Pirate Wires - Moon Should Be A State & California Doom Loop | PIRATE WIRES EP#12 🏴‍☠️

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

EPISODE TWELVE: John Coogan returns to the pod to join Solana in his mission to make Moon a state. We discuss how crazy it is that the U.S. never took control of Moon after successfully landing on it. Also on this episode, how billionaires and Prop C ruined San Fransisco, billionaires now leaving SF due to the homeless crises, and California's new city that the NYT can't seem to comprehend. Featuring Mike Solana, John Coogan, Brandon Gorrell, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://twitter.com/johncoogan/status/1696686230141043170 https://www.piratewires.com/p/doom-loop Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell John Twitter: https://twitter.com/johncoogan TIMESTAMPS: 0:00:00 - Intro 0:00:30 - Welcome Back To The Pod! John Coogan Is Back! 0:01:57 - Moon Should Be A U.S. State 0:17:00 - Prop C Ruined San Francisco - Billionaires Like Marc Benioff Are To Blame - Homelessness Is Worse Than Every 0:46:50 - Forever California - A New City - The Press Predictably Melts Down Over It 0:59:35 - Industrial Cities 01:02:35 - Thanks For Watching! Follow On X - See You Next Week! Pirate Wires Podcast Every Friday!

The moon should be a state. That's our moon. Get off our moon. Why are they on our moon? It's crazy. We invented the moon. That's our moon. That's ours.

No one else gets it. Proposition M. We need these people on the moon. We should have taken the moon. That's our territory. There's no reason. It's so crazy. That's our territory. There's no reason. It's so crazy. That's our moon. Get off our moon. That's moon orientation, the true north.

Welcome back to the pod. Moon should be a state. Let's get into it. So this has been a topic. This week, we're going to talk a little bit about the moon, something I've wanted to do for maybe about a month now. I've been just really captured by the moon. I want to segue from that into San Francisco, talk a bit about Proposition C, which I consider to be the turning point in the relationship between the technology industry and San Francisco. And I think it's a very important policy to revisit in terms of, I mean, when we're looking forward and talking about how the technology industry is or is not going to move forward in local politics or politics generally, I think

it's really important to look back at that moment and assess what we accomplished and what we didn't revisit that and think of a new way forward, perhaps. Apparently, I just learned John loves Mark Benioff and everything he's done for the city. So we'll talk about that. And then I want to talk about this new city in the Bay Area a bit, because this really does just... These series of topics, I think, really are going to help us get at the different ways that tech industry leaders think about engagement with reality. And I'm a huge fan of... Really, I think there's something exciting about each one of these directions, but they are in different ways in conflict. And so right off the bat, I think we start with the moon and what it means to me. We got into it a little bit last week with Augustus.

And what it means to me, we got into it a little bit last week with Augustus, this idea that I think that we all internalize this idea that America, the world, history, it has ended. There is no more growth. America has grown as big as it is going to grow. Alaska, Hawaii, that was it. I think some people want to give Hawaii back. We should maybe be shrinking if anything else, but certainly not growth. The idea of an American Greenland or an American Cuba, I think the reaction to this online when I talk about these things tends to be, oh, you're going to invade these countries? I don't think we have to invade these countries. I think there are lots of places in the world that would be happy to enter the American empire. But why are we so resistant to this, to the idea of growth, to the idea of expansion? When did we internalize that idea? And I think back, I think once I

started thinking about this idea, I saw it everywhere and in everything that we do, this somewhere along the line, we're taught that we're done and we're supposed to be done. And the idea to suggest that perhaps we should grow is actually extremely controversial. It is polarizing. It infuriates people. And I think that a lot of the times they don't even know why they're mad. But the moon is just this really great example of that. And there are so many weird policies we can get into. I saw it, Coogan, you've been talking about it a lot online and you're raising very interesting points. You have a poll that I want to talk to you about in a second, but just like my steel man for, I don't know if it's a steel man. It's not a steel man. I'm not thinking deeply, but the reason I want the moon is just,

it's ours. We got there first. We planted the flag. We should have taken the moon. That's our territory. There's no reason. It's so crazy that we actually, for the first time in history, I actually can't think of another country in history at the zenith of its power that would have gone to the moon and said, this belongs zenith of its power that would have gotten to the moon and said, this belongs to everybody, actually. Who would have done that? That's such an American thing to do, which also goes back to just one of the things, I mean, I say I want to grow, but one of the things I do love America is just the weirdness of America. There's never been a country this powerful that has done so little with its power and is expected so little from

the rest of the world. But yeah, the moon should be a state. I think we need to be growing. I think it's obviously already ours. We need to put a base there. We need to think of novel ways to start terraforming. And we need to start expanding as a population in the world, but also as Americans. I think we need a bigger American population. And I want to see Americans all over the galaxy. but also as Americans. I think we need a bigger American population and I want to see Americans all over the galaxy. Maybe we should use the word moon base more frequently because when I grew up, the idea of what you put on a moon was a colony. And the way I grew up was we were talking about space colonization, but now colonization has this kind of dirty word to it. And so people don't really want to use that and

i i used it around my wife and she was like oh yeah like you can't say colonization anymore and i was like even in the even in the context of like putting people on mars it's empty it's empty like what like it's kind of a different thing i get i get if there's a war and there's a fight but you would get pushback though increasingly so to go to mars where there might be life is considered among a certain kind of environmentalist extremely extremely bad you should not be contaminating mars with with uh with human life or with any kind of life from earth and um that is just i think that's even at a more extreme level, the internalization of whatever this thing is that we keep hitting at, this barrier between us and growth and progress, that's the worst version of it. That's the Thanos version of it. The life is bad version of it. with no atmosphere is better as it is than populated with life, with a new atmosphere, with trees, fauna, whatever. When I did Anatomy of Next, season two, New World, this came up a lot,

this weird psychological resistance to bringing life to a rock. It was considered, I think, sort of arrogant. And I think to myself, if that's arrogant, then whatever, sure, I'll be arrogant. I'll be arrogant if it means bringing life to Mars. That's what I want. That's my America. Yeah. I mean, NASA, they have these rules for non-contamination when they go and visit a new body in our solar system. And I think it's probably generally good just to be safe if for no other reason than, you know, when we do show up, we want to have, you know, all of the data

and capture as much as possible so that if we're looking for life, we don't, you know, accidentally contaminate it with human DNA we found on the rover because we didn't clean it off before we went there. And I think that stuff's generally good. But yes, I mean, we need to be thinking long term here. We need to be thinking about how we build a very, very large Mars colony. And the moon, I see what actually unironically excites me the most about the moon is that I see it as a staging point for Mars. Yeah, it's a launch pad. Yeah, yeah. And there are so many different things. Let's do the helium three. Let's get the ice. Let's do space tourism. I don't care about any of that, really. I think a lot of that's kind of far away.

