Pirate Wires - Everyone Lost Their Minds Over Titanic Sub, Joe Rogan & RFK Jr. Debate Science | Pirate Wires EP #2

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

This week in Pirate Wires: We discuss the Titanic submersible that was destroyed in a catastrophic implosion. We dig into the insane discourse surrounding the event, the de-humanization of the victims, and overwhelming hatred of the rich on the left. We also discuss the Science debate between Joe Rogan, RFK Jr. and Peter Hotez. Featuring Mike Solana, Sanjana Friedman, and Brandon Gorrell. Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: Titanic Sub & The Insane Discourse: https://www.piratewires.com/p/pirate-... Joe Rogan & RFK Jr. vs. Peter Hotez: https://www.piratewires.com/p/pirate-... Pirate Wires Twitter: @piratewires Mike Twitter: @micsolana Sanjana Friedman: @metaversehell Brandon Twitter: @brandongorrell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro - Introducing Sanjana! 0:40 - Titanic Submersible 5:30 - Unhinged Discourse 12:30 - James Cameron Has Been To Titanic 33 Times 13:30 - Dehumanizing The Victims 18:55 - We Want Humans To Take Risks 19:30 - What About The Migrants?! 24:15 - Tech Bros In San Fransisco 37:00 - Rogan vs. Hotez - Media Loses It Over Science Debate 57:40 - RFK Jr. Claims WiFi Causes Cancer

Welcome back, guys. It's Friday. It's time for the Pirate Wire show. I'm going to try and say like a little bit less this time. I got a lot of content this time. I think actually, I really think it was River who was getting the heat for that. And I was maybe just doing this five-step thing. Also got to get a haircut. I promise it's coming. I want to introduce you guys to Sanjana Friedman, our newest writer, our newest full-time writer. Sanjana has been a writer at Pirate Wires for a while now. I think about six months, eight months, something like that. Six months. Was that when Transmaxing came out? That was when Transmaxing came out, yeah. Word. So new to the team, first time on the pod, and I think we're just going to get right into it. The big story, the biggest story has got to be,

I mean, it's this,'s the, it's this, I keep wanting to say submarine. It's the submersible. What, before we start on the Titanic, the Titanic submersible, I'm smiling. It's like, maybe not a smiling matter, dark story. What, what is the difference between a submersible and a submarine? Is it just like a size difference? I have no idea. I have literally no clue. Is it just like a size difference? I have no idea. I have literally no clue. That is a good question.

Well, I keep, I've never heard the word submersible before this story broke. I didn't either until I, one weird side of my learning all about this story has been a new love for James Cameron, who I, I mean, really didn't think, I liked Titanic, hated Avatar. And that's kind of like, that was the full extent of what I thought about James Cameron. And now I'm learning about, I mean, I didn't realize how harrowing, excuse me, harrowing the experience of diving actually was, or how dangerous just kind of naively never really thought much about it. It puts the fact that James Cameron has dove down to the Titanic 33 times.

I've been made 33 dives. I actually calculated that I've spent more time on the ship than the captain did back in the day. That's like a new perspective for me on that man. Also, he's one of, I think, just like a few, maybe three to five people who've been to the Mariana Trench, which is like many times deeper, more deep than uh yeah like i think it's 36 000 feet so three times that's crazy to me um i think but uh but yeah he says submersible a lot and he's my now

go-to on everything related to the ocean um so let's let's just get into it uh brandon you want to just take us through just to catch the sort of audience up, before I get into my piece and the kind of reaction to this, what was this story? What happened, man? Yeah, so on Sunday, Sunday morning, just off the coast of Newfoundland, which is where the Titanic wreckage is, just off the coast of Newfoundland, which is where the Titanic wreckage is, this company called OceanGate launched a submersible or submarine,

whichever one it is, with five people in it to go actually explore the wreckage of the Titanic and to see it. Within an hour and 45 minutes, they lost communication. The support vessel on the water lost communication with the sub. Okay. So I think – What were they using? So before that, they were using – how are they communicating even at that point?

It's just like, is it – I think they're actually – I'm not 100% sure how they're how they're communicating i heard that they were there's like a space i think sort of based it's radio communication they are using radio to communicate with like a text-based thing it's not yeah this is an important detail because later on we're going to be talking about the satellite internet thing and the fact that elon was blamed for killing a bunch of people the other day which was right crazy and it's also not uncommon i think for submarines to lose contact with their surface vessel for periods of time right so this is not necessarily too abnormal

right um but i guess as the day goes on, they determine that the support vessel determines that the submersible with these five guys in it is lost. And by Monday afternoon, the news sort of breaks. I remember I was putting together the morning report for Tuesday, and i included just a line like one line yeah it wasn't on my race submarine yeah i saw the news kind of bubbling up on on monday and i was just avoiding it i actually had a whole piece in my piece about this process of me being like this feels like a story i don't need to know about and don't want to know about yeah but yeah by by tuesday it was just the biggest story in the world. Yep. And on Tuesday, Tuesday is when it became a culture war issue very quickly. And we started seeing people on Twitter,

a lot of people were just saying, you know, wow, this is horrible. These men must be having, you know, it sounds like the worst thing in the world to be trapped underwater potentially losing oxygen uh in pitch black right uh but but other people were joyously celebrating uh right so tuesday when i dipped in, I mean, I think that I did, I actually read it was, it was a Ben Collins tweet. Ben Collins is the sort of NBC's like chief disinformation expert. Can't stand this guy, go after him all the time just total propagandist and i guess sidebar on propagandists it's when we're told they're it's like when we don't know that they're not officially that right like a fox news host is like sort of any and an msnbc host these are like they're like officially propagandists to a certain extent but someone who is who's framed as like the cop the information cop who is also a partisan propagandist just fucking drives me

crazy um but what he he made a joke about it he made a joke about the story it was like oh this is you know at least the internet is back to the sort of bubble boy era which was a fun and flirty story that no one died in and no one intended it up it was a story of this we thought there was a boy lost in a balloon um and there wasn't it up. It was a story of this. We thought there was a boy lost in a, in a balloon. Um, and there wasn't, it turned out it was a balloon was just, you know,

there was no boy in the balloon at all. I believe was what happened with that story. We should probably double check. Uh, uh, I think there was a movie about bubble. Like it was called the balloon. What year was this?

