Pirate Wires - Neuralink, Starship, Moral Inversion, Kara Swisher & Don Lemon Insane Interview, & Liz Warren Tax

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

EPISODE #44: Time to end the week! Welcome back to the pod! This week we hit you with some amazing white pill with advancements in Neuralink & Starship. We then discuss the moral inversion that that is sweeping the nation. Don Lemon & Kara Swisher’s unhinged interview about Elon & tech, a look back at the Rise and Fall of Clubhouse 4 years ago, and we wrap up with the one and only Elizabeth Warren and her crusade of taxing the rich forever. Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/moral-inversion?f=home https://www.piratewires.com/p/jordan-neely?f=home Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! Like & Subscribe 0:45 - Check Out The New Pirate Wires Daily! FREE Link In Description 1:40 - Neuralink & Starship - Incredible Advancements In Tech This Week 6:00 - Moral Inversion That's Everywhere In Society 17:45 - Don Lemon & Kara Swisher Interview - The Obsession With Elon Musk 34:00 - Remember When? Looking Back At Clubhouse - The Rise & Fall 48:15 - Elizabeth Warren's ULTRA-MILLIONAIRE Tax 1:04:00 - Thanks For Watching! Subscribe To Pirate Wires! See You Next Week!

I didn't want to go there. Do you think he was uncomfortable sitting in front of a gay black guy? Seems to me that Kara really believes that like she herself would have started a private rocket company had she only been born with a p***. I think she desperately wants Elon's attention. I just felt so much like secondhand embarrassment watching their interview. It's just people who grew up in the exact same way, one upping each other on like, I'm gay, I'm black or whatever.

I'm like yeah all of your parents went to princeton like who gives a well if you don't like the media don't read the media what's up guys welcome back to the pod um bunch of cool stuff to talk about today starting with neuralink and spacex starship. But first, I just want to remind you guys, or really maybe announce, I guess we just started this week. We have a daily now, the PirateWire's daily. You should definitely subscribe to that if you haven't already. If you're not a PirateWire subscriber in general, I guess, because if you're a PirateWire subscriber, you should definitely know. Check your inbox. We're doing it a little bit different. Our idea is just most dailies are boring and people don't

really read them. If they're too long, it's just aggregated news. Nobody really cares. We're giving you takes, three takes once a day, very short, 90 seconds to read the whole thing or less. And so far it's been really fun and it's doing really well. So stoked. You should definitely join, subscribe. and now onto the show. Brendan, I want to start with you today, just on the actual white pill reporting of it all. What happened?

We have two really exciting stories, one with Starship, one with, uh, Neuralink. And then once you kind of lay it down, I've got a bunch of thoughts and a bunch of questions. So take it away.

Sure. Um, so there's a video making the rounds right now on Twitter of a 29-year-old paraplegic guy called Noland Arbaugh. And the video, which was originally live streamed from the Neuralink account, the Neuralink X account, shows Arbaugh basically controlling a cursor, controlling a cursor in a computer chess game, like with his mind. I guess more specifically with the Neuralink device implanted in his brain.

And in the video, he says that the way he's doing it is just by imagining where the cursor should go. And that's just where the cursor goes. He describes it as using the force. Earlier in the video, he also says that he played Civilization VI for eight hours uninterrupted and was only limited to the amount of battery charge

available on the device. But yeah, so the video shows this guy controlling a cursor with the Neuralink implant in his brain. And it's just pretty interesting to see. On the Neuralink side, I noticed something kind of interesting on the kind of press reaction culture, tech culture side of it, which is this phenomenon of, it's like in this case i saw a lot of people reacting to a negative press reaction that didn't exist and i think that i mean i have a few thoughts as to why but but roughly it looked like um can't wait for the media to uh say the guy was racist or something um oh great like elon helped someone lose at chess

that'll be the media's reaction uh but really the media wasn't reacting at all on this one they have previously you mentioned negatively reported reported on knurling quite a bit is that kind of roughly correct is that maybe what's causing the the sort of reaction to the imaginary reaction right now yeah and and um the most scandalous coverage i think people are reacting actually to wired's coverage of the second starship launch um which was a success by you know nine out of ten metrics um but they covered it pretty pretty poorly so i think that's still in everybody's brain. Yeah, so that one is a little more straightforward because they're reporting on, and this happened even last week.

So you saw this across the press when Starship, it's failed. It's being reported as a failure. But of course, these are experiments. They're running tests on a new rocket ship. It's supposed to happen. They say it's going to happen. They say it's likely going to happen. And then it's reported as this tremendous failure throughout the press. I think a lot of this has to do with just the overall opinion of Elon Musk among people who

cover the industry for a living, which is extremely low, right? It's just like they hate his politics. They see his politics every day on Twitter. They hate that he took Twitter. They hate that they are no longer in charge of the discourse on Twitter. This then shapes the way that they look at these things, for example. I mean, these sort of, in my opinion, unambiguously good things. So incredible new rocketry or in the case of Neuralink, right? It's like we have someone curing for degenerative musculature disorders and spinal injuries. And what is next? It's going to be like the anti-blind technology, sort of bringing sight back to people. These are, I mean, I hate to use religious language for something that is totally based in reality and does not require a leap of faith to see,

but they feel like miraculous technologies and they're hard to go after. They have, people have, like you saw Bernie Sanders specifically. I mean, the whole left loves to go after space conceptually, the idea that we shouldn't be exploring the stars, that we should be focusing here at home and whatnot. The Neuralink one is harder, unless you're going to go after it on grounds of like i don't want to microchip in my brain i don't want to be microchipped by by uh you know the the elon bad type guy then maybe there's that but this one's this one's hard to go after and it's part of for for me um i've written a lot about this concept called the moral inversion.

