Pirate Wires - Invasion of the Non-Binaries | PIRATE WIRES EP#17 🏴‍☠️

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

EPISODE SEVENTEEN: The Pirate Wires staff is back again for the weekly podcast. This week, we talk about recent murders of far-left activists in major cities that have caused outrageous responses online. We then get into the clown world of men pretending to be non-binary to attend a women's conference, A muslim mayor bans the pride flag, and Solana gives us the White Pill on the new face of tech after Mark Zuckerberg's interview with Lex Fridman. Featuring Mike Solana , Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed:https://www.theindustry.pw/p/of-course-men-were-going-to-start https://www.piratewires.com/p/hamtramck-muslim-city-council-progressives https://www.theindustry.pw/p/back-to-the-future 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 - Intro 0:40 - Welcome Back To The Show! 2:25 - Leftist Activist Murdered In Brooklyn - The Response From The Far Right 14:27 - Clown World - Men Infiltrate Women's Conference By Applying As Nonbinary - Sanjana Reports 27:50 - Muslim Mayor In Michigan Bans Pride Flag - River Reports 40:38 - White Pill - Tech's Face Lift Through Beautiful AI Industry & Mark Zuckerberg's New VR Interview With Lex Fridman - The Future That We Want Is Coming! 53:40 - Like & Subscribe! New Podcast Every Friday! See You Next Week!

In recent years, conference organizers have broadened the target audience to women and non-binary technologists. A lot of Gen Zers have actually just drank this gender Kool-Aid, and they really do believe that non-binary is this ontological category. You can separate from men pretending to be non-binary. You can separate from men pretending to be non-binary. That's all they would have had to do, by the way, is like just pound the face a little bit and put on some like ill-fitting kind of like muumuu thing. And no one would have said s***. All right, guys, welcome back to the pod. We have a handful of topics for you today. Kind of. I don't know, is it are they loosely related to I don't want to say they're about crime.

I don't want to be doing a crime show. I think they're more about maybe just like the evolving philosophy of the country, let's say. So we're going to we're going to start we're going to start with this recent string of anti-police activists who have been killed. And then the sort of backlash against that online. You have a lot of people laughing about it. You have people, well-meaning people, I would like to say like myself, saying, hey, no, don't do that. And then those people getting dunked. We'll get into that in a second. We'll get into that in a second. We have a really interesting story that Sanjana is going to walk us through at a women's only tech conference in Sanjana. Where was it? Was it San Francisco? No, it was in Orlando, actually. In Orlando that has been taken over by just like straight up men, mostly Indians and Indian and Chinese men who have found the loophole. Or she him non-binaries well they've found

the loophole they found the non-binary loophole and have taken the women's conference under siege uh and then we're going to talk about a small town in michigan that has banned pride flags following the election of an all-muslim uh city council river is it a city council city board what is the city council and mayor so every elected official in this so it's now a theocracy uh and that is fascinating to me uh we're going to conclude like i said with the with the aesthetics of the future let's just start with i am presently being ratioed into outer space by mostly right-wing people, hard right, I would say, hard right people. A dude in Brooklyn is at a bus stop with his girlfriend. They are coming out of a wedding. He's brutally stabbed to death by a deranged guy on the street. And it turns out that this guy,

who was stabbed to death, was a, I don't want to say he was a member of antifa this is what people keep telling me but we know for sure that he was a friend of it he liked antifa the girl the girlfriend and him both were active in in these kind of like far far leftist circles celebrating antifa um like protesting and rioting uh their pictures of the girlfriend in particular with like smiling in front of like a carl marx license plates and uh she's a super uh all cops are bastards oh by the way and who you're so a little tasteless um she is an anti-police person um there's now also uh news that she has refused to give a description of the man who killed her boyfriend to the cops i could not find confirmation of this the story is definitely running away now all we

know for sure is the cops didn't have a description i'm not really sure if she gave one or not uh but certainly the victims i think ryan was his, his roommates have not helped the situation by talking to some press outlets and saying he would not have wanted the killer to be taken to the police. So wait, just why would the girlfriend need to give a description of the guy? Because the snuff film was all over my timeline when i woke up yesterday i don't think you could see the guy yeah this is one of these so listen this is following this is on the heels there have been a handful of crimes like this so this is the this is the hardest one to talk about because the victim and i would say his girlfriend's also a victim to to a certain extent here uh well certainly she's she's a victim as well. They were so active in the anti sort of police movement. So obviously it's going to be a controversy. But there have been a handful before this where we recently had a guy in Philly who was just gunned down in his apartment. He was a journalist, also had some sentiments like this. He'd also been laughing at other high profile right wing people who had died in various ways, specifically, i think herman cain during uh who had not taken the covid vaccine died of covid and then you had

i want to say it was about a year ago there was a woman oakland who was another defund the police uh sort of but she wasn't really an activist she wasn't that well known she just believed in this stuff and she was killed by a criminal who hijacked her. And then it was a gruesome, awful death. I mean, she was dragged through the street and died, I believe, of brain damage. So there have been a handful of these things. Every single one of them is celebrated. I am a big don't dance on people's graves guy. Also, I see the images of the criminals and I think to myself, like, I just want them in jail forever. That's all I care about. I don't care about the victim. I mean, I care that it happened to them,

