Weekly Skews - Weekly Skews – Don’t Look Up, Down, or Sideways, or Forward, or Around

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

Courts have witnesses accidentally pleading internet insanity now. We check on the state of athletes and gambling and whether we’re at the beginning of a legislative backlash. That story starts with an icon of pooping in shoes. Then we talk about the firing of the Head of Bureau Statistics and how successful we can be trying to deny our way out of problems.Support the show

What's up, everybody, welcome back. Happy Skews Day to you. It is Tuesday, August 5th, 2025. We're coming to you, pre-recorded from Monday, August 4th, at about 2 o'clock p.m. on the left coast. That's where we are in the time space continuum right now. This is weekly skews. I'm Trey.

That's Mark. How's it going, Mark? Good, man. had a good weekend. I hope you did too. Our president had an interesting weekend. He spent at feuding with Charlemagne de God and repositioning nuclear subs to threaten Russia with nuclear war, perhaps, because he saw a fake tweet from Dmitri Medvedev saying that Russia also had copies of Epstein's sex tapes. Right. Wait. Wait. You said it was a fake clip?

Fake tweet, yeah. Oh, I thought I saw, yeah. Isn't there a clip of some Russian guy that said something like It would be a mistake for him to assume that only Maasad has those tapes? That was Mavidav, but I thought it was a... I'm not saying it wasn't fake. I just, of course, if it was fake, I just totally believe that it happened. I also don't speak Russian, so if they just put fake captions on it,

we have to be AI. But the Trump doesn't speak Russian either. But like, our nation's ruler is slandering Charlemagne while threatening invasion over insults to his sexual. honor. This is such a middle age's ass problem

we have right now. Got that right. Well, time to bust up the guilletains I've been saying but, you know. The guy of the

middle ages already kind of solved this problem with the sexual honor invasion thing. Like the Habsburg just had sex with each other

so it was no real problem, you know. Well, I mean, I'm sure Trump would be on board with that based on, you know, some of the rumors

out there. Yeah. Before we go to the show, I wanted to, I want to check, like check him on a random little, you know, cities occasionally.

And let's talk about Nashville for a second in your home state of Tennessee. There's a fraud trial going on where a guy named Mark Jankbash, Jankbox, sorry, I don't know how to say it. Just call him Mark. Mark is on trial for fraud related to some car dealerships he owned or used to own.

He also owns a famous music venue called Plaza Mariachi. Last week's testimony featured a guy named Chad May who showed up to testify wearing a linen shirt, baggy cacchino's and long white hair pulled back in a multi-bubble ponytail. All right. Just a set the vibe for you.

May had served as the head of IT at his car dealerships beginning in 2001. And then, like, he's basically been called to testify about some emails he was asked to delete. Okay. So the defense got to go around to cross-examining Chad May and eventually asked him, are you terrified of Mr. Jackbash because you think he's a lizard person? And then May responded, I don't know if he's a lizard person. There's a difference between a belief in entertaining something as an idea. And then we want to explain what he called, his extended imagination helps him perceive

reptilian characteristics in people. Okay. Now, I mean, we all heard of the lizard person conspiracy theory, right? It's like, it's something called the Babylonian Brotherhood, popularized by conspiracy theorist by the name with David Hick, who's very famous. The idea is basically that shape-shifting, blood-sucking lizard people rule the world through a ball that, you know, the usual suspects of Obama, Hillary Clinton, British royalty, celebrities, sometimes Donald Trump. Right.

As you said, sometimes Donald Trump. I used to, back in the early days of well-read and stuff, I would use lizard people just as like a catch-all for, you know, rich and power. The rich and powerful, oligarchs and overlords and plutocrats and that type of thing. And, you know, my fan base being what it is, I was told along the way that we should stop doing that because the lizard people, thing like most conspiracy theories was at its root about the Jews was like an anti-Semitic thing so if you're calling rich people lizards it sounds like you hate Jews or something and I was like well I didn't even know that you you've root now I know that if I say that it might but you know like fucking this is your fault but anyway yeah I mean always because you can't like

dabbling into stuff that eventually could bug up against anti-Semitism so so at this point the trial the prosecutor was like wait a minute uh he tried to object the judge overruled him i just like as a long time fatal law and order it's like this this whole lizard person thing and the judge being like i'll allow it yeah i mean i don't blame him it's what i mean i felt when i was like let's see where this is going type yeah i would want to know i think if i was the judge me too courts are boring as fuck but the real the real procedural thing was and this is like anybody's watched law and order also get around this the prosecution had quote unquote opened the door by asking Mr. May how he felt about, uh, you know, Mr. Jankbash. So like the lizard person's

imbalance of his feelings. You asked how he felt. I'm asking how I felt if the guys are a lizard big. So they introduced like blog posts by my May where he had quotes such as I see London, I see France, I see reptiles and golfing pants. And he claimed he has an uncanny ability to spot pedophiles. Uh, so one real takeaway here is like with how crazy everyone's gotten on the fucking internet, this is a real opportunity. for every defense attorney because you ask somebody if they believe in like lizard people or the earth is flat or whether the defendant was drinking adrenachrome you're about to have a like you have like a one and three chance of getting a yes to one of those questions right

and then you just discredit everything they say you would think although then maybe you know then the judge is like uh finally somebody who gets it you know like uh the judge is a pair team too you never know i would uh i would especially advise any any enterprising defense attorney to try this uh this gambit if the witness has a ponytail and a blog so there we go all right well we'll go ahead and get into it but first of course i got some uh announcements as always if you'd like to see me to stand up live and in person you should go to traycrouter dot com and check out my upcoming tour dates what is

Indianapolis this weekend and then Austin, Texas, St. Louis, Missouri, upstate New York, Connecticut, all through Ohio and then in October, Virginia as I was telling Mark. And then other places after that, the rest of 20205 so go to Treycrouter.com and check it out. You can also why you're there. Check out a link

to my most recent special Trash Daddy. If you want to get to know, producer Matt a little more and get some good news in your life, check out his audio exclusive called Good Skews. Audio exclusive means that is only available on the podcast feed or audio version of this show. So you have to go to the audio version and subscribe to it if you want to hear producer Matt's good skews, which you should check out.

