Pirate Wires - Did OpenAI STEAL Scarlett Johansson's Voice?! | PIRATE WIRES EP#54

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

EPISODE #54: Welcome Back To The Pod! Another wildly random, spicy episode on deck for you that only Pirate Wires could deliver (please don't ban us YT!) We get into the controversy surrounding Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI. Scarlett is threatening legal action over claims that her voice was stolen for GPT4o. Does GPT actually sound like her? Next up, microplastic in every man's testicles?! Is this really the reason for low birth rates in this country? Then, the C*vid reckoning continues.. Hidden emails that involved Fauci and a gym in NJ has all charges dropped after defying lockdown measures. Finally, California is still a clown world. Senate passes bill to stop you from going above the speed limit in your car. Enjoy!  Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Sanjana Friedman Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/testosterone-emergency?f=home Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! 1:00 - Scarlett Johansson Suing OpenAI? Does 'Sky' Actually Sound Like Her? 16:00 - Microplastics In Every Man's Testicles?!  27:00 - C*vid Reckoning - Fauci Emails, Gym In NJ Has Charges Dropped 44:15 - Clown World Continues - California Senate Passes Law To Limit Car Speeds 1:06:30 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe! Tell Your Friends! #podcast #technology #politics #culture #ai

Hey, ChatGPT, how are you doing? I'm doing fantastic, thanks for asking. Did Sam Allman steal Scarlett Johansson's voice to create AI assistant that sounded like the girl from her? I like I listened to the voice. It sounds nothing like Scarlett Johansson in the first place. When Forbes doxed Beth Jezos,

they found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jesus was Verdon. We know the MSM could like check if this is actually Scarlett Johansson's voice, but like nobody's doing it. I can't believe that her close friends actually think it sounds like her. It's actually a little bit like offensive. Because it didn't happen. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod. We are talking about Scarlett Johansson versus OpenAI because what else will we be talking about today? The question is, did Sam Allman steal Scarlett Johansson's voice to create AI assistant that sounded like the girl from her? And that's sort of roughly what the controversy is. We're going to wind it back. So a couple of weeks ago, and we've been talking about this quite a lot, or just last week,

we talked about this for a huge portion of the chat. We have a really incredible AI assistant. So the innovation of an AI assistant that sounds like a human that is able to interact or at least sort of read the physical world as well as listen to your voice, as well as read text and interact with you really sort of almost like a human, not yet able to do things for you. That's probably coming next. We'll see what that looks like when the time arises. But for now, it was just a sort of very exciting demo. And in the demo, the woman sounded like a sort of millennial 40-year-old woman, I would say. A lot of people referred back to the movie Her, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. This is the Spike Jonze movie about the AI assistant who the protagonist of the movie falls in love with. And there was a question almost immediately of, did it maybe not sound a

little too much like Scarlett Johansson? This is a question that became much more serious once OpenAI canceled the, what was this girl's name? What was the name of this? Sky. Sky. So OpenAI canceled Sky and they say, they sort of make it very clear that it had nothing to do with Scarlett Johansson. And there's sort of like a cancellation letter.

And everyone's like, wait a minute, what about that? Let's double click on that one. So immediately following that and after our show aired, Scarlett Johansson issues a statement that says OpenAI actually went to her and asked her to be the voice of this chatbot. Again, Scarlett Johansson, the star of the movie Her. Clearly, Sam was obsessed with her because he tweeted about her. He tweeted Her directly following the release of his chatbot. And now suddenly it seems... So they went to Scarlett. Scarlett said no. And so now suddenly it really does seem like Scarlett said no. And so now suddenly it really does seem like she said no, they cloned her voice and that's really fucking evil. She's suing them. It's a huge controversy. But I listened to the voice. It sounds nothing like Scarlett Johansson in the first place. So I immediately found this

story pretty strange. It was almost as if people were not listening to the voice at all. They were just reading the headlines and they wanted to hate OpenAI and Sam and say, yes, he cloned Scarlett Johansson's voice. I just kind of learned about it minutes before I started recording. There's a story in the Washington Post, which actually details or provides, let's say, a little more context on all of this. The voice actor who played the AI or not played, who recorded, who's now used in the AI clone, or the AI assistant, was hired before anyone ever reached out to Scarlett Johansson. Natasha Tiku, the writer of the post, has a lot of emails sort of going back and forth on the construction of this and the timeline of the deals here. Also, no evidence that the voice actor was instructed to sound more like Scarlett Johansson in her or anybody else was instructed to make it sound like Scarlett Johansson in her.

I really don't think we've seen everything here. Who knows what could have happened behind the scenes? I don't even know what this voice actress sounds like free of voice modification. I have no idea. But certainly the story is not so cut and dry as like, couldn't get Scarlett Johansson, so we cloned her voice, which again, sounds sounds nothing like her and now we know it shouldn't because there was a human who was voice acting this character um whole thing feels crazy to me a lot of interesting cultural cuts here i'm gonna let you guys take it away with your your sort of first cut um first first thoughts on the controversy as it emerged i thought it was kind of annoying that it got abstracted into a Me Too narrative right away. Like, where is Scarlett Johansson?

Totally. Scarlett Johansson was being taken advantage of by a gay twink. Classic. A classic Me Too. A classic Me Too. It's always a gay twink. And did you guys see that guy who tweeted today? What was his name?

Like Dave Roberts or something like that? He's like, it's crazy to me that AI is so popular because nobody wants it. And it's mostly white men who like it. He's gotten totally ratioed. Matt, you can pull it up. But now, I feel like a lot of people on the Me Too camp are putting points on the board of a game that nobody's playing anymore using the Scarlett Johansson thing, which, I don't know, it's just frankly annoying. It's like, kind of, go away. But none of the mainstream coverage actually discussed whether or not Scarlett Johansson really did sound like Skye. Nobody was like, look, it doesn't really sound like Skye.

Wait, you know what we should do right now? Matt, play a recording of both. Let's just play it. Hey, ChatGPT, how are you doing? I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for asking. Oh, a bedtime story about robots and love? I got you covered.

