*UNLOCKED* Ingest Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way

Summary

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TRASHFUTURE – UNLOCKED Ingest Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way

Date: February 17, 2026
Hosts: @raaleh, @HKesvani, @milo_edwards, @inthesedeserts, @postoctobrist

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Episode Overview

This bonus episode takes a typically irreverent and critical look at the psychic and physical fallout of late capitalism’s excesses. The crew begins with the discovery of heavy metals (specifically lead) in health supplements, dives into the performatively broken state of Anglophone politics, returns to their nemesis OpenAI and the AI investment bubble, and ends with a scathing and hilarious look at what it means to own a Tesla Cybertruck in 2026. All of it is done in true TRASHFUTURE fashion: absurdist, sharp, deeply internet-poisoned, and very, very funny.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Why Is Everyone So Stupid and Angry? (00:15–06:28)

• The hosts riff on a Consumer Reports story about high lead content in protein powders and health supplements.

  • Matt: “So it’s all lead. Apparently. It’s...just lead.” (00:15)
  • Charlie jokingly blames heavy metals for societal stupidity and anger, especially among fitness-obsessed “chuds”.
  • The idea that “being stupid and angry correlates with being obsessed with health” sets up a recurring joke about wellness culture being not just bad but toxic—literally.

• Discussion on regulatory standards:

  • California’s ultra-strict standards are mocked as “insanely woken” but also, it’s “funny and therefore I think it’s a good bit to build the opening of a comedy podcast out into.” (Charlie, 05:15)

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2. The Collapse of Food & Health Regulation (06:28–08:34)

• With neoliberal cuts, food and product safety are being systematically gutted in both the US and UK.
  • Matt: “You basically just accept a certain level horrifying chemicals in all your food.”
• Riffing on the idea of the FDA as a militarized force—culminating with jokes about British Food Inspectors wielding heavy weapons.
  • Charlie: “If the British Transport police can have a mortar platoon, why can't the FDA have a weapons company? Answer me that.” (07:38)

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3. “It’s All Desserts” – Skipping the Serious News (09:37–10:00)

• The hosts explain this bonus episode will sidestep the week’s “serious news” in favor of lighter, absurd material.
  • Charlie: “That’s why it’s a bonus episode—you get to feel good about something happening in the world for once, maybe.” (09:54)

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4. OpenAI and the AI Bubble (10:00–21:39)

• Targets OpenAI’s business model, funding, and cultural impact.

  • Matt: “You know how we are at the center of several trillions of dollars worth of broadly worthless, rapidly depreciating energy infrastructure, data center infrastructure, excuse me, build out...”
  • Charlie: “Anything that AI says, I already know what [Ed] Zitron’s going to say about it, because he is in my head yelling at full volume.” (10:25)
  • OpenAI: 800 million users, 5% pay, $3 spent for every $1 earned.
  • Charlie: “The wrongest you can run a business, but it doesn’t matter because you’ve convinced a handful of people you’re going to make God with it.” (11:53)

• Mocking OpenAI’s desperate pivots (AI TikTok, “AI girlfriends”, soon-to-be-implemented adult content, etc.).

  • Zoe: “The OpenAI strategy has largely just been every month is sort of posting big things coming soon and then just sort of just repeating that just every month. Yeah, it's just like a SoundCloud rapper who's kind of convinced that they will get the deal one day.” (13:08)

• Criticism on tech’s failure to “deliver” miracles (curing cancer, economic growth).

  • Matt: “Now that we've been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues our product causes, Please put it in everything, by the way. Please put it in schools, please. Like, base the government on it, base the whole economy on it.” (15:14)

Notable Quote

• Charlie: “I'm gonna start sex shaming. I'm actually gonna become a sex negative feminist now. I think this shouldn't happen. Don't do that. That's wrong, actually.” (16:42)

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5. The “American Century of Humiliation” & UK Political Absurdity (22:41–41:50)

• Extends the metaphor of China’s “century of humiliation” to a new “American century of humiliation”, now mirrored in the UK.

  • Matt describes a viral video where Trump humiliates Keir Starmer:
    “United Kingdom. Where's United Kingdom? Where's my friend?... Everything going good? Very good. That's very nice that you're here. These people all came on like 20, 20 minute notice and I think it's fantastic.” (24:42–24:59)

• Labour’s woes and general UK party dysfunction get lampooned, including the Greens, Reform, and the media’s complicity.

  • Charlie (re Greens): “For the longest time, I had an instinctual aversion to it because I'm a Red, I'm a communist. But maybe ... do at this point.” (26:46)

• Discussion on right-wing grievance tactics—how "being called far-right" is spun as violence/incitement.

  • Matt: “They are very clearly aiming at doing the same thing [...] they're going to justify it by saying, oh, there is a left wing terroristic threat brewing.”

• Satirical character creation riff: “Massive Bollocks” and British political media tropes. (33:09 onward)

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6. Neoliberal Meltdown: Industrial Policy vs Fantasy Economics (35:07–44:40)

• Host explainer on the industrial decay of the US/UK vs China’s rise.

  • Financialization replaces real productive capacity; data centers and speculative assets stand in for factories.
  • Neoliberal logic facing material reality; fiction can no longer mask relative decline.
  • Matt: “If all of your productive capacity is directed towards fine tuning [...] imaginary things that have imaginary relationships with actual production, then ultimately the guy who makes the battery wins.” (38:19)

• The global order post-China’s WTO entry, the end of cheap labor arbitrage, and the looming impossibility of “infinite growth.”

  • Matt: “Guess what? It doesn't work anymore. That's gone.” (40:38)

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7. Cybertruck Owner Interviews: The Culture War as Personal Vehicle (46:43–56:47)

• Matt reads/interprets from a recent WIRED article on what it’s like to be a Cybertruck owner.
  • Owners recount being heckled, leaving threatening notes, and in one case, tracking down a note-leaver using the truck’s cameras.
    • Charlie: “She didn’t know that my car actually has a built-in stalker mode. That means that if anyone within 50ft of it frowns, you get their Social Security number.” (48:07)
  • The most “politically homeless” Cybertruck owner turns out to be a January 6th rioter.
  • Debates about whether owning a Cybertruck is performative and if these owners secretly love the reaction.
    • Zoe: “Anyone who drives it can’t actually see anyone beneath them, which is also part of the design. It’s just, like, really sort of garish and obnoxious. It is like the thing you buy if you have loads of money and you just want to tell people to go fuck themselves.” (52:46)
  • Riffs on therapy conversations with the Cybertruck’s AI ("Aura"), and owners achieving “the presence of God” after offroading—via either stroke or climax.

Notable Quote

• Charlie: “If I see you in the cybertruck and we enter into the chess battle of the mind of, I give you a thumbs down and you start jerking off, you have bested me, you have won in that environment. You’ve beaten me in the marketplace of ideas.” (52:09)

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8. Closing and Meme Explanations (56:47–End)

• Brief moment where the hosts explain the “three finger” meme from Inglourious Basterds.
  • Charlie: “We brighten your day a bit, I hope, and also teach any of you who didn’t know what that one meme from Inglourious Basterds was about.” (57:00)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with timestamps)

• "Lead is very dense. How do you expect me to pack on mass otherwise?" — Matt, 00:57
• "Turns out that the level of Jay Z collabs in a lot of weight gain powders is higher than anyone previously recognized." — Charlie, 02:51
• "You know, and is ultimately at the end of the movie is taken down by like a guy with an M240 on a bipod." — Charlie, 07:57
• "The wrongest you can run a business, but it doesn’t matter because you’ve convinced a handful of people you’re going to make God with it." — Charlie, 11:53
• "It’s like, guess what? We pivoted to TikTok, but that wasn’t quite hitting. So now we’re pivoting to AO3 and we’re going to cure cancer after that." — Matt, 17:22
• "Nobody must allow the creation of a British big balls." — Charlie, 32:55
• "China doesn’t have a Massive Bollocks." — Charlie, 35:07
• "If you haven’t seen the movie, you haven’t seen the movie, you know?" — Charlie, 49:06
• "You gotta ask if he’s doing what Sam Altman calls ‘a rotica’ with the truck." — Charlie, 54:36
• "If I see you in the cybertruck and we enter into the chess battle of the mind of, I give you a thumbs down and you start jerking off, you have bested me..." — Charlie, 52:09

