Pirate Wires - Tok Blocked! TikTok “Ban” Is Here - Everything You Need To Know

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

EPISODE #42: Pirate Wires Podcast is back for your weekly fix! This week we get into the breaking news of house legislation to force ByteDance to sell TikTok in the Unites States. We’re joined by special guest Nathan Leamer to break it al down. Next, we get into Solana’s explosive piece in Pirate Wires, revealing what’s really going on at Google. Spoiler Alert: It’s not good. Finally, “Allyship In The Outdoors”. This one is about as clownish as it gets. Go check out these articles after the pod on Pirate Wires. Enjoy! Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman, Nathan Leamer Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/breaking-bill-to-be-introduced-to-force-bytedance-to-sell-tiktok?f=home https://www.piratewires.com/p/google-culture-of-fear https://www.piratewires.com/p/north-face-anti-racism-course?f=home Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell Nathan Twitter: https://twitter.com/NathanLeamerDC TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! Like & Subscribe 1:00 - Breaking Down The Latest TikTok News With Nathan Leamer 31:55 - The Crew Reacts To Nathan's Report 35:00 - Solana's Bombshell Reporting On Google 53:30 - Allyship In The Outdoors 1:07:11 - Thanks For Watching! Tell Your Friends! See You Next Week!

Americans using TikTok are at risk of having their data harvested by the Chinese government for any number of concerns. China is setting up their own rules of the road. We've seen whistleblowers come out saying that CCP is involved. We've seen that Hong Kong protesters were caught up in dragnets because of TikTok data. The political side of the White House, who opened up a TikTok account for the White House literally a month ago on the Super Bowl. If you try to open a TikTok app, it won't allow you to access the app unless you call your congressman. I will say what I'm worried about is that individual members could get picked off because their donors, a couple of big donors, have invested about $32 billion in TikTok and ByteDance. TikTok is like the first on deck, but like there are some other companies that we should be looking at further.

And I hope this kind of allows us to go further with that. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod. We have a packed one for you today, starting right up front with what the hell is going on with TikTok. Madness in Washington, D.C. Today, really, because we're recording Thursday. This is coming out Friday. so yesterday madness in washington dc but really all week um from the moment the news broke uh the company there's now a bill in play where the company may be forced to divest so sell

um from its china-based uh parent company bite. So to sort of talk about all of that, these first 20 minutes, I want to hit all the TikTok news. We brought in Nathan Leamer, so a special guest today. Hi, Nathan. Nathan is the CEO of Fixed Gear Strategies, which is a boutique firm providing like comms and policy advice to clients in the telecom and infrastructure space. But before that, before he started his firm, he served as policy advisor to Ajit Pai of the FCC and worked on the Hill as a legislative aide to Representative Justin

Amash. Basically, he's a swamp creature, which is why he's here today, a dispatch from the swamp. Let's get into it, man. TikTok. I just saw TikTok actually declaring it a ban, which I thought was funny. There's like sort of straight to propaganda mode. There's a lot, by the way, of interesting propaganda stuff to interesting propaganda threads, I think, to pull here. Everything from obviously the way that they're communicating to, I think, really the way they're lobbying and the people who are lobbying on their behalf. to, I think, really the way they're lobbying and the people who are lobbying on their behalf. But before that, we do have to just get into, I think, the basics. High level, what is happening here? I know that there was a closed session, was it last week, that kind of seems to have triggered all of this. Can you tell us a little bit about that and sort of what is in play right now. And then after the sort of general picture, what is in play today? Yeah, so this week has really been crazy. I had heard for several months

that off and on there were conversations between Republicans and Democrats about what a TikTok legislation could look like. As you may know, this has been an ongoing debate over the past probably five or six years. President Trump tried to ban them through a method they got thrown out in court. There was the Restrict Act in the Senate a couple of years ago that got some support, but never got a hearing, never got a markup. And there were a lot of kind of major flaws with the way

that they were going about this. And so there are many ways to skin a cat in DC. And so this is the latest kind of version, but what's different about it is how it's tailored. The bill, which is called Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which is a terribly written name, basically is about calling on a divestiture of ByteDance, the Chinese owned company that actually operates TikTok. And it basically sets a date for a divestiture of ByteDance, the Chinese-owned company that actually operates TikTok. And it

basically sets a date for a divestiture. And if they don't meet that criteria for divesting within a certain amount of time, then they would call on the app stores and cloud servicing entities to not provide services. And so what is fascinating about this is how it's tailored in a way that it applies to TikTok, but could also apply to other foreign adversarial-owned companies that are doing this type of bad conduct and questionable conduct that we see TikTok doing. It's about the conduct. It's not about the content on the platform, which is something that some people have wanted to do, to go after the content, whether it's like, you know, bull-haired people singing and dancing or whether it's like kids on there or whatever it is. No, this is a separate conversation. It's about the conduct of the company. And as you said, last week, there was a really evidently classified hearing that really left some mouths agape,

really concerning for a lot of people. And it really kickstarted this conversation into high gear on Capitol Hill. It has to be pretty crazy whatever they discovered last week. I mean, obviously, we have no idea. So I don't, maybe it's not even worth speculating. But I will just say that it's not as if we have no evidence of the espionage. There is endless reporting on this out of, you know, everywhere from your right wing outlets to your obviously sort of centrist left wing outlets, the New York Times, like endlessly recording, you know, point by point. Every single time a story breaks where someone from the company has sent data back to mainland China, including after. So what's his face?

The CEO of TikTok famously testified the first time, not this most recent one. And made his sort of promise never to do that. They had this sort of program to, I think it was called Project Texas, which is fucking crazy, where they're like the most jingoistic pro-America name ever, where they're going to sort of ban data sort of moving from TikTok back to mainland China. It has moved since, we know that, or at least there's been reporting about this. So it's like, what could it be? It has to be worse than that to have sort of sparked so much interest. But certainly now we're here, what actually has to happen for the divestiture to be forced? There's a vote today. Who is voting?

