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- [00:16]
A
Hi, everybody. Welcome to this episode of tf. Nova is still being re educated in Andy Burnham's small plates rehabilitation camp. They do things a little differently there. We recommend of the brainwashing hypnosis programs, we recommend three small ones ones and then one large hypnosis program if you think you're really deviant from northern thought. So it's once again, it's me, Hussein and Maddie. How is everybody?
- [00:44]
B
Just found another trans woman to do it. Well, it's. I'm actually, I, I keep making the joke that it's like, oh, you just found the other tranny, you know, but what. The real reason why I'm filling in for Nova is that I dropped the dime on her so I can. Sacred place.
- [00:58]
A
You know what it is? It's. It's like in Afghanistan where if you wanted your neighbor's poppy field, you'd just be like, oh, that's a guy's tal. Hell, I see him doing Taliban shit all the time. The US Army's just like, yep, all right. Good enough for us.
- [01:09]
B
Andy burned him.
- [01:11]
A
That's his name. Well, as of today, we are entering day one of Britain doing things a little differently. The Manchester. And we all live in Manchester now. Greatest Manchester, in fact.
- [01:23]
B
Manchester, by the way.
- [01:25]
A
That's right. Manchester is Bay. All of we. Andy Burnham, great new slogan for you. You can use it.
- [01:32]
B
Free.
- [01:33]
A
That's free for you. We're going to do a sort of more focused episode about what Andy Burnham says he's going to do now that he's in power. But in the second half today, I'm actually going to be talking to Nathan Tankus, repeat guest, an expert on the plumbing of how all the stuff happens and how that has been attacked and politicized. We're going to be going through some of the, let's say, some of the strange things that are happening in the US At a federal level. But before we get to that and a little bit on Burnham today, he's made five promises. He's made five, and they're my favorite kind of political promises. He will, number one, end infighting within the party.
- [02:19]
B
By which way does he have really long arms? And he's going to separate everybody. He's going to hug him apart.
- [02:25]
A
It's going to be hugs.
- [02:26]
B
He's going to.
- [02:26]
A
He's going to separate and he's going to hug. Okay, the old hug and separate.
- [02:30]
B
Yeah.
- [02:30]
A
And in. I don't, I don't know how. It's not like he's going to. It's not like he's going to, like, get rid of anybody. It seems he's just going to shuffle the cab. You know what? I would love to see a leader also who would get elected and be like, I won't end infighting within the party. I would never do that.
- [02:45]
C
Yeah.
- [02:45]
A
It's like this is. Yeah. Every single British Prime Minister since, what, like, 2012 has promised to end in. For 2015 maybe, has promised to end in fighting within the party. But you think you can do it by force of personality instead of, I don't know, understanding that these are, like, you're. It's. It's like saying, I will convince. Convince this trained steam whistle to stop whistling without dealing with the underlying head of steam that's been building up.
- [03:10]
B
Maybe they could begin. They could stop the infighting by beginning out fighting.
- [03:14]
A
Yeah.
- [03:15]
B
By, like, you know, make. Creating any separation between them and the Tories in reform on, like, anything.
- [03:22]
C
Well, like, they could. They could get some inspiration from Trump in that regard and the ufc, White House fight. Right. Like, so in the. In the Downing Street Garden, they could sort of set up a little dojo.
- [03:32]
A
Okay.
- [03:33]
B
It's a lot smaller, though. Right. There's not as much land there for them to put the big. The entire device from contact out there.
- [03:39]
C
Yeah. It'd sort of have to be like a sumo ring. And there'd be, like, questions over, like, whether, you know, whether it's like, pads or no pads, gi or no gi.
- [03:47]
A
Also, sumo's foreign, so we need to have a British version of sumo.
- [03:50]
C
That's true. I mean, British sumo is just two very pissed guys in the pub who, like, try to fight each other in the back and they both miss, and then they start kissing. This actually happened. Did I ever tell you the story about.
- [04:00]
A
Oh, my God, Have I ever told you this guy about this time you say this actually happened? You're about to just. You're about to relate to me and Maddie and the listeners. Like a situation that you were in. Yeah. That got filtered through the special processes in your brain that meant you reacted to it. Like, I don't think any other living person possibly could have conceived of. So, Hussein, tell me this actually happened to a backroom pub sumo match. Go.
- [04:31]
B
Though. There's a lot. There's a lot of talk on the show about Hussein having, like, being in, like, Mr. Bean situation. I submit he's been living a sort of Gulliver's Travels lifestyle. Yeah.
- [04:41]
C
Because I feel like. I feel like a lot of the time with these stories, I'm more of, like, the observer. It doesn't really happen to me that much.
- [04:46]
B
Yeah. You know an island where horses could talk?
- [04:48]
A
Yeah, yeah. One time. One time, Hussein was tied to the ground by a bunch of little people and he just tried to discuss Evangelion with them.
- [04:57]
C
Yeah, well, I would sort of submit at that point. But what I was going to say was that this sort of happened. Couple, maybe a year ago, my wife and I were coming back from, like, an event in town and we were walking back home and there's a pub on our high street. And there were like two guys who were kind of fighting each other. And they were both really pissed. And one of the guys tried to punch the other one. He missed. But because the other guy who was about to get punched was drunk, he, like, lost his balance and fell on the ground. Right. Or we sort of like run across. We run across the road. Try, try, try help him. And the guy, like, as he's sort of waking up, he's just like telling us to fuck off. He's just like, get off me. Get off me. We were like, all right, fine. We'll wait here until the ambulance comes. Meanwhile, this guy, like, gets up and he starts, like, hugging the one who was trying to punch him. And it turns out they're actually like, really good friends. And they just wanted to, like, they weren't even really in an argument. They weren't actually agree with each other. They had made a bet. And I'm not sure what the bet was, but it did. But it basically was just like, yeah, I bet you couldn't knock me out. And I think it's a really funny situation because actually he couldn't get knocked out.
- [06:03]
D
Right.
- [06:03]
C
Like, the punch did not knock him out. It was the fact that this guy had sort of like, lost his balance.
- [06:09]
B
You know, this is actually very much like sumo in that there's like a lot of pre and post amble and a lot of ceremony and explaining what's happening and very little actual action.
- [06:17]
A
Yeah. So basically what we're saying, we're going to have British sumo, which is a traditional sport called I bet you can't knock me out. And they're going to do that on the Downing Street Garden to end in fighting within the party number two. So I think, Matty, you mentioned we could do out fighting, but he's also said he's going to end point scoring.
- [06:36]
B
Oh.
- [06:37]
A
I guess by playing a very defensive game. He's gonna park the bus. No, no one's gonna score. Yeah, I guess.
- [06:44]
C
So how. Yeah, how are you gonna, like, judge the Fights if there are no points.
- [06:47]
A
Well, that's true.
- [06:48]
B
We just watched probably six weeks of like the God punishing those who park the bus. And that's his lesson. That's the lesson.
- [06:56]
A
He takes away end point scoring and
- [06:57]
B
end point scoring no more.
- [06:59]
A
So it's gonna. He's gonna have. His cabinet is gonna be a raid, like in a. In a six person pattern. Too deep up against Downing street, preventing anybody really from getting in. Number three, Set a direction that is distinctively Labor. That's in quotes. By being us. That's also in quotes.
- [07:16]
B
Manchester, by the way. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, sorry. Set out a direction that is distinctively labor by being us.
- [07:24]
A
Yeah. Which Keir Starmer didn't do.
- [07:27]
B
That's okay. Cool. Is there like a aphorism not missing here because I don't live in Britain?
