Pirate Wires - Snow White Went Woke & Plane Lady Isn't Real?! | PIRATE WIRES EP#10

Episode Date: August 19, 2023

EPISODE TEN: The Pirate Wires staff joins Solana this week to discuss Rachel Zegler/ Snow White, whether or not that plane lady is real, the SF homelessness crisis, and some depressing developments in the Maui wildfire story Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/san-francisco-homeless-ticking-time-bomb Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Coming Up.. 0:30 - Welcome Back To The Pod !3:30 - Snow White Controversy 20:00 - Plane Lady Revealed, Issues An Apology.. But Is She Real?? 32:54 - SF Homelessness - Deep Dive Into Sanjana's Report 53:30 - Maui Fire Corruption - State Official Refused To Release Water?! 1:03:50 - Check Out Solana's Interview With Peter Thiel! 1:04:08 - See You Next Week!

I want to know what she saw. Yeah, what did you tell me what you saw? Like, I'd be much more likely to subscribe to your newsletter if you were like, listen, I saw it was a straight up reptilian. I'm going to explain what reptilians are for $8.99 a month. I will tell you how to defend yourself against them. I'm down. I'll go to a course, a retreat. Does she do yoga as well? Like, I'm in. Take me to Ecuador. Teach me. Welcome back to the pod we have a packed show today um honestly i want to talk about snow white i'm like dying dying to talk about it we're not we didn't write about it this week um there are a bunch of things this week we didn't get a chance to write about um but it is just the apple of my eye right now and we've got to get into it we're talking about the crazy plane

lady and the question of whether or not her her apology, that's the same woman. There's a huge conspiracy theory that we need to break down. And then through that insanity, I think we need to... Because it's fun to talk about this stuff, but there are some real world ramifications of this level of degeneracy in the country and that brings us to um san francisco's homeless crisis uh sanji wrote an incredible story about that this week that we're going to talk we're going to talk all about and and then maui we have to get into um so let's just start snow white and the seven dwarves um this is a wild okay so i guess in the in the in the there's like the pantheon of crazy disney controversies and they've been coming harder and harder over the last few years disney's fully involved in the culture war

um just like completely interjected there this would not be something I would be talking about. This is like the new Snow White movie. Were it not a controversy that somehow just keeps evolving in such remarkable fashion. Out of the gate, I think about a year ago, it was revealed that the new Snow White was going to be played by Rachel Zegler. Now, this is kind of immediately a race swap controversy, as we've seen in The Little Mermaid and things like that, which I care less about. I mean, we've talked about it a bit. It's a thing, but not a necessarily thing that we would focus on. There was a much funnier controversy about the dwarves in which there were no longer going to be dwarves. There's just like

a sort of cast. It looks like the United Colors of benetadad um somewhat it's like they're no longer doing dwarves because they're saying that this was bigoted in some way but then dwarves got mad and they were like you're erasing dwarf this is dwarf erasure and it was a whole wild controversy again like funny but didn't touch it now rachel's popping rachel zegler actress of White, popping back in the chat because she's just been sort of relentlessly attacking the original movie, just like in interview after interview. And this is something that I picked up maybe a week and a half ago, I noticed it for the first time on TikTok. And I was nervous that TikTok figured me out and they were just sending me shit that I agreed with.

I'm like, this can't be culture, right? The average person thinking about Snow White can't be actually on my side here, are they? Just sort of seeing her attacking this movie and getting angry about it. And they are. It's like another example of the broad culture shift. But I want to break down the whole thing have you guys been following this this is such a stupid question to ask but i'm going to ask it have you guys following the snow white controversy i have yeah i think it's going on for like two years it's like the most staggered controversy i feel like it just like disappears like people were first like they were like it's snow white not snow mexican or whatever and then it's just like nowhere from there but snow mexican or snow polish for the people who are obsessed with

race swaps i will say that this one was like a little more disorienting because it's like i mean her skin is white as snow or whatever it's like a part of the the the story that i haven't been said like i mean i don't i don't care really about that but she's half colombian half polish and but it's like she has like the same hair and skin tone as me like you know what i mean like it's like she's like kind of like a little bit all of the and she played maria in west side story yeah i mean this is like a nordic prancing through the fields or something i mean it's definitely a thing it's definitely a decision by disney to diversify the cast is she i mean natalie wood of like wasp also slayed maria and west side story originally so in a different age though that was back when we were

race swapping in the opposite direction it's true it's just the reckoning river what do you what do you river what do you know about Rachel Zegler? Was she... Because I saw a clip of her as a young actress. It seems like she was... Has she been an actress for a while? Is she like a child actor, straight up? I don't think she was a child actor. I think it was more like she got a...

She got cast in some musical or something whenever she was in high school. It was um whenever she was like in high school it was like she's she wasn't like a disney channel kid or something like that i just thought interviewer she said that she like applied for the maria thing like they sent her profile in and she got it that way yeah i think west side story was like her breakout um but before that so staggered controversy you were saying before you were saying yeah yeah it's just been going like whenever it was announced uh there was a controversy and then it seems like every then there was a controversy with the dwarves because peter dinklage of game of thrones and other stuff 30 rock um he said that he was basically criticized

the movie for having dwarves because he was like it's stereotypical or something and then other dwarves got mad at him because they were like you're taking job there's not a lot of work out here for us and you're thinking young man like the one good job that here's morgan brought so pierce i mean not to drag us into pure morgan discourse pierce morgan who i think he's like filming from the uk but he's obsessed with all the dumb shit happening in america he drags like he has like a standard gay woke guy who he brings on just to beat the shit out of on screen so he brings that guy on to talk about the dwarf controversy and then separately i'm assuming he didn't tell the guy this he brings on a dwarvish actor and so he has this he had this woke white guy being like no it's like rude to

have dwarves in a movie and he has this dwarf who he has to debate who's like you're erasing us and like we need jobs why don't you want dwarves to have jobs and like that's where the controversy was i don't know but that was like eight months ago yeah i saw shorty like the um the dwarf guy from jackass he was also upset about it i think the tmc interview which direction did he land on was he in favor of the snow white the seven doors or he wanted snow and doors united colors of venetian ad okay so because they swashed it they switched it out with just like it looks like a gaggle of sort of like it looks like a line at a methadone clinic now it's just like if you pull it on that it's just like these normal sized crackheads just like filed up in a single line i'm like this this is not for kids. This is scary. These people look intimidating. There's one dwarf.

