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Space Force Guardians: Wardrobe Malfunction? · The Overlap

0:00
So there's a an image. It went up on Truth Social in September of twenty twenty six,
0:06
the year of our Lord, from the account of the sitting president
0:09
of the United States, and it shows a next generation Space Force uniform.
0:14
Black, grey, high collar,
0:18
and down in the corner of this thing,
0:20
like a designer's mood board, there's a label that says design
0:26
inspiration. And what it credits in writing on project.
0:29
Purpose is quote, the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform.
0:36
Starship Troopers, the 1997 film.
0:39
The one Paul Verhoven made after growing up in Nazi occupied Hague,
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where his family moved in nineteen forty three when he was five years old.
0:50
No one where the costumes were sort of built ~ was
0:56
Unaware that this was Nazi propaganda aesthetics on purpose,
1:00
as like a joke, at the expense of exactly this kind of guy.
1:04
The one where Neil Patrick Harris shows up in an SS officer's coat
1:08
and the crew reportedly starts calling him Doogie Himmler.
1:12
That is the cited inspiration in the design notes of a real proposed uniform
1:17
for a real branch of the American military that this same sitting president signed
1:23
into law in twenty nineteen.
1:25
Now here's what you want to sort of reach for an easy explanation,
1:30
and and I'm not gonna do that because the easy explanation is that somebody
1:33
in the White House social media shop got a cute AI image,
1:38
didn't really know the movie or whatever,
1:40
fine, except the label is the whole problem.
1:43
Nobody actually writes design inspiration and then names a movie.
1:48
Like that's a
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Person who watched Starship troopers saw the black uniform
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and the propaganda newsreels and the new recruiting slogans and came away thinking,
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strong look, aspirational, let's get some.
1:59
And that's not even the strangest part.
2:01
The strangest part is that the Space Force already has uniforms,
2:04
like real ones. There's a document called SPFI 362903,
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issued in January 2026. It's a dark blue jacket,
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silver buttons, gray pants, mandatory purchase for personnel transferring in.
2:17
Two hundred to four hundred dollars out of pocket.
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And there was a wear test. General Chance Saltzman put on the all black mess dress
2:24
himself at the Air Force Weapons School graduation in Las Vegas
2:28
on June twenty third, twenty twenty six.
2:30
Years of Guardian feedback, an actual process run by the actual service.
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And then a picture generated by a machine showed up on a website and made
2:42
all of that look optional.
2:44
So the question I want to chase is not whether the president understands satire.
2:47
He doesn't. We can stipulate that from the get go.
2:51
The question is what happens to an institution when its identity gets decided
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by a guy who's good at scrolling?
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And how do you end up wearing the costume from a movie that was made to make
3:03
fun of you?
3:20
This is the overlap, Will. ~ I've been waiting to talk to you about this
3:24
one all week.
3:25
And I've been watching Starship Troopers on repeat,
3:27
so which is the strangest sentence I've said in a while,
3:31
but I did it for you, buddy.
3:33
Right, that's love. So here here's what's in this episode,
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right? In September of this year,
3:39
the president posted an AI generated Space Force uniform that credits
3:43
in its own design notes a movie made specifically to mock people
3:47
who like uniforms like that. And we're gonna follow that all the
3:52
way down because the paper trail on that black uniform goes somewhere kind
3:57
of bleak and somewhere mostly funny all at the same time.
4:01
And just to say it up front, the interesting part here isn't the gaff.
4:05
Everyone got the gaff. The gaff was in every outlet in about six hours.
4:09
So Adam Kinzinger, Jonah Goldberg,
4:12
both of them Republicans of various vintages,
4:14
both of them dunking. ~ Derek Guy,
4:17
the menswear guy wearing in ~ weighing in,
4:19
sorry, wearing in. ~ that's the easy layer.
4:23
Right. And and the dunk is fun,
4:24
but it's not like information.
4:27
No, the information is that the black uniform in that movie was not invented
4:30
by a custom department in 1997.
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It was rather designed in 1932 by two men who we can name here,
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Karl Diebitsch, a painter, and Walter Heck,
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a graphic designer, who also drew the SS double lightning bolt insignia
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in nineteen twenty nine. So, you know,
4:47
there's his portfolio. They were doing brand identity.
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And the company that manufactured what they drew in Metzingen,
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Germany, was one they may have may have heard of.
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~ by the name of Hugo Boss.
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The suits Hugo Boss
5:01
Which by the war years was running those factories on forced labor.
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So by the end of this, you will know the names of the two guys who actually drew
5:08
the thing, the president graphic in two moves basically is copying.
5:14
You'll know what the real Space Force uniform costs a guardian out of pocket
5:19
and who ordered it. You'll know w what the June 2025 tank parade ran in its range,
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25 to 45 million, and you'll know that six in ten American adults told AP N
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O R C they didn't want it. You'll know
5:34
what the Department of War rename costs and that number is the least funny thing
5:38
in this episode.
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And you'll know one thing I haven't seen anybody say out loud in the coverage,
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which is that this post didn't just misread the purpose or the intent of the movie,
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it stepped on a live, in progress,
5:48
wear tested uniform program that the Space Force's own chief was walking around
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Las Vegas in three months earlier.
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That's a bureaucracy that did its homework here.
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Nobody's talking about them.
5:59
Well nobody ever talks about them.