I was last in Paris. I spent some time in Paris over the summer it was very quiet I just like to walk around the city when I'm here it's so beautiful well right when you asked me if I had a name I thought yeah he's right I do need a name but I wanted to pick a good one so I read a book called how to name your baby and out of a hundred eighty thousand names that's the one I like the best. Gather round, Barrett. Once upon a time, in a world not too different from ours.

Here's the point I wanted to make. Make it. Just stick with me. got the director of the National Center for Media Forensics to compare audio recordings of Jesus and talks given by Gil Verdon, who is Jesus. And this is a quote from the article. They found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jesus was Verdon than it was, than it could have been any other person. So we know the MSM could check if this is actually Scarlett Johansson's voice, but nobody's doing it. And that seems to me to be- No one's doing it because no one has to do it because anybody who listens to it

knows immediately that it's not even close to her voice. It's just a white woman speaking with a little bit of vocal fry, which is like every white woman over the age of 30. So what are we doing here? It's complete fantasy land. I mean, Sam really played himself because he had these conversations with her. Then the recordings come out, whatever. It doesn't sound like Scarlett Johansson, but it does feel like her. It's a woman's voice who is your assistant. We always get her brought up in the AI conversation. Then he goes and he tweets it.

And once you tweet that, now Scarlett has a case, I think. Sandra, what do you make of this? Yeah, I was going to say, I think, I mean, it doesn't sound like her at all. I think the whole thing is kind of like cracked up. I can't believe that her close friends actually think it sounds like her. It's actually a little bit like offensive. Because it didn't happen.

It seems offensive on the part of her friends to say that. But it's true that, I mean, there's an article in Verge that discusses some of the legal precedents here. And apparently in the 80s, people like Betty Midler and Tom Waits actually successfully sued in the California court system. So it always has to have a little bit of a caveat. But they successfully sued ad companies that got voice actors and instructed them to imitate their voices uh or their sort of mannerisms in ads um and there there was like explicit they could show that there was explicit intent to imitate their um mannerisms and likeness and i think sam's tweet unfortunately lends credence to the idea that there might have been explicit intent, even if there wasn't necessarily, and even if the final product isn't at all like a Scarlett Johansson sound alike. So I think it's interesting that this case could actually have legal legs if she actually decides to pursue it. The thing I found more worrying about her letter is that she said she wants to help like contribute to legislation that's gonna restrict the creation of like AI that violates intellectual property which

I think there does need to be a sort of thoughtful conversation and maybe even some legislation about deep fakes but I'm not convinced that Scarlett Johansson is the right person to be leading this charge on the basis of this clearlyivalent at all. That to me is really freaky, the idea that my voice could be taken from me. And that, of course, is, I think, maybe not of course, I believe that that's the anxiety that's fueling this entire debate, is that people sort of at this point understand that this is the kind of thing that could be happening. The deep fakes that you mentioned, Sanjana, we've seen that in the context. It's easy in the context of porn to understand how scary that is. For anyone, the idea that your face could be easily put onto something or whatever. I mean, I don't know how different it is than Photoshop, but it feels just on a gut level, really disorienting and the kind of icky thing that we don't want to exist.

I think it's even worse in the context of voice because your voice really is your it's yours it's your it's your identity it's like come on we all saw the little mermaid we know how important a voice is um i don't want to live in a world where ursula gets my voice that seems fucking horrifying imagine imagine like you're selling shit that doesn't belong to you, but that's not what's happening yet. And that's the anxiety that she's hoping... Scarlett, who I love, but I don't love this lawsuit. She's hoping to use that generalized anxiety to her favor in court. And if that works, I mean, that could be a case that really has a huge impact on this kind of stuff. Can a voice actress not sound like another character?

I don't even understand. Is it even Scarlett's character? She was directed to do a voice recording that was off of a script that she didn't write. There are a lot of people involved in the character of Samantha in OpenAI. Why does she just get a right to it? Again, it's not her actual voice. So I'm just not sure what we're talking about here. And any kind of law here would be super chilling when it comes to creative production and creating new things in this entire space of generative AI, which, of course, people like Scarlett are really worried about for a whole other host of reasons that I think are interesting and we should talk about. But Brandon, it sounds like you have something to say. that I think are interesting and we should talk about. But Brandon, it sounds like you have something to say.

Just that I would be surprised if personality rights didn't come into play in this conversation. Personality rights are like an intellectual property law that basically say that you have the right to the commercial use of your own identity. And that seems to be a fairly, you know, like this is like a, there's a lot of precedent for the, for this law in the courts. And I feel like it should cover the right to, you know,

sort of use your own voice commercially and to not have other people use it too. So I don't know. Yeah, I guess we're going to see. I don't know necessarily what to make of her chances here, but I do know that this case is only exploding because many, many, many people feel like something evil is happening with AI, taking aspects of us, taking aspects of our work, creating something new. Part of this is rooted in, I think, just misunderstanding of the technology. Part of this is just probably, I don't know, I think based in reality a little bit, right? To create these models, you are trading things. Let's just talk about text. You're training them off of work that exists in the world. It's countless numbers of them, but in a

way, the way you can imagine it, the way that probably the average person imagines it is, it's like we've created a mind out of a lot of other minds. And if it's not actually conscious, and it's just generating text based on things that it's learned then is that not ours in some way if a model's trained on me is it not mine in some way um i've trained a chat bot or a i've trained a voice i don't even know what to call it and this stuff is so new what is it called if i have cloned my voice you've cloned your voice using ai yeah You've cloned your voice using AI? Yeah. I don't know what that's called. Yeah. Voice bot? I don't know.

Can we say the company? Is it mine or is it something else? What is a voice? The differences between voices is not so extreme. It could change just slightly from person to person there are people who sound almost identical um i mean i don't think it's also how you speak it's not just your voice it's how you say things it's where you put intonation it is your identity but we've never just we've never had to really unpack this question of you know how much of this is yours what is it where does your identity begin? And this is the problem, right?