And there's not a vote today. They're discussing the vote today. And the vote will come in the next two weeks, right? Yeah, it's called a markup. So the committee of jurisdiction, which is the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House, actually has to mark this up. This is like step one to get a vote. You can't get a vote in the House floor unless you go through a committee. Again, no TikTok bill has ever been through a committee before. So this is pretty fascinating. So they're getting a markup. They released it two days ago. They knew they had the votes ready to go for the markup. So the markup is Thursday. And from what I've been told, again, I'm recording before it's actually happened. They're going into executive session throughout the day to deal with various

classified aspects of what is going on to make sure they get this right. And so you're going to see over the course of the day, them coming in, coming out, press coming in, coming out, conversations about what this will look like. And from what my sources tell me, unless something changes that I'm not aware of, we're going to have a vote that passes this bill, probably with some changes. I can imagine some definitional changes, some questions about what the qualified divestiture means, some of the covered entities, more further clarification for that. But in conversation with the House leadership, both the majority leader's office and the Speaker's office, they're working with their Democratic counterparts. They plan on once this bill is passed in the markup to bring it to the

floor. Now, a question is timing. Next week, they're only in session for three days because there's a retreat for some of the members of Congress. Look, members of Congress like the vacations, just like you. And then the following week, there may be time. So they have a session through the next couple of weeks where they're trying to get this through. The other question is, will the Senate pick it up? Will they bring up their own companion version to go through the Senate committee process and then pass a later Senate full committee, a full Senate version? Do you have any sense whatsoever of what could have been revealed last week? I mean, are you hearing any rumors? Do you have any, like, I don't want to speculate, but i would love for you to speculate oh great i'm here to speculate this is my job this is wonderful um so i know that there are a number of doj investigations into the treatment of of uh conduct and and data um flows and where that data is going particularly

because as you remember bite dance is uh is actually responsible for the uh national uh counterintelligence measures that china has so they have to hand over any data they have. And so my hunch, again, totally guessing, is that there is something about the DOJ investigation that may have found that, yes, this data is in fact going to the CCP. We've seen whistleblowers come out saying that CCP is involved. We've seen that Hong Kong protesters were caught up in dragnets because of TikTok data. So I think there is something in that orbit that they have now confirmed or that they're able to

show and demonstrate to members. And that has really just changed their opinion. I do want to kind of go back and double click on something you were just talking about, or you just mentioned, which was that if you are running a company in China, it is the law. You have to give data to the CCP. And this is something, I think a lot of the pushback against any kind of TikTok legislation comes from a place of ignorance. And I don't mean this in an insulting way. I mean, literally people are ignorant of what exists in China. So if you have this connection, you have... Separate from the question of like, oh, do you have a family in China? Then you're sort of like de facto compromised because that's a really scary place to be and demands can be made of you or whatever. Table that. It's literally

the law in China for ByteDance to hand over any information they want. Now there's a question of whether or not TikTok is sending things over, but we know they are. That's definitely happening. So you're already at... Americans using TikTok are at risk of having their data harvested by the Chinese government for any number of concerns. Then there is a separate question that I find compelling. And it's not the one that I feel like most maybe sort of you often see what you also alluded to earlier you see a lot of more right of center talking heads talking about um the propaganda drive or whatever the propaganda element of tiktok here it's a giant question mark honestly i have no idea how the algorithm works i have no idea what the link is between china and tiktok like i kind of think it's just about as left wing as most crazy young people

are left wing and i kind of think the craziest left wing stuff on that app is being amplified in the way that other crazy shit on other apps is being amplified algorithmically which is just like crazy things get attention on the app don't know maybe not don't care the thing that i care about more than uh i think honestly more than even the spying um is just the trade disparity here the idea that that every single social media company american social media company is banned in china and now tiktok which is control owned by bite dance is publicly talking about the value of the First Amendment and competition. And I've said this before. This is kind of a point where I've really departed from libertarianism.

This is one of the main points, I think, that kind of shook me away from it. We cannot have a situation in America where the entire world is permitted to compete in our market, but we are not permitted to compete abroad. That's just a total trade imbalance. It makes no sense. I don't know why we've ever tolerated it. And then it's like especially stupid when we know that a hostile foreign government is using the tool to spy on Americans. So I don't know. Maybe this is like a lot of opinion I just spewed out.

So if anyone would like to push back or say, no, no, we need TikTok to be here, I would love to hear from you. I wouldn't say that, but I would agree with you. And I would also say that this applies equally to the law in Florida banning property ownership by non-permanent resident Chinese nationals. Because China, you have to to live you can't even own property if you're a foreigner there and you have to live there for 12 months just to lease for 75 years or whatever which is the closest thing you do to buying um and you can't rent it out i think it's a good point there are all of these bizarre disparities it's like uh someone commented today on a tweet of mine about this and they were like it's it's like a cheat code in liberalism, right? We have these very free governments.

It's probably the freest in the history of the world in many respects, certainly when it comes to things like this, when it comes to property and speech and civil liberties. And a totalitarian government, that makes us very easy prey in a lot of strange asymmetrical ways to a totalitarian government. Trade is one obvious place uh this whatever the fuck this property situation is is another um i wonder how much of this nate do you hear people talking about uh in dc a lot of people are like no one are they is it are they all sort of like me like no one like the spying yeah it's bad but like it's also a giant question mark whereas you know there are all these all these obvious other reasons maybe that you want to ban the app. How much of it is being fueled by that? First Amendment doesn't protect against espionage.

That's as clear as a day. And unfortunately, you're seeing a lot of talking points being pushed out by TikTok and ByteDance. Today, I don't know if you saw this, but Thursday, day of the hearing in DC, at least, if you try to open the TikTok app, now I don't have TikTok, but I've seen this screenshots, it won't allow you to access the app unless you call your congressman. You have to figure out how to opt out, but they want you to call your congressman. They're attacking your free speech, your first amendment rights. Now, as FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, a friend of mine and a great leader on this, has been saying, it's about the content.

It's not about the conduct. It's not about the content. The reality is that if you're a, he references a Supreme Court case where if you're a bookstore doing illicit activities, if they want to shut down the bookstore, that's not a First Amendment violation. That's because you were doing illicit activities in the bookstore. If you're running a- Yeah, you're like laundering money. No, no, no, no. You can't ban the books. It's not how it works. The reality is that we're looking at the actual conduct.

