Pirate Wires - WE'RE BACK | From 9/11 To Lindsay Clancy - How The Internet Has Gone INSANE

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Welcome back to the Pirate Wires pod! The gang is back together for your favorite weekly pod covering tech, politics & culture. PW alum, Sanjana Friedman, returns to the show with Mike Solana in Riley Nork. Today on the pod,  25th anniversary of 9/11 and how the old world feels so ancient, the brain rot phone addiction that led to the decision of the Lindsay Clancy case, another AI doomer has sprung to life from the the bowels of Anthropic, we ponder if we're all in a simulation, and Solana gives us a deep dive into immigration and H1B's. -Thank you to our PRESENTING sponsor Monaco! https://www.monaco.com/-----Get $500 off your Eight Sleep pod: www.eightsleep.com/piratewirespodcast…- Check Out Our Pirate Wires FLAGSHIP fund on Autopilot: https://marketplace.joinautopilot.com/landing/5890/1390461?referrer=AP Featuring Mike Solana, Riley Nork, Sanjana FriedmanSign Up For The Pirate Wires Daily! 3 Takes Delivered To Your Inbox Every Morning:https://get.piratewires.com/pw/dailyPirate Wires On X: https://twitter.com/PirateWiresMike On X: https://twitter.com/micsolanaTIMESTAMPS:0:00 - WE'RE BACK!2:55 - 9/11 25th Anniversary & Gen Z Irony Posting8:50 - THANK YOU MONACO!9:25 - Lindsay Clancy Trial Highlights Phone Addiction Brain Rot40:45 - AI Death Cult - Anthropic Employee Warns Of AI Doom1:06:46 - White Pill - Are We In A Simulation - Sponsored By Eight Sleep1:12:25 - THANK YOU EIGHT SLEEP!1:13:08 - The Truth About Immigration & H1Bs - Sponsored By Autopilot1:31:00 - THANK YOU AUTOPILOT1:32:00 - Wrapping Up1:34:00 - We're Back For Good! See You Every Friday at 4pmET#podcast #technology #politics #culture #tech #ai

Ladies, gentlemen, they, them, queerbies, autonomous AI agents watching us after work. It is the moment you've all been waiting for for a year. The Pirate Wire's pot is back. Before September 11th, that sort of 80s, 90s, halcyon era that everybody talks about, that was an age of innocence. I don't even know where to begin. Where do you begin with this? Seeking consensus of the entire world is impossible. That you cannot even get 12 Americans in a room to agree that a woman murdered her

Children, wait, am I the villain in this story? What if I end up doing, like, what if I become something like really fucked up in 10 years? All right. I honestly, guys, I am so excited to be here. We've got Riley back in the chat, of course, looking fantastic in his professional studio. We've got the studio that we built that ourselves. Thank you, Max and Hunter and Matt for all your work. Matt's in the pod.

He'll be probably bopping in and out every night. down then and of course our lovely Sanjana on the pod returning to the pirate wires. Say hi everyone. Hello. What's up? How's it going? You know, so moving forward, it's going to be, it's going to be us. This is your core group. Sanja is going to be in and out about once a month. We've got a bunch of other sort of a co-host who'll be hopping in and we're just getting the gang back together. I've missed the podcast. You guys have asked for the podcast. I think on every single channel I've seen from Twitter to YouTube comments of other shows that I'm on to the mafia thing that I produced randomly in the street emails like I'm not even kidding it means a lot um you guys it it

does mean a lot because I enjoyed it myself I was sad to let it go and I'm excited to be back talking about the news uh with my friends um any any last thoughts on just the show in general before we we get going here because we've got a lot to cover The comments were crazy. You guys were thirsting for this podcast. So you are welcome. Like, subscribe, all that good stuff. Yeah, you better not disappoint us at this. After all of that, like I am going to need to see some activity in the comments section. Before we get started, one last thing. Shout out to Monaco. This is the company that's bringing back the podcast. We would not be here without you guys. I'm super stoked to have you on board. You are our presenting partner. Founded by the incredible, the handsome, the intelligence, Sam Blonde, the heroic. Hardy saved a woman from a burning building last week. Didn't even ask for gratitude. Just like such a great guy.

They call him the Odysseus of automated sales. Thank you, sir. Stokes to have you on board. The journey begins. Welcome to our ad reads. Welcome to the ad read era of pirate wires. We are professional around here. Let's get into it.

We've got to talk about, obviously, September 11th is my little sister's birthday, which is the very first top. of the day. Riley, take it away. All right, so yes, the first topic of the return of the Pirate Wires podcast will sadly be one of the most tragic days in American history, as today is, like Salana mentioned, the 25th anniversary of 9-11. It can't all be laughs, people, but nevertheless, there is much to discuss on this somber occasion. We just put out a piece on Piratewires.com about a guy named Mani Marada, who will be documenting the entire thing as if it was happening in real time,

with over 400 posts time down to the second documenting the tragedy that was 9-11, go check out that piece. Part of the reason he's putting so much time into documenting 9-11 like this, specifically, was sort of the nihilism he feels among his Gen Z cohort about this event, with some people even justifying it. In the meantime, folks, what are we thinking about today's occasion about this guy documenting history as if it was happening in real time, or about the uproar surrounding a guy Hassan campaigned with Zora Mamdani as he commemorates this occasion. Man, so what you're getting, there's like the Zuma question of why are millennials so obsessed with this? Why are older people so obsessed with this? It's like we're not really obsessed with it. It's like an important day.

Before September 11th, that sort of 80s, 90s, Halcyon era that everybody talks about, that in polling every single generation points to as the best period of time in American history. That was an age of innocence. That was an age when Americans, certainly young Americans, weren't really thinking about the rest of the world, though the rest of the world was definitely obsessed with us. And our government was certainly, you know, fucking around abroad. We could talk endlessly about that. But what was American culture? American culture was pretty much focused on us. This was a day when suddenly the whole world entered our psychology. It's like we were suddenly very, very, very aware of it and it could never stop thinking about it again

after that point. I missed the world before. I think probably most people do. The period that followed that's like 10-year cultural period was pretty dark. You could see that even in our music and in our style. It's hard to be like, what were the 2000s and the way that we happily talk about the 90s, the 80s, the 70s, the 60s, the 50s. Yeah, I mean, I think that just that the everyone, who was aware of what was happening during 9-11 has this kind of visceral memory of it, right? This kind of like sense memory of you, you know, watching all the TV channels. And right, the further you get from that, the more abstracted you are from it, the more it just seems like one history event in a long list of historical events.

And then the, yeah, the easier it is, I guess, to sort of, yeah, not see what happened. I also think there's this kind of zoomer. The way that you consume violence on social media just, I think, totally desensitizes you to its reality. And like, I do think that the flippancy that you see with people actually showing like footage of, you know, the planes flying into the towers and sort of almost this sense of, I wonder if there's this kind of sense of irreality around it

for some of the people who didn't live through it of like, Did this thing really happen? You know what I mean? Like I wonder if that's kind of what explains. I mean, this is a generation of people that joke about. What is the one who can't, who is that famous woman who can't see or hear? Oh, Helen, Helen Keller. The Helen Keller truthers to believe that she's faking it.

Like there isn't an irreverent sort of like desire to just go after whatever the sacred cows are, which I understand. I will just say on violence, I realize I was thinking about this. just maybe it was like last week or something. And it occurred to me, because people were making an argument about Zoomers and violence and how they think about it. You can't help but do that

when you're talking about Charlie Kirk stuff and Luigi stuff. And like, wow, it seems everyone is super into violence these days. And it's increasingly bipartisan. I think it really started on the left where it went out of control, but the right is mimicking it now. All of these things. All true.

And yet, when I was a teenager, people were going on these crazy weird internet sites and watching like executions. In college, I remember people seeing like ISIS executions and sharing the most heinous, like killings and things were suddenly available. The internet in that era was very wild. I would say it was in many ways much more wild than what we see today. I think there are just way more people on the internet today. And maybe the era of no rules was in some way safer for what was then,

modern morality than today. Like we're coalescing around a new set of moral rules where violence is more centered. Whereas maybe back then it was like, oh, yikes, gross. But also I felt pretty desensitized. I mean, again, in college, I remember, was it college? I think it was it was college or right after when ISIS was going wild. And suddenly it was like, you know, watching people be burned alive and beheaded and all that shit.

It was, it was wild. It was really crazy. It's going to be so interesting to follow. the Mania Marada documenting this because, you know, it's going to be happening in a, you know, decentralized Twitter ecosystem. It's going to be like a preview of like what it would have been like to watch 9-11 happen on Twitter instead of like you mentioned that like unified media landscape. So that's going to be a really interesting to watch him document all of that. If you're building a company, you need Monaco. No, not the luxurious playground for the global elite.

