Pirate Wires - Trump & Elon Musk Expose The Deep State

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

EPISODE #86: Welcome back to the pod! We’re covering the reveal of the deep state this week in our DOGE Report. Tons of stories regarding the DOGE cuts to the federal government, but what exactly have we been paying for? Is Politico a government sponsored media company? What we do know is that the team working with Elon in charge with fixing our government spending are quite based. From ancient scrolls, to a shit poster known as ’Big Balls. We get into all of the reactions from another insane week in the Trump administration.Featuring Mike Solana, Riley Nork, John Coogan, Kartik SathappanWe have partnered with AdQuick! They gave us a 'Moon Should Be A State' billboard in Times Square!https://www.adquick.com/Sign Up For The Pirate Wires Daily! https://get.piratewires.com/pw/dailyTopics Discussed:- https://www.piratewires.com/p/pirate-wires-in-times-square?f=home- https://www.piratewires.com/p/deep-state-they-them-vs-the-wonder-boys?f=home- https://www.piratewires.com/p/it-is-time-for-america-to-step-up-in-panama?f=homePirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWiresMike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolanaRiley Twitter: https://x.com/rylzdigitalJohn Twitter: https://x.com/johncooganKartik Twitter: https://x.com/sathaxeTIMESTAMPS:0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod!#podcast #technology #politics #culture

We will win! We will win! We will win! Doge Teen owns Tesla.Sexy LLC. Edward Koreshteen, a Doge staffer who is gone by big balls online. Well, I don't know if he would pass the background check, but he does pass the vibe check. This is really good sh**, man. I stand with big balls. $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists what pronouns are. There's some truth to this, maybe a lot. It's a Muslim Sesame Street.

That's crazy. Okay, carry on. I got what I needed. You just keep going. What's up guys? Welcome back to the pod. Don't get nervous. Brandon is, he's not off. I am actually nervous that you're going to get nervous.

It's going to be comments, messages, maybe pester him online, but he's reporting right now. There's a hearing in Congress that he's covering on Operation Choke Point 2.0. They use the exact same headline as we used in our first piece by Nick Carter, which is absolutely crazy, the impact that PirateWires has. I mean, surreal, amazing, humbled and blessed. We've got two guests with us today.

Well, not guests. I'm sorry. We don't have a guest. John feels like extended. John's like a cousin at this point. And then Cardic is the co-victor of Pirate Idol. Molly should have been here today, but is already failing in her very first week here. Could not make it. Oh, but Cardic's in the pod. Thank you, Cardic. It's been a long journey.

Cardic and Molly are popping in and out like every month, just as the as the sort of episodes come. I don't want to say to I do have to like blow smoke up your ass. Carg, you're great. We love you. You know a lot about San Francisco local politics and tech. I'm probably going to use you for more serious topics because you're more of a professional than me, even though I'm technically a professional at this. Welcome to the team. It's it's been a joy getting to know you. Yeah, thank you.

I just want to say that I did this for all my brothers waiting on the H1B list. So this is for you. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. I think before we get into the topics today, I guess, you know what?

It is a topic. It's a topic. We have a new partner at PirateWires, AdQuick, and this is a company that allows you to find billboard space and stuff like this. The reason I'm sort of prefacing it this way and getting quickly to the meat of it is they went and bought us an ad in Times Square,

which was absolutely epic. Matt's gonna put that up right now of the advertisement that was in Times Square yesterday. Moon should be a state. It was amazing. I took a picture. Elon retweeted it and just like sent it into the stratosphere. I think we're very close.

I think we are maybe days, maybe not days. I don't know how long who can judge Donald Trump, but I think that Donald Trump is going to eventually say the phrase moon should be a state. And here's how I think he's going to do it. I think what he's going to say, it's going to be rolling. He's going to be freestyling the way that he does. And he's going to say something along the lines of like, you know, it'll have to do with either mining or it'll have to do with China's space

orbitals or something like that. And it'll be like, you know, the moon should probably, I mean, many people are saying it should be a state. I don't know, not me, but it's gonna be, it'll be so quick, it's gonna roll off his tongue. I mean, many people are saying it should be a state, I don't know, not me, but it's going to be. And that's how it's gonna present, but it's gonna happen because of the good hard work

that we've been doing here. I'm very proud of us and really me, because I invented the idea of what should be a state. It's my meme, don't let anyone take it from me. And they're gonna fucking try. And you all know they're going to try. I've been giving. Yeah, I've given up a lot. I have. I've allowed for the culture people to take various things that we've started at PirateWires. I just think it's like the mission is more important, but this is not one that I'm going to give up. I mean, I'm not going to be nice about it if someone tries to say that they invented it. John, do you have anything? I know you followed me to the

state pretty closely. I mean, I've been a huge bull on this concept for forever. I love it as a coinage. I think you did a great job of distilling the concept. I remember you were workshopping it on X for basically months. And then you texted me one day and you were like, I finally got it to go viral. And you posted just moon with the image of the flag. That was X. Right. Yes.

And that got like 150K likes or millions of views. And it was like, okay, crack the code. You made the meme. You distilled it down to its essence. Everyone understands this and plenty of people are down for it. And I love it. And it's interesting because it should be less controversial than Greenland. It should be less controversial than Panama or Canada or any of this.

There I don't know where the pushback would come from, but you know, it's just going to be a huge cultural issue when he drops it. But I'm ready to fight. It's crazy how mad people get about it. Oh, yeah. There are no people up there. I had a guy today email me about it because we did a little blast for the PirateWire subscribers to tell them what was going on in Times Square. And someone hit me up and was like, this is colonialism.

I was like, first of all, what? I don't need, first of all, actually, I'm like, that's complicated. That's a complicated word. America was a colony and I'm glad that we were. I'm glad that we're not anymore, but like, it's like, it's a complicated word. Second, there are no people on the moon.

Like, who are you afraid for? Who do you think that we're going? It's not just that. Well, yeah, we have to find them. It's not just that there's no people on the moon. It's that we sent, America sent people there 50 years ago and no other country has sent people since. They've had 50 years.

We proved that it could be done. And every other country is very disrespectful to the moon. They are not sending people. We paved the way. They don't even want to try. And so, we gave them 50 years to, hey, send your people up there too. They said, no, we're good. We don't want the moon. And so, it's ours now.

Yeah, it's frustrating, the controversy over moon statehood, which is really bubbling up right now all over the country. And I just obviously stand on the side of moon. I think... I just obviously stand on the side of Moon. I think it's like maybe because it's a blank slate, people can just project themselves in their own weird, annoying things onto it. And that's actually what we're fighting about.

We're just fighting about, it's like maybe every issue is sort of like this on the internet. It's like, we're actually just fighting over someone's like strange psychological quirks and we don't even know who they are. Some stranger on the internet getting mad about whatever. But I think that Ocasio-Cortez in particular will be mad about Moon statehood. She just seems like that kind of person. And I'm excited for that. I'm excited for her to mount Warren probably also will be mad about that. Yeah, but I'm looking forward to it. Shout out to Eric for designing that

flag, by the way, that got it to go viral. Mujib is state was good, but like it didn't quite you really needed that visual for people to understand, which is a good lesson for all of us moving forward. You know, we're all I mean, we all speak for myself,

definitely more of a word chat than than a shape, which is a shape rotator. And and I think that we forget sometimes the power of a word chat than a shape rotator. And I think that we forget sometimes the power of a good visual. So yeah, last thoughts on AdQuick. Love you guys, very stoked to be working with you. I actually extremely a huge fan of this product.

And not just because you gave me a giant free ad, billboard in Times Square, which was so cool. And my mom was very happy. When I talk to people about pirate wires, if they have heard of us, the first thing they ask about is like, oh, are those the people that want to make the moon estate? So we are we're spreading our brand far and wide, and it's beautiful to see.

Yeah, we're like an educational resource for the country. We should be getting USAID money, and we'll get into that a little bit later in the episode. First, though, we've got to do a Doge report. Riley, do you want to break that one down? Yeah, sure thing. So the early returns of Doge are starting to trickle in. There was a lot of speculation about what

this cost-cutting program would look like. Turns out it looks a lot like six cracked Zoomers firing bureaucrats, which we'll get into more. So Elon and the Doge team have gained access by the treasury department. I just got to pause. I'm sorry. I just, I have this visual image right now

of like a 19 year old kid in a broccoli haircut, just like sort of standing in front of this desk, like giant fat guy, cheese, little dust all over his shirt. And he just looks at him. He's like, you're straight bussing dude. You gotta go. Uh-huh.

I think that's literally what's happening, Mike. I love it. All right. Sorry. Carry on. He does like a fortnight dance on his desk after he's fired. It's going to be beautiful. Yep. But with so the treasury department gave Elon and the Doge team access to the federal payment system, something that very much triggered the Elon derangement syndrome Democrats. And with this information at their disposal, Doge claims that they are saving the federal government, quote, one billion dollars per day, mostly from stopping the hiring of people into unnecessary positions, deletion of DEI, and stopping improper payments to foreign organizations.

