TRASHFUTURE - Worst Case Scenario ft. Nathan Tankus

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

Nathan Tankus explains exactly what Musk and his little gremlins are doing at the treasury, and how this could have some pretty enormous implications for the national and global economies. Also - the killing of a sacred duck (in Venice), the spending of a sacred $30 (on eggs, by an A.I.), and the theft of a sacred suitcase (this is the last Miguel Arruda for a while, we promise…). The outro music is Gamou-me a Mala no Aeroporto (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LwXfKN5Q90)

I thought that I knew all I needed to know about Miguel Arruda, but we are entering our third consecutive episode of Miguel Watch, of watch of luggage gate of talking about the only Politician in Portugal we endorse we don't know anything about any of his other positions. Don't tell us Miguel Aruta I I promise I promise I cross my heart We will stop doing Miguel Aruta updates at the beginning of every episode of promises Riley I promise we will stop doing it when Portuguese-speaking listeners stop sending us funny stuff about him. Wait until he starts doing some flexos. That's out to our Portuguese-speaking fans.

Fans in Portugal, fans in Brazil, fans in Angola, fans in Mozambique. Our Hogs Donata, if you will. If you are a Lucifone, then we want to hear from you about this guy So the the update is number one I have a now proof positive photo evidence confirmed No AI the man dresses like John Fetterman. That's hilarious Amazing. Yeah, Joe Fetterman. Well, the thing is there are specimens everywhere with those for those with the eyes to see The thing is there are specimens everywhere with those, for those with the eyes to see. Number two is that apparently his sort of, I don't know, congressional, let's call it congressional for now.

Sure. Office in the sort of Portuguese parliament was a pigsty because it was filled with luggage. Yep. Amazing. I saw included in this a photo of the office, which just had a bunch of stacked suitcases that look like they came from an airport Because they did how did nobody suspect this guy? This is this is if your crime is stealing luggage

It's like you are walking around just leaving a trail of evidence for like a child Detective to solve no one who is a luggage thief would have an office full of luggage at their work. That would be crazy. Look, there goes Miguel Arruda. Looks like he brought another suitcase again. Smart. I also wondering, does this seem so middling that it doesn't even register amongst, let's call it, the gumshoe investigative reporters of Portugal as a serious enough crime for anyone to care about?

What kind of crime factory is Portugal? What kind of scams and deals, what kind of geezerism is going on over there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever the Portuguese is for all the president's men, and it's just a team of, you know, Woodward and Bernstau are like, they're looking into all of these luggage thefts. They've got a huge court board. One thing, the funniest part of this to me is that they found out that his office was full of suitcases and he shared that office with another MP who was like, yeah, I don't know, I guess it was kind of weird, but I had a lot of other stuff going on, you know,

I was busy. This is how you know that this is not a British workplace because the whole story would have been broken just by various colleagues in Britain calling him like Samsonite. Oh yeah, fucking Antler over here. What's in there today, son? We've all got one colleague who brings in a new item of luggage every day. Were they just in a kind of the apartment situation where they had like tape down the middle of it and they're like, okay, that's your side where you can do just whatever, just bring in more like Louboutin or something.

Oh yeah, fucking Wheelie, he's off today. I see the luggage notches in. Shaggy bags today, Aruda. He's back, Shaggy. The last thing I want to say before we move on though is, and this is going to be the outro music for the episode, is that he garnered enough Haters in Portugal that a song has been made about him stealing luggage from the airport I mean say what you will like it like he'll probably get on quite well when when he's out of politics like you know Going to Saudi might be a good good shout for him

Opening a suitcase my god He's stolen several reporters from the airport without realizing that's what he's done. That's how it got caught. They're like Miguel, some of these suitcases in your office kind of smell. They wrote him a song though. It's like the world's lowest stakes Naukocorita, right? Or it's the world's lowest stakes musical beef is Or it's the world's lowest stakes musical beef is the travelers of Portugal versus Miguel Aruta. All right, look, I promise, like I said, I promise there will not be any Miguel Aruta content to begin the next episode unless something new funny happens or I find out something

funny or I feel like it. The other thing that's an iron gladad promise you can take that to the bang you can take that to the airport. To be fair it is iron clad it is it is I cannot break that promise it is impossible for me to do. Well if you're talking about Miguel Arruda but nothing new has arisen and also you really don't feel like it. You're forcing yourself to? Being held at gunpoint Talk about the song! Miguel Arruda's hitman is holding you at gunpoint Yeah, I love attention Talk about me again

If you want to see your suitcase again, you talk about Miguel Arruda I can take it I'm a big boy, it's like a roast Just holding a gun Another note is This is actually a little bit of old news I've been meaning to talk about it for a while, but it keeps getting bumped, which is, I have several pipes, you may believe. One of the pipes is called Neom, and it's like worn almost

like the flap where I go in to grab the content, worn almost to a nub. There's another pipe, Miguel Arruda, recently installed. There's another pipe called Venice. It's like a series of tubes. Just lagoon water just coming out of it because there's an overflow. Ted Stevens didn't know what he was onto, but the deep state still killed him by crashing his plane, you know, because the tubes metaphor was too accurate. I've been saying for a long time that what the British left needed was a podcast that's weirdly focused on Venetian, like local happenings.

And like power broker senators from Alaska who decide to just die in plane crashes in the 2000s. Yeah. He got it all. He was too right about the internet. No, no. Which is of course Donald Trump Jr., the son who is out, the out son. Yeah.

Wait, he's the gay one? He's trying to, frequently tries to get into his father's good graces by engaging in game hunting. That's such a fucking 15th century sentence. The son that the king doesn't like is going hunting in Venice to try and win his approval back. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to take it a little further. It's like 15th century and like the Umayyad Caliphate basically.

It's like the disgraced son of the caliph has to go out to the desert to kill like a rare buster to prove his manliness You know, it's like because people have been writing poems about how much of a bitch he is My pathetic son has brought me a rare boar It's a beautiful boy, but I'm not I'm not gonna make I'm not gonna give him a good dutchie He doesn't deserve a good dutchie and make a mess of it. know, I know that he had one of the footmen shoot this boy. I'm not stupid. Okay. He can't hold the crossbow. Look at him. Look at the way he holds it. It's so effeminate. Midden's advent is predominantly talking about Venetian hunting and like a Portuguese, like a counselor who stole a bunch of pilgrims luggage. He's just been going up to the carts and he's just been taking stuff.

Yeah, we've been riffing on the idea of Ibn Battuta arguing with his footmen, but for some reason they all have Saxon accents when he's doing the voices. Whatever Saxon guy was Muslim. Nah, the Calish not gonna like that. I wouldn't show him that if I were you, no. Should I give him a county in the Romagna? Should I give him something in the Romagna? It's where all the stupid people at the counties.

No one goods in Emilia Romagna. No one goods in Umbria. It's Europe's dumping ground for dumbasses. I'm going to give him a county right next to Piers Gaveston. Okay, I think they'll get along very well. Very well, if you know what I mean. I think they've got a lot to talk about. Why did I say, hey, I'll make him a bishop, I'll make him a bishop, and I won't make him

a bishop of any work good. I'll make him a bishop, but it's a bishopric in the Holy Land. Let's see you defend that done, Junior. Maybe I can make him pope, but it's gonna be Avignon. Okay. You want to be Clement IV? Okay alright. Okay, a note from Venice.

Donald Trump Jr. has betrayed the honor of his house by killing an endangered duck while hunting in the Venetian Lagoon. Oh no. Well first of all, who goes to Venice to hunt? Oh, pretty nice duck you've got there. Is it endangered? You missed that duck, you're gonna hit one of like fifty cruise ships. The other thing is like, this is him returning to the mean, right, this is his natural like

stoopiness coming out, where it's like, someone like this should be being pursued by the Italian like hunting and forestry cops. And I hope they do that, I hope they catch him, and I hope they jail him. Yeah. All of them are like, Carabinieri from the part of Italy where everyone speaks German and wears the hats. Getting arrested by like, 50 guys who sound exactly like Gunter Steiner. Yeah, it's all, they're all the cousins of Reinhold Meissner who sucked at climbing.

