 Gentlemen, what's up? We have an interesting discussion tonight. It's going to be about Trump. So this should make for a really cool discussion. We're asking the question, did Trump handle COVID well? We have Matthew and Steve tonight. Basically our format tonight is just going to be a simple five minute opening. Then they're going to jump right into discussion for about 50 minutes and then we'll do a Q&A. So because I'm moderating tonight, if you would tag me with your questions at Converse Contender, and I'll make sure and ask them at the end. We want to make sure that everybody feels welcome here. So try to be friendly in the live chat. And if you have anything you want to make sure that they see, you can super chat it and we'll push it to the top of the list. With that being said, if you love these guys and you think, man, I really want to hear this guy again. I want to see what he has to offer. Well, their links will be in the description if they're not already. So with that being said, we'll kick it over to Steve to let him get us started. Steve. All right. Thank you. And first, I want to thank Matthew for stepping in for this debate. My argument was not initially with you, but I'm glad that you've taken the time to debate the topic with me. Thank you Converse for hosting tonight and James for creating this amazing open platform. COVID-19 has been one of the most world-shattering events since 9-11. And the aftermath of this pandemic is likely to be just as far reaching and deep. We are already seeing how some of those unexpected ramifications have happened and they still continue to happen. As we discussed the way that President Donald Trump and the United States responded to COVID-19, I would like to make a few things clear about my personal position. I did not vote for Donald Trump in the last election. And I had been personally critical of his communication style, his management of the cabinet, and his seemingly lack of ability to take criticism. I tactically supported the recent impeachment process, but in the end I felt that his removal was unwarranted. His Nixonian pension for finding villains around every corner troubles me. His fondness for authoritarians worries me even more. The conflict of nature between the media and Trump, both of which continue to throw matches into that demonstra fire concerns me as well. I'm not determined who I'm going to be voting for in the next election as of this time, but I have not completely discounted against voting for Trump. But, even if we're here to debate whether he responded to COVID-19 correctly, I did take my hydroxychloric in this morning, watched about 12 hours of Fox News, injected some Lysol and opened a Twitter account and branded about the mainstream media for about four hours last night. So I'm ready to defend Trump. Unlike Trump though, I'm obviously using a teleprompter for my own. I do think Trump's handling COVID has been successful up to this point. And I'm defending that success, because we have not had a complete social and economic breakdown. He may very well still screw the pooch, but I am looking to lock into a few aspects of his response that I think were successful and prevent a catastrophe. He let the states manage the crisis at the state and local level while using the federal government to provide guidance and aid when needed. There was a slow implementation of tougher guidelines as the crisis unfolded until finally advocating for the full lockdown when it became obvious that it was necessary rather than overreacting to the crisis. This place blamed directly on the Chinese government as a bad actor and responsible for this crisis. I'm finally pushing for the reopening of the economy with Westa threat that stabilized and greater information had become available. The ramifications to the shutdown started to become more painful than the benefits it was providing. So, in conclusion, I just want to make sure that you understand that I'm not here to defend Trump as a sick of it, but I do find the continued hyperbolic Orange Man Band rank coming from all corners to be intellectually dishonest. What I'm here to defend against is this perception that he's grossly mismanaged this entire ordeal. As they say, hindsight's a bitch. And as we saw the rising tide of this virus slowly spreading across the world, Trump and the U.S. government made measured decisions to avoid and prevent as much debt as possible and also an economic meltdown. We're still in the crisis, so it's very possible my own position may change once we reach the other side of this. But we should hope that the worst is behind us and realize how fortunate we've been so far. Thank you. All right. Thanks so much for that opening, Steve. We'll kick it over to Matthew for your opening. Well, I... I'm going to do my best to limit my criticism of Trump as Steve has done to just the response of the Trump administration to the COVID outbreak and handling it on a federal level as the president and the leader of the country just on that score. If we were going to debate other aspects of his presidency or his actions or his leadership style, that would be, you know, weeks worth of debate. But just to stick to how he has responded, I have to say that throughout the entirety of the outbreak here in the United States, I have been very frustrated with the way that he has chosen to respond to this issue, which was building up in other countries sufficiently that by the time anything more than a declaration of national emergency was done to coordinate the response to COVID and the spread, I believe that it was too late. That's not necessarily something that I would solely lay at the feet of President Trump, I think that the Senate and the House they bear just as much responsibility and a lot of just the aspects of our country in general are to blame, but specifically for what Trump has done, I would strongly argue based on especially the research that I've been doing for this debate that President Trump was well aware by February 22nd that we had an impending disaster coming based on his own statements, something that was going to reach every aspect of society in the United States, every sector widespread from schools to small businesses. And the fact that by March 13th, which is a good deal later, of course, all he had done is issue a national emergency warning. The preparation in terms of contingency, I think, is what we ended up missing out on. I'm not even going to speak to what he was advocating for in terms of where research should be going because I think that's a side issue. He had experts who were advising him at the time and in my opinion and the argument that I am making, he did not responsibly handle the advice that he was given and lead the country down a path that was going to minimize casualties as much as possible. Now that is a critique of his leadership skills, his actions, his values and ultimately his effectiveness at doing his job. I work for a company, a very large company that's shut down on our own in the middle of March. The actual lockdown nationwide where everyone was being strongly prompted to do what they could to stay home and halt the spread, as I recall, was March 24th. So between February 22nd when Trump himself stated that we had a serious issue on our hands that was going to reach every aspect of society until March 24th, that is over a month of preparation that could be made in stockpiling the equipment specifically sanitation not just the sanitizer itself but the procedures that could be put into effect to disperse as needed to hotspots. Gloves, masks, even as small as just those resources on a federal level, that infrastructure is not prepared in time. Now, as far as ventilators and all of the other specific equipment that we ended up needing so much of, that's another issue I think that because of the complexity of some of the equipment, it's not really fair to critique how many ventilators were ready here or there, I think that the basics for protecting the country the individuals of our country were not available despite him having enough time to coordinate that with the governors and provide a stronger hand in making sure that the states themselves were guided towards protecting the citizens of this country. So although I would not say the