TRASHFUTURE - I Hear You Move Carpets

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

Riley, Nova, and Hussein talk about the trials and tribulations of trying to give every job in the world to a computer, as “Agentforce” fails to materialise, discuss Jan Marsalek (finally), and look at a terrible new startup. Also, a new Political Son rises… and this one is a soundcloud rapper. Get access to more Trashfuture episodes each week on our Patreon! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I did the research for a No Gods No Mayors episode and I had to read one million small town newspaper articles. Amazing. I feel like No Gods No Mayors and Trash Feature are converging in that sense. Yeah, that's right. But I'm just reading more and more, harder to access local journalism. Yeah, I'm trying to get the Riyadh Gazette so I can see who's been fired from Neom recently. Yeah, weirdly in Riyadh it's the New Shopper.

It's like an entirely advertising supported publication. It's the only non-regime-pilled paper in Riyadh. I do like the idea of a British local newspaper struggling here, so they open up a Saudi version of it. Oh yeah, like New Shopper Neon? Yeah, or like the Kent messenger Dubai. I feel like everyone who works on the Kent messenger currently wishes they like lived in Dubai.

So yeah, it's like this is dangerously plausible. I love that. It's like you could easily like, you know how the Saudis love going in around and like buying prestige brands. If you just judge the Kent Messenger up a little bit. It's like a football club, right? Where you're like, well we've got some new investors and all of a sudden it's printed on the most expensive paper you can possibly get.

Yeah, that's right. What if the Kent Messenger was printed on the stuff that that monocled newspaper is printed out of? Yeah, I thought it was weird that the New Shufferers hired some of the most expensive journalists in the world. But it's got to be like a low level Saudi, not as low level Saudi prince, but just like a Saudi kind of rich kid. Oh yeah, like one of MBS's cousins who has a real passion for local journalism in the

South London area. Yeah, and we're just like, look, there's a newspaper called The South London, no, The Non-League, oh my god, now we're cooking with gas. The Saudi-owned Non-League newspaper. Or the Saudi-owned South London Press. The Saudis have purchased, like, the... Well, it used to be, like, the Brighton Argus would be a Non-League newspaper, but they've been really, really good in recent years.

What you get is, like, the same local news photo of pensioners standing pointing angrily at a pothole, but it's photographed by Annie Leavitt. That's how we're going to save the British news industry. Someone should go to one of the fucking news conferences where they talk about, oh, we just need to do more ads or newsletters and be like, no, fuck you, everything's going to be bought by Saudi, and it's all going to be printed on the good quality paper, but the monocle like, ski magazine gets printed out of, I don't fucking know. I thought it was weird that the new shopper has a how to spend it section.

I also thought it was weird some of the things that they were writing about Yemenis. I mean, this is the things that they were writing about Yemenis. I mean, this is the thing, right? Like the new shopper English is fine. That's just like straight journalism for Christy, but the new shopper Arabic, some of the stuff that's in there. Well, it's crazy. The new shopper English is actually like, if you want good reporting on the English speaking world, you really have to read that. Yeah. Although it's crazy. It's crazy that their documentary about the activities of the Kent Labor Party in 2019 was suppressed. Hello everybody. Welcome to TF. It is Nova. It is Hussein.

It is Riley. Yeah, so TF Saudi edition. Yeah, we've been boss out. The audio quality is 10 times better. You can hear distantly the sound of Nate getting bone sword in the back of his shoes. Yeah, it's very funny because we already have pretty good audio quality. It would be like, no, better. Better.

We're like, everything's we've got like gold cables. Yeah, exactly. You know what? I like the idea we are an audio file podcast now that you like have to listen to with like a headphone amp. Only comes out in like flak. Yeah. The dream is like, yeah, but Dream is like your listeners.

It's like, I really disagree with everything they say, but damn, the audio quality is good. You can't, you can't fault them on that. Yeah. But what it is is you don't listen to it at home unless you're like a billionaire. You go to like a hi-fi store and you ask for a demo. Like one hour a week, two hours a week, you ask to like sit in their fake living room and listen to an episode of Trash Sheet feature while they dial in different sassings. They just do doing like the THX ad. Oh yeah check out how high the bass on this can go.

As you get the theme song and you get start taking notes that blasts your app. Weirdly that the only two differences. One is the audio quality is amazing. Number two, they're actually really bullish on Neon now. They think it's going to go great. No, I'm going to welcome us all to the show. Welcome to the show, everybody. Yes, welcome.

I hope you enjoyed that three minute bit prompted by me remembering the name of my local newspaper when I was a kid. Yeah. We're going to be focusing a little bit more on tech and finance stuff today. We're going to talk about the politics a little bit more on Thursday. No, the tech and finance stuff today, we're gonna talk about the politics a little bit more on Thursday. Uh, no, the tech and finance stuff is fun. There's so much politics and it keeps outpacing our ability to part about it.

Yeah, well, that's what we're, we're going to give ourselves and the listener one where we talk about a new sun that I found. Okay. You, you promised me a son. That's interesting. I'm willing to kind of, much like a medieval monarch, right? You, you gave me a son, that's interesting. I'm willing to kind of... Much like a medieval monarch, right? You give me the promise of a son I'm willing to put up with some shit for a little while

longer, right? Yeah. I promised you a son, I promised you a startup. I'm finally getting to the Jan Marsalek article. Okay then, okay. We're gonna talk about the, I would say, wholesale collapse of the rule of law on Thursday. Yeah, well, because by then it will have collapsed some more. Like, by Thursday, fucking like, Mark Carney will be leading a flying column that's gonna

take over like Yonkers, New York or something. Okay, before we do that, Mark Carney now saying, yeah, we're completely dropping the carbon tax, which by the way was like an important... Canada's a huge producer of greenhouse gases. That was probably pretty important. But just like there is no center left, like liberal, whatever you want to call it party in the global north that is that ruthless about beating their opponents to their right as the Canadian Liberal Party. Like they couldn't sacrifice Liz in the US. They couldn't sacrifice Liz Cheney, the guy whose dad was behind the theory of the unitary executive, which is basically how Trump is doing everything he's doing now. They're like,

no, we're with her. We're not going to sacrifice Biden. We're not going to get rid of any of these people. We're not everyone is going to stay put. Yeah. No daylight kid. Meanwhile up North, we are going to ritually sacrifice Justin Trudeau so we can get two points off of Pierre Polyam. We are going to roll coal to own the Conservatives. Yeah.

I've become increasingly, just, I mean, obviously because I am Canadian, but just as a sort of weird outlier, I just like to keep up with it every week. But before we get to the sun though, it is other sort of parties that let's say can't learn. Like if Rachel Reeves was in the Canadian Liberal Party. It might sound a little something like this. Oh, I'm going to make the moral case for austerity. Eh? No. That's just Krista Freeland.

