Pirate Wires - We Interviewed Jack Dorsey, Apple Controversy, Fake Meat Ban, FTX, & Based Met Gala

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

EPISODE #52: Welcome Back! This week, Pirate Wires is in the news after Mike Solana was able to get an exclusive interview with Jack Dorsey. We get the details on Jack's decision to leave Bluesky, his conversations with Elon Musk, and what's next for him. We also play some exclusive audio soundbites from the interview that you won't get anywhere else. We then talk about Apple's controversial dystopian iPad advertisement, the strange war on fake meat, FTX costumers being made whole, finance evil villains, and the fake virtue signaling at the Met Gala, and why this year was kind of based? Enjoy! Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Sanjana Friedman Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! 1:00 - Pirate Wires Exclusive Interview w/ Jack Dorsey 19:15 - Apple's "Controversial" Advertisement 30:50 - DeSantis Signs Cultivated Meat Ban In Florida 46:50 - FTX Costumers To Be Made Whole - SBF D*ed For Our Sins - Discussing Evil Villains In Tech & Finance 59:15 - Met Gala Takes Place Right Before Deal With Their Union - Looking Back at Fake Virtue Signaling 1:03:05 - Hot Take! The Met Gala Was Kind Of Based This Year?! #podcast #technology #politics #culture

Like, this is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. I reached out to him about Blue Sky, wanted to know what happened, and he told us. Apple released an ad this week for their new iPad Pro. It is called Crush. I didn't realize it was called Crush. It was like maybe a war on fake meat, uncultivated meat. I didn't realize it was called Crush. It was like maybe a war on fake meat, uncultivated meat. DeSantis and a bunch of buff slash busty people standing around like a plate of meat.

He died for our sins, but you guys are not ready for that conversation. The Met Gala was this week. I will never, ever get over Ocasio. She's infiltrating the institutions, though. She infiltrated them right up to the raw bar with a glass of champagne. She did infiltrate, indeed. What's up, guys?

Welcome back to the pod. Right out of the gate, I want to talk work and thinking for years now, since right after Trump, I would say, after Trump war, if you want to call it that, sort of launches at that point. This is where everything starts. It all, of course, sort of concludes around the time of Elon Musk taking over Twitter. But there's a huge story there. And a lot of it has been somewhat untold because Jack doesn't really say much publicly. It's like a tweet here and there. He confirms an intention here, but it seems to be in conflict, according to most people, with his actions as the CEO of Twitter. So we interviewed him. The first thing

we wanted to talk about, I reached out after he left just recently, the board of Blue Sky. So famously, Blue Sky was supposed to be the alternative to Twitter, a decentralized social media protocol that you could build social media on top of. The stated purpose was to create a world where someone could not be banned from the internet. And again, at the time of its launching, seemed very strange. People found this in conflict with what Jack had done as CEO. I felt the story was more complicated than that, especially by the time that he was speaking before Congress and sort of telling them to their faces that he would never grant them the power to censor and things like this. It was pretty exciting to watch, but again,

you know, fairly enigmatic person. I reached out to him about Blue Sky, wanted to know what happened, and he told us. So long story short, they just became a sort of left-wing version of Twitter. They were not a decentralized social media protocol. They became more of an app with a company and a board. And once everybody left Twitter, the sort of one group of people left Twitter because they were disaffected by or because they were sort of upset with the Elon free speech brand early on. They went to Blue Sky and came with pitchforks demanding moderation, which is the polite way of saying bands of people they don't like. The place devolved into a more censorious, in some ways, version of Twitter. And that's sort of where our story picked up.

Brendan, you edited this with me and Mark and Eric. What was your sort of thought going into it? There was a lot. I mean, it's a really long interview. I think it must be over 3, words if not 4 000 um it was actually so long that we couldn't include it in our email like we can include the whole thing in our email because email is truncating it but um i don't know i think the blue sky story feels for taking like an ideological brain position on this it feels pretty embarrassing for the left and also for jay graber the uh the now ceo of blue sky even though jack was very

careful to say that he's on jay's side still he completely supports her but he's just not aligned with the mission as it is i thought that one of the anecdotes he shared about the first time he was like, this wasn't necessarily in the spirit of the intent of my investment in Blue Sky was when Jay, in response to, I guess, Elon potentially taking over Twitter, got a little bit spooked about the investment and decided that she needed to get VCs attached to Blue Sky. She needed to incorporate it as a B Corp. She needed to get stock options issued and all of that stuff. Like this is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. And this is not a protocol yet that's truly decentralized. It's another app.

is not a protocol yet that's truly decentralized. It's another app. That's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population. So everything that we wanted around decentralization, everything that we wanted in terms of like an open source protocol suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. And I just, that's not what I wanted. That's not what I intended to help create. On the other hand, I got this anonymous Brazilian guy who's doing Noster. There's no board. It's not even a company. I don't know who this guy is. And that's what I really want to do. Around the same time, I found Noster, which has, we don't know who the leader is fiat jeff like it's this anonymous brazilian um it has no board it has no company behind it it has no funding

it is a truly open protocol um it's uh it's the development environment is moving fast and i gave a bunch of money to him and a little bit you know day by day i learned that this was actually the path and it emerged from something that was not twitter driven it was a reaction to twitter's failures and i thought that was right as well like that's what i should help and that's what i should support and i just decided to delete my account on Blue Sky and really focus on Nostra and funding that to the best of my ability. And, you know, I asked to get off the board as well, because I just don't think a protocol needs a board or wants a board. And if it has a board, it's not the thing that I wanted to help build or wanted to help fund at the time. So I thought that that was a really interesting anecdote.