I think the much bigger thing that we should be investing in today is just let's go put people on the moon regularly, de-risk this, figure out how we actually live in space, in harsh environments. We've done the ISS. The next thing is clearly the moon. And then that prepares us for Mars. And so, like, Elon, he's right to focus on Mars because that's the real goal. And that's the exciting one. But I think, you know, he's notorious for not really thinking incrementally, but the incremental list in me wants to do be doing moon missions constantly right now, and then set us up for, for, for Mars. What, tell me about your poll.

and then set us up for Mars. Tell me about your poll. So I wrote this thread on X that just broke down. Basically, I've been laughing to myself for the entire week about moon should be a state. I think it's hilarious that it's not the moon, it's moon, because of course we don't call it the Alaska or the Hawaii. We just call it Alaska and Hawaii. So if moon was a state, it would just be moon, which is hilarious. So I was just laughing at myself. But then I started asking myself the question, like, why isn't moon a state? Like we,

we won the space race. We were the first ones there. The prize for the space race should have obviously been the moon. It's so weird. And, and you can see a bunch of other ways it plays out. Like you could see a world where, okay maybe the united states and the ussr don't want to you know give the full moon away but the person the winner gets 60 or or the winner or they split it 50 50 but no that's not what happened they gave it to all it just completely violates this narrative of like you can't i would say in defense of us then at that time you can't take anything that you can't defend so we got there first we had to go back the russians were going to go up we weren't going to stop them it would have gone back and forth like that for a

while but when you start to look forward you know and you you ask the question of well technology is improving um the cost of the cost of a launch to the moon has lowered significantly in an age of elon musk the future looks musk's entire belief with mars is if you just lower the cost of launch to enough that martian colonization actually just is emergent there's no way to stop it once it's really, really, really inexpensive. I think that you could see some version of that with the moon in terms of staging or experimentation. Certainly you get to a base. Who builds that base first? To get away from the fun framing of this, what is China's move? I don't really have much faith

in China. I talk a lot about the dangers of china i'm not that nervous about china maybe i should be more but let's say they go up there they want to build a moon base what is to stop them that doesn't belong to anybody but are they going to think about it the way that they that the way that we have thought about it are they going to follow these sort of international treaty what is the what is the piece of legislation there's a piece of legislation it's the outer space treaty uh it says all yeah the notion there's also the moon treaty moon treaty which didn't get ratified by all the spacefaring countries and that's a little bit different but basically yes no one can claim the moon right now but this is going to become a problem when people start building infrastructure

on the moon because you won't technically own the land under it it'll be a lot of complex the entire framing of the outer space treaty which says all non-terrestrial bodies belong to everybody, right? That's just not the way the world, the universe reality works. It's a crazy piece of legislation that no one ever could possibly have taken seriously. And the only way you would draft it is if you never really believed we would be exploring space, or if maybe you thought we would, but someday, like 100 years in the future. And so you just try and avoid that problem. But we're getting to a point now where we're going to have to start seriously talking about what happens when you go to Mars. That doesn't obviously belong to everybody. It belongs to whoever's there. And we're not going to be voting on what we do in accordance with

whatever the fuck the un wants nobody's going to care on mars yeah i mean there are also like different ways to allocate the moon like you could you could just say we're allocating it based on current gdp or current population or current land control of the of the earth like at least at at least at that point you know everyone gets a piece or something like that no but no one's advocating for that it's weird it's we're not what's absolutely we're doing by population oh china india get more of the moon than we invented the moon that's our moon that's ours that's no one else gets it the end yes next question but your poll so wait so so so so at the end of the at the end of the thread where i kind of investigate why the moon did not become a state,

I ask the question, I basically conclude by saying, you know, the moon is currently under treaty. It's for everyone. But should America make moon a state? And the current results are like 50-50. It was very, very odd. Which blows my mind in this way, so the internalization of that that poll, you see that, you think that's a joke. And in a joke, you're going to vote the jokey answer, which should be moon should be a state. Instead, you had 50% of the people who were so animated by this that they were sufficiently angered by the problem. They felt they needed to vote no. They had to snuff this out in the cradle. Don't you dare think that we're going to make Moon a state. That's actually now

very, I understand the first wall. It's what's always been difficult for me. I understand the wall between us and growth. I don't understand the next thing that seems to happen among a certain kind of person, which is an actual anger about it to the point and a motivation by this. A need, not only a resistance to the idea of growth, but a need to stop growth. That's weird to me. It's weird that that many people felt the need to answer no to that question. There's also a flavor in the conversation of stopping the capitalists from extracting resources, even more resources somewhere else. When I posted this tweet thread about how to extract rocket propellant from lunar regolith, half the comments were like, great, capitalists are going to the moon. you know like we got to stop that we must stop the spread of capitalism the solar system let's not even the universe the solar system is so huge um imagine being mad about someone going to the asteroid belt and doing something i just i don't how do you i can't even begin to get into that that mindset i who cares who cares what's going on on the moon as long as you're not you know yeah it's people who are who are scared of change like people who

are worried about change and so all of this represents just change in their life change and uncertainty and i mean that that's my philosophy on like degrowthers generally is that they're not really degrowth they're oftentimes yeah they're oftentimes just afraid of uncertainty i think they're they're also afraid i mean if they're on on team i guess it's socialism or d growth if if the if the advocate or if the people that are complaining about capitalism going to the moon um are are on if we assume they're on team team socialist um then they just don't want to take another l they're like fuck like capitalism it's working and it's it's it's spreading and we have to stop it you know it must not it must not continue i i also think though

