Pirate Wires - WTF Is Happening With The Drones, Elizabeth Warren Goes After Trump & Elon, Canada Is Falling Apart

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

EPISODE #81: Our last episode of the year! We attempt to get to the bottom of the drones on New Jersey. Our resident Canadian expert gives us the latest on Justin Trudeau's regime falling apart. When 51st state? Liz Warren is back to take on Elon Musk & Trump. And Kamala for Governor of California? Say it ain't soo... Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, Riley Nork, Kevin Chaiken, Alastair John Pitts We have partnered with Polymarket! Download the Polymarket: Election Forecast app https://apps.apple.com/us/app/polymarket-election-forecast/id6648798962 - Disclaimer: Not Financial Advice, For Entertainment Purposes Only. Sign Up For The Pirate Wires Daily!  https://get.piratewires.com/pw/daily https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Topics Discussed: Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell Riley Twitter: https://x.com/rylzdigital Kevin Twitter: https://x.com/KevinChaiken Alastair: https://x.com/AJ_Odyssey TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Last Show Of 2024 2:30 - WTF Is Happening In NJ? The Latest On The Drones - Brandon still believes that they're just planes. 27:20 - Canada In Turmoil - Trudeau's Administration Is Falling Apart - We Get The Latest From Our Canadian, Alastaire. 36:00 - Polymarket Segment - Will Trudeau Resign? 39:10 - Elizabeth Warren Attacks Elon & Trump's WH Relationship 54:30 - The Next Hot Swap?? Will Kamala Harris Becoming Governor Of California? 1:04:45 - Predictions For 2025 1:10:20 - Thank You For The Great Year! Happy Holidays! We Will Be Back In 2 Weeks #podcast #technology #politics #culture

What the hell is happening in New Jersey, particularly its airspace? My position is not that nothing is happening, only that every single thing that I look into, it's nothing happened. Things aren't looking so great for Justin Trudeau's administration right now. Alistair, we are so close to freeing you, man. It's a matter of time. How do we join forces? I'm willing to sort of like negotiate on behalf of the states. Elizabeth Warren cried a trail of tears this week about the close relationship between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. You don't need to be governor. It's you did it like you. Good job. Like you were the vice president. Yay. Now go home. We're done what's up guys welcome back to the pod this is the last one of uh of the year we're taking a

couple weeks off that's just like straight off of the top we need to do some announcements i'm tired you're tired uh i'm very grateful for your continued viewers, but we're taking a break. Thank you for sticking around. More to come. Also taking a break from the daily. We will have some pieces coming out throughout the next couple of weeks and a couple of very cute Christmas and New Year's cards. So be sure to subscribe to PirateWires daily.

If you haven't yet, just go to PirateWires.com and subscribe on the newsletter tab or probably a pop-up will come up if you're not already subscribed. More announcements. We've got Polymarket coming up. We're going to talk about Justin Trudeau. We have our special Canadian correspondent and friend of the pod, Alistair, in the chat today, who is also, if you follow The Daily, one of our writers on The Daily, you can probably notice him at this point. And we've got Kevin, who is now an employee at this point. And we've got Kevin, who is now an employee of PirateWire. So we are stacked today.

When we come back, we have even more exciting news. We just signed a new... I don't know if I should break the news just yet. Just know that we have something exciting happening in the very first episode when we return. We also have Pirate idol coming back when we return it'll be four weeks four guests um one an episode full sort of like the full episode and um i think that's enough for the updates right now christmas is coming riley's got a cool hat on it's uh a family heirloom you can tell you about it in a minute but before he does that we're going to talk about these drones uh for the second week in a row because now i have thoughts i think probably kevin has a bunch of thoughts because he's been covering it brandon is going to tell us that they're planes again and uh we're gonna have ourselves a conversation about it take it away yeah we'll save the santa hat discourse for later so on the

drones it's time to revisit the story about what the hell is happening in New Jersey, particularly its airspace. So last week on the pod, we offered up some initial speculation about what these flying objects could be. They're planes. They're mostly planes. Brandon made a pretty passionate defense that, at least based on the evidence at the time, they were planes. They're planes. They're mostly planes. at the time they were planes their planes the planes uh guest molly o'shea seemed nevertheless convinced that they were in fact drones of some kind um in the time that has transpired since though uh the story has only picked up steam one dude who is i guess the ceo of a drone manufacturing company uh raised the possibility that it might be linked to missing radioactive material,

a sentiment that the mayor of Belleville, New Jersey, echoed. I guess the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a warning that a shipment carrying a piece of medical equipment for cancer screenings had arrived at its destination with the equipment missing and the package damaged. You have reality TV star Bethany Frankel saying that she totally has a friend who, yeah, yeah, this was the craziest, one of the crazier takes out there. So she says she has a friend who works at the Pentagon who is sounding the alarm that the drones could actually pose a real danger along with other similar panic theories filling the X timeline. Meanwhile, Joe Biden, the man of sound clarity who we all want in charge

during these uncertain times, is saying that there's nothing nefarious about these possible drone sightings. Whether he's telling the truth or not, difficult to say because as Solana noted in the Daily, it's pretty difficult to find the signal right now with just how many wild theories are filling the timeline and how much the American people are being left in the dark. Let's start with Bethany, the Bethany Frankel of it all. Bethany Frankel, for those of you who don't know, and I'm assuming almost none of you know, is she's a star of The Real Housewives of New York or a former star. She was as, what is the, there was one famous actor, none of them are that famous, one sort of B-list actor who's very popular on Bravo who referred to her as like the Michael Jordan of The Housewives.

one sort of b-list actor who's very popular on bravo who referred to her as like the michael jordan of the housewives she has since sort of lost her grace i would say she's she's become a kind of sad internet creature she does a lot of those like you know those weird tiktoks and instagram reels of people eating too close to the camera and like kind of munching in an uncomfortable way she does a lot of that she's like any i would say i would say she's like an innovator in the space of that to be honest um but she's an innovator in the space of that, to be honest. But she's been waffling around trying to find something to do, which is odd because she's wealthy. She's the creator of Skinny Girl Margarita. She's, I think, one of the most interesting reality TV stars and Hollywood people in general based on the branding of it all,

the way that she's been able to translate her little bit of fame into actual money success. But right now she's grasping, she found the drone thing. And that kind of is my gateway for looking at a big part of this right now. I think there probably is something happening and we can all, I mean, I would love to hear what each one of you are thinking about this at this point, but whatever it is that's happening has been massively amplified inside of this totally, I would say almost impossible to navigate information ecosystem. I've been trying to figure out what's going on for a long time for, I guess, over a week now.