- [07:32]
A
Yeah. Distinctively labor, because labor has only ever been one thing. It's never been a whole bunch of different stuff. And each of these things has claimed to be labor, but he's just, you know, it's going to be vibes. 4 Return power to people across the entire UK and also be a pro business leader. No one has ever been. We have had attempted pro business leaders in the UK, I guess for the last, what, God knows, 50 years. But really, other than Thatcher and Blair, no one succeeded in being a pro business leader. According to everybody's own standards.
- [08:05]
B
Pure capitalism has never been attempted.
- [08:07]
A
Yeah. Or it was. We had pure capitalism for four years from 1980 to like 84.
- [08:11]
B
Cool.
- [08:12]
A
And then it started falling apart, I guess.
- [08:14]
B
Return power to the people and be a pro business leader. Are those things, Are those things in conflict with each other at all or what do you think?
- [08:20]
A
Well, people, business people. He'll return power to business people and other power to other people. Maybe he'll play that song. He'll play Renegade Master for everybody, which I think is a song you maybe could have heard in Manchester at some point. At some point, you know, so if you're a bit. I mean, again, all of these things are completely, you know, incoherent. But his promise to bring back good vibes, I guess, to British government without really changing much.
- [08:47]
B
I'm just excited to see a former mayor get a shot on the world stage like this. Yeah, well, I just, I just think it's the sort of. The premise of that show that we do. It's me and two other people. The premise of that show is that the mayoralty is sort of an insanity catch fence. So it's very interesting to see when Somebody escapes.
- [09:07]
A
Well, the thing that Andy Burnham was a strange mayor, though, because he was a minister before he was a mayor. Oh, I see. Like he was. He sort of. He bided his time as a mayor saying, oh, I can be. Because the whole point of being elected to Britain, a system that's designed for people to hate it and fail them and expose them to the vagaries of global capitalism, right? Like Britain is like, uniquely exposed among North Atlantic democracies to or liberal democracies, quote, unquote, whenever you want. It's like uniquely exposed to like global financial markets. And so everyone hates it. And so the way that you get elected is by saying, I hate Westminster also, and I'm different from them. I do things a little differently here. That's what Andy Burnham did. He's like, well, I'm going to govern Manchester as a locality and then what I'm going to become is the mayor of all the localities, which is going to be different from somehow than a prime minister. I guess I'll have to devolve some power. So, you know, and let's just say Andy Burnham is not the guy so far vindicated. But I'm not here primarily to talk about Andy Burnham. I wanted to make another very fun announcement before we move on, which is I'm ringing the big Charlie Kirk woke fund bell. This was sent to me through the Discord. Thank you everybody in the Discord for keeping me updated with the Charlie Kirk Fund for woke public servants who did not like him. A Polk City firefighter will receive nearly 200 grand after she was fired for online comments made about the killing of Charlie Kirk. Her name, Alyssa Furry.
- [10:37]
B
No comment.
- [10:38]
A
She is a Polk City firefighter paramedic who made several posts and comments on her private Facebook page, including, I choose not to celebrate but also not be sad. And today in America, we interrupt the assassination at a college to bring you news of a shooting at a high school. Furry deleted her post and deactivated her account on the same day after once again, a co worker daubed her in with the fire chief. She was put on leave in September 16, fired October 24, and then just last week has been given $200,000 sick.
- [11:07]
B
I will say about. Just real quick, Alyssa Furry. I feel like the suit would melt if you were near a fire. Those things are mostly plastic. This rocks. This is good. I. Who are these? Who are the. I don't understand. Why are you dropping the dime on your firefighter co worker for not even. It's like the least offensive imaginable Thing you can say, right, like, this is like, almost. It's not like, oh, hooray, he died or anything, right?
- [11:33]
A
Well, because it was like the whole Kirk thing.
- [11:36]
B
It was like a week of, like, fever that we all had that we couldn't say anything. It was very strange.
- [11:40]
A
Yeah, it was. It was. Everyone. A lot of people in public offices were terrified that it was like, oh, this is the moment. This is the moment now.
- [11:49]
B
Yeah.
- [11:49]
A
And then reacted as though, like, fucking stormtroopers were on their way. And it turns out that no, no, they weren't. What's happening is we're funding every owner of a coexist bumper sticker car that works in the public sector in the United States of America. It's great.
- [12:04]
B
A glass of wine that you can see from space.
- [12:06]
A
Yeah.
- [12:07]
C
I think there's something, like, really interesting about this in terms of, like, how the people who were, like, pretending that they sort of supported Charlie Kirk, like, what they actually thought Charlie Kirk was and what he represented. Because I remember that weird period of time when he was killed and, like, in the sort of following days afterwards. Like, one of the things. And I mentioned this on my other show, 10K Post, but, like, it's something that I think about a lot is just, like, the influencers who try to sort of jump on this bandwagon. And, like, there's this one guy that I know from, like, just like, media appearances and stuff. Like when I used to go on to, like, radio to do, like, little sort of talking headbands, and there was, like, this influencer guy who used to come on to one of the BBC radio stations that I was on. And his, like, whole thing up to this point was like, he sort of goes to Ibiza and he asks, like, drunk women sort of inappropriate questions about, like, their body count and all that stuff, like, kind of gross stuff, but, like, broadly sort of just like things that were sort of there to grab attention. But when Charlie Kirk died, he, like, pivoted his content to be, like, really, really political, but in this sort of sense of, like, Charlie Kirk was there for free speech. And, like, you know, his message was that, like, you know, you should be allowed to talk about anything. And so that's why I'm going out on the streets of London to ask people what they thought about Charlie Kirk. And, like, it's qu. Funny watching the video because he, like, uploaded all the footage, and most of.
- [13:24]
B
The.
- [13:24]
C
Most of the stuff he got was just people being like, who's Charlie Kirk? Like, they don't actually sort of know who he is. Or they sort of think that, oh, he's just like this American guy, it sort of sadly got shot. But, like, I don't really have any opinions other than that.
- [13:36]
B
Right.
- [13:36]
C
But there were a few people, like, along those lines who were really trying to sort of like, present Charlie Kirk as being this, like, neutral free speech actor. And we obviously knew that wasn't true. But there was this period where I was just like, oh, like there are enough people who don't know who this guy is that like, suddenly there's this opportunity to, like, reframe as like the ultimate free speech guy.
- [13:55]
D
Right?
- [13:55]
C
But actually, what these people wanted and what they were really sort of gleeful for when he died was like, oh, this is a great way of getting people into trouble. Right? Because if you can get people to, like, say things that are like, a little bit disparaging about Charlie Kirk. And obviously there are lots of people who just, like, don't shut their mouths online and are sort of, you know, just sort of went down with it. Like, we talk a lot about how Charlie Kirk is probably like the most disrespected far right and disrespected person in the world. Right. His death has just sort of become like memes upon memes upon memes, like, no respect whatsoever. Turning Point as an organization is basically a shell of itself. We're all just waiting for Erica. Erica. What's his name? Like Charlie Kirk. I was going to say Erica Trump, but there's Eric Trump and there is Erica fucking. What's her name? We're waiting for Kirk.
- [14:39]
B
Erica Kirk. Well, my brain, it's a patronymic.
