Pirate Wires - Destroying Statues & Wearing Shorts In Congress | PIRATE WIRES EP#15 🏴‍☠️

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

EPISODE FIFTEEN: This week, we are joined by Comfortably Smug! We discuss the insane politicians who hate America and want to tear down statues, the embarrassment of John Fetterman wearing shorts in Congress, the migrant crises taking over the world, and River's piece on Biden's "CHIPS Act". Featuring Mike Solana, River Page, Comfortably Smug Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.theindustry.pw/p/chips-act-tech-hubs-dei Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Smug Twitter: https://twitter.com/ComfortablySmug TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro 0:40 - Welcome Comfortably Smug To The Show! 2:40 - Statues - NYC Politicians Want To Tear Down More Statues From Our Past 11:25 - Migrant Crises In The U.S. And Europe 27:15 - Fetterman And The Embarrassing Lack Of Dress Code Standards In Congress 39:00 - Hunter Biden - Smug Gives Us All Of The Updates 50:45 - CHIPS Act - River Wrote About Some Of The Policies Enacted 1:05:30 - Politicians Giving Up - Dean Preston In SF Blames Citizens For Car Break Ins 1:07:40 - Shout Out To Smug - Subscribe To His Podcast! 1:08:15 - Like & Subscribe! Pirate Wires Pod Every Friday! See You Next Week!

It's worse than not having a plan. We don't even know what the goal is. Being a moron is his thing. It's like part of his drag. What he's saying is, I don't give a shit about any of it. His dad is an insurance executive from upstate New York. It's like, what the fuck? Why do you look like shit?

It's fucking stupid. I'm expected to have a serious conversation with fundamentally clownish people. You just gave up as a policy. I don't know if it's even a slope at this point. We just completely jumped right off the cliffside with this. Yo, that's... I don't... I don't even know what to say about something so crazy. Welcome back to the pod. We have the honestly legendary Comfortably Smug with us today.

I met him online years ago. He is the host of The Ruthless Pod, which is now the leading political podcast. But as I was just telling him a second ago, I think it just, you said it's now beating Pod Save America or what is the one that's now beating? That's right. We beat Pod Save on the charts. Really proud of that one. Yeah, for me, I mean, in my heart, you beat them many moons ago. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me. Of course. Thank you for coming. It's been a long time coming, I think. We have a packed show today. First of all, before I get into all the different topics we're going to be covering, I apologize for the sort of strange environment I'm in. I'm traveling a lot. The next few podcasts,

I'll be hopping around stealing, or rather sort of, what is it when they used to, what is the couch surfing thing? I'll be surfing from office to office. But the topics of the day, okay? We have the statues of our founding fathers in New York City being taken down. We have the John Fetterman dress code debacle in the Senate. We have Comfortably Smug. Smug is just going to lay down the Hunter Biden indictment and the evolution of that discourse, which I think is fascinating. River is going to lay down the details of his latest piece for PirateWire, which follows Joe Biden tech hubs. This is funding from the chips bill, is now being spread around the country. And we are going to apparently create San Francisco's

in every single state, multiple San Francisco's in several states across the country. And we have Dean Preston, the city supervisor of San Francisco, who is all of our favorite, his advice for the city in terms of combating car break-ins, which is simply to stop putting stuff in your car. Let's just get into it right at the top. This statue thing is something that feels stupid almost to care. It's a statue. I shouldn't care about this. I care about this a lot. I've cared about this forever. I've cared about this. So 2020, the summer of 2020 is the first time that this issue for me really became alarming in that something was happening that I felt was unthinkable. It was crazy. I was in the hate. It was the summer of 2020, right?

This is the summer in which rioting was legalized. And it was just sort of general Batman-esque, Christopher Nolan's Batman-esque chaos in every direction. And as I sat in my apartment in the hate, I followed the news on Twitter of these sort of roving mobs moving around, tearing down statues. The backdrop behind that, these were statues of purportedly evil sort of, they were American historical figures, but they were evil for some crime or other. Typically racism was the one that we would sort of swirl around. It was always some sort of strange, ambiguous connection to slavery. Famously, the statue of Ulysses S. Grant was torn down in San Francisco, which is on grounds of racism, which was especially crazy because he fought against the south like famous that was his main thing was winning the civil war and freeing the fucking slaves um but that's where we were in 2020

backdrop is you had all these confederate statues and uh monuments being targeted and the argument was uh the argument from the people who wanted to preserve it was like this is a part of our history and if we start here if we take these statues down what's next is it going to be george washington and everyone said no that's crazy it will never be george washington um it was always going to be george washington george washington's like the main one they want to get rid of and here we are fast forward to today. And I don't know, it's like, this is happening in New York City. The city council has decided they, I mean, they're very close to passing the bill that is going to take down the statues of Columbus,

Washington, and Jefferson. That eats me up, man. I'm pissed about this. And I don't want to be angry. I want to find the levity here. But it just feels, it hurts, right? That's our legacy. That's what America is. That's our history. That's something that we should be proud of. I don't know how we kind of persist as a people when you lose something like that. It feels important. I don't know. What does your asses take? They already tried to take the Columbus statue in Chicago down because if you remember Lori Lightfoot, America's Mayor, she

was on record. There was a recording of her saying, f*** the Italians. I've got the biggest d*** in Chicago. It was over the Columbus statue. This is right though because it's kind of awesome. Excellent line. No, she's perfect. of awesome. Excellent line. Yeah.

No, she's perfect. I miss her a lot. Anyway, I'm sorry. What were you saying, Spoke? So, yeah, I think that is really interesting is, to me, this all began in 2017 when it was the debate of, okay, should we bring down Confederate statues? What should be done? And at the time, there was an executive

order that was put out by the White House of, okay, there will be an establishment of a national garden of monuments, trying to find a place to house these monuments. And at the time, Trump famously did what he always would do is he went on Twitter and he gave his take. And his take was, this is just the beginning, folks. They're going to come for Thomas Jefferson and George Washington next. And when I went back and looked, it's funny, NBC News and Newsweek both did fact checks where they said, this is false. Statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are not next. Those will not be removed. That's a crazy fact. How do you, sorry, keep going. And then we got to talk about the nature of a fact check. crazy fact. How do you, sorry, keep going. And then we got to talk about the nature of a fact check. I mean, that's the thing is I think a lot of, you see the cultural changes that come

