TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* The Century of American Playsets feat. Nathan Tankus

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

Trump’s touching the money! Nathan Tankus, the Fed whisperer, returns to talk about the political economy of dying empire, specifically as it relates to some of its more important (if somewhat… evil…) institutions. Also, we talk about the ongoing assault on the mental health of vulnerable people by chatbots. Check out Nathan's writing here! Get the whole episode on Patreon here! TF Merch is still available here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Before we actually dive really far into this topic, I wanted to talk about one more crucial news item. It's probably, I think, one of the more important things going on right now. And it's actually one of the ways that Donald Trump is delivering, not just for Americans, but for people around the world. Okay. Making my a Zen pic 150% more expensive. Thank you, Donnie. Well, no, it's that, look, I don't know if you all notice this, but Intel flattened their logo in 2020. They took away the fabulous oval that everybody loved, and they just had a flat app-friendly logo in 2020. And now, what's he done?

He's taken a 10% share of the company for the U.S. government. And I think Intel's going to be changing their logo back sooner than a lot of people think. Intel had a flaccid logo. We're going to go back to the hard logo, the nice, the viral logo. The viral logo. You're going to get back. Intel inside. You knew it was going to work with Age of Empires.

I feel so sorry for Sydney, Sweeney. amount of ads which he's going to have to do when he keeps taking over these companies. Yeah. Intel has good code. Yeah, that's right. I mean, look, this is sort of going on in terms of like the serious or politic, direct personal party political intervention in the economy is going on in terms of the laughable where it's like, you know, Florida Congressman Byron Donald is like, I gave my life to Christ in the parking lot of a cracker barrel and now they've changed their logo. You know, their logo was iconic and their unique restaurants were a fixture of American culture. No one asked for this woke

rebrand. It's time to make Cracker Barrel great again. People are saying that's the funniest reaction to the Cracker Barrel go to and from logo change. However, I found a funnier one, which was this was a YouTube comment. Uncle Herschel was the cracker, the guy in the Cracker Barrel logo. Uncle Horshal was the Cracker Barrel old country

store founder Dan Evans's real uncle. They deleted the founder's uncle. Yeah, because it woke. Yeah, they're getting rid of uncles up and down. They literally said goodbye to his uncle and we're just okay with this? Well, also, like, in the same way that, you know, they've flattened, like, the Intel logo and they've gotten rid of the uncle from the cracker barrel, they've also, like, you know, popular culture has also shortened the uncle to Unk. Now everyone's calling themselves Unk. I was really angry about this because I'm just like, no, like, an uncle is a very noble position to be in. It's a very honorable. You're very privileged to sort of like be an uncle and you should sort of state that you are not an Unk, you are an uncle.

Yeah, that's right. You're not miscellaneous. I love the traditional culture of a 1969 Shell subsidiary. designed to sell more gas. Yeah, it's like, it is a simulation of an old-timey general store. It's a pastiche, and this pastiche is no longer authentic. They have ruined my pastiche that I love so much. I would hate to have my pastiche ruined, you know? Yeah. And it's like so much of like non-material politics is now down to being advertised to

because that's how so many people experience the world. It's a world of freedom where all he can do is exercise, different personal consumer choices. I mean, listen, at least where I would have pushed back on this stuff now, remember when they killed Mr. Peanut? They killed Mr. Peanut. They deleted his uncle. You know, and this conservative, a conservative backlash to a made-up thing that just involves changing a logo to make more, to fit better on an app. They tell each other's stories about how

the world has gone communist. And you can tell because the Cracker Barrel app is different. I mean, it's, I was saying this to some of my, you know, friends who I sort of talk to about this stuff occasionally, it's like the best way to understand the vast majority of political life in global North developed rich countries, you'd ever want to call it. it that currently are experiencing declines in relative power and expectation of living standards mass constant hallucinations.

But really what I want to talk about here is not really cracker barrel. It is actually Intel because I think there are some common themes between what's happening with the Federal Reserve and what's happening with Intel and what's in the relationship between government and the economy. Intel occupying the role of like the

priest of the computer, which is similar to the money in the sense that everything depends on it remaining outside of Donald Trump's kind of grubby control. Well, indeed. He's touching the computer or he's going to touch the computer. He's going to get in there and he's going to touch your shit.

