EP #1 - Trump in Miami, Pythons In South Florida, Aztec Video Game
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Welcome to the inaugural. We've had so many inaugural like PirateWire's things. This is our inaugural podcast. So thanks for joining us. This is going to be our weekly news show. We're going to go over all of the pieces that we've done. We're going to go over all the random crazy shit we've seen online. We're going to go over all the

and it's friday you know it's just going to be like a fun chill friday news recap uh i think we should just get right into it it's been a crazy wild last week especially leading into this week i think was just it was completely insane we published a bunch of pieces it seemed like the drama never really ended this week i had a bit of a hangover and then it didn't matter because there was more news it was the trump arraignment and i think maybe that's where we start because i think it was it was like what was it it was uh

Tuesday was the... Yeah, it was Tuesday. So the arraignment's Tuesday. We're in Miami and I get a text from someone who's driving downtown and they're just like, you guys are covering this, right? This is insane. And it's just like Trump flags and crazy horns. It was 10 a.m. at the time. I think his arraignment was scheduled for three o'clock. So I get into the office and I'm just like,

I think we got to get River on this. And so he did. And off he went. And I think it's like... I think you just walk us through it. You went downtown. You're in Miami. What did you see? It was...

So when I first walked up, it was like the Uber driver was like, I can't take you no farther because of Donald Trump. I was like, okay. And so he lets me out. I'm like walking. I'm like walking and I see like a Land Rover with an upside down American flag and like a bunch of cars like behind it. And they're all like have like Trump shit like written on the windows or like Trump flags or like make America great again, paraphernalia of various kinds.

And I was like, okay, so I guess I should follow these people. Basically, they had formed like a caravan around the perimeter of the courthouse. And that just like continued all day, just like honking. They're playing like Trump's

like Trump jams. I don't, I don't even know, like how to explain it. Like YMCA, tiny dancer, like all of Trump's like favorite. It's boomer. This is, we were saying before, this is like, yeah, it's a party, right? This is in there. I, my parents are like, like my parents will go to Key West or something and report back drunk on a balcony. Like it's boomers having fun. This is what they do. This is their style. Right.

exactly we should keep it up actually like no one is like no one's active it's well it's like what this is the way they vibe like they like to get like drunk and weird and like wear festive hats and be on a balcony somewhere i think is like vaguely what boomers like yeah they love a hat always they love a hat they love uh casual chain smoking uh yeah yeah um but anyway so

I walk up, um, and then like the first thing I see is this kind of like a centric, I don't want to say schizophrenic cause I'm not a doctor, but you know, not normal, uh, like black dude. And he's like covered, like he has like this white linen, uh, suit and he's covered like every inch of it in Sharpie. It's like, fuck Trump, like a pussy ass to Santa's, like all kinds of stuff like that. And, uh,

he's like in an argument with some lady and then she just gets like bored and like walks off and like that was like the vibe of like all the fights which were like few and far between but the ones that were it was just people who would yell at each other for a minute and they would just like walk away um right because yeah what was up with that one video that you shared where this lady is just screaming this is manga country

I honestly, I walked up on that. Was she yelling at a specific person? Yeah, it was some guy. I don't know how it started or anything like that. I just heard, like, this is MAGA country. And I was like, oh, fuck. That's the Jesse Smollett line that he paid those Nigerian guys to say. I was like, nobody's going to believe me if I say I heard this in the wild, sincerely. Yeah.

So I, like, I just started recording and she just kept screaming it. But, um, I have no idea what that fight was about. That was like the, that was like the most heated one that I saw though. Um, all the other ones were just kind of like people like, you know, kind of bickering back and forth, but there wasn't like a crowd that formed, I guess. Um,

But yeah, apart from that, it did feel just like kind of like a party or like not even so much a party. It felt like a convention or something like, I don't know, like a Star Trek convention. I don't know. I've never been to a fucking convention. But like what I assume a convention would be like people are like selling merch. People are just like hanging out. Like even though like they would like tell you like, I mean, I talked to one lady and eavesdropped on a lot of conversations and stuff. But like,

or i talked to a couple of people but i like actually interviewed one lady but everybody was just like like they were saying that like this is like existential like the country's over if uh like trump doesn't win 2024 they didn't nobody even really would say like if trump goes to jail like i don't even think that's like something that they could like

they were willing to like reckon with like the possibility. It's not really something that I'm willing to reckon with. Does anyone really believe he's going to jail? He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who goes to jail. I just don't believe it's going to happen. Yeah, it doesn't. I think that's why people aren't, I mean, because if you just break it down to its simplest, like,

A president, the president, the president of the United States arrested his chief political rival. And that like would matter in any other country. If this happened in another country, we'd be like, oh, you know, like freedom watchdogs checking in. They must not have democracy. It's like quite an insane thing that happened.

over some fucking documents, I guess, that we can get into eventually. But no one, unless I know, until I know that the documents he was holding onto were some sort of like really insane secrets he was trading with the Saudis or something, I need some like crazy story to make this okay. And I think the reason...

no one's freaking out about it is because it doesn't feel real. None of it ever feels real. It just doesn't, I don't believe the, like he was impeached twice and no one cared because it just, it seems the whole thing is, is a show. It's like, he's a clown on stage performing for us. And we all kind of know that none of it is charged. There's not going to be any consequences. He's not going to jail. It's just like the show must go on. And it's also like,

They have plausible deniability to not tell us what the documents are about. So we can't know if they're important because they're classified. So like, how do we get out of, how do we get any information about what's going on? Like no idea. Is there a discovery process that we like the public, like at this point, doesn't the, does the public get to know anything?