2018, the balloon boy. uh, Sonia, do you want to look that up while i yeah carry on you just fact check me there um i'm pretty sure there was no boy there i know that nobody got hurt in that story and i dipped in and that was when i saw kind of just what that was when i really first saw the reality of the situation it was 09 but yeah yeah. Oh, no. It was that long ago. It was that. Yeah.

So that I dipped in, we're looking at five men in a small metal tube that is the size of a Subaru lost somewhere 13,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. If they lost power, it's also pitch black and freezing because they're not going to have any way to heat the vessel. 40 hours max of oxygen left is what I heard by the time I dipped into the story. And then you start thinking about all the kind of messed up potential like human ways that this gets complicated you know like who is fighting and and who is going crazy down there and it was just there's one little like there is a toilet next to the porthole um with no door obviously it's

like a tiny little tube and you just start to realize like no one knows where you are. You're going to slowly die in the worst way possible is what I thought going into the story before we knew what ultimately happened. Um, and what ultimately happened was it imploded and we can get to that later. And it imploded fast. It's like when they lost communication, they lost communication because the vessel had imploded. fast. It's like when they lost communication, they lost communication because the vessel had imploded. But the reaction to it was like, I would say truly nightmarish. Two in most people,

I think had the same reaction we all did, which was like, holy crap, like, this is scary. What if it was me? What if, what if it was someone I loved? And even to a certain extent, why would these people do this? This is a crazy risk. And I think the answer is they didn't know how big of a risk it was, or at least most of the passengers didn't. One of whom was just a 19-year-old kid. But the reaction from the left was like, there was some like anti, oh, were they like following DEI stuff to build this submarine from the right? But for the most part, it was not even the right. I mean, we're talking the far sort of hammering and sickling bio communist left thought this was awesome which was just that was crazy to me to see that in real time just constant jokes um and you can read my piece at pirate wires but

there's like a whole list of the uh or a partial list of the sort of grisliest tweets celebrating the death here but all together it was framed in this kind of, um, it was framed in this way. So as to say that this was okay, because these people were responsible for bad things in the world. And some of this was made explicit. One girl, uh, tweeted super viral tweet, um, that Hamish Harding, one of the billionaires on board he ran a private jet company which was bad for the environment and so his death was a good thing um that was like you know one of the more explicit ones but what was your sense she followed the tweet up later with rip bozo not gone soon enough. She threaded that tweet underneath.

See, that is... It's insane. That's psychotic behavior. I don't understand that. This person has a family. I don't... I guess it's like maybe to a certain extent there's an impulse among people.

I think a lot of the jokes were actually just... It was some gallows humor. This is a really horrifying situation and the way that people, many people deal with that is to, is to kind of crack like whatever off color jokes. And, and, uh, it's just a way to kind of relieve stress, but some of this was not that. And it's an important, I think it's a, it's a kind of recurring theme that I've seen a lot. And I've written about a lot, which is this tendency on the Marxist left to genuinely celebrate the death of rich people, which it's like, why are we pretending that that's a joke when this is actually the dehumanization

here is what we've seen in every single communist country in history. This is always how it goes. And it always leads to actual murder. It's not a joke. They're just telling us what they want, which is to mass murder people. And I think that's worth talking about. I think it's something we have to talk about. That process, that dehumanization process, I think is basically standard now on the far left. And we see it in all sorts of ways. I want to get into a few more of those. But first on the submarine thing, what were your guys' takes? Brandon, I know you researched the background of the guys on board and they've done a bunch of cool shit um yeah you know any thoughts there yeah no i just want to say first though like that this is these these like ghoulish tweets and takes are do seem to be coming from super far left

people but some of them have like three million views on them and 13,000 retweets and like 75,000 likes. Like I'm not making these numbers up and it's like, yeah, these are not just like random people with, with like five likes that we found to make a case. Right. It's the culture. Yeah. Yeah. And, and that's, um, it's depressing I think but yeah anyways the guys so the so the guys that were on the sub they were rich um with exception of the kid who was the son of a rich guy um but they're actually like pretty like i i read through their bios and they're they're all kind of like badasses quite frankly um paul henry nargalit i'm probably gonna butcher these guys's names he's the he's the french guy on on the explorer right yeah he's he's he's like um cameron he's made more than 35 trips

to the to the titanic um he started i think he he started doing this in the mid 80s. So this is like, he's doing this all the time. His company owns the salvage rights to the Titanic. And he's apparently done a lot over the course of his career to protect the wreckage site of the Titanic. So he's like a Titanic nerd. Okay. And I guess in more ways than one. He was in the French Navy. He was a mine clearing diver.

He was a deep sea diver and a submarine pilot. Like this guy is just like a bad-ass explorer who liked to do cool things and was really nerdy about the Titanic. Um, so he, he was in the sub, um, this guy, Hamish Harding, who is the, um, the subject of that ghoulish tweet. Um, he, he does, or did, he did own a jet company, but the jet is a, is it's a business jet that goes to Antarctica and it's the only one on the world, like in the world that does that. And he's flown like buzz Aldrin to Antarctica. And I think you go to antarctica to do like cool science shit and cool explorations stuff right he's not this isn't just like luxury travel to i don't know the bahamas or whatever um he has like he's a guinness hamish is a guinness

book of world records holder for like many things i think he one of the things is he's he's been um i think it was like the longest uh he the longest amount of time in a submersible at a certain depth like he holds the record for that he's been down to the mariana trench in 2021 um he completed the fastest circumnavigation of the world in a jet Um, he completed the fastest circumnavigation of the world in a jet. Wow. Uh, he went into low earth orbit on, I don't know if he was piloting. He was with another guy. He was, I think he was with a Saudi, a Saudi guy. I'm not, I'm not a hundred percent sure the details on that.

Um, he went to low earth orbit on, um, the blue origin spacecraft, Jeff, Jeff Bezos's thing. So this guy is like, again, another adventureurer risk taker, who's just doing cool shit and like, is having a good time. And of course he's also rich, right. But like, he also is all these other cool things. And then there's, um, the, the British Pakistani business guy with his son, uh, his name's, uh, Shazada Dawood. I think that's how you say it. He's just like a science nerd. He's on the board of trustees of the SETI Institute, which is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. SETI actually put out a statement when we didn't know his fate. And the statement

was just expressing like grave concern. And they were like, you know, this is a big deal. The situation's really serious. We're really, really worried about this guy. The guy has survived. Him and his son are survived by his wife and daughter. And like in the New York Times obituary that I read about him, both of them just like love Star Wars and Star Trek and are just basically science nerds.

