Pirate Wires - Media Blames Trump For Assassination Attempt, Tech Workers On Strike, Beeper Boys, And PIRATE IDOL

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

EPISODE #70: This week, we experienced another assassination attempt of Donald Trump. After a day of reporting, the media quickly shifted to blaming Trump and obsessing over the cats in Ohio. Amazon announces that workers must return to the office next year, officially ending the Covid era of work from home. We also discuss the clownish demands from the NYT Tech Workers who are threatening to strike. Israel pulls off the sneak attack on Hezbollah by targeting beepers. Last but not least, our last week of Pirate Idol first round contestants. Pick your winner this week in the comments. Next week, we bring our winners back to compete in round 2! Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Riley Nork, Matt Marlinski Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Topics Discussed: Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell Riley Twitter: https://x.com/rylzdigital Matt Twitter: https://x.com/mattmarlinski TIMESTAMPS: #podcast #technology #politics #culture

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Holy sh**, the second one. Donald Trump himself has contributed more than any president in history to violent rhetoric. For his own assassination attempts, it doesn't actually add up. I can't get over the fact that this dude, like, fought in Ukraine. Like, we seem to have glossed over that fact. I think also we should just have Mossad protect Trump. The New York Times Tech Guild is threatening to strike.

They've asked for unlimited break time. A ban on scented products in break rooms. Mandatory trigger warnings in company meetings, you know, for the news outlet. The Daily Wire's Matt Walsh claimed that adults shouldn't be taking sick days at the office. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the PirateWires podcast. Before we get started with the substance of the day, please subscribe to the show. I'm serious. I ask every week, and I think that it just bleeds into what you're hearing me say. If you watch the show and like the show, subscribe to it. It helps us. It does nothing to you.

You don't have to pay for it. What are we doing here? Help a guy out. Subscribe, comment, like it, share it, tell your friends about it. You are a part of the Pirate Nation, and that comes with certain responsibilities. Moving on. Pirate Nation and that comes with certain responsibilities moving on um today is the final round of the first there's a final episode of the first round of Pirate Idol so some great ones lined up for you there we have our polymarket segment today we're gonna be focusing on we're

focusing on it's we're focusing on Israel but just trust me it will make sense when we get there as as to why I mean we're talking about the beeper boys in uh the the hospital of beeper boys the grim operation and so we'll get there um but first uh before anything else i mean we got to talk about the attempted assassination of donald trump holy shit the second one um this a huge story, yet somehow not huge enough, I feel, which is perhaps maybe where I'm going to take this in a second. So just to kind of recap anybody who somehow doesn't know that the president was almost assassinated again, or the former president, now current person running for president, Donald Trump was playing golf. Nobody knew that. It wasn't public posted. Man, I'm not going to use his name because we

don't name attempted presidential assassinations yeah maybe we do right i guess we do we talk about assassins ryan ruth is his name um stood outside uh in the bushes for like 11 hours and was uh shot at spotted by the secret service agents who were playing around ahead ran away a um a helpful good karen saw him running into his car ran up to the car and took pictures of the license plate and uh reported his ass to the police and now he's in custody we know nothing about him uh we don't or we know a lot about him we don't know we don't not really anything about his motives yet there's not been anything reported about perhaps what many people are wondering if he was working with someone on the inside,

because how else did he know where Trump was? It's very strange. I would say where I first started picking up on this story was Sunday. I watched it on the news. I was watching CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. And I want to start because we're going to talk about the media's reaction to this. And I will say that on Sunday, I almost posted about how impressed I was with all of them. MSNBC and CNN were doing a great job. CNN especially, I thought, was doing a really good job of kind of parsing what we knew and what we didn't and just accurately reporting on a story that I felt was really important that I think probably just objectively was really important. The New York Times had incredible coverage. And I'm so glad I didn't because by Monday morning, I was surfing. I mean, this happens on Sunday afternoon. The guy gets away, gets taken into custody. By Monday morning, every single major media outlet almost had a split coverage. The coverage was on

the one hand, Donald Trump's attempted assassination, and then directly next to it. So on CNN, I saw this. On MSNBC, I saw this. On the Washington Post, I saw this. Directly next to it was story of the Haitians eating cats. Did they, did not, did they, did they not? Why is Donald Trump spreading fake news, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this by Monday afternoon, going into Monday evening, and certainly by Tuesday morning, evolved into a piece of a broader argument, which was Donald Trump was responsible for these attempted assassination attempts. And this was said widely. There were tons of reporting to this effect. Largely, the idea is that Donald Trump himself has contributed more than any president in history to violent rhetoric. And that violent rhetoric

is contributing now to attempted actual violence. There was a lot of media obfuscation here. This is one of the pieces. It's not really quite clear how Haitians eating cats is a violent rhetoric. It's certainly a whole other thing, which we talked about last week. The fact that we're still talking about it to me would imply there's a justification there. It's so heinous that it could potentially set somebody off. But when you're talking about justifying the violence, that's, I don't know, that's a strange new place to be in where a man almost got killed for the second time and we're saying, know, it's your own fault for whatever reason. Time kind of helped this narrative along in another interesting way by arguing, you know, it was really not clear what this guy's

politics were. This is a, this is, it's very clear what his politics are. We all had access to briefly to his social media. I scrolled it. The man is a standard normie lip who um is obsessed with the ukraine i do think he gives a crazy vibe i'm sure there is something mentally wrong with him um but he was in the mentions of you know harris and biden asking for something to be done about trump not actually violently done but you know in a very sort of he used the phrase uh democracy is on the ballot we need to you know fix the discourse in this country come on kamala he just sounded like some idiot on facebook or something um and uh and he has a biden harris sticker on the back of his pickup truck or his truck or whatever so it's like we know and he

tried to kill trump like i it's for me it's not a complicated puzzle as to what this man's politics are, but for the media, it was. And I think that's how they made this work. By obscuring what he believes and why he's doing what he's doing, they could circumvent what we talked about last time that Trump was almost killed, which is their own responsibility for telling the entire country over and over and over again, including about two days after he was almost killed the last time, that this is a Hitler-esque figure, Donald Trump. And if he's elected, we will lose democracy and freedom. There'll be death camps and everything that you care about will be illegal. Your freedoms will be taken away. The ballot will be illegal. Your freedoms will be taken away. The ballot will be gone. Voting will be gone. He will be a dictator. This is what they're saying. They're arguing this. And even as I was saying it just now, it occurred to me, fuck, that's crazy. That's a crazy thing to be saying, but it's not just some random person

on Twitter, right? These are the mainstream talking points coming from the DNC, which is then filtered through the press. They've all participated. We've seen the covers. Maggie pulled up the famous Hitler one. That's where the rhetoric is coming from. Now, I don't even think that that is necessarily... I don't believe that they're responsible for the attempted assassination of Trump. I think the crazy person is pretty much responsible and maybe anybody else who he worked with, but certainly the person who's not responsible is Trump. My take, what do you guys think? I think if you're an institution like the DNC or even the secret service who wants to prevent another Trump assassination attempt, the comms around all this has been super, super strange. I think the first thing that you would do is put out, you know,

sort of, uh, communication and memos to the media. And, um, like we've seen with school shootings, right? Like don't mention the name of the shooter, um, to, to maybe say like, uh, Trump was to blame for like, maybe, maybe we shouldn't be saying Trump is to blame for the second assassination attempt. Um, I think it's also weird. Like I noticed in the video of them ascertaining the shooter, he had his shirt up, uh, on the back of his head so that you couldn't see his face. Right. And presumably this is a guy that's tried to kill Trump. And I can't imagine that they, that he, that they just let him do that.

