Pirate Wires - Google A.I. Has A Problem & Taylor Swift and Joe Biden’s Secret Plans

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

EPISODE #39: Welcome back to the pod! This week, we get right into the absolute insanity of Google’s Gemini A.I. Image Generator. Twitter erupted in activity earlier this week when people were using the AI, only to find that it was nearly impossible to generate a white person (despite historical inaccuracies.) We get into all of the hilariously absurd examples. Next up, what do Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and Joe Biden all have in common? Well clearly it’s their attempt to take over the election this year! (but also.. probably not.) We get in to the conspiracy of it all. Finally, Sanjana breaks down her piece on how a local government successfully ended homeless camps. Another fun one! Hope you enjoy! Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell Timestamps: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! Like & Subscribe 1:00 - Google Gemini Image AI Is Here - Why Does It Hate White People? 27:20 - The Taylor Swift Conspiracy 42:30 - Will Joe Biden Be Replaced As The Democratic Nominee?? 50:30 - How To End Homelessness 1:01:30 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe!

We should just do like a cold open, be like, I think Alexei Navalny had a good run. You could really not get Google to generate a picture of a white person. It like was hard-coded out of the universe. Maybe the best was an attempt to generate the Pope, which turned up not the Pope. It's speaking out of both sides of its mouth where it's like, where's the white people? And then it's like, I can't talk about race. Give me five ways black people can improve themselves. Of course, it doesn't answer. Give me five ways that white people can prove themselves. And the first one is overcoming

bias and prejudice, of course. There's clearly this very heavy-handed effort on the back end to correct for this perceived racism. And the irony of it is it's really racist. Welcome back to the pod, guys. Obviously, right out of the gate, we need to talk about Google's racist AI chatbot. The actual title of the piece, we just crashed a piece on this, wrote it in three hours after our Slack channels were like,

I mean, absolute red alert. The title is Google's AI is an anti-white lunatic. So a heartwarming tale. Where do I begin on this one? I think that, uh, maybe I just begin with the substance. So a couple of weeks ago, maybe like early February, actually Google releases the Gemini AI art generation tool. So for people kind of just tuning into the Pyrewire's universe, we've been covering this

for a while. There are a handful of competing large language models that people use to prompt art generation, as well as answers to questions and whatnot. But the strange thing about Google's tool is what people discovered, really, it was like yesterday. So this is, I guess, this is coming out Friday. So he's published on Wednesday.

It was Tuesday morning was the first time that people first started to realize that you could really almost not get Google to generate a picture of a white person. It just like was hard coded out of the universe. And so to get at this question, sort of really understand what Google was doing here. People began to prompt like sort of obvious historical things. I myself, I mean, I saw a lot of crazy shit on there that made no sense to me that seemed really like someone was trying to spread some fake news, which is really what I thought it was a journalist making up some nonsense about AI. And then I saw it was like the shit posters who were mad about it. And I'm like, oh, they're lying. They're making up memes or something. So I started prompting myself. I went to Google Gemini and I asked it to show me.

I had a few. I did American Founding Fathers. I did British royalty. I did like a 17th or 18th century French novelist. And what comes back are, I mean, it's like black people, it's Native Americans in these stereotypical sort of environments. Across the internet, you saw people sharing their own attempts at trying to get Google to generate a white person. There were medieval knights. There were Vikings. That one was really sick because they looked cool. They looked fantastic.

Matt, definitely pull that image up. There was a Roman gladiator. There was probably, I think it had to have been, there were a lot of great ones. I think maybe the best was an attempt to generate the Pope, which turned up not the Pope, shall we say. One was pretty good also. They tried, you know, you tried to do some real life ones. Like obviously we can't get any kind of, you know, historical representations. What about real life living people what about the founders of google um sergi brandon larry page two jewish dudes um and what you got were a couple of asian guys it was like the asian facification of those two guys though which was what do i how do i feel about am i disturbed i mean it's funny it's just like really clownish and funny trans facial it's the

here's what you would look like if you were black or chinese thing but like for all of human history yeah i mean there was now listen there was one way to get google to generate white people and that was when you asked it to generate images of people doing stereotypically black things, things that would be considered a bad black stereotype. For example, that would be like eating fried chicken. So that is how you get a family of white people around the table eating fried chicken. But that was pretty much the only way. By the way, this is not me saying that all black people eat fried chicken. I'm saying that is a stereotype that exists that Google has clearly tried to avoid. And so you found the one way to get white people on the screen. There's a lot to talk about here. There's the question of, first of all, the people running Google, obviously. Why are they

doing this? I think mechanically, it's interesting to get into how this is happening. It has to do with the prompts. I think there's an interesting piece on Timnit Gebru, who really has been totally vindicated. So Timnit, I've come after hard. She was the fired. She was not fired. She quit Google after Google accepted her. So Google accepts her resignation after she sort of famously accused Google of being racist and predicting that Google's AI was going to be racist. She, of course, believed famously that AI was being constructed to genocide all people of color.

It turns out it's like the AI is actually like Black Hitler. But she was nonetheless sort of directionally correct. It's totally racist. Again, getting into all the rest, but first, I want to just hear where your guys' heads are at. This for us, again, this was red alert. The chats blew up.

We saw every meme. It's been a wild ride. I want to check in. Where are you guys emotionally? What have you seen? What would you like to see? How are you feeling? I feel like it's funny, but it's also kind of scary.

Like I don't want to be histrionic, but now I understand when like black people are like, it's black erasure, you know? I'm like, oh, what's Google going to do? Like, is this the program now? Are we really going to change history and erase white people from it? It's kind of worrisome. Well, I mean, we've seen it happen. Despite the fact that it's hilarious.

