TRASHFUTURE - Tank! feat. Victoria Scott

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Once again, it seems like tariffs are going to slice the North American auto industry into ribbons while it simultaneously tries to make buying some of the only good cars in the world illegal. Victoria Scott from Tran Girlismo takes us through the decline of the American auto industry (for non freaks) and the rise of the American auto industry (for freaks) augurs the wheels coming off the broader American project. Also November’s back and we look at some of the early days of living in Greatest Manchester. Check out Tran Girlismo here! Get more Trashfuture 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 week's free TF. Nova is back. I'm back. Welcome back. Nova. I don't recognize this country anymore. I came back from 10 days away and I left, you know, when everything made sense. And now, you know, I got into the airport and, you know, people were just like drinking bitter everywhere. Everyone had like a sort of a whip it on a string. It's like, you know, it's untenable what's happening. I don't. I'm a stranger in my own country now. Can I ask, would you say you didn't leave the north, the north left you? I would say so, yes.

You would say that? Yeah, I would say that. Yeah, very much so. So, welcome Nova, of course, to greatest Manchester, which is now what we're calling the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It's Riley, it's Nova, it's Hussein. And we are joined by repeat guest, perennial fan favorite. It is Tran Girlismo's very own Victoria Scott here to talk to us about the North American

auto industry as a kind of general synecdoche for the decline of the entire project, Victoria. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, if you want to understand why my society is shooting itself in the head. Looking at how we sell cars is a really good way to understand it. When you messaged me, you didn't say head. No, I said, well, no, because it's specifically the most recent thing is, you know, the whole, we've got bipartisan support to ban every Chinese car from our shore forever. And that specifically, I have called the shoot your own dick off bill. Honestly, Donald Trump did say transgender for everybody. That's true.

Rampaging through the city. Here in Seattle, we're working on that as a promise. Now, weirdly, it's been like, it's been a hugely car couple of weeks in as much as Tesla's earnings are out. We have had this, like, huge trend now be covered in terms of even upper middle class people trying to, like, put cope cages on their cars. And also, as you say, the shoot. your own dick off bill. It's kind of a two-part thing. A, yes, we are trying to ban every Chinese

electric vehicle, the place that's making the next type of car that there will be. Sort of the, you could say the shoot your own dick off bill or the, hey, everybody, go attack the sea. And, of course, Trump responding to all of that by massively increasing the tariffs on automakers in Canada and Mexico, thereby utterly. siloing the North American auto industry, which it hasn't been since, I don't know, 1987. Yeah, the shoot your own balls off act. Yeah.

Well, look, one's in the House, one's in the Senate. They have to be called something different. They have to reconcile. At some point, Bill Clinton decided that, like, you know, all of the stuff that gets made in Detroit, half of it should get made in Windsor, and then they should truck it back and forth

for, like, you know, American-Canadian friendship. And now, you know, that was, those were the balls, right? now the bulls are being sort of like obliterated. Yes. I mean, look, before we get into it, like, just as a piece of table setting, there has been no greater symbol of prosperity and industrial dominance of the sort of greater American project than the car.

Yeah. It is the ultimate symbol of the entire project. And through a series of entirely self-inflicted injuries, it looks, and again, I turn to Victoria on this one, the entire. entire premise of mass affluence as demonstrated by universal, possibly multiple car ownership, has never been more dead, not just from the demand side, but for the first time, from the supply side. Yeah, well, it's, the American auto industry in a very, very brief nutshell, where I'll try not to, like, spoil the stuff we talk about later is just, I, there was an article I did for

the Trangrilismo Patreon that we talked about, where I went through all of the Fred data, which is the Federal Reserve of St. Louis banks sort of like internal inflation reporting on the American market, and it has basically never been more expensive to operate a car, own it, insure it, get it fixed. The only thing that's actually cheaper

than it has been in the past is gas right now. Everything else, cars are at a historic high. I mean, the average car in the U.S. sells for right around 50 grand, and it's stayed there since COVID, roughly, you know, with maybe a few thousand up or down. And average used cars are now at 30,000. thousand dollars or above with like loan lengths are incredibly long the interest rates on those loans are incredibly long there's a increasing proportion of them are subprime uh so like nobody can

really afford to buy them and part of this is because since i would say since covid a lot of manufacturers have kind of realized if you if you follow like the high end car market right um you're astin martins your Lamborghinis your ferraris whatever uh you'll notice that a lot of those automakers have kind of they don't really care as much about making their sort of entry level supercars anymore, like getting you in the door and into your first supercars to become like a loyal buyer of that brand. What they care about is making, you know, 10, 15, 100, whatever, special, incredibly rare cars they sell for and basically an infinite amount of money that are sold out before they're even announced to the public, that they go to the same like, you know, 50, 100 rich

collectors, they get shoved in a warehouse somewhere. And the logic behind that is that they realize they can make more money, you know, developing one special edition of a car that they only have to build 100 of, and they can sell for, you know, 10 million bucks a piece versus having to figure out, like, volume manufacturing and making a smaller margin on their, like, lower-end cars. That has come for the lower-end car market is kind of, like, my sort of understanding of how things are going. And so, like, there is so much choice if you have a hundred grand to blow on a car today.

It's, like, the best time to buy a car. There's ever been. But if you are, like, a normal person who's, like, I have $26,000 and I would like to buy a car. You have like five options. Like legitimately, there are, there are, I think, I wrote this down somewhere and, you know, this is going to be an estimate, but I think there are seven cars for sale in America right now that are under 25K as a starting price. Well, I mean, that would be really bad if the 60 day delinquency rate for subprime auto loans wasn't hovering near historic highs approximately 7%. Yes. Oh, I have some bad news. It is. Okay. It is. It is that is a subprime auto loan delinquency rates are

approximately 7%. It's sort of difficult for me because I've been busy focusing on the sort of bad newsline on whether or not the strays of Hormuz is open or not. But you've got like a phone to each ear and each one is a different bad news line. Yeah. Well, when we started our trend girliesmo podcast, I was kind of like, I guess I'll talk about cars or whatever. And it very rapidly became a, oh, no, this is about the collapse of empire because it's just, there is no angle you can look at the modern American auto market.

not say, like, we've lost the plot. We only build cars for rich Americans. We are Galapagosing ourselves into, you know, all we, all an American automaker knows how to do is like build Dodge Ram, eat hot chip and lie, basically. And nobody else in the world is going to be buying, you know, a 70-foot-long pickup truck that gets eight miles ago. I don't, I don't pay a lot of attention to this, but I have noticed that the sort of median American new cars use case does seem to be like domestic terror attack. Well, it's domestic terror attack or look like you're masculine enough

to perform a domestic terror attack. Yeah. I mean, despite all the best efforts of like Olivia Rodriguez and driver's licenses didn't work out. It's like, nope, the car is now. The car is a weapon. Sorry, it's not going to be,

we're not doing the sort of fucking slice of life shit. The car is a weapon. She hasn't mentioned cars ever again. And like if you're just curious for an idea of how bad it is, if you are not intimately familiar with the American car market. This was Edmund's data back in like, oh, I want to say this was April. The 20% of new car buyers in the US have a

monthly payment of a grand or more. Like, fully, fully almost a quarter of new car loans are 84 months or longer. Like, people are paying these off longer than the life of the car. Yeah, it's like, what I'm in is in a kind of, like, predatory semi-surfdom relationship in order to drive the car that I could perpetrate

domestic terror attack in if I wanted to. What's cool is as well, because the average new car loan is a grand. Average income for a full-time worker before taxes, five grand. What's rent? Is it like $200? I assume it's $200. Hold on. I'm trying to fumble like three phones here at this point.

