Tank! feat. Victoria Scott

Summary

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TRASHFUTURE // "Tank! feat. Victoria Scott"

Date: July 28, 2026
Guests: Victoria Scott (@victoriascott), automotive journalist and podcaster (Tran Girlismo)

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EPISODE OVERVIEW

This episode dives into “carbrain” as a prism for the psychic and material decline of late capitalism, focusing on the American auto industry’s evolution into a marketplace for weapons-grade luxury vehicles for the rich, the rise of paranoia as a consumer trend, and how protectionism and narcissism are driving catastrophic policy and design choices. Alongside American developments, the hosts draw parallels with British car policy and public transit debates, and explore the implications for class, national identity, and social collapse—with ample jokes, bleak humor, and cultural references.

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KEY DISCUSSION POINTS AND THEMES

1. Welcome & Topic Setup

[00:52]

• Nova returns from time abroad, joking about feeling foreign in her own country, highlighting how the UK’s landscape has changed.
• Riley introduces Victoria Scott, explaining that the US auto market is a “synecdoche for the decline of the entire project.”
• Victoria: “If you want to understand why my society is shooting itself in the head, looking at how we sell cars is a really good way to understand it.” [01:18]

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2. American Auto Industry as Economic Barometer

[03:13]

• The car is the ultimate symbol of American prosperity and mass affluence; that project is now “dead,” from both supply and demand side.
• Victoria provides stats: It’s “never been more expensive to operate a car, own it, insure it, get it fixed. The only thing that's actually cheaper than it has been in the past is gas.”
  • Average new car price: ~$50k; used: >$30k
  • Loan lengths are often >84 months, many are subprime
  • “There is so much choice if you have 100 grand to blow on a car...But if you are like a normal person who's like, I have $26,000, you have like five options.” [05:13]
• Subprime auto loan delinquency at historic highs (7%) [06:21]
• US automakers, emulating luxury makers, focus on selling limited, ultra-expensive editions to wealthy collectors vs mass-market vehicles

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3. American Car “Death Drive” and Class Politics

[07:25]

• Hosts joke that median use case for an American new car is “domestic terror attack.”
  • “The car is now a weapon. Simple as.” [07:45, B]
• Vehicles becoming unaffordable except to the rich, with many Americans “in a kind of predatory semi-serfdom relationship in order to drive the car that I could perpetrate a domestic terror attack in if I wanted to.” [08:26, B]
• The myth of the “normal, working class” suburban car-owner is dissected (notably through mocking responses to bus fare caps in Britain).
  • “You stupid cunt. You live in a society.” [16:45, B]
• Solipsism and lack of social imagination critiqued—people oppose policies unless they see direct, immediate personal benefit.

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4. British Carbrain: Public Transit Policy vs Media

[14:14 & 15:11]

• Overview of new British PM Andy Burnham’s proposal to cap bus fares at £2 outside London—framed as shockingly controversial.
• Media (Sky, BBC) run vox pops with people like “Mark Tate,” who claim, “This is great if you use the bus, but no good for those who drive. Yet again, the working class person is left out.”
• Extended riff on the British public and media’s inability to conceptualize public benefit; applying US car logic to UK politics.
• Victoria contrasts with US context: “We’ve got a lot of this coming. We've got kind of like service cliffs. And in these cases you enter this sort of trap where you cut service…you lose those people basically instantly and they go buy cars and they don't come back.” [21:41, C]

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5. Car Brain International: From New York Bins to the Bus Wars

[24:20]

• US: Example of bin placement in NYC (taking away parking to put dumpsters) is met with “working-class driver” outrage: “If you take away a free parking spot…you have decided to fuck [drivers] over personally.” [25:20, C]
• Politics isn’t a taxi, it’s a bus—“you have to be able to imagine yourself using it.” [26:12, B]

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6. Tesla, Cybertruck, the Paranoia Market

[27:00]

• Cybertruck sales far below projections (“delivered 20,000…4,000 of the 20,000 went to SpaceX” [27:29–27:33])
• The vehicle’s design reflects Musk’s personal paranoia and America’s death-drive. Original marketing: “It’s got impact proof bulletproof glass, it's resistant to 9 millimeter fire…showed it in…apocalyptic conditions.” [31:13, C]
  • “He was actually doing what…the culture and economy wants him to do, which is what if a car was also a gun, but he’s…doing it too stupid to make it popular.” [30:32, A]
• Tesla succeeds by being earliest and most ruthless, not by making good products.

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7. Protectionism, Siloing, and the Anti-China Hysteria

[35:05]

• Bipartisan US legislation to ban any car company with >15% Chinese ownership. Termed by Victoria “the Blowjob brothers” bill, named for its sponsors (“car dealership owner from Ohio, which makes him literally to the right of Hitler” and a “CIA operative.”) [35:41]
  • Cites how this will functionally ban Mercedes-Benz for having Chinese minority stakeholders.
• Trump threatening to end the USMCA (NAFTA 2.0), threatening the integrated North American market out of protectionist rage. [37:54]

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8. Collapse of the Fordist Model and Creation of “Surplus Americans”

[40:34]

• Past: US automakers tried to pay workers enough to afford their cars (the “Fordist model”).
• Present: Now, “the goal is not to really make a better car or like a more efficient car. It is simply to become the only people selling cars.” [42:01, C]
• Inelastic demand: Americans outside a handful of cities are forced to own cars, whatever the price.

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9. Class Paranoia, Armoring, and the Car as Fortress

[49:11]

• New York Times story on the explosion of private armored car purchases in the US.
• “Burton is the founder and chief executive of Armor Max…he no longer needs to travel quite so far…to help people safeguard their Yukon Denalis and Cadillac Escalades from potential assault rifle rounds and hand grenade blasts…” [55:27, A]
• The American elite, as Victoria puts it, "think that nothing bad should ever be able to happen to them because that's for poor people." [56:07, C]
• Paranoia among the rich is described as delusional but also, after high-profile crimes (like the United Healthcare CEO’s murder), somewhat self-reinforcing.

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10. American Car Industry’s Future: Cuba-Ified Roads and More Dystopia

[63:34]

• Victoria’s prediction: “90% of American roads will look like Cuba’s...we’ll all be passing around a 35 year-old Honda Fit held together with chicken wire, and...the other 10% [will be] up-armored.” [64:24, C]
• Increasingly, only the rich will have access to new cars, and these will be absurdly over-armed/personalized.
• Tariffs and protectionism, supported both by the right and nominally left (unions, Democrats), ensure this scenario.

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11. Epic Example: The Rezvani Tank & The Ultra-Carbrain Consumer

[60:14]

• Profile: Karen Kobayashi, LA producer, owns a $350k bulletproof “Rezvani Tank” (really just an armored Jeep Wrangler).
• She says, “if I make a wrong turn and I'm caught in some sort of protest, I want to feel safe.” [63:20, A]
• Victoria: “She paid $350,000 for a Jeep Wrangler, which means she's driving to In N Out Burger in her bulletproof tank and the plastics are still fucking rattling because it's a, it's a goddamn Chrysler inside.” [61:19, C]
• All her neighbors have bulletproof cars too.

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NOTABLE/MEMORABLE QUOTES

• Victoria Scott: “If you want to understand why my society is shooting itself in the head, looking at how we sell cars is a really good way to understand it.” [01:18]
• Victoria Scott (on car market stratification): “If you are like a normal person...you have like five options…There are seven cars for sale in America right now that are under 25k as a starting price.” [05:13]
• B: “The sort of median American new car’s use case does seem to be, like, domestic terror attack.” [07:25]
• B: “You stupid cunt. You live in a society.” (on complaints that bus fare cuts don’t help drivers) [16:45]
• Victoria: “In the US...you must own a car. There is literally no way to participate in the economy. You can’t get health care, you can’t get groceries. Cars are…like housing, basically inelastic demand.” [42:01]
• B: “Politics isn’t a taxi. Politics is a bus. Right. In the sense that you have to be able to imagine yourself using it.” [26:12]
• Victoria: “Every American car tracks you everywhere you go...if you happen to have a car that's old enough where you don't have like full time cell connectivity, we have a nationwide web of flock cameras to make sure you can never go anywhere without the state knowing.” [45:39]
• A: “What if a car was also a gun?” [30:32]
• C (Victoria): “Cuban roads are full of like very, very old cars, mostly American… The U.S. is going to do the exact same thing to itself.” [64:24]
• Victoria: “Rezvani does not make their own cars…This woman paid $350,000 for a fucking Jeep Wrangler, which means she's driving to In N Out Burger in her bulletproof tank and the plastics are still fucking rattling because it's...a goddamn Chrysler inside.” [61:19]
• Kobayashi (quoted): “If I make a wrong turn and I'm caught in some sort of protest, I want to feel safe.” [63:20]

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MEMORABLE MOMENTS

• Extended riffs mocking the car-centric logic underpinning both US and UK “working class” identity, and how policies are sabotaged by media vox pops (e.g., Mark Tate).
• Victoria and Nova trade stories about British and American transit, with Victoria astounded at the reliability of British trains.
• Satirical speculation about armored vehicles, “the American death drive,” and the rise of the bulletproof SUV as a class signifier.
• Absurdist humor about European kidnappers, “being hostel’d,” Mormons in Utah, and what car you need to avoid being sutured to someone’s ass.
• Segment on how AI, mass surveillance, and consumer paranoia all feed the contemporary auto market.