But unfortunately, you're seeing, whether it's activists who are fans of TikTok on the left, or the political side of the White House who opened up a TikTok account for the White House literally a month ago on the Super Bowl, saying that they want to use TikTok, but also they're saying it's a free speech First Amendment rights. Then you have the White House policy team saying, no, it's not. Well, let's pause there and talk about that because it's not just the Biden administration. You see this throughout government. What do you make of it? I mean, on one hand, we're being told that it's this huge national security threat. On the other, certainly the president who should know the most about that is using the app is it and like

how much of a of a threat is it really it makes you wonder right i mean the question is like you're enabling young people onto the app to now have their data sucked up you're now basically encouraging them into this the the this uh these concerns but like I think that's why the divestiture bill is written in such a unique and helpful way is we're looking at the actual problem here. Because if we start getting into the content, you're now opening up all these first amendment questions. And you just say like the structure of our government

is in such a way that we don't have an authority. You can just willy nilly, you know, cut people out that say things they don't like. You know, you can't- Which is great, by the way. Like that's not the problem. They don't like you. You can't shut down a podcast because they don't like you thank you very much solana for what you're doing here and keep it alive no one can shut you down on this uh uh but like the reality is that if we're going to do it we have to go in a careful way and we did that

with the fcc and my experience at the fcc was chairman pie went after huawei we went after the concerns that huawei was sucking up the data through our routers and through a wireless infrastructure and your cable networks and fiber. And now we're able to shut that down because we knew it was spying. It wasn't your ability to access the internet, Huawei users. It was the fact that they were using a platform, a conduit that was also being used by the What do you make of the criticism that I receive relentlessly that this is no different than what Facebook does? It's an American company. That's a big difference. I mean, that's why we're saying

it's about the... If we want to go over content about privacy issues, overall privacy issues, there's a lot of bills in Congress that can't quite get agreement around how to do that. And that's part of the problem is that whether it's Google or Facebook or some of these American companies, you know, but they don't have to hand over that data to the federal government in the same way. There are checks and balances that we fight for. In fact, I wish we had more of them. And that's why the FISA reform and NSA fight that's happening right now on Capitol Hill is so important, so vital to this conversation, too, because we need to make sure that we as Americans online are free from surveillance, whether it's our own or an

adversarial government. So next step, you know, entering markup today. And then as you mentioned, you know, over the next couple of weeks, we're gearing up towards the vote. What are realistically the odds that this passes? You said it has bipartisan support and they sort of, they got to mark up sort of before they even made the announcement. Um, but what about the actual vote? So every bill, this Congress can barely get done, right? Obviously there's a little small odds everywhere. Um, it's like, you know, being a Philadelphia Phillies fan, hoping when the world series this year, there's a chance, but who knows? Um, the reality is though there's momentum and that's what,

that's what matters. Uh, that is the most important thing right now is that there's momentum and that's what that's what matters uh that is the most important thing right now is that we have momentum and the fact they can move on over the next couple weeks is just super vital for uh next steps so um i i am worried though i will say i'm what i'm worried about is that individual members particularly important members in the house republican side could get picked off because uh their donors there's a couple big donors who jeffrey yes let's talk about them. Yeah, who have invested about $32 billion in TikTok and ByteDance. And he's on the boards of several very powerful organizations in DC, really in part of the campaign finance infrastructure of DC politics.

An individual like that can make things very hard on certain members. And that's the part that we got to mitigate against. And how do we reinforce those members to stay strong on this issue? It's crazy to me how many former Trump people also now effectively work for China by way of one of these companies. You have, what was it yesterday? I went through the whole list. You have, what was it yesterday? I went through the whole list. Well, OPEX is the most recent. So you also have like David Urban,

who I think he ran Trump's campaign in Pennsylvania, sort of turning now and working for ByteDance. It's not this like right-wing effort, I think, to ban TikTok that we think it is. I think it's pretty complicated. And from my reading right now, the big risk is not on the Democratic side. I think there you probably have the votes you're going to have. It's on the Republican side because of the money from Yass and things like this. to be a no on this and he's going to say it's for you know fair competition or whatever and then it's like i mean the reality of that is we don't have it with china so it's just bullshit again this is like why i'm not into libertarianism anymore um but that seems to be the piece in

play now it's like what is the what really is the republican position on this and is that not honestly that conflict between um the quote free market and national defense kind of at the heart of uh the changing way that the republican party is thinking of itself right it's like it's really it's it's globalism versus nationalism on the right i think is that would you kind of agree with that i think there's a lot there i mean we used to think what that every mcdonald's and burger king of china would solve our free market problems. That was actually the ideology of most of the right. I still, to be fair, think a lot of that is partly true. I'm not calling for a decoupling of our country.

I'm not a foreign expert to know all that. But I can tell you that in the age of Trump, since 2016, we've seen a concerted effort to wrestle with these concerns. The fact that we are in such an interconnected world. wrestle with these concerns and the fact that we are in such an interconnected world. And, you know, if Huawei and Chinese-made entities are controlling the internet in Europe, that's going to have negative ramifications for us, not just our security, but our economy. Look, like the big fight in Leo space, the future of a lower Earth orbit satellites is the fact that China is setting up their own rules of the road to make it hard for Project Hyper or Starlink or these other American-made companies to compete. So it's not just security. It's also

about our own economic freedom, which you mentioned earlier. And that change because of Trump and because of the rise of this, you might call it populism, maybe a resetting, recalibrating of free market ideas has, I think, actually allowed us to become stronger and focus on these really concerns. Honestly, if we had not been changing our lens, I think very few people would be interested in addressing TikTok. You would have far more members interested in what Yaz or the Libertarians are saying. We saw Vivek, who is sort of a surrogate for Trump in many respects at this point, certainly wants to be perceived as a surrogate for Trump. While he was running, changed his mind on TikTok, he became a pro TikTok guy. Where do you see Trump coming down on this? Do you see him being quiet on

this before the vote happens? Do you see him actually offering his opinion in one direction or another? Because it seems that that would also have a huge impact on the way the Republicans are thinking about it. I think that would have a big impact. And I am I am careful to ever suggest what he may or may not do. But what I would say is, is look, I mean, Vivek was trying to run for president and try to win. And he was running from behind. And he realized that his base was millennials and millennials, and they to win. And he was running from behind and he realized his base was millennials and millennials and they use TikTok. And so I think he was trying to separate himself from the older people that he was running against. And so when Jake Paul tells you that TikTok can

reach young people, who to question Jake Paul? I think to be fair, President Trump and his team was very much a part of the kind of refocusing the way we go about China. And so I think, you know, just my guessing is that there's a lot of people in that world who recognize the real concerns with China and the real concerns with their influence on our cybersecurity space. And so, you know, I don't know that he's going to go the same way as Jake Paul. I don't want to misframe it. It's thinner on the Democrat side than the Republican side, right? It's just that the Republican side is now being threatened by uh lobbyists and things like this support i mean support for the tiktok to vest a shirt would be thinner i mean tiktok there's a number of

articles in politico about the number of lobbyists and leftist center partners like i think there's a former white house staffer that was really close with joe biden helped him get elected who was brought on by tiktok like they have a lot of people in their space, too, who are trying to be in the years of Democratic leaders. So like it's it is a full court press from them as well. But, you know, Representative Jamal Bowman was the biggest TikTok advocate last year. And, you know, he's the same guy who tried to, like, you know, break out of the house and set out the fire alarm, the fire alarm. I'm not so sure how effective he is right now at bringing on his team with him. So I think you're right. They do have an uphill battle, but it does speak to this fact that there's forces on both the left and the right

that are advocating for and against this issue. And look, that's actually a good place to be. To be frank, this isn't a right wing effort. This isn't some Biden pipe dream. This is something that I think rational level headed people are looking at doing. And honestly, I'll be honest, like some of the libertarian libertarians that I know in DC, who are generally the most vocal to vocally opposed to anything like this, were actually kind of muted yesterday. They're like, this is kind of a cleverly written bill. This is kind of like an interesting idea. I have quibble with this and that maybe bill the tainter questions, but like, weren't in the same, like, this is a terrible non-starter as they were several months ago. Um, also the