They kept one dwarf. So it's like you didn't even go all the way. You should have dug your heels in and been like only crackheads of normal size. Why would Peter Dinklage not want dwarves? I don't understand that position. His issue, I think, was like that they're all living in a cave together it was like the tokenization of it maybe it's like why even call them dwarves they're just people it's like we're not your clown kind of energy and I guess that is like I mean if if you were to step back and look

at dwarvish reverent representation in film for the last century it's like there weren't a lot of Peter Dinklage's out there playing whatever what was the character he played on game of thrones which is like a real person who had violent love interests but they were love interests and uh real motivations and challenges it's like they were clowns and the lorry ball killed yeah yeah it was very it was very that so i think it was maybe it was it was kind of that um it was like with the assumption that maybe we need more dwarvish leading men um okay another topic for another day after that there's just been it's been like a trickle of controversies like every time

this woman rachel zegler speaks on the issue of the movie she kind of puts her foot in her mouth and she's like oh yeah it's not good there's now the prince isn't going to be saving anyone and um kind of shitting on the original story but that those are the recent so i think the dorkish thing and the race swapping that was all a while ago i think the recent stuff is actually much more interesting because the old stuff clocked in the way that you would expect. It's like people who are obsessed with culture war fell in predictable ways on those issues. Now you have Zegler getting out there, trashing the original Snow White, and she's basically accusing the original movie of being sexist. She's saying it was produced in 1937. And in this movie, the prince is not going to be saving Snow White. She's going to be a strong leader,

And in this movie, the prince is not going to be saving Snow White. She's going to be a strong leader, girl boss, they're calling her on TikTok. And the prince is stalkerish and this kind of stuff. We talked about how she actually didn't like the original. She found it scary. She didn't like the ride. Just coming off really, I guess you have people who get mad at her because no one likes someone to seem ungrateful for what the average person perceives as one of the great opportunities in the country. You get to be a princess on the big screen, a widely celebrated actress. It's a huge deal.

I think it's interesting because this movie i mean people become furious so not only did she piss off the typical culture war right wing people she pissed off disney people and disney people are uh like a disney adults is like a scary other it's like they're like beyonce stands or something or like swift is like that level of k-pop stands it is like it's like that level of intensity when you come for the shit that they like and so they've descended on her you know how dare you come for snow white and you would expect some of this for any disney movie uh the more recent one like ariel or whatever you know you change key things about the movie and people get mad though that actress was extremely gracious throughout every second of that

controversy um i think the big difference with this one that a lot of people aren't maybe fully grappling with it's like not only is it a lack of gratefulness that you're seeing but it's a lack of kind of it's like it's an it's ignorance like this movie is not just a movie. This is the first animated feature in history. This is the movie that created the genre. This is the movie that put Disney on the... Basically invented Disney as the major studio that it is. It is a major part of not just cinematic history, but American history and the history of business now.

You think about what Disney has become, and she's just a piece of shit about it and like it is annoying um but it's it's interesting how everyone is annoyed no one is taking her side at this point she's not getting that she's not getting that cultural love from the feminists or from the people who want to talk about you know endless poc stuff it's just like nope vibe shift vibe shift is here yeah 100 i don't think i've seen anybody like defend her the closest i've seen is actually me it wasn't even really a defense i was just saying like i i don't know why anybody's surprised by this because disney if you think about it disney really hasn't made a movie where like the prince saves the princess in my whole life and i'm like you

know not not to get too deep into it but i'm like getting real close to 30 and like the last time i feel like there's even like an actual kind of like love story as like the main even kind of a main point was like pocahontas which came out when i was like a baby and she saves him which i guess is like the historical thing or like the myth or whatever but it's yeah it hasn't really been a thing in like forever this is kind of like it's gotten more brazen i think lately with like the kind of flight feminist stuff but um this is a long road to get here, I think. To bring up the feminist point, it was interesting to see so many people on, again, TikTok, which is what I consider to be a platform dominated by the cultural left. There were so many viral videos,

most of the viral videos, I would say. The first wave that I saw were about the issue of like what a woman is allowed to be on film. And it was Rachel Zegler. It wasn't just her gratefulness or her lack of gratefulness. It was that she was saying like a woman shouldn't be saved and a woman should be a leader. And there was one that I saw, the first huge one one was like why can't I just talk to animals in the woods and bake like that was the a big part of the original it was like very aspirational to me and what the fuck is wrong with that like why does every woman have to be running for president um why does it and it's like when you look at male dominated it's like not that I mean men have way wider diversity of leading characters um film. And it does seem like

what you were just saying. I mean, Disney has really leaned into this one sort of archetype for a while. So when you're talking about transforming this original, it's like, well, you've already had a bunch of features where you have Mulan and you have Frozen and you have Moana and things like this, where it's a totally different kind of girl. It's not the classic Disney princess. And she is a leader or a fighter or all these kinds of things. And that's great to have that diversity. But why can't you also have a beautiful, ethereal, soft?