alongside with the political changes, they go in hand in hand. And the reasoning behind this is you can't lead people over the edge if they see it coming, right? It's kind of like, you know, you want to boil a frog, it doesn't feel the water getting warmer. And that's kind of the effect that the left tends to take when they bring about their policy changes, because they can't bring about the utopia they think they want overnight. It has to happen incrementally, slowly. And in just three short years, we got to the point where actually George Washington is the bad guy, is now the accepted belief among city-dwelling people in New York City. Yeah, it feels totally standard to the point that there was a backlash online, but

it's going to happen and nothing's going to stop it. And that's just that. It actually, strangely, the response to the statues being shattered by the mobs in 2020 felt much louder. And now, I've talked a lot about this kind of vibe shift. It seems the culture's changed. The Overton window is broadened. It doesn't seem as bad to me as it was a few years ago. But then this issue in particular really got me thinking about, I don't know, I might really have gotten that wrong. Because the problem

here is not even necessarily that this specific kind of leftist wants to get rid of the statues. They're always going to want to do that. This is Marxism. This was the cultural revolution in China. This is how they do it. They erase the past. They make you ashamed of what you were, and they provide you the new faith, the only new accepted faith. The problem that I'm facing is not them. Like I said, they're always going to exist. I have a problem with the reaction to this, which has been pretty muted. And that says to me that culture has, yeah, I was maybe right about a shift, but I've had friends kind of push back on me in the past. They've said, listen, they won. That's why things feel calmer. They won. They changed the way that we think about these things. And that's how it is with Washington. It's crazy

that I'm sitting here thinking to myself, what are the ways that I could possibly get, I don't know, in trouble for defending George Washington? That's a huge change. Well, I mean, it's like you said, it's incredibly deliberate. If you're not grounded to your history, if you're not grounded to anything, you can be taken anywhere. And that is a central point that they want to happen. To me, the funniest thing is this whole city council, the reason that they give for the removal is just wrapped in layers of irony and hypocrisy where the city council said, we have to start shutting down places. We can't afford to keep

up these statues of George Washington and they should be removed given the troubled history that they have. So it should be first on the chopping block. The whole belief that they spread for years of this is a sanctuary city, well, to live up to that hypocrisy and not let people see the headlines of where they say, well, we can't take any more people. The Statue of Liberty has changed her words overnight. It now says, go back. There's no place for you here. They'd rather say, well, we can't take any more people. The Statue of Liberty has changed her words overnight. It now says, go back. There's no place for you here. They'd rather say, well, I think we could go with chopping George Washington. That'd be the acceptable outcome for this. I didn't realize that they were... Can you actually try and steel man that for me? What is the possible reason that statues could cost... I didn't think they cost anything.

They're statues. They already exist. Sure. So this was in the proposal from the city council when they put together the annual budget, and they were looking specifically for service cuts that could be made because of the cost that's now being brought upon by the influx of migrants, where the estimates go up to 15% of the city's budget may now have to go towards housing, sheltering, and caring for the migrants which have come into the city. You've had shutdowns of parks in the city. During the summer, they tried using schools to house migrants. But to deal with that influx in the cost, there were proposals that were taken up of where can we have

service cuts? And they saw the upkeep and care for statues as one of the first places that they could go. Particularly, they mentioned the George Washington. Yo, I don't even know what to say about something so crazy. The immigration stuff in general is, I mean, this wasn't on our docket, but we do seem to be in this, I mean, it is a crazy immigration moment. You have concurrently the island in Italy where you now have what more migrants, when did we, by the way, shift from immigrant to migrant? That feels like a recent thing. Or illegal immigrant is the more accurate term. They

never filed the paperwork. Well, they sluck it in there, right? Because you have some actual refugees from war-torn countries, Venezuela, but you also have just illegal immigrants. And now they're all just migrants. The refugees and the illegal immigrants, they're all the same. Anyway, so you've got this island in Italy, this sort of gateway to all of Europe, flooded with illegal immigrants. More now illegal immigrants on that island than Italian natives. But six times as much as the actual initial population of the island. But then now we have Abbott on the border showing us a video of federal agents removing the wire that he put up to prevent crossing, right?

And then waving migrants over the border. It does seem like, I don't know, is this just, is the immigration conversation that happening? I was thinking about this the other day. Is it possible that we are getting these images for the first time simply by virtue also the fact that border crossings have been a record every year of the Biden administration. Like 2020 was a record for southern border crossings. 2021 was a record. 2022 is a record. And 2023 is probably going to be a record, too. Like it just keeps beating itself. So it's like there are actually more.

And there's all this spin on it where they're like actually um i remember in may they put out something they were like actually it's um at the lowest point since the beginning of the administration which was like the largest ever so it's like like this they just keep comparing it to like how bad it's been under the same administration. It's really, there really are more than there have ever been. And I mean, I don't know. I mean, what do you, what do you guys think about it? It's sad and harassing for smug, which is the political component of this. So Donald Trump, there are and will always be endless, I guess, theories on how he won in 2016 and what it was exactly that propelled him to success. What is the unique sort of special sauce of Donald Trump? Indisputably, one of the most

important parts of his campaign was immigration. He was the only person on the Republican side and then certainly in the general who hammered this issue home. I would say it feels like his central issue to a certain extent, build the wall, right? This was very much something that he was talking about and it resonated as far back as 2016. The immigration problem was not nearly as bad at that point, or I should say the illegal immigration problem was not nearly as bad at that point, or I should say the illegal immigration problem was not nearly as bad at that point as it is now. We have millions of people who have crossed the border. We're not talking about, because the border is with Mexico, there's this assumption maybe that we're talking about Mexican immigrants. We're not, not anymore. That is your grandfather's illegal immigration problem. We're talking about people from all over the world who we have no sense of who they are crossing this border. And it's a major problem. It seems, I mean, to me,

it seems that the problem has entered the sort of moderate sphere of politics, which is really crazy to see. It's a completely normalized conversation across social media. And it seems that if it was a big problem in the 2016 election or a big issue, I can't imagine it not being a massive issue in this election. And how do you see, I guess, how do you see the Democrats responding to that given Joe Biden's in power? You also have a year now to get ahead of it. political reason for them to at least seem like they care about this issue rather than, as we just saw in Texas, opening the gates and waving people through. It feels like a bad idea politically. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think what you're seeing is a prime example of the game plan that the Democrats have essentially been running on ever since Trump was elected, much to their surprise. Their idea is we don't need to have a plan. We just aren't Donald Trump or the Republicans. So we don't need to come up with a plan. We don't need to put a plan into place. We can just say, hey, we're not Donald Trump. We're not the MAGA radicals. So that