Just the fact that it seemed to have gone bad from the start in a way, after which people began flocking to Twitter, or sorry, to Blue Sky, because it was not the Twitter. So that whole saga was super interesting and compelling to read about. You know, we're getting flooded with people who are mad about Jack Dorsey. Now this happens every time I read about Jack Dorsey, anytime I, uh, write about him and his work and Twitter with any kind of nuance, um, people are frustrated. They think, you know, this is a person who was the CEO of the company, and we asked him about this. I think that for me, the most interesting thing about there's the blue sky thing. I kind of, while it's definitely news to sort of understand just

the degree to which he is, Jack is completely broken off and why, and the fact they've sort of failed ideologically. In fact, they are sort of the opposite of what they set out to become. In fact, they're sort of the opposite of what they set out to become. All that's news. To me, the more interesting thing was the insight into who he was and who his core team was at Twitter even before Elon, right? So these were people who internally already were, they were looking at the landscape. They were saying, this is fucked. The censorship is wrong. Jack publicly, and I had talked about this because I'd found it confusing. Again, very few, he has almost no interviews expounding on this, but he made a tweet about the Trump banning that would have been 2020. Or was it 2021? January 2021. So he tweets, this is the right move for Twitter, the company, but it's wrong for the world. This is bad. This is a bad thing to do. And that is one of your early hints at how he was thinking about this. And then he just sort of broke it down for me. You have a situation where once you accept advertising revenue as your model, and you're a publicly

traded company, you are a hostage. You have a huge brand like Disney, for example, get mad about something that you're doing, something that you're not censoring. Then it was the president of the United States. And you're at risk of losing 80% of your revenue or something overnight. Your stock price plummets, your employees leave, and at that point, you're at risk of a hostile takeover, which actually attempts have been made in Twitter's past. One in particular, which he referenced, this is sort of what you're at risk of suddenly so it's not so easy as uh as principle the way that you free yourself from this dynamic is by going private which he had really hoped for for a while he wanted elon on his board for a while uh he and elon had talked then about this

sort of high level problem that the company was facing uh he was super in favor jack was super in favor of uh elon taking the company private well I had tried to get Elon on the board for some time. He obviously loves Twitter, and I've always loved how he used it, because he used it in a very pure form. And he would be extremely expressive on it. So I tried to get him on the board twice before, but the board ultimately said no both times, which also again was one of the reasons I left the second time that that happened. When our activists came in, I offered to step down as CEO, and the board wanted to go a different direction. And at that point, because I didn't want to be on a board with an activist.

I didn't want to run a company like that. Like it's just wall street mess. It's not creative. It's diminishing. And the board said no, but I, at that point I'm like, okay, like I have to plan an exit at this point. It's not going to be right now, but it has to be over the next two years. Cause I just don't want to live this way. In this way, you know, elon is gone to his head i mean he's he's losing tons of money from

uh the the advertisers who have really abandoned him because he's refusing to censor and mass like all sorts of political dissidents on the right um but it's a private company uh there's no risk uh on the stock side the employees working there don't care and they're gonna try now and find new uh revenue streams which jack was himself sort of on the path to trying before elon's takeover it's just that when you're doing this stuff in public you know for a publicly company, it's much harder. You have to work much slower. And there's this risk always of a hostile takeover from a rogue board member or something. He talks about the conflict internally with his own board. He talks about the conflict with his sales team. I had no idea how much influence the sales team had over product and also things like what we call

moderation policies. And it was just a mess. And altogether, it sort of looks like it's a mess that on a long enough time horizon takes down every social media company with a centralized sort of vector for attack, let's say, if you're a centralized social media company, then a company, a country can petition you for some sort of action for any number of reasons. And in the US, that's sort of the frame that we usually have. That is somewhat limited, though still a problem. And Jack kind of sheds light on all of the different attempts that his team made to keep the government at bay. We saw through the Twitter files where they really failed, and they definitely

did. But we didn't see the scope of what the government really wanted from Twitter, which was rebuffed. That becomes much more difficult abroad where you don't have the robust defense of free speech that America has. And so everywhere from India to Brazil, whatever, these places are going to shut down these companies if they don't do really draconian censorship acts. And he kind of framed something for us where it really does just seem like this form of social media, this global, centralized, pseudo-free, but not really speech thing. It just, it has to end. It's sort of reaching its expiration date. The only hope that we have is some sort of decentralized protocol. And that's a big question mark as to sort of, if we get there, they're hard to use,

they're sort of weird, you know, do people care enough? But certainly the old order is gone. And it was just totally riveting. Sajana, what was your take? I mean, I thought it was a fascinating interview. I mean, in terms of what we've been talking about, the question I always have with decentralized protocols, which Jack kind of alludes to in his comments is, it seems like you really have to fight against profitability incentives to get these protocols off the ground. Because he says at one point, you know, Twitter is making significantly less now

that they've kind of moved away from this ad-forward revenue model. And so you kind of have to have a billionaire like Elon come in, it seems like, and be willing to take a lot of financial risk on board to move toward a more subscriber-based model. And it kind of, I guess the sort of open question is, you know, how do you get corporations? I mean, I guess you have to sort of abandon the corporate model, it seems like, because one of the reasons Blue Sky seems to fail is because actually it was a Twitter surrogate, right? That was kind of tanked because of its proximity to Twitter,

its ideological associations with Twitter. So I don't know. I sort of think, can you get a critical mass of people to build on a platform where there's not this kind of, these cheap hits of ad revenue coming in all the time? Like that seems, I would hope you could, because I think I agree with Jack that decentralized protocols are the only way moving forward to have a kind of not, I don't know, dangerous censorship regime. But I'm not sure if that's possible.

He comes at this from a Bitcoin perspective as well. And there, it's a little more obvious. There's a much more powerful financial incentive for people to get involved in it and to build on it and to buy and sell in it and to just buy some. That's the extent of how you want to involve yourself in decentralized technology. You just buy a little bit of Bitcoin. That that's fine too and there's still some sort of economic gain there potentially for you it's a little bit tighter in the world of media and well a lot tighter in the world of media and at least now you know we haven't seen something on that side that can really make a ton of money for people and so i think um you know one of the more interesting things about Blue Sky was just that he launched it within Twitter in the first place.