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TIMESTAMPED HIGHLIGHTS

• 01:18 – Victoria: On the American car market's dangerous trajectory.
• 05:13 – Victoria: Only seven new cars under $25k, vast array if you’re rich.
• 06:21 – Riley: Subprime auto loan delinquencies at 7%.
• 07:25 – B: The car’s “median use case” is “domestic terror attack.”
• 14:14 – 17:30 – UK bus fare cap policy; “carbrain” media responses.
• 21:41 – Victoria: “Service cliffs” and losing transit users in America.
• 27:00–31:13 – Tesla/Cybertruck/American “wealth weapon” trend.
• 35:41 – Victoria: Anti-Chinese car bill sponsors—car dealer and CIA vet.
• 42:01 – Victoria: “You must own a car”; inelastic demand in America.
• 49:11–50:50 – Armor Max, boom in civilian armored cars in US.
• 56:58 – B: “The American rich never think that America will happen to them until America happens to them and then they freak out.”
• 60:14 – Rezvani Tank owner (“I want to feel safe if caught in a protest”).
• 63:34 – Victoria: America’s Cuba-fication; future of old, patched-together cars and a 10% armored class.

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RECOMMENDED FURTHER LISTENING

• Tran Girlismo podcast (with Victoria Scott) for ongoing coverage of the intersection of automotive policy, collapse, and gender/class society.

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Summary prepared for listeners: This episode, brimming with acerbic wit and devastating social analysis, is a must-hear for anyone trying to understand the self-cannibalizing logic of the US and UK auto-industrial complex at the twilight of capitalist affluence—where, increasingly, only the paranoid and wealthy can buy new cars, and everyone else is left with scraps, suspicion, and surging bus fares.

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Transcript

[A]

Hi everybody. Welcome to this week's free tf. Nova is back.

[B]

I'm back.

[A]

Welcome back.

[B]

I don't recognize this country anymore. I came back from, from 10 days away and I, I left, you know, when everything made sense. And now, you know, I got into the airport and people were just like drinking bitter everywhere. Everyone had like a sort of a whippet on a string. It's like, you know, it's untenable what's happening. I don't, I'm a stranger in my own country now.

[A]

Can I ask, would you say you didn't leave the North. The north left?

[B]

I would say so, yeah.

[A]

You would say that, yeah.

[B]

I would say that, yeah. Very much so.

[A]

So welcome, welcome, Nova, of course, to Greatest Manchester, which is now what we're calling the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It's Riley, it's Nova, it's Hussein. And we are joined by repeat guest, perennial fan favorite it is Tran Girlismo's very own Victoria Scott, here to talk to us about the North American auto industry as a kind of general synecdoche for the decline of the entire project. Vittoria, welcome to the show.

[C]

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. If you want to understand why my society is shooting itself in the head, looking at how we sell cars is a really good way to understand it.

[A]

When you messaged me, you didn't say head.

[C]

No, I said, well, no, because it's specifically the most recent thing is, you know, the whole we've got bipartisan support to ban every Chinese Chinese car from our shore forever. And that specifically I have called the shoot your own dick off bill.

[A]

Honestly. Donald Trump did say transgender for everybody.

[C]

That's true. He did.

[A]

Rampaging through the city here in Seattle.

[C]

We're working on that as a promise now.

[A]

Weirdly, it's been like it's been a hugely car couple of weeks inasmuch as Tesla's earnings are out. We have had this like huge trend now be covered in terms of even upper middle class people trying to like put cope cages on their cars. And also as you say, the shoot your own dick off bill, the not, it's kind of a two part thing. A yes, we are trying to ban every Chinese electric vehicle. The place that's making the next type of car. That there will be sort of the, you could say the shoot your own dick off bill or the hey everybody go attack the sea bill. And of course Trump responding to all of that by massively increasing the tariffs on auto makers in Canada and Mexico, thereby utterly Siloing the North American auto industry, which it hasn't been since, I don't know, 1987.

[B]

Yeah, the shoot your own balls off act.

[A]

Yeah, well look what. One's in the House, one's in the Senate. They have to be called something different.

[C]

They have to write.

[B]

At some point Bill Clinton decided that like, you know, all of the stuff that gets made in Detroit, half of it should get made in Windsor and then they should truck it back and forth for like, you know, American Canadian friendship. And now, you know, that, that, that was, those were the balls. Right. And now the balls are being sort of like obliterated.

[A]

Yes. I mean, look, before we get into it, like just as a piece of table setting, there has been no greater symbol of prosperity and industrial dominance of the sort of greater American project than the car. It is the ultimate symbol of the entire project. And through a series of entirely self inflicted injuries it looks. And again, I turned to Victoria in this one. The entire premise of mass affluence as demonstrated by universal, possibly multiple car ownership has never been more dead. Not just from the demand side, but for the first time from the supply side.

[C]

Yeah, well, it's the American auto industry in a very, very brief nutshell. Where I'll try not to like spoil the stuff we talk about later is just there was an article I did for the Tran girlismo Patreon that we talked about where I went through all of the Fred data, which is the Federal Reserve of St. Lou Bank's sort of like internal inflation reporting on the American market. And it has basically never been more expensive to operate a car, own it, insure it, get it fixed. The only thing that's actually cheaper than it has been in the past is gas. Right now, everything else, cars are at a historic high. I mean the average car in the US sells for right around 50 grand. And it stayed there since, since COVID roughly, you know, with maybe a few thousand up or down. And average used cars are now at $30,000 or above. Like loan lengths are incredibly long. The interest rates on those loans are incredibly long. There's an increasing proportion of them are subprime. So like nobody can really afford to buy them. And part of this is because since I would say since COVID a lot of manufacturers have kind of realized if you, if you follow like the high end car market, right, your Aston Martins, your Lamborghinis, your Ferraris, whatever, you'll notice that a lot of those automakers have kind of, they don't really care as much about making their Sort of entry level supercars anymore. Like getting you in the door and into your first super supercars to become like a loyal buyer of that brand. What they care about is making, you know, 10, 15, 100, whatever, special incredibly rare cars that they sell for and basically an infinite amount of money that are sold out before they're even announced to the public that they go to the same like, you know, 50, 100 rich collectors. They get shoved in a warehouse somewhere. And the logic behind that is that they realize they can make more money, you know, developing one special edition of a car. They only have to build 100 of that they can sell for, you know, 10 million bucks a piece versus having to figure out like volume manufacturing and making a smaller margin on their like lower end cars. That has come for the lower end car market is kind of like my sort of understanding of how things are going. And so like there's. There is so much choice. If you have 100 grand to blow on a car today, it's like the best time to buy a car there's ever been. But if you are like a normal person who's like, I have $26,000 and I would like to buy a car, you have like five options, like legitimately. There are, there are. I think I wrote this down somewhere and you know, this is going to be an estimate, but I think there seven cars for sale in America right now that are under 25k as a starting price.

[A]

Well, I mean, that would be really bad if the 60 day delinquency rate for subprime auto loans wasn't hovering near historic highs, approximately 7%. Yes, hold. Oh, oh, I have some bad news. It is. Okay, it is, it is that a subprime auto loan delinquency rates are approximately 7%.

[B]

Sort of difficult for me because I've been busy focusing on the sort of bad news line on whether or not the Strait of Hormuz is open or not. But you've got like a phone to each year and each one has a different bad news line.

[C]

Yeah, well, when we started our Tran Girlismo podcast, I was kind of like, I guess I'll talk about cars or whatever. And it very rapidly became a. Oh, no, this is about the collapse of empire. Because it's just there is no angle. You can look at the modern American auto market and not say like, we've lost the plot. We only build cars for rich Americans. We are Galapagosing ourselves into, you know, all we all an American automaker knows how to do is like build Dodge Ram eat hot chip and lie basically. And nobody else in the world is going to be buying, you know, a 70 foot long pickup truck that gets eight miles a gallon.

[B]

I don't, I don't pay a lot of attention to this, but I have noticed that the sort of median American new cars use case does seem to be like domestic terror attack.

[A]

It's domestic terror attack. Or look like you're masculine enough to perform a domestic terror attack.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean despite all the best efforts of like Olivia Rodrigo and driver's licenses didn't work out. It's like, nope, the car is now the car is a weapon. Sorry. It's not going to be, we're not, we're not doing the sort of fucking slice of life shit. The car is a weapon. Simple as. She hasn't mentioned cars ever again.

[C]

And like if you, if you're just curious for an idea of how bad it is, if you are not intimately familiar with like the American car market. This was Edmunds data back in like, oh, I want to say this was April. The 20% of new car buyers in the US have a monthly payment of a grand or more like fully, fully. Almost a quarter of new car loans are 84 months or longer. Like people are paying these off longer than the life of the car.

[B]

Yeah, it's like what I, what I'm in is in a kind of like predatory semi serfdom relationship in order to drive the car that I could perpetrate a domestic terror attack in if I wanted to.

