can to this. But like, say a little more though about like this phase of the crisis being over, this crazy phase and a more insidious phase beginning. Yeah. So, you know, you can imagine I, you know, break this stuff on Doge and the treachery. and then I have this follow-up piece about them just taking money

directly out of New York City's bank account and like, or is there any controls that are stopped from the federal government just capriciously taking funds out of people's bank accounts for like any reason they can come up with and the answer basically be no. It's just been

this has been like the most hard-corded norm ever. It's just like, well like, you know, it's like people would get on the internet and tell lies like someone would get in the government and just start like randomly taking money out of people's bank accounts. It was just the norm.

Yeah, it's like, hey, they all promise to not do that. They all said they all, they didn't even promise not to do that. And he was just like, oh, obviously it would be crazy to do that. So no one would do that. It was just the norm to defeat all norms. It's like, okay, Trump is going to break every other norm, but surely he's not going to break this norm. It was a norm that was so hard-coded that it didn't occur.

to anyone. It literally did not occur to anyone. It was a norm that hard-coded. It's like how you don't smell oxygen. Yeah, exactly. It's like, I don't think about how I need oxygen. It's just there. And of course, that's the kind of thing I think about.

And checking around and it's like, nope, there's a national association, trade association, that deals with the automated clearinghouse policy. But the federal government has long had an override where it gets to override the association's rules. And everyone's just been like, well, they'll probably be fine with that power. You know, what could go wrong? And here we are.

And so between those two things, it's very hard to get rid of the idea that this stuff is just going to keep on popping up everywhere. And I searched and I searched and I searched. And we just couldn't come up with more classic payments crisis type stuff. But we could come up with impoundment, various examples of impoundment. Because my first piece wasn't actually about the Bureau of Fiscal Service. It was about O&B. And before the Trump administration started,

I knew O&B and Russell thought was going to be a big thing to look to. And I wrote a big piece about him just issuing this guidance, which throws payments. This was the major main mechanism. This is the mechanism that the Trump administration intended to use to shape the federal government in the United States to its will, was just straight up in how, not messing with the pain system. And as I looked at this more, what I came to what fully clicked in my head was

this has been just like an embarrassing rigumeral all around. Because if you look at the world through Russell Vaugh's eyes, you know, he's happy that like Musk sent those kids into different agencies and got people fired and, you know, got control of the real estate and the email addresses and all that stuff, but ultimately at the core issue of impoundment, not just like bending individual administrative agencies to the Trump administration's will, but like the core issue of impoundment, Vought must look at this stuff and go, you fucking idiot, because he's already got what Musk wanted. What must didn't understand is that when Musk looked and said, oh my God, the Bureau of Fiscal Service processes all the payments, they just process a payment

automatically? What about anti-fraud? What about this? What about that? And, like, got himself in a tizzy? The whole system has checks for that. They're often agency-based checks, but more than that, OMB has oversight. So if OMB doesn't want a certain type of money to be spent, O&B could reach into these administrative agencies and deal with that. He doesn't, like, essentially, on the fly, high on ketamine, Elon Musk tried to get his 20-somethings to just, jury rig built a very complicated apparatus to control payments that Vaught already had. It's like he didn't need to touch the money. The important thing is don't touch the money, but he was like, he was too stupid and he touched it.

You just reaching into the like copper wiring of the federal government of pulling it out. And Vaught is like, no, I've already built all these apparatuses to do all this stuff. In fact, it was a bipartisan project to build this for 50 years, and I'm just taking control of it and decked it to my will and reshaped it to doing what I want, rather than the good governance shit that they claimed this system was built for. And so he must let the sur level look to like, why are you freaking everyone out?

