SIO230: Blue No Matter Whomberg?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 230, I a second, but I'm Thomas, that's Jamie, how you doing, Jamie? I'm good, we have just an awesome interview in the bank, ready to go, that I can't wait for everybody to hear with Gregg Caruso on Free Will, so much fun, but we wanted to get this debate out, episode out first, because, you know, it's more newsy, free will, not a recent story. The yeah, yeah.

0:00:35 Jamie: I am all right, Thomas, how are you?

0:00:56 Jamie: Yeah, no, I, I don't even think we've decided whether or not we have it, um, so, we've, we can, we, we we've got time.

0:01:03 Thomas: Plus, I just mean like, it's, you know, it's been talked about for some number of years. One might say millennia, actually. So I don'T think it's going anywhere. So we're going to do this debate episode because, because, ooh, we had ourselves a debate yesterday. That was, wow. And lots to talk about, and it'll be better to do this right away. So, that said, I guess we should dig in. But, let's see. Why don't we start with, I don't know, overall impressions of the debate? Go ahead.

0:01:33 Jamie: Uh, this was really unpleasant to watch. This had the feeling of a sort of cage match to it, you know, the candidates were on full attack mode, which was to be expected, did. But the moderators, I thought, did a really terrible job and it was just hostile and unpleasant and I feel like we all came away worse for having listened and watched it.

0:01:56 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I was sitting there hoping, like, Like, I kind of hope nobody's watching this. Like, I don't even want, I wouldn't want somebody to see just as a member of the democratic party. I'm like, I kind of would rather people aren't watching this, but at the same time it's been this process, this primary has been a process of being like, okay, when are people going to pay attention kind of thing? Because Biden was so high for so long and you and I both thought a, not only is he a good, not a good candidate, but B I don'T even think we thought like the democratic party was going to think he was a good candidate. So eventually it felt like he had to fall. Now it's finally happened, but, uh, I found myself thinking, okay, nevermind. I stopped paying attention to everybody. I don't want you to be watching this. Cause it's just like awful. And I really do have to say that I just think it was moderated so poorly.

0:02:45 Thomas: Like it really was, uh, you know, like you have to set a tone or do something that's going to make it so that candidates are not yelling over each other for extended periods of time. There, there was a time when Bernie was talking and trying to give a response and it was rightfully Bernie's turn and Buttigieg was just talking over him for, I don't know, 20 seconds? And it's like, that's not good for anybody. You know, and it, like, it was infuriating. I would rather, you know, I would rather at least hear Bernie get his turn and then whatever, Buttigieg can get his turn after that. It doesn't help anybody if they're all talking on top of each other. Just really poorly done, in my opinion.

0:03:25 Jamie: Yeah, I completely agree with that. One of the things that I was thinking while watching this debate was that it really gives us a sense of how each candidate is going to respond under pressure. Because at this point in the race, while it's only like 4% of delegates have been counted, the media narratives are starting to sort of consolidate. And there's talk about clear front runners and who should be dropping out. And I think there's a sense in which each one of these candidates are feeling like they're fighting for their lives, and they're pushed into a corner. And I think we're seeing how these candidates would respond when they feel threatened. And I think that's really interesting to see as it relates to holding the highest office in the land when you'll have to make really important and weighty decisions about which countries to negotiate with or escalate military conflict or hopefully de-escalate it.

0:04:18 Jamie: So I think this gave us a really interesting insight into their personalities and their temperaments. Yeah.

0:04:24 Thomas: Yeah, I think it's more just, Bernie is like we're, you know, because we saw Elizabeth Warren briefly be what people were calling a front runner in October ish, and then she really got attacked to a degree that I was, you know, struck me as a little harsh. But when we also saw Biden get attacked early on, you know, by Kamala Harris and others, but we hadn't really seen anybody go after Bernie that much. You know, here and there, each of the candidates had gone after each other a little bit.