Like, you've got to stop hanging in these phones. Sorry, this is a new phone. A new phone has entered the chat. Anyway, look, we are going to be talking about, especially because there has been a huge new development in the auto industry in the states, which is essentially Donald Trump deciding to continue siloing it between Canada, the states in Mexico, to this bipartisan bill, as Victoria mentioned, to ban essentially the most innovative new technologies in making cars because they're Chinese and therefore sneaky. Yeah. Donald degrowth Trump. I mean, honestly, I'm glad he's doing

it, I guess. They call him Mr. 15-minute city. We're going to be getting to that. But I'm aware, you're aware, we're all aware. We have a new prime minister in Britain and I wanted to address this very briefly. There is a car angle, of course. But the new UK government is slowly taking shape. And I do not have a huge amount to say about it quite yet because it appears to be, can I just shock you, in a roughly similar shape to the last one in terms of ministerial appointments,

what the priorities are, promising to cut benefits, which I'm so glad someone has tried. You have to meet this with kind of. Postal apathy, I would say. Do not become the kind of rube who looks at this and goes, ooh, but they do things a little differently here. It's the same people. It is absolutely

depressingly identical. The deference to Trump is the same. The willingness to attack transgender people, people claim benefits. Oh shit, I'm one of those. The usual punching bags of the most venal expression of the British state,

Andy Burnham has shown exactly Please zero willingness to change tack on any of those. And so I'm willing to restate what we said weeks ago. Andy Burnham is not the guy. No, no, of course not. He's not the guy. But he is like so unsurprisingly not the guy that if you feel rug pulled by him, whether that's now or next week or next year, you have only yourself to blame.

You know? Yeah. 100%. You know, maybe he will surprise us, but I fucking doubt it. Yeah. Like he appoints Miliband as his foreign secretary, who's very critical of Israel. then, like, he takes a call from Donald Trump and then says, we're going to let the U.S. Air Force fly missions over Israel from our base in Cyprus still. Yeah, well, I mean, Miliband's foreign secretary is interesting, but it's a climb down from Miliband as chancellor because, you know, he got sort of bullied out of that one. And even then, it's not like, I don't say this was any particular animus towards him. I think putting your faith in Ed Miliband as your hope for, like, change within the system is optimistic, let's say.

Yes, it's a lottery ticket. And I think it is funny that they put Mr. Army in charge of the Treasury because before he was Mr. Army, he was Mr. Treasury. And again, like the same thing. O Yvette Cooper takes West Streetings, all places, health secretary. West Streeting has taken Mr. Army's place as defense secretary. Because like the great thing about the UK is everybody who's a real person, which I guess is 24 people maybe in the country, just gets to have a go.

Yeah, all of the same like, you know, a couple of dozen people who were at Unified. university together, get to try their hand at this. The defense angle is interesting in the sense that moving the former defense secretary to the exchequer is maybe suggestive that the army wants to start touching the money. I think they're going to run into the same problem that Starma did, which is that there is simply not that much money left to touch. Yeah, there is, if you are unwilling to be confrontational with someone other than the poor immigrants or like transgender people.

There's not a lot of money there. You have to be confrontational with someone else. Exactly. And I mean, I've talked up the fact before that I'm, you know, slightly more hawkish than a lot of people on the left about defense funding, right? But military Keynesianism does not work, right? It's like one of the few forms of public investment that doesn't have a sort of broader sort of public good attached to it very much, right? Like, it's so if the idea is, well, we're going to try the forbidden idea of the government spends money, but only on defense, right? Then it's going to run into the exact same ditch all over again. But, you know, at least this time it's going to have a slightly different, you know, regional inflection on it. So that's going to be fun. Finally,

we're going to do things a little differently, which means we're going to take the same meal, but you're going to get less of it for proportionally not less money, and it's going to be on a smaller plate, and we suggest you share it. Yeah. And of course, meanwhile, the actual conditions, for like any normal person to getting that much more desperate, but also everyone has become so deranged about politics that even if you were Andy Burnham and you wanted to do any of the sort of like

really like side stuff, like nothing too important, like rearranging a deck chair here or there, quick wins, right? Say if you wanted to do something like, oh, I want to cap bus fares, right? It's not that expensive to do that. It's a good idea.

And it's one of those things that it's not going to move the needle that much, but it will actually improve some people's lives, then a lot of people who don't take the bus will decide that actually you are doing gay Antifa shit to them. Wouldn't you know what, Nova, and bringing it back to Carworld, I have some quotes. So like, like Nova mentioned, I'll just bring it back for a little table setting and go back into it, which is Burnham has made some commitments. Some of it appears to be the usual starmerist fiddling around the edges stuff, like cutting that

on energy bills. Some of it appears to be like impactful, like ending rough sleeping. If he can do it, which by the way, he didn't in Manchester. No, no, very much. Manchester, I would say the British city that is like, in my experience, most immediately affronting with the amount of street homelessness. Yeah. So maybe he's got a new, maybe he has like the money hose.

He can do a new plan, but based on everything else he said, I doubt it. And or some of it is the bus fare cap, which has been Vox popped relentlessly by what I can only imagine is Paul Daker in a series of wigs. Because we have Kier Starmor, but with different hair and a different accent and like doing things a bit differently. And one of his things, part of his brand is being Mr. Bus. Right. He's the Buses guy.

So he's going to fix the buses. So he said, national cap for bus fares at two pounds. And again, this is a genuine horrifying scandal in the UK, which is that privatization of buses outside of London has meant that sometimes a single way bus fare is. fair if you are in Birmingham or in not Manchester because it's been taken into public control, quote unquote. Say like notting him. You're like outside of London.

Yeah, Nottingham. It can cost like four pounds, five pounds. Like it is genuinely scandalous. Yeah. And of course, the provision that you get for that is also very bad, right? Because these are like profit seeking entities running them. So they're going to just extract that profit. So one of the easiest things and cheapest things you could do in Britain is say, we shouldn't

do that anymore. which he is committing to do. And again, I am never going to defend Andy Burnham, but between Andy Burnham and the British media, I hate the British media more. And so I will choose my side thusly, which is the British media, especially Sky and the BBC,

appear to be on a crusade, and this is we're going to bring Victoria back in because it is about car-brained people, to rubbish Andy Burnham's plan to do this by suggesting, and I am now quoting a BBC, your voice, Vox Pop.

Bus fare cut is no good for those who drive, says Durham, ma'am. Mark Tate, who lives near Durham, tells the BBC the bus fare caps make a little difference to him. Quote, this is great if you use the bus, but no good for those who drive. Yet again, the working class person is left out. You stupid cut, you live in a society. This is how everything works, is that no one is using all the stuff all the time. You use enough of the stuff that everyone pays for. together, you live in a society.

I don't know what to tell you. It's just this to-saw fucking ablation of the top layer of your brain. Like you've just run it through a fucking bandsaw to go, well, yeah, this is, you know, potentially useful to someone who isn't me because I don't have object permanent. And as, you know, that sort of person, I'm not presently on a bus, so that appears to do fuck all for me. You could get the bus later. There could be a version

of you that gets the bus. There could be someone that you want to be able to get the bus, like for instance, to get to work, to pay some taxes, to fund the public services that you do use, unless you imagine that you live in a perfectly frictionless, colorless, airless vacuum in which occasionally a fucking

bus goes past and you think thank God I don't have to pay for that because I'm not using it. Now, Nova, can I offer you a counterpoint? Have you considered that much like the only working class decades to be born in are 1960,

1970 and everything before them? I didn't even address the working class bit of that. I'm just struck with a kind of solipsism last seen in like certain 18th century French kings. Oh, that'd be like, oh, that palace, that's fine, because I'm not presently occupying.

