TRASHFUTURE - Steube Is As Steube Does feat. Mike Isaac

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

We talk to NYT tech reporter Mike Isaac about the ongoing Greg Steube-fication of every major tech CEO in the US. Also, Rachel Reeves has depression, DOGE makes some cost cutting recommendations at the DEA, and Peter Thiel learns Greek. Get access to more Trashfuture episodes each week on our Patreon! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello everybody and welcome to UK Chancellor Depression Watch. That's right. We are now the official podcast that is tracking the mental health status of Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom. But the thing about men's women's mental health is that it can strike at any time. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's reported that Chancellor Rachel Reeves, this is from an article in the Times about how she sucks, they're all turning on her, is she can't see a way out of the bleak economic outlook and is quote, very depressed, with

aides saying she is now watching the fourth season of the US office in number 11. ALICE Yeah, she's eating cereal out of the big popcorn bowl. It's like, it's really not going well, you know? I think we can all relate to that, right? Whomstamungus has not been in charge of managing one of the largest economies in the world and been like, this is too much, you know? I think most of all what we all need at this time is grace, we need to remember the people

who really matter, like Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Ace Checker, and I think we all need to do our part to chip in, so I think if we all do that, we can send a card and maybe a box of milk tray or something to number 11 Downing Street, and I think that may be just a really rally round, and let her know that we've got her back. Yeah, she's just there like, why can't the British government find buyers for its bonds like Jim found Pam? I think what we should do is use the UK's facility to be able to send any petition to parliament.

We should all send a petition to parliament. Just a petition that just says, you're okay, hun. X-X. Well, I was going to say, let's send a petition to the UK parliament that's just the Samaritan's phone number that we want to read to Rachel Reeves. Okay, to be fair, to be fair, if the Tories were serious about being funny in opposition, they could just read her the Samaritan's phone number. That would be very funny. If I was elected as a kind of like, you know, a labor right person and my mandate was like

growth and growth and growth and growth. And then the bond markets just decided on their own one day. Oh no, that's not allowed. I might put a bag lunch in my red box too. But like all the same, it's kind of stretching things a bit to ask me for, for like my sympathy personally, you know? Yeah. I'll introduce our guest in just a moment, but I want to conclude this discussion with, you know what? If being the like ultra responsive, straight jacketed to fiscal rules tied to global bond markets, chancellor is a job that you've decided doesn't suit you. You don't have to do it. You can do another one.

You fought so hard to be there, to make sure that Britain would always be straight jacketed into responding to exactly what financial markets want through these crazy fiscal rules. You kicked everybody else out. You fought, like you were part of a faction that sabotaged your own party on multiple occasions to make sure that like the risk that someone else did that job was nil and now you have it and you fucking

Hate it because it turns out that just like Liz trust It doesn't matter how much you suck off the bond markets if you don't fix the fucking foundations of the building It's still gonna fall apart. So Jeers to Rachel Reeves Let me conclude by saying you have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever. Anyway, anyway, anyway, that's all the arcane Britain stuff. Let's bring in our guest. It is returning champion.

It is Mike Isaac, the New York Times' technology reporter, Silicon Valley guy covering Metta. However, the last time you heard of him on this show, it was a, let's say a, the episode about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, where one segment turned into a two-parter. Mike Isaac. How you doing? I'm good. I'm, I guess I'm better than the last time we spent two hours talking about Elon, although I'm sure, I don't know, this is, there'll be this fun thing with Zuckerberg. I guess.

See how you feel after this. How many British chancellors of the Exchequer are you feeling right now? British chancellors of the Exchequer are you feeling right now? Uh... Out of... Out of, uh... Out of a five, I don't know. I need to go hit Betty's Tea Room, I think is what I would say, and just load up on scones. That's the last thing I remember.

Oh yeah, oh yeah. I mean, the thing about Rachel Reeves, right, is it's so funny to me, imagining being a civil servant who is being told to like leak to the newspapers that your boss has depression. I have to imagine if you're like a senior civil servant in the treasury, there is no shot zero percent chance you do not have worse depression than Rachel Reeves, right? Because you're stuck there. She can she can retire and go get a directorship somewhere,

but you are fucked and you have to go and call up a newspaper or WhatsApp a journalist and be like, my boss has been wearing the same sweatpants for two weeks. My boss has been posting some stuff on your close friend's Instagram that I think the Times of London would like to have a look at. She's like blacked out her like profile picture and she's like, you know, if you, if you know what it is, don't text, you know, like, I don't just, I, I can't believe posting like, um, old My Chemical Romance lyrics, but about like Bond traders at Barclays. I mean, the thing is we know she's depressed.

We don't know that it's related to her job in any way. She could have been like, maybe she was like all in on the Adrian Ditman thing. And when she found out that wasn't real, she out that was kind of like spirals, you know? Oh my god. It is Riley, it's November and it's Mike. Milo may jump in, he's having some internet problems. So we will see.

If you hear a Starmer impression later, chances are that's him. But we're going to talk today a lot about meta. Having a reasonable amount of depression. A moderate amount of depression, moderate amount of depression, having ticket, taking all the boxes, but only some or few days, not all of the days in the last two weeks. I mean, there's some synergy here because I don't know if you saw the, the like, uh, the interview Blair and he said that you've got to like stop having depression. So, you

know, that's really like labor right to labor right communication. I hate how the government just talks to itself in the press. Buck up. Get it together. Yeah, that's right. It's like a house share. It's just like, you know, Tony Blair and a rare political intervention called on Rachel Reeves to remember to do the fucking dishes for once. Yeah. The Downing Street chore wheel is crucial to ensuring that all of the chores get done. You're going to leave food in the fridge, label it with your name.

I understand that Rachel Reeves wants her friends Vanden and Stash to be able to crash for the week. Now, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Rachel Reeves' friends, Vanden and Stash, are welcome to stay at number 10 so long, Mr. Speaker, as they get up from the couch by nine, because I have to go to work in the morning. I would watch that show. An anarchist number 10? It reminds me of,

you talked about this on a show I used to do with Dan Beckner, how when he lived in an anarchist squad in Vancouver, some guys from the States came in and tried to dig a latrine and everyone got like cholera. Oh my God. Jesus. It's always the Americans that give people cholera. I want to announce a public health crisis in the UK that at least one house in central London has experienced a Giardia outbreak

because someone dug a latrine in the garden. No, so we're going to be talking a lot about Metta. We're going to be talking also about Peter Thiel. And I guess one of the theories we're going to be coming back to and something we're really going to want to hear from Mike from as well is about like, this is sort of like the final chess move of the quote unquote anti elite tech billionaires cycling in as the new, just simply replacing an old elite.

It's interesting the combination of Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg in you've got a guy who thinks he can speak Greek and a guy who thinks he can speak Greek and a guy who thinks he is Roman. So it's a real shame that the classicist among us is like, you know, hindered by his internet for this. Mm. The other thing I wanted to say was one more bit of Britain before we get to the tech news. And this is of course, this has been all over the internet.

Yeah, this is something we would have to acknowledge, you know, and obviously we have a strong take on it. We've also briefed Mike on this one as well, and it's a phenomenon that happens in the states in addition. And this is of course former Labor Defense Secretary and former Labor MP resigned late 2004. Ivor Kaplan, who was also leader of the Jewish Labor Movement in 2018, has recently been confronted after a sting by volunteer pedophile hunters. ALICE You have to imagine, of all the days you could have as a volunteer pedophile hunter, this isn't even really an endorsement of them, but they've got to be so pleased with themselves after that one.