And I'm having a hard time doing that as someone who lives online and looks at shit online for a living. Still don't entirely know. I'm getting clips from friends in New Jersey of drones they've seen. So actual footage that is shitty footage. They're definitely seeing something, but also people have drones. So it could just be someone's drone. I don't know. really closely. I want to start with you and then we can kick it back to Brandon. And I also am really dying to know what the Canadian take on America's drone situation is. So Kevin, what are you seeing out there? Yeah. So I think to your point, the information ecosystem right now is sort of insane. I spoke to a source who works in the UAP space and they're pretty well connected in the intel and defense areas. And she's spoken with a lot of high-level officials,

and they all kind of have a different story, and they can't really reach any sort of consensus at all. She spoke to former Governor Andrew Cuomo about this topic for a while, and he didn't really have any idea what was going on. So her take, and I think I agree with it, is it's pretty scary that either A, they don't have any idea what these things are and are not able to defend our airspace against something that might be a threat. But I think it's even scarier that they are not able to come to any sort of alignment between these agencies, even just to communicate to us that they have things under control. agencies, even just to communicate to us that they have things under control. It's really frightening for the American people to have this idea that there might be something going on

that they don't have under control. And that's when you get these sort of wild theories that spin out. So like Riley mentioned, this guy who's a CEO of Saxon Aerospace, which is a UAV manufacturer in Kansas, put out this video saying that it is likely that these drones are not of nefarious intent, but they're actually looking for a missing nuclear warhead from some time in the past. My source talked to somebody who is in the NEST, which is the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, and they said that they don't use drones to do any sort of nuclear or like they do radiation measuring of like different nuclear sites. They don't use drones for that sort of thing. They use helicopters. So they're sort of trying to debunk that theory. But I think the fact that

we have all of these different theories promulgating is just indicative of kind of the chaos that is ensuing. And I don't think it bodes well for us as a people. Well, who are the only people that sort of bodes well for are people like Bethany Frankel, who are able to capitalize on moments like this to amplify their own message, whatever that is. It's not really a message. It's more like to attract attention, I would say. And that's one of the really hard things in an environment, a media environment like we have now where we spend a lot of time on x all of us do and you just i mean you see these tweets going massively viral to x's credit uh every single

sort of massively viral tweet i've seen on the ufos has been community noted which has been really helpful for me to uh sort of investigate this thing and also i would say stands in pretty stark contrast i've noticed with places like threads and blue sky where let's talk about threads specifically. I actually see, and I think I have a lot of problems with X and I've shared them throughout over the last year or so. I had problems before he took over. I have problems now, but threads, I see like straight straight up like totally invented news about like even rage baity uh like woke stuff as well as just like regular sort of standard issue media lies um that goes wildly viral and totally unchecked on that platform every day like

much more egregious than what i've seen on x and uh yeah in this kind of social media environment people are going to say whatever they're going to say to gin up the story which probably started with a handful of actual drones we know that there are all sorts of spy drones that people are being captured from we have we just had another chinese spy um arrested out of california we talked about that last week so we know there's something but then uh there is this mass hysteria thing which brandon has been talking about which i agree has probably built up around it but brandon do you have any like have you have you rethought your your take or is it still just like planes do you think no i've started um muting all the conversations because i can't talk about it or hear about this

story anymore i think it's absolutely fucking ridiculous they're like so look there's like a few explanations that that you could explain all these videos that we're seeing on twitter and by the way what i'm saying right now and what i'm about to say has no reflection on how i feel about people in new jersey because i don't even know if people in new jersey are scared about this i know that people on twitter are like amplifying this and absolutely. People in Jersey are definitely nervous. I mean, I have my friend who sent me shit is like a doctor. This is like a regular,

this is, I would say I want it to characterize her. Actually. She is like a Kamala, a Kamala Harris voting New York times reading, like be skeptical of the Joe Rogan type person. Who's like their shit that I'm looking at. And I'm nervous. Like my little sister was nervous. She's like, should i be scary about this what's going on up

there like there's real anxiety i would say new jersey right now well and also last thing before you go they do know what planes look like so carry on fair enough i i i don't i assume that they also know what planes look like um but but i just high level. Well, first off, what I'm about to say though is not about New Jersey. It's about what I'm seeing on Twitter. I'm not in New Jersey. I don't know anybody from New Jersey and I live in LA right now. So I can't comment on what's happening in New Jersey, literally the people of New Jersey. But as far as I can see it, there are a few possible explanations right for for any for for these videos that we're seeing there's various of them right there's like there's like a mistaken plane

helicopter satellite star right like that's one category um the second category is is actual drone right and then there's there's three explanations for an actual drone. One is some sort of foreign invasion that I would say is pretty incomprehensible. It's very hard to explain why they would be... Like what they're doing by going into people's backyards and like freaking people out, right? I can just go on Google Maps and see somebody's backyard.

So I don't totally understand the foreign invasion, but that's one explanation. Let's say that that's a reasonable explanation. There's a foreign invasion of drones. Number two, incomprehensible government PSYOP, which that story has changed multiple times too. So let's go to the nuclear thing. The nuclear PSYOP thing started

as the government was testing a new fleet of nuclear sniffing drones for a scenario in which a nuke is lost. And they were gauging the public's reaction to the mass deployment of these drones, right? So that's how it started. Then some random medical company lost a tiny part of a PET scan machine. And they had to report it to the EPA because of some stupid regulation. This piece of... Yes, it is radioactive. But I think it's like, you get more radioactivity in a commercial airliner flying for two hours than you would holding this thing for a fucking year. airliner flying for two hours than you would holding this thing for a fucking year right so that sent people into a frenzy including the mayor of a small town in new jersey one of the smallest towns in new jersey as far as i can see via gpt he gets on fox news and no not fox news sorry uh

something called new york morning news or something like that goes viral and says these drones there's missing nuclear material and these drones are like trying to sniff them out was that what the one I think I might have been with the won't resent a Scotto on it I believe he's referring to this piece of a PET scan machine which if he thinks that there's an army of drones out there searching for a tiny part that a private company lost I mean fair enough whatever all right so that's the other explanation is a strange government, the US government PSYOP or something. There's an operation for the government. And then the third explanation is that the operator of the drone took the video and put it on social for likes. And so far, I haven't seen any videos that have unambiguously ruled out that last

possibility, right? So, if that's true, if what I've seen, if those three things are true, if those are the three explanations we have on offer, well, then I don't care how anybody feels. Maybe somebody thinks that a strange foreign influence operation is happening right now. But I think my foreign influence operation is happening right now. But I think my inclination is to think that the most reasonable explanation is that somebody is doing this for likes, like this random video. Also, a lot of the videos,

or most of the videos don't roll out the possibility that the video was not taken in New Jersey. So again, I don't know. I think this is kind of like a mass hysteria. On your point of you have friends who have taken video of drones on the ground. They're smart, right? You have on-the-ground people. I want to share just something that happened a few days ago

that I saw on Twitter, by the way. So this girl called Lucy Biggers, she's an intern at the Free Press. She posted on December 12th on Twitter, I saw five drones over the Fairfield, Connecticut train station last night at 645. Let me explain, thread. Okay. The next tweet. This is like on December 12th. The next tweet is, they were flying low like a drone, but no humming sound. My husband has a DJI drone, so I know what they sound like. They hovered in one location and also made turns. 165,000 views.

