Elon Musk, Media Manipulation, and the Internet’s Toxic Chaos with Alan King

David Brown: 00:00:05

I think the thing that winds me up is this sort of attitude from the keyboard warriors that are like, oh, well, they don't know how to run a SQL query, and they're using columns that aren't probably used anymore.

And it's like, no, dude, do you think that he has people on his staff who are like some sweaty 16-year-old who's only ever worked in their basement on JavaScript?

David Brown: 00:00:25

Well, hello, everybody. Welcome back to My Crazy Uncle Dave's Podcast.

Today, we're going to talk about Elon Musk and people on the Internet who have no idea what they're talking about. And so to have this discussion with me, I have my friend Alan King. Alan, say hello to everyone.

Alan King: 00:00:41

Hey. Hello everyone. How are you doing?

David Brown: 00:00:44

Alan runs an AI group called AI Your Org. And just for full disclosure, Alan and I co-host a podcast with another guy named Ben called the AI Evolution podcast.

And so I'll drop a link in the show notes to that as well. Alan, or do you want to expand on that before we get started?

Alan King: 00:01:04

Probably just worth saying full disclosure when it comes to Elon.

I do have views, and I run a little sort of subgroup off our main AI group, which is we need to talk about Elon, which is obviously a play on the movie, "We Need to Talk About Kevin."

I'm not suggesting Elon's anything like Kevin in the movie, but you know, yeah, it's definitely a lively discussion, and we definitely get into some fairly, you know, explosive conversations around Elon and, of course, his friends Mr. Trump and co.

David Brown: 00:01:32

So you do. And that's one reason why I'm not in that group. I think I.

From the discussions that we had, and I know this is a little inside baseball for everybody, but from the discussions that we had in the general chat before you split off and had the Elon group, I think I was generally in opposition to a lot of things that people said, but I don't know if that's just because I'm being contrarian or if I genuinely have those, if I have those feelings. So, I think in this discussion, we'll get into that a little bit more.

Alan King: 00:02:04

Yeah, I think it depends if you're Elon positive or Elon negative. I'm going to say the group leans towards negative.

But I do flip-flop a bit myself, and we do get some positive views coming through as well because, you know, sometimes he does do interesting things.

David Brown: 00:02:18

Yeah, he does. Right.

So what started this rant this morning was I've been commenting on a thread on LinkedIn and again, I'll put a link to that thread in the show notes if anybody wants to go and have a look at it as well.

And it was based off a post where Elon showed a table that had the age ranges and how many people were receiving Social Security in those age brackets. And it's pretty much as you would expect. The largest group was like 30 to 39. And you know, it sort of goes up peaks there and then trails off.

But there are a whole load of records that are in like 170 years plus and 150 to 160 years and that sort of thing. And that, obviously, for him, raised some questions about why that's like that. And this isn't, by the way, the only thread that's like this.

There's tons and tons. It's all I've seen because I come from a data analytics background.

I ran teams of data analysts for nearly 10 years, all based around looking at data, looking at things like web analytics data and digital marketing information, ads, all that sort of stuff. And so yeah, so it's been lively in my feed.

And the thing that really surprised me, and that winds me up a little bit, is there's so many people in the comments saying, well, Elon obviously can't run a SQL query, and this is probably some column in the database that isn't even used anymore, among others.

And the thing that winds me up the most is that first of all, Elon Musk, whether you like him or not, he is one of the most successful business people on the planet right now.

He has several companies. Okay, they may not be making a profit on paper or whatever, but they are some of the largest companies in the world that are doing really interesting bleeding-edge technology stuff. He's the only one that's got a reusable rocket that works. He's not an idiot. And the people that he hires are not idiots either.

And I think the thing that winds me up is this sort of attitude from the keyboard warriors that are like, oh well, they don't know how to run a SQL query, and they're probably, you know, like I said a minute ago, and they're, you know, they're using columns that aren't probably used anymore.

And it's like, no, dude, do you think that he has people on his staff who are like some sweaty 16-year-old who's only ever worked in their basement on JavaScript? That's not the people that he hires.

He's probably got people that are way better sort of data analysts than most of the commenters in the group, and it just winds me up. And this is pervasive across the whole Internet all the time.

There's loads of people waiting in about stuff that they know nothing about, but it's almost like there's this blanket refusal to accept that any of that data is real and that stuff is being paid out to, you know, Social Security numbers and accounts that are 170 years old and whatever. And so that was the basis of my. Of my rant today.

Alan King: 00:05:29

People do live a long time in America. Yeah, I mean, look, I think the thing with Elon is he throws a lot of information out there very fast in very short order, doesn't he?

You know, so he could post 20, 30 posts a day, maybe more sometimes. And so sort of trying to keep track of what's real, what's not, becomes really difficult for people.

So I'm not surprised that there's a whole list of human beings out there ready to kind of go, is this true? Is this real? Is this facts? You know, I mean, he himself stood in the Oval Office earlier in the last week and said.