And finally, if you enjoy this program and we'd like to show your support, you can do so by signing up on Patreon, go to weekly skews.com slash more or just go to Patreon and search for my name. Either way it works. $5 a month, get you access to two full-length bonus episodes. Do additional episodes of this show, but sometimes we do Q&As as well. So if you like this, you'll like that, get some more skews in your life. Support the show and the prize.

process. So, as for the show tonight, Trump got some bad news last week and responded in the only way he knows how, just denying its existence and firing a person, two things that he's very good at. If you don't, it's kind of my grandpa's old approach to medicine, you know, if you never go to the doctor, you can't have nothing wrong with you. You know, if you just keep acting like everything's fine, then you won't die of a massive heart attack before the age of 70, which is what happened to him. Anyway, we got all that coming up soon. But first, The Daily Dumbass, Matt. Graphic, please. Tonight's D.D. Christians who didn't read the fine print where Jesus warned you not to take his financial or legal advice. Caitlin and I are being charged in a civil charge from the Colorado Securities and Exchange Commission for basically selling millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency that is deemed worthless by the state. Now, the reason that they're seeing that it's worthless is because there is no exit for people who have bought. We launched an exchange. The exchange technology failed. Things went downhill. And from that point forward, we've just been waiting

in the Lord literally for a mirror. So the charges are that Caitlin and I pocketed $1.3 million. And I just want to come out and say that those charges are true. So that $1.3 million that's been taken out of, I think it was a total $3.4 million. But out of that $1.3, half a million went to the IRS and a few hundred thousand dollars went to a home remodel that the Lord told us to do. I'm sure. All right. All right.

Well, who could stay mad at that? So what was he supposed to do? Deny the Lord's wishes to get that new kitchen island going and if I can fill out the back patio and stuff? Get a yacht out back. So I find this whole like fusion of like evangelism with like big tech interesting. There's a lot of, there's a lot of aspects of which are right. This guy has just got into.

a fucking crypto and so he's on crypto exchange like a lot of him doing. He's just like a mid-tier local evangelist pastor. I don't even think he's that big of a church, but like this guy's name is Elegio Regalado. Him and his wife, Caitlin, were indicted for 40 counts of theft, securities fraud, and racketeering last week. So they created and sold a cool God-inspired cryptocurrency. God-inspired cryptocurrency. How the fuck do we get to the point where we're doing this? It's called index coin. It raised near $3.4 million, like you said, by marketing it to their Christian followers. But like he admitted,

it was just basically used it to buy their own shit. It's a posy scheme, right? They just took money out of their fake crypto exchange and bought themselves shit with it, like our home remodel. And I guess he thinks he didn't know he could, like he said he went to the crypto business

because the Lord told him to in a dream. The Lord is a crypto bro on Coke at a fucking college party or whatever. The Lord, it corners you fucking at 2 a.m. It won't stop talking about crypto and fucking Quentin Tarantino movies and shit. It's funny to imagine that version of God. But, you know, the Lord told Oral Roberts to buy a kick-ass Buick, and he did. And, you know, that worked out great. The Lord told Kenneth Copeland to get a new private plane because demons fly commercial.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So he said that he, that God told him to start a cryptocurrency business as a quote, wealth transfer for his people. Now, he's not saying, basically, when he's he's saying he knew it was a scam the whole time, but he thought he'd be scamming people who weren't part of his congregation, and accidentally scammed his own followers. Right. He was saying, I was trying to help good Christian scam heathens with this, is what I was trying to do. But it's like, how would the heathens even know to get involved with the, you know, if you're just marketing it straight to your Christian followers anyway, but I do think it's refreshing for these guys to admit that it's like it's just about who's being,

who's left holding the bag, because that's pretty honest. But like doing it on the behalf of God, seems pretty fucking bleak to me. And this is all like, he said, Regalotto and his wife said their cryptocurrency platform, quote, blends biblical kingdom principles of wealth creation with cutting edge block change, blockchain technology. What does that mean? Like,

nothing. Right, exactly. It's such like corporate babble technical bullshit, gobbledy-gook speech that people do. And in the business world, the money world, and all that stuff, It's always just like buzzwords strung together. It makes you sound like, you know, stuff, but it don't. This kind of stuff is what turned me off from organized religion, but honestly it makes me feel more Jesusy in my heart sometimes

because it's like there's no way to blend biblical principles with wealth creation. It's kind of the whole fucking point of the book. Like there's a whole, Jesus Christ, he did admit that he posted on Facebook that he felt like a fraud, but that the feeling stemmed from, quote, misunderstanding of how to receive God's grace. So Jesus didn't make a mistake when he told him to start a fucking cryptocurrency exchange and make a crypto coin.

He just misunderstood his instructions on specifically how to do it, and that's his bad. And for that, he will not be giving you back your money. Right. But he will feel bad while I'm singing his renovated kitchen. Yes. You can find that. I'm sure Jesus can say to it.

You find it in your heart to forgive him as his Lord's way. There's a whole debate going on in evangelical circles right now about what large language model chat bot to use best to talk to God and make your prayers with. And I'm like, what the fuck are you guys? You're undoing the Protestant Reformation by turning Chad GPT into the Pope. Yeah, everything is so, so weird. But we've got honorable mention for Daily Dumbass for you.

I guess I'll keep it simple and just say that it's guilt. Gilbert Arenas. So what happened here was we had, there's a video that the only dumb assed, Trey read a few minutes ago we had to edit around was it was cops for not adding a right to number twos and the Miranda warnings. But the video of Gilbert Arenas complaining about the cops would not let him take a ship before they put him in the police car got deleted for some reason because the internet fucking hates us.