- [14:46]
C
We're waiting for Erica Kirk and Eric Trump to also be like, we know we've been impregn. Impregnated by JD Vance. We're just waiting for that to happen. And so it's sort of like this guy kind of died for nothing but his whole purpose, which was just to sort of like, own the libs and then get the libs arrested, just hasn't worked. The opposite has happened, which is that, like, he's getting the libs paid. We're making the big live Laugh love sign, and they don't know what to do about it. And I think this is also so interesting in terms of looking at the state of the right and just like this kind of weird sense where they sort of are aware that, like, you know, the curtains are closing and they're not quite sure what happens at this point. And I think it's just really interesting just to observe just like the fact that these kind of a guy that they had really hoped would be a sort of like martyr in which they could sort of cast into his own image just would. Just has. They have no control over it.
- [15:37]
A
Well, can I give you some other good news in terms of like, lib. Let's say lib, laugh, love. Yeah, libs. Lib, laugh, love. Libs having a field day. Which is. I mean, this is us too. This is us. And the libs kind of are sort of lined on this one, which is the Tate brothers getting arrested the same week that Alyssa Fury got paid. So we're going to be following that as well. But there's actually something I wanted to talk about before I switch over to me and Nathan, which unusually I haven't actually done yet. So I can't do my in the future past little thing.
- [16:08]
B
I don't know.
- [16:09]
A
It's like, I also know that's only amusing to me, but it's very amusing to me, so I won't stop doing it. So this is another piece of news I want to discuss. Leather jacket worn by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sells for just under a million dollars at Sotheby's Charity Auction CNBC.
- [16:26]
B
What?
- [16:27]
A
Well, on Friday, last week, after 65 bids, one of Jensen Huang's pre worn and signed jackets sold at auction at Sotheby's for $960,000, higher than the presale estimate of 40 to 60 thousand dollars.
- [16:40]
B
Is he dead? My first thought is, did he die? He's alive. Did he die in the jacket?
- [16:47]
A
Is this the jacket that took over Jensen Huang's mind? Like the Green Goblin? So he wore the jacket in 2023 at an event at Foxconn in Taipei, Taiwan. The original retail price was only $10,000. A lot for a jacket, but not much compared to 960,000. The high price for the garment is. That is a sign that collectors are looking to bid on artifacts and collectibles from the artificial intelligence boom. And I just wanted to say one of the things that people said after the Great Depression is, hey, when like sort of corporate executives become like, know public, public figures and like your taxi driver suddenly is like, well, hey, here's, here's what I would invest in, and so on and so on. You might be in a bubble, sort of an indicator, bubble territory.
- [17:28]
B
When a bubble starts getting lots of sub bubbles, or I call them subles, like, it is just that casino scene in the Big Short, right? Where it's just like we're adding things onto the AI bubble, where it's like, yeah, we're paying a million dollars for a jacket now.
- [17:43]
A
It just. So the response to this sale surpassed even our highest expectations. Sotheby's head of modern collectibles, Brahm Vochter, said in a statement. Pretty good name, he said.
- [17:53]
B
He added, don't ask about my grandpa.
- [17:56]
A
So Sotheby said in a statement that proceeds will go to a philanthropic initiative in support of the Edge Institute, which is a nonprofit dedicated to innovation. So you may be thinking, ah, Riley's gonna move through a few more news items then onto the interview with Nathan Tankus. Not so. Because do you remember how I said just now? Really? I said the Edge Institute?
- [18:18]
B
Yeah.
- [18:18]
A
Did you ask what the fuck is the Edge Institute?
- [18:21]
B
No, I. Because I know that the Edge Institute is a philanthropic initiative in support of innovation, which I love. Innovation.
- [18:29]
A
Huge innovation fan.
- [18:30]
B
I'm a huge innovation fan. I'm using a computer right now.
- [18:33]
A
Honestly, if we didn't have innovations, then we wouldn't have anything for Jensen Huang to inflate the value of his jacket. That's pretty obvious to me, I think. So this charity auction in support of the Edge Institute, I was like, okay, well, I have to find out what the Edge Institute is. And I can tell you according to their. What they do. They say Edge City. The Edge Institute, which runs Edge City.
- [18:54]
B
Everyone there is edging.
- [18:56]
A
Everyone there is. They're very edgy.
- [18:58]
B
I do not go to Edge City because everyone's about to punch me and come. And I don't know which one each person is.
- [19:06]
A
They're just daring each other to say the word.
- [19:08]
B
Yeah. The common group is edgy or edging. And they look at you and you have to answer the same.
- [19:13]
D
Yeah.
- [19:14]
A
If you're different then you have to fight or get come down. That's true. Well, it's like that sumo, British sumo wrestling match. So they convene people working at the frontiers of tech, science and social innovation in pop up villages across the globe. And it's actually part. This will be interesting. It's part of the Zusulu ecosystem.
- [19:33]
B
Uh huh huh.
- [19:35]
A
What the what? Thank you so much for asking.
- [19:39]
B
We bought a Zuzuloo
- [19:41]
A
Suzalo Zuzilu. It is the. That's the pop up city movement started by Vitalik Buterin, the guy who came up with Ethereum, or the guy who, let's say is widely thought of as the guy who came up with Ethereum. It got started with a gathering in Montenegro, which means, by the way, Vitalik Buterin is now canonically a mayor because he was the mayor of the first Edge City. They say Edge City is a society incubator, an IRL lab of experimentation for new ideas, tech culture organizations, all dedicated to accelerating human flourishing. Do you think this is a good charitable organization to donate the proceeds of a ludicrous rich guy purchase of a jacket to? Oh my God.
- [20:19]
B
I know what they've done. I know what they've done. I know what they've done. So you know how like Burning man, for all of its insane faults to begin with, was at some point an art project and then got like overrun with like Silicon Valley types who like just want to like put on like a headdress and run around on drugs in the desert. They've made Burning man, but it's just business. They've eliminated the art part. Finally, finally, it's Burning man where you can wear just a zipper up, like a zip front sweatshirt.
- [20:45]
A
It's a Burning man where you don't have to be embarrassed to wear a gilet to it. Exactly. So our annual flagship pop up village in Heldsburg, California is co organized with the Esmeralda Institute, a new permanent village just 90 minutes north of San Francisco.
- [21:00]
B
They have great wine there. Helzberg.
- [21:02]
A
This month long gathering, Russian Valley. Oh yeah, I. I know. Don't. I'm. I'm upset that they're. This is, this is good wine land and they're putting tech idiots on it. They' ideas with it, which I think is terrible. This month long gathering served as a prototype for our vision, helping us test new ways of living, working and thriving together. Why create spaces that support this type of experimentation, you may ask? Well, you were about to ask that right then. That was going to be your question. Because the systems that shape our time, M dash institutions, norms, governance structures, M dash were made for a prior world. Ones that worked in the past are now rigid and slow moving, unable to evolve to meet the opportunities and challenges of the current moment.
- [21:42]
B
Mind numbing sentence. It doesn't mean anything.
- [21:43]
A
By creating these micro exits, you know a microexit.
- [21:47]
B
I know what a macro exit is. It's when I leave.
- [21:49]
A
Well, a micro exit is like you can sign out of normal society for like three to four weeks at a time.
- [21:55]
B
It really is Burning Man. Jesus Christ.
- [21:58]
A
We create space to experiment with new systems, technologies and practices. What works in these experimental environments can then be shared with broader society, shaping a brighter future for everyone. So Jensen Huang donated his jacket sale. The proceeds from it went to a network state cult thing.
- [22:12]
B
They're finally. Okay, cool. This is the first time in human history that someone's built, say, like a city on a hill for everyone to go look at and think about how cool it is and then make society reflect that. That they see, which is a good understanding of power and how it works and how it's. Yeah.
- [22:27]
A
This is from one retrospective of an Edge City event. Like, they have them all over the world. They have them. They have them everywhere. But like the California one's, the flagship one.
- [22:35]
B
Okay.
