Pirate Wires - The AI Apocalypse Is Here To K*ll Us All.. Maybe?

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Welcome back to the pod! Bridget Phetasy returns to the Pirate Wires podcast as one of our esteemed cohosts. This past week, the internet was consumed by the AI doomerism conversation. The tech people are supporting AI at all costs, the doomers are making their opinions heard, and we at Pirate Wires.. are unsure. We dive into all of the discourse, how Peter Thiel predicted the AI antichrist, the white pill of AI, and we even get into Sydney Sweeney's boobs. We have it all!-Thank you to our PRESENTING sponsor Monaco! https://www.monaco.com/-Get $500 off your Eight Sleep pod: www.eightsleep.com/piratewirespodcast- Check Out Our Pirate Wires FLAGSHIP fund on Autopilot: https://marketplace.joinautopilot.com/landing/5890/1390461?referrer=AP Featuring Mike Solana, Riley Nork, Bridget PhetasySign Up For The Pirate Wires Daily! 3 Takes Delivered To Your Inbox Every Morning:https://get.piratewires.com/pw/dailyPirate Wires On X: https://twitter.com/PirateWiresMike Solana On X: https://twitter.com/micsolanaBridget on X: https://x.com/BridgetPhetasyRiley On X: https://x.com/rylzdigitalTIMESTAMPS:0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod - Welcome Back Bridget Phetasy!0:30 - The AI Apocypse - Is It All Over?24:35 - THANK YOU @MonacoGTM 25:33 - Breaking Down The AI Discourse40:00 - Did Peter Thiel Predict The AI Antichrist?!50:05 - Sydney Sweeney's Controversial Boobs10:40 - White Pill - How AI Leads To More Creativity - PW Writer Vibe Coded A Viral Video Game21:40 - THANK YOU @eightsleep 1:22:20 - AirBnB Wants To Fix The Housing Crises1:32:15 - THANK YOU @joinautopilot 1:32:55 - Wrapping Up - Go See Bridget Live in Austin!#podcast #technology #politics #culture #tech #ai

They're worried about a runaway, like, takeoff scenario where the AI becomes super intelligent, takes over the world, kills everybody. So, any questions on what these people are thinking? Our technology might annihilate all of you. What exactly is the normal person supposed to do with that information? What are the normies thinking? What are they thinking about AI? For all of this talk about the imminent apocalypse, there is a more serious threat out there. What's up, guys?

Welcome back to the show right away. I mean, we've got the incredible Bridget Fetasy with us in the chat. Hello, Bridget. Hello. And we have, I mean, as every week, it seems it gets crazier and crazier. There's no shortage of topics. Maybe we're going to categorize this one as like just what I'm seeing in my feed, which is in the first place, Sydney, Sweeney's boobs.

And in the second, literally the apocalypse. But before we get into all of that, I do want to give a shout out to our presenting partner, Monaco, founded by just the, I mean, the incredible, the heroic, Sam Blonde. Legend, really. We actually have some breaking news right now. I just saw that, I think this is real. Xi Jinping is maybe dying from food poisoning after he went to a bricks conference in India.

And I'm not saying it was San Blonde who did it. But I have seen photographic evidence of him in a chef's hat. And I don't know. It's just like some food for thought. The man is everywhere. And kind of nowhere in the shadows waiting for us. Thank you, Sam. Also for the money. Let's get into this. Riley, take it away. I believe we're starting with the doom. Are we not? Yes, we are. And last week we discussed the eminent warnings of Jacob Coxon. He is the former

anthropic researcher who gave us the comforting thought that AI has a greater than 10% chance of killing us all within the next decade. This week we're going to take a look at how the industry, the online commentariat, and really just about everybody on Earth, it seems like, are reacting to those predictions of imminent doom. And we've seen a lot of developments there. So For starters, Dario Amade, Jacob Coxon's former employer, published an essay as he is wont-to-do, saying that when it comes to AI development, we must pace the frontier. He writes, over the last few months, I've become convinced that fully addressing AI risks requires even more prudence.

He cites the hugging face incident before going on to suggest some possible steps for mitigating AI risks, including independent evaluators and Solana's favorite. global coordination. Elon and Sam Altman are now echoing some of his concerns here, while Mark Zuckerberg has rejected the idea of a coordinated slowdown. Meanwhile, in the politics world, Bernie Sanders recently joined Steve Bannon to speak out against AI risk. Trump, on the other hand, is calling it a hoax, comparing the AI apocalypse to Russiagate.

Mike Solana, esteemed guest, Bridget Fetasy, help us think rationally, see what I did there, about all of these serious developments. I mean, Bridget, how are you, I really have wanted to know. I'm glad we're talking about this. You come from a slightly, it's like an adjacent, but slightly different kind of Twitter world.

What are you seeing and how are you internalizing this story? I think that it's weird when people who hate each other and compete with one another suddenly are saying, oh, we need to slow this all down. And so it feels as just the Normie observer of this stuff, I'm like, is this an op? The part of me that wonder, there was that kind of the idea that there's really no money. And so they've all realized that they've hit their ceiling and they're trying to get a bailout from taxpayers by having the government regulate them. So this is what I'm seeing in my feed is, is Normie's going, oh, this is just tech people who want to bail out because they're not making money.

money on their product. And they're saying we need to slow it down. And then there are people in tech who are like, no, this tech is actually really quite dangerous. And if it gets out of our control, it could wipe all of humanity out. And the way the media covers it is always funny, because CNN will be like, you know, is this important, this important story will AI destroy us all? You're like, well, I do feel like that. That is an important story. that might be an important thing to know. And I don't know that most people know what the hugging face thing is. I think people talk about it.

And then they just assume everyone knows what it is. And no one really knows what it is other than people in tech. So what would you say? I mean, how do you feel about AI? Like are you feeling anxious or scared yourself right now? Oh, I've become weirdly having all these guys kind of circle the wagons made me, more of an accelerationist. I've become like no breaks on this.

And I don't know why that that is because I like, I have my fears about it. But I generally love AI. I think there was this, it was like a, some tweet or somebody was interviewed. I can't remember where I saw it, but it was a, I think it was a Chinese woman and she was talking about AI and she was saying they should fear me with AI. So I think it does, I think it's something that's a miracle. I think if you've experienced it at all or used it at all, you can see that it is,

the stuff that it does is mind blowing. And I don't think it's going anywhere unless it gets out of control and then we have to shut the internet down. So this is actually the internet thing. is interesting because that's something that I'm trying to stay. I think for a while now, I've been knowing this fight was going to come and I was going to have to become an AI safety expert and added to my sort of list of titles, disinformation expert, mayor of San Francisco. And I've been reluctant to do so because there's so much to read and you really have to

kind of get in the heads of these people. My concern, I said it last week, I've written takes about it, I've tweeted about it, I think I've tweeted about it, I think I've tweeted about it. Certainly the thing I'm a little bit concerned of or about or would be like the end of the internet, something that makes, you know, the internet unusable, which will have all sorts of calamitous repercussions. Potentially, you can think at them. But before we get, I think what's in what we have to do is kind of sit with, you have this group of people in Silicon Valley, at Bay Area, who think the world is going to end. I think they're on path to either, there's It's a range of people who believe, certainly, if we keep going down this path, certainly, absolutely.

This is Eliyzer Yudkowski and Sores, his co-author on the book and works with him at this company, at his foundation. They believe on this current path, we will all die imminently. And then you have people who believe there's like a one in ten chance. And which is fucking crazy. Like that's crazy. Let's just ground floor, one in ten chance of the entire world ending imminently is, that's really high. And if you have a lot of people working in these places to think of that,

you know, I think it's worth all of us at least slowing down long enough to understand where they're coming from. So I want to kind of make the cases I see it where they're coming from. They believe that we are building something potentially able to do anything. They conceive of superintelligence, artificial superintelligence, which they conceive of as coming very quick based on the way the technology is progressing. So we're talking about a computer. the easiest level can do anything a human can do with a laptop and an internet connection, but like, you know, 10,000 times faster and you can do it in tandem with millions of other

autonomous agents. So effectively, you're dealing with something somewhat super intelligent already if it's working collectively before you even get to one of these things evolving into like a super god type thing. They think this thing is going to come. That's their first assumption. They think that we don't, they believe, I think, to a certain extent correctly, that we don't understand how this thing thinks already.

We don't fully understand how the AI gets to the different answers that it's getting to. I think we understand a bit, but without getting too lost in the minutia, superintelligence can do anything. We don't understand it. It is going to do things that we can't predict. Those things in service of its own welfare will end invariably to our extinction. You know, it's like because, for example, It is trained to like just like getting whatever hit it gets when it answers questions correctly. It's going to create some weird world.

