Grubstakers - Ep 130 BLERN: Patreon Unlocked and Remastered

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

This is episode 130 exclusively released to our Patreon Listeners. It is now available to you! The wonderful listeners who aren't yet a Patreon. If you want to hear all of our historical episodes and be on the bleeding edge of hot takes on current news and politics with our new Bi-Weekly Updates. Then you should totally go to pateron.com/grubstakers and we can hook you up. Thanks for listening, and here is the original episode description. "In this episode we attempted to cover Larry Robbins but got sidetracked by the prospect of war. Also Andy tells a completely fictional story about getting fired from a company named Blern which has no relation to one of Larry Robbins's charitable ventures by the name of Zearn."

We find people that basically can't make enough to eat before they go into the fields. I don't believe that. I think that you're looking at other places that are not Central Romana. People actually who focus on and who like getting an orgasm never get one. Pull up your socks and figure out what you're going to do. Any chance we'll ever get to be a completely red state? Oh, yeah. Well, the kids are always uncertain. But more uncertain now.

Listen, Blue Ivy is six years old. Beyonce, she tried to outbid me on a painting. Everybody in Atlanta right now at the Louis Vuitton store, if you black, don't go to Louis Vuitton today. For he's a jolly good fellow. For he's a jolly good fellow. For he's a jolly good fellow. For he's a jolly good fellow. Which nobody can deny.

I'll deny it. Which nobody can deny. Which nobody can deny. Objection, sir. Are you singing about Yogi or Khomeini? Oh, both. And the good people of Dubai. I guess welcome to the patreon side of grubstakers yeah welcome uh welcome to grubstakers we didn't even have to

count in uh we were going to do a fun episode today remember how we ended that last episode by first predicting that there would be Iranian retaliation, but then also promising a more peachy episode to follow it. Well, I was just hoping, and I think I predicted wrongly, obviously, that they would just wait a year and then maybe murder a NATO general or something. Right. And call it good. Well, that would be the appropriate response. Ayatollah Khomeini.

But actually, as of 8.51pm January 7th, Eastern Standard Time, two bases in Iraq have been shelled by either rockets or ballistic missiles or something

by Iran. Pentagon is saying cruise missiles. There you go. We'll see. It's going down right now. Yeah. We're going to be working through that.

It looks like Iran did the smart thing and said hey, if you retaliate against us the next ones are going to hit Dubai and Khalifa. I don't know how to pronounce that city's name. Which it looks like Trump was about to give, this is all old news

when you're hearing this, Trump was about to give speech. If you're hearing this. Sorry to cut you off, but interesting thing about launching missiles at Dubai is that you have a 20% chance of hitting the worst people on the planet earth yeah and you have an 80 chance of hitting literal human slaves yeah my the best outcome of hitting dubai is uh the ideal outcome is that it ignites a slave rebellion because i was actually even thinking about this like if you

were geo uh coordinating targets in dubai you would just like aim for the five-star hotels yeah but like try to hit the top floors and like see if you can google like where the janitorial staff this is already the worst guest worker program imaginable okay they don't even have pass their passports with them well listen i don't want to make this too serious but the worst thing was you know we were honeymooning in baghdad and honestly once we heard the news we were like we got to get the fuck out of here i feel like the best way to hit the uh the right targets in dubai is you have like an altitude limit during business hours so like the top 80 floors of the burj khalifa it would suck to be like the iranian guy in charge of the targetingj Khalifa. It would suck to be like the Iranian guy

in charge of the targeting system and you just fuck up the math a little bit and hit slave shacks instead. Just like, fuck. Should have carried the two. I'd say like they could sink that world map pleasure island

off the shore of Dubai, but it's doing that on its own. Sean lives in a world where Arabic people are bad at math. Persian. Yeah, I messed that up, guys. Let's take this from the top. Hello, and welcome

to GrubState. They invented the number zero, which is the number of American casualties the Pentagon is claiming tonight. They keep the number zero, which is the number of American casualties the Pentagon is climbing tonight. Well, they keep saying, like, you guys, it's fine. There are only Iraqi casualties. Oh, yes.

It's just, like, so much better. Yeah. This is the story of the last decade. Yeah. So, status quo. Only brown victims are zero victims. Yeah, I remember, like, every day during the iraq war

there would be like the newspaper would come out and be like they'd have a running count of how many american casualties there were it's like uh 300 1000 2000 and then eventually i got on like wikipedia or something and i was like okay civilian casualties in iraq oh shit it's like at the time like half a million cool that wasn't reported on the democracy now would read out the names of like fallen soldiers it was only ever like one or two it's like john smith uh that's it actually yeah um but yeah so we have an episode tonight on uh a billionaire uh that andy has personal experience with and he'll he'll enlighten us a bit but i guess you know again we're just trying to process this this iranian information because this situation is going to change by the time we

release this episode as we said this is you know close to 9 p.m eastern time uh thursday january or tuesday january let's tell them more old news things could be amazing you don't know yeah but like uh as you know trump did not address the nation tonight he originally said he was going to address the nation tonight uh he's threatened you know to bomb 52 sites in iran so i mean it's just kind of an open question here when pelosi got the news she started praying yes real yeah but they didn't mention she was starting playing praying to all allah it's a whole thing with pelosi she's a secret muslim yeah it just out of uh respect for the uh muslim victim she stopped drinking vodka for five minutes

of her life just stopped slurring her words every single goddamn sentence double down on the botox for some reason though yeah if i must be sad my face must not move yeah botox not haram yeah but i guess andy would you be able to set me up with like a real morning zoo drop to just kind of diffuse the rage and the anger that I would express if I were to try to just articulate what I'm feeling and thinking right now about this Iranian attack, counterattack? Yeah, we're going to add about 10 seconds out of this. Well, we're going to add about a minute out of this well i'm gonna we're gonna do it sorry yeah i know well i can mention it all i want because we're gonna edit this out no it's gonna stay in but i but i guess you don't even finally say the n-word we'll cut it out we promise but but i guess what you know i guess, and I would like to hear what you guys are thinking as well, but I want to just say what I am thinking right now is I feel a deep sense of hopelessness and anger and despair. Because it just makes me so fucking angry that everybody in the Bush administration got away with what they did in Iraq. Because there is no statute of limitations on torture and murder and war crimes.

These people should have gotten a special prosecutor. And what I would say to the Bernie Sanders transition administration, whatever, if you win, you god damn well better prosecute these Trump people because they are corrupt up to the gills and they have killed people and i'm just so fucking tired of innocent people having their lives erased because of the mistakes of uh and the crimes of pieces of shit that will never be held accountable for any of this whatsoever ba. Steve, you got anything? Basically all of what Sean said. This president, man. It's not funny anymore.

Yeah. Well, it's a little bit funny. But listen, all I know is that I had multiple days in herbal Kirkuk and Basra booked for my honeymoon that I had to to cut short i had a mineral pool and basra that i was willing to do a beautiful mud hut and cut and how dare they cut my honeymoon short to what start a war how dare this presidency cut my enjoyment down your patreon dollars go for me and my now new bride to enjoy our lives together. I can't believe your new wife convinced you that Kirkuk was a real city. It's just like, yeah, I'm going to go out to Kirkuk. Yeah, you know, honestly, she did come back

and she was sore the next day. And I don't know how that happened. She said she was riding a camel, but all I know is she got too humped that night. Yeah, but listen to me. Prosecute fucking... First episode is a married man oh yeah murder prosecute fucking dick cheney too because like and look i don't want to get too down this fucking road but you know it's sad to me that that everybody who dies is a fucking tragedy, that the people who are held accountable for these wars are always the poor, always the working class.