Right. Cause he has to like put his hands around his pockets, you know, put his, put his arms above his head and do that motion. And any other criminal who just tried to kill somebody would probably, that would get them shot. My point is to say this, like it sounds, it seems like they instructed him to cover his face and to do that whole thing. And again, I think if you're trying to prevent assassination attempts on a current president, the whole comms around this whole thing would not look like what we're seeing like we have no information on the shooter we have no information about what the secret service and other relevant authorities are doing to prevent another shooter

and i would i would think that you would put that out or some amount of that out to deter other shooters to be like look like we have got this thing locked down we're doing all these things plus a bunch of other things that we're not going to tell you to prevent you and if you do this again you're going to be, you're screwed, right? Like there's no way, there's no chance that you'll get it. You'll get past us on this one. And it's like what we're seeing is the opposite. And that's really puzzling.

I think also we should just have Mossad protect Trump. I think they just don't know what, I think, I think they're a little overwhelmed. What we know about these two, what we don't know is how many attempts there have actually been. How many attempts have been foiled? I've been thinking a bit about that this week. They don't want to be announcing this stuff because as we saw with this last attempt, what came out immediately was, well, they were able to stop him because you have the secret service agents playing around ahead of Trump, one hole ahead of Trump on the golf course. And that's probably a security measure that's been in place for,

I don't know, decades, I'm imagining for every president that plays golf. And now it no longer can be, they have to change the entire strategy around because we all, you know, it's public now and there has to be something else. So they want to be quiet about even their wins. And this is a big one. I mean, I don't know how you, I don't know how there are two attempts. This public says to me that this man, people want this man to die. And it makes me nervous for his life like really nervous i think the just to go back to the media line that he's responsible for his own assassination attempts it doesn't actually add up because

we should be seeing assassination attempts on kamala too right because kamala would arguably be the target of of people that he's you know, sort of influencing to be hyper-violent, right? So that line doesn't make any sense at all anyways, you know? They want us to believe that he has incited people to violence against the Democrats, and that has somehow activated random crazy people with no real conceivable political ideology to go after him i again i'm i don't really believe that i i think we should not be crazy in our discourse we should not be escalating things to the point of this repeated it wasn't just an offhand comment i don't have a i always am more forgiving enough of an offhand whatever you're in a debate you're in a comment you're on a talk show for a minute and you say like this man is hitler or i mean stupid but like you say

it you say he's gonna he's a threat to democracy democracy on the bell whatever you said it once that's not what happened this is their campaign this is like their talking points that go around like a memo around washington and everybody's again and again and again and again. This is their strategy. This is a main part of their campaign is to say the world will end as you know it if this man is in office. and you try and do something to stop it or you don't and whatever. Even still, I don't know. I don't blame that. I think probably what's happening is like Donald Trump is uniquely famous and he's just this magnet for this kind of crazy person, especially after the first attempt. I kind of hoped that because the first attempt ended in his heroism is what it looked like when he stood up and was fearless and brave and he had the blood on him, but he was fine. And the other person who tried to kill him was just mortifying, first of all, ugly and sad,

incel-looking person who got the shit just blown out of him up there on the roof. And you hope that that's enough psychologically to ward off people like him. Certainly, on the roof. And you hope that that's enough psychologically to ward off people like him. Certainly, I hope that. And what we know now is it just isn't, especially now the second guy, nothing happened to him. He just got a ton of attention. I think that Trump is just a magnet now. And I know they're nervous about it. I know that Biden was. There were a lot of bad comments coming out of this or a lack of comment. Hillary Clinton said nothing. But Monday morning, she did talk about the cats, the Haitian cats.

She went on and on about this and J.D. Vance and misinformation. And in fact, she spread some disinformation herself at that point. She said that J.D. Vance had lied about it said admitted that he had lied about it's not true it'd been debunked multiple times by the time that she'd amplified it um but biden was pretty consistent in his messaging from the beginning and um i have to believe that there's someone on that side of things that is nervous for themselves at this point as well you know it's it seems like the switch has been flipped to craziness and now anything is possible I don't know Riley what did you make of this yeah for

for as much as this has become a debate about discourse and how we immediately pivoted back to the cat memes as you perfectly highlighted Solana I can't get over the fact that this dude like fought in Ukraine like we seem to have glossed over that fact in the same way that we just glossed over the fact that the first guy had no social media presence which is also weird like did ukraine have this guy on their radar was he connected in any way i know that sort of gets into conspiracy territory but like the point is there's a lot that needs to be unpacked here which makes it even more depressing that the media has glossed over all of it and immediately gone back to cats well the media i have not done a ton of digging into this, but the first one I noticed was

Semaphore had quoted him previously, the attempted assassin. And the New York Times had as well, which I learned from the New York Times. The New York Times acknowledged, I forget which piece of reporting it was, that they had previously covered him on the topic of getting, I think he wanted to recruit Afghan fighters to fight in Ukraine. And they said, we have interviewed this guy. And they said that their writer at the time felt that he was, they used some phrasing to say that their writer felt that he was out of his depth. It might have just been out of his depth. I didn't read the original reporting,

so I'm not actually sure what the original characterization was but they were this was not a random person who we didn't know about this was a person online saying exactly what he believed he was very like as you said obsessed with ukraine in fact he was there now we have stories coming out of like oh all the ukrainian soldiers didn't like him and they said he was crazy and it's like of course you're gonna say that um uh i did also notice that this one was really weird man going through his his twitter was weird his twitter read like a bot if i had not known that he was a real person i would have assumed it was a bot if i looked at the profile it it was just copy almost copy pasted a lot of the

first two tweets he had added or like mentioned the ukrainian government i believe and they had removed themselves from the tag and i don't know i've never removed anybody from a tag. By the way, I should say that I saw this profile within two minutes of it. The news broke about his name. I think it was Fox News that broke the news of his name. And I immediately went to see if he had a social media presence, and he did. And at that point, his top tweet, he had less than 200 Twitter followers at that point when I saw it. And his top tweet was a couple of likes or something. So I know that I was early to finding this. And it had already been untagged, which says to me either they untagged it at the time or they were right there with me or something. They didn't want the heat.

