Pirate Wires - Tech Antitrust, The War On Algebra, The Right To Disconnect, & Squatter Revolution In The US

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

EPISODE #47: The Pirate Wires crew is here for your weekly podcast! This week, we kick things off with FTC Chair, Lina Khan, appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. From the standing ovation, to the blatant speak of dismantling tech companies, we analyze exactly what she said. We then get into the "Right To Disconnect" bill introduced in California, that would effectively punish companies who message an employee after 5pm. Next up, the war on algebra continues! Last week, we discussed Jo Boaler in San Francisco. This week, we dive into the insane discourse around the Garry Tan funded company, Mentrava. Finally, squatters all around the nation, from NYC to San Francisco. River breaks down his piece on an organization in SF that's actively helping people to find places to squat. It's all crazy! We're here to help navigate it all.  Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! Rate & Review 1:00 - Lina Khan's Interview With Jon Stewart - A Tech Anti-Trust Discussion 21:00 - The "Right To Disconnect" Bill - An Insane Piece Of Legislation 39:30 - The War On Algebra 51:35 - Squatter Revolution 1:05:00 - Thanks For Watching! Tell Your Friends! Rate & Review

Litikon appeared on The Daily Show, standing ovation. Okay, the crowd is like going wild. Like I did not realize until this interview that she genuinely believed her job was to make sure that these companies actually failed. The proposed law will legally establish a right to disconnect. Just turn the phone off, dude. All the normies that I know that work email jobs,

none of them work hard at all. And she's like, why do these folks want kids learning math so fast? And then she screenshots something. If you're advocating for equity in education, you're always gonna be advocating for gifted kids to not perform in gifted ways. The squatters are taking over.

By the way, I've got Venezuelan migrants who got released from an ICE processing center. These are the widest Venezuelans I've ever seen in my life. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod. Right at the top, I want to start with Lena Kahn. This is a couple of days old. Right at the top, I want to start with Lena Kahn. This is a couple of days old. Lena Kahn appeared on The Daily Show. She kind of, this is Biden's FTC chairwoman,

his kind of like industry terrorist in chief. Her job is to dismantle big tech, roughly. I mean, that's sort of her self-proclaimed job, I guess, at this point. This is the mandate that she believes that she has. And she's been executing, you know, with great force. She calls herself sort of entrepreneurial about it. She appears at The Daily Show. It's a big to do. Mostly the headline there was John had wanted to do this at Apple and was not allowed for whatever reason. I got to tell you, I wanted to have you on a podcast. And Apple asked us not to do it,

to have you. They literally said, please don't talk to her. I sat down to watch it just because I'd heard so much about it. And what I found was much funnier than that. So first of all, she shows up. This is a government official, right? Her job is to just sort of go after companies. I didn't even think that anybody knew who she was

outside of tech. Standing ovation. Okay, the crowd is like going wild over Lena Khan, who's not even said anything at this point. She sits down. At this point now, the crowd, every time she sort of insinuates, this is a 20 minute sort of mutual masturbatory interview between her and Stewart, just like loving each other, obsessed with each other.

Every time she even sort of casually implies that she's going to sort of go after this or that tech company, wild cheers from the audience. And about like five minutes in, I realized this sort of strange absence of any actual claim that any tech company had done anything wrong whatsoever. I sort of kept waiting for that to happen. And it never appeared once. I want to get your thoughts on all this, but I want to kind of go through a few sort of interesting pieces of the interview first, and then just kind of get your take on her specifically, and this kind of cultural moment that we're in more generally. At one point in their sort of lambasting of tech, Stewart pretty sure sort of argued, not argued,

suggested that Jeff Bezos was still running Amazon. There was at one point a conflation of Boeing. So Lena Kahn mentions if they don't get sort of big tech under control, you know, Boeing jets are going to keep falling out of the sky. So this bizarre conflation of that airline with, I don't know, Apple's potential monopoly on the app store. The most interesting and telling piece to me, I think, and the real substance of it, probably for this conversation, she spoke about Instagram specifically, the Instagram acquisition. Now, when Facebook acquired Instagram, it was like 10 years ago, it was universally made fun of throughout not only, you know, the press, but tech. Everyone was like, this is crazy. A billion dollars for what? It made no sense. Facebook buying the free smartphone mobile sharing app for a billion dollars. A billion dollars of money?

For a thing that kind of ruins your pictures. Now, obviously it's seen as like the most genius move ever in the history of social media. Lena says her, her breakdown for this is like at the time that Facebook acquired Instagram, they needed to acquire Instagram because Facebook sucked for mobile and Instagram was great at it. And if Facebook did not acquire Instagram, that company she believes would have failed, which I didn't realize. Like I did not realize until this interview that she genuinely believed her job was to make sure that these companies actually failed. Like what is it about if you just break that position down, what she's saying is like success itself is anti-competitive. Like, what is it about if you just break that position down, what she's saying is like,

success itself is anti competitive. Anyway, crazy interview. Really, what you see there is a desire on her part to take apart business. There's not really an actual claim that she's made against any of these companies that she went after. And the crowd loved it. So she certainly, her and John both, and we said earlier, maybe a few weeks back, maybe a couple of months back, we talked about Stewart being a new force in media. He certainly is. The clips are huge.

The show is huge. His audience loves it. What do you make of the Lena Khan moment? I mean, it's pretty clear that there's a tech backlash. I feel like it's surprising and a little bit dismaying to see a standing ovation. The message of Lena Kahn is essentially tech's bad, and people are chipping out over that, which is strange. A government official, too.