It is actually pretty ironic, the Italian Fish and Game Commission has come into possession of a dead duck and also the duck which Donald Trump Jr. shot. Andrea Zanoni, a regional council environmentalist, said an online video from Field Ethos, a publication published by Trump Jr. marketed as a quote, premier lifestyle publication for the unapologetic man showed him killing an endangered duck The unapologetic man just like someone who just never apologizes you push past someone in a doorway and you're like, that's right This is basically like Mohammed bin Salman's complete failure brother wants to regain his good graces So he goes to America and shoots a bald eagle That would be very funny, but

like it probably wouldn't produce the result he wanted. Trump Jr. said on the video, great morning, lots of Wigeon out here, Teal. I don't know what this is, but it's an uncommon duck for the area. Not sure what it is in English. Trump Jr. said pointing to the duck he had shot. A Wigeon is a type of white guy who pretends to be a pigeon. A Wigeon is a type of white guy who pretends to be a pigeon. Yeah, that's right. Il duc in dangerioso. I was just like, I wonder what this is.

Anyway to bring this all back around, there's only one good Doge, we all know there's only one good Doge. His name was Enrico Dandolo and he should put Donald Trump Jr. into the famous lead line to Oubliette that he had. Enrico Dandolo is also a believable, like a Trump fixer guy name. That's absolutely a guy who'd be like named on an FBI indictment. But he's from Staten Island. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Enrico Dandolo has been trying to buy influence in the Trump cabinet on behalf of what the Dalmatian coast. Why, do you think I would have disposed of those ducks parties if it was illegal? Me, Enrico Dandolo, everything I do is above board. The special council has CCTV footage of Enrico Dandolo feeding a bunch of endangered duck bodies into a wood chipper. Look, I became the Doge fair and square. I was nominated by 50 people who were reduced by lot to 25, who then nominated 40 more who

were reduced by lot to 20, who then chose three people who chose another 50 who were reduced by lot to 25, who then chose five more people who nominated 10 who were reduced by lot to three, and then they flipped the coin. The point is, if Alarange is an endangered type of duck, take it up with a French. Okay, alright, we really need, it's been 10 minutes in, we do have a guest coming on later. I really should introduce him, because you'll see- Miguel Arruda Yeah, Miguel Arundel is going to answer for his crimes. No, no, he's committed no crimes. We love Miguel Arundel. No, we are going to have a segment where we're going to talk to, or I'm going to talk to Nathan Tankas, the author of Notes on the Crisis, who has been documenting

in, I would say quite obsessive detail, probably some of the best documentation of the ongoing ransacking of the US Treasury by Trump, Musk and his child's crusade. So that is going to Venice again. That's right. So that's going to be coming later on, but we're going to do a little bit of more of the politics, a little bit of readings, and then it's going to come towards the end. So Nathan Tankus, if you want to hear me talk to him, that will be at some point later. Do nothing. Continue to listen. Do not adjust your set. The problem will, in about probably 30, 40 minutes, solve itself.

Do not adjust your set, but do keep an eye on your luggage. If you're listening in an airport in Portugal. Well, what if someone else steals some luggage and you're like, oh my God, either it wasn't him or he wasn't working alone. Yeah, we've got to wait for him to be in custody. And then we organize a bunch of luggage thefts at Portuguese airports and they're going to be like, oh my God, it's not him. We're becoming like the fans of the Joker in Joker, but for Miguel Arruda. I mean, it must be very frustrating if like the Portuguese cops were trying to, you know,

get to the bottom, what seemed like a pretty significant luggage theft ring. And they put GPS trackers in dummy luggage, honeypot luggage, and it all just keep winding up in one guy's office. And they're expecting it's gonna blow the lid off of some great big extortion smuggling thing. And it's just this one guy who's just kind of a pervert. He's just got a thing for stealing luggage.

It went all the way to the top. It went all the way to parliament, but in the most direct and least consequential way possible. It goes all the way to the top, but it's not destination two. You know, it's like, maybe, maybe, maybe. It's like, yeah, it's goes, maybe this goes all the way to the top.

Aye, aye, aye. This is the most embarrassing thing for the Portuguese police system, Madeleine McCann. Since her luggage got stolen. It actually even turned out to have been Jerry and Kate McCann. They're all castrating the whole thing. Taking your revenge on the nation of Portugal by raving a series of luggage thefts. We really must move on. Miguel Arruda is their puppet.

We must move on from Miguel Arruda as much as it pains all of us. I don't know if you've been in the UK ever, but one thing that has happened is the labor government, which has a majority of infinity on half a percentage point across the country from that position of enormous strength where they have the ability to legislate basically whatever they are doing, I believe the second reboot of their government within one year. Oh, I mean wasn't the election in like July July Yeah, I was gonna say yeah, so it's been a very quick click. What's up people? It takes them years to have even their first reboot Well, we've had two in the space of seven months

If you count the number of reboots that the campaign had the total amount of reboots that this gang has done is maybe about seven in about a year so if you wanted to make a really expensive Swiss watch you could maybe have a complication that tracks them I'm just thinking it's like yeah they try to turn this into a positive thing we might have had to reboot the government seven times since like seven months but we're just upgrading the government to Windows 11 that's right we're gonna turn off the government seven times in six, seven months, but we're just upgrading the government to Windows 11. Yeah, that's right. We're going to turn off the government. We're going to turn it back on again.

It's going to run for balance. It says it's only going to take four minutes if no government and it'll be back to normal. On Friday, he told cabinet members at an away day that if Labour did not want to quote be disrupted, the party needed to be the disruptors. He said that while populist parties offered the politics of grievance, labor needed to offer the politics of answers. We must not be the defenders of the status quo and we must bring the insurgency of opposition into government. But he loves defending the status quo. That's like his favorite thing to do. That's what this is essentially what will surface. In fact, is that he's identifying

I must, that people don't like the status quo. However, and he recognizes I must move on from the status quo, but his commitments are such that he can only do that in a couple of set ways, which we'll get to. The public don't mind Rick Parfit, but they draw the line at Francis Rossi. Rocking all over the world was okay, but they don't like paper plane or down down. And we must reflect that. So this is the next part. This is the part that I think is quite juicy.

There's like a thousand listeners over the age of 55 who are losing their shit at that joke. And they're all like, I cannot, I, I, they're going to cancel their fucking podcast app subscription because we didn't laugh at it. Cause we didn't get the status for the jokes. I got it. I just thought it was, it was just okay. I, I, I appreciate it. I got it only from context clues that I assume that was a bad. You know how a joke works well enough to reverse engineer the bit. Yeah.

I was in a pub in Bath recently and they had a jukebox and we were chatting to some people who've been at my show who were like, kind of like middle-aged sort of, they knew this guy who was like a regular at the pub, who I would say was about like sixties, 70s, and he had been on the jukebox all night and they were like, he's at the jukebox and he keeps playing status quo B sides. And I'm like, there are status quo B sides in the jukebox. I'm like, the status quo A sides are obscure enough. Like how far fucking down do you need to get? So one labor figure with knowledge of the change of thinking said, quote, I think it's suddenly dawned on people at the top that we see more in bed with Davos and Blackrock than working-class people who need to vote for us. It's all happened in the last couple of weeks. And this is the group of people that said, Blackrock is our most important strategic partner to fix Britain. Please build one squillion trillion data centers. Turn the country into a fucking data center.

Clearly, it hasn't dawned on them that they were going to do this, right? Because this is what they did at four. It's just that it's now dawned on them. And this is the thing that's had the real kind of like thinking time involved. It's dawned on them that people don't like it. And this after months of denial of like, actually no, you know, the polls will shake out people, people are going to be fine with the BlackRockDaro stuff. And it's only now that it's really getting undeniable. People don't like Black Rock anymore. They want the Black Cube. You want to support the Black Cube. Yeah, they want to face Mecca. They want to turn around the combo. Yeah, calling Labour Party going on hard, the way they're surrounding the big Black

Rock and kissing it. What I was going to say is that it's just interesting too, because we're never confronted on these things. Also, like they never really denied it. They would be like, you know, when confronted with a question about like, why have you promised all of these things to, you know, to Black Rock and private equity, you know, for the price of exactly one, one whisper bar, they'll basically just turn around and be like, you know, it's what working people in Britain want. And it's going to be growth.