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:15–06:28: Heavy metals and health supplements; social/mental consequences
• 10:00–21:39: The AI bubble (OpenAI, investment, “AI girlfriend” pivot)
• 22:41–41:50: UK/US humiliation, political spectacle, media figures
• 35:07–44:40: Neoliberal economic collapse, China vs the global North
• 46:43–56:47: “WIRED” Cybertruck Owner interviews
• 56:47–End: Closing jokes, meme explanations

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Tone & Style

The entire episode is suffused with TRASHFUTURE’s signature blend of absurdist comedy, leftist skepticism, and satirical diagnostics of late capitalism and declining empires. Comedic exaggeration, quick-fire references, and meta-commentary abound. The hosts’ chemistry is sharp and the jokes relentless, but the critiques land with clarity for anyone tuned to 2020s business, tech, or political discourse.

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For listeners: If you want a savage, surreal digest of why the Anglosphere feels so unhinged right now—this episode’s for you.

Transcript

[Matt]

All right, so it's all lead. Apparently. It's. It's just. There's lead.

[Charlie]

Okay. That's why everyone's like this. I've been wondering and it's so. I'm so glad that we have an answer to. To why everyone is kind of stupid and angry all the time.

[Zoe]

Yeah.

[Matt]

Or more specifically, why being stupid and angry sort of so correlates with being obsessed with health.

[Charlie]

Well, because the thing is, I thought it was like a chump. I thought this was kind of a multivariate process in the kind of rise of 21st century fascism, that there were any number of reasons why everyone was stupid and angry. But it turns out that all of the kind of pre workouts that people have been doing, that's all cadmium, just loose cadmium powder.

[Matt]

Yeah. Lead is very dense. How do you expect me to pack on mass otherwise? Come on.

[Charlie]

And so obviously all of the chuds who go and do CrossFit and do technically zero pull ups, but it looks like a lot if you don't count form. They're all filling up on heavy metals before they go and do that. And that's going to sort of be part of the reason why they are the way they are. So it's nice to know that not only are our enemies sort of ontologically evil, but they're also biologically evil. That's nice. That's reassuring to know.

[Matt]

The funny thing is there's. I'm going to get into this actually because I've been thinking a lot about a lot about trade recently.

[Charlie]

You know why you've been thinking about it a lot is because you don't do a lot of like workout powders.

[Matt]

Yeah, that's true. I guess if you, if you have enough workout powder, then most of the time you just like, you think of like the racial composition of your neighborhood. You think of like what you would do to like someone if they broke into your home.

[Charlie]

Yeah.

[Matt]

And you get sort of angry at the TV a lot.

[Charlie]

It's not a nice existence, is the thing. Like as much as it seems to involve a lot of kind of venal kind of satisfaction of your, of your kind of lizard brain. It doesn't seem to bring them any pleasure. You know, it seems to mostly be a sort of a curse of unfulfillment. And that's why I've got to suggest that we investigate, and this is something that RFK's CDC could do, investigate which kinds of heavy metal poisoning make you feel happy instead of angry.

[Zoe]

Well, can I suggest that in Fact, like, you know, we learn from this and we sort of like, you know, we eradicate. We sort of like slowly filter out the heavy metals and we instead introduce something called nu metal into our protein powders. I mean, as always, I am constantly thinking about, like, how do we bring DJs back into rock bands? Not how do we bring back DJs, because I do think that I feel like there's an oversupply of DJs, right. But I feel like we need to just redistribute them rather than sort of get rid of them.

[Charlie]

Yeah, it turns out that the level of Jay Z collabs in a lot of sort of weight gain powders is much higher than anyone previously recognized.

[Zoe]

I think.

[Charlie]

I think. I think a DJ sort of DJ numbers are like, you know, skirt hemlines. A recession indicator, right? When people start getting nostalgic about David Gasser or whatever, that's. That's like reading the phrase since 2009 in the financial Times, November.

[Matt]

Are you just remembering me admitting that I used to love the album Pop Life by David David?

[Charlie]

Yes, I am, when I was 16.

[Matt]

But the thing is, number one, DJ numbers, perfect. I love DJ. Bunch of numbers. Number two, I think maybe, maybe. Look, the issue is that, like, U.S. industrial production capacity has been allowed to wither and die. They've not kept up crucial supply lines, largely for ideological reasons. And that goes back to Reagan, it goes back to Clinton, it goes back to all those neoliberalizing impulses. It's not a recent thing. And what's happened is that China is able to ramp up a huge amount of industrial production of DJs. Right?

[Charlie]

That's true. That is true. If you look at even stuff like giving your own citizens heavy metal poisoning, they were ahead of the curve on that, you know. And so ultimately this too is just like another example of the US kind of lagging behind, both in the actual thing itself and in the response. Because I would sort of broadly approve of this. I would sort of turn the big, like, you know, the big approval dial for debate samples up. If the CEO and sort of like, executives of Huel were sort of like, tried and executed. But I don't. I don't know if the. If the Feds have that in them, you know.

[Matt]

Yeah, it's like the seat. What's going to happen is you'll find out that the CEO of Huell, which is one of the worst offenders, by the way, and that's not just the us, that's the UK as well. That's everywhere.

[Charlie]

Well, I mean just, just for balance, right, Because I'm not going to give Huel a rice of reply because I don't respect them or their products. But is it not the case that like this, this expose, this Consumer Reports thing that's like, hey, all of your protein stuff has incredible amounts of lead in it. Isn't it that way? Because it's using the like California definition of lead which is insanely woken, which is like no lead ever. So it' it's like supposedly it's like a thousand times less sensitive than like any other anyone else's definition. It's some real like contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer type shit. However, the results of it are funny and therefore I think it's a good bit to build the opening of a comedy podcast out into.

[Matt]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Charlie]

He was probably fine. It's not going to make you, it's not going to make you stupid except in like a socioeconomic.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Zoe]

I also kind of feel like if you sort of bought Huell, like there's a very good chance for you bought Huell because you got a discount code from Steven Bartlett at Diary of a CEO podcast. So I feel like you're basically already there anyway.

[Charlie]

And we'll think about this, Think about this. If you get the heal, you're gonna go to the gym more. You go to the gym more. That correlates with getting dumber, you know, not for any kind of environmental exposure reasons but just because it's like the place where you gotta do that. It's like an inverse library.

[Matt]

Yeah, look, I got a new personal trainer recently and the notes have gotten so much worse. I'm like, I'm now treating int as my dump stat. I'm going all strength con. No, no. So anyway, this is, this is, this is I find something I find amusing and yeah, it's whether or not it is the California definition of lead or whether or not it's too much lead. It seems as though again the Make America Healthy again people, where are they?

[Charlie]

Yeah, well, the thing is it kind of doesn't matter in the sense that regardless of how safe these individual products are or aren't both in the US and the uk all of our food safety stuff is being gutted because it costs money.

[Matt]

Yeah, exactly right. Like it's the, it's the same thing in the in US it's like the anyone overlook overwatching food, Overwatching anyone sort of shooting food that's running towards them.

[Charlie]

I'm a tactical FDA agent. I'm on the roof of the building providing like bounding overwatch for the meat. I mean that's a pretty ideal job. But like that's woke and in the UK you're opposite number who doesn't get to carry a gun.

[Matt]

So only some of them get to carry guns.