So, you know, these guys are rich, but they're also pretty interesting dudes that have lived cooler lives than probably all the people on Twitter shit talking them. Yeah. That's the, it's like, we shouldn't have to sit here and talk about who they are as people for them to not be, for their deaths to not be celebrated. And that's like a strange thing that even has to happen but when you sit down and do it it's like they weren't even just they weren't even just like regular guys like these are people who did something they they all they did shit and that is sort of the subject um you know i wrote about this

yesterday i published something yesterday where uh i opened up with just like the humanization aspect that was happening and then I got into something weirder that happened which was more normalized and less gruesome but perhaps more significant which was like this idea that they were stupid for doing this and and like maybe to a certain extent they got what was not even maybe to a certain extent I think kind of explicitly this was made this this argument was made and not in a gruesome way but just a sort of matter of fact many people who are you know not on the socialist left just thought well um you you sort of had it coming because you took this crazy risk and you did this crazy thing that you didn't have to do

but if there weren't these crazy people taking these crazy risks, the world wouldn't exist. Nothing would exist. Everything in our world that matters has been created because someone took a risk. And this is kind of, yeah, this is a more performative risk, it seems to people kind of watching by. Whereas I think these people on the vessel and many explorers like this, you're sort of Mount Everest person. We talk about James Cameron, you know, going down to the Mariana Trench. There's an impulse that people have, some people have, a minority of people have to do extreme things and to see crazy things and to take crazy risks and to survive just to do it. And I like celebrating that stuff

because that is the thing, that impulse is the thing that leads to everything that matters. It's like who we are to a certain extent. It's like love, curiosity, and triumph over risk, I think are kind of the three things that make people maybe make humanity what it is. I think it's important. I think risk is important. I thought about Harry Houdini, you know, like,

like we all, no one's like that fucking idiot. Everyone's like, that's cool. Like he would be bound up in chains and trust and nailed in a coffin thrown in the ocean. And he would emerge, you know, triumphant over death. That was exciting to watch. What is that, that that touches inside of us? I think it's an important thing. And so like, not only was the celebration of, of their death, a horrifying to behold, I think that like, we're also lacking something, which is an impulse to be maybe sort of odd by people experiencing or trying to experience seeking out this, this, this sort of remarkable thing. Um, yeah, I thought it was, it was depressing to, to see people say like, you know, you could just watch Netflix to see the Titanic. You can just

watch footage of the Titanic on YouTube. Why would you not just do that if you want to see the titanic yeah and it's like are you serious you know is that is that an actually serious critique of what the what these guys are doing i that's i heard that a lot i saw i travel why go outside yeah because you can just see the outside on youtube like it doesn't so i was just going to say that what i was seeing a lot of was people being like Yeah. Because you can just see the outside on YouTube. Like it doesn't. Well, I was just going to say that what I was seeing a lot of was people being like these rich people indulged in this insane, you know, self-indulgent trip that they did. And they got what was coming for them because who in their right mind would bolt themselves into a submersible and go down to the depths to see the Titanic. But I think you're right. I mean, it's basically this desire to explore that, you know, underlies all of our great achievement. The take I've seen a lot of is why should we have any sympathy for these rich people who have paid for this self-indulgent trip,

you know, 32,000 feet down into the ocean to see the Titanic when there are these migrants off the coast of Greece who are drowning, which is, you know, we've heard this take a billion times from mainly the left, which is like, why should we care about this one specific story when there's all this other stuff going around, going on in the world? Yeah. So here's what I have to say about, and I saw this a lot and it immediately bothered me and it took me a minute to sort of unpack what it was about it that bothered me. Ultimately, I decided it's a manipulative tactic. The point of a conversation like that is just to sort of shame someone for feeling some sort of way about a massive story that actually is quite

horrifying to behold. But my real question that I have for the people who are not only tweeting about it, but writing pieces about it, the same people who over at, I forget, what was the trash journal that went and discovered that the owner of Ocean Gate, who was down there dying, had donated the New Republic. So they found out that he donated to republicans wrote a whole piece about that they were also sharing this piece on the migrants and it's like where were your tweets when that happened like you could have said no one was stopping you from saying anything about it why are you shaming me for not even knowing about it meanwhile you apparently did where where where was it where was where was the. Where was it? Where was the critique? Where was it? I would have loved to have heard about it,

but I didn't because here's the thing. You don't actually care. They don't. And it's like worse what they're doing. They're using these dead migrants as a way to shame other people for feeling some kind of way about a story. And it's like, for what?

Why do you care this much? At the end of the day, people die every single day in horrible ways from crime or disease or random horrible things. Lightning strikes. Every year, people in America die from lightning strikes. We don't hear about them. Stories take hold for whatever reason they do. They capture the zeitgeist. There was a lot about this one. It was the fact that they were still alive, like the kids who were in the cave,

which is the other thing where it's like, oh, you only care about these men because they're rich. That's not true. We just saw this, a perfect analog go down five years ago in Thailand with all those boys who were stuck in a cave. And it was like, the thing that kept you coming in was, it was, oh my God, these people are stuck. How do we get them out? How do we save them? What would I do if that were me? That's the kind of thing that's happening. And then this was even, this story was even more complicated, or I guess, maybe sticky based on the fact that it was the Titanic. They were going to see the Titanic and there's this hubris component. And, you know, the owner had made these comments about risk and it all is part of, it's all part of the story. And that's just how people react. They respond to stories that way.