they feel is enough to ameliorate themselves. And in much of the media, that has been enough. It was enough in the last election, right? The midterm? That's exactly it. Joe Biden essentially ran on, I'm not Donald Trump. And that getting him the win is how he has governed is, well, it's not like I really need to come up with any plans to govern because I'm not Donald Trump. I didn't really come forth with any plans of what I would do. My plan was, I'm not Donald Trump. And as such, you're seeing the chaos which occurred at the border. During the Democrat primaries, there was a debate where famously, the question was asked, what would you do with the problem of illegal immigration with migrants at the border? Would you provide them with healthcare, job services, show of hands if

you'd be willing to provide them with healthcare and services if they enter the country illegally. And without exception, every single Democrat candidate raised their hand. So their idea has been that, well, I feel the most compassionate approach is number one, labeling it as migrant, which is a catch-all term for anyone who enters the country illegally, whether they're for seeking a better life or for nefarious purposes. The actuality of what ends up happening is the border is essentially being run right now by coyotes, people who smuggle, it's human trafficking, who smuggle people up into this country. They set the groundwork in terms of what paths that they

use. And then you get statistics where roughly 50% of all women and girls who cross the border have been sexually assaulted on the way up, where it's gotten to the point where when they begin the journey, it's understood, here's contraceptives and here's plan B, carry that with you because inevitably you will be sexually assaulted. Because under this guise of being compassionate, all that is encouraged is a market for illegal behavior and for people's lives to be ruined in effect. So I think not having a plan has led to this chaos. And whenever you had a situation where Donald Trump puts forth a policy like remain in Mexico, where it's like, while your

paperwork is being filed, that if you seek asylum in the United States, you must remain in Mexico. And that was lifted by the Biden administration. And so now there is essentially no plan of what to do to separate individuals who have entered the country illegally for nefarious purposes, where we've now seen a record influx of fentanyl. There's every week more fentanyl brought into the United States than to kill every American 10 times over. So we clearly don't have any idea of how to secure the border in any sense for our own safety, let alone to have some sort of an immigration procedure put in place. I mean, this is years ago, the Republicans used to talk a lot about real ID laws.

Isn't this like to work, you have to have the ID? These feel like ancient conversations, but slowly, there has to be something that has to be brought up again. Well, there's E-Verify, and E-Verify doesn't work because you can just buy a social security card from like a flea market. Like if you go to like flea markets in Houston, like you can just buy like a social security number. Like it's, I saw it when I lived in Texas. And if you get an Uber and the photo of the driver doesn't match the guy who's driving you, I mean, because the person who got the E-Verify done is the person in the photo, not the person driving. I mean, the whole situation has become to the point where there is this significant population which has already entered the country illegally.

And you saw governors like DeSantis and Texas Governor Abbott who are so frustrated in feeling that for years they were essentially told that, hey, border towns, you just deal with it. The Statue of Liberty says they should be allowed in, so deal with it. And so when you have these border towns, which have been suffering horribly, unable to deal with this influx of people, and then they begin sending them to Martha's Vineyard, New York City, Chicago. And after only a few months of a few thousand, you have New York City being like, well, we got to get rid of George Washington before this situation. It's now become a real problem for them. Catastrophe. And it's not just a catastrophe

in terms of their services or their budget. I think it is a political catastrophe. I think that there's a real serious problem when what this did – I tweeted like, I think Greg Abbott has done more to change, I would say, the immigration debate than any other person I can think of in living memory. By sending immigrants to each of these cities and forcing people to confront this, it's sort of changed. I think it's changed the way Democrats think about this, or it is certainly changing the way Democrats are thinking about it. And one very important situation there is, I would say, Black Americans in particular, because you have a lot of Black neighborhoods in these cities that are getting inundated in particular. And it's just, it's sort of, it is reframing the immigration debate as what about the people who are already in this country and need help? And

what are the people who the Democrats are supposed to be supporting. And separate from the merit of that, we could talk about immigration all day. The political component of that, which is interesting to me, is toxic for the Democrats. I don't know that they can run with this for a year. So it seems to me they have to come up with something over the next year. Otherwise, I do not see short of, I mean, well, I do see a few ways that Trump could not win. see short of, I mean, well, I do see a few ways that Trump could not win, but my sense is Trump in an election is going to do very well given these circumstances. Yeah. It used to be like the left-wing position, actually, that immigration is bad. Yeah. Bernie famously said in 2016, and then once again in 2020, so then somebody asked, a reporter asked

him about open borders. He said, that's a Koch a cope brothers plan and it is it was like a libertarian idea that you could just yeah i was libertarian yeah but i mean like the labor left which was you know the core of the democratic party for most of the 20th century until rapid de-industrialization. They didn't even like legal immigration, more or less like illegal immigration. I mean, Cesar Chavez called Mexican immigrants wetbacks. He was like, these people are strike breakers. They drive wages down. They shouldn't be here. The UN farm workers sent patrol, like militias, down to the border with guns to stop Mexican immigrants from coming across. It is a very basic principle that hardcore capitalist libertarians are obsessed with

in every other dimension of the market, except for this one, which is supply and demand. When you have a lot of workers, you don't have to pay them as much. And it's just, I don't understand why this is a complicated thing for people to grasp. And not only will they not grasp it, they will look at you like you are an idiot. You're like an illiterate who can't understand these absolutely basic principles that the more labor you have, the more expensive it becomes, the more that you pay these people, the better it is, the more the middle class grows. How? It doesn't make any sense. And so, of course, the socialists had a problem with it. It's pro-union. I mean, I have all sorts of problems with the labor movement.