And actually said, I'm going to say things that aren't true, you know, but, but you'll, you know, you'll, you'll catch up with me, and then you'll point them out, and then I'll go, oh, yeah, I got it wrong. But that shouldn't be how government works, should it?

You know, you should be a bit more careful, maybe, than just kind of throw out the, you know, he'll see, literally see something on Twitter and kind of go, yeah, that fits my circle of belief.

Retweet, you know, and suddenly he's sending tweets of Tommy Robinson and, and all these kind of crazy people all around the world to all of his followers who are all going, oh, you know, Elon said that it must be true. So I think where these people are coming from is they're worried. And, yeah, maybe they want to see, you know, there's this nice little picture.

He's just grabbed a screenshot or something, and here's a bunch of numbers, but there's no other information around that. So then people start going, well, is it right? Can you not do SQL? Can you not do this? Can you not do that?

I suspect we'll find out the reality on those numbers in about a week's time. You know, it's a bit like the USAID stuff. We sort of seen the statements around that.

And then you find out the real story a little bit later; it's a bit like the condom stuff he was talking about. I mean, condoms, goodness me. Right. And saying that, you know, they were sold to, you know, Iraq or somewhere, wherever it was.

David Brown: 00:07:13

Gaza.

Alan King: 00:07:14

Gaza. There we go. And then.

David Brown: 00:07:15

But it was Gaza. They were sold to Gaza. But it was Gaza, Mozambique, not Gaza, West Bank, but it is Gaza. So he was correct, factually correct, that it went to Gaza.

It's everybody else that misinterpreted what he said.

Alan King: 00:07:28

Yeah, but I don't think he meant that when he said it. You know, I think he thought we. He thought it was the same Gaza as we all thought.

So, yeah, you know, and he admitted that in the Oval Office, you know, he stood there and said it. So I think that the problem is when he's doing that sort of stuff so quickly, so fast, you start to become quite untrustworthy.

And I guess the worry with this behaviour is where does it take us? Because it's a real move fast and 'break things' mentality, in my view right now. Some might say, well, that's refreshing for government. Yeah.

And maybe it is. And I think there's definitely a case where we elect leaders, and we want them to do something, and boy, are they doing something right.

Like no other race I've ever seen coming in my lifetime. To be quite clear, you know, what they've done in the space of time is almost mind-bending. You know, they've blown the roof off.

Okay, so is it a good thing? History is going to tell us that the risk is that people vote for and elect confident liars.

Okay, the people who come in say they're going to do this; they're very well-spoken. They put out these big messages.

We saw it with Brexit, you know that the people who wanted to leave Europe had a very clear message, right to people. And it was, you know, we're going to save the NHS, you know, we're going to bring back control, we're going to take control of our borders.

This kind of stuff, really simple slogans. And on the other side, you had this much more nuanced, complex message about macroeconomics and trade and all this stuff, and it just didn't land.

Yeah, people just go for the simple slogan. So with Trump and Musk they're masters at controlling this kind of information.

So he can put a tweet out on his platform, which he can, you know, obviously, algorithmically make sure everyone gets to see. And it can be a very simple, powerful message. It may or may not be true.

And that's the problem, you know, and people would rather have those, you know, confident liars than people tell them uncomfortable truths. It's almost as though they'd rather be reassured about something than actually informed about something if that makes sense.

David Brown: 00:09:27

Yeah, I think that also works both directions as well.

Defense Exhibit B.

If you just Simply Google this $400 million contract for Tesla, you will find very quickly that, A, it was started under the Biden administration, not under Trump. B, it was just a request for responses to see if any companies were interested in replying to a government contract for EVs.

And at the time, this was May: 2024

But I think it was just in their mind because they were the only ones that answered. It should have just said electric vehicle supplier. But this is easily fact-checked, and no one's fact-checked it.

And these are major media organisations who are still promoting this story and loads of people are promoting it. And it is very simple to fact-check and just see what's actually going on again. I'll put some links in.

I've got a couple of stories from one's from AP, one's from NBC. It's all over the Internet. It's very simple to go and check. So it works both ways as well. And I think a lot of people are disingenuous, and they're.

Everybody's trying to find something, you know, against them because they don't like the fact that maybe he's, you know, he comes across as being conservative or on the right.

I think it's interesting that he voted Democrat his entire life and, you know, up until recently and, you know, everybody seems to have forgotten that, that he was a liberal.

Alan King: 00:11:17

That's, that's really interesting. And I agree, it absolutely runs both ways.

I do think at the moment, though, the people on the right, and let's just take the Democrats, Republicans, it seems to me that the Republicans have got this absolutely sorted at the moment, right, in terms of the message, how they get that across, how they reach their audience. I think the Democrats they're their own worst enemy. They are floundering; they have no idea how to get a message through to their core base.

And then beyond that, they seem to be utterly stumped by this. You know, in that sense, take your hat off to the Republicans for the job they've done. I think with the, you Know, where do we go from there?

Is this what we want from democracy, though? Do we want this kind of move-fast-break thing mentality?

Do we want to just smash everything to pieces and hope it's all right in the long run, or should it be a more cautious, measured approach?

