 Ladies and gentlemen, thanks so much for being here for the main event for tonight. We are going to get it rolling with Sean's opening statement, roughly two minutes or so. Thanks so much, Sean. The floor is all yours. Cool, everybody be quiet, pay attention. Okay, so obviously without a shout out of a doubt, COVID-19 has been a thing that has been basically omnipresent in our everyday lives ever since. We were told that we need 14 days to flatten the curb, straighten all this stuff out, and then we could pretty much have to respread out all these hospitalizations, go back to our everyday lives. However, unfortunately, like many things, anytime the government takes power, they're only taking a new position and slowly over time, inch by inch, they basically eroded almost all of our civil liberties. Certain states in this union right now are still under some form of lockdown where freedoms are still being restricted, despite the fact that we're well over a year into it. I live in New York City right now. You need a vaccine passport to go to restaurants, movie theaters, and the only way to possibly avoid it is to drive out to Long Island to see screen five, which wasn't very good. But it's really unfortunate that people have kind of let fear take over. Many people have brought up that people in the Democratic Party, and this is not just people in the Democratic Party, greatly overestimate the hospitalization rate of COVID. I think it's something like 80% of Democrats think bare minimum your hospitalization chance if you get COVID is about 30%. And there's a significant portion of that. I can't remember the exact number that believe that your chances of being hospitalized if you get COVID, if you're just in the general population, are like 50%. Bad information permeating throughout our society has led to bad policy. If you look at the states, everything in the beginning was the beginning, it was unfolding as it was unfolding. But if you look at the state's death rates right now from COVID, the number of people have died per state, it's literally by the size of population. So we've tried different types of experiments. It turns out this virus spreads the way that it spreads and people are pretty much getting it, the way that they're getting it. I'm not gonna come up here and tell you that like the vaccines are gonna hurt your great-grandchildren somewhere down the line by unraveling your DNA. I think vaccines are good in general. I just don't think this specific vaccine should be forced because of the parameters of the virus that we're dealing with. If we were talking about smallpox where the death rate is closer to 30%, we'd have an argument. If we were talking about a disease where children are the primary person that are like vulnerable to the virus, then we would have a conversation because as parents, you can't kill your kids. Like we understand that's a violation of their rights, but this is something that largely affects adults. I think I'm ready to move on and live in a state like we are in Texas right now in this moment where we can go about our day-to-day lives and assess our own risk. And unfortunately, the fear and political, political gain is preventing us from doing so. So I do agree that there has been, unfortunately, a lot of misinformation spread from both the left and right related to the coronavirus, related to the efficacy of vaccines, related to the types of measures that we need to take in order to protect ourselves from the coronavirus. But I think that a mistake that the right makes is because the left gets something slightly wrong. For some reason, they are very desperate to do the exact opposite of whatever somebody on the left might say. So even when we get to an area where people are saying things like, well, it doesn't make a difference what protective measures we take, the same people that say that will get mad that Fauci lied about whether masks were effective or weren't effective. I do think that the virus is spreading, especially now as a new variant comes out after Delta. Now we've got Omicron, and it seems like it's incredibly infectious. But I do think that if you watch the cases, I pretty sure the top nine out of 10 or eight out of 10 states that have the most deaths and the most hospitalizations from the coronavirus are red states. That's probably not a coincidence. I do think that once you've seen states enact pretty strict social distancing measures and mask mandates like New York, you can see the cases fall off. Same thing with countries like Australia or New Zealand, as soon as these mandates are enacted, you can see that they have the ability to control the spread of the virus. I guess it's just up for us as a society to decide how far we want these measures to go. I don't believe that we've experienced a severe erosion of our civil liberties. You're still able to criticize the government. You can still worship whatever religion you want. You still have a right to carry firearms. I do agree that a lot of the restaurant lockdowns and the closing of the gyms definitely sucks, but I don't know if I would go as far as to say that this is an erosion of our civil liberties. I do agree that sometimes people have let fear kind of take over their mind in terms of how serious they're treating everything, but I think that the right is just as, if not more guilty of that, then the left has. People on the left are definitely overestimating the deadliness of the disease, but people on the right are dramatically overestimating the danger of the vaccine or any other type of mandate. I've seen a surprising number of people say that wearing a mask is going to inhibit your ability to exchange gas and you're going to suffocate on your own CO2, et cetera, et cetera. I do agree that bad information leads to bad policy, but I think that it's pretty clear that when we look at the states or the countries that have enacted more strict lockdowns in terms of mandating masks or vaccines, we have seen slightly better outcomes. So I mean, all we can do is kind of watch the number of cases, watch the number of deaths, and then kind of adjust our expectations and our policies accordingly based on the amount of deaths we're willing to accept every year from the coronavirus. Well, I will say I was going to get to it, but I mentioned it, but I didn't go over it. Republicans also way overestimate the hospitalization rate of the COVID. I believe it's 25% of Republicans think it's above 30%, but that's because there's been a lot of fear pushed out into the media about that. As for your point about Australia, yes, they've had reduced cases with strict lockdowns, but like Australia's strict lockdowns aren't New York City's strict lockdowns, which has been one of the strictest states in the union. This is like 100 consecutive days of lockdown, forced quarantine, all kinds of like crazy measures that we would find to be hopefully, some of us, ridiculous in this nation. And as far as the states that are being hit with the new waves of COVID that them skewing red, the way I see, I've seen the data time and time again is that every time we talk about Florida, two months later, we're going to talk about another state. We're going to talk about all the blue states. And by we're going to talk about it, I mean, somebody's going to point out that the rates of spikes are going to go up there and nobody in the media is going to talk about it because clearly they have an axe to grind against Ron DeSantis, the governor of this state, Greg Abbott, and all these other red state governors that don't do the restrictions. What it seems to be is happening with COVID in this country is that it's regional. And what ends up happening is the Southern states, which happen to be red, get hit with the new wave first and then it kicks up to the Northeast. And this is why very recently New York was leading the nation in what you call in new cases. So vaccines work. I'm not going to talk down the efficacy of vaccines. I think if you want to get it, go get it. But part of the reason why I'm not that concerned about the virus at this point is because I believe they work. I got mine. And if you guys are sneezing on me or whatever, I'm pretty much protected. That's what the data seems to show us. And as far as getting a million boosters and this ever moving standard of what fully vaccinated means, I think at a certain point, we have to understand that we've lost a ton of people to this virus, but it seems to be infecting whoever it's going to affect. Regardless of what measures we've taken in this nation, obviously we're not willing to go as far as a Singapore or as an Australia or as a China. So it is what it is at this point. I don't think there's an ever moving standard. I mean, boosters have been standard with a ton of vaccines since vaccines have been invented. The idea that there are boosters for vaccines has never been controversial until now for some reason. If the coronavirus is spreading in some areas and then later is showing up in other areas, I mean, there's no excuse for the South spreading variants of the coronavirus before the Northeast. New York, it's international travel from Ronald Reagan. It's probably one of the busiest airports in the world with a different level of people coming from all over the world. If you're seeing spikes of the disease in Alabama or Louisiana before places like New York, I think something is wrong there. Now, I mean, Atlanta, Georgia is literally the busiest airport in this nation by far. It probably is. I've been through ATL a lot, but for international travel coming in and out of the US, I'm pretty sure DCA does more than Atlanta. But actually, that might not even matter that much because you're to do international travel and you probably have to prove like a PCR negative test or whatever. So maybe it might be safer to come in through international travel versus regional travel. I do think that at some point, we have to take a look at like, what is the acceptable level of destruction or death that we're willing to take for the coronavirus? I remember at the beginning of the pandemic, very early on, I think it was a paper published in Nature, they posited that with absolutely no restrictions, it was possible to see around, I think 1.5 million deaths from the coronavirus and everybody laughed at this. Everybody was like, oh, this is like actually ridiculous. Like we didn't see anywhere near this. And here we are a couple of years later and we're about to hit a million. And now people are like, that's not really a big deal, who actually cares? When we're approaching the numbers that people laughed at before is being literally impossible. And that was with no restrictions whatsoever. So I think that the challenging question moving forward is what level of death are we prepared to accept for the coronavirus? We see like 800,000 cases a day now. If in a couple of weeks we're hitting four or 5,000 deaths a day, which I don't think will happen, but say we get to 3,000 or 4,000 deaths a day. Is that just kind of like the new normal that we just accept that, that 800 and 900? Well, I would say that the fact that we're on that trajectory anyway and we've tried a bunch of things and we developed a vaccine in record time would lead me to believe that we're like in a very unfortunate state that, look, if there was power to do more that like made sense and was respectful of our liberties then I could get on board with that. But at a certain point, like the vaccines out there and the Omicron thankfully at this point right now, who knows, it could get worse. Everything gets worse with the pandemic appears to be less deadly than the previous strains that transmits a lot more. So it can still be a problem, but a less deadly strain like these continued mutations