Pirate Wires - Defund NPR, How To Handle Bridge Protestors, & Humane AI’s Disaster Release

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

EPISODE #49: Welcome Back To The Pod! This week we're talking about NPR's new CEO hire, who can only be described as an NPC Leftist.The question though, why should our tax money go towards this organization? We then get into Solana's solution for dealing with protestors that are disrupting our daily lives on the bridges and at the airports. Next up, the first major AI hardware was released to scathing reviews. The Humane AI Pin was torn apart by the biggest reviewers in tech such as Marques Brownlee. Is it ok the rip founders trying to build? Or should we be cheering them on? Finally, the globalism takeover; a breakdown of Solana's piece "Exit vs. Build". Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/katherine-maher-statements-on-tech?f=home https://www.piratewires.com/p/exit-vs-build?f=home Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! Like & Subscribe 1:00 - Defund NPR - Crazy New CEO Hire CEO Katherine Maher 19:00 - Bring Back Flogging - Yay-Hamas Protests Close Down Bridges & Invade Google 40:00 - AI Disaster - Humane AI Pin Gets Scorched By Reviewers - Fierce Debate Breaks Out 51:20 - Exit Vs. Built 1:05:00 - Thanks For Watching! Tell Your Friends! Like & Subscribe

NPR's new CEO, a woman named Catherine Marr. Brandon was calling her like an NPC leftist, talking about her like cis mobility privilege, criticizing Silicon Valley, and even people like you, Solana. What to do about these people who are blocking the bridges? A very brief, publicly televised flogging. And I know that's gonna sound crazy,

but I'm gonna break it down for you. You shut that bridge down for like four hours, You know how many people shit in their car? You know what I mean? It's called the AI pin by Humane. This is the worst product I've ever reviewed in my entire YouTube history. For one, it's a gay name. Like, let's just be honest. Like, what do you wear? Oh, it's a humane AI. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod. We're talking about NPR. We've got to talk about NPR. Of course, we're talking about NPR. NPR is the intersection of multiple tech personalities now, including obviously Elon Musk jumping in there. You have sort of a, it looks like deranged lunatic running the company. You have people quitting, people potentially being fired, people running for competitive outlets

to talk about how biased it is, etc. I'm sort of I was dropped in the middle of this controversy and obviously like started swinging. But I think we should ground you guys in the actual news of it all first. And there's no one better for that than Sajana. Tell us what actually happened rather than what happened in my sort of fevered imagination. in my sort of fevered imagination. Yeah, I mean, so NPR, I guess the news cycle around NPR began last week when a now former senior editor,

but who was then employed at the company, published a kind of tell-all, really whistleblower piece in the free press. So Barry Weiss's free press, where he basically made explicit what many people have suspected for years, which is that during the 2016 election and the Trump presidency, NPR was basically consumed by Trump derangement syndrome

that informed every aspect of editorial decisions that were made at the company. And so this senior editor said, you know, we basically made the decision not to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story when it came out. Um, this was something that, you know, our, I think NPR at the time said they weren't going to report on it because it was like not corroborated or something like that, but they didn't even pursue it. He talks about how they explicitly made the decision not to, you know, give much credence to the COVID lab leak theory, because they thought it was racist. And, you know, they were sort of all in on the Fauci,

you know, natural origin theory of it. And it was really just this kind of explosive piece from a guy who said, you know, I'm a self-identified liberal. I drive a Subaru. This is the son of a lesbian or something like that. I mean, he drives a Subaru. Yeah. And he's, and he was saying, you know, like we lost America's trust. And it's, it's remarkable to look at the change in the demographics of NPR. The editor was suspended shortly after publication of this piece. He's since resigned. But in the meantime, journalists and activists like Chris Rufo start looking into NPR's new CEO, a woman named Catherine Marr, who was named CEO in January, but has assumed the position,

I guess, last month. And what they discovered is basically a kind of archetype of, I mean, Brandon was calling her like an NPC leftist. I mean, she's basically a, what is it, like an affluent white female liberal um uh and she yeah she's an awful um and she you know has a she started her career in the non-profit sector i mean she worked for unicef she um headed up the wikimedia foundation she has worked in in non-profit web summit as well yes yeah i think so uh her her cv is kind of a laundry list of um like i don't know pro-censorship sort of borg type uh non-profits i mean she's on the board of the signal foundation uh which you know has a lot of people are sort of ai doomers um anyway chris ro, among other people,

starts digging up her old tweets and finds like this gold mine, basically, where she's sort of variously calling Trump a racist sociopath, talking about her like cis mobility privilege. She, at one point, I guess on a Zoom call, sort of says like the First Amendment is the number one challenge we face when we're fighting disinformation. Yeah, not saving the First Amendment.

The existence of the First Amendment. Yes, the existence of the First Amendment. Exactly. And she thinks, you know, when she was at Wikimedia Foundation, she said, you know, we do think that we should be censoring and removing content we deem racist, misogynistic, transphobic, etc. So she's one of these types of people. But where we come into the story is, did some digging and got some tips and find that actually, she also has a long history of criticizing Silicon Valley. long history of criticizing Silicon Valley and even people like you Solana she is very upset about the influence of white male Westerners like you I get this a lot but so basically I mean she she has outlined her position against

Silicon Valley most coherently I would say, in this 2018 speech she gave in front of the Oxford Union, which is a kind of mix of like a coherent and actually interesting philosophical position, I think, where she's basically saying, you know, like these multinational publicly traded companies are able to collect personal information at scale. And this raises all of these questions about privacy and user experience. It's sort of similar to a book that came out a few years ago about the rise of surveillance capitalism. I mean, it's an interesting argument, I think, that she's making. But then she goes on this tangent where she's like, and all these companies are run by white men who actively suppress basically the voices of women and minorities.

And you can see this in their products. Not true. To be clear, we're run by Indian men. Most of our companies are run by Indian men. The example she gives are like software, like voice recognition software that doesn't recognize non-native English speakers, you know, AI that has trouble recognizing darker skin tones. And she basically uses this to say, well, this AI is allowing us to, you know, this technology is allowing us to encode racism at scale.