The whole framing that Stewart kept hammering home with her she she gave it to herself she she invoked the language of like scrappy upstart and whatnot they're trying to frame an official for the most powerful government in human history as an underdog in a fight against in a fight against big tech that's crazy to me like who actually holds power in this country? The tech companies hold a lot of power and a lot of wealth, but the government is power that they're literally power. What is she talking about? I don't understand this. You're not an underdog. And Stuart kind of, I mean, he is just, he's like a clown for the Democrats. I understand that

he's very good at it. Um, but the way that he sort of to see like a left-wing person sit down with the government, like a figurehead of real power, that's crazy to me. It's embarrassing. I don't know why he thinks that he's fighting for the little guy there. I mean, she's the biggest guy you could possibly be. Yeah, I don't really get how antitrust is supposed to work in the tech space. This is something that's bothered me for a long time, because I'm generally somebody who I support anti trust, you know, I think there was a lot of industries, especially in agriculture and some other places where it's just gotten way too big,

and it is uncompetitive. And same thing goes with medical sector. And there's a lot of companies where you could break them up because they make a product and they have basically they've cornered a market and nobody else can enter in it because it wouldn't be competitive and it's things like insulin or seeds like Monsanto branded sorry patented seeds things like that. But when it comes to tech, the reason that these are monopolies is because of consumer choice. You know, when you go to the grocery store and you buy tomato, you don't know it's a Monsanto tomato. You just buy the tomato. And the competition is all around price. And if you are big enough, you can corner the market and essentially make things uncompetitive. With tech, though, I think it's a lot different,

especially when you're talking about social media, because people are choosing these companies because they offer a product. And in order for a social media company to work, you have to have scale. People are on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or whatever, because other people are on it. are on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or whatever, because other people are on it. So you can't break it up and have two different Twitters with, you know, half of the consumers go to one half to go to the other. It would basically just, you would create two companies where one would succeed and

one would fail, and then you would have a monopoly all over again. So the whole concept of antitrust when it comes to social media specifically has never really made sense to me at all. I noticed this a handful of years ago. They started to... And I think it's a great question. What do they actually mean when they're talking about antitrust here? I think forever, the idea was, is there a consumer harm? Is this company cornering a market on some vital thing that you need? I think probably famously, the railroads, right? Like you need access to the railroads.

And if you don't have it, you're screwed. And if someone is cornered the entire market and they can jack up the prices, there's clear consumer harm there. They really have distanced themselves from that question of consumer harm. And you could say, I think you can make an argument, certainly Jonathan Haidt's doing it, that social media is harming people, harming kids specifically. I think the evidence there is pretty mixed. We've talked about this a little bit. We sort of all kind of roughly intuitively feel that it's bad, but there's

not, I don't think there's real evidence there, but it's sort of a separate question when it comes to antitrust. If you think it's really bad, like it's cigarettes or something, that's not an antitrust question. That's like an FDA question or something. They're now, for the monopoly conversations, for the antitrust conversations, they are really sort of totally discarding the question of whether or not this person having dominance is bad. And in fact, there are these places where dominance is really good, including in the marketplace. Talk about Amazon. Amazon at scale is able to do delivery the way that it is for so inexpensively. And that's actually really good for consumers, the prices historically have been really good, you can break that apart and sort of find some nefarious thing that they're doing. I'm sure there's something

that someone in the comments will leave us. But in general, like cheap shit, people tend to enjoy. And that's what Amazon has been able to afford, They don't really care. And so you have to sort of ask yourself, like, what is the real reason for this? And I think it's linked to the people cheering and, you know, the standing ovation and whatnot. It does just seem like they're very rich and they're very successful and in a manner that has not really been seen in you know a long long maybe ever sort of time this many people or this few people with so much wealth right like that that's the thing itself that is bothering them it's not that the success is hurting anybody else it's that the success is itself sort of unprecedented um and it just drives people like this crazy.

Yeah. I mean, the nefarious things that companies like Amazon are doing do not actually affect the average person. In fact, they actually help the consumer in some ways, which is why antitrust has been slow because there's this doctrine that if the consumer is getting something for a cheaper price or whatever, you can't really intervene but the stuff that they're doing is like uh hurting other small businesses essentially like i've heard stories about people like they'll make a product they start selling it on amazon it does really well and then amazon basically copies their product and sells it at

a cheaper price um and so stuff like that um you know i think is genuinely uh that is anti-competitive and that is a problem but that's not why these people are cheering in my opinion but let's talk i want to talk about this question that you just raised anti-competitive you know you said it is anti-competitive and that's why it's a problem i don't know that first of all i don't know that it's anti-competitive it's competitive and they're they're winning the competition but i would would say, why is competition itself the thing that we are prizing here? Why are we saying they need to not be winning this competition? It's like, do you care about consumers? Or do you care about this strange ideal of lots of people competing? I don't really know why we care about that, the competition

piece. Why does it matter? Historically, I think you could make the argument that you needed to care about that because that and consumer harm were linked. But if it's not the case, then which things should you care about? And it's like, clearly, you should care about the consumers. There's a more, there's maybe a more salient anecdote here, which is the Department of Justice's lawsuit against Apple. One of the things they're accusing Apple of is not allowing other smartwatches to pair with the iPhone. And it's like what that it's totally incoherent along the lines of competition because this is just a product that they offer that the consumer can either opt into or opt out of. that the consumer can either opt into or opt out of.

And I don't see how any competition concerns come in there at all because it's basically one product, the iPhone and the Apple Watch pair. And that's super confusing. It's like if Sega Genesis back in the day got really, really huge and then they were sued because they wouldn't allow you to play nintendo games on the sega or something right like wait

did that actually happen or is that a that's the best of my knowledge that's never happened but okay but like yeah it's like that's what it sort of that's what it is that's what's happening here the phone they think is just too big and so you have to be allowed for in for the app store one it's like you have to be allowed onto the app store to compete. But then again, when we get to the point where it's like, well, how is this harming consumers? It's always some really abstract, idealistic argument about like, well, just imagine all of the flourishing of interesting ideas we would have if it were more open. And I actually think that that's true. And I fucking hate how closed off Apple is. But it's not really clear that it's worse

for the consumer in fact i think you can make an argument that it's much better for the consumer um apple famous i mean when apple first took off it was the era of the people were getting viruses on their computers still like i mean your computer would be crippled with viruses and apple took off because it was a closed system that was better at policing that i mean there are a lot of reasons part of it was a brand monopoly. It just looked better. They had those cool iPod commercials that everyone, they were cool then. Everyone loved them.