I'm not saying there was no attacking, but this really did seem like the first debate where everyone was like, oh, well, Bernie is the front runner. Here we go. And, uh, last debate, I, I think that might have happened last debate, but for the fact that, uh, Bloomberg had just waddled his way in there and then everybody is like, uh, you know, I don't know, a cartoon where you got a bunch of hungry lions and somebody tosses a zebra steak in there or something. Like, I think they were all just so willing to jump on him, as this, yeah, for many reasons, this asshole that come lately who's just gonna buy his way, way in.

And the fact that like, he seemed like a free target that everybody could just bash and not offend anybody else's, you know, support that they're wanting to not offend kind of thing. And so I think we would have had more attacks on Sanders last time if it weren't for that, in my opinion, but now people are, you know, this debate was the first one where everyone's like, well, here we go. Let's try all these attacks.

0:05:56 Thomas: Um, what did you think of the attacks? I think we had a lot on the Cuba thing. And, uh, I, just to give my opinion on that, um, it definitely didn't seem like a worthwhile thing for Bernie to do. Like, I don't know why he felt like he needed to double down on his comments about, you know, the literacy program and all that. Um, I also don't really care that much when you have, you Know, like what's the competition, You know, oh, no, he said something nice about, you know, Cuba from this whenever it was. God knows when. Compare that to his opponent in the general, if he gets a nomination, who spends all day worshiping the worst dictators that are currently in power and not just their literacy programs, like just praising them.

0:06:47 Thomas: And, you know, this is, of course, talking about Trump with Putin and the prince in Saudi Arabia, just any number of these people that are really, really, really bad. And he doesn't get the scrutiny he should get for that. So, like, how, in what world, am I going to care more about Bernie's, you know, comments on a literacy program or whatever it might be in Cuba versus everything that Trump is doing? I don't know. You know what I mean? On one hand, I'm like, OK, I don't think it's like like the greatest thing for Bernie to have said, but on the other hand, who cares? What do you think about it? Yeah.

0:07:25 Jamie: So, um, I'm glad to hear you say that you also thought that Bernie Sanders was on the receiving end of the attacks. Um, because, you know, I fear as a Bernie supporter saying that I'm liable to be accused of having conspiracy theories or overreacting. But yeah, I definitely thought that the attacks were directed at Bernie Sanders, but I'll also say rightfully so. As you pointed out, when Elizabeth Warren was in the lead or when Joe Biden seemed to be inevitable early on, they were attacked. And as Pete Buttigieg surged briefly and we had a debate, I don't know, that was number 4,013. Pete Buttigieg was occasionally attacked. And so it was Bernie's turn. I don't think people generally tend to do very well when everybody is ganging up on them.

0:08:14 Jamie: I think it's much harder to handle yourself in a debate in that environment. And so I can sympathize with what you're saying about Sanders not having the best response on Cuba and doubling down. I think being a bit defensive is sort of a knee-jerk instinctive reaction, particularly when you're being attacked in what to me seems like such a bad faith way. As you pointed out, given what we currently have in the White House, it's hard to take these attacks or these criticisms of Bernie very seriously for a couple of reasons. As you've pointed out, the the president currently sitting in the White House regularly praises dictators, dictators and autocrats. And that is a bad thing. But it's also a complicated thing in the sense that what Donald Trump is congratulating and what he's praising in these dictators is precisely their violent inclinations, is the extent to which they suppress dissent and they uphold this very toxic form of masculinity and power.

0:09:13 Jamie: And when Bernie Sanders is criticizing or when he's praising a dictator, he isn't praising those things or those attributes that make dictators terrible, and make them violent. In fact, this entire sentence and where he's praising the literary program is bookended, beginning with his opposition to the authoritarian nature of Cuba, and then ends with specifically condemning the jailing of political dissidents. Like he's very clear that the way that these programs have been brought about is a moral violation. And I think that frustration sort of comes through because what Bernie wants us to have is literacy programs. He wants usto have decreasing infant mortality, which Cuba does.

0:10:00 Jamie: They have lower maternal mortality rates than we do. They have improved literacy rates. And I think Bernie Sanders wants us to be able to have those things without having to go through the violent revolutions that Cuba took to get to that destination. And so yes, I agree, he does get defensive. I don't think he always handles these attacks as well as he could. But I think the reason has to do with one, the natural inclination to be defensive, and particularly when the attacks are made in such bad faith.