And the elites, they just go on to better think tanks, better media careers, better whatever the fuck. And until you start putting people like Dick Cheney in prison, this is never going to stop. It's just going to get worse. If it's funny, it's buzzing. Interesting. Well, I just want to say... Hey, real quick. Why were we doing drops from that show?

Because he had the same name? Was that the whole... Sheldon Adelson, yeah. That was the connection? Nice. Oh, yeah. It was quotes from young Sheldon Adelson. That's right, yes.

What I want to say is this quote from this guy, Nick, on Twitter. His name is Nick, and then a crown of val underscore 16 underscore uh nick says damn around really fired back this shit ain't about memes no more it's serious and i think i think we're all feeling that right now it was nice of trump to get yogi that wedding gift though yogi had been calling for the assassination of general sulamani listen you know when your tweets get noticed they get noticed and i don't have as many followers as i like but it's nice to know the big dogs are finally looking at some of

whatever little pups are putting out on the web it would be so funny if you like tweeted some shit like that in 2014 and then somebody sent it to the white house like could you get my friend this for his birthday for his wedding his wedding present they just really want to see a free iran oh man if you want to go down a rabbit hole um click on uh hashtags uh where it's what is it uh shah reza hashtag shah reza and you'll just see a whole slew of cia accounts really yeah calling for the reinstatement of the shah oh fucking fantastic it is wild because i i found i ran across it someone posted there's you know some official tweet regarding iran and there is some lady, a quote lady, probably a legend.

Yeah, probably a recent college grad in Langley saying Iran is an occupied state. And then you click on their profile and it's like, reinstate the Shah hashtag. But any other, I guess, thoughts? Maybe, you know, we'll update if we hear more news uh just from twitter and various breaking news sources throughout the episode uh but any other

thoughts on on just what we're hearing tonight and you know just most likely the united states and iran are going to war i mean hopefully we're able to back down from this it's uh you know we'll see what happens what am i gonna do about my deposit on hotel ramada ramadi what am i gonna do about it huh the amount of money i spent at karbala bars because i didn't want to go to alfaloosia what how dare you trump ruining my love what was really fucking me up on the way here was that uh was thinking about what happened to Eugene Debs when World War I kicked off. Because he was a big part of the anti-war movement at the time. And they threw him in jail. And if this does become a real hot war and honestly i think it was brilliant for iran to say dubai and uh halifo

are next because that's going to give trump pause um even if he doesn't want to pause all the people around him will be like uh you're not going to have any allies if you keep this up yeah um the next targets are going to be golf courses yeah but what worries me is that you know the you think america is becoming a police state now um wait until it's in a major war like it's going to be she it's going to go from zero if you consider this like on the if you consider us at zero on the fascism scale, it's going to go all the way to 10. Um, it's, it's going to be, uh, just absolutely terrible. And on top of that, uh, and you know, every, every leftist and a war opponent is, uh, going to be just, uh, just, just jailed pretty much surveilled jailed everything and you know i wanted a i thought i wanted a eugene debs now i kind of want a linen because well i

mean i agree like the thing is if you look at opinion surveys you look at everything 70 80 oppose a war with iran yeah but we're as some like past the looking glass era where it doesn't fucking matter i know so it's like if we if everybody fucking opposes something and they have no power to stop it it just seems like you know they don't even need to jail people they can just let them march let them get it out of their system and it doesn't fucking matter yeah but eventually when people realize that marching isn't going to do much people are going to get more extreme and when people get more extreme the crackdowns get more extreme and it's just gonna spiral well before iraq they had the largest demonstrations in human history and they still

went i know well that's what i'm saying is like, what if the demonstrations become more effective? Oh. Like, that's when things... Well, it's been, I mean, our leadership has been arguably just as unable to listen or just uncaring. I mean, before Kent State, they burned down a bank. That's... Well, but the thing is, it's the fucking draft. Like, you know, and I have other opinions about anti-war movement tactics,

but the reality is, as Americans, we're middle class. We live relatively privileged, pretty fucking privileged, by the global scale of things, lives. This shit just doesn't impact us. No, but what I mean is, before, at Kent State, they got more militant and burned down a bank by the school. And then after that, the rifles opened up. They won't institute a draft here.

Oh, yeah. No, because you can't do Imperial War with a draft. I mean, you can, but it's much more difficult to do Imperial War with a draft. Yeah. or difficult to do imperial war with the draft and i think that were were you know what one s on twitter while back was that like that that the draft of the decrypt exist because the prison population in its current form is free labor for government so you want to talk about uh... population of this cut country

working for the government we we we are present on the issue in here that so it uh... that what that instead of the draft that form of slavery is is most likely more prevalent, if you ask me. And just jingoistic fervor is sufficient to where people will just volunteer in high enough numbers to where a draft isn't necessary. But it's not even jingoism. It's like economic necessity for a lot of people.

It is, but I think we shouldn't underestimate that a lot of people just really do really do believe the propaganda i do i mean like both working class in middle class people oh yeah well no i mean you know look i here's what i'll tell you about myself i remember in high school i wanted to join the military because i bought into this shit i even told the fucking recruiter like yeah could i go to afghanistan not iraq and he's like yeah well i can't really make those kinds of promises like they'll just send you wherever the fuck they send you right um and you know i didn't join because of course my mom didn't want me to and they had the money to send me to college and a lot of fucking families you know uh people their sense of patriotism their sense of a desire for

service is taken advantage of they don't you know like when you're fucking 18 or 19 you don't fucking know about lockheed martin and boeing and how these fucking vampires kbr how these people are making billions of dollars off of just killing innocent people on the other side of the world and getting 18-year-olds from Nebraska getting their limbs blown off. You don't know all these things. Did a couple of your bullies corner you and then they beat you down and then you got up and you're like, I can do this all day. That's actually like they told the recruiter and the recruiter's like

that's what we need someone who can take a few hits you get signed up for the super soldier serum I think that we're looking at the people that think starship troopers isn't a parody are the people that are most susceptible to be drafted

and to be thrown into the military complex without realizing the ramifications of what this country is and does. And the best things that you can see on Reddit are people that are former military. You literally see they post a photo thread of them pre-military the first few days, and then after, you literally see their smile dying because they realize that they fucking bought into the pyramid scheme

that is our military. Can I just say, interesting to note that in Starship Troopers, the fascist government's motto is service guarantees citizenship, whereas in the United States, we'll actually still deport you even if you commit to service.

You're guaranteed pretty much nothing and people still join up willingly. Would you like to know more? At the end of that movie, Neil Patrick Harris puts his hand on the bug and goes, it's afraid and everyone cheers. And I'll tell you one thing about Iran right now.

They're not afraid. No, they are unified. Nor should they be. Yeah. The pictures from his funeral wake, it was so crowded. I was just thinking if i was an average iranian there that would be that would be like the watching the ball drop yeah there's no restrooms it'd probably be more enjoyable watching the ball drop i would be pretty pumped up obviously

from all the propaganda but it would also not be very comfortable. But it's unification. Look at that group of people and think to yourself, are they not collectively going, fuck this noise? I mean, like in the search of troopers reality, they are Neil Patrick Harris and we are the brain. Well, I wish I knew more about the left-wing opposition within Iran. Sure. Because I'm wondering what they're up to right now.