And so I think where you have the media, the, so if you say the liberal media are looking at this and yeah, they're going to, anytime they can find something, they can get a stick into here to try and open the door a little bit, right, and to have a go at him, they're going to try and do that because they are scrabbling and they are, you know, they're failing.

And on social media, you know, I mean, you, you, you know, X is, is obviously a wash with, with pro-Trump, pro-Musk, you know, news and then, but even, you know, Facebook meta's platforms, they've all come out, all the big, you know, sort of tech leaders have come out and basically swung in behind Trump on this one.

David Brown: 00:12:42

But do you, do you think that's because, and, and they've even come out and said this publicly because they were being so pressured by the liberal governments and everything else to suppress information that was on the right that all they're doing is not suppressing all the stuff that was being suppressed and censored before.

Alan King: 00:13:01

I think they know which side their bread's buttered if I'm honest.

And I think that you know, for the Mark Zuckerberg's of the world and that who, you know, let's be honest, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, he wasn't on the side of Trump at all, anything but in fact, he was almost being targeted by Trump as, you know, one of the bad guys. Right. So, you know, he's, he's very much, you know, sort of, you know, come and doff the hat now, hasn't he? And swung him behind it.

And I think he understands that you know, but he's a businessman, and for his business to flourish over the next five years, going head to head with this guy and particularly if that guy, you know, Trump is, you know, his best buddy, his first buddy is Elon, you know, he, he better get on the same page because otherwise he's just, you know, it's not going to end well. You know, it's gonna, it would adversely affect his organisation. So they've all done it.

And so I think the, the, if you like, the independent media that perhaps sits outside of that, if you like, it's almost like the legacy media now that, you know, the, the, the Times, the, you know, the Wall Street Journal, stuff like that, they're, they're going to try and find anything they can, but you know, it's, it's very hard for them. And, and even when they say something, there's an army online that's going to push back incredibly hard and very fast and very aggressively.

So I think they're on a hiding, to be honest. And I don't see this kind of juggernaut, as I would describe it at the moment, slowing down at all.

It's going to be really interesting where it does take us because I don't think we've ever seen anything like this before. I honestly don't, no.

David Brown: 00:14:26

And I think the Democrats in the US are in the same position as Labour, or sorry, not Labour, as the conservatives in the UK at the minute in that they have no, seemingly no self-awareness of what got them into the position that they're in in the minute. And there's no contrition whatsoever. So they have, they're not even saying, hey, you know what, we're really sorry we got off base.

Maybe we didn't really understand what people wanted from us. You know, we need to go back to the drawing board, we need to get out, we need to talk to people, we need to, like, there's none of that.

There's none of that. Wow, we're really sorry. I think we totally missed the ball here.

You know, they're just doubling down on what they've done in the past, which I think is, is the wrong way to go. So let's. I wanted to go back to something, though. A minute ago, you brought up USAID.

Alan King: 00:15:17

Yeah.

David Brown: 00:15:17

Which I think is really interesting. So I don't know how you feel about Joe Rogan and his show, but Mike Benz has been on recently. I think it was in the last two or three episodes.

And Mike Benz used to work for the U.S. government. He was a former official with the U.S. Department of State, and he gives a really good history at the beginning of that show in the first maybe 20, 20, 30 minutes. He gives a really good background on the history of USAID and what USAID is about.

And essentially, it was set up by Congress specifically, and laws were passed to enable it to act.

But it was set up as a vehicle for the CIA to influence elections in other territories, and there was a firewall that meant that it could not act against any US citizens and act in the US, and this has been a covert program that's been funded and run.

So all of the money that it's been getting has been literally to influence governments and elections and stuff happening in other countries outside the U.S.

it wasn't until Barack Obama repealed the firewall that they then started funding US organisations like News and that sort of thing and NGOs within the US to then start exerting pressure and to sponsor narratives like around Trans and some other stuff to advance kind of the liberal, I think, the liberal political agenda. The guy's got receipts, man, and he gives you links to all the documents. Everything's basically public now.

So I think this is something that personally, I think everybody should know.

We should know where our tax dollars are going, and we should know that we are funding all of this stuff to the tune of trillions of dollars to influence elections around the world. Now, whether we should or shouldn't do that is maybe a different discussion.

And I assume people are going to feel obviously differently about that, but it's.

Alan King: 00:17:25

Slightly different view on it.

David Brown: 00:17:26

But I think understanding that we think this money is going to buy condoms for people in Gaza, but that's not what it's going for.

It's going to influence the people in Mozambique to get some sort of a political outcome that we want to have happen, or it's to get information on people and data collection and those sorts of things. So it's not the nice shiny humanitarian thing that everybody thinks it is. It's much more sinister than that.

And when you're in a situation where you've got struggles within your own country, I think spending billions and trillions of dollars outside your country is irresponsible.

Alan King: 00:18:07

Well, there could be a good reason for it, and it might be something like this. So John F. Kennedy, I believe, was the person who sort of set up USAID originally when he was president. And the word development is the D in USAID.