[A]

What's cool is as well because the, the, the average new car loan is a grand, average income for a full time worker before taxes. Five grand. What's rent? Is it like 200 dol. I assume it's $200.

[B]

Hold on, I'm trying to fumble like three phones here at this point. Like you got to stop handing me phones.

[A]

Sorry. There's a new phone. A new phone has entered the chat. Anyway, look, we are going to be talking about especially because there has been a huge new development in the auto industry in the States which is essentially Donald Trump deciding to continue siloing it between Canada, the states and Mexico to this bipartisan bill as Victoria mentioned, to ban essentially the most innovative new technologies in making cars because they're Chinese and therefore sneaky. Yeah.

[B]

Donald degrowth Trump. I mean honestly, I'm glad he's doing it. I guess

[A]

they call him Mr. 15 Minute City. We're going to be getting to that. But I'm aware, you're aware, we're all aware, we Have a new prime minister in Britain. And I wanted to address this very briefly. There is a car angle, of course, but the new UK government is slowly taking shape, and I do not have a huge amount to say about it quite yet because it appears to be. Can I just shock you? In a roughly similar shape to the last one in terms of ministerial appointments, what the priorities are promising to cut benefits, which I'm so glad someone has tried.

[B]

You have to meet this with kind of total apathy, I would say. Do not become the kind of rube who looks at this and goes, ooh. But they do things a little differently here. It's the same people.

[A]

It is absolutely, depressingly identical. The deference to Trump is the same. The willingness to attack transgender people, people claiming benefits.

[B]

I'm one of those.

[A]

The usual punching bags of the most venal expression of the British state. Andy Burnham has shown exactly zero willingness to change tack on any of those. And so I'm willing to restate what we said weeks ago. Andy Burnham is not the guy.

[B]

No, no, of course not. Only is he not the guy, but he is, like, so unsurprisingly, not the guy that if you feel rug pulled by him, whether that's now or next week or next year, you have only yourself to blame, you know, 100%. You know, maybe he will surprise us, but I fucking doubt it.

[A]

Yeah. Like, he appoints Miliband as his Foreign Secretary, who's very critical of Israel, but then, like, he takes a call from Donald Trump and then says, we're going to let the US Air Force fly missions over Israel from our base.

[B]

I mean, Miliband is Foreign Secretary is interesting, but it's a climb down from Miliband as Chancellor because, you know, he got sort of bullied out of that one. And even then, it's not like. I don't say this was any particular animus towards him. I think putting your faith in Ed Miliband as your hope for, like, change within the system is optimistic, let's say.

[A]

Yes, it's a lottery ticket. And I think it is funny that they put Mr. Army in charge of the treasury, because before he was Mr. Army, he was Mr. Treasury. And again, same thing. Oh. Yvette Cooper takes West Reading's old place as Health Secretary. Wes reading has taken Mr. Armey's place as Defense Secretary because, like, the great thing about the UK is everybody who's a real person, which I guess is 24 people maybe, in the country, just gets to have a go.

[B]

Yeah. All of the same, like, you Know, a couple of dozen people who were at university together get to try their hand at this. The defense angle is interesting in the sense that moving the former Defence Secretary to the Exchequer is maybe suggestive that the army wants to start touching the money, whether I think they're going to run into the same problem that Starmer did, which is that there is simply not that much money left to touch.

[A]

Yeah, there is. If you are unwilling to be confrontational with someone other than the poor immigrants or like transgender people, there's not a lot of money there. You have to be confrontational with someone else.

[B]

Exactly. And I mean, I've talked up the fact before that I'm slightly more hawkish than a lot of people on the left about DEF funding. Right. But military Keynesianism does not work. Right. It's like one of the few forms of public investment that doesn't have a sort of broader sort of public good attached to it very much. Right. So if the idea is, well, we're going to try the forbidden idea of the government spends money, but only on defense, right, Then it's going to run into the exact same ditch all over again, but at least this time it's going to have a slightly different regional inflection on it. So that's going to be fun.

[A]

Finally, we're going to do things a little differently, which means we're going to take the same meal, but you're going to get less of it for proportionally not less money, and it's going to be on a smaller plate and we suggest you share it. Yeah.

[B]

And of course, meanwhile, the actual conditions for like any normal person are getting like that much more desperate. But also everyone has become so deranged about politics that even if you were Andy Burnham and you wanted to do any of the sort of really, like, side stuff, like nothing too important, like rearranging a deck chair here or there, quick wins. Right? Say if you wanted to do something like, I want to cap bus fares, right. It's not that expensive to do that. It's a good idea and it's one of those things that it's not going to move the needle that much, but it will actually improve some people's lives, then a lot of people who don't take the bus will decide that actually you are doing gay antifa shit to them.

[A]

Wouldn't you know it? Nova and bringing it back to car world. I have some quotes. So like, like, like Nova mentioned. I'll just bring it back a little table setting, go back into it, which is Burnham has Made some commitments. Some of it appears to be the usual Starmerist fiddling around the edges stuff like cutting VAT on energy bills. Some of it appears to be like impactful, like ending rough sleeping if he can do it. Which by the way, he didn't in Manchester.

[B]

No, no, very much Manchester. I would say the British city that is like in my experience, most immediately affronting with the amount of street homelessness.

[A]

Yeah. So maybe he's got a new. Maybe now he has like the money hose, he can do a new plan. But based on everything else he said, I doubt it. And. Or some of it is the bus fare cap which has been vox popped relentlessly by what I can only imagine is Paul Daker in a series of wigs. Because we have Keir Starmer, but with different hair and a different accent and like doing things a bit differently.

[B]

And one of his things, part of his brand is being Mr. Bus. Right. He's the buses guy, so he's going to fix the buses.

[A]

So he said national cap for bus fares at £2. And again, this is a genuine horrifying scandal in the uk, which is that privatization of buses outside of London has meant that sometimes a single way bus fare, if you are in Birmingham or in. Not Manchester, because it's been taken into public control, quote, unquote, outside of London. Yeah. Nottingham can cost like 4 pounds, 5 pounds, like it is genuinely scandalous. Yeah.

[B]

And of course the provision that you get for that is also very bad.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Because these are like profit seeking entities running them. So they're going to just extract that profit.

[A]

So one of the easiest things and cheapest things you could do in Britain is say we shouldn't do that anymore, which he is committing to do. And again, I am never going to defend Andy Burnham. But between Andy Burnham and the British media, I hate the British media more. And so I will choose my side thusly, which is the British media, especially sky and the BBC, appear to be on a crusade. And this is we're going to bring Victoria back in because it is about car brained people to rubbish Andy Burnham's plan to do this by suggesting, and I am now quoting a BBC your voice vox pop. Bus fare cut is no good for those who drive, says Durham ma'. Am. Mark Tate, who lives near Durham, tells the BBC the bus fare caps make little difference to him. Quote, this is great if you use the bus, but no good for those who drive. Yet again, the working class person is left out.

[B]

You stupid cut. You live in a society. This is how everything works is that no one is using all the stuff all the time. You use enough of the stuff that everyone pays for together that you live in a society. I don't know what to tell you. It's just this total fucking ablation of the top layer of your brain. Like you just run it through a fucking bandsaw to go, well, yeah, this is, you know, potentially useful to someone who isn't me because I don't have object permanence. And as you know, that sort of person. I'm not presently on a bus, so that appears to do fuck all for me.

[A]

Me, you can get the bus later.

[B]

There could be a version of you that gets the bus. There could be someone that you want to be able to get the bus. Like for instance, to get to work, to pay some taxes, to fund the public services that you do use. Unless you imagine that you live in a perfectly frictionless, colorless, airless vacuum in which occasionally a fucking bus goes past and you think, thank God I don't have to pay for that because I'm not using it now.

[A]

Nova, can I offer you a counterpoint? Have you considered that the. Much like the only working class decades to be born in are 1960, 1970 and everything before them.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I didn't even address the working class bit of that. I'm just, I'm just struck with a kind of solipsism last seen in like certain 18th century French kings to be

[A]

like, oh, that palace.

[B]

That's fine because I'm not presently occupying.

[A]

So the thing about Mark Tate is that every time he goes to Durham to like, I don't know, get a coffee, let's say. Because baristas seem to occupy a lot of these people's attention. The barista lives in the coffee shop.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And goes to sleep in the bathroom.

[B]

Every, every time I like open my eyes, the world is instantiated in front of me exactly as it always has been. Right. And so no one needs to get the bus anywh. It's just a funny little thing that happens in my peripheral vision.

[A]

Well, like, like, like the only working class decades to be born in is like 1970 and before we were learning also is that the only. And we also know the only working class place to live is a car dependent suburb not near London.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

The only working class amount of money to make is approximately 60 to 80,000 pounds a year.

[B]

No, the only working class amount of money to make is the exact personal allowance balance. And then you just do everything else in cash. Right, but like.

[A]

Yes, exactly. And so of course the real thought here is that if you, if what Mark's hate means, right, is working class means I am a separate individual node, totally self reliant and anyone supported by the state is being propped up like an aristocrat. Yeah. As well as actual aristocrats, who, by the way, I'm desperate to have lorded over me.