0:10:33 Thomas: Um, I'm having flashbacks of when Warren was, was demanded how she should pay for everything when nobody else had really done that either, but anyway. Um, yeah, I, I agree, and I also think to add on to that, um, also the bizarre audience played a part in that. You know, when Bernie starts to explain or, or whatever on, on that answer, he got boos in different, in weird places. I, I just, I don't know what to make of the audience. You know, they were very unpredictable.

Um, they, they seem to be fans of things that made no sense. And then they seem to boo in places that made no sense. It wasn't like ubiquitous, like everybody had some applause and, you know, it's not as though the entire audience was one way or the other, but there seem to be, first up, they seem to be very non-responsive early in the debate, which it's such a tough thing because I think you either want a rule, or the knowledge as a viewer that there's going to be zero response, or you want to be able to hear the response, because what we had in this debate was they would try to land little jokes or little lines or whatever that normally you'd hear some cheering and it's like, yeah, whatever.

Uh, and there would just be nothing early on for some of these lines that seemed like, okay, they ought to at least get a, you know, a little, whatever their, their corner out of chair, and you couldn't hear it at all. Um, I, that's why I wonder, I feel like there was one debate a while back. I can't remember, or if it was in the 2016, uh, cycle, that I, it wouldn't be that bad if they just had a rule of like, okay, no audience noise.

0:12:08 Thomas: Like, you know, because it, it, it does cause a big, it can potentially affect how viewers are seeing things, I think, pretty, pretty dramatically, I would think. You know, I mean, when you, when you have an audience full of people who apparently, by some accounts, had to pay thousands of dollars to be there and were seemingly way too sympathetic toward Bloomberg, and then you have them like booing at different moments. And then you saw, you know, it got to Bernie in places. He reacted to it. He, you know, was a little, as were some of the other candidates at times. And that has a real effect. And it's a very unfair effect. It could go both ways, of course. I mean, it could also help, you know, my candidate or your candidate, but it just feels like maybe there should be more strict rules on that, or what.

0:12:57 Thomas: But have you gotten to the bottom of this audience thing? I've seen conflicting reports on, you know, what some people tried to say. Oh no, it was the same, same exact thing as every debate. Like, here's how the people got the seats. They were, the campaigns were offered tickets, all that kind of thing, but it was undeniably a different kind of audience than any other, uh, of the debates. What do you think about that? Oh,

0:13:21 Jamie: Yeah, so I haven't had the chance to get down to the bottom between the conflicting reports. I had seen reporting from a Fox affiliate that said all of the debate tickets were made available by purchase, and the starting price for the tickets was $1,700, and they went as high as $3,200 per ticket. Most people don't go to these things alone, right? So that means people are going, they're purchasing them at least in pairs. So the entrance fee to this was anywhere from $2,500 to $6,000 if you want to go with your wife. And I think that's going to dramatically skew who's in the audience and what their priorities are and what they're values are.

0:14:07 Jamie: Obviously, if you've got $3,000 to drop to go to one of, you know, the 15 presidential debates this year, You have a different set of priorities and you live an entirely different life than the average American who is voting in this election. And so what what you cheer and what you boo is going to vary quite widely, I imagine, depending on whether or not two $3,000 is the sort of discretionary spending that you have access to to go to something like a presidential debate on a random Tuesday night.

0:14:38 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, no kidding. It was, it was distracting. It, weird. Not good stuff. Let's see. What else? There's so much, so much more. I mean, I do want to get a talk about Bloomberg. I'm also, you know, that we can talk about what's ahead. We've got South Carolina, obviously. This was yet another debate that Bloomberg took part in when he wasn't even, and it's not even on the ballot for the contest that it's for essentially, but I get it. He wants to get on the national stage. Um, so we've got South Carolina that's been looked at as, you know, uh, Biden's kind of firewall, as they say, that that was going to be what can get him back in this race. But man, I'm seeing some stories that it might, it, he might be cratering so hard.