The first comment on this thread, by the way, is, hey, Lucy, it's Evan from CBS News. Can you confirm you own this video? If so, can I use it? Then she ends up going on Fox News with this story. Can you guess what happened next? Like anyone? Was there a peace sign?

Five days later, Lucy gets on a call with this guy, Mick West, who's like this fucking optics camera guy genius and she posts I'm very humbled to say that after speaking with Mick West I was able to track my drones to specific planes I had done this previously but Mick used a more advanced software and I'm convinced in the video we tracked down the three planes that flew into the frame flame while I was filming facing northwest there is no doubt that

these were three planes with these exact same paths paths at the same time i'm very embarrassed to be so wrong i'm now convinced that most of what people are seeing are just regular planes again i said on fox that they were flying really low and very quiet and it set off my spidey senses but now i think that most of us don't really pay attention to planes that much. Okay. So this is like, this is an example of like that,

you know, like I have this, these really smart friends. Right. But, and they saw something again, like I'm not saying anything about your friends. I'm not saying anything about New Jersey.

Maybe they did see, see something. That's my position is not that nothing is happening. Only that every single thing that I look into, it's nothing happened. I will say one more thing about the authorities. I don't know about your friends, Kevin, but the Department of Defense press secretary this week, this Tuesday, gave a press briefing about this. And he said, look, there's over a million drones registered in the United States on any given day, approximately 8,500 of them are in flight. So the vast majority of these drones are probably going to be recreational hobbyists.

There's going to be commercial drones used in things like architecture, engineering, farming, or they could be used for law enforcement. Is it possible that some of these drones could be up to malign activity? It's entirely possible. But the vast majority, that's not the case. In the case of drones flying near or over US military installation, that in and of itself, just given the volume of drone flights we see on any given day is not something that's new. On December 16th, the FBI out of Newark sent out a warning saying that there's been an increase in pilots of manned aircrafts being hit in the eyes with lasers because people on the ground think they see an unmanned aircraft system. There's also concern about people potentially firing weapons at them. So they say misidentification

often occurs when unmanned aerial systems are mistaken for more familiar objects such as manned aircraft. To improve the accuracy and prevent false sightings, a variety of tools and techniques can be used to assist visual identification of these things. They're basically like, guys, it's are elected officials going on TV and perpetuating this hysteria? Right. And the, the, the problem here is like, what will happen is somebody does that,

right? Like a state Senator or whatever, or the mayor of this little, of it's it's called Bellevue, New Jersey. They go on and it goes viral because people automatically think that they have more information than us. Well, the fact is, is they definitely don't. New Jersey Senator Andy Kim shared videos a few weeks ago of what he describes as multiple unidentified flying drones over his state. A few days later, he posted a thread. The first tweet is, after going out with police to observe reports of possible drones, I was, with the help of civilian pilots and others able to do deeper

analysis, concluded that most of the drone sightings were most certainly planes so i don't know man like again maybe the people in new jersey are seeing something but i'm not personally seeing anything from my seat at pyrewires looking at twitter every day is this story something people are talking about in canada at all or not really we don't talk about much up here anyway. But my first exposure to the story was on Twitter as well. A mutual acquaintance I knew in Jersey was posting videos. And they're kind of blurry. It's hard to tell. It kind of reminded me of those early videos that came out of China during the lockdown, like the very early days of COVID videos that came out of china during the lockdown like the very early days of covid where people weren't sure if the lockdown videos were real or the

quarantining videos were real um but you know in situations like this where you're not sure and you really you need a trusted high level analysis someone you can really trust i go to tim dylan's twitter profile and uh it seems that he's posted he supports the searching for a nuke thesis he thinks it's a nuke he thinks the drones are trying searching for a nuke somehow so popular among the rogan people in general i would say like the whole rogan very popular because it has it has everything i think you know it has all the little pieces of catnip. It has the UFO angle. It has the potential bioweapon angle.

It has everything a QAnon conspiracy theorist would love. Or even anyone who just was skeptical of the COVID narrative. I'm glad to rub this up because this feeling, I think everyone's coming at this, everyone who's really, really obsessed with this story is attracted by some specific piece of it, but it is multiple pieces like that. I saw more than one person say that this reminded them of specifically COVID.

They said, I feel like it's February or March of 2020 and I'm warning people about something and they're not paying attention. And I had never felt that way about this story. I've been, it just didn't catch me the way that COVID did early on. And now I've been playing catch up a little bit and kind of thinking about this, like, what is it about this story that has driven people wild? And as you said, it's like, there's the government interest piece, as Brandon, you said,

anytime an expert says something, a person of authority, who we've granted authority, and that includes especially elected politicians. And local news. Local news completely fucked this up. Absolutely fucking... If it wasn't for the local news, I think in New Jersey, this probably wouldn't have happened, but it took off because of the early local news reporting. They were definitely reporting on planes and helicopters. Local news has never been... I mean, the difference, what we're dealing with now is the fact that any kind of clip anywhere can travel rapidly across the internet, which has been true for so long. But for some reason, it's only the last few years that we've really been dealing with this, like in this media ecosystem, this like chaotic media ecosystem at scale. I don't

know why it took so long, but that's what happens now. So it's like if the government thing, you have the nuclear thing, you have the UFO thing. I genuinely think that I've noticed there are people talking about the story who are not talking about government stuff at all. They believe that this is a UFO story, which is like a whole other, like I never once thought this was a UFO story store i i don't understand where that's even coming from but people really seem to believe that so there is sort of something for everyone uh in the sort of online or the two online nation and um and i think maybe it's like a little bit of a hangover from 2020 people feel they're feeling really vindicated about their

skepticism of the government and state media narratives back in 2020 incompetence and they're and it's like they want to relive that a little bit i think it's like rather than just go back in time or just reassess what happened back in time and hold some people accountable for what happened during covid we're like we're now looking for some other version of that to get angry about but it's like that's over and probably what should happen is we should just i don't want to say that she belongs in jail but we should we should have the conversation is what i think about that yeah i think that's that's a super interesting point that like you're basically saying there's no

like there hasn't been closure there hasn't been a proper post-mortem on covid on the excesses of covid um and some of like the literal human rights abuses that happened for covid i'm talking about with kids not being able to go to school with us not being able to go outside go to funerals is not gonna be able to yeah not being able to sit by your loved one as he died you had to you had to facetime him in. All the while, the doctors said that it was more important for you to protest George Floyd. That police violence was a bigger public health risk than COVID. And so you could go outside for the Floyd protests, but had to stay inside, of course, if you were protesting the mask mandates or whatever. So yeah, I totally think that's a really good point to make

because there wasn't closure. And if we had closure, maybe you wouldn't be seeing people just going haywire on things that can be construed as the government doing something bad at a massive scale again. Yeah, we can't even have closure on it because Donald Trump was the president in the summer of 2020.