So the thing about Mark Tate is that every time he goes to Durham to like, I don't know, get a coffee, let's say, the baristas seem to occupy a lot of these people's attention. The barista lives in the coffee shop. Yes. And goes to sleep in the bathroom. Every time I like open my eyes, the world is instantiated in front of me exactly as it always has been, right? And so no one needs to get the bus anywhere.

It's just a funny little thing that happens in my peripheral vision. Well, no, like, like, like the only working class decades to be born in is like 1970 and before. We were learning also is that the only, and we also know the only working class place to live is a car dependent suburb not near London. Yep. Yeah. The only working class amount of money to make is approximately 60 to 80,000 pounds a year. Well, no, the only working class amount of money to make is the exact personal allowance. And then you just do everything else in cash, right?

But like, yes. Yeah, exactly. And so, of course, The real thought here is that what Mark Tate means, right, is working class means, I am a separate individual node totally self-reliant, and anyone supported by the state is being propped up like an aristocrat, as well as actual aristocrats, who, by the way, I'm desperate to have lorded over me. I don't need to get a bus anywhere because I am an island, and everything human is alien to me.

What a lonely fucking existence. That must be, to be like, actually, I kind of prefer it here completely untouched by any human interaction whatsoever. No. Victoria. Yes. You're a student of carbrain. Yes. How car brained is this?

But how Britishly car brained? It's interesting because, like, you know, my experience with the UK was like, wow, this is a utopian society in which public transit reaches even the most, like, outer limits. You have been spoiled by me taking you on the train to Ed and. once and I was almost missing it and you're going, when's the next one? I assume not for two or three days. And when I told you 20 minutes, you almost had like a seizure. Yes, that's correct. That's for American listeners.

That's actually what it's like. Yeah, yeah. Everything else is bad. I mean, we also took a train to like Locke Lomond and that was like, that came like every hour or something. And that's like that was, that's insane. That's insane. We don't have that here.

So like this, I think the thing about it, this is obviously incredibly carbureened. In the U.S., like there is actually a case we made that most middle-class people do drive to work because only, I think, 3.9% of Americans take transit to work every day. 80% of them commute via car. Like, it's, it's in, the amount of car brain here is, like, terminal. Uh, you have an earlier case of it. So what's, what's good to do is when you have situations that are driving people away from the bus, like having these insanely expensive fares that kind of reduce the economic case for taking it, you cut it. And the thing is, like, you know, they're in the U.S., we've, we've got a lot of this coming. We've had kind of,

like service cliffs. And in these cases, you enter this sort of trap where you cut service or you make the bus more expensive or you make it worse in some kind of notable way. And you lose those people basically instantly and they go buy cars and they don't come back and check cross shop the bus a month later, right? Like those are lost customers. So to get them to come back, like to get them to come back to transit, it takes a while of doing things like this, which is smart policy. And so like even if there is not a single person in the entirety of the UK who actually currently takes the bus. This is still a good idea because you are eventually going to

recapture people who are going to shift their personal travel habits and it will have, you just have to be able to think more than like 20 minutes ahead for you particularly. We don't do that here either. Like, what do you think we are? China? Yeah, well, and that's the thing is like this is

actually a good policy and it would like we did the same thing here in Seattle where we cut the price to like three bucks for KCM buses, King County Metro and capped it there for the for the meantime. It's not the same kind of privatization stuff, but we are coming up on like a service cliff, and it is one of those things that's like we have to figure out some way around this, because if we end up cutting the amount of stuff required to keep the buses solvent into the coming

years, no one will use it anymore. We'll take the gold standard of a bus system on the West Coast and destroy it instantly. And it's just because like you lose these riders and they do not come back for a long time. So, you know, but I assume that Mark Kate has not thought about this. Weirdly, the BBC interviewed people who fit into this category. They interviewed another couple, I think in the West Country, who said something in the lines of, we used to use the bus, then it got so expensive so we needed to reorient our lives around a car, and now they're capping bus fares, and we just feel forgotten. And the BBC is, or I think it's Sky, is pitching that as Andy Burnham is picking favorites.

He's not governing for everyone, when everyone is always assumed to be a relatively high-earning car owning white heterosexual couple with 2.2 children. And anyone who does that and no longer uses public transit is assumed to be normal. You can sell a car, right? Like you're allowed there? Sorry, to whom? The king? So you can like, if you are interested in media studies and you want to look at media bias,

the last couple of weeks in the UK has been utterly instructive in terms of sheer car enthusiasm. I would say, in response to the idea that buses should no longer be extortionate. And again, in the alien versus predator of the Labor Prime Minister Andy Burnham versus the British media, I know who I hate more. Yeah, we are going out there to defend Andy Burnham like those South Korean Marines entering the DMZ or the Klamour mine strapped to our forehead, right? We're brandishing pickax handles, right? Well, and our version of this in the U.S.

just for an idea of how terminal our car brain is, is, you know New York City, right? Oh, duh. Is it the windy city? Oh, sorry, you mean like other Chicago. Yeah. Okay. So, do you mean, sorry, Victoria, do you mean Tinsletown? You asked them?

Well, the thing is, is like, I would call it one of the biggest cities and cultural capitals of the world, except for their entire history, they've been putting all of their garbage bags raw on the sidewalk. Yeah. We're familiar with Eric Adams' trash revolution here. Yeah, which, of course, Eric Adams never got anywhere with it. So Mamdani came into office and was like, we're going to actually do it. Yeah, he made the bins work. Yeah, yeah, because New York doesn't have alleyways.

They have to put the dumpsters somewhere, so they're replacing street parking with dumpsters so that you can put your garbage bags in something instead of leaving them, like, leaching garbage shoes all over the sidewalk in the middle of summer where it's like 90 degrees. Seems smart. Do you think you're too good for garbage shoes in the middle of summer? Yes.

Sounds pretty middle class to me. Yeah. The New York Post found like six people to interview who were like, can't we just put our trash things somewhere else? I'm using the phrase trash things here because that is a direct quote from the New York Post's interviews about this. Like the Vox Pop hits here are like, if you take away a free parking spot, one of them, in like the densest city on earth in which like one of the densest cities in America at least, where it's the only place where most people use transit in all of the United States,

they will still be like, we found somebody who identifies as working class and drives everywhere. And you have decided to fuck them over personally because you didn't give them a free parking spot directly in front of the place they work. As a car enthusiast, it brings me no pleasure to say this. Yeah, I mean, as a transform, it brings me no pleasure to sort of strap the Andy Burnham, Claymore Mind to my forehead. But, like, ultimately, sometimes you have to, like, sublimate your own sort of, like, politics, politics isn't a taxi.

Politics is a bus, right? In the sense that you have to be able to imagine yourself using it. Look, here's the thing. You have to strap a Claymore Mind to your head for someone. Is it going to be the person who appointed Bridget Phillips and Education Secretary? Or is it going to be gestures at everything since 2015? Well, of course, there's always the, uh, the Ed Davy Martyr's Brigades.

L. Davy. I want to talk about one more news item before we get to our core topic, which is, of course, Tesla has announced their most recent earnings. Can I give you some numbers, please? I hope Elon's handling all of this well and not having kind of testy interviews

with anyone about it. Well, so the cyber truck has been projected to sell a quarter million units a year. In retrospect, in its first full year, it delivered 39,000. and then last year it delivered 20,000. Didn't that also involve a lot of like Tesla selling to itself or subsidiaries or SpaceX? Yeah, thank you so much for asking November.

