Pirate Wires - Mark Cuban Falls Prey to DEI, Elon's Neuralink Is Here, & SF Police Called Over A Tupac Tweet

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

EPISODE #35: The Pirate Wires crew is back for your Friday pod! This week, we get into Mark Cuban's battle with a cartoon rabbit on Twitter over questionable DEI policies. Nearulink, Bryan Johnson's p**** and.. electric stoves? What do these all have to do with the aesthetics of the future? We jump into a viral 'men vs. women' political views chart. Garry Tan's tweet that has the SF supervisors clutching their pearls and police involvement. Finally, the recent societal queer cosplay by our far left citizens (particularly by women.) Featuring Mike Solana , Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/crypto-rumblings Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell Timestamps: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! Like & Subscribe! 1:15 - Mark Cuban Gets Called Out For DEI Policies 18:00 - Men vs. Women Political Ideology Divide 30:00 - First Neuralink Implant, Bryan Johnson's P****, and Electric Stoves (Stay With Us On This One.. It'll all make sense) 45:45 - Garry Tan To Be Arrested By SF Supervisors?? - Tupac Tweet Leads To Outrage 49:00 - Fake Queer Identity Politics 1:00:00 - Don't Drink And Tweet 1:04:00 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe! See You Next Week!

Mark Cuban versus a cartoon rabbit on the question of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I've never hired someone based on their race or their sex, but it has been a factor, which is legal. A federal organization hops into Mark's mentions and she's just like, that's illegal. Long story short, this man injected Botox into his dick and he loves the results. Yeah, he's like, I'm doing the full Joan Rivers on my dick. Like, who gives a fuck, you know? Like, that's kind of cool. Gary Tan is going to be arrested

by the Board of Supervisors. This is all verbatim Tupac's song. Physically going into a drugstore and attacking people, stealing whatever you want, or dealing in fentanyl, totally fine. Still legal, still okay. They're afraid of Gary Tan's Tupac reference. They're afraid for their life. You've killed people.

Welcome back to the pod, guys. We have got yet another banger for you lined up today. I want to start with really something that I wanted to make the lead story of the industry newsletter this week. But Eric, my director of ops at Pyrewires, insisted that I've been doing too much of the same thing lately there. It really is just perfectly

my drag. The story is Mark Cuban versus a cartoon rabbit. The question of diversity, equity, and inclusion is completely the apple of my eye. And so I'm going to take some time in the podcast today. We have to talk about it. It's just, it's too fucking good. So the background here is Mark Cuban versus Elon Musk on the topic of DEI. So Mark Cuban of Shark Tank fame, somehow he's a billionaire, incredibly stupid person, versus Elon Musk landing rockets on the question of whether or not racist, sexist hiring practices are okay or not. Mark Cuban believes that they are morally correct, and Elon believes they are a moral abomination. Now, in this conversation, this is about a month old, we've been covering

the overall American vibe shift, and DEI is very much central to that, where we're now talking about this in a huge public way. You're able to criticize it in a way you've never been able to criticize it before. We have lawsuits brewing. Tech is really now increasingly a battleground for this. And we actually have an interview coming up, just to tease it, in just a few days with christopher rufo to kind of talk about all of this and and more um but in this conversation cuban's been doing the thing that i think a lot of dei people are doing so as as dei has become less popular uh the sort of racist and sexist hiring practices, a native DEI, DEI being the kind of praxis of critical race theory or whatnot. As it's become super unpopular nationally and people have kind

of gone after businesses for doing it, there's this wide retreat. It's a sort of classic Mott Bailey to, wouldn't you like to live in a company or work in a company where people have lots of different perspectives on things and whatnot? And they're always dancing now around the question of actual race-based hiring. We know this exists. I wrote about this not too long ago in the case of IBM. One recent example where your racist quotas were tied directly to your bonus structure and things like this. We know these practices exist. We know that's actually what we're talking about, but possibly because there's liability.

Now people like Mark Cuban are kind of trying to back away from that. Well, uh, separate from the Elon Musk of it all, he gets into a battle with famed cartoon rabbit. Um, I believe the handle is the rabbit hole, 1890 something or other.

You can go to my twitter and check it out I've been retweeting some of his stuff phenomenal account the cartoon rabbit and he kind of goads Mark into this total battle over the issue of DEI of a kind we've seen you know again and again nothing too exciting there but as he the rabbit continues to answer and again it's fucking crazy that Mark is engaging with the rabbit but he's he, the rabbit, continues to answer, and again, it's fucking crazy that Mark is engaging with the rabbit, but he's engaging with the rabbit. They're having this battle of minds. And as the rabbit answers Mark's many stupid questions about DEI, he continues to ask this question, like, have you hired based on race? Are you hiring people because of the color of their skin or their sex?

And Mark's avoiding the question, avoiding the question. Finally, the rabbit frames it more pointedly. He's like, are you doing this thing that is a violation of Title VII? And Mark says, I have never hired someone based on their race or their sex, but it has, and I'm paraphrasing now, but it has been a factor, which is legal. Okay. At this point, a commissioner for the EEOC or the, I believe it's the, what is that an acronym for? The Equal Employment Opportunity Committee? Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Commission. So the official for this organization, a federal organization, hops into Mark's mentions and

she's just like, that's illegal. Race and sex cannot be any kind of a factor at all, not a mild factor, not one of the factors. It can't be the primary factor. It can't be, you know, a tertiary factor. It cannot be a factor. You cannot factor in it at all. You can never consider it. and obviously it goes tremendously viral. The federal government just jumped into the mentions of Mark Cuban, who by engaging a cartoon rabbit on Twitter just inadvertently implicated himself in crime publicly. Phenomenal story. I think it's also an important story. It's yet again, it's another example of this