president is responsible for the 100,000 deaths that we've had since COVID hit I think our first case was January 22nd in the United States. I wouldn't say that but I would say that the numbers would have been significantly less if better planning had been instituted period of containing the outbreak which we never had. So that is my criticism that may not be strict enough or severe enough for some critics of Trump but to make the case for this particular debate, that is the point that I'm making and I'll be happy to expand on that but I think my five minutes are up. That's my position. All right, thanks so much for that. We'll kick it over to Steve to start the live discussion. Steve, do you want to start with that? Yeah, so I guess my main question is you said that I know it's evidence here that your company shut down in the middle of March. I know that your company are essential but everyone who could work from home was sent to work from home and I will still be working from home until September at the decision of my company to do as much as they can to protect our employees from being exposed to the risks of the outbreak. Certainly. We waited until very end of I want to say March and I think that is one of the main issues that I had going through this entire situation. I can actually agree with you on the fact that we weren't necessarily preparing throughout the month of January and February. We're not going to have as many disagreements as I think we thought we were going to have going into this. But at the end, I think what we were looking at was no one really understood how widespread this was going to be. When it started in China and I think the first cases were, well we don't even know when the first cases are because China's they have the ability to suppress that information but I remember hearing rumors of things going on in December. Possibly. Yeah, exactly. No one knew exactly what was going on. I think that their numbers are highly suspect. I think they're downplaying them way more than even that I could even guess. Yeah, we're not going to disagree on that or any basically any criticism of China or how they handled it. We're probably going to be completely in agreement on any of that. Okay, so and when it did start to spread across the world, when we started seeing it impacting Italy especially, I think that's when everybody started to realize that this is a real thing. And I want to say that was early February that was really starting to take hold there when there was massive spikes and started to slowly spread through Europe. And at that point we were still everybody was still kind of confused as to what this was. And I think we're still trying to grasp what it is as well. And I think the biggest problem and the biggest issue that I've had with a lot of critique Trump is that he didn't take the situation seriously. Now, yes, he's got more information. He should have more information than the average person on the street. He should have started to kind of ramp the country up a little bit faster. But at the end of the day, how are you going to convince the entire population of America to start locking down, shutting down for a virus that no one even understands. And it hasn't even really hit our shores yet. That's been the biggest issue for me. That it seems to me that everybody says, well, Trump didn't act fast enough. But at the same time, what would have happened if he had it? I know that's, you know, that's a hypothetical. We don't know. We can never know. Just like if we can never know what would have happened if we didn't lock down, but we didn't try to herd immunity situation. We got a little example from Sweden and obviously that didn't work out as well as we thought it would. I thought that was working out well. Information coming out of there sounds like it didn't work quite as well as I thought it was going to. But I mean, even before the lockdown started lifting, and like I said, I'm not going to disagree with you on a lot of the preparation parts. It's the period of the lockdown that I have the biggest contention with. Because that caused not just a lot of confusion amongst people. We finally realized what was going on and everybody agreed. We got a lockdown. We don't know what's going on. The best thing is to isolate and stay away from each other for a little while and try to suss this out. Figure out what's going on. But by mid May, everybody was ready to leave. I mean, people were already doing it anyways. We knew that the virus was not necessarily as we initially thought. It's still highly transmittable. But there's easy precautions to take against that. We know what kind of populations are vulnerable to the disease. So we know who should isolate themselves who needs to be away from the general population. And those people should know it too. If they're taking the risk to go out and get themselves infected there's not much we can do about that. But if folks, healthier folks, get the disease they don't even know it. I could have had the disease myself and not even know it. I could have gotten it all the way back in January or February for all I know. So when we started to lift lockdowns, we had already seen the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. And those are part of the population that can't work from home. They're not the folks that need to go home and get their paycheck like regular. And they're also pretty much the least vulnerable part of the place we're talking about folks that work in production and manufacturing and things like that where you are around a lot of people. But you're not physically active in your job, just in your job. You're not 65 years old working at a factory. That's that simple. Go ahead. I do the same thing. That's perfectly fine. I just wanted to clarify something before we continue any further. Are you suggesting that we focus more on the length of the lockdown once it had been initiated or the lead up to when we realized there was a real problem and when it ended up going into effect? Because that's really the crux of my argument is how long it took for the federal and state to carry out any organized plan of defending the rest of the country from hotspots that did crop up. I'm just wondering where do you want to focus this debate on the actual lockdown or leading up to the lockdown? I mean, there's an argument to be made for both, I think, personally. Like I said, I'm not going to have too much contention with you on the lead up to the debate or to the lockdown, I apologize. There was an obvious situation that was occurring. But it wasn't until really we saw the scandal later in New York that we knew how serious the situation was. And that's when we really kicked into full gear when the Federal Procurement Act went into effect after a lot of debate over that. You can see here a couple of my information here. Sorry, I did miss a lot of my opening there because I cut it down to five minutes. Feel free, by the way, if there's anything that you'd like to add from your opening that you didn't, feel free to do so now. I don't mind waiting. Yeah, no, no, it's all right. Once we realized the situation was getting as bad as it was, especially in New York, which was obviously the hardest hit. I think at that point we did start spinning the gears into effect. We did start to realize that there is a situation but without that inciting incident people weren't going to shut down and lock down just for the hell of it. It just wasn't going to happen. Look at it now. We know the virus is out there and people still won't wear masks, even if they're close proximity to each other. We've got the possibility of spikes occurring due to the current mass gatherings going throughout the classroom. Now, do you think that the spread and the fact that people are and throughout all of this have been very lax in my opinion about affecting... Let's just stick with, for the sake of this debate, the guidelines. I got one in the mail. I believe it was in April. Of the Trump administration's guidelines on what everyone should do based on the guidelines that were being presented to the Trump administration by the CDC, basically. The fact that it was presented as guidelines instead of, this is what we're going to do, legally I am saying as the