but I don't care about critiquing the victim at that point. I don't care how much I disagree with them, which by the way, is completely about their ideology. I just want the murderer in jail. And yeah, said something to that effect, the right wing is not happy um and i think there's like a like i think there's a spectrum here on on the on the far end of the sort of i really do not think that we need to be talking about the victim at all spectrum is this woman in oakland who uh not a super public person she had a lot of political ideas that you could say maybe are in part responsible for what's going on in the streets um but i it's just it's hard i don't that one's not for me and then you have the sort of the antifa a cab people and uh and that one i

mean again i i guess I understand why people are going after them, but I still just feel like your, your focus needs to be the thing that you want in the world. And what I want is less crime. And, um, and so I'm focused on the criminal. I don't know. What am I just a complete softy hereie here or what do you guys think? I mean, personally, I think that the claim that's made by people who are sharing this video, specifically in the Brooklyn case of the guy getting stabbed and dunking on him, essentially, is that these people are responsible for advocating for policy decisions that have real life consequences and these real life consequences become manifest on the individual level. And so somehow we're like making apparent that connection for people by highlighting how like, you know, need to make people understand um that the policy decisions they

might be sort of abstractly advocating for actually get people killed um i just don't think the way to do it though is by disseminating a snuff film um and making fun of in some cases a guy who died i mean i just don't think it's a persuasive tactic um maybe i'm wrong about that but i think what it leads to is this now like meta debate that you're seeing on twitter where people are going back and forth about should you be you know sharing this film should you be dunking on people should you be spitting on your enemies graves and it's like this debate is so far afield from an earnest desire to like change people's minds about some of this soft on crime policy and i think all right yes a hundred percent yes i was in uh so a pretty high profile way bigger than me um online guy i don't want to

say who he is i'm not trying to get into some kind of war with him. I actually like him. He is in my DMs. He and I was in his DMs. We're in each other's DMs talking about this. And what I didn't understand was like, I mean, do you want this crime stuff to end or not? Because I agree with you, Sanjana. Like this is seeing people laugh at a grisly murder is extremely radicalizing in the opposite direction all you want to do is is identify now with the person who was murdered so just tactically it's so stupid like separate from the morality of it and i you know i just can't get on board tactically it is so it's so dumb um you're never going to win over the antifa people and that's fine whatever but that's not that's not who we're trying to win over the Antifa people and that's fine, whatever. But that's not that's not who we're trying to win over. It is it's it's people in the in the the moderates,

it's center left, it's even regular left. Like all of these people don't want to live in a world with people getting murdered at bus stops by crazy people. Nobody wants that. So you just have to kind of convince them. And that's a lot of people and you have a lot of room there and this alienates them. It seems really just self defeating to me. Yeah. I mean, people aren't doing, people aren't actually doing political strategy on Twitter though. They're doing tweets that try to get, I mean, their goal is to get a lot of attention and that's what's happening. I think that's just exactly what's going on. They're not thinking about, you know, how do I convert the most center left people to the center

right or to the far right? They're thinking, um, I mean, I didn't even say yes, yes and no, you're right. I think you're right about the average person, but, but actually the, the, the people generating all of this are a handful of high profile activists. Andy Ngo comes to mind who was immediately sharing this stuff. And of course, I don't think I saw a tweet of Andy really laughing about it, but he's setting it up for that. He's giving you everything that you need to go and then dunk and make it a joke. Jake something was another one. There are these big, huge, massive accounts who I don't even want to criticize them. I think that these people

are all actually correct about the problem of crime, but they are activists. And so if their goal is to persuade people that I don't understand what they're doing, I will say one more thing actually on just the philosophy of the surprising thing about the people who were killed, the sort of philosophy of the Antifa people. I think as Sanjana, you said before, um, we've been waiting for them to sort of fuck around and find out. Uh, the really weird thing here is I think a lot of people thought, well, they just don't care because they're not dying, right? The crime, these are some rich, privileged white kids that has nothing to do with them. It's other people who are, who are, privileged white kids. It has nothing to do with them. It's other people who are on the shitty end of the crime equation who are experiencing it. And that's why they don't care. The crazy thing

is actually the crime happens to them. Your boyfriend is straight up murdered and you're not actually taking his side, right? Your friends, your roommates, no one is actually standing up at that point which means this on this extremely extremely far left end of the spectrum we're dealing with a uh a really um i want to say robust philosophy faith-based way of thinking there is something here that is that is beyond reason now these people uh are just they're down to die for the cause that is a little bit that's a little bit disorienting to me as well it's it also seems like attacked it that the right wing is pulling right hell on twitter that's normally associated with the far left it's like bring the war home it's like we need to you know