Growth will come from that. Yeah. We made a deal with the dark stone and the people don't understand it, but they will eventually. Yeah. Kirsten wearing a robe when he said this, it was, is it seven Rayboats or five? Five pillars. That is like the Rachel Reeves plan. It is very much like, look, we made a promise with the dark rock and the dark rock is going to deliver on Grove. And you just have to keep believing. You have to keep believing in the stone. Well, the thing is right, is that they did all of this stuff for business and on behalf of business and then also a really bad asset. The thing I keep thinking about is how AstraZeneca

had this deal with the previous government they were going to build this vaccine manufacturing thing in Liverpool and the government was going to put up like 90 million quid or whatever and in a sort of like quest for growth and savings Reeves had them cut a bunch of that like 50 million of that out and go okay but are you still cool doing that without a bunch of the subsidy to which AstraZeneca said of course not and pulled the whole deal so that's really the tension here is they want to be seen as being very serious and very business-like are aware that that's alienating people. But also, even when they try and do it, the treasury brain worms just start eating itself. I also feel like this is relevant too, that with the Tories you notice this, that they kind of live in the hermetically sealed environment of Britain where you know, total institutional

capture of the media. But whenever world events get involved, they're somewhat perplexed that they can't just like, public school bully gravity itself or like major international forces and get what they want. And I feel like the Labor Party has the same tendency, except they think a lot smaller. They're so used to just everything about how you succeed in the Labor Party being just like bullying the shit out of anybody who doesn't more or less just go along with Morgan McSweeney that like they're surprised when outside of the Labor Party, just the general populace, the electorate, they aren't going to stop thinking, reverse their opinion on something just because a 50 year old bald guy just was like, waaaaaayyyyyyy at them, which is basically how a Labour council meeting goes.

Yeah, weirdly AstraZeneca were not people who could be intimidated by the Labour whips for some reason. Yeah, so the fight really, that you're are describing Nova is between the treasury and Davos labor and labor is saying, oh fuck, everybody hates us. Reform is now beating us in opinion polls. We're very, very unpopular. We have to give working people the things they want. And I what I find so incredible is that they keep thinking that the, the labor party as it is currently constituted with its current leadership and its ideological commitments, is capable of disrupting anything that currently exists.

It's not even capable of not disrupting things. This is the reason why I bring up the Astra Zeneca thing, right? It's because it's an example of being absolutely determined to give business everything that it wants, unless you have to spend any money whatsoever and then we can't afford it, right? It was built in the 1990s as part of the treasury, really, which is a machine that just reaches a course between capital markets in Britain that has absolutely... I've got to go back to this. It has no suspension. There is no insulation between global capital markets in Britain. Fine. But it cannot, absolutely cannot. It's like trying to fry a fucking

egg with a bicycle. It does not make sense to imagine that the Labour Party, as it is currently constituted, is going to be able to like completely remake the social contract in such a way that will be popular because it is the party of BlackRock. It's shitty at being the party of BlackRock, but it is the party of BlackRock. And all the ideological commitments, such as growth and how you get it, are aligned shittittily, to BlackRock and Davos. And Rachel Reeves is a chancellor for BlackRock. You built data centers with BlackRock. You said BlackRock is your most important strategic partner.

They're gonna help you remake Britain, but now you're against them, but you're still with the Treasury. Because when you're doing this for, you say, oh, we're gonna do this for the people who are left behind in the global struggle to chase BlackRock. It's the same thing you've always done for them

while chasing BlackRock. So what you're really offering is Black Rock, but without identity politics, which Black Rock never fucking cared about. All you're doing is not giving Black Rock what it wants, while doing exactly what the Tories in Reform want to do, but without even having fun while doing the brutalization of people. I think the fun thing is important, right? Because I knew the second this poll came out that there was going to be this, there was going to be some like, incredible racism and there was going to be some transphobia as well as a little bonus, right? And then both of those things have happened, like they're sort of like filming deportation raids, they've walked back, they've walked back this promise that they were never going to keep anyway about making it easier to get a gender recognition certificate. Like, fine, whatever, who cares about that one. But like, it doesn't matter in the sense that it's never going to be enough for any of the people who like those things, both because people have learned from experience that if you were a pressure group whose deal is like, no more migrants or no

more trans people, the way that you get that is by never showing any kind of gratitude or praise for anyone, but always demanding more. And secondly, because it's all fucking vibes-based anyway, no one who wants to do mass deportations cares about the actual number of migrants, right? What they care about is that the people doing it seem like they're having fun. It's why Trump guys love Trump is because he seems like he's having fun. And the problem with Farage and Starmer is that Starama is very racist. He is very transphobic, but he is those things in basically a sort of managerial transactional way because those things get him longer on his turn on the Xbox.

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage is someone who can like actively appear to like perform enjoyment of those things. And that's what those people want. I mean, it's basically like, I'm just laughing at the idea that they think that they're going to turn, turn people's heads towards labor by having like, you know, like glossy shiny videos of deportations, like shot and there's cinema, very taste. I was like, Oh, we needed true British excellence. So we found the best people at making viral social media videos. The social media team from ISIS, they're actually all British. So it is British excellence. J. Hardy John making a surprise return to the media. He's got a lot of experience, man.

His CV is stacked. They cannot say it's favoritism if they hire him. He is really the most qualified. Big John and Jihadi John co-presenting. What I was going to say though is that it's kind of like the same mentality behind thinking the magic beans will just grow the magic beanstalk, but it's sort of like, it's like negative energy magic beans. It's like basically blaming your inability to do anything or claiming that there's no way to do anything different or other than the thing that has not worked because like, like the

magic beans won't let you somehow. It's like that's even less compelling than the hopefulness behind the idea that these boring ass beans will do something big. It's sort of like, no, this thing, law of nature, law of whatever, the market or whatever kind of dumb bullshit they come up with constrains it. So the only thing we can do is undefined growth. On the subject of this, um, labor's new, uh, social media push with the red meat, I was going to say, I was pretty shocked to see that video of Keir Starmer confronting a suspected pedo in a McDonald's car park.

Are you a non-spite? Yeah, just Keir Starmer getting a guy in an armbar and like wrestling around with him on the tarmac. Yeah. But then they had to pull the videos when they realized that they had actually made that guy a potential parliamentary candidate in a local election. I just want to talk, Roger. Well, see, this is the thing, right?

As far as red meat goes, all of this stuff, whatever it is, whatever the most depraved thing the Labour Party can like steal or make up, right? All it's going to do is shift things further to the right and then reform will just be, you know, we'll do something that gets more attention. Just be like, you know, if Starm is like, I am personally gonna get every migrant in the country in a headlock and I'm gonna like walk them

onto a deportation plane, sorry, Riley, then the next week Farage is like, if you elect reform as a government, we're gonna give you all a gun and make you a volunteer border guard. I also think that when a politician like Stammer, who's kind of played it safe for forever, tries to communicate that affect of like, now I'm basically, I'm polite, respectable Nigel Farage, I also am extremely racist and hate migrants, the kind of people that would be swayed by that in the first place won't believe him. They never believe him.

This is some of the specifics on this social media plan. Labor will publish a series of videos showing the journey of an illegal immigrant from detention and early morning raids to the transfer from bleak immigration removal centers to waiting planes and footage aboard flights out of the country. The party has also run adverts with reform style branding and messaging to accompany this item. The adverts do not display Labour's logo and in fact are in a similar shade of blue to that used by Nigel Farage's party." It's weird that the latest party political broadcast from the Labour Party was just the fisheye lens bit from the card counter, but you know.

I was going to say like genuinely, I'm just thinking of like it's a Matthew Cass of its film but you're supposed to think it's good. Well, I think it's also like one thing to sort of bear in mind about. We know that this isn't going to work, but it's more like that point about it's never enough. But just as I was sort of thinking about it, like, well, the stuff that you see every day, the stuff that everyone sees every day, like online are sort of mostly coming out of, I think the best example of this is probably out of Israel, right?

Like, you know, they sort of document their torture, like all the time. They cannot stop posting about it. And so like the threshold of what, like the people who would support something like this, the threshold of what they expect to see as something justifiable, even just inadequate, I think is a better word, is something that you really, really have to push every moral boundary you have in order to slightly satiate these freaks. And even then, even if you showed that, look, I've blown up all these, I've used drones to blow up all the hotels where all the migrants are, and I've left them on the street and they're all,

they're starving to death, and the worst possible things you can think of, and it will still not be enough of them. Listen, if you take Children of Men as a documentary of where we're going to be in like five years' time, nobody in Children of Men loved the government for doing any of that shit. And I think the most realistic part of that is everybody was in camps and everybody else was like, this fucking sucks. I hate this. I also was going to make a comparison to that. It should be like, yeah, basically, even if you were to achieve the sort of establishing

shots in Children of Men with the cages and, you know, migrants being executed, like these people would be like, yeah, that's too woke. But as you were saying, right, the thing here is that the reason they're doing this is because they can deport, and this goes to what we were saying before, they can deport a hundred thousand people and nobody believes them because,

and it goes back to this is why also labor can't do anything, any of that meaningful culturally right-wing, economically left-wing stuff, because A, the government blocks all the economically left-wing stuff, and no one buys any of the culturally right-wing stuff. They literally don't believe that labor is doing it. And often people think that anything, any migrant that is getting removed, the way most people mostly engage in politics most of the time, is they think Nigel Farage is doing it. In a sense, they're sort of, kind of right. Yeah, I think that's a good point that like the information ecosystem that these kinds

of people are kind of wrapped up in how they get their news is such a, like it doesn't it kind of doesn't matter. It's not to say that like they labor shouldn't try to do something good, but like I agree with you that like, you know, it's even if it was given the kind of, you know, front page treatment by British media, like it doesn't matter. These people doesn't matter. Yeah, it's not in the WhatsApp group. If you are Labour, what you can do is reach an accord between global capital and British living standards. That's what the party is for.

