TRASHFUTURE - Waiting for Lordstown feat. Bryan Quinby

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

“We’re bringing the jobs back!” has long been the rallying cry of the right, but what kinds of businesses are actually coming back to places like Lordstown, Ohio? We are joined by Bryan Quinby (@murderxbryan) of Street Fight Radio to do a deep dive on Lordstown Motors - a “too good to be true” electric car manufacturer that has set up shop in the town of the same name. It’s all well and good when rich people take money off one another, but what about the workers who believe their lives are getting back on track? The primary source for this episode was this report published by short seller Hindenburg Research, which also similarly exposed Nikola. https://hindenburgresearch.com/lordstown/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *NEW SHIRTS ALERT* We are accepting pre-orders for two new shirt designs -- get them here! https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/shop We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello Trashes, your fans. Just a quick heads up. We have two new shirts available. They are also available on discount for our Patreon subscribers. Check the link in the show notes. And if you are a subscriber and you want your discount code, check for the post on Patreon. Thank you and enjoy this week's free episode. Well, you see, that's the thing, Keith, because I used to be in the band D Reim and then I became a renowned cosmologist. And what that makes you realize is when you look out of the vastness of the universe, you just sort of see how sort of pointless a lot of these debates really are. Yes. Thank you, Brian. Professor Brian Cox there. He's always, always calling into the show. So today we are taking your calls as you may have heard on the big debate with me, Keith

James. And the topic for today is, of course, will you be traveling abroad while the pandemic is ongoing? Have you traveled abroad? That's what we're taking your calls on today. And I've got this call coming in from Barry. Barry, where are you right now? Good morning, Keith. Yeah, I'm calling in from Raka. So I'm sorry if the lines are a bit dodgy, but you know, the coverage out here is not exactly great. Sorry, Barry, you said you're calling in from Raka as in Raka in Syria, the ongoing conflict zone in the Middle East. Yeah, that's right. That's where I am. Yeah. Okay, Barry, let's just let's just take a step back here for a second. So you obviously have been traveling during the pandemic. I take it that you are your British, your British national. Is that right,

you live in the UK? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I was born and bred. And so what exactly happened here? What made you take the decision to travel abroad? Well, what I was, with the pandemic going on, you know, you got everyone in the house, you've got a wife and you're here and all that. And to be honest, we were having real trouble with a bin collection. You know, you've got people that are not collecting a bin properly. And I was talking to one of my mates, and I said, you know what, I bet they've got better bin collections in the Islamic State. And he said, well, you wouldn't want to live there, would you? And you know what, to prove a point, I thought, you know what, I'm going to go out there and see what this Islamic State might

be about. So again, Barry, just to be clear, you have, during the coronavirus pandemic, you have traveled to the Islamic State to join them with a view to assessing what their bin collections are like. Now, as I understand it, that does invalidate any travel insurance that you might have. Oh, yeah, that's right, Keith. I'll tell you, Thomas Cook won't touch any of a barge pole. I had to come out here in the back of a truck. Anyway, my point is, I got out here, and actually, the State would have been collections. It's not, it's not fantastic, but you know what, a lot of people, a lot of people have got a lot to say about it, Islamic State, but they've not, they've not tried it. And you know what, for a kickoff,

there's no cancel tax. And, Tariq, will you, will you fucking lay off with that 50 cal? I'm calling it, I'm calling it in a BBC home can. Yes, yes. Anyway, and in fairness, they're a decent bunch of lads out here. You know what, I was surprised to find that some of them actually quite like Brian Ferry, for example, but I tell you what, it is a fucking nightmare trying to get a bag of sandwich. And so Barry, what does your wife think about all this? You know, where do they, where does your family sit in all of this? Well, honestly, Keith, I've got to tell you, she was not, she was not best pleased to start with, but you know, I've got to say, like I said, you know, actually, when you get out here, the people on the ground in Islamic State, they're

like people anywhere else, you know, they just want to, they just want to do an honest day's work for an honest day's way, bring death to the kafar. And to be fair, the kafar have got a lot to answer for that. And that's what I've learned while I've been out here, to be honest with you. So, you know, I would stand by it almost entirely. And just before I go, I would like to shout out all the warriors of Alar out there. And yeah, we'll be keeping a black flag flying, Keith. And if you wouldn't mind for us over in Raqqa playing, playing Roxy Music. Well, thank you, Barry. Thank you to Barry. I think he's, he's gone now. So this is Roxy Music for all of the brave Islamic State fighters in the Levant.

Hello, and welcome back to a free episode of TF, that podcast you're currently listening to at this moment. It is the free one. Hey, you don't know what I'm doing about my life. You're listening to this one right now, Milo. But it is the free one. Indeed. And it is the free one with myself and Milo and Alice coming at you from the British Isles and the Dutch. The Dutch is not here this today, but we are joined for, I believe, collecting his third appearance certificate that entitles him to entry into the Plus Club lounge. It is Brian Quimby from Street Flight. Brian, how's it going? Great. How are you guys? Oh, not so bad. I mean, as we said earlier, it's Britain,

so as good as can be expected. Yeah, like pretty bad, but not as bad as it could be. Boy, there's a giant statue of Churchill in the studio now. Just notice that. Giant statue of Ulysses S. Grant in my studio, so. That's right. Yeah, because we sent it to you when we replaced it with Churchill. That's it. TF now supports the Lawrence Fox campaign for London Mayor and is on a platform of more statues. We're even putting the campaign on a plinth. We're casting it in bronze, and we are putting one in every room. More than one statue, everyone has ever been anyone ever. No. We are, in fact, we are doing a little bit of a TF Ohio edition,

as a matter of fact, today, which is one of the reasons Brian that we're talking to you today as well. Cracking up in a cool, crisp monster energy. Exactly. I know that's one thing I know a lot about is Ohio. That's right. Ohio streets fighting. No, we are. So, everyone in NTF world today is wearing a flat brim hat. We're wearing shorts in the winter. We are driving around and drinking a pre-band for local. You're lucky we're all on probation. Yeah, that's right. So, what we actually have done is we are going to talk a little bit today about a little company called Lordstown Motors. Lordstown Motors being the recent subject of a research report by Hindenburg Research, which alleges, among other things, that the company... A company that researches you when

everything's going very well. Yes, absolutely. Which, among other things, is suggesting that the company is fake and not real and largely fictional, despite the fact that it appears to have a very large physical presence and political presence indeed in Ohio. When you go bankrupt in the matrix, your mind makes it real. Yeah, that's right. So, before we crack on though, I just wanted to ask Brian, for maybe more international listeners, places like Lordstown and the Rust Belt in Ohio, what's it like there with regard to manufacturing and unions and so on? Well, I don't think there's a lot of manufacturing going on. I mean, I guess if you drive a little bit out of one of the cities, which I don't often do, you do see plants, but they all seem to be very