Because, you know, in no small part because of my role, but other people too, people started randomly showing up and screaming at these people going, what the fuck are you doing? Like, they're telling us that you're, kill out blow everything up. And of course, I'm sure everyone involved was like, who are this fucking guy, who are these people, that's all bullshit. But nevertheless, like, none of them wanted to deal with this. Like, this was a crisis that broke out in like the first two weeks. Like, we started banging a lot of about this like January 31st. Like,

that's a really quick crisis. That's a really quick TTC time to crisis. Susie Wiles did not want to have phone calls about the most boring part of the Treasury. Now, I want to talk about what Russell Vought actually is controlling and the way he's changing it to sort of try to shape the machinery of the federal government more towards, let's say, his hyper-authoritarian ends. Because he's doing this as head of the OMB Office of the Management of Budget, and he's doing it in a way that's not scary or headline-grabbing because that was the problem. What Musk and his teens were doing was touching the money. It was frightening. It was also something weirdly that was kind of understandable because at the same time as they were doing it to like payments to New York City,

they were also doing it to stuff like scientific research, things that are easy to picture. They're doing it to the CDC. You can picture yourself shitting. Now a lot of people have to. But Russell Vought is doing it in a way that is not as overt, but is you could say about as damaging, at least in terms of his agenda being damaging. The big picture is as I was searing at this,

what clicks in my head and the specific reason that I say, that OMB already had built what Musk was trying to build, if he even had a coherent concept in his head, is that agencies don't just like, oh, Congress passes the legislation, in appropriation for an agency comes, and then suddenly the agency has a whole bunch of money. There's a recent piece with a couple of research fellows

who've been working with me on this, doing a great job. Juan Haynes and Josh Lawrence, I wrote about how you can kind of think of like Congress passing the law and the appropriations, meaning just like money that's been quote unquote appropriated for X or Y activity as a kind of congressional check. But the congressional check, you know, is no longer say like Treasury gets the, you know, gets the money and hands it out to different agencies in their bank accounts. Instead, what happens is for the last number of decades, like a kind of middleman has been

inserted in processing congressional appropriation. And this middleman is the office of management and budget. So nowadays, what happens when Congress passes the law, the office of management and budget, the OMB interprets that law. And it creates different appropriation accounts, is what they call it, for different line items, different types of funding for different agencies. And the crucial element of this is that the fact that they create these appropriation accounts, they also get to defy over the period that they're spent. So there's something called apportionment. So they don't have to release the money that an agency is granted for a full year all at once. They can divide it up. And in fact, they can define it up as thinly as they want. They usually do every three months,

but they could do per month. They could even do every single day. This we're releasing you little drabs of money to spend every day. You can imagine if someone can decide that you're only getting a certain amount of your money available each day, they have a lot more control over you than if you're just like processing the check and you just get all the money. But it's even more than that. So OMB is able to attach what are called footnotes. So they're able to just create conditions notionally within the powers that have been granted them, but nevertheless, to create conditions on how this money is spent in various different way. And, you know, I started to look at this and thinking, okay, these appropriation accounts, they're essentially money. They're just a kind of internal money of the federal government.

You know, whenever money needs to be sent to an external actor, to some contractor or whatever, the Bureau of Fiscal Service processes the payment. The payment goes out. So this money is not something that anyone outside of the federal government ever interacts with. Wait, are you saying the American government has Walt Disney bucks? I mean, essentially, the American government, the American government, has they have O&B bucks and they have to spend out of their own B account

and the Bureau of Fiscal Service will turn O&B bucks into, you know, U.S. dollars, money and bank accounts, so on, the money that we think of as money. They've got this internal, yeah, they've got this internal O&B bucks, you know, maybe they should put box space

on it, but yeah, they've got internal, just like an internal little money that is just for asserting a middleman between Congress and spending money out there. And notionally, it was to make these systems, quote, unquote, more efficient, reduced redundancies, but also, yes, for the presidency to be able to express its policy priorities by influencing what and how the money is spent, that Congress is already appropriate.