I've thought about this idea for a while. I kind of noticed this for a long time, a few years. And I wanted to finally sit down and write a piece about it following the attacks on October 7th. culture again and again and again, where something that is unambiguously bad is defended or worse, in my opinion, when something is unambiguously good and it's framed as evil. We saw two recent cases that have less to do with technology, but I do think relate back to the way that this is being covered over the past two days going viral. the first case you have a squatter story which i think everybody has seen at this point just like everyone's blood boiling my mom is like serially texting about this to me about how insane this is um you have a woman in new york who uh was

arrested after changing the locks trying to get rid of squatters in her house or a house that she owns i'm not exactly clear on uh i don't think she was living in the house when the squatter showed up it was her parents house that uh they left to her yeah right so it's it's a house that's left to her now you have squatters in the house and uh she goes tries to take care of it she is arrested and the squatters are sort of self-righteously like you know how dare you could see them like shouting at her and like they really believe that like they are entitled to this house it's like they're they're like straight up vagrants taking someone's home um and then today i saw a news i think it went out last night but i saw it today on uh daniel penny is being tried for man's is it manslaughter or murder i don't know if any one you saw that, but he's being tried in court for Daniel Penny, famously as the Marine who accidentally killed a guy who went nuts and threatened to kill a bunch of people on a train. So crazy person comes in a train, threatens to kill everybody. Daniel puts

him down with a handful of other people. He dies. It's not entirely clear to me how this guy dies. And now Daniel Penny is arrested. He's like the poster boy for everything that the left hates. He's like a Marine, first of all. He's a white guy. He's tall. He's handsome. And he did a heroic thing that they... It's hard to defend. Again, it's hard to defend this stuff because it seems so crazy to me. That's the moral inversion. I do think it's at work here. What do you guys make of this, first of all? Just these just these stories this concept do you see it at play as well am i totally off here i definitely see it at play in the i mean i think the point about how difficult it is to critique this neuro link story is really interesting to me because i do feel like the critique i can see

coming from some people on the left are people who valorize disability as like an identity category, like these, these like disability rights activists, right. Who, uh, I think they, you know, they take issue with even talking about like curing blindness because they'll say, okay, well, blindness isn't like something we need to cure. It's just sort of an identity. And it's something that, you know know some people happen to be blind and they'll say interestingly enough the same thing about drug addiction like this is you know some people are just drug addicts and and that's their identity and i think it kind of gets to what drives a lot of the moral inversion is just this idea that like you shouldn't be trying to fix um either social ills or like physical disabilities,

mental illness, anything like that, because these are just emergent properties of like of humanity. Right. And maybe, you know, we see someone who's paraplegic and we think, you know, it would be great if they could, you know, engage in tasks with autonomy and walk again and, you know, have the kind of freedom that we have. And some people on the disability rights activist side would say, no, actually, that's like patronizing or, you know, doesn't really respect their experience. It doesn't just go in one direction,. It's not like anything goes. I think the

thing about a moral inversion that I see again and again, the sort of strangeness of it, the bizarreness of it, the thing that's I think hard to face and truly difficult to comprehend is that it is the framing of the good as the bad and the bad as the good. And there are unambiguously good things framed as bad, unambiguously bad things framed as good or in some way defensible. And so, I mean, there are more and they're related to this space. But for example, fentanyl dealers who are not from here, not being deported, right? That is defended as important by... It's not just like, ah, we got to do it because it's part of this broader thing it's it's flipped around and it said no that's actually good that shows

that we are good and i don't i don't know it's it's hard to get to the the real moral root to me it feels like a self-hatred actually that is just metastasized and is poisoned our entire country i do know that it's at work i want to talk more about how it has kind of woven throughout tech, but I know that you guys probably all have thoughts on this. So I'll start with River. Yeah, I think a lot of what you're describing is the consequences of dialectical materialism, whether people realize that or not.

This is an idea that Marx and Engels developed from Hegel. And it's basically basically you know that thing from kamala harris where she's like do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree you exist in the context of like that's dialectical materialism basically her dad was actually like a marxist economist or something so maybe that's where she got it from uh but it's like this is a systematic thing a way of thinking where you you interrogate ideas that maybe seem good, but then you're like, how does this fit in with the broader society

and capitalism oppression or proletariat or whatever? And of course it's changed now because what happened with the new left in the 70s was people took dialectical materialism and Marxism, basically basically and started applying it to race gender homosexuality whatever just sort of like replacing capitalism with um the patriarchy

and replacing um the proletariat with women or whatever and And I think that's what you see a lot with stuff like the Daniel Perry thing, but where, you know, he killed, you know, yes, this guy was acting up, but he's, you know, a victim of society. And so it was actually wrong to intervene. You should have just left him alone or something. But to me, this is actually a misuse

of dialectical materialism in a way and i and i wrote about this on our site nearly wouldn't be dead in the state hospital and it's that if you actually want to do dialectical materialism you should ask why there's a homeless person having a full mental breakdown on the train and no one's the state hasn't provided a place for him to live um hasn't provided him like medication hasn't done anything like taking care of this person who clearly can't take care of themselves and i think you know it's the same thing with the october 7th thing where like people are thinking like okay well we have to think systematically about the last you know about the knockbar we have to think about the last you know whatever imperialism the

last 80 years of uh israeli history blah blah, blah. And I think that it can be a useful tool in certain contexts for, like, digging into questions. But I think that people misapply it and they take it too far. And, yeah, it results in this sort of weird thing, the moral inversion that you described, where good things are good, but whatever people think is it's actually bad like that's almost like the default um yeah it's a suspicion of every every moral instinct that you have is it generally whatever your natural instinct to morality is is called into question and kind of flipped around um and you're then given the

horror version story of that and expected to um yeah not only tolerate it but but accept it as correct as is important and that you are bad it's really like a warped psychological thing to live through right now i wonder i wish i could, because you never know how to calibrate this stuff. Like, is it really new? Has this been happening for years? Did our parents experience this? To what degree did they experience it? It's hard to know like just how much the culture has changed. I do feel like there was less of this. It just, I remember, I mean, things like crime were not really a huge question when I was, it was just like, it's wrong to do it. You shouldn't do it. People shouldn't do it. But also I grew up in the suburbs, so things can be different there. Maybe the cities were always just like these

horrible sort of wastelands, or at least have been since the seventies when things got really dark. Brandon, thoughts on this before I move on to, we're going gonna talk about carrot and lemon i mean is it just unprincipled ideological warfare like if penny was black and the guy that he killed was white what would the reaction have been on the left silence so i don't think they would have defended at that point i think the racial thing is is like a blind spot to it they wouldn't have i don't think i haven't seen it yet where someone's like you know it's good for black people to be murdering white people um but i thing is is like a blind spot to it they wouldn't have i don't think i haven't seen it yet where someone's like you know it's good for black people to be murdering white people um but i i think it's more like we just would not they're not going to want to talk about that story because it

it's uncomfortable for the racial component i think that even if you took the race out of it i think that penny would still have been targeted it's yeah i think he's been targeted more because of the race thing but i think he still would have been targeted i think what what i see with the with the moral inversion is people who are doing this are reacting to change that they don't like it um it bubbles up when there's a news item that indicates like civilizational progress in some way. And I think in general, the left is anti-civilization. I know that paints a really broad stroke there, but I see it as a combination of like a particular worldview and just highly partisan, unprincipled ideological warfare.

