Pirate Wires - Kamala’s Economic Plan (ft. Martin Shkreli), DNC Report, and PIRATE IDOL

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

EPISODE #66: Martin Shkreli is back on the pod to discuss Kamala’s economic policies. We break down all of the details and why they are terrible ideas. The DNC is wrapped up, and we react to the events of the week. The media came after Ben Horowitz and his wife because.. wait for it.. they support Trump. And finally.. the most anticipated event of the week.. PIRATE IDOL. Shkreli is our guest judge this week as 4 contestants compete to earn a regular contributor spot on the Pirate Wires Podcast. Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Riley Nork, Martin Shkreli Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/death-by-vibes Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell Riley Twitter: https://x.com/rylzdigital Martin Twitter: https://x.com/MartinShkreli TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back Martin Shkreli to the pod! 2:00 - Breadlines Are Brat - Breaking Down Kamala’s Economic Policy 16:45 - Price Gauging 26:30 - The Latest Polymarket Report 28:15 - DNC Recap - Including Land Acknowledgements, Vasectomies, and Free Abortions 46:15 - Media Attacks Ben Horowitz and His Wife For Supporting Trump 59:10 - PIRATE IDOL - Who’s Going To Be The Next PW Star?! 1:37:30 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe #podcast #technology #politics #culture

Kamala's economic policy. Red lines are brat. Kamala's plan to ban price gouging in grocery stores. Shies be crazy. Planned Parenthood also announced they would be providing free vasectomies. No, but seriously, how does the abortion thing work? Do we know?

Like the actual logistics of setting up a food, an abortion truck, and just planning on doing abortions that day in the truck. Welcome to Pirate Idol. I mean, the hotly anticipated segment. and just planning on doing abortions that day in the truck or welcome to pirate idol i mean the hotly anticipated segment there's a difference between having the right take and being entertaining you failed spectacularly at one of pod we have with us the legendary martin screlli welcome back my friend we are doing uh martin's gonna be guest co-host and i mean we had a lot we have a lot there's a lot going on in the pirate wars pirate wars universe pirate wars that's

actually how what's it they said it on the joate Wars universe. Pirate Wars. That's actually how, what's it? They said it on the Joe Rogan pod. That's our new name, actually. Oh, it was on Tucker. It was on Tucker. Yes. There was a story in Pirate Wars. So Martin is going to be, he's co-host today, but also a guest judge for Pirate Idol. Pirate Idol.

Very excited. We have a bunch of, we have four potential co-hosts who are going to come in and battle it out, take by take, on the topic of nuclear energy in Germany, which is extremely,

it's like a very stupid nation, a very stupid topic. We're excited to talk about it. We're excited for them to talk about it. We're excited to judge them while they are talking about it. Something to look forward to. We have a ton stupid topic. We're excited to talk about it. We're excited for them to talk about it. We're excited to judge them while they are talking about it. Something to look forward to. We have a ton of pieces

that we've been publishing in PirateWires. Brandon has been just relentlessly editing stuff. Go to PirateWires.com. Make sure you're subscribed to the daily so you're getting the updates on the bottom of what we're publishing. Also, there are some great takes in the daily. Let's just get on with it um martin

this one is going to be to you uh but i want to tee it up for you so obviously there's a lot that we have to cover today but the one that we have to cover is kamala's economic policy you've been talking about a lot online uh for good reason it's very important we finally have a policy uh so bread lines are brat let's talk about it um we have sort of evolved from coconut season to like the question of maybe is it a coconut mirage uh and we'll get more into the sort of polling in our poly market segment which will be coming up uh but she released so kamala explosive people are excited. They've never been so excited, not since Obama, I'm hearing. I mean, people are really losing their minds out there on this topic.

She releases her economic policy. So a sampling of things that I've seen. $25,000 subsidies for buying a house, wiping out literally all medical debt. A proposal on unrealized gains, which Martin, you can kind of unpack that in a minute and what that means. I think it's worth having that conversation. And probably most famously, we have the question of, and I say question because it's been challenged relentlessly now by the media, price controls. Kamala's plan to ban price gouging in grocery stores. This is part of her broader and the Democrats' broader tactic or strategy of trying to convince you to not ask

about inflation, which they have caused with their spending policies. Now, Axios is defending this. They are saying this is not price controls. This is price gouging, a price gouging ban. Very different. We can have that conversation. Let's talk about it. It is funny because they got community noted into absolute outer space. It drives me crazy. Because they have said they've used this phrasing themselves. And also, I mean, Axios has been caught up in this stuff before. We have the Atlantic saying, don't trust. It's okay not to trust the economists, which is funny.

They finally found a class of expert they don't care about only in this one context. And I guess it's just like this overall question of, you know, I've been referring to Kamala for a while as like little coconut, coconut queen, but things have changed. Is this communism with a K? They're asking in the New York Post. I prefer the question is like, is this the rise of Hugo Chavala, if you will? But I don't know. There's a lot to talk about here. With the analysis, just first reaction to Hugo Chavala's economic plan. Martin, what are you seeing out there? So before we even get into that, like, I actually would take issue with this idea that she is that popular. And again, maybe this is just me like being in denial. But to me, I think the media is forcing but Kamala is popular, and people love her narrative down

our throat. People actually loved Obama. When I met Peter Thiel, 15 years ago, we actually fought over whether or not Obama was cool. And he took the no side. And I was kind of like, I don't hate him that much. Kamala really doesn't have the redeeming quality. She's like the $5 billion pre-money startup that got like, you know, is on Series D, has no revenue. She's Magic Leap. Yeah, she's Magic Leap. I mean, she is like, yes, Sequoia put in a lot

in Series D. So we're going to market up from, you know, $2 billion to $5 billion. And then the round fails, the company shuts down. And everyone was like, what the fuck was that? And I think it's just people forcing this opinion. In terms of the economic stuff, obviously, it's a disaster, disaster on its face. What I tried to do on Twitter is I really tried to sort of try to be generous and how could we make this stuff work? What's the best possible light we could put this stuff in? And there's been all misinformation, too, about what exactly is her policy. There's been a lot of misinformation too about what exactly is her policy because some people say, well, our 50% cap gains tax is long-term, but it only would apply certain strata of income.

So if we take it on its face that a 50% long-term capital gains would apply on any capital gains, I think that's a really wild proposal because most of the wealth and value in this country is created through capital. I think there are two big wild proposal because most of the wealth and value in this country is created through capital. So I think there are two big things that people are discussing. One is the price gouging ban. And I think it's a mistake to focus on that one because we don't even really know what she... I mean, we could talk about it.

It's very stupid the way they've framed it. But the unrealized gains thing is potentially crazy. Can you explain? Because it's only on gains of, I think, it's supposed to target only people with like, what is it, 100 million? Yeah, this is an Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg tax. I mean, and so basically,

the borrow, spend and die philosophy, if anybody hasn't heard that, you basically are, you go public. This would only apply to like public companies. And by the way, which would force even more companies to stay private as a result. But if you're Zuckerberg or Bezos, probably a lot of people don't know how much cash these guys actually have on hand. And it's a lot. And how do you get that cash? Well, you go to Morgan Stanley, you go to Goldman Sachs and say, look,

I've got $50 billion of stock. Can I borrow a billion dollars against that? And they say, sure. And you borrow the money and you don't pay taxes on that because it's a loan. If anything, you got to pay interest on the loan. So why would you pay capital gains tax? And the idea that, well, you're up on your stock by $50 billion. Not only are we going to stop you from borrowing against your stock, but we also want to tax you

on the gains you made. And there's no idea here as to how would you implement that. And so my charitable view is, okay, let's say after 10 years of having sat on a gigantic capital gain, perhaps then you could have a tax of some kind of wealth tax, basically. And again, this is me really trying to make this work. But the problem with that, as we all know, is that what happens when that stock drops 50%, you know, and you've basically paid the wealth tax, which I'm guessing is not going to be a small tax. And then the stock's down 50%. And you've basically lost most of your wealth. Yeah. Does the government pay you back? So is the government by doing this taking on a crazy liability? So let's say you started a company and your stake goes from zero to 50 billion, amazing success. And they say, you know what? We're going to deem the 50 billion you made. We want a stake in it. Which is really wild, because by the way, there are, I mean, they can wait for death tax, right?

Like, it's got, eventually that thing's going to be sold. No stock in America stays forever. So the idea that, like, we need to get it now, we're going to get it someday. There's only two certain things in life, right? Like, so, like, why do we need to take Elon's money now, as opposed to when the guy, I hope it never happens, passes away, gives his stock to a foundation? Something like that is going to happen someday. It happens with everyone. And in fact, you do see the Zuckerbergs, the Bezos is selling their stock. They eventually do

diversify. You kind of touched on it a second ago. You said this was basically a tax on five people. We're targeting this very small group of people, it seems, who have over $100 million in the stock, who are doing the sort of borrow strategy that we're talking about. There is this snippet of an interview back in the Obama days that I think is pretty telling here. Back then, they were talking about an increase in gains tax. Now, since then, over the last eight years or whatever, Democrats have been increasingly interested in taxing gains before they were realized. But this was still a post-realized gains world. And Obama... So it's like, this guy's saying, listen, if you do this, it's not going to pay

back any of our debt. It's like nothing, actually like it's actually not that much money it's like it seems to really suck for the wealthiest in america but you it's not as much money as you're sort of pretending and you're not gonna be able to do anything with it it's not gonna help it's signaling i mean aoc famously had a policy guide that said every billionaire is a policy mistake yes and and this is the extension of that she comes from this obama straight up says well charlie so is charlie gibson well charlie uh what i've said is that i would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness so now our tax policy is no longer about funding our increasingly bloated government or paying down our right like existential debt at this point it's actually punishment it's screwed up like i am going to punish these rich people uh i think that is one in itself dark and like we don't want to go down that road but more importantly too on

the gains itself if i mean income tax started this way it started as something that targeted the ultra wealthy and then it gradually came to target everybody. If they start doing this, and this affects now all of us, let's say even just reasonably wealthy people, people who are worth 10 million or more, people who are starting businesses, who is owning an asset that's pre-gains. It's like, if you have a company, that's worth something. That is worth something that you can actually value. If you have a home, that's worth something that you can actually value. If you have to start selling some piece of that, that's a nightmare. That's certainly the end of... I mean, that is a huge hit to entrepreneurship generally, and then also

just I think all of us. Well, imagine somebody comes to America and starts a laundromat company and they build it up and what's the mark to market? I mean, do we do a DCF of laundromat and say, well, it's worth 20 million. Congratulations. You came from a different country and you came to America and you made it and you owe us 4 million. And then you're looking around and you're like, what do I do? That is such another great... There are a lot of great points here because the idea is crazy and there's a reason that we haven't done it, but you're right. How do you value these companies? In tech, how do we value a company before it's public? It's just like guys saying shit. It is like really... Look at Theranos. On Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes owes the government a billion dollars.