Let's just take his ambition, which was to create, really, this would have been a decentralized layer of speech where all of our identities live, your username and all of your content, whatever. This is the unbreakable, uncensorable, decentralized. It exists in the internet. You'd have to delete the internet to get rid of it. There's no point of failure. That's the critical layer owned by nobody like Bitcoin. On top of that, Twitter would be pulling from that layer as much or as little as it wants. So Twitter as an app now that lives on top of this layer can censor and moderate whatever. And Twitter would have fought to be the best possible

version, the best possible app on top of that layer, but it would not be a point of attack. The governments of the world could not come after them and they themselves would never have the power to, for example, eliminate a president from speaking. But what was always interesting about that to me was it sort of seemed to be this strange answer to the innovator's dilemma, which is this idea that's very popular in tech, where big, huge legacy companies sort of fail to pick up on new important technologies because they would undermine the company's sort of core business. It's like a lot of these huge companies understand how cool and exciting and important new technologies

are. They even maybe pursue them a little bit, but at the end of the day, they're just not incentivized to drive themselves into something that is a fundamentally new technology that would replace its original reason for being. And Jack, I've never seen anybody do it the way that he did. To sort of embrace this and even talk about this was really crazy because it would have really undermined his own power and reduced the power and influence of Twitter itself. really undermined his own power and reduced the power and influence of Twitter itself. And it sort of never really came together and he never got to see the dream all the way through.

And now, of course, Blue Sky spins off, it becomes a company, which was never the plan. It gets bored, never the plan, raises money, becomes its own kind of app. And it's just a totally different timeline. But it was interesting that this person who I do think is highly ideological and really deeply misunderstood by a lot of people, especially on the right, who just love to attack this person. People on the left love to attack him because he's a rich tech person. People on the right attack him because they really think that he was sort of in a back room somewhere trying to ban all of the people that they liked. From what I can see, it just truly was never the case he's a fascinating person he's a really sort of uh i can't think

of anybody who's more sort of at odds with his public reputation at least on some sort of like the deeply online among the deeply online people um and uh i don know, I'm excited to see what happens next for social media, but I'm not hopeful after that interview for the future of sort of centralized technology solutions. Maybe I haven't been forever, but this was a great one. I really hope you guys go and check it out. It was awesome. I just am also a big fan of Jack's from afar. I mean, I live on Twitter, right? We all do. And it was cool to get to finally ask him all the questions that I had. And yeah, Bitcoin, he gives the price for 2030. I'm not going to tell you what it is. You got to go read. Moving on. We got to talk about another great American company, which is Apple and this crazy ass fucking commercial.

Okay. I mean, basically Apple released an ad this week for their new ipad pro um and it's been hugely controversial it is called crush um and so i didn't realize it was called crushed they named their advertisement yeah i think they they name all their advertisements um but yeah on youtube it's it's crush exclamation point and the the actual thumbnail on youtube is an emoji with its eyes bulging out uh about to be crushed as the name suggests between two metal uh panels um but basically the the video itself is um there's a bunch of sort of instruments and other sort of artistic implements paint brushes cans of paint there's a harp at one point uh that are all being it was like a renaissance

sort of scene you know it's something like like leonardo da vinci's bedroom or something yeah his workshop i mean there's like a bust of yeah renaissance sort of bust of a human head um and they're all being crushed by this uh sort of metal i don't know what you would call it like a metal hydraulic press a hydraulic press okay um while this woman with an accent that i couldn't quite determine, she didn't quite sound American, narrates sort of the new features of the iPad Pro. And so this has been hugely controversial. I know we say that all the time, but by that standard, it means it's, by our standards, that means it's generated a bunch of angry articles in the mainstream tech press and even a lot of blowback on Twitter among, I guess, people who would otherwise sort of align themselves against. Could be on their side. Yeah.

TechCrunch ran an article called Apple's Crush Ad is Disgusting, where the... Did you read the last line,ji of the article yeah if that future doesn't disgust you you're welcome to it yeah it's i mean it's just like a wholesale like take down the ad so basically the thrust of this article is um what the author says is the things being crushed here represent the material, the tangible, the real, and the real has value. Value that Apple clearly believes it can crush into yet another black mirror. This belief is disgusting to me

and apparently to many others as well. And then it ends with this line about, you know, Apple is telling you what it is and what it wants the future to be very clearly. If that future doesn't disgust you, you're welcome it and there was a piece in vanity fair about how hugh grant is mad about the ad apparently um yeah so you know i saw a bunch of japanese tweets where people were very like i'm like they were expressing hurt we found it was like a hurtful ad, which was interesting to me.

I definitely saw, yeah, it was totally negative. I think that had this ad come out 15 years ago, the reception would have been totally different. And the reception would have been different because tech had not yet dominated everything that exists in the world um it to me felt you know the idea of crushing all of these things is viscerally horrifying for someone who cares for for me i know brandon totally disagrees and we can do in a minute no i didn't i mean i i understand why it's offensive i would say it's

offensive it's gross it is it is kind of gross to me ah maybe is it gross i don't like it it's just it's distasteful it feels it's distasteful it is gross when the eyes pop out of the emoji at the end well that's the least i feel like that's the least gross part because you're just you're crushing in a cartoon, basically. I care about art and I care about music and I care about knowledge. I think that actually the digital, we've written about this a lot, published about this, spoken about this. I think digital information has a lot of pitfalls that we didn't even really understand until recently. I don't want to live in a world where everyone's just living on their phone and stuff like this. But the reason I think that it hit the way it did is because all of these industries,

sort of anything in this space of information have been destroyed by tech. So music and film and television and anyone writing, right? The revenues have all been gutted and you have giants like Apple that are thriving. And so separate from just the visuals of destroying these things, I understand. I'm smart enough to understand that's not what they're really saying, right? They're saying it's all in one thing, whatever. Separate from the visuals of that, it is in poor taste because it's sort of like a victory lap after having pulverized all of these other people into oblivion and i think emotionally that's where a lot of people are coming from plus people are just tired of living inside of their phones i think um i did see one person do a reverse of the advertisement which i thought was really

interesting he said you know all you had to do was run it backwards. If you ran the ad literally in reverse, and so it starts crushed and destroyed, and then it opens up and you see everything there, that would have been an interesting way to show what the new... What is it? An iPad that was very thin is capable of. But yeah, didn't like it. I thought it was kind of funny that everybody said Apple, this is from Apple. How could Apple have done an advertisement like this? I mean, we've talked about Apple ads before. The last one was when they brought Mother Nature to the table and sort of apologized for Chinese slave labor. I don't think this was outside of the realm of what Apple is capable of now in an advertisement. It's been a long time since that