I don't know that there's anything more to it than that. Certainly like the new left, which is what we have now. I mean, there is no like old left. I mean, it's weird because it started out as this like utopian project and now it just sort of ended up as pure critique because they kind of gave up on politics for a long time i mean you see sort of secondary influence in the democratic party or whatever but like the democratic party is still funded by corporations it's not like like you know if they have to i

mean we've already kind of seen it with um you know biden is taking a harder line on immigration he offered to do basically everything the Republicans wanted because the Democratic Party is sort of soulless and they will sort of sell out sort of ideological leftism when it suits them. I mean, they've been doing it since the 90s. you know these things all get so confusing because what even is it like when we say the left are we am i even talking about the democratic party i don't know i i don't know that most of the people who are charging up these discourses online are even maybe they're voting democrat but i i don't think of them as democrats i usually use the word leftist like straight up and it's not because it's like an insult or something it's it's just it is a helpful differentiation. I agree with you about the democratic party. I think though that's there maybe less relevant, especially to the journalist side. And speaking of the crazy journalists,

did you all see Don Lemon on his dumb fuck tour, talk to Kara Swisher about his Elon Musk interview? I don't want to spend too much time on Don. We already talked about Don Lemon. We've talked about Kara, but it is they have a they did introduce a couple of interesting concepts in this latest banger um the team up really was phenomenal between the two and i want to talk more about the concepts as they relate to the technology industry so um you have uh lemon really just trying to juice every last bit out of his cancellation by Elon Musk for freedom of speech issues in which Don Lemon specifically was getting paid by Elon.

And then he gave or conducted a hostile interview with Elon and Elon decided to cancel his partnership, which is now being framed in some sort of nefarious language by Lemon. So he has an interview with Kara to talk about it. which is now being framed in some sort of nefarious language by Lemon. So he has an interview with Kara to talk about it. They talk about her book, which is all about how awesome she is, but how terrible everybody else is in tech and how terrible people in tech have become. And it's like the same old sort of like old woman yelling at cloud thing that she always does. But they talk about a lot of interesting things.

For example, the idea that they believe that Elon Musk is censoring right now people like them on Twitter, Don Lemon specifically, as well as presumably her. She didn't outright say that she thought that she was being censored, but she said for sure that she thought Don was being censored. Don just tweeted, he has a tweet about his interview with Elon, this hostile interview, where he has over 2 million impressions. It was, I think, three days ago. So I'm not entirely clear when the censorship began or what exactly it looks like. It is funny, however, that she is really worried about everything that happened to her ideological combatants throughout the prior order and in fact she says it's so weird like it's like looking in a in a black mirror it's really hard to tell like who believes what and why are we just reflecting each other she says you know everything they accuse us of they themselves do and she says the words like you know i know that he is censoring you don because that's what

i would do um if i were in his position it's so fucking chilling because it's true we know that you would do that if you were in their position because you and all your friends did do that for the last like five years it's crazy that she said it out loud uh she did try and like take it back right after she said it but sweetie like you said it we heard it you said it we know who you are um And she kind of downplays the Twitter files in which we know for sure the Twitter files, to be clear, I think a lot of the Twitter files, I mean, Twitter files, 567, they went on for a long time. And most of them towards the later days were very stupid. But in the early days, a lot of Tybee's reporting, we discovered some

pretty important stuff on shadow banning, which for sure exists. And also the connection between the government and notings of our, I guess, giant, sprawling, decentralized speech apparatus in the 21st century that we never would have known were it not for the Twitter files. She has some other good ones here that I want to just talk about really quick. She says, for years, women haven't spoken up. They're trying to understand. They're obsessed with Elon, and they can't stop talking about him. And they're trying to understand they're like obsessed with elon and they can't stop talking about him and they're trying to get in his head and figure out like like like why he is the way he is and by that they mean he's against things like i mean he'd list the things that he's against he's like anti-crime and city i don't i don't want to defend elon that's not what this is about but she says for years women uh haven't spoken up and i'm like what like carol like your whole

career is talking you know she's very good at it. She's never stopped. She's been talking way longer than me. They say that they imply that Elon wouldn't have what he has were he not a white man. The implication being that Don Lemon, who's been a famous CNN anchor for as long as I've known, I mean, decades at this point, I guess is in some way not successful, right? Like that was strange to me. She herself is from wealth. He came from an attorney father. It's like, I keep, I'm struggling to understand like what the things were that they didn't have, but they're obsessed with the things that they didn't have. And that he apparently did. My overall, I mean, my overall feeling of this, it's like separate from the morally inverted nature of it.