- [22:35]
A
There were movement classes in the morning, lectures and workshops throughout the day, and dinners and parties through the evening. There were no ground rules as far as what programming was allowed and events covered everything under the sun. There was more standard fare, conference talks about people's work, but also sessions on animal telepathy, fertility, regenerative farming, acro yoga, and the aptly named kids at the Pool. I don't know what that last one is.
- [22:57]
B
Animal telepathy. You skipped right over animal telepathy. Is that talking to animals using your mind, or is it animals talking to each other using their minds?
- [23:05]
A
They, you know, they didn't go into more detail. They just left. They just left it. At animal telepathy, we're like, well, we assume you know what this is.
- [23:11]
B
We're doing the Men who stare at goats again. Again. But this time it's worse. Stupider.
- [23:14]
A
This time. Well, this time instead of being funded by the government, it's being funded by the sale of proceeds of the sale of Jensen's jacket. So they say what gets built at Edge City. I actually looked into this. Only two startups have emerged from Edge City, one called Constellation and one called Ami. Both those startups are related to building new AI models, and both of them have been invested in, but neither of them actually have a product released.
- [23:35]
B
Sorry, the new. This little flyer that you posted here.
- [23:38]
A
Uhhuh.
- [23:39]
B
It says new towns, Colon, Esmeralda and Gilefu. Mindfulness City, which sounds like a Zelda location.
- [23:45]
A
Galefu. Mindfulness City is a version of this in Bhutan.
- [23:49]
B
Cool. Mindful. I want to go to Mindfulness City,
- [23:53]
A
where the grass is green and the girls are calm. The other thing about this, by the way, is that the whole thing is funded by a venture capital company called Long Journey Ventures and the sale of one jacket. Sale of one jacket. So basically, again, the charity that the sale of Jensen Huang's jacket funded is something that is also a venture capital investment pipeline thing. So they've paid for a VC's deal sourcing pipeline with a charity auction.
- [24:26]
B
That's cool.
- [24:28]
A
I love it. I love it.
- [24:29]
B
Awesome. I bet that money couldn't be used for something better.
- [24:32]
A
So here's the other thing. Here's the other thing. Okay. Mose has the Edging Institute build a permanent city. Well, Esmeralda is supposed to be there. That so Edge Esmeralda is a pop up city that quote works with the Esmeralda Institute. So there's the Esmeralda Institute and Edge Esmeralda. The Esmeralda Institute is also a nonprofit trying to prototype a new way of life with a city 90 minutes north of San Francisco like no one else has ever tried to do.
- [24:55]
B
They even read Palo Alto by Malcolm Reese.
- [24:58]
A
There also is something called the Esmeralda Land Company, which is a private land development organization that the Esmeralda Institute does free press for in the guise of philanthropy. Owned by a woman named Devin Zigel, who used to edit Peter Thiel's Stanford Review.
- [25:13]
D
So, uh huh.
- [25:14]
B
We did this already like a hundred years ago to take photographs of horses. Better. Whatever, it's fine.
- [25:20]
A
Zeugle, a 31 year old software engineer raised in the heart of Silicon Valley. This is from the SF Chronicle, arrived in Cloverdale two years ago with fanciful renderings for a village of upward of 600 new apartments and homes in the city's eastern edge. She named the city's Esmeralda. And in Cloverdale's tight knit town of just under 9,000 people, the idea stoked excitement and alarm. This summer, Cloverdale will begin formally considering Zeugl's Esmeralda development proposal. An idea that has already consumed two years of public debate whether a long dormant 266 acre former industrial mill site along the Russian river should become an entirely new walkable neighborhood with housing, a hotel, amphitheater, shops and cafes, playgrounds, parks and trails. This all seems lovely, right? But she owns the company that owns the land. This isn't even the first company to consider this brownfield parcel for like a rich person retreat. Just a few years ago it was rezoned for a wine country resort and golf course. It's just fell through because they couldn't clean it up well enough.
- [26:11]
B
I'm looking at the renderings because I need to see them and they're just like, like in there. And these people's like greatest wildest dreams and imagination. It just looks like a country club or like a fancy hotel or like the Getty Villa or something. Yep, it's just such a lack of this is the future to you.
- [26:28]
A
Well, you're. Devin Zoigel said.
- [26:31]
B
What?
- [26:31]
A
I don't look like the typical CEO of a Development company. I'm proud that I'm different. Doesn't seem to be creating anything different.
- [26:39]
B
No.
- [26:39]
A
So what happened?
- [26:40]
B
Basically, she just looks like some lady. All right, whatever.
- [26:44]
A
Is that. Jensen Huang sold his jacket for a million dollars and donated the proceeds to an organization that is, among other things, primarily concerned with the traveling circus of Silicon Valley. People who are promoting, among other things, yet another network, State Style land development, whose main concern right now now seems to be saying, hey, we can have this thing that Devin Zeugel wants to make, who's also, by the way, connected to the Peter Thiel network. We're gonna actually have our traveling edge Esmeralda thing happen there to promote that. It's like a reasonable thing that it should be rezoned and it's valuable for developers. So it's basically. It's a real estate value inflation play, sponsored in small part by Jensen Huang selling his jacket for charity.
- [27:27]
B
These people truly cannot. All they do is invent stuff that already exists. Right?
- [27:32]
A
Yeah.
- [27:32]
B
Like, we all make fun of, like, when they come out and they're like, we've invented sailboats again or whatever, or like, we've invented the city bus, but this is just like reinventing robber baron shit over and over and over and over again. I just. It's. So how stupid do they think we are?
- [27:48]
A
Relatively.
- [27:49]
D
Okay, yeah, you know what?
- [27:52]
B
To be fair, I'm pretty fucking dumb.
- [27:54]
A
So. In case you were wondering, by the way, if anything specific came out of the Varys Edge cities, this is from their blog. The village was hard to describe because it wasn't any one thing. The activity of the village was, in principle, not something that could have been planned in advance. Each event came to be because someone who was attending the village decided that there was something inside of them that wanted to bring into connection with the community, an aggregate that meant the whole experience was merely an amalgamation of what happened to be alive for the 1200 attendees at any given moment living in the middle. This is just describing people being at
- [28:24]
B
the same place instead of giving them millions of dollars. I'm making a prop.
- [28:30]
A
Jensen Huang redirects your jacket money to the following.
- [28:33]
B
The jacket's already gone. Jensen Huang. Sell your shoes or pants or both
- [28:37]
D
and give me the money.
- [28:38]
B
See, shoes go for 2 million.
- [28:40]
A
Sell your used underwear.
- [28:41]
B
Yeah, sell your used underwear, Jensen Huang. And also your ear. Well, shoes could be 1 million each because there's two of them, right? Pants, 2 million each because there's two legs to the pants. So it's $4 million right there. And I will use that seed money to construct the village from the Prisoner and send every one of these there for the rest of their lives.
- [28:57]
A
Hey Maddie, have you been watching?
- [28:59]
B
I've been watching Prisoner Riley and I was texting you about it and now I'm talk about it on the show because I've been watching the Prisoner. You know, it's a cool show, the Prisoner. They changed me. $4 million to remake the Prisoner. How about that?
- [29:10]
A
Okay, perfect. Jensen, if you're listening. And we know you are. And we know you are, we know you are. 4 million for a remake of the Prisoner or 1 million for sponsoring like a kind of self directed Montessori summer camp for like billionaires. Which, which do you think you'd rather want to do? I mean, I know what he'd rather want to do, but one would be
- [29:28]
B
cool as someone who actually went to a Montessori arts summer camp as a child. Child. Because it's sort of like where you furloughed your gay child when in the year 2001. This is like that. But they, but, but at least there I was like learning life skills by teaching 11 year olds how to weld and here, you know, nothing's happening.