So anyway, when you're talking about sports gambling and Gilbert Arenas. All right. So Gilbert Arenas got arrested for running a poker game or owning a house where a high stakes poker game took place. Okay, but if you want to understand who Gilbert Arenas is, he's a former NBA player, really good player, three-time All-MBA, All-NBA, three-time All-Star, played for the Warriors Wizards Magic. I forget who else. Think the Grizzlies. For context, back in 2009, he got hit with some criminal charges and suspended for a long time because he pulled a gun on Javaris Crittenden, a teammate, over $1,100 boo-ray debt. the, uh, crittenden pulled a bigger gun back and he was very lucky because crittenden later

ended up in prison for actually killing a guy. So, so that pulling a gun over that $1,100 boot rate debt cost arena $7.5 million in lost salary, if you want to understand how his financial brain works. And he also had like $200 million in career earnings. Crittenden did not. So like, there's no reason to not pay your gambling debts. He also once took a shit in another teammate shoe. and he acted with a former wizard's teammate named Eton Thomas

in a dramatic production of Our Town. So he's a real renazots man about town, okay? Just to set the table what Gilbert Reins is like. Yeah, he was all, I mean, he was known for being a wild son of a bitch when he played and everything. It's just he's been out of the league for a while now. But weirdly, I guess it isn't weird because there's stuff going on with him, but I just sent you guys a clip the other day of him.

Kwame Brown calling him a dumb ass over and over. Like, I hadn't thought about Gilbert Aranson forever until that popped up on Reddit. And now he's all over the play. The reason that clip popped back. up is because he got arrested for being a huge dumb ass. Right. As he has wanted to do. So the FBI put out this arrest warrant affidavit, and they got really had to flex on him

because this is one of the stupidest crimes ever. I wonder why they worried about it, but that's another thing. His nickname because he wore number zero was Agent Zero, or Habachi is another name he had, but they called him Agent Zero all throughout the fucking arrest warrant affidavit. Also, I didn't know Arrinus lives down the street from me, so that's cool. He, a much nicer neighborhood, I'm assuming. me. So they charged him with one kind of operating illegal gambling business, conspiracies operated illegal gambling business, and one kind of making false statements

to federal investigators. He owned the mansion and fed say rented it out to a guy who staged the house for poker and collected rent money for him. And a different co-conspirator is accused of hiring young women who served drinks, provided massages, and offer companionship to the poker players in exchange for attacks on their tips. So they were pimping. Okay. So I was going to say this is like a Molly's game type. situation but also with with a tricking and hookers and stuff like that because at first I thought you said he got arrested for having like a poker game at his mansion and I was like I've been to a Hollywood mansion and played poker before I didn't know that that was ill but it was just a

bunch of like you know boring people yeah I mean where you're really getting the trouble is a house is taking a cut that's what makes it more legal right because that's like a casino or something right like you're operating an illegal casino or something like that yeah But, like, talking about the extent of the lack of, like, trying to get away with it, we're talking about here. The poker club, which Arenas did not own or run, he wanted to, he wanted to look like he did. He had a custom-made poker table that had Arenas poker club emblazed across it, which is like you selling drugs with, like, Trey Crowder branded Fant on the baggie. You don't want to be doing this. I feel like we should start a side podcast.

It's like, this is not what you want to do if you want to get away with these crimes type shit. Right. Add into the intrigue here, because I can't, like, at a time when everyone's gambling on their phones, I don't, I don't understand why the federal government gives a shit about some rich guys playing poker. Yeah. I mean, no, I'm with you. Like, again, I know he's a complete dumbass in so many ways. And also, again, you add in the, the pimping part of it, whatever, and that definitely complicates it further. But in general, yeah, that's what I thought, too.

It's like, it's a fucking poker game. Like, who really gives a shit? But if they're up to, you know, other nefariousness, and I suppose that's different. Right. But charge him with the actual shit. Charge them with sex trafficking if they're really running a hook in the ring, right? But like, so, but adding to the mystery here, another one of the guys charged,

the FBI described him as a member of an Israeli transnational organized crime ring. A guy with the name of Yvgeny Gershman, an Israeli citizen, who's also charged with a woman, an American citizen by name of Valentina Kojikari, with three additional accounts related to American, a conspiracy to commit marriage fraud. Like, Yovgeny was trying to marry her for a fake green card and pay her for it. But,

how high level of a transnational organized criminal can he be if he can't get into America without paying this woman to marry him? The whole thing, fucking, like, the feds are up to something here. It's nothing to what they're saying they're up to. But like, whatever. Time out. Matt, do you have the video?

Arrested, and you got to use the restroom, man. I'm just trying to tell you. They don't treat your ride. Now, but everybody was in there, and they're nice. Like, what was crazy is the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the who arrested me, I played the, in basketball. All right. He was, he got it back. You got it.

So, you got it. So, you got it's a different clip, but you guys get the Amrinus's vibe. So, so, so we're at in America with Gambling, man. I, I keep waiting for this huge backlash to happen, like, because people are getting fucking, ripped off costly. Athletes are getting caught cheating all the time. And, like, the gambling companies aren't even making money. And everything about it seems really predatory.

And through that lens, I want to talk about, I know this is something we disagree about because you love, like, legal gambling. And I think it's a fucking societal... Scourge. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I don't know.

I both... I definitely think it's bad. What I definitely think is bad is the leagues themselves being so, like, in bed money-wise with big gambling operations and stuff. Like, that's bad for fucking everybody and for a lot of reasons. Do I think generally that a grown adult should be able to gamble on a sports game if he chooses to, he or she chooses to in this country? Yes, I do think that they should be able to.

Right. That's why I think there's a compromise position here, which is we're going to have to, we should have to settle out at some point where it's not just like whether or not it should be legal. It's specifically how it's fucking legal. right right like i can't think of a good reason for like for everything being a prop bet right but if you guys don't gamble prop bets like when you bet on a specific outcome of like a very sometimes a very small thing like the coin flip at a football game or you know whether or not a role player will have uh over under two and a half rebounds or some shit in the NBA game

uh that allows for a lot of fuckery from potentially from players and that's why i want to talk about two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, two relief pitchers, by name of Emmanuel Claisse and Luis Ortiz who have disappeared by the fucking team. They cleaned out their lockers. They're just gone. And the rumor is related to a gambling investigation over

prop bets, although no one really knows what happened with Clase. With Ortiz, they're talking about two pitches, two specific pitches that happens in games in June, where there's a lot of irregular betting activity related to whether or not the first pitch of the second

inning, his second inning, would be a ball or a strike, okay? I want to watch what happened. I want to show you what happened on June 15th when an enormous amount of betting action was happening on whether or not his first pitch, a ball or strike, and yes, the voice you're going to hear in this