And this is one of the reasons why, you know, fundamentally we should believe that tech empires are a net negative for society. And that's, that's sort of where her argument leaves off. And I can run through the list of her tweet stuff. But you know, is she doesn't screw around. She comes in and she says, no, Sam Altman is trying to genocide all black people. And I think if you're going to be crazy, just be crazy. Get in there and give us what we want. I want to take it from the very top and just,

I want to start with the dude who, like a whistleblower. It's like not really a, I guess maybe he's a whistleblower, but the whole drama surrounding like why he, like, oh, he was suspended and this is i'm clutching my pearls how could they do that like don't they care about free speech he works for them and he that he went to a competitive media outlet and trashed them i would have fired he would not be suspended he would be gone you would all be gone everyone would be gone don't fucking forget it um i don't understand why people are pretending that's a shock. I guess I understand why people are pretending NPR being liberal is a shock, because we all have to kind of pretend. It's weird. It's like, no matter what they do,

or how obviously biased their spin is, the story of them and of neutrality and the neutrality of our institutions is so strong in America that even in our criticism, we cling to the delusion of their neutrality. We're like, how dare you not be neutral? Like, we know they're not neutral. There's not really a surprise there. It doesn't bother me as much when it comes from MSNBC. I don't care.

Whenever we trash MSNBC or Fox, whenever someone is saying something stupid, we'll go after them. But I never go after their bias. I don't mind a biased media outlet. What I mind is an outlet that purports not to be biased. And then what I really mind is being forced to pay for a media outlet. And that is, I think, really why this is even a controversy. It wouldn't matter if it was just some,

like the New York Times or something even. Like, who can, we kind of know where the New York Times stands. and where they stand by the way is to the right of mpr they're definitely moderate right of where national public radio is but why are we paying for them i've never understood this um i don't understand how it's legal and in a few different ways like i don't know how it's not considered, you know, grossly unfair for truth-seeking outlets like Pyrewire's. And I also don't understand how it's not in conflict

with the First Amendment in some way. It seems weird to force Americans to associate with a virulently left-wing media outlet. And yeah, I don't think, I don't think that this would be a controversy word, not for that. I do think that NPR needs to be defunded. I think the era of us not talking about this is maybe finally close to over. And then maybe my last thought is just her tweets were not that controversial. her tweets were not that controversial like even the one kind of referencing like kind of alluding to founders fun as being part of the kkk i looked at that and i was like i've seen crazy shit like that for years what's crazy is that it's no longer tolerable like she's talking about how bad the white men are and she's talking about systemic white supremacy and she's saying texas forced

for evil in the world because it's run by white men and all this kind of stuff none of that when she was tweeting it four years ago in 2020 she was tweeting it then as a professional who people knew and nobody cared because the culture was so different and like once again it's like another uh example of just how far we have really changed and there's a question of you know what will come of it if these people will be fired if It's like another example of just how far we have really changed. And there's a question of what will come of it, if these people will be fired, if the institutions will correct themselves. I don't know. I hear really compelling arguments in both directions there.

Chris Ruffo actually just had a really interesting debate with Curtis Yarvin, where they sort of parsed some of this out. Yarvin believing the institutions are right up beyond saving and Christopher Ruffo really being an idealist in this way. he thinks he can change these things um but i do just think it's interesting like we are all really going in and just the world is so different i mean she she has not changed it's not like she's just now crazy uh this is just what america looked like four years ago what do you guys think yeah i mean i think that people listen to NPR so they can look down on others. Like, it's something that like upper middle class liberals listen to and yeah i mean i i i don't even do people actually even think that it's neutral i i've

never gotten that i think people think that pbs is kind of neutral because if you watch like a pbs newscast it is pretty dry and i mean the rest of it is just what like sesame street and you know 36 hour ken burns documentaries about the civil war or whatever um though with npr it's like here's a lesbian uh reggaeton band based out of toronto and like it's like i don't know it's just like uh kind of like gen x hippie shit They say it in that breathy voice. It's like, I'm Terry Gross. We're looking at the lesbian reggaeton band as she takes her Subaru to the Burning Man camp and discusses the, I don't know, endangered spotted frog and why this is actually the fault of the Western man. Yeah, I love when Terry Gross interviews an annoying gay person or something like which yeah yeah embarrassing i should interview like rupaul or no no not rupaul what's that other guy

the broadway guy um billy oh i know who you're talking about he like wears dresses to the events yeah yeah yeah yeah and she's just like so how did you get to theater he was like girl i've always been dressing up like just like going crazy on her it's so funny um but yeah i mean i'd like npr is like kind of soothing like i used to listen to it sometimes um because they would they would have like these fun kind of like human interest stories uh where they're like we found this quirky old man who lives in you know new hampshire or whatever who blows glass he's like interesting for no reason um but i mean yeah like it's their politics are like completely like liberal and biased and i don't think anybody um i mean if people are thinking otherwise like where have you been have you ever listened yeah yeah yeah i think that that's true today for sure but the entire justification in npr was that it was going to

serve some vital public interest and i still i would love an answer as to why because you know this question gets kicked up this is not the first npr controversy uh this is not even the first npr controversy that i've been embroiled in myself this This is part of a tradition of NPR controversies in which NPR does some dumb shit and the whole country remembers that we're paying them millions of dollars a year to do that dumb shit. And they say, I'm furious about me being forced to pay you for this. And then we just move on until the next stupid NPR controversy. we just move on until the next stupid NPR controversy. I don't know if that's going to, that feels like it will happen again. You know, I don't even think they're going to fire Catherine Mayer.