6:00
So yeah, let's talk about them.
6:02
So, of course, as as always, we start out with the machinery first because there
6:07
are two machines running in parallel here that are not talking to each other.
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Machine one is the Space Force Uniform Program.
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It's pretty boring, and and boring is the point,
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right? You stand up a new entire branch of the military in 2019,
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and one of the first really hard problems is what people wear.
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Because
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A uniform is the entire visual argument for why your service exists.
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So you run wear tests, you get feedback from the people who have to like live
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the thing in 200 days a year, right?
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So you you iterate, and on January thirteenth through 15th,
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2026, the Space Force actually issues dress guidance,
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which is the SPFI 36-2903,
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which formalizes the actual service dress uniform.
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Dark blue jacket, silver buttons,
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gray pants.
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And in case you've never had any dealings with the military,
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~ these are mandatory purchases.
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It's not optional for you to dress like everyone else.
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It's called a uniform for a reason.
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and anybody who transferred into that service or started out in the space force
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was estimated to pay a two hundred to four hundred dollar cost for that uniform.
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And that is out of pocket.
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And if you'll you'll ~ take a look at the pay grades for modern soldiers,
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you'll know why we brought up why we emphasize the fact that that's out of pocket.
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But that's normal for the military.
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Don't you mean guardians? Guardi Space Force Guardians.
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Guardians, yeah. So pardon me.
7:28
our department of war. I didn't
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know if to if guardians worked for the department of war,
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you know, that sounds like more of a department of defense kind of move,
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but anyway. ~
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We'll find out.
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yeah. so but that's normal for the military,
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right? And also worth remembering later because we're gonna talk about a two billion
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Mr. Joshua?
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Ba ba ba billion.
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That's right. Sign replacement project in a minute.
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And I want those two numbers in the same room.
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Yeah, so the rollout started in November of twenty twenty-five.
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First two recruiters, training instructors,
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and senior leaders and ROTC graduates.
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Optional for most guardians for now,
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there's a a senior master sergeant,
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Brandy Gonzalez, who is actually photographed modeling it for the announcement.
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And that's the process. It's real people,
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real fittings, real feedback loop,
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real document with a real number on it.
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In the same way that that the Army,
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the Marines, you know, the the Air Force,
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the Navy have done.
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Generation after generation with the rollout of new uniforms.
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And fast forward to June twenty-three of this year,
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General Chance Salzman, Chief of Space Operations,
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as we kind of touched on a little bit,
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wears the very first wear test,
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all black mess dress at the Air Force Weapons School graduation in Las Vegas.
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Mess dress means the formal
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Say that three times fast.
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one, right? Yeah. I was trying to get it out once.
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I'm not even
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going for
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Ha ha.
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three. ~ but mess dress, in case you again,
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in case you don't know, is the formal dress,
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like it's the black tie equivalent.
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The name mess may throw you off a little bit there,
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but it's it's dress uniform. So the service is at that very moment actively testing
9:00
a black formal uniform through its own channels with its own people on the record.
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Which is important because it means that the fact that it was black really wasn't
9:09
the whole scandal of this thing.
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Right. This is not about the the shock troopers or whatever,
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you know, is showing up in black and looking scary.
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~ it's that black mass dress is not unusual.
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Roughly half of the world's militaries wear black in the evening.
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The Navy's dinner dress is functionally black.
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I mean most people not most people,
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but many people can't tell the difference between Navy the US Navy dressed uniform,
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color navy and black. But this is not
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If you're colorblind.
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a case of someone it right, ~ or to varying degrees.
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But this is not a case of someone inventing a a sinister color.
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That's more than that.
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Yeah, so the the the machine one is is running fine.
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It's slow, it's expensive, it's a little dorky,
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but it's functional, right? Like it's the government doing the thing government
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is supposed to be doing, which is grinding through a design problem with committees
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and a waterfall process until you get something that fits.
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Machine two is just a guy with a phone.
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Nowhere test here.
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No. no fitting, no guardian feedback,
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no document number. Machine two generates an image with AI and posts it,
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and the image depicts a black and gray design that this service had not announced.
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It does not have it in its program,
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in the pipeline, and as far as anybody can tell,
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nobody's ever seen it before that morning in a true social post.
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Well, to be fair, you know, they have if they've seen Starship
10:32
To be fair.
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Troopers if they've seen Starship Troopers,
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they've seen the uniform roughly.
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~ but you know, and also to be fair,
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it does say incorporates the functionality of the Starship Troopers uniform,
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which is hilarious to me because I never saw anything in that movie about
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functionality, right? When Patrick Neopatrick Harris shows up in the black uniform,
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nobody says, Wow, that's really functional.
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I should get me one of those. but anyway.
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We talk about those details a little later actually.
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Yeah.
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So let's be pedantic about why this matters institutionally,
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because this is the part that gets lost when the story becomes a joke about a movie.
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there's a chain of authority for what an American service member wears,
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right? It runs through the service chief,
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through the dress and appearance boards,
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through the guidance documents.
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Saltzman owns all of that. It's one of the few genuine prerogatives
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a service chief has.
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And it was overruled by a retweet,
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like a an executive tweet, if you will.
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Yes, and nobody in the chain can say anything about it because
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the person who ordered it happens to be the commander in chief.
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So you get this silence where the institution just sort of stands there like,
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okay, what do I do now?