[Charlie]

Yeah, but like costs money to employ and we can't do that because that means, you know, the books aren't going to balance in November. So we. You basically just accept a certain level horrifying chemicals in all of your food. You know, ultimately this is a victory for Tim Ferrin, pub landlord.

[Matt]

Yeah, well, look, who knows what's gonna happen to the frogs when they start like loading creatine.

[Charlie]

Oh, Jesus. Yeah, swole frog.

[Matt]

Also, I do like the idea of the fda but heavy weapons squad.

[Charlie]

Yeah. I mean, if the British Transport police can have a mortar platoon, why can't the FDA have a weapons company? Answer me that.

[Matt]

Like, if and like going back you who the FDA's Heavy Weapons Company is going to be overwatching? It's Greg Stube in the life he should be leading. Right. He should be selling counterfeit beef as.

[Charlie]

Like, you know, and is ultimately at the end of the movie is taken down by like a guy with an M240 on a bipod. Yeah, absolutely.

[Matt]

It's great. It's Greg Stubby in Sarasota acting like. And he just perfectly imitates the exact shot at the end of Platoon, you know, but. Except flying out of his hands are just a bunch of like packs of horse meat relabeled as beef.

[Charlie]

Mommy, what did you do at work today? Well, honey, I'm a. I'm a woke armed meat inspector for the federal government. And today I fired a bazooka Greg Stubby killing him.

[Zoe]

And everybody clap.

[Matt]

So I'll be honest with you. I was like seriously looking at. And we can choose which how we want to end it today, which is we want to end on.

[Charlie]

That's an ominous phrasing.

[Matt]

So we could choose how we want to close out the show today because I either had a whole thing about the different about the Peter Thiel's Antichrist lectures, which I actually wanted to get to with Adam Becker. We just got way too sidetracked. Or I have in this crossed this crossed my desk like 20 minutes ago. People recounting the stories of what it's like being in public as a cyber truck driver.

[Charlie]

Oh, Ambassador, with this. With these items, you spoil us.

[Matt]

There is. There's a lot of everybody clapped in that one. But. But I've Got a few also, by the way. Hey, it's TF. It's that podcast that introduces itself 11 minutes in. It's a bonus episode. They know what it is.

[Charlie]

I hope you enjoyed the immediately previous episode. I thought it was weird that we did an hour and a half of just blasting Swan Lake, but everything's cool now.

[Matt]

So basically the other thing is, you might have noticed, hey, there's some news, some quite serious news that has happened. We are going to be discuss. We have Seamus Malekevzeli coming back on Monday. We're gonna sort of talking about that all with him then it's all all desserts today, I'm afraid.

[Charlie]

Yeah, well, that's why it's a bonus episode is because you get to feel good about something happening in the world for once maybe.

[Matt]

So here's the other thing. Remember how OpenAI was like, hey, you know how we are at the center of several trillions of dollars worth of broadly worthless, rapidly depreciating energy infrastructure, data center infrastructure, excuse me, build out. And we are financing that largely by passing kind of elements of the same TR billion between Nvidia's money, Microsoft's money, our money.

[Charlie]

Yeah, I mean, here's the thing, right? This is going to kind of open me up to criticism from the AI people, if any of them cared or knew who I was. But I have internalized Ed Zittran on this so deeply that I am now a kind of zitron cultist. Anything that AI says, I already know what he's going to say about it because he is in my head yelling it at full volume.

[Matt]

He's in your head smiling.

[Charlie]

Yeah, I would say so. I think one of the most vindicated men in recent history because you take a position on AI, which is this is obviously stupid and fraudulent and it's going to collapse instantly. And you just hold on to that against all of the doubters and naysayers and eventually you will be reincarnated as a lotus flower and the economy crashes.

[Matt]

Yeah, you're reincarnated as a lotus flower. Unfortunately, the lotus flower is in a building that is suspended in midair because the last. You know what it is, You're a lotus flower, but you're on top of that one building in Avenue that's constantly threatening to fall over.

[Charlie]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Matt]

So anyway. But you know how they're at the center of all of that and they have to keep on trying to find reasons to justify their existence because for.

[Charlie]

Some reason the sort of like cerebral Ed is at this moment going like so not making a profit then. You're not going to start making a profit at any time soon.

[Matt]

Oh, so recently some numbers were released that they have 800 million users but only 5% pay. They do 13 billion in annual recurring.

[Charlie]

Revenue and just again, the wrongest you can run a business, but it doesn't matter because you've convinced a handful of people that you're going to make God with it.

[Matt]

So if you do the math, they spend $3 for every one that they make.

[Charlie]

That's. That's magical.

[Matt]

Yeah, that is good.

[Charlie]

That's incredible.

[Matt]

It's pretty good.

[Charlie]

Putting up real, real kind of effort numbers there.

[Matt]

Yeah. So this is, this is where we are. Right. But you know, you know how a few weeks ago we were like, hey, you were saying that all of these trillions of dollars of investment and the sort of, the fact that the has now been kind of, I would say, taken over, almost like a parasite by this one gigantic speculative bubble with like 80% of gains in the stock market this year being AI related sort of it. Without it, there's no GDP growth. All this stuff. And then they were like, okay, we're going to do TikTok. What if we did TikTok but AI generated? And it's like, well, there's no where's the cancer cure? The cancer cure?

[Charlie]

Not even that much so much as where's the money? How do you make money off of that? Like it's like really like 17 year old at a sort of careers advisor meeting of like, I know none of my shit works, but I'm going to make it big on TikTok. That's my plan is I'm going to make money off of being on TikTok.

[Zoe]

Yeah, I do really love that. The OpenAI strategy has largely just been every month is sort of posting big things coming soon and then just sort of just repeating that just every month. Yeah, it's just like a SoundCloud rapper who's kind of convinced that they will get the deal one day.

[Charlie]

You have that one Demi tweet where he's in the studio and it's like, I'm on Drake's team and we're recording our response to Kendrick right now. We are not taking this lying down. It's the worst shit you've ever heard. That's every Sam Altman tweet that I've seen.

[Matt]

Well, Sam has said, okay, fine, you didn't love the sort of OpenAI version of TikTok. Cool, okay.

[Zoe]

No, we loved it actually. We did like the woman like, the women with the big boulders. Like, every time they come up with something good, it's just like, oh, no, we're changing tack. It's like, no, just keep doing the woman with the boulder.

[Matt]

We do love the women with the boulders.

[Charlie]

The thing is, they're turning the dial back and forth, looking to see what one shots people's brains, right? And, like, obviously the Facebook slop works pretty well. They dialed past me, like, for a minute with the, with the, like, image generation. They had me on the hook. And then they were like, no, this sucks because it doesn't make money. We got to do something else that's going to suck worse and also won't make money. So I was. I was saved. I was thrown clear of the wreckage, you know?

[Matt]

Well, so what they've done is Sam Altman has said, we made Chad TPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were careful with mental health issues. No, you have not.

[Charlie]

So many people have, like, died or, like, killed other people or been institutionalized off of this ship. Like, and we're reading the tip of the iceberg as well, because, like, cops don't fucking know what this is. Like, you would have to get an unusually, like, canny, like, detective or, like, psychiatrist or whatever to be able to, like, piece together some of this shit. If you have a chatgpt induced psychotic break and you get, like, the boomer psychiatrist. Love that Avalanche's song. They're not going to fucking know what that is. They're just going to, like, you know, put you on fucking antipsychotics. And. And it's just going to sort of, like, have faith that it solves itself. So, like, none of this stuff is getting recorded as much as it should be.

[Matt]

And, you know, he says so even then, he's like, okay, well, look, the last update may have given everybody AI psychosis. We've tweaked the guidelines a bit. We realize this may have made it less useful to many users who don't have mental health problems, but we wanted to get it right now that we've been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues. Also, it's like, now that we've been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues our product causes, Please put it in everything, by the way. Please put it in the schools, please. Like, base the guts government on it. Base the whole economy on it.