I mean, the documents were classified. What's crazy, though, you have not even really had any surrogates for the administration who have seen the classified documents come out and be like,

Oh, they were bad. Yeah. There were some bad documents. Like they're not even lying. So we know that there were some dumb doc is like Trump grabbed a box of shit on his way out. And then for whatever stupid reason, wouldn't give it back because either he didn't understand what was going on or he didn't care. He wanted to be a jerk, but like it's the whole thing. Yes. Like it's illegal. And it was illegal when Biden did it. And it's illegal when Hillary, whatever the email shit on her phone was like,

But nobody really cares about any of that stuff, which is why it didn't stick for Hillary, no matter how badly the Republicans wanted it to stick. And I mean, we don't even talk about it really with Biden unless we're talking about it in the context of Trump. Like he really just nobody is calling for any consequences whatsoever. So it's like that's because no one cares until you tell us why we should care. It's really hard to be like, oh, there were some documents in.

this really important politician's house who we voted into office and the classified documents can literally mean anything like i remember going through uh like wikileaks and like looking at like state department cables that they had uploaded on there like when they did a big hack a couple years ago or somebody hacked and then gave it to wikileaks or whatever and it was like

Just like diplomats emailing each other back and forth being like, have you seen this Reuters article? Like, it's like literally like not a fucking secret. Like it's just regular email. Like there's like, but it was like classified. And I'm like, that's not a government secret. Like, um, like it's, there's basically no rules. You can just say that like,

literally every like email you send every like fucking text message every report that you do you can just say that it's classified if you just if you don't want to be public record like that's like it's become like standard practice um there are different levels of secrecy though I wish they would just tell us like this is the high like this is the highest most sensitive classification that Trump has that's why this is a problem like even that would be a clue unless have they told us that or do we just

Is it just the word classified that we're all saying and referring to? I think they might have said like highly classified, but that also, and none of that means anything to me. Isn't every, presumably everything the president does is highly classified. That's my assumption about what goes on in the white house is like,

we're not supposed to know about it. And I'm fine with that. Um, I'm also fine with the president who knew all of this information already. These were his documents. Like, it doesn't seem to matter that he then has that. He already had them. I don't understand like what the problem is here. Now, if he was, if he was giving the documents to someone else, that would be a huge problem. And actually there's a security risk here. You know, it's like, you don't want classified documents, I guess, not in a place where there's security. Um,

But if that's the problem, it just doesn't seem very nefarious. It doesn't seem like enough to put a president in jail. It doesn't. And this is going to land on the Democrats. I mean, unless they're doing it on purpose, because it's so stupid that one wonders if they're doing it to keep DeSantis out of the White House. It's like every time they do it, obviously, his base either doesn't care or they're kind of like, oh, man, we got to show up and support him. And so it only seems to really help him.

Yeah, and I think if he had done something like crazy with the documents, like I remember hearing like rumors a while back. They were like, oh, he like...

sold like the nuclear codes of the fucking Saudis or whatever. I'm like, we like, if that was real, like it would be like in the imagine, like it would be on CNN. Like people would be on MSNBC 24 set. This is how we know it's not real. This is how we know there's not even a hint of that because if there were even a hint of it, we would never hear the end of it.

MSNBC for, what was it, two years tried to convince us that he was a Manchurian candidate working for Putin. That happened. It's like we're – like any shred of evidence that he did something wrong with those documents and it would be on blast every day. It would be inescapable. The truth is just there were some dumb documents and a bunch of crazy Democrats wanted to arrest the president. And they did. Congrats. River, what was like the –

the breakdown Democrat Republican at the, at the arrangement? Very few Democrats. And most of them that were there like seemed unwell, like, and I don't mean that like just in terms of like, I think their politics are stupid. It's like, like I voted for Bernie Sanders twice. Like I'm not, you know what I mean? Like, I'm like, okay, fine. I mean, I wouldn't go to a, I wouldn't protest Trump. Like he's too funny. It's too endearing, but yeah.

The people who were there, it was like the guy who had the fucking Sharpie written all over, these two kind of gender goblin looking ladies who were walking around with rhinestone studded signs, just antagonizing people. People that walked up and were arguing, but then they mostly just walked away. There was no sustained Democrat presence there.

Literally, the Zoomer trolls who were walking around with signs that said, "My cock doesn't work, but my mouth does. I'll suck Trump." Those people, or "I'll blow Trump," something like that. They stuck around for longer than most of the Democrat protests that I saw. Last point on this, and I do want to move on. I think the most interesting thing

About the arraignment was not the it was not even the arraignment because the whole arraignment It's a what it's a political sort of its political theater or whatever But it's what happened outside of that courthouse Which is why I sent you out there and I was excited about it and then you showed us with videographic evidence That we were correct. It is

This massive burst of energy that follows Trump around that no other candidate seems to have. One question worth asking yourself is just,

In speculation, just imagine, just trying to imagine this, trying to imagine what the reaction to any other candidate's arraignment would have been. Or President, for example, Joe Biden. If Joe Biden was being arraigned for some sort of crime, what would it look like outside that courthouse? And I think it would be very similar in terms of the press presence. You would have a million cameras waiting for him to walk out and they'd be hoping he would make a statement or his lawyer would or whatever else.

But would there be a tailgate party outside of like a thousand people partying and yelling and drinking and grilling and selling merch? Like that would not happen. That would not happen if it were any other Republican candidate running with the exception of DeSantis. I don't think you would even have many cameras there. And then for DeSantis, he would have the cameras, but there wouldn't be that crowd. And that makes him...