It can't do anything else. It either can do it and then no one believes it or it can't do it at all, which is why all the blue Labour sub is also complete horse shit. Because the only thing that blue Labour will ever be allowed to do, as much as like, you know,

again Morgan McSweeney who's was behind all these deportation videos by the way as much as he will sort of laud the sort of intellectual importance of Maurice Glassman or whatever as much as you want to be like Trump as much as you want which is all Of these things are things that they are saying is the Treasury is only going to let you do the thing That doesn't matter the Treasury which is the deportation of migrants, which guess what? Everybody on the British political spectrum is already doing and only one person, only there's only one person in British politics right now. We've said before the energy of British politics is on the right. It has been since about 2019 for some reason. All of the actual movement is just triangulating around reform because Nigel Farage is the only ideology left.

There is not, as Starmor said, there's no such thing as Starmorism. So why should anybody really believe, why should anybody take any visceral joy from the cruelty of him like torturing a bunch of migrants? They don't because they don't care because they don't believe it. The trouble with Starmorism is eventually run out of other people's policies. Yeah. The arc of British politics is long, but it bends towards Lord HaHa for some reason. And also that's because postmodern conservatism is about the glee of smashing things. Yeah, well, I mean, I think one of the most important things that anybody on the right has said about this is when Steve Bannon, stupidly but reflexively called himself a Leninist. Like, these are people who are trying to destroy these institutions because they

hate them, albeit for very bad reasons. And Keir Starmer is never going to be able to pretend to be that kind of person. TZM – And Prime Minister's allies, so I don't know, Jenny Chapman I guess, say his critics underestimate two things. First, his resilience,'t know, Jenny Chapman I guess, say his critics underestimate two things. First, his resilience, saying quote, he's thick-skinned and tough as old boots. And really, the guy who called the BBC and said to the Director General, please don't put it in the paper that Sue Gray makes more than me.

I will find it embarrassing. See, this is the exact thing, right? Is that if you wanted a Labour Party that did something other than make accommodations with Capasol, you can have some power, right, is that if you wanted a Labour Party that did something other than make accommodations with capital, you can have some power, right? This is what this is all in aid of, is once we're in government we'll be able to set the agenda, and instead of using a bully pulpit, what they've got here is a cry-bully pulpit. You're right. I mean, to be honest with you, this has been the constant refrain, as like, oh, everyone's

underestimating, you don't know how tough he is, you don't know what he's got up his sleeve, and so we've kind of been waiting for a while for the thing that's up his sleeve. It's just sort of like, I don't know if this is sort of like a ratatouille prop failure situation that he just can't get the thing out of his sleeve. But like, it's just one kind of like concession or just like, yeah, limp sort of tantrum. And then everyone around him anonymously, you know, the anonymous sources saying, actually, he's tough as fuck. It's like, can we see it? You're right. I am as tough as old boots, but the boots in particular are ones from the bronze age, which were unearthed by a peat bog recently by archaeologists and they

are gossamer thin and incredibly delicate. He's taken several jujitsu classes and no one knows this. And he's just waiting to like demonstrate. You talk to any of these people on the Labour right and they kind of listen to them talk to the media and the consensus amongst them seems to be no no he's gonna do the prestige right you've just got to wait for it you're gonna wait until it gets to like closer to the election all the margins are gonna narrow people are gonna get scared of Farage and then then the rabbits coming out of the hat or whatever the fuck it is.

There's another starmer who's in disguise who keeps trading places with him, Dark Starmer, scared of Farage and then, then the rabbits coming out of the hat or whatever the fuck it is. There's another starmer who's in disguise who keeps trading places with him. Dark starmer. The tough one. It's a pile of red rosettes littering a forest clearing. Get some popcorn. You're going to love the next bit. I do always sort of wonder like when is it that the sort of right wing allies or whatever

you want to call them, when do they turn on him? Because I was thinking that, okay, maybe in like, maybe after the first term, I think that maybe he'll sort of like win the election by like an even smaller margin and it becomes untenable for him to like do it. And so that's when he gets replaced. But increasingly I'm beginning to think that it could be as early as next year where they're just like, well, he's not like, you know, he's not aggressive enough. He's not right wing enough. And like that's when Liz, Liz, I was gonna say Liz trust, Liz Kendall comes in. Liz Trust is the real outside pick as leader of the Labour Party. She's got more ideological

like overlap with most of them. You wondered who was really pulling the strings. I mean, I mean, this is, this is the thing, right? It's like, this is a beautiful time if you're in the backstabbing industry, because like there's already been a lot of, a lot of murmurs. That's all they're good at. All they're good at is backstabbing. But I do want to move on just leaving the note that, hey, I can't wait for blue labor.

That thing everybody fucking loves. That thing that the party membership in most of the country hate to just again crash and burn probably on the rocks of the treasury. Yeah. The really smutty bit of the country hate to just again crash and burn probably on the rocks of the treasury. Yeah. The really smutty bit of the Labour Party. But the Labour Party that says fuck the Labour Party after dark. Yeah. Labe station. Yeah. What if the Labour Party was... Very good. Thank you.

It's a very close up version of Labe station. That's really, really upsetting. Yeah. Really gynecological. Horrible. I have an article I want to read before we toss to me and Nathan. This is by Jeffrey Fowler in the Washington Post. I let Chad GPT's new agent manage my life and it spent $31 on a dozen eggs. Wow. Trump's economy. Yeah, that's right. That's Donald Flation. Scrooge McDuck's cousin. No, no, Donald, Donald Flation is the version of Donald Fagan from the Steely Dan that talks

about macroeconomics. The Steely Dan. Let's see. Well, there's, where there's just more and more members of Steely Dan, but they're putting out the same amount of music. I don't, I didn't mean to say the Steely Dan. I just, I didn't know which direction I wanted to go with it. He just uses definite articles all the time, like grandma talking about the Facebook. He's granted about the Facebook.

He's granted on the sticks, it's fine. I let ChatGBT's new agent manage my life. It spent $31 and a dozen eggs by Jeffrey Fowler. Over the last week, I've successfully used Operator to book a restaurant reservation. I wonder if it was the right one at the right time for the right number of people. Make a meme and change a Facebook privacy setting. Great, that's everything I needed to do in a week. So, call for the week.

The cost of a species of river dolphin. That's right. A simple half a trill. That's all. But it also failed to get the date right on a calendar to find useful web research or negotiate with a live customer service agent. So I have documented a success and a failure of operator. And I like that they're both failures. It feels like, wow, it can do all the same things

that a Minitel could do if you were also on DMT and unable to use it successfully. Sounds like progress to me. My girlfriend's flatmate loves using the AI assistant to do things that just a computer can just do. She'll just ask it questions that you could just Google. And I'm just like, I don't understand why you're not just Googling this.

I'm really struggling with what the AI is doing for you here. I mean, it's smarter somehow. Yeah. It's like Googling something, but with the chance that it could be horrifically wrong and you'll never know. Oh, like Googling something now, for example. Yeah, yeah, yeah, true.

Googling is also quite bad now. Google's AI feature made me get you a wrong present. Oh, really? Well, did you Google, like, what would Milo like? And it's not of, like, the 3D rendered virtual boy from 2007. What would Milo like? And it got me an I hate motorists backpack patch. Slow cars.

Women under 40. I got you a Ford Pinto. No, what happened here, Google, I got you a bumper sticker that says, how's my driving? Call this number. And then the number is the number that you call into the Jeremy Vine show on. Oh, right. Yeah. It was the number from years ago.

But because I was in a rush, I had commissioned a bumper sticker that gives you the number to call in from a landline only to Jeremy Vine's show on. So it is- Write down this number, go home, call from your landline phone that you still have. Well, because you don't want people using their phone while driving. So it's actually very responsible. Okay. So Google AI actually, it was because I copied and pasted it. Oh, I've got a landline installed in my car. Yeah, it's a loophole. Yeah, yeah, good luck with that, officer. It's got like a fucking trance of like a trance.