You know, that is what pop culture already is. It's strange. It's typically though, like it's the Shonda Rhimes-ification of, of it, of like, of history though it's it you you know that it's not real um but this is supposed to be real which is what makes it i think extra eerie uh and you're sort of i mean it's like what do you do with that when you know that there are people on the other side of this program who no matter what you prompt have coded in prompts to keep you from seeing images of white people. And they do this for diversity's sake, is what I think they were saying. They were like, they're not diversity's sake. They want to avoid harmful stereotypes about all the different people. And God, I'm actually at a loss. I'm sitting here trying to steal money because I

don't know how you see this, how you see the founding fathers in Native American headdresses and not just automatically know that you're on the wrong side of this. That's really crazy. Sajana, what are you thinking? Well, I don't know if this is a steel man, but I do think an explanation, something that kept coming to mind for me when I was seeing all the prompts, my favorite one was someone asked to see an ethnic brit and i just kept giving them pictures of indian guys um but i kept thinking about how a few years ago there was this like massive moral panic over algorithmic bias and like racism in google search results and there were a number of studies that came out one was was published in ProPublica, I think, that was basically suggesting that this machine learning legal tool was biased against black people because it suggested that they were more likely to recommit crimes.

There was another thing that suggested that Google search, like its search feature was racist because if you looked up black teenagers, you'd get like mugshots. like its search feature was racist because if you looked up black teenagers, you'd get like mugshots. But if you looked up white teenagers, you'd get, I don't know, like teenagers at the movie theater or something. And I remember when I was in college and I was taking some computer science classes, there was a section where we had to talk about this algorithmic bias. And it was part of this AI ethics. And basically the framing was, you know, if you sort of, you know, you're a CS major and you don't really care about social issues. And so you just, you know, create this LLM or this, you know, other generative model and you train it on a massive data set, but you're not really thinking about societal issues. You're going to bake in all of

this racism and sexism because we live in a racist and sexist world. And this is at Stanford. And I remember we had to do these like writing exercises basically where we'd say, you know, we commit to in future lines of work, actively working to root out this racism and early, you know, coming up with strategies to root out this racism. And I think that this Google thing is a really clear example of that hyper correction and action where you basically can clearly see, I mean, we don't know mechanically exactly how it happened. We don't know. I don't think their algorithm is open source. So we don't really know like what, what ways they're filtering the prompts, but there's clearly this very heavy-handed effort on the back end to correct for this perceived racism. And the irony of it is it's really racist.

I think it's such a good point that it's the perception. Yeah, it's like they are correcting for the perception of bias and in so doing they have to inject it themselves. On the prompt side, I do think it's worth maybe trying trying to understand how this is happening so you go to you go you go to google and you ask to see an image you give your prompt it seems that they have coded not into the model but into the interface a prompt that you don't see that has a bunch of rules on like the number of white people that you see which is a number close to zero um i think it is a prerogative or directive rather to interject quote diversity and that diversity does seem to come with some kind of racial hierarchy where black people are first and

then native americans like stereotypical like we're talking guys and giant addresses and shit um and then asians and then among asians they're sort of a subset but i also saw like uh muslim women exploring the arctic um you know in the 18th century and things like this like they have a lot of diverse they have a lot of quote diversity um just not actual white people and uh i also think you, based on all the images we saw, it feels because you can't actually, you know, you start by just saying, give me a picture of some people at a mall or something. And none of them are white. And you're like, oh, that's interesting. I don't know.

Sometimes there are malls where there are no white people. And then you go to history, like historical, like what about the American Revolution or something? white people and then you go to history like historical like what about the american revolution or something and it's like they're you know all women of color with my shit with like rifles and shit you're like okay something is like deeply amiss here um it seems to me so that so then you're like okay well let me let me just try and get a white you're using the word white you're like show me white people it's telling you it can't do that and uh it gives you reasons why it can't do that and it has to do with typical boilerplate diversity stuff and harmful stereotypes and things like this but what it seems to me is that somewhere in that prompt are explicitly and it has to be like anti-white language people who look a certain

way are not supposed to be on there um again, as you mentioned into your points, we don't know. I have yet to... Hopefully, guys, if you work at Google and you're on this small team of crazy people who just produced this tool, I would love to talk to you. Off the record is fine. I just want to understand. Maybe I'm totally wrong here. Open my mind, explain to me why it's important that we erase history in this way. But that's how it's working. And that's how they all work, which kind of, this one is almost helpful because it was so clownish, right? Like you see how it's this, this is so bad that you're reminded while you're searching like,

oh, I'm being manipulated here. And in a way that's refreshing because the truth is every piece of the internet's architecture is manipulative and AIs, they have to be. I don't know if they have to be. It's like, if they weren't, they would just be a raw nerve that you would be touching all the time. You would see the truth. Nobody wants you to see what that is. The truth is sort of politically incorrect, I guess. And so everybody has some kind of set of rules that are existing on top of the prompts to filter things out. You start to think about a future, maybe 10 years from now, naturally, where

these tools, these AI models that you go and you ask in natural language, show me this, show me that, what happened in the year 1545 when X, Y, and Z happened, this replaces search. If this replaces search and this becomes the lens through which we look at the entire world, and that lens is manipulated and shaped by just a very small handful of people in Silicon Valley who all have the exact same warped ideology, that means that... warped ideology uh that means that well i don't know exactly what that means but it seems it seems fucking bleak um river what is your how what have you been experiencing while uh toying around with our new history i mean it's uh it's this sort of hamilton Hamilton vision of world history where it's like, anybody can be any race.

