 Today's debate question is, is Biden succeeding as president? Thanks so much, Nuance Bro and Stephen. Given that Stephen, you would take the affirmative if you want to get it started with a roughly two minute opening statement, and then we'll get the same Nuance Bro, and then we'll go right into open dialogue. Ready to go? Yeah, I would say that insofar as Biden could be expected to succeed, and then Biden has done a pretty phenomenal job in office so far. I think his domestic agenda, passing bipartisan bills, has been really good. He delivered on an infrastructure plan in one year. That Trump couldn't get done in four, despite having a historically divided Congress. I think that his foreign policy has gone pretty well so far. The Afghanistan pullout was rough, but he got it done. I think that our presence in getting it out to support and reaffirm Ukraine, and the support that we've given Ukraine has been a phenomenal job on his part as well. And I would say that his general decorum as president in trying to bring us together and unify us instead of constantly being divisive and screaming at people on Twitter, has been a pro as well. Yeah. All right. As far as how Biden's doing, succeeding, I think you just look around us. You see inflation is right around 8%. You see deficits are still well over a trillion dollars. The national debt's over $31 trillion. We see turmoil internationally in Ukraine, in particular, which we didn't have under Trump. And domestically, I mean, for the legislation that he's passed, the Inflation Reduction Act, which doesn't actually reduce inflation, it just continues to rack up spending and actually breaks some of his promises to not tax those making under $400,000 a year. So I don't think things are going too well under Biden's America and the people tend to agree when you look at the polling that they're not happy with the state of the economy under Biden. OK. The first thing on the Inflation Reduction Act, I don't believe that increase in deficits. I think that was matched with spending cuts, right? I think the Inflation Reduction Act wasn't increasing the deficit at all, the budget deficit. I think it was paired with all the spending necessary. So over 10 years, I believe it was projected by the CBO to do something like $90 billion over 10 years, which is $9 billion a year, which is nothing. Well, sure, but I'm just saying it didn't increase the deficit, right? Because part of his goal was to make sure that it was paired with the budget cuts so that it didn't actually increase the deficit. It's arguably as close to deficit neutral as you could probably get. Yeah. Well, that was not an increase in the deficit. He did bring the deficit down from, I believe when he came in for the first year, I think it was $2.8 trillion, the next year it was $1.4 trillion. We had big budget deficits, but we had to spend our way through the lockdown. So I don't know how much more he could have done there. Sure, but a lot of those were temporary measures that had to do with stimulus and also the economy being shut down and things like that. So it wasn't really him bringing the deficit down. It was just the nature of how COVID played out and the policy at the state level and things like that. Yeah, that's kind of true. But I mean, I'll give him some credit for cutting the spending because it seems like people oftentimes are reticent too. So for instance, when we talk about inflation, man, it's really early. Yeah. Got like two hours of sleep. No, it's OK. When we talk, so like, when we look at inflation, so this is something that triggers me. People will be critical of everybody for spending because everybody wants to claim the other guy spends too much. But when they get an office, they spend like crazy. But it seems like Republicans are especially prone to this. When Trump stepped into office, he inherited a pretty booming economy from Obama. Obama's economy had been posting all-time highs, I think. It's like 2013 in the markets. And when Trump came in, that trend continued and ramped up a little bit more. But he did it on the backs of massive deficit spending. He did his huge tax cuts, which was the only major piece of legislation he had. That's not really like deficit spending tax cuts, giving people back money that they already own themselves. Sure, but it runs up to deficit if you don't meet it with spending. Exactly. But yeah, he reduced the income of the federal government. He didn't reduce the spending at all, right? I believe before Biden, Trump had the largest budget deficits in the history of any US president relation adjusted. Most of that, obviously, due to COVID. I don't know if most of it was due to COVID. It's almost entirely due to COVID. I think there were some in the early years where he was still deficit spending like crazy because he was doing these like, he did his huge tax cut, but he didn't pair with any spending decreases at all. Yeah, nothing compares to the COVID spending, though. Sure, nothing might compare to it. But I'm saying he did have like three years where he had an opportunity to do something about the budget deficit, he didn't. The inflation rates remained historically low. His spending was insanely high. And then towards the end of his term, obviously the coronavirus picked up. The idea that like Republicans try to throw the deficit or inflation or whatever at Democrats when they have every opportunity to do something about it and they don't, because Trump did nothing to deal with inflation, right? Because he wasn't seeing it in his administration yet at all. Not necessarily. I mean, inflation's not just a function of the amount of spending that the government does or the amount of money out there necessarily. It also has to do with the supply, like the actual supply of goods and services, production. So production was cut massively, you know, obviously in part due to COVID and also part due to policy, but supply for the most part in the early days of Trump was actually good. Like we didn't have a lot of problems, supply chain issues, things like that. So inflation was kept down for most of those years, even though there was a lot of record spending and things like that. Yeah, I agree that inflation is like a multifaceted thing, but for a lot of the supply chain issues, a lot of these are international, right? It's not like the only the United States is experiencing the inflation related to the supply chain issue. I'm pretty sure this is like a worldwide problem. I think even China, I think even to today, I think China's still taking like pretty insane measures for locking down whatever the coronavirus happens. Sure, but their inflation's like what, like 2. something percent. It's not as crazy as ours. And they didn't have the issues at, you know, first of all, they produce everything. So they don't need to import the same amount of stuff like we do and we had all the backups at the ports, a lot of that had to do with really bad logistics policy that the federal government could have been more involved in and actually managing, but, you know, they were like, oh, well, that's LA's issue. We can't really do anything about it. I think a strong leader and effective leader could have taken charge and actually, you know, even use the bully pulpit or, you know, they have connections at local levels and state levels to get things done like this, you know, because this is not just an issue affecting the port of Los Angeles. This is affecting the nation. I mean, I don't realize that I don't know how much the federal government could have done to step in and just like alleviate the port issues. Honestly, even literally just talking to leaders and saying, hey, why do you have this limit where you can only stack shipping containers ex-yay high when, you know, we know you can actually do way more and this would help alleviate a lot of pressure. I don't. Or even divert ships. There's no way, there's just a matter of stacking more containers on a ship. That was, that was a huge part of it. Absolutely. It was a huge, it was a huge number on ships in the actual storage areas of the ports. That was, that's why there was a huge backlog in the actual ocean with these ships that couldn't come into port because they had nowhere to put the actual shipping containers. So you, I'm curious, what percentage of like all of the backups you think was contributed to by not being able to just stack boxes high enough? There's no way that it was a significant number. I mean, it's hard to actually put a number on something like that, but that was a huge issue initially. And then they actually did roll back that rule. And then there was like, train logistics, there was trucking logistics involved as well. And then they also had to divert some of it to like the port of Long Beach and other ports throughout the United States. But yeah, I mean, there was a lot of issues that the federal government could have absolutely and the Biden administration in particular could have gotten a lot more involved than when it came to logistics. And they just weren't in the earlier days. Yeah, I mean, especially from a Democrat leadership, I feel like the Democrats are more likely than not to get involved at the federal level than they have the ability to. The idea that it was just a simple like aspect of them saying like, hey, I need you to like logistics better. I don't know if I, I don't know if I'm buying that one. I do know that when it came to logistics, congestions and everything, one of the big issues was, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, you had like this huge transfer of people from spending to services, to spending almost exclusively on products because things like restaurants were shut down, people weren't traveling as much to go out to eat. And one of the big early contributors people were saying to inflation was that even if you're not spending as much as you were prior to the pandemic, now all of your spending is going into goods, like importing stuff, buying shit. And there was just no possible way. I don't think a speech or a tweet by Biden could have like magically fixed all of the logistics like hangups that we're having in relation to the unprecedented amount of goods we're shipping into and throughout the United States. Yeah, it was also ours work. There was like certain rules, I think set by the union or something that worked there as far as how many hours they could work and how many people could work on a certain shift, operating the cranes and things like that. So that was another contributing factor. What do you think of Biden breaking his promise not to raise taxes on people making under $400,000? I think he's still reiterated that promise for not doing it under, it was 450K I think, right? Something like that, yeah. Has he yet? Well, has he what? Has he raised taxes on that? Under the Inflation Reduction Act, yeah. How did the Inflation Reduction Act raise taxes? So if you look at the JCT, it's either JCT or JTC, I can't remember. It's basically like the tax version of the CBO, nonpartisan supposedly nonpartisan governmental group and they determined that the Inflation Reduction Act actually raised taxes on those making $450,000 on the revenue side, basically saying that it disproportionately affects those on the bottom side, like people making under $450,000. Disproportionately affects how though? Like to settle tax rates, I don't know what you're saying. So it's not just a matter of tax rates because obviously tax rates weren't physically raised but when you're raising revenue, that money comes from somewhere in the economy and they're saying based on their analysis through the various measures of revenue raising throughout the Inflation Reduction Act that it disproportionately affects people making under $450,000 or whatever the number is. Yeah, I guess it would