tremendous shift in the way that we're litigating, we're sort of socially litigating this question. Not only do DEI proponents not even want to defend the racist hiring practices that just two years ago they were demanding, now there's serious risk of litigation. ending uh now there's serious risk of litigation uh america first legal which is this kind of activist uh legal arm of stephen miller the former trump guy is sort of offering a bounty i mean they want to find people who have worked with mark um and help them sue him uh for a violation of title seven and that is i think the future mean, I could be wrong here. What do you guys think? Sajana, what did you make of this one? Solana, you actually had a really good tweet on this that kind of sums up how I feel,

where I think you were quote tweeting Mark, where he was talking about this hypothetical situation where you have a company with 30 black women um and you decide you want a diversity of perspective so you you know decide to hire a white man is that you know it should that be illegal right he asks that as he because he asked that question to the rabbit and he was asking it like like obviously it should be okay to hire the white man in this case because you want that diverse opinion right and you you're pointing out how like the enormous how like how incredibly patronizing it is um and of course incorrect of mark cuban to assume that like somehow 30 black women are all going to be this perspectival

monolith right they're all going to have the same views on things and you know you can understand that like white man is going to have X opinion and black woman is going to have Y opinion. And like, you want to have roughly equal representation of those two opinions. Um, I just think the only way out of this is litigation. I agree. Like someone needs to basically take, uh, you know, a company that's proven to be engaging in racist hiring practices to court and basically get enshrined yet again that there are penalties for this this kind of thing um but on a basic sort of what does this say about the people who are pushing these hiring practices i think it's just patronizing and as we always say it's really racist like why are they assuming that because

of your race or sexuality you have you know a certain set of opinions it's just definitionally racist yeah i i want to actually underscore that point that you just raised on the 30 black women thing because it is it's crazy that he said this casually out loud what he said i mean matt pull up the tweet. He is saying that if you have a room of 30 black women, you really only have one opinion there. And there's a benefit to your company in bringing in another, quote, diverse opinion. He's trying to sort of turn this on the anti-DEI people because his assumption is that the anti-DEI people are actually white supremacists. And they will see this and they will think,

oh, wow, there's a dangerous possibility there of 30 black women. We better bring in a white opinion. But of course, the anti-DEI people are like, that's crazy that you think all black women think exactly the same and that you said it out loud and that you're the one who is over here pretending that you're anti-racist it's fucking bananas um and i i think it's just that stuff is is definitely over culturally and now there's this really really fascinating fight to save face like mark is someone mark cuban is someone who has you has put a lot into this conversation publicly and to just kind of give up and be like, okay, the federal government is now telling me I'm potentially at risk of litigation here. I better just back up and apologize for my racism and try and do better. He's really trying to just kind of rewrite history here and get to a point where,

I don't know, he hasn't just taken yet another massive L in what was really just like, I mean, this was 24 hours straight. He wouldn't let it go, but it's been, at this point, I think months of this. Brandon River, any final thoughts on

Mark Cuban versus the Cartoon rabbit before we carry on? Yeah, I'm, I'm curious how the future is going to play out, uh, legally for these, for a lot of the companies in, in tech that had sort of racial based and gender based, um, recruiting practices. based recruiting practices. Andrea Lucas, who's the commissioner who showed up in Mark Cuban's mentions embodied him, has also tweeted basically that the EEOC's official stance is that, and I'm quoting, title seven is violated if race was all or part of the motivation for an employment decision. So that would implicate to me increasing the pool of quote unquote diverse applicants explicitly to do just that, right? To hire more of them. She also wrote an article in Reuters on the heels of the Supreme Court affirmative action decision in June, basically saying, look, now that this has

happened, companies, you better start cleaning up the DEI stuff. I would encourage listeners to actually go read this article. And she specifically takes shots at this notion of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes, which is interesting to see. She says that the EEOC is charged with enforcing equal opportunity at work, not quote unquote equity. Our mission is to prevent and eliminate discrimination, not impose quote unquote equitable outcomes.

So this is a Trump appointed EEOC commissioner, and there are five total. So there's a little bit of like, I don't know, maybe partisanship coming out here. So there's a little bit of, I don't know, maybe partisanship coming out here. But this is one of the lead people at the EEOC signaling there may be trouble ahead for some of these companies that were super into or making a big deal and promoting their diverse quote-unquote hiring practices. I mean, all of the reporting that's coming out of tech on this issue is, it's either companies are backing away from this stuff because of the downturn, and they're just kind of using the downturn as an excuse to get rid of something that never was really adding to the bottom line. They're using the downturn as an excuse to get rid of something that never was really adding to the bottom line. Or you're seeing people sort of quietly go back and try and rework their policies to in some way work within the law. But the Supreme Court was pretty clear. I don't know how they're going to be able to do that. There's no version of we are trying to hire more black people that is going to work for them. That's it's like not legal. River, it seems like you had a point.

Yeah. I mean, we thought the whole like standpoint epistemology that Mark Cuban's talking about. Nobody has ever explained to me how in a normal business, how someone's lived experiences as a member of a particular group of any kind would have any bearing on like the ideas that they come up with if you're you know if you're talking about code or um just basic consumer products or something like that i just don't really i mean maybe you hire a black woman if you are a makeup company that's making wants to open like a black a makeup line targeted black women or a shampoo line targeted at afro textured hair or something but other than that like i don't i don't really understand the point of it. Nobody's ever really actually explained what these alternative viewpoints are and how they add to any value, except in cases like I just cited.

I agree. It's always a super tenuous link here. link here. When in fact, what appears to be the case throughout the history of certainly tech, we always want to hide behind viewpoint diversity. And the right does this as well as the left, where we're clearly talking about racial quotas and gender-based quotas, but then we all kind of recoil back to viewpoint diversity whenever both sides are trying to defend on this issue. Whenever both sides are trying to defend on this issue. But actually, neutrality on the question of racial diversity is sort of like, if it happens, okay. You should not be against racial diversity.