TikTok's largest trade association that they're a member of has not said anything publicly about the bill. If, if TikTok really did have sway with certain, with their trade association, they would have come out opposed to the thing right away, but they've been sitting on their hands for the past several days. And it makes me wonder why. I actually have a question on the text of the bill, because something I've been seeing on Twitter is there's this provision in the bill that gives, so the bill sort of says, you know, foreign adversary controlled applications can be subject to these foreign adversary controlled applications can be subject to these demands of divestiture, right?

But it also has a provision saying that if the president determines that an application poses a significant threat to national security, he or she can issue a public statement, I guess a public notice it says, and then submit it to Congress and then potentially force the application into a divestiture or ban it or something like that and I've been seeing sort of murmurings on Twitter about how this might be used to I don't know weaponize criticism of applications yeah exactly and so I'm curious what you what you think about that. And if that's a substantive critique, let me just say, like, the fact is, we have a separation of

powers. And there's need for transparency and accountability, both from the Congress to the White House and the White House, vice versa. And so it is really important that they hammer out this language in a way that makes sure that there is transparency and accountability to make sure that the president or any president, whether it's this one or a future one, doesn't weaponize this new authority in a way that would be problematic. Honestly, that was my biggest concern with some of the previous proposals was that was way too broad. And it was done in a way that I think really could be a weaponization. So, look, we live in a world where Google is cuddling up with with with the government. We live in a world where, you know, we saw different social media platforms censor things based on what the government told them to do. You're right,

it's a fair criticism. And I really hopeful to see the markup actually flesh that out. So we can kind of get a better idea of what this would do and what this would not allow, because I understand the concern. I think it's a safe, I think it's a fair thing to be critical of and be wary of. But that's what a markup's for. That's what this congressional conference process is for. And honestly, that's the role of libertarians. That's where Rand Paul's perspective or Representative Massey or Mike Lee or certain members in the Freedom Caucus or others or Billy Lofgren on the other side of the aisle. That's why libertarians are important too. Let's balance this out and move forward. Given that this is a divestiture and not a ban, not an outright ban, it seems like a pretty

easy thing to message on just patriotic, nationalistic grounds to Republicans. to Republicans. I'm wondering how do you steel man the opposition from Republicans? Is it just completely political? Is it just like the machinations of the swamp that are producing this opposition? Or are there actually good reasons to allow ByteDance to continue owning TikTok? I'll do my best. You know, in DC, we don't steal, man. We just, you know, straw man. But I'll do my best. I'll do my best West Coast impression here.

You guys are so thoughtful and engaging. We don't come to compromise, man. We're just trying to like, you know, beat the other guys down. That's what Twitter is for. X is for, sorry. No, I think there's actually some fair thoughts. I mean, if you're saying like, look, like how would this actually affect the small businesses and various entities that are actually leveraging TikTok

for economic opportunity, right? Let's say they're not getting the same engagement. You're a small business who's using TikTok to become like the greatest hairdresser or whatever it is. I could see an argument for that, first off. Like, actually, would it have an impact on small businesses and small entrepreneurs that can't get the same? But it wouldn't. A divestiture wouldn't have an impact on that. Yeah, I'm just, well, that, first off. Like, actually, would it have an impact on small businesses and small entrepreneurs that can't get the same? But it wouldn't.

A divestiture wouldn't have an impact on that. Yeah, I'm just, well, yeah, but I'm just, I'm trying to come up with ideas. The other side is. I mean, they're saying it's like a closet ban. So if, here's, I've got one. Who's going to buy it? It was valued at like $86 billion or something. There's no way Democrats are going to allow Mark Zuckerberg to buy it.

Or Elon, I don't think, could afford it, right? He can't. I don't think he'll. Maybe. Who knows? I mean, maybe X could do it, but there's no way they're going to allow that in this climate. So what is the company? What giant company that can afford it? Are they going to allow to actually buy it? That's going to want it. And if they can't find a buyer, then is it a de facto ban? Or do they just have to sell it at a sort of massive discount to like, I don't even know, a gaming company or something that then becomes immediately overnight the most important social media company in the country? Yeah. I mean, look, Lena Kahn is at the FTC. So who knows what they would allow for any sort of purchase? I mean, that is a legitimate question. The other one I would say, Brandon,

because I was starting to think about the, because I went away, but you're right about the investor clarification. I missed that. What I would also say is that, like, it kind of speaks to this larger conversation with the economic questions, geopolitical economic questions.

How does this play? Is there a reaction from China? What does that look like? What American companies are involved in that? That was actually a concern that was literally raised by, I think, honestly, an earnest Hill staffer yesterday to me about like, hey, if this happens, what does this look like down the road for us? What are they going to ban our social media companies? Not just social media. I mean, look, we have so many manufacturing, how much

other stuff is in that space. What are they going to do? They're going to retaliate. I mean, this is what I don't understand on the DC side. What is the fear of trade war with China? We will suddenly have to pay, what, $10,000 for a new phone or something, and they will not be able to feed themselves. It's like they don't want a trade war. Their entire economy is based on trade. They cannot have an enemy in the United States. And it's like, this one seems like an absolute softball to me. As long as you have someone, as long as you have people in DC who are willing to fight. So on, I had to say, I literally heard this person say that and I sat quietly and I thought the same thing you said, but Hey, I got to play the game. And I I'm glad that you made the point. Um, yeah, I, I, I see that. I absolutely get that point. It's that, that is the one perspective that I think some people here would, would, would, would quibble with. And again, that's my best effort to be a steel man for their side. Not that I would take that position myself. How do you think that would this bill affect other Chinese apps like Timu,