wake up the woke masses you know because if you post like a BLM thing on Instagram in 2020, you're asking to get stabbed basically. I mean, it's just bizarre and it's not very helpful. It does seem like there's something gleeful about it, about the way people were posting. That was disturbing. Yeah, they're happy. Like a living human level. Yeah, they're for sure happy about it. And then I see one now saying over and over again, all of these people saying we shouldn't be celebrating this from the ostensible right

or supposed right. Where were they when Herman Cain went down and when all these other people went down and people... i'm always saying that's grisly we talk about the grisly nature of the deranged left-wing activists on this specific stuff all the time this is this is just it's super anti-human is not the way and uh it is hard to navigate because um you know you have the crowd against you now and uh you just people are just so desensitized to death too i mean you start with the jordan neely thing where it was like this controversial thing and i'm like yeah you can like form an opinion on whether it was like legitimate self-defense or not i think it was but like i i still don't want to see the life leave somebody's

eyes on my fucking twitter you know what i mean and i'm not like i don't feel good about what happened either way i'm not like yeah great he like choked that schizophrenic to death it's like no this isn't like a good thing he's probably not happy that he did that you know like and that he had or he was put in a situation where he had to do that nobody wants like that on their conscience for the rest of their lives it's like just an insane thing where i'm like you need it really is like a touch grass moment or like i don't know go to church or just i mean that's the real one just talk to another human being in person because it's not human behavior that we're saying on the timeline i will say so on the on the kind of self specifically on

the on the antipa side uh this sort of apparently deeply rooted self-hatred that leads to being okay with people who you know and love being killed with no justice. I would say that's like the final form of the philosophy. It starts in much clownier and apparently seemingly, I don't know, non-threatening ways. And one such recently has been this conference that we talked about just at the top of the show. You have an all-woman conference for tech in Orlando, and it is taken over in the, well, it was a cell phone. Sanjana, why don't you just kind of walk us through the story

that you wrote about for PirateWires? Yeah, I mean, I should start by saying, like, this is the kind of story that if you tried to explain it to someone 15 years ago, it would have made no sense, which is incidentally one of my favorite types of stories. But basically, there is this conference for women in tech called the Grace Hopper Celebration. Grace Hopper was this very prominent computer scientist in the mid 20th century. And the conference has been running, I think, since the mid 90s. And it's historically targeted young women in computer science. It's a four day thing that runs. This year, it ran at the end of September. And they've got like a speaker series, a job fair, most notably. And admission is very expensive. So for students, it's around $650. And I think for members of the public, it's around $1,200. So it's really mainly been this event where, you know, young women in computer science go and network and get jobs and that kind of thing. young women in computer science go and network and get jobs and that kind of thing.

And in recent years, conference organizers have broadened the target audience to women and non-binary technologists. And that really bore fruit this year at the Grace Hopper Conference, where it was a much different conference than previous years. So basically, the day after the first session, a woman who attended the conference posted a petition on change.org called Enforce Fairness and Refund Women Strictly Prohibit Men from Participating in GHC 2023. And so the petition opens by saying, we, the concerned attendees of GHC, demand fairness and transparency in an event that claims to be for women and non-binary individuals and technology. So this person doesn't negate the fact that non-binary people should come. She still doesn't get it.

She still doesn't get it. It has come to our attention that a significant number of men are participating in this event, which contradicts its purpose and undermines the opportunities it aims to provide for women. And then she goes on to recommend some things that the organizers do. And I should say that this is in the context of a bunch of videos going viral on Twitter and TikTok of mainly Indian and Chinese guys just like storming the conference. And there's like pictures of all these men like trying to get their resumes to recruiters. And stories are coming out of like men harassing women and like talking about their bodies and their native languages and following them back to their hotel room. So that's all the context. But anyway, this woman recommends

refunding all the attendees who paid registration fees under false pretenses. And then she recommends establishing clear guidelines stating that only self-identified women or non-binary individuals may participate. But they were self-identified as non-binary. Right, so she still hasn't figured it out again. And then she says, implement a thorough verification process during registration to ensure compliance

with the event's intended audience. And so this petition, it's only up for a day, and then it mysteriously gets taken down. But in the interim period, it gets over 2,500 signatures. And it gets posted on Reddit, this subreddit where a bunch of people who attend the conference go. And the people start having this very earnest debate over how you actually figure out these people's gender. How do you figure out if someone is genuinely non-binary or just a man pretending to be

non-binary or uh you know just a man pretending to be non-binary and so there's like this debate over whether or not you know they would implement penis inspections and check blood for testosterone and it's this very weird moment where you realize like a lot of gen z-ers have actually just drank this gender kool-aid and like they really do believe that non-binary is like this ontological category that you can separate from, you know, men pretending to be non-binary. But anyway, the conference organizers end up issuing like an apology video where they basically, you know, say, we're sorry that this conference wasn't as safe and loving as it has been in the past. It's come to our attention. A lot of men have taken advantage of the fact that it's technically open to them to come. But they're still not talking about the real problem at hand, which is that people are taking advantage of this non-binary loophole. And there's discussions on Twitter with the organizers where non-binary people are like, they want to be included and the organizers trying to figure out a way to adjudicate this identity. And yeah, that's basically the scandal.