Right. And what is it actually worth? We never know this in business until it goes public and the public decides based on what they're willing to pay. What are people willing to pay for a share of that? Before that, you're in VC territory. The valuations are very different. So who are you going to have making these determinations on what a business is worth? Certainly not someone who's competent in business. I think it's all about signaling, right? I mean, they know they can't... You can't actually logically implement this. So it's more showing the voter, hey, I'm beating up Elon, I'm beating up, you know, whoever. And I think that it's also showing themselves because a lot of people say Elon's the shadow president. government's kind of tried to poke a stick at Elon, he's now got a megaphone where he says, fuck you. I don't care. I laugh at you. You're nobody to me. And that's not something that the government likes. I learned that the hard way. I was so below Elon. But the point is that by

making that kind of messaging, you make a lot of enemies because government people, that's the one thing they have. They have a little bit of power and they want to hold on to it. And anybody tries to subjugate the power. It's very scary. So the response from them is, well, what can we do to bother this class of people? And under the guise of like paying the deficit or under the guise of equality or fairness, I do think that Americans aren't going to buy this. I think that Americans look up, many Americans look up to Elon and people like him. And it's the American dream. It's still there. It's a reason that we're different from Europe and that people look at this and say, well, how do well, don't these people pay the most taxes to begin with? And now we want

to tax them before they even make the money. I don't agree with you at all. I wish that you were right. I really wish that you were right. But it seems to me that the public is totally bought in on the concept of like, we are being treated unfairly and these rich people are getting away with murder. I think it's always been that way. And I think there's no way to win against a party that is telling you that. If you're confirming that weird suspicion that you want to believe that none of your problems are really your problems, there's this evil minority class of billionaires who have hoarded all of the wealth and they're treating you unfairly. And wouldn't it be nice if I just wiped out all of your medical debt by making them pay their fair share of taxes? I think the average person says, fuck yes, which is why, weird take, tell me what you think, all of you guys. I've gotten on board with Trump's deranged economic plans also. I think that you do need both parties to be crazy at this. You can't have only one party be crazy. I think if it's only one party that's crazy, you definitely lose because the crazy

party is going to win on economics. But if both parties are crazy, if the left is saying, we're going to liquidate Elon Musk, but the right is saying, we're going to take every house that politicians own after their first house, we're going to seize it and we're going to give it to the people to have. So everyone gets a house in America. We're making it, everyone gets a house in America promise or something like that. If they get even crazier like maybe there's mutually assured destruction in in in economics or in politics for the first time ever in well not ever but probably since fdr i don't know what do you guys think yeah i think you're right this is the way you win elections i would say first thing it's good that kamala is talking policy for once

that's a win um but the second thing for everyone who hates her it's good that Kamala is talking policy for once. That's a win. But the second thing is... For everyone who hates her, it's a win. Right. Which we can talk about in our polymarket segment. Right, right. But I do wonder, yeah, this is the way you move elections or you win elections. So I do wonder for how insane Kamala's policies are, I do wonder how much it's going to move the needle electorally.

And if not, is it just going to benefit her? Because you mentioned the 25k for a house like a lack of uh young home ownership is actually like a really big problem in this country so if people just hear like without getting in the weeds of it if they just hear 25k for a house they think that's a good thing dude she talked about wiping out medical debt like all of it that's i mean that's a i don't know how you're solid with debt i don't know how you look at that and don't think maybe the student debt thing also, like, I mean, there are many people, there are reasons that all these things are bad, but I'm saying like, if, if you're just trying to sort

of sociopathically gain votes by promising things that are not fair and that you can't do, then that's compelling to a certain kind of idiot person who is by the way, the average voter in this country is, is not like a genius. I did see a statistic about 10% of Americans are millionaires. So I do think that if you're not a millionaire, which is most people, you may be the dependent of one, right? Like, you know, it's gotten to a point where there's some sophisticated person in your household, ideally, that is like, hold on, you on, this is maybe not a great idea. And I want to talk about price gouging since I'm the guy there anyway.

It's a real pet peeve of mine, as you can imagine. Gouging is when there's COVID and your local deli or grocery store charges $100 for roll toilet paper. That's price gouging. There's some transient phenomenon that is being taken advantage of. Price changes are permanent, right? They're not meant to exploit some weird dislocation of demand and supply. And the price increases we've seen in the most mundane shit, right? I mean, food markets are like the most, like if you ever traded commodities or anything like that, like corn or OJ, this stuff fixes itself to the right supply demand so quickly. Because a farmer is like, yeah, I'm going to grow less worms. And it's just like that. You know, the price normalizes correctly.

So like these are goods that they are a little more volatile than normal goods, but they normalize so fast that this increase we've seen in the price of a vegetable or the price of milk or something, it's not because of price gouging. It's because of pure I guess all of the grocery stores in the country gotten a Zoom call and they were like, yeah, we're going to fuck Americans right now. And we're going to increase the cost of bread by precisely the rate of inflation, just sort of coincidentally. That's what we're choosing to do. If they did that, then you would have to what to stop that you would have to say we're going to set a to determine what is it to determine what's an unfair price you have to set a fair price so that is what a price control you're setting the fair price that's the price control how i don't understand so tell me how is it they've done this once they've done this once in pharma uh so in pharma if you raise the price higher and i I know this because I tripped this

law, if you raise that price higher than the CPI, the cumulative CPI, you have to pay back the excess. If you have Medicare and Medicaid, Medicare and Medicaid are only like 25% of revenue, but I had to write a check to the government for a, like a excess price increase law. And so it kind of exists in pharma. And so what, what Kroger or Walmart would have to do is say, all right, erase the price of milk from two to two 50, but CPI only was two to two 20, let's say. And they'd have to write a check for 30 cents to who the government like it's it doesn't or the government can force you at the price of 220 which is the the price control right there's sort of two ways to do it i guess but it has been done but then of course back in reality

where the grocery stores are not price gouging um there is a I think, a pretty common sense sort of question, which is like, why, if a price is set, and that price means that I will lose money selling this product or just not make enough of it to make it worth my while, why will I carry that product? And the answer is, you wouldn't. And that is how price controls have led to famine everywhere they've ever been implemented when it comes to food. But who do you think sets the price? It's the farmer who sells the stuff. So Kroger has to buy it from somewhere. And Kroger is just putting a fucking 3% markup on it, which is their gross margins, like 10% or something. And Farmer Joe says, okay, Kroger has to buy my stuff at $220 instead of $250, which is what I want to sell it for. Well, it cost me $220 to make it.

So I don't want to sell to Kroger for $220. I'm out of business. So, you know, it's going to trickle down all the way down to the product creator. I guess there is a question of just, we have it like, is it even, is this just them saying stupid shit? And like, they're saying it to distract you from inflation.

They're not actually going to do anything. This maybe why oh you see them go yeah i think they just basically did this like bureaucratic mckinsey like politician thing where they were just like let's get a focus group and uh 10 people out of 10 people 3.6 people said they were concerned with the price of groceries and they're like okay okay, let's make a policy about that. What can we do about that? And then they're just going to go down the list. Whereas Trump has this innate instinct of, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but he just shoots from the hip of what his policy should or might be. Whereas I think they just did a systematic thing. And the average American or the average American in the places they're trying to get votes is concerned about food prices.

The price of food, yeah, which is just inflation. I mean, it's not just the price of food. It's the definition of inflation. Yeah, it's like food, it's housing, it's clothes. Everything is up. And it's like, are they all gouging? As every entrepreneur in the country literally got on a Zoom call from every industry, and they were like, let's raise prices by 20% to 30%.

Wouldn't that be illegal, too? Yes, it would be illegal. Yes, it's illegal. So who's doing it? Who's colluding? Sorry, Brandon, what was your point? That's my take. That type of coordinated action has absolutely got to be illegal,

and it's on the Biden administration if they are not enforcing action against these companies that they're saying are coordinating higher prices for the consumer that would be sweet if the ftc brings a lawsuit against yeah i want to see that yeah every company in america yeah i mean just put your money where your mouth is i think right yeah let's see the lawsuit i mean it's just so it's so transparently not what they believe they they know that there's not price gouging and it started with warren like it's so transparently not what they believe. They know that there's not price gouging.