like e-commerce from China, which is really big? So yes, I think it could have an effect on, it should shine a light on e-commerce. And I think the China CCP Select Committee in the House has done a really good job of kind of raising more and more concerns about that i think you can't go forward with some of those other entities unless you look at uh tiktok first one point i would bring up is i'm still focused on the hardware side i mean i'm really concerned about apps like not apps but like uh hardware like tp tp link uh which is a wi-fi router that has some major uh concerns concerns with how it can be used back in China, information go back to China. Let's look at some of the other telecom side of this as well,

not to mention the e-commerce. So yeah, I think to your point, TikTok is the first on deck, but there are some other companies that we should be looking at further. And I hope this kind of allows us to go further with that. Great. Thanks, man. It was great talking to you. And just, I don't know we're gonna follow the news and hopefully bring you back on in a couple weeks with with an answer in one way or the other uh i so you're in all this i am literally above tick tock's office right now my office is literally above tick tock they have dc offices in the third and fourth floor on the seventh are people like running around frantically they're crazy i actually can i tell you a great story i

was in an elevator with a couple of them complaining about the last hearing and like what was being said and what members were saying and oh, Tom Cotton said yada yada and whatever. But I am hosting. Just so you know, you're invited and like when we win this, there's a bar right next door called Last Call. I'm hosting a Winnie the Pooh

themed happy hour. You're more than welcome. We'd love to have you. Yeah, I mean, what mean it was like two weeks from now we'll know for sure well the senate they take time but you know if we get a house pass we'll go from there and and let's see what happens all right man well i'll see you there have a good one take care i mean we had a lot i want to move on to to google in a minute but what do you guys think about tiktok any any other thoughts that kind of weren't shared? I think that if it is banned, somebody can just make a clone. I mean, how difficult can it be?

Can they though? You think it should be like that and yet Zuckerberg has really tried and Instagram, I mean, the crack does not hit the same way. I don't know if you've noticed. I think there is something that has not been replicated. I think it's harder to build these things up. One question I have, this is very easily Google-able, but what percentage of TikTok users are American? Do we... So TikTok has over a billion monthly actives. As of January 2024, the United States was the country with the largest TikTok audience by far, with almost 150 million users engaging with the popular social video platform. Is it true that mainland China puts limits

on how long kids can watch the app per day? They have a different version. It's not TikTok. It's something else that's totally, yes, like restricted and there are all sorts of laws in place. And also, I mean, they have all sorts of limits, though. It's not just their short their short form video sharing it's um video games video games and things like this yeah they're super into the control mindset which i don't know man

i'm getting there do i want these 14 year olds on these things all day like but then i guess i mean this is always the question it's's always, what is different about this than television? And I think to myself, well, it's also bad for kids to be on television all day, but it is different. Every app, every new technology advance is different. To have this living inside of your head is different. The short form nature of it is different. The way that it tracks algorithmically to your interests is different like there are different things about this um and they pose different risks just like different substances pose different risks i think they're worth interrogating sorry sajna i cut you off i was just gonna say in terms

of what might replace tiktok if there's a ban i think something useful to look to is india because they banned tiktok in india and it had like 100 and like 200 million users, I think at the time. And they just permanently banned TikTok a few years ago. And I just looked it up and it looks like the TikTok ban in India was connected to the rollout of short form video content on YouTube and Instagram. So maybe what we'd see if the TikTok ban goes through, if they can't find a buyer, for example, who's willing to pay the exorbitant price would be like a fine tuning of Instagram reels and YouTube shorts so that the algorithms get better. I don't know. Well, certainly people would flood to those platforms. I did realize that they abandoned

India and that must be why I feel like every YouTube short that I see is just like an Indian guy with a cute animal. There's just so much Indian content on there that now I realize why. Well, sound off in the comments. Let us know what you think about the TikTok divestiture or ban if you are a TikTok propagandist. I want to talk about Google. We published a piece on Monday, Google's culture of fear inside the DEI hive mind that led to Gemini's disaster. If you'll remember a few weeks ago, we reported on Google's AI disaster in which white people were erased from image generation effectively. And this had all sorts of clownish things where, you know, you couldn't even look back through time and find like medieval knights or something that were white.

The Pope, you could not get a white Pope, right? You were like turning up images of a black Pope and an Asian lady Pope and things like this. The diversity sort of, the over diversification problem is what people inside Google refer to this as. I can hear report because I talked to a bunch of Googlers. But this, this problem, the question of, you know, what exactly happened at Gemini got me on, on a journey, I decided to reach out to Googlers and see, you know, if anyone was willing to talk, a lot of them were including people, really at all levels of the company, from all

different roles within the company, and broke some news. So we had a bunch of stuff in there, everything from the actual DEI architecture of Gemini, which we wrote about, no one else has reported on that yet, to all sorts of anecdotes on like the culture of what's happening at Google. We were able to also break, separate from the architecture of Gemini, the fact that the Greglers, which is an affinity group for people over the age of 40, are being forced to change their name to something else we don't know yet. Google had to hire an outside consultant because apparently not everybody over the age of 40 has gray hair and this was considered not sufficiently inclusive. I kind of walked into this expecting a clownish story of just DEI run amok and maybe some illegal stuff like illegal hiring practices and things like this.

But what I got was much more interesting. It was like a much more interesting business story, I think, than that. And this is just, the company is incredibly siloed off to the point where nobody, most people I spoke with didn't even know what was happening on any other team. By the end of my interview process, and I interviewed a ton of people for this, I definitely knew more at the higher level than people working at the company. Most, I mean, obviously there are people working at the company at the highest levels who know more than I do, but sort of the average person at Google seemed to know less than even I did because they don't have sort of a top-down view of what's going on.

No leadership. Sundar is completely inept. And the disaster happened. I mean, sort of the over, again, the over-diversification, they call it. The disaster happened. I mean, sort of the over, again, the over diversification, they call it. This is a product of the outsized role of HR, which is itself infected by the DEI bureaucracy, that you have at a company that's super siloed off to the point where the only thing most people have in common is HR.