But this, which, again, we could talk about it. I understand that position. It's just, again, it's supply and demand. They are correct about that. My suggestion, Governor Abbott, would be to send some of these buses of migrants to the UAW strikes and just see how that goes over. Because at this point, the Democrats have- Well, the interesting thing is how the UAW strikers received Joe Biden. He came out to support them and they were not into it, which is crazy to me. The politics of the 2020s are insane. They're constantly evolving. It makes perfect sense when you kind of double click on that, that working class people are going to be wary of Joe Biden because that's the natural home now of, I don't want to say the Republicans, it's the natural home of

Donald Trump. And then Trump comes out in the Meet the Press interview and very smartly goes after union leadership and supports the unions. And he pointed out the electric car thing, he brings in China. He says, these things are going to be built abroad. That is why they're... And he's right. I just was writing a piece about this. The unions have specifically called out electric vehicles as a serious concern of theirs, and they're not wrong. How can we even pretend that they're wrong after decades of globalism gutting American industry? It's like, of course, the electric vehicle thing, which all of those parts come from abroad. That is a problem. That

is a problem for American workers and Trump's keyed into it. Yeah. And I think the Democrats are going to have a problem if this continues, that the numbers that are happening right now, it's going to be a big problem for them because like black people, specifically like black working class men suffer the most from illegal immigration. There is a study in 2007 that said that the immigration influx that occurred between 1980 and 2000 accounted, explained about 20, between 20 and 60% of the decline in wages among black men, 25% of the decline employment and about 10% in the rise of incarceration rates among blacks with a working class education or less. How did the, how did that, how did illegal immigration spike black incarceration? I guess it was like more poverty, more i didn't look i could i'm only interested

in how the direct tie that's placed between poverty and crime is if well if you're poor the crime is next well i mean i think there is a link between poverty and crime but all three crime thing below i'm like i know lots of poor people my mom grew up poor she never had a hard time not breaking into somebody's home like i think we have to get we have to but it's not just property crime i mean like the in my where i grew up whenever a lot of the factories shut down you saw like a spike in you know drugs and all sorts of things that come from that so if like you're in an economically devastated area and people are doing meth and heroin and stuff like there is both crimes, but also there are crimes that come from that.

There's a general social decay, I think, that comes along with it. It's not just people stealing because they're hungry or whatever. Well, speaking of the working class and the working class hero, well, heroes, but there's one more than any, and that is the man who we call John Fetterman. I want to talk about the fact that John Fetterman, who is the, and I get in trouble here when I talk about him because people say, well, he's disabled. And so you can't insult the way that disabled people speak. And I don't remember John Fetterman ever speaking coherently. So that feels unfair to me. I should be able to make fun of the fact that he's a moron. I think he would be okay with that. Being a moron is his thing. It's getting out there, he's a bumbling fool, but he's just like

everybody else. He wears shorts and a hoodie to the Senate, which I will admit that there is something funny about that. Didn't you show up in the Senate in jean shorts, Mike? I think I remember hearing that. No, so that's the thing. I would never. But I think this is like, I mean, I haven't been a libertarian for a while, but maybe I never was one. I always had this reverence for the country and the institutions of it and the history. And I remember going to DC as a little kid and looking up at Lincoln Memorial and the White House. And I'm getting goosebumps right now. That stuff really meant something to me. I did an interview with Dan Crenshaw a couple of years ago, and he took me into the Capitol. This was during COVID, so no one was around. And it was quiet. And he walked me through and

I saw, it was just all these different statues, including a grant statue, art. And I felt something for that. that's an important place for us and it feels and i know i sound maybe like an old man but to see him in there in a hoodie kind of like shuffling through with his nasty ass beard and his disgusting shorts with his weird little skipped leg day calves, it's insulting. I feel like deeply offended by it. And it's just crazy that the Senate changed the dress code rules so he specifically could dress like that rather than wear a suit. I don't know. Maybe I'm totally off base here. River, you're the youth. It's white trash appropriation by the way because his dad is an insurance ex executive from upstate new york it's like what

the why do you look like you grew up with money like you know what i mean like it's stupid you know he's a rich kid who like it's like who like became like a leftist mayor or whatever and like moved to like some like shitty like town and was like i'm gonna be like king here it's like a tale as old as time really um but yeah i mean it's just so it also feels like it's feeding into like his depression because like the sort of like the core of depression is like nothing matters, right? And so they're like, yeah, nothing matters. Just like show up in basketball shorts and a hoodie to vote in the Senate.

Fuck it. Nothing matters. And he's like, yeah, okay. This is a part of depression because this is the pathology as identity thing that's been happening for the past, let's say, five years. Him being depressed is a core part of what he's giving now. It's like part of his drag. And my question is, I thought that depression was a mental illness, right? That's how we treat it now.

It's not some just like I'm sad thing. It's a mental illness. Are you able to be voting and shit if you are mentally ill? Shouldn't you be getting help and fixing yourself before you're passing legislation that affects 300 million Americans? Yeah. Well, there's layers of hypocrisy to this. Just like it was mentioned, this is a trust fund kid. This is someone who is wealthy and who the home that they lived in was purchased for $1 in the signed deed from his sister. He lived the American dream. He has a paid off house. He only had to pay $1 for it. But for him to wear this as something of like a symbol of the working

class is a complete absurdity on face of that. But what really is messed about the situation is, you know, you brought up, okay, it's not fair. People say it's mean because he's disabled. Well, he hasn't said that he suffers from any sort of a disability to the exact opposite sense. During the election, Kara Swisher famously said that, hey, everyone needs to leave Fetterman alone. In a few months, he's going to be completely fine. Him having to have all the questions annotated and put in front of him at a debate to be able to understand it, and given time to be able to understand it, is no different than someone using a hearing aid. Well, there's never been an allowance under the ADA if you wear a hearing aid that now the dress code is you wear a hoodie and shorts.

That's a completely absurd reason to give for that this individual is allowed to have the Senate rules bent. Are people making the argument that the stroke is the reason he has to wear a hoodie? Because I intuited that that was maybe the landmine here, but have they actually said this is because of the stroke? Essentially, what the left really loves about Fetterman is he seems to have this kind of a shield of it's unfair to ever criticize him because it's like, oh, come on guys, he had a stroke. So they feel that can shield anything that he does or says or any of his behavior under the guise of, well, he's a stroke, so you can't criticize any of his behavior. A perfect example of this being that he can't even do the most basic sign of respect. And it's not to the august body of the Senate. It's a sign of respect to the people who put you there.

That's a house that was built by US taxpayers. You're doing the work of the taxpayers, of the Americans who put you there. So you show up in a suit while the tourists can wear whatever they want, because you have to show respect to the people. You serve the people. So this isn't about, oh, it's a hoodie. It's no big deal, guys. I think the layer of hypocrisy that really gets me is the way that the media essentially shielded him. When this news came out, there was this journalist, Sarah Ewald Weiss, who said that it's telling when some people here in D.C. are more upset about the Senate dress code than, say, the threat of a government shutdown or child poverty more than doubling in the U.S. interested to see what their opinion was when Fetterman was running. And then I pulled up from October their tweet where it says, John Fetterman in a radio interview on whether he would wear a hoodie on the Senate floor, quote, I'm going to only wear what you're supposed to wear and whatever dress code. Well, he couldn't really finish the sentence. He said, whatever dress code.

