Pirate Wires - TikTok Bill PASSED, Tent City At Columbia, NPR CEO Is A CIA Asset?! and Mission Driven Tech

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

EPISODE #50: We made it to episode 50! This week, Liz Wolfe is joining us to discuss the week that was. We start off with the TikTok divestiture bill that was signed into law by President Biden, and was conveniently placed into a foreign aid package for Ukraine & Israel. Next up, Ivy League colleges shut down over yay-Hamas protests. Is all anti-semitism? Or just an excuse for kids to go glamping with their friends. We transition into protests at work and woke activism. Coinbase started the trend years ago with mission driven company, and now their bet is on the right side of history. Finally, the NPR story gets even better (or worse). Katherine Maher appears to be involved with the CIA. Enjoy! Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Sanjana Friedman, Liz Wolfe 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 Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell Liz Twitter: https://twitter.com/LizWolfeReason TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! Welcome Back Liz! 1:00 - Tiktok Bill PASSED - Included In Foreign Aid Package Bill - What Does All of This Mean? 19:55 - Yay-Hamas Take Over At Colleges - Tent Cities Are All The Rage 32:00 - Ilhan Omar's Daughter  35:55 - Mission Driven Tech At Coinbase 54:00 - CEO Of NPR May Be A CIA Asset?! 1:06:30 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe! Tell Your Friends!

Make no mistake, this is a bank. Rest assured, we aren't going anywhere. That bill, just the conflation of funding for Israel and funding for Ukraine at this point is kind of wild. These are different conflicts. Why are they not being voted on separately? We've got to shut the tent cities down, okay? It's 2024. I'm tired. They're gross. They're terrible. We don't like tent cities. I wouldn't discount how much of this is just like, it's fun to be outside in the spring with your friends. The CEO of NPR, who is, it turns out, a CIA asset. Yeah, yeah, yeah. CIA, important. Okay, sure. But I also always look at the New York Times

wedding announcement. Obnoxious, ultra elite stuff. I mean, she's from Connecticut. Red flag. Always a red flag. Red flag. Always a red flag. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod. We have a special guest today. Again, returning, Liz Wolfe. Say hello. Hey, what's up? Liz Wolfe runs the... Is it fair to say you run the newsletters at Reason? I get your newsletter. The newsletter is essentially my personal diary diary that I just sort of like spit out every morning at like 5 or 6 a.m. So like make of that what you will. Reason, unfortunately, puts it under their own branding. I say unfortunately for them, not for me.

Well, keep up what you're doing. It's one of the few newsletters that I actually read. I just unfollowed a bunch today. I won't say which ones, but mine with the MePress. Okay. So I want to start with the TikTok bill. Absolutely huge news this week. We've been writing about this and talking about this, I think instigating this, me personally, for a very long time. We have followed every twist and turn of the Xi Jinping controlling a powerful US speech platform in America story. Last you heard from us, we talked about the House vote. So this has since moved on to the Senate. It got somehow insanely mixed in with funding for Israel and Ukraine and passed the Senate, was signed into law by Biden. That's basically uh tick tock is now going to be forced by the

government to divest and uh this is monumental this has happened before we've talked about this you know in the sense of um or we've talked about this in the case rather of uh grinder is the last big one that one i think in some sense you, way easier to defend on national security grounds. It's very obvious why you wouldn't want Xi Jinping to have someone's like gay nudes. The TikTok one is a little bit nebulous on the national security side. It's definitely a spy app, but you know, what information are they getting and what are they using with it? It's a complicated question. Ferocious battle in Washington, but at the end of the day the senate vote was overwhelming and bipartisan which is um well decisive and uh here we are sort of moving forward i think that there's a question now of who is going to buy this um that has recently been

complicated by the fact that the ceo of tick tock who again this is a company recently been complicated by the fact that the CEO of TikTok, who again, this is a company that's owned by the parent ByteDance, which is the Chinese company. So the CEO of TikTok is signaling that, or the CEO of ByteDance rather, is signaling that they are not going to sell the app with the algorithm, which of course is like the main part of the app. That says to me that they are never going to sell the app and it will just be shut down completely because China does not want us to know sort of what they've been doing. And it's a valuable asset. The algorithm is very good and China loves to steal shit, but does not want to share it, which understandable, but also once again,

proves that China controls the app and uh we're gonna enter now about 12 months of legal hell the big winner here is really just tick tock's law firm whoever is representing them because it's going to be boatloads of cash for months and months and months up until the final moment that uh they cannot sell the company at which point i don't believe they will sell the company. I do believe this thing or not in its current carnation. I do think it'll be shut down or effectively shut down. If it's sold, it'll be some way worse version of it that will absolutely, well, not absolutely, but probably fail. And so follow many, many questions about, you know, is this a free

speech issue as like Elon Musk has said? I don't think it is, but interesting. Perhaps our libertarian on the chat can lay down that argument for us today. Is it- Don't use slurs like that, Mike. You know what? I just want to give it to you now. Like I'm not going to list all the possible reasons to get at, we're good. Liz, what is your take on what has been unraveling? I mean, you also, you've got the sort of, you don't live in DC, but I feel like you're closer to the sort of DC pulse. Living in DC would be my worst nightmare. I would immediately **** myself. No, I think that you, so, I mean, I'm an avid consumer of all of the Pirate Wires content on

this issue. And I think I frequently find myself a little bit closer to the Mike Solana camp than perhaps the Standard Reason camp. But I do think that you are still missing some things. Namely, one thing that I have been thinking about a lot is the degree to which TikTok's user growth has really been plateauing. The degree to which it's sort of becoming an aging platform. It's no longer the sort of playground of the Gen Zs. It's getting

a little bit older. And I kind of wonder whether we'll see it become this milquetoast, very shitty app akin to Instagram. We've even seen TikTok shift to attempting to be a little bit more of an e-commerce platform. It's a little bit of a libertarian cop out to say, oh, you know, the natural destructive forces in the market will make it so that this is a non-issue that doesn't really need to be ruled on. But I also do think that every single time, you know, there's been an antitrust concern with regard to meta and some of these other big platforms. Anytime there's this concern about bigness, which to be fair, the TikTok concern is not bigness, it's national security. But anytime there's a concern about a platform's market share, the platform kind of seems to take care of the issue itself by simply failing or by