1985 Mac ad that people cannot let die. That was, guys, that was my age, okay? That's fucking 38 years ago. Get a new thing. Brandon, tell us why it was actually awesome. Well, my position is not that it's awesome. It's just that the reaction- Yeah, man, you fucking hate artists. Just say it. You hate artists. You hate musicians. You saw them getting smushed and you liked it it made you feel something i like those those uh hydraulic press videos i'm a fan in general i thought that was clever though that they used that that trend because i don't know if you guys are aware of this but hydraulic press videos are like a big thing they have been on youtube for for some time yeah i've seen them um so that was clever but no like like my take, my

observation was that when I got on my feed, I don't know if I'm using Teapot correctly, but like my Teapot, I'm sure I'm not using that correctly quite frankly. But my part of Twitter is filled with a bunch of EACC bios

and other tech people because I work for PirateWare, right? And all of them are coming out being like, this is disgusting. And my thought was like, well, what did you think acceleration looks like? Better woodwinds? Are we going to innovate the flute? No, what's going to happen is actually it's all going to be digitized in some way and AI is going to help us. And this is exactly what eacc wants this is exactly what tech wants and so i thought it was a little bit rich maybe maybe even hypocritical uh for some of these people to be like this is you know this is disgusting even though i understand like i also had a little bit of like an awkward feeling watching that ad so i

totally understand how it's in essentially in poor taste, kind of, especially the way that you described it, Mike, where it, I didn't, I didn't think of it that way where you said that it's almost like Apple's taking a victory lap after, um, basically just destroying or, or, uh, compromising these industries. Um, but I just think it's kind of funny to see the reaction among tech Twitter when this is actually what tech Twitter wants. Yeah, like you want to build an AI god. You know, you want to be jacked into the internet. We're talking about Borg shit right now.

And you think that you're, well, we're still going to be painting on an easel or something and that that's worth protecting or saving. Like you got to to pick a lane you got to pick which one of them do you want there's no way apple didn't anticipate this i think that like the rage that they knew this ad would provoke is probably part of it i mean i'm sure that we know it's we know it's flat now we know it's a really flat thing that they have released and we know and we know we know they released it yes i yes it was a super successful ad for sure it's just like the same i mean it's an ipad i guess it has an m4 chip

which is cool um and the new pencil has extra haptic technology that helps you draw better i mean it it just seems like um i don't know i i had a negative reaction to it, but now seeing all the hysterical pushback to it, I'm kind of inclined to just sort of think it's fine. while now. And I remember in college, there were kids who took all their notes on iPads and had the keyboard with the iPad. But it never really seemed to widely catch on as a computer alternative even. And I think a lot of people still don't understand why they would need an iPad if they have an iPhone or another smartphone or something like that. So I can't fault them for trying something provocative and rage-baity for their ad. I salute them. That is a good point. It is clearly... You're right. It's clearly intentionally provocative. It's not... In a way, it is. They are taking a risk in the vein of the 85 or was it 84 ad. It was a risk. It just maybe didn't land the way they thought, but you're right.

Maybe it did land the way that they thought. In any case, one thing we're not talking about anymore was the Vision Pro goggles or whatever they are. I would say conversation successfully shifted. Well done. That's, I would say, conversation successfully shifted. Well done. Brandon, last thoughts on your favorite new iPad? I think it's funny.

There's a very specific thing that happens, Sanju, that you described that I think we don't have a word for, but we need one, where you like something, but then the reaction on Twitter is so cringe. Or you dislike something, but the reaction on Twitter is so cringe that you are forced to like it after that. You're like, no, no, no. I don't want to be associated with any of these people.

I could see a lot of people maybe turning that way after that TechCrunch article because that headline is pretty ridiculous. Reactionary standing. Yeah, once they get too... Yeah, reactionary standing. They become too crazy, too hyster too hysterical this is how i feel maybe about the reaction against the uh the protesters to a certain extent it's like

okay so you almost want to like yeah you almost want to like be reactionary be like wait wait hold on let's hear them out at this don't shut them up this is america no yeah because like the people who are mad about it are doing too much you know we're trying to pass fucking legislation and shit no just call everybody everybody calm down let's talk about fake meat brandon all right um so there's a there's like maybe a war on fake meat uncultivated meat i should say i don't know um last week uh ron desantis an act signed a total ban on cultivated meat in florida um and like it's like a total ban so like the uh it's sb-104 that's the bill it makes it unlawful for people to manufacture for sale sell hold or offer for

sale or distribute lab-grown meat in Florida. That means like a black market of lab-grown meat would be illegal in Florida, right? Like you can't even like go over state lines and give it to somebody with that last word was distribute. And he's like pitching it on cultural war grounds, this bill. He said today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a Petri dish or bugs to achieve authoritarian goals. And there's been several other states that have either preceded Florida or begun to follow suit. In West Virginia and Texas, there was a ban introduced, but not acted on.

