Pirate Wires - Trump/Kamala Debate, WTF Is Going On With Cats In Ohio & PIRATE IDOL Week #4

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

EPISODE #69 (nice): This week, we gotta get into this crazy story out of Springfield, Ohio. A town of 60,000 has become overrun by 20,000 Haitian migrants. Things took a weird turn this past week when reports of migrants stealing pets and eating them started to pop up on Facebook. This led to an AI meme war, JD Vance tweeting about it, and Trump yelling about it on the debate. Speaking of the debate, we react to this week’s Presidential debate with Trump/Harris. We were fed the typical political slop that we expected, but it Harris did much better than anticipated. Finally, another round of Pirate Idol! 3 fresh contestants take the stage to compete for a co-hosting spot on the pod. Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Riley Nork, John Coogan, Eade Bengard Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter 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 John Twitter: https://x.com/johncoogan Eade Twitter: https://x.com/eade_bengard TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod! 3:20 - Haitian Migrants & Cats.. Where Do We Even Begin.. 35:00 - Trump/Harris Debate Reaction 51:05 - The Latest Update On The Election Polls - Brought To You By Polymarket 1:00:55 - Pirate Idol - Week #4 - The Pandemic Of Incles #podcast #technology #politics #cultre

They're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there. Right away, while I was watching this story, I thought, oh, sh**. But the memes were relentless. They will get to the bottom of this. I'm so convinced.

People really, really love cats. And if something happened to a cat, like, the internet will solve it. It's like 67 million people tuned in to watch. But overall, a lot of the takeaways I saw were people saying Kamala maybe did better than expected. What's up guys welcome back to the pod we have in the chat special guest hosts eid back for more back for round two say hi eid hey and john coogan the iconic the one and only good friend of the pod. Thank you for joining us today, sir. Thanks for having me.

Have anything that you want to... John, do you... John has a great podcast, or a great sort of YouTube, rather, that you should check out. What's the name, John? It's just my name, John Coogan on YouTube. It's just the John Coogan Show. It is incredible. I think sort of unique documentaries in tech that you should check

out. We use them ourselves when we're sort of showing off cool companies. They're fucking excellent. He does an amazing job. And then Eid, as I mentioned, is just an incredible poster and a brilliant mind, a light in this dark world. Unless you have something that you want to plug. I don't know what you... Oh, I'm working on an agency. There we you need a tv commercial call me yeah that's interesting i might i mean we gotta get these subsidies we have to get the daily subscribers up my friends tell the world to subscribe to the pirate wires daily it's doing the well really well but i want i want we gotta grow so coming out we're long documentary up right now about donald trump

it has over a million views uh and people are watching like crazy i made a i made a documentary want, we got to grow. So coming out. We're long documentary up right now about Donald Trump. It has over a million views and people are watching like crazy. I made a, I made a documentary like an hour long about Trump, the full history of his career and life. And then same thing with Biden and then Biden dropped out. So no one's watching that one. And now I have to like scramble to maybe do one about the Harris campaign, which I think would be interesting because not that many people actually know her full. It would be interesting. I would love to see the deep dive. Are you going to start with San Francisco local politics? Yeah, yeah. No, I think I'm going to start with where she was born and everything.

Yeah, all the way through. Well, we have a packed show today. Coming up, we have a few things. So we've got Apocalypse Meow. Obviously, we're going to talk about the Haitian cat situation and we're going to be responsible adults about it but facts will be shared and opinions will be stated um we are going to talk about the debate slop and uh and we've got a great polymarket segment coming up

in which we're going to do i think it's time i don't like to just typically do a um a pure horse race type thing but a lot there have been a lot of changes in the com lovers trump polling and markets that have been interesting to me and i do want to do a recap right now especially after the debate it feels like a good time to do so uh first up let's talk about cats so ready so let's. Where do we even begin this cursed story? It is the most cursed discourse. Okay. So Springfield, Ohio has been a growing story, a percolating sort of bubbling story for about a year now. Over the last couple of months, I noticed it a couple months ago for

the first time. And that's when I first heard the quite shocking figure that a town of less than 60,000 people, Springfield, Ohio, had received around 20,000 Haitian migrants. So that is a shocking change to the city and i had a lot of questions they were not really being parsed by the mainstream media i will say to the times credit they have covered this they covered it about a year ago i believe i'd have to go double check um but i'm pretty sure about a year ago was the first time they covered it correctly as this interesting flash point in the immigration discussion in america They responded, they preferred to the Haitian immigration to the city as the revitalization of Springfield. Locals have a mixed opinion

on whether or not the town has been revitalized. Certainly, the tax figures have gone up. More tax is being collected. That's always an interesting way, I think, for a leftist to analyze how a town is doing is just how much money is being made. I don't know about that myself, but none of that really matters because what matters is the cat memes. Now, the background is this town is incredibly important in the immigration debate. It was really a powder keg. We've been seeing pieces of this story for a while. It was only a matter of time before a picture of a man carrying a goose that he gutted in a park went viral alongside a Facebook post in which a woman claimed that a neighbor had her cat stolen and eaten by a Haitian migrant. Now, right away, while I was watching this story, I thought, oh,

I dug in, I double clicked. I saw that the entire story was coming from a Facebook post. And I thought, oh, you in danger. What is that Whoopi Goldberg clip? Molly, you in danger, girl. you don't want to get too involved in this discourse because we have no idea what's actually happening out there i'm not from springfield don't know much about the haitian migrant influx other than it's happening and no one wanted to talk about it on the left until today um but the memes were relentless matt pull up the memes We have seen really, I mean, just a really interesting use, I would say, of ChatGPT. It's interesting. We're not seeing a lot of fake news with chat GPT. What we are seeing is the rapid memification of news, and man who's saving the cats and the ducklings, the kittens and the ducklings from the angry, sort of terrifying foreign horde. It is all, obviously, I think, we just have to be honest here. There's a crazy kind of impossible to miss racist undertone to this um if if if no cats were if no cats were eaten

and you were telling the story of um haitian immigrants eating cats that i don't know how to read that in any way other than you're trying to mislead in a way that triggers our disgust impulse and use it to generalize on an entire group however um i don't think that's as important as the immigration crisis that we're not talking about i do not think that's important that's as important as the fact that a town of 60 000 received 20 000 migrants there are lines out the door of people um at the government services center receiving welfare and food stamps. Okay. There's a housing crisis in Springfield.

There's a housing crisis across the country. And then in the New York Times piece on the revitalization of Springfield, they're talking about, oh, well, no Americans wanted these jobs. No Americans could afford to take these jobs. That's the only, Americans don't have an aversion to working, working class Americans. It's like they have to pay rent. The rent is incredibly high. Americans don't have an aversion to working class Americans. It's like they have to pay rent. The rent is incredibly high. And if the wages are low, the only people willing to do that are new

migrants to the country, usually illegal migrants willing to basically live, tend to a house in a way that's way better than Haiti. And so here they come, whatever, it's a job and we'll just pack ourselves in and we'll take the low wages. And that's that. Now I sound like Bernie Sanders, but that's where the left used to sound. And suddenly they don't care about things like the working class. I do think that's what's happening. I think that it's worth noting that the town denies any cats were ever eaten or they ever heard about that. The police department, I believe it was a police officer just today, I was reading the police department i believe it was a police officer just today i was reading uh the police are saying there actually have been quite a few reports of geese being eaten in the park or

killed in the park and taken home to be eaten but they didn't believe that was really true it seemed racist um and unfortunate that anyone would suggest such a thing i mean we have seen pictures i don't my honest sense is i don't think the cat thing happened. Chris Ruffo put out a bounty. If you have evidence that a cat has been eaten, you can give it to him and you will get $5,000. But I do think a few geese have gotten whacked in the state of Ohio, at least a few. The high level thing here is just there's an immigration crisis. It does matter. We do have to talk about it. And now because of this meme, we are. It's complicated.

It's fraught. Where are you guys standing on this? Have you seen Don't F*** With Cats, the documentary? I think it's on Netflix. No. One of the most insane documentaries. Basically, there's some video that someone puts up of this person. They're like torturing this cat.