[Charlie]

Well, when you think about it this way, there's two groups of people who could plausibly be yelling at Sam Altman right now, right? One is Jensenheim, or, like, you Know, fucking Microsoft, whoever. The people who actually have the money, but also the users. The only people who care enough to sort of like yell at him about it are people who are mad that by turning off some of the more mental health breakdown inducing features, he has functionally lobotomized their AI girlfriend.

[Matt]

Well, hold that thought. In. In a few weeks we plan to put in a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what what people liked about 4o, which is the insane insanity causing one. If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a human like way or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it. But only if you want it. Not because we're usage maxing. And then in December, in December, hold on. In December, as we roll out age gating more fully and as part of our quote, treat adult users like adults principle, we will allow erotica for ve adult.

[Charlie]

I'm gonna start sex shaming. I'm actually gonna become a sex negative feminist now. I think I. This, this, this shouldn't happen. Don't do that. That's. That's wrong, actually.

[Matt]

Maybe not only is your ass fat, but it's juicy too. I can't wait to see that penis.

[Zoe]

Yeah, we've listened to all the feedback about how like your alarmingly young AI girlfriend, like won't sort of say the things that you want them to say. And we will fix that problem for you because you have great.

[Matt]

Yeah, yeah, we fixed the mental health. We fixed the serious mental health problem.

[Zoe]

Yeah, we solved mental health. So now you can have like weird pussy.

[Matt]

Yeah, it's like, guess what? We pivoted to TikTok, but that wasn't quite hitting. So now we're pivoting to AO3 and we're going to cure cancer after that.

[Charlie]

Not to keep comparing it to a content creator running out of ideas because, you know, that kind of hubris invites disaster. And I'm currently touching wood as I say this, but like to go like, I'm not making any money, I got to pivot to TikTok, I'm not making any money. I got to pivot to OnlyFans, you know, and in every case, if it's not making money, maybe it's just it's not a good product. Maybe you can only capture this kind of selection of like losers who are all sort of floridly unwell, you know?

[Matt]

Yeah. Well, the thing is, this actually reminds me a little bit of the article we read about Tilly Norwood, the very upsetting article. If you remember it?

[Charlie]

Yes, yes.

[Matt]

Sorry, I don't want to say about Tilly Norwood. That's imbuing the computer with personality. About Tyler Cowen's desire to molest a computer.

[Charlie]

Yeah, the virginal AI actress.

[Matt]

Yes, correct. Is that he. He noted that it's like. Well, look, like it or not, it's coming. And what I. What I can see about. About again, about, like the ongoing deluge is now, you know, we. We already looked at OpenAI integrating payments, integrating shopping, integrating Etsy, integrating Walmart. They're trying to replace the entire Internet, but with something that only ever reflects things back to you. Right. That makes communication, as I always go back to. That makes communication completely impossible.

[Charlie]

Have you heard the story of Narcissus, Master Wayne?

[Matt]

Hey, you know what? He could buy everything he needed from Walmart from inside that pool.

[Charlie]

You know, reach right in. What are you stupid?

[Matt]

Yeah, reach in. Grab the thing that you're wishing for and then you're fine and you can jack off to it.

[Charlie]

Also, we must. If you have to imagine Sisyphus happy, we have to imagine Narcissus masturbating.

[Matt]

God. And also, what I also love is then, you know, I often look at sort of your standard, like, you know, your standard Internet smart guy, Matt Iglesias, Nate Silver, these. These people, the stupid smart guys, the brainiacs.

[Charlie]

Sure.

[Matt]

Yeah, yeah. You know, the classic. The classic nerds. I like to see how they react to AI not creating God yet and real. And every time one of the AI companies is like, all of their cancer curing rhetoric is undercut by their porn conversation and so on. Nate Silver said should save this for a newsletter. But OpenAI's recent actions don't seem to be consistent. Company that believes artificial general intelligence is right around the corner.

[Charlie]

I don't think that guy's coming back with my money.

[Matt]

I better not leave here in case the man who asked if I had the confidence to let him borrow my watch, if I go somewhere else, he tries to find me. Yeah. So, you know, this is where we are. And again, there's another Goldman Sachs report that was released today, but it was a Goldman Sachs sell side report. It just says AI investment levels colon sustainable.

[Charlie]

Your money colon fine.

[Matt]

Yeah. The money is not being touched. It's not being molested. It's safe.

[Charlie]

Like. Like Tilly Norwood. The money remains ever virginal.

[Matt]

The money is as young as. Or as old as you want it to be.

[Charlie]

Some shit that Donald Trump was writing to Jeffrey Epstein.

[Matt]

Goldman Sachs basically says rising AI Capex is not A concern. They say that investment levels are sustainable.

[Charlie]

And I'm closing this leather portfolio that I have in front of me right now. And I'm pivoting my chair around 180 degrees to go. Okay, cool. What's the next thing?

[Matt]

Yeah, they say so long as AI deployments are boosting productivity. Which they aren't.

[Charlie]

No.

[Matt]

And that so long as that productivity keeps getting boosted, all of the money being spent on COMPUTE will be saved in productivity gains. Which so long as that happens, it's fine. Okay, but.

[Charlie]

Okay, sure. See, I've I. Based on these three variables, all of which, by the way, are nonsense, I've mapped out a trajectory directory where we're fine.

[Matt]

Yes, exactly. So, you know, the. And I just. I just love taking what the AI companies are thinking about, what they're integrating with and matching it up with financial projections. Now, admittedly this is not a rigorous method. Right. It is a Vibes based method, but it is nevertheless interesting.

[Charlie]

It is. It is the method that, for instance, any kind of investigating, kind of short fund would do. Right. Like it's to be like, hey, hey, does any of this seem to add up on a first pass? And then you kind of dig deeper, Right?

[Matt]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Charlie]

And then that's when you start hiring private investigators to follow Sam Altman around to see if he has like a kind of worried look in his eye.

[Matt]

To see if he was a magician. Yeah, to see if he was ever a magician.

[Charlie]

See how much Huel he's drinking. I'm going through Sam Altman's trash looking for like, protein powder.

[Matt]

Do you know that, by the way, that guy, Serhat Gumroku, two weeks ago was found guilty of murder.

[Charlie]

Wow. You know, I actually wasn't keeping up with him, so this is a total surprise to me. Yeah, no, he was like, magician found guilty of murder. Like in the prestige, you gotta make sure you get the twin too. If you don't get the twin, it's fucking over.

[Matt]

If you don't get the twin, then you basically haven't gotten any of them.

[Charlie]

Yeah, he's gonna do the ball thing when you kill him in prison, and then basically he's gonna come back. I don't spoil the prestige.

[Matt]

Yeah. So here's the thing. Here's the thing. I want to move on a little once again, and to note that we've got a few sort of things we can spin around. I. The thing I want to start with is, of course, a greeting from the ongoing look. The American century of humiliation.

[Charlie]

Oh, boy. I hope it stays In America, because if we had a century of humiliation, I don't know what I'd do.

[Zoe]

I would say, don't friend me of a good time.

[Charlie]

A century of it, you say.

[Zoe]

Interesting.

[Matt]

So the American century of humiliation appears.

[Charlie]

To be a guy going to a dominatrix being like, yeah, I'd like to pay by the century.

[Matt]

Yeah, could I pay? What would that be like? I guess it'd be more than like, 100,000, I suppose it would be millions.

[Charlie]

And millions of pounds. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be, what, like 36,500 overnights.

[Matt]

So, by the way, if you ever want to do a job interview in November, that's how you can practice the quantitative interview question.

[Zoe]

Yeah.

[Charlie]

I applied to like the KPMG graduate scheme and they asked me, like, how long, how many overnights for the dominatrix would you need in the new British century of humiliation? You know, it's just a quick maths question, but they put all this language around it to obscure it, to see how quickly you can sort of pick it apart.