depend on I guess where you're getting that money from but the, I mean like almost anything, so I know a lot of the Inflation Reduction Act had to do with stuff related to energy. Most anything related to energy that you're increasing or getting more revenue from is probably going to disproportionately impact lower spenders because it's a bigger portion of the overall room. It's always going to be a bigger portion. Yeah, if you're like a millionaire you don't spend 100,000 a year on heating or whatever, right? It's always going to be a bigger portion of a poor person's income. But in terms of, I don't know how I would say it's a violation of a promise that through like an Inflation Reduction Act some cost of energy end up going up and that ends up translating to a tax on people earning less than $450,000 a year. Or if it's part of the revenue raising and that revenue raising disproportionately affects people making under that amount and that's where the money's coming from is that not breaking a promise? I mean that's what the Joint Committee on Taxation. Yeah, no, I don't think I would consider that. Like let's say for instance, so for the CHIPS Act, where we're starting to do like local manufacturing, we're getting big investments in local manufacturing and CHIPS or whatever, if we were to place like a tariff or something or if we were to place some sort of like sanction on a country that imports goods and services to the United States, if poor people bought those services more than wealthy people, would I say that that's effectively a tax on poor people? Well, it depends, is this like a- I mean tariffs are for the government to raise money. It just seems strange that like a tariff or like an increase in person- No, no, if you're doing a tariff and it's on a good or service that these people, it's a disproportionate part of their income, like tariffs are a tax. And if that tax is disproportionately affecting the poor, like yeah, that's a tax, absolutely. Gotcha. Well, I would say that the way that I originally saw Biden's promise was he said it wasn't gonna raise taxes on poor people- I mean if you raised gas taxes, for example, that disproportionately affects the poor, but you're not literally raising tax rates on income tax. Well, I think raising the gas tax would be quite literally raising a tax, right? That's what a tariff is. Sure, but like what part of the- What part of the- I don't remember all the different revenue- Well, just like I said, because I don't remember any tax raises being a part of that, that was, like I know there were things in there for- Well, the revenue raises. Yeah, but what were the revenue raises coming from that were disproportionately impacting the poor? I'm trying to remember. I don't remember all the details on the revenue. Do you remember what the different revenue raises are? I remember all of the different, like the line-editor investment, there was a lot of investment like green energy and stuff like that. That's for the spending side, but the revenue raising side, do you remember what they were? No, I have it written down on my phone somewhere though. Yeah, I don't remember all the- I know they took out a lot of the stuff to appease, to like cinema, like the carried interest loophole. They took that out, so that's no longer in there. But yeah, do we have questions? James. Yeah, we can actually jump in here. Well, wait, here's a question I'm curious. Ola says, do you think Trump would do better in regards to spending and inflation than Biden would have now? I mean, that's like a hypothetical, I don't know if we can, it's just, you don't know- Well, sure, we had like a midterm now, which was like arguably like a referendum on the current administration, right? And, you know, usually when we say this guy's doing a horrible job, generally argument is that my guy would have done better. Let's tell him who he was. Do we think that if Trump was in this position now, do we think Trump would have done a better job? It's hard to say because again, you know, you have to look at the makeup of Congress, you have to look up the makeup of the Senate. Would he even be able to get legislation passed out of there because he's a Republican and then the House, you know, being Democrat, the same majority that he did when he was a president. Oh, then, I mean, that's like, I really don't know. I have no idea. I would imagine so, I would imagine so. So, Biden's being a lot about the deficit. He talks a lot about it, he's like- Every president talks about the deficit. Trump didn't, Trump didn't do anything. He never talked about the deficit. He spoke about it, but he never did anything about it. What have you said, talked about? Sure, but I mean like when he- Biden hasn't really done much about the deficit. The inflation reduction act though, at the very least, that was a bill that was paired with revenue raising mechanisms. It did basically nothing as far. It's not going to make a blip in the deficit whatsoever. But at the very least, it was deficit. And it arguably increases, it arguably increases inflation, probably. Did Trump ever, I don't think that's true. I think most people- Well, the CBO said it either did nothing or it even had the potential to raise it by like 0.1%. But they also, to be fair, said, had the potential to lower it by 0.1%, which is nothing. But deficit neutral is better than- So it's not an inflation reducing act. Do you think Trump will be passing the deficit neutral legislation if he had the opportunity to? Like would you say- Most presidents don't. So I don't think- Statistically I bet on not. So I think that if Trump had the ability to pass the same act, I don't think it would have been passed with the revenue raising side of it. I think it would have just done more deficit spending like he did in his administration. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like obviously, Biden could always be doing better by when we're comparing like Democrats versus Republicans. I don't think Trump showed any inclination ever to care about the deficit. I feel like he talked about it coming into office, but once he was there, I don't think Republicans said anything about the unbelievable deficits that he was making. Yeah, that's pretty typical. Sure, well, like I said, at least Biden is talking about it. And it seems like he's trying to pair some legislation with revenue raising measures instead, which is more than I can say for Trump, but. All right. Do we have questions? Forgive me. First, if you could read out my question in case it hasn't been discussed already. But I've just been focused up here. Have you talked about the student debt for you at this point? No. Let me love to hear your thoughts. Okay. So the question is about student debt forgiveness. So Biden did that through executive fiat. It's been struck down in the courts recently. So that's apparently not going through. I believe it was. Was it permanently struck down or was it a temporary injunction or something? I mean, it's all temporary because it's all going through the appeals process and everything, but was it an injunction or, I believe it was an injunction. Because those usually, an actual full decision typically takes longer. So I believe it was. So there'll be a stand till the courts figure out if he actually has the power to forgive that debt or not. What do you think about the move towards marijuana? Are we just going to ignore the question? Are we not going to talk about it? We're talking about executive, oh, okay, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I guess we would have to talk about, so the original plan, like $10,000, I think there's like an extra 10,000 for people who meet certain parameters. I think it's 10,000 for most of them. I think it's another 10 if you had a Pell Grant. Yeah, so I mean, I don't think what he did was constitutional through executive fiat. I don't think it's good policy. What are your thoughts, Steven? It definitely doesn't help inflation, right? Probably doesn't have inflation. I don't think that's the only issue that matters in the United States, but. I agree. For, I'm personally against debt forgiveness because college students, because they're going to earn a lot money anyway. No offense to you guys, but I think in terms of like trying to do what he can as president, it seemed like it was a pretty popular move. At the very least, he was doing like a limit on the amount of aid given. And he was like restricting the certain income brackets, which I am a fan of if you're going to do it. I don't like the idea of doing like student loan forgiveness for people that are like doctors or for people in incredibly hiring families. So I like that he tried to restrict it to certain income limits. I like that he tried to give a little bit back more to people that had Pell Grants. So student loans and stuff or something that a lot of presidents have talked about, nobody's done anything, but. But you're generally against it and we agree it doesn't reduce inflation. It doesn't reduce inflation. It's generally not good at all. I'm looking at every single policy through the lens. It's generally not good policy. Economically, personally, I would say probably not. I don't think I'm a big fan of it. But in terms of like, you know, winning a popular sport and everything, it seems like the student loan debt forgiveness is a thing so a lot of people climb her for, so. You wanted to talk about marijuana or something? Oh yeah, do you think that the executive actions for and then the new approach to marijuana that he's pushing for, do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing? Oh, I liked it, yeah. That was pretty good. I was not, well, I wish Trump would have done something like that. But what are your thoughts on his gun control actions? I'm not a big fan of gun control, generally. But yeah. Well, what about the legislation that he passed? Which one are we? The one that actually made it through the House and the Senate that even some Republicans voted for. Which do you remember what that particular is where of it? There was multiple different provisions. For example, when it dealt with background checks, I believed it was like one of those things. You know how they have the three day rule? Like if you don't pass, if they don't have an answer coming back within the three days, then the background check just goes. It clears for people under the age of 21 or 21, under 21, they basically extended that period significantly longer, just in case for like a Uvaldi situation. Another provision was, oh, they changed the, when it comes to private sales, which you can do on the federal level without a background check person to person, but you cannot be engaged in the business of selling firearms, otherwise you would need an FFL and then they could prosecute you. But they said they changed the definition. So now, if you do it for profit, which is very kind of ambiguous, but basically if you sell a gun and you're like, oh, well, maybe I need the money. I wanna sell this and make some money. Even if it was one sale in a year, that's now illegal. And it would have to go, you'd have to be like a licensed seller to sell it and they could get you on that. Which is criminalizing, I think, a lot of law-abiding citizens. Potentially. Is that criminalizing without filling out, so if you're a private sale, you basically have to do the 4473 now? You would have to be an FFL. There's not even, I don't even think there's a process in a lot of these states that don't have private party transfers that involve going through an FFL like California does. I don't even think that process is necessarily there for a lot of private sellers. And they're saying you have to basically be an FFL if you're gonna be engaged in the business of selling firearms, which means if you sell one gun even for a