- [29:44]
A
Well, they're making a lot of interesting pre product startups.
- [29:47]
B
They're making a lot of interesting money.
- [29:49]
C
Well they, they also really missed a trick because if you had Charlie Kirk's jacket and imagine what you could do with that.
- [29:56]
B
Well, you could clone them probably with
- [29:57]
D
the blood from it.
- [29:59]
A
All right, I think with that it's time for, it's time for me to take talk to Nathan a little bit about the threats to the plumbing of the world, which is pretty. That's right. Hello everybody. From the first half it is Riley. In the second half joined for I think the third or fourth time, Nathan Tankus from Notes on the Crises. Nathan, fresh off your off lots appearance. How was it doing? The second best show in our genre.
- [30:40]
D
It was fantastic. You know they've got a fancy new studio where you can document the craziest hand gestures that you've ever seen three Jewish guys make. You're, you're, you're happy, you're. You can have quite a fun time with that video. You can see my tattoo fully visible on it. So I'm talking about all these technical things and I've got this crazy tattoo you can't quite read, but you know, it's crazy. It was a great tattoo.
- [31:05]
A
And also of course, thank you for coming back on. If you're not familiar with Nathan's work, he writes a great deal about the mechanisms through which the Trump administration has attempted to take control of certain elements of the United States federal government that are really supposed to be a million miles away from politics. Things like if this, if the federal government grants a state money to do something and the money shows up in their account, the Trump administration is trying to take over the mechanism that allows the money to stay in the account, therefore undermining the concept of what makes money money. And we've spoken about this a few times, and it's worth almost having a retrospective on that, what you call the Trump Musk payments crisis of 2025 and the sort of the long tail of touching the money. Basically, Trump and Musk touched the money a lot. A bunch of things could have happened that didn't. A bunch of things did happen, and a number of other things have now been, say, fatally undermined. I mean, I think the perfect example of this whole sort of DOGE effort that encompasses things outside, maybe what those literal guys were doing is the current cyclospora lettuce parasite outbreak, because DOGE cut a team that was monitoring this particular parasite from 11 to three people on the basis that there wasn't a cyclospora outbreak going on right at that moment. And therefore it wasn't in the media and buzzy and headliney and so on. But what they did was undermine, like, the future resilience of certain things that you might want and even if you're a capitalist want. And a lot of what we're going to talk about is the things that are not, not as obvious as, like, cyclospora funding or like general medical research funding, but like, stuff like the very underpinnings of the economic plumbing of the state.
- [32:53]
D
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great way to put it. And I think, you know, for me, a comparison that I made from the very beginning of the Trump must payments crisis, which we'll get into, I think really is the thing that you should keep in your mind first and foremost, because the model for everything is that Elon Musk bought Twitter and he eviscerated a whole bunch of teens. He like, you know, knocked down a whole bunch of the infrastructure that they had and then went great, things didn't immediately collapse. Ergo, we didn't need any of that stuff. And, you know, the thing about Twitter is you knock down the resilience of Twitter, you make Twitter gradually worse in all these ways, you know, inveterate posters like you and me suffer. But ultimately it's not the most important thing in the world. But a guy like Musk learning a lesson like that, oh, all these, you know, white hats, you know, telling me all this infrastructure that we need and how important it was and blah, blah, blah, well, they were all wrong. I could like unplug and it'd be fine. Is essentially his, his mental model for everything. And, and when you knock down the, when you take that same approach to Twitter, to say the federal government of the United States and you knock down all this redundancy and resiliency in the system because of things that aren't happening right now, and your proof that it was fine is that things didn't immediately collapse then you're going to see recurring things like this happen where we're all having diarrhea now, or all this, all this other stuff and stuff that's less, you know, sexy isn't the right word for diarrhea, but less in your face, let's say, is diarrhea that is happening, you know, a thousand fold over all these different elements of the federal government and then things that were funded by the federal government. And we see it play out and we're going to continue seeing it play out. I mean, we're going to be having DOGE related outbreaks or crises or, you know, something's going to break that's going to cause a lot of damage like 10, 15 years out. And they'll be like, oh yeah, this is another DOGE thing that we didn't quite catch even as we were trying to reconstruct the federal government or whatever. You know, I was talking to some people recently and it's like a, in a lot of ways, a Democratic administration that rolled back 40% of the damage of Doge in their first term. Term would be a wild success. Like that would be really impressive to just to be able to work back 40% of the damage. And there are just a million things like this. And it won't be predictable what breaks next or exactly when it breaks. But we do know that a bunch of stuff is going to break over the next 10, 15 years. Because, yeah, teams went from eight to three guys, guys. There was one guy on it and he's the only person who knew why it was important. So he couldn't justify why his job was important. He was fired. And then like three years later, you know, every building that's like above 100 stories collapses or something. And it was like, oh yeah, he, like, he produced the, like the, the tungsten alloy that went into the steel beams or whatever. You Know, just whatever it is, it'll sound like the most nothing thing in the world and it'll be very important.
- [36:20]
A
Whenever we speak about this thing, as we've spoken about it a few times, we tend to speak in terms of possibilities, contingencies, risks, things that should have a non zero chance of happening suddenly gaining non zero chances of happening. The last time we spoke, I think we talked about how close the world came to a generalized financial crisis during the impoundments crisis, where suddenly the US government appeared to politicize the question of which bills it would pay. Because the actual mechanisms, the plumbing if you like, is the frequen used had become politicized. And it was looking as though the federal government may start making choices about say which treasuries it will pay the interest coupons on, thereby destroying the global financial system. Because again, the person who's directing most of that, Elon Musk, thinks, well I can try it and if it destroys the global financial system, I'll just reset it and it'll be fine. But doesn't understand that the thing he's breaking, just like with Cyclospora cutting that team, the thing you're breaking isn't just oh, I caused an immediate financial crisis and then fixed it by restoring it. My bad, everybody. It's that these things are social, they're about belief, they're about say if you buy a Treasury bill, you never have to worry about the, about the coupon being paid, Right? And suddenly if you have to worry about the coupon being paid, that changes a social fact. And so that's more abstract than they cut the team monitoring for the parasite and now everyone's pooping. But it is incredibly damaging that this was even right. This is something that should have a zero possibility, that should have a zero possibility that was given a non zero possibility during the Trump Musk payments crisis.
- [37:56]
D
Yeah, I mean I think even bigger than that, which I think we also spent a lot of time talking about, is just these people being idiots who don't know what they're doing. Like the bigger possibility, the biggest danger was simply that you had some 20 somethings who downloaded deep Sea and were like rejiggering Cobalt code, code based on Deep Sea and didn't barely understand the cost of business logic, certainly don't understand the decades of business logic that have accrued in these systems and breaking something that they didn't know how to fix and them breaking things enough that payments simply stopped being processed by the federal government. And if payments stopped being processed by the federal government, like wholesale all payments were stopping processing process. It's you know, not just the federal government. It would be a, like a global social implosion within a matter of weeks. Because just think of all the payments that went off. Suddenly no one's getting Social Security. Suddenly no state, local governments are getting, are, are, are getting payments, you know, not no treasury pay, as you pointed out. The, you know, the treasury bonds, treasury securities, it's it which in a lot of ways would be the easiest to quote unquote fix because the Fed can step in. But like all these other payments where you can't locate who you need to pay and you have to engineer a system on the fly, it's insanity. It's just total insanity. And they really did risk doing something like that that would have, you know, even if you do something where you can fix it in a month, like what happens in American society when no payments are coming out of the federal
- [39:32]
A
government for a month or what happens if no one, if no one is 100% confident that the payment will come.