Like, normally you've got to figure that stuck in trade is like, y'know, sad man of little consequence, whereas this appears to be like, sad man of some political consequence crashing out this way. Now, this is, I think, probably the most important reading I can do on the subject here, so I'll say this. Sections 1 and 2 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 contain a rule but a publication... Yeah, yeah. That's pretty much it, you know.

Like my definitive take on this is, um, damn, that's allegedly crazy. I think it's legal to say that whatever he may or may not have done, this is a guy who has had an interesting few months, and I hope that the authorities get to the bottom of it one way or the other in a way that this is, you know, correct. I, yeah. Yeah. As a British publication and to any Americans on the British publication, I have to add that everyone here is bound by British contempt of court law. I think what we can say is I hope justice is done in whatever direction, and also, given what we know about volunteer

pedo hunters who stream their stings on Facebook, as November said, what a fucking red letter day for them. ALICE Like, to these guys, they must have figured they caught the guy who invented Globo Homer, right? They found the first gay guy as far as they're concerned. So they're having a great time. And, you know, as you say, the section's one or two for the contempt of the court side. Yeah.

But this is also something that happens quite a bit in the States, right? You see live streams of guys who are like, we're volunteer pedo hunters and, you know, we're out to do some entrapment. Not to like, just take over Milo's bits, but this is something that like Russia was ahead of the curve on. They were innovating on that. They were like, hate-criminin' people who weren't even doing anything on live streams from that pretty quickly.

Not that we want to imply that Ivor Kaplan did anything, crucially. That's true. Okay. So, so allegedly but yes, no, it's just like ultimately I think we're heading towards a culture where This is just like completely normalized is that it's like go about who can say but you know Did this guy do anything good so bad so you can say that not us legally. He certainly did some posts He certainly he certainly had yeah had an interesting Twitter account that I think maybe was ill-advised in some ways. Yes, but was followed by everybody in the Labour Party.

Yeah. I mean, that's gotta be a little bit awkward as well, to be like, your colleague is at a minimum that you know about, visibly kind of like having a weird one by retweeting a lot of porn, like from his like real name politics account. Yeah, maybe that's what gave Rachel Reeves depression. You know, she's been following it for so long. Well she got like one-shotted by like seeing this guy retweeting like fucking massive twink cocks and was like, okay, I I'm going to like take two weeks off

to really not think about this. Yeah. She just hates cringe posting. Oh, oh, there we go. And that's why that's that's fresh features Milo Edwards. Yeah. Hi, I'm back. Yeah.

Yeah. Sorry. I was busily retweeting massive tweet cocks and then I remembered that I was supposed to be on this podcast. It's less weird if you're a podcaster, I feel. But if you, if you were like, veterans minister, and like, all your other retweets are like, like, Starmer stuff? That's weird company.

Starmer hasn't been in company with like, Twinks for, you have to imagine a while. How dare you as veterans minister retweet massive Twink cocks? You expect members of the armed forces to see naked men's penises? Come on. Well, like, relatedly to this, in the alleged video that may or may not have been taken by these alleged volunteer pedo hunters, they like call him on this specifically of having been veteran's minister, because I guess it's worse to be like associated with the military nonce than to just be a not allegedly

Which I just thought was really funny to be like not only is this guy allegedly doing like reprehensible sex crimes But he's also Tarnishing the reputation of the British Armed Forces I wanted them because I know that like volunteer pedo hunters streaming shit on Facebook as a transatlantic phenomenon I do want to bring Mike in here before we talk about Doge and Meta and stuff. Has an American group of, uh, amateur hunters to your knowledge ever, uh, confronted a fish of this size? No, no, no. This is like the big mouth Billy Bass of PETA hunting lands. I think that American guys just beat up random dudes or, you know,

random dudes that they find. And I don't, not to my knowledge, has there been an actual famous person, you know, celebrity, American celebrity or, you know, politician that I've seen. But it's usually like the real sick version of bum fights, basically, but finding, you know, potential pedophiles over here. It's all content. Like, this is the new content economy, I guess yes It's pretty it's disturbing to me honestly like yeah

It's actually tea boo stuff in America. You know they're imitating our culture, but I don't really understand how it works You know they're just being up a guy in Cleveland going he could have been a nice What I was saying when you're off was that they're imitating Russian culture ultimately yeah Which is just slapping a guy. Having it be the original, the original happy slap was Russian and there was nothing happy about it. The depression slap. Yeah.

The perestroika slap. Look, the glasnost slap was actually a lot more fun. So look, I, I want to move on. I want to move on to, of course, another piece of news. This is more sort of US oriented news. It has been revealed a little more, the structure of the department for government efficiency as called, it's been revealed how it's going to work. Apparently the first thing it's done is it has put Vivek Ramaswamy on the moon and taken away his phone because that motherfucker-

Like in the umbrella academy? Yeah, that motherfucker has been gone. He has been disappeared. He has been colored, he's been altered out of photos like the 1952 in the Soviet Union. He has vanished. He posted about Urkel and now he was never heard from again. You know what this means? As a guy who was fired for posting too hard, I am obliged to respect him a bit. Especially because the post that ended his career was talking shit about white people.

That's, you know, that's... I think we sort of have to tentatively hand it to him. You know? Crumped out like an ex-boyfriend on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. hand it to him. You know, it's out like an ex boyfriend on Instagram. Getting, getting iced out by the riot from my tweets about white people drive like this. But the structure of the organization has been announced. Mike, have you, have you seen the sort of reporting on the structure of Doge?

So I think that it's still sort of considered like a, So I think that it's still sort of considered like a give a ball to these kids in the corner so they can play with it over here, at least for a lot of folks in the US, like just like Trump admin folks that are getting kind of tired of a lot of these people. I know they're like posturing like this is a real thing. This is really, you know, we can actually send these people in. They're going to, the billionaires can like take their important time off and have civil service, but like, fill me in on the actual structure, but like, I just keep, the only thing I keep reading is like, it's distract them with a ball in the corner sort of thing.

ALICE The department of jangling keys. I mean, the thing is, the thing that always fascinates me about this, right, is if you actually like, take them at their word, if you have this idea of like, you know, a Doge guy and a windbreaker who runs like 15 Kroiper Twitter accounts is going to come into your office and tell you how to run your, your, you know, agency or whatever. All well and good for the like, soy bits of the federal government. You know, you can do that to the Department of Education, but like, what do you do to the, the, the like, psycho half of the federal government? Like you're going to, I want to meet the, the Doge guy they send

to the CIA, you know, they're going to, they're going to tell like Alan Dulles the 24th that he needs to like cut out the woke shit. Yeah. I personally, I would love to see them go to like the DEA and just like, like looking at a bunch of photocopied receipts while an increasingly nervous tweaking DEA agent rubs his nose nervously, like fingers his gun. No, just doing a ride along with your Doge Guy like training day. $200 bill for like Starbucks and for my breakfast. We made the Doge guy smoke cracks.

I know what that's like. Yeah. I'll write everybody at the DEA. This is Bill. He's the founder of Glunch. It's a business to business invoice automation AI provider. And he's going to be looking through all of your expense accounts. Yeah. And he's going to be looking through all of your expense accounts.