profit, potentially that's, I believe that's how they're interpreting it. Is that concerning to you? Soundspace. I feel like one of the big... Criminalizing law-abiding citizens who... I feel like one of the big... Because they're not changing the law. You could still sell private party transfer without a background check, but they've got this weird interpretation. It's like, well, if you do it for profit, like if you post like, hey, I just made 200 bucks and I bought this originally for $200 less, like you could be criminally prosecuted. I'm guessing they're having trouble closing the private sale loophole completely or they can't get any people on board with that. Yeah, but I mean, that's kind of a shady way to go around it now. Why? I mean, you do it, you can legally, right? If whatever it is, you can't. Generally, I know you're not for criminalizing law-abiding citizens because of something they do in like, oh, I didn't even like... Of course, you sell something like you're trying to make money on it, but it's not like you're in the business, you're selling one gun, you're now considered in the business of selling firearms. I think the only, like when it comes to control, the only thing that I generally broadly support or one of the things I generally broadly support is I feel like there should be better tracking for person-to-person sales. If they can't mandate that an individual citizen fills out the ATF forms and they actually do the sale for the federal background check, then I mean, like finding other ways to kind of like hamper those transfers, I think is okay. I'm not like, I don't think, I'm trying to think of like how many people are negatively impacted in the United States because they're trying to sell a firearm that would get caught under this. I feel like it's pretty low number. Well, getting, so that's the issue. It's getting caught, right? So there's plenty of people who sell firearms every single day in this country without a background check. How many are caught? Like, I don't know. But like the problem is... Or well, you can sell privately without a background check, right? Yeah. But there's also like, there's other federal restrictions place, you can't sell... I don't actually be curious on those things. You're not allowed to sell a firearm so it's not allowed to have one, right? Like if you were a felon and I knew that, I couldn't say that. Knowingly, knowingly. Yeah, but knowingly, yeah. So like how many people actually get prosecuted under that? I'm curious. Because to prove somebody... I mean, how many people get prosecuted just for lying on a background check form of 4473? Basically none. It's very few. Even though we have, they always cite the crazy number. Oh, this many people got denied a background check and this is how many lives are saved. It's like, no, they don't even prosecute any of these people. Why? But at least if you fail it, you don't get the gun, right? Well, a lot of those are initial denials. They're not necessarily actually prohibited people. So you're actually, this is like a prior restraint on exercising a fundamental right. Sure. I'm generally in favor of like, the sides coming together and doing some type of bipartisan gun reform. But it seems like everybody has like big asks that the other side is unwilling to listen to. So I don't know. The gun reform stuff for me because Democrats tend to focus on things like rifles and then Republicans... Which is stupid. Yeah, and then Republicans don't really want to do anything, which I think is also stupid. I feel like closing the private selly loophole, I think it's good. I think everybody should be required to fill out the federal background check. I think it's fine. And then there are some like red flag laws that I think are like, okay, but as far as I'm aware, neither of those things are really made into any of the Biden gun control legislation. So I don't know. Don't really have any strategies. Would you be like, for example, when Trump did the bump stock ban or whatever, do you think, because basically they just gave that to them with no concessions whatsoever, do you think it would have been a reasonable, like it could have been more bipartisan if they gave like, you know, Republicans national concealed carry reciprocity and then gave them the bump stock ban? Maybe, but if you're... Is that something you would be a fan of? Well, I mean, if your own Republican president is gonna do gun control, I mean, why would you give anything if he wants to give it to you for free, you know? I agree, yeah. Yeah, I think that everybody's so freaked out by the, because I came off the hill of the Vegas shooting, right? Where people were like, yeah, fucking ban it. So, yeah. I think that there are, like I said, I think closing the private sale is good. Closing that loophole. I would say like, don't be so strict on things like silencers and stuff. It's really silly, like how crazy the federal government is. I know that a lot of state governments and I think are starting to get challenged. Like I think New York had their, basically like their pistol ban kind of like thrown out, right? Well, they had a carry ban thrown out. They basically had their May issue regime policy that dealt with good cause thrown out. That was under the New York state rifle pistol association v. Bruin case, which is now pretty much rolling back like every preexisting gun control law throughout the country. A lot of states are having it. Cause they changed the standard now. It's now like a lot of lower courts were doing undue burden standards, but now the standard they're going with is it's basically text history tradition, which is what Clarence Thomas put out. And he wrote the decision and that's like the strictest. It's even crazier than like strict scrutiny. It's like goes beyond that. And like these localities and states are having a hard time actually justifying any of their laws because they can't find an 18th century like, you know, timeframe justification. Cause that's basically what they have to go back to. Yeah. James. Anything? Yeah. In addition to me, if anyone else has any sort of conversation bother in particular kind of specific questions, please raise your hand. Otherwise I do have one online. Yep, absolutely. And then if you guys can repeat the question on induction. Yeah, I have a question for nuance bro. Do you describe the Inflation Reduction Act's deficit reduction as practically washed and nearly doing practically nothing? The Congressional Budget Office looked at the Inflation Reduction Act and they found it would reduce the inflation by 238 billion, something like that. That was the- So I'm curious, like who's wrong here? No, you're actually right. I think initially it was 90 billion but I think in the final revised version it was 238 billion. So thank you for reminding me. But again, that's over 10 years. So if we look at the deficit currently, it's over a trillion dollars. So basically over 10 years, that would be like 23 billion, 24 billion dollars a year. So basically in the grand scheme of things and the wider deficit, it's basically nothing. I mean, what's 23 billion out of, what is that? Out of a trillion. Is that 2.3%? Yeah, so it's really not much at all. It's basically nothing. No, it's not 20%. Over 10 years it is. The deficit on an annual basis is over a trillion dollars. So 23 billion, no, wait. 23 billion annually, that would be 2.3%. That's not, so you can't take the 10 year number for one and then push it into the one year number for another. Oh boy. So you guys were talking about spending cuts for like 10 years out and all of that. But we all know that no Congress can buy the future Congress. So if you backload all the spending cuts, won't this just be another sequester situation where they get rid of that and then it's convenient in the future? Yeah. We're spending all the money now. I feel like we have a really good- You wanna restate the question. Oh yeah, sorry. So the question was like, you can't really bind Congress to future budget cuts. They could theoretically like roll back on it later if they're negotiating some other piece of legislation or whatever. I mean, that can always happen, but I mean, that's just kind of the reality of our democratic system. It seems weird that presidents can kind of push stuff off into like future administrations and then hope to see how they deal with it. Like arguably you could argue, arguably you could argue that the Afghanistan situation is kind of like that where Trump had like pushed off that leave date until like after he was either out of office or in office a second time. And there's a lot of weird games you can play there where it's like, well, if I get back, I can change it later. If I don't get back, then whoever's there is kind of fucked. Yeah, I don't really know what the, I don't know what the counteract, like how you deal with stuff like that in our democratic system, I'm not sure. Especially as we become like more willing to fight over every single fucking thing, whether it's like a defensive marriage act or whether it's like against like raising the debt ceiling or whatever. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I mean, budgets are almost always passed. Like everything budget wise is passed on like a 10 year time schedule. I think that's good in the sense of stability, giving people a sense of like, okay, this is what budgets are going to be like. I think doing everything year to year leads to a lot of problems. But I agree. I mean, we've seen this before with like the sequester situation where they're like, okay, well, let's cut this and then we'll give more for the military and this and that. So, it's just, that's the nature of Congress. Like what are you going to do? Yeah, Sean. That's the nature of Congress. Dumbass. So basically his question is under Trump, two million people lost ACA coverage, whereas under Biden, I guess 14 million gained it. So why is it good to be uninsured? I, you know, a bit of a biased question. I'm not as familiar with some of the ACA stuff that Trump and Biden, like all that stuff. I'm not as familiar. Yeah, I'm just, I'm not as familiar, to be honest. Every president has a different set of like circumstances when they come into office. Like coronavirus inflation or even going further back, what are some metrics that you can kind of take like absent those environmental factors of any that you can kind of judge like a president like Biden versus Trump versus Obama versus Bush? Like what are some of those metrics that you can kind of just take from this? So the question was presidents inherit situations. How can you really tell, you know, what metrics would you use to determine how an individual president is doing absent the circumstances that they found themselves in, whether it's inheriting a good economy, bad economy, war situation? It's a tough one. I mean, most Americans, I think they just kind of look at the circumstances around them and say, oh, well, things bad. This person's president. Therefore, this person responsible for bad situation. I guess you could, you can maybe try to look at similarly situated countries and see how they're handling things. So if they started out in a relatively similar position and you know, how did their leader, how did their country handle something? Did they do better? Did they do worse? How did we respond? I think that's one way to look at it. You can even look on like a state by state level to see like what kind of policies and maybe similar environments affected things differently. You know, I think you could put, I guess, you know, like the Santas in Florida versus, I don't know, Whitmer in Michigan and see how those things, not to say like those states are completely analogous or whatever, but just, you know, governing styles during similar periods of time, general philosophies