a new scrappy upstart coming onto the scene and stealing its lunch. And I wonder whether we're actually beginning to see some of those things in the works with TikTok, where maybe it won't be as effective of a platform as the people who are concerned about it say. That said, I do think that the way that the algorithm currently suppresses information that is critical of the CCP is something that is concerning to me. I don't know if we have enough evidence to prove that in as airtight of a manner as I would want there to be in order to take such a drastic measure that I find speech suppressing like a TikTok ban. But also at the same time, the area that I find most convincing is

how effective would TikTok be as this mass propaganda dissemination platform in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, for example. I'm less concerned about algorithmic suppression of certain content and more concerned about algorithmic pumping out of propagandistic content that favors the CCP and that could really sort of work. I almost wonder whether they're kind of slow rolling it in a way that would be very consistent with what the CCP does in other areas where they let a little bit of stuff seep through the great firewall sometimes, right? They're very sneaky with making sure that it's not an all or nothing thing. And they know when dealing with an international audience, you don't want to raise American hackles too much. So of

course, there's a little bit of Tiananmen Square content available on TikTok. Of course, there's a little bit of Hong Kong content available on TikTok. But what happens when they really, really do want to deploy it as the sort of national security tool to change public perception in the US at scale? That's the area that I'm concerned about. So those are just two areas, the e-commerce-ification and natural possible failure of the platform, as well as my legit concern that it could be used as this mass propaganda dissemination platform. What do you think of that, Mike? Well, I guess I just don't. So let's say that TikTok was suppressing.

I mean, it seems to be suppressing information on like Tiananmen Square or whatever. I don't really care. It's suppressing a lot of it, but not the entirety of it, right? Yeah, right. In a very sneaky way. I don't, you know, and I don't want to sound,

I don't want to be sounding like a broken record here because I think I've commented on this quite a bit. I don't care really about that one as much. I think the thing that is really – I think it's a problem to have them controlling a speech platform that is potentially for, you know, 100 and whatever. 170 million users in the United States. It's massive. It has a huge impact on how we see the world as a nation. That is a problem. It's a very nebulous question and hard to prove and not necessary to prove, in my opinion, because the question of trade reciprocity for me is more than enough. There's the national security question, the spying piece, sure. And

that's enough for the bipartisan coalition in Congress that forced the vestiture of the app. But one thing I've seen a lot of over the last few days has been this question of, well, how is China going to retaliate? And I thought, they have already done that. What do you mean? This is like every one of our social media platforms is banned. Every one of our media companies is banned. I saw someone else say, I made a comment on the fact that it's pretty clear that the CEO of ByteDance wants to not sell the app, which doesn't make any business sense at all. but it does make a lot of sense if you're run by the government. And they said, oh, well, why on earth

would he sell a potentially trillion dollar company for a billion dollars? It would be as if China was going to ban Facebook, but said, or you could take a billion dollars. They wouldn't even do it. And it's like, that's not a question because China did ban Facebook and it happened overnight. I think it was never an option actually in China. Facebook was banned preemptively, but the companies that they do ban, like the New York Times, are shut down overnight. There's no less forced divestiture of the Chinese market or something. It's shut down. And I think that Americans need to at least engage with this idea that every other country in the world seems to be thinking about trade in a very different way than we do. And I don't know, I don't think national security is an important reason. I

don't think it's the only reason. I'm glad it happened. But I think that there are many other areas of trade that we should be policing in this way and sort of demanding reciprocity. So we just saw something from the Biden administration that signals the opposite, which I wrote about a little bit this week in one of the takes on The Daily, which you guys should check out. You have now our sort of trade watchdog group is changing the way that it approaches this stuff. So historically, all throughout the Obama administration as well, when regulation targeting our companies came from abroad, we would think of ways to push back as a nation. We would at least think. We didn't really do much, but we would think about it. And that would be factored into policy and whatnot. They've explicitly said that that's no longer the benchmark. Countries are allowed to regulate our companies however they want. And any regulation,

even if it sort of bans a company for whatever reason, is not necessarily an act of trade aggression. That's the opposite way that we should be going. And that's just kind of where I tether in. Sanjana, what do you think about all this? I mean, I also find the trade argument compelling. I think it's crazy that China has basically all of our social media apps banned and we allow TikTok to sort of operate freely here. The thing that I found more interesting about the way the bill was passed, though, was how it was sort of tied to foreign aid to Israel and Ukraine, which I found a bit depressing.

I mean, I understand that this is how DC operates, but it is kind of crazy that, you know, we can't have, apparently we can't have sort of, you know, Congress just vote on whether or not we should force the divestiture of TikTok. We have to sort of sweeten the pot with these massive transfers of aid once again to Ukraine and this seemingly interminable war. And then, of course, Israel. And yeah, I mean, it just sort of, because Mike, you were saying it passed by a bipartisan vote. And I sort of wonder, you know, how much of this bipartisan vote actually reflects a kind of genuine conviction on the part of all these Congress people that divestiture is, you know, in the best interests of the American people, whatever that means, and how much of it is just this kind of like, okay, we need to get more money to to ukraine and israel i think that's such a good point and it also works like it works it's more than tick tock at this but that bill just the conflation of funding for israel and funding for ukraine at this point is kind of wild these

are different conflicts like why are they not being voted on separately um all of these things should be voted on separately i we had this is another take of i think it maybe it was riley that wrote about this one um what are we how are we expected to vote on these things in any kind of reasonable way if they're all lumped together they're totally different causes and totally different totally different with totally different drawbacks and and in favor. It is, I agree, depressing. Well, and specifically the manner in which the Ukraine aid was decided. I mean, I hate reading the Washington Post because it makes me want to... Particularly like the world of politics, but Washington Post had a really interesting

long reported piece that they published, I believe, yesterday that was talking about how the new House Speaker Mike Johnson was essentially kind of bullied by Biden and a lot of congressional leadership into really prioritizing the passage of Ukraine aid. And, you know, for a long time, Johnson has been really, I mean, he's newly in his position, newly minted. He's dealing with a very fractured GOP, a huge component of his party. The far right flank, you know, has been really interested in also adding border spending and getting the border crisis under control to this package of aid bills, which again, like more to your point, why is it that we're talking about banning a social media platform, aid to Ukraine, aid to Israel, aid to Taiwan, by the way, and then also apparently getting the entire immigration situation

solved in the United States. I mean, it really shows a certain unseriousness on the part of legislators. But you actually read this Washington Post report, which I reported a little bit in this morning's Reason Roundup as well. It's kind of stunning the fact that not only is Johnson not able to really in any way appease this side of his party that is concerned about government spending run amok, which is something that's a very legitimate concern. Not only that, but he's also trotted into the Oval Office to essentially be kind of bullied and pressured into passing the Ukraine aid packages. passing the Ukraine aid packages. And it's a little bit like, well, at what point does the bill come due? And at what point will genuine dissent actually be entertained and genuine debate sort of emerge? Instead, it's just kind of government spending all the way down and the game of politics, no matter what, no matter the issue and blending all the issues together quite consistently. Yes, I agree. Brandon, what do you think about that? I think we should really, I think it's an interesting subject of just the conflation of subjects or, I mean, lumping of subjects in together.

