Pirate Wires - Investor Paul Graham “Delves” Into War With Nigeria & Elon Musk Takes On Brazil

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

EPISODE #48: Your favorite podcast is back. This week we start off with a story that could only happen on the internet. Investor and Founder of Y Combinator, Paul Graham, tweeted out that he was able to spot the use of ChatGPT in a pitch email over use of the word "delve". This might seem uneventful to most, but for the nation of Nigeria, it was war. We discuss the use of language, and you'll get a behind the scenes look into how the Pirate Wires staff approaches writing. Then, Elon Musk takes on the nation of Brazil over freedom of speech. Finally, Sanjana shares an insane story of a school in SF teaching sexual terminology to kids. Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/inside-san-francisco-public-schools-shocking-health-curriculum-trans?f=home Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! Rate & Review! 1:00 - Paul Graham Goes To Battle With Nigeria Over "Delve" And ChatGPT 17:20 - What Makes A Great Writer? 26:00 - Elon Musk vs. Brazil 46:45 - Inside SF Public Schools' Shocking Health Curriculum 1:01:00 - Vibe Shift - Harvard Brings Back The SAT 1:07:45 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe! See You Next Week!

Paul Graham, famous investor, founder of Y Combinator, he tweets someone he was very excited about it until the word delve. The nation of Nigeria found out about this tweet and absolutely lost its f***ing mind. It's essentially a censorship regime inside Brazil. These showed emails between the Brazilian government and pre-Elon X requesting to remove certain users. In this ninth grade health class, which is a graduation requirement, the first unit of the class is dedicated to systems of oppression, gender norms, gender identity, and transgender experiences. Seeing this child's handwriting juxtaposed against these very adult terms produced this visceral reaction.

What's your favorite coup remember any favorite coups i feel like you got one favorite coups i like the one that what's up guys welcome back to the pirate wires pod um i want to just i I've had a great week following the Delve controversy. So let's just delve right into it. Paul Graham, this is going to take, just trust me, this will take like 30 seconds to explain, but you're going to appreciate it when you have the full story because it really is something special that could only happen online in 2024. Paul Graham,

famous investor, founder of White Combinator and writer, like one of the more famous tech writers, I would say. He's been writing for, I think, at least a decade and a half, possibly two decades at this point. His writing is beloved. He cares a lot about it and he talks a lot about it. Just the concept of good writing. He's sort of of the like modernist Hemingway mold. He thinks less is more. He's talked about this for many years. He tweets about an email he received. And in this email, someone, he was very excited about it until the word Delve was used. And that to him was, he said, a signal that the email had been composed by ChatGPT. Now, this sounds weird, but there's

actually some data backing this up. It looks like the use of Delve has skyrocketed since ChatGPT became popular. And there are all sorts of theories as to why chat gpt seems to favor the word delve but we do know that it it does favor the word delve and then of course separate from that uh paul just doesn't like the word and he made that really clear there are a lot of words he doesn't like he thinks that these are words that people would never use in ordinary speech and it signals sort of like i don't know a try hard sort of intellectual thing that's bullshit and you should speak plainly and blah blah blah, blah. I don't entirely agree with him on his writing criticism. That's a maybe separate conversation we can get into in a bit. But the really interesting thing here is

that while most Americans who know Paul and follow Paul saw that were just like, whatever, dude. Okay, sure. He hates Delve. Got it. Next tweet nation of nigeria found out about this tweet and absolutely lost its fucking mind so it started i woke up a couple days ago when the story was first breaking i think it was one of the first people in tech to sort of see what had happened over the night because paul lives in the uk so he's on a sort of slightly different time um than the rest of us and i i immediately saw that he was being, the tweet that I had seen before it blew up, was being targeted by a handful of Nigerian influencers

who were accusing him of like, basically a colonial mindset, policing speech. They were saying, this is an extremely common word in Nigeria. How dare you go after people who use the word delve? And what's more, this mentality is why Nigerians have had such a hard time, I guess, succeeding, which I didn't think they had had a hard time succeeding, especially comparatively. I thought that Nigeria was

absolutely killing it. They really have changed my perception of the nation throughout this controversy. I want to say handful we're talking thousands of people because i got involved myself couldn't help myself uh threw up a few tweets got dogpiled as well i would say that this was uh just for sort of defending him and i want to break down what i think is happening here and why i enjoyed this so much felt so engaged by this topic. I received probably the worst dogpiling on Twitter I've ever received, like ever. I think more than when the DSA went after me like a couple of years, three years ago or whatever, when I wrote Extract or Die, that was pretty bad. This was bigger. This was huge. It was never ending thousands of people, but it was funny

because the conversation quickly evolved into this question over what is the right way to speak English. A conversation that really nobody cared about over here. They are obsessed with this conversation and in their idea, their mind um you know they the people and by they i mean the people who were attacking uh they seemed to believe that there were people most people in nigeria spoke english better than native english speakers and um while they were sort of making this argument they were doing it in like broken english and also it would look like a different language kind of interspersed throughout i was called a lot of weird words that i'd never heard before in my life um i uh there's a there's like a there's a lot here i think the very first thing is like they were demanding an apology and paul didn't

give it uh paul didn't give it what he did give was this a woman uh named moji sensei delano just admit that your repertoire of vocabulary is achingly limited rather than project your insecurities on non-americans to which paul graham replies rather than apologizing rather than doing the work and learning and uh getting back in his place I guess, as a world famous investor being talked down to by the nation of Nigeria on, I guess, what goes into a good pitch email. He responds, the repertoire of is redundant. Your sentence has the same meaning if you take it out. I assume you didn't intend this as an example of the problem I'm talking about, but it's a pretty good one. And he kind of goes on from here in this way, and he's sort of playing around with it, not apologizing. And