Well, I'm going to make the moral case for austerity as well as the foundation of the nation of Galicia. Yeah. That is what Christopher England sounds like. That's our accent. We got to expel the polls from Galicia. Hey, no, no. So Rachel Reeves yet again, I don't know how she took another freebie.

Hmm. Yeah. She went to a Sabrina Carpenter concert or something. Yeah. And then I forget who it was, but one of these kind of chinless freaks was like, no it's fine because honestly she probably doesn't even like the music so it was just a bribe. That's better, right? She was going for corporate relationship building purposes, come on!

This is something that should work in Britain if you're like, well okay obviously everyone in government is hopelessly corrupt, but it's crucial that you know that they're miserable. They're not having a nice time either. That should work. And yet it's like no no no, that was too far. And even the other argument is just like she probably doesn't have time to go with her kids because she's so busy being the chancellor. It's like, I don't care. Anyway, anyway, I'm using in contrast to the liberal party of Canada, which seems to have no problem dragging its sacred cows up to the top of the stone temple pyramid and then sacrifice them. I'm mixing my continental metaphor.

Neymar Rachel Reeves is like at the Sabrina Carpenter concert, like going back and forth in her head about whether or not to just kill all disabled people. Yeah, which again, we will talk about along with the abolition of NHS England and stuff like this on Thursday. Bring me my son. Yeah. Just to, just for Americans who think, how come you're being so calm about the abolition of the NHS?

This is not the NHS. It is a like administrative layer between the, between the NHS Trust and the Department of Health. Yeah. Although, how come you're being so calm about this as kind of an apt question for almost any of this stuff, and the answer is because it's a comedy podcast, right? And we can't... Because, like, if you... It's like Wile E. Kai Ozu, right?

As soon as you acknowledge how bad any of this stuff is seriously, you just get overtaken by a kind of months-long fugue of depression much like Wile E. Kyose. When he looks down and then stops getting out of bed. Yeah, for real. But the NHS England, I mean it was it's like created in 2013 as a management layer between the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS Trust. These people do want to abolish the NHS, it's just they haven't yet. Yeah. This is like, they abolished, they did something that to an American sounds like abolishing the NHS, which is definitely gonna be consequential, is worth talking about, but we will in a couple

of days. I need to ask you both right now, if you think that Cali is the place to go when your life is growing mold, you need your time to shine and glow- When my life's growing mold? Yeah, if your life is growing mold. Am I living in one of like, Jazz Atheros' flats? Yeah. It's a catalyst for artists, I swear.

A jungle of snakes, so just beware. Give you some tips to help prepare, gotta embrace you, or you'll have a nightmare. Okay, first of all, buzz. Second of all, uh, yeah, I do think that... I'm always saying this, yeah. Especially the mold thing. This is the creation of the sun that we're gonna be talking about.

It's one of the most beautiful relationships in the world between a father and son and that it produces such idiocy sometimes. We are of course talking about Howard Lutnick's son, Kyle. Yeah, this is so cool. It's like Trump's like, I'm gonna start a trade war with Canada and my point man on this is gonna be this kind of like, aggressive moron who crucially has,

uh, like a Kyle, just on deck in the family. Yeah. He has like, Kyle, also known by his hip hop name, KXTZ, once rap. Kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kext-kextK-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K- you know, with your kind of like modernist lens, you're like, Oh, that guy's just rapping. But actually, he's experiencing like serious divine presence. Until I run the game, KXZ once wrapped, I've got everything to gain. This is from Bloomberg. That's that's so real, honestly. This is from Bloomberg. The 20 something wasn't kidding. His real name, Kyle Lutnick, is the son of the Wall Street billionaire

who just became U.S. Commerce Secretary. It's like, yeah, the guy in charge of replacing the service based economy that the, again, the United States economy was, as we've said many times in the show, wasn't good. It wasn't good. It wasn't sustainable, but it also wasn't a kind of autarchist fantasy, right? Yeah. By its own terms, it contained the seeds of its own destruction, certainly, but it seemed to be kind of rolling on well enough until it had its meeting with destiny in the form of Kyle's dad. Yeah.

So, Kyle's dad, Howard Lutnick, is now the Commerce Secretary, obviously, used to be in charge of Cantor Fitzgerald. Going to be thinking of him this way the whole way through the trade war. Now, here's the thing, right? This isn't just a son who's just a SoundCloud rapper and like he's just an embarrassing son. Yeah, cause that's funny, but it's like how much son-ness is there, right? Which son does not have a secret SoundCloud account?

Hmm, that's true. That's like a filial passion, you know? Like, if you're a son these days, you gotta have one of those, I feel like. Yeah. I mean, it's a long tradition of political sons, including Eric Adams' son. Not just political ones. I mean, probably with the podcast dynasty, it's only going to be a matter of years before, like, all of us have sons and all of those sons have Soundclouds. I mean, I have a son and he does have a Soundclouds, so yeah.

He moves fast. Like, cornering the market first. Yeah. You're teaching your son, be like, no, you have to really, you have to learn to rap over electric guitar. It's very important. And shouting is just a kind of rapping. Rap rock is the most noble way of expressing your feelings. That is what I keep saying to him, yeah. And like, you know. In the womb listening to not Mozart, but the Linkin Park Jay-Z like, dual album. That's right. That's correct. That explains so much about him.

Anyway, yes, please continue. This is his real name, Kyle Lutnick, son of the Wall Street billionaire. This is from Bloomberg, by the way, who just became US Commerce Secretary, the guy in charge of turning America into an autarky. Now, Kyle and his younger brother, Brandon, have been elevated to the top of their father's sprawling financial empire. So they've been given control of Cantor Fitzgerald. These two kids. Yeah, I saw this. I saw the photo of Kyle and Brandon looking very uncomfortable in suits in a boardroom. Every single sort of of square centimeter of that room is more expensive

than anything I've seen in my life, and they look terrified. Yeah, they're having... this is definitely the highest they've ever been. The article goes on, Kyle's Stanford University roommate gave him his start in music, according to a thank you on one song that said the friend had moved on for music and was now in the crypto world. Cool. Quote, it's not as fun as being a rapper, but we all have our vices. I mean, yeah, sure. I just, Kyle and Brandon, it just, there's a real generational thing here as well, right?

It's not just these guys, it's also the Doge Teens and stuff. Or it's like, there's a real feeling amongst these people that like, even though, you know, the top level like Trump or like, they're like decrepit personally, their like, shithead sons or would-be sons are like, willing to take the reins and if anything are like, more pilled than them. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, it's even like, if you want to talk about sons, Gavin Newsom's son got him into podcasting for exactly that reason. Yeah, absolutely. It's supposed to him into podcasting for exactly that reason.

Yeah, absolutely. It's supposed to work the other way around, you know, the father is supposed to get the son into podcasting. Yeah, what the hell? So basically these two, along with like three other people, are now like comprising a pentarchy that's in charge of Cantor Fitzgerald and its subsidiaries. So it's like, the repercussions of this, when they inevitably mismanage this because they're distracted by like SoundCloud beefs, are gonna be like, oh, your pension no longer exists.