[Matt]

Yeah, that's the trick is to actually write the numbers down. Anyway. So look, this is the American century of humiliation is taking place against the backdrop of the. A rising industrial power. Right. However, the UK century of humiliation is taking place against a. What appears to be US and America. America is to us as China is to America in terms of centuries of humiliation. And it's really, really, it is, it is quite something to see. I'm of course referring to the recent video of Trump and Starmer interacting at a recent. I believe it was a Middle east peace summit.

[Charlie]

He loves doing it. He keeps doing it on purpose. And one of the few things that Donald Trump and I agree on is that it's. Is that humiliating. Keir Starmer is funny.

[Matt]

United Kingdom. Where's United Kingdom? Where's my friend?

[Charlie]

Where come there?

[Matt]

Everything going good? Very good. That's very nice that you're here. These people all came on like 20, 20 minute notice and I think it's fantastic.

[Charlie]

He looks. That is Donald Trump just looking around trying to find where Keir Starmer is. And even when he's looking straight at him, he kind of doesn't even know. And then Kia thinks they're about to have a conversation and Trump just disappears. Probably to tell another story about Steve. We agree that it's funny. We agree that he should keep doing.

[Matt]

Yeah, you know what, what are the Chuck Schumer things to say to Donald Trump is, you know, well, he's busy declaring the Democratic Party domestic Terrorists or whatever is to say, Mr. President, get off the golf course and do your dang job or whatever is his job.

[Charlie]

To me, this is what I want him doing seven days a week is thinking of new ways to psychologically destroy Keir Starmer. When he made him walk back from that podium, Mark Carney was laughing at him. That's the level of humiliation we're operating at. And I think we can do better or worse, depending on how you think about it.

[Matt]

Yeah, ye.

[Charlie]

We could be getting laughed at by, like, so much lower rent countries than Canada.

[Matt]

Yeah, we could. Like, I mean, Italy. Giorgio Maloney definitely also like laughed and then whispered to someone. It was, it was. If you go through life, I would say, with a burning hatred of Keir Starmer in the same way as we do, it really is the gift that keeps on giving that Donald Trump is the one man who has the power to wish him into the cornfield.

[Charlie]

He used to pray for times like this, you know, like he, he got everything he wanted in labor. He became prime minister with like this kind of like thumping majority, and it has all turned to ashes in front of him. And admittedly, like the whole country burning down and us all being herded into the camps and everything is not great. Right. But sometimes you have to pay a little bit of price for your spite and, you know, whatever.

[Matt]

By the way, his newest prize for that is tied with the Greens in a recent poll.

[Charlie]

I mean, listen, it's, it's time to get a lot more Green with it. I've been saying this for a while, like, that's it. Because every day some more your party shit comes out. I'm either a member of your party or I'm not. I don't know. I guess once someone tells me, maybe I'll just join the Greens. Because the thing is, I had for the longest time an instinctual revulsion. Not revulsion, that's too strong a word. But I had an instinctive aversion to it because I'm like, I'm not a Green, I'm a Red. Right? Like, I, I am, I am a communist. I don't want to sort of like be in, be in a party with a bunch of like, Birkenstock wearing solar panel enthusiasts. But maybe, maybe do at this point.

[Zoe]

You know, Birkenstocks are nice. They're like, they're pretty. I got a pep recently.

[Charlie]

It's not that the thing itself is bad. It's that the combination of all of these things is kind of signifiers is something that annoys me.

[Zoe]

You know, all I'm saying is they're very, very cozy.

[Charlie]

More of a Teva woman myself.

[Matt]

The thing that I notice most in the kind of transatlantic madness exchange. Right.

[Charlie]

Is it a continental ballistic madness?

[Matt]

Well, quite that. Reform UK seems to be like looking for their horsed we wrestle moment. And the right wing press, you can tell, is lining up behind that narrative already.

[Charlie]

I gotta say, nobody shoot anybody. Like I've been saying this for a minute. I like to think I've been consistent on it. Don't do it, please. Like, the last thing I want to wake up to after, you know, armed police kicking my door in is seeing on the news someone in a trash future T shirt, like popping off majorly illegal style. And the new the news analyzing what the fuck they meant as they sort of like, you know, stand up, katana in hand, covered in some like poor fucking chuds, like, viscera being, like, what did they mean by. What if your phone was a guy? You know, that's my nightmare. I never want to see that happen. So if you are inclined to violence, please get into like MMA or something. Don't. Don't do violent political action.

[Matt]

Yeah, that would be like November. I think you've said this before. I'm the most anxious man in show business.

[Charlie]

Listen, I am not Jodie Foster. I will not be impressed.

[Matt]

Right. Jodie Foster's one thing. That's a horse of an entirely different color. No, Reform UK seems to be trying to take this moment for themselves anyway.

[Charlie]

Of course. Well, you saw some people with like RIP Charlie Kirk placards at the thing and then some fucking sad yank bullshit. But like, it would, it would be absolutely something that they would leap on here. Like, I don't have any doubt in my mind.

[Matt]

And they have to the extent that Nigel Farage seems says that calling him far right, basically inferring that he is outside the political norm at all, is inciting violence against him.

[Charlie]

Yeah, sure. I mean, at this point it's like you are inciting violence against me by not voting for me, you know?

[Matt]

Yeah. This is the core of the belief that they are wanting to take into government, basically. Right. Which is the same belief that the. They're looking at the US they're looking at like Trump using the IRS to go after like Democratic donors and stuff. They're looking at how the state has been particularly like weaponized against people who it's not often weaponized against, you know, like other competing elites rather than like people who are supposed to be kept down by it. And, you know, they're they are very clearly aiming at doing the same thing and they're going to do it by. They're going to justify it by saying, oh, there is a left wing terroristic threat brewing. And I always go back to is, you know, who gives them the fucking like, who's giving them the legal cover to do it is the people who prescribed Palace Palestine action.

[Charlie]

Of course. Yes, absolutely. It's like again, there's this kind of both because they want to do it in themselves and because they think it makes them look tough. The Labour right are absolutely going to hand them the keys to some of the most repressive the British state has been internally in the last couple of decades, let's say, which is saying something that's a high bar.

[Matt]

And recently, right again, this is the closest they have, which is they claim George Finch, the baby leader of a council in this Warwickshire, isn't it? Yeah, Warwickshire, yeah.

[Charlie]

He is the Warwickshire guy because we talked about him and to be clear, when we talked about him, we did not say do violent political action against that guy. We were pretty clear that you shouldn't.

[Matt]

I think, I believe we talked about him on no Gods, no Mayors, where we also didn't say that.

[Charlie]

Okay, yeah, yeah, okay. It's going to be nice to know exactly which podcast I'm getting spuriously arrested because of.

[Matt]

Yeah, you know, this is Mr. Finch, right. He says, he says he was attacked out of the blue, a bit like Edward Corostein big balls in D.C. with a sort of perfectly timed, very convenient attack to, let's say, underpin lots of narratives about like, oh, how dangerous it is to be a conservative or white or whatever. And he says it is clear that the man who attacked us was wound up and sent into battle by the dangerous rhetoric of labor and the Greens. I'm extremely concerned.

[Charlie]

What the fuck are labor doing? Like, labor have got their like tongue so far up reform's boot that they're shitting shoelaces. And the idea that they are sort of like inciting violence against them is magical.

[Zoe]

Yeah.

[Matt]

And the politicians they follow know this, but are willingly allowing it to happen. They have a duty to speak out and quell the increased threat faced by my friends and colleagues. And again, there are politicians inciting people to acts of stochastic terrorism in the uk Although apparently now to point out who those politicians are is inciting stochastic terrorism against them. It's almost as though this kind of fascist turn at that level makes certainty about anything utterly impossible. It makes it utterly impossible to express anything other than what you can do with power.