4,000 of the 20,000 went to SpaceX. Thank you. Thank you so much for asking. That's the statistic there. Every SpaceX employee has to kind of like ghost ride two cyber trucks around. This is a condition of employment. Look, we need to do demolition derbies with cyber trucks every week so that we can go through them. Like the only time military Keynesianism worked is when Britain was like,

we're going to unite all of British domestic industry to produce spitfires that are going to get shot down infinitely. So we have infinite of them to produce. And we're just using the existing steelworks, leather works, like fucking engine makers that we have to just do all of that for full employment as long as they're going to get shot down infinitely. Elon's trying to do the same with Tesla Cybertrots. Yeah, it's a kind of Oppenheimer thing where it's like nuclear weapons did end up destroying the world because the sort of like capitalism's mode of production of the USS we built this yesterday, it can now no longer be used for like total war. It has to be used to make the bad truck.

Specifically, it has to be used to win like internet arguments. Oh, God, you're not wrong and I hate that you're not wrong. The USS we built this yesterday is Elon Musk's cyber truck winning. an internet argument. I've already depicted myself as the USS we built this yesterday. Now, Musk of course, talks about this for years and this is something I think we're

going to explore over the next sort of 40 to 45 minutes or so, which is he unveiled and when it was unveiled in 2019, I want people to remember what he said, which is you want a truck that's really tough, not fake tough. That was a weirdly good Elon. Yeah, like it captured something of the cadence of the man. Yeah. But, but,

you want, you don't want, you don't want a truck that maybe people might think you're gay if you're driving it like an F-150. You want a truck where everyone's going to know how macho you are. Everybody's going to know that I'm gay driving it. That's why I drive a Dodge.

You don't want a Ford or as I call it, feeling on rigid dick. Yeah, the problem with calling it the cyber truck is it's really quite difficult to get an acronym out of that. Oh, you're driving a GMC? Give me cock.

Come on. Oh, a Chrysler? Just, just kidding. I'm not quick enough to do all of those letters. But it appears to be, with people being poorer and car buyers being richer and crazier, seems to be the only place the U.S. is going, which is, hey, do you want to buy a weapon?

Hmm. Do you want to do the domestic terrorism attack? Do you want to feel like Halo Master Chief as you blow yourself? up inside of this in the carport of the Trumpet's National Casino? Do you want to kill yourself in like a cortege or whatever it's called? This is the thing, right? The American car industry has always been a large part of where America has kept its

death drive, but now the death drive is soy and whiz. So, I mean, this is kind of what I want to, where I want to go from here, right? Which is Elon, like he always does, you even like connect this to our episode with Nathan Tankas, where like Nathan and I talked about how. Elon did the Project 2025 thing to the U.S. government fiscal apparatus, but was like too obvious and stupid and reckless with it. And so Russell Vought had to undo a bunch of it than do it smarter. It's the same thing with the cyber truck where he was actually doing what the broader culture and economy wants him to do, which is what if a car was also a gun. But he's, again,

doing it really too stupid to make it popular. I mean, can you just expand on that, Victoria? Yeah, I think the thing is, like, the cyber truck is a terrible vehicle, and it also became, I think, in a way that none of the other, like, Tesla cars sort of are, like, a symbol of Musk's personal overreach and, like, conservatism. Because, like, people, so in Seattle, which is, like, one of the biggest markets for Tesla's, people have not stopped buying Model 3s and wise. They are still the best-selling EVs in America by a massive margin. And so it hasn't really stopped people from buying his EVs because they're relatively cheap. They are everywhere. I still think that Tesla is still kind of synonymous with electric cars here, which is entirely

for the worse. And they're still bad. Don't get me wrong. But like the cyber truck is so obviously a product of Musk specifically that I think it got associated with being that kind of right-wing chud before it actually dropped. And so I think that like that impacted demand. And also just like it's not useful or good. Like the people who are buying, it's expensive.

The people who are buying electric pickup trucks. largely went for, like, the lightning, which was a much more useful truck, which, of course, Ford has since discontinued because they couldn't figure out a way to make money on it, right? And, like, this is sort of the only reason that Tesla is able, I think, to, like, limp along making these is because their cars are so, they make money on their cars because they are shit. They have never needed to figure out the kind of, like, economies of scale stuff that Ford and GM and Stalantis have struggled with with EVs, because they started it early.

They had a lot of the battery infrastructure, and then they just don't care. Like, they have horrible build quality. Like, the cyber truck was, I think, for a moment in last year, the most recalled vehicle of, like, the past decade because they had to keep, like, people burned to death alive inside them because the door mechanisms would fail and stuff. And that's just like, they continue to get away with this because they are Tesla. And, you know, when the cyber truck first came out, I was like, I think this is going to be the emblematic vehicle of our moment, not in that it will be the most,

like, the best selling or the most popular or even useful. But I think that this is like, this, vehicle will sell whatever it sells solely because crony capitalism exists. And like, that's true. Like, one in five of them going to SpaceX is like, you know, it's the same thing as like the AI bubble, right? It's like, let's just build a big or a boros of demand with our own fucking financial schemes.

And the cyber truck is really perfect for that. And I think it also, like, the cyber truck was prescient in that Elon is paranoid and probably for the correct reasons in that a lot of. people absolutely fucking hate him. And so he worries constantly about being killed. If any interview he's got, he talks about how he's got bodyguards all the time, and he's, like, constantly worried about being assassinated. And the thing is that that paranoia leached into the design of this,

and so if you remember the ad campaigns for it, it was like, it's got impact-proof, bulletproof glass, it's resistant to nine-millimeter fire. A lot of the original ad campaign images showed it in, like, extremely unsettlingly apocalyptic conditions. Pickup truck advertising in the U.S. is always like, yeah, I got a whole bunch of boulders up the Mojave. But like the cyber truck was like very strange that it showed kind of like

the wreckage of society in a few of its press pack images. And it's very revealing to me because it was like we, you know, it predicted sort of this societal anxiety about the incoming collapse in a way that was sort of like an undercurrent when it was announced in 2019 and is now very overt, I would say, as it bombs. Because again, like it's terrible. Once it came out, stopped using his son as a kind of like small arms protective insert.

Well, yeah, because a cyber truck will protect him. It won't. It really won't. I cannot emphasize to you enough how much, like, if you use any gun larger than, like, you know, a toy pistol, a 22 that you used to shoot squirrels with as a 10-year-old in America, it will just rip right through that shit. So let's talk a little bit about, like, electric vehicles, what they mean. And what we were alluding to at the beginning, which is the American auto industry,

as a broad temperature check of the American, sort of wider American, including like Europe, Canada, Mexico, et cetera, economy. Because right now, the best way it seems that the U.S. car industry is able to defend itself from Chinese electric vehicles is by banning the import of any car that's made by a company that has more than 15% Chinese ownership.