like some portion of these people just genuinely hate humanity and these are the same these are like antinatalists and people who think that we you know shouldn't be having kids we should be phasing humanity out um why would we go to the moon when that represents you know a potential solution for a bunch of problems like overpopulated cities whatever in the long term um they just don't they don't think that human beings uh do good for the world. And so when they hear about human beings potentially going to other worlds, they're like, no, that's a bad idea. The virus is spreading. In fact, I used to get that comment a lot on the Mars thing, that humans are a virus. And they'll always quote the Matrix in this regard. And they forget that

the person who said that was the villain, the genocidal maniac said that. This is the Thanos thing as well. Thanos is a hero. It really blows my mind. I think you're totally right. I think they don't think humanity is good. I think in fact, I mean, it seems to be this very obvious form of self-hatred. And I always come back to that when I... There are lots of political points where you can just simply disagree and everyone wants, let's say, really great education for their kids. And then there are many different ways potentially that you could get there. And I understand kind of fighting along the way. But often in disagreements with a certain kind of person,

you come to the sense that you actually don't want the same things, that there is an aversion in their mind to the sort of existence of not just you, but us, themselves included. It's this crazy suicide switch in Western culture that we have got to figure out because it does not just manifest in 50% of people in a fun poll saying no to the question of should Moon be a state. It is more pernicious when it comes to how we govern our cities. You look at San Francisco, for example, and let's get into Prop C. You look at the absolute state of human misery, the effective legalization of dealing fentanyl, which is a mass murder every year, that's an anti-human set of policies that have led us there.

There is no way to look at that and deduce anything else. It is just like there is something and deduce anything else. It is just like, there is something innately anti-human about it. And I think it's hard to really move forward with people who are thinking about things that way, especially because they don't often name it themselves. They don't frame it. They're not like, we hate humans. But if you just look at the preferences that are revealed in their policy choices consistently over time, that is the only commonality between all of these things. Environmentalism is another really easy one. When you start talking about global warming versus environmentalism, and it becomes very clear that the goal of environmentalists right now is not to end global warming, it's to

reduce the number of people on the planet. And this is why you have aversion to things like nuclear, and you have a resistance to the concept of potentially releasing sulfur back into the atmosphere to cool down the oceans and things like this, it's because they don't want to solve that problem because they don't care about that problem. We should actually explain Prop C. Because I didn't know what it was before hearing about it a few days ago. Sure. Yeah. So Prop C was it was they came up with it in 2018 and then it was voted on late in that year um and it's basically the largest increase in san francisco largest tax increase in san francisco history um it increased the gross receipts tax on businesses um by 50

and it earmarks all of that money for homelessness-related services in San Francisco. And so it generates around $250 to $300 million a year. It used to generate more, but a lot of the big revenue generators in San Francisco left as a result of the passage of Prop C. Prop C. And it was a piece of legislation that was really controversial when it was introduced by mainly far leftists in San Francisco. People like Dean Preston championed it. And notably, Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, which is, I think, the largest employer in San Francisco. Well, it is now, now that he's run everybody else out of town. Yeah. So yeah, that's Prop C in a nutshell. And didn't that effectively double the budget for the homelessness services in San Francisco overnight? Yeah. I mean, just for people who are not familiar with the San Francisco homelessness panorama, this was a major piece of legislation. It doubled the budget for the HSH,

which is the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. And it continues to generate an enormous amount of revenue for them every year that they can't even spend. That's how much it is. I've been thinking a lot about Propsy this week because, and I'll get into why in a moment, it all has to do with Mark Benioff. And it is, I think, And it is, I think, we think about the sort of tech culture war, which I would describe as the conflict between the tech industry and activists in the press as really kind of blowing up in 2020 through COVID. I think about Bology versus Taylor Lorenz and things like that as the first big explosion of that. But if you want to look back, I really feel the turning point was Proposition C. And it was because this was the first moment that people in the technology industry, which was still seated in San Francisco as the kind of de facto capital of the entire industry. It's the Bay Area, but San Francisco was the shorthand for that at this point. This is where most technology employees,

either they had lived or they were living, they were there a lot. The CEOs of the major companies were forced to face the problem of homelessness and expected to come up with a solution, which already I have some strange thoughts about. We're paying a lot of taxes. Our job is not to solve the problem of homelessness. Our job is to elect people who solve the problem of homelessness. But regardless, this is when it really began. You had Mark Benioff, who for a series of deranged reasons, which Sanjana, maybe you can get into in a second, ends up supporting Proposition C, which is going to be like Sanjana said, the largest tax increase in San Francisco history.

It is specifically going to be a tax on huge businesses in the city. And among those big businesses, so all tech companies and a few others, it disproportionately hit financial companies, a lot, like two times as much or more for companies like Square and Stripe, which naturally came out immediately against. And they said, hey, listen. And there were a combination of disagreements at this point back then. It was Patrick Collison of Stripe, Jack Dorsey of Square are the two most famous people who come out and talk about this issue. Jack is, I believe, the first. And he breaks it down. One, the mayor is opposed to this tax. Two, it's not a fair tax. We're paying a lot more than Mark Benioff is going to be paying. And that's fucking suspicious, first of all. Why else would he be so enthusiastic about this?