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So let's talk about this image itself,
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because the design inspiration label is doing something specific here.
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That's not the language of a military procurement document,
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right? That's the language of a pitch deck.
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It's a PowerPoint slide, somebody made like a mood board.
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Board for National Armed Service.
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The thing about a mood board though is that it tells you what the maker thought
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was cool. That's like the whole purpose.
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So when a mood board says the discipline and functionality of the star trip stip
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starship trooper uniform, we now know something true about the person
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who created it. They watched that movie and the key takeaway
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was discipline and functionality.
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Which is, I want to note, not what that uniform does in the film.
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As we talked about, the uniform of the film is not functional.
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Nobody in Starship Troopers is protected by what they're wearing.
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It's a running visual gag. They send teenagers in the movie against giant insects
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in what amounts to a safety vest and a helmet,
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and the bugs go through them like tissue paper.
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Bearhoven is making fun of you for thinking the outfit is armored.
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And the outfit is not armor. It's recruitment,
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right? Like the their their logo,
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their motto in this is service guarantees citizenship.
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That is the propaganda that they're spewing out on television and newspapers,
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right? It looks badass two thousand on a recruitment poster.
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Correct. And the actual armor,
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when you go back to the Source novel here,
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which is a Heinlein novel from nineteen fifty nine,
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their actual armor in the the novel is a exoskeleton suit like a big mech,
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like from Alien or something. mobile infantry.
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Like actually cool.
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Yeah, actually cool. ~ although I didn't have to visualize this,
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so that helps a little bit when you're in nineteen fifty nine.
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But also being that much closer to World War Two,
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I think everybody knew what his inspiration would be drawing from if
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he had drawn those. Anyway.
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~ Verhoeven deliberately so well in addition to the exoskeleton suits they've
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got mobile infantry, jump jets,
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all the latest tech. Verhoeven deliberately took the cool suits out.
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he read the book and decided the politics were ruled by military elite,
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dressed up as adventure, and made a movie where the soldiers wear stylish
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but non functional play clothes and then get shredded on the battlefield.
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So the design inspiration credit is citing the least functional uniform
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in science fiction for its actual functionality.
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Deliberately non functional, yes.
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So that's that's pretty damn funny.
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I and I wanna give that its moment.
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Take a moment.
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So so here's here's the the the mechanism question,
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right? Does this image actually become a uniform?
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Because there's a version of it where it's a a Tuesday,
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right? It's content and it evaporates by Friday.
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The Gish Gallop, like last week's episode about flooding the field
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and and filling it with bullshit.
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There's a version where somebody at the Pentagon reads it as an executive order,
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though.
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And based on our last eighteen months of experience,
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which version would you bet on?
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So that's the thing. Look at the pattern of how decision has moved
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in this administration. June 14th,
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2025, a military parade in Washington for the Army's 250th anniversary,
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which just so happens to fall on the president's 79th birthday.
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Right? Roughly 6,600 soldiers,
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24 M1 Abrams tanks rolling down Constitution Avenue.
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And six and ten adults in the AP North Pole,
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~ opposing it.
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Right. So which for you math nerds is a sixty percent disapproval rating.
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And it happened anyway. And it cost somewhere somewhere between twenty five
15:19
and forty five million dollars,
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which I think is a purposeful range so wide that it actually tells
15:26
you nobody was counting the beans in the bean counter area.
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Are there beam counters left in the administration?
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~
15:34
they're counting something.
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Well the tanks needed metal plates on the road,
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by the way, because Abram's tanks are not meant to drive on on asphalt.
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Surprise, surprise. ~ and they'll tear it up.
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So I'm sure that's a real line item somewhere.
15:47
There's still a line item because apparently it had to
15:49
be repaired afterwards because of how much it had been torn up.
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So then, fast forward a little to september fifth,
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twenty twenty five, executive order renaming the Department of Defense
16:00
to the Department of War. And Pentagon workers started pulling the sign lettering
16:06
on the exact same day.
16:09
Somebody probably advised them ahead of time,
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I'm imagining. They didn't just show up to work and say,
16:12
I think I'll take down the defense part of the Department of Defense.
16:15
Sign. But that tells you the sequencing,
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right? The order is signed and the maintenance crew is on a ladder with
16:20
a pry bar before anybody's done any costing analysis on it.
16:23
So whatever whatever the
16:24
And the cost
16:24
Office of Congressional Budget or Congressional Budget Office does.
16:27
No, never mind. Go ahead. Yeah.
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They don't CBO doesn't do anything anymore.
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It
16:32
just it signs the checks. The cost estimates
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Right.
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actually for that that whole name change,
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by the way, are have run from about ten million to two bi billion,
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depending on whether you're reading
16:45
Talk about a range.
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the the Congressional Budget Office or you know the National Broadcasting Service.
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That is not an estimate range.
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That is a 200 200x spread. That is two different organizations answering
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two different questions and nobody in the middle reconciling them.
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Because the $10 million is signage and letterhead and the two billion
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is every contract, every legal instrument,
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every treaty reference, every uniform patch,
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every email domain, every piece of software with a hard-coded department name
17:12
on it across an organization with roughly three million people attached to it.
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And that's again the mechanism.
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That's the whole flabby, coughing,
17:21
smog generating engine in one gesture.
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A decision gets made as an aesthetic,
17:28
announced like a spectacle, and then the institution just eats the cost
17:33
of making that brand change real.
