David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism | Lex Fridman Podcast #375

I tweet that and then I finished the day. And I wake up the next morning and I glance at my phone. I'm seeing all these verified accounts that are, you know, quote, tweeting it and demanding a retraction and whatever. And I go, oh, okay, this looks like it's getting, looks like it's getting some attention. I then continue about my day. Around noon, I hear from my dad that he got 100 messages from, you should have aborted your son to we're going to find all of you to whatever else. My dad has no idea what's going on. He's like, I don't know what this is, but I have 100 dms to everything else you can imagine. And I start to get emails about, you know, we, you know, your Jewish faith, this and that and the other thing. And so at that point, to me, I thought, this is just going to get worse and worse and worse. And so I deleted the tweet and I really regret doing that because over the 48 hours that followed, yes, the attacks escalated. It went through Candace Owens and then@fox news.com Newsmax kind of peaking with, with Donald Trump Jr. And it was horrible.

The following is a conversation with David Pakman, a left wing progressive political commentator and host of the David Pakman Show. I hope to continue to have many conversations on politics with prominent insightful and and sometimes controversial figures across the political spectrum. David and I have been planning to speak for a long time and I'm sure we'll speak many more times. This conversation was challenging, eye opening and fun. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's David Pakman. Are there interesting differences to you between terms like liberal Democrat, left wing, leftist, progressive, socialist, communist, Marxist, far left, left, center left, all of these labels. Is there interesting distinctions between them?

Yeah, there's two sets of distinctions. One is, if you just want to say, let's define each of these as political terms. They're all different terms. You can be a progressive ideologically, but not be a member of the Democratic Party. Many say the Democratic Party isn't even really very progressive. So these are certainly terms that we could define in order to have a conversation about the next thing, kind of as a precursor to a conversation. Sometimes the terms are used in order to tag someone with a certain ideology that's not really linked to policy or any particular political question. But they can be used positively or negatively to just kind of say, here is the image of this individual that I have in my mind. So like Marxist is right now very popularly being used by some on the right to attack Democrats. There's very few actual Marxists, certainly not in positions of power in the United States, but even among the general population. So I think it's important to distinguish. Are we defining these terms because we want to compare and contrast the ideas that a particular group might bring to the discussion, or are we using them as insults or to stifle conversation? They're terms that can be used to start conversation or to stop it.

And the use of those terms is evolving rapidly month by month. So the term leftist, I think is a relatively popular term now to use in the negative context to describe what an outraged left wing commentator.

I think what you're kind of grasping onto is that there's probably some set of ideas that would apply to most of those who consider themselves to be on the left. The discussion of how that term is mostly being used is not about policy ideas. You're accurately kind of identifying that. And it does seem like progressive is no longer being used as a smear and leftist is being used as a smear more at this point.

Okay, but sometimes some of these terms are useful, like, can we try to pick the terms that are useful, like liberal and progressive and Democrat, liberal and progressive. Is there an interesting definable distinction between liberal and progressive to you?

That's a maybe one of the most interesting ones. Ten years ago, liberal often meant what now we mean by progressive. More recently, the progressive socialist leaning part of the political spectrum has started to use liberal to mean Joe Biden, to mean someone who is not really left enough. So liberal is very interesting because I remember talking with my audience years ago, maybe eight years ago or something like that, where I identified. I'm going to now use the term progressive more commonly to describe my own beliefs because liberal has now been made a smear. It's being shifted into something else. And it also means more of like a center left politics. So it's changed in some sense by, by necessity, by force, and also because the, the spectrum has shifted to some degree.

So the term liberal has evolved. Now liberal meaning some kind of embodiment of the mainstream Democratic Party almost to some degree.

Sometimes I'm called, I'm written off by, you know, within my space there are all sorts of shades of gray which I'm sure we can talk about, about where I am versus should be, could be, or am wrongly placed. And sometimes an attack on me is he's just a lib, meaning I'm not left enough. I'm not progressive socialist. Wherever else you want to go. So, yeah, the. The problem with a lot of these terms, and they're used very casually by people who call into my show, is that unless we actually define them each time, they very often mean very different things to different people and often come with an agenda attached to them. And so I find that they often stifle meaningful conversation rather than encourage it.

Do you sense that there's a drifting of what is the threshold to be a progressive, or is there. Should we use progressive synonymously with democratic socialists?

I think we should not use it synonymously with democratic socialist. And this is where there's another linguistic confusion and a political confusion. So we'll first talk about the linguistic one. Social democracy versus democratic socialism. Very similar words in a different order. Okay. My. The way I operate is democratic socialism is actually a form of socialism where one would seek to socialize ownership of the means of production. As an example, social democracy is a very highly regulated form of capitalism, the likes of which we would see in Northern Europe, Denmark, etc. These are very different things. I associate progressivism in 2023 with social democracy and would consider democratic socialism a form, actual socialism. That is different. We're no longer talking about a capitalist organization of society.