Patrick Collison came out and said something similar. But I want to focus maybe now a little bit on just... It's like the mayor's response to all of this was weirdly grounded and reasonable. And it was echoed by tech leaders at the time who were opposed. But we are pulling in $300 million a year already for the homeless problem. There were 7,000 people living on the street. Use some rough math, that's like $42,000 a homeless person every year that were blowing. Now, if you really look into the homeless problem, Asanjana did in a piece of hers called San Francisco's Homeless Ticking Time Bomb, you understand that most of the money that we raise for the homeless is going to permanent supportive housing. So free one-bedroom apartments for people who move to the city. It's not going to the people who are

living on the street. But at that time, people are kind of thinking of the math that way. Nobody really knows where the money's going. There's no plan in place to solve the problem. And a lot of the money's being funneled to these useless nonprofits in the city that are all... Now there's something, 80 something, I think, get money from the city. They're all sort of taking ostensibly one piece of the homeless problem. And Breed is just saying, no, we can't do this anymore. We cannot just be blowing money on nothing. We need to audit the spending and then decide exactly what we need to accomplish a problem. and then decide exactly what we need to accomplish a problem. That didn't happen. The bill passed. And five years later, Mark Benioff is now talking about leaving the city. He's talking about taking Dreamforce out of the city, his huge Salesforce conference every year,

specifically because of the homelessness problem. And I find that to be absolutely incredible because concurrently, he has just donated a million dollars of Salesforce's money to the Salvation Army to help with the homeless problem. And everybody's celebrating him, including many leaders in tech. And it's like, the short memory here is unbelievable. This man, because of this piece of legislation, raised countless dollars. The homeless problem has increased. Tech companies have left the city. That has affected tax revenue. And now I think we are very much in, I think the city is very much in a sort of doom loop cycle. I don't think it started with COVID. I think it started in 2018. And I think that he has not gotten nearly enough credit

for the disaster that he is responsible for. Okay, I have a lot for this. So there were three main buckets that Mayor Breed opposed Prop C, as I see it. One was lack of accountability, not knowing where the money goes. Two were economic concerns. If people leave the city and GDP goes down, receipts will go down, city will lose money. And the third was legal risks. Like there was a question about whether Prop C could legally collect these taxes. And she was right about a lot of that.

Like the accountability, we know there's tons of questions about where this money is going. There were some companies that left, gdp is up in san francisco and so overall tax revenue over the next few years should be up and the legal risks were the really were the big one that i want to dig into because the money was held in escrow while the while the prophecy was challenged in the courts and it was only released like somewhat recently, maybe like 2020, 2021. And I'm just wondering, like, are we calling the game too early? Like, is there an optimistic scenario here where the money does? Yeah. Yeah. So how would, how would you fight up? How would you, how would you respond to that? I would say it was released a long time ago. Here's what I

would say about how long, how many years should it take to deploy? If you have unlimited money, how many years should it take? Mark Benioff in his victory lap, which he declared he ran five years ago on Twitter when he said he solved the problem of homelessness in the city solved. He also said in the same breath, there is no finish line. Okay. He is voicing the belief, the actual belief of the far left in San Francisco, which is this is a problem that will persist forever. And we must always be funding more and more money and doing more and more and more, and it will never be enough. They do not conceive of it as a problem that can be solved. Even the city itself, when they talked about... I mean, we're talking about doubling the budget

from 300 million to 600 million. So even if you have people in supportive housing, and that's eating up all of that money, presumably you now have $300 million a year. You can spend on the few thousand. In terms of unsheltered, it's half of the 7,000. It was between three and four or five, Sanjay and I think. I mean, it's bounced around in there, but it's less than the seven. You have $300 million. You should be able to solve it. And here's how you would do it. You would build an immediate emergency shelter on the outskirts of the city. You would staff it with supportive medical staff who are trained with addiction type stuff. You have food, you have heating, you have care, you have clothing, you have bathroom facilities. You need probably a couple thousand beds. And then you make it illegal to sleep outside. You move everybody from the drug markets

to the outskirts where this is taking place. You force them to either accept this housing or to leave. You give them a homeward bound ticket. You bring back the program in San Francisco that basically gives people a free bus ticket to go back to where they came from. Because most of these people, almost all of these people are not from San Francisco, despite what the far left says. And you've solved the problem and you do it with probably a fraction of that 300 million. It's been years. We're not anywhere near that because the problem, it doesn't matter how much money they have. They don't agree that we need to provide shelter for people who are homeless. They believe that first, these people have a right to sleep outside. They have a right to do drugs, that we should not do anything about the drug markets. And also that what they really have a

right to is a real house forever in the most expensive city in the world that they don't have to pay for and they can just do drugs drugs until they die, which is what we saw in Sanjay's piece. That's what we see now. That is their belief. So they don't think of homelessness as a problem to be solved, one. And two, the way that they're chipping away at the problem is this really impossible thing, which is building, I think there are 33,000 people on a wait list right now for permanent supportive housing. We cannot spend that kind of money to build, let alone actually do it, actually build all those units for free forever in a city that doesn't even allow us to build market rate housing. So it doesn't matter that the money was in escrow for a couple of years and has been out for a couple of years, by the way, they're never going to solve the problem because

they don't want to. Yeah. And just to echo that, I mean, I think, first of all, London Breed wasn't the only politician to oppose prop see the only experienced politician to oppose prop see Gavin Newsom, who, you know, was former mayor of San San Francisco and before that was a supervisor, also came out. And, you know, I give Gavin Newsom a lot of shit on other things, but on this, I think he was right. And he said, you know, something like $300 million is not more is not going to solve San Francisco's homelessness problem. It's going to make it worse. And I think he's right. And Solana, you're right as well, is that, you know, it comes down to this philosophical problem, which is that California has codified housing first into state law. And housing first says that, you know, you should be prioritizing permanent supportive housing over temporary shelter and that you can't premise that supportive housing on sobriety.

variety. So essentially what they're doing is they're providing housing to a lot of mentally ill, severely drug addicted individuals who end up overdosing in this housing. I mean, it's a really horrible, dysfunctional ecosystem. And of course, all of the nonprofits that participate in it have a financial incentive for the problem to continue because this is a billion dollar industry. I mean, literally, you know, 2020, the year that the Prop C funds were released, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing had an $852 million budget to solve, you know, the supposedly 7,000 person homelessness problem in San Francisco. I mean, almost a billion dollars in one city in America to solve this problem. And yeah, you can say that part of it is because the department is chronically understaffed. I think they're also chronically

incompetent. Can't it just be incompetence, right? When you talk about that number that they have in a budget for one year, you have a few thousand people sleeping outside. You can literally pay their rent. My rent in San Francisco was $2,000 a month. I think by the time I... Maybe now it's somewhere between $2,500 and $3,000. That's in the most expensive city. Now, it's maybe not the most expensive in the country, but it's up there. You can be moving them anywhere with that kind of money. You can actually just... You can house people with that kind of money, you can actually just house people with that kind of money. You have enough money to do it. The fact that they can't with all of that, it says to me that they have to just not really want to do it, which is the real problem. So the follow-up question there is like, why don't they want to do it?