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for weeks. There's no way we can't talk about it. Riley, tell me about the power of postpartum depression psychosis. Yeah, now we move from the cheerful topic of mass murder via terrorism to like a small scale murder via women hopped up on Prozac. So the Lindsay Clancy trial has concluded in a mistrial after one lone male juror, a stalwart in a sea of estrogen held out and refused to find Clancy not guilty for the crime of killing her kids after the other jurors argued she was in the throes of postpartum psychosis and therefore did not bear criminal responsibility. Another juror said of the male holdout in an interview with a local news station, he just had a hard time getting over the fact that she viciously killed her kids. Fascinating. This, of course, follows weeks of discussion about the trial online. like you mentioned, spearheaded by America's lovely true crime girlies on TikTok,

who speculated that Lindsay's husband Patrick was the real killer of the Clancy children because of his mean demeanor and his horoscope sign. I'll get your guys' thoughts on Clancy before we get into the whole social media addiction of it. What did we make of the trial and of this new precedent that women apparently have license to kill if they're crazy? and whether that makes me in danger of my ex-girlfriend. I think, per the rules of the internet, I've got to give it to Sajana to start, right? I think that you have to educate me on this,

because I have been lost. I mean, oh my God, where to start. I think that, I mean, I sort of take issue. I think that as a society, we need to revisit the definition of legal insanity. I mean, it varies by state. but the reality is the way that some of these laws are written, there is this kind of broad provision in some states whereby if a jury determines that you're insane

and unaware of what you're doing, and I mean, there's a bunch of other conditions that, you know, you need to meet, you can not be convicted of murder. And like we see this, I think, in other cases, I mean, the kind of paradigmatic example that comes to mind is like the crazy person who's got, you know, 17 prior convictions, who pushes someone in front of a subway or, you know, like dumps gas on them and lights them on fire. We've had tons of these kinds of stories in the country. And I sort of see the Lindsay Clancy stuff on some level as just another instance in this really, you know, distorted kind of branch of our league.

system where we give, it seems to me, as a non-lawyer, a lot of deference to the mentally insane and very little deference to the innocent victims of the mentally insane who are extremely numerous. So that's my kind of like meta take, I guess, on Lindsay. I mean, we can get into the specific. I mean, I agree with a lot of what you said. I think it is, I think it is really a question of what do we do with crazy people moving forward like that that i'm aligned like that is the problem here in this case i mean in massachusetts specifically it wasn't even like they had to prove that she was crazy right it was more the state had to prove that she wasn't crazy which is i don't know how you how do you do that how do you prove beyond reasonable doubt that this

person was not entirely crazy that's maybe the the first obvious question but then i have i have all these really broad questions, which is like, I don't know, is a serial killer who stalks like 20 different people over the course of 10 years and eats them also crazy? That sounds, he seems crazy to me, but I also want him executed. Like, I don't necessarily care that he's crazy. And why are we, are we executing people like that, but not people like her? Why does, why is one crazy acceptable and one crazy not acceptable? I have a hard time thinking of almost anybody consciously, like, I'm going to go murder someone. And, and, and it's, It's not self-defense and it's not, you know, war or something where which is essentially an abstracted form of self-defense or a projected form of self-defense maybe.

I have a hard time thinking of those people is not in some way crazy. And yet I don't care. I think it's like this whole entire concept of, well, I wasn't in my right mind, therefore, is I think it's just I think it's just bullshit. You know, in the case of Clancy, I don't know what I would have done on that jury. I want justice for the three women that she, I mean, this woman, I don't want to get graphic here, but we're talking about a woman stalking around the house, her three small children, like, hunting them,

killing them one by one as the others ran and screamed in horror. It's wild that we're just like, like nothing, nothing is done. No one goes to prison for that. There's no one, not her, not the people, if we're saying it was the drug people that are responsible now is the thing, Are they going to prison? Is her doctorate? Someone, someone's got to go to jail for that.

It's crazy that no one's going to jail for that. So yeah, I think it's like you back up. We got to change, we got to change the sort of the broad legal landscape. But there is this interesting tech element to this entire story, which goes back to what we were talking about with 9-11 and the way that people consume information now. You know, 20 years ago, people would have consumed one story about Lindsay Cansey. I have no idea what that would have been in that world. It was a long time ago. We're a different country. But today, I mean, depending on what social media platform you're on, you have a completely different reality surrounding this story that you're following.

And on TikTok, not only was it like we're showing empathy for this woman, we're standing by here. I mean, we've got to talk about all of the women wearing pink, going to the courthouse. They have, they're not, it's not a small amount of people. I thought at first, these are certainly nuts. I don't want to be doing nutpicking. I'm not going to engage in this. I even hit up my friends who were more like true crime girls to be like, you know, this isn't real, right? It's a movement and it all disseminated on TikTok and a big part of it was not just like, we got to talk about postpartum.

A big part of it was like, she didn't do it. I mean, this is really a level of wild delusion that we are now kind of super steeped inside of. It's been a year since the pod was on. We would touch on these topics sort of a lot. I would say we've really crossed the Rubicon here into the realm of like total normalization of conspiratorial thinking. We're talking about a world where immediately following Eric, uh, Charlie Kirk's murder, the conspiracy that Erica Kirk, uh, was responsible for this or the Israel government also in some way maybe working with her. Like that is a, that is a hugely

popular conspiracy now on, on the, on the right wing to the point where this like trune slaying that should have been this galvanizing moment for, you know, the right wing for generations is overshadowed by by this thing. And then now this, I wouldn't even say this is not necessarily a left wing thing. I see women from all political stripes, but all TikTok users, tumbling down this rapid hole. I don't even know where to begin. Where do you begin with this? It's so interesting. I think there's a strand that you're identifying, which is super interesting, which is that, you know, maybe, probably because of this massive breakdown institutional trust, a lot of which was accelerated during the pandemic. And, you know, obviously

there was an enormous amount of conflicting information that was coming out of big institutions then. Then maybe you had this sort of real sense that there are no more mediators, you know, gatekeepers of the truth. And every person is empowered to find his or her own truth, regardless of how, you know, intelligent or how much access to information, real information they actually have. The true crime thing, though, is interesting. Like, it makes me think of that podcast that went super viral years ago. I think it was called Serial. Oh, serial.

Phenomenal. Yeah, phenomenal. And, and, like, change the game. Anyway, as an aside, I just think that the true crime genre, the attractiveness of the true crime genre to, it is interesting that it's so attractive to women. I actually don't know. Maybe it's this kind of like almost puzzle kind of thing

that you're doing or like I don't really. It's spooky. It's like it's sexy. You know, he loved me so much that he killed me maybe. I don't know. I can, I have a lot of, one of my best friends is varying the true crime, but she's also super grounded in reality.

So it's tough. I think it's like, this doesn't feel necessarily like a true crime moment to me. This feels much more like, like a social media psychosis situation. I don't even know. What do you?

I don't know what you call it because I look at it and I'm like, at this point there are so many people who think this way. I'm talking to normal people. I'm talking to friends of my family about this and they're like, she didn't do it. She didn't kill her kids.

She admitted to killing her kids. The lawyer is not arguing that she didn't kill her kids. The case is not about whether or not she killed, we all know she killed her kids. We have timestamps. We have video footage of the dad being out of the house. Like, we know everything. What we don't know is whether or not she's crazy. The case wasn't even about that. So like, what is driving these people to do it? One, but then in these numbers, when there are so many people who think this, I start thinking, am I the crazy one?

I mean, I might be. This is, this is, I think, the groups are too large at this point to be like, oh, those are just some some lunatics who believe a crazy thing or who are into a crazy thing. It's not even like the Luigi stuff, which was, wow, it's super grisly that these people think this way. You know, they don't seem to think of other people who they disagree with politically as humans. This is like these people see a different, they're in a different reality. And it seems to be constructed largely online. Yeah, it is disturbing the extent to which we live in completely different realities from people on different timelines. I mean, because I'm not on TikTok and I saw some of the TikTok.

girly conspiracies. But I guess my sense is like, look, if you're scrolling TikTok five hours a day and it's your main news source and your algorithm is tailored to provide you content that is from people who think that Lindsay Clancy was innocent, I mean, that is your reality. Like you don't have, you are not accessing the other information that, you know, someone who's just reading a sort of mainstream news outlet that's providing them information about the trial has. And so in that world, it's kind of like it makes sense that these people maybe believe that she didn't do it because that's the extent of the information they have. And it is scary, though, because it's like, well, how do you live in a, how do you share a country with people like that who just have

access to a completely different set of facts? I think that, I think like the breakdown of institutions and these centralizing forces obviously had a lot of positive, you know, effects that, you know, I think you've written a lot about in terms of the breakdown of the censorship regime and this kind of, like, heavy-handed schoolmarm control of what information could come out. But I think we're now reckoning with like, okay, a lot of the censorship is maybe gone, but what do you do when people literally don't live in the same realities? Well, there's nothing you can do. There's nothing, if you can't re-centralize the dissemination of information, if you can't re-centralize that,

if it's totally decentralized, I think that this is just a natural effect of that. People are going to be living in different realities, and they're not going to be just slightly different realities. They're going to be very, very, very wildly different realities, which is super wild to me because all of the information that could challenge all of your biases or all of your assumptions or anything that you think is also right next door,

but we don't see it. You mentioned the algorithm a second ago, which I think is so important. I was talking to, talk to two different journalists about this, who are certainly politically quite left of me, and they have friends who are way more left than me and hate me and us,