the more he doesn't apologize, the sort of more furious the reaction becomes. It lasts like two full nights, like it kind of escalated both times. And my immediate thought is like, on what planet should a famous American businessman, investor, who is speaking to an overwhelmingly American audience about an email that almost certainly came from another American, apologize because a bunch of people from the other side of the world happen to sort of like see this conversation, invite themselves into it, make it about them and then get fucking mad about it. It's like really crazy. It was a wild example of like, you kind of people project what they're mad about onto you. The word arrogant was thrown around and there was like this arrogance they said of his to sort of not come down and learn from them. But my thinking is like, it's very arrogant when you're reaching out to someone for attention who is very prominent and maybe has something that you want to expect them to sort of come to you. If I had to, I don't know, get an investment from a prominent Nigerian and he had publicly written something to the effect of like, I hate when people email me in short form and casual. I

need them to respond or email me with a long, flowery, formal introduction. I would just fucking do that. As a person who wanted something from them, that's what I would do. It's funny because Paul is giving you a hack. It's like, if you want to have a successful email to me, an investor, this is how to do it. And they're like, if you want to have a successful email to me, an investor, this is how to do it. And they're like, no, no, no. You have to change the way that you speak. Paul's also, he's like American and British. So it's just like, especially, it's like another layer of funny to be telling a British person about the English language. But I don't know. Do you guys follow this? It was absolutely wild. I have more thoughts. I've

been going on about it for a while though. And I want to sort of hear your take all around on the sort of great Delve controversy of 2024. I mean, I use Delve. I don't know. Should I start saying a Nigerian accent? Like I'm mad at that. I'm already getting accused of racism for saying that it is bullshit. Let's not do that. Yeah. mean i it from top to bottom none of it makes sense to me the that you shouldn't use delve doesn't really make sense to me i think it's a fine word uh that it's nigerian doesn't make sense to me i've probably never met a nigerian in my life until i was like in my mid-20s and i'm pretty sure i knew what Delve meant before then and used it. I don't know.

It's just deeply strange to me. I don't really know what to make. I mean, I will say that Nigerians do have, it's a weird thing where I feel there's like something spiritually white about them. And that like when they try to go after you, they do it in a different way than sort of like woke American black people do and and a lot of it is just like using big words like incorrectly and i guess it's because in the the sort of diasporic ones or whatever they're all like upper middle class people anyway who like benefit from the programs who are that are supposed to benefit like actual

american black people like if you look at like admission rates for abbey league universities it's just all nigerians um that are like well that you know getting these spots that reminds me of what because i was in the dogpiling um people were nigerians there were no there was no one other than there were some other african people involved and afric Africans from the diaspora. There were no black Americans in this conversation. There were barely any Americans in this conversation. It was mostly Nigerians.

And the thing that was throwing me again and again and again, this sort of accusations of racism, was that this was akin to dropping an N-bomb. that this was akin to dropping an N-bomb. Specifically, it was when I said... This is before I realized it was a totally Nigerian controversy even, but I saw that people were mad about him caring about his language or whatever. And I was like, your niche perspective on this doesn't matter. It's like, he is just this very famous investor you're trying to get the attention of. He's not going to change his preferences for you. And they heard niche, and they were like, this is like you using the M-bomb. And I thought, one, that's not true. It's like not even close to fucking true. Two, that is an acutely american racist sort of construction that is our deeply racist past there that you were now co-opting and trying to use in this conversation about the word

delve i don't think that you're welcome to it like we do have a deeply fucked up racist history in america absolutely but it's ours it's not yours you have your own deeply fucked up racist history and you should just stick to it yeah i mean i think just to echo river's point like nigerian the nigerian diaspora is insanely overrepresented in both england and the u.s and like doctors and lawyers i mean they're really really high achieving diaspora um and i do think like paul's point, Paul is actually giving like a very rare and democratizing instance of like advice for how to pitch in this kind of, you know, hard to access world of venture capital, right? These are the kind of codes that you might need to follow when you're writing an email

to not immediately get written off as like someone sending an email written by chat GPT or someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. Like, ironically, he's actually not being arrogant at all in giving this advice. He's being like, again, sort of democratic in that he's offering it, you know, for free into a broad audience. I mean, it reminds me of like, I was writing an email at one point to a French university, and I wrote it like sort of in the way I would write it in American English and just translated it into French. And I showed it to a French friend of mine, and she was like, this is insanely rude to just start off an email with like, hello, or something. You have to sort of, there's all these codes you need to follow there to make an email read polite that to us would read as like insanely excessive and over the top.

But I appreciated the advice because I was like, yeah, I'm coming from a different cultural context and I don't know how to, you know, express. I would understand how to express this to like an American professor. Right. But I don't know how to make the point come across politely to them. um but i don't know how to make the point come across politely to them so the whole controversy is just bizarre and has like this weird twitter dream logic to it um yeah is the whole thing just that nigerians use delve a lot because like the real narcissism is expecting people to know that you know what i mean it's not even it's not like it's a nigerian slang word or something like it was like mexicans being like stop calling people way or like whatever like i would be like oh okay

i guess i mean that's annoying but like i at least it's your word delph is not their word no it's just i guess a popular word in nigeria i don't even know that that's true i know that that's the people people were screaming that at me on Twitter for two days. So I'm taking their word for it. But you know, it's ethnic narcissism. We saw this. This is my problem with the whole Palestine Israel thing as well. It's like, I feel like there's a lot of ethnic narcissism on both sides. It's this expectation that me as an American should know everything about you on the other

side of the planet. And it's like, I don't, I won't, I refuse to. Like, I'm just not going to do it. I'm going to just like let you know that right now. I'm never going to learn about the words that you care about in Nigeria because I don't fucking live there. Sorry.