I mean, like she hasn't responded on Twitter. If they fire her, it sort of seems like, it seems like they're capitulating to the sort of right wing ideologues. You know, they're never going to introspect and think maybe I shouldn't be talking about, you know,

over half the country in a super alienating way, if I'm supposed to represent the entire country or something like that. I think we're just going to move on and it'll be like this forever. Somebody on my timeline characterized her tweet history as an in-this-house tweet history, which is very apt, I thought. It's striking how much of an npc she appears to be um and i think the question now is like um actually this i'm actually just kind of cribbing from this guy named daniel friedman he had a little a very short tweet thread that i thought really put it well and he

kind of asks like he's like i don't see a lot of liberals circling the wagons around katherine and he says probably because a lot of them were doing it the exact same thing as her between like between 2016 and 2021 so it's like what um they're they're they're all still out there right with these tweet histories and they're all probably still in positions of power and i think you know the question is like what are they gonna do like you know they kind of just have to like put their put their heads down and and maybe like delete their old tweets yeah these people are fucking stupid you can delete your tweets i don't want all my tweets from 2020 i would i would be deleting they are gone yeah if i realized that some crazy shit back then not about that i was actually kind

of on the other side of it and went a little buck wild because it was in the grips of lateral addiction which is kind of going on but like no if you still have tweets up from 2020 delete that yeah they should i like to say some of us were on the right side of history i was out there i i looked up we recently had this tech maya copal where these um huge uh investors and famous professionals were talking about the various canceled people and how they should have done more and one such person was palmer lucky they were like man i should have really said something i was saying something. I went, I keyword, I like keyword searched my name.

And it was like, I had like 10 likes because nobody followed me back then. But I was like, this is outrageous. But it was more, I think I was like, I attacked it in different ways. And I also, I went after like Kara Swisher at one point for this. Like there were people there.

It's just like, they were not being listened to. We were in the middle of a mass hysteria that lasted. It was like 2017 to 2021 probably it's like an actual mass hysteria and there was just no speaking reason to anybody and yeah like the katherine mayors of the world she was one of a million and when is there going to be any kind of i don't know justice for what they did and the terror that they inflicted on people i don't think ever because honestly they're still in charge it's just um it's just they've toned things down like we've i think culture culture has has at least shamed away the crazy speech but those people are still in all the

positions of power yeah they don't want us to, they're going to try to pretend it never happened. After they went insane on everyone, they went absolutely psychotic and they destroyed a lot of people's lives. People like Catherine Mayer, she's the prototype of a person that was doing this in 2018. And I think what we're going to see now is that they're going to try to brush all this under the rug, downplay what they had said and what they were doing, and hope for the best. I think it's our job to make sure it doesn't go that well for them. To hold them to account. Yes. We are the media now. I want to talk about what to do about these people who are blocking the bridges of America. I was in San Francisco just a couple of days ago, and I was on the day.

It was like the Palestine protesters' day of outrage or whatever it was, day of look at me. And they closed bridges around the country and airports. And I think there was stuff abroad in Europe too. And they were all just very mad. A day later, sort of in a dollar short, they tried to fuck up Google and got arrested and now are all fired. But that's a separate story. I want to focus on the narrow question of crazy left-wing activists, or let's just say crazy activists of any kind, any political stripe, blocking a bridge. I think that there's an important distinction to be made here. You have people who are just protesting in an annoying way about things that maybe you don't agree with, and that can take place in the streets of New York City, and you're like,

oh, I hate them. Shut up. Leave me alone. Whatever. Then you have blocking a vital throughway in a major city. In the case of the Golden Gate Bridge, you're connecting Marin County to San Francisco. There are any number of things that are happening on that bridge from either ambulances passing, someone could be needing to get into a hospital. Not this one. The last time for sure I know, there was an organ delivery happening. It was fine. Everything worked out. But important things happen on this bridge. And that's separate from the question of false imprisonment. And if you're stuck on a bridge and there are people behind you and now you can't get out and you're there for five hours,

that's illegal. People have gone to jail for this in the past. Now, every time the bridge protests happen, and they're happening now in greater frequency because it's a meme, it's a successful meme, they actually get a lot of attention. We all talk about them because we're totally outraged. I would say if I were going to steel man the Palestinian side here, they think that people need to know about this thing and they think that nobody knows about it. think that nobody knows about it. And so when someone says, hey, idiot, you're just going to piss people off. You're not going to convert people to your cause. They don't care about converting people to their cause. They just want the attention on the issue. That's the whole entire goal. And then I would say what's really happening is they want the attention on themselves. Their identity as someone who is doing good things is very important. And the idea of them getting arrested is part of that. The idea of them going to prison potentially is part of that. So now when everyone's like, what do we do to stop this? We've got to start throwing people in jail. These people were arrested. The first thing they'll say is these people need to be arrested. Most people don't even realize that they were all arrested. They were immediately or not immediately as quickly as they could possibly be arrested and removed. They were arrested and removed. This always happens. Now they're going to be charged. This one was pretty serious. So they'll probably be in charge with false imprisonment. People are

already, there's a link you can follow to, if you were on the bridge, to actually petition for this. We are looking at a situation in which these people are going to go to prison. And many people are like, great, we want more prison. I don't think that's going to end the bridge protests in the first place. And in the second, I think that's pretty harsh. I am a criminal justice advocate. And I think that all of these people should be given an option between five to seven years in prison or whatever it is for false imprisonment and attempted murder and a very brief publicly televised flogging and i know that's going to sound crazy but i'm going to break it down for you

so what is flogging i mean fully like you're strapped to a pole and you're just like spanked in front of people um and i think it should happen like like what every third friday of the month there should be the pbs should broadcast um the national flogging third Friday of the month there should be the PBS should broadcast um the national flogging and all of the people that month who did bridge protests and you know or something of this nature we could probably have a handful of crimes in this category um who have accepted flogging rather than prison uh will be flogged and the great thing about this separate from the fact that it keeps these people out of prison, which is so barbaric, and I can't believe that people are still advocating for such things in 2024, separate from freeing them of that fate, you're confronting the meme responsible for the protests directly. myth of these people as these heroic freedom fighters who are like fearless and i'm going to jail uh it's shattered because they're not going to jail they can be they're free to walk

