Donald Trump

Michael Lewis says the people Elon Musk called blockers were doing their job beautifully. They were not partisan, no one would ever accuse them of incompetence, and they were dedicated to the country. Blocker was a new insult. Before January 20th, 2025, they went by civil servant.

When Musk went into the government with his team at Doge, he said the same thing he had said when he went into Twitter. People already there will want to stop you, so find the blockers and get rid of them. The six main characters in his book never called themselves blockers. Musk would have described them that way. Lewis says they are mainly trying not to break the law. He lines the word up with impressionist and

Peter Kafka opens the episode by calling Larry Ellison an 82-year-old billionaire and one of the 10 richest men in the world. Larry Ellison bought his son, David Ellison, a media empire. The companies were once called Paramount and Warner Brothers. Peter Kafka says they are now called Skydance.

Peter Kafka also calls Larry Ellison the eighth richest man in the world, tight with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and connected to both TikTok and a traditional media conglomerate. He says the public does not know that much about Larry Ellison.

Eric Spracklen, who runs Twitter @ThatTrumpGuy, tells Zuby about a clip from a Hillary Clinton campaign office. He walked in as a volunteer ready to knock on doors, stayed three or four minutes, then said he supported Donald Trump. Spracklen's clip made the Drudge Report and other conservative outlets. The first tweet drew four or five thousand retweets in an hour, then counts fell as people said Twitter blocked retweets, likes, and shares. A second tweet, accusing Twitter of stripping likes and retweets, reached almost 25,000 retweets in a couple of hours. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity talked about the clip. Spracklen reads the drop as live suppression, and says @ThatTrumpGuy still cannot

Trump is expected to win 2020 in a landslide, not a close race. There was not a pathway to 270 electoral votes, but there was a pathway to 306. He is expected to win every state won before and maybe pick up one or two, while California and Illinois stay too far blue.

After the election, people sent private messages saying Trump isn't that bad. It was not just one or two people. A nice amount ate their pride, said they were sorry, and admitted they were kind of wrong.

Politics matters only as far as it changes society and culture. America has 350 million people, and they still have to live together even if they do not share the same beliefs or like the same people.

Illegal immigration was the issue that clicked first. At a bank in college, one legal immigrant cashed a paycheck just under $10,000 every week and split it among 20 illegals. In the US, $10,000 or more in cash has to go to the IRS, and the bank could not stop what looked like blatant fraud.

Before Trump ever ran for president, the same media now trashing him was basically championing him. Donald Trump was treated as the American dream, showing up on magazine covers, in movies, and on TV. The warm portrayal came first; the hostile one arrived after he entered politics.

He played football and wrestled in high school, then played football in college and graduated with a degree in marketing. He came from a Republican household but stayed pretty apolitical because other parts of life mattered more. A Trump rally with his mom in Columbus felt absolutely overwhelming and pulled him in.

On Pirate Wires, Mike Solana and Liv Boeree open on a week of superintelligence news. The show says Donald Trump answered Bernie Sanders by signing an executive order that renamed artificial intelligence to superintelligence across federal departments, at a White House meeting the episode calls a morally binding pact for AI labs to police themselves. It places Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg in the room. Solana describes Sanders's Stop Artificial Superintelligence Act as a pause on advanced AI, a permanent ban on superintelligence work, and prison for violators, plus only a soft maybe on withholding technology from countries trying to build it. He says Eliezer Yudk

The Munger test shows how support for having the state decide what people can say on the internet disappears when Donald Trump replaces the word state because there is no such thing as the state. The people who run the state are the same people who run corporations. Public choice requires comparing a real market setting with a real government setting to avoid romance about perfect government incentives.

Casey thinks that Donald Trump would use another platform to post. Then, a bot would be set up to screenshot the post and upload it to Twitter. It may be somewhat of a positive for Trump to be on Twitter so we know about whatever topics are on his mind-- even if it's talking off the top of his head with no information.