Like next stupid question, Brandon. I don't know that the controversy is about the word delve. I think it's about the uniquely Nigerian way of writing emails. I mean, like I, i you know like i vet applications for jobs at pirate wires all the time and you can immediately tell when the when the applicant's nigerian because it'll start with like you know dear good sir i do formally declare my application to your great company pirate wires and it's like oh my god you know like you do not speak english very well this is crazy and i think they do they speak it so that's

that's the worst english that is it's so awkward and then when when you reread um that response to paul g's uh tweet i didn't realize she said the word achingly, which is like the weirdest adjective to use in a tweet about somebody's behavior. It's almost like, it's not appropriate in a weird way. And I think it's bizarre that they're saying that English as a second language speakers are in fact better than English, than native English speakers because like they had to learn a bigger book, vocabulary or something like that. Well, I would say a lot of what you're talking about

comes down to taste. And this like construction, and I believe the people who were yelling this at me is what they prefer. I believe that. But I just think it doesn't matter what you prefer if your goal is to do business with Americans. I'm not knocking down the door of Nigerians begging them to do business with me. This whole thing is happening because Nigerians seem to

believe that there was a bias that was keeping them out of some kind of conversation. But what's crazy about... I guess I do think, okay, that is sort of unfortunate for you that you were taught in your culture that this is the right way to speak and we just happen to not prefer it that way. But if you want to do business with us, you should just adapt. And the whole premise of this whole controversy was that we should adapt for them. And that is, it's a very, it feels like a very 2020 kind of conversation. And I thought to myself, man, if this had happened, then there would have been endless think pieces about, you know, text teaching, teachable moment, and how we have to come to terms with our, you know, implicit bias. And, you know, it's a global community now, and we need to do better and blah, blah, blah blah was very interesting was i didn't see a single american come to their defense it was just mostly

ignoring and then laughter um and just at the the obviously there were a lot of very strange attacks i mean i think it was cursed a couple of times um like i really am not even saying that to be an asshole like this happened, it was a specific construction. It was like a curse on me and my family. And like a lot of homophobia, too. But that's, you know, whatever. That's just the internet. It doesn't work anymore.

That idea that, you know, every person you want to engage with has to change themselves for you is just completely over. There's no support for it. So it's like another vibe shift sort of story as well. There was no teachable moment at the end of it. It was just a lot of blocking and both sort of very disparate groups of people on Twitter went back to their corners and the hornet's nest has died down since. They had a bunch they had a bunch of words too though it wasn't just delve i would say i mean they brought up a bunch discombobbled was one i like that word myself um but i don't know that i would use it in an email to paul graham trying to get money from him especially because he's told me that he's like basically a hemingway fetishist and wants very very very very very simple language construction what do you guys think about that by the way the sort of like uh his whole premise that the most simple writing

is the best writing he agonizes speaking of the word over um just like simple sentence construction and getting to the just the absolute bare bones point this is like sort of a style question uh i think that it's i'm not i haven't read any of his stuff so i'm not like you know uh criticizing him or his running or whatever but i think it's good advice for people who are not naturally talented writers uh because they tend to write too much but i i don't like i've had editors before who are like trying to like trim down every single set i'm like no i wrote it this way because it sounds better like and i like the reason that i work in media without having gone to school for it or done any internships or whatever is because for whatever reason like i have like a good impulse

of like i know how this senate should sound and it will sound better this way and like that's impulse of like i know how this senate should sound and it will sound better this way and like that's basically what i do and like when you're like trying to get like an arbitrary sort of like formula for you know how the senate should be constructed i don't know i think it's um it kind of like gets in the way of creativity for you know but i mean if you're writing a business email i suppose that's a different genre. I mean, they're not meant to be beautiful or interesting. Well, I think when you write an email to someone, I've actually given this criticism, not criticism, feedback to people on the BuyerWire's team who are trying to reach out to different people to do pieces for us or whatnot. I tend to just reframe it for them and be like, here's how you should approach someone who I know if you're trying to get them to do something. And there's like a more of a casual thing that I like to interject. I try to make sure there's like a PirateWire's overall vibe to it. And what you're really doing there is you're

just, you're thinking about your audience and you're writing to them. There's a level of respect there, which is interesting because this was accused of the opposite. But it's like, no, you should respect the person you're writing to enough to give them something that is sort of in their language. I agree with you, River, about good writing, I think to a certain extent. I always feel like it's not just for the kind of work that I do, it's not just like making a point. It's making a person feel a kind of way. And that is like a journey, a story that I'm telling and I'm bringing them on. And that requires setting the stage and evocative language and alliteration. And I don't think about this in a math way. I just write for

my gut and I read it out loud. And it's just like, do I like this myself or not and um a lot of people like it as well so i think we're doing okay job brandon what do you think about the style i think there's um a creativity in and being as as parsimonious as you as you can um like i actually i that's my creative process is to is is to find the sometimes the most economical way to say something. That's a creative thing for me. Um, I can feel myself like flexing my creative muscles when I'm, when I'm doing that. So I don't know. I think, um, like Solana, your style is a lot different than what we end up, like the style of reporting that we have, which is very straightforward. And I always tell like Sanji and River and other contributors, like we need to go from zero to 60,

basically in the first half of the sentence of the piece, right? Like you want to get immediately to the point and you want to bring it to them right away and you want to be completely unambiguous. And I think there's something very powerful about that um but i don't i mean like river especially you know like you're funny and you've got away with words and um you know it'd be stupid to ignore that as an editor so i'm i tend to be in the camp of like you know why say prior to when you could say before right

why say like at this time rather than now this is like a David Foster Wallace video but I'm not I don't think I'm militant about that view I know Sanjay has a different opinion but I think it's true when it comes to writing but

when you're doing prose like a think piece or like a take where the point is supposed to like the point is less like what you're actually saying i mean it's not less but it's like evil parts what you're saying and also like the prose like there's a musicality to that which is sometimes which is why i defend like using the passive voice sometimes because sometimes it just sounds like it has a better flow um 100 there's like there's this great piece by um lauren euler she wrote i think it's called i didn't want to go and it was about her time going to the goop like she went on the goop cruise um and she sees gwyneth paltrow at the end that's like the climax of the story it's in harper's i

think it's like five thousand six thousand words and it's so creative and verbose and i wouldn't say flowery but um i would never if i was the editor of that piece i would not have been like okay no like you know we need to cut 30 out of this because like there's so many wasted words here and um so basically i'm agreeing with you river um brandon and i occasionally go head to head about uh the sort of prior to versus before i mean i my i generally am skeptical of anyone who has like a very hard and fast rule about like if you can shorten it do it or something like that i mean i think it's one of one of orwell's rules in his like politics in the english language essay. It's like, why would you ever use a long word if a short one would do? I tend to think that really the word you should be using is the word that has the most technically correct meaning, if technical correctness is at stake in