It was just, the whole thing is weird. I agree. The whole thing is fucking bizarre. We don't know anything about it. And it seems like the kind of thing that we should just be talking about like 24 hours a day, seven days a week until we figure out what the hell happened there.

I mean, it's just like, we just gloss right over it. Yeah. There's so many details to unpack that we are completely ignoring in favor of what is the accuracy of this AI cat meme directed to the town in Springfield, Ohio. Like, on the scale of which things are important, that seems far less to me than a guy who fought in Ukraine, may have had connections to Ukraine. What connections did he have to intelligence here or anything? Just tried to kill the president president that's way more important to me than a cat meme i guess also i i wonder just what it takes to go and fight in ukraine i i know that antonio um garcia martinez he just flew there when the war first broke out um and then made friends and exported wasn't fighting you know he was writing but i i guess because i guess my first thing is like well can you just

can anyone just go to ukraine and fight and it's like probably you could probably like they would just take anybody to help fight at this point um so maybe that's what what had happened is he's just some crazy guy that went there and then somehow somehow you get the ear of the new york times which is crazy like how does a guy like that get the ear of the new york times like what did the new york times writers see in that profile of almost no one following it and it looks like a bot? And they said, you're my guy. You are going to tell me about what's going on in Ukraine. That's fucking weird. Yeah. He's not just some random guy there. He was an authority there. That's, yeah. Apologies, guys. It looks like we lost Brandon.

Let's see if we can get him back to the chat. Well, Matt, you're on. Matt is here for the next topic. Hi, Matt. What up? Brandon's internet went out again uh out there in los angeles um we are gonna i mean this is just a the the the ryan ruth thing the assassin thing is it just remains crazy i think it's gonna be crazy forever the fact that we're not talking about it

at all is crazy it's no longer the headline story um we're talking it's been a few days since someone almost took out the president from his the bushes of his fucking golf course uh for the second time this man almost died and it's just like they don't care at all other than to say it's his fault that to me is you know sort of morally bankrupt to the degree i didn't even know they were i really was surprised by the way that they handle especially the new york times They published a piece that became, I've been watching a lot of 24-hour news lately. So their piece became the center piece on MSNBC specifically, which brought it up again and again and again and again, this New York Times piece that broke down the history of Trump's violent rhetoric

about 24 hours after he almost died, was almost killed. That's crazy. The fact that we don't know anything about him is crazy. We don't know if it was an inside job. That's crazy. The fact that we don't know anything about him is crazy. We don't know if it was an inside job. That's crazy. There's evidence that indicates it may have been. This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's just straight up like, we have a question as to how he knew that Trump was going to be playing golf, right? That's a huge question that implies something really frightening about our politics. we need to know we need answers and it's just shocking to me that nobody is demanding those answers um no one's doing it for us we're it's even like even we aren't though like out there on twitter like where are all even

the right wing god they just don't care it's like this just got fucking what yeah memory holds that's crazy no you i mean you talked about like the moving on with the memes, but like, I've had actual conversations with people I know in my life who are Democrats about the assassination attempt. And they said the same thing. Like, yeah, Trump's rhetoric has gone too far. And I'm like, I'm taking fucking crazy pills right now. The guy who was actively being shot at multiple times, like almost on a weekly basis at this

point. Well, because break that down. If you are not like there's no way that you believe that it's a trump it's like people who like trump are doing it that you just don't believe that you don't believe that he has spoken to people in a way that has encouraged them to kill him no one thinks that so when you say that what are you really saying that his rhetoric has to be toned down you're saying that he is saying something that is so bad that it has driven people to try and kill him and he should stop doing that he should stop saying that thing that makes people want to kill him that's why the cat

story comes up because they are saying look at how heinous this misinformation is and it's like if you are sharing misinformation that is that heinous someone's going to shoot you and you shouldn't be able to complain about it and it's like that's crazy okay so new york times man who shares cat meme should be shot that's not not that's a that is a that is a no for me it's a dark world man right it's a dark world because like again like i get to see the sort of like the effects of like what the sort of normie or democrat audience that gets fed because i see it in my group texts from my family they're talking about the cats right they they're saying like they don't care about trump being almost assassinated and they're moving on to the cats

and it's like you know you wrote about this after the first assassination attempt which is like if you call someone literally hitler what the do you think's gonna happen they're gonna kill hitler i got it here well so that piece my because i want to be careful not to blame them i don't really think the new york times is responsible for an attempted assassination trump um i think that what that says to me is like, if you're going to say thoughts and prayers for him and his family, I no longer believe that you believe that he's Hitler. Because if someone tried to kill an actual would-be dictator of the United States of America, I mean, you couldn't possibly care about that. By the way, if you try and take control of the government, it's a military coup that

you attempt, that's treason. The punishment for that is death. These words have meanings and there are crimes that are real crimes that are associated with real punishments and people just throw this shit around like it's nothing. No, if he's a traitor, if you really believe that he's a traitor, that's why I take the January 6th stuff so seriously. If you really believe that was an attempted coup, then there's a punishment for that. And it's not a light slap on the wrist and we're going to fine you for your stupid real estate shit. It's like a trial and then an execution is what happens when you try to do a military coup. And that is like, this stuff really bothers me, but we should move on to something more fun because we have no answers to any of these questions just yet. We'll keep you up to

date as stuff comes through on the attempted assassination and its motives. I do want to talk, I feel like I'm part of the problem now because what I really want to talk about is it's a bit of a clown world story uh brandon tell us take us into um the harrowing world of amazon hq and uh the shocking revelation that they are going to be forced holy shit to go to the office sure the ceo of amazon andy j, sent a memo to the company announcing that the expectation after January 2nd, 2025, by the way, which is not in a lot of the news coverage, they're giving them four months or something like that to come back to the office. The expectation will be that they have to come into the office five days a week after January 2nd, 2025. to come into the office five days a week after January 2nd, 2025. Now the previous policy or the policy that's still in place until January 2nd is that people can take two work from home days a week. So he mentioned that pre-pandemic in this memo, there was never any expectation of two work from home days a week so that they're just basically, they're going to go back to that.