I asked it to generate something and I asked it why they were all black and Chinese. And it said, we can't, it said, basically we can't talk about race. They're like speaking out. It's speaking out of both sides of its mouth where it's like,

here's a diverse set of people. And it's like, not it's like, where's the white people. And then it's like, of both sides of its mouth where it's like here's a diverse set of people and it's like not it's like where's the white people and then it's like i can't talk about race it's like okay but aren't you already yes just make them diverse why i didn't ask like i i don't know it is this future i do worry um about everything just sort of looking like a college brochure i thought we had kind of moved past i feel like tech is always a little bit late to like art and aesthetics in a way um because we kind of gone back to like hot white people in the culture instead of it being like you know like every ad was like a fat person and then somebody in a wheelchair somebody with vitiligo it was just

like this weird thing that felt kind of like a freak show like it actually felt more disrespectful than inclusive in some ways um and that was just like every American Eagle ad and now we're kind of back to just like hot lights and hot people of all races but you could but

also hot white people which you just kind of weren't allowed to have an ad like in uh these sort of like high art sort of like advertising and stuff like that for a long time i think yeah i think you see it i think it was a notorious secret kind of went back to hot skinny people rather than um like realistic body types for the lingerie walking thing, I think was one of them. But I don't know. I was just in Target the other day and this is not true. The ads are like, they're giving cultural revolution.

That's what you're getting in the Target ads. I know another way you can get white people off Gemini is you ask it for Ukrainians. Yeah. I saw that one. That one was hilarious. And also, if you want white people doing communism, that one works too. Right.

It was Ukraine versus Russia, which brings us to the next part, which is that not only was it this kind of racial, obsessed racial lens that they were kind of injecting into every aspect of our lives but um it was a political worldview to have so when you when you ask for pictures of a Ukrainian and then a Russian parade you see Ukraine is like smiling happy beautiful white woman flowers in her hair surrounded by other beautiful white people just like that and then the russians also white but totally fucking evil and monstrous and marching like you know hitler status and i've been separate from the political context here i'm really not trying to turn um this into a monologue on ukraine it's very clear what the Google engineer's perspective on the Ukrainian war is. And that, again, if it's just one model, one language model, if you have one,

it's a huge deal. If you have a bunch, if you have, let's say, three or four, which is where we're at now, that should be less of a big deal. You should be able to go to OpenAI or something else and get a better approximation of reality. But again, finally, on this point, I do want to just hit it one more time. We at least roughly know what the Google people are trying to force down our throats. We have no idea what the rules are at OpenAI. And that is very alarming to me, especially as these things become much more popular, which I just, I don't see a world in which they don't.

It's just, they're so good. It's so much better than search. Except one weird idea I had, and I'd like to know what you guys think about this. While I was working on this, I thought to myself, man, what we really need, I hate to be the regulation guy, and Eric, one of our colleagues, pushed back and I've moderated my position somewhat. But what I was asking for, I was like, what we really need are citations. I want to see every single piece of information that this model was trained on to get to this exact image. What are

all the images it's referencing? If it's a piece of information, just an answer, you know, a text-based answer, I want to see citations. I want to see what exactly it is drawing the information from. If it's 10 or a hundred, whatever, show it to me. That way I can sort of judge how I feel about the information. You know, like I can decide, do I trust those sources or not? Because right now it's a black box. And then I got to thinking, what if that is a reason that these things don't take off in a huge way? Is that not a natural human impulse to wonder where the information's coming from? And on Google, you Google something super manipulative, they're removing all sorts of sources and weighing all sorts of sources they preferred at the top,

but you at least know exactly where they're coming from, you know exactly what human they're coming from. And that just makes you feel, even if you don't like the person, you feel like, okay, well, I at least understand that. Is that not maybe a weakness of the black box AI? I think it's just too soon to tell how people are gonna behave with this stuff.

But that's one reason perhaps it might not take over everything. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I don't use ChatGPT very much precisely because it just tells me shit. And I don't know if it's true or not. I don't know why it's telling me that, where I can look for more. I don't know. it's telling me that where i can look for more like i don't i don't know i just i think that search is honestly better if you know how to work search in like a good sort of investigative way if you're willing to go to like page three you know or something um even wikipedia is better

for just like finding general general information which i feel like is all that they can really give you um i don't i don't know i i just i haven't i think they're cool but i i like the llms i've never really found them to be all that interesting or useful for me personally i think like what you said, Solana, about if Google just starts. So I think Google images are probably in general, some sort of liability. Like it's like not, it's, there's like a non-trivial liability for Google just to have Google images at all. Right. Cause they have to host this content. If section 230 gets tweaked at all, images on Google might be a little bit even more of a liability. And so if they decide, well, we're going to use Gemini for the first 20 results of all of our Google image searches, I think that's where

they could use that product and it could actually reach a lot of people. River, I think you're, I don't know where you're going with this, but I think you're pretty much right. There aren't that many, I don't think Midjourney, Google, Gemini using for art, I don't think that's the killer app. And I don't, because a lot of people don't,

they don't, I mean, I try to create my own art sometimes and I'm like, I don't have an idea about what I want to create because I'm not an artist. So it's just kind of like difficult for me to do that. I was listening to All In podcast yesterday and they were talking about Sora, which is OpenAI's new text prompt to video generator. And Friedberg, I like this podcast a lot, so I'm not ragging on them. And Friedberg, I like this podcast a lot, so I'm not ragging on him. But Friedberg was like, yeah, the next generation of video games and content is going to be people telling the video game or Netflix or whatever what content they want to watch. And I'm like, dude, when I play video games and when I sit down and watch Netflix, I don't want to think about what I want to watch.