Because that was managed by, like, one of- Kyle. Yeah, it was managed, well, like, Kyle owns the thing that manages the thing that manages the thing that manages your pension. Yeah. So with Canterfit- so Canterfit's Gerald is a little bit of a funny one. They're a huge investment bank, but they do kind of niche stuff. So for example, they were like the main custodian and counterparty of like Tether, the cryptocurrency that created billions

of like stable coins out of nothing. Right. They also have a brokerage. They own a lot of commercial real estate. And so it's like, it's a huge investment bank, but it's not like they gave JP Morgan to, you know, Lil Pump, basically, which would be funny. And I think they should do. I mean, I agree at this point. Yeah. So Brandon, 27 is now chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and Kyle, 28 executive vice chairman of the parent company. He's not continuing to wrap cause he could like sort of call himself Lil Pump and Dump. That would be fine. Very good.

I was a lot more depressed by the knowledge that Kyle is 28 years old, as well. That feels like, that's a uniquely grim age for a Soundcloud rapper to be, I think. Oh, certainly. Yeah, cause, well, he put out his songs, like, from what I saw, like, when he was in his early twenties, right? Mmm. Yeah, that's a normal Soundcloud age. Unless he's, like think. Oh, certainly. Yeah, cause well, he put out his songs like, from what I saw like, when he was in his early twenties, right? Mm, yeah, that's a normal SoundCloud age. But like, if he's still doing it now, that's... Yeah.

...cruppling. Existentially so. So that's, it's harder to say. Most of his releases are from earlier, but there's no reason to believe that he's stopped. This is like a top level briefing that like, any finance minister in like a G7 country is getting now, is just like, oh yeah, by the way, the commerce, Cirque du Soleil's kid, like, the intelligence community assesses with like a high probability that he could still be rapping.

Yeah, so, suspect is dropping bars. He could drop bars at any moment. Yeah, he has a breakout capability, but for raps, right? So what he is doing, so he's the executive vice chairman of the parent company that controls the bank, as well as a brokerage that they own in a commercial real estate firm, and also Tether. So Kyle started his career in 2016 as an intern, and the brokerage is for an exchange desk. Then he went to go intern for Scooter Braun the talent agent who like managed Taylor Swift

Jesus Christ and then in 2018 again, this is all what he's like a baby You know, he goes he goes in is a good rapping baby gets another job Again with his dad's companies at the commercial real estate firm and then was global managing director of flexible office business. However, what he was mostly interested in was rapping, singing, directing, and being a nightlife figure who blends hip hop and electronic dance music, whose main claim to fame outside of business after that is he helped redevelop a rival to Soho house in London. Oh my god. Called what? Called Old Sessions House.

Sounds fucking terrible. Weirdly, I've been. Uh huh. And how was that experience? Did it blend the nightlife and corporate life experiences for you? I went to their restaurant, which was fine. It was massively overhyped. Uh huh.

You can see, it's weird, they were constantly playing a kind of low level white boy rap over the speakers. Yeah, whenever the servers came they did hand gestures with all the orders. So, it's a notel, it's a flexible office business, he gets promoted to managing director, and then notel starts trying to develop a rival to Soho House, immediately. It's just, it's succession shit, right? You can just go play with these jangling keys, and one of the jangling keys now is Counter Fitzgerald. Which is, I think, instructive for how seriously all of this stuff gets taken, you know?

Oh, absolutely. It's like, they're moving more money around than any of us will ever see in our lives at any one time. And it's just kind of a, I don't know, soft play area for Kyle and Brandon. Yeah, well, yeah, that's how I saw it as well, right? If you know that in the history of investment banking, this kind of thing used to be way more common in like the 20s. Like an investment bank would be like the American version of, I don't know, a barony

or whatever that you would hand to your sons. But it's the 20s again, so it comes back around. Exactly. Like Lehman Brothers, for example, that was a business that was started by three immigrants in the South, like three Jewish immigrants in the South who were selling like tools and seeds and stuff to farmers. Started like, then they started lending money and they just passed it father to son for like four generations until like that model just stopped working with too many sons

when are there too many sons? yeah what one of them became a ragtime piano player it was very embarrassing under William McKinley you could you could pay five dollars a, or five dollars a month to hear a wax cylinder of three wags talking about the ragtime compositions. Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's just ridiculous. It's classic that the son of the guy who's in charge of implementing McKinley-nomics, which also was about turning America into an artarchy to be fair, is playing ragtime

piano and trying to start a gin joint. At some point we will have gone to the well of previous historical era trash future too many times. But that day is not today. Yeah, no, absolutely not. I believe it will never come. It never ceases to fill me with delight. You're like JD Vance mode, you've got the big lollipop and the propeller hat and you're

filled with whimsy. Back to the lyrics before we go. He says, rap grew up with fathers like EZ Dre and Big E too. And I'm not trying to change the game or disrespect the legends, fool. Uh huh. Well, thanks for clarifying that. I was worried that this guy might be about to disrespect the legends. He's like, hey, you know, you may think that my father has basically just purchased my success, but like me, rap also has fathers.

The worst part is, it's not as if that's an impossible needle to thread, because it's one that childish Gambino has, right? Like, it's just this guy can't make it land of like, my father is grotesquely wealthy. My father invented new kinds of credit product that are like, specifically designed to fleece the elderly, and now I'm writing, we gotta make our art our bride, and keep our nose to the grind. It was? So true. You gotta make your art your bride.

You gotta marry, rap. You gotta marry the game. Yeah, okay, sure. And you gotta- once you've married your art, you gotta keep your nose to the grind, live by the do or die, and live for the ones who died, riding with the ones who try. Who- who of Kyle's boys has died? Like what? How?

What? Like a- like a polo accident? Skiing accident? Yeah, like getting killed by Agent 47, like some other 1% cause of death. I do have a question which is, not having listened to this, only having read the lyrics, how are the beats? I would say, who say, you listened to it most recently. Yeah, it's weird, it's sort of like, I don't know how to quite describe it. In the 30 second sample that Riley sent me halfway through, like a visit was very weird, like over bass, like something that he's just turned the bass up way higher than you expect.

It just kind of comes off as really weird. I don't know how to describe it. Like pulling a dial. I don't know how to describe it other than just like it just sounds like something you would make on Fruity Loops like for about an hour. I don't know. Like describe it other than just like it just sounds like something you would make on Fruity Loops like for about an hour. I don't know. Like that's kind of it. It's sort of it's very generic in one way, but it also feels very sort of out of place.

You know, any case, maybe if we sample it in the episode, people can like make a judgment of themselves. We'll have the outro music be a California roll by KX to Z. I'm giving it one Pinocchio. Wait, cause it's false? Facts checking. Fact checking my enemies rap. Yeah.