of thinking and operating. So I guess those are some answers on that. I feel like we can kind of look at like, or how do you, so when I look at how each president dealt with the coronavirus stuff, it felt like Biden was pretty aggressive and that like in his first 100 days, I think his goal was like, what, like 100 million shots and he'd gotten like 200 million in his first 100 days in office. I think he used the Defense Production Act in order to assist companies with creating like personal protective equipment. I feel like when it came to dealing with issues like that Biden moved about as aggressive as he could, I could compare that to Trump being on TV saying like, we only have six cases here, it's fine. It's only 13 cases, it's fine. It's only 27 cases. Like we have like a whole history of him basically like gaslighting all of us saying that there aren't that many infected people and it seemed like the getting like personal protective equipment and stuff, that rollout was really, really slow under him. Maybe because he was like unwilling to take it as seriously as it was. I mean, so, I mean, if you want to talk metrics wise, the first, basically Trump's last year in office, there was no vaccine effectively. It was in trials, but it was not out there for the general public. Yet you had more, basically the year that Trump was in office, granted there was like a month where there wasn't room. It was kind of there-ish, it was there, but we just didn't fully know about it. But basically there were more deaths under the first year of Biden, even with the vaccine and the vaccine rollout and a lot of people being vaccinated than there was under Trump and nobody being vaccinated. So, I mean, if you want to look at- But like, why do we think that was? Because it hadn't spread as much yet, right? Well, there's that, but there's also, you know, the vaccines probably weren't as effective as we were told. For example, we were told, oh, it's gonna stop the spread. It stops transmission. And then we get Pfizer coming out and saying, oh, we actually never really, that wasn't part of, we never claimed that. That wasn't part of our testing. Well, so yeah, I mean, when you trial a vaccine, it's not, I don't even know if you can trial to stop the spread because you have to vaccinate like entire communities to do it. But that was what everyone was telling us. That's what the- I don't believe that's what everyone was saying. Are you serious? Nobody was saying that it was gonna 100% stop the spread. No, no, not 100%. They were claiming the efficacy was super high. It's like, once you get this, it stops with you. If you get the vaccine, it doesn't transmit to others. You don't get other people sick. Rachel Maddow was saying this. President Biden was saying this on the campaign trail. Yeah, there were a couple votes from like Biden and Fauci. One is from Biden, where it's like, if you get vaccinated, you're not gonna spread it or whatever. Like, yeah, I think they said a couple of things like this, which were like kind of dumb, but like taking into account what they're saying, there was no- That's why a lot of people got the vaccine. It was not, they were hearing that all over the place. At some point, we have to stop treating Republicans like actual children, okay? If you listen- What's that to do with Republicans? If you listen to the totality of what was said, there was no reasonable expectation given that the vaccine was gonna 100% stop the transmission. No one's, no, I'm not saying 100%. Okay, when you're saying that, they were saying 100%. Even if you wanna take the 95% efficacy or whatever. The efficacy is high for preventing you from getting infected, right? But like, that doesn't mean- Well, that wasn't even necessarily true either. But it was true. That's why the places that got more- No, it's like an asymptomatic infection. Sure, you can have an asymptomatic infection, but the people that got vaccinated when you look state to state community, communities that got vaccinated had lower mortality rates, lower hospitalization rates. They outperformed the unvaccinated communities in every single metric. Like, it's possible to play like the game, like the Alex Jones or Joe Rogan game where you like clip like one statement of like, Biden said, if you get it, it stops the spread. Therefore, the entire establishment was saying, if all got vaccinated, it's 100% effective, blah, blah, blah. I mean, if you wanna play that game, you can. This is what was being claimed, though, all over the media. It wasn't all over the, it was all over the Republican- It was absolutely- It was all over the media. It was all over the media. That was spamming the same two clips of them, saying it was gonna happen. This is absolutely the case. What are you talking about? You said Fauci yourself said it, Biden said it. They'll make like one, like you can cut out like five seconds of a statement of like an entire speech on this. Like, if you listen to what they're saying, it's very obvious what they're saying, right? Nobody is saying that it's gonna be 100% shopping. I think most of us remember, I remember, I think most of us- Yeah, because you saw the same two clips. This was one of the major claims about the vaccine. Because you saw the same two clips played over and over again on Joe Rogan and Alex Jones. Did you ever claim this, by the way? That it would 100% stop. No, not one. Why do you keep doing the 100% that's such a, that's such a- Well, wait, what's the claim? That it would reduce the transmission. That it was like, it would reduce transmission or whatever. It would reduce transmission. Well, that's not, they didn't study that apparently. How could you study that for a vaccine? What do you mean how would you study that? How could you study for a vaccine on a population of the transmission of a virus is reducing? How could you possibly do that, but without injecting an entire vaccine? So then why would that be part of the claims? Because if you're less likely to get sick, if you watched all of the Biden or Fauci speakers, you would know this. No, but we learned from the virus a lot of the spread was asymptomatic infection. We know plenty of people got infected from vaccinated individuals. It can be asymptomatic, but if you're less likely to get infected, you're less likely to spread. If you're saying you can't study it, then you don't actually know. This is like an assumption, right? But we can go and look retrospectively at which communities had most of the virus and it was the unvaccinated ones. So then you can make a claim about spread, yes or no? Retrospectively, yes. So are the vaccine manufacturers claiming that or are they saying- I don't know if they- I know prospectively- Because they said they never studied it. Because you, do you understand what they're saying? You can't make the statement now, or you could make the statement in the past, but you could make the statement now. So they still haven't studied what they have now in the looking back. I don't know if it's in the purview of a vaccine manufacturer to do epidemiological studies on the transmission of a virus. Of course it is. What are you talking about? The point of a vaccine is to try to prevent you from getting infected or to try to reduce the symptoms if you are infected. That's the point of the vaccine. It's never to stop spread whatsoever. That's a byproduct of preventing infection. That has nothing to do with the measles vaccine. None of that was ever like, oh, herd immunity and like spreading to people. Herd immunity are things that you can do, but if you're a vaccine manufacturer and you're trying to get your vaccine passed through FDA trials, my understanding is all you have to do is show efficacy that the vaccine is safe. That doesn't cause like a bunch of unwanted harm. I'm not talking about FDA approval for a vaccine. I'm talking about like the purpose of a vaccine is never to reduce spread. That's a byproduct of reducing the amount of infection. Then why didn't they make a... You're speaking out of both sides of your mouth. I'm not speaking out of my mouth. It's very, very, very clear. You're saying they didn't make a claim about transmission but that it's also a byproduct. That if it's a byproduct, they can't like say like how much of a byproduct it is. No, how could you possibly know that? Well then how can you make that claim whatsoever if you can't attach any figure to it at all? I don't think the pharmaceutical companies weren't making the claim that it's going to stop. The claim was that it's a safe vaccine that would reduce the likelihood of you getting infected. A byproduct of that is most likely going to be a reduction in transmission but you can't know that as a vaccine manufacturer because like you said an asymptomatic spreader could theoretically reduce the virus. I'm not a designer of studies. I'm pretty sure there's probably a way that you can measure like... Once everybody's vaccinated. Yeah, but not in phase three trials. Like, oh, like we've actually... Once everybody's... Once you have... Studying transmission is going to be a societal wide effect, right? Let's say that I go to a community and I vaccine like 1% of the kidney. How can I study the spread? Not everybody's vaccinated. There's no way you could even... How can you study the spread? I mean we contact tracing. Yeah, but like, for instance, what if like one person in a household gets... Isn't that how we measured, like we figured out spread based on contact tracing for unvaccinated people. You can't do that for vaccinated people. You can figure out what the spread is, but after only vaccinating a few people, try to figure out what the spread will be. Like the, what do you call it? Like, wide tails? Like, the data on that would be insane. Like, I would be... If you're telling me that you vaccinated, even if you got like 10,000 people in a state vaccinated... When the spread will be... Well, let me finish. If you vaccinated 10,000 people in a state and then afterwards you're going to tell me based on those 10,000, you can predict like what the transmission is going to be. Well, what? Like, not everybody in those communities is vaccinated. You don't know what kind of people they're coming in contact with necessarily. Like, I don't think that... Have vaccine manufacturers ever like said as part of their trial? Like, oh, and also it's going to reduce the transmission by 45%. I don't think that's in the purview of a vaccine manufacturer. That can only be studied retrospectively after like society-wide you've had a vaccine program. Okay. Well... Questions? Yeah, just before. Yeah, it's a general question for the two of you. When... So roughly one in 320 Americans have died as a result of the coronavirus. Now we had this whole episode of people who promoted in-clinic hydroxychloroquine, hydrovection, who dissuaded people from getting the vaccine and dissuaded people from wearing masks. I'm wondering, would you consider that the people who did this, who were predominant in the Republican, would you consider them to be either responsible or the scores dead from the coronavirus? Do you think the public practice campaign might have produced the deaths? Okay, so the question is, do you think people who promoted, basically counter-signal the vaccine and promoted what they view as alternative treatments that aren't necessarily scientifically proven, like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, did that public discourse contribute or are they responsible? I mean, I suppose, did it contribute? Probably, yeah. I mean, at the same time, you have to look at the other side of this as well, like the people who advocated policies that weren't proven when it comes to stopping spread or making things, for example, like stopping kids from going to school for so long. I think most people now, looking