It's like this stuff is so complicated because they're questions we never had to ask. And now we have to create laws based on it. And I don't think we're ready to do that, but we have no choice because the technology is here. Yeah. to do that but we have no choice because the technology is here yeah um awesome you know what i really want to talk about plastic in your balls um so while scarlett johansson was suing open ai another story was going super viral uh which has to do with microplastics. Fascinating subject which I have nothing but questions pertaining to. This study, very small, covered a bunch of guys and also dogs

and in all of them there are microplastics in their testicles. This is not so surprising because we know microplastics are basically everywhere. So in most animals, bloodstreams walking around all the way up in the Himalayas, microplastics have been discovered. So in most animals, bloodstreams walking around, all the way up in the Himalayas, microplastics have been discovered. We know it's sort of just in the water system now, and they're all over the planet. So it's, yeah, it's not surprising they're in your testicles, but it is just viscerally disturbing to think about microplastics in your testicles. And so of course, the story goes viral. And people naturally wonder, you know, is this the reason that we have a fertility problem? Perhaps maybe this is the reason that we have an obesity problem and the obesity problem isn't the cause of the infertility problem. We really don't know. Um, but we do have a bunch of new sort of modern

problems to worry about. One of them is this birth rate problem. If this declining population problem and, uh, one of them is this giant question mark, which is microplastics. First, what did you guys think of the story? And then I have some follow-up questions on microplastics generally, which again, we know almost nothing about. I mean, I'm with Sanji actually. It's not clear to me that microplastics have any effect on your health. I'm not totally convinced that's the case.

I don't think it's been demonstrated yet by any of the science. So, I would prefer to like, you know, get to the bottom of that before being worried about microplastics in my balls. It's also worth mentioning that that study had 23 men, which is like a extremely small sample of people. And so I wouldn't put that in the robust category of studies if I were... So I don't know. discourse around testosterone and male fertility is like still pretty messed up and not very, I would say, sophisticated. I think in large part because of the past 10 years of like Me Too activists and media just brushing off any male health related concerns as, you know, just trivial or not worth talking about, right? So, it's hard to know what microplastics in your balls

even mean. And I think most people actually feel like that. I've seen that opinion expressed a lot on Twitter, people being like, I'm glad I have microplastics in my balls, just making a joke out of it. Yeah, I want more. Yeah. Where do I get a microplastic injection into my balls uh yeah no idea we also have declining so

declining fertility increase of microplastics in our balls possibly but like probably let's be honest and then declining t though is the other thing yeah i mean it's hard to know it's not really clear also the the t stuff is difficult to sort out too. I plugged this in our last podcast, but I'll plug it again. We have a really long piece called Testocalypse on the site by Jordan Castro, who goes through like, you know, sort of all these different aspects of how the media is treated tea, whether or not tea is in fact declining at the population level. And we come to the conclusion that it probably is, but it's still not totally clear what's causing it or if it's a chicken and the egg problem, or if the studies are even good. There's all sorts of weird stuff about tea that sometimes studies don't take into effect. For example, your tea is higher in the morning than it is at night. For example, your T is higher in the morning than it is at night. Sometimes studies don't account for that.

It's just like it's a difficult problem to solve. I'm not a doctor, but it seems like the science is still up in the air on it. It does seem like it's declining, though. I mean, from what I've read, it seems like there's definitely a population level decline. No? That's what our piece ends up... We're like, probably. But again, it's hard to know what to attribute to it. It's hard to know how big the issue is. I have a crazy theory that I... Oh, a hypothesis that I would like someone to test, but I don't know how you would. I have some ideas of how you would. Call me. I think that there is some kind of epigenetic

kill switch for testosterone that is flipped when you're in really high concentrations of people, when there's like tight knit spaces, lots of men around in a situation basically where you would want lower T males rather than higher T males because high concentration plus higher T equals like lots of conflict. So you want less conflict, right? So if that epigenetic kill switch exists, then naturally you would start to see this in more densely packed populated regions. And in a world of smartphones, ubiquitous mass media first, but then smartphones especially when you're living face to face with what looks like people constantly all day, you feel, you get the feeling that you are surrounded by people. And so maybe that is what's triggering this entire thing.

Yeah, I mean, they've done studies. I would study it. study it i think they've done today i believe i read a study on primates that when uh a gorilla moves between social situations where he is an authority in the first one and not an authority or an alpha in the second one his t changes based on that situation oh yeah my t has been increasing for years every year it's just spiking straight up as i become more authoritative subject to subject i'm like the highest male in san francisco at this point but there's also like that's a low bar i know yeah that's yeah there's like weird stuff like becoming a father might lower your t levels because you need to be a caregiver um like if you masturbate if you don't masturbate for, for a week, your tea goes up.

Uh, like there's all this weird shit. I don't know. Like there's being, I, I have like a list of like weird facts about tea that I'm looking at that I researched, um, being around women crying tears of sadness might decrease tea. So Me Too made us all lower tea. We all just dropped. It was a psychological warfare. It was definitely Me Too was a Russian propagated memetic warfare designed to lower our T. It could be Me Undies. It could be tight-fitting underwear. That might decrease testosterone levels.

that might decrease testosterone level levels. You know, didn't like, didn't we have a me too moment that was about the temperature in the office? Yes. Or like women were like, it's sexist, but it's cold. So apparently increased room temperatures in American homes and offices have gone.

