Pirate Wires - We're Back! Tech Updates, Jony Ive & Sam Altman, Air Travel Is Awful, The Left's Joe Rogan

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

EPISODE #93: Hi friends, we're back! Lot's to catch up on. First up, we discussing the awful state of air travel that Solana reported on this week. Next up, your tech news round up! Everything from Golden Domes, to dating apps, to 4-in-1 d*ck pills. Sam Altman & Jony Ive combine forces. What will the aesthetic of the future look like? Finally, the Dems continue to pick up the pieces as Biden's health cover up was exposed last week. Will they ever find their Joe Rogan?Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Riley Nork, Blake DodgeWe have partnered with AdQuick! They gave us a 'Moon Should Be A State' billboard in Times Square!https://www.adquick.com/Sign Up For The Pirate Wires Daily! 3 Takes Delivered To Your Inbox Every Morning:https://get.piratewires.com/pw/dailyTopics Discussed:https://www.piratewires.com/p/smoke-signals?f=homePirate Wires On X: https://twitter.com/PirateWiresMike On X: https://twitter.com/micsolanaBrandon On X: https://twitter.com/brandongorrellRiley On X: https://x.com/rylzdigitalBlake On X: https://x.com/dodgeblakeTIMESTAMPS:0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod!1:20 - Say Hi To Our New Writer, Blake!1:50 - Infrastructure Is Collapsing In America - Air Travel Is A Mess18:00 - Tech In DC - Is The Optimism Still There? Golden Dome24:00 - HIMS 4-in-1 D*ck pills29:00 - The State Of Dating Apps37:00 - The Aesthetic Of The Future -  Sam Altman & Jony Ive combine forces54:00 - ADQUICK! Thanks For Sponsoring The Pod55:10 - The Search For The "Liberal Joe Rogan"1:08:40 - The Joe Biden Health Cover Up1:23:00 - Thanks For Watching! Like & Subscribe#podcast #technology #politics #culture

What is with this slogan? The new Joe Rogan lives are obsessed with Joe Rogan. It's like really like it's like an American idol for the most tedious man alive. It's the it's an it's welcome back to the pod. It has been, I mean, months. We've been gone for a while. I said it was three weeks and it was a lie. Thank you for sticking around. Thank you for every time I posted anything on Twitter,

demanding that I get back in the studio with the equivalent of get back in the studio, bitch. Actually, I think you said, someone said that to me at one point, multiple every day, another email. While obnoxious slightly, mostly I feel complimented and loved. Lot to talk about today.

First of all, thank you AdQuick for sponsoring that. They got us back into the studio, bitch. Thank you very much, AdQuick. I think Blake had already joined the team before we went on hiatus, but Blake, welcome to Blake, who is now formally a member of the PirateWire's team, has a story of hers that she's gonna be talking about today, and is to be joining us for a lot of these team pods

moving forward. So, hi Blake. Yay, confetti. Matt, maybe like give me a confetti or something. We moving forward, I'm going to be working and I think a lot, I have a lot more great guests lined up in addition to our team. So, it'll be a combination of stuff, but we're still going to have a team pod. I know you guys like that where we talk about the news.

And so I think that we should just get in to that. Sure thing. So there are a lot of things people don't love about the flying experience. Some people get nauseous. Some people get jet lag. Some people are worried that they're going to flip upside down

on a runway in Toronto. For me, what I don't like is that you can't get anywhere on time anymore. Last week, airports throughout the mid-Atlantic had widespread cancellations and delays. Around 1,500 flight cancellations by Friday evening, along with over 10,000 delays, yes, 10,000. And yet nobody in the media covered it. Nobody that is except for Mike Solana. You're welcome everyone, who just wrote a banger about

last week's airport disaster, what caused it and how air travel just seems to be deteriorating before our eyes, all while making a pretty interesting connection to South Africa, which was also in the news this week. After 59 Afrikaners were welcomed into the United States and after a very interesting meeting between President Trump and the President of South Africa. Solana, please tell us about the shit show and about the bearded Johnny Walker sipping air traffic control guy. This this story is interesting. I was supposed to write about something else that I had agreed to, and I found boring and didn't want to write it. And I was dragging my feet.

And then Friday morning, I had three different people who I knew who were flying. One had a flight canceled in all of them were flying into the New Jersey, New York area. One had a flight canceled in Nashville, and there were no hotels left because there were so many cancellations and delays. He had to book a car. It was the last one and he was driving back to New York. One had a three-hour delay in Miami. He was flying Miami to New York City. It was a three-hour delay to get off the ground, but he was flying to Newark, which is now you expect it. So I wasn't that surprised. I was really surprised when he texted me from the sky. He was stuck over Washington DC where they had been circling for two hours because they couldn't fly into Newark.

Finally landed, the pilot said with 50 other flights that were in a similar position. Finally they landed in DC and there were no flights up to New York yet. They could train the following day which was packed with other people who were in a similar situation. which was packed with other people who were in a similar situation. And finally, it was someone flying my mom, actually flying from Tampa to New Jersey. She it was like something like a six or a seven hour delay. Most people left and you could because she was flying Spirit. There wasn't another flight until one was cancer.

One was booked two days. They didn't fly. And then the second was booked. Long story short, massive disaster. No one covering it in the news. And that let me down a little bit of a rabbit hole to see sort of like what was actually going on, if anything. Before Friday, there had been widespread reporting on the air traffic control staffing,

I guess crisis you would call it. It's been a crisis for a couple of years. It's only now that we've had a couple of near misses at Newark, which have apparently quote, traumatized the air traffic controllers who are working at that airport. There were already too few of them and they were already working massive overtime hours.

Sending a bunch of them on trauma leave, which the United CEO, Scott something, Kelly, maybe, not Scott Kelly, I forget his name, sorry, look it up. Actually, Matt, you look it up and put it under my face in big letters, the United CEO's name. So that dude called it a walk off. And, uh, and I started just keying more into that and what's been going on with airports generally. And what it seems like to me is, uh, Newark is down, had already been down one runway out of three by the time Friday

rolled around for construction, which is going to last through June 15. The second one went down almost certainly because of air traffic control, there weren't enough of them. And they're worried about near misses, which they're happening out of Newark. They've also been widespread reporting on the radar blackout and radio blackout. And it's just this massive sort of clusterfuck. But the crescendo for me was reading about Johnny Walker Blue, one of the whistleblowers who was working in air traffic control, who was on leave himself,

who let him, I mean, I didn't realize this, he sort of just offered it freely to the Wall Street Journal. He makes $450,000 a year. Yes, there's a staffing crisis. And yes, he believes we must absolutely get more air traffic controllers into the airports. There are a whole host of reasons that it's been hard. And we can talk about them in a minute. But he says he does not believe that he deserves to take any less pay. And that for him is a huge issue. And that is what led me to believe. I think there's some union fuckery going on. These are all government workers.

And I think that while they're not legally allowed to strike, they are sort of rattling the union saber, if you will. I think they really, really want more staff. They really, really don't want to take a pay cut. They really, really do want a budget increase. And this has really, really scared America, both the whistleblowing efforts, sort of going to the press saying New York airport isn't safe, and now frustrating them further with all these delays.

So I think that there's like this sort of stew of things going on, but that's a big piece of it. Robert Leonard I think that's one of the most visceral examples that people feel of our decline, because it's something we all have to do like pretty regularly people feel of our decline, because it's something we all have to do pretty regularly. We can just feel that it's gotten exponentially worse. Now if I'm picking up a friend from the airport, I just have to plan for the very realistic possibility that they're going to be there five hours after their scheduled arrival time. We all just have this sense of it, it didn't used to always like be this way. Like it feels like, like, I don't care what data the, who gives a crap Institute has to say about like flights cancellations or whatever.