Yeah. Hey, do we need to have this many cartel guys on the payroll? And then he's already hanging by his ankles from like a Tijuana overpass. And like there's the other thing that I mentioned this for is that there are surprising little pockets of this kind of like scary federal agency throughout. You know, like, and what they're going to do when you try federal agency throughout, you know? And what they're gonna do when you try and go to, say, I don't know, Health and Human Services, right, and you go, alright, we gotta delete all of this stuff about anti-racism, and then you also have to talk to the Health and Human Services SWAT team that exists for

some reason, and has like a billion dollar budget that they spend entirely on like flashbang different hospital wards. That's gonna be entertaining to me. Yeah, I can't believe the CEO of Pooda Pood has been blinded and deafened permanently by you. That's not even the guy they're gonna send. Absolute disaster when we flashbang the heart attack ward. They are gonna send like a 19 year old ectomorph called Tyler in to do this shit, you know? And he's gonna have a little scraggly fucking beard, and he's gonna like try and get like

whatever four star general Mark Milley handpicked as his successor to be like, you know, say that there are only two genders. This is what it said, right? Is that Doge will not exist. It will not be an organization. It will be a, it's a way of life. Well, it will, it will exist as, and I say, get this, a group chat. I have a gun in my mouth. We're going to put Gibbo in charge of Doge. Oh god, I have a gun in my mouth. No way. That's it. We're gonna put Gibbo in charge of Dosh. I think that'd be better.

Gibbo. Yeah, there we go. It is unlikely to incorporate as anything. Its office is just gonna be in the SpaceX Washington office and quote, it is more likely to exist as a brand for an interlinked group of aspirational leaders who are on a joint group chat and share a loyalty to Mr. Musk or Rameswamy. Sorry. I'm seeing Rameswamy being deleted.

Fully like explicitly like oligarchical influence network. You know, like you used to, back in the day when you had a kind of thing like this, you used to have to run it through like a recently privatized state gas company or something. Yeah. Oligarchies gone to the dogs. Back in the day, you had to marry Boris Yeltsin's daughter and use your newfound influence to convince the bank of Moscow to loan you a huge amount of money to buy so good nefty gas. Now, anyone just walk in off the street, you know, you're saying you've got group chat, you want to run the American empire. Sorry, mate, you've

got to put in the hard yards. Doing like last hard class shit, but for like oligarchy, you know? Remember when the oligarchs were hard. They've gone soft now. I'll tell you what, none of these guys could murder anyone in a sauna with a crossbow. Trevor Traynor, a billionaire, a great name, who considered joining Doge but didn't because it doesn't pay. Hey, respect to that guy.

Yeah. That's how you get to be a billionaire is you never, you never work for free. Value your labor. To be fair, I suppose it's number one, like we know who actually is taking these jobs. It's all people who've gotten teal fellowships who worked at Palantir, Anderil, and they're doing it like they're working those jobs exactly like employees of fucking SNC Lavalin made quote unquote campaign contributions to like Momar Gaddafi's reelection right like we know what this actually is you know it's like okay well it's these hand-picked oligarchs just putting their guys into a bunch of government departments who are going to

you know try and shape the future of them and I guess the question is are enough of them gonna risk taking the DEA assignment to see through that agenda? And I think the funny thing is by the way, Trevor Trena, this entrepreneur, he says, Pete, the cynics among us will say, oh, it's just naive billionaires stepping into the fray of government.

But it's a service to the nation that we saw more typically around the founding of the nation. The friends I know have huge lives and they're agreeing to work for free for six months, leave their families and roll up their sleeves. Oh yeah, tech guys being like, oh sorry. I, a member of the Teal Fellowship who has, by the way, committed pronatalist. I have a wife and we're going to have nine children together. I and all the other guys from the Teal Fellowship are

going to go live in a house for six months alone with no wife. So goodbye. Yeah, no wives allowed. Yeah, well, an attempt to really turn things around. You can view it either way. The funny thing about Trevor Traynor, of course, is that under Trump, he was ambassador to Austria, who flew a pride flag at the Vienna embassy and is now considered to be a soy by the rest of those guys. The fact that they all hate each other

for a sort of fractal number of reasons is, that's one of the few things keeping me going. People like to talk about the left and splitting and shit like that, but we don't have a monopoly on these kind of microbeefs. And at least ours tend to be somewhat discourse focused. All of these guys are just interpersonally hate each other anyway. Anyway, I want to move on. Let's talk meta. Let's, let's begin plumbing some of the, some

of the depths. Now, this is the second episode on meta in a very small amount of time. This is of course because they've announced a lot of changes and half the change has got announced literally as we were finishing our previous episode. So there's a lot more to talk about. Now, Mike, you mostly do cover Meta. Like that's one of your main focuses for the New York Times. I'm calling this total Greg Stubbe victory, but how would you characterize what has happened at Meta and its group of companies more on the politics, company, and content side rather than the AI first side in the last four or five months. Yeah. So yeah, the AI thing is a whole other sort of business implications for them. But

it's really striking as... I don't know, I see it as a few things. A capitulation, this idea that this stuff that we have been holding back in a way of like not sort of explicitly catering to the government in their language is now just like a complete turnaround. We're gonna, you know, do this announcement where we're rolling back a number of the content moderation things and sort of speech policy on the platform that we had had in in stone for eight, basically eight years. And a lot of folks are sort of saying, and I think this is partially true, this is a cynical ploy to sort of appeal to the Trump administration, which I think is right. But

I want to be clear, it's like not Zuckerberg holding his nose while he does it and saying, I have to, this is not stuff I believe in. I do think, at least for now, the guy has believed a number of these, like the internet age is too woke, or at least we're being forced into wokeness by the government, by progressives in Silicon Valley, by progressives online, we need to sort of roll this stuff back. But you know, like with the other caveat that the guy also has pretty malleable views over time and tends to kind of meet the moment based on what is existential to his business, you know, so for four to eight years from now, maybe we see an entire reversal again. But I do think that like, this is not like liberal Zuckerberg deciding to become Trumpist just because Trump is moving into power, if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. It's like liberal Zuckerberg was a kind of outgrowth of a bet by him that

Trump was an aberration in 2016. And you could see it actually. You could see when the switch happened. It wasn't when Trump won. It was actually around 2022 when the Ukraine war happened and the aftermath of COVID. Just like a lot of the other tech billionaires, he seemed to sense, okay, the thing that animated MAGA is not going to end similar movements in other countries is not going to be going away. It's not going to be beaten by a kind of reheated early 2000s pre-financial crisis liberalism that sort of is responding to like... I think the other thing that can't be overstated as well is that at that moment, that kind of liberalism was trying to... At a moment of trying to resuscitate itself by responding to the Black Lives Matter

sort of protests around the states. That also happened in the UK, like Keir Starmer fucking kneeled with a Kente cloth, as did Nancy Pelosi. And I think it was at that moment, combined with like, you know, the end of COVID and the Ukraine war, that a lot of the tech billionaires went,

okay, this far and no further, we're all like anti-DEI now, We're slowly going to start rolling back on those policies. That's when companies started deleting DEI policies. Coinbase was just the first one. Yes. And that's the sort of... I think you're totally right. And I was thinking about this. Folks online, including myself, were like, oh, they only think Trumpism is going to last four years or what happens when the Democrats come back in power. But I think you're right. Like I think the Democrats even now are backing away from that. You know, exactly. The kneeling era, the sort of like posturing, we need to wrap everything in what we think is the good signaling, the corporate sort of pink washing

of different initiatives. This is a bet on that being done now basically and like maybe maybe they're right maybe if Democrats do come back you know you're even seeing Dems over here sort of really backing away from this this sort of what they are calling now woke woke is sort of PC speech but like I don't know for me it's just like it colors everything not that we shouldn't have already been cynical about all of the things that they've been putting out there and all the initiatives that they've had for a long time, but it colors all of the past eight years of Zuckerberg's sort of company-wide billions of dollars spent on this stuff in an even more cynical light, I would say.

