Pirate Wires - Trump Coin Chaos, Fake Right Wing Vibe Shift In Tech?, Ukraine Update, & Insane Climate Activists

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

EPISODE #58: Welcome back! This week, Pirate Wires found itself in the middle of some breaking news. We reported news about an official Trump crypto coin that Barron Trump was spearheading. The aftermath was chaotic.. and we're reacting to all of it. Next up, we discuss John Coogan’s piece in Pirate Wires this week on the right wing vibe shift in tech. Is it even real? Or just overblown by a few major donors? We are then joined by special guest. Patrick Blumenthal gives us a live report from Ukraine. What is the feeling like day-to-day in Ukraine, and how are tech companies doing amidst the war? Finally, the clown show that is Just Stop Oil. This week they attacked Stonehenge. All of these attacks on sacred monuments makes us just want to burn more oil. Featuring Mike Solana, Sanjana Friedman, John Coogan, Patrick Blumenthal Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/is-silicon-valley-shifting-right?f=home Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell John Twitter: https://x.com/johncoogan Patrick Twitter: https://x.com/PatrickJBlum TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! 0:50 - Brandon In Italy This Week 1:20 - Wen Trump Coin? The Chaotic Aftermath After Pirate Wires Broke The News 21:50 - Is Silicon Valley Shifting To The Right? The Evidence Is Weak 40:50 - Live Report From Ukraine w/ Patrick Blumenthal  58:35 - Just Stop Oil Clown Show 1:19:30 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe! Subscribe To The Daily! See You Next Week #podcast #mikesolana #technology #politics #culture #trump

This f***ing Donald Trump coin. Barron Trump is involved in this. Martin Shkreli, certainly involved. One thing I know for sure is like, I never want to be a part of crypto news again. It's completely schizophrenic. Yeah, I did get a ton of DMs from random anonymous crypto accounts

asking me about the news. Silicon Valley's right wing shift. What I found when I looked at these Midas List donations is that very, very few people have actually changed their donation patterns. These two clowns lumber over to the Stonehenge and douse it in some chemical and cheer about how awesome it is. And I personally want to burn as much oil as possible. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod brandon is not with us today he's on an italian vacation um sending little comments once in a while nine hours difference between there and

la so he's a little bit deranged and jet lagged but we do wish him well uh sad he's not here to talk about all the crazy shit we got to talk about today but the person that we do have is the one the only the legendary john coogan back on the pod um john is actually here well he's going to be here with us all day but uh specifically to talk about piece that he just published in pirate wires which we'll get to um very quickly, but first, the very first thing that we absolutely have to discuss is this fucking Donald Trump coin. Um, okay. This is a difficult, this is just, I'm going to be honest. This is a difficult subject to talk about for me because I am a part of the story. Pirate wires is a part of the story.

I don't want that to be the case. Genuinely. Um, I want to be writing the stories. Let's see. What can we share here? The tension is I don't want to blow... I'm not yet ready to discuss everyone who I talked about leading up to this news, but the news is basically this. The news that we've reported was donald trump is launching sort of an official coin um and it is being spearheaded by baron trump um since that news was released there has been just like a massive like shit show i would say just like a complete like swirling hurricane like that eye of jupiter the sort of like red eye on jupiter that's like a it's like a 300 year old storm or something like that like that is what it's like that is like

jonald trump's face is kind of what has descended on us and uh there's a question of is this legitimate is it not we have the polymarket betting markets um uh like running all sort of polls on this um is it a scam? Martin Shkreli, heavily involved. And so, I mean, sorry, Martin. Obviously that raises red flags for people. And there's a general question of like, is this all a bunch of lies? Here's what I can say.

Martin Shkreli, certainly involved. And Martin Shkreli, certainly a person who connected me to the source that made me go, whoa, this is definitely newsworthy. who connected me to the source that made me go, whoa, this is definitely newsworthy. I know as sure as I can possibly be that Barron Trump is involved in this. I don't know the extent to which there is perhaps

warring family stuff behind the scenes. I don't know if Martin is the reason that baron is involved i don't know what baron knew getting into it i can only tell you from my point of view that the son of the president the former president donald trump was involved in the creation and certainly the distribution and the promoting of this coin and I was relaying that news. It was framed to me as Donald Trump's official meme coin, whatever the fuck that means. None of that is really important to me. I don't bet on

these kinds of things i think the whole scene is kind of like i don't know you guys do you it's not for me personally i do think it's relevant that the president of the united states is this far into crypto and that is a very big story i think it is like solidifying his involvement in the space it is solidifying in my opinion his like protection of the space the idea that he would be incentivized to protect it is really important and um yeah well I'm not yet ready to discuss like to share like details on who I spoke with um off the record was never really used but it just seems unseemly and not yet necessary people keep saying tell me who your sources are and I'm like i'm not like i've not been a journalist for a long time but i'm pretty sure you're not supposed to do that

um if the story changes in a way if there's some sort of firm denial from camp trump you know this never happened this was this is like complete fabrication, whatever. Um, I'll be willing to say more. Uh, but until then, just, I don't know what Trump knows. I do know that Barron was involved. Um, and, uh, I do know that it was framed to us as, uh, and not just by Martin Shkreli, though, again, I i might do we got to say that he was involved right um like yeah i mean those are i mean it's just like it was just never for me too trust me i'm not gonna be like hey let's fucking get involved in bizarre meme coin like crazy person schizo news because martin shkreli told me to do something like not in a million years was he involved yes was that a red flag yes sorry martin um but uh i i definitely know enough that

i'm confident in what we reported and uh if the story changes that will also be news and um i will definitely be there to share more uh but there have been a bunch of developments since i mean coogan what was what is your read of of craziness, Ben? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because Trump has a couple, like everyone's using on X, they're referring to the coin as dollar DJT. But in traditional Twitter parlance, the dollar sign is used for a stock ticker. And I'm pretty sure dollar DJT is truth social, which is also become kind of a meme stock and doesn't really trade relative to the financials of that company. So there's already a way to kind of like bet on Trump in the financial markets broadly. And then Trump has also done stuff in crypto. I'm pretty sure he launched an NFT collection.

And if you bought the NFT, you got to go maybe shake his hand at Mar-a-Lago or something. Of course, dude. So, like, I don't know. This is, like, ridiculous, but also entirely predictable. The thing that got me was, like, Barron, you know, this is just, like, you want to feel old. This is just like you want to feel old. The president's son, who was a child when you first were introduced to him, is now an active player in national politics. And I remember the George Bush era hearing like the Bush twins and then like 10 years go by and you see an interview with them and they're like have kids and have families.

And you're just like, oh, my God, what's happening to me um that just the the evolution of the fact that you know over the next four years like baron is going to be a you know a piece on the chessboard yeah and that's just something that i'm like not not fully you know digesting but it's crazy how many he's baron from my read is fairly plugged into the the world, I guess, culture too, right? Like he has a lot of strangely culturally important friends. He has friends in the tech industry, or at least, let's say, friendly acquaintances, people he knows and he's talking to.

And like you said, he seems to be an active player. It's weird. I saw a lot of, like, there's been a bit of, you know, this is just a kid and we should leave him alone, blah seems to be an active player. It's weird. I saw a lot of foot, like, uh, there's been a bit of, you know, this is just a kid and we should leave him alone, blah, blah, blah. Fine. Uh, but I mean, he, I don't think that he wanted that up until a second ago. So, um, high school right now.