Trump continues to be this strange outlier political force in America years later following the unsuccessful last presidential bid. And he's no longer even on social media other than Truth Social. It's really wild how much influence he has. Yeah, there's an entire Trump subculture and a micro economy that supports that subculture. That's like...

what I was like experiences when I was walking through is like people like trying to sell me like MAGA hats and like flags and shit and like I sort of like it felt like I don't know there was like a sort of almost religious thing to it which felt like a little weird and uncomfortable but it was also fascinating it was like people thought that Trump was going to speak including me

um because it seems like something he would do like we really had no evidence it was just like yeah he would he told people to come out and protest he's probably just gonna come out and like shoot the shit and like be like this is a scam this is a witch hunt whatever and everybody was waiting for that he was like saying it's this like spanish guy who's like putting his kid up in the tree like

Like he was like, you're going to remember this for the rest of your life. And then it was just like nothing happened. But it would like it felt like, you know, people like waiting for the second coming or something. And I was like, is it that or is it because as I was you were talking and I was thinking about, you know, who an arraignment would have mattered for, you know, who where you would have had a similar crowd for some. It would be like if Britney Spears was being arraigned.

Or if maybe right now Taylor Swift was being arraigned for something. I think you might see something comparable outside of a courthouse. Like, is he a religious figure or is he more of a rock star? Or maybe just our rock stars are sort of religious figures. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a video I just saw. This is a little bit of a left turn of, um,

I think reacting to Beyonce and it's just a shot of the crowd and you don't like, so you don't know what's really happening on stage, but presumably like Beyonce comes out and like every single person in the crowd starts crying. Like, right. It's the weirdest, most uncanny thing you'll see. And like,

I don't think Trump makes people cry, but I feel like there's a similar effect there. On Twitter, the right-wing trad accounts were going after that. They were like, this is a sign. It's just disgraceful that we're such a pathetic people who would cry before Beyonce or whatnot. And I thought, man, they are really scraping the bottom. There are way worse things out there than people crying over a Beyonce concert, which has been happening since.

For as long as there have been pop stars people were doing this for Elvis. Yeah, probably to write to the Beatles. All right, like yeah. Yeah well, I would just say that my Sort of retort to like Trump is Beyonce or Britney Spears or whatever. It's like when Britney Spears was like, you know under like her what is it called like retainer ship or Whatever ship conservatorship. Yeah, which I

I don't know if you follow her on Instagram, but... No, she should be... I wrote about her at the time. She burned down her own kitchen or something? Well, she's just like... She's just like, titties out and her sons are like, please stop, we're being bullied. It's sad, but it's also like people owe Jamie Spears an apology. But...

The thing is, the difference between that, it's like, yeah, people would show up for Britney's conservatorship hearings or whatever. But if you walk around in the crowd, I mean, you can get a histrionic gay guy to say anything, but most people aren't going to be like, oh, this is the end of the country if this goes south. You know what I mean? That was what people were saying there. But the weird thing was people were saying it, but I

they felt like they were going to be delivered. And that's why, like, I felt like it was like sort of, uh, there's something like very Christian or like messianic about it is like, these people are sort of like waiting for the second coming. And like, they weren't when Trump didn't come out, it was like, I expected people to be like, maybe like angry or like disappointed, but like, there's a little bit of that, but it wasn't really that like people were still hanging out and like having a good time. And then I was like,

I grew up really religious and I was like, my parents believe that the second coming can happen any day now. That's supposedly the reason that they go to church, right? Is to prepare themselves for Christ coming back. But it's not really. The reason that they go to church is to be with other people who also think they're going to be raptured. Other like-minded people to feel a sense of belonging to the community and to feel like you're a part of

something. And I think that's actually just what's happening here is like, and it's partially because of like the media, every time the media digs its heels in and it's like, you know, Trump is Hitler or whatever, like it like reinvigorates these people because it like makes them more subculture in a way that they, you know, wouldn't have been if they were just Republicans voting for George W. Bush or whatever, you know, um, or Mitt Romney or whoever. Um,

And that's why I think it's become its own thing. And also because of like Trump's like charisma and personality. His charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent. Yeah, exactly. It's a RuPaul reference. Probably no one in the audience is going to get that. We should talk about, Brennan, you want to bring us to the next topic? Pythons. Killing them all. Pythons.

Yeah. So I had this idea. We wrote a piece or we published a piece of Pyrowires of mine called Dominion. And basically, I mean, we've been in Florida. I've been in Florida for a couple of years now.

River, you've been in here for, I don't even know, a few years, five years, 10 years, how long? How old am I? 27. I've been here eight years, but we don't have pythons in Pensacola. Pensacola is Alabama. Right. Well, now you're in python country. Yeah. In Southern Florida. And...

Basically, so this problem emerged. I think maybe most Americans don't know how bad the situation is, but Florida is like an invasive species ground zero. Every kind of invasive species is here. It's like a biological contamination zone, unlike anything, maybe in the world, because it's just a good temperature, I guess, to invade. And there weren't a lot of natural predators to begin with. So...

You have the three big ones. And there are, like I said, tons, but the three big ones that are actually doing a lot of damage are in the first place, the iguanas and the iguanas seem cute, but they eat wires and shit and just do a lot of, and this damage is less, even when I'm saying it out loud, I'm like, ah, like who really cares? But they're everywhere. It's a complete infestation. There are these giant lizards that eat shit and,

And like I'm talking like all the stuff that gets your sort of – that like powers your house, your restaurants, there are blackouts because of them. They're always like getting up on electrical wires and chewing those and then popping them and it's – that's kind of the level that we're at.