up of this person, they're like torturing this cat. And basically like the cat community online goes insane and is tracing like, oh, this power outlet means that it must be in this city. And they go like total, you know, the guy who can like geo-gather off of like, oh, I see the background. I know that this is this city in this country, like the cat community will discover if this is real or not. They will get to the bottom of this. I'm so convinced that, that like people really, really love cats. And if something, something happened to a cat, like the internet will solve it. And the fact that there hasn't been any evidence that's been cut, that's come up, maybe we just need to give it time, but I'm very skeptical. And then if it's a dog, I think if you, if you kill my dog, like I'm going John Wick mode and, and so, and so if it's a dog, I think if you kill my dog, I'm going John Wick

mode. Oh, it's over. And so if a dog was killed and we don't see evidence of someone going John Wick mode, I'm skeptical that a dog was killed. Yeah, I agree with that. I think it's where I want to just add also into the recap, everyone shared. So I also draw a distinction between starting the lie, if it was a lie, and sharing the cat memes, which I think on some level are just objectively funny. The problem is maybe what they do to a group of people, which I think is pretty gross if it's not true. And we have, I mean, there's a whole long list. It's like Don Jr. Obviously, Elonk was in there

um donald trump himself uh well ted cruz there were two different republican congressmen that i saw online um jd vance on twitter not only shared the memes and joked about it and he actually said that he's been receiving calls of pets being um eaten in ohio for a long time he i mean he's straight up i mean he just was like no no we're driving this ship forward and donald trump of course this is the important uh last important point here he brought it up in the debate which we're going to talk about longer a little bit later with just i mean what is objectively an iconic it is now an instantly iconic line please play the clip in In Springfield, they're eating the

dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame. And that is that, John, you were right. Isn't it crazy how much of our political discourse has been driven by people eating different animals like the covid thing was all like bats and and then the rfk thing he was going to eat a bear i guess or something like that and he got where'd he get that you got the word in the park no i i mean i he ran he there was roadkill that was a bear and he dumped it in the park but i I think that there was a quote of him being like, I thought I could maybe eat it. And I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was

going to skin the bear and it was very good condition. And I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator. And you can do that in New York City. You can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear. It makes sense. He has a brain warm. There's something about like you know we're having a big cultural discussion over like what can and can't you eat like and years before it was like the shark fin soup doing a lot of it was conservation based but now it's

devolved into just like what is weird to eat or not well i think that eating someone's pet is not only it's like horrifying yeah it's theft as well as animal cruelty and then the geese thing i think that's illegal if it's ha again if it's if it's happening if it is happening and i don't have any evidence personally that any cats have been harmed in the making of these memes i understand the goose thing a little bit more at least they like look kind of delicious yeah i agree i have thought about the geese. No, don't. People eat.

People eat duck. In the defense of Haiti, I have thought about eating geese. I mean, I've had duck. They're mean, too. But Canadian geese, specifically, in the parks, which are, I think, it's like there's some agreement with Canada. It's a migratory bird thing. I don't know. It's also just weird to eat animals in a park. There's like hunting but that's maybe us that's our culture we

were it's like we're this very i mean you think they just like you think these uh these immigrants just like listen to too much joe rogan and they were like we got to get out there and do some bow hunting like yeah they're trying to get a return they're doing the return meme well we're returning to something i i don't know if we want to go all the way back i mean we want to go maybe some things we want to turn back to you want to turn back to the hunter-gatherer era i don't know about that i'm not ready that's what people were talking about so on top of this um the the pet eating you know there's this instance of an 11-year-old boy dying, which people online were saying that he was murdered by a Haitian immigrant. The actual story is that a Haitian immigrant

got into a car accident with a school bus. And it is still tied to the reality. I mean, he did get charged with involuntary manslaughter, but they are asking for two and a half million dollars and for highway patrol to come help local police because none of these people really understand American driving laws and they are getting into accidents and things are less safe and they need reinforcement for it. I have a question about that. How are you getting your license if you don't understand American? Do you even have a license? Why is there a separate set of rules for people who came here from a different country? You do have to follow. And again, I actually, I've looked at this a bit and most of the people in Springfield are just there to work, right?

Like you have a lot of people in factory jobs, they are working, but you have, when you in sort of move in 20,000 people from a different country that is war torn and fucked and culturally not anything like what we want to be in america it is nothing like we are in america and nothing like we want to be in america you have to expect that there is they're going to be extreme differences and there's going to be certainly a minority probably a large minority that's just not jiving and not fitting in and they should have to fit in you should have to become like america and one of those things is like learn how to drive this is not just what we're saying.

Also, we have reports of this that have predated the cat meme, the great cat meme-ification of the election of 2024. You have nonstop videos being released from locals in Springfield talking about this. And I would finally add,

it's not, I don't believe it's, it's not, so I said racism earlier, it's more like it's culturalism. You have black Americans in Springfield, right? They are not Haitians. There is no similarity in culture between Haitians and black Americans. And you have plenty of black Americans living in Springfield who are pissed about this one of them going wildly viral because he was talking about the duck thing um which one of the congressmen quoted um yeah so i think it's a little it's just more complicated obviously i mean you're 100 right it is just like such a complicated thing and so i feel like we haven't we haven't like had this discussion of like like when there's a crisis nearby there's going to be migrant flows like how do those

cascade through like how do we decide that a hundred thousand is the right number to take in and then twenty thousand went to a single city like is that the right thing like it kind of makes sense to cluster people around their friends and families but then maybe taking a more diffuse approach and spreading people out over the country and you know ingratiating people in smaller numbers might be better and and then also just the question of like should we have done more to prevent the instability in haiti like they had this massive earthquake 7.7 on the Richter scale in 2010. It killed a quarter million people. A million people became homeless.

We saw that happen. It was on the news. We could have predicted that this was going to be more chaos politically. Then there was another earthquake in, I think, 2021 that was super destabilizing. Less people died, but it was still really bad then the president got assassinated which is insane well haiti has always sucked haiti has since they genocided the french it's always been a bad place to be yeah but the question is like like what is there is going to be a negative externality to that chaos what is our role in preventing that negative externality like like right now there's a un plan to send kenyan militant like millet the kenyan military or police force into the country to like fight the gangs and like basically do regime change to turn it from an anarchic like gang state into

something that more resembles who's why is i didn't why is kenya involved who asked kenya who called up kenya the america's paying for it, but I think America- That's crazy. We called Kenya. We're like, yo, you want in? It's yours. It was more like the UN. We'll send the bus tickets.

Go on in. I think it was more like the UN called us and we're like, hey, do you want to pay for this? And Kenya, do you want to go handle this? And Kenya was like, yeah, we'll go handle it. And America was like, yeah, we'll pay for it. That's so strange. Have we called Kenya before in such a way? I don't know. But it is interesting. And it's like, should we have done that earlier? Is this

the right model? If you have an anarchic state on your border, if Canada, take the race thing out of entire, if Canada was like, Justin Trudeau gets assassinated and there's just absolute chaos and gangs are running the country now, it's like, there's going to be a lot of flows. There's going to be a lot of chaos. There's going to be a lot of like weapons dealing. Like right now there's like a massive flow of, of guns from Miami to, uh, to Haiti. You can buy a gun at a gun show for 500 bucks in the States, send it to Haiti and sell it for like $10,000 because that's like what the gangs are willing to pay so there's like this huge economic arbitrage opportunity tons of tons of

like little minor crimes going on all over the place because it's just like war-torn essentially and the question is like like they have autonomy that's a different country like does at what point do we just say no america's going in and stabilizing this like we only will respect you if you have elections regularly or something like that like like when do we do regime change america's been very burnt by the middle east but the middle east all that chaos like when we pulled out like it didn't really flow to our border because it's very far away yeah i agree i think that it's got to be a part of the strategy is just keeping these places from descending into madness it's just hard

yeah um you take south america for example i mean this is a whole continent that seems to love communist revolutions and it's not it's just culturally different and um it's different enough and they've been taught enough like you've seen the evidence of what communism brings to your country enough at this point that at some point it's like okay well it's if you just kind of keep doing it i don't i don't know how you fix that really yeah the learning curve isn't there i or they just don't want it it's like i don't again i think it's we're in this weird place where we kind of have to acknowledge we're told that you know in the context of immigration all cultures are both different and don't exist right they're different because they're special

and great and differences are amazing but they don't exist because integration isn't even a problem. We're all the same fundamentally. And that one of these things is not true, obviously. And I think the one that's not true is that we're not different. I think cultures are obviously different. You see this with the way that obviously Americans have had a much easier time integrating South American immigration than Europeans have had with Islamic immigration. You have a difference. Our religion is the same, are similar. Our language is similar. Our history is similar. There are things that make it easier to integrate. And in the question of Haiti, it's like, when you move 20,000 Haitians to a town of less than 60,000, does that town become more like Haiti? And I think it has to right now, because there hasn't been integration. It has to become more like Haiti, because how do you become

not Haitian if you just came from there? You were raised there, that's your culture. And so there is a slow process of integration that has always happened in america with immigration and we're i don't know we're forced to sort of pretend that that doesn't that that's not a reality of there's also this there's also this very very weird like kind of like doomer aspect to it where like obviously like the crisis in haiti is like a massive tragedy and it and's very rational. If like, if, if your hometown in America was just like, oh yeah, they just assassinated the government. They're like, you're out. People, people say this, like, oh, if Trump gets elected, I'm moving to Canada. Right. Like this is an American thing. And if, and of course they don't actually do it, but if, if like, you know, Biden got assassinated and then Trump got in and he got assassinated. And then all of a sudden there were just gangs everywhere in America.

And like, it was just complete chaos. People really would leave. They really would. But the question is, like, should you want to go back at some point? Because it doesn't feel like at any part of this conversation is like, OK, yes, like like we're being a sanctuary city. We are saving people from, you know from the abject poverty and violence. But long term, we'd love to make Haiti great again. Where's that plan?

And what is it? Is it boots on the ground? Is it the Kenyan military? Is it just a bunch of aid? Is it rebuilding roads? Is Halliburton going to be involved somehow? I don't know. But it seems like that should be the goal, not just let's just like absorb all the haitian population and then we just have this

like empty country that's just like run by gangs like that doesn't that seems like an un seems like an underutilized resource like well they do there's a prison there what if we just turn haiti if i would i'd be willing to talk i would i'd be willing to entertain ha I would be willing to entertain Haiti as the new Australia, actually. And we just spend them. Well, did you know that the Dominican Republic is building a wall? They better. I mean, it's crazy. They're building a massive, massive wall right now.