So transition from one to the other is a fundamental shift in how. In how society operates then.

Absolutely. And when you talk about social democracy, you're talking about socializing a couple more things than we socialize in most modern capitalist countries. I had this conversation with Patrick Bet David recently. Social democracy is okay. We've socialized the military already in the United States. We've socialized some health care in the sense of like the VA and Medicaid, etc. We're talking about socializing a couple more things still. In a capitalist country, democratic socialism would be something beyond that. And as someone who is not a democratic socialist myself, I'm maybe not the best advocate for explaining exactly how that system would function, but it would have some version of socializing ownership of the means of production, businesses, etc.

So you mentioned you appeared on the PBD podcast with Patrick Bad David. The debate was pretty intense. I. I should say I personally enjoyed it. I thought actually you did well and I thought Patrick did well, and it was a good conversation. I think there was a little bit of tension.

Yeah.

And I. I thought that Patric. So I disagree with the Internet. I thought Patrick just took on a kind of devil's advocate, like he was. He was purposely being stubborn to bring out the best in you. But the Internet thought that he's being stubborn, not being open to your ideas. I thought the tension between ideas. I think a lot of the tension had to do probably with Donald Trump and Trump supporters.

That certainly could be the case. And people wrote to me, after people wrote to me, the full gamut of everything you can imagine from this was your best thing you've ever done in public to. You got humiliating, humiliated, and your mother should have aborted you. Okay, so every and everything in between. So, you know, take your pick. But the most interesting feedback I got was from people who asked me after was it incredibly tense and awkward? And because it seemed so combative. And I think for. I'm so used to those types of tensions in the discussions that I have that it's very comfortable to me. It's not like afterwards it's. It's. There's a grudge or it's tense or whatever the case may be. I'm very comfortable just I. I disagree with people and that's it. So I did not find anything that happened inappropriate. I disagreed with a lot of the things he said, certainly.

So you also spoke on Michael Knowles, I think, about the idea of what is a woman do? Can you speak broadly about your conversations with people you disagree with? You know, some of the cases, it feels like it's gone wrong.

The conversations have gone wrong. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple different things. And I'm the first to tell you that depending on who I'm talking to, I go in with a different attitude about how, quote, seriously, I'm taking it in the sense of whether I think it's going to be a deep policy discussion versus where. Whether it's going to be more of a performance for an audience that is expecting a certain thing. And I think there's different types of shows. When I was interviewed by this guy, Jesse Lee Peterson in Los Angeles, it's very different, for example, than when I'm talking to Patrick Bet David, just to give to two examples. I think the reason I stopped doing the Michael Knowles show was the number of threats I would get after the fact. That's really the reason I was glad to engage with him to the extent that the interviews were interesting and, you know, we could organize it reasonably efficiently. But the reason I stepped away was sort of the aftermath. But I did find him to be someone who was abundantly clear about his view and where he comes from. And while I could not possibly disagree more with him in terms of politics and culture and Our backgrounds. Everything is just so, so different. I found it easy to engage in the conversation just because of how upfront and clear he was about what his beliefs were.

But the number of threats, yeah, it.

Was just too much. And this, you know, I don't know how much you saw about this recent Twitter dust up I was involved in that peaked with Donald Trump Jr. Tweeting about me and then that, then declining from there.

Let's talk through it. I didn't see it. Okay. I have to understand, like, the way you study Shakespeare, I have to study your Twitter to understand somewhat how much of it's sarcasm.

It's mostly sarcasm. I mean, here's the thing. And I know that there are people who will say, david, you're dealing with such serious issues. It's really not okay not to take everything you do completely seriously. But my view is, it's so incredible that I've, between chance and timing and so different things, fallen into a position where this is what I do professionally and it's a career and it's financially sustainable and all these different things. I don't want to end up taking myself too seriously because I recognize the timing and luck and all of these other things, and this could have gone a completely different way. So my approach to a lot of this is let's not take ourselves too seriously. And in particular on Twitter, a platform that, you know, the degree to which it should be taken very seriously maybe has changed over time. I'm always sort of thinking a little bit tongue in cheek on Twitter.

So what happened with Donald Trump Jr.

So.

Or the full arc of it.

Yeah. To make. Give you a one minute arc and then we can pick whichever parts we want after a mass shooting. Now, you might say there's like two or three a day. You're correct. After the Nashville mass shooting at a Christian school, I tweeted snarkily, tongue in cheek, to point that thoughts and prayers not only aren't particularly useful after a shooting, they also don't prevent shootings. That there's some confusion about how there would be a shooting at a Christian school, given that it is a place where prayer is taking place. I think I, you know, jokingly said something like, were they not praying enough or correctly.

In my deep journalistic integrity, you have it, I have your queen. This is the only display of journalistic integrity I will show today. Okay. And I have a couple of responses.

Beautiful.