Like it just feels like it didn't used to be this way and it's gotten worse. So you picked the right topic. I think of like this being a good example of our decline because we all feel it. And it has gotten worse in one serious way, which is technology failure. So we've had massive sort of nationwide blackouts in previous decades while flying a plane has gotten safer since the 60s and 70s. The delays sort of mass blackouts have

increased when you discount for weather related mass blackouts. If you get rid of those, which kind of always happen and always are disruptions, just like straight up, we had one in 2023 when we had, I forget, I'm confusing, there was CrowdStrike and there was one other one. So there's one in 2023, there was one in 2024 that was pretty bad. And now we have whatever's happening sort of cascading out of Newark. So the Newark thing has been a problem for a while and it keeps it what it seems to be happening is it keeps it keeps kind of like flaring up. And this is just one you know last Friday or whatever that I happened to be super keen into myself and was following

closely. I wonder how often this is happening and I'm just not even paying attention to it because I don't know anybody who's flying. And this one was certainly, you know, this one was pretty bad. I think probably the other maybe grimly ironic thing or element of the story, you did have the South African piece of it all. While I was researching this, I couldn't help but notice that people on Twitter were sort of obsessively focused

with the question of whether or not the South African refugees, these like 59 white South African refugees, allowing them into the country was racist. Were they racist? Was it racist to let them in? Was it racist not to let them in? And we had this sort of huge culture war problem or feud bubbling up across social media. The thing that we need to actually be, I think, be mindful of is not, you know, the question of South African refugees. We're not in danger of 59 South African refugees.

We are in danger of becoming South Africa. And I poked around that that country has completely collapsed. The infrastructure is, you know, sort of train travel, I would say, has been decimated. It's down 90 percent commuter rail travel. There was like I read on this was GPT. So you better double check it. But between 10 and 12 commuter rails to connecting the city's major ones down to one or two that run sporadically, you have water facility treatment problems almost systemic at this point, security issues, private security is now ubiquitous, and power failures. It is it is truly like Atlas shrugged. And I think this stuff,

we kind of believe that this stuff can't happen in the West. And I would like to disabuse you of that fact. Like it certainly can happen here and it seems like it is happening here. And it seems like it's happening here across the world. It's just happening in America very slowly. My concern is that we're gonna wake up in what? 10 or 20 years and things will just be much worse

and never reported on. And that's kind of the world that we're heading in. And in what, 10 or 20 years, and things will just be much worse and never reported on. And that's kind of the world that we're heading in. And that was why I wrote the piece, Smoke Signals. Check it out on piratewires.com. I kind of liked your point in the piece that kind of painted the US as like the frog that's like slowly boiling in the pot type of thing. When I was reading that, it's kind of reflecting like the frog that's like slowly boiling in the pot type of thing.

When I was reading that, it's kind of reflecting on my own experiences. Like I've stopped flying if I can train somewhere in under like nine hours. Like it's like a high number. And I thought of that when I read that like, whoa, like I don't even know if I noticed that I did that. Like I had questions after your piece, like, what was

so great about us 50 years ago that we could build trains? Like it, it doesn't really, it doesn't really make sense. There's another on the like, how we were different 50 years ago. Obviously, this is super complex issue. And there are so many different pieces of this, just the question of, you planes not as reliable or what keeps things running on time or why can you build? One thing that as I was working on it, I just kind of stuck on or got stuck on was the idea that the planes are safer, the idea that there are fewer deadly crashes than there were,

but it could be both safer and less reliable at the same time. Now, there was just recently a deadly crash and it does seem related at least in part to air traffic control, also in part to the pilot of the fighter jet. It seems like the pilot of the commercial planes was doing his job, but there was like the fighter, the fighter, a copter pilot and the air traffic control thing. And they both had issues. Still, statistically, for now, watch me fucking be the one, watch me be the one. And then this fucking clip goes viral.

But for now, statistically better. And yet things are breaking down. I wonder how much our own safety-ism is coming into play. One of the reasons there aren't as many air traffic controllers is this deadlock conversation on reducing the amount of time to train an air traffic controller. One of the interesting things that the New York Times reported was, first of all, the problem at New York is not just at Newark, it's ubiquitous. It's all over the country. Almost every airport is understaffed.

Second, the air traffic controllers are trained for two to four years. And they can't they're not interchangeable. They can't go from one airport to another. It's specific. It's certified by by airport. And the union doesn't want to reduce any of the time in training because or increase the number of green people at airports because they feel it's not safe. I wonder if we're just less,

we're sort of more risk averse now. This plays into, I think, space travel as well. We used to expect, there was a pretty good chance that astronauts were gonna die on a rocket ship. I don't think there's an appetite for that at all anymore. The public would not accept it. If an astronaut died, it would be like, wow, something went, this is, obviously this is a tragedy

and they always thought it was a tragedy, but also this is unacceptable. Like no one can ever die doing anything risky at all. I don't know, just something, I think we are different and probably in a lot of ways as a culture. Yeah, what gets me about people and air travel is like, you know, there's people who get stranded at the airport for like six or seven hours or 12 hours.

Tom Hanks in that movie. That's like such a skill issue, though. It's like just get an Uber and go to a hotel. I don't understand people getting stranded for longer than six hours. Well, air travel is so it's like, what's the issue? You get anxious. You can definitely get out of the airport. You can like literally leave the airport and go into the city and like get a drink.

I know. But don't you always read a radical thought people I know people are going to be like my grandma got stuck. And it's like, well, you're your issue. Your position is like your position is just get over it. I guess I'm always there. I'm not get over it. Go outside the airport and like rent a hotel.

Yeah, unless you have these like big like I think there was one last year or something. Like people were like, I'm stuck. You know, like you're not actually stuck, you know, like you're literally not stuck. Well, you're not using to stay at the airport. They don't always tell you they're not like United doesn't give you a little push notification that says, hey, you're going to be delayed for 12 hours. So please come to the airport and sit here. They say green flags, there's no delay at all. Then once you've passed through fucking security, it's like, oops, two hour delay. And they don't even that's it's not over you wait two hours and then it's another delay. And then it's another delay. And then you get stuck there.

It's not always those huge delays. I think maybe that's partly you know, I partly agree with you, but partly I think the airlines need to be more honest about what they certainly already know. On Friday, there was no way they didn't know that these delays were going to be happening. There was just no way. They saw it coming. So how come they don't tell you? And I think it has to do with cancellations or something. I don't know. That's maybe a room for another piece on another day. To your point about like safetyism, the people like not being like interchangeable with other airports or whatever reminds me

of the situation in the healthcare industry. Like doctors can't really practice in another state unless they're licensed. And getting licensed is not like a click of a button thing. Like it's actually kind of a headache. Also an industry with like severe staffing shortages. Like maybe there's kind of a relationship there between the tendency to like hyper-regulate

with like the, I don't know, fear of disaster and risk? Well, this is why it's so easy to fall back on the Johnny Walker Blue question, which is, are you really interested in safety or are you doing something that is just keeping your job really lucrative? Because it's a simple question of supply and demand. I want to assume that you're a good person and you just want there to be not a plane crash or something. But also, when there are fewer air traffic controllers or fewer nurses or fewer doctors, the amount you pay them goes up. It has

to. That's just how it works. And so it's like these systems that are extensively in place to keep us safe. Obviously, or not, like, I don't know whether whatever they're intended, whatever, but they're obviously not keeping us safe. Like if you have a shortage in these things, that's that's, that's a problem in it in and of itself. But they're leading to these problems in such a way that you could obviously just fix like you look at that you think well that you should just not have that like obviously if

you're certified for a doctor, especially or a nurse, which you can't even make some argument about whatever the local weather patterns are or something like that you should just get rid of that regulation. And it's like, why is no one getting rid of that regulation? The only possible reason that no one would be getting rid of that regulation is there are lobbyists who are preventing people from getting rid of that regulation. Because it doesn't make any sense. It's one of these regulations that is it's not like a question of, okay, well, what are we going

to do for, for affordable housing or something, which is a super fraught issue that I have very strong opinions on that people come at me against on very ideological grounds. This is not that this is a simple matter of like, let the doctor cross the state border and heal. Like, why is that not happening? I want to get to the tech roundup. Riley, take it away. So we're doing a, I don't know, maybe I'll introduce the concept. We're just like, we're going to blast out like