what you're saying. And then obviously you want to pay attention to sonority and sort of flow and and that kind of stuff um i mean i think yeah but writing emails is a different art and you should play to your audience and you should not be an ethnic narcissist and think that everyone's going to understand your um you know the quirks of your dialect which is really what is at stake here is like nigerian english is a separate dialect from American English and British English. Indian English is separate too, etc. But the point is, if you're writing to, you know, a specific audience, maybe it's in your best interest to adapt accordingly. And if you don't want to adapt, then I guess you're banking on the fact that your idea is good enough that it doesn't matter if you've presented it in a way that's like deliberately antagonistic or unappealing to your audience um which is fine i guess yeah bold

bold strategy um let's see how it works out for the nation of nigeria uh probably well i don't know i think they seem to be growing this other thing like i think nigeria is going to be fine and there's a lot of um pride there that i found like i was a little bit jealous over i wish americans cared about america as much as nigerians care about nigeria and sort of all go so hard for nigeria like even when nigeria is not even a part of the conversation but a nigerian invents themselves into the conversation even then it's like no no we're going to war with this guy paul graham right now um you know like they put up the bat signal and that was that uh it's cool it's the sign of a culture that is ascending i think um the french are sort of like this too

is i've always loved this about the french the french fucking love the french and um i think that if you don't have that as a culture you basically are in decline look at the brits um i want to talk about uh elon versus brazil um brandon tell us about uh what seems to be like a dictatorship a budding dictatorship over in brazil so i guess i just learned this this week given all the elon news that there is a is essentially a censorship regime inside Brazil that the way that it works is they can force social media platforms to disappear their users without giving any reason why. And part of the way that they do that as well is they prevent the social media platform from a telling the user that they that they are suspended they just suspend them be not telling them also not telling them why they were suspended and the third thing that

they can't do is they is the social media platforms can't reveal to the public who they suspended on account of this process so this has been apparently been happening for like at least five years. And I know that because Michael Shellenberger published over the weekend, I think, what he's calling the Brazil Twitter Files, which were kind of like the Twitter Files from last year, a year and a half ago. But these showed emails between the Brazilian government and pre-Elon X, pre-Elon Twitter, requesting this to remove certain users. And so the Brazilian government's position

is that this is all on behalf of fighting misinformation. So the Brazilian government's position is that this is all on behalf of fighting misinformation. But Elon is saying that they are currently getting requests from the Brazilian government to ban sitting members of their Congress and journalists. Presumably, Elon's ex was following these orders. And I've seen it alleged that Google and Facebook just have been following these orders since they started doing them. But this week, Elon decided that he would no longer follow these requests for basically disappearing Brazilians.

And that as a result, it would be likely that that X would probably no longer be able to do business in Brazil because they're levying like massive fines against them every day. $20,000 a person a day who's supposed to be erased. Correct. So one interesting thing about this story that I would love to know if I'm roughly correct about, it seems that Twitter does in every other country every country other than America has I think every other country um has no free speech the way that we do it there's there are some rules uh limiting that we would consider to be um totally unconstitutional uh certainly all throughout Europe there are like hate speech laws and things like this and um and then you have more more extreme versions in the middle east and thing and uh and

things like this and elon follows those rules he censors in accordance with the government in all of these places as do all of our social media companies which kind of undercuts the chinese argument that like the only reason google is not here is because our social media companies aren't in China is because our country wouldn't follow the law in China. It's like, it seems like our social media companies follow the law in every other country. That's how they're able to operate. And so the Brazil thing struck me as weird in the first, I'm like, wouldn't he just do this?

It seems like he would always, he's not like there is no free speech speech absolutism in in south america um but he's saying that the brazilian orders are violating brazil's own government like own law um which is sort of another weird layer of this because he's now litigating like brazilian law in public and i we can't see most of this stuff i don't know what is going on there i don't i don't know that that's but you've summed it up perfectly um x x um abides by the laws of every country he says this but he's also specifically targeting brazil and saying no actually this is against your own laws he's quote tweeted somebody that lists all of like the titles and sections of the brazil's constitution that this behavior apparently violates and so that's um his tactic for um or his i guess his position um for brazil but i don't i don't know why he's chosen brazil and not any other country because

he's also saying that this guy there's this supreme court judge in brazil who he's accusing of basically being a dictator at this point and i'm kind of thinking like if that's true then that is the law of your country now i mean this guy if he's saying it and he's the law and that in brazil has just lost its democracy or whatever then those are the rules and there is twitter in other places where i believe where there are dictators right isn't this saudi saudi really saudi saudi arabia counts as this i think um i don't know what the government of saudi arabia is it's absolute monarchy yeah so like and i think there's twitter over there uh it's just it's it's the whole thing is it's the brazil reaction obviously crazy and alarming the u.s government i saw uh is requesting

more information on this so maybe there is some concern growing here in congress over a potential civil war in brazil which is what it looks like to me when you have one of the sides of the government trying to silence the entire other side formally um i was just i mean that's been going on in brazil for a while i mean the current president was imprisoned by his predecessor and then got out and then yeah it seems like both sides are pretty authoritarian and that is this whole really messy situation for a u.s tech company to be embroiled in and i don't know why he would do it And I wonder if there's some huge piece of the story that we don't yet know that would explain why this matters so much to him, to Elon. It's tough to say, to be honest.