Basically saying, I'm just going to follow the rules. That's why you're voting for me is because I am capable of this job. I will do what's required of me. And now the same journalists were like, okay, well, he said he's fine. He'll do what's asked or saying, well, here's why it's actually good that he's not doing what he said he was going to do. It's totally fine, folks. Start looking at these other things because they don't want you to look at the hypocrisy because at the end of the day, they don't even see it as hypocrisy. It's about hierarchy. It's once they're there, what do you simple people have to say about it? What say do you have? He's a senator. He can wear whatever he wants. While I was talking about this online, there was a lot of pushback. And it was interesting that it's kind of across the political spectrum.

It divides in a weird way. Not every – obviously, the libertarians don't care, but I saw a lot of Democrats who really do. A lot of Democrats who really sort of almost fetishize the institutions and they're upset by this. And so there's a lot. There's interesting common ground in certain places and departure in others. by this. And so there's a lot, there's interesting common ground in certain places and departure in others. But the notion was raised that you do not, the way that you dress has no bearing on the way that you do your job. And I would say maybe that's true. Maybe if I wear this hoodie or I wear a three-piece suit, I'm going to be writing in the same way. But to say that the way that you dress doesn't convey anything is totally wrong. Obviously, the style of formal dress has been designed to convey a sense of formality. The

whole entire pageantry of it is designed to convey respect. The reason that I'm wearing a hoodie right now, and the reason that we dress this way in tech, and the reason that even across corporate America, dress codes have sort of gone down in schools and things like this is because we as a culture have decided those are not places where you need to show that level of formal respect. We are saying something with these things. And so when you have the conversation, I think, when you have the conversation about the dress code, it's not frivolous. You're talking about where we do and do not demonstrate to each other formal respect. And so this for me, it's like weddings. You dress up at a wedding. You convey

formal respect. And when someone has been voted into the most important legislative body on the planet to represent us, it seems bad to me that they don't believe they need to convey a sense of respect. That feels like a degradation of society. And maybe we've been degrading for a while, which is why the rest of us aren't in suits. But I don't like seeing it there. And I don't think it's a small thing. I think it's an easy thing to put the suit on. And it's quite a big statement to change the rules of the Senate so you specifically can wear your fucking shorts. Exactly. This happened when my doppelganger,

can wear your fucking shorts. This happened when my doppelganger, Vladimir Zelensky, went before Congress in a green t-shirt and was meeting Biden just wearing a green t-shirt or a green pullover jacket and people were like, he's fighting

a war. And I'm like, he's not. He's here. He's in D.C. He's not fighting a war right now. It was optics. Completely aware of what he was doing and re-registered that. What happened was what you just said. Put on a suit, slob. You know what I mean? You're meeting the president who's giving you all of his money. Put on a fucking suit.

He's doing it on purpose, right? He's conveying something. So people are responding to you the way they are because Zelensky conveyed something with the way that he was dressing. This is, oh, it is a kind of communication that humans do. And I am very frustrated when people expect me to pretend that I don't understand what's being said by the way that someone is dressing in a situation like that. Zelensky was very transparent. He's conveying military guy, don't have time to wear a suit, trying to beat back a fucking invasion. Fetterman's saying

something too. We're just trying to pretend that he's not saying it. And what he's saying is, I don't give a shit about any of you. And that is like, I already kind of knew that based on his overall vibe. But the fact that the Democratic leadership would kind of formalize this into the rules of the Senate, it's not good. That's a huge problem. Again, that's the thing is it was never about institutions or norms or any of that. That was just the line of attack that would work when they wanted to go after Trump. They don't care about any of that. What about the norms of indictment? Smug, you've been talking about Hunter. This is a very political episode, so apologies to folks at home. But I mean, if we're going to have Smug on, we've got to talk about Hunter Biden. You had a tweet recently that was pretty interesting, kind of just pointing out the evolution of that conversation in America. Want to walk us through that? through that? Sure. So the tweet in question, it arised when Gavin Newsom was asked about the whole Hunter Biden situation. And Gavin Newsom said, it's normal for people to use family members

to get a little influence, to justify his business deals. So this is such a, I mean, this is a rapid slippery slope. I don't know if it's even a slope at this point. We just completely jumped in. I'll write off the cliff side with this because in the tweet as I laid it out and I said, incredible how we've gone from number one, Hunter's laptop is Russian disinformation. That's what we were told leading into the election. And then we were told, well, Hunter did nothing wrong. Then it was Hunter did drugs, but not corruption. And now finally, we've arrived at actually corruption is good. We've gone whole hog into anything that's been said about Hunter is actually it's the Russians yet again trying to interfere in an election. And people were locked out from Twitter. There was a photo from Hunter's laptop during the campaign, which leaked.

And it was him with a hooker on his bed. And there were a bunch of stuffed Pokemon. And I zoomed in and took a screenshot of four Pokemon from his bed. And I was like, bro, why does Hunter have these here? And I got locked out of Twitter for that. You couldn't even have a screenshot of the Pokemon that he had in the room. That's the level that we reached of like, well, this is absolutely not something that's allowed to be discussed. And here we are now, it's two years later. And not only are we now aware that yes, everything on that laptop ended up being true, but it's kind of okay. Let there be a little corruption, guys. Come on. At least he's not Trump. Can you break down the indictment for us?

What is he at? Because Trump said something, it's always hard when Trump's making a case for something you can't quite tell what is real and what's not. But he made the case on Meet the Press that there were eight or nine possible indictments and the only one that Hunter went down for was a gun charge. He invoked this to rebuff the interviewer's assessment that, well, surely now you can stop saying that you're being targeted because everybody's being targeted fairly or whatever. What's the truth there of the EU? Actually, I haven't been following Hunter Biden's stuff too closely. What are the indictments on the table and what is he now being charged with? Sure. So, I mean, it's actually, it's a long story, but the gist of it is really interesting.