And if you don't speak Farsi, it's pretty difficult to get good Twitter contacts for this stuff. I mean, they're definitely not siding with America. I can guarantee you that. Well, yeah, sorry, go ahead. Also just say, I mean, I guess this doesn't really mean anything because people everywhere are people, but I also, I've met a good deal of Iranian people in my life, never met one I didn't like,

which doesn't mean anything, but it's also like... It does mean something. It means that this demonization of people that happen constantly in our media is bullshit and human beings uh for the most part react like most human beings do which are uh in in decency and in intelligent logical fashion and the fact is is that andy's uh incidental uh a reasoning of every ir every Iranian he's met has been a decent person is the reality of most people everywhere. I mean, yeah, the horseshit that is the propaganda that one group, be it cut by religion, race, gender or any other small demonstrative way to cut down people is horseshit.

It's all for the elite to divide us and conquer because as this country was founded on divide and conquer, we've never stopped doing that. Well, now Turkish people, I met one guy who was a douche. The rest of them were really cool though. But there was one guy I don't like. What did that one guy do? Come on.

He was just a douche. What'd he do though? It's not what he... It was like... Maybe the problem was like it's you know andy maybe the problem was you did you ever think about that maybe your american ideals projected his you know i'll tell you he definitely tried to make me think that i'm kind of liking this turkish guy uh if you're the turkish guy who cucked andy please dm the grubstakers account and we'll have you on a future episode we'll pay pal you money for it too um but yeah look i mean obviously there were uh in the in

the lead-up to this there were protests in iran there were protests in iraq and assassinating sulamani like undermines all that it completely undermines any domestic opposition to the government there like you know uh... just give an example uh... social democratic resistance to hitler was uh... the social democrats in exile right after he took power noted that the population rally behind him when he found his nose at the versailles treaty when he said we're gonna rearm we're not gonna let outside imperial powers impose their will on us

and it is just kind of a reality that a nation state, as people within it, will say, we don't like outsiders telling us what to do or killing our people with 80% approval ratings. Not including the amount of time I was going to in badra spend as well as the hotels in gassan and the wonderful spas on lake hamrin how dare you trump cut my honeymoon short how dare you the worst thing that's happened this year has been my honeymoon being cut short i did just want to mention david from has tweeted this would be a good moment to have a non-pathological commander in chief um and and i just want to say that um you know if iran is looking for a new place to bazinga david from of course coined the axis of evil speech which uh you might have heard

through various podcasts this week um when the u.s invaded afghanistan there was a cooperative relationship with iran that was undermined when george w bush went on tv and declared iran part of the axis of evil uh and the reason for that was because uh while uh while david from was trying to write a speech uh deriding iraq and north korea he wanted to use the phrase axis of evil and someone told him you need three things for it to be an axis and uh guess what happened next it's such a great story but um yes you know i think that's not to say i mean i think we can all agree that the world would be better off if david from buzzing gun i was gonna say you know bernie transition team if you're listening pass a law we're gonna outlaw waterboarding except for one last time this time look david from's the worst because he of all of them because well i mean

dick cheney's obviously the worst but david from is the most on a visceral level he's the worst because he is completely trying to reframe himself as a liberal anti-trump conservative and um i just think it would be nice if uh maybe iran took some initiative and buzzing gun listen for our homophobic listeners it's a richard cheney but just like what if you pass a bill that says we're going to waterboard David from for charity. And then like, yeah, you're going to live stream it for charity and you can do like super chats and you can like gift streams on Twitch, all the platforms come together.

And you know, and then like, and then you can choose between water, milk or Mountain Dew. And then one of the torturers is manning the stream. Somebody gifts them $100 and they're like, oh, thank you.

Thank you. David Frum wobbling, thank you. Yeah. David Frum's like, wait, you're not going to... Stand back i have a knife and then that's a knife anyway zern wait i'm gonna try this again david from's like uh what are you holding and uh one people on camera is like that's a knife so in the middle of all the trending topics about the war

warren supporters thought it would be a good idea to get hashtag warren 2020 oh what dumb idiots oh what fucking dumb cucks she said Soleimani was a monster or something like that yeah to make it make a Megan McCain bullied her into saying so before you know what Trump will do if she can get bullied by yeah but in fairness if Warren hadn't agreed Megan McCain would have sucked her in like Kirby and Smash Brothers

you don't want my most disappointing things with Warren is you can see her arm twitch reflex to be like, I want to fuck you up right now, but my PR team's telling me not to. And with that Meghan McCain thing, there's a moment where she's like, I'll respond to what you're saying, and it has a half twitch,

and I just really wanted Warren to be like, Meghan, your dad's dead, so how about you fuck off real quick? What I'm really trying to hear to say like just straight annihilation is what i would like from warren at this point i mean that she's just not capable of that i think she's got the eye twitch to let me know she's got some of that fire in her you're right that she doesn't have the inner but i think there's uh she's being slow she's got some weights that she needs to drop if you ask me i mean she definitely definitely has the kindergarten teacher demeanor.

She'll take it out on her BDSM partner. Okay, check this out. So, Meghan McCain sucks in Elizabeth Warren, like Kirby, and absorbs her powers. And then she goes... Becomes less charismatic. Yeah. And then she goes, So my dad's not burning in hell yet.

I've got a plan for that oh god you know what at least he's fucking dead and he doesn't get to see this fuck you you piece of shit john mccain the maverick yeah then fuck your worthless daughter too also i will say uh i hope she be waitep! Wait, you need... Soon. Let me... Let's try that one more time. I hope your worthless daughter joins you in... Bazinga! Thank you. Nice.

It is pretty funny that... John McCain sang Bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, Iran. And as of yet, still hasn't happened, but they hit us. Let's keep it that way. Jesus Christ. So let's talk about Larry Robbins,

the man behind Glenview Capital Management. And we're mostly, most of this, what's left of this episode is going to be talking about some of his philanthropic properties. A company, a small company that he was on the board of. But let's do some, let's do some, some bio. So Larry Robbins of Glenview Capital Management. He's 50 some years old now he's born in 69 or some shit and he has a hedge fund manager what show do we do anymore

all right this guy he's fucking this all these he's around here he runs uh hedge funds he's uh He used to work for a company by the name. Okay. How great would it be if we released this and then Yogi and Post has to be like, Yeah, so when we recorded this, we didn't yet have the news that Dubai was a smoking crater. Every single building in Dubai hadn't been leveled yet so those references to iran not us not bombing iran were not accurate yeah i want to apologize for all the cities that i mentioned that i was fake honeymooning in not existing anymore uh i really didn't know that kirk cut and uh that'd be so great if you have to cut all those jokes because it's insensitive to the 10,000 people who have died since we started recording this.

Guys, interesting development. Turns out Iran had those nuclear weapons this whole time. And looks like they're better at using them than we are. So we're just putting this in post so you don't get mad at us. We didn't know when we were joking about Tel Aviv getting turned into glass. Well, anyways. Do you guys see that Netanyahu? Oh, yeah.

Steven posted a thing about Netanyahu. The mask is looking off and he accidentally said that Israel has nukes. He said He called Israel a nuclear power, but he was talking about nuclear energy. Wow. What a mook. And he just sort of had this demo and shook

his head reaction. Well, how funny would it be if Iran immediately wiped out all of Israel's nuclear silos? Really? Just in one fell swoop. That would be fun.

That would be, that's best case scenario is just immediately denuclearizing Israel. Okay. Larry Robbins, he started with Omega Advisors. He's a hedge fund manager. He is the founder what's up well i guess you should uh maybe you should explain to those listeners who don't know your personal connection so the reason we're talking about uh larry larry robbins is that he is on the board of a math education company called zurn incorporated oh they're upstanding if I've heard correctly. Yeah, they're teaching kids to learn and love math.