If talent exists, great. I'm personally neutral on this issue. I think racial diversity is sort of a giant sure. I think you should be. I think racial diversity is sort of a giant. Sure. Um, I think you should be, I think that's the moral approach, but on viewpoint diversity, which everybody says they want, I'm actually against it. I think that when you're a startup, you don't like, there are certain viewpoints that don't really matter. You could have diversity on a wide range of views that have nothing to do with the business, but on like value alignment and commitment to the business and work ethic and things like this.

You don't want a diversity of opinions. You want everybody completely cultishly obsessed with one set of values because startups are really hard. This is not a giant company like Google that can burn tons of money. You guys have to be in it together. And then certainly in the context of something like PirateWire. I mean, can you imagine hiring people here who just fundamentally were opposed to kind of everything that we write about? That is not a recipe for success at all. That doesn't work in any company, really, at scale. You need a culture to cohere around a certain set of ideas. I feel this way about nations too. It's like racial diversity, yes. Ideological diversity, I have a very limited band of ideological diversity that I'm willing to accept inside the context of a country. You kind of have to have buy-in on a handful of very core,

important ideas. And this is like, I think the fundamental moral inversion really of the topic. You know, we are all on all sides fighting about it in exactly the wrong way uh i think i don't know what you guys think of of that am i off base here i i get in trouble for this one um for saying actually diversity of thought is i it's not that great diversity the protecting the ability of people to speak their mind and dissent very important but in in the context of a small organization, no, I don't think you want ideological, you don't want a lot of ideological diversity. Yeah, I think people get a little bit confused between what we permit in civil society and what

is ideal for like a private company, essentially. And I think obviously, you know, what you're describing in a situation where you have a media company or a company that somehow otherwise relies on employees being on the same page about, you know, a set of values that probably has nothing to do with their identity at the end of the day. Or maybe it is informed in some ways by their identity, but not in ways that we can like easily track. You know, it's, of course, the discretion of the people running the company to hire according to values. We don't really make any, there's no, you know, legal prohibition on doing that. And to just say that in the private sphere, we should be able to discriminate on the basis of that. I think people then, they hear that and they get sort of upset and they think that you're basically saying, okay, no, in all spheres, you have to sort of align with my values, even in public society.

But of course, those are two entirely separate things. I actually am inspired. We're off topic. I'm about to take us off topic, off of our sort of roadmap for the day. But you just got me thinking about a recent story that broke on the growing gap between young men and women specifically on politics, the ideological gap there. What do our two Gen Zers make of... I want to know, River and Sanjay specifically, what are you making of this apparent... I mean, the infographic is pretty shocking. the infographic is pretty shocking. It's apparently a chasm between young men and young women on ideology, with women voting or just being sort of much more left-wing, especially recently, a recent massive spike, and men kind of gradually becoming more right-wing.

Is it also responsible for the dating? People online are linking it to the fertility crisis. That one I feel is a little bit far-fetched but what do you think yeah i mean well i think that it's a byproduct of all politics becoming cultural and gendered in a way to where like left-wing politics have just become a symbol of feminization and right-wing politics have become like a sort of masculine symbol you could argue maybe that that's always been true to a certain extent but we also but we used to have i mean the interesting thing about that study is that it was happening all over the industrialized world and maybe less so in america than some places in europe but used to have like class

politics where you know if you were you know a working class person in union you voted for the labor party or the democratic party or whatever and like the cultural politics were kind of like a separate thing that maybe didn't matter and um it was also less cohesive you know like in the democratic party rule, uh, you know, the South for a hundred years and they were like the most like racist, socially conservative people in the country. Some of them actually pretty economically left-wing though. Um, but that's kind of gone now. And like, there's no really seemingly like no material politics up for grabs nobody's you know providing anything and uh so it just becomes these culture wars and uh i think the left is all over the world really in the industrialized

world anyway is just increasingly unable to appeal to heterosexual men because it doesn't really have anything to offer them. In America, I noticed that, sorry to interrupt the Zoomers here, but I did notice that, so Adi, you can go. But I wanted to note that America, so there was that lady you quote tweeted, Solana, who said something like, these charts show that clearly that men

are increasingly sociopathic or psychopathic or something. She really went hard. Her handle, the name of that user is Angry Black Lady. Literally? Yes, that's her handle. Interesting. And there are numbers after it, but it's Angry Black Lady. Very interesting.

But I noticed that the chart specifically for the US was the least extreme of all of them. And that it showed that men are still left of center, that the average man is still left of center, still more left than they are right, which was an interesting observation. I would attribute that to the United States as a unique racial relationship to politics

in that, you know, for instance, like black people are, a lot of black men are increasingly like coming to the Republican Party, but the vast majority of them are still Democrats. And so like if you say right wing, that codes as Republican. I think it was an age thing.

I think it's just younger people always vote a little more left. So that would explain it. It was a chart about Zoomers. So it's a little more left. So that would explain it. It was a chart about Zoomers. So it's a little more left. Right, I know. But he was saying that it was less true in America than some other countries. And my point is that those countries are more culturally and ethnically homogeneous.

What is going on in Korea, in South Korea? That one was crazy. Korea was the only one where the spike was more significant on the right wing side among men than the left wing side among women. I have no idea. I don't know what to make of it. I don't know enough about Korea. We got to bring in an expert on Korea to talk about that. I read something about that a while back.