Well, you know, it was sort of between like, it's a, it's a pitchfork style review, but with Pinocchios. Pitchfork hiring all the fact checkers away from meta. Well, he did go with Sheldon Adelson's kids to see a SpaceX rocket launch. Maybe that's how his friends die. Yeah, turns out one of them died like face down in an infinity pool. So like, you know, pull one out. Sorry, Sheldon Adelson's kids.

Sheldon Adelson's like great grandkids. Anyway, Sheldon Adelson's 90 year old kids. Yeah, they're hanging out with Richard Evans. The 56 year old. He should get into rapping. I think maybe rolling deep with a bunch of 90 year old war criminals. Yeah. Yo, this is the son's posse. All of us are bonded by the fact that we are sons. We got, we got rich, the kid rich, the honorable, of course, and then we have shelved nails since 90 year old son. We're the, we're the heirs to the Wu Tang clan. You get hit by a beam of sunlight. Bam. I'm going to go

discover I'm going to be the scooter brawn of the sons. I'm going to be a super group. Yeah. The house of the rising sons. David Solomon is our DJ, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Anyway, anyway, look, there was another thing I wanted to talk about as well. This is a little bit of like the AI update, I guess you remember one of the last times they are still doing that. One of the last times we talked about AI and we talked about, okay, well, I guess if Deep Seek is going to make it so that language models in general are sort of cheaper to train,

then American hyperscalers, their next best chance is applications. Stuff like agents. And if you recall, AI agents work by variously taking screenshots of your computer and then kind of semi guessing where to put the mouse. It's right 80% of the time, but it will order a dozen eggs, which now costs like $40,000 to like an address in Dubuque you've never been to. Yeah. Yeah, there we go. Just table setting, right? At that point. So the other thing is that

Salesforce, one of the world's largest technology companies, which basically is for managing customer relationships. If you're a big company and you have lots of different clients, you manage your relationship with them through this thing, Salesforce. It's one of the largest technology companies in the world and so on and so on. Yeah, sure. And they are experiencing a little bit of a downturn. They're perpetually experiencing a bit of a downturn, then they buy another product that revives their fortune. So some years ago they bought Slack. Oh, so in that way Salesforce works a lot like my mental health in the sense that it's

always declining until they buy something and then it goes up for a second and then starts declining again. Yes, correct. But now they're trying, basically they got a bunch of activist investors on their board a few years ago and they were like, you're not allowed to buy anything anymore. The sort of intervention. Yeah, they got an intervention. And so what they've done now is they've been like, okay, we have to be cutting edge on the cutting edge of AI.

And Mark Benioff, the CEO was like, okay, well, what we're going to do is we're going to rebrand ourselves as agent force where we're not just going to be how you store your customer data and how you organize your campaigns of customer contact and all this stuff. We are actually going to automate that for you. Do the interaction. Yeah. We will be the ones like do the phone calls, but the phone call will be like an AI. Yeah. Precisely. You won't just... And it won't just generate your email for you. It will handle cycles of customer interaction for you entirely automatically. That's the table setting. You think it might be kind of dangerous to a business whose deal is kind of like consistently

being able to warehouse that information and interact with it for you to hand it all to something that doesn't work. Well, you would think so, but what if it did work and there were no problems? Oh, well in that case I would be a fool in clown shoes. I would be a moron. I would be a fucking idiot. Yeah. You'd be donning the barrel of an oath if that was to be the case. Yeah, absolutely. However, Mark Benioff, who is actually one of tech's more oafish leaders, uh, perhaps by the end of this segment, Mark Benioff shall be donning the barrel. The Cooper is on standby. The two of you are

to find out, find out which one of us gets, which find out which one of you donning the barrel. The Cooper is on standby. The two of you are to find out, we find out which one of us gets, which one of you dons the barrel of the oath and the other wears the crown of the prescient. It says, yeah, the Cooper's kind of like dual skilled. You can do both. Yeah. God, it's, um, well, crown's just a hoop, you know, shape wise. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, you have to have a really big head or it's more,

more of a kind of sort of metal belt. So Salesforce CEO, Mark Benioff has a long track record of navigating Salesforce successfully through economic downturns and other business challenges. However, Agent Force is appearing to be a tough sell. Wouldn't you know it? Crazy. I'm, I'm feeling comfortable about my, my sort of like barrel situation here. Yeah.

The barrel-ometer is there's a big barrel-ometer with November on one side and Mark Benioff on the other. Yeah, weirdly Jeremy Vines there. There's a big like 3D map. So Salesforce is pitching this artificial intelligence product as, quote, digital labor that can replace humans for tasks such as developing sales leads, creating marketing campaigns, and so on.

And this is a multi-year effort to redefine the company's mission and make money from agents that automate menial, repetitive white-collar work. However, a Salesforce manager talked to by the information said many customers do not seem ready to commit to using the software for many reasons." Yeah, cause it doesn't work. I feel like this is a real dagger at the heart of the few cubicle jobs that remain. You know?

Oh, absolutely. You're kind of like real office park style job, the one that's like, I'm a middle man between the big repository of sales data and clients or whatever, and yeah, I think that's very sad because, you know, Office Space was a great movie, The Matrix was a great movie, and if you try and insert a chatbot into either of those, it just doesn't work. Well, basically what you would be doing is you would be recasting Kevin Spacey from Glengarry Glen Ross just as the computer. Is Kevin Spacey in that?

I thought it was Alex Baldwin. No, he's Williamson. He's when... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. You think you could work with men? He gets chewed out by Al Pacino in one of the greatest like rants. I like Glengary Glen Ross. The whole movie, not just the first, not just the Alec Baldwin bit.

It's the only bit I remember. Yeah. It's that's the bit that's just for like people whose entire YouTube history is like that the Alec Baldwin scene, the Matthew McConaughey scene for Wolf of Wall Street. And then every episode of the diary of the CEO. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, you could just replace Kevin Spacey in the movie with a computer and you'd have Jack Lemmon just like trying to suck up to like an old Mac classic. So some early agent force customers like staffing agency, a Deco have touted the software's ability to automate certain customer support responses.

Others say they have received AI hallucinations while testing how the software handles customer service inquiries according to another person who does business with Salesforce. Yeah, it's like, I wanted to know how many fucking crates of commodity that we needed in this business quarter. You can tell I've never worked a real job. We need to know X number of things. Instead what it did was order us 15,000 eggs to be distributed to random locations across the country.

Yeah. You wanted these distributed from Zeppelin, yeah? Yep. Without a parachute. All the way down. It was weird in like early 2025 when the Zeppelin egg bombing started and then we traced it all the way back and it turns out it was Salesforce. Yeah. You heard the Matt Classic, give him hell. And also it's like there are other technical reasons where to use Agent Force you need to like pay a lot of money to connect their product to your databases.