I don't, I don't know. I know he's 18. Uh, and I know that, uh, he's making headlines not like like it's not as if he's an innocent bystander in any i feel like he's just gonna show up one day on like a three-hour podcast it'll just be like rogan or tucker or something come on this podcast i've got a lot of questions and it's a friendly environment baron we're not gonna gotcha like i just have a lot of things that i want to know the first one is probably just is it true what they say about what your dad puts down for mcdonald's like i don't like are those just pictures is it is it like real is it does he

really eat that much i've never fully believed that it was possible and for him to not be dead yet like with those arteries it's just it's impressive and i want to know more about it yeah i don't know it's it's it's been crazy there there's uh there's been a handful of i mean the crypto one thing i know for sure is like i never want to be a part of crypto news again for as long as i live like i just it's completely schizophrenic first of all no one is almost everyone is anonymous it's like an anonymous bird telling you that you're going to prison is my read of what crypto twitter is um and it's like there are now dueling just before as we were coming into this chat right martin screlly is online leaking what he alleges are texts between him and the former president's uh son he is uh i've seen leaked texts between him and

what's his face? The men's like, not men's rights guy, but the Andrew Tate is involved. Oh yeah. I saw dueling multi, like, five, six, seven, ten thousand people in these

chats, dueling Twitter chats or ex-chats. One being led by Shkreli sharingeling twitter chats or x chats one being led by shkreli sharing the tea i guess one being led by ryan selkis who um is i don't even just like i know the truth it's x y and z and um they just i think it's i don't i don't fully know what to read of it which is maybe one of the big reasons that i don't i don't fully know what to read of it which is maybe one of the big reasons that i regret reporting i don't really regret reporting anything but one of the reasons i would like to sort of stay away from the future is like there's a whole culture here that i really am not a part of and um and don't really want to be a part of no offense um to any of you guys like i love you i'm happy that you're happy but it's just too chaotic for me and um uh yeah it is funny i guess it'll be

less funny if like um well there are a handful of ways it could be less funny that i'm not really who needs to speculate who needs to my my bet on this on this, and I don't really know that much, but my bet is like kind of like prank by Barron. The family denies it. The core Trump organization doesn't actually have that much to gain from this meme coin. Like it's just a ton of FEC complexity. You know, how do they, is this a donation to his campaign does that get classified in a certain way like right it's just a ton of legal baggage that i feel like someone in the organization would have put the brakes on it well i think they just put the brakes on it i think i think the news broke and then they put the brakes on it because

they didn't know about it and they didn't know about it. Yeah, they didn't know about it. I think this part is not me knowing anything that nobody else. I have no special information from here on. My read of what's going on is Trump was considering a meme quite of some kind. He had a handful of people in his orbit who wanted to be like the guy that did this and baron is a little i i think that baron made a move and uh tried to preempt all of that and um and and become the guy it's like super uh it's very succession it's more like succession you know it's like it's like kind of funny and um again like it could become less funny i guess but that's what i think happened i think the news broke uh i think baron and his possibly his like friends um i think i think trump activated it was

like are you what is going on over here and And just maybe shut it down. And if, or at least, at least it's like, we're not talking about this for a moment. You know, maybe it persists. Maybe they come out later and say, yeah, that was the coin. Maybe they come out with something else. But as of the news breaking, I think lawyers became involved.

It also is hilarious how the narrative around crypto as a technology has completely shifted. It used to be like, well, we're launching the coin because the coin will get you access to something. It has some special code that runs on the blockchain. We need it to run and it's special. And we had a software developer involved. And now it's literally like copy, paste, click, like memes. There's a picture of Donald Trump's face. Do you want one of these shit coins?

Yeah, but it's less valuable than the NFT. People are like, let's fucking go. Like even if it was real, like the NFT would be more valuable because at least it's like art or something or at least it gets you a handshake this is the interesting conversation about this stuff i think is like it it forces the question of what is even the value inherent of the dollar i was talking about this about someone today a little bit aware i won't say who uh someone's sort of like associated with this in a sort of an adjacent way.

Um, and he was like, oh, well like the printing of the dollar and there's all this stuff that goes in. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. The dollar is worth what it's worth. It's a fiat currency. It's only worth what it's worth because people think that America means something. That's the entire value of it. That's how all of this stuff works. But it doesn't mean it doesn't mean it's fake. It's like super unstable unstable but it doesn't mean that it's fake um i would say something like you know bitcoin is finite number of them i would say it's more valuable than a dollar uh it's less it's well broader philosophical question i guess and no reason have you been on truth social recently no what. What's going on over there? It's hilarious. So when you sign up the, the two, the top two accounts that you're recommended to

follow Donald Trump, but then Joe Biden and one of Biden's staffers is, has just been shit posting on truth social. And they just make these edits of like Donald Trump did something terrible, you know, like the same stuff that you see Trump post. But every post just gets horribly ratioed because it's like Trump's network. Yeah, it's like going to his house. Whoever runs that account, the Biden account on Truth Social, I kind of I'm here for it because it's so funny. The account has laser eyes. It's like really over the top.

it because it's so funny the account has laser eyes it's like really over the top and he's just whoever's running it is just baiting all these people and they just get so mad every single time they post yeah you do have to hand it to him it would be like going to a trump rally and being the one up act and be like yo so trump that guy sucks am i right yeah exactly it's like what are you doing here like they fully went in the lion's den with this with this account because it'd be so easy for them just oh yeah we're not going to do that but they went in there and just post wild stuff uh but other than that it's just a bunch of like ads for nonsense like you know so i mean did you i don't want to put you on the spot here it's a bizarre culture and it's a really a different world um it's not something that we typically cover but did you happen to follow any of this

or have any read of of what was going on well i mean i'm in in the uk so i just woke up to the news sort of on a on a an eight hour delay but um i do think the the crypto meme scene to me tracks very strongly with like a specific branch of trump supporters which is kind of this like shit posting um pepe sort of adjacent like 4chan type of person edgelord kind of stuff that seems kind of it makes sense to me that someone like baron from what little i understand of him or his like the persona that people on the internet associate with him would potentially be associated with this coin. But yeah, I mean, I think it would have surprised me if the campaign had come out and really assumed it because it does seem like it brings a lot of SEC risk for them. But then again, you know, it's Trump and you never really know what he's going to do.

But yeah, I did get a ton of DMs from random anonymous crypto accounts asking me about the news. So like so-and-so's brother texted me frantically wondering if the Trump point is real. And I'm like, you can tell so-and-so's brother or whatever it was. All I know is what I reported. That is the extent. That is the extent to it. Or really what was told to me, obviously. I did see a bunch of people online saying like this you know and also privately like this is so bad for the reputation like like like these things are supposed to be this is not what

crypto is about this you know crypto is this other thing that it's going to be i'm like are we really pretending that these any of these things have utility beyond just the value of like, oh, I think this Beanie Baby is worth X amount of dollars or whatever. We're saying there's utility, like these are going to be used for some technological application that we haven't yet seen. I find that hard. It's been many years, right? I mean, the Bitcoin paper was 2009. When are we going to see these other applications? I'm really waiting for that. I would like to see it.