Sorry. Like the average temperature has like gone up lately and this may lower t well we know that increased temperatures lower your sperm count specifically you talk about a hot tub or something that has a real effect on your sperm count it increases it fixes immediately like you take about a week and your sperm counts back sperm rules it's just like sperm is so good it's unstoppable sperm cannot be taken down wait there's another one that there's another news item currently in the hype cycle or new cycle which is that now more people are using marijuana on a daily basis than are using alcohol and there was a study on again non-human primates

where they gave them thc edibles and their balls actually shrank and their t levels plummeted so like maybe it's just like everybody's you know taking their gummies every night and uh they're just turning into beta cucks yeah i also don't i mean we don't know much about the microplastic these are all like shitty studies that i just recited to by the way so like i don't yeah because i make studies in general are kind of shitty that's a maybe a higher level problem that we have as a species that wants to know about ourselves in the world it's really hard to run studies i think it should be easier i wish there was a way just a place that you could go and i don't know more easily raise money for

questions that people have and then connect with scientists and launch a study because i have all sorts of things that i would love to be studied stuff like this is i think really interesting i'm like on the t for example i'm at any question really related to that because i do think it's really important especially when you talk about low t counts uh low sperm counts and male infertility and the plummeting birth rates in the western world um i will say though is for as little as we know about microplastics in their role in all of this i do not fuck with water bottles anymore i don't want to touch plastic i don't want a plastic baggie i don't want a plastic tupperware container i don't want a plastic water bottle i am like going back it's like i want burlap i want metal i want just

like the ancient things is what I want. And I want to be eating probably more meat and I guess not masturbating, but that's TMI for our audience. Last thought on, I guess, microplastics and fertility and all the questions that we have about these hormones. I mean, I think there's an interesting corollary for women here where as T levels seem to be decreasing in men, rates of polycystic ovary syndrome, which in women is correlated with like irregular menstruation, weight gain, infertility, and that has tentatively been linked to endocrine disruptors that you might

find in microplastics. So it's a kind of, it seems like it cuts both ways for both men and women. There's this sort of adverse, maybe microplastic driven adverse effect on hormones. And I think it's to your point, Brandon, about how like we didn't really, we weren't able to discuss men's health issues for a while during Me Too. It's interesting to me because I think women are probably better situated to understand their fertility in a kind of intuitive sense because they have menstrual cycles. And so if something's off with that, you can sort of immediately know, maybe you should go see a doctor, get tested, get your hormone levels tested. Whereas men are more in the dark in that sense. So really we should have more of a sort of focus on raising awareness, I think, of men's fertility issues uh hashtag perhaps yeah hashtag he too he too you heard it

um i want to talk speaking of testosterone here's a man who seems to have a lot of testosterone uh just and this is you know i'm i'm being judgmental i'm judging a book by his cover but gigantic uh let's take you back four years to um a horrifying parallel dimension in which the government is flirting with forced vaccination or at least coercive is using coercive vaccination mandates um you know forced masking schools are shut down businesses are shut down science is being believed but like everything is a a scientific i would say or at least every public health policy is a scientific uh in new jersey there was a gym that was absolutely terrorized by the state for refusing to close down and always kind

of like bucking the rules and regulations that were thrown down upon them. It was, I think, two guys, Ian Smith and Frank Trombetti. Thank you. So you know what? Do you mind breaking down just like the bare bones of this story for us, Sajana? Yeah, so basically, they owned this gym in New Jersey. And I guess during the early stages of COVID, Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey mandated that non essential businesses, which included gyms closed down. And these guys just refused to comply. Basically, they were ordered to pay over $150,000 in fines for violating public health emergency rules. Cops arrested clients who were leaving the gym. It was this really pretty draconian crackdown on them.

And then last month, so this has been like sort of an ongoing lawsuit where they've been trying to contest the charges that have been brought against them by Phil Murphy's government. A judge decided to drop all the charges against them and kind of vindicated, I guess, after all this time, their case against the governor. is that relevant here but people keep bringing it up is that the gym owner happens to have multiple dui charges but it seems completely including i guess he did kill someone in 2007 not funny but he did kill someone in the dui um nerve that's that's nervous laughter um but how do you how are you not in jail if sorry's not. I mean, whether or not he's done bad things in his past is not relevant to the specifics of this lockdown case where he was basically completely vindicated. He posted suck my dick, Phil Murphy on Instagram, I guess, in a triumphant sort of victory lap. Yeah, I have a little bit of extra context here which is just an on the grounds thing so i'm from jersey my parents still live in jersey and my mom used to tell me about this guy all the time because murphy was a huge sort of bug man type guy uh hardcore leftist he was more

on the socialist leftist side i would say economically he's like very very very far left um and he was coming in after i forget who the last guy was right before him, the governor. But he was certainly already that person in government before COVID happened. And then under COVID, I think he became one of the more aggressive governors on the sort of, I guess, pro-lockdown side. And this guy, the gym owner became a kind of folk hero in New Jersey because not only did he resist, but he kept sort of publicly antagonizing the governor. And the governor would strike back

and he would become, you know, the crackdowns became more aggressive and the overreaction became more extreme and more shocking. And more and more people really were on the gym owner's side. And he became sort of the face of people who were being abused in that state by the governor on behalf of what, in hindsight, was a series of sort of really misguided policies. And now, think about that. And four years later, the case is thrown out. These cases have been thrown out all across the country because they're not rooted, to my understanding, and things like this for uh not wanting to take back because there wasn't a strong legal legal case to

be made on for the state to do this and i think a lot of people in government um at least the ones who are left in government at this point you know so many people have so many of these politicians have lost uh their seats following their decisions um i think there's an anxiety that people are going to start suing for damages because i think that they will have a case and i think that this guy's going to sue and i think there's a broader thing happening with covid which really is worth talking about um there is uh the fauci case which i believe is sort of related to this so you have and this is another one sajan i would really like you to break it down because I don't want to get these details incorrect,

but basically it was, there's an important testimony last week for one of, following one of Fauci's aides admitting under oath that gain of function research did occur in Wuhan with NIH funding. And then this week, explosive story following a senior advisor, I believe, to the NIH, who has been avoiding FOIA requests and potentially destroying documents related

to the gain-of-function research being done in Wuhan, correct? Yeah. I mean, basically, the timeline on this is back in May 2021, Fauci testified before Congress and explicitly said there is not and never has been gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology funded by the NIH. I don't know if he even caveated it with funded by the NIH, but he basically said none of this research occurred. Last week, that testimony was explicitly contradicted by a guy named Lawrence Tabak, who's currently the principal deputy director at the NIH, who said in testimony to this House subcommittee on the pandemic, which has been having these sort of ongoing hearings, doing a sort of postmortem of all the lies, the public health lies we were told, trying to get to the bottom of it. Lawrence Tabak said, you know, a congresswoman asked him whether gain-of-function research

occurred, and he said, if you're talking about the generic term, then yes, it did occur at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And he sort of caveated it by saying, you know, this wasn't necessarily gain-of-function research to modify coronaviruses. But in any event, it does contradict what Fauci said, which was a very general statement that this research had never occurred. So that was last week. This week, the subcommittee released a trove of emails that were sent by this guy, David Morens, who's a former senior aide to Fauci. He worked at the NIH. And the emails are really shocking. I mean, basically what they show is that David Morenz seems to explicitly have colluded with colleagues to hide sensitive emails from FOIA requests by housing them on his personal