They've determined that productivity is higher at the office, people have more collaboration, and it's just generally better. He was pretty careful to point out that there would still be a fairly liberal remote policy. So, for example, if the employee, and I'm going to quote, if you need a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, that's totally fine. It'll still be fine. Um, but, but again, the,

the expectation is that, you know, the office workers, I don't, this obviously this can't apply to the warehouse workers because they have, they have to be in the warehouse. Um, but office workers will need to be in the office five days a week. Kevin wrote for us in the Daily that some employees took to the web in protest. One of them said, I'd rather go back to school than work in an office again, which is fair enough, whatever. Somebody said that they're probably going to quiet quit. And generally, like people are upset. They actually have to go in and do what their employee is requiring them to do, which I find insane. But yeah, that's it.

It reminds me. I know it's, you know, Amazon, the tech company. And I think the big thing there is just you're a massive monopoly company and you now have tons of employees all over the place. And there's a management problem there. You're having a hard time tracking your employees and make sure that they're actually doing stuff. For years in tech leading up to COVID, there was so much waste because it was just the golden age. There was money raining from the skies and nobody really cared. That world has really changed quite a lot. And I think it's just like, you know, COVID's over.

It's time to go back to work. And what we're really learning, because there were all these experiments at the time. It was the question of whether or not people would be more productive or something if they were at home. I think probably a small minority of people really are. But most people are not. a small minority of people really are, but most people are not. And they wouldn't be doing this unless they had found that they were getting less than they were already getting out of their employees, which would have been low comparatively compared to other Fortune 500 companies. All the tech companies are just their easier jobs. And so that's that that that's the end of the trend but then what you have is

not the end of i'm sorry that's the end of the story but like the trend is a little bit broader um this idea if i think your entitlement to not work at your job um came to a head recently in the story of the new y Times Union, which is another story, Brandon, that I would like you to kind of unpack for us before we break it all down. I wanted to bring that one up too. So this week, Semaphore reported that the New York Times Tech Guild is threatening to strike during election season at the New York Times. So not the writers. Not the writers, um, tech support, developers, um, people who make sure Wordle is operating 24-7, those types of people.

So they've been threatening a strike because they've been in sort of negotiations with management for over two years now. And they still haven't reached an agreement with them. you know, an agreement with them. During these two years at various times, Semaphore reported, they've demanded pretty ambitious things. They've demanded a four-day work week, but increased pay. By the way, the average salary of the union member in this union is $190,000 a year, $40,000 a year more on average than a journalist at the New York Times. They've asked for unlimited break time, a ban on scented products in break rooms, paid pet bereavement. That's my favorite one.

I want to do a Matt Walsh thing saying if you need pet paid paid pet bereavement like grow up come on that's embarrassing for dogs like maybe i would take a day off my dog died i would be really sad um i was pretty sad when darwin died yeah i mean dogs are yeah i'm thinking of cats i guess dogs maybe you should dogs maybe maybe that's legit for dogs yeah you should get a week off yeah cats suck which is why i had a hard time with the h&m cat story to begin with i was like if they ate one cat like come on it's not that big of a deal just to close this off a few more of their things that they've wanted over the past two years they wanted to write they essentially wanted to write to review op-eds before they published they wanted to say you know that's fucking crazy it doesn't work it doesn't work from the editorial workflow right you can't so you have two different kinds of crazy like you have what you have are a handful of very

sort of standard crazy new left kind of um entitledty sort of things, which is almost everything that you said. Then you have, if I were a reporter at the New York Times and a f***ing engineer said that he needed to be able to review my pieces, I would lose my f***ing mind. I would be incandescent with, I'm mad for them and I'm not even usually on their side. I am furious. And how are they not? I guess they can't, maybe they feel like the writers are in their own union and they have to show some sort of union solidarity, but that's crazy. How come the writers union hasn't stood up and said, maybe they have, has there been any comment? Do we know if the writers union has responded to that one at all?

They're probably in solidarity. There's some more points that, uh, I wanted to bring up to non-performance based annual bonuses. So you just get a bonus for just being there and vibes bonus, uh, mandatory trigger warnings and company meetings, you know, for the news outlet, more money for non-white staff to attend conferences. Yeah. Which is illegal. which is illegal which

that's illegal that is what said they were like i think this is illegal they i'm thinking of so one of my favorite movies growing up as a kid was this movie scrooged with uh what's his face bill murray and um he is so mean to the people who work for him uh me to the point where one of them goes and tries to kill him and there's this like epic like shooting scene that maybe you could pull up a clip of of just like this is i mean we're getting in the christmas well it's still halloween anyway the 80s man, these people could never, they could not survive what happened there. And I don't know, I kind of miss it. I think that we need to be a little harder. I don't think it's, I think there's got to be a happy middle ground between never take

a sick day, which we'll talk about later, um a four-day work week with an increase in pay and trigger warnings and the scented candles thing also i'm on board for because i think that those are i think that those are hormone disruptors and so we gotta i think that it's like we gotta get rid of the hormone disruptors in the office and we have to high protein diets uh huge subsidies for going to the gym maybe some kind of like put it in there and like let's boost that tea and then i never want to hear about trigger warnings again at the new york times which is supposed to be reporting on world news like you a trigger warning exists so you don't have to be emotionally disturbed by content that is like you know sexual assault content or um genocide or uh you know violent street crime the things that the new york times

exists for the news it's crazy to be like the news disturbs me please stop talking about it what's at the new york times um yeah i wish that i could uh i could ask some of my times friends about this because there's no way that, they don't think this is insane. I think our listeners should all follow the, um, advice that Brandon gave our readers in the daily this week of, uh, stand, stand with the times and solidarity and boycott the hard hitting journalism that blames Trump for his own assassination. Good point. Yeah.

I love this. This union is great. I want to see more from this union. Yeah. Good call. Yeah, I love this. This union's great. I want to see more from this union. Yeah, good call, Brandon. Thanks. I stole that take from Mark Andreessen. He was the first to be in support, ironically. You joined in the fight.

Yeah. I'm in solidarity with Andreessen and the Guild. I think one of the things that really gets me, the quiet quitters kind of really frustrate me, especially the ones who use Marxist language to like dress it up as some sort of moral, like high ground thing, because it's like, it's a totally deceptive and dishonest thing to do. Like you are deliberately, you're like, I am going to quiet quit.

So that means that you are like, you're planning on not doing work and lying every single day to a bunch of people about what you're doing. I don't know many people who lie a lot. I personally like have a hard time lying. Like big lies are like hard for, I don't do them because it's just uncomfortable for me. But you have people saying that they're going to lie every single day to their managers, but then making it some sort of statement about labor and Karl Marx and like, I don't know, workers' rights. And that really like bothers me. It like, also, so there was a story in the news, sorry, Solana, this week about, so this lady, Tracy, I don't remember what her last name is. She's coming out of the book called Abolish Rent. And she tweeted about it.