Well, I think Sajan's point is the first really important correct one that nobody wants to grapple with because it sounds too evil, which is that they have an incentive not to solve the problem. These people, their whole life is fighting the homelessness issue. There's no finish line in sight. We have to fight the good fight. We need more resources. There's an entire class of people who are working at nonprofits in San Francisco to work on this problem. It's all like these small chipping away. We're going to provide a mobile shower home, and we're going to provide meal kits, and we're going to provide counseling services or whatever. Everyone's taking some very small piece of the puzzle, but that's their livelihood. That's their job, and it's their identity. And so they're sort of clung to it in this fight, and they don't want to solve it. They don't want to pull all of the resources. What I would do tomorrow, I would strip all of the funding from the nonprofits. I would give it all to the mayor.

She would elect or appoint a director in charge of just actually solving this problem. They have five months to do so and we would be done. We would do it in that time. And if they didn't, they'd be fired. We'd get a new one and we would make sure that it happened. She's not right now able to do that because she needs legislative support from the board of supervisors. But there is no appetite for that because I think on some level, they want this to persist. There's a more insidious version of it, which is the anti-human stuff we were talking about. I think some people really like to see reflected in the streets, their own take on life and the world.

They really maybe feel that things are that bad and they want to see something there. I don't think they think about it that... I don't want to believe they think about it in that straightforward of a way, but I think that on some level that does motivate them. But mostly it's their identity. It's we need to be fighting this fight forever and no, we shouldn't be breaking down camps and people should be able to sleep wherever they want. And it's always, it's a victim first, they consider drug addicts victims. And so if they don't want to leave, if they don't want the housing, there's got to be some reason, it's got to be our fault somehow. And it's just, yeah, there's no path. There's no path to success there. What do you, Solano, what do you make of like Preston coming out against deporting

fentanyl dealers? That's- I think it is unbelievable. I don't even know. I mean, I feel stupid even talking about it because it's so obviously evil. I don't know how you survive as a society when you don't want to support an actual mass murderer. I just don't understand that. We're not even saying- We don't see them as mass murderers. It's offensive to say that, I think, to a certain group of people. I just saw Dean Preston. This is, by the way, he's the socialist member of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. I just saw him doing a day of

awareness for drug overdose. He's always out there talking about... Well, he's not always out there talking about it, but he is paying lip service to the sort of plight of the drug dealer, which is really at the heart of a lot of the homeless policy and not wanting to move people and whatnot. It's like, oh no, we can't trample the rights of these people. But then when you're like, should we put their murderer in jail or just get them out of the city? That is suddenly a bridge too far. And again, I feel silly talking about it because I can't imagine that there are people out there who could have any argument in defense of this other than there shouldn't be borders at all. If you're opposed to the concept of a border, then I guess maybe that's your quibble. And certainly,

he's seeing that maybe the preservation of the sanctuary city as more important than um you know a few dead drug addicts in his mind i reversed that that to me is reversed the the the drug the american drug addict is more important to me than the nicaraguan fentanyl dealer honduran sorry honduran sanji you were we were talking yesterday over slacks and Slack and you made up a really good point. You're basically saying that some maybe perhaps Preston is stuck in this mindset of like the 1980s where like crack dealers were some crack dealers, assumedly were actually dealing crack dealers, assumedly, were actually dealing crack as a means of livelihood and to actually afford food. And today that situation has changed a little bit with cartels essentially flying their dealers up to San Francisco and making bank off of fentanyl. But maybe that's part of the reason is Preston

and company are kind of stuck in this idea of like, look, these poor people have to turn to drug dealing to feed their families, which is obviously untrue. But I found that a sort of credulous explanation of their mindset. That's never been true. That wasn't true. When you're saying it was true, that wasn't true. of their mindset. That wasn't true. When you're saying it was true, that wasn't true. Poor people have always existed. My mom was poor. She wasn't a drug dealer. It's possible to be poor and not be a drug dealer in America. Food stamps have existed for decades and decades and decades. So that one problem alone, let's just take that off the table. This is the problem is we should not be... There's not two sides to this issue. And we're trying to rationalize it and engage with it in

an honest way. And it's like, no, if you're dealing fentanyl and people are dying because of that, you're fucking evil. And that is wrong. And we cannot tolerate that as a society. I think maybe I'd actually be more open. I'd actually be more open to the libertarian, just anarchy argument at the sort of philosophical level. Be like, okay, we're just dealing with one of these, it's a libertarian. We're going to have to have this kind of a conversation. But even a libertarian would not say that the fentanyl dealer is potentially just doing

what they have to do. They're just saying it should be legal because that's our right to sell for whatever. I think we can't do that. I think that's the path to doom. I think we have to just take a hard stance here and nobody wants to because we're all freedom-oriented Americans and nobody wants to ruffle any feathers, but it's pretty bad out there now. And I think that our philosophy of

governance is the problem. The idea that we're going to be both laissez-faire and then involving ourselves into the minutiae of business in such a way that it actually drives taxpayers out of the city. It's that sort of unholy combination that has gotten us where we are. And I would like to see the tech industry get more involved because I do think that while Benioff was certainly not the way, it does seem that in business and in technology, everything is goal-oriented. You have to have a clarity of purpose to do anything, to succeed in any way whatsoever. So the very first thing that a business person does when they come into the city is they set goals. What are we trying to accomplish here? And then from there, the strategy is formed. And I think that that's what we need right now, is if you're going to get involved. Now,