Basically, it begins in 2017 when he was, and this is all records which have been put out by the U.S. Treasury. So this isn't, you know, some kind of a conspiracy theory or anything that I'm coming up with. This is from the Wall Street Journal, where in 2017, he earned $2 million from business that he did in China and Ukraine because, I mean, of course, he's an energy executive. He's an energy executive, someone who uses the law of cocaine and hookers, I guess, knows a lot about energy. So he earns $2 million on that, but he doesn't want to pay the taxes on it. And further, then you see in October of 2018, he purchases a gun. And then when you purchase a gun during the background check, you're asked if you use drugs or if you're addicted to drugs. And he said no. And at the time, his girlfriend, his brother's widow, took the gun and threw it into a trash can in a school zone when they were having a fight. And so a few hours later, I guess they both calmed down. They go back to find the gun and it's gone. So you've got a gun in a school zone, which ends up missing. And a gun shop owner is approached by the Secret Service who say,

can you give us some paperwork on Hunter Biden who purchased a gun from you guys? And he says no, because he was worried that, okay, I guess a gun that I sold was used in a crime. I'm not giving this to the Secret Service. He sends it to the ATF to have. Hunter is then interviewed on, OK, what happened to this gun? And he directly says, I mean, this is what's absolutely wild and it's difficult to find, but you can you can actually find his statement out there. to find, but you can actually find his statement out there. He says, if I had to think, I've seen some Mexican people hanging around near that trash can. I think they were probably illegal. So that was the statement that he gave on the record to what happened to the gun. So we fast forward years and years later, where an investigation finally begins into all of this.

years later, where an investigation finally begins into all of this. And Hunter, Merrick Garland, the attorney general, lets an attorney in Delaware take the charge on investigating, okay, what happened here? Was there any corruption? What's with these gun charges and the tax evasion and everything? And eventually they get to a point where Hunter is going to take a plea on the tax charges, not have to pay any of the back taxes. Of course, it's great to be the president's son. The gun charges, everything will disappear. And his lawyers get it written into the plea agreement that also any other crimes Hunter committed are forgiven. And so the judge sees this and they're like, are you serious? This is not legal. Any other crimes. Like the little asterisk at the bottom, he can never be held accountable

for anything else he's ever done. Also other crimes he did are okay now. And so the judge says, absolutely not. And throws out, that's when the whole plea deal fell apart. Absolutely not. And throws out, that's when the whole plea deal fell apart. And you saw this wild scramble from the White House because at the same time, unfortunately for the Bidens, the Republicans had won the House and the House is where investigations begin. And so they actively began an investigation into all of this and the House has subpoena power. So they can get all legal documents related to their area of investigation. And that's when they start picking up all this information. And multiple whistleblowers come forward from the FBI and from the IRS saying that we were told specifically, these are the areas we're not allowed to investigate. And so then the Attorney General Merrick Garland, once again, goes back and appoints this time the same attorney who got Hunter that deal as the special counsel to investigate. So this, in a way, can stimmy further investigations from the House because now the federal government can say, wait, wait, wait, we have a special counsel that's on it. The main takeaway to begin with is by holding on to the

case in this way, the statute of limitations is now passed on his tax crimes. So he has already skated on those. The question now is what is going to happen with his gun charge, which is an extremely serious felony. And also now thatS. Treasury has released these records that the millions of dollars that were coming in from China to Hunter were also then being wired to nine different members of the Biden family. And so that's where the story leaves off. So whenever you hear this thing of like, oh, well, Hunter isn't the president and what does him having hookers have to do with me? Well, when nine members of the family that control the White House are getting money wired from China, I think it kind of has something to do with all of

us. Yeah. The salaciousness of it all, I think, kind of distracts people. That's the whole thing. Because they see Marjorie Taylor Greene with the pictures and they're like, wow, he's pretty hung for an Irish guy. And then they just forget that there's this whole other thing going on where he's like, yeah, wiring money directly from foreign governments. The whole Ukraine scandal, it's like Biden basically did what Trump was impeached for the second time. That's the thing. Which is denying foreign aid, like congressionally allocated foreign aid to Ukraine in order to influence their internal politics. in order to influence their internal politics.

You miss all of the insanity just because of how fucked up the story is and how he's... Because he's such an interesting character. I am fascinated by Hunter Biden just as an individual. There's something funny about him and kind of awesome. He does not care.

And if he were... Fucking the widow of his dead brother. Yeah. This is so... if he were fucking the widow of his dead brother like yeah if he were a trump i think that people on the trumpian side they would be down they would be it would be endless memes in favor of hunter he is just he is he is that bitch i mean it's and again i think the whole thing goes back to the whole slippery slope of like what we were initially told and then where we are now, where during the election, Joe Biden was asked, did you have anything to do with any of this business? And he says point blank during a meet the press interview, I never once spoke to any

of Hunter's business associates. And now from the records that have come out, we now know, number one, Hunter Biden called business people that he was working with in China and said, I'm sitting right now in the room with my father, and we are extremely disappointed that the wire has not arrived. There's going to be problems if it doesn't. Hunter, is he a crack addict? Can you believe the things that Hunter says? So here's the thing is, the date that that phone call, this is the benefit of the House Republicans now getting all the subpoena records.

The date that that phone call actually happened is a date that he was in this broom. We have at that time with Joe Biden in the White House when Joe Biden was the vice president. So we now have the time and the place. It's not just that he was on crack at the time, which I agree, definitely makes him a very difficult person to trust what they say, but we have that on record. And then further, when we have an incident, a record for Joe Biden being put on speakerphone at a dinner with Hunter's business associates having a discussion. And then you have the Congressman from New York, Daniel Goldman, who initially said,

Joe Biden says he never once spoke to the business associates. Now saying that, well, listen, doesn't everyone, it's preposterous premise to say that he shouldn't be talking with Hunter's business associates. Every dad would talk to their kid's business associates. So we're constantly in a state of, well, we just need to hold information from people until the next election. Then when we get there, we just tell them it's not a big deal. And it doesn't matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or whether you support Trump, whether you support Biden, at the end of the day, everyone should be concerned if there's an individual who is willing to cash in and get in money from foreign adversaries, and now that person is sitting

in the White House. That should be something that is concerning to everybody. Agree. And more to come on that. I mean, the indictments just went down, and I think, I mean, we're in an election year. I think this is going to be, I say I think as if I'm making some really crazy prediction. I was about to say, it's going to be crazy. It's going to be a crazy year.