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Nobody prices it out first, because putting a price tag on it would kind
17:40
of spoil the moment.
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And the Space Force uniform graphic is then the same motion at a smaller scale.
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Someone made an image. If it becomes policy,
17:49
the Space Force absorbs a redesign it didn't ask for,
17:51
on top of the one it just finished.
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If it doesn't become policy, then the president of the US publicly overwrote
17:57
his own service chief for content,
17:59
and everyone agrees to pretend that it didn't happen.
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Now both possible outcomes actually cost us.
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One costs money and one costs the idea that the chain
18:10
of command actually means anything.
18:14
So who's holding the bag on this one?
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Let's do the people. And I want to start with the guy who has
18:18
the strangest position in the whole story,
18:19
which is Paul Verhoven.
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The most vindicated man in Hollywood right now.
18:24
The most vindicated and possibly the least happy about it.
18:27
Here's his situation. 1943,
18:30
he's five years old. His family moves to The Hague,
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which is under Nazi occupation.
18:35
He has said directly that this is the biographical source of the fascist imagery
18:39
in his films. Not an influence.
18:41
The source. He grew up watching German soldiers in the street,
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and then he became a filmmaker whose recurring subject is how appealing that looks
18:49
from the outside.
18:50
And he creates starship troopers as a trap.
18:53
He builds it as a trap, technically,
18:55
sure. He casts it like a Lenny Raf Riefenstahl film.
18:59
Beautiful blonde people, symmetrical,
19:01
glowing, Casper Van Deen at his peak.
19:04
Denise Richards, Dina Meyer,
19:07
Patrick Muldoon. He shoots the propaganda news reels in a Riefenstahl grammar.
19:12
Puts Nil Patrick Harris in a coat so close to an SS officer's uniform that
19:15
the crew starts calling him Doogie Himmler.
19:18
On set. You can actually look that up on IMDb.
19:19
Hm. Monset.
19:21
Yeah. The casting crew, they got the joke.
19:24
The critics unfortunately did not.
19:26
So in 1997, the film comes out,
19:28
and Janet Maslin in the New York Times and Roger Ebert both essentially read
19:32
it as the thing it was mocking.
19:33
Ebert, who I I love or respect the guy as a critic,
19:37
was as good a reader of film as any America's produced,
19:39
took it as an empty brutal spectacle.
19:42
And Verhoeven's line about the whole thing,
19:44
which is the most devastating six words in this episode,
19:46
is no one saw it at the time.
19:49
And the truth is it it underperformed with adult audiences and it cleaned
19:54
up with teenage boys, becoming somewhat of a cult classic.
19:59
I can't imagine why, but what which is the joke inside the joke?
20:02
The satire of military recruitment propaganda became successful military recruitment
20:07
recruitment propaganda for fifteen year olds.
20:09
It played straight to the exact demographic it was warning about.
20:12
So I actually I I saw this movie when I was thirteen,
20:15
right? In nineteen ninety-seven I was thirteen years old and I thought
20:18
the uniforms were cool. I did.
20:20
~ I I mean, I was not doing ~ like a
20:22
The whole movie was cool.
20:23
it was. I was not doing like a critical reading of Riefenstahl,
20:27
right? I was watching Neil Patrick Harris look sharp and thinking,
20:31
damn. But even then I thought it was funny.
20:35
Everyone did.
20:36
Everyone who got it. And that's Verhoven's point,
20:39
right? And it took me a long time to realize this as an adult.
20:42
So I want to hold a little grace for the 13-year-olds like me who missed it,
20:47
like little baby Gerbil, Stephen Miller,
20:49
or the 51-year-old like Donald Trump,
20:52
who even then didn't have enough hair to catch the joke going right over
20:56
the top of his head.
20:57
So I wanna hold zero grace, however,
21:00
for the White House communications office in twenty twenty six.
21:04
Boy, if there was ever a more a worse misnomer.
21:06
Because the difference is in the label.
21:08
A teenager thinks that looking that the code looks cool is the mechanism working
21:13
as designed. The mechanism is supposed to catch you.
21:15
Writing design inspiration on a slide and sending it out from the office
21:18
of the president is not getting caught.
21:20
That's endorsing it in writing after twenty-nine years of people explaining
21:24
the joke.
21:24
Gross. Nineteen ninety seven was almost thirty years ago.
21:28
Blah. Twenty
21:30
Yeah.
21:30
nine years of of think pieces.
21:32
There is a cottage industry.
21:35
There are dissertations. You can get a degree in this now.
21:38
And so Verhoeven's outcome in september twenty twenty six is that
21:41
a sitting American president promoted a uniform whose own design notes,
21:46
sorry, his own design notes cite the anti fascist parody costume he built
21:50
to warn people. That's the outcome.
21:53
He set a trap twenty nine years ago and the president of the US walked into
21:56
it holding a mood board.
21:58
Okay, so who else's back is this actually falling on?
22:02
Because Verhoeven is fine. Verhoven's right,
22:05
he's got like a a cool story to tell at parties now.
22:08
But who actually pays for this gap?
22:11
Well, it seems like Chance Saltzman pays pretty directly.
22:14
Like this is where it gets less funny.
22:16
Saltzman is chief of space operations.