I think that also, though, the gambling stuff is like, go gamble. I don't, maybe, I think you should be allowed to. Do you see how people are gambling on this? It's fascinating. How do you, what do you mean? So, so, so, uh, the, like, like somebody proposed this trade, uh, that was basically like you, you go on poly market and you bet that the Trump coin is fake. And then you take the same amount of money that you would win if it is fake and you put it in the Trump coin. And if it's real the coin will moon probably because it'll give you national news it'll be huge and you'll make the upside but if it's fake you didn't

lose any money interesting very interesting like using like these betting markets to offset the risk of like essentially it's just doubling down on gambling but you basically like netted out the possibility that's really what i what we're up against here it's like we've got rid of the horse track and there's you know like this gnarly old guy who's got 17 tickets and uh and you're sort of bugging with a question like he doesn't want to be bothered he's in the zone he's doing something and uh and all these people are looking for information and and that's what the the like the anger the intensity the sort of trying to provoke you into giving them more information they're all trying to they're all trying to gamble i am not a big gambling guy i don't recommend

buying into this stuff uh i don't have any i don't even know how to do it i've i got into like bitcoin a long time ago and left i mean i still like bitcoin but like i'm not in this stuff so anyway that's my last thought on it don't recommend gambling at all um go to church uh yeah some of the victims here just don't look sympathetic i've watched a couple of like youtube videos that like oh the you know this nft project was a total scam and and you're like yeah it really was it's very clear that the people behind this were bad. They probably need to, you know, be in a court. And then they'll be like, now we're going to cut to the victims.

And it'll be like some guy in a gold chain with a Lambo behind him. And it's like, this is not like the mainstream grandmother that was like victimized by the housing crisis. Like, this is a completely different. This is a gambler who probably has a problem, help but like not the most sympathetic victim when it's some like insane bro who's like kind of knew what they were getting into when they started gambling on like the most ridiculous nfts you've ever heard of but yeah it's a it's an awkward awkward awkward industry well that's that more to come uh we'll break it down as the story progresses though hopefully not too much like i said again i'm really not trying to live inside

of crypto news it is it makes me feel schizophrenic even just to look at it what i do want to talk about is this crazy not crazy it's uh i gotta stop saying not everything's crazy this is more fascinating than crazy ableist of you yeah well i am ableist but in terms of this particular story like is it crazy or is it not um and just to back up i am ableist insofar as i think it's bad to be crazy i don't think anyone should anyway that's a different conversation for a different day we'll leave it for the daily takes you should be subscribed by the way to the pyrewires daily if you're not already go to pyrewires.com and subscribe for, we give a take, three takes a day. Sanjana is always in there saying brilliant things. I want to talk about Silicon Valley's right-wing shift.

John Coogan wrote a great piece of analysis this week that we published on Pirate Wires, exploring the question, because for months and months now, we have been told that there's this whole vibe shift narrative um and that has kind of evolved into a political donations narrative and it's like whoa there are all these guys in silicon valley putting millions of dollars into the into the into trump and that sort of it serves in it's it's interesting in two ways that story

uh one it's another just vibe shift narrative which seems sort of reflexively anti-leftist i would say it's like oh the right wing is winning the left is crazy you know even the silicon valley libs are on trump's side and and that that's popular for certain people online for obvious reasons to tell a story like that and it tends to be more right people tend to like telling that story um but the other story is like these Silicon Valley tech billionaires who the left reflexively hates are now Trump people. And that's a very popular story on the left. And so the story is really blown up. And I kind of didn't feel a certain way about it other than curious. Is it how much of it's true? I actually don't know. I certainly feel the vibe shift myself. I've definitely felt the cultural change. But dollar to dollar, how has the world of Silicon Valley changed? Didn't know.

Crooked link into it. John, why don't you break it down for us? What did you find? Yeah, I actually ran this analysis three years ago in response to a similar piece by the New Yorker where it was in that piece that doxed Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander. And the narrative of this piece of that original New Yorker piece was that, oh, Slate Star Codex is this right wing blog that everyone in tech is influenced by. And it was kind of circling around the same idea that tech power brokers were right wing or shifting right wing. And this is in opposition to all the reporting that you see around the donations that are made by employees of big tech. donations that are made by employees of big tech. So when you look at how the political donations swing at a company like Google, it might be 80, 90% Democrat, but that, but that's kind of a

broader slice of the tech ecosystem than like the real power brokers. So my methodology was I took the Midas list and I cross referenced it with all the political donations that show up in the FEC database. And it's not like a perfect representation. I did a few other analyses where I zoomed out and looked at firm-level donations, but the findings were pretty clear. The vast majority of donations are driven by power law donors, people like Reid Hoffman on the left and Peter Thiel on the right. donors, people like Reid Hoffman on the left and Peter Thiel on the right. Together, those guys have donated over $100 million in their career. And the Midas list as a group has only donated like 160 million in their career, the current Midas list. And more recently, as Peter stepped back from politics, overall venture capital has definitely shifted more to the left now it's

nowhere near google levels it's not 80 90 percent it's more like 60 40 democrat republican but i think it's interesting because you would assume that venture capitalists are in the business of business. The Republicans for decades have been the party of business. And so you would just by default, tabula rasa, assume that a VC would be a Republican. It's the party of business. But that's not what we see coming at it from the different direction. You could assume, oh, Silicon Valley's left wing.

We would assume 100 percent of VCs to be left wing, but that's not the case either. And so I think that what I found when I looked at these Midas List donations is that really what's happening is that very, very few people have actually changed their donation patterns. Very few VCs have really crossed party lines. Most of them have been solidly blue or solidly red for their entire careers, and now they're just okay talking about it publicly because of the cultural vibe shift that's happened due to Elon Musk buying Twitter and just kind of a general backlash to all the craziness of the previous culture war but so

now you have someone like doug leone at sequoia publicly endorsing donald trump but that's not him him switching from left to right he was donating to republicans back in the 90s to trump didn't have as much money he even donated i'm pretty sure he donated to trump he then said he would never vote for trump i believe it was after the 16th um but but or not the 16th i'm sorry i believe it was after january 6th but then he's then he comes back and he and he does so and you're right it seems like more of a cultural thing on the peter thing as well um you know he's not really uh putting any money into politics it looks like uh over the last couple of years but even when he was that you know the bulk of that money, what was that? That

wasn't just general Republican spending. That was to the campaigns of people who he knows and has worked with for years and years and years and years. It's sort of different than you would think. Now, Hoffman, on the other hand, who has accelerated in recent years, is more of a general spender also for the left. But the big takeaway, and I think the important takeaway, is Republicans betting actually down, Democrats betting actually up, and still overwhelmingly the majority, no? Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. And there's maybe one or two people who have really crossed the aisle. Chamath Palihapitiya is the big one, because he's on the All In podcast with David Sachs. He co-hosted this fundraiser. If he made a donation, I think that just to attend that,

you had to make a donation. I don't know how it works if you're a co-host, but if he's made a donation to the Trump campaign, it hasn't posted yet. And also, he wasn't included in this year's Midas list, so he didn't make it into that analysis. But it's worth looking at him because he does seem like the one major example, but the New York times post included like five or six people and none of them had shifted. You know, Peter always on the right, you know, Reid Hoffman always on the left.

Like there aren't these vast swaths of people who are shifting back and forth. Yeah. I think that what you have from the media there is this correct sense that something has changed and they want to write about it. But what's, what's changed is that when they attack people for being, for voting red rather than blue, it doesn't hit the way that it used to. Like you can't run somebody out of Silicon Valley anymore because they're not even just a Republican, but a Trump supporter. Like you can be supporting Trump publicly and it doesn't matter. It doesn't affect you. It doesn't affect your job. It seems like at all at that level. but that I'm still interested in, you know, the data from looking at everyone who's not

at the sort of highest elite level. So not the Midas list venture capitalists, not the billionaire founders, but, you know, the VP marketing or whatever at these companies, the product leads, the engineers, what is the average employee of one of these companies in Silicon Valley? Where is their money going? How has has that changed if at all um and my gut feeling is it probably hasn't changed at all i think it's i think it's like close to the same in the same way that this is close to the same i think that's probably close to the same um and uh and i guess you know that's a story for another day but i would assume that so far donations are probably a little bit lower than 2020 since that was such a critical election for the Democrats. It was like, get Trump out now.