five different topics really fast. There's a lot of stuff that's going on in tech. And obviously we have a lot to say about all of it. So Riley, TF, the first one. Yeah. So the first of our tech stories that we're running through comes out of our nation's capital where our reformed blog media writer Blake just was for the Hillam Valley Forum, which he wrote a fantastic piece about that everybody should go check out. But Blake, I would like to hear some of your thoughts about this forum between Silicon Valley and some of the leadership in Washington. Going into the conference, we were sort of interested in this idea of, like, an alliance forming between Tech

and the Republican Party. And just from the news, it seemed like it wasn't necessarily going anywhere. Like, I don't know, if you just look at the work between Elon and Trump with Doge, I thought there might be some kind of like really striking vision to come out of that. And instead, what we've seen is like kind of this steady drip of news that's a little bit piecemeal. Tariff's Doge, reshoring manufacturing, but even with reshoring manufacturing, it has felt kind

of like half-baked to me. And then what I learned was that, I mean, my thinking was like pretty imprecise. For one, the Alliance, like if you can even call it that, like it's not between tech and the Republican Party, but there is a lot of, there is a lot of, I don't know if you want to call it, like synergy or momentum between the Republican Party and little tech. So the defense sector, like people who want to get

into manufacturing, people who want to build robots, and among that community of like strikingly young founders, by the way, like people who are like 25, 26, 37, 28, they are just like so down to work with the government and they don't have whatever like progressive sensibility stopped their forebears from doing that. Like they just wanna build. of whatever progressive sensibility stopped their forebears from doing that. They just wanna build.

And I feel like there was a lot of excitement around that. And I did leave the conference feeling like, I need to watch this and how this develops. This does feel like something could happen. It's so different from where things were when I entered the industry via Founders Fund 15 years ago or whatever. Then it was you had people, first of all, tech wasn't taken as seriously. If you just look at the Fortune 500, right, it's like the top 10 companies were not tech companies. I think maybe one or two of them might

have been at that point. Certainly, I think Apple was up there. Google might have been in the top 10 probably was in the top 10. But like it wasn't like every single one of them. There was a feeling in tech that you didn't work with the government because the government couldn't do things at that time. And you were building very startup focused back then it was like we're building these new things that are going to be better than what the government does and why would we ever work with the government. It was both a libertarian thing as well as probably more so a kind of there was like this hacker ethos. It's like pirate hacker kind of thing. Like they just

were not doing stuff. They didn't need the government. They weren't working with the government. But of course, the government has this long history of doing stuff. You have the Manhattan Project, you have the Apollo Project, you have DARPAnet and the creation of what is now I wouldn't say the government created the internet, but it did. Like that's the DNA of the internet is the government or government research that built these things. Government funded research. The government has been a part of all these different things.

Stuff can happen because of the government and you can work with the government and do stuff. And now it's just, I mean, that's really a part of it. That's really something that people are, it's just not weird to say, I wanna go and work with the government. I remember when, just like the question of Palantir back then, that Palantir had these huge government contracts and that those government contracts were a big part of its business was considered,

I wouldn't say evil, but like strange. It was very like, I don't know what kind of business is that that works with the government that maybe is replacing some it was replacing intelligence basically. So it was like it was like replacing some core aspect of what the government did is maybe one way that you could frame it in a way that tech people would find compelling. And then SpaceX was another piece of that, right? Like, America sort of abandoned its rocketry to a certain extent, to a large extent, and literally abandoned its shuttle program under Obama. And there was SpaceX to rise up and sort of do some other big part of it. But again, with government contracts. So yeah, it's cool. It's very interesting. I don't know where it goes necessarily or when the pendulum swings back.

I do know that there's the Golden Dome that news is breaking. America is building a dome. I don't have much information on this one other than sounds awesome. Sounds like sort of a, what is it? The government is working with SpaceX and Palantir and we're going to do some sort of like iron dome

thing for the entire country. With satellites and we're going to stop nuclear war or something. It's all super Star Wars-y. I don't have any real details for you which is, you know, how I love to fly. I'll come back to you next week. We'll just we'll be tracking the story. We'll be tracking the story closely. Riley, what's the next one?

I think was it the foreign one dick pills from hims? Oh, well, we got to go to our foreign one. Our foreign war correspondent, Blake Dodge. Tell us about it. Yeah, so Hymns obviously is, that's a brand like a lot of us are familiar with. They sell healthcare directly to consumers. Dick pills.

So last week, they had sort of a viral ad for a four and one dick pill that promised sort of better erections, fuller hair, less hair loss. I thought that was sort of an interesting nuance. So yeah, these DTC companies, they want to make you the customer and they want it to be like delightful and they want to build across conditions to be sort of like a virtual primary care doctor. That's like the grand division.

But the problem is they all start off in... selling dick pills and hair loss medications as like cash cows to like help the business grow. And then they just get stuck there. So I looked at the four-in-one dick pill through this sort of dystopic lens of like what direct-to-consumer health care is still not accomplishing. It obviously started off with you know singular dick pills and then two-in-one dick pills and then three-in-one dick pills and now we have and then three and one dig pills.

And now we have four and one dig pills. I don't know. Stay tuned for five and one dig pills, six and one, seven and one dig pills. I just, I do appreciate that I'm seeing less of the ad or all ads. I guess that's just not allowed anymore to do direct to consumer ad or all stuff because I used to see a lot of these ads that are that would say things like, you know, do you find yourself like quirky and different and just like really have a hard time relating to people? Are you like more introverted and shy, but like you like to read like these mundane normal things and they'd say, you might have ADD. And, and I noticed that was sort of capitalizing on this, I don't know, tick tockification of Generation Z, that really has

mainstream this idea that your pathologies are part of your identity. So your ADD is not just something that you have, if it's even real, let's be honest. It's something that you are. It's something that says a lot about you. And these companies were using that to sell drugs you are. It's something that says a lot about you. And these companies were using that to sell drugs to people. It just seems, that seems fucked up. Though the concept of like a 957

in one dick pill seems interesting. I mean, and funny. I'm not gonna say that it doesn't. Yeah, the whole Adderall chapter, I don't think it, it didn't, it didn't do justice to the direct-to-consumer healthcare case. And yeah, damaged probably some of the momentum there. I will say, HIMSS did not ever sell Adderall.

A lot of them actually didn't on kind of ethical grounds. It was like a few fast growing young startups that went kind of rogue and like capitalize on regulations being like relaxed during COVID. During COVID, yeah. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, no, I mean, still, yeah. Like basically the promise of like getting healthcare online has not been reached, whether it's

mental health or even probably erectile dysfunction care. Doesn't him sell mental health? I think they do SSRIs and stuff too. I'm a little skeptical of their business model because part of the deal of the four-in-one dick pills is the hair meds, like Nukier, Libido, So then you need to get their libido drugs. I'm a little, I'm a little skeptical, but I am all on board for the virtual primary care. I am hopeful for that future. Well also do you need any of this or do you just need more sunlight?

Because I saw a viral Twitter post this week, homeless men have way better hair apparently. Um, and there's this idea that like you could have technically like a, and not just better hair. I mean, you have the, what do you even call these people? The sun pills? They really believe that actual crack addict,

crack, they use this word crack. You could be a crack addict in the street that you are metabolically healthier than a cubicle cell. I think it was called a cubicle cell, they said. And they showed pictures of the homeless guy and he was jacked and like did have a thick head of hair. And I mean, we've all seen this. We've all seen homeless men that are jacked.

I mean, they're skinny, but they're like ripped and they do have hair typically. I have not seen a lot of bald homeless men. So is sun exposure the thing? Do we just need more sun? I think it's not the sun, it's the crack. The crack is providing the benefit. Yeah. And I mean, they took that away from us in COVID, you said.

I mean, they were the DTC companies were trying to help. They were trying to sell us the legal crack. And instead, what do we have? We have dick pills. We got to move on. We got to move on. We are running out of time on the tech roundup. Tinder, Incel, go. I don't even know how to tee this up, but a story that caught our attention while we were on our hiatus,

the story of Fish Guy, AKA 26 year old Hayden, who allegedly swiped right on two million Tinder users over the course of five years before finally finding himself a date during which he said there was, quote, no spark. Now, several people have pointed out the many red flags on his profile. You know, a sweatshirt that said sit yass on my face, holding up a fish in his profile picture, which is an infamous no-no in the, in the dating app world. So it all sparked a broader discourse about modern dating, about dating apps,

about social media, generally curious to hear your guys thoughts on his situation and his choice and sweatshirt. I frankly was so relieved when you guys were timing in on the Slack channel, like noticing the red flags, because I thought I was going to have to be the one. Has anybody been on Tinder here? Yeah, yeah. Before when I was single, I was on Twitter. Has anybody been on Tinder here? Yeah, yeah. When I was single, I was on Tinder.