It's like you have a man who's doing more when it comes to, let's just table the speech stuff. When it comes to the, we're talking about power. So things that they care about. So energy, renewable energy. We have Tesla. All of the neurological disorders now that are being tapped tackled with neural link you have space exploration big exciting things um that in a previous era most people would talk about in a positive lens uh so separate from sort of going after this man

who's doing all of those things because he tweets political things that you don't like um which is it's self-colored the way that you approach all of those other topics uh it just is funny because it seems to me that carol really believes that like she herself would have started a private rocket company had she only been born with a penis and that is like a just a bizarre it's like a very strange way to think about the world that she just says out loud. And I think for so long, people like her and Don have gone unchallenged in the public square. They've sort of gone unchallenged for so long that they don't understand how crazy that sounds. I don't know. What do you guys make of this? Not to be like a commie again, but class is the only thing that matters in this country. And they both grew up upper middle class and like have careers in journalism no she grew up with with old world

like really wealth like real wealth she's talked about it before he grew up i'm assuming rich his dad's an attorney my dad was in construction i don't know what attorneys make right um it sounds i think a lot but sorry continue yeah i mean like but that's i i got this is why i've hated this shit for years because it's just people who grew up in the exact same way one upping each other on like i'm gay i'm black or whatever i'm like yeah all of your parents went to fucking princeton like who gives a fuck like what are you taught i'm like talking to my cousin she's like i'm trying to get my kids back or whatever you know like give me a break i don't because like that is like the actual it doesn't have nobody cares like how you grew up it's all about like opportunities for that old um media establishment you have to get in there because you have to do all these stupid internships for like six months where you don't

get paid and you have to go to the right schools and meet the right people like before the internet you had to do all this in person and i mean like i there's no way that i would be a journalist today if it weren't for the internet you know what i mean like i don't think i'd ever met a journalist in person like when i started publishing it all happened because of the internet and i think like that's why they're focusing on it's just these these arguments are so stupid to me because all of these people none of them struggled like in the way that uh somebody who had actually grown up poor of any race gay straight whatever like would have to break into the industry when they broke into it yeah don mentions like he he just he thinks you know Elon just had a really hard time sitting across from a gay black man and people have been asking me what I meant by when I said he did not like

answering questions or being held to account from people like me and so some people took it to mean a racial thing I meant someone who has a different worldview. But since people raised it and you said what you said, do you think that he was uncomfortable? I didn't want to go there. Do you think he was uncomfortable sitting in front of a gay black guy? Probably more gay than black, I would think. I hate to say that, but I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I mean, answer questions from. I don't think he likes control beyond himself. And I thought, and Kara mentions the anti-gay things that Elon said. I'm like, I don't... He's never said a thing against gay people. And just on the gay... I really resent the constant conflation of criticizing young children taking life-ing hormones and getting life altering medical interventions to alter their gender appearance and homosexuality which presents after puberty yeah there's three gay people on this podcast and i think we all have a problem with it so take that for what you will yeah it's obnoxious um brandon what do you make of all this um I don't really have a take here I think it's ridiculous

um and totally uh predictable and I don't know if I was Kara I'd be less predictable quite frankly she's boring I think she really desperately wants Elon's attention um which is so sad and I just felt so much like secondhand embarrassment watching their interview. It was like watching a bad elementary school recital or something. But like, at one point, she says, she's like talking about how Elon says he's a free speech absolutist. And she's like, well, if he were really a free speech absolutist, he'd be showing more opinions on his ex, like on his personal timeline on twitter and it's like why why would he have to amplify opinions he doesn't agree with on his personal social media account it's like this really weird moment that to me revealed like oh she's just upset because he's actually not giving her attention and don lemon's also upset because you because the interview went poorly and now he's not going to get Elon's attention. But yeah, they're very obsessed with Elon. And River, to your point, there's also a moment where she says something about... She's talking about tech people who want to get involved in media. And she's like, well, if they don't like the media,

they shouldn't engage with the media. And it's like, well, so you're saying that you own the media, like you get to define what the media is and you get to like gatekeep who enters it. Like, well, if you don't like the media, don't read the media. Like, I don't know what to say. And I think, again, it's this very revealing, like, you know, she comes from wealth she was part of a class of people that had sort of this it was almost this like legacy system to get into the old media and now that people are breaking that model she's really upset um yeah yes she's in competition with like she he has things that she wants and it's really hard to look past that, that, that she sees herself as fundamentally in competition with tech,

even though she's doing media stuff poorly, but she's doing, she's doing her best. And, uh, you had, um, you,

you have this critique a lot that she gives, uh, people in tech. She's like, you know, these people have incredibly thin skin. They can't handle any insults or blah, blah, blah. I would say that's not really true. That was true.

Well, I don't think it was ever true that it was a thin-skinned thing. I think about five, six years ago, you had a really... Five years ago even, you had a really horrific tech press environment where people were criticized relentlessly for no good reason at all, no matter what they did. You get a spotlight on you and the journalists were like, destroy. In fact, we've had people who worked at the Times and whatnot reveal that there were mandates to report critically only for a very long time. And so people were reacting to that, but people have not really gone after the press. Elon talks about the press. He means the press generally, not the tech press. Tech press hasn't really been a big bad for a few years. It's like they lost. They'll write things and people will attack them sometimes. They do get read, but they're kind of mixed in now with other voices within tech who

are, I wouldn't say like yet equally influential, they're kind of influential in a different way. They're not as relevant as they once were. Still relevant, but they're kind of one piece of the puzzle. They lost the gatekeeping. They're now kind of in the sewers with the rest of us fighting with a knife. I think Elon has really thick skin. Are we not going to say anything? I don't know. She was right about that one. I'll give her the, you don't have to cut this shit. But yeah, she was right about that. He's so fucking thick skin. Personally, not tech in general but you know yeah i mean like he doesn't like people to say things he i mean elon is someone who's what is thin skin i guess thin skin to me means like you can't field even a single i get attacked constantly on twitter and

you just ignore most of the crazy people right like I feel like a thin-skinned person wouldn't be able to ignore everyone. This is a man. I mean, to his slight defense, he's attacked relentlessly every day by them. In fact, we started this by talking about the amazing things he's done that are framed malevolently constantly. It's like he gets frustrated with them

and I understand why, but there's a broader group i mean there are so many people at neil's also not the only person in tech right like yeah he is to cara but he's not in general there are so many i mean she also she talks a lot about venture capitalists these awful she hates venture capitalists they're obsessed with everything and think they're experts and like vcs talking about ukraine i literally want to just poke my eye out. Let me ask you about this. You talk in this book about the sense of victimhood amongst many of the tech moguls. Grievance.