This is a, can I just shock you bipartisan bill? Yeah. I like to call them the blowjob brothers, even though what if them is a woman. Bernie Moreno, a car dealership owner from Ohio, which makes him literally to the right of Hitler. And Alyssa Slotkin, three terms, three tours of Iraq as a CIA operative. That's the pair. Oh, she was the one who, like, did the only cool thing I've ever seen a CIA officer do, which is one of the, like, Republican opposition researchers was following her to her car.

and she just turned around and went, hey, how are your names both of his dogs? Never spoken to the guy before in her life. Yeah, well, the thing is, like, Bernie Marino, like, is a car dealership owner, so you can assume he is literally Hitler. That's just the U.S., like, the worst people we have in this country own car dealership. It's somebody very representative here is we have a half deep state, half Hitler. Yeah, yeah. And then Alyssa Slodkin is her, I was.

doing some research into her background for recent TranGurlesmo, and I discovered that she was the only person, the only Democrat in the Senate to vote with the Republicans to ban California from having tougher EPA restrictions because she like was just like, yeah, well, I'm from Michigan, so I have to protect our auto industry. And that means like shooting down good, like, good environmental policy because it might accidentally hurt an American car company. Because God knows they're not going to build better cars, like, just seating that territory immediately. So that's like, I just want to put that context out there about the two people who have sponsored this shit. And yeah, it's 15% Chinese ownership is enough to ban a car from American roads forever. But so the point

here, and let's look at this in context of like the other major like economic shift that's going on in America, which is, again, if it holds, which God knows if it will, because all at the best of a very sort of senile musical theater fan is the tariffs that are going to essentially silo the unified North American auto industry supply chain that was created by the signing of NAFTA

in the 90s where I believe because of, in part because of Canadian cheeses. Yeah, well, so this is what's even crazy, right? It's like, so NAFTA was superseded in 2019, 2020 by the USMCA with US-Mexico-Canada agreement,

which was even more favorable to auto manufacturers than NAFTA was. That was the main point that they kind of wanted to relitigate. And I don't know if you remember who was president then, but it was Donald Trump. And he championed this as like an incredibly good decision. I believe I don't know if I'll be able to find the exact quote for it. But at the time he called it the fairest, most balanced and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed. This is Donald Trump six years ago. Doing the kind of like anti-Baltic chauvinism

where it's like, yeah, Canadians spent like 200 years polishing cheese wheels before being elevated to sapiens by Detroit, Michigan. Yeah. Okay, look, some things are funny, but some things you can't take back. Like, the thing about it is

the most recent batch of tariffs probably won't immediately blow up USMCA, but Trump is already refusing to renew it. It's supposed to get, you're supposed to look at renewals every five years, five years, I think, maybe six. And he already was like,

We're not going to renew it. Theoretically, the U.S. could pull out at any moment. Every ball knower is like, oh, he'll never do that. That would destroy American trade and the entire auto industry. And so I think he might do it. Because, again, yeah, he's mad about the cheese or whatever. I can't even keep track. He is one lover in its tariffs.

He wants to just keep pulling that shit. And the thing is that, like, him doing this actually has more support from, like, American unions than you would expect. Like, because they also want more American protectionism. A lot of it is over the Mexico side of things, because, you know, the U.S. has this kind of like economic parity relationship with Canada, but really what U.S. auto manufacturers do with Mexico is they're like, what is the lowest possible wage we can pay to people in the least safe conditions

where we can still not pay import taxes? And that's most of what we do with Mexico's manufacturing base. So I don't know exactly how that's going to end up turning out. I think the tariffs are, they've already made it harder for American car companies as of last year. They might make it harder again in the coming months. But the auto industry is also kind of like, yeah, blow our dick off. Do it. Do it. We love this. Because their main goal is to just make sure that nobody else can compete. Because I was going to go back to something you were saying towards the very beginning, Victoria, right?

Which is the American auto industry, and again, I don't like to romanticize previous, let's say, additions of capitalism, previous ages of capitalism. But you also have to understand that things can get worse. And just because things were better doesn't mean they're ideal. deal. Yes. But that the car industry in the States was for a very long time about high wages and affordable products because they were trying to enter a market that had no saturation. Yeah. Well, and I mean, like, it was the Fordist model, right? Like you pay your employees enough to afford the thing they're making and it will ultimately benefit you as well. And that was kind of like the idea we don't do that anymore. Yeah. But a huge amount of that was because there is an obvious and known

lever of resistance against it. And the point of something, and was so like sort of strange and contradictory about discussing this, right, the shoot your own dick off act. One of the big things that the sort of distribution of the auto industry throughout the entire North American continent was trying to accomplish was making it so that you didn't have to pay your own workers enough to buy your product because your workers were distributed throughout the, throughout the continent, that the people buying your product were likely buying it, maybe as their third or fourth car. and it increasingly became more about serving a very, very small number of people who could afford it, and then putting a much larger number of people into financial difficulty through complicated financial schemes.

We all know the trope about Ford being a provider of medical insurance and finance that happens to make some cars. Yeah. Essentially. And so instead of being nostalgic for the time where it was more comprehensible, understand that it becoming less comprehensible is a strategy to further what they were already doing. Yeah. Well, and a lot of it also, I mean, the other thing, too, is like, and I say this mostly for international listeners outside of the U.S. or UK listeners in your country, where it's like in the U.S., you, what are you going to do? Not own a car? Like, unless you live in, like, one of three major metro areas, you must own a car. There is literally no way to participate in the economy. You can't get health care. You can't get groceries. You have to own a car. And so they are, you know, in the same way. that like housing is basically an inelastic you know demand

because what are you do not be housed cars are actually remarkably similar in the US and I think that that's kind of the moment we're at is it's like the the goal they know they'll still sell cars no matter what and so the goal is not to really make a better car or like a

more efficient car it is simply to become the only people selling cars this is the Tesla move with EVs in the US this is why Tesla was like such a big Trump supporter and ultimately loved these tariffs is because Tesla actually is one of the most American manufacturers by like parts sourcing and location of manufacture. You can see what the goal is, which is as the vast majority of Americans, and this is true for British people as well, but like the car thing isn't

quite so sharp here, as the vast majority of Americans become surplus to requirements, it's to start serving the ones who aren't surplus to requirements who can either still get credit or have enough money to buy their fourth car. Yes. And what they want for their fourth car is they want something that's going to show how masculine they are, generally speaking. Yeah. Well, and I mean like, also, like, this is less of a thing in Seattle because Seattle has different car buying habits and we have like really genuinely narrow streets and stuff. But when I lived in like Texas, for example, every single person had a full size pickup truck. Like that was just, if you were a man and you didn't own a full size pickup truck and it was like, what do you, what if you had to like call a lawnmower

or something? Like assuredly, you couldn't fit that in. to a hatchback and also like that would be gay. I mean, genuinely, it was, when I lived in Texas, I owned a Chevrolet suburban for a bit because they were just dirt cheap and gas cost nothing. And it was a 7.4 liter V8. And I was like, you know, whatever. Maybe I could tow with it or, like you invent use cases because you're just like,

well, there's nothing else to fucking do here. So might as well own a giant pickup truck with a huge V8. They're everywhere. I got a whole lot of these rocks. That's the fucking thing. Right. But part of the explanation that's also given is not just that China is going to eat America's lunch by serving this portion of the country that the American car industry seems disinterested in,

but that additionally, they're spying and they're sneaky. Oh, yeah. This is also true in discussion of Chinese AI companies and so on and so on. Remember, you can't generalize that to an American car, right? Like, if you go and think about like a Chinese car and, think, well, all of the software in this, it's got a lot of cameras in it, it records a lot of audio,

it's recording your face all the time. Maybe that's going to the company, and we don't know what they're doing with that, right? And maybe that's kind of a security threat. You can't apply that to an American car because an American carmaker wouldn't do that, I don't think, probably. Free, no, freedom.