Well, it's marketing. It's in so many cases. This is any time I would see conservatives getting incensed about DEI, I'd be like, what you're doing is you are getting angry at a marketing campaign. And then, but just to remember that in, again, what I always remember, Beat Takeshi referring to America

as a quote, entertainment nation, and that extending to the rest of the Anglosphere is like getting people to get mad at a marketing campaign is a great way to energize them because that's what they understand the world to be comprised of. Oh Jesus, that's pretty good. Yeah. It worked great with Bud Light, you know. Why not do it with everything else?

But I describe this as total Stoobie victory because as listeners to the show will know, we have a favorite US congressman as every podcast in the world does. Of course. Of course. And our favorite US congressman is course, Sarasota Republican Greg Stubbe. A man who once asked Sundar Pichai why his emails were going to junk mail for his friends and family. That fucking rocks. That is like exactly what you do when you're in power. You use the CEO of a company as tech support in a congressional hearing. Yeah, he then a couple of months later, he then fell off of his roof while repairing

it, but was apparently fine. A gigantic meathead. He's too big. Ground injured. Still be fine. He is our perfect oath, right? Yes. And, you know, without the kind of, like, you know, burden of DEI and wokeness holding them back, thanks to Doge, any kind of like, you know, the federal like, you know, fish and wildlife service will finally be able to pursue him. He's a guy who should have been saved from politics and who should have spent his life running from the HHS SWAT team. Unfortunately, unfortunately, he's in power.

Yeah. Well, he's a prisoner of destiny, like so many Greek tragic figures, you know, the American Empire was faced with a question, Stooby or not Stooby, and you know, like a philosopher king, he has been summoned, you know, he didn't want to rule, but he must. He turned down Imperium three times. So the Greg Stooby has long had a lot of complaints about Facebook. He's kind of per when I want to think about what the US right wants regarding tech regulation, you're sort of average right winger. I always look at Greg Stubbe as my bellwether. He is the most Facebook-pilled of them.

Yes. He is like one of the dumbest examples of a Facebook user there is. One of like your just replacement rate, replacement level rather, sort of Trump supporters. You know, what has happened is Mark Zuckerberg has closed his eyes really, really hard and pressed on both of his temples for a long enough time until he became Greg Stubbe. He turned himself into Stubbe. So Stubbe's most recent venture forth on Metta was only a few months ago where he said again, Metta is notorious for censoring conservative speech only after Zuckerberg got caught engaging in election interference by censoring the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020, did he promise to reform Metta for content moderation purposes. Stubbe said before then going on to suggest that his appointment of John Arnold, a former Enron trader and charter school advocate who happens to have hopped on the board, the disinformation train by a global witness to Metta's board. Stubbe was like, yeah, that shows they haven't changed

at all. So Mark Zuckerberg has just said, okay, Greg Stubbe, if you're not going to believe us, I will turn myself into you. Yeah. That's why he's at the gym all the time. He's trying to get big enough to be Greg Stubbe. So of course then we're going to talk a little more about specifically what's changed, but Zuck outlined a lot of this on what can now really be understood as like regime radio Joe Rogan, essentially. So what did he say on Rogan? I have a few examples here, but I want to know what jumped out at you, Mike. Yeah. The Rogan interview really blew me away and I'm still, this is my fucking job and I'm only two and a half hours through it basically so I need to get back back into it

I guess it's not it's not fair what they're making you do I say my job is now listening to Rogan every so often and it's really Lord Roror But it blew me away because I do know just you know I've been reporting on him for a long time and have talked to folks kind of in a circle I've known that he's held some long time and have talked to folks kind of in a circle. I've known that he's held some of this sort of some of these views around, you know, we are holding our... Basically, I think if they had their way, they would not have to deal with any sort

of moderation, which is not possible because there are laws, especially in the EU and in and I believe in Britain that where you have to sort of take certain things down or face massive fines. But if they had their way, they would have no sort of moderation at all. So a bunch of the, what they once called their hate speech policy, they now call hateful conduct particularly because they wanted to get it away from this idea that speech can be damaging, I guess, is what some of the policy thinking was. They rolled back a lot of things you wouldn't be allowed to say on there. from this idea that speech can be damaging, I guess, is what some of the policy thinking was.

They rolled back a lot of things you wouldn't be allowed to say on there. So one policy example from a source we talked to said that, you know, you wouldn't be allowed to post white people have mental illness because that is targeting a group, a white group, I guess, is what it was. But you would be allowed to post gay people have mental illness. And a lot, so a lot of things that were kind of centered on trans non-binary. It's in the Rachel Reeves was gay.

Yeah. It can happen to anyone. And then we watched the office. But I, so what I think the lesser issue was sort of taking out fact checking, at least in the United States, they still are required to in the EU, I believe, which I think is a lesser deal because, you know, fact checking the billions of things that go through Facebook every day is an impossible task. And like, honestly, also always was sort of a fig leaf in my imagination to get the government

off their back. And then lastly, reversing their stance of the past 12 to 18 months saying, no one wants to see politics in their feeds. We just want to see dog pics and whatever. And they're shoving it back into Facebook, Instagram threads. And oh, no, not threads. I know we're all fucked. So just a bunch of reversals.

There's a lot. I think there's a few ways to look at this, right? One is the old adage that every platform eventually becomes the same platform over time. Used to be that every platform was becoming TikTok, but now it seems like the proximity of X specifically to Trump, X the everything app, of course, specifically to Trump and American power has meant that other platform companies have an incentive for every platform to become Twitter or X the everything app. Yeah. Which is at that scene. We're seeing the grokification of American society.

The Doge guys said we have to replace the language model that targets the howitzers with grok. Yeah, that's right. The future of warfare is to anti-woke AIs fighting each other. Yeah. Norman Grok-o-fella, is that anything? Norman fucking Grokwell.

But there's there's that one observation, right? Platforms become one another. Then I think there is there's another one, which is what we're seeing. Like we've seen capital in the US, specifically large nationally important, quote unquote, corporates, and the US state being largely coterminous with one another is not at all new, obviously. But what we're seeing is platform capital and the US state becoming largely coterminous

with one another, I think because of how important posting is to movement conservatives and the president in particular. Hmm, that's pretty good. And also because of the fact that now, you know, we have, there is an official platform enemy in the form of TikTok, which may get banned. So it's that if you are, if you're Zuckerberg, you have a really strong incentive to align yourself as much as you can to the president to be like, Oh, Mr. President, I know you said you were going to like, you know, turn me into a court jester 18 months ago, but we know that was all fun, right? We're, we're friends now. Please ban TikTok.

As grim as it's looking, you really have to look to Trump as the real like destabilizing element, the wild card here, uh, Trump and Elon Musk, you know, like, the two like really uncontrollable weirdos here. Cause otherwise it's really seeming like these guys have a lot of this shits sewn up, you know? I do think that that's, you're exactly right, and this Mark has also taken this like, outwardly America first tack to kinda secure that, right? He's saying, you know, we must eliminate the Chinese

menace that is tick tock, which he may actually get his way very soon. It's looking like the Supreme Court here is going to ban it after, by the way, not that long ago, regularly courting Xi Jinping and asking the president what he should name the birth of his first child when he was over in China visiting God. So incredible. It's not Mark Zuckerberg is just a lifetime bitch. That's a pretty good. Yeah, right. But like, that's the thing. It's like people have kind of a short memory around this stuff. And that's what I think Zuckerberg is counting on when he's like waving the

American flag on a, on a hydrofoil drinking a Bud Light or no, I'm sorry, the non gaygay beer, right? So it would have been Miller Light. But like, that's the sort of, the thing is like he kind of figures out, especially around his like close advisors, Joel Kaplan, Bush era sort of guy who's like basically architecting all these changes. They know what the strategy is and it's all in on the USA. And I agree, like, what does Trump do tomorrow, what does Elon do tomorrow, god knows, who knows what they're gonna do, but I think that that's what Zuckerberg is sort of counting on, basically.