Yeah. What? Why? Well, Don, the richest people in the world, all money of whom are white and straight, are really the victims in this society. They really are. I don't know if you know that, but they are. No, it's just ridiculous. It's an astonishing thing to watch people who have every advantage talk about how bad, like what I think has happened is for years, people of color or women or whoever have never spoken up. And now they are. And they've been like, okay, fine okay fine i was bad now let's move on like that

move on is their favorite word but maybe we don't want to move on for a second maybe we want to let you have a little bit of of maybe we want some schadenfreude schadenfreude first of all they're not a monolith you know not all venture capitalists um but a lot of them were protected from the culture of fear that drove most people working at companies, especially private companies. Well, I don't even know if it's especially private companies, but certainly private and public companies, tech companies that prevented them from speaking. So you're at a VC, you have longer time horizons for success. You have a lot of money, you have a smaller team, and there's a little more wiggle room, I think, to speak your mind. Certainly, I mean, Founders Fund was really early, like, very early to this. I mean, people with Founders Fund were running their mouth off forever. But at this point, you know, lots of VCs are talking and

sharing their political opinions. She mentioned at one point, a real anger with vcs talking about ukraine and it's like like not in the way that i mean it's true she's right like they're it's annoying but it's annoying because it's the opinions are annoying not because the concept of a person talking about ukraine who's not a journalist i agree with david sachs actually yes you do you guys have a lot in common on your farm policy positions um anyway i i want to uh uh i want to kind of there are two interesting directions here um one is clubhouse which maybe we just start there before we get to liz warren because i think liz warren is sort of where it all ends. Clubhouse was an extremely popular app four years ago. So March of 2020, I believe, it launches. 2021, a year later, the founders are... I don't know what the exact details are,

but you're fumbling a $4 billion acquisition deal with Twitter. So just 12 months. Over the summer months of COVID, this app becomes the most popular private company in tech, which sounds crazy now because it's totally forgotten other than to kind of bring it up like, wow, wasn't it crazy how hysterical we are all were over this company. So this is a, I don't know, for folks maybe just graduating high school who missed this, Clubhouse was the app that we all talked on during COVID. This is like interactive talk radio, basically. So I was on there a lot. That's where I started talking about local politics and things like this, talking about tech, doing early Pirate Wire stuff, and absolutely exploded to the point where everyone in the

sort of, at that point, still very influential tech press was decrying it for its lack of moderation. Famously, there are two articles from the New York Times about unfettered conversations. One was critiquing the unfettered conversations that were being attacked in China. So they were critiquing China because of China's crackdown on speech. The other one was a piece attacking Clubhouse for hosting unfettered conversations. This means conversations that are not moderated once opposes by a New York Times columnist who has the appropriate opinions. And it was really just kicked up into this whole tech versus press war, the whole free speech thing.

Everyone's home in COVID listening to these chats. It dies. It is sort of at that point, I think, a warning sign in the way that these huge flash in the pan companies always are to tech founders where it's like, these things grow so incredibly fast. Consensus of your peers can be absolutely deafening to the point that no one can even understand how a company like this could fail. It just feels like it's got to work. It is the future. And then they can vanish. But it's also pretty interesting to think about what the press was talking about back then in the context of Clubhouse. They truly believed that this was a threat to democracy,

Clubhouse. It was like people talking in an uncensored way, which was an aberration back then, because you had all of the moderation architecture in place at every other social media company. They were like, this future is dangerous. It's going to spell an entirely new media ecosystem, entirely new information ecosystem, and we've got to stop it. And I was just thinking this week, on looking back, they were wrong about Clubhouse, as was I, by the way. I really thought that Clubhouse was going to be around at this point. I tried to hedge because you never know, but in my heart, I believed it would be around. But they were wrong about the speech stuff kind of metastasizing. And by speech stuff, I mean free speech stuff metastasizing, in their opinion,

on Clubhouse. But they were right that everything would change. Substack grew and grew and grew. And if not on that platform, the concept of Substack, of going direct to your audience via email as we do on PirateWires, a major part of the information ecosystem at this point, relentlessly defended by the founders of that company, the free speech of it. They are very dogmatically pro people saying what they want to say. You have Elon over the course of the next few years, taking Twitter, expanding the Overton window. And really now we're living in this world where everything they feared is basically here. There is an expanded Overton window. They're not in charge of the discourse

and technology was a big part of it. So they were right. Wrong about Clubhouse, but right about, they were right to be afraid. You know, they're the dinosaurs and the meteor is coming. What do you guys think?

I think it's funny that I remember I wasn't actually on Clubhouse, but I got it like an invite, but I don't think I could use it because they didn't have Android or something. I don't it was iphone only i think for a long time it might still be i have no i've been on there in a long time yeah but i remember reading like news coverage of it and i think the worst thing that they could find was somebody had said like said read like there's like a new york times investigation and just whether somebody said i have to tell you i

wrote about that story that was taylor lorenz in a chat where Mark Andreessen and his co-founder of A16Z, Ben Horowitz, were having a conversation about someone using the word. So Ben Horowitz uses the word, but it's to say it was like a meta conversation about the word. It was like he said retard or whatever. Yes. was like a defense of it and i think it was in there maybe in their name of something and they even talked about this taylor frames this as mark andreason said the r word is is what she wrote so at that point i'm like the r word like are we not even saying we can't say i didn't even know that i knew that you know people were weird about the word i didn't know it was like an n bomb i did not know that we were at that level with with the r word um which is you know now it's over river you say it all the time

yeah but i never stopped um but so she gets in a lot of trouble for that that was like so that i'm pretty sure that she was fired because of this. And, you know, allegedly, you know, she's not technically fired. No one's really talked about this openly, but she sure stopped writing after that. She was forced to apologize, which she did begrudgingly, like a little girl who got in trouble by her parents and like drags her feet to the other side of the room and slams the door. But she technically did apologize um after the entire internet came down on her and her editors the new york times itself completely changed its social media policy around that to shut these people up online i'm pretty sure there was some kind of a retraction

and she stopped writing and now she's at the washington post which is the only place that would take her um but sorry continue on with the r word story yeah i mean if the culture back then yeah i mean if the worst back then yeah i mean if the worst thing that you can find is somebody saying like on the internet like you couldn't find like people like saying rothschild conspiracy theories you couldn't find like somebody saying something super racist uh misogyny like you couldn't find actual hate speech like that's crazy like that actually sounds like it probably wasn't that bad of a place if the worst thing you can find somebody in passing well this is all on uh sorry mike this is all on the time on like a timeline

