Pirate Wires - RFK Gets Grilled By Congress, Trump’s Insane Start To His Presidency, & DeepSeek Starts An AI War

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

EPISODE #85 : Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took to Capital Hill this week for his hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Thursday. There was some hope that he might attract some Democratic support, but he quickly faced a furry of angry Democrat senators. Trump is having one of the most consequential first two weeks in office. Regardless of your views of Trump, the number of executive orders show that he came prepared this time around. DeepSeek AI emerged from China and took out the entire US stock market. Are DeepSeek's claims real? and how will this effect America’s AI supremacy? And finally, we are the media now. Will Pirate Wires soon take over the White House press briefing room? Featuring Mike Solana, Riley Nork, Liz Wolf, Zach Weissmueller, Miles Orion We have partnered with Polymarket! Download the Polymarket: Election Forecast app https://apps.apple.com/us/app/polymarket-election-forecast/id6648798962 - Disclaimer: Not Financial Advice, For Entertainment Purposes Only. Sign Up For The Pirate Wires Daily!  https://get.piratewires.com/pw/daily Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Riley Twitter: https://x.com/rylzdigital Liz Twitter: https://x.com/LizWolfeReason Zach Twitter: https://x.com/TheAbridgedZach Miles Twitter: https://x.com/milesorionn TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! 1:30 - RFK Jr. Goes To Washington For Senate Hearing 27:40 - Trump's Crazy First 2 Weeks In Office  49:30 - DeepSeek Causes Panic For US AI 59:20 - Will DeepSeek Get Banned In The US? - SPONSORED BY POLYMARKET 1:11:55 - We Are The Media Now - Trump WH Opens Up The Press Room For New Media & Podcasts - Will Pirate Wires Be There?! 1:25:25 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe! #podcast #politics #trump #technology #culture

You're asking me not to serve vaccine to companies. RFK testified this week before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. It's nice to have a skeptic there on this stuff. He's like a bit of a loon. And now he's in a position of power. We're going to get Dr. Phil. Yeah? How do you know me? I mean, we've never seen a president so prepared in our lifetime.

It's like they are all cowards and unable to actually decide who the adult in the room is going to be. When people tell me that I'm going to be replaced as a writer, like, well, first of all, no, I'm not. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod. We've got Zach and Liz in the house today coming at you hot from Reason Magazine. They've got their own pod as well. We'll link it down below. Do you guys want to maybe just shout it out right now really quick before we get started? Yeah, just asking questions.

We have our own YouTube channel. We just spun off from Reason's main YouTube. So definitely subscribe if you're interested. I've actually been on it. It's fantastic. I guess in the previous incarnation when it was still over at Reason, but they're great. They're libertarian, a little more libertarian than me.

Things might get spicy today. I am anticipating it, especially with you, Mr. Zack. We also have in the house, Miles. This is the final finalist for Pirate Idol. And Miles is here. He's looking sharp, I might say. Last round. Thanks for having me back. Look at that. Really, it's like a new man. Very excited. Got a lot to cover. Polymarket segment coming up.

RFK, I mean, let's just actually, there is a lot and I want to cover it all. Let's jump into the RFK of it all. Riley, break down the first topic, please, for the day. Yeah. So, RFK testified this week before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, featuring members like Elizabeth Warren as part of his confirmation process to become our new HHS secretary. And once again, a commission with a Warren on it proved to be pretty troublesome for the Kennedy family.

RFK was grilled pretty strongly by the Democrats on the panel with some of the highlights being questions on his prior comments about Lyme disease being possibly engineered. Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon? I probably did say that. Did you say that? And that's what the developer of Lyme disease said. Okay, I want all of our colleagues to hear it, Mr. Kennedy. Just being a conspiracy theorist in general, of course, questions about his position on

vaccines. Bernie Sanders at one point held up pictures of onesies that said, like, unvaxxed, unafraid on them, that I guess RFK's organization was selling all of this while Megyn Kelly was laughing hysterically in the background. But one notable exchange came when Elizabeth Warren asked him, quote, will you commit that when you leave this job, you will not accept compensation for a company, a medical device company, a hospital system or a health insurer

for at least four years to which RFK was like, yeah, all those people hate me. Why would they give me money? And it prompted some sluice on X to dig up data on just how hypocritical some of these senators were. So according to OpenSecrets, Elizabeth Warren received $822,573 from the pharmaceutical industry for her 2019-2020 election cycle. The second most for anyone in the Senate behind only Bernie Sanders, who I guess received over a million dollars. So a bit of hypocrisy for sure from some of these senators

grilling RFK. What did you guys make of that? Zach's a bit of an expert on RFK. Why don't we start there? What is your, as a man who I, Elizabeth was just talking about before we started, you've interviewed him, you have a, you sort of, you know him, I think you have maybe a nuanced perspective on him. What was your read? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll just give my overall perspective on RFK, which is that he is a fascinating mixture, a fascinating grab bag. Like there's something in RFK, I feel like for everyone to love and everyone to hate. And from my libertarian perspective, I mean, I think he does have a real appreciation for just individual rights.

I saw him give a speech actually at the Libertarian Convention on the Bill of Rights. So that's an unusual thing to hear these days from someone who just yesterday was a Democrat. On the, you know, on the health and vaccine front. There's a lot there. To comment on the Elizabeth Warren exchange, though, I would say, I hate to say it, but I think Elizabeth Warren has a point here, because you always hear, you know, the drum that RFK has been banging is that the pharma companies are greedy, and the government is in bed with pharma and there's a revolving door between the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry, all of which has a lot of truth to it. But you do have to flip that question around, as Warren did, and say, well, RFK, do you

actually stand to profit if some of these companies go down given your association with these law firms? And I think the answer is potentially yes. And what she was asking is that he take he commit to a four year break after he gets out of government with being able to collect fees from these sorts of lawsuits. And then kind of gave a list of different ways that he could make life harder or make it easier for these kinds of lawsuits to succeed

by using the power of the states. And I think those are all legitimate questions to consider when you're putting someone in front of an agency as powerful as HHS. Yeah, I mean, he has an incentive to drive these lawsuits forward. It's still a really bizarre place for Democrats to focus, I think. For sure.

To have a Democrat up there, I mean, effectively, he turns it immediately back on her and was saying, you know, you're asking me not to sue pharmaceutical companies. And she was like, she was the angriest of anyone in the entire meeting. She was like, no, I'm not. I'm not doing that. You have said we're...

You're asking me, Senator, you're asking me not to sue vaccine pharmaceutical companies. No, I am not. My culture is stuck in... Yeah, you are. That's exactly what you're doing. It's like, honey, like that's exactly what's happening here. Now, I think it's valid, like the way that you said that it is an're doing. And it's like, honey, like, that's exactly what's happening here. Now, I think it's valid, like the way that you said, that it is an incentive of his and it's worth considering,

but you are asking him not to sue them and you are taking money from them. I think it's a little bit complicated. Bernie Sanders cleared it up when he was attacked. Isn't the mechanism that he's collecting fees from clients who have been referred to take part, I believe, I'm not sure whether it's class action lawsuits or whether they're individual lawsuits. Yeah, RFK, we're getting fees from clients being referred to a

law firm that's suing, like, for example, there's Merck, the makers of the Gardasil vaccine. And so there is a little bit of like, I don't know, at least like my libertarian heart, on one hand, I'm like, politicians are totally fucking corrupt on this front. And there really is this crazy revolving door between Congress and becoming a lobbyist right after. And that's a huge issue. But also at the same time, like what RFK is doing, we like, we do this all the time, right?

We advocate for, we do this at Pyroiris, we do this at Reason. We get paid to advocate for things that we also happen to believe. And it ends up being this very lovely thing. And like that kind of makes the entire world go round. And so it does seem a little bit bizarre to say to RFK, oh, well, you can't do this thing.

That's just like a very missional and sort of like capitalist behavior that is kind of natural that we all do to different degrees. That said, it is kind of sticky, right? Because Warren kind of stands to gain from this, right? Like if she's making money off of Big Pharma and RFK is this huge antagonist to it and this huge opponent,

well, Elizabeth Warren has something at stake here too. She's not a disinterested party. Right. Everyone does. And I think that's such a good point and such a strange point for people to wrap their heads around. But I have thought about this before in my own personal, uh, my personal life, but professional life,

where it's like, yes, I, my personal life, but professional life, where it's like, yes, I, we've invested in a bunch of different things that I love and know a lot about. And so when I'm talking about them, it's like, well, you're biased. You have this, this like incentive to defend it. It's like, yes, but that, that like belief system is why I'm there. That like the belief system in venture, in the concept of investing in companies is why I'm in, it's like, that's why I'm on this side of things is because those are my ideals. Still, it does color, you know, these things are, I think it's just like these things are worth knowing about and I'm glad we did.