- [39:38]
D
Yeah.
- [39:38]
A
You know, even, even after.
- [39:39]
D
What's funny about that is it seems like kind of the answer is kind of nothing right now. You will can talk about this for later but like the ability for what I've been calling, you know, the conventional wisdom processor or like conventional wisdom to hold for decades. We were told like any little thing would scoop would like spook global financial markets and like have everyone running for the exact it. And if anything has disproven that it's this where like, I mean Trump, Trump could go on television, do the Reagan bit of like there's going to be a nuclear war in five minutes and, but like be serious and like the financial markets, oh, there'd be like a little sell off. It'd be like, you know, the stock market's down like 1% on the, on the word that Trump plans to announce a nuclear war tonight. But like, you know, Taco Trump always chickens out like he's not going to, he's not going to go for it. So it's fine.
- [40:35]
A
This is something you've written. I'm officially declaring the Trump musk payments crisis over for now. It appears we are settling in for a long, drawn out and still ongoing impoundment crisis along with a constitutional crisis over executive authority. But that notwithstanding, the extent to which the Trump administration has backed away from abusing the payment system is because they think both impoundment and targeting enemies can be accomplished with more familiar tools that are less dangerous to wield what the Trump musk payments crisis has illustrated is that our payment system is incredibly fragile and subject to enormous abuses which, as we say, the markets did not bring about. The worst significant damage was done and high latency damage that we won't be identifying for years. And that damage will also be very geographically dispersed. Like for example, Doge cut a program that was researching how fast shrimp could run on like underwater treadmills. And they elon highlighted that. He was like, this is stupid. This is like a woke waste of money. Jobs programs for, for scientists, whatever, whatever. And it's like, well, no, that's super important to shrimp farmers. Farming. And so if the United States is suddenly unable to produce as many shrimp domestically, then shrimp prices around the world would probably go up. Right. So that one thing could have high latency, geographically dispersed damage that's difficult to trace back to it. Right. And so it's like this fragility and these abuses are so widespread and so subtle that they are very insidious and will be. It's always, the important thing is to always trace it back, if you can, to this, this. But like, say a little more though, about like this phase of the crisis being over, this crazy phase and a more insidious phase beginning.
- [42:13]
D
Yeah. So, you know, you can imagine I, you know, break this stuff on Doge and the treasury and then I have this follow up piece about like them just taking money directly out of New York City's bank account and like, is there any controls that are stopped from the federal government just capriciously taking funds out of people's bank accounts for like any reason they can come up with? And the answer basically be no. It's just been, this has been like the most hardcore norm ever. It's just like, well like, you know, it's like people would get on the Internet and tell lies. Like someone would get in the government and just start like randomly taking money out of people's bank accounts. It was just the norm.
- [42:57]
A
Yeah, it's like, hey, they all promised to not do that. They all said they all, they didn't
- [43:02]
D
even promise not to do that. It was just like, oh, obviously it would be crazy to do that. So no one would do that. It was just the norm to defeat all norms. It's like, okay, Trump is going to break every other norm, but surely he's not going to break this norm. It was a norm that was so hard coded that it didn't occur to anyone. It like literally did not occur to anyone. It was a norm that hard coded.
- [43:24]
A
It's like how you don't smell oxygen.
- [43:26]
D
Yeah, exactly. It's like I don't think about how you need oxygen, it's just there, there. And of course that's the kind of thing I think about. And checking around and it's like, nope. There's a national, there's a national association, trade association that deals with the automated clearinghouse policy. But the federal government has long had an override where it gets to override the association's rules. And everyone's just been like, well, they'll probably be fine with that power. You know, what could go wrong? I think ends here we are. And so between those two things, I, it's very hard to get rid of the idea that this stuff is just gonna keep on popping up everywhere. And I searched and I searched and I searched and we just couldn't come up with more classic payments crisis type stuff. But we could come up with empowerment, various examples of impoundment. Because my first piece wasn't actually about the Bureau of Fiscal Service, it was about owning. And I was long. And before the Trump administration started, I knew OMB and Russell Vaught was going to be a big thing to look to. And I wrote a big piece about him just issuing this guidance which throws payments. This was the major main mechanism. This is the mechanism that the Trump administration intended to use to shape the federal government in the United States to its will was just, just straight up empowerment, not messing with the pain system, them. And as I looked at this more, what I came to, what fully clicked in my head was this has been just like an embarrassing rigmarole all around because if you look at the world through Russell boss eyes, you know, he's happy that like Musk sent Doge kids into different agencies and got people fired and you know, got control of the real estate and the email addresses and all that stuff. Soft but ultimately at the core issue of impoundment, not just like bending individual administrative agencies to the Trump administration's will, but like the court issue of impoundment. Vaught must look at this stuff and go, you fucking idiot. Because he's already got what Musk wanted. What Musk didn't understand is that when Musk looked and said, oh my God, the Bureau of Fiscal Service processes all the payments. They just process a payment agreement automatically. What about anti fraud? What about this? What about that? And like got himself in a tizzy. The whole system has checks for that. They're often agency based checks. But more than that, OMB has oversight. So if OMB doesn't want a Certain type of money to be spent. OMB could reach into these administrative agencies and deal with that he doesn't like. Essentially on the fly. High on ketamine, Elon Musk tried to get his 20 somethings to jury rig build a very complicated apparatus to control payments that Vaught already had.
- [46:24]
A
Yeah, it's, it's like, it's like he didn't need to touch the money. The important thing is don't touch the money. But he, he was like he was too stupid and he touched it.
- [46:33]
D
He was just reaching into the like copper wiring of the federal government. Napoleon out and Vladi is like, no, I've already built all these apparatuses to do all this stuff. In fact it was a bipartisan project to build this for 50 years. And I've just taken control of it and dedicated to my will and reshaped it to doing what I want rather than the good governance shit that they, that they claimed this system was built for. And so he must sure level looks like, why are you freaking everyone out? Because you know, know in no small part because of my role, but other people too. People started randomly showing up and screaming at these people going what the fuck are you doing? Like they're telling us that you're going to blow everything up. And of course I'm sure everyone involved was like, who, who are this fucking guy? Who are these people? That's all bullshit. But nevertheless like none of them wanted to deal with this. Like this was a crisis that broke out in like the first two weeks. Like we started banging alarm about this. Like January 31st.
- [47:33]
A
Like that's a really quick. Christ, that's really quick T to crisis.
- [47:37]
D
Susie Wiles did not want to have phone calls about the most boring part of the Treasury.
- [47:43]
A
No, I want to talk about what Russell Vaught actually is controlling and the way he's changing it to sort of try to shape the machinery of the federal government more towards, let's say his hyper authoritarian ends. Because he's doing this as head of the OMB Office of the Management of Budget. And he's doing it in a way that's not scary or headline grabbing. Because that was the problem. Problem. What Musk and his, you know, teens were doing was touching the money. It was frightening. It was also something weirdly that was kind of understandable because at the same time as they were doing it to like payments to New York City, they were also doing it to stuff like scientific research, things that are easy to picture. They're doing it to the cdc. You can picture yourself shitting Now, a lot of people have to. But Russell Vaught is doing it in a way that is not as overt, but is, you could say, about as damaging, at least in terms of his agenda being damaging.