I mean, who knows? But the closed element of that system was seen as advantageous for certain things that were seen as to the consumer's benefit. Yeah. I mean, I think that's like the broader question that's been happening for antitrust for a long time, which is, is the consumer the only person that matters in the equation or is there a broader project of competition that we need to be pursuing on the market? Like, is it becoming too difficult for smaller firms to compete and

you know what effects does that have on innovation on the broader economy blah blah blah blah there's like a whole body of literature about this but i mean you can make the argument either way i mean i do think there are downsides to something like apple where like if you get you know if you get an iphone you are kind of like locked into the system where you have to keep buying like more apple you just get a different phone you're not locked into any system at all you can just you can just not use an app you can just not use an iphone and when it comes to the the sort of argument about you know these companies are you can't compete with them anymore and whatnot. There wasn't a version of Amazon before Amazon. And there wasn't a version of Facebook before Facebook, like all of these companies are so there wasn't a version of Uber

before Uber. They're all sort of first of their kind. I mean, yes, it's true. I think competing with them at this point is very, very hard. I don't know entirely how you would do it. You think about Google and this, Google has a search monopoly and has forever. It hasn't hurt consumers, it seems totally fine for consumers. And it's weird to sort of invent something about Google and this Google has a search monopoly and has forever. It hasn't hurt consumers, it seems totally fine for consumers. And it's weird to sort of invent something that never before existed. That was the Google specifically, it was their it was their algorithm or another algorithm that would have been it was their specific search. I forget what it was exactly. It was like that their, their technology, the underlying technology behind their search was very different than

what had come previously. It was very simple and it was very effective and they won, but it wasn't like it didn't exist before that. So it's just weird to say like, you're too big to compete with if what you're competing with is something that is brand new. It would be like if this podcast got huge and like, I i mean millions of people are watching it and people are saying like well it's not fair to other people who want to start a pirate wires podcast it's like okay sorry i don't know what to tell you yeah i'm just i'm just like making like yeah yeah sorry we'll keep making it because i'm confused i want to i want to understand what the hell is going on with this it's crazy and actually And actually, River, what do you make as sort of like a, I would say like a Glenn Greenwaldian leftist with a healthy suspicion of government?

What do you make of like the Stewart sort of sitting down with the government official thing and just, you know, celebrating her publicly as a left wing guy? I mean, it's strange, no? Yeah, it is and it it reminds me of if you remember a couple of years ago when libs were buying stamps because of something that the postmaster general did with mail-in ballots or something it was like three layers of convoluted political nonsense um but like the post office website sold out of stamps it was like a weird thing but it like it's this rise of political hobbyist hobbyism where you have not only does john stewart know who this woman is but his audience knows who this woman is and it's a it's a in a way it's like

a subcultural thing i actually don't think that it even describes like the average democratic voter or anything. It's really odd. Sajid, a last thoughts before we move on to another banger, if I do say so myself. River, to your point about how consumers are driving tech monopolies in a lot of ways, in ways that they weren't necessarily driving agricultural monopolies or real monopolies. I mean, I think my sense on this whole tech antitrust debate is like, if consumers want to proactively opt out of things like Amazon and spend more money to support small businesses because they sort of think that the monopoly of Amazon

or an Apple monopoly over phones is bad, and they want to spend more money to buy other goods is almost like a political statement. That seems like the way to sort of fight the tech monopoly if you think it's bad. I don't think someone like Lena Kahn coming in and, you know, implementing some top-down government solution that probably is going to have just the effect of, you know, eventually recreating-down government solution that probably is going to have just the effect of, you know, eventually recreating the monopoly in a different way because people are always going to opt into the best technology. They're always going to choose Google PageRank

over, you know, whatever other search competitor came before it. That seems like the solution to me because I do feel, I understand people who are sort of frustrated by, you know, Amazon's practices around copying other consumer goods or just like don't want to live in a world where you're to your house like a lot of this just seems like consumers are choosing convenience uh and you know you get the world that you pay for basically right and i guess there there is a a degree of like the more people do it the more you sort of have to do it yourself you know the world opts you into the system at a certain point. But I don't know, I don't really hear people talking about it this way. I don't hear people talking about the sort of remote culture and how sort of spiritually harming that maybe is. And I don't see people talking about like in the context of the FTC, they're not talking about social media sort of depressing us and our kids. It's just a straight economic argument that

doesn't make any sense. And it betrays, I think, the real motivation behind all of this, which is just to punish people who are successful in tech specifically, which increasingly, I do believe, is seen as a fount of, by Washington people, I think it is seen as a fount of competitive power, which is alarming. And you see these people kind of emerging from Washington, wanting to be involved in tech. There are no shortage of people from whatever administration immediately making a beeline into either a VC shop or working in-house at some giant tech company, or in the case of what's his face, I forget his name now, the guy who worked for Trump, who now thinks he's going to buy TikTok, right? Like they're all fantasizing about being Mark Zuckerberg. It's this weird, memetic hellscape. And I think that's what's

that's what is happening. It's like it is just a war for power. It has nothing to do with any of us. Speaking of disconnection, though, thank God for Matt Haney in San Francisco, who went from being just one of the worst supervisors in history to one of the worst state assemblymen in California state history. That is sort of what happens, I think, in the state. And Sanjana, you can really break that down for us later. But it seems like people to sort of fail up throughout their entire careers. This dude drops a bill, and it is going to be, you know, people have the actual right, he argues, to disconnect from their phone.

And what he means by that is a limited number of hours through which you can be reached by email. It will be after which, after the set number of hours, it will be literally illegal. I think, Brandon, I believe you're the one that researched this one, it would be literally illegal to send an email. I don't know. Unpack it for me. I believe you're the one that researched this one.

It'd be literally illegal to send an email. I don't know. Unpack it for me. The proposed law will legally establish a right to disconnect. And basically it will require every employer in California to have a policy or action plan communicating how it will implement that standard. That's from a news article that I read about it. So it's not totally 100% clear. Enforcement of the law will be

done via the department of labor, which could levy fines at a hundred dollars per incident for employers with a, who like, I don't know, paying somebody at 5 0 1 PM or something like that. It's a, it's totally, in my opinion, the weirdest law that I've ever come across, quite frankly, because for me, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever because people self-select into jobs that are difficult. And they self-select out of jobs that are difficult at the same time. class um the laptop class that doesn't want to work very hard and wants to just like clock in at nine and leave at five they're already in jobs like that so i'm not sure what this like and the people that want to work hard are like going after ambitious aspirational positions in ambitious companies and working hard because they choose to do that. So it's totally weird that like California is just like, no, I don't consent, you know, when everybody else is

consenting. Um, so yeah, I think it's a really weird, it's like that meme. Yeah. It's totally that meme. It's like, not me, you know? And, um, I don't, I don't get it. It's creepy to me. Like why, why, why does California... It's almost like they assume... There's a quote in the Standard by Haney. They got him to talk about the bill. He says, right now, it's very murky, and he's talking about jobs, I guess.