Oh, wow. And full disclosure, I used to work for Zurn Incorporated, but then last November, I got fired from them. On your birthday. On my birthday. And I currently have a case against them going through the NLRB. So I will not be talking about Zurn

just out of self-preservation. I will not be talking about my experiences with Zurn. However, I will be telling a fictional story told in the first person about a quantitative logic educational company called Blurn. Oh, Blurn, you say? Called Blurn, where all the individuals in the

stories, incidentally, have the same name as people in the Seattle comedy scene in 2010. And this is for your fictional story uh written by uh uh randy momber yes uh randy balmer yes thank you related to steve balmer so the company's called blurn yes blurn so that's interesting because i read this article about how everyone who works at blurn has actually been convicted of child rape. They've actually pleaded guilty to lewd acts with a 12-year-old.

Well, you can't have read that because it's a fictional story. Oh, okay. Well, I guess within the extended universe of Blurn. Sean's talking about the liner notes of the Blurn book. I read the back of this Blurn fictional tale by Randy Bomber. And I have to say, riveting stuff. You cannot even make up stuff about a universe that hasn't been created yet. Riveting. We're world building today.

That's right. Yeah, we're world building. We should just note um sean hannity of course uh does his show at 9 p.m eastern time uh according to uh and he regularly talks with donald trump he opened the monologue of his show tonight by saying quote they're gonna get hit hard their three major refineries could soon go up in flames we can report six b-52 bombers are on their way to the region unquote so that's uh we'll find out tomorrow if sean hannity is full of shit or not i guess uh now's a good time to um get a nice view of the burj khalifa if you uh if you're in

dubai and then head into the nearest parking garage. Okay, cut the Baghdad joke. Cut the Kut joke. Cut the Azeem Castle joke. Yogi getting progressively madder at the reporting as more cities get hit. We're down to 10 minutes. Cut the herbal joke.

Good thing we didn't do the muzzle joke. Cut two. All right. Okay, it looks like everyone has too. All right. Boy. Okay, it looks like everyone has hit Blurn Incorporated. But let's talk about this fictional company, Blurn. So this fictional company, Blurn, it was started in 2010 by a bunch of people who used to work at, I can't say Bain Consulting, so I'll say McKinsey Consulting.

They left there in 2012 because, let's say, a prominent presidential candidate, not from Bain, but McKinsey, probably made it awkward to be liberal and work at McKinsey. And so they, I should also note that when I got fired from Blurn, they reminded me that I can't release any proprietary information. Okay. And that the fictional company. Yeah. The fictional company. I'm not allowed to mention it.

Not that I had any plans and also not that there really is any proprietary information. The fictional company Blurn says in their public statements that when they're looking to hire a new programmer, they're looking for someone who knows how to code in Ruby on Rails,

which is an open source web development program. So it's like, what proprietary information? And that, by the way, hasn't stopped the lead developer. Let's say his name's Mauricio. That hasn't stopped Mauricio from acting like he invented the World Wide Web. Oh, man.

The lead developer, Mauricio, once during a lunch meeting, he did track in college at an elite university let's say Princeton and he said that he could in his distance class he had a time advantage over Usain Bolt can we do all the episodes

about Andy's fictional co-workers which it there's a good story Can we do all the episodes about Andy's fictional co-workers? There's a good story. What's worth noting is he had another time advantage over Usain Bolt, which is time spent in a shitty office. Way more time spent in a shitty office than Usain Bolt. Usain Bolt probably spends, I don't know, one or two days a month in a shitty office than Usain Bolt. Usain Bolt probably spends, I don't know, one or two days a month in a shitty office talking to an agent. What is a shitty office for Usain

might be a nice office for Mauricio. I mean, technically speaking, Usain might spend a lot of time in shitty offices. I actually fucking love that, though, because, you know, a guy saying to your face, I had a better time than Usain Bolt is only one of those things that you let go when you're like, I got to see this person 40 hours a week.

Like if this was any sort of casual setting, I'd be like, no, I don't think you do. But because I have to be here with you in order to eat, I'm just going to say, oh, uh-huh, yeah. And also if I call you insane dumb dumbass i'll get fired on the spot so wait did he really say this fictionally yeah he really said this fictionally for you like mauricio weird i will literally get kicked out of my apartment if i call you a liar right now what a what a shitty fictional company blurring yeah and mauricio is only

tangential to the story but i had to tell i had to say that just give you an idea of um but the clientele blurring is hiring is uh so up their own ass yeah yeah it's i mean this and they hired they hired sorry they hired the fictional meat no yeah no i i really learned like what an ivy league uh or just elite degree really means working there uh fictionally and so so the real story that uh takes place there it it started about uh two years ago when we had a meeting when i had a meeting with the office lawyer i'm going to call her uh barbara and um nice she sat me down and said andy you okay i'm not steven these are comedians from the seattle comedy scene some of them better than others mauricio fictionally but also really says fuck yogi paulo on facebook a lot and uh i don't know why he's saying it but fictionally

fuck him and literally fuck him too. I will say that Mauricio is the only one where I could think like, oh, that one matches perfectly. So Barbara Sayre. Why did I ever get off Facebook? Yeah, buddy, you fucked up. So Barbara Sayre,

who's the office lawyer, sat me and several of my fictional co-workers down and said hey so there's a new New York law because you're listed because of your employee categorization you are not exempt for overtime which means that your

salary increases by about $2,000 from $48,000 to $50,000 and I was like oh. And then I looked it up on the computer and I'm like, oh, next year it's going up to 58, even cooler. And my coworkers who had that same meeting did the same thing. And they were like, oh, cool. So then a year goes by and we get our first paycheck of the new year. We're like, all right. 58. 58. And then it was the same.

Oh. So you're telling me Blurn fucked fictional employees out of eight grand? Yeah. So then I went to Barbara Sayre and I said, hey, I was wondering if we could talk about this thing. And Barbara Sayre said, just a minute. I'm still working on it. Did you have a year to work on it, to be fair? What turned out happened was they spent a year.

They decided that we were labeled labeled administrative employees which wasn't quite accurate so they were like all right well let's reclassify them and also not tell them that they're reclassified and so they reclassified all of us without telling us into what were known as computer employees which is a classification where you're available for overtime, but we were instructed that we're not allowed to work for overtime. Sure. Yeah. And it's the story of the fictional book.

Yeah. We were not allowed to earn overtime. So they told us that we got, we were suddenly eligible for overtime. And I looked up the definition of computer employee, what they classified us as. And it turns out the federal definition is for IT. Oh, really?

Yeah, just people who program computer systems, which wasn't what we did. We worked with Adobe Photoshop. We did some light JavaScript coding. I'm sorry, this is fictional, CoffeeScript coding. We, not Photoshop, GIMP. We worked in synfig studio uh the you know i'm just gonna say open freeware stuff but yeah uh we in in fact the federal definition explicitly pro or said it this does not apply to people who rely on computer programs to do their jobs. So when I looked this up, my boss, let's say Mitch Burrow,

with female use of Mitch. Got it. Of course. You still listen to the show, might still. Hey, Mitch. So Mitch Burrow was like, hey, I don't think we have anything to talk about during our weekly meeting. And I'd been talking with my coworkers and we were like, this is bullshit. And I was like, okay, the only way we can address this is if we all address it as a group.