And I bet it's not controversial. I don't think there's a single Dominican who's like, no, you better not. We have to let the gang lords in. I wonder how how that like discussion will play out i wonder if it will turn into something like oh like the dominicans are you know being really bad and they're like subjugating this population no of course luxury beliefs yeah yeah when you're when you're staring down the barrel of a gun you're not you're not having these conversations. I know you researched this one.

I want to give you a chance to tell us what you learned. I mean, we covered everything in the past 15 minutes. I was going to talk about the car crashes too. I thought that was an interesting and under-discussed part of the story. Well, there are a lot that are actually happening. Yeah, I mean, so I was looking through. It's very difficult actually to research what the truth is right now online because the reaction is so vociferous and

aggressive from the msm if you just search for haitians springfield you'll mostly get fact checks about trump and you never really get too much ground truth, but I did find on a local news site, um, they went and interviewed people from Springfield and one of them said, um, the Haitian community is here. They're going to be here. They're going to start businesses here, but we do have an issue with, we do have an issue with the driving. Um, so this has been a, it seems like it's been a problem for a while. And, to shore up your points, the guy that killed that kid who crashed into a school bus, he did not have a driver's license, but he had one from Mexico for some reason. So I don't know if he immigrated here. Yeah. I'm not worried about that. It's a technology problem.

There'll be a technology solution. I'm not saying problem there'll be a technology problem but they won't crash anymore well john a question you brought up that i thought was interesting um was should we be allowing people to move from one you know from one place in droves to this like a single location like assimilation requires social pressure and once you hit velocity you know with this like group of or you have enough momentum with this group of people does assimilation really occur in the way we need it to um like certainly not in dearborn right yeah it's like uh like every year there's like exchange students that come like we had a german student that came to our our you know high school but it's like one per college per high school class it's not like send all the german students to one high school and and and just like overwhelm it's like it's

very diffused across the population and everyone gets a little bit of you know a taste of the foreign exchange students and the foreign exchange students get to see all sorts of parts of america and it's very like blended across the entire country but i i don't i i really want to know more about like about like you know is there some is there a borders are right now like we know that it's not kamala right but never has been she's never a murderer just like but jokes aside like is there a person who yeah the president demo or like how how should we steer this should we create a little economic incentive for them to go all to one place is there a place that needs them is that is there a city that raised their hands like if china invades

taiwan there's going to be a hundred thousand tai that want to come to America. And we're going to want the TSMC folks to come here. And there are lots of cities that are like, no, no, no, please come here. Like we want to manufacture the chips, like bring all of them to this city. I want this in mind. Like there will be economic incentives to bring those Taiwanese. The Haitians are not building chips and it's a slightly different conversation. I think it's worth asking those questions though like what are we getting as a society and there are just differences between different immigrant groups and taiwan is a great example i agree like it's a very obvious win for america and this feels more like charity that comes with a lot of, at this point, it's like very confusing to talk about

because it's not, I don't, I mean, there's like cat eating. The interesting thing about the cat eating meme is this. No one was talking about this until the cat meme. The meme of Haitians eating cats, and it is a meme now, and it's now being counter- memed um it somehow both makes the problem visible for the first time right there was a lot of effort by the media to suppress the story of springfield completely the fact that this happened um so it makes it impossible to ignore now like you see it or impossible not to see it's visible but at the same time it obscures you from really grappling with it or silences you from talking about it both like both like, it like unblinds you, but mutes you. And that's where we are now where, because it's so fraught, you can't ask questions like, for example, about the faith of Haitians. Everyone's like,

oh, they're Christian. Okay. Well, I am reading a lot about voodoo right now. And you know where I'm reading it from? The New York Times, which wrote about the high incidence of voodoo in that community. Like, what goes into voodoo? What is it? They have a whole long article from 2010 that I stumbled upon this morning, sort of arguing for the softer side of voodoo, like Miss Obscure Voodoo

Source of Comfort in Haiti is the title of this piece, by the way. Please go Google it if you want. The Steelman for More Voodoo in America, which i'm a spooky guy love new orleans um maybe that's a net benefit for america to be dabbling more in satan worship and i don't know the sacrifice they're just returning to tradition they're just we're going back but i'm not going to sit here and pretend saying we all we need to go back we need to go back and then all of a sudden some people show up and they want to go back. And all of a sudden we have a problem with it.

I don't get it. But here, I do think this is, I just want to predict the next media cycle, the way this is going to go. The voodoo thing is going to come up. You heard it here, folks. Voodoo is about to enter the chat. And possibly via the cat sacrifice itself, but maybe some other context. But the religion of Haiti will be questioned and you are going to see an

avalanche of pieces arguing about the sort of inherent racism of questioning the faith of voodoo, which will be sort of formed ad hoc immediately. You're going to have voodoo scholars on MSNBC. You're going to have persecuted voodoo which will be sort of formed ad hoc immediately you're going to have voodoo scholars on msnbc you're going to have persecuted voodoo experts saying like voodoo is a religion

of peace um voodoo is a really is really just another version of christianity and i think it is related to christianity there is like uh it's like christians are practicing voodoo in haiti haitians are generally christian um but i think that's what's coming next and that's just why i mean we can't talk we are sort of incapable of having a real nuanced conversation like uh we need to have on the question of well actually i don't know what are haitians like and do we want a lot more haitians in the country i mean how many is too many is there too many is if if it was possible to have not just not just 20 000 but a third of the country be Haitian, how would the country change? Questions like that, I think, are valid. And in fact,

the country always changes with immigration is the other thing. We say immigration is our strength. The country has changed dramatically over immigration. We always talk about that. We talk about, obviously, Jewish immigration during World war ii we talk about scientific innovation and what that did for us uh we talk about the early immigration of the germans obviously in the wasp we talk about the catholic immigration all throughout the 20th century um we talk about that and it's i don't think that there's ever just a net i don't believe in good or bad i think that things just change and um probably there yeah this is ty Cowen's point. Like if you're going to make an argument about immigration, like you better give me a cost benefit analysis. I don't want to just hear some emotional like, oh, I don't like this type of person. I like that type of person. It's like,

no, let's actually talk about like, what's the benefit? Like what's, what's unemployment like right now? What is unemployment in certain sectors? Like clearly there's very, very low unemployment in chip fabrication. And so everyone very, very low unemployment in chip fabrication. And so everyone's on board with bringing on chip fabricators into the country. But again, it goes back to who the borders are, who's the one that's doing the cost-benefit analysis on this stuff? Because sure, they might come up with a different analysis than what anyone else might, But at least like, I at least want to know that someone did the analysis and we're going to like understand

what that analysis was. And then we can evaluate and learn from that decision instead of just like, oh, this just happened because no one was paying attention and no one cares. I also think though that the emotional reaction to just having your town change at all, you could have taken 20,000 people from any other country in the world and no one there would have been happy with that because you're if you take it doesn't matter what the culture is we don't know that like it's totally possible 100 do know that if suddenly overnight a town of less than 60 000 had 20 000 people from another country in their town. I mean, what if they voted for it? What if there was,

what if there was like a ballot? We'll look at the results of the vote. And once we do that, we can have an honest conversation about this. Okay. But, but theoretically, I think that an American town should be able to vote for that. Should be able to say, you know what what there's this and and we want to do this and this is and this is you know we are democratically choosing to do this well so everything's being seen through the lens of like who is the most in need or hurt it's like slave morality right um so it's not you know do these people like share my values I want them in charge. It's, you know, we're bad.

They need it. They're good. It's very anti-Haiti, the country. You know, it's like America, it will do everything to bring the population here, but nothing to the population there. I mean, I'm assuming

the very best and brightest of Haiti. I'm assuming it very best and brightest of Haiti. I'm assuming it's like the people who don't want to be living in- Yeah, certainly the most industrious. A war-torn hellhole, and they somehow are able to get off of an island and get here. So that is, in my opinion, good. That's something. We have some hurdles in place that have proven that we were getting, you know, some great Haitians, but Haiti's losing them. And as the population dwindles and all you have left are the worst, scariest people there. I don't know. That's a fucking scary place to be. And I'm glad I'm not there. And I don't want to ever be there. Let's talk about the debate.

ever be there let's talk about the debate um riley why don't you break down i mean i guess i'll just say i mean we we've been waiting for a while for this didn't think it was going to happen uh there was a question about micing obviously biden wanted the mics to be cut if trump tried to interrupt what happened was trump flourished under that system kamala then tried to reverse it and go back to the previous sort of situation in which you could interrupt. That didn't happen. She didn't get what she wanted. She did get a couple of fact-checking moderators who clearly were in the bag for her. And we had a debate. We had ourselves a fight. What did you think? Yeah. So after much debate, like you alluded to about the rules of the debate, Trump and Kamala finally squared off where I think it was like 67 million people tuned in to watch, which I guess was significantly higher than the previous Trump Biden debate.

to be on at all times that Trump could interrupt her. She could drop that I'm speaking line and it would be like a nice like Yas Queen moment. As it would turn out, Trump would end up being the girl boss though, because on at least one occasion, he responded to a Kamala interruption with like a I'm talking now. He even at one point hit her with like the quiet,

which he famously did a jet back in 2016. But as for other highlights, you of course had Trump, the aforementioned Springfield Haitians pet story where he said, quote, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people who live there. A lot, like you said, was mentioned about the moderator sort of doing those like live fact checks during the debate, which they did for Trump on more than one occasion,

including after his abortion comments and after those Springfield comments. But yet they didn't do any of those for Kamala, despite comments from her, like repeating the very fine people lie, which has been debunked like a million times at this point. You had Kamala sort of baiting Trump on occasion. You had Kamala sort of baiting Trump on occasion. She pivoted from a question about like the border to sort of like goading Trump about people leaving his rallies early, which he then spent some time, who was busy living his best life, putting on MAGA hats and saying he was going to, quote, do 9-11. I'm going up to my granddaughter's birthday in New York. Then we're going to watch a debate. And then tomorrow I'm doing 9-11.