Yeah, well like the AI that decides to start doing egg bombing raids is expensive in and of itself. And it also requires a lot of infrastructure, which is expensive. So you've got to pay for this quality. Well, this is very amusing. Agent Force is probably powered by OpenAI. It's more ambitious than any other feature,

aiming to take actions on customer behalf and replace human staff for certain types of roles in marketing, HR, IT, financial analysis, and so on. IT support is terrifying, right? Because that's like, you could just prompt hack that so easily, right? You could just like say, hey, am I allowed to install virus.exe? And depending on what it's looking at, that could in theory be very easy. It's fine. I'm sure this isn't like hooked to anything important.

No, no. Just all the commodity, all the crates of commodity? Well, they're no longer moving around the world, right? It doesn't matter. So some Salesforce customers say they privately, they are concerned about the cost associated with with Agent Force as you have to like buy huge amounts of other services to use it. And it costs $2 for every customer service conversation its AI handles. That's so much money relative to like a human. And the other thing is, right,

in terms of the broader economy, right, this needs a lot of kind of stuff around it to make it work. A human intercessory here also needs a lot of stuff around it to make it work, but it's stuff that is like economically beneficial, right? Like you need to build an office park from office space. It probably needs like, I don't know, stuff around it needs like restaurants around it

so they can go like have lunch break somewhere, right? It's all stuff that like goes back into the economy rather than to this kind of like black hole of more AI shit that just burns more money. The computer doesn't need to eat lunch, so, you know. You know what I always remember? Early on in the like, AI boom, it was argued that, you know, you say AI's bad for the environment, but it takes a human writer more carbon from like, the food that they eat and like, moving around and living. Yeah.

To live in a society, you're fucking emissing like Helicarvin, sure. Yeah. But it's like I'm doing that in a way that is cool rather than the way in which you're doing it, which sucks. Well, yeah, exactly. I'm doing it in a way that allows me to be alive. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I suppose like it would be much more economical to just kill everybody and let the AIs just talk to one another. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, that's the fact that's like, well, we've got to do rockers, basilisk. That's

kind of it. That's the way you can only make... That's the only way this makes sense. The other funny thing that I enjoyed about this, in addition to people don't really want this technology, it's super expensive. By the way, it doesn't need to be that expensive because these things are not as expensive to run as it was initially believed. But it's really expensive. Rivals charge like half as much. However, because they need to keep their valuation so high, that doesn't matter. They need to keep their sales so high, it doesn't matter. And current and former Salesforce employees say there is a heightened urgency about the current campaign where they say that they have been using aggressive tactics to convince

customers to sign up for Agent Force or just force them to buy it as it's included in bundles of other services, even if they have no plan to use it. That's great for your business, right? If you get into Salesforce with the expectation that you're going to be needing a lot of client management or whatever from them, and all of a sudden it costs you $2 a second and doesn't work. Yeah. or whatever from them, and all of a sudden it costs you two dollars a second and doesn't work. Yeah.

It's that they're using it, and if I'm a client of Salesforce and I buy a bunch of other stuff, now what they're doing is they're saying, okay, by the way, you've also bought Agent Force. We've thrown that in. And then they say, well, chalk it up as another Agent Force customer. Yes, sir, the AI train has left the station. This is malware. This is the shit that they install on a computer you buy before you like, they have to scrape

off. This is actually, so what do we say? The sort of next round of like economic growth in the global north is to be predicated on something that is being distributed in the same way as my comet cursor. Yeah, pretty much like Bonsai buddy. It's like bloatware. Great! I love it. It's like bloatware. Great! I love it!

That's so cool! At least Bonsai Buddy, you had like a purple kind of ape. You could watch this, you don't have anything. You have an AI agent that will like misunderstand you and like commence the egg bombing runs. So, they say, most clients still have reservations about Agent Force, including its high price. But the bundling makes it hard to determine how much additional spend Agent Force is driving. One executive said, there's no telling whether they're ever going to actually use it. But technically, now they're an Agent Force customer.

Perfect. This is supposed to be the thing that 10x is all productivity that fixes all the problems in the economy. I reminded the fact that Keir Starmer was like, we're going to use AI agents when we revolutionize the government, right? Even going back to what I said earlier about NHS England, a huge part of that is they're like, there are 10,000 civil service jobs we can get rid of. That was announced around the same time that Starmer was like, if there is any job that a human is doing that an AI could do, we will have an AI do that job. And yet the people who are the early adopters

of this stuff, or considering adopting it for non-ideological reasons, i.e. I have a direct economic incentive as the owner of capital to exploit my employees more, to automate and de-skill their jobs if I can, and so on and so on. They're like, why is it shitty and expensive and doesn't work very well? Leave it to the British government. Let them take it. We've invented the steam loom that doesn't work. I mean, I'm looking forward to interacting with any British government department and then just getting like, when they reply to me like months afterwards, just getting like envelopes and boxes full of crushed eggs.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it wouldn't be that much less coherent. Exactly. At least in affect. Unless they specifically program this out because, or like prompt engineer this out because living in this country requires that everyone be miserable all the time. AI agents do at least have to sound nice to you, which is an improvement on most British

like civil servants. Yeah, because the AI agents will have gone woke. Mm, that's true. That'll be when you complain that the AI agents are being too nice to people. I'm almost certain that you're right about that. Not least because if you look at the things that chatbots and stuff say when prompted, that really upsets Nazis where they're like, oh, Grock is woke despite Elon Musk's best efforts or whatever.

Because Grock doesn't fucking know what a trans person is, but it has scraped a lot of stuff that is about trans people, so it's like, oh, they're probably like, human. And so that, like, you know, heinously triggers whoever's using it. It's gonna be the same, it's gonna be like, oh, the Department of Health is now run by GROC, but GROC is like, we should probably do, like, I dunno, some healthcare or something. Which is gonna be unacceptable. It's gonna be unacceptably woke. Yeah.

No, no, no, you're not supposed to help anybody. We need to, yeah, a really depressing stage stage of kind of like altering all of these models so that all the agents are significantly nastier. We need to Britishify this for domestic consumption. Well, we're going to keep an eye, of course, on Salesforce, but as the, I would say, the tip of the spear in terms of large companies trying specifically to sell an application of AI other than just we'll put AI and stuff. It seems to be going not amazingly. I'm going to do something we haven't done in a while.

We're going to talk about a company. That's a startup. This was sent to me by friend of the show, Shox. And I'm going to read from the founder's sub stack before we talk about the company itself. Ooh, okay. Okay, let's go. I'm going to read from the founder's SoundCloud. I promise you, I absolutely promise you, you will not know what this is advertising. Unless

you can think laterally. This is a bold claim, this is like, it's like one of the kind of like, interview questions that they're supposed to give you to work at like KPMG or something, it's like, estimate the number of paper clips in the world or whatever. It's not really... You don't really want to know what I think the startup is. You want to know how I go about solving the problem. So I'm going to read now. In feudal Japan, war was currency. Block coin. Let's go. A community's prosperity was only as good as its ability to defend itself. Because of this, the samurai were indispensable. Quickly rising to the most elite level of society, how is it possible that the samurai eventually fell from their perch of incredible value, both functionally and for what they

represented in their code of ethics? The answer? The gatling gun, a technological advancement for which the sword could not keep pace. Okay, we're doing gatling coin. Or we're reviving the samurai. I mean, it's about time. Given that we're heading towards everybody just hires a mercenary whenever they want, I feel like hiring a specifically samurai coded mercenary because you're a weeb is like, that's a growth market.