And you deleted the tweet since then, which I regret. Oh, interesting.

And we can talk about that.

I would love to. Because it's such a interesting decision because when you tweet something, one of the things I've also learned is you don't often understand how it's going to be read. It's going to be analyzed. Like I mentioned Shakespeare, like there's certain. The use of certain words that you regret saying in a certain kind of way. Maybe just because it wasn't as eloquent, as powerful, it didn't actually convey the thing. Or is the distraction to the main message, all that kind of stuff? Okay, the actual tweet is very surprising that there would be a mass shooting at a Christian school. Given that lack of prayer is often blamed for these horrible events. Is it possible they weren't praying enough or correctly despite being a Christian school? And a lot of people quote, retweeted that, which I'm assuming was criticism. So Colin Wright wrote, I used to consider you a reasonable progressive, but you clearly devolved into partisan hackery. I'm an atheist, yet cannot begin to fathom using the murder of children and adults at a Christian school as an opportunity to dunk on the concept of prayer. And you responded, I'm dunking on the people who send thoughts and prayers and do nothing else. And the shootings continue. Okay, I'm sure there's a lot of other interactions.

There's a few other hundred thousand interactions. So do you want the arc leading to the deleting?

So I just wanted to display.

Do you know what time of day I tweeted the original one? I feel like it was in the afternoon or evening of on a Monday.

3:42Pm on 27th, March 27th, which was a Monday.

Okay. So basically I tweet that and then I finished the day and I.

So you tweet and then you go on with your day.

I might have looked once at Twitter and it had 2000 likes and a few people saying this might have missed the mark, but it's sort of like it's one of my 20,000 tweets. I don't know. I wake up the next morning, my baby daughter did not sleep till 7:30 the way I would like. So she's up at 6am and I get up and I'm just there starting to make breakfast. And I glance at my phone and I'm starting to. This was when verified meant a different thing that it means. Now I'm seeing all these verified accounts that are, are, you know, quote, tweeting it and demanding a retraction and whatever, and I go, oh, okay, this looks like it's getting Looks like it's getting some attention. I then continue about my day. Around noon, I hear from my dad that he got 100 messages from, you should have aborted your son to we're going to find all of you. To whatever else. My dad has no idea what's going on. He's like, I don't know what this is, but I have 100 dms to everything else you can imagine. And I start to get emails about, you know, we, you know, your Jewish faith, this and that and the other thing. And so at that point, to me, I thought, this is just going to get worse and worse and worse. And so I deleted the tweet. And I really regret doing that because over the 48 hours that followed, yes, the attacks escalated. It went through Candace Owens and then@fox news.com Newsmax kind of peaking with. With Donald Trump Jr. And it was horrible. I mean, thousands and thousands of, okay. But once I told my audience about what happened, I got thousands of messages from people saying, david, only someone who doesn't know you and is determined to interpret this in the worst possible faith would think you're blaming kids who died for getting shot. Of course you weren't doing that. I wish you hadn' deleted it so that it would still be up and you would now see the tide kind of turning on it. This was not a fun three days, regardless. But I do regret having deleted it because it was a. I wanted to do the quickest thing I thought I could to get people to stop trying to find family members and send them threats. And so around noon, that's what I did. And the truth is, the threats didn't stop anyway because everybody had screenshotted it. And I do wish I had left it up.

And is there some degree, maybe stepping outside yourself, that you regret tweeting that in that it feeds the mockery engine that. That fuels Twitter. So, like, does that tweet really represent what you believe?

It absolutely represents the disgust with a politics that includes saying, we can't touch guns. We just, we can't. But we're willing to point to mental health or say we need more prayer in schools or whatever. 1000% it represents that view. Is it the type of snark and sarcasm that I would use if given an hour to discuss the topic rather than whatever the number of characters is now on Twitter? No, definitely not. And so I am very cognizant of the fact that it was unnecessarily provocative, how it was written.

I think I asked a similar question to Ben Shapiro do you worry that this style of presentation can turn you from being, you know, a deeply thoughtful, objective political thinker to somebody who is just a partisan hack or partisan. What's a good word? Talking head.

Do you mean with regard to Twitter or the format of my show in general?

So Twitter for now. Let's start with Twitter for now. And can you silo your style of communication on Twitter from being a virus that affects your mind?

Right. I don't have deep thoughts about the Twitter component beyond, I think, across all sorts of disciplines, this is not the best way to most effectively solve problems and figure out solutions to complex issues.

You talking about Twitter now?