I much more interesting to me is kind of like the overall RFK, what he represents. And there's this question, I mean, obviously he's being framed as a crazed conspiracy theorist, but he's spitting facts on different studies and complications in the studies and the background on pharma and the link between pharma and Congress. And it kind of got me thinking, you know, what is it, because there are these things that he says and I'm like, wow, thank God someone's saying that. But then also I'm like, I don't know that Lyme's disease is a bioweapon that was released into the wild. I'm not sure. I haven't researched it.

I know maybe you guys know more about it. I would love to hear if any of you have researched it. But for me, it's like, I think he's really, really good at identifying flaws in the system and identifying flaws in really granular things, like in research and things like that. But then he is really overconfident in the way that he pieces the puzzle together

and constructs narratives on sort of like what it all means. And that's why he sounds crazy. He's wrong, I think he's probably wrong a lot about his sense of what's really happening, but he's right about when things are really broken. And then sometimes he'll probably be right about the sort of what it is happening, but he's right about when things are really broken. And then sometimes he'll probably be right about the sort of what it is all his question too, but I think it's important. There was one exchange in particular on, and I'm nervous about talking about this because I think that YouTube might demonetize us, not even demonetize us, but shut

us down for talking about... I think even on vaccine science, it's complicated. Some of them are newer, some of them are older. We know different things about different things and we're wrong about some stuff and right about some other stuff. With mental health, I don't understand the confidence that people have, the lack of humility that people have when they're talking about things like mental health drugs, which are solving a problem that we don't even understand. We're talking about like depression and things like this. We don't understand how the human mind works. We don't

know what consciousness even is. I really am suspicious that we've like cracked the case on things like Adderall and all of the other like depression and anxiety meds. And also we do know that they're super addictive. Some of them, this is like the stuff that almost destroyed Jordan Peterson's entire life. Like this is like this is just off the top of my head. Like, we know that these things have an impact. And I think that he represents just kind of... It's nice to have a skeptic there on this stuff. Though, I mean, it's like, we've criticized,

I've criticized him personally before. There is like a bit... a bit of a loon. I mean, and now he's in a position of power. I mean, I think you're right though, that he's tapping into something deeper. And it's this belief that, this belief that I think is true, that we've moved past the era of certitude,

where the whole, the science is settled mantra that we heard throughout the 2010s, that's over, because we all know that it's not so settled. There's a lot of more contested area than what then the gatekeepers, it's a use that phrase, wanted us to acknowledge because the complications then open up the door for kind of loony explanations. And so there's been gatekeeping of even asking the questions. I mean, that's why that's partially why we playfully named our podcast just asking questions because like we're like, yeah, it should be allowed and legal and even encouraged to ask questions, even for questions that, you know, 90% of people think are settled. Even if questions like was Lyme disease, a bioengineered

weapon, I don't know the answer to that either. I know there's a book about it and a documentary about it. But but it is like, you know, the reason that question sticks in your mind is because, well, we just had a virus wreck the world that probably came from a lab. And maybe we should be thinking at least we should be thinking in that direction, like, is it a good idea to be developing these kinds of viruses and labs and bringing them to city centers. So like just asking the question itself has value, where it starts to get into dangerous territory, which I think you're nodding at there, Mike, is that then once

you have RFK who's so confident with his often wrong answer, making policy decisions, then we're getting a whole different orthodoxy kind of handed down to us from on high that could raise could bring a whole host of other problems. I'm old enough to remember when Zack got in trouble on the internet and many other people got in trouble on the internet for daring to question the early COVID orthodoxy as to where exactly it had originated. And now I think it's a little bit more of a clear consensus even embraced by many people who are the loudest voices against it, that it did in fact originate in the lab and was leaked to the world. But like remember for such a long time, that was

a heretical thing to say something that was censored from major social media platforms. I mean, that in and of itself is a real problem. But one of the things that I think about a lot with RFK Jr. and specifically the autism question and the vaccines that he links to that, there was a line of questioning that I thought summed this up very nicely, and it was from Senator Maggie Hassan. And her questioning was

basically pointing out, she was basically gesturing at like the OG vaccines cause autism study, which I think was like early nineties. And she was saying, look, this was originally based off of a really tiny study of like some 12 kids. The actual study design was not especially good. I think she got like emotional because her kid has cerebral palsy or something along those lines. Something unrelated. I'm sorry, I just can't, in an emotional argument. I think that's very fair. But she basically was talking about how, okay, so here's the quote. I was really worried that the vaccine had done something to my son. And over time, the scientific community studied and studied and studied and found that it was wrong, referring to

the link between vaccines and autism. And the journal retracted the study because sometimes science is wrong. We make progress, we build on the work and we become more successful. And when you continue to sow doubt about settled science, it makes it impossible for us to move forward. Do you notice how with that entire soundbite

at the beginning, she's like accurately describing science as this like iterative act. And then at the very end, she contradicts describing science as this iterative act. Then at the very end, she contradicts herself by calling it settled. To me that encapsulates- Who heard a tropian phrase, settled science? To me that encapsulates so much of the problem with the modern democratic party where it was like, I was nodding along with her roughly up until that very last bit where she contradicts

herself. It's like, well, you just decide from on high which science is settled and which is not. I think that actually, like actual scientists with integrity would very much disagree with you. And so RFK, I think smartly taps into that. He taps into the fact that people know that that's bullshit. But at the same time, the things that RFK offers after calling that bullshit, I don't think is very good.

And I think he really latches onto, like, I don't know whether he has an especially sophisticated understanding of the study design of some of these things, or even, like, you know, the things that he points his finger at as the sort of obvious culprits, which he defends with some intensity, like thimerazole vaccine preservatives,

which have since been removed from vaccines out of sort of an abundance of caution, another one of those terrible phrases. But, like, we don't actually have a ton of evidence at this point to establish that the Marisol caught was causing huge problems with autism, right? Like, that's still just a theory and RFK acts like some of these things are far more settled, or far more far better established with more weight behind them than they in fact are. But it's kind of like nobody on either side actually knows how to talk about this in an intelligent way.

I think a lot of scientists would probably be like, what the hell are you even referring to? Yeah, this is like the microplastics people as well, where it's like, it's this thing that we know really nothing about and we've constructed entire certainties. I mean, I'll be honest, I've stopped using plastic wherever I can. I'm like, I don't want that shit anywhere near me. But I don't know anything about it.

It's like my version of astrology or something. And maybe there's something to it, but I don't really know. And I think it really is the thing about this, what you're addressing that I think is just so important to drive home for me at least is he is right to be skeptical and wrong when he stops being skeptical. And it's like this is science that we're talking about. And scientists and scientific discussions should always be conducted through the lens of skepticism.

The autism thing is so interesting. And I know that we're going to get destroyed because we're using words like autism and vaccine. But like, I didn't even, I think the average person does not even know about these studies. Oh, there's a debunked study or a study that was small or whatever. The average person has been told, don't you dare discuss this. It's like if you even mention this topic, you are an anti, you're like a Luddite crazy person. And I think there's certainly enough in the realm of this stuff to talk about it. And with vaccines, like we know that there are trade offs in all different ways. Like there are dangers to certain vaccines and it's like they're acceptable risks, you think, because the benefit outweighs the risk or something. But like, to pretend that there are no risks is why

people don't trust you when you try and sell them on these things. And it's why someone like RFK has so much success then coming up with his crazy other shit. It's like, well, they were lying to you about all this stuff. Here's what's really happening. I still think it's probably meant healthy. Go ahead. I mean, I think it's healthy to the degree that it causes some sort of social revision, you know, on the microplastics thing,

since there's a lot of unknowns around that. If people, you know, voluntarily start using water, metal water bottles more like I don't think there's anything wrong with right? And so he knows how to work a jury. He even said, kind of proudly says, you know, they come in with their experts, I come in with my experts. So like, who's to say what's right? And he knows how to throw enough doubt in there and enough theatrics to win an argument in a courtroom maybe.

And this is exactly what happened to the vaccine industry back when everything got screwed up. Like the whooping cough vaccine got pulled from the market because there were all these lawsuits against it. Because it's in a sense easy to persuade a jury with questionable science. And then studies only later came out, a lot of this is documented in a book by Peter Huber called Galileo's Revenge.

And that that basically undermined all that stuff that was introduced in the court. But it was too late by then. The the damage had been done. They paid out the claims. And then the federal government panicked and was like, we have no whooping cough vaccine. So we need to give all the vaccine manufacturers a liability shield, which I think has then created a lot of the, you know, a lot of the problems in terms of incentives, because I think that's a quite an elegant solution to the problem of

externalities. Right. We saw something similar with COVID, if I recall, like the COVID vaccine, there was, that was the discussion. It was like, well, you can't sue them and things like this. To me, honestly, a big part of the issue here, like all of this is great. And I think that that's a good point about RFK's legal background. But like the fundamental thing that keeps really bothering me is he is not being appointed to have oversight over one specific small little division. It's all of health and human services. So a huge chunk of his job is actually going to be overseeing the administration of Medicare and Medicaid

programs, which in these hearings, he demonstrated he kind of knows nothing about. It would almost make more sense for RFK Jr. if you're a fan of his or whatever, to have him being put up for head of the FDA or something that's a little bit more narrow, but like, he's gonna have USDA oversight, he's going to have Medicare and Medicaid oversight.