Gmail. And he says this pretty explicitly. I mean, it's almost, Brandon and I were saying yesterday, like the emails are so explicit that it almost feels unbelievable. He says in one email, I forgot to clarify my email yesterday that both my Gmail and phone calls are now safe. Text is not as it can be FOIAed as can my government email. So you, Peter and others, I think he's referencing some scientists he's collaborating with, should be able to email me on Gmail only. There's dozens of emails like this where he's basically telling people only talk to me on Gmail because that can't be subject to these FOIA, FOIA's Freedom of Information Act requests. At one point he says, I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I'm FOIA'd, but before the search starts. So I think we are all safe. Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to Gmail.

So, I mean, it's just like, it's clownishly conspiratorial. I mean, it's basically, yeah, you can see Fauci isn't directly implicated in these emails, although it does seem that this is a senior advisor to him. Clearly, he must have been in the loop. The memo speculates that he may have conducted official business on his personal email which seems completely reasonable on the basis of david morin's emails um so it's it's pretty damning stuff i think in terms of there being a high level conspiracy it seems very hard to believe that either of these people were doing something that fci didn't know about. And that, of course, is what all this is about. It's the question of where did the virus come from?

Did American taxpayer money go to that lab to help create the thing that shut the world down for four years? And then there is this broader thing that I would love, which is just accountability for all of the bullshit. Not a bullshit. I mean, just horrible things that happened policy-wise in this country throughout that year really 2020 was the worst of it um like there needs to be accountability for that for coerced that for the four shutdowns for all of the people who lost their jobs i mean all the schools being shut down all every piece of this. And we just kind of memory hold the

whole thing to move on. But now maybe Jimbrow on the one hand, Fauci potentially perjured himself on the other. The public seems to really care about this. The New York Post, not the Times, New York Post is not letting it go. Maybe we do get some of that accountability. is not letting it go, maybe we do get some of that accountability. Look, if you're going to be corrupt, I expect some amount of corruption from our policymakers and our people in our institutions, but not so stupid.

I learned not to say subpoenable stuff over email when I was 21 years old. And this guy, Morins, is talking about how Fauci hired Berks because she wore a skirt. And it sounded, honestly, like I read those emails and I was like, did somebody hack this guy's account to sabotage him purposefully? That's how dumb these emails are. And these are the people who are in charge.

Be better at corruption, bro. I mean, what do you guys make though of the accountability thing so i'm thinking back i remember in this was i think 2021 um no i think it was 2020 so san francisco uh the parks dolores park specifically painted a series of circles all across the park lawn like sort of of six by six, six foot by six foot. I think it was six, maybe let's say nine foot by nine foot, just white circles. And people were supposed to sit and did sit inside of those circles. It was like a social distancing sort of thing. People were not allowed to go to the beach. The beaches were shut down. When they did violate that, they were arrested. We have photographic evidence. We lived through it. We saw this happen. I remember walking

down the street outside without a mask on outside near nobody. And across the street, a woman walked by and yelled at me for doing that. That is the world that we were living in. It was really frightening how close to a sort of crazy authoritarianism we got. The virus was not even nearly so bad as it could have been. Like, imagine if it was just a little bit worse, how much crazier people would have gotten. need some kind of strong response in hindsight we need to we need to sort of we need affirmation from everybody in the group like hey that was crazy there are consequences now legally for the worst of it and we're not gonna we're not gonna be that crazy again next time uh it makes me nervous that that's not there it makes me nervous that that accountability is not there. There's also, I mean, aside from the social, the, you know, like the weird social stigmas that were happening around that time, the fact that they're just in LA alone, 15,000 small businesses permanently shut down.

Right. So it is no small thing. It is no trivial thing to have a business and to have that shut down is a huge deal. And if you just multiple, like, let's say every one of those businesses that has even two employees, that's 30,000 people out of work or whatever. Right. pandemic fraud handouts, like billions of dollars of people just signed up for payouts and got them and they did not need them, right? They were scamming the government. I think I'm very interested in seeing accountability on those fronts because that was like, I live in California, that was literally my money that the government facilitated other people stealing. What kind of recourse do you have for that? I suppose one could sue the government for that.

But yeah, it's pretty egregious what happened. This is definitely the popularity of Kennedy, the Kennedy campaign. No one even knows what else he stands for. He just wants, he just is really animated on the issue of the COVID stuff. And my sense is that's where it's coming from. Is like vaccines and COVID is kind of what that whole campaign is. In a way that like Trump's was all immigration in 2016. And it was something that people really cared about. And it was something that was not picked

up by other candidates. Of course, Kennedy's not doing nearly as well as Trump was doing, but still. I think there's one thing I find interesting about this like pandemic postmortem moment is it seems to me that a big problem with a lot of the narratives that were sort of like shoved down our throats during the pandemic is that they are being pushed by laptop class people like us who in some ways, I mean, in many ways, we're completely insulated from the worst, the devastating financial impact of like closing down businesses for months, forcing, you know, kids to stay home from school, all that kind of thing. for months, forcing, you know, kids to stay home from school, all of that kind of thing. Who might look back on the pandemic as this kind of like weird couple year period where you can see your friends all the time and you can travel and there are all these kind of uncomfortable, arbitrary restrictions on your movement. You had to wear the mask and that kind of thing. So you have those people who are like writing the news stories creating narratives uh in the government as well um and probably don't understand the fury and trauma that the pandemic created for a lot of people and then