Right now I'm talking about Twitter. That being said, I think all of us to some degree have to adapt our content to the platform that we're using. In the same way that what I post to YouTube is different than what I post to TikTok, what I post to Twitter is also different. Do I think Twitter has been an unmitigated good for society? No. Have I chosen to step into Twitter as one of the ways in which I get my message out with the good and the bad? Yes. And I think that there is a deep conversation to be had there. I think zooming out a little bit in terms of what I do, and I was hoping this would come up because I think it's really interesting. I will often get emails from people who say two things. I will get the. You would have such a bigger audience if you did X type emails. And usually they are plays to sensationalism, salacious and titillating content, more pop culture stuff, etc. On the other hand, it's folks who say, listen, what you're doing really isn't as serious as it could be. And it seems like you could do something more serious and you should consider doing deep dives. You know, once it was do a deep dive into Calvin Coolidge, and I was like, nobody will watch that. So there. It's not by accident that my show is the way it is. Right. In an hour, I'm thinking of all the platforms I'm on and I'm saying, okay, I want to do a relatively deep dive on the federal budget and I want to talk about some of the political tomfoolery going on within the post office. And I'm going to do a segment about the wacky rally where Trump said crazy things and made up three words and said endorsed a candidate whose name. Right. I'm crafting that in total to find a balance between let's build this audience as much as I can in order to have a bigger base to get my message out there and include the more serious stuff with the hope that there's a little bit of something for everyone. And I'm finding a balance between those two sides of the spectrum. It's a deliberate thing. And I'm aware that if I were producing my show 50 years ago, the balance would probably be different and it would probably change again if we didn't. If the show was audio only, rather than having all these video platforms, it would also be different. But it's a decision that's proactively made to try to get the best and most out of the hour that I'm creating every day.

Well, it just feels like there's an entire machine fed by Twitter and journalism that wants to divide people and the drama of that division, highlighting the partisan division. The drama of that division feels like it's a tension with objective, clear thinking sometimes. And so that's the. I worry that there's a drug to it. There's too much fun to mock ridiculous people on the other side.

I think you're right about that. And the fact that that is true to me supports. I've talked with my audience about, you know, like the old food pyramid, which I guess was like wrong, but let's imagine that there was a pyramid that, that made sense. At the bottom, bread, I think, like whole grains maybe. I don't remember. It's been a while.

Sugar is on the top.

Junk food is at the very top. I am very open with my audience. The vast majority of what I do is the top of that pyramid. And I tell people very openly. I don't consume a lot of the type of content I produce. And I think it's really important to, as a base, be doing critical thinking, epistemology, how do we believe the things we believe, basics about the world. After that, reading history, economics, philosophy, etc. After that. Now we're getting into current events. I would mostly be looking at consuming primary source reporting things like Associated Press, whatever. I know everybody will have a different list of what counts there. After that is when I'd say indulge in some of the commentary type stuff that I do. If you find that I'm thoughtful enough to make it into that. But I'm very open. And really what I try to do on my show often is in being that at the top of the pyramid, tell people there's all this other stuff that should be forming your foundation that I hope you're consuming in addition to just watching Me, and I'm very open with my audience about that.

What about the shape, the dynamics, the. The characteristics of your audience? Is there some degree to which you're through mocking maybe Republicans, that there's a. There's a lean to that audience, and then you become captured by the audience? Do you worry about the audience capture?

I worry about it. I'm relatively comfortable that it's not shaping the program to a great degree in the sense that at this point, I have a pretty good sense of the things I can say that will upset what I might call my core audience. You know, one of the interesting things, just to briefly go back to the Twitter thing, was those people who were furious with me on Twitter and they contacted my advertisers, and some advertisers dropped me, and on and on and on. None of them are actually in my audience. None of them are regular consumers of my audience. They were kind of weaponized against me by people who said, hey, look at this. The people who follow Candace Owens on Twitter, other than for their kind of shock value, they're not in my audience. And with my core audience, I know there are things I can talk about that will generate displeasure, I guess you could say, with my audience. Sometimes when I touch the Israeli Palestinian conflict, that will happen sometimes. On vaccines, there's a portion of my audience that is more generally skeptical of vaccines, sometimes on some foreign policy issues or. You know, I'm not a big fan of Marianne Williamson NOR Bobby Kennedy Jr. S challenges to Joe Biden, not because I love Joe Biden, but because I don't consider them to be the most serious challengers. I know there's people in my audience who don't like that.

They get.

They get mad at me about that, and I'm totally okay with that and that tension with. With my core audience. So in that sense, I don't feel as though I've had that audience capture take place. But I know it can happen, and I'm very open to being told ways in which it may be happening without me noticing.

So I've made a call for questions on Reddit for this conversation. There's a lot of good questions that I'll probably bring up, but one of them was about Marianne Williamson asking why David thinks she's a garbage candidate, which, of course, I've never said, but perhaps you have more eloquently criticized her. So let's go there to the 2024 election. Okay, so Biden, Joe Biden officially announced that he's running again. Donald Trump officially announced that he's running again. If that's the matchup, who do you think wins?

If the election's held today, I think Biden.

Why?