And the idea being that you're supporting countries with their development. And I'm sure there's plenty of stuff going around influencing elections as well. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that's part of the narrative.

But part of the narrative is about developing this country so that they are receiving funding from the US. So they are then favourable to the US. What does that mean? It means that they're not going to be an adversary to the US As a result. So what happens now? You cut the funding, you pull everything out, right?

Ten years roll by, and there's a vacuum. Those countries still need funding. They're going to go somewhere.

They're going to go to China; they're going to go to Russia, they're going to go to North Korea, whoever it might be, to state actors that maybe we wouldn't really want to help those countries. And now they're going to be favourable to those countries in the future.

So it may not be in the US Interests to pull out because all you're doing is creating a vacuum for another regime to go in and build that relationship. And that could be dangerous in the long run. That could come back and bite the US and the world effectively.

David Brown: 00:19:22

I take that as a point. And yes, there are some global politics that we need to take into consideration, but that is not the express remit of that organisation.

That is not what that organisation is there to do. And that is not legally why it was allowed to be set up in the beginning.

And I think what it turned into, and this is what we're finding with all the links to all the different NGOs that have been set up and funded, that it's actually just turned into a gravy train for legislators. And now I'm going to say this as well. I absolutely did not think that this was a liberal-conservative or a Democrat-Republican issue.

I think every single congressman, every single senator has been using this to their advantage on both sides of the aisle for decades, probably since the 70s. And so I don't think either side is clean in this. And that's what's so interesting about Trump and Elon is they have no political loyalty whatsoever.

So they come in, and they, like the Democrats, can try and pressure them or the Republicans can try and pressure them, and they just don't give a shit. They're just like, no, I'm going to do what I'm going to do, and I don't care what you think.

And your PAC money and your election funding money and all of that stuff, all of the people who are donating, doesn't matter. I don't have to listen to them because I'm doing my own thing. And I think that's the refreshing part.

And that's what a lot of the people, the normal people in the US who, the 80% of the people who live in the middle of the US, not on the coast, in the big cities. I think those people have known for a long time that this stuff was happening.

And now that's why they elected Trump because they wanted somebody who wasn't a politician and who wasn't beholden and didn't have. They didn't have a score to set. They didn't owe people along the way. They literally have Just come in and gone.

Now, I'm just going to blow the lid off all of it. And that's fine. The CIA will continue to get funding and it'll work through another secret way in the background.

But if, if blowing the lid off of USAID is one way to do it, to show how all of that money runs around and it's getting back to people in government, I think that's a good thing. And I think, I think, let me just take one more step and then I'll, I'll, I'll be quiet.

But what I think is going to be very interesting on the international stage is that the longer this goes, like we're only weeks in, we're not even three months into this yet. Like, wait till we're a year down the road. It's going to be interesting to see what has come out in a year's time.

But I think this is scaring the shit out of other governments around the world because every government has ways to get around, you know, internally.

They've set up all these little rules and laws and stuff and, and all of the people, you know, the MPs and the people in local government and all that, they all know how to, they all know how to navigate and how to say the right thing to be able to get access to money and all this.

And I think people, citizens in other countries, are going to start to look at what's going on in the US, and they're going to start looking at their governments and saying, so where's our Doge? Where are our people who are actually digging into where all of our money is really going? And I think that scares the shit out of everybody else.

And I think that's partly why other governments don't like Trump as well, because they're scared of the knock on effect of what doing that in the US may cause in their own country.

Alan King: 00:22:58

I mean, that's a really interesting point. I'll pick up on that second.

But I think just going back to the USA briefly on that, I mean, I think that the thing, the thing there, I suppose is, you know, you've, do you throw the baby over the bathwater? Because that's what they've done. Right.

And that's the risk here is that rather than looking at going, look, yeah, there's bureaucracy, there's gravy training and all of the above is probably true, what you said. Yeah, those things.

However, there still might be very good reasons to be doing this, but doing it in a better, more refined way, and maybe we should fix it rather than just destroy it, you know, And I think, I think that's the thing.

And at the moment, they're very much sort of taking the approach like, we're going to come in, we're not going to decorate the building, we're just going to knock it down right now. Now, maybe that gets you where you want to be eventually because you build a nice, shiny new building.

But I wonder if in five or ten years' time when we look at the new building that they're building if that's not full of corruption itself, you know, because I, I don't see much evidence of checks and balances in the way they're doing things themselves.

And the way Musk is operating unelected almost as the President of the United States, the most powerful richest man in the world and his best friend, effectively just.

David Brown: 00:24:05

Well, let's also be fair. There have been appointed people forever, ever since the beginning of the government, who've had immense powers in the government.

Every president comes in and appoints loads of people who are unelected. So that's nothing unusual. Trying to, trying to say that that happens is, is like, it's not a big deal. That's the way it's always worked.

Alan King: 00:24:26

True enough, but I feel that Musk is different. He's the richest man in the world. He has one of the biggest platforms, social media platforms in the world to kind of put his voice over.