She's promoting her book right now. And one of her promotions, one of her tweets promoting the book was a picture of her building with a caption, My entire building hasn't paid rent for two years. And then she tweets another picture of her building. It's about to meet my new, new landlord, smiley face. Right. And it's like, you are a predator. Like you, you were literally a predator who's deliberately scamming other people and you're doing it in a premeditated way. And I actually feel that way about quiet quitters. And she's also, she's justifying it with like Marxist language, which is just like a total show.

And I think quiet quitters and people who demand four-day work weeks for extra pay, like they know what they're doing. And especially when make 190 000 a year and um it's just hard for me when i read that stuff i'm just like this these people suck you know like they're they're fundamentally dishonest and there's nothing there's no dressing up you can do to to hide that and i don't like that yeah you have people who are committing crime and they're dressing up in the language of morality. Yeah. And we've been seeing it for many, many years.

This is a very egregious example. I get this a lot. And when you go after people like that, you always get the socialists in your mentions who, this is a big thing in socialist circles, especially on social media. They really do believe that landlords are evil and that uh not paying rent is um not only is it acceptable but there's something it's like morally necessary or something yeah heroic about doing it um and i don't believe them i think that it's cope or not really cope that but that's uh that's how they dress it up for themselves they're doing crime and how is that actually legal if she's open so open about it someone should definitely take her to court um well she wrote a book about it and it

is it is legal because of tenant because of um sort of like tenants protections on steroids in california and new york um where does she live another thing is she new york or california so that's confusing she she started the la. She co-founded the LA Tenants Union, but I believe she's been living in New York for the past two years. But that whole, that part of it's confusing. I also found out, so I was listening to a podcast not too long ago and I was listening, it was about communists in the forties and fifties. I was listening, it was about communists in the forties and fifties. And back then they were really, really hardcore. Like just the communists were no joke compared to the people right now. What they would do is they would take jobs and the people in the managerial class,

like the ones that were speaking about the New York times, this lady who wrote that book, they would aim to get promotions so that they could give more money to the party who would then return that money, but only a little bit of it as a worker's wage. So people in the Communist Party back then would work, give all their paycheck to the Communist Party who would then pay them essentially minimum wage, and they would be like a unit in this party. And I think what these New York Times employees are doing, the ones in the union who are like pro-labor, are in fact using their like $190,000 salary

and they're getting their $10 coffee, stepping on a homeless person to get to the coffee shop and not doing anything that is even remotely Marxist, actually. Like I feel like they're just, this is not serious Marxism and it's very deceptive well thank god for that we make fun of these people a lot but at the end of the day it's it's awesome that they suck so hard you know i mean it'd be way worse if they were talented marxists and then you had to deal with you know again, again, what is it? Barack Obama's former mentor, Bill Ayers, blowing shit up.

Like, I don't want to live in that Marxist. This is a much the softer side of Marxism is enough for me. We have to quickly talk about the fact that these are not Marxists, but they are terrible people. uh you have a bunch of terrorists in lebanon who tuesday i believe exploded um sort of small explosions but a lot of them died and uh the reason that they died was because their beepers which they use because i think they're afraid of being tracked on other technology by the israelis um exploded were were packed it seems like with some kind of explosive device uh it was a huge intelligence coup for israel people are going to be talking about this maneuver for many years to come because it did not even conclude with that first wave of you know hundreds

and hundreds of beepers the next day during a funeral for one of the um beeper boys who got blasted into outer space a bunch of walkie-talkies exploded and um a bunch of other shit it's i'm seeing other reports now of uh solar panels and things like that i don't know what's true what's not right now we're sort of in the fog of war but certainly beepers and walkie-talkies both of which are sort of primitive tech that um have been used to uh protect yourself from um espionage basically somehow were captured before they were handed out and reworked in such a way as the israeli uh government could uh pinpoint members of hezbollah and kill them uh the reason we don't typically talk too much about, you know, the war abroad or anything like this. This is interesting to me because what, I don't think that our, I don't, I don't think we have to worry about our iPhones blowing up. Maybe famous last words,

that would really suck if that's how I went out. But we do manufacture these devices that we carry with us everywhere in a country that we understand to be an adversary. And it's sort of, it's just this really interesting, the reaction to the beeper thing was bifurcated along expected tribal bounds. And this is a different kind of tribal. It's not like the standard American tribal where it's necessarily left, right.

It's, are you like a Yehamas person or are you like an obsessed Israel tweeter? And so those people got mad or happy in both of their ways. But there's a broader question here, which is what is happening with our devices? You know, this really opens up a gateway of new ideas and new questions. Again, I don't think that we should worry about explosives, but I do wonder about hacking and about what else is in there in terms of hardware and how well protected are we? And I don't know.

Is there something you guys think about at all? Am I totally off base here? I mean, the Chinese have already shown a propensity for wanting to spy on Americans. I think they've been buying up government land or, or land that's close to army bases. I think they almost bought land around the Capitol and then were found to, um,

be planning to like put communications devices in it. Uh, I don't, I don't have the facts. That's very loose on the facts there. But I suppose I definitely wouldn't put it past them. I mean, we blocked that 5G company from doing business, I think, in the US for national security concerns.

Does the technology matter? I mean, they're using beepers from the 90s. I mean, it's nice to see Hezbollah a lot of their vintage quite trendy with the vintage tech but i don't know like is the iphone more protected probably and i'm sure that apple is just a more sophisticated company and there's all sorts of the way that i think it probably works is one out of a thousand iphones is cracked open probably and just like routine and and it's cracked open here at home and people look at everything and then they sort of keep moving on but also there are plenty of spies um Chinese spies throughout the tech industry I'm sure

there are spies at Apple and so is that a system that could be gamed also possible it seems possible seems plausible even I'm not worried about explosions i'm worried about being tracked and um and having my messages captured and things like this and you know your photos and i don't know who even knows the thing is like i don't you don't want to give any information away because you don't know how it can be used against you and um and we don't know how things are going to escalate with China. We don't know what's going to happen in a year or two years or whatever else. All we know is that we're not friends.

And so I don't know. It seems like a problem that they are manufacturing some of our most important technology. Like that just straight up. I don't know. I don't love that. It'd be interesting to know the economics of what's the actual cost. If you brought all of Apple's iPhone production to the United States, what are the economics that I look like?

I don't know. It's kind of interesting. Bad. I bet you're looking at like a $10,000 plus phone. Maybe. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there are a couple thousand already. So.