22:18
He oversaw a multi year uniform program built on guardian wear test feedback,
22:22
which means this is what the people who are actually going to be wearing
22:24
the uniform say about it. it's the correct way to do it,
22:28
right? He personally wore the black mess dress in june twenty twenty
22:31
six at graduation in public as part of formal wear testing.
22:35
He did his job the way his job is designed to be done.
22:38
Right. And then three months later,
22:41
an AI slot picture makes the whole thing just look like a suggestion.
22:45
And Saltzman can't say anything.
22:47
That's the cost. Not money. He can't hold a press conference and
22:52
say the president has no role in this.
22:53
He can't correct the record because the record belongs to his boss.
22:56
So the cost to Saltzman is the difference between having authority
23:00
and having the appearance of authority,
23:01
and that is a cost paid in silence.
23:04
Which is why nobody's covering it.
23:05
Except us.
23:06
There's
23:07
right, today. There's there's
23:09
Mm-hmm.
23:10
someone else here too, so David Madsen,
23:13
apparently a design lead connected to the mess dress work.
23:18
Right, and that's a person whose actual craft is being compared unfavorably
23:22
and in public to an image an LLM made in four seconds for three gallons of water.
23:26
If you've ever done skilled work and had it overruled by somebody something
23:30
a boss saw and liked, you know that specific feeling.
23:33
Multiply it by the entire US military and put it on the news.
23:36
Then there's also Master Sergeant Brandy Gonzalez,
23:39
who stood there and modeled the real one in photographs in a magazine.
23:44
Like
23:46
For the
23:46
November 2025 rollout. Caution here because I don't know what she thinks about
23:51
any of this, and the article doesn't cover a sourced quote.
23:53
What I can say is that she's the human face of the uniform that exists,
23:57
and there's now a competing uniform that doesn't exist,
24:00
promoted from a higher altitude,
24:01
which she has nothing to do with.
24:03
And modeled by a man on the mood board.
24:06
And then
24:07
Course.
24:07
the actual Space Force Guardians,
24:10
the rank and file. Who are the actual ones with a mandatory purchase requirement
24:16
of two hundred to four hundred dollars if they're transferring into
24:19
the Space Force from another armed service?
24:22
Right, and that's where the line in the sand is drawn for the money.
24:24
I mean the people at the bottom of this pay in cash for their clothes.
24:27
That's how it works. That's how it's always worked.
24:30
There's a uniform allowance and it doesn't always cover it and
24:32
you eat the difference. So when the aesthetic changes from the top on a whim with
24:36
no process, the question every enlisted person in America immediately asks
24:39
is Am I buying this twice?
24:41
Do I own two coats now?
24:44
Well to date nobody has answered that because there's nothing to answer.
24:47
There's no program. There's an AI slot post.
24:51
So circling back though, ~ we brought up Hugo Boss in the intro,
24:54
so we should probably finish that part of it out.
24:57
Go for it.
24:59
1929, Walter Heck, graphic designer.
25:02
He draws the SS double ~ sea Gruna,
25:06
the two lightning boats we talked about earlier.
25:08
I'm sure you've seen it tattooed on Pete Heggseth's body somewhere.
25:11
1932, Heck and Carl Diebitsch.
25:15
Diebitsch, that's the best way I can spell it.
25:19
D-I-E-B-I-T-S-C-H.
25:22
He's a painter, right? ~ he becomes an SS Oba Fjora co-design.
25:29
And i the all-black SS uniform is co-designed by him.
25:33
So two professional clothing designers,
25:37
not like the kind that Tim Gunn would be like designers,
25:40
designers, doing a branding exercise for the actual Nazis.
25:45
And the manufacturing goes to Hugo Boss's company in Metzingen,
25:50
which is also produced SA uniforms and Hitler youth uniforms and
25:55
During the war ran both of those factories essentially on slave labor.
26:00
There's a portfolio nobody wants.
26:01
So the actual human cost at the bottom of this aesthetic lineage,
26:05
the very first time, was people conscripted into sewing rooms to produce
26:09
the clothes that made the men who conscrip conscripted them to look magnificent,
26:12
right? So you're making your captors look better by sewing them fancy new clothes.
26:17
Right. And that's that's the thing about a product design,
26:20
right? Like somebody has to make it.
26:22
Somebody sits at a sewing machine or sits at a plate factory or whatever
26:26
and like they have to produce these shitty goods.
26:29
And Debich's other job, which also was also very deranged,
26:33
was running the SS Porcelain Works at Alec.
26:36
He designed dinnerware. Same guy,
26:39
same eye, same project. Make this beautiful so people want to be near it.
26:43
So the chain is Heck and Debitch in nineteen thirty two,
26:46
manufactured by Hugo Boss on slave labor,
26:50
absorbed into film iconography for fifty years,
26:54
weaponized as satire by a man who watched the originals march past his house
26:59
as a child in nineteen forty three,
27:00
and then in September twenty twenty six pulled off the shelf by
27:05
an AI image generator and captioned with discipline and functionality.
27:10
Four steps.
27:12
Four steps and one of them is a joke,
27:15
and everybody somehow skipped the joke.
27:18
Alright, so I think there are three things in this story that don't hold up,
27:21
and one of them is is ours.
27:24
Start with ours.
27:26
So ours is going to be the the word fascist,
27:29
right? We all have heard it as a descriptor about this administration,
27:34
these this president, all of these elected leaders,
27:35
but this uniform specifically.