He's going to switch out your RAM. But what he is doing is he saying, well, look, the Chips Act under Biden just gave a whole bunch of grants to Intel. I think that's a bad deal for the U.S. government. If we just give grants to private enterprise, we should take a stake in it. And again, this just like taking direct control of

like a central bank by like sort of being like no i want my friends on it who agree with what i want who's going to who are going to politically control the money to my ends right that it's considered to be again in the sort of liberal the liberal model you know the governance of america whatever that's considered to be utterly beyond the pale and is being like no though the government exists to socialize risk and privatize wealth it doesn't exist to you know take public control of private companies and have sort of claims in future earnings and you know i guess i sort of go back to Nathan, which is like, I guess I see these two things in parallel, which is the right, the right wing revolution that has been brewing for 40 years that sort of almost like sent,

sent the neoliberal world in as its shock troops to sort of financialize and worsen everything. Those shock troops are now being surpassed. They're now being moved past, right? Where it's like, okay, well, the right wing revolution now wants to take direct control of the money because we know we can be trusted with it. The right wing revolutionary is willing to take control of a, take a stake in a private enterprise because it's like, no, we know that we're not going to use. this for some kind of pinko-communist ends. We're going to use this to like fight China, right? I think there's a lot of truth in that. And I think the thing I would emphasize, this is about like the personalization or like the familialization of government. You know, there's always the

classic talking about like the government is not a household. The government is not a household. But like, you know, a common form of the state throughout history is, you know, what you might call household states, meaning the whole country is kind of just an extension of some. royal or religious household, whether it is the King of England or the Catholic Church or, you know, the Sultan in the Ottoman Empire. And, you know, when you see an empire degrade, often what it is is the familialization of the professional. Like the late Ottoman Empire is a classic example of this, where things were more and more about the personal enrichment of the Sultan that encroached on a professional system. And I think that's what we're seeing with

this. So it's not just that like, oh, we the right wing revolutionaries aren't going to do the bad things by taking inequity stake in Intel. It's specifically, I am Donald Trump. I am 10% in Intel. Like you see the way he talks about it. He's not thinking, oh, the federal government has, you know, a stake in Intel. Like Trump, I think legitimately, if he was like leaving office in 2028, and even that's like a big question mark, but if he was like, hypothetically, if he's just leaving office rather than the third term or I'm officially king forever or whatever, he'd be like, what do you mean? I can't take my intel shares. Because he'd just be like, those are mine. I mean, that's the same thing of him getting the like jet from Qatar. It's like,

well, no, it's not just the federal government is getting it. I'm going to get it at the end of this. And it wouldn't be that surprising if he's like, like, I'm going to come home with the Soma portfolio. I'm going to take the bonds. I get them at the ends. And so, like, you take over the Federal Reserve and he gets to literally keep, like, you know, four trillion dollars of treasury securities because I bought them. They're mine. How do you think I'm going to fit a jet in a presidential library? I should just take it. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's the personalization of government. And that's also, like, the legal stuff. The legal, what's been going on, you know, with, you know, the kind of full implementation of right-wing legal theories of, like,

the unitary executive, you know, the idea that, like, oh, we don't have these independent and administrative agencies that can engage with policy independently the president. Everything that goes on in the quote-unquote executive branch is of the personal purview of the president. That's about the householdification of government. And so even just like the broad legal theories, whether or not they conceptualized it this way, and they were just thinking, oh, we just need a strong president who's going to murder all the brown people. It's specifically like the way it's played out and especially, you know, coming to fruition through Donald Trump is Donald Trump as a person like the government is his plaything. And, you know, this elected king concept is in practice what it comes to, it also just, you know, it's Trump's personal household.

You know, there's more limitations on what Trump can do with his company than there is what he can do with the federal government at this point. I do wonder, you know, if you were to ask, you know, like Dick Cheney, just like, hey, but all that, all that stuff you did, the things you don't, the actual evil you don't care about, but it did allow, it did create the system that allows this one very embarrassing real estate idiot to sort of, you know, go in and just like, you know, have fun fucking around with the Fed, you know, you, you have created the century of American humiliation. We've created the century of American playset, essentially. Yes.

Like, this is the fun thing about the kind of thing is you might think, oh, it seems terrible, huge kind of post-Soviet vibes, massive decline in, like, quality of life and everything. True, certainly. However, you're going to see what people, different people, not just Trump, get to do with all of the toys. And there, you know, there has been a long period of building the toys. And it's going to be like, you know, the post-Soviet aspect of like, did my boss just get blown up with, like, Semtex? Did somebody just like deploy an experimental, like chemical weapon that they had left over in a basement for 20 years? And the answer was going to be, yeah, probably. I think Dick Cheney's

personal opposition to Trump, I think a lot of it is based on a feeling that I think goes beyond jealousy. I think it's a blood-curdling blood lust and a frustrated bloodlust. Like he's got like mass murdered blue balls watching Trump just like he's just imagining all of the people that he could murder and all the territory he could take and all the like oil rights that he could get control

of and mineral rights or whatever the hell if only he had had that level of the unitary executive theory he's like this is my been my dream this has been what everything's about it and this guy who's unworthy of it has it I think in his mind he's like

having like these Burkean fantasies about Trump and that's why he seems to be the only one of like the old guard who actually cares about opposing Trump.