- [48:32]
D
The big picture is, as I was staring at this, what. What clicked in my head and the specific reason that I say that OMB already had built. What Musk was trying to build, if he even had a coherent concept in his head, is that agencies don't just like, oh, Congress passes the legislation in appropriation for an agency comes, and then suddenly the agency has a whole bunch of money. There's a recent piece with a couple of research fellows who've been working with me on this, doing a great job. Juan Haynes and Josh Lawrence. I wrote about how you can think of Congress passing a law and the appropriations, meaning just money that's been appropriated for X or Y activity as a kind of congressional check. But the Congressional choice check is no longer, say, like treasury gets the money and hands it out to different agencies in their bank accounts. Instead, what happens is, for the last number of decades, a kind of middleman has been inserted in processing congressional appropriation. And this middleman is the Office of Management and Budget. So nowadays, what happens when Congress passes a law of the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB interprets that law, and it creates different appropriation accounts is what they call it, for different line items, different types of funding for different agencies. And the crucial element of this is that the fact that they create these appropriation accounts, they also get to defy over the period that they're spent. So there's something called apportionment. So they don't have to release the money that an agency is granted for a full year all at once. They can divide it up and, in fact, they can define it up as thinly as they want. They usually do every three months, but they could do per month, they could even do every single day, just, we're releasing you little drabs of money to spend every day. And you can imagine if someone can decide that you're only getting certain amount of your money available each day, they have a lot more control over you than if you're just like, processing the check and you just get all the money. But it's even more than that. The OMB is able to attach what are called footnotes. So they're able to just create conditions notionally within the powers that have been granted them, but nevertheless to create conditions on how this money is spent in various different ways. And I started looking at this and thinking, okay, these appropriation accounts, they're essentially money. They're just a kind of internal money of the federal government. Whenever money needs to be sent to an external actor, to some contractor or whatever, the Bureau of Fiscal Service processes the payment. Payment, the payment goes out. So this money is not something that anyone outside of the federal government ever interacts with.
- [51:24]
A
Wait, you're saying, are you saying the American government has Walt Disney bucks?
- [51:28]
D
I mean, essentially the American, the American government has. They have OMB bucks and they, they have to spend out of their own B account. And the Bureau of Fiscal Service will turn OMB bucks into, you know, US Dollars money in bank accounts. So on the money that we think of as money, they've got this internal. Yeah, they've got this internal, internal OMB bucks. You know, maybe they should put bot space on it. But yeah, they've, they've got internal, just like an internal little money that is just for, you know, asserting a middleman between Congress and spending money out there. And notionally it was to make these systems, quote unquote, more efficient, reduce redundancies, but also, yes, for the presidency to be able to express its policy priority priorities by influencing what and how the money is spent that Congress is already appropriate.
- [52:21]
A
So then maybe this is where that rule comes in, which is, well, how. What are the conditions that we can put on on these accounts? Like, because we can attach rules to the spending of Disney bucks, essentially. And what Russell Vaught appears to be doing this is that 2 CFR 200 is changing the way that, yeah, Disney bucks are allowed to be spent by creating a huge amount and arbitrary additional bureaucracy. But I think more importantly, quite nakedly, political review of what money is being used for. I'm going to do a quote from Notes on the Crises. And this is from Phil Rocco, one of your co authors. This is the sort of thing that has attracted attention for its potential to politicize scientific research. But the scope is far broader than that. Its application to state and local governments does nothing short of using intergovernmental aid to create a new patronage system. Agencies which the rule deprives of substantial discretion and adjudicating grant components compliance can now terminate awards that do not align with the President's priorities. Most disturbingly, discretionary grants to state and local governments must now go through pre issuance review, which means that political appointees will scrutinize proposals to ensure not that they are consistent with the statutes Congress has passed, but that they align with the prerogatives of the President. The rule Arms agencies with new vague and easily politicized criteria to apply. These include ambiguous rules about a recipient's past questionable practices as well as risk factors, not to mention defined. Discretionary awards cannot be used, for example, to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize or facilitate, among other things, any other initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti American values. And that's just left up to any, say, political appointee to determine. Right. There is other political additions as well. It's a reputational harm proviso. There are points around viewpoint discrimination, but also it franchises this out. Agencies can coordinate with private individuals or organizations to bring private actions against grant regulations recipients. Anyone might deem to be too un American. Is that approximately the shape of it?
- [54:15]
D
Yeah, I mean this, this is a huge, huge proposed rule. Comments closed last week. There was like about 50,000 comments ultimately submitted. So like you can imagine how big a deal something has to be for 50,000 comments to be submitted on an OMB proposed rule. It's pretty amazing. And it's precisely because of this is that we're talking about, about, you know, the federal government makes nearly a trillion dollars of grants a year. And that, that is an enormous amount of money that goes to all sorts of things from science, from state and local governments and to be able to, you know, traditionally the traditional concepts and of course it's never been ideal like this, but nevertheless was that civil servants were processing these grants, were making the decisions around them, that, that there was professional criteria that went into, into that went into these grants and you know, a little bit of a good go along to get along thing with state and local grants where like, well, we don't want our priorities to get screwed over so much. So we're going to, you know, go light on, on, on your priorities and just sort of treat it as like, you know, state, local governments, red or blue. And what this is, is, is a process of just purely trying to override that system. You know, Vought, in essence wants to have direct control over what gets glanced. So that means nothing lgbtq, nothing woke, quote, unquote, nothing gender ideology, nothing Marxism, nothing green, New Deal. All of that will be, you know, will be cut. These, these are the terms that are literally were used in the first executive orders that the Trump administration listed. And you know, they mean anything remotely that could be put under any of those categories. Categories. And they want full control and not just do they want full control for blot, but they also want essentially to give a private right of action to let like the craziest far right fascist organizations in the country to be able to sue grantees if they come across a grant that they think is violating these rules that like is too woke or is too just like, you know, let's say basic competency oriented. So it's not just that like Vault wants direct control, but he also wants to let the looniest, you know, far right nonprofits to also be able to exercise control and oversight over who gets what funds. And so, yeah, I mean you can imagine if you can directly control who gets a trillion dollar in funds and they have to do your bidding to get it, then we're talking about an enormous system of coercion for both private actors, state, local governments, et cetera. Like you can imagine for example, in like the most extreme cases, hey, if you state and local government aren't going to implement our views of election rules. And also, hey, maybe Ubo wink wink declared that, you know, this person didn't win the presidency when they did, then, you know, you're getting all your funds cut off. Or this person didn't win the midterms when they did that, you know, did they, they get their funds caught up. You know, that kind of direct control can get anything. All of that is possible if, you know, this OMB Pro pro's rule goes through and isn't tilted the courts or rolled back by Congress. Like this is all stuff that is possible and you know, it kind of follows through from, from the unitary executive state. The idea that the president is supposed to have direct control over anything that goes on in the executive branch.
- [58:01]
A
Yeah, well, they seem to be trying to create not just an empire abroad, but an imperial system at home as well. Right. Like even in like the late Roman sense where the Senate becomes a consultative body, but largely what the emperor wants.
- [58:16]
D
If Congress doesn't have the power of the purse, if Congress has the suggestion of the purse, then we are fully in an internal and external imperial system with direct precedential. And that is we're talking about nothing less when we're talking about this stuff.