are all positive signs. Yet every time we hear a story about a new strain everybody loses their mind even though viruses typically mutate for two reasons. One, to transmit better and two to be less deadly because viruses like every being on this planet they evolve and they evolve to survive longer and you can survive longer in a living host than a dead host. So like when I hear new variants I'm like, all right, that's good. Like we're on the right trajectory. When people hear new variants in this country they panic and they push more restrictions. We started restricting stuff over Omicron when we had no deaths from it in the world at all. Like not even any deaths with it the way that we measure it and it started spreading in South Africa which has like a 20% vaccination rate. So it was infecting largely an unvaccinated poorer population and we still saw no deaths and then everybody lost their mind. My city reinstituted all these vaccine like requirements and all that. We have certain states that have vaccine requirements for remote learning in schools and Destiny's microphone died. So yeah, we have certain states that have vaccine requirements for not even physically attending the school. It's ridiculous. New York City, New York State is one of those. Like at some point we have to like allow common sense to prevail and we have to understand that the initial idea that we're being floated around there about herd immunity getting us out of this is probably what we're gonna end up with no matter what. I don't think that preemptively doing restrictions when you're getting like three X the rate of infection is necessarily a bad thing. This is totally anecdotal on my end and I'll admit it but like it seemed like with the original coronavirus you had like a friend of a friend or you heard of somebody getting sick by this. Maybe you had a grandparent that got sick by it with the Delta variant. It seemed like a lot more people were hearing about people in their community getting it but with Omicron now it seems like a lot of people are getting it or friends are getting it and everybody knows at least like two or three people that have been infected with this. You're hearing stories of like half an office building or like entire like two thirds of a classroom in school I've seen teachers reporting this are like out who are sick. I don't think it's necessarily the worst thing in the world to be a little bit preemptive and saying like hey maybe we should be a little bit more stringent with masks and distancing now so that we can avoid the overload on hospitals or avoid like the staffing shortages everywhere. I don't think that's the worst thing in the world but I mean I do agree that people freaking out every single time a new thing happens the Christ but it was like the flu COVID hybrid that some, that was a stupid article. The chimera? Yeah, whatever that was, it was really stupid and I shout at people when they link a new like because every like two weeks there's like in China five people have the new H5B and it was like okay let's just calm down. I do agree that the fear monitoring goes really extreme on the left but also I mean for every person on the left it's like getting a little bit too overzealous about mandates, you've got somebody on the right that's pointing to an ovarious report showing that vaccines are gonna cause you to mutate like a third leg or something. So I mean like yeah the misinformation environment is really disgusting on both sides. I don't think it's necessarily the worst thing to be a preemptive with lockdowns and mandates but again it all comes down to the end of the day to deciding like what's the level of risk we're willing to engage in societally speaking. Being over cautious and one of the things I like about you is that at least you'll acknowledge that this is a possibility what I'm about to say. Being over cautious is not a no cost position. One of the things that I can't stand about the COVID response is that people think that the lockdowns and all this there's no price to it but there is a price when you're shutting down regular services of hospitals people who need heart surgeries and cancer screenings and all that are getting delayed and we might find out when like the nerds crack the books in three to five years and study this that more people died due to like delays in care or deaths of despair caused by the economic lockdowns then actually will have died from the virus. We seem to have prioritized nobody dying from COVID over everything and we're like oh every other cause of death don't worry about it like pretend like it's like everything can be paused. It's a little bit ridiculous. Like we have to weigh the risk of both sides of this and then make policy accordingly. I mean that's true but I mean I would be shocked if there was over 800,000 or whatever excess deaths recently that happened as a result of despair or shutting down. It doesn't have to be recently. It could be prevention. When I say resigning over the past two years over the yeah the problem is that even in places where there weren't stringent lockdowns enacted people are still acting in an incredibly cautious manner because of the disease. Sweden is a really good case study in this when you compare them to other Nordic countries Sweden didn't enact as stringent policies or in some places they didn't really enforce or enact policies at all but they still suffered a lot of economic harm comparable not quite as bad but almost comparable to the other Scandinavian countries because a lot of people were genuinely homesick a lot of businesses had to close and a lot of people were just being extra cautious because they didn't want to get sick. Again I do acknowledge that you do have to weigh the risks one way or another. There is going to be a cost to shutting things down. There is going to be some level of harm. A lot of children are behind in math and reading because they missed a year of school essentially because online learning is not the same thing. I just think it's important to be honest about both sides of the conversation. You're saying the same thing just on the other side. So the Swedes by the way they don't like when they hear about six foot distancing they're like that's way too close. Like they're not a very social people. No that's not true. That is true. That's absolutely not true. That is true. I've had visitors from Sweden they're like. I just lived in Sweden for two months. Everybody in Sweden is right next to each other if you go to any. I said they're not taking precautions. They don't take precautions very well. You're contradicting yourself there. Hold on. If you're trying to trigger me by not listening to me you're doing a good job. So I literally said explicitly that Sweden is one of the few Scandinavian countries that didn't. People individually take their own precautions. Well when I say take their own precautions I mean that they might stay home from work or they might not go out or whatever if they feel. My understanding is there's been some level of economic harm in Sweden and Sweden's main strategy was they were gonna say we're not gonna undergo the same economic harm as other Scandinavian countries. But it seems like people's decisions on how much they wanted to shop or go out was impacted by the virus even without government restrictions. I'm fine with people taking their own precautions and also it's like kind of weird to say we're not gonna be the one nation that's gonna have economic problems. It's a global economy. Yeah of course. There's the interlinking of everything as well. But like we have a huge supply neck chain like that was like all these like cargo ships that are tied up in California right now. Like we have a ton of issues that are having real consequences on people's lives. And it doesn't have to be this year or next year that heart attacks outweigh or cancers outweigh the deaths of COVID. It could be missed cancer screenings from this year that cause deaths within the next five years or something that would have been preventable or delayable. That's what I'm saying. We have to like. That's possible but man I wish that conservatives cared this much about preventative care before the coronavirus showed up. Like it's really not to say that you're a concern. I don't know if you identify as clear or not but to hear a conservative talk about the importance of like regular screening or preventative care or how important it is to get access to hospitals because the coronavirus is here preventing some people from doing so is a little bit strange to me but. I mean that's one of the best aspects of the American health care system. Look at our five year cancer survival rates. We mammogram everything that moves. My honest, we mammogram things so much that I think some of the recommendations have been curtailed. So women aren't recommended to get mammograms as early as they were anymore. Our five year survival cancer rates my understanding is they're about on par with other countries. But we spend like five times as much for it. So it doesn't seem to be the best system if we're looking at outcomes compared to spending on how much we do. But even if you go into like the Commonwealth Fund which always produces that study every single year that's like America's health care system is the worst in the Western world. If you actually go into it and read the data like they talk about how our preventative care is like off the charts in this country. Yeah, but it's a matter of access, right? Like who cares how good something is if your population doesn't have access to it. I mean, I think that for rich people I think America offers the best of most in the world but not everybody has the financial means to access it. No, that's true for sure. Cost is definitely prohibited for a lot of people. But back to the coronavirus and my understanding is you're on board with the vaccine mandates. What's up with that? Justify that. What's wrong with you? So I'm against the vaccine mandates because I don't think they're very politically effective but I would be in favor of it because vaccines work best when everybody does it. I think the medical science is there to support it. And I think everybody should get it but it's just politically it's a loser so that's the reason why I'm opposed to it at the moment. But in principle, you're in favor of it. Absolutely, because when you're part of a society I think you have a buy-in, you have a responsibility to that society to contribute in a meaningful way and one of those is to take like the minimum level of precautions to not infect people around you with a virus. Much the same way that we would say would be irresponsible to engage in sexual practice without ever getting tested or without ever alerting partners that you might have a disease. I think it's irresponsible to engage in day-to-day life without taking the minimum preventative measures to make sure that you're not infecting other people with another type of disease. Wait, you can get diseases through sex? Yeah. Oh, I'm just kidding. Okay. No, I understand that. I think for vaccine mandates, it depends on the context like I said before if it's something that affects children and those are usually for public school and all that. I thought you're still holding that position for public schools and everything. I'm absolutely still in favor of but like what we vaccinate children for in public school is like we don't force the flu shot on them and the flu is more deadly for under 18s than COVID is. Yeah, that's possible depending on the strain. Like 600 kids have died from COVID since this whole thing started under 18. Sure, it's probably exceptionally where I would imagine but like we're not just vaccinating children just for children, right? We also send them home