There's even a sweet new Doge Tracker that has a leaderboard of government departments that have seen the most cuts. Currently in first place is USAID, the organization that has been in the news quite a bit recently, as Elon and Trump have made moves to shut it down altogether, while also prompting Republicans to sort of bring up all the crazy sounding programs USAID was funding something about Guatemalan sex changes there's a lot of a lot of Crazy programs floating around it's all been sort of a blur as has been most of Trump's presidency so far But I guess card act did some more digging into the USAID programs and into the Doge cuts in general

So I'll let you take it away sir. Yeah, sure So, I mean there is a ton so I didn't, sure. So, I mean, there was a ton. So I didn't get a chance to dig into everything, but there's a lot of interesting stuff here. So I'm basically going off rapper response 47's tweet. He has like all the craziest stuff. I'm assuming it's a he, I think it's a decent guess. And yeah, it's interesting to find this info.

So most of it comes from USAID's website, which as you guys probably know is down, like you can't access it. And also this thing called IREX, which is the International Research and Exchanges Board. Their mission is to make a more just, prosperous and inclusive world. Their main goals being media development, gender equity, and governance. They don't do everything that USAID does, but many of the things I'm about to talk about, they're the ones that distribute the funds. And most of their sites are also blocked, since obviously everyone is trying to do this research. So they've decided just to go dark. Luckily,

all the LLM apps have already cached all of this, so they know everything. So it's pretty cool. I'm going to dig into things. It's about, let's call it three sections. So the first one, I'm going to start with something that I actually think is not that bad, but people might think it is. The headline is 20 million for Sesame Street in Iraq. It is locally called Alan Sim Sim. It looks like they actually spent 11 million. So they doubled the number. It is actually almost exactly what you think it is.

Like I, there's nothing really too weird about this. Alon's. All right. So I don't know if you, what I think it is, is a Muslim Sesame Street. I heard like Allah. Correct. That's correct. I mean, not like, no. I mean,

I'm out. I was like about to like defend. I'm like, this is all, this is not as crazy as it seems. That would blow my mind. If there's a fucking Muslim Sesame Street and they got Big Bird in a hijab, I'm like, oh, I can't handle that. That would be a lie for me. Some of the women hanging out with Big Bird

are wearing hijabs, as is normal in the region. But it is a regional Sesame Street. I watched like an episode or two. I didn't see anything too crazy in the show. Also, the spend is... Wait, no, no, no, wait, pot. But regional to where? So basically, this all started after the crisis

in Syria around 2011. It's a Muslim Sesame Street. That's crazy. OK, carry on. I got what I needed. You just keep going. Okay. So basically I'm going to talk about the cost. My mission is to talk about the cost and you guys can cast a judgment on these programs. Okay. So basically the 11 million

was spent on this. If you compare it to USS Me Street, it's 10 to 15 times cheaper, which would make sense. Obviously it should be cheaper, but it's not like it's like gross expenditures on the production of the show. Outside of that, what I will say is about 40% that goes to the actual production of the episodes. The other 60% is basically for what looks like daycare programs, teachers, stuff like that. In Syria?

Yes, so you see a bunch of... Okay. You see a bunch of photos of basically families, parents of the young children and they're like playing with Sesame Street themed blocks. So outwardly, if you look at the photos, like it seems nice and genuine, but I'm happy to hear what you think about this. I'm sure it's genuine. I just don't know why the fuck we're paying for it.

Yeah, correct. Like it sounds really nice. I don't care. I don't need to be funding Sesame Street in Syria. OK. Can I just? Oh, there's a lot more. Do you want to just list them and then just blow through them?

I will list them. You can go after it. So basically, yes. Like, the theme of this that keeps coming up is like, I didn't find too much fraud, but we can say that you shouldn't have spent it anyway. So that's what you're going to keep seeing. So it looks like they actually spent this money pretty

efficiently, assuming you wanted to do what they wanted to do. Okay, the next one, the next headline was five million to the EcoHealth Alliance, saying it's a key NGO for funding bat virus research in the Wuhan lab. The number seems a little high. They're kg around where four million went,

but it has been discovered by the government accountability office ours that 1.14 million did indeed go to EcoHealth and did indeed go to the the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And so at least that amount of money went to them. You know, EcoHealth has received a lot of money from the NIH and other sources, but I was specifically focused on USAID. As of today, they deny they played any part in COVID, gain-of-function research, or still saying that the COVID definitely did not leak from a lab and was definitely animal transition.

And that's as of a couple months ago that EcoHealth Alliance said that. So it looks like the numbers are a little expanded, but definitely at least $1.14 million, one from USA to this NGO. These last three are more about kind of the weird like news and like reporting stuff. And so the hot one is 3.5 million to the BBC.

Is it state funded media now? The distinction was that this money went to BBC Media Action, which is an international development charity. That's what they call themselves. Its mission is media development, climate resilience, and countering misinformation, which is a theme you're going to hear a lot.

It's almost exactly what I said the stated goals of IRX are and the next two things I'm going to talk about. And basically, US-ID is its second largest donor at $3.5 million. Its largest donor is the FCDO, which is the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, which is basically the UK's USAID. It has the exact same mission, and that was $4 million.

So we're basically paying just as much for it. The next one that is related is six million dollars to transform digital spaces to reflect feminist democratic principles. I looked into this one. That is exactly what the name of this program is called. If you dig into it, it doesn't seem as crazy what they're saying, the results are terrible.

But basically they're like, okay, this is trying to combat online violence against women with a specific focus of those in government or in the public sector. What do they mean by online violence? Can you describe online violence? So basically they're talking about harassment, like basically dick pics, coercions. So not violence. Yeah, not violence. We're talking about violence.

We're talking about online harassment. And or bullying. People are being mean online. So we're giving how much? Six million. Got it. And so I tried to look for like, what actually happened with this money, about $2.5 million of this went to launching helplines in various countries around the world. Um, but the numbers are pretty bad.

So over the past three years, that resulted in about 320 survivors of, uh, online violence. Survivors? Getting... Can you describe, can you explain a survivor to me though of this? Getting ratioed, if you survive getting ratioed, it's rough.

You're saying like a man said something nasty to a woman online and she- Yeah, online and or the workplace. Continued to live. Like in the real world. That's a survivor? Correct. And so about 320 people got legal aid. So that means there is actually some kind of case and they got legal aid. But then beyond that, about 5,000 people across 30 countries access these

various resources. And remember that's so let's add it together. 5,320 people over three years for $2.5 million were offered some kind of assistance. So that's gross negligence. The rest of the money was kind of vague, but there was one funny one. So they funded for it. There was one? Well, one I'm going to tell you about in detail.

So they funded 40 apps. Basically, they called it IT, like revolution or whatever. And one of them was in India. These apps get anywhere from 50 to 300 K of funding through this program. The one they highlighted in most of their documents is called Uli. I think that's how it's pronounced U-L-I. And basically the idea is it's supposed to combat this harassment online. I downloaded it. You can get it on the Chrome Web Store right now. It has two five-star ratings. It has 58 users.

And it does not work right now. I wish that Sanjana was here to explain something. So she did a great piece. I forget how long ago now it was, where we looked into the Dream Catcher thing in San Francisco. Dream Keepers Initiative, yeah. The Dream Keepers Initiative. It sounds very similar, where you have a government was where we looked into the dream catcher thing in San Francisco. Dreamkeepers initiative. Yeah, the dreamkeepers initiative. It sounds very similar where you have a government that is spending tons of money for projects and programs like this. It feels similar. It feels like a gift to people

who just are value aligned. Yeah, definitely. I'll give you the last one. And then we kind of talk about, you know, this at a higher level. But basically, the last one I looked at was $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists what pronouns are. There is some truth to this, maybe a lot. So the program is called MEND, Media Empowerment for a Democratic Sri Lanka. I actually thought the acronym was MED-EL,

which would have been pretty funny, but it's not, it's MEND. And this goes to IREX, which I talked about earlier as well. The express goals of this program are gender inclusive language training. Don't say things like ladies and gentlemen, or Vikram was born a man. Those are quotes from the documentation and training. Ethical reporting workshops and media digitization. It looks like with this money, they help the local stations gain two point one million followers on social media

and three times their output in video production. I mean, I guess that last bit is nice. But again, like it's eight million dollars. And this is where the funds went. Did you happen to look into the Politico stuff at all? Uh, the Politico stuff, I did. I don't have numbers like this. What it really seems to be is that the Politico Pro subscription, um...

Well, so we saw everybody exploding online over the issue of the government funding Politico. And it seemed to me just like a distraction immediately. I thought there was no way that the government straight up gave $ the government funding Politico. And it seemed to me just like a distraction immediately. I thought there was no way that the government straight up gave $8 million to Politico. That just I did not pass the sniff test. And then from what I could tell, it was just Politico has a like an enterprise subscription. Yes. So I think the high ticket number was lower than people said, but it was still millions. It looks like Politico has a political pro subscription that they subscribe to.