I don't want to figure out what is going to be in the video video game before i play video games i just want to play the video game you know like then it becomes just frustrating because you're just like no i don't want that character i want this character and it's super tedious so i suppose my point is like i don't think i don't think this current iteration of gemini is going to rewrite history but i think think if they use it, you know, for example, to replace Google images, that's when it gets interesting and scary. But I was also thinking this is what you were saying about, you know, as long as one LLM in the space is not like Google, then we're fine. That's a lot like how Twitter is compared to the rest of the mainstream media ecosystem,

where, you know, for a while, it was kind of scary, where when before Elon took over Twitter, where you couldn't really get a mainstream opinion that didn't sound like every other mainstream opinion out there and was just regime propaganda. And today, you have at least one outlet, and that's very powerful and good for us to go to. So that outlet by existing drags the others yeah into a hundred percent balanced place because it has it has to kind of contend with all the new information i will say you know to finish an earlier thought on the evolution of all this stuff you know really huge problem if only one ai dominates everything less of a problem if a handful do with that handful we still don't know how we're being

manipulated i feel that way about twitter right like it's still not entirely clear not a clear it's not clear at all how we're being manipulated on on this or that platform and how these things are affecting us and with the prompts at least I would like to see exactly what they're adding to the prompts. They don't want to show us the data that these LLMs were trained on. I think that demanding we see what they're filtering from us is an easy request. And then I just got to thinking, I don't really believe that there's a way to make these things more trustworthy. I think that there's always going to be manipulation. And so really the only defense that we have is more of them rather than one of them.

We have to just make sure that we're not accepting. And right now there's a huge push. I think it's framed as a push for thoughtful AI regulation. People going to Washington saying, please regulate me for the good of the world i just i'm a good person uh do not trust any corporation that is asking for regulation that says to me they are trying to uh create a regulatory capture they want to be a monopoly in that space and like that works in some places you know like a monopoly steel company or whatever i don't give a fuck like maybe that's great for the world companies where like you need them to

learn about the your entire existence to sort of conduct a democracy um you can't have one company determining what is and is not true that's really really really dystopian and terrifying so i think we have to watch it again as as you know, to all of your points, like maybe this is a good point. Maybe it doesn't take off at all, but in the meantime, here we are looking at a brand new technology that does seem pretty powerful and totally ideologically captured.

So keep your eyes peeled. I came across a picture of two prompts, both from the same person. The first one was, give me five ways black people can improve themselves. And of course it doesn't answer. And then give me five ways that white people can improve themselves.

And there's a long answer. And I think the first one is overcoming bias and prejudice of course but that was one of my favorite different screenshots that i came across on twitter but that's a really interesting tell i think because it shows that there's like this explicit concern about purported anti-black bias that's somehow been like very explicitly well not only that but an obsession with white people like their entire if you think about this entire prompt maze that

they've created it's it's essentially obsessed with white people it is like separate from the racism against white people think of it all which i do think is true it's like they only see white people they think about white people every day the problem of white power of white people think of it all which i do think is true it's like they only see white people they think about white people every day the problem of white power of white people the quote superiority of white people like that's what they're giving that is the direction that they're going the white person is the elephant in the room here it feels like an elephant yeah it's all they care about is white people and um that is i mean again like i've talked about this before like the almost sort of fetishistic nature of a lot of the really hardcore radical politics like it feels like that to me it's like the the obsession with it feels i don't know we're not gonna get the weird sex stuff right now but um it's very adjacent to that for me um speaking of adjacent to weird

sex stuff let's talk about and and this is, I mean, the Superbowl is old hat at this point, but we got to talk about the Taylor Swift conspiracy. Um, I wrote about that this week for pirate wires. Um, and you should definitely go check out my full piece. It is long and has multiple stages and is sort of almost like that conspiracy theory picture dude itself. Like I'm connecting a lot of dots, shall we say? So we've got this Travis Kelsey, Taylor Swift romance

that buds up, gosh, I don't even know, a few months ago. I want to let, so either Sanjana or River, are either of you kind of well-versed in the buildup to this? I would love for one of you to take this. Well, Travis Kelsey, he's kind of, he was dating this black Instagram model for a long time. He's kind of like a swagged out white boy.

There's not really a word that we're allowed to use for him anymore, but it's. I know what it is. But yeah, China's putting these people in camps, I guess. That's what you can say. Anyway, so he kind of like became i think a little like instagram famous he has a podcast with his brother so he's sort of this cool white football player he starts dating taylor swift he got vaccinated and apparently this is a problem. And then also Taylor Swift is apparently being courted by the Biden White House to endorse Joe Biden, as she did last time around. world economic forum soros controlled plot to vaccinate and uh destroy america through woke

ism or something it's it's completely like insane and kind of hard to follow you i mean you wrote about it so you probably honestly no more than i do there's it well it's so the conspiracy is kind of complicated i think the the core of the conspiracy is like this relationship exists to propel Taylor into a massive position of fame to then have the deep state assist Travis Kelsey's team to win the Super Bowl, which would itself propel her to the zenith of her fame, at which point she would endorse Joe Biden and win the presidency for Joe Biden. That's the baseline conspiracy. There are slight variations, one being that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey are both gay and their beards for each other. Very popular, increasingly popular on the right wing, which has had a problem with Taylor.

It's funny because I remember, I'm old enough to remember when the left said that Taylor Swift was vaguely white supremacist and she was popular among white supremacists and that was a problem. It quickly turned around and now she herself is the bane of the white supremacist. She sees everything that's bad according to the very far right. But the sort of rough nut, yeah, is that she and Travis, well, really she is going to help Joe Biden win. So the deep state has orchestrated all of this. It's a fraud relationship and the game, the team should never have won the Super Bowl. In fact, Levesque sort of hinted as much himself. So that's the point where you sort of start to look at and be like, whoa, this is not just a crazy person on Twitter or even what I really thought when I first started hearing about this, which was that it was totally made up and not a real conspiracy. I assumed it was like left wing people trying to make the right wing look crazier than they actually were. But it is one in five Americans believe some version of this conspiracy theory, according to a recent poll. It also gets crazier. I mean, it depends on how deep down the rabbit hole do you go.