president, everyone is required to do this from urging every state government as well in the strongest possible terms to save human lives and prevent the spread of this epidemic and any possible mutations, which we can't predict because we didn't know where the hospitals were going to come up. Of course, there were a lot of unknowns, but just in terms of preparing for contingencies, there could have been ten times as many cases as there were. There could have been a tenth of as many cases as there were. We didn't know at the time, but in preparation for the contingencies of huge outbreaks like we had in New York, my argument is that the guidelines that the Trump administration put out and the lax way that the state governments ended up approaching the guidelines that he put out, some weren't never enforced at all. Some states never enacted any lockdown at all. And I realized that this is all unprecedented. But the Trump administration, Trump himself as the leader of the country should have urged in the strongest possible terms since we are talking about 100,000 people now. Regardless of what it could have been, this is what we're left with actually having occurred. He should have, even if it was 10,000 people, urged everyone in the country to do this as more than just a suggestion of guidelines that people could or could not choose to follow because there was no leadership in that way. I would argue we ended up with such a problem as we had. I think we're nearing 2 million cases now. I would have to check the numbers, but that to me is a serious problem. That is the lack of leadership, I think, that has led a lot of people to never bother to do social distancing or wear masks or take this seriously. There's a lot of people who are still considering this to be a conspiracy theory or some deep state operation as opposed to the product of a worldwide catastrophe that is evident to anyone who cares to look. So I'm sorry, I'm the one doing the rambling. You understand where I'm coming from. The difference between guidelines and saying, no, you are going to do this as law in whatever necessary legislation had to happen, it never happened. Well, that legislation would have had, unless you were suggesting you should have done it through executive order, it would have gone through the Congress for legislation to occur, and we know how Congress works. It was hard enough just to get the unemployment checks out there, which are not the unemployment, but the stimulus, which I have my own questions about as to why that was implemented the way it was, but I guess what I'm curious about here is that you're saying that he should have been more forceful. How do you think that would have been responded to by, I mean, it's been hard enough just to get him to follow guidelines let alone being told to do something? I don't think that anyone has actually, aside from peers, people who own businesses trying to prompt their employees or prominent public figures saying you should do this because it's in your best interest, the same sort of language of a suggestion or this is what you should do because I think it's a good idea is the same approach that the Trump administration has had to this entire epidemic. At no point has any federal legislation been put into effect or state legislation as far as I know has made it a crime to willingly and intentionally ignore any and all protection of the public when someone was at risk. Now, there might be some laws that I haven't done enough research to know if there were ever any done but I do know that on the federal level that never happened and I think to answer your question the fact that it was always just a question of these are guidelines that we hope you'll follow for your own well-being and that's just what we're being told so maybe you should do it as well instead of know you're going to do it because people are going to die if you don't which is the entire point of the federal government is to protect the country as a whole. That never happened. Well, sorry, go ahead. I was just going to put it in different terms than I already had. Yeah, because I was going to respond to the you said well you're not sure if there was any laws implemented at the state level and there definitely were in many states even in Arizona here which is what I would call a liberal state by any means. We had an executive order that went through that basically said you have to stay home unless you're doing essential business and of course the list of essential businesses and essential travel and things like that was fairly long. It didn't look like we had a whole lot of enforcement regarding what it was but it's just that extra tool but you saw it in other states I know Minnesota sorry, Michigan had some pretty draconian rules implemented there and they were enforced same thing as in Texas where the woman and I'm using specific examples obviously because I'm not too familiar with the law that was implemented in Texas but they reopened her business followed all the CDC guidelines and was arrested for and put in jail. Even though she got a part of the government I think is what ended up happening. So there's definitely laws that were implemented state by state which I think is what needed to happen essentially and that's what I think one of the brilliant parts really is too high praise for Mr. Trump on this issue but one of the greatest things that he did in this crisis was rather than essentially putting the entire country into an executive order or lockdown which I don't even think is constitutional he allowed the states individually to handle their specific situations just every states different socially, economically how people are organized with New York, the solutions in New York City aren't going to apply to the situations in upper state New York same thing as with California versus Georgia there's too much diversity in this country to have a one size fits all policy and that's I find it odd and I'm not accusing you of this because it sounds like you're thinking of this more objectively than I would have expected and I probably do a little bit the same here too but I do find it odd that a lot of folks wanted the Trump administration which could slam the left and right for pretty much anything it does to have more power in this situation that's something that just has blown my mind throughout this entire do-it-it I would like to clarify then because I don't want you to think that I was suggesting that Trump unilaterally tell everyone in the United States you are going to do this because I said so I'm talking more about coordinating with the states to enforce it on a federal level where I think the best analogy that I heard throughout all of this is that we're going to have a peeing section of the swimming pool over here so when you have some states that are doing something about it and some that are not and it's completely up to the state governments to decide with no top-down coordination to have both the federal government Congress on the federal level and the state level forming some nationwide system of controlling the spread and preparing for contingencies and I don't see how it could have ever possibly worked we just got lucky honestly that there have been as few deaths and cases as there have been because people did on their own decide to do what was best for for the country and for each other I just want to clarify again quickly that I understand very well that states have their own paradigm each state handles its own business in a different way than every other state and Trump can't tell what to do on every single issue governors can't tell mayors what to do on every single issue everyone has their own slot that they fill in making this country work and it's much different than anywhere else in the world my case is that Trump didn't try to do more than set out guidelines and hope that the states would do something he sat back and allowed them as you just seem to be saying he allowed them to decide what to do instead of making any attempt to get people to follow through with something that would affect everyone and protect everyone at the same time it never developed on any level that I can tell so what ended up happening is a sort of a grassroots decision from individual communities and citizens