back, would agree that they did that for way too long. Children were not really at risk at this virus, statistically speaking. It just did not justify the actions that were taken. Lockdowns in general. I mean, you got the John Hopkins study that says it probably net maybe reduced deaths by, it was something like 0.1%, it was crazy, but they basically said lockdowns had no effect and it wasn't worth it, especially looking at the other negative downstream effects that we've been seeing. I mean, learning loss, economic issues and things like that. We can also look at some of the countries that promoted policies of staying more open. Everybody talks about Sweden or whatever. You can compare it to its Nordic neighbors. They experienced more deaths. They arguably front loaded a lot more of those deaths initially, but they had lower outcomes than a lot of other countries including the United States, I'm pretty sure, when it came to death rate. Not earlier on, but now. So I think there was a lot of mistakes made by a lot of people, but I think the most egregious mistakes were the people that kept this lockdown for so long. Even the masking policy, which wasn't really proven, especially the types of masks that were recommended initially. I mean, the CDC even came out and said cloth masks or the statistical significance on actual affecting spread or infection, things like that is basically zero. So a lot of people wearing that stuff for nothing. Just on two fronts. So one, Sweden did underperform every other country, every other Scandinavian country with their coronavirus policy. Yeah, so I said the Nordic countries. And they also still experienced like a pretty significant output reduction that I think was comparable to other countries as well. So it's not even like they didn't like save their economy. I think a lot of people generally just stay home when they get sick and whatnot. So it seems like they had a lot of the negative experiences economically and then suffer even more health wise because of their policy. I mean, they were open more. So I mean, that's always a nice thing if you enjoyed that. But I don't know if I would cite that as being successful. I do think lockdowns are pretty effective if for no other reason we can compare Sweden to the other countries, we can compare other countries around the world. And we can look at the studies that have been done in the United States of which there have been multiple of them done. People like to quote that John Hopkins studies, but one, it wasn't a Johns Hopkins study. It was one of the professors that contributed to that study was a professor at Johns Hopkins, but they've had to actually remove that from the study because it's not a Johns Hopkins study. And two, the methodology on that study is insane. The way that they measured, the way that they actually measured lockdowns was if there was at least one non-pharmaceutical intervention done. So if your community had like mask mandates, they considered that a lockdown. So that study came back saying that there was basically no effect, but it is the only study that has ever come out that said that lockdowns had no effect whatsoever on transmission, probably because the methodology of that study was so wacky. I mean, you could also look at states like Florida versus some of the states, what, New York and New Jersey? Don't do that, don't do that. You're gonna have to do that. Oh, no, I can't. I have a look at the one of the most heavily dense places in the world that was the first one to get massively impacted. Yeah, but I mean, you could say similar things about Florida as far as having a much more elderly population and things like that, but they decided to take this approach of, okay, let's maybe quarantine out elderly people, protect them, but the rest of the population, you can go out, your risk is very low, and then you're actually building up a natural immunity as well, which a lot of people were downplaying initially, but a lot of other countries take a lot more seriously. If you got recently infected, for example, a lot of other countries will actually list that on your vaccine passport or whatever version of that that they have there, and say, hey, this counts, but in America, we don't give a shit about that apparently, even though Fauci says it's actually valid, but we still haven't done anything about that. And then even after you're infected, it's like, well, then you still have to get like a booster or get COVID vaccinated in a lot of places to go visit restaurants, not as much now, but initially in the past and stuff, even to get into the country for a lot of people, they still, in America for foreigners, have vaccine mandates, even though most other countries have basically got- They still have vaccine mandates for foreigners? Wait, what do you mean? To come into the country in the United States, you have to show that you're vaccinated. I don't know if that's true, I can't. Yeah. It might be, but I will say that when people, okay, everybody always does this, when they say, how well did the mandates work? And then the first thing that comes out of that is, New York, like I can't wait to say New York, because it was the first place where everybody traveled to that was fucking sick, where everything started spreading and like the initial numbers like, oh, most are only a hundred people infected, when it was probably in the tens of thousands, if not more, right? If you want to compare New York to another state, why not just compare New York to New York and see like, well, what did the infections look like? They looked like this, and then as soon as they started doing really aggressive lockdown measures, they looked like this. It looks like that everywhere regardless of measures, it always spikes and then comes down. That's out for it. No, when you don't do even anything. That's not true when you don't do anything. What goes up comes down. Like it happens like that everywhere. Happened like that in Sweden too. Like it happens like that everywhere. It doesn't just go like this, the rate goes up and then it comes down. You don't think, again, you don't believe in natural immunity, that it doesn't do anything? Of course it does something. Okay, so of course, after you get a certain amount of people, especially like super spreader, hyper spreader types, what do they call it? Smooth the hump. It comes down, right? Smooth the hump. What do they say? Lower the curve, whatever the fuck? There was a name for it. Flat in the curve? Flat in the curve. Well, that was for like, that was not to like overwhelm hospitals and stuff. But that's the whole point, right? So lockdown measures are effective. Well, Sweden didn't overwhelm hospitals. No, but they had a lot more people dying. Well, not compared to America in a lot of states. Not a lot of states that took measures. A lot of this has to do with different populations. Sweden has like a population of like LA, okay? There's like nine million people living in Sweden, okay? So yeah, and nobody's traveling to Sweden, okay? A lot of people were traveling. Are you kidding me? They were one of the only countries open in Europe. A lot of people were entertained to, you weren't traveling there. You weren't traveling there during Corona. How much travel do you think the entire country Sweden gets compared to New York City? During Corona virus? Sure, during Corona virus. I'd imagine Sweden probably got more people during that time. Then New York City? Yeah. It's one of the biggest travel cities. Did you look at the streets of New York? They were dead. They were empty for like a decent chunk of time. That was not the case. The lockdowns in New York didn't happen until after the virus is already there. Like you can look at- Oh, yeah, we're not talking before all like the stuff. But that's the frustrating part is because whenever you throw New York people's faces you are bringing up before because all of the spread had happened before anybody even knew what the fuck was going on. That's when Trump was on Twitter and on the press saying like, oh, we only have like 16 confirmed cases, we're fine. When tens of thousands of people were probably getting affected in New York. And then afterwards we, you know, when shit finally starts going down, we're like, oh, well, let's see who's doing good. Well, New York, you know, they fucking suck. That's a blue state. Looks like lockdowns didn't work. When as soon as they started implementing that the numbers plummeted and not because of natural immunity, not because they would have any. So here's a question. Do you think that when you see how aggressively some places, we say Australia, we say New York, started doing lockdowns and you saw the numbers come down. Do you think they would have went down in any comparable way if they would have done nothing? I mean, you saw that in some, you saw that basically in sweet. They had a spike too and it came down. So you think that it would have basically taken the same trajectory? No, the spike probably would have come, I mean, it probably would have been prolonged by a bit longer, but probably not anything. Okay, I submit that it would have been significantly worse without the aggressive lockdown measures, but that's what we'll never know. So if we can look at other countries that did significant lockdowns like Australia, New Zealand and had very little, if any, issues with the coronavirus, but. Well, they had a lot of issues with the policy associated with that. And issues with the policy, but they didn't have people getting it. People in concentration camps basically over there. I heard that. It was concentration camps, literally. Well, listen, it's not the same as like Auschwitz, but it's still like, it's not in a democracy, a free Western nation. But now we're shifting the conversation. I agree. That's probably not ideal. I agree that having freedom and being able to run around and stuff was cool, right? That was cool in Sweden, that every other place in the world, you felt like you were walking on the streets. But you can't, it's the frustrating conversation. I like guns too, okay? I enjoy guns, I like shooting, but I recognize that by making them legal in the United States, some crazy motherfuckers out there are more likely to kill themselves just by having them in the home. Some people are gonna have their kids kill themselves just because they find the firearm. And some people are gonna get into violent issues using firearms just because they have them, just having the firearm predispose you towards that. If you wanna have the benefits of one thing, you have to be willing to acknowledge the downsides. I personally like the way that Sweden dealt with their stuff. I don't know if we could have handled in our medical infrastructure in the same United States, but I'm not gonna say that Sweden did it at no cost. And it seems like you're willing to recognize it. Yeah, they had some cost compared to every other Scandinavian country, but they had more freedom too. But then if you look at places like Australia, they painted- Hold on, it seems like you agree that, like, again, you said you liked the model that happened there. It seems like you might agree that the cost on the other side of doing the extreme lockdowns and things like that is actually worse. That's why you prefer the model that they did. Yeah, it's possible, yeah. But I'm not, like, I think, it's hard because I don't know, I did live in California, which had insane, you needed the passports and all the gyms shut down and everything was fucking ridiculous. What a great way to promote public health. Shut down the gyms and then give people Krispy Kreme Dome. Oh yeah, because you know that in the United States, people are visiting the gyms, so fucking off it, okay? Yeah, of course. I mean, in California, all I'm saying is that, all I'm saying