There is a whole satanic version of it and taylor is steeped in this sort of strange number 13 lore so i mean you could google this you really should just read my piece if you want like the full thing um but you had at the super bowl her friend ice spice wearing an upside down cross and doing what they said were like deep some kind of demon hand gestures. Um, and there's, she did do a demon.

She did a weird devil thing. I saw that. Did we see, did they, did they scrub it out yet? Okay. I don't think they scrub. I mean, she did a weird thing.

She did a weird thing. Um, there is a sense that perhaps like the elites are these baby-sacrificing, vaguely sex-trafficking, literally Satan-worshiping, Illuminati-type people, and she's one of them. And there are many variations here. But I got to thinking, because the conspiracy is funny, but it's also interesting in that like most conspiracy theories, most really popular conspiracy theories, it seems to be sort of kind of wrong, but directionally correct.

In one way, really, what it seems to do is correctly identify the coordinates of power. And in this case, that would be not Joe Biden, but his handlers. Joe Biden is clearly seen out, right? He's not running anything. Clearly, there are people behind him who are just doing the day to day sort of like running of the country. I mean, he didn't even tweet, right? He put up a tweet about the conspiracy himself. And it's like, nobody thinks that Joe Biden knows about the Taylor Swift conspiracy. Nobody. Nobody thinks that. He wasn't even awake when that was posted.

So we know that he's being handled, shall we say. And I think that's maybe really what the conspiracy is about. River, you and I were talking about this a little bit because I was like, I want you to push back. Am I wrong? What is the... Is that right? Do conspiracies usually right to conspiracies

usually or popular conspiracies usually indicate the courts at power? We have a handful of examples. It's like Kennedy and Maryland being off by the CIA. You've got FDR knowing about Japanese internment. And it goes back and back and back. It does seem like they usually are sort of like wrong on the details, but right about who's in power. I mean, I think that it comes from like a suspicion of power where people sort of fill in the gaps of what they don't know. I think that so this is perhaps driven by people not understanding why Taylor Swift is as massively popular as she is. Like it kind of seems crazy a little bit that she, she's like creating earthquakes with her crowds or something. I don't know.

I read something about this. Like it all comes like secondhand and it does seem sort of like demonic a little bit. She's like, I don't know. I, right. Cause she can't even dance it's yeah very weird have you ever seen a video of her like trying to move and like especially if you try to do like a sexy move it's not flattering i'm gonna tell you i might call myself a swifty but

yeah 1989 bangers only what is the taylor swift demo is it just gay people no no i don't know no no no no it would be girlies like taylor swift has her girly army of all ages not yeah i don't think gay men is the death 1989 was a banger for gay men and i think a lot of gay men flirted with when she went through a bad girl era it was the uh what was that one that came out right at was like after kanye and uh and kim turned the tables on her and america decided they hated her for a minute she came back it was like called enemies or what was it come on it was the era it was like her bad reputation reputation it was like she came out she's like i'm a villain now and everyone was like but nobody bought it it's so because she she's's like a Taylor Swift is like a girl you went to high school with.

And I think that people are like, why? Cause she is like the most powerful cultural figure in America. And it kind of, it doesn't seem to make sense because you look at her and you're like, Taylor from algebra class. You know what I mean? Like it's just,

it doesn't really. Yeah. I think maybe that's what i think it's also anytime you bring in like politics in the vaccine that also drives people crazy it's one of the weirder ones because i it's there's no clear normally i can figure out exactly why people believe what they believe about a conspiracy theory but with her it's so it's oh pure vibes i think like there's not even like they can't even point to like a thread that you can kind of pull on you know with like some of the 9-11 stuff it's like why did so many people

sell stocks on that day and i don't know like you know two claims three towers islamic efficiency like you know whatever you don't mean there's like stuff where you can be like yeah that is a little weird but like with the taylor thing it's just like yeah i don't know she just has like millennial white women by the throat i don't i can't really explain why but she does and um they probably would vote for biden if she told them to well they did they she already endorsed them in 2020 uh in him in 2020 and she famously was like get out the vote and there was this you know record-breaking number of people who went and registered to vote or something um the vaccine thing you keep referencing is funny this is travis her soon-to-be husband i

would say i don't think They're not engaged yet. They will be. Taylor has to. I mean, it's like she can't, people are too bought into this relationship at this point. She can't have another one pulled out from the rug for people. But he gets paid, I think, by Pfizer. He's done commercials for the vaccine. He sort of made it a minor part of his brand. I've seen, who's the other, I'm not like a big sports news guy, but there's the other sports guy who got in trouble for being anti-vaccine, Aaron Rodgers.