I think over 300, they have over 300 of these accounts and it's in a, it's a five digit subscription. Like it's $15,000 or something. And many, many, many government programs are buying them. Yeah, correct. It's just like subscriptions to the information or the Wall Street Journal in Silicon Valley. Like everyone has to buy a pro subscription and buy seats and... Well, nobody has to buy anything. It's like you do that. I guess, why do people buy that subscription for the information? I don't know. It seems to me you

do it because you want them to like you and you want them to not trash you in coverage. It feels and you want them to not trash you in coverage, it feels like you're, like, it feels like a bribe to me. And I wonder if the Politico thing is sort of like that. Like, it's a good thing, John, to bring that up. I wonder if that is actually a similar motivation, because God knows you're not learning from those subscriptions. Some of them probably. I bet there are probably

some pro subscriptions that are really valuable. John, what do you think about? Yeah, I mean, I think if you, you know, Politico does break stories and have paywalled content and there's plenty of people in the government that probably need to read it for their jobs and understand what's happening and see the digests that go out. And so there's probably if you just said like the US government has what millions of employees like tons and some of those people probably need access to information, whether that's from the Wall Street Journal or Politico or wherever, and they're going to need to pay for those seats.

You wind up putting them on a group buying license if it's a big organization that's buying. So that one doesn't seem that crazy. If it is from USAID, that's kind of weird, but even within USAID, there's probably some people that need to track political movements of what's happening in the nonprofit world and Politico is actually reporting out interesting facts and helpful stuff for their job. So spending some amount of money with Politico probably makes sense, but the sticker, there's definitely a sticker shock when you realize like, oh, they're selling a lot of these seats.

And also we just know that when these enterprise contracts get written, you get a bunch of seats and then you wind up with this happens at VC firms that subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. Oh yeah, we bought 200 licenses and half those people have never logged in and they just raised their hands and said, yeah, I want the Wall Street Journal, but they don't actually read it. And so in a VC firm, there's so many fees, who cares? It doesn't matter that an extra 10K is going to the Wall Street Journal every month, but when it's taxpayer dollars, yeah, we should be more efficient.

And this is the perfect example of how Doge can clean up just a little bit of waste here and there. And it adds up over time. It will add up. I think that there's this question of like why people are freaking out to the degree that they are. And I've been really. Captivated by that, I assumed that people would be absolutely just like incandescent with rage at the thought of criminals being deported because we live in the clown world and that's going to rub the wrong people the wrong kind of way. I assumed that as deportation conversation got more got broader, like sort of what we talked about last week, that there'd be a lot of good natured criticism of that. And people would have different views on it.

And it would be a heated contentious debate or something. I thought the trans stuff would rub people the wrong way. I thought I just expected a lot of backlash to the Trump administration but not on this and in hindsight like I really probably should have because I think that a lot of what sustains the left lives inside of these programs is my read of it. Like it will not be a meaningful cut to the United States budget, but it will be meaningful to the sort of like leftist activist class, international class

that is sustained by it is my read. I mean, what do you guys think of that? I mean, I'm not surprised. It's two classes of people on either side of a line trying to feed their families, right? So like it's taxpayers who want to pay less tax and not waste money on this bullshit so that they can feed their families And the other side it's people who have no skills who need this money to be paid and and pay and you know And feed their families and so I'm actually not surprised that this is the hottest issue because like

Humans are capitalists whether they like it or not. And you know, here we are. Just to steel man some of this stuff. I do think that there's an interesting argument. Can I pick one? I want you to pick the one that you steel man. Sure. I want I want you to steel man the Muslim Sesame Street. I would happily steel man that one. So first I saw some people criticizing these as oh USAID. they're spending all this money to influence Middle Eastern countries with American propaganda. This is a CIA front." And I said, you don't have to sell me on this. I like the idea as a neoconservative of bringing American values all over the world. And there is, as much as I'm joking, there is some element of exporting. We drop pamphlets over the USSR of American propaganda during the Cold War.

We broadcast American radio broadcasts all over the world so that people can hear American values, what we stand for, our opinions, our arguments for capitalism and democracy. And so some of these programs could, in effect, be bringing American ideals abroad and that could have knock-on effects that are positive for the government and for the United States and for the American taxpayer. It's not a foregone conclusion that these international projects are ROI negative. Now individually, I think they probably are extremely ROI negative and they're probably not doing anything and they're probably a huge, and I agree with all that. But in theory, the idea of spending money to influence another country abroad and spread American values, it's not as crazy as it sounds.

And I think that they're like, we're going to cut a lot of stuff. And whenever there's cuts, there's going to be things where we realize in a few years, oh, we shouldn't have cut that. And I just saw this, people cut the budget in LA, they cut the fire department budget, it looks really stupid in hindsight. But you go in and sometimes there's second and third order effects where you don't realize, hey, that thing that looked really smart to cut,

ah, it was actually important in hindsight. And so there's gonna be some messiness. I think overall, there's so much waste that they can cut pretty broadly and be very, very safe. But I would expect a backlash to the thing that gets cut. And then we hear the story about, oh, this was actually bandages for someone who was injured. And it's a very heartbreaking story of someone who just didn't get bled out from a car crash because the bandage wasn't there. And it'll be a very obvious trace.

Well, bled out where? Is the the other question bled out on what continent, like in what country is it an American? I mean, there's a high level question about USAID. I don't care. There's a high level question of USAID that is like, why are we sending aid abroad in general? Like partner, what kind of partner are we talking about? Are we talking about,

if we're talking about a Western partner, then they don't need our money for bandages. What country are we talking about? Are we talking about, if we're talking about a Western partner, then they don't need our money for bandages. What country are we partnered with that actually needs our money for maybe in a war torn area that we're actually in? It's very, very narrow at that point. And then I don't know why someone like USAID would be responsible for that money. It's like, it might just be better applied from the military, which has a more tactical

understanding of that. I agree. I think that USAID, you mentioned the ops thing, the CIA thing, I think that is true. I think probably there are some foreign CIA assets hiding in some of this stuff that we don't know about. I hope that the government is coordinating. I suspect that they're not.

I think that probably there is some danger there, but I don't think that's the danger that AOC cares about. Oh, I completely agree with you. I just, I do think that there are some countries that are a little bit of a jump ball right now, where they could become American allies or they could become Chinese allies. And China's coming in with the Belt and Road Initiative,

saying, hey, we're gonna build your power plant for you. We're gonna build your highways. We're gonna do all this nice stuff. And those countries can say, oh, wow, like China gave us all this nice stuff. Like, let's get a bunch of sovereign debt from them. Let's become like a vassal state of China. And in certain cases, it might make sense to go in with our military and make sure that we have, you know, authority over this country or protect them and they become a protector to the United States and they join our team. Or sometimes it's as easy as just saying, hey, we're going to send some money.

We're essentially going to buy your faithfulness to America and you're going to be on our team. Now, this doesn't make sense in many cases. Obviously, this gets abused all the time. But there are some cases where certain countries have certain resources or talent pools, or there's a whole bunch of different reasons where we might want them on our team as opposed to on an adversary's team. Tons. I mean, throughout South America, I would say Panama is one in particular that comes to mind.

I agree. GB, a new writer at PirateWires, did a great piece on Panama and has been writing about Panama in a way that I think is smart way that no one else in the press is writing about right now. And he was very keen into the Belt and Road stuff that's happening there. One surprising fact from that piece that I picked up that I did not know before I asked him to write it was how popular America is in Panama, like 80% plus approval ratings and how easy it would be for us to

retain dominance there with some kind of effective program. China is building a bullet train from coast to coast, not because the Panamanians asked them over, but because the Americans wouldn't bid on the project. And so now China is doing it. And that's the kind of thing where we probably could be smarter if we don't want to actually exert military dominance abroad. And I don't think that we should want that. There's a very easy way to exert economic dominance abroad and also cultural dominance. And that's by building really beautiful projects.

