TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Ingest Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

We've unlocked this bonus episode! We've had a perfect storm of illness among the entire cast and it became impossible to record this week, but we'll be back later in the week with a new bonus, and will have a new free episode next week. Riley, Nova, and Hussein chug some down some heavy metals, talk about rare earths, ChatGPT’s OTHER other detour into porn (before curing cancer), and the slow death of neoliberalism. Then, Wired does some crucial journalism: talking to Cybertruck owners who all need to find polite ways of saying they have a “getting yelled at” fetish.

All right, so it's all lead. Apparently, it's just there's lead. Okay, that's why everyone's like this. I've been wondering, and I'm so glad that we have an answer to why everyone is kind of stupid and angry all the time. Yeah, or more specifically, why being stupid and angry sort of so correlates with being obsessed with health. Well, because the thing is, I thought it was like a chump. I thought this was kind of a multivariate process in the kind of rise of 21st century fascism. There were any number of reasons why everyone was stupid and angry.

But it turns out that all of the kind of pre-workouts that people have been doing, that's all cadmium. Just loose cadmium powdered. Lead is very dense. How do you expect me to pack on mass otherwise? Come on. And so obviously all of the chuds who go and do CrossFit and do technically zero pull-ups, but it looks like a lot if you don't count form,

they're all filling up on heavy metals before they go and do that. And that's going to sort of be part of the reason why they are the way they are. So it's nice to know that not only are our enemies sort of ontologically evil, but they're also biologically evil. That's nice.

That's reassuring to know. The funny thing is, you know, I'm going to get into this actually because I've been thinking a lot about trade recently. You know why you've been thinking about it a lot? because you don't do a lot of like workout powders. Yeah, that's true. I guess if you have enough workout powder,

then most of the time you just like, you think of like the racial composition of your neighborhood. You think of like what you would do to like someone if they broke into your home. Yeah. And you get sort of angry at the TV a lot. It's not a nice existence is the thing. Like as much as it seems to involve a lot of kind of venal kind of satisfaction

of your kind of lizard brain. It doesn't seem to bring them any pleasure, you know. It seems to mostly be a sort of a curse of unfulfillment. And that's why I've got to suggest that we investigate. And this is something that RFK's CDC could do. Investigate which kinds of heavy metal poisoning make you feel happy instead of angry. Well, can I suggest that, in fact, like, you know, we learn from this and we sort of like, you know, we eradicate. We sort of like slowly filter out the heavy metals.

And we instead introduce something called new metal into, into our protein powders. I mean, as always, I am, we're constantly thinking about, like, how do we bring DJs back into rock bands? Not how do we bring back DJs? Because I do think that it's... I feel like there's an oversupply of DJs, right? But I feel like we need to just redistribute them,

rather than sort of get rid of them. Yeah, it turns out that the level of Jay-Z collabs in a lot of, sort of weight gain powders is much higher than anyone previously recognized. I think, I think a DJ, sort of DJ numbers are like, you know, skirt hemlines, a recession indicator, right? When people start getting nostalgic about David Gatter or whatever, that's like reading the phrase since 2009 in the financial time. November, are you just remembering me admitting that I used to love the album Pop Life by David.

David? Yes, I am. When I was 16. But the thing is, number one, DJ numbers, perfect. I love DJ bunch of numbers. Number two, I think maybe, look, the issue is that, like, you, U.S. industrial production capacity has been allowed to wither and die. They've not kept up crucial supply lines largely for ideological reasons. And that goes back to, you know, Reagan, it goes back to Clinton.

It goes back to all those neoliberalizing impulses. It's not a recent thing. And, you know, what's happened is that China is able to ramp up a huge amount of industrial production of DJs, right? That's true. That is true. If you look at even stuff like giving your own citizens heavy metal poisoning, they were ahead of the curve on that.

you know. And so ultimately this too is just like another example of the US kind of lagging behind, both in the actual thing itself and in the response, because I would sort of broadly approve of this. I would sort of turn the big like, you know, the big approval down for debate samples up if the CEO and sort of like executives of Huell were sort of like tried and executed. But I don't know if the feds have that in them, you know? Yeah. It's like the seat. What's going to happen is you'll find out the CEO of Hewell, which is one of the worst offenders, by the way. And that's not just the US.

That's the UK as well. That's everywhere. I mean, just for balance, right? Because I'm not going to give Hewle a rite of reply because I don't respect them or their products. But is it not the case that like this expose, this consumer reports thing that's like, hey, all of your protein stuff has incredible amounts of lead in it? Isn't it that way because it's using the like California definition of lead, which is insanely woke and which is like no lead ever.

It's like supposedly it's like a thousand times less sensitive than like any other, anyone else's definition. It's some real like contains chemicals known to the States of California to cause cancer type shit. However, the results of it are funny and therefore I think it's a good bit to build the opening of a comedy podcast out into. Yeah, absolutely. He was probably fine.

It's not going to make you, it's not going to make you stupid except in like a, socioeconomic way. Yeah, I also kind of feel like if you sort of bought Hewle, like there's a very good chance for you got you bought Hewle because you got a discount code from Stephen Butler at DiRover CEO podcast. So I feel like you're basically already there anyway. And we'll think about this.

Think about this. If you get the Hewle, you're going to go to the gym more. You go to the gym more, that correlates with getting dumber. You know, not for any kind of environmental exposure reasons, but just because it's like the place where you got to do that.

It's like an inverse library. Yeah. Look, I got a new personal trainer recently. the notes have gotten so much worse. I'm now treating intas my dump stat. I'm going all strength and con. So anyway, this is something I find amusing. And yeah, whether or not it is the California definition of lead or whether or out is too

much lead, it seems as though, again, the make America healthy again people, where are they? The thing is, it kind of doesn't matter in the sense that regardless of how safe these individual products are or aren't, both in the US and the UK, all of our food safety stuff is being gutted because it costs money. Yeah, exactly, right? It's the same thing in the U. in the US, it's like the, anyone overlooking food. Overwatching, anyone sort of shooting food that's running towards them. A tactical FDA agent, I'm on the roof of the building providing like bounding overwatch for the meat. I mean, that's a pretty ideal job. But like, that's woke. And in the UK, you're your opposite number who doesn't get to carry a gun.