to their families and everything as well. And then you also have to deal with teachers that can be old in classrooms as well. Again, conservatives have a very narrow focus when it comes to like, how does a vaccine protect an individual? Like as an individual, I don't really care much about the coronavirus at all. I'd like to not get sick, but if I do, it's whatever. But the reason why you get vaccinated is to protect the other members in society that might be more at risk to that disease. And when it comes to vaccinating children, I think it's more or less the same argument. Well, many of these European countries that you referenced earlier didn't close their schools throughout this. Like they might have had a brief closing or whatever but they had the kids come back and they found that the schools were not giant transmission of. So for whatever reason, it doesn't appear that kids, and I couldn't be wrong about this, it could change with a different strain, are transmitting the virus the same way that even adults are. Like it's not only that it's not affecting them the same way, but it doesn't appear that they're transmitting it the same way. I think that during highly infectious periods, I think there are good arguments to keep children home in the beginning. I think that once the data came out relating to schools, I think that that argument lost a lot of its merit. And I think that that keeping people out of schools became a pretty politicized argument. So I'd probably agree with that. But that's irrespective of the argument of whether or not children should be vaccinated. Like a child can get sick and a child can bring a disease home. I don't think that's a very controversial statement. And insofar as we're already forcing children to get vaccinated for a host of other diseases which are far rarer than obviously the coronavirus, it doesn't make a lot of sense why you would. Some of them are rarer because of vaccines. Sure, yeah. They're rarer now, but they're also more deadly for kids. Some of them are weird. Like hepatitis, blood-worn illness. Kids are supposed to get vaccinated for it, might I say. It's a little weird. Like you have to be vaccinated before you're like 10. But like for the most part, there are diseases that typically affect children and would be more common if not for vaccines. I mean, remember, before any of this virus stuff, we were talking about the vaccine skeptics in the richest neighborhoods in California that were refusing it because they were like naturalists and all that before vaccines became like a political thing. Partisan political thing. So yeah, it depends on the circumstances of the virus and I don't think the circumstances of this virus warrant that. And as far as transmission, the teachers can be mandated to get vaccinated. They're government employees, but they're fighting that every step of the way. It's like we have a different standard for the children. Parental rights are being thrown out, but the teachers union can run the show. I don't know 100% why we wouldn't have, we say that coronavirus is not a big deal when hundreds of thousands of people are dying every year. That seems like an easy vector to get people vaccinated through school vaccines. If they've already got to get a half dozen other vaccines, why wouldn't you just add the coronavirus vaccine? I'm gonna add the flu shot over here. If they wanted to, I wouldn't be opposed to that either. Well, they don't have. But the problem is like when you, like the flu is killing 20x or 10x less people then. Overall, but like for children and like you can have. Yeah, but again, it's not the vaccine isn't just for the person getting vaccinated. You just talked about like those elderly teachers in these schools that like could get infected. The people preventing them or actually fighting for them specifically to not be vaccinated or on the right. But there's also teachers unions that are pushing back against this because they don't want any like requirements on their behavior. My guess is going to be, I haven't looked into those specific arguments, but my guess is going to be that those arguments are less centered on the health of the vaccine and more centered on the idea that if you're in a union, you don't want your employer to force you to do something without also getting something in exchange. So I would consider that a fundamentally different argument. But if you're asking me, if children are forced to get vaccines, do you think teachers should be forced to get the same vaccines? I would probably agree with you. I'm not going to die on that hill. I'm not going to say like, yeah. If you had to rank the priorities of what's more important, the children getting it or the teachers, like you would say it was the teachers, correct? Most likely, yeah, probably. I would probably do it, but like if you've got like a ton of children that all have the ability to get sick and then there's a teacher that could get sick. I mean, if the teacher's vaccinated, I mean, it probably gives them better outcomes to survive the disease and not be hospitalized for it. But I mean, there's a child going into school. It's just a good opportunity in society to get somebody caught up on all the necessary vaccinations they have to make sure that we don't have things like measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, other things spreading through society. It just seems like an easy area. We don't vaccinate them in the schools. Like, yeah, they have to get vaccinated outside of the schools. But to be entered into the public school system is what I'm saying. It just seems like an easy thing to do. Again, we don't have to, I mean, man, when we talk about, like we compare it to the flu, the flu kills, I think a really bad flu season. The worst one I think in the past 10 or 15 years is like 52,000 people dead or whatever. No, no, I'm not saying the flu overall is more deadly. That's just not true. And anybody who tells you that is like they're spreading this information to you. I'm saying four children, it is significantly less. Sure. That might be the case. But again, if you're vaccinating for society, I just think it's an easy way to throw them out. Elderly are also vulnerable, although I think I'm pretty sure COVID like takes out the elderly. Like if I were to pet, I didn't look it up right before. Sure. I mean, this isn't very disagree. I think we're nibbling around the edges, James. Push us in a direction. Yeah. Wait, that's copyright, nevermind. Drop it. I'm ready for everything. I'll make him go first since I did the opening statement. Elijah Schaefer was supposed to be the other guy here. That guy would have been crazy. I mean, I could channel Elijah. I could talk about how... I love Elijah. He's a sweet guy. But I could talk about how, like if you get this vaccine, listen, your great grandchildren, not gonna have kids. They're gonna have three eyes. Oh, Bill Gates invented this. Did you know that? Yeah. Bill Gates found out that you could cure this with like a horse thing. And then he was like, nope, microchip time. Are you aware of that? I... Oh my God. Oh, the abortion bounty thing? There are, I'll say this, if you wanna really make people mad, I think that there are, from a strictly legal point of view, I think there are good arguments against Roe v. Wade from a legal point of view. That like, should this be a decision that should have come from the Supreme Court or do this need to be codified in law? Every time people get upset or scared about a potential executive order or a Supreme Court decision getting overturned, I think that's a good part to look at. Like maybe this is something that we should have passed legislatively. But the problem is we're so divided in Congress. We're like, we're looking to the Supreme Court and the president to give us laws because we can't get anything out of Congress. It's a weird glitch or feature, some might say, of the American system. So yeah, it's hard to say. It's, for the Roe v. Wade, I think the most honest take I've heard from somebody who's in favor of it is that they said that it was a really good law, but they just wished the legislature had written it because the court wrote it. Like there's nothing in the Constitution that says in the first and second trimester, which by the way, aren't even medical terms, they're legal terms. The Constitution says this, but in the third trimester, that's the state's rights issue. Like that's just nonsensical. But we have deferred far too much of our power and authority. We expect the Supreme Court and the president to do everything. And it is a weird failure of our system because we expected all the branches of government to be pushing back against one another in order to gain more power. So like, yeah, the fact that we left this up to the Supreme Court when it is essentially a political question is absurd. And like the Texas thing where you're like, if you catch your neighbor, like looking a little, like hanging a little low, and then all of a sudden that's gone. Like you got to call and you get a reward. I think that's really goofy in that part. Would even in this Supreme Court would probably be chucked out. I think that's, it's funny though that I think, did Newsom say in California that he wanted to do the same thing with guns? Yes. Did he get away with that or? I think they're trying to do it. So that'll, it'll be interesting to see the limits of that bounty system tested if that gets patched out of our current legislative framework or not I guess. But the second amendment's actually in the constitution like Roe versus Wade with like an abstraction based on the constitution right now. It's accepted as law in the United States just as much as the second amendment is, right? Now to change it might be easier, but it is like. Probably more so. You can't put an undue burden on somebody seeking an abortion. Yeah, so, but so I'm just saying that like it's as much law right now as the second amendment would be so it'll be, if it doesn't work in California I imagine it shouldn't work in Texas. Well I think the bounty thing won't work but like this Supreme Court will be like well the second amendment's in the constitution Roe versus Wade was made up by like the Supreme Court when they wanted to play legislature. Yeah, but I thought the point behind the Texas thing was they weren't technically making abortion illegal. Well they did. They restricted it heavily in there. It was like six weeks and then you tell you. Yeah, but they didn't make it illegal. They were, oh God I should have written about this. Yeah, so the problem is that they were giving somebody standing in civil court to sue. Oh yeah, you get sue on behind the, They weren't making a criminal matter. That was like the big loophole, how they got around it. Yeah, that's weird whether or not you can grant standing in a scenario like that. I think they'll go that way. James. I will do this, Destiny. I didn't want to. I mean you can pass on some of these topics too because it is one that just Sean, you know where I'm going, Stephen, is that Sean's requested in the past a discussion on systematic racism among the police. Are you open to that? We've gone back and forth in this before. The problem is he's pretty reasonable. He's just a little wrong and I'm very reasonable and I'm mostly right. But I think we agree on like 96% of things. So the 4% we're gonna fight about is gonna be right. The problem with people on the left is anytime they see any gap they want to explain 100% of the gap with racism. But the reality is there's probably a lot of different explanations for it. But I might argue that like 20% of the gap is explainable with racism and Sean will argue that like 15% of the gap is explainable with racism and that's more like 1%. Fair