Kind of the base assumption is that presidents tend to win their second term. Things are pretty good. This Trump guy seems crazy. He's been deplatformed for most things. Like, it's a little bit more abstract, especially if you're in kind of a bluer filter bubble like you're on threads instead of twitter you probably haven't seen that much trump news um and so it might it might be a little bit less urgent to actually pony up and make a donation to get the guy that you hate out of out of office. But also, we're still a little on the early side of the election cycle.

Obviously, donations will ramp up. And then there is a big delay between when donations are actually made and when they post to the FEC database because there's a quarterly reporting system. So when I looked at the data, even someone like Sean McGuire at Sequoia who publicly posted on X that he was donating, I think $300,000 or something like that to Trump, that didn't show up in the FEC database when I pulled the numbers.

And that's just because I'm sure it will. It's just going to take a couple more months until that actually shows up. Sajar, what'd you make of all this? I mean, I think, well, it was refreshing to see the actual data because my sense had been that really what journalists were doing was extrapolating from like two or three tweets that they had seen and also just like David Sachs' fundraiser in SF,

which obviously raised hackles. And they were trying to say, you know, look at this evidence of this massive Silicon Valley vibe shift, which I think points to a broader issue with the idea of trends in general, which is just that they're so, they've always been subjective, right? And sort of perspective based. But I think particularly now when you have so many journalists sort of, you know, working from home and on X or threads all day, their impression of what trends are is going to be shaped by their own algorithm, right? And so I think that you sort of always have to be

a little bit skeptical whenever like the claim being made is based on a singular event or even like you know a couple of of big donors um because obviously silicon valley is is a diverse place in the sense that it's composed of like you know very different within a sort of broadly high earning economic tier but like there still are differences, right, between really, really high earning, big donors, and then sort of rank and file at tech firms, who, my sense is, are really still dyed in the wool Democrats. Even if, you know, they might support more moderate local candidates, if they're in San Francisco, I think that, you know, there's, there's a lot of hysteria around that potentially tracking to support for Trump. And I just, as I've said on here, like, don't think that that is the case at all.

the way that all of the local politics conversations have probably shaped perspective among journalists on this because you have this real opposition to the far left in San Francisco on a number of issues, school stuff, drugs, law and order, the homelessness, housing. But those issues don't clock as really, I mean mean maybe the law and order to a certain extent but like nationally those issues don't that's not how we perceive left and right it's like left and right according to a place where everyone is left um which is which is san francisco so i think people

have just been confused um i do think though the, the culture shift is real. And if you can write a, you know, writing about that is, I mean, it's obviously real, right? Like you just, you look at, at who is able to talk about Trump today and is talking about Trump today versus who did it in 2016. There was one person in 2016. It was Peter. And he was run out of town over it. Like nobody defended him. It's just clearly very different culturally today. I mean, if this was 2016, people would be like boycotting David Sachs' portfolio companies. He has like a bunch of random enterprise SaaS companies in his portfolio. People will be writing stories about his company. Here are the companies that took money from David Sachs. Have you denounced them yet? Like have they denounced him yet? Like have they given the money back yet? And it's just like, it's none of people just don't. Wildly, wildly different.

Yeah, people just don't care. They're there. There's also this interesting, like, I think there's this weird dynamic where almost both sides want this narrative to be realer than they think. Because these ascendant tech right-wing power brokers they want to project that they're gaining steam and that everyone's behind them and get in this is the best boat to be on you want to come with me to the promised land we're going to have big influence over the republican you know administration and then the the the more like left wing journalists really want to paint tech

as this bad, evil thing that's right wing. And so they need to kind of amp it up. And so you don't have that many moderating forces or that many incentives to tell a different story. So it just kind of compounds and compounds. And here we are, the moderates. So it just kind of compounds and compounds. And here we are, the moderates. The moderates in this chat. No, I completely agree with that. I also do think that the culture can perpetuate real change eventually,

but not now. I think that it is. Go ahead. Yeah, there's also something interesting about like the, I don't know, just like just nationally in the zeitgeist, there's this idea that like tech dollars are more important than other dollars. So, uh, Peter gave, I think a little over a million dollars to Trump.

And, um, there were plenty of other, you know, rich guys who gave 10 million or more, but they're kind of like no name industrialists from like backwater industries, like legacy wealth has just built up and they're making a big donation to something that they kind of just believe will benefit them. But there's this perception that like if a tech person has their hand on the scale in DC, that will have a bigger impact on society because tech is changing society so quickly. And that does feel somewhat legitimate to me. But at the same time, there's just the reality that there are so many lobbies.

Big oil is still a thing. Big tobacco is still a thing. There are other companies, other conglomerates. It's not just big tech. And we should probably be aware of all of those to some degree. Yes. But tech, it's the new one. And it's still shaping itself into a new elite class of people. And there's a question of how are they going to involve themselves in this process? And as you just mentioned, they also, separate from the donations, are involved in the creation

of platforms that are themselves shaping our entire reality now. And so it's a question of not only how are they influencing this election with money, but what are their values and how are their values going to shape society separate from that? The money in this way becomes a tell of which way they're leaning. And so I think that there should be more attention paid personally. I think that, yeah, I think that there should be more attention paid to tech because I think it does matter more what the technologists think about the world because what they think about the world is going to tether, I think, a little more closely to what

it becomes over the next 10 years than what a guy in the middle of the country cares about who happens to be really rich. Unless you can sway politics at a certain level, but politics doesn't matter. What matters is what shapes politics. And if that's culture and culture is created online, then the most important people in the world are the ones who are creating the platforms that shape the online culture. And that's kind of, I think that's certainly talking about, I heard this stat. I don't know if it, I don't know exactly how true it is, but I, I think during the Obama administration, the number one, uh, organization or like private company that Obama visited more than any other was Google. Like that's where he spent the most

time, which is very interesting, which like kind of makes sense. I have this thesis that if you believe that politics are downstream from culture and you believe that the medium is the message, then the synthesis of those two is that those who shape the mediums, i.e. the technologists, create the messages, which creates the culture, which creates the politics. technologists create the messages, which creates the culture, which creates the politics. So in fact, when there's a lot of times when people levy these criticisms at tech, and then the technologists try to say like, oh, no, we're just like independently building platforms. And we didn't take a side here. But in fact, even just like putting a retweet button or quote tweet button that makes society more adversarial

or less adversarial or hiding likes like that does actually trickle down it's hard to predict but i think it does have an impact speaking of that i mean we have to we have a guest coming on in a moment from uh ukraine but before i do want to just quickly on the likes thing we're now what a week into it i hate it i want public likes back i want them back i want to see there are a lot of one i like to get a sense of who is involved in an issue and the likes a public like option gave me a whole layer an interesting layer into the conversation in the discourse that was happening that is now god i feel more blind than i was before um and so less good at providing my insight i think into um what's going on generally too when someone says something stupid in my mentions i don't want to just block them i want

to block every single person who liked their tweet and now i'm not able to do that and it's fucking frustrating um yeah i don't know what I mean, are you into the like thing? Are you anti-like? I haven't really noticed it. But I did enjoy if you find someone who's posting really interesting things, you could go to their page. You could look at what they like. And you can kind of see a second order. I would very rarely click on a post I like that had hundreds of likes and then scroll through them.

That wasn't what i would do but um so i haven't really noticed it yet but i'm sure the next time i find someone who's like a diamond in the rough type of account and i want to see what else they're associating with um i'll be disappointed well we are uh we have a lot to talk about on the deranged climate activists who attacked Stonehenge the other day. There's a wild drama there. But before we get into it, we have a special guest live from Kiev. I actually have been there twice.