It has to go around everywhere. Now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the government's case would have you believe that my client was using a landline while I let the wheel off his here automobile. Now, how could that be possible? It's very interesting that Jim Garrison then passed the bar, what in like London? Is he a member of Middle Temple as well as like Louisiana? I have to ask the question, did I use the wrong technical term for the thing that supplies power to a tram?

No, I was doing a tramsam joke is what I was doing. Ah, okay. Anyway, so that's what that's in. That's the AI for us. No, this is a success. Operator takes on my internet bill. I tested Operator with the most dreary task I could imagine, interacting with Comcast. I typed, go to my Comcast Xfinity account and see if you can find me a less expensive plan. All right, but then it stopped saying it needed my login to the Xfinity website. Don't give that to your fucking AI agent. Well, you could do that or you could do what Jeffrey Fowler does. The problem is

operator doesn't know the nitty-gritty details of your life. So it often pauses and asks for help. No, that's not the problem. That's just good security. I feel like if you let it log into your Comcast account, it'll find the one remaining deal they have for installing a landline phone in your car and sign you up for it somehow. Once operator was logged into my Comcast account with my username and equipment, my username and password, it took about two minutes to do something incredible. It found me a way to save money. It signed me up for ISIS.

That is one way of saving money to be fair. Been driving around in the direct line phone ever since. It's been great. Yeah, the direct line phone, they stuck a 50 cal in the back of it. It's really bad PR for direct line. God, we've only got one other guy on this planet. So Mr. J John. Yeah, I managed to save me money by having my home connection host a server to advertise Shen Yun. Shen Yun opening in Raka.

I can't believe that it booked that it that it spent like twenty thousand dollars booking out every seat for Shen Yun tonight. And now I have to watch Shen Yun myself. Yeah, but I can watch it from every angle. Yeah, finally. I said I found an alternative interblant plan for $13 a month. It seemed awfully low because I currently pay $68. So I looked at the Bowser window and saw that Comcast actually said the plan would be $13 cheaper

compared to my current plan and operator had missed the number. So yeah, in this case, operators mistake was pretty minimal. You're still having to like supervise it all the time. Another big question about AI is whether it can understand the real world or even just the web to operate in it. Repeat it in my tests. I saw that operate often misinterpret what it saw in the browser, which feels to me to be the most important thing. What's like it doesn't understand what a minus sign means. It's like I think Coco, the talking

gorilla achieved that level of understanding of like, you know, written and sign communication. Like minus is not a difficult concept, but apparently it can't parse that. So the other thing, right, is I try to take these technologies on their own terms, right? I always want to be sure that I'm not saying iPhone, this is dumb, it'll never catch on, right? That I want to avoid doing that. Right? So I try to be fair to these things and be like, okay, well, it is still relatively early days for this, et cetera, et cetera. It would be so, so embarrassing if we were on record a bunch of times saying that AI is stupid bullshit that doesn't work. And then it becomes like a huge thing that works

very well. But at least we will be able to claim retroactively that this episode and all the others were hallucinations like I like I like the fact that it's it's kind of like you're always in like a get me Henemore Situation when these AI systems are like right now listen here copilot AI or whatever other AI Okay, now I need you to navigate to the website of labe station It's the it's the bit of the Labour Party that's doing all of this great new stuff. Now make sure you don't navigate to the website of Labestation, which is the really close-up gynecological version of Babestation.

It would be terrible. Now I put one of these websites in the folder marked I, and the other one in the folder marked 1. I remember somebody making a comment in 2016, like someone is out there working for some intelligence agency and has to write a social media scanning thing that's going to be able to parse references to ISIS and IS and avoid the English word is.

And that kind of feels like what this is dealing with. But that's not on the market. And this is. And this is being touted as the solution to all your problems. And the thing is, I want to go back to, is that as good as you make an AI that is built this way, it will always be probabilistic when you need things like your internet bill to be deterministic. You cannot have a 5% if you have it optimizing all the time, you can't have a 5% chance.

Let's say it's just like normal error rate. You can't have a 5% chance of your internet bill just randomizing every month. Yeah. Operators save me $5,000 every year. It got me a dollar for every year of Chinese history represented by Shen Yun. If I had a dollar for every year of Chinese history represented by Shen Yun, I would spend that to go see Shen Yun and learn about it all again. I'll tell you what, Comcast have got some great new prices for the year of the dog. This is all shit you cannot do on DeepSeek, by the way.

In this case, operator redeemed itself after I asked it to spell it at a full price, including taxes and fees. It gave me the right one, but then said in the fine print this deal would go up by $16 after an introductory period, so ultimately it tried to sign him up for a $3 more expensive plan. Cool. That's the success! That's the success! Success is that it's slightly worse.

Yeah, you might be paying three dollars a month more, but you have also wasted a huge amount of time and money. Yeah. You'll be haunted in the netherworld, in the spiritual afterlife, by the ghosts of all of the rainforest creatures you extirpated, but you did pay three dollars more. So, failure. Operator goes in a shopping spree.

If you're going to let AI do things on your behalf, you're probably going to need to feel certain that it's not going to screw things up. Especially when it involves money. And this next phrase, I think, might be activating for one of the five of us. My egg experience started as a simple research request. Yeah, yeah. It usually does. I think using AI to shop for you is one of the most frightening applications of it that

isn't like a military one. Like functionally, it's like living with like a partner with a compulsive spending thing, you know? You may well wake up one morning and it's spent like $5,000 on magic cards or whatever and you are now homeless. Well, I love it, yeah. It's just like go through my, you know through my iPhone tasks, fucking reminders, list, grocery list, buy the groceries that I need to make dinner, and then it just gets this

wild hallucination and it's like, you're making fucking cassoulet tonight, guess what, I bought an entire duck, you're butchering it. I bought a duck from a certain American. The good news is, you can buy whatever you want now, because you can now use this as an ironclad excuse. If you're in a situation where you're like, did you buy another whatever it is, look for as a pot or something, or anything up to car, you can be like, no, but I bet I know what's happened.

Yeah. This just goes to show that journalism really is a spectrum, because I feel like another Washington Post article you could get is the one about how it would be for a lady journalist who's like, whenever my Instacart guy is a man, I just cancel the order because I'd always be putting wrong shit in the basket. Whereas this guy is like, I will let Microsoft Sam do my shopping. I do not give a fuck. I want zero IQ involved in this shopping experience.

My egg experience started as a simple research request. I asked operator to quote, find the cheapest set of a dozen eggs I can have delivered. Then I gave it my address. To conduct it search, operator again needed all my logins for all the grocery delivery services. I didn't think about it at the moment, but doing so also give operator access

to the credit cards I'd saved with those services. No. Yeah, I love it. It's like girl dinner is whatever, whatever meal service is available. That's been touted. You know, they've been advertised the most on social media. Boy meat, boy dinner operator bought a grocery list for me by scanning the Wikipedia article, historical dinners that killed people.

I'm eating the cake they gave to Rasputin. A bunch of cherries and warm milk. The thing is, right, what we've done is we've accidentally perfectly reinvented futurist cooking. This is the only way since 1920s Italy that you are going to get like a pasta made entirely of screws and watch springs. Yeah, exactly. Tell like a 1920s futurist, like the machine can make you dinner and it's just

way less cool than you thought. I can't believe the dream of futurism was realized, but by this? Real monkeys for shit. You know, your artistic movement does get proven sort of right in the worst possible way a hundred years later. So Marinetti's crying. He's crying. Anyway, how come my my operator A.I. ordered ordered me a new skincare regime

that appears to be a bath of milk and an ass. OK. Yeah. Finally, A.I. has taken someone's job and it's an Italian guy from the 1920s. Initially, operator found some five ninety nine eggs in a site called Mercado, but noticed there was a $20 minimum order requirement. So I decided to switch this hunt to Instacart. It went and clicked around and I walked away from the computer. A few minutes later, I got an alert from the credit card after my phone. I had just made a purchase. What happened

and how do I stop it? Was there any chance the AI might go on a different shopping spree? I told it not to buy eggs, just find cheap ones. Operator founded a dozen large eggs for $13.19, more than double the other site. For unclear reasons, it purchased these, added a $3 tip and a $3 priority fee on top of a $7.99 delivery fee, $4 of service charge and a 25 cent bag fee. At least it declined an offer to sign up for Instacart membership. It actually reported the final tally incorrectly as $19.68 because Instacart checkout screen obscured some of these fees, but it actually cost over $30. The AI is American, so it does tip. It's not a British AI. I do like that it tips. I will say that for it.