enough. We also, we can jump to another one, no worries. We, Chris, thanks for your idea. Namely, whether or not COVID cases overwhelming in the hospitals, is there any where you guys might disagree on that? So like right now, whether the hospitals are being overwhelmed, I would doubt it, but it would depend on the hospital. Like my mom worked as a nurse and like people were like, the hospitals aren't being overwhelmed. Like she worked as a nurse in New York. Like it was pretty bad. They had trucks for like the, like freezer trucks for the bodies at like peak. But like right now, if you go into any hospital, is that gonna be overwhelmed? Probably not, especially if you go there with the camera. And I don't think the hospitals with the dancing TikTok nurses were overwhelmed, if I'm being honest. Yeah, there, I think regionally some places have had hospitals get overwhelmed, but just like conservatives will post one picture of a grocery store and say America is running out of food, somebody will post a picture of one ER that's overflowing and say, all of America's hospitals are full. That's not necessarily true. This is where we're in disagreement. The lefties do it and they say, oh, I thought there were no stuff shifts in capital. Sure, but people on the right are doing it now too, because they want to show them Biden for everything. The, yeah, the hospital stuff gets a little overblown. Also for a fun fact, my understanding is that hospital ERs, their goal is to operate. I've heard at about like 70% capacity. So sometimes news articles will get posted where it's like, oh my God, like this ER is at 75, 80% capacity. Like it's all over. And it's like, well, they try to operate in that area. The goal listened to be 20% capacity because that's a lot of idle wasted resources you would allocate it elsewhere. If the audience is up for it, we'd love to hear any questions that you have on COVID or anything else. So let's jump into the Q and A. So one thing we do want to do is we'll do it differently in terms of the microphone. This time you'll speak into this mic. So I'll just hold it up for you. And then the reason being this my grade over here isn't working right now. So if you do have any questions regarding the topics that have been discussed or any topics that you'd like to ask for the speakers, please do come on up in the center aisle and we'll start asking questions. Especially if we got a new topic that we'll fight over. Do you guys think the American political system is effective? Yes. Effective, effective how? I mean, that's such a vague open-ended question. I think our American political system is effective in that it is designed to delay, it's designed to stall, it's designed to prevent big sweeping pieces of legislation for being passed based on the wins of the current popular majority. So in that way I would say it's effective. In terms of if you want a parliamentary style system where one party takes over and they just pass more legislation on more issues, then no, but I'm more in line with the design of what the system is actually meant to do. I think people want to blame the system because they don't like the underlying reality which is that Americans are genuinely very divided right now. People look at Congress as being unable to get anything effective done but I think that's because as Americans we genuinely have huge disagreements about the future of our country. So I mean, we see that reflected really well in the current political system. And in terms of like parliaments that have a lot of parties and all that, they still break down into like basically two sides no matter what. So like even when you have independence in the, it's very rare you get an Israel situation where they just won't form a majority and they'll run like four elections in a row like in a European system. So what ends up happening is you have two mostly dominant political parties but then you have like further left or further right parties that end up joining with them much in the same way that Bernie Sanders caucuses with the Democrats or did before he ran as a Democrat, no matter what and he'll endorse the Democratic nominee even though he was like the longest serving independent. It's because like more or less people align with whoever's closest to them and like that's how you form majorities or whatever. Like I did the parliamentary system was a little bit different but it's like not as different as people. Yeah. And you run into very similar problems. It's very frustrating. Americans will look at some European coalition governments and go, oh my God, look, they've got four parties. Like they don't get cucked by mansion and cinema. Well, okay, if you go to other countries though sometimes you will get cucked by a party that has like seven seats because that's what you're like party needed to form a majority government. And those people are the ones that are dictating so much of your policy. Like this happens in coalition governments too. Not to say that the two-party system or coalition style government is superior or inferior just that they each have like their own sets of problems and concerns. And I'd love for Democrats to like attack Joe Manchin. He's the only Democrat that can hold West Virginia for the Democratic Party. It's the most popular politician in West Virginia history. And I just love watching Kyle Kalinsky talk about how this progressive is gonna primary him and they're gonna take him out because Kyle Kalinsky knows better about the people of West Virginia than the people in West Virginia. Trust me, like Manchin is a very savvy politician. Like you have to be to win in one of the reddest Trumpist states as a Democrat repeatedly. And you're like the Democratic Party is lucky to have him even if he is more conservative as a Democrat. So this is a little non-sequitur, but like if either of you have any sort of experience or knowledge of blockchain technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, all that stuff. Do you see many opportunities in the American political system in which a decentralized ledger could assist in sort of assuring the public of validity in terms of results or even supply chain questions like vaccines, stuff like that. And if so, where do you see that? I think like blockchain technology, you're talking about like the way that you could verify each transaction. You use that for the votes, right? I'm not like an expert on it. But I think that sure, maybe like you could establish a system that would like on paper or on digital paper, make it seem like the election results can be trusted and verified and all that. But unfortunately, like the arguments about the election are, they're political in nature. All right, like every time a Democrat loses, we hear about voter suppression, voter ID, all this like racism and all that. And if a Republican loses, unfortunately now we hear about like everything being stolen, rigged, like all the terms and all that. And we like, it's just, we have people in our country that realize that you can gain more politically from not like conceding with grace, but from saying that the election results weren't valid. And just declaring yourself the winner, which by the way makes a lot of sense like from a political motivation because what people love in politics more than any other thing isn't policy, ideology or even personality. It's a winner. The reason Joe Biden won was he had the nostalgia from President Obama. Michelle Obama would have announced at any point she would have won the presidency, won the nomination, running away with it. Like people vote based on winners. And the Democrats are more dedicated to voting based on winners than the Republicans. You have to remember, Bill Clinton was the first two-term president for the Democrats since FDR. They ran a bunch of progressives throughout that time period and they lost. So all they're looking for is a winner. And if you never concede defeat, then you're always a winner and you can always come back. That's why Trump's gonna easily, if he runs, take the nomination. I think that Blackchains are interesting, but they don't solve for any of the problems that we have right now related to our trust of our current political system. Like, okay, so we put everything in a public ledger that's like publicly verified. If you're accusing somebody of committing election fraud, you're just gonna say that the data that's going on the actual ledger is already fraudulent. You'll say that people are inputting fake data. If you want to take that a step farther and you want to say, well, at least with a public ledger, the verified everybody's information is then the suggestion that we need to publish publicly the information of every single person that goes on the blockchain. I think that Blackchains have interesting theoretical implementations for problems that might be able to solve, but I don't think any of those are related to the election. Also, we have to be honest that Democrats make election laws easier for Democrats to win and Republicans try to make election laws easier for Republicans to win. Like, the reason ballot harvesting is a huge thing is because Democratic voters live in more urban areas and you can gain a lot by sending a party official door to door in a single building with 100 tenants and Republicans can't utilize that if their base is more rural and you have to go to like 100 separate properties. So like, we have to acknowledge that a lot of that is people being angry about the gainsmanship between the parties, like getting nasty and like fraudulent, you know, getting nasty and creating the idea of like fraudulent elections. All right, my question actually is about voting rights. I'm just interested in both of your opinions on things like voter ID, reducing ballot boxes for drop-off, reducing hours at the ballot, as well as something else that I forgot. Just anything regarding these new laws going in place about voting rights restrictions or anything on that topic, thanks. Well, I think voter ID is not unreasonable. A lot of the studies that show that like black people are somehow incapable of somehow of getting an ID come from one study that was in New York, I believe it was in like 2005 that asked people if they had driver's licenses in New York City and they found out that this percentage of black people didn't have driver's licenses and then they were like, oh my God, like black people can't get IDs because the DMVs racist or something and that's just been a thing. I think an ID requirement is totally fine. You need an ID to open a bank account. You need an ID to like get into certain buildings. You need an ID to check into this hotel. Like it's not a big deal to require that to vote and it's actually helpful for people for them to have some kind of photo ID that's verifiable. As far as other voting rights, I don't even remember I got stuck on the ID and I spazzed out. If you wanna do a voting ID requirement, then just send everybody an ID for free. I don't know why Republicans never suggest that. If you wanna make it so that you need an ID to vote, which I guess on his face is fine. So a lot of European countries would do it. Then just make it so that we send out free either national or state level registered IDs to be able to do it. Anytime somebody's putting up barriers in front of voting, it kinda makes me wonder what the goal is. Voting is a pretty important part of running our country. I don't know if opening a bank account or getting into a hotel is at the same level of importance as being able to vote. But I think that Republicans, it's hard because if you look at the data, opening up more voting rights to people and even things with mail-in ballots don't actually necessarily even favor Democrats. A lot of that data ends up being a