[Charlie]

Nobody must allow the creation of a British big balls. I think that's the key point here is that is an American. That is a particularly American political horror that cannot be visited on us.

[Zoe]

Yeah. There is a guy called Massive Bollock somewhere and he's just like, yeah, Massive.

[Charlie]

Bollocks is gonna get his phone stolen by like two guys on a moped and they're gonna send the paras in to occupy London for six months. That's a little preview of the future for you.

[Zoe]

I mean, I was gonna say that Massive Bollocks is like probably a guy who was like interviewed by the Daily Star like, you know, a decade ago for having massive bollocks and also just like liking a brand of crisp. And now and we find out 10 years later that his name is still Massive Bollocks. But he's like been sort of like, you know, radicalized and is kind of. Did you. This is like a caveat, but like it's been in my head for so long, but I do need to. Did you see that headline with Bonnie Blue basically saying that she would never have sex with a Calais refugee?

[Charlie]

Yeah, she went the lobe that exists in regressibly every British person that can just unpredictably make us go like, fucking. I am a turf stop for boats or whatever that just tripped, just activated. It's very, very troubling.

[Matt]

She walked past a particularly powerful magnet.

[Zoe]

Just happened. Bonnie Blue demands UK stop the boats as she won't bonk illegal immigrants. Yeah. This is basically what I mean by.

[Charlie]

Like, who Big Bollocks is a single sip of pre workout.

[Matt]

Yeah. She's going to join the department for local of local Government efficiency. She's going to become like. She's going to join Dolge.

[Charlie]

Yeah, the Dolge. Starting lineup. We got Bonnie Blue. We got Massive Bollocks. We got the guy who shoved the road flare off his ass.

[Matt]

We got Captain Gas.

[Charlie]

I don't want to impugn the guy who shoved the road flare up his ass because I don't know, maybe his politics are better than I'm giving him credit for. That's a real Captain Gatso. On the other hand, day one. Yeah, yeah.

[Matt]

Oh, yeah, for sure. This is what I go back to, which is the people who are taken most seriously are some of the people who are least materially interested in the material things of governing. Because. And actually this is where I go back to thinking about, you know, like China and trade and everything.

[Charlie]

China doesn't have a massive bollocks.

[Matt]

You know, they don't have a box. They don't need to do that.

[Zoe]

I mean, there probably is a guy, there probably is a Chinese massive bollocks. And he's probably like really, really big on like Chinese TikTok.

[Charlie]

He's on red note where he belongs. Not in government, you know.

[Matt]

But what I've been thinking is that these increasingly unreal representations of, of political life that are, that are just, I would say now exponentially growing in the US and the UK are, you know, and they have been doing this for a while. I often think of them just as a, a direct symptom of the inability of our economic system to fulfill its various promises. Of the inability to, to deliver growth, of the inability for investment to be returned profitably. Right.

[Charlie]

Thinking of, thinking about Bo Blue getting Stealther boats as a distraction from her inability to deliver on her promise of banging a thousand strangers. It's like. Well, I'm. Well, I'm sorry, but the numbers simply aren't there, you know?

[Matt]

Yeah, she gives her a November statement.

[Charlie]

Doing PMQs, but it's Bonnie Blue.

[Matt]

Yeah, yeah. Because there's this political imaginary of whether it's shadowy enemies or sunlit uplands or the boats or all of these like related phantasmagorias, you know, it's all worth talking about just the unreal economy of the global north versus the increasingly real, well, increasingly versus the extremely real economy of China, which is causing now, I think increasingly, and this is like regular direct interventions from the state and the economy, at least in the US's case, for example. Scott Bess price flaws. Yeah, well, for critical, like for rare earth minerals now, you know, by the way, you could just harvest those from the gym bros. All of the US's rare earth minerals are like inside Joe Rogan experience listeners biceps doing a kind.

[Charlie]

Of like dialysis to get all the platinum out of them.

[Matt]

You know, we're sticking, taking the gym bros in a big centrifuge and there's a gram of precious cadmium in each one. Lead, follow or get out of the way. So basically though, what happens, right, which is we don't have expanding industrial capacity anymore. We have contracting industrial capacity, we have growing financial capacity or in some ways we have growing fictional industrial capacity in the sense of like data center build out.

[Charlie]

This is the beautiful thing, right? If you think about this on a kind of, as a narrative of a few days, decades, right? Or even like a century, right? We worked out that you can have infinite money if you just, if you make up a number and Call it debt, but that works so long as you never actually start caring about what the debt number is. And then we started caring about what the debt number is and we fucked ourselves. So we were like, we don't need factories, we don't need anything that makes anything. All we need is infinite number go up because, you know, debt isn't real. And then we convinced ourselves otherwise.

[Zoe]

So we're blaming those like right wing rows, blaming those Republicans who like funded that billboard to show the US national debt, like in Times Square.

[Charlie]

Yes, as being a kind of like partisan paramilitary fighter for John Maynard Keynes and being like, these are the people who fucked our economy as the cartoonists drawing the national debt on something foreboding.

[Matt]

But it's also not, it's not just the national debt, it's also the private sector as well. Because at the end of the day, right, we live in a real world. And if you need a battery, let's say you're in a battery having competition in the first person to have a battery wins. It doesn't matter how many times you can sell and resell bits of it and pieces of it and rights of it to Somehow make a $10 battery worth 10,000 in various tokens and fucking futures contracts and bets and gambles or whatever. Ultimately, if you, if all of your industrial, if all of your productive capacity is directed towards fine tuning those various like imaginary things that have imaginary relationships with actual production, then ultimately the guy who makes the, the battery wins. And there's only one country in the world that has a major economy that has massively expanding industrial and labor capacity. And like the enormous impacts of, I mean, I think really Trump too, in the way it's diverging from the EU and the UK to a lesser extent, is a response to this reality. I mean, and I think that the departure of our politics into the realm of the now comically unreal is connected to this phenomenon. Because as they need to do more things to counteract forces they can't admit are there, then the more unrealistic you have to be. So like, for example, for example, right, the narrative of infinite growth in the US with the US is the consumer of last resort and China is the producer of first refusal works as long as, say, China is a place where you can do enormous wage arbitrage and there is an infinity of frictionless supply chains between the US and China and the US and the China and the eu, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right? But that's just not, and we talked about this in the show before it's worth raising again. That's just not the case anymore. They have the rare earth to make the batteries, but they also make the most advanced batteries. And crucially, what they didn't used to do before, but have started doing in the last sort of 10 or 15 years is increasingly they are now the people who are inventing the next most advanced batteries and their domestic consumers are buying the cars powered by them. While the US and their client states try to continue to establish the political legitimacy in a growth based system with exclusively fictional ways of engendering growth. And where the last place that they were able to get relatively, they were able to square that circle, they were able to do that fudge was with that Chinese wage arbitrage. Arbitrage. But guess what? It doesn't work anymore. It doesn't work anymore. That's gone.

[Charlie]

Listen, you might be saying that I'm losing the have a battery first competition, that in many ways you are losing the have an AI girlfriend who's a slob but also a virgin competition. So I think maybe you should like reflect on that a little bit.