I've seen signs for like a guana removal. Like this is a, like a guana exterminator is like a job that people have in South Florida. Yeah. And like all of the other invasive species that I'm about to list, you're allowed to kill as many of them as you want with no, as long as you do it humanely, you can kill and eat, eat as many of these things as you want. And there are all these videos you can search for online of, um, like random South American dudes, like grilling iguanas in their backyard in Miami. It's very insane. Um,

Uh, but moving on to, I think a more dangerous one for the ecosystem, or I don't even know if it's just, it's not one ecosystem. It was like the entire hemisphere really would be, uh, the lionfish and the lionfish is that little fish that was induced bigelow male gigolo. I don't know if anyone ever saw that, but, uh,

The main gigolo that Deuce Bigelow wants to emulate. Rob Schneider. Yeah. Well, Rob Schneider wants to emulate the Fabio-looking, good, actual talented gigolo. And that guy...

has this beautiful aquarium with what is supposed to be this like uber fancy fish um you know an $800 fish they call it back when I was a kid that seemed like it was thousands and thousands of dollars I was like wow an $800 fish oh my god like these people are eating diamonds for breakfast um

that fish was a lionfish they're ubiquitous now all over the entire western hemisphere because they're super invasive and the invasion i bel it started in florida it took over the entire coast um the lionfish is poisonous carnivorous highly aggressive and really robust it's also now mutating it's getting bigger our lionfish are far bigger than the lionfish in their native habitat

And people don't know what to do about it. They live in the coral, they eat everything, and they're destroying all of the native species. There are hundreds of species in the Gulf of New Mexico now that are at total risk, including shrimp potentially, which would be really bad for the entire economy. And it's like, what do you do for a problem like that? You can't even see them. That's a problem for another day. Today, I want to talk about the most famous one, perhaps, which is the python, the Burmese python.

Now this one, and for all of these species, there's like a weird urban legend associated with how they took over the state of Florida. It's like,

a scientific lab that was destroyed in a hurricane or a capsized ship carrying like thousands of lionfish. And I've done research. I can't find evidence that any of these things are true. It seems like the truth with all of these things is they were pets at one point and they were, um, not just one or two, but like over time, Floridians were always releasing crazy shit into the wild. And some of them just took the Bermuda python, wherever it came from became obviously a predator.

not a problem, but it became obviously, what is the word I'm looking for? It was a known breeding sort of feral species by the early 90s. Endemic? That was the first. Well, we didn't know if it was endemic, but we knew that there were some of them at that point that were breeding naturally on their own over the next three decades.

Every single mammalian species in the Everglades, which was one of the most biodiverse regions of the entire country, the population crashed by between 95 and 99%. So these things are completely gone. Yeah.

uh deer uh like all different kinds of like beaver and shit uh like every in the piece i list a handful of the sort of more notable species but it's all of them also uh egg laying birds and birds that stand still in the water these things eat now this one they've not crashed the population they've not crashed is the alligator the most famous apex predator in the everglades that that

population remains constant, stronger than ever, but the snakes do eat them. Um, the alligators eat them back. So it's like, I don't know, not quite as bad, but the question is like, as this population spreads, eating every single small creature in its path, not even small deer are not fucking small. Um, what do we do to stop it? It's now there. The native population is as far North. It's, it's just, just inching towards Tampa and,

And that could be a serious problem for not only our habitats, but for people. I mean, how long is it going to be really before one of these things grabs a kid? And I mean, they're everywhere. You can't even see them when you, when you put trackers on them because they're so well camouflaged, actual expert hunters can't find them. And that's the other thing. It's like we put bounties on them. We'll pay by the head. You can kill as many as you want and nothing seems to work. So what if you,

Turned to synthetic biology to eradicate the species completely. And that was the topic of my last piece. It was applying this thing called the gene drive, which has been more famously applied to mosquitoes in an effort to take down malaria to the Burmese python. And it seems like it is possible to do. Why don't we just gene drive every single invasive species on the planet?

Like what's okay. So is that not, so basically what the gene drive is, first of all. So I think it is possible, but there are these problems of, there are a couple of problems here. So first of all, what the gene drive is, uh,

You're genetically modifying... You take this snake and you breed them in captivity after genetically modifying them to only produce males. The gene drive drives a gene, so it makes it so you don't need two copies of the gene to present in progeny. And so the gene is... It's like only produces...

male gene and it is driven through the population. You produce a bunch of these snakes in captivity, like clutches in the 80s to 100s. So you're raising, you know, thousands and thousands of these new genetically modified snakes that only produce males.

And then you just fucking release them into the Everglades. They go and breed with the native population. Because they only produce males, they quickly overtake all of the other males. So it's like, you know, 9, 10, 20 times as many males have this gene than don't. And they just rapidly spread from their point of, I guess, infection into the native population. They spread through the population until it's mostly males. And then they crash it.

It's going to be effective. We've, I think, I mean, we've had a handful of lab studies on mosquitoes recently that have worked. Has that happened yet? Like, has it not done it? I have not seen any, there might've been someone doing something, but like I asked the guy who,

first thought through all this and he's a synthetic biologist out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. And he, I thought I was under the impression we had done it, but he said, no, the, the holdup is governments are scared of it. They don't want, we have a kind of anti GMO culture generally across the sort of the elite

ruling class, um, genetically modified organisms. And this is very genetically modified. This is not even like a slight modification. Uh, and, and so there's been some reluctance. So they started in lab, they started in lab experiments for the mosquitoes. The lab experiments do seem to work. The population does seem to go down. Um, snakes take a little bit longer to sexually mature. So rather than, you know, a couple of years, you're looking at

few decades, best case scenario. But the reason maybe that you wouldn't do it is there are a handful of fears. You could be afraid that there are some unintended, I think most people are afraid of some unintended edit that makes the snake into like a super snake. And now it's really smart and it's, you know, 10 times bigger. And it's just like humans are gone. It's like,

Snake apocalypse. That's crazy. There's no evidence. I couldn't see. There's nothing. We know what we're doing. We know what the edit is that we're doing. And then we're breeding them ourselves. So that seems like an extremely... I mean, I don't want to say nothing's possible. Everything's, I guess, possible. But I don't know how that would even happen. What's more likely and more dangerous, I think, would be...

people take these snakes from the invaded region. So we take a genetically modified Burmese Python from the Everglades and they bring them to its native habitat. And I think somewhere in China, um,

and eradicate the species completely. Or the gene-driven snakes become invasive species naturally. I guess that doesn't happen, right? Never mind. They're self-extincting themselves. What could happen is the reverse problem is we have too many now and we could have none and we don't want to be eliminating. I would not care if we accidentally annihilated all of the mosquitoes in the world. This is the second problem.