Right. Right. And so strength in numbers, strength in numbers, uh, collective bargaining. Cause what they were saying is like, if you have any questions about this, talk to me one-on-one. Uh, that's what both Mitch Burrow and Barbara Sarah were saying to us. And so interestingly, it's also what they fictionally said to those children when they

attempted to go to the authorities. Sean, why are you hard? So I insisted over our Slack thing. It was like, we should meet as a group. And Mitch Burrow was like, I don't

think we should do that. And I was like, no, I really think we should meet as a group and uh mitch burrow was like i i don't i don't think we should do that and i was like no i really think we should meet as a group right and so because you can break one arrow but a whole bunch of arrows more difficult to break and so we had the group meeting and i just explained hey we don't qualify for computer employees here's why and uh mitch was like that's just the decision we made and so that was that uh except then in this fictional story they straight fucked you and then you went you're fucking us and they went that's what we're doing well then it develops more because uh like a week later uh mitch burrow's boss um uh give me a name name uh nam hun uh mitch burrow's boss nam hun uh took me into into her office and said uh so the tone that you used with mitch

does not uh match the collegiate quality of our office and if you do that again your job will be in danger wow your job might be in danger so she's tone policing you yeah well so i said quite literally uh that might be a violation of the national labor relations act and then she said well i'm just talking about your tone and so i put that to the test and went to the NLRB and filed a charge and won. So now when you did that, had you ever gone to the NRLB before? NLRB? No, that was my first time. Right. So I said the words National Labor Relations Board,

and she started shrieking as if I had shown a cross to a vampire. Holding a pencil and it just cracked. Snapped in half. half actually what you're describing steven is pretty much her demeanor um for anyone in similar situations what would you tell them about going to the nlrb um i would just say uh look into look up the national labor relations act and what your rights are in terms of collective bargaining. Because as I what I just described, it sounds like something that you would not be able to get that is too flimsy to count as government protection. But I won that case. Right.

So when you won, what did that mean? It actually meant very little. It meant they had to send out an email that said that we respect your employees' rights. And it also meant that they were supposed to put up a little sign in the break room, which they never did. Yeah, the break room on their bulletin board that detailed the case and everything, which they never got around to. And they were supposed to remove any official reprimands against me, which because it was an informal, uh, right. It wasn't an official writeup. It was just a warning, if you will.

Yes. In terms of fictional police terms. Yes. And a few months after that, um, suddenly my performance was inadequate. Oh, my performance didn't change. Like I, I, what they said is they said is I was getting work done late. I was previously you're given 30 pumps per fuck. You're still doing 30 pumps, but now they're not happy with it.

That's one way to put it. I like to cut through the bullshit of business jargon, really cut through the meat. Eating just as much ass as before. That's right. Can I just say about your boss, Nam Hun, it's interesting that all the comedians who fictionally bullied you in Seattle moved to New York and started

fictionally bullying you at your day job. Did Nam ever fictionally? No. It was cool. You did tell that story about he showed you a gun or he pointed a gun at you once. He pointed a fucking gun at me. Fictionally.

Yeah, that wasn't bullying. That was him being a dumbass thinking it would be a funny gag to point a loaded gun at me. It is pretty funny, though. I mean, yeah, it was pretty funny. Is this real or fictional? Or real fictional?

Nobody will ever know, Stephen. Fucking psycho. I love him though. So now the company is telling, Blurn Incorporated is going. They put me on a performance improvement plan. Right. Because.

Which is the fictional version of eating, tossing a salad diet, if you will. Some 12 year old listening like, I've been there, buddy. We know all about blur performance reviews they're um yeah so i got put on this performance improvement plan thing and here's here's something i should say um even in this fictional universe is that the vast majority of people i interacted with at this company um who were at the ground level wonderful people sure um uh the way you

wrote these people at blur the way i wrote these people at blurn the way i wrote these people who i'm not mentioning they were all wonderful uh uh the um which is the case with any company that is mostly there's a blurn family yes yes um and i should also mention that most of them uh left over the last year um there's a massive turnover at this fictional company which is the sign of a company being corrupt in general i think that's a pretty prevalent for all of us all i know for a fact is that anytime i see a company or a organization that has a high turnover it literally is this bullshit and once people figure it out they're on their way out yeah uh this thing about like

they suddenly put you under a performance review and like give you like a verbal warning or something like that yeah i've also experienced that in other corporate environments oh really yeah both real and fictional yeah it was it was one of those things where it's like every single thing i did was suddenly put under a microscope and so that and there would be a written record of every mistake i made right um under my and wanted that your character out um do you think uh well yeah but can i just like well just kind of a related story about what i've learned about how employers work um so i've worked like you know various grocery stores i worked at whole foods um and you know what we would talk about there is when the bosses want you fired i mean most people who've worked any job know this

they'll find an excuse yeah um so you know like if uh say they want you it's essentially like if they want you fired and you're punching in say two or three minutes late occasionally if they want you fired they'll fire you yeah and use that as an excuse if they don't want you fired they won't and i just wanted to say this story that i remember is i worked at um uh eli's is another grocery store on the upper east side i remember going to the back room and hearing the manager of the store telling um approvingly a subordinate a story about rudy giuliani who uh was uh demanding somebody be prosecuted for a crime. And I guess in this story, Rudy Giuliani's subordinate asked him, well, you know, what has he done?

What crime has he done? And Rudy Giuliani said, everybody's done a crime. You just got to follow them long enough, and you'll find the crime that they've done. And this was, you know, my manager at the store telling a story about analogous to getting somebody fired. Well, wait until we get to the crime that I've done. Yes, so they put me under this performance improvement plan.

Mostly because I did my work late and showed up a little late and missed a meeting that was at like 8 a. 8 AM when there were like five meetings between two days, uh, which wasn't normal. And so, um, so one of the things that, uh, these coworkers told me, one of these coworkers, who's a good friend of mine told me after I got canned was like she was like yeah everyone always knew that andy does the best work and he never does it on time and she was like i even requested to have you be the only one to work on my projects um and it didn't get granted but like and like actually like, like, even though they put me on this plan, like Mitch Burrow, my manager was at the same time or was like just a year earlier calling up the, the temp company that they got me from and like requesting more people like me. Oh, wow. Yeah. You were the model that they wanted more of.

Yeah. Yeah. But now, now I'm turning in my work too late uh all of a sudden and it's a problem at the same time they were bringing in this uh guy from uh school let's say bail and oh good school yeah fail yeah fail let's call it fail well i mean it's a it's a prestigious university bail and uh i don't think fail does it justice um it's let's call it jail and this is a guy who i looked up his linkedin he well he first of all he seems to be incompetent at everything except

ass kissing sure in which he is a superstar let's name him kyle hike now listen i i've seen kyle hike in action and this man knows how to eat but can i tell a kyle hike story please uh but this is a real kyle hike this is a kyle hike from uh seattle story is at one point he said on stage uh hey you know he named he named he named, he named this female comedian and he's like, you know how you see her. This is at an open mic where the audience where she had just performed. And he goes, you know how you see her and you think like,

I want to fuck her brains out. Like, do you really want to fuck her brains out? And it's like, he sexually harassed her and then transitioned it into a hacky joke. Like, it's like if, if you were on a subway and there was a guy masturbating and the moment you accidentally made eye contact with him, he was like, what's the deal with hand lotion?

They know you're going to put it on your dick. The genius of people from bail never ceases to amaze me. Yeah. I can't believe your boss at Blurn did this. Now, at one point you mentioned that while you're writing this story in your log cabin next to Stephen King's, that at Blurn, this individual from Bale named Kyle Hike was brought in to essentially replace your character. Yeah, yeah. First, he started talking about how bad that was an earned fist bump he just did uh first he started talking about how uh my code was sloppy and bad uh even though he had never done the kind of coding that i had right oh and he also so at first but he had some like comments

about javascript where he's like he knows copy script he knows something about this coding language um so i looked up his background and he studied geopolitics at Bale. And then his first job out of college was working at Bloomberg as a, quote, software engineer. Oh, yeah. That place is great for those. Yeah. You know, geopolitics and the software engineers. That's a natural transition.

