What most impulse.

Hello and welcome to this week's episode.

And listen, I leave the country for one teeny, teeny tiny three-day period and everything

I'd want to talk about kicks off, right? You had Donald Trump and Elon falling out like the,

the two hottest girls at US high school, proper mean girls stuff, then reform chairman,

Zia Yusuf, doing the old political hokey-coki-coki going in and out of the party. I mean,

I was sitting there eventually watching social it's, should I cut short my holiday? You know, should I do a little podcast by the pool? But listen, I should say we do have a guest this week. We've got a special interview with Ian Dale on his new book on Margaret Thatcher, which is out now. And I had a chat with him. And it's interesting, you know, during the time of flip-flopping, emotion-stroping leaders, mate, maybe it's a bit timely. And also in the Patreon-only section with the spending review coming up, I'll ask Ian what Lady Fatch would have done face with these economic headwinds. But I'd say, I mean, the Trump thing was just, it was a slow moving car crash, wasn't it? From the moment they became friends to Elon gurning his face off in the Oval Office. I mean, I just got back from Ibiza, right? I did three days in Ibiza. And I swear to God, I didn't see anyone as wasted as Elon Musk on the whole aisle of Ibiza. I mean, it was just mad. Like, I wasn't, I was aware that something was kicking off. I mean, from the moment that Elon Musk said that Trump's bill, you know, it could be big or beautiful, but it couldn't be both. I said on the podcast, you cannot tell Donald Trump that he can't use as many superlatives as he'd like. And it was just, it was a ticking time bomb.

And then somehow you go right from that, that weird meeting in the Oval Office.

I guess that was Trump trying to, he probably knew Elon was on the turn, shall we say.

And I wonder if you ever offered Trump, I mean, little bump, there you go.

He'd go, it's better a few than McDonald's. And then I saw the post, the tweet, the X, that Elon Musk had said that the real reason the Epstein files were being held back was because Donald Trump was on the list. Now, I don't know if that means on the manifest. I think there are a lot of people that went to Epstein Island that wouldn't, how can I put it, gone all-inclusive, but still, still, it's a fairly big nuclear bomb

to fire. But, you know, I thought what was interesting was at the heart of it was an ideological

spat, right? It was all this kind of petty, sloppy, sloppy stuff in the foreground. But at the

back of it was, you know, Elon Musk, and I agree with him,

he believes that constant increase of government debt,

you know, it can't carry on forever.

It's happening all over the world.

Debt, you know, is going up.

Debt repayments are going up.

And all of it is sort of putting it on future generations.

It's a bit like we're the kids waiting for an inheritance while our parents are continually remortgaging to go on Viking River cruises, right? Which actually does happen. I mean, they just all do it now. All of them talk, I mean, the right, quite frequently, campaign right and govern left. So Trump's done it. He's sort of talked about getting efficiencies, doing doge and all this stuff.

But he's just introduced a bill that's going to increase debt anyway.

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