Yeah, yeah, because of the freedom. Yeah, freedom. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I've got an article. It's not. consent to not suggesting that like any time you buy a car from anyone, you are sort of handing an immense amount of like surveillance data on yourself to whoever made it. Can I tell a fun little story I have from the autojournalism days of my career? Yeah.

In like 2017, and this is this is going from memory as I don't have the article in front of me. So if I get a couple details wrong, I apologize. But in like 2017 or so, I think the Model 3 was coming out. Tesla was still had a PR department and still gave autojournalist cars. they had a press fleet. So it was cars internally that they could hand out to people and, you know, they could go drive. A journalist drove it. He complained about the EPA estimates of range not matching his cars.

Elon Musk personally went into this journalist's road trip he had taken to review the car and, like, bitched him out about it. I think on Twitter, it was still Twitter at the time, about him lying about aspects of the trip because it just stored all the data and had no protections over who could access it. And he was like, cool, yeah, I'm going to just look through this guy's entire history inside this car for the time he had it. And this was, this was like a decade ago. And I mean, basically, the thing is, like, this was unusual and surprising at the time

for, for, I think, most people, I think at this point, every American car tracks you everywhere you go. And if you happen to have a car that's old enough where you don't have, like, full-time cell connectivity, we have a nationwide web of flock cameras to make sure you can never go anywhere without the state knowing. What if, though, the password to your car was password. Because if you bought a car in Southern California from 2017 until a week ago, apparently the password to your car, if someone downloaded the right app on their phone, was password. This is a new piece of research for the University of Southern California

where if many cars at Honda Toyota Mazda Ford and Jeep dealerships in Southern California from 2017 to today were sold by dealerships that included as an upsell a piece of security software that allowed you to control the car remotely in case someone stole it, which I'm sure happens all the time and can be remedied by remotely controlling it. It was a smartphone app that's installed by dealerships to manage vehicle inventory and prevent theft. The device installed underneath the bottom of the dashboard connects the vehicle and app via Bluetooth and performs similarly to a key fob, lock and lock doors, honk a horn,

flash headlights and so on and so on. I'm sorry, I blacked out for a second. You're talking about something that happened in China, right? Like these are Chinese dealers dealing Chinese cars. Let me just see. China, California. There's probably a California in China, I assume. It's a big country.

They've got kind of everything. Are you talking about Chino? Oh, yeah, no, that would make sense. Yeah, okay. The People's Republic of Chino, yeah. It's a Chinoease innovation, I think. People's Republic of Chino? It's a society that's very, very into the deaf tones.

Yeah, look, I come from the People's Republic of Chino, so all your threats are empty. I'm just at a very Chino part time in my life. And so, essentially, again, like, if you want to think, oh, it's like not private, it's, like, spying on you. It's like, no, no, no. American cars are spying on you hugely. And they're spying on you so much because of this, again, this paranoia about machoness and security that is based on selling a smaller number of cars to a much richer population is getting popular, more more and more and bigger.

And it's where the cars are getting bigger. And that's where the security features is getting more paranoid, which is why I actually want to come to our closing piece, which is an article that, Victoria, you sent me to talk about on this show. Yeah, it's just, if you were trying to get into kind of like what the general tenor of this country is right now, there is, this is, I think, like, the key to understanding all of it. So, before we get to that one, though, I actually want to read a New York Times article from 1932. Pittsburgh, September 16th.

Five armored automobiles have been ordered here by a South American country embroiled in warfare for the use of its president. The first of these is being equipped by the Armstrong Motor Car Body Company and we shipped from New York by September 20th. The cars are to be eight-cylinder sedans. each will be lined with steel netting weighing 650 pounds, 1,300 pounds of armor plate steel, and will have 450 pounds of bulletproof glass one in one quarter inches thick. Tear gas bombs and machine guns

will be added to the equipment whose extra weight will make necessary three extra leaves in each spring and 12 ply tires. 1932. Yes. For a like compradore government in South America. And Victoria, what's changed? Well, you see the cars are going to Americans now.

Also, we made the armor a lot lighter. So it's way easier to build armored cars that are looking cool. Going to Ramzan Kada off and being like the cyber truck technical is, you know, by every metric, a worse technical than you would have gotten out of America a hundred years ago. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, the armor's lighter. That's good at least. That's the different.

It's staying domestic in armors lighter. That's the Trump promise. That's the Trump economy, I think. So this is from the New York Times article you sent me. Mark Burton has been caught in some sticky situations. He was in Amsterdam, he said, when a gang tried to kidnap him. Hey, Mark, why? Why that happened?

Probably because of all of the things that American right-wingers believe about Europe. They tried to do taken or possibly hostile to him. He didn't know if he's going to be in taken or hostile and didn't want to find out. This is basically like the only two things that can happen when you see a European guy in a bomber jacket. Like, it's basically he's going to either taken you or he's going to hostile. will you? And honestly, if you ask him, he has to tell you. That's true.

But then you're in a situation right where you've kind of, you've opened the box with throading his cat in it, right? And you know which one's going to happen, right? But like, neither of them are good. You don't, look, not ideal. No. I'd rather be taken than hostile. I, hmm.

That's an interesting question. Can I put my hat in the ring for like Hostel 2? Like the one that was like slightly skeezier? Like, I think that's my my preferred like European vacation. Yeah, yeah, hostile to taken. Anybody for Torillas in South America? Oh, they might do you. Or like, they might do you human centipede style.

That one's really bad. Like, see, this is the thing, right? This is why we need this kind of wave of right populism sweeping Europe is because five, ten years ago, right? A European guy in a bomber jacket and a funny accent came up to you and said, I'm going to do X to you. X was Euro trip, right? You're going to get like handcuffed and like comedically beaten by a dominatrix, right?

But like, you know, now, now you're getting your like lips sewn to somebody's asshole. And that's no good. Yeah. They brought that in, actually. That came in from up to North Africa. Yeah. Migrants brought that in. It's a Moroccan thing.

It's a, it is a continent-wide shame the extent to which people are doing midsummer, even in places where the sun does set at normal times. Because of feminism. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, they're doing feminist human center feed on you. He was in Amsterdam, he said, when a gang tried to kidnap him. His bodyguard twice thwarted attempted robberies in Mexico.

And the early 90s, when he was in the early stages of starting his armored car business, he was dining in a restaurant in Peru when a bomb blew out the windows. What a coincidence that a guy in the armored car business would have so many things happen to him that prove the necessity of an armored car. Almost as though he's going to places. Or that might be, yeah, exactly. Burton is the founder and chief executive of Armour Max, a company in Ogden, Utah.

Mormons. Mormons. Mormons. If ever there was a people to get hopped up on crumble cookies and decide this European man is going to sew my mouth to someone's asshole. It's like, can you imagine

I'm getting in my half a mile per gallon up-armored tank and getting a dirty soda from a drive-thru because I think that like hot drinks are evil. That's the Utah economy at this point. You'd hate to be human centiped to the guy who mostly consumed dirty sodas. Like, worse than usual, I would say. If you're going to pick the Mormon, you gotta know where you're going. Just like being human centiped, but you're like slipping them like 500 euros. We're like, put me in front of the Mormon, you know? I don't think a

Mormon would even mind being human centipated. They'd be like, hey, just part of life's crazy journey. You need so many interesting people. Crucially, the thing is, right, is that, again, this is the European mind, right? It's generally speaking, they want nothing more than to, like, kidnap a guy named like Bradlin and, like, you know, fucking surgically suture his asshole to you. That's essential, you know, now. Every stereotype Europeans have about Americans is actually about Mormon.