Well, first of all, I believe he won last time. And if I start with the results from 2020 and I think to myself, what has happened since then that would push or pull voters one way or the other? I have a hard time making a case that Trump is in a better position today than he was in November of 2020. So that's kind of my starting point, which is it's a rematch of an election with a known outcome. What has changed? And I can't make a case for circumstances having changed in Trump's favor. To give a couple of state level examples, Florida seems to be kind of moving more to the Republican side since 2020, but Trump won that state already in 2020, so it wouldn't really change the outcome. Arizona was close. I think Arizona has moved to the left since 2020. So I don't see Trump taking that one. Wisconsin, I think the same sort of thing applies. So being very like practical, that would be kind of the start of my reasoning.

Do you think Joe Biden is a better candidate now than he was in 2020?

I think he's a worse candidate. This is going to sound ageist, but I think he's a worse candidate in that he's even older and there already seems to be an appetite for younger candidates, particularly on the Democratic voting side. So he's going to be four years older and in a sense that could be a liability. However, he also is going to have four years of accomplishments. Now you might not like the things he's done, in which case that would hurt him, but he has started to accumulate not insignificant number of accomplishments. Some of the big things that are known, inflation Reduction act and Covid stimulus, you know, but also less well known things like a bunch of little tweaks to health care, bunch of little tweaks to student lending. There's been a lot of little things at the macro level. I don't actually think Joe Biden has that much to do with this. The same way I didn't credit or attack Trump for a lot of the macroeconomic stuff, but inflation has started to come down significantly, the stock market's quite steady, these sort of things. I think looking historically it's a pretty OK environment for Joe Biden with the exception that he was already the oldest president to be inaugurated in 2021 and he would beat his own record in January of 2025. And I just don't know how voters are going to see that.

So in terms of just a public human being, how would you compare Trump and Biden? So if I were to give criticism towards Trump, it would be that he's chaotic, maybe to the point of being disrespectful to a lot of different groups, to a lot of different ideas, to a lot of different nations and leaders and all that kind of stuff. And then the criticism towards Biden would be that he maybe perhaps because of age or any other kind of cognitive capabilities, is not really there mentally, as you know, in the way that perhaps you could say, like Barack Obama was there just mentally being able to handle all kinds of aspects of being a public representative of a nation to the world and to the people of that nation. So which, in the competition of personality flaws, which do you think is more powerful?

You've laid out fair and I believe accurate assessments of elements of both of those men.

Yeah.

You haven't weighed in on to what degree you value each of those assessments, which is where I think the kind of bold, the meat of this question really is. I don't see, and I know that, you know, Biden's going to get us into World War Three. World War Three doesn't seem to be happening. I don't see the Biden deficits you listed, which I agree with you on, I don't see them as dangerous or threatening to the standing of the United States in this kind of environment with our Western traditional Western allies and geopolitics, etc. In the way that the sort of unhinged personality of Trump combined with his lack of knowledge about most issues is a threat. So for me, if those two are the candidates, Biden would be my choice. Now, are there people I would rather see on the Democratic side? Yes, if I knew the president would be a Republican. Can I think of better options than Trump? Absolutely. You know, it's, it's so funny when in 2012 it was Obama versus Romney, the difference seemed so significant between them. Thinking back, I'm sure I would disagree with Mitt Romney about tax rates and his views on LGBT or I'm sure I know are different than mine, but it seems without looking at him with rose colored glasses, so comparatively benign given the four years of Trump. So that's kind of where I come down.

Even McCain and Obama, the differences seem quite drastic.

Yeah, McCain was interesting because Palin as his running mate opened the door to the sort of cartoonish stuff that we've started to see on the Republican side. Palin, Trump, Marjorie Taylor, Greene. It started going in that direction, which has made the party a bit of a joke. Aside from what you believe the tax rate would be, right? You can say taxes are too high, but Jewish space lasers, Come on. You know, so, but. But I agree with you on McCain also.

So going back to the political terms we talked about, what. Where in that spectrum do you place yourself today? Which of the label do you think captures your political views?

Progressive, social Democrat, which. Which, again, is a capitalist. I own my own business. I pay the taxes I'm legally required to pay and not a penny more. And, you know, all those things, that's where I place myself.

Would you place yourself to the left of Joe Biden?

Yes. Yes.

Where does AOC fit into that?

It's a good question.

What do you think about AOC as a candidate? Do you think she eventually runs?

I think that if she doesn't run into some kind of scandal, and I don't mean scandal in the sense of some personal impropriety that, you know, but I mean some kind of major political problem. It seems that she has the staying power to be in American elected politics for a long time, whether she would even want to be president versus maybe going to the Senate or being governor or whatever the case may be. I have no idea what her ambitions are in that sense.

But.

But certainly, like policy aside, she has this combination of charisma, likability to some, but also something about her personality that angers the people who don't like her in a way that only fuels her sort of presence, which I think applies to Trump as well. That I do think that she has the potential to be. To have significant staying power in American politics? President I don't know.

Do you think that's the future of political elections and politics in general, is people who are able to skillfully piss off the other side, like KLC and Trump did.