He has a huge influence, unlike anybody else who's ever been in an unelected position, I would say. I don't think there's anyone you could compare to him that's anything close to that. So, I don't know. He's definitely unique, I think.

And I mean, it was evident when he just rolled up in the, in the White House the other week, you know, and he's just turned up in a baseball cap, you know, with a sort of weird jacket and his son hanging off his arm. You know, no one, no one else on this planet, would turn up in the Oval Office and behave in that way or be dressed in that way.

He and he's clearly sending a message is, I'm, you know, no one controls me. Right. I'm my own guy here. Absolutely. You know, he's not conforming to anything. So, you know, he is an absolute wild card.

Now, it may be that that turns out to be, in the long term, a good thing. It may turn out to be an absolute disaster. The problem is we just don't know, do we? At this Point.

David Brown: 00:25:22

Yeah.

Alan King: 00:25:22

And look, Elon, as you said at the start, has done some incredible stuff. Right. There's no doubt about that. And you know, we wouldn't have a space program probably without Elon.

Electric cars wouldn't be where they are today without Elon, you know, Starlink or communications. There's many things that you can kind of hold your hands up and say, yeah, you know what? You know.

all his life, but he's now in: 2025

He's getting behind the likes of Tommy Robins. Right. He says Nigel Farage, who's very right, is not right enough for him. Do you know what I mean? You know, so, you know, maybe people change.

rsion we have of Elon Musk in: 2025

David Brown: 00:26:13

, let's say: 2018

Alan King: 00:26:20

Yeah. I hope I haven't gone quite as far.

David Brown: 00:26:25

No, I, I, look, I get it, and I, you know, I know when he very first came in, and he talked to the, you know, the person that was the head of the treasury, for example, and they were looking at a lot of the payments, and even the head of the treasury said, you know, he said, how much of this do you think is fraudulent? The guy was like 50%. And he's like, so why don't you do anything about it? And they're like, we just don't have the ability to.

And it's because, like, they're not even followed.

The government doesn't even follow basic accounting principles that you or I, as a small business, would have to do, like putting payments into accounts like they don't even know what the money's for. They don't know a lot of the accounts. They don't even know where they're going.

The people in the companies that it was supposed to be going to don't even exist anymore. And so, you know, there's all this stuff that's just falling through the cracks now. Fine.

That means half of that is probably okay, and it's probably going to the right person. That's totally fine as well. And we want to continue that. But, there needs to be some accounting, and there needs to be some responsibility for it.

And this is what's happening. And I tell you what, I've worked with government in the UK as paid, and I can tell you that stuff like that happens as well.

And I can tell you there are internal discussions where one team will go and they'll, they'll say, you know, they need to get money for something, but there isn't any money available. So they'll come up with some really weird way to work in some other pot of money.

And then they take that money and they spend it on something completely different that it wasn't earmarked for in the beginning. But everyone does that because that's the way government has to, has to work. But I think the scale of it in the U, in The, in the U.S.

is just on a completely different, like it might happen here to the tune of maybe millions right there. You're talking billions potentially, where this money is just going to the wrong place.

And I, I think, you know, they came in, and I know they came in and, you know, judges came in and said, oh, you know, you can't get in, you can't do with this, you can't do that.

But they can pass rules to say you can't make a payment now unless that has been actually put in the correct account and that you have to verify who the payment's going to, and you have to have a note of exactly what that payment is for and what invoice that payment relates to. Like, none of this basic accounting is even there. It's just haemorrhaging money, and it's just being paid, and nobody knows where it's going.

And so even if we just get that, that's a major, major step in the right direction because then we can actually start to see in a year's time, okay, so they've been paying for a year into this bank account, but this person notionally doesn't exist. And what is this for? Like, there was some program that ended 18 months ago, but nobody stopped the payment. So it's just continued to go.

Like, I expect there's tons of that out there.

And if we just uncover that, then let's say it's 50% sort of across most departments now you've cut 50% of your budget, and you haven't done anything just by stopping payments that shouldn't be going out in the first place.

Alan King: 00:29:26

Well, I suppose my worry is, and you're absolutely right, there will be corruption, and they will find it, and that is a good thing.

David Brown: 00:29:32

It's maybe not even corruption; it's just people just not doing their jobs.

Alan King: 00:29:36

Yeah, yeah, it can be, it can. Bureaucracy spurred management. It could be a whole number of things. And they're going to find lots of that because you'll find that everywhere.

You'll find that in any kind of, you know, state organisation, you know, charities, whatever it might be. This, this stuff happens, it exists, it goes on. The problem is then because they find stuff, and you go, oh, well, that was great.

That then justifies maybe some of the other stuff they're doing that isn't actually right and isn't justifiable, you know, and so, but you, you kind of, you, you then conflate everything together and go, well, you know, actually, you know, it's all good because, well, but maybe it isn't.

And my, I think my big long-term worry about this, Dave, is this, is that these two characters, you know, have, have shown a way of doing politics and winning elections that the rest of the world is now looking at going, all right, that's how you win an election because you don't win an election by being moderate, by talking sensibly, by being methodical, by being smart.