[B]

I don't need to get a bus anywhere because I am an island and everything human is alien to me. What a lonely fucking existence that must be to be like. Actually, I kind of prefer it here, completely untouched by any human interaction whatsoever.

[A]

Now, Victoria.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

You're a student of carbrain.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

How carbrained is this? But how Britishly carbrained?

[C]

It's interesting because like, you know, my experience with the UK was like, wow, this is a utopian society in which public transit reaches even the most. Like Outer Limits.

[B]

You have been spoiled by me taking you on the train to Edinburgh once and us almost missing it and you going, when's the next one? I assume not for two or three days. And when I told you 20 minutes, you almost had like a seizure.

[C]

Yes, that's correct.

[A]

That's for American listeners. That's actually what it's like.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Everything else is bad.

[C]

I mean, we also like took a train to like Loch Lomond and that was like, that came like every hour or something. And that's like not, that was, that's insane. That's insane. We don't have that here. So, like this, I think the thing about, about this is obviously incredibly carbon in the us. Like, there is actually a case to be made that most middle class people do drive to work because only I think 3.9% of Americans take transit to work every day. 80% of them commute via car. Like it's, it's in the amount of carbon here is like terminal, you have an earlier case of it. So what's, what's good to do is when you have situations that are driving people away from the bus, like having these insanely expensive fares that kind of reduce the economic case for taking it, you cut it. And the thing is, is like you there in the U.S. we've, we've got a lot of this coming. We've got kind of like service cliffs. And in these cases you enter this sort of trap where you cut service or you make the bus more expensive or you make it worse in some kind of notable way and you lose those people basically instantly and they go buy cars and they don't come back and check Cross shop the bus a month later. Right. Like those are lost customers. So to get them to come back, like to get them to come back to transit, it takes a while of doing things like this, which is smart policy. And so like, even if there is not a single person in the entirety of the UK who actually currently takes the bus, this is still a good idea because you are eventually going to recapture people who are going to shift their like personal travel habits and it will have. You just have to be able to think more than like 20 minutes ahead. We don't do that here particularly.

[B]

We do.

[C]

Yeah, we don't do that here either.

[A]

Like, what do you think we are? China?

[C]

Yeah. Well, and that's the thing is like this is, this is actually good policy and it would like we did the same thing here in Seattle where we cut the price to like 3 bucks for a KCM bus, buses, king County Metro and cap it there for the, for the meantime there. It's not the same kind of privatization stuff, but we are coming up on like a service cliff. And it is one of those things that's like, we have to figure out some way around this because if we end up cutting the amount of stuff required to keep the buses solvent into the coming years, no one will use it anymore. We'll take the, what the gold standard of a bus system on the west coast and destroy it instantly. And it be. It's just because like you lose these riders and they do not come back for a long time time. So, you know. But I assume that Mark Tate has not thought about this.

[A]

Weirdly, the BBC interviewed people who fit into this category. They interviewed another couple, I think, in the west country who said something in the lines of we used to use the bus, then it got so expensive so we needed to reorient our lives around a car. And now they're capping bus fares and we just feel forgotten. And the BBC is, or I think it's sky is pitching that as Andy Burnham is picking favorites. He's not governing for everyone when everyone is always assumed to be a relatively hot earning, car owning, white heterosexual couple with 2.2 children. And anyone who does that and no longer uses public transit is assumed to be normal.

[C]

You can sell a car, right? Like you're allowed there.

[A]

Sorry, to whom? The King? So you can, like, if you are interested in media studies and you want to look at media bias, the last couple of weeks in the UK has been utterly instructive in terms of sheer car enthusiasm, I would say in response to the idea that Buses should no longer be extortionate. And again, in the alien versus Predator of the Labour Prime Minister, Andy Burnham versus the British media. I knew who I hate more.

[B]

Yeah, we are going out there to defend Andy Burnham. Like those, like South Korean Marines entering the DMZ with a claymore mine straps to our forehead. Right. We're brandishing pickaxe hat handles. Right.

[C]

Well, and our, our version of this in the US Just for an idea of how terminal our car brain is, is, you know, New York City, right?

[A]

Oh, is it the, the Windy City?

[B]

Oh, sorry, you mean like, like other Chicago? Yeah.

[A]

Okay, so do you mean, sorry, Victoria, do you mean Tinseltown? New Alpha?

[C]

Well, the thing is, is like, I would, I would call it one of the biggest cities and cultural capitals of the world, except for their entire history, they've been putting all of their garbage bags raw on the sidewalk.

[B]

Yeah. Trash revolution here.

[C]

Yeah. Which of course, Eric Adams never got anywhere with it. So Mamdani came into office and was like, we're actually going to do it. Yeah.

[B]

He made the bins work.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because New York doesn't have alleyways. They have to put the dumpsters somewhere. So they're replacing street parking with dumpsters so that you can put your garbage bags in something instead of leaving them, like leaching, you know, garbage juice all over the sidewalk in the middle of summer where it's like 90 degrees. Seems smart.

[A]

Do you think you're too good for garbage juice in the middle of summer?

[C]

Yes.

[A]

Sounds pretty middle class to me.

[C]

Yeah. The New York Post found like six people to interview who are like, can't we just put our trash things somewhere else? I'm using the phrase trash things here because that is a direct quote from the New York Post interviews about this. Like, the vox pop hits here are like, if you take away a free parking spot, one of them in like the densest city on earth, in which, like one of the densest cities in America, at least, where it's the only place where most people use transit in all of the United States. They will still be like, we found somebody who is. Identifies as working class and drives everywhere and you have decided to fuck them over personally because you didn't give them a free parking spot directly in front of the place they work. As a, as a car enthusiast, it brings me no pleasure to say this. Yeah.

[B]

I mean, as a trans woman, it brings me no pleasure to sort of strap the Andy Burnham claymore mind to my forehead. But like, ultimately sometimes you have to like sublimate your Own sort of like politics. Politics isn't a taxi. Politics is a bus. Right. In the sense that you have to be able to imagine yourself using it.

[A]

Look, here's the thing. You have to strap a claymore mind to your head for someone. Is it going to be the person who appointed Bridget Phillips an Education Secretary, or is it going to be gestures at everything since 2015?

[B]

Well, of course there's always the Ed Davey Martyrs Brigades.

[A]

L. Davy, Navy. Look, I want to talk about one more news item before we get to our, like, core topic, which is, of course, Tesla has announced their most recent earnings.

[B]

Can I give you some information handling all of this well and not having kind of testy interviews with anyone about.

[A]

Well, so the cybertruck has been projected to sell a quarter million units a year. In retrospect, in its first full year it delivered 39,000 and then last year it delivered 20,000.

[B]

Didn't that also involve a lot of, like, Tesla selling to itself or subsidiaries or SpaceX?

[A]

Yeah, thank you so much for asking.

[B]

November

[A]

4,000 of the 20,000 went to SpaceX.

[C]

Thank you.

[A]

Thank you so much for asking. That's the answer.

[B]

Every SpaceX employee has to kind of like ghost ride two cyber trucks around. This is a condition of employment.

[A]

Look, we need to do demolition derbies with cybertrucks every week so that we can go through them like, like the only time military Keynesianism worked is when Britain was like, we're going to unite all of British domestic industry to produce Spitfires that are going to get shot down infinitely. So we have infinite of them to produce and we're just using the existing steel works, leather works. Yeah, like fucking engine makers, that we have to just do all of that for full employment. As long as they're going to get shot down. Infinite Elon's trying to do the same

[B]

with Tesla cybercript Oppenheimer thing, where it's like nuclear weapons did end up destroying the world because the sort of like capitalism's mode of production of the USS we built this yesterday. It can now no longer be used for, like, war, like total war. It has to be used to make the bad truck.

[A]

Specifically, it has to be used to win, like, Internet arguments.

[B]

God, you're not wrong, and I hate that you're not wrong.

[A]

The uss, we built this yesterday. Is Elon Musk's cybertruck winning an Internet argument.

[B]

I've already depicted myself as the uss, we built this yesterday.

[A]

Now, Musk, of course, talks about this for years and this is something I think we're going to explore over the next sort of 40, 45 minutes or so, which is he unveiled. And when it was unveiled in 2019, I want people to remember what he said, which is, you want a truck that's really tough, not fake tough.

[B]

That was a weirdly good Elon. Yeah. Like, it captured something of the cadence of the man.

[A]

Yeah, but. But you want. You don't want. You don't want a truck that maybe people might think you're gay if you're driving it, like an F150. You want a truck where everyone's gonna

[B]

know how much truck that. Everybody is gonna know that I'm gay driving it. That's why I drive a Dodge.

[A]

You don't want a Ford. Or as I call it, feeling on rigid dicks.

[C]

Yeah, the problem.

[B]

The problem with calling it the Cybertruck is it's really quite difficult to get an acronym out of the.

[A]

That. Oh, you're driving a gmc. Give me cock. Come on. Oh, a Chrysler. Just. Just kidding. I'm not quick enough to do all of those letters, but it appears to be with people being poorer and car buyers being richer and crazier. Seems to be the only place the US Is going, which is, hey, do you want to buy a wealth weapon?