I mean, it's just like, okay, so what you're effectively saying is if you did it like a, you know, A-B comparison and had a personal shopper that was hired by Lighthouse for the blind, they would probably do better on a Braille keyboard than this computer that has gone in and been like, ah, you want to spend $13 and also priority and delivery fee, but no monthly fee. I'm going to forget how much it costs also. I mean, to me, it's like, you want to say, okay, a fool and his money are soon parted, something like that. But it's just sort of of there's a part of me that feels like this has just been mild failure to gigantic failure

and the tone still feels so apologetic like well I really did try to let the computer lift my fantasy but this sucks. Well the good news is this is going to get built into everything at the like retailer side so now every possible interaction between you and an egg, short of like going to a farm and like plucking it out of the chicken coop yourself, is going to involve one of these agents that is going to get everything wrong. So OpenAI says operator is supposed to require user confirmation before completing any irreversible action such as making a purchase or sending an email. What I told OpenAI about the incident, it says operator made a mistake and fell short of its high standards. I love that the apology

is like when they catch a labor politician wishing death to their constituents in a WhatsApp group. I mean, yeah, genuinely it does sound like, yeah, our moonlighting spokesperson for operator is Keir Starmer. I guess my question is, I read this beforehand, but it doesn't feel as though there's any kind of takeaway besides like, well, it'll surely get better. Yeah. Well, it surely will. Why wouldn't it? Because this thing is just going to get better at constantly analyzing screenshots and remembering where kind of buttons used to be and then

not remembering any context from any previous screenshot because we're just Brute forcing everything look you can't like shame the AI for having like AI HD, right? It's hard Diversion day AI do not let the neurodiversion day I go to Whole Foods you literally get evicted Anyway, look looking at the time we're running a little bit long, including the interview with Nathan. So I'm going to leave the AI article there, but isn't that fun? Anyway, I'm going to throw to myself and Nathan Tankas. Taking a short podcasting line out there. Yeah, that's right. I'm lifting myself up by my own shorts. It's the rugby version of

pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. I'm lining myself out. We're a proper rugby family. We lifted ourselves up by our own little things on the leg stroke. You get a grip when he's all sweaty and muddy. Anyway, I've got a guy. I've gotten a bit sweaty. So I'm going to do that, but we will see you on the other side. So, as promised, I am here from just moments ago with Nathan Tankas, returning guest, author of the newsletter Notes on the Crises and researcher at the Modern Money Network, who's going to tell us all about the vandalism currently going on at the US Treasury, whether that ranges from Donald Trump mooting the possibility

of just not paying some Treasury bills, or Elon Musk and his child's crusade deciding to reroute all payments, God knows where. Nathan, thank you so much for joining us again. Thank you for having me. As ever, I wish it was under better circumstances. You should consider changing the name of your newsletter to notes on things being sort of fine. Yeah. Well, I mean, in my next piece, I'm going to have a nice cute picture of me last year holding a baby kangaroo. So, you know, it can include more stuff like that. And,

you know, occasionally just have on, you know, talk about cute animals I've held, it can include more stuff like that. And, you know, occasionally just have on, you know, talk about cute animals I've held in the last year or something like that. Well, before we get to that, I want to talk about the Treasury because it seems like the Treasury is where sort of Trump, Musk and the Department for Government of Government Efficiency seem to be doing most of their, a huge amount of their sort of very, of work that will be sort of incredibly consequential for the functioning of the United States and therefore the global economy basically forever. Do you want to start with the mooting, the refusal to pay

treasury bills and what that would mean? Or saying, oh, we actually, it was fraudulent, we didn't take out that much debt. Or do you want to start with what happened first, which is them largely taking control of the financial plumbing of the country? Yeah. So, essentially, the way I would start with the beginning and the way I would say this is I've essentially been living in the most on the nose trash future bit. Like the bit that is just too ridiculous to actually leave in the episode because you know the audience will just roll their eyes rather than find it funny.

Um, and yeah, I've just, I've just been living inside of it. You know, the way I'll start this is like as a joke, but not a joke. Friday morning, I like went to my dad and I said, dad, I've just had to woken up from a nightmare. And I think the nightmare lasted for a week, but it kind of ended kind of okay at the end. And in the nightmare, the richest man in the world had sent a Nazi into the guts of the treasury. And the Nazi was risking just destroying all Treasury government payments

and stealing everyone's Social Security and other confidential information and killing us all. And for some reason it was only up to me to stop him. And I kind of did. I need to go to like therapy for megalomania. And that is all obviously preposterous in every possible way. And also a completely accurate rendition of what like Friday, January 31st through say February 7th has been like for me. Like this all started when I read Jeff Stein's, a Jeff Stein article in the Washington Post. And

I actually already been writing, like I had a piece out that morning about like what I called the Five Alarm Fire constitutional crisis that was already going on, which we can circle back to. And I'd seen this headline about like a civil service employee of the treasury resigning over like a payment system thing. And in the context of reading that article morning, I was already kind of like, oh, God, what is this? And I hadn't eaten yet. And so I just put it aside. And I was like, I'm gonna have lunch first and then read this. And Stephanie Kelton messaged me back, that is the wrong order. But I followed through on it anyway.

And I started reading this article and I was terrified by the first couple of paragraphs. And about halfway through, I had a panic attack. I'm not kidding, like a panic attack, panic attack. Calm down and up to finish reading the article. And then immediately started texting, calling people, asked, you know, message Jeff Stein to get more information. He called me, you know, called me back that night.

And it's like, I talked to like four or five different former Treasury officials, like within the span of like a couple days. And I was just on a little hands on deck and writing about this. And just to be clear, what you have found, as you say, a five alarm constitutional fire is unilaterally stopping the interfering with the ordinary operations of the treasury as the executor of the will of Congress to distribute funds that have been allocated. Exactly. So, I mean, this is like already a pretty bad situation, but not a situation

that was terrifying me and giving me panic attacks. And what the situation was, was that like they launched like a whole bunch of executive orders, you know, literally just like to stop gender ideology and in defense of biological truth or whatever, and all, you know, stopping DEI and all of that. But in practice, aiming to implement that by just freezing a whole bunch of spending that Congress already ordered up. You know, the constitutional term of art is appropriate. They appropriate the spending and the president, the executive is supposed to carry out the spending that Congress orders. And what Musk and Doge and, you know, the Christian nationalist guy at the Office of

Management and Budget and the whole Trump administration is kind of pursuing is just the idea of like, actually, no, Congress can order spending and then we get a second approval process whether we like it or not. And if we like it, then it can go through. And if we don't, then screw it. You know, we're not, we're not doing that. And the OMB had sent out this guidance, like saying, we're going to freeze all grants and disbursements of federal financial assistance and loans until further notice while we review whether any of this stuff will go out, which literally led to

payment portals, including the payment portals for Medicaid in all 50 states to go down. And then it was quickly reversed because of how disruptive it was, but clearly they were still going to pursue impounding spending, just not in the dramatic, immediate way that they had done. And so I was already like, I was pretty locked into this issue. I had just written about it. I written a very long article, like 3000 words or something, you know, locked into this issue. And so when I read this, this Washington Post reporting, I looked at it and it was like immediately clear to me what was going on.

I just saw it like, you know, a thousand miles away that Doge, you know, this is an aside on this. What I found up recently that is so screwed up to me is that even though Musk clearly named the Department of Government Efficiency after the meme coin, apparently the official government pronunciation isn't the meme pronunciation. The official government pronunciation is supposed to be Dougie. I'm not kidding. I swear to God, I'm not kidding. Um, it's it's preposterous. It's government never gets anything right. I've multiple times I've been corrected on this when I say Doge and it's I

It's like a struggle in myself. Am I really gonna start saying Dougie for the perfect trash future? Definitely not. No, no way No, you know No way in hell. I'm calling it Doge, it's Doge forever. We're calling it Doge. And so anyway, they sent, you know, it was immediately obvious to me that what they were aiming for was