It's a massive chunk of the federal budget. And it's not clear to me that he actually knows how these programs work or really has the sort of managerial experience that you would really want for somebody to be able to constantly oversee. I think it's what 20% of the total federal budget. It's some like massive, massive chunk. It's shocking. And so it's a question of like, okay,

like his vaccine views aside, has he demonstrated competence in these other areas? And it seems like repeatedly the answer is just no. But I think he's still gonna get confirmed because it's not like competence really matters that much these days, right? Yeah, I'm not actually expecting much change there. I think it's like,

he reminds me a lot of what Trump was in 2016, where very popular among, you know, large group of people represents a lot of things, but has no, like bureaucratic state capacity. Like he's not going to be able to navigate it, but maybe I'll be wrong. Miles, I do want to know what you think about the Lyme's disease super weapon. Is it a bio weapon? Well, I'm wondering, I just, I do want, I would like to get to the bottom of it because my honest sense is there's probably more

to this story than it just- Yeah, definitely. It's not made up from nothing, right? There's gotta be, I think there's some smoke there. I'm gonna have to check the science on that, but I also thought the clip of him talking about the AIDS in Africa is different than the AIDS in America are two different. Do you recall saying that AIDS is a different disease in Africa than it is in the United States?

I looked up that passage in my book and found that indeed the diagnostics for AIDS are very different in Africa than in the United States. So the list of symptoms is almost completely different. Yeah, he does a lot of this thing where he asks questions and I'm like, do I have to research another thing now? Like, there's too many fucking things. I can't have all these hills that I'm dying on. It's just like, oh, I thought that... I don't want to even know that. -♪ Yeah. -♪ HE LAUGHS I didn't think the... your tweet today about the acting that these hearings are like doing, that it's not even about the health.

It's like they're clip farming for their social media. Not really trying to get... Having a proactive conversation. I mean, they're really just trying to get gotcha moments. Yeah. And it's for the Democrats specifically, I think it's a huge problem. They're doing this huge, it's this massive performance. They're performing, you know, hey, we're trying to stop the bad man. They're not in an election year. And they're going to have to be soon. They're totally lost right now. I have no sense of what the Democratic Party even is. That was made abundantly clear when you see people like Liz Warren

and Bernie Sanders defending pharmaceutical companies. That's really confusing for their... what is left of the Democratic base. Like, who even are they anymore? Donald Trump is a populist on economics. He is anti-crime and anti-all, like, this sort of, like, woke gender stuff. That's the Democratic... That was the Democratic base. That was like... That's what a working-class, like, this sort of, like, woke gender stuff, that's the Democratic, that was the Democratic base. That was like, that's what a working class Democrat was forever. Like, who are they now?

Is it just these, like, masked up, kind of blue-haired craze? I don't think that's even true. I have, I actually don't know the answer to the question. I know that they have to figure it out. That is actually what they should be focusing on. They should just say yes to whatever is going on in Trump. They already lost the election. They're not going to stop him in this blitzkrieg of executive orders right now. They need to think about who they

are and how they're going to win the next election in two years. They don't even know. They don't even know either. Chuck Schumer was standing up for the police when he was coming out talking about the federal funding cut. He's like, oh, the police are going to be defunded now. Yeah. Anti that. With the J6 stuff stuff they were doing the same thing where they were. They were like, these people attacked the police and whatnot. And I'm like, I agree. That was my position. I was like, yeah, they rioted.

Not a big fan. Wasn't a big fan of the last six months of rioting. But that wasn't your position. So what exactly do you believe right now? Who's who are you appealing to? It's not clear. They have this empty suitism problem where it's like nobody's actually, seemingly across like vast swaths of like, not just the Democratic Party and the Democratic establishment,

but also all realms of progressive politics, whether it's academia or activist circles or the sort of nonprofit industrial complex. It's like they are all cowards and unable to actually decide who the adult in the room is going to be and be able to tell either the youths or whomever it is who's influencing this like, hey, actually, we look really weak and sort of pathetic when we continuously change our position every few years. Actually, we're just going to be in favor of this thing. And we're going to be focusing on, you know, a pragmatic solution to it.

But like the degree to which I think so many parts of society, parts of liberal inflected society became very wrapped up in the sort of like 2020 progressive fever dream, it's really hurting them in a major way. I mean, I think that that's the significant part of why Harris didn't really end up finding a sort of good and resounding message, to some degree,

because she just looked like somebody who flip-flops and is just doing whatever people tell her, not like somebody powerful enough to be the adult in the room and say, here's what we're about. Like, you're either with me or you're not, you know? Yeah, and it wasn't just a look. It was just, these are facts. I mean, she had, like, totally opposite views on things and couldn't defend them or retract.

She couldn't even, she was not even willing to get on camera and say, listen, that time I said we should give illegal immigrants free sex change operations, that was crazy. And you know what, like I was having a bad day. I don't believe that. Right now, I promise you, I'm not for that. She couldn't do that.

She didn't, because she doesn't have views. And that style of Democratic politics and Republican politics But they lost it Republicans Donald Trump killed that style of Republican politics on the stage in 2016 The Democrats have not lost it until now and now they have to lose it And I'm kind of frightened to see what comes next which we'll talk about a little later in the pod Unfortunately, I would posit that there's basically no illegal immigrants who want sex changes anyway Like we're talking about traditionally more conservative cultures. It's not like there's like a bunch of Guatemalan men

who are coming across the border being like, I really want to be a girl. Like, that like literally doesn't exist. Give them a minute in the free California public schools. And trust me, don't learn. They'll learn how to review things in this country. Liz, you need to see Amelia Perez before you make this proclamation. Which is about a cartel leader

transitioning. So this stuff, this reminds me a lot of, or it's very related, I think, to what is happening with just the way that Trump has taken office and the executive orders that he's been blitzkrieging through and the way he's been approaching immigration and deportation. What might go down as the most consequential first 10 days in the presidential office. Trump has been traveling to Asheville to visit flood victims who are abandoned by FEMA and to LA to embarrass the mayor. Also, the high and highly anticipated ICE raids are underway with Trump showing 92% drop in border crossing numbers. Kristi Noem was in New York City with a bulletproof vest helping with raids and for some reason, Dr. Phil was too.

Yeah, Dr. Phil. Yeah? How do you know me? No, I seen Dr. Phil on TV. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. What the fuck was he doing there? I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up Selena Gomez weeping on the timeline.

Also, Columbia refused US military deportation flights. Trump sent out a message saying, emergency 25% tariff on all goods coming into the United States in one week, the 25% tariff will be raised to 50%, a travel ban and immediate visa revocations and sanctions on the Colombian government officials and all allies and supporters, all party members, family members, and supporters of the Colombian government. And the problem was magically resolved in a couple hours. And then on top of all that, he signed over 30 executive orders. And some highlights of these includes revamping Guantanamo Bay to send the worst of the United States illegals there in a 30,000 bed facility, offering federal workers a chance to take deferred resignation, which would mean they agree now to resign

and get paid through September. And they expect a 5% to 10% of all the federal workforce to quit, which could lead to around 100 billion in savings. Or the other option for them is to come back to the office. Some other ones are canceling affirmative action for federal contractors, an American Iron Dome, federal grants and loans, funding freeze, declassification of JFK, RFK and MLK assassination, assassination files and changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America,

which is actually already happening. But even if you didn't know, it was going Like, he said some shit and I was like, well, that's not gonna happen. In the campaign, I'm like, there's no way. And then it was the first thing he talked about, I'm like, well, now he's talking about it, but it's not gonna change. And then now it's changing.

And I'm like, wait, what? You can just do that? What else can he do? It's, yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, we've never seen a president so prepared, uh, in our lifetime, come through and just lay down the hammer in this way. It was really, I I mean, we've never seen a president so prepared in our lifetime come through and just lay down the hammer in this way. It was really, I think the Democrat, by giving him those four years to prepare, this is something we've talked a little bit about before.

I kind of want to focus more on the immigration stuff since we've got some libertarians in the house. It's like he went into the hyperbolic time chamber in Dragon Ball Z and he had this like one day in there, it was like years out here, and he's just been training and training and training. And he popped out like just a totally different person. And you can see the difference truly in the two portraits

that he chose for himself as president. The first one in 2016 is that's a reality television star who oops, accidentally became a president. And the second one is the man that you just put in prison or tried to who came out with his mugshot. I mean, that shot looks like his mugshot picture. And he's like, I'm fucking knocking this board over and starting anew.

And it's been crazy. Some of it I really love. I mean, I'm very in favor of all of the deportation stuff. Don't know why Dr. Phil is there. Like interviewing convicted criminals. How do you know me? On their way out of the country, but I appreciate it. What have you guys made of it though? Liz, are you actually in favor of all the deportations really? I'm in favor of anyone who is in the country illegally not being in the country illegally and I want to start with criminals for sure. I'm totally in favor of anyone who is in the country illegally, not being in the country illegally.