0:15:36 Thomas: Uh, and Bernie might be rising so sharply that if Bernie could could pull off a win in South Carolina, that to me, it seems like it's just pretty much absolutely over. I think we've all been under the impression that that was going to be Biden's contest and that's going to be where he can get back into this thing. But wow, who knows if that happens? I mean, I don't see how anyone else could possibly have a have a claim to the nomination after that. Yeah.

0:16:03 Jamie: Yeah, so I agree with that. I think even if Bernie only wins South Carolina by like 0.3%, that that is an enormous victory for him and basically forecloses just about anybody else from a path to nomination, certainly on the first ballot, and may render conversation about a second ballot meaningless. That would be such a landslide, given the extent to which South Carolina was billed as Biden's firewall, and was going to demonstrate his strength with historically dominant democratic demographics. And this would just, like you said, it would just be an almost unprecedented sort of cratering. It would really shift the dynamics of the race. I don't even know what would happen next.

0:16:56 Thomas: I think it's been so funny, too. I tweeted jokingly that, you know, Biden's my guy now because I want a president who sort of obeys time rules because that was, I don't know, like what he seemed to be really into that last night. And OK, I admire his, I don't know, his gentlemanliness or something, but like I don't really know, harping on that so much, I don't know what that does.

I don't know if there are a lot of voters out there who are just really keenly interested in timing rules or something and that's going to be their issue. But anyway, it's funny to see Biden's role in these debates and how it shifted, you know, like he was, he was all the focus for the first many of them. And then in the last few, it's been like, you know, the moderators like, you know, "Vice President Biden," you're like, oh yeah, oh, okay, "is he, uh, is he here? Yeah, let's, let's see what he has to say," and it's, it's really interesting to see him in that role.

It's probably, honestly, it's been better for him, like, it's, I think it's less pressure and he can pick his spots and try to do a little better. But he's still, he still, it's just, he starts an attack, like he had one on, um, I believe it was, I thought he was talking about, um, Bloomberg at first because he just said like, oh, this billionaire or whatever. And then it turned out it was an attack on Steyer about the, I think that was the private prisons one. Do you remember that?

0:18:14 Jamie: Yeah, so that was, yes. And I think that has to do with the fact that Steyer has surprisingly high support in South Carolina. And if Joe Biden is going to have any path forward after Super Tuesday, it is dependent, or even on Super Tuesday. I think he absolutely needs a win in South Carolina. And with the entrance of Mike Bloomberg later on in the race and Tom Steyer pulling it near 20% in South Carolina, I think strategically, it made some sense to go after him and particularly on prisons.

0:18:17 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:18:48 Thomas: I was going to say that. I don't know how many people saw this coming, but it's like these two billionaires, it's almost like they have come together to hand Bernie the nomination because whether it's Steyer might be, as you say, And you brought this to our attention a few weeks back, I think, where you mentioned how Steyer was polling so unbelievably well in South Carolina. He was in second. I don't know if that still holds to this very day, but he still has a high percentage. And a lot of that has got to be coming out of potential Biden supporters, I'd say a little more so than than any potential Sanders supporters. Although, you know, Steyer does try to talk a pretty progressive game.

0:19:34 Thomas: So who knows? Maybe it's a little bit imbalanced there. But I think, you Know, Bloomberg, though, on the other hand, he just nationally is making it so much harder for the, I guess, quote unquote, moderate or centrist cadre of the Democratic Party to coalesce around one candidate. And if Bloomberg, it's just so amazing to me. You know, if this were all just a ploy by Bloomberg to get Sanders to be president, then it would make me feel a lot better because right now it looks like a bazillionaire, you know, like truly a just astonishingly wealthy man. Man. I, I, you know, we often, our language fails us. It's, it's not just a billionaire. It's a $61.2 billion or whatever, you Know, like the, just the, the amount of money that is 12th richest person in the world.