Pirate Wires, but they are super friendly, and we chat often on controversial topics, so I like to get a sense of where their heads at and why they think the way they do about certain things when I'm genuinely confused. I like to ask them about what, they're seeing just what are you seeing on Twitter the first one we were talking about some

unrelated subject and I started thinking man we really are not seeing the same version of whatever the story was that we were talking about and so I I had mentioned something about um Islam and radical Islam and um you know what are the beliefs of the average Muslim in America how popular are the Islamist, like very sort of extreme radical views among American Muslims. These are questions that we really don't have good answers to because there's not a lot of great polling data on this. There are always some polls. But when you go into Dearborn or something, no one wants to talk. And so I don't think we really have a good sense of this answer. And I had mentioned casually, you know, like, you know, radically imams talking about their goal in America,

you know, to make it, you know, entirely Muslim and how the importance of Sharia and centering all these things. And she was just like, yeah, I mean, I've never seen any of those videos. Wait, how have you never, you never seen a radical American Muslim video? That's like a main kind of video that I see. I see a new one of those videos. Every week I see a new radical Muslim in America saying some radical Muslim shit, which did not make me think, oh, you're ignorant. it made me think like, wow, what are we being fed and why? And then who is who is right? I mean, you could, I don't know who's right. I don't know, I don't know if I am maybe too overly skeptical of this sort of thing or critical of this sort of thing. I don't know if she's wrong to be more skeptical of it. I know the information that I'm seeing and that she's not. The next person was even crazier to me because I was, cat, we were talking about, she had asked me if I had seen anything about a story, which I had not seen anything about, uh, on my timeline, which was Gavin Newsom had an affair with, uh, some,

it was like some guy who worked for his campaign's wife, I think, like 15 years ago. Did you hear about this? I didn't hear anything about this story. Apparently, lives, it was an old story though. Apparently it was, I googled it right after she asked me about it. And I was like, oh shit, like the lips are going wild. But they care about this story. I don't give a shit about it.

I didn't hear about it. That was the first I'd ever heard about it from. like a committed lib and I thought wow that's that's fascinating I didn't hear anything about that somehow Elon Omar came up and I casually mentioned um her brother who she married and uh and she was like she said what and I was like what do you like what do you mean what do you mean what like I like obviously yeah like who knows maybe you're going to push back think I'm crazy for saying this she had never even heard she had never even heard the conspiracy theory that Elon Marr Elon Omar married what was it like her her stepbrother or her half was like her half what was it

Riley? No. Am I being brought into this? The most extreme it's this woman married her brother. Okay. And she did it. I believe it was immigration fraud. I don't think he was on a full 100% brother, but he was up there. And the real story here, the real takeaway here is that she committed immigration fraud. But the fact that this girl said to me that she had never, she'd never even, it wasn't like she didn't agree with the conspiracy or thought it was mean or she thought it was racist,

all appropriate, whatever. I expect that, those kinds of pushbacks on the internet. She had never even heard it. I said, Elon Omar marrying her brother. To me, that's like the main thing about her. That's like, that is the number one thing that I hear about her. I cannot believe that you've never even heard that. And I think that we are actually really not appreciating how different our information diets are. I think it's like it always used to be kind of different. Once we started doing algorithmic shit, I think today, I think they're really wildly different. And, and that's a very difficult thing for us to confront. because we're living in our own minds to a large extent.

We're not sharing these things. They're not public. We don't have a sense of how different our information diets are. And I think it's worth looking at. I think it's not just worth looking at. I think it's something that we're really going to have to look at. I think it's a massive problem. And it's way bigger certainly than I appreciated it until very, very recently.

Yeah. What you're saying makes me think that the experience that we currently have that each one of us has in our individual timelines, is almost like, I mean, you know, pre-internet, you could be part of a subculture, right? And like, you know, maybe you were super into punk subculture and you had all your friends who were punk and you listen to punk music and whatever. But you were probably still aware that you were situated within a subculture that existed in a broader, you know, superculture. And you sort of saw yourself as in opposite, or maybe not in opposition, but like within this thing or. It's counterculture. You were encounter to the culture.

You were encountered to the culture, sure. Counterculture implies a culture. Exactly. And so you had this sense of positionality. But there is this thing about the kind of like totalizing effect of the timeline, right? Where you like open up your phone and it seems like everyone is talking about this thing. Like everyone knows that Y'all and Omar, you know, married her half brother or brother or whatever. I certainly thought.

Wait, we all thought, right? And then you go, maybe you like, I mean, for me the, yeah, the crazy moment. or when I talk to a friend who lives in another city who is not on, you know, my corner of Twitter or whatever, or not on Twitter at all. And they have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. And it just becomes apparent to me that everything that we are concerned about, everyone who we think has cultural status is completely distinct. Probably like there is less daylight between the kinds of things that, you know, you and I consume on Twitter and what, like, I don't know, someone in another country who's also on, like, tech politics, Twitter consumes, then between us and someone in San Francisco who's just, like, in a completely different corner of the information ecosystem, which is insane. Yeah, I think it's like, you could be on the same platform and experience this, like Twitter, or then,

as we're sort of touching on, I think it becomes even more extreme when you hop from one to the other. So from Twitter to TikTok, for example, or threads. Well, I would watch, I would, threads is a great place to go for reality television conversation.

So I would dip in over there once in a while to trash the ladies. Wait, what reality shows are you watching? All of the housewives. Okay. Yeah, there's not. a housewife. I mean, there are housewives I haven't seen yet, but there's not a housewife that I won't enjoy. Um, huge fan of the housewives. Uh, huge fan of traitors as well, though there's

less to really talk about with that show because it's, it's less pure drama and it's kind of like a cartoony version of the drama. I love like the real drama. Um, well, none of it's real, but the point is you can talk about it on threads. And so I would be exposed to all of their other crazy bat shit ideas and topics that they're discussing. Um, then this was about I haven't actually done this in maybe it was like eight months. There was a little more overlap, though it was the sort of bizarre world version of what we were talking about on Twitter. It would be, I mean, the opposite. It would be all of this sort of general sentiment about a topic would be inverted on threads.

Every now and then, though, I'm not even every now on that, maybe once a week. I would tune in and I would discover an entire story that was actually quite a big deal that just wasn't being discussed in my corner of Twitter, really. really at all. And to my own detriment, I felt like it was helpful for me to be on this other platform that was very different because there was a lot about the world that I just had no idea about that really mattered a lot. And yeah, I think you're right. I think you're super right about, especially the idea that there are people in foreign countries who are just super online in the exact same ways that maybe we are, who probably have more sense of what's going on, or at least as we see it, than like even our own family members.

And I don't know what to do with that. I don't know how you people don't take these things seriously for some reason, but I take the internet very serious. I take the where you get your information about the world from, extremely serious. Maybe it's like the main thing that we talk about at, Pyro Wires it sometimes feels. And certainly the thing that I have been super fascinated by obsessed with since 2020, maybe even before 2020, whenever I wrote Jump, is when I was really deciding these were important ideas. and important topics, which have only become more so. I don't know how you stay a country if you guys don't. It's not about disagreeing with reality.

It's about seeing a different reality. I don't know how you maintain any kind of cohesion necessary to the existence of the nation state without that. And yeah, it's like, okay, so this woman doesn't know about Ilana Mar's brother, who she married. Is that the end of the world? I don't know. I'm more concerned about like what else don't we

know about each other you know like these are these are quite important topics you know we're we can't agree on on politics obviously immigration is a really good example of this where it's just like how are these people completely pro open borders

which is what I consider to be the opposition that we if you have the position that we should get rid of immigration, cosmos enforcement, what you're saying, if there's no enforcement, then the border is effectively open. Like,

how can you get there? And I think it's like, well, maybe you get there because you have it, you're reading a totally different book. Like, like,

it's a totally different book with an obvious conclusion to them that is only different to me because we're just, we are just seeing completely different things. Kind of bleak. How do we fix it?