And I want to start with criminals for sure. I'm totally in favor of the criminal thing. I don't know why it's even a question to be honest. So that's the thing that I think is bothering me. I felt like, I mean, I'm a Trump voter, right? I'll put my cards on the table. But I do feel like the traditional talking point on this, which was embraced by Vance and at times Trump as well,

was we're going to deport people in an orderly fashion. We will start with criminals. And we're going to be doing this in sort of a sensible way as to like, who is the greatest threat? And at least from my perspective, I'm not feeling so good about this, especially as I see Trump beginning to go after like TPS recipients, which yes, that's a temporary program. totally get it. But you know, a lot of the TPS, you know, people here on TPS status are currently legal residents, or currently legally here, it's a legal program. They're long time residents, they've really been struggling to find work authorization. And for TPS holders, there aren't a ton of really, really good pathways for them to establish that a lot of employers are not willing to take a chance on them. And a lot of people are going to be like returned

to fucking socialist Venezuela. It's really making me frustrated because I feel like the manner in which deportations are happening and the specific immigration policy crackdowns, it feels a little bit like Trump is doing his classic showmanship thing of being like, yeah, we're done with TPS. We're done with birthright citizenship.

And I'm a little bit like, wait a second, hold on. I would like it if you actually made sure Yeah, we're done with TPS. We're done with birthright citizenship. And I'm a little bit like, wait a second, hold on. I would like it if you actually made sure that illegal immigrants were not using my tax dollars as a New Yorker and being on welfare for forever. And I would also like it if you made sure that people who are active threats to the communities around them and active criminals,

they're the ones I want gone first. But I'm not totally sure why the Venezuelan TPS recipient who's been here for, you know, eight years and who's really, really wanting to find a pathway to citizenship but, like, is currently unable. Like, why are they going after them? It doesn't make me feel so good. I agree that just in terms of where we both want this to start,

I agree. I don't know enough about this. And I think that we're in a bit of a fog of war right now. There's a lot of media coverage about it that is created by people who are just fundamentally against the anti... against the deportations period. Um, so I don't know quite enough. My sense of it was not that.

I've just been seeing... I've just been kind of absorbing the information and it seemed very criminal heavy, which I'm just like super in favor of, but I don't deny that you've seen that. I think probably, I don't want to start there either, but at the end of the day, it's like, if people are here and they're not supposed to be,

and you don't do anything, that incentivizes something that I really don't like. Um, Riley just broke a story, or not broke a story, I'm sorry, he wrote a take about someone else who broke a story, on this woman who's being a... who just got a prison term for facilitating birthright citizenship tourism from China. And it's like, that's the kind of stuff that is just crazy. prison term for facilitating birthright citizenship tourism from China. Yeah.

And it's like, that's the kind of stuff that is just crazy. And to me, I don't want that. I don't want that here. It seems like an obvious flaw in the system and... No more Asian babies? What? We can have Asian babies. Asian...

There are plenty of Asian Americans. They can have babies. We don't need to have like this weird loophole in the system. I want imported Chinese babies. I'm a good pronatalist and I'm a mom, so I really like cute Asian babies. We can import them to American families. We don't need to have spy babies running around, which is obviously the problem when you're dealing with a country like China or Russia

having birthright citizenship and then they go back to their country and they've got, they're technically Americans forever, but they're actually Chinese. Like I think that you, there are some basic realities like that that I'm concerned about. Zach has angry face on. I want to hear what Zach has to say about spy babies. Oh no, I think that that gets to the bigger question, which is what kind of immigration system do we want at the end of all this?

Because the Biden administration left this in the worst possible spot. If their objective was to welcome peaceful immigrants to the United States, this is the worst possible way to hand things off to Trump with this chaotic border and record crossings. Not knowing what is going on exactly, you just clear the deck for Trump to come in with this slew of orders. And you're right, like he was just like locked and ready to go. And I, you know, that this first round will probably be very criminal heavy. And you're not going to get any argument from me about deporting criminals,

although you will get an argument from me about sending them to Gitmo, which we libertarians were saying back in the Obama administration should have been shut down. And then you didn't do it, Obama. Look what happens when you don't listen to libertarians. No, but then the thing is that after all that clears, then we need to ask, well, who do we want to come to the United States? And what sorts of people already this question is, you know, bubbled up with with the great with the the infamous Vivek tweet, and the debate over h1 b visas. And then this birthright citizenship order that you were referencing kind of raises the question of like, you know, how do we determine who deserves to be an American and my fear about taking away something like birthright citizenship like across the

board is then that really undermines just a fundamental aspect of like, I don't know, the American dream upward mobility, because the whole idea is, you know, your parents come here, and then the next generation is really the ones that make it as an American. And then if you have that sort of uncertainty... Your parents could come here as American though. Your parents should immigrate as Americans legally. And then you're like that. I don't agree that it's part of the American dream to have an anchor baby.

Well, it can be. I mean, it's it's and it's not it's not just about you know, there's these cases that you're talking about about Chinese nationals abusing the system going to some far flung US territory, having a baby, and then jetting the hell out of there just to get the citizenship. Maybe those kind of cases, there's some sort of targeted rule that can go after that. I'm talking about kind of the broad sweep of the order that says that, you know, even people who are here on a on a visa, and have been working here for years and have a baby before they obtain full citizenship that their parents are now not protected or ambassadors and so forth.

You know, a lot of this was like seemingly targeted to make it be like, oh, Kamala Harris is not really a U.S. citizen because of our interpretation of the 14th Amendment. So there is some aspect of that like Trumpian mentality at play here, I think. But overall, that's what I worry about with the kind of broad sweep of this orders is that we're really going to yes, we will get the criminals out, but we're also just going to really undermine something fundamental about what it means to be an American. You mentioned the Biden thing, which he left immigration in a disastrous state, or rather

than him, honestly, it's the people around him who managed him, who were actually quietly running the country, whoever they were, giant question mark, they fucked everything up. It's impossible to have a conversation about this now because it's a disaster. It became a disaster zone. And when it's a disaster zone, you're in, me personally, the way I think about immigration is I'm in triage mode.

I need to stop everything until we figure out what the hell is going on. And I think about two things. One, the Vivek thing is interesting context. Maybe we can get into it in a second. The other one that really draws it to light for me is Ocasio-Cortez immediately coming. To Twitter in the context of the Columbia stuff,

to talk about the increased price of coffee, which one, I don't even I don't believe that's gonna happen. Two, if it did, it's not as important to me as getting Colombian criminals out of our country. And I think that the average person looks at that, that like, not even the average person, I look at that. I look at someone in a position of power who is siding with Colombian drug lords

over Americans, in my opinion drug lords over Americans, is in my opinion, the safety of Americans, because of, she says, the price of coffee, which I don't even, that's crazy, but I don't even believe that's the answer. I think she's just fundamentally against borders. But I see that and I think like, you guys are so far off the mark

that we have to just go to a totally different extreme and clear this up and change the discourse on immigration in America. And then we can talk about what it should look like. I mean, we still have legal immigration channels right now. They're narrow, but we could talk about that, I think, just once this basic stuff is taken care of. Sorry, Riley and Miles, you guys have not gotten in yet.

Anything bubbling up on your side on this topic? Just one thing from the press conference that Caroline Levitt gave. You guys have not gotten in yet. Anything bubbling up on your side on this topic? Just one thing from the press conference that Caroline Levitt gave. She got pushback from a reporter who was saying like, oh, I thought you were only gonna go after the criminals first. And then Caroline Levitt's response was sort of like, well, they are criminals

because they broke into the country illegally. And I think a lot of Americans like really resonate with that opinion. Like they are criminals, like aside from the people who are on like worker visas and things like that, but the people who broke our laws to enter our country. I think you get a lot of Americans who resonate with that idea that like, Hey, they broke a law when they first arrived here. And I think the fact that Trump won by such a landslide in the last election is a

testament to the fact that he does have a lot of widespread support for that position. This is why he won. This is why he won in 2016. It was this issue and he did nothing about it. And then he talked about it a lot again in this election. This is what people, I would say, if you took immigration off the table,

I don't know that Trump would have won this last election if that was not a conversation. I think that people were really, really upset about it. And how could you, again, were really, really upset about it. And I, how could you, again, it's, and it's, they're not upset about, well, no, they're upset about a lot. I am personally not as upset about the, you know, people who are coming here to labor, but also a lot of Americans are, and that was what you saw also in the H1B thing. So it's like a broad gut.

But do you think that is like, how do you think that is going to play out? That because there is the side of MAGA. Who's going to pick our strawberries kind of conversation that stuff? It's not, I mean, not just that, but, you know, all, all, all up and down the labor scale, right? I think we'll find out and it'll happen slowly. And as things get out of whack, we'll know, but I don't think the fear mongering, I saw a woman on CNN yesterday talk about, she's like, I just can't wait until,

until like white American women find out that they can't buy blueberries because the blueberry pickers are gone. I can't wait until American women can't get blueberries for their smoothies. I cannot wait until there is a full crackdown on all small businesses as if that's gonna be the solution to the immigration problem.