too and you just have to pay for hbo and that's the only thing you want kind of sucks um i don't have i don't have a take on it seems depressing right so like it sucks that's the way our politics work and i totally agree we should be voting on these issues separately they're completely different issues israel is not the same as um you know chinese foreign influence um and yeah i don't know how you get out of that. I think it's just like the fact of the matter is that you have these like broad coalitions in US politics. And the only way to pass things nowadays, I guess, is to lump a bunch of issues together and just ram them through. Now it is. So it is passed. It is signed into law. We have this interesting. So Trump has come out strongly. He was going back and forth on it. And he came out at the last moment sort of strongly against this. Very strange considering he banned it himself in his administration. And that was undone by Biden. You've got to love his brass balls though, right? Which is just the opposite of what he once did and pretend he never did. He just doesn't care. He doesn't give a shit. But so does Biden, right? Biden started his term by undoing the ban and is now concluding it by pushing it through signing the bill.

So I mean, they're both, we're just living in a world where we're supposed to forget what happened four years ago, always in the case of both parties, they are always changing it up. And it's like, nobody is grounded in any kind of ethics or morals or values um it's just always a raw game of power and that is while depressing interesting you know what is the the element of what is the trump case for for this bill other than i guess you have um i mean you have people who are funding him who care about tiktok um you have david sacks now a friend of the pod is doing um i just read uh david's going to be having a fundraiser for trump um It was news, I think, yesterday. And David's been super, all in guys in general have sort of changed their perspective on this. He's been super against the divestiture he believes is going to be used. And I think there's a, I wrote about this. I think

there is an interesting case that the bill itself was maybe too ambiguously crafted. itself was maybe too ambiguously crafted. And because of that, we run the risk of some future president banning, for example, Twitter, because Elon, they're going to make some nebulous case that Elon is a foreign asset or controlled by a foreign adversary. I broke that down on a piece where I don't think that's necessarily convincing at all, actually. But I think it's worth thinking about. Does Trump really care about that? Does he care about the youth vote? Does he care?

Actually, what is the Trumpian motivation here? I don't know fully, other than to oppose Biden. What if he just cares about the David Sachs vote? It's like he loves the Olympoid? He's going to be on it. I think it could actually be, I think that we are all more powerful than we think. And the all-in guys, they've helped change culture. So good on them. They got the ear of the next president, I think. I mean, I think Trump's going to win, right? He has to. Well, unless it's stolen again. No, kidding. I mean, I have to say I prefer the,

so both Trump and Biden are quite transparently just making pleas to Gen Zs to vote for them. And I much prefer Trump's approach, which is like, here, you can have your retarded dancing app as opposed to Biden's, which is just, we will bankrupt everybody for many generations to come

to pay for your basket weaving sociology degree crap from Oberlin, right? Like one of those is far less objectionable to me than the other, but it's clear what both are. Yeah. Speaking of the troubled youth, we've got to talk about the sort of Hamas encampment on the grounds of Columbia University and the counter protesters, including that there was a professor who, I don't know if he said it himself, but certainly online, the framing is like, he got kicked out of campus because he was Jewish. And then I saw this one, so there you have the Hamas chanters and dancers. And you know what? I should actually bring in a real journalist to tell me about what happened. I believe, Brandon, you were the one who researched this one. Do you want to just break down the Gaza conflict on the grounds of Columbia University is presently taking place? around actually NYU also and Columbia. And specifically at Columbia, they set up a tent

city on the south lawn of the campus. I feel like both sides are a little bit weird here, but like that Jewish professor, a lot of Jewish people sort of like went into histrionics about this tent city saying that demonstrators were yelling anti-Semitic things at Jewish people, threatening language at Jewish students and faculty. I think the New York Times did report this, so there is a little bit of that going on. And a flashpoint in the tent city saga was a little bit early on when a prominent rabbi sent a WhatsApp message to a group of hundreds of Jewish Columbia students saying that they needed to stay home from campus because it was not safe. with Passover. So Monday was the beginning of Passover. So the kids, the Jewish kids were not going to go to campus anyways, I think. But after that, it seems to have sort of motivated the president of Columbia to order all classes to go remote, which she did on Monday.

Was it, they're all remote or there's a remote option? All remote on Monday. And then the next day she said that the classes would be hybrid, which basically means like you don't have to come to class to attend it. But you can go to class until the end of the school year, which is only next week. So April 29th. So it's not like, you know, we've got months and months of hybrid or remote. It's just like one more week of class. She did this because the president was like, we need to dissolve tensions here. Hopefully with less people on campus, it'll just get better. That apparently didn't work. The president called the police,

who ended up making 100 arrests a few days ago. But that actually sort of engendered a new wave of enthusiasm, uh, uh, on the pro Palestinian side, um, more tents have popped up since then. Um, and it's just kinda, it seems to just be getting more intense. Um, I, I guess my first cut on this is just, I'm never in favor of a tent city. I don't care what flag it's waving. I just, we got to shut the tent cities down. Okay. It's 2024. I'm tired. They're terrible. We don't like tent cities. The Pyrewire's, I don't like to make official statements on behalf of Pyrewire, but I feel like we're, we could say no tent cities. These kids got nice new tents

though. I think they always went to REI last week. Are you anti-Burning Man? Burning Man's like the original tent city well that's temporary tent city and it's in the desert all tent cities are temporary if you have the national guard no just kidding i guess you're right um it's true i like some tent cities better than i like tent cities i'm okay with tent cities i'll give you this tent cities are allowed in the desert you can you can do a tent city far away from the city um so they can they can host the palestinian tent cities the there i mean go off build a whole palestinian commune i'm fine with that You can do intensity far away from the city. They can host the Palestinian intensities there. I mean, go off.