So they exert a tremendous amount of pressure on the company. Everything is overcomplicated. Everything is like multiple layers of bureaucrats and people you need to talk to and process. This is a company that was famously at its inception engineering-led. It is now bureaucracy-led. And that has led us to a situation where I think it's actually impossible, in the words of one engineer, senior leader that I spoke with, I think it's actually impossible to build good products at Google. And I think the future is pretty bleak right now, unless tremendous change happens at Google for Google because of AI. So Google has sort of

famously lost like every single new product initiative or sort of product battle over the last 10 years that it's entered. Everything from AR or social media to AR, that was fine. They could lose those battles. The thing about artificial intelligence is it's being sort of spoken about right now as a search killer. If you have, this is why Microsoft is obviously so, you have Microsoft and Bing sort of pursuing full throttle on AI and their partnership with OpenAI specifically. If artificial intelligence does eat search, if that's the

future of AI, that it can do that, then Google's facing the first real challenge in its history. And it's not a company that's built to fight. So I think it's in trouble. And that was kind of the gist of my piece. All sorts of crazy anecdotes in there throughout the company, all kinds of interesting business insights and structural insights into the company, all sorts of insights into the way that diversity has creeped into the product and why that's a kind of core component and why you should expect it to persist. Yeah, you should check it out. Guys, what were your thoughts on the collapse? It's not collapsing yet, but what were your thoughts on what's happening at Google?

Did you, Solana, when you were talking to your sources, did you get a sense that there was like a moment inside the company where people started to use Gemini and saw that it produced overly racialized images and said, yes, this is what we want. We're going to take it to market. And secondly, you'd think that if the founders would have used this for a few minutes or even the CEO, that it would have been stopped in its tracks. So I have to assume that they didn't use it before it was released. There were people on various teams who did have access, who did use it, who did flag the quote, over-diversification problem, which is what they refer to this as internally, and over-d diversification um it was either ignored or

lost in the shuffle but my sense was ignored and that is based on the things that were being tested for for example you query or you prompt uh show me an american farm worker and white people wake up like over 90 percent of uh farm owners and workers this actually i saw this kind of surprising poll about that recently in terms of breakdown of jobs by race most popular jobs and things like this or brandon you earlier made a a suggestion of um sort of royalty british royalty is a really easy one you show me show me show me the british royalty. And so obviously the machine is trained on images that it scrapes from human history. And what it's spitting out is the truth.

It shows you a picture of a white person. In the case of farmer specifically, we start there. That is seen. Also internally, the word that's used is we want aspirational answers. So if most people doing this job, whether it's an engineer or let's say, again, a farmer or something like this, are not black, that's a problem because there should be a lot of diversity on every single job that exists. So they have this convoluted system of LLMs that are designed to sort of rework your prompt

and then show you something that is sufficiently diverse. And this is what they were testing for. They were testing to make sure enough diversity was in the answers. So they're now like, show me a farmer and it's like an Asian woman and it's like an asian woman and it's like uh a woman in a in a uh a muslim headscarf and it's like you know one black guy and another fourth person maybe is white but i also saw i mean i don't get you in the weeds here the point is

they were not testing for the problem of like i I don't know what happens if you show me British royalty and it's all black people. What if you ask for like a 19th century British novelist and it's like, you know, an Asian woman, like that doesn't make any sense. They don't care about that. They didn't see it as a problem. And in fact, when it comes to like diversifying things that don't make any sense, they see that as part of their mission. Again, the word aspirational was used over and over again, not only for the... It sort of began in professions, but then it moved into things like nationality. So like Swedish, show me Swedish women or something. And if the image turned up all black women, that would be seen as fine

because there are black people who live in Sweden and in the future, all these countries will be women or something. And if the image turned up all black women, that would be seen as fine because there are black people who live in Sweden and in the future, all these countries would be super diverse and isn't diversity great? So that ideology kind of, I think, inhibited them from the question of historical accuracy, which they're sort of now thinking a little bit about, but the real trigger there was just black Nazisis because when you erased white people from human history that meant that you know the prompt show me a nazi turns back an asian chick or a black guy and uh that was seen the whole thing in general was seen as um racist against people of color And that internally is the story that's completely been adopted.

It was a story that was propagated by beginning the tech press. The smaller outlets led to the New York Times piece, which framed the whole story for them. And that's the kind of path they're pursuing now. It's hilarious that they would show like a picture of a black guy doing agricultural labor

and be like aspirational. It's like, they worked hard to get out of those fields. What are you talking about? Like, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, you see this again, this is across every job. This is just, it's a really interesting insight into, again, I think the problems at Google are much bigger than the DEI stuff. I think the DEI stuff only happens because of these huge, enormous systemic business problems of the companies facing. These are leadership problems. These are like structural management problems. It's hard for people to collaborate against across teams, hard for people to see across teams. It's hard for people to really know what they're all working on. Like what is Google doing? You know, what is the thing that Google is doing?

I know what they make their money off of. It's a search monopoly that's now, it seems like increasingly by the day threatened. But like, what is the average person working on? You know, what's a small thing they're doing that's part of the bigger whole? There's no sense of that. And so you do get this creep from people who are very good at navigating bureaucracy and happen to really care about this shit. They happen to really, really care about DEI. And so this, the most important search tool, it's not a search tool. AI is not strictly a search tool. I think it can be used for search, but it's obviously important to Google for this reason. And so that is how that creep is how you compromise what should be the most important product um you know that people are working on at the company yeah i think it's not to keep shitting on libertarianism but i do

think this is a good example of uh maybe why some of those theories don't work because the bureaucracy that you described in your piece about google i mean that's way crazier and worse than like anything that's happening in i don't know like the post office or some other like you know just normal government agency that does a thing i'm not prepared to say that that's accurate because i haven't investigated the post office i'm sure they're getting up to all sorts didn't you write a piece about the crazy fucking kwanzaa stamps and shit like this at the post office well yeah but the mail still comes yeah the chinese the chinese i think there's plenty of shit going on in the government we report on crazy government all the time in fact like we have cities that are not at the end of the day google search still functions you can still go to the search bar and

get amazing results and like the city police in san francisco do not so i think it's like there there's a lot of bad everywhere. Fair. I think all of that is just to say that like which companies get to a certain size, they do start to resemble sort of like the least jittery

descriptions of government bureaucracy. Yes. I think that's a really good point. And one of the pushback, I wouldn't say it was pushback, but a lot of people would say things like, you know, this is just all giant companies. I think that not all giant companies are the same, but this problem does persist to some degree in many different giant companies, the siloed nature

of it and the lack of leadership, especially once you lose a founder, no longer becomes a founder-led company. I think there probably are really interesting versions of stuff like this everywhere from Amazon to Apple. And those are two companies I would love to write more about. So if you guys listening work at either of those companies, please hit me up. I want to know everything that you have to tell me about what's going on there. I think there are a lot of important stories to tell right now in tech. And this thing, this DEI thing, it's so interesting because it's the nature of it blinded the tech press from pursuing it. The fact of the matter is Google produced a product