I mean, two million swipes and one date and it didn't work. This is again, another skill issue. Very obviously. There's nothing wrong with Tinder or this does not reflect on Tinder at all. It's crazy. Well, I think the reason the story blew up for a lot of reasons. One, there's the idea of, I mean, we've heard of an in cell. Have you ever heard of an in cell that in celled?

It's hard to imagine someone who swiped right that many times and couldn't get a yes got one yes and then it ended in no chemistry. Wait, he swiped right 10, 2 million times and got one match. He says that's not that's fake. There are lots that would that would that you would match with. But I'm saying the reason that this story I think took off the way that it did is because it speaks to a real feeling that a lot of people, both men and women have.

Men have the feeling that they swipe constantly and don't get any matches, which is just by the numbers true. And women have a feeling that the the matches that they're receiving, or they're like profiles that receiving artists super, super bottom of the barrel, which also might be true, based on trying to like the business model is designed to convince people to pay money to get better matches and things like this. So everybody is sort of

to get better matches and things like this. So everybody is sort of on these apps miserable. And it seems that I think a lot about just the promise of online dating from 20 years ago when people first started really talking about this seriously. I remember there being this interesting moment where suddenly most people who were in a relationship have met online in some way. And that was in the early 2000s. We're talking like 1% of people were meeting online. It was like a really, really a small number. So that's a radical change to our entire way of approaching dating that has happened in all of our lifetimes. And, uh, and it seems to be going poorly. Like this is now the replacement and it seems to be driving people miserable and probably worth talking about, you know, probably worth getting to the bottom of that. What, what went wrong? Was it always wrong? Um, is anybody trying to fix this? How do you fix this? Is it just, we got to blow up our phones? We got to, we got to turn these things off. Um,

I don't know, but no one is happy with them. That's for sure true. And that's what the conversation was really about. It became this, you know, a collapse into this gender war between men and women, but like neither men, men are not really upset with women and women are not really upset with men. What everyone's upset with is their experience on these apps.

And that is like, you're actually upset with the company or three of them or five of them or I'm not sure what the popular ones are anymore other than Tinder. I don't like that they feel like I'm picking out my significant other like I'm picking Uber Eats like that's just feels weird. It's like what are you feeling today Mexican or Italian? It's like it's just it doesn't feel right to me. I'm much more in favor of meeting people in person. But are you meeting like how are you doing it these days? Like, does anybody meet? And what does that mean to meet in

person? How do you go about that? Nothing. Our society has increasingly stopped catering to that are trying to do that, right? As the as the demand is decreased. The places aren't really there, the expectation isn't really there. used to maybe, I wonder, these are such hard things to study, but also because we've lost it. But I wonder what the role of just like a busy body best friend 30 years ago was versus today. There were probably these super matchmakers and friend groups that really did a lot of connecting and you don't see that anymore or like the sort of Busybody ant or something maybe we don't I think look like dating apps are a

Solution for people who don't have the stamina the will or the courage to do it in real life and This is what we got I think that the option to do it in real life is still available. You can easily go to a bar and approach somebody. My friend does it all the time, frankly. So I don't know. That's not how people met though. People mostly met through friend groups and family. Friend groups still exist. Church, I think, is one of them too. Work. People still go to church. People still work. I'm still exist. Church, I think is one of them too. There are still friend groups. Work. People still go to church, people still work. I'm a huge fan of, I mean, don't do it here

because I'm your boss, but generally speaking, I think dating at work is... Oh, it's a desire, yeah. I was gonna say, for me that's an okay. That's a yellow light for me. I think it's a really bad idea. This is off topic. I dated somebody at work once and it exploded in my face.

She's awesome though. I'll never be doing that again. But we love her. We love her. Yeah. Solana knows her. But yeah. She's a great editor.

What, like maybe the best I've ever worked with. Sorry guys. I don't know. I don't know if I'm rambling or not. I just don't. I'm like, I feel like sympathetic to the dating apps. I the fact that it's not very fun is not a reflection on the apps necessarily. I think dating itself is kind of hellish. You know, like, you're never going to not be rejected whether you're dating IRL or on apps. You know, you're never, as a man at least,

like, you're never gonna sort of face an uphill climb to quote unquote find the right person. And if you no longer have a friend group, if you moved away from your hometown, you know, to live in the big city, that's kind of on you. And you've got to, and sorry, removing yourself from some of those more organic connections, that's on you. And you got to figure out how to make it work after you moved away from, you know, all of

your connections. So I'm not saying I don't have sympathy for men and incels or whatever, and for women who have a difficult time dating, but I don't know that we're dealing with some new issue or that it was not completely predictable what would happen. Well, I wonder, I mean, fertility is crashing. Is it marriage down as well for younger people?

Maybe we are dealing with a real issue that's new. Is it because they can't meet or is it because generally societal expectations have changed a little bit? People are sort of prioritizing other things over kids. I've said this in a few podcasts, but growing up, I was told that having a kid too early would essentially be a death sentence. You know, you had like the horror story was the the girl that got pregnant when she was 17 in high school. You know, so I was like propagandized into thinking that having a family too early would be like

some sort of irredeemable loss. Right. So I don't know. I think the broader question of our relationship with our phones is interesting. And what's kind of I don't know about ironic, just also interesting. It this story is bubbling up this week at the same exact time or maybe like two days before this partnership between Johnny Ive and OpenAI.

Riley, you wanna unpack that a little bit for us? Yeah, so OpenAI, they just announced they would be buying the AI device startup co-founded by Apple veteran Johnny Ive in a $6.5 billion all stock deal, signaling that OpenAI will now be making their push into hardware. I've of course helped craft the look and feel of the iPhone we know today,

while working alongside Steve Jobs, and he said of this week's acquisition, quote, I have a growing sense that everything I've learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment. It sparked a lot of speculation about what this new device is going to look like. I've I think you flagged this in our Slack channel. Solana had expressed some regret about the addiction we sort of all have to our phones these days. But what did you guys make of of this this recent tech news?

Blake, you were just writing about that exchange, right? Can you tell us a little bit more about what happened there? So I nerded out about this story in a couple different directions. First of all, it was a big PR push from OpenAI. They put out a lot of content around this. One piece of content was like a nine minuteminute video that was kind of a documentary-style interview between Sam and Johnny. And they talked about their kind of shared concern, I guess, for how, like, technology has affected humanity. Uh, I thought that was, like, kind of striking.

Um, it's also kind of obviously ironic because Johnny is like, in large part responsible for what has made the iPhone so addictive. Um, like he did a really good job on the design of the iPhone and they want to like get together and build products that don't have screens, um, that you do not wear. And that, I don't know, I mean, it kind of sounds like they're explaining Alexa a little bit.

But the idea is that it's better than Alexa and has an open AI level of like contextual awareness. Yeah, it reminds me of like in Star Trek, the computer, I guess, but maybe, or maybe it's just her. Maybe that's what really, we're all just, everything goes back to her. Spike Jonze is her. So don't you wear that? Her?