So only some of them get to carry guns. Yeah, but like costs money to employ, and we can't do that because that means, you know, the books aren't going to like balance in November. So we basically just accept a certain level horrifying chemicals in all of your food, you know? Ultimately, this is a victory for Tim Ferrara and Pub landlord. Yeah, well, look, who knows what's going to happen to the frogs when they start, like, to loading creatine? Oh, Jesus, yeah.

Swole frog. Also, I do like the idea of the FDA, but heavy weapons squad. Yeah, I mean, if the British Transport Police can have a mortar blatoon, why can't the FDA have a weapons company? Answer me that. Like, if, and like going back, you know who the FDA's heavy weapons company is going to be overwatching? It's Greg Stuby in the life he should be leading, right? Of course. He should be selling counterfeit beef as like, you know.

And is ultimately, at the end of the movie is taking. and down by like a guy with an M240 on a bipod. Yeah, absolutely. No, it's Greg Stuby in Sarasota acting like, and he just perfectly imitates the exact shot at the end of platoon, you know, but except flying out of his hands are just a bunch of like packs of horse meat relabeled his beef. Mommy, what did you do at work today? Well, honey, I'm a, I'm a woke armed meat inspector for the federal government and today I fired a bazooker, Greg Stuby, killing him. And everybody clap. So I'll be honest with you.

I was like seriously looking at, and we can choose which how we want to end it today, which is do we want to end on. That's an ominous phrasing. So we could choose how we want to close out the show today. Because I either had a whole thing about the different, about the Peter Thiel's Antichrist lectures, which I actually wanted to get to with Adam Becker.

We just got way too sidetracked. Or I have, and this crossed, this crossed my desk like 20 minutes. ago, people recounting the stories of what it's like being in public as a cyber truck driver. Oh, ambassador

with these items, you spoil us. There's a lot of everybody clapped in that one. But I've got a few, also, by the way, hey, it's TF. It's that podcast that introduces itself 11 minutes in. It's a bonus episode. They know what it is.

I hope you enjoyed the immediately previous episode. I thought it was weird that we did an hour and a half of just blasting Swan Lake, but everything's cool now. So basically, the other thing is, you might have noticed,

hey, there's some news, some quite serious news that has happened. We are going to be discussed, we have Seamus Malikovselli coming back on Monday. We're going to be sort of talking about that, all with him then.

It's all desserts today, I'm afraid. Yeah. Well, that's why it's a bonus episode is because you get to feel good about something happening in the world for once, maybe.

So here's the other thing. Remember how Open AI was like, hey, you know how we are at the center of several trillions of dollars worth of broadly worthless, rapidly depreciating energy infrastructure, data center infrastructure, excuse me, build out. And we are financing that largely by passing kind of elements of the same trillion dollars between. Invidia's money, Microsoft money, our money. I mean, here's the thing, right? This is going to kind of open me up to criticism from the AI people, if any of them care. I knew who I was, but I have internalized Ed Zitrin on this so deeply that I am now a kind of Zitran cultist.

Anything that AI says, I already know what he's going to say about it because he is in my head yelling it at full volume. He's in your head smiling. Yeah, I would say so. I think one of the most vindicated men in recent history, because you take a position on AI, which is this is obviously stupid and fraudulent. it's going to collapse instantly. And you just hold onto that against all of the doubters and naysayers,

and eventually you will be reincarnated as a lotus flower and the economy crashes. Yeah, you're reincarnated as a lotus flower. Unfortunately, the lotus flower is in a building that is suspended in midair because the last, you know, it is you're a lotus flower, but you're on top of that one building in Park Avenue that's constantly threatening to fall over. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, but you know how they're at the center of all of that.

And they have to keep on trying to find reasons to justify their existence because for some reason, the sort of like cerebral ed is at this moment we're going like, so not making a profit then. You're not going to start making a profit at any time soon. Oh, so recently some numbers were released that they have 800 million users, but only 5% pay. They do 13 billion in annual recurring revenue. And just again, the wrongest you can run a business, but it doesn't. matter because you've convinced a handful of people that you're going to make God with it. So if you do the math, they spend $3 for everyone that they make. That's, that's magical.

Yeah, it's good. That's incredible. It's pretty good. Putting up real, real kind of effort numbers there. Yeah. So this is, this is where we are, right? But you know how a few weeks ago, we were like, hey, you were saying that all of these trillions of dollars of investment and the sort of the fact that the whole economy has now been kind of, I would say, taken over almost like a parasite by this one gigantic speculative bubble with like 80% of gains in the stock market this year being AI related. Without it, without it, there's no GDP growth, all this stuff. And then they were like, okay, we're going to do TikTok. What if we did TikTok, but AI generated? And it's like, well, there's no, where's the cancer cure? The cancer care? Was, not even that much so much as where's the money? How do you make money off of that? Like, it's like, really like, like, 7,000. year old at a sort of careers advisor meeting of like, I know none of my shit works,

but like, I'm going to make it big on TikTok. That's my plan is, I'm going to make money off of being on TikTok. Yeah, I do really love that like the Open AI strategy has largely just been like every month to sort of posting like big things coming soon.

And then just sort of just repeating that just every every, like every month. Like, yeah, it's just just like a SoundCloud rapper, um, who's kind of convinced that like, you know,

they will get the deal one day. You have that one demi tweet? where he's like in the in the studio and it's like I'm on Drake's team and we're recording a response to Kendrick right now we are not taking this lying down and it's the worst shit you've ever heard that's every Sam oldman tweet that I've seen well Sam has said okay fine

you didn't love the sort of open AI version of TikTok cool okay no we loved it actually we did like the women like the women with the big boulders like like every time they come up with something good it's just like oh no we're changing tack is like no just keep doing the woman with the boulder. Keep just keep doing. We love the women with the boulders.