You win an election by coming out and saying very provocative, crazy things and slogans, basically telling people to mistrust, but they want to hear it, and you gain power.

Now, if you're a party around the world and you're out of power at the moment, you're surely looking at what's going on in America and going, that's how you win. Right. You know, we're not going to win by putting forward a better-reasoned argument.

We're going to win by, you know, saying we're going to blow the roof off. We're going to change everything; we're going to upend.

And so we could be entering a period globally where we see governments around the world effectively aping, mirroring what is happening in America. And it wouldn't happen immediately because, obviously, there's a cycle for elections.

But I bet when we look back in 20 or 30 years' time, we'll see that this was almost like a trigger around the world in other countries to see similar things take place in other countries. But they go, that's how you now win elections. That's how you get the people behind you. And that may be a good thing. It may be a terrible thing.

David Brown: 00:31:30

Yeah. But I think the other thing that you're going to find, which is a big part of that, is that you then have to have the follow through. Right.

Because they're following through.

Like it or not, he's doing exactly what he said he was going to do, he said he was going to close down the border, he was going to start looking for illegal immigrants, and he was going to deport them, which is happening, you know, to the tunes of flights and flights and flights every day. They are active, actively actioning those things at pace, at pace, you know, and this is what they were elected to do.

And I think, I do think, probably a whole nother episode because, because we're already half an hour in, and we don't have time to talk about peculiarity.

Alan King: 00:32:11

Of the American system. David, because you have these executive orders, I don't think you could do what Donald Trump's doing in the United Kingdom.

David Brown: 00:32:17

Right, I agree, and personally, I'm not a huge fan of executive orders. I think it's, it, it does circumvent the process.

But I also think that in this particular instance, it's also lending because that's the only way to, I'm going to say, drain the swamp, but that's the only way to get around a lot of the entrenched, you know, party politics bullshit that's happening in the background is somebody needs to be able to come in and go, yeah, no, we're just gonna, I'm just gonna do this. We need to investigate this. And it does because otherwise, they would just kill it. It would take four years, and they would just kill it.

You know, what he needs to now do is he needs to take some of these executive orders and this may happen.

I think after this first year, what we might see is that they'll see which ones are successful and which ones kind of panned out and work the way they thought it was going to work. And then I think they will start to write that into actual legislation that will need to then go through.

But I think by that point, the only ones, the successful ones, pretty much the general public, will be behind because they'll be like, hell, that actually worked well, that should be a law. So they'll move it past being an executive order and into being some sort of legislation.

And I think what would I like to see, I'd like to see them do something. I don't know if you saw the funding bill that Elon posted the photos of, but it was like to keep the US Government open.

or whatever. And the bill was: 1500

And it was like they had put all sorts of stuff into that bill.

They'd written raises for themselves; they'd put all sorts of other stuff that was totally unrelated to the bill notionally that was being passed for the budget. And Elon said, we've rewritten it and proposed it and it was 150 pages.

And they took out all the extra stuff that people were trying to stuff in that it went through at the same time. Now, I think something that they could do, I'm not sure if they will, is if they passed a law that said you can only pass one thing at a time.

So you can't stuff something that's called, I don't know, a health care bill with defence contracts and with border stuff and with environmental stuff and with raises for yourselves and everything else. Like each thing needs to be done individually and very clearly so that every. So that there's a much clearer record of what's being passed.

And that's fine. If you need to go and you need to vote on 100 things in a day, then guess what? That's what you got to do.

But each one of those would be listed separately so that you had totally clear and full oversight on what your representatives exactly voted yes and no for on every single item. So that would give them the choice to be able to say because we don't have whips and stuff.

I mean, we probably do in effect, but formally, we don't have like a Whip in the U.S., so, you know, you may be pressured to vote in a certain way, but there's no like person that's kind of supposedly forces you to do that.

But at least as far as I.

Alan King: 00:35:44

Know, I think TikTok was bundled through with something else, wasn't it, when that exactly was saying it was completely not anything.

David Brown: 00:35:52

And that's where the, I think that's where the kind of, the other part of the corruption comes from, is they very much like to sneak shit in and they put, you know, that's how they get the black budgets through and they, that's how they get a bunch of other stuff through. So, you know, it's, it's. There are some things that I think that Trump could do down the line that could be a much more permanent solution.

But I think he's trying everything at the minute, and then we'll see which ones work and which ones don't. Some are going to blow up in his face 100% 100%.

Alan King: 00:36:22

This is a huge experiment, I think, really, with what we're seeing.

And we're either going to look back in 10 years time and go, well, that, that changed, or it was a complete disaster, or maybe it's a complete disaster, and it still changed everything. But it's certainly, I think, going to change the way politics forever. Forever works. You know, I don't see it ever being the same again.

I think fundamentally, the world has shifted on its axis, and we'll never go back to the kind of sleepy Joe, you know, the kind of steady as she goes, hand on the tiller, just carefully guiding the ship. Those, those are gone. Those days are gone, I think. And I don't think you can get elected on a platform like that in the future anyway.