First of all, I really love the kind of person who starts a change.org petition they remind me of they kind of are the final incarnation of the woman who when i was very young you used to hear about the kind of person who would write a letter to the supermarket if something went wrong like a letter to a letter to to the to the to the owner of the company. This is who they became. And I think, and this is, we've talked about the need for Karens before. I think there is a need for this kind of person. I think that she is obviously like very, well, she's in this very difficult place where she's getting exactly what she asked for, but doesn't know how to change her mind publicly without seeming like she is a bad person. And it's like, obviously what you want is a conference with only females, because your

opinion is that females do not have the same advantages that males have in tech. But you can't say that now because you have the gender conversation has gone so entirely off the rails that even gender and sex have been conflated and nobody knows how to talk about this stuff anymore. And all that really does, all it means for sure is that like an Aspie Indian guy in tech is perfectly suited to hack a situation like this is going to walk right in and take as many opportunities as he can and not care because culturally he's totally insulated from our woke bullshit. He just doesn't give a shit. It is funny and tragic in its own way. I don't know. River, what do you think about this? I know you have to do something. Yeah, and the Aspie Indian guy isn't even going to put on leggings and a little bit of eyeliner. They did it. They were in cutting downs. leggings and like a little bit of eyeliner just like you know they were in like yeah yeah that's all they would have to do by the way is like put on like a little just pound the face a little bit and put on uh some like ill-fitting uh kind of like muumuu thing and no one would have said shit

like that's i i remember when this first started, because I, I remember, like, when I first started hearing about, like, not the non binary shit. And then I started seeing people and I was like, Okay, I guess it's like, you're like androgynous, or like, you're like, you know, whatever. And then you start seeing like these people who are I'm like, you're just a woman with what the fuck? Like, I met a girl in real life. And she like, somebody was like, Oh, she's trans. And I was like, Damn, she got good work. And then I found out she's a woman like what the fuck like i met a girl in real life and she like somebody was like oh she's trans and i was like damn she got good work and then i found out she's not trans she's just a fucking woman who's like dating a guy and i'm like this is just a heterosexual woman and um people were like i like was talking about it on mine people were telling me they were like non-binary people don't owe you androgyny i'm like like, well, they owe it to themselves. Give me, if you are defying these gender, which you say is so restrictive and awful and powerful, all these gender norms, prove it, put in a little effort. If gender is a presentation of norms, then you need to be presenting the norms for me. I need to see

something. I need to see a little bit of effort. The out magazine thing is the, I think it was, was it outer advocate when you have the tooth, the famous actor and the famous model? Uh, I forget which one it was now, but the actor, I say famous let's I'm using that word very loosely. They are gay famous. Uh, the, the actor in particular is gay famous because he's bisexual. No, he's bisexual. He was in Scream 4 is what I know him from best. I'm an enormous Scream fan. It's October. I'm rewatching them right now. But this dude was in Scream 4. He is apparently bisexual, which I believe because all of the sort of micro gay celebrities are super obsessed with them and some of i think said they booked up with him and whatnot um he is married to a woman and uh

the woman previously apparently allegedly only dated women but now they are just they're a straight couple they're it's a biological male a biological woman um they're dating not dating they're they're married. And they're on the cover of a gay magazine. Like this is not even just a regular straight couple, right? Like this is one of the hottest couples on the planet. And they are on the cover of this gay magazine. And the headline is like, this is a queer relationship.

is a queer relationship. And that, I tried not to be, I tried not to be woke in my own sexuality and be gatekeeping it and policing it and be talking about the struggles that I've gone through or the difficulty, for example, of navigating like my boyfriend and I holding hands in wherever we're going to be. I have to think about shit like that, but this, it just, it drove me insane. I saw this and I'm like,

this couple, this couple, not only can they go anywhere that they want in the world, not only are they not gay by any means, like there is no definition of gay that makes sense for them. Um, they are, they are better off than the average straight couple because they're so fucking hot like they are they're a beautiful straight couple what are we doing here like we we're losing we're losing words we are losing we are losing the we are losing and through that loss of words we're losing a way to even talk about this stuff and and key among the things that we're uh key among the subjects we are losing our ability to discuss is specifically the thing that this stuff is supposed to exist in the service of, which is protecting gay people.

How do you do that when you've lost the term gay or queer now? I guess, which just means straight. It means anything. Literally, this is a straight couple we're talking about. Yeah. If a guy introduces you, himself you himself as queer you're not getting laid like that's just like i think a guy you might i don't agree with that actually i think a guy yes i think a girl a girl i was gonna say yeah i think a girl no sanja you have probably a little more as as someone who's non-binary passing um and in a

relationship with a woman yeah i mean i think it's just just going back to the the women um non-binary thing for a second i think this is such a like female socialized thing to do though because it's like of course it's the women who are like falling all over themselves to say like no we actually we do want to include the non-binary people, but just like the right types of ones. And, but they don't really know the women, right. But they can't say they don't want to be exclusionary. Um, and it's like, it's like one, one woman or like a histrionic gay guy. Yeah. That's like, that's what non-binary means. Like really? I mean, Like that's what non-binary means, like really.