I think it's an aspect of it. I think it's also understanding how to communicate policy ideas. Trump, I have things I can praise Trump about. If we want to get to that segment at some point, you let me know when that is. But I do think that there are some things Trump is very good at, and this is why it's very hard for me to believe that Ron DeSantis has what it takes to actually fight Trump in a national primary. And one of those things is Trump has a. Even though he often says very strange things, that if you transcribe them, you go, that's what language is that. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. In the moment, the way he relates to adversaries on stage, etc. Is very good in that he is very much aware of how it is going to be seen by the audience. And so that's why a lot of times it's more about doesn't matter that a word salad came out of his mouth, how he immediately respond and related to the person who. Very good. So I think that knowing how to be good when clips are shared all the time, often out of context, is extraordinarily important. Knowing how to use social media, which every election cycle, that means something different. But understanding how to use social media, very important. Those things are absolutely so important. And whether you're able to do a deep dive on the deficit, it's certainly useful. But I would say it's a bad thing. It's becoming less important in terms of figuring out who we want to represent us.

So just lingering on the AOC and then maybe let's throw in Bernie Sanders on that.

Yeah.

So where do you place yourself and how do you do the layout of the land of Bernie Sanders, aoc, Joe Biden and David Pakman?

My instinct is, and I'm going to answer it, the thing that makes this tough is Bernie says he's a Democratic socialist. He ran as a social Democrat. He didn't run on anything that was really socialism.

Right.

So I'm going by their public facing platforms.

I've been listening to him for many, many years and all the way back to the Tom Hartman show and I think using the terms as you've been using them.

Yeah.

He has, I don't think ever been a Democratic socialist. I haven't heard him speak about socialism. I think I've heard him speak about social programs and the value of social programs.

Yeah.

Throughout the history of the United States and there and how they've been beneficial.

My understanding is very similar to yours, although there may be stuff from the 70s where he really was talking about.

Bona bites of shit in the 70s.

Yeah, yeah. You and I even who weren't around, we were doing stuff in the 70s.

I feel like we did. Yeah.

My sense would be, you know, Biden is like center left and then I'm to the left of that. But maybe just inside of where AOC and Bernie are very, very similar to Bernie. I mean, I identify with a lot of Bernie's ideas. Maybe their implementation I'm more flexible on. I'll give you one example, Medicare for all. One way of trying to get health care to everybody, which Bernie's very big on, is you Take the current Medicare program. You just eliminate the age limit, make it available to everybody, pay for it through taxation. Interesting. However, I'm open to other models if they get everybody health care that is good quality and affordable. Singapore has an interesting model. Germany has an interesting model. I am. I am more agnostic about how we do it than just saying, let's expand Medicare. Whether that puts me to the right of Bernie, I don't. I don't know. But I'm not like exactly right there on. It has to be Medicare for all.

Yeah, that's more of a. That's more just flexibility versus dogmatism. So I don't know if that puts you to the left or to the right.

I don't either.

What do you think about the. We could term manipulation or the corruption in the DNC that perhaps tipped the scales against Bernie in the election?

Do you think there Was such a 2016 or 2020?

Both, I would say, in different dynamics. There were different with Hillary Clinton and the pressure from Hillary Clinton as a candidate and so on.

Yeah.

What I mean was there. Why didn't Bernie win? I guess is one one way to ask.

Okay. I think there's a couple of things here. First, the dnc. I'm not a Democrat, just. Your audience may not know. I'm just a independent.

Yeah.

I mostly vote for candidates that end up being Democrats in local elections. Often there's no party designation. So. Okay. I'm obviously on the left. I'm not denying that.

But.

But the Democratic Party as an institution has never really been interesting to me.

You're still a rebel that resists belonging to any institution.

Exactly right. Exactly right. And whether it matters, I don't know. The DNC and the RNC really are organizations that to some degree exist to justify their own existence because if they were no longer necessary, they would go away. And so they have to assert their value and their importance. They do this in a number of different ways. Organizing the way that the nominee is chosen, the convention, working with states on everything from redistricting to whatever else the case may be, setting the order of primaries and having some involvement in how that's all going to happen, and also coordinating behind the scenes. I guess they would describe it as making sure our candidates don't get in each other's ways. We might see it and say they're picking the winner. There's nothing illegal about them being involved in picking the winner, but we might say it's not in people's interests. I think the 2020 primary was really interesting. Bernie supporter myself. I started telling my audience after a couple primaries and even before, based on polling and different things. I see a real uphill battle here for Bernie. And it's really important. People in my audience are not the average, you know, union worker in Michigan who is mostly working and raising a family and then goes to vote on primary day and goes to vote on election day. If you spend a lot of time on Reddit and Twitter, you're going to have an inflated sense of Bernie's popularity within the Democratic Party. That was my sense, and to some degree we saw that in certain states. I don't have the exact primary order and results in front of me or in my head. But the big turning point was South Carolina. South Carolina was when Joe Biden one and one handily understood to be because of the larger African American population in South Carolina. And right around that exact same time. I actually don't remember now whether it was the day after or the day before some of the smaller Democratic candidates, smaller in terms of support, got out and said, I'm endorsing Joe Biden. And to some degree, of course, it was all organized and timed to help Joe Biden. There's no doubt about that. This is what the DNC does. It's hard for me to be mad at the DNC because this is sort of like if, if we believed they were there to be unbiased arbiters and to stay as much on the side as possible, it would make sense to be furious that they've gone against their stated, you know, kind of mandate. But we know that the DNC negotiates and is working behind the scenes and has a favorite. That favorite was Hillary in 2016, 2020. So I share the frustration about the power that the DNC has. But for people who are saying they did something illegal or whatever else, the case may be that that doesn't seem to be the case. But this is part of why. I mean, I would love to there not to be this duopoly of Republicans and Democrats and there's probably four major changes that have to happen in order to make that a reality. But I share the frustration of folks while recognizing that Reddit was not accurately representing Bernie's level of popularity.