I just really hope that, listen, I don't know very much about Xi Jinping personally, but I hope that he is a uniquely petty and vindictive man who is deeply wounded by Mark Zuckerberg's perceived betrayal of him. Yeah. I think it would be fun if so many Americans are so hopelessly addicted to TikTok that that becomes the resistance. You've got middle-aged moms in secret in a basement somewhere in Wisconsin making tea in a microwave and filming it and being like, this is how we show that we're not

part of it. Yeah, forget about Lib January 6th, it's the TikTok January 6th. Every time, every time like more than two Chinese people are on like the same non, like the same VPN side at the same time and they get a kind of breathless rise up that's like, is this the end of the Chinese communist party? I just, I look forward to like a couple of Americans posting TikToks and kind of like breathless international coverage of the end of the American regime. Yeah, the South China Morning Post in between loudest sneeze ever recorded by Panda and this boat sail all the way to Antarctica is the end of the American regime. Sort of a People's Daily vibe, but yeah.

Sorry, People's Daily, not South China Morning Post. Fuck. More and more Americans have been tuning in to watch the videos of the family as they dance to Forget Me Knots in their local pub, showing discontent with the regime. Honestly, it can't come soon enough. I want to be reading English language People's Daily content that's like a peasant from rural Montana province still makes barbecue the old faction way or whatever yeah Cincinnati Zoo gorilla has 46 birthday oh shit he turned 46 oh cool everyone in China loves American Pangzai.

I believe there may be a case for genuine proletarian exchange there. America has a lot of working class alcoholics and they salute them. American Pangzai, also known as a regular guy. Mysterious disease emerges at cattle market in Wyoming prefecture. Back to Metta. Right. So this is what I, when I still look at like, well, this is the union of capital, a political movement and the organs of government for an era where entertainment appears to be everything. But at the same time, you wonder, like, what is explicitly aligning itself with the American state going to do for Metta in its very important global markets?

As the American state becomes kind of, like, more unhinged. Well, yes, indeed. I genuinely don't know, right? Because it's not as though Metta... What's the EU gonna do to Metta if, like, sort of, Zuck is palling around with Trump and then Trump invades Greenland, you know? Yeah! Well, genuinely!

Yeah, he is even, in that Rogan interview too, he railed against, I think he even said, you know, the European Commission as well, but like, he's just saying all these other governments are encroaching on us, The Biden administration gave them liberty to do that because we capitulated to them during COVID by taking down certain things, which again, he's very pissed off or resentful at having to take down stuff during COVID lockdowns here. I keep asking myself what the long grand plan is that, you know, just fully aligning yourself with Trumpism is going to work on. But maybe it's not even more, you know, looking beyond the idea that they have to fend off Trump threatening to jail Mark Zuckerberg or antitrust and FTC investigations in here

looking to break them up. I'm not sure. Getting hauled into the European Commission and giving the enhanced interrogation treatment. Like, you forget yourself, Mr. Zuckerberg. I did not get these frameless glasses for the lack of perceptiveness. You never want to hand it to European Libs. They're evil people, but it's the same thing I always say. I hate it when the government defends itself from the left, but I love it when the government defends itself from the right. And if can if they can make zuck and you know Trump even Bend me honest and so much the batter you either speak to me now Ursula von der Leyen in such room of us

It's the scene from Sicario, but instead of the bottle instead of like the big water cooler bottle of water Benicio del Toro just grabs a gigantic perrier water cooler bottle of water. Benicio del Toro just grabs a gigantic perrier. But the other thing I want to mention Mike, I will take this back up so you mentioned is out on an antitrust right which is that at the same interview Zuck also was like oh yeah Lena Kahn said we had to be woke so if you're not woke you should oppose Lena Kahn trying to break us up. All of these guys have the stupidest possible grievances. That's why I say the only way to understand Mark Zuckerberg, I think, and what he will

do is to ask what Greg Stubbe would do if he was put in that position. I have a question, right? Because as we've established- Fall off the loop. As we've established, Mark Zuckerberg is a man for all seasons, right? He has a very, very mutable nature, right? So the question I'd like to pose to you is, who is your favourite Mark Zuckerberg? And I'll tell you my answer.

My favourite Mark Zuckerberg is the Mark Zuckerberg who decided he was gonna run for president, spent like two weeks going around diners in Iowa and then decided that this was a terrible idea and stopped stopped but the photos are still up. That's my favorite Mark Zuckerberg. My favorite was when they were launching Facebook Live and it was the grilling meats. Mark Zuckerberg, we're grilling some meats here. Yeah, that was a good one.

I just watched that video again. That was a trip. I forgot about that. There's so many meat. It was fucking excruciating. Yeah, many meat. It was fucking excruciating. Yeah. Really meat. I guess the way I've taken all of this right is that there is a number of tampons in a safe at Meta headquarters and those tampons. Wait, is

this, is this a management consultancy interview question? So this tampon, uh, what day is it? I don't need to. you're already holding it. Every time there is a political change, those tampons will be redistributed through the men's bathrooms at Metta properties. It seems to be. I like to hope so. It's pretty scary and you don't want to think too hard that this is going to be a Weimar

type situation. Because the last time you had this corporatist unison behind the very far right government in a sort of superpower, it was not a good time. And I think I kind of want to caution against this assumption that like, first of all, that all these people are like secretly in their, you know, in their deepest heart libs, right, who are just trying to wait this stuff out. But also that this stuff can be waited out in that way. I think, you know, that we may have to deal very seriously with the possibility that this

can only be solved by turning the whole country over to the people's daily, you know? Whatever course that takes. If we want to look at like how under Trump's thumb Zuck is and how happy he is about it, right? It says, in August, Zuckerberg sent a letter to Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, who was also on the same panel as Stubi asking fucking tech support questions to like Sundar Pichai, saying that the president, that president Biden's White House was wrong to press her Facebook to censor content in 2021 related to COVID-19 that meta wouldn't comply with such efforts in the future. So essentially if anything happens. So essentially you are going to die of like bird flu because of Greg Stubbe. Just

to be absolutely clear, Greg Stubbe is going to kill you in the next pandemic because he didn't know how to send an email. Oh, I've got the avian flu beat. Honestly, I think they've come a long way, Trump said about Metta and his policy changes. Asked whether Zuckerberg, he thought Zuckerberg was responding to his own threats, Trump said, yeah, probably.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of rags. threats, Trump said, yeah, probably. I got the like Trump personal analysis of vibes. He's not wrong here. Like he agrees with me now, but he's still a pussy and that's probably why he's going in there. He literally says that.

He doesn't want me to have to come down there. It's like this is, this is one of the like, you know, few bright spots of Trumpism is that you get, you know, one guy who's allowed to tell the truth and it is this kind of prissy former real estate developer from Queens who just also happens to be turbo Hitler. I think it's weird that the King has Jester's privilege, but that's fine. My kind of sole remaining hope aside from the Chengdu J-20 Joint Strike Fighter, right, is this idea that like shit's so weird and stupid all the time that something weirder and stupider will happen, you know? Like if we're in the kind of like, farce of first is tragedy, then is farce, there's gonna be some more farce along pretty quickly. Oh yeah, like, people are gonna get hit with sandbags dropping from like, from the rafters,

lights are gonna blow, like, someone's gonna flub their lines. It's all the play that goes wrong. Um, this is from another Wall Street Journal article. The government that goes wrong. Yeah, this is from another Wall Street Journal article about meta before we go in, of course, to we couldn't ignore it, the teal op-ed. Zuckerberg had been personally upset by meta's system. In November 2023, he posted a picture of himself after knee surgery, which he tore during MMA fighting.