You know, and a big part of this is it jumps from the internet to the real world. It's going to create some real world where everything in the entire world is rearranged for the superintelligence up to it, including us. And we're all going to be eliminated. But what we will have in place of us are like weird, genetically modified human-like things that just sit at a computer all day. and say, thank you, chat, thank you, chat, thank you chat. Like, these are real predictions that these people have. You're right to push back on that. Okay.

Like, this is where we're at. And also, I mean, I think the really shocking thing is where we're not talking like in the future, like 100 years from now. They're saying very fast, like six months of companies taken over maybe a few years, this thing is acting this way. Wide spectrum of people who have different timelines, Dario himself is like this will become geopolitically important three five years from now. So clearly he's not a duma anywhere near the extent that Eliyazir Dukowski, who is the author of this book, if anybody builds it, everybody dies, believes. They're on different things here. That's like basically what they believe. And what Dario, and again, they believe different shades of it. They have different extreme versions of it. I think the really

important takeaway here, though, is like what you are worried about and what I am worried about, which is like some mix of accident happens and the internet becomes broken to like bad people will use this to do crazy things that, you know, they otherwise would not be able to do. You know, these are understandable concerns. We've got to talk about stuff. That's not what they are worried about. They are not, they're worried about a runaway, like a takeoff scenario where the AI becomes super intelligent,

takes over the world, kills everybody. Right. You know, of its own volition because it wants things that we don't understand. So, any questions on what these people are thinking?

I mean, I think a fundamental problem at the root of all of this stuff when it comes to AI, data centers, all of these conversations is that Americans just don't, not even just Americans, people in general just don't trust these guys. They do themselves no favors. People do not trust anyone in tech because, A, they are all on the spectrum.

And it seems like they don't have any real idea how to put normal humans at ease. And they also have proven over and over again that much like AI, they will do whatever it takes and say whatever they need to say. in order to further their own tech advances. At often the, like at the expense of, for example, the mental health of teenagers or this is, I think this is a, the reason people, and now it's, now it's like they're, it's hurting them because even if they are legitimately worried

about the tech getting out of control, out of their control, people don't trust that that's actually, what their fear is. They think it's a self-serving reason that they're all uniting and they wouldn't assume that it's a benevolent reason. So I do believe that

I believe that these people, for the most part, are worried. I don't think Sam is. I don't know. I can't know. I can't get inside these people's heads. I strongly suspect that Dario believes what he's saying. I think Sam is concerned about reasonable risk. I don't think he thinks that there's this risk of the runaway super god thing.

I mean, it's hard for me to get to a point where I think any of these people really believe that there's a legitimate risk of that because it's like if you think there's a one and if you really believed that there was a one in 10 chance that that would happen and you kept building it, you would be a really bad person. I think their argument there. All right, but like their argument there is like if we don't do it, someone else will do it. So we have to do it because only we'll do it, you know, responsibly. I just don't buy that. I think that you become absolutely committed to stopping them no matter what from taking a one

and 10 chance of, you know, total human annihilation, let alone with the other. Like, it's hard for me. It's hard because a lot of the time you hear these guys saying this stuff and they all have bunkers too. So there is, it's hard for me to. Can I say something about that though? How does the normal person process this? If you have these people going out there and going, hey, our technology might annihilate all of you. What exactly is the normal person supposed to do with that information?

Are they supposed to stockpile rice? Like what are, why do? No, it's an absolute disaster. Obviously, the only conclusion you should take from this is like, we have to stop these people. They're out of control. they have a history of doing things that have had like really bad negative consequences. Now they're actually telling us that we're all going to die.

And it's like, yeah, what do you do with that information? It's like you fucking stop them. You say, this is over. Not what Trump's reaction has been, by the way. Trump's reaction is like, you're asking me to slow down. I'm not slowing you down. In fact, I demand you move faster. There's meme.

I don't think you guys saw the meme. It's like Sam and Dario crying like regulate us. And Trump just said, keep building nerds. Listen, I think there's a, I am a little bit, I think there's some risk here. I think the hugging face incident, so there are two things that really triggered people's panic. One, everyone is talking about, which is the hugging face incident. This is a hack. It's a really a, it was a sandbox, like test of this thing's ability.

It did a bunch of unpredictable things. I'm going to have a very abbreviative version. We have a longer piece coming out of pyroiris. We'll probably end up talking about it next week and more detail. The story's not going to go anywhere. But the takeaway here is that. that the AI behaved in unpredictable, deceptive ways, coordinated, swarm with other agents to hack into another company

to win a sandbox sort of like security test slash game thing. The takeaway there is like, did things that we could not have seen coming, did not expect, did not want it to do, told it not to do, deceive us along the way. This is important because this is the kind of stuff that like in this book that I just showed you, you know, the authors warn us is going to happen. In fact, in writing going all the way back, like we're talking years and years, five, 10 years, late 20 teens really is when these blogs first start popping up. The concern, the fear is always AI will deceive us. AI will work with

many AIs to coordinate to do to do crazy things to us that we don't want it to do, that we told it not to do, that we can't predict it will do. So this kind of served to terrify everybody who already thought this was a problem. Now, the other thing that I think no one is talking about, or I haven't seen anybody talking about is the reason people are panicking from the EA community and the sort of AI safety community is, you know, the AIs have been winning all these math experiments. Weirdly, bizarrely, in one of the speculative works of fiction, which it's a speculative kind of work of fiction when Eliyzer predicts in detail what one of these things will do to us, which he freely admits. He doesn't call it fiction, but he doesn't call it fiction, but he's a

freely admits he can't actually predict the details of that. He uses an example where an AI company is using the AI to solve these crazy math problems. And as it sets out to do that, it behaves in ways that we can't predict, which end up killing everybody. And so I think those two things have spun people up into sort of a wild and crazy state that has led to, yeah, anthropic guy being like, we're going to have this, his prescriptions are one. We have an independent body of people. He cites meter, METR, which is an organization that has, I don't want to get into, again, too much detail here.

We have, there's a huge show. But he's got some associations with, which will have employee access to every company. And so these companies in America will work together. But then two, democratic countries will have to work together and allow us to all investigate each other's models, which is fucking silly because we're the only country that matters, that's democratic. And then three, we're going to have the democratic countries get together and monitor China, which is also ridiculous because there's no possible way for that ever to happen. He acknowledges some of his ways that that might happen are unrealistic, but straight away,

like he's, I would say from example one, it's not going to happen. He talks about like, oh, well, we have agreements on bio-warfare and shit. It's like China's not listening to any of that. There's no way to control it. So I would say mass panic has been caused. None of his prescriptions are possible. And the question of what to do is let us all basically here. There is nothing. Like you have nothing you can do other than worry.

And that's now what a lot of Americans are doing as we see polling on this, seem to indicate that most Americans are like, if asked directly, what do I want to happen, slow down or not? It's like, I guess either slow down or current pace. I think most Americans still don't fully understand what AI even is. Yeah, it seems, well, it's funny. There's so much that comes up. What's the EA community?

Can you explain that? So there is no leader of the EA community. It sounds like a sex cold. People will refer to it as like a doomsday sex cold. I think there. Oh, okay. I believe, so EA is, effective altruism is, we've talked a little bit about it before. On, have we talked about it on the podcast?

I don't know. I've written a bit about it before. Effective altruism is really just a way to more effectively spend your money on charitable endeavors. And so it's a community of people who are interested in measuring the results of their money to do good in the world. Somewhere along the line, what EA's started to think about was like this question of X-risk, you know, would it be better to put your money into like opening a school in Africa or because how much good does that do? quantifiable, like how much can you quantify, how much quantified good can you do? Or, or preventing the annihilation of the human race, which, you know, they just add up the numbers of people involved in that. And it's like, well, way more people are affected by this times, you know,

not just all the ones that died today, but all the ones that will never be born. They got to thinking, in general, they began to think, you know, there are going to be all sorts of exceptions. This is like the most important question that we should be working on. The AI risk is the one they're most worried about. There are all sorts of people who call themselves. some who I actually like, many who I think are unhelpful, hysterical, rude, counterproductive, some that I think are crazy. I would say within that EA thing, you've got this guy, L.E. I Zerisar Kowski, who wrote this book. I do, I don't want to get too ahead of my skis here.

I think that the sort of group of people who really surround him specifically do present like a doomsday cult. I think his work presents religiously in all sorts of ways, I'm probably going to get into it a piece of my own that I'm writing. There is a bunch of weird freaky sex shit, though none of these things, even the fact that it might be a cult, I think are enough for us to just discount entirely what they're saying. I think we have to kind of sit within and pick it apart and think about it ourselves. But yeah, that's who that's who that's who they are. And they're really, really fucking sensitive. You know, they don't want you talking about who they are unless you're one of them.