video clip is a renowned character actor, J.K. Simmons, who is sitting in in the booth. Our son, because I didn't do it all. Pedro Pahez leads off and takes one night. Just a bit outside. He threw that ball so far in the dirt. Victor Wayne Minyama, if he crossed over sports, couldn't fucking reach it. And so, like, yeah, well, pitchers get away from somebody, but somebody had a, something

irregular was happening with the action on betting that would be a ball. And it was definitely a ball. Right. So, yeah, yes, because it's like it, it's much more easy to get away with, you know, you would think, than, like, throwing a game or throwing a match or something like that. Like, you also, like, you could probably talk yourself into a lot easier. athletes. It's like, well, I'm not, you know, I'm not throwing a game. We're still the whole, I'm not screwing my teammates over. I'm not doing all that. I'm just, I'm throwing

one ball on one at bat and making this amount of money to do it, you know, why wouldn't I do that? Be stupid not to do it, you know. Right. And it's the first pitch to the inning, so no one's on base. Like there's no like, so yeah. So like there's a lot of, a lot of reasons you can like rationalize and justify it, but it's super against the rules and illegal. Of course. And it's really like a, this is really like a pigs get fat, hogs get slaughter type situation, which is sort of how I think we should think about the whole gambling phenomenon, because these guys should have been able to get away with this. And for a minute, I thought the reason they weren't is they were doing it too often.

They were throwing off their averages for their ball strike ratio. And, you know, professional betters notice that kind of thing because the computer models they build, notice any aberration for betting purposes. And they build it in their models to get a slight edge because they're betting thousands and thousands of bets, small bets, right? So like, but I guess instead what they have, they figured they couldn't do it often to get away with it. So somebody put like millions of dollars on this one super prop bet about whether Luis Ortiz would throw a first pitch ball. And the feds are going to notice that.

The betting apps are going to notice that. And so Ohio Governor Mike DeWind is Republican, has been the first politician I've seen call for any sort of legislative like regulatory pushback against this kind of stuff. He's called for the Ohio Casino Control Commission to remove these kinds of prop bets specifically from the state's sport books, which I think is a nice compromise for everyone involved to make everything a little. saner and less corrupt because like the people that got left holding the bag for this Klossay sold stakes in his future earnings to 282 random investors through some fintech bullshit so if his career is over 282 people lost to combine $370,000 they had paid him

for his future earnings so he also scammed these people because he was gambling and I'm just say like this like maybe you should be able to buy stakes in professional athletes maybe you shouldn't but like yeah I'd never even heard of that until just now I don't think because Is that like a more moneyed person's version of sports gambling is like buying a slice of an athlete's career or something? I had no idea you could do that. That's crazy. It's happened, but like I've heard about it happening under the table with like people like boosters giving college kids money in exchange for chunks of their future earnings in college back when paying college after is illegal. But I've never, but like I've heard of like versions of this, but I've never heard of being this organized.

Someone has built a specific financial product. Like derivative swaps. you can buy on fucking athletes with their tendons and shit. Right. So, yeah. By the way, I googled Guardians gambling to do more research for this story. And one of the first results was a headline up in New York Post today. Bettingy on bonus code post bet for $1,500 in bonus bets for Mets versus Guardians on Monday.

So, yeah, everything's going normally. As far as a fun sports gambling thing, I wanted to talk about this happening in WMBA for a second. This is a phenomenon that's happened a couple times to play this video about. of activity, yeah. And no one's picked the object up yet. You've got to say, oh, my gosh. That is a neon green dildo on the floor of a WMBA court

that someone is thrown out there. It's happened a handful of times, I think at least twice. It's become sort of a meme to go to WBA NBA games and throw a loud green dildo on the court. Bet Online has started offering prop bets where you can bet on what color

the next dildo to be thrown on a WMBA court will be. Uh, it's like a total of six different prop bets that you can parlay. One asks the color of the sex toy with six different options. Uh, should the, should the device not be green as it's been so far? Another bet asks how the sex toy will be handled first by whoever takes it off the court with hands or feet being the two options. So if you can sneak a dodo into a WMBA game and pick it up with your feet, you can make hell a bank off of it. Yeah, I was about to say, I don't, that one, like with players, you have to have a player on board with the, you know, with whatever it is that you're running, the scam that you're running.

But with that, I don't see how you could, like, just a person who lives in a WMBA city couldn't just make a bet and then buy a dildo and throw it from the crowd and hope for the best, you know, which I guess is what anybody that's throwing a dildo from the crowd is doing. Yeah, so the ticket to the NBA game is like $30, and a dildo is like $15, and it's, uh, the odds that bet on land's giving or it's plus $1,400 if it's a, if you bet 100 if it's a blue dildo. So this is a free... But I guess you're running the risk

that someone else are going to have the same plan at a different game and beat you to it and then you end up being the second blue dildo so you don't win. Oh, but the first dildo was still blue.

It just wasn't you. Anybody, right? If anybody beats it to it, your bet still pays off and you don't get in any trouble. It's a win-win if somebody else does it first. Right. That's what makes it so run.

Well, might if they have a pink dildo, though. If you get scooped by a pink dildo and then your bet was on blue and then you're left, you know, holding the ball bag of the bill. But the next, but blue is by far the next, I think the next best albums are plus 300, so

it's a sucker bet to do anything but blue unless you want to fuck over everybody else bet it. Right. You know what I'm saying? When does the next Sparks game, Mark? Sure, there's a sex shop on the way between here and that. Yeah. Fly Cori out. He'll smuggle it in his butt.

That just also, Bill's Mafia, Buffalo Bill's fans, when Tom Brady played for the Patriots, they would traditionally throw dildos on the field whenever the Patriots came to Buffalo, I think. It's because Tom Brady's a dildo

or whatever, you know, you get it. Yeah, I get it. Anyway. All right. Well, let's get into it, shall we? So we're splitting the difference here. We talked about sports, you know, cool guys shit in the first half. Now we're talking about math in the back half the show. Some real nerd show, okay? So

tell that labor statistics, and it won't be as dry as I'm as we're framing it. But basically, Trump didn't like the numbers and the latest jobs report put up by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So he fired the lady in charge of the agency, a lady by the name of Erica Mintarfer. Sorry, him said that wrong. He's not supposed to, in other ways, people, he's not supposed to be able to fire statutorily, but whatever. He just does this shit now.

