Invasion of the Corgi Snatchers feat. Wendy Liu
Friend of the show and Silicon Valley anthropologist joins us to discuss the cultural weirdness that has taken over Silicon Valley - what do you do to get noticed when your only route out of the permanent underclass is to make the same product everyone else is making? Go Crazy! Also, we look at the parade of old friends back from the dead - Quibi (sort of), Neom (a little bit), and Jan Marsalek (for real).
RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here!
HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here!
MILO ALERT Check out Milo's tour dates here:
https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows
NATE ALERT Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album and you can stream it for free here!
Comments (47)
About Corgi: to be an insurance company, you must employ insurance agents who are licensed to operate in the state you want to operate in. If you're 50 states, that's a bunch (not necessarily 50) agents you must have on the payroll.
Wasn’t it short for Quick Bites and so should be “Qui-bye”?
"What if we just used Suno for the chanting?" Am I the only person who thought she meant Sunn O))) ? Because they would be perfect for that role.
Wendy is the Virgil to Riley's Dante, huge respect for being an unflinching guide to the horrors. Also may her victory over Lucy Guo be soon, swift, and total! ✊🏽
‘I’m sorry to listeners also we’re running long’ Oh no, my steak is too juicy, my blahaj is too soft, and I have too much podcast
40:05 is the first time I heard someone make Riley walk away from the microphone and yell his frustration out into the void as far as I can recall. Splendid job, Wendy!
going up to the other girl at the convention like, "hey, u seem cool, wanna.... touch agentic business cards?"
So great that you have Wendy on to represent SF. We’re not all tech bro chud psychos.
If only Hussein's WhatsApp group dads knew they're famous...
This song is just “I’m a little bit Alexis” from Schitts Creek
Show of hands: who immediately imagined the Homer Simpson 10 gallon cowboy hat with an FBI camera when Wendy said "l showed up in a hat and it was more suspicious"?
Grrr, how dare you run long >:(
Why the fuck do you know what a Great Wolf Lodge is??? Also Blue Harbor Resort is nicer.
He misread the HUGE ARMS SHIPMENT label on all the big boxes.
I agree with fd on the political assessment of the white supremacists not so much media criticism front, i do see the point he is making about it conservatism but there r quite a few subversive choices Nolan's made, which are all the more impactful cos hes interpreting one of the defining classical texts, last act was great cinema and probably the most conceptually coherent Nolan has ever been. I mean, can see the case for it being conservative but far less than i can see the case for it being anti-imperialist. 🔥Either way tho
I am of the weirdos mispleased with the look. I wanted bright colors, I love the armors as Homer describes them with their colorful inlays & enamelings; I love ridiculous shields with their moving images; & I love that Ottis is just lying about all this shit that didn't happen to the guy whose daughter found his naked on the beach.
Heraclitus of Ephesus is as ever relevant
Medium sized bank employee checking in, “do something with ai” added to our yearly performance evaluation
Mattie and Riley absolutely sniped me with the Cheboygan Great Wolf Lodge pull. The only thing that could have made it more accurate would be calling it mechanical instead of HVAC. Buddy of mine works for Vertiv selling chillers for data centers and has absolutely been a speaker at that conference.
Wait I'm sorry what was that about Saudi Arabia having the bomb?
Also I'm sorry to be a lib about this but it's 2026, advanced Russian weaponry is an oxymoron. Unless they're second-partying Iranian weaponry to countries that won't buy directly from Iran. That's a market I guess.
Grok, write a song that perfectly combines the plot, aesthetic and quality of the first episode of The Idol. Make no mistakes.
Using Grok to rewrite It's A Wonderful Life so it's all about Clarence showing George Quibs
I think part of the reason why the Here's What Helen Of Troy Would Look Like If She Was Busty And Aryan style of grievance conservative media constantly fails is because there is plenty of "normie" media that is just ambiently conservative. Gunt Spungel in rural Idaho has plenty of copaganda shite to watch if he wants. It shows a disconnect between the very specific grievances of the conservative movement's footsoldiers and its voter base which is animated by much of the same impulses but hasn't had them channeled into specific things by their participation in the political-media social bubble i think
Ben Shapiro has a list of cultural insults against the white race he can fire off if you ask him. Gunt Spungel has just a vague sense that things are different and hostile these days to "people like us".
Sociopaths using LLMs to validate their utterly soulless behaviours. We need to stop our governments surrendering our collective agency to people who know nothing, and do nothing, and get to decide everything.
Hussein always apologising before speaking on his own podcast is so cute
Yay Mattie!
No gods no mayors/wedgeLIVE! crossover please for the jacob frey ep (and ty for pronouncing his name incorrectly)
The Chinese micro dramas are very big right now. I have a coworker whose wife is very into them. Quibi made the mistake of investing too much in production and not enough in soap opera fan fiction.
BEWARE GROKS BEARING GIFTS WAS RIGHT THERE
Wendy flash-banging Riley with crazy startups is just *chefs kiss*
I think it's a PK Dick story where suburbanites buy household robots which sneak out at night and fight
And the dads start shopping for bigger robots
Love when Wendy is on LETS go (also Mattiember yay)
And a happy Suisun to my fellow Cali listeners
Mattie’s AI piloting her like an Eva.
Hilarious mispronunciation of Suisun. We need to get Riley a California travelogue show on the revived Quibi.
I know thats how it's splelled and I'm being a pedant, but every time I hear it pronounced "swee-son" I can hear the aneurysm in my brain growing. It's pronounced "suh-soon".
Thank you, yes. Also, the accent is on the end: "suh-SOON"
"Do you want to live forever?!" No longer the battle cry of Crom's Valkyries, but rather the motto of an AI powered insurance company named after a small dog. Le sigh....
Quibsatz Haderach
hell yeah
I kept hearing shit-building and it was pretty fun.
Me, punching the sky to Hussein's "they've failed" comment, yes, king!! 🤴
i watched F.D. Signifier’s breakdown of the Odyssey “backlash” and he made a really interesting point: white supremacists don’t care about seeing white people in movies, what they want is to see black people (and other marginalized groups) actively suffering on screen. the movie is actually textually very conservative, it’s just not anti-black enough for them
Well, it's part of the overall 'piously starving peasant' mindset isn't it? The priest says that the lord's high taxes to fund his feasts, which are starving you, are righteous and you will have your place in heaven if you pay them. You bury your children so he may party and you do it with holy tears in your eyes and pious indignation when another peasant suggests that things could be different. You delight in the suffering of your fellow peasants when they are the wrong kind of peasant, in the eyes of your lord on earth (and in heaven) because there is no question in your mind whether things could be better. They can only get worse and worse, and you just take joy in some suffering more than you before you are too feeble to work the fields and are shoveled in with the rest A death cult with a suicide pact can hardly offer a better tomorrow, so the next best thing is seeing the people you don't like suffer and die more and first. And yes, the absence of that hurts them because what is even the point of us all suffering and then dying if the ones I don't like don't suffer and die more and first? Of course, they absolutely refuse to question whether or not we (except the lord) all need to die. The idea that no-one even needs to suffer is so far out of their moral universe that it is absolute lunacy, a kind of spell or beguiling hex to lead you astray from the path of righteous self-sacrifice. The hunger which knaws at your empty belly as your lord feasts and you bury your children is proof of your heavenly reward and you welcome it