closed. So, I don't know if you can have unions in places that are closed. So, I'm assuming it's not going great out there. That's what a do-nothing union job is, is you have a union meeting in a closed spot. Yeah, everyone has a no-show job because the plant is closed. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so I assume Ohio is just a lot of guys in track suits eating big sandwiches outside job sites collecting fat paychecks for doing shit all. Yeah, I mean, when you get outside of the cities, there's not a lot of people collecting paychecks is what it seems like. That's what it looks like when you drive out. Yeah, so fortunately, however, Lordstown Motors appears to have done, well look, at least a bait and switch has the first half, which is the bait. So,

they have done a bait and they appear to be in the process of doing the switch on a... Switches when the bait gets better, right? Yeah, on a town that basically has born a lot of the brunt of deindustrialization in the region most recently. So, a little bit of background. Lordstown Motors is a company based in Ohio, started by a man called Steve Burns a couple years ago, Mr. Burns. He tries to cultivate an affable image, but in policy terms, yes, very close. A man who I'm sure would blot out the sun. And this is essentially like a bud off of his previous company which called Workhorse, which did essentially the same thing from which he was let go for being basically useless. It recently went public via SPAC and raised about $675 million in cash

from doing so in no small part because this electric vehicle firm generated over 100,000 pre-orders to fleet buyers. So, people who have fleets of trucks that they use for things before even making a single car. It must be a really good truck then. Yeah, it's great. It's good business. It's actually... I like the idea. I always talk about Elizabeth Holmes, the fucking the blood thing where they get... Fuck, I can't remember the name of the company, but I'm always there and there. I'm always like, what a great idea to get all the money for doing something but not actually doing it. That seems like a great business. It's even better than podcasting. It is. It is.

We have to make some even shadow of a product. At a high enough level of price, you actually have to do quite a bit less. Like Nicola, which we've talked about on this company before, they've partnered with General Motors. This part of General Motors is transitioned to electric. So, it does seem as though General Motors may have been the victim of another flimflop. I know. Not General Motors. It's the bad for them. Yeah. Oh, man. Now this whole thing makes me feel bad, which I didn't before. I didn't think to do with General Grievous. So, like Nicola, also the company is helmed by a showman type figure who's been compared to P.T. Barnum. Mr. Lyle Langley. Yes. And like Nicola, it's also recently had, yes, this report published

about them by Hindenburg, which alleges it is essentially a scam. To me, this is worth talking about, because it is essentially, like the Nicola situation, it has defrauded a lot of investors, which is cool and funny and hilarious. And we like that. But unlike the Nicola situation, part of that, you might say, fraud, scam, illegal crime, activity. Appears to have been much more sadistic because it has heavily played on the narrative that it's going to revitalize Lordstown, Ohio and the surrounding area as part of like the much wanted transition of the area to what is being called Voltage Valley. Oh, I never heard of Voltage Valley. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, don't get too attached to the concept. Why does that sound

like a sub channel on kink.com? I'd say, yeah, don't get too attached to the concept because it's probably not going to work because so many of these companies that get involved in it seem to be a scam. The title that we put on the notes for this was Oops, All Scams. Yeah. Woopsy-Daisy, It's All Scams. And Alice, this reminded me of Nicola, but it reminded you of a different company. Carbon. Carbon Motors. If you ever played the video game, Need for Speed, Hot for Shoot, right? If you played that long enough, you could unlock a special cop car, which had like classified statistics called the Carbon E7, which looked very futuristic. They didn't just make that up. That was a real startup that came to the town of Connorsville, Indianapolis, and built them out

of like at least $7 million worth of public money, which they used to pay themselves. They were going to bring something like, you know, over a thousand jobs to this post-industrial town. And what Carbon was going to do is they were going to build the cop car of the future. That was going to be their thing. I invested in them, actually. I didn't know that this had gone upside down, though. I was like, oh, cop cars, we're always going to need those. Yeah. Ryan's got to call his broker, actually. This is very bad for his financials. The city awarded them like $7 million, mostly in riverboat casino money.

Oh, come on. Don't take the riverboat casino money. An old-timey guy in like a waistcoat with a bow tie and like a big, big moustache is like, now I'm a little bit needing some money here for this cop car of the future. I would have made enough money here on the riverboat casino, although I don't see why we couldn't see our way to that classic Ohio accent. That's right. Yeah. No, it's like on the one hand, it's like guys defrauding riverboat casino people who are already fraudsters, right? It's just scams against scam artists. But riverboat casinos kick ass because they're in places that it's illegal to have a casino, but they will be like, but you can

put it on the river. You're allowed. You're not allowed to have a casino in the state, but you know, international waters. Yeah. If you have a lake, then it's legal. Of course, you can't enforce laws on water. So like, of course, it's a connoisseur was literally it was called like little Detroit back in the day. And then all of these factories, like I think there was definitely Ford there, but I think GM2 had closed and had moved elsewhere. And so all of these, all of this, like both the officials and the normal people were like, yeah, we're going to get the jobs back. We're going to, we're going to have a sort of a high tech cop car factory in our town.

And then they immediately filed for bankruptcy with like $21 million worth of debt. And the city was left with their sole assets, which is just the perfect sort of scam thing. Their sole assets were some staging for trade shows and a single prototype cop car that did not drive and was sold for like $20,000. It feels like investment. It feels like in a car business, you can really get away with like saying, I'm selling a car that doesn't work, you know, like both of these stories are like, yeah, I mean, you know, there's, it's a car. I had an idea for a car, you know, you've seen cars before. Well, this is one of those. I feel like less bad about the carbon thing because they were defrauding cops, right? Very,

very easy people to lie to. And so they could just tell these guys, yeah, it's going to have a place where you can put your gun or whatever, and they would turn around to the mayor and be like, yeah, now I have an urgent tactical need for $21 million worth of cop car. Yeah. But like, not so with Lordstown, right? Well, yeah, so with Lordstown, well, it's a little bit different, right? So much like, much, much like sort of many of the other places sort of discussed here, and including, yeah, this place where they had carbon. Lordstown had a, was the center of a lot of factories, a lot of manufacturing. GM built cars and cars in Lordstown, Lordstown assembly plant from 66 to 2019. But like, they really used it a lot less, like they slashed, they've been

slashing jobs ever since about 1972, following a historic strike. So the Lordstown strike of 72 was very significant in American labor relations history, because, and this is from an article by Sarah Jaffe, it was this newer generation of assembly line workers who like saw what their forebears had secured, which was a relatively secure, but monotonous 40 hour work week where you basically do what you're told and assemble a car. And what she says is, the 1972 Lordstown strike revived all too briefly, as things turned out, the demand from organized labor for workers to exercise some control over the moment to moment process of production. Yet the Lordstown action also ended up marking a different kind of turning point for factory work in America.