This conversation of taking new territory that I started personally does move me, but we have to be, I think, aware of the fact that that's a little bit of a meme. And the important thing is to be doing more with the territory that we have now the USA aid program to teach the Sri Lankans not to use pronouns correctly. I think that is not the way I think that is not going to be building a love of us abroad. I think that probably Sri Lankan's just not knowing how to speak proper English is going to be frustrating to them if they're using this program. I think it's probably like not as great as a bullet train. And I think that there are just way more impressive things that we could be doing. And just overall, I'm

suspicious of the idea that they're using USAID as some kind of way to build up goodwill in foreign countries in some way comparable to Belt and Road, which is building out critical infrastructure. But then, these people are stupid and that is their approach to things in America as well. So maybe that is just how they think and they think they're giving some kind of gift away. Also, I mean, if you just think about the inefficiencies in the government and nonprofit industrial complex, like you're just going to get much lower returns on a single dollar versus doing something in the private sector. You look at how does China think about influencing American culture? Well, it's with projects like TikTok that are massively profitable, and it doesn't even require that much subsidy by the Chinese taxpayer, right? And they have this massive impact. And America has been able to

somewhat do that by bringing free and open expression into other countries. And Elon's fought for X in different countries. And Zucks brought Facebook to India and then subsidized the cost with free internet plans and all these things. And all of those create, it basically brings the American culture and American values to new countries. And it's highly efficient and often extremely profitable because it's handled by the private sector instead of through these like weird targeted NGOs. We were doing that with Hollywood. Yeah. And we don't need the government to be spending this money. I agree. Like at all. We're doing that with the internet. All we need is a free market. And so what we really need for the government to do is to

guarantee that those channels are open, that the market is open, that when Europe tries to fuck with our companies, we fuck them back harder, that when China tries to ban our companies, we ban all of theirs. And it's like, as long as you keep shit open, Americans are honestly, like, very cool. That is like the main thing about Americans is that they know how to put on a show. And if left to freedom, if left to a choice between the Americans and the Chinese, it's like the Chinese are not very charismatic. And I'm not worried like we're going to out Hollywood them nine times out of 10. It'll be fine. What the government has to do is I think guard that stuff. I want to complicate this conversation a little bit though, or sort of grow the conversation a little bit and introduce the fact that so concurrently with these cuts to the USA program,

there have been a lot of cuts to staff of the federal government, including the FBI and State Department. Just yesterday, I saw a picture of the American flag hanging upside down outside the State Department. And this went super, super viral. The guy who shared the picture did it in a celebratory way. There is this idea that right now that the federal bureaucracy is sort of fighting back against the president

to retain power. And this is being celebrated. It's being seen in sort of like a resist Hitler sort of way. You have people throughout the press and government really, really upset about the Musk Trump Alliance and specifically the payment stuff and the staff stuff. So you have AOC calling in a five alarm fire. You have Kara Swisher calling

it a hostile takeover of the government. You have Jesse Signal, who I mean, this is also by the way, a topic I was not thinking about actually until Signal. He hit me up over the weekend. I was trying to enjoy myself and cook

and like be peaceful. And I tweeted something to that effect. And he immediately dragged me back into the toxic sewer dumps of Twitter by accusing me of defending some crazy controversy I knew nothing about but the second I looked at it I was like I could defend that and I will this week on the podcast Chuck Schumer Talking about the installation of a shadow government via Elon Musk, which ironically was retweeted by Alex Soros

So cardic, do you believe? that slimming down the federal workforce is akin to a hostile takeover of our government? No. I mean, I think the funniest thing is when you had all these congresspeople outside, like, doing their stump speech, there's a super cut of them all saying Elon, like, over a thousand times, getting hysterical about it as well. It's ridiculous. We're going to make sure you understand what democracy looks like. This ain't it. Every

movement needs a scrappy little dick and I am that person. Elon Musk is seizing the power that belongs to the American people. We are here to fight back. Elon Musk is a Nazi. Get me shut down the city. We are at war. It's funny because they usually like tell a lie and just keep saying it over and over again. It's just like a copypasta. But at this point, they're just saying the truth.

They're saying no one elected Elon. No one wants this. That's like no. Fifty one percent of people explicitly want this. Like he was at every Trump rally. Like people voted for this and the president can hire people and now he's doing it. Well, that's it. They didn't. I don't think they voted for Elon to be the government, but he's not the government. You can be fired at any moment by Trump, who, let's be honest, is probably going to do that. There's no way this lasts four years is like inevitable that Trump kicks this man out of the out of Washington.

But for now, he is the duly elected president. Trump is the duly elected president in the United States. He is firing people who were never elected. And and he hired Elon to do it. I don't see what the problem is. And I think that I mean, I do see what the problem is. I see why they're upset. It occurred to me when I was thinking

about how the strange obsession with this over actual policy issues like immigration, which if I were a leftist who believed in open borders, I would be very upset about right now because it's a successful campaign. It seems like an America's on his side. Why be angry about this? And I think it's because it's sort of like a high level. It's it's a high level problem for them. I think that as I was watching the USA people talk about getting kicked out

of Washington losing access to their computers and things like this, and I saw that upside down flag in front of the State Department, it felt to me like we were looking at actually the deep state. The deep state is not this chain smoking, X-Files, scary, competent man. It's like a they, them librarian is just going to like hashtag resist Trump in

this way that we somehow see as legitimate, even though it shouldn't be. She works for the government. Like, why is she hashtag resisting the duly elected president of the United States as he tries to do the very things that he was elected to do? And I think I wrote a piece about this called Deep State, They, Them vs. the Wonder Boys. And we'll get to the Wonder Boys segment in a second. But first, I do want to just drill down on this specific idea, which is like, we have an unelected government in Washington. You have this massive state that exists for a lot of reasons, and it makes sense that you're not going to be electing these people to power.

They shouldn't be elected. Like you have to staff up the federal government. This stuff really starts under FDR when you're fighting a war against two really huge, tyrannical states on either side of either ocean that borders the country. And you need a giant, competent federal government. And so you empower it. But then it kept growing throughout the Cold War. And the Cold War eventually ends. America in the 90s has this giant government that somehow doesn't get smaller.

It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and takes more and more power and seems to believe that the power belongs to it. You see this idea reflected now throughout the culture. When you have someone like Kara Swisher absolutely losing her mind over someone doing something that she doesn't agree with, even though that person was elected to do just that, and none of her people

that she cared about were elected for a very specific reason. What that says to me is that this is a person who, for her entire life, has never lived under an administration that she didn't agree with. And I am including Reagan there, because Reagan was never really in charge. Like, the federal government was in charge. You have this massive apparatus that controls really every aspect of our lives.

Well, everything the government does is handled by this apparatus. And and I think that while that was always in control of the left, the center left, let's call it, I don't think it's like really the untethered crazy left, though that exists there. It's mostly the center left. Well, that happened. The center leftists felt very comfortable about it, but much less so now that it seems like this thing could actually lose power. And the man in the White House could actually be in charge of, you know, the executive branch of the government.

And I think that's roughly what people are actually upset about and why they don't care as much about things like immigration, because what they're looking at now is a real changing of power, which they said they've said they've almost fetishized for the last four years. They say they really care about this, but I think they've never actually wanted it. And we might be looking at it for the first time ever, which could work and could not. I just think that that's what's happening.

I mean, I think the Kara Swisher quote is very interesting because she calls it a hostile takeover. And you can compare that exactly to Elon buying Twitter, which was also called a hostile takeover. But then eventually he made an offer that was well above what the market thought Twitter was worth and the shareholders agreed. There was a battle and then eventually they tried to force Elon to buy the company because it was a deal. That's what happened with the Trump election. Like politics is the forming of a whole bunch

of different policies and the politicians go on the stump and go around and make their campaign speeches. And eventually, if all of the American people or enough of the American people say, yes, this basket of ideas is good, they vote them in. And so it's not a hostile takeover, but it is a takeover. And what happened with Twitter? A lot of people lost their jobs and a lot of people were against the changes

of Twitter because maybe they had a job that was cushy and they didn't want to lose that. Or maybe they were fine with the way the app worked before and they didn't want changes. But the important thing here is that it was popular. And so it wasn't like the election was stolen or Twitter was bamboozled to sell to Elon. And then what happened with Twitter? There was a massive rebranding. It's now X, but we just found out yesterday that the company is massively profitable and had its best earnings, I think ever, and produces over a billion dollars in EBITDA.

And so Elon is instituting something similar and Trump was elected to do just that and they were on the campaign trail together constantly. It was not a surprise. He said, if elected, I will put Elon in charge of Doge. This is a thing. This was reported out. This is widely known and the American people voted for that. And so it's just like the shareholders at formerly Twitter that said, yes, at this price, we are willing to let Elon take this company and do whatever he wants with it and completely change the culture and the name and how it works and the employee structure and everything.

And it's the same thing that happened with America. the similarities between the Twitter takeover and the hostile government takeover. And I was mad because I was like, damn, I was gonna write that piece. And they gave me to it because it was true. And this was I think it was like a week or two weeks ago, they put this together. And it's just it's very true. It's very obvious. It's the exact same playbook. But what is also interesting, I think, is that the response to it is the exact same. And it's not just Oh, my god, I'm melting down. This is terrible. It is specifically when Twitter was taken over,

what was specifically said was the company will die. And now they're saying like the government will die. Like the country will die. The government will collapse. It cannot survive this. And that's just, I never believed that people were that stupid when that one guy, Ben Collins was his name, I think.

The misinformation expert for NBC who now runs the onion. Yep. I believe so that dude, I remember he was his name, I think the misinformation expert for NBC, who now runs the onion. Yep. I believe so that dude, I remember he was saying goodbye, goodbye. It was like the last night of Twitter. He thought everything was going to shut down. And there was like this question of is he that's he's not really that stupid. Like, I mean, he's a dumb guy, but he's not. He can't possibly be that stupid.