Alabama passed a similar ban, and now the governor just has to sign it. There are two bills in play in Arizona. And in Tennessee, the bill is in committee. committee so i mean the big question is like why are republicans states making an effort to ban cultivated meat which which is in like its nascent stages there's currently no company selling cultivated meat like what's going on here i think is the question We've reported a bit about this during, but before long before, I think months ago at this point, before to say to sign the bill when there was still an opportunity to do something about it.

And nobody really cared about it. Nobody said much about it online. You know, we published it. It was sort of, Hey, this is pretty crazy that they're going to ban cultivated meat. And then silence after it's

signed and it's too late of course everybody freaks out and um i find that a little bit frustrating from tech this is the problem maybe in tech is uh when it comes to politics it's like just this total blindedness to what is going on politically. And it's really, I guess, it comes from disinterest, just a refusal maybe to even engage publicly at all until it's too late. And then anger, fury, how could people be so stupid? And it's like, well, rather than now we're seeing some crazy idea to build X, Y, and Z strategy to push notifications to people and tell them how the world is uh which way the world is voting or whatever just vote just maybe participate in government slightly and be aware of what's going on and get people involved and also spend money because what it really looks like

is uh a massive lobby i mean the beef uh beef and agriculture is very important to america it's very important to the republicans um every single person in florida who was involved in this had taken money uh even if it was a very small amount upwards uh from the one of the big lobby groups lobbying groups in the state and uh it's just sort of very obvious at this point that beef is looking at what happened to milk. And this is from what we've heard from people working in dairy as well as people working in lab-grown meat. The beef people sort of looked at that and they said, that can't happen to us. We cannot allow some sort of fake product to take over that would destroy the business. And so they're using the government to try and stop it from happening, which is a sort of, that's a tale as old as time. And they're going to keep going. They're going to keep winning. They're sort of trying now to compare. You see a lot of

influencers online saying, this is like bug, eat the bugs. I won't eat the bugs, blah, blah, blah. It's the sort of, they're like trad right-wing person. It's not, I don't know what people are talking about. It's not the same as eating bugs. And in fact, even people who are in support of lab-grown meat, I've got all these private channels where people are talking about this. They are like, oh, tech people just don't know how to talk about this stuff. The average person looks at lab-grown meat, the idea of in a lab growing meat that is beef, genetically, is actually beef, but no animal was killed. They look at that and they think this is the

same thing as eating bugs. It's gross. They're the same thing. It's like weird science freak show. That's not true. That's just not accurate. And you know that's not accurate because no one has to ban eating bugs. No one wants to fucking do it. It's like, I'm not eating crickets and you can't make me and I won't do it. But this is something that the average person either doesn't know about or would find interesting. I don't know many people who, when I talk about this, aren't like, oh, that's cool. Can that happen? What does that look like? How does it work? The problem here is not that people think it's horrifying. It's that people don't think it's horrifying. And I think it's just sort of in a way, this is a very classic kind of political fight. It's the way that it always happens.

This is about money and this is about power. And it's not really about anything else from where I'm sitting. Sajana, what do you think? I mean, to your point about the average person not really having strong preconceived ideas about lab-grown meat, it's interesting to me that DeSantis used this, like, I won't eat the bugs, I won't live in the pod kind of meme language in his press release about it. Because to me, that just underscores, I mean, obviously, there's a huge lobbying effort behind this bill, but it underscores how out of touch uh the bill is with like general public opinion i mean it to use this kind of niche meme language uh in this very sweeping legislation is is weird to me um and honestly kind of ridiculous like that picture that has now gone viral of uh desantis and a bunch of like buff slash busty people standing around like a plate

of meat as he looks on um and that was like the kind of uh the picture that went viral on twitter about the news of the ban um i think the difference for me between the reason the cattle industry i would imagine is probably even more um scared about lab-grown meat than the dairy industry is because I would imagine, I mean, I've never tried it, but I would imagine it probably tastes in some iterations almost indistinguishable from actual non-lab-grown meat. Whereas I'm currently drinking almond milk in my coffee because we've run out of milk and it's disgusting. I'm currently drinking almond milk in my coffee because we've run out of milk and it's disgusting. And I think lots of people just don't like the taste of oat milk, almond milk, soy milk, whatever. And so I do think this represents a much more credible existential threat to the cattle industry. I mean, you look at this and you can see easily a world where nobody will ever eat meat again. Now, this is where I think there is a legitimate bit of pushback, which requires kind of like a couple steps.

So if you imagine not a world where people are forced to eat the fake meat, which is what everybody, you know, anyone who's really animated on the issue in sort of against the lab-grown meat always is like, well, we're not going to be living in this California-style world where people are not allowed to eat beef anymore. And it's like, well, that's ridiculous. That's not up for vote. No one's trying to ban cow right now. What I think is more likely is that this becomes or at least possible is that this becomes so successful that um everybody actually opts into it instead right now it's too expensive to produce but if you can figure that piece out then everybody's eating this it's you know genetically identical to regular beef uh why would you ever eat the other thing? If you could spare an animal some suffering,

I think probably a lot of people would do that. I think maybe some people wouldn't care, whatever, but enough would that it would change the market dynamic in such a way as beef, real beef from cows would become much more expensive because there would be fewer of them. And so if you're living in that kind of world where suddenly beef is 10 times as expensive, then in a way, the market sort of forces you into the fake product. And so I guess in this way, you could argue, well, people are going to be forced. Poor people are going to be forced to eat beef, maybe. I mean, it's a lot of hypotheticals sort of across the way, but I do think that's probably the likeliest way that this potentially becomes something worth talking about. I also think it is worth asking a lot of questions

about this. I think there should be testing and whatnot, but I don't think it makes any sense to be living in a world, let's say a state where I can walk down to the corner store and buy a pack of cigarettes, but people can't run experiments on cultivated meat. That to me is crazy. That is definitely not the future that we want to be living in. One of the other things that I thought was interesting, we were talking to a CEO of a cultivated meat company and he mentioned cultivated meat from fish. And on the market side, we actually import something like 60%, I think, of our fish from China.