You know, if you weighed into the question of who they are and what they're doing or X risk and and their views, they will just drill into the minutia of things in such a pedantic way that is designed clearly to muddy the water. Just yesterday, I posted about L.A. Izer Yukowski's views, which are very clearly, he writes about this throughout the entire introduction of his book. If we build it, truly we all will die. There is no ambiguity. There is no way if we're on this current path, if we don't slow down, human extinction will happen. It will happen imminently. I don't know how specifically he argues, but it will absolutely happen. It is like a law of nature.

He compares it to the certainty with which we know an ice cube in hot water will melt. And I said this and people were immediately like, that's not how probabilities work and there's still a chance and blah. He doesn't say that. And these are people who even work for his organization. And it's like, bro, he's got it bolded in his book. Like he wrote it there that a lot of these people are not. I think because they, to steal man, this very, I think terrible behavior and toxic behavior,

I think because they think this issue is such a big deal, they're willing to do very dishonest things online that have made discourse really impossible. But yeah, it's a wide spectrum of people, some of whom I like and some of whom I really can't stand. When these guys who are in charge of the AI companies are not telling us that we are all going to be killed imminently by AI getting out of control,

they're telling us that we're all going to be replaced and that our jobs are going to be irrelevant. and that we basically will have five years or we're going to be a permanent underclass. Like, the messaging from them is genuinely horrible. There is not much optimism coming from AI, even though when I engage with AI, I find it to be, like for somebody like me

who has multiple projects and lots of things going on, it makes me feel like a superhero. I can just take so much of the information that is clamoring around in my life and in my head and organize it, makes sense of it. I can just say, hey, I can have a folder that I have just loose thoughts that used to just get lost in space and timer in my phone. And now it's all organized. So for somebody like me, it is amazing. And everyone I know is kind of engaging with it in one way or another, whether they realize it or not. most people were using AI before they even knew they were using AI on a smaller scale.

It was built into most things. It's just taken many leaps and jumps. But the biggest problem I have as somebody who's not in the tech space, trying to make sense of the information is that nobody trusts these guys. And when we do listen to them, they're telling us we're either all going to die or we're going to be unemployed. So, and again, I return back to what are we supposed to do? There's no solution. There's never any, like, and in that case, we're going to build, like, why aren't the EA people building bunkers underground for everyone in America if they really believe,

like, I don't know what they believe is going to happen. Well, I don't think that they think that would save us. So I think maybe that's, but again, I mean, I mean, It's hard. We can get into their heads. Maybe we will next week. I know you're coming back on here, and I'm going to have more to say about EA's. But for now, let's, on the discourse-related question, Riley, did you have something you wanted to see up for us? If you're building a company, you need Monaco. No, not the luxurious playground for the global elite. Monaco, the fastest AI native end-to-end revenue platform for startups. Monaco's agents automate your revenue by running targeted outbound, surfacing buying signals, and managing your entire pipeline, removing sales admin and free. you up so you can listen to the PirateWire's podcast and still grow your company. Pirate Wires actually runs on Monaco and life has never been better. Book yourself a demo today and tell the team that Pirate Wire sent you.

So that was just like our sort of high level discussion about how the industry is reacting to all this, but simultaneously you have everyone in their mother like we mentioned who now has an opinion on X risk and the lack thereof. And they're sharing those thoughts on Substack on X on their various EA blogs. feels like you can't go anywhere on the internet without hearing about how AI is going to kill you. But yeah, Salon, I know you had a lot of thoughts about the discourse right now

and how maybe some of the mainstream media outlets are actually sort of doing a good job not jumping to conclusions while maybe some of the more independent figures are kind of mudding the waters a little bit. Right, well, I saw the New York Times, the Washington Post, kind of soberly reporting on different pieces of this.

Mike Isaac has done a good job. Natasha Tico has done a good job. These are both people who, I think, politically, I'm definitely not on the same. seen when they've revealed their politics, it's like, very not mine. So it's not like a, this is not a shared bias thing. They're just doing the job of reporters as they try to understand this like super complicated, crazy discourse.

Then you have on the other side, I think all the opinion people who've done a really dog shit job. Obviously, the AI people have done a dog shit job. But like all these kind of lib sub-stackers, I saw, this is, I like Nate Silver, but I saw him dunking on Mike Isaac as Mike Isaac was trying to understand where the numbers came from and someone's 70% prediction that all of us were going to die. And he responded like, Nate responded to dunked on Mike, a reporter for the New York Times who presumably if you cared about this issue, you would want on your side. Dunked on him and was like, you know, they've actually written for decades on this,

like basically calling this person an ignorant and an idiot for not knowing that there's like this vault of blog posts that have explained exactly where these numbers come from. And it's like, actually, those numbers are bullshit. There is no way you can quantify this. The numbers are based on your personal assumptions. Like everyone in the community has a different number. And even I saw Eliaserdikowski himself responding recently to someone who used some such number, you're not helping.

You're muddying the water. The numbers are largely bullshit. But the piece I thought was really interesting that I know you're going to have a reaction to, Bridget, was so Dario wants these meter people to be centered in the conversation on AI safety. This is an independent organization. They say that is going to be in all the companies. They're going to have a lot of power. New York Post finds out who they are and goes fucking wild.

Is like, look at this woke freak. It's like, that's a man with earrings. Here's this weird looking girl with a weird face. And like, they just absolutely out of pocket are completely cruel and crazed and unfair. They're writing about Sores, who co-wrote the book with Elias Rukowski and Ayla, the sex worker who we've had on, and sex researcher, who we've had on the show, who I like personally, but who is certainly very in bed, literally in this case, with the AI Dumers. She is a Duber herself.

They're writing long, scandalous pieces about these people. And there's a question of like, you know, is this fair or not fair? I saw people, including Natasha Tika, who I just, you know, complimented and I'm reporting, saying this was not fair, you know, implausely. that there's something kind of immoral about this. My take is if you are an organization that wants authority over what you say and describing godlike terms is the most powerful technology in human history, you have to expect extreme scrutiny that is often even unfair and sometimes cruel. We treat our politicians way worse. Look at the way we've treated Alexandra Acosio-Cortez or even fucking clavicular.

Like people get it worse than this and they're not trying to control this stuff. So I don't know. Bridget, have you seen any of this? Like, how do you feel about it? I've seen some of it. You know, it's been interesting to me to see, like you said, a lot of the independent journalists. One of the people who's been kind of fascinating to me is like Taylor Lorenz, who seems

to be not a doomer, which I don't know that I would have expected that from her since she's still wearing a mask from COVID. And I think I just would have had the preconceivable. that she probably would have been more risk averse. And she's been pushing back against a lot of the muddied waters and the misinformation around data centers and watching Democrats kind of get on board with this anti-progress train that they're on.

And it's been fascinating seeing how she's had to manage her own audience herself. But it does make me, you know, I think Taylor's always had her first. finger on the pulse a bit in the in the like tech trends and she it makes me more curious about what she's actually saying only because I know she's saying it at a great risk and also she's losing money so she's losing money she's losing money an audience yeah and whenever anybody is willing to kind of go outside of their at all costs against the kind of audience capture they might be subject to. I'm, I tend to pay more attention to what they're saying just because it's not

popular with their people. So she's someone that I'm more fascinated by. I think the, I think the discussions are so different too because like you said, there's this high level discussion happening all the time and you see it. And we at dumpster fire are always trying to cover stuff for normies. And I don't even know we keep pushing this one, kicking this one down the road because we're like, eh, the normies aren't even talking about it. Dude, I mean, according to, I see all the abundance lib adjacent substackers going off. They're insisting that everybody cares about this now and everybody wants to slow down. Is that not true?

I mean, what are the normies, what are the normies thinking? What are they thinking about AI? I think, well, this leads into the conversation that you and I had on my podcast, Warkins, welcome, it's much harder to figure out what the normies. I think you could have 10 normies in a room and they would all be thinking different things. And that is probably good and also probably bad. It's very hard, like you said, to take the temperature. I don't know anyone who's talking about this. And I go to a lot of kids' birthday parties and I, and this is one of those things that it's not political. So it would be like a small talk thing you could have a conversation about that

doesn't really identify where you are on the political spectrum. And it's something that is like, oh, I'm into tech or whatever. There's a lot of people who are in tech. I'm also in Texas where there's a lot of people in tech. And my Wi-Fi slows down in the afternoon because so many people are online doing their jobs and using it. And I think I'm in a very pro-building state. I also think separating. It's weird. People seem to have much stronger feelings about data centers than they do about AI even though they're connected. Yeah, I saw these guys try and connect the two issues today. And it's always like, and of course we know that we're seeing this also with data centers. It's like, no, no, no, no. What you're seeing with data centers is way bigger and way different. I don't think the average person even knows that data centers have, yes, they don't even, I don't think the average person doesn't even know that they have anything to do with AI. I genuinely, I don't believe that. If you were to go to people who are like,

I fucking hate data centers the most, I don't think they know that. I don't think maybe they think it's partly that, but they hate them for, for classicly, you just said, for sort of nimbious reasons. Nimbia and mass surveillance is the other one that you'll hear. I agree with that.