And you had a left-wing consensus on the topic of all of these things and the right wing was divided, but Trump started all that shit. And so there's just not much appetite at the highest levels of government, I think, on either side to revisit this because so many people on both sides were complicit in all of these, I think really traumatic things. I mean, I think that what happened during 2020, the summer of 2020 is like, that was a traumatizing moment for not just us, but like the entire Western world. And no, it's just never, it seems to me that just nothing is ever going to come of any of that. And so, yeah, we're going to be reliving it in other weird ways as someone traumatized will do. Do you think there's going to be we're going to be reliving it in other weird ways that's as someone traumatized will do

do you think there's going to be like a does there will be like a truth and reconciliation commission for covet ever i think that someone might try and scapegoat someone but i don't i don't see anyone i could be wrong i don't see anyone going after fauci i i would be interested to see if uh we talked about this a few weeks ago, if Biden gives Fauci one of these new magical preemptive pardons that apparently the president can do, that would be interesting if he did that. But I don't know. I just don't think there's enough appetite on the Republican side to do it because so many of the Republicans were totally complicit in every single terrible mistake that was made. To their credit, Republicans cried out first about like, hey,

let's stop this. This is actually out of control and all of that. And the conversation on what we should do over COVID only ever happened on the right of center where people disagreed and had multiple opinions and had a real robust debate about how this should take place. The left was just complete and immediate submission to authority, and then no questioning was allowed. But ultimately, both sides were complicit in this, and there's just no denying that. So you know who had a much worse time of it during COVID were our friends up north in Canada. Riley, so we have a lot to talk about in terms of Canada this week. Riley, why don't you just break down the very first piece of it? Awesome. Yeah. So Alistair, we are so close to freeing you, man. It's a matter of time. We'll get there. But things

are looking so great for liberation, operation free Canada. That's right. So things are looking so great for Justin Trudeau's administration right now with a number of major resignations on Monday, as well as for his views on spending and quote, the best path forward for Canada. The spending disagreement in particular is only underscored by the fact that Canada's economy may be set to face another pretty significant hit in the form of tariffs that Trump has threatened, which economists say are going to have a pretty major impact. And all of that is leading Trump to say that if Canada can't afford the tariffs,

that they might as well just become our 51st state. But we can hold that piece for later if he wants, Solana, while we just break down the fact that Trudeau is in very hot water right now. It all is important background on trudeau's collapse right now it feels like this sort of international humiliation of this man and his administration um which alistair wrote about this week for uh the pirate wires daily and i think had some pretty unique insight as someone who's been living under his uh i guess reign of of terror for the last, what is it, eight years. Can you tell me what your read is from up north? Yeah, you know, I think this is the worst it's been for Trudeau in a long time, I think ever.

In 2022, there was the trucker rally in Ottawa that became a very big story. And that did a lot of damage to Trudeau's personal brand. I think that's triggered the downward trajectory for his reputation because he had invoked the Emergencies Act, the War Measures Act, which is sort of a very serious emergency piece of legislation that Canada can use. And they invoked that to break up the trucker rally. It became a big global story.

And things have been downhill for him since then. You know, Chrystia Freeland, his deputy PM, who just resigned, was, you know, his partner in crime. She had pushed a lot of policy through for him. And, you know, I remember like back in 2018, 2019, going to conferences in Toronto, tech conferences, and, you, and the sort of business and tech world of Canada was allied with the liberal government. They were on panels with the Minister of Innovation talking together about the great Trudeau government and all the things coming down the pipeline. And now it seems like everyone has 180'd on them, the business community, tech leadership

community, investment community. And formerly, that was just sort of the domain of rural Albertans driving F-150s, you know, swearing about Trudeau. It was, you know, formerly like an untouchable thing for a lot of sort of polite Canadian society. But now it seems like everyone's turned against him, which I'm thankful for. So you think it's a confluence of, is it like the is it the economy is it immigration is it the in looming tariff stuff is it old covet stuff what do you think is it that that really you said it started with the truckers which was crazy we i wrote about that at the time and i tend not to write about um out stuff too closely if it's taking place outside of the united states

and i did because um the debanking of the truckers felt important. It just felt like a new, we hadn't seen something like that from a liberal Western democracy. Canada is really, really close. I mean, it's basically America. And it felt like maybe something that could happen here. But what specific things do you think it has been that have uh that have catalyzed this i think the lockdowns and the trucker rally response was the catalyst because covid put all the other issues

on pause immigration was still a problem um you know prior to 2020 here but it was put on pause by by the lockdowns inflation and the growing deficit of the country was also put on pause or or at least it was kicked down the road as sort of uh in terms of social perception because people didn't care as much about the government spending as much because oh well we're in an emergency who cares um yeah i don't know i'm interested in canada i do have a question for you just as a canadian and i promise the rest of these topics i won't be focusing so much on your canadian citizenship but i am intrigued we don't often have one on the pod and especially especially when it's living there, that's just crazy, like a diamond in the rough. Because it feels, I always have felt like Canadians are really the

same as Americans. I mean, just like you sound the same. It's like culturally, it's so similar. We travel different places, Canadians in all of our cities. it seems like a no-brainer that we should just be the same thing. What is keeping that from happening from your perspective? I think it's healthcare. Is it mostly just healthcare? In terms of Canada joining the US and the cultural differences between the populations, I don't think there's much really. I think 100, 200 years ago, I'm sure that people more inclined to be loyal to Great Britain or to the empire moved north. But I don't think that's as true now. I think health care is probably the main issue that people would be attached to. But even sentiment here around public health care has shifted, I would say, over the past five to 10 years because that and other infrastructure has become a lot more crowded as the population's grown. And, you know, it hasn't really been upgraded or improved

since sort of the golden age of the 70s and the 80s, where that that model really shined. So you go to a hospital here, and you can often wait 510 plus hours, you know, unless unless, you know, your leg is broken, you have some emergency, you're, you're going to be waiting. And particularly for like more complex healthcare services services like MRIs and stuff like that, people are seeing the cracks, I think, in the public healthcare system here. Okay, what else besides healthcare, though? Is there anything else? I want to solve this right now. How do we lock it down?

How do we join forces? I'm willing to negotiate on behalf of the states. Tell me. I think that what you have to do, essentially, I think how annexation should go down is there should be one province, one singular territory that's essentially a beta test, trial run. And you establish that so that everyone favorable to the US project, the American project, everyone who wants to become a protectorate can move there. And now you have the most favorable population. project, the American project. Everyone who wants to become a protectorate can move there. And now you have the most favorable population,

more inclined towards American. I love that. Because I think the biggest risk is if you just fold in everyone that's close to the border, that whole population, you're bringing in a lot of people who are not, you know, ideologically aligned, I think, with what you would want from a new american citizen um and even you know in canada in major major urban centers leans very left

obviously similar politics here to san francisco um but even in rural areas in canada even on vancouver island once you get outside major urban centers you still have like strong strong left leaning bastions and i'm still not sure why that is but it's not just urban centers you still have like strong strong left-leaning bastions and i'm still not sure why that is but it's not just urban centers that are um lefty here extremely lefty what is the reason that you think that what like where where should we focus you know environmentalism green party stuff is huge it's like crack here for the Canadian population. They love it. They love environmentalism. I think you go through a Canadian post-secondary or primary education, and that's like 90% of the textbook. Social studies textbook is all about climate change and environmentalism.