You can't shame people for caring about something that actually was wild to behold. Yeah. And I mean, to your point, new stories take hold for reasons beyond like people. I mean, it's a story that it just makes you put yourself in their position and you sort of the horror that it inspires of like imagining yourself locked in the submersible, I think is what kept people hooked on the story. And paradoxically, I actually think that the coverage that this immersible got and the migrant story has given the migrant story coverage it wouldn't have otherwise gotten i mean people have been talking about this yeah they're writing all these stories and they are getting a lot of coverage it's it's like now they are it's like the media has decided it has to go into overdrive i think really almost out of,

it's like to prove that this is a more important thing. And I mean, a more important thing. It's like, what makes something, what makes one person's grisly, horrifying death more important than another person's grisly, horrifying death? It's like, I don't understand this i don't understand the tip it's like the the point the point scoring based on someone's horrifying end i don't get it it's like am i am i missing something are they missing something like in my brain perhaps like am i just chemically different i don't like i just don't get. It's a crazy way to talk about something to me. Yeah. Um, I want to, I do want to, I do want to get onto to Hotez and Rogan, but I guess the last piece on this, the dehumanization, when I was writing this

piece on the dehumanization that I was witnessing and sort of how sad that was and the risk-taking, and sort of how sad that was and the risk-taking. I did also talk about this tech bro shit. And it's like, there is the tech bro in sort of air quotes. And I say, it's like, I don't even know what a tech bro is. I've never met a tech. I've worked in tech for 12 years now at this point. I've never met a tech bro. I think the archetype, the idea that people have in their mind is some kind of like banker bro, like a really like masculine guy who's just like swinging his dick around being an asshole in the, in the board room and like making money or something. But also he's working at a tech company as an engineer. Like these are nerds is what, yeah. Well, so I guess there's like a VC version of that. And it's

like those guys, I don't know those guys. Like I don't, I think those are, there are like a lot of people maybe pretending that they're important and they sort of fit that role. But the average tech worker is like, the average engineer who is the reason that tech exists is just a nerd. And it's like a nerdy guy is like what we're dealing with here. Not even just white. It's like white Indian. Um, like that is kind of, but they're guys and they're nerdy and they're not bros and they're just interested in their cool sort of like hobbyist computer shit. And thank God for them because they've constructed the entire modern world. Um, but Timnit Gebru, a sort of disgraced former Google AI safety expert is, I think, what she's billed as now. She went off about how the tech bros were responsible for the

collapse of San Francisco. And she cited three things in particular, which I thought were like banana land. It made the whole tweet. It was amazing. She said they were responsible for the homelessness, which is the go-to problem in San Francisco that everybody talks about. They were responsible for the shitty train service, which I was like, now I'm leaning in. That's a really strange one to say.

And finally, they were responsible for all of the dance clubs that she used to go to and loved closing down. It sounds stupid, but this is actually an important phenomenon. The idea of blaming this class of people for all of your problems is very closely related to this impulse to laugh when rich people die, because you've created an archetype that's like, it's like you've basically framed an entire group of people as something that they're not. You've given them a name. She calls, she goes off specifically on something called test girl, which I wrote about in a piece called robots are racist. What is that? Is that an acronym for something? It's an acronym for a bunch of sort of futurist philosophies, including like transhumanism, rationalism. And there are, I've listed them all out in, in, in the piece, but it's basically like all the really weird philosophies that you run up against in the Bay area. run up against in the Bay Area. And this is, again, they're not tech. It's like the banker bro is not a transhumanist. And he's not an EAA person. You're talking about a very niche

subgroup of rationalists who are highly ner that's, it's a totally different thing. But she kind of lumps it all together. And her belief is that tech bros, who are part of this task rule movement, which she labeled, are literally white supremacist eugenicists. And the purpose of AI is to annihilate all non-white people in the world long-term. And there are different ways of getting at this, but her main implication is that it's going to be used to somehow like inhibit birth of like the sort of non-white people and things like this.

It's like a really crazy shit, but it's also really closely related to something called blood libel, which is how Jews were demonized. I forget where it first started, but the idea was that Jews wanted to kill your kids, basically. And it's like this cartoonish way. You're creating like a cartoon evil person and you're calling an entire group of people that thing. an entire group of people that thing. And then it's like, why are we surprised when the reaction to the grisly death of people termed with these labels or something close to it are celebrated? It's like you've dehumanized them. That's what you've done. But in the context of the city thing,

it's just crazy because it's like, separately from the dehumanization, the reason the city sucks is because the people in charge of the city are crazy and they've done everything. Like every problem that we're facing is resultant of a policy that has been put in place. Can you, is there any way to steel man Timnit's statement about tech pros? Like, is there? Well, I have, I wrote about this in 2020. I blamed tech bros? Well, I have. I wrote about this in 2020. I blamed tech bros, sort of. I mean, I kind of explained how the city actually collapsed and the policy and all this and

extractor die. That's a piece that sort of put PirateWire on the map to a certain extent. We were blamed at that point. Anyone working in tech was blamed for leaving the city. The city was breaking down because we were city. The city was breaking down because we were leaving. And I was like, this is just crazy. You can't own somebody, first of all. And the idea was that we extracted the resources in the city and left. And I'm like, that is just absolutely not the way the world works. No resources were extracted. This isn't oil. We're not digging up oil in San Francisco or gold. It's a gold rush, but not literally. The people who are leaving are the

people who produced the value. It's intellectual value. It is like our ideas and our hard work created something from literally nothing. And I say our here, I was not a part of it, right? Like I worked at an extra capital firm. I was not even producing the value myself, but she's blaming the people who did. That was crazy, I said. In fact, what happened was the San Francisco budget doubled from $6 billion to $12 billion over that 10-year period because of tech workers and tech companies. But where you can blame the entire industry is they didn't get involved politically. And they're not going to like this. The Timnits of the world are not going to like this framing.

But my belief is that actually tech people should be running the city completely. Like they should be in, like there are no tech people at any level of power in San Francisco, but they should occupy every level of power. Every person on the board of supervisors should be a pro-tech politician. The mayor should be pro-tech. Mayor should be from the tech industry. Their industry talents are a thing all across the country. Why is the most important industry

this sort of like abused stepchild in the city that it just gave billions and billions and billions of dollars to, which it squandered in a way that probably we have never seen in the history of the world. I think there has never been a city that has wasted so much opportunity to the extent that San Francisco has. And so the steel man of Timnit's thing is like, yeah, we are, we are in some way responsible because there was an opportunity for us to do what she's actually, to do what she's saying we did, which we didn't. There was an opportunity for us to actually control the city and we squandered, not even squandered. We didn't even, we didn't even consider that opportunity and, and we should have. And I

see some signs, some good signs now, maybe maybe that some people are are kind of looking to get involved but that's what should have happened is we should have just been involved where do you where do you think this this ends up with timnet and her do you think she's ultimately going to be successful at exterminating the uh the tech pros the tech pros I think that what does it look like in five years? What's she doing? What's she talking about? She's trying to replace them in the AI safety conversation. Yep.