0:20:25 Thomas: Uh, according to, I don't know, 2019 Forbes or whatever, it was just a truly astonishingly wealthy guy decides to just throw his hat in the ring. Uh, it is completely stale. Like, he does a good job advertising. Like, you can't deny that he did did a good job hiring the people to design ads that took what is a very boring and now being revealed in these debates, a boring, just black hole with no charisma, taking him and making him into somebody that like almost 20% of Democrats started saying they would support. And the whole thing he's accomplished with that and the whole reason he said was that, oh, we can't have Bernie running away with this thing. Like, oh, that's crazy. Bernie's crazy, oh it's so, we can't have a socialist blah, blah, blah, like his whole spiel.

0:21:12 Thomas: And he's doing the exact opposite of what he's trying to do. Gosh, it's just astonishing. Go ahead.

0:21:17 Jamie: Yeah. So I mean, I love this on so many different levels. Obviously, as someone who supports Bernie, I'm thrilled to see the way that this is actually playing out in real time, time, um, and the the classicist in me is just really really sort of enthused about this because if you take a look at any of our tragic Greek heroes, they always find the fate they fear on the path they take to avoid it. And there's just something so satisfying about that happening to Bloomberg here, the gods, you know, they hate nothing so much as they hate hubris. That is, that is really who they punish the most, right? Prometheus has his liver torn out eternally for daring to question the God's wisdom and for, you know, taking it upon himself.

0:21:54 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, I thought it wasn't because he bragged about his drinking or something.

0:22:13 Jamie: Oh, that was, I believe that was Tartarus, Tantalus?

0:22:18 Thomas: I don't know. Would they have known that the liver does filters out the, but they, did they know that back then? That'd be amazing.

0:22:24 Jamie: I don't think that they did. But so Bloomberg just like really tickles me about this. He has just gotten in this because it's, he has so much money. I mean, this is just how bizarre this all is, that he's so worried about what the taxes will do to his financial portfolio, that to save money, it literally is a cost saving mechanism to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a vanity presidential campaign. And it just goes to show what what's at stake here, we could either have childcare, funded preschool education for all of of our children, we can pay daycare and preschool teachers, salaries commensurate with the skills that they're actually utilizing in order to care for our children.

We can eliminate medical debt, we can provide health insurance, or alternatively, we could have a lot of TV commercials about who you should vote for president, which everybody totally loves and really improves the quality of our lives. Also, yeah, so one more thing. This was just on a personal note. I really appreciate Mike Bloomberg helping to crystallize these notions of inequality and who we should help out with such accuracy. He, in class, was able to be a living, breathing example of diminishing returns and marginal utility. So I really appreciated being able to get my students to conceptualize these terms by saying, if I gave a billion dollars to Mike Bloomberg, it would have literally no impact on his life. He has so much

0:22:25 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:24:05 Jamie: Money that to give him a billion dollars would in no way change how he experiences his reality. And at

0:24:10 Thomas: He Probably Would Lose track of it. But do I have 62 billion or 61? I can't remember.

0:24:17 Jamie: The Same time, we're spending half a billion dollars on TV commercials so that either Warren's wealth tax or Bernie's wealth tax doesn't provide education for our children, doesn't eliminate lunch debt, doesn't go toward providing health care. He really is a caricature of what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been running against, and I really, really appreciate that he has spent all of this money to be a living, breathing ad for just how gross billionaire priorities are and to really put, put into perspective, how much good we could accomplish. So, love

0:24:17 Thomas: Oh, I know, And this is

0:24:58 Jamie: It.

0:24:58 Thomas: Why I love Warren's wealth tax so much, you know, I've said a lot on this show, um, because it just goes to show, you know, you can with a two percent tax on whatever stock line is on the wealth over 50 million, uh, we could accomplish all these things, it would make no, no difference to them. And I love how you get, gosh, because I'll talk about this online or whatever. And you inevitably, I think this is a pretty American thing, and I'm not just picking on like individual people on Twitter or something. This seems to be pretty universal that as a country, we've instilled this idea that we're all just like, you know, a couple breaks away from being a billionaire. Like everybody in this country feel, apparently feels like they're just, what is the line, a temporarily disgraced billionaire or something like that, and Because Yeah, yeah.