Build a whole Palestinian commune. I'm fine with that in the desert, far from human civilization. I think there are a couple of funny things about this. The first one is the idea that these protests are uniquely crazy. Disclosure, they're crazy. crazy they're terrible they're disgusting i have seen anti-semitic things i think probably most people are not that at these protests but there are unlimited examples of just disgusting like signs and people who do say shitty things about jews and um quoting various like terrorists and things like this all of it's gross um and can't

stand these people okay now that that's settled uh these protests being framed as uniquely terrible in um sort of like recent american history is that's crazy to me we all lived through blm okay we had six months plus of like legalized writing all the way up from June, 2020, all the way up to January of 2021. You had riots. It was January 6th specifically. It was like once the crazy Trump people did it, shut it down. Writing was no longer legalized. And that was the end of it. That was the end of the sort of summer of writing. Um, those were crazy months and nobody was speaking up. Um, nobody was questioning it. Nobody was saying, hey, maybe there's like a racist element to any of this or whatnot. And that's because culture

was just very different at that moment. And we have since sort of memory hold that entire period of history. But it's been sort of surreal to watch what really appears to be a fraught debate over this topic kind of in America that is now able to even be voiced in a way that before debates were not able to be voiced. And then I think just like even in the sort of pantheon of leftist tensities, this is an inferior tensity. I was in New York in 2009, so 2008 through like 2011. Brandon, I think you were there too. We lived through Occupy Wall Street. Those were some fucking tent cities all over the country. It was the Occupy movement. And my sense is those were like way crazier. No? I mean, Brandon, do you remember

that? Totally. And they were facing the winter. So I think they started in the fall and they had they were facing the winter so they i think they started in the fall and they actually did go through some of the winter they ended up it's in the tent city out the winter did because new york city is obviously pretty harsh um but yeah it's also you know well the end of the school year is like is is right here and i think half of these students probably have plane tickets home you know like are literally already bought them you know so i i mean we'll see where we are in a week i think basically yeah like where they they gotta go home right like they are gonna go home and then there's no there's gonna be no other students to see them doing what they're doing which will be a problem for them too right they'll be protesting on martha's vineyard um

will be a problem for them too right they'll be protesting on martha's vineyard um so you went to school with these people um can you kind of help me understand the psychology here i mean i think part of this is just there's like a party element to be honest like you're tenting you're camping with your friends in nice weather and i mean i think it's nice in new york right now you guys listen mike you can confirm um but i mean yeah i think there's a lot of hysterics on both sides right now i find the aesthetics of the tent city kind of disgusting i was just thinking like are they sleeping in there what where i guess they're going back to their dorm rooms to shower or something these are like the questions that immediately came to my mind um but in terms of like what the psychology is i do think there's uh well there's a portion of this that's just like they're probably really underworked i would imagine that after covid like the academic standards that fell really

significantly and i lived through that where like classes were remote everyone was cheating on exams classes were pass fail, like this, this whole sort of dumbing down of a kind of already dumbed down, uh, set of academic standards, I think has continued. And I wouldn't be surprised if like, you know, final exams are also hybrid or something like that, which students love because it means that you don't actually have to study very hard for them. I mean, I think there's, you know, they're probably underworked. Some of them probably do care a lot about the conflict. Um, but I wouldn't discount how much of this is just like, it's fun to be outside in the spring with your friends and like,

feel like you're part of a political cause while also not really uh i don't know making that many sacrifices uh in your everyday life that's a take that i that i had written down for this too which is like protesters in general would be wise to like always try to distinguish their protests from a party and this one feels like there's not much of a distinct of a distinction um if if not only because one of their demands like there's there's five demands that they have i looked on their website and one of them is that they don't face um any consequences from the school for protesting and i feel like they're trespassing they're camping on the lawn and they were told not to it's they're breaking the law exactly well so what i don't understand i actually don't understand the difference between this protest and a party if there are no consequences.

I think a protester should be like, they should ask for consequences. That's the whole reason. That's the whole power of a protest is you're going to sacrifice something because you believe so much in this cause that you're protesting. And they're actually just, they're dismissing that possibility, which makes it a lot less serious. It's a pro-Palestine themed party. That's what it is. This is the common thread to all of it, right? It's the same as the 12-hour hunger strike, which I do all the time. It's called sleeping and then skipping breakfast because you're busy with work, right? That's a normal thing to do. It's the same with the Vanderbilt student throwing a fit over how she needed assurances that as she goes to

the bathroom to remove her tampon, which by the way, what a disgusting thing to be talking about on camera and disseminated among hundreds of thousands of people. Like, my God, have some self-respect. But talking about how she needs to be able to go to the bathroom and, you know, be assured that she won't be arrested and she can return because otherwise she'll face toxic shock syndrome. And like all these things, it's the same thing over and over again where you see. And I was actually thinking about this with regard to why are these protesters so hellbent on masking all the time, especially if it's essentially a party, right? Like you don't, this isn't actually a thing. It's an aesthetic commitment. It's something to show that you're at the vanguard of something leftist, right?

But they were also talking about how, you know, it's a means, like the excuse that they so frequently use is it's a means of covering your face, hiding from surveillance, ensuring that you won't be caught, ensuring that you won't be doxxed, all these things. And it's just over and over again, it's like they want to be perceived as embattled. And yet they're not actually willing to sacrifice anything in order to show that they are committed to these causes. So it leaves all of the rest of us who've seen other protest movements or who are just goddamn adults feeling a sense of like, you are incredibly whiny children, right? You have no sense of what it actually looks like to give up something. You want to draw comparisons between hunger strikes and apartheid South Africa. Yeah, guess what? 12 hours ain't gonna fly. That just doesn't cut it. And I don't think that they have enough context to understand that. Or, you know, I mean, they're just dumb kids doing dumb kids stuff like this

sort of it. We've just, we've all seen versions of this and maybe the mistake we're making is framing it as in some way novel when really the novel thing was 2020. That was crazy. It was an historical anomaly. It was, it was BLM was happening, happening inside of the, inside of COVID and everyone was locked down. That was crazy that was a moment of a real um potential calamity even for the country that you know irreparable calamity um this is just back to sort of business um among dumb kids in college uh one dumb kid i forgot i can't believe we almost it wasn't even on my list and i just it occurred to me while sonja you were talking um we've got to talk about Ilhan Omar's daughter. We just have to talk about her. So she is going to