[B]

Do you want to do the domestic terrorism attack? Do you want to feel like Halo Master Chief as you blow yourself up inside of this in the carport of the Trump International Casino?

[A]

Do you want to. Do you want to kill yourself in, like, a cortege or whatever it's called?

[B]

This is the thing, right? The American car industry has always been a large part of where America's kept its death drive, but now the death drive is soy and whiz.

[A]

So, I mean, this is kind of what I want to. Where I want to go from here. Right? Which is. Is Elon, like, he always does. You can even, like, connect this to our episode with Nathan Tankus where, like, Nathan and I talked about how Elon did the Project 2025 thing to the US government fiscal apparatus, but was, like, too obvious and stupid and reckless with it. And so Russell Vaught had to undo a bunch of it, then do it smarter. It's the same thing with the cybertruck, where he was actually doing what the broadcast our culture and economy wants him to do, which is what if a car was also a gun, but he's, again, doing it really too stupid to make it popular. I mean, can you just expand on that, Victoria?

[C]

Yeah, I think the thing is, like, the. The cybertruck is a terrible vehicle. And it also became I think in a way that none of the other like Tesla cars sort of are like a symbol of Musk's personal overreach and like conservatism because like people. So in Seattle, which is like one of the biggest markets for Teslas, people have not stopp Buying Model 3s and Y IS they are still the best selling EVs in America by a massive margin. And so it hasn't really stopped people from buying his EVs because they're relatively cheap. They are everywhere. I still think that Tesla is still kind of synonymous with electric cars here, which is entirely for the worse. And they're still bad, don't get me wrong. But like the cybertruck is so obviously a product of Musk specifically that I think it got associated with being that kind of right wing chud before it actually dropped. And so I think that like that impacted to demand and also just like it's not useful or good. Like the people who are buying it's expensive. The people who are buying electric pickup trucks largely went for like the Lightning, which was a much more useful truck, which of course Ford has since discontinued because they couldn't figure out a way to make money on it. Right. And like this is sort of the only reason that Tesla is able I think to like limp along making these is because their cars are so. They make money on their cars because they are shit. They have never needed to figure out the kind of like economies of scale stuff, stuff that Ford and GM and Stellantis have struggled with with EVs because they started it early, they had a lot of the, the battery infrastructure and then they just don't care. Like they, they have horrible build quality. Like the, the cybertruck was I think for a moment in last year the most recalled vehicle of like the past decade because they had to keep re like they're people burned to death alive inside them because the door mechanisms would fail and stuff. And that's just like they continue to get away with this because they are taking Tesla and you know, when, when the cybertruck first came out I was like, I think this is going to be the emblematic vehicle of our moment. Not in that it will be the most like the best selling or the most popular or even useful. But I think that this is like this vehicle will sell whatever it sells solely because crony capitalism exists. And like that's true. Like one in five of them going to SpaceX is like, you know, it's, it's the same thing as like the AI bubble, right? It's like, well, let's just build a big ouroboros of demand with our own fucking financial schemes. And the cybertruck is really perfect for that. And I think it also like the cybertruck was prescient in that Elon is paranoid and probably for the correct reasons in that a lot of people absolutely fucking hate him. And so he worries constantly about being killed. If any interview he's got, he talks about how he's got bodyguards all the time and he's like constantly worried about being assassinated. And the thing is that that paranoia leached into the design of this. And so if you remember the ad campaigns for it, it was, was like, it's got impact proof bulletproof glass, it's resistant to 9 millimeter fire. A lot of the original ad campaign images showed it in like extremely unsettlingly apocalyptic conditions. Pickup truck advertising in the US is always like, yeah, I gotta haul a bunch of boulders up the, up the Mojave. But like the cybertruck was like very strange that it showed kind of like the wreckage of society in a few of its press pack images. And it's very revealing to me because it was like, you know, it predicted sort of this societal anxiety about the incoming collapse in a way that was sort of like an undercurrent when it was announced in 2019 and is now very overt, I would say, as it bombs. Because again, like, it's terrible.

[B]

Once it came out, Elon stopped using his, his son as a kind of like small arms protective insert, so.

[C]

Well, yeah, because a cybertruck will protect him.

[B]

Exactly.

[C]

It won't. It really won't. It Gen. Like I cannot emphasize to you enough how much like if you use any gun larger than like, you know, a to pistol, a.22 that you used to shoot squirrels with as a 10 year old in America, it will just rip right through that shit.

[A]

So let's talk a little bit about like electric vehicles, what they mean and what we were alluding to at the beginning, which is the American auto industry as a broad temperature check of the American sort of wider American, including like Europe, Canada, Mexico, etc. Economy. Because right now the best way it seems that the US car industry is able to defend itself from Chinese electric vehicles is by banning the import of any car that's made by a company that has more than 15% Chinese ownership. This is a. Can I just shock you? Bipartisan bill.

[C]

Yeah. I like to call them the Blowjob brothers, even though one of them is a woman. Bernie Moreno, car dealership owner from Ohio, which makes him literally to the right of Hitler and Alyssa Slayer Slotkin, three terms, three tours of Iraq as a CIA operative. That's, that's the pair.

[B]

Oh, she was the one who like, did the only cool thing I've ever seen a CIA officer do, which is one of the, like Republican opposition researchers was following her to her car and she just turned around and went, hey, how are your names? Both of his dogs never spoken to the guy before in her life.

[C]

Yeah, well, the thing is, like, the Bernie Marine know, like, is a car dealership owner, so you can assume he is literally Hitler. That's just the US like the worst people we have in this country own car dealerships.

[B]

It's some like, very representative here as we have a half deep state, half Hitler.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. And then, and then Alyssa Slotkin is her. I was doing some research into her background for a recent Trend Girl Ismo, and I discovered that she was the only person, the only Democrat in the Senate to vote with the Republicans to ban California from having tougher EPA restrictions because she, like, was just like, yeah, well, I'm from Michigan, so I have to protect our auto industry. And that means, like, shooting down good, like, good environmental policy because it might accidentally hurt an American car company because God knows they're not going to build better cars, like just ceding that territory immediately. So that's like, I just want to put that context out there about the two people who have sponsored this shit. And yeah, it's 15% Chinese ownership is enough to ban a car from American roads forever.

[A]

But so the point here, and let's, let's look at this in context of like the other major, like, economic shift that's going on in America, which is again, if it holds, which God knows if it will, because all at the behest of a very sort of senile musical theater fan, is the tariffs that are going to essentially silo the unified North American auto industry supply chain that was created by the signing of NAFTA in the 90s, where I believe because of, in part because of Canadian cheeses.

[C]

Yeah, well, so this is what's even crazy, right? It's like, so NAFTA was superseded in 2019, 2020 by the USMCA with US Mexico Canada Agreement, which was even more favorable to auto manufacturers than NAFTA was. That was the main point that they kind of wanted to relitigate. And I don't know if you remember who was president then, but it was Donald Trump. And he championed this as like, an incredibly good decision, I believe. I, I don't know if I'll be able to find the exact quote for it. But he, at the time, he called it the fairest, most balanced and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed. This is Donald Trump six years ago

[B]

doing the kind of like anti Baltic chauvinism where it's like, yeah, Canadians spent like 200 years polishing cheese wheels before being elevated to sapience by Detroit, Michigan.

[A]

Yeah, okay, look, some things are funny, but some things you can't take back.

[C]

The thing about it is the most recent batch of tariffs probably won't immediately blow up usmca, but Trump is already refusing to renew it. It's supposed to get. You're supposed to look at renewals every five years, five years, I think maybe six. And he already was like, we're not going to renew it. Theoretically, the US could pull out at any moment. Every ball knower is like, oh, he'll never do that. That would destroy American trade, trade and the entire auto industry. And so I think he might do it because, again, yeah, he's mad about the cheese or what. I can't even keep track. He just, he is one lever in its tariffs and he wants to just keep pulling that shit. And the thing is, is that, like, him doing this actually has more support from like, American unions than you would expect. Like, because they also want more American protectionism. A lot of it is over the Mexico side of things because, you know, the US has this kind of like economic parity relationship with Canada. But really what US Auto manufacturers do with Mexico is they're like, what is the lowest possible wage we can pay to people in the least safe conditions where we can still not pay import tax, like, taxes. And that's most of what we do with Mexico, Mexico's manufacturing base. So I don't know exactly how that's going to end up turning out. I think the tariffs are. They've already made it harder for American car companies as of last year. They might make it harder again in the coming months. But the auto industry is also kind of like, yeah, blow our dick off, do it, do it. We love this because their, their main goal is to just make sure that nobody el can compete.

[A]

Because I was going to go back to something you were saying towards the very beginning, Victoria. Right. Which is the American auto industry. I don't like to romanticize previous, let's say, editions of capitalism, previous ages of capitalism, but you also have to understand that things can get worse. And just because things were better doesn't Mean they're ideal.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

But that the car industry in the States was for a very long time about high wages and affordable products because they were trying to enter market that had no saturation.

[C]

Yeah, well, and I mean like, it was the Fordist model. Right. Like you pay your employees enough to afford the thing they're making and it will ultimately benefit you as well. And that was kind of like the. The idea we don't do that anymore.