- [58:33]
A
Yeah, and just like when we were talking about like undermining things like payment finality, what we were talking about was an attempt to impart that control somewhere. That touched off huge alarms when they attempted to extend into that area, partly because it was new, partly because they were doing other things and so on and so on. This is an attempt to extend that domestic imperial power to do almost the same thing just without setting off really quite so many easily comprehensible alarms. You know, that's partly because of the political immune system, if you like, sort of the things like outrage, media cycles, elections and so on versus courts and agencies. Right. Like the different difference and the difference between something having a huge amount of political salience and the institutions that are able to. Then you do something about it that the institutions designed to notice these kinds of problems are different from the ones that are designed to act on them. And that's what's. And those were temporarily brought into alignment. But the craziness of the Trump Musk payments crisis of 2025, but the Russell Vaught imperial presidency crisis of right now, even though, yeah, there are 50,000 comments on this, this proposed rule change, it's not on the front page of every paper. Like the sort of dismantling of the state under Doge was. It's still the realm of, let's say, interested parties and podcasters.
- [59:55]
B
Yeah.
- [59:56]
D
And I know to really highlight this, a big part of this is how decimated our media system is that there's not really room for built in expertise. I mean, this is kind of in a way, way very similar to the Doge. Like we're going to fire eight people and get down to three people, three people thing with, you know, when now we're all shooting ourselves. It's, you know, this kind of happened first with the media, you know, media getting cut to the bone, you know, various profitability issues, getting bought out by private equity and such like. So there's no room for having like, you know, in the 1960s you could open a dusty room and there'd be like smoke filled everywhere and papers everywhere and you'd go, hey John. And it's like, ah, what are you, what do you want? And it would be a guy who's kind of lost his mind a little bit being on his own, but he knows everything there is to know about a specific thing. And you had that guy around for when it was important and you take him out of the smoke filled room and he would be like the font of knowledge you needed for the biggest story on earth. But it requires that expertise. That stuff is like, we're way past that era. And so what it means is to the extent that there have been OMB stories, it has been basically from sources, from talking to Congress. Like, basically a combination of like whistleblowers are talking to Congress and the stories are fairly superficial, even if they get like the details of their specific story.
- [61:28]
B
Right.
- [61:28]
D
Because no one has expertise on, no one in Congress has expertise on omb. You know, I've talked to congressional staffers who tell me, oh, yeah. You know, when there's something OMB related, they have some former official at the OMB and he gives the OMB talk, which is clearing up basic misconceptions about omb. But there's no like staff that has like a congressional staff that has like a guy or three guys who knows everything there is to know about omb. You know, I've talked, I've talked to Senate budget staffers who are like, yeah, I don't really know about omb. And it's like, okay. I mean, you know, as a result, like Congress people literally don't know. Like we had, I got this one quote from this rigged OMB guy that's basically like, oh, it's like a knife in the back. You know, I could totally destroy this Congressperson's priority and they won't even know anything. Anything that happened, I could collect 4 billion more dollars in taxes and no one would know where the revenue came from. From like just through just like little things in the guts. The more you look at omb, the more you're just like, it's so, so important. And he exercises so much control. Like just one of the stories we dug up from an oral history was this guy who retired as a high up in the State department, started at OMB. And when he started at OMB in 1975, it was like his first job out of college and taking the fourth servicing exam. And he was put in charge of the entire line item, Naval Research and Development, which was a $4 billion line item at the time. And he, you know, treated as a vip, like given all these like flyover missions and like, you know, see the, you know, the latest naval boats and all this stuff and see all their like development facilities. And he's some 25 year olds. And I did the math. $4 billion line item is 1.31% percent of Ford's proposed presidential budget for fiscal year 1975. So like one 25 year old has control over more than 1% of the federal government's budget just by virtue of their seat as a program examiner for omb. And like it wields enormous, enormous power. And that was when it wielded enormous power, when it was like within the, roughly within the constitutional framework we had.
- [63:46]
A
Yeah, that was before Russell Vaught decided to sort of do what he's now doing with it. And now it's going to be we're taking that 25 year old and we're just like showing him, I know he's saying, hey, we freed Andrew Tate and He's going to do a flyover for,
- [64:00]
D
you know, or yeah, they it's going to be a 25 year old who posts Pepe memes and is like, well, what if we just didn't spend any money on boats that could go in cold water? I don't want a sending boat served near Russia.
- [64:17]
A
Maybe, maybe cold water is soy. Yeah, maybe cold water is soy now. And I think that the Navy shouldn't be gay and soy. I think the Navy should be like jacked and based. And now my good friend Russell has given me the legal basis to say no more cold water boats going in cold water is gay officially, according to the omb. And so no more of that. Thank you.
- [64:42]
D
One other thing to illustrate of how important this is stuff is, is that like this is like the technical stuff around this is actually what the first Trump impeachment was about. You know, the very famously like Trump has a call with Zelensky where he's like, you know, basically investigate Hunter Biden more or less, you're not getting the money. But the technical way that that was done was that Vaught, who was also head of OMB in the first term, but kind of getting sea legs, learning how it all worked, just decided to start attaching footnotes to the specific line item. The appropriation account that was associated with giving Ukraine money for weapons and training. And just like, oh, after, you know, we're not going to release this money until like an interagency committee is able to review this. And the date for that was like 16 days later. And then 16 days later he just releases a new footnote attached saying the same thing. And they just kept on doing that until like mid to late September. September, where by the time it reached that point, there just wasn't enough time to spend like the money in that account. And so $214 million expired. And of course Congress reauthorized, they reappropriated the funds. But that was the technical form of denying Ukraine money that the whole, what the whole impeachment process was about. Now, of course, one way and look at this and go, oh my God, this is so tiny. Not nothing compared to everything that has come come later. But it's also interesting, like when you, when you want to do something like that and screw with somebody and you want to try to hide it as much as possible, what you do is you do something very technical and boring with the O and B.
- [66:26]
A
Well, I think that is as good a place as any to leave it for today because that, that thought the, the, the Technical and boring is where they get you is I think, true and has been true for a very long time. Nathan, it is always a pleasure to speak to you. Where can people find a little more of you?
- [66:45]
D
Well, they can find it in my publication, Notes on the Crises. C R I S E S N O t e s.com and if you add a dash trash feature there, you can find a 50% off discount code on a subscription for trash feature list listeners.
- [67:02]
A
That's right. Or people who are trying random combinations of letters on their keyboards and happen to get really lucky in a very specific way.
- [67:09]
D
I think some people google it and find it too. Yeah, like, I don't like these scratch feature guys, but I like.
- [67:14]
A
I like free money, so I'll make it look good. Anyway, Nathan, thank you so much. Always a pleasure to speak with you and I'm just going to hand back to myself in the future past and Matty and Hussein, just to say goodbye from there. See you in a second. Ah, and what an interview it was. Matty. Hussein, I'm sorry that I muted you both and talked over you as well.
- [67:48]
B
Yeah, it's okay. I was, I was trying to get Jensen Huang's phone number.
- [67:51]
C
Yeah, I was actually looking at a replica jacket because I want to pull up one of these schemes myself. So. Yeah.
- [67:58]
A
Thank you everybody for listening to this episode of tf. We're going to be back as usual with the bonus on Thursday and we will see you in a few short days. Maddie, what do you got? What do you want these people to do?
- [68:10]
D
You got?
- [68:11]
B
I put my podcast earlier. Go listen, go buy my book, please. Simplicity, Book, xyz or in any fine place where books are sold. Yeah, and hopefully the next six months he can pre order the next thing, but keep buying the old book because it needs to be bought.
- [68:28]
A
Maddie needs to buy. All of Jensen Huang's wardrobe is on
- [68:32]
B
theme because it is about utopian separatism and. But in a way that is interesting. Not the way the, the, the. The Jensen Huang's jacket is doing it.
- [68:41]
A
All right, well, thanks everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye Bye,
- [68:51]
B
Sam.