Columbia. So that's like the lesser Columbia. It's lady brain Columbia. Columbia for girls. Columbia for the gals. So Columbia for girls only. Girls only Columbia. Got it. So she is going

there. She's arrested for trespassing because she's in she was in the tent city right and she wouldn't leave i think is that i'm pretty sure she was in the tent city certainly she broke the law and got arrested um ilan amar obviously proud of that uh i specifically want we're talking about aesthetics and the aesthetics of protest brenna you're saying it's a, it's a Palestine theme party. Agree. Like clearly the way these people look is very important. Ilan Omar's daughter,

uh, and forgive me, I don't know her name. Um, Hercy, Hercy, H-I-R-S-I, I believe. Hercy Omar looks like a leftist college,

uh, sort of protester. Her glasses specifically haunt me in my sleep okay those glasses that she's wearing like I have never seen those glasses on a girl in my life um that did not lead to me being yelled at for something okay Okay. Like these glasses, those are, it's like, of course she has those glasses. Like that was the most expected thing I saw. Um, I feel like I said on you, you basically, I think that in, as a man, um, when you see those glasses, you have just two real options there. It's like you either run away or you just apologize

like you don't even need you don't have to even wait for her to say you just i'm sorry i it was my fault i take all of the blame for everyone in my lineage even i i apologize it's either sexism it's racism it's the environment but it's those glasses i'm telling you you could also satisfy them by like becoming a eunuch in a performative manner in front of them or self-immolation i think they also tend to really like so you have a lot of options mike they're they're like bug cat eye glasses this is like this is like i'm wearing glasses this is like i'm a communist that's got to be the thumbnail right there for the YouTube, uh, YouTube video. I think the best thing about this was that the daily beast wrote that whole article

that interviewed, um, uh, here, see, I guess, whatever her name is. Um, and it was so focused on, you know, daily beast did such a good job promoting it to basically to optimize for hate clicks, talking about how, you know, she was, you know, going hungry and she was unhoused and it was this whole thing. And it really, to me, at least there's a little bit of a meta narrative there, which is that the Daily Beast is so obviously a failing media, like media outlet, right? Because this is the only thing really left for them, right? Like in the post vice world where all of these sort of new media organizations have fallen, the Daily Beast is just basically doing this thing that they obviously know is going to get roasted on Twitter. And that's really the only way they can get clicks because nobody gives a shit about them anymore. Wait, I just saw, this is really rich. Daily Beast aggregated that quote from a teen Vogue article, which that's where she gave Ellen's daughter gave the quote to teen Vogue,

which is very apt. I forgot. I didn't know that teen Vogue was still around. I have no idea. I'm just finding, I'm finding this out today. I know that they were kitty communist site these days. Right.

It was like the death star of this stuff, but that was always has been. Yeah. But that was years ago that was not i mean i didn't think that they were still up to their antics um i i think it's probably time to move on so you know the tent city of it all had a close analog in recently just was it two weeks less 10 days ago is, you had a bunch of also on behalf of Palestine protesters who employed by Google, went into a manager at Google's office,

locked themselves inside and demanded that the university or that the university, that the company stop working with Israel. And, um, this, while, you know, not a surprising request from the pro Palestine protesters, uh, you know, divestment is, um, something they like a lot in the context of Israel, less so in the context of China. Um, it is shocking in a company. It's like the idea that you're going to lock yourself inside of your boss's office and have a hunger strike until they do what you want, that is very of the moment only over the last five years, let's say. That's an aberration in the world of business. Google, to everyone's surprise, the house that built Crazy, decides to have these people arrested and then fired along with a bunch of other protesters who were protesting at the office in both New York City,

or I believe it was New York City and down in right outside of San Francisco. And I think it was Mountain View is their office. So what you have here is a very interesting shift, which we've talked about at Tech, where suddenly Google is, they said in a blog post following all of this, mission oriented. I wrote a piece this week on the mission first sort of policy that was created by Brian Armstrong of Coinbase. This happened four years ago when workplace activism, so people protesting things like walking out even of the office on behalf of things like, for example, systemic racism or sexism first became popular. And then it was very shocking because we had seen, you know, strikes and walkouts before all throughout

the history of business, but typically, you know, on behalf of labor, not on behalf of unrelated political issues. And that had really consumed tech for a lot of years. Then came the mission first philosophy, then came a pretty slow and then rapid cultural shift in tech. I think that probably coincided mostly with the economic downturn, at least within tech. The bull market, the 14-year bull market crashed. The relationship between managers and employees changed. And the bullshit ended. It was back to business. But Google was the last bastion of that, it seemed, of the crazy. And now it's over. It feels quite significant. So yes, you have crazy people on college campuses. No, they seem to not be permitted anymore at our companies, or at least our tech companies. Have you guys followed this at all? And what do you make of it?

is that Google's move does mark the end of this era or the beginning of a new era. I'd love to hear you, I don't know, expand on that because I think that's the only sort of vulnerable point of this article. It's like, it could be, who knows what's going to happen in the next few years. Well, I think certainly, Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Y Combinator,

wrote a piece in 2017 called The Sound of Silence. And at that point, Me Too is happening. But Sanjay, you're working on a piece now that even predates Me Too. a silencing for a while, a cultural silencing. People were not supposed to speak out in any way against what was becoming a fairly loud political point of view that was not only being shared online, but was expected to be shared by the company itself. Not just company statements, but policy in keeping with fairly leftist political dogma. She didn't say all that in her piece. What she said was, we're not allowed to talk. We're not allowed to dissent. We're not allowed to share controversial ideas. That seems to be getting worse. And what's going to happen is people are going to stop talking. And once people stop talking, you're going to stop knowing what people really think. And that's going to be a problem for tech.