to protect themselves because from testing to having masks and gloves available for a very long time there seemed to be no way for anyone to find some place to be safe besides in their own apartment or house and that's it there was no because of the way our healthcare system is built and the way that it runs there was no protection for people until something like New York happened and everyone was yelling at the same time we need help I'm sorry I want to add that it is a marker of how great this country is that so many people did rise to the challenge and help each other but we still need leadership because there are always going to be people who don't care about anyone else but themselves so I guess I'm trying to still figure out how that would have been implemented are you saying it was more of a communication issue or do you think there should have actually been law or legislation passed in order to essentially force the lockdown that's I guess where I'm trying to figure out exactly okay I'm I am a computer drafter I do floor plans depending on the industry that I'm working in or the discipline that I'm working in at any given time as a drafter I basically just draw plans electrical plans, mechanical plans, architectural plans that's what I do I don't have any training political science sure I'm not expecting to be an expert it's been years since I've taken any political science so I'm not expecting that as a caveat I'm just saying as a lay person there is certainly a way for the Trump presidency the Trump administration pardon me to resonate with every governor to initiate a nationwide protection in let's just say two or three steps above the guideline suggestions for how people should protect themselves and in extreme cases yes jail time or heavy fines but some sort of a consequence for not following the legislation yes I am talking about the state and local state and local and federal governments enacting some sort of legislation together to make it all the same for every state instead of just allowing governors to decide to pick and choose whether or not they were going to do something to protect people from each other since we didn't ever really know just how communicable it was or who was genuinely at risk the best advice that he could have been getting he seemed to not really be listening to a lot of the time and would even talk over and correct and disagree with publicly instead of listening to and that's spilled milk under the bridge I'm not just talking about him I'm talking about throughout the world the entire medical science community of the people who are trying to and even now working their butts off to try to get as much testing and vaccine research done as possible that it seems to me that it was a power issue and a lack of leadership and although with the caveat that I gave I don't know exactly how that would have happened legally I'm sure that there's nothing preventing it from happening if that decision had been made okay I want to kind of loop back around here the main contention was due to lack of preparedness and lack of essentially moving forward with things like respirators PPP and what was the other big one hospital beds that was a major for shortfall on the government's part and one of the reasons I think that was is because we as a country haven't experienced something like this before I my original opening I was going to reference the two other situations that came out of China there was SARS and I think it was another one of the COVID diseases I can't remember what it is off hand but a lot of other countries had a little bit of experience with this they've been through it before that's why South Korea was able to respond so efficiently and effectively they already had things like contact tracing in effect they were able to test it off the bat they were they and they also knew hey besides they let's figure out what's going on and then then once we got it under control then go about your daily lives now of course that didn't necessarily work for them either because they did reopen and then they got another spike in their cases and we're probably going to see that again here you know it's just a matter of fact that once everybody's locked down for a certain amount of time you're going to go back into society there's a lot of asymptomatic cases out there people don't know if they have it we don't have a lot of testing available yet for a big country it's hard to get those tests out especially when we have hot spots like New York, Jersey, Seattle areas where those tests need to be rather than in rural Nebraska they don't need them out there as much as they do in those major cities in fact it was looking into the comparative situation where it does in Canada and Canada had hit by the SARS virus pretty hard they understood the response and we did drop the ball we weren't learning from other countries on how to implement this how to be prepared and be ready for it that was an objection I was going to bring up but I'm you just addressed it so I don't even have to but that's kind of the direction I'm going on that's why I prefer to that hindsight situation this is not something that anybody really expected we should have it's happened twice before in the last 20 years maybe not as bad and somehow we managed to avoid at all times to the most degree why would we think that this time would be any different especially when we're not getting information that we need about the virus as it's coming out and obviously much larger issues than what we were being told now I know we already agree with the fact that China really did not share the information that they needed too early enough and I think that was one of the main issues that we had in responding to this we just didn't know what was coming and even when it started to come into the country we knew that it was it had a higher transmission rate but it didn't seem like the fatality rates were that high we didn't quite understand the asymptomatic issue we didn't realize that more than half I think is like 80% of the people that get it I'm just throwing that number I don't have a statistic you're right it is much higher than was previously thought now I do believe it's somewhere around 70 or 80% okay they're walking around with the disease they don't know and it lasts for 14 days you can transmit that thing 14 days, you don't even know what you have. So we didn't know what we were dealing with. And to basically ramp up the country, I don't want to say frenzy, but essentially say, okay, we got to stop everything, we got to drop everything, we got to stop going to work, you got to stay at home for whoever knows how long until we figure this out when it didn't seem like there was an issue. It was hard enough to keep people in their homes after we knew how bad this was. So I guess my biggest contention is that we didn't understand what was going on, and an overreaction would have just been as bad if we had underreacted. I think he split the middle just right. Maybe a week before one of the numbers I've heard is probably could have reduced the cases quite significantly if we implemented the lockdowns about a week, just a week prior than when we did, which was at the end of March, I think, is going into April is when I know that we locked down here, which I think we were one of the last states to really, really do so, to fully locked out and have the executive order or something like that. Well, there were a few states who never did any lockdown at all, though. And I think you're referring to like Montana, states, you know, more rural states, right? States where they don't have large cities, they're not having as many issues. I think that's actually kind of a problem that stems from lack of testing, though, is we look at the numbers now of who has been reported to have been sick, to have had the disease. And we can trace quite a bit of that because we have the technology to do so. We have the data to do so. But if you are in a country, say in Southeast Asia or Africa, wherever it might be, where they don't have the infrastructure to test, there's no telling what the numbers actually were. And in rural areas, even in the United States, I would imagine it's kind of the same problem where if you don't have any way to test, you don't have