The her one? Yeah, you put it in your ear. So they said that they're not doing wearables. Yeah. I didn't know that. They've said like eight things that it's not, but they have not said what it is. Well I'm excited to learn more. I think you're so right to Kiana on,

first of all, I wanted to say that maybe Johnny wasn't necessarily respond, we don't know. Is there something about a small screen that's more addicting than a giant screen, like a flat screen or a computer screen even, which I never felt as addicted to, or is it really just the software? I suspect it's the software, but then I don't know,

because also children, this is all anecdotal, but I hear from every parent I know that the small screens are crazed, like the kids, they could watch the same thing on a small screen, and the behavior is completely different than on a big screen, where it's easier to get them away from the big screen than the small screen. Don't know about that. What I do know is they are opening a conversation that we've never had in tech before. And I think it's a really, really important conversation, which is like, again, to go back and you should go back. All these conversations require context. 15 years ago, nobody thought for a second that we would be living in the world that we are in now where everybody is walking around obsessed with their phone and sucked into it. The other day I saw an interesting tweet. It was like,

are kids, by kids I mean Zoomers drinking less or are they just at home sort of on their phone more? Are people just less social than they were? I don't quite know. I do know that this phone does not make me as happy as I expected it to once upon a time. Had the phone in the early days. It also wasn't as addicting. And now I feel like, I don't know, almost across the board in a lot of these apps, certainly Instagram, which I just deleted Facebook, which is now a ghost land. Twitter makes me miserable. They're all kind of tick tock when I had it on my phone briefly for work purposes.

They all do the same thing. They all YouTube increasingly YouTube, like any kind of shorts or things like this. They just they suck me in and they make me not a better person. I remember thinking about that in the context of the Instagram for you page specifically that I had no control over. It's like I want to give you guys is I want I want to see the best in what you were doing here. But by not giving me control of this page until you recently let me nuke it, like, I want to give you guys is I want I want to see the best in what you were doing here. But by not giving me control of this page until you recently let me nuke it. I am not like you're

appealing to the worst things about me the things that I don't necessarily want to be like I want technology that helps me become a better person that listens I want you as a technologist to listen to what I want to become in my life and help me get there. I want technology that helps me achieve things that I want, not drives me to goals that I never even had before previously based on some weird algorithmic, I don't know, attention game.

And to have people just hinting at that in tech, just hinting at the fact that we have gone really sort of wildly adrift of the original goal of a lot of these things is I think very important. It's a conversation that's going to happen. It'll be forced eventually because there's gonna be legislation regarding kids and screen time. It's just inevitable.

And I'm glad that we're having it now on our terms, my R, I mean, sort of the terms of technology. It's good that people are like, is this making my life better? And if not, in what ways and how can we do better, right? Yeah, plus when you think about, Sam made this point in a few different ways, but like AI has obviously gone nutso.

Like we're able to do things now that we weren't six months ago that are kind of groundbreaking. But the way that we actually engage with that, AI is pretty antiquated. Like we're still engaging with it via typing on our iPhones or typing on our Mac. Hopefully, this all just doesn't lead to a white blob Alexa thing that sucks. But the idea is, if you remove the screens, remove some of the weird, like how do you get to play with AI?

I guess my only criticism of it, I really love a lot of what I saw. I really love the stuff that I mentioned before. But what you were just saying now, Blake, about what the future is, you're really talking about what the future is going to look like. And I think it's a little bit strange. And I could be totally wrong.

It could just work. But to pick someone like I've who. Represents an aesthetic of the future that is now 30 years old and really defined this entire epoch of of future aesthetics. You could go back in time and look at like you had the 60s and the 70s, sort of like the Jetsons aesthetic of the future, the original Disneyland Tomorrow world version of

the future. Then you fast forward, you get to the 80s. Epcot Center opens in I think 1981. You have Epcot Center, you have Back to the Future, you have Terminator, I guess, would be in there. But like that's a different version. It looks very different. And then I think of the third sort of what is the future like major aesthetic chapter would be Apple, not fiction, not represented by fiction, but represented by a consumer product.

And I think Apple really dominated for like the last 30 years. So if we're looking through AI and we all are, we're looking for the radical future, the radically different future, I would maybe expect someone new and an approach that has never before been considered. I don't know what lessons we have to learn from this guy

at this point, but I guess we'll see. Yeah, there was kind of chatter about this online, like people kind of saying like, why didn't OpenAI find someone new? And also kind of... I guess OpenAI doesn't have, like, the best reputation around product. So I think the combination of those two things, like, it feels like people are right to kind of just point out

the vulnerabilities. I mean, people are always going to criticize the guy on top, you know, especially when there's so much competition right now and everybody's trying to prove that they know a lot about AI. So I guess we got to discount the chatter quite a bit. But it is just worth looking at his work and being like, is this, I don't know, should it this? He reminds me if you know, this,

the meme of what the world would look like if something happens, like whatever if like, if we were allowed to build housing, and then it's always the same thing as this giant towering city of glass. And it's like white and glass and light and there's one person in it with a dog. That is like the Apple aesthetic of the future. It is this idea that the future will look like nothing. Everything will be clean and empty and white like a fucking insane asylum.

And for me, that is not what the future should look like. That is what happens when you don't know what to create. You naturally conjure up a blank page. And that's what I always feel I think Apple at first was very interesting. And now it's like, I think we're just looking for a new vision of the future. This was a feeling that I had an idea that I had while I was writing fiction, actually, I was trying to create the future years ago, like 10 years ago. And I found that I would often do some version of

this where like, the future would be empty, the future would be it would be like, clean, super clean. It's it. And I found that I would often do some version of this where like, the future would be empty, the future would be it would be like, clean, super clean. It's it. And it took me a minute to realize what I was doing. It was like, I was not actually imagining the future. I was trying to imagine the future. And it's very hard to do. And so there aren't a lot of things there recently Brian Chesky was talking, I think he unveiled new design on his site. It's a more of like a you guys remember like the early early 2000s internet where I created.

I remember creating like an angel fire page that was like a fan page of Gambit and Magneto. And then like also Pokemon and like there would be like a flaming Charmander email box that would light up when you hit it. And like the internet was just way more fun and interesting and textured. And you would have like someone's homepage, but it was like a tree house and come over here and go down the rope. And we were like, man, the internet can be anything. And over the last 20 years, it's just been flattened completely by people who had this design aesthetic that

was really inspired by Johnny Ives, which I really am fucking over. I would like the internet, the future to be a little more colorful. So I hope that he's able to deliver that, especially if open AI becomes God, because that would be crazy. If our God looked that boring, I just it wouldn't be for me. I don't know, what do you guys make of the aesthetics of it all before we move on to the ad read? It's good to hear it's not a wearable because when I saw people talking about what the device was going to look like, I saw people like, like, suggesting glasses. And it's like, it feels like if you think we have a problem being addicted to the computer in our pockets, like, we're going to, I really truly feel like Zoomers are having the exact same conversations that we all had 15 years ago.

They're all happening again, like all of them across the board. Google Glass was like this massive thing that we went through and lived through and talked about relentlessly and there were press cycles about it. And like, we saw the future of augmented reality and we, all of these things we have talked about.

I feel like it's like in Battlestar Galactica, all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. That's truly how I feel like it's like in Battlestar Galactica. All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. That's truly how I feel. It's surreal to watch young people discover Google Glass for the first time. But to Sam's credit, I don't think that's what he's building. There's no way. And if he is, that'll be maybe one piece of I guess they said he wasn't wearables, though he said that. So I don't know. We'll see.

Yeah, I was thinking about the wearable stuff today, too. And just from a certain perspective, it struck me that Yeah, I was thinking about the wearable stuff today too. And just from a certain perspective, it struck me that glasses and the, the her concept where you're constantly talking to an AI with an earbud seemed to be kind of wildly unrealistic and impractical. Just given the fact that like evolutionarily,

we as a species have never first off had like a chiron of visual information displayed in our visual field. And that seems like a huge barrier to get over. And secondly, on the her thing, I know this is not about aesthetics, but that like, you know, the closest analog we have to her is like annoying people on FaceTime all day You know are people who are like annoyingly on the phone all the time, right? And that's the minority of people

I Don't know anybody that does that but I've seen people who do that and it's like I Google a lot and like the promise of her or whatever is having Google in your head pretty much. Yes It's like I Google a lot, but I don't Google the promise of her or whatever is having Google in your head pretty much. Yes. It's like I Google a lot, but I don't Google the majority of the time. I probably only Google. I Google extreme minority of the time and I probably Google more than anybody. Right.

Or like I'm in the top 99% of Google. You're a power user. Probably your power Googler. I'm an open eye, open AI power user, but that doesn't mean that like I would find having open AI in my head all day useful because I just, again, most of the time I'm not doing that. So I think the shift away from wearables, which I didn't know until Blake said it, I thought they were definitely, they were bringing Joni in to make AirPods with open AI in them or something.