So a lot of people believe that it's like this Ferngully myth of the world, which is that or Pocahontas, right? It's like really the poke of the mood, the hold that that cartoon has on the average liberal is incredible. They genuinely believe that.

The natives, first of all, the indigenous Americans, as if there was only one tribe, they believe that the indigenous Americans were like this peaceful utopian. And we can get to that in a second. But they believe they were like these peaceful utopian, like spiritual naturalists, just like one with nature and the way they conceive of nature, which is.

really the faith here is that it's perfect just the way it is. And everything is in perfect balance. And every single thing that is eaten is fed off of some, it's again, it's like also Lion King, the circle of life, like everything has a purpose. Every creature matters. Um,

Well, the truth is most creatures don't matter. And even biology, any biologist will tell you like what matters are keystone species that, and even those go extinct and you know, the ecology changes, but you know, the, the average, the average animal on planet earth could vanish tomorrow and, and nothing would happen. And we know this because animals, entire species go extinct every year and nothing really changes. If,

if the honeybee went extinct that would be a huge problem and probably a lot of people would starve to death that's a keystone species um mosquitoes are not you get rid of them and it wouldn't matter and the way that you solve the other problem of accidentally annihilating the burmese python which again we don't need but would be nice to not be putting extinct she's putting species out of existence is something called a daisy drive which is a complicated genetic like

hack that requires multiple snakes with this gene to sort of be in the same region. And that's a whole long technical conversation. We could, you just, you could go to the piece and click the link. I think probably the real danger is not that we accidentally use this technology in some nefarious way. It's that someone else, it's not that we accidentally use the technology in a way that does damage. It's that someone else does damage to

on purpose, which is to say nefariously, right? Like the real danger is some foreign government or some random ass ecological terrorist here at home designs

a drive to go after, for example, the honeybee, um, or, and this is what the guy, Kevin S felt who I talked to about the gene drives is working on. He's like, listen, the real problem that we're facing is it's like very easy to create new organisms, specifically new viruses, let's say. And, uh, and he's kind of on the hunt. He, his team actually looks at bathrooms around the country and airports around the country and surveys them for new, um,

Isn't that a great place to find new COVID strains? That's what they do for new COVID strains, and he does it more broadly than that. The thing that he's really worried about is the new HIV, he says, because this is something that our entire society could perhaps already be infected by, and we don't know it. And that's a whole other topic, which is really interesting, which is like,

why don't we worry about that? We had this crazy disease that was dormant for years until suddenly everyone was dying from, well, every gay guy in the country was dying from it. And that is like, that could easily happen again. And not just to gay men in this population or everyone in Africa, like this could happen broadly and with a more deadly disease. There's no reason that it couldn't. Yeah. I had a question on the pythons. So I,

I do wonder, I guess, so I don't know like what Burmese python genetics are like, but I know like in humans, it's like if you're a male, you have an X and a Y chromosome. So it's like theoretically, if you had two Y chromosomes, you could you like you would only produce like other males because it's a dominant gene. Right. But also you would be dead.

Like, like you, like that, that's just like literally not, I mean, I, I guess it would be dead. I don't know. Like it wouldn't exist there. You can't have two Y chromosome. I mean, you can have two Y chromosomes and it isn't to an X and then it wouldn't matter. There are lots of people who have this and no one's are really sure what that even does. It's like a weird, I don't want to call it a mutation. It's like a aspect of biology we don't understand, but you need it. Everyone needs one X. What this gene does is it like eats up the other X. So all that's produced are X Ys.

Okay, so it's not like creating a sort of like, like a third gender of...

So, okay. So it's like stopping the production of whatever, like the Y chromosome is like, and I guess Burmese Python sperm, if that's a thing that they have. It's producing, it's the, so a female's the double X, right? So you, it's, it's stopping the production of that or it's eating up is the way that Kevin described it. The, that second X chromosome. Okay. I gotcha. I guess one thing I would say is like, I grew up, like where I grew up in East Texas, I

feral hogs are a really big deal um they actually killed a woman it's like the only case where a woman has ever been killed not too far from where i grew up in uh palestine texas spelled like palestine but um she it was like a home health nurse and she uh was like visiting or she like took care of this old couple she like showed up she would show up at their house at like 5 a.m or something and uh they were like waiting for her to come in she just didn't come in one day and like

uh finally they went outside and they saw her car there and then they saw her body like in pieces basically like throughout the yard um and it's like the only case of like feral hogs killing somebody uh that's like been reported ever in picture wild man they also so i looked into the problem of invasive feral pigs as well they

eat each other. Like they train themselves to, they're smart. So they, for the most part, there are some regions where they don't, but, but for the most part, they train themselves to be nocturnal. They're not supposed to be nocturnal because they know they get hunted better during the day by humans and,

They are carnivorous. Uh, they are cannibalistic. They need to be stopped. They need to be taken. When I was growing up. Yeah. They, I, when I was a kid, uh, my cousin caught one in a trap that was like over 400 pounds. Um,

But my dad used to hunt on me like you have dogs and like you do hunt at night. My brother has like some hog dogs now. Like it's a whole like subculture of like hunting these hogs and like killing them. And like you I mean, you can eat them. It's pork. It tastes it's a little gamier, but it tastes pretty much the same. I and but the thing is hunting and I thought they were disgusting.