Like, it's very murky, and people on the left, people are left expecting to be working and responsive all the time. And so, that's his quote. He's like, people don't know what to expect at their jobs. And so, Haney actually thinks that there are like hundreds of thousands of Californians, again, in the laptop class who don't know what their job expectations are. laptop class who don't know what their job expectations are. It doesn't like for me, this is like, not actually realistic and not happening. I think I there is an interesting thing here. At least I think that Haney is correct to address new behaviors in a world where we fundamentally change because of technology, right? The phone

has changed behavior. I think people are way more connected now than they ever were. I think it has a lot of negative effect on our lives too. I sort of agree with all of these different things. I think it's worth talking about. I think it's a crazy thing to pass a law on. It's specifically crazy because one, I don't know what kind of law you would pass to really fix this problem of a fundamental shift in society because of a technology that's changed the way that we communicate. But what he sort of does is he erases the possibility for opting into a situation where really you work at a startup, for example. There's no such thing as a startup that can just clock out after, you know, after the hours of five or before the hours of

nine, it doesn't, it doesn't work that way. Like there's work all the time. There are lots of jobs, even outside of startups that are like this, you're working in a newsroom, and you're chasing a story, they don't just stop in the middle of a story, because well, I've like reached my average hours per week, you're on salary, you're not getting paid by the hour. And if you want to get paid by the hour, you can do that. There are jobs where you can do that. I think it is a complicated labor issue, and I would be more willing to sort of even entertain it if it wasn't framed in such a way as was like, I personally would not even be permitted to opt into a situation like this. You see this huge push also on the left to, and again, when I say left, it's, I'm talking far left, like Rose in bio left hammer and sickle in bio left leftists, like crazy deranged Twitter left. Uh, you see a push to ban

like what they call child labor, which is 14 year olds working at McDonald's or something. see a push to ban like what they call child labor, which is 14 year olds working at McDonald's or something. Anyone who is a teenager getting a job, which I is another situation where I think to myself, it's not your right to tell me what I can and cannot do my job when I was 13 working illegally. And then 14 when I started working legally on the boardwalk, it changed my life for the better. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I worked all the time. I absolutely loved it. I made new friends.

I had my own money. I had freedom. And it was all sort of with a kind of training wheel situation. And I get that these, you know, high level, the reason we even have child labor laws is because you have these situations of exploitation or whatever. You had kids, you know, forced in factories and whatnot by their family. Okay, that's not what's happening here. What's happening here is you are telling me a adult perfectly capable of making his own decisions on the way that he wants to live,

how to live. And it annoys me. It really does. It infuriates me, I would say. I'm infuriated, River. It's a professional class politics. Is it essentially what it is? There's been this weird move on the left. And I wrote about this a lot early in my career, how the modern left is essentially just a form of upper middle class politics or PMC politics, class politics, whatever you want to call it. And that's basically what this is. Because if you are a working class person, you are not going to be getting Slack messages at all. And you're definitely not going to be getting them in the middle of the night.

And I do sometimes. And that's fine because I signed up for this. And I get a nice salary and whatever. and I get a nice salary and whatever. I think it's kind of ridiculous to go after that. I mean, they're clearly playing to their... The left is clearly playing to its base, which is no longer working-class people.

It is people who have email jobs. And, I mean, that in and of itself is one of the craziest political developments I think of the 21st century is that the people is that this great divide between the left and the working class it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger I find it fascinating for that reason but i mean i yeah i mean i don't like you know sometimes it is kind of hard to find a work-life balance um if you work remotely if you have a job where you're like you know journalism where you're kind of on the clock all the time but it's what you signed up for. And, um, if you can't handle it, then,

you know, you have to get another shot. I don't know what, I sort of thought that you would have, uh, out of everyone here been the most kind of interested, at least in the question or like you're clearly interested, but like open to it for some reason, do you not kind of, could you, could you maybe steal me where they're coming from? Yeah. I mean, where they're coming from is they want a, they want to create more work life balance, um, for people. They don't have,

they view it as a labor issue where, you know, productivity has risen yet. A lot of people in these sort of email job positions feel like they're still on the clock all the time. It creates these neuroses and, uh, the constant sense of anxiety your slack notifications your sleep

whatever and i get it but uh it's what you signed up for i i just really don't like growing up the way i did like i never thought i would have a job where this sort of thing would even be a problem to me as opposed to like paying my bills so i i kind of just don't have a lot of sympathy for this type of shit i don't i don't know it irritates me uh it feels like uh sort of snobbish upper middle class complaining and i don't i don't like that which you know this is like that tyler the creator tweet about cyber bullying that he posted in 2012 just just like shut the laptop like yeah i mean come on it is it's hard i can see but then again i mean honestly when people don't respond who's the call me now solana i don't i don't buy this at all i feel like i might be the

close so what do you think about this first before I say where I think I land here? Well, I think that this is... I mean, my issue with this bill really is that I think it's not going to change anything in practice and it's just going to add a lot of ridiculous red tape. I mean, there's a clause in it that if you're going to have a job

that might require round-the-clock work at times or work at odd hours, you have to specify it in someone's contract. And so for a startup, I would assume every startup is going to have a clause in the contract that says you might be required to work around the clock if we have a big product launch coming up or something like that. Which is like, okay, so what is this bill going to do in practice? I mean, you're going to have to, like, add some clauses to a contract. Some employee might get mad and sue you. So I guess there's legal fees with that. And maybe, you know, you'll have to pay out some money from the Department of, you know, the Department of Labor might advocate on their behalf or something, and a company might have to pay out some money in settlements if they don't add that clause to the contract. But in practice, it just seems like totally,