And that will ebb and flow depending on what's happening culturally and politically. So if it's advantageous for the media to talk about racism in the context of artificial intelligence, Timnit will be the go-to because she's made this her entire brand. That's what the test world thing is. I mean, it's an elaborate sort of nightmare fantasy that she's concocted in which these actual Nazis are running the tech industry. And she breathlessly talks about, it's ironic. I mean, she talks about dehumanization and racism, but she is one of the most sort of outspoken, explicit racists in the entire industry, maybe the most. She'll come up when that matters,

but she's in a competition for attention with like Eliza Yudkowsky and to a certain extent, the more reasonable people like Sam Altman, who actually, I mean, Sam also runs OpenAI. Like he's an actually important voice. A builder. Yeah. I wouldn't, I don't know that he's a, he's definitely the CEO, right?

Like, so credit where credit is due. But I think that she'll, yeah, her influence will ebb and flow. Inevitably criticizing her will be labeled itself as racist. I look forward to that moment for me. We should get on to Rogan. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can break down what the Rogan-Jotez drama was. I mean, I think we should start with RFK Jr. going on Rogan. So RFK Jr. RFK Jr. in general, maybe. Not even just the Rogan, like what is your Sanjana? What is your, what is this thing that is happening with RFK at this moment in time? It seems like people are excited. They're leaning in. They're like, maybe AIDS is a hoax. Tell me. Yeah. Well, yeah. So RFK

Jr. Well, first of all, he's running for president. I think that should be foregrounded in any conversation about what he says, because he's been in, I mean, people have known that RFK Jr. conversation about what he says, because he's been in, I mean, people have known that RFK Jr. has supported conspiracy theories for decades now. I mean, he, I think, was kind of genetically primed to support conspiracy theories because of what happened to his uncle and his dad. But, you know, he thinks the CIA is tracking him. Maybe they are. He, as you said, doesn't think that HIV causes AIDS. He, for years, has been talking about how vaccines cause autism. Even pre-COVID, he was talking about vaccines causing autism.

We should circle back to that one eventually. Sorry, but continue. I don't know that I'm... We'll get to it. Yeah, we can get to it. I mean, there's definitely... This is a conversation that needs nuance, which has been sorely lacking. He's also very outspoken about Wi-Fi and 5G

and the brain melting potential of both, which I guess might be according to- I know, I find myself laughing and I'm like, well, I mean, I don't want to say never. Like he, I mean, he might be right about everything, but it sounds crazy. It well, I mean, I don't want to say never like he, I mean, he might be right about everything, but it sounds crazy. It sounds, I mean, yeah, a lot of the stuff he says sounds crazy. Um, people say he's a persuasive speaker and I say people say, because I don't actually find him, uh, particularly persuasive when he talks, but yeah, he's, he's in the media

a lot nowadays. I mean, he was in SF this week, I guess, on the streets talking about how we should solve the homelessness crisis in San Francisco. With housing vouchers. With housing vouchers. Really the fentanyl crisis, which we're going to solve fentanyl addiction with housing vouchers, which, I mean, we already put all the homeless people up into hotels under COVID. It was a massive failure. Sorry, please carry on. Yeah, no. I mean, so basically give money to fentanyl addicts and that'll solve the

crisis in San Francisco. But RFK Jr. was on Rogan and they talked for three hours about typical RFK Jr. topics and also kind of typical Rogan topics. I mean, it was really focused on vaccines, the COVID vaccine. Rogan talked about ivermectin, obviously. And there was conversations about 5G and Wi-Fi, of course. And the podcast blew up and was also, it blew up both among Rogan listeners and then, of course, among the disinformation experts. And Vice ran an article, which is called Spotify has stopped even sort of trying to stem Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation. And they called the conversation like an orgy of vaccine misinformation and sort of ran through a bunch of RFK Jr.'s claims and debunked them. Although I was actually clicking a lot of

the links that they were using to debunk and there were like links to the same device journalist's articles that she had written. This was a famous, I noticed this tactic for the first time during the Gawker days. They would completely malign somebody in one piece, a blog post of theirs. And then like a week later they would say, as it has been established, and they would link back to their own trashy, like, you know, journalist, like a journal scribblings. The thing about Anna, so that's Anna Merlin is the writer of the piece. She is the person kind of most famous during, she didn't write the UVA rape hoax, but she went after the people who first expressed criticism of it there's uh robbie suave

is a journalist at reason magazine um he was the first one who was like this seems when the uva rape story in um i believe it was rolling stone came out he was like this seems there are a lot of questions i have about this story and it seems like there are some holes in it and it i i don't want to get attacked here but like we need to look into it. She freaked out, called him an idiot, said like, it was a whole sort of, it was like, I don't, I think that was before the, the me too era, but it was, it was kind of, it was of that genre of thing where like, how dare you criticize this? Obviously she was completely wrong. She's doing this. This is the whole point. She loves to shut down conversation. That's like the trend in her career is like, how do I police the conversation? So my political

views are the only things you're allowed to talk about. And this one, her job is, I mean, what she's trying to do here is not go after RFK. She wants Joe Rogan show taken off of Spotify. And so she's going after Spotify. She's saying, yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say that. I mean,

that's like the framing of the article is just like Spotify is not doing their duty. And they're, cause they're continuing to kill people. Joe Rogan is literally killing people. Yeah. This is the, this is the thing.

Yeah. And no, I mean, you're right. It's really, it's, it's not about RFK jr. Um, who's basically dismissed out of hand as like a crackpot at the start of the article. It's really about why Spotify continuing to give this platform to Rogan, um, legitimizing disinformation, all of these. What a fascinating evolution from you could not, this conversation could not have happened 10 years ago. 10 years ago, if you were like, how could Spotify possibly quote, give a platform to some, it's like, well, because it's free speech, like what, like,

like they can do whatever they want. And of course, what do you mean? Like, it wouldn't even be a question you could understand. It took us like years to chip away at that, like cultural sensibility surrounding the concept that like people are allowed to talk about shit and disagree about things because this is America that's gone. Yeah. I also think it's just an old media mindset of thinking, okay, there's a platform that exists. Like you can almost think of it as a physical stage and we can control who gets up on it and who gets to tell the public what to believe and what not to believe. And if we can somehow get bad actors off the stage, right. And like chain them backstage,