I mean, this specific judge does have a long history of targeting tech companies. And I think last year, or two two years ago had issued a similar order um glenn greenwald has talked a lot about it because obviously he covers um brazilian politics pretty closely um but he'd issued an order sort of demanding that like facebook and telegram and a couple of other tech companies uh immediately cease distributing misinformation also upon penalty of like fines or something like that. So I wonder if this is just kind of like a, this is kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. And this is like a good way to sort of make a broader statement about this, this judge who's clearly out of control. And I mean the brazilian president has also been like extremely critical of

elon and spacex uh in in other statements um and he was exonerated of his corruption charges by the supreme court on which i think this judge was sitting at the time so there's all kinds of like you know messy political entanglements here that could explain uh this there's also a very conventionally looking left right divide um over this um even in american media with the exception of the new york times which i think came out on elon's side when i was researching and i read two other msm articles one from cnn another one from, I don't know where, but it was a popular one. And both of them were clearly on Brazil's side

because of the misinformation issue of it all. And then you have the Green Walls and the Schellenbergers and obviously Musk who are positioning this as a free speech issue. And so it looks very familiar, even though it's happening in Brazil. But I think it's not familiar. And I think that we are all going to get dragged into something that really has nothing to do with us,

that does not map to our politics, really, in any meaningful way. It looks like you have two authoritarian sides of what could be a civil war. I mean, that's, I think, the direction this is going in. And I just don't think we should be a civil war. I think the direction this is going in, I just don't think we should be involved in this. And I don't think our tech companies should be involved in this. And I think that long-term, they kind of can't be involved in this. I was thinking about that in this context. Twitter has no way to win, actually, because no matter what side of this

power in Brazil takes over, they're're gonna want the same shit which is the end of the constitution and to erase whoever they want um you see governments across the world sort of wanting control certainly of social media or media generally speaking um but tech also more broadly uh they want their own tech companies they want their own ride-sharing shit. They want their own version of Airbnb. And you understand the nationalist sort of impulse here to do so. I just, I don't see, yeah, I long-term do not see a way for Elon, for any really US social media company to win here. But River, you were about to, I didn't mean to cut you off before, you were about to talk about the politics here. If I mean, yeah, I mean, Brazilian politics is kind of shaped by the dictatorship that they had, the military dictatorship that they had, um, in like seventies and eighties where the current party in power, the workers party, a lot of its former members, former president uh jimmy rousseff she was like tortured by the military regime because she was part of this like marxist guerrilla group

but when they came into power they were actually they were not so radical as they once were they you know they're still i think they call themselves socialists but it's like just welfarism basically um but there was um i think's a, it's the one parallel I can see with American politics. It is a, uh, it shows the dangers of, um, imprisoning your political opponents, uh, basically, um, because I believe Jim Russo was, uh, impeached. I believe she was also in prison. Uh, uh, Lula was imprisoned. she was also in prison uh uh lula was imprisoned i think that and now i think like uh the de silva government is going after people in the bolsonaro government i think bolsonaro is like in orlando

or something like i do keep seeing pictures of him in public i think he's on the lam because the de silva government wants to go after him so like what happened i mean because you know the democrats a lot of them it seems like they want trump to go to jail. And it's like, this is you should not do that, because that creates more authoritarianism. Even if what people do is bad, like, yeah, you can impeach them or whatever. But when you start putting people in prison, that's when things get really rotten, because they go back into power, they're never going to want to leave because then you know it raises the stakes it just raises the stakes you can't lose now if you lose you die and so you'll do whatever it takes to win it's i agree it's very bad the the jail thing it reminds me of a peter gotten peter teal got in trouble um uh during the obama administration um i think it was the obama or it might have been right after it um but uh so he was like you know this guy did nothing he was a useless like there i think it was roughly what he was saying and then someone's like well you know there was no corruption and peter was like there should be a

little bit of corruption that's how you know that they're at least doing something um and it feels kind of spiritually related to this topic which is like it's better to let your political leaders do a very little bit of crime um than to start jailing them because there are repercussions to the jailing if it's very serious crime obviously go to jail but uh if they're all doing there are so many rules surrounding all of these people that i think a lot of them are probably breaking the law often by mistake and um like, certainly we saw, you could just talk about, you know, the Hillary email show that was illegal. She was not allowed to do that, but there's no repercussion for that. And that's the real problem. It's not that, that Trump probably broke a bunch of laws, but everyone

is breaking laws. And so if you don't jail all of them, then you're in sort of a dictator type situation and um and once you start jailing one they want retribution that everyone's freaking out because trump's like you know when i'm in power there's going to be retribution and it's like yeah that's how this works i don't understand why you would be surprised by that yeah in the beginning he was like i'm gonna put what was it in the debate he was like uh if i were in president you'd be in jail or something to hillary but he didn't actually put her in jail and now they're like but i remember when that happened they were like this is leads this is how dictatorships happen jailing your political opponents is evil or whatever and now they're just actually doing that yeah i mean it's just so hillary killed more

people than trump ever did by the way like just completely destabilized north africa like voted for the iraq war like she's a monster she should be in jail it's not good for the country so she shouldn't be but spiritually yeah i don't think she should be yeah yeah she's definitely a criminal but again like i just i mean just, my assumption is that all of them are sort of criminals. To be that level of power, I don't really see a way for them to be squeaky clean. And I just, I don't know. I think it's just impossible to be completely... We are already the least...

Maybe I'm going to get pushed back here. But it seems like we are among the least and maybe i'm gonna get pushed back here but it seems like we are among the least corrupt countries in the entire world and i think a very little bit of that in exchange for a functioning democracy is better than the precipice that we are on now though i also think that we're still quite a far away uh from brazil um which i was thinking a lot about during the tiktok conversation where you have this huge uh belief like very loud loudly and it's still a defendant belief that you know this law was going to be used against american tech companies it didn't matter what legal precedent was um because the government was out of control and it would just do whatever it wanted.

And I thought, okay, that might be true. But if that's true, then what you're saying actually is that the American government is over. There is no more government. We're in a sort of dictatorship. And that just gut level feels, it doesn't feel like we're there um but i might be naive i don't know do you guys think that we're living in a dictatorship no i think like i was hoping you would say yes no i mean i think we could get like you could get there if like yes i agree like i mean because you have to think about like it's just if trump is like okay if i ever relinquish my office i'm going to go to prison. Like I would be day one,

like talking to the generals, be like, let's figure something out because I don't want to spend the rest of my life in prison. Like, I mean, Pelosi did before Trump left office when she talked to the generals and she was like, yo. Yeah.

If I give you the signal, we take over. Yeah. The fact that people are talking to the general, anyone is talking to the general shouldn't be sent for alarm. Dude, the fact that he was accused of doing a coup and she was talking to the generals blows my mind.