i think that just goes back to me too of super super, like oversensitive people making a big deal out of nothing burgers. In 2018, Jonathan Friedland at Netflix, he was an executive, he got fired from Netflix for using the N-word in the context of a discussion of when it's acceptable to say the N-word in the shows that they have on the platform. And so I just wanted to mention, this is all part of the lineage. And for me, I remember that story very, the Taylor Loren story,

and it just wasn't surprising to me because this stuff was happening all the time back then. I think only now there's a lot of backlash to potential things like this. Right, because of the Overton window. I think separate from even the discourse and the things that you could talk about though, and the way that that's changed, what you saw in Clubhouse was really fascinating about it early on. And I think the real reason the press lost its mind, you could see numbers next to audiences and how big they were with no journalists involved at all. So you were getting tech people opening chats and they would dwarf, greatly dwarf any journalist. And back then, I mean, these journalists were popular. They would still have pretty big rooms, but it was nothing compared to like a Marc Andreessen room. Or at that point, I mean,

Elon was at the zenith of his power. If he entered a room, there were a couple of times he and Zuckerberg would enter a room, you would get these enormous, enormous, like tens of thousands of people flooding a room. I think there were actually limits on the number of people you could even get back then. So there were all of these like janky hacked extra rooms of people just, you were in a room and you use that room to just jankily record it with another phone just you were in a room and you used that room to just jankily record it with another phone so you had like these separate overflow rooms for people to listen to these people um in the tens of thousands of people listening listening to these guys talk and i think what you saw at that point was um the power of the of the influencer really like the

different the the different world of media to come that was happening. And it's very threatening to people who are not that. It's like, no one really cared what the middleman in tech said when someone who was in the arena actually trying things was speaking. I mean, again, this was, I think,

I'm pretty sure this was pre-all-in, right? All-in was not only a couple of years, I'm not sure. So they, I think, I'm pretty sure this was, this was pre-all-in, right? All-in was not only a couple years, I'm not sure. So they, I don't remember them being around then. I know CalCandace had a podcast for sure. But- Saks launched a competitor to it called Call-In. Right.

I remember that. But I don't know where that went. That I think though, I wanted to double, so I really think it was, it was actively seeing the numbers next to your name on a platform that was no longer part of the machine, right? This is outside of Twitter. This is outside of Instagram and Facebook. And now on Twitter, yes, Elon was extremely popular back then. Andreessen was extremely popular back then as well. I don't remember if Mark was actually

tweeting much himself, but he had gone into a hiatus for a long time. I think he might have still been inside of his hiatus then. But certainly Elon was like the touch of God and you could see the difference, but it still felt like everything was dominated by the other side. Clubhouse was not moderated. They were right about that. And it looked very different than Twitter. And that was what was scary. And it wasn't even about the politics of it. It was about the kind of person who was able to attract enormous audiences. And it was really no longer them. And now that's where we are today. We're still there. The Globe and Mail published a piece yesterday called Excessive Free Speech as a Breeding Ground for More Trumps. Did that? The which mail? The Globe and Mail. It's a Canadian paper. British british oh canadian why are they worried about it they don't have anything to talk about in their own country the leafs act like they don't have a fucking country it's ridiculous like they're always talking about our shit they're always worried about it look they had they haven't been able to find the indigenous children so they they don't, you know, like get buried in mass graves.

And so, you know, they're back on Trump again. God. Canadians, man. What would we do without them, though? I mean, they do keep it fresh. Dajano, did you, what were you, what was the, did you have any recollection of Clubhouse? It's crazy how big it was and how little people

who are just a little bit younger, they have no real recollection of this no that's why i was right covid 2020 you would have been yeah i was in college and um that's why i was keeping my mouth shut because i have no recollection of this at all i mean i wasn't on twitter to be fair so um yeah but i was completely insulated from it video video chats were novel in 2020 and they were exciting and it's hard to remember it's hard to remember that before the pandemic you really didn't get on video chats with people um but now it's like the way of the way the world you yeah every video chat you had to open up with like oh this is crazy like i see you it was so much fun to like call your friends in quarantine and

everybody would drink together i founders fun obviously for years and like every now and then they would do meetings and they would video in or whatever but i never ever ever ever did a video meeting it was a quick phone call and that was it yeah grand divers who's been on this podcast he sent me a link to it he was like you should get on here and i wish i had an iphone because i was at the peak of my adderall addiction back then like i could have just gone for hours just like rambling on it would have been i could have been a star for like the six months that it was real star there were star it was funny clubhouse had its own. Every platform does. Every single platform, especially when it's a platform inside of a new medium, you have a new set of rules. You have a new set of content rules in terms of what works, in terms of how it works. You

can't translate it at all from platform to platform. There's no like, oh, let me just do what I'm doing here, but in a Clubhouse way. You have to think from first principles and do something completely new. The reason I stopped hosting chats, which got huge, they got enormous, was just it was a lot of work. And to really successfully run a chat, there was no casual way to do it. I had to be hosting a group of a bunch of people who I didn't necessarily know and moving the conversation along to keep an audience engaged. You could see that number of people in the audience leaving or rising to sort of tell how you were doing. And I just feel like, I'm not getting paid for this. Why am I giving this excellent content away for free? Pay me for my labor. I was very woke about it.