And just the headache of bringing chips over. That was a nightmare. So I'm sure this would be a nightmare as well. Well, we should, I mean, in the context of the Bieber boys blowing up all over Lebanon, we should talk about, well, we have our PolyRead. So it's time for our PolyMarket segment. Thank you, PolyMarket, for giving us what we need to give you all what you want, which is the greatest news in tech. Okay. So let's talk about the question of whether or

not Israel is going to invade Lebanon. So in Lebanon, in Lebanon, Hezbollah radios exploded across the South on Wednesday, killing 20 and injuring over 450. This follows Tuesday's explosion of Hezbollah pagers, which killed 12 and injured nearly 3,000. While they haven't claimed the attack, it is widely believed that this was the work of Mossad and the IDF. The odds of Israel invading Lebanon by November changed drastically on polymarket. So a week ago, these odds were just 10%. On the morning of the attack, they jumped from 29% to 43% in the span of an hour. The time of this recording, these odds stand at 36%. I did see that

the White House is using very strong language, sort of condemning. Not condemned. I don't think they actually condemned. It's as strong as you can be without shit-talking an ally. They consider this escalatory. I think that the escalatory action was probably the terrorists setting missiles or rockets into Israel. I mean, there's like every day, like, what are we talking about? Like, these are actual terrorists. It was a pinpoint attack.

It does concern me. There was a question of terrorism. Obviously the Hamas people are like, this is terrorist, Israel's terrorist. This is a terrorist act. What is the, if you're at war, is it terrorism? Like what is the, what it makes it is it terrorism like what is that what it makes it i feel like they're at these people they're firing rockets at you that's an act of war you're now fighting back i don't know if you were sort of mass murdering civilians that feels terroristic to me in nature but this is war right it's like i don't understand that the argument is that they were in public places when it happened right so like explosions will hit kids or families that are nearby right but if like if you're firing a rocket you're kind of

getting the same results so i don't really know how you avoid that one in a war like yeah i mean this is the thing it's like people do people not think that kids died in world war ii like what do we think that that we don't think that American soldiers have killed kids in war that no one would say is a crime. So let's ignore Vietnam or even Korea or something. Let's just go to World War II. You don't think we killed any German kids when the allies were firebombing Dresden? No children killed in the making of this war? That's war. This is why we don't want war. This is why it's not it's like it's not war is not this magical thing you press a button and then there's a way to do it where only adult

men die which by the way also sucks speaking as an adult man like what the fuck it's crazy how they're just like well men are expendable well maybe i mean i understand it but it's like it's not good when anybody when anybody dies but the idea that like kids don't die is just it's it's what you would say if you were an american and you've never actually had to face war before thank god in your life you would say something this stupid um but no i don't it doesn't strike me as terrorism i don't love to get caught in like the the tangled web of israel palestine. It's like this fucking ancient blood feud is what it feels like to me. And I just want us to not have really much to do with it.

AOC did sort of go off about it. And I think that it was on grounds, you know, this is terrorism. It's opened a new door. This sort of tactic can be used against us now um if we're ever at formal war we haven't been at formal war with a country for a very long time i think it might have been i think world war ii may have been the last formal where there was a formal declaration of war let's look this up actually matt look it up okay let's see um last u.s formal declaration of war yeah i was right world war ii was was the uh united states last formal declaration of war was june 5th 1942 against romania bulgaria and hungary during world war ii to get to a point

where we're really at war um and something like this could could be done against us, there are such bigger problems in a world, a nuclear, a post-nuclear world where we're a superpower. No one's declaring war against us unless they're also a superpower. It's like exploding beepers will be one thing of many things we'd be worried about.

I think the biggest one will probably be drone warfare. If it happened right now, that's the thing that I would be worried about. Yeah. So maybe Israel does invade Lebanon. I would if I were Israel, but I'm not Israel. I'm an American and I don't want to talk about this anymore. Thank you, Paul. Now we're about to get into the Idol segment. Ryle, you want to break down just where we are there? Sure thing. So to recap for our dear Pirate Idol viewers, Matt, I'm not sure if you want to play some sentimental music here or anything. Week one saw our first four contestants break down a topic on a nuclear power plant demolition in Germany.

break down a topic on a nuclear power plant demolition in Germany. Martin Shkreli was our guest judge, and voters seemed to like Cardick by a wide margin in the comments there. Week two, contestants discussed The Guardian, calling for tech CEOs calling to be arrested, where voters seemed to like both Molly and Patrick that week. Week three saw Eid being our guest, while contestants discussed San Francisco moving to ban the sale of Zin. And in that week, Chris and Andy seemed to be our top vote getters there. And lastly, week four, contestants talked about the ongoing pandemic of

loneliness where returns are still coming in, but Olivia seemed to be getting the most love in our comments so far. Well, if you guys don't agree with any of that, you better sound off in the comments as soon as you can, because next week we begin the quarterfinals, and we'll kind of announce the rules and everything then. For now, we got one final round of Round Wonders. Let's get into it. Welcome back to the greatest show on earth or certainly on YouTube. It's Pirate Idol. It is the last week of the first round. Next week begins the quarterfinals. You guys just got the updates on who is in the lead, but we have three final contestants lined up, ready to deliver takes.

And I think we're just, I mean, we're going to get right into it. You guys know the rules. Everyone gets an introduction, a take. In between that, whatever happens, happens. You guys can jump in, you can jump out. We've had people just leave before when their technology failed. I wouldn't want you to do that. It would be interesting, I guess. That's it. I mean, we're just going to start. The topic today is, well, Riley's going to tip the whole thing, but the sort of rough topic is just the question of sick days. Are they childish? Should you just never be taking them? Riley, break it down. Sure thing. So in a recent video seemingly recorded from his house and not an office, The Daily Wire's Matt Walsh claimed that adults

shouldn't be taking sick days at the office. Taking a sick day as an adult should be pretty embarrassing for you, he stated. They're for kids in school who are trying to stay home so they don't have to take a test that day. You shouldn't be using sick days, okay? I've used sick days maybe twice in seven years. And in both of those cases,

because I lost my voice and I couldn't speak, you can't blame me for that. It's impossible to do a podcast when you can't speak. I guess. So there we have it. I mean, are sick days just a product of our infantilized, lived out society? Are we just overly estrogenized over here taking sick days when we have the flu or something? Maybe Matt has a point. Kevin, I'm going to start with you, my friend. Where are you from? Who are you calling in? Where are you calling in from? And I mean, what do you think about the question at hand? Hey, I'm Kevin, originally from Texas, but calling in from New York City. I think, you know, Matt works in the media business. He's in the business of getting clicks.