any way to implement healthcare failsafe system for something like this, then I think that's why they started looking at increases in the number of deaths in a given area in comparison to previous years, because there was no way at the time for people to know who was actually dying from COVID and who wasn't because it's the symptoms do mimic other illnesses, whether it's bronchitis or pneumonia or whatever it might be in a lot of countries around the world. I'm sure once we are able to start testing worldwide and spreading the vaccines over the next few years, we're going to find that there were quite a few more cases than we thought. But I don't want to get too far off base here because this is a huge issue. There's so many aspects to it. Hard to really narrow down. We're over 45 minutes now, so we're going to go for about 10 more minutes. So I just want to stop real quick and say to everybody, thanks for your questions that you've given so far. We're about to go into a Q&A section in a few minutes. So if you want to ask a question to either of the contenders here, just go ahead and tag me at Converse Contender and let me know what your question is. I will try and ask it to them in the Q&A section. But you guys got about maybe 10 more minutes if you want to maybe make that sound pretty good. Do you want to go ahead and do your closing and maybe finish off what your opening was going to be? Honestly, I don't have a closing really set up. So I'm fine with continuing the conversation unless you've got closing that you want to do. Okay, yeah, because you never know where these conversations are going to go. And I think especially in the political conversation, you're going to be learning each other, talking to each other and hitting different aspects of a very broad issue, like you were just saying before we had the side go up there. And I wanted to go ahead, so I was pulling it up while he was on. You are right, there were seven states, looks like that did not implement any lockdown orders. And just to give you an idea of what states those were, it was Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and Arkansas. I knew Arkansas was one of them, but I didn't remember many of the others. Yeah. And I kind of figured that those were the states that were most likely not to have had actual stay-at-home orders. I do know folks in those states, though, that did actually, you know, they had to work from home or they, you know, there was a definite marked difference. But yeah, I lost my aunt. My aunt is in Oklahoma and I lost her to COVID. I'm sorry to hear that. But please, I mean, you know, you've been in your room. Sure. And yeah, no, and I don't want to make that sound like, you know, obviously that's a tragedy. And I don't know if there was a specific issue that occurred as a result of, you know, I don't want to get too detailed with it unless you want to go through that or not. That's up to you. She was the highest risk possible with prior medical conditions and dementia in a nursing home. So it's not exactly a surprise. You know, it was no 45-year-old runner. She was in her 80s and didn't really remember who her family was. So it's not, it's not as much of an issue. But it, you know, she is in Oklahoma. And there's no telling. I really think that over the next few months and years, we're really going to see that the especially with testing to see who has antibodies, who is asymptomatic and had a slight, you know, one or two symptoms, even if they weren't asymptomatic, and just powered through it. And with the new data that keeps coming in for who is a supercarrier, if you will. And the fact that they keep adjusting just how dangerous it is to be, to have like different levels of it, apparently a lot of the doctors who have worked on a lot of patients ended up being sicker and getting sicker than someone who was just mildly. I mean, all of these variables, we couldn't have known them in advance. That's true. But we could have planned for contingencies. We could have had some sort of infrastructure set up so that we were prepared for whichever way it ended up going. But that didn't happen as you were just saying in at least seven states. And where it did happen, it didn't stop it from spreading anyway sometimes. So it's done now. It's in the past. And we're just talking now about what could have happened, what could have been done when we don't have all the information. So to be mature about it, we have to accept things as they are. Yeah, and that's a good point. Because even as I was doing my research, I was, I was, I mean, I'm not too much of a metrics guy myself. So it was quite a, quite a shovel for me to go through a lot of the numbers and things like that. And one of the things I noticed going through it is that things that I remember peering in February, I can't even find anymore. Things that I remember hearing in March, April, and even last month, it's impossible to get those numbers. One of the big things that I was trying to figure out was what the initial projections were supposed to be before any lockdown was initiated. I couldn't find it. I'm sure it's, I'm sure some Google genius out there can probably find it in like three seconds, but I'm nowhere near that. And I guess that's the hardest part about this whole debate is because it is still an ongoing situation. We are more likely than not going to have a spike, but we might not. We don't know. No one really knows what the next couple of months is going to be like. And I guess my, the biggest, the biggest issue I've had throughout the entire thing is, and that's why I made a fairly particular point of stating, you know, in my short opening there, which was mostly just me stating that I'm not a, I'm not a big truck supporter. I'm not, I'm not on that set. I'm on the right. I'm a conservative. I'm over on that end of the spectrum and everything like that. But I do just like a lot of what he's done, but I see a lot of, a lot of the take back or the lot of the give back that people are giving him for the response. And I think it's, I think it's intellectually dishonest and a lot of points because he didn't, I mean, yes, he could have been a better communicator. I, that's one of his hugest flaws is he's a terrible communicator, except for a certain segment of the population really loves that kind of communication, but I'm not in that population and I don't think most of the country is either. But that segment takes him very seriously. But even so, I think that the actual response that the federal government did and the states and down to the local level, for the most part, some, some did fail. Some really dropped ball on things. I think New York is a huge example of that. And obviously we can't get into that situation at all in depth because that's a whole mess there. But that's one of the things about the system that we have is that it does allow for successes and failures and allows folks to learn from each other and figure out what the best route to take is in the future. And this is a huge learning lesson because this is going to happen again. I mean, like I said, it's already happened twice before. This is the third time it's probably going to happen again. Do you think that the approach that we've taken this time should be taken again? Well, I think what we've learned from it is that we need to have testing, we need to have testing available. Contract tracing is probably a good idea. I think there's going to be a lot of resistance to something like that, especially implementing, you know, everybody's paranoid about their phones, even if they're not a conspiracy theorist. A better infrastructure to be able to supply those respirators to hot zones, those hospital beds, all those things. I mean, we're still looking at the fact that this vaccine, I mean, it's going to be a miracle if it's out by October. That's like the earliest I've heard. And that's I think the fastest development of a vaccine in the history of vaccines. I think more realistic is in January, but that's still pretty amazed to have it done that quickly. So I guess we're learning our lessons, but we learn lessons from this. I'm not saying that every aspect of the response was correct. Anybody that said that is not paying attention to reality. So that's I guess, but I think