So then maybe this is where that rule comes in, which is, well, how, what are the conditions that we can put on on these accounts? because we can attach rules to the spending of Disney bucks, essentially. And what Russell Vaught appears to be doing, this is that two CFR 200, is changing the way that, yeah, Disney bucks are allowed to be spent by creating a huge amount of expensive and arbitrary additional bureaucracy. But I think more importantly, quite nakedly political review of what money is being used for. I'm going to do a quote from Notes on the Crisis, and this is from Phil Rocco, one of your co-authors. This is the sort of thing that has attracted attention for its potential to politicize scientific research, but the scope is far broader than that. Its application to state and local governments does nothing

short of using intergovernmental aid to create a new patronage system. Agencies, which the rule deprive of substantial discretion and adjudicating grant compliance can now terminate awards that do not align with the president's priorities. Most disturbingly, discretionary grants to state and local governments must now go through pre-issuance review, which means that political appointees will scrutinize proposals to ensure not that they are consistent with the statute's Congress has passed, but that they align with the prerogatives of the president. The rule arms agencies with new, vague, and easily politicized criteria to apply. These include ambiguous rules about a recipient's past, quote, questionable practices,

as well as risk factors not defined. Discretionary awards cannot be used, for example, to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate, among other things, any other initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values. And that's just left up to any, say, political appointee to determine. Right. there is other political additions as well. It's a reputational harm proviso. There are points in viewpoint discrimination, but also it franchises this out. Agencies can coordinate with private individuals or organizations to bring private actions against grant recipients.

Anyone might deem to be too un-American. Is that approximately the shape of it? Yeah. I mean, this is a huge, huge proposed role. Comments closed last week. There was like about 50,000 comments ultimately submitted. So like you can imagine, how. big a deal something has to be for 50,000 comments to be submitted on an O&B proposed role.

It's pretty amazing. And it's precisely because of this is that we're talking about, you know, the federal government makes nearly a trillion dollars of grants a year. And that is an enormous amount of money that goes to all sorts of things from science, from state and local governments. And to be able to, you know, traditionally the traditional concepts, and of course, it's never, been ideal like this, but nevertheless, was that civil servants were processing these grants, were making the decisions around them, that there was professional criteria that went into, that went into these grants. And, you know, a little bit of a good go-long to get-al thing with state and local grants where, like, well, we don't want our priorities to get screwed over

so much. So we're going to, you know, go light on your priorities and just sort of treat it as like, you know, state local governments red or blue. And what this is is a process of just purely trying to override that system. You know, Vought in essence wants to have direct control over what gets plants. So that means nothing LGBTQ, nothing woke, quote unquote, nothing gender ideology, nothing Marxism, nothing Green New Deal. All of that will be, you know, will be cut. These, these are the terms that are literally reused in the first executive orders that the Trump administration listed. And, you know, they mean anything remotely that could be put under any of those categories.

And they want full control. And not just do they want full control for bought, but they also want essentially to give a private right of action to let like the craziest bar right fascist organizations in the country to be able to sue grantees if, they come across a glance that they think is violating these rules that, like, is too woke or is to just like, you know, let's say basic competency oriented. So it's not just that like Walt wants direct control, but he also wants to let the lunious, you know, far right nonprofits to also be able to exercise control and oversight over who gets what funds. And so, yeah, I mean,

You can imagine, if you can directly control who gets a trillion dollar in funds and they have to do your bidding to get it, then we're talking about an enormous system of coercion for both private actors, state and local governments, et cetera. Like, you can imagine, for example, in like the most extreme cases, hey, if you state and local government aren't going to implement our views of election rules and also, hey, maybe a wink wink-wank declared that, you know, this person didn't win the presidency when they did, then, you know, you're getting all your funds cut off or this person didn't win them in terms when they did, you know, did they get their funds caught off. you know, that kind of direct control can get anything. All of that is possible if, you know,

this OMB Pro Pro's rule goes through and isn't tells in the courts or rolled back by Congress. Like, this is all stuff that is possible. And, you know, it kind of follows through from the unitary executive state, the idea that the president is supposed to have direct control over anything that goes on in the executive branch. Yeah, well, they seem to be trying to create an, not just an empire abroad, but an imperial system at home as well, right? Like, even in like the late Roman sense, where the Senate becomes a, you know, consultative body, but largely what the emperor wants.