That seems cool. But yeah, I don't know where it goes. And I think your point about aesthetics is absolutely correct, though it is hard to imagine what the future might look like in terms of aesthetics. We're not looking to spend more time with the machine. I think what we all want is to spend more time with the machine. I think what we all want to spend more time with each other. And I was imagining

Max, our director of Ops, and I were having a conversation this morning and Slack came up and the idea that the workday kind of starts for me is certainly immediately now. And I wake up and I'm in Slack and I'm clearing stuff out and I'm kind of casually working all the time. Technology has served this other purpose. I think people have always looked to technology to free up time. And that's always been that's really been the value proposition of technology forever. I think for always is to free up time to free up man hours to do more with less. And while certainly, certainly true of artificial intelligence,

for other consumer apps and for, I don't know that you would call, what is Slack? I guess that's a, I guess that's SaaS, but productivity apps, productivity tools. That's not necessarily the case anymore. Like these things, while making work a lot easier,

and we can work remotely, and that's amazing, really, like, we can't discount the important amazing things that have been contributed. People are working a lot more now, people are distracted. And you see this in consumer apps. It's like the technology is now taking away away our time, rather than freeing up our time. It's not like a laundry machine, which is just this ambiguous net good. Wow, I am now saving hours and hours, you know, a week, probably like 10 hours a week doing laundry or something crazy like that. What do you do with all that extra time? This is not that this is like, I

don't know what this is exactly. But it's not that this point is made verbatim. I'm not making a novel point, but it's just that there's a new category of business model that monetizes attention, you know? And so when you had the laundry machine saving time, you actually have a sort of parasitic business model on the other side with social alggoes, trying to get your time, you know, and again, I know that's a novel point, but I think that's a general way to explain it.

Okay, well, we got to move on more on aesthetics next week. Actually, we do have a couple of guests coming on in this that is going to be a big part of the conversation. I'm going to discuss finally, ugly buildings at length, I hope we'll see if they're we'll see if they're game they will be okay, moving Moving on ad quick. Thank you guys so much for your patronage. We love that. Quick ad quick. We love you. Sound it. Sive angels. You might have seen our moon should be a state billboard on NASDAQ and thought how to pull that off. Simple answer. We have no idea and still don't. We're writers and content creators, not Billboard pros. Before AdQuick, pulling something like this off would have been a huge hassle. We didn't

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your creative and go live in minutes. If your messages deserve more than just another scroll-by post, make it larger-than than life with AdQuick. Sigh of angels. Thank you, AdQuick. All right. So yeah, the elusive search for the liberal Joe Rogan continues on. According to new reporting from the New York Times, Democrat party mega donors are being quote, inundated with overtures to spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an army of left leaning online influencers. They say that Democrat strategists are pushing the party's wealthy donors to open up their wallets in hopes that they will quote, find the next Joe Rogan. This of course comes after Trump used the podcast circuit heavily as part of his media strategy, leading up to the 2024 election. Meanwhile, one of those podcasters, the great national treasure, Tim Dylan, who had JD Vance on his show, I believe before the election.

He recently did an interview with CNN where they asked him basically if he felt some sort of new responsibility being a part of the quote, new establishment. Tim Dylan responds and is like, let's see, you have the CIA, NGOs, every major university, basically every institution in America. And you think me and Theo Vaughn are like the establishment. Okay. He also says that for whatever role podcasts played in electing Trump, Democrats were not exactly giving the American people inspiring candidates. What did you guys make of this interview and the continued search for the liberal Joe Rogan? Why do we keep, what is with this slogan, the new Joe Rogan? Libs are fucking obsessed

with Joe Rogan. We've been talking about this for six months. Like shouldn't they move on to a new message? Yeah, but now they're pouring money into the search? Now you have the Democratic Party pouring money into the search like it's like they're on the hunt for the new Joe Rogan. So it's it's like it's like really like it's like an

American idol for the most tedious man alive. It's the it's an American idol for the next bad boy who does what he's told. That's what they're looking for. And it's like, what are we doing here? It's just the fact that you're looking for the next Joe Rogan in private. Yeah, right. It implies to me that you You're just completely You're just completely lost and that's I think that continues to be the story of the Democratic Party is they're just in the woods

They have no idea. There's a more sinister interpretation of it, you know Well, I mean so the Democrats are correct in that there is a, there's an influence game to be played, which needs to be fueled by money online. And that is spreading inorganic messages through paid influence campaigns, right? So we've covered things like this at PirateWires. And maybe that's what they're actually signaling under the cover of like trying to find the next Joe Rogan. So maybe that's it, right?

Like paying Mario Nafal or whatever that guy's name is to do like, you know, big tweets about, I don't know, you know, how Trump sucks or whatever. I think another big irony is like Joe Rogan wasn't the pot, like the product of some focus group. Like he wasn't like made in a lab with like tens of millions of dollars. Like no one was saying like, all right, Joe, let's talk about DMT or whatever. Like his growth was organic.

And like the fact that they don't get that is, yeah, they keep saying that like they're like, we need our Joe Rogan. The Republicans don't have Joe Rogan. They don't have a joke. They don't have a Theo Vaughn. Theo Vaughn was just giving an interview where he's like, there's a genocide happening in Gaza and Tim Dillon is on that exact same page, which is another interesting, there's really what you're seeing is a fault maybe also on the right there. That's you have like your sort of populist, totally the earth type

folks who are in a very different place than the institutional Republican Party. And then you have people like Trump who try and walk on both sides of that fence, but you can't only he has been able to ever do that. No one else can can sort of walk on all sides of all fences. And and so that's another piece of it is like, he doesn't belong to anybody. These people just happened to choose Trump

for a variety of reasons, including what you said, Riley, like the Democrats just didn't have anybody. I mean, what would the story have been if someone else was running for the Democrats during the last election? Would we be having this stupid podcast conversation? Would Trump have won? Had they just not run first a corpse

and then the coconut queen herself, Kamala Harris? Like there are a lot of other, I mean, what about Gavin Newsom? Would he have won? I think maybe, I don't know. Blake, what do you make of the hunt for the Lib Joe Rogan? On the one hand, it kind of seems like exactly

what the Democrats should be doing. Like in the sense of they don't have anyone, like, that makes them seem cool. Um, Joe Rogan kind of makes Trump seem kind of cool. On the other hand, it is kind of, it does kind of seem like a lost cause in the sense of they're trying to manufacture coolness, like to Riley's point. One of the reasons Joe Rogan and Theovon

and those types, I think, gravitate toward MAGA is because progressive culture stopped being cool. I kind of feel like there's a difference between progressive politics and progressive culture. Like Theovon worrying about genocide is a little bit progressive culture. Like Theovon worrying about genocide is a little bit progressive politics, but like getting canceled for saying retarded, that's progressive culture.

So I feel like there's been like a rejection of progressive culture. That's why there's a vacuum and like trying to manufacture someone to fill it. That seems kind of like a lost cause. Yeah, what comes to mind again is just, they do have these people. You have your dirtbag left podcasters,

you have the true non pod and you have a son and all these people that we have mentioned and talked about. Increasingly you have Taylor Lorenz who gets just more radical by the day. I mean, she just said, I think she was rooting for Joe Biden's death. May he rot in hell and

piss or something. Very crazy shit. I mean, there's a we could. Was that real? Yeah, that was real. That's Taylor Lorenz. Yes. Yeah. She's impressive.

Constantly says quite impressive things. Well, she's an apex predator of attention. That's just what she like. She is she is the fucking cheetah. She is the lioness. She is the final bot like no one is

better at her than just reading the tea, the sort of cultural tea leaves and being like, oh, you know what's going to shock them today? This thing over here, it's she's getting worse at it, unfortunately, because like it's not her fault. I think you can only just you can just

only do what that well for so long before people realize you're kind of just a drag queen version of yourself. And it's not it feels not real. Either she's crazy, or it's not real. And then it doesn't quite land the same way. And but anyway, yeah, she did say that. So there are plenty of people on the left who are willing to do what I think they've abandoned, maybe not her, but the other ones that I mentioned have abandoned long ago, they never accepted progressive culture.