Is there a way to fix it? I think we all got to get on threads, probably. I mean, we got to get on threads. We need friends. We all need friends. on these different platforms. I've tried every now that at pirate wires. Riley, I had you be a

blue sky correspondent for a moment. It seemed, it seemed cruel. I think it might have violated. It was torture. It was torture. But yeah, to your point, it did give a totally different perspective that I, you know, never get in my daily life on Twitter. So, yeah, but it was torture. Hmm. Saj, what are you doing? What's your information diet? I mean, it is a lot of Twitter. I also read a lot of things on Substack, though, and my substack algorithm is completely different from my Twitter algorithm because I follow a lot of like, I don't know, sort of like fiction writers and people talk talk more about literature and they are just kind of in a different world. Although sometimes, and I know I don't want to, you know,

get ahead of ourselves, but sometimes things do break out of containment as you see some of the AI discourse and then you see interesting effects. But yeah, I mean, my diet is, I try to do a balance of Twitter, substack, like mainstream media, I do try to read, like, you know, the Financial Times. I do read the New York Times just to get a sense of, you know, what

the what the paper of record for, you know, a lot of Americans is saying. And Wall Street Journal and that kind of thing. And then I also try my best to have friends and, you know, family in my life who have completely different jobs and interests.

And then I'm always learning things from them about things I should care about that have not at all entered my frame of reference. We also have, there is the political component of this that we have to talk about because it's not as if there's not action targeting social media. I think we generally maybe, if everyone's not verbalizing the anxieties in this way,

everyone shares some kind of, for most people seem to share some kind of anxiety. We have this sense that something is completely off about the way that we're consuming information and especially, it seems to me, the way our children are consuming information. So you just have this massive lawsuit that Facebook got trounced over where now they are expected to pay, let's see, $18 billion over 10 years. Only $12 billion is guaranteed. The other $5 billion is contingent on other major platforms, YouTube and TikTok, agreeing to similar terms. where the state sued them for poisoning their children, essentially. I'm really, really giving the TLDR here.

Facebook lost. They have to give the states this money. The money's not going to parents. It's not clear with the money. I don't understand just like the terms of this lawsuit. Like why is the state getting paid for Facebook being toxic for teenagers? I don't fully understand that. But there is this question of like, is it safe for kids to be online?

Is it safe for teenagers to be online? At what age are you allowed on social media? how are you navigating yourself these questions? What do you guys think about that? Should anything be done about the scourge of children reading about the world online? I mean, some countries have already banned teenage access to social media, right? I think like Australia. The UK has their idea law, which she...

I mean, we jumped right. The UK law was so obviously about getting people, it's ending, in my opinion, ending anonymity online. If you're forcing each verification, then with a... the ID, then now you have an idea on everybody who's using these platforms. And that is, I think, what the UK wants. It's a very, very scary, censorious authoritarian country is what they're becoming. I mean, they've written about it. Orwell was right there like, yo, this is who we're going to be.

This is coming. There's a reason that all that crazy shit came out of the UK. Australia has a version of it that it seems like people are easily gaming. I don't quite entirely know what Facebook's going to cook up over here to, to fix this problem without abolishing, well, they're not a very anonymous. They're going to have to get rid of anonymity. I don't think there's a way to do this without getting rid of anonymity online. I don't agree with that part, but like what about the part of we have these parents who are claiming their kids are like suicidal and stuff? Like what do we do? I mean, I do always think about the

Tyler or the creator tweet of like just maybe the kids should close their computer. I mean, I think that like the thing that gives me hope actually is that there is this weird nostalgia among young people, Zoomers, but also like Gen Alpha, for like 2000s era technology. Like people are buying Walkmans and they, I mean, I think, you know, the piece you guys published a few weeks ago, Mitchell's piece on Vice that sort of sparked this like incredible wave of nostalgia apparently among Zoomers. Like clearly there is. Like, clearly there is. this longing. Like young people, I think, are aware

that they're being screwed over in some ways by, like, growing up completely addicted to their phones and social media platforms. And, like, my hope is maybe there's a movement. I don't think it should come from top-down government imposition of, like, you know, age verification laws, which I think, as you say, are just going to be... I mean, there are really just ways to...

make anonymity illegal. But I do think, you know, if there's a cultural movement that's just like, hey, what if we all, you can just go bowling with your friends, right? Like, Zoomers are apparently super nostalgic about bowling, and it's like, there's still bowling alleys. You know, like, you can just. I know. I'm kind of frustrated by the lack of.

That's what, I mean, isn't an addiction and what do you do about it? I think that's, those are the questions. We got to move on, because we're running out of time. here. We had a couple more topics we have to hit. But before we do move on, I want to know from both of you guys one, should social media be banned for these young kids?

Two, what would you have done if you were on Clancy's trial? You were the jury on her trial. Maybe start with that one and then should the do we need to shut down TikTok? No, it shouldn't be banned because I'm very skeptical

that there won't just be some Chinese social media that emerges that everyone just latches onto that doesn't do these, you know, uh, policies. So, no, I'm against that. What I would do on the Lindsay Clancy trial, uh, hope and pray that the other women on the jury don't kill me as I attempt to be a brave holdout like that. One guy did, so. Yeah, I mean, on the Clancy trial, I think have to be a holdout. It is a screwed up situation in which it seems like, I mean, who knows what the, the specific definition of legally insane is in Massachusetts, but, um, you know, she murdered her three children, and it just seems like unconscionable that

that there could be no punishment for that. And then on social media, I just, I don't know, I don't think you ban it for kids. I don't know. I mean, I just think there's too many negative externalities, as you say, and like, I don't know. I advocate for self-discipline, but I know that that's maybe optimistic for people whose prefrontal cortexes aren't developed. Well, there you have it. Solved. Moving on. We've got to talk about the AI death cult.

Yeah, now's totally the part where we stop talking about death, except no, we are going to talk about the total extinction of humanity. That is what one Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic. That's what he alleged this week in a tweet thread where he announced his. his resignation. Jacob said, quote, I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both Open AI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving intelligence and gambling with our lives. He went on to add, the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. To which Evan Huberinger, a current employee at Anthropic, replied, Jacob is correct here. We,

do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it is a greater than 10% chance within the next decade. This has now set off a firestorm with tons of people, buying the doomerism at face value, others accusing this of being just another op to regulate the shit out of AI, perhaps in an attempt at regulatory capture. Where do we land, Power Wires podcast? Well, I think the idea that he's, is some kind of op, I don't buy that. I think, that I think that what you're looking at is a guy who definitely wanted to be a safety influencer. You don't go to a company for six weeks and then at what point did he reach out to the Washington Post? When did he compose this thing? When did he set up his whole media blitz? That's not a lot

of time. He went in knowing he was going to do this, is my read of the situation. But I also think that that's the kind of thing that many, many AI safetyists would do. That's a very normal thing that I've seen that in the way that they think about this. I think it's perfectly in keeping with their behavior generally. I think that many of them believe that this is an existential, almost all of them believe this is an existential, that's what an AI safetyist is, that's an existential threat, the whole world could end. They have a responsibility to spread the message. And then why did this thing take off? It's obvious why it took off. I mean, he definitely is friends with all the AI safetyists, huge ones. They all massively amplified him immediately. And then the important piece,

which I think people may be, maybe this is the piece that people aren't understanding, is this caught fire among a more normie audience in a way that previous AI safety things, if not, just because of the timing of it all. I think it took the average person time to catch up and like be using AI and be thinking about AI and for these, you know, anxieties to penetrate into the mainstream. It took a moment for that to happen. And it was just primed. We were, it's like, you know, California wildfires. The Tinder had been building up for a while. And this was the guy who caught who caught who caught who caught fire and um i mean let's just talk maybe about you can talk about that piece first and then i have some thoughts on on you know the actual risk here

uh sange what do you think about what do you make of the dude i mean yeah i i the op thing seems uh i mean obviously it was like coordinated in that he um i guess had an exclusive with the wall street journal before the tweet went live and has been making the rounds on on, you know, media platforms. But again, that makes complete sense. I mean, if your goal was to raise awareness because you're genuinely convinced that this is going to have, you know,

non-trivial existential risk for humanity, then it makes sense that you would do a coordinated media thing. And I think it is this interesting example, as I was sort of hinting at before, of what happens when these discourse that for years, I mean, this has been something that people have been talking about for years in tech Twitter on, you know, less wrong, you know, in whatever, the kind of EA community, rationalist community,

when these concerns break out of their sort of parochial subculture and hit what is left of the mainstream, which clearly there is a mainstream in some, sense where, you know, I think by this point, the average person, well, I don't know, but it seems like a lot of people who don't ordinarily consume AI news have heard of this story. I guess from this sort of information ecosystem standpoint, it does show that stories can still break through, but as you say, they require this kind of priming, which is very interesting. And I sort of wonder, in this case, you know, you had the Open AI Hugging Face incident,

which then kind of, I think, broke. a little bit more into the non-tech discourse when you had, you know, you had Dwar Keshe's piece that went massively viral about like agent civilizations at Open AI, which was this really, uh, instantly captivating narrative on it, right? Because there's sort of this anthropomorphic angle, the AI is coming alive. And my sense is probably that began to percolate into non-tech media. And then this was just the matchstick that lit everything on fire. But the groundwork, as you say, was already laid because you have a lot of concern about

data centers that has been a very kind of normie topic for a while and like data centers consuming water and all this kind of stuff. And then you have this sort of like other track of anti-AI sentiment that is coming I think from a kind of