No idea how to pronounce it. But Patrick Blumenthal, who is there today, is going to tell us how to say it. Let's start there man what what is how do you pronounce that word pretty much anything but kiev i've learned apparently kiev is the russian pronunciation and like those are the landmines you have to avoid um which yeah so when i was there that go ahead yeah all the russian words i've learned um i've had to like specifically avoid saying and learn like the differences between between ukrainian Russia, because all the people in defense here like refuse to say anything Russian whatsoever. Interesting. Yeah. When I was there, it was, man. So first of all, Patrick,

thanks for coming. You mentioned that you were in Ukraine and I just thought that is really interesting. We haven't talked to anyone there in a while. We haven't really talked about Ukraine in a while. It's been just sort of like memory hold from the public conversation. And then also the tech scene in particular in Ukraine, I think is really interesting. I was there twice previously before the war.

And the main reason I went the first time was I went to Lisbon for Web Summit in 2016. It was right when Trump was elected. It was while I was in Lisbon, Trump was elected president. So it was that moment in time. And I was pretty skeptical about going there and checking out the sort of like european tech scene um my assumption was like europeans didn't build companies and to a large extent they proved me right while i was there but the weird thing that i found while i was there was every single person i met was like yeah i've got this company doing whatever stupid thing and i'd be like oh we're like how many like, how many engineers? Like, where are you guys based? And it's like, oh, well, there are like five of us in Paris, but our entire engineering team is in Ukraine.

And that at the time in America, there's a little bit, remote work's more common now, but in 2016, super not at all how things were done in the American tech industry. It was all just, it was a really negative signal to have teams in different places, especially to be outsourcing your engineering talent. But what it led me to believe was just, that's pretty interesting. There's something happening in Ukraine. There are a ton of engineers in Ukraine. What is that? I went, I met a lot of interesting people, have my own stories there. But what I'd really like to talk about now is just, I mean, it's been a long time and many things have happened in the eight years since I first became interested in Ukraine. And one of them is a fucking war,

which was unthinkable when I was there. And the whole time people were just like, they kept bringing it up randomly. They kept saying, you know, people are really nervous to invest here because they think that Russian tanks are going to be, you know, coming down Kiev. And that's not the case. And I was like, I wasn't thinking that. What is going on here? What is going on there? You're there. Why are you there? What are you seeing? And then I want to get into the tech scene a little bit. Yeah. So, I mean, at a high level, obviously, I'm a VC. So, you know, everyone talks about defense tech and deep tech and Ukraine has been a big part of that picture. It's kind of grim, but everyone has been calling Ukraine like kind of the laboratory for defense tech

because instead of having hardware, you know, bogged down in DoD sales cycles for five years, you can save lives now potentially if your stuff actually works and also see if your hardware works. And so you have a lot of American companies, you know, officially and unofficially sending gear here to see if it works.

And unfortunately, most of the time it doesn't. But, you know, I was largely interested in it for the same reason as you. Back in 2022, pretty much every investor update that I would get would be like, you know, lowlights. Half of our engineering team is in Kiev and they're finding shelter in like Poland and Denmark, or they're hiding from conscription or whatever. I mean, a huge, huge, huge amount of Silicon Valley startups are built on Ukrainian talent. And, you know, in terms of what I'm seeing, it's basically all the people who decided to stay. And honestly, a lot of the people who didn't decide to stay have switched from just being, you know, IT or software engineering

consultants for Western companies to actually helping the war effort. And again, people who also left the country, like so many of the introductions that I got ahead of this trip were from Ukrainians who don't want to go back to the country because they don't want to have a Kalashnikov thrown into their hand, but they still want to help the war as much as possible from abroad. What is the vibe there just in the streets, like day to day? What is your life right now? What is their life right now? I would say Kiev is kind of like San Francisco. If San Francisco was at war, there's like a super strong cafe culture. People are out and about. There's a lot of cool spots like i'm sure the same cool spots that you went to when you visited here you know eight years ago is it

really what san francisco would be if it was at war i don't know what san francisco would be if it was a war i first thought another maybe you'll be fighting i don't know that like our sort of strange gender politic necessarily mapped to real war with a superpower. Well, so I think the cool thing about, or I shouldn't say the cool thing. The war is a horrible, horrible, horrible thing, but the silver lining is that it really breeds necessity as a result of it. And so the kind of fake tech scene that you saw when you came here eight years ago or Europe more broadly has kind of washed away. Like everyone is focused on what actually matters. And, you know, from my perspective as a VC, like I first started,

you know, investing in, I guess like 2018, I honestly never considered European companies like ever. Like I think probably have invested maybe like two and two or three over the years before the war started. Completely different now. Like just there's something biological or evolutionary in us that when survival is at stake, you stop doing all the bullshit. And I think, you know, I'm optimistic that that's largely what happened

to San Francisco too. But I don't know, that's kind of the vibe that I got. Everything is super serendipitous. Like I've had probably 50 meetings here. There has not been a single calendar invite. A quarter of those meetings come from just seeing someone on the street and then they're like, oh, let's catch up later.

It's like very, very just like good vibes with some air raid sirens and explosions going off occasionally in the background. Once in a while or like, I mean, how much of that is happening? There were like, there's probably like an hour and a half of air raid sirens today, like cumulatively. Once in a while you hear interceptions or things hit or I mean, sometimes it's kind of hard to tell the difference between the two. The air raid sirens are pretty often. I would say more days than not that I've been here. There's been sirens that go off oftentimes in the middle of the night. Um, and then the other thing that sucks are the power blackouts. So typically you don't have power for like eight hours a day. Like I'm at a friend's place right now because I didn't want to lose my power and my internet. And then there's a world where maybe I keep power, but the internet goes down. So I have to switch to my hotspot. What is the sense there, I guess, of how well the

war is going on the, on the Ukrainian side? What is their sentiment? Yeah, I think it depends on who you talk to. I'm super biased because pretty much everyone that I met with while I'm here is somehow in the defense ecosystem. When I speak to average Ukrainians who are not at all involved, they just want the war to be over. They all hate Russia, but they also are tired of air raid sirens and power blackouts and missiles going off. It's, you know, even if you're a very stoic, resilient person, it's kind of hard not to be scared

when sirens go off in the distance and then you hear a boom. Like you don't sleep close to the window anymore because you don't want debris to shatter your window. Like there's all these considerations now that they didn't have to worry about before. In terms of whether or not they're winning the war, I think it's pretty much a stalemate.

I would say that Russia's probably slightly winning, but it's kind of hard to spoil it. I'm less interested in really what the truth is so much as what people feel and think, or are feeling and thinking on the grounds. I think everyone's pretty exhausted um to be honest yeah yeah everyone like everyone wants to win the war but it's hard to not be exhausted when like you don't have power and working hot water and stuff do you think there's

resignation to just is it like it's gonna end and whatever that means we accept um no i think a lot of people are optimistic that the war is at least going to last for a while i don't know if optimistic optimistic is the right word to use there but like no one thinks that kiev's about to fall or anything like that or that the country is about to imminently go under i think if you're in the like pessimist pessimist camp you're like okay you know ukraine's going to give up the East and admit that Crimea is Russian territory and there will be peace. And I have heard rumors of a peace deal, which I don't at all believe is going to happen, especially ahead of the US election. But that's kind of what the pessimism is. It's like, okay, we're probably going to lose the war,

but it's probably just going to be losing the East kind of thing. Right. Tell me a little bit more about the tech scene. You were mentioning that things have evolved pretty quickly there in an interesting way, just given the pressure of the war. What does it look like now? What is the Ukrainian tech scene? It's basically a city full of very, very small offices and very discreet office buildings of young Ukrainian dudes, engineers typically, just working in dark rooms. And they have their power banks during blackouts selectively hooked up to the electronics and laptops that they need.