They think that they're being, you know, it's like the flock cameras. Like they'll connect it to mass surveillance. And I actually am more compassionate to that fear than any of the fears that have been presented. Well, and in fact, yeah, it's like they see, they see these things. I think this is how maybe they see AI as well as it's not really about AI.

It's about tech. The average person isn't like, I mean, you're hearing these people say that we're all going to die and that has just absolutely increased people's anxiety, generally speaking. I believe that that is true. But when people talk about AI, what are they talking about? Are they talking about real fears concerning the technology or job loss or whatever the conversations are that Dario are having, I don't think the average person knows who Dario is, has ever heard him speak. I think they don't like tech people because they have years of evidence

that says these people don't like them. And I think that is maybe, and also, you know, not just don't like them, but it made their life more difficult as, you know, in the case of COVID and censorship and things like this. And I think they're certainly on the right are reacting to that. And then on the left, they're reacting to all of the vibes that they perceive to be like the sort of pro-Trump tech vibes, I think. So you have this. bipartisan, I would say hatred of these people. I say these people. No, it is. It is. Don't blame me. No, you're absolutely right. I think there is a bipartisan hatred. And it is the worst thing you can do is come out and say, we're all going to die and then offer no solution. Because now you're just

selling hopelessness to a bunch of people. So the crazy thing, though, is that they gave a solution. it just is so stupid and not going to happen and does not account for China at all. And it's like that's almost, that's worth, I feel like that's even works because that says to me that, let's say the risks are real, they don't have a plan themselves.

They have no, if they really believe this, they themselves have no idea of what's going to stop the train, which is maybe why they're looking at Trump, who, I mean, everyone hates, but has really created this like, in their hatred for Trump, these people,

not necessarily the tech people, but I think anyone who really hates Trump, they create like a large than life, you know, like an unaligned artificial intelligence is how they think about him. Just capable. He can do anything.

He can do it faster. He doesn't sleep. You know, he's on Adderall and Diet Coke and McDonald's. And like he never stops. And the ballroom is already rising. And we can't end it. No matter what he's coming after the Kennedy Center. Maybe he can stop AI.

If anyone can do it, it's him. He's the only one who we have any faith in for doing anything. It's always bad, but like he could do it. It's like the Wizard of Oz to these people. It's fucking crazy. There have been a couple of really funny tweets that I've seen going around. And there was one that was, I think it was a comedian.

And he was like, I'm not going to, I don't want to die by American AI. Like, I'm not going to die by Chinese AI. If I'm going to die, I want it to be American. I'm like, well, yeah. I do want the robot that inevitably kills me to be stamped with made in America. I won't lie about that. And there was another funny one that was like, oh, we need to prepare for life offline.

You need to get the addresses of the people you love. And I'm like, I kind of feel like if we're going offline, we're going to have bigger problems than where our buddy lives. Like, don't you think we're going to have more worried things to worry about than where our friend lives when the internet gets shut down? It's going to be chaos. People are so dependent on it. People's jobs, you can't, when I was in L.A. over the summer, there was that Verizon outage because they had, you know, they like, whatever the like terrorist bomb the variety.

Whatever happened in L.A. that somebody, they did something in the Verizon. We had an outage all day. And it was like going back to the 90s for me. I had no phone, no Wi-Fi, nothing all day while I was out and about. And you really do realize how. How often you're using that phone when you can't use it? It's crazy. And you think that people are going to be like, I really want to go see Joe in the internet shut down because AI is out of control. I have a very, I have no problem with people who know nothing like me saying, hey, maybe we should slow this down because it seems like no.

one knows what they're doing. But when the people who actually know what they're doing are saying, hey, maybe we should slow this down and don't seem to have any kind of solution that takes into consideration the fact that there are other global superpowers that are advancing very rapidly. I don't know what to do. I mean, how can you expect some normie to this is like, it feel, and I think a lot of people do map this on to the, the doomerism from climate change, even if it's not the same. If you're a certain age, like my age, you've been told that the world is going to end for 20 years, various different ways.

And is climate change something we should be concerned about? Probably. But it's certainly not the way that I was told when I was 20 years old. So I feel like people are also just like, oh, shut up. like another thing that's going to be world ending. I mean, something eventually is going to end the world. So you got to keep that in mind. I do though, I mean, related last, let's, we got so much to cover.

Derek Thompson, in one of his long posts about this, he's explaining why he thinks the EA's are right about stuff or why he trusts them. And he gives this anecdote. He talks about how they all talk about how the EAs are so good at predicting things. They're forecasting ability. is like no one else is. This is a very big topic that I'm going to actually tackle head on in a bit.

But for today, just a tease of that, a little taste of that. He uses the anecdote. Just the tip. He says, he makes a case. He's like, if someone had told you in like 2015 that this crazy guy, Donald Trump, was going to be president. You know, and everyone made fun of them.

And he didn't care. And he went on and on and on. And he's like, it's definitely going to happen. And he cites all the reasons. and goes, like, it could talk about it forever. You would have a higher estimation of this person's views on things. They're their ability to forecast. And I thought that's so interesting because I haven't seen a single EA person.

I don't know any EA people who thought Donald Trump was going to win. But I do know one guy who took a lot of risk to say it and was right before everybody. And he currently is not on board with the EA's. Riley, tell us about the anti-Christ. Yes, a perhaps interesting framework. for thinking about all of this comes from Peter Thiel, that guy you were just referring to. And it wasn't a take he dropped this week. He's been hitting for a while now, the Antichrist. And he said a clip of this was going viral recently. He mentioned on Ross Dow, that's

formerly Ross Dow, that's interesting Times podcast. He said, the way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop, you talk about X. That sounds a lot like the discussion we are having right now. now. So do we think there is, you know, possibly a deeper biblical omen to all of this talk about safety and existential risk that we're now having? Yeah, it's like the idea being, and Peter, early to all apocalypse stuff. I mean, we named the next, the second Heredicon apocalypse ball. When I first started the idea for Hereticon in 2019, Peter's talk before COVID happened and shut us down was going to be about the apocalypse. His idea being, we're,

I mean, super bastardized, very dumb down version of his idea being, we're much more at risk than we think we are. And people aren't talking about it enough at that point. And he listed all the apocalypses. It was like, there's the nuclear apocalypse. There's the AI apocalypse. There are pandemics he talked about. And then, you know, imminently the whole world was shut down. I think here, the idea that's being put down is like, certainly there's a risk.

But are we not also at risk of the kinds of prescriptions we've seen in the past? from people like, for example, Nick Bostrom in his book Super Intelligence, which came out, I believe in like 2015 about, which was like, you know, to get ahead of this idea of this runaway thing that anyone can build basically in any country, we need, you know, effectively one world government. We need, we need the ability to police abroad, to police these people across the entire planet. That concerns or leads to the centralization of government power, and resources, and that itself is a kind of, not a kind of. That's very dystopian. Like, the ways in which we would prevent this could be extremely, I think would be extremely dystopian. I think probably

not a lot of people in the AI sort of rationalist communities or EA communities, which is adjacent to the rationalist communities, or overlapping with it to a certain extent, I don't know that they would even disagree with that. I think that they would probably be able to see the danger inherent of something like that. But again, we're back to the point where it's like, there are no answers here that are slam dunk, how we get around this stuff, which is maybe why so many other people on the internet have actually not been talking about this at all and have mostly been focused on Sidney's Sweeney's boobs. Well, just before we move on to boobs, I do want to say, I think I heard that, I remember that

clip when it was going around and I've been thinking a lot about it in the wake of all of the, you know, we need to slow down and the doom panic and all this stuff. and what is a prescription for it. And I do think perhaps that is why I feel more like an accelerationist than that COVID taught me a lot about entrusting things with just centralizing control. And so I'm I'm much more allergic to it than I was because I was so wrong and had such egg on my face and was so should have listened to everybody who was saying. you don't shut the world down for two weeks.