[Matt]

And the thing is, right, if you want to talk about the death of neoliberalism, which I think has been now happening for a while, since COVID certainly, but even since before that it was sort of falling apart since the financial crisis, since the accession of China, the WTO you could even say was its pinnacle and everything after that was like a step down from it, right? Is that the us, the Global north, sustaining its consumer economy based on that relationship, was also building up the industrial capacity of China. And now guess what that contradiction is resulting in the economic model of China sort of coming piece by piece to places that have been trying to resist it with every subsidized solar panel, you know what I mean? Then the Global north can either resist it as the US is going to at the expense of living standards of people in it, right? By slapping and suddenly completely eliminating that wage arbitrage, you no longer are able to have the cheap consumer goods, which means then now either wages are going to have to go up, prices are going to have to go up, you can't export that conflict anymore. And so they're trying to resist it. And you know, and so basically living standards are going to crater, or if they don't want living standards to crater, then they have to begin accepting that they are now neither a producer nor a consumer of last resort, but they are now a country on the periphery of another, another one. Basically. I don't know if they're going to be, I don't think they're going to be able to do that. I mean, Bidenism and Trumpism were both two different ways of trying to respond to that. Bidenism was trying to be like, well, we can make some tweaks to try to make the sort of competitive like non state capitalist model kind of work well enough to like, for example, massively subsidize certain strategic domestic industries like solar panels. Or you can do the Trump thing, which is. That's woke. That's gay. I'm only going to hang out with oil executives and like, you know, guys who are trying to make themselves immortal with the computer. And we are going to be so ideologically captured that we are just going to try to fight this every step of the way. And you know, either one, right? You're like the, the idea that, that neoliberalism will deliver high enough living standards to maintain broad enough legitimacy in the population to stay at least vaguely supported, in both of those cases, that idea goes away. So.

[Charlie]

But I was really enjoying this. Like, you're telling me that instead of the century of burrito tax, it's actually going to be the century of humiliation?

[Matt]

Yeah, I'm afraid so.

[Charlie]

Fuck. We got like the decade of burrito taxi.

[Matt]

Yeah, well, and that was, that was all part of that transformation, right. The thing that drove the. One of the things that drove interest rates so low in the early 2000s was with China in the WTO. They were. There was a huge amount of money flooding in and then Chinese institutions needed to save. Where do they save treasury bills? What happens when huge amounts of money goes to buy treasury bills is the interest rate in treasury bills goes down. So then everyone who needs to, needs to find yield, right? They look elsewhere at riskier and riskier assets. So that's one of the things that causes the financial crisis.

[Charlie]

Well, I'd like to see you find a riskier asset in the British government right now.

[Matt]

Yeah. And what I get back to is, for me, as I think about these things a lot, is that the more this becomes a material factor in people's lives and not something that is studied by academic economists as something that may happen, then the more insane the stories have to become, the crazier the domestic enemies hidden in the shadows have to be, and the more fanciful, and also the more, I would say, let's say vigorous those denunciations will become. Because nothing works, because you're King Canute trying to fight the tide. And instead of Normans coming, what will happen Simply is that you're going to use bigger and bigger and bigger swords to fight a tide that just won't stop coming. And what we're seeing with, like, the, I don't know, Donald Trump's change of refugee policies to be like, if Europe. If you've been shadow banned in Europe, you can come over here, right, for that.

[Charlie]

The poster of refugees I cannot wait for woke to purely on the basis of getting the exact opposite of the most spurious, the most tendentious, the most like, penny anti online bullshit finally being applied in my favor for once in my life. Getting the, like, red carpet, no questions asked visa to the US for life. JB Bretzker. All of my enemies are sort of like, banned for life. Please. I need it to happen quite badly. And here's the thing. If that were me, I would be thrilled. None of these guys even seem happy. They're getting random Paraguayans banned from the US for, like, tweeting, damn, looks like Charlie Kirk is shit at Gun Fu or Gun Carter, you know? And like, that's a miserable existence. I would be having more fun with it than that.

[Matt]

Sorry, November. You were thinking of Donald Trump who said that?

[Charlie]

Yeah, he did say that. But the thing is, Donald Trump is not, to the best of my knowledge, Paraguayan, and therefore was not banned from the US for life for saying this.

[Matt]

Oh, what if he was?

[Charlie]

Las Malvinas Paraguayas.

[Matt]

Folks, this is what's been on my mind, I guess, is that these collapses are so, so deeply connected to one another.

[Charlie]

The polycrisis, if you will, which is not what I call it when my girlfriend and my partner don't get on because they get along quite well.

[Matt]

Yeah, this is good. But it's something that we talked about before, and I think it's worth restating that when another brick of neoliberal price controls, for example, Right. Is ripped out and thrown away, it's worth restating that. That is why politics seems. Politics as they're experienced by people seems so crazy is because you are literally watching a system in its death throes. You're watching something in terminal decline.

[Charlie]

Are you saying that famous quote from poem, dying new struggles born, things of this nature.

[Matt]

Yeah. No.

[Charlie]

Are you doing that one? Yeah.

[Matt]

Now is the time.

[Charlie]

Now's the time of Paraguayan Donald Trump.

[Matt]

Yes, that'.

[Charlie]

That's the rough beast that slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

[Matt]

Now it's time, I think. You know what? I think I want to talk about the cybertruck owner, please. I'll save the Antichrist Stuff for another day. So this is an article in Wired by Zoe Schiffer. Spit on, sworn at and undeterred what it's like to own a cybertruck.

[Charlie]

Unbent, unbroken and unbound.

[Matt]

Unbent, unbroken and burnt. Quite badly burnt.

[Charlie]

The thing is, the way things are heading, if somebody gives you the thumbs down as you're driving your cybertruck, you are now a US citizen and the US Armed forces will be deployed to your location to protect you.

[Matt]

Yeah, you have American consular protections abroad. They've built the Star wars satellite system just to send a titanium rod down on anyone who looks askance at a cybertruck. So this is a series of interviews with people. What is the craziest interaction you've had with someone while driving this car? Answer. A while back, I went into Whole Foods to drop off an Amazon package. I usually wear work boots because I do construction. So I go in and of course, lady with an electric Mustang comes and puts this note on my car.

[Charlie]

It reads, damn, this lady is mocking you already. It sounds like.

[Matt]

First of all, the note reads, this truck is an extension of your small penis.

[Charlie]

Yeah, go off.

[Matt]

She doesn't know these cars record 24 7. So I actually was able to find her after she left. Why?

[Charlie]

What the fuck is wrong with you? Just take that in stride, you fuck freak.

[Matt]

Well, hold on, hold on here.

[Charlie]

I was able to find her.

[Matt]

It's like.

[Charlie]

Oh, I just. The thing is, she didn't know that my car actually has a built in stalker mode. That means that if anyone within 50ft of it frowns, you get their Social Security number.

[Matt]

So this. But this is when. This is when this guy, who is an undercover, just like either Facebook or like verified Twitter replier or whatever, puts up his index, middle and ring finger to order three drinks instead of his thumb, index and middle finger because he says so.

[Charlie]

Is that a reference to a movie?

[Zoe]

I don't.

[Matt]

As in orders the beers wrong. Like an Inglourious Basterds.

[Charlie]

Yeah, that's dead. There's the way that I would make sense. God damn it.

[Matt]

Okay, please cut me missing that.

[Zoe]

Is that what the meme's about? Wait, is that what the meme's about?

[Charlie]

Thank you for making that uncussable, Hussein.

[Matt]

Bless you. God damn it.

[Zoe]

I was. I've seen that being shared and I've like. I haven't said anything because I feel like, kind of embarrassed about.

[Charlie]

Did you say that you had some kind of imposter syndrome?

[Matt]

Were you suggesting. Do you think the meme was just about when there's three of something.

[Charlie]

If you haven't seen the movie, you haven't seen the movie, you know?

[Zoe]

No, that's the thing. I have seen the film, but I saw it, like, when it came out. And so, like, I've sort of, like, forgotten, like, what the.

[Charlie]

What does he mean by this? Yeah.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Zoe]

Oh, that makes a lot more sense now.

[Matt]

No German would ever order three of something. Those nice even numbers.

[Charlie]

Would you ever do two or four?

[Matt]

Yeah, right.

[Zoe]

Oh, amazing.

[Charlie]

Okay.