Employees won a couple smaller concrete goals, such as getting laid off people rehired, but the UAW international caved to management when it came to the demands for greater control over working conditions. Labor historian Eric Loomis said they were unable to win freedom from work or freedom from that kind of work, because they were just starting a conversation about autonomy and it never really had the time to come to fruition. Before being crushed by a giant robot. Effectively, before being crushed by the response of Western economies to what is comparatively a relatively minor recession in 1973, the decision was, well, time to discipline

labor, crush the unions, etc. I thought I knew a company that builds giant union crushing robots. I'm going to need $100 million of riverboat casino money. So, in fact, what we have is this place where we came so close, where the UAW came so close to piercing that membrane, getting that little bit more control, and where then they just got completely shut down. The defeat of the labor movement here, in many respects, set the stage in motion for that factory, returning not as a center of value creation as it was, where people would come in and work on a thing, and then organize together to try to work on the thing for more money and have more control over their working on the thing. But essentially,

now the factory is an ornament and a power point to build money out of investors. That would be great, but for the fact that it's giving all of these people false hope. Oh, yeah, essentially. So, I mean, just in that little bit of Lordstown labor history, turning back to Brian, that story of we come from a strike that has these very lofty goals to eventually becoming basically an unused, unallocated, as it was after NAFTA and after the steel plants closed down in Lordstown. How does that story strike you? It's this transformation of vibrancy to sort of fakeness. I mean, it is like argues, like, so the vaccine is available in the United States, like pretty readily available. You can get it if you look,

you know, and basically what you do in Ohio, if you want to get it right away, like I wanted it the day I was eligible to get it, I had to look in traditionally Republican parts of the state, you know, maybe an hour, hour and a half out of town, a place where there's not a lot of stuff. And like when you go to these cities to, to, you know, steal their vaccines that they're not using, because everybody in Columbus is like, I want it, you know, when you go into these cities, you really can get a sense that like, man, these were all towns that were like, there was a lot of stuff going on, you can see the buildings and they're all kind of burned out now. And it, it is really sad, you can see people kind of falling for a scam like this, if they're

promised anything, like any job that's not like working at Tim Hortons or a CVS is like a good job. Because if you think about it, like the only real local jobs or maybe the two restaurants in town that employ six people, and then you have like the Walmart area of town where, you know, there's probably a strip mall where a lot of the people work or they drive two hours out of town to work. So like, you can definitely see why they would be so willing to fall for like, we're going to build a fucking plant here. This is going to be Voltage City or whatever. I forget what you guys called it, but like, I could get very, I can see them getting very excited and rolling out the red carpet for this. Indeed. And that's sort of what happened, because after GM

basically took revenge on its workforce by unallocating all these American plants to Mexican after NAFTA was signed, after rewriting all the contracts, the big three auto manufacturers as two tier contracts were like, but senior workers who are like, you know, kept those jobs and, you know, junior workers who came in under basically gig economy conditions, but in 2007. And then you've got like, this factory makes the Chevy Cruze, which basically saves GM from bankruptcy because people like compact cars. And then it's shuttered completely in 2019, Steve Burns comes in as the head of Lordstown Motors, heavily invested in himself by GM and says, I'm going to unshutter this factory. And here's what he said the plan was as of January

2019. 600 workers in Y1 to build 20,000 of the pickup called the Endurance. 2022, we ramp up hiring and production to include other EVs aiming at 5,000 skilled jobs in the medium term in this town. And the jobs would pay $17 an hour, which is just less than a new hire at the big three. And would not be unionized off the bat, though Burns has set a record, he would allow the UAW to organize the workers if they chose to have a union, which is very nice of him. How nice to $17 an hour. That's so funny though. What a king's ransom. To be like, yeah, no, this obvious scam, right? This fraud, these jobs that are imaginary. Are these imaginary jobs going to be union? And you can't even bother to lie about that. You're

just like, no. Yeah, I told you last night, no, I don't want them getting ideas about their there are no jobs coming. I still don't want them getting ideas about their station. Had a union before and that's what made all the factories close. So I think we need to do away with that idea. Look, if we have an imaginary union, then how am I going to be able to make imaginary money from the imaginary factory? I wonder if he was just worried that someday he might have to hire some people, you know, to make the scam look good. Like, well, we'll say $17 an hour. It's not a lot of money, but, you know, it's it's better than CVS or, you know, the fucking McDonald's $17 an hour. Well, I actually do know how many people are working at the plant

in Ohio as of right now. Is it numb? Is it numb? Is it numb? Okay. It's actually a whole 171. Oh, they got to be doing great, though, because they're not really doing anything. Yeah, I don't know what it is that they're doing. I've gotten some examples of some people. They're all like Vito Spadafore. They're just there in a lawn chair eating a sandwich. This sort of does come not with the people, but it does come up at some point that stuff like this is happening. It's one of the people one of the people hired, for example, has been hired basically to like go through and check to see which of the machines work and don't work, which again, just it really seems like like a dad promising to come to like, you know, like a

divorced dad, like being like, I'm definitely going to come to your little league game, son. And then just doesn't it doesn't show up. But like, you keep seeing his car almost coming. Maybe this is him. Yeah, none of the machines work. That's the thing is like, how do you hire a mechanic for something that doesn't work? Like, what do they do? Do they just have like, like, you know how Chuck E cheese or the animatronics, did they just make like animatronic machines that you can just crank up and be like, Oh, wow, look at it go the Chuck E cheese truck factory. I imagine it looks like a set for if you were putting on a stage musical of Dexter's lab. Yes. So again, they did buy the plant with all the stuff in it does have working stuff in it.

However, again, your reference to a stage musical will be relevant later. Oh, because it's like the produce because essentially what they've done yet more or less. So what they've done is they have built they are like saying they're building cars, they're saying they've been, you know, they're saying they're building cars basically. We'll get to what's actually happening. They've also been approved for a state tax credit worth $20 million on the expectation that that $20 million will incentivize them to create 1,570 new full time jobs. Let's see if they materialize. I love it when, you know, there are some scammers and they've started a business as a scam.

And you're like, well, maybe if we give them $20 million, then they'll be embarrassed to how much money they've scammed out of us and they'll maybe like do something. They'll take pity on us. Yeah, exactly. So Mike Pence and Donald Trump made a huge deal out of Lordstown when it opened in 2019. They said it was it was it signaled the American recovery. So Pence said it's a new beginning for Lordstown and a new day for leadership in electric vehicles. The recovery is on the electric vehicle, something which I normally think is gay on this occasion because it suits me. Yes, which makes it more time, which makes it more timely and appropriate to be here at Lordstown Motors, a part of the great