And I don't know. I think that he was I don't think he ever thought it was gonna end. I think that what was happening there, they weren't afraid of Twitter dying. They were afraid of Twitter surviving without their friends in charge of this really important medium for communication

where information was disseminated across the country. And that's what's happening now. They're not afraid of the government, you know, not making it the federal government collapsing on itself. They're afraid of Donald Trump, who was elected to be the president, being in charge of the government, or people who are more value aligned with him,

having the exact same roles that were sent or left before, doing the exact same things, you know, following the exact same rules, not actually taking over, not there being fascism, but there being a real culture change inside of those institutions. And then suddenly things operate differently. And what they're really, really afraid of is they're afraid of people acting like they have acted for the last however many decades. They're afraid. This is why when you they

talked about Trump retaliating against his enemies or something like retaliating for what you're afraid of him doing what you did over the last four years. And I would be afraid too, if I had if I had participated in this way, I don't I don't want that. And I hope it doesn't happen now. But but I think that's what's happening. They're not afraid of these things dying. They're afraid of them surviving and thriving. I'm pretty sure Twitter had like dozens of designers, maybe more. And now I think they're down to just one designer. They can hire a few more, I should say. Let's just fix the product. It's super lean. There's just so many examples through American history of duplication of work

actually resulting in worse outcomes. The most famous one is probably 9-11, where the FBI and the CIA were both tracking Bin Laden but not coordinating and they didn't wind up catching him because there was no one person who was like the responsible individual. I just found this with the Ross Ulbricht story. There were like six different cases going on. One guy wound up solving it just by going on Google, looking at old posts about the Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht was the first one to post about it. So he followed that lead. Meanwhile, there were two other FBI agents

that were just embezzling money and they went to jail for a decade because they were just like completely messing around. And so there's all these questions about like, do we need the government to do things? Yes, probably, yeah. There are plenty of things that the government needs to do, but it is putting a hundred people on the job

actually more effective than putting one really good person on the job who has authority and autonomy and the ability to actually go and solve a problem? Sometimes you get more with less. Yeah, pay them more and give them some assistance to support them. Totally. I'm gonna throw you a quick curve ball

because you mentioned a plane crash. Hillary Clinton just said that Donald Trump was responsible for the plane crash last week Clinton just said that Donald Trump is responsible for the plane crash last week. Do you agree? Absolutely not. I mean, like it's like, what, two weeks into the administration,

like he's still getting his people confirmed. Like it's. Did you guys see this, though? I guess he's he gutted the FAA is is what we're. Do that already happen? I I would be shocked. They hired the gutted the FAA is is what we're. Do that already have it? I I would be shocked if anything has changed. The head of the FAA resigned.

The head of the FAA was not supposed to be in that little booth. When the fighter jet or copter crashed into the plane, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure that wasn't like his job. Yeah. I mean, like to make to make that terrible tragedy, like a left right issue is really is really disappointing Well, that's the world we live in I can't even blame the left on this I mean, it's like everyone is gonna do in fact the right did it the second it started right there were like soon

This is actually a DEI thing. Yeah. Yeah, I knew it. I knew it as soon as it happened I almost posted but I was like this is in poor taste I was like, okay Here are all the takes like the left's gonna say that left's gonna say it's capitalism The right's gonna say it's DEI the right's going to say it's DEI, the alien people are going to say it's aliens, the war hawks are going to say it's China, the other people are going to say it's because of foreign interference or whatever, the Boeing haters are going to say it's a Boeing issue or whatever, and just all the takes are going to play out exactly

as you expect because we just have this playbook now for attention and stuff. But I mean, I don't even know if you can put it on the Biden admin like like our like we have been getting slower as a country since the Concord retired. Like with TSA things are slowing down like this is well understood like all of our infrastructure is crumbling under every single administration for the past 40 years. And this is just you know, there's a moment right now of hope where, hey, this new configuration of Trump and Elon and tech and all these different things, maybe this is a new day, maybe this is a new approach, maybe we'll get some better results. And I'm hopeful as I'm always hopeful, no matter who's in charge, I want America to

get better. And I hope that this is that this does work. But it is going to take time. Like none of this stuff. I mean, Doge is going around finding a billion dollars here, a million dollars here. That's still not going to balance the budget. Like we're trillions of dollars in debt. And so clearly this is like a very, very long road, just like it was at Twitter.

It took years for Elon to really actually turn that company around. There's a lot of volatility in the interim period. Well, fortunately, we do have years and we've got this team of cracked zoomers that we have to talk about and in particular, their treatment in the press, Riley. Yeah. So more about the segment though, the title of the segment, fuck them kids. Isn't that a Michael Jordan quote? Yes. yeah. Wow. Yeah, so about those cracked Zoomers, those kids who are currently running the government

and panicking every Democrat in Washington. So tech hating tech magazine Wired published a piece this week on these kids in their 20s who are working with Elon to try to cut costs in the federal government. The piece, the headline was called the young and and Experienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk's Government Takeover. So who are these six dudes at Wired, profiled in what I assume was supposed to be like some type of hit piece. Turns out they're super geniuses, one of whom wrote a computer program that could decipher ancient texts from burnt scrolls recovered from the Herculaneum. So yeah, sorry, not seeing the freak out there and these people running the government, the literal best and brightest

people in the country, something we haven't had in decades. I'm totally here for it. Because as Solana noted in the daily, who would you rather have a 22 year old engineer who designed an AI program that helped decipher one of the 2000 year old herculaneum papyri working for the government or a much dumber older person. Real difficult decision there. Yeah, so they immediately, the moment Wired released, because Wired released their names, and it was this interesting story where at first they were like, I'm pretty sure they said they weren't going to

because they were too young or something, and they were like, no, no, we're doing this because it's important. And they work for the government. Then you had a bunch of people online in tech who were like, how dare you release the names of these like poor little children. And then you had people on Reddit who were like, let's find them and kill them and their families. And there was a lot of that actually, like Reddit, really, we're going to have to do a deep dive on Reddit one of these days because what the fuck is going on over there. But this like gets very loud, the conversation obviously around them inevitably and variably. My quick take is just like, if you're in the government and you have a lot of power, you are not above scrutiny. So I don't mind that they were named. I'm rooting for them. I really am. I am rooting against Wired.

I think that they did this in a, I don't think it was necessary to know their names, but I don't really care that we know their names. I really think though, just from like a writer's perspective when I'm talking about a program I don't like, what I would not do is make it sound way cooler than it actually is. Wired, obviously, I mean, they found these people's names out. That was a gift to them.

And they've been writing pieces about it since. The one this morning, and they're really trying to, like, milk it for all it's worth. The one this morning, though, is where, I mean, this is where I was like, we've got to talk about this on the podcast. It just kind of lit my entire world up. OK.

Headline. We've got to talk about this on the podcast. It just kind of lit my entire world up. Okay. Headline. Doge Teen owns tesla.sexyllc and work at startup that has hired convicted hackers. Experts questioned whether Edward Koreshteen, a Doge staffer who has gone by big balls online, would pass the background check typically required for access to sensitive US government systems. Well, I don't know if he would pass the background check, but he does pass the background check typically required for access to sensitive US government systems.

Well, I don't know if he would pass the background check, but he does pass the vibe check. This is really good shit, man. I don't know, I really don't know how the writers did not realize that every fucking word in this headline made me like him more, like absolute banger. First of all, Doge Teen, so evocative.

You're telling me there's a teenager in the government fucking shit up, I wanna know more. He owns textesla.sexyllc, 19 years old, has a company, is funny, calls it sexy, tesla.sexyllc, loves Teslas, great, cares about the environment, unlike some people I know at Wired. And then he worked at a startup

that has hired convicted hackers. Like, who, did you see hackers with Angelina Jolie? This is like a huge part of being in Silicon Valley. It was a huge part of Wired's own culture not too long ago. And if we're talking about hackers who were convicted, but now they're out of prison, are we not just talking about restorative justice or something? So he's like a good, so he's like a humanitarian as well.

Like, there's nothing you could do. There would have been nothing you could do to make me hate this kid. And then you told me that he used to handle big balls online. And I was like, this has to be, you have to be, you have to be secretly on our side. It's like basically about these. I said online, I was like,

there's nobody who actually loves these, who loves these kids, who has made them sound cooler than why it has accidentally made them sound while trying to destroy them. It's just like, come on, man. Like, I'm ready to die for these kids. This is amazing. I stand with the kids. 100%.

I stand. I stand with big balls. I stand with big balls. Who wouldn't? As he tries to dismantle, as he tries to dismantle the deep state, like what? Like how are you not on his side? Please, there's never been a greater story told. Also you're now the side.