And he was like, look, when you vote for a ban against cultivated meat, you're voting for more imports from China. And even the fish that we catch, that Americans catch, we send over to China for processing and they send it back where we sell it. And so there's not only these arguments for, I don't know, safety and reducing animal cruelty. There are also sort of trade reasons to at least prefer cultivated fish as well. I thought that was a really interesting point that like really nobody, I've never heard it before and nobody

really talks about. Yeah. Fish is just not a part of the situation. It's not a part of the conversation. I didn't even know you could, I didn't know you could cultivate fish. I didn't either until I was connected with this guy. Very interesting to learn more. I mean, what is really different? I saw, I saw this video a while ago, one of these shorts about salmon at Trader Joe's, which I had been eating because there's a Trader Joe's right by my place here in Miami. I think I know what you're about to say. the farm-raised. And that's a question where I have gone back and forth. I could swear that I've heard it in both ways my whole life. Someone saying this one's better or this one's better. So I never know which one is healthier. But they say, you got to eat the fresh rather than the farm-raised because look at the color of the farm-raised before they add dye to it. And they

showed you like a gray slab of fish. And I thought that's not possible. There's no fucking way that farm raised salmon looks like that. So I looked at the ingredients on a piece of salmon at Trader Joe's and there's food dye in it. It's like they straight up dye the meat. That's terrible. That that's crazy which is maybe the other piece of this that i'm thinking about which is um our food is terrible that is definitely true um i think that there is no doubt that ever all the processes chemicals whatever that we're eating in packaged food and non-packaged food right like you know you think that fish is safe just a piece of fish it is not safe um we have a lot of fights you know to that are worth fighting this is a hypothetical potential meat

that is too expensive for most people to even touch right now i would like them to work on it a little bit more before we make some kind of decision here yeah i've i've seen those i don't know if you guys have seen those videos of people, fishmongers pulling the parasites out of fish meat. It's disgusting. It's absolutely awful. I just try not to watch those videos. I still eat fish. How did RFK get the brain worm? It was some kind of meat, right? Maybe it was... No, he said... So that's another thing. He was like, I eat a lot of tuna fish. Maybe he was saying something else, but I did want to bring up tuna fish and mercury it's like every it's undeniable it's not controversial to say like people actually now avoid eating too much tuna because there's mercury there's too much mercury

in the tuna and um obviously cultivated meat would solve that like i don't know why they would be putting mercury in their fish but another point uh for cultivated fish meat. Sajid, you were just going to say. Well, I was just going to say, like, I think so much of the pushback comes from these kind of like sci-fi ideas we have about what lab-grown food alternatives would be. Like, I'm thinking about, you know, the scene in Snowpiercer where you find out that the people in the back of the train are eating like these disgusting bug filled like protein slabs and i think that's what people imagine but if you actually had a lab-grown meat alternative that was of higher quality than the average meat that people are buying in grocery stores which is probably not like organic in the case of fish most of it is probably farmed in the case of certain, most of it is probably farmed.

In the case of certain kinds of fish, it's probably farmed in China in really disgusting farm ecosystems. I know we're talking about the cattle lab-grown beef band, but it all seems connected. You're actually talking about something that for the average consumer would probably like really increase the quality of product they're consuming um so yeah it's just total hypocrisy no the only thing that's for certain is that in a world of really really cheap really really high quality cultivated meat a lot of farmers are going to lose their jobs like a lot of people working in beef and poultry um are not going to be at in work anymore and uh we subsidize these industries a lot of people have work in these industries that's a big part of our economy uh i think you have a lot of people maybe practically looking at this and saying

what are the trade-offs here? Get rid of this one random thing and potentially avert a whole labor apocalypse. Maybe that's a risk worth taking for certain people. And I think it reminds me a little bit of the Waymo stuff when you had this sort of shadow war from the labor shadow war against self-driving cars in San Francisco. And it's weird they feel like they have to kind of hide behind all these different reasons the self-driving car shouldn't exist it's very obvious why they're actually mad about it it's just like we don't want to lose our jobs and i think if you said that that actually would resonate with people

um you know most people aren't libertarians so like that's an argument that i think people can get their heads around. And that would work here as well. I think people, if you just actually spoke with them honestly in that way, it will be a very different conversation. But politicians are not capable of speaking honestly. So probably we'll have to keep talking about how unhealthy this phantom currently, for the most part, imaginary meat is for the next however long it takes them to ban it.

And I guess every right-wing state first. And then, I mean, eventually left-wing states, they love to ban really anything technologically progressive. So I don't know, unless tech people band together and do everything they can to stop it. And I guess also if it doesn't happen here, it's going to happen somewhere. Once people are doing this in China or Japanapan or something and you can get this really high quality product i think once it happens anywhere in the world it'll be very hard to keep it from america let's see speaking of uh huge terrifying tech criminals we gotta talk about spf um and uh and the fact that apparently everyone who he screwed was gonna be fine sajna i mean yeah basically this this was an announcement that came out uh i think earlier this week where

the bankruptcy lawyers who have now taken over ftx are going to be paying back everyone who lost uh money when the uh cryptocurrency exchange collapsed they're gonna be paying them back the amount they had plus I think 18% interest or something like that. Although the amount they're getting back is going to be based on November 2022 crypto prices, which are significantly lower than they are now. But, you know, it is, this is actually, I think they've accrued even an excess of money than what was needed to pay people back in general. Like they've gotten, they've recouped billions and billions of dollars. But yeah, I mean, it remains to be seen. The point that people are making about how this is not actually making people whole is that you know they presumably lost a lot of opportunity to uh you know make investment profits

on the money that they you know weren't able to access during this year and a half long period um but tldr they're getting their money back which is what happened he said give me a minute and and we're gonna we're gonna get you all back to we're gonna get all your money back and uh i don't know i guess people i think people did believe him they just didn't care i i think people just really wanted him to be punished yeah i mean this actually is a point that i think came up significantly in his trial because this is like the one of the primary arguments his lawyers were using for why he shouldn't get such a long sentence uh and the judge i believe said something like you know the the problem at hand the primary problem at hand isn't the fact that people lost