American comeback, which is just fantastic. The great American great America has been out with like a fucking metatarsal. You guys don't remember there was a time there where they were making America great again. There was a time before that where it was not so great. I don't know where what happened before, but they were busy, you know, making it great again. Then they did it. And then people were like so unkind to them and they were like, well, we don't want to keep America great. We're going to elect Joe Biden, actually. Yeah. And if not for Joe Biden, if not for Joe Biden, Lordstown would have produced tens of thousands of trucks by today. But Joe Biden said, no, sorry. Joe Biden would have gone to Lordstown

too. Let's not fool ourselves. If they could have said they would have been like, hey, you know, we'd love you to come and speak at our Lordstown plant where we crank up machines every once in a while. And he'd be like, oh, cool, you know, and you get them in there and you put on some safety glasses and a hard hat and he watches them crank up a machine and everybody's really happy. Makes a really confusing speech. Everyone would look away for just a second. They'd look back to where he was and be like, oh, no, where's the president gone? And he's wandering through a row of like automatic welders, like Mr. Magoo, getting barely missed by each one. Very fun. Time was, your daddy would work at the car plan

and you'd say, well, what are you doing down there, dad? And he said, well, son, it's a day, oh, what am I talking about? Yeah, that'd be great. So that'd be a lot of fun. Anyway, so, but no, of course, yeah, that every single president would be or every single political tendency in America would be very, very pleased to sort of look at, again, the very surface level recovery that's represented by a guy comes in, says he's going to buy the factory and promises to do technology that's basically indistinguishable from magic. Well, that means it's good. His magic is very impressive. As essentially a, yes, this wonderful sort of story of recovery, again, without sort of

looking too closely at it. I went to this car plant and the man there, he made a car appear behind my ear. I'm telling you, it was absolutely tremendous. I've never seen some of the losers over at General Motors. Okay, they think they can do cars this man car in your ear. They can't do it, folks. They don't know how. So basically, some of the workers hired thus far at Lordstown Motors are former members of the UAW local 1,112. Tim O'Hara, the shops former president said, I'd hate to see them get another job. And then the same thing happens to them that happened with GM. Of course, there are a lot of hopes resting on Lordstown Motors as far as jobs are concerned. Folks, we do hate to see them. We have our hopes very up. Yeah.

Yeah. A place of sort of despair that has been wrought on you by like the sort of dispassionate greed of a company like General Motors. And then to more or less have a con man come in and promise you a guy essentially rode into town on like a horse-drawn carriage, selling what amounted to like, you know, miracle cures more or less for this town's economic woes. I think it must, I think it would really do a number on you to like experience sort of to experience just a brief flash of hope before being told, oh, no, sorry, we don't make anything in America or the UK. All we make are complicated financial instruments. And we needed to, we needed the factory to be full of people. We needed to make it look like we were going to

make this area recover in order to make off with our millions. Sorry. Listen, buddy, let me level with you here. Are you familiar with the battleship patenkin? I mean, politicians get a ton out of that, too. You know, oh, I brought the plant back, you know, which is like, okay, you didn't bring the plant back. Some guy rolled into town and brought the plant back. But the thing about it is that's really sad is that people want the fucking plants, you know, like that's all anybody really wants in this world is in like those parts of the country is like they just want to have the damn plant where they can go to work 40 hours a week and do something and then come home and have a house and some money. It's really not that fucking

hard of a thing to make people happy. But, you know, of course, capital prevents that from happening every step of the way. Yeah. And I mean, if you look at the thing that's interesting, I guess about this is that the formation of capital is different. You know, the sort of extractive exploitative, the directly exploitative model of capital, like at least it includes, or the pitch is right, is that look, the directly exploitative model of capitalism, it includes you and it's sort of located in a place and you can organize against it. And then it sort of de-territorialized itself and became sort of the sort of globalized finance capital. And all of a sudden, if you're in Lordstown, you're no longer included.

It's going to have to go somewhere where, you know, we're actually using children now to make Chevrolet. Yeah, the Chevy power wheels. That's right. And now, though, you've seen the size of these kids hands, they can get in there. The new formulation of capital is essentially, you know, it's beyond sort of simple, it's beyond sort of simple, sort of globalized, like just-in-time supply chain capital. It's now essentially like largely fictitious and beyond credibility. It's now just, I need to make a convincing enough slide deck to get someone to purchase my SPAC and then that's all that really needs to happen. At no point does a car really need to be made. I just need to tell a good story

about a car being made. Hell yeah. And so the job that comes back to Lordstown is a fake version of the job that was there before, because it's easier to sell that on a PowerPoint because finance has already de-territorialized most of the car production. That's fine. We don't need it anymore. And also just makes every single person happy. There is a part of a scam, like a scam person that also like really gets off on making people happy, that I think is a really underrated part of scams where it's like, yeah, man, I get to come in, I get to throw a parade, probably had the high school band play at a rally and we're opening

up the plant. The mayor gets to cut a big ribbon. I get to like, you know, crank up the machine for the workers while they clap. I think that part of a scam is that joy. Yeah, for sure, because it's the, because that's the joy, because at least you're experiencing some like optimism. It's like cheap, fake sort of sugar optimism. It's not connected to, it's connected to a fictional story. So a few more, a few more things. This is from NPR. Youngstown native Frances Turnage worked for the plant for three decades starting in the 70s. She says, I looked around one day and I saw a lot of the jobs were empty and replaced with robots. It got lonely and that was just another blow. She said about this region

that had lost so many jobs. She followed the news about Lordstown's plans for the facility and like many in the community, she's wishing for the best. I hope it works. I pray it works. Well, it's not going to grow. So shall we discuss Lordstown's fictitious car? Yeah, is it really good? Well, so this is as good as the super truck, much like the union, the non-union imaginary jobs. Why do I imagine the imaginary car won't even be good either? It's not. So by the way, if you're wondering sort of what they made from this, right? Remember, they went public as part of a SPAC. So they did a reverse merger, went public on the stock market, and then were able to sell a bunch of shares the moment they

went public. By the way, all the insiders sold tons and tons of shares, millions and millions of millions of dollars worth of shares for this company whose value was based on the idea that it was going to be one of the most valuable car companies in the world in a few years. But as soon as they went as it went public, they sold tons of shares, which definitely engenders confidence in it for me. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you're running a company and you believe it's going to be worth untold billions of dollars in five years, you would sell most of your shares right now. Yeah, because you want to let share the wealth. Exactly. Yeah, because you're a Marxist. That's right. So the fictitious car is a commercially focused, fully electric pickup

truck, and its USP is that it's got like four small motors, one powering each wheel directly. That sounds like a lot to go wrong, actually. The most is on the actual wheels? Yes. That's the dumbest thing I've ever fucking heard in my life. Presumably they're in like the body of the car on me, but just... No, they are unsprung. They are below the shots. That's the dumbest thing I've heard in my fucking life. People who drive cars have always said more motors. I would like more motors on the car. That would make it better. Yeah, I think the logic... It's quite cool for electric cars to have two motors, right? Like front and back. But like, yeah, four sounds like a lot. It's like a

razor blade logic in the wheels where you have the sort of brake caliper heat on them. You have stuff getting thrown up on the road. You have... If you hit a curb... Oh, don't hit a curb. Oh, poor boy. Don't do that. No, don't do that. Don't hit a curb. Our advice is don't do that. Yeah, sometimes I drive a shitty car, right? And my car has... There are no lights that come on in that bitch because there aren't any lights, right? If something goes wrong with that car, you find out because you hear the noise. You don't see a light, right? And then sometimes I drive my mom's car, which is like a fucking nice Japanese car, and like you drive down a pothole and like a little light comes up on the dashboard being like, whoa, don't do that.