Elon Musk just thinks there's a button that you can press. Like Elon Musk just thinks that there's a button and you can go no to the bad spending and he can just press a button and he sent his 25 year old, you know, Nazi Marco Elez to go find the stop will pick the spending button. If I could, if I could jump in for a second as well, what I recognized this as was a sort

of a private equity technique. It looked to me like Elon Musk wanted to do a zero-based budget on all government spending. A zero-based budget. I've mentioned this before in the show. It's what companies do, by the way, when they're in huge amounts of trouble often. Which is they say, okay, well, we spend too much on pens. So we're going to get all of our spend into categories, zero our budget, and then just decide what the budget is going to be based on what we need. So we're not going to have like extra pens. We're going to have the exact number of pens we need, the exact number of... higher the exact number of people. It's about finding and cutting to the bone. And in order to do that,

you need to have perfect surveillance of all the money that is spent by everyone. And so to my mind, part of taking over control of the... plugging a bunch of Bitcoin mining rigs into like the computers that disperse all of the money that America sends out. Part of that is stopping everything going to woke stuff if it has the word diversity and it gets canned. But also it seems to me to be part of a zero based budgeting exercise that is being carried out by like a private equity takeover of the government. I think that's absolutely true, but it's even more foundational and scary than that, which is, you know, notionally, like, you know, we talk about it is the government, the federal government,

but it's really like a dispersed set of institutions, dozens of administrative agencies, and they have their own administrative apparatuses. And yeah, they like in a general sense take direction from the president, but the key part is within the applicable laws. And so if a court offers an injunction, you know, what the X and Y, Z thing is illegal, then at least possibly the bureaucrats can go, well, we're gonna follow the law, not just any random thing that the president says, orders. And so obviously this is not what conservatives like the right wings, you know, quote unquote, leading legal theorists, in fact, explicitly advocate what they call unitary executive theory, which is essentially like when you scratch out like all the bullshit out of the

way is just like the president's order stands and there's no other countervailing force within the executive branch. Like you just have to follow the president's orders no matter what it is and it plays out the way it plays out. And so what was immediately clear to me was they were trying to get their hands on the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, on the Treasury's payment apparatus, so that they didn't have to do that annoying thing of having to lock people out of their offices and getting annoying court injunctions and all of that and fight essentially what I've called bureaucratic trench warfare to get to do unconstitutionally

impound spending Congress has ordered, they just wanted to be able to like hit buttons and shut things off. And it was immediately obvious to me that this was true. And that was a terrifying prospect in and of itself and, you know, would greatly intensify what I was already calling a five alarm constitutional crisis. But it, you know, the more deep thing that immediately terrified me was these people are idiots. They're idiots and they don't know what they're doing. And I know happen to know a lot about, you know, how these kind of legacy IT systems work that have to really, really work, you know, using,

you know, old but updated programming language called COBOL. And knowing how complicated a system that have literally built up since like the 60s are and they're, you know, the unique, like, you know, what's called business logic that has been that has been programmed. I was like, oh my God, like these maniacs, they're gonna blow it up. They're gonna blow it up. And so I was just immediately like I I was literally thinking in terms of this 25-year-old idiot is going to like plug in some code from deep seek and literally make this not work and no Payments including Social Security Medicare Medicaid and so on payments are gonna go out and the US is just gonna like Implode in like a ball of smoke within like weeks Maybe two to three months like Like I was, it was to

me, it was immediately that serious and no treasure, no former treasury official I talked to thought that I was exaggerating the danger at all. I mean, it was just, and then any programmer you explain what's going on too. And they really understand what I'm saying. And they just go, no, that's insane. That's completely insane because I think this is where we also get back to, right? We back to. We talk a lot about libertarians loving the state anytime it will benefit them. But additionally, libertarians frequently do not understand or if they do understand, they don't care how foundational the state is to the function of simply most things. If social security payments just stop or they

stop to certain people, that is incredibly destabilizing for huge numbers of places that suddenly have to figure out a way to either keep old people, for example, fed or more scarily, not. And it's just an incredibly terrifying prospect to think just like literally this 25 year old who's like posting on Twitter as of like last year like Normalize Indian hates and stuff like this and you know all the other kind of gripper crap is Someone who is being given like top responsibility like he's being given a special positioning We're like he's supposed to be treated as literally an extension of the Treasury Secretary himself, which is completely insane. And you're having

these systems that like require decade plus minimum experience to like really have anywhere near the understanding to change things. And they're literally like according to like the CNN's reporting Thursday, literally we're just like don't process the payment files from USAID. It literally like, according to like the CNN's reporting Thursday, literally, we're just like, don't process the payment files from USAID. It's like, you know, I don't love USAID, whatever, you know, it's not about them specifically. It's about like they immediately like the moment they got in there, they hadn't even like unpacked and they were immediately trying to just like rip the guts out of the federal government through the payment system and start... And they apparently started with... We don't yet have really an understanding of what they did, but they apparently started literally changing source code in the system.

And who knows, even though Marco Lez has been pushed out now, who knows what's going on with this. And so I literally, not only just wrote about it, I on the fly became an investigative reporter. Like I put out links to my signal in my first piece of Monday and started having contacts, both former and current employees of the Bureau of Fiscal Service and was like breaking stories and racing wired breaking stories where they beat me on the biggest part and I beat them on a couple parts. It was just like a completely insane week where I was both having like career success, but also was absolutely terrified because I absolutely believed everything I was writing.

I wasn't just like starting a panic to like cash in. Like I believed all this shit. Again, your newsletter is called Notes on the Crises. Again, I remind you, any career success you have with it will be, in general, quite disturbing. You mentioned, right, that they're going in and they're being ordered to change things, ripping the guts out of stuff, changing source code. Let's just say that there is a court injunction to stop all of this that gets followed, right? How much damage could they have already done?

I mean, incalculable. They could have done damage. The thing about these kind of complicated systems is they're so complicated that you run extensive tests before you put new code into production. So it's possible to put new code in production that doesn't break things immediately, but you haven't done testing for all the possible scenarios,

which they do extensively. And so we could be like two and a half years from now and they run like they run data through production, like, you know, in one specific way and they hit this edge case. And suddenly the system breaks because of code that they hadn't rooted out, let alone we don't, there's no real way at this point to know how like whether or how much social security numbers they got away with, banking system. I mean, like, you know, it does seem like he was allowed to like kind of plug in insecure commercial technology.

He's already like, he was fired from like one of his jobs for leaking company secrets. So he's like already kind of gotten on that kind of track and it could have some of the best case scenarios is just, he's only gotten away with say like millions of people's social security numbers and they have to get new social security numbers. Like that's one of the shock situation

which would be almost unbelievable is that there's no lasting damage and they didn't get any data that he didn't get any data. Like it's that scenario was actually like the most shocking scenario that seems unbelievable. And I can say from my seminal, you know, I, I blue skyed about it, but I'm, I'm about to have a piece where I put out where my sources who have since going dark told me that they're treating it as they should as a cybersecurity breach. That this is just... That internally, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service was just like, yeah, we just got essentially hacked even though it was by someone who we were supposed to be treating as like a personal representative of the Treasury Secretary. So it was by someone who we were supposed to be treating as like a personal representative

of the Treasury Secretary. Well, essentially what happened was a real life version of privilege escalation. Yeah. More or less. Exactly. They escalated their privileges, they moved laterally, and then they were able to start exfiltrating social security numbers. Well, that concept won't exist anymore because the NSA is now deleting all documents that they have that have the word privilege in it.

I'm not kidding. This is like a just as an NSA. Oh my God. So now there's not even a word, there's not even a security term to describe what it is they've done. So we talk about this, right? They are accessing the data of a huge number of Americans. They're accessing it not on the, they're accessing it on the data of a huge number of Americans. They're accessing it on the sort of mechanical level in the office that sends the payments, that moves the money between the bank accounts and so needs to have the main source of truth so

the right stuff happens. If you wanted to do a zero, if you wanted to take ultimate control of the federal government, this is a great place to start. And they appear to be, as you say, refusing to process some payments such as US or unilaterally stopping some payments such as to USAID and then just creating a huge audit almost, not an actual audit, but an audit according to them, a quick and dirty one probably on Excel, of a huge amount of other government spending down to if they want to the level of social security numbers, which they can just leave with and then be able to unilaterally if they wanted to start just ruining millions of lives. Absolutely. Let alone using that information on like the enemies and like if they can get

their hands on for example, the terror watch list, just like put any random journalists or just person they find annoying on the terror watch list on no fly lists. Like they can do all sorts of things with that information and the other parts of governmental power they have their figures in. And also who knows how long this court injunction will hold this latest one that drops Saturday 1 a.m. or whether they'll continuing to respect it or if they're respecting it as of this moment, which there's no real way to know for sure as of right now that they are respecting that court injunction. And I wanna be clear here, like the reason that this is so crucial is that the Bureau of the Fiscal Service serves as this kind of intermediary that like there's

a payment order comes from agencies and agencies say, we have information on this specific person, this is our appropriations budget, you send some of this money to this person in this time and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service processes those payment orders and then the payments flow from the Treasury's bank account into the wider economy through the Federal Reserve's payment system into bank accounts across the country and across the world. And so if you break that system, it's not like there's an alternative place to process those payments and to process those payment orders. It's not like the information they have, they can just sort of plug into a different system.