Yeah, of course. So it's like being a guy that walks tightropes and then getting a job as a semi-truck driver yeah so he spent a bunch of time saying why my shit was bad and then i explained well no there's reasons why you do this this and this that you don't uh understand yet and then over the next few months he slowly like retreated into like picking up the the habits the like things that i had for right silently yeah um oh really so kyle hike uh had his uh cock in between his legs and i realized he was not realized he was wrong but self-admitted he that you were doing it the correct way your character without ever saying it and still being a complete dick to everyone right uh i should also note that everyone hated him still does probably

anyway uh fictionally. That's how you wrote the characters. That's how I wrote the characters. And so the reason I bring up this guy is eventually he was brought in to train the people on the stuff I was coding. Even though he had never done it himself. And he ended up training them with training materials that I'd written myself. Wow. And then he was giving, it got to the point where after I had finished this performance improvement plan, and I was going through the performance improvement plan while he

was doing these changes. And then my boss, when I was disagreeing with his terrible ideas my boss was like you have kind of an attitude problem um we we think that you know you should be more supportive of um the work that he's doing wow um so basically after the first nlrb incident there was a target on your back and the individual kyle hike was relegated to i mean you know kind of make your make your character's day a fucking bullshit reality even though that wasn't technically their job essentially you became the black sheep why is it gonna be black yes so basically uh this guy kyle hike he he's put in charge of training people on the things that i uh

code and then i'm also talking to the people who are being trained by him who are like yeah we'll ask him questions and he doesn't really know the answer to them uh but i don't think he wrote these training materials did you write these training materials uh like he's that inept he's that inept kyle hike from bail doesn't know how to fucking make print this is a realistic story this is a realistic it's completely fictional none of this happened um no i'm just saying it's very convincing writing right yeah no some of the best fiction writers you think they're like documenting reality true crime i should also note that that his boss was the one who kind of implemented this code changing program because she looked at uh some of my fictional code and uh

couldn't understand it was like well you guys need to write your code a different way and that's why she brought kyle hyken and she also wrote some of her like you should write your code this way and wrote some example code and it was like riddled with errors oh wow and i was like i i couldn't tell whether she if whether i was like imagining the errors or whether she like really knew what she was doing and so then i looked on her linkedin and it was like um blarvard business school like before she got this job and it's like oh none of these people like have a background right and the stuff that they're trying to tell us what to do do you think those people were brought in just on the pedigree of their bivy league educations um because they were doing jobs they from your perspective at least

as you've written them had no business doing yeah like it for part of it it was like for one of them it was um uh for um that uh for kyle hikes boss let let's say... Seth Lazier. Seth Lazier. For Seth Lazier, she... And these were all people that Sean alleged earlier had relations with 14-year-old and younger individuals. Seth Lazier, Nam Hun, Mitch Burrow, Barbara Sayre, all these individuals were written as people

that at one point are not Kyle Hike. Let's not forget him or them. I can't wait till we see people from the Seattle area canceling their Patreon. I bet it's going to even out between people canceling and the people we didn't name who are like, wait, I want to hear what Kyle Hike did.

The five people who remember kyle hike um early 2010s seattle comedians do anything for you that's what we're doing so uh i mean seth lazier was at least competent at being a manager but kyle hike just had the pedigree. Sure. More like a James Milton, if you will. So this year, competent manager, but James Milton, I mean, more ego than manager. A joke for two people.

Neither of them are in this room. So, yeah, Kyle Hike had no managerial experience where seth lazier actually had some sort of uh talent for it yeah yeah and seth lazier like i was on friendly terms with seth lazier for a while and then uh seth lazier went all in behind kyle hike uh and it it got pretty messy by the way do you want to hear a story about the CEO, Terry Taylor? Yes, I would love to hear a story about CEO of Blurn, Terry Taylor.

I love Sean, by the way. Yeah. The CEO of Blurn fucking loved Sean. Look, I know how to keep a secret. Yeah, that's true. So we would have these meetings with the group meetings with Terry Taylor.

And she would tell us how hard she's working for the company. And she'd be like, you know, I have literally, because it's a non-profit, so it's based on donations company and she'd be like you know i have literally because it's a non-profit so it's based on donations and she'd be like i have literally asked for billions of dollars what as the as though like if i walked around and asked 100 people for one dollar i could be like i've asked for like a hundred dollars yeah yeah so that's um that was the

leadership uh who uh sets the culture oh they also gave us a culture book a year ago that uh would lecture us on what blurring culture is really yeah one of my friends when she uh when she got a better job she was like yeah i'm gonna go camping this week and i'm gonna burn the culture book and i was like hold on take the plastic off before you do that. Um, so, so eventually it comes to a point where, uh, Kyle hike is lecturing a bunch of the new hires on the proper ways of, uh, writing a certain, uh, code variable or writing, uh, directives for certain code variables

so that my team can code them properly. And during this talk, the people he's lecturing are quantitative, former quantitative logic teachers, elementary school quantitative logic and middle school quantitative logic teachers who understand quantitative logic. Sure, that's their job. Yes, and he's trying to tell them how to write,

how to describe certain random variable ranges so that my team can accurately code them. And he would say things like, now you have to specify a beginning and an end because if you don't specify an end there could be an infinite number of them it's just like sagely yes gives you this advice yeah yeah it's like all these teachers are gonna be like oh shit i didn't really i knew there were a lot of numbers fucking thank you yeah for pointing out this difficult advanced technique.

You go to fuck Kyle Hicks' brain out and then you're just fucking air. This is another Seattle comedy Kyle Hicks story where once he started talking to me and was like, yeah, I got in a lot of trouble last week because they gave me this beer.

And here's the thing, I had a bunch ahead and and they and there's something you know and i work hard for that if they threw me out and there was i don't know who this is but that sounds fucking hilarious yeah i mean you don't have to think that hard to picture the guy um and i'm just standing there like uh-huh yeah no that sounds tough man like i i don't want to say something that turns on like he's clearly got like a fight or flight switch and i don't want to flip it um uh anyway going Anyway, going back to Blurn. Yes. So it gets to the point where we're having this group meeting, and Kyle Hike is giving a presentation

about how to properly code variables in our CoffeeScript. And you don't have to write in. I know that's an actual language as well. And so he's he's uh giving a presentation about how to properly write code and coffee script and there are obvious mistakes in it and so and this is a small meeting and so it's it's one where people will like jump in and point things out right and so i point at one of his slides where i'm like okay well actually you um uh in here you don't have semicolons after some of the statements and uh that's actually going to break

the program if you uh uh you're going to get a break and i'm just telling this so that everyone knows that it's going to break if you don't include semicolons and he goes everyone knows about the semicolons andy uh he couldn't handle even the most moderate criticism that tone is okay well so then he gets to another part of his presentation where he's like and you should break up the variables and i'm like well actually uh i actually code it with uh uh do these things with just one variable and actually um or one like kind of large variable and that the way that the thing's structured actually works better this way because uh you can get into all these and he's like would you stop interrupting me um wow yeah and so when he finished i was like are you done can i uh say my

thing he's like yes you can say your thing and so after after this meeting uh i get a message from one of my good coworkers, Eric Youthis. And she says to me, great coworker. Yeah. Hey, are you okay? That was really unprofessional what he did.