I mean, California already has all this insane, like, it's a miracle that the tech industry emerged here because the state has so many insane many insane like requirements on running a company and, um, you know, all of this red tape. And this is just more of the same thing. I mean, I am actually sympathetic to people who want to disconnect at 5 PM,

but I think that this bill is not gonna really do anything meaningful to that. Uh, and again, I feel like my instinct with these things is like you opt in to the jobs and if you have a problem with the company culture in an ideal world i guess you know you could maybe try to change it um or sort of yeah is there an exception for doctors or people like that jobs where like somebody dies if you don't show up or because i mean that seems

like crazy to me where if i'm like in the hospital and like there's only one doctor in the area that knows that can like do my heart surgery or whatever and he's like sorry off the clock like all these bills work where it's sort of ambiguous and then they just punish you if they don't like you um and it's it's like you kind of don't know until you know. I do think the broader – this is similar to the app thing in a way, but I think this one is more interesting or more compelling. If we're living in a world where everybody has opted into the system or enough people have opted in that you sort of have to opt in to, to compete. And we can, we can just divorce this right now from the work issue. We could just talk about the expectation that I have from my friends that I respond to texts fairly quickly is very new. And, or, or my, certainly my, my family, my mom, like, uh, my, like my partner, it's,

that's, that is a strange behavior that never existed before that went from, I mean, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you could kind of let a text sit, but at this point you really can't, um, you're expected to sort of respond. And, uh, respond. And that has kind of default opted all of society into a level of connectivity that many people are probably not – most people, I bet, are probably not comfortable with. I think most people probably would like to be more unplugged. But it's very hard to do that socially now because so many people are on. No? Yeah. Just turn the phone off dude yeah but there are consequences for that that never existed before is what i yeah i think that's a good point i just for me like i can't get over i just don't i don't

buy i have a hard time buying the necessity of this particular bill? First off, like all the normies that I know that work email jobs, none of them work hard at all. They all take super long lunches. They wake up at 8.59 AM because they're all working from home still. And they take off as soon as they can, like at 4 59 PM, they're off. I don't, I totally don't buy this notion that there are a bunch of, um, exploited upper middle-class workers that are getting nightmares from their Slack messages who can't just shut off the phone and, uh, who can't, who have like opted into jobs that would even do that to them. I don't, I don't see it. Like it's, I don't think it's realistic. who have opted into jobs that would even do that to them. I don't see it.

I don't think it's realistic. It's all the not... You have to imagine it's the San Francisco nonprofit industrial complex type person and the government worker who are working nine to fives, who are complaining the most about this. And the ironic thing is, I don't want this bill to pass, but probably if all of those people were doing less work, it would be better.

I mean, the government's not doing work at all at this point. But on the nonprofit side, it would be a social benefit if they just fucking stopped for a little while. Last thoughts on this before we move on to the war on algebra. Yeah, I think it feeds into the ambient anxiety of the upper middle class that Barbara Ehrenreich described pretty well in Fear of Falling, which is a book that was written really like the professional classes because your job is your identity and there is you kind of have to always be on even if you don't work that hard you have to be prepared to work at any time and like the if you don't if you aren't able to do that then you are going to if you don't, if you aren't able to do that, then you are going to fall and you're,

it's, it's difficult to, you, you've lost your identity and you have to become like a regular sort of like shift worker. And, uh, you lose not only your job and your income, but you also kind of lose your identity in a way.

And I think that like that, that's sort of like a little bit of what this is about it's not that people don't necessarily are like afraid of like responding to an email or at 6 p.m or whatever they don't want to have to like think about the email they want to be treated like um a waiter or whatever to be honest the happiest i've ever been in my life was when I was like a waiter and I was broke because I would go in, I would clock in, and then I got off and I got drunk all the time. I was also in my 20s, so like, it didn't matter.

But like, I mean, that was kind of, you know, you are very, like, you don't think about work when you're not at work. And that's what people want, but they also want the income and the prestige and the identity of being like, well, you know, I'm a coder or I'm a identity of being like well you know I'm a code or I'm a writer I'm you know whatever and you can't have it all

there's trade-offs to everything and you just have to accept that and if you can't then you know choose a slower pace choose a different you know lifestyle but just accept that there's gonna be less money that comes along with it that's just I think it's an interesting distinction. I was also, I was a barista and I loved it. It was the best job I ever had. It wouldn't be the best job I ever had, but it was that probably the happiest, like the most peaceful that I ever was. And that's just not how art works and that's not how building companies works.

And that's not how really demanding jobs where you feel like you've accomplished something tremendous work, work comes where it comes and you work as hard as you have to do to get something done. And yeah, that's that. Sorry, Matt Haney. I know you've never had a real job in your life, but this is not how working works. There's a there's an obvious way to sort of raise your self confidence and be proud of yourself is to do work that you're proud of. And to do work that you're proud of, it's not usually easy. And I think, like you said, River, the laptop class here in California

is trying to have its cake and eat it too. And they're not gonna get there by limiting their work hours, even though they already don't work hard. I'm imagining like those- already don't work hard i'm imagining like they do not work hard these there's nobody that's that all there's so many companies you can go to where they're giving you mental health days they're giving you half day fridays um hr is just buzzing around asking if you're all right there's perks you know like this still exists nobody in california in the laptop class is just like,

who does, who has not, like, nobody's being forced to work more than they want to, except for those people who are opting in and actually doing, you know, like things that they care about. Um, I do want to move on. Sanjana, you've probably been watching this kind of, uh, I guess yet another dust up over the question of whether or not we should be teaching our kids math on Twitter, centering on Gary Tan and a company he invested in and this one deranged activist, I believe activists, I don't know, media personality. I don't know what she is. Just tell me the story and let's talk about math. personality. I don't know what she is. Just tell me the story and let's talk about math.