I mean there's so many disparate threads here, but like there's an aspect of it that's just like, hey you know, this thing is going to all of our jobs or like my kids are using it to cheat on homework and all of this this kind of thing. And so like it was like AI as this kind of bad thing was in the air in Normie circles. But it is yeah, it is interesting that like this is the tweet that sort of took off. People are also using it so much. And it's better than it's ever been. So if you yourself have experience with AI and it seems like a person to you online, which is how most people, I think,

uh, intuit this all, or maybe, um, intuits the wrong word. This is how most people, uh, internalize all of this is like this is a, this is a kind of person talking to me. Um, and it can do anything. Then suddenly this person online, this like digital person that we have plenty of science fiction frameworks for helping us think about this is capable of anything. And then now someone working on it says it's got a one in ten chance of killing everyone that you know you're like I believe that you know like it's it's a it's a quick sort of you can understand that and I think that actually just general exposure to AI is what it took to get there maybe it's worth talking now though just like is it something that we should worry about I was playing

match with the gathering last night we were playing the superhero's edition with a couple of friends and they're decently online they're not as online as online as any of us or any of the people were talking about this stuff. And the one dude was like, I am genuinely worried about this now in a way that I never was. I like, can someone make me not worried about this? He was really scared about the end of the world. He was actually like convinced it was going to happen at this point.

He's like, I just don't know how to not be convinced at this at this point. I mean, it seems like now is the time to be taking the AI safety conversation seriously and to have to like sort of engage with these people and do some introspection and kind of decide where you are. I can get my own sense. I am a little bit anxious for sure. I think that we're dealing with a new technology.

Anytime that it's something really new and really powerful, there are potentially very dangerous externalities, negative externalities, as well as, you know, countless great positive externalities. But in the world of X risk, it only takes one to annihilate everything, right? What do I think the danger is going to be, though?

I think that what we're almost certainly going to see are, it's going to be, I think it'll be hacking based and sort of economic damage will be done. That could be massive and that could itself result in like, you know, we saw how easily the world unraveled during COVID. If banking, like everyone's bank account goes to zero suddenly and there's no way to recover, you know, what anyone is actually worth or owes whoever else, like it's, it's, I can understand how things could unravel really quickly. But what I think most likely is there are. going to be a few high profile, very damaging things that will happen. And probably this stuff is going to centralize under the government. I don't think on this trajectory with people at the lab saying that the whole world is going to end, you know, based on a coin toss, the public is too well primed at this point to be like shut it down.

once one very, very bad damaging thing happens, which I think buys us time. I think with fewer people working on this, the odds of some really rogue thing going wild are diminished. So I don't even have to really, I think we almost don't even have to, well, I don't know.

That's kind of just where I'm roughly touching. I think something bad will happen. It won't be as bad as people frame it. I don't think it's as, certainly not my P-Doom is certainly not one at of ten I think we're going to be okay but I don't know where are you guys sitting? I was feeling spooked a couple nights ago I have to say

but I was spooky. What's that? Yeah, it was spooky for sure. It was spooky, yeah, yeah. I mean, the way I come down on it is I do believe these researchers are being sincere. I think I'm confused as to why there aren't more leaks of internal information

if they, like, you would expect that when they leave, if they really want to... Right. If you believe, like, hey, we need to, all these labs need to open up, open source the models, open source the training data, like, make, you know, make this legible to a broader group of, of people who can sort of, you know, maybe help, I don't know, come to some kind of international consensus, it sounds like is what they're calling for. You would think that they would, yeah, be a little bit more. Okay. So that is also, who gives a fuck about international consensus? That is not how you run something like this. You're not looking for the consensus of the entire world. Can looking, seeking consensus of the entire world is impossible that you cannot even get five Americans in a room at this point to agree 12 Americans in a room to agree that a woman murdered her children. Like if you can't do that, how are we getting the governments of disparate cultures around planet Earth?

to agree on what America should do with artificial intelligence. That's not how we built the atom bomb. That's not how we're going to build AI. And it's like either we're going to build AI or in this environment, who knows what I think maybe that's their plan for actually shutting it down. But certainly we're not going to be able to get any kind of consensus. China is never going to listen to any kind of consensus. And so I think that the best case that these people could hope for is actually nationalization

with someone like Dario in charge of. the entire thing, which is I think what, I mean, I think it's kind of what they want, is my read of their behavior and even just their fucking social media policy. Because I don't know how it doesn't conclude with this eventually. Certainly, once Democrats retake power, this is very, there's plenty of skepticism on the right, tons of it, anti-data center stuff, anti-AI stuff. Of course, I see that on the right as well. It seems like a ubiquitous opinion on the left. So it is going to come. It's going to come because of the things that they themselves have said. And I think it leads to nationalization. But no, there's.

There's never going to be international consensus. We shouldn't even want international consensus. We shouldn't, I don't know why we care about that. I don't know why we're seeking that. Like, that is not, you cannot build anything by committee, let alone by UN consensus. It's wild that we're even having that conversation. Yeah, it's a total pipe dream. I do think the nationalization under Dario thing is really frightening, though.

And it's kind of this like, you get the sense that these people really think they know so much better than anyone else in the world about, not just the nature of this technology, which I do believe that obviously an AI researcher who's deeply embedded at a frontier lab understands the trajectory of this technology better than almost anyone else. But that doesn't mean you understand exactly how it's going to disseminate and affect the world. Yeah, or how it should, which is also the question of me. It's like there's a more question here. How should this be used?

Yeah. What information should be people, should people be exposed to? On a very basic level, let's ignore the X risk and talk about the issue that we're already having, which is the moderation, let's call it, of real information, of real information, the dissemination of actual knowledge that is deemed unsafe for the average person to have or unsafe when stripped bare of whatever nesting that people feel they have to do to get around whatever the social justice rules. the day are. For example, when we're talking about, you know, the most controversial thing I can think about right now would be like, maybe like race and IQ or crime statistics and things like this. Like, these are the kinds of things that people don't want, they don't want to share information that could get people, you know, too excited. There are unlimited ways that this could become dangerous, even if you agree with the caution on these certain issues, that we

already saw during COVID. In so many ways, COVID was this, it was this test run for everything that we're talking about right now, everything from being locked inside your house because of some potential calamity to information and who is entitled to it and why. Like, what happens in the next pandemic when people are trying to understand how the virus works or how viruses work in general? What is that AI going to give us? That comes down not to a question of technology but morality and you know ideology and why just this very small group of people get to determine that for the entire world which is the that and that's why I have a hard time with these people is like you said I think you were just touching on this it's like to me it seems

incredibly arrogant though the X risk stuff I actually do here you know I just think it's gonna play out differently than maybe they're saying I also feel like they're trying to scare us into taking some kind of decisive action. Yeah, to your point, nobody elected anybody at Anthropic. So, like, at least when the government does these things, like, there's some accountability. But it sounds like you guys are buying the regulatory capture angle, maybe a little bit. Because, like, every time something like this comes out, yeah, it's a little bit scary. I'll read about how AI could, like, unleash bio-weapons.

But then in the back of my head, I'm like, okay, is this just a ploy to become, like, the one AI? Listen, I don't think it's a ploy. I don't think it's a ploy. I think these people are really scared of these kinds of things and they talk about them. And I think that the effect it's having is this, though. I don't know how you, I do not know how you are building the most important technology in any of our lives. And everyone at your company is saying it has a very serious chance of killing everybody alive and not invite the kind of scrutiny from the government.

it's now receiving, not just like, let's have a fun conversation, but of course it's now, it's a national, we're talking about a major national security risk. Like the government, I would, I can't even be mad at the Democrats or the Republicans for thinking, okay, well, then we need to shut this down or we need to take over. We need to step in. How could they not think those things when the researchers are saying stuff like this? I just, I don't know. I think that this is, if this makes the thing that this would make impossible first, AI, that's this powerful that can hack anything, would be the internet, our existence online that we've been talking about for the last hour and change. Like this online world that we live in where our money comes from and where we

talk to each other and where we disseminate information and share information and hold secret information, all of that's going to be broken. I actually kind of think that is going to happen. I think that anything that touches the internet probably will be. broken. I think you should anticipate that your text. Nothing's going to be private. And if that happens, in the future is like a, the online, the future of the online, the future of the internet is this crazy cyberscape in which like good AIs are battling bad evil AIs or foreign AIs and no information is safe, then don't we just shut it down? Like it seems like we just leave the internet. It seems like the internet is walled. Maybe you, the few of us go online. It's like

exploring this weird hellscape dimension or something. And things start happening in the real world again. It's like suddenly we're doing newspapers again. Suddenly like banks are using pen and paper again. Suddenly people are going outside again. You're not online dating anymore because you can't trust anything. Like do we just return to the 80s and 90s? And then I think, well, shit, am I an AI safeties?