Miss that guy. Missed that guy. But overall, it was a mostly standard platform slop, which you alluded to in the Daily as well, Solana, all of which was maybe slightly overshadowed afterwards by the endorsement of one Taylor Swift. A cat lady who struck with a vengeance. I do think for the debate, really the expectation for kamala

was be better than a corpse that that was the goal and the goal for trump or the expectation for trump i guess was to be a different candidate like for for the press like if he suddenly came in there and was just a different guy completely um and he failed at that and she succeeded he failed at his and she succeeded at hers i think think that she was charming. I think that she doesn't like, I think she's a charming person generally. Like she seems very fun to that happened was she shook his hand and that's actually really a huge gesture there have been no handshakes for many years i think it's ironic that she's sort of concurrently um trying to put him in prison but i do think it looked really good and she looked really good for doing it i think that she did a fine job. I think that her points were all slop, bullshit. You could have had, I think one of you, I think said it, it might've been Stuart, maybe it was you Riley, you could have trained an AI on both of their Twitter feeds and gotten nothing different. nothing different. There were some highlights, some fun highlights, but in general, we learned just absolutely nothing. Everyone declared victory and it didn't really matter, I think.

I mean, I thought Trump basically lost it on the first question, in my opinion, because the very first question of the debate was, it was for Kamala, but it was framed in this way that said, you know, Trump's whole pitch is asking the question, are you better off than you were four years ago? And so the moderator asks Kamala very directly, do you think the average American is better or worse off than four years ago? It's like a very, very literal, like yes or no, plus or minus question. And she completely dodges it and goes into, oh, well, like I grew up middle class and I'm going to do the opportunity economy and then take some shots at Trump. And instead of just sticking to that question and saying, whoa, she didn't answer the question. Like we need to get her to answer this question.

This is the foundation of my entire pitch. And my entire campaign is, are you better off four years ago? I, I'm not answering any questions in this debate until she answers this one. He just goes off and just starts rambling and just, just does like, you know, like he always does. And, and I just thought that was just so, I mean, it was frustrating to politicians not answering questions. It's nothing new, but it was frustrating that he and his team didn't think it through to say, wait, maybe the move here

is to actually try and hold her to account, even though he famously has never been one to be held to account. But I was just immediately, as soon as I turned it on, I was like, oh, this is going to be a nightmare to listen to. I think her big weakness, I think you're onto something. I would have loved to see a hammering of her on just every position that she has changed since 2019, because these are not small changes. I'm actually down for a changed opinion, but you have to tell me why you have to be like i thought this i i thought that we should defund the police in 2019 um in 2020 and i gave actual rioters money encouraged other people to do so um i was totally wrong the crime situation this country is out of control it was a fun experiment while

it lasted but we need law and order i apologize she's not doing that she's just changing these it's like everything immigration crime uh the writing of 2020 what was the one that you said fracking fracking is a huge one obviously in pennsylvania gun ownership she wanted buybacks uh what about what about here's a good one what about sex change operations for illegal immigrants what about sex change operations for illegal immigrants? What about sex change operations for illegal immigrants? In prison. That's crazy. Wait, was that real?

I thought that was just like a Trump meme. No, that's real. That is real. It's been fact-checked. So the fact-checks have been fact-checked. Really? What was it? One of them wrote, it was Time Magazine wrote a fact-check of that, that they had to correct

because she, in fact, did support government government funded sex chain operations for illegal immigrants she was asked this she answered in the affirmative she followed up she made it very clear that she really really really wanted to make sure that these illegal immigrants were getting sex changes okay fucking was that like and also like one side of that like are you mad about like which side which side should you be i don't know know. That's a whole other conversation. But the point is, I want to see her talk about that. And Trump had this really great opportunity. He, yes, he's changed, right? I mean, he used to be a Clinton supporter. That's how much he's changed, but he has not changed for the last really eight years. I mean, what are the real

meaningful ways that he's, that he's changed? I don't really see that. Everyone changes some positions. I don't think I've ever seen it. John Kerry famously was called a flip-flopper for a couple of things. I've never seen a candidate pivot. Pivot is not really the word here. We're talking about, she is the opposite. She is taking opposite positions of what she took just a few years ago. One of them came up in the debate on the gun ownership where she was like, how dare you spread these lies that I want buybacks? I'm a gun owner.

I'll never take your guns. There are endless clips of her saying, I will do mandatory buyback. This wasn't like when she was some radical college student doing her communist thesis or whatever the fuck Barack Obama was doing back then in the day when he was being mentored by a literal terrorist, Bill Ayers. He's had a lot of years to evolve. Kamala was doing this three years ago. Come on, ask the questions. And he couldn't do that. But again, I don't expect much from debates. Debates always kind of... When's the last debate

that there's been one debate that has mattered and we just saw it? And I don't think... I think asking for two debates that matter in a single election when there hasn't been a debate that's mattered for the last 30 years is maybe being a bit greedy. Yeah, I agree with that. And I, I guess my sort of hot take, and I'd be curious to know what you guys think about this. I think the T Swift endorsement afterwards, much bigger needle mover than anything Kamala said at the debate. Like I saw a post debate poll that said voters trust Trump on the economy more after the debate which he supposedly did bad at uh than they did before so like while yes kamala had some good like scripted lines i think taylor swift if her comments lead to even like a small marginal increase in her

millions of fans registering to vote i think that's so much more impactful yeah and i think the like trump supporters are really letting their ass hang out on this one. Just ignore it. Don't engage with that. Don't be mad at her. Don't attack people for listening to her. I'm pretty sure Elon technically suggested, offered to impregnate her. I would just personally stay out of it. I would just personally not touch it. I mean, she had already endorsed Biden. This wasn't a surprise.

I know, it's silly. Obviously, you're going to endorse the next candidate. It's just that she waited to drop it until a pretty good moment. Which, I believe, Riley, maybe someone said this to me, but that was a great... That was really smart.

Oh, yeah, totally. And she held the cat which was like yeah fighting back at the cat and stuff like lulu had a great yeah breakdown lulu had a great thread about the taylor swift endorsement and why it was so smart yeah from a pr perspective which of course is all taylor cares about and that uh and she's great at it i mean she is like really i don't even know she's like what is a and she's great at it. I mean, she is like, really, I don't even know. She's like, what is a great, she's like, I don't know. I'm trying to think of a good apex predator. What kind of animal is she? Well, a snake. I was there for the redemption era, which underrated.

I have a hot take about debates generally. I think that it's more valuable to go back and watch the previous debates than the current debates, because you can actually see with the clarity of four years, like what they said and then what they did and whether or not they were right or wrong on those issues. Like going back and watching, I mean, it's, it's very interesting because I watched the Kamala Mike Pence debate. And in that, that was where the I'm speaking came from. But if you actually watch that clip, she was going over time and the moderator was telling her that she needed to wrap up.

And then Pence says, look, I really got a response. She's said a bunch of things like, can I please go? Moderator, can you do something? And then the moderator says another thing like, you really need to stop? And then she looks at Pence and says, I'm speaking. And then the moderator says, 15 more seconds. And I remember the audience cheering at that point. Oh, yeah.

She played it really well. Let's go, feminism! Yeah, but Pence, I mean, and the funniest thing is that pence is like he's not like that that line it feels like something that was directed at trump like oh she was like she was being talked over but pence literally at the start of the question he's sitting there taking notes like writing things down which like he's listening very like husband and wife notes. Wow. Yeah. He's sitting there like taking diligent notes being like, okay, like I need to fact check

this and I need to do this. And it's like, this guy's not like some aggressive debater. Like he's like very much like, okay, I'll, I know how I'll rebut that. And, and then she like, you know, takes the opportunity as soon as he chimes in, even though the moderator had already said something, she gets the quote, which is really smart. Really, really, really, really, really high quality. I'm going to pull that on one of you guys. If you interrupt me during this, I just want to talk to someone who interrupts me.

She did too. She was sitting on it all night and she got her chance. Yeah. It seemed very strategic. Like if you go over time, there's a chance that they will speak over you. There's this male, female dynamic. You can kind of goad him into saying something as you're going over time and then you can clap back and that will be powerful. Did you guys think it was weird at all? Oh, you could say I'm speaking to me.

Did you think it was weird at all though, that austerity politics were completely left out? I thought that, you know, spending should have at least some place. We talked about inflation a little bit. What are they going to say? They both agree we should spend ourselves to death. They both want to spend us into the apocalypse. So what are they going to disagree with each other?