Yeah, we need to bring honor back into being a goon. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the hench app is, you know, it's only a matter of time before that happens. Yeah. Yeah, I mean the the hench app is you know, it's only a matter of time before that happens Yeah, it depending on what you're a as a sort of aspiring tech fascist, which science fiction world have you misunderstood? The satire of do you want a space marine or do you want like a cyberpunk street samurai? Okay, so patent pending right because we could absolutely do this We could become the like more soy Eric. We could be the person who's

like, okay, well, do you want a squad of Starship Troopers mobile infantry because you're convinced that Starship Troopers is anti-woke? Yeah. Or do you want some William Gibson, Neuromancer, street samurai guys? Do you want a drop pod of Ultramarine? They will be guys in like, you know, cardboard outfits with like foam and cardboard. With foam bolters, but we will send them to you. So industrialization arrived prior to the samurai having a chance to rebrand themselves. Yeah. The samurai just didn't have good, maybe they should have had agent force.

The old wartime currency of disciplined warriors transformed into a new currency of productivity and innovation, for which the hero was the machine. What the fuck could they possibly be selling? The balance between utility and admiration had tilted to the point of no return. While the samurai were still highly respected by those in power, it was not enough to justify their lack of utility. Why are we talking about the samurai? Because the workforce of today has information at its disposal past generations-

The workforce of the samurai of today and they're no longer relevant. Yeah, it's just like, in many ways the commute into the office is like the last bit of the last samurai. You're kind of, your honor bound ways don't matter anymore, you're getting mown down by madams. The salary man is the only person who really has like any sense of Bushido and that's about to be automated. That's about to be automated out of the way. Me and six of my compatriots have been hired to defend an office park outside

of Reading from a roving band of AI agents. We've been paid in rice. Yeah I will die for the wandering salary man values, you know? I'm a Ronin salaryman who's been given a chance to reclaim his honor. Walking around with an empty briefcase. The equivalent of cutting off your top knot. Yeah, you'll be getting a face tattoo, so you could never get another salaryman job again. It's just really sad, because occasionally you see bunches of masterless salarymen attempting

to recreate a prep from nothing, in the hopes that it'll bring back the jobs. Yeah, that's the thing, we had the work from home Meiji restoration, and now I don't care how many of these salarymen have grouped into their salarymen Shinsengumi. We're trying to expel the TikTok barbarians from city centers. This, this is not a tech finance politics podcast. This is a history podcast that's looking for an in to become a history podcast. I just like thinking about it. Anyway, so they go on. Because of this, today's workforce has an opportunity to elevate their standing past the point of reliance on the ruling class. Quote, once the samurai lost their state-granted privileges, they were largely forced to rely

on government programs designed to rehabilitate them economically. For some- Is this about teaching gig workers ninjutsu? Are they gonna be like, there's a number of hidden weapons you can use, so if the government does a sword hunt? It's actually a salaryman privilege to have a Mac book. And if you have one and you're not a salaryman, then you get executed. No, no, it's the Mac book and the cell phone in the holster. That's, that's the wakazashi.

But, but so like you can, you can emulate these things in secret with things that don't look like a Mac book, but have kind of like functionality like it. Yeah, you can have like two iPads that you tape together and then a Microsoft Sam. And then you can solemnly with two hands present a weekly status report. So here's the question that the startup asks. How can labor unions adopt Bitcoin? Shoot me in the side of the fucking head.

Sick. Okay. Read it again. I don't hurt bad enough. Uh huh. How can labor unions, sorry, I missed one word. How can labor unions adopt Bitcoin responsibly? Oh, there it is.

Okay. Good. Yeah, but Samurai would have survived if they simply just put, what if you put Bushido on the blockchain? I think this would have made the Irishman a very different movie. Just an aged up Pacino falling for a pump and dump. It's an aged up Pacino with broccoli zoomer hair. Well, there's the episode art if we can get somebody to Photoshop that in a hurry.

Hello? Slime? episode if we can get somebody to Photoshop that in a hurry. Yeah. Hello. I'm talking to you. Slime. If they can rug full of president. So welcome to proof of workforce, a non-profit. Fucking hell. Okay. I have one more thing. So, so what do you, what do you do, Frank? You know, I hell. Okay. I hate that. I have one more thing. So what do you do, Frank? You know, I move carpets.

I heard you move carpets. Well, that's the episode, so. There it is. There it fucking is. I thought it was going to be something about the suns, but nope. I heard you move carpets is what we're going to go with. Welcome to Proof of Workforce, a non-profit helping workers, unions, and pension funds with education-based Bitcoin adoption.

ALICE I hate the fucking stupid pun title, I hate the samurai analogy, I hate everything about this. ZACH Yeah. Also, I always love that, like, in the Bitcoin world, the most important thing you can be is a Bitcoin educator educator because what you're actually doing is providing exit liquidity to people who already have Bitcoin and need to get real money. Yeah, it's a really important role in a Ponzi scheme is to be the guy who recruits more Ponzi scheme victims. Yeah, and so this is a charity that said, what if labor unions and like retirement funds and stuff, what if they were the exit liquidity? Well I mean consider this right if they don't go for this if they if they stick with their traditional salaryman values that money is getting

invested by Kyle the SoundCloud rapper. This probably this is accurate. You want to front-run Kyle probably doing this is not a bad idea. Yeah this is the between Scylla and Charybdis here. You don't have good options. So proof of workforce aims to empower unions, workers and organizations to discover ways in which Bitcoin can enhance their mission and wellbeing. Now of course, if you actually look at all of this, the only thing Bitcoin does is go up in value. Of course, yeah.

That's the only thing it can do to enhance your mission and wellbeing is it goes up in value and then you sell it to someone or borrow against it. That's it. You find more suckers. So if you're a union, presumably that's then your members? Well it's that if you're a union, you would invest your members' dues, right? Cause unions have investments that they use to pay for stuff. I saw the Irishman. That would be... Like instead of building casinos in Las Vegas, it's just like, it's gambling. What if we, instead of building a casino in Las Vegas, we went to the casino

in Las Vegas that someone else owned because the player always wins. I hear. Perfect. Yeah. Should be fine. Yeah. So this is what Shock sent to me. It was IATSE Local 728, which is a chapter of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage, employees, moving picture technicians, artists and allied crafts has made history by purchasing its first Bitcoin investment directly according to a press release sent to Bitcoin magazine. This initiative approved by a majority of its membership was executed with the assistance of proof of workforce. IATSE Local 728 is a representation of proof of work behind some

of the best entertainment in the world. Their members work incredibly hard in motion picture and television lighting, ensuring the highest standards in the industry. They have now begun to explore an innovative network aligned with the values of proof of work and exhibited by its members. Lights, camera, bitcoin." So, is I actually just fully on board with this then? Well, at least that chapter is. Okay.