They kept using the word soft. A good friend of Brandon and mine, Chrissy, when she talks about feminism, she's like, why can't I be feminine? Why can why can't I be like a strong, soft woman who is, and they, she uses this word soft. I thought that was interesting. What do you guys make of that? It's lean out feminism. I mean, just like, I think that there's, you know, when I was in high school, Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg came out and that was to me like the epitome of girl boss feminism. It was this like, yeah, women can and should have it all. And that should be the aspiration is like, you want to be in the C-suite and you want to have

your kids and you're going to, you know, maybe there'll be latchkey kids, but whatever, like, it'll be fine. And I feel like the TikToks I've seen that are responding to rachel zegler and saying like you know let this woman be saved let her be soft let her you know not be a girl boss to me is part of this bigger lean out feminism trend or whatever movement um where women are saying like yeah some of us don't want to be girl bosses some of us, but the people who don't shouldn't be shamed or looked down upon for just, you know, wanting to be stay-at-home moms or work part-time or whatever. So, yeah. Not be slaying dragons all the time. Yeah.

I thought it was like, I especially because my sister loved taught like the talking animal vibe as a kid was like very very and it wasn't snow white it would have been like um like thumper and bambi she was a big fan of and then um the pocahontas yeah like no so those old cartoons they do even as a kid i remember thinking they felt they felt dated they weren't as exciting visually as then like The Little Mermaid or The Lion King or something. Little Mermaid was the first movie I saw in a movie theater. And that is vividly burned into my mind. It was an important, I would say, seminal experience in my life. But yeah, I just keep thinking about that.

Why can't I just hang out in the woods with these talking animals and bake and isn't that just fucking beautiful um and it's it's true it's like why is this why is new snow white running for president it's strange it's like you could just just run just make a new just make a new movie um do we think that this is gonna make just what what uh what are the disney executives thinking about this i mean this is going to get oh zero on rotten tomatoes almost definitely at this point there's no way this is this is going to work don't know i mean they have a year to recover from this before it comes out um i don't know how they do because it's not that you know ariel though people thought ariel was yeah how dare you change up whatever and it's it's like, how did that do? Ariel killed it.

Ariel did really well. Audience loved it. It did well in the box office. It was critical and a box office success. So then, but then Ariel was not so different. I think they changed a couple things. I believe they had the Ariel save Eric rather than the other one around. But for the most part part it was very similar other than that like creepy looking

fish flounder looked fucking horrifying to me and so did the crab but the this Snow White feels like a different movie and it seems like people really hate it so I guess we'll see we'll see we'll see we'll see in a year I wonder if she she has to come out at this

point there's no way once the actors strike ends and because right now she's saying she can't address the controversy because of the actor's strike um once that ends they're going to start doing some damage control and we'll see yeah one of the things i noticed about the discourse specifically with what Zegler kept saying and what, um, and what media, what media on the cultural left kept repeating was, we're just updating Snow White for modern times. Like that's the line that keeps going around, but that always just means making it this weird brand of girl boss feminism. That's the only thing it means it doesn't mean like adding iphones to to snow white right or or anything else that is modern it's just no we're going to make it in a specific way right and the mop bailey here is they're clearly so they they they're clearly doing something with with cultural purpose they're they're saying this is what a modern

woman and man are um and then people react to that and they're like why are you so mad it's just a cartoon calm down it's like well you said you like you're specifically doing this to sort of make a statement on femininity in the year 2023 um so people are going to have a reaction to that um and they don't want people don't want to have to have a reaction to anything like i think people just don't want to care they don't want to have to think about politics while they're watching a movie and um and yet here we are once again i mean i love this shit but i think the average person can't stand it it's also the same cultural engineering like explanation that they tried to use with the Bud Light controversy is just like

the the justification for having Dylan as the face of of Bud Light was we want to change the brand to make it like not for frat boys and more for like a sort of new modern demographic of consumers and it obviously tanked Bud Light stock and will go down in history as one of the worst uh you know in terms of economic uh impact ad campaigns of all time um yeah it's the damage is permanent i mean the damage like it's permanent it's still down it's a new coke for the social media age it's like something we'll teach in like business classes or something i think i think we need to move to uh to the the plane lady the fake plane lady the real plane lady oh god what is it i can't believe river just just

you seem like the kind of person who was aggressively glued to the crazy plane lady story um why don't you just lay it down for us okay so a so... A couple of weeks ago, there was this video that emerged of a woman standing on a plane and she's pointing at the back of the plane and she was like,

you can all stay on here if you want to, but this plane is not gonna make it that motherfucker back there and then like the camera pans to the back and she was like that motherfucker is not real and okay so the first time i the back and she was like that motherfucker is not real and okay so the first time i saw this i was like this is like one of those because people keep filming these fucking skits on planes yeah and i always fall for them like me too and i was like this is just another one of these but apparently it was real but it felt like so perfect like the timing was so great everybody turning around to look um and it

just became like this meme where like people would like photoshop it and it would be like um or like and i saw one guy who made a painting where you would like go back and it's like the Loch Ness Monster and like Chewbacca or like Sasquatch and uh fake Avril Lavigne which is like a very deep floor internet thing it just became this whole thing and then i think everybody kind of forgot about it and then the new york post um basically like docs this woman um after a while after a while not knowing people wanted to know who this lady was well yeah because she was figure it out yeah and there was just all this stuff where people were like i believe her because she's hot it's not like so there's stuff there's a lot of like guys who are

like well she doesn't it's true like i think the hottest thing actually is it sounds stupid but i think it's an important point it is she does not look like a crazy person on the side of the road like she's put together she seems she seems like like a like a regular aware person who just happened to have access to the ethereal plane and like understood something about reality that the rest of us didn't and i've got to be honest like someone on a plane says that she stands up and says that on a plane next to me i'm not on the plane i'm off the plane i'm walking off behind her and and then we're outside and she's like because you there are video then there's video now of her like outside they're on the plane she's off and then sakura's like ma'am we you have