[Matt]

All right. She says, you're driving this, and I'm offended. You're a Nazi. So. Yeah, you're driving this and I'm offended. Yeah, that's definitely the three finger order right there. Like, no one talks like that. So we start talking and she says, well, I saw you get out of your truck with your boots, and you're a big white man. And I guess I just assumed because Elon's a Nazi, you fit the profile. I stopped her and said, I'm Jewish. Okay, so you just accused. You just accused me of being a Nazi when I'm a Jew, and you just said your wife was Jewish, so I'm assuming you're gay. Is that a safe assumption?

[Charlie]

Merely because I was driving the fucking Mercedes Benz Hitler car to the store, you assume that I'm some kind of Nazi, realizing this is. This is a plot point legitimately in the nonverbal good remake of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World, Rat race.

[Matt]

So. And I was like, well, you do realize you just profiled me based off the vehicle I drive and me wearing work boots and being a big white guy as being a Nazi when it's something completely different.

[Charlie]

This guy, I assume, is very anti profiling in all other respects.

[Matt]

And then she broke down in tears and apologized.

[Charlie]

Damn. That's how we heal. Our divided society is owning the libs. Charlie Kirk is up there in heaven smiling down at you. Yeah.

[Matt]

So another person. How do you feel about becoming a political lightning rod? People occasionally just flip me off or whatever, but nobody's come up to me and tried to make a statement that's kind of dumb. But it's just a vehicle. So it's ironic that it ever become a political. A political statement, but nonetheless, it is. And then the best editor's note ever comes next. Editor's note. Taylor was arrested and pled guilty to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding in the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

[Charlie]

Yeah, that's maybe a little relevant detail there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Matt]

I'm basically. I'm basically not very political.

[Charlie]

Apolitical.

[Zoe]

Yeah, yeah, I just got.

[Matt]

Look, I got lost on the tour.

[Charlie]

This is the reform thing again. This is like doing you. You retain for yourself the privilege to do, like, violent political action, cast yourself as apolitical, and anyone who, like, doesn't like it is doing violence at you. You know, basically, I was a victim of terrorism when someone gave me the, like, thumbs down to my cybertruck.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Charlie]

I mean, I think it's very bright of all these, all of these, again, survivors of domestic terrorism to go out there and put on the record that they're staying strong. You know, they're not letting this sort of define them apart from the part what they do.

[Matt]

Roger Davis, Age not given job, entrepreneur. What do you like about the truck? What I love about the truck is how it's so polarizing.

[Charlie]

Oh, this sick little fucker loves it. He loves getting the thumbs down.

[Zoe]

Yeah, I bet this guy is politic. Yeah. I bet this guy's politically homeless as well.

[Matt]

Right.

[Charlie]

I mean, to be fair, right, if I see you in the cybertruck and we enter into the chess battle of the mind of, I give you a thumbs down and you start jerking off, you have bested me, you have won in that environment. You've beaten me in the marketplace of ideas. I'm sorry, this is sort of my.

[Zoe]

Question, like, whenever I. When I. When I've seen this story, because it was just like. Well, I'm very sure there was a time where, like, it's always been the case that there have been people who have used their sort of purchasing power to buy, like, obnoxious things in order to sort of, like, assert themselves in a world where they know that they're being dicks and they are deliberately doing it because they have enough money to sort of, like, move in the world in a different way.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Charlie]

They're called cannon owners.

[Zoe]

And the cybertruck is really sort of like the kind of the sort of contemporary product to do that. Right. It's like this massive car that doesn't fit, let alone on sort of like European roads. It doesn't sort of fit on most American roads. And so it's deliberately designed to basically be able to kind of take over roads and public space. Anyone who drives it can't actually see anyone beneath them, which is also part of a design. It's just, like, really sort of garish and obnoxious. It is like the thing that you buy if you have loads of money and you just want to tell people to go fuck themselves. And there was a time when people did that. And they would actually sort of really be thrilled by people being annoyed with them because that was the whole purpose of it. And now it just sort of seems to be the case that. And I don't know how sincere it is, but it is just like, oh, these people don't like me for having this fucking obnoxious and completely impractical vehicle that just annoys everyone and they shouldn't be allowed to be annoyed with me. But it's like, no, you do want them to be annoyed with you.

[Matt]

Like, that is the reason why you bought it. Yeah, right. Well, are you married? They ask. I was, but I'm not anymore. Women do not like this car.

[Charlie]

Okay, if you just said, no, sure, fine, whatever. Lots of people get divorced, but only some people get divorced, if you follow me. And the people who are divorced with a capital D are the people who say things like, yeah, women don't really like my epic truck.

[Matt]

In July, Tesla rolled out a software update to integrate GROK into its vehicles. Do you use it? I think this is like whatever the opposite of journalistic malpractice is, is following up. Yeah, I'm like, mega divorce because I love my cybertruck is following up with the implicit question, do you have sex with the truck? Basically via the AI. So, Zoe Schiffer, congratulations on doing the opposite of journalistic malpractice.

[Charlie]

Yeah, you gotta, you gotta ask if he's doing what, what Sam Altman calls a rotica with the truck.

[Matt]

You know, her name is Aura and I use her as a therapist while I'm driving. I'll ask questions and, and it gives really good advice. What's the craziest experience you've had in the car? And I can tell what she's going for, which is one time I fucked the car.

[Charlie]

I pre cogged this shit when I talked about him jerking off. I don't know how I did that. I just knew.

[Matt]

Years of experience.

[Zoe]

Yeah.

[Matt]

So in June of this year, I wanted to put the truck through its paces. The Rubicon is a very famous 22 mile off road trail that takes a few days. I decided to be the first cybertruck to cross it. I built out the truck, I spent $50,000 kitting it out and then went. So three days into the trip, five miles into the trail. It was way more difficult than I could have imag imagine. On the third day, I was coming down the hardest part of the trail and I just finished and I was in the vehicle by myself and I was driving along a little stream and all Of a sudden, through the trees, I felt the light hit me. And I'm gonna call it a miracle because it was. Imagine if you're flush, like how your face blushes, but over your whole body. And then I just felt the presence of God. Deep peace and love. It really broke me down and reset my life at that point.

[Charlie]

Okay, sure, man. He came in the truck. He came in the truck. I died in the truck.

[Matt]

Either he had a tia, Like a mini stroke, or he came in the truck. So, look, that's. That's the people who own the Cyber truck. A lot of the people who have them, who I didn't read from, a lot of what they do is they're, like. They'll, like, keep, like, toys in the truck to give them out so children don't, like, yell at them.

[Zoe]

Okay.

[Matt]

All right.

[Charlie]

Yeah. Maybe there's an easier way to signify that you're going to do that. Maybe you could get like a. Maybe like a custom sort of paint job for the cybertruck that just says, like, free candy or something. Thing along the side, you know, just.

[Matt]

Speed that right up. Yeah, make it white.

[Zoe]

Just.

[Charlie]

Just. Yeah, make it. Make it black out all the windows. Like, missing tail light, something like that. Real dirty as well. And then if you just, like, drive around real slow by schools, playgrounds, whatever, then. Then I think the left will be forced to concede to your epicness, you know?

[Matt]

That's right.

[Charlie]

Christ, at least that guy's only jerking off to the truck, you know? Then again, the truck was only built a couple of years ago, you sick fuck. It's like two years old.

[Matt]

You know, I think that's probably all the time we have for today, but I want to thank you, of course, as always, for being a Patreon subscriber. I want to thank you, my lovely co host as well. Thank you for being my co host.

[Charlie]

Absolutely. I mean, listen, this is an educational service we like to provide where we brighten your day a bit, I hope, and also teach any of you who didn't know what that one meme from Inglourious Basterds was about.

[Zoe]

Yeah, thank you for, like, just getting me out of the dark for, like.

[Matt]

What has been months I once was lost.

[Charlie]

But.

[Matt]

Anyway. Anyway, look, so we'll be seeing you on the free episode in a few short days. Bye, everybody.

[Charlie]

Bye.

[Matt]

Bye.