wash or very slightly favoring Democrats. It's not even a thing that is that harmful to Republicans. I don't know why they're so against letting more people vote other than the fact that it's an issue that galvanizes the basis of both parties. If you really want voter ID, then just send everybody an ID so that we don't have to worry about something. That's the reason why the states with the strictest voter ID laws have a free option that you can get from your DMV, your non-driver's ID. Also, the idea that the charge for an ID, it costs me, I think, I don't know, I'll say 80 bucks to renew my driver's license. I'm gonna be totally honest with you and I'm gonna admit to a huge crime. I lived in California for three years and I live in Florida right now and my plates are four years expired and I don't have a license for either state because every time I'm going to the DMV, it's like a four-hour wait. Maybe other people are better at dealing with that shit or maybe I just have problems, but fuck the DMV. Holy shit. Mail it, mail it to people. If it's so goddamn important that people need an ID to vote, then just fucking find them mailing address and mail it. Listen, if I owe the government taxes, the IRS can find me under a fucking rock, okay? So you can't tell me, you can't find people that are living in different addresses. I think if the political will was there to mail people a voter ID, we'd be able to do it without having to clog up the DMV with a billion people going to show up to get an ID to vote. That's what I think. You know, if you would have just registered on time, then you would have been able to get the mail option. I just renewed mine over the internet without having to go in. Well, but to get your first one, because I lived in Nebraska for three years. Yeah, your first one, you gotta go in for your first one. It's a big weight. All right, then maybe you can't be trusted to vote. I don't know, like, if you can't go to, like, you can't go to the DMV once every eight years. Like, I was gonna say, I think it's like 80 bucks, but I could be even making that number. It could be lower in New York state to get your driver's license. But it's good for eight years. Some places the driver's license is good for 10 years. And I'm sorry, this may sound elitist. I may even like be against the pores by saying this. But if you can't afford $8 a year for 10 years, like, how are you even alive? Why are we even talking about you voting? Like, the idea that this is like some undue burden on people is a little bit absurd. And I say that as somebody who doesn't vote. I agree, you guys should be earning more money. At the very least, you should have $5 a month to subscribe to me on twitch.tv slash destiny. Make sure you smash that subscription button for $99 a month, even cheaper if you're in other countries, guys. And if you're an Amazon Prime member, you can subscribe for free. Amazon Prime is true. Yeah, so we already know that lockdowns work. And in countries that, you know, that perform strong lockdowns, the COVID rates have been very low and they've been really good at preventing people from getting COVID. So, and we've seen that with the United States, with under Trump, not really having strong lockdowns that are COVID deaths of skyrocket, right? And so Destiny, you've said that it would be a losing battle if Biden just forces COVID lockdowns. And sure, yes, it may be a losing battle and it may be, it's probably gonna be a tough battle. But if we're gonna save probably, or definitely thousands of lives at the end of the day, why should we not do it? Because it's not gonna work and you're gonna end up losing more political power than lives you'd save and whatever things you enact are gonna be rolled back as soon as the next president steps in office. I think that we have to balance. People get mad because they say the CDC makes political or economic decisions. Everybody does when it comes to health. The WHO even does, when they're considering whether or not to declare something pandemic, the WHO will take into account like global economic factors or geopolitical facts for making certain declarations. If we were pushing as hard as we could to mandate these vaccines, then imagine you end up losing an election over that. And we're already, it's already like razor thin margins in every area. People showed on the cinema and I think it was one of the four closest races in the country. You're at a 50-50 divide in the Senate. Like if this is the issue that tips the scale, do you think more lives are gonna be saved by getting an extra, 4% of Americans vaccinated via OSHA mandates, then you're gonna save if we lose the next set of elections and now you're even more gridlocked in Congress. And then you're paving the road for another four years of a Republican president that is gonna give more tax cuts to the wealthy. It's gonna deny climate change, isn't gonna do anything to help working class Americans. Like, yeah, I don't know. It just seems like not a good path to go down for vaccine mandates. Well, wouldn't you also say that there might be a risk at the end of the, like round the election where people are gonna say that, oh, well, Biden hasn't really done that much with COVID and hasn't really, like, you know, hasn't really done any COVID lockdowns or anything like that. Do you think that could also be a possibility that could end up harming him? I can only go by what I see and what I hear, but it feels to me like the vast majority of Americans already feel like we've gone too far with certain types of mandates. I feel like there was, and maybe it's not, maybe because Americans are very short-term memory when it comes to voting, voters have short-term memory, but a lot of people were incredibly upset with how long the school closures lasted because for working class people, as bad as it sounds, school is the cheapest alternative to daycare. And when you lock down a family in a household where one parent can't work because a child can't go to school, it is incredibly destructive to those families. You're also setting back the education as well. And then when, this might just be me because I've been to different types of states, but man, some places it feels oppressive. I don't care as much because I'm autistic or whatever, I just don't, whatever, give a fuck. But I can imagine that if you live in a place like Seattle and you've gotten all your vaccines and they tell you that you can go out and do everything, but I still have to show a card every time I want to go into any area where certain gyms are closed and it's like, well, what the fuck? What did I even get vaccinated for? Right? Like I'm 33 or whatever. Like I'm not going to get sick or die. And now I got vaccinated. I still have to show a card everywhere. I still have to wear a mask everywhere. A place that's still closed down. Some schools are still like, it just seems like at some point you're overwhelming people's ability to deal with things. And like the political costs aren't going to be worth it. I don't think, I understand what you were saying before, but, and I could be wrong, but I would be shocked if we ever got through point in an election season where people were like, man, Biden didn't do enough lockdowns. Man, the Democrats went way too easy on COVID. We needed to stay home even more. We needed to enact even more closures. I don't think that that's where the American consciousness is sitting at right now. My opinion. Trump lost on not doing enough pretty much, but that's like the Republicans can lose. I'm not doing enough. The Democrats like, he is right about that. And it would be a disaster because you're like, oh, you could save thousands of lives with the strict lockdowns. Like what are we talking about? We're talking about the, there's a city in China. I believe it's Shenzhen. That's like 14 million people in there. And they're like locking them in their homes and they're giving them like, basically food rations every day. And like even the people over there are like have had enough with it. Like there's only so much a president and under our system can do. And like Trump couldn't get what he wanted through. Like when he wanted Michigan to open up, if you remember, he tweeted like liberate Michigan. He didn't like order the Michigan governor to open anything up because we have division of powers. Like most of these powers that are not designated for the federal government are reserved for the states. That's in the 10th amendment. So there's not a lot that Biden could do. And I'm not in the business of giving Joe Biden good political advice, but he's right. If Biden tried to do a full crackdown lockdown on the federal level, like that would be like, you know, that would be everything, that would be everything that a lot of conservatives have been waiting for. Like they're coming for you. They're gonna get your guns after that. Like that whole thing that's in line with the federal takeover. Like just imagine him sending the military in there. Hello, I have a more lighthearted cultural question for y'all. Both of you, have you seen the Witcher Netflix series? I only saw two episodes. Are you a fan of the Witcher in general? Maybe the video games? Yes. Okay, so you know the cast of the Witcher then. Yep. Pretty well. So I was having a discussion with a friend about how Hollywood tends to miscast well-developed and well-known characters for the sake of tokenism, or at least it seems like it's tokenism. So is that good or bad? Or does it annoy you? Does it not? Does it make you think, oh wow, that's progress America? Tell me what you think. And the Witcher's just one example, but anything. So this is a complicated question. When Ghostbusters 2 came out, that was like a, now I like the Ghostbusters 2, okay? But it was pretty universally panned. Everybody thought Ghostbusters 2 was bad. Nobody thought that Ghostbusters 2 was bad because it was all men. They just said it was a bad movie. When the Paul Feig remade the Ghostbusters with an all-women's cast, it wasn't bad because it was a bad movie. It was bad because of tokenism. I think it's hard sometimes when we say that there's a bad movie to, we always wanna blame it on if there's like a black recast or a woman recast like, oh, it was bad because of that, when it might have just been a bad movie period. There are definitely times where there is tokenism and it goes a little bit too far. The best example that I can think of is it feels like when we write women characters in movies, we're really, really, really afraid of showing them failing ever. So I think that Rey from the New Star Wars is a really good example of that. I think that Captain Marvel is a really good example of that where you don't even get a traditional hero's journey because there's never the failure part because it feels like we're afraid to see women fail. Whereas historically, older women are written with that in mind and it actually works totally well. So Kill Bill is a female character lead and she fails a ton and that's part of her journey. Or Sigourney Weaver in the Alien movies has a lot of failures and fuck ups and problems and she is a great character. So I think that sometimes there can be times when people are writing characters and it's a little bit cringey when you see like, oh boy, here's like the token gay character or here's the token woman character. But I think that there are times when it's fair to just insert a character like that and it's not necessarily tokenism because they're there. And one of the seasons of Dexter, there was a serial killer that opposed Dexter and he was gay, but it wasn't a big deal. It's just like some people are gay like in life that just happens. So yeah, I think it's okay to swap out. If you wanna re-adapt like popular media and you wanna