Farewell Joe Biden, LA Fires, Mark Zuckerberg’s Culture Change, & Will Elon Musk Buy TikTok?
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I wasn't even going to watch it. I keep forgetting that Biden is still our president. I do believe that Biden is going to be remembered, if we're doing this honestly, as one of the worst presidents in any of our lives. Didn't he give the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros? Yeah, he gave the other medal to Hillary Clinton. Yes.

Everybody in LA knows somebody whose lives have been completely destroyed. People keep saying this is the end of Gavin Newsom's career. It's not. Gavin Newsom's not done. TikTok is planning to shut its US operations. Users have been migrating to a different app called Red Note as a reference to Mao's actual manifesto. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod. We've got Andy in the house for the second week of the finals of Pirate Idol. Say hello, Andy.

Hello. Our resident dad on call here to deliver all of the daddest wisdom that you're craving. I know I'm craving it. Speaking of dads, speaking of great, great, great granddads, we've got to talk just straight off of the top. We'll get to Zuckerberg. We'll get to the fires again just a bit. There's some stuff we've got to cover there. We will get to TikTok. I think before all of that, we've got to talk about

Joe Biden and his farewell last night. Maybe just Andy, why don't you go ahead and just tell us what it was. Just tee up the news item there and then I'm going to get to a point by point summary of the major themes he hit that I think are going to have some pretty significant relevance for tech specifically moving forward. Yeah, sure. So, yep, last night, good old grandpa President Joe said,

gave a farewell address. He called for a number of things like an end to stock trading in Congress, term limits for the Supreme Court. He tried to take credit for a ceasefire in Gaza. I guess he was just trying to go out and sort of cement his legacy and stuff like that. But I have my doubts. I wasn't even going to watch it, weirdly. It's so crazy. I keep forgetting that Biden is

still our president. I think that the Democrats do too. It was wild during the wildfires to see Bernie Sanders weeks before President Trump would even take office actually call out Trump like, what do you plan on doing, sir? It's like, you know, we have a president right now and the fires are happening today. It's just like a very sort of strange thing where we all kind of, I think just implicitly and often explicitly on this show understand this man's not in power. I

But I knew that we had to talk about it after the oligarchy stuff. So I wanted to watch it. I tuned in. And like you said, Andy, right off the bat, it was pretty shocking that the very first thing he did was take credit for the ceasefire in Israel. He said after like a year of negotiations or something, we've been able to figure this out with Netanyahu, whatever. And what I remember is just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump tweeting –

The following.

Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America. All caps, release the hostages now. So then pretty much right after that, they announced they'd be releasing the hostages. And what is, there's a date. Isn't there a date for the ceasefire? Is that, when is this actually taking place? The deal will take effect Sunday. So that's this Sunday. Wait, is that the inauguration date?

That's the 19th. That's why I thought it was the 19th. The day before. It's the day before inauguration. So let's just, I mean, okay. So let's just, okay, Joe, let's table that for a second. And I want to come back to why this is interesting that he's opening with this. I don't think this is a Democrat specific thing. I think Democrats and Republicans both have their own kind of boilerplate slop. This was Democrat boilerplate slop. It was like all the democracy stuff, all of the immigration stuff, all of the global leadership stuff, which basically

That last one, global leadership, I increasingly don't care about that. Then it was like, I had this feeling I was just kind of waiting for him to fuck up the whole time, which he did a few times. He mentioned checks and balances a lot on the presidency, which I thought was interesting, coming from one of the most authoritarian presidencies in any of our lifetime. One of the great, this was a weird one. He said that he had achieved one of the great modernizations of infrastructure in

our history. And I wondered, I mean, is the modernization of infrastructure in the room with us right now? He talked about internet, which also was really funny to me, the affordable high-speed internet, because you have car doing updates on how many days it's been since nothing has been built in that regard since he started. He said we invented a new kind of semiconductor, which I didn't understand that entirely. I think he might be referencing the CHIPS Act, which I

I agree was, I think is kind of cool. There's a lot of pushback on that. And this one was really good. It's going to take us a lot of time to feel the full impact of everything that I've done. And then he introduces the oligarchy thing. So he, he kind of concludes with this warning. It was like this kind of Washingtonian warning about,

avoiding foreign entanglements, he took the sort of end of his speech to say, there is this tech industrial complex. We're facing this really terrifying oligarchy now. And he sort of spoke back to the robber barons of the 19th century, kind of invoked them and said – and he kind of just I would say implied that people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were running the country.

This was immediately echoed by Bernie Sanders and other Democrats. I think actually Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did it before Biden like quite a while ago. I think she might have been the one who started this meme. And straightaway, like separate from the Biden sort of substance, and I would love to hear each of your takes on that. Yeah.

The oligarchy thing reminded me of just the way that we all talked about Democrats, specifically in this administration over the past four years. And really like the Biden administration in particular. It's like, okay, control of the media via not just the leftists in the press, but also the tech industry, which at the top of Biden's – the very first thing that was happening in Biden's term was –

Every tech platform in the entire country took out Donald Trump, a sitting president. Right before Biden took over, Trump was erased from the internet by tech companies. So it was like, tech is on the side of the power class. We have speech control by the left. We have an oligarchy was wording that I'm pretty sure if I went back and looked at PirateWire's pieces, I'm confident that I used that word when talking about these people. And it just

You have Jen Rubin, who is leaving the Washington Post, which is now owned by Jeff Bezos, to start her own thing called the contrarian. I mean, that phrasing was created. Not created, but I mean, it's teal, right? That's like tealian language, or at least...

It's certainly – I think years ago he used it and it's been applied to him ever since. It's interesting to see this mirroring of the insurgents previously by the left. And the question I have is just, you know, is this because the right is truly in, you know, total – not only political power but cultural power? Or is the left just so completely out of ideas? I forgot there was one more thing that he did at the end of his farewell address that

he talked about congressional... There's no reason to talk about congressional stock buying. Why? Why go out that way? You have 11 minutes. I think the video was a little over 11 minutes. What is the purpose of including that one thing? You can't do anything about it. It is something that

doesn't haunt the Republican Party. It's something that only haunts the Democratic Party. They're the ones who are getting all the heat for that because Republicans, generally speaking, don't care. I think they might care as the Republican Party becomes more populist. They probably will care. But it's a weapon that's used against one person almost exclusively. Her name is Nancy Pelosi. And it seemed to me that Biden was saying like,

fuck you on his way out to Nancy is what is that's what it read like to me. Right. I see you nodding your head. What is your thought there? I had the exact same take, like because we all remember the rumors of like it was Pelosi's decision to force him out of a reelection and anoint Kamala. And so I really do think this was a little bit of a subtle dig against the person who may or may not have been pulling the strings behind the scenes to make sure he doesn't run again. That is exactly the thought I had as well. I mean, who else could it even be about?

But also like this is a man – I mean he just pardoned his son for – there were tax evasion charges, weren't there? So it's just like it's very –

silly to me. If you were to judge him just as a Democrat, he has not accomplished anything. I did not say this when Obama left and I couldn't stand Obama, didn't say it about Bush, couldn't stand him, didn't say about Trump as he was being erased by the tech gods four years ago or whatever when I was writing about it, critically of tech, but also of Trump for the way that he behaved on January 6th. It wasn't a coup, but I thought it was a

I do believe that Biden is going to be remembered, if we're doing this honestly, as one of the worst presidents in any of our lives. And it's not just because of the... It's not like, oh, he did all these leftist things that...

that I'm mad about. I do think he came pretty close to, uh, authoritarianism, especially with the way that he bullied tech companies into censoring people that he didn't like, especially with the way that his administration went after Trump, uh, during the election. But I think that if you judge him as a Democrat, it's bad, right? Like he didn't really get much accomplished. And what he did do led to Trump's victory, which is a huge victory. And it's led, it seems like to some kind of massive cultural shift. He had nothing to talk about because there was nothing there that was good. And, uh,

and that's that i think for i think for biden i think biden represented the final push of the ancien regime

And he failed at gaining the territory back. And Trump is now in office. And I think we're in a sort of new political paradigm as a result. So I think, honestly, that's how he'll be remembered as well. It's like the end of that regime and his inability to stop a second Trump victory. I think that's probably the biggest part of his legacy for me. Didn't he give the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Okay. So those two things don't line up for me. George Soros spent $22 billion on left-wing causes over the past five years or something like that. It's patently absurd. We have had the same four or five families controlling US politics for like three decades. He gave the other medal to Hillary Clinton. Yeah.

