🎬 Old friends meet under a broken clock tower. That was the premise. A twelve-year loop, snapped back to life. You’ve probably watched it by now. Thought I’d drop the old interview from back then for good measure. Time-travel vibes. Maybe I overdosed on Bret Easton Ellis in LA. Maybe I didn’t…here’s one last summary.
Twelve years later, old friends, they don’t talk, they detonate. Words fracture. Memories splinter. Like shards of glass. This beach-side chat with Steve wasn't a podcast. It was post-apocalyptic cinema dressed as economic philosophy. Strap in. This is talk of the ruinous kind. Post-crash. Post-hope. Post-everything.
Steve Drobny and I last shared a stage in 2013 at the London School of Economics. I was hedge fund royalty then. Polished shoes, tailored rage, Gucci suit zipped around a body programmed to care too much. The market was a colosseum. I played to kill. The wide-eyed college kids, kids-with-dreams, I sneered; poor motherfuckers. Some now run funds. Others run from themselves. High on dreams, low on self-diligence.
Cut to Santa Monica. Present day. Clocktower office. Surfboards instead of suits. You’ve watched the interrogation by now. Just two guys running out of things to run from. So naturally we talked about the dollar. It came up. Of course it did. You don’t talk power without talking money. America isn’t an empire. It’s a refinery. Treasuries aren’t securities. They’re spice. Pulled from the Washington swamp by fiscal hallucination. Thirty-six trillion dollars of rancid belief. Belief that smells like printer ink and scorched circuits.
💣America has become a spice colony. Not cinnamon. Not nutmeg. But Treasuries. Endlessly harvested💣
Washington doesn’t govern. It harvests. And the spice flows.
This isn’t theory. This isn’t lecture. It’s script. A slow-burn dystopia with a thirty-year Treasury curve on the edge and maybe no third act. Maybe. No one screams. Everyone resigned to fate. Treasury spice, a hallucination everyone accepts. A whirling centrifuge now running dangerously low on ZiRP vintage low-yield enrichment.
This isn’t empire. Not one against another, but one devouring itself. America, colonized by its own capital flows. Wall Street dressed as Arrakis, running black ops in pinstripes. Washington doesn’t mine because it wants to, it mines because its foreign creditors demand it. But something's changing. Tariffs are the backlash, a crude uprising against the invisible hand that sold America to finance. The electorate smells it now. The spice has poisoned the colony. And all the while, the low-yield enrichment dwindles. The centrifuge at maximum tension.
No one tells you that empires don’t end in fire. They end in finance. In rates that stop making sense. In yield curves bent like time. In spice that burns too bright.
Steve and me, we weren’t catching up. We were decoding the Matrix. Steve laughed nervously. I stared at the glass. Santa Monica shimmered like it knew something we didn’t. The world runs on illusion, I murmured to myself. But cracks always show. Especially when old friends meet under broken clock towers.
👉This isn’t your dad’s macro. This is finance with blood under its nails. Pulp economics at golden hour. And no, I’m not dialing it down. I’m just getting louder. About to press send but the scene’s changed.
👇
You see, I’m no longer pacing the cracked sidewalks of Venice and Santa Monica. I’m seated now, outside, somewhere inside Tokyo’s cavernous metropolis. The air thick. Humid. Heavy with the weight of stories yet to be told. The sun doesn’t shine here. It interrogates. Asian heat pressing down like a boot on your chest. Everything glows. Nothing breathes. Everyone sits indoors. Not I.
The BVLGARI residence envelops me like a villain’s lair disguised as luxury. Steel and serenity. Privacy so rich it feels criminal. It watches me as much as I watch it. Blade Runner stuff. Quiet surveillance built into the bricks. The concierge doesn’t blink. Neither do I. Another chink out of my credit card.
I’m writing in this pressure cooker. Ink sweating onto keyboard. Mind dilated. Where’s my tape recorder? The city murmurs in neon below me. The future. Some proclaim it’s already here, lit in kanji (灯) and cloaked in air you can taste. I’m gonna investigate. Harangued the female staff, organized a search and destroy party to surveil this vast city.
I crossed oceans to find this mood. And now I sit, haunted, typing like a spy from tomorrow. One eye on the skyline, one on the screen. And all because this is where the next thing begins…
Hugh
Chief Pyschonaut
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