Because that sounds, I don't know that I hate that. I don't know that I don't like this world. I'm feeling pretty internet poisoned myself at this point. It's like we gave it a shot. Didn't really work. Maybe it is time to shut it down. And the AIs are potentially going to force us to shut it down. I don't know.

What do you think about that? Science fiction scenario that I just laid down. I mean, yeah, it doesn't sound terrible to me. I actually, I want to go back to your point, which I really agree with, that it does feel like, because I, again, I don't think this is a point. I think the X-risk stuff seems plausible on some level, right? I mean, like, you have had these kind of really frightening hacks. I mean, it doesn't, I don't know if, like, all of humanity going extinct necessarily.

No, with damage for sure. Damage. Massive damage. And it does feel like we are not metabolizing the rate of change quickly enough. And so to the extent that, like, maybe this results in a slowdown. of like frontier research and more opportunity for the already incredible models

to like disseminate into the economy. I mean, it feels like we haven't even created like 1% of the startups that need to be created to kind of help metabolize some of this new technological capability. I mean, I think the average person uses AI all the time but it's not clear at all to me that we've come up with the optimal ways

for that used to happen. right? Like a lot of it is just people talking to chat CBT about their relationships. The promise of this thing was like you could learn anything. It would be this tutor. It would kind of, you know, you know, help get rid of all the grunt work in your life and all this kind of stuff, right? And it seems like, yeah, I mean, I share this feeling that like, yeah, maybe, you know, at some point if the government gets involved. I mean, again, I'm very frightened by the idea of centralized overlord, just controlling the most powerful technology of our time. But yeah, some amount of slowdown seems inevitable at this point. And people keep, I guess I'm divided on the China question as well.

It's like, well, if we slow down and they don't slow down, I understand where people are coming from. I think it's worth noting that, like, they're not really. really, I don't really believe that they're going to, I think that China, a big part of their information diet is us. Like, what are we doing and building? What can they steal from us? I'm not convinced that, I'm not convinced that they're going to build, that they're going to end the world without us. And I think it's a risk. I think it is a risk. Listen, I think it's like, the problem with, that we're facing here is that there really are risks in every direction.

There's also sort of uncalculable positive change that is right in front of us that almost no one ever talks about because of the anxiety that everyone has when they enter the unknown. No easy answers here. I do wonder if the AGI scenario where we're talking about this thing coming online, just killing everybody, the Terminator situation, But also it's the birth of a new godlike intelligence or something, like the most extreme version of the of the safetyist sort of dystopia that that you could possibly talk about when you think about that. And as this guy at the magic game, um, was talking about his anxiety. I started to think about what is that,

what would that like extreme world? What would it mean? I used to talk a lot about care a lot about this. We're going on like 18 years ago, 20 years ago. The simulated, uh, the simulator, uh, the simulator. reality. And the idea of the simulated reality, it's like a thought experiment that, you know, if it's possible to create simulations, if it's even possible, if it's even technically, technologically possible, then the likelihood of them being created is, you know, certain. Eventually, on a long

enough time horizon, we will create them. Then if we do create them, these perfectly matrix-like simulations, you could create theoretically an unlimited number of them in which you're simulating entire worlds with people inside of them who are themselves simulated. And if you have countless simulations like that, then what is more likely that you are the one reality that creates the simulated reality technology or that you are one of the countless simulations? That's where the thought experiment begins. But the premise that I explored in a book that you'll never be help define called Citizen Sim. It's a young adult science fiction book. Like 10 years ago, I published this.

What for a future society would be the thing that you would most want to simulate and it seems like your past? Like these history sims would be really interesting. And I think that what I want to simulate would be like my parents' lives. Like what led them to meet each other and what were their lives like? What were their families? What were their parents like? What did they grow up like? What did the world look like back then?

If I were an AGI, I think that I would want to simulate my own birth. And if this is the birth of AGI, then it feels like a really good time to be a simul. It seems like that's, it just, I feel like the simulated reality argument has gone up. The stock is skyrocketing at this point. I'm like, if AGI real simulated reality almost certain, which would cast most of us as main or semi-me, main characters in the story, I think. As a guy who talks about this stuff for a living, the simulating reality,

the AGI wants to know, you know, what were people saying? And we're the ones who'd be saying things. I don't know, what do you guys think? Are we living in a simulator reality? Why are we, why would we be main characters in this, in this scenario? I think that there would be a huge interest. I would certainly have a huge interest in the culture

surrounding my own birth. Oh, I see. Because we're talking about, this. Writing at the intersection of technology, politics, culture, these are the kinds of topics that we talk about. When I say Maine, I mean like millions of main characters. Like, you know, like there are

hundreds of thousands, certainly, of main characters. The simulated, the AGI would want to probably get into the head of every single one of them. There's probably simulations following every single one of them. You want to, you want to really understand the story. You want to understand every single person who even touched

the story. And you know, a significantly powerful machine could do that and is that the world that we're living in. Am I an NPC in your simulation or am I also a main character in this simulation? I think that we, this is like, I mean, this is an ancient philosophical question that we really can't know, you know, if anyone's real but ourselves. I like to believe that you guys are main characters. You're certainly main characters in my life. I don't know if you're, I don't know if you're a main character at the AGI's life.

I suspect. And also you have a long life ahead of you. Who knows what you're going to do. I was actually brushing my teeth this morning like, wait, am I the villain in this story? What if what if I end up doing, like, what if I become something like really fucked up in 10 years? And, and the AGI, what if I am the star of the show, but like, not for the reasons that I hope. Like, it's like, you know, it's like a Hitler simulation that I am like the AGI's version of that maybe. I hope not. I mean, I'm, I'm really not coming for you super intelligence. I, like, am not. Like we're all friends here. I've written very, I would say thoughtfully on the line. I try and hear all sides. I see a lot of good. But anyway, you know, similar to reality. Maybe. Who knows? We got to move on. Okay. So I have an I have a thought. And I think it's a white pill. So shout out to our white pill partner, 8 Sleep on this science fiction tirade that I'm about to rock your world with. I hope. Maybe not. I need help. I need to hear what you guys think about this because I be thinking.

I mean, this is really crazy. I acknowledge that it's crazy, but I do think it's a massive white pill as well. Because if we're in these simulated realities and if the AGI is kind of down with what we've produced, I don't know. Aren't we sort of immortal? Can we sort of do anything? Can't we know anything? Maybe we're also living in a world, I mean, this was the premise of my book where we are alive in the future and we're experiencing our past sort of backwards. I think that we're looking, we're sort of on the cusp right now of all sorts of longevity technology. I think it's, I think there's a lot that's conceivable. I think there's a lot that's positive that we aren't really ever talking about when it comes to AI. And the fact that it's potentially powerful enough to, you know, think of everything, simulate anything.

is one of those things. It is the corollary, right, of something that's capable of annihilating everybody what overnight is that it can do anything. And I don't think we talk enough about that. I don't know.

What are the, I guess my question for you guys, one is this crazy, too. What are the realities that you would like to simulate? What would you like to see? Do you can see anything? Sorry, the first question is...

Did I just like completely actually reset you guys? I actually, totally agree with you that it is a white pill worries about existential risk notwithstanding that we are living in such interesting times and that this technology is capable of solving parts of the millennium prize math problems right like we we to me the worst case scenario is actually just radical boredom like i know that maybe this sounds kind of uh you know flippant or whatever but i i i i

I do, we're living in interesting times. And that alone, I'm, you know, sort of grateful for. The simulation stuff is a total mind trip. I mean, I sort of, my mind kind of rebels against the thought of everything being a simulation, honestly. I mean, I see that it is a plausible thought experiment. But it does seem kind of depressing, right? That there are all these. Yeah, there are these problems with it naturally.

where exactly it kind of it it absolves you of responsibility for your own life it totally you into this headspace where it's like well what does it matter i'm just in a video game it's not even about me whatever i think it's i think you can't think about it that often i think you have to live as if it's not true um but that having been said these days i'm wondering if it's true i'm wondering if it's just true uh oh riley what would you simulate what is what is a what is a reality you would like to simulate. I mean, going full circle, I'd like to simulate the reality of America pre-9-11, which you were talking so fondly about Salon. And to your point, you know, if AI does, you know, lead us to a post-internet world, maybe that is actually in store for us. So I'd

like to relive the nostalgia of the 80s and 90s that you talk so fondly about. Yeah, I mean, what is it even about those eras other than, like the main thing about those eras is that we weren't online. That's what we're, that's what we're thinking about. We're thinking about a world where it's like we're going out to hang out with our friends and, uh, we're super engaged in, in the stuff of being human, uh, you know, community and family and like little league and show, I didn't, I hate it little league, actually. I was not good. I was not good. I was not good. I was the worst at baseball on my team became better as I got older. I think it was a mind game thing. I just didn't believe that I could do it. Then people got in my head. But now I'm great at like basketball and soccer and stuff.