They agree on everything. They agree on everything now. They agree on everything. It's the worst election to be anti-gun,-fracking anti-israel anti-immigration both candidates apparently are anti all those things i think they do disagree on or pro all those things on like the like trans culture war stuff but if you press kamala i don't know what her answers would be today she might just be ready to throw a she might be ready to throw the trans bus that's the trans lobby under the bus at this point.

Yeah, it's the same. Drive it over. She has done that to everything else. But I would say, has she gone after Trump hard on immigration? Actually, for real. She's not really committing to the bit for me. If she had said, I really am sorry. I was wrong.

This is a disaster. It wasn't me. It was Biden. And let me explain to you what he did i told him the whole i said joe you got to do something but that man has dementia you saw him debate like oh my god it's fucking insane what i was putting up with in that white house trying my best and then she just accurately says you know he hid me away for years they didn't want me speaking refuse to let me out here so i could tell you what was going on we have

she's like it's crazy out there i've been there they're they're letting in rapists murders and guess what donald trump you didn't build the wall and you should have and i am gonna put the wall and i'm gonna make mexico pay for it i'd be like i mean maybe maybe a lot in the campaign office he's gonna win this for the dems don't let her see it because i don't believe her see it. Because I don't believe her. I don't believe either. I mean, they're both come on. It's like the age of it's like the age of clown. It's just this is what politics is now. Yeah. I mean, to your point about austerity politics, I went I also went back and watched the 2016 Trump Hillary debate. And it

was very interesting because Hillary is saying like her economic plan will not increase the deficit whatsoever. And, and, and then she, and then she says like, and look, I've turned my website into a fact checker to check all of like Donald Trump's lies. And that just seems so ridiculous to me because like the, I feel like there hasn't been a single day when the deficit went down. Like the deficit just goes up every day, matter what like the best thing we can hope for is a candidate who like increases it at a slightly less rate because it's going up what's also just interesting that no one even believes in no one believes fact checks anymore so you would never even say that they're just lie they both lie constantly on stage

the whole time like that's there's not a day that goes by where they don't lie uh speaking of but on the debate i do want to do um i do want to introduce uh the polymarket segment this is our thank you to polymarket our uh paid partner they are a huge supporter of us is why we get to do a lot of the cool stuff we do like talk about haitian voodoo cats and uh i don't know whatever the fuck happened at this last debate and uh probably i mean sex change operations for immigrants i don't know if shane wants me to talk about all of that we never really got into it but if i asked him to run a market on it he might let's look though on i want to do a standard i want to do i want to take a look at where just these candidates are today.

There's no better time to do it than after the debate. And here we go. Here's what we're looking at today. On the morning of the debate, Kamala's odds of winning the presidential election stood at 45%. Following the debate, her odds climbed to 50%, narrowly surpassing Trump, who now stands at 49%. While this surge is encouraging for Harris, a broader look over the past month reveals a downward trend from her peak of 54%. So just very quickly, I was actually, during the debate, I was at a work event, and people were all very keyed into the fact that Kamala surged following this on the markets, which was shocking to see. And in the very next

morning, I noticed that she was already losing again. But I think she's winning again at this point. It appears Harris's overall election odds have improved after getting three to 5% in most of the swing states. The one swing state where she has struggled to make any progress is Ohio, home to Springfield, which remains which remains 91 in favor of trump showing no loss of momentum following the debate um which is actually that's really interesting presumably if you had some sort of horrible lie about what was happening in springfield they would care but jd jd is also the senator there so well senator of ohio right yeah i mean i don't know how close he was to well

certainly you're right that's a good point um many on right-wing twitter have urged trump to visit springfield and seize on the immigration stories but as of now the odds of that visit happening are only nine percent on polymarket so at this point i guess uh it does look like kamala's winning again at 50 but there's been a a back and forth. It's weird that it's been bouncing back and forth. After the Taylor Swift endorsement, after the election, obviously she was winning. But again, I woke up the next day, she was not. Now she is again.

The time of this release, which is just, it'll be like 12 hours from now, about a little less than 24, we'll see what happens. I don't know. I don't know what to make of it at this point it seems like again i think it's an interesting that it's been an overall loss of momentum still she's still significantly down from her entrance into this uh competition but that was her last moment i don't think there's gonna be another debate. So the rest of it's just gonna be, I don't know, the slow decay of both of their stories over time and then whatever the hell happens in October

because you know something crazy is about to happen. I wonder if the pro-Israel slash, maybe I should call it anti-Hamas, commons, lost her, Michigan. Interesting. Could, definitely. And it will be interesting to track i saw one that was interesting on uh muslim support for both candidates and it wasn't it did not add up

to 100 it was like both sub 20 and i was like who are they voting for i didn't double click did anybody see that no but i think it was on there but Jill Stein? Yeah. They're all Green Party. They're like, yes, we want to caliphate and renewable energy. Those were two issue voters. No, we want to caliphate and we're willing to put up with green energy. I think that's the framing. Yeah. Definitely.

Yeah, but there are some conflicts there. Do you think a second- We're not on board for the trans immigrants. They're not. Do you think a second on board for the trans that the trans immigrants they're not in the second debate it's going to happen did you see trump on fox how he was talking about oh i don't want to do it you know i saw him shake her hand today uh or yesterday at the september 11th thing and he said good job yesterday which was interesting to me but that say that say that he's, well, he like, you know what I really thought at the top of that debate? The very first few moments I thought,

I think he's thinking she's kind of hot. And I think he was a little, like she shook his hand and he was like, I don't know what to fucking do with that. And I think that she, I really do believe that he looked at her and she is kind of hot. I think you need to be objective about this there's something kind of hot about her it's the way she moves and talks and she fucking rattled him and uh i think he's still thinking about her and when i saw him shake her

hand and be like you did a good job i he's still rattled he is it's not like he's not rattled about her he's he doesn't know what to do with her right now and um and he said, good job. Does that mean he wants another debate? I don't think so. I think that... Do you think he should do another debate? I think he'll give it a couple of weeks and he'll see how he's doing in the polls. And if he's got an edge,

there's no reason to debate and he won't. Is the VP debate on October 1st? Yeah. I wonder if that's going to... That'd be interesting. Another thing we've never seen is a vt a vp debate that mattered so maybe this will be an historic year where we get one of those as well we'll see yeah i i definitely think it's in trump's favor to do another debate

because it seems like you know it was his first time debating her he was a little bit off of his game she was pretty good but over time there's like a mean reversion and he just needs like to find a couple more openings find some uh like you know clippable moments yeah i mean she aimed so center on some of this stuff it was hard for him to disagree with her in the way that he normally does and the the types of lying you know that's like going on during these debates is so different like trump has his like super self-aggrandizing um the kind of the biggest audience that's ever seen me and they stay the longest and yeah like just brazen yeah and her lives are much more organized and so it they really just depends on someone

to ask themselves like do i believe this person yeah when he called when he called into fox he was like i have 14 polls that show that i won the debate and fox is like our poll showed that you lost the debate yeah which polls donald's where are you getting these polls he can't stop triggering tds i think that's the his team should should be like, don't trigger TDS. You know, like, because you could stop triggering TDS. True. Like, he has a specific way of triggering it, and it's by the self-aggrandizing.

Well, also, the cat thing. What he knew going into that, that it was going to be fact-checked, he... What did Eric from our team said? He's like, he walked right into that fact-check happily. He said, they're eating your dogs dogs the people who are coming here they're eating your cats they're eating the pets of the people that's like that that is designed to blow someone's lid and i mean i really think he just like he does this intentionally like the the good people on

both sides the bloodbath the dictator on day one he figures out how to create these stories that will trigger tds make people go crazy but then if you dig down into the fact check you can see that like oh okay it was a little more nuanced and the media took it out of context and that can work really well to like yeah the true fans because they're like oh well this is evidence of their they're saying he said something crazier than he did and i i saw the full clip and it's not that crazy but at the same time it's like if you're on the edge like you are going to push more people away with that type of rhetoric because it's designed to kind of trigger people i just don't know who's still undecided it's we've we've seen these people we've they've been around since 2015 right like i i don't know

like the the there's like no one knew what commonwealth policies were and and i think people still don't know you know she's like she said that she owns a gun. Is she pro gun? And then will she be pro gun in three years if they win the majority of the house and Senate? Like, you know, it's like, there's a, there's a really wide gap between like, okay, she's like scoring some political points, but like, will she actually advance my agenda? Because like, yeah, maybe if you don't like Trump and you're like, Hey, like she's saying that she's going to check for the important boxes for me. Like that's enough, but she has changed her position a lot. And so like, if you believe that the change is real, then she could be a great candidate to some people. I just had this crazy vision of like Mad Max dystopia. And like, like I did, I really did. I just like, I truly did. And I saw

myself and I, I just said, well, fuck it. It's Mad Max now. And I felt relief. It was like this strange, no longer hoping it's not going to come thinking I can maybe do my part to help try and prove it's just, it's over. It's Mad Max now. It's like lord's over it's mad max now it's like lorded over by i mean it's like the democrats pack the court and you get dictatorship or something and we're all in not me i'll be on the road with a dog and a truck and a gun and uh but it'll be straight up mad max there's something weirdly comforting about it i've got to say i don't understand if america becomes mad max i'm moving to haiti and i'm going to take over that country i'll probably just go back to san francisco and stay there full time i mean same difference really uh internet is back it's pirate idolate Idol, guys. Welcome. Thank you for joining Trent, Olivia, Louie.