This is like, you have, so you have the Zoomer haircut kid firing useless bureaucrats on one end. Then you have Hillary Clinton, who is like 95 years old or something at this point, blaming Donald Trump for a plane crash and saying that 22 year old shouldn't be in government. And you know what, I saw that and I thought,

you know who shouldn't be in government? Boomers. How is that still happening? How old are you? Like it is time to go. You ruined literally everything. And I defend the boomers. I do, I think the boomers,

they get maybe they take a little too much shit. I think the music culture was good. Like they take a little too too much shit. I think the music culture was good. Like they made the best of what they had. And I don't know. There are some good things. They're my parents are boomers. I love them. But like you had a good run. It's now time for us to try and fix this mess. And I don't need to be hearing from Hillary,

ninety five year old Clinton telling me that young people shouldn't be in government. That's just a really crazy thing to say and to harken back to or to like sort of piggyback off of what we're talking about last week. I'm like, what are the Democrats at this point? What do you mean you don't want talented talented young people in government? It's not even like these people. They're not running shit. They're working for people who are running shit. Like, what do you mean you don't want a talented 22 year old who, like, as Riley noted,

coded up an AI program that helped decipher a 2000 year old lava fucked scroll in government. Like, why would you not want that? That's just like, and if you don't want that because you don't want them to win, you should at least not say it out loud because the optics are so bad for you and everything you believe in.

Sorry, John, I can see the US like that. It's also like, like the idea that the Biden administration for the last four years was not heavily dependent on exactly young, inexperienced people is basically like a conspiracy theory at this point. Like it is well established that that's what was happening. And you could, if you're a pro Biden admin, you should be celebrating that and being like, yeah, this is actually a good model,

regardless of whether it happens on the left or the right. We shouldn't hate the model. We should hate the outcome of the model, right? Or the direction of that model. But also there's a difference. Those kids seem to be inexperienced at anything. These kids are experienced. They're very experienced.

Just not in firing, like, overpaid, underworked, morbidly obese, they then librarian government workers. And I think anyone can pick that up relatively fast. I mean, you drop that one word from the original Wired headline and it's amazing. And I agree with everything. The young engineers aiding Elon Musk's government takeover.

Cool, it's a good article now. Just take out that inexperienced thing because they are experienced. We're also glossing over the government takeover thing, though. It's like we just kind of were like, OK, fine. They're saying that they can't help

but say things that don't sound cool to me. And I'm like, that's not technically true. What you're saying is not true. However, I'm going to let it go. I'm going to let it go because it sounds awesome. Riley, what do you think about,

I guess, your your college roommates running the government? I would love to hang out with them. First of all, um, just one more additional thing that makes them seem just incredibly based. So one of these kids, um, I guess wrote a sub stack, um, called why I decided to leave my job and go work for Doge or something, put it behind a, I'm like, damn, there's gotta be someone working on that script. And it should just be us. We cannot let we cannot keep letting the people who are doing the script, the people who are doing the script, the people who are doing the script, the people who are doing the script, the people who are doing the script, the people who are doing the script.

And I think that's the biggest thing about this. I think that's the biggest thing about this. I think that's the biggest thing about this. I think that's the biggest thing about this. I think that's the biggest thing about this. I think that's the biggest thing about this. I think that's the biggest thing about this. I think that's the biggest thing about this. I think that was Bridget tweeted that to that effect. I'm like, damn, there's gotta be someone working

on that script and it should just be us. We cannot let, we cannot keep letting people who are not on the level, write our entertainment. We gotta get involved in this. We gotta start, we gotta start funding these things, participating in these things, starring in these things. Riley, a new role for you. Love to.

Kartik, what do you think? Where's your head at on the Doge Wonder Boys? I mean, I'm not going to keep saying how amazing they are because obviously they are. I think it was funny to see videos from people like AOC complaining about their age. In the same video, they're complaining about how dumb like Elon Musk is or whatever. And it's funny because she would have been self-described as a young, competent new voice in our party. And at this point, you have AOC and David Hogg versus Big Balls and Faradar.

And so it's just kind of like, like you're going to lose, you know? And it's kind of self-defeating. It's very, yeah, it's very odd to just kind of hate yourself. Such an important point on the youth attack thing. I really try my best to be open-minded about young people because I noticed when I was young that older people weren't. They were just looking to hate. And I think they're looking to hate because they're afraid of getting older and dying one day or whatever. And you have to just let that shit go and

embrace the new stuff. Like be open-minded and be encouraging, be mentoring. And that could be what AOC could be doing. She could be doing that to the younger generation right now. And I say that because like she is not the younger generation. She's, isn't she in her like late 30s? I mean, she's like around my age for sure. And I think that when you're like little Miss Agenu and you've made an entire identity or brand really out of being like the cute young one, it's a little bit threatening when these when these younger people come up and start and start doing things and moving and shaking and in all the ways that you once did though, you know, in a less kind of like millennial way. And I just am not threatened ever by younger people,

or I try not to be maybe it's natural to be a little bit, but I don't know. I'm not. And check me if I ever start to be. Like, it's important, I think. I understand criticizing in experience. I understand criticizing people who are maybe really stupid and sometimes young people are not actually stupid. They just don't know a lot.

And maybe that's a kind of criticism or something. But I think that you can never be criticizing someone actually stupid, they just don't know a lot. And maybe that's a kind of criticism or something. But I think that you can never be criticizing someone just because they haven't put it in enough years on this planet. Unless they're like, you know, sub 18 or something. And it's like, I don't know, I don't want a 16 year old in government. Maybe, but maybe I would. Probably not a 14 year old.

Maybe that's my cutoff. I've been on record saying I want a 21 yearyear-old president who will just chug Celsius and stay up all night to solve the world's problems. I think having young people in government is fantastic. The jet lag alone from, oh, the queen dies, the president needs to go over to the UK, that's three days lost to productivity. But if you're 21, you're going to shake that off, grind out, you're gonna be working on the plane. The energy level with a young person is just infectious

and it's exactly what America needs. Speaking of Luke Ferator, one of the scrolls decipherer, he's locked his account, but I have one of his old, one of the last tweets he posted before he went in and he's asking the most practical question, are there LLMs made specifically for parsing things like documents, forms, PDFs, JSON, HTML, Excel, et cetera, and converting them from one format to another? And this is hilarious because he was clearly thinking about like, okay, I'm going to get

a trove of documents and I'm going to have to deal with them. And the question is, why doesn't the government already have this implemented? We don't even have all of our documents in one format that we can query. And so a lot of people are saying, why doesn't every American have read access to the Treasury data? And of course, there's a lot of good reasons why that's not the case. But the people in the government should at least be able to see what's going on. And Luke is having to actively write software just to parse all of the random files the

government has to be able to tell what's going on. And so his work with the scrolls is perfectly translatable to the work he's doing now. And I'm just glad we have a hacker in the government at this point. Yes. Thank you, Luke. Thank you for your service. Thank you for your service. American Hero. Call us. We'd love the exclusive on everything you're doing right now. We got to talk. I mean, we're rounding out this episode.

I would like to talk a bit about, I mean, it's I don't know if it's Trump derangement, but it's the Trump deals. It's like this sort of volley, this onslaught, this torrent of deal making that he is doing. We've got Canada. We've got Mexico. Riley, take it away. Yeah, this is one of the things that he is doing. We've got Canada, we've got Mexico. Riley, take it away.

Yeah, this is one of the things that the media definitely briefly was pretty outraged with Trump about. So you had a lot of takes about these tariffs on Mexico and Canada about like so much for him reducing prices and Canada is one of our best allies, how could you? Turns out those concerns that they had turned out to be pretty short-lived because after previously vowing to place their own tariffs

on American exports, once Trump announced his, Canada and Mexico quickly agreed to a 30-day pause on tariffs of their exports coming into the US in exchange for some concessions on border security. Trudeau said Canada would be implementing, quote, a $1.3 billion border plan, reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology and personnel. Meanwhile, on other sort of like international fronts, Panama said they will be waiving fees for all government vessels

transiting through the Panama Canal. And the president also laid out his plan for the future of Gaza this week after a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu. He said the US could take over the Gaza Strip while adding that I do see a long-term ownership position. However, it's a question of like, is this even his final proposal? Because as we've seen with the mastermind of the art of the deal, Solana, as I think you noted in the daily, Trump will just sort of put out this

first initial posture. And then eventually through negotiations, it gets worked out to something else that maybe was his original plan to begin with. So maybe that's what we're seeing here. But regardless, yes, a lot of freak out about Trump's tariffs, but an issue that got resolved very quickly. Well, there haven't been them. They haven't happened yet because we haven't gotten to them yet.

China, I'm assuming will happen because China doesn't know how to play ball. But I guess when this most the God, listen, I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to sit here and tell until you find people that saying you're going to depopulate Gaza and turn it into some kind of like beachfront Southern California paradise is not a little bit crazy. That's crazy. I understand that that's crazy. I understand that that's crazy. It sounds cool in some ways, but I'm not saying it's not crazy. It's definitely crazy. It's not crazy. It's definitely crazy.