So I think leaning heavily on that angle, which I think RFK would help with, there's some sort of marketing angle there. Well, what geographical location? You said you should focus on one. If you had a pick, would it be Pacific Northwest? Would it be the East? The obvious pick is Alberta, given that people would say Alberta is the most conservative Canadian province. Alberta also has a lot of oil oil sands a lot of resource rich rich area so you could go with alberta i'm personally biased towards british columbia because british columbia is just a little bit cooler a little bit nicer a little bit more mild a little bit like california i like to

think oh no i think it is i think it is for sure okay cool well that's settled we'll focus on the pacific northwest and uh and we'll bring out our environmentalism. I do want to, we have to talk about, we got to get to the Polymarket read. So Polymarket, our paid partner over here at Pirate Wires, thank you guys for funding our incredible reporting and analysis, such as you are now hearing in this conversation. I mean, look at us bridging two different cultures

and negotiating new territory for the United States, would not be able to do it without our good friends at this premier betting market. Today, we're talking about Trudeau. So we're checking out the odds over there on Fidel Castro's son, allegedly, potentially. After Trump's tweet, Polymarket put up a market on whether Canada will become a US state by June. The odds, just 4%. A lot of the yes bets seem to come from people having fun trolling Canadians like BBman's 1214 who said, think I'll buy some yes and send a screenshot of the bet to Canadian friends. As for Trudeau resigning before February, those odds are much

higher at 44%. I'm surprised at how few people seem to think that Trudeau is going to leave. There's been a major exodus. There seems to be a total bottoming out of support for him. And now Trump's in power and he's sort of embarrassing him. That's the main thing about the Canadian statehood thing. It's like you see the leader of the country being just mercilessly mocked on an international stage with like relative frequency or relatively high frequency. Why is it only 44%? I mean, what is up with, what is going on with that? What could that be? Trudeau's a survivor. He's, he's managed to elude a lot of scandals in the past, and it seems like nothing sticks to him very well. And, you know, the liberal government has had this sort of alliance.

They've had this agreement with the more socialist party, the NDP party, to prop up their government because the liberal government does not have a majority. So they need this other party to support them, to enable their government. And that government could have called and can call an election. They can trigger this at any time, but they've chosen not to. A lot of people argue that the NDP leader, the Socialist Party leader, Jagmeet Singh, is doing so to basically confirm his own pension. Because if he delays an election beyond a certain point, he sort of gets a guaranteed pension that gets locked in um but my my gut here my instinct is that trudeau will just try and hang on as long as he as long as he can until he's essentially forced out crazy it's kind of related to our earlier topic of just information chaos there were a flurry of these uh of reports from

these accounts that are doing like news on X now that we're all like, you know, heard from our contacts, Trudeau is out within the next 24 hours, whatever, it was days ago.

And I actually, I hit up Alistair immediately. I was like, Alistair, my man in Canada, is this accurate? Because I want to talk about it. And he's like,

no, I don't think so. I don't think that's accurate based on my reading of the lineup here. So maybe you're right and he'll be around a little bit longer. Maybe you're wrong. And we'll find out when we're back in two weeks, but we'll keep you posted. Moving on. Riley, let's talk about Warren demanding accountability over Elon Musk. Yeah, sure. So Elizabeth Warren cried a trail of tears this week about the close relationship between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, saying that Trump needs to hold Rocket Man to ethics standards now that he's set to play an increased role in the incoming administration.

Warren warned about the possibility of fraud that this now poses in the upcoming Trump administration, writing to the transition team. Trump administration writing to the transition team. Currently, the American public has no way of knowing whether the advice that he is whispering to you in secret is good for the country or merely good for his own bottom line. And in response, Trump's team wrote back, Pocahontas can play political games and send toothless letters, but the Trump Vance administration will continue to be held to the highest ethical and legal standards possible. Which is of course a great response, but especially so because as Solana noted in the daily,

not only has Warren like tried to defraud people about like what her race is, but also presided over like $200 billion in COVID funds being just like thrown down the drain. And like Congress in general, just like definitely wouldn't know anything about committing fraud or being corrupt on a daily basis. So that place you work, not exactly spotless, Elizabeth Warren. It's worth underscoring the $200 billion. That's not a small amount of money. It's a number that's so big that we actually have a hard time comprehending it, genuinely. We have a hard time

of conceiving it. Our brain is not built to comprehend a number that large. And it's just fucking gone. That's really bad. That's really, really bad. Who is she to come in here and demand some kind of ethical oversight over Elon? She's afraid of billionaire corruption. There's already corruption. And not only is there corruption, my real problem with it is not only is there already corruption, but we can't do anything. You are both corrupt and incompetent. You cannot be both. You've got to pick a lane between those two. You cannot be both of those things. If Elon is super corrupt, he's not. Let's say he is super corrupt, but he's still landing rockets and he's now doing it for the country and everything starts to work.

I don't even care. Sorry. I know I should care, but I don't care. I just want shit to work again. That's the flag that I'm sticking in the sand. One thing that she does get right here is that Elon is pretty influential in the government right now. His tweets alone pretty much single-handedly killed the continuing resolution in the house right now which i think is funny by the way like you have all these gop congressmen who are like oh yeah we're on board for doge and cleaning up spending and elon's just like okay well why don't you uh put your money where this where your mouth is and uh they just all sort of like fall in line instantly when he comes out against the cr i think that's just pretty hilarious um but it's also not a case of him yeah on that on that that was uh so this is we're december 21st

we're approaching the deadline for a government shutdown if they don't pass a budget this was supposed to extend this until march something i believe i was looking at it this morning um without it now we're in government shutdown territory. And it will be interesting to see if they dramatically cut, what, a bunch of pork? Elon's concerns then greatly amplified in the national conversation and ultimately co-signed by Trump were, it was a bunch of pork spending. There were a bunch of subsidies in there he didn't like. And he focused a lot also on pay raises for government employees. I think there's 4% or so for military workers, around 2% for government workers. And then there was a pay bump to, I think, $180,000 a year for congressmen. And that's the one that got the most attention. It was like, how dare you get a pay raise or

whatever? I mean, what do you guys all make of that? Do you think they renegotiate? I mean, we've seen government shutdowns and this kind of bullshit before. We've never seen something renegotiate. We've never seen something renegotiate. We never seen the government renegotiate in such a way as we came out of the other end with less spending. That would be really remarkable if that happened. I mean, do you think that's going to happen? What do you guys think? It'd be remarkable if it did.