to leave the airport and she's like i'm just telling you you have to save them like like you have to go out you have to stop it if i were I were out there, I'd be like, what do you need? What do you need? Tell me what you need. In the very beginning of the controversy, when the video began to go viral, I remember people were actually taking her seriously. There were really weird little conspiracies popping up about literal lizard people in the plane. I swear to God, I saw this online people were saying

like they were analyzing the the background and like they found somebody in a hood i think and they're like that's the guy that's the not real one she felt adjacent to like an entire universe of very deep internet conspiracy theory type stuff um where it's like no longer there is a point in in the conspiracy world where it starts like political and social and like the epstein stuff and if you keep going down you get to this kind of supernatural level of it where you're talking about reptilians and aliens and they are and it's really hard to believe or to understand actually who really believes this versus like is it a metaphor and um it's just a strange kind of it's very in keeping with the culture of the internet which

is our culture now where there is just just this veneer of unreality over everything where you can't quite tell what's real and what's not. But she was tapping up against that. And of course, it was framed as right-wing by Rolling Stone, but we'll get into that in a second. River, you want to wrap up the full story before we discuss? The New York Post publishes an article basically doxing this woman um they say that she's her name is tiffany gomas she's a marketing executive from uh texas they're like she lives in a two million dollar home whatever and in some way and then they also have these details where they're like apparently this started with uh this started because she, the family members that she was traveling with, she believes that they stole her AirPods.

But like how, it's never explained how we get from, you stole my AirPods to this plane is going down and you're not real. It's like, none of that is like clear. There was a controversy about like should people like i can't believe the new york post would dox this woman and i'm like have you read the new york post but like i don't know uh i mean it did seem like kind of unseemly like uh probably someone having uh she's not a public figure she's a random crazy person who went viral no one was hurt um it is i mean you definitely should not be able to talk about a plane exploding on a plane i mean i i don't i'm happy that that is

illegal i think yeah i think you can't say the word bomb on a plane or something like that so so she's with fire in a theater he didn't get arrested she also pushed a flight attendant um and didn't get arrested for that um they just kind of like told her to leave and then this weird video comes out where it's a woman claiming to be after she's done but wait in the doxing so they're telling you kind of rough details of who she is she still has not responded yet right so we don't we still haven't heard from her and then comes the video and then comes this mysterious video where she's apologizing looks put together not like someone who's like a schizophrenic and she's like so let's just look

so also not like hers original video is like put together but beach it's you know it's like it's it's the it's the it's it's giving miami vibes you know she's like going on vacation i feel like there's sandals jeans on white tank top is what i remember like that's the vibe hair hair back now it's like she's giving business she's giving girl boss oh yeah yeah yeah she's leaning and it kind of doesn't look hurt and people are like the nose is different her hair is a different color which that can be explained obviously she looked older and there was just and she some of the weird stuff to me is that she apologized like her apology was like oh I used like profanity on the plane in

front of children not because like she forced them to she delayed the flight by like three hours because they had to take everyone off the plane to like recheck them i guess to make sure nobody had like a bomb or something and then they also she also like pushed a flight attendant and was like screaming at cops she didn't apologize for any of that it was just like oh i'm like sorry i cursed on the plane i should have handled it better but She didn't apologize for any of that. It was just like, oh, I'm sorry I cursed on the plane. I should have handled it better. But she didn't explain what she was talking about. What happened. There's just more questions than answers.

And she basically creates all these new social media accounts on Twitter, YouTube. They all link to this website, which just has the video. And it says, we're coming soon. It actually says at the end of the video, Tiffany Gomez, join me on my journey of promoting positive mental health and standing up against cyber bullying. And then it's the link to the website. And she's only following like a couple of newspapers and like Rogan and Jordan Peters. Because that's where she wants to go.

She wants to be on Rogan. But's real so yeah okay so many crazy things about this video i think the one that and just the whole journey in general that the thing that keeps coming up for me is like why have we not addressed what actually happened you know nothing Nothing is being addressed. This extreme explosion, you're talking about an invisible man on the plane and you're going on and on. There's so much footage in the airport. It was not just a small, crazy plane moment. This is a complete episode and she didn't even say that. So that's a bit strange. But then, so you're just starting to allude to, there's this question of like, is this the same lady? So conspiracy theorists on the internet, of course,

they're on top of this out of the gate. I see a video the other day, this guy actually uses AI. He's got a piece of software where he just runs image comparisons and he just maths it and he's like this is not the same woman um and of course i don't know shit about that app piece i don't even know if it's a real piece of software but i'm seeing that i'm like definitely it's definitely a different person absolutely i saw people check where where uh where her address was and it's like the corner of whatever whatever and i'm thinking man this

is fucked up like you can't be finding people's address and they zoom out she's a couple blocks from the white house and i'm like what is going on she was in texas yeah that's what i thought too i didn't do that it's probably it's probably her it's the same woman i just want to i have strong opinions on this like there are so many this, this is all back to people not understanding how like makeup and lighting work. And this is the same, the same people who are like, this is not the same woman are the people who like, you know, a few weeks ago there was this thing on, on Tik TOK or Twitter about how like hot girls have like a white dot on their nose. And it's just because of makeup and lighting. Like when you take a picture of yourself and you're wearing like foundation, the light, you know, goes on your nose and it looks like you have a white dot there.

I mean, I don't know. It just, yeah, she looks slightly different in the video because she's holding the camera up and the lighting's different. Um, but I don't buy it.