We have been just, I mean, going strong for weeks now. I'm pretty sure that we're just about to wrap up the first round. So next week, I think, is going to be our last of the first

grouping. And then we'll figure out, I don't know, the rules moving forward. I'm kind of making it up as I go, as is my way. I'm stoked to have you all here. We're just going to get into it today. Or should we, I guess we may recap on how folks are doing. It's kind of all over the place. I'll tell you what, I've been talking to the Polymarket guys and we might actually do like a polymarket like a betting segment on the pyro pyro victor um so yeah stay tuned for that for now let's just get into the show uh the rules are sort of standard as always i'm going to or really riley is going to break down the topic of the week then each contestant is going to kind of say hello where are they from tell us something cool about themselves or the world.

They're going to give us their take. You all and us, whoever, can jump in, can dunk, can compliment, can add to whatever take. Just like have a conversation with us. And then you guys in the comments or the viewers in the comments should sort of say what you think about the topic, what think about the contestants um we have become i think a little bit nicer you know this is sort of the way of pirate wires is we have like this really negative angry brand but really we're all very nice we're the nicest i think um the nicest and the greatest maybe trump would say but let's just get into it riley you're up my man break down the incel pandemic. Sure thing. So your topic this week, contestants, comes from a story we wrote about in The Daily. According to a new Stanford study,

the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a continued recession in Americans' dating lives. The study's author estimates 13.3 million more Americans were single by 2022 than they were before the pandemic, with young people being especially impacted. Bloomberg writes, rather than creating a temporary disruption, COVID seems to have accelerated the U.S.'s decades-long decline in connection and community. Damn. So it's like population crash adjacent we've got covet in there we've got gen z which i i mean ripe for making fun of louis i think you probably are gen z um right on the cusp of gen z and millennial so i'm 27 years old born in 97 so i don't know am i gen z i don't even know well you could be our translator you could be the gen z whisperer you could translate for me because i

can't understand half of it. The only thing I know about Gen Z are the giant pants, and I could not explain them if I had to. Those, like, weirdly shaped, huge pants. Anyway, a different topic. I like the big pants. That's a whole other topic. Louis, you are back.

You came in last week, had some technical difficulties. It was a tragic moment. You seemed very sad, but you've risen like the phoenix. What do you think about your incel compatriots? And is it or not sort of the response of or in response to COVID? Is COVID to blame for the fact that you kids are not fucking? I do think that COVID definitely exacerbated the problem. But to me, I think the problem is declining testosterone levels. So if you look at a chart from like, yes, we're like, yes, yes.

Yes. If you look at a chart of testosterone levels, like from the 1980s up until now, you'll see a very clear downward trajectory, which is very alarming. And obviously, if men don't have high testosterone levels, well, then they're not going to have the gumption or the motivation to go up to the girl and talk to the girl. They're not going to have that energy to want to procreate because that's literally what testosterone is. And so I think that's one of the problems that we need to kind of solve first and foremost. Secondly, I do think that phones are also a problem because phones, well, smartphones, they provide instant gratification, right?

So if you're horny and you're too nervous to go and talk to a girl, you can just go to Pornhub.com, see some, I don't know, big booty Latina. Is that what you see, Louis? Is that what you see on Pornhub.com? I'm a Latino, so I've been around some big booty Latinas in my life. Show us your tobs. I don't see that. Porn is degenerate. Porn is bad.

Don't do porn, kids. It's the worst thing ever. It should be banned, frankly. That's a different subject. Yeah, and you go and you can gratify yourself by watching some porn video. You know, I'm not going to get into the details, but... You can. It's Firewires.

What do you like to get into? I'll do it for the children who might be watching. There are some children watching actually, so we shouldn't. Exactly, exactly. I learned through Olivia, which we'll get into in a minute. Interesting, yeah. So besides the instant gratification thing, also like back in the day,

people didn't have smartphones to use as a crutch. So for instance, if you were like a college freshman in the 1970s, right, and you went to some social gathering and like you got socially anxious because you were with the cool kids or whatever. You can't you couldn't just like pull out your smartphone and go into a corner and start scrolling through Twitter, acting like you're doing something more productive or more cool. You had to actually face your anxiety and go and talk to people and make conversation. And I think our phone is kind of like a crutch in a way. And so there's like, there's multiple aspects as to why phones are like a problem when it comes to loneliness. You know, I thought you were going to tie it to... I mean, roughly, I think it's like we kind of don't know any one of these roads.

This is an interesting road worth walking down and seeing what's up there, researching more, finding out more. Cell phones are new, right? This whole thing is a new... It's a really new technology that should be... I mean, technologists have been saying for decades, it's been a truism that the internet has fundamentally changed society. Mobile internet has fundamentally changed society. Okay, well, the thing about fundamental change is it is fundamental.

We should see evidence of change everywhere in everything that we do. I think dating is a really good example of it. It's not quite clear how. I do sometimes wonder about the tea thing. And because this is another thing where I've really dug in trying to understand what's causing the T decline, which does seem to be real. No one has a good answer. And I wonder if it's the phones. They're in our pockets. On that point, now that you mentioned it. So supposedly, I Googled this really quick before coming on. Screen time does, like if you have excessive screen time, it does correlate to lower testosterone levels. Okay, I have another really crazy one that I have to share.

This one, this is one of my craziest, and I think it's a novel idea. So I would like someone to, maybe some scientists out there listening to Pyrowires can do some research on this. I think it's worth exploring. on this i think it's worth exploring so wouldn't it make sense from an evolutionary psychology standpoint to um for humans in high concentrations to have lower testosterone right if you have huge like very sort of um what is it uh high population density the higher the population density in a group you would want some lower t so men specifically, are less likely to fight and more likely to get along. Well, how would you even know that you're in high concentrations of people? Obviously, there are hormonal things that you think about. There are, I don't know,

something else. Who knows what it could be? But one obvious one is just visual stimuli. If you see evidence of tons of people all around you, perhaps that alone would be sufficient to lower your T. And now all day, every day, we're on our phone looking at other... Of course, we had television and we had walking around the park and seeing people, but the phone is right in your face. You were scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. There's people everywhere. Every single second of your day, there are people. And I wonder if it's just that, which again, sounds crazy. Zero evidence, total, complete, like, fake news type opinion in terms of, like, don't quote me on it. This is not a peer-reviewed journal.

But I wish that it would be. I would like a peer-reviewed journal to look at it. So, maybe it's just more complex social hierarchies. When you have people in greater concentrations, it gives rise to these complex hierarchies. And people that are lower have demonstrable measurable decreases in testosterone. So if you've got a really complex society, a king on top, there's going to be fewer people that can occupy the upper strata. And therefore you would expect to see decreases in T across those lower. So awareness of the hierarchy. Yep. There's a study that shows men how they change their voice around different groups of

people. So, for example, if an attractive woman is nearby, they will subconsciously lower their voice. But if there's a man they perceive to be potentially stronger than them, they will make their voice higher. Oh, yeah. I don't want to fight. Do you know where you see this the most? At the gym. Most at the gym.

You go, men in a gym, nowhere will you see a more peaceful, hushed voice than in the male locker room where guys are like, hey, could you, oh, thanks, bye. Like, it's like, it's the most, it's very much on display. Like all over the gym, you see this. Yeah, interesting. I've also read, maybe Brandon, I think you told me this, that when men take positions of leadership, their T spikes. Because we published a piece, I think, a while ago on the testocalypse, I believe it was called.

Yeah, it can change by situation. Like if you move in one day, if you move from a scenario where you are in a high sort of position in the hierarchy to a scenario where you're in the middle of the hierarchy, for example, your T levels do change. But a lot of these studies are flawed because your T levels naturally change per the time of day. So I think maybe at night it's highest. I'm not totally sure. But a lot of the science is difficult to sort of pin down.

That explains the late night booty calls. Yeah. Also probably the morning. We don't have to get graphic let's just let's just let's move on actually before we move on louis who are you and where are you from and um tell us tell us an interesting fact about yourself an interesting fact okay i'm from the southern border i think that's very interesting i am interested in the southern border these days especially yeah yeah so the river is literally a block away from my house so i well in my house

back home i live on 6th street the river is like on 8th street if there were an 8th street so south texas right on the border i think that's a pretty interesting fact but as far as what i do i'm an editor at the daily caller i've been here for like a year i've been working in news for almost two years and yeah that's that's me wow so oh man you know what we're gonna have to just it's a it's a whole other topic but i have a lot of border border questions and border wall questions and damn it's too bad that you weren't here for the haiti segment we know we today we discussed uh obviously we had to discuss the cats um but for it for another day uh trent you're up sir where are you from where are you where are you reaching to us where are you calling us from and uh yeah tell us tell us something about the world and then i'm gonna ask

okay so i'm trent faller i'm in Colorado right now, about 20 minutes east of Denver. Louis got to do an interesting fact about himself. So do you want a fact about him? I want it. Or a fact about me? Okay. Give it about you. I suppose I'm learning Mandarin alongside my daughter.

She's in a Mandarin language program. Wait, why? Well, because I think it's going to be a very important language in the future. And she's half Guatemalan, so we figured we could get Spanish for free, just spending summers with her family who don't even speak English. So she and her brother should come out of high school trilingual. Dude, I don't think it's going to be... No offense at all.