So, I mean, if it's just down at the chapter level I don't have to feel quite so bad for suspending an entire season of Kill James Bond in solidarity. Yeah. This is one chapter has done this. This is not a big charity, it's working with mostly firefighter unions, because the guy who's in charge of it was a firefighter union rep who got fully Bitcoin pilled. Yeah, he exceeded the kind of maximum amount of like smoke and toxic gas you can inhale

on the job and just kind of became like this. So yesterday, the CEO of Proof of Work, a guy called Dom Bae, announced that he's running for a seat on the board of the California Public Employees Retirement System for more exit liquidity. Because like national level social security was there. There's like ripping people out of it for having like a name that's longer than 10 characters or whatever. Now it's like, OK, well, at the state level also, we're also going to go to the casino. So he is running for a seat on CalPERS, which is this thing, which is a 500 bill.

I have a trillion dollar pension fund for two million public sector retirees. And his whole job is to take that 500 I have a trillion dollar pension fund for two million public sector retirees and his whole job is to take that $500 billion and try to invest as much of it as he possibly can in Bitcoin. So many people, oh my God, all these people are going to die, aren't they? All these fucking people are going to die or like they'll lose their money and die. He's also spearheading quote unquote education efforts. That means he's also trying to get the Wisconsin retirement system into being extra liquid.

Kind of like Bitcoin evangelist. Yeah that's what he is. And this guy is just sitting on like multiple boards of stuff. He says, now more than ever, pension participants and stakeholders need to engage with their pension funds. I'm running for the CalPERS Board of Trustees with the goal of being a conduit for education and transparency while advocating for the long-term health and success of our nation's largest pension fund." So what that really means, what's behind that all is like, oh yeah, they're your, you know, the same like gold, gold bug as them where they're like, oh, they're going to inflate all the money away. You need Bitcoin. Everyone else can have fun staying poor, but then we can all be rich because everyone's

going to get a Bitcoin, which I assume is going to be worth like $2 million at that point. Anyway, that is proof of workforce. I hate it so much and it makes me feel sick. Let's talk about Jan Marsalek. Right. Yeah. So, Jan Marsalek. Now, it's weird.

Whenever there's a big new investigation on Jan Marsalek, you have to sort out who's found out something new versus what is like widely known, right? So like, so like table stakes, Jan Maslach was a financier who was the guy behind Wirecard, which was gonna be like European PayPal, it was gonna be a whole thing. Like people invested a ton into it. And then it turned out that maybe that was not in fact, the European PayPal,

but three guys shaving a poodle at like a fake business address. Correct. And then it also turned out that he was kind of a Russian spy. Yes, but then it also turned out that he was being run by like every secret service in the world. Cool. And he had, he had, the thing that just finished the trial was he was employing several Bulgarian goons in the UK to aspirationally do, like, you

know, we're gonna poison Navalny with Novichok kind of stuff, but in practice turned out to be mostly be in the group chat thinking about that and bumbling around after dissident journalists and stuff. Yes. As it transpires, this was a group of some of Europe's greatest bumblers, which had a Wile E. Coyote as well. This is the thing. Because we're in this period of kind of rearmament and autarky

and stuff, Europe is discovering that we're going to need to build things ourselves because we can't rely on the Americans. And finally, what we've discovered is that we can't rely on the Americans for the movie Burn After Reading. We have to have a European Burn After Reading capacity. So, Marseilleck, this is from the investigation that's published in the Telegraph, but cites

a lot of the FT stuff that we've talked about. They did the most recent investigation. Marseilleck is currently on the run, having fled Europe in 2020. He's on Interpol's most wanted list for his alleged part in the fraud. I think we could just say part in the fraud. And is believed to be splitting his time between Moscow and Namibia where he is supporting gold mining operation. What the fu- why- what? Like, I would get like Dubai or something.

That man's like, nose is grinding all the time. Yeah, no kidding. Namibia, Jesus. Yeah, it's like illegal artisanal gold mining. Yeah, no, this is like Indiana Jones villain shit that he's up to. Like... He's stealing artifacts. Bond, we're sending you to the Namib Desert in pursuit of fraudster and illegal gold miner Jan Marsalek.

And also our contact is also Jan Marsalek. Yeah, it was weird, he had to do like a kind of dramatic monologue thing where he was playing both characters. I mean, this is, again, it's very burn after reading, and it's also just like, any real spy shit, it turns out, is either anti-terrorism guys grooming 17 year olds into committing atrocities, or being willing to, or it's just very, very strange people who are trying to play like five sides at once, you know? Oh yeah. So like Marseillec, it was quote,

cooperating with rival secret services around the world, including the Russians, the Americans, MI6, France, Germany, Belarus, and others. Like everybody who's working with, oh, sorry, there's, there's the list is longer. UK, US, Germany, Austria, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, France, Croatia, Hong Kong, and Turkey. What I have a number of questions here. Just everybody. I mean I get kind of like dipping into all of those like secret services like hospitality budget right that's why I get the Italians there because because you're like, okay, I obviously I'll help Italy do whatever, please get me some more nice Barolo, or whatever.

But like, it seems like a lot of work to keep all of this on the go at once, like I would be getting social anxiety pretty quickly. So some of it is, it's like being polyamorous but with intelligence agencies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some of it is like he was being run by the Russians, the Americans and the Brits. He then had contacts that he worked with either knowing or unknowing in all those countries. Again, I come back to my original question when some of this came out and he disappeared, which is how is this guy not permanently interred in a gold mining shaft in Namibia? The article did speak to some various people about it,

including Stas Plotinski, his FSB guy. It was like, look, if you work with us, then we will just keep you alive forever. That's what we offer you. I mean, I've heard worse insurance policies, I'll say that. Yeah, so it's like, yeah, he's just gonna be guarded for the rest of his life. But he's like hard to guard because he's a thrill seeker. He loves to wear Gucci gear in like the Libyan desert

to track sniper bullets. It's really hard to keep safe. Having fled to Russia to avoid prosecution, Marsilek now appears to be working full time for both the GRU and FSB together with Orlan Rusev, who lived in this like old hotel in like Yarmouth. he was running a network of gym Bulgarians in the UK. ALICE Yeah. This was so weird as well, because it seems like, first of all, they were infiltrated from the start, which is probably understandable if the guy who was in charge of them was also talking to the Americans and the British. But what they were intending to do was stuff like, oh we're gonna maybe like sabotage some

like US installations that are training Ukrainians, or we're gonna try and like kill Kristogorzow or something, and then nothing comes of it concretely? Oh yeah. It's like up there with the Sopranos for like like guys who mostly just seem to be sitting around talking about doing violence Yeah, that was the thing that struck me most about this is like they're they're sitting in group chats coming up with nicknames for them For like one another that's sort of like Why do I have to be mr. Pink? Mr. Brown is like mr. Shit

Mr. Brown is like Mr. Shit. But yeah, that is definitely like me if I was trying to do crime and I'd just be like to sort of bog down and like what my crime name would be and thinking about it more than and by the time you think about it enough, it just yeah, you kind of talk yourself out of it in some ways as well, right? Nobody wants to work anymore. That's right. Like everybody's got anxiety. When I was like reading this, I was like, why don't these guys just do a true crime podcast or

something because it seems like it would be more fun for them and more up the street. Because this is the difficulty I guess if you're the GIU or the FSB or whatever is that if you want to actually do something properly nefarious, if you want to nerve gas somebody, you have to send two really conspicuous Russian men who look like they came straight from the Spetsnaz camp. Right? Yeah, but they're actually from the local cathedral appreciations society. Of course.