I think this is how government always gets funded is they stall, stall, stall, stall, stall. And then the last minute just rush through everything. And I think that is a huge contributor for the fact that we're 40 trillion dollars in debt or whatever so i think it would be very remarkable if this did lead to something and it would show elon is yeah like even more powerful than the corrupt system that are like or incompetent system that our government operates on like year after year um so i think that would be very notable um and yeah i think that would yeah i would be very much in favor of that and i don't think that sounds like elon lining his own pockets that sounds like him um going out of his way to stop us from being 40 trillion dollars in debt which i think is a good thing i just don't think it's gonna happen i don't

think that i don't think democrats are gonna bud budge on or Republican. The pork is a problem in every state in the country. The subsidies, we're talking about agricultural subsidies. Those aren't, I mean, maybe they are partly on blue states, but this is like a red state thing as well. This affects everybody in office. And then you have the problem. So what are you left with? I don't see there being any movement on those issues. And you're left with what? Government pay? We're left with the idea of like, oh no, congressmen should be poor. Okay. Well, guess what? They're not going to be poor. So they're either going to be evil and criminal or they're going to be paid well. And right now, what we have is a situation where we're not paying them anything. We're paying them jack shit. So why

do you want that job? You have to have two houses to have two houses as a Congressman or a Senator, right? You have your home, uh, your home place, and you have to have a place in DC where you work. So what is, what is the incentive to take a job for, um, what less than a entry-level lawyer makes in Washington, DC, um, where now you have a target on your back with lawfare. You are not, you've all sorts of, um, intense oversight from like ethics committee and people are talking about like people are mad because you're trading on robinhood and shit um like what i just don't understand what the incentive is to take that job and i don't understand how it helps us to with all the money that we spend that we blow on

fucking nonsense brandon you just saw something today. What was it like? Close to $80 million for nonprofit defense in San Francisco. What was that thing? It was $76 million allocated during fiscal year 2024, 2025 in the state of California to security for nonprofits who are at high risk for violent attacks and hate crimes. Like, what is that? Like, honestly, what is that? That is great. Why? I'm going to bring that one up in the Kamala segment, but that it's, it's absolutely fucking enraging. It's, it's definitely, it's, it's corrupt theft. Like I don't understand how else to explain it unless there's a pattern of firebombings going on in California that I'm not aware of.

I personally haven't heard of any. Even if there were, okay. $76 million, yeah. But that goes to what the police, there should not be a special amount of money for private security, for nonprofits that are also being funded by the state. None of that, We should not be paying

for any of that. Our politicians should be paid to govern the security and infrastructure of the nation, period. And those things should be great, top of their class. And they're not. And I feel like, yeah, we spend on the absolute worst things. And then things like government, like the pay of lawmakers comes up as this really easy symbol, like a straw man type thing that we can beat up on. I really think it's like the dumbest position of the boomer right wing to care about this. It's just as simple matter of incentives. officials and really like lawmakers specifically um that role is in competition with the private sector in a country that has like the most ripping private sector in the history of the human race um you're just simply not going to attract smart people to those roles uh unless you fix the pay situation unless you actually compensate them and you should compensate them the way that we compensate like professional football players and shit like like we should or coaches like i was thinking today

on my walk even for mayors i don't care if they live in the city i just care if they're good it would be cool if you could pick up like you're like you're the sick mayor in uh in a small town who just like cleans house and then chicago sees that they're like fuck we got to pick him up over here and we give a signing bonus and they bring him out and he fixes things over there like that's the way that we got to think about this stuff uh We should not be disincentivizing people who are intelligent from going to office because you're going to have either the stupidest people ever, that's your first option, or your second option, very smart people who are also evil. Yeah, they're not there for the salary, they're there for corruption. They're going to find some way

to make money that is not in the best interest of the country if you don't compensate them. So yeah, that's self-publishment. I think on that really quickly, just on the idea of incentivizing government officials to act on the behalf of the American people in an effective way, these people are, like you said, they're smart and they want to make money like everybody does. And they're going to do it one of two ways. and they're going to do it one of two ways. One is by sort of taking their role from sort of lobbyists and these corporations that kind of have their interests and they're going to make money doing things

that sort of line their pockets that way. Or what if there was a way that, you know, startups give their top employees equity so that their incentives are aligned and as they perform well and as the company performs well, they have the chance to make more money. We don't really have that for our government that they're bought into the system in any other way other than making money through these sort of back channels. So I wonder if there's a way that they could sort of buy into the system. And if we do well as a country, they are rewarded for that. And then we all benefit. Well, you could force them. People also concurrently are bringing up

right now the issue of insider trading in the government where Pelosi has this great stock portfolio or whatever. I don't give a fuck about that. I would care. Okay. If they have some secret information that bothers me, there's a delay between when their trades become public and they trade. That's not great. The answer is not to ban them from trading. Just make it public and force them to announce their trades like a day before or two days before, and everyone can see it. And so then they can't front run the population. And if you really believe that they have some kind of secret information, you could just follow them and you could become really, really wealthy. And that benefits everybody. Or I guess I've also heard people recommend, and I'm kind of

open to this as well, though I don't see a real need for it, forcing them out of any specific trades and certainly out of short selling, which I don't like that. And just forcing them into index funds or letting them only trade on index funds, which would give them, yeah, some skin in the game on the American economy. In fact, I think part of their pay, they should be forced to take in index funds that they can't tap for 10 or 15 years or something like that. Force them in and let that be the majority of their pay. That would be great. That would be great. They would be totally incentivized to a booming economy. Sounds good. At least let's try it out and see how it goes. I mean, maybe there's some huge, terrible negative externalities that we'll find out in six months

or a year after that or whatever, and we can reassess. But for now, that sounds good to me. I mean, I generally agree with you, Solana, but I think we're ignoring the fact that the people who got us $36 trillion in debt are the ones that are getting the pay raises right now. So like, or the ones who are asking for a pay raise, right? And so I'm down to pay politicians a lot more money, but not the ones who have essentially run our budget into this weird, you know, vote, like large vote buying scheme, almost in a sense, and have like lined their own pockets. So that doesn't seem fair to me at all. It's kind of like a company that's

been bankrupt or in the red for the past 10 years, or however many years, and us giving the C-suite a raise every year, right? Like it doesn't make any sense. You replace the C-suite, c-suite a raise every year right like it doesn't that doesn't make any sense you replace the c-suite and you start you start a new so i would i would suggest that if there is a bill that increases uh congressional pay raises it's only to newcomers right it's not to the current people that are in office yeah i guess i'm i'm open to that as well i also the the the debt really started skyrocketing under bush uh during the what the first Iraq war, right? After Clinton, yeah. I don't know.

I just think it's actually such a small amount of money, and mostly we're talking about it because we want to punish these people. It's not because we want to be congressional. I know, but there's a perception of unfairness, right? It's like all this... Again, we're putting $73 million to a non-issue non-profit security right that is unfair so that's the kind of stuff that i want to focus on like that is crazy that is the way that our government works that that is the way people are like we are the richest

country in the history of the world our tax rate is insane where is the money it's there it's like the system it's this fucked up system where you have to know who to ask and and and like what weird sort of levers to pull to get random chunks of cash and that's that's the whole entire non-profit system is like this and um and most of our government bureaucracy is like this and and like and and also most of our government welfare programs are like this like think about city housing how do you get get into, in San Francisco or New York City, some kind of free or super, super subsidized living situation? It's all about joining these weird wait lists

and going to some weird, meeting up with some weird dude at city hall or like knowing them, like knowing someone who can help you cut a line, which is also, by the way, what happened. I'm not saying they're the same, but this is how you survived in the Soviet Union is by knowing people who could get you what you needed because you have scarcity of resources there. And, uh, and you could no longer, the market was no longer, was no longer a part of the dynamic. And so you have to know somebody.