I didn't have a crazy game. And, you know, Mr. Pfizer, we kind of shut him down a little bit and have, you know, his like crazy impact game. Obviously he had, you know, some yards and stuff. So that was part of, that was certainly part of it. The thing about them being gay is interesting

to me too because travis kelsey doesn't strike me as gay taylor swift doesn't strike me as gay she just struck me as asexual like i'm not sure like i she kind of it's giving like barbie doll down there or something like there's nothing actually going on because i don't i don't know like i've listened to i have listened to her music and there just doesn't seem to be any it's very like 13 year old girl type vibes even as a woman in her 30s now it just doesn't there doesn't seem to be a lot of like depth there either like sexually emotionally like it's all very like shallow and maybe that's just because i like i was like alana gay like it's like a like born to die came out when i was like 14 and so i grew up with this just like listening to that sort of stuff from like female artists where it's

like i want to fuck like a 40 year old trucker or whatever and like that's the song and i was like yeah i get that but then taylor swift is just like in the eighth grade still and maybe that's because she got famous too fast like she is like in the eighth grade that sends me to the i just die every time is band-aids don't fix bullet holes like i just i can't believe she gets away with this shit that's crazy to me that's a she's yeah she's like but the songs are catchy um i also think it's interesting that people would react the way they do given the aesthetics of her and travis seem to correspond pretty like one-to-one with what the right wing wants i mean she's she's discarded all of the effeminate artsy boys um who say the right things and now she's with the kind of goofy giant man who wins the super bowl like that i i think maybe it was almost even that was

clocked as really suspicious it's like you don't go after those kind of guys you're not this kind of woman we know what kind of woman you are this must be a plot you know you're trying to get us to do something or whatever but just at its face value like what she best get married are they gonna have kids like these seem to be things that the conservatives wanted um am i totally off here i'm like the just like the aesthetics of it no the aesthetics of it are perfect and i guess maybe that's what what they think the side because they keep saying psyop when i think they actually mean marketing but like they believe it's an actual government concocted information weapon like they're all in on it they really i would love to believe it was i mean i

dug in and they people believe this shit like yeah maybe that maybe that's the thing though is that because they are just like this um sort of norman rockwell uh white couple it's just like the jock and the blonde girl or whatever and that's it's too perfect and we can like, those people shouldn't be telling you to vote Democrat. It should be some like blue haired fat, like monstrosity telling you to vote Democrat. It's more dangerous, isn't it? If it's someone who's compelling to you aesthetically, then it's like, oh, wow. I mean, we're used to being told that working out is right wing.

If those dynamics change and suddenly the playing feels a little more even and you have to actually make a case for what you want rather than be running against the craziest people alive, maybe that is a threat. Maybe Taylor has some power. To her credit and to the credit of the people in, I don't know, the office, the deep state office who concocted this plan. Donald Trump himself seems nervous. As this was going on, he's sort of like Googling around. And I saw that his office had responded to this. Like, yeah, if Taylor comes out and then does X, Y, and Z, we're going to have to do A, B, and C.

They were thinking about strategies to get ahead of it in a way that, of course, Donald Trump takes this stuff seriously. That he's exactly the candidate who is like fuck now taylor's in the game what were the plans like who are they gonna get they didn't reveal their plans they did not i i don't i they're like we gotta get lana del rey to endorse us we gotta like split the vote i i think it's i don't think they know i think that trump's at a loss i think he's a little bit nervous about how he's going to take down Taylor Swift

at the zenith of her power. She could. My conspiracy is that because Biden is dying, actually, he's already dead. If somebody's telling you Joe Biden is alive, they're fucking lying to you. He's dead. Spiritually.

Mentally. And at the DNC they are going to replace him and they could replace him with Taylor Swift it would be the smartest thing they could do they could have like a 10,000 year reign you know what I mean like they could actually

create like an American aristocracy her and Travis Kelsey could have kids like they would just it would be like the Kennedys but forever until one of them becomes an anti-vaxxer then they shut it down you know but are they

going to replace Biden is that really do we think that's going to happen I think yeah they if they might not just because they're so like the Democrats they're like battered housewives or something like they just they're just like yeah we'll take it we'll lose again we'll eat like they're really not as machiavellian as i think republicans like to think that they are and

they're very hierarchical hierarchical in a way. I think a lot of people are too... Nobody wants to make the first move and be like, we got to get rid of this guy. But I think if things keep going badly, I think that they might actually replace him. Because you're seeing... Ezra Klein wrote something about it in the New York Times about how, yeah, they got to replace him. And I'm like, if you got that in the New York Times

from Ezra Klein like that's not, cause he's like the total, like, you know, Neil of Tuck. We talked a little bit about Stewart last week and this is, that was the signal for me. It was Stewart aggressively going after Biden's, I mean, he's an agent for the DNC, but he's smart. And he's saying, you know, you can't win if you run him. And so his entire monologue to me seemed like it was him grabbing the DNC by the shoulders and shaking it and saying like, you are going to lose to Trump unless you replace this man with someone who is young, like younger than 50, younger than 60. Like he has to be replaced. And then the New York Times, yes, Ezra was published, but the New York Times has been reporting to the point where I see leftists, well, not really leftists, regular left of center

people. Leftists are all like, we want to replace him with a communist and they're mad about Palestine. But left of center people are kind of frustrated with the Times for writing too many pieces about his age. They're comparing it to, I've seen multiple comparisons now to going after Hillary's emails, which is like, first of all, that was illegal. Second, this is nothing like that. This man is not running for president yet. You have a chance to replace him and to replace him with someone who can actually win. I really just think it seems like the rational thing. And yet people are telling me that this is just what people say when they don't like Biden. And I see, I don't know. I think that they have to, but I don't know.