27:38
And I want to be careful because a black uniform is not a political ideology.
27:44
The salon headline said the uniforms,
27:47
quote, scream fascist supervillain,
27:49
which is fine. I mean it's funny.
27:51
And it's super accurate as like vibe criticism.
27:54
But a coat is just a coat, right?
27:56
Italy's ~ carabinieri, they look incredible if you've checked out their uniforms,
28:00
and and Italy is a parliamentary democracy.
28:03
So if our claim is that the aesthetic is the danger,
28:07
then our claim is pretty weak,
28:09
and somebody smarter than us will pull it apart in about 30 seconds.
28:12
I mostly agree, and here's how I see it.
28:14
The uniform isn't the offense.
28:16
The uniform is diagnostic. The question a uniform answers,
28:20
which is what does this institution want you to feel when you see us?
28:22
And Debitch and Heck had a very specific answer in nineteen thirty two,
28:26
which is they wanted to mess their pants.
28:29
Fear plus envy in the same glance.
28:31
The combination is the design brief,
28:33
and that's what the black was for.
28:36
Right. Fear plus envy. Like mean girls without the glitz and the glamour
28:42
and the makeup.
28:43
Well every day we wear black. Right?
28:45
Get it? 'Cause on Penn Wednesdays they wear pink.
28:46
Hmm. Took me a second, I was like,
28:48
what kind of accent is that?
28:50
Alright. You want the population?
28:52
They all want me to wear
28:53
the black clothings.
28:55
On every day. Alright, you want the you want the population
28:57
Alright, enough of that.
28:59
frightened of you. Yeah, let's ~ Yeah.
29:02
you want the population frightened of you and simultaneously wishing they were you.
29:06
That's what makes it work as recruitment,
29:07
right? 'Cause Verhoven understood that so precisely that he reproduced
29:12
the whole apparatus. And twenty nine years of teenage boys wanting
29:15
the code proves he nailed it.
29:17
So the graphic kind of just tells us the vibe.
29:20
Well, somebody in that building wants the American military to produce fear plus
29:23
envy. Somebody in that building.
29:25
And
29:26
Mm-hmm.
29:26
reached for the most efficient known template for it and cited their source,
29:30
which is unusually helpful of them.
29:31
Sure, but they forgot the peer review.
29:34
Anyway, second thing that doesn't add up,
29:37
the stated justification, discipline,
29:40
and functionality.
29:42
Which we've established is false at least on the functionality part.
29:45
So fifty percent that's an F, right?
29:49
And the American grading system.
29:50
But I hear the the Asian grading system is a lot harder.
29:54
So let's ask what would have to be true for that sentence to make sense,
30:00
right? You'd need the Starship Troopers uniform to be a functional garment.
30:05
It isn't. It never was. It's a costume built to look good on camera
30:09
and fail on screen while the cameras are rolling.
30:12
You need this movie to be.
30:15
presenting that military as disciplined in a way that you'd admire.
30:19
But it presents them as disciplined the way like a cult is disciplined,
30:24
which is the point of the scene where they all cheer while a guy gets executed
30:29
on live reality television.
30:31
And there's a recruitment ad in the film that ends with children stomping insects
30:35
while an adult says, Everyone's doing their part,
30:37
are you?
30:38
So for discipline and functionality to be an honest take,
30:41
you'd have to actually have watched the movie with the sound off.
30:44
Which and I say this with sincerity is my leading theory.
30:49
My theory is that nobody watched it at all.
30:51
My theory is that somebody typed a prompt.
30:53
Well, mm, what do you mean by that?
30:55
Like, spell it out.
30:57
Here's what I think happened, and I want to flag clearly that this is inference,
31:00
not documented. It's an AI slot,
31:02
so the process was somebody wanted a cool future uniform.
31:05
They typed a description into an image model,
31:08
and the fastest way to get a cool future uniform out of an image model is
31:11
to name a movie. You write in the style of Starship Troopers,
31:14
because the model has seen 10,000 stills from it.
31:17
Then the model returns something and someone builds a slide around it,
31:20
and the design inspiration line is just the prompt cleaned up and given a font.
31:25
Yeah, that's worse, but not I I mean,
31:28
not far off from where I think the average AI user is right now in terms
31:33
of prompt mechanics and prompt engineering.
31:35
Right, but for the administration it's much worse because it means nobody vibe
31:39
checked it at all. There was no meeting,
31:40
nobody said we want fear plus envy.
31:42
Somebody wanted a picture, the picture needed a reference and
31:45
the reference was whatever the closest to hand was closest to hand
31:48
in the model's memory.
31:50
Yeah, I guess ~ what's closest to hand when the request is make
31:53
the space soldiers look scary,
31:55
right, is ninety years of imagery descended from two guys who just
32:00
so happened to work for the Nazis in nineteen thirty two.
32:03
Right, that's the mechanism. The model isn't being fascist,
32:06
the model's being average. It's giving you the statistical center
32:10
of imposing military uniform as rendered across everything humans have ever
32:14
put on film, and the statistical center of that data set is downstream
32:18
of Heck and Debitch because they were extraordinarily good at their jobs,
32:22
and everyone's been copying them since.
32:24
So the danger isn't that a machine has politics.
32:28
Not in this case. In fact, in this case the dis the danger is that
32:31
it doesn't have politics. It has an average,
32:33
and the average is contaminated.