And it's like, yeah, well, no, not to do that. The road is shit. Well, so I would say if you're driving on a workhorse endurance, so named because Steve Burns said the endurance has a dual meaning about the endurance of the people in the region. Not the car, I guess. That's good. That's a good thing to say. It's got one horsepower. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, this car is impossible. I'm now looking at the website. This car is impossible. This is a real Theranos Mobile here. All right. I want to see this now. All right. Let's get it up. You get the initial operating cost comparison on the main page and you start looking at it and you're like, get the fuck out of here. This is impossible. Yeah. Well, there are a number of

reasons why not. Oh, wow. Okay. It looks like you gave a pickup truck like gigantism. Yeah. Like what if Ramzan Khadirov was a pickup truck? And what if Ramzan Khadirov was a pickup truck and also dressed as Robocarp? And was also in charge of that company? I'm asking this constantly. Yeah. I'm always asking this. One of the sections of photos, it just says Mike Pence and it's also just a picture of the pickup truck. He visited Pence and Steve Burns visited Pence and Trump at the White House. Anyway, so more on the car. Yeah. So you guys have all pointed out the main flaw right away, which is that hub motors, as they're called, are susceptible to durability issues as you might put it gently. Much like the Hindenburg. Because these are electric motors, right?

Yes. Correct. So when you say susceptible to durability issues, do we mean in a sort of catching fire way? Well, okay. So far, okay. I'll give you a little bit of a history of the rollout of the endurance. By November 2019, the company promised to do for 2020. Having missed that, they then said that they would begin in January 2021. Having missed that, they then said that deliveries would begin sometime early 2021. And now having sort of basically having missed that, the latest company presentation now says deliveries are expected September 2021. There has been one time. We're not going to miss it again. The car, the truck appears to have been tested once. And according to a night, the transcript of a 911 call obtained by Hindenburg,

it stopped driving after 10 minutes and immediately burst into flames. Yes. That's bad. You don't want your car to do that. That's something. I'm not a car guy, but I know that I don't want that to happen. No. Yeah. That's more of a specialist thing. Yeah. I mean, if you want to drive a car a very short distance and then destroy some evidence, like if you want, if you're running from a murder and you want to really deprioritize getting away from the murder, but prioritize destroying the evidence of the murder, this is the car for you. Absolutely. Yeah. Guys are overrating how much people want flames on their car. I said decals decals. So basically, it loves to talk about this in wheel drive system,

but apparently, according to employees, Burns went with this with the company that supplies, so they don't do anything in house. That's why he's called that. Yeah. So by the way, they don't actually make much of this technology in house. They just license it from other companies and put it together. In fact, like fucking none of these tech companies, very few of them actually do anything technical, like Greensill, for example, they just licensed their like AI invoicing software from a third party firm. Like none of these companies actually do anything. It's just a guy has an idea, goes and licenses a bunch of stuff and then talks a bunch of people out of money, promising that he'll make them all richer than creases.

That's basically what happens. Cool. Yeah, sounds fun. I would like to do that myself. In fact, we're very proud to announce a joint venture between TF and Street Fight. We're making our own transatlantic VTOL taxi service. All we'll need is millions. So investors, please get that. Uber, but forgetting to another continent. That's right. What if it's Uber for private jets and it also comes to your house and is a VTOL? And I see no problems with that. They did do her Uber for helicopters in New York. Yeah, I do know that. That's right. So I don't know how long it lasted or whatever. It sounds dangerous, but I mean, I'll let them do what they're going to do in the big city.

Look, when, sorry, when has anybody ever died in a helicopter accident? Nobody that I can remember. No one's ever told me that they died in a helicopter accident. Exactly. As far as I'm aware, there was only one helicopter of heavy seals that went to get bin Laden. Anyway, so what's basically right? Yeah, this, if you sort of, and again, it's a work truck. It's supposed to go on job sites and stuff. Like it's supposed to be for companies that are using it as parts of like working fleets. And if it like goes over a small bump, then we'll catch on fire. It's designed to be driven by blokes and geysers can handle a car that's on fire.

That's right. So this is what was very funny to me. And Miley, you kept talking about a stage for a play. This is where some of that all comes together. So this is also in the Hindenburg report. A senior UAW union leader who worked for decades at the Lordstown plant for GM also believes production of the endurance is lagging way behind the stated schedule, referring to a video posted by Lordstown in late 2020, late February 2021 of an endurance body being assembled by four robots, only one of which actually generated any sparks. So what they did was they put the body into like a bay. They turned on a bunch of, they had a bunch of robot arms moving around it, but not actually doing anything.

Oh, yeah. It's like an amusement park ride. You go to like an amusement park. You go through a little like it's the factory ride. You go in there. There's people with hard hats. There's machines making noises and jumping up and down. You're like, well, they're really making a truck here. That is really good mileage. It is cheaper than a Ford F-150. So this is a fun ride. Yeah. Essentially, that's what it is. Is it's an amusement park ride for venture capitalists? Yeah. Which again, fine. Yeah. I mean, usually the kind of amusement rides they go on are like a VTOL taxis that kill them. So in this respect, it's much better for them. Or planes owned by certain guys. Yeah. Planes owned by guys going to places that are like in the middle of the ocean

for the reasons. So anyway, that's one half of it. You have a company with a product that appears to be a little more than smoke and mirrors. Let's talk a little bit about Steve Burns because, look, maybe the car is just like bad because of a bunch of coincidences. I'm sure Steve Burns has a lot of experience in making cars. Presumably. Yeah. He's been in charge of one, two, three, four, five different car, different companies, all of which I didn't actually read these. I assume they all have to do with cars. Yeah. So the first one is called AdLink, which is a computer program that allows real estate advertisers to track newspaper ads. Okay. So all right. That's one. I'm sure the other four are to do with cars. PocketScript, a provider of electronic

prescription software. Is that my car? No, not cars. Ask me now and Ask Jeeves Clones Search Engine. Ask me how to make cars. Ask me now. A search engine that launched in 2005 and traded as an over-the-counter stock until it went defunct three years later as a clone of Ask Jeeves. Okay. That one wasn't cars. I imagine the next two are going to be cars. I love the idea of being a clone of Ask Jeeves. Like everyone remembers Ask Jeeves, the internet colossus that was Ask Jeeves, the household name. That's why people always say you should ask Jeeves that. Yeah. That's why I say that. Okay. Mobile voice control, which I assume is for cars, a provider of speech recognition software, not for cars. Yeah. Okay. Last one. They could tell who was asking Jeeves. I took this

on my phone. A photo storage site formed in 2007 that went defunct in 2011. So like a photo bucket clone. Oh. Okay. So he hasn't done any car stuff until he started Workhorse, which he was then forced out of for being not very good as the executive of a car company. I like that this guy's approach is like, well, I'm bad at everything I've tried so far. I've got to be good at something. Cars, maybe. Or try something else. Yeah. Maybe cars. You know what? This seems to be an empty, an empty factory in this city and everyone in there just sort of looking up at me with giant eyes full of hope. Maybe I'm good at cars. Yeah. Yeah. A huge piece of equipment that people can die in. I could probably do that. You know, yes. My Ask Jeeves clone, Ask Terry or whatever it was

called, did not work, but I could make a car. For sure. Watching this car drive on like, because they have a screen of it driving on dirt roads, which I assume they weren't able to do. Or I mean, this reminds me of the company Nicolo, which I was mentioning earlier before we started recording, which demonstrated it's electronic truck working by rolling it down a hill and then filming it rolling down the hill. And they said the truck in motion. So they were technically incorrect. Right. So I used Ask Terry and then 10 minutes later, my computer caught fire. Yeah. So like, for example, one thing we know is that the car doesn't, like there are tons and tons of regulatory standards it has to adhere to. According to the report, it adheres to none of them.