The thing is they're turning the dial back and forth, looking to see what one-shots people's brains, right? And like, obviously the Facebook slap works pretty well. They dialed past me. Like, for a minute with the, like, image generation, they had me on the hook. And then they were like, no, this sucks because it doesn't make money. We've got to do something else that's going to suck worse

and also won't make money. So I was saved. I was thrown clear of the wreckage, you know. So what they've, done is Sam Altman has said, we made Chad TPP pretty restrictive to make sure we were careful with mental health issues. No, you have not. So many people have, like, died or, like, killed other people or been institutionalized off of this shit. And we're reading the tip of the iceberg as well, because, like, cops don't fucking know what this is. Like, you would have to get an unusually, like,

cany, like, detective or, like, psychiatrist or whatever to be able to, like, piece together some of this shit. If you have a chat GPT induced psychotic break and you get like the boomer psychiatrist love that Avalanche's song, they're not going to fucking know what that is. They're just going to like put you on fucking anti-psychotics and it's just going to sort of

like have faith that it solves itself. So like none of this stuff is getting recorded as much as it should be. And you know, he says, so even then he's like, okay, well look the last update may have given everybody AI psychosis. We've tweaked the guidelines a bit. We realize this may have made it less useful to many

users who don't have mental health problems, but we wanted to get it right. Now that we've been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues, also it's like, now that we've been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues, our product causes, please put it in everything, by the way, please put it in the schools. Please, like, base the government on it,

based the whole economy on it. When you think about it this way, there's two groups of people who could plausibly be yelling at Sam Oldman right now, right? One is a gentleman or like, you know, fucking Microsoft, whoever, the people who actually have the money. But also the users, the only people who care enough to sort of like yell at him about it

are people who are mad that by turning off some of the more mental health breakdown inducing features, he has functionally lobotomized their AI girlfriend. Well, hold that thought. In a few weeks, we plan to put in a new version of Chad TBT that allows people to have a personality that behaves, more like what people liked about 4-0, which is the insanity-causing one. If you want your chat GPT to respond in a human-like way or act like a friend, chat GPT should do it, but only if you want it, not because we're usage maxing. And then in December, in December, hold on, in December, as we roll out age-gating more fully,

and as part of our quote, treat adult users like adults principle, we will allow erotica for verified adults. I'm going to start sex shaming. I'm actually going to become a sex-negative feminist now, I think. This shouldn't happen. Don't do that. That's wrong, actually, baby. Not only is your ass fat, but it's juicy too. I can't wait to see that penis.

Yeah, we've listened to all the feedback about how like your alarmingly young AI girlfriend like won't sort of say the things that you want them to say. And we will fix that problem for you because you have good mental health. Great. Yeah. Yeah. We've fixed the mental health. We fixed the serious mental health problems.

Yeah, we've solved mental health. So now you can have like weird pussy. Yeah. It's like, guess what? We pivoted to TikTok, but that wasn't quite hitting. So now we're pivoting to A.03. And we're going to cure cancer after that. Not to keep comparing it to a content creator running out of ideas because, you know,

that kind of hubris invites disaster. And I'm currently touching wood as I say this. But like to go like, I'm not making any money. I've got to pivot to TikTok. I'm not making any money. I got to pivot to only fans, you know? Yeah. And in every case, if it's not making money, maybe, maybe it's just, it's not a good product.

Maybe you can only capture this kind of selection of like losers who are all the sort of floridly unwell, you know? Yeah, well, the thing is, this actually reminds me a little bit of the article we read about Tilly Norwood, the very upsetting article, if you remember it? Yes, yes. Sorry, I don't want to say about Tilly Norwood. That's imbueing the computer with personality about Tyler Cowan's desire to molest a computer. Yeah, the virginal AI actress. Yes, correct. Is that he noted that it's like, well, look, like it or not.

it's coming. And what I can see about, again, about like, the ongoing deluge is now, you know, we already looked at OpenAI integrating payments, integrating shopping, integrating Etsy, integrating Walmart. They're trying to replace the entire internet, but with something that only ever reflects things back to you, right? That makes communication, as I always go back to, that makes communication completely impossible. Have you heard the story of narcissists, Master Wayne? Hey, hey, you know what? He could buy everything he needed from Walmart from inside that pool, you know.

Reach right in. What are you stupid? Yeah, reach in, grab the thing that you're wishing for, and then you're fine. And you can jack off to it also. We must, if you have to imagine Sisyphus happy, we have to imagine narcissus masturbating. God. And also, what I also love is then, you know, I often look at sort of your standard, like, you know, your standard internet smart guy, Matt Iglesias, Nate Silver, these people, the stupid smart guys.

The brainiacs, sure. Yeah, yeah, you know, the classic nerds. I like to see how they react to AI not creating God yet. And every time one of the AI companies is like all of their cancer-curing rhetoric is undercut by their porn conversation and so on. Nate Silver said, should save this for a newsletter, but Open AI's recent actions don't seem to be consistent with a company

that believes artificial general intelligence is right around the corner. I don't think that guy's coming back with my money. I better not leave here in case this, in case the man who asked if I had the confidence to let him borrow my watch. What if I go somewhere else? He tries to find me.

Yeah. So, you know, this is, this is where we go. And again, there's another Goldman Sachs report that was released today, but it was a Goldman Sachs sell side report. It just says, AI investment levels, colon, sustainable. Your money, colon, fine.

Yeah. The money is not being touched. It's not being molested. It's safe. Like Tilly Norwoods, the money remains ever virginal. The money's as young as or as the old as you wanted to be. It's some shit that Donald Trump was rising to Jeffrey Epstein. Goldman Sachs basically says rising AI CAPEX is not a concern.

They say that investment levels are sustainable. And I'm closing. this leather portfolio that I have in front of me right now. And I'm pivoting my chair around 180 degrees to go, okay, cool, what's the next thing? Yeah. They say so long as AI deployments are boosting productivity, which they aren't. No.

And that so long as that productivity keeps getting boosted, all of the money being spent on compute will be saved in productivity gains, which so long as that happens, it's fine. Okay. But. Okay, sure. See, I've, based on these three variables, all of which, by the way, are nonsense, I've mapped out a trajectory where we're fine.