Smug, what is it you famously say? I want to get the exact verbiage right. Today is going to be an insane day. Today is going to be an insane day. Today is going to be an insane day for the next 365 days. Plus, I want to talk about one thing that Biden did that... Well, I'm sort of... So the CHIPS Act. Let's talk about the CHIPS Act really quick. I'm roughly in favor of mercantilism. I think at this point, our government, we're competing in the global market.

This is... I don't really see a way for us to build up any kind of manufacturing capability at home without significant government support. I liked the spirit of the CHIPS Act. It actually started under Trump. And I wrote all about it in a piece called American Hustle Microchips Edition. One of the things that was going to happen, one of the earmarks of this massive bill, I think, and River's going to break it down in a second, just like the whole history of this, was the creation of tech hubs around the country in, I don't want to say blighted areas, but just sort of like economically depressed regions of the country. The notion being, we're going to create little mini Silicon Valleys everywhere. River wrote a story, just published this week, all about it. Why don't you break it down for us?

just published this week, all about it. Why don't you break it down for us? Yeah. So this is the Tech Hubs program, officially the Regional Technology and Innovation Hub program. It's just one part of CHIPS. There's a lot of other stuff that's going on there that I don't get into. But essentially what this program does is the Economic Development Agency which is like a sub-department of the Commerce Department is going to designate 20 tech hubs and there's all these requirements on what those have to be

one third of them have to be in low population states which is like there's a whole list of them but it's like Alaska, North Dakota South Dakota, Wyoming all that. I think that's probably states um which is like there's a whole list of them but it's like alaska north dakota um south dakota wyoming all that um i think that's probably was put in there to get a little bit of republican support but um one third will have to go to rural areas um and a certain portion of those 20 designated tech hubs it's weird that like they're like we're gonna build these designated tech hubs. It's weird that they're like, we're going to build these new tech hubs,

but they're actually just not even going to give all of them money. But they are going to give some of them money, a lot of it, up to $65 million. And the way that this program is conducted is sort of insane. Like, you're judged on how well you coordinate with hbcus and other minority serving institutions which i looked into it's like basically any college that's like more than 25 percent of like students are non-white or something also like you have to have like plans of like how you're going to help traditionally marginal.

I forget what the exact word is, but like traditionally marginalized groups are basically non-white people. Like they have like a whole footnote that explains that it's like disabled people and all kinds of stuff. But the most like insane thing is that because you have to you're thinking about this, right? But because you're thinking about this, right? You're like, okay, so they're trying to create tech hubs in rural areas and rural states that also have like HBCUs and them or whatever. Okay, how are you going to get tech people to move there? And the answer to that is you can't and you shouldn't. You're not allowed.

You're not allowed. You're not allowed. There's this provision in this that says, it's called the non-relocation policy, which says if you accept any money from this, you cannot use any of it to entice people to move from one part of the United States to another. So basically, they know, I think, that this is a problem. Are migrants covered under this? Is that okay? I think that might be. Is it historically marginalized? Yeah, immigrants are

specifically, they're historically marginalized. And I think perhaps there could be a loophole where you could attract, because the relocation policy says that you can't entice workers to move from one part of the United States to the other, so I guess you could entice them to move from abroad, which is insane. But they suggest like a list of suggestions of what you could use the money for.

They suggest using some of the grant money to create partnerships with organizations. This is a direct quote. Partnerships with organizations that support employer adoption of hiring and employment practices that support employer adoption. Gosh, that's so clunky. Blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah that tap into the talents of existing workers and remove barriers to good jobs such as skill-based recruitment and hiring practices so they want you to get rid of skills based recruitment and hiring practices so that you don't have to deal with the fact that like you're in rural north dakota and like there aren't a lot of people who know how to work in tech or don't know how to code

or do whatever how much money are we talking about um up to 65 million i think it's like we're talking about taking this money per program or per recipient so like multiple grants so 20 times 65 million no not 20 because not all of the 20 are going to get money, which is an even more insane program because then you're just saying that a place is a tech hub and you're already even giving them the money to do it, even though the money's probably not going to help. So the goal is to go into an unpopulated area with no skills in tech whatsoever and to use $65 million to create a tech hub without inviting anybody else in the country with tech talent, legally not allowed to do this, to help build the hub. And their suggestion for

how to do this with people in the area who don't have these skills is to simply stop caring about the skills, such as, for example, the ability to code. This is not serious. It's like that succession. You're not serious people. This is not serious. And persistently, I feel like I'm driven to the point of madness because I'm expected to have a serious conversation with fundamentally clownish people. This is crazy. Why is this happening? Yeah. Well, I mean, this could only really... I suppose you can make the argument that certain projects that would be covered under this, certain types of high-end manufacturing and stuff, you could hire a local person to work on the line. Yeah, true. But you're also going to have to have

stuff. You could hire a local person to work on the line. Yeah, true. But you're also going to have to hire engineers to design the products and to work on the finer details of things. Yeah, you can hire local people to work on the line, but you're still going to have to attract top talent, especially if you want to be a hub with multiple different companies going in. It just doesn't make any sense. When they're like, just drop the skills requirement and hire them anywhere or whatever, that's some stupid shit that you just expect from today's politicians. But the problem that we don't have people in these regions with the skills, that they're not properly educated, to me, that's a real problem. It is a problem that large swaths of the population, the American population, are not skilled for

a technological society, for anything, let alone tech. Our education is abysmal. And one thing that really bothers me right now in tech is this, and it's been like this since I joined. And I used to be much more open to it, but these days, and this is like really a heresy in the tech industry, but the H-1B visa shit, I am like, yes, if we're going to have immigration, I think we need to be bringing in people who are skilled. But the bigger problem to me is not that we don't have Indian engineers who American entrepreneurs can hire for less pay than Americans. The bigger problem is that there are so many Americans who are not skilled to do these jobs. I would love to see, it's hard because you can't just throw money at

a problem, but I would love to see a strategy in place to help these kids in these rural areas, in these every suburbs or the cities like the skills problem is persistent across the country. I want to see us doing more to get Americans prepared to work. And I wish that instead of creating these fantasy hubs in the middle of nowhere, they would put the resources in and not just the resources, right? Because you need a strategy in place. And maybe here's where the tech industry could help by even pointing them in the direction

of what they need and going into schools themselves and hiring maybe, I don't know, educators or something and training them up to train other people. That's where the alpha is, is in the next generation of Americans. I almost feel stupid saying it because it's so trite, like we need to focus on education, but we need to focus on education. Well, I mean, I think H-1Bs also allow elites to basically disengage from like the problems in education in America. It's just like, okay, we're not training the workers to like need our workforce credit, so we can just hire people from abroad to do it. And that it, so that way, like, oh yeah, it can cost like three hundred thousand dollars to go to medical school or like you know even just a regular college degree if you are not