So I imagine like it could have been anything. They could have in the mold. They could have put it. They could have just put it in your mom's car. No, well, no, it's not crucially because she doesn't operate a fleet Milo. Geez. No. Anyway, so, but that's the fictitious car. Somebody weighed your mom joke like your mom operates a fleet. Yeah, that's right. For all the good pre-order one for a hundred bucks. They do have a hundred bucks to order now and you pay a hundred bucks and you got yourself a pre-order. Now, be a Lordstown vehicle deposit. Now, $100. Brian, you mentioned a pre-order. Well, let me tell you that this, the pre-orders play a huge part in one of the reasons that this has

been able to go on for so long because they've claimed to have a hundred thousand pre-ordered trucks, right? And not just from podcasters going on their website. So effect essentially the pre-orders from Lordstown and its predecessor essentially actually were just a commitment to think about ordering it later. Yeah, but they got a hundred bucks for each one of those commitments. So that's something. I'm updating the quantity here. I said I wanted to get a hundred thousand of them. Well, I'll save this company. 404 not found. So you can't order a hundred thousand of them. Damn it. What about my fleet of a hundred thousand kamikaze pickup truck drivers? So mostly what would happen is they would arrange these through third parties, right? Or they would sell

them to like other companies and fleet operators. However, when pressed as to what these pre-orders actually meant, a member of staff said these are soft orders. It's not a firm commitment. It's let's take a look and decide later with thumbing in an order. But they have to do it a lot. I mean, I'm not sure if I says I have no idea if that's a fabrication or an exaggeration or the real deal, but I know some of the people who have these orders and they are absolutely not firm orders. However, they'll often say, oh, we have a hundred thousand pre-orders. We're a rock solid company. They'll basically trumpet these numbers as real when they're in fact, let's say, less than. So they basically use this fictitious demand to generate excitement among people financing it.

And this is the part that I think is fine. It is very funny that a bunch of people got a bunch of investors essentially got a buffaloed by this. How the fuck does that work? How do these people whose job it is to invest in companies? Very smart. I mean, if you say you got a hundred thousand pre-orders, they really don't probably care to see the paperwork. It just sounds like a really good deal. Also on the thing where you can pay a hundred bucks for a vehicle deposit, there's a little section that says, how many total trucks could you end up potentially purchasing in the future? So I assume they've gotten a hundred dollars for people saying, I'm probably more than a hundred. I can see my business needing a hundred of these things. Absolutely. And so what happened,

right, is they'll get a letter of intent signed by someone else, right? No commitment at all. And here's a couple of their third part of counterparties that signed letters of intent with them. One is E-squared energy, which represented 17.5% of Lordstown's order book at one point. The principle, again, this is from Hindenburg, the principle of E-squared energy was identified as one Tim Gross, where his LinkedIn profile, he identifies himself as a transformational leader in clean energy. No relation of harassment. No, it's got a need. Yeah, different gross. However, E-squared, which ordered, again, $735 million worth of trucks. E-squared has two employees and they're both going to have to drive a lot of truck. Yeah. It's registered address is a small

apartment. Huh? That's fine. You can park the trucks outside. They're busy hiring right now. They don't need the trucks quite yet. They're going to have several people on staff. Yeah, they're also written a letter of intent to someone else to hire like a hundred thousand people. Well, that's sort of what they did. So they say, when challenged about this, Gross said, we don't operate a fleet, but we provide fleets. It's a hybrid of a lease, but it's not a lease. That's the closest I can describe it to someone who isn't already familiar. And now I have to walk down these stairs. Oh, yeah. Our business is too good for you to understand it. That's great. I love it when that's the case. You know, like, oh, yeah. Well,

our business is like, basically, it's like, it's like a lease, but it's nothing like that. Anyway, you wouldn't be able to understand it. It's pretty, it's pretty highbrow. Do you mind leaving? I'm trying to smoke a bowl here. Money pliggies. Yeah. Essentially, what they do is they it's just fucking Brad Pitt in a true romance. They're like, are you the mafia? Yeah. So, effectively, right? They're saying that they're, they're, they're intending to buy all these trucks that they will then lease, but not lease to provide fleets, but not provide fleets to a bunch of unspecified people. But they're a company of two employees, one of whom is part-time and doing it as a side hustle. And when challenged on what kind of

energy consulting he actually does, he advises buildings on how to like change their lights to be more efficient or turn off their computers. I guess now he also provides thousands and thousands and thousands of trucks directly from his apartment because that as a business is also a scam. I got you to turn your lights off. Can I interest you in 10,000 electric trucks? Yeah, you get him in by turning off the lights, then you hit him with the 10,000 electric trucks. Would you consider? Because you know, like that, that whole, I mean, I presume it is in the States as well, in Britain, like that whole industry is basically a scam as well. Because I think at some point is either the Tories or like the end of new labor, they introduced this thing where

every building gets given like an energy efficiency score and like you can and it affects how whether you can rent out a building, what energy efficiency score it has. And overnight, this whole industry of like wide-boy geezers sprung up for all these like qualified energy assessors. And they were all guys who used to be like fucking, I don't know, like used car salesmen or whatever before. And you could just like retrain overnight to be like a qualified green energy assessor. And you get paid like 200 quid a throw to go and walk around someone's office and go like, yeah, you can need to change them light bulbs, mate. Oh, is it light bulbs? You're gonna need the LED's. That'd be 200 quid, please. To like fucking stamp a certificate

that says change the light bulbs. I love capitalism. It's so cool. It's like any boom industry like this always generates people who are sort of reckoned that the eagerness of other people to get involved in it means that they won't check what they're doing too closely and they can just kind of try to either, even if they're not like directly like fabricating a company, they can try to sort of just invent a middleman role for themselves, just grab some of like the dumb money that's flying towards it. You can become lights, Baz. Yeah, that's right. Hey, better turn them off, mate. So another one. You added the environment. Innovations, LLC. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, pretty fun. Slime it into my veins. Ordered $52 and a half million worth of trucks. That's an innovation

or and they spoke and the firm spoke with David Hine who explained that innovations has no plans to actually purchase the vehicles instead describing his role as merely out of a promoter or influencer. I'm a truck influencer. Oh, an influencer. Hey, a commercial fleet influencer. Sure. Why not? Instagram. Why not? Sure. Yeah, he goes on there. He's like, have you seen these fucking trucks, you know, and also a CBD pill. He's in Dubai like showing hole on the truck. So yeah, so what they what he says is what we do is host and support events with companies and then we invite Lordstown Motors to the event to show the product. We just direct the company to Lordstown directly when they tell us that they're

interested in purchasing trucks. That's what we do. We don't get involved with any of the actual ordering. We're just influencers. What what Intervisions does is promote the product and we think we can influence from there. Remember, we don't sell the truck. We just influence companies. As of the time of the report, they had 30 followers on social media. Huh? That's a successful influence. We have that influence. I love that they didn't even bother buying some followers like for literally like $20. They could have bought a few thousand followers, but they were like, nah, if each one of their followers buys 33 trucks, yeah, they're going to do pretty well. I would respect this company so much more if they'd have just sold a shitload

of trucks to Isis. That's right. Well, that would be so really stop Isis. Yeah. That would be great. That would be like a win-win for everyone concerned. You get your money. Stop Isis. Yeah, but the crazy thing is, right? All of that people basically signing letters of intent to buy trucks when really they're just like truck promoters or whatever. That looks wildly legit. Spongebob for trucks. Like I'm making my racist YouTube video. I've been sponsored by the truck that catches fire. Oh, you could totally be like a like a dash cam YouTube guy. And you're talking about, I don't know how like, you know, the SJW's made it so you can't jack off the space jam anymore than 10 minutes into your video. It just explodes because you hit a small pebble.