Hillary Clinton? Yeah. What do we know about oligarchy? I mean, they're talking about running Michelle Obama. We had two Bushes. We had Clinton and then Hillary in the Senate, and she ran for president twice, right? These people have been occupying the Kennedy family. These are people who control – Washington is controlled by powerful political families. And then what is Trump? Trump is like –

He's a real estate guy. He's rich and he's a reality television star and he's a populist and he runs and then he taps twice, three times and then he taps – he wins the third time and the first time. In his third term, he – or second term, third time running, he taps a successful entrepreneur immigrant to what like oversee cutting down government spending.

And that's oligarchy? It's like that's just – it's really ridiculous to use words like that. And also an interesting downgrade though. It's interesting that we've downgraded Trump in just a matter of really –

month, six weeks from fascist dictator to oligarch, right? I think that's really interesting. What that says to me is that the left is actually more afraid of Elon Musk than they are of Donald Trump. I think that in the beginning, it seemed that the press was just trying to drive a wedge between the two. But now I actually think there is global fear amongst big government globalist type people of

the power of Elon. I think it really comes down to that speech platform. I mean, I would not want to be in competition with Elon. And I think Elon's entry into American politics definitely represents a threat to- And not just American politics. It's also, it's UK politics. It's EU politics broadly. It's Brazilian politics. He is swinging his dick around all over the planet, which-

Seems unwise to me. I don't know why he's doing it. I think Brandon's right. I mean, it just really does signal the sort of a paradigm shift. And I think, you know, like, it's really, gosh, just an astonishing last gasp, really. Because, I mean, you know, the whole thing, his whole presidency was like the most glaring emperor has no clothes thing.

fully a plusieurs like moment you know that's ever been tried like to be foisted on on the public so like so blatantly you know i mean the guy you know when they when they tried to say that oh yeah he's just kind of losing his step like he's losing his step in in 2024 he wasn't all there in 2019 you know like he was never all there and you know the idea that they thought

That they could, you know, shuffle this old man off on us for, for golly, for this long without anybody noticing is just crazy. It's like thinking about what it means that like, it seems very clear to me that Americans really want competent politicians.

Like executors in office. And I think they're fed up with career politicians who don't seem as competent and effective. And I was just thinking about so Blue Origin just had a successful launch, I believe, today of their first orbital class launch.

I just had, I just like realized I was desiring, I was thinking, man, I wish Bezos was also interested in politics. Cause that would, I would like him, you know, somewhere, you know, maybe department of transportation, he'd probably be really good at, right. Cause that's like logistics and infrastructure. Yeah. I don't know. It's a, it's an interesting vibe shift to, to sort of realize like that. I think Americans actually just want competent people. Right. And, um,

And right now competent, it's easiest to see competent people in the business class and our, in our entrepreneurial class. And I don't, I just don't see anything wrong with that. If that's an oligarchy font, like I don't,

I don't know. That's fine with me. We need the country running again, and it doesn't seem to be. In fact, it's the only place where you see competency. This is what I've said. I have a riff on this where I talk about why I think people keep demanding Elon Musk solve world hunger, and it's because he's one of the only examples we have of a person doing anything that has any kind of global impact. And so it's usually an – it's always –

It seems like an insult. It's perceived as an insult generally. It kind of sounds like an insult. But I think on some level beneath it all, it's people are really desperate for something

to change and he's a change agent. And you're right. So is Bezos. It was interesting to see Bezos and Elon kind of supporting each other publicly. What is up with that, by the way? Have you guys seen this? The sort of evolving bromance between the two? Like they're kind of, yay, celebrating each other's rocket launches. They're in competition. I don't know. That's not like Elon at all to be friendly with competition. I don't know. Interesting. Something worth double clicking on. Another person he's in competition with who he's not as friendly to,

But not as mean, I don't see him going after him the way he goes after Sam Altman. Mark Zuckerberg. So I wrote a piece this week for Pirate Wires. It's called Wildfire, but I should have called it Chaos and Accountability. That's ended up being the language that I framed it with on X. I had this idea that, you know, the two stories are kind of happening at the same time. The wildfires in LA, which we talked about, and then also Mark Zuckerberg's policy changes at Facebook, which really are, they do signal, I think, just the complete end of a prior crisis.

of a prior order, not just the end of an era, but it's like, it's more like regime change is what it feels like though. He's was the regime and is now changing it. It seems to me that the, the strangest thing about the wildfires last week was

was that we, for the most part, were having an honest conversation about them. So it starts on X, where it was always honest. There's lots of misinformation just across social media, but mostly there were questions being asked that I thought were totally valid. And some things that I thought would end up becoming misinformation, like the fire hydrant thing, were totally true. They were not reported out early in the day on

by the New York Times for two days. I saw in the Daily, the New York Times Daily, one of the days was focused on, there's a global warming came up a few times. That might've been the very first day. And then the second day, still by then, there was none of this stuff was in the Daily. It took them, there was like a bit of a lag there.

But then what happened was you had a wave of fact checks by the press, less of the times than I saw one on CNN that was pretty good. And by good, I mean funny. They're fact checking narrow examples of false stuff. So this one viral video of looting was not actually looting.

Meanwhile, there's a mass looting problem throughout the city and everybody knows it. We have tons of footage and reports of this. And in fact, there've been like 30 arrests at this point and the city is saying that's a huge deal. So it was just like a weird kind of obfuscation, but that finally gave way to people throughout the press really reporting on all of the things that were being discussed on X day one. I think the honesty that we have with that and continue to have with the

with wildfires was just obviously completely because of the new management of Twitter, which is a kind of topic we've talked about quite a lot, you know, for really since Elon took over. But it felt much more apparent to me during the wildfires than even during the election, because I've

covered the wildfires before. I covered them in 2020 and in 2021 when the conversation was completely the opposite. You could not talk about the management of resources. You could not talk about the history of burning in California. You could not talk about anything Gavin Newsom had done. I mean, you could, you weren't getting banned for it, but that was not the discourse.

All you could talk about was global warming. Those were the topics that were curated by Twitter. That was what the media was writing about. It was global warming did this over and over and over again. Now,

You have Mark Zuckerberg saying, we're doing free speech at Meta. So there are 3 billion people on Meta. He also talked about in his statement on Instagram announcing the policy changes. He went after his own third-party fact checkers. He denounced them as biased

totally biased, wrong often and kind of implied that the entire concept of them was immoral. And then he said they were going to replace it with a sort of community notes like sort of X-like feature.

And he was committing to not only free speech on political topics in America, but pushing back against global censors. This is clearly a nod to what's happening, I think, in places like the United Kingdom. So we're now expanding this Elon type approach.

I say Elon type, I was gonna say like Elon type free speech. It's free speech. We're just like having free speech sort of across all of the different platforms or at least the two most important, I would say, or several most important because meta constitutes what is like Instagram threads, which is kind of dying and obviously Facebook and X. So that's kind of everything. So I think we're,

Basically, what we're approaching is an era of much more chaos in terms of fake news. It is information we're out there, and I would like to talk about that a little bit more with you guys today, but also accountability. I've never seen so much heat on Democratic officials in California as I have over the last week, and I think that's not going to change. And so the question now is, does that affect the way people vote?

I'm skeptical, honestly. I mean, I don't live in California like a couple of us do, but there's been so much like right flight out of California that it seems like they'll just sort of like kick out the guy who's currently fucking up and then elect another guy who's just going to be just like him. I don't know, Brandon, you and both you guys live in LA. I mean, what is your sense of... Is it...

Because I'm super online, but I'm not living there. Are people generally in the real world talking about the government at all? So I'm going to get into it in a little bit, but I went to one of the evacuation centers yesterday and was wondering if I would see that because, yes, I agree with what you mentioned in your piece where the discourse online is very much changing in that direction where calling out government officials is more of a part of the discourse.