around the next day if they can uh following the flogging um that's replaced with the image of them like sort of crying and with their pants around their ankles which is buffoonish and uh and fun and i think people will start looking forward to bridge protests rather than dreading them so they can get to the flogging of these people who they hate which that desire alone ends the bridge protests once and for all i've solved the problem i genuinely believe this but i know it's controversial i would like to hear your perspective the public flogging is very arab the arabs are like they ended up too many we did it america amer Americans did it in this country I looked into flogging Americans have been doing so the idea also I think we have this idea it's like oh my god

that's we could never do we did do that for thousands of years straight up until like 1950 I think was the last flogging like there have been floggings all of our founding fathers they were down with flogging not they were the ones who wrote the they didn't like cruel unusual punishment they did not consider flogging a cruel or unusual punishment um yeah it's not just arab it's western it's super it's like every

every country in the world has had some form of this and i think we got to get back to shaming uh to public shaming or i think at least i don't know if we got to get back to it i would like to talk about it just to be clear in your idea solanaana, you're talking about not whipping them with an actual bullwhip, but pulling down their pants and bare hand to bare ass spanking? I don't, yes. No, no, no. I think probably like a wooden paddle. There's a lot of places you can get that done in San Francisco. Yeah, they'll do it for free at Alter Street Fair.

Why are we pretending this is shocking? They're doing it out there in a public parade. We can do public flogging i think it's too much no permanent i don't want them permanently you know maimed that would be crazy but i think pants around the ankles like mortifying very painful and like they should be crying and mostly out of embarrassed but mostly out of embarrassment not not pain you know um it was spanned health as a child like it has like pretty yeah but that's illegal now i'm saying we got to bring some version of that back i don't think it is that illegal i think it's illegal to hate your kids is it not depends on the state yeah i grew up in texas they like they like electrocute mentally

disabled people i don't think that they're so I can't spank your kids. Yeah, I think Corporal punishment was still allowed in schools in Alabama I think up until very recently. It was allowed in schools in Texas when I was in school. I was spanked in school.

There's no way that you were legally spanked. Yeah, I was in school, I was spanked in school. There's no way that you were legally spanked. Yeah, I was in the sixth grade because I got into a fight with another kid. Did you go to a religious private school? No, it was a public school. That's shocking to me. I know growing up, I knew about schools that were taught or the teachers were nuns catholic schools yeah my parents both went to one yeah and they would like hit the kids hit their knuckles with a ruler or other sort of physical forms of punishment but i had never heard

that in a public school before i mean i'm looking at a map right now if you look up school corporal punishment in the united states on wikipedia it's pretty shocking i'm telling you this is normal it's legal in texas it's legal in public still texas still yeah as well as of december 2023 um it's legal in florida it's legal in yo what a bunch of states yeah yeah so that's why they're so well put up the the map but it's it's um yeah i remember talking about this if we can beat children for talking in class we can definitely flog a deranged barista for blocking the golden gate bridge i think it's perfectly reasonable but you were about to say that you disagreed well no no i don't i mean i don't actually know where i stand i agree that

it's clear that whatever our current approach is to arresting these people is not working because i mean for example in san francisco the bay bridge protesters you were talking about who you know were they were they were charged with like false imprisonment refusal to comply with the peace officer tons of charges that could have at least theoretically landed them in prison for a year. And recently it was announced that they got out of trial. Wait, you're talking about the ones before this last one? Yes, this is November. Yeah. So this is, it's analogous. It was the same thing that happened this time, just the Bay Bridge instead of the Golden Gate Bridge. They were arrested,

they were charged. The district attorney sort of exceptionally decided to pursue the charges. And they basically got off with a slap on the wrist. I mean, they have to pay like $50 of restitution, and they do a few hours of community service, and they're not even going to trial. That I didn't realize. I didn't realize they were already out. Because that one seemed serious.

Everyone was so – that one really evoked fury in the city. And I thought, especially because they were going to prosec of earned media from the whole thing, which is, you know, they call themselves the Bay Bridge 78. And they like got all these they have these rallies in their honor. working my only concern well i guess one of my concerns with flogging is just i don't actually know if i agree that it wouldn't make them like martyrs basically i mean like you know that it wouldn't sort of benefit their public image in some way right because you're saying it's going to be embarrassing for them and they're not going to be able to capitalize on it the way they capitalize on like their arrest photos and stuff let's tease it out what happened people hate these people like we i hate these people imagine you see like i don't know uh what's a good name for one of these like like sparkle butterfly uh it's a boy and he's got like i don't know weird tattoo weird weird piercings and like a puffy blue hair thing and he was just screaming on the bridge and there was like a pregnant mom

trying to get through and he wouldn't move because he was like fuck you you're participating in genocide then he gets arrested then he gets then we the public are given a date and they're like hey like you're gonna get the chance to see sparkle butterfly get flogged it's gonna be on friday at four o'clock get your popcorn ready um i will fucking be there right i'm gonna be there i'm gonna watch it i'll be live streaming with my friends we'll have a drink we'll be laughing about it but also sparkle butterfly is gonna end up on like a leaderboard of like the funniest reactions to getting flogged. And now a big part of their story online is not that there are these people protesting. It's like, look at Sparkle Butterfly cry while getting spanked by a cop. And I think that that is memetically powerful. And I think that it will change the way that we do these things um i think that the the policing element

of it um it's like if it's no one's actually scared of the cops it's all it's all theater um so you have to find some like competitive story within that framework that it's not like you really want to disincentivize them with the spanking. You want them to be afraid of the way they'll be remembered. And I genuinely think there's something in that. Now, I actually had read... So there was a book that I was recommended a while back called, and I should plug it, In Defense of Flogging by Peter Moskos. Never actually read it, but it was summarized to me. And so that was like, sort of bopping around in my head, just the idea that you could introduce such a bizarre concept, such an apparently bizarre concept, and then sit with it. Like, well, wait a minute. What is the place that something like this used to fill in culture? And maybe what happens to culture once

the shame-based solution to punishment is gone? But anyway, I think that that fear would actually stop. I do believe that it would stop people from doing it. Much more so than even the threat of prison time, which anyway, we're not even doing. If you talk to these people, they actually think it's like a victimless crime. And I just want to be like, you shut that bridge down for like four hours. You know how many people shit in their car? You know what i mean like that's all i can think about just as like somebody who's like been you know like okay i i'm like on google map i'm like okay i'm five minutes from 7-eleven i can make it

and then you pull up and people are like chanting about you know war crimes and then you just shit your car and those people are not coming forward because it's embarrassing, but they're the real victims here. And so if there is a flogging, I would like, we can put them in like hoods or something and like distort their voices.