all this money necessarily it's that he engaged in this you know really sustained insidious kind of fraud um where he was intentionally misleading investors and there was no bookkeeping and all this stuff um which i understand um but it does still seem like the kind of primary emotional argument uh for why he should get such a long sentence was that so many people had like lost their livelihoods and i understand that like if you lose all of that money in november 2022 and then you get it back i mean there's a lot of time between november 2022 and may 2024 where you don't have access to those assets um but you know you know he never struck me as uh like a made-off type person who was genuinely

trying to steal from people i think that he was very just adderall brained and acris type personality really thought i mean he definitely broke the law you know and i think that he knew that he broke the law uh sort of moving the funds over and using them to invest. But my, I don't know, I struggle with these kinds of, this was very much a witch burning. You had an SBF, a person who everybody in the tech industry could point to and say, I'm not like that guy. Okay. Like, yeah, we all got crazy in, you know, was it 2021 that massive bull run right before the crash? We all got crazy. Okay. We all were playing roulette with other people's money. And yeah, we all lost a lot and gained a lot and whatever. And it looked really bad. You know, don't look at my Instagram from back then. Mine's fine. I'm speaking hypothetically right now.

But we're not SBF. That's a fucking criminal. Get him. He should be in jail forever. And you could see the bloodlust with which not random ass people on Twitter were speaking, but investors, people in the industry who were saying that. And it struck me as really just a kind of classic witch burning scenario where it wasn't really about SBF or what he did. In fact, I think when you talk to the burning scenario where it wasn't really about SBF or what he did. In fact, I think when you talk to the average person, they don't really know what SBF did. It reminds me a bit of the Elizabeth Holmes stuff, which I think was a similar case, but slightly different in that one, she definitely lied to it. There was actual certain

real fraud involved in the way that she lied to investors. That doesn't bother me actually as much as putting people's health at risk with the blood tests. But even still, she went down, she should have gone down, same thing with SBF. But I think both of their sentences reflect a broader climate that was very anti-tech. And both of these people were blamed for what a lot of people were doing. And while SBF was blamed for the crypto stuff, I think Elizabeth Holmes was blamed for a different kind of tech. It's like lots of huge rounds were being raised and a lot of people who people in the press just didn't like were getting money to do world changing things that seemed like science fiction, new fusion reactors and let's say remote power charging and crazy stuff in the space of meat and food um and blood and they just wanted to see someone pay pay the consequences for i guess um everybody else you know they just

didn't like these people and uh and these people you know again elizabeth holmes sam mcfride they broke the law but i think that in in a way, and certainly with SBF, he died for our sins. But you guys are not ready for that conversation. Or maybe the two of you are. Brandon, what do you think? I wonder if the effective altruists now are feeling vindicated or if something happens where the reputational damage that they took is is a little bit reversed from this because as i understand it sbf like the the customers are being made whole because of maybe bets that sbf had made previous to fdx going down and that they're just like playing out now and now they have all this extra money that they can make they can like help the uh the customers be whole um and at the time sbf was like the poster child of effective

altruism and when he went down um effective altruism will mccaskill all of them basically just like had to go dark for a while um because it was such a bad look for that movement. And I'm just curious about what happens with effective altruists. Well, I still think they suck. And I still think that he sucks. I don't want to be, let's not get it twisted. He's definitely, he sucks. And he broke the law and he should have gone to jail. Should he have gone to jail for 25 years? What are the technicalities of that? it can he gonna can he like for good behavior get out in two years or something like that is there like a parole opportunity do we know let's see i mean he's trying to appeal sorry no you're good i was gonna say they're trying to use

this now to appeal his sentence um but so like what okay so what ftx did was they spent customer fund they said they basically told customers you have this much money in your account, but on FTX aside, they had nothing to back that up. They had no fiat. They had maybe fake coins like the FTX coin, right? What's the difference between that and Madoff? I mean, Madoff ran a pyramid scheme, but he essentially at the same time, he was saying, I have this money when he didn't have that money i think intent matters like if you actually if your goal is to steal from people that definitely right okay so yeah yeah the distinction is intent i think if someone is it's like the

difference between manslaughter and murder murder right like you hit someone with a car by accident or like you like speed up and you're like fuck that old woman in the car in the crosswalk like that's very super different i think and i think most people probably think i'm fine with that i'm fine with the difference between the two um and i made up you know i made off got 150 years yeah yeah he was more than a lot and he was it was like two it was multiple life sentences or something crazy like that they definitely wanted him to die in prison they're like no you're not getting out this is not a this is not like you know your your professor parents annoy us and we're gonna blame you for something that a lot of people were doing that was crazy this was like he was

definitely a villain um and it was much harder for them i think to recover the money that he uh that he stole right i mean there was like there were like rounds of repayments that they did to people i don't know this was like just a little bit before all of our like i i this was years ago i was definitely not writing about stuff back then when that happened it's i feel like this is something that like uh gen x people get really animated about made off that was like their big bad finance guy thing that happened i for one am hopeful that we'll have more to come i was gonna say like i think with sbf and elizabeth holmes in particular part of the i mean obviously what they did is bad they're bad people and should have i mean maybe well their actions were bad and

they should you know be punished for them in some way or another but they the obsession with their individual personalities like sbf you know this whole thing about the way his sort of autism and like autistic savant qualities interacted with his business calculations and like things like how he would play video games during interviews and all this stuff it was just and oh and of course the the affair with uh what's her name oh my god girl thank you thank off no caroline ellis ellison yes caroline and her writing where like her old tumblr that came out during the trial where she was like writing about polyamory and stuff um it makes for good drama and people love that yeah it was weird it was like very and then elizabeth holmes the deep fake voice and the steve jobs turtlenecks and she also i think had an affair right with her was it her investor yeah sunny was the indian guy

the whole thing both of them are they're excited it's like people you know what say what you will about them they're they're living a life they are really just you know what you can say about you cannot take away

from either of them they were in the arena they were both completely in the arena and they were unique I mean when are you going to meet like an Elizabeth Holmes