It started with Warren. It's insulting because Warren, yes, Warren's very good at this. I think Warren's really smart. I think she's really, that's what makes her dangerous. She's really good at picking up on things that are going to play well publicly by making arguments that seem based in reality, but aren't. And

they're, they're very cleverly constructed and you could sit there and argue with her for however long, but, um, the average person listening is just going to be like, I don't know. It sounds like the rich people are taking too much. And, um, and that's the genius of a Democrat who is able to make arguments like this. Now Kamala is not that good at it. Kamala is, let's be honest. I, did she even know this was her policy before one of her aides said it was her policy to a reporter? Unclear. Or what was the other one?

The other stupid thing she's doing is, oh, the gains tax, which will destroy the tech industry, which fucking VCs for Kamala, which we talked about, I think a couple weeks ago. In their open letter, they're saying that um if trump wins

the industry itself could collapse um they say the the institutions are that he threatens you know the lack of them means the collapse of the industry now we're talking about potentially a pre what is it an unrealized gains tax, which actually would end the way that we do things in Silicon Valley. Yeah, so I'm an LP in NEA or something. And the vintage does this huge leap up and then this huge leap down,

which happens sometimes. And I can be taxed at the peak, presumably. And if you know anything about taxes, you know that your losses carry forward, but you can't apply them against ordinary income. So like you traditionally, you know, they take at the top, but they don't refund you at the bottom. And that's something that just never happens. If I make $10 million capital gains this year, and I lose $10 million capital gains next year, I pay on the first and I don't get the money back in the second. And so the LPs of these funds would be completely torched if this happened.

I think it's more difficult to make an argument against raising the gains tax, even though I think it's unfair and it shouldn't happen. But just raising the gains tax, like realized gains, you sell the stock, now we're raising it. There's nothing wrong with that. We're going to do some stupid draconian 60% thing because we hate rich people. That's really fucked up. And I think it disincentivizes building companies. But what it does not do is make it almost impossible to build them in this way, which in unrealized gains tax, I think would actually do. And it's also, it's transient. Like if they

did that, they could see with how the experiment worked. Did it actually generate tax revenue? Did it actually do this or that? And I can wait four years to sell my company, right? Like I can just, you know, okay, eventually the tax rate's going to drop. But the traders, like a lot of us don't give a shit about what happens to the traders anyway. So the short-term tax gains, it's like, okay, some hedge fund buys a stock this week and sells it for next week. Are they really creating value in society? Who really gives a shit what tax they should be there? But the entrepreneurs in the world that build things, I think that we could all probably wait four years for a long-term tax. And I do think a new administration would fix it.

And I also think these things move marginally, is again goes back to the old obama argument that you know he raised capital gains tax like two percent or something you know uh nominally from like 35 to like 37 or something and it it didn't stop any of us from from building legendary companies uh and it's you know something like that's totally fine like i i don't like it i'm an anarcho-capitalist i want taxes to be zero so when i said this on twitter a lot of people are like, taxation is theft. And it's like, yeah, I know, but we have to compromise here. I mean, if they want to take cap gains up 2% or 3%, cool. I mean, that's not that bad. Maybe they want it. Maybe they wanted to compromise all along, but I don't know. I don't think they're that clever. They've been asking for an unrealized gains tax for a long time now. And let's see how all of this stuff... So I want to move on to our betting

market segment, which is supported by our partner, Polymarket. There's some pretty interesting stuff here. So both related to the economic policy of Kamala's that was released, and also I think the DNC, which Riley, you're going to break down in a second, sort of what's been going on this week at the Democratic National Convention. So in the span of seven days, Trump has seen a 9% bump in his odds to win the election, launching him back into the lead. The boost seems to be coming from Democrats' own efforts. So Kamala Harris released her first major platform proposal, a 45% tax on unrealized capital gains meanwhile the chaotic democratic national convention has a 40 chance of mass arrests during the event on uh on poly market right now the time of our recording fueled a lot of the early excitement. It was like, Biden has dementia,

and that was really demoralizing because Democrats knew there was really no way he could ever possibly win against Trump. He's gone. Now we have the coconut floating in the sky, like the star above Jesus's manger or whatever in the Bible. And people are like, hell, yeah, there's some hope here. And what they did was they just projected their own shit onto her and they diluted themselves in the last month of fantasy, basically. I wrote about this a lot in a piece called Death by Vibes this week in Pirate Wires. It was just a weird, crazy projection of ideas onto this woman and we lived by the vibe. Now, I was a little bit more nervous, like a vibe was

enough. They started talking, the vibes changed pretty quickly. And now there seems to be a giant question mark over what Democrats were very excited about moments ago. Part of that, certainly the convention. And Riley, I would love for you to break down what we've been seeing there this week. to break down what we've been seeing there this week. Sure thing. So I would be remiss if I didn't mention first the land acknowledgement that the Democratic Party announced in their party platform at the start of the convention.

You better make a land acknowledgement right now. Whose land are you standing on? Nevada. I'm sure we have some tribes, but anyway. So they said, while we have some tribes, but, um, but anyway, so they said, um, while we meet in Chicago, uh, we recognize that this is the traditional homeland of before listing all their, uh, native American tribes that I'm not even going to try to pronounce. Um, side note, we looked up on chat GBT, how many times those tribes went to war with each other.

And it turns out it was several, but anyway, um, but apparently the, uh, the DNC is going out of their way to cater to influencers as well at their convention, um, at the expense of traditional media, which is a little bit of a funny wrinkle there. Um, but as for actual speakers, uh, it seems from clips that I've seen, um, the person who's got the best reception so far has been Michelle Obama. Um, some notable things I saw from her speech, uh, there seemed to be a subtle shot at the, uh, pro Palestine wing of her party, uh, sort of telling them to like get in line. Um, she said, we cannot be our own worst enemies. Uh, we cannot get a Goldilocks complex about whether or not everything is just right.

Um, essentially telling her own party, like if you have issues with your candidate, like pipe down, just enjoy the vibes, enjoy the joy. But she also didn't mention Biden's name once, which was interesting. But after her Barack spoke right after echoed similar calls for unity. Notably though, he also joked about trump's obsession with crowd sizes while making a gesture to imply he was not in fact talking about crowd sizes um but i guess last observation on the topic of sort of phallic things um planned parenthood also announced they would be providing free vasectomies um as well as abortions for all dnc attendees great i am yeah

in favor of that at the democratic national convention was it abortions or abortion vouchers i think literal abortions out of a truck voucher is imagine being handed an abortion voucher that's there's no context we're gonna hand you an abortion voucher where you would where i would i'm shocked just talking about it, to be honest. They're in Happy Meals now. One party wants the birth rate to decline. I mean, I think it's, you know, tacitly or, you know, not, you know, it's kind of scary. And then we have to clarify the the nuclear arsenal

that's also part of the part of the process no but seriously how does the abortion thing work do we know like because you have to you want me to give you like the medical breakdown no no like like the actual logistics of setting up setting up a a food an abortion truck and just uh planning on doing abortions that day in the truck or what can a democratic congress person preferably a congresswoman give me my vasectomy you know the second is more straightforward but like you have to i mean i'm sure they would love to you have to be pregnant i'm sure they would they would love to give you a vasectomy they want to give all of us vasectomies but typically careful i have two just before we can talk about the abortion

vehicle of it all i would mean i have thoughts you guys all have thoughts i do just want to on riley's like the the sort of facts here i would like to introduce two one one more of a wild theory but that's popular online and then one that is less of a theory and more of just like a well-reported, I guess, piece of drama. So the Bidens and the Obamas hate each other. Like absolutely from all the reporting I've seen, the Bidens blame the Obamas for stealing this presidency from Joe. the Obamas for stealing this presidency from Joe. They have a lot of background leading up to this, where the Obamas have gotten in the way of Biden previously on different runs for the office. They didn't want to support him necessarily four years ago, even. Obama thought he was too old. Kamala Harris last night, she left the convention and did an event uh some kind of fundraising event or something to not be on the premises with the obamas i believe to um appease joe and his rage for these people who kind of stole this from him now what did the obamas want what they did not want also was kamala they

obama's statement was like we're gonna have a a process here to determine who the presidential candidate is going to be after Joe stepped down. And he was, they say, pressured to step down by Obama and Pelosi, but mostly Obama, talking to fundraisers, talking to all of his political allies. Obama's sort of quietly been orchestrating this entire thing. So he gets to the final moment. Joe does step down. But what Joe immediately does is he endorses Kamala Harris. And once the president endorses Kamala Harris, Kamala is like the presumptive nominee. And that happened overnight. Everyone was like, oh, I guess she's running, the donors, the public. That was it. It was over. Why did Obama want a process? Now, here's where the conspiracy gets... It's not really

conspiracy, but the sort of wild theory is that Michelle Obama is in the running. And she has been speaking... So I've noticed that she's been in the polymarket odds forever. She's one of the top... After Biden, but when Biden was still running, even before everyone realized he had dementia officially during the debate, even before that, Michelle Obama was always like 3% chance of being the Democratic nominee. And that's because Democrats are obsessed with her. They absolutely love her. We've done this before with the Bushes to an extent, certainly with the Clintons. We repeat this oligarchical family thing where when there's a popular family member, we want the other one in there because we know that they represent the same thing. And I wonder if we had had a fair process, would Michelle Obama have thrown her hat in the ring? I think it's actually possible. And everyone was obsessed with that speech she gave last night. I should say, finally wrapping it up. I think that's some important additional context of what's going on with the convention right now.

You know, I sometimes track influencers just for some like data, you know, stuff I do for investing. Michelle Obama has some of the most amount of influencers like I think she's in the top 100 on Instagram. And it's a really remarkable thing because you know, right? She's the most followers. Yes, thank you. It's a really remarkable number because, you know, she has the most followers. Yes. Thank you. It's a really remarkable number. She's wildly popular. I don't think just I mean, probably within Democrats, but like just like 40, 50 million followers. And compare that to like Jill Stein. I'm sorry, Jill Biden or someone like that. It really is a very different, you know, adoration for her.