But I think we need like expert testimony. Like you made me shit. I shit in a plastic bag. Oh my God, the trial before the flogging. Yeah, I agree. That's awesome. And I agree. Con agree conceal their identities but let them give testimony that's such a good idea like kids watch me in a bag they won't

look me in the eye like you know what i mean that's a traumatic memory yeah the other thing that we could do is just actually pull the protesters off the road yeah like they didn't florida maybe maybe we start there yeah i i wonder i don't want to i know it's easy to dunk on san francisco um but that i think that it was pretty dangerous like you you had a full so you had first of all they had it's a bridge it's different than in florida and miami or i think it was miami where i saw the footage it was like a regular giant road there was places to pull them it was a very different situation than you're on a narrow bridge or relatively narrow space.

They drove three cars up, locked them, chained them together. Then in front of those cars, they chained themselves, and they put their arms in these weird barrier things. So they really set it up in such a way as you could not remove them without doing serious damage to them which is a very like terroristy way of doing it it's like you know they're preying on our innate goodness not to to harm them they know the system is good enough not to actually deal with them the way like i mean any non-democratic society would deal with them. I don't know. I don't think it was

so easy as just removing them because they also removed them much quicker last time on the Bay Bridge. This is like within an hour, it's done. My sense, and I'd have to dig into all the details here, but my sense from what I heard from people on the actual bridge and from just the coverage of the way this went down and how long it took, that it was actually very hard this time. Isn't there, Sanji, I think you know about this, but there's a legal structure in place that prevents cops from removing protesters in San Francisco and in New York, or do I have that wrong?

Just in New York. I mean, in New York, yeah, you're talking about the ACLU settlement. I mean, there was basically, so a lot of this comes back to the Floyd protests, but basically after, in the aftermath of the Floyd riots and looting in Manhattan, the ACLU sued, I think they sued NYPD for like mistreatment of the rioters. rioters um and they won a settlement with the police department which basically implement it requires the police department follows this very convoluted like multi-tier system whenever they're responding to a protest where they basically have to get approval from these designated like protest um like officers who sort of observers yeah observers or whatever um before they before they arrest people they have to get permission before they move people off the road so there's this kind of convoluted system um but that's in new york san francisco as far as i know doesn't have

something like that but i i think in in the golden gate bridge situation it was definitely logistically challenging to get them off because they also throw their keys into the ocean or the bay. That's like their tactic. They're not leaving their keys in the ignition to facilitate the removal of the cars. It's also funny for a tow truck. I mean, get a few tow trucks, drive them up and... Right, but to get the tow truck onto the Golden Gate Bridge

when there's already cars... I mean, it's doable, obviously. They did it up and... Right, but to get the tow truck onto the Golden Gate Bridge when there's already cars. I mean, it's doable, obviously. They did it in a few hours, but it's... Yeah. The idea of them throwing the keys into the bay as well, though, just further drives home the fact that all of this is narrative-driven. They could easily just hide the key in the back of their car,

like tell people if they're, like they don't have to actually do that. They're doing it because of the character of themselves that lives inside their own head and the story they're trying to project to the world about who they are and what they're doing. And so the only way that you're going to fight something that is just so entirely narrative based

is with a competing powerful narrative they are heroes the only way to change this is to make them look like clowns and we don't do that enough i i heard it um anyway there we could go on about flogging forever um i certainly could got a lot of pushback he was like again it was like we should do prison we should do actually what about all of the hours that every single person there um lost times what they get paid in their salary and these few people should be forced to pay we're talking like millions of dollars for them for you know derain unless they're maybe i mean a lot of them probably have family money but uh if they don't it's like life-ending money i think it's interesting that we think that those

two things, like why do we think that those two things are less severe than a brief five-minute spanking, like public spanking? And I think it's because culturally, and I know I've been joking on here to a certain extent. I mean, I still think this should be an option, but I mean, I'm playing with it. But I do think it's interesting how shocking the idea of public shame is to us now. We are really a quite shameless culture. And that is a very recent phenomenon that we've become so shameless. That used to be a very big part of what we were. We wasn't our only thing, but it was a huge... It was one of the pillars of society was trying to avoid this kind of shaming, this public shaming. And it's just

completely gone now. In fact, you have the opposite river you alluded to, you know, San Franciscans flocking each other for fun at Folsom Street Fair. That's like a, what is that but a celebration of shamelessness? It's like the, I mean, it's really the opposite of shame culture. I mean, that's, it's pride culture, right? It's like, right it's like no no i'm not shamed i'm i'm proud um you know i don't know where that that came from but i do feel that that has uh a sort of larger impact probably on the way that we do things and the way that our society functions then we maybe even give it um maybe that we maybe even believe i don't know somebody told me one time that uh the reason that they have fulsome is because gay guys invented it so that uh the castro would have become gentrified and i'm like

how'd that fucking work yeah i'm like what a lie now we've got an army of queer women um who are actually just dating men i am watching vanderpump rules right now don't now. Don't make fun of me for this. Don't hate me for this. Don't judge me for this. It's just reality television is important and I'm lazy. And sometimes I just need my brain to turn off. And I'm encountering this drama in which one of the characters has, or one of the people, two of them are having a wedding

and their pastor, because he's a real Christian, has a problem with gay people. And of course, these people all live in West Hollywood. And it's like a huge scandal that the pastor of these people who lives in Kentucky and their wedding is going to be in Kentucky, that pastor has said things about gay people. They all get mad. And the two people who lead the charge, one is a bisexual woman who recently has come out and come to terms with her bisexuality while in a relationship with a man

who she's still with, who is the other person leading the charge. And he's doing so on behalf of his bisexual girlfriend, who, again, is dating a man, him. It's like these two, it's a straight couple who are appalled,