It's very, very, very scrappy. I'm not positive about this, but I'm I appreciate there's actually a law that you can only have a certain number of engineers in any room at any given time, because there have been, you know, issues with Russians sending missiles at startups. Um, and so like, there's, there's, there's all this calculus that goes into like where you work and like what you say and what you don't say. Like, um, I have not verified this, but someone told me that the highest floor of every office building is now the lowest, like cheapest. It's completely inverted

because you're at the highest risk of being hit by a missile or debris. And so it's just a- Wow, but what about on the Russians targeting startups thing? Can you tell me a little bit more about that or what you've heard? Yeah, I mean, like basically if the russians find out that you're working on like a uh important capability like

maybe you're i don't know doing visual navigation for drones so you can fly in like ew denied territory like electronic warfare denied territory or you're working on a new munition that they don't know how to defeat um if they know where you are, it's like a calculus. It's like, okay, this missile cost us a million dollars. This is our likelihood of hitting this target based on Ukraine's air defense. They very much consider you viable though. And so I think the Russians are just constantly doing like a prioritization of this person's worth it, this person's not worth it. And like, for example, I was just in Krakow for a NATO conference before this, which was the first trip or the first country to Europe I've ever been to. And one of the guys that I met there afterwards, he told me that 12 people from Moscow

visited his website. And it's like the Russians are always watching. And so that's in the back of the mind of every single entrepreneur of like, am I a target? How do I avoid becoming a target while also telling people about what I'm building? What is your sense of, I don't know about your sense, what is your gauge on how the Ukrainians think about tech elsewhere? How are they thinking about their relationship right now with Americaica or americans i would say everyone here is super super grateful for western aid like there has not been one even like when i go to the kind of like williamsburg uh equivalents of kiev like no one is anti-america or anything um there is kind of a general i would say consensus here that like american defense tech

is not super serious and so everyone has their own version of the story of like an american product that gets tested here and just completely fucking fails uh and it they're just not viewed with with great uh reputability and then i wouldn't say that there's animosity but there is some general like disconnect of like why are these american companies who are not even in Ukraine raising tens of millions of dollars? And I, as a Ukrainian entrepreneur, am trying to get the next $10,000 to purchase this drone kind of thing. I don't understand the distinction. Or I don't understand the parallel there. They're very different things, right? One is a company raising money to build a product, and one is someone who wants money to buy something to use right oh like i guess in the latter example i mean like you know

a ukrainian startup that is building something that goes on a drone but they need the money for the drone like my point i understand that there's there's sort of like a risk in funding a company based in a country at war yeah so that So that's, that's obviously my response. Like, you know, I've, I've made several investments here, um, but very selectively. And like what I have told explicitly to a lot of these entrepreneurs is, you know, it's first off impossible to invest in a Ukrainian entity. So you need a Delaware C-corp or something. Uh, and then, you know, to your point, there is, uh is added risks to the already very risky nature of venture when you invest in a country like ukraine um but from their perspective you know they're avoiding

missile attacks they're thinking about the russians they're trying to win a war and every single week or month they're being tested on the battlefield and the products that they're building and then they you know hop on their laptop and they read an article like, so-and-so company with no contracts in the US wins X millions of dollars in funding. Does that make sense? Well, it makes sense. I mean, just generally speaking, the funding ecosystem in America is stupid.

Like there are all sorts of companies getting money that shouldn't be getting money. And a lot of that just has to do with the fact that there's so much money that's been raised to put into a very few number of companies that are actually good. Yeah, I understand where that's coming from. Really interesting. Sanjana, John, do you guys have any questions for Patrick while he's there about either the tech ecosystem or just the sort of what's going on on the streets of Kiev generally? I would just ask, I mean, my sort of

naive assumption was that most military age men would be like actively conscripted. Is there some sort of exemption for people who are working in the defense tech space, um, from the draft? Yeah, pretty much exactly that. Um, they keep eliminating the exemption. So I don't know what the latest is. Like, um, it's, it's actually been quite a controversial issue. They just eliminated one for dual citizens. So if you're like a Ukrainian US citizen, in theory, you could be conscripted because they need men, obviously. But yes, my understanding is if you work in the defense industry for a company and you have government contracts, then you're exempt. And then I think

there's some category of entrepreneur who doesn't have contracts yet, so could be called to the war at any given time. I think they're being careful about conscripting young people, though, because obviously they want someone to rebuild the country after the war. How often are you seeing Americans when you're over there? Are you seeing other people like you or are there people know people from the u.s government or dod or military over there um i would say extremely rarely especially young people um there's like definitely a category of like shady foreigner who i don't know why they're here uh there's also like dignitaries so like i was in a hotel the other day and there were just 10 japanese people drinking i don't know why i'm

assuming they were here as part of some mission. Um, I was in a supermarket today and there was a tall American man wearing a suit in like very expensive Gator cowboy boots. Um, I complimented his shoes and ain't perfect English and then just walked away. Um, because that's how rare it is. Like I had been here for almost three weeks at this point and I've maybe heard English on the sidewalk like four or five times from Americans. I mean, so it's pretty rare. I've heard about a couple of stories about people just like kind of running hustles, like they'll go to Best Buy in America, buy a bunch of DJI drones,

hop on a flight, resell them for 10X and it pays for their flight and they make a profit. Have you run into anyone that's kind of not doing a startup necessarily, but just like, you know, running a hustle essentially? Yeah, there's definitely a lot of just very scrappy people here. I've definitely met a few of them. There's like the NGO world, which in the West, or at least in tech has a very negative connotation, obviously has been kind of useless. They're kind of like running the war in a lot of ways. So like if you can't get a government contract in Ukraine, you basically sell to the NGOs, or at least that's my understanding of it. And then they donate it to the front lines. They're getting gear in and out of the country is my understanding. I mean, I don't

have any direct experience with this, but they have, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of people who are doing all that. So I wouldn't at all be surprised by that um very interesting really interesting i would love this war to end as soon as possible it's a total nightmare i feel bad for everyone there um i think it's really interesting that you're out there it's interesting to hear what's going on uh thanks for stopping by and um be safe see you back in in the country. Cool. Thank you. All right. So we got to talk about Stonehenge. A couple of days, was it now at this point, it's Friday.

This release is just a couple of days ago. I mean, this is in this ongoing trend, right? Of crazy people attacking things that people care a lot about either with uh paint usually over so someone it's like a climate activist throwing paint on the mona lisa or something it's protected by glass so nothing really no damage should be done we we recently saw a couple of climate activists also in the uk actually slash a painting um that was on one of the campuses and now going after the stonehenge which is like an ancient monument and part of not only just UK, but I would say really like world heritage and history.