Yeah. Speaking of members of the laptop class in California with nebulous job descriptions. I mean, so basically, you know, last week we talked about Joe Bowler and this kind of push to water down math education across California, which is happening in public schools all over the country. One of the solutions that enterprising people have sort of thought of, uh, to fight back against this, like idiotification of math education is creating their own companies that teach kids, uh,

math and accelerated pace. And so one of these companies is called Mentava. Uh, Gary Tan happens to be invested in it. Um,'t know if maybe through YC, I'm not sure. But the company seems pretty cool. It's like an app that has all of these sort of courses and you can put very young children on it and they will learn up to college level courses before they're in seventh grade. So they teach reading. It looks like per their sort of curriculum, they're trying to teach four-year-olds kindergarten and first grade math, which is pretty cool. Apparently they're trying to teach seventh graders AP calculus and fifth fifth graders AP Computer Science, Algebra 1 and 2 in fourth grade. And they have a sort of, you know, interesting pedagogical approach where they're

doing flipped classrooms where kids sort of self-study the material and then they can work with a tutor, I think, who will sort of help them reinforce the concepts. And they have a ton of interest, even though I'm not even sure they've launched officially yet. So anyway, that brings us to Emily Mills, who I'm not actually sure what she does. She's always on Twitter. I mean, everyone who's like familiar with SF Twitter politics knows who SF Mills, which is her username is she's also really obsessed with you solana she uh like has this long tweet thread where she's like mike solana of pirate wires and founders fund yeah you should you should look into it uh it's like also involved she was involved in the school

board recall hell yeah she brings up the one of us this is this is fan behavior. Hi, Emily. Thank you for your support. It was actually a really good promo for us. Yeah, she mentions your interview with Chris Rufo. She's a fan. Wow. She watches closer than... She looked into... Well, not as close as my mom,

but she's one of my biggest fans, it sounds like. Yeah, she read the About page on PirateWire. Anyway, so Emily Mills tweets out screenshots one of my biggest fans it sounds like yeah she read the about page on pyrowires anyway so emily mills tweets out like screenshots of the slide deck from mentava which are saying you know we're going to teach two-year-olds to read a second grade level and all this kind of cool stuff um and she's like why do these folks want kids learning math so fast uh and then she screenshots something uh where i don't know someone someone associated with the company is like you know we want to accelerate human achievement

and they're talking about how many lives would be lost if the mrna vaccine came a year later so this is kind of this idea that you know we should be educating kids well and as early as possible so that we can you know innovate more more effectively in the short and long term. And she then says, she sort of reframes her critique as like, this is an attempt to exploit children's labor because basically the idea is these tech bros want to teach kids advanced math and coding so that they can build products for them and become this under you know underclass

of cheap labor um but can we just paint a picture of what that is that's like i'm imagining just like thousands of like little 10 year olds in lab coats at a chalkboard just doing addition and shit like that's crazy that's a awesome in a way, but very weird. It's like a very bizarre, niche, dark fantasy. But that's not even what she's saying. She's saying they want, the tech bros are coming after your future labor. I don't think that she's saying that the tech bros are going to exploit 10-year-olds. No, she does say, she says, are going to exploit 10 year olds no she does say she says um she she cites a video of a kid of not a kid of a guy um who works for replit i guess which is invest in yeah mentava and she said

these investors literally want the kids labor um and she then doubles down in comments and talks and that guy so that he he responds and he's like, because she goes off on Balaji as well. And she goes after him for saying he's going to create, we're going to do, we're going to take over, create new institutions, blah, blah, blah. And she's like, this is scandalous. They're going to take over. They're going to do new things and create a new world. And Amjad is like, yes, we are doing that.

Did you really think you could just capture the schools, brainwash our kids, ban math, and we wouldn't do something about it? Like we're just going to give you our children? No. Yeah. So it was a fun, it was a fun, crazy war. She had a lot of support, it seemed like. I mean, she, it wasn't like, yes, she's a crazy person, but she has thousands of followers. She has a lot of like, she's part of that whole sort of scene of hard left. I don't know if activists, personalities, whatever, the people who sort of feel the local elections. At one point, someone asks her, what is your beef with trying to teach math? And she responds and says, what is my beef with turning little toddlers into learning robots so people can use them for their future labor and bragging rights while partnering while partnering with people who plan to utilize taxpayer-funded government services until they are too big to fail and can start their own she also said it was only men who were going after her and her implication was that like men are in some way especially obsessed with teaching math to kids and then i guess maybe being interested in math

and i'm sitting here thinking like who is the is this the feminist position that only men care about math i don't know seems suspicious river what we're about to say it reminds me of like old school anarchists that i used to meet sometimes when i was like more on the left where their their whole thing is like school is bad because it teaches your kid how to be a good little worker like it like it prepares them for the workforce where they can be exploited by capital worker like it like it prepares them for the workforce where they can be exploited by capitalists i'm like well that's gonna happen anyway so it's like a weird thing where they don't the idea that education should have anything to do with like labor

productivity which is like what the society builds i don't i don't know what these people like everybody in the fucking soviet union was a civil I don't know what these people like everybody in the fucking Soviet union was a civil engineer. Like, you know what I mean? Like they had like, like they actually were pretty invested in like making people learn practical skills to the point where it kind of actually got out of hand because they

were like, you know, they figured out when you were like five, like what your occupation was going to be or whatever. Um, but it's like, it's really, uh, it's like it's really uh it's so it's so strange to me like that argument that like kids like shouldn't be prepared uh to for the workforce that you should not you shouldn't

teach them practicable skills that it should just all be reading like audrey lord or something or but it's crazy don't you just sort of get the sense that she doesn't really believe this i i think that the left in sf in all the cities really this has been this is in new york this is a big deal in boston i've seen this play out um they got themselves in hot water by you know going after gifted and talented programs algebra specifically is under fire in California because not necessarily we don't want our kids to learn math. It started because only some kids were learning algebra at a certain age. And those kids were the gifted kids who were doing better at math

and they were sort of weighted into these things. So in an effort, I think, to do something that they perceived as the far left perceived as like equitable, an equality issue, a race-based issue, they created this sort of strange dynamic where they were going after, the education people were going after teaching kids. And so the really loony tunes like Emily then, they see all this happening and rather than be like, well, wait a minute,

maybe my guys are wrong about something. For example, like, I think that we should teach kids math actually actually, they have to actually find a way in their mind to justify what they think the left is actually fighting for. And in this case, we shouldn't teach our kids math. And so she creates this bizarre fantasy, where, you know, we're teaching kids math, so they can participate in capitalism or something. And you can go after it in that dimension. But I don't I just get the sense she doesn't really believe it i think it's all just like you know reptilian lizard brain reaction to the discourse yeah i mean i do think though