And that's, that's what it feels like at every level of our government that's way less fair to me than um nancy pelosi's uh nancy pelosi's stocks it's like her policy is much worse than that i think yeah i think you'd have a much easier sell on the increasing politician salary than the um letting them trade stocks because i think like americans look at like politicians who like own like defense contractor stock and are like then voting for wars and naturally sort of see that as being like a little bit corrupt. And it's just it's just even if it's not corrupt, it's the appearance of being corrupt. And I think that's like something we shouldn't have in our politicians. So I think if you increase their salary and you take away the incentive for them to even do that in the first place. And so I think that makes it a little bit more palatable

for the American people than, no, let's look the other way to their various trades. I think it's good. Yeah, I think it's also, it's kind of what we're all saying. It probably is something like you have to take a huge chunk of your salary in just straight index funds

and you can't access them for like 10, 15, 20 years or something like that. And that incents you to long-term thinking and and maybe that's the answer i agree with the uh the defense contractor thing um speaking of failing up um we got to talk about this kamala harris gavin newsome hot swap um where just riley just break it down for us yeah so this was a pretty notable shake-up Gavin Newsom's chief of staff Dania Williamson I guess a long time chief of staff of his recently announced her resignation and soon after that it was also announced that her role would be filled by

none other than a former Kamala Harris aide named Nathan Berenkin a number of people online sort of noted the significance of this including someone who suggested that the emerging plan may be for Newsom and Kamala to switch roles with her running for governor and him for president. This possibility led to some consternation from California resident Brandon, who wrote in the Daily that our last best hope may be a second Harris run for president since she can't do that and also run for governor. And yeah, as a new fellow California resident, I have to say, I agree. Because Newsom running for president seemed like a foregone conclusion, but Kamala for governor is like the last thing this state needs right now. So I say, yes, either run for president or start that cooking show that you clearly have always wanted to do deep down. I don't know why she's not doing that.

She's got to do the cooking show. Love that. We all want her to be cooking. She wants to cook. We want her to cook. Like, just do it. You don't need this. You don't need to be governor.

You did it. Good job. You were the vice president. Yay. You made it. You were so sick. You broke the glass ceiling. Now go you made it. You were so sick. You broke the glass ceiling. Now go the fuck home. We're done here. I don't want her to be the governor. I don't want

Gavin Newsom to be the president, though he is very clearly running. This is why he was jumping on the Doge thing. Did you see that shit he said about Doge the other day? He said California's been doing Doge, what, for- Excuse me. He's been doing it the whole time. California's been doing Doge for the whole time. they've been doing doge before doge was doing doge that means accountability the government the california government has been cutting waste i find that very hard to believe i found that hard to believe when he said it i found it absolutely hilarious when a day later news broke from california from san francisco uh that the city government had just hired a just hired an anti-fat shaming consultant. What is her exact title? What is this woman's exact title? Bring it up. We're going to go

straight. You know where we're going to go? Fat activist New York Post is where we're going. Here we go. It comes right up. They've got our've got our back guys they know what i want they give it to me the headline is fat positivity expert hired by san francisco department of health to consult on weight stigma and now there are really just like there's endless content on this woman's instagram where her chief focus really is to sort of normalize the concept of fatness and this idea which we've not talked much about on this show, it feels like too red meat culture or like anti-woke for me. It's like the jokes make themselves, but why not now? It's like this idea that you can be healthy at any weight, including morbidly obese. And this woman is going into the workplace, obese and um and this woman is going into the workplace the city workplace that we pay for to normalize that concept one but to also protect employees from harmful sort of fat phobic

conversations explicitly this is her position like talking just talking just talking about exercise um in one in one clip uh you know let's just start there guys is talking about exercise at work fat phobic we're not even talking about telling you tell someone that they should exercise i wouldn't say it's fat phobic i don't really believe in this idea i'm not afraid of fat people i simply don't want to be one and i encourage other people not to be one though i wouldn't do it to their face i think it's rude i don't want to be one. And I encourage other people not to be one, though I wouldn't do it to their face. I think it's rude. I don't think there's any place in a workplace to be like, yo, fatty, get on a bike. That's fucked up. And you should not do that. I don't need a fat phobia consultant to come and tell me that. That's just called being a decent human being and also being professional. Look, I don't think anybody should be fat phobic. I agree. We should, we should, I agree. Like in a sense, like it would be nicer to fat people for normal people to like, uh, to normalize being fat in a way like that's, that's fine from a societal perspective. But like, we shouldn't, we shouldn't normalize that, uh, in our medical community. Like our doctors should not normalize fat. Like they're, they're supposed to give us advice on how to be more healthy and so she's if she's going after the medical profession which it

seems like she is saying like you know uh um it seems to be medical uh sorry normalized among medical people that's like totally fucking wrong and a waste of taxpayer money this is such a it's a it's like this one's almost too easy it's like can someone alistair can you steel man it defend her defend her well um um i find that tough to be honest to be honest like these activists you know activists always talk about these issues and whether it's weight or other topics they always talk as if there's just sort of you know bullies lurking around every corner in the office like peeking their heads out waiting to find the perfect moment to yell you know you suck fatty or whatever but i really don't think that's very common anymore no one says these things anymore it's not like widespread

this stuff doesn't happen anymore especially in a culture now that's been very very like over socialized and exposed to media like people are barely socializing people are barely flirting in the office or anywhere else so i don't think i don't think fat phobia is going on i'm trying to find uh this clip of the kid was bullied um and the talk show host is like uh what are the kind of insults he would call you and he like lists like like 15 of them matt can you play that clip if you can you're i'll send it to you after just play that clip right now what kind of names were these kids calling you at the pool meathead fatso wide butt value the whale porky hog fat ass double wide butterball those sorts of things right it's just fucking crazy uh man i gotta stop though that's terrible it's not i mean it's

terrible when it happens to a kid it's terrible to say it to an adult um but i would never say it at work so it just begs the question of like what are we really talking about like this no this woman's not being called any of these things at the at the workplace we are nice though nobody's being mean to him i honestly think it's just like this woman's insecurity has driven her to start like a non-profit or something like that and she and it like and san francisco's insane politics enable these types of people i don't is it is it really that i mean maybe she was bullied when she, she grew up. A steel man might also be like, did she have any actual like science to back up the claim that like being mean to fat people only makes their like obesity worse or anything? Because I mean, I would guess the opposite would be.