you know if your parents can't afford to pay you're gonna have to go into tens of thousands of dollars in debt to get it and so like that disinitizes a lot of people um from going to school especially if they're like and a lot of people go and then they drop out because they're having to work all the time to like take care of themselves it's just way too expensive um to like get an education in america and i think that like prevents a lot of um people who who are in these areas who would otherwise like you know be able to get those jobs if it were free or cheap from being able to do it. I would say also, this is a very big country,

one of the largest populations in the world. And if you were in some tiny little 5 million person country and you needed to have a Silicon, like our American tech industry, you need to staff that and you couldn't find the talent, I would understand, oh man, we better look elsewhere. In America, perhaps we do need to look elsewhere right now. And there is an argument for the H1B thing and I'm willing to listen to that. But there's a much bigger, if you cannot find engineers in America, computer programmers in America where the tech industry was, in a population of 300 plus million people with unlimited resources, that is a huge problem. And that is a much more important problem than Facebook needing engineers. The much more important problem is we have left behind our entire youth. And I really, really want to see people addressing this. And I hope that we can see...

I hope this is something that Democrats at least have paid lip service to forever, and Republicans really historically have not. I would love to see in the age of this new sort of Tucker Trumpian government doing more for people. I would like to see them start talking about this. I would like to see them start talking about this. I would like to see them start talking about skills-based education in ways, actual strategies for helping young people prepare themselves. And it would be cool, actually, if we had some bipartisan consensus on the topic of like, we need to do this. And then the question became not whether or not we should focus more on this, but what is the most practical way to go about it? I mean, just hearing this, it's shocking to me because I don't think anyone in any of these groups planning any of this asked the simple question of what are the metrics for success

here? What are we actually looking to accomplish? What's the end goal and how do we know that we're getting there? And then I would be remiss if I didn't bring up an example. There's this guy who's actually running for president, and he doesn't get nearly the attention that he deserves. Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, who was once a chimney sweep, came from an absolutely broke, poverty-stricken family, ended up going to Stanford and starting a software business in North Dakota because he saw that anyone who developed tech skills would leave North Dakota. And he started his software business in North Dakota and turned the University of North Dakota into a tech feeder school for his company, which he then goes on to sell to Microsoft where he's an executive. So it's not necessarily that

the answer here is another government program because I think the H-1B shows that's a government program that's just an admission of defeat on the US educational system. And it perpetuates the continued failure and acceptance of the failure of the American education system. When you have teachers unions who are pushing to get calculus and advanced placement classes removed from the curriculum so that there might be a better chance of kids passing basic literacy because they just want to be able to teach a basic literacy test instead of worry about, okay, there might be some kids who want to take calculus, who might want to learn how to code, but we can't worry about them. If we don't start hitting some quotas on getting some kids to pass reading and writing at a basic level, I'm going to lose a job. Yep. I think that the framing specific, it's interesting. It's crazy because this is one

of these topics where no one really talks about it. And then the moment you sort of peel it back, it's like everyone sort of agrees. You can see the problem to this day. We need to be focused on applying our resources that are coming from America to helping out the future of America. And then perennially, I mean, the idea that you mentioned before is like, I love this. What are the metrics of success? I often say we need a plan for success. And I don't want to pass any kind of legislation that increases spending without a plan. I talk about this in the context of homelessness in San Francisco quite a lot. But as you just mentioned, it's worse than not having a plan. We don't even know what the goal is. And you can't create a plan towards anything if there's no goal. And I think it's because the

goal here was just to give money to people. And this is what our government is doing. It's just cutting checks. And so it's like this leaky faucet that just spreads like oil all over and nothing really comes of it. And I think it's like I've evolved from being – I never maybe knew it's like am I against government. And what I want is a government that does shit like Apollo. And I want to be inspired. And all of these things are connected, right? Like the Fetterman thing. It's not inspiring to see a man like that in Senate representing me. It's not inspiring to be building hubs to nowhere in the middle of the country. It's not inspiring to be giving up the youth of America

with the H-1B-1 thing. He's at a total admission of defeat. It is exactly what we're seeing. I mean, to give you a local politics example, Dean Preston, a supervisor in San Francisco, the best one, he's an actual millionaire Marxist, a member of the DSA. And he has come out, he's decided after years in office and saying, you know, defund the police and everything else. He's now decided to come out and say, okay, the car break-in problem in San Francisco is a problem. And he's saying this because it's like 99% of people in San Francisco either have had their car broken in or know someone who's had their car broken in and everyone agrees it's a problem. But the solution is not... And he didn't say the solution was not policing. He's no longer a defund the police guy. It's just he doesn't talk about the

issue at all. He's memory-hauled it. The solution to car break-ins, he says, is simply convincing the public to stop putting things in their car. That's the solution to rampant car break-ins. And that, what is that but just an admission of defeat? It is like you just gave up as a policy. That's crazy. This is your job is to stop this, not to tell me to stop having things as a way to avoid having my things taken from me. I mean, that's a great solution. If you simply have nothing, it can't be stolen. I mean, great idea.

Great solution. Problem solved. Put us in Congress. We had more to talk about today. I wanted to get to Apple and stuff, but we are running over. All this stuff is really interesting. You actually, I've been trying to put together a piece on immigration and I think I now know

the approach. So that'll be in your box next week. Again, this is Comfortably Smug. And I've got to say, man, you are a legend. You are amazing. Your Twitter is fantastic.

Oh, thank you so much. Everyone should follow you. You were one of my, you were one of my personal earliest supporters. You are, I think, are really responsible. I was there for the first album when you were still underground.

You were there from the ground floor. And I really, it's like I saw Nicki Minaj talks about Taylor Swift. And people were like, what do you like about Taylor Swift? And she's like, because Taylor Swift told everybody to go and download my album when Super Bass came out. And then I became famous. And Smug is my Taylor Swift. Oh, wow. The little compliment. Thank you so much.

Follow me on Twitter. Check out the Ruthless Podcast. You can download it anywhere. Rate and subscribe to this channel, Pirate Wires. Tell your friends to listen to it. Spread the good word. Check us out. We will be on Twitter. Talk to you guys later. Have a great weekend.