personally offended. Not just like, this is bad for these other, they're talking about their own personal offense here. Well, you know who got a public flogging this week was, or sort of de facto, like a virtual public flogging was Humane AI. Brandon, tell us the drama. Sure. Just for readers who don't know, or sorry, listeners who don't know what Humane AI is, it is a wearable AI device that's sort of part of this first heat of companies making attempts at taking AI from

the laptop and the phone and getting it onto a device. This Humane, it's called the AI pin by Humane. Basically what it is, is it's a multimodal AI that you can talk to and it will speak back to you. So it's like auditory and it's also visual. So it has a projector and it projects onto your hand if you want to look at its results. And the way that you. So it has a projector and it projects onto your hand if you want to look at its results. And the way that you can control it with the projector

is you have these sort of intuitive hand movements that allow you to scroll through different options or show different things that you want to see, such as like the time of day, the temperature outside or whatever it is. There's been kind of a long hype cycle around Humane. It's been like, I covered it in the White Pill Gift Guide. Now we're talking six months or so ago. But it recently hit the market and people are starting to finally get it and be able to use it.

And the feedback and the reviews have been pretty much overwhelmingly negative. And most recently, this very, very big YouTube tech reviewer called Marcus Brownlee, he put out a review that was titled something like, this is the worst product I've ever reviewed in my entire youtube history um i watched the video and he actually he's very he's very fair um with his review uh the title is is you know kind of clickbait but he does make he justifies the title with with how he criticizes the device um and he ultimately lands on this point where he's like look like

smartphones are not going away and this device has not is not disrupting that format yet um so that's kind of the controversy um and yeah like it's sort of sad to see i i intuitively like want humane to win because they're they're really casting right now for a different format and they've come up with something um and it also i wanted to say reminds me um of i don't maybe solana you you remember this our older listeners will remember when we were transitioning from like walkman and disc men to the iphone there was all these like like for 10 years what we did was we went to this this like funny format of like a mp3 player pretty much i remember i had a sony minidisc player um and we basically like we the market couldn't decide the best the best format for a device that played MP3s.

Ultimately, we landed on the iPod, which turned into the iPhone. But I feel like we're in that period right now with the AI device. We can't quite figure out how to get the AI off of our laptops into something that feeds the AI to us all the time. But companies like Humane are the early players trying to figure this thing out. And that's why I like Humane. Though after watching Marques' review, it does seem like not a very well-designed product. I think that's such a good point you just made about that period of time and hearkening

back to that and the excitement of that. It was not just MP3s. It was tech devices broadly. I remember you had video games that were handheld that you could buy at the store for one game, like a throwaway type game that you would be like your Street Fighter thing or Home Alone 2. I saw a short, it was like an instagram reel recently they were they were looking at these um like old phones you could get like a giant phone like a like a hello kitty phone and like you picked it up and whatever there were all these weird things you get at the hot topic like just technology came in strange shapes there were a million different kinds of phone you could get. Compared to the

iPhone, at the same time, you had the BlackBerry was still happening and there were other kinds of text devices and things like this. What we're really talking about is the world before Apple, period. And I think we forget how enormous Apple has become and how much of all of that stuff it has really swallowed up, including our computers. I every i mean apple the mac 20 years ago was like the cool it was like it had this cachet as like a thing that cool kids did like you oh you work at a coffee shop you have a mac i bed like that it was it was that it was like you were a hipster um now it's all we have and i agree like it's been nice to see this it's like um when there's an extinction event and then all there's like all this evolution that

happens and all these like weird fucking animals show up and like most of them go extinct but it's like very cool for a minute um that is sort of where we are i think i i hope because it's like the early days of that still but there are all sorts of interesting hardware things happening it's still not yet that huge rush um and i can't even quite put my finger on why it's happening right now. Doesn't this kind of seem strange? It's not like there's this huge... They're not all AI-based. There are other things like they're like SoulReader and there are a bunch of different kinds of hardware things being designed. I think it's almost just like people got bored and they want to do it. And maybe that's good enough of a reason. I'm not sure. Yeah. I mean, it's almost just like people got bored and they they want to do it and maybe that's good enough of a reason i'm not sure yeah i mean it's a good question um the other sort of ai

wearable contenders i think are that it's obviously like the apple vision pro and then there's metas ray bands which are also very interesting looking marquez reviews them as well um but maybe you would include apple watch in that category too yeah he really feels like a like one of the first true ai wearables i hate the apple watch i don't want that shit on my wrist i don't want it's like maybe the other oppression that i'm feeling or pressure that i'm feeling is just from the technology itself. But the phone in my pocket already feels like more of an imposition than I want. I want less of an imposition on me from the technological world. I find the internet to be very exhausting. I know that I kind of uniquely live a lot of my life there. So probably everyone's different to some degree, but

I was never a watch guy i want i want fewer notifications yeah i i agree and i mean i think there's a couple of problems here like for one humane ai it's a gay name like let's just be honest it's not like what do you wear oh it's a humane ai it's like it's just the marketing is and it's like a ugly brooch or something i don't know like it's just like why that like why do you why on your chest it's there's just a lot of things about it that like are like aesthetically unappealing and uh not even in like the ironic way that like that the apple goon glasses were um Um, and I don't know. I just think a lot of this shit is fucking goofy and that's why people don't like it.

And I don't, why do I need to read shit on my hand? Like I have my phone in my hand. I don't need to, like, it just doesn't make any sense to me. Like, I don't,

I think people are like, they're just like, like it's people are pitching things and they were like, Oh, like that sounds cool in theory. But like it's people are pitching things and they're like oh like that sounds cool in theory but then it's like i'm old enough to remember the iphone not making sense to people people were like i don't need all this on my phone what do i i just needed to make a call or whatever like we were still living in a world where we thought calls were going to keep happening do you when's the last time i don't have calls unless someone has a gun to my head like that was

considered like the iphone was it was like the killer app on the iPhone was the phone still, of course. So why don't I just get a much simpler phone? And it just, it wasn't, there was a whole behavior that we didn't realize was going to become a much bigger part of our lives. And that I think, I think that's the value prop for something like Humane AI is that there is this other world of things that are going to be happening that we don't quite know about. is that there is this other world of things that are going to be happening that we don't quite know about, which I think is fair.