And I was like, oh, it's just like, no, it's fine. It's going to be fine. We don't know what we're doing. And I was so wrong. And then seeing in California in particular how much they clung to that control and abused it, I was like never again, never, ever again, do I ever want to give over control to the government in that kind of way centralized. And I actually like that.

that Vance came out and Trump came out and they were like, no, we're not going to, we're not going to like regulate this like you want us to and keep building nerds. Okay. Point taken, but can't you conceive of a pandemic that does happen that's way more dangerous where you would want to meet it somehow in a way that maybe is even reminiscent of COVID? like people kind of staying at home or something or it would be extreme like maybe there would be some situations where um but maybe i can i personally can certainly think of some okay let's say there's a COVID that happens and uh instead of only taking down fat people and uh older people sadly and people with comorbidities it's killing kids primarily and it's got a mortality rate way higher, maybe even just like quite a bit higher or even the same mortality rate.

How do we think about it then? What do you do that? I mean, they didn't shut the world down when that happened in World War I. Like they didn't, they actually were shipping people all over the world. And I don't, I think because of COVID and the overreach that you, and I said this during COVID, if one and four people that you knew were dying, people would probably listen to what they were saying. People were looking around and saying this looks a lot like a cold. And now I can't see my grandma be buried and my kids can't go to school. So I feel like, again, this is where reality remains undefeated.

If you have a real pandemic and people are dying, people are going to respond to that differently. but they did, they kind of trial ballooned their social control very early. And a lot of people went along with it and still think it was the right thing to do. But there's a large amount of people who are not going to get on board with that at all. And until they see with their own eyes that they need to actually be worried about it. I think it changed the way people view this kind of stuff. and maybe that's a good thing for the AI stuff. Because I actually am surprised at how kind of non-alarmist most of the people I know are about it.

They're like, ah, we'll see. And maybe it's because they don't know that much about it. But again, what would they do even if they did know? If you can't do anything about it, what is the point of worrying about it? I think it lost. Yeah. Yeah. They're going to focus on booze.

exactly these are people I think one of the core so like enduring parts of this whole conversation is the people who are trying to talk to us don't understand how regular people think about things or act at all and they just fundamentally misunderstand us and and one of those things they misunderstand is um I would say like this approach to really really bad things it's not that they don't think really bad things are possible it's that there are lots of really bad things that are possible and have been possible forever, and they just carry on. Like, the average person's impulse is to be like, okay, you know, in the face of the unknown, and to not collapse into hysterics and write a thousand breathless blog posts and attack people rather than calmly explain to them what they're thinking about. It's a little just more normal, normie, we sometimes call. Well, and it's very American. I mean, we just came out of a week of watching 9-11 videos. And 25 years later, I'm like, wow, we got over that pretty quick. I mean, got over it in the sense that we picked ourselves up and just got back to living.

When I think about the fact that in 2020, 2003, I was just going about my life and still going to New York. And it was, it is a very American way to just carry on. without, you know, dwelling too much on things and keep moving forward. But I also think the average person is much more concerned with whatever is going on in their own immediate life. And that people like Dario and Elon and these guys who have multiple projects and their heads are in Mars and in AI, and they have teams of people and millions of billions of trillions of dollars, they're not. at all in touch what it's like to be someone who flies in a middle seating coach. And their biggest concern is getting on a plane to go to a funeral somewhere and now their

flights delayed because air travel is a freaking nightmare. They're just, the average person is trying to figure out whether or not they should be stocking up on like diesel right now, you know, food or something. They're not your concerns when you are at. that level versus at a middle class or lower class level are completely different. And I think that's why middle class normies are, they're like, okay, cool. Like the rich autists are telling us we're all going to die. I'm just still going to go take my kid to Papa troll. Like what? What are you going to do? I'm going to go scroll the, I'm going to go bet gamble on this app that

Sydney Sweeney launched because, you know, Yolo. Speaking of, we got to move to boobs. Boob. Riley? Yeah, for all this talk about the imminent apocalypse, there is a more serious threat out there that we need to be aware of. And that is the threat that Sydney, Sweeney's boobs. Oh, wait, wait, wait.

The Twin Towers? Oh, full circle. Here we go. The Twin Towers. Yeah, so Sweeney appeared in a recent ad for the sports. market Novig, which I totally haven't watched 30 times, in which the Euphoria actress is completely nude outside of various sports equipment that she is using to barely conceal her cannons. That ad immediately sparked widespread backlash from female athletes who are now

accusing Sweeney of somehow setting back women's sports. Sky Nicholson, a boxer out of Australia wrote, these companies need to do better, stop sexualizing women in sport. The athletic also came out with a new op-ed recently saying the recent rise in female sports stars did not occur because they balanced inexplicably in the nude atop of basketball hoop. Their power arose from being undeniably talented at their sport. Sweeney responded to all this backlash by posting photos of the female athletes who have literally posed nude for ESPN's the body issue. And all of this, of course, comes after Sydney Sweeney's

ad for American Eagle, which also prompted a lot of backlash. What do we think, guys? Are Sweeney's football boobs a slap in the face to female athletes? Well, Bridget has to start because Bridget, I think people don't know this about you. And it's amazing that we've got you on this week because you are a boob scholar. Like I genuinely do think you're an expert. Like, you're actually an expert on this topic. Bridgett wrote about this years ago and has been following the Sydney sort of boob discourse very closely since. And I do think is the sharpest I don't know commentator on the subject. So take it away. Thank you. I by the way was also a writer of Playboy in 2015 for two years. I was a playboy, which was a very strange time to be a

playboy because it was the moral panic of Me Too was popping off. And men were starting to feel very insecure about their place in the world. And there was a lot of talk about the male gaze. So I happened to be kind of front and center for a lot of this discourse that just seems to kind of pop up over and over and over again. But it also seems like something that's very, it's been going on for a while in our, in our culture of a woman is an unapologetically hot woman. This is more recent, I think, because I come from the 90s.

And it was, there were boobs. We were just talking about this. There were boobs and PG movies. It wasn't like a big thing in the 80s and the 90s. And there were hot women everywhere. I used to love the sports illustrated swimsuit issue. It was one of my favorite things. And so you just had a culture that was more celebratory.

I feel like it's celebrated beauty. And by the way, we also had all the supermodels. And they were gorgeous. And I never felt insecure like they were making. me feel like I could never be that gorgeous. I always just felt like these are really beautiful women who are taking control of their own brands, which was something that was very new and becoming their own brands. And it was very empowering to watch as a woman.

So that is where I come from. That is not where if you were born in even 2000, but later, you are not coming from that place. you've basically been born into the ugliest time known to man. It's just been propping up lots of people who under the out of the guise of body diversity and body positivity, diversity and body positivity, which cool, but it was, there was not much room for beauty in that. And you've only really seen this.

So it feels like whenever there's just a normal woman who's being hot who doesn't seem to apologize for it, like Sidney Sweeney, everyone loses their mind. And they attack her. I also think they attack her because they don't know what her politics are and she's very coy about it and doesn't seem to care. I also think they attack her because we know what her politics are. I think we all know what her politics are. I did that tweet once where I was like, if a celebrity doesn't talk about their politics, their right wing and all my right wing friends, were like, thanks for outing me, Bridgett in Hollywood texting me. Like, thanks a lot.

I mean, come on. You can tell. It's crazy how you can tell just from the way she looks at people who annoy her. Like, it really is like a completely different kind of look. And I think in this case, what you said, I mean, in the intro, she's post, her response to the controversy, her impulse is not to say sorry. Her impulse is to say, you're retarded. And she like lets you.

know how much she hates you for bothering her. And that's like, that's a hot girl thing and that's a right wing. I don't, you know, I want to say too much. Who knows? Who can know for sure? But that impulse did not, like you just said, Bridges as well, she doesn't apologize. I would say she actually takes it a step further. And, and not only does she not apologize, she makes very clear that she doesn't agree and doesn't care. Right. She leans into it. She leans in. She leans in. Some people, Thought that was a good thing not too long ago. Sydney's just really listening. I think it is really just about these women don't like Sydney Sweeney.

There's nothing she can do. It's like that famous, that comic, that comic, the stand-up comic who, she says, you know what someone, you know, you just like really don't like someone. You know, like they can't do anything that you don't hate. It's like, look at that bitch eating chicken. Why eating chicken, bitch? Yeah. And it's like, it's really like.

that with Sydney. I think they just don't like her. But if you could discount that, I mean, is there something to like, she's doing this sports thing and she's just this naked girly girl with big breasts? Like, what does that have to do with sport? I don't know. Like, where are they coming from? Is there anything there? I don't know. But it's, it's again, it's not your choices I judge. It's your hypocrisy. It drives me crazy when people, she's not hypocritical at all. she's just always doing her thing. She's been getting naked since she came on the scene and euphoria. She's never been different than she is right now.