then the public won't know this bad information. And that just doesn't make sense in the internet media ecosphere. Cause like people can get, I mean, there's lots of people who get all their information from Twitter and Twitter is, you know, supposedly a free open forum. Right. And there are people who are on rumble and all these alternative platforms now reddit these growing reddit that we're seeing i think that probably one of the bigger stories that we have no way to even really get at or we could but it's very hard is the

growing influence of just these of group chats that are growing and growing and growing in size that are private um but yeah you're right It's a different world and you can't really control it completely. But he went on Rogan and then get us to Hotez. All right. So he went on Rogan. Hotez's name was mentioned, I believe, in the podcast. And then Hotez, who had been... Peter Hotez is a very famous virologist. He works at Baylor University and he has been very involved with CDC on vaccine policy. He is just a very, you know, public facing scientist who has been involved with a lot of coronavirus research, vaccine development. He frequently appears on platforms like CNN. And he had been on Rogan a few years ago and they'd had a

conversation about vaccines. So they know each other. And at one point- Was he on Rogan about COVID-19 or was that before? Twice. No. Jungle viruses was what they went on to talk about and then it ended up being autism. and then it ended up being autism. Yeah. Yeah. No. So he, he, I guess he has been on twice. And yeah, the main focus of the conversation has been, because I think Peter Hotez's research has to also do with like tropical viruses. And so Peter Hotez, establishment scientist, very renowned, it should be said, retweeted the Vice article and said something to the extent of, you know, it's really sad to see this misinformation, i.e. Rogan's podcast and RFK Jr. getting such a platform. You know, this is a sad day, essentially. To which Rogan responds

and says, hey, Peter Hotez, I will invite you on my podcast to have a debate with RFK Jr. And I will donate $100,000 to the charity of your choice if you agree to come. You know, no time limit, you guys just get on and fight it out, basically. And then of course, you know, the Twitter sphere enters the conversation, Elon comes in and says, well, so first of all, Hotez responds, I should say, and says something about, I will come on your podcast, Joe, but basically implies that he won't debate RFK Jr. Okay.

So that's the premise is like, Rogan invites him, Hotez basically says no. And then Rogan makes that explicit by saying, hey guys, in case you didn't figure this out, this is Hotez saying, i won't debate rfk jr and this is when the twitter sphere enters and elon basically says you won't debate rfk jr because you know that your arguments aren't going to stand up to his you're a coward i mean i don't know if he's a coward but he you know piles on him and then there's a bunch of people on twitter who are like you know this bowtie wearing nerd is too afraid of rfk jr to go head to head with him and so hotez gets piled on on twitter and then so this is yeah that's the um i don't know if they're really not pro rfk jr but they're pro debate piled on i also he was getting tens of

thousands of i thought one like setting at 70 000 at least likes on his, his stuff was going viral too. And he had the support of the entire media. He had like every journalist on the platform was on his side. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I guess I should say, yeah, sorry, Gobern. Shortly after that all happened, now you can find articles where the headline is something like, scientists should never debate on Joe Rogan. Like, the vanguard arrived and wrote him a bunch of stories being like, no, scientists shouldn't debate anybody, basically.

Yeah. I was just going to get to that because I was going to say the whole disinformation anti-disinformation media contingent basically did just that and they put yeah they activated and um exactly and there was a ton of scientists shouldn't be debating uh crackpots like rfa junior i mean science science.org published an article that said something i mean the headline was it was an op-ed um and the the headline was like scientists shouldn't be debating gaslighters and the two reasons they gave which i think we should explore because they're basically the reasons that define this whole disinformation debate were one hotes should not be debating rfk jr because he by debating him he were giving we're putting their views on an equal

footing and we're basically saying okay rfk juniors like ideas about vaccines causing autism that are maybe poorly substantiated are on the same intellectual playing ground as you know peter hotez renowned virologists ideas about vaccines but the second point which is under emphasized um is that you know p Peter Hotez is a scientist. He's not a debater. And you talked about this a lot on your piece, but just like, it is unreasonable, I guess, to expect a scientist who spends all of his time in the lab, theoretically, and might be a bit of a nerd to debate someone like RFK Jr. So I agree with that. The first point is the, but the problem

is there's one reasonable point and one insane point. And you can't go after the insane point without being accused of going after the reasonable point. The reasonable point is absolutely science and debate are completely, when I say debate, it's like I think people hear debate and maybe many people hear I'm saying disagreement, discussion. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about two people are on a podcast moderated, that's charisma. That is nimbleness when it comes to words. It's about being clever. It's about picking arguments apart in a really smart way. It's about framing things in a smart way. It's not about learning or educating. It's about winning. And that's not science. I am not a scientist. I am a guy with a microphone on a podcast. And that is a very different skill set. However, the much more insidious thing here in my, and so I go off on that and I say that, and I don't like RFK and I've talked about that a lot as well. the take, the argument that we're seeing from Hotez, you know, he's citing all of these,

the fact that like media outlets are defending him. He's like, case closed, you know, because Vox.com said that I'm right. That's an appeal to authority. That's not science either. And the idea that we're supposed, why is the, it's like, we have to choose between the debate me bro mentality and the hysterical quote believe science people

and they're both wrong but the belief science people are actually dangerous because they have actually been in charge and over the last three years we were not allowed to criticize people like hotas and he has been wrong about shit he was the one he trashed john stewart for talking about a lab leak which we now have very strong evidence happened because according to the wall street journal and who knows, I mean, the story just broke this week. We've known, I mean, please we've known forever, but according to the wall street journal, as of this week, the first reported case of COVID was someone who was at that fucking lab. And it's like, why weren't we allowed to talk about that? Because people like Hotez, wrapped in the cloak of science, were saying, no, I'm a priest and

you are not allowed to deny what I say is true. And that shit bothers me. Yeah. I mean, the story, it's fascinating because that lab, so what the Wall Street Journal published was basically, it was someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who in November 2019 got something that appears to be, who was working with coronaviruses, experimenting with coronaviruses, contracted something that appears to be COVID-19, one of the first cases of COVID-19. And that research was partially funded by an NIH grant, National Institute of Health grant, one of which was underwritten by peter hotez and there are some caveats here about you know the extent to which this funding like there was other funding coming from the chinese government too um and there was also i mean the the story