I agree with Solana. It was a really unsatisfying apology video because she didn't explain what she was talking about i just want to know what she was talking about about i don't know what she's not a real person yeah what did you see just you saw like i'd be much more likely to subscribe to your newsletter if you were like listen i saw it was a straight up reptilian i'm going to explain what reptilians are uh for $8.99 a month i will tell you how to defend yourself i'm down give me i'll go to a course a retreat does she do yoga as well like

i'm in take me to ecuador teach me yeah well apparently she's like a high-powered like marketing executive so like now my conspiracy my conspiracy is like okay this is if this is a real woman then maybe this is just like the most insane like marketing ploy in history where she's like okay i have a public r slash public freak out on the plane i go on rogan i start like this like bullshit anti-bullying charity and i do like a bunch of ted talks and i just become independently wealthy. So I thought that. I thought that myself, but when I see, after her apology video came out,

I saw her outside of the plane. I just don't think she was faking those feelings. I just do not believe, like she just did not seem like she was acting, and she could just be the world's greatest actor. Maybe, you know, I guess that is Occam's razor, is that it's all a scam. But i guess that is occam's razor is

that it's all scam but i believe that she believes what she said occam's razor is that it actually she would she had a she had a some sort of episode on the plane and like now she's dealing with the fallout and she just took too much ambient or something why wouldn't you say that like i was on drugs because i'm scared of planes and then because she's not she's she's too much ambient or something why wouldn't you say that like i was on drugs because i'm scared of planes and then because she's not she's she's a normal person she doesn't know how to normal people don't know how to deal with uh huge personal pr issues like this she went viral she had previously been a nobody and now she's she's trying to do communication strategy for herself and she's an icon she's kind of crazy too she is the moment yeah so speaking of crazy people

we gotta get into san francisco um so i mean all this like we have two things so you have on the one hand uh a sort of like dei type conversation gone off the rails and then in the other you have an example of like actual psychosis i think for both of those things we have manifestations in the real world that have done real damage this one is like kind of a combination of both um san francisco has this famous homelessness problem one of the most famous i I mean, this is what Europeans love to talk about. Went to San Francisco, why don't you care about homeless people? And it's like, well, I think it's just like people in San Francisco really care about homeless people to the point where there's endless services and whatnot and becomes a magnet for

every homeless person in the world. But that's been an assumption for a while. And you look at data and it kind of seems that way um it seemed like a good opportunity to just collect all the information that was happening in the city about homelessness and just do the sort of canonical piece on why the city is so fucked up in this regard and that's what sanjana did um take us away tell us the story yeah well so. Well, so again, as you say, Solana, it started with just this question about why are so many people living in abject squalor on the streets of one of the wealthiest cities of the world? Anyone who's been to San Francisco knows

what I'm talking about. And it's not just panhandlers on the streets. You have people in tents smoking fentanyl and cooking on open fires that sometimes turn into conflagrations and like burn down buildings like happened a few weeks ago. And so I started looking through. So San Francisco has a dedicated Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing that receives an ungodly amount of money from the city. They get over half a billion dollars a year in money, specifically for the supposedly 8,000 homeless people on the streets. And so you do the math and it's like a ridiculous amount of money per head.

So why are they still on the streets and why are people still living in tents and vans and stuff like that? And it turns out that the strategy is what's called housing first. And housing first is basically this very extreme ideology that's somehow gotten written into California state law and San Francisco law that says that the solution to homelessness is to provide housing to everyone. And that the way that that should be implemented is by essentially providing

indefinitely subsidized single occupancy rooms, which are most often one bedroom apartments. And that the city should prioritize providing this housing over providing temporary support services on the street care and that kind of thing. So as you can imagine, this creates a lot of perverse incentives for people to, first of all, come to San Francisco, either for the housing or for the weather, the lax drug laws. They also provide like stipends to people who are homeless there. So this is something that we didn't get a chance to mention in the article, but like when you come to San Francisco

and you're homeless, the city will actually provide some form of like monetary assistance to you. And they do this in New York as well. It's not unique to San Francisco, but yeah, so they provide this kind of assistance. Yeah, so they provide this kind of assistance. And it's a really awful system because in California, they can't require that people in this housing are sober.

So a lot of the people who they put into the houses have drug problems. who they put into the houses have drug problems. And they don't really have requirements in place for getting access to this housing. Or the recertification requirements don't involve getting clean or finding a job. Like you can essentially, if you want, indefinitely stay in these housing units. I think the average person who comes face-to-face with homelessness in San Francisco for the first

time immediately makes an assumption that the city just doesn't have enough emergency beds, which is true, to put the people into. And so because there aren't enough beds, it's like you think, oh, homelessness. Naturally, there are homeless shelters for the homeless. If you're on the street, there's at least a bed for you, maybe a meal, some care. If there's not, it's because there aren't enough resources for that. And so there's this question, given the city has spent several billion dollars over the last couple of years for, when I first started looking into this, 7,000 people on the streets. Now we're around 9,000 people sleeping on the streets of San Francisco. There's this obvious question of like, you just do the math. It's like, well,

clearly we have enough money for a bed for 9,000 people, like more than enough. So we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a person. Why don't we have the shelter? It's been decades. People have been talking about homelessness in SF. Conversation has become louder and louder over the whole last 12 years since I moved there, I think 12 years ago. And it's a bigger and bigger issue now. It's a national issue. But it's been decades and decades of this. So several billion over the last few years, but probably many billions more. Where is the money going?