Yeah, she was really popular during Barack's presidency. She was considered one of his most powerful weapons to bring out. She had broad bipartisan appeal. No matter how much right-wing influencers online want to pretend that's not the case, posting weird, ugly pictures of her and calling her a man, and is she actually trans? You can have all fun and games or whatever online, trashing political person you want but she is people love her um jill has three million followers on twitter or next and mike has 22 million so it's a really big big difference mike sorry michelle um yes i think that uh i think that it's coming and i think that she wanted it to come do i think

that uh i really do i really think i really do think that had there been some kind of actual formal process i think michelle would have been in that ring. And I also think Gavin Newsom would have been in that ring just based on what Gavin was doing leading up to that season. And I think the only reason Gavin slowed down at the last minute was not because he was worried about Kamala or Biden, but because he was worried about the Obamas. I think he knew that in a fight against Michelle, he would lose and he would sort of maybe lose his chance uh to your point i think uh michelle is sort of like a foil to kamala in the sense that every time like kamala gets behind a microphone and says something people kind of like cringe and are like what what strange thing is she gonna say now every time michelle speaks

people like democrats are glowing like she got the best reception at the convention by far yeah i think yeah she is adored among her party for sure there's a lot of people in the dc like Democrats are glowing. Like she got the best reception at the convention by far. So I think, yeah, she is adored among her party for sure. There's a lot of people in the DC politics circuit that talk about and think that Michelle is the architect of Barack and that there would be no Barack without Michelle, not just this old trope of like every behind every man is a strong woman,

but like behind every male president named Barack Obama, there's a puppeteer named Michelle Obama. And there's a lot of feelings like that. And I don't think there's a single person who's ever been in the White House that says they want to leave. Right? I mean, there's just this constant... Whatever happens there, I have no clue. But once you're in, you seem to want to stay there. And to go back a third time, I think would have been seemingly something they would have wanted. I guess I wonder, well, I have an answer to my question, but it does seem at face value,

sort of strange that she didn't go and run for office in the way that Hillary did. But then again, Hillary lost. She didn't become president. And what Michelle Obama is right now is not politicized entirely in the way that Hillary was once she ran for office. Michelle gets to be popular, generally speaking. And even among people who don't agree with her husband, there's some insulation there from that because she's never held political office. When Hillary was in the White House as the first lady, her first lady's project famously was health care which immediately politicized her michelle did the like let's get fat kids to move thing which

had broad appeal people want to see fat people exercising they want it they've like deeply in their bones they want to see it and she gave it to them um i think that's pretty interesting uh i think that she's learned from trump as as well as hillary's losses she learned from trump's victory you don't have to have been in politics to win she has a very good chance i think that she's probably going to run for president and um i think she's going to be hard to win uh to win against to beat rana what do you think yeah i think the question is if kamala wins what happens in four years do we i think she's another one term if she if she if she wins um i think your your instinct about or everybody's here here's an instinct about

comma sorry um michelle being the better candidate than kamala is correct and so um yeah i'm curious about what happens in four years, given that Kamala is going to accept the Democratic nomination tonight. Doesn't it just feel that way? It feels like she's losing right now. I don't know. In the way that it didn't a week ago. We'll see. How many more days? Yeah, we have like, what, 70 more days, 80 more days until November.

Right. I think once you have the first debate debate you're really going to sort of force this issue of like well how do you defend price controls how do you defend unrealized tax gains how you defend all the other batshit stuff that she's gonna say and i think it's sort of like the biden debate all trump has to do is just shut up and i think he's kind of been doing that the last few weeks maybe it's just because the dnc is going on but i think like the more you know trump's we've had enough of Trump for eight years. We know what his policies are. He doesn't need to say anything. All we need to do is listen to Kamala for the next 60, 90 days and watch the debate. I do think she'll bring up the black... He said he just found out she was black or whatever. She'll bring that up and it'll be

her one huge zinger. trump has a lot of time to figure out how he's going to answer that i will say to that sort of thing that he said i think what happened there if you look at black trump supporters um on instagram or whatever and i get a lot of reels and i'm always seeing this stuff and there are tons um this is very it's like a common thing that that black like right-wing influencers were saying, not even right-wing influencers. I saw the Don Lemon clip the other day, uh, where he goes to Atlantic city and he interviews a bunch of people in Atlantic city, but all of them, except for one, I think were black

Atlantic city is a very, uh, black city. Um, so he's on the boardwalk. He's interviewing these people. One of them actually brought up the Kamala black thing themselves. And they were like, they were like clearly in favor of that. And I think Trump made a miscalculation there. Like that's something that maybe black people have this conversation themselves. I think that as a white guy doing it, it comes off really different, including for black people who maybe even agreed with you. And we're like, who is this person or whatever? Anyway, not endorsing that.

I'm just saying it's going to come back up to haunt him. And that's maybe the only thing that he has to worry about in that debate i think the left is is very has turned out to be extremely formidable when it comes to the information war that we're seeing online like the the price controls conversation i think is kind of working out in their favor because every time somebody freaks out about price controls they can just say yeah only if you are in control of assets over $100 million. So you're simping for- Direct gains. The unrealized gains tax.

Yes, unrealized gains. And I also have this feeling that the right is actually less capable in the information war than the left. When the left is activated, they're pretty good at just being super semantic, engaging in a vicious war of semantics, and always sort of somehow turning these issues into their favor. And so that's what I worry about for Trump's chances. I don't really worry about what happens in the real world. I think the information war is where a lot of it's happening. And again, I think the left has been pretty consistent about how good they've been on that front. Yeah. It's just that they have to be excited about a candidate.

And once they are, you have all of the word cells and the word chats, I consider myself among them, they become activated. And what was happening with Biden is they weren't, I will say I've noticed online a little bit of demoralization. I've seen plenty of journalists. We're always like the media is totally in the bag for Kamala or whatever. I think largely, yes, that's true. But then the Washington Post had a whole, from the editorial aboard, a critique of Kamala's price control thing and the economic policy stuff. I see everyone on, what is it, CNBC, constantly going after Kamala on this economic plan. I see journalists in the Wall Street Journal. I just saw earlier today on X going after her for this stuff. When I click onto the New York Times, yeah, there's lots of support for her, but there are lots of questions like light on policy,

pro, like strong on vibes, or I forget what the actual headline was the other day but they're not saying nothing about this um the washington post thing was like apostasy i mean it was like a true break and i also think that i mean this might be just something that bothered me but the there's a the volunteers for kamala input form has about 82 genders on it and nine exactly nine including faith faith faith is real faith fair faith is real but uh regardless the uh you know that that kind of stuff does have an impact because i think that the original thought is like kamala and the left would step away from woke but but you now have this increasing,

like again, this clarifying the nuclear agenda or arsenal between that, the input form, you do seem to have wokeism creeping back in. I do think wokeism is one of these things that almost became bipartisan where even the left has sort of had enough of it. And I think Kamala's embrace, remember she was the first vice president with pronouns in her bio. That was a really big deal. Well, she went up on stage with Cuomo

and she introduced herself as she, her, and then Cuomo said, ah, like me too. And the audience was just silent. Like, what did you just say? Cuomo, Chris, both Cuomos. I have a new theory on the Cuomos. There's a new clip going around of Chris Cuomo. He's on the floor of the DNC complaining about the rich people up in the box. And he's like, this is the Uniparty and this is how it works and blah, blah, blah. And I was watching and I'm like, is he a Trump supporter now or is he a communist? I can't actually tell the difference. And I think increasingly that's just politics in America. But one thing is certain, he's no longer pro whatever the blob thing is. As his brother, who was the governor of New York, I mean, he did a lot of damage there on the COVID stuff.

But why did he really go down? Why did Chris also at the same time really go down? I think it's because they were no longer part of the machine. And I think that was kind of well known. And I think that all of this... So his brother, actually, the governor went down for sex stuff. I think it was like a sex scandal of some kind. That is on earth right when he becomes politically useless and used against him to get him out. And then Chris, I forget the reason. I think it might have been actually just his brother. He was like too friendly to his brother on air.

And that became a huge scandal. But in hindsight, like, was it that big of a deal? I don't think so. Anyway, let's come back to the cuomos one of these days i think that there are interesting things coming from the cuomo brothers in the days ahead might be communism not entirely sure but i am interested brandon last topic related to this um the sort of you were just talking about how good these people are information war uh there was recently the story of the SF Standard

wrote a hit piece on Ben Horowitz's wife, and I would love you to break that down for us. Yep. So last week, the title of the article that you just referred to is called How Ex-Liberal Billionaires Ben and Felicia Horowitz Made a MAGA U-turn. It was pretty scandalous on our corner of Twitter, but maybe our listeners haven't read the piece. But the lead to the piece kind of says it all. The lead reads, they once hosted Kamala Harris and handed out food at Glide.

Now they donate to MAGA candidates and live inside a four-gated mansion in Nevada. What is pause really quick? Four-gated. Describe that to me. Somehow there are four gates. There's like a sequence of four gates, each one taller than the next. Because I want to know more about the four gates. I played a video game like that once.

You need four keys. You have to basically siege the compound to get in. It won't be able to wait months or whatever, starve them out. I don't know. I have no idea what it means, frankly. I mean, we can kind of skip the content of the article because it's very obvious what it is. It's basically just like a master class in the type of hit pieces that are served as punishment for like when somebody ideologically defects right like i happen to know the the reporter very well emily sugarman yeah yes

recently fired from the daily beast or something like that that's right so so she was a hit piece writer and uh she did about five or six of these numbers on me so she's not the one that you had the thing with in prison. No, no, no, no. Okay. I would have clutched my pearls right now. Sorry. Continue. She's a very pretty young lady. She's a lesbian. And her boss basically commissioned all these articles.