If Congress doesn't have the power of the purse, if Congress has the suggestion of the purse, then we are fully in an internal and external imperial system with direct presidential. And that is we're talking about nothing less when we're talking about this stuff. Yeah. And just like when we were talking about like undermining things like payment finality, what we were talking about was an attempt to impart that control somewhere that touched off huge alarms when they attempted to extend into that area, partly because it was new, partly because they were doing other things and so on and so on. This is an attempt to extend that domestic imperial power to do almost the same thing just without setting off really quite so many. easily comprehensible alarms. You know, that's partly because, you know, the political immune system, if you like,

sort of the things like outrage, media cycles, elections, and so on, versus courts and agencies, right? Like the difference between something having a huge amount of political salience and the institutions that are able to then, you do something about it, that the institution's designed to, like, notice these kinds of problems are different from the ones that are designed to act on them. And that's what's, and those were temporarily brought into alignment. but the craziness of the Trump-Musk payments crisis of 2025,

but the Russell Vought imperial presidency crisis of right now, even though, yeah, there are 50,000 comments on this proposed rule change, it's not on the front page of every paper, like the sort of dismantling of the state under Doge was. It's still the realm of, let's say, interested parties and podcasters. Yeah. And to really highlight this, a big part of this is how decimated our media. system is that there's not really room for built in expertise. I mean, this is kind of in a way

very similar to the doge, like we're going to fire eight people and get down the three people, a three people thing with, you know, when now we're all shitting ourselves. It's, you know, this kind of happened first with the media, you know, media getting cut to the bone, you know, various profitability issues, getting bought out by private equity and such. Like, so there's no room for having like, you know, in the 1960s, you could open a dusty room and there'd be like smoke-filled everywhere and papers everywhere. And you'd go, hey, John?

And then it's like, ah, what do you want? And it would be a guy who's kind of lost his mind a little bit being on his own, but he knows everything there is to know about a specific thing. And you had that guy around for when it was important. And you take him out of the smoke-filled room and he would be like the font of knowledge you needed. for the biggest story on Earth,

but it requires that expert. That stuff is like we're, we're way past that era. And so what it means is, to the extent that there have been O&B stories, it has been basically from sources, from talking to Congress, like basically a combination of like whistleblowers

are talking to Congress, and the stories are fairly superficial, even if they get like the details of their specific story, right? Because no one has expertise on them. No one in Congress has expertise on OMB. You know, I've taught to congressional snappers who tell me, oh, yeah, you know, when there's something O&B related, they have some former official at the O&B, and he gives the O&B talk, which

is clearing up basic misconceptions about O&B. But there's no, like, staff that has, like, a congressional snap that has, like, a guy or three guys who knows everything there is to know about the OMB. You know, I'm talking to, I've talked to Senate budget staffers who are like, yeah, I don't really know about OMB. And it's like, okay. I mean, you know, as a result, like, Congress people literally don't know. Like, we had, I give this one quote from this Reagan OMB guy that's basically like, oh, it's like a knife in the back. You know, I could totally destroy this Congress person's priority and they won't even know anything, anything that happened. I could collect four billion more dollars in taxes and no one would

know where the revenue came from, like just through just like little things in the guts. The more you look at OMB, the more you're just like, it's so, so important and he exercises so much control. Like, just one of the stories we dug up from an oral history was this guy who retired as a high up in the state department started at OMB. And when he started at OMB in 1975, it was like his first job out of college and taking the fourth service exam. And he was put in charge of the entire line item, naval research and development, which was a $4 billion dollar line item at the time.