I didn't really get that at the centers and naturally, I mean, they're dealing with all kinds of other stuff, like their lives being uprooted. So they have other more pressing concerns, but just like among my friend groups, like people I know who are not even like in the slightest bit, light rain, right. Leaning are, are more, uh,

are calling out their government officials more. So I think it is becoming more of a part of the discourse in real life in much the same way that it is online. But yeah, I guess I wonder if it's going to last that way up until the next election. Like, I'd be curious to see. Yeah. I mean, something that struck me was when the LA fire chief essentially turned on California and city leadership and

That was a super interesting and surprising development that I honestly was not expecting. Did the city of Los Angeles fail you and your department and our city? It's my job to stand up as a chief and exactly say justifiably what the fire department needs to operate to meet the demands of the community. Did they fail you? That is our job. And I tell you, that's why I'm here. So let's get us what we need so our firefighters can do their jobs. Did they fail you? Yes.

I only have one anecdote. I mean, like I was walking down the street next to a, um, a cafe that I go to often that has a lot of outdoor seating. And I overheard somebody complaining about the politicians and the leadership in response to the fires. Um, but it's, it's really hard to say, Andy, I think you, what you brought up about, you know, the Dem, sorry, the California citizens not really being able to quit the Dems that, um,

I'm like on the fence about that. I don't, you could be right. I don't, I don't know. Um, I think there's a lot of anger toward Karen Bass and I think Rick Caruso, who, uh, Karen Bass beat in the, in the most, most recent mayoral, uh, contest, uh,

Rick Caruso has been seen as being vindicated for a lot of his criticisms against Bass during his mayor campaign. His giant shopping structure in the Palisades was one of the only large structures to survive the fires as well because he hired private firefighters to keep the...

keep the structure watered and keep the fire down. So he came out and he was a, he was a centrist slash right-leaning political candidate. He came out looking very good in the, in the aftermath of the fires. So I don't know, it's kind of difficult to say, you know, everybody, one observation I have is like the amount of people that I have to a second degree who lost their house is

is insane. I've never been so close to such a big catastrophe. I mean, I probably, there are 50 to 75 people who I know of, who I don't know personally, but my friends know, who lost their homes in Altadena and Pasadena and the Palisades.

I know people whose childhood homes, whose childhood elementary and high schools, whose malls they used to go to when they were kids, all have been completely wiped off the map. And so, you know, my point is to say that everybody in L.A., I'm confident, knows somebody or knows somebody who knows somebody whose lives have been completely destroyed. Right.

And I think if that doesn't have an effect, well, I mean, we'll see. But it does seem pretty significant. And this is a major, major disaster. We all know somebody. So yeah, not to get too serious and sad. No, I think so much of what you're allowed to...

to say in terms of politics or who you're allowed to vote for is just determined by culture. The average person doesn't think about this stuff ever and kind of just looks around, I think, for cues from other people on what they're supposed to be thinking about this stuff. And that's not, I'm not even lamenting that. I think that might just be a human thing. You know, we're pack family type creatures and that's just the way that you have cohesion. But I do suspect that that's how things happen is that people just kind of looking around at other people. And when you free up a platform,

or all of our platforms now in the case of the meta platforms as well, where you can talk about these things and it's just totally normalized in the culture online. I think that culture then hits the real world. And if it's suddenly, if there's no, if it doesn't feel like there's any hit whatsoever to talk about these things, I think they will be talked about

And if they're talked about, there has to be an answer to them. There have to be answers to questions like what happened with the fire hydrants and what was going on with that reservoir and what was going on with that woman who's paid $750,000 a year to make sure that there's water. And why wasn't the fire department alerted about any of this? And why weren't there enough firefighters? And why did you cut the budget and things like that? Like, it's just, there's too much. It has to be answered. And I don't know, I guess if it's not this, if this openness does not lead to some kind of

wide-scale change throughout California. I think there's probably nothing that ever will, but we have already seen movement in Northern California. So I don't know, maybe none of this is that hopeless. If it just comes down to culture and the culture changes, then we should expect to see some political change as well. One thing that I...

One thing that I was shocked that was happening during the middle of the fires when we actually got evacuated was that the emergency notification system kept erroring and sending the wrong people back.

um, evacuation notices or warnings about fires in their area. And it didn't just happen once. It happened multiple times over the course of more than 24 hours. So like that for me was like the biggest, like, holy fuck, nobody has any, like how hard is it to keep control of this messaging system, you know? And it wouldn't surprise me if like that singular thing, I mean, there's a, there's plenty of things like obviously, but that singular thing was, was such a, like,

shocking display of some fundamental, um,

like a system that wasn't working when it should have been working. And it was, I just know that I don't want to law down because she got one in, in, in a place that had no danger to the fire. I had to be like, no, no, no. Like this is a mistake. Riley and I were actually talking about this because Riley was the one that told me that it was a mistake because I was worried. And yeah, I mean, just that was like,

one of the most shocking things for me. It was like they can't control the notification system. I mean, like, it's literally just pressing a button

It's a huge deal. I'm glad you brought that up. It's not a small thing to have an alert that goes out to all of LA County to leave the county in the middle of fires. And here's why. So this exact same thing happened in Hawaii, which is another sort of like completely incompetent government that is worth talking about. But you have this one in Hawaii. Remember they said the bomb, the nukes were coming? Yeah, there's a big nuke coming. Which is fantastic.

Totally crazy. Somebody got into a sewer, I think. That was one of the anecdotes. Somebody was on the street and crawled into a sewer. But that caused a certain amount of fear, a lot of fear, I would say. But it was also crazy. That one is one where you're like, wait, is this true? And you're like, wait, what? You check around for that.

The LA one, if you're in Los Angeles and there are fires everywhere and you get an alert that says to leave because of fire, you're thinking, I'm going to die. I got to leave. And so now people are trying to move around the city and you just cause a mass evacuation event.

for millions of people and we just move on as a society. Like what? How do we not know who's responsible for that? Have people been fired for that? Why wasn't there a press conference about that? That's crazy. You have access to our phones specifically for emergencies of this kind and you fail. That's like- Multiple times. Like it's not- A lot. Yeah, more than once. The worst part about it was not that it happened the first time, but it happened the second and third time. And not just like a minute apart, that these were hours and hours apart. So-

That was just unbelievable. I was like, oh my God, this is out of control. Well, who knows? Maybe somebody will get fired. After all, Newsom was on the Pod Save America podcast saying he wants answers.

He wants answers. You know, he's got a lot of questions about how all this happened. Well, partly he's right about that, though. So so I don't think we can blame Newsom for everything. I think there's a there's there's some statewide stuff that should have been done. So I think it's really just unacceptable that we've been talking about.

Let's just say that global warming is causing the fires. Let's just say that wildfire has not been raging in California for 5,000 years and there's not like clear geological record of this. Let's just say that we didn't know it was a problem five decades ago when we were talking about it. Let's say we didn't know it was a problem three decades ago. Let's say that Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth comes out 20 years ago and we're like, oh shit, there are going to be wildfires in California for the first time ever. Why have...

we not developed better systems for dealing with this. We talked a lot about, it was interesting to see the wave of fact checks surrounding the fire hydrants. Fact checks. It was no, yes, it turns out the fire hydrants were running dry. Firemen were going up to try and put out fires and there was no water. But the fact checks say, well, that's because the system was not designed to handle big fires. It was designed to put out fire on a few homes. Well,

Why? Why is that the case? And that seems like a state – that's a huge problem. If you're building in wild – like land that is subject to receiving – or that is very often on fire, you should have some kind of system in place. And certainly that's something that the state should be responsible for. We're talking about bigger things too, more ambitious things. I would love to see more reservoirs. I would love to see a better system of canals up from –

Mary Marjorie Taylor green had this tweet that she got made fun of for about cloud seeding. She thought that maybe you could just seed the sky and then it would rain on the fires and put them out in LA. And everyone's like, wow, she's crazy. This is the woman who thinks that there are secret government hurricane lasers, which I think is also an anti-Semitic coded one. I've heard about like Jew lasers as well. And it's crazy shit like that. And she's always getting caught up in this kind of weird shit. And she was wrong about that. But when it comes to cloud seeding,