has been framed the peter hotez involvement in this has been framed as like Peter Hotez was funding gain of function research. He created it himself. He was in his lab making COVID. He was like math. Yeah. Yeah. And it seems like that might need to be nuanced a little bit because there was definitely research going on on coronaviruses in the Wuhan lab. It's not clear because there was like an NHS research freeze on gain of function research, supposedly between 2014 and 2017. It's not clear whether or not his grant overlapped in that period. The research could have been classified as gain of function, like whether or not they were trying to make gain of function just means making a virus more contagious, basically. they're trying to make gain of function just means making a virus more contagious basically having said that with all the caveats the optics are awful like the optics of look you some part of your research grant was going to fund work being done at this wuhan institute of virology

that then plausibly seems to be you know what led to the outbreak that, you know. Well, and you're trying to silence, you know, critique of it. And I have two thoughts here. So the first is just, even if, because I don't, I think it's important to say, like, we don't, we don't know for sure that, that COVID came from a lab. We don't. It seems all, like most of the evidence at this point that we have, not I want to say most, but there is a lot of compelling evidence. And this most recent one is, I mean, that to me seems like a smoking gun as, and I think most people are on board at this point that it is a smoking gun. But it could not be the case that having been said, we've known, we've had evidence. It's been suspicious from the beginning. It's been suspicious from day one.

it's been suspicious from the beginning. It's been suspicious from day one. And there is no, and who knows that more than anybody would have been Hotez. There was absolutely no reason that we should have been framed as crazy people for wondering about what was happening at the fucking coronavirus factory, a few, like a mile from where apparently coronavirus emerged by itself. The second thing is the gain of function stuff. I think one thing I really don't like on the, what's happening on the, on the right in reaction to what is perceived as leftist sort of policing of, of information in this way is like,

so gain of function research. And it's, this is what you do. It's, it's not like, I mean, who knows, maybe they were building some bioweapons over there,

but the reason that you would fund something like this is actually because you do care about getting ahead of pandemics. And you're trying to basically create really scary versions of the virus that you can then cure or work around or create vaccines for. You're trying to preemptively fix a problem that doesn't yet exist, but will eventually exist over a long enough time horizon. There are going to be other pandemics. And people have been worried about this for a really long time. The, I think the, the impulse behind this research is really good. It's very dangerous. I think we

do obviously need to have a sort of broader conversation about it. Now we have a bunch of labs. I remember I was at Boston university when they were building a level, I think it's, there are different levels of like the sort of scary labs. And I think it was like a level five or something, the highest. Huge conversation about it at the time. And you're sort of, you can either study these things or you cannot, but we have to, maybe we don't have to study them. This is how the vaccines get developed though. And sort of the, I mean, if. maybe we don't have to study them. This is how the vaccines get developed though.

It's a risk you're taking to sort of mediate a future risk and it's complicated. And as you mentioned earlier, like this is all this stuff requires nuance, which is hard to come by here, but certainly things like this, this is the thing that does not set at all from the pro-Hotez people. How do they not at least see that these failures on their part have completely undermined what is ostensibly their case, their entire position, which is that we should trust them. And it's like, you have to have humility and you have to be able to call someone like him out for lying about something. He was clearly going after someone for a reasonable opinion, knowing that it was reasonable. And that is really, I think, insidious and just really toxic to the entire conversation, way more so than RFK, who people look at and kind of, I mean, it's like a good debater. Like I would love for someone to debate him. I would love it. And I would love for it to not be Hotez. I want someone who knows their shit to go and have a real conversation with him in front of everybody for three hours and just

drill down on all of the evidence he has for things like, for example, HIV is a hoax. Like let's, or the fact that HIV gives you AIDS is a hoax. Like, let's really interrogate that position. I'm curious. I have a lot of questions about it myself. Yeah, no, definitely. And I think, you know, to your point, one of the issues with the framing of this entire debate about Hotez is that the real issue, it seems like with the lab leak is the biosecurity measures. Like why there's, you know, former, what is it, a former official in the health and human services department who came out and said, like, there are multiple studies that were coming out of NIH funded research in Wuhan that have alarmingly low biosecurity standards. So it might not be the case that,

like, you know, these scientists were nefariously creating the coronavirus so that they could release it to the world and like kill a bunch of people. What was more likely the case is that they were doing these experiments, the safety standards were subpar. And that, you know, led to this, this outbreak. The very, very early days of the pandemic, like I want to say it would have been February. pandemic, like I want to say it would have been February. I read an article in either the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post, which talked about, there was a mention of like a very brief mention of this, of like lab security issues. And it was like, before we polarized and couldn't talk about these things. This is a problem that people have been aware of for a while and people internally at, and I don't, I'm not sure which department would have been responsible for, for following this stuff. But there've been all sorts of reports about people

internally discussing this very issue. It's like the lab's just not safe. And, and that's the question that we should be talking about that that's the conversation we should be having. Like, like if we want to do research like this, first of all, do we want to do research like this? Or is it just beyond the pale? And there's not a right answer there. It's complicated and it requires a robust public debate among people who do know what they're talking about, but come at it from maybe different perspectives. And we have to make some kind of decision. And then if we decide to do it, we have to figure out how to do it more safely because clearly whatever we were doing before did not work. Yeah. No, definitely. Remains to be seen whether or not

we're a mature enough society to have one of those debates. I know. Yeah. It's like, why do I even offer? It's like, that's not going to happen. Like, that's just like, that's never going to happen. It's just like that's never gonna happen it's just gonna be chaos and pandemonium until the very end shit posting yeah yeah how do we survive like this it's a never-ending meme war you just gotta get it's just like you have to just maybe adapt it's like if it's gonna be if it's gonna be clown world you gotta fight within the laws of clown world you mentioned the memes it's like, if it's going to be, if it's going to be clown world, you got to fight within the laws of clown world. You mentioned the memes. It's like, you just need better memes. It's a war of memes. Like there's no, there's no point in lamenting the fact you just got a meme.

You just got a meme harder and longer and faster and stronger. I mean, I agree. I think this gets again to the old, old media, new media paradigm shift is like, we're applying old media rules of like this robust public debate that we think is going to happen with sane experts who are going to sit down and the public's going to listen with their notepad and then everyone's going to compare the pros and cons list and you know in good faith come to their conclusions we're actually what we need is like a meme war as you're saying or like people who are you know getting on podcasts and rhetorically equipped to go head to head with someone like RFK Jr. Right. That's what's gonna work, I think. So, yeah. Which again, like, in my opinion, does not seem like that,

like it would be that hard. I haven't really seen anyone, Joe Rogan in that podcast of his briefly pushed back on the Wi-Fi thing. Well, Wi-Fi radiation does all kinds of bad things, including causing cancer. Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer? Yeah, from your cell phone. I mean, there's cell phone tumors. I'm representing hundreds of people who have cell phone tumors behind the ear.