And here's Kevin Hassett, the director of Trump's national economic council, trying to explain this in a way that's pretty revealing, but also very, very fucking stupid. Number's wrong. Do you have any hard evidence that you can present to the American public that these numbers, these revisions that were reported, and there were plenty of revisions under former President Biden, including right before the election, do you have any hard evidence that these numbers were wrong? Yeah, there is very hard evidence that we're looking at the biggest revisions since 1968. Are you going to present that evidence? If you look at the number

itself, it is the evidence. But just saying it's an outlier, it's not evidence. It's a historically important outlier. It's something that's unprecedented. It's still not evident. I've been looking at it for 40 years, and I'm like, it must be a typo. The numbers are so bad, they must be fake. Right. Yeah, that's pretty disconcerting. Right. Like, it's like, if the altimeter says you're about to fly to the side of a mountain,

it must be wrong because I am a good file. Therefore, there's no choice but for me to smash the altimeter. Or to put a gun to someone's head and make them tell me it says I'm higher than I yet. Right. So as far as Trump's theory of what's happening here, that like they're putting out intensely bad numbers just to make him look bad. It's not even really possible with the agency like structured. The commissioner

who's the Bureau's sole political employee even though McIntyrefer had been a career. She got politically appointed as a promotion, but she's been with the agency a long time under both parties. She's the sole political employee to the appointee. She's not control the numbers the agency publishes or even see them until they've been

finalized by staff of career technocrats. In order to collude or fudge the data, it'll be hundreds of people would have to be on a conspiracy, but none of this has ever leaked. there's no way they had a BLS could have manipulated this number. The numbers, and also the numbers are in line with what we're seeing from all kinds of private sector sources. The Bureau of Labor Statistics actually came in with better numbers than private agencies that collect similar data. So are those private agencies, are they like sounding alarm bells over it then?

Do they agree with what that guy just said as far as the like, this is historically bad thing? They do think it's historically bad, but their numbers are even more or worse. I know. Well, that's what I'm asking. Because I didn't know, you know, I didn't know if that guy was just, if that was just all bullshit, you know, where it's like, oh, the way I know. I know that, I know that, I know that he's bullshitting. I'm just saying, I didn't know if these other corroborating sources, like, agreed, like, this is, this isn't just alarming. This is, like, historically bad stuff. Well, let me say, one of the research agencies I'm talking about is called ADP, and their numbers are like, their job numbers came in, like, two-thirds of what the BLS's was. So, like, if McIntyre Tarfer had to be fired, then ADP would have to be executed for how bad the numbers are. Okay. And as far as whether or not that's going to solve the problem, the number two guy, I guess the

automatic promotion is also a career technocrat. And he has the job for the time being. So they have to do this again next month and the job numbers are worse in order to fire the way down to the guys go to, right. They got to do another political appointee to do this shit because these are, these people have like, are career economists and researchers. They're not going to throw away their reputation for Donald Trump. Like, it's like they have to work later.

it's like their entire life I think no 100% I can always largely voodoo sometimes but like they can't count stuff but they're gonna they're clearly gonna

try to get this second guy to like play ball right and we're saying he won't do that because this has been his life and career so then they have to find someone who's not I don't know why they even promoted that guy to begin with given who's in charge of the FBI

and fucking all these other you know the dude the fucking real world guy and stuff. Like, why didn't they just find some dipshit that's not at all qualified and put him, give, appoint him to this position. So he'd just give them whatever numbers they want to be given and fucking pretend everything's fine. They'll get around to try to do it, but the Senate sign session. They got to confirm and or whatever.

Right. Yeah. So this is the acting person. Yeah. Yeah. So specifically why Trump's mad, uh, the number of new like new hires for July were extremely anemic. I'm talking about 73,000 jobs nationwide. But also

the BLS revised down numbers from May and June. Here's a chart of what we're talking about. See that white area? Yeah. That's revised down May and June. They revised down like 85% of the job numbers. I mean, that's pretty stark.

Yes. So you can believe it's a conspiracy if you want, but you've got to understand how this process works, like, which nobody, I get that very few people are interested in trying to understand. how this process works, except for, like, us and the people who listen to this show. But, like, what they do is surveys. They basically wait for a bunch of different companies, employers, and state agencies to

send a call up and say how many people they hired or how many people quit. And you're like, well, there's got to be a better way to do this. And you're like, well, tell me what it is. Right. So, like, you can have, like, a militantly armed agency go around into employers, but guns to people's heads to make them tell them the numbers sooner. But these are voluntary reports as currently constituted. then the people are busy, and sometimes they handed their reports late.

So when you get your first run a report, you do an estimate, and then when you actually get the actual data, you go, actually, there weren't as many jobs as we thought, because we didn't get, this industry is doing worse than the others, and they reported date. So, like, and the, also the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been very transparent because they got hit with a bunch of doge cuts and a federal hiring freeze and funding cuts and a, and a corresponding drop in survey response rates.

Like the former commissioner of BLS did an entire episode, sort of a podcast called Odd Lots about this. He was talking about how they're going to really struggle to get accurate numbers. So they come back and like, extra numbers weren't accurate because we had difficulty with this. And it's worse than we thought. They're like, well, up, you're fired. It's like, well, fuck, I told you we couldn't count on what the little resources you give us.

So I don't know what to do. There's also the part where like this happened routinely under Biden, too, where he'd get like a stronger jobs report and then it'd get revised down later. Exact same thing. And when Biden was president, Trump would say that was a conspiracy to help Biden. Right. by saying it was fluffed up to begin with to look good and then later quietly revised down to reflect the reality of what happened

when people wouldn't notice. That's how it works when it's Joe Biden in office. But when it happens to him, then it's a conspiracy in the exact opposite direction. Yeah. And this is just like part and parcel of like, you know, firing all the medical experts, the vaccine boards, the climate change experts,

Some lady in Louisiana, like some of the scientists, like environmental scientists, just got fired from a college for, like, sampling water and noticing that there was pollution in the water. She's not even charged, she's not the person in charge of, like, penalizing a company for poisoning the water or even calling for anything. She just got fired for noticing that there was poison in the water. We're just making noticing illegal, Trey. Right. And I just sort of say, like, if you thought the Great Recession was bad, imagine a Great Recession, but this time the government promises, promises. you that it's not actually happening it'll be interesting to see because i mean i thought of that too just because a lot of people that are trump people and voters and stuff

they thought that that was their opinion on what was happening during the biden administration do you know what i mean that's how they uh acted and thought about the economy under biden is like fucking you're bullshit and us and expect us not to know it when eggs and gas are this much it's like we know what's happening we can see it And if that does happen now in the coming months under teetering on the precipice of a recession, whenever it happens under Trump, I just wonder how they will react to that because I'm betting it'll be different. I'm betting they'll just swallow what the government is telling them this time. Obviously, not everyone, but a lot of people.