She was also wrong about cloud seeding, but she was narrowly wrong. I think she's sort of directionally correct, which is that there's a lot more that we can be doing. And you could be seeding places where it has a higher likelihood of working, sort of up north and in the Sierras and things like this. And if you had better canal systems down into a better reservoir system, it's very conceivable that we could have much more water in the region and

Obviously, we should be building for better pressure and things like that and the hydrants. I don't know how you're in charge for all of this time and you don't even think about this stuff. I'm not even saying you should be out there with rakes clearing up all the brush because that seems – while I know that that is what has to happen, I don't know how you do that at the scale of an entire state. That seems –

really hard to clear up all of the brush, which naturally would have burned away 100 years ago in these giant mega fires in California or whatever. That's not happening anymore. You got to get rid of the fuel somehow. I don't know that you can do it that way. So you do need controlled burns, but you also just need water. And they should be thinking about that. So that's what he should be responsible for. But I don't think he's responsible for

The fire department's budget, I don't think he's responsible for the mayor being in fucking Africa during the fires. I don't think he's responsible for the reservoir being closed and for the various sort of chaos that happened in the city that day. He is maybe also responsible for the insurance stuff. I think you could maybe put some blame on him for that. But it's a mixed bag. I think he's going to get out of this. People keep saying this is the end of Gavin Newsom's career. It's not.

Gavin Newsom's not done. I have two proposals that are not against the law of physics for solving wildfires. I was talking to my friend and he had some really good ideas. Number one is why don't we just water the mountains? Like we can with, with water from the sea, we can, we can put up a desalinization plant and literally just irrigate them. I actually don't understand why it would not be against the law of laws of physics, but

to like run water up there, water the areas around the neighborhoods so that they don't catch on fire and create a natural fire break area with like always watered vegetation. Like I don't actually see the problem with that. The second one that I have is people are saying, well, you know, we can't bury the power lines because it's way too expensive. And the power lines did probably cause some of these fires, right?

Um, on Tuesday night, I guess it's last Tuesday when the winds were really, really popping off from my house in Glendale, I could see over the hill in, um, Griffith park around North Hollywood. And for about an hour or two, every five minutes or so, I'd see this big green flash of light, uh, light up the sky beyond the mountain. And those were like, those were power lines or power, um,

apparatus just like popping right because you get this really big flash of light and that that creates sparks and the sparks create fires well if it's too if it's too expensive to bury the lines like why why don't we just put them in like tamper proof weatherproof tubes and run them along the ground right then they're there the the wind is not you know threatening it

threatening them. You can't break into them and your problem solved. But it doesn't seem like we're talking about that, doing that or anything like that. We're not talking about anything. It is either decarbonize the entire planet. It's too expensive or whatever. Decarbonize the entire planet or we're going to keep burning is the position, the local position on this. California's, Los Angeles's budget is close to $50 billion a year. $50 billion a year. Yeah.

About a quarter of that goes to like social welfare type stuff. Like they have enough money to do something to start at least thinking about this stuff. I remember they, there were all of these, there was a flurry of programs that were designed for these long-term studies into the efficacy of like reparations and things like that all over California.

Why not a couple of studies on how to stop, on how to better fight against the fires or things like this? Like why not really ambitious technology solutions? Anyway, it's not our job to be talking about this stuff. It is like fun to talk about this stuff, but they're literally, they're in place to fix this and they haven't. And I'm glad that we can finally talk about it. I do want to know though, we've talked a lot about the fires last week and now this week. I want to know what you guys think about Zuck.

So have you been following the policy changes? Have you been following the discourse online sort of going after him for this? He appeared on Rogan where – I mean the comments were pretty much uniformly I would say like hatred of Mark Zuckerberg. What was all of your read of kind of this? Yeah, I don't know. I mean it just sort of seems – people are saying opportunistic and –

I have a hard time buying it too, man. Like, you know, I mean, the time to do the right thing is when it's difficult, right? I mean, that's when people are going to respect you. And, you know, now that, yeah, now that the winds are changing and stuff like that, it's pretty easy to come out and say, you know, well, yes, I'm all for free speech and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. But when was it –

I'm glad you raised this because people, this is the thing. I just don't know when was it hard and important to speak up? When the government was supposedly coercing them, he could have taken a stand against them.

We're talking four years ago, and I think it's not you, but I'm not referring to you now, Andy. But all throughout tech, I've seen this as well. And four years ago in tech, nobody was saying anything. None of these people who are now like, yay, the Trump administration were Trump supporters. In fact, they were, if anything, still demonizing them in that time and totally bent over for the censorship apparatus. I think that we're forgetting how...

crazy it was back then. And there was, I think, a real sense that maybe this administration could do something to your company and would. It was this pandemic. They had this apparent reason to go. And it was very scary to people that they could go and do whatever they wanted, any kind of overreach they wanted. I think

It was bad for sure. I criticized him all the time. I was one of the few who did publicly. I think at this point, the only person who really has – there are like maybe two people in Silicon Valley who have a right to be criticizing Mark for quote blowing in the wind.

That would be Palmer Luckey, who he fired, who, by the way, also didn't support Trump publicly back when that was going on because that was the culture of Silicon Valley. And Peter Thiel, who was run out of the entire fucking town in 2016 for supporting the wrong person, who now, I guess, we're throwing parties for in Washington, D.C., right? Like everyone is in D.C. right now throwing parties for Donald Trump. It's crazy how things have changed. And I just...

I think it's been changed for a while. So I don't like these people who are saying, who are going after Mark now for doing something that is easy today. Because I think it's been easy for a long time. It's not been hard like it was for Peter for many, many, many years. And I also think just at the end of the day, all that matters, if the policies are changing,

And one of the most powerful executives in the entire world is now saying, hey, I'm sorry. You were right about literally everything. I made a bunch of mistakes here. It's not going to happen again. Here are my real beliefs. I'm changing policy on these platforms in accordance with your values.

I think you just take the win and you say, that's great news. I don't know why people are not taking the win, I guess. Just one thing on the new ecosystem we have. So you mentioned it in your piece. It was talking about the fact-check-free social media ecosystem. You mentioned it's going to be chaos, but the chaos is preferable to authoritarianism. And so whatever it took

However it took Zuckerberg to get there, this new ecosystem that's now not just on X, but also on platforms like Meta is so much more preferable to the previous ecosystem. And the parallels with the wildfires there really are so apt because in people actually calling out the government failures, which is now a big part of the government discourse...

With that comes the conspiracy takes. And so like for every post about California failing to maintain its reservoirs, there's another about how it's like an intentional depopulation scheme or something. And it's like, so that's a little bit jarring, but I'll still take that chaos over heavy-handed authoritarianism any day of the week. So however it took Zuckerberg to get there, I will take it. Thank you for bringing that up. I think it's an important point because-

that is what we react against mostly when it comes to the sort of information landscape is, uh, is this like really, they really clownish crazy stuff. It's Marjorie Taylor green talking about, uh, government lasers to create hurricanes and target red, like red States, right? Like that's, that's the kind of stuff that we see on Twitter that was supposed to be suppressed in the, in the prior order. But the more important thing is that, uh,

we can criticize, you know, Gavin Newsom's wildfire strategy and not have to have a conversation about global warming while we do it. And that's going to be the, yeah, that is just, that was my sense when I was writing this is I agree with everything, literally everything that the sort of

There's a left critique of must that it's like things are getting crazier on X and the critique of Zuckerberg is going to be way crazier there because it's like boomer central. And it's just going to be like madness. Like the weirdest shit you've ever seen is going to proliferate. We have deep fakes coming. It's going to be crazy.

it's going to be, it's going to be really, really crazy. It's already kind of crazy. It's going to be crazier and it's still not going to matter. It's going to be, we're going to see everything. We'll see the crazy stuff. We'll see the fact checks. We'll see the fact checks of the fact checks. We'll see actual thoughtful discourse and it'll be all kind of mixed together in this, um,

maelstrom of just people yelling on the internet, probably a lot of government bots too. And like government ops from, you know, Russian agents and, uh, and Chinese agents, they'll all be out there, but we'll, we'll never be sent. We will not in over the next four years. I don't think we will not be censored from, uh, from interrogating power. And that is, uh,

I think that's better. I think, you know, four years from now, we'll look back and maybe it's, who knows? It is. I mean, it's great. We've never seen this before. We've never seen people speaking at this scale before online. So I don't know what it means. I don't know what it's going to look like. I know that what we had during COVID was bad and we can never have that again.