The editor at the Daily Beast, who was also fired, was this sort of like 400 pound social justice warrior lady that, you know, it was basically like, look, we hate Martin Shkreli. Or, you know, here's the hit piece you should write to Martin Shkreli. And basically, you know, she was this hired gun. So to me, I point the, you know, kind of a finger up here to, you know, who asked her to write this piece? Because it doesn't come out of nowhere. Like somebody has an ax to grind says, Ben and Felicia, write the story.

Yes, sir. Or yes, ma'am. And I'm going to go. And she's, I think Emily's actually kind of like a decent investigative reporter, but she's also a hired gun. And, and I'm not sure, you know, I mean, she fits, fits the bill, but. This is how the democratic, this is the democratic party's immune system in action i don't think this is out of character for how they've been treating anybody who like ideologically defects over the past four years or so rather than engage in the issues that

ben and felicia supposedly felicia has, with the Biden administration and by default, the Harris administration, they just try to shame and embarrass them. Right, they put them in MAGA hats on the pic, which was kind of crazy because I saw that and I actually was like, damn, why would they wear those hats out in public? They're obviously going to get roasted for it.

It took me a second to realize that was Photoshopped. it was very funny in the context of the ai deep fake conversation we're having where the most believable deep fake i just saw was like a cheap photoshop job by someone who just hated another person um yeah that was wild they were definitely upset about that over at a16z uh i do think that the point of who are these people who are assigning the pieces, though, just like let's get niche in the media stuff is pretty interesting. Yeah. The idea that like they're kind of invisible. They are this invisible. And biology talks about this quite a bit in the context of the souls of burgers.

And I don't think I agree with him kind of roughly that that's why aren't't we talking about the Sulzbergers more than we are? They're obviously important. They're obviously influential. They obviously have a lot to do with everything to do with what's going on with the New York Times. But the writers are writing pieces. And I think the New York Times is not as bad as some of these others, the other outlets. I don't think you would have ever seen a piece like, it would have been better than this. It would have been harder to attack if it was in the New York Times. But there are editors who are signing this, and those are the real players. Those are like, if you're on a chessboard, right? The writers are the pawns. And then maybe the editors are like, they're like the bishops or the rooks or something. And then the owner is the king, right? Ultimately not doing a lot of the, like, how much has Bezos done at the Washington Post? Like he's pretty constrained. The owner of the standards is this guy Moritz, right?

Who used to be at Sequoia, but is not anymore. So this is what Ben Horowitz alleged. Yeah, right. So they came out, they sort of sniffed out that there was going to be a hit piece published eminently by Horowitz and Andreessen and basically tried to play offense for,

for like 24 hours before the piece came out. Um, and they were claiming that like, this is a, this is essentially top down from Moritz. Um, and the reason was because they're, these two groups are in competition with each other somehow.

Um, the editor of the standard, I can't remember what his name is, but it's a guy. He actually, he, he totally went to bat for Mor moritz i don't know what's true by the way i have no inside information but he was like very vocal on twitter saying like you know it was me and only me who signed who assigned this hippies was it jessica i know him i don't know if it was him i can't remember his name i i tried to look it up and i can't find it

I can't remember his name. I tried to look it up and I can't find it while we're recording. It might be Adam something. The other thing that's kind of interesting is that Emily's very good at hit pieces, which are generally kind of have these half-truths that are a little salacious and don't have context

and just makes you kind of say, oh, what a terrible person. There was none of that here. There was nothing in here that was bad. It was just they changed their mind. They don't support Democrats anymore. And it really lost its oomph there. Cause usually there's some, oh, he grabbed her ass or, you know, all of a sudden, you know, he's, he's hiding this or hiding that. None of that exists here. The sort of implication that she was betraying black people, I thought as a black woman was gross, but I agree that it could have been actually worse. I still think it was bad. I control left for the word black in the

article and it is mentioned 14 times the word black. I mean, this is like, she's totally coming at this angle of, you know, I have a certain way that i think black people are supposed to act and felicia is not acting in that way and therefore she's bad um so i think that was absolutely a a uh an element to it which is that is kind of for sure the implication and that's the game that she's trying to play um and it hurts the reason it hurts felicia is because felicia's done so much on like over the last few years. I think the A16Z had the culture fund like Ben Horowitz also like they're very invested in black culture and stuff. So it was a very sensitive place to poke, I think. So white newspaper owner, white editor, white reporter tells the black lady what to think and what to do.

Many such cases. We've seen it a lot. It's also like, why did she get dragged in to begin with like they point to like her uh she like removed some pictures of her with like liberal politicians on her social media that was their justification of like she's the far right mega person too like why did she even have to be involved she retweeted the endorsement and retweeted the endorsement which is you're right it's crazy like she's, she's not Ben who did a 60 minute YouTube with Mark on why he was supporting this person and giving money to them.

And then you went after his wife is it's, it's just, it's really interesting. The, she changed her Twitter profile or X profile to say escaping the matrix, which of course is like this andrew tate idea but she's not the first black person to do this there are many black people in hollywood who are in fame and wealth that have said gee i've kind of been forced into this decision by lots

of people around me that i have to be a democrat and so many of them like little wayne and others have said maybe i want to just think for myself and i i don't i'm not i'm not signing up for this anymore and i think that that's sort of like not atypical like so to focus on her that much is is again i i'm not surprised i wouldn't be surprised if moritz or you know kind of there was it may not directive but kind of like this understanding that hey wait the two biggest bc, Sequoia, A16Z, it certainly didn't fall on anybody's... Excuse me, they're not the two biggest VC firms. Let's just calm down. They're up there. They're a handful. And I guess one question maybe to explore or might be fun to think about is why does Ben and Mark sort of defecting from the Democratic Party mean so much to people who read the standard or people in that orbit? What is the meaning of A16Z or at least the leadership of A16Z mean? Well, we did reporting on – if you look back at the donations, A16Z mean? Well, we did reporting on, remember, if you look back at the donations,

A16Z was right in the middle. They had not gone left or right. Like Founders Fund was out there, right? Like we know where Founders Fund, we know where Peter Thiel stands. Sequoia was on the opposite end of the spectrum. We know where Sequoia stands. A16Z is in the middle.

And so there's a war for the middle. And where the middle goes, it's very threatening if the middle leans right. Founders Fund never gets targeted ever by any of these people. I mean, Peter got it relentlessly in 2016. But recently, everyone kind of knows it's not worth it, in my opinion. With them, is there a chance that you can scare them back into the center or back onto the left, possibly? And then on the question of race specifically, yes, Martin, to your point, we've seen this before with famous people, but right now in this election, we're talking about the black vote in a way we haven't talked in my entire life. We talked about it right after Trump won. It was like, oh, that's odd. There was a bump in black people voting for Trump. It was

still a minority, but it was the most that any Republican had gotten in many, many, many years, maybe in our lifetime. Now, we're seeing a lot of black people supporting Republicans. They're still going to be overwhelmingly Democrat, I think. But this is a trend that if it continues, really, I think, existentially threatens the Democrat party. All throughout all of the South, even the Rust Belt states, to lose 90% of the black vote, which is what you're counting on, to lose that is very threatening to the party. And I think that you're going to see probably nasty attacks like this increase targeting black people who waver. I also wonder if you have a doppelganger effect with with Miss Horowitz in the sense that here you have a wealthy,

intelligent black woman with a white husband. And Kamala sort of you can superimpose that. And the de facto opinion again, if you saw The Breakfast Club with with Biden, you ain't black if you're if you don't vote for me. You know, this sort of approach. And he takes brings out the eight, you know, to connect with the black person that, you know, this 85 year old man or whatever is thinks he can connect with. And so I wonder if like, you know, you have this, again, de facto, like, how could you not be Democrat, you have a mirror image woman running for president, and you're not with her, it's insane. And what's interesting is there are also families, prominent families that are against each other, she could still be a Democrat. You know, so the fact that she's willfully, you know, and if anybody's sort of like, okay, with a little bit of, you know, PR strife or something, A16Z, I don't think it would have been a problem if she said, you know what?

I love you, Ben, but I'm still a Democrat. I'm going to keep a photo of myself and Obama on my Instagram instead of deleting it. She clearly made up her own mind of this. It's not, in my opinion like oh husband's republican i gotta be republican i can't embarrass him i don't think that's maybe in like an oil family or something but not here maybe moritz realizes that she's actually the one pulling the strings like she was pilled first and she dragged ben she was like we got to get rid of we got to get rid of these democrats man um who knows story for another day what we have to do right now is i mean just prepare

yourselves we're about to start pirate idol Welcome to Pirate Idol. Okay, guys. We, I mean, the hotly anticipated segment. I've announced it on Twitter. I announced it on last week's episode. We are on the hunt for a new co-host or a contributor. We'll see how it goes. But certainly someone to kind of regularly occur, regularly occurring guest on the show.

We had tons and tons and tons of applications, way more than I expected. I was like, whoa, people are down to join the pod. Many of whom I wonder, are they going to be allowed to join the pod? You have real jobs. Some of you are competing media companies. We'll worry about all of that at a later date. For now, what I'm interested in doing is just actually going through the group really quick, sort of welcoming each of you. And I'm just, for a second, I was like, wait, are we missing someone? No, you're all here. Let's welcome each of you. I want each of you guys to sort of tell us who you are. And then Riley's going to break down the topic and we're going to get to the competition.