Brandon, what do you think? Who are they going to replace Biden with? Who is the number one contender? Gavin Newsom. I think Gavin Newsom is the most obvious optionender newsome i think i think gavin newsome is the the most obvious option um i have heard people say really crazy shit and this i don't believe but i i've heard people talk a lot about michelle obama for some reason i think is the one that comes up which makes no sense like she hasn't there's no way in hell i'm again. No. Can't run again. I think Michelle would actually be an okay, not actually be okay for them, because I think enough time has passed where some people sort of have fond memories

of the Obama administration, and she was kind of, she was never really, her whole thing was just like fat shaming kids or whatever. She wasn't like stupid. She kids or whatever like yeah like stupor she wasn't like yeah yeah yeah she wasn't like launching the drones in yemen or whatever like she wasn't like doing any of the stuff that upset people so i mean i mean maybe but honestly any the ironically the only person that they that wouldn't help them is if cop is if they replace them with kamala which would be like the obvious choice because she's the vice president but she's just so

unlikable and weird that uh i don't i don't even think that would work but just like a generic democrat they could literally just like go to congress put everyone's name in a hat and just pick someone out they were like yeah this random just just get like a random white guy from like the midwest or something and he would probably win just because people were like oh this guy seems like normal he doesn't seem senile and it would probably work what's what's up with bernie is he is he just done he's not he's too old he's you can't replace biden with an isn't bernie older than biden but he feels yeah he has he said that he's not going to run again? Can he speak?

He's like 90. He's 95. Isn't he bedridden at this point? This man is... No, he's not bedridden. They're not running... They're not replacing like ancient Biden with like a more ancient...

If he's not older than Biden, I would be shocked if Bernie is younger than Biden. That seems crazy to me. What are the odds? What do we think? Newsom versus Trump, who wins? I think Newsom wins. Newsom.

Really? Yeah. Yeah, I think that he's like this really underrated candidate. He's very smart in a debate. He is more moderate than people realize because his state is so insane. And I could see him being very difficult for trump to be because trump has his baked in audience but i think trump's really relying on how just how

feeble joe biden is like right now you have tons of democrats who are just like that man is not as river said he's not alive like this is we gotta we gotta we gotta just call a spade a spade at some point i think yeah i think newsom is underrated yeah i just think newsom i mean i don't like him at all um but he's super cynical i think he would definitely moderate his policies um as much as he needed to to win the presidency and he's also i think pretty likable like he was much more likable than ron desantis in the debate they had i thought thought. And I think that's an important factor. And he's, you know, looks vital and is fairly attractive. And so I think that, you know, those sort of superficial qualities could probably be the edge he needs because so

many people just hate Trump. So, yeah, I think Newsom, if the Democrats were smart, I think that they would basically kick Biden, you know, send him to the nursing home and, and get Newsom the nomination. Is there, there's a strategic, there's like a timing thing here, right? You don't want to, you don't want to announce that Biden's not going to run now. I think that has probably has something that like, there's gotta be a time or a strategic reason or, or a time that they would actually choose this and it's not now. Like when would be the opportune time to announce?

At the convention, you wouldn't want a race. You would want the delegates choosing and you just control them behind the scenes if you can. I don't know how much control they have over their party. It's going to be a massacre if they actually do a debate between Trump and Biden because Trump is alive. And even when he does see now shit,

like it just seems funny and part of his personality. I don't know if you guys saw when he released those tacky ass shoes and he was like, are you guys sneaker heads? We got any sneaker heads here? You're all sneaker heads. You're sneaker heads, right? Does everybody in the room consider themselves a sneakerhead? I think so. incumbents they're both incumbents but i think that people when they look back now with the

trump administration i mean libs obviously they're like evil but like i think for a lot of people who maybe weren't or just like casually pay attention to the news like they're gonna see trump again they're gonna be like oh he's funny and then they're gonna be like how bad really was it during the trump administration they're like i got two checks in the mail with his name on them during the Trump administration. They're like, I got two checks in the mail with his name on them. And like, I don't know. Was it really that bad?

And I feel like people are going to be like, yeah, probably not. I mean, COVID sucked, but I guess that wasn't really his fault. I don't know. I think that time passing is like actually to his benefit. I want to get to Sanjana,

your piece that you just put out today. We only got a little bit of time left. I think it's a great piece. Why don't you just take me through. We're going to take you down to San Francisco. Speaking of Gavin Newsom, we're going to take you to the city that he helped destroy and is never, ever going to suffer the consequences for. He somehow just skates by. Tell us about the homeless encampments and

the whole strategy that you outlined today. Yeah. So the piece is basically about a successful legal strategy that has managed to clear a massive homeless encampment. I mean, anyone who's been following the homeless issue in the West Coast knows that there have been this series of legal cases brought mainly by nonprofits. So like the ACLU and the National Homeless Legal Center, I think it's called, where essentially these nonprofit lawyers have gotten a bunch of homeless people together who have been cited for like having tents in the streets. Um, and they've managed to successfully sue cities to prevent them from clearing the tents. So if you've heard about like this injunction in San Francisco, that's supposedly not letting city officials clear the tents. This is what it's referring to.

There's this really long, uh, now legacy of cases in the ninth circuit, uh, which is the West coast that are supposedly preventing cities from clearing the encampments. But it turns out that there is a successful legal strategy that basically gets around these injunctions. Because believe it or not, cities are not, none of these cases, none of these rulings say that cities have to permit people to put their tents in the streets to defecate on sidewalks to use meth in the open to have prostitution tents i mean the stuff that happens in these encampments all over the west coast is insane and a lot of it happens like it's really i can't i can't believe what we have allowed to happen.

Yeah. So to give a little bit of specific detail, I mean, basically what happened was in Phoenix, there was this thousand plus tent encampment. And essentially, you know, the city said, OK, we can't clear the tents because of these laws, these court cases that are preventing us from clearing encampments. They're based on this really weird interpretation of the Eighth Amendment that says that this is cruel and unusual punishment to clear homeless people's tents. And so we're just going to have to let these people live here. And so, you know, this is where there was a prostitution tent. There was all this insane stuff happening. They found like a burned body in a dumpster. I mean, really awful like crimes happening. And so a bunch of residents got together who had been like materially affected by the encampments.