David Brown: 00:36:56

Or maybe you will. Maybe you'll. Because kind of Keir Starmer was elected on the safe pair of hands theory. Like, we need an adult in the room, and that's like him or not.

That's what he's done. He is the adult in the room. It's boring, it's quiet. You know, every, Everybody's, you know, I.

Alan King: 00:37:14

Voted for Kier. Right. Full disclosure, okay? But I'm going to say this completely clearly.

He got elected not because he won the election; because the Conservatives utterly lost it and because they had their vote split by reform. If you put the Conservative vote and reform vote together, they got more votes than the Labour Party.

Labour got elected on the lowest elected mandate of any party in electoral history in the United Kingdom. So.

David Brown: 00:37:39

But the Tories were chaos, utter chaos. There was no control, there was no one at the helm. Nobody knew what was going on. Nobody still knows what's going on.

Alan King: 00:37:47

Exactly. And that.

David Brown: 00:37:48

So we may see that pushback, you know, push back against Trump as well.

Alan King: 00:37:53

If you look around Europe at the moment, you see everything going to the right, okay? And actually, you look at the UK and go, well, that went left, didn't it? But when you really look at, you go, no, it actually didn't go left.

Still, more people voted right.

It's just that that vote was split in half, you know, so actually; I'm fully expecting in the next section, if the Tories get their act together with reform in some way, work, work something out, then you know it's going to slide back the other way. So I, I think Kier got in there because of circumstances, but not because the majority of people wanted the kind of steady hand.

I don't I don't think that's the case at all.

David Brown: 00:38:26

I don't Know, I did. I can't vote because I'm on a. I'm on a visa, so I can't vote anyway.

Alan King: 00:38:34

But I mean, I vote steady hands. But yeah, you know.

David Brown: 00:38:37

Yeah.

Alan King: 00:38:38

Yeah, right. We'll see.

David Brown: 00:38:39

Okay. Anything else you want to bring up while we're at it?

Alan King: 00:38:44

One thought for you about crazies online that were exercising so much this morning. I mean, where are you seeing your crazies? Because actually, I go to X a lot and just for the shits and giggles of it, really.

And, you know, I saw the same things you were seeing, and there weren't many detractors. Most people on our ex are going, you know, go Elon. So, yeah, you know, you need to go on a different platform, Dave. I don't know.

David Brown: 00:39:05

Well, yeah, but it happens. It doesn't just happen to Elon. You know, it's. I just find it like.

And this is another rant that I have about anonymity online and maybe I'll do a separate episode on that. And I've been banging on about this for years, years.

And I started to build my own social network around it because I think one of the biggest problems that we have at the minute is anonymity online. And yes, I accept all the arguments. People can go, and they can be free to be who they want to be, and nobody can know who they are.

But what that's actually turned into in practice is everybody being a dickhead.

And you get trolling, you get cyberbullying, you get revenge porn, you get trolling, you know, you get people just sitting, thinking it's funny to wind other people up.

You get, you know, the most horrific, like, particularly women in politics and women in business and stuff get the most horrific messages and stuff like that.

And it's just because people think it's funny and they think they can, and because they know they're not going to get punched in the face and that there's no repercussion to it. And. And I think that the negatives far, far, far outweigh any potential positive of somebody whistleblowing at some point.

And so, you know, I think a lot of what we're getting on both of the platforms, not so much on LinkedIn, and that's why I like LinkedIn. I know people rail on LinkedIn a lot, but. And yes, there are fake accounts.

I totally get that there are fake accounts on LinkedIn, but not nearly as many. And it, it is a general. It's a different type of discussion that you generally get on LinkedIn.

Because a lot of people do use LinkedIn for business, and they do keep their business contacts and stuff in there. So, it keeps the conversation a little bit more tame. But what's interesting is you're absolutely right, it tends to skew more.

The conversation I've seen at least, tends to skew more against what Elon's doing than for what he's doing, which is on X, which doesn't surprise me. Again, it's his platform and all his fanboys are over there and fangirls are over there, and so they're waiting in to kind of support it.

Whereas it's still, I think, a little bit more liberal, traditional liberal type stuff on LinkedIn. But. But, yeah, no, you're right. I mean, it's like, you know, I do that. I read the page, you know, I read all the online stuff.

You and I are both heavily into AI and, you know, we're constantly following all the AI news and all the stuff that's happening there. So we're all around tech and, you know, there's loads of discussions about, you know, what's J.D. vance done?

And, you know, he's come to Europe, and he's pissed everybody off, but frankly, they don't care. And again, at the end of the day, you got to remember that most on-the-ground people in America love that. They absolutely love it.

And so they, you know, he and Trump are absolutely playing to their main audience.

Alan King: 00:42:08

And I would imagine that the ratings for Trump right now are through the roof. I would have thought. Yeah. I imagine he's more popular than any president's been in a very long time.

David Brown: 00:42:18

That's interesting. I wonder what his approval ratings are at the moment. Yeah, let me just look.