For sure, but like there's like what these statistics are used for them? This is like an intra-elite fight. We don't really, the rest of us, like the 98% of us don't really have a stake in this. We just get fucked by it. Right. But what these numbers are used for are trillions of dollars of capital allocation. And without those numbers, the business dickheads who in other times we'd all like to, you know, redacted, redacted or redacted, they, those guys are going to be fucking fuming mad because

they're not going to have any idea of what's happening in the markets, which is why we have, there are other indicators here. These businesses are going to know when their clients go under. Right. Right. They're going to know that they're not selling as much stuff because more people are unemployed. ADP is going to notice when they do their own job surveys. Like in our society, as yet, you cannot suppress shit to the level that you need to do to run an authoritarian society.

You just can't do it. They don't have the infrastructure for it. Like, Fox News is not enough to make people think they aren't fucking jobless, you know? Right. So like, but the elite like masses the universe type business dickheads, I keep waiting them for start flipping tables because like the tariffs are part of this. All this stuff is like, part and parcel of all this. shit. And like, one guy finally flipped the table. The director of the American Enterprise

Institute took to social media over the weekend and post, let me read here. Trump fired, he's got him Scott Winship from the American Enterprise Institute. President Trump firing the BLS Commissioner is appalling and honestly would be an impeachable offense in a better world. He's correct, but like this is the thing? Not like being a sex criminal or like the Salvadoran sodomy prison?

This, like, whatever takes you to get here, man, but I guess welcome, but like, Larry Summers, you know, that Clinton's former cabinet secretary, director of Harvard, the world famous economist, he took a break from Stammerg about a while. It was totally cool for him to have his own seat on Epstein's plane to go on ABC and said, this is worse than anything Nixon ever did. No, it's not. Yeah, I don't know about that. He's just fucking with your livelihood. It's not worse than Bob in Cambodia? Right. To these people, that's, you know, that's always been the thing.

You don't fuck with the money. Because, I mean, you were saying it's like, if I don't want to flip tables, I've been, we've been, that's come up. I don't even know how many times since, even the first go around with Trump, but since he got reelected and stuff and just keep posing the question, it's like all these big money people that were always saying actually run shit in American politics. Like, they cannot be okay with all this, right? because they just doesn't they're getting real fat off the status quo and things working the way they had for the past you know however many years at least post Reagan they were fucking and i still like they were still squeezing people too much and bleeding people too dry and it was fucking heading in a direction where it would you know they would bid it bite off more than they can chew but still it was pretty profitable for all them you would just think that they would be not on board with him just wantonly tearing it all

to fucking assume. I like how you say wantly, like it's a Chinese food. Wantonly. Wantonly. So, so like the American Enterprise Institute guy, like the AEI is like

the kind of think tech that like usually spends its time writing reports about how it might be more economically advantageous to burn your grandmother for heating the winter instead of natural gas. And like they're like, this is too much. It's like, okay, well maybe like I keep waiting for somebody who fucking matters to like to care about this.

shit. Right. Which is, like, part of the reason, even though the Senate's in recess, Trump can't do a recess appointment is, who's the Republican Majority Leader of Senate? John Thune now, right? I feel like. Yeah, I think that's right.

They're gaveling. Even though they're out of session, they're technically speaking in session. Somebody's flying back to D.C. to like gavel in and out every three days. So Trump can't do a recess appointment, specifically so he can't appoint some moron like paper eater to be in charge of places like the BLS. So that's their form of resistance. they're still going to appoint somebody really, really bad, but, like, they want to have some say in it. The thing about trying to cover up this crime is the evidence is already out there.

It'd be like if Arenas tried to say he had no idea what his operation was going on in a house he owned with Arena's poker club ingrained on the table, right? So it's about some economic data we have right now. So throwing out the pandemic, which is, you know, an outlier for a lot of it, you know, with the economy for a lot of reasons. The current unemployment rate for college graduates over 25 is rising fast and is higher now than any year since 2014. Job growth in the past three months to the lowest since 2010. Spending on services, especially travel and tourism, is declined for three straight months for the first time since 2008. Consumer spending is flatlined, construction manufacturing or contracting, and employment is set to fall. And because inflation is on the rise, the Fed can't cut interest rates to tighten, to combat all this shit.

like seeing an economic collapse with like basically full unemployment is so fucking funny it's the four minute mile of economic mismanagement and it's purely like tariffs and throwing out all the work like the reason unemployment rates low is because like right now there's a bunch of like white people with college degrees trying to figure out how to be roofers because Trump deported all the fucking roofers yeah it's like this is always this is no way to run anything dude yeah I mean I know that I know this means actually nothing, and it's purely anecdotal. But I travel all the time as a comedian. And I used to say, while Biden was still president, I'd hear bitching all the time about the economy and stuff, I used to say to my friends and shit like that and probably said it on here. He's like, look, I know that price of eggs is high and all that. And the fucking housing crisis and all that shit is real.

And I'm not trying to act like it isn't. But I know the economy can't be doing too bad because I've been traveling regularly. for work since 2016 and the last couple years of the Biden administration was just insane in terms of every airport and every city I ever went to was fucking packed to the gills with people going somewhere and doing something. It drove me crazy because it was like fucking Disneyland crowds at any airport you ever went to. And I was like, that's got to be, that has to be indicative of something. There's more people traveling than usual. And now recently, I have been noticing that it's less so.