The worst was yet to come. She was correct about everything. What followed was about a seven-year period of silence that lasted, I would say, up until the moment that Elon Musk walked that sink into the halls of Twitter and took it over. And because of that, because you were not allowed any kind of political dissent without getting absolutely murdered by people online, largely amplified by the press that followed tech and hated it and agrees, generally speaking, with the politics of the far left inside of the companies, you were locked in this sort of strange stasis where political activists had way more power than ever before because they were the only people allowed to speak. Once things changed on the speech side, silence was thawed. People were able to sort of speak against whatever part of that philosophy they didn't like, the whole

thing kind of collapsed. And one by one, companies banned the activism altogether from the workplace and chose this different approach of only allowing people to... Well, only allowing the company to sort of take political positions on that impacted the actual business of that business. So in Coinbase's case, it would have been like crypto legislation or things like this. And so, yeah, that was tech silent winter. I think within that, you had the dawn of workplace activism. I think workplace activism and really

authoritarianism and this effort to sort of take control of these companies and actually use them for political purposes in the country and everything from, um, you know, divesting from Israel in this case to, uh, speech policing across our social media platforms in favor of one or two, uh, very narrow political viewpoints was possible. And I think it's less possible now that we're able to speak is basically what I did. We also interviewed, uh, I had a, I had some quotes from Brian Armstrong in there, um, on his advice from google and we talked to dhh of base camp who followed brian and he revealed sort of his whole process of changing his mind on this stuff and um taking the very difficult decision in the early days of uh becoming mission first which you know came with a lot of press hatred uh pretty interesting

stuff i would check it out. I think it's especially interesting, the Basecamp, what really triggered him. And I think a lot of people in tech had a similar version of this, but he was at his office, or not his office, he had discovered while working with one of his employees that they had been screening potential clients based on their politics online. They were going onto their social media accounts and trying to see who they voted for, uh, in determination of whether or not they would work with, with, um, with them. And, uh, David is like pretty left-leaning Scandinavian type anti-big tech person. That's what he was known for. And he suddenly realized like, wow. Like a work-life balance guru type,

like really very zen. That is who he is. He's from Denmark. That's just how they do. For better and worse. And that was the moment that he realized this was not like some peace-loving anti-authoritarian group of people that had taken over all these companies. This was an actual authoritarian force of darkness. And he had a choice. It was either neutrality or become a thing that he hated. And he chose neutrality. I covered this a fair amount back when it happened, both the Coinbase, the Brian Armstrong decision and DHH's statement

at Basecamp. And I actually went on the New York Times podcast, the argument to literally debate this with somebody. And the thing that was so interesting to me, and I think you made this point too in your piece, Mike, is there was always this expectation and DHH has actually made this point a bunch of times. There was always this expectation, and DHH has actually made this point a bunch of times, there was always this expectation that what these big founders needed to do in the face of employee workplace activism was listen, take a step back,

re-examine their priors, and they just need to listen. But the thing that never went said, and my debating opponent for the New York Times made this case over and over to me. Who was it? God, I'm totally forgetting him. He was such a nobody. And New York Times really, I think, inappropriately edited parts of that debate. I think I still came out looking good, but I was really frustrated by how it's like they culled my strongest points and boosted his

points that they agreed to. I don't know. I felt like it was very lopsided. But regardless, the thing that always goes unsaid is it's not just that these CEOs need to listen. It's that they also need to come to the prescribed conclusion, right? You don't have the option available to listen and say, yep, I'm going to weigh the available evidence. I'm going to sift through it. Yep. Fair enough. I'm going to be humble and reflective. But no, actually I still am on board with the political priors that I had previously held, right? Like that's not available. There's always this implicit thing, which is you must come around to their point of view. And legitimately it is such an authoritarian speech environment where any sort of dissent is not tolerated. Uh, and the choice to opt out is also, you know, infrequently tolerated by these employee activists. But that was always the component to me that felt like the biggest tell, where it's not just about listening. It's not just about trying to encourage, to foster an environment of humility and discourse certain viewpoints and to cull all of the

dissent, suppress it, squelch it, and ensure that it never sees the light of day. It's a really fucked up approach to speech. And it's incredibly inappropriate to have this in the workplace at all. I mean, nothing but respect. I wish Google had come to this conclusion about a decade earlier, but better late than never. I feel the same way with Bill Ackman sort of waking up to DEI as a problem, where I'm a little bit like, I don't know how much grace to extend to these people. On one hand, I'm like, better late than never. But also, I don't know. A lot of people have been saying this for the better part of 10 years, right? If only we could have stopped more of this in its tracks. I guess my plea to Ackman, to Google, to all of these people is like, pay attention to these things as they emerge earlier on. And that's a

way we can really try to almost deescalate the psychotic culture wars, right? And everybody wins out when you do that. But don't kind of wait and put it on simmer and wait and wait and wait for it to become this thing that reaches a spoiling point. Yeah. The Ackman stuff is more annoying than that because he's not just only now learning about it. He's like, I'm going to tell you guys about this crazy thing that's happening that you don't know about. He's,

he's over here trying to explain to, he's like, did you guys know about wokeness? Did you know? Like, have you heard about this shit? And the corollary to this is Mark Cuban also being like, actually,

I don't know. Diversity is awfully nice in this very like Obama era thing where it's just like, dude, wake up. Where have you been for 15 years? That's what David talked to, DHH talked about Cuban specifically. And he's like, I've got to give this guy some grace because he is sort of clearly just learning about these like equity. That sounds great. It's a little cute, right? Like we love equality, right? They're the same thing, aren't they? It's like, Oh, dude, you're just so rich that you've not like been in the swamp with us. Like you have no idea how crazy this shit has gotten. And then maybe a little bit

with with Cuban is also like once he realized he had a safe face, and there's no saving face because his position was just so stupid. But I don't know, Sandra, Brandon, what do you guys think about this? I just, the thing I can't get over with the Google employees in general is just their level of entitlement. Because I'm like, I understand college students agitating for their administration to take certain steps because they're paying to go to the school or they're on scholarship or whatever.