I'll explain the rules after introductions. Actually, fuck it. I'll explain rules now. So the rules are going to be like this. Riley's going to break down the news item. You are each going to deliver a take. You are allowed to respond to each other's take, to sort of like cross talk to ask questions to dunk if you want to dunk if you're ready for a dunk back i mean that is sort of on you uh at the end of the take when i sort of feel the take has been delivered i am uh the panel of judges it'll be me and then martin's our guest this week so i think it's probably mostly gonna be me and Martin this week. We'll deliver our sort of Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul-esque, I guess, assessment of the take. It's not clear yet who is going to be Paula, Martin or myself, but we'll figure it out.

Riley, step on up and deliver the news item that we're going to be discussing in today's final segment um of the pirate wire spot sure thing so to set the stage for our contestants here so germany's decommissioned nuclear power plant grafen reinfeld npp uh was demolished last week uh this plant was constructed in 1975 and commercial operations began in 1982, though it was closed in 2015 as part of the government's policy to transition away from nuclear power. The demolition of Grafenreinfeld was delayed slightly after a pro-atomic energy activist named Andreas Fichtner scaled one of the pylons in protest

of its destruction. There's so many questions. So with wind energy also experiencing slower growth in the country of late, this suggests that Germany will be increasingly reliant on crude oil as well as coal, something that already makes up 19.5% of Germany's utility scale energy generation. So listen, I want to start by just saying, we don't like to cover European anything, generally speaking. Who cares, right? I understand that. But this is funny. And I think broadly, it is an issue that is sort of broadly relevant here at home. So I think it's worth

discussing on the FireWire spot. And the first person to do it is my man, Chris. Give me a few, before you get started on just like what you think about this, where are you from? And like, what are you all about? Who are you? What brings you to the podcast? Yeah, yeah, definitely. First, thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Big fan of FireWire. You got it, definitely. First, thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Big fan of PowerWire. You got it, man. Originally from Iowa. I spent a little bit of time living in Japan. I've kind of lived all over, spent 10 years in California, been in Texas now almost eight years. So kind of popped all over around. I've always been in technology. It's kind of like first got started

in venture capital and technology, self-taught programmer designer. So I'm very passionate about technology, but also how the implications that it has on broad topics like energy. Sick. Well, the view is spectacular. Can't beat that. I don't know, man. What do you make of this? What do you make of the, what was the word that you use?

The dystopian job, Riley, I believe it was professional nuclear activist. Was that what it was? Pro-atomic energy. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Broadly speaking, I think nuclear energy is the mother of all litmus tests for cognitive dissonance. It is just unbelievable to me that a climate activist would be somehow praising, you know, the idea that we're going to take away a good energy source. And when we do that, typically, when we take away nuclear, we traditionally replace it with coal

or natural gas, which from that perspective is way worse for the environment. I think it was also some of the things that I was looking at from the perspective of the Germans that they might also have to now rely more on energy from France, who produces the most amount of energy in terms of their production from nuclear sources. So just from a broadly speaking standpoint, I think that it's a great litmus test for people that struggle with cognitive dissonance. Yeah. I mean, Riley, I have a follow up on the news item. I was sort of confused about the actual news item itself while I was watching it unfold.

So they're tearing down the nuclear plant because of anti-nuclear sentiment. But then what were the people protesting? The protester is pro-nuclear. He's a pro-nuclear sentiment but then what were the people protesting the protester is pro-nuclear he's a pro-nuclear guy he is he wants nuclear he scaled the pylon in protests of taking it down he was trying to prevent it from the cooling tower he's a pro-nuclear so i actually so my original when i just i mean this is a problem i gotta stop doing this but i kind of just absorbed the headline and intuited what the story was about rather than click um and i sort of for some reason suspected that it was like another environmental

concern about blowing up the tower so it wasn't really about being pro-nuclear but about like maybe there was asbestos or something in the towers and he was like, we can't do that. I guess this is a little bit more sane. I guess I feel bad doing judgment now. I don't know that we should do that. Is it weird? I wish that we had a live interaction from the audience to decide right now. I think it was a great, I think you did a good job, Chris. I don't have a problem with the take.

I do think, here's what I think though about it. I'm going to give you a little bit of not really pushback on the take but just my thoughts on this in general we have to get better i'm pro-nuclear obviously maybe not obvious i think probably obvious to anyone who listens to the podcast i i do think that a couple of years ago maybe even like like four or five years ago nuclear became the take that was safe to take it became the sort of contrarian take that was safe to take and it was a rational take um it was just it's obviously correct if you care about the environment or just more energy or really almost anything uh there are these little drawbacks like nuclear waste and things which we can talk about. But on net, the thinking man's take is to be pro-nuclear and what's up with these idiots who are against nuclear.

That was important five years ago because there were not many reasonable takes you could take five years ago. So 2019, 2020 was a very different landscape than 2024. And so now I find myself a little bit bored with the pro-nuclear take. Not like I want to switch it up and be anti-nuclear, but I think that we need to do more. We can't just be like, we should do this while nuclear plants sort of keep collapsing as we go. I don't know. Martin, am I like roughly correct about that?

What is your gut on that? Yeah, I think you're right. But if we're judging, are we here to judge Chris? I think we're going to like judge, but like not say we're judging. It's like we're actually having a conversation with Chris. i don't i mean you can just you know what fuck it judge him judge him simon cowell idol like you gotta get you gotta throw it at us a little bit there's there's a difference between having the right take and being entertaining and um ideally you do both you failed spectacularly at one of them. And the other and it keeps me from even bothering to look at the other one. So, well, I think you're I like I like the thoughtfulness. I like the I mean, I love the I take on this specific activist delaying.

I do believe that on the outskirts, there was a lot of people there that were watching the demolition who were advocates of it being taken down. So, yes, maybe this specific activist was saying, hey, I don't want this thing. I am pro-nuclear. There are tons of photos, I think, of people that were very excited about the idea of this thing being taken down. You have this whole continent shooting itself in the foot, committing suicide.

We're watching Europe burn and shooting itself with, let's dismantle nuclear. Let's stop ourselves from using AI. Let's put cookies on everything. It is really like a continental suicide. And that's interesting. And I think when you're up and trying to entertain people as well as be interesting and intelligent and inform them, you have to find something. Like this guy scaled the... Did he actually scale the thing? I mean, that's pretty amazing.

I just tell you that what I think happened is entirely divorced from reality. I've created an entire elaborate fantasy of what was going on at that power plant that I am increasingly learning is not tethered to reality. I will say, Matt, if you could pull it up, this is another story I'm about to invent. I don't know what it is, but I think I remember, I remember a weird, there was like a lesbian sex thing as in germany there was like was it two lesbians talking about it's better than sex like anti is that what it was grant what was it do you remember yeah yeah they were basically like oh sex is good but have you ever like

destroyed that country's industrial base what it was so good that is what it was in this ongoing and now sanjana's here so i feel like i can't harp on this one too much i think she gave me some plot armor so to speak um but there is like this subtle evil lesbian thing that's been going on at pyrewire lately and so i'm like very keyed into i saw always listen there've been all sorts of evil people right the last couple months there have been a lot of evil lesbians um but that's a throwback and is funny and matt please just throw off her stupid tweet about that she got ratioed into outer space but that's when i learned also or reaffirmed this knowledge that i have that um that that powerful dunks and ratios are not enough because they she won she won it's and i hope it's better than sex uh jesse what i would love from you after a little hello is uh i want the steel

man i mean you said you were going to bring a steel man. If you have it in you, I would love to hear the anti-nuclear take. Yeah. So real quick. Hi, everyone. My name is Jessie. I am based right outside DC in Northern Virginia. I work in tech. I worked in tech for the last 11 years in pretty much any sales role you can think of. I've been inside sales, outside sales. I've been in tech in California sales role you can think of. I've been inside sales, outside sales, been in tech in California, been in tech in Boston. I moved over to Dublin, Ireland for a while to work for a tech company. So I really wanted to just be a part of the conversation. I love the podcast. I listen every week. So that was why I reached out. And I think the first thing I want to say about this is like first starters, just to set the stage.

Germany has a history of just making terrible decisions when it comes to their power and energy. Like this is a country that notoriously gave up like their self-reliance to Russia. self-reliance to Russia. So, you know, like, I think that it's easy to come on here and say, yeah, it's so dumb of Germany to blow up this plant and they should be pro-nuclear. Like you said, that's a boring take. What I immediately thought of when I saw this this morning, I actually think like the context of how Germany got here is the most interesting part of the story, right? And what America can learn from it. So a lot of what got us here is like this emotionally based decision-making in Germany that is rooted in guilt from World War II.

That's it. And America needs to like learn like this guilty decision-making isn't helpful. So if you throw back to 1989, Berlin Wall Falls and Europe is in this moment and especially Germany, right? Like they've just been united of, oh, yay, like peace has come to Europe, right? This is their like, insert, we did it, Joe moment for them. And Germany then makes this crazy decision that they're going to

tie themselves to Russia for their gas supply. I think it comes from hope, misguided, but I'm not the most like hopeful person. So it's easy for me to say that. And then two, I think it comes from hope misguided, but I'm not the most like hopeful person. So it's easy for me to say that. And then two, I think from guilt, right? Like, I see you want to jump in. Go ahead. Me? Yeah. Oh, you look like you're gonna jump in. No, I'm trying to get better at that. Because people are always attacking me for talking too much on my own fucking podcast. Not you guys. I'm like, excited to talk. No, you can take it. I'll have plenty to say once you're done, but like finish your talk. Yeah. So basically, you know, they, they made this decision. And I think in the context of nuclear, like they're not, Germany is not being logical about why they're

anti-nuclear. It is a, you know, if there is the smallest probability, no matter how remote it is, that there could be another catastrophe in Europe because of a German nuclear power plant. They don't want it. It's like a non-starter for most Germans. And so I don't know if any of you have actual German friends, not Americans with German heritage. I lived in Spain briefly. I lived in Barcelona and it was in the Bush years. It was during the election of Sarah Palin. So everyone was very animated. Not everyone. Americans were in it i would read about it on the news and you're in barcelona no one gave a shit about anything when it came to politics except this except this german who i lived with who was relentlessly wanting to talk to me about politics and really like blame me for bush um and then i was trying to explain to him i was at my most anarchist at that point and so i

was trying to explain to him like the principles of anarcho-capitalism in broken English, which is what he spoke. And it just didn't work. But that's my exposure to Germans. That and also I learned that they have a weird thing on vacation with Brits where they both try and steal the chairs at the beginning of their vacation. That's all I know about them though. So if you want to educate me further, I'm open. Well, I had a similar experience to being how you got blamed for Bush. I was in Ireland when Trump was president. And so I got to be like the American spokesperson. I remember showing up to a meeting and my client was like, oh, are you here to buy us?