And he, you know, treated as a VIP, like, given all these, like, flyover missions and, like, you know, see the, you know, the latest naval boats and all this stuff and see all their, like, development facilities. And he's some 25-year-olds. And I did the math, $4 billion line item is 1.31% of Ford's proposed presidential budget for fiscal year in 1975. So, like, 125-year-old has control over more than $1.1.1.5 year old has control over more than 1% of the federal government's budget, just by virtue of their seat as a program examiner for

OMB. And like, they wield enormous, enormous power. And that was when it, you wielded an enormous power when it was like within the roughly within the constitutional framework we had. Yeah, that was before Russell Vought decided to sort of do what he's now doing with it. And now it's going to be, we're taking that 25-year-old and we're just like showing him, I don't know. He's say, hey, we freed Andrew Tate and he's going to do a flyover for you. Yeah. Or, yeah, they, it's going to be a 25 year old who posts Pepe memes and is like, well, what if we just didn't spend any money on boats that could go in cold water? I don't want us sending boats to near Russia. Maybe, maybe cold water is soy. Yeah, maybe cold water is soy now.

And I think that the Navy shouldn't be gay and soy. I think the Navy should be like Jack. and based. And now my good friend Russell has given me the legal basis to say, no more cold water boats, going in cold water is gay officially, according to the OMB. And so no more of that. Thank you. One other good thing to illustrate of how important this stuff is, is that like, this is like, the technical stuff around this is actually what the first Trump impeachment was about.

You know, the very famously, like Trump has a call. was Zelensky where he's like, you know, basically investigate Hunter Biden, more or less, you're not getting the money. But the technical way that that was done was that Vought, who was also head of OMB in the first term, but kind of getting to sea legs, learning how it all worked, just decided to start attaching footnotes to the specific line item, the appropriation account that was associated with giving Ukraine money for weapons and training. And just like, oh, after, you know, we're not going to release this money until, like an interagency committee is able to review this. And the date for that was like 16 days later.

And then 16 days later, it just releases a new footnote attached saying the same thing. And they just kept on doing that until like mid-sally September, where by the time it reached that point, there just wasn't enough time to spend like the money in that account. And so $214 million expired. And of course, Congress reauthorized and reappropriated the funds. But that was the technical form of denying Ukraine money that the whole, what the whole impeachment process was about. Now, of course, one way you look at this and go, oh, my God, this is so tiny nothing compared to everything that is come later.

But it's also interesting, like when you want to do something like that and screw with somebody and you want to try to hide it as much as possible, what you do is you do something very technical and boring with the O&B. Well, I think that is as good a place as any to leave it for today because that thought, the technical and boring is where they get you is, I think, true and has been true for a very long time. Nathan, it is always a pleasure to speak to you. Where can people find a little more of you? Well, I can find it, and my publication notes on the Cracies, uh, C-R-I-S-N-O-T-S dot com. And if you add a dash trash feature there, you can find a 50% off discount code on a subscription,

uh, for trash future listeners. That's right. Or people who are trying random combinations of letters on their keyboards and happen to get really lucky in a very specific way. I think some people Google it and find it too. Yeah. Uh, like I don't like these scratch nature guide, but I like my, like free money.

So I'll make it look good. Anyway, Nathan, thank you so much. Always a pleasure to speak with you. And I'm just going to hand back to myself in the future past and Maddie and Hussein just to say goodbye from there. See in a second. Ah, and what an interview it was. Maddie Hussein, I'm sorry that I muted you both and talked over you as well. It's okay.

I was trying to get Jensen Huang's phone number. Yeah, it's okay. I was actually looking at a replica jacket because I want to pull up one of these schemes myself. Yeah. Thank you everybody for listening to this episode of TF. We're going to be back as usual with the bonus on Thursday. And we will see you in a few short days. Maddie, what do you got?

What do you want these people to do? What do you got? I plug my podcast earlier. Go listen. Go buy my book, please. Simplicitybook. XYZ or in any fine place where books are sold. Yeah.

And hopefully in the next. six months. He can pre-rote of the next thing, but keep buying the old book because it needs to be bought. Maddie needs to buy all of Jensen Huang's wardrobe.

It's on theme because it is about utopian separatism and but in a way that is interesting not the way the Jensen Huang's jacket is doing it.

All right. Well, thanks everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.