Still, I wish that the bias wasn't towards the, what could be negatively termed the deep state, towards the bureaucracy, towards the momentum of the past, which I think Joe Biden kind of represents versus new ideas. Which is funny to say that Bernie Sanders somehow represents new ideas because he is also an older gentleman.

Well, it's a frame It's a lot of framing. And the other aspect to that is, on paper, Joe Biden's platform was arguably the most progressive of any Democratic candidate who won the nomination. Now, of course, there were people who challenged the nominations who were Joe Biden's left, left. A lot of this is perspective. And, you know, that's how you end up saying the guy who's a couple of years older than Biden is actually the guy with the fresh perspective, which is interesting because I don't disagree with you.

Yeah. And you also have to say the perspective doesn't always align with the policies. You're right. And you know, the actual policies of Joe Biden are different than the maybe.

The perception of Joe Biden or what he ran on. I mean, just two examples I would give are, during his campaign, he played up a little bit his interest in doing student loan forgiveness and something on cannabis. I never bought it. I told my audience, I think he's saying this stuff because this is the way the tide is kind of the wind is blowing and he's being advised to say this stuff. I don't think he's going to do very much on either of these things. He did actually do some student loan stuff, but that would be two examples, I think.

Okay, let's go to the something you alluded to, which is the pros and cons of a particular candidate. Well, what do you, as a critic of Trump? What to you are the pros? The strengths of Donald Trump, and what to you are his biggest weaknesses?

The strengths of Trump. See how I can frame them in a way that is both accurate and accurately assesses my feeling about it and.

Can be taken out of context most masterfully through the clipping process.

Yes, Trump's strengths are mostly superficial. And in terms of presentation, Trump was able to, I call it a grift. Some on the right say he's just so good at relating to different types of people. Trump, as a rich guy from New York City, was able to convince people that he spent most of his life trying to be kept isolated from him, that he had their best interests in mind, that he knew why they weren't doing well in the 2016 economy, and that he had solutions that he was going to bring forward. The truth is he never really liked those people. And as soon as they weren't useful to him for a brief period of time, he, you know, that that love affair with his followers stopped, and then now it's back that he needs them again. He didn't really understand the causes of the problems that those folks were experiencing. And his solutions were laughable. Right. Like Jared was going to solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict in year one. He was going to replace Obamacare in 2017. Things that were never going anywhere. Anywhere. But what he did really well was he put up a united front of I know what is ailing you, I know how to fix it. And I know how to fix it, I guess because he's a businessman and he's been above the fray of politics for so long, knowing how to use political donations to his advantage. He called that smart, etc. I think that's his greatest strength.

Why do you say that? The, the Jared plan for Israel and Palestine and the plan for health care to improve Obamacare. Why, why do you say that's laughable?

Well, only someone. I would include the North Korea plan as well, which I'm glad to talk about. Only someone who doesn't know anything about the size and scope of these issues could so arrogantly say that they could solve them in that way. And on that time frame. I'm all for optimism and, and bringing a new face to things. Absolutely, without a doubt. But, you know, a wall with Mexico that Mexico will pay for at the end of my first term. I know there are people who believed it because they would call into my show and say I'm voting for Trump because of it. But it's hard to believe that anybody serious would fall for that unless you were deliberately wanting to just believe whatever was being fed to you or you just hadn't ever thought about these issues before. The health care plan, you know, in 2017 they proposed one would have led to 24 million or so people ending up without health care. Didn't go anywhere because it was so terrible. And then In August of 2020, Trump said, In two weeks I'm going to finally have my health care proposal. It's 2023. We still never got it. You know, with all of these things, when you think them through, it was just sort of arrogance. And I get the perspective of I want optimism. And I liked that optimism. It worked. I mean, fair. A lot of people saw it and liked it. As someone who followed a lot of those issues closely, they seemed, of course, like impossible promises.