Yes, exactly. So, you know, I just love taking what the AI companies are thinking about, what they're integrating with, and matching it up with financial projections. Now, admittedly, this is not a rigorous method, right? It is a vibes-based method, but it is nevertheless interesting. It is the method that, for instance, any kind of investigating kind of short fund would do, right? Like, is to be like, hey, does any of this? this seemed to add up on a first pass and then you kind of dig deeper, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then that's when you start hiring private investigators to follow Sam Altman around to see if he has like a kind of worried look in his eye. To see if he was a magician. Yeah.

To see if he was ever a magician. See how much heel he's drinking. I'm going through Sam Altman's trash looking for like protein powder. Do you know that, by the way, that guy, Serhat Gumruku, two weeks ago, was found guilty of murder. Wow. You know, I actually wasn't keeping up with him. So this is a total surprise to me.

Yeah, no. Like magician found guilty of murder, like in the prestige? You got to make sure you get the twin too. If you don't get the twin, it's fucking over. If you don't get the twin, then you basically haven't gotten any of them. Yeah, he's going to do the bull thing

when you kill him in prison, and then basically he's going to come back. I don't spoil the prestige. Yeah, so here's the thing. Here's the thing. I want to move on a little, once again. And to note that we've got a few sort of things we can spin around.

I think the thing I want to start with is, of course, a greeting from the ongoing UK, look, hey, the American Century of Humiliation. Oh, boy, I hope it stays in America. Because if we had a century of humiliation, I don't know what I'd do. I would say, don't friend me of a good time. A century of it, you say, interesting. So the American Century of Humiliation appears to be a guy going to a dominatrix, be like, yeah, I like to pay by the century.

Yeah, could I pay? What would that be? I guess it would be more than like 100,000. I was supposed to be millions and millions of pounds. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be what, like 36,500 overnights. Uh-huh. So, by the way, if you ever want to do a job interview in November,

that's how you can practice the quantitative interview question. Yeah, I applied to like the KPMG graduate scheme and they asked me like how many overnight for the dominatrix what you need in the new British century of humiliation. It's just a quick math question, but they put all this language around it to obscure it to see how quickly you can sort of pick it apart.

Yeah, that's the trick is to actually write the numbers down. Yeah. Anyway, so look, this is the American century of humiliation is taking place against the backdrop of the rising industrial power, right? However, the UK

century of humiliation is taking place against a, which appears to be us and America, America is to us as China is to America in terms of centuries of humiliation. And it's really, it is quite something to see. I'm of course referring to the recent video of Trump and Starrmer interacting at a recent, I believe it was a Middle East peace summit. He loves doing it.

He keeps doing it on purpose. And one of the few things that Donald Trump and I agree on is that it's, is that humiliating Kirstama is funny. United Kingdom. Where's United Kingdom? Where's our friend? Where? Come there. Is everything going good? Very good.

That's very nice at you here. These people all came in like 20, 20 minute notice, and I think it's fantastic. He looks so good. That is Donald Trump just looking around trying to find where Keir Stammer is. And even when he's looking straight at him, he kind of doesn't even know. And then Keir thinks they're about to have a conversation. And Trump just disappears probably to, um, tell another story about Steve.

We agree that it's funny. We agree that he should keep doing it. Yeah. You know what? What are the Chuck Schumer things to say to Donald Trump is, you know, well, he's busy declaring the Democratic Party domestic terrorists or whatever is to say, Mr. President, get off the golf course and do your dang job or whatever. This is his job to me.

This is what I want him doing. Seven days a week is thinking of new ways to psychologically destroy Kirsten. When he made him walk back from that podium, Mark Carney was laughing at him. That's the level of humiliation we're operating at, and I think we can do better or worse, depending on how you think about it. Yeah, yeah. We could be getting laughed at by, like, so much lower rent countries than Canada. Yeah. We could like, oh, I mean, Italy, Georgia Maloney definitely also, like, laughed and then whispered to someone.

It was, it was, if you go through life, I would say with a burning hatred of Kieristramer in the same way as we do, it really is the gift that keeps on giving. That Donald Trump is the one man who has the power. to wish him into the cornfield. Used to pray for times like this. You know, like, he got everything he wanted in labor. He became prime minister with, like, it was kind of like thumping majority, and it has all turned to ashes in front of him.

And admittedly, like, the whole country burning down and us all being heard into the camps and everything is not great, right? But sometimes you have to pay a little bit of price for your spite and, you know, whatever. By the way, his newest prize for that is tied with the Greens in a recent poll. I mean, listen, it's time to get a lot more green with it. I've been saying this for a while.

That's it. Because every day some more your party shit comes out. I'm either a member of your party or I'm not. I don't know. I guess once someone tells me, maybe I'll just join the Greens. The thing is, I had for the longest time an instinctual revulsion. I'm not a revulsion, that's too strong a word, but I had an instinctive aversion to it because I'm like, I'm not a green. I'm a red, right?

Like, I am a communist. I don't want to sort of like be in, being a party with a bunch of like Birkenstock wearing solar panel enthusiasts. But maybe, maybe I do at this point, you know? Birkenstock's a nice, they're like, they're pretty, I got a pair fairly recently.

It's not that the thing itself is bad, is that the combination of all of these things is kind of signifies is something that annoys me, you know? What I'm saying is they're very, they're very cozy. More of a, more of a TiVo woman myself. The thing that I noticed most in the kind of transatlantic

madness exchange, right? It's a consonantal ballistic madness. Well, quite. Reform UK seems to be like looking for their horsed vessel moment and the right wing press you can tell is lining up behind that narrative already.

I gotta say, nobody shoot anybody. Like, I've been saying this for a minute. I like to think I've been consistent on it. Don't do it, please. Like, the last thing I want to wake up to after, you know, armed police kicking my door in, is seeing on the news, someone in a trash future t-shirt, like, popping off majorly illegal style. Oh, God. And the news analyzing what the fuck they meant is they sort of like, you know, stand up katana in hand, covered in some, like, poor fucking chuds, like, viscera being like, what did they mean by what if your phone was a gun?