Cool. I'm in the endurance. This is great. I'm loving entering all of this heat. Yeah. Coming from you, coming to you from the endurance, the Dunkin Donuts cashier wouldn't serve me my drink because I wouldn't put a mask on. That's right. So this all, but this all looks wildly legit compared to their next way they generated pre-orders. So in early 2020, this is from the report, with a go public transaction on the horizon, former employees told Hindenburg that CEO Steve Burns was desperate to increase his number of pre-orders regardless of the quality of those orders, regardless of how much anyone previously they've been very quality driven. I mean, yeah, they, for example, what they did was

they needed to get 10,000 pre-orders in order to secure better financing terms from someone who was basically lending them money or buying equity. So the company, I'll do that for them. Well, that's the thing, Brian, you could have, because the company hired a two-person consulting group called Climb2Glory, the number two there is in Climb2Glory, where they every, and where they, it was to receive $50 per truck pre-order they made. 50 bucks. Okay. So I would be an affiliate for these guys, like, hey, you know, these electric trucks, they're really woke. You just pay them a hundred bucks and they'll send you an email that says you might be able to get a truck. I get $50 of that. This is all great for

everybody. None of these people send them a hundred bucks. If you sign a big deal with them, you just sign the paper, you don't pay them anything, no financial commitment at all, nothing. Oh, why do I got to pay the hundred then? Come on. Now I want my money back. So you just make, like, a 5,000 orders and you get paid $50 for everyone that you make, and then you don't buy any trucks? Correct. That sounds like a great job. Are they still hiring? Because I could order so many trucks. Like, honestly, they think those guys are good at ordering trucks. I will piss those guys into submission with my truck ordering. I will have four screens of truck orders open at once. I will load a billions of trucks if that is what it takes.

We don't even need to do the exploitation anymore. I'll take $35 a truck. I'll just order more. Like, the labor, like, that's what's really, that's what's crazy about what capitals figured out how to do at this point. It's figured out how to, like, make an enormous amount of money off of a car company without involving any labor at all, except for the labor involved in placing a fake truck order that you have no intention of fulfilling and getting paid for doing that. That's it. Sounds great, though. That's not a bad job at all. It's very, it really just strikes as the ideal. We used to make stuff in this country. It's like, yeah, I guess. Now, what do you make? I don't know, money? I suppose.

I used to be in the band D. Green, but now I just order trucks online for money. And I'm not going to do anything with any of these trucks. I've got nowhere to put them at my house. And that's even when you bear in mind the vastness of the universe, the number of the trucks I've ordered is vast. An enormous amount. Thank you, Brian Cox. So, yeah, this is essentially sort of how they raised the rest of their orders was just by paying some guys to go and talk to other guys to say, hey, we'll consider ordering some trucks from you. And then Lordstown just has to take those numbers and turn around to their financiers and be like, look how many we've sold. It's a closed loop. Money has no need to interact with stuff at all. It just interacts with confidence tricks

all the way down. I love that the economy is all gambling tokens now. It's so cool. Like, honestly, like, I mean, we joke a lot about not having a real job. I don't know, Brian, if you feel this way as well, but I've come to realize that we have a more real job than like 99% of the economy, which is just like moving stuff around that doesn't mean anything. Yeah, the people that make a bunch of money, I mean, we definitely work harder than they do. Oh, yeah. That's true. So with that being sort of the story, I guess, of how Lordstown Motors came to be and what's happening with it, I guess I just want to sort of refocus on the, you know, the only people I particularly care about in this equation, which is the people who actually live

in Lordstown and who like, who are basically used as like, I don't know, props for this like Potemkin company that sort of either, I don't know if it was intended to never work or just was sort of every corner was cut so hard at every opportunity and all the focus was just on generating upfront investment as soon as possible, that again, they're just sort of left by the way side again. I guess like the people that are actually working there are probably doing okay. They're probably pretty happy with the deal if they're not actually having to do a lot of work. But I think the sad thing is like this community of people who thought that, you know, they're going to have generations worth of work because that was kind of the promise of auto factories and

stuff like that. You know, we had these, these, I guess you could call them years of prosperity with a middle class, you know, and like people would go to their auto factory job and they would work their 40, 45 hours a week and they would get to live in a decent house and go home and sit on their deck and like grill burgers and drink a beer every weekend. And like now everybody's in those towns, there's just nothing there, you know, and, and they're traveling, they're traveling an hour, hour 45 minutes. I mean, I used to work in this warehouse back in when I was a real worker guy. And I made $7.50 an hour to fold boxes. And I did this for 40 hours a week, but the warehouse was 25 minutes away from my house. But there were guys that worked

there with me like guys and their wives just like these couples that worked there with me that were driving an hour and a half, two hours to get to work because they lived in one of these Lordstown type cities outside of Columbus. And they needed, they needed the job, they needed the money, but they were probably paying, you know, they were probably paying two hours of labor to get there just in gas every day. So there's like this promise with these plants that like, no, those are the good jobs, you know, when you go to high school in, in Ohio, you know, you went, at least when I went, you heard about jobs like that, you know, they complained so much because teenagers are like, Oh, I want to be an influencer when I get older. I want to, I want to be a rapper or whatever.