Quote, still looking forward to it after I recover. Thanks to everyone for the love and support. The post did not receive much attention on Facebook. Oh, that's a radicalizing experience. Why is it all legs with this fucking guy? He just can't get legs to work. Yeah, well, he put, I mean, this is obviously like there's a multi-phase plan, right? Phase one, put legs in the metaverse. Phase two, start goose-stabbing.

Ah, you think that you're having trouble with your legs now, but if you cross the European commission again. November, would you say it's fair that legs are clearly Mark Zuckerberg's Achilles heel? Would you say that's fair? The post initially did receive the anemic attention on Facebook that slowed the spread of viral health related content. Obviously, right? Of course they would do that because people were using it to be like, what if we coughed on each other and got the COVID out that way?

Like that's what Facebook was being used for. That and Shrimp Jesus. People refused to answer that question to be fair. Established after Metastaff determined such immaterial was frequently false or sensationalistic, but the rule had also ensnared Zuckerberg's innocuous post, prompting him to personally demand a review of the rule and other overreach and safety measures. God. He was silent for truth. He was deboosted.

He became one of those Congress people who's like, why am I getting deboosted? Why am I emails going to spam? Why can't I update the clock on my microwave? He was sitting in his bathroom, sitting in front of the mirror, having a two way conversation with himself as Greg Stubbe. That's it. Why am I being de-boosted Mr. Zuckerberg at long last? I just, billionaire mindset is like, inscrutable to me for a couple of reasons,

not least the fact that like, I mean, this really underscores that none of them are tech guys. Like we've sort of known that about Elon for a long time, but like, Musk kind of, you know, we've sort of known that about Elon for a long time, but like, you know, Musk kind of, you know, that's sort of different. Zuck had this kind of nerdy affect to him and it now is increasingly clear that he does not know shit about his own product and he's just like a kind of culture war guy. But like, imagine getting mad about this.

Imagine getting mad about anything. You have enough money that you could buy enough heroin to never feel anything for the rest of your life and enough Doctors to keep that life going for another like 80 years if you wanted you can turn in you could turn into the fucking like You could be hedonism, but you could be the emperor of mankind They're like every single day of your life you you like could experience new Delights the likes of which we can't even think of you could be eating Civet or something and instead you're like getting mad about posts. Why are you getting mad about posts? You could literally be like hey today

I'm gonna sit here and I'm gonna burn like a piece of the most expensive rare hardwood in the world And I'm gonna do that with a different species every day, and I'm never gonna run out of them, and I'm never gonna run out of money. Like, literally, you have a kind of, like, boy-king level of resources, and, like, no whimsy, because you're just a, like, aging divorced freak show, and it's just, like, really... the limitations of being governed by these people is a fucking insult, you know? At least when we had like kings and emperors and shit, you would have like a nine-year-old Kaiser who died choking trying to eat like plums made out of solid gold. But instead this guy is just trying to like kick people's legs off and get mad that he isn't getting enough likes. Well, this goes to show for me that, you know, the the tend like the arc of oligarchy is

long, but it does tend towards Russian oligarchy. Like American oligarchs have more money, but Russian oligarchs are the apex predators because they understand truly what it is to be fully actualized as an oligarch. Because, like, you know, like you say, you know, Musk, Zark, whoever, they can afford all this stuff. They can live a more luxurious life. But deep down, what they really in their souls desire is to run our hang else. Right. Like they want to be the feudal lord of a town where like they have armed men like setting burning tire barricades. They want to live in like a gold house. Right. They want to be murdering their enemies in saunas with crossbows. Like that is what they want. That is their, that

is their truth. They want to force all of the journalists in the town to come to a press conference they have called where they announced that the Greeks are Uzbeks with a 400 slide PowerPoint presentation about why this is true, which is all for stuff like, you know, truth juice dot KZ. And they have to listen and go, yes, very good point. I will put this in paper. Like, and they could have every luxury, but they don't want that. What they want is to run surgut. You're so right. Like, and this is the thing, like if you look at someone like, I don't

know, Alexander Dugan or like, um, Edward Limanov even, right? Like you had these Russian, like intellectuals who were sort of, like, able to sell the guy who runs Surgut on the idea of, like, you know, Uzbeks being Greeks or whatever the fuck. And so too, you have guys who are willing to, like, sell Musk or Zuckerberg on this idea of, like, the cathedral or whatever the fuck. And it's just, like, you have too much money to be thinking about this stuff like obviously what you think is is like wrong and stupid and offensive and and like You know take the take the transphobia as an example, right?

There is no earthly reason for you to think about trans people ever in your life because you should be thinking about new kinds of like Research chemicals you could be doing. Yeah Unless we're about to unlock chaser Zuck Ark. You could literally be trying to like, uh, like crash a new one of one luxury car every day. And instead you're thinking about like tampons. A lot of people in Arkhangelsk are doing research chemicals involuntarily. The other thing I'll mention as well, right? And there's sort of,

and I think this is something that Mike will know about too, which is so many of these rules that they are now changing and railing against, they never put in because of a set of beliefs or even because of what they thought would be popular or what they thought would be right. It was because this is what they thought advertisers would respond to. That's all. Yeah. Like, look, like that, this is actually a funny thing now is like all the advertisers are, there's always been this like quote unquote brand safety thing, right? You don't want to put an ad for Pepsi next to like, I don't know, white supremacist rhetoric

on Facebook or something. So like, Dave, so that you're exactly right. Like, okay, we're going to put all this stuff in there. This is going to placate our advertisers who by the way, are going through their own moment of putting Kylie Jenner on the front lines of like riot shields or whatever the fuck that was. Like that, that was like a very specific cultural moment here. The funny, quote unquote funny thing now is that Facebook

is so dominant in this specific type of advertising called direct response advertising, which is basically like app install ads or performance marketing, things where you can eventually like that you can measure directly, like say like a Google ad, they are so dominant there that even if my Pepsi ad appears next to some really knocks your shit, I don't have a choice to pull those ads anymore. I don't have the ability to do that sort of boycott that you might on a Twitter which is reliant on brand advertising which is basically like those billboards of awareness rather than like clicking on

a thing. So in a sense they're hostage in a way to the Facebooks and Googles of the world that they don't really have a choice on which is funny quote-unquote I guess. I mean this is this is the right? There's irrespective of the actual merits of any kind of a liberal vision, right? There are also people who were there to sell that to them, you know? Like, this is the only extent to which the cathedral could be said to be a real thing, like, the I could be said to be a real thing, is that this was a service that you could sell Facebook to be like, yeah, we are gonna, like, make your sort of corporate culture conform with a kind of inclusive, like, liberal notion, right? And it's just that that's out of favor now, and it only really had

like a kind of indirect relationship to things people, like actual real people were doing, you know? Because it was all still kind of pandering. So yeah, ultimately, if you're in that position, there's always gonna be that lens, you know? I think it's gonna be weirdly distortive of what the right want from them too. Yep. And that's, you know the funny thing too, is that I'm already seeing right-wing folks who are responding saying, like, this is bullshit, this is dis disingenuous mark is doing another heel turn the Brian Armstrong's of the world who's the guy who leads coinbase that those were the guys who were standing up for what was Unpopular at the time and now we're doing this we can't trust a guy with that much hair, you know, like

Really like alarmingly bald guys only, you know, please as As a bald guy, I identify with that, but I do, I do know what you're talking about. But like, it would be fascinating if all this prostration doesn't even work in the end, you know, or at least work with the people that he, he really wants to, and back to Milo's point, wants to like him, you know, online. And also, I don't know, it's still like a TBD on whether this will work in that regard, even beyond the Trumpism sort of like hoping the government doesn't kill them point of view. I think, I don't think it's gonna work in the sense of making people like them just

because they're not likeable people and that's not something that they're ever gonna come to terms with, it's driving them crazy. Jeff Bezos went to fucking space and he's still mad you don't like him. Like you, personally, listener, do not like Jeffzos and that that like keeps him up at night. I actually argue that doesn't Jeff Bezos is the only one that doesn't keep up at night. He's the only one that doesn't give a shit. The rest of them totally agree. But it's remember Jeff Bezos when he came back from space, he just shoved William Shatter to the ground and put on a cowboy hat and said, Yee-haw.