I don't know never again she was just the gossip was just punished. People are terrified now. Maybe this kind of thing wouldn't matter as much if we were doing ticker tape parades for people who are actually good and successful, but we're not. So we only get these high profile cases of the people who mess up being just absolutely brutalized. Even the people who have not done anything wrong, like a Jack Dorsey, for example, or a Mark Zuckerberg are completely hated. It does, I don't know, little bit older than me. So it's like millennial type people. They grew up seeing a lot of people championed and celebrated and tech

was very much celebrated. It was an exciting place to be. No one's really seeing that anymore. So I do get a little bit nervous about that. Joking aside, I get nervous about the memes that we put out into society and how they impact young people who maybe see this and think... They actually internalize the real story in SBF or Elizabeth Holmes, which is not really about their crimes, but about their ambitions. And that's really, I think, why someone like Elizabeth Holmes was being punished. People thought that her ambitions were just obnoxious. You know, she was this bajillionaire, raised a bunch of money, thought she was going to create this crazy blood testing

thing that shouldn't exist. And the real science people said it can't exist. I think to a certain extent, that's why she was being punished. But again, she did also break the law. So I don't know, whatever. She's going to get out though. And less time than SBF, which I also think is not fair because you know i do think the health thing for me complicates complicates it quite a lot um let's finish this one off with a very quick jaunt to the met gala brandon yeah as as pirate wires listeners will definitely know um the the met gala was at uh 4 p 4 PM on, on Monday of this week. But what Pirate Wires listeners might not know is that just 12 hours previous to the

beginning of the Met Gala at like three in the morning, um, Condé Nast executives, Condé Nast runs the Met Gala and owns the magazine Vogue of which Anna Wintour, I think is still the editor in chief. Um, and she puts on the Met Gala. They were in sort of intense bargaining sessions with the Condé Nast Employees Union. And by the way, this Employees Union is basically made up of social media managers, TikTok creators, people with really, really easy jobs. TikTok creators, people with really, really easy jobs. And the union had been threatening to disrupt the Met Gala if they could not come to an agreement before the event had begun. I had a take on this in the Daily, and this is worth discussing very briefly like solana said just because you

know given the gala's history of giving our you know most narcissistic celebrities a platform for virtue signaling whatever current thing like that is left-leaning and deranged like if you'll i'll just remind everybody like aoc's tax the rich dresslevingne, who I don't even know who that is. Like a model actress who's friends with the Kardashians. She has a unibrow. I think she's famous. Thick brows, right? Thick eyebrows, yeah.

Thick eyebrows. She wore some overalls that said, Peg the Patriarchy once to the Met Gala. Megan Rapinoe, I hate her so much. Not because of what she carried. She brought a clutch that said, like, in gay we trust to the Met Gala. Anyways, like, people, the celebrities

make all these, you know, current thing, political statements at the gala, and it's shocking that Condé Nast passed up this great opportunity to actually highlight the plight of um email workers rights in america they could have just allowed uh the union to disrupt the event and make a political statement um it's almost like none of these people have any principles at all when their when their fame or money or whatever is

threatened i will never ever get over akazio first of all a socialist sort of populist type person going to the met gala in the first place the met gala is the kind of rich person spectacle that like the joker would attack in a batman movie okay that's the level of place that we're talking about. So a socialist politician who's like, you know, the people we've got to fight for, for living wage would never, never in a million years.

Not only that, she goes there wearing, this is COVID era. So she goes there unmasked wearing a tax, the rich, whatever dress it's being carried by her little slaves in masks. Okay. Behind her. And that is just why on earth she would give us that image. And by us, I mean the people who love to hate her,

that image. It's just too good. And I think that someone like her is maybe just surrounded by people who love her so much that she doesn't realize um how earnestly people don't like her and uh and so she was just oblivious to the fact that the optics there are of course reality which is that she is not the proletariat she's the bourgeoisie she's infiltrating the institutions though she's trying to change them from within she infiltrated them right up to the raw bar with a glass of champagne she did infiltrate congratulations acasio i thought the met ball this met gala this year was was kind of based honestly uh which i know might be an unpopular take just because their theme was so like tone deaf for the kind of virtue signaling the people who attend usually engage with like

it was this the theme was this jg ballard short story uh the garden i think it's called in the garden of time or something like that about this rich couple that's sort of drinking tea and uh you know having a conversation while a mob a ferocious mob encroaches on their property and like you know threatens to destroy all of the cultural artifacts that they've sort of stockpiled in their home, which I think is hilarious. I mean, it garnered a bunch of angry op-eds in Teen Vogue, The New York Times, whatever. But of course there was a protest actually happening

outside of the Met Gala at the time. And they kind of had, I mean, Kim Kardashian's dress went really viral where she had this extremely cinched waist. People were saying that she's like promoting an unhealthy body type, but it was designed by a guy, John Galliano, who was canceled up until very recently. And so, you know, there was some wrong think I think on display at the Met Gala that as a contrarian, I have to have to give it to them. It's very in vogue, the wrong thing these days, you know, more and more people are like, oh, I'm going to be bad. What's your, what's your bad opinion? And while I love it, I do, I do wish we could have seen a little more of that during COVID when we were the closest we ever were in any of our lifetimes to real ass authoritarianism. No one wanted to be bad then.

When you had like Maggie Glacius talking about forced vaccine, holding people down and jabbing them with vaccines. Like the world was very different. But these days it's like, ooh, are you controversial? Let's be a little bit controversial. Whatever. Good for us, I guess. It is better than the other thing. You know what, guys? It's been real been real love y'all see you next week

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