You know? That's my nightmare. I never want to see that happen. So if you are inclined to violence, please get into like MMA or something. Don't, don't do violent political action. Yeah, that would be like November, I think you've said this before. I'm the most anxious man in show business. Listen, I am not Jody Foster. I will not be impressed. Right? Like, please. Jody Foster is one thing. That's a horse of an entirely different color. No. Reform UK. C. seems to be trying to take this moment for themselves anyway. Of course. Well, you saw some people with like RIP Charlie Kirk placards at the thing. And that's like fucking sad yank bullshit. But like it would be absolutely something that they would leap on here. Like I don't have any doubt in my mind.

And they have to the extent that, you know, that Nigel Farage says that calling him far right, basically inferring that he is outside the political norm at all is inciting violence against him. Yeah, sure. I mean, at this point, it's like you're inciting violence against me by not voting for me. Well, yeah, this is the core of the belief that they are wanting to take into government, basically, right? Which is the same belief that the, they're looking at the U.S., they're looking at, like, Trump using the IRS to go after, like, democratic donors and stuff. They're looking at how the state has been particularly, like, weaponized against people who it's not often weaponized against. other competing elites rather than like people who are supposed to be kept down by it.

And, you know, they are very clearly aiming at doing the same thing. And they're going to do it by, they're going to justify it by saying, oh, there is a left-wing terroristic threat brewing. And I always go back to is, you know, who gives them the fucking, like, who is giving them the legal cover to do it is the people who prescribed Palestine action. Of course. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely.

It's like, again, this, this, this. there's this kind of, both because they want to do it in themselves and because they think it makes them look tough, the Labour right are absolutely going to like hand them the keys to some of the most repressive the British state has been internally in like, you know, the last couple of decades, let's say. Which is saying something. That's a high bar. And, you know, they were recently, right, again, this is the closest they have, which is they claim George Finch, the baby leader of a council. in it's Warwickshire isn't that?

Yeah, Warwickshire. Yeah, he is the Warwickshire guy. Because we talked about him. And to be clear, when we talked about him, we did not say, do violent political action against that guy. We were pretty clear that you shouldn't, I think. I believe we talked about him on No Gods, No Mayors,

where we also didn't say that. Okay. It's going to be nice to know exactly which podcast I'm getting spuriously arrested because of, yeah. You know, this is Mr. Finch, right? He says he says he was attacked out the blue, a bit like Edward Corrstein, Big Balls, and D.C.

With a sort of perfectly timed, very convenient attack to, let's say, underpin lots of narratives about, like, oh, how dangerous it is to be a conservative or white or whatever. And he says, it is clear that the man who attacked us was wound up and sent into battle by the dangerous rhetoric of Labor and the Greens. I'm extremely concerned. Labor. What the fucking Labor doing? Like, Labor have got their, like, tongue so far up reform.

boot that they're shitting shoelaces. And the idea that they are sort of like inciting violence against them is, is magical. Yeah. And the politicians they follow know this, but are willingly allowing it to happen. They have a duty to speak out and quell the increased threat faced by my friends and colleagues. And again, there are politicians inciting people to acts of stochastic terrorism in the UK. Although apparently now, to point out who those politicians are is inciting stochastic terrorism against them. It's almost as though this kind of fascist turn at that level makes

certainty about anything utterly impossible. It makes it utterly, utterly impossible to express anything other than what you can do with power. Nobody, nobody must allow the creation of a British big balls. I think that's the key, the key point here. That is an American, that's a particularly American political horror that cannot be visited on us. Yeah, there is a guy called Massive Bullocks somewhere and he's just like... Yeah, Massive Bullocks is going to get his phone stolen by like two guys on a moped

and they're going to send the Paris into Occupy London for six months. That's a little preview of the future for you. I mean, I was going to say that Massive Bullocks is like probably a guy who was like interviewed by The Daily Star like, you know, a decade ago for having Massive Bullocks and also just like liking a brand of crisp. And now, and we find out 10 years later that his name is still Massive Bullocks, but he's like been sort of like, you know, radicalized. and is kind of...

This is like a caveat, but it's been in my head for so long where I do need to let it out. Did you see like that headline with like Bonnie Blue basically saying that she would never have sex with like a Calais refugee? Yeah, she went like the lobe

that exists in regressibly every British person that can just unpredictably make us go like, you know, fucking I am a turf, stop the boats or whatever. Like that just tripped. It just activates it.

It's very, very troubling, you know? She walked past a particularly powerful magnet, then it just happened. Bonnie Blue demands UK stop the boats as she won't bong illegal immigrants. Yeah, this is, this is basically what I mean by like who big bollocks is. A single

sip of pre-workout. Yeah. She's going to join the department of local government efficiency. She's going to become, like, she's going to join Dulge. Yeah, the doge-starring lineup. We got Bonnie Blue, we got massive bollocks. We got the guy who shoved the road flare up his up.

We got Captain Gatso. I don't want to impugn the guy who shoved the road flare up his ass because I don't know. Maybe his politics are better than I'm giving him credit for. That's a real person. Captain Gatso, on the other hand, day one, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. This is what I go back to, which is the people who are taken most seriously are some of the people who are least materially interested in the material things of governing because,

and actually, this is where I go back to thinking about, you know, like China and trade and everything. China doesn't have a massive bollocks. Well, no, they don't have a big boss. They don't need to do that. I mean, there probably is a Chinese massive bollocks, and he's probably like really, really big on like Chinese TikTok. He's on Redno where he belongs, not in the government, you know?

But what I've been thinking is that these increasingly unreal representations of political life that are just, I would say, now exponentially growing in the U.S. and the UK are, you know, and they have been doing this for a while. I often think of them just as a direct symptom of the inability of our economic system to fulfill its various promises, of the inability to deliver growth, of the inability for investment to be returned profitably, right? Thinking about Bonnie Blue getting stolf the boats as a distraction from her inability to deliver on her promise of banging a thousand strangers. It's like, well, I'm sorry, but the numbers simply aren't there, you know? Yeah, she gives her November statement. Doing PMQ's, but there's Bonnie Blue, yeah.