32:35
If you use it without knowing anything,
32:37
you inherit the contamination and put it on a slide.
32:39
Yeah, I think I'll go f one further and say that the part that actually concerns
32:43
me about how this stuff is is sort of getting used in government,
32:47
and it's not really the whole like people usually worry about kind of thing.
32:52
Everyone's braced for AI to make something up.
32:55
Fine, right? Like that's that's manageable.
32:57
You check it, you c we call it guardrails or or grounding,
33:00
right, in the in the computer tech space.
33:03
But what I don't actually see anyone braced for is the AI giving you the most
33:08
conventional possible answer, like literally statistically,
33:12
visually average. Just as like a fresh idea and and nobody in the room having enough
33:19
history to recognize where that statistical average came from.
33:23
Because it looks new.
33:24
Well the timestamp is new, right?
33:25
Because it was generated four seconds ago.
33:27
But it's a ninety four year old design.
33:30
And it arrives with a con a confidence that a human designer wouldn't have,
33:33
right? Nobody would put this out there as their work and be proud of it.
33:36
A human costume designer in nineteen ninety seven knew exactly what he was quoting.
33:40
That was the job. The model doesn't know it's quoting.
33:44
Yeah. Third thing that doesn't add up and this one's just a straight missing number.
33:48
Like what does this actually cost us in the long run?
33:51
No idea.
33:52
Well, you have no idea yet. But that's not an oversight.
33:57
I mean, that's just the way Republicans have worked for years.
33:59
Look at the pattern of the numbers we already have,
34:03
right? The parade twenty five to forty five million.
34:05
That's a twenty million dollar uncertainty band,
34:08
right? For an event that already happened.
34:11
It's not like we can unspend it,
34:12
right? We renamed the Department of War ten million to two billion dollars.
34:17
Those are I don't know, ~ with dollar signs attached.
34:21
Just like the Lake Ontario to Lake America and and Gulf of Mexico
34:27
to Gulf of America and now apparently New Mexico to New America.
34:31
I it's so it's so mind boggling if we're being honest.
34:37
But
34:37
And
34:38
yeah. And in each of these
34:39
No, it's fine.
34:39
cases the announcement the announcement comes before the accounting
34:42
by a wide margin. September fifth,
34:44
twenty twenty five, order signed,
34:46
letters coming off the resolute desk that afternoon.
34:49
So when a uniform pick, right,
34:51
goes up with no program, no wear test,
34:53
no number, the only honest look at this is that the number is going
34:57
to be produced later by whoever gets stuck putting it into place.
35:00
And the range will be embarrassing for all of us because we pay those with
35:04
our tax dollars.
35:06
And here's what none of us know at this point.
35:07
nobody outside the administration knows.
35:09
We don't know if this becomes real.
35:11
We don't know whether there's a follow-up memo.
35:14
The research we did didn't have one.
35:15
~ it's possible that this is a post that dies as a post,
35:19
right? In six months the SPFI thirty six dash two nine three uniform
35:23
is the only uniform in the graphic is a trivia answer.
35:26
think I'd rather it be the inscription on the tombstone of this administration.
35:29
How about you?
35:30
I'd take that outcome. But I'd note that we survived because the decision
35:33
was too dumb to implement. It's not a governing structure anyone should
35:36
be comfortable relying on.
35:38
Haha I would agree with that. So here's what I think this is really about,
35:41
and I think the movie stuff is both a gift and I think the movie stuff
35:47
is also a distraction at the same.
35:49
In the familiar words of our former pr press secretary,
35:52
both things can be true at the same time.
35:54
Right. A uniform is a promise,
35:57
right? It's it's the ethical content of it.
36:00
When you put a person in a uniform,
36:02
the institution is saying two things at one time.
36:05
This person acts on our authority,
36:07
and this person is accountable to us,
36:10
which is a claim of both legitimacy and a claim of restraint
36:16
in the same exact uniform. That's why
36:20
An unmarked goon with tactical gear covering his face with a with a sock puppet
36:25
and no name on his his badge or his uniform is really scary.
36:31
So much more so than a police officer in a uniform with a name and
36:34
a badge number and a business card that they can actually hand you.
36:37
And this one tells you that the consequences belong to a mood board.
36:42
Right. Because the space uniform that does exist,
36:45
that the SPF thirty six twenty nine three,
36:47
I think we should we should come up with an easier name for it.
36:49
That's just it's SPFI
36:51
Mm-hmm.
36:51
thirty six dash two nine zero three.
36:53
But that's how I mean that's how not far along they were in
36:58
the uniform selection process.
36:59
It just still has a classification number,
37:01
right? But it was a promise made by an institution.
37:05
And it came out of a process with names on it.
37:08
Saltzman signed off and and Guardians have
37:10
Tested this so far, Brandy Gonzalez stood there and modeled it in November of 2025.
37:15
That is boring, but it's legitimate,
37:18
right? And it's also accountable to us as the people who are paying
37:22
for these uniforms and paying for these armed services.
37:24
The graphic itself is a promise made by nobody,
37:29
right? There's no signature, there's no board,
37:31
there's no process. And the design credit really goes to just kind of a funny movie.
37:37
And I think that's what actually unsettled people this week.
37:39
It's not the black uniform, it's the unaccountability of it.
37:41
You look at that image and there's nothing behind it.