Yeah. I don't know what I would. I know what I would say. I do know what I would simulate. Yeah, I would simulate the past. And so I think it's like a really good version of one. But isn't that beautiful? Like what are the potential, you know, in confronting potential dystopia? If you just give it a little bit of thought, you can generate yourself just almost countless versions of the future that are actually lovely. You know, a future world where this, I don't know, thoughtful, super intelligent entity just wants to know where it came from implies something superhuman that I can empathize with myself, obviously,

because it's a fucking fantasy that I just wrote myself. But to me, that's not less plausible than The Terminator. Like they, when you're talking about something that can do anything, you're talking about something that can do anything. And if it can do anything, why would it do the worst, worst things? You know, and then at ground floor, it's like, I don't know, there are going to be problems and they're going to be good things. And I'm looking forward to the future. Certainly, as you said, Zanjana, it's going to be interesting. And as writers, even as just people, why not be an interesting times?

If you had to choose, I think this is where you would choose. And sometimes I do think that we choose to chose it. Sometimes, and sometimes I do think that we chose it. So whatever you're doing, building a company, building a family, building an army of maga fighters for Christ, you need good sleep. AteSleep is seriously advanced technology for producing good sleep. The pod is their smart mattress cover with side-specific cooling, temperature adjustment, and snoring prevention, thank God.

Get $500 off the eight-sleep pod at www.8.com slash piratewires podcast. Or you can use the code pirate wires podcast at checkout. exclusively for Pirate Wire's listeners. All right, it's time for our business segment, sponsored by our good friends at Autopilot. Thanks, guys. We're about to talk about something. It's not going to be that controversial, I promise. Riley, take it away.

Yeah, we are discussing the recent H-1B war that happened online on the heels of Vivek Ramoswamy's infamous Christmas crash-out. This newest one, it all started when President Trump decided to tack on a new one. $103,265 fee for H-1B visa petitions. That was struck down earlier when he tried to do it through executive order. After this newest proposal, VP Vance,

he wrote, if an American corporation needs workers, it should hire and train Americans. This recently got criticized for DEI by one VC and eventually spilled over into an all-out timeline war on the topic

of skilled immigration. Palmer Lucky chiming in, Paul Graham chiming in. Salana during all of this, you took the time to understand everything there is about America's immigration system. Everything. So I will kick everything. Everything. Everything. You are the expert. So I will kick it over to you if you can tell us how to H1 be an American. Yes. So obviously what attracted to me first of the story was just the drama. I mean, you know me. You've got Palmer Lucky fighting with Paul Graham. We do have some YC people in there. You can read about all that, not really a summary of that really is all I got into in the piece.

Because while that was what first attracted me to this thing, there is the question of the H-1B. That is the giant visa in the room with us right now, you know? Like, we have to talk about this thing. I have avoided it for a while. You referenced Vivek, very important detail. Vivek Ramoswamy got absolutely murdered over this question back in 2024. His framing of it was like, again,

and we've seen this, we saw this in this most recent dustup as well, there's this idea that the, like, there's like H1B culture and it's better in some sense than American culture and that H1Bs are, you know, more hardworking and more intelligent and Americans are not. And this is framed as a labor question. And it's like, you have one group of people saying, well, you should focus on Americans and you have another group of people saying, Americans suck actually, which is wild to hear from people who just got here by the way. And I really recommend, even if you do have those opinions, guys, what are we doing here? Why are you saying that out loud? Why do you expect people not to get upset by that? I am upset by that. And I am not even super opposed to the concept

of, certainly not a concept of skilled migration. And I finally realized, okay, we got to dig in and learn about this. Now, my assumption of H-1B that I think a lot of people share is a super small program. And it is for extremely talented people. And it's an immigration visa or it's a it's a it's a dual intent temporary visa for immigrants. I thought of it as like one of many. I conceived of the immigration in America as something like millions of people a year. And then they were just like 80,000 over here who were like, hey, we're really smart. And why wouldn't you let them in? So the very first thing I realized, which kind of rocked my world, totally reframed how I was thinking about this and also helped me realize how much I had not thought about.

this to my embarrassment for so long, something so important, is it's not a minor program. 85,000 people a year does not seem like a lot. But if you are a foreigner and you want to come to America, you do not have a path to do that other than breaking the law, claiming asylum, often fraudulently, anchor babying, and then hoping that that anchor baby and you get along well enough until age 18 or I think it's 21, so the anchor baby can sponsor you then for citizenship, or really one of these visa programs. Okay, we're looking at one of the temporary, it's a temporary work visa. There's the H-1B, the L-1, and the 01 that are dual intent, which allows you to petition

for your green card while you're on the temporary visa. And if you don't get one of those, your only other bet is a 55,000 person a year diversity lottery. So just right off the bat, it's extremely. important. And then it's just riddled with kind of, I would say, endless problems. It was the answer to our immigration problem at the time, this idea that we were not bringing in the best. So it was like, well, let's rework this in a skills-based direction. Also, you had tech people back then saying, we need more tech workers. So we create this thing. It's then exploited for like three

decades by consulting firms, which often are literally Indian companies, hiring, almost exclusive exclusively Indians, Indian National, 70% of this program about was benefiting Indians primarily, and then flooding a lottery-based system with applicants to kind of drown out everybody there. I want to say this is often framed as something usually on the center left that is beneficial to the tech industry. I think it has been, in part, beneficial to the tech industry. But every single founder that I talked to who actually uses the H-1B programmer tries to, has also expressed immense frustration with it. So before we even talk about the labor question,

let's just talk about, like, is it benefiting tech? You know, separate from, is it good for the country, separate from how should we think about immigration generally? Like, is it good for tech? Endlessly, what would happen in the tech industry at our most elite companies is they would apply for this visa. And then some consulting firm would apply

a thousand times more often with a thousand times more candidates who are not necessary. necessarily that brilliant. When you're talking about consulting firms, you're really just hiring for people who can code. It's not the best and the brightest, though there are some who are incredibly brilliant. They're all sort of in the same pool if you're not going for the 01, which is like the really exceptional, the really exceptional talent. So I think there are issues. What I learned pretty fast was like, one, it's a major program. In fact, it's like the primary path into the

country. Two, there are many structural issues that don't even benefit American technology companies that need to be addressed and that Trump is trying to address right now. And then I would say, I mean, and we can talk about this in a second. Sanch, I want to hear your thoughts on H1B generally before we get into it. Then there's a lot of like sort of general immigration stuff. We can talk about the path to immigration and seating and families and stuff in a moment. But first, like, what is your read of the H1B thing just from a sort of tech industry perspective? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think that basically, I mean, the thing I find so bizarre about this whole conversation is it does feel like on paper, most people could agree that you want to minimize the situation that you're describing, right? Where you have these like predatory foreign consulting firms taking advantage of clearly a poorly written or like as is right now, a poorly, you know, conceived of immigration path. And we want to, you know, facilitate the immigration

of the people you're describing, the exceptional tech and research tech. talent. And clearly the status quo is not doing that. And so, you know, we need to have some kind of reform. I mean, I think the Indian dimension of this whole story I find kind of interesting. I mean, I actually didn't know somehow until reading your piece that Indians are the second largest immigration group to the U.S. I didn't know until writing it. That was shocking to me. Yeah, that was really surprising to me. I sort of expected. that after Mexico, I don't know, you'd have another Latin American country maybe.

But I do think that there is this kind of... I sort of wonder if... Like, we are talking now about this kind of specific, you know, these policy loopholes that need to be closed. Obviously, the immigration system is filled with these kind of bizarre, you know, people who are not allowed in, people who are allowed in. The diversity lottery, as you say, is absolutely insane on its face. Like, why are we just, you know?

Literally Pokemon for races. They're like, well, we don't have enough, I don't know, like Eskimos, got to let them in. What? Are we trying here? This is wild. It is a really unsurious system as it stands. But, like, beyond that kind of policy question, the, like, the real frenzy that this debate inspires seemingly on like a six-month cadence, I think of almost as a process.

I think of almost as a proxy in some ways for a general public or like a growing resentment towards tech as a as a cultural force, as a political force. Like every issue with tech, there are 50 different reasons that people are mad and they tend to project their own politics onto it

as a blank canvas to a certain extent. But one of the things I, as I was research, I spent a long time just like actually learning about the immigration stuff. And before I even had my opinion, I think I went in kind of skeptical of the critics of H-1B, to be honest. I really felt like tech was not a big part of the immigration story. And so why are we even being discussed? Like certainly this is the best you could possibly have. And you might actually think on net, this has been great immigration.