is that, like, maybe there could have been less aggressive lockdown measures taken in some areas. I probably went okay with that, but I'm not gonna sit here and say lockdowns did nothing because they clearly were very effective in the place. Oh no, I would never say they did nothing. They did a lot of- How about the Johns Hopkins study? Well no, they did a lot of terrible things. Okay, very well. Let's go back there. The question was whether or not more people killed themselves because of lockdowns. I don't even know statistically if those numbers came out. I thought people were saying initially that they were worried about mass suicides, but I don't know if that ever was born out. I thought the crime that went up more was, that's not funny, I'm sorry, it was domestic abuse because people were locked in together so much. I thought that was one that you saw increase a little bit, but I don't know if there was a huge epidemic of suicide. Well, we had a lot of deaths of despair. I mean, deaths of despair have gone up significantly. I mean, we had over 100,000 people, I think, maybe even from fentanyl alone when it comes to overdosing. It's now the number one cause of death among people, I believe, 18 to 45. Yeah, there's a weird age bracket of like from the ages of 18 to 45 where people aren't really supposed to be dying anyway, the biggest contributed to their death is fentanyl, yeah. I think it might be opioid related deaths, but sure. Yeah, so, I mean, that's, it's important. Is that getting played by the lockdowns? Like, what do you mean, like? Is it like, I can't go to work, like I'm locked out of my apartment, I need fentanyl, is that the, I'm just curious what that's gonna be? Well, I mean, when people are losing their jobs all over the place and they can't see their loved ones and people, you know, like, yeah, that's gonna, I think you basically destroyed people's lives, I think, that's the despair gonna go up, yeah. I feel like we've had, like, especially, like in place like the Midwest, I think we've had a problem with opiates in the country for a long time. Yeah, but it went up drastically and it's not just in the Midwest, in San Francisco, I mean, like, it just skyrocketed, like, an insane amount. Sure, but I don't, again, like, there have been different drugs that have been coming and going. Fentanyl has gotten really popular over the last several years. I don't know if I've blended in the lockdowns. I feel like that's a hard sell that, like, we're lockdowns and now we're doing fentanyl. I mean, I guess it's possible, but maybe it'll be another Johns Hopkins study on that one. All right. Yep. Yeah, during COVID, the common flu could really disappear. Can you explain why that happened and is there any other examples of common respiratory disease happening in the same way or just disappearing when another disease kicks in? Yeah, do you want to restate the question? Yeah, so the question was, why did the common flu disappear when the lockdowns happened? And I think that the, I think that the conservative talking point is that all the flus are just being reported as the coronavirus. I think that the counter talking point is that when you have the most infectious virus, the history of humanity, which was COVID-19, when that virus happened and we started to take aggressive lockdown measures to curb the spread of that, other diseases that were less transmissible are going to see a massive reduction in transmission. I think that seems pretty reasonable to me, but. I mean, another thing people don't talk about is we didn't take these measures with the common flu, right? And the idea was, well, this was a lot more deadly than the common flu. And that was true initially. If you look at the IFR, it was like way more, but like I think as soon as it starts dipping around that number or even below, which we've seen that like the COVID IFR is below the common flu. And then people are still taking these insane measures, treating it like it's this insane thing that we have to like all worry about and be super scared of. It's pretty ridiculous, but go ahead. Yeah, so I mean, this kind of goes to this idea of like mean orange man. He's like nasty on Twitter, you know, he's divisive, oh, so divisive. And then Biden's like this bumbling old fool. Oh, he's so nice. He's grandpa. He sniffs hair and you know, all that stuff. I don't, honestly, I don't even want people to like the president. I'd rather have people like hate the president and not look up to him. I've always found it weird. Like people like, honey, that's the president. Like you should look up to like that's no, you shouldn't like our leaders. Our leaders should be, they're gross people. I don't think we should ever admire them to honestly. The character has real world implications. Absolutely. I mean, I think they're, I think just their actions and how they carry themselves, not so much like is he like mean on Twitter and stuff. Like, so for example, when Trump's style of being more kind of like impulsive and bombastic and you know, we're gonna, you know, hey, Mr. Rocket Man in North Korea. Listen, in that case, it kind of worked out, I guess. How did it work out? I mean, we got zero concessions from North Korea for anything. Like we gave them photo opportunities. How many, even Pence was I think, how many missiles was North Korea launching into like South Korea's waters during that time? Launching into South Korea's waters. Cause they're doing a bunch right now. They're doing a bunch right now under Biden. But they didn't slow down any of their testing programs. They might not have been shooting missiles towards South Korea, but there wasn't a single concession that we pulled from North Korea in all of those talks that happened. It was a lot more peaceful during that time. South Korea was a lot less worried. But again, missiles weren't being launched. All of Europe was literally saying we might not be able to look to the United States for leadership anymore. They can say all the fucking shit they want. They were wrong about it. Trump was telling Germany, hey, the German delegation at the UN. Hey, you're getting all your energy from Russia. Isn't, this is pretty bad. Like you're gonna have to, you know, deal with it. Yeah, Trump made a thousand. They laughed at him. And now that he's been proven right, basically. You can't have been proven right on anything. Trump made a thousand ridiculous statements about all sorts of things. Yeah, but on that one he was used to that. Yeah, well, you know, that's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. I can make a thousand random statements to be correct on two and I can say, well, history has proven me to be correct. Oh, for sure. Broken clock and all those things. Yeah, of course. I'm just saying on that statement. Germany's dealing with the ramifications of them deciding to rely on Russian energy this whole time. And now, you know, again, they're being stupid. They're shutting down nuclear plants. Now they're, you know, luckily extending them because like, oh, we don't want to freeze to death and die. So that's, luckily they're heating some of that advice and being a little bit more level-headed on that front. You really don't think the decorum of a president is any bearing whatsoever on how like a country is? No, of course it does. Of course it does. I think it matters. Absolutely. Okay, I thought you, it's, okay, I'm sorry. That sounds like the exact opposite of what you just said. No, no, I think people exaggerate and like put too much emphasis on like, oh, I don't like the mean tweets. Like that's what a lot of, like a lot of people who won't vote for Trump is honestly a lot of it. I'm not saying all of it. I'm not saying all of the people in this room, but there's a lot of people who I've heard them say and they even, it's reflected in the polling that they don't like, he's just a mean man and he says not nice things. And I'm like, I think that's kind of stupid. How is that stupid? Part of the goal of being the leader of a country is that you're supposed to be leading all sides like towards one common goal. When you're literally using your position. I mean, you can do that by being mean. No, not by, no. Absolutely. What was, you'll see- Listen. No, no, hold on. You can say it all you want it, but I guarantee you- Let me finish my point. You can take all these nasty dictators throughout history who were mean and brutal, but I mean, were they not leading their people towards one common goal? I think you could say they were, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's a good one. I'm just, it's still a common goal, but I don't, you know, I'm just saying. In my opinion, your head of state should be your chief cheerleader. This is like the guy that people sees as being like resembling or emblematic of like your country and your people and what you're voting for and what you're standing for. So when he's on Twitter at fucking 4 a.m. in his underwear tweeting some wild shit that he just heard from fucking Fox and Friends, I don't know, that to me is like really fucking sad. I think it reflects poorly on- It was pretty entertaining. It reflects poorly, yeah, you can say this entertaining, but it reflects poorly on the character of our country. And if a Democrat were doing anything like that, like if Hillary Clinton had gotten elected and she was still saying like, oh, these basket of deplorables, people like you would be on Twitter be like, oh, she's so divisive. Oh, it's horrible that she calls Trump voters this. Like, I'm curious, were you one of the people that were freaking the fuck out when that five-second clip got cut from Biden's speech with the red background where he says like the MAGA Republicans and you're like, this is horrible and divisive and I can't believe you said this. It was not the best option. Exactly, so it does matter when the Democrats do it, right? You'll take that one clip to the top. Was that a very bringing together speech? Yeah, I think it was a fine speech. Really, it wasn't divisive whatsoever? He literally explicitly calls out a segment of the Republican Party that's denying the election results. That's a large portion of the country. That's a big problem. You have to be able to say something about it. But he'll say explicitly in every one of these speeches. No, but he wasn't going out of his way to say, you know what, we're gonna do things to actually make it so people can believe in our elections again. We're not doing that. What are we supposed to do? Every time elections happen? How about not have like half of the polling stations in Arizona the day of the election have machine problems where it's actually lightly printing, where they had none of it during the early voting whatsoever and yeah, I think that's a bit sus. Okay, so Biden needs to go down and personally tinker with each of the machines? No, of course, you can pass policy and advocate that states pass policy to restore faith in the elections. No, you can't. Absolutely you can't. No, you can't because anytime people have gone to look for election fraud or look for voter fraud, they either find none or they find Republicans doing it. Are you really denying that there's been no history in America of election fraud or voter fraud? Of illegal ballots cast? No. 1876, are you serious? 