Because it was the day that Trump tried to buy. I would have been like, you'd you wish you actually fucking wish. Well, I was in the UK at the time and I was like, isn't Brexit supposed to happen for the fifth time today? And like just kind of went back and forth with them. So they're like actually cool. But that's side note. But anyways, so when I talk to my like German friend, it blows my mind how much like this World War II guilt like still influences all their policy decisions today. And so they should be pro-nuclear to your point, right?

Like it's better for the economy. It's better for the average German person. It would bring down costs. They could be taking a, you know, break some of the alliance on Russia, but now they're just going back to coal. And it's like, I think it's kind of funny because they're very like pro-environmentalists over there.

They want to stop climate change um you know greta thornburg is oh yeah i mean i don't know what it turned she's like scandinavian or something she feels german to me i think it's like she does but she even like will say you should do nuclear over coal like that's just like how much everything is divorced from reality it's just like i i mean we could i wish we had a separate segment on greta because the fact that she feels german for us is interesting and it plays into your point right now that you're making about guilt because what do we associate with germans is like nazism it's like this person wants to put me in a gas chamber and when greta thunberg is talking i get that i like get that vibe i get like a very what a lot of you off the

gas chamber vibe from that little autistic Swedish girl, whatever she is, who's now, I guess, pro-Palestine. You guys, feel free to jump in at any part of this. Chris, Grant, Cardick. I would say one thing is, how do Americans, how does the US learn from this? There might be some argument that we are learning from this. I think one of the proposals in the infrastructure bill was reopening a nuclear reactor in Michigan. And while there is sentiment to close nuclear reactors in America, we don't seem to be on that path. So I would hope that while we're not expanding our ability to generate energy from nuclear power plants, at least we're not shutting them down in the same sort of rate that a place

like Germany is. Not yet. And I think it's, it's, the Germans seem so much more, I guess I'm not fully convinced. I agree with you that Germans have this weird guilt thing that defines almost everything that they do. But also, the anti-nuclear thing is broad and deep, and even in countries where there is none of that. And it's like, I wonder if maybe they're clocking the anti-nuclear thing as the way to be a good liberal because that's what it was in like the 70s and they just grabbed onto it and they're trying to sort of show people how good they are and uh even at their own their own expense martin

what do you what did you want to say on that no it just really clicked for me for a second but you know when you have two sides political sides some of some of them will co-opt these movements and say, ah, that's ours. And it's kind of scary. That's sort of happening in nuclear. Anyway, on the judging side, I think Jesse was a lot more fiery and interesting than the other dude. I don't even remember his name. Chris is bringing facts and thoughtfulness.

And I don't want to hear this. Let's not get too bitter. I brought some facts. All of you are truly here, by the way. All of you are truly here because the way all of you are truly here because i opened your video and i thought oh i like this person i want like you'd all have done a good job so far let's just i can't believe i'm the fucking paula grant can you please introduce yourself i didn't think you were gonna be the paula either i'm not just people don't think

about me people think i'm this asshole because of my twitter and then they get to know me and they're like oh i could totally get away with murder as of like you as my i mean in relationships let me tell you one i have one all right mike okay great good before i jump into like my like hot take i just in responding to this i just want to say that zero people died due to radiation in fukushima so as far as being terrified of like the worst case scenario if there's a people I trust to properly engineer and run the nuclear plants safely, it would probably be the Germans. Like for all of their faults, like that's something that they'll get right. So I'll lead with the kind of way I got to respond to that, though, because two actually interesting things there. The first is Fukushima is what actually like helped even push them further

down this route. Right. So like in 2011, when Angela Merkel was looking at Nordstrom 2, they were like, oh, maybe. And then Fukushima happened and they were like, we don't want any part of this. Like the Japanese can't handle this. We can't handle this. And so we're going to tie ourselves to Russia. That's like a super smart plan. So they actually doubled down there. And then you have to think about Chernobyl's impact on Germany compared to America, right? We think it's interesting and we like to learn about it, but Germans actually had radioactive particles flying towards them. They were calling their sandboxes death boxes. They had contamination scares in their mouth. I don't know, man. Were they really worried about it? I don't buy that they actually

cared about Chernobyl. I think they were so desperate to be like, look, the Germans or the Russians are worse than us that they were like, oh, it's so bad. These nuclear particles. Look, how dare they? But I'm not saying they're actually scared for themselves. They're scared of the outcome. Like that's my whole point is like they can't risk a nuclear issue. I just don't agree. I really don't think so. I don't think they believe in't agree i really don't think so i don't think they believe in that i i really don't think that i really think it's more about the idea of nuclear and what it represents i agree they're guilty i agree that's probably motivating this somehow but they're not afraid of a disaster i think they just want to show people like we care about the environment

so much that we're willing to like kill ourselves over it and then somehow there's a cognitive dissonance there with coal i genuinely think they're going back to coal though so it's like i think it's like they just won't face that i think it's like it's this weird thing where they're so committed to the idea that they're they're pretending the coal thing has got to be misinformation it's just too insane it can't possibly be true they love to double down grant where are you from and give me your take so i am grant dever i'm from rochester new y, currently based in Austin, but moving home. If you want to become a podcaster and have long hair and a mustache, you have to choose at some point. So I can't be a podcaster in Austin. I'm willing to sacrifice that.

All right. I think there may be other representation here, but I am a German-American. My grandmother grew up in Germany. Strike number two. but I am a German American. My grandmother grew up in Germany. So I'm willing to just go after. Strike number two. I'm willing to, yeah, yeah, that Germany too. So I'm willing to just go in on this one. I just want to remind people that the United Nations exists for maybe a couple reasons,

but the major one is that every couple decades, the Germans whip themselves up into a frenzy and try to make it everyone else's problem. So I think that we should be sure to... I don't think we should let them completely deslaborize their country. But so far, at least their bad policy and their current frenzy is mostly just eroding their own industrial base, which is still not good, but they've done worse. Wait, so is your take that, yes, it sucks, but it's a good thing because if they were succeeding in a really smart way, it would be sort of scary to have a sort of competent pro-German Germany on the map?

I mean, they could have a worse frenzy. I don't think it's good. I'm mostly just poking fun at the fact that Germany seems to get some radical political ideas and take them in directions that are disadvantageous for their country, which has happened a couple of times in the last 100 years. And then I do want to comment on the activist. It was really refreshing to see climate activists that I agree with and also who engaged in an act know, an act of physical courage, risking his body, risking jail time, he was briefly jailed. You know, and this was kind of the nuke bro equivalent of like a hippie climbing up a tree to save an endangered species. Unfortunately, you know, this, this actual act wouldn't have saved an operational reactor,

it was basically determine whether or not they destroyed critical infrastructure that could be reused in the future. But either way, they didn't listen to him. They're not listening to his other great takes. And they seem pretty intent on having their industrial base go the way of the dodo. So my two takeaways, completely different country, different political economy. But two things that I think Americans should take away from Germany's failures is one, don't shut down your existing nuclear plants, just like hard stop worth investing in them just to keep them alive, the a little bit of money you got to put in to keep that sweet, sweet baseload,

clean power, especially as we pass all kinds of stupid regulations to make it even harder to create new power. Can't let that happen. And then two, we cannot allow the United States to become dependent on a geopolitical rival for our energy supply or expanding our energy supply. And that's something most people just refuse to talk about. Instead, we want to show us graphs and be like, everything's okay. Don't worry about China. I guess we're now butting up against another... Like NATO, man. I don't want to be paying to defend these people anymore. They're really, I would say, aggressively stupid about some of this stuff and

they're not i was thinking the other day like if china invades berkeley okay which i don't know that it will happen but wouldn't it be funny wouldn't that be fucking funny uh if they do that you think that france is sending troops to america to defend us like not in a million years i don't think that for the rest of this country's history france will ever be back in our hemisphere defending us in the way they were during the revolutionary war which is the last time that we got an assist from france so i just i'm kind of over it i there's a global trade piece that's kind of interesting you know we just net benefit? And I think probably, probably our economy certainly benefits, but that comes with all sorts of, I don't know, we're running out of time here. I want to get through the nuclear takes, but I'm just like, I don't necessarily, I guess what I'm saying, Grant, is I don't necessarily care about them getting closer to Russia. thing, Grant, is I don't necessarily care about them getting closer to Russia. If that means that Russia, at least, is now taking care of Germany rather than us and paying for it, maybe I don't,

what do we get from Germany that we need? I don't think anything. Well, I mean, the other thing is, you know, they're, right, leading, you know, one of the leaders of NATO in Europe, like, to your point, it's more their problem than our problem, right? And then the other thing that's insane is even after Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany was still getting natural gas from Russia for seven months after that. And then like they did pause the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which someone blew up. I don't know. I like the pause. It's a good way to operate it. Well, it was, they did slow the, like, basically they used the bureaucracy to like slow it from