0:25:47 Thomas: Yeah, temporary embarrassed millionaire, that's what I think we, our culture has kind of instilled in a lot of us, I think, and it's so funny because you see these people, I talked about, like, yeah, nobody, I just tweeted the other day, and, and I don't know how much we've talked about that, this on that show, but I'll make this explicit moral claim right now: we shouldn't have any billionaires, it's immoral for anyone to, and I don't know where you want to draw the line, I think a billion is pretty easy just to start, you know, like we shouldn't have billionaires, no, nobody in my opinion, nobody is worth that much more in material, you know, equivalence units of, of worth, which is honestly how our society does tend to value stuff, nobody is deserving of that many more, more resources than all the people in our country who have nothing, you know, when the median wealth, again, the median wealth of the Black community is like $0.

0:25:45 Jamie: Temporarily embarrassed millionaire. I

0:26:40 Thomas: Like literally, that's not even an exaggeration because there's so much debt that offsets all the assets and stuff. Uh, so for somebody to have a wealth of 61 point, whatever it is, billion dollars. See, I can't even keep track. It's plus or minus 500 million that I can't remember if it's 61.2 or 61.7. It doesn't matter. Okay. Who cares? One of those. So the point is I made that simple claim, you know, like I just don't think they should exist because it was part of the last debate, you know, where they asked that question. And it's amazing how many people, even people who are like Democrats come in there and like, oh, well, what if you own a company and it gets valued past a certain amount? And then should you have to give up control of your company. I'm just like, oh, are we really going to, okay. I just did a quick Google.

0:27:26 Thomas: There are, you know, in the, in the, in the world, there's something like, I don't know, 2100 billionaires or something like that. In the U.S. there are 607 or so. I think that was the last number I saw. So a rough give or take there's, this is around 600 people, 600 of literally the most privileged people, like the maximum privileged people that we're going to spill our tears over. Like they might have a company that's, you know, they have 51% of, and so if it goes above 2 billion, then they might have to sell some of it to, come on, that's what we're worried about?

0:28:01 Jamie: Mean, this is just all such a farce. If somebody that Like, I can't even take this seriously. What happens if I'm a billionaire and I've run this successful company? Oh no, I'll somehow struggle to figure out how to comfort myself with my remaining make $999 million. Like, give me a break. This is not a real problem. I don't know what I'll do on my yacht to the Caribbean where other people bring me food that other people I pay have cooked for me.

0:28:04 Thomas: Yeah, it really is.

0:28:38 Thomas: Yeah.

0:28:38 Jamie: Like shut up.

0:28:39 Thomas: I won't be able to hunt as many humans for sport. Come on. It's like, seriously.

0:28:43 Jamie: Like this is just, I refuse to acknowledge that I'm supposed to feel more sympathy for the billionaire who is brought down to only having $900 million, that somehow that's a greater injustice and more deserving of my moral concern than the children who are going hungry, or not allowed to attend their prom because they have student lunch debt, or not able to go to school because their family can't afford it and they need them to work to help out around the the house. The sense that that's where our moral priorities are supposed to be with billionaires on yachts is just so offensive to me. I don't even know how to respond to it. I

0:29:29 Thomas: Yeah. I have a conservative family member who, I remember this was, I don't know, let's see, This was back in July, I think it was, who I was seeing. I only remember because it was a family event that took place then. I even talked to this person and they said we were talking about some stuff and they said, like, well, if if because Liz Warren had at that time, I think she was the first one to have the student loan forgiveness thing going on.

0:29:57 Thomas: And he said, well, that happened, there's, the economy would just crumble. It was just, you know, it was just crash that day. If we happen to forgive whatever millions of dollars that is for these people. And it's so funny because there's never that concern if Trump is running trillion dollar deficits on the budget and spending God knows how much on a stupid wall, like re-diverting funds that should be going to other stuff to pay for a stupid wall. You know, real money, too.