there are a handful of different approaches in technology to what we should be doing locally. there are a handful of different approaches in technology to what we should be doing locally, right? You have the exit people. We should just keep leaving. Every time something's bad, we should go somewhere else. We should go to Miami. And then after Miami, we should go to some island in the Mediterranean. And then after that, I don't know. You just keep going. The rod extends and you run and you run and you run. Two is commitment to local politics. And that's what we're seeing a lot more of right now. Gary Tan is a big banner waver of this in San Francisco. Mark Benioff is an example of someone who has engaged, but in a disastrous way. And I think that's because he

ceded control, right? He's like, we're going to give funds to you guys, but we're not going to actually be responsible for it. We would never dare suggest that we should be telling you what to do with the money. You should just take all of it, take what we have and do what you want. But then three, it's like you start over, you just build a new city. That's moon orientation, the true north. I don't know. What do you guys think? moon orientation, the true North. Um, I don't know. What do you guys think? I mean, I completely agree with you about the, like the, the homeless situation in San Francisco looks very, very bad for tech people because tech people are, their whole brand is being smart and rich. And if you're, and if you can't figure something out when you're smart and rich, I don't believe that you're smart or I believe that you're heartless.

And so which is it? Are tech people in San Francisco dumb or are they heartless? Because they have the money and they should be able to solve this problem. And with Benioff, I mean, I want to read one of Benioff's most recent tweets that I think is valuable here. He says Salesforce growth 2014 $4.1 billion 2015 5 billion 6 billion 8 billion 10 billion 13 billion 17 billion 21 26 31 34. He is crushing it like he is he is the Michael Jordan of enterprise SaaS. And I don't think you know, this homelessness thing is going to be remembered as you know, you know, a baseball career for him. It's very minor. He is a masterful operator. And I think he does definitely deserves credit for growing an incredible company in the, in the city. But I think what, what, you know,

jokes aside, what, what, what we're probably missing is that, is that the reason he's able to deliver those great results is because he's actually in the weeds running that. And he'd probably be fine if he was in the heart solving the problem, but he's not, he's writing a check. That's like a small fraction of what's going on there. I guess I have a, I have a question about this, you know, like we, we, in general, we view politics as, um, as sort of influenced by, uh, funding sources. We look at George Soros and we blame him for a lot of far left policies because he's apparently, he's like allegedly,

or we think he's bankrolling politicians that's got this program. Are tech leaders in San Francisco not doing this for local politics there? Well, they have. One of the problems is that like- Aside from Benioff to- Well, you also have West's face, Moskowitz. I said in the piece that I wrote this morning, Doomloop, when I take apart the Benioff

stuff and revisit Prop C, I wrote a piece in 2020 called Extract or Die, where I kind of laid it on tech. I said, the industry has not gotten involved in local politics at all. And that's the real problem. Not that we ruined the city, but that we didn't save it. There are a lot of smart people, as John mentioned, a lot of smart people with a lot of money who could have gotten involved and really could have made an impact and just chose not to. I think that has more to do with distraction and weakness. Generally speaking, you have people who are both distracted by their job and also that are sufficiently weak enough to when a deranged activist gets on a phone call with you, like is what happened with Mark Benioff, and tells you you're a bad person if you don't do something, you think, oh my God, that must be right. Let me give you some money

and support this thing that destroys the city. You had a combination of that in tech. It was a smaller contingent, but it existed. So they were investing money. They were doing it in the wrong things. And they were hoping, I think, that they could just... And I see this actually throughout the tech politics thing outside of San Francisco at the national level. I see this at the activist level. I see this... I see a lot of... At the media level, I see this where a lot of people in tech really just want to write a check to somebody who does a thing for them and solves a problem. And I just don't think that that is how it works at all. I think you really have to roll your

sleeves up and throw yourselves into it and marry yourself to the problem and really determine that you're going to fix it. And money is not enough. You need to be providing strategic assistance. You need to be connecting people. You need to be... You need to operate like an enterprise SaaS operator. You need to be a killer. You need to be looking at your margins. In the arena. You have to be in the arena. The EBITDA obsessed guy is going to be the guy who delivers goal here. I mean, honestly, I think you can be super cynical about Benioff. I think if you made him the homelessness czar and he worked for the government full time, no Salesforce work whatsoever, I think he'd be able to do a good job. I think he's capable and smart enough. Well, I think that that's probably

true of almost every successful business leader in the country. And that is just a broader problem that we have nationally, which is this weird... It's not weird. It's a completely understandable following of incentives. All of our incentives are in business and none are in government. We are a nation that is kind of baked into our DNA to be suspicious of government and to not respect government. So why is it surprising to us that when the most talented, smartest, wealthiest people don't want to get involved in politics, except at the level of president, right? Except if I'm going to run, I'm going to do a vanity run for president. Then is when, or even governor of California, which is insane. It's a huge, huge, huge thing, right? Nobody's trying to run for the board of supervisors, right? That's not what's happening.

I heard this described recently as like a wicked problem in the sense that it's like an onion. As you peel back layers, you learn more and more about the problem. There's more and more problems to solve underneath. It's kind of the opposite of enterprise SaaS. Enterprise SaaS is complete greenfield. You're on the internet. It's just a subscription. People just pay you. It's so simple and there's so little regulation. There's so few counterparties that you can see why just complete success in enterprise SaaS and then just complete struggle in- When I was switching from Anatomy of the Next New World, which was building a new world on Mars to Asylum, which was how do we fix San Francisco? Just even thinking through the problem,