And it's like, I want to be a fleet. Yeah, that's all there is. There aren't factories. Nobody can say like, I want to work in a fuck. I want to work in the factory my dad worked at and retired from and has a pension that doesn't exist. And the thing is, right? All this austerity, right? All of this, all of this, this austerity that's happened since, well, again, you want to start it in 1970, 1980, 2008, whenever you want to start it, right? The whole promise was always if we do enough austerity, then the good jobs will come back. And not only will they be good jobs, they'll be better jobs because they'll be massive innovators who have been like, you know, who have been sort of incentivized to succeed because we have no taxes and we are basically throwing money at business. And, you

know, that's why your kid can't go to school or it's got like 70 people in his class or whatever. And you can't, we have to have all this austerity, but it just creates, it's just highly financialized environment. It just says, well, the incentive is to use the factory as a movie set because the actual money is made from investors. It's what happens is it's all just, it comes back, but hollow in a parody. And truly for a guy like me, what sucks about this most, a guy that loves scams is that there is a real working class human toll to these things because the whole thing kicks ass all the way until you get to that point. You know, guy rolls into town, he makes the mayor look like a dipshit. Everybody looks like a fucking idiot in the end,

but that also includes people who really need help and could have really used those jobs. That's what's sad, you know? Exactly. It's just, it's such a flex, right? Like by sort of capitalists who have won so hard, who like ever since like the Lord's Downstrike of 72, right, have like won and have crushed any attempt at socialism. And now they're just like deciding, hey, I guess we're going to do like scams today because I like the movie The Sting. Yeah. And well, I wonder if they even, my real curiosity is like, does this guy think he's doing a scam? Did he think that this was going to be possible? Or did he go into this knowing like, we weren't fucking doing anything here. I mean, I probably lean more on the cynical side of he

went in there and we ain't, we aren't doing anything here. We'll just get investors, you know, but you don't even get in trouble for this shit. I mean, you guys sent me the report. I guess the report, has anybody gotten in trouble for this? No, well, what's happened is that report basically is just a short sellers report where it's sort of detailing all of this stuff that's happening, that they're alleging is happening to the company. Well, yeah, short sellers are only regulators left. We love them though. We love them, the GameStop guys. It's a big short selling firm that's basically just saying that, yeah, there's a bunch of bullshits happening at his company, but if it wasn't for them, then no one would have fucking known.

The thing is with all this stuff, like my natural instinct, much like Brian is to wear on the cynical side, but then when you actually talk to these people, lots of them are such like perfect sunshine morons that you kind of, you can sort of believe that they believe that like somehow it's going to work. Like one of my good friends like does a lot of like Silicon Valley startup shit and just like the shit he reports to me that people say to him about like they're obviously insane concept for a company that they're just like, yeah, it's probably gonna be worth like $12 billion. And you're just like, you really believe this. You all really like, no cult is as powerful as like the fucking venture cap Silicon Valley people. But if everyone does

believe it, then the line will go up until it doesn't because if people keep believing in the line until it's like when you get a run on a bank, right? It once enough people stop believing in the bank, then the bank collapses. And so it just like that they haven't reached that like event horizon yet where suddenly they all wake up one day and they're like, wait, it's all nothing. We make nothing. It's an app that tells you if your carrots are happy. What the fuck even is that? I own a house in downtown San Francisco. Slipping into Boston, Asimov there. What the fuck? I'm supposed to just sell Hondas.

So it got me making a fake truck. I mean, look, if you want to sort of get some insight as to whether or not this is cynical or not, I mean, again, I kind of can't tell either, but an in wheel drive system ordinarily would cost like hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, right? And he licensed this technology for like $13 million from a company that had had $15 million invested in it, not even in sales, just in total investment. When you look at the cost between it and a Ford F-150 and it's only like less than $1,000 more, that's where I tend to be like, okay, I mean, I don't know if you can even

fucking do that. And I think I don't even know if that's possible. It is when it catches fire after 10 minutes. It is. That's actually true. So I think rightly the thing is what is the difference between like psychotic optimism and cynicism? And I think that at some point, there's a bit of a horseshoe theory here where kind of not much and it's not important where it's you're either you're unwilling to communicate the outcome is the same. You're unable to confront the truth and you just believe that because of your own innate brilliance. And again, a belief that is cultivated a lot in our

sort of in our society, economy, whatever, that because you are a founder, you're uniquely brilliant and you're here to change the world, that you're not going to let the fact of like that you're getting like the cheapest version of the in wheel engine that burst into flame immediately all the time. You're not going to let that bot dig to track from the fact that you're here not just to save the world with all of these electric vehicles. You're also here to save America by bringing the jobs back. And it's just so happens that the only people who do this are the kinds of sociopaths who believe they can do it. Sorry. I just had an extreme flashback of the guy I've mentioned to you before. I know from

Cambridge who has like started some mental health startup to like help blokes who are like a addicted to eating Toblerone. And it's got like national fresh coverage. Perfect. Well, I think also like that the highest levels of capital are like a mix between psychotic optimism and cynicism. Like I think they see themselves as cynics, but I do think that they think that they are optimists. Like they I think a guy like this thinks that this is the endurance will get made, you know, it's going to get made. We just have to do some shit in order to, you know, we just have to like tread tread water for a while until we figure out how to get this thing made. I don't think he doesn't think it's going to get

made is what I think. So he says in response to this report, he says there's always haters. I quoted Taylor Swift to somebody the other day. Haters going to hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. You've got to shake it off. Sorry, I've become the Joker. That's incredible. Taylor Swift. Yeah. Mate, mate, come on. There's a bit out here, Shard's comedy show a few years ago where it's like, you ever in an argument with someone and you find yourself just going, mate, mate, come on, mate, no, mate. That's how I feel about this. There it is. I love that he included all of the additional hates. He didn't just say, hate is going to hate. He didn't paraphrase. He's

like, no, short sellers, just haters. They are haters. Anyway, they are though. They hate businesses. That's right. I wanted to ask you before I get out, before, before you make me leave. Yes. You guys are the only people that I've talked to from your neck of the woods. And I talked about my neck of the woods. And I want to ask you guys, if you've ever seen that, I want, I want you guys to know if I want to know if you've ever seen this movie or this, this series that came out of there called Years and Years. We've been, I've been talking about this with my, my, my co-host. Yes. It is the, the Lib Dem version of Children of Men. I've heard tell of this, but I haven't actually seen it. And I don't know much about it. I have seen

elements of it. Honestly, one of the funniest things I've ever, it is so bad. It is West Wing Brained. It is like a West Wing Brained Children of Men is a really good example. It is so stupid. With, with all of that in mind, I also say before you watch Years and Years though, I urge you to check out Street Fight, which is available on any fine podcast platform, Patreon, and some disreputable ones as well. Yeah. All that good stuff. So do check that out. In the meantime, I just want to say, Brian, thank you very much for coming on and talking to us today. Thank you. I'll bring Brett with me next time, I promise. He's, he's got some shit going on. If you listen to the latest Street Fight, you'll know what's up. So sorry guys. Sorry I couldn't

get us both. Not at all. It was a lovely time regardless. You're, you're worth, you're worth many lesser men, Brian. And thank you with all that being said as well. Don't forget, we have a Patreon five bucks a month. You can subscribe to it. The episode can come out in a couple of days. The episode, the bonus episode this week is very special. They come out after the free one. The bonus episode this week is very special. It is the thrilling conclusion to the Greensill Saga. We are going to be doing the thrilling conclusion, the Greensill Saga, the Bride of Frankenstein's balance sheet. So do subscribe and check that out. So I think all that's left now is to say thank you very much for listening. Don't forget to listen to Street Fight, all the TF

spinoffs. Don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to donate to the various bail funds and the IWGB's Strike and Hardship Fund and all that good stuff. Yeah. We will see you in the bonus. Don't forget to pre-order a truck. Pre-order a truck from Endurance. Why not? I have, I have a hundred of them. That's right. All right. All right. Later everyone. I'll see you later.