0:30:26 Thomas: Like, yeah. Yeah. Like, this is real money to and like somehow that's all priced in. And somehow there's this feeling on the right. And, you know, I remember since I was raised conservative, I remember this feeling. There's this feeling that like if you mess with the market, it's everything's going to all come crashing down. When really if you gave them like the neediest people money, they just have to spend it. Like they absolutely have to spend that money because that's the position they are in. They will spend it on, you know, they will spend on rent. They'll spend on clothes. They'll spend on, you know, they are the very people who will actually put that money back into the economy fastest and this idea that like there's going to be any sort of economic downturn because we take some, you know, we tax billionaires slightly higher and

0:30:26 Jamie: Got blown over.

0:31:16 Thomas: Then just absolutely release the shackles off of this oppressed, you know, debt riddled class that like can barely do anything, thing, that that's going to cause some, like, economic downturn. It's just absurd to me.

0:31:31 Jamie: It's just false. There's a term for this, and I'm not going to get it exactly right, but it's either velocity of dollars or something like that. And it's about how when you put money into the hands of those who are most in need of it, it's way of measuring how it moves through and stimulates the economy. And this is something that's talked a lot about in the aftermath of disaster areas, where they say the single best thing that you can do if there's a hurricane or a tsunami is send cash directly to the people who are impacted. Because as they spend the money on on what is needed, it sort of organically begins to re-stimulate the economy for reasons, as you said, that at that income level, the bulk of your income needs to go to maintaining the necessities of life.

0:32:22 Jamie: You are going to, rather than invest in a mutual fund or buy stock or an investment property that's probably going to sit somewhere vacant, you are going to buy groceries. You, you are going to make that repair on your car that you have been putting off. You are maybe going to have enough that you go out to dinner and are able to tip a waitress or go on a much needed vacation. It necessarily goes right back into the economy because people are living in a position where they need to spend what they have because they don't have enough coming in to regularly cover everything. And that's so much more beneficial to the economy. So.

0:33:03 Thomas: Absolutely. So let's, um, well, okay, I want to, well, I can do two things at once. I want to do a little bit of our Blue No Matter Whom Berg. Um, I'll tell you this. I had planned to maybe a week ago or so, I can't remember now. I wanted to do an episode on Bloomberg, like, because he was, you know, tearing up the polls. It was, it was alarming, still is, by the way, but everything I'm seeing now seems to indicate that he's, people are starting to see who he is and and not support him anymore, but I, you know, you never know, like, I, I we still never know in this contest. Um, Super Tuesday is coming up very quickly, and that is going to change a lot of things, I think, I hope. Um, but who knows, I mean, maybe he has bought enough support to gain, you, you know, a solid delegate amount, even if it's not like more than Bernie or something, uh, to, to really wreak havoc in this race.

0:33:57 Thomas: So while I'm not going to count him out, I do think he's going to come back to earth. The point is I wanted to do a deep dive on him and, uh, really evaluate. Cause for me, I won't speak for Jamie. Cause I know you are probably, I don't know, more decided on this than I am, but I genuinely, genuinely wanted to examine the question of of if the nominee were Bloomberg, would I vote for him in the general? And I'm genuinely undecided on that. And people are probably going to react and be like, well, weren't you so mad at anyone who didn't vote for Hillary? And wasn't it blue no matter who? And yeah, that's all true. And the reason is that Hillary Clinton is not Michael Bloomberg. The things that people said about Hillary were like things that were just not true is the, is the problem.

0:34:46 Thomas: Um, as much as people may want to criticize her, she was nowhere near, she had an incredibly progressive platform. She was nowhere near Bloomberg. And the thing about Blue No Matter Who is, I guess, it's slightly, uh, inaccurate. You know, there is an assumption in Blue No Matter Who that it means somebody who's actually blue. Like it doesn't mean, like, if you paint Ted Cruz with the Blue Man Group paint, you know, a la Arrested Development or something, and then you have him be the nominee, that doesn't, well, okay, now you gotta vote for him. Well, no, he's not really a Democrat. Um, so I guess there is in there an assumption that we're actually talking about something like a Democrat. So, um, so that being said, do we want to talk about that hypothetical, like, what if, uh, what if Bloomberg's the candidate, what do you think, what are your thoughts? Yeah.