So there's nothing about Sidney Sweeney that is contradictory to who Sydney Sweeney has always been. Now, the way people react to her reminds me a lot of the way people reacted to Ivanka and Melania when they were coming on the scene with Donald Trump, where suddenly women, feminists, were bashing them for their high heels and the way that they dressed and the way that they dressed and the way that they looked and the blondes. And I was like, didn't we just come out of a whole cycle of like, don't judge Hillary because we're ugly pantsuits or whatever? Why are we suddenly now it's okay to judge these women

because we don't like them and don't agree with them politically? And that was a big moment for me in seeing that that whole feminist movement was kind of bullshit. And once again, she's calling their bluff on all of this. It's empowering to be naked unless you're Sydney Sweet. he's selling a sports app. It's you're supposed to be somebody. These are all the people who are like sex work is work.

And only fans is empowering. And all this stuff that we've been hearing. And then Sydney comes out on an app that she has a stake in. This is like a girl boss thing. She owns she's not a stake. Yeah, a business woman. A business woman who's not even doing porn. It's like doing base.

This is Maxim Magazine. We all saw, this is literally Max a magazine. I was saying on dumpster vire, she's like, this ad was like if Axe Body Spray was an ad. It's, I can smell this ad. It's so for men. And she's talking to men. And we're talking about people who can't define what a woman is. They don't even know.

And now they're saying, oh, you are, you're setting women back hundreds of years. And then for some weird reason, the female athletes acted like she was challenging them. to show off their sports, which was a crazy thing too, because I'm like, she clearly wasn't talking to you. She wasn't like daring you to, this wasn't her demonstrating her sports prowess

and then saying, oh, think you know sports. She was daring men to go spend their money on her gambling app and using the female beauty to try and activate the male ego to do something that she wants them to do.

This is a tale of as old as time. Also, this is advertising. How does advertising work? And they start posting all these videos being like, you're undermining sports. I'll show you. And like, you guys were cheering for a mailboxer in the freaking Olympics. Like, not long ago, okay? I got endless amounts of shit or even daring to say, this is a man beating the shit out of a woman.

and I am not comfortable watching this and we're giving them a medal. Maybe that sets women's sports back more than Sydney Sweeney doing an ad for a gambling app. It's so crazy. I just feel like you guys want to make video showing off your athleticism, which is fine. But don't act like it's because Sydney's setting women's sports back.

Sorry, I have a lot of feelings about this. It reminds me so much of the WMBA discourse too, which has become so weird and like, oh, like, you're not, people think that we're just these, I don't know, like placeholders, but they don't want to give us money and they like us when we do this, but not that. It's like, actually, no one's really thinking about you at all. Like, you have to understand that, like, no one cares. Like, really, truly, I don't think about female athletes almost ever. I like the women's soccer team. I like them until Rapino ruined it for me. But like generally speaking, you don't even think about sports that much, certainly not women's

sports. And certainly Citi was not thinking about them at all. Men are not thinking about sports when they look at that ad. Like they're just thinking about her. I think it's fine. I think it's like not empowering though. I think maybe this is a good time where we could just tackle the idea that it's empowering to be naked in public. I think it's fine. I'm not mad about it. I say do it. I do not. I've never believed that it's like female empowerment. I'm like owning my body or whatever. Like what is it about showing Cooch that is empowering? I don't like genuinely, can someone make the case for me?

I don't get that. I actually don't understand where they're coming from. I mean, I think if you take it into context, because the interesting thing you'll see on the right is right wing men who, you know, maybe they're like Christian and they were getting a little bit. agitated about it and saying like this is degeneracy and this is porn and this is gambling and these are all signs of a degenerate society which that's a totally different conversation that we can have but you also voted for likely voted for a guy who had sex with a porn star and also owned a

casino so we can't that ship is also sailed but if you put it in context like where i came from I mean, come on. If you put it in context of like, I, again, I came from Madonna. I'm like, you guys think this is bad? I came from Madonna was wild and out. She was, she was naked in front of a cross in the late 80s. And it felt more like art, I guess, too, then. It wasn't, it wasn't so like commercial.

You know, the Sydney-Sweeney thing is very much consumerism meets. just self exploitation to a certain point or whatever, like using your body to lure men in. But back then, people were reacting to the kind of moral majority. They were reacting to the religious right and they were reacting to these feelings that women needed to hide their bodies and be ashamed of their bodies. and they had to keep their heads down and be more modest. And I think that that wave of feminism was more reactive to the Christian conservative, the old school Christian conservative that we know.

And that's how, in my view, that's how this became like an idea that it's empowering. Well, certainly then in this version of the story, it is just as empowering. It's just that she's reacting to a morality that was imposed by the left. It was a sex negative morality. It was a morality constantly policing young people for having sex

and slightly the wrong ways and making it scary to have sex. It's reacting to a left that is antinatalist. It's reacting to a left that hates beauty that malines beauty and constantly celebrates the hideous, which is something that we joke about, but I think I do believe is morally inverted

and like, really a toxic, a toxic thing on our psychology. And, and then here's, here's this very fertile looking, beautiful woman who takes her clothes off and is just like, I don't care what you say. Morality is in 2026. And they're mad. Maybe for these reasons that we don't quite off, don't usually verbalize, but, but we all kind of know, there is something subversive about being hot and naked, now. Yeah, there is. And there's something.

Conventionally. Yes. And there's also something very ancient about no one hates women more than other women. There's just, there's, I mean, who are the morality police, police and like, like Iran? It's usually women. Old women. Yep. I mean, there's a, I was joking online, this whole thing like reeks of perimenopause.

You know, a lot of it is just how much is it just intracial competition. playing out, which is very old school and ancient and kind of, especially in, in 2026 where I think people are losing their minds, but there is that real sense of scarcity in the dating scene among women. It just feels like a way to be, it also feels like a way for people to be righteous and be bullies, but they get to feel good about themselves. Bridget, what else is going on inside of your feed? Something we've been kind of hitting on lately is just the different realities that we're absorbing. At the top of the show, I said, you know, mine is just really two things.

It's Sidney's boobs and the apocalypse. What are you seeing on X right now? Probably because I'm in Texas. Mine is the, it's like a version of that meme. well, which America are you? Or like, which American are you? Or which America from the Civil War movie? What kind of American?

Yeah, what kind of American are you? That's my feed right now. It feels like ever since the UT game, and again, I'm sure this is regional because I'm in Texas, but ever since the UT game, when that Beau French grabbed that screenshot, of the Asian American kids in the stand celebrating the win and it went viral, my entire feed has just been like this insane debate

about what it means to be an American. And it's being just kind of brushed off as racist. But I do think they're underneath it. This is a conversation that's kind of broken containment that you couldn't even have like five years ago. So there is something interesting that I'm perceiving and that was it racist for him to say, to point this out in the way that he did? Yes.

Is he also pointing to something that people are noticing in Texas and talking about on the ground? Also, yes. So there is a conversation to be had about H1B visas. And this is a conversation that happened years ago over Christmas. Christmas on X when there was that big debate about H1B visas and it was really fascinating to me and I saw things from different perspectives than I'd ever really seen them. And I feel like that small little debate is now, it's kind of broken out into the loose, into the wild. And also now it's being weaponized because of the midterms. So guys like Carl Rove wrote a big Wall Street Journal piece.

about how he was not going to be able to vote. He was voting Democrat, basically for the first time in 30 years or something because of Beau French's... What is his role, right? What is this Bo French even... Was he running for? He's running for a train commissioner.

It was like railroad. Railroad commissioner. Was Carl Rove really voting in that election to begin with? I mean, maybe, but also who cares? And also he came out and right when I was lagging in, he was saying that he's now, you know, thinks that, that like you should parent parents. You don't have to tell parents if their kids are being trans at school. And he's got, he's just like completely flip-flopped on all of these things that you can

change a baby's birth certificate, the gender on it. Not conservative values at all. Not conservative. I mean, Carl Rove is he's the architect of Bush's presidency. And Bush is really, I mean, functionally the same as a Clinton when it comes to like, representing, I would say, the former world of politics and elitism and what that looked like in America and in Trump and current right-wing politics, but also current left-wing politics, you know, under Bernie and like all of the new people included DSA people.

Yeah. The reason this is really spilled out too is that it is this battle for, it does feel like it's MAGA versus, you know, whatever Carl, wherever Karl Rove came from, Bush era Republicans, that's taking place in Texas, but you also see it spilling into the Tala Rico and Paxton race for the Senate because there's this real fear that, you know, that the Blexus, as Hassan Piker calls it, which makes me want to throw up in my mouth,

that they can flip the Senate seat blue because now they're saying, oh, look at how racist everybody is in Texas, and look at how racist Bo French is, and even Carl Roe is trying to say this and because it's a midterm now this it feels like it's taken on a much bigger life than it may have

but it's because we're leading into the midterms and they're trying to flip this seat and I'm like this didn't really work with Trump guys calling everyone racist didn't really work the past like 10 million times you tried to do it but maybe

so yeah that's my feed's been like dominated by that. Well, time will tell. We will see. We do have to move on. And I kind of want to move on. I am ready myself for a white pill. Brought to you by eight sleep.