How do you not hear that you were talking about these people like slaves, basically? You were talking about them like, first of all, if that's happening, if we have to import a class of an underclass to do jobs for menial pay, trivial small amounts of pay, like there's something wrong there, I think. I think that the market should not have this weird loophole where you can just access cheap labor from the third world and pick blueberries for cheap, if that's even true, but I'm just suspicious of that.

I don't think, I think this stuff will work itself out. Uh, through like automation and stuff like that. Is that... Automation? Well, that's a good reason not to be bringing in more engineers from India and China, or not even China, but India. That's what I'm saying. Is that, is that what your expectation is? Is that the labor shortage that we are experiencing and likely will continue to experience as fertility goes down, like that is going to just like automation is going

to be the kind of solution that patches that whole. I think that there are lots of Americans who want those jobs too. And I think that this stuff just... figures itself out. I don't think that Trump is going to, or anyone in America, suddenly the cost of all groceries skyrocket. This is like a very crazy, almost conspiratorial... I don't believe, I simply don't believe

that if we have immigration laws, Americans will starve to death. Which is like kind of how it's being framed on CNN. Like, let's just take it step by step and abort the criminals and then see what happens as we go forward. Well, okay, two things on that. One, like, I think that that's a little bit of a sort

of like intense way of hearing it, right? Like, I believe in having immigration laws too, but I believe that our laws ought to allow for seasonal migrant visas. We ought to allow for low skilled workers to come here. Like I think we do have intense labor needs in this country, some of which will be solved by automation. But I think that currently like there would be a massive shock to the system in terms of poultry processing plants

or berry farms or avocado pickers, you know, avocado farms, like whatever area of produce and sort of the food industry you want to point out, there really would be massive disruption if we attempted to revoke, if we cracked down not only on illegal immigrants, but also even attempted to revoke the seasonal migrant visas that people are currently using to do that.

That would create a massive shock to the system. Right now, we're also seeing a shock to the system with egg prices, right? So that's not a life-runa- I can't find eggs. What is wrong with eggs? Because I keep not being able to find system. Right now, we're also seeing a stock to the system with egg prices, right? So like, that's not a life- I can't find eggs. What is going on with eggs? Because I keep not being able to find eggs. I got a stockpile. I'll send you some. Give me your address. I'm like, what is going on with egg right now? Zach is actually an egg farmer. So Zach is like basically doing migrant labor in addition to like

the high skilled white collar labor like all the time. This is why the issue is so important to you. I do think there's a fair point, You're like, this is my heart. There's a fair point, which is like, yeah, okay, people won't starve overnight. But I do think that creating mass chaos and shocks to the system would be really bad. But furthermore, the way that Democrats are messaging this, I'm not sure whether it was the CNN panel where there was that insufferable commentator or where it was, NBC, MSNBC, whatever. The way they talk about this is really, really stupid, right? Because I don't think it's a very winning argument, though it may be technically true to say, we really need, you know, Nicaraguan blueberry pickers on essentially modern day

plantations in the United States in order for white women to have their Arawan smoothies or whatever. Like that's a bad, that is true. And that's a really bad argument. Because part of what I think people really want to believe and what has in fact been true, is that the American dream is all about being able to in the past, come to this country, ideally legally, and be able to do that menial work that frankly, I don't want to do. And that many other Americans do not want to do and be able to then have children here

and the children get a good education and you are able to slowly work your way up and become a part of a community somewhere, ideally take advantage of private charity, not government, welfare and social services, but be able to actually really make something of yourself and be able to have the peace of mind of knowing you're not gonna get kicked out tomorrow

and that you have a certain amount of due process protections, that you have legal recourse in this country and that you can have the expectation of some amount of safety here in a way that you didn't have in your home country. I just reject the idea that they don't want to do them. You don't want to do them. Okay, so Aaron. To say that is like the reason, if there's a good reason that people don't want to pick berries is because they're not getting paid enough, then I think that they should be paid more to pick berries.

And it's like my... Like, then there are other classes of job, like construction, for example, where my dad was in construction, it was a great job. And like, importing lots of cheap labor to fuck that up, I don't think that works in the benefit of all Americans. Maybe it... I mean, it should have decreased the cost of labor and the cost of building, but it didn't.

Everything just gets more and more expensive, even if it did. I don't know that... That's not a fair trade to me. I get what you're saying. And I'm very sympathetic to this idea of we don't want to create a permanent underclass of Americans who feel as though their only path forward in this country is to sit at home watching online porn, shitting off and doing illegal or now legal online sports betting, right? Like that sounds horrible.

I want good industrious lives for the wealthiest among us and the poorest among us. And like we should consider what's in our national interest in terms of making sure that even the poorest people here have a dignified life. But I think we're getting at kind of the same thing, which is that like you want a dignified life. But I think we're getting at kind of the same thing, which is that like, you want a dignified existence for the poor Rust Belt whites or people in Detroit

who the car manufacturing industry has totally basically done away with. And I want that too. I also want a dignified existence for the migrants to this country who work these really menial low wage jobs. But I think fundamentally, we're committing a little bit of this, like,

honestly, it's a capitalist sin or libertarian sin, where it's like, we don't get to be the central planners and decide that we know what's best in these different industries. I think it's fair to say that when setting immigration policy for our country, we ought to be considering current American citizens and what will best serve them. But also at the same time, I think that we all understand how foolish it is to become overly meddlesome in any industry and to try to protect it and keep it static as opposed to dynamic. And I mean, I think people also talk in these terms when it comes to automation and using AI. But I think that we run a little bit of a risk when we act reflexively opposed to the dynamic change in these industries. We don't know exactly what the future holds and there very well might be some winners and losers,

but I think that it is probably possible to craft policy that attempts to honor the dignity of poor people, whether they're born in this country or not, but also attempts to not try to keep these industries frozen in time in a way that ultimately, I think really cripples innovation here, right? This is a hard thing to balance and I just don't think that Trump's approach is getting it quite right.

Well, we'll have to see. I do like to see the criminals in the car crying about it. And I think probably a lot of other people do. I do want to move on to something, Zach, you brought up, which is automation. Let's talk about DeepSeek. It's kind of perfectly positioned in this conversation. Riley, you want to break it down for us? Yeah, sure. So the latest version of Chinese AI company DeepSeek got released recently, quickly impressed AI experts and the tech community broadly shot to the top of Apple store downloads. Our stock market freaked out in response. $2 trillion of market cap was erased Monday,

although I believe things have since rebounded. But the thing about DeepSeek is that they claim the model was developed at the low cost of just $5.58 million. And it raises questions about just how many Nvidia chips they have since the only way they would be able to get around that and build up a huge stockpile of Nvidia chips is going around export controls. But regardless, the development shows that our AI race with China is definitely going

to be a competitive one. That's a sentiment that David Sacks, our new AI and cryptos are. I believe that's his official title. That's something that he shared this week. And then meanwhile, Trump said in a speech, the release of deep seek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake up call for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing to win because we have the greatest scientists in the world. Even Chinese leadership told me that they said you have the most brilliant scientists in the world.

And I am very suspicious of the chip thing. I don't know how many chips they have or they shouldn't have. If you look at their... I did not mean... I'm not just, you know, coming with it myself. I did a lot of talking to people in... who I respect a lot in the field. I won't say their names, because they are technically on background. All of the research that you can look at that the company has produced is about getting around

the compute problem. And so it seems to me that the constraints force them to innovate, which is shocking to me as well. You don't see Chinese companies innovating almost ever. You see them stealing a lot. And I think they probably have also stolen. I think that there's almost no doubt that they've stolen from OpenAI. I think there's almost no doubt that there are spies in all of our companies. And, um, and there's probably something to the idea of like a really hot Chinese girl coming up to an engineer at a party in San Francisco, who's a super nerd and being like, you're cute. Don't worry. I'm not a spy.

Like there's something in that worth just maybe, maybe let anything that's it there and we can address it later. I think they've, I think there's been spying and I think, um, it doesn't matter. I think at the end of the day, they now have a company that is proving these companies can be built. There'll be a lot of them, not just one that kind of changes the game and they can be done possibly with less compute.

Though I think probably with, when you have more compute, you can just do more in general. I don't know that this is necessarily like an anti-Navidia story to me yet, but it's, it's like you said, it's like China is, they're right there with us, no matter, they're right there with us on the path to building AGI. Like, do you want that? I, do you want China to have the AGI before you do? I don't personally. Would you be fine with sexy work happy hour espionage

if it increased the birthrate in America? Ha. Ooh, what a trade-off. That's a good question. Like, hot Chinese girl comes up to engineer. I don't know. Is there an opportunity here, perhaps? I think, I mean, I'm in favor of sex, generally. Like, let's get them let's get the kids fucking again. We got to get back. We got to

get back to the basics in this country. Without an obvious ban, obviously. I do think you and I've been careful myself. Like, like, in my current relationship, I was like, you're really hot. Like what this is, I don't know, necessarily that I trust this. We've had conversations about it, actually, actually, where I like flooded it casually. I was like, Hey, so, and he's not Chinese, but I was like, like maybe an Israeli spy or something.