No, I don't think that. No, no, no. What she's arguing is that obesity is not itself is not a problem that, uh, in other videos on her Instagram, she talks about the idea that she grew up going to doctors as a little kid who was fat, although she said in a bigger body, her phrasing, I believe. Though fat, by the way, fat, like Lindy Weiss or West or whatever,

she's, there's a, within the fat community, saying the word fat is like a, it's a thing. It's not an insult. It's like they're like reclaiming it or something and we're supposed to call them that it's better than all the other ones i don't know anyway this woman as a young woman said doctors would tell her the immediate thing was you have to straight how like the most important thing is for you to shrink your body and she always assumed that that came from a place of medical advice um but actually there is no medical basis to the idea that morbidly obese just let's just say fat people should lose weight for their own health and i find that hard to believe based

on what i've seen um but probably we should get a fat expert in here to talk about it because it would be a fascinating conversation i don't know how leftists like presumably would endorse this fat lady and fat studies and all this stuff but then like turn around and like go ape shit about robert kennedy you know oh right well because yeah they're going after the medical establishment i agree i mean a lot of these like hardcore leftists have tons of overlap with the rfk maha contingent of one really interesting clip i saw this morning um on the view you see the more moderates get in a fight with sunny hoss and yet again and this time it was on the it was over the question of robert kennedy and sarah haynes brings up stupidly like eastern medicine and she she's like, you know, there's like some,

there's some truth to this. Like, what about like all of these other practices? And then Sunny Haas is like, my husband's a doctor and he's right about everything. And that's kind of the debate between the two. But it was interesting to see these women who are super diehard anti-Trumpers reveal what I think is a real interesting fault in American politics, a fault line in American politics on this issue. Like on the health stuff, you loop in a lot of lefties with a lot of right-wing people, especially like left-leaning women who are more open to sort of strange, like experiment, like not experiments, but just like natural, like homeopathy and aversion to medicine and things like this. It was always a left-wing issue. And now there's a huge overlap

with the right-wing people, but yeah, it was, it was, it was left-wing issue. And now there's a huge overlap with the right-wing people. But yeah, it was cool to watch that. And not surprising that Sonny has an expert in the house telling her what is right and what is wrong and that she's defending it on those grounds specifically. Just the conversation ends with, my husband's a doctor, so you're wrong. To your point, yeah. I think that was actually a genuine way for Trump to like broaden his coalition was to get some of the yoga moms onto his side in 2024. Like I like personally know a lot of people who were never even right leaning at all. And then with the whole RFK thing, you get some of those like granola like, yeah, type people.

And I think that was actually a genuine way to get more people on this side. What do you guys hope for the new year? This is how we're gonna round it out what are you grateful for give me your give me your rose and your thorn all all of you oh uh best thing might be a total cop-out but getting to uh work for this job that i now do where i talk right in a hat on a podcast for a living which which is awesome. There we go. Worst case. I guess we, yeah, I don't know.

I guess we avoided the worst case, which would have been the worst case is soon to come. Well, yes, but worst case may be soon to come if Kamala becomes governor of my new state. And I'm begging for that one not to happen. So fingers crossed for the new year. I was going to,

I thought we were going to, we were gonna we were gonna do like best thing that could happen and worst thing that could happen in 2025 so i prepared answers for that you want to do that let's do that do that go in either direction you go past you can go you can look back i'm looking into the future best thing that could happen is elon is elected speaker of the house um as we are hearing might happen today very serious reports of this i'm seeing. And the worst thing that could happen is nuclear war with the Ukraine.

So let's hope that doesn't happen. Hopefully Trump will stop the war. I don't know. I think for me, best thing that's happened so far is just generally the vibe shift. I feel like you can just sort of... There used to be a lot of tension about saying what you wanted to say all the time. And I feel like now you can just speak your mind freely and people seem to be a little bit less crazy and a little bit more respectful of different views. So I feel good about that.

I think worst thing is if I live in New York City, if New York City continues to descend into chaos and not kind of get their act together when it comes to some of the insanity on the streets and in the subways um hopefully hopefully eric adams can continue on what he says is going to be a crusade on protecting the subway but if not i think it's it's gonna it's gonna keep getting uglier down there well yeah i think this year i am personally grateful for you know even though the canadian state might be crumbling,

it has meant that given all my clients are now American, I get to take advantage of an increasingly attractive exchange rate. So I get a nice arbitrage play as sort of the country falls apart. It's okay. For next year, I think, you know, I think we're seeing experiencing a lot of sort of the fallout of code in 2020 now, especially this past year where it's like, we're not going back to what was before 2020. I think a lot

of people were sort of like, we'll batten down the hatches for a bit and go back to how things were. But I don't know. I think a lot of stuff is on the table now. I do see something like annexation or some sort of play with Canada and the US being able to happen in 2025 and beyond that. 2025? being able to happen in 2025 and beyond

that. 2025? Okay, maybe not 2025, but in the 2020s or 2030s, I could see an event like that, that formerly people would have thought was just kind of totally outlandish and impossible. And I honestly, I want to play a major central role in that initiative. I hope it happens. And if there's a Doge Canada or whoever come find me, come hit me up. Cause I want to, I want to take, I love that idea that I agree that things do feel possible right now. I was going to, my, my bud was going to be, um, the success of the pirate wires daily, which I feel like just opened up a whole new gateway for us and like really kind of focus the company and things like that. But as you're talking, it reminded me. So my thorn was the day that Trump was shot. That for me was really dark

because I think I just saw the negative timeline kind of right in front of me. And it was less about Trump than it was about entering a period of really frightening and chaotic political violence without knowing who was in charge or where things were going to go. Things could have gotten very, very, very dark for everybody, regardless of your politics, and not just in America, but worldwide. That would have been really, really, really bad. It feels like America is open for business again. And that is accurate. That is the feeling that I've had for a while. We were watching a building be built, and it's nothing different. It would have been built regardless of who won the president, right? The presidency would have

been built regardless of whether or not Doge was on the table, would have been built regardless of whether or not the economy was cranking and Bitcoin was at an all-time high and all of that. But something happened in the culture where people are just excited here right now. People are, maybe excited's the wrong word. I want to say optimistic because I feel like even Democrats are feeling this way. Whether or not you like who's in charge right now, for whatever reason, this sense of optimism about the future is back in play for the first time that I can remember. I mean, I didn't feel this way during Trump's administration last time. I didn't feel this way certainly in the last administration or before that under Obama,

like this feels really exciting to me. And I don't think it's about Trump necessarily. It seems like America is just looking to get over its shit and, um, and just do stuff again. And I'm, that's the bud for me for sure. That, that is, uh, that sense of optimism is back in play. And I just hope we do a lot with it and I hope we make the most of it because it's not going to last. So you have to make the most of these windows of optimism when they appear. And I'm certainly going to try

and I hope you guys all as well. It's been a joy working with you this year. And it's been a pleasure talking to you guys all every week in this chat. Again, we're off for two weeks, Christmas and New Year's. Rate, review, subscribe, comment. Tell us who you want to see back

on Pirate Idol next year. Yeah, 2025 is coming. And thanks for everything. It's been real. Bye.