Why aren't there beds? And it's like, well, the reason there aren't beds is not because you don't have enough money. It's because the people who run the city are opposed to the concept of emergency shelter. They think emergency shelter means you're not ever going to get a permanent housing solution. That means a one bedroom apartment or two better, depending on what the situation is. And you just kind of, when you step back, that's crazy. You can't, in the most expensive city in the entire country, one of the most expensive cities in the entire world, you can't promise everybody who moves there a free one-bedroom

apartment, let alone specifically the kinds of people who we're attracting are drug addicts. So you have people who need services, mentally unstable, addicted to drugs. They get this housing. And now we have, and this was the numbers. Why don't you run us through the numbers of how many people on the streets today, how many people in support of housing, and how much does that cost? What are they asking for? Just break all that down for us. Yeah. So there's around uh 7 800 people um either on the streets so intent like encampments or living in their cars um or just sleeping directly on the

streets uh right now um and people in in temporary shelters and then there's currently around 9 000 people living in permanence what they call permanent supportive housing units. So these are the indefinitely subsidized housing units that they offer to people. And there's crucially almost 33,000 people on the wait list for this housing. So there's this question of like, where are these people, these 33,000 people? The numbers are very bizarre in this case in terms of some of these 33,000 people are presumably not even living in San Francisco, but they're on these wait lists because the turnover- Or they are, they just have rooms or something and they're looking for a free room from the city, which is what these people believe in. And this is, if you had a hardcore

socialist on here, the DSA left NSF, let's say, I don't know if all socialists think this way, but I mean, I think they do. The idea is that housing should be free. And in San Francisco, if you need a place, it should be, you should not have to worry about that. There should just be a room for you. In practice, that's like a beautiful idea in a fantasy land where resources are magically assembled in front of you and we don't have to pay for things in the context of a city like san francisco where you have the entire country's mentally unstable moving to one place for free shit you just can't afford that and um i think that this conversation is like i think the average person doesn't realize how many people are

being paid for by the city right now to not be on the street. I think the average person doesn't realize how much money this costs to maintain that system. Every year when they ask for more money, it's to build more of these units, to bring more people into the city that become permanently attached to this program. And that is a ticking time bomb because the moment the city is not in a bull run and can no longer pay for this stuff, what do you do with all of these people who need the city to pay for them to exist? Because they're medically either mentally unstable or they're total drug addicts. They're not going to ever be able to take care of themselves. What do you do with those people? The city is now looking over the next two years, I think it's something like a $760

million deficit potentially over the next two years because so many of the taxpayers have fled the city and so much office space has closed. It's a dire situation. And I think as bad as the homelessness situation looks, when you just walk through the streets, you're like, damn, clearly these people have a problem here. It's way worse, like maybe three, four times worse. Yeah. And I do think like my takeaway from writing and researching this article is actually, I don't think it's true that all of the city's leaders believe that this is the correct answer. I think that what's happened is you have a very small cabal of activists who have essentially captured the city's policymaking decisions. So Mayor Breed

and the Department of Homelessness unveiled this five-year plan a few months ago where they basically are asking for over half a billion dollars in additional funding to cut overall homelessness by 15%. So again, the numbers are just completely insane. Isn't it 50? Is it 50 or 15? 50% for unsheltered homelessness. So on the street, street homelessness, 15% overall. Oh. This is below... Okay, listen. You see a problem like 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 people in the streets of San Francisco, and the only acceptable government response needs to be how do we make that zero people on the streets that is the only acceptable

response if you don't have a strategy to do that within the next few years like you are this is like criminal negligent job negligence in in my opinion like it is not even we're not again this is not an unsolvable problem if you don't want to be providing people in the most expensive city in the world a free house for the rest of their life. If you just want to make sure that people have... We are living in a society where there's no sleeping on the streets for you. No matter how bad it gets, no matter how messed up your life, we're going to make sure that you're not literally sleeping outside in your own filth. We're going to make sure you have a bed. We're going to make sure you have food, medical care if you need it, and clothes and things like that, the bare essentials, which the city more than provides for in terms of food, clothing.

And where we're missing is just the beds. You need to take that money. The plan needs to be, how do we build enough beds to get everybody off the street? And then once you have that, you're no longer allowed to sleep on the street. And that's the only path forward. It's the only way that you're going to solve this is by you have to have enough beds, and then you have to say, there's no more sleeping outside. Clean up the drug encampments. Move on. These are not unsolvable problems. And it drives me crazy that we can't just live in a normal functioning universe where this very obvious solution is not the thing that everybody wants. And that's really the real key friction here. It's not resources.

It's not even, I think, as Sanjay, I think you've kind of begun to touch up against with the average person on the board. Maybe it's not everybody on the board of supervisors, not everybody in local government. It's certainly not everybody in the city. The average person assumes that this is the strategy. It's just this small group of people who believe that this is immoral and they're not going to do it. You know, when they unveiled this insane plan, which also has a bunch of crazy DEI language in it about they want to provide like 150 units specifically for transgender and gender nonconforming households. They want to prioritize black led businesses and I don't know, organizations in historically marginalized neighborhoods. There's all this weird boilerplate.

And the plan, by the way, costs $300,000. Writing the plan cost the city $300,000 because they contracted it out to a homelessness consulting firm. From LA. From LA. Yeah. Types of things existed. But I was just going to say that when they unveiled the plan, there were people on the board of supervisors, like this guy named Raphael Mandelman, who were like, can we please change strategies from housing first? This is insane. It's

financially untenable. We're not able to house. It's not just all the homeless people in San Francisco. It's the thousands of people, the thousands of drug tourists primarily who come to the city. Like San Francisco cannot be the city that is responsible for housing all of the drug tourists who come and stay there. Which is the main, this is another, they're constantly saying that the people in San Francisco sleeping on the streets are from San Francisco. streets are from San Francisco. And this is a way to say, I think it's a way to make an argument that appeals to many people, myself included, which is every city should be responsible for people in the city and they shouldn't be sleeping on the street. And so the only way to keep justifying all of these funds in this program, even though more and more people are growing on the sort of, we are housing you in three, one bedroom apartments list, while concurrently more people are growing on the street, it's being framed as like, this number

on the street has never changed. It's just slowly increasing. And all of these people are from the city. Bullshit. Almost none of them are from the city. This is San Francisco. Like none of those people from this like robust welfare capital of the country are almost none. I'm sure it's like 1%, maybe. I would imagine less than 1% were born and raised in San Francisco. The