Like I don't, I don't, I'm a little bit suspicious generally. I went profiles a little bit higher. Like maybe they want to access my tweets or something. But I don't think that was funny. You backed a hot Israeli spy? Mike, that's incredible. I'm so excited. Well, he's actually German, but I don't, I don't, but anyway, that's, we can't, we

gotta, this is too much. I don't know. I want to, but I was nervous about it. And I think it's perfectly fine and fair to always be a little bit suspicious of that gentleman. Like always be looking inward and being like, is this person out of my league? And if they are, what are they really after? Zach, any problems with you in the spy department? It's been a long con if so, because I've been married for like 15 years. Zach's wife is a babe, so she is a little out of his league, but I think she's fine

though. I think she's not a spy probably. Yeah. But I mean, this does tell me that whatever the case, whether there's some sort of deception about how much compute is being used, or it's the story as it is on its face that they found a workaround to make it more efficient. I mean, it's clear that export controls are not the thing that's going to get it. Like you're not going to be able to export control hard enough to stop this. And it seems like David Sachs has with his statement, he has that in mind that it's got to be like kind of pressing down on the accelerator and full speed ahead, like straight head up, straight up head to head competition is like the only way to get out

of this. And I mean, it's interesting to me that China is the country that has taken the open source approach and we are like, they had to. Yeah. And like, they just had to, they had nothing else. Yeah, they had to. Yeah. But that seems like that maybe that maybe that's a bullish sign for open source going forward. I don't know. But what I would love your libertarian perspective on both of you is when you talk about a head-to-head competition with China, the Chinese government is backing these companies. Like, to do that, to have a real head-to-head competition, the US government will have to be backing our own AI companies.

How do you guys think about that? Why is that the key? Why do you think that the only way to operate Chinese for the federal government... Well, that's a fair competition. It would be our government protecting the interests of our companies in the same way that China is around, not just in China, but in our country as well and around the world. You have to have basically a more mercantilist approach to the relationship between government and industry if you're going to compete with a country where this powerful centralized state is behind everything that's being exported?

It would have to be directed towards purely defensive uses, which there are lots of for, you know, like I'm sure that going through, that there's gonna be lots of military funding going to AI and already is going to AI. And I don't see a big problem with that. The problem that always pops up when you have big federal agencies funding any sort of science is then it gets bureaucratized. And like,

that's what happened to NASA, right? And the only thing that kind of broke that apart was allowing, you know, starting to rep, starting to privatize that. And so I worry about like, but not in a head to head race. The head to head race was famously was it was it was a space race, right? It was a space race. It was two, it was two companies funding their science programs in a head to head, hand to hand combat. I honestly think that attempting to get the US government to partner with current AI companies

in order to be competitive with China on this front would be almost akin to like trying to do a sprinting race except that the US government backing these companies would be like tying a bag of sand to your leg, right? Like I don't see that as actually necessarily being helpful to these companies in any way whatsoever. I could see that being an hindrance. It's like regulate, certainly we can cut through it. Like they can just do this, like, you know, we're cutting away all the bureaucracy. We're giving you special tax treatments.

We're going to give you, we're going to protect you. Like should, let's get, we should, Miles, you have one comment and then I'm going to get to our, our poly market read because it's about the next question I want to ask you, Liz, on how we should treat Chinese companies. Yeah. If it is a race, what stops China from just copying AGI once we get AGI? So I feel like government will eventually have to take it over like a nuclear weapon or like Russia, Sputnik Russia did, did they make it to the moon? Well, if it's as powerful as they're saying, I mean, it depends on who you believe. If you have people in AI, right? You have like the

same moments in the world where like, we're gonna have to reimagine the social contract, it's gonna be such a total transformation. I mean, this is also I sort of believe this myself, when people tell me that I'm going to be replaced as a writer, like, well, first of all, no, not. But if you are saying that you have a robot that is capable of writing like me, you're actually saying that you have a robot that's capable of thinking like a human. And if that is the case, then the world is so fundamentally different that I don't

even know how to predict it. I don't even, it doesn't matter that I'm losing my job as a writer or a media company owner. Everything is so radically different than what we see now that we have to start from scratch in terms of how we use. The main thing that makes me think that Sam Altman is full of shit and the AGI is still pretty far away is that like I try to get ChatGPT to write like Wiz Wolf sometimes and it does a terrible job. And then every once in a while, I'll try to have Zach write like me

and Zach does like a pretty good job, which is actually very disturbing. But I mean, we're basically saying that like, ChatGPT ends up being less sophisticated than Zach Weissmuller. Like I'm sorry, but like, I just don't think we're there yet. And I don't really get the sense that writers like us are going to be replaced anytime soon.

But maybe that's just a self-serving narrative. If anything, I think it will become more powerful. The things that are going to be... There are lots of things that will be replaced, but what you can't replace is taste. And a perspective and, uh, like a compelling, and now in this, like, very anti-human world, a human voice. I have this feeling that it might be the opposite of what some of these people are predicting.

And there are suddenly media companies that are run by people, personalities that people really like, become much more precious and valued. Finally, I get what I'm deserving. Let me just read this Polymarket read really quick. Polymarket, welcome to our Polymarket segment. This is a paid partnership. Thank you guys for supporting the work that we do here. We're going to take a look at the betting markets and how they've been thinking about the deep

seek problem and also just like the government's reaction to it. So Polymarket odds currently give a 14% chance that deep seek will be banned in the US before April, and an 8% chance that it trained its models on Nvidia chips. A ban would reflect broader concerns about foreign AI firms competing with US companies while operating outside American regulations. Speculations about how DeepSeek trained its model ranges from stockpiling the Nvidia chips before restrictions to finding a workaround spying. The markets are actually basically on the side of what I've heard in tech, which is like, they're not, the Nvidia chip thing is not what's happening here.

But banning the company from operation, that seems a little more likely. And in a world where all of our stuff's banned in China, how did the libs in the chat room feel about it? Of banning DeepSeek? Is that the proposition? Well, I mean, I'm taking this out further. I'm like, I'm ready to shut it all down until they open up their market to us.

But what are you thinking about the DeepSeek? But I mean, like, it's an open source piece of software, right? Well, on the app stores and things like this. Yeah, you could shut it down on the app store. Right, okay. So I mean, yeah, so like you're basically slowing down the widespread distribution. I just wanna be clear that you can't really ban-

And the data harvesting and things like this. I think that what people are talking about now is like the data harvesting, which they've acknowledged. And also just the idea of, I saw this one, it was actually crazy. Matt, you should pull it up. There's a clip from praying for exits where he goes through his search query and DeepSeek starts to answer and then it gets to, it goes to North Korea.

Then it gets to China, then it stops and it says that it can't, it can't answer. It's too sensitive. They're going to get better at hiding that. And actually, I mean, these are, it's great to see them make mistakes like this, cause I have a sense of what's going on with the app, but once they get really, really good and artful, I would say at dodging questions and altering reality, that's a tool that is worth talking about in the hands of,

I mean, potentially a hostile foreign government. I'm really worried about this trajectory of banning the government, making the idea of banning things from being easily available, digital tools easily available, becoming more and more normalized and on the heels of the TikTok ban, just because it just opens up the flood gates for whatever quote unquote adversary to be defined.

Any tool that I think kind of is deemed inconvenient or subversive to the government, that sort of definition can kind of like, become increasingly... I don't think it's subversive. I mean, it's inconvenient or... It's bad for us. It's bad to have a population learning about the world from a Chinese propaganda platform. What is your... I mean, do you think it's a problem?

And if you do think it's a problem, how would you address that if not government interference? Yeah, I agree that it's, like, I think TikTok is bad. I've never had it on my phone. I would not advise my kids to have it on their phone. I guess like a compromise position I could reach is like, you could treat it like a labeling thing. Like if the government was proposing like a label pop up

and be like, you are about to open Chinese spyware on your phone or something, like maybe I can't be down with that. On cigarettes. Right. Yeah. If you smoke these FYI in Europe, it's like they show you the picture of the black lung. And it's funny, because that like, did not stop the French. They're like, well, it's funny because that like did not stop the French they're like well yeah but it's like the the the kind of you know tools of encryption communication and especially you know married to encryption I think these are ultimately going to be the safeguards for us as AI becomes more advanced because AI is a tool that can bombard us and trick us

and surveil us. And you know, we we see we already see like on the perimeter these things happening. We see Pavel Dura of getting arrested in France. We see these guys getting arrested in the United States for operating tornado cash, which allows you to anonymize your Bitcoin. Those are the very tools that I feel like we need the most at this moment. And the more that we're kind of opening the door to national security outright bans,

I really worry about mission creep, regardless of the specific example of DeepSeek. I wanna read the room, or I to take the room's temperature on something. So I assume you guys saw Palmer Lucky's tweet about whether... So DeepSeq is backed by a quant hedge fund. There's some thought out there and Palmer Lucky was talking about this in one of his tweets that perhaps they're maybe developing a real and legit product, but also the big part of the motivation is that they're seeking to short Nvidia.