I just don't, I am really committed to not being bothered by things that Trump says over the next, it's gonna be a long four years if you guys don't maintain some kind of locus of control here and start like assuming command of your own emotions and just thinking about this stuff. Like I'm not gonna be swayed by every nonsensical thing or crazy thing or extreme thing he says, because as we've seen now for like what four or five times over just the last

two weeks this is just what he does this is just how he this is just how he begins the conversation and I used to think maybe there was no method to the madness now I very much do believe there's a method to the madness I think the method actually works I think that you could see that in trade negotiations with Mexico, with Canada, with Panama. I think that we're going to see them with, I think we'll probably see something up in Greenland with at the very least, bare minimum Arctic security, which is extremely important for beating back the Russians and the Chinese. And I want to just speak a little bit to you.

So Gaza, I have no idea. I have no idea what's going on there. I'm assuming we'll find out over like the next week what's actually happening with Gaza. Right now we have the crazy thing that he said. We don't know what's really in play. We don't know who he's negotiating with. We don't know why he's saying what he's saying. I think we'll find out. And I think there will be a reason because there always is on the topic of Canada

specifically, that's the one that that I sort of brought up. And it got a lot of pushback from people who are really committed to never giving Trump any kind of a win at all. And they're like, well, everything that Trudeau gave him, he had already said he was going to give him. And like, first of all, that's not true. There's one thing that he gave him

that he had already said he was going to give him, which was the billion dollars plus or whatever for border security that the Canadians were gonna add to the border to defend against or monitor fence and all or whatever for border security that the Canadians were going to add to the border to defend against or monitor fence and all or whatever it was. That was something first of all that Trudeau did not promise until after Trump won the election and started threatening him with tariffs in the first place. The reason that we're seeing it

renewed again the conversation is because the Canadians, there are proposals all the time that don't materialize into anything. He said this, it was a proposal, but there was no action. And then I had this question. I was like, well, I wonder I wonder how often the Canadians propose things that just don't happen. So I did a little research and I asked our friend Chet, GPT. This is Chet.

This is this is Mr. GPT's read of the situation. The time from when Canada makes a trade related proposal to actual implementation can vary widely, depending on the complexity of the policy. However, Canada does have a history of taking a measured approach to trade policy changes, sometimes

leading to significant delays between proposals and implementation. There's a lot here. They give a bunch of examples of different proposals and how long they took. There was something on NAFTA actually that took like two

years between proposal to initiation. They are taking their time. They were dragging their feet. And Trump said, you're not dragging your feet. I want the security now or you're going to get a tariff. And then Canada

came to the table and they're playing ball. And that was what Trump wanted from the beginning. Never wanted them to be a state. He never wanted the tariff. He might have some kind of a tariff, but the purpose of it right now was the border security. And there were a whole list of things that, in addition to

that, that Trudeau said that he was going to give. But the most important thing was getting him to implement the border plan. And he did it. And so I think that that's the kind of stuff that you have to maybe look at Trump's actions through the lens of. I see him as not an ideological person. I see him as not a crazy person, actually.

I see him as a really, really pragmatic person who I think enjoys deal making. I think that's I think that's what he's doing. And I think that it would be a real mistake to let him. Pull you into the sort of black hole of crazy emotions that we saw throughout the first term. I hope that we can avoid some of that this term. Oh, we're not going to avoid it. It's getting worse, man.

I stumbled upon kind of a left-wing podcast network that I'd never even heard of. They have massive following, like 20,000 reviews on Apple podcasts. And they're doing a deep dive. They kind of do these like take downs on business leaders. And they're currently trying to cancel Oprah Winfrey for birthing the anti-vaccine movement, which I didn't even know was a thing. And it's just a completely... It was like stumbling into a portal to another world. And so these things are going to continue to go viral, people are going to,

you know, find different angles on them. That's what's interesting about that is we really do live in another world now because of media fragmentation. Oh, yeah, I didn't know that existed either. But the blue sky, I didn't realize how blue sky how big blue sky was getting. I'm just not over there because it's like a freaky place. But it's absolutely massive. We were writing a take this week on meta cloning one of Blue Sky's features,

which is kind of sort of like an algorithm, someone else's algorithm that you can use. Like we're almost at the place of algorithm stores like Jack Dorsey outlined, but just more control over what you see in your feed,. And, and they were just laying down some of these numbers in the millions and millions. I was like, damn, like they're, they're growing really fast. That's a, that is going to be another alternative place to be and probably to be crazy. Right. Anytime you're in an echo chamber, things get very strange, very fast. Yeah. We got to bring back the blues to Twitter. We need them. We need us.

We need them. I miss us. I think they miss us too. I know. I would miss me. I mean, come on. It was so fun when there were some stakes. You say something crazy, you get canceled.

It was the best. I mean, I think it's important that AOC is still on X. That's interesting to me. Yeah. And Taylor Lorenz is still out there. There's a couple other people posting. Taylor's is still on X. That's interesting to me. Yeah, and Taylor Lorenz is still out there. There's a couple other people posted. Taylor's just kind of everywhere. That's what she does.

But AOC is very specific about where she goes. Like, why isn't she on Blue Sky? That's a strange, why isn't she predominantly on Blue Sky? That says to me that at the very least, she finds the platform to be more relevant, but maybe on some level, she just really gets a charge out of the conflict with Elon. You know, she's really into him.

Yeah, you know, well, they won't they thing going on, right? So yeah. And she also I mean, people are speculating that she might be pregnant now. I'm not saying it's Elon's, but wouldn't that be something? Many an AI video have have fake news their way to that conclusion before yeah

I know what do you guys make of the the deal making or the sort of fury over it? What do we have got? I mean we can we don't usually talk about Gaza on this show But if Trump's taking over it's sort of fair game. I mean if we do buy it we have a we have a cartoon I'm buying it. We have a cartoon locked and loaded for them. So yeah, Sesame Street, get it out there. Oh, man. I don't know. I mean, it's crazy that this is crazy that the Trump strategy works because it's so openly analyzed as like,

okay, he opens with this really, you know, headline grabbing top line number proposal, we're just going to make Canada a state. That's where the Canada debate started. Was like, you'll be the governor, Trudeau. And he was joking about that. And then he dials it back. Then he hits him with the tariffs.

And then he winds up getting to a good place. But you'd think that at a certain point, that kind of like, posturing and leverage wouldn't be effective, but it seems to actually be effective. And we're just in this weird new era where deal making is theater and it's WWE, it's wrestling. But it works, which is crazy. I would think that once people knew that, oh, this is just WWE, it wouldn't work,

but it still does apparently. And we'll see how it all pencils out. But maybe. They may have mistaken a little bit with actual strong men. So you had Putin, Putin said he was gonna invade Ukraine a lot, you know, he wasn't shy about it. Xi Jinping is saying he's gonna invade Taiwan or go after, I think he will. He said about Hong Kong as well.

Like I think that probably will happen. Hitler was very honest about what he was going to do. And I think and sort of along the way, no one believed them. They're like, well, that's crazy, though. Why would they do it? And then they did it. And Trump's like the opposite. You know, he does he says these these apparently crazy things as at the sort of very beginning of the negotiation and our own press is like, he's going to do it.

And then he never does. And they never learn, uh, their lesson. Now there are some things he has done that he said, maybe that's where there's also confusion. Maybe I just, maybe we're just all somehow better at interpreting him than they are. Maybe we're closer to, we have like an ear for the music and they don't. They can't hear whatever it is that he's laying down. But I just don't I don't believe that he's trying to take over Gaza right now. That in my gut, that's not something that I think he's actually serious about.

And I mean, I'll be looking like a real clown on this show if he ends up turning Gaza into a beachfront paradise. But I just don't think it's in the cards. And I think that everyone probably should just calm down. I mean, Riley, what do you think? One, do you think that's happening in Gaza, too? Would you go and hang out? Well, even if it is, even if it is beachfront property, that's that's preferable to war. That's preferable to bombs coming down. I just hope as any part of the deal, the refugees aren't resettled because like, you know, if you're from a war-torn country that already has a history of terrorism, my preference would be resettlement in the United States isn't

part of the deal. But if he is serious about the beachfront takeover of Gaza, I think it's still preferable to all out war. Yeah, I think we're not going to solve Gaza on this podcast. It's like the problem with the refugees is the high level. I mean, that's like the biggest problem. And I saw this like stuff blowing up online just before we started recording about Israel saying that Spain and Ireland had to take

Gazan refugees. And then I saw the European right-wing people freaking out about it being like, we'll never take them. And it's like, well, I think that my sense is the Israelis are saying this because Israel and Spain are because Spain and Ireland are always talking about how great the Gazans are. And they're just saying there's fucking with them. But in any case, it's going to be I think it's just going to be a massive disaster, no matter almost what happens. And I really don't want to own it. And I don't, I would like for Trump not to, but I don't know.