It's a cherished object in our world, one of the more important physical things in terms of how people understand themselves. And we could go on, I guess, on this for a while, but the point is they threw some orange paint on it and everyone obviously lost their minds. That's the point of this is to get everybody in the world furious about something and to look at something and to pay them attention, which of course I'm doing now because it's just too funny. And I have to talk about the fact that apparently these climate activists, by throwing the paint on the monument,

one, are in violation of some crazy monument law in the UK, so maybe they're going to prison. Two, there's a rare species of lichen, apparently, that only lives on the monument. Strange to me, find it suspicious, but everybody's saying so. The environmentalists are angry with themselves in this case. And then three, this happened right before solstice so the people who were most incensed were actually environmental pagans in the uk who are freaking out about how offensive this was to the pagan people of um i don't know wherever the fuck stonehenge is but a lot of thoughts on this drama generally speaking it is funny always to see the craziest people in the world mad at each other. But this particular organization, Just Stop Oil,

has quite a funny background. Sanjana, I would love for you to break it down for us today. Yeah, so Just Stop Oil is actually a pretty new group. They were only founded in 2022. They're British because all the crazy environmentalists, all the craziest environmentalists tend to be british um so you know extinction rebellion is british as well um another group called insulate britain that apparently goes around the uk chaining themselves together and

blocking roads um so that the government will insulate houses is also British. But yeah, they sort of favor direct action, as they call it. So they're responsible for the paint throwing on like the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh. And they sort of tend to use orange. That's their color of choice. But they are mainly funded by U.S. philanthropists. It's actually pretty interesting. They've gotten almost all their funding from an L.A.-based climate organization called the Climate Emergency Fund, which ironically is funded by big oil through many generations. It's funded by a woman named Eileen Getty,

who is the heiress to the Getty petrochemical fortune. And I'll say that there's a kind of, this is a, there's a pattern of female, so of heiresses to oil fortunes giving money to kind of deranged activist causes. Leah Hunt Hendricks, who's the partial heiresses to oil fortunes, giving money to kind of deranged activist causes. Leah Hunt Hendricks, who's the partial heiress to a big Texas oil fortune, is one of the most notable donors to Solid Air, which is a big left-wing nonprofit that gives money to tons of deranged climate organizations,

funded a lot of BLM stuff. She actually got her PhD under under cornell west at princeton so she there's lots of lots of interesting writing about her but basically just stop oil indirectly uh is is being funded by oil um well it makes sense right i mean what i know personally when i see these two clowns lumber over to the stone henge and douse it in some chemical that i don't know what it is and cheer about how awesome it is and sit down and refuse to leave i personally and they're doing this in the name of you know stopping us from using oil i personally want to burn as much oil as possible like i would literally buy barrels of it right now and light it on fire that's that's the state of mind that i'm in and so if big oil was funding these people it would make sense i mean who doesn't want to burn gas after one of these neckbeards tells you to stop

doing it yeah people i mean people have been saying for a while that some of these kind of extreme climate uh like what there's a word for them these like extinction they're obsessed with the idea of human extinction and and their only solution to to the climate crisis is basically just like stop having kids and then kill yourself um and stop taking planes before you kill yourself um but you, that maybe somehow they're kind of like a big trying to tackle these deranged British activists who were desecrating their own sort of millennial cultural monument. And, you know, you see this and you immediately think, okay, whatever these people are for, I'm against, basically. So it's extremely ineffective, I think, as a tactic. Well, there's a debate about that specifically, right?

Because obviously every time they do something hideous like this, I mean, something like Stonehenge, we all know what it is. And so to see it, even though it's going to be fine, the idea that it might not be, that someone would try to make it not fine, is enraging for the reasons that you mentioned. But the retort is like, yeah, we know, and we're doing it on purpose. And there's actually a book they all read, something for radicals, like advice for radicals or strategy for radicals,

or like this popular Marxist book that advises people to do just this, to evoke as much rage as possible. It doesn't matter. Your goal is not to persuade people. Your goal is just to get attention on your cause. If their goal is just attention on the cause, they've, I guess, in their minds, succeeded. And I think it has to, I don't know. It seems so crazy, right?

But I do think that they think that they're winning. That's why they keep doing this. There was that one, the one That's why they keep doing this. I mean, she said one, there was that one, the one who said she was an archeologist. There's the tweet of the chick is just like, as an archeologist and a supporter of just stop oil,

allow me to explain why this was great. Um, and then she defends this sort of desecration of Stonehenge. Uh, I mean, I guess these people, it must be scary to, to really believe that the world's about to end.

And it's just like, um, they always, yes. Well, they, they reference movie that Netflix movie, the don't,

don't look up member. Yeah. Um, so this is the premise of the movie. If people haven't watched it is there's this giant meteor that's going to destroy all life on earth. And the scientists who are all the heroes of the movie are saying, we've got to stop doing something with this meteor.

It's coming. We're all going to die. And everyone's like, you're crazy. It's not going to happen. And it's like right there. And you can look to die and everyone's like you're crazy it's not going to happen and it's like right there and you can look at it and everyone's like no it's a it's a um it's you know cheap fakes a whole other story we could talk about uh but in fact it's real and everybody dies and climate scientists like to say they like to point to that movie and say it's just wow it's just like it's just like that movie, which was created as propaganda for the climate

people. I don't think that it is. I don't think it's so simple as all of life on this planet is going to end. And I think probably there are some real consequences, serious consequences to global warming. I think it's going to be chaotic, not really predictable. I think some places might actually be better than other places. And it's just a super nuanced conversation that also has drawbacks when you're talking about what would happen if we stopped using oil? Let's actually talk about that for a second. What does the world look like if suddenly there's no oil production, no fossil fuels whatsoever, the entire plastics industry vanishes? What does that mean for medicine? What does that mean for the cost of transportation of food? How many people starve to death because this deranged blue-haired

activist doesn't want us to use oil? Literally starve to death. I mean, at a certain level, you're moving food around the world and there's an oil cost to that, a fuel cost to that, that in a kind of figurative sense, we're eating these chemicals. And if you just stop, a lot of people can no longer feed themselves. There are no... In third order effects. Sorry, John.

There are no low energy rich countries. You've seen that graph, right? Where it shows the more energy the country produces, the richer they get. Well, they're rich, they think, but rich is bad. We don't need money. It's like, well. But it's also correlated with mortality and all the other things and food and stuff.

No, I'm just saying these are people who are divorced from it. These are people who have always had money, so they don't know what it's like when you don't have any. These are people who've never had to worry about food security. So the concept of where it comes from is nothing they've ever talked about or thought about. This is like during COVID, we saw this when all of our supply chains, I wouldn't say they collapsed, but they were disturbed and you suddenly couldn't get things. That, I think for a lot of people was sort of a wake-up call. For your whole life, you go to the store and you buy what you need and you don't really think about where it comes from or why or what the costs are associated with that or what needs to go into those things until suddenly you don't have them.

And then you're really curious, like, why is there not enough meat or dairy or whatever? Why does it cost so much money and I can't afford it? Like, you don't really care until there's a crisis. And these people don't really care at all because they've never had, I think, a real crisis in their life. Fun fact about Getty Airs. There's a different Getty Air in Los Angeles whose name is Balthazar Getty. It's an awesome name. And he's just a DJ. And so you go to a party at an art gallery and he's there DJing.

And it's just the best. See, that's it. He's not trying to fuck up the world. What was that, Saj? No. I was saying that seems like a better use of the money is just like fund your tj career i do wonder if i mean it seems like you know this this particular oil air is like funding like decelerationist anti-oil movements but like i wonder if there's at least some allocation towards proactive solutions like do you buy tesla stock you know like there are a

bunch of i i just see these people and I'm like, go work at a nuclear company. Go build a solar panel. Like, just do something. There's so many ways. They were charging, they were just in Germany charging the Tesla factory, trying to take down the man. I forget it.

It looked like, it was like, it was like Dawn of the Dead. They're just like charging through the field, like destroy the electric cars. Yeah, it's just, I don't know how you get to like the decelerationist position. You can totally believe that there's a climate crisis that's imminent and that can motivate you to build nuclear power plants and roll out solar panels and do so many other things.

But for some reason, when someone does that and then they make a bunch of money doing it and they create actually a sustainable, scalable system that can take carbon out of the atmosphere consistently, then all of a sudden they're demonized and it's very odd. The weirdest shift has been all the climate people saying like, kind of electric cars are bad and we should go back to gasoline cars. And it's just been a very, very weird shift. I mean, it reveals that it's not actually about the climate. It's about like production and wealth.