And I'm like very, do you eat things? It was dry. Terrible. Yeah. I shot the weed. You can, there are places you can go hunting. And what was like the cut? Did you, it was like a pork chop or like bacon or like what was, they made sausage because they're so lean that it's like, well, let's just try and mix it with some stuff. And yeah,

Is the feral hog in the lineage of like, did a farm pig escape and then like 20 years later they're feral hogs? Well, in Texas, at least they're descended from hogs that the Spanish brought and that escaped like domestic. Wow. They do not taste like prosciutto. Yeah. But the thing I was going to say is the problem has gotten a lot worse ever since I was a kid.

Like the thing with the lady getting killed and stuff that happened, I think like when I was in college. But the problem has gotten so much worse because when I was a kid, we used to go to like cattle, like livestock auctions and stuff like my grandpa owned cows and we would like round up the calves every year and go to the auction, the cell barn. And before slime flew,

People would catch because there's like live traps that you can have I can catch them with dogs and kill them or you can get live traps You can just set them up in the woods put like corn and shit in there and then the pigs will go in there and then it'll like shut on them and people would like take these hogs to the livestock auction and like sell them and they would just like enter like I guess the food chain or whatever like they would go to like Processors and stuff just like every other looks like the cows that were there the goats that were there everything else after swine flu

it basically became almost impossible to have like pigs in a livestock auction. Like, I don't know if it was exactly banned, but like where I grew up, every livestock auction around there, they just stopped selling pigs because they were like, we can't like deal with the regulation. Like it's like, we just can't do it anymore. And so basically like people who had made like either a living or like a side hustle, like catching these feral hogs and like selling them,

Um, just, you couldn't do that anymore. Really? Like there were like some like niche places that would pop up that would like pay you for them, but it wasn't like the direct thing where you could literally catch them, put them in a trailer and then drive them up to the Thursday auction in Nacogdoches, Texas and sell them at an auction and just get paid in cash. Generally and legally, because you can't do that. You can't sell things that you hunt in, in,

like I've got my hunting license in California, but this is the case in Florida and New Jersey as well. Like you can hunt and you can eat what you hunt, but you can't sell. So when you're eating alligator, for example, or deer or bison, those are all farm raised that you're not allowed to go to hunters to get them. So. Well, genetically, these are domestic pigs.

Oh, so you can't even tell the difference is what you're saying. I mean, you can, I know what they look like. Like they're like, they tend to be like spotted different like colors and stuff. They tend to be hairier because it's a land race and because, and it's descended from Spanish breeds, which are different than like the Anglo breeds that are mostly in the domestic pig population today. But this is all like farm kids shit. But like,

they you could so i mean i know that people sold them because i saw them when i was a kid like and they were they were fucking wild they were hairy they were like all these crazy different colors that i was like that's not a fucking pig that was raised on a farm and like anybody could could tell um but they sold them anyway and like i mean you probably had one in a fucking hot dog or something in 2004 and didn't know it but um

Yeah, it was just a thing that people did and it kept the population down to a certain degree. And now it's just exploded because you can't do it anymore. So the other thing that they worry about in Florida with the Python and well, the Python specifically, let's say, I forget the actual term for this, but it's just the unintended consequence of offering money for a snake.

is obviously that people are going to breed them themselves and then kill them and be like, look at all these snakes I killed. And what you're actually doing by offering an economic incentive to kill these things is you're offering an economic incentive to produce a lot more of them. Yeah, to start a snake farm. Yeah. Which is what I actually saw in Florida. So the sort of feral hog hunting situation that I saw was,

I mean, it looked an awful lot like these people were raising them. Like they were everywhere and they were feeding some of them. And I'm like, this, I do not think is what the laws exist for. Yeah.

yeah i mean if you bring them in like if you like hand raise them like they are just domestic pigs like yeah i mean they act like yeah you you could like you could go catch a like a baby feral pig and like raise it and it would behave like a normal fucking pig pretty much but like did you go hunt from a helicopter no no no no okay i was supposed to say you rich fuck

No, hog hunting is fun. When I was a kid, my dad took me to the hog dog trials, which is like basically a blood sport, like an illegal blood sport they had in Texas. And they had like a thing where they would grease up a baby pig and then make the kids go catch it and shit. It's so much fun. The South is a strange place. Tell me about the Aztecs. The Aztecs? Oh, God. Brandon, do you want to like cue it up?

The worst. The worst. Okay, yeah. Yeah, go ahead. So what happened with Aztecs recently? An indie video game publisher announced that they were going to make, or that they are making, they're developing a game called, I think, Ecumen Aztec is what it's called. And in it, you can play as Aztec warriors fending off Spanish conquistadors. Mm-hmm.

they put out a trailer that shows the shows you playing as an Aztec warrior and like basically it's like a stealth game so you sneak up on conkey sedors and knife them um IGN put out put put this this trailer out on its Twitter account and uh all sorts of predictable hit the fan pretty much so River you took it off like let's just like

The conquistadors are framed as obviously completely evil, invading, even sacrificing. I think the word eventually they talked about conquistador priests sacrificing Aztecs in response. Did that not happen? Am I making this up? Am I fantasizing this? I could have sworn the word sacrifice was used, which was ironic to me. Catholic priest? No, I think the follow-up to the story is that

After, I think the tweet got like 40 million, like an insane number of views, like way more views than like, like this is probably the most attention this game will ever get.

Because it's just like an indie game on Steam and like no platforms. Anyways, they were like, oh, we heard you. Now we're going to let you play as a conquistador against the priests that sacrifice people. And I think that they were referring to Aztec priests. I don't think there was like a Catholic priest sacrificing anybody in their messaging. Yeah.