And that's that. And I just sort of like just ground floor, don't trust anybody who defended that system because it was clearly authoritarian. It clearly led to the coercion of people to do things with their bodies that they didn't want to do. It shut down the entire economy. We still not recovered from this in a lot of ways. And that was it could have gotten a lot worse. You know, the next one might get worse depending on when China decides to release it.

Yeah, I think the challenge moving forward is, I mean, I really wish we'd had like an algorithm. We have an algorithm. We had an algorithm store or something like that where you could choose your own algo. Because right now, I agree, like free speech is preferable to, you know, sort of unaccountable leadership and censorship. Right. But when I got on Twitter, I mean, I got I got like really upset looking at Twitter during the wildfires.

Because despite the fact that I imagine myself to engage with only the most pure fact-based content on Twitter, I was being shown shit about the Chilean crime syndicate that conspiratorially started all the fires, even in the mountains of the... Stuff where I was just like, clearly, none of you are in California. How wrong are we for sure that that's wrong? I was... I don't...

I don't know. The fact that I've never heard of a Chilean crime syndicate before, you know, like Monday morning when I was literally evacuating was a little bit of a negative signal for me on that story. And I know that there's a smart guy in venture capital who thinks and is going to reveal something about that soon. And maybe he's right. I don't know. But my point is like,

It was an uncomfortable place for me to be Twitter wise. Yeah.

And it is, it is now like, you know, I don't like going on Twitter very much because I, it's like that. What is it called? Jill amnesia effect or whatever. Once you, oh yeah, yeah. Gilman. Yeah. Sorry. I butchered that, but like once you see amnesia, Gilman amnesia, once you see, this is about newspapers, but I had it for Twitter during the fires. You know, like once you see like,

the masses or whatever, people on Twitter, the public getting something so wrong about something that, you know, you know, more better than most people. Um, you know, like what, what does that mean for every other topic, uh, that's going around on Twitter? And again, I prefer it this way, but, um, you know, the social network that makes it's algo a, a more pleasant place to be, um,

I think that's like the next thing that we have to do. And by pleasant, I mean like not full of... saying really stupid shit. And that's a really difficult problem, right? Like I'm not advocating for censorship. I don't know what you do because some conspiracies obviously turn out to be true, you know? But man, it's a...

You're just, you're asking for more control over what you see, which is what we all want and what we're not getting. That's what I want on Instagram. I would love, I hate being just delivered messages.

random shit that I spent too much time hovering over for a second. Because what? I don't know. If anybody here runs ad advertising on Facebook or Twitter, there's this concept called lookalike audiences, right? Where you can tell Twitter, for example, to deliver ads to followers,

or accounts who look like Michael Solana, right? Who, who for some reason resemble Michael Solana or whoever, right?

And I don't know why they don't set up lookalike-based algos for people that you could choose. If I could see content from accounts that were just one account that I like a lot, they could really experiment with this. And I feel like there would be some interesting A-B tests you could do there. Because they're farming you. They don't care about any of this. And this is – I hate to sound like a chain-smoking leftist conspiracy theorist, but –

They're right about that. Like literally you're being on Instagram, of course, but not enough, not more than the advertisement revenue that they're getting. You'd have to pay a lot. And it's like the, that we see that already with the, you see how like all these streaming platforms are becoming more and more like cable by the day. They just increasingly look exactly like a TV channel, like the subscription thing. It doesn't work as well as the advertising revenue. And that's what works on Instagram. And they,

are going to do whatever they have to do to drive those numbers up. And you see that on X as well when it comes to things like links, for example. Being able to link to your work and read links to high quality sites where there's longer form work, to me is a very enriching part or always was a very enriching part of the information ecosystem. That has been taken away because there's a little number that Elon looked at that said when links exist,

uh people are you know x times less likely to be on the platform for however many minutes and that little optimization thing it's like it's cut so you can optimize your time on this platform so we can sell more to you and um and that's unfortunately it that's the game what we need is just

some way to get off of these platforms and reset. And I don't know how to do that. I think it's just, I don't know. This is like a whole other, it's a whole other topic at this point, but they're not going to give you the algorithm store. It's just, it's too...

You would have too much control over what you were watching, I think, and it would no longer – because certainly the first thing that all of us would choose is not to be addicted to the platform and be endlessly scrolling for six hours a day or whatever. And they need those numbers. So it's – I don't think that we're going to get what we want.

And or at least not for any kind of reasonable price. If it was optimized for what you want to see, then you're you would be so much more likely to just dip in and out of it like whenever you want to. And that sort of doom scrolling effect of like, oh, these people are stupid, but I like I need to see more like that car crash effect that would no longer be there. And they love that car crash effect. So, yeah. Yeah, it's the loop. It's sad to see. And I want to talk about TikTok now. It is sad before we get into TikTok to see.

All of these people talking about how we have to delete the fentanyl app or whatever and no self-reflection at all about what Reels has become. It is TikTok. It's the exact same thing. It's designed for the exact same purpose. The whole point of it is to go on and forget that you're on and scroll forever. And I think all of the early stuff, I mean, it's sad to see all of these companies used to have really optimistic mission statements. Facebook was about connecting people.

It hasn't been about connecting people for a long, long time. Facebook is a form of television now. All of the platforms, every single platform is a form of television. It's just a different form of content consumption. It's not actually social media, right? It's like a very sort of interactive TV. And this one is, yeah, it's just as bad as TikTok, though not controlled by the Chinese Communist Party to the best of our knowledge. Riley, do you want to tee up the TikTok bye-bye?

Bye-bye spy app segment of the day. Yeah. So everyone's favorite gyrating teen hooker dance slash Chinese spy app as Solano so astutely called it in the daily. TikTok is planning to shut its US operations this Sunday, I think, when the federal ban is set to take effect, barring some like a last minute deal. Same day as the Israel-Palestine ceasefire. Busy day. Interesting. Okay.

Convenient timing. Yes, for both. So the Washington Post reported that Trump is considering issuing an executive order to suspend an enforcement of a TikTok shutdown. Can he do that? What the fuck is an executive order? Can somebody please tell me what they are? It's like it feels like they feel like magic scrolls where the president is just like, I'm going to do this thing. And everyone weirdly says, well, well, the executive order was signed. What do you mean it was signed? That's not how this works. You can't just do that.

And it's also the ban goes into effect the day before he gets into office. So it's is he even able to do that for something that's already gone into effect? It's very, very legally muddy. A group of Democrat congressmen also have introduced legislation to extend the deadline for an additional 270 days before ByteDance has to divest.

But meanwhile, rumors have been swirling about who could possibly step up to buy the app before it shuts down, whether that's Sunday or some later date. Mr. Beast has publicly said he wants to buy the platform. And also Elon Musk's name was also floated as a potential buyer. He seems busy. Yeah.

very busy and will he own the entire internet at some point? I guess we will wait and see. But, um, in the meantime, the, uh, users of the Jai reading teen hooker app have been migrating to a different app called red note. Although the name of the app more accurately translates to a little red book, which if that sounds familiar, yes, it is a reference to Mal's actual, uh, manifesto. Um, and yes, before you ask Taylor Lorenz has already made her account. Um,

Someone online said this was a Taylor joining the Chinese internet is a payback for COVID. It's actually like we're sending her over there. It's like a wish to weapon. That's right. Is Mao still venerated in China? Like, I feel like they've like scrubbed that part of. Yeah, maybe he is.

No, they love now over there. I want to say, okay, so first of all, just, I guess there's some questions about what's going to happen. If you guys are on the gyrating teen hooker app, you're going to not be able to see it on the, on the, it'll be off the, the sort of the stores, the app stores.