being opened up. And then someone was like, well well what if we just blew it up you know but yeah i mean who do you think blew it up well they're saying it was a ukrainian oligarch i don't know like i don't know i've read different things i've read that it would have to be someone who has like a really skilled um like underwater charge team and then i've seen people be like, no, this was an easy job. You could do it. But it's so tough. I don't know anything about underwater explosives. Yeah, but you're on a podcast. Don't let that stop you. Don't let expertise stop you. I would guess it was NATO. I mean, I can tell you, I don't think it was the Russians. I don't think that makes sense. Who did it beyond that well maybe actually maybe russia did it to

because it looks like really uh no russia didn't do it we probably did it you guys don't think america i think we probably did it i think we probably did it that's a conspiracy so the reason that we maybe probably didn't do it is because we can't really do anything i don't know that i don't really i have not seen any signs of confidence from our government so i'm a little bit skeptical that we would have gone and and done that i mean most of what we're able to do right now is give them money i don't but maybe i'm wrong martin what do you think start with with grant i'm like nervous now for good yeah no granted did all right I definitely think you know this is a space that's outside of my

comfort zone and bringing NATO into it furthers that but I yeah I mean nobody knows who blew up the pipeline but I would agree that this administration was it under this administration during Trump yeah it happened during us yeah

it's hard to say but you know i could you know who knows i think the cia kind of independently operates from the government anyway yeah so you know it's a little bit hard to know uh but that's that seems like something that would have to have come from a government martin can you tell me about but tell me about grant's mustache. What do you think about that? I think his German background is very sus. I agree. It's a point worth

considering. But otherwise, I like the guy. I'll claim Irish when it's convenient. Oh, you're 50-50. So you lied. It gets really ambiguous. You lie about your... Okay.

Lie by omission. I see. Interesting. Karnik, my man, take us away. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I'll keep the intro short. I'm an investor in Social Graph Ventures.

I'm a new dad in San Francisco. Just trying to stay safe out here. That's about it. Congrats. Thank you. Where in the city are you? I'm in Lake Naumville. Okay.

Well, crime don't climb. Yeah, exactly. I've said that a hundred times since I moved. So, yeah, basically my take here is like, I'm really worried that nuclear is becoming a partisan issue and I'd love to avoid it. So I'm going to kind of talk more about nukes, but then get back to this specific German situation. So I think what I'm really worried about is that basically like this, like, do we really want to live in a world where, okay, Trump wins, we get tons of nuclear power and everyone

has Bitcoin or Kamala wins. And now, you know, there's wind turbines on top of my house and we have a central bank digital currency. You know, that sucks. And I don't want that to be I don't want this to be a partisan issue. So how do we avoid that and kind of learn from some mistakes the crypto community has made with Bitcoin? I think if you look at this global green party, it seems that they're really just anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. I don't think it has anything to do with clean energy or saving the earth. And it's very clear from all their actions. Every time they're successful, okay, we just get more LNG. We get more nat gas. So obviously they're not trying to save the environment. It couldn't be more clear. And then on top of that, have you ever seen them

protest China or Russia on building more nuclear reactors? No. And the worst part is they're not building just for themselves. They're building in Turkey, Hungary, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Argentina, Iran, Romania, UK. So this is going to be a situation with Huawei and 5G towers where we fight them and then build our own. But that seems to be the most concerning thing for me. It's becoming very partisan. But the one glimmer of hope is it doesn't have to be. So if you go back to the 70s and 80s, the German Socialist Party actually supported nukes, realizing that, oh, this will bring tons of jobs. Yeah, the Soviet Union famously, like the best at nuclear after us. Yeah, the state can control it and give everyone a job with a plan. It's going to be amazing. And it turns. So I think we can get back there. And I think this Andreas guy who went and climbed these

towers was amazing. I actually talked to Mark Nelson before recording this podcast, a big nuclear guy on Twitter. He was telling me that Andreas built a ladder with his hands, like a homemade ladder to get up that tower. And so we're seeing this tree hugger inversion. Why do you have to build a ladder? They don't have Amazon in the same way. Capitalism. You're a moment. And so he built a ladder and he climbed it to save this great technology. All they have is twine and you get some sticks, but they got nothing, man. Sorry, I keep cutting you off. It's just the idea that he had to build a ladder.

Sorry, if I could challenge you, Carter, why do you think that we can avoid partisanship? I mean, the 70s are a long time ago, and we seem to live in a world where everything has to be partisan. the last story about someone climbing a tree to save something? And he actually made demands too, which may have not been reported on. So he actually said, the CEO has to come out and talk to me of this nuclear plant. He just wanted a... Pretty ballsy. I'll just make a point. So basically, we had a woman named Laura Loomer here in the US do that for X. So sort of like that. Oh, she smacked me off of Twitter. I remember she chained herself to the door. for x so sort of like that twitter i remember she chained herself to the door dude when i first started writing pirate wires the world was so much more exciting to write about like it was like

crazy shit every day and we forget how fun i mean i was depressed i thought the world was ending in 2020 but like it was on top of the x or chained to the front no she was chained to the front door if she i think she like handcuffed herself to the door or something it was a crazy day on the internet i was like what i but i was sort of i was like yeah like answer for your sins like bring him out i want to hear why he's censoring us sorry finish your point we were like we got to wrap this one up the very end of the point is yeah i mean he climbed that ladder he got on there made these demands and basically you know this can't be confirmed the ceo's like hey dude like the reactor is already decommissioned like maybe you do this you, wink, do this somewhere else where it might actually make a difference. And I think it's interesting to take this kind of left leaning clothing of climbing a tree

and like, just take that stance to save nuclear. I agree with Martin that maybe with I'm sort of I agree, I share Martin's impulse towards skepticism on the partisan question, because as you yourself said at the top of your take, this is not about energy and it's about capitalism. And if it's about capitalism, and in America, at least, one of the parties is, I mean, as we were talking about earlier today in the pod before you guys showed up, I mean, the new democratic plan is not capitalist. It is not pro-business. And I think that the nuclear thing is perhaps being resisted as strongly as it is here. Not really Germany. That's a different set. But in America, because it solves a problem.

That's a useful problem for the Democrats to have. So if they lose the problem of global warming to wave over people's heads and scare you out of more production, that's one less weapon they have against business. I think that's my sort of pushback on you. It seems like you have something to say, Grant. I just want to say that it's trended being less and less of a partisan issue, particularly over the last five years or so. Congress just passed the Advance Act, which passed like overwhelmingly in like a bipartisan way.

Basically Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Markey were the only people who opposed that. That's a bill that basically gives more authorities and some, you know, a new mission statement. And it's basically trying to be

a bipartisan signal to the NRC that, hey, we're actually, we want to build nuclear now, we need to build it. Coming from both parties, I think that's a big step forward, because nominally, the last like four administrations have been pro-nuclear. But at the same time, next generation power companies are running into all the regulation and red tape that's slung down. So I agree that I think there's things that are being done, but there are also things that are holding back

some of the latest and greatest from an innovation standpoint. That is interesting. I wonder, it sort of does prove that the left's overall hostility to... I think there is... Maybe it doesn't prove. I'm like, it proves.

It proves the opinion I'm about to give you. It seems to me that there's a general hostility on the left towards new innovation because they correctly understand that that generally leads to new industry and industry generally speaking is like the only check on government power in this country and it maybe isn't even supposed to be that i think that's actually what drives the government industry tension there there is real power and especially tech now. That's a natural fount of real power that has real influence on people's lives that exist for the most part outside of the government. I think there's always a fear of the next thing that's going to disrupt

their power, which is what a lot of almost all of the AI conversation is really about. It took the government five minutes to understand enough about AI to realize like, okay, this is another thing that's going to challenge our authority potentially. And we got to do something about it. I once did business with a company in Germany. I went to Leverkusen and there's a company called Bayer. It's sometimes called Bayer here.

The company is about 400 years old. Like that's the kind of company they want, a company that's really enmeshed in government and not new and breaking things and changing things. In the auto example, you see this with Biden's talking about every auto company other than Tesla. That's a really good point. Well, you guys... Wait, Martin, you got to judge. You got to lay down the gauntlet here. I like Jesse the most. I think in this business, show business, you have to be interesting.

You have to be exciting. You can't put the people to sleep. You're putting the people to sleep. Grant's second best. I thought Cardick was a brilliant guy, but again, people want pizzazz. Look at the average talk show. It's not boring and i'll say this um thank you martin but i want to say that on pirate wires we have played with a lot of

different things like on the on the different groups and sanjana you know just left and uh and she'll be back we'll have her as a host probably as a guest judge eventually um i one of the things that sanjana brought that i don't have and that nobody else on the team had was like a thoughtful introspective facts based just like laying down something that we could actually speak to and i really relied on her for that um i agree with you generally martin about like what makes a show, but I also need other stuff, not just that. I don't know where Brandon... Okay, I thought Brandon was going to walk through. Sorry. He's like, camera's out.

I'm fucking over this. I guess to the people listening, I don't know how we're going to make this selection process. I think that you should vote in the comment section. Tell us who you want to join. Who was your favorite this week? We're going to go for a few more weeks. I'll probably bring back people who ranked high in each episode and have another one. Tell me who you loved. Tell me, I don't know. Tell me something about Greta Thunberg. Tell me you love us. Just tell me something. Rate subscribe tell everybody um what else i have an out here oh conclusion right because this is the end of the episode uh it's been real guys another great week on the pirate wires pod touch grass goodbye