adjusting to the situation as we did was at the very least acceptable, if not perfect, because it can't be perfect in a situation when there's so many unknowns. Converse, I realize we're probably pushing the limit there, but I of course, I would have responses to make and we could continue discussing this, but if you're ready, I think we can go ahead and move to the Q&A. All right. That sounds good to me. We'll go ahead and kick off the Q&A. All right. We didn't have a whole lot of questions. So if you have any, shoot them into the old live chat and we will try and get to them. And I know what you're thinking, man, I'd really like to see these guys again. Where can I find more of their material at? Well, if their description, if their links aren't in the description already, they will be shortly. So you can check them out. And also, if you're a first timer here, please consider subscribing, hitting that like button. If you like the political discussions, that lets us know that you like these type of discussions rather than, let's say, a religious discussion or some other type of discussion about aliens or flat earth or whatever else. So hit that like button. It helps us with what we're doing. All right. First, we have a Super Chat, $5 from Dave Gard. Thanks so much, Dave, for your Super Chat. It says, at Converse Contender, please have the interlocutors refer to Trump as Bunker Boy for the rest of the Q&A. Will do. Dave, thanks so much. We had a Super Chat, our next Super Chat came in from Negation of P. Thanks so much for your $5 Super Chat. It says, happy birthday yesterday, Matthew. He's a good friend of mine. He actually, I got married last year and he officiated my wedding. Oh, well. Okay. Yeah. Good guy. All right. Awesome. All right. And on Saturday, you were handled a boy good there. Yeah. That was good. A good time. All right. We had one question for Steve. It says, is Steve coming at us from a fishbowl? I think your mic's a little bit... Oh, is it a little? Sorry. All right. Well, I haven't had any trouble understanding you. There's been a little bit of background noise, but we haven't had any technical issues as far as I can tell. Okay. Yeah. It's 110 degrees here in Arizona. So, I mean, I gotta have an air conditioner on somewhere. Yeah. All right. That is actually all of our questions so far. So, since there's so little questions, I actually, I'll ask a question to you guys. First, to Matthew. You said that you thought that Trump should have initiated the lockdown sooner. Yes. Forcing states to follow that requirement. And I just wondered when you said that I was thinking and I was wondering, I wondered, do you think the same thing about the riots that Trump should kind of override some of the states that are not implementing their forces on the riots? Or do you think he should do the opposite in this case? I think that even though, to some degree, it's in apples and oranges, I get what you're saying and that there are some governors who are, I don't want to say sympathizing with, but being much more lax about enforcing curfews and that sort of thing. I think that the biggest difference that would prevent me from saying we should follow the same extreme measures is that currently the danger involved is mostly to property. And human life is always going to be more of a valuable commodity than property. And when you have the added unknown of a virus that is being transmitted unseen and behind closed doors and completely untraceable in real time, I think that that's much more of a danger than riots in some locations and peaceful protests in other locations and people looting. I absolutely think that anyone who is looting and rioting and causing damage to private property or attacking police officers, they should be prosecuted, they should be arrested for the damage that they caused just like any other law that's broken. But as far as instituting, I don't want to say a martial law, but emergency, I don't think that it would have helped to have him do an executive order for commanding governors to be stricter on how they handled dispensing masks and gloves and all of the things to protect people and making sure that people were social distancing. I think that even that level of demanding governors do what he says, just to truncate what I'm trying to say instead of rambling. I don't think that that level of control or force is something I would even advocate to make it through the coronavirus. I think that that should have been something that people were, they were working together with and if anything it's only been exacerbated by the fact that everything was so chaotic during the coronavirus, now governors are just sort of doing their own thing and not listening, possibly because there is no established rapport between the federal and the state right now. One thing I'll agree with is it is a huge difference between having the federal government say it's mandating and this I wouldn't be as much of a contention with mandating the social distancing, things like that. I think there's still issues with that, but it's a big difference from that to going to ordering the military into urban areas. It's, I mean, trust me, the active duty folks, they don't mess around when they're in those kind of situations. The police, yeah, they can be a little rowdy, a little brutal and sometimes they're all way, way outside of the scope of what they're supposed to be doing, but military is not going to have nearly as much of an issue with those kinds of things once you start bringing them into cities and that's where that creates such a chaotic situation that you think we've got problems now that that'd be just insane. Well, I think that what you asked me would be a great debate topic all by itself and I would love to elaborate, but I realize we have to move on. Right, especially because of the virus being still, you know, like we're still waiting, like maybe a second wave to happen, right? So yeah, I think you're right about that. We actually, I bought us some time and we had a lot of questions popped in for the whole live chat. So Brian Stevens, thanks so much for your Patreon question. He says, you can pick anyone from any political party currently alive to vote for president and they'll magically become president. Who would it be? Can you repeat the first part of that because I was trying to think of whether it was anyone alive or anyone who's active in politics and I missed what you actually said. So you can pick anyone from any political party that are currently alive to vote for president and they'll magically become president. So as long as they're alive from either political party or any political party, who would it be? Steve, you want to go first? Sure, sure. I've actually advocated, I think, since probably maybe just after the Bush years that I think that Colin Powell would be an excellent president, even though I think he's probably too old now at this point. And I know that he's too smart to get involved in that. And I think both he's kind of burned his bridges with both the Democrats and the Republicans. So I don't think you'd have a bunch of chance on either side of the ticket. But I think he'd be an excellent unifying figure. Pardon on that. That is a very difficult question for me to answer because it's always, for me, I'm always going between being an idealist and a cynic and there's nobody that I see that I say, yes, I'm absolutely behind that person. There's always going to be issues that are close to your heart and there's always going to be issues that you're never going to get what you want. So just to pick somebody who would do hopefully the best job. Yeah, let's see. You can ask another question. I'll come back to it. I'm going to think about it. Yeah, that's fine. All right. So actually, Joshua Howard, just to get his question out, I think that we've already talked about it. So we'll move on. But he said, should leaders do something about all the writers, protesters, breaking social distancing guidelines? Since we already kind of discussed that a little bit, we'll move on to the next question. And maybe that'll be a great discussion for the future. Jared Lynn, or Jajarin Jones, hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly says, was the first death in Wuhan not a great