I mean. It's just this insane self-own. But you're right. Like in the case of women and the case of like the gay community, it has these real consequences because it's like, yeah, if you do broaden these definitions up so they can include anyone, anyone is going to come in because of course there's benefits, right? To like, in the culture we live in, there's benefits to saying you're a queer couple in certain circles, I guess, because it gets you clout or something. Well, no one wants to just be a regular straight person anymore. So they're in my lane. Get out of my lane. You're not allowed in my lane. Unless you are, as a man, unless you are unless as a man unless you are actively i don't want to be vulgar here but i'm going to be vulgar here unless you are actively s***** a d**k i don't want to hear

it i like i just don't want to hear it that is the line for me you are not you're not a queer unless unless that is happening and even if you are actively s***** a d**k like on the side if you're still married to a woman that relationship is still straight yes it's like just because your husband's on truvada doesn't mean that this is a queer relationship um river i want to talk about so another way that this kind of uh this philosophy can sort of collapse it on itself uh and and work against itself really against the interests of the people sort of propagating it, defending it, is really on display again in the sort of LGBTQ orbit up in Michigan.

You just wrote a story all about this. Why don't you break it down? Yeah. So there's this city called Hamtramck. I always mispronounce it. Hamtramck. It's like a suburb of Detroit. And it was previously a majority Polish town.

It was like a Polish ethnic enclave that was sort of best known for being the site of like a really big Dodge plant. And a lot of the Polish people leave. And some Bangladeshis who live there started basically hiring their own at the factories that they were managing. And this led to a lot of Bangladeshis. And then other Muslim immigrants came from Bosnia, Yemen, all sorts of places. Anyway, about half of the population of Hamtramck now is Muslim of some kind. But 100% of local government officials are. Every member of the city council, the mayor, all of it. So this has led to some problems, as you can imagine.

imagine um the local um lgbc activists see that have like told multiple journalists that they feel betrayed they went uh before the city council when we're saying that you betrayed us we let you in here and then um now you're taking the um the pride flags down you're refusing basically the the city council had said that you can't show pride flags um you can't display pride flags down, you're refused. Basically, the city council had said that you can't show pride flags. You can't display pride flags on city property anymore. So they felt massively betrayed by this, the local leftists and LGBT activists. And it was like, the question is sort of why? Why do you feel surprised by this?

Why do you feel surprised by this? Why do you feel betrayed? Particularly because the mayor ran on a platform of removing the pride flags. Yeah, it's like they just couldn't believe the words coming out of his mouth. The left in this country has this idea of Muslims as sort of congenital leftists because I guess of like post 9-11 anti-Muslim bigotry. And so it's just assumed that they will be this sort of like diverse totem of a person who just like doesn't actually believe anything. It's just like they're not white. They're not white they're not christian so why can't they also be like uh polyamorous and like a peg leg i mean there's like a meme or it's not even a meme it's a legit thing that someone posted that has just become a meme um where it's like a polyamorous peg leg hijabi and it's the most like that is the image that the left has of Muslims in this country. They don't actually because I think so much of the left wing intelligentsia doesn't believe in God, even if they call themselves Christians or Jews or whatever.

Nominally, they just assume that nobody else really believes in God either. And so, you know, Muslim doesn't actually concern a set of beliefs but they're learning now that it does and it's descended into all-out war in this town um they uh there was an issue with the labor day parade where the city council and the mayor refused march next to a um lgbt group then uh they're they just passed some anti-hate crime ordinance that was directly aimed at lgbt activists intimidating them there's even like a thing that says like if you put um something on someone's car like you can go to jail and it's because somebody had put like a like a pride flight sticker on the mayor's car um the aclu is kind of raising hell about it um which is surprising given the way

they've behaved lately but um in there like yeah this seems like this could have some free speech implications uh because they were also the law also prove it prohibits you from like defacing, uh, posters like campaign posters and all sorts of things that the activists were doing in the town. So it's, it's really gone like completely off the rails. Um, but it,

it, it's not a surprise. Like Islam is a conservative religion and this is what you get yeah i mean i i think um what you said a little bit earlier about the difficulty of the far left to really take religion seriously is is it i think that you know a lot of people in the country now are uh are anti-religious they think you, organized religion is bad and whatnot. I don't think they really understand it. I don't think they really know what it's like to be talking to someone who genuinely believes in God, in a faith, in the tenets of that faith, who believes in the afterlife and believes in living in accordance with the law of that faith to go to that afterlife. And they certainly are not ready for them to act out against them in order to achieve these things. One of the really interesting things about this story to me is

it's not even just, so you have the the religious component but that's what happens in the broader context of immigration i think i think another thing that we don't take seriously is the fact that other people from other places have other cultures that they care about actually that that it's not this we have this sort of strange uh it's like the captain planet version of of reality um where there's sort of like one of everybody and they look really different and they're from really different places uh and a team of five different colors and different faiths and different styles of dressing but they all think and act exactly the same that's not reality that's america that's american culture is what is what is what we're talking about there. And when you were taking a lot of people from other places,