I don't see that much on electric cars broadly, but on Elon Musk specifically. And isn't that really just rooted in the fact that, I mean, these are just, all of this is, I don't, I'm not one of these people who wants to reduce every single political thing into communism versus capitalism. I don't think it's all of it. I don't think wokeness, honestly. I thought a lot about this. I'm not really convinced that it's just Marxism. I think it's more complicated and weird than that. It's like pseudo-Christian, like, or anti-Christian, sort of like a bastardized version of Christianity. It's interesting, complex, not just about communism. This feels very motivated by socialism, I would say. It feels very left-wing economics-based. And that is probably also why you keep having to have conversations about the disparate economic

impacts of different regions based on climate change. They always want to talk about this, which is crazy because you're speculating on a future world that how could you possibly begin to map who's going to be impacted by climate change? But they try to, and it's usually a poverty-based thing. It does feel like code, right? Again, like you said, John, if you cared about global warming, and we've had this conversation a million times, I don't want to belabor the point, but it's like, nuclear is obvious. I think that geoengineering is obvious. If you really think it's a problem, we need to start talking about ocean seeding. You're already saying there is too much carbon in the atmosphere. We are all going to die, right? This is what Greta Thunberg

is saying. So keeping carbon out of the atmosphere doesn't matter. You need to be removing it. Why aren't we doing that? There are projects we know that will help and we're not doing it. And we're not doing it because I don't think they believe in this. I do not think that they really believe that we're facing an imminent climate apocalypse. I think it's just a gut feeling they have that rich people are bad for the world and that's a feeling that you know zealots have had since the age of like the beginning of mankind i think people who have more bananas are going to be targeted by people with less bananas um i think it's probably especially bad if it's like a little girl who grew up with a lot of bananas and now she can't make as many bananas because she doesn't have a skill that is sellable but there there's this guy over there, Elon Musk.

He's got a whole fucking castle of bananas. That makes me mad. I'm taking down the castle. That's what she's mad about. Okay, last question. Is Stonehenge actually cool? I've never been. And I feel like a lot of times you build these things up and then you hear people go and

they're like, eh, it wasn't actually that big or cool. Once I found out the druids were worshiping it and then I Googled it to see if it was cursed, because there's this Stonehenge Twitter account that was furious with these activists. Like, Stonehenge Twitter was going off. I just Googled it and it turned out it's cursed. I think it's interesting. I would love to know more about Stonehenge.

We need, like, a Bass Pro Shops version of Stonehenge in America. For sure. Well, we have that snake thing you got to watch more netflix documentaries about ancient civilizations there's the crazy like like native american snake mound um i don't know it looks like you're about to say something though about uh about stonehenge i hear ave breeze where it's at which is another stone uh formation but apparently you can actually touch the stones.

Whereas at Stonehenge, you're supposed to maintain like a respectful distance from them. So Avebury is like the cooler place to go, I guess. What is the read, if anything, about all of this in the UK right now? I mean, you're there. Do people even know? Is it even registering? Does no one even know this is happening? Is this like a complete Twitter drama or what?

No, people have been talking about it i mean i think well the election's coming up um and it seems like you know labor the sort of left-leaning party is almost certainly gonna sweep um but i think my sense is people are it's it's people are pissed about it but then there is all this also this like contingent of people maybe this is because i'm actually around the area that this organization was started who think that this is like sort of a justifiable action i mean they are very fringe um and uh tend to live in areas that already have like very well-developed organic food networks and lots of nearby local farms and so they think that this is the way that like the entire world lives um but my sense is most people knew about it and have been dealing with these people forever um and kind of just hate them i mean they were condemned by basically everyone

across the political spectrum um so yeah so i mean massive lack of ambition from these guys i feel like if i was in charge of disrupting Stonehenge, I could have knocked it over. Right. It doesn't seem that hard. It doesn't seem that hard to actually just knock over. You throw a rope over, you pull really hard. Like, if you're really about that life, you should have knocked it over, made a bigger statement. A couple, the paint, the lichens, they're going to be fine.

Well, I don't know if they're actually physically strong enough to do it i mean the the organization is basically composed of like non-binary women and old men i guess give me a lever long enough and i shall lift the earth yeah you gotta put some math skills to work i don't think that maybe you're right maybe i mean they but these are the people who've i've seen them cement themselves into buckets before i mean they've used tools they know how to use them i didn't know your point about like the fact that they're all out of shape i just saw another video from just oil it was this you said she was genderqueer she might have i'm not sure was her name was ambiguous gender ambiguous for sure but um she was uh a little video that they posted probably she had painted some private jets

orange and she was sitting down the what oh that was taylor swift's jet that's what they're saying yeah that's the other their action against taylor swift there's a whole so they're mad at taylor generally you see that i just saw a whole tiktok or not tiktok instagram reel about this it was a guy breaking down his climate anger with Taylor for taking private jets everywhere. He did one. He was like, and the thing was like the video at the end of the video, which was like a couple minutes, maybe it was like a four minute thing about all of her crimes against humanity for her private jet usage.

He's like, and the real fucked up thing about this is that the private jet that he was talking about the private jet ride that the private flight that he was addressing of taylor's in california it was like from one town to another he's like that private flight was as long as this video so she took a private flight for four minutes to go to a different town which which is actually so iconic. I know it is. But they're mad about it. And so that is the meme I think that they're building on top of, is the Taylor Swift jet thing. So this woman's painting them orange.

She's filming about what she just did. She's on camera. She can't catch her breath. I'm 22, and I've just sprayed two private jets orange. We need an international treaty against the burning of all oil, coal and gas. She's like, yeah, this jet that I just and she's like overweight and like the skin looks clammy and it's like someone's got to get this girl a shot of vitamin something. I don't know all of them give her the works get her on a treadmill give her a diet plan like these people

need help flying cars are here they're just not evenly distributed i i eagerly await taking a climate neutral four minute flight across town sounds amazing i i mean if you've got it you know you don't want to be against the swifties as soon as i heard well the swifties are it's complicated for them this is like sort of like in the in the rupaul in the rupaul universe um a lot of rupauls like most hardcore fans are divided on the issue of rupaul's fracking rupaul has public has land that he leases to frackers um and it's like it's complicated they're like we love him but like this is problematic and with taylor i think a lot of them are like we love her but yeah it's problematic but but she's taylor and she's gonna save the democracy because i'm sure she's gonna endorse biden or something whatever they think

about i don't know man fans are crazy um they're about as crazy as these activists how would she not take a private jet though she would get like mobbed if she were on a commercial flight like even in first class she would get yes i do think though like a private jet from one town to another she doesn't have to i mean yeah 30 minutes in an suv that's private versus four minutes on a plane that's private. But I'm sure there's a factor of like, you got to move the plane to get there. You know, all the equipment. It's hard to be Taylor Swift. You know, she deserves it.

Good for her. She does. She does travel with a lot of people. I'm sure. Like she has a whole crew. Yeah. But yeah, it's Taylor. Well, you know what?

I'm happy for her. I'm happy for us. i am happy for the weekend touch grass this weekend you guys definitely go check out john's piece on pyrowires i posted one this week as well had a pretty sick interview with um paul bukite who is the architect of gmail it is a long 4 000 word feature we didn't talk about it today but check it out on pyrowires.com definitely subscribe to the daily if you haven't already tell your friends to subscribe to the daily okay this is like the best way that you can help grow the pirate nation is just push that link to everyone that you possibly uh can like we've got to double triple this thing um leave a comment

tell me something interesting about Taylor Swift and the environment. It's been real. Catch you next week.