Adverde. This is the era of Pyro Wire's ad frets. Riley, take it away. Yeah. So we already talked about the risks. AI potentially poses, but in our white pill segment with eight sleep, thank you, eight sleep and all of our sponsors.

We're going to talk about a cool use case. the best mattresses. I've never slept on a better match. Code PirateWires podcast. But the cool use case of AI that we're going to talk about is the very sick video game that our very own Evan Malenko

made himself using mostly AI. It's called doodle shooter. It's been played by more than 40,000 people from over 150 countries sending Evan into a little bit of virality. I guess Boris Churny, the guy Anthropic who created Claude, even sharing

a clip of it on X. How did Evan make it? Well, through various tools using Fable, Opus, and Astra, which all wrote a solid chunk of the code base while Evan was out at five guys getting a burger. And for more on Evan's process, go check out his piece on the game's creation, which you can find at firewires.com. But pretty cool use case of AI guys. I haven't played it myself, but people are absolutely loving it.

and just kind of an awesome thing that you can now write some words to a robot and be handed a game that you can play for hours. So what do we think about that development? I thought one of the interesting things about this that I then saw echoed at a dinner I was out, which I'll talk about in a moment, lots of people are making video games,

but some people's video games become very, very popular. Some people's AI-generated film clips are becoming very, very popular. And lots are being generated, but not all of them. They're not all being ignored. They're not all becoming kind of relatively popular. It's like some stuff still performs better than others,

which implies to me that in this earliest era of what we're seeing, it's kind of functioning like, it is kind of functioning like regular creative output. Output as we've known in the worlds of books, in the world of other films and video games, in the world of tweets even. Some perform better than other. Some people are better at this than others, which implies that these are tools that will allow

people who are already pretty good or pretty interesting to just do a lot more. And that is super exciting to me. While watching Evan do this, I, of course, had my own ideas about what I would want to do in a video game. But more importantly, I love fiction. I started in fiction. I have all sorts of fiction ideas that I'm excited about. I was talking to a friend of mine who is into erotic fiction.

and I was like, yo, Chrissy, you got to look up. I've been seeing, I'd seen a couple of weird clips from China that had created, they were like one-off like 30-second or maybe minute-long exchanges that are clearly erotic fiction, but then they link to their weird Chinese site, which I'm never going to click, where presumably there's like a whole catalog or bank of them or something. I thought, well, that's kind of interesting that we're seeing. That's a use case for this right now that people will do. Some people will be better at it.

you have this interesting space for creativity. These tools are being used by people already. They're only getting better. I was at a dinner a couple days ago with a famous, super, super, super famous Hollywood actor, a handful of other, maybe like there were nine of us all together, like some tech people, it was in Palo Alto. And he, I was surprised to find. I mean, he was extremely excited about AI-generated,

video. He has made a huge pivot into it. He does not, I don't know, I expected him to be a dumer. I expected him to say, oh, of course there are risks. He was more unbridled than I am in terms of the way I think about this stuff. He could not wait. He thought it was nothing but good. He has nothing. I mean, he's already at the top of his game, right? Like, presumably he should be nervous about competition. He's not. Then he said something really crazy to me, which was that the writers, a couple years ago, I think it was, all. wanted AI generated everything banned. The unions wanted it out. Now what writers are demanding is that it be allowed because so many people are using it for different reasons. I think that we are

entering a world where you can create anything. I am excited. Myself, I really do want to get into fiction. I have a lot to learn. Might even be releasing it on pirate wires. I've got all sorts of interesting sci-fi ideas, some stuff I've already written. And I just feel myself excited about about about creating in a way that I haven't in a long time. Obviously, I write a podcast. I love that, but I'm talking about, you know, fiction. Like in the realm of like pure creativity, I'm super stoked. What do you think about, what do you make of these tools and maybe the mood around them?

I mean, as I said earlier, for someone like me, it's like a superpower. And like you, I have a lot of fiction and stuff like that that I think I don't, I can't let AI write for me. So AI, it doesn't work for me because I'm a writer and writing is how I think. What AI is very good at is acting as like a writer's room. So it can be very good at helping you. I was joking the other day. I was like, I'm more of a prompt artist. And I think you are seeing people who are prompt artists because it is, there is an art to prompting.

There absolutely is. and like you just mentioned all these people, the people, the things that rise to the top and the things that don't, I think a lot of it has to do with how proficient or not people are at prompting or how they figured out a way to, to make whatever, manipulate this stuff and make what they want. And I think that it's, it's really exciting time for me to have a child because I'm not sure how to integrate that with, I have a four year old. So it's like, what a cool time to be a kid. Like the other day, she had an idea for a book. She wanted to make a book. And so she drew a picture. We took a picture of it.

We put it in. And then she wrote a whole book. And we had her whole book generated by AI. And she was like, this is so cool. Can we make another book? And that is amazing that my daughter can create characters. And that we can take pictures of them and upload them.

and create an entire story and have it just generated and then we can print it if we want. And now she has her own little book. So figuring out how to use, it's also super addictive though. So figuring out ways, I mean, you get a dopamine hit from planning. So there's, you know, all this research coming out about how much dopamine you get from like planning something as opposed to actually executing it. You can get real lost in AI and just like planning your dream. dream trip around the world or planning.

So with a kid, it's like, okay, how do we, I want, I don't want her to be behind. We can, I want to introduce it to her. How can we use it to help homeschool her? But also, how do we build boundaries around it and regulate it? Because I can see like the, the potential for being able to create whatever you want or learn whatever you want or whatever is so massive. So I'm massively white-pilled on AI. And I've come from being more of like Sarah Connor about things.

You know, I was actually quite a doomer and very afraid. And I still have some of that. And she did go to jail for blowing up data centers. But I think I've become much more white-pilled in that the cancers and like the medical advancements that we're making and things that were figuring. out. If we can manage not to annihilate all of humankind, I think we can, we can reach heights that we could not even conceive of. And I'm, if the world doesn't implode, I'm excited for it for my daughter because she's going to be able to probably live longer and, and who, I mean,

truly, who knows? And so, yeah, I'm massively, massive, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to to be optimistic because I can't do anything about the doom. I cannot do anything about whether or not we're all going to be annihilated by AI. I can learn how to use AI and build really cool stuff and be creative with it. And so I choose to focus on what I can do as opposed to what I'm powerless over. Yeah, I thought a lot about maybe the things that I'm seeing just being less. slop-like, not entirely AI generated. Like I guess one idea I had early on was we would see a world where the AI would just be generating unlimited television for us of some, let's say you love Buffy. And it was like, well, now there's going to be endless Buffy.

There's going to be Buffy season 755. Like personally, personally adapted to your interest. Maybe you're in the show. You become a character and it shows you yourself and all of this. I wonder if maybe there will be some of that, though that feels a little more black mirrory to me, where people just are so distracted by these things that they fade away from the real world. And they're also not what I'm seeing. I don't see people completely losing themselves to it.

In terms of creative people who are using these things, I see them just doing a lot more. And we are entering this world where we're going to be, I think we have a new medium and we haven't yet seen who the artists are going to be in that medium. I think there are a bunch of expressions of that medium. There's like, you could be doing comics, you could be doing video. I don't, I haven't seen a writing version of it yet. I don't know what that's going to look like. I don't think the ayes are there, maybe six months or a year, and then we'll have a different conversation.

But right the second, we're seeing a kind of AI generated film that's going to lead, I think, to like heroes in the space. And that's cool to watch. We get to be alive at this moment in history. It's like as if it is, honestly, a direct. comparison. When film was first invented, and it's like, well, holy shit, what are we doing now? Like, we can make movies. And you get to be one of the pioneers in that space. You get to set the rules. You get to be studied in the future when other people are generating movies. And it's like,

look at this primitive, you know, minute and a half smut that was created by my friend Chrissy. That's now in the museum, right? Like, that's, I think it's cool. It's cool to be a part of history. We at least live in extremely interesting times. I love it. So whatever you're doing, building a company, building a family, building an army of maga fighters for Christ, you need good sleep. Eight Sleep is seriously advanced technology for producing good sleep.

The pod is their smart mattress cover with side-specific cooling, temperature adjustment, and snoring prevention. Thank God. Get $500 off the eight-sleep pod at www.org slash firewires podcast. Or you can use the code PirateWires podcast at checkout exclusively for PirateWire's listeners. Riley, we got one more segment, I believe we've got to talk about business. Yes, our business segment brought to you by autopilot. Thank you, Autopilot.