rest have come here and largely for drugs, which is another thing that you can't really talk about. We have this idea that the average homeless person is this single working mom with three kids living out of her van. And I don't know where that's the case. I know that it's not the case in San Francisco where I lived for 10 years. The average homeless person in San Francisco is a mentally unstable drug addict. That's the average homeless person in San Francisco. Yeah. And what happens when you put all of those people and a housing unit together? It just seems to me like they're recreating the projects but like like all the social ills that came from putting the poorest people in society in a building together

and all the social problems that come along with poverty but like making it worse because it's like you have to be like a drug addict or a schizophrenic basically to live there like you have to have like some sort of a problem that goes beyond just being poor, basically, is what I understood more or less. Otherwise, you could lose it, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sandra, you said if you put your reason for entering the wait list as you are addicted to drugs and then you become clean, you lose your housing potentially. So it's not, the rule is not explicitly that it's just that you can interpret the eligibility

requirements like that, which is very disturbing. Um, but basically, yeah, in order to get permanent supportive housing, you have to cite a disability. And if you cite that your disability is drug addiction or alcohol addiction, for example, and then you get clean, then you technically no longer have a disability. And so when they recertify or, you know, extend, you know, every year they do these recertification processes, when they recertify your unit, if you no longer have the disability, theoretically, you no longer qualify for the unit. theoretically, you no longer qualify for the unit. And I will say, River, to your point, these are not luxury, despite how expensive they are to operate, these are not luxury apartments. The living situation in these units is awful for a lot of people. And one of the things that

didn't make it into the article, but that, you know, we had talked about a lot in the editing process is this shelter in place hotels initiative that they had done during the pandemic, where they basically, you know, COVID started and San Francisco was scrambling to get all the homeless people out of the streets and into shelters. So they rented a bunch of hotel rooms from either like old hotels that were dilapidated or just like, you know, normal hotels. And they put a bunch of people, most of whom or a lot of whom had drug problems

in these rooms. And the results were horrifying. 4% of the people in the program died. Again, it's not clear how many of these deaths were from overdoses, but presumably a lot were. And there's stories about staff who were just so traumatized by repeatedly administering Narcan to people who had overdosed in their rooms or watching people who they'd come to know and love die from mainly fentanyl that they required trauma counseling.

Some of these people relapsed on drugs themselves. There's even been cases of people who then relapsed and died. The whole ecosystem of these supportive housing units is really perverse. And it's just, it is really horrifying when you think about the amount of money they're spending and the kind of living conditions that people end up in regardless. I feel like there's also probably like a danger too with like, I've seen like a, I didn't see it, but I heard a meth lab explode one time. And like, it's so loud. And like, like the people are like in these like units that are just like full of drug addicts and they're like hooking meth and people are like falling asleep with like a cigarette in

their hand or like just you know passing out and like leaving the stove on like i feel like there's like so much danger for things to blow up or burn down or um all that and that goes beyond just like you know people having like psychotic breaks and you know coming out with a gun or a knife or whatever like it just seems like it would be a disaster like a horrible like uh almost like prison like place to live we should probably move on to maui um i just want really quick though um what what i found interesting about your article sanji really was this, the way that they count homeless people, which is, doesn't seem like a very serious way of counting. They count every two years and they do it on over the course of one night, which is like, look, if you want to solve the homeless problem, why are you counting people every two years? It's such a, it's such a weird way.

homeless problem. Why are you counting people every two years? It's such a weird way. And I just wanted to mention that it's a really strange way of collecting the data. Yes, because they do not want the real information publicly available. They want to conceal it as much. They don't want you to know how many people are on the streets. They don't want you to know how many people are in supportive housing. They certainly don't want you to know how many homeless people are not from San Francisco. Because if you have to address face on the reality of that problem, which is a growing number of free one-bedroom apartments forever filled with drug addicts, a growing number of homeless people on the streets, and a massively growing number of people from around the country coming into the city for the free, not free, for the widely available fentanyl on the streets, plus access to housing, food, money, a free phone.

If you have to just look at, if anyone just looks at that stuff, you take one glance, it's all but maybe 1% of the craziest ideologues on the farthest left ever who think that that's okay. Nobody else thinks that's okay nobody else thinks that's okay and it's like it's clearly a problem of incentives in addition to a problem of i would say values like what do you think we should be providing and and i think the data just forces you to have that that that conversation with with yourself first and then i mean if you become radicalized by it like i was like holy shit everyone needs to know so um of course listeners will know about the uh the the disastrous wildfire that hit maui i think it was on on august 8th um but what recently came out uh was an article in a

in a local hawaiian newspaper newspaper that cited a few sources, which with like direct knowledge, they were anonymous sources, but they had like direct knowledge of the incident, who are basically saying there was a dispute between, it's called the Department of Land and Natural Resources, which is their water resource management division on Maui. And landowners regarding the release of water to fight the wildfire that was currently blazing.

And that dispute took up most of the day. So apparently, according to this article, on that day, we had some area that could have been saved or could have been prevented from catching on fire, waiting for water. And some bureaucrats in an office somewhere were preventing that for some reason. It additionally came out that the guy behind this maybe is this man called M. Kaleo Manuel. He's a deputy director for water resource management at the Department of Land and Natural Resources. And he, this Manuel guy, he's animated by this concept. He's on record. There's a video of him going around talking about this concept called One Water, which is how Hawaiians, according to him, traditionally manage water.