It's like a fair speculative thing in the world of AI. I mean, AI should conceivably change everything if it's even close to what proponents and people working at it are saying. I think the other challenge that devices like these are trying to address is just the latency issue between the fact that you have to type with your thumbs onto an iPhone and you get an answer after that. It's much faster to speak and even faster to think your question. And now I'm referencing

like Neuralink, for example. I think that is one of the challenges of of our next generation of devices is just decreasing the latency um such that you don't have to type things with your thumbs um and so yeah i think well you can do like tech speech to text that's true yeah and i i i thought i'd never used that like it's been i've had a phone that can let me do that for like five years now and i'm. I think I've only ever done it when I'm driving or something. Just because I don't want people to know what I'm texting. I don't want to be in the grocery store.

Yeah, people who speak text are always older and boomers. I speak text sometimes. Boomers and zoomers, I guess. As far as the Neuralink thing, i i don't know i don't want like uh my thoughts to go direct to email you know what i mean cock yeah i mean like i don't

know there's like there's a reason that like uh i don't know like do we really how would that even work like do you have to think send i mean that's not even like we don't have to go there because the first thing it's doing is helping people with paralysis play chess and shit like i think that's like we just let them do that and then probably the use case if there's a use case at all a little murder i agree with listen i'm not trying to get microchipped okay like that's not a thing that i'm excited about right now but i I'm also not a paraplegic, thank God. And so I feel like that's an interesting thing there. There are use cases in some of this stuff. But I agree. I mean, the thing about Neuralink, sometimes a technologist will do something that is, or create something with a story that is just sort of implicitly a little

bit dystopian. That's sort of, I mean, VR is kind of that, right? We see it reflected in the fiction. It's dystopian. It's very dystopian. It's like if a world is so good, the only possible victory for VR is that it's just as realistic as the real world. And if that's the case, then what is it but an exit from the real world

and the real world crumbles? Which actually works as a perfect segue into our final piece here, which is a piece that I wrote called Exit First Built. A couple of themes in here, and I want to just get to you guys as fast as I can, so I'll summarize them pretty quickly. First of all, check it out on Pyrewires. The premise of it is, well, it's really a discussion of these two concepts, or really this one debate in largely in the tech industry that we've been having for years now. It feels like really since 2020 when we first all faced the maybe just full extent to which our important and cherished institutions have kind of rotted to their core. What is a city but a series of institutions?

Same thing as a country. And in the context of San Francisco, let's say, we have this debate over whether we should work there hard to fix it, which was framed as voice, or to leave, which was framed as exit. And then there are a variety of different forms of exit. One is just going to a different state. One is sort of leaving behind the world of government completely and just building companies. One in the sort of purest instantiation would be the concept of network states and building digital community. And we don't have anything in common. It's not the problems around these cities or the institutions. The problem is we are a different emergent class and we have more in common with people, you know, tech workers in Nigeria than we have with like a barista in San Francisco.

And that was really called into question during the Paul Graham thing, which we talked about last week, Paul Graham versus the nation of Nigeria over the question, over the word delve. Those people were largely tech workers. And that was the first time I started thinking like, well, wait a minute. I don't have more in common with people freaking out over the word delve than I do with a barista who I sort of disagree with in America. I'm an American. And I started really thinking about things that we've written about here at Pyrewires for a very long time um just you know how do you build how do you rebuild a city where you live i think it's like change basically i think you could distill it down to i believe change doesn't you don't need some giant you

know world altering strategy like with the guy on the whiteboard the meme of him sort of like put piecing the conspiracy together it starts on a city, and that's it. The piece I want to talk to you guys about first, so go check out that whole thing. It's a whole big thing, and we'll debate it in the chat on Friday when this is airing. I got the idea first for it, the premise that became the story, the sort of kernel at the Museum of Natural History, which has recently taken down the statue. It was Theodore Roosevelt. So famously, there was a, well now, infamously, there was a statue of, massive statue of Teddy Roosevelt at the museum, flanked by a black guy and like a Native American dude. And this was framed very

recently as racist. And it was framed very recently as racist. And it was like, oh, there's a racial hierarchy here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was created by a guy who was like super against the Trail of Tears and had, I believe that's what it was. I was looking back at him talking about the way the Native Americans were treated and whatnot, the sculptor. Clearly, this statue was designed to evoke racial harmony and unity. is designed to evoke racial harmony and unity um all throughout the museum you see uh the signs of of of this mentality to sort of like take down our heroes and say no no we're bad we're white

supremacists whatever that thinking is baked in every exhibit um let's say every every exhibit that's younger than a few hundred years old um it's like either people are bad in general white people bad specifically uh i googled their deiI manifesto that precipitated this entire change, the museum. It was published in 2018. And in it, they use the word global. They say, we are a global institution. And I got to realizing that is actually the key to all of this. It's not about weird and anti-human environmentalism. It's not about DEI. It's not even about Marxism. What to all of this. It's not about weird and anti-human environmentalism. It's not about DEI. It's not even about Marxism. What do all of these things have in common? They have in common this idea that we're not American. The global perspective is not a thing. You cannot

have a global perspective because you're an American. You cannot be a global institution that is located in New York City, run by Americans, funded by Americans, visited almost entirely by Americans. You are hopelessly American. There's no escaping your American-ness. All I'm really hearing when you say that you're global rather than American is that you hate yourself. And I think that that's the high-level thing maybe that exists in society right now that we're all struggling with is self-hatred. And that's where maybe, I don't know, what do you guys think about? I know it's like a very sort of heady kind of concept, but I see it everywhere. What do you guys think about that? I mean, I agree. I think that, well, I've always sort of thought that like the way that America