I realized pretty quickly how totally fundamentally different it was and why probably tech people are so animated by things like moon should be a state because it's a blank slate. There's no one there. There is no regulation. You get to start it over and design a perfect system from scratch. You get to run things the way they should be run, But the reality of politics, so I want to believe it's more simple maybe than it is because the reality of politics is just chaos. You have a bunch of personalities, all conflicting interests. They all want different things. In the case of the homeless crisis, it's really that, right? What you need is someone to come in and align people. However, then it needs to happen. I don't know what the strategy would be there, but until there's

alignment, you're not going to solve it. And one person's not enough. Mark Benioff as mayor would never be enough, right? Mark Benioff as dictator, who knows? I mean, I don't know that I like the guy. Maybe he would be able to do it as dictator. But even then, it is a very complex problem, which is why you have to push to actually not just exit to a different place and not to just get in the arena and get messy in San Francisco politics, but to start from scratch, which is the new bogeyman of the press is this city that the billionaire tech bros are building just outside of San Francisco in Solano County. I feel like the last last five years this name has really blown up right from

never hearing in my life so i hear it everywhere um and it feels to me the idea of of building a new city right it's like disney world status epcot was originally the experimental prototype community of tomorrow disney's ambition was to build the city of the future in florida that's i think the ambition here that we're seeing now from a handful of folks in tech in Northern California. It feels like a fun middle ground between Moon should be a state and Mark Benioff destroyed San Francisco with a single piece of legislation in that you need that. And this is me too, right? This is our content at Pyrewire. I think a lot is we do both. We do the big aspirational, exciting,

white pill science technology, and then it's analysis and criticism of operations and the things that are going wrong. And we got to be serious about this. I think there tend to be two camps. People focus on one or the other. I think you have to have a true north that is incredibly ambitious and you have to never be so blinded by it that you can't see the problems that are right in front of you and the complications. I think you need both. And this city feels like maybe an interesting middle ground. Sanjana, why don't you just... Can you give us a little bit of context on it for people who aren't familiar with the tech pro paradise? Yeah, well, they just dropped their website yesterday, probably potentially in response to the cryptic New York Times articles

that have recently been published that sort of framed this as some nefarious land grab by tech billionaires to insulate themselves in the coming apocalypse. But it's called California Forever. tech billionaires to insulate themselves in the coming apocalypse. But it's called California Forever. And the website is CaliforniaForever.com. And they've basically bought up a ton of land in Solano County, California. And they are planning on... So part of the land is owned by a collective of investors. And then part of the land is still owned by local residents, but they're not going to change the zoning. So a lot of land is still going to be allocated for agriculture, but they're planning on building schools and they're hoping to basically have a kind of planned city there where people will come and, you know, want to raise their

families and that will revitalize Solano County. If you look at pictures of Solano County right now, it's basically just this empty prairie land. There's not stuff there. Some of the articles have framed this as over-eager- A thriving community that's being invaded by the evil rich people. Right. Or these investors- The farmers,

they always, it's all the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching about these poor farmers that exist only in the imaginations of New York Times columnists who've never left Brooklyn.

Yeah. I mean, also, also with the farmers, like, I was talking to somebody, I was like, oh, like, I assume that they were paying,

like, what, like 30% over market for this land? Like, they probably got a pretty good deal. And somebody was like, no, no, no. They were paying, like, three acts over paying like what, like 30% over market for this land. Like they probably got a pretty good deal. And somebody was like, no, no,

no. They were paying like three X over market. So like, imagine you just get to sell your house three times as much. It's pretty phenomenal deal. It's pretty, no one was harmed in the making of this city that still is not made. It is like,

in fact, in fact, I think now they're suing because of like price fixing, because a lot of people were, once they figured out, they were like, Hey, like, let's all check up the prices. Cause we know that they really want this land just like you know game respect and one one interesting dimension of the story is apparently like the project is being managed by this guy named um jan uh what's his name jan it's a czech

name jan's uh svovik or something. Jan Svamek. Svamek, yeah. And so there's all these articles now about how like this guy is some evil mastermind who like tech people hired in order to engineer this project. And because he, you know, like got great grades on his A-levels and then went to Cambridge and then did really well in his finance jobs um before he sort of like fell off the grid and started doing this project um and all indications just point to the fact that this is like an extraordinarily competent wonder pin yeah yeah yeah the idea that you hire someone

smart and confident must be evil he turned to the dark side young he was he was a young evil genius yeah also just the idea that this guy got like hired is ridiculous if you know anything about silicon valley like he definitely came up with this idea and went and pitched it like 100 i don't know enough about it yet i gotta hit up uh andreessen and and and unlock the details maybe get them on the pod. I'm going to, I'm going to invite them today. But, uh, I think that it's amazing. I think that we need to be thinking about stuff like this. I want to see big, huge experiments. I want to be inspired. I can't, I think if I were to steal man, the sad tote bag wearing vegan in New York, who's mad about this, I would think that they see this

as an escape. Rich people are going to be able to escape and live in utopia. And that's really bad because the rest of us are going to be fucked. And that kind of implies a couple of really wild and I think true things that we need to sit with. And the first is that this is going to work. That if these people put their minds to something and it's to build a city and they were allowed to do it and that city would be perfect, they could do it. They're going to be living in this really great place, one. Two, without them, the rest of the cities can't function. They're going to lose their tax base and they're going to lose their ability to lead. They're losing their smart people.

They need these people to help them make the rest of the cities better. And I agree with that. I think that there is a certain kind of person who's more competent than the rest and that we need them in our cities. I think that we need their money. I think that we need their intelligence. I think that we need their commitment. But if you believe both of those two things, then shouldn't you be actually much more excited about this kind of person, the existence of this kind of person in general? Shouldn't you be wanting to be a little more positive to them, a little more inviting to them? Shouldn't you want them in your city? Shouldn't you be courting them in? Instead, you're constantly attacking them. Why? What is that? You're admitting right now that you believe that they're competent, intelligent, useful,

and yet you also want to both drive them out of the city and somehow force them to stay. They want both. They just want whatever the other people don't want. Go ahead. See, I disagree with this. I think your point is that you want these competent people in your city and you want all this money building a new Californian city. I think all of that is a distraction. I think we don't need to be thinking about Proposition C. We need to be thinking about Proposition M. We need these people on the moon. We need all that money going towards building moon colonies and

you know just let's just forget and that's the ultimate exit i don't want to hear about people talking about seasteading or going to some island or leaving america if you're leaving america leave the earth and go to the moon i think the moon's got to be your true north mars has got to be your true more exactly. Let's stop reshuffling the board on the earth. But listen, to go back to what we were talking about before, it's also, Mars, speaking as, I would say, one of the more prominent tech bros who was obsessed with Mars. I mean, that was the whole fucking Founders Fund podcast.