Like I'm anecdotally saying the number like go back down and I've been, even though it used to annoy me all those people in there, this, I'm now being alarmed by that. Like I find that a little ominous, you know, because again, I don't know how much it actually means, but I know it's got to mean something. And it's kind of like a storm coming. Yeah. I mean, like right now, a few like economic researchers are saying that basically like we're already in a full blown recession. except for a few basic industries. Like the overall, like I was reading a piece earlier today, the overall economy, the numbers look fine.

That's basically because of two industries. Capital expenditures for AI, artificial intelligence contributed more to growth in the U.S. economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending. Well, that's even worse, because that's not real. Like, you know, that's a dot-com bubble situation waiting to fucking happen.

And the other thing, basically like the sane and the sanest like in between takes about AI like is that like yeah this is something akin to the dot com bubble but just like the dot com bubble it'll burst and the computing power will have uses it just won't be with what they're planning to do for AI so it's not like it'll all be a total waste but it's fucking it's a depressing thing that like a bunch of people invest a bunch of money and trying to impoverish and make the rest of us the rest of us and make us unemployed, right? So the other sector that's doing well right now is health care spending. So if the bubble pops in AI and at the same time, the government cuts a bunch of health care

spending, they just put themselves on track to do. I'm not sure what's going to happen because we won't even know what's happening in the economy because they'll just say that everyone's working when they're not. So I'm not going to do. Do you know what the stripper index is, Trey? Talk about other economic indicators that we'll have access to that aren't the BLS statistics. No. I mean, I know about like SIM stocks and things like that. And then there's the Waffle House Emergency Index. I know that one, but I don't think I know the stripper index. So basically, like, the first thing that drops off in a recession is discretionary spending.

And there's kind of nothing more discretionary than tipping a stripper for a lap dance. Right. Because you don't need a lap dance at all. You don't need to tip anyone to be at a strip club and have a beer and look at a dancer from across the room. It's uncouth. You're supposed to tip if you, you know what I'm talking about. So, but I went to check to one of the biggest publicly held strip club companies is RCI Holdings. RCI used to stand for Rick's Cabaret International.

Their stock's down 39% year-to-date. I surf across this TikTok from a dancer if you got this video, Matt. Just talk about recession indicators. They really do have their finger on the pulse. You're ever going to notice a recession. I feel like as a dollar tripper, one of the first places that you were ever going to notice a recession happen. is in a spicy club. One of the most telltale signs

that we are in a recession is as a dancer, I used to constantly get asked by customers where they can hit the slopes in the club, if you know what I'm saying? I haven't been asked that question in months. Nor am I seeing customers do it as much.

People don't have Coke money anymore. It's sound of the alarms, dude. Bad news. That's like, it's like no one's buying a Coke from the guy at the club anymore, this is a hard time. I mean,

if you think about like the 80s fucking Wall Street, you know, Reaganite yuppie era and stuff. That's also when Coke was through the roof, right? So, you know, I mean, it makes sense to me as Coke goes. So it goes the American dollar. I don't know. So good news for other kinds of sex workers. A bunch of only fans, women are performers, I should say performers are saying

the stripper index does not apply to Bitcoin on Onlyfans. So good news for your bomb, Dre. so I'm not really sure what the plan is here like you've got to hope that a bunch of people would too like like just by trying to lie your way through this problem what you're trying to do basically is to hope that people with $200,000 in college debt don't notice they're working very poorly as like construction workers while hamburger is $11 a pound because Trump's trying to use tariffs to spring Jair Balsanera from the Huscao in Brazil which is I don't know if you're following that story or not but it's fucking nuts we're

tariffing a country we have a trade surplus with because they're trying to hold a former president accountable for trying to overthrow the government. Yeah. Another aspect of this is like the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is also responsible for calculating the consumer price index, which is used to set the annual increases for Social Security. So if they put out a fake report saying that inflation is not actually going up, your grandma's purchasing power for Social Security check is going to be way down. What I'm saying is the Golden Girl and Golden Bachelor, January 6th, is back on the table, baby. What's the biggest problem you ever tried to lie your way out of?

I've got a few of them. It never worked. Yeah. I don't know. I'm a terrible liar anyway, so I've never, I don't think I've ever lied my way out of anything of note. No, the best I've ever gotten away with is that I'm late to work because my tire was flat. That's about it.

This is the kind of move that's been tried before. And other countries, I've been trying hours in various ways. It's maybe not this many times at once. Like countries like Argentina and Greece, Soviet Union, and it usually doesn't end well. Like a guy named Olympic Kivitken was a Soviet census official, was arrested and executed when his population count came in lower than Stalin had announced. So I'm not sure. Like population count went down by one more, Joseph. I'm not sure what hell you did.

Right. Yeah. You said this is a move that's been tried before by, but which move? the like Trump and Stalin or the lying in a lying in a sufficient statistics right yeah government statistics are used to use for stuff like no I know but we're not right they're accused but right now we're not saying that there's anyone lied right they're saying no you find no Stalin executed the guy for being honest right which is what has happened this lady except she's not dead right she got fired so the fall another windows comes

later. But even just the economic officials being fired for being honest, a guy named Andreas Georgiao, Georgiao, Georgian, Greek name, sorry, Andreas, was criminally prosecuted back in like 2009, 2010 for reporting accurate deficit figures when he was the head of Greece's statistical agency. Let me quote here from Andreas, if society cannot see itself clearly, then it cannot identify its problems. If it cannot identify its problems, they cannot find the right solutions, if cannot find the right persons to solve these problems. So, but Andreas, what you're missing here is, what if we built the whole society around the society not seeing itself clearly?

Precisely so, specifically so we could not identify our problems. What if we just didn't want to do our problems? What if you just convinced a huge chunk of the society to also pretend that there are no problems? Or, well, not those problems anyway. There's plenty of other non-acistic problems. I had a relative who, immigrants and fucking shit like that, you know. I had a relative who, like, had blood in his stool and just ignored it, and then he's dead now.

And died, right. Right. So you can ignore problems. It's nice for a while. Right. But we're learning all these old lessons about, like, like, a couple weeks, like, we bombed Iran. It was like, okay, we're speed running the second of invasion of Iraq in 2003. And, like, we're learning all these economic lessons from 1920s and 30s and 1890s.