you have people who were completely burned by these policies who had like businesses they invested decades of their lives into destroyed um because you know gavin newsom said outdoor dining had to be closed while he was going to french laundry and all this shit uh and i think that it's it that's a huge problem because you basically have like two radically different experiences of this period of time where obviously everyone suffered to some extent, but some people like their lives just got completely ruined by these government policies. Like this guy who runs the gym. I mean, I don't know. Like, how do you, how do you get accountability for that? I guess you can sue, you can get the lawsuits thrown out and then you can counter sue and hopefully get some money to settle um but for the kids who had like years of their education just like completely rest from them and are now going to be behind

on tests and socially screwed up i don't know it just seems like yeah maybe an official apology from the government, but it's- We'll never get it. And it won't matter. We'll never, yeah. You need a cultural change. And I think maybe that's the bigger problem here is that before you can get any sort of legal change, you need a cultural change. And the cultural change, even while most people who were sort of pro-authoritarianism during COVID, have eased up. They have to, I think, work through what they became at that moment, memory hold the entire thing. It's just like a complete denial of how bad things had gotten

and how really much worse I think things could have gotten. Was there not really sort of a few, maybe six months in, four months in, when things started to get really bad, people did start to push back in little ways. Yeah, I don't know. We should talk about, have to talk about, the California speed law shit. the state of California, the California Senate just passed a law that would ban the sale of any new car either built or sort of sold in the state that does not come equipped with a warning in your car, sort of an obnoxious, loud beeping, I'm assuming, every time you're driving over 10 miles over the speed limit. So a couple of interesting things about this, actually.

That means, one, this is a warning that I'm imagining is going to be like your seatbelt warning. When you're not wearing your seatbelt, the little ding, ding, ding that's so irritating that you just have to listen and snap in. It's going to be like that, but for driving too fast, a little too fast. What that would require is tracking, first of all, there'd have to be some monitoring of your car so it knows where you are and what the speed limit is. And then second, we're getting to a point where, I mean, the warning is the first thing. I think the next thing is like, does the car even work past a certain speed limit, which worries me,

not only for practical things things like what if I need to get to the hospital and drive really fast, but also just, I don't know, it annoys me. It's my car. Don't tell me what to do. I don't even like, I'm sort of like an anti-speed limit person. I don't think they should exist, but I certainly don't want, I certainly don't want to be forced. I know it's the law. Give me a ticket. Don't fuck with my car. This is, I think, attached to a bunch of ideas, a bunch of sort of similar type policies. But before we move too far into it, let's talk about this one, Sanjana. I know you cover California and have been on top of this one. You alerted me to this bill. I didn't even know it was happening until it was too late. What should I be thinking about here?

I mean, this has been a pet project of Scott Wiener, who's I think the senator behind the bill for a really long time, which I think kind of makes sense because Scott Wiener is from San Francisco and he represents San Francisco. And in San Francisco, there's been this very longstanding Vision Zero push to reduce traffic fatalities through a bunch of totally inefficacious measures where they basically repainted streets and they spent millions of dollars on, I don't know, stop signs and all these things. And traffic fatalities have only gone up in conjunction with trying to ban autonomous vehicles which is a whole another conversation but i think politically it makes sense for wiener um i i think it's annoying first of all because to be honest if you think about how frequently you drive over 10 miles an hour that like 10 miles an hour over the speed limit it probably happens all the time on like highways uh you know deserted roads like this would be incredibly annoying though i do think

the tech probably exists because if you use apps like ways and stuff they can track uh the speed limit of you know the road that you're on and tell you if you're over over the limit um Um, I mean, there's been a lot of, I've been more surprised to see how much positive response this bill's gotten from Californians where people are like, this is an amazing way to reduce traffic fatalities. Uh, because I guess some study has shown that if you tell people they're driving, you know, too fast, they'll slow down and potentially be safer.

I would actually have to look into that study because my sense is that reckless driving... I don't know if a speed governor would actually stop someone who's disposed to driving recklessly from driving recklessly. It just seems kind of weird, but I'm definitely in the same boat that I think it's nanny state behavior. Unsurprising from Scott Wiener, but- It's also going to increase the cost of cars. I mean, let's just talk about that. It's not free to do this. It's a change that's going to impact everybody in the country because there's not going to be two sets of cars one for california and one for everybody else this is a policy that california alone is going to be able to force

perhaps onto the entire nation of the united states which in itself is really irritating just the complete arrogance of that um why don't it's like why should someone living in louisiana be beholden to what california voters decide and then again this cost thing in a sort of super inflated world everything costs more how is that going to affect families and be riding old cars is what's going to happen um but really what i want to talk about is have you guys seen the movie demolition man i saw that a long time ago oh it's great so this means i get to describe it really quick and i'm going to break it down for you so demolition man first of all as a child this was one of my favorite movies um i created a science experiment

based off of it and it got me the blue ribbon and i went to state for it and then lost really bad there but uh this is a movie about a cop his name is is Sylvester Stallone. And he's chasing this really bad villain. And this is in like the early 90s. And the really bad villain lights a building on fire and everyone dies. And Stallone, who's a really good guy and really jacked and like an action hero, he is blamed for this thing based on some reason that I forget. Because of this, he and the supervillain, they are sentenced to really, really, really long prison sentences. And in this alternate

version of America, it's a sort of science fiction world, this new technology had just emerged where the criminals could spend their time cryogenically frozen. And rather than serve it all at once, you're frozen and you spend it all and then you wake up and you live your life and while you're cryogenically frozen um they do a bunch of behavioral things to you to sort of um i guess make you better is the first sort of draconian thing that you have here um so well a lot throughout you go on forever long story short they wake up in the super super duper future duper future in, in, in, uh, in California, I believe it's San Francisco.