It was a huge distraction for me. It was a way for me to simplify the problems of the entire world into this blank page where I could say, if only we went there and cared, we could build a better place. And when you believe that, when you have that in your mind, you're like, this is how things should be, then you don't worry about the rest of it. And I didn't worry about the rest of it. And it rotted in San Francisco when I was living there, working on the Mars thing, San Francisco was rotting, rotting all around me. And that led to COVID 2020. And that radicalized me. That was the moment when I realized it was not some random thing I had ideas about. It was,

I had a response that we all have a responsibility to to to the places where we live and um and i think that we gotta have both i think we just we have to have and and more pragmatically like like jokes aside very clearly like you need an extremely healthy san francisco you need an extremely healthy cape canaveral obviously you know all of these american cities need to be flourishing in order to build all the different technology and and maybe the real white pill is that we like we also need enterprise sass to get us to the moon and get us beyond and we need all of this stuff i don't think we need enterprise i'm really bored this is a whole other conversation please but i'm i'm bored of people solving lucrative, but not important. I get it. I don't oppose it. Go and do SaaS.

But what I really don't want you to do after you work on SaaS and make bajillions of dollars and are not really contributing anything massively impactful to the world, I don't think you have to do that. I don't think you have to contribute anything massively impactful to the world. I don't think you have to do that. I don't think you have to contribute anything massively impactful to the world to be a good person. I think that you could just be a good person and you could just make money and that's fine. I don't want you to come and look for some kind of trophy from me for that. That's what I don't want. And I'm not going to sit here and celebrate it. What I am going to celebrate, I'm going to celebrate rockets that land and I'm going to celebrate spaceship or space factories and I'm going to celebrate rockets that land and I'm going to celebrate spaceship or space factories and I'm going to celebrate genetic engineering and I'm going to celebrate the person who builds

a city that is utopian because I want to live in that city and I want to live in... This is all the legacy of Walt Disney and this was his dream. I think if Disney lived forever, he'd already be on Mars. That would be a lush planet by now. And that's where Disney World, it would be Disney literal world. It'd be the literal Disney World is what Mars would be. It was the ultimate end goal for sure. And we're all just working in his tradition. This idea that you can change the world around you, it started in animation and it extended to the actual physical world. He's the OG. He's the one that we should all look to. And this city is... I know nothing about it. There have been attempts before. Who knows what happens with it? But the idea alone, the ambition,

I don't know how you look at that and get mad because it just makes me excited for the future. Yeah. And just to echo that, I think the white pill for me with California Forever is like, this is an actually good way for billionaires to be allocating their money. Like the bad way is Mark Benioff writing a check for millions of dollars to incompetent, corrupt nonprofit organizations that are basically doubling down on a paradigm that even if you think about it for, but the paradigm is housing first, if you think about it for five seconds, doesn't make much sense. And again, he just sort of wants to write a check and then go wave a poster and get, you know, kudos from people on Twitter, perhaps. And then, you know, the other approach is to say,

we're going to invest in a project run by a competent person that, you know, might be successful. Maybe it won't be successful. A lot of planned cities, though, have worked. might be successful. Maybe it won't be successful. A lot of planned cities though have worked. And that could meaningfully improve the lives of thousands of people and revitalize a specific region, right? This is a project with very specific goals. So that to me is what I'm excited about with California Forever. Yeah. Imagine if every billionaire did shit like this. That would be awesome. I want to live in that world where people get really rich and then build awesome shit everywhere that benefits all of us. Get back to the days of... Billionaires used to be spending money on giant libraries and museums and things.

I want that. I want the cities. I want statues. We need a giant statue in the San Francisco Bay. I want it. Why isn't there a Colossus? That's crazy to me that we don't have a... There should be a giant 50-story towering Ayn Randian soldier. Maybe not a soldier, maybe a soldier slash scholar, a little bit of both, one in each hand, a spear and a book or something. Just like they're welcoming you to the golden city. Why don't we have that? We should have that. It's because we got to be celebrating our billionaires when they do shit like this, like Assange is saying.

We got to positively reinforce the positive pro-social behavior. I feel like we also kind of like forgot about this concept of industry cities. Like LA is basically an industry city for Hollywood. SF, I think what kind of was a tech city, but nobody, people don't want it to be, like its opponents don't want it to be the tech industry city. I feel like we need to like bring back this idea of like cities should be industry cities. There should be for every industry,, multiple cities that are dedicated to that industry, and it's an industry city. That's such a sick idea. working in in in uh alignment with with hollywood because it's it serves it serves the city just like in new york finance serves the city and in boston education serves the city no one in boston is going to be like no more college housing or something crazy like that they know that that's

it's part of what the city is and um and Francisco is this very unnatural, strange, interesting, weird place that has these edges like this, where it should be the industry city. It sort of was de facto the industry city for a while. And I think actually remains that way to a certain extent. But yeah, the city doesn't want it and it's- Yeah, it is. But yeah, you're right. The Hollywood LA thing is absolutely acceptable to everybody. Nobody questions it. But in San Francisco, everybody hates it apparently and wants it not to be a tech industry city, it seems like. Yeah. Maybe because San Francisco means something in a way. LA has hollywood forever and san

francisco has been other things before tech you know the spirit of san francisco has been there longer than la uh it represented the west then it represented the counterculture um it's it's meant a lot of things to a lot of different people and it holds maybe a quasi spiritual place in the hearts of many people. And so it's a little more precious or maybe they just honestly attracted a lot of crazy people who are fucking with the city right now. Yeah. I mean, I guess you go to LA, I mean, it's common to hear younger people going to LA to to make it you go to you go to new york to make it i think you go to sf to start an enterprise sas business baby yes yeah or to do fentanyl unfortunately yeah yeah it's a huge which way western man yeah um the perfect circle of this

is going to be a fentanyl dealer using Salesforce CRM to manage their clients. That would be the most ironic outcome. I am an open-minded person. And who knows? Maybe there's a win in there for someone. Guys, thanks for joining. John, thanks for joining us today on the pod. Of course.

Brandon, Sanjana, Ben Swell. We'll catch you all back here uh next week let's build that moon colony moon should be state