Of course. That gay couple who came to Salisbury to appreciate the cathedral, yeah. But if you don't want to do that, if you want to get someone a bit less conspicuous, you just have to outsource that to Jan Marselek, who will hire some Jim Bulgarians. But also, right, they tried to send like their team to go and capture information from like the mobile phones of like the Ukrainians training at a German military base, right? And they were like, okay, a team on the ground is going to go on to tour in Germany for like one or

two days, an observation made of the entrance to a training regiment of Ukrainian soldiers, and so on and so on. And then they would say, okay, we're going to install like a big like credential catcher in an apartment, which like in this guy, Orlan Rusev just like built in his flat, you know, and they're like, okay, both the locations that we're going to try and put this like, you know, big net over appear to be US bases. We have to be very careful. And then, you know, they conduct all this like reconnaissance and so on and so on. But then it turns out that they're just like, they don't like turn on the thing. Like they just, I have an anxiety. Yeah. They're just like, oh yeah, there are too many cameras. We can't do it. You know,

so they says their entire base is surrounded by a fence with wire mesh on the, on the fence. There are cameras every five meters in both directions," said one of the guys working for Rusev wrote, using the nickname Jean-Claude Van Damme. In their communications, Orlan Rusev was known as Jackie Chan. Just like, you're some poor guy who's been recruited out of a pure gym because you look like you can do like a hundred sys-ups in a minute, and you're just like, oh, being a spy seems really hard. So Orlen Rusev lives in a 33 room converted hotel in Great Yarmouth but it was less of a family home than a horde

of spy gadgets. In telegram messages he described his house as a quote Indiana Jones warehouse packed with technology including listening devices GPS trackers radio jammers and disguises. Stick with the fucking program dude, if you're Jackie Chan you can't be Indiana Jones. You've gotta pick one. Others who worked for him included an esthetician, a lab technician who recently- Indiana Jones didn't have gadgets, he had like a wit. You're thinking of James Bond, what gadget shit was Indiana Jones doing? Well the esthetician recently had won an eyelash championship, and another the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, you're like, I am part of a deep cover Russian intelligence cell in the UK, and I receive orders from my boss, who's like, now wanted international fugitive, but it's

the guy whose idea of, like, a sort of successful business scam was the three guys shaving the poodles, right? Like, and he left his business card in your flat, and also your name is Jackie Chan. Well, yeah, and also the other thing to remember, right, is that the thing that made Marseilleck appealing to them was that a lot of the German intelligence services, as well as the Austrian, used wirecard for all of their prepaid cards that they would give to their agents., they did that with a company that was run by Jan Marsalek? It's just... It's just... I don't know.

Yes, uh... It's... George Smiley it is not, right? Like, there's... It's significantly dumber than any of the Le Corais stuff. So in their chats, Rusev and Marsalek made frequent references to Mission Impossible, Inception, as well as The Fast and the Furious. They should have just done a podcast! They just want to talk about films and like what

if they were in the films? Like what would they say to fucking what's his name Vin Diesel? We are doing improvised version of Fast and Furious taking through Andenburg a fringe. Twist is one of us is drunk. One actor is drunk. So, for example, any idea how to geolocate the Russian mobiles of those guys in Montenegro without asking the Russians for help, Marsalek was said to have asked Rusev one occasion. Seems like we can't trust the FSB unit responsible for this. This was one of the frequent derogatory comments about work-shy Russian agents being too drunk to have meetings at weekends to do their jobs properly. Marseillec liked to imagine with Rusev a future where he was higher up the chain in command saying in November 2021, one day I'll set up an office specifically to run special operations. So he's imagining that he's going to lead the whole operation. Yeah. Once I run this shit, he kind of is European Eric Prince here.

Like, yeah. So, but trial evidence shows that while the ringleader's ambitions were lofty, the results were often underwhelming. Yeah, you don't say. Like most notably, the guys they wanted to kill are still walking around and posting and stuff. The surveillance on individuals may have been intrusive, but it is unclear if it ever generated any useful intelligence.

The FT contacted two people who were targeted to ask about their experiences. The journalist said he was unaware of ever being tailed and says that while his pin code was stolen, the wrong pin code was stolen. So they, they like they basically like stole it. They stole the wrong pin code from his phone as they didn't know anything. Cool. A source with links to Russian intelligence said on his way to the airport, leaving, leaving Germany, Marsalek was really scared. Marsalek thought it was a movie that he could do whatever he wanted and nothing would

happen to him. When they came and knocked on his door, he understood he was not James Bond. He wasn't ready for this outcome with Wirecard. He thought he'd be uncatchable. But when it came to it, he understood that it is one thing to be cool, and another thing to think you are cool. Jesus Christ, all of these guys are such fucking nerds. Even the real guys, who you hope are competent are like, no, actually, I am cool. I am Jean-Claude Van Damme. Um, for example, he made several careless mistakes, I'll end it here. The flight had been booked using a Georgian businessman's passport, but when he arrived

at the airport, Marcelac, in a panic, forgot and presented his own, before being waved through anyway. Oh, what a time in the new European security infrastructure. It's gonna go great. Everybody on both sides is like this, I guess. Yeah, we're just... Burn After Reading was right, just about the wrong place, basically. Yeah, I think we've developed a spiritual successor, is the thing.

Yeah. Anyway, look, that's all the time we have for today. So I want to thank you for listening to this free episode. There will be a second one that will be coming out later this week. It will be on the Patreon for five American dollars or whatever that's going to be worth at that point, depending on what Kyle's dad does. We might switch to like Renminbi, not sure. We're going to switch to Euro dollars,minbi, not sure. Yeah. We're gonna switch to Eurodollars, like from Cyberpunk.

Hell yeah. Anyway, anyway. Thank you very much for listening, and we will see you in a few days. Bye! Bye! Bye! California Roll Cut Let's go

Cali is the place to go when your life is growing mold Need your time to shine and glow, need to climb up fast not slow Catalyst for all this I swear, jungle is thick so just beware Get some tips, help you prepare, gotta embrace your having nightmare and I'm out!