But then, yeah, I don't know. It just kind of fell off. It did, however, like I said, the trends held. The influencers kind of took over all throughout the country. Now, tech, it's very obvious because that's where I live. It's very obvious to me, I would say, because I think that's where I live. And also because so many people in tech are on these platforms. But it's increasingly true across the board um and i think that because of that tech which is this natural reset button when it comes to power is hated um and i want to talk about that now in the context of the warren bill sandra do you want to break that down for us yeah so this week

liz warren is back on the warpath um She has reintroduced... Yeah, she wasn't satisfied with, like, regulating the amount of Doritos in a bag or the diameter of a roll of toilet paper. But she has reintroduced a bill called the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, which she had previously introduced in 2021. And I think before that, in 2019, this has been, like, a very long-standing

political cause for her. But the long and short of the act is it would impose a wealth tax, so a tax on unrealized gains or net assets of 2% on households with a net worth of between 50 million and 1 billion and 3% on households worth over 1 billion billion but there's a caveat which is that if uh the united states ever uh implements legislation that creates a universal public health system and prohibits competition from the private sector this bill would increase that highest tax bracket um to six percent on people with assets of over $1 billion so that that money could fund this universal healthcare system. Is that annual or is that a one-time? It's annual. Yep. It's an annual tax.

And it also, if anyone was thinking, well, people could just leave the country and renounce their US citizenship, it would impose a 40% exit tax on people with a net worth of over 50 million who would seek to renounce their- A 40% exit tax is crazy, but it's not as crazy to me, actually. They're all crazy to me, but it's not as crazy to me as the wealth tax. Because let's talk about what is wealth. We're not talking- I think income tax does suck. And I would rather see, I don't know, property taxes, some kind of aggressive sales tax. Income tax is annoying to me in that it does seem to target upwardly mobile, middle income and above type people.

It does not affect poor people. Poor people don't pay income tax. It's literally... There's no federal income tax people under a certain like quite high salary actually, higher than poverty. The idea that poor people are being taxed here is wrong. It's like the middle person and like upper middle class. So you're like work really hard, you're making 100K or something, like you're the guy that's getting screwed. That annoys me. But a wealth tax to go after like your home, your car. Well, car doesn't really count.

Let's talk about the really wealthy. So your property, your stocks is where it really comes in. Your equity share in a company is how it affects tech. So this is not liquid wealth. This is random shit that's tied up and it's kind of conceptual to a certain extent. Nothing's ever worth anything until someone's willing to buy it from you. So if you have, let's say, a $50 million stake in a company that you yourself founded, let's talk about where that number comes from. That comes from private investors giving you a valuation. So you're going to start a media company, let's say, and someone wants to

give you $2 million to start it. They're going to value your company at $10 million. It's worth nothing practically. It's actually not worth shit. You don't even have a company, but someone has given you $2 million. They're valuing your company at 10 million. And now your net worth, if you own 80% of it, is $8 million. This happens all the time in tech. This is how you raise money. This is how the technology industry has operated for the last 50 plus years. So you have a lot of founders right now of companies that are valuable theoretically. We'll see. Basically, private investors are taking enormous risks with a lot of money at risk on these

people and they lose all the time. Most of the time, these things end up being worth nothing. In this system, before we've ever proven out value, these companies are now going to have to sell off huge chunks of unproven technology companies, which who are they selling them to? It's not really clear. Are they selling them back to the investors who gave them the money? Are they selling them to the average Joe, which would be really crazy if there was suddenly this huge market for random middle-income people who don't know what's going on in the private market to be picking up equity that the founders are forced

to sell. It's really bad. It would alter not only this for founders, but you have all sorts of people who take equity on the worker side, on the employee side who would be affected by this. And it's sort of like so disastrous, the wealth thing, an actual wealth tax where you have to sell things in order to pay money to the government, that it feels like it's on purpose. It actually does. She's not a stupid person. And I would say that for me, for me, this is evil. Brandon, what do you think? Brandon, what do you think? It's shocking that Warren with a straight face would choose to go after essentially the jugular

of one of our most productive economic sectors that we have. I don't understand her state of mind. And yeah, maybe it's evil. Well, it's an easy thing to go after, I guess. I no one people hear that and they think well i don't my worth 50 million i don't care about people who are worth 50 million um and that's fine like i don't expect people who are not uh i don't know in these industries or aware of these industries to understand this part like why would they there would be no reason but she does she does understand how all this. She does understand that nobody's actually... There are plenty of people who are running around with liquid, but most people are not.

She understands what that means to sell things that you don't have access to. And that's just... It's really insidious to me. Knowing what that would do to the industry, that would end the concept of the poor scrappy founder. I don't think that they would ever be founding companies again, at least not in this model. So I don't know how without capital you can create these highly scalable technology companies in any kind of competitive sense, especially with other countries where this is still going to be allowed. Yeah, I don't know, river. still going to be allowed um yeah i don't know river i mean i think you like your point about the tech industry is well taken for other people who are worth 50 million for like other reasons i

kind of see the problem she's trying to solve which is that you do have this problem where if you are just independently wealthy like never actually worked a day in your life, inherited all your wealth, whatever, you pay like lower taxes than like a middle school teacher. It is kind of crazy. And I think that like the concentration of wealth in this country, it has gotten worse over the years. And that's probably not great

for like the social fabric of the country uh there's you know it that typically doesn't end in like good political outcomes it usually ends in like fascism or communism i don't know what it would end in the 21st century but when you have massive wealth disparities it does breed uh but well like political destruction it's almost everything that's funded publicly is funded by the wealthy in america it's tax on the wealthy so when we're talking about these extraordinarily wealthy people who play no taxes that's still not it's like still not true the rich are not paying taxes they're paying most in terms terms of proportion, I guess.

Yeah, but again, we're talking about a poor, like a middle school teacher or something. How much are they making? Most people under a certain level, we can look up the numbers. I'm not exactly, I don't have, I think obviously you have state taxes where things are different, but it's a pretty high level.

I think the idea that these middle school teachers are paying tax out of their ass in Louisiana or something is actually just factually not true. If you're on the poverty level, you're not paying taxes at all. I agree that there shouldn't be any income tax at all on these people, but most of them are not paying income tax. It's like they're going to get taxed on property. They're going to get taxed on, I guess, their stuff. When you have these communists who are talking about the tax thing, they're usually making arguments like that. They're saying, well, look at all the taxes they're paying on their food and their property,

and that is baked into their rent. and so it's like the guy with the the the blackboard and all of the sort of conspiracy theory guys stringing stuff together he's like if you look at it that way we're paying more than a multi-millionaire but at the end of the day most of the tax that we collect comes from millionaires well i i think that for liz warren because i have read a lot about i like i've I've really looked into her. Like I've actually read one of her books. Right. She's, you wrote a piece.