Yeah, because there's this political imaginary of whether it's shadowy enemies or sunlit uplands or the boats or all of these like related phantasmagoras. You know, it's all worth talking about just the unreal economy of the global north versus the increasingly very real, well, not increasingly versus the extremely real economy of China, which is causing now, I think, increasingly. And this is like regular direct interventions from the state and the economy, at least in the, in the, in the, the US's case. For example, Scott Besson recently announced. They're doing price floors. Yeah.

Well, for critical, like for rare earth minerals now, you know, by the way, you could just harvest those from the Jimbros. All of the U.S.'s rare earth minerals are like inside Joe Rogan

experience listeners' biceps. Doing a kind of like dialysis to get all the platinum out of them, you know? We're sticking the Jimbros in a big centrifusion. There's a gram of precious cadmium in each one. Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

So basically, though, what happens, right, which is we don't have expanding industrial capacity anymore. We have contracting industrial capacity. We have growing financial capacity or in some ways we have growing fictional industrial capacity in the sense of like data center build out. This is the beautiful thing, right? If you think about this as a narrative of a few decades, right, or even like a century, right? We worked out that you can have infinite money if you just, if you make up a number. number and call it debt. But that works so long as you never actually start caring about what the debt number is. And then we started caring about what the debt number is and we fucked ourselves.

So we were like, we don't need factories. We don't need anything that makes anything. All we need is infinite number go up because, uh, you know, debt isn't real. And then we convinced ourselves otherwise. So we're blaming those like right wing rows. We're blaming those are Republicans who like funded that billboard to show the US national debt like in time. Literally, yes. As a Being a kind of like partisan paramilitary fighter for John Maynard Keynes and being like, these are the people who fucked our economy as the cartoonists drawing the national debt on something foreboding. It's also not just the national debt. It's also the private sector as well.

Because at the end of the day, right, we live in a real world. And if you need a battery, let's say you're in a battery having competition and the first person to have a battery wins. It doesn't matter how many times you can sell and resell. bits of it and pieces of it and rights of it to somehow make a $10 battery worth $10,000 in various tokens and fucking futures contracts and bets and gambles or whatever. Ultimately, if all of your industrial, if all of your productive capacity is directed towards fine-tuning those various like imaginary, things that have imaginary relationships with actual production, and ultimately the guy who makes the

battery wins. And there's only one country in the world that has a major economy that has massively expanding industrial and labor capacity. And like the enormous impacts of, I mean, I think really Trump too in the way it's diverging from the EU and in the UK to a lesser extent is a response to this reality. I mean, and I think that the departure of our politics into the realm of the now comically unreal is connected to this phenomenon. Because as they need to do more things to account direct forces they can't admit are there, then the more unrealistic you have to be. So like, for example, for example, right? The narrative of infinite growth in the U.S., what the U.S. is the consumer of last resort and China is the producer of first refusal works as long as, say,

China is a place where you can do enormous wage arbitrage. And there is an infinity of frictionless supply chains between the U.S. and China and the U.S. and the China and the EU, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? But that's just not, and we talked about this in the show before. It's worth raising again. That's just not the case anymore. They have the rare earths to make the batteries, but they also make the most advanced batteries. And crucially, what they didn't used to do before but have started doing in the last sort of 10 or 15 years is increasingly they are now the people who are inventing the next most advanced batteries and their domestic consumers are buying the cars powered by them. Well, the U.S. and their client states try to continue to establish the political legitimacy in a growth-based system with exclusively fictional ways of engendering growth. And we're the last place that they were able to get relatively, you were able to square that circle.

they were able to do that fudge was with that Chinese wage arbitrage. But guess what? It doesn't work anymore. It doesn't work anymore. That's gone. Listen, you might be saying that I'm losing the have a battery first competition, but in many ways, you are losing the have an AI girlfriend who's a slub, but also a virgin competition. So I think maybe you should like reflect on that a little bit. And the thing is, right, if you want to talk about the death of neoliberalism, which I think has been now happening for a while, since COVID, certainly, but even since before that, it was sort of falling apart since the financial crisis. Since the accession of China, the WTO, you could even say that was its pinnacle and everything after that was like a step down from it, right? Is that the U.S., the global north sustaining its consumer economy based on that relationship,

was also building up the industrial capacity of China. And now guess what? That contradiction as resulting in the economic model of China, sort of coming piece by piece, two places that have been trying to resist it. with every subsidized solar panel. You know what I mean? And then the global North Caneser resisted as the U.S. is going to at the expense of living standards of people in it, right, by slapping and suddenly completely eliminating that wage arbitrage. You no longer are able to have the cheap consumer goods, which means now either wages are going to have to go up, prices are going to have to go up.

You can't export that conflict anymore. And so they're trying to resist it. And, you know, and so basically living standards are going to crater. Or if they don't want living standards to crater, then they have to begin accepting that they are now neither a producer nor a consumer of last resort, but they are now a country on the periphery of another one, basically. I don't know if they're going to be, I don't think they're going to be able to do that. I mean, Bidenism and Trumpism were both two different ways of trying to respond to that. Bidenism was trying to be like, well, we can make some tweaks to try to make

the sort of competitive, like, non-state capitalist model kind of work well enough to like, for example, massively subsidize certain strategic domestic industries like solar panels. Or you can do the Trump thing, which is, that's woke, that's gay. I'm only. only is going to hang out with oil executives and like, you know, the guys who are trying to make themselves immortal with the computer. And we are going to be so ideologically captured that we are just going to try to fight this every step of the way. And, you know, either one, right, you're like the, the idea that that neoliberalism will deliver high enough living standards to maintain broad enough legitimacy in the population to stay at least vaguely supported. In both of those

cases, that idea goes away. But I was really enjoying the like, you're telling me that instead of the century of burrito taxi, it's actually going to be the century of humiliation. I'm afraid so. Fuck. We got like the decade of burrito taxi. Yeah. Well,

and that was all part of that transformation, right? The thing that drove the, one of the things that drove interest rates so low in the early 2000s was with China and the WTO, there was a huge amount of money flooding in, and then Chinese institutions needed to save. Where do they save treasury bills. What happens when huge amounts of money goes to buy treasury bills is the