The commission is responsible per our authorizing statute to protect and manage all water resources in the state. One Water is like taking it and looking at it from a holistic system perspective and that's not any different than how hawaiians traditionally manage water you know in in essence we treated a native hawaiians treated water as one of the earthly manifestations of a god and a kua kane and so that reverence um for a resource and that reciprocity in relationship was was something that was really really important to our worldview and and well-being right so this is the guy that apparently held up uh life-saving water uh to fight these wildfires that ended up killing over a hundred people and um now the story is sort of coming out. I'll just,

just to, just to bookend this, the, the democratic governor of Hawaii, Josh Green has also alluded to, to this conflict. He said, one thing,

one thing people need to understand, especially those from far away is that, is that there's been a great deal of water conflict on Maui for, for many years. It's important that we're honest about this. People have been fighting against the release of water to fight fires. I'll leave that for you to explore. So, uh, so this is going to be that right there is going to be a story over the next month. And it's going to be a huge story because it intersects directly with this idea that your sort of cultural heritage, which I don't even

know. I don't think any of us know how real this is. This guy's a Hawaiian studies major. I think a lot of what happens in academia right now with people looking backwards to various cultures, trying to identify with them as modern people is invention. People just kind of making up entire versions of the past, including everything from how people dealt with sexuality to how people would deal with water. It's like, how are people dealing with water 400 years ago in Hawaii? I don't know. It's not entirely relevant to how you need to deal with water in a giant metropolis. It's like, it doesn't make any sense. There were no Hawaiians 500 years ago, 400 years ago

dealing with that problem. But we have these weird histories about how that might happen. And then it's like, why is your weird cultural faith even a part of this discussion? And here we are. I think it's a very sort of woke concept, I would say, and people maybe forget how extremely to the left a lot of these sort of... It's like the Hawaiian separatist type people are. Yeah. And a lot of the people that lost their homes and their lives are native Hawaiian people who are now worried. A lot of them who are like still alive anyway are worried that like developers are going to come in and like basically pressure people into selling land that they've held on to forever despite the fact that maybe they don't like

make a lot of money but their land is worth like millions of dollars because it's like beachfront property but they don't want to move it's their home they've lived there forever and so like Native Hawaiians are actually the ones who have like been harmed probably the most by this because if it's like you know a hotel or something that burned down like you know it's a business they'll have you know good insurance or they'll you know just it's an llc they'll shut it down whatever like the people who are like most harmed are native hawaiians so there's like this weird irony to it as well yeah i don't yeah i don't i don't know how as a bureaucrat or as a person in charge of managing water like this um you're sitting around on the phone saying no to the

release of life-saving water while a wild wildfire is blazing through your community? How do you let your- I think at that point, he's seeing it as a business could burn down. He's seeing it as a piece of property owned by a business is asking to stop this thing from burning down the entire business. And he's like, sorry, that's not in keeping with the rules of one water or whatever. You have to go ask the other townspeople how they feel about us putting out this fire. And he's thinking about it the way that you would think about it when you're entirely detached from reality because you've lived your entire life in this academic clown world situation where these questions are abstract rather than like, this is a question of life or death and we need to have competent people in charge of these things. There's this guy, Simon

Sarris on Twitter. He said, nobody thinks about their jobs as jobs anymore. There are these things that are bestowed upon you. They're either awards. They're like awards that can be given and taken away. They don't think about them in terms of like, I have to do this thing. I have a duty to the community. I work for the government. That should mean something. I have a responsibility to my neighbors to protect the land. How does that not come into play at a moment like this?

I don't want to get too carried away here because these are early reports and we have a lot to learn still, but this has been a problem on Maui for a while. We have now multiple reports blaming this man for not immediately going in with water specifically because of his philosophy about this. And it's a conversation that we're going to have to have. Yeah. The other side of the story is the climate change angle that a lot of people have taken. The New York Times wrote an article about the wildfire called Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinder Box.

And recently, Michael Schellenberger and a few others, I think, have written articles citing the fact that Hawaiian Electric, which is the electric company that services Maui, has basically failed to maintain the grid such that in many places on Maui, there are just sparks literally flying out of their power lines. And one of the things that you're supposed to do around those sites is clear the grass and clear the brush away from those sites so that it doesn't catch on fire. And Hawaiian Electric has apparently failed, was like dragging its feet on doing that. They released a plan. Lee Fang reports that they have,

are the inspectors connected to the board of that company or something? What was the thing that Lee Fang reported? I don't know, but there's a utilities commission that is connected to Hawaiian Electric and the utilities commission is responsible for kicking the wildfire prevention plan back to 2027 or something like that. So there's some mixing of government and private here. I wrote a piece a couple years ago during the California wildfires, which were also being blamed on global warming, called Global Warming Ate My Homework.

which we're also being blamed on global warming called global warming ate my homework and this is like broadly a thing that i'm very i think that there is global warming related stuff all over the place but the bigger problem is the total decay of our civic institutions and like why people are under the false assumption that someone is in charge and actually like nobody is in charge and again and again when a crisis like this happens you have people who are saying no no no are under the false assumption that someone is in charge and actually nobody is in charge. And again and again, when a crisis like this happens, you have people who are saying, no, no, no, no. It's not because we didn't do these ground floor basic precautions. It's because of global warming, this huge abstract concept that nobody can stop and therefore nobody is responsible for. There's zero responsibility, zero accountability. And it's like, at this point, I don't know, like people need to start going to prison for this level of failure to, I mean,

you can't have a situation where everybody in a society thinks that this group of people who they've given money and responsibility to, to protect them, to maintain the power grid, to release water while things are burning down. We have to know that these people have it together. And if they fail, it's like there needs to be an investigation, there needs to be a trial, and many, many, many people need to start going to jail. Yeah. Well, I mean, I agree. I agree. Josh Green, the Democratic governor of Hawaii, also may agree. He's, you know, like I said, he said, I'll leave that to. Josh Green, the Democratic governor of Hawaii also may agree. He's, you know, like I said, he said, I'll leave that to you to explore on the, on the water,

on the water conflict issue. Um, well, this story is going to be evolving. We have a lot more to cover on it. Uh, catch you guys here next week. There is a new pot up. I did an interview with Peter Thiel that is now live. If you're a subscriber to PirateWires, send you an email. You can get it at PirateWires.com or you can search it on YouTube. And we'll see you next Friday.