But, like, I want to go back to a, you know, an older lesson here from my homie Plutarch. Love Plutarch. Plutarch. He's no Pliny the Elder, or is it Cato the Elder? Actually, those are both guys. A bit more of a Cato, the younger guy myself. But anyway, I don't know. I'm sure that guy's a monstrous petter-ass.

I don't know. I'm just saying names that I know. They all were. Anyway, wouldn't Plutarch say? Yeah. Plutarch is like a series of books. I forget. It's called Lifetimes, I think, about various, like, powerful.

people. This past he's talking about Tigranus, who's an Armenian king, and Lusolus, who's a Roman general. He's like, quote, since the first messenger who told Tigranus that Lus was coming had his head cut off for his pains, no one else would tell him anything. And so he sat in ignorance while the fires

of war were blazing around him, giving ear to only those who flattered him. So Tigranus is dead now. Not the any of you tell you that. Right. Well, it's like that I would say, always shoot the messenger. It's ancient wisdom. them there. Yeah. And there's

like this old Soviet joke I was reminded of. Soviets had great. We're going to get some great jokes out of this guy. Yes. Pain brings humor. Everyone knows that. Yeah. Long understood precept of the pursuit of comedy in general. Yeah. So the conceit for this joke

is two guys are talking at an airport. The first says, why was the flight delayed for an hour? The second says the pilot saw a problem with one of the engines, but it's okay now. Wow, you replaced an engine in an hour? No, we replaced the pilot. mm-hmm good job yep it's funny like

to be an American to be raised all this American exceptionalism bullshit and like the evils of the Soviet Union it was evil I'm not about to do some tanky fucking defense of the Soviet Union right here I understand like we're taught that like the main problem with the Soviet Union was socialism and like

it it wasn't it was authoritarianism and corruption yeah right well it seems to be like you'll that the you know the the common theme there is fucking people and men and stuff like that. So it's like the problem with any of the systems ends up being corruption and authoritarianism and all that,

which you'll get out of any of them if you don't, you know, properly police it because that's just what people do. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that stuff. It's all pretty true. So. Yeah. And I'm trying to quote. I forget which founding father was it. Like we know that no men are angels who set the devils to watch themselves.

So, but anyway, we just. decided to undo all that to give one man the authority over everything, including how many people, like what the report says, how many people have jobs. So it's just what we're doing for a little while at least. I don't like it, not a fan. Let me just ask you real quick, so I think we've got a couple of minutes left. What you think, like briefly about the thing in Texas, the situation in Texas, like the Texas Democrats fled the state because there's a last-ditch effort to keep gerrymandering from happening, and now they're trying to Ken Paxson wants to round up a posse.

They love possees, you know, bring them back. This is like, this has been kind of routines as I lived in Texas in early 2000s. Like they happened like in like 2003. So traditionally, the census is done every 10 years and you'll do redistricting after the census, right? So 2000, 2010, 2020, 2030. Republicans randomly started doing mid-term redistricting in Texas in 2003 because they finally took unified control of the state government after Democrats had launched. time held it, so they decided to just re-jerrymander it.

And that time state legislators fled to Oklahoma, I think, and eventually they sent the Texas Rangers to, like, arrest them and bring them back. So they had a quorum so they could pass a redistricting plan. This time, they fled Illinois, where they're living on the dime of J.B. Pritzker or the governor of Illinois, who's a billionaire, who can afford to put them up for, in perpetuity. So this is pretty funny, and the Republicans are asking like, they're going to, they have a way around this? Maybe they do.

Maybe they can just, like, they can unseat. everyone so yeah that's what abbott's been saying right that's what he's been threatening is that he can just somehow yeah right unseat the ones that are absent and but like if you don't like like this kind of pissing shit like Oregon Republicans do it all the time where they'll deny a quorum uh and my general stuff on this is like I get that politics in bean bag and I don't really care about people doing stuff like legislative chicanery stuff I care about whether they're doing it for good for evil um and uh i think trying to stop a state that's like 50 i think people's vote should matter right so i think when a t when it when it when a when a state is like 54 percent

republican or whatever it should be something approaching that than the congressional representation it's not going to be exactly that out of obviously but like it shouldn't be gerrymandered where it's going to be like 25 to three or some shit um which is what they're trying to do and they're going to get to this like democrats can try to retaliate with i mean they they drew their maps unfairly for Republicans in New York for reasons that we don't even need to get into because the New York State Democratic Party is fucking useless, speckless and incompetent and corrupt.

California Democrats could very easily gerrymander a full Democratic map, which I don't think is, again, in a perfect universe, I don't want my fellow Americans who are conservative, not have congressional representation. But it's like a, no, I agree to. gerrymandering is a concept. I'm, you know, like against, but like,

you know as far as like fighting fire with fire or the idea that if they if like California did it made it known that they were serious about doing it that you know then it'd be like like how California passed like gun control laws when black people started buying guns in the 70s or whatever like that there'd be a response like that to it maybe like if it came to that and California was actually going to do it that that would make them fucking chill or you know or it would actually become illegal or something for everyone I mean I don't know but I just it's like you said they also they also they also open up a bag of worms they can't really contain because like you the only way to make it

a more gerrymandered map is to weaken the incumbents so in a way of election it might not work out the way they want although the computer models are so good now and they might be able to figure it out but like the people i saw some democratic representatives being like we don't be hypocrites about this it's not hypocritical to be like i am against gerrymandering i will I will support a bill to end gerrymandering nationwide by using a non-partisan computer modeling system to have like contiguous compact districts that are representative of the people with sort of similar populations. But until that point, I want to try to gerrymander to get enough people who agree with me

so we can pass that bill to get gerrymandering. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That would hit.

So we'll have none of that. All right. Thank you guys for watching. Appreciate it. Reminder. Go to triccrouter.com. Check out my upcoming tour dates. Come and see me in Indianapolis.

this weekend and then Austin and St. Louis and a bunch of others after that. Also check out Trash Daddy while you're there. Listen to producer Matt's new audio exclusive called Good Skews if you want some uplift in your life and to hear from the man of mystery himself. And consider supporting the show on Patreon. Go to weekly skews.com slash more.

Just go to Patreon and search for my name. $5 a month. Get you access to two full link bonus episodes. But either way, keep watching this one on Skews Days. We'll keep doing them. So we'll see you next time. Love you. Bye. Thank you.