that erased white people. And because of that, because it was so obviously contra their narrative, which is that AI was going to be racist against black people um they were blinded to the bigger story which was the ongoing disaster at google that and that's like this important business story that they missed um and sort of i think continue to miss uh we'll see if they catch on i've had a couple of people reach out um and asked to collaborate and wanted to share so i was like please get the fuck out of here um but uh i think that there's a version of this across the board i think the dei stuff is like an interesting signal i think we're you have to you have to follow it to uh to the real problems

facing the company which tend to be again business problems and if these things are serving us in ways that are actually really vital um that becomes interesting to me. At what point does this kind of stuff compromise, I don't know, privacy protections at Apple or at Amazon or something like this? I don't know. These are questions, but I do think there are probably problems facing all of these companies that are worth pursuing that affect all of us and importantly, the people working at those companies. I would love to know the story of what's happening inside Google right now in reaction to our story and the chatter around it. I think that'd be a great follow-up story for us if we can get sources on that. But Mike, just after the story dropped, do you know anything about

how it's been received inside Google? I've only seen a few things. I've seen people on Blind talking about it and they were like, correct, this is all basically true. I've seen people quibble on different parts, like, oh, it's not this bad on this part or whatever. But in general, when it comes to the big structural thing, the leadership thing, the failure of Sundar, the persistent sort of decade-long failure of Sundar, the fact that you can't ship products there,

the fact that AI was massively embarrassing to the entire company uh the sort of disaster of that um it does it seems from what i've seen which is limited that yes people um who've seen the piece tend to be like this is kind of this is you know basically this is basically the truth um obviously i write with my bias on my sleeve and so that's going to turn some people off internally who just really love the DEI stuff, which I consider to be like an abhorrent racist stain on American history. But, you know, I can get past that. I think it's hard to disagree with the portrait that I painted because it's just the truth. It's what people there all think. And in fact, you see it to a certain extent,

they have an internal meme chat where at the highest level, separate from all of these real detailed things on AI or DI or whatever else, Sundar is seen as an impotent leader. He's relentlessly mocked. In fact, they tried to take away upvotes on the meme channel at Google directly following the Gemini disaster. And while they didn't say this, internal sentiment was like, they're doing this because we're coming for Sundar too

aggressively. All the upvotes, all the most popular memes were criticizing Sundar's performance as CEO. And then as if to underscore the impotence of Sundar, they relented. They gave back the upvotes once they got this sort of criticism. So it's just like, there's no leader there at all. And part of this is the weird dance between you have the Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, you have the board and you have Sundar. There's a confusion generally about sort of who is actually in control. The founders technically have like absolute voting power, they can do whatever they want. But it's kind of like British royalty where if they dissolved parliament, that would be really bad in some way. And so they don't get involved. And so the board

doesn't want to push back sufficiently and Sundar doesn't want to piss anybody off. And so they all just do nothing. But at this point, you kind of have to do something. I think doing nothing actually made sense for Google for a long time. They had a runaway search monopoly. They were just printing money. Right now, they have, I think, 120 billion-ish. We'll have to fact check that and throw the number up on the screen. In cash, they have, I think, 120 billion-ish. We'll have to fact check that and throw the number up on the screen. In cash, they're just sitting on, they're printing like 80 billion in net revenue a year. All of this, it's the advertising search monopoly. And it's like, who cares about anything else when the times are that good? We've never seen, I don't know that we've ever seen uh a monopoly this easy in history this easy and

massive in history and uh now that's threatened and so again for the first time ever they have to do something and maybe i mean you know we'll see if if ai is the search eater that that it purports to be if it's not i mean joke's gonna be on us and google will be a monopoly for decades down eight percent over the last month where s p in total is up 3.24 percent over the last month so yeah immediately following gemini we saw this uh once the gemini disaster broke it they shed i put it in the piece it was tens of it was in the tens of billions i think it was like 30 billion to 70 billion range in terms of a hit to the market cap. This is a $1.7 trillion company,

so not as significant as it could be. River, I want you to round it out this week. I would love to know about allyship in the outdoors featuring a little old company called the North Face. Last week, a bunch of national media outlets started reporting that the north face fame for their puffy jackets that i think a lot of you in san francisco are very fond of uh started offering a 20 discount if you took their ally ship in the outdoors

course which is this anti-racist uh training program but specifically for europeans in the outdoors even more specifically british people uh and you could get 20 off but only if you were in europe uh so i took this and yeah i learned um there's some there's some bad stuff going over there uh they don't even tell people of color about the outdoors they're not even aware of the outdoors uh it opens uh with just saying when's the last time you saw a person of color hiking or in the or participating in it was like have you ever seen a black guy ski? Like, it's like that type of thing. And it sort of goes from there.

For example, early on in the course, they provide an example of white privilege. It says, I've grown up knowing that the outdoors is a place for recreation and fun. It's just, I don't know. Is that true for all white people my mom would let me be in the boy scouts because she said they were perverts which actually gives some stories that broke later on um river how do you steel man that is it is it is it like they're saying that

most people of color are like physical laborers and so they don't have fun outside because they have to work out there like what is the how do you how do you get to a situation where a black person doesn't know that outdoors can be fun i don't know really i guess well they there was also some stats uh that they gave about people of color not visiting national parks in england and i don't they never really offer an explanation as to why uh they have made people of color in the uk so terrified of the outdoors i don't know uh exactly why uh and then it's just it's it tries to kind of give explanations it says like they're there's a lack of awareness about the outdoors i don't even know what that means i guess they

don't they don't know about it uh uh they're they're afraid they might encounter racism in the outdoors as opposed to the indoors all right um but even though they're black apparently people of color in the uk have this fear their their face wants you to lure them into the forest with you um so it you have to answer these there's a quiz at the end of every unit and if you get the wrong answer they'll explain why it's wrong so for example, when the quiz asked me which of the statements are true about diversity in the outdoors, my kind of like fake answer, because I wanted to see what they said, diversity creates siloed communities for people of color was wrong,

and it was corrected by a prompt that said, this is not about segregation. It's about creating safe spaces where affinity groups can learn about the outdoors without fear of being judged wrong, being judged and wrongly stereotyped. They're saying there is no segregation. Right. If you get affinity,

if somebody forms an affinity, like a black affinity group, that's not segregation. I guess. It's like, it's weird to me that it's like you have these very it's always a pesky kind of busy body like white person kind of like it's like i'm imagining like a white woman let's be honest um who look around she's looking around about her hike and she's like, I want a black person here. You know,

it's like a strange, that's a strange, it's, it's like a strange imposition on the whole world. There's a strange betrayal of your sense of, of importance. The fact that you can just deign that, like I want, I would feel better in the presence of a few black people like polite

black people who can affirm my belief that i'm a good person and like i'm gonna pluck them out of wherever they are and force them into the woods that's like if you just if you just like break this stuff down to its barest it's really bizarre yeah and it's strange that we've gone on so long not calling out the like fundamental the fundamentally bizarre nature of a demand like this. Like, show me an Asian right now. Yeah, yeah. It's like a white lady in a puffer jacket on the edge of the woods. She's waving it back to him.