And I don't even, as I get older, I sort of don't even hate Nancy Pelosi. There's something funny about her. Like she doesn't really give a shit. And, you know know all sorts of most of her politics i hate but just like her as a person i don't know she doesn't get under my skin in the way that some of these people do um that was that was she that was a coup to me that's what a coup is is you're talking to the generals you're like we're actually in charge now not the president

that's a coup that's a that's a military coup that's like the worst kind of coup that's the only kind of coup um uh any last thoughts on on brazil which i try not to talk too much about other countries but this one is i think relevant because we're talking about how we interact with the rest of the world and if that's possible um or just coups are we in a coup would you like to see a coup what's your favorite coup river any favorite coups favorite coups yeah um i like the one that they did in turkey a little bit that one was that brief coup that was a good coup that was a good coup where's people's memory on that coup uh so it was like the the current president erdogan who's like this islamist that's running turkey like the country

that's supposed to be like we're uh we're nationalist which is good even though we like we killed a bunch of armenians and greeks to like get that label but like we're we're nationalists we're secular whatever erdogan takes over and he's like actually uh we're not doing that anymore we're doing like a soft islamism and his former ally who was another guy who was also like we're doing the soft islamism thing who just ran a bunch of charter schools there's he believed that this guy had like moles all in the the government so it was like a weird self-coup i don't i don't know it's like hard for me to even remember what was happening but i just remember that guy in america he he was like a weird self-coup. I don't know. It's like hard for me to even remember what was happening. But I just remember in the after.

Wasn't that guy in America? He was like, he's like, this guy like lives in Pennsylvania or something. Yeah. Lives in the Poconos. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then there was just like all of these people were getting rooted out and they're

like secret Gulanists or whatever. And like, if you look at the ideology, it's almost exactly like Erdogan's ideology. Like there's almost no difference whatsoever um and i find that one interesting just because it's uh it's such a uh turkish thing which is to say like incredibly petty and like you have to know like 300 years of history to understand like what the difference between these two men even is um but yeah yeah that was a good way because i remember he it was just it was a crazy day on twitter when that happened it was within 24 hours it was uh there's a coup maybe and people are like nah and it's like no there's a coup and erdogan's on a plane and he's leaving turkey and then like by evening i feel like he was back in

turkey and the coup was over and the coup the coupers were under they were like apprehended and and that was that i was in turkey um when that happened uh no i was on twitter when it happened in twitter i think in san francisco at the time um i was in turkey for a wedding like a couple months ago and maybe longer, six, it might've been a while. I don't know. Time bleeds together now that I've got this company. Um, but I went to this temple and, uh, or it was a mosque and it used to be a church and there was a little placard outside of this church that was now a mosque that said you know in x year when the muslims came uh and took turkey over um it

uh was converted this this church was converted into a mosque as is the custom and it wasn't like um as was the custom it's like as is the custom this is like how we do it and it called to mind all of the videos that you see in Europe of like these young Muslim dudes outside of churches that have been converted to mosques being like, that's right. Like it's ours now. Like we're taking over. Anyway, total side, but very crazy and fun to remember that Arabs are colonialists, like famously. They took over the old Middle East, took over North Africa. They were in Spainain um like you see the marks of them everywhere it's like like classically presenting colonial power um and uh

yeah turks aren't arab and they'll they'll point that out to you they're not but there are like we're from central asia no like their whole thing is like it the language comes from like central asia like uh it's the turkic languages and like turkmenistan and like whatever but like their whole thing like they had this weird pride in being like we're we we did take it over and we're the invaders and we're turks we're not like greeks or armenians or whatever but like if you actually do a dna study like they're like 90 percent greek they just like converted all the like poor christians in uh like asia minor and over a period of like hundreds of years got them to speak english and then like when they had the the target like after the ottoman empire fell um they just started

pretending that it was like a racial classification instead of just a religious one which is why they like genocided the armenians and the greeks even though like genetically they're like almost indistinguishable it was just like the upper classes like remained christian because they could afford to pay the uh jizya or whatever i want to talk about uh sojourner's great piece on um I don't even know where to begin. It's the edge. It's like the school health questionnaire. Trans health.

Yeah. Give me the story, right? Let's just break it down. Tell me about America's public schools. Yeah. I mean, so basically,

uh, I had a, uh, mom from San Francisco, like a mom of kids in San Francisco's public school district, reach out to me, uh, So like a mom of kids in San Francisco's public school district reached out to me because she found this worksheet that her ninth grade son had completed in his health class. And she was like really pissed off about it.

And, you know, she reached out to the school and they were basically sort of, you know, like, yeah, this is this is just what we teach in health class. you know, like, yeah, this is just what we teach in health class. So basically, it's this three-page worksheet, which you can find on our website. It's zoomable, very well presented. But it lists like 30 different, the worksheet's titled sex unit terms. So basically, for context, in this ninth grade health class, which is a graduation requirement, the first unit of the class is dedicated to systems of oppression is one of the sections. And then there's also a section on gender norms, gender identity, and transgender experiences. And we sort of assume that this is from that section. But yeah, basically lists a bunch of terms, some of which

I had either never heard of or had only heard of like on Tumblr, basically. I can list some of the more niche ones, but so they start with sexual orientation. And basically the format of this worksheet is there's a term, then you write a definition of it and then you have to write a scenario demonstrating that you understand the term so we have like sexual orientation sexual preference gay lesbian straight bisexual queer by curious gray sexual demi-romantic demisexual, down low. Down low! That's nice. Don't they also have closeted on there?

They do, they do. Y'all get to that. That's hilarious because, like, should they make you explain the difference? Be like, he's texting from an Atlanta area code. It's just, like, closeted black guy. Like, that's all it means. Like, John Travolta is closeted.