I mean that was pretty grim, but like I think you look at the way in which he's like, you know, sort of like exercising control of the Washington Post. I think that's a guy who cares a lot about what you think about him. Yeah, that sucks. I preferred when he was just like the only tech guy who came from a hedge fund background. So it was like, he has the spirit of someone

who should be like cocaine, tastelessly munching through a giant steak at Carbones in bonus season. And yet here he is trying to like, instead of like grinding his teeth through a whole, like sabering a bottle of mowat by grinding his teeth through the neck. Here he is like exercising editorial control over a newspaper to make himself look good. But I want to talk, I want to talk to you before we head off, which is of course the article, the article that launched a thousand responses to the article. I think there are some things in it that are worth going through, but I think it's going to be a bit of an echo of stuff we talked about with the Zuck section and even with the Doge section, which is what we have to understand is happening now in the leadership of the United States.

And therefore the leadership of the empire of which the United States is leader is a cycling of elites. This thing that we talked about in Britain is the fact that it never happens in Britain being one of Britain's major weaknesses, right? The whole point of the Corbyn project from 2015 to 19 was an attempt to cycle out committed neoliberals from elite leadership of the United Kingdom and the committed neoliberals or committed right-wingers or if you want to call them, were too good at defending themselves and the British elite had been too good at keeping itself from cycling for too long.

Yeah. They do get depression from that though, so... And the Teal article, much like these other things, is an example of what is being cast as kind of a revolutionary moment, but is actually just a change from one set of elites to another. So he calls it a time for truth and reconciliation. Trump's return to the White House augures the apocalypses of the Ancien Regime's secrets. Uh, I've-

Shut the fuck up, man. Yeah. Jesus Christ. Like, like, like, like, like, like to be liked, which is need to feel smart. And like, I get that. I also am a sufferer of this condition, right? And it also makes me say some stupid things and use some words I don't really understand. But like, the thing is, I can't afford to, like, never worry about anything else for the rest of my life instead of that.

You know? So, he says, the apocalypse of the Ausein regime's secrets. Now, again, I've added this for brevity. You know? So he says the apocalypses of the Ancien Regime's secrets. Now, I've added this for brevity in some place, but he says Dennis Miller, do you remember this down? OK, Dennis Miller, kind of evocative. You know, OK, Trump's return to the

White House augers the apocalypses of the Ancien Regime secrets. OK, and what happened to coffee flavored coffee? Who is the Ancien Regime? It's the cathedral of course the Austrian regime is NGOs reporters As as they gain more and more power this joke becomes less and less funny because I'm doing the the liberal like correcting the grammar It's actually your with an apostrophe re thing

but like really like no luck finding that cathedral. But like, yeah, you've been looking around for it for a minute and not even, not even so much as a nave, not even an apps of this fucking thing has made itself evident to you. Yeah. Not a single flying buttress. The new administration's revelations need not justify vengeance. Reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth.

Now the truth of reconciliation, as we know, refers to post-apartheid South Africa and was the nation building moment that culminated decades of struggle that claimed lives and years and livelihoods. It was really quite bloody. And Peter Thiel seems to be saying, you couldn't say that Ivermectin cured COVID, we need the same process now as a result of that. From what I can tell, that is what he is saying. It's like kind of, these are equivalent in his, of like, well, it's our turn, so we need one. Like, you guys, you get a truth and reconciliation commission

for the times we tried to do, like, secret biological warfare and, like, police massacres and stuff, so we need one about the, like, horse dewormer posts getting deboosted. Yeah, that's right. We can become the rainbow posting nation, finally. No, no, no, we're trying to stop that. That's the kind of thing we're trying to stop. By analogy, you would get a kind of Invictus movie where it's a team of like chud and lib

posters coming together to show like the true American spirit. They get a big thumbs up from Trump who like inspires them. Yeah. I never thought I'd die side by side with a shit lip. I can't remember which of diamond and silk died, but whichever one died gets replaced by Randy Rainbow. And that's the new thing. The apocalypse is the most powerful apocalypse, meaning unveiling is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guards war on the Internet.

A war the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the distributed idea suppression complex, the media organizations, bureaucracies, universities, and government funded NGOs to traditionally delimited public conversation. No, no, no, no, no, it's not a cathedral, it's a disc, okay? It's like, that's different. But ultimately, I think what this is about, very roundabout, is it's about knowledge production, what can be sort of knowable in public, what can be quote unquote debatable in public, as worthless as public debate might be.

But even when we had Abby on ages ago, she referred to this as defining what are the intellectual lacunas? What are the things that we just can't look at? Yeah, I'll go further than that. Or a couple of goose steps further on from that. And I think we're approaching a kind of like epistemicide, right? Of like, these are kind of like no longer permissible ways of knowing things, right? Or forms of knowledge.

Um, like there's a reason why I think all of these guys get really het up about the phrase lived experience, for instance, right? Like they don't like a kind of subjectivity that, you know, requires them to, you know, see trans people, for instance, right? And what we want instead is we want to like truthfully reconciliation our way back to a kind of like objectivity that Peter Thiel and his friends get to decide. Oh, exactly, right? It's that, because who are they really talking about about the media organizations, bureaucracies, universities and government funded NGOs, et cetera, et cetera.

Right. The examples they give are about the COVID, Teal gives are about the like the COVID lab leak hypothesis, like an Ivermectin, the JFK assassination. Right. Yeah. I mean, this is this is the thing, right? Like all of these guys, when they indulge them, more kind of aristocratic fantasies and sometimes they involve AI in this, sometimes not, it's like, we're gonna be like, you know, the top like, one, five,

ten percent, whatever, of like, it's implied like, white cis male guys, are gonna be like, we're gonna be the ones who think everybody else is gonna be using like, GROK or whatever the fuck else, and, you know, our, you know, superior rationality will enable us to, to, you know, kind of like, have like, kind of like have aristocratic dominion over everybody else. One problem with this is that everything that they believe is wrong and stupid. It just isn't true. I think the ivermectin shit is a great example of this. To be like, well, obviously I should have a kind of superior societal position because of my, you know, my knowledge and my reason. And you go, okay, well, what does

that reason lead you to do? And the answer is take like equine medications. People say that I'm full of shit and yet I shout out my entire intestines when I took ivermectin. So I'm actually one of the least full of shit people you'll ever meet. Also right, like this is, you want to say, like the distributed idea suppression complex, as Weinstein calls it, number one, it's like, yeah, a lot of liberal organizations have not earned a great deal of trust from people, right? That's fine.