But somehow they are, the administration is in some ways indebted to them. but somehow they are... The administration is in some ways indebted to them. But to have a struggle session at your employer's office as if... You can't just leave. You can leave the company. You can just go to another company. And a lot of these people, it's like they're software engineers, they're product managers. It's not like this is a really small field where they can't find a company that aligns with their values. They just don't want to take a pay cut, I presume, can't find a company that aligns with their values they just don't want to take a pay cut i presume or a benefits cut and i just there's no world in which i can understand like the logic of trying to force your employer to change their their political opinions it just seems um yeah really entitled and it kind of one thing that was interesting at some point, someone on here like confused the students and the Google employees. And it's like, they are kind of the same, the exact same person. It's like this weird, they're in this protracted adolescence, where I think in their mind, they think of their employer as their university administrators, and they're bringing that same mindset to work.

university administrators, and they're bringing that same mindset to work. And I'm glad that Google is finally disabusing them of it definitively by firing them. So they'll have to find a new job. I think also about how much like American culture has really like fostered that notion, right? Like we've entirely created this environment, whether it's Vox, instituting their two drink limit for their Christmas party to ensure there's no funky workplace sexual harassment or like anyone making a pass at, you know, another adult that they have things in common with, right? Like whether it's, I think there's like such a parallel between the like title nine, um, you know, attempting to adjudicate all manner of sexual miscommunication on college campuses. And then the fact that a whole crop of people graduated and came into these workplaces, maybe not at Google, but at a whole bunch of other places and kind of wanted to do the same whole rigmarole all over

again, where it was like, oh, so-and-so made an unkind comment about my appearance or whatever and wanted to report it as if there's like a title nine, an overpaid title nine bureaucrat available for them, you know, each and every moment. I guess to some degree, like bloated HR departments kind of gave them that message. Can you fault them for understanding that this is just weaponized grievance, weaponized grievances as a means of distracting from actual work all the way down, regardless of where you are? It was a talent war. So you had this massive bull run in tech starting around 2008 straight up what, like two years ago when the crash sort of everything came tumbling down or a year ago about, that meant that, and Google

sort of famously embodied this, you had to give these people whatever they wanted and more than they could even possibly dream. These places actually were a lot like college campuses. You had dining halls that was like breakfast, lunch, dinner paid for. You had your transportation covered with Wi-Fi. You had all sorts of strange... Google famously fighting with Facebook for talent, offering the craziest perks imaginable. Everything from massages and you had your coffee shop and your beautiful gym, your laundry service in some cases, to literal nap pods,

in the case most famously of Google. They were also sleeping there. It was like their dorm. That, I think, bred a different relationship with their companies over the years. People identified with them more, which worked for the companies. They wanted these people to identify with them. Google wanted to just hire every single talented person that existed as a sort of preemptive tactic to suppress innovation everywhere else. Insidious, but topic for a different pot, I think. They did a great job of it up until very recently when the sort of world changed. And it changed most, I think, for these employees. You don't hear about these perks anymore because they don't really exist. It's a lot,

way less of that today. There were so many pieces making fun of the way that we treated tech workers 10 years ago. All the perks, endless think pieces about the perks. all the perks, endless think pieces about the perks. And it's just, it's kind of over. And I think that the activism in a way, less so than sort of workplace wokeness or whatever, it's like that stuff, the activism is almost a perk. It was like, this is not just a workplace. This is this other thing. This is like- It's the bring your whole self to work type culture. That was one of the perks that the companies were offering, right? These people weren't just doing it. The companies were offering that and the offer has been rescinded. So sorry, guys. It's back to the computer. I think it also speaks to just how flush with cash some of these companies

are. I mean, imagine if we had a work stoppage that was like two weeks long. You're just burning so much money every single day that people aren't working. It's like you're never going to see that again. And this went on during Floyd era 2020. I'm aware of one company whose story has never been told, um, where work stopped for like a good two and a half months for struggle sessions every single day. And it's like, how do you, if you, if you don't have a bunch of investment capital, how, how do you survive something like that? You know, and it's, it's interesting. It's interesting that Google and other companies can actually tolerate this from a financial perspective. And I think it just goes to show how actually powerful of a position they have in tech.

Yeah. And maybe that, the richness that Google is the richest, man, they're a money printing machine. And maybe that it's just that simple. You're right. It's like they just had the most money. And so this shit persisted there the longest. I do want to make some space for the CEO of NPR, who is, it turns out, a CIA asset. Sanjana, take it away. She may be a CIA agent. She certainly seems to be an asset. I mean, this is based on Chris Ruffo's reporting. He basically published an article in City Journal, I think it was yesterday or a couple days ago, pointing out that Catherine Marr, the new CEO of NPR, has in her previous life working at NGOs in the Middle East, sort of weirdly hewed closely to a lot of revolutions happening around the time of the Arab

Spring. And she was like in the right place at the right time in a lot of cases. So, I mean, first of all, she got a degree in Islamic studies and Middle East studies at NYU. I remember I was told in college if I wanted to be a CIA agent, that was the direction to go. Yeah, I was going to say like there is kind of this lore. Everyone I know who studied like Arabic in college was either like a second gen Muslim kid who wanted to learn the language or something or wanted to join intelligence uh services so she studied that um but then between like 2011 and 2013 she was in um let's see she was in libya tunisia she was at the turkish and syrian border at a bunch of times and As one does, right?

Who among us? She's like the Forrest Gump of color revolutions in every single one. She wrote blog posts about sort of, she was writing blog posts about getting internet connection to Benghazi. I mean, she basically seems to have been working for NGOs that had very close connections to the CIA,

including one called the National Democratic Institute, which I guess former CIA employees have said, yes, has very close connections to the intelligence community. in some ways been involved in fomenting these like pro-liberal democracy revolutions abroad. And then at home come back and, and fomented our own color revolution, as he says, uh, in the George Floyd protests through her work at the Wikimedia Foundation, sort of pushing this left wing, uh, you know, racialist ideology. And, and he talks about gender ideology as well. I mean, I personally think the thing i find interesting about this is like whether or not she's actually part of the cia it's kind of she's like indistinguishable from a cia agent and her work at these these ngos um and also a lot of the reporting he did was based on her tweets like he just went through her twitter and found there's like a tweet of the reporting he did was based on her tweets. Like he just went through her Twitter and found there's like a tweet of hers

from 2011 where she's like, I'm heading to the Turkish Syrian border tomorrow. Um, and so it's not, it's not even like, you know, she was hiding her, uh,

her movements. This is all publicly available information. so yeah. Does Rufo allege like a, does Rufo allege a formal affiliation with the cia or does one have to have a rufo strategy is just he's just asking questions yeah he he's just asking questions he actually says it's like it's irrelevant whether or not she is formally affiliated with the cia which i do agree with i mean he's really just pointing out

you think it's irrelevant well i mean i think it's irrelevant to the fact that she clearly i guess his broader point seems to be like she's part of this you know ngo apparatus that seems to be ideologically aligned with the cia um so in that sense it's like okay they're working toward the same end goal. I guess it's relevant in that. Yeah. It's crazy. If we have a CIA agent, uh, at the head of media. Yeah. So right. That is, that's true. Um, my, my take on this is just, I don't think we should let anybody with a New York times wedding announcement, uh, take on a position of power in the American media, because I think it's the most cringe fucking thing on the entire planet. So that's one of the things that I always Google. Like if I'm doing my own little Rufo thing of digging up dirt.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. CAA, important. Okay, sure. But I also always look at the New York Times wedding announcement because you can always find little nuggets as to like, not only who they are, but also how rich they are and how they present themselves. Right. And so there's one little nugget about her first date with her now husband and how, you know, she wasn't sure whether she was interviewing him to, to be her counsel, her general counsel or not. And it's just like the type of just like moneyed, um, obnoxious, ultra elite stuff. I mean, she's from Connecticut, like, you know, who can, who can really blame her. But it's just like this type of thing where it's like,