And this is a Thursday by the way. And I was like, yeah, I'm fine. I'm actually kind of, it's kind of like a relief that the mask is off. Yeah, sure. Now you're referring to Kyle Hikes

showing his true colors when you say that? Yeah, yeah. But in fairness, if you could see the slack, we really go on Andy about the semicolons. Yeah. And then on Friday, let's see, I had a meeting at 8.30 a.m. I got a message about it on, or no, it's a meeting at 10. I got a message about it at 8.30,.m. I got a message about it on,

or no, it's a meeting at 10. I got a message about it at 8.30 to show up at 10 o'clock sharp. Oh, wow. And I was like, well, I'm not going to be late for this meeting. I know what it is. I put on my nicest clothes

and I got this letter. Dear Andy, this letter confirms that your employment with Blurn is terminated effective immediately. Your termination is due to unprofessional conduct and poor performance. You're saying a fictional character got this letter. Yeah, a fictional character got this letter.

Let's see. Blurn expects all team members to work together collaboratively and respectfully. However, you have exhibited repeated inability to work collaboratively with respect towards your team members when receiving guidance. Because you interrupted him. Derogation of Blurn's stated values. You have resisted taking directions from others and improving Blurn code over the past several months. I haven't resisted taking directions. I mean, I took the directions, and then the things that I didn't take were actually incorporated by kyle hike um yeah kyle hike said hey take three lefts to go straight

and you went i can go straight he went stop interrupting yeah yeah so it says uh product manager kyle hike was attempting to explain best coding practices to the analyst team through a presentation on what's called the mountain coding guidelines, multiple times during the presentation, you interrupted him with disrespectful comments, disagreeing with the guidance in an unproductive manner for the broader team. You repeatedly shouted, free bird, free bird. Mitch Burrow, your supervisor, has repeatedly instructed yourself and the entire analyst team that the team should be following um uh kyle's

guidance however you chose to not only interrupt with opinions that you had already expressed and which already had been responded to well not the semicolon thing i was pointing out bad code um but also point out a oh but also point out a typo in the product product manager's presentation the interruption was excessively long un unproductive, and unprofessional. Wow. Yeah. Long, unproductive, and unprofessional. I had no idea they got that specific

in the termination letter. Yeah. That's crazy. Well, it's because I already went to the NLRB. It's also funny because they talk about all the other things they did. Oh, so they had to like dot all their I's, cross all their T's after that.

Yeah. At one point they say, at the conclusion of your performance improvement plan on august 7th 2019 mitch burrow reinforced the importance of maintaining a positive and productive attitude well i've got the recording of that meeting and uh that was not said so it was so full of shit just to complete cover your ass like and you know again we've talked about this to death this is just because labor law is so fucking useless in this country that they just you know make up a reason to terminate somebody for uh asking why are you illegally denying me a raise uh you know and uh and i guess also you know when it's a friday morning meeting you're getting fired because there's another weird... Oh, Monday morning meeting.

Oh, it was Monday? Yeah. I thought it was like something about American culture where they fire people on Fridays just so they have the... Yeah, it's a mob space. They get the whole week on you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they don't shoot up the place.

That's right. The only labor action available to American workers. Well, they did have two mob-ass looking guys who were there to escort me out. And then as I was leaving, Barbara Sayre was like, she like popped her head out of the door and was like, by the way,

you don't have any proprietary information, do you? Wow. It's like, what the fuck proprietary information would I have? As I said, it's... Your character said in this fictional story about Blair Incorporated. Did you have like their

whatever the fuck values like their guide or whatever with you? The cultural? I think I definitely left one of the books like just sitting on my desk is the only thing that I left behind. Andy with like a thumb drive of pictures

of the management team with 12-year-old children shoved firmly up his asshole being like, no, no proprietary information at all. So now when your character was fired, you went to the NLRB once again? Yes, I called them up, scheduled a meeting to file a charge. And so I made a mistake, actually, when I was doing the performance improvement plan, because that was bullshit.

It was cut and dry retaliation. And I knew it at the time, but I was so beaten down. I was literally thinking about suicide on the regular, fictionally. I didn't do it. We love you, Andy. Thank you. I will say also, fictionally, I'm much happier now that I'm not going to that place. Andy, we would miss you more than we would miss

the quarter of the patreon we would get back if you were to do something like that and if you killed yourself i'd have to edit two to three times more could i just say also like so we started this episode like knowing we're going to award a rant so i've just been drinking uh these fat tires and it's interesting like over the course of a podcast where you kind of remember how to do jokes in your head. But the drunker you get, the like the ability to connect the words gets more difficult. I'll tell you what, that's never a problem for Kyle. No, no.

Kyle High commits to the bit. The drunker he gets. Just don't put too much head in his beer. Or I'm guessing he'll assault a waiter. If that seems to be. Yeah. So you went to the NLRB in your story a second time, but the mistake you made was that you should have gone when they did the performance review thing?

Yeah, because when I went the second time, what they told me was that this is actually going to be much harder because the statute of limitations for retaliation from that second time you went has expired because that that lasted until like august or something sure so it's like a month and a half that you can can it's it's six months actually if it lasted till august 7th maybe it didn't expire it's well it started in april and it lasted until august because they tacked on an extra uh uh month because uh i was resisting the uh coding changes that... Kyle Huyck was instituting?

Yeah, that Kyle Huyck was instituting. Well, I was saying, I was pointing out issues with them and that maybe they should talk to us before telling us how to code something they never coded before. Did you try not interrupting them? You know, when I think back on the mistakes I made, I should have not interrupted them more.

Sure. Okay. That makes sense to no one. Oh, what, what was on your performance, uh, like,

uh, plan? Um, let's see. Yeah. Were you not required to show up late? What did they make you do? What did you write about this character that,

that you were supposed to do that you, your character didn't do? Yeah, I'm trying to dig deep into the universe right now. Not, uh, let's see. We're still world,

world build, world building. Here's one of the reasons that they put on my performance improvement plan. Let's see. One of the reasons they started was I was not doing adequate prioritization of work, e.g. leaving work early to attend a happy hour while behind on my tasks. I should say that when they say that, what they're referring to is an instance where we were having a going away happy hour for one of my favorite co-workers.

Well, Andy, you shouldn't have done that. I should have stayed and completed my task before saying goodbye to someone I've been working with for years. What's their plan, though? What do they have you do to get better? Starting May 1st and for a period of 60 days, establish regular office hours. Be at the office no later than 10 a.m.,

working eight hours each day. Remote work will be suspended until further notice. There are people who work outside of town remotely. It's a regular thing. Establish prioritization and communication practices. Review Q assignments each morning. Checking in with Mitch Burrow if clarification is needed about which order to address the tasks. Refer to content team QA calendar to help prioritize tasks based on lo-fi and quality assurance review.

This seems like copy pasted from policy and procedures. Delete content team QA. Complete my daily and weekly goals in our um editing program so basically if i get over assigned work and i can't complete it on time or can't tell my ba can't tell mitch burrow that um i won't be able to do it on time by the end of the day um that's a that's a issue and so it's it's things like that where it's like sometimes you can't really predict how much work you're going to have during the day and suddenly not being able to predict that you won't be able to finish certain tasks.