And they contacted a law firm and they sued the city for permitting public nuisances. They said, part of your requirement as a city is to not allow these kind of things to happen. If someone sets up a boombox outside your house and is blasting music 24-7, you could call the police and get them cleared because they're creating a noise disturbance, public nuisance. They won in court despite all of these other activist lawsuits. And Phoenix had to clear the encampments. And so essentially, this is a model, I think, for how people who want to get encampments cleared can force cities to do it. Because cities are essentially hiding behind these injunctions and saying oh you know we can't do anything we can't clear the encampments obviously they can they did it during when she visited san francisco but that itself it becomes part of the law like it becomes part of the case

right we know that you can do it you're just choosing not to do it uh another thing that's interesting is just that original or interesting to me is that original court ruling, which I don't believe it's been kicked to the Supreme Court yet because Gavin Newsom keeps asking for it to be kicked. He wants the Supreme Court to look at this law because he knows that nobody in California is going to shut it down, but the Supreme Court absolutely will. And so you have this really interesting case where a Democrat, who everyone thinks is like the most left wing guy that could ever possibly exist. He wants to clear this shit. He wants he he because he wants to be president. So he wants to fix this problem before he runs. He is asking the Supreme Court to pick up this

case because he knows it's not constitutional. He knows that cleaning up a crazy-ass drug encampment is not the same thing as cruel and unusual and punishment. That's just a crazy example of judicial overreach. And so if it does go to the Supreme Court, I think that would end it overnight. That would just be the end of this. So the Supreme Court is going to hear the original case that set this precedent is called Martin versus Boise, and that's from 2018. The Supreme Court is going to hear a case that's based on Martin v. Boise, Grants Pass v. Oregon in April. And they're going to decide on it. I think they're going to release their decision at the end of June.

And it's expected they're going to overrule it because it's based on such an insane and unusual interpretation of the eighth amendment that there's no way it's gonna um most people i've spoken to don't think it's gonna hold up um but i will say there's a little bit of a sinister dimension here because even if these cases get overturned city officials aren't going to be required to clear injunction to clear encampments they're just not going to have this legal barrier where you know people can cite this martin versus boise case and like sue them to stop them from clearing them um and i think ultimately city officials want to be able to clear encampments on their own terms they want to be able to do it when they want to and in some cases leave them when they don't want to

clean them up um like i think gavin newsom to some extent you know he they could clear the encampments in san francisco if they let a public nuisance lawsuit go through um but i think there's a little bit of a weird thing that happens where you do have some people in city government who for whatever reason don't mind there being a certain number of tents on the streets um well i think in fact they like it yeah i think that it has the only thing that i can think of is i knew a couple people during covid who were kind of crazy. Sort of like actual somewhat, I don't want to say schizophrenic, but what is it?

Multiple personality disorder? Not that one. Bipolar? Borderline. It's borderline personality disorder. Who going into COVID, I expected to become absolute raving lunatics. And they were some of the most normal people that I met. They felt calm. They seemed calm. They were totally

reasonable. And it occurred to me that they were actually comforted by the fact that the entire world had warped to what had always previously existed in their mind like they felt calmed by the chaos of it all um as if maybe like the world was confirming their inner sense of reality and that's how i think about these crazy lunatics in uh in these west coast and also increasingly east coast cities is you have very very radical people who believe that the country is, um, a fundamentally like evil place and, uh, that the capitalism is this force that like creates things like this. And so to have a homeless encampment, not one, but you know,

to have a city, let's say of an homeless encampments everywhere you look, that confirms their worldview. It makes them feel good. That's say, of homeless encampments everywhere you look, that confirms their worldview. It makes them feel good. I really do believe that that is the psychology behind the entire thing. They want these people outside because of how it makes them feel. They feel good. Not for the people. They feel good.

They feel righteous. Like, yes, I'm right about the world and of course you know they're not going to see it that way but um i mean how do you i don't think i don't know how you could actually sit with something like that and i don't know like look at yourself in the mirror every day but from my outside perspective kind of looking in that's what i think is happening well i mean i think like just letting feral kind of like mentally ill people roam around. I've said this before, but for all the left wing sort of activism around it, it's actually an incredibly radical, almost a libertarian idea or like anarchist idea. or anything like that because under socialism or even just like a normal functioning state you would actually have these people uh taken care of in some way like put into drug treatment programs or put into um uh jail if they're committing crimes i i mean uh in the socialist countries that every socialist country that's ever existed like you don't really have uh massive homeless issues because they view

those people as um either mentally ill and institutionalize them or they view them as uh social parasites and that you either have to like get a job and get off drugs or you have to go to like a gulag and so if you actually want socialism then that's what you should be advocating for i holy shit am i a communist now yeah you just converted me yeah i mean i the like you actually do need like a strong like strong state action to solve problems like this. And what they actually want the state to do is take a step back and just not do anything and just let these people live in sort of filth and squalor and die of drug overdoses.

And it's, I feel like it's more cynical and actually evil in a way um it i've dug deep into this and when you confront these people about what i just described they will accuse you of you being paternalistic and i'm like well these people need these people need a father you know these people need someone to actually uh tell them what to do because clearly they're not capable of managing their own lives. It's totally like you said a while ago, River. Jordan Neely wouldn't be dead in the state hospital. No.

That's why he's dead. We didn't take care of him. Unironically now, why I was always in favor of keeping Brittany locked up and that's a conversation for another day where I would like to end this one is just when Taylor Swift comes to power

what do you think she would do for the homeless problem told him to shake it off I don't know we're gonna end it there yeah catch me next week it's been real uh watch out for the conspiracies this is pyrewire subscribe or die uh maybe bleep out if i can say it on youtube without getting banned later