[A]

Yeah. And. But a huge amount of that was because there is an obvious and known lever of resistance against it. And the point of some. And what's so like, sort of strange and contradictory about discussing this. Right. The shoot your own dick takeoff act. One of the big things that the sort of distribution of the auto industry throughout the entire North American continent was trying to accomplish was making it so that you didn't have to pay your own workers enough to buy your product because your workers were distributed throughout the. Throughout the continent that the people buying your product were likely buying it maybe as their third or fourth car.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And it increasingly became more about serving a very, very small number of people who could afford it and then putting a much larger number of people into financial difficulty through complicated financial schemes. We all know trope about Ford being a provider of medical insurance and finance that happens to make some cars. Yeah, essentially. So instead of being like nostalgic for the time where it was more comprehensible, understand that it becoming less comprehensible is a strategy to further what they were already doing.

[C]

Yeah, well, a lot of it also. I mean, the other thing too is like, and I say this mostly for international listeners outside of the US or UK listeners in your country where, where it's like in the us, you. What are you going to do not own a car? Like, unless you live in like one of three major metro areas, you must own a car. There is literally no way to participate in the economy. You can't get health care, you can't get groceries. You. You have to own a car. And so they are, you know, in the same way that like housing is basically has inelastic, you know, demand, because what are you going to do? Not be housed? Cars are actually remarkably similar in the US And I think that that's kind of the moment we're at is it's like the, the goal, they know they'll still sell cars no matter what. And so the goal is not to really make a better car or like a more efficient car. It is simply to become the only people selling cars. This is the Tesla move with EVs in the US and this is why Tesla was like such a big Trump supporter and ultimately loved these tariffs, is because Tesla actually is one of the most American manufacturers by like parts sourcing and location of manufacture.

[A]

You can see what the goal is, which is as the vast majority of Americans, and this is true for British people as well. But like, the car thing isn't quite so sharp here. As the vast majority of Americans become surplus to requirements, it's to start serving the ones who aren't surplus to requirements who can either still get credit or have enough money to buy their fourth car.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

And what they want for their fourth car is they want something that's going to show how masculine they are, generally speaking.

[C]

Yeah, well, and I mean like, also like this is less of a thing in Seattle because Seattle is, has different car buying habits and we have like really genuinely narrow streets and stuff. But when I lived in like Texas, for example, every single person had a full size pickup truck. Like, that was just if you were a man and you didn't own a full size pickup truck and it was like, what do you, what if you had to like haul a lawnmower or something? Like, assuredly you couldn't fit that into a hatchback. And also like, that would be gay. I mean, genuinely, it was. When I lived in Texas, I owned a Chevrolet Suburban for a bit because they were just dirt cheap and gas cost nothing and it was a 7.4 liter V8. And I was like, you know, whatever, maybe I could tow with it. Or like you invent use cases because you're just like, well, there's nothing else to fucking do here, so might as well own a giant pickup truck with a huge V8. They're everywhere.

[B]

I got a whole lot of these rocks up the fucking thing.

[C]

That's right.

[A]

And part of, but part of, part of the explanation that's also given is not just that China is going to eat America's lunch by serving this portion of the country that the American car industry seems disinterested in, but that additionally they're spying and they're sneaky.

[C]

Oh yeah, that's.

[A]

This is also true in discussion of Chinese AI companies and so on and so on.

[B]

Remember, you can't generalize that to an American car.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Like if you go and think about like a Chinese car and think, well, all of the software in this, it's got a lot of cameras in it, it records a lot of audio, it's recording your face all the time, maybe that's going to the company and we don't know what they're doing with that. Right. And maybe that's a kind of a security threat. You can't apply that to an American car because. Because an American car maker wouldn't do that. I don't think probably

[A]

freedom.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Because of the freedom. Because the freedom.

[A]

Oh, I've got an article. I've just sent an article.

[B]

It's not, it's not suggesting that like any. You buy a car from anyone, you are sort of handing an immense amount of like surveillance data on yourself to whoever made it.

[C]

Can I tell a fun little story I have from the auto journalism days of my career?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

In like 2017. And this is coming from memory. I don't have the article in front of me, so if I get a couple details wrong, I apologize. But in like 2017 or so, I think the Model 3 was coming out. Tesla was still had a PR department and still gave auto journalists cars. They had a press fleet. So it was cars internally that they could hand out to people and you know, they could go drive. A journalist drove it. He complained about the EPA estimates of range not matching his cars. Elon Musk personally went into this journalist's road trip he had taken to review the car and like bitched him out about it. I think on Twitter, it was still Twitter at the time about like him lying about aspects of the trip because it just stored all the data and had no protections over who could have access it. And he was like, cool, yeah, I'm gonna just look through this guy's entire history inside this car for the time he had it. And this was, this was like a decade ago. And I mean basically the thing is like this was unusual and surprising at the time for I think most people. I think at this point every American car tracks you everywhere you go. And if you happen to have a car that's old enough where you don't have like full time cell connectivity, we have a nationwide web of flock cameras to make sure you can never go anywhere without, without the state knowing.

[A]

What if, though the password to your car was password? Because if you bought a car in Southern California from 2017 until a week ago, apparently the password to your car, if someone downloaded the right app on their phone, was password. So this is, this is a new piece of research for the University of Southern California where if many cars at Honda, Toyota, Mazda, Ford and Jeep dealerships in Southern California from 2017, 17 to today were sold by dealerships that included as an upsell a piece of security software that allowed you to control the car remotely in case someone stole it, which I'm sure happens all the time and can be remedied by remotely controlling it. It was a smartphone app that's installed by dealerships to manage vehicle inventory and prevent theft. The device installed underneath the bottom of the dashboard connects the vehicle and app via Bluetooth performs similarly to a key fob. Lock and unlock doors, honk a horn, flash headlights.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Running.

[B]

I'm sorry, I blacked out for a second. You're talking about something that happened in China, right? Like these are Chinese dealers dealing Chinese cars.

[A]

Let me just see. China. California.

[B]

There's probably a California in China. I assume it's a big country. They've got kind of.

[A]

Are you talking about Chino?

[B]

Yeah, no, that would make sense. Yeah. Okay. The People's Republic of Chino.

[A]

Yeah, It's a Chinoese innovation. I think People's Republic of Chino is

[B]

a society bad's very, very into the deftones.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Look, I come from the People's Republic of Chino, so all your threats are empty.

[A]

I'm just at a very Chino part time in my life. And so essentially, again, if you want to think, oh, it's not private, it's like spying on you. It's like, no, no, no. American cars are spying on you hugely. And they're spying on you so much because of again, this paranoia about macho ness and security that is based on selling a smaller number of cars to a much richer pop. Popular, more. More and more popular and bigger and bigger. And that's why the cars are getting bigger and that's why the security feature is getting more paranoid. Which is why I actually want to come to our closing piece, which is an article that, Victoria, you sent me to talk about on this show.

[C]

Yeah, it's just, it's. If you were trying to get into kind of like what the general tenor of this country is right now, there is. This is, I think, like the key to understanding all of it.

[A]

So before we get to that one, though, I actually want to read a New York Times article from 19 Pittsburgh, September 16. Five armored automobiles have been ordered here by a South American country embroiled in warfare for the use of its president. The first of these is being equipped by the Armstrong motor car body company and will be shipped from New York by September 20th. The cars are to be eight cylinder sedans. Each will be lined with steel netting weighing 650lbs, 1300lbs of armor plate steel and will have 450lbs of bulletproof glass 1 1/4 inches thick. Tear gas bombs and machine guns will be added to the equipment, whose extra weight will make necessary three extra leaves in each spring and 12 ply tires. 1932.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

For a, like compra d' or government in South America. And Victoria, what's changed?

[C]

Well, you see, those cars are going to Americans now. Also, we made the armor a lot lighter, so it's way easier to build armored cars that going.

[B]

Going to Ramzan Kadyrov and being like the cybertruck tech. Technical is, you know, by every metric a worse technical than you would have gotten out of America 100 years ago.

[C]

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. The armor's lighter. That's good.

[A]

At least that's the difference. It's staying domestic and armor's lighter. That's the Trump promise. That's the Trump economy, I think. So. This is from the New York Times article you sent me. Mark Burton has been caught in some sticky situations. He was in Amsterdam, he said, when a gang tried to kidnap him. Hey, Mark, why?

[B]

Probably because of all of the things that American right wingers believe about Europe they tried to do, taken or possibly hostile to him.

[A]

He didn't know if he was going to be in taken or hostel and didn't want to find out.

[B]

This is basically the only two things that can happen. When you see a European guy in a bomber jacket, it's basically he's going to either taken you or he's going to hostel you.

[A]

And honestly, if you ask him, he has to tell you.

[B]

That's true. Then you're in a situation where you've kind of opened the box with throating his catnip, right? And you know which one's going to happen, right? But like, neither of them are good,

[A]

you know, look, not ideal. No, I'd rather be taken than hostile.

[B]

I. That's an interesting question. Can I. Can I put my hat in the ring Like, Hostel 2? Like the one that was like slightly skeezier. Like, I think that's my preferred, like, European vacation.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Hostel 2. Taken. Anybody for Teresas in South America?