Apparently, they have like misogyny is just like a really big problem. They're like almost kind of like uniquely. problem they're like almost kind of like uniquely so for a country that's rapidly developing at the speed that it is um they had like there was some like anti-rape protests that then garnered like a giant anti-anti-rape protest it was like crazy there's i don't know they have like a lot of weird sexism going on over there but aren't they also just on the border of a hostile nuclear power that wants to obliterate them and talks about it a lot? It seems like your politics are always going to clock a little more right wing if you're at risk of annihilation. I mean, maybe, but we also have, you know. also have you know that i don't i don't i i don't think that like i don't know how much of an actual fear that is because the united states is like posted up on like the 38th parallel and has been

for 70 years you know i mean north korea talked a big talk but they said they hadn't done shit since you know the eisenhower administration so i don't know i find it very hard to believe that people in korea aren't worried about north korea that seems very far-fetched to me um but who knows sajna uh any any more thoughts on the zoomer sex politics divide yeah i mean my general take as to why um like contemporary left rhetoric and sort of wokeism appeals mainly to women is because a lot of it has to do with social policing and sort of this very careful attention to language and sort of regulating what language other people are using and there's all of this sensitivity around perceived offense that's being caused and not wanting to cause people offense

in a way that I think appeals to a lot of women who, I mean, I'm stereotyping here, but I'm a woman, so it's okay. But I think, you know, a lot of women can sort of, are maybe more in tuned to that, like hypersensitivity to language than maybe a lot of men speaking very generally. It is. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. The aesthetic power that's of both parties right now, they both more than I noticed this in Trump. The first time I ever noticed this was in Trump in that people seemed to be reacting more to his overall vibe than they were to his politics it was a combination of the way that he held himself and the way that he spoke and the cadence of the way that he spoke and the actual language that he used which clocked very um uh like working class almost uh even

though he but not in the in a typical way that you know, George Bush would jump in and use, you know, country language or whatever. It was more authentically what working class people were saying, even though Trump is, you know, super famously rich. That's like his main thing. I'm really rich. I'll show you that in a second. But people on the left and right were reacting to that either positively or negatively and you see this i think more than ever even biden's election was kind of rooted in this idea that the vibe would change you know we would talk about things differently and um people responded to that uh it's crazy because there are so many enormous problems but that we're facing i

mean historic problem the immigration problem is insane i mean was it like almost 10 million people have crossed illegally under the biden administration but still we're kind of worried about the way that people say things and that is an interesting facet of modern or contemporary politics i'm sure it was i know it was always a big part of politics, but I think maybe there's something about being steeped inside of an election, you know, because we all are so online now and we carry it around in our pockets on our smartphones. I wonder if maybe that has something to do with rhetoric, style vibe, mattering so much more. Brandon, it seems like you have something to add. Social seems like a uniquely fertile place for the sort of feminist style of communication or the feminine type type of of of behavior that

sanji described yeah i mean it's completely non-physical it's all about language yeah right so i think that that's a big part of it yeah i think there was a book about that called uh warriors and warriors yeah that's it i read a review of that book i really want to read the whole thing but it's a great review yeah i've like skimmed through it it's pretty interesting uh our theory is kind of that women uh seek to they they seek to like uh create order in social hierarchies and it's like asanji was saying they're more sensitive to bullying um and uh it's about like enforcing equality and stuff whereas men are more competitive and like more receptive to i guess natural hierarchies that might rise what we're doing

right now this exact kind of men in general are like x and women in general are like y this is not a super regressive thing this is or maybe it is regressive it's not a super unusual thing um this was a common way of discussing topics up until like very recent last five years or so and now it feels even while I'm listening to you guys, I feel sort of shocked by it a little bit. But if you think back, men are from, what is it, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, that famous book. I mean, this was a way, the whole,

I feel like the view, the existence of that show, The View is largely kind of hinges on this concept that there are differences in spaces and the way that people talk and things like this in general and women let's come together just as girls and have a discussion uh it's really it was banned for a while and it's it's it's now increasingly back uh and i guess how could you really not discuss it this way when you see such massive differences in general on things like for example politics that's a huge swing between men and women in the way that they're approaching politics right now.

It's like, you sort of do have to address this. But I want to slide. Go ahead. I mean, well, it's just this whole like constructivist idea of gender and of, you know,

masculinity and femininity being these abstract concepts that were created by society and like don't have anything to do with biology and i mean it's it's just so obviously and patently untrue that you know it but but it's become uh the standard like line i guess in society is that like that men if men act a certain way it's because they were socialized to not because of you know biology or anything yeah i'm so turned around on this discussion i don't actually even know and i mean not in this particular one but just in general i actually am not entirely sure what i think myself anymore on this um and so i'm not going to deign to offer an opinion here because who the fuck knows uh i do want to turn to uh the fact that it's a very stark difference in conversation um elon musk's neural link just successfully microchipped a human being which is

in the brain crazy future type thing that i want to talk about uh the specifically the aesthetics of it um and the reaction the reception to it generally in in culture uh but right on the heels of that um because i was almost not going to even talk about that until i saw this phenomenal tweet from brian johnson which i am going to uh read you guys right now, which is very much, I think, in the same vein. I injected Botox into my penis. It increases penis length by one centimeter. It also improves erection hardness, peak systolic velocity, and diastolic velocity, sexual health satisfaction. Therapy was built on a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, prospective,

comparative study conducted involving 70 patients with ED, refractory to, I don't know, it goes on and on. Long story short, this man injected Botox into his dick, and he loves the results. And he is this, this is the guy we talked about last week. This is the longevity dude who I wrote a huge feature on in Pyrewire's 5,000 word deep dive into his thinking and kind of what he means in tech, the very specific role that he plays in the culture here. The reaction to this is obviously very strong. And the reaction to him is very strong. And I've been thinking a lot about the aesthetics of this futurism.

And he's slightly less jarring than the brain chip. But in both cases, and I like Brian. I like his, I don't know him personally. I like what he represents in tech. I enjoyed our conversation. I like what he represents in tech. I enjoyed our conversation. I think that his work is important. But it's not popular and it turns people off. Like the overall look of it, the feel of it,

the brain microchipping of it all, the future are sort of tech's aesthetic or at least the aesthetic of the really kind of cutting edge tech, it's kind of out of tune with people in a way that feels culturally new. So you think back to the Jetsons and the 1950s era of American sort of futurism. You think about the World's Fair and things like the Disney World and Epcot Center, right? You think about the World's Fair and things like the Disney World and Epcot Center, right? So up through the 80s and 90s, you had the Young Astronaut Program. And people really were receptive to the overall future story that we were telling.

And now it's completely out of sync. I think the tech story generally is very much out of sync with the public. I think it's going to have a lot of – it does, certainly, it's already having ramifications broadly when it comes to tech policy. And I think if it's left kind of uncorrected, we are going to have a problem. I think culture totally indicates the direction of both innovation and political policy, which in turn shapes effectively what we are as a society. And I think this story, the way that we talk about the future, it has to be more compelling. I want to hear what you guys all think about this,

but I want to introduce one last piece of the puzzle here first, is a it's sort of it is an aesthetic difference and also a technology that it's the electric stove or the uh what is the other version of the stove the one they're always like no no electric stove suck but we have this induction stove right induction stove top um which are supposed to be these are supposed to be like the future. These are better, people often say, than a gas stove. This to me is perfectly representative of something that tech people do because they don't understand what the average person is or wants or needs. And in fact, it's like the very existence of the electric stove makes me averse generally to the concept of technology. First, I mean, do you guys have any thoughts on the aesthetic piece at all? And then I'm going to go off.

I have a lot to say on the electric stove. You mean the induction stove? Or both. I have thoughts on both. Oh, okay. Well, induction stoves suck because you have to buy like special cookware, which is stupid. But I will say, yeah, I mean mean it's just i it's the aesthetic i don't know if it's the aesthetic so much as it's just so easy to make fun of i think that's kind of like

putting botox in your cock like that's kind of that's easy to make fun of you know what i mean like you're kind of it's like you're setting yourself up a little bit which is kind of what i like about brian johnson is that he doesn't care yeah it's what he it's it's his thing yeah he's like i'm doing the full joan rivers on my dong like who gives a fuck you know like that's kind of cool but on the other hand i mean it's for the putting the microchip in the brain uh the neural link thing i mean i mean it's to solve it to be i wouldn't want to be the first one to do it i don't but solving a disease i forget now which which one it is um i wrote about it in the newsletter today let me see really quick uh oh so it's like a medical thing it's not like spotify directly

into the brain or whatever the device is currently in clinical trials, which are open to some individuals who have quadriplegia due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS. So it's like, it's not just, we're not in the stage yet where you're just microchipping yourself for fun is to solve, you know, a major disease.

But still it's a, it's a brain chip. Yeah. I mean, well, it's the idea of like elon being inside of your head i think it doesn't appeal to people you know i'm sorry what are you saying sanji i was just gonna say i think a big thing that freaks people out about both what brian johnson's doing and

stuff like neural link is just this like immediate repulsion that transhumanism produces in people and this idea that we could like augment our lives with technology um which obviously we do in you know less invasive ways all the time like when we ride bikes and that kind of thing but like that we could implant devices into ourselves um or you know in the case of brian johnson like you know i guess inject well the botox thing the botox injection i don't really understand the objections to because people seem to be fine with it like on faces and stuff but uh i think in general there's this kind of um sense both from people on the right and the left

from the right maybe from like a christian perspective and from the left i'm not entirely sure where it comes from that like we shouldn't be um valorizing the strong over the weak necessarily and like we shouldn't be um you know there's something kind of unsettling about this quest for like immortality or uh preternatural ability um and i think that that kind of vague sense of unsettlement is what is making this aesthetic out of sync with the average person. Interesting because it doesn't come up as often with some of the trans stuff on the left, but that's another discussion. The left thing also comes from Christianity. It's all Christianity. It's just Christianity without the humility at the end of the day. Well, I mean, I want to talk about the stoves.

I think so. There are a couple of guys, people don't want to hear it, but I think it's important. There are a couple of guys I like a lot on the sort of in the EAC adjacent space online. So these are like pro tech kind of utopianists. They're entrepreneurs, they are engineers, they're building stuff, they're working on a new stove. And I want to like them because they're, I do like them, but I want to like what they're doing because it is, because I like them and I like kind of what they represent generally, which is progression and make improving the world and using technology to make our lives better and things like this. But the problem that I can't shake is that I have is that I actually cook all the time.

I like to cook. So I use these things. I use an induction stove. I've used an electric stove. And in San Francisco, when I'm back west, which is briefly these days, but every now and then it does happen, I cook on gas because there is a remaining... Well, the trick with San Francisco is none of the new buildings are allowed to use gas lines, but the silver lining there is in San Francisco, it's basically illegal to build new buildings. So we're all on gas anyway and in perpetuity. But as someone who cooks, it's just fire is better. And so if you're going to try and the whole argument of tech that we're constantly trying to make is like, listen, we're going to make things better. And you have to do

at least that. If you're going to use energy in some way, if you're going to change our behavior in some way, I'm fine with these things. If you're either using more energy or you're dramatically changing our behavior, or if you're going to introduce some new device that's very hard, as is the case with electric vehicles, very hard to fix on your own, and you have to go in and it's going to cost more money and things like this, I'm fine with all of those changes provided at the ground floor. It is actually better than the thing that we used to do. And this is not that. And I've used all this stuff and it's not, they're like, oh, but this new coil or whatever,

that's going to make it water boils really fast. Anyone who, I don't care how fast water boils. That's not the issue that I have with the stove. I want to be able to lay a frying pan down and feel the heat on my skin and and kind of have an overall sense of where the heating is and it's more even it's just it's just it's like it's you don't know it unless you're using it but when you're using it it's vastly superior when you're on electric or uh or induction right the moment you step up off of that stove you lose the heat um you have to reconnect it it's don't cook even. And if you're trying to sell people on a progressive technological future, you have to think about this stuff. And little things like a shitty stove are not taken as a shitty stove. They're taken as, here come these tech guys trying to make my life harder again uh selling their junk bullshit um

yeah who here cooks and those are the only opinions that i'm willing to tolerate uh i've never had a gas stove i've always had an electric stove i don't get the induction ones i don't know i don't are you legitimately don't understand the appeal i just know you have to buy expensive cookware and so that's why i would never go water boils really fast it's true i have an induction uh stovetop in miami i you like basically have to and there's very few gas rigs so there's so much new building here um and it like that's the one thing it does it water boils really fucking fast so congratulations you've got fast boiling water i mean i think people are like rejecting uh the cult of convenience particularly interestingly it's not exclusively in the kitchen but a lot of it is in the kitchen i was thinking

about how uh the cultures really turned on like keurigs uh i remember when those came out i was like huge yeah of course you like had coffee machines before that but i feel like when curious came out it was almost just like a step too far people were like this is actually too uh artificial and like quick and whatever and so that's when people started doing french presses and like i feel like everybody has like some sort of weird drip coffee setup now that you know not everybody obviously but like um um, it's, it's actually kind of like an elite thing now to be like, oh, I only, you know, drink coffee that I made myself over the course of 45 minutes. This is, I still prefer a pot. I love just a pot of black coffee. I always, whenever I'm home, it's a big pot of just whatever mild roast sitting there.

Because I think for me, it's about just having a giant cup of something that's hot. And I like that it's there. It brings me comfort. But also, I've been probably over-caffeinated. I've been realizing recently my anxiety is less about the world and the company, perhaps, than it is about the fact that I just drank too much coffee that morning. I don't know. Something I'm exploring.

Interesting. Brandon, no thoughts on the electric stove, huh? Yeah, you can take my gas stove out of my cold, dead hands. I guess that's my thought. It's crazy. Well, that's the funny thing, too, is that you live in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Boston, these are places that have lots of gas stoves.

Meanwhile, places like Florida, Texas, tons of electric and induction because that's where the new buildings are. And weirdly, the politics are totally reversed. So you have these red states where people are like, how dare you come for gas stoves? But none of them use gas stoves. And you have these blue states where people are like, we got to do actually it's blue politicians i don't know that the average person in a blue state is saying please take away my gas stove we all know it's we all know that we're getting a worse product uh in in this exchange but it is funny the kind of political reverse here and i guess the last thought I have on it is, again, the aesthetics of it. When you're designing some sort of Jetson-looking alternative to fire,

you have to keep in mind that you're replacing fire. So fire is one of the most, if not the most, powerful image in human history, the history of human civilization. It is a powerful archetypical force that you see in every aspect of our culture. And that is a story that is primal and ancient and mystical. And if you're going to come at it with a little battery-powered piece of shit, you're going to get stomped brutally. And this is something that I think a lot of tech people don't understand is the power of stories and this kind of sensitivity to myth and legend and things like this. They don't have it. So they're often sort of flying blind in these crazy cultural backlashes and conversations.

They don't understand Lindy. They do not. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. They don't understand lindy or they do not under well yeah yeah yeah they don't weirdly i do think that concept of lindy which we talk about a lot on this podcast and i write about it a lot of piroware as well reference it uh popularized by taleb um i just actually invented it i didn't say he invented i said he popularized it so nassim taleb popularized it with his book anti--Fragile. This is when tech people and sort of broadly on Twitter,

you start seeing a spike in conversation about the concept. And that is like, it's for the industry, it's like quite bizarre. It's the tech industry. And yet that is like a newly popular thing to talk about at least. I don't see much of an application of the idea it's very hard

right there's no such thing as a Lindy rocket ship so what are you going to do at the end of the day with Lindy concepts I think you're like you're aware of it you're aware of the power in ancient things you're aware of the utility in ancient things but if you want to progress you kind of have to kind of have to try to

some new shit. Last thoughts. Anyone before we move on to why won't there's no need to reinvent the wheel and then something else. Yeah. Done. Settled. We're in charge. Gas stoves

are everywhere. Induction is illegal. Thank you for coming to my ted talk gary tan is going to be arrested by the board of supervisors in san francisco sajna take me through the latest uh psycho drama in the city by the bay yeah um so basically on saturday night around like 1 a.m., Gary Tan sends out a tweet quoting a Tupac song, specifically Hit Em Up, which people know is Tupac's notorious diss against Biggie. And he says, fuck. And then he lists all of the progressive supervisors on the board of supervisors as a label and a motherfucking crew. And if you're down with progressive supervisors as a crew, you too, slow motherfuckers. Again,

this is all verbatim Tupac song that he's just inserted, um, you know, the progressive supervisors names in. So he tweets this out at like, you know, 1230 in the morning, and someone responds to him and is like, Gary, you seem kind of drunk. And he replies, and he's like, I am and he sends a picture of his, like, private liquor stash at this bar in Chinatown where it's got like $300 bottles of liquor. And so, you know, whatever, it's a drunk tweet, basically, that he sends out. Do you know, that's where I first, I didn't know about all this drama until yesterday. I sort of somehow missed everything other than the liquor stash photo. Because when I saw that, I thought, why would you ever post that publicly? You're going to get poisoned. People hate you. I would never, ever reveal where I have a private stash of liquor somewhere. Yeah. I mean, it was clearly just like a drunk tweet that he sent out off the cuff at 1 a.m. He's not doing dry January, apparently.

And so the next morning, he deletes the tweet. Obviously, it gets flooded with leftists from San Francisco saying, oh my God, you want the supervisors to die? So the next morning, he deletes the tweet and he apologizes but of course you know the internet has a long memory and so immediately all the local outlets in san francisco uh run pieces like mission local they have this piece uh gary tan tech ceo and campaign donor wishes death upon san francisco politicians um so this basically starts this like one or two day long Twitter firestorm where every single person on the San Francisco left is basically tweeting some version of Gary Tan is like a domestic

terrorist. So you have Tim Redmond, who's the editor of 48 Hills, which is like one of the most DSA left-leaning publications in San Francisco, taking the cultural appropriator angle and saying Gary Tan shouldn't be like appropriating this Marxist anti-imperialist Tupac's lyrics. You have Jackie Fielder, who is running for board ofors, saying that she basically compares Gary Tan's tweet to Harvey Milk's assassination. And she says, you know, right wing toxic masculinity is what led to Harvey Milk's assassination. This is a woman who, by the way, I mean, she calls herself queer, right? It's like yet another. I mean, she calls herself queer, right?

It's like yet another. Yeah, Jackie Fielder. I mean, she calls herself queer. And a few years ago when she was running for state Senate against Scott Wiener, someone had. Really? He's like, I mean, he's a fulsome gay. I was about to say, he's a confirmed homosexual. He is a fulsome street gay. Always, you know, posting pictures in his harness and stuff.

But so Jackie is running against Scott Wiener and someone, and she's calling herself queer, and this is a big part of her platform. And on Twitter, someone says, Jackie calls herself queer, but she's never specified what type of LGBTQ she is. Soie then quote tweets type no one's attention sorry go ahead jackie then quote tweets this and she says something along the lines of you know i don't have to justify uh my identification as queer like you know it's i'm defying gender norms and norms about sexuality by identifying as queer and you know since when do we have to disclose what it means to be lgbtq well you disclose it sweetie you you just you said

you were queer and now i want you to fucking prove it i'm so tired of this i think we should be allowed to ask those questions yeah also especially if you offer it you're like hey i'm queer and you're like oh really you do date women and you're like how dare you ask that follow-up question that is offending my what this is like i already know she's that's a straight girl answer that's how straight white girls talk oh i'm sorry she's also not white is she i mean she is white but what does she say she says she's native american indigenous she's a fake native american is she actually native american she's actually native american i think i mean she's affiliated with a tribe in north dakota um oh affiliated okay yeah um but she's also she's also at home google her and and take a look this is take a look at this woman who's not white she's she's also mexican i mean she yeah i i've now i

have a new rule where whenever um i see someone introduce themselves as a queer woman of, I immediately assume that this is just like a straight woman who's happily coupled with a man. It's the racial roles all over. Jackie Fielder. Jackie Fielder. Yeah, I mean, she does look like, you know, Mexican, I suppose, or Latina. But regardless. I want to know who she's having sex with. Maybe our readers can get on that. Does she have a husband? I know she's got a boyfriend. I want

to see her boyfriend. This is an aside for people who are really into San Francisco politics and follow the newspapers closely. Soleil Ho, who is another very vocal queer woman of color, is married to a man, a white man. Well, tell us about her recent article, though. So people have to know just enough about her to feel happy laughing at her idiotic queer identity while married to a literal man. It's they, first of all.

But yeah, her recent article is about how we should basically, the state should like expropriate the gig economy and take over the gig economy and make it into a public utility because people who work in the gig economy, like, you know, for Uber or whatever, say that they feel exploited, but disabled people say that they rely on, you know, food delivery and other gig economy services. that they rely on, you know, food delivery and other gig economy services. And so the compromise clearly is for the state to take it over and, you know, nationalize it. She wants a government-run Postmates. It's like, we're out here nationalizing, like, really, I mean, I'm not going to shit on you. If you're truly profoundly disabled there's already services for that and pretty much definitely in San Francisco and pretty much everywhere else too where it's like you have meals on wheels there's like public transit and I know like where I live there's like some service that like carries disabled people and old people around that's

like kind of like a subsidized uber it's only like a dollar or something. Those services actually already exist and are funded by charity and sometimes the government. Yeah, it's interesting to me. We've gone from saying, I'm old enough to remember when these companies were first being formed. And the criticism from the press was that here comes another tech bro reinventing delivery, right?

The whole premise of the critique was, you're not doing anything new. You're doing things that have always existed. You don't deserve any kind of accolades at all. Okay. But now we're saying that these companies are, one, vital to the workers on them. They're new and therefore vital. And so therefore, we need all sorts of worker protections. But more importantly, too, they're they're new and therefore vital and so therefore we need all sorts of worker protections uh but more importantly too they're so critical um that we literally need the government to come in and take them over to make sure that they never go away also though so while makes uh sorry is that how you pronounce soleil soleil how do you say your name I've been saying soleil but you know so so soleil makes sure to note that the profit motive the dangerous prop

profit motive will be removed from the companies so uh enjoy your postmates you'll get the delivery of your dinner four hours from when you order it if that at all um thank god we have another fake queer uh laying out a plan to fix the economy for us. I really am. Go ahead, Brandon. All those tips and fees though, I gotta say are getting pretty crazy on DoorDash and Grubhub. They're like, now I pay like 30 bucks

just to get it delivered. So maybe Soleil has a point. It is funny how once these products are baked into your life, if they- They jack up the price, yeah. If they do anything to annoy you though, you become just like super open to communism. You're like, you know what?

Burn it down. I don't know. I'm so mad right now with my Uber driver. Nationalize it. I do not give a shit. People don't remember what it was like though. I mean, I remember I moved to San Francisco. You had to find a cab when you

were coming home. It was hard. I would walk home a lot of the time drunk through dangerous neighborhoods. The idea that you don't have to do that anymore. I mean, there are a million different aspects of this that are interesting, just the way that the world has changed. But the world has changed very rapidly and we now take for granted these huge changes. But I do also want to talk about the fake queerness of it all i mean do you guys have any any further thoughts on this on on the idea of you know public figures demanding accolades for their queerness while being married to straight men it's basically just women who do it straight women who do it i think um and it's probably because my assumption is that there's

still this kind of cachet. Again, if they're in the woke space, you get the cachet of being queer and thus, you know, being part of this marginalized identity. There's still that kind of like thing about identifying as bisexual when you might actually not be bisexual. Maybe there's an additional component of like you get positive attention from men. I'm not saying that's why they do it, but it could be. And then, of course, there's no opportunity cost because queer could mean anything. And, you know, it could be as simple as saying that you use they pronouns. So you don't actually, no one's going to like force you to, you know, perform a sex act on a woman.

Well, I am. That's welcome to Pyrewires. no one's gonna like force you to um you know perform a sex act on a woman well i am that's welcome to pyrewires that's the first thing that i'm doing henceforth to prove it oh you're queer show me i want to see it otherwise it's still in valor it does yeah it does actually feel like a kind of egregious form of cultural appropriation or like valor stealing it's like exploitation it's exploitative i think it's not radical anymore and if it was like you wouldn't have to like like none of these women would have identified as queer when it actually came with like negative social consequences so it feels kind of fucked up a little bit just because like you know i mean

like i came it used to really bother me a lot just because i came from like a religious family that you know had a lot of issues with me like being gay and so it was like okay so you're just a straight woman and you're pretending that we're like the same and it's like we're not we're not the same like i've had to deal with stuff that like you have not had to deal with and um yeah it just feels kind of fucked up and so i've gotten this from straight women before who again call themselves queer not not a not a girl everyone there's always a there's a certain kind of girl who loves a gay bar and has all gay friends and she's straight and she says she's straight and it's very big it's totally yes that is a part of gay culture it is we accept this we love this

we welcome this um the new thing is is effectively straight girls calling themselves queer demanding space in gay environments saying these white men won't make space for queer whatever of blah blah blah blah blah blah uh these are not lesbians again lesbians the the the relationship between lesbians and gay men is a complicated and long it's a complicated and long relationship there uh but lesbians have have uh always had a space and uh there are less spaces than ever that are strictly lesbian but um that's not what i'm talking about we're talking about straight woman weird identity wants room in a place that's not for her. And this is that to me. But it's in a kind of cultural, it's on a stage. It's also probably seen a tick down in acceptance of uh of gay people it's always been a steady rise up we've only seen it recently and it's because the gayness has been

associated with politics and uh and so of course people are going to have you know a weird feeling about it i do want to get an example of this is afab drag queens which are just that you're just a birthday like you're just like you're not you can't be a drag queen if you're a woman like you just can't like if you're trans like sure whatever i guess you know i think that's a little bit of a tacit admission of uh some biological reality but like if you are a fully a woman biological woman you're just putting on clown makeup like that is not drag yeah i know and you see the demand for in like san francisco drag shows now daytime never at night when people are paying but uh

there's like a brunch or something they're always trying to force uh an afab it means assigned female at birth so they're always trying to force an afab queen so a woman who's dressed like a woman into these shows and it's just like nobody's here for that people are here for like weird looking dudes with giant fake breasts like dancing around to a madonna song in a really awkward way that why what do you think is happening here it's crazy offensive i don't like it um i want to talk about gary tan i want to cap this conversation off because uh didn't this board of supervisors call it cops yes so basically to go back back to Gary Tan, so a bunch of people freak out on Twitter. And then the Board of Supervisors, so two supervisors, and I think a third might be doing it soon, have filed reports with the police department because they claim that they feel threatened and they're worried for their safety. their safety. So that's Aaron Peskin. Very ironically, because those familiar with San Francisco politics will know Aaron Peskin is a literal city hall bully who took a leave of

absence a couple of years ago. He was- A drunk? Isn't he a drunk? Yeah. He was an alcoholic. He took a leave of absence to go into alcohol treatment. But before he went into treatment, he was known for like bullying his staffers until they cried. Even his fellow supervisors, like this is all over the internet, said that, you know, he would berate them. He's apologized for his behavior. Like he's an actual bully. So he's filed a police report. Abuser. Yeah. Yeah. And he's also said that he's going to ask the city attorney to draft legislation to ban speech like Gary Tan's, which is scary, of course. And then separate from this, a couple other supervisors like Dean Preston claim that they've gotten mail from people saying, you know, Gary Tan is right. I wish death on you. And then you know print below this is just a

political statement it's not meant to be construed as a threat and so now this is adding fuel to the fire but it seems like the left in san francisco is basically gonna get a lot of mileage out of saying that um they feel threatened and it's it is a a real it is like quoting Tupac, not okay. Call the cops. Literally, we're calling the cops. But physically going into a drugstore and attacking people, stealing whatever you want, or dealing meth outside in the middle of a, or fentanyl in the middle of a mass epidemic, totally fine.

Still legal. Still okay. How many people have died? I went off. I got a little bit angry about this two ago um when the story broke of the police component of it because you i guess i just i started wondering how many people have actually died because of policy run by the board of supervisors we're talking about death or oh they're afraid they're afraid of gary tan's tupac reference they they're afraid for their life. You've killed people. You've literally

killed people. You are directly responsible for the death of fentanyl addicts throughout the city. You did that. And it's just my tolerance for this is I don't have it. It's gone. And I just think these people are really bad. They're not just stupid, stupid right there's always this question of of like stupid or evil um and a lot of people in local politics are just you know kind of authentically dumb but these people are evil this is like this is like there's a darkness there that needs to be um voiced and faced and conquered we have to remove these people from power and bring in people who are not psychotic does anybody have any final thoughts on this before we break? It just seems really clear from the supervisor's behavior and reaction to Gary Tan that they're really just playing

a bad faith, dirty game of politics with this stuff, and that's who they are, and it's depressing to see. Gary Tan, you should never apologize for a drunk tweet. Just always lay down. Yes. uh gary tan you should never apologize for a drunk tweet just always laid in yes i mean i think reveal the private stash though never reveal the private stash and also i mean don't tweet drunk i that's that's you you're not at the river level anymore you're at the you're the gary tan level it's like at a certain at a certain stage there is a transition that happens a baton is passed and you do have to to set aside the drunk tweeting um if you're the gary tan level it's like at a certain at a certain stage there is a transition that happens a baton is passed and you do have to to set aside the drunk tweeting um if you're not a

professional writer i think especially it's like we do have to there are some political realities here we have to keep in mind um gary not wise absolutely love you standing beside you um but like less of the drunk tweeting. Okay. I think that's, we're pretty much there tonight or today rather. It's been real. Subscribe. Please comment.

I want to hear about the dumbest thing you said while you were drunk. And do you regret it? Maybe not. Maybe it had to be set. Don't know. Rate, review, subscribe.

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