I think he sort of plays this character of a curmudgeon-y old guy, like a Red Foreman, That 70s Show type of guy with a flannel shirt and a bad attitude. So I think, like, he's sort of playing into that a little bit. I don't know if this is actually what he thinks about sick days. Look, I think we should be working hard. I think if you're healthy enough to go into work, you should. Do I think it's embarrassing to take a sick day? Not really. Just get your stuff done on time if you can. Don't leave work on to your teammates if you can avoid it. But I think he's probably leaning into a made for Twitter moment a little bit, which seems to have worked since we're here talking about it. Oh yeah, I always click. That's sort of my take.

Anything designed to click, I'm clicking. I'm clicking it multiple times. I'm clicking it right now. Because he's got a movie coming out. What was that? He's jumping it up because he's got a movie coming out. Or three days ago, he had a movie come out. Right. He's got to get us however he can. he can exactly miles where are you from and what do you make of the sick days i'm from uh an hour outside of nashville it's called clarksville tennessee

uh i guess the steel man it like nobody's ever going to be great if they're taking sick days like bill gates famously didn't work for or didn't take a day off for like 10 years and then what if Michael Jordan called in sick to the flu game but Matt does kind of posit himself as some tough guy when he's an actor and an author who argues with old gender studies professors and writes children's books so that's the toughest thing about him yeah that's the toughest thing about him is that he doesn't call in sick to work but of course i mean it's like riley said but like where is your work i mean where are you recording from sir it seems like your bedroom so what do you mean you're not calling in sick i don't really understand it i just like i have some colleagues who will come in

to the office sick and they'll be coughing, sneezing. Oh, sorry. I've got a little cold. I don't want to hear that. I'm thinking like, I hear that and I'm angry now. I'm leaving the room. I'm not going to be a jerk about it, but I am definitely like, why did you come? I need to go protect myself from this. And I think it's, I guess I was thinking the whole time it felt, I wonder if COVID had not happened, if that would be a perspective, we would still be happy. I don't know that I, I don't know that he would, I think he would have said it. It's like something happened with COVID where we over-indexed on the ridiculous nature of it all. And we went from like, no, the masks don't work to like diseases don't exist and that i'm not

entirely on board with i don't want to get sick it takes you out of the out for weeks it's just i don't know just it's just kind of stupid but as you were saying kevin it's like his character and like it's like that entire that entire archetype i just i'm kind of over it i'm i'm exhausted by it it's no longer the funny wow what did he just say that it was five years ago when he was owning the blue-haired whatever kindergarten teacher um the culture has evolved and uh and now it's like we're scraping we're scraping the bottom of the barrel it seems and. And we're down to sick days. Are you a real man or do you take sick days? Jack, have you ever taken a sick day? Yes, I have. So I'm Jack. I'm from Georgia, live in New York, currently calling in from LA.

I think you raised a good point on the COVID thing. So a hypothetical question, who would you rather have as your boss? Matt Walsh, who is the sick day denier, or Taylor Lorenz, who is still living in 2020 COVID and 2024? It's like the new political spectrum thing. Every day is a sick day, or sick days are for losers. Where would you put yourself in that? Right. The two genders. There's really, I mean, what a world that we have descended to that we have to choose between one of these two um i don't know i i think uh i think i i think if that were if my choice were were no sick days ever or every day is a sick day i think i would have to go no sick days okay so you're more walshian than yeah i think

society would collapse i think society would just end if if it was um if we all acted like you know masked up for is she still masked up though i i was just i was wondering this the other day at this point at this point if you're still masked up i think i have nothing but respect i think it's like the commitment to the bit is it's it's like i've never really seen any kind of commitment like that before in my life. And go off. But no, I don't want to live in that world. Yeah, go ahead. Another take is, like you said, committing to the bit.

Matt Walsh has six kids. I looked him up on Wikipedia earlier to do my due diligence. So a conspiracy theory of mine is that he actually himself probably does believe in sick days, but he's gaslit his kids into thinking they shouldn't take sick days because he doesn't want his like six. If you have six kids, one of them will probably be sick every single day. So perhaps he's just been telling his kids, like, no, you have to go to school, man up. So he doesn't have to deal with it. So him putting that on Twitter is just like, no, daddy actually thinks sick days are bad because it's just like trying to keep his own sick kids away from him. So there's a

little spin zone on that. Mason was in my mentions and she was like, this guy has six kids and I love that for him, but he is absolutely the plague vector in the office. It's like kids are, they bring disease wherever they go. And if this is a man that doesn't believe in sort of staying home, but of course he does. This is the broader thing,

right? It's like these characters that we're playing online um are just i don't know they're they're increasingly a little buffoonish what miles he said he had a movie come coming out what is it again i've i saw that there was one i saw him um doing the thing with the author of the white fragility book robin d'angelo he got her to pay yeah he's just did some money yeah he's doing the uh less funny version of money. Yeah, he's doing the less funny version of Sacha Baron Cohen, like dressing up like a lubbed up guy, pressing these liberal people,

sort of like playing into their character. I was thinking it's interesting that his far right point of view is sort of circling back to like the anti-human vibe of the anti-left. It's like you're either, you got to go to work every day, you're a wage bot um no sick days or you live in your pod and you eat bugs so it's sort of horseshoeing over to the far right anti-human vibe yeah it's sick i agree i think i mean because you see a lot of the on the anti-bug on the bug versus anti-bug dimension there's um there's like the sun your balls uh don't wear

sunscreen eat red meat um like swim naked kind of thing uh and that to me is compelling that i'm like well it's there's something charismatic about that um from a health influencer i don't think Matt's something is balls is my personal read of the situation but I think that what he brings is it it's a different kind of conserve like all the son your ball stuff is this new sort of Nietzsche and right wing thing it's like this throwback to like you the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans there's like something sort of pagan about it there's something sort of anti-christian about it and matt walsh is like

he's just he's like what a conservative was when i was growing up um and but he wears skinny jeans and was like- He's a 2012 hipster. And he was like early to sort of making fun of crazy leftists on thedailywire.com. And I just, I find it, I'm not interested in going back. You know what I mean? I want something new. I want fresh material. This is why I'm pros on your balls.