make a character black or a woman or whatever, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think it's fine to do so. It gives you greater representation, more people might find an appeal in it. But when you start changing things just because you wanna make that character like an indestructible token, then I think it's fair to be critical of that particular thing. I think with Siri, did they make her black in the Witcher or something? No, it was Frenchella, I think. Of course it's not as redheaded as well. It's a redheaded, look. No, no, he's downplaying the redheaded genocide that is going on in Hollywood. All the redheads are being recast in Hollywood and it's shameful. And there's actually, one of the characters that people complain that they cast as a black person. This is the other thing I can't stand. Is if you're gonna recast somebody, just commit to it. Because in season two, they just like lighten her up to make her look more like a redhead and that's almost more offensive. Like they're like, oh, maybe if we brighten this person up that we cast in this role, like people will be less off-put by it. But it's like, no, I noticed that. Like why are you doing that? That's inappropriate. So yeah, but the redheaded genocide is real and Hollywood ought to be ashamed. And like I said, they gotta commit to it if they're gonna just come out with their anti-redhead agenda. But overall, in reality, there is a weird double standard that we have about like if you recast a historically minority role, then that's like considered horrible. But like if you recast like in the mostly European like inspired story, then that's considered fine and you're like angry for being angry at it. And as far as like Tolgens, I think the best show about that ever is my favorite show on Netflix. And that's 13 reasons why. Because after season one, which was like about the book, they were like, they had no material and then they had to continue writing three seasons of the show. So season three, four or five is literally about every single topic, which means that every single diverse casting gets like stereotyped and it's hilarious. Like the Mexican guy gets deported because like Mexicans have to be deported or his family gets deported. And like the DEA are so messed up that they don't even turn off his family stove. So like he goes out to like get like vegetables for dinner or whatever. He comes back in and like his whole family's gone, like no trace of them and the stove is still on. It's like, yeah, I mean, he's Mexican, obviously illegal immigrant. It's like, so in a certain way, I do love it when they like tokenized so hard that it's like absurd. Thank you guys. The vaccine debate reminds me of many people who are skeptical about the vaccine. Many people arbitrarily pick and choose what they're skeptical about. And others are ultimate Nagarjuna skeptics where they don't believe anything no matter what you say. What advice would you give to the average person who struggles between being too accepting versus being too skeptical? Skepticism is good, but when you apply it selectively, you're not being skeptical. You're just being a reverse partisan hack. I've seen so many people that will say on in the same breath, they'll say every single death was counted as a coronavirus death. George Floyd was counted as coronavirus death. And then they'll be like, also every single various report is a 100% verifiable vaccine death. And it's like, really, why would you pick one and not the other? It's totally inconsistent. There are so many slogans today that are really good slogans, but the action behind them is just not there. People that say, do your own research, don't. And if they did, that would be great. If you wanna do your own research, that's totally fine. But do your own research to most people just means copy paste in the last five memes you saw on Facebook and Instagram and then pretending that Joe Rogan is like the fucking director of the CDC or some shit. Yeah. Just don't do that. Well, if he was the director of the CDC, then the government would be able to silence him. I was gonna say, definitely listen to Joe Rogan on all of his medical advice. Like he's better than a doctor, actually. But yeah, what I would say is that we're not receptive to factual information. Like that's the way our evolutionary brains are programmed via evolution. I don't know why I said that sentence that way. So that means you're already predisposed to believe and think certain things and you seek out information and what stands out to you is what already confirms your priors. So if anything is like extra confirming it's like the perfect story for you and it validates everything that you believe, just double, triple check it, go through it. Like there was a post that came out recently about 75% of the people who died from the virus or whatever had like four core mobilities. Therefore, like something, something, it's not about anything like that. And it turns out that was only for specifically vaccinated people. So as long as you don't have like four devastating things wrong with you, like you're gonna be fine if you get the vaccine. But like they was misinterpreted as like the general population. And then people started like cutting off three quarters of all the COVID deaths based on them not looking at a story that they should have like checked their priors on. If you wanna be more informed than 99% of content creators and 99.99% of like the public at large, if you just read a full article past the headline you'll know more information than most people. It's actually unbelievable how many people are unwilling to read past the headline. I once read a book and then made a video about like two pages in the book and people were like, Sean you're the greatest researcher I've ever heard in my life. People don't read, it's serious. It's a problem. And just I gotta give the vegan channels out there some content to react to. What is your opinion on obligatory veganism? Against it. Correct. I love animal suffering. It feels so good. I just went to a Brazilian steakhouse where they like carved the meat off the rack. I'm like burping up blood as we're talking. So like I don't think I'm on board with that. Yeah. Texas A. Brazil is sponsored. Go to it if you're in the wherever they have this. This question coming in from online. Dan Zammett asked socially is our country progressing or regressing? I thought that question was gonna ask me about the cuck article I wrote. And if that was the case I was gonna say fuck you Hartfeld. Sorry, what was the question? They said, I get the reference but they said socially is our country progressing or regressing? I am a post-modernist so I reject grand narratives. The idea that you can characterize everything as moral progress or moral regress I think is a little silly. I would never view it that way. Whether or not society's progressing or regressing is always gonna be with respect to some value you have. If you consider yourself like a quote unquote progressive in the American sense then you'd probably say that we're making progress up until recently at least. Maybe you view the abortion rights as maybe a step backwards or something. But yeah, anytime somebody starts to speak about objective progress or regression I would be a little hesitant to use those terms. I think overall in history we're progressing. Obviously higher standard of living. People are being better to each other in the long term. As far as you call it a grand narrative. Yeah, I don't like the questions like that. It depends on how far along Japan is with the sex robots. That would determine whether or not we're progressing or not. I will say that being in Western capitalist countries when we think about progression I think we can load that in very Western ways in very capitalist ways that we're not aware of and I think it's good to be aware of that. So typically in Western countries when we think of progress we especially tie it to technology but we never think about relationships. So if I were to ask you if we've progressed today from where we were 100 years ago people would say we have cell phones, we've got computers, we've got better video games, we've got way better porn and these might be like the ways that they mark progression through society but if I were to ask like well do we have more friendships today than we did are our family relationships healthier? Are there like self reported happiness higher? The amount of depression that children or pressures that we face, right? People never really think about it that way because that's a harder to monetize thing. It's harder to sell you that. It's harder to buy or trade that. It's harder to have like a quantitative value on that. So I would be like careful about how we think about progression or regression through society because I think in some ways it's easy to miss certain types of regression because we just don't think about it that much. Excellent and this one coming in from online just now. WHMW asked question opinion on Dr. Fauci and the alleged Chinese lab leak. Dr. Fauci stands next to Joe Biden as true American heroes. I'm glad that we've had both of them at the helm over the coronavirus pandemic. Whether there was or wasn't a leak from China I don't think it affects much in terms of how we deal with the virus and if there was or wasn't a leak if that information exists in a classified manner somewhere if China is the only one that has it we're never gonna know unless it gets leaked or unless our intelligence agencies dig it up. So it seems like a red herring to focus on it so much. I know it was a topic of a lot of debate early on. But okay, but yeah, I don't see what the point is. Point the mic part at your face. Yeah, that's this part, right? Yeah. Okay, is this better? That is, absolutely. Cool. As far as Lord Fauci I literally have those Pope candles of him and I pray to him in the nighttime. But for the lab leak theory I think this is a great example of like the absurdity of expecting everybody during a crisis to follow a government narrative and then all these social media companies to censor on behalf of the government narrative. This laboratory was at the epicenter of the origin point of the virus. The virus came from bats that weren't like within like 300 miles of this laboratory and the laboratory studied coronaviruses. The idea that it was irresponsible or conspiracy nonsense to speculate that the laboratory that researches and studies and hybridizes these viruses could have been responsible for the leak that even though it's at the origin point is ridiculous and absurd. So I do think it is important to find the origin right now. Like I don't wanna say that it's the most important priority to find out like who's at fault. But at some point like you wanna have like some record of how this happened because you know, don't you wanna prevent this from getting out of a lab there in the future? I will say that. Also Fauci did it with the dog experiment. As somebody who studies criminal justice a lot, we wouldn't say that cops cause crime because we send cops to where criminals are, right? Right. So it doesn't really, it shouldn't be that surprising that we have an institute dedicated to studying coronaviruses where a ton of the world's coronaviruses could originate from as well, right? I mean, if the cops were hybridizing criminals there to make like super criminals just for the purpose of studying it and then a super criminal broke out of there, I would be like, it's a little bit suspicious. I mean, if, but I mean like as opposed to shipping bats that could have highly infectious diseases across the world because we don't wanna build the lab close by, like I think I would rather have. The lab isn't close to where the bats is. That's