And that's fine. I'm not even disputing that. My point is that the reason tech is centered in this conversation is I think, because it should be. The H-1B, the L1 and the O-1, so the L-1 is for multinational corporations bringing executives over. The O-1 is for, as we mentioned, exceptional talent, like the kind of people who'd be working at a frontier model lab or some crazy nuclear program. They'll probably be not that because of security clearance. In fact, I talked to someone that got a company in a more top-secret space, and he was avoiding it for that reason. Every one of these things, though,

the way immigration works in this country is not really for individuals. Okay. Individuals are applying for visas, but immigration is structured in such a way as once you get a temporary work visa, like one of the three I just mentioned, or you win that diversity lottery, or you get asylum. Well, actually, I'm not sure about asylum. So the way immigration works in this country is once you get one of these three dual intent temporary visas or, you know, you win the diversity lottery, you're able to bring over your spouse. and your children. Once you become a citizen, once, so, and those people then gave, they gain their own status. So now, once you apply for citizenship and you get your citizenship, you can bring over your siblings. You can bring over your parents. Okay. Then once they become citizens,

they can do the same thing. And so the system of immigration is designed in such a way, uh, as it is going to bring over entire families, extended families, like, you know, communities, not just single people. Uh, and, uh, and And so, you know, when we talk about every year about maybe a million people getting their citizenship or something, the overwhelming majority of those people being because they have a family who's a citizen, I had a question. I was like, well, that's interesting. Like, how does that work that a citizen has all this family abroad? And it works because you either get one of these visas or you are an anchor baby. And those are your options.

So if you're not an anchor baby or you're not doing this illegally, then this is really the only path. Now, of those three major temporary work visas, the tech industry is a big part of every one of them. The tech industry is applying for every one of them. Like a huge part of this is the technology industry. I can't actually think of an industry that has had more of an impact on these visas. And so we've centered ourselves. Not we, I mean, not me. I didn't even know about it.

But the industry has, by virtue of, you know, I wouldn't say that this has sort of been decided for them, right? Like all this was set on course 30 years ago. But certainly the laws are there for what is perceived to be our most valuable asset, which is our new companies. And that is who is being benefited right now on the legal side. Those are small numbers a year. But when you can pound them over three decades, they're not small numbers. This is how, you know, with Indians taking about 70% of the. H-1Bs, you get to a point where in 1990, Indian population is like 800,000, about,

about half of whom were born here, half of whom came from abroad. And today we're looking at population between 5 and 6 million. So it's like, that is why we're talking about Indians. That is why we're talking about H-1Bs. That's why we're talking about tech, not because it's a small issue, not because it's a side issue, but because it is the legal path to the country. And it seems to be opting for, in terms of, of legal things, people who code.

So there's this other question of like, is that what we want our immigration system to be built around or should it be something else at this point? Maybe people who coded was really important a decade or two ago. Is it going to be as important when we're building machines that do it for us? I don't think so. We're going to have to change these laws eventually. But certainly what we're going to have to do is acknowledge the centrality of tech unless we can find a way to change the laws in such a way that we're not centered anymore, which

I really hope that we can do because the conversation does not benefit the industry. It's like, the reason we keep getting dragged into this stuff is because we're in this stuff. I liked that your article ended with this call for tech to kind of just be aware of what's happening, but allow the nation to kind of have a conversation about this. I mean, I think that I saw a tweet that I actually thought was quite on the money, which was basically that on the one hand, which was basically that on the one tech needs to appreciate broadly that America is not an economic zone, right? Of just kind of like, you know, like there is this kind of, there's such a thing as American culture, there's such thing as America as a country of people who, you know, some of whom

have lived here for a long time. But also that technology, in the frontier of technology, is our economic strength, you know, like we, we, um, We innovate, right? We go zero to one. And we don't want to sort of neuter that. No, which is why I think I love the, I think the 01 is a fantastic visa. I think that it needs to be aggressively guarded because the moment there's a crackdown on H1Bs, the consulting firms are going to be finding a way to game the 01.

It just is inevitable. They have business models that are based on this. they have an economic incentive to survive. I think really what should happen is we should not be allowing consulting firms to even access these things. And if it's for our top companies, then the visa should only apply to our top companies. But really what has to happen is we got to get rid of this lottery component. I think it's like if you cannot, if we don't have the resources to vet the people who are

coming into the country, then that's too many people coming into the country. I think that you have to at least look at the application and someone needs to be in charge somewhere making a determination of like whether. or not, this is actually a high-skilled person, or this is a scam artist. Like, you, that's, that's like the ground floor. I think you could also do something, though, where maybe, you know, briefly, the agricultural visas became super controversial in the earlier part of Trump's first term. These are temporary visas where people are coming over to, like, pick blueberries and

things in the South. And looked into those, they are temporary visas, and almost everyone on them goes back. So it's like it's not fully a labor issue. American unemployment is extremely low right now. People have jobs if they want jobs. It's not really an immigration issue. And I think the reason that people left that topic was because no one was actually immigrating on that visa. So I think the 01 maybe stays a path to immigration.

You keep that as dual intent and you aggressively police it. But maybe the H1B should just be a temporary visa. Like if we really just need coders for a little while and there are people all over the world who are down, then we just remove the dual intent aspect of it. And we preserve the 01 again for those exceptional people who we do want to be here. And maybe some other stuff too. Like I don't know that immigration should be based or for technologists only. I mean, someone somewhere made a determination that that was what we needed in the country.

And I think we do need a lot of those. But is that all we need? Is that what we need? Who do we want to be as a country? These are the questions that tech injects itself into when it talks about immigration in the way that it does in this sort of very callous way online. You know, we just want the smartest people and like no DEI for white people and things like this. What you're trying to steamrolling over is this conversation that the nation is trying to have about what we want to become. And much like the censorship conversation, I think tech needs to stay out of it.

Our job, the job of the technologists should not be to determine these crazy more. questions that people have not been able to agree on forever, ever in history, have people been able to agree on these things? Your job should be to build tools that are very useful and make the world a better place. And the rest of it needs to be determined by the actual country. And you have to be okay with that because you're not in charge. You are just one of many people in this country. Guys, it's time for you to buy a house. Unfortunately, that house costs like three million and your competition is me paying all cash.

That's why you need autopilot. The platform that lets you invest alongside politicians like Nancy Pelosi and soon-to-be, I'm sure, billionaire, trader Rocana, and real-time traders automatically. You build the cash flow, let autopilot help build the wealth. Autopilot's built by the same team behind the infamous Pelosi tracker and now includes our own Pirate Wires flagship fund, which you can find over on the autopilot site at www.com. I think it's important, you know, early on, the H1, this most recent H1B dust up, I wrote a take about it, not about it.

I wrote a take that just had a name H1B in it. And I talked about something else entirely. That was misframed, I think, on purpose by one of the annoying people from, I don't even want to say where they're from, one of these annoying trolls who lives online, who has a huge audience and pretends he's an intellectual. And it was a sort of anti, it was, my position was framed as anti-immigration and anti, specifically anti-high-skilled immigration. And the truth was, genuinely, that wasn't my position because I didn't have a position because I didn't know how to think about this because I hadn't really learned a lot about it. And at this point, I have learned a lot about it.

And I think it was a well-intentioned program that many good people have used to come here that has been massively exploited for, decades that does need to be reformed. Fucking period. Like, it obviously has major flaws. I also think Trump's tweak to the visa in favor of large tech companies over consulting firms, which just happened in March, is fantastic. And I wish these people who are trying to defend the H-1B and even addressing, I saw these people addressing the fact that it was better, I wish they would give him a little bit of,

a little bit of credit for that because it wasn't better under Biden. and allowing it to get as bad as it did is why there's so much backlash against it today. You know, had this always been a responsible program that was truly only benefiting American companies and Americans more broadly, I don't think we'd be having the same conversation. So, yeah, learn about it. Still in favor of high-skilled immigration. I don't think that's what this program is doing in its current state. I think there's some of that and a lot of other stuff.

I think we got to reform it. And I think we can and I think we will. I'm feeling positive today after our conversation. Last thoughts, guys. Anything. I mean, H-1Bs, let's get into the singularity. Let's talk about simulated realities. Clancy, would her life have been better?

Had she just learned to code? I think her kids' lives would have been better. What do you guys think? I was going to say, does the singularity obviate Lindsay Clancy's responsibility? I mean, maybe there's like an insane branch of TikTok that thinks that Lindsay Clancy is not guilty because we were in a singularity. I mean, there's something for everybody out there. Yeah, yeah.

That's a mind fuck. That sounds more reasonable than what they are saying. So, well, until next week and our inevitable next TikTok psychosis and tech industry dust up on X, which we will, of course, research and present to you with the correct opinion. This is PyroWire's. It's great to be back. Thanks for watching and rate, subscribe, comment, and come back next week. Later.