Diddy is down low. Like, that's all it means like john travolta is closeted diddy is down low like that's like the only difference it's crazy that they put both on there to me i think there's a subtle maybe it's like because closeted has more of a a subtle implication that they're in an unfortunate place that they will leave eventually whereas down low almost feels like an identity you know maybe closet has become an identity but it down low feels like more of an identity it feels like an identity because because they won't come out you know what i mean it's like claws it's like the you like if somebody's in utah they're like oh he's closet if they're if he's in at, they're like, I'm down low. You're still, like, getting a **** in the back of the

same, like, Honda Accord. It's, like, not, like, it's still sad. I feel like down low seems more like a gay male-specific term to me. Sure, yeah. Where, like, closeted is maybe more general. But, yeah, I mean, it is insane that that

they're having kids memorize the definition of of down low i mean other things they have on here like polyamorous pansexual uh gender fluid androphilic apparently um wait just gay yeah you'd be or a woman you are attracted to men no you're attracted to androgynous people no andro is like androgen like right yeah i think they're using it well the kid's definition doesn't seem correct i don't know if he's paying attention um I would assume androphilic. Yeah, attraction to males or masculinity. The gays were on top of it. Crossdresser, biphobia,

scoliosexual, attraction to people who are trans or non-binary. Okay, so I thought this... I could not figure out what this was. Brandon showed me this the other day before we published it, and I was like, is that like, I only fuck hunchbacks or like something like I can only get off of the chiropractor's office like I was like what the fuck I gotta like a I don't got like a semi during the hunchback of Notre Dame like it was like I could not figure out like I thought I had something

to do with bags but it's just tranny chaser it's crazy that like that's oh no one has ever used that have any have we ever heard that anyone i don't know you were not supposed to use that if you're a homosexual they've been trying they've been trying to tell us for years that there's no difference between like a trans woman and a and a biological like regular woman that then like, yeah, this doesn't, denialism. Like they've been saying,

it doesn't, they ain't out there. They're just straight. It's like, yeah, okay. They're not straight. It is definitely its own distinct category of sexual interest.

Um, but I think that it was forbidden previously. I'm very confused brandon you seemed saja do you have more on this before i i have some questions yeah i mean i have so basically i can just say this is all part of so this is the the final course in their health ed curriculum which is a series of mandatory courses that sort of starts in elementary school and goes till high school um and the health ed curriculum is just chock full of like this kind of insane gender stuff. I mean, as early as kindergarten, kids are being taught that like

sex assigned at birth is quote, a guess that grownups make to label the bodies of babies when born. They're watching insane YouTube videos on channels called queer kids stuff. I mean, this is really, it's like libs of TikTok couldn't have made this i mean this is really it's like libs of tiktok couldn't have made this up i mean it's like queer kids stuff has videos called what is my gender dysphoria and what's an abortion anyways um and so they're watching videos from this like non-binary woman uh teaching them about this this kind of stuff and you know teachers are learning about you should always ask a child's pronouns instead of assuming it um they learn to express solidarity with trans people of color i mean it's basically like all of the stuff you would imagine your most sort of woke like conventionally woke

flat um idea of what they'd be teaching in health class they are uh and importantly they're also not telling parents that they're doing it because california law only requires that you notify parents about content of sex education when you're teaching about like std transmission i think um and you know obviously teaching about uh you know the definition of uh scoliosexual isn't explicitly about stds so you know they don't need to tell parents i think about this stuff like i it reminds me of um do you know how people are always given the question if you could go back in time and kill baby hitler would you do it and it's like yeah i'm not saying i would do it but i mean i don't know it's complicated you have a conversation about. And the implication is that if you did that, Nazi Germany would never

have come to power, which I think is probably true. I feel that way about Tumblr. If you could go back in time and just convince the founders, it'll never work. Just don't do it. Turn back. It's really bad. Where would our culture be today if tumblr had just never existed uh brandy you said that this was you mean you've described this as an earth-shattering piece that was going to alter american history forever um tell me about it not that way yeah i think i was just i i had a visceral reaction to that worksheet because you really i would encourage readers to go to the site and check it out because seeing this child's handwriting juxtaposed against these very adult terms for me like produced this visceral reaction and it struck me as like unusually cruel and

and like an unusually cruel and oppressive thing to do to kids um sanji didn't mention this uh just just now but in the piece she um also brings up this gender snow person that um exercise that fifth graders have to do and i i was looking at it um and basically they're given a uh like a sort of coloring worksheet with a snow person on it and and they're taught that they can put a mustache and maybe like a carrot like a mustache on its face and a carrot on its like where its genitals would be and that would be perfect that would be perfectly normal right because uh you know or i you know what i'm saying like it could be a gender bending snowman or whatever yeah and it's like frosty full like ffs he just has like fully yes probably yes if i snow person yeah um i just remember when i was a kid if i was in fifth grade um

i did not i don't think i like like i don't know i i can't imagine learning stuff like that um as a kid and it it appeared i think this was my real like i don't know it was like a light bulb moment for me that um they are propagandizing our like our children um and this is the sf usd the san francisco united school district um this school is in the middle of san francisco like our children. And this is SFUSD, the San Francisco United School District. This school is in the middle of San Francisco. This is not like an outlier school. It's a public school. And they're doing it from K to 12

and you got to graduate and they're just teaching kids to be oppressed and to pick some identity that makes them not like a straight white person let's say you know um and and it just feels really bad and and again the worksheet if you just see this kid's handwriting on this worksheet it's just it's a very jarring thing to to witness yeah i think these these i always think of these people as like the real gender fascists actually because they're so obsessed with policing kids behavior and like labeling it in this really like i was watching one of the queer kids stuff videos just sort of to get

into the mindset of these people when i was writing this piece and there's this point where in one of the videos all these people are describing like what their gender expression is and one of them is like, I'm a femme presenting woman, which means that I wear lipstick sometimes and dresses. And then this other person is like describing herself as like a mask presenting woman or something like weird thing about how like they're non binary. Cause they wear like car heart or some shit like that.