And I love that framing by the way, Blake, but never progressive politics. In fact, they're more progressive on politics, more, I would say left-wing, more sort of openly communist. And the problem is it's the institutional left, the center left that wants to find this person and then control them. And you can't find and control someone as again, to your point, Blake, and and have them be cool. That's, I think, not possible. That's like not a cool thing to be owned by by any political party.

Not ever going to be Joe Rogan. And it's not Joe Rogan. And so they're misunderstanding what happened in the last election. Joe Rogan didn't determine who was gonna win the presidential election. Joe Rogan was one of the Americans of which the majority voted for Donald Trump.

That was what the culture was broadly. And he happened to be there and Joe Rogan will pivot tomorrow if he doesn't like the person. He has it in his bones. All these guys are unhappy with Gaza. They're all like a little bit economically populist and it is gonna be fucking easy.

The really scary idea is if a Democrat, if those guys become the Democrat, Joe Rogan, it's just, it's Joe Rogan. That's the Democrat Joe Rogan. All you have to do is stop being annoying and let him, as you said, like say the word retarded and you're golden. Free money for poor people.

These guys are all on board with that. That's what populism is. It doesn't pick a side. Yeah. Dumbs don't need a new Joe Rogan. They just need to stop being insane about about certain things. Yeah, they should. Hard. I do also understand the instinct to try and find a palatable figurehead. Yeah, but that they just misunderstand what Joe Rogan is.

I think a palatable figurehead is different than Joe Rogan. When you talk about Joe Rogan, you're talking about somebody who's just a normal guy that you can easily listen to. And Dems are like, we need to find that for our camp. And it's like, that's not, they're thinking about it in a completely wrong way, in my opinion, sorry to interrupt, but I just think they're like, they've got a categorical misapprehension of what's going on

and it dooms them to stay on the current path, in my view. They can't stay on the current path. That mean, listen, they're getting it... Blake, do you have a last thought on the, on the... live Joe Rogan or the next one is related to this topic? I just struggle with,

okay, then what should they do? Like, it feels like... there is missed potential still with, like, the validity of progressive politics, that, like, progressive culture kind of ruined. There could be a vision there. It just doesn't feel like it's escaped the death velocity of, like, how dumb progressive culture can be sometimes. I was just gonna say, you said, what should they do? I would say they should not have kicked David Hogg out

of the Democratic Party for being a guy. That's fucking crazy. That was crazy. I wonder if they just used that though. That would be one thing that they should not do, where Joe Rogan would probably be like, oh, good, you know good. They didn't do that or whatever. Do you think it was just covered though? They were looking for any excuse to get him out because he was so embarrassing. Hogg's problem was maybe, I mean, listen, at the end of

the day, that was the justification though. That was the official justification was, bro's a dude. He's got to go. That's weird. That's really fucking crazy. I don't think it's legal. Is it legal? Like, Hogg should sue them. Also, I hate, here's why I really hate the Democratic. How are you gonna make me defend David Hogg? That is so fucked up. That's the most fucked,

they've been, they've done fucked up shit for years. This is the lowest low. This is the worst it's ever been for me personally. Like, don't make me defend him. He's indefensible, I thought. How did you do it? How did they even do that? How did they make that happen?

Crazy. David Hogg is like 12. Oh, he's young. He's like 24. Like, he's not supposed to be good at stuff. I don't know. Like, he's 12. Like, to me, it's like David Hogg gets like a gun, a bunch of guff for

being ineffectual. And it's like, no, the Democratic Party is ineffectual for having to rely on a 12 year old. You could say that, okay, if you frame it that way, that actually their problem is that they have to rely on them. And that's the, okay, fine. But he has to be, it's the same way Greta Thunberg, like we can't hide behind how young she is when every establishment is throwing her in our face. Like, you can't throw a Greta Thunberg out there and pump tons of NGO money behind getting her on stages

all over the fucking world to talk about whatever extremist thing she's talking about today. And they'd be like, oh, but like she's so young. It's like, okay, well, what are... She has... Is she having impact or not? Like, she's out there presumably

because you think that she's... Her voice is worth hearing. If any voice is out there, I'm allowed to criticize it. And with Hogg, it's like, they did choose this. They have chosen, the press choose this. They have chosen, the press has chosen, politicians have chosen to push him into the spotlight. So his missteps are

on them, I think, until they repudiate it. But then now they have. It's just they do it for the almost reason ever. It's not like they couldn't just say, David, you're embarrassing us. You're fired. Joe Rogan would have covered that if they said that too, by the way. He would have been like, yeah, the guy's embarrassing. And David Hogg was like also a big reason they didn't like him was because he was trying to primary all these other Democrats. And so that's the real reason they want. So like, just say that, say you were trying to unseat our own members. Don't say you're a guy, so you can't be here. Well, because they need to rule. Well, they needed a rule though. This is the problem with Democrats, right? Like not really into democracy. You have this, there was a rule though. This is the problem with Democrats, right? Like, not really into democracy.

You have this... There was a... He was voted into this position. So they can't just be like, you're fired because you're bad, which is true, and you empathize with that. Like, yeah, he is bad, but there was an election. He got that role. You can't just take it away from him because he sucks.

That's like what democracy is. And that's... You had a democratic rule in your party, and now you should be stuck with him. Those are the rules. So they had to find something. But this is also what happened with Kamala. Like they she was not fucking primaried. And had she there been a primary, I don't think she would have been the one that was running. And like, in hindsight, probably democracy would have worked better for them. But yeah, sort of connected to this, maybe the final piece of this, which is really, I mean, high level, you know, bird's eye view, you look down what is happening. It's like the Democrats are trying to figure out who they are and how they're ever going to win another election.

And it's Biden is is the sort of major piece of this puzzle, Riley. Yeah. And the backdrop behind all of the recent news with him was a recent book published by Jake Tapper, it was called Original Sin, where he talks about the coverup of Joe Biden's cognitive decline. Same Jake Tapper who scolded people for talking about Biden's health. Megyn Kelly recently did an interview with him where she brilliantly called out that hypocrisy there. But two days before the book comes out,

we get the news from Biden's team that he has apparently been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had metastasized to his bones. Biden and his team remain adamant that this cancer was only recently discovered, yet you had many others questioning that timeline, given Biden has had access

to the best medical care in the world, and also raising the question of, well, if he was battling cancer, like who was running the country? And then Solana, yeah, you raised the possibility in the daily that actually what we're seeing in this sort of finger pointing about who was covering up what about Biden's health, really all of that is a way of the manifestation of an internal like Democrat Party Civil War that we see playing out. So I'll let you cook more on that idea. Well, I think it's just obviously what's happening. I mean, we have everybody knew that Biden was there. I don't believe people who said that they didn't think that he had cognitive impairment.

What was happening before he won, before he stepped down from the race was people were pretending that he wasn't as bad as he was because they thought the alternative, which was Donald Trump, was worse. And they were willing to play block and tackle for him. The media did this constantly, including people like Jake Tapper. Even though he did, to his credit, I think he was doing more than the average

like MSNBC co-host. Certainly his co-host, or I'm sorry, his co-writer, or his co-author, Alex Thompson'm sorry, his co-writer, his co-author, Alex Thompson did a lot of work on this, and he did care about this. Jake Tapper, I'm a little bit whatever on. But this question of like, is this man senile? Is it being covered up? Who is responsible? It's like, well, everybody in the administration is obviously responsible. Every major Democrat is responsible and the media is responsible, including all of your friends. Alex Thompson at Axios. Like they're all fucking responsible.

And the search for who is responsible is a joke. What's really happening is you have nonstop leaks right now coming all entirely from the Democrats on each other because they're trying to clean house and seize power. And it's like the Biden team is being destroyed. Everyone associated with him is being destroyed. He is being blamed for the failure of the last election. And the new group that's trying to take power is a part of that.