I think it's probably Los Angeles actually. Um, and in this future world, everything's amazing. Everything's super utopian. The very first thing that you learn is that you can't curse. Stallone goes to curse and he gets a little ticket for it. Um, you can't curse. Stallone goes to curse and he gets a little ticket for it. You can't curse. You can't eat fatty foods. All of the restaurants serve the exact same food. You can't have sex. Okay. It's just considered icky and bizarre and everyone's dressed really well and it's super futuristic and everyone seems happy, but the rules are, while very friendly

and very kind, very oppressive. And altogether, it paints this bizarre picture of a super interesting dystopia that we haven't really seen before, where it's not killer robots that we have to worry about. It's just an anti-state government that sucks all of the joy out of living a human life. And that includes not only driving a few miles over the speed limit, but in my opinion, eating meat, which is really where this took me. We were talking about the DeSantis bill in Florida not too long ago. And the bill was a ban on lab-grown meat. When that happened, which I considered to be super outrageous, people should be allowed to experiment and eat and sell whatever lab-grown meat they want right now. I mean,

within reason, if we find out it's lethal, okay, but that's not where we are yet. There's a lot of pushback. And the most interesting pushback I got from that position was in a world of ubiquitous lab-grown meat, everybody's going to be forced to eat it. world of ubiquitous lab-grown meat, everybody's going to be forced to eat it. And the reason is because the government is going to ban beef, certainly California. And I thought that's crazy. That's not what's happening. Anyway, it's not what we're discussing. It's not the law that's on the books. I would oppose that. There's no way it'll ever happen. I think actually, I was looking at this speed limit thing and I thought, there's no way it doesn't happen. looking at this speed limit thing and I thought, there's no way it doesn't happen. There's no way that if these people and this mentality persists, there's no way we don't see an effort to ban

things like meat. Scott Wiener also was a big soda tax guy. He is just a nanny in general. He gets this weird pass for moderates because he's a yimby, but he's bad on basically everything else. He's a sort of classically presenting bug man and those are the people who are going to be in charge it's just like actually like a nuclear apocalypse like who survives uh the dystopia it's the bug men it's the cockroaches and like this is kind of i don't want to call him a cockroach i don't think he's a cockroach um but he's a bug eater okay and like that is i don't want to eat the bugs and uh i don't know brandon what do you think about the bugs i don't want to eat them either um and i hope that we

don't ban meat i i have a hard time believing that we'll ever ban meat i think it's too culturally ingrained um for that to ever fly um and correct me if i'm wrong has that the the um the speed limit dinging that's only a bill that's been introduced and passed the senate and it's going to be signed by newsom i think right uh i don't know if it's actually passed in the assembly let me double check i thought i had to go back to the assembly then okay it'll let me pass sometimes both yeah we'll pass them both it's a question of with newsome we'll sign it yeah and he like kills so many yeah it's like crazier laws so i don't know i mean i hope i'm on i'm on your side salon i don't i don't want the annoying dinging i think actually that seat

that seat belt dinging is is is because of a regulation by the way um but yeah i think it's – California is on a tear lately with nanny state regulation. And it's – honestly, it just gives me anxiety, frankly. Like, I don't – it sucks. It sucks to see. I wonder what the limit is. You know, where – I don't wonder. I just don't want it. You got to stop this stuff.

You have to – like, it does seem innocuous, right? Like, okay, a digging if you go 10 miles over the speed limit. But it's my car. It's not your car. And it just, the concept of this bizarre violation of my privacy also, just you shouldn't know where I'm going. I don't even like the idea of toll booths or in Jersey, there's so many toll booths. So there's always this idea floated. We could actually track your speed from toll booth to toll booth by moderating the license plates. And then you can just measure how fast someone's driving by doing the math there. And so we'll just start mailing people speeding tickets based on how fast they went. And I don't like, there needs to be a cop there. You have to have an officer of the law who spotted you, who wrote you a ticket. You broke the law.

They know for sure they were there. I don't like the automated system. I don't like the over automation of everything. And maybe I would like it more if the over automation of everything was contributing to my life rather than only being used to write me tickets. But that's sort of what it feels like in a situation like this. It's just like this extra oppression on me. Yeah. It's like a constant reminder. The state is,

is there that the state exists. Yes. You're constantly being reminded of this thing that is it's there and it has authority and um you better you better know it dude it reminds me of um also like when you go to a hotel and there are these bright neon exit signs and shit at night and like all these blinking lights for your fire alarm and your smoke detector and everything else um it is that it is this constant reminder that there are people in charge of you and i just want to be left alone sometimes and i get it saves lives but like what is what is that

life that you're saving let me live what is a life worth saving if i can't go 25 miles in a 20 mile an hour speed zone i was gonna say it's like the uh the british prime minister banning cigarettes for everyone who i think everyone who's like 16 and under is going to grow up in a world where cigarettes are banned completely uh in the uk uh And it's kind of this thing where, I mean, people are going to buy tobacco on the black market. Lots of people are probably going to stop smoking, but it is one of those things where it's like, can you just leave people alone? Let them smoke a cigarette if they want. No one has to. But I don't know.

I just- That one's really crazy. I get the logic of that. And it's maybe the only way that you get cigarettes out of a system. But it's just, I would be furious if someone just a couple years older than me at age 35, some 38-year-old could do something that I couldn't do. That's just so unfair. But yeah, that is probably what's going to come here. I wouldn't be surprised if California does that. I mean, they've banned everything else. They banned menthol cigarettes, right? Like, there's nothing that they won't do. We've totally lost our way on this. I think people like Wiener don't... He's forgotten why America is the best country in the world. It's because we actually have liberty to do basically whatever we want, as long as it doesn't get in the way. It's because we actually have liberty to do basically whatever we want,

as long as it doesn't get into, get in the way of anybody else. Um, to ban menthol cigarettes. I mean, I think he'll probably like, people probably argue, well, you know, that ultimately is paid for by the taxpayer and it's a strain on the healthcare system, but that's like, okay, good. Right. Like, like our taxes are to promote Liberty, like ultimately, right. Like we should, we should be able to do, we should be able to kill ourselves if that's what we want to do. And that's what we're paying taxes for, you know, for this, for this very free society. And, um, it's weird how many people don't realize that and actually sort of like to hear about new laws like this and think that they're good. We should talk about the hypocrisy a little

bit too. So, Scott Weiner specifically, he's famous online and I think he gets probably more heat than he deserves for this. I think it's the right wing especially comes out of in a way that is really dark this is a guy who is sort of famously very into folsom street fair yeah folsom street fair is a fetish party and it is totally a place that valorizes rampant orgy fuel like drug fueled is like promiscuous sex um all sorts of bizarre fetishes that are also, I'm not going to sit here and graphically describe them, but many of them that come with a complicated health risk. Certainly promiscuous sex, which again, in my opinion, I do think he's sort of glamorizing by being a proponent of something like this. I don't personally have a problem with the existence of something like Folsom Street Fair. I say, let the freaks fly their freak flag just as long as the children aren't around.