37:43
It's an outfit for a military with no institution attached.
37:47
Right. So look, we don't really have anything for you to pay attention to this time,
37:51
right? We don't have like a list of things that you should do,
37:54
not including calling your senator.
37:56
Nothing that caught us off guard or anything that we keep coming back
38:01
to because this is all starting to feel like just a giant joke.
38:04
We wanted to be a little lighthearted this week and,
38:07
you know, point at the big stupid shit coming out of Washington
38:10
and hopefully laugh along with you without getting too serious.
38:14
Hence the terrible German accent.
38:16
Right.
38:17
we aren't great at that because we like the history and when you're looking
38:20
at the parallels between current dark times and relating them to the past dark ages,
38:24
it can sometimes feel all too serious.
38:27
Yeah, I think we're both a little guilty of that.
38:29
Did any of you know in our audience that servicemen and women had to
38:32
buy their own work uniforms? Joshua,
38:33
did you know that?
38:34
Well, I think I vaguely remember something about that because there is an allowance,
38:39
right? Like you get an I think and I think it's just like one.
38:41
You know, and I think you have you get one in so many amounts of time.
38:45
But if you're if you're enlisted full time,
38:47
like you need to wash them because they're gonna get dirty
38:50
Exactly.
38:50
in the same way that you have,
38:52
you know, a couple of suits. ~ if you were working in an office.
38:55
I is that what people do? I don't work in an office anymore.
38:57
D do people show up in suits still or is it just like jeans and t shirts?
39:00
No. But y you need more than,
39:01
Some do.
39:02
you know
39:03
w one t shirt or one pair of jeans anywhere you go and so they have to
39:07
pay for those completely out of pocket.
39:09
Right. So here's our stake. We're saying that by March thirty first,
39:12
two thousand twenty seven, long after AI AGI has arrived,
39:16
~ the
39:17
Mm-hmm.
39:17
Space Force will not have adopted the black and gray design from that Truth Social
39:21
graphic as an official uniform.
39:23
And SPFI, should leave it at that,
39:27
the dark blue jacket with the silver buttons and gray pants will still
39:31
be the service's actual dress uniform of record.
39:34
We really hope this one actually dies as a true social post.
39:37
I I mean I have to be honest. But look,
39:39
if we're wrong, we will let you know and we'll say it while looking
39:43
at a photograph of an American service member a a Space Force Guardian wearing
39:48
a doogie Himmler coat.
39:50
Which I would like on the record as an outcome I would bet against.
39:53
But hey, you know,
39:53
Noted.
39:54
at least we have work one thing we have working for us is that Donald Trump hasn't
39:57
shown up by anybody's bedside at a hospital and miraculously cured them.
40:00
So some of these posts die on the vine.
40:02
N
40:02
no one has miraculously showed up at n at Donald Trump's bed at a hospital yet.
40:09
Right.
40:10
So no one has shown up yet. We're we'll we'll still wait on that.
40:13
That's why we're we're starting to
40:14
Okay.
40:14
we're trying to collect the receipts here,
40:16
right? We're gonna we're trying to make predictions and see what happens later on.
40:19
We'll include it in a another post or something like that.
40:22
So look,
40:23
Sounds good.
40:24
thanks for joining us today. You can visit us on the world wide
40:27
web at FOF.foundation, not dot com,
40:30
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And we specifically say five star review.
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It's ~ it's basically a a pop up for,
41:21
you know, other people so that they can laugh with us.
41:24
Or cry, you know, K Sarah Sarah.
41:26
So Will, thank you for watching that movie twice,
41:29
I think you said, and thank you for being co host with me on another episode.
41:33
I do it again. So in fact I'll probably watch Stormtroopers again Stormtroopers.
41:38
Starship Troopers again tonight.
41:40
So ~ I actually might see Stormtroopers,
41:43
but maybe I'll watch Star Wars.
41:44
I
41:45
you know, it it still holds true for the graphic.
41:48
Right, which I you know, one thing we didn't talk about and I know it's
41:50
not your favorite movie, that's why I didn't bring it up before now,
41:52
but the Star Wars movie, like the Empire in Star Wars,
41:54
also has very similar uniforms to the the Nazis.
41:57
But
41:58
I thought were white.
41:59
the the stormtroopers are white,
42:00
but the the
42:01
Okay.
42:01
admin like the officers all have that sort of similar look with the
42:05
Okay. I guess they were black.
42:06
the like crisp lines and yeah.
42:07
yeah, sorry guys,
42:08
I'm not a I'm not a warzy. I'm a Trekkie,
42:11
so I I prefer, you know, space utopia over trailer park space opera.
42:16
Not a huge fan, but Will is, so.
42:19
He actually likes both, right?
42:20
Nobody's perfect, Joshua. I do.
42:21
You you're a bother. Yeah, and that's fine.
42:22
I'm both there. I'm equal opportunity fantasy.
42:23
Yep, I just not good on the
42:26
Space fantasy.
42:27
space trailer park. Anyway, ~ you guys should all watch Stormtroopers
42:32
or Starship Troopers or
42:34
Whatever, the Federation. Yes,
42:35
Super troopers if you like. Meow.
42:37
if you
42:38
not the second one. but if you could use some lighthearted humor,
42:41
because I think we all probably could.
42:43
Make sure you take care of each other.
42:45
Bye.
42:46
Bye.