Pretty much overnight. You should not be able to access it via browser. I think you may be able to for a short term if you have it downloaded, access it on the app for a little while. But it will just die and there's precedent for this. The New York Times writes, Apple has long complied with foreign governments that have ordered apps to be removed in their countries. Last April, for instance, Apple pulled communication apps like WhatsApp, Signal, Threads, and Telegram from its App Store database.

in China at the request of the Chinese government, which I thought was kind of shady. It was very funny to write that in the context of this ongoing, I guess, Chinese attempt to argue America as an authoritarian sort of censorship type country that doesn't believe in free speech. Meanwhile, they've banned literally every single one of our speech platforms abroad.

Then also they conclude with, I don't know that you're appropriately defending shareholder value if you don't take the law seriously, even if you believe Trump. So Trump's going to reverse it. So maybe Apple just doesn't comply because the idea is that like,

Even if Trump doesn't support it now, he could support it later. And if you're breaking the law as Apple, Trump has leverage against you now as the president. So if you fuck with him, it's like he can just really retaliate in nasty ways. You have to just follow the letter of the law. And I think they're going to. So probably it will go down. I will note on the Chinese gaslighting thing, it's been interesting to follow this. So, yeah.

In the court case, Justice Roberts said something at one point. Are we supposed to ignore the fact that the ultimate parent is, in fact, subject to doing intelligence work for the Chinese government? So they were really trying to argue, you know, this was a violation of free speech. And all of the Supreme Court justices seem...

pretty skeptical, I think skeptical of that argument. They believe the government has a right for national security purposes to force divestiture, which is what this is. And I think it's also important to remember that. It's weird how we've just completely mainstreamed the ban thing. There's no ban. There is no ban of this app.

ByteDance is being forced to divest. They have to sell TikTok to an American and they haven't done that. And they're not doing that on purpose. And I think it's very clear the reason that they're not doing that. They're not doing that because they are controlled by China and nobody wants a TikTok files situation following the new regime at the company where all of the correspondents are

from that company is released. And we know for sure what we've all suspected, which is that the government of China is involved in what is going on at the company. So in the end, I'm glad this is happening. I think it needs to happen soon. That puts me on the other side of both Trump

and Elon Musk, who both opposed investiture, and I think will probably continue to oppose investiture. I think it's the right move. I'm happy for it. Good riddance. What do you guys think? Yeah, I think this is ultimately a good thing too. I mean, the only, you know, as kind of a free marketer, like that part of my nature kind of rebels against this. But

On the other hand, like, you know, China's just been taking advantage of our open market for forever, you know? And it's like, they can't keep getting away with this, you know? So yeah, there's a distinction too. There's a national security thing and there's just a smart business thing. And there's a question of how you compete with countries that...

operate in a different way. China's a mercantilist society. They're going to support their industry throughout. And can we really, can our companies, why do our companies have to compete against the entire world in our country and then be prohibited from competing in any other market? I don't think it can, that's not a free market to me. That's like, the market's not free. So why are we operating in the way that we are? Like we're like operating like Captain America over here, but the game is rigged. So why would we tolerate that?

Yeah. The game theory doesn't work out. Like, you know, free markets only work if everybody has a free market. And, you know, as again, a committed free marketer, you know, Milton Friedman type person, like I, you know, resisted the whole, you know, when Trump and the sort of the new rights started talking about tariffs and all that stuff, I was like, you know, I had this sort of reflexive attitude.

reaction against that. But the fact is, look, they're not playing by free market rules either. So we have to use whatever weapons we can to make sure they play ball. Yeah, we see that with our tech companies being targeted a lot. And I think I was saying...

I saw someone online, a journalist, talking about how Silicon Valley was sort of overwhelmingly right-wing now, or not even overwhelmingly, but majority right-wing or something like that. And I think that's not quite right. I think it's more the elite than it is the average person. And I think that the shift is actually less, maybe there's some ideological change, but mostly what you're seeing is self-interest.

Silicon Valley, both levels. So at the startup level and at the mature sort of fang, or not, I don't know if it's fang anymore, the mature sort of Fortune 500 or top 10, whatever level is being screwed by Europe and China and South America in the case of Twitter briefly, I think it's going to become a bigger deal. You have the M&A path basically taken off of the table, which is very difficult.

I wouldn't say it's dangerous, but it has mattered a lot to what some folks are calling little tech. And then on the big tech side, you have European regulators going after companies like Google and Facebook constantly. So it's only natural that all of tech at every level would eventually try and find some political alignment in some other party. And it seems like they have. It was just like, I don't think there was ever...

Anyway, that it wouldn't conclude like this when you have the Biden administration actively assisting foreign governments as they try to regulate our companies to hell.

I think that the fact that all of the TikTok users instantly migrated to Red Note or Little Red Book. Yeah, we got to talk more about this. I think it sort of shows that like the narrow focus of just making this about TikTok was like sort of the wrong approach here. And it should have just been a general reciprocal trade idea like Palmer mentioned here of just like, hey, everything that...

we use as ban in China. Why are we allowing any of their social media apps here? So that's why I wonder like the narrow focus of just TikTok. I wonder if that was the right approach versus just, hey, just anything in China, they don't let us use our things there. So why are we using their apps here? I think that should have been the approach this whole time. Yeah. I mean, I think I agree. That's what it should be. That is a lot of stuff that's going to have a huge, huge, huge impact. And it also feels sort of like

That is very aggressive for China. It's a huge departure from the way things have gone for many decades. And I don't know that people are confident they won't retaliate in some way that actually might matter. And I don't know. But yeah, I think that it should just be that. You have people, sort of Chinese agents, following the exodus of Americans...

from TikTok and their convergence on Little Red Book. What is it? Is it Little Red Book? Little Red Book. You have Yin Sun. So he's making an announcement. This is a Chinese dude making an announcement to all of his new American friends on the app. He says, sorry, TikTok refugees, but our platforms implement strict content moderation policies that are aimed at fighting disinformation. What you should know before coming to our platform is the following.

One, Taiwan is not a country. Two, Tibet is already free. Three, COVID didn't come from China. There are academic studies tracing the origin of COVID in Europe and the US before the pandemic expanded to China.

Four, there's no Uyghur concentration camps. Five, there was no massacre in Tiananmen. That is actually true, but complicated. Look it up. It's very interesting. There was a massacre that day, but it wasn't actually in the square. Mao didn't starve 45 million Chinese. The U.S. was partly responsible for the famine that occurred in China due to its embargo on China at the time, and other reasons were unusual droughts.

And it's approximately 10 million Chinese who died during the famine, not 45. Don't worry, guys, just 10 million people starved to death because of Mao. Also, it's funny how America is blamed for fucking everything. Like literally the blame here is we're not, you're a communist dictator now. We're not working with you. And he's like, well, fine, then we're going to die. And that's our fault somehow. That's crazy. That's like when you have like a little kid in the house and they're

you yell at them and say, you know, you have to eat your vegetables. Okay. You won't do it. Well, now you're grounded. And then they like, they like run away and you're, you're the one who's in charge of that. Like you're, you're now they're going to run away. Or what is that? The movie, a Christmas story where Ralphie has the, he has the fantasy. He's being forced to eat soap after cursing. And he has this fantasy of going blind because of it. And his mom feeling so bad because she made him blind. Anyway, this is like, this is childish behavior. And it makes me think like China is really not in a position of

There's nothing to be worried about there. These are children. But he keeps going. And since you're at it, there's no social credit score in China. Islam is not prohibited in China and we don't destroy mosques. That's a random one. I don't know why he's throwing that out there. China is also a democracy, but of another kind. We call it a whole process democracy here in China. Good to know. I did not realize that. Is it a dirty account?

No, because – okay. So no. And he goes on and on. I thought that. So I go and I check and it's – if it is, it's in the uncanny valley, man. Like this guy is really just going after – he's constantly arguing against just America in ways that seem stupid but not like a joke. This one, he's responding to Melissa Chen about the options that TikTok has.

He offers another option. He says ByteDance is considered a Chinese jewel by the Chinese government. Its technology and recommendation algorithm is unmatched by its American competitors that are YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.