1948? I didn't know we were going back to 150 years. Okay, fine. Okay, my bad, hold on, I'll take the L in it. In 1876, there might have been voter fraud that I didn't hear about. My mistake on that one. Yeah, yeah, okay. All I know is it went Trump, went Trump. No, no, you can keep filibustering. Let's go more recent. LBJ in his primary in 1948. How much federal voter fraud was there? Federal voter fraud. Like in terms of his election, like in terms of like the presidential election, are you saying there was enough to flip the election or what is the- He wasn't running for president in 48. This is for his Senate run. Okay, what is your claim? He literally 202 fake ballots. This is like not disputed by anybody. This is like 100% fact. Sure, it might be. I'm sorry, I didn't know we were going to find- He literally stole the election with fake ballots, same handwriting, like alphabetical or everything. And it was 200 votes for him and then two for his opponent of like these fake ballots. Why is it that every single party- Paterson, New Jersey, 2020, the judge even ruled that they had to redo that. Why is it that every single part of Trump's administration was pushing back on him when he was making these voter fraud claims? Wait, why are you denying the cases I just brought up to you? There might be some handful of cases where there's- Okay, so now it went from it never happened, this didn't exist to you. It might have happened, this might have been twisted. Okay, the original claim that's been made by people, repeatedly, is there has never been voter fraud on a level that would have swayed any elections. It absolutely did though. In those cases I literally- In the LBJ one, okay, maybe there was. I don't know about his Senate election. I don't know that one. In 1948, whatever, okay? I don't know about that one. But I do know that Trump himself put together a panel of people to look for voter fraud in the United States, and he couldn't find any. I do know that as much as you're complaining about the machines, Bar and the FBI themselves got machines and looked at them, and they said, there's no problems- No, I'm not talking about this. I'm just saying that when you talk about restoring faith in the elections, I don't think there's anything that you can do to help people that wanna see what they wanna see. I still hear people to this day talk about the ballot box that was mysteriously taken out from underneath the table from that YouTube- Yeah, it was stupid, but people still talk about it. But I'm just saying that I don't think there is a set of measures you can do. You talk about, oh, well, what about some machines having problems? I don't know. Chances are today, anytime you hear about any machine having problems- I'm talking about real example. I'm not talking about bamboo fiber ballots with shipped in from China. I'm not talking about people sending votes up into space. I make fun of those people. The Dominion machine people, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about real, concrete examples where judges have even ruled in the Patterson, New Jersey case where they overturned and said, you have to redo that. And they've actually arrested, they're prosecuting the people right now. The Attorney General of New Jersey- When they did that redo, was there a significant difference to the votes after redoing it? I don't even know if they- Isn't that kind of important to know? Isn't that a really important part of that? I don't know if they- Because I know they've pushed for recounts in a lot of places, but they redo it. They're like, oh, it's about the same fucking number. I don't know if the redo has happened yet. They're still in the process of being criminally prosecuted as well. So we'll see the outcome of that case. New Jersey, not exactly a Republican bastion, by the way. Sure. I don't think there's anything you could do to shore up the elections. I don't think anybody would be happy seeing anything at this point. Republicans wouldn't. Not the people under Trump who still think that election was stolen despite there being absolutely no evidence pointing that direction. I mean, you could go back to more in-person voting, for example. I mean, because do you not think there's a lot more opportunity for fraud with mail-in ballots whatsoever? So what, do you get rid of mail-in ballots completely? Or what? No, you just, you don't have mass mail-in ballots like a lot of states have been moving to, especially post-COVID. We used to, I mean, in my lifetime, over 95% of people would vote in-person on election day. In my lifetime. Like, that was the norm, typically. It's only in recent years where it's really dipped down below 50%. I feel like you have to show a problem to get rid of it. I like mail-in voting. That was nice, guys, I think. I gave you an example. The Patterson, New Jersey case, I believe, was actually done with mail-in ballots. Sure, but we don't even know right now if the results were actually different. I don't remember if they claimed the results would be different. I think they actually might have, but I don't know. Hi. Do you think that in the year of our lord, 2022, that most Republicans don't vote in elections because some machines in Arizona wrote out, made it take a little bit longer for people to pass their vote? Do you think that's a compelling reason for so many Republicans to just reject the entire election integrity that we have? So the question was, do I think the reason people deny elections is because of basically what happened in Arizona, or is it because of, I guess, a lot of the other reasons that they're typically citing? I disagree with a lot of the other reasons they're typically citing. Again, like I was saying. You brought up that, no, that's why you... What was that? You brought up that, that's why you... He said you brought up that one, that's why you... No, I mean, that's why I have some of the issues. I'm talking about me. There are a lot of Republicans who actually agree with what I'm saying on those things, but some of them take it further with the bamboo fiber ballots and some of like, who's the cracking lady? Who's saying all the crazy stuff? Yeah, Sidney Powell, yeah, that was... I mean, it feels a little bit like the BLM fallacy a little bit, where if you ask a lot of progressive people, how many unarmed black men do you think are shot and killed by the police every year? Their answer is gonna be like... 10,000. Maybe 1,000, maybe 10,000, right? And the answer is like 17 or something, or like 30. It's a very, very, very, very, very low number. But like, people will... You can tell when you ask a person a question, okay, well if you think that like 10,000 black unarmed men are being killed every year, that's pretty insane. Like, I can understand why you think that. But then when you go on the Republican side, like what is the expectation that no machine will break down in the entire country, that no delay will ever happen in the entire country? Dude. Like because... 38% of the election day ballot places in Maricopa County, having these issues where it was not present during early voting anywhere else in the county, it wasn't present. It just happens to be on the day that Republican... And again, I disagree. I told, hold on, hold on, let me make my point. It didn't happen during early voting. It just happened to be on the day where people vote like 80, 20 Republican. And again, I disagree with Republicans who kept telling me, oh, I'm gonna wait till election day, because that's how they can reduce the problem, like no, vote early. If it's available to you, vote early. Do whatever you gotta do to do it, but don't wait till election day, because if they're gonna sabotage, they're gonna do it on election day. No, okay, hold on still. That was proven right. Oh my God. That's exactly what happened. You were proven right. There was sabotage. You think that was just happenstance, 48% on election day, zero problems during early voting in Maricopa County? So here's what I'm gonna do. Come on, dude. First of all, so after this conversation, I'm gonna Google 48% voting machine in Maricopa County and I'm probably gonna find that it's not that number. Of the election day. I'm probably gonna find that it wasn't that number. No, it absolutely was. I'm probably gonna find that in one place they ran out of paper and that got tallyed into that. It wasn't running out of paper. It was light printing ink that then couldn't be read by the tabulator. Sure, number two, even if what you're saying is true, wouldn't it make more sense for it to happen on election day than during early voting or in early voting? No, no. You've got people that are staggering in when you don't have as many people coming in. They had more, hold on. Would it make sense in a day when everybody's there in a huge fucking line and they have like, No, it happened at the beginning of the day. It was right from the beginning dude. It wasn't later on. And then you are alleging that there was some sort of sabotage that happened. If 48% of Maricopa County is back. Just why don't I understand. I'm sure it's just a giant coincidence. It just happened on the ones that were open on election day. So there's some sort of conspiracy with the Democrats to destroy all of these dollar box data. No, I'm sure Katie Hobbs, the person who's in charge of running the elections who just happened to be running for governor at the same time and narrowly won over Carrie Lake. I'm sure that was just all a giant coincidence. Dinesh D'Souza is gonna have a documentary watching her running for every place. No, 2000. Ringing the ink machine. 2000 mules was horseshit. I was criticizing it right from the beginning. I don't like the the Sousa docs. So that's not me. Back there. Have you either read the anchorries thing but have you read the forensic audit? This is some case to the questions about some county I've never heard of and the forensic audit. That's the fault, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, do you know about this project at all? Is this the one that was done by the company that doesn't exist anymore? No. I'm not that you're coming with a Maricopa County audit. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of, yeah. Okay, no, I'm not, why don't you inform us? Tell us. I'm not dismissing it, I just haven't heard it. I've heard of the Maricopa County audit one but I haven't heard it. Whenever I've looked into a lot of the Dominion machine claims, they just don't add up. They haven't read the forensic report. I feel like if there was a report that said that the machine was actually switching votes. I've seen the switching vote claim, they call it like black magic or something. I don't, whenever I've looked into it, it just hasn't been. Here's the thing with the Dominion machines typically, my understanding is most of them have paper backups. So when they print it out, you see, are you talking about the machine itself on the printout is switching the vote or it's in the tabulation system? I don't know what that means. You gotta read the report, dude. Education? You gotta read the report. Well, I think he's making it sound like they misstate what's actually on the ballot on the machine. Here's the thing, that's why I'm a big fan of paper backup systems. So when, you know, I like the machine, it's very convenient, you pick it out on a machine, it does the printout, you put in the tabulation system, it's paper backup, so then if there is an issue with the count, you can do an actual hand recount, and then you have the paper system there. So I think paper backup systems are switching up. Sure, but his issue specifically was that the machine was misstating, I guess, what was on the actual ballot. I don't know. I'm sorry, well that's what your claiming report said, Jesus. Well, that's why you can, that's why you can look at the ballot and see if it chose right for you. I haven't heard it, I haven't heard of this at all, yeah. Let's go to Sean. Sean. Yeah, the Republican, right? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Wow. What was the name of the election, or who was it, who versus who? It was a Republican guy. Yeah, but was this a state election, like for the Congressional race? Okay, I'll check it out after. I mean, listen, this is decently well known among people who actually conduct elections. Like, you know, people talk about ballot harvesting all the time, right? Ballot harvesting, I think, is an issue. For example, it's illegal in the state of Arizona, but you go to next door to California, they allow it, it's just like a free-for-all. You actually have, like, you know, I know of Republicans who now do ballot harvesting in different congressional districts in California, and you're like, whoa, how did this Republican win in that county like Fresno or this one over here, like CD-13? It's because they're doing ballot harvesting. Is that democracy, do you think that's like a good way to conduct a democracy is ballot harvesting? When you say ballot harvesting, are you just referring to collecting ballots that people have already felt outside? You're literally going out door to door saying, because you know all these people are getting mail-in ballots because they have a mass mail-in ballot system now. And it's literally like whoever can get to the door first, tell this old person who doesn't even give a shit about elections to fill out their ballot and give it to you, it's basically whoever does that first. Is that democracy? I don't think it is. I mean, if you want to start having questions about that, there's a lot of, like, we don't have, like, for instance, a day off for an election, right? Is that democracy that working class people have to do ballot harvesting? I mean, like, there's a lot of questions you can get to do. Hold on, would you agree to a compromise where you basically eliminate most mass mail-ins and then even reduce or even eliminate early voting but then have a national in-person election day, like, holiday so people could go vote? If people, actually, if people wanted to do that, sure. But the problem is that the election claims never come from a place of good faith when it comes to conservatives. For instance, if somebody, people talk about, like, voter ID to vote, voter ID to vote, that's not even that rare. I'm pretty sure across most of Europe you need an ID to vote, but nobody ever pairs this with, like, a free national ID. If somebody is like, oh, if the federal government provides you with a free identification card, then fine, you can have an ID to vote. That's fine. I believe in most of the states that, or almost all of the states that have strict voter ID, they actually have a free ID that's available to people who request it. That might, I don't know if that's true because I always hear people say, oh, you have to go to the DMV and spend 30 bucks and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, like, this would have to be, like, because the goal is, is whatever, if you are a person that likes democracy, which I'm not really sure how much of our country even cares anymore, but if you are a person that likes democracy, then the goal should be to put as many, as few roadblocks as possible between you and actually voting while still maintaining the safety and integrity of our elections. So the biggest reason why I've always been critical of Republicans that are trying to say, like, get rid of early voting and get rid of mail and blah, blah, blah, blah, is that generally speaking, for a country with over 100 million people voting, you don't usually see them any problems. Like, yeah, sometimes the machine breaks down or a pipe bursts or there's a box or whatever. It just seems to be in the contentious races like it happened in Harris County, which is now being investigated by the left wing Soros DA, who's actually saying there was, this probably happened, and the attorney general, well, the governor is requesting an investigation. I mean, like, historically, mail-in ballots have favored conservatives slightly because I think people from rural communities are more likely to mail-in ballots and stuff. Definitely not the case now. It might not be the case now, but I'm saying there were no problems with them before when it favored Republicans. It wasn't mass mail-ins. So just when it was the Republican side that was tending to mail-in ballots? You couldn't do mass ballot harvesting back then because it didn't go out to everybody. It's a lot more of a problem now, absolutely. Okay. Front row, James. Right here, James. James, James. He's got one right here. Front row. What Biden could, so the question is what could Biden do to give me a net positive impression? Yeah, without them betraying their... Oh, without them betraying their... Because when you say net positive, like, this means it would have to outweigh all the other negative things that I think are associated with things. I mean, they could, how about this? There's things that they could do, I think, to not theoretically betray their values that I could support. Is that, can I answer that? So after the Biden administration, though... Six more years, baby. Say. You have traveled and say, what do you know why they made it on the other side of the aisle? But overall, I think they did a pretty good job. Oh, man, I think it'd be pretty tough for it to be overall without them betraying some of their principles and things like that. But unlike an individual issue, I mean, theoretically, if they support this idea of democracy and voter integrity, if they wanted to come together with Republicans to pass something like that, I would support it. But I don't think they actually, I don't think they actually wanna do that, so. So like a quick follow-up from my really good question. Yeah, so are you saying that that they're too ideologically opposed or whatever? Or do you really have a good impression of that presidency realistically? It's not an, I mean, is it ideologically, I mean, to some degree, almost everything we believe is like somewhat ideological. But like, to me, it's just, is it good policy, is it bad policy? To me, so I mean, is that driven by ideology? I guess, but I mean, I like to think I'm a pretty practical person. What about the things that Biden succeeded on that Trump said he was going to but didn't? The fact that Biden got the infrastructure to go past in one year when Trump couldn't do it in four. Or that Biden was able to secure $1.5 billion in smart security for the border wall for Mexico that Trump never could. Like, are those like benefits to Biden's administration or? So, well, we wanna talk about the border and Biden and that whole debacle. I mean, we're seeing record levels that we've never seen before of illegal immigration across our southern border. We're seeing- You notice how you didn't answer the question all the time. Well, no, no, because it's like- You went to the next talking point. It didn't do anything. It's like, Trump actually, like he actually achieved results when it came to illegal immigration across the Southwest border, but we're not like it's just drastically, it's like, it's horrible what's happening under Biden and they're not doing anything. He puts Kamala Harris in charge of the border. She visited like one time and is like, has she actually done anything on that? Like- Okay, so reiterating the question. The fact that Biden was able to secure a one and a half billion dollar investment for Mexico and a smart security on the border that Trump wasn't able to do. And the fact that Biden was able to pass an infrastructure bill in one year with bipartisan support that Trump wasn't able to do in four. Are those things, you're like, oh, okay, I'll give Biden a little bit of props for that. At least he did something there. Because he- I'm gonna go- Oh, sorry. Again, what he's been doing at the Southwest border, net has been counterproductive. Getting rid of the remaining Mexico policy only to, first of all, judges smacked that down and they allowed it, but now he's reinstituting that basically, but with Venezuelan migrants. So he's basically conceding that that was actually an effective policy under Trump. I mean, he got rid of a lot of the Trump policies like the three-country agreement between Guatemala Honduras and El Salvador, I believe. And the immigrants who are coming across the border, whenever you ask them, if you look at the reporting of Bill Malujan, Jorge Ventura, Julio Rosas, like they all have the impression, oh, the border's wide open. Biden wants us to come here. And I mean, I can't fault them for actually believing that. So- So I haven't gotten my check in Soros this month, so I can speculate a little bit about if the Democrats have pertained. Consider this is supposed to be about if the environment has been successful, when they talk a lot about a lack of confidence in the election. What would Biden need to do to be considered successful or restore your confidence to the U.S. election? What would Biden need to do to restore confidence in the election for a new one? That's the question. I mean, usually these things are handled at the state level, but I could see, you know, if Biden, it was an issue he really cared about, like working with state leaders or even, you know, announcing publicly, like, hey, these are the types of measures we should take, like voter ID. I think that's a basic thing that actually the vast majority of Americans actually agree on when you look at the polling. I think reducing mail-in ballots just because it's just a way, there's so many opportunities for mail-in ballots to actually just, you know, the person who's not actually, you know, the name attached to the ballot, it could be someone else voting, like you could never know, whereas it's a lot harder to do that with in-person voting. So basically reducing mail-in ballots as much as possible. And that's some pretty good stuff. What's some other ones trying to think? It's just not at the top of my mind as far as the different types of policy, but those are like two good ones, I think, to start with. We're gonna do a quick two-minute re, just basically a two-minute summary of each of you. If you could choose the candidate for your party for the 2024 presidential election, and who would you choose and why? Stephen, you go first, and then we'll pick it over to you. Well, I mean, my answer's easy. I think that the incumbent advantage is huge. I don't think Biden should leave. I think Biden's really good during the midterms, and as long as his presidency continues trend in this direction, I would say he's probably gonna be okay, but obviously anything can happen in two years, so who knows. So I mean, I would obviously say Biden should run again. You wouldn't wanna throw away that advantage. I'm conflicted. Cause here's the thing, there's a lot of unknowns with, you know, the different candidates. So for example, let's say you say Trump, right? You know, you look at some of his first-term performance. I wasn't a big fan of a lot of things that were happening under that, especially with some of his administration picks. They started getting a little bit better towards the end of his administration, but you know, I look at some of the people waiting in the wings for his administration, like the AFPI folks. I'm not a big fan of that. So I have my concerns there, but you look at Ron DeSantis, you know, if he's an effective governor of Florida, but you know, when it comes to foreign policy and some of the staffing of his administration on the federal, you know, when he's actually in federal office, I worry that he might put some of like the more traditional neocon types into office. So I don't know, I'm kind of, I'm conflicted on, I'm like a wait-and-see person. I kind of wait more towards the last minute and see how things are playing out, like how's the economy doing, you know, what's voter sentiment. And you know, I wanna see the debates play out. I wanna see, you know, these candidates get questions. So I can't really answer the question. Just to be sure that everybody gets a chance to go to the restroom, I wanna wrap this one up. Thank you guys very much. Cool. All right, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.