in my mind like equity to the extent that equity means equality of outcome these people if you're advocating for equity in education you're always going to be advocating for gifted kids to not perform in gifted ways because you then won't have a quality of outcome i mean emily mills seems like totally disingenuous also like an aside on her is she said she was leaving twitter in like last june or something for mastodon or blue sky and she's like she's got an insane amount of uh of tweets still you know what is going on has anyone checked in on mastodon i still don't even know what it is is it the same as blue sky yeah blue sky i'll see screenshots of every now and then but mastodon i haven't heard of in ages i think the blues at least blue sky was where they um they uncovered the uh the linux backdoor hack that we had to take on a few days ago so something's happening there all right go off presumably none of those will ever work because

it's only libs going there like twitter is the hate site like you have to have your foil you know what i mean like you have to have like somebody to fight with otherwise it doesn't work like that's why people go on twitter is to fight with other people yeah it's you cannot there's never going to be a nice twitter there's never going to be like a libs only twitter or conservatives only twitter that's i mean the reason that blue sky doesn't work is the same reason that what is Trump's thing? Truth. Social. Yeah, this is the same thing.

I only see screenshots of that if Trump is posted. And that's only because he's on there because he's like contractually obligated or whatever. He wants to come back to Twitter. You can tell i think i what's i mean i want to believe that's true because i do enjoy his tweets and sort of the way they affect the world around them sort of like it's like in the matrix like you're the one and you just bend reality he's like that with short form content um but i i get the sense that he has a weird rivalry with Elon Musk. And I think Trump's really suspicious of Elon, sort of naturally.

He looks to men like that and doesn't see. If he can't be in charge of something or someone, I think it's threatening to him. I don't know. Has he said anything, though? Because he can't keep his mouth shut. He did. He's gone after Elon before. And Elon's been extending all of wrenches because elon has a business to run and he's like this man this man is gonna bring in the money we need trump back

on the platform um so he's been doing nothing but extending overtures and trump's not been biting um i think he's it'll see how i think we'll see how it'll depend how hard this election is. And if he's 50-50, I think there's no keeping him off of Twitter. But if he's winning, overwhelmingly, I don't know. River, you have a crazy fucking story that you need to tell us about. Take us to the heart of darkness.

Again, back to San Francisco. Sorry, it's a heavy SF week. But we got to talk about squatters. Again, back to San Francisco. Sorry, it's a heavy SF week, but we got to talk about squatters. I'll get to San Francisco. Let me set it up. So there has been squatting is the hot new craze taking over cities and various properties in various cities.

Everybody's doing it, mostly Venezuelans, but everybody's doing it mostly venezuelans but everybody's doing it um by the way i've got pull this off marlinski venezuelan migrants who got released from an ice processing center in texas went to the bronx and took over a house and pulled these people up because people are going to be like rivers being racist again racist again. These are the whitest Venezuelans I've ever seen in my life. Blonde hair, like Hitler youth. Yeah, this is, Brandon says this all, Brandon says it's only white people who squat.

And ever since he told me that, every time I see a picture, it's like, they're white. It's like dirtbag, white barista looking people. Right. Of various nationalities. so you've got these white devils taking over a house in a poc neighborhood a woman in queens uh we talked about her a couple weeks ago she was arrested for changing the locks on her own house it was like a house that she had inherited from her parents.

In San Antonio, even, they hired a contractor and the contractor started squatting their house. Everybody's doing it. There was that Venezuelan migrant who was like, mi gente, like telling Venezuelans how to squat. All kinds of crazy, the squatters are taking over. DeSantis passed a law that says that if you live in Florida, you can basically get the sheriff to come to your house while you kick the squatters out.

You don't have to go through the normal eviction process. A new bill in New York, which is less, I guess, comprehensive than the one in Florida, was also introduced to address this problem. All this goes back to San Francisco and the Tenants Union, which has been shaping housing policy in San Francisco since the 1970s. A couple of decades ago, they formed an organization in conjunction with Food Stop Bombs, the annoying anarchist food bank. They do some, I mean, it's nice. They're feeding people whatever,

but they're dirtbags and they're annoying. And they all claim to be straight edge, but they're all on coke. I know these people. They formed this organization together called Homes Not Jails, which is basically just a squatting organization. They recruit homeless people to take over buildings.

They tell you how to squat. They connect you with resources if you're squatting and somebody tries to kick you out. And they are still deeply interconnected with the San Francisco Tenants Union. Homes Not Jails shares a website with the San Francisco Tenants Union. Like their, Homes Not Jails shares a website with the San Francisco Tenants Union. And that website contains a link of vacant buildings,

vacant, which may just mean nobody's there. I mean, this is the really crazy part. That you can squat. The fact that they have a list of properties to go and take is, I don't, I feel like I'm always saying things are crazy in this podcast. Crazy, fucking crazy. I think it's crazy. That's just crazy. But this is crazy. That's crazy. That is, it's, it's crazy to me that you have an organization just openly doing this.

I don't even know what is the steel man for squatting rights? Because they seem it's something that seems so insane that there has to be. And it exists. Some version of this exists in all 50 states. So like, what is the what is the thing that happened somewhere that made most people say, oh, we need to protect, you know, this? I looked into this. Actually, it goes all the way back to medieval English common law.

It's not like, and basically the deal was if you're in the middle ages in England, land is very scarce. It's an agricultural society. So if somebody goes on a crusade and dies or like disappears for whatever reason, it's, there's not always a way to get a hold of them or to get a hold of

like relatives or whatever so they didn't want all this land to go unused and for people to importantly people not to be paying property taxes to the crown and so if you were someone who was like i'll go into this farm and i'll work the land and i'll pay the taxes or whatever um they basically said okay if you do that for a certain amount of time you can keep it because this person abandoned their property or there's no one to take care of it. So it's yours now if you fork the land. It was formed by the material circumstances of literally the Middle Ages. So, like, it doesn't really apply to what's going on in San Francisco today, but it's been carried out, you know, through the centuries, through common law, and that's basically the basis for squatting, you know, legally. in cities across the u.s there are just sort of like buildings that have been vacant for years

and that will not you know it's like there are some buildings probably that have been vacant for 10 years 15 years and we should allow if if if it could be a shelter for home for a homeless person then they should just be allowed to to go in and until and to sleep under that roof because there's like no end in sight to the vacancy of this building and nobody's getting hurt because they're doing that. I think that – I feel like that's sort of the spirit of squatting in America today. Yeah, you can make that case, but a lot of times it's not what's happening. They're not taking over vacant warehouses or whatever. They're taking over people's houses. The case that you cited in San Francisco with the people who were remodeling their house, that is messed up. What was that one? Tell the story.