I mean, obviously, I'm not going to judge the Mandarin lessons. I think that China's fucked. I just saw the chart today about the collapse of Chinese startups.'re it's you should really matt actually i'm gonna let's pull up that chart it's really dramatic um i think we need to believe there's an enemy there because i don't know it's like the last time that we felt that we were great was when we were fighting a giant enemy and then spent a while um but i'm not really worried about china i think you'll be speaking english and spanish for sure so she's definitely set up no matter what though and it'll be cool to learn chinese imagine like yeah ordering chinese food in chinese that's exciting and novel at college will be really all

our friends will think she's really cool i mean it doesn't even matter what happens with china economically in 10 years you're gonna have air have AirPods that can translate into any language immediately. Everybody will be monolingual. But that doesn't mean it's not valuable to learn a new language. It can be like learning to drive a manual sports car. That can be fun and exciting. I encourage that. It's probably good for your brain, but I don't think it's going to be very practical, even if China takes over the world.

We'll see. We shall see. Well, they've been promising that real-time translation for rather a while. I do grant that generative AI has gotten much, much better. I've worked with a bunch of generative AI companies, so I know how fast all of that is moving. So you could be right, but I have been hearing that for some time. And I think the cognitive benefits will still accrue regardless of all the rest of it. But you could be right. Hopefully, our enemy does collapse. but it's fortuitous that you phrased it that way because some of my take actually centers around that.

So I'm going to stake out a somewhat contrarian position in as much as I don't think COVID-19 has all that much to do with the epidemic of loneliness and isolation that we're seeing. I think the pandemic was just the latest in a long series of insults and injuries to a basic sense of optimism that we once felt about ourselves,

the world and the future. So when you're trying to elucidate a complex social phenomenon like this, it always helps to do comparisons. And I took the liberty of looking up the reproduction stats before and after World War II, which was arguably the last time we faced existential risk of this kind. And you guys all know that our forefathers triumphed in that conflict, came back and had so many babies that it permanently distorted the demographic structure of the United States. And the numbers are something like it nearly doubled, the reproduction rate nearly doubled over about a 20-year period from 2.2 up to 3.8. So not quite a doubling, but pretty close. And I don't want to make light of the suffering and the loss that happened during COVID-19 to say nothing of the concomitant erosion of civil liberties we saw

from being locked up in our houses. But I think we can all agree that sitting at home with access to air conditioning and Netflix and running water doesn't compare to sailing across the ocean, storming Normandy and facing down the greatest evil to have ever emerged on the European continent. So given that we were able to weather that far more dire storm with a basic sense of self-respect intact, I don't see how COVID-19 is responsible for what we're seeing today. And I think there are two basic lenses that we can use to try to figure out what's going wrong here. And the first and slightly more shallow is just the broader spectrum fraying of the social fabric of American life. So by a

fortuitous coincidence, I happen to be reading Bowling Alone right now, which is Robert Putnam's ethical study of the decline of civic participation in American life. It's arguably the most comprehensive such study that had ever been written. It's not that the social fabric was destroyed by COVID-19. It's that we went into it badly frayed already. So we were not embedded in a rich tapestry of social connections that would allow us to get through it with resolve. Instead, we went in already isolated. And that was just exacerbated by the isolation

that we experienced from the lockdowns. And I think the deeper reason, and I'm going to soapbox a little bit here, but I think the deeper reason is that the fire in Western civilization is flickering and dying. I think that we no longer see ourselves as a spiritual and moral beacon for the world. I think we no longer see ourselves as serious people. And I don't think we any longer see ourselves as part of a glorious project that's worth understanding and sustaining. And this isn't terribly surprising. How would you expect people to respond when they've spent decades being told by communists and the woke and postmodernists that their civilization is uniquely responsible for every evil that has ever befallen the world, that their very existence is

offensive, and they should be sorry, begging on their knees for forgiveness for every breath that they take. How would you expect people to respond when we've been told every year that we're just right around the corner, there's a global climate change induced conflagration that's going to destroy the entire world and consume us all in fire. Like it's no surprise that in view of seeing that, that people don't have the hope required to go out and make these connections, to start families, to have kids, all of which are, in my view, inherently optimistic and hopeful acts. And in preparation for this, you sent us a Bloomberg article, and I actually thought there was a really good quote in that that I want to read. It comes from near the end, and it's from Joanna Hsu, whose name I know how to pronounce because I'm learning Mandarin, by the way. She's the director of the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers.

She says, what we're seeing is a dramatic lack of hope. And she goes on to say, people are in a funk about politics. People are in a funk about the economy. It would not surprise me if that was connected to being in a funk in more personal areas. People feel defeated. We aren't isolated, alone, sick, and depressed

because we somehow forgot how to strike up conversations during COVID-19. We're in that state because we've been under a very quiet siege for a very long time that has undermined our sense of optimism. And I think that's what's ultimately playing into it. I think I agree with a lot of what you said. I think it's something that has happened slowly, so it's been hard to track. But certainly, I was thinking just about this not too recently, the context again of technology,

how there are these sort of unambiguous goods that you think in technology, for example, video calls like this. And you think, well, what could possibly be the negative externality there? And then I wondered, how much less likely am I to maybe visit my family because this feels so much like that. You know, it's similar. It gets just close enough. In the days before when, you know, calls were difficult, I probably wouldn't even have moved across the country. I would have not wanted to leave my family, you know. And it's just been a slow sort of maybe degradation of that.

And then through our topics today and just recently a lot I've been thinking about is what even is America? I have a sense of it and I have a sense of American identity, but I wonder, you have 20 million immigrants, somewhere between 15 and 20 million illegal, on the illegal side of immigrants over the last four or five, six years. What is their sense of America? What are they integrating? What are they expected to integrate into even? And what are we expecting them to integrate into? It's just to a certain extent, we've sort of been reduced to an economy in the world. We just happen to be people living between these borders. That's just that we just happen to be the people who were born here or who

came here and naturalized. And I think on the one hand, there's a loss of a sense of American identity at all that we're united around a common set of precepts. And there's also this insidious idea that if you expect immigrants to learn English and to assimilate into the society, that's racist. Somehow you're erasing their identity and that's bad.

So on that two fronts, you have just this erosion in the, the idea that there could be an american identity i like the i like the covid being like over overstated take but i i'm still a little loose on like what what is your solution no one who has a solution that's a that's that is not the assignment i would never ask someone to solve the population crisis on the pirate wires podcast i mean unless and put testosterone in it put test put test in the zin packages and i was told last week that zin boosted t naturally yeah i'm riffing on nicotine john is that true, by the way? The evidence is a little weak on that.

Highly correlated, obviously, because look at who's using the product. Olivia, solve the population crash. No, I'm kidding. First, just, Olivia, welcome to the pod. Who are you? Where are you calling in from? And then let's get into the question at hand, which is the installification of the Zoomers. Cool. So I'm Olivia. I'm living in Nashville. I worked in tech, in sales for my career until

most recently. I'm a PM for an 11-month-old. So that keeps me super busy. A fun fact is Chris from season four, episode four is my husband. I was going to ask you that, but I didn't want to blow up your spot in case you guys were trying to keep it private. No. So you got a little intermarital competition. Once the polyamory guys- Chris, the contestant from the last episode, Chris Duvall.

Oh, an idol contestant. I got it. Wow. You guys are flooding the zone. Yeah. We're big Pirate Warrior fans. We got to participate. Okay, so I've got a dunk, a real take, and a hot take.

My dunk is I think the low T argument is really funny, but I don't think it's accurate. For the reason of like, if we go back 50 years, were all these guys really cold approaching women all the time i don't think that they were i think in reality there were like social scenarios set up more often where like you're interacting casually with women and then maybe you're friends and then that slowly progresses to like a romantic relationship um the cold approach is actually like not best for women in the sense that they're forced within like five seconds to make a judgment call on like if i should trust this guy to spend more time with

him um i looked it up quick too and there's a study that says in a risk of our sexual markets cold approach you're gonna yield a higher percentage of dates with more sexually unrestricted or crazy women. Oh, you know, a crazier woman would be way more willing to like take a bet on the random guy that hits her up at the bar. Okay, so that's my dunk on the low T argument. My real take, I really agree with Trent in the sense that like, there's been a slow decline through the internet through our phones through covid of like our third spaces being gone so you've got your first second and third spaces home place of work and then like some social space you go often and for a lot of people two thirds of those are completely gone like if they work remotely their workspace is gone, and then their social spaces are gone. And I think phones

like really steal a sense of agency. And also they like restrict boredom, which is an incredibly powerful emotion for agency. So I'm thinking back to like my parents, my in-laws, my in-laws met at a church dance. My parents met at a club called JJ's in upstate New York. And it's like, they were at those places because sitting at home was lame and boring. And so it's like, let me go out and interact with people. But now your phone is just as entertaining as potentially going out in public.

So why would you go out? And then I would say my hot take is bring back arranged marriages. I agree. I think I'm the minority in that I actually would have trusted my parents to find me a spouse. I know that's not the case for most people, but maybe it's a friend. Maybe it's somebody else. Maybe it's pirate wires setting you up with a husband or wife. You know, I've been asked, I have literally, I was asked for a dating service just last week.