the thing. And also the bat lady works there, the one who studies coronaviruses and bats. Sure, but this institution has been studying coronaviruses for decades. It's not surprising that it would be in an area where bat populations can be found and coronaviruses like come from. But the bats aren't found there. The lab that studies the virus there. If it's a lab leak, then it's not surprising that the lab that studies it could leak it. But the bats interact with other animal populations. Like I think was it pangolins is where they suspected it came from that are in the area. Like it's not that surprising. I mean, sure, but like the bat at the origin lives like 300 miles away and it would be weird that it flew all the way to Wuhan just to, just to- Zoo and not, listen, viruses travel in crazy ways. They can go, they travel around the world at this point. Look, maybe the bat like has homies that are being studied inside the lab and it wanted to frame the lab. So it spread it over in Wuhan. But I think that's a little ridiculous. I think it's fine to speculate that that lab like right next to where the virus started that studies those viruses specifically that is hybridizing those viruses to make them transmissible to humans in order to study them better might have accidentally leaked it out. Like I'm just saying, I don't think that's a crazy conspiracy theory. It could be the best frame of the laboratory. It could be. This one coming in from E-Tips says, Sean, have you heard of Adam Johnson of citations needed and do you have any responses to his responses on your videos about crime? I have not heard of him, but I love watching video responses to me, especially really, really, really heartfelt bad ones. So I'll definitely check that out. You got it. And this one coming in from Reverend Father says, was January 6th worse than the 2020 BLM Antifa riots? Oh, for me, January 6th was the worst thing like humanly possible. I always like to pause for a moment and like reflect on where I was on January 6th. I was at a car dealership when our Republic fell. I was talking to a car dealership man. That's what they call them, that's their title. And he was trying to sell me a car and he was telling me that like frame damage to a car is not a big deal. And I said it was a big deal. Then I looked up and on the screen with CNN and January 6th was happened and I realized what a big deal actually is. So yeah, January 6th is the biggest deal of all time. It's like the greatest event. Unfortunately, we have unarrested, unindicted co-conspirators of January 6th in this audience right now. And yeah, despite the fact that like the riots were more violent and more people died and more property was destroyed and it was the property of American citizens that had nothing to do with anything related to George Floyd and it was a horrific stain on our country that lasted for months. January 6th was just so, so worse. Where were you that day? So I was at home watching our Capitol getting invaded by a bunch of insane conservatives that were led on for misinformation by the president of the United States trying to undermine the entire electoral system of the country. I don't think that January 6th was the worst thing that ever happened but I do think it's a uniquely horrible thing in our history and I think that conservatives that downplay it by just going on the dollar amount of property damage is a little bit disingenuous. I think that it's pretty uniquely horrible that the president of the United States is literally undermining, at that point, he'd undermined every single person in his administration, in his cabinet and now he'd finally gotten to the vice president and was telling the American people that they needed to fight to take back their system and then you saw that result in people invading our Capitol House where they're trying to disrupt the election process. Some of them at least, the oath keepers, we see that was the case. I think that's a pretty uniquely horrible thing and I think it's okay to feel that that was a pretty horrible thing. In terms of comparing it to the BLM riots, I don't know why anybody in the right state of mind would compare a single protest to an entire year of protests and rioting. That just does, I don't understand the comparison. Like, do I want to compare January 6th to Tiananmen Square or do I want to compare January 6th to 9-11 or, I just don't think the comparison holds true. I think you can simultaneously criticize the BLM riots and the damage caused in cities while also acknowledging that January 6th was a uniquely horrible event in US history driven by misinformation from a wannabe fascist president that was trying to undermine the American political system because he wasn't happy with the outcome of the election, that he himself probably sabotaged by getting his own voters not to mail in ballots because he didn't trust them so much because he was worried about losing. Oh, yeah. Thanks. I mean, like the whole, all right. I mean, the whole Black Lives Matter riots were ginned up hysteria about misinformation. I mean, Jacob Blake, most justified shooting ever against slam dunk in every way, you can't let a fleeing felon on a sexual assault warrant take off in a car that's not his with other people's kids, with the knife in his hand, by the way. And that led to the riots that led to people getting killed in self-defense, most justified shooting ever again, by Kyle Rittenhouse. But like all that damage in Kenosha that was posed to Jacob Blake was based totally on misinformation and misinformation pushed by politicians all over the Democratic Party. Some of them are in the White House, in the vice presidency. So yeah, we've had problems like that. I mean, part of the Black Lives Matter riots. You could pick, the thing is, is like, I get left the left credit for not organizing on one day because you can't name a day that they did something bad, but they were trying to storm the White House while Trump was in there. And that's when they burned down that historic church that's across the street. They were trying to storm the White House that night, and the night before. And it was all over there. And then the story was whether or not Trump used tear gas to hold the Bible up in front of the building. So like I, you know, it is a serious thing. Like don't go into the Capitol. Those people were idiots. A woman got shot by the police because like she was ginned up on that hysteria. It's ridiculous, but like I'm not gonna pretend that this is 9-11 Pearl Harbor and what you're going, and Armageddon, you know, the Michael Bay movie all rolled into one. Like it's just not true. I don't think it was horrible, but again, the excuse-making, like I think there is something uniquely horrible about the President of the United States trying to undermine your own electoral system in a democracy. That's like a uniquely horrible thing to me. Stop. This one, we did actually just put a poll. And so for the live chat, we asked what they'd like to hear your opinions on first out of these topics. And well, I'll just tell you that Biden was the most voted for topic. He's always the most voted for. He's the most voted in history. I assume, well actually given that destiny, you already did have a debate regarding Biden's more- Biden the American hero? That's right. So if you, Sean, what are your thoughts on Biden and then we'll see if destiny agrees or not? Biden is a winner. I don't mean that like facetiously at all. Like Joe Biden, I should have bet money on the election. I made a video all the way back a year before the primary telling everybody in the world, look it up on my channel, that Joe Biden was going to swing the election back in his favor after South Carolina. And for months and months and months, as he stumbled and bummed through the primaries, the Democratic primaries, I would save a section in every one of my videos for dislikes for my audience, where I talk about how Biden's still going to win this. And God damn it, he did it. So yeah, Joe Biden proved me right for a year. So me and him are in good terms. The worst thing that could have possibly happened is I said he had a good chance of winning the general election is all this frog talk because that off you skates how correct I was about him. And as a resident, I mean, he's a bumbling idiot. He's Joe Biden, what we're expecting, but he is a winner and that's all that matters. You got it, thank you. Destiny, any thoughts on that? I love Biden, he's doing a great job. You can call him a bumbling idiot, but I will say the funniest thing, the funniest challenge that I put to conservatives from 2016 to 2020, I usually give people credit where credit is due, even if I don't like them. Trump is the first person in the history of mankind that's made me wonder if somebody could legitimately luck their way into becoming a billionaire because oh my God, one challenge that I put to conservatives was if you can find me a single video from 2016 onwards of Trump's sounding intelligent on any topic, I'll give you 100 bucks. I was just super curious. There is not a single video. You've got videos of him talking about invisible jets where I legitimately think I really do believe that he thinks that invisible planes are invisible. Like Wonder Woman's jet. Any time he talks about the Middle East, I would pay money to see if he could find just Iraq and Syria on a world map. I don't think he could do it. I legitimately don't think he could do it. Talking about cyber, any topic, it's just unbelievable. You have to get ahold of the cyber. Yeah, so I mean, I don't know, people can talk about Biden bumbling. He's got a stutter, at least he has an excuse for sounding like an idiot. Trump, I get to find one, so I don't know. I'll take Biden any day of the week over Trump. He might stumble through things, but at least there's something going on in there. And I think it's a lot to say when Republicans accuse Biden of having dementia, but he still sounds more coherent than Trump when he's talking about anything that's actually important in American politics. I will say the stutter is something that's legit. And I think what happens when you get to a certain age is they teach you techniques to deal with the stutter and it's harder for your brain to do that. So I do think that Republicans overplay their hand. That was the thing is people would always cite Joe Biden's stutter, his bumbling and all that, which is entertaining as like Marx against him, but what people need to understand is that the world is not on Twitter. So those videos of Joe Biden not making sense while smelling some senator's daughter and talking about corn pop, nobody in the general public sees that. What they see is the guy that they've known for a long time that is a stabilizing influence for them. So what I would say about Joe Biden is his greatest asset as a politician because he's always been a gaff machine and all that is that he's non-threatening and Trump was threatening and his intelligence statement was obviously I'm a very stable genius. All right, so smart. Thank you very much. This one was the next one. They asked what your honest predictions on the 2022 midterms? And Brad Wave, I mean, come on. Everything changes so quickly. I wouldn't make a prediction. It's gonna, my gut feeling is it's gonna depend largely on how the economy is doing and it's gonna depend on how well, I guess like supply chain related stuff and demand related stuff lines up to where whether or not Americans are feeling the effect of inflation. I think people are seeing it the most right now in cost of goods and especially things like gas and energy. If they're continuing to feel that pinch, then come election time, they're probably gonna wanna vote red, but if that inflation starts to come