they don't believe in that. Not everybody. Some people might. But that is not what like every culture in the world is. And this is a problem that you're seeing way more so in Europe because the culture of the Islamic cultures tend to be much more divergent from the Western European countries, cultures then do mostly what we have in America is right now South American immigration. And so there are struggles there, but they're not nearly as bad as that. And what you see in Michigan is that you see this very strong cultural difference. You don't see an interest in integrating into broader American culture. You see an interest in reshaping American culture,

certainly local culture in your image. And then you see the protected classes, or people who are supposed to be protected classes in America, naturally at odds with each other because their entire philosophy is flawed. It is completely illogical these you cannot bring these different kinds of people together because they don't they don't agree on the same things they think they share an enemy and they don't actually the enemy of the lgbtq is always going to be

people who think the lgbtq should not exist and guess what that is not like Donald Trump. That is a Muslim fundamentalist for sure. And that's what you're seeing in Michigan. That's just reality. And that's going to be something that they are going to have to deal with as, uh, I don't even know if they're going to have to deal with it. I think it's kind of, I mean, the battle is lost. It's time to, it's time to leave Michigan. Yeah. And it's, I feel like once you start saying stuff like this, it gets turned into race. But this isn't about race at all. I think America could actually probably assimilate anybody from any ethnicity in the world. If you look at most of American history, we have assimilated most people. But the groups that we haven't assimilated have always been hardline religious groups, the Amish,

um, Hasidic Jews, Mormon, uh, polygamists. Um, like there's like all these examples of these little in different little pockets of the country.

You have these people who, you know, are Americans like legally, um, but they're, they don't participate in mainstream American culture. They're very isolated. Um,

and they effectively live in a parallel society. And I think that's what you're going to end up with in a place like Hamshirmik, where you have so many Muslims concentrated in one place, which really does slow down integration in a lot of ways, even for people who maybe would be a little bit less religious and for whom it might be more possible. River, when I was reading your piece, I just kept thinking about Submission by Michel Welbeck, that novel, where he basically imagines a sort of near future France where they elect an Islamic theocratic party. And the theocratic party gets they they get to power because they have this alliance with the the left actually um and their first moves immediately are

to like institute islamic state education and ban women from going to universities and you know other things like that um which obviously haven't happened in in michigan but um it's just fascinating to me how the left seems to think that the like various quote unquote minority groups they co-opt will be satisfied with just representation and like that there are these little pawns that they can sort of maneuver, but that the status quo will remain the same. Why would they not want to reshape this if they get power in the city government? Why would they not want to reshape it in accordance with their worldview? The left does that. The right does that. It's just bizarre.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think just maybe a last little note on this one is they are, you know, join the coalition, they're saying, join the leftist coalition. And ostensibly, that's because we see you as people. And, you know, the right doesn't, the Republicans don't, they're racist, whatever. You don't see them as people at all, because if you saw them as people, you would understand that they are going to act as all people do in what they perceive to be their best interest and they are going to rule uh with sort of self-ownership like this is what they are fully they are fully developed human beings with a worldview and they are not it's not fake it's not like they're on stage, you know, dancing around for you. This is, this is who they are. And it was you who didn't, who didn't treat them like humans. It was you who didn't listen to the things that they said. It was you who didn't take them

seriously because you don't see them as serious things. You see them as objects in your little weird circus that exists inside of your imagination. This is where we're at. Well, this is where Michigan's at. Again, I don't live in Michigan and I don't plan on moving there. It's a nice state though. I will say I was surprised I went to a wedding there once.

Knew nothing about Michigan and now I know that it is very beautiful. The bottom down by, what is it, Ann Arbor and all the way up to the lakes. I liked every piece of it, but I won't be going to Amtrak anytime soon and especially not for gay pride. We lost

Brandon. He's having internet issues. We're going to talk about Canadian censorship, which is absolutely wild. This country, or I was about to say this country, or wait a minute. No, no, no. It's a state. I actually, I genuinely forgot it was a country. Yes, it is a country. It is totally, it's going totally off the rails. I think it is sort of funny that Canada

is, um, I mean, it's sad for all Canadians. Uh, we will have Canadian refugees shortly. Um, it's, it's sad that they are becoming increasingly authoritarian, but it's sort of ironic because this is the country that was held up as the great liberal, and I mean classically liberal, paragon, right? These are the freedom-loving people. This is what we should aspire to be. And they are, in the entire Anglosphere, among the worst at this point. among the worst at this point. But we're going to have to save that one for next week because our boy is out of the chat and he had all the facts. I want to move on to the white pill. And you guys probably both have some interesting perspective on this

because we all live online now and we see it all the time. If you've been on Instagram any time recently, you've probably seen these lush rooms so just strange homes on the side of mountains and beautiful rooms uh like sort of videos panning around a cozy looking library with pouring rain before giant windows and it's like sort of tree fort-esque, but maybe not. And it looks ethereal, but very real. And the people in it, if they're ever in it, also look real. I think a close, a sort of cousin