Yeah, it was a young couple expecting a baby they had just bought a house in san francisco and you know permits in the city are crazy so they're having to get permits to remodel the house so they can move into it as a fixer-upper and as the remodeling is going on squatters come in and they take over the house and it was you know the article i cited they still hadn't gotten their house back from the squatters no it's just a drug den yeah the the squatters that came in everybody's doing two ways so there are a lot of vacant buildings um though i think it's interesting that again like these laws have always been around and everywhere and as river mentioned they go back you know forever so it's i don't think it's like,

it's this very specific modern thing is maybe not why the laws exist, but it's how they're being justified today. But why are there so many vacant homes or places, let's say, in San Francisco? Part of this is foreign buyers and people holding investment property. But the problem is there's a fear of renting your place because once someone enters your house in a really liberal city, or let's not even say liberal, let's say a really blue city, you can't get them out if they stop paying. It takes, I wish I knew the exact number,

but it's an obscenely long period of time. I think it's gotta be at least a year before someone not paying or something like this. And that's only if they don't have kids. Once they have kids, it's a whole other complicated situation, but it's just hard to get people out. And it's like all of the sort of anti,

I'm gonna say, we're gonna defend landlords for a second. They got a raw deal in these big blue cities. And this is one of the things where you can straight up just sort of, you can enter a house and really almost not leave. And so of course, I mean, if that's what you're up against, if you're sitting on a house, you're maybe going to sell it in a year or two years, three years, whatever, is it worth taking on the risk that you're going to get somebody who screws you to that degree. And I think a lot of

people in San Francisco think not. This is also why you keep seeing a push from the Board of Supervisors to introduce a tax on vacant homes. They think they can, well, the homes are vacant, so if we just tax it, it'll force them to let people in. But of course, that policy is not going to help because the reason the houses are vacant is because of other policies they've already passed that make it really not smart to rent in a lot of circumstances. Sanjay, is this something that you've crossed at all? Yeah, well, I mean, I think San Francisco has a sitting supervisor who's declared his district an eviction-free zone. I mean, this is Dean Preston. He's literally said, you know, on my watch, I don't want any evictions happening um

and he was responsible for getting the city has a permanent eviction moratorium on non-payment due to non-payment of rent during covid so like you know if you were unable to pay i don't exactly know what time period they used to define covid but if you were like if you didn't pay your rent um at any point throughout that you can't you can't be evicted um i mean and i do think dean preston oh sorry i was gonna say dean preston and the san francisco tenants union the organization we're talking about they did a uh that he they endorsed him and they've worked with him and he did a uh workshop with them at the tenderloin museum like they're very close yeah yep and dean started tenants together which is an organization that does you know this kind of similar tenants rights advocacy that gets really extreme i mean i think like the funny thing about all of this is you look at the people who are involved in this like

activism a lot of them live in the hate um they are you know they come from money um many of them kind of like you know they either have inherited properties themselves like dean uh or they you know opt into these like co-ops where they live you know collectively and that kind of thing but they have no sense of like they they have this totally infantilizing view also of homeless people because they're they're like entirely disconnected from the reality of like who the homeless in san francisco actually are it's like the homeless in san francisco are not people who have been priced out of homes that they were already paying for in san francisco these are drug tourists many of whom are like actively psychotic who you know you put them in the sros they have ways to

get rooms here and they just destroy them uh like it's i don't know i think there's there's a lot of um levels at which the people who are advocating for squatting here are like completely disconnected from even the like poor and dispossessed people they claim to be trying to empower. I think that the squatting thing does have the potential to become a major national story, especially it's an election year. It's an easy thing to talk about. And it's a hard thing to go after if you're on the left and Biden is, um, you're going to lose, he's already having trouble with his base on the Palestine stuff. Like you take away squatting. I mean, you lose the baristas forever. And I don't know that the Democrats can handle that because who is left as

river you mentioned earlier, like they've lost the working class. What is left in that party? Uh, they, they really need? They really need the coalition. I don't know. Do you think? Because, I mean, DeSantis is already making it an issue by going after it. I can see this becoming something that every state sort of has to address. Also, the more that people expose that these laws exist, I think the more squatting is going to happen.

I think probably we'll see a spike of this in places like New York and San Francisco, because a lot of losers are just learning for the first time that you can literally just take someone's house and it's fine. Yeah. The San Francisco Tenants Union website even tells you kind of how to do it. And they basically tell people to lie and to say that whenever they try to evict you to say that you have a verbal agreement with the landlord to lease the house and that you're leasing it

and then you have to go through like a whole court process and blah blah blah and the thing is is that if you stay at the building long enough under like certain circumstances you can actually like get the deed like you could actually literally permanently steal the house uh and i don't know if they've done that with individual houses with homes not jails but they've definitely done it um

they even brag about it on their website with um with like vacant uh industrial buildings where they've gotten homeless people in the buildings got them to stay there forever fought off evictions and eventually just literally took over the house it would be crazy to be sort of a venezuelan like border hopper who hears about on tiktok you're you're hearing about like these strange American laws where it's like finders keepers. If you see an empty house, you can just walk in. And they really I mean, what I don't know, like if you're not from the country, and you hear that you're like, is that man, it is the land of milk and honey, we got to get there as fast as we can. And then they get here. And it's like,

I don't know, I guess it's sort of true, but maybe frowned upon. Certainly, I'm frowning upon it now. I'm excited to see how the story plays out. Great talking about it with you guys today. Thanks for talking about it in the comments section. Tell everybody about this podcast. Rate, review, subscribe, or die. Talk to you next week.