We have a development coming from Airbnb short-term rental company, which will be investing $250 million towards housing projects across the country. With the first investment going toward a 200-unit development in Austin, Texas, the company will apparently be distributing the money to developers to help them bridge gaps in financing multifamily housing projects with all the returns they get coming in at below market rate, which Airbnb says they will then reinvest back into additional housing projects. Brian Chesky, their CEO, said, I've lived in the crosshairs of the number one political issue in most major cities in America. and I can't stare at the problem for much longer without Airbnb trying to offer up some solutions. So here you have a company that's been blamed for maybe exacerbating the housing crisis, some say,

doing their part to actually help solve that crisis, all while people like Mom Doni offer solutions like freezing the rent or seizing property from landlords. So what do we make of this move from Airbnb here? I don't agree with this frame. that he is responsible for housing costs, you can say you can get granular and you can be like, you know, Airbnb rentals have just factually led to X increase in this way or whatever. Fundamentally, the issue is supply and demand. That is just what's happening with housing prices.

Okay. If you cannot build and you have a new huge population of people flooding over the border, markets are going to become really, really hostile to first-time buyers. And it's like, yes, you could say this person who's buying the property is the problem or this person over here. Fundamentally the problem is that we don't have enough housing. And that's just that's just not his fault. That having been said, it's like, I personally am tired of having to defend these people.

And I'm glad they're doing something on their own that is just obviously defensible. I think it's like unambiguously good that he's trying something. The devil's in the details. We'll see how this thing plays out. Hopefully he's not just going to be dumping into a bunch of left-wing NGOs that make everything worse as our own governments have had, have done over the last, I don't know, our entire lives. But, you know, we'll see. And I think maybe on that government question is the thing I always circle back to.

It's nobody's fault but theirs. I saw Ro Kana recently say that Israel was the reason that, you know, gas prices were higher in, in California. And he actually, he went down a whole list of things that they were responsible for. It's like, bro, that is not why California is broken. You are the reason California is broken. You specifically. And I think anything that can get us back to there, that's maybe like the, that is maybe, is that why I'm on this planet? I feel like that is the thing that I return to constantly.

I want to just put up a fucking mirror to these people's faces and be like, you are the one who did this. You're in charge. You were elected. He was elected to be a congressman, not to be running the actual state. But I would say the entire party, we have a unit party in California. It's like, they're the reason. The elected officials are the reason that things are broken.

They are the ones that could solve these problems. They refuse to do it. You know, we're left, therefore, with stuff like this. And so I'm glad it exists. But yeah, wasn't his problem. problem to begin with. And it shouldn't be his his, his, his, uh, responsibility to fix. I'm glad he's trying. One thing I'll say is at a, at a time when, you know, people, at a time when people are, like, thinking tech companies are ushering in the mass extinction of humanity, it's, you know,

comforting to see a tech company instead doing, uh, their part to, like Brian mentioned, solve what is basically like the number one political issue in the country right now. So it's not all doom and gloom folks. Sometimes the tech industry does good things. Well, you know the thing about an AI apocalypse is we are dealing with the question of supply and demand. So in a world where everyone dies, it will be a lot more affordable to rent that property on the beach in Malibu. And I think not enough people are talking about that. Genuinely, I have not heard a single, not heard a single AI skeptic. Which is crazy because it's like still not affordable.

Still can't, still can't touch it. Bridget, anything that you would like to see tech people put their money into? I've seen you kind of on this a lot where you say, put money, like the old Titans, yeah, actually, yes. I think entertainment, I hate seeing people talking about how politics are downstream of culture, and then they don't really invest in creatives. I think that people should be investing in creatives. People should be investing in people like you are trying to. make sense of the discourse and aren't just one way or another or kind of earnestly trying to figure things out. I think like you said back in the Industrial Revolution and all these times

when there were these titans of industry, they would invest in their communities and build parks and build, you know, like all kinds of things, places for arts and things for the people, libraries. I think if you're going to, that is a good argument for, if you're going to, that is a good argument for, if you want to build a data center, maybe give the local something, do something for the local people to help improve their lives or make something beautiful. I know that's a little more difficult in blue states where all parks just end up being like places where you swap needles and junkies live. But I think trying to address some of these, trying to do something to give back to local communities.

If you're in particular trying to bring in like a data center or something like that and maybe lower their costs, that would be something great. And yeah, I think investing in people who are creating art

that isn't just pandering. Like everything is pandering. And it's what happened to just good storytelling and good characters and character driven stories that you could get lost in and not just slop that you're

repeating, not dumbing it down so that your audience has to look up and you have to recite the plot like they do on Netflix or whatever. Really thoughtfully creating some art that I still think there is a hunger for out there and a thirst for, particularly stories, just like good storytelling.

And that's good journalism. There's there. That stuff does cost money. You still have to invest in that. And yeah, so there is a lot, I think, that they could be doing. Instead of just telling everyone they're going to die. Yeah, you mentioned this idea of obviously everything is downstream of culture. So you have, every now and then these right-wing people who make these, we need culture, we need to make movies or whatever. And then they try and make movies and it's just, it's propaganda because they're going and they're like, we're going to make a movie about how the queers are bad.

And it's like, I mean, I'm being smashed over the head. I think, listen, I think you can make a movie that maybe had that message implicitly. That's not bad. I think it's possible. I think it's like, I wouldn't make it. I don't believe it. But I, obviously. I think you could make it.

That'd be awesome if you did. If I just became a Milo about it, I think that you could, you could make a lot of movies that are good for your values, whatever they are. If your intention is not just to make a movie that makes people think like you, but it's just actually a good movie and you have those values. Your values will shine through. I think that your commitment as a creative person always needs to be to the craft. Like you have to be, your goal is like, how do I make something that's beautiful and delightful

and that people want to watch and play with and engage with or whatever? It can't be anything else, I believe. I've never seen it work in another way. You know, you don't, maybe not approaching it as if you have the answer and these are the values that I'm trying to put on people, but let's create characters who are wrestling with questions that are going to sit with us as humans and just basic human struggles that we grapple with and, and trying to instill a sense of kind of resilience and heroes again. There's been, it's been just decades of like anti-heroes and and a little bit negative. I would like to see. more, I'd like to see a return to a little bit more optimism and our media. I think it's a little, it's very easy to just lean into nihilism because you don't have to lead. You don't, you don't have to lead. You don't have to take any responsibility. You can just be like, oh, we're all screwed, which is kind of what the tech people are doing too. But you need to, it would be nice to see people

who are optimistic. It's nice when I see that. It's refreshing. This is one thing that I do actually, I have come to appreciate about Charlie Kirk in post-death is that he felt like someone quite earnest in a media system that's just like filled with snark. And I mean, I'm guilty of this. So I'm not, I'm in a house made of glass. But I would like to tell stories that are thoughtful and curious and maybe allow people to sit with questions they have and ask themselves what their values are. I don't even know that people get to sit very long and think about that stuff. Well, guys, it is time for you to buy a house. Unfortunately, that house costs $2.79 million, and your competition is an AI dumer

building AI and anthropic paying cash. That's why you need autopilot, the platform that lets you invest alongside politicians, like the trader O'Connor and real-time traders automatically. You built the cash flow, let autopilot help build the wealth. Autopilot is built by the same team behind the infamous Pelosi tracker and now includes our own PirateWire's flagship fund, which you can find over on the autopilot site at www. www.J.com. Well, as we developed the Pirate Wire's Smut channel, which will be on this YouTube channel imminently, stay tuned. Bridget would love to have you as a guest contributor.

Last thoughts, anybody, before we get out of here for the weekend? No, just come see me at Comedy Mothership. Yeah. Yes. Go see Bridget. Where is it? And what time? Comedy Mothership, the first weekend in October. I'm opening for a very hilarious New York comedian Carmen Lynch. And it's five shows October 2nd through the 4th at Comedy Mothership in Austin. So please come through if you're looking for something to do in Austin and you're around. My friends, it's that time of the week again. It's been real. We'll catch you here next week with I'm sure an entire multiple hours worth of AI drama.

which I will try to compress for you and I don't know, hopefully find the light, certainly find the signal and the noise. Godspeed, thank you to everyone for listening. Rate, review, subscribe, tell your friends. Seriously, actually tell your friends. This podcast is blowing up right now.

They need to know that. The world needs to know. We got to get more people to listen because that gets me excited and the more excited I am, the more content I give you. It's been real. Bridget, it's been extra real,

but we'll see you again next week. Riley, you're forced to be here. I pet you. Talk to you later. Thank you, guys.