Many TikTok users who had extensive experiences of the three almost all confirmed that TikTok was unparalleled. China, do not cave into the forced extortion of TikTok by the authoritarian US government. It's a matter of national security and reputation and pride. They are really out here calling us authoritarians, which I agree. I've said, I think Biden's administration was the most authoritarian in our lives, but

But it's not actually, he has not made it to authoritarianism. We're not living in a, he's literally handing power over to Trump now. That's what's happening. He's not an authoritarian. That's not what we're looking at here. But also like, why am I even saying it? Like, we all know this. Like, what am I, I'm just, it's like Chinese people online saying crazy shit. The gaslighting just bothers me though, man. And I've never seen it the way that I see it from Chinese state actors, the way they will look you in your face and say like, you don't have free speech.

This is not a – we have free speech, not you. No, no, you don't have democracy. We have democracy. It's like that's – it's crazy that they just lie to you in your face like that. I guess that's what they're used to doing though, right? And honestly, that tweet sounded kind of Trumpian, didn't it? Yeah. Didn't it have a Trump vibe to it? I think they respect him. They're like, well, we know what we're getting with him. He's acting in the way that – I think America –

Maybe there's a sense abroad that America is always acting in its interest, but likes to dress it up in language that makes it seem like they care about the rest of the world or something. And Trump is just saying, I don't care about the rest of the world. I only care about America. And that's refreshing to an abuse victim. Yeah.

So good point, I guess. I don't know. I think they're giving us a little too much credit. Honestly, I think we just behave the way we behave. To tie back to an earlier topic, I would much prefer the internet where sure, we might have some Chinese bots, but they're posting cringe posts about only 10 million people died in Mao's revolution.

And that person gets dunked on then the Chinese authoritarian censorship app. So as the resident zoomer, I won't be joining my fellow zoomers on the little red book. I'll stick to X. How many do you well, what is your sense of how many people are actually using it? Because my initial sense was like, it's not a real thing. There's no way that it is actually a trend. I think it's just a fun thing to talk about. Right.

That's sort of my sense as well. I wonder if it'll be different if the ban actually does go into effect this Sunday, if all my friends will start sending me red note reels. Okay, so all my friends send me TikTok reels. I can't open them because I'm not on TikTok. So I really hope that the trend of them sending me links that I can't even open, especially if it's from the little communist little red book, I hope that that does not continue. Yeah.

I just think reels is going to blow up. Why wouldn't it? It's right there. Yeah. It's just, and it works. It's there's your digital fentanyl. It already exists. We've got our own version of it. All these people are already on Instagram. That's where they sell their only fans account. So it's like, it's, it's, it's as easy as pie. Um, this is not going to affect us. I don't think it matters. People are going to, the band's going to go into effect. Nothing will matter. Like nothing will change in our lives. And, um,

And that'll be that. But let's talk about Polymarket. Thank you, Polymarket. Welcome to our Polymarket segment. Polymarket, thank you for supporting Pyrewires and this valuable journalism that we do here. This is a paid partnership. I don't want to get into any trouble now that we've got this new oligarchy in control. Who knows where the law of the land is going to hammer down on top of us. But I want to talk about who's going to buy Polymarket.

So TikTok faces a potential U.S. ban by January 19th, 2025, unless ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, sells its U.S. operations due to national security concerns. Rumors suggest Elon Musk and Mr. Beast as potential buyers, though TikTok has dismissed these reports as, quote, pure fiction. Polymarket odds currently place a 12% chance on Elon purchasing TikTok and a 9% chance on Mr. Beast making the acquisition, which is crazy, by the

one in 10 chance of Mr. Beast owning TikTok is insane to me. President-elect Donald Trump has asked the US Supreme Court to halt the ban, seeking more time for negotiations. The court is reviewing TikTok's appeal with a decision expected before the January 19th deadline. What do you guys think? What are the odds that Elon Musk buys TikTok? I don't know if the bettors are just operating on fake news fumes or if there's something actually to the

to the Elon support. If it was like a 2% chance, I would think, oh, these are just professional gamblers who are taking these crazy outside risks on the off chance or whatever. That's not what this looks like. 12% is like a lot of people seem to believe this, which is something we've crossed before where

These people are not as rational as you would think, even with the introduction of money. I think mostly they're more rational maybe in general than the average person. They're thinking about it a little more deeply, but this is not that deep. The odds of Elon Musk buying TikTok feel very low to me. Actually, I should revise what I just said. Bloomberg did report three days ago that there are some anonymous sources who are close to the issue saying that

the Chinese government has discussed Elon. So I read a pretty clever- And TikTok. When that was going viral, I read a clever comment that said, this is designed to make Democrats not want the ban.

Because this is – remember, I mean, it's easy to forget this because I've been – I know that I'm like coded right wing or something and I've been in support of the ban. It's like, well, this is a right wing position. It wasn't. It was the Biden administration is the reason that the ban, the ban, the divestiture is happening. And –

If you can convince the Democratic Party that this is going to give Elon Musk more power, they've already made it clear that they fear Elon Musk more than they fear Donald Trump. I think they're going to be against this. Donald Trump is already against this. And so that seems like, honestly, a pretty smart strategy. It's like, sure, we'll sell it, but we're selling it to the person you hate more than anybody alive. Yeah. I mean, if you just think about it, who's the best setup to buy? I feel like Meta

would be a good purchaser of TikTok because they have- America will never allow that. There's no way that they- Yeah, you're right. There's no way.

So it would have to be this, I mean, in a way, Elon maybe makes sense. It's a minority speech platform. It's like a much less dominant speech platform than Meta in terms of the numbers. And then you have something more like people love to be like, oh, here's competition. Maybe the polymarket folks know a little more than I'm giving them credit for. Maybe there is some wisdom to this.

I know that Elon would say yes, but can he afford it? This is, I mean, how much is TikTok's got to be valued in some insane level at this point? I don't, I don't know that he could afford it. Wouldn't all users of TikTok just immediately leave the app if Elon bought it? Like these people don't like Elon. Like this is the app where people read a

Osama bin Laden and are like, yeah, this is good. These people aren't just going to leave the app, I think, if Elon buys it. So I think you need a billionaire who these people are much more likely to look up to to buy the app. And that's why I think Taylor Swift is a much more likely candidate as a TikTok purchaser. Then their users will be happy. But I think China would... Musk would be a good option for China because he's already tied into China with Tesla. Yep.

And so I think they would probably prefer somebody who already has business interests because that's leverage for them. Yeah, they have leverage over him. That's a whole other... That is... It would be... I would not like to see Elon acquire TikTok. That would make me... It would be concerning. Concerned. Yeah. I don't like that. That says to me that they're trying something. We got to talk about touching grass. Riley, take it away.

Sure thing. So grounding. So grounding is a fascinating trend that I had been wanting to write about for a long time, in part because I had been memed into doing it myself as a longtime health Twitter lurker, but also because it's it sounds so strange, this notion that just walking barefoot through the park like a weirdo would have actual health benefits.

That if it did turn out to be true, it would be sort of this like perfect encapsulation of the state of health today, which is that you have this thing where trust the science normies would be quick to dismiss it. But it's embraced by like these trad wives online and health influencers that if it did turn out to actually have like a little bit of evidence to it, it would be just this like perfect reflection of this post-COVID like world of health.

So when I did some digging, what I found was pretty interesting. And I should preference all of this with I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Um,

So while there are a lot of experts who dismiss grounding in part because like grounders will make all these like unsubstantial, unquantifiable claims, grounders, if that's what we call them, they'll make these claims of like, you're just like vaguely connecting with the earth. And like, there are also lots of, we'll call them opportunistic people sent selling like grounding products for like $700 online. Yeah.

But there are also several studies that show grounding actually does have some positive effects. And the most notable is the study they did at Penn State. So researchers there did this study on preterm infants in the neonatal intensive care unit to see if grounding had any effect on their health outcomes.

They hypothesize this would be important because the intensive care unit has all these electromagnetic fields because of all the equipment there, which can preterm infants can be particularly sensitive to.

And so what they found was if they literally electrically ground the babies by connecting their cribs to the ground, it has an effect on vagal tone, which I guess is this, uh, really valuable health metric that analyzes your heart rate in between inhalation and exhalation basically just shows that the babies were in a more relaxed state. And so, uh,

What I wrote was that this suggests grounding is uniquely suited to our digital age because it's not just NICU equipment that gives off these electrical fields. It's also the laptops that we're talking into right now. So perhaps grounding can counteract the effects, however subtle that we do get from that.