Right. So the problem, of course, is that like the framing of the game is the Aztecs. Again, it's like the Pocahontas myth of the indigenous Americans, which I'm sure there were probably one or two tribes that were very peaceful, utopian. And those tribes were the tribes that were taken as slaves by people like the Aztecs. Yeah, they were the Aztec slaves. But...

it was, that was the framing versus sort of like the evil Westerner. And like, I'm sure the Westerners have done all sorts of evil things. They, I know they've done all sorts of evil things. I say as a Spaniard myself, Oh, I'm an American, but my lineage is Spain. So probably got some conquistador blood in me. Um,

I am certain that messed up things were done, but the enduring question is like, why do we focus so much on that and to the sort of complete blinded view of the rest of the world? But there was more because of the memes. River, tell us about them. So the memes that were posted in reply to IGN's tweet announcing the game,

uh they're hilarious um it's one is like a guy uh or like an aztec priest like holding up like a human heart and uh he's saying oh look here comes the far right as like the conquistadors and the priest like the catholic priests march on um one is like a chad meme with like weeping libtards and like aztecs in the background that says sorry but the human sacrifices will stop

Yeah. And like these, like people love these. And the thing, the funny thing is, is like these were around before. Like I've seen these memes around before. There's like a certain durability to like Aztec discourse because it's just,

I guess like some people on the left would maybe say it's like the exception that proves the rule. Actually, they wouldn't say that, but like that would be, if they were being honest, they would say, you know, trying to make the best case, they would say it's the exception that proves the rule, which it isn't, but it is the most insane example of human sacrifice in all of civilization. And like, it's very difficult to make an argument on like any kind of moral basis that like these people did not deserve to be

and have their civilization destroyed. You know what I mean? Why don't you go into... So I think probably a lot of people don't realize, I think how bad it is. I think our education really...

is designed, generally speaking, to avoid these things and to lead people to the conclusion that everything bad that has ever happened in the rest of the world has come from colonization. So I didn't really know much about the Aztecs until I was much older, like late 20s, I think was the first time that I dipped in and was like, whoa, that seems much worse than I realized. Describe the society for us.

So what makes Aztec society unique as opposed to other societies that have practiced human sacrifice, which is always a retort is like, you know, the ancient Egyptians did human sacrifice. The Chinese did human sacrifice. The Vikings did human sacrifice. And yeah, in a lot of societies, their human sacrifice was a part of like elite funerary rituals or, you know, certain like festivals occasionally or something. But,

The thing that made Aztec society unique is that like human sacrifice formed...

the was like the central point of the civilization it was the central point of the religion they believed that like if they didn't sacrifice people that the world would literally end that the sun would not rise in the morning they believed that the sun god feasted off blood um so they not only sacrificed humans which they did basically every day um estimates um usually average out to about 12 people a day

um but they also sacrificed a shit ton of animals um and they had an entire calendar if you want to think about it like in terms of maybe I guess like Catholic feast days might actually be like a pretty close comparison he's like there always is one like you know I like I had a great grandma who's Catholic and she was always like oh it's Saint Phoebe's day or whatever like just some random shit but like that's how it was with the Aztecs it's like

Basically, in addition to the dozen human sacrifices that they had in Tlechicon, like current day Mexico City, every day, they would have these festivals where they had very specific forms of human sacrifice. One was to the water god, I'm probably going to pronounce this wrong, Talachek, who it was believed that he could be appeased by humans

children's tears and so basically they would like not only sacrifice children to like this water god like during his festival or whatever like his feast days um they would also like torture them like um they've recovered archaeologists have recovered like bones from uh his the temple where he was like worshipped and they found like you know broken bones abscesses just like all kinds of horrific shit and

There was a one like festival where it was, I think I called it like the gender goblin festival or something where they're like celebrating like the, the sexual and like gender ambiguity of the gods and so it was like, they would like,

sacrifice this woman and then a priest would like strip naked cut her skin off and then like wear it as his own and like parade throughout the streets and then they would also like find like guys who had big dicks to like follow around him but then they would also be the guys with the big dicks would be like carrying like effeminate like symbols as like cotton or something like things that meant like femininity and Aztec culture and so it's like

There was like the part of human sacrifice where it was like, we have to do it. The, so the sun comes up the next day. There's a part of it was like, we have to do so the rain can come. And then there was a one, this one ritual that's literally just like theater. Like, it's just like performance art where they're like demonstrate. It's like a sun, like a disturbing Sunday school lesson where they're like trying to like teach the public something about the gods by killing a woman and like wearing her skin, like Buffalo bill. Like these, this is the most fucked up society to ever exist. Yeah.

That's just like two of dozens of... What do you think it is? It is so horrific that it seems like it should be our go-to example of evil in the world. In the way that always seems to be... There's always, in a time, we always say, or not we always say, I always used to wonder, who is the guy that...

Everyone would be like wow that's the most evil you could be before Hitler existed because that's obviously our go-to now It's like oh, that's your Hitler is what we call everyone that we really hate who's really evil And I think it was Napoleon is what a lot of people would use before that maybe that also was just like maybe in the time before Hitler people just didn't It wasn't quite the hold that that that people had but this seems like the kind of thing that you would reference for just like

pure evil to me. And it's never mentioned. What, what is the, is it because it was so long ago? Is it, is it just because of the Western verse, you know, indigenous people's thing? Like what is the thing that's going on there? Well, there's a few things. The oldest argument is to basically discount everything that's said about the Aztecs because they,

Some of it was written by the conquistadors, but actually like it doesn't really make that much sense. Like that argument kind of falls on its face a little bit because the sort of like central document that historians use when they're talking about Aztec culture is the Florentine Codex, which is this giant manuscript that was only translated into English in like the 70s, I think.