Well, it's a double edged sword. So to push back a little bit, if you look at the things I have a little bit more knowledge about, which is the space of artificial intelligence, there's a company called DeepMind and there's a company called OpenAI that were laughed at for a long time when they were Talking about that they're going to solve intelligence. And now they've made especially DeepMind and now most recently OpenAI with GPT. They've made progress that most of the AI community would not have imagined. They'd be able to make everything from AlphaGo beating the world go champion. Just all the different steps in progress that I can get into were surprised everybody and they are legitimately, fearlessly pursuing the task of solving intelligence. The other aspect, he gets a lot of criticism now, but another example is Elon Musk in I can say a lot of things like SpaceX, so commercial space flight. He was laughed at for a long time that that's possible. Same thing with Autopilot in Tesla autonomous vehicles. His approach was harshly criticized by all the experts and still criticized to this day, deeply criticized. And I, as a person that I believe objectively can look at the progress of autopilot as a semi autonomous vehicle system has been incredibly surprising. So the reason I mention that is sometimes it feels like you need the guy or the gal who makes those preposterous, ambitious statements like we're going to solve healthcare this year, like, and then, and then there's experts like yourself that are looking, thinking. Have you read anything about the history of it? Israel, Palestine is a good, is a good example of that. Do you know there's a history there? Do you realize how complicated how many people have tried, how many people have failed, how many millions of people hate each other in this, in this little place, in this, in this land? Like sometimes the expertise can really weigh you down. So sort of to push back, sometimes you have to have the almost be naive and stupid and just rush in with an optimism in order to actually make some progress.

I agree with you, 100. I think it's interesting that all of the examples you gave of, of successes are from the technology space, not politics. Not from politics, which, I mean, listen, yeah, I would love to be able to make headway on some of these issues more quickly. Without a doubt. I do think at some point though, when it comes down to voting and saying one of these people is going to be ostensibly in charge for four years through all of the departments and secretaries and choices that they make, we do want to apply some level of realism with the, with the understanding that your examples are from the tech space and they're good examples. There's, there's no question about it. One thing I'll add to this, I recently read Bradley Hope's new book about North Korea and it's really about an activist who doesn't even really matter. But the in the background of the book it's written, much of what is written about happens during the Trump era. And when Trump did the first and then the second, I guess you'd call them summits with Kim Jong Un. And it actually did seem like to some degree Trump's we're going to handle this like I do a business deal approach to Kim Jong Un. In some sense, it actually was logical because of Kim Jong Un and the way that it was so ego driven and they both, as sort of authoritarian strongmen types, to different degrees, wanted that. There was actually a kernel where I actually thought, as I read it, Trump's initial idea wasn't crazy. The problem was he knew nothing about the backstory of the relationship. He fell for all sorts of lies from Kim Jong Un and he made offers that didn't make any sense to me. It fell apart. Fine. But that's an example where I think Trump's personality was not actually at its base. The, the problem when it came to North Korea.

Well, there's other things of this nature that could go or some people argue goes into the strengths and pros of Donald Trump. For China, for example, tariffs on China. Can you make the case that there's some positive outcomes of the way Donald Trump acted with China?

It's really tough. And I'll give you a couple.

Okay, then also cons I'll give you.

It's tough to make. So the China thing is really so just very recently to when we're recording this, Trump was on Fox News interviewed by a guy named Mark Levin. And Trump proposed a new, I call it a conspiracy theory. Maybe it will strike you as something different about China Covid and tariffs. And Trump's suggestion was that the tariffs cost China so much money, China sent the US So much money in tariffs that they released Covid as punishment. Now, there's a couple problems with that. One, American companies pay the tariffs. Trump still doesn't seem to know this. Trump seems to believe that when he puts a tariff on Chinese imports, someone in China is cutting a check to the United States. American companies buy the stuff from China and then American companies cut a check to the United States for the tariff. Trump doesn't seem to get that, but.

It still has a sting to the Chinese economy.

You can make the argument that if there is a suitable alternative domestically or from a different country, that it will reduce imports, but it didn't happen. And we actually have reports now that the tariffs on China cost about a quarter million American jobs. The other problem with that idea is China created and released a virus in order to hurt you. But as of today 5.7 of the 6.8 million deaths were in other countries. It's a very indirect way. You're mostly killing people in other countries to hurt Trump. Maybe there was a this is the sort of thing where when I think about how Trump dealt with China it's very scary because given another four years who knows what he might do if he still doesn't understand how tariffs work.

The geopolitics operates in complicated ways with carrots and sticks and Henry Kissinger has written quite a lot about this and in some sense the positive aspect here that Donald Trump is willing to take big risks in in the game of geopolitics with this giant superpower that is China and a lot of others are too afraid, too afraid to call them out to come to the table and criticize.

I certainly think that's an argument that can be made. My question would be what tangible.