Do you guys have any thoughts on whether this is a little bit more of sort of like a stock market play than necessarily like, like, are we perhaps missing sort of the point here and freaking out about something that ends up not being a red herring, but that's sort of tangential and they're attempting to, in some way, short a profit off of Nvidia stock plummeting. I think that people were genuinely shocked at how good it was and that freaked them out. And in a moment of mass freakout,

all sorts of theories come together. I don't know, maybe. I mean, I would, I trust Palmer. But he, like, I would say I'm like now 50% on that. But, um, I saw stuff about, you know, obviously the company was like, dropped on the same day as the inauguration, and then it was like a certain amount of years before the first COVID case and stuff like that. And it just feels like people are a little bit bothered

right now because we're talking about something that for years, people have referred to as the new nukes. You know, this is just as impactful and paradigm-altering as a nuclear bomb. And we're saying, hey, an adversary is basically right behind us now on this. And they did it... It didn't seem that hard. It was very fast that they got there.

Also, I mean, if they're also innovating and they're not just stealing, which they have, there has been innovation here, then they're capable of getting there before us, you know? And I certainly didn't think that. I genuinely never thought that until this. And then I thought, whoa, I misjudged this. I didn't fully understand what was happening in China. And so anyway, that's what I think is mostly happening with all the different theories surrounding it. And in reality, it's like we should just do something to... I'll just do something.

I think we have to change the way we think about this. There's going to be a little more urgency and we have to work together a little bit more and actually get there first. I really do think that. I think there's no stopping AGI development, so we do have to get there first. Big concern I have about wrapping it all in it. Now, it's like we're going to do Manhattan Project for AI, right? Like that's kind of what it's how it seems like you're framing us. I don't know that we don't need a Manhattan Project for AI. Our companies are crushing it.

It's probably something like, I do think some amount of export controls, I do think probably some amount of secrecy, maybe like encouraged at least, I think probably help with regulatory stuff, help with trade stuff. Maybe just, I don't know, it's a question mark for me because I don't know exactly what the companies need from the government right now, but I think they can assist them in ways that are not, we're going to run this.

Even though, by the way, I mean, we do have a history of the Manhattan Project and Apollo, these are the two things that we're constantly talking about here, because those are the two most impactful sort of science technology projects of the 20th century, and they were run by our government. I don't know that we can do that anymore, but I'm not advocating for that. Like, are you at all concerned that, let's say, the government sort of goes all in on a couple of the big, you know, goes all in on Gemini and OpenAI.

And like these are the, you know, now these become the quasi governmental AI companies, like we're partners in this together. Is the effect going? I'm not saying that they should be government companies. I'm saying that our government should assist them. And I'm saying, I think they should assist all of our companies. I think that when Europe goes after Google,

I think Trump should threaten tariffs. And it should be like, that's our, you can't just create these bullshit fines and steal billions of dollars from American companies and expect us not to do something. Like, they're playing a game, and China's playing a game that we're playing without playing. Like, we are in the game whether we want to be in the game or not. And I think we have to act as, we have to act with agency in this dynamic. But you don't think they should be given any special privileges over companies that do not have that. That's what I'm like most worried

about in the country within America. No, I'm more concerned about how we can have DC and Silicon Valley work together as needed to get us over the finish line before China, generally speaking. I would not like anything that would benefit, that would hamstring startups or things like that. I'm opposed to that. I was opposed to most of the AI regulations that we're gonna, those are mostly like safety regulations

and things like this that I'm not super into. Well, that's kind of what I'm worried is that it's like there's to be one, that there will be one set of safety regulations for the big guys who play ball with the government and then everyone else. Because that, I feel like that is the competitive disadvantage. It's like we need to have a robust competitive ecosystem. Everything that his administration did for our corporations was to disadvantage them.

He actively assisted foreign... He actually actively assisted European countries in pursuing our countries for our companies for antitrust purposes. He was crafting legislation that would have totally hamstrung our startup ecosystem, not just AI ecosystem, but startups in general, when you start talking about the different taxes and things that he was interested in. That he's just AT business in general.

And Trump is not, and I'm very grateful for that. He sees our companies as an asset. And I think that we, I am aware of, I think most of what you're saying, and I probably share most of your concerns about the way that this could go off the rails. I just think that we saw that more before. That's not what I'm advocating for.

I'm advocating for something that we've maybe not seen since, I don't know, when we were Mercantilists? Was that like the Robber Baron era? I'm down for that. Like bring it back. I love that shit. The top hats and the monocles. That's me, man. Give me a couple years. Yeah, I think the framing is that race is weird because if we get AGI, excuse me, they're able to copy it, then they'd copy AGI. So then it would turn into like a mutually shared self-destruction situation and the government would have to step in and get involved. Like

On that point, it's probably, I mean, what do we mean also with AGI? They keep changing the definition of AGI. And now it's like, new acronym that we're using for super gov, which is what I always thought AGI meant was like, this thing goes off. It's like, it starts to improve itself. Once it can improve itself, it becomes incomprehensible almost instantaneously. And we enter this weird shift in human society. And that's what I thought AGI was. I don't know that you could even have time to copy it at that point. If things change so rapidly, again, this is something where we just don't know. Copyed. It's this huge, changed so rapidly. Again, this is something we just don't know. It's this huge, really scary, unknown question. Also exciting, but I mean, you know.

Bollogy had a good tweet. He said, it might turn out that the GBT rapper was more remote than GBT itself. Do we still listen to Bollogy anymore after he lost his bet? Was that the million dollar one? Yes, it was the million dollar Bitcoin bet. He ended up having to write a check to an online leftist, unfortunately. Poor went out for biology. That must have hurt. That would have hurt me, but I wouldn't have made that bet. I think eventually we're going to get there. So does Jack Dorsey who I interviewed and he said, of course, a million dollars is definitely

going to happen. So I'm waiting for it. Jack Dorsey, he's like the white whale of just asking questions, guess. We would love to talk with him. Oh my goodness. I'm a fan of Jack's and I get a lot of shit for it, but he deserves it. That's a whole other topic.

I want to just, we're approaching the end here. Do you guys have last thoughts on deep seek, recantilism, the war against China? Before I get to that, I mean, really we've got some incredible news out of the White House press box. Let's move on. I do have to go in the next five minutes or so. All right. Well, you can just vanish as you go and we'll say, we'll tip our hat. Riley, break down the new rules. Brief us on the briefing. Brief us on our new home. Yeah. So Caroline Lovett, she held her first press conference. And some of the highlights

were the immigration exchange that I mentioned earlier, but most notably, she said that the press briefing room would now be opening up to not just mainstream news outlets or even news outlets at all, but also to quote independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers, and content creators, before sharing a link where those people could then sign up to apply to join the press briefing room, which of course I did instantly. I sent that application so fast. So fingers crossed we get our very first PirateWire's White House correspondent in the briefing room. What's the first question you would ask? Moon statehood, obviously. We're doing Greenland, we're doing so many

places. When is moon statehood? Miles, what do you make of the trend towards influencers in the White House? Yeah, I wish there was multiple chairs. It'd be crazy to get just insane rows of the influencers. I was wondering what you guys is, who you want to see in there besides yourselves, obviously. Who are your top three influencers you want to see in there, besides yourselves, obviously. Who are your top three influencers you want to see asking questions? There are some regular, not just, obviously it's like, there's something funny about Cat Turd with a microphone demanding evidence of some weird conspiracy.

But I think that people like Matt Tybee have really earned their space there. These real journalists who have done a lot of work over the last five, six years, and a very hostile moment in the country for people like them. I would like to see them get a little action. But also, I do, I mean... Let Lives of TikTok spice it up.

Let's see what happens when Lives of TikTok and Taylor Larens are both asking questions in the briefing room. I think it should be a little bit of a mix. You can eat a little bit of that in there. And I also think that, like, you know, PirateWires, we're closer to a lot of the stuff than any of the outlets that are covering the stuff that we cover.

So, I think they will have much better questions. And I think that there's stuff like that in the new media ecosystem everywhere that you look. Where influencers actually are very keyed into certain questions. And if they are just introducing people based on that, let's say we're covering something, so this is, we just had this plane crash,

unfortunately this week, this horrific thing that is happening, kind of ongoing tragedy right now. There's gonna be a briefing on it and get some aviation influencers in there who are actually very keyed into There's going to be a briefing on it and get some aviation influencers in there who are actually very keen into what's going on and can ask smarter questions than a journalist who's just learning about the history of plane crashes for the first time this week. They're like Wikipedia it actively so they can ask a question, like bring in some real experts, I would say, who are eating and breathing and sleeping this stuff, which is what you see again, more and more online.