Alan King: 00:42:23

I can't imagine there is anything else because it goes back to this idea, what I said at the start, that people just want to see something happen. They want impact, they want action, they want someone to come in and actually just do something because in their own lives, they'll feel frustrated.

They feel that you know, things aren't working for them. And so anyone coming in, doing something, you know, is going to be kind of cheerleaded all the way, I would imagine. I can't imagine that.

You know, I'm sure there are lots of people in America who are very frightened by what he's doing, but I bet the vast majority are going, yeah, this is great. Be interesting.

David Brown: 00:42:55

It's.

So what's really interesting is if you actually search on Google for Trump approval ratings, what you get is you get what appears to me just by looking at the headlines is you get the. The two different sides, you get the, oh, yeah, he's doing really well, and you get the other side of he's doing shit. And.

And it seems to be roughly aligned with the conservative and liberal traditional media stuff. So I don't know where the truth is in between there. It looks pretty. I mean, I'm looking at Gallup at the minute. Oh, that's first.

Oh, sorry, that was first term historical.

Alan King: 00:43:35

Is that us?

David Brown: 00:43:36

This is all old stuff. Yeah, yeah, this is. Sorry, this is all old stuff. Here's one from February 7th.

Sorry, I know this is boring for people on the listening, but anyway, I'm trying to see. So his current approval rating is higher than at any point during his first term.

Alan King: 00:43:58

There you go.

David Brown: 00:44:02

So, yeah, it does seem to be. This is from Pew Research. I don't know if they have any particular leaning, but the data looks pretty. Pretty interesting.

I will share a link to that as well with everybody so you can go and look for yourself. And Alan, I'll. I'll drop it into WhatsApp for you.

Alan King: 00:44:19

You know, and things like that. People, the politicians around the world will see that.

They'll know that, yeah, they'll know that he's a really solid president in the sense that, you know, he's got the approval rating of, of his countrymen. And, you know, they'll. They'll be thinking, how can we. How can we simulate that? How can we. How can we do that? You know?

David Brown: 00:44:38

Yeah, be crazy.

Alan King: 00:44:40

Be crazy.

David Brown: 00:44:41

The other thing, though, is.

And just a final point: I think the other thing that a lot of people maybe don't realise is that Trump is a master negotiator, whether you like that or not. And he has worked in the property business in some of the most competitive property markets in the world his entire career.

And he knows how to go in, and he goes in strong, but he gets results. So he comes out with some crazy thing like we're going to put 100% tariffs or 25% tariffs on all things from this country.

The other country freaks out.

And then two weeks later, what you realise is he's negotiated a deal to get what it was that he wanted in the first place, which had nothing to do with tariffs. It was all about border control. So you look at Canada, and you look at Mexico. What he wanted was he wanted better border control, and they said no.

So then he went, fuck you, I'm going to put tariffs on. Then they started to freak out.

Everybody jumped around and freaked out because they know he's a loose cannon, and he will do it because he has no fear. And they're like, shit, he's actually going to do this. We better do something. And then he got what he wanted in the end.

So there is a method to his madness, I think. And I think people. I think people underestimate him at their peril. I think he's.

He's a much more shrewd businessman than a lot of people give him or want to give him credit for, and I think we're seeing a lot of that as well. So he's. He's big and blustery and everything, you know, and.

And he follows through on stuff to make people believe because they have to believe in a negotiation. They have to believe that he's going to do it. You know, if. If you're negotiating and you say, well, that's too much, and if.

If that's it, I'm going to walk away; the other side has to believe that you will actually walk away, or it's not effective. And so I think there's a lot of sort of positioning and stuff just to get what he wants from the negotiations, which seems to be working so far.

Alan King: 00:46:37

And he's very transactional, isn't he?

David Brown: 00:46:38

Yeah, and he is. Yeah.

Alan King: 00:46:40

And there are people on his team, like Vance and Musk, actually, who have in the past publicly said negative things about him, but because they've come to him now and said, hey, actually, we're on your team now. We believe in you. That's fine. Then, we move forward. He doesn't seem to hold that grudge, so.

David Brown: 00:46:54

Exactly right. Allan, thank you for ranting with me, keeping me calm, bringing me back down, making sure that I don't get too outrageous.

Alan King: 00:47:04

I'm into the Elon group, you know.

David Brown: 00:47:07

I might have to now. I might have to now, and I.

Alan King: 00:47:10

Think we need a little bit of the other. You know, we can all get a bit down on Elon in the group, I think, so it'd be good to have the other voice there.

David Brown: 00:47:16

All right, fine. I'll see how much it winds me up. Cool. All right, thanks, Alan. This will be out in the next couple of days probably, so later this week.

I'm going to try and get these out as soon as possible. So, look, if anybody's listening and you've made it this far, please.

If you haven't subscribed or if you haven't followed the show, follow the show on your favourite platform. We're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, we're on YouTube, and we're on our own website. So I'll put links to all that stuff in the show notes.

And for today, that's it. And we will see everybody soon. Bye. Bye.

Alan King: 00:47:49

Thanks, bud. Don't.