I was asked for a dating service. It was a guy. He just, he had just broken up with his girlfriend because he felt he could not talk to her about, I mean, it was very, I didn't recommend this. I don't recommend breaking up with your girlfriend. If you can't talk about pirate wires articles with them. But that was roughly what I was getting. And he was like, I would love to meet someone who likes the same things that I like. And I was like, I don't know. I don't know that you need that, by the way. I think that you could have a partner who just

likes you a lot and you guys have different things. But anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt. Sorry. Did you have something to say there i just i i pyro wires dating is something i i do think about though we're like we do skew male i mean let's just call a spade a spade yeah i'm not surprised um but no that was the extent of my that was my hot take bring back arranged marriage what do you mean bring back like what did america ever do that a rose marriage was yeah i feel like that's like not an american tradition is it is there no version of that in europe i thought the love marriage was pretty new basically certainly marrying here certainly marrying for love is quite new in the grand scheme of reality. That's like a human existence. That's a, that's a

new thing. Yeah. I mean, I, I think like one of the under discussed technologies that's probably having a huge effect here is just the invention of contraception. And maybe we're still feeling like the effects of that because there's, they just completely rewrote like the, the, the way dating kind of progresses. And I imagine that a lot of the, a lot of like the, the, the the the way dating kind of progresses and i imagine that a lot of the a lot of like the the the giga chad high t males in the baby boomer generation like they came back they had kids and they were like i have some level of responsibility here and so i'll settle down um and kind of progress that way um and and maybe like maybe the the phones and the technology it will have an effect

and it's having an effect now but maybe the bigger effect is going to come in 50 years and maybe the thing that we're experiencing here is actually still from the contraception that was invented 70 years ago. Maybe, but I mean

boomers were having kids, man. our boomers were having kids man even boomers were having like much bigger families than than gen x or millennials yeah yeah yeah and and and i think a lot of that was due to like a lower prevalence of of uh i think it's more the cultural acceptance of using protection so the idea of using a condom today and being like, oh, I couldn't do that because it's against my religion seems crazy. Like no one, you would not hear that. Whereas that was pretty, I mean, I was raised Catholic and my parents are like kind of, they're like, well, they definitely used protection.

But I do think- The Pope was against contraception until they're against it no they're still against it as the resident catholic here i'm a catholic oh yeah we're totally against and uh premarital sex it's all very bad i i liked um olivia used there were two things there that that you said that i really resonated with me one was bored um i agree i think that it's like really important to be bored generally separate from this conversation i think about this a lot but boredom as you said i love your the idea that yes it provokes you to sort of go and find something to not be bored and often that brings

you to people or projects or something um but but also it's just like it's a weird talk about things that aren't lindy sort of living a life without boredom is not Lindy. That's really new. And I think there's, separate from what the more obvious things that could be a problem with just no longer being bored ever, there are probably things that we don't know and aren't thinking about. This is a huge, again, fundamental change to the way that we exist in the world that has never existed before. It really matters that we talk about it. And another one I was thinking about, you're talking about third spaces. Agreed. They're all gone. I think church is a big one where people used to meet their partners, obviously their neighborhood, neighborhood

community things. The only third space that we really have now is a bar. Problematic for a bunch of, I think, more obvious reasons. Another one though is work. My parents met at work. I think meeting at work is probably historically over the last handful of decades since more women have been in the workforce was pretty common. I've had a lot of fights, even with fairly based friends at work about this. I think it's totally fine to date people at work. And I think it's crazy that we expect people not to date at work, not to meet someone and then date at work. that we expect people not to date at work, not to meet someone and then date at work. It's like, oh, they're weird. Especially during the Me Too era, this would come up a lot and people would say, oh my God, you just shouldn't do it. You shouldn't mix work and romance. It's like, that's not the way it works, my friend. You meet someone and you're into them and you want to be with them. And if you have a strong social walls up against that, just driving people away from that, or even just against relationships in general. Our culture became pretty averse. College campuses, pretty averse to sex. We're in, I think, a sex negative

environment. I look at movies and stuff from 10 years ago, and we were much more open sexually, I think, culturally. I really do think that, which maybe sounds strange, but I really believe that we're more socially conservative now than we were a handful of years ago and more conservative about sex. And then also more just like, not just sex negative to say this in like the lib way, but we're sort of more anti-men, women coming together. And it's like, there's like a, this increasing like friction between the sexes that I don't quite know what to make of. I think something that's also interesting is you've got college, which is presumably like an incredible third space to meet other young people

who are, you know, in your community. But I heard when I was in college, like so much, like, don't even think about marriage. You are way too young for any of that stuff. And so you leave the space that you could have met like a great partner, but you were told like, keep it casual, keep it simple. And then when you're actually ready to settle down, you look around and like, there are no more spaces like that. Yeah. I think that cultural normalization of the infantilization of like adults is certainly i mean who knows what causes the cultural normalization that's the i think the missing piece but we're treated like children i mean people in their 30s still act like children and think that they're children and safe in their early 30s will say things like i'm too young to settle down. No, you're not. You are not.

Go back. Abort, abort, abort. This is the path of destruction. You are not too young to settle down in your early 30s. My mom had four kids, four by age 31. Like, that's crazy that we just like extended. We think that we're just extending our youth or something, but we're not. We're actually just

adults acting like young people for a long time, which is a new thing. I think that's why we like superhero movies so much, because we're grown children. And meanwhile, sorry if this offends you. It's offensive to me. You can finish, and then I'm going to say something. Come on, dude. Finish your point.

Finish your point, and then I'm going to put you in your place. Go ahead. Okay. Like, you're watching grown men in costumes fight each other in this weird fantasy world that's clearly for children. Marvel was like never, I don't think Marvel was ever made for adults. I think comic books are for children. And the fact that Marvel is beating all these kinds of records just shows how infantilized we are as a society like what you're you're the biggest movie in america is

two grown men in tights fighting each other in this fantasy land i mean i think that's pretty bizarre like how do you go from casablanca or like pulpp Fiction to like... First, oh my God, we have to stop right now. Pulp Fiction, great movie. Nobody saw Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction had never been like one of the top 10 blockbusters or whatever. Never, never, never. Casablanca, yes, but that's like a culture

that is so far removed from here that I wouldn't even begin, I could not even begin to get in the mind space there. Or like The Godfather. Sure. Comic books, we're talking about, oh, people have never been into this sort of thing. They're Greek. It's Greek mythology.

They're like, they're gods fighting each other. And some are petty and some are, you know, humorous and they're going to war or whatever. Like, actually, these archetypical characters are tapping into something. And the success of it should just tell us, I agree it's worth looking at. So let's just start there. It's worth looking at the success of superheroes. But what I love about superheroes, not all of them, and first of all, Marvel's movies are failing left and right right now, but they were succeeding while they were at their purest, when they were the purest matching back to the comic books. And when you saw these archetypical characters fighting out, I would say on behalf of values that we all hold dear, we were seeing the good fight for really the first time in decades on

screen that had fallen totally out of favor. Every great movie was supposed to be some twisted clown world version or funhouse mirror version of what is good and what is noble and now what are superheroes movies hot objectively hot people physically at their peak fighting on behalf of values that we all share freedom thanos is such a great example you should you work for the daily caller you should love superhero movies thanos was the villain what What did he want to do? He was an environmentalist. He wanted to kill half of all beings

in all of existence to save the environment. He was an environmentalist. He was Greta Thunberg with the Infinity Gauntlet. That's what we were looking at in Thanos. And what happened? Thanos got his head chopped off by a god named thor case in point you guys are all talking about heroes instead of women right now

are there any single guys in here like when is the last time you approached a woman i'm single i went on a date not too long ago i last time i approached women was like this past weekend do your friends approach women? So you think like IRL, it's fine. Cause I feel like I also get the sense that guys are told that they're so threatening all the time that they don't feel as comfortable approaching women.

Men, just don't overthink, just don't be a creepy guy and just talk to the girl you think. I think creepy is determined after the fact though. Creepy is typically determined by whether or not you like pretty. I think creepy is determined after the fact, though. Creepy is typically determined by whether or not you like someone. I mean, has anyone ever called, in his prime, Brad Pitt? Was Brad Pitt

ever creepy? I find that hard to believe. I wish he was creepy to me. You can tell when he's very much determined. Listen, the superhero thing, by the way, I want to close it out. That is very common. I i get this a lot and i think that you are probably maybe even most people listening will agree with you certainly i mean actually teal has gone out peter has gone after

me on this um he think and he'll go on and on i just think that you're all wrong and i think that superheroes are like one of the only the good not even recently but like everything up until end game and marvel it was like one of the only cultural bright spots in america and the fact that they were going just doing so well with such kind of in like unambiguously good ideals and values was very interesting and remains interesting to me some dating advice if you're watching this and you're single go to places where you think your future spouse may be. If you care about faith, join a church. Go to the local comic book store. Guys.

Very close to me, girls. If you're looking for a guy, go to nerd spaces. Go to comic book conventions. Go to Magic the Gathering Night or whatever. You are going to be the queen bee. I've been in nerd spaces for a long time.

There's only one girl out of 50 and she is the goddess. That's how she's treated. Go in the PirateWire's comments. Go in the PirateWire's comments. That's a great way to close it out. Thank you very much, Olivia. Go in the PirateWire's comments.

Rate, subscribe, review. Leave a comment. Tell us who you want to see more of. Tell us what you think about Marvel comic movies. I am curious, but i know that i'm right already uh thank you for watching subscribe or die see you later