sign to close the borders? January 11th was the first day a death was claimed from Wuhan. We closed the borders January 31st, 20 days later. How's that logical? I'm not sure who exactly that's for, but I think the first two for, oh, sorry, go ahead. Well, it wasn't directed toward anybody. So maybe that might be a question for you, because it's about Trump's policy. Yeah, I think actually the first deaths were, like we were saying earlier in December or November. I think they were as early as November, but I don't think we know exactly when they were, because again, the information was not being provided to us that needed to be adequately prepared for the situation. And actually, there was a lot of pushback on this decision to close the borders with China. It started with first, and I do remember actually looking at this, because I thought that this was going to be a part of our contention. Apparently it wasn't. So there was a lot of wasted research time for me, but we first started funneling planes from China through specific airports to ensure that whatever testing we could at that point was implemented until we finally did a lockdown of all China flights. Now, fortunately, it didn't completely lock down like we should have, but it was too late. It was already in here. Even if we had locked down at the beginning of January, the likelihood of it getting to the United States was going to happen eventually. I think actually the majority of the cases that they found actually came from Europe through via Italy, and then later Central Europe and England and Spain more so than China, though I'm not saying that China didn't have some influence on the West Coast of the country that the contractions are. All right. Thanks so much for that, Steve. Jasmine Jacobs says, what was the best action Trump took in reaction to the virus for Steve and Matthew? First, let me say I think that the person that I would like to hear the most from and give a shot to be president would be Andrew Yang. I don't agree with all of his policies, but I don't agree with all of his policies either. That's why it's hard, but I would like to hear more of him, and I would give him a shot. Yeah, but what I would agree with what Trump did was yeah, I would say closing the border to China. I would have gone further with it than just China, but I think that in hindsight that was a very good thing to do. And I would agree with that as well. I mean, that's obviously one of the main things that was done right and early in at the right time. The only other thing I would say is the use of federal power, or not federal power, but allowing the states to control their individual situations to the degree that he did. But go right ahead. Sorry. All right. Thanks for that. We have Dave Garg again says, question, using the benefits of hindsight, what could Bunker Boy have done better about making PPE more available during the crisis? I think the easiest thing to do would be to take companies who were either having a stall in their productivity in the public sector to have them put to work creating. And this did happen in a lot of places. A lot of companies did convert what they were making to something that would help the situation, such as the ventilators. I forget which company ended up making them. It was Ferrari or Lamborghini, I believe. They ended up converting to creating ventilators because they could. And not a lot of people were buying cars at the time. So I think that that would be something that should have been implemented was having companies that were flagging or shut down completely, put their workers back to creating our own stockpiles of PPE, especially, which we could still be doing now. Yeah, that would be my suggestion. All right. Thanks so much for that. Zuka89 says, I have a question. Why was Bunker Boy trying to reopen the country when experts said that we need another week or two? Well, I mean, you can probably pick any one and a number of experts that said that we kept the lockdown down too long ago, too. I guess you'd have to tell me specifically which experts are telling them that we should have stayed closed. But we did notice that there was a flattening and a dropping of the curve in most places. And if there was, if that was not the case in the individual state, then you did reopen. States did reopen based on their individual situations. Some of them stayed closed longer. I mean, Michigan was one of the last ones. I use Michigan because I did live in Michigan for quite a while, so I do have an affinity for the state. They were one of the last states to actually remove the restrictions on the lockdown, like the hard lockdown, too. And I think the only reason they did it was because the protests started. They weren't going to be able to control it anyways. So they just kind of said, mom, we're just going to put a curfew in instead. But it's kind of eerie how the lockdowns and the curfews are almost the exact same thing. Only they're different time. So at least that's what it's here in this state. It's like almost the exact same thing, only it's between hours rather than the whole day. All right. Thanks so much for that, Steve. I personally think that Trump made a mistake by not calling Chuck Norris when this all first started. I got a bad joke for that, but I'm not going to do it. We had a question. We had somebody critiquing your pick for president. A. Munn says, is it Colin Powell, the guy who lied us into America into a war? And yeah, I was going to, that's, that's one of the ways I said he burned a lot of bridges with that. I mean, there's so a lot to discuss the Iraq war with me. I'm more than welcome to do that. That's a whole 50 gallon drum full of worms right there. Oh, yes. Yes. I am well aware. I have very many opinions about it myself. But I'm not going to go into that. But even so, that's one of the reasons why Colin Powell would have such trouble getting elected. Another thing is when he endorsed Obama for his presidency, then burned a lot of Republicans too. So he's pissed off everybody. And I think that's probably what we need is either someone that's not pissing anybody off or pisses everybody off. I don't think that anybody's worth electing if they're not pissing someone off. Yeah, exactly. All right. So we have Zuka 89 hat says, I have another question. Why the hell was it muck or boy wearing a mask on TV? And we've had some other similar questions. So maybe you guys want to give your opinion on like, how big of an issue is it that Trump refuses to wear the mask? Is it a big issue? Or is it just a kind of a hand waving thing to be like, meh? You mind if I if I take this one? Yeah, go yeah, go ahead, go ahead. I got I got I got stuff to say, but I want to say first, well, I could give you a very long response to that. But two things just to be short. Most of what Trump tries to present as his own version of being a leader and presidential is the sort of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne concept of never apologize, never show weakness. And I think for him, wearing a mask is showing weakness. It may also have to do with his cynicism or distrust of just how serious the possibility of him getting sick is because I would imagine that he falls into several categories of being at risk. But that being said, I think the reason that he doesn't do it is because he doesn't want to appear weak and to need a mask is to appear weak. As far as the dangers of it, I think that it sets a very unhealthy example for people to follow when the very simplest example that he could be setting for people to protect themselves from COVID is what he is adamantly refusing to do. And just to kind of pull up on that. So I mean, most of the time he's not within six feet of other people. And that's where the mask is needed. I agree with you. Just as people on the left virtue single, people on the right virtue single to and I think it's a virtual signaling on his part, not to be wearing a mask or not be not to be seen wearing a mask. Because I from what I understand when he was in the plan in Michigan, when he did have a specific meeting with folks in closed quarters, he did wear a mask during that time period. That's all I know, although I don't actually know that for a fact because obviously there's no pictures of it because he probably wouldn't have allowed any pictures. Fixer didn't happen. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that's all concerned in my part. But I agree with you on the most part that it's a good assessment of why he personally doesn't not. I don't think he's using the intellectual reason is it's well, I stopped with our faculty side effect. All right, we had a couple of questions relating to Trump and hydroxychloroquine. Do you guys want to say anything about that? Do you want to touch on that? Not, not really. I mean, I don't really have anything to say about that at this point. No, I mean, it was it was dumb. Yeah, I think that's a good way to sum it up. It was dumb. And we that's all it needs to be said. That's why that's why I use it as part of my job. It is what it is. He is not he shoots from the hip way too much. And that's what gets him in a lot of trouble. That's why folks like me do have issues with him. I think if he was a little bit more precise in his speaking and stayed away from his Twitter account a little bit more, he probably would be much more of an effective president probably wouldn't be pissed as many people off. All right, thanks so much. Judge Erin Jones has messaged a couple of times saying no, I was right. She was right about or he or she was right about the first death being reported on January 11 and not November or December and says, please look into it. I'm not sure if that's not really a question, but there's only so much looking into it that we can do when even the intelligence agencies are coming up short on what they're allowed to access in China. I mean, yeah, I look at just security here and they're stating the first possible case of COVID was in November 17th of 2019. But again, it could have been earlier than that. We don't really know. I mean, there's there's a lot of information that it's just impossible to know China's a hard country to for especially us that are, you know, not privy to secret information or understand. There was apparently a report issued to the intelligence community, the DIA by the NCMI, which is the National Center for Medical Intelligence, warning about the coronavirus being a worldwide threat back in November, but nobody can find that report now. So there's I mean, there's only so much digging you can do into into where all this came from. And if the responsible parties don't want you to find that evidence, you're not going to find it. All right, thanks so much for that. We did have a mistake on the border. It's the deal hunting debate will actually be tomorrow. Just so everyone who's seen that we have filter rang says Trump's lie count is on 20,000 now. That's like 10,000 times more lies than Obama. If you guys want to touch on whether Obama was more of an honest president or not, that's up to you or if not, we can move on. So whatever you're saying. Honesty, honestly, honestly, honesty is it's not so if you expect your politicians, even Obama, to be honest, then you're you're living in a dream world. Every politician has to sell some part of who they are and kiss rings and bend the knee to people who are going to make them compromise their their morals and lie. And it may well be that if Trump has told 20 some odd thousand lies, that he has just been much less delicate about covering his tracks and doesn't really care if people see that their lies. And Obama did a better job. I have my own bones to pick about Obama with the drone strikes and the invasion of privacy that Edward Snowden ended up uncovering along with others. He is no saint, although he has done some great things. He has done some terrible things. And whether or not someone as honest should not be a judge of whether or not they're a good president. They should be a good leader and make good decisions. And sometimes that requires you to say things that are not true. That's just part of being an adult and politicians are no different. Alright, thanks so much for that. We had a question that is related. Well, we had a comment that was related. I'd like to get you guys both the opinions on this. It says that Twitter removes Trump's call for unity video. And then we also had a polytheist YouTuber that we all know had a video taken down off of YouTube. I think yesterday because it showed police reming into some rioters. And so I guess the question would be like, what do you guys think about during this whole time these major social media outlets either censoring or trying to, I guess, influence the story on some of these things? Do you guys have any opinion on that at all? Steve, you want to go ahead? Yeah. I mean, I initially was of the opinion that while YouTube owns YouTube and YouTube is able to make its own decisions on its own platform. But I've started to hear a different argument kind of emerging from mostly on the right here that it's almost not just become platforms, but a form of communication kind of like a phone company or something along those lines where now it's no longer just the ownership of the company. There's free speech issues to be involved, even though private companies aren't necessarily beholden to free speech. Based on the fact that these are emerging technologies, we're still trying to wrap our heads around exactly what kind of impact they do have in society. Sorry, you're suggesting that they be considered more like utilities than private companies? In a sense, with freedom of speech issues, not in other aspects because I know where they're arguing can go. I haven't reached a conclusion on it. It's something that actually just started coming up a lot due to what's going on with Trump and getting knocked out with these comments from what Twitter did last week or something like that. So I think it's still something that needs to be looked at intensely because when certain forms of media do have a monopoly over discourse, I think a lot of these companies are trying to have it both ways too. They want to say we don't have any responsibility for what's on our platform, but then they knock things down that they don't want. It's a fine line. It's going to be very difficult. It's going to be something that we're going to be grasping with for quite a while as we try to figure out exactly what these new forms of media are capable of doing. I agree with all of that, and I just want to add that people need to remember that media, whatever form it takes, whether it's a television station, however that is manifesting now, people don't really watch television anymore much, but any form of media that you are taking in is owned by someone. We live in a capitalistic culture, and they are selling you something to get your attention. Just like anyone else on TikTok or music video or you name it, media companies have a bottom line. They are not public servants. They are trying to make money, and that is going to create bias in what they do and what they say, just like anyone else. They need to be held accountable when possible, but the state of our culture is that the dollar is the bottom line, and not the value of human life or what's best for the public good. Until somebody starts changing that, then you better just get used to media companies doing shady things, just like any other company does. All right, thanks so much for that. That was actually our last question. I know you guys, if anybody in the audience is wondering where can I get more of this, check the links in the description. Again, if this is your first time here, we have discussions, debates like this all the time on here, and we have a lot of interesting debates coming up. I'm going to be in one of them, which will be interesting. Again, hit that like button if you haven't already, and I'll just say to you guys, Brian Steven said, both of these guys are pretty well balanced. Coming from Brian, that's definitely a good thing for both of you. That is definitely a good couple over there. With that, thanks so much. I want to thank both of you guys for coming on and spending your time tonight doing this, and for all the audience for keeping it civil. There was a lot of cool discussion actually in the log chat. It'd be interesting to read back if you weren't in there for the whole time. But yeah, with that, as always, keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable.