TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* The Last Trudeau-mino to Fall feat. Luke Savage

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Luke Savage (@LukewSavage) joins the gang to talk all things Canada, and the drubbing the feckless Justin “Northern Gavin” Trudeau is anticipating from the one and only “Maple DeSantis,” Pierre Poilievre. Plus, we pay our solemn respects to (former) UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, the newest victim of America’s gun violence epidemic. Check out the book Luke co-authored here! Check out Michael and Us here! And get the whole episode on Patreon here! 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)

being a conservative Canadian meant that you were like an epic Alberta oil worker or like an IT guy at an oil company who has a big car and like you're obsessed with the idea that like some pansies in Ontario or BC are going to get upset with what you're doing. You're loving that. You're loving you're like, yeah, Trump's president of America. Fuck you. I bet you hate that. And now, but now like, I mean, we're're gonna talk about this later We might as well bring it up now the fact that Trump is like, oh, yeah We're gonna do 25 percent tariffs and everything coming in from Canada. They're like fuck I met this guy in Japan. I met a Canadian guy exactly like this We were in a bar and then you do that thing where they're like, oh like you're both English speaking Why don't you talk to this man? Cuz it's a very small bar and he's kind of like kind of normal for a bit. And then and then he starts talking to me. He's from Alberta, of course. And then he's like, and he's like, he's like, yeah, man, I'd vote for Trump

if I could. And then I'm like, and I'm like, but you but you can't because you're Canadian. And then he starts telling me about all of these like guns that he's bought specific that are illegal specifically to protest gun control. And I'm like like but it's not gun control in Canada you just never had guns like this isn't like this isn't like a new what are you protesting gun control in a different country by doing stuff that I presume if Britain is anything to go by is so illegal like the only like the ultimate Canadian conservative thing is thanking an ice guy for his service while he picks you up because you illegally immigrated trying to do January 6th. That's the ultimate Canadian conservative move. It's so fucking

ridiculous as an institution. They call that the maple descent. Well, it's because it's, especially as it is now, it's largely an outgrowth of the hydrocarbon industry in Alberta. Like the whole, like most of the funding for it is from like, from these like, you know, oil companies. Its political base is people who live on in oil company money Like the Alberta the reason they don't charge like provincial taxes is because of the is they have the oil industry There's this whole big like in the US so much conservative shit is again like the Koch brothers are you know? Like physical capital oil all this stuff

But there's so many steps between oil and conservative columnist politics. In Canada, it's like right fucking there. And so it ends up being like, you are a nationalist for the president of a neighboring country who's now directly threatening the industry upon which your entire politics rests out of like, spying. Well, maybe I had it coming, you know, maybe I was secretly woke and I didn't know. Yeah. Oh my God. They're like, everyone in Alberta is just going to like begrudgingly get a neo pronoun

to try to like atone. Anyway, I want to talk a little bit backwards. I want to talk a little bit about the news, which is of course the most important single event that's happened. Look, I know we don't like to talk too much about the great man, great man or woman theory of history, right? These, we should be focusing on material. Great men or women. And now we've got one more. I like the woke great man theory of history. Great man or woman. Great non-binary person theory of history. The great them of history. Of course. But

every person theory of history. The great they them of history. Of course. But sometimes, sometimes someone comes along like Napoleon or, you know, FDR who materially individually alters the course of history. And I think we just have to acknowledge Hawk Tuah turning into a crypto rug. That's right. No, the of course we are talking of course about the assassination, it seems, of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, the CEO of one of the largest health insurance providers

in the States, probably the most cruel, if you want to say, health insurance provider with the biggest individual body count in terms of denying claims, refusing to pay people. One of the more evil people. And that's in like, stiff competition. Well I hope he had life insurance. Pre-existing condition. That would be really funny if he didn't have life insurance. Yeah.

What are they gonna do? Shoot me? Yeah. So there was some speculation as to why this happened, of course. The company paid a pretty large ransom to a ransomware gang. He also oversees the highest level of claim denial in the entire decrepit US healthcare system. At 6.45 in the morning,

well, going to a meeting of shareholders was, brrrah, brrrah, absolutely, just was a plug. I mean, if you have the stomach for this sort of thing, and I recognize some people don't, we have some like squishier, more liberal fans who maybe don't wanna see a guy get executed on the street. But trust me, when I found out who it was and why it happened, squishier, more liberal fans who maybe don't want to see a guy get executed on the street. But trust me, when I found out who it was and why it happened, I did, and that video is clean.