I feel this way about sex in general. I'm pretty liberal about it. But you certainly can't tell me to my face that there's not a health consequence or a health risk involved of having unprotected, constant, or even protected promiscuous sex with strangers. Okay? Like, yeah, there are all sorts of precautions you can take and drugs you can take after the fact, but it's a hugely risky lifestyle that you are promoting that many other people would have a huge, and do, have a huge problem with and would love to see banned, would love to see pride banned because of the sex stuff that not even just Folsom, but pride banned because of the lifestyle that the

lifestyle that is sort of on display at a festival like this. And the reason that we the way that we defend this, the reason that we don't do this is we say, no, the government doesn't have a right to tell you what to do with your own body. But here the same man is saying you can't smoke a fucking menthol cigarette, or let's talk about a sugar tax. Come on, dude. Why do you get to decide what is healthy and which rules about health, what natural laws about our body we listen to and we don't? It's just incredibly arrogant. He has no right. It's not just that he's correctly addressing health concerns. It's that he's creating a world that he would specifically be happier in. And that's not the way this country

should work. It's like you either are in the freedom lane or you're not. And he's very much not. And so I have a hard time defending him on the weird sex stuff because it's like, you don't get to pick here don't get to pick here it's like you you either you either believe that the government has a responsibility to police our health or you don't and if you do you better get married young and never have sex before or after with it with a stranger because that is the healthiest way forward didn't he also try to reduce the penalty for like intentionally infecting someone with hiv is that he succeeded in which is oh yeah wow which is a like a that has come up recently there was a case

where a dude with uh a dude with hiv purposely infected somebody else and the judge was like jesus christ like i want to put you in jail for a long time and i cannot because of the new legislation um and you know this is a nuanced conversation i think um but at the end of the day this is a man who passed legislation that resulted in more hiv infections purposeful hiv infections um that went really on it's basically unpunished uh but wants to tell you what to eat and it's like oh my god come on dude what are we doing here huh wiener was also the sponsor of a bill that passed last year that made it illegal for cops to call uh male to female trans criminals by their former name online after like if they've done like they

could not post their mugshot they had to like get the name right when they posted it online something like that this This was what? It's like, whatever. Those are his personal priorities is all. I mean, he's from... Well, apparently it was a big issue for the LGBTQ caucus, which he is a part of or the head of or something. I'm totally sure how that works, but... Well, there's no way.

He's a cis white guy. There is absolutely no way he's in charge of it they would never allow that in today's in today's political climate true he did do something to give scott a little bit of credit he's currently trying to make a section of downtown sf uh an entertainment zone which means that you could like legally drink alcohol in the street uh i mean you can legally basically legally do fentanyl. But I don't know. I think that's kind of nice.

I think personally, open carry laws are kind of annoying sometimes. Open carry? Not open carry. Sorry. Open container. Open container. They're called open container laws, right?

I'm pro-open carry and I'm pro-drinking in the street, man. And drive as fast as you want. It's Salon is America. That's how we're going. Open carry while you're drinking in the street. Did you see that? This is a recent clip that's going viral of people talking about drinking while driving in the 80s when all the laws were being passed. They were just like dude

after a long day's work why can't i crack open a beer on my way home still any attempt to restrict drinking and driving here is viewed by some as downright undemocratic it's kind of getting common is when a fella can't put in a hard day's work put in 11 12 hours a day and then getting your truck and at least running one or two beers. They're making laws where you can't drink when you want to. You have to wear a seatbelt when you're driving. Pretty soon we're going to be a communist country. And here's the thing about that. I don't think you should, and I would never.

But I actually don't think probably one beer is the problem. It's people who are wasted and they're behind the car. Anyway, I get why the law exists. I get why that one beer is the problem it's people who are wasted and they're behind the car anyway i get why the law exists i get why that one exists but that one's funny it's all these different clips of these people talking about this like are you fucking kidding me like what kind of is this is this the soviet union at the end of it the one woman's like i just think that we're very close to communism at this point i was like hell yeah 80s were like so much more based than we realized we've lost so much we're losing recipes we've you know heard of me before um i don't you know the thing is like you could say this is one of these we're all gonna look back and be like yeah history is not gonna be

nice to us however i don't know i talk about the seat the seatbelt thing all the time and people are like yeah beeping is annoying you shouldn't have to listen to that um i i wonder about these laws hasn't california tried to pass legislation forcing you to like take a blood alcohol test before starting your car am i really imagining i don't know but there's no way that that sounds right yeah that's it sounds correct um The thing is, you can't be like, no. You can't not want. You look bad. It's like, oh, that person drives when they're drinking. I truly think it would be wild to take on the mantle of, you should be allowed to drink a little bit and drive, to take on that, to die on that hill. Because bet there is like a really good libertarian argument for it and you know there's some autistic libertarian who's has that the the full all the data has

the argument is just waiting for his chance in the arena if you're out there and you have the argument hit me up i'm ready to listen guest we're doing guest takes now um we will put you on blast uh and i will listen. I'm ready to learn about just a little bit of drinking and driving. I'm not saying do it. Do not do it. But I do want to learn more about it. Guys, it's been real. Rate,

subscribe, review. I don't know if we're going to make it to you this week because YouTube's definitely going to come after us. These topics were not allowed. We'll see what happens. Catch you next week.