particularly exports, it's like racial taxonomy to other countries and tries to impose that on countries that are, you know, have a different history than we do and a different ethnic makeup has always been weird. It sort of has the biggest uptake among the university-educated professional managerial class that probably shares the most similarities globally. This is something that people have talked about for a while, that there's this kind of rootless elite who travels all the time and doesn't really feel a particular sense of belonging to place and they're the only people who can entertain this

fantasy of like you know we could have a global community right because um you know we have sort of people who are ideologically like-minded um around the world from us uh but i mean i i would question when the people when people talk about this i would be interested to know who they identify as their global analogs and like where they were educated um you know what their beliefs are like i think you're going to actually find that it's a very small group of people who probably went to similar universities. And obviously, most of this stuff is happening in English. So a lot of these people probably, if they grew up abroad, maybe went to international schools or something like that. Um, but yeah, I do think it's a fantasy, uh, that in some ways is informed by not having like actually, um, read a lot of history or sort of interacted with a lot of people who

are not part of these who are not constantly, you know, traveling in this way. Um, yeah. I think it's interesting because generally what we're talking about is sort of framed as wokeness. It's like, oh, these people who, these are these nasty elites who hate the common man and like, they think they're better and they have all these weird like this strange language of dei what not they impose on us um but when you framed it the way you just did we talked about uh you know i'd be curious who they are who they think their analogs are abroad and

like what language they speak i also thought like well what what religion like what god do they worship and um like what is their what history do they have what who do who what God do they worship? And like, what is their, what history do they have? What, who do, who, who, what do they love? Like, what are their, what cultural things do they like a lot? I started, it's, it's very tech. Like, like the people who could do this are very potentially, the tech scene is as close as you could get to that in

terms of shared values and whatnot. And even still, I think there's a huge divide, a massive... There's an ocean between American technologists and I think a product manager in Lagos or something. I think it's very, very, very different. Culturally, it doesn't matter if they have a similar job. But in this way, the network state concept is kind of the first it's kind of the it's like a it's a it feels a little bit woke like i hate to say it but like it's like it's it sort of seems like a woke fantasy um in uh in a sense i don't i want to be i want to be tentative there and be open to pushback, but that's kind of what it feels like now. When you say that it's a woke family, are you talking about all the tech

people coming together and creating... We're a global community. So the idea that there are global values that are transcendent of American values, it's super anti-nationalist, the network state, fundamentally. In fact, biology has said the internet is

the new america and stuff like this uh and what that implies obviously i'm not saying they have the same values as like your call your sort of standard world college professor very very different values but what they have in common is the belief that their community transcends borders and that they are a global community which which is like, what was that? Was global, was Marxism not the first global movement? Yeah, that sounds like the international proletariat, yeah. Yeah, it's like those are all, that's not, I am not global. And global is a thing that I make it really, really, really, really not. And much more so that I'm not woke,

much more so that I'm not an anti-human environmentalist, much more so that I'm not a Marxist. I am not global. I am American. And I was made in America. I am fighting for America. If America goes down, I'll go down with it because where the fuck else am I going? It's like, it sounds really exhausting to start over somewhere else. This is my country. I feel that we are very different than other places and distinct. And I just think it's um not only do i think it's sort of immoral to run away that way and uh betray your country for some other sort of fantasy country um i think it's illogical i don't think it's actually possible i think the only people who pretend to not have

these sorts of nationalistic values are americans who hate themselves there's no one in the thing that we saw last week with nigeria was like it it was not like the Nigerians were being bad or something. It was Nigerian saying we're Nigerian and we're proud of being Nigerian. And they're petitioning for Nigerian culture broadly. There's no such thing as a global culture. There are people fighting for their own culture. And it just seemed strange to us because in America, the default state is to hate yourself. river yeah i agree but i also just think that hanging out with people who have the same job as you or like are in the same social class as you even if you want to narrow that down to just tech workers which are just like a subset

of like the professional managerial class where i guess like if you want to use a marxist term like the bourgeoisie like your founders but like to me that's just i don't know like my i work in media my husband's a bartender like i have friends who are like amazon drivers and like and i also have people who like are like publicists and like work in like media they're writers and stuff and it's like it's actually interesting to have a diverse group of friends and to like be in contact with people who are outside of your like social class and social milieu because otherwise you become very narrow and you become delusional and you start thinking that you have more in common with somebody in nigeria than like you know um a guy who another american guy who's like pretty similar to you in a lot of ways, but just has like a lesser paying job in a different industry. That's insane.

Yeah, or voted even just like the difference between, I don't think the difference between, let's say a more moderate guy who votes Biden and a more moderate guy who just tilts Trump, the difference between those two guys is nothing compared to the difference between the average Trump supporter and the average Nigerian. What are we talking about here? It's a total delusional worldview. And the more that we pretend that that's real and give it any kind of legitimacy i think the less we spend on ourselves and sort of rebuilding our culture and rebuilding our cultural institutions and things like this um i think this is just symptomatic of americans unique um denial i think that some like they we can't have this conversation about how some cultures are actually better than other cultures and i think that's what like we're not willing to say like i don't want to live with a bunch of people from another culture because

actually like their customs and their values like kind of suck and it would not be fun to live with those people right um it's really easy to prove this you know you could say um to a woman who lives here in america who has a job in san francisco would you would you prefer to live here let's say one of the google protesters right do you prefer to live here or would you like to go let's say to syria where you have to wear a niqab and you have to like literally when you're eating you have to put your fork underneath the niqab just to get the food to your mouth underneath this thing which one do you prefer you have to make the decision right now so i i think you know like that's what balaji even misses right like if he if if oh i don't know does biology want to have a physical location for this network yeah it leads to the ideas that it would lead you start with online law and online online community online

law and then you find these um either uh either sort of uh what are they called the states within a state um sovereign territories or something like that charter cities so you could do some form of a charter city or a whole ass new country on an island or something some version of that in that world which we've been taught this is like a theme that's existed since the world of sea setting where i came up um some version of that will take place but only after the online community he's sort of very it's a very interesting idea He's wetting a lot of different ideas over the last 15 years in the intellectual tech spaces together to conclude in the network state. I don't know. Avoid global, build local. It's been real. See you next week.