Like, you are seeing someone get like, killed for good reason, which is, you know, a nice change given the amount of people getting killed for bad reasons in the world, by someone who appears to know what they're doing. Which is nice, you know? I think we used to call this praxis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't want to see the amateurs out there on the streets. So he was scheduled to speak at the annual investor conference for analysts and hedge funds beginning

at 8 a.m. Just really ruined that event, you know? Like even if you don't feel bad for the guy, you should feel bad for the institution because, you know, the analysts and hedge funds, they're, you know, they're missing an angel tonight. Yeah, they're missing their favorite act. They were like, oh, he's not going to speak about. I love his little routine. No, the stock went up. I guess he wasn't doing that good of a job. I mean, I guess like, shit.

Okay. The, you know, the market corrects for this stuff after all. Yeah. Maybe analysts were just like, look, he didn't deny enough claims. Look, they call it dead man's shoes, right? We need to get someone else who was going to be in. Someone's got to go get that guy's shoes. I'm the dumb guy who works at United Healthcare. Yeah, so there are a lot of different theories flying around. I want to sort of highlight a

few of them. They found in the course of this that the guy had written on the shell casings, what was it, like, deny, defund? Yeah, exactly. All the shit that insurance companies do to not pay your healthcare insurance. So I think that's a pretty clear motivation. I think this is a sign that whoever it is, as yes on court, and I hope they remain that way, was looking into the camera and saying that they were the exact same kind of communist that I am. I feel pretty good about this. What I'm surprised about is that this just doesn't happen more given that the United States is a country that is suffused with guns, that is high and soaring inequality. These are like the conditions that tend to cause political instability against like,

named elites. So the other thing though, right, is maybe he was a disgruntled policyholder or the relative of someone who was basically killed by neglect by the United Health. The thing about United Health Care is they disgruntled a lot of people. They disgruntled very few people because it's fundamentally a disgruntling business model. Colombo is going to have to go and interview 50 million people. Yeah, because even if you have a good experience with your health insurance company, that's in relation to someone getting sick or injured.

And that's something that you want the profit most of far away from. You're never going to say, oh, hey, this guy took my money to pay for my chemotherapy. But he did it in a really nice way, so I couldn't fault him for that. The other thing to note is United Health is the worst offender for getting a sort of large dubious payments from the government Medicare Advantage program. So maybe he was just trying out for a job at the Department of Government Efficiency. Maybe one's worth three, one must. Only the top 1% of applicants will be considered.

We're holding tryouts. Was it not United Health that recently announced that they're no longer fully covering people's anesthetics when they have like, under the knife. That was Blue Cross Blue Shield. Okay. But like, what I'm saying is this guy has a lot more bicycling to do. Also we could mention as well that United Health was one of the adopters of like an AI system that's built to deny claims.

Cause insurance, if you're going in the business of mass insuring a population that's pretty unwell, then you have to find ways to deny as many claims as possible so you can make sure that you're making enough money. And it's difficult and expensive to fight back against an insurer. And many of the people who will have their claims denied will go on to die and then be unable to fight back against the insurers. They just have to delay it for as long as possible. So it's again like, I think what I've seen flying around is the quote about the two terrors, right?

Oh, the Mark Twain one. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The two terrors, the sort of the 10,000 years of grinding terror of, you know, basically being killed by social neglect in an appropriate way that, that creates all of this upsurge of pressure that then is released. And then the people who, you know, perpetrating the 10,000 years of terror like, ah, now there's terror that it's being visited upon us. Right. And you know, it's the, you're, you're, I guess you're just surprised that, you know, it happening so infrequently then because there is so much inequality,

so much pressure is sort of itself surprising. And you know, you wonder why there aren't more like kill dozers and why the killdozer guy was so particularly right-wing. The killdozer guy, as you say, was kind of like a right-wing libertarian. And I've been wondering about this too, why this has kind of been like the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime, right? Why this has happened so seldom, right? And I'm not sure that I have an answer. You know, the story with the killdozer guy, why he didn't succeed and why there haven't been like, I don't know, people working more, you know, firmly within the

kill dozer tradition. Two reasons. One, he did like build a fucking tank, right? Like he turned a bulldozer into like a tank and that's like not, I think that is like beyond the average person's technical abilities. I think it's like he was like an engineer or something. But secondly, I'm pretty sure Ronald Reagan died like a few hours into his rampage. Then the news just became that. And it was not until the Netflix documentary that he got his due as one of like the weirdest kind of spree shooter adjacent people in American history. Mason- He starts his spree and then Reagan dies and they're like, in American history.