I'm not recommending it. And I have yet to try it myself, but I am curious about it. And I just think that's the future. I hope the right wing adheres to that path rather than wavering back to the sort of like sick days are for women type posting. It's just silly. Nobody believes it. Nobody believes you. I do want to see the interview with Robin DiAngelo, however, because I hate her more. And I don't know, has anyone, have you guys been watching the trailers at all? It's pretty funny. He basically, yeah, he dressed up as Matt, a DEI consultant and goes into all of these sort of anti-racist workshops like i think you mentioned he eventually got robin d'angelo to pay reparations to his

assistant she has now stated that that's not how reparations work but she did make the payment so i don't know um it's it's it's funny i mean i think the first one he did what is a woman i think was the name of the first movie sort of went into the whole gender ideology stuff. It'll be interesting to see him take sort of the craziness of the DEI stuff to the masses and see how they respond. I think like a lot of us who are very online and kind of have dove into the underpinnings of all this stuff and know how crazy it is. I don't think most people really kind of know what's going on behind closed doors. So I do think he's maybe doing a valuable service to showing some sunlight on all of that craziness and see how the masses react. I was doing an interview the other day with a journalist who's working on a piece on Pyre Wires. it's a coin toss that he listens to so hi

uh it's we're not sure yet how this piece is going to turn out but i decided to take a risk and um he asked me a pretty a good question um this last time which was did i how did i see pirate wires being impacted by the vibe shift in terms of things that we cover? And I don't feel like at all because we didn't create an identity based on woke whack-a-mole. In fact, it's something that we've made fun of a lot here. But I do think that, and I mentioned the Daily Wire, I said, I think that they're going to have a hard time with it because a lot of what they've done over the last five years is just say what nobody else was willing to say on a very narrow social dimension. And now no one has a hard time saying stuff like that. And so that is why, what is going viral right now with him, it's an interview with a woman who was relevant four years ago in 2020 was the height of her relevance and yeah it's funny and i still don't like her and i'm glad i love to see her get roasted like that

but like why did i i mean i'm not i wasn't waiting for for the latest robin d'angelo takedown like i feel like she's been taken down culturally she's not what she wants i mean she's rich as hell so i mean no one's really taking her down in the way that she deserves to be taken down for the grift. But it's like, that's not really that relevant anymore. We don't have legalized race riots at the moment. And we don't have her on TV defending them. So, it just seems like they're... I think that they're trying to figure out what they are now in this world that is much more willing to criticize the craziest excesses of the far left. I think his Twitter handle is still Matt Walsh blog. He was one of the original right-wing blogger types.

I think in some ways he is still stuck in that early 2000s world where that plays. And I also, like Ben Shapiro said our business model is Facebook ads. I think they're very much boomer focused. And this still plays to boomers, honestly. They're five years, maybe more behind us online young folks. So I think there is an audience for it. But yeah, I do think it's getting tired. It was. Yeah. Facebook is how they built the Daily Wire. The whole story there is pretty interesting. And they were doing it... I mean, they started before everybody, really. And they were... Brandon, you would have more insight into this. But my read of it is that they were doing it at a time when Facebook traffic was free. And they got very big, very fast by putting

money and thought into this huge opportunity that a lot of other people were slower to hit. Because it's an older crowd, not only were they early to this, they were uniquely well-positioned to take advantage of, and not in an insidious way, just in a business way, to take advantage of the opportunity in a way that it was always going to be a tougher... Vox was going to be a tougher sell on Facebook, really. I mean, I'm like way that like it was always going to be a tougher box was going to be a tougher sell on facebook really i mean i'm unlike my parents like that was never going to happen um and so they blew up but now facebook traffic is not free and boomers are getting older and are they even are even they all on facebook still like i mean are people using i went on facebook the other day and I did see some people were still using it, but I just hadn't been on Facebook in so long. And I don't even think,

like my mom's on Facebook. She uses Instagram. She sends me videos about, she loves, my mom also watches. What's up mom? She loves plants and she sends me videos about like being a plant person. She somehow discovered the plant person algorithmic, I don't know, trap. But she's not on Facebook, right? You know, posting the like my Native American spirit guide memes or whatever is happening over there. So, yeah, what is the next step for the Daily Wire? It is so washed up now like that that really started hitting the zeitgeist in like 2015 when those ben shapiro compilations were

popping off it's so everybody thinks it's corny at this point except for the old heads on facebook who repost jesus uh ai pictures like he's come back you know well they had they had candace too who they you know clipped her wings for the the pro hamas stuff um and it's just been a rough road for the daily wire um all right guys last thoughts anything closing remarks yeah it's kind of like this whole thing is it's like the reverse cnn from like 2015 or whatever right like. Back in the day, CNN's entire thing was, all right, Trump did this dumb shit. We're going to talk about it, whatever. We have to talk down on him. And then he lost the last election.

And all of a sudden, their views tanked because their whole thing was just rage baiting everything they didn't like about him. And when he wasn't in the picture, then when he wasn't on Twitter, he wasn't even posting that much. So then they didn't have any content. Daily Wire was trying to own the libs and they did it. The libs are dead. You can say the word retarded again. There's been a whole vibe shift back to the right. It's huge. And so when you

can do that, you get stuck in this thing where you're having to start a war against sick days because there's nothing left. I think he's right, actually. Go off. Shouldn't you be slightly embarrassed to take a sick day? Like, so that you don't take more sick days than you actually need to take?

I'm embarrassed to take a sick day. I'm not sure that you should be super embarrassed. Like, when you're super sick, obviously you should take a sick day, but you should think twice before you take a sick day. Like, if you have a sore throat, it's a little bit sore, it's, like, kind of scratchy, should you really take a sick day. Like if you have a sore throat, it's a little bit sore, it's like kind of scratchy, should you really take a sick day? It's like, you're probably okay,

especially if you're working from home. I think there's some truth to what Matt Walsh is saying. Matt Walsh. I think there's some truth to the idea, as we were discussing earlier, there is some truth to the idea that the average American worker is today is soft and american in general is soft and um and that's annoying and fun to make fun of and maybe he was touching on

that but i mean again to go back to the original point it's maybe just hard to hear that from someone who is that specific message of like you should never be out you should you should never be taking off from someone who's who's recording from um from their house which i mean i'm doing myself but i'm also pro sick take a sick day take two. It is also annoying to hear the Amazon workers complaining about going back to work as well. I have no tolerance for it. Exactly. I just have no tolerance for it. And to be clear about why I'm here, I'm here because this is the best place I have to record the podcast for now. When I'm in New York, I have a studio now. And thank you, Matt. In SF, we're working on something at Founders Fund that

I'll probably use myself. And then I guess in Miami, I mean, we're working on something at Founders Fund that I'll probably use myself. And then I guess in Miami, I mean, we're going to have to figure something out. I don't know what it is. That's all stuff for another day. Guys, last thoughts, anything you have to say at all to the Pirate Nation? Speak now or forever hold your peace. Nothing it sounds like. It's been real.

Thank you guys for watching. Next week begins the quarterfinals. Rate, respond, review. I'm serious. I said at the top of the show, please fucking subscribe. If you're following the show and you haven't subscribed yet,

subscribe. I don't understand why people don't subscribe. It doesn't hurt you. You don't have to pay for it. It's totally free. Just give it to us. Thank you very much. Goodbye.

Have a great weekend.