of this entire genre of AI-generated art is what we just saw from Facebook. You have in a podcast with Lex Fridman. Is it Fridman or Friedman, by the way? Friedman, I think. It's spelled Fridman. So in a podcast with Lex Fridman, Mark Zuckerberg revealed the new avatars for Facebook,

which look like people. So when you go into virtual reality now, it's like the matrix. It looks, you scan the person to the point where you're now talking to other human beings in VR. And I started sort of, it was the combination of those two things. And I started to realize like, oh, the future. I mean, when we talk about the future, the aesthetics of the future, art of the future,

we have always imagined a world of robots and glass and metal and the color white. Everything is always really white and plain it's like apple macbooks all over the place it's like that's the that's the aesthetic of the future that we imagine and i've always thought that the whiteness of it all was kind of a placeholder it was like we couldn't fully imagine the future and so we provided a canvas um but it was the metal that now the metal and the glass of it all that now is collapsing away as we see what what we're actually walking towards in terms of uh an aesthetics of the future which is just human so human. So let me break this down. In a world where you can live in any way that you can imagine, things are going to look not cartoonish, not like, quote, the future of towering glass and steel, but intensely human. It's like everything you've ever dreamed but couldn't do physically,

you're going to build in VR and it's not going to look like a giant tower. It's like everything you've ever dreamed but couldn't do physically, you're going to build in VR. And it's not going to look like a giant tower. It's going to look something like this, like lush trees. It's going to look more solar punky. It's going to be weird trees and cozy libraries and giant huge ceilings and strange evocative things. You see a bed in the middle of a lake. It's all sorts of stuff like that. That is going to be the world that we're approaching. And I wonder, I wonder what's going to happen.

I mean, as we get better at, at first of all, just visualizing this stuff and then in a world of VR, actually constructing something that feels like you're kind of navigating it. I wonder if that's going to actually start shaping the physical. I think it almost has to in some ways, but I wonder the extent of it. And it's certainly just as interesting to me because I think we're all, when it comes to the future, a little bit anxious about a future that feels more robotic, but I don't think so at all. I think what's going to happen, it's the interesting thing about AI

is that it does not seem to be hinting at a more robotic looking future. It seems to be hinting at a more human looking future, a sort of like ultra human future. I don't know. Do you guys kind of follow? Do you get it? Do you see this stuff? What do you think about the aesthetics of the future? Yeah. I mean, there's two sides. I see this as kind of two different things. The AI-generated art, it is getting more realistic, but it's very porny. Like, the features, like, are very exaggerated. I just feel like everything kind of looks like sort of like a Lois Griffin, like, porn now. And it's just, like, giant, like, so it's, like, shiny, super shiny skin. shiny skin um so i think that's sort of strange it maybe speaks to what's on the internet how people look on the internet everybody looks like you know like they just got laid i don't know but the um as for the vr thing it is interesting that it's it's getting more realistic and it could um like just kind of like look like the real world. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I feel like that could like, not to bring it back to porn again, but that could definitely ruin some people's lives.

Like porn addiction is already a bad thing. If it's like super, if it's like you're there, I mean, imagine. And I also think it could probably take people away from the real world when people are already sort of, I think, in many ways too immersed online. But I'm also not quite sure if it will take on in the way that everyone is anticipating. Everyone has been saying like VR is the future forever, and it just really hasn't been. And I've played like VR video games and stuff. I've had like the headset on. It is kind of like a surreal, cool experience. But I don't know if I would want to do it all the time.

Just doing it alone in your house is kind of scary because you're kind of like, it's almost like you're in a coma. You're like, oh, if somebody came in right now, I'm blind and deaf, basically. And they could just kill me. That's what I kept thinking about as I'm playing my little VR tennis game.

I'm like, somebody could kill me right now. I wouldn't even know and like maybe I'm just a neurotic and like so that's why I would not be using it all the time but um I don't know I just I just remember when VR video games came out and everybody said you're gonna have one in your house in 10 years and most people don't so yeah I, I would say just a quick, uh, when you said everyone says VR is the future, I think it was everyone said VR is the future. And you're right about that. And that was about 10 years ago. It was when the Oculus rift came out. And for the first time we had working VR and it did feel like the future and that didn't happen. I that's true. And I think people have really soured on it since. And then you saw Mark Zuckerberg's

first kind of cartoon avatar about a year ago that looked so goofy and you thought, I will never do this. Yeah, they're like paraplegics. Like, they didn't have arms or legs. Yeah, it was really bad. But to see it advance this far, this quickly,

it makes me think there is still tremendous value there potentially and uh in terms of what it means for the world yeah i agree with a lot of what you're saying i think anything that that removes focus on the real world is to a certain extent a problem uh unless that sort of alternate reality helps you imagine a sort of better world that we can build here. If it starts inspiring you, just the feeling of being able to build things unencumbered, if that alone is motivating, sufficiently motivating that we start doing stuff in the real world, I'll like it. I'm trying to stay white pill about this. I do think it's a cool,