But also we know what he's actually talking about again, is like, oh yeah, you're not allowed to misgender people. That's because a big bunch of universities, media organizations, NGOs NGOs and bureaucracies have decided you can't do it. That's like what's sitting beneath this as well. And also, but we know what kinds of ideas are suppressed by these people, which like people like Peter Thiel are perfectly happy to be suppressed. For example, what definitely does need a truth and reconciliation commission are the information that got suppressed by

the UK and US defense establishment in the early 2000s that got us to fucking Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean, if you want to talk about distributed campus totalitarianism, right? It's not making you not misgender people. It's having the university's police kick the shit out of you because you have a Palestinian flag in camp. Yeah. Elon Musk going deeper on his like sort of like tier boo Wikipedia binge and asking if

Dr. David Kelly was vaxxed. Yeah. Or even in the UK, right? Like we know that there was a whole report commissioned by the home office on how to combat drug crime that Theresa May sat on because it supported legalization, right? We know, we know that actually if this any, any true, everyone listening to this, all of us, Mike, Milo, November, me, whatever, we all know that this was never an actual anti-elite movement. It cast itself as one because a lot of people think of

managers rather than owners as elites and they cast themselves as anti-manager because they wanted to be completely unfettered even by like restrictions that were supposed to make them more money in the long term as a class. Fine. Right? LLM being like my woke letting agent. Essentially, yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know that any actual anti-elite movement would probably deal with things like Iraq, for example. Or, as you say, if you're worried about campus speech, it's not about universities

deciding to have vegan Mondays, or having a pronoun policy in the Student Union. It's, oh yeah, if you express any amount of Palestinian solidarity, then fucking Canary Mission sends around like a panel van with your name on it saying that you're an anti-Semite, you know. But you do get a free panel van, so, you know, it's kind of 50-50. You know, so it says, we cannot wait six decades to end the lockdown on a free discussion about COVID-19. And he goes into a bunch of like, Anthony Fauci, you are ex-communicato, like a John Wick villain. So it's then saying, our first amendment frames

the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? A tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine. Jesus fucking Christ. I mean the question there is does Brazil have sovereignty? To which the answer Teal wants is no, of course not.

Obviously they don't. It's not what the Monroe Doctrine is about. The Monroe Doctrine is about foreign policy, you fucking moron. He doesn't know anything and he doesn't have any curiosity to find out either. And like I say, yeah, I fucking do that too, but I also don't have billions of dollars. So our Aux-en-Regime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought the party would never end. 2016 shook their historicist faith in the arc of the moral universe, but by 2020 they hoped to write off Trump as an aberration.

And it's like, okay, yes, fine, that is actually true. They could have! It's also really funny to be like, the arc of the moral universe is a kind of like slam on Obama, but calling him the Austrian regime in that the arc of the moral universe is one of the most Robespierrean things ever said. So it's like, they could easily have written this off as an aberration if they confronted the weakness of their own offer to people. It's the same as the Labour Party. They're not back to normal because they're defending a set of institutions people hate, right?

It's the same thing in the US. People don't like these institutions. They don't want to defend democracy without doing anything for them. It's fair enough. But that's not the idea that that's because of some hidden egalitarian agenda that a hive mind of like do-gooders are sort of trying to foist on like America or Britain or wherever through like supporting Alexandra Demouret's own Elon Musk or like giving the HHS SWAT team gender seems entirely ludicrous. It's so funny how like labor and the Democrats have got themselves into this situation where they're basically like calling a press conference where they're holding a gun to their own head going, so help me.

I'll fucking do it. Meanwhile, Trump is, you know, I'm really worried about it. Trump is winning just by going Obama. Like that's what you have to do. Mike, I want to know what your reaction was to this, this piece before we end. No, I think, I think your reading is correct, especially in the, well, first of all, I want to know what your reaction was to this piece before we end. No, I think your reading is correct, especially in the... Well, first of all, the idea you guys really need to... I guess I want to validate your thinking that these people all exist in a group chat together,

gassing one another up as they misread ancient texts or things like that, because... Or don't understand the words that they use, because that is literally what they're doing all day You know Zuckerberg is very closely communicating with Marc Andreessen all day teal who's on the board teal left the board But he's still a close confidant of Zuckerberg's that usually that was more theater around teals political donations and so I just like pieces like this to me read as And so I just like pieces like this to me read as they had this sort of idea in the group chat Teal is the most famous of them who can like put this out there in a in again like a Lot of like a his sources to at least misreadings of history Way using words misusing words and like it resonates with a large amount of people who?

Who also are sort of on board with this point of view or at least tealism and I don't know it's kind of defeating in the sense that it works and it's some of these guys are much sound or are trying to sound much smarter than they actually are not particularly deep thinkers they're people inside of Facebook who make these grand sort of proclamations on history and just don't read the history books. So every day of my life, I feel like I'm losing a different chess match to a dog. Well, you know, a lot of people think it's suspicious that all of these billionaires are such close friends with Mark Andreessen.

But what you've got to remember is that a few years ago he had a great fall from a wall and they were all summoned to help put it back together again. And they were all incredibly trauma bonded by that experience. We have gone long once again, but I do want to say, number one, Mike, always a blast to have you on. Thank you very much for coming and hanging out with us today.

Oh my God. Thank you for having me. It's lovely. And y'all are one of the funniest podcasts I get to do. So thank you so much. Well, thank you. And also, if you are out there listening and you have five dollars, five dollars Cash American, you can get a second episode of this show every week on the Patreon. You know all about how to do that.

I also want to remind everybody, by the way, remember not to sign up via your iPhone app. It will cost extra and we don't see that money. So sign up via your browser or any other phone app. Yeah. You are directly funding the next emperor Augustus in his own mind if you do that. It goes to Tim Apple. Why you fucking mix up Apple and NASA. And then of course Milo's in like, you know, like, like like Leiden or whatever or Hamburg, most boring towns of Europe to you're doing a tour last seen by like Lutheran ministers in 1532. Come and find me in Breslau, Leipzig, Salzburg, Utrecht, Arlborg, Malmo, Milo, from small towns in Pomerania, Syracuse, Bristol, very much on sale for this Sunday, the 19th.

Please buy tickets to that. Yeah, London is sold out. Already of those towns, Brussels and Rotterdam still a few tickets. Velstoes, Rotterdam will definitely sell out, so get on that. But Brussels, few left. Yeah, The Hague. How many are left in The Hague? Yeah, how many are left in The Hague?

I don't know. Well, there's a few spots available in The Hague. Yeah, me doing a show exclusively for war criminals and everyone commits suicide at the end. That'd be fun. Hey, there's an idea. Yeah. If any brave promoter wants to take that one on. Yeah. Australia on sale. Yeah. I think that's, you know, any many of those check them out.

My level is at UK. My political correctness gone mad bit doing like an absolute barnstormer at the Hague. Yeah. Yeah. Seperaditzer, I hardly know her. Uh-huh. Yeah. Oh, God. It's gonna be in Lake Como.

I'm putting in that one. Saint Moritz. Yeah. Biarritz. Yeah. San Sebastian. You can find me in Osieck. I actually have got a show there.

Okay. I don't know why I got trapped in just naming sort of European town slightly manic phase, which will continue for the next hour I'm just anticipating you just like texting me the names of like whatever town the monastery from the name of the Rose was outside of John Strasburg Milo will be performing in Mount Athos to an all male audience of monks, monks, monks, political correctness gone mad. Okay. Actually. Goodbye everybody. Thank you very much again, Mike. And we will see you in a few days on the Patreon. Bye bye. Bye. Thanks for watching!