Did you get the piece? Did we publish? No, I've never wound up. I think we like killed it. Like I never actually wrote it, but yeah. Anyway,

I can one day if you want, but I think the people misunderstand her. She's actually not like a socialist at all she actually believes that breaking up um companies and all this it will actually make capitalism better like she's a premier like technocrat like she actually says in one of her books like that uh like the point of the state basically uh is to like create and regulate markets which is like the most like neoliberal like idea you could possibly imagine um so i i think what she she actually believes that this will make capitalism better because it will increase um and like create a more cohesive society she's like

actually conservative in a lot of ways at heart uh which is why she was a republican until like the 90s i think um if she were actually the fact that she wants people to sell and sort of break up their wealth um into like liquid assets or it can be paid or whatever that's actually not what a socialist would do a socialist would be like we're taking five percent of the company every year until we own all of it um and she's not doing that she it's market it's market manipulation but um she actually wants to like diversify uh like ownership in the markets i think that's what she's trying to do here about something really quick when i say elizabeth warren is a communist i mean in the way that some people say the word gay like i don't mean she's literally

gay i mean that she's like an asshole like she's a bad person who wants to destroy these things that's how i use communism for me is a curse word as well as a political philosophy i do not think that she's a big c communist i think that she's a piece of shit who wants to destroy the tech industry, genuinely. And I think that it's because it's seen as a threat to her power. I think she's actually a statist more than anything else. I think that she's going to be coming after speech

over the next few years as most of the left, hard left is. I don't think that she's a communist. I think that she just wants power. And that weird, you see this kind of, there's's like a it's on the democrats and the republican side there are people who just really they they're just like in the washington game and they want to be in control and and this is a threat it's the way that she's a super against cryptocurrency why it's she if you don't have access to someone's wealth you cannot fund the giant power apparatus in washington that she wants to run um and i just find that kind of person very scary yeah and also because she thinks

that the primary function of the state is to create and regulate markets and you can't do that if you don't control the currency yes like but why do you think that why do you want the control over the markets it's like you want control over the capital so you can fund all the the shit that runs the state and be in charge of it she it's it's a it's not like she just is a fetishist for markets it's like she specifically wants to be in power she's running for president shit like she she sees herself as in charge of the system yeah i mean i will say like from what i've read of her work she actually she believes that it's necessary to create like to protect capitalism like she's she's like really influenced by teddy roosevelt who felt like basically if he didn't uh break up like the big monopolies

clap like capitalism was going to collapse in on itself um and that there would be like some sort of like revolution or something. And if you read through her work, I think that's like her actual concern. But that's not even here or there. So you don't agree with the power thing? You don't think she wants to be in power and that she needs to- I mean, obviously, she's a politician. I think she wants to be in power. But I do think that there's a very specific kind of ideology behind it.

That's I guess that she's like thought through, I guess more than some people like she has, she does have like a theory of politics. I just find it interesting. So I brought it up. I want to give you the last word on this one since you broke down the story. I mean,

I think one thing that I find interesting about the way she presented this bill is she does talk about, you know, the example she gives actually is a middle school teacher who earns $50,000 a year and someone who comes from inherited wealth who has like yachts and fine art and whatever and earns $50,000 a year. No, they're paying the same amount in taxes or something. And this is a problem and we can remedy this problem with the wealth tax. or something. And this is a problem and we can remedy this problem with the wealth tax. But of course, like when you have, you know, founders and people who are actually actively contributing to the economy who are not just, you know, heirs to this kind of static wealth, there's all these trickle down effects of their capital where they're, you know,

allocating the capital to technology development. And this is helping workers be more efficient and, you know, increases wages over time and, you know, eventually increases GDP. And they've done models of the sort of impact in 10 or 20 years of this bill and found that ultimately it's going to potentially depress wages pretty significantly because of the effects of decreased investment and, you know, less capital sort of going into technology development, workers working less efficiently, that kind of thing. at least in the presentation of the bill, skates over by presenting this very simplified case of the kind of do-nothing heir who is just sitting on this massive fortune and not actually using that fortune to contribute to economic development. I do want to talk on that thread, actually, because the investment thing is the difference between selling and investing is really important. And I'm glad you brought it up.

This is, and you mentioned earlier stocks and things like this. That is, I think when people think about wealth and like people who inherit wealth, they think of them as like sitting, it's like Scrooge McDuck in a bath of gold doubloons or something. And it's like, no, they put it in places where it can grow. And what does that mean when you put it in someone, someplace that grows? It's like, it's the stock market. That's an investment.

You're investing in these companies and they're using the capital for something people are using the capital when you invest in private companies they're using it to do more things to grow more things um as opposed to what i mean you suddenly have to sell you to sell six percent sell it to who who gets it what happens to it how is the money then used does that does that grow the economy it just sort of like enters the economy It's not really clear to me how that's better than the growth piece. Any thoughts just on that, or last thoughts in general? I mean, Paul Graham, I think, has a very good illustration of just how confiscatory this tax is. He said that for a successful founder, because it compounds, this tax compounds over time uh the tax would would take 65 percent of their

uh their assets basically um their stock in in their company it would basically de-incentivize people to start successful companies in the u.s um and the ultimate consequences of that all across our economy i think are going to be disastrous um so yeah i think there should be like actual owner like limits on like for instance the amount of like the number of single family homes you can own i'm down for that like let's show like yes like i'm down for that kind of shit they should not be able to you shouldn't like even if they were gonna do something crazy and limit the number of homes you could have period um as an american i think we start i think we don't start with us though i think there are a lot of like we can start with other countries we can start among those other countries with nefarious sort of uh antagonistic

countries to us then we narrow but then we broaden it to other countries read my piece about ownership in china it's up on pirate wars now Warriors now. There are other things we can do before we shoot ourselves in the face. I think. But I am not Elizabeth Warren and I'm excited to see her babbling her mouth on throughout the next election. We'll be here to talk about it. Love you guys. Fun talking to you in the chat.

Definitely go subscribe to the newsletter. I don't know. Share your thoughts in the comments. Want to hear more from you. Adios.