I know that she styles herself this, you know, woke racial justice warrior, but can you actually be that if you're fundamentally a rich girl from Connecticut? Right. And I'm always interested in the class frame of all of this because how representative is NPR actually going to be if they have Connecticut, fancy New York Times wedding announcement, CIA shill working for them and taking all of the taxpayer money, right? This is not what we need. If she was actually a CIA agent and she was out there reporting from all these revolutions on the ground, I think I would be much more interested in listening to NPR. Definitely like tune in at least once to see her topple a government. That's that. I mean, I don't know that I agree with it, but you can't say it's not interesting. And, and that, but, and also isn't that like,

I mean, that is her biggest problem. That's all of their problem is that they're not. They're not these charismatic, scary people. Actually, if this is the face of the CIA, and she's, you know, up at a TED talk talking about, I mean, you can listen to one of her speeches. It is just nonsense buzzword after buzzword after buzzword to conclude with some kind of boring platitude that means nothing. It's innocuous bullshit. It's like with a veneer of niceness to it. It's like a Brene Brown who likes foreign policy, right? It's totally boring. And that's just, if that's the face of American power, then I don't know. I'm a little bit worried about that. Just as someone who doesn't want us to be destroyed, that's troubling that that she if she actually is the kind of person who's in charge that's like i mean that's in some sense worse than if she isn't um well that's i guess no yeah i confused myself there she sucks brandon finishing thoughts i hate to fall back on cliches, but I'm not surprised that she's the prototypical blob person.

Where did that come from? The blob thing? The blob? Yeah. I don't know. I probably became aware of it years ago, a few years ago. It's like the swamp. It's just slang for the foreign policy establishment. slang for the foreign policy establishment um and like the meat i think the the mainstream i include the people in mainstream media who have all the right opinions current thing members so but that alone goes back to my my thought a second ago so the blob versus the deep state is just a totally different thing a few years ago we were talking about the state. That was scary. That was like, Oh my God, spooky. Like they're controlling the world. They know about aliens

for sure. But also they're secretly running the country. There is no stopping them. They can't be removed. They are taking down a president and now it's just the blob. And no, it's just, it's distinct. The blob is the elite managerial class and the deep state is the deep state. The two different things, I think. Yeah. But my point was to say that I was researching, I was looking into Wired magazine for an article that seems like I'll never end up writing. I know. I'm still waiting for it. and every single person is the blob it's it's impressive how they how they hire they seem to hire every every single person is like i you know usually or sorry previously worked at the new york times washington post and then i was like you know at some ngo right and i i think my point is to say

that what's her name katherine marr is not a unique type of person in, um, in media today. I think there's, I think you could look into a lot of people and find the same sort of affiliations or connections or, or, or past. Yeah. Everybody's like a nameless, shapeless, Fulbright, Middle East, whatever Arabic language expert, Ted talk batch, right? Like from Connecticut, right? Like he just, that's just everybody. Liz, I want to give you the last word actually as our guest today. I want to give you an interesting, I guess it's just, if you were in the CIA assets shoes right now, how would you fix NPR? Well, I mean, the way to really sabotage it from the inside as a libertarian.

Not to fix, I'm a libertarian. Well, no, I mean, it's just stunning to me that NPR still receives taxpayer dollars, right? People want to continually diminish this. They receive a hefty chunk of funding from not only directly from the federal government, you know, a few percent, but then also like 10% of their funding is from their member stations, which are directly funded by the government, right? And so, you know, you can tally it up all kinds of different ways, but a chunk of it is actually legitimately coming from taxpayers. I don't think that this is needed. I don't think it was ever needed. And it's kind of stunning to me that this continues to exist. I mean, one thing that NPR really could benefit from is instead of

just being these like anodyne milk toast, sort of like liberal generic shills for the state, if they actually wanted to invest in any scrappier type of reporting, that would be good. I think sometimes their foreign bureaus are pretty solid. You actually, you know, it pains me to say it, but like New York Times also has some really good foreign reporting. NPR could beef up their department there and attempt to make itself useful in some way. I also think, you know, their radio and podcast products, you know, can remain quite good. And so investing in that realm, I think would probably be excellent. But the main thing I would do if I were Catherine Marr or with the, you know, beautiful curls in charge of NPR is I think I would probably commit arson and try to burn it all down because it's

really such a waste of all of our money. And all of us should feel we should wake up a little bit angry about this every day. It's okay if you don't want to choose violence the way that I do. But I do actually think that like it is a terrible problem. And we continue to see as the media landscape sort of becomes more and more of this desiccated husk and more and more newsrooms fall, not to arson, but to natural causes. There continues to be this drum that gets beaten by all kinds of like sadist journalist shills that are like, oh, we need taxpayer funding for local news. We need investments in local news. And it's like, I don't know if you understand this, but when the government in any way funds journalism, that journalism will not be adversarial to the government. We want journalism that is adversarial to the state. We want

journalism that, you know, does legitimate muckraking on power, wherever it may be. And when the government funds it, it ain't it, right? That's not how that happens. And any journalist worth their salt should be aware of that. Well, I think we're going to... I was saying, I think we're going to see, but for the reason that we talked about earlier, or the topic that we talked about earlier, where you can never in Congress vote for just one thing, that's how NPR is funded. It's snuck into all of these other bills that people can't say no to. So we'll probably never get a vote just on NPR. And until we do that,

then it lives on another day. But we will be here to make fun of it. It's been real. See you guys next week. Probably a day later next week, because I'm going to be abroad and it's going to be hard. So bear with us. For the CIA or for someone else? At the border of Tunisia.

Are you going to be at the Syrian border? I'll be in Barcelona instigating a movement for independence quietly, but I'm going to talk about it. Bye.