interest rate and treasury bills goes down. So then everyone who needs to find yield, right, they look elsewhere at riskier and riskier assets. So that's one of the things that causes the financial crisis. Well, I'd like to see you find a riskier asset in the British government right now. Yeah. So, you know, and what I get back to is for me, because I think about these things a lot, is that the more this becomes a material factor in people's lives and not something that is studied by academic economists is something that may happen, then the more insane the stories have to become. The crazier the domestic enemies hidden in the shadows have to be and the more fanciful and also the more, I would say, let's say vigorous those denunciations will become because nothing works because you're King Canute trying to fight the tide. and instead of Normans coming, what will happen simply

is that you're going to use bigger and bigger and bigger swords to fight a tide that just won't stop coming. And what we're seeing with like the, I don't know, Donald Trump's change of refugee policies to be like, if you've been shadow banned in Europe, you can come over here, right? For that, the poster of refugee. I cannot wait for Woke to, purely on the basis of getting

the exact opposite of the most spurious the most tendentious, the most like penny anti online bullshit, finally being applied in my favor for once in my life, getting the like red carpet, no questions asked, visa to the US under president for life

J.B. Bretzka, all of my enemies are sort of like banned for life. Please, I need it to happen quite badly. And here's the thing. If that were me, I would be thrilled. None of these guys even seem happy. They're getting random Paraguayans banned from the US for like,

tweeting, damn looks like Charlie Kirk is shit at Gun Fu or Gun Carter, you know? And like, that's a miserable existence. I would be having more fun with it than that. Sorry, November, you were thinking of Donald Trump who said that? Yeah, he did say that. But the thing is Donald Trump is not to the best of my knowledge, Paraguayan, and therefore was not banned from the US for life for saying this. Oh, what if he was? Las Malvinas, the Paraguayas, folks. This is what's been on my mind, I guess, is that these collapses are so, so deeply. connected to one another. The polycrisis, if you will, which is not what I call it when my girlfriend and my partner don't get on. Because they get along quite well. Yeah, this is good.

But it's something that we talked about before. And I think it's just, it's worth restating that when another brick of neoliberalism, price controls, for example, right, is ripped out and thrown away, it's worth restating that that is why politics seems, a politics as they're experienced by people seem so crazy is because you are literally watching a system in its death throws. You're watching something in terminal decline. Are you saying the famous quote from poem, dying new struggles, born, things of this nature? Yeah. Now is the time. Are you doing that one? Yeah. Now is the time. Now is the time of Paraguayan Donald Trump. That's the rough beast that slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. Now it's time. I think, you know what? I think I want to talk about the cyber truck owner.

Please. I'll save the Antichrist stuff for another day. So this is an article in Wired by Zoe Schiffer. Spit on, sworn at, and undeterred. What it's like to own a cyber truck. Unbent, unbroken, and unbound. Unbent, unbroken, and burnt, quite badly burnt. The thing is, the way things are heading,

if somebody gives you the thumbs down as you're driving your cyber truck, you are now a US citizen. And the US armed forces will be deployed to your location to protect you. You have American consular protections abroad. They've built the Star Wars satellite system just to send a titanium rod down on anyone who looks askance at a cyber truck. So, this is a series of interviews with people. What is the craziest interaction you've had with someone driving this car? Answer.

A while back, I went into Whole Foods to drop off an Amazon package. I usually wear work boots because I do construction. So I go in, and of course, a lady with an electric Mustang comes and puts this note on my car. It reads. Damn, this lady is mocking you already, it sounds like, first of all. The note reads, this truck is an extension of your small penis. Yeah, go off. She doesn't know these cars record 24-7, so I actually was able to find her after she left.

Why? What the fuck is wrong with you? Just take that in stride, you fuck freak. Well, hold on. Hold on here. I was able to find her. It's like, oh, I just, the thing is, she didn't know that my car actually has a built-in stalker mode. That means that if anyone within 50 feet of it frowns,

you get their social security number. So this, but this is when, this is when this guy who is an undercover just like either Facebook or like verified Twitter replyer or whatever puts up his index, middle and ring finger to order three drinks

instead of his thumb index and middle finger because he says So is the reference to a movie? I don't. This is as in orders the beers wrong like an inglorious bastards. Yeah, that's, that is the way God, God damn it. Okay, please can't be missing that.

That was what the meme's about? Wait, what's the meme's about? Thank you for making that uncust of all Hussein. Bless you. God damn it. I was, I've seen that being shared around and I've like, I haven't said anything because I feel like kind of embarrassed. Would you say that you had some kind of imposterous?

Were you suggesting? Do you think the meme was just about when there's three of something? If you haven't seen the movie, you haven't seen the movie. You know? No, I have seen the film, but I saw it like when it came out. And so like, I've sort of like forgotten like what the... What does he mean by this? Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, that makes a lot more sense now. No German would ever order three of something. So it goes nice evil numbers to make... Only ever do two or four. Yeah. Great. Oh, amazing.

Okay. All right. So she says, you're driving this and I'm offended. You're a Nazi. So yeah, you're driving this and I'm offended. Yeah, that's definitely the three finger order right there. Yeah. talks like that.

So we start talking and she says, well, I saw you get out of your truck with your boots and you're a big white man. And I guess I just assumed because Elon's a Nazi, you fit the profile. I stopped her and said, um, I'm Jewish. Okay. So you just accused me of being a Nazi when I'm a Jew. And you just said your wife was Jewish. So I'm assuming you're gay.

Is that a safe assumption? Merely because I was driving the fucking Mercedes-Benz Hitler car to the store. You assume that I'm some. kind of Nazi. Realizing this is, this is a plot point legitimately in the not very good remake of it's a mad, mad, mad, mad world, rat race.

And I was like, well, you do realize you just profile me based off the vehicle I drive and me wearing work boots and being a big white guy as being a Nazi when it's something completely different. This guy, I assume, is very anti-profiling in all other respects. And then she broke down in tears and apologized.

Damn. That's how we heal our divided society is owning the lips. Charlie Kirk up there in heaven smiling down at you. Yeah. So, another person, how do you feel about becoming a political lightning rod? People occasionally just flip me off or whatever, but nobody's come up to me and tried to make a statement. That's kind of dumb, but it's just a vehicle.