He probably, he's often seen things that I don't see. Maybe he sees something there that I don't, an opportunity, a real estate opportunity, I'm sure. I mean, the reason I had a cool headed reaction is it does sound like funny. It sounds crazy. I don't think it's actually going to be beachfront property. But the interesting thing is, you know, this conflict is literally as old as time.

And so we should be willing to try crazy ideas. Like, obviously, normal ideas and smart ideas and thought through ideas have not. I'm not OK. Maybe scratch the last one. But all these normal ideas are not working. And so trying something crazy is basically worth it. There's no what's like we've already seen the other side of it. We've seen the worst case scenario multiple times. So why not try something new? I think it's just the resettlement though. It's like, you can't rebuild Gaza with the people who

are there because the problem of Gaza is the people who are there in my opinion. It's like one of the big problems and you can't move them without destabilizing wherever you move them to. And you can't trust them not to start another war with Israel, even if there's a ceasefire. And so it's like, what do you do? Other than just take your ball and go home, which is kind of what I advocate for generally as an American is like, well, nothing is the answer.

You guys have fun with it, but Trump's diving in. I mean, I think he's like very, Trump's on a path. He wants to be remembered as the greatest president in history. Generally, genuinely, I think history better than Washington, Lincoln, all of them. I think he maybe thinks he's on his way there already. He maybe wants to be remembered as the greatest leader in the history of the world. And if he's to achieve that, you know, growing up, it was this colloquialism where you would say, like, oh, that'll happen when there's peace in the Middle East. It was this idea that there could never be peace in the Middle East. So to create a lasting peace in the Middle East feels like a almost Christian achievement, this mythological achievement. It gives you God status. It gives

you this crazy halo that casts you as one of the great leaders. I mean, that would be a thing. So maybe he is making a play for it. I've said before, I think that that's his motivation. So you have to always, I try and follow his incentives. And that's how I judge if I feel comfortable about him or not. And I thought that our incentives were aligned because he wanted to be the great known as the greatest American president. But if he wanted to be known as the greatest American president. But if he wants to be known as the greatest leader

in the history of the world, then we might be slightly out of alignment. There could be these moments where he has to jump in some place abroad to be remembered in that way and recognized in that way. I just don't know. But I think we'll find out. It's all boiling up to a new Iran deal

because Iran is such a key player in the Israel-Palestine conflict. And so even though they haven't been mentioned in this kind of news cycle, I think that that's exactly what this is boiling into is if America is going to be way, way, way more aggressive, even if it's in the abstract, not the specific details about Gaza, but it's just America is going to be way more aggressive about this conflict, resolving this conflict, that should bring Iran to the table. What that deal looks like, maybe there's some sanctions that get traded, some tariffs, all

sorts of different stuff in exchange for, you know, essentially peace in the Middle East. Yeah, that was my thought while it was happening was it had something to do with it with Iran. Like there's some deal that we don't know about that's being worked on there. And he's just creating leverage for himself. You know, it's like, well, do you want us there or not? But who can keep up? Last thoughts, guys, on not just Gaza, but any of this, the crack zoomers, Kara Swisher, my new fave. Can we shove women's sports in the last five minutes or is that crazy?

Let's do it. Let's get crazy. Let's get crazy. Tell me about women's sports. Well, I'm sure you've seen it, like, beautiful photo op. It's him surrounded by women of all ages, mostly children, signing an executive order, you know, basically banning men, trans women, from women's sports.

Um, for me, I mean, it was pretty... I don't know, it was pretty amazing to see, only because, like, I have a son now, but I have a daughter on the way. And for me, I just, like, I wanted to avoid this at all costs. Like, as soon as I found out the gender of my next child, like, I was just praying, please, God, like, just resolve this issue so I don't have to be that guy

that drives my car through the front of the school because there's a bunch of penises in the locker room. You know what I mean? Because, like, I would just see red. You know, like, if my daughter gets in that situation, so it's kind of like, and, you know, I'm in San Francisco, so maybe it's gonna happen either way, but... Yeah, so if it's gonna happen anywhere, it's gonna happen there.

And so it's just like, okay, there's some progress, it's pretty early, and, you know, so to me, it made me feel really good, and it's like, oh, my God, maybe this will be resolved, and I don't have to make this my number one and only issue, so... It was crazy to see J.K. Rowling being excited about it. Just a very strange betrayal for the far lefties who got her tattoos on their body

to now have her supporting a Donald Trump thing. I mean, she even, I think she said something along the lines of like, I'm glad XYZ happens so this amazing thing could happen, but it was a quote tweet of him. Yeah, I think that the trans stuff is like... so over. It just politically, there's no way that was that was like an 80 20 issue. Dems included. No one in America supports the idea of trans women competing against natal women in sports,

in youth. It's just a very crazy thing to refuse to let go of and to refuse to have a kind of I I'm fine having a calm conversation about it. I'm fine letting people do whatever they want with their own bodies. And I'm fine, honestly, truly fine calling people what they want to be called within reason. I just I don't like to be told what to do. But I'm willing to be respectful if that's what you want. I have friends who have changed their names and I'm like, all right, go off data lists or whatever it is now. It's always some weird shit like that. I'm like, cool. Okay.

But it's like when it starts to affect other people is when you have to be sober about it. And I don't know, man. I just don't think the Democrats are going to get away from this. This is like this was the one of the most popular commercials in the election was about the trans stuff and Kamala support for them. And it was the they them won famously. And so my thought before I realized that was, oh, probably the trans stuff is being overplayed right now. Typically, Americans don't care as much about the culture war stuff as people who are obsessed with politics care about the culture war stuff.

It's like the economy is what they care about, and immigration is what they care about, things like that. But this really does. Specifically, parents with kids in school right now dealing with this kind of stuff, not just the issue of kids also, not just the sports issue and the bathroom issue, but the issue of, you know, your kid starts to socially transition in school, and then you don't say anything to your parents about it. Like you're not revealing what's going on with your kid back to the parents. Like that stuff is what was really driving people nuts. They felt like their kids were being encouraged to do

this. And I think that if the Dems don't let this go, it's just gonna sink them every time because this is not one of these trends that's like, oh, you're gonna be on the right side of history. They're on the wrong side of history. This is not in a hundred years, we're not gonna look back and be like, oh yeah, that was where the beginning

of the end of sex happened. And that was so, you know, go off queen. It's like, it will be remembered like lobotomies. That's how it will be remembered, I think. Yeah. I haven't had a chance to look at like the actual proposal that he signed, but I do hope, I know that this will get framed as trans people can no longer play sports at all. And I do hope that there's some sort of free market, you know, allowed to work itself. Whereas if I want to buy the rights to the slam ball league and start a new league that's completely open

and anyone from any gender can play, I should be allowed to do that just as a capitalist. And so I do hope that they can know they can play with men. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or I should be able to structure a private league and monetize that however I want. But I understand that there's an important, there's probably an important line in the sand to not let, you know, publicly funded women's sports be, you know, essentially destroyed if over time, if you just allow, you know, men to play and it's going to be rough. Yeah, I am interested in the opposite of a non drugged up league. You know, it's like that funny.

What was that tweet? It's like, let's let's let's let's legalize doping in sports and see how far a man can really jump. I am interested as well in that. And that's the what is that league? The one John it's it's. Yeah, it's a Peter investment. It's called the

enhanced games. Yeah, the enhanced games. We have that dude on to talk about. I think, yeah, go let's let's get crazy. But let's not do it with just more leads, you know, more leagues. And and and let let the free market decide. I mean, the WNBA is a league and people get paid a certain amount. Certain amount of people watch that and the ad revenues flow through. The NBA is a league. What is what is the certain amount of people that watch the WNBA?

I think it's much lower than the NBA, but they're still making a living. I love women's soccer. I I've I've been a huge fan of those girls for a while. Then Rapinoe came along and just like ruined it for everybody. But before her, I was a huge fan. And I think I could see... I don't follow them until the World Cup. And then I enjoy soccer, but our men suck,

so the women were what I had. And they were great. They were really fun to watch. I do want to get into sports because I know that the path out of political derangement syndrome is paved with really, really caring about what's happening on Sunday. Because if you're just obsessed with sports, you don't have time for the latest political hot take and you can just blissfully think about what you're going to grill. John, you need to start going to church, my friend. That's what's happening on Sunday. Yeah, there you go.

What else do I have to say here? Nothing, I guess. We're ending with church. It's been real, my friends. Thank you for joining, John. It is absolutely a pleasure. Everyone, you know where I want to end is people should go and check out John's new podcast, the Technology Brothers. We want to give us the sort of pitch for it. Yeah, me and my co-host break down the tech news of the day.

We avoid politics. We focus strictly on tech and business. Of course, we bleed over every once in a while. You can follow us on X at TBPN, the Tech Bros podcast network or something like that, kind of ESPN's take on tech. Cardick, welcome to the team. Riley, it's always a pleasure. My friend, rate, review, subscribe, please comment

and tell your friends to check out PirateWars. It's been real. Have a good one. Have a good one, everyone. See ya.