I would also just kind of introduce one more strange idea which is that the abundance Dems thing that's happening is very similar to the original sin Dems thing that is happening. In fact, those groups feel like the same group to me. I feel like these are the center leftists who are trying to control the party. They are afraid of the far leftists and they are looking to kind of, I guess, fortify influence within the party. Part of that is proposing policy and attacking bad leftist policies that have made

people's lives not so great, including housing policies in most of our major cities. That's what you're getting from the abundance dens. Part of that is finding a scapegoat and blaming all of the failures on him and the people around him. And that's kind of my read of what's happening. I think that's the real story of Biden's cognitive decline at this point.

How could it possibly be a story now, months into Trump's presidency? Like, why are we talking about it? The Republicans aren't the ones talking about it. It's the Democrats and they're doing it for political purposes is my read of the landscape. Yeah, I mean, I was looking stuff up ahead of the pod because I was like, okay, what do I like?

I need to like freshen up on this issue and push back on Solana. Literally, it was like, okay, the press at a minimum was complicit. I guess I find that to be the most interesting piece of all of it. Literally a former New York Times executive editor wrote in some op-ed, I think, for, no, it was for Semaphore, that they quite literally didn't want to publish negative stories about Biden's health for fear of like advancing Trump's agenda.

So I read that and I was like, hmm. Like that sort of flirting with the line between being complicit and actively participating in something. Yeah, I don't know. It holds up, I guess. I think you're pointing out something that's valid. In terms of the scapegoat thing,

that's, like, beyond my scope of expertise, like, him being sacrificed. It sort of always happens, right? This is how every... Anytime there's a huge loss, and no matter what the party is, when there's a huge political loss, like, a sort of a realignment-type moment,

one party enters the woods. This happened during this happened during the Obama era as well. The victories under Obama were staggering and realigning. And the Republicans had to figure out who was responsible. Why was it the Christian right? Was it the whatever the sort of the hawkish right? What is it? What do they call them?

Rhinos, right? Like who is responsible? Who are we going to be? You had Ann Coulter out there being like, the reason that the right wing doesn't win is because they don't run on right wing issues. It's like right wing issues are actually really pop. I remember the conversations over immigration. I remember her specifically being like, why would Republicans care about you? You don't care about people. Like the thing that everybody wants to talk about is immigration and there's not a Republican that you can trust on this issue. And there would be things like that though. Like they'd be having those kinds of conversations and they'd be looking to blame people in their own party. And that's the stage that we're at with the Democrats. It's just that we're living it out through this thing that happens to be an issue that is very juicy for, like it's very hard for right-wing people

or hardcore Trump supporters to see any Biden dementia story and not click and engage and amplify because it was upsetting to them. Of course, to be, to have like a fucking corpse on stage and to be told that that's normal is upsetting. That's like, you're furious at that point. You're being, you are being gaslit. And... So yeah, they're gonna click, but it's not about them.

And it's not about Biden. It's about whoever is trying to take power right now within the Democratic Party. I think I would give some, I would put some blame on Biden and the insider, well, the insiders around Biden. I don't think it's fully scapegoat stuff. Are you guys aware of the content of the Herr tapes? Yeah, so this is one of the huge reveals of the,

well, that's not necessarily a reveal. The audio leaked yesterday, or the DOJ released the audio yesterday. But one of the key takeaways there is that Biden, he's on, he's being recorded. He can't get the date of his son's death right. This is in 2023. And I listened to the, and so obviously, you know, like, I'm not minimizing the tragedy of the death.

And I'm not saying that Biden doesn't care about his son's death, but clearly like you are not, you're super not mentally there. If you're unable to demarcate, you know, sort of the timeline, you can't remember when exactly your son's death was. And we're talking about a year, right? He can't remember the right year that he died. And so I think I also listened to Jake Tapper's interview with Sam Harris, which came out yesterday. And it talks a lot about what the contents of the book. And it sounded like, you know, at first the people around him were kind of

like, look, there is a distinction between fumbling your words, forgetting stuff, and like normal old age stuff, and being a completely different person and no longer being able to make decisions. And at first, you know, the insiders were like, look, like Biden is still Biden. He still is a strong decision maker. He's just not good in public. And he stumbles over his words more.

And that's just because he's getting old. But Tapper kind of alleges that as things progress with Biden's decline, it actually became a lot, lot, lot worse. And due to the Bidens themselves in large part who have this like almost, they deify themselves. It's this weird family dynamic where it's like always trust a Biden's word, I think,

is one of their family mottos. They and their really, really close insiders who worshiped Biden, according to the book, or according to at least this podcast, they began to cover up the actual real obvious decline. And once Biden had lost, Tapper says there was just this flood of insiders who wanted to talk to him.

So, I mean, I agree there's a scapegoating situation going on. But I also think that, like, there were some very bad there was a literal cover up going on inside the White House. And that should be aired out, regardless of the sort of political convenience of it all. That is true. You're right. It sort of doesn't matter. there's a political war happening. We do need to know. I think that's a really good point. And also I do wonder,

I mean, the reason that I want to know who is in charge. That seems to be a huge deal. I was just wondering while you were talking, oh, why would these people feel so comfortable or not comfortable? Why would they rush to Jake Tapper after the election? Wouldn't they be alarmed that someone who has dementia is potentially gonna be the president? It's like they would not be alarmed because he wasn't the president, because there was already, who knows?

This is what I don't understand. Was there a group of people around him who were making decisions? Was there one person who was making the decision? Who were they? Who was making the decisions like up to it? And really, it's going to be actually a really important issue, because who is drafting the executive orders? And like,

I mean, who is responsible for that? There were a whole bunch of them. And even things like, like, what are they called? pardons, executive pardons, like all of this stuff matters. Who is in charge of that? You kind of, Tapper, this is an interesting interview. Obviously I haven't read the book yet because it just came out yesterday. But on that specific question, he does answer it.

He says there was a very small group of people that were kind of making decisions with Biden by committee. And there was sort of the selective thing going on where they would be the filters of what questions were asked of Biden. So he gave this like, you know, funny analogy where he was like, look, like, if you have any choice of ice cream, but I come to you, but you don't know what choices you have. And I come to you and say, Hey, do you want to want vanilla or chocolate? Well, you're only going to choose vanilla or chocolate. And that's kind of how the decision making was happening with Biden.

Apparently the people around him would filter the the options on offer for what to do. They would be sort of hand crafting those and Biden would, you know, give us give us yes or no to this small group. So it was definitely a small group of people running the country. It wasn't Biden. Well, that's true. That part, yes. But when it comes to the details and how bad it truly was, you also have to remember that who are the sources for this book? There are people who are coming to Jake Tapper who were presumably a part of all of this. Like, it could be much, much worse

and probably is much, much worse. The gnarly details of that, including like, how many people just, or what person specifically, saw an opportunity to take over the presidency and is like, oh, I'm gonna get my agenda pushed through right now because no one's in charge. Who was that person? Like fucking names. I want the names of the people who were responsible. And I think America deserves that. I hope maybe that's what I mostly hope out of this

is that we get that. It's definitely frustrated to feel lied to and in such a clear like to see it so clearly is doesn't make you feel good. I saw a rumor floating around and I'm not sure if this has been confirmed. I think it came from some Republican congressman. I don't think it's been confirmed yet, but reports of people who had access to his auto pen like putting up offers for pardons. That can't be true.

But it does raise the question of just just how like insane did this get? And I hope it's not true, but where did you see that? Right. I was not on true social salon. I swear I promised all that too. I was, I was worried somebody is going to bring that up. I mean, it did come from like a congressman. I may be totally fake, but Riley heard this at the gas station, some guy at the gas

station. Yeah. My driver is really convinced about this guy. Well, we'll keep a close eye on all of this and more. It's been real. Thanks for coming back. Thanks for, I don't know, clicking, rating, subscribing. This is the part where you guys never listen because it happens at the end of the episode and you're trained to be like, oh, that's just this thing that he says at the end. No, I would really love you to comment. It means a lot. If you could just say some shit in there and like, give it the

fucking lot. It takes no time to get to press the like button. Why don't you all just do it? I don't get it. Thousands of people are watching just why is there only a couple hundred light like it just fucking click the button. It's crazy. Click it please. Thank you. It's the least you can do for your free podcast. You're welcome. I love you. Have a great weekend. Goodbye.