So, the homepage of the Armor Max website gets to, straight to the point. You will never get hostile-tude out of one of these. Do you not want your mouth sewn to an asshole? Armour match. I got to say, it's a compelling sales pitch. I'm sorry. Yeah, I was going to read it to make fun of it,

but you know what? I'm kind of on board. No, the quote is, we turn regular vehicles into extraordinary bulletproof machines. While Burton has spent most of his nearly 40 years in the industry, decamping to hot spots where his products are most in demand, quote, I'm in Lagos, said Sean Johnson, one of his customers.

Enollog needs to travel quite so far from home to help people safeguard their Yukon Denali's and Cadillac escalates from potential assault rifle rounds and hand grenade blast. I don't think you need to secure your car from a hand grenade blast in America. No, no. I mean, this is the thing. Victoria, are we off base? No, I think that you're actually correct. We have that developed into open warfare yet.

But this is the thing. This is becoming a kind of like internationalized paranoia, right? Like you're seeing a sort of like 1% or even people who wish they were 1% start feeling like they have to act like, well, like the international kind of compradors of capital, like local elites, like regional elites, the people who maybe do have to worry about people throwing like grenades at them. And as to whether that's a founded belief, I really don't think so. I tend to view it as a kind of like delusional terror that they're all experiencing.

Well, I think the thing is, is that, like, the American, to an American rich person, nothing bad can or should ever happen to them, which is part of why they've, like, you know, built a second legal system for elites. And they largely don't, like, like in the U.S., we really do have a very parallel structure that I got to sample a little tiny bit of when I was an autojournalist because the car companies wine and dine you as an autojournalist, but their vehicle launches and they take you to very fancy places. And so I got to see the kind of hotels that rich people stay at and the kind of, like,

restaurants they eat at and the kind of, you know, the dealership experiences they have, all this kind of stuff, it's just a parallel world that we don't get to experience. And so in the creation of this, they also think that nothing bad should ever be able to happen to them, because that's for poor people. And I think, uh, if you really would like a singular moment, there are probably lots of these, but the, uh, United Healthcare CEO getting got, I think that freaked out a lot of them. See, this is, this is the thing. He was worried about the wrong movie. He was worried about, like, kind of European pervert shit happening to him. And so, like, he was walking down the street in Manhattan feeling safe being like nobody's ever going to hostile to me.

But then a very American form of violence happened to him because a guy taxi drivered him, allegedly. And it's very funny, but this is it. Like the American rich never think that America will happen to them until America happens to them. And then they freak out. They want European solutions from a very specific period.

Bumping, I'm afraid of Americans in the back of the up arm at Denali's got to go hard as fuck, though. you know what? I want to go back to something Nova said a few minutes ago. Is it the like sewing mouths to assholes thing? Because I think we've kind of played that bit out. They're acting like compradors, right? Which is that the metropole, as it is commonly understood by people, is shrinking.

And I think that's what we're seeing through the transformation of the car industry. There's a kind of like racist talking point that incorporates this world for you, I think. Right. If I love you've ever seen this, this is sort of born of still being on Twitter despite everything. But one of the sort of Nazi talking points of late has been like, if you import the third world through mass migration, you become the third world, right? And I think these people genuinely do believe that in the sense that

they are starting to think that they have to conduct themselves like third world elites. Right. And I think that's delusional, right? But like I say, I think that's the kind of nightmare that they're having. And I think that the reason that they might be having that is partially just flat racism. I think we can't overstate that enough. It's like they are seeing as they, as far as they are concerned, too many brown people and that means that someone is going to throw a grenade at them.

Yeah, it's a combination of flat racism. And they're also aware that the social contract that used to keep them safe is now exploded. Yeah. And to be fair, they're the ones who exploded it. Yeah. They decided that this was preferable. And I think they sort of had this delusion, right, where it's like, well, we can sort of get all this like regulation and this social contract and this

liberalism out of the way and have the nice kind of orderly society where I'm in charge of everything. And it's not proving so. Mods? Mods? Mods? Yeah, mods. Mods? I mean, also like, yeah, 2020 is another big one here. And that, like, rich people see, when they see a window being broken, they see a kind of unspeakable violence that shakes them to their core that seeing a person murdered would never do for them. Yeah, because that's kind of in the run of things that are supposed to. happen, yeah. What if that was my, that's not my person, but what if that was

my window? I'm in there. I'm not taking the bus right now. The car, unfortunately, has just become the American id. Like, you know, you look at the 70s and it was like vanishing point, you get in a big muscle car, you're nihilist, drive into the middle of the desert, and you die out there. And you look at the 80s, and it's like

I've struggled, like, just every, every era in the U.S., there is some sort of definitional media you can point to and be like, yeah, Americans want to fuck the car, they believe they are the car. They think it's super cool to have a car that you can kill other people with. And like this

decade's version of that is just like cyber truck shit where it's like I've got my armored penis. Well, can I read you a person who's been driven insane by cars? I think maybe Victoria you know what's coming. This is about Karen with Hawaii Kobayashi. Former

producer in the entertainment industry interviewed for this article who owns a car called a Rezvani tank. The The fucking armored vehicle that the rock drives in the first and furious movies. Uh-huh.

Uh-huh. Yeah, that's the one. Well, here's the thing. Andy Burnham's bus fare cap is going to do fuck all for them. The Rizvani Tag is an extreme military-inspired tactical utility vehicle with a thousand horsepower V8 engine.

It has ballistics armoring, electrified door handles, a ramming bumper, thermal night vision, and gas masks. She said, I need to be able to go to the drive-thru at In-N-L Burger. Yeah, that's why she paid for the rolled-out windows,

because normally it's bullet-in. Because otherwise, otherwise Antifa would, like, roll a sort of gas grenade in through the window, you know? So here's the real thing, right? It's like, Rezvani does not make their own cars. Like, they are based off of other vehicles. They're one of the,

they're like a mansory or, um, there's like a million of these tuning houses that take, uh, factory vehicles and they convert them into something else. Usually it's for rich people to show that they have even less taste than they are assumed to have. But Razvani does these like armored vehicles, whatever. So I know that this woman paid $350,000 for a fucking Jeep Wrangler,

which means she's driving to In and Out Burger in her bulletproof tank and the plastics are still fucking rattling because it's a goddamn Chrysler inside. The article says, This vehicle is a monster if Optimus Triumph from the Transformer, and a Jeep Wrangler had a baby, it would be the Resvani tank. But again, that's wrong. It's just a Jeep Wrangler wearing a tough outfit.

Jeep Wrangler in drag. Kobayashi, who is 5'7, says she feels like a T-Rex whenever she drives it, which is, that's the point of every, like every car in America now seems to be converging on that point. And they're defending themselves from China, and they're defending themselves from any of them

ever being made affordably on the old hyper-Rankler. exploitative multinational model because they're just like, no, our whole market is people who have 10 of these. That's the new idea of mass influence in America is you're like, your husband wrote the movie Greece. You're sorry, co-wrote the musical. Excuse me, not the movie the musical. Your husband co-wrote Greece. Your son is a social media anime influencer. And now you're like, well, I guess I'm a feudal lord and I need a destrier and a suit of plate armor in the form of this up-armored jeep.

I have to protect myself from MS-13. Yeah. But not only do I have to protect myself from MS-13, I need to feel like I'm the king of the dinosaurs, essentially. Whoa, because out there, it's dinosaur world, right? And so you have to be the best one. She then says,

if I make a wrong turn and I'm caught in some sort of protest, I want to feel safe. A protest. The thing is a lot of people's brains have been, I worry irreversibly damaged. Yeah, yeah, they have. Well, and the auto industry is more than happy to profit off that is the thing. And that's increasingly the only way that the American auto industry sees a way to make any money.