[B]

Oh, they might do like, they might do YouTube centipede style. That one's really bad. Like, see, this is the thing, right? This is why we need this kind of wave of, right, populism sweeping Europe is because five, 10 years ago, right, a European guy in a bomber jacket and a funny accent came up to you and said, I'm going to do X to you. X was Euro trip, right? You're going to get like handcuffed and like comedically beaten by a dominatrix. Right. But like, you know, now, now you're getting your like lips sewn to somebody's asshole and that's no good.

[A]

Yeah, they brought that in actually. That, that came from North Africa.

[B]

Y.

[A]

That is migrants brought that in. It's a Moroccan thing. It is a continent wide shame the extent to which people are doing mid summer even in places where the sun does set at normal times. Because of feminism.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, they're doing feminist human centipede on you.

[A]

He was in Amsterdam, he said, when a gang tried to kidnap him. His bodyguard twice thwarted attempted robberies in Mexico and the early 90s when he was in the early stages of starting his armored car business, he was dining in a restaurant in Peru when a bomb blew out the window.

[B]

What coincidence that a guy in the armored car business would have so many things happen to him that prove the necessity of an armored car?

[A]

Almost as though he's going to places that might be. Yeah, exactly. Burton is the founder and chief executive of Armor Max, a company in. Ogden, Utah.

[B]

Mormons. Mormons.

[C]

Mormons.

[B]

If ever there was a people to get hopped up on crumbl cookies and decide this European man is gonna sew my mouth to someone's asshole, it's like,

[A]

can you imagine I'm getting in my half a mile per gallon up armored tank and getting a dirty soda from a drive through because I think that like hot drinks are evil.

[C]

That's the Utah economy at this point.

[B]

You'd hate to be human centipeded to the guy who mostly consumes dirty, dirty sodas like worse than usual.

[A]

If you're gonna pick the Mormon, you know, I don't know where you're going,

[B]

just like instead of being, being human centipeded, but you're like slipping them like €500 be like, can put me, put me in front of the Mormon, you

[A]

know, I don't think a Mormon would even mind being human centipeded. They'd be like, hey, just part of life's crazy journey. Interesting people.

[B]

Crucially, the thing thing is, right, is that again, this is the European mind, right is generally speaking they want nothing more than to like kidnap a guy named like Braidlin and like, you know, fucking surgically suture his asshole to you. It's, that's, that's essential, you know.

[A]

Now every stereotype Europeans have about Americans is actually about Mormons. So the homepage of the Armor Max website gets to the point you will

[B]

never get hostile too'd out of one of these.

[A]

Do you not want your mouth sewn to an asshole armor.

[B]

Max, I gotta say, it's a compelling sales pitch. I'm sorry.

[A]

Yeah, I was gonna read it to make fun of it, but you know what? I'm kind of on board. The quote is we turn regular vehicles into extraordinary bulletproof machines. While Burton has spent most of his nearly 40 years in the industry decamping to hotspots where his products are mostly in demand. Quote, I call him sometimes and he's like, I'm in Lagos, said Shawn Johnson, one of his customers. He no longer needs to travel quite so far from home to help people safeguard their Yukon Denalis and Cadillac Escalades from potential assault rifle rounds and hand grenade blasts. I don't think you need to secure your car from a hand grenade blast in America.

[B]

No, no, I mean, this is the thing.

[A]

Are we off base?

[C]

No, I think that you're actually correct. We have not developed into open warfare yet.

[B]

But this is the thing. This is becoming a kind of like internationalized paranoia, right? Like, you sort of like you're seeing your sort of like 1% or even people who wish they were 1% start feeling like they have to act like, well, like the international kind of compra d' ors of capital, like local elites, like regional elites, the people who maybe do have to worry about people throwing, like, grenades at them. And as to whether that's a founded belief, I really don't think so. I tend to view it as a kind of like, delusional terror that they're all experiencing.

[C]

Well, I think. I think the thing is, is that, like, the American, to an American rich person, nothing can or should ever happen to them, which is part of why they've, like, you know, built a second legal system for elites. And they largely don't. Like, like in the US we really do have a very parallel structure that I got to sample a little tiny bit of when I was an auto journalist, because the car companies wine and dine you as an auto journalist at their vehicle launches and they take you to very fancy places. And so I got to see the kind of hotels that rich people stay at and the kind of, like, restaurants they eat at and the kind of, you know, the dealership experiences. They have all this kind of stuff. It's just a parallel world that we don't get to experience. And so in creation of this, they also think that nothing bad should ever be able to happen to them because that's for poor people. And I think if you really would like a singular moment, there are probably Lots of these. But the United Healthcare CEO getting got. I think that freaked out a lot of them.

[B]

See, this is. This is the thing. He was worried about the wrong movie. He was worried about like kind of European pervert shit happening to him. And so like he was walking down the street in Manhattan feeling safe, being like, nobody's ever gonna hostel to me. But then a very American form of violence happened to him because a guy taxi drivered him, allegedly. Yeah. And it's very funny that this is it. Like, the American rich never think that America will happen to them until America happens to them and then they freak out. They want European solutions from a very specific period. Bumping, I'm afraid, of Americans in the back of the up armored. Denali's got to go hard as fuck, though.

[A]

You know what, I want to go back to something Nova said a few minutes ago.

[B]

Is it the like sewing mouths to assholes thing? Because I think we've kind of played that bit out.

[A]

They're acting like compradors, right. Which is that the Metropole, as it is commonly understood by people, is shrinking. And I think that's what we're seeing through the transformation of the car industry.

[B]

There's a kind of like racist talking point that incorporates this worldview, I think. Right. I don't know if you've ever seen this. This is sort of born of still being on Twitter despite everything. But like one of the sort of Nazi talking points of late has been like, if you import the third world through mass migration, you become the third World. Right. And I think these people genuinely do believe that in. In the sense that they are starting to think that they have to conduct themselves like third world elites. Right. And I think that's delusional.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But like I say, I think that's the kind of nightmare that they're having.

[A]

Well, and I think that the reason that they might be having that is

[B]

partially just flat racism. Like, I think we can't overstate that enough. It's like they are seeing, as far as they're concerned, too many brown people. And that means that someone is going to throw a grenade at them.

[A]

Yeah, it's a combination of flat racism. And they're also aware that the social contract that used to keep them safe is now exploded.

[B]

Yeah, but. And to be fair, they're the ones who exploded it.

[A]

Right.

[B]

They decided. They decided that this was preferable. And I think they sort of had this delusion, right, where it's like, well, we can. We can sort of get all this, like, regulation and this Social contract and this liberalism out of the way and have the nice kind of orderly society where I'm in charge of everything. And it's not proving.

[C]

So mods. Mods.

[B]

Yeah, mods.

[C]

I mean also like, yeah, 2020 is another big one here. And that like rich people see when they see a window being broken, they see a kind of unspeakable violence that shakes them to their core that seeing a person murdered would never do for them.

[B]

Yeah. Because that's kind of in the run of things that are supposed to happen.

[A]

Yeah. What if that was my. That's not my person. But what if that was my window?

[B]

I'm not taking it the bus right now.

[C]

The car, unfortunately, has just become the American ID. Like the. You know, you look at the 70s and it was like vanishing point. You get in a big muscle car and your nihilist drive into the middle of the desert and you die out there. And you look at the 80s and it's like struggle. Like just every, every era in the US there is some sort of definitional media you can point to and be like, yeah, Americans want to fuck the car. They believe they are the car they want. They think it's super cool to like have a car that you can kill, kill other people with. And like this, this decade's version of that is just like cybertruck shit where it's like, I've got my. My armored penis.

[A]

Well, can I read you a person who's been driven insane by cars? I think maybe Victoria. You know what's coming. This is about Karen with Hawaii Kobayashi, former producer in the entertainment industry, interviewed for this article who owns a car called a Rezvani tank, the fucking armored

[B]

vehicle the Rock drives in the Fast and Furious. Serious movies, huh? Huh?

[A]

Yeah, that's the one.

[B]

Well, here's the thing. Andy Burnham's bus fare cap is gonna do all for them.

[A]

There is. Vanitag is an extreme military inspired tactical utility vehicle with a thousand horsepower V8 engine. It has ballistics armoring, electrified door handles, a ramming bumper, thermal night vision and gas. Gas masks. Kobayashi said I need to be able to go to the drive through at In N Out Burger.

[C]

Yeah, that's why she paid for the roll down windows. Because normally it's full of.

[B]

Yeah, because otherwise. Otherwise Antifa would like roll a sort of gas grenade in through the window.

[A]

You know the thing.

[C]

So here's the real thing, right? It's like Rezvani does not make their own cars like they are based off of other vehicles. They're one of the, they're like a mansory or there's like a million of these tuning houses that take factory vehicles and they convert them into something else. Usually it's for rich people to show that they have even less taste than they like are assumed to have. But Rezvani does these like armored vehicles, whatever. So I know that this woman paid $350,000 for a fucking Jeep Wrangler, which means she's driving to In N Out Burger in her bulletproof tank and the plastics are still fucking rattling because it's a, it's a goddamn Chrysler inside.