It's always on the ear that you favor with your cell phone. And we have the science. So if anybody lets us in front of a jury they it will be over you know what we said what is the number because a lot of people there's a lot of people with it they're glad less on it that's the kind of cancers that they get the cancer is not the worst thing they also you know it opens up I fight rate radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier and so all these toxic that are in your body can now go into your brain how does wi-fi radiation open up your blood brain barrier yeah now you're going beyond my uh my expertise but what there are

there are i'm going to use a number here and you're going to think it's hyperbole but it's not there are tens of thousands of studies that show the horrendous danger of wi-fi radiation like okay well finally we're getting somewhere with the idea that wi-fi destroys your blood-brain barrier and kills you or whatever it's like okay well we're all using wi-fi so this is like let's just start there like clearly we should be seeing way more cancer there should be some kind of crazy uptick since we've all adapted and i don't see evidence for that i could be wrong and listeners let me know if there's been some crazy uptick in cancer broadly across the country. He briefly pushed back. He was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wi-Fi gives you cancer. Let's unpack that for a minute. Jamie, pull it up. And it's like, there are studies. And that

was it. He was like, well, I guess you're right. Like, yeah, it looks like Google pulled up a bunch of cases. And I did this to myself. In our chat chat, I was like, whoa, like I'm, there are, he's not lying. There are, there are studies, but there are tons of counter studies as well. And it seems like it's like everything, a question of how much radiation you're being exposed to. So it's anyway, another nuanced methodology that we're probably not at risk from, but you can make seem really bad in a very clever way that maybe you even believe. Like, I don't really have a doubt that RFK Jr.

believes that Wi-Fi is killing people sort of left and right. I think that these things are just sort of mind traps. With a little bit of evidence in one direction, you can create a pretty elaborate palace of the idea in your own mind and get lost there. And once you really believe something, you don't want to entertain the counter evidence and have a nuanced belief about it because you become radicalized. I've dealt withized. I've dealt with it. I mean, we're all, this is a natural human thing, I think, is to become

really obsessed with something and then it's really hard to see outside of it. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess that's what the disinformation experts think they're protecting us from is like, they don't want us to become radicalized. Sure. If they were perfect, I would be, I would love the impulse. The problem is that they are also beholden to their own crazy ideas and they're also lost in their own palaces. But I also think there, I mean, I think that the disinformation experts are radicalizing more people paradoxically, right? It's like on some level, someone like me, I would never have been, I would not necessarily have been predisposed to thinking that

RFK Jr. was onto something with this blood barrier thing with the brain Wi-Fi. But if it's so repeatedly and strenuously suppressed by these people who claim they know what's best, then I'm going to get curious and want to look into it more. So it's- 100%. What happened%. What was that? Just when, before Elon took over Twitter, there was a fact-checking program on Twitter and they were using a third party and they would mark tweets as potentially misleading

or something like that. Every single one of those tweets that I saw that was marked as potentially misleading, I was more inclined to believe because of that label. I feel like the disinformation, it's so fraught. And like you said, Sanji, it's almost radicalizing to have somebody in your face in a way telling you, wait, what you're looking at, what you believe isn't real. This isn't real. I know best. That's really frustrating. And I think it just naturally engenders skepticism.

Yeah, we don't trust them anymore. And all of these things just contribute to that belief. And if they were really interested in assisting the information ecosystem right now, what they would be focused on is apologizing for all the things they got wrong and attempting humility because we can all see through it. Like we just know when you got something wrong and can't admit it. And if you can't admit that, it's like actually completely rational not to trust you then, because if you can't admit it, then I don't know. I don't know what else you're lying to me about. I know about the few things we've caught you in. I don't know about the rest of it. And so it's like, you have to fix if you're serious, if you really want to be educating the public, you have to be serious about things like this. And that's like, ultimately for me with Hotez, I actually started the week more defending him. My piece was like too nice to him.

I would later discover as the days went on. He's not acting in the best interest of the public, because if he were, he would have suggested immediately someone to go and debate RFK. And then rather than talk about all of the different media coverage that was fawning over him, he would have produced a very large article in the manner of a scientist taking apart in a very calm and reasonable way, all of the things that he thought were wrong. But I still haven't seen that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just, you get the sense these people are acting. I say these people, I mean, basically, the sort of people on the, what I've been calling the disinformation expert side, everything they're doing is creating conditions that are favorable to getting us to sort of buy

into the most radical conspiracy theories possible. And I also think another component of it is they're so humorless, like they have no sense of humor right like some of the shit that rfk jr says is is does sound crazy right and it would be there's like lots of potential i think a lot of this like sort of mainstream media the reason they don't do that well on social media is because they just don't know how to meme they don't know how to like post viral tweets essentially um and yeah i, it's like, there's so many opportunities for these people if they were just to put down their like

capital D disinformation hammer that they just, you know, keep bringing down to have some fun and be like, wait, look at this guy who's getting on Rogan and has kind of like, you know, I'm not saying you should make fun of his voice necessarily, but his voice is- Well, he blames it on vaccines. Oh has kind of like, you know, I'm not saying you should make fun of his voice necessarily, but his voice is. Well, he blames it on vaccines.

Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. Well, someone in his campaign hit me up after I wrote about him and was furious. And it was like a very long email that I was sent insisting that Xanax does in SSRIs do like so anti-anxiety medicine do. They are, in fact fact responsible for school shootings. She insisted, um, all of them, every school shooting is resultant of just, it's their school shootings would not exist were it not for anti anxiety medication. Um, and one of the other things that she mentioned in there was like, how dare you make fun of his voice? He got it. He got

it from a bad vaccine accident. And I was was like what the fuck is going on over here the wild email um and i was like listen i didn't respond but when it comes to his voice i'm like i'm not making fun of it let's just be honest about what that's gonna mean in a general election is like people are not gonna want to listen to it And I know you don't like the fact of the matter, but this is just reality. Welcome to it. I think we should wrap this one up. Final thoughts or none? Are we closing it? I'm good. I think that's good for me. Yeah. I think we're good. Have a good weekend, guys.