really not even cool. I think it's a brilliantly impressive technological leap. Um, I did not expect it to happen. Certainly not this soon. I didn't expect to see Lex talking in a way that looked semi real. I mean, we're well beyond the uncanny valley. Now it does not look strange. It looks like him for a second. I thought it was him. Yeah, but I mean, I agree. I mean, we're spending too much time online. I spend too much time. I'm definitely addicted to my phone. I would love to get off Twitter sometime. It seems hopeless. The idea of being in a virtual Twitter is I think my idea of hell. I don't want that. I don't know. Sajana, what do you think about the aesthetics of the future? I mean, I think that there are a ton of use cases for VR that are not like heinous, deep, fake porn and stuff as well. Not that anyone's suggesting that, but I think, you know, for, you know, soldiers who are deployed. Brendan was talking about this a few days ago. Soldiers who are deployed, people in long distance relationships, like this kind of technology. Space. Astronauts.

Yeah, this technology could be really, really cool. really, really cool. The thing I always think about, though, when we talk about virtual reality and how we should think about striking the balance between integrating it in real life and then also using it as an immersive technology is Robert Nozick's pleasure machine thought experiment, where he basically said, if you could construct a machine where you just enter it and you can experience unlimited pleasure, but you're kind of sedated from an outsider looks at you and sees you sort of sedated. Is that a good use of your life? It's really a thought experiment in ethics. I think the scarier piece of that for me is if you're capable of jacking someone in and

doing that to them, giving them actual just pleasure, that means you're also capable of jacking them in and giving them unlimited pain. I think that level of control over you in general is something that is very nerve wracking. Yeah. But I think in general, it's like, you know, what, if we get to a point where the technology is so sophisticated that people can just opt into this world where they're living entirely in, you know, a virtual reality where they can sort of dictate, you know, how their relationships go and who they're, you know, what their sort of job success is. And it's not the real world, but for them, it like feels as real as the real world. Do we have objections to that?

And, you know, obviously this is not where the technology is right now. But as you're saying, Solana, it's advancing so quickly that I can see a few years down the line, us getting to a point where people are spending tons of time in a VR world. And that's something that we're going to have to think about negotiating because I don't think it's going to be straightforward in a lot of cases um which you know what kind of lifestyle people want to have in a world where where that option's available to them i mean we do so i guess it would have to be incredibly realistic and i mean you'd have we're approaching we have neural

ink coming i mean you'd have to be really jacked into something to enter a new world and feel like you're in a new world and have it matter. In Snow Crash, the Neil Stephenson story that came out in the early nineties, you actually see a parallel economy emerge. And so that actually answers the other question I have, which is if you can't get anything out of the world, then why would you stay there? But if you have another economy in that world and you can buy things in that world and the things you do in that world can give you wealth in this world, suddenly there are incentives to be in that world. Maybe it starts to change the calculus, but as of right now, it's like, you know, there are people who waste their day spending, uh, they waste their day on, uh, playing video

games all day. And there are kids who spend way too much time in front of a screen this feels kind of in the same class as that uh something to watch out for it's like all of these technologies they give and they take and uh you kind of you don't get the good stuff without without some kind of bad the problem with the bad is you kind of never know what the bad is going to be right like social media nobody knew that social media was going to be considered a disinformation weapon uh 20 years ago nobody said that they want to maybe say they were saying that back then nobody said that nobody took it seriously information exists as a word right right no it was like it was no it was fox news was there was a show called al fox that was the scour right. No, it was like, it was no, it was Fox News. There was a show

called Al Fox. That was the scourge of the nation. It was like, these people on Fox were saying things that, you know, you should not be saying online.

That's what people were talking about when I was in college. This is, this is the nature of technology. The sort of, the,

I don't think we'll really know the problem with this stuff for another couple decades. I think until then, we got to kind of focus on what we really want to get out of it. And for me, at least, I think it's been cool to see emerge right before our eyes a future scape that people are actually excited about. Which leads me increasingly to the sort of solar punk category of things. People love plants. People love running water. People want more imaginative, evocative, beautiful surroundings. And just aesthetics in general are something that I

think a lot about. I think about the horror of brutalist architecture and the beauty. I'm walking through New York City, the beauty of our old buildings, the Art Deco buildings, the more classically inspired, or not classically, the more romantic inspired buildings, I would say, of the late 1800s and things like this. People want that. And yeah, I've just been excited about that lately. I want to make the world a little prettier. I think that's a weird, it's like a weird value that we don't have anymore. The idea that, that something being pretty is kind of an important thing. I think the world should be prettier. And if, if, if that's all I've gotten out of, out of, uh, out of the AI generated art

so far, well, that's something and I'll take it for today. That's the, that's the, that's the white pill. Uh, all right. Uh, that, guys. We'll catch you here next week. Thanks for joining us. Remember to like, subscribe, share with your friends, and talk to you later.