She's like, hey, come here. Come here. Hey, come here. It's okay. You don't have to be afraid. Come here. It is a little creepy when you think about it patronizing yeah um so they also said that it could take generations to incorporate these uh infinity these uh in hiking like affinity groups into uh the broader

outdoor sports world which is crazy because it didn't even take Mississippi that long. I wonder if the UK, I wonder if this company, right, they're focusing on the UK. UK demographics are changing. This is probably just straightforward business strategy. They're looking ahead and they're saying, actually, the average muslim immigrant is not

as interested in camping as you know the silly white person and uh we gotta convince them that it's like cool and so they're doing it in a probably the wrong way what i would do is i would start advertising to muslims if that's what you want rather than to white people and I don't know what they expect like what is their best case what is their best case here it's like someone takes they want that code they take this quiz they realize like oh I should go to a mosque and start just like handing out flyers to the local fucking trails or whatever it's a very silly strategy though I think the higher level thing here is a is a little bit more interesting which is that you know europe is increasingly muslim and the uk in particular

is increasingly muslim yeah and they're talking targeting like the dead serious muslims in this too like they had like a lady in like the full in the cob it is like hiking or whatever uh and she formed some group that uh they do hiking but then they stop for like the prayers or whatever at like the designated times per day um i think it's weird to force people of color into the woods i think it's weird to expect that they have to like it as much as the average white person and is it even the average white person is the other thing like you kind of alluded to this yourself river you're like you didn't know anything about the outdoors and you were like poor and so maybe i think there's probably a class thing here it's not a rich person thing

i think it's like an upper middle class or a middle class thing um you know my dad and mom were teachers and we did a lot of camping um as a kid and i did do boy scouts and stuff and loved it but it was it's like an inexpensive thing but also it does for whatever reason seem like poor people aren't into it and really rich people aren't into it yeah i mean i grew up like hunting and fishing and stuff i didn't go i wasn't like in the boy scouts like i don't know i didn't do outdoor sports i mean i don't consider hiking a sport also let's be you're walking okay uh but they there there was like crazy shit in here when it was they said you shouldn't judge uh people of color by the same standard you judge yourself

um which was one of the wilder things that i said i did just see i do i have to talk about i did just see another this is going viral on tiktok again it's someone complaining about time being the concept of being on time as being punctuality being racist or being racist yeah i've seen that one before crazy to me i can't they're trying to destroy someone who's saying this because it's it's so it's wild it's it was a black woman and then it was corrected by it was it was stitched by a black guy who was like, are you fucking kidding me? And like, he like went off about it. But like, she was saying, she's this woman, she's married to a white guy.

They showed up. She, her version of the story is they showed up 10 minutes late to some dinner and people were already eating. And then she was like, you you know this is a teachable moment for me to explain to them that not everybody thinks this way and not all dinners i guess start exactly on time or something um i think what probably happened is it was more than 10 minutes and they were probably firm about when they were starting dinner and they just showed up late not because they were black but because they were late and so it's like this this story that this argument confuses me on the standard sort of weird like racial uh it confuses me along the typical sort of racial racialized dynamics of

modern american discourse which is like if you are saying that punctuality or the concept of punctuality or the expectation that people be on time is racist you are saying that black people are innately late to things which is weird like how do you not just hear yourself saying this stuff and like and understand immediately that you're being racist if you think all black people are late to things and can't help themselves because they're black that's crazy that's like a that's more racism than i've ever That is way more racist than anything my grandma said. It's real. That's racist. You really believe you have an actual racist worldview, but it doesn't mean that if you hire a black person, you have to change your policy on when

meetings start and things like this. It's just very crazy to see these things, these ideas sort of bubble up and then you have to take them seriously even if they're completely clownish. Yeah, absolutely bizarre. I would say that this one is probably more offensive than the black people don't camp thing, which is just kind of funny.

And I am upset that we don't have a code like that here. Why do you think they didn't offer it here? I don't know. I really don't know why they wouldn't offer it here because there's more black people here. Way more. We actually tried and they're like, black Americans are never going to go

hiking we've done everything that we can maybe we don't know they've been at this for years yeah yeah and black people have been here for a long like most of the black people in england like they're like immigrants like they chose to come there you know when i really don't think they're talking about black i really do believe it's like it's muslims i mean if there are well they also choose black british people are talking to it's black muslims and it's it's yeah it's like recent black muslims and it's arab muslims and things like that that's uh turkish also i think pakistani polish they're not black or muslim but they don't want polish people in the woods they made that clear in the quiz yeah like not here yeah back we go where are you saying oh yeah i was just gonna say i mean i spent

a little bit of time in the british countryside and i feel like there is a genre of white british woman who maybe grows up in a sort of rural area and then goes to study in a metropolitan university where cities i mean lond London is majority non-white Britain and it's been that way for years now. And they get exposed to all of this kind of rhetoric about how Britain is this like fundamentally racist country. And I do think it's, Solana, you're right. It's this genre of white women that's like probably behind this kind of course. I think it's as simple as that is like, I've been in conversations with people where there's this kind of like apologetic tone about how, you know, these British village towns are like all ethnically British. Um, and you know,

you don't see people of color, uh, everywhere in the streets and stuff like that. Um, and so I think this is kind of a very on the nose response to that uh is my read and that doesn't exactly translate to the u.s as my opinion because there's we don't have the exact same sort of demographic breakdown between rural areas and and cities the way they do yeah i mean like i grew up in the south like i seem glad people go fishing you know it's like not a crazy thing to say but yeah maybe that's why they didn't do it well yeah i think that is it is true though but the idea of going like you're gonna go camping like who's going camping in america yeah i do think there's probably some weird it's like i think it is a certain class i think it is a certain uh it probably is breaks it probably does break down

along race it seems like there are just interests that are that are different i mean we have this idea that everybody there should be this exact you know racial and gender breakdown across the board of people who are interested in the same stuff um but it just doesn't present that way and i don't think it has anything to do with systemic issues i think who knows i don't know the answer to the reason there aren't a lot of black people camping beyond my pay grade we'll catch you here guys uh next week thanks for joining us spread the word pirate wires rate review comment and thank you for joining us once again in our 4 p.m live chat later