But it was this giant manuscript written in Natal, which is like the Aztec language. And there's like illustrations in it that were done. The entire thing was written by...

um natal people like formerly aztecs some of these people i mean that most of them were like from the elite classes even in aztec society they were very most of them were old it was this priest that put all this together a priest who by the way was like very sympathetic to the indians are very critical of the spanish for some of like the sort of like

atrocities that they had done but he was like you know the last of the Aztecs basically are dying so I want to like get an account of their culture before these people are gone and so he recruited these people most of them from like the literate elite classes and

um he had them basically write down everything about aztec society their history their culture um all of that because the the kinky stores had basically burned sort of like the aztec library of alexandria like there's very little like original writing from the aztec era there is a few like fragments basically that are in like various museums but the florentine codex is the main thing and the florentine codex is how we know about like

the details of all these fucked up human sacrifices. Like, the very specific ones about, like, wearing people's skin and, like, torturing children. And it was written by people who saw it and, in some cases, probably participated in it. So, like...

the there's really like why like why would they lie in such incredible detail the book is like 3 000 pages long like the the conspiracy is that like this priest was like oh make it look as bad as possible i'm like even if like it's half as bad as they say it's still like the worst society ever and um the other argument is just that basically the spanish um

uh also did a lot of travel like you know awful things and my sort of retort to that is like yeah sure you can say like christopher columbus like burned people like skinned some indians alive in cuba or i'm sorry i think it's like actually haiti now but um like skinned some people alive and uh like sold like nine-year-old girls into like sex slavery like he did do all that shit but

Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, like, had him brought back to, like, to Spain in chains. And then were, like, you can't be the governor anymore. Like, you're, like, a bad person. So, like, it was, like... Yeah, he was a... Like, there were, like, individual bad people. But from the very beginning, like, in the Spanish colonial project, you had...

you had to like keep all of that shit secret because if the crown heard about it, they would get mad or if the church heard, depending on who in the church, but like generally speaking, the church was like opposed to like the genocides, you know, just outright killing people, torturing people, selling people into sex slavery. Most of what we actually know about the atrocities that the Spanish committed were written by a Catholic priest named De La Casas.

who you know documented like the very gory details of burning people at the stake and flaying people and stuff that the spanish did as punishment to indian slaves

Like that all comes from a Spaniard who was critical of it and was like, wrote the book to try to like speak out against it. It's the same thing with slavery in the United States. It's like, it was opposed from the very beginning, even though it persisted in the South and other places. It does seem like an enduring quality of the West is the self-critical, the self-critical lens, right? It's like, it's this constant introspection and, um,

Because I want to say it's a byproduct of freedom, but I don't even know that it is because not everywhere in the West was super free. And yet everywhere in the West, you see this tendency towards self-reflection analysis and even anger or hatred at our own past and what we've done, even while there are sort of concurrently heroic things happening and whatnot. I don't know what that is or what that quality is. I think it's... I mean, I hate to say it because I feel like...

the Tragcats and shit on Twitter. Like, so annoying. No. But I do think that it is, like, Christianity. Because it is this, like...

basically like peasant religion like that's how it started like it started mostly like in the lower classes or people who are just like maligned in society like it only spread like through the elite through like women who like in roman society even if you were a wealthy woman you still basically had like no brides um and so like it's this it is like a religion of meekness which is why if you get like actual like nazis and like

super, like, fascistic, like, right-wing people, they're, like, they don't like Christianity. They're, like, you know, like, Varg or whatever. They're, like, pagans. Yeah, it's, of course, pagan, and they dig back to the ancient European religions. Yeah. Yeah, because they don't like the sort of, like, meekness and, like, self...

reflection of Christianity where it's like you're supposed to confess your sins you're supposed to think about things you're supposed to feel bad about things also victim orientation rather than heroic orientation of Nietzsche and that's why a lot of the super right wing people today are like pretty Nietzschean I think right but I do think that it's a good like I think I have like a pretty like

actually traditionally Christian like view of human nature, which is that like if left to people, people when people are left their own devices, like they will commit evil and like the pursuit of like greed or, you know, whatever else. And so like, I think you do kind of like need like a religion, like

like Christianity or something, or maybe not Christianity necessarily, but like, I think like what Christianity provided to the West was like a temper to that, like human impulse to just like destroy everything in your path, you know? Um, and the, the argument that people will make is that like the Aztecs like destroyed the Spanish and that, that the Aztecs like, yeah, the Aztecs did bad things, but then the, um,

the Spanish came in and they just like completely genocided these people. This is not true. There are people in Mexico today speaking Nahuatl. There are like,

There are fucking descendants of Montezuma in the Spanish royal family. The Spaniards, like Cortez married Montezuma's daughter. Like the Spaniards like incorporated the Aztec empire into at the very least on like the elite level incorporated the Aztecs like into the

literally the Spanish royal family by like 100 years after or something. But like they incorporated them into elite Spanish society. It wasn't actually like a racism thing. Like that was just such a new phenomenon. Like that even developed. And the Aztecs are...

Like after their Empire was crushed. Yeah, a lot of them died of disease and whatever but like as a whole They were better taken care of by the Spanish than most of the other indigenous societies that the Spanish came into contact with which is why there are still people speaking fucking not all in Mexico today and we literally don't even know what Tiano sounds like the native languages of like Puerto Rico and Cuba and there's none of them left and

and it's because like the spanish it it's up it's like they thought like the aztecs were they did sort of admire that like oh these people are like literate like they have a written language they like have like an advanced like sense of like architecture and like agriculture and stuff like there was sort of a respect there um well i'm excited for the

mob to hear what you just said and come after you tomorrow. Yeah, of course. I think that we're going to call it for today. We had a lot of fun stuff coming up this week and we'll catch you guys back next week. This was, this was pirate wires.