I think it's really cool. It was an inevitable change. I think it's going to be Brandon, who's not here today, he said it was like, it's going to be like, it's like sort of dystopian, but also probably mostly good. And it'll probably be clownish, but there'll be some really important stuff asked and I'm stoked for it. Zach, what do you think? Yeah, I think that it's still somehow underrated the degree to which Trump's success grew from his deep, intuitive understanding of media.

Like, obviously, the him winning in 2016 was both a showcase of his mastery of television, and then also Twitter. And then 2024 showed his understanding of the changing media landscape in the form of podcasts, like why he he jumped right into that flow, apparently with a little push from Baron, and it paid dividends for him. And it's just mind boggling to me how far behind the Democrats and kind of, I guess, the DC establishment still is in this regard. Like, it kind of

harkens back to what Miles was saying earlier, with the the kind of clip fest's coming out of the RFK hearings. Like, yeah, they're everyone involved with that is speaking with an awareness that it's going to get clipped and it's going to get circulated on social media. But the difference is that somehow now the people being questioned are more savvy than the senators. Like the senators were always the ones sitting in the position of authority, they're up higher, they can intimidate you. But RFK, like he handled it like a champ.

So, and I was just watching a little bit of cash. You're so right. It's such a good point. They're like really savvy at this. And so Trump, you know, he knows how to handle himself, depending on what the media environment is, he's surrounded himself with people, his spokespeople are all, you know, kind of come from that world and understand it. And it's, you know, whether it's good or bad, it's inevitable.

And the question is, when are the Democrats gonna actually catch up to this? Like in the 2028 cycle, are they actually gonna put forward somebody who can handle themselves in that environment, who can go on four hour podcasts and have fun and be like a real person? Or is it going to be more like incredibly stilted, staged manage stuff that everybody sees through? It's hard for them, I think, to let go of what they used to have. Yeah. That press briefing room is filled with people who are just their allies. It's hard for them, I think, to let go of what they used to have.

That press briefing room is filled with people who were just their allies. It's like ABC and CNN and of course, NBC and places like this, the Washington Post, they're allies. And I even, as I write about this stuff, I have a hard time understanding the impact anymore of that camp first, the new media stuff.

For years, it was, oh, you know, the mainstream media was very powerful. And I would talk about them as this incredible fount of power. And now I'm like, I don't, I'm actually not certain how powerful they are, even as just this other thing in the New York Times, the top, of course. But all the others, like, even as, if they're just in this fragmented media ecosystem

and they're speaking to Democrats, are they really speaking to Democrats as much as like Joe Rogan is speaking to his audience? And I don't, I don't really think so. It's only intensified with the, you know, the Musk Twitter to X transition. I just saw someone posting a screenshot today of just the incredibly

depreciated reach that all these leftist organizations have from fleeing X over to blue sky. At the top of the list weirdly of all things was the ACLU can't handle a free marketplace of ideas and it's like they've got one and a half million Twitter followers over on blue sky. It's like, you know, I don't think even a hundred thousand. And so they're like, they're like intentionally kneecapping themselves and, you know, pushing themselves further and further to the fringes. And I think it's going to be the people who resist that, that pole, the pole of the echo chamber,

who kind of emerge over the next four years. You know, you see that a little Bernie Sanders, um, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, John Fetterman, very different people. Fetterman is very different than the other two, but they're all very engaged with the new media ecosystem. And in people like Ocasio, we were talking about the Columbia stuff before, and I see in her someone who's that's such a clownish opinion to be siding with criminals from a different country that I don't see her as the future of the party in a way. I'm waiting for the leftist who like a Trumpian

leftist who is a populist who's very savvy politically or very savvy in the new media ecosystem. And whatever that is... With some charisma. Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be scary, I think. I think that's the future of the Democratic Party. We haven't quite seen it yet, but it will be very effective.

The left has no swag. I don't know if it will be... Not yet. Not yet, but it will happen. Exactly. It will happen. Yeah. I mean't know if it will be. Yeah, not yet. I don't know. Not yet. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, let's entering this like, sorry, go ahead, Zach. Oh, well, you mentioned Federman.

I don't know if it will be Federman, but it will be someone kind of like that, who it's like, it's just weird that he's the guy who's out there, like sitting down with Joe Rogan and having this very public transformation from what he used to be. Like it's, I don't think it's going to be Federman, but I think Federman is like a preview of coming events in a way. In a strange way, Federman is the only,

he's one of the most statesman-like figures that we have now. He's not just on Rogan, he's talking to the ladies of The View. He's calling, what did he say? It was like pins and whatever, it was some sports reference. But basically, he is calling out Democrats and Republicans for similar river. I remember he was very early to the Menendez, the Senator Menendez, Senator Goldbarz, the corrupt dude. He straight away was like, this man needs to resign. This is fucking crazy. This is nope.

There's no place for this in politics. Now he looks like a total sloth. But what he's saying is this very like, he reminds me of maybe McCain a little bit in that way. And people respect calling out your own side. I mean, that mean, that's what also drove Trump, right? He went up on stage and embarrassed all his fellow Republicans. So, there's gotta be a, like, Democrat pantsing moment, too, at some point. Maybe that's what we're all waiting for. I am. I am. I mean, how do you not criticize... It's so easy for Democrats, man.

Like, all you had to do was be against crime. Like, the populists, I would love for the populist economic All you had to do was be against crime. I would love for the populist economic issues to not be popular, but they are. It's like if you just did that, plus you weren't totally crazy on the gender stuff and you were like, yeah, police should exist and crime should be illegal, they would not be here. But they weren't capable of it, which means the next version will be that. In the UK, like old days, the labor movement was super anti-crime. And I think that maybe that's, well, we'll see.

I guess we just have no idea. But you had the perfect room for that overlap too. Bernie Sanders used to be very against immigration precisely because he's like, I know this is going to have economic impacts and now that is just a thing of the past. So he is very attuned to that. Yeah, there's integrity there. I think that he still has integrity, but yes, like that's... He has this... He's super committed to this group of people, the working class American people.

And so he's been very keen into issues like this, like, for example, the immigration thing, because he knows that they care about that, whether or not, Zach, you agree with it. It's like that's... They care about it, and he knows that. He definitely lacks... Uh, he definitely lacks, he definitely lacks some awareness that like, he doesn't have that Trump thing.

He doesn't have the Fetterman thing of being aware of Oh yeah, no, I agree. Where he is and what he is doing. I mean, the getting totally embarrassed with the onesie thing is just one example. Him being kind of like pushed aside on stage during the Black Lives Matter protest. It's like, that is the Bernie Sanders

that we all know and cringe at. So it's not gonna be him, but you're right. There are certain characteristics that maybe the next iteration will take. I think it's gonna be someone in that orbit though, who's young and charismatic like Myles said and good looking who gets the internet. It's gonna be like someone horrible like Hassan and it's just like that's like the fucking end of the world. Myles, who do you want to see in those

seats? I want to see the most radical people on the internet. I want nuts in there. Like Hassan, that's a good one. People want you like bring him in. Yeah. Let's just accelerate the, that's a good one. Uh... Yeah. Let's just accelerate the dystopia. Yeah. Andrew Callahan with Channel 5, that'd be cool. And then, I don't know, it's another crazy one.

Sam Hyde. Oh, is he, is Andrew Callahan the guy who trolls the rallies? He doesn't really troll them, he's more just sitting there interviewing people. They're sort of trolling theirself in a way, just like spewing crap in his mic and he gets them to really open up. Oh yeah, someone like that who's good at man on the street kind of thing, that would be excellent to have.

Yeah, there's another one, No Cap on God. He's a new channel, very similar to- That's who I was thinking of. That's who I was thinking of. That guy is hilarious. He would be funny in the White House. He's a new channel. Very similar to I was thinking about that. So I was thinking about that guy's funny in the white house. Taylor Taylor, Lorraine. It's inevitable. It is. Tell her we'll find her way in there. But she's like media company already. Would they let her in?

Is she, is she, I'm not sure. No, she's, she's, she's been cast down into the bowels of Substack, where she is currently struggling. Well, folks, it's been real. Firewire obviously will be in that chair. Nothing's been confirmed yet. But I have hope. It's confirmed. I have a hope and I have hope that justice will prevail.

And if there's justice in the world, you'll see one of us with the microphone up there. Maybe Zach, Reezy, have you guys applied? We haven't yet, but we gotta get our thinking cancelled. We need a libertarian perspective in there. Get in there. I agree, I agree. Um, well, it's been real, guys.

Liz, Zach, thank you for joining us. Miles, Pirate Idol, it's been real, my friend. Thank you for having me. And to the rest of you, rate, review, subscribe, please comment, tell us that you love us. Miles, Pirate Idol, it's been real, my friend. And for the rest of you, rate, review, subscribe, please comment, tell us that you love us. Yell at people who are going after us in the comments. I'd love to see our listeners just like dogpile the naysayers. It's been real. Have a great weekend. Catch you here next week.