And it's just this insanely regressive limited really like uncool uh view of like fashion and style and identity um and i just i find it depressing that they're imposing this on kids um because i think you know obviously obviously some of these kids are probably gonna feel like they develop gender dysphoria and maybe go down you know the path of medicalization that has you know a lot of consequences but more than that i just think it's gonna give kids this really sort of like limited skewed weird idea about like if they identify as something then they can dress like this other way and yeah you know it's it's a it's we didn't it's the concept of placing yourself in a box is not the problem the problem is we don't have enough boxes so they're just creating more boxes

to jam you into and if you want to you know wear a different set of clothes you have to pick a new box or something and that's just not true like people can just dress whatever they way they want to and present however they want to and like i i feel trite it's like feeling a trite conversation at this point like you can only say this so many times and like we all agree on this i think most americans i don't even know where most americans sit on this question anymore um but yeah it's definitely sad but also was not surprising to me that that was happening in the san francisco public schools uh river you had you said you had a um you had a list of what did you want to do here with this oh i we kind of already did it anyway but we were like going through the list i mean some of them like the gray gender like bi gender stuff some of that shit feels

it feels so dated it's like teaching kids the hanky code or something like this stuff has not been around since like the early 2010s on tumblr where it would only ever existed really um but it's kind of weird to see like stuff that literally has only existed on like tumblr and social media be sort of immortalized in like high school curriculum um i don't it just feels very strange to me that you would do that even above like i i was like well if you're gonna teach kids all this ridiculous nonsense they don't need to know like why not teach them like what a twink and a bear is because at least that might come up in conversation like gray gender or whatever has never come up

in conversation ever except to make fun of it um i wonder i wonder if there is some kind of uh academic vibe you know we saw a tech vibe shift. Obviously, we wrote about it at Pirate Wires. I wonder if it's coming to education now. Chris Rufo's been on this for a while in different places like Florida, but I just saw this story break about Harvard bringing back the SATs after a couple of years where they were like, there's not going to be any standardized testing to get into the school anymore. That feels significant to me. That feels, you know, where goes Harvard, where it tends to go all the other schools. And it feels like a bizarre question about what school should be was answered definitively by going back

to standardized testing. I don't know. Sanjana, what do you think of that one? I mean, I tend you think of that one? I mean, I tend to think like it's a little bit, it's like too little too late in some ways for these universities as people start to sort of realize that maybe the exorbitant education that they're getting over four years is not necessarily correlated

with getting like a very high paying job immediately. But it is, I mean, Harvard's reversal on it. It follows a number of universities have now reversed. I think UT Austin did it a few weeks ago. Dartmouth, I think, did it. I mean, it's just, it to me is interesting because it shows, it's like remarkable that this even happened in the first place. Like there was no data supporting the fact that removing the SATs as an admission requirement would ever help like the supposedly sort of like you know black and brown underprivileged kids that they thought they were going to help it does the opposite

it actually favors like rich private school kids who can you know game the system with their essays and things like that um I mean I guess i think that it's it sort of shows that maybe like some of these dei commissars who managed to get like an insane amount of power kind of randomly during the george floyd stuff and like force all of these policies into place are finally on their way out but I don't actually know if the like broader structural issues with the modern American university were ever really I mean the DEI commissars it's kind of like your google piece like the DEI commissars are like a symptom of the problem but I think the actual structural issues go much deeper and to the extent that this sat reversal um just

shows that the the commissar's star is waning it's a good thing but um i'm so the college is still yeah they're still screwed interesting what do you guys think last thoughts on school the gender stuff um harvard any of it was it a coincidence that that Harvard reinstated the SATs a month or so after Cloud and Gay resigned? Could that have had something to do with it? I think the colleges have a huge brand problem right now, which I believe Sanjay was sort of hinting at, certainly a piece of it with the fact that the idea that your college education would improve your chances in life is a huge part of their brand. But then also academic excellence, certainly at a place

like Harvard, it's the brand. It's the best one. The best people go there. The smartest people go there. And it's like on some maybe gut level, no matter what you say and how much you cry about whatever invented oppression you're talking about this morning, people all know that if someone is really good at testing and someone else is really bad at it, the one who's really good at it should probably be at the place where they fetishize academic learning. That's what people want to see. And that's how, no matter what the cultural watchdogs are saying about what merit is, the average person has this sense of it. And Harvard divorced themselves from that, and that hurt their brand.

We know there was a dip. There was a dip in – it was a small dip, but it was a dip in potential – what is it? When people apply applications to college, to Harvard. I'm not necessarily sure what to make of that, but that feels more related to me than the Claudine Gay thing. But the Claudine Gay thing is another example of embarrassment, academic embarrassment. This is a person who, I don't think that her fraud case was nearly as bad as Joe Bowler's seems to be, but it was not excellent. And that's probably what's going on is they need to they need to save

some face here i do think it'll be interesting to see in the next like 10 and 15 years as these harvard graduates who were admitted under like very sort of weakened admissions conditions like break out into the world and probably go into like public policy and uh you know i don't know maybe media and that kind of thing and then get lampooned if you like for saying stupid things people always be wondering what year did you graduate yeah calculator comes out like let me see yeah um they'll we'll know who they are because they're they're going to be the ones who never talk stop talking about the fact that they went to harvard that's how you're gonna know what year they graduated yeah um river final thoughts i mean i don't i don't see the point in going to some of these schools anyway because i feel like i work at this in the same

field as people who did and i went to state school in florida nobody's ever heard of just because it was the closest one to where i lived and i regret going there like that didn't do me any fucking favors you know what i mean um so i don't know i mean if you are i suppose if you're going to like some sort of technical school or whatever like you're going to a medical school or something or law school maybe you should go there but other than that like if you're just going to get a ba don't even bother like it doesn't even matter i hope you know it's felt like this was gonna happen for so long because the really less separate from all the dumb woke shit separate from the end of merit separate from the sat stuff and uh you know the academic fraud all the table all of, just the cost of college. It is so insane that you think

there has to be a point at which people just mass stop going. And also like, not only is it so insane, the Zoomers have this whole, their history is so different than millennial history. There was no huge history of people telling them as they grew up, like, hey, college debt is insane. You're going to be screwed. It's going to be a disaster. It was sort of a surprise. Everyone was telling millennials to go to college. They're like, yeah, you're taking on debt, but it's good debt and you're going to be fine. You're going to get a great job and you've got to do it. Zoomers were not told that. And they're still behaving as millennials did. They're still pouring into these places and taking on all of this insane debt. At what point point does that shift it seems like it has to at some point

because it's going to be worse for zoomers than it was for millennials i don't know but when it happens i think it will happen all at once and be a sort of crazy shattering of the system and we'll be there to write about it catch you next week guys um subscribe or die later