[A]

So article says this vehicle is a monster. If Optimus Triumph from the Transformers and a Jeep Wrangler had a baby, it would be the Rezvani tank. But again, that's wrong. It's just a Jeep Wrangler wearing a tough outfit.

[C]

Jeep Wrangler in drag.

[A]

Kobayashi, who's a 5, who's 5 foot 7, says she feels like a T. Rex whenever she drives it. Which is, that's the point of every, like every car in America now seems to be converging on that point. And they're defending themselves from China and they're defending themselves from any of them ever being made affordably on the old hyper exploitative multinational model because they're just like, no, our whole market is people who have 10 of these. That's the new idea of mass affluence in America is you're like, your husband wrote the movie Grease, co wrote the musical, Excuse me, not the movie, the musical. Your husband co wrote Grease, your son is a social media anime influencer and now you're like, well, I guess I'm a feudal lord and I need a destrier and a suit of plate armor in the form of this up armored Jeep.

[B]

I have to protect myself from ms.13.

[A]

Yeah. But not only do I have to protect myself from MS.13, I need to feel like I'm the king of the dinosaurs, essentially.

[B]

Well, because out there it's dinosaur world, right? And so you have to be the best one.

[A]

She then says if I make a wrong turn and I'm caught in some sort of protest, I want to feel safe. A protest.

[B]

The thing is, a lot of people's brains have been, I worry, irreversibly damaged.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, they have. Well. And the auto industry is more than happy to profit off. That is the thing. And that's increasingly the only way that the American auto industry sees a way to make any money. Like I have long maintained, this is kind of my called shot for America. Over the next 10, 20 years. I'm not sure the exact timeframe on it, but like 90% of American roads will look like Cuba's where it's like they have. But we'll do it to ourselves, right? Like Cuban roads are full of like very, very old cars, mostly American that are sort of hodgepodge together because they've had to live under an embargo for you know, what, 70, 80 years at this point, I have lost count. And the U.S. is going to do the exact same thing to itself. And nobody here is going to make any cheap cars to replace all the ones that are dying. And so it's going to be like we're all going to be passing around a 35 year old Honda Fit held together with chicken wire and zip ties. And then the other 10% are going to be doing like Russian elite kind of shit where they're all rolling around in like up armored Rolls Royces and shit with the blue, with the extra, they paid extra for the blue light on the top so they can blow through traffic lights and all the rest of us are going to have to move out of like genuinely I think that is the vision for our society. I think even if we manage to avert the worst outcomes, I don't see how like the only way we're getting cheap cars here is if, if we, if we somehow decide to walk back the bipartisan consensus that selling Chinese cars here would destroy America. And I don't know if we're going to do that because again this is. Biden also passed a lot of stuff that was anti Chinese car. We didn't even get to it in the main discussion. But like Senator Ted Cruz, one of the worst people we have in America, correctly pointed out that the Connected Car act that they're going to ban all these Chinese vehicles with would functionally ban Mercedes Benz because there are two Chinese companies that have a 20% ownership ownership stake in Mercedes Benz that would put them over the cap. And Bernie Moreno's response was they'll figure it out. We can either write them a waiver like they do. They just, they like it is, it is just locked on. And we can never allow Chinese cars to be sold here cheaply. Every American company is like, they've all basically blown up all of their EV programs or they increasingly have decided to dropped into like Stellantis, which is 14 car companies in a trench coat. But primarily in the US it's like Ram, Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep. Their whole thing now is they just make cars for like Fox News watchers. They, they they brought back the v, the Hemi V8 after developing a more powerful, less fuel consuming inline six for the Ram and put a big V8 badge on it and called it like the, the the the the free. It wasn't like the Freedom Edition, it was like the. They did a whole like America based. Here's how proud you should be of your V8 ad campaign for it. And it's just like cool. We explicitly build cars for family Annihilators as a marketing strategy. It's so dire, it's just, it's so bad.

[A]

Can I tell you a little bit about who's buying one of these ultimate like one of like the end states of these family annihilators?

[C]

Sure.

[A]

Because I have Karen Kobayashi's IMDb page in front of me and I see what she's been a producer on. She was a producer on six episodes of Modern Dads on, on A&E, 11 episodes of Restaurant Startup, also on A and E, only one episode of the Almost Impossible game Show, which I believe was canceled immediately. Two episodes of Billion Dollar Buyer, one episode of Life or Debt, which was canceled immediately. Nine episodes of the People's Couch, an American ripoff of Gogglebox and then three seasons of House Hunters. And this woman is like, I must be up armored.

[B]

Well, she's got a reason to be. It sounds like she's been a real victim of Cancel culture.

[A]

All of the ultras who are like, I am a Life or Debt crazy super fan and I will, I'm willing

[B]

to take them all into my own hands. It's what it is is the kind of, you know, brave stalwarts of Jabasar Gogglebox insisting that anyone who tries to adapt a patriotic British format to vulgar Americanism must have an RPG fight at

[A]

their car just to finish it up. Kobayashi said, I needed at least one car that has some type of. Type of armoring. Tobin's young, he's in his 20s. So I started to see a lot of weird stalker type people in this generation. I have no idea what's going on through their minds.

[B]

The Modern Dads fandom is really rabid.

[A]

Yeah, basically the Mark David Chapman of Modern Dads. The general state of the world hardly helps. She describes herself as a prepper, saying all civilizations crash after 250 years, then adding, I'm not saying there's a zombie apocalypse coming, but we are prepared. But she knows she's not alone in her upscale neighborhood north of where else? San Diego. Quote, everyone here has money and they all have bulletproof Cars down.

[B]

I think it's cool that America is into the sort of like florid stages now.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Out, out of bed, wandering around, throwing in the morning, trying to fist fight a nurse. And you know what? Fine.

[A]

Honestly, like, America's shoe cupboard is the most peed in area of any house. Yeah. So honestly, what's happening is the rest of the world, it's coming home, unfortunately. It's coming home. It's just. This is what's coming home to America. It's what it's. Honestly, this is. This is their vision for everywhere else. So eventually it had to come back. He ran out of every everywhere else to do it.

[C]

Yeah. No, I mean, I will say, like, broadly speaking, as a people, we deserve this. And I hope that this woman, like, never feels quite safe. I just want her to be paranoid. She should be paranoid.

[B]

I just think it's interesting, right. Basically, like the only immigration that the Trump administration is allowing and its second guise is its kind of Hyman thing for the, I would say, biggest, like most coherent group of people who have this exact kind of paranoia, White South Africans. Right. And so what we're seeing here is this real kind of coalescing of the I need a flamethrower on my car for when they try to kill me constituency internationally. What if, what if you had a car that was like, sir, kill a lot from Robot Wars? Well, exactly.

[A]

What if that. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's basically it. It's the, it's the Iranianization. Like we, like the Israelization of America is one thing. It's the Iranian ization is quite another.

[C]

Well, I mean, like, this is just. I think, I think our wealthy very much want to be a petro state, which means that they, they're like, first goal is obviously to actually create a second class of people within the legal confines of the United States who cannot leave, are basically, you know, slave labor, neighbors, can't get passports, can't vote, have no say in the society, and then a, you know, wealthy class over them that goes to F1 races that we hold around the country. But also at the same time, they're like, that's going to be kind of dodgy getting to that point. So we should probably have a rezvani tank again. I, if you. I desperately wanted to get somebody who bought one of those and had never listened to my show before on my show, so I could basically do an hour and a half of public shaming. Because you paid $350,000 for a Jeep Wrangler. What's wrong with you, BMW? You know, here's the thing that's crazy, right is BMW has been armoring cars in their Factory for like four decades. You can buy a 5 Series or a 7 Series that like is resistant to RPG fire and looks identical to a normal 7 Series and have been able to do this by handing BMW $500,000 or whatever for decades. You could buy a good car. I just the American ideology having to buy your domestically produced French owned conglomerate off road truck covered in bulletproof cladding. Fascinating. We're such an interesting people. It's too bad they're gonna kill me.

[A]

I'm gonna become like a Warren Hastings style, like Americanophile where he's like adopting American ways. Look, I think that we've gone very long today, but Victoria, I'm going to say thank you so much for coming hanging out with us today. Everybody should go listen to Trangirlismo.

[C]

Thank you.

[A]

It is available wherever fine podcasts are downloaded. Our very own Nova has been on

[B]

it's true, and I had a fantastic time. So please listen to it, please subscribe to it.

[A]

That's right, Victoria. Anything else you want to direct people towards?

[C]

I have a Bluesky account, Victoriascott BSky Social. And that's where I'm basically on the Internet. And I'll have a book coming out soon about sort of a photo exploration of queer life in Seattle where I live, quite soon that's called Pollination. I'll announce it on my on my Blue sky when it's up for pre order, but that should be coming very soon.

[A]

Lovely. Well, in any case, thank you all very much for listening. You know all about the Patreon that we have that you can subscribe to if you want. Can I just shock you more episodes and we'll see you on the bonus episode in a few short days. Bye bye everyone.

[C]

Bye bye bye and thanks for having me.