under control, there's a lot of other parts of the economy that have picked up pretty hardcore for especially working class Americans. Wages are up in a lot of places anecdotally, but like I hear like nursing staff complaining that like the Walmart down the street is starting to offer competitive wages and they're getting really asked about it. Unemployment is incredibly low. We've had a huge restriction on immigration so supply of labor has been down a lot. So wages are actually following. It took a while, but they're starting to bump upwards pretty significantly, but a lot of those gains might be wiped out by inflation, but inflation is a complicated beast. People are still arguing over whether the CPI is an appropriate way to measure it or whether the goods included in that basket are over-representing some things for some types of money, et cetera, et cetera. It'll depend on how the economy is doing basically. I wouldn't make a prediction now because I don't know where the supply chain or inflation is gonna be at some number of months from now. People always struggle in their midterm elections, especially in recent history. So like that already tends to the Republicans. There's like a generic congressional ballot and the Republicans are doing better, I believe, at this point in time than they were doing when the Tea Party was like a thing and Obama got wiped out in that election. Inflation is like, that's no joke. And like people, the way people like interact with inflation is the childish way. It's basically like the price of gas and like shit that you see every day. So that does not bode well for Joe Biden. And also the Democrats are on a mission to alienate as many of the American people as humanly possible. If you watch any of these CRT debates with politicians or whatever, they're not going well amongst the American people because the strategy is always like, there's no CRT in public schools. That's not CRT. Well, I'm in favor of it. We should probably teach it anyway and you're kind of racist for not liking it. Like if you're gonna go with that as your election strategy, I mean like how'd that work out for you in the government and the governor's race? It's not looking good. Sounds crazy, but I think more Democrats need to fall in line behind Biden. And unfortunately, like some of the cringe social issues that people push, you need to chill. I liked it. Biden seems pretty aware of how to interact with a lot of social issues and ways to speak to all of Americans. So he was pretty big on not supporting any of the riots. He explicitly condemned violence a lot, which I think was really important for him as president-elect or when he, I think it was just a candidate back when the Kenosha stuff I think was going on. But I think it was good that he took a stand against that and he's not like leaning really hard until like the socialism memes and the ACAB stuff. Like I don't know why Democrats try to find the most divisive issues that they can to split their voting base down. There is like a possibility with minority voters that Democrats lose in an unbelievable way come midterm. And it might be Republicans like Great Awakening where they're like, maybe if we don't hate black and brown people, we actually can find huge voter bases here because the Hispanic vote in the most recent poll aggregates I've seen are actually getting close to 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats. So that's like a potentially huge cause of concern for Democrats going forward. And Joe Biden knows why. A book that I read is lucky how Joe Biden barely won the presidency. And his internal polling during the course of the campaign and people can criticize him for being in the basement all they want had Trump way closer and was way more accurate than the national polling that was publicly. Like, you know, that was out public. And the number, like it was one, he was, he didn't believe that the national polls were counting who's actually gonna show up properly. Like weighing the factors. And number two, he found time and time again that they were losing Hispanics on crime, on black lives matter, on defund the police. Which makes a lot of sense because when you see spikes in crime, Hispanics tend to be the next group that lives near where these neighborhoods that spike up in crime happen to be. So they're affected by it and that's turning them on it. And what we're gonna see if everything holds as constant, which you know, everything's in flux, so who knows, is the Democrats are gonna learn a lesson that the Republicans learn that Hispanics number one issue is not immigration. In 2012, Republicans swore it was immigration. They were like, let's soft talk on immigration. It turned out they were behind Obama on healthcare and they totally overplayed their hand on that. And the Democrats are gonna figure out that the number one issue for a lot of Hispanics is crime and they're completely overplaying their hand on it. I just, if I could like impart one piece of wisdom, if you're a white suburban kid and you live in a gated community, please shut the fuck up about police or crime. You have no fucking idea what you're talking about. You don't have the context in your own lived experience and you haven't bothered to read the historical experience either. When you look at things like the 93 crime bill that so many Bernie Bros and so many people like to jump on Biden for supporting, a lot of the drive for a lot of these, what we would call archaic and horrible crime policies were spurred on by the black community because they didn't like to watch their communities get destroyed by things like crack or other types of drug violence because at the end of the day, white people aren't the ones that bear the brunt a lot of this violent conflict. It's gonna be black families and black people. And when you get like the types of black families that are willing to vote and participate in society in a positive way, a lot of these families socially are really conservative. They're not out at all of the LGBT marches. They're like hounding their kids to go to school, get your homework done, go to bed by nine o'clock, I'm gonna beat the shit out of you. Like these are like, they're very, very, very conservative type families. And you do see with a lot of these, a lot of the polling data, progressive white Democrats are lagging behind their support for the cops compared to black and Hispanic communities. And that's like, it almost seems like an unfathomable reality compared to what you see in the media or on news every day where it feels like the average black or Hispanic person is a socialist that wants to eradicate the police. That's just not at all the case. And it was the case during the last midterm session and then during Biden's election season where a lot of Democrats were complaining, a lot of lawmakers were saying they had lost elections or they were getting calls from their constituents saying, hey, I don't want my neighborhood to be overrun by crime. I'm not on board with the ACAP stuff. I'm not on board with the Defund stuff. I think it demands attention that you're aware of what different constituents feel about these things rather than generalizing everything from the people you see posting on Twitter. You got it. And last question from those that were picked in the live chat, namely, this is further out. So it is a little bit harder in a way given how far it is out at 2024 election. Any predictions on what's going to happen? Is Joe Biden going to run? Is Trump going to run? I have no, I don't make any predictions. I don't know what's gonna happen in midterm. Anything can happen in six months. Who knows? There might be, we might get the monkey-cron-virus mutation that turns us all into apes again and then Joe Rogan is our king. Who knows? I will say if Joe Biden and I'm rooting for him to be okay, obviously, I know he's an elderly man, if he's able to run, meaning he has half of a pulse, he's going to run. Politicians like Joe Biden run for president over and over again because they want to be president and they don't want to be president once they want to be president twice. So if he's around, he's running and he's the candidate. Like all this talk about replacing it, like I've heard, like I've listened to conspiracy theorists, I've gone through this every single election and I feel like it's the same stuff on repeat about how Trump wasn't gonna run again because he doesn't actually like being president and he's getting all these different reality TV show offers. I've heard Obama doesn't want to run for president and they're looking for a replacement because he just wants to watch ESPN all day. Like these guys are running for two terms. They want to be president. That's why they run for president. Joe Biden is going to be around. Nobody's gonna wrestle the nomination away from him. No serious primary challenger is going to exist. If he has a pulse, he's going to run because replacing your candidate is considered admitting defeat. Trump, if he runs, he might just tease it over and over and over again to make money like Sarah Palin did. Like when she was the VP, she was like, I might run for president. I might run for president, hire me on Fox News, hire me on a reality show. Like he might tease it for money, milk his supporters to the last point and then decide to quote unquote, bow out gracefully as like he doesn't, like he just wants to pick up, be a kingmaker. But I think he's an egomaniac and egomaniacs run for president. So he's going to run. And if he runs for the nomination, he's probably going to win. So expect to see Biden, Trump 2024, the oldest battle of all time. And I can't wait for the debates. Something I'm curious about, you might know the answer to this. Can Bill Clinton run again for president or can Obama run again for president? So if you've served two terms, you can't. So an interesting question with Trump then, if Trump were to run and win, he wouldn't be able to run for a second term. Right, he would be the second non-consecutive. Yeah, so that puts the Republican Party in an interesting position where if you run a candidate and win, because he's already served one term, you don't have that incumbent advantage, which is pretty huge for presidential elections. So it's an interesting strategy for Republicans to consider if that's worthwhile or not. For Republicans to consider, but Trump doesn't care. Trump doesn't. Trump absolutely does not care. I'm still the president. I'm going to win three times. First guy to win three times is FDR. Like that's Trump's mind. But yeah, they're going to run in my opinion. It's just, I feel bad for Ron DeSantis because Ron DeSantis is, I feel bad for his political ambitions, for him personally, I don't care. Because Ron DeSantis, like your window to run for president is small. That's what Chris Christie found out when he should have ran against Obama in 2012. And he's like, no, I'll get it next time because Obama was a juggernaut in the campaign and he didn't want any part of it. By the time 2016, like rolled around, nobody cared about Chris Christie. And Chris Christie's selling a book about how he's unifying America on Bill Maher's show because nobody cares about Chris Christie till this day. Like that's like, so, you know, a lot of people are going to be hurt by it. Everybody who's nice to Trump isn't going to be nice going into the primaries. And all the people that said they'll step aside for Trump are also going to run. They all want to be president. They're all egomaniacs, 100% of them. Well, unless there are any other questions, want to say thank you so much, gentlemen. It has been a true pleasure. And with that, folks, thanks so much for being here with us for this first conference. All right, I'm traffic for you.