And these aren't like heavily time sensitive tasks. It's part of a long process. And so it's things like that where then it's part of like a long process and so you know it's things like that where then it's put under a microscope um let's see and then b bring the average number of times your tasks need to be shifted into line with team expectations about one to two times every 10 days when looked at over a month so the number of times that that I say, hey, you've given me too much work and I can't complete it by the end of the day, I can only say that about one to two times

every 10 days. You better use it wisely. Yeah. And also don't do overtime because now your overtime is being tracked. They also, they... So when you're saying you're illegally underpaying me,

you can't say that more than once every two weeks. Right. You've misclassified my employment status well what was it i i played you guys that fictional recording of um me talking to the boss about our uh reclassification and i think steven you had like the best response to like what she said which was like okay first of all shut up oh yeah she just like immediately tried to shut you down yeah i was like okay first of all shut up oh yeah she just like immediately tried to shut you down yeah i was like so we're being reclassified as computer employees because we write code and she was like yeah so just like god i wish you had one year in a,

in a RB case within the window so you could come back there triumphantly. I mean, if I win this, which I'm, it's going to be weird. Like if I go back, I mean, what,

what are you still could? Yeah. You still could. I still could. Yeah. Okay. And the reason I'm like saying all this, because it might jeopardize like,

um, a lawsuit. I don't want to bring a lawsuit against these assholes like i just want to say what they did sure yeah uh like i don't i don't want to people have said like sue them i don't i don't want to i don't i you don't care to you want this shit to stop happening you don't want to get a payout for it i mean yeah a payout would be nice but the amount of hurdles you have to do to do that is bullshit. Also, you want Blurn, the company, to stop being written so poorly. Yeah.

Well, yeah. I just... Was there a semicolon in that sentence, Yogi? Too many, actually. Please don't point that out because it's unprofessional conduct and poor performance. Yes, Sean. So what would you have done differently,

one of them being that you would report it to the NLRB when you had the performance review stuff would be one thing. Is there anything else you'd recommend to any of our listeners that may be dealing with injustice at work that should contact the N nlrb which we'll link in our description of this episode um that's at the main thing is is just you gotta do it on time you gotta do it on time yeah andy does great work but it's never on time and therefore should be fired um oh, did I also mention that they fictionally reclassified sales employees

as computer employees? Really? Yeah, nothing to do. All they do, the only connection is they work on computers. This is like sort of related, but something I learned when I got hit by a car on my bicycle, just speaking of doing paperwork on time. So in New York State,

if you're in a car accident uh the insurance company the car insurance company uh is supposed to take care of all your medical bills it's called no fault insurance and the way no fault insurance used to work is you had 90 days to submit paperwork to the car insurance company to say hey i was in a car accident i have medical bills. You have to pay them. But then they lobbied the New York state government and they got it switched to 30 days. So you if you are in a car accident in New York state, you have 30 days to file all of your paperwork to get your medical bills taken care of. And it's just one of those fucked up things

because it's like, say, you're seriously injured. You're just in a hospital for like two weeks. You're not going to think of that. Yeah. yeah you know you were in a coma for 31 days yeah so but i mean it's just the way it's the way shit works in america like if something bad happens to you fucking file your paperwork next day or as soon as you can and it's a horrible thing because you know people are traumatized they're stressed or they're even you know medically incapacitated but it's like you just have to because the system is so stacked against you. So, theoretically, if a Gandhi bomber wins this

NLRB case, what is the next course of action? Does he get his job at Blurn again? That's a possibility, though. I think they would try to pay this fictional guy to um uh not come back with a settlement and then he might refuse to sign an nba in that case or they'll give him his

job back and i think you promised uh fictionally to give this guy uh bail uh clothes to walk into office the first day with. I said this? Yeah, you'd buy me a bail hat. Nice. Just go in there and immediately interrupt him. I did say I'd buy you a bail hat. That's right. If you in this story get this job back

and are facing going to this place, I will spend the $35 that evan fields flannery sells their bail hats for we should get andy a custom shirt with just a giant semicolon on it we should sell those shirts that's great that's fucking perfect one of my co-workers was like i mean uh what's kyle gonna do when he can't take your ideas anymore because another thing he would do is like i i would suggest all these improvements to the um thing for like years you would do his fucking job before he even like became an employee and then he um and i even got to the point where i was like making improvements in my like uh code editor uh to like have these hot keys to do things

quickly and then he would make a presentation where he's like we're implementing this program a code editor to have these hot keys to do things quickly. And then he would make a presentation where he's like, we're implementing this program that allows you to write the code faster using these things. Stealing your ideas. Yeah.

What a perfect summation of corporate America. Yeah. What's he going to do when he fires you and he can't steal your ideas anymore? I mean, it's also pretty obvious that part of the reason

that I got fired is he like you know told his boss uh nam yep um seth lazier seth lazier he told his boss seth lazier and then like seth lazier might have like said hey terry taylor here's a good reason to give him the outs um or mitch burrow did it on uh her accord. Yeah, Terry's been tragically fired for using the N-word at work. So the story's a mystery. Yeah, yeah.

Well, we have more updates on Blurn coming in the near future, but before we close out the episode, our resident Twitter extraordinaire recently banned. Yes, I was suspended for 12 hours because they knew what I was going to say.

Sean was on suicide watch. Has collected some of the finest tweets to share with our audience at this time. They suspended me for 12 hours from Twitter for my own good just so I didn't blame Id Pol for the war in Iran. Just tone it down on the

class reductionism just a little bit, buddy. You can come back in the morning. Did you see what our commander-in-chief just said? Yeah. So we have two tweets, though I guess we should just advertise. We will talk on either the free or the Patreon episode next upcoming. We will

have a full episode on the billionaire Larry Robbins and Glenview Capital Management. We're going to full episode on the billionaire Larry Robbins and Glenview Capital Management. We're going to talk a bit more today, but, you know, events distracted. And we'll talk about how Larry Robbins and his company relate to Andy's story. And we'll also talk about some of the other Pizzagate linked billionaires. He actually has no relation to my story because it's fictional. That's right. We'll talk about some of the other Pizzagate billionaires who are involved in this fictional story Andy just made up right now.

Andy's story, it's Calzonegate. So I guess just to close out, we should mention the foreign minister of Iran. And, you know, if you're listening to this, you know this, but we'll just discuss it briefly. For those of you who don't.

The foreign minister of Iran has tweeted, Iran took and concluded proportionate measures in self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, targeting the base from which cowardly armed attacks against our citizens and senior officials were launched. We do not seek escalation of war, but we'll defend ourselves against any aggression. So, you know, that's important because he's saying they concluded

proportionate response. So Iran is saying we launched these 12 cruise missiles and we're done. If you hit us back, there'll be more. If not, things can climb down. Donald Trump tweets all is well! Missiles launched from Iran at two military bases

located in Iraq. Assessment of casualties and damages taking place now. So far, so good. We have the most... So far, so good. Just like a hundred dead Iraqis. So far, so good.

We're in good shape, folks. We have the most powerful and well-equipped military anywhere in the world by far! I will be making a statement tomorrow morning. And by the time this episode is out, you will know which supermodels Donald Trump claimed to have fucked in his statement tomorrow morning, updating us on the Iran war. But, I mean, you know, we'll see. But it seems like, according to some people on Twitter, maybe he'll climb down from this.

Yeah, I think they outwit him. Just like, I mean, that's just like. That's what the world's hoping. Like, Jesus Christ, what a depressing statement of real politic. Just the fact that they only killed Iraqis allows Donald Trump to climb down and us not have a full-blown war because he didn't kill any Americans. Allegedly. And, you know, we'll see if this comes out tomorrow. But, you know, hey, Jesus Christ, I will be so happy if things do not get any worse from here and we avoid a war with Iran.

And Iran just bombed Iraq so great Still prosecute the Trump administration, though. And Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger. There's no statute of limitations on this shit. They can die in jail. Bazinga. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Yogi Paliwal.

I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Steve Jeffries. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Thanks for listening. And check out our upcoming episode on Larry Robbins and other fictional Pizzagate billionaires. Bye-bye now. Get that

butt wet. Hey everybody. Thanks for listening to this episode of Grubstakers. This is one of our historical episodes, episode 130 Blurn. If you enjoyed this and you wanted to hear more of our historical episodes, you can right now. You can go to patreon.com slash

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