Um, and similar to Solana's take today about, uh, red number three die. Uh, sometimes the age old wisdom we get from our moms of just going outside and not eating garbage is right on the money. Um, and then the last thing is that I think a thank you is an order for pirate wires because in our white pill newsletter, we used to close that by telling you all to touch grass.

And it turns out this whole time we were giving you some valuable medical advice. So you're welcome for that one. I thought you were not giving us medical advice. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if we are, it's valuable. The science says it's valuable. Don't make us complicit in your fake news. Brandon, do you ever walk around barefoot outside? I used to when I was, I don't know, seven. I think it intuitively makes sense. I like the feeling of the ground on my bare feet.

I do get some pleasure out of it. So it's got to be worth something. I'm interested in all the new health stuff. Yeah, I'm listening. Tell me more about grounding. I want to hear all of your weird shit. I also, it is funny that you bring up red dye number three, which it is a very adjacent conversation where there was all of this wisdom. I mean, I grew up, my mom would literally look at the back of packages and be like,

What is all, what are all these chemicals? They probably give you cancer. We're not eating this. This is just, no, we're not red dye. Number what? And yellow, blue 52. That's we're not doing that in this house. And it's this like,

folk wisdom almost is what it feels like and how it was met. And there was a lot of elitism that surrounded health opinions like that for a long time that is being proven to have been wrong. Like the idea that we shouldn't be eating all of these chemicals. I mean, it seems like it's gaining, it seems like it's gaining legitimacy. And that is interesting. You got to listen to mom.

Thank you, mom, for not pumping my body full of poison. I am very happy to have not been red dye number three. Another one I think a lot about, though, is you guys remember yellow number five? Do you remember this one? The other famous dye. Yeah, that's right. That's the most famous. Anything that's a color plus a number, we should probably just scrap it.

I wonder if any – I wonder if girls even know about this. This is something like every schoolboy lived in fear of yellow dye number five. And it was because we were told – I'm assuming it was like on every campus that – every like elementary school that existed. I was told and believed that yellow dye number five would shrink my balls. And they were like, yeah, you'll like lose your balls. Was it in like American cheese or what was – where was it? It's all over the place, yellow dye. It's like –

Yeah, it's like one of these chemicals that's in everything. And I lived in fear of that. And just before this podcast, or before I wrote the take on Red Number 3, I remember Yellow 5. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's got to be fake, right? Like, I want to see it. And I chachi-pede-teed it to find out what I thought would be...

what I thought would be like an urban legend or something. I thought that would be the answer. Like, oh, this was like an urban legend that blew up in the early nineties or whatever. And it was just like, yeah, it's this dye that has possibly the ability to like fuck up male fertility. And I was like, what? Wait, what? That's what I'm getting from this? Like I assumed it would be an outright, this is fake news. And the AI was just like, listen, you got to hear both sides. I don't know. Don't do it. I would not recommend it.

Riley, what's your grounding routine? Like, do you spend, what's this look like? Is it a day-to-day thing? Like, is it like going to the gym, but you just go outside and work out?

So it used to be like literally just walking through the park. But I did as for as much as I bash on the grounding products, I did buy a pair of shoes that they say keep you electrically grounded. So the toe shoes, they're not toe shoes. Oh, if they had toe shoes that did this too. Oh, that would be another level of this. But I did buy a pair of shoes that they say are grounding shoes. So

You look crazy though, to do that in a park. Like anybody, anybody in public in bare feet, just like that guy's crazy. You know, you know where you don't look. The only place you don't look crazy grounding is on the beach. Dude, Adam Newman walks around grounding in Manhattan. Yeah.

New York City. That to me is – that's crazy. That can't be – that's got to be whatever the grounding benefits you get on a beautiful park like lawn situation. I think it's the opposite if you're grounding in Manhattan. If you're grounding in Manhattan, it's like you're getting hepatitis. That's the only – there's no way you're escaping without a disease. Yeah.

You're absorbing, you're channeling like the... What was that? The overdose on fentanyl or something. Yeah, you're grounding. You are like you're channeling, but it's like the darkness of the darkest city in America is like pouring right up into you directly. Riley, did you come across anything about grounding in Manhattan on your research?

I didn't, but I would imagine it's something similar to what you said of you get some strange disease and horror. Yeah. It would not be good for your health outcomes. We won't give medical advice. We will tell you not to walk barefoot through Manhattan. One last thought on the weird health stuff. And like, cause grounding to me is really more about if you just ignore the funniness of it, what are we saying? Really? It's like be in nature more is kind of what is, is what you're being told. And, um,

I was thinking about after red dye number three turned out to be probably giving you – actually, we've known that it was probably going to give you cancer for a long time, which is crazy because it was banned from other shit like decades ago in America. And it just took the FDA a long time to force a ban for all of our products. I think Tylenol uses it. Hearing that and thinking about other wisdom from my mom, it was like, just go outside. You kids should be outside. Like, go run around. Go, go. It's like what she's saying. She's like, you need exercise.

You need sunlight for a certain amount of time a day. She only wanted – my mom was one of these early ones who was like, organic food? She was pilled on organic food day one. She was like, oh yeah, I don't want pesticide on my baby's fruit. And I'm starting to think like, you know what she really – moms are basically the original RFK Jr. Moms were doing RFK Jr. shit way before RFK Jr. had the Maha movement. Like you could just talk to really any mom. And then I started thinking about it and I was realizing –

There is probably an evolutionary case to be made for a mother's intuition about nutrition. A mom is responsible for feeding her babies things that are not poison. And so it's like, our moms are not

being crazy, everything in their body is telling them to watch out what their kids are eating and to be giving them food that's healthy rather than poisonous. And so I don't know that we can trust them for everything, our moms. But I think on nutrition, they're probably right. I think they're probably the closest. I would bet that women are better at this than men at judging what is healthy and what is not.

I don't know, man. I grew up, both of my parents were professionals and my mom still managed to cook a lot of food for us, but we still had a lot of processed food in the house. So, I mean, I think in that sense, we were a good right wing, we don't give a shit about any of that crunchy stuff family. They were like, you're going to eat your frozen fish sticks.

Yeah. But crunchy is right wing. My mom was just ahead of the curve. My mom was never, but my mom was always voting. My mom, I mean, she was a Democrat before I was around, but when I was around, she was, she would see both sides, but like she leaned right for sure. And she was like, I don't trust over medication. Uh, I'm not putting my kids on fucking Adderall. We're not doing food dyes and processed foods. And like, I, I think that that crunchy right wing thing, it's like, we're seeing a lot of it now, but I think it's been around for a while. Oh,

Oh, it certainly has. I just don't think that's like, I don't think that's really been the default. Now, I mean, if you want to go all the way back to like the John Birch Society and fluoridation mandrake, like that's kind of like, you know, that's every time I hear about seed oils, I think to myself that scene and Dr. Strange loves seed oils, mandrake, you know? So, but it's not always been that way though. I think it's more like you started to hear about the crunchy cons. Like I think in the early 2000s is when I first started hearing that

that term, but it's really picked up steam. I don't know. I mean, that's John Mackey. The founder of Whole Foods is like kind of... Oh, he's a libertarian. He's a libertarian, yeah. But that's a flavor of the right, I would say. I...

I do wonder about fluoride, but then I don't want to learn too much about it. Cause I just feel like I have too many Hills that I'm dying on. I can't do floor. I cannot be an anti-fluoride person as well. It's just like, it's getting exhausting. So I need other people to carry that, to carry that fight forward for me. Um, do you guys have, uh, any last thoughts on health on the, on the, um, on the, the mom DA, which is what I'm calling for, uh,

On the sort of mom health movement, on Mark Zuckerberg, on maybe what his mom was feeding him to make him a boy genius who created Facebook. Who knows? Anything? Last thoughts? RFK, if you're listening, just hire a bunch of moms at the HHS. I think that would help set the country straight. Yes. And I guess this time next week, Donald Trump will be the president, yes? Yep. Well...

It's the end of an era, folks. We'll see you back here next week when the fascist regime begins. Dark, scary music, Matt. Goodbye. Touch grass. For real, though. Listen to Riley. Go heal your body and your soul. Have a good weekend.