Like, I have long maintained, this is kind of my called shot for America over the next 10, 20 years. I'm not sure the exact time frame on it, but like 90% of American roads will look like Cubas where it's like they have, but we'll do it to ourselves, right? Like, Cuban roads are full of, like, very, very old cars, mostly American that are sort of hodgepodge together because they've had to live under an embargo for, you know, what, 70, 80 years at this point? I have lost count. And the U.S. is going to do the exact same thing to itself, and nobody here is going to make any cheap cars to replace all the ones that are dying. And so it's going to be like, we're all going to be passing around a 35-year-old Honda fit held together with chicken wire and zip ties. And then the other 10% are going to be doing, like, Russian elite kind of shit. where they're all rolling around in like up-armored Rolls-Rices and shit with the blue,

with the extra, they paid extra for the blue light on the top so they can blow through traffic lights and all the rest of us are going to have to move out of, like, genuinely, I think that is the vision for our society. I think even if we managed to avert the worst outcomes, I don't see how, like, the only way we're getting cheap cars here is if we somehow decide to walk back the bipartisan consensus that selling Chinese cars here would destroy America. And I don't know if we're going to do that because, again, this is, Biden also passed a lot of stuff that was anti-Chinese car. We didn't even get to it in the main discussion, but like, Senator Ted Cruz, one of the

worst people we have in America correctly pointed out that the Connected Car Act that they're going to ban all these Chinese vehicles with would functionally ban Mercedes-Benz because there are two Chinese companies that have a 20% ownership stake in Mercedes-Benz that would put them over the cap. And Bernie Moreno's response was, eh, they'll figure it out. We can either write them a waiver. Like, they do, they just, like, it is, it is just locked on on we can never allow Chinese cars to be sold here cheaply. Every American company is like they've all basically blown up all of their EV programs, or they increasingly have decided to opt into, like, Stellantis, which is 14 car companies in a trench coat, but primarily in the U.S., it's like Ram, Dodge, Chrysler, cheap.

Their whole thing now is they just make cars for, like, Fox News Watchers. They, they, they brought back the V, the hemi V. V8 after developing a more powerful, less fuel-consuming in line 6 for the RAM and put a big V8 badge on it and called it like the free, it wasn't like the Freedom Edition. It was like they did a whole like America-based, here's how proud you should be of your V8 ad campaign for it. And it's just like, cool. We explicitly build cars for family annihilators as a marketing strategy. It's so dire. It's just, it's so bad.

Can I tell you a little bit about who's buying one of these? ultimate, like one of the end states of these family annihilators. Sure. I have Karen Kobayashi's IMDB page in front of me. And I see what she's been a producer on. She was a producer on six episodes

of Modern Dads on A&E. 11 episodes of restaurant startup also on A&E. Only one episode of The Almost Impossible Game Show, which I believe was canceled immediately. Two episodes of billion dollar buyer. One episode of Life or Debt, which was canceled

immediately. Nine episodes of the people's an American rip-off of Gogglebox, and then three seasons of house hunters. And this woman is like, I must be up-armored. Well, she's got a reason to be. It sounds like she's been a real victim of cancel culture. All of the altars who are like,

I am a life or debt, crazy super fan, and I will take the law to my own hands. What it is, is the kind of, you know, brave stalwarts of Jabassau Gogglebox, insisting that anyone who tries to adapt a patriotic British format to vulgar Americanism

must have an RPG fight at their car. Just to finish it up, Kobayashi said, I needed at least one car that has some type of armoring. Tobin's young. Uh-huh. He's in his 20s. So I started to see a lot of weird stalker type people. In this generation, I have no idea what's going on through their minds.

The modern dads fandom is really rapid. I'll tell you how much. Modern dads! Modern dads! Yeah. Basically the Mark David Chapman of modern dads. The general state of the world hardly helps. She describes herself as a preper, saying all civilizations crash after 250 years.

Then adding, I'm not saying there's a zombie apocalypse coming, but we are prepared. But she knows she's not alone in her upscale neighborhood north of where else San Diego. Quote, everyone here has money and they all have bulletproof cars. I think it's cool that America is into the sort of. of like florid stages now. Yeah. Out of bed, wandering around three in the morning, trying to fist fight a nurse. And you know what?

Fine. Honestly, like America's shoe cupboard is the most peed in area of any house. Yeah. So honestly, what's happening is the rest of the world, it's coming home. Unfortunately, it's coming home. It's just this is what's coming home to America. It's what, honestly, this is their vision for everywhere else. so eventually you've had to come back.

He ran out of everywhere else to do it. Yeah, no, I mean, I will say, like, broadly speaking, as a people, we deserve this. And I hope that this woman, like, never feels quite safe. I just want her to be paranoid. She should be paranoid. I just think it's interesting, right? The basically, like, the only immigration that the Trump administration is allowing in its second guise is it's kind of Haimenzhrig thing for,

the, I would say, biggest, like, most coherent group of people who have this exact kind of paranoia, white South Africans, right? And so what we're seeing here is this real kind of coalescing of the, I need a flamethrower on my car for when they try to kill me, constituency, internationally.

What if you had a car that was like, Sir Kill a lot from Robot Wars? Well, exactly. What if that? Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's basically it's the, it's the oranization. Like, we, like, the, the Israelization of America is one thing. It's the oranization is quite another. Well, I mean, like this is just, I think, I think our wealthy very much want to be a petro state, which means that they, they're like, first goal is obviously to, uh, actually create a second class of people within the legal confines of the United States who cannot leave are basically, you know, slave laborers can't get passports, can't vote, have no say in the society. and then a wealthy class over them

that goes to F1 races that we hold around the country but also at the same time they're like that's going to be kind of dodgy getting to that point so we should probably have a Resvani tank again I desperately wanted to get somebody who bought one of those and never listened to my show before on my show so I could basically do an hour

and a half of public shaming because you paid $350,000 for a Jeep Wrangler What's wrong with you? You know, here's the thing that's crazy, right? Is BMWs been armoring cars in their factory for like four decades? You can buy a five series or a seven series that like is resistant to RPG fire and looks identical to a normal seven series and have been able to do this by handing BMW $500,000 or whatever for decades. You could buy a good car. I just, the American ideology, having to buy your domestically produced French-owned conglomerate off-road.

truck covered in bulletproof cladding. Fascinating. We're such an interesting people. It's too bad they're going to kill me. I'm going to become like a Warren Hastings style, like Americanophile. We're just like adopting American ways. Look, I think that we've gone very long today, but Victoria, I'm going to say thank you so much for coming hanging out with this today.

Everybody should go listen to Tranigilismo. It is available wherever fine podcasts are downloading. Our Vario Nova has been on. That's true. And I had a fantastic time. So please listen to it. Please subscribe to it. That's right.

Victoria, anything else you want to direct people towards? I have a blue sky account, Victoria Scott. That's where I'm basically on the internet. And I'll have a book coming out soon about sort of a photo exploration of queer life in Seattle where I live. Quite soon, that's called pollination. I'll announce it on my blue sky when it's up for pre-order. But that should be coming very soon.

Lovely. Well, in any case, thank you all very much for listening. You know all about the Patreon that we have that you can subscribe to. If you want, can I just shock you more episodes? And we'll see you on the bonus episode in a few short days. Bye, everyone. Bye.

Bye. Bye. And thanks for having me.