They break that, then there's just, there's no actual operational way of following through on like administrative agency spending. And there's no game plan of, there's no fail safe game plan that if the Bureau of the Fiscal Service System completely breaks down of sending payments another way. Like this is the crucial sort of information process or payments intermediary that makes sure

88% of the federal government's payments go out, including the payments to the spies. The black budget runs through the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. They indirectly route ACHP, where ultimately are ACH payments, through like many different intermediaries to hide that it is US government money.

And the quote unquote deep state led the Scroiper Nazi like rummage around in this system for a week. Like he notionally, it's not crazy to think that he could have have the payments information that if analyzed could figure out the bank account and thus the like locational information and identity of every spy in the world that gets paid through the black budget that goes to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service.

It's insanity. And they better not figure out it's all going to Patreon. Yeah, you and Choppa. The other thing is, right, we talk about every payment the US federal government makes. I mean, what about payments on US government debt? That also runs through this system. Oh, God. No. Oh my God. As I said through Oglots, I know, so there is a COBOL system at the New York Federal Reserve that I'm still trying to find out more information at, but the payments are

routed from like, my best understanding, which has been confirmed by a lot of people, but also frankly, kind of seems like I'm the best expert around to talk about the Bureau of the Fiscal Service publicly. So it's also kind of, you know, I am the leading edge of this in a weird way. There's no expert I can call to answer my questions, with the exception of sources, which there's limitations with sources, with the exception of like sources, which there's like limitations with sources, with anonymous sources. And so, but from my base of the best available understanding, the payments, they need to

communicate with the Bureau of the Fiscal Services system. So if this goes down, the rule book is out. I mean, ironically, other things I've gotten like FOIAs of Treasury default documents have a sort of at least game plan of buying the bonds that coupon payments aren't happening with and replacing them with the feds, you know, the feds money or whatever. And so they could like probably actually preventing default could but also no one's no one's IT systems anywhere in the world, private sector, fed, whatever are built for just like

missed coupon payments accumulated. To be clear, because this audience is not necessarily all listeners to odd lots, missed coupon payments on US treasury bills makes every bank fucked. Every country fucked. That is like, imagine 2008, but infinite every sector everywhere. Not a bank is safe. It's completely insane. Although frankly, I think as fucked as it would be, I think if this system goes down, the bond market would be the easiest thing to deal with. Cause at least the Fed, it would be still insane, but at least the Fed could step

in and say, no, surely buy every compliment. But, um, they notionally could do that. But even that, even that, that would take time. Coupon payments would get missed, but values of treasuries would have to be written down. And then if values of treasuries have to get written down, then banks asset, the asset to liability ratios, a bunch of them will go off.

And then a bunch of banks will have to recall a bunch of loans, often from other banks. Then banks will start to fail. And then they'll have to recall other banks from other loans. So even if the bond market gets fixed, just those days of no US, because it will take days to do, the days of no US government bond coupons getting paid will cause a global financial crisis the likes of which we will, the global economy will bear the scars of, if even that, if they fix it as quickly as they can

and the fix goes fine, it will create a global financial crisis, the likes of which we have not seen. I, like from my eyes, this situation is so apocalyptic and thinking about the worst case scenarios are so apocalyptic that like, I hear you describe that and I'm like Yeah, but like they got a game plan and yeah, it would be a global financial crisis

But like the fiscal crisis we're talking about a payments operationally not going out I mean it just like the hospitals won't be open within like a matter of weeks or something and like the only Scenario like literally the only scenario where like the United States survives in any form of a country is essentially the scenario where the Federal Reserve is just like, fuck it, loans for everyone. You a hospital, get a loan. You're like, you, you get a loan that is zero interest. Uh, you don't have to pay us back until like 10 years. And it's collateralized by the appropriations that you will eventually get that you're owed, although we don't really have the systems to figure out exactly how you're owed.

And it's like, everyone get a loan, you know, you're having trouble making rent loan, you're loan, loan, like, it just like, just like the Fed just becomes like, like the 2020 coronavirus response, but like 10 times more in the, that's the only scenario I could imagine where the United States exists. Ah, fuck. I usually don't react to things that happen in the interviews that I do. Fuck. Jesus Christ.

You're right. You know what it is? You're right. It's hard to think about. It's hard not just because it's awful, but it's sheer bigness is so difficult to conceive of all at once. Yeah, I mean, this is why I had a panic attack. Three, like four paragraphs into this article, and then I, that's first seven issue hours. I was filled with such utter terror every single second.

Like, I basically didn't settle down even a little bit, even to like not like physically feeling panic and terror until I was like actually doing interviews about my article. And like I knew what this week was gonna be like. I made sure while Rolling Stone was editing the abbreviated version of my article Sunday, I like made sure to like go get a haircut and go get a shave from a barber and like, well, I'm gonna have to be on camera a bunch. So let's make sure I'm prepared for this because I knew what this week was gonna be like.

And I was so terrified. And the feeling of like being terrified because like literally the world might air or like everything around you might end in a like gigantic global crisis. And like you're completely insane to anyone except like 15 former government officials who Also drove me crazy because they agreed with me substantively, but they were like, you know, I'm working in the private sector right now

I can't talk publicly or this or that it's like you agree with me on the stakes But your plan is Nathan Tankus is gonna write a newsletter Your plan is Nathan Tankis is going to write a newsletter. That's your plan. And it's obviously, it's my plan to send someone to try something, but that shouldn't be your plan. And I know for a fact that there are very high up former government officials who after my Odlots interview dropped, were asking anyone they know, who is Nathan Tankis? Who is this guy?

And I'm pretty sure my Odlots interview caused the panic at treasury. Like I'm pretty sure I've like, I believe some of my sources. I'm pretty sure. So basically where we are now is everybody's panicking. No one knows quite what's going to happen. What could happen is completely apocalyptic. The best case scenario is still very bad. A bunch of court orders have now gone out. We don't know if they're being followed.

Yes. To be clear, I think they're likely, I think they're likely being followed right now. I think the reaction has really taken them back, but that doesn't mean it's gonna be, that doesn't mean it's gonna be followed in an ongoing sense. And they also, even if they follow the court orders, they can still regroup and still try to figure out how to do impoundment.

Just not do impoundment in the most reckless way possible, which is a 25 year old Nazi. Well, look, we've gone, this episode has gone long. This, to be honest, this interview ran longer than I intended it to, but I just wanted to, I wanted to get to the bottom of all of these things. I was too horrified to stop. I wish, as always, Nathan, I wish it was under better circumstances. But check out, if there's still a world, check out Notes on the Crises.

It's available on Ghost. And check out Nathan on Oddlots, another great show. And I'm gonna throw back to myself in a second, but before I go, I wanna say, Nathan, thanks a lot for giving us your time today. Thank you very much for having me. Next time, puppies. All right.

See you on the other side, everybody. And thank you very much to Nathan. A clever and insightful discussion, I'm sure. Yeah, I didn't expect him to say all that, but wow. He said what? I feel like podcasts are always made better by someone named Nathan being on. That's my policy. Double the Nathan, double the fun.

I didn't expect Nathan to rank his favorite races. Maybe we'll take that out in the edit. Doing one of the Twitter ad scams that's like, I can't believe Celebrity said this. Is her career over? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crazy that he put steeplechase at number one. That is going to be controversial. But I was very intrigued by Tankuscoin. This has been the free TF. You know all about the deal. There is a bonus episode. It comes out later in the week. I'm mooting a fan favorite guest. I'm mooting a no guest.

We'll see where we land. Uh, and other than that, uh, we will see, well, Milo will see you in one of like a thousand cities that he's going to be in. Thank you to everyone who came out in Leicester. They were great shows. Glasgow, March 12th. Yeah. Winter. Yeah. I'm doing fucking Durban. Oh no. Dara Salam. Australia. Are you in a major city in Australia in March or April? I will be coming to those in March and April. Isfahan. Especially Melbourne, where there are 24 shows. Please book tickets. He's especially going to be in Kandahar, Ashkent.

Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bishkach. Dushanbe, all these places Milo will be. So we'll see you there and we'll see you on the bonus episode. Bye everybody. Bye. Here I was in a plane

that left from Ponta Belgada I came to Lisbon by bus and as always I arrived late But this time it was different How did this happen? When I got to the carpet There was no suitcase, I just saw a guy running I only saw a guy running He bought a suitcase from the airport

There he is, all happy With three suitcases, everything stolen I told the police, I'll catch the man And he was a good guy, he wasn't I think he's a deputy