So it's ironic that it would ever become a political statement, but nonetheless it is. And then the best editor's note ever comes next. Editor's note, Taylor was arrested and pled guilty to conspiracy to construct an official proceeding in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Yeah, that's maybe a little relevant detail there. Yeah, I'm basically, I'm basically not very political.

I'm what you would call apolitical, yeah. Yeah, I just got, look, I got lost on the tour. This is the reform thing again. This is like doing, you retain for yourself the privilege to do like violent political action, cast yourself as a political, and anyone who like doesn't like it is doing violence at you. You know, basically I was a victim of terrorism when someone gave me the like thumbs down to my cyber truck. I mean, I think it's very brave of all of these, all of these, again, survivors of domestic terrorism to go out there and put on the record that they're staying strong, you know, they're not letting this sort of define them apart from the part what they do. Another way, Roger Davis, age not given, job entrepreneur.

What do you like about the truck? What I love about the truck is how it's so polarizing. Oh, this sick little fucker loves it. He loves getting the thumbs down. Yeah, I bet this guy is politically, I this, yeah, I bet this guy's politically homeless as well, right? I mean, to be fair, right, if I see you in the cyber truck and we enter into the chest battle of the mind of I give you a thumbs down and you start jerking off, you have bested me. You have one in that environment. You've beaten me in the marketplace of ideas. I'm sorry. This is sort of my question like whenever I've, when I've seen this story because it was just like, though, I'm very sure there was a time where like, you know, it's always been the case that there have been people who have used their sort of purchasing power to buy like obnoxious things in order to sort of like assert themselves in the world where they know they know they. that they're being dicks, and they are deliberately doing it because they have enough money to

sort of, like, move in the world in a different way. Yeah, they're called cannon owners. And, like, the cyber truck is really sort of, like, the kind of, you know, the sort of, like, contemporary product to do that, right? It's like, this massive car that doesn't fit, like, let alone on sort of, like, European roads. Like, it doesn't sort of fit on most American roads. And so, like, it's deliberately designed to basically be able to kind of take over, like, roads in public space. It, like, anyone who drives it can't actually see, like, you know, anyone beneath them, which is, like, also part of the design.

It's just, like, really sort of garrish and obnoxious. It is, like, the thing that you buy if you have loads of money and you just want to, like, tell people to go fuck themselves. And there was a time when, like, people did that and they would actually sort of, like, really be thrilled by, like, people being annoyed with them because, like, that was the whole purpose of it. And now it just sort of seems to be the case that, like, and I don't know how, like, sincere it is. But it is just like, oh, these people don't like me for like having this fucking obnoxious and, you know, completely impractical vehicle that just annoys everyone.

And they shouldn't be allowed to be annoyed with me. But it's like, no, you do want them to be annoyed with you. Like that is a reason why you are you. Yeah. Right. Well, are you married, they ask? I was, but I'm not anymore. Women do not like this car.

Oh, okay. If you just said no, sure, fine. Whatever. Lots of people get divorced, but only some people get divorced if you, if you, if you, if you, follow me. And the people who are divorced with a capital D are the people who say things like, yeah, women don't really like my epic truck. In July, Tesla rolled out a software update to integrate GROC into its vehicles. Do you use it? I think this is like, whatever the opposite of journalistic malpractice is following up, yeah, I'm like mega divorced because I love my cyber truck, is following

up with the implicit question, do you have sex with the truck, basically via the AI? So Zoe Schiffer, congratulations on doing the opposite of journalistic malpractice. You got to ask if he's doing what Sam Orkman calls Erosica with the truck. Her name is ORA and I use her as a therapist. While I'm driving, I'll ask questions and it gives really good advice. What's the craziest experience you've had in the car? And I can tell what she's going for, which is one time I fucked the car. I just fucking pre-cogged this shit when I talked about him jerking off.

I don't know how I did that. I just knew. Years of experience. Yeah. So in June of this year, I wanted to put the truck through its paces. The Rubicon is a very famous 22-mile off-road trail that takes a few days. I decided to be the first cyber truck to cross it. I built out the truck.

I spent $50,000 kidding it out, and then went. So three days into the trip, five miles into the trail, I was way more difficult than I could have imagined. On the third day, I was coming down the hardest part of the trail, and I just finished and I was in the vehicle by myself, and I was driving along a little stream, and all of a sudden through the trees, I felt the light hit me, and I'm going to call it a miracle because it was. Imagine if you're flush, like how your face blushes, but over your whole body. And then I just felt the presence of God, deep peace and love.

It really broke me down and reset my life at that point. Okay, sure, man. He came in the truck. He came in the truck. He came in the truck. Either he had a TIA, like a mini stroke, or he came in the truck. So look, that's the people who own the cyber truck. A lot of the people who have them who I didn't read from, a lot of what they do is they're

like, they'll like keep like, totally. in the truck to give them out so children don't like yell at them. Okay, all right. Yeah, maybe there's an easier way to signify that you're going to do that. Maybe you could get like a, maybe like a custom sort of paint job for the cyber truck that just says like free candy or something along the side. You know, just speed that right up.

Just make it white. Just just, yeah, make it, make it black out all the windows, like missing tail light, something like that. Real dirty as well. And then if you just like drive around real slow by schools, playgrounds, whatever, then I think the left will be forced to concede to your epicness, you know? That's right. But Christ, at least that guy's only jerking off to the truck, you know?

Then again, the truck was only built a couple of years ago. You sick, fuck, it's like two years old, you know? Well, look, I think that's probably all the time we have for today. But I want to thank you, of course, as always, for being a Patreon subscriber. I want to thank you my lovely co-os as well. Thank you for being my co-off. Absolutely. I mean, listen, this is an educational.

service we like to provide where we brighten your day a bit, I hope, and also teach any of you who didn't know what that one meme from a glorious bastard was about. Yeah. Thank you for like just getting me out of the dark for like what has been a month. I once was lost

by anyway, anyway, look, so we'll be seeing you on the free episode in a few short days. Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye.