Pirate Wires - Media Layoffs Everywhere, Jon Stewart Is Back, Barbie Movie Shunned By The Patriarchy

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

EPISODE #33: Pirate Wires crew is back for the weekly Friday podcast! This week we get into the complete implosion of the media industry with layoffs at multiple companies (the same week we launched our website btw..) Jon Stewart is returning for the election.. but it doesn't quite hit the same. We react to the Bryan Johnson interview. Finally, the Barbie Oscar nomination controversy that summoned Hillary Clinton. The patriarchy strikes again.. Featuring Mike Solana , Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed:https://www.piratewires.com/p/welcome-to-pirate-wires https://www.piratewires.com/p/bryan-johnson-interview 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! 1:10 - Substack Is Full Of Nazis According To Casey Newton - Except It’s Not.. 7:00 - The Speech Police On The Internet Who Want To Control Everything 19:45 - Davos Was This Week - Surprise! They Also Want To Control Speech 23:00 - More Examples Of Media Fake Outrage 26:30 - Trump Crushes In Iowa - The Meltdown Has Begun 37:00 - INSANE eBay Story - eBay To Pay $3 Million For Harassment - Stalking, Pigs Head, Cockroaches, The DOJ Involved 46:00 - eBay Still Exists?? Who Uses It? 50:00 - Babylon Bee Caused Trouble.. Which Leads Us To A Light Conversation Regarding A Particular Word 56:00 - Vibe Shift Continues! RuPaul Contestant Is A Villain And The People Love It. 1:01:00 - Thanks For Watching! Like, Comment and Share With Your Friend - See You Next Week!

It's kind of strange to be building a media company while the rest of them completely evaporate. They kind of bring it on themselves. I was the second woman and a person of color who got laid off. The resurrection of the John Stewart of The Daily Show. He's kind of an incumbent and he hits a little differently and has lost a lot of fans. Barbie, Oscars, controversy. I don't know if I watched the same movie as these people. Ryan Gosling shouldn't have been nominated for Best Actor.

It was great. But this is the Patriarchal Speaking, so... What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod. I feel like I say the same exact thing every single time. You could probably do a little compilation of this. It would be extremely embarrassing. Welcome back to the pod. I feel like I say the same exact thing every single time. You could probably do a little compilation of this. It would be extremely embarrassing. Welcome back to the pod. Welcome back to the pod. Welcome back to the pod, guys. All right, guys. Welcome back to the pod. What's up? Welcome back to the pod, guys. Welcome back to the pod, guys. Welcome back to the pod, guys. Glad to have you back. We got some big news we're going to

start out with, which is actually just the launch of our new site. I'm super excited. We've been on Substack forever, Pirate Wires from its beginning. Love those guys. I think they're awesome. I do not think they're Nazis, unlike some Substack writers who recently migrated. I think they're awesome, but we have a different kind of ambition. We want to do our own thing, chart our own course, and this is the way. We've worked on it for a while. We're very excited. We have a ton of cool content up there right now.

Would love for you guys to check it out, piratewires.com and let us know what you think. In the meantime, or related, I should say, it's kind of strange to be building a media company while the rest of them completely evaporate. I don't mean to be smiling either. Online, I think there's this huge, there's excitement every time a journalist loses their job. And I think it's because a lot of people just, I don't think it, I know it. I mean, the polling data is right there. A lot of people just really fucking hate

journalists. They feel like they're being talked down to. They feel like they're being lied to. Massive erosion of trust, which we can get into in a second. But just the bare bones details of what's going on. Brandon, do you want to break down all of... Media is always taking L's. This week was... Last two weeks, really,

have been completely bananas. Yeah. We were going to talk about the LA Times, but I just remembered Sports Illustrated last week laid off their entire staff. So that magazine is, I guess, dead now, which is crazy. I mean, Sports Illustrated has at least a 30-year history as a media company. I think, I don't know how long it goes back, but this is like a real legacy institution. You have Sports Illustrated, you have the LA Times, and then this morning you have, yeah, Business Insider. So it's like a crazy just slashing of jobs across the board.

The LA Times though, sorry, you take it away. This is like where the drama comes in, which I do love. This is like where the drama comes in, which I do love. Yeah, so two days ago, Tuesday, 20% of the newsroom was laid off at the LA Times. The DC Bureau was, seems to be very significantly gutted. The bureau chief got fired too, got laid off, I should say. And you were saying, Solana, people sort of tend to dance on the graves of laid off journalists as of recently. And I agree. I think that's bad, but I would just note that they kind of bring it on themselves. I'm sorry. I mean, the DC Bureau

Chief, when she, so she just, I don't know if she tweeted today or after she was laid off. She tweeted something like, I was the second woman and a person of color who got laid off. Like, that was the subject. She was the subject of her tweet about getting laid off, obviously. And her gender and, I don't know, other DEA, I think. This is specifically a genre of tweet that brandon hates he hates well i think everybody about themselves yes that's true right i don't like you to be the subject of your own tweets i don't want to read about you yeah you know you you read

tweets like that not just about yourself but you know where she's saying i was the second woman to have ever been the dc bureau chief it's like. But what's behind that is a total refusal to actually think about what's going on in your industry and how you might be implicated. I'm sorry, but the DC bureau chief did not get fired because she was the second woman that was ever the bureau chief. You know, it's this, and I think that's frustrating to be for people to see and i think that kind of brings on this reaction more like for people to be like oh you know it's sentiments like these that may have like ultimately led to in part you being laid off or your company having to do these layoffs i don't think it's a crazy connection to make Okay. So we'll just go through the brief, briefly go through the LA

Times walkout slash firing saga. Yeah. The strike. I just want to tee it out because for me before the idea that, okay, so you have cratering revenue, you have people are not reading the LA Times. They're certainly not reading their business reporting or their DC reporting. People are reading news in general. They're not reading mainstream news in general. They're specifically not reading the LA Times. And in response to the people running the company who have to make the company profitable, being like, hey, we have to lay people off. the union is like the the writer's union is like well actually you can't fire us because we are going on strike like what the fuck you think

that not going to work is going to fix this i don't understand i do i like genuinely don't understand what they're thinking it's actually kind of genius because you can't fire people on strike like it's a labor law so that's probably why you're doing it like they're because you can't fire people on strike like it's a labor law so that's probably why you're doing it like they're like you can't fire you don't have to pay them but you can't fire them so they're like well i mean i don't know how long that's gonna work for i mean i guess maybe it'll keep your health insurance up for a couple of months but it was just a one day it was a one day work stoppage it was a symbolic gesture. So they walked out. It was the first newsroom union work stoppage in 142 years. 300 people walked out. They sent a letter and they published it online to the management demanding at least one insane thing, which was that they wanted better buyout packages of up to a year of pay after getting laid off um yeah it's like what's that tweet you wrote about the money the

money the money tree i i think i always think about my parents as a kid saying like money doesn't grow on trees and they they some people just don't grow up. I've been thinking about the childishness, the sort of essential childishness of this all week. Like they really don't seem to understand that they are, because the phrase, one of the journalists, not one of the journalists responsible, but one of the journalists in the sort of like pantheon of journalists

who drive me insane on Twitter talked about the fact that there's like some, a billionaire, I think owns the LA times or something. And he's like, this billionaire is a billionaire and he could, and should actually just subsidize the important work of the LA times. Like he doesn't matter that they're losing money. He has unlimited money. And so he should pay all of these journalists indefinitely. And the phrase, they're doing valuable work was employed. And it's literally not valuable. It's not valued. Work is not valuable unless someone finds it valuable, unless other people are like, hey, the work you're doing is essential to my life. And the problem here is that the LA Times is not producing work like that. The LA Times is not actually producing work that people need in

their lives. And it's like, if you're not valued by your readers, if you don't have readers who value your work, and you did historically, I think you need to do some soul searching. Now, a lot of this is macro stuff, right? It's like you have the social media element. You have the fact that you have these giant platforms that have swallowed up all the advertising revenue and driven people onto those platforms to try and sell their work. Yes, it's like media is an uphill climb, but you also have a kind of golden age of subscriptions for really valued media entities, like for example, the New York Times, which has never been. Maybe it has been slight. I can't remember if it was a little bit more valuable at the height of Trump, just on the

stock market side and in terms of paid subscriptions. But I'm pretty sure it has more paid subscribers now than ever before in history and are paid online subscribers. And that to me is just, it's evidence that there is a way, it's just difficult. And the way that you build up an audience of loyal readers is you have to establish trust with them. I think that's the high level problem the LA Times is facing. And just sort of crying about the fact that people won't give you money for no reason is not the way to build trust. That does not inspire trust in me as a reader that you know how the world works, let alone are able to accurately report on it.

Specifically on the LA Times thing, I think it's a little bit disingenuous the way people have been saying that 20% of the newsroom got laid off because it gives the average reader the sense that suddenly there's going to be no reporters covering breaking news stories in Los Angeles, and there's going to be this dearth of information and no one's going to know what's going on. But as Brendan was saying, when you look at who was laid off, it was the Washington Bureau, right? And like, obviously there's dozens of other mainstream media outlets that are covering the same things that people at the Washington Bureau of the LA Times are doing. It was like photo and media people. And I'm sure that now with the advent of social media, there's just a lot of citizen journalists doing that same kind of work.

And then it was their sports section and their Delos section, which is their Latinx focus column, which I actually am someone who reads the LA Times every week, not of my own volition, but because I skim it for Dolores Park. And Delos, I encourage people to take a look at it, is just this like really bizarre identity politics stuff where they sort of talk about how, you know, white people are responsible for making Latino people feel like tortillas aren't healthy. This is a real article that came out weeks ago. They're not healthy. Breaking gender boundaries. Breaking gender boundaries in Latin dance.

And it's like, this is work that actually has such a limited audience. I would imagine it's basically just the people who write the stories and they're like few friends. So it's not, I just think that like they're really cutting off fat when they're doing these layoffs. Like this is not even, it's not even the case that a lot of their breaking news people are being laid off. But you also have these huge impossible trends that we're dealing with. And we should, so Taylor Lorenz, our favorite, gave a monologue on the sort of the disaster that is facing media right now.

And it went viral online on Twitter where people mostly made fun of her. And I think they did so because of one line in there where she said journalists are important and they just personally hate her and don't find her work to be valuable, which I understand where they're coming from. I'm personally a huge fan of Taylor, but I get where other people sort of part ways with me there. Everything she said was correct. She accurately diagnosed the problem that media is. First of all, the fact that it is a crisis, the fact that media is completely gutted, the fact that the entire new media ecosystem that all of us, well, certainly me and Brandon came up in, is totally

gone, evaporated. The fact that there are less jobs than ever in media, and the fact that journalism as a concept, which is something that I really would love to talk to you guys about right now, it's like, well, I don't think that Taylor said this part, the sort of like journalism as a concept is kind of, it may just completely vanish. Though I think she kind of walked us there. That is significant, whether or not journalists have dropped the ball as a class of people over the last handful of years, which I think that in aggregate they have, though in the particulars, there of course have been many good journalists who have reported accurately on things that were happening and got in trouble for

trying to report the truth. We often talk about the Hunter Biden laptop story being suppressed and it gets rolled up in this like, well, the media silenced us in collusion with Twitter. I mean, I talk about this myself, but the story was written by a journalist. They worked for the New York Post. They didn't want to put their name on it, but there are people in media who do things that are good sometimes. And in fact, a lot of what I do for the industry newsletter is aggregation of news. I'm going and finding other people's reporting on things. You do need to have this first record of things. And I don't know what a world looks like. There's so little money in media now that I really don't know. I don't know how we're going to learn about stuff. Especially,

I think about, like Sanjay, the kind of reporting you do, where you sit down and you listen to a whole stupid board of supervisors meeting in San Francisco. No one wants to do that if they're not getting paid for it. It's fucking miserable. And it's like, what happens when you don't know what's... I think the big things are going to be covered for a while, but what happens when all of those little things are not? In fact, I guess maybe the next question is just like, well, aren't we already living in this world in small towns across America? People aren't reporting in every single town that exists. I think local news has been shutting down forever. These trends also predate social media. We've been seeing a decline in readership of the news for many decades.

Um, so I don't know. I think it's like, it's certainly a problem. It's been a problem for a while. Uh, and I do wonder what the next thing is going to look like. So I don't know. Uh, you know, what do you guys think? Like one, is this an important thing? Does it not matter? Are we making much ado of nothing? Um, and two, what's next? What replaces the current machine? I agree. I think it's important to have like sort of detailed sometimes even boring stories about like what's happening in city council or you know things that are happening around town local politics stuff like that because sometimes it can become part of something bigger um you know it can help you understand you know a bigger story down the line um it's good for the historical record like i think it's all important it's just um

it's not very profitable one time and i guess it is a question of whether or not like the market should decide necessarily always what like important news stories are um i personally don't think it should i think there's a lot of good things that come out that are you know if you are a billionaire maybe you should just fund the la times like you know like rich people have always done this like with art and literature and all this you know i that is interesting and i i if i were actually a billionaire rather than just sort of LARP billionaire on Twitter, I would do this. However, what, like all of those, these people are all of the same class. Like another concurrent

problem in media is the ideological consolidation of viewpoints within media. So you could buy the LA times and it's like, great, you're a billionaire and now you have employed a bunch of people who are the kinds of people who go on strike when the economic realities of their own company that they don't understand have forced management into trimming the fat and don't really kind of understand the world. Is the work that they were doing really worth protecting? It's like is the work that they were doing really worth protecting how many people are it's like some of those things are important but um i don't know i wouldn't want to buy a i wouldn't want to i don't know that i would want to buy the

la newsroom you know what i mean yeah yeah i wouldn't buy the la newsroom i would buy like the like dying newspaper of some like medium size like midwestern town or something you know that doesn't have a billionaire could buy a lot of not just one you could buy one you could honestly if you're like a dentist in san antonio you could probably buy one you know so yeah that i love i mean i think yeah i i do that's like it's like your civic duty to buy a small newspaper in a town that i don't know the name of but no i mean like the stuff like that is important i don't think that and like there are like towns and stuff now like and not even like super small like 500 people towns but like you know towns of like 50 000 people that don't have a newspaper and like that's probably not

good i followed a couple uh back in boston uh when went to school, I briefly interned at a place called the Weekly Dig. And it's like a small alternative press in the city. And one of the writers there went on to move to some small mountain town in, I think it was upstate New York. And she and her wife tried to just do this, to just eke a living out of reporting local news for this town like a sort of small town um because she believed in the importance of of this and like you said i mean there are towns that just don't have reporting at all um it fails obviously like it's just it doesn't work economically it doesn't work people do not value it and it's like, I wonder sometimes if it's one of these things that we just value. And so we're blinded, perhaps, to some other maybe more important version of this.

Do we not need it maybe as much as we think that we do? What happens if we just don't have this kind of reporting at all, city hall or what not? What really happens? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people, my sense is a lot of people just don't want to pay for media. And if they don't pay, then these small companies are going to go out of business. If everyone in 50,000 person towns was willing to pay, I don't know, 50 bucks a year or something. You could probably have a small newspaper operating that's reporting on local news stories. I think that my sense is a lot of the irony, I think, of a critique from some of these social justice people about, uh, mass layoffs that these media companies is like, and, and local news, you know, organization shutting is a lot of

them don't really seem to care about local news stories because they're so fixated on things happening, you know, worldwide. And there's kind of, you know, the cause du jour or whatever. Um, so my sense is like, you know, as River was saying, it's sort of unsexy reporting that matters if you care about local infrastructure, local crime. If you're invested in a place, it really matters. But if you're not, and you're just sort of content to sort of care about whatever the global headline is, then yeah, there's no reason for you to fund it. I didn't watch Taylor's video, but it sounds like she's also,

I don't know if she's describing the death of journalism or the death of the traditional business model that supports journalism. Just using the local newspaper example, you know, advertisers now value local newspapers way less too, in addition to readers. And I think the reason from a certain perspective is pretty simple. 30, 40 years ago, there were very few sources of information about the world. And the newspaper was a significant complement to what you could hear on the radio and see on the TV. And so a lot

of people would be interested in reading that and advertisers would be interested in advertising whenever they needed to advertise on the paper because a lot of people had to read the newspaper to understand what was going on. And that model is obviously not, you know, it's completely over because you can get your information basically anywhere today. So I think that that's the reason why we're seeing this just very broadly, this change in the market and what the industry looks like. We talked about this a lot in the context of Substack and sort of the new media mirage in the early 2000s when subscriptions were framed. When we were in this middle of sort of like a new media wave and the advent of subscription-based new media companies was seen as primitive in some sense, like a step backwards. But the truth is no one has ever paid for news. The advertisers have paid for news. And your cost of a newspaper could not cover it, could probably not cover the

paper that it's printed on, let alone support an entire staff of people generating news. And without that advertising, it's just going to die for sure. Like definitely. The only thing that will work are subscription-based news companies. And the only way someone's going to pay for a subscription is if they fucking love you. And that's why you see something like The Daily wire working really well with subscriptions and the new york times which represents more the new york times is not just it does generate news great news um in addition to a lot of shit but it also is an identity thing you know people want to be associated with the brand of the new york times they want to be the kind of person who reads the

new york times um and that is just there are very few people who can build a company like that. So I guess the question is, what is the future of news? And it feels like, I mean, we have, it's not like things are not filling this attention gap. We have TikToks going viral every single day that are news stories. It's like you have Twitter and you have TikTok and you have Facebook. You have people just basically saying shit. And I don't know. I want to kind of look back and be like, we're sort of in a place, the same place that we were in the 18th century or something. Maybe the early 19th century.

But this is not that because we live inside of the information now and there's more of it than ever. And it's really low quality and most people are really stupid. So they fall for everything. That is a strange new environment for us and I don't know how to navigate it. I do know one man who is going to help us navigate it and his name is Jon Stewart. We should talk about the return, the resurrection of the Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. Brandon, I know you are a huge fan of his. Can you break the story down for us? I was a huge fan. I don't know that I am anymore. He's only coming back for one night a week,

I think, on The Daily Show. Around 2010, he was an insurgent in the media system. He was up against a culture that was still quite influenced by, I would say, hard right conservatism, if you will. But now he's kind of an incumbent and he hits a little differently. And I think he's lost a lot of, a lot of fans, uh, for that reason. I think the media was always super left-leaning. Um, and so I think culture was still controlled by the left, even at that time, though, there were some real dogs in the fight. I think that the gay rights, for example, was a very different place. Um, but in general, the only value I ever... I used to like him as well when I was younger. And I think it was his... Probably because I was more left-leaning when I was younger. And then also, it was his media criticism, which was interesting to me. It was breaking down the way that news happened was fascinating to watch. But as you said, now he's an incumbent in that system. It's like he used to do this sort of...

He played this game where he pretended that he was not delivering news. He was just a comedian. He famously did this when he took down Tucker Carlson on CNN. There was a just absolute... This is in media, it's like a quite famous moment where he goes on to, I think it was called Crossfire. It was Tucker and the other left-leaning guy on the show. And he tells Tucker

to his face that he's destroying America. This is before Tucker was actually influential. This was when Tucker was a nobody on CNN. Some people watched him. He had very different politics. And he basically ended Tucker's career, we thought, until he rose again from the ashes like the fucking Phoenix and took over right-wing media um of course in hindsight stewart was always doing the exact same thing that tucker carlson was doing they're they're both talking about the news and the media um stewart just had some insulation from from that because he got to he was on a comedy show uh he was on the comedy channel. So now we kind of know how the game is played. He comes back on, was it HBO where he just had a show? And totally fails. He's no longer speaking in a way that feels new and fresh and young. He's speaking in a way that we have heard people talk

in media now for 20 years. In fact, everybody who is on TV sort of sounds like him to a certain extent, certainly everybody young. And I don't know, it just doesn't hit the same way. He doesn't, like you said, I agree with the part about the incumbency thing. It's like he just fully is on the side of the machine. How could he possibly critique it? It's a giant question mark. And it feels like a bizarre walk backwards for like how do people

in the media not understand this um just to give him a little bit of credit he he was it seemed like the first public figure to on the left to come out and say that covid leaked from a lab science has in many ways helped ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science. The disease is the same name as the lab. That's just that's just a little too weird, don't you think? That was wild. Yes, was wild trying to get him yes he was trying to stop him and stewart was like are you crazy like do you not see what is happening here is so obvious that it came from the fucking covet factory like why are we pretending

um i was shocking there was a role frame there well that happened before his show came back which is why i thought his show i don't know i deluded myself into really thinking his show was going to be great. I thought he was going to come in, he was going to do his both sides bro, typical shtick, but he was going to accurately speak some truth to power on the left as well as the right. And he didn't do that at all. He was defending child gender transition, sex changes and shit. And it's like, that is like is like i mean i understand staying out of that conversation i don't understand taking up a partisan position in that conversation in a sort of straightforward obvious way when i don't know it's just that is something that is so completely it's a topic that is so completely controlled by the people in power

that you would think i don't you wouldn't be maybe necessarily just jumping up to defend you know people in charge if you're saying that you're a you're a speak truth to power guy which he just yeah he's not anymore yeah i mean he's like a gen x lib who was trying to be like he was like i have to be relevant which means i have to be like you know annoying i mean really like the only like gen x libtard left is um uhFarlane, which is why, like, Family Guy is still funny. Because he'll still make, like, you know, a trans joke or whatever. Like, even though he's obviously, like, you know, thinks Trump's evil or whatever. Like, he's still funny because he's still, I don't know, he's like, it was like a different era.

I didn't know Family He's like, it was like a different era. There's no family guy was still on. I mean, like he was making like chicks with us. Johnson was making like chicks with dicks jokes. And now he's like telling me, you know, that you should let your, like your 12 year old cut off a dick. It's crazy. You know?

Yeah. It's just too straightforward. It's boring. It's like, we don't need this from John Stewart. We don't need this at all. We certainly don't need it from John Stewart. I want to talk, we have any last thoughts on Jon Stewart Media's

last-ish effort to resurrect itself? I would just say, I don't really see the role for late night shows anymore, honestly. I mean, viewership has been decreasing significantly in the past few years. And I think Jon Stewart was kind of, if you think about when he was at his peak in the 2000s, the competition was like Jay Leno and David Letterman. And Jon

Stewart was kind of like this breath of fresh air. And he was funny and he was doing something a little bit different. But I almost feel like this is a sort of media paradigm that's on its last legs as well. That is interesting. And I think definitely true. We, I wonder if there's some weird sense we all have about, we all kind of know that the media is different, but we don't want to believe it because we don't like the new thing is my sense of this. I think we really kind of want there to be, I certainly

know that I want there to be a show that we all watch. I want there to be some kind of news that we all receive and then react to in some way, even if it was a binary system where it was like two people who disagree, but we all read them or something, some kind of basic level of commonality among every American, right? Like there was something really cool about watching the finale of Survivor or something like, yeah, really like Survivor, right? And everybody talks about it. And now we're just, we're kind of, we're all passively ingesting memes that we receive

and laugh and probably laugh about. Probably everyone does see them, but we forget about them the second that we're done watching them and uh doesn't really have any kind of cultural impact it's just like a information bombarded daily in quantities that are unimaginable to would have been unimaginable to our grandparents even let alone our great great grandparents quantities of information that we are not designed to consume. And then it passes through us and nothing changes. Maybe we slightly evolve in some direction that I'm not even really sure of myself. It's like, we recognize that the current media ecosystem is not healthy, and yet we have no way out of it. And so that's why we cling to people maybe

like Jon Stewart. It's not him. Certainly it's not him that we miss. Certainly it's not him that we need. It's like what we miss is a time when all of our friends watched The Daily Show and talked about it after. I think we do kind of. It's just fractionalized. It's broken up into smaller groups of people. And you're right, it happens quicker and the clips are shorter. Right now, Paglia, Camille Paglia, like everybody on my Twitter, on my teapot, I don't know if I'm using that correctly, but everybody's talking about Paglia because there's like three clips that are going viral. Everybody's talking about Paglia because there's like three clips that are going viral. Like that's the daily show, you know, for my group. I just don't think there's any way. There's just no way in hell if I call up my sister right now or my mom and I say, hey, have you seen those viral Paglia clips? It's fractured. There's no way.

It's fractured. It's different groups of people now. And the information is not crossing over between them. The one of her cooking, where she's, there's this one of her, there's this one of Camille Paglia at, she's doing like a cooking show. It's like, oh, you like put the wine in and whatever. And the host is like, so why do you think that, I forget, like maybe it was a benign, I feel like it was a question

about the recipe or something. And Paglia is like, oh, because there are no modern, a question about the recipe or something and poglia is like oh because there are no modern there are no there are no modern uh role models for the american upper middle class white woman and then she goes into this like super intellectual conversation casually while wearing like a homemaker's gown before like a like a roast or something it was absolutely bananas and you serve this magnificent platter with a fresh green salad and a nice loaf of Italian bread and some red wine and it is devoun. And it's easy. Easy.

And it's quick. Quick and savory. How's this looking? Now we have just a few minutes while we wait for that to cook and I want to ask you, why do you think we have so many problems with eating, with food? Why do Americans have so much problem with food? There's a major crisis in the white middle class female sex role. Now, working class women, African-American or Latina or Italian, they don't have this problem, right? Anorexia and bulimia are indeed everywhere. There are epidemics on the elite Ivy League campuses. She is awesome. I know River is like a huge super fan of hers. You probably, I'm sure you have something to say about Camille right now. Go ahead. Just go.

Oh, yeah. Do it. Give it to us. Polly is great. I mean, and if you like, I mean, she's been having a resurgence for a while. Like she was, she did like, she's kind of disappeared for like the past four or five years, like in person, her clips of soul like circulated. But every time she puts a book out uh she'll do like

a media circus and then she'll kind of like go back into hiding and write another book um uh i mean she sexual person i is like a masterpiece it's like 800 pages long um but she was like the first really like the first like victim of like campus cancel culture uh like she was a sexual persona which is like this super like dense book they called her like feminists were like calling her hitler and all kinds of stuff because she was saying like um if women ran society we'd still be living in mud huts but it's all like about like men and women and like how like men like symmetry and they like like to like build things and whatever and it's um it was it's really interesting how she was the prototype and how she's still popular. She was also showed in the 90s what happens when you cancel somebody who's interesting,

which is that you just make them blow up. Because her sexual persona was published by like princeton university press or something it was like only supposed to be really read by like academics but it was ending up like uh the english departments at these like elite schools were like um putting up like you know memos and stuff saying like this book is hilarian you shouldn't read it and all this shit and so people wanted to read it and then it became a bestseller and now she's you know and that's why she was on the fucking cooking channel of all places through network uh dismantling

feminism before an audience of millions while braising beef it looked like to me. Yeah. Sanjana, do you have any thoughts? I mean, I like Pollya. I've skimmed some of her writing. I don't have any... I mean, I think that what's funny to me about her is that she's in some ways kind of the more articulate, edgier version

in many ways of Jordan Peterson and yet did not blow up in the same way that he did um which I don't necessarily think has much to do with the fact that she's a woman or anything like that I think it's just that she's not she wasn't sort of on social media in the same way that he was uh at the time that he sort of burst onto the scene and was involved in the sort of gender and pronoun stuff in Canada uh but yeah, I mean, I think she's worth reading. Yeah. I don't know what Camille Bocley would say about Brian Johnson, the immortal man, but I do want to talk to you guys about a piece that we published at Pirate Wires this week. We did an interview with Brian Johnson,

the founder of Braintree, the former CEO of Braintree, sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars, kind of went quiet for a while, dealt with a bunch of crazy personal stuff, including his own deep, dark depression, which he kind of came out of with a mission to arrest the human aging process. What I found fascinating about this topic, the reason I wanted to cover this and write about Brian, well, there are a handful of reasons. I think that the first thing was everybody hated

him. Ideologically, so right-wing people hated him, left-wing people hated him, the media hated him. My own friends in some of my sort of quiet signal chats could not and still cannot stand him. And that always is interesting to me. Unless you're an actual, you're not like a mass murderer or something, but if you're just saying something that doesn't have an ideological home, that's cool. It's at least interesting. I want to learn more. He is part of a sort of space of intellectuals, I want to say, who believe that death should be a choice, that you should not have to die. That is a really subversive, controversial idea. And it has been for my entire life. It's hard to think about. You knee-jerk say it's impossible aging is something that has to happen you have all of these weird hacks that you build up in your own mind to prove

this to yourself you know it's either it's god or it's you know limited amount of resources or we need young people to take over new ideas or whatever uh it's not natural is used by people on all sides of the aisle and um And yet nobody wants to actually die. If given the opportunity, you would look both ways before you cross age 90, you're not hoping to die. So what is it about this idea to go on a journey with your own body to experiment? What is it that sets people off ground floor? And then I guess then there's a question of brian johnson himself who is using the internet successfully to kind of troll himself to the front pages by being open about every weird experimentation that he's running on his body so you have kind of two things here you have like the

weird self-experimentation and you have the concept of of uh of not wanting to die itself um i don't know did you guys follow this at all do you even have any thoughts on on the immortality things yeah i mean i i think that a lot of it is a sort of like death is the great equalizer right we all die and when you have like billionaires who are like no we're not going to do that we will be unequal even you know at this we're going to get rid of the one thing that um is universal which is dying like the one thing like you can't take it with you or whatever and like i think maybe that a lot is i mean because it's a and it's not i guess it's maybe partly like classism and i think part of it also is just you're seeing like a sort of hubris

in these people that a lot of people find off-putting i mean i think that i find him personally kind of like entertaining i think he's funny um i i even when he's like maybe like not trying to be i don't know when he was just like he's like calculating the exact age of his dick he's like i have a 32 year old dick and i'm like that's an amazing way to open a conversation yeah he's been doing penis rejuvenation right yeah um he's doing great work in the space of penis rejuvenation yeah i mean i think a lot of it is just like you know billionaire hubris and people are like oh these people like think that they can like cheat death which is like you know if like uh it just and they're putting all these resources into it does seem also kind of like vain a little bit like you're putting all these resources into like

making yourself seem younger which i mean i guess be, but everybody's kind of doing that now. Like everybody's getting plastic surgery and Botox. Like, I don't know. It seems like everybody is, people may not be trying to like literally like cheat death in the way that Brian Johnson is. rand johnson is but like we're all kind of you know doing this to one extent or the other where it's like i'm not eating i'm not using canola oil because i think it's you know it's bad for me i mean or i'm getting botox or you're getting solar you're doing like people are doing all these things right so like try to like make them it's a cult of youth or whatever you know but that's exactly that's exactly what he's doing it and he's his research is public it's mostly this it's it's a cult of youth or whatever you know but that's exactly that's exactly what he's doing

and he's his research is public it's mostly this it's it's cutting things out of his he measures his body for damage every day and he kind of tries to remove things from his diet and his day that caused that damage in this exact same way that we all do so it's in the class thing it's like it doesn't if all this information is basically given out to people and he's just running experiments on himself, it feels not sufficient to me as a reason that people are mad about him. They're less mad about him now, I think, because he's funny and he doesn't care about the criticism and he won't go away. So you can only be really mad at someone, I think, for so long before you're like, okay, whatever. There's going to be a billionaire

vampire in midriffs right now and I'm just going to have to deal with it and then you know what is it famous it's like you uh you first day first day i was it first day laugh and what is it first they ignore you then they laugh at you then you mean or something or something what is that for you whatever they're we're at the last stage with brian johnson and so like he's about to win um and i i think uh i think that's the class thing is not sufficient it's an excuse that seems sufficient so we reach for it but when you just look at it it's like there's nothing he's doing he it's sleep diet and exercise are the main things he's learning the blood thing is a little i think the blood thing was the most like because that's what

really that's really when people got on they're like a literal vampire elite you know like and uh i think like i mean that was the thing that i was like oh you're like but we should have... They're feasting on the blood of the youth, Kalana. We should have that. I'm tired of it. Billionaires need to be doing weird... High level, billionaires need to be doing crazier shit. And I am tired... No, they do.

That's how so many scientific breakthroughs got done. Science used to just be rich guys fucking around because they didn't have anything else to do. I am exhausted with the idea that the best thing a billionaire can do is give their money to the Democratic Party to light on fire. I want giant statues in the San Francisco Bay. I want scientific research. I want a network of small little newspapers in tiny towns bought up and funded. I want a vampire billionaire with midriffs. I want those things. I think that we deserve those things. I think that we are only going to be as good as our billionaires are weird. I think that has always been the case.

We need someone to sort of like pioneer a course for us that is bizarre and strange and aspirational. for us that is bizarre and strange and aspirational. And I think that... I can see how perhaps the diet is not so aspirational and the blood thing is maybe a little bit unsavory. Um, but I respect a man who doesn't give a fuck and has a lot of money to burn and just does incredibly strange things. I saw this giant hanging garden illustration of castles and whatnot.

And someone's like, this should be the future. And I thought to myself, people can build that today. People can build beautiful things right now. Why is there so... And now I want to be a little more serious about it. things right now. Why is there so... And now I want to be a little more serious about it. There are more... If you had all that money, you should be building monuments to your ambition. And they should be making the world a better place. In the 19th century, we had libraries and museums and hospitals. I want to see that stuff again. And I think it's like our billionaires,

our poor billionaires have been so beaten down psychologically that they really just want to be invisible. And it's like, we don't need them to be invisible. We need to be he funnels into crazy shit. How much did he spend on Twitter, right? He's doing fascinating things with his money. And yeah, so for all the billionaires listening, I want to see some more weird shit. Guys, what's some more weird shit that billionaires can be doing with their money? I got one. We have to give credit to Jeff Bezos. He's building something called the Clock of the Long Now. It's a 10,000 year clock. It'll run for 10,000 years. It's in some mountainside in like West Virginia or something. And it's symbolically supposed to represent the power of long-term thinking. But I learned about it when he was on the Lex Friedman podcast. And he speaks about it very eloquently. And he almost specifically said what you just said, Solana, about artifacts. He's like, I want there to be something that

in 10,000 years, America, as we know it, is probably not even going to exist. There's going to be a new type of person, a new citizen of a new republic or whatever the form of government is that can come and take a pilgrimage to this ancient site in 10,000 years and understand our values at the time. And I think that's super cool to me. I hope we get to do a Pirate Warrior story about it and I get to visit and take some pictures. He also built a giant, I think the world's biggest sailboat with on the mast, a statue of his naked wife, which is absolutely epic. It's a combination of those two things, which I do think is essential. And any good billionaire, you need them both. You got to have both. Sajana. I think something like California Forever, honestly, this new city that they're building in

Solano County, California, which is going to be, if they can actually achieve it, because they're facing a lot of resistance from people who who live in the area but it's going to be a kind of ideal city in a really dysfunctional state which is going to be like you know medium density it's going to have good public transportation like that kind of thing investing in if you have a problem with the layout of society and you know the sort of dysfunctional increasingly dysfunctional low trust world we live in my contact lenses got stolen yesterday for example oh my god that's right you know you could build something new and if you have billions of dollars um you know you could invest it in just creating an entirely new city i think that's amazing um yeah it's the sphere, the Las Vegas sphere.

You guys can't see my view. I'm looking at the Golden Gate Bridge right now is the view that I have. And I want a colossus there. I've dreamt about it since I was a kid. I always wonder why there are not more giant inspiring statues that make me excited to be in a civilization that I'm inside of this is seen perhaps is not important i think it's very important to have inspiring art around you and specifically giant art the idea of a giant human leading the way the statue of liberty right there's a reason we love these things. It's because they inspire us to be better and they remind us of what we are every day in New York City. That means something about who we are and it reminds you, it makes you happy to be where you are, happy to be placed where you are. It makes you feel a part of something bigger than yourself and also makes you want to be bigger. So yeah, I want more giant statues. I would settle for one.

There's like one really huge colossus. We got to get back to that. River, you, I'm not going to say you are a billionaire. You get to tell the billionaire what to do. Actually, fuck it. You're a billionaire. What do you do with your billions? Oh, well, because I'm like a gay guy.

And I also have like the, because, you know, we don't have kids. So like we usually have to like do something to make ourselves feel immortal, you know? So I'll probably like write a novel or something. And then like- If you were a billionaire, you could write a novel now. You don't need to be a billionaire to write a novel. I don't have the time. Oh my God. would like lock i would buy a house in the woods i would lock myself in and write a novel and then i would like um actually what i would want to do would be to uh build just like a giant bitch like library of alexandria level library where i collect shit from all over the world uh make like a massive archive have everything digitized um so they can be like searchable um online too and then also have like a plate physical place where like people can go um because a lot of that is like so uh fragmented i think um and a lot of it isn't

i've like because i used to be a history grad student and I, um, like there are a lot of things you can find basically anything anywhere, but like, they're all in archives that are just sort of all over the country. And, um, I think it would be amazing to just like, if you had the money to just hire a team of like 500 people to just like digitize all of these, like important, like old books and like uh historical documents and stuff yeah we need jobs for all these english majors with nowhere to go to be honest right well yeah we create and make works for basically building an orphanage for english

phds um which is essential work i love it i think these are all great ideas. But one more thing I want from you, River, is on the topic of important media, vital media, worth remembering, building mausoleums to, I want you to take me through the Barbie Oscars controversy. Okay, so let's start with the beginning. I watched Barbie. And when me and my husband were walking out of there, he was like, do you think this will win Oscars? And I was like, for like set design, maybe. It has won seven more Oscars than that. It has been nominated for eight Oscars.

People are mad because it was not, or it hasn't been nominated for 10. They're basically, like, they're mad that Greta Gerwig wasn't nominated for Best Director, and they're mad that Margot Robbie was not nominated for Best Actress. I don't know if we all, if I watch the same movie as these people, it's unclear to me.

I mean, America Ferrera should not have been nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Ryan Gosling should have been nominated for Best Actor. Nah, he was great. But this is the patriarchy speaking. He was fun. I mean, the ironic thing about that movie is that Ken is supposed to be the villain,

kind of, but he's the most charming character by far because Ryan Gosling is just so charming. So this happened. The nominations go down. People become furious. Hillary Clinton tweets about it. Another dude actually tweets.

His tweet goes viral for a mix. I thought, I assumed it was views being ratioed for it, but it was people concurring and people attacking him. But his position was greta gerwig and margot robbie not being nominated for this movie is indicative of the very forces at work that are responsible for hillary clinton not being the president of america it is the patriarchy it is evidence of a systemically sexist society. People are somehow forgetting that Margot Robbie is, she's not running for best.

She's not, she's, she was, they wanted to be nominated for best actress. The people who took this, this nomination for her, they're all women. Everyone who was nominated is a woman. Like what world are we in right now? The Greta Gerwig thing. I feel like you have a super popular movie.

Maybe you should be nominated. There's something happening with just people, for some reason, finally realizing that the Oscars don't nominate movies that anybody actually cares about. And I think that's maybe sort of an interesting thing to talk about. I was surprised. Arch should not be populist.

It's not. It's not a democracy. It's no. I feel like this also goes against i because i everybody thinks i'm like you know a crazy like malice or whatever but like no there should not be democracy in art barbie is not like the people will forget that barbie exists it's not even like it's not even like mean girls where people will resurrect it. It'll be completely forgotten. Yeah. And the only one movie I think that really did well,

I think Oppenheimer still did well. That was a popular movie. Killers of the Flower Moon got nominated for a bunch of stuff. That was pretty popular. I watched it. It's really good. Barbie is popular. I mean, but... Yeah, Barbie's not popular, but she was popular. No, no, he's not saying it. It's really good. Barbie is popular. Yeah, Barbie's not popular, but she was popular.

No, no, he's not saying it was popular, but there are normally things that get nominated for Oscars, like Ed Solano was saying. They're not blockbusters. They're also not good, though. They're unpopular, and they're not good. They are movies that confirm the biases of a very small class of people they are the same thing those nominations we talk about art i agree

that i don't i'm not here for necessarily uh i don't think everyone's opinion is valid when it comes to art i think my opinion is valid when it comes to art and in my opinion there is good art and bad art and it's not what is existing in most modern art museums when you walk in and the art is some woman on a chair staring at a naked dude or something, which is an actual exhibit that I saw. Like, it's just stupid.

And I think people know that it's stupid. And the values that say that that is good are the same values that are nominating most of those films, which is a sort of separate conversation because typically the Oscar conversation is just like, it's people on really the right

attacking the Oscars and saying this is garbage that nobody cares about. People on the left saying, I don't know, kind of ignoring it and watching the Oscars. And now you have a lot of leftists

angry at the Oscars for, like you said, only nominating Barbie for eight rather than 10 Oscars. you have a lot of leftists angry at the oscars for uh like you said river only dominating barbie for eight rather than 10 oscars they really want greta to win because they want a woman to win best director and the director's spot is seen as i think uh and it is a male dominated profession um yeah i think only one uh katherine what's her name for uh the hurt walker i think she's the only one who's ever won and then people were mad about that because they were like it's like an imperialist like propaganda movie that was made in direct consultation with like the pentagon

which is kind of true hell yeah it was like a movie great um the fact that she didn't win didn't get nominated evidence of a vibe shift, perhaps. It's like the DEI nominations not happening this year. Sorry, Sanjay, I feel like I cut you off. Well, I was just going to say, I think it's extremely ironic that people on the left are freaking out about Oscar nominations because as we were talking about in our Slack channel earlier, the Oscars have these insane representation requirements that just got rolled out a few years ago on the heels of the Oscars So White controversy. People should check them out online. has at least 30% of all actors in secondary or minor roles from at least two underrepresented

groups, which include women, racial or ethnic groups, LGBTQ+, and people with cognitive physical, cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing. So there's now this like, kind of entrenched DEI ideology in the nomination process, so it's especially ironic i think that people are like freaking out and sort of relitigating the oscars so white or oscars so male whatever uh debate in light of this it's insane also recently our friends over at the uh anti-defamation league were trying to get jews added to the list of ddi requirements they were like we need more jewish representation in hollywood and people were like come on oh boy yeah um that's that's hilarious so it's like you have to be 30 percent uh one of the

preferred groups among uh the sort of hardline left, or all about the minority, I think. You basically just can't be a movie where it's about white men. You can if, like, all of your cast is Mexican, or, like, the whole crew is Mexican, basically. Like, you can get by with it with the crew, I guess, if you're doing, like, a historical drama about medieval england or something but like the crew has to be you have to arrive those rules are gone you want to do a show about queen anne or whatever the fuck and that's going

to be a black woman um and not only is it going to be a black woman they're gonna you're gonna say oh that's a black woman in the same way they like you know there are black people in hamilton or something we're doing a colorblind casting kind of interesting i kind of can make an argument honestly in favor of it they're not no no no they're actually saying there's a link to this person to some ancient african whatever and in fact while you were taught that the queen of england was white she was really black um well actually they did she was mixed they. Well, actually, they did. She was mixed. They did make a movie about Queen Anne

that won a bunch of Oscars a couple years ago called The Favorite, but they made her like a lesbian. That's true. It's a good movie. That was a great movie. It's a good movie. I don't think she was actually a lesbian, though.

I thought I'm a little more open to it. Yeah. Final thoughts on Barbie. The barbie the great barbie controversy of 2024 which ken had to apologize for he after he was nominated i just think it is a travesty that america ferreira was nominated because river i think you were talking about this on twitter but like the speech she gives the histrionic insane like tumblr speech she gives about how women can't have it all yeah that's the speech that made me think that the barbie movie was actually like a woke satire and that in fact it was it was anti-woke because it was so ridiculous

and on the nose that i was like there's no way that this speech should be taken at face value value like clearly america ferreira is just you know doing this satire of this insane girl boss feminism so apparently it was serious i guess i don't know yeah i felt inspired by the kens to be honest they really the movie i really don't want to get lost in the ways of barbie right now but but the concept of like women can do anything and then barbie leaves for five minutes and the kens lead a revolution and take over like easily overnight it feels sort of contra the message of barbie which is what i encountered throughout that movie i couldn't tell if it was woke or anti-woke or nothing at all.

I think that actually they tried to do a lot inside of the movie. They tried to appeal to everybody. And therefore, much like the movie, there was a much like, what is it, Miss Marvel, the first one. I think it's like it was very popular because of the sort of stuff around it. Barbie came out, it looked stunning. It was a really visually exciting movie.

It's a media property that everybody knows and is curious about. And Greta Gerwig is a buzzy director. Margot Robbie is beautiful and extraordinarily talented. Uh, and so is fucking, what's his face? Uh, Gosling. So it was exciting. Like, it's like people wanted to go see it but the movie itself no I loved

it sorry last thoughts the only message that people should have taken from Barbie is that you shouldn't use CGI you should actually get your ass out there and like make a set because that's what made the movie good is that it was actually they actually built all of these like pink like Barbie houses like pink like barbie houses like

they like fucked up like the market for pink paint or something because they use so much but it was crazy that is a great yes i agree i feel jurassic park in the early 90s still has i think texture that is exciting to watch today and this is a big of it. It's just like the craftsmanship that people would put into film back then. That is a very great topic and one that we will have to kick off to another day because we've reached the conclusion of this week's episode. Do check out the new Pirate Wires website. Do tell us what you think about it in the comments. Do tell us what you think about Barbie in the comments. I mean, are we totally wrong here? Did Greta deserve the Oscar? Lady Bird sucked, in my opinion.

Don't understand why she's popular, but Barbie was a huge hit. Let us know, and we'll hit you back here next week. Later.