0:35:33 Jamie: I think this is an awful question. And I'm mad at everybody who even made it so that it was something we had to consider. Donald Trump is an outrageous nightmare, and a genuine threat to our institutions, our form of government, and our way of life. And it sounds so hyperbolic to describe a sitting president like that, right? Because after all, when Fox News and the Tea Party were describing Barack Obama as this radical socialist hellbent on destroying the American way of life, it was obviously crazy. And it was honestly overblown. And clearly, we all survived the Obama years without being converted to the gulags. And they were they were mistaken. And so there is this sense, right, where you're just being partisan and hyperbolic.

0:35:39 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:27 Jamie: But I think that's really true. The president has flagrantly committed crimes on national TV. He has punished his political opponents. He has secured the help or sought the help of hostile nations as well as allies to investigate his political opponent for his personal benefit. He uses the properties he owns to make money, and he trades access to him for material wealth. This is all outrageous, and none of this is okay. And we have to take seriously the need to get him out. And so if that means it's Michael Bloomberg, that's really terrifying, because Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump overlap in some really troubling ways that are even more troubling now that Donald Trump has set the precedent of criminality and corruption that he has.

0:37:23 Jamie: And so I feel inclined to say, given the stakes, I probably would vote for Bloomberg, that I would be really pissed about it the whole way along. But one thing that I think would be very important is if it were getting to that point where it looked like Bloomberg was going to be the nominee, which hopefully South Carolina doesn't go that way, and Bernie does better than we think, and there's a clear alternative, and he's just clearly on the path, we have to talk seriously to Bloomberg. Bloomberg has to answer questions. What are you going to do about the children in cages on the border? How is your policy going to be different? What sort of checks are you going to put in place to make sure that a president is never able to do the sorts of things that have been done?

0:38:14 Jamie: What initiatives will you be pursuing your first term? I think we need to get much more clear about what his goals and agenda would be, because we need to have more, and especially if it's Bloomberg, about why you're president other than just the fact that you're not Donald Trump.

0:38:34 Thomas: He really has given us very, very little policy, anything. It's all, well, I can beat Donald Trump. Do we want to decide between a socialist and Donald Trump? I can be, there's not much going on. So I did all this, you know, did all this research, and then Elizabeth Warren pretty much just, you know, said all of it in the debates. And I was gonna talk about the Garrison complaint and the, the NDAs and stuff, and I have it, I could still go over some of the highlights. I have it here. But I think it's all kind of out there. So maybe it's not worth spending that much time. But one thing that I thought was funny that maybe Warren hadn't had the debate time to point out because she's working with a limited clock. But I love how so many of these quotes that are floating around of really horrible things that Bloomberg did say, the source, and some people may not realize this, or if you've read this and you've followed it, you probably do.

0:39:28 Thomas: But the source of a lot of these was a booklet that one of his associates made him in 1990 as a gift, and it was the collected, you know, like wisdom of Michael Bloomberg. So that is to say, these horrible quotes, a lot of them, not all of them, some come from depositions. There was a deposition he did in a in a complaint, and some come from other stuff. But a lot of these horrible quotes are in a book of someone who thought, "Oh, this will be great. I'll write this down and give it to Michael Bloomberg as a gift" in 1990. So imagine what's not in there. And the person who made this booklet even wrote in there, "Some stuff was too extreme. We couldn't include it. We didn't want to write it down."

0:40:13 Thomas: This is all true. I'm not making any of this up. And so just imagine like how much worse stuff is likely was likely said in that company and was likely, you know, part of Bloomberg's management style. It's it's really it's we just don't need this. And so I'll say this in the end to kind of cut to the punch line of my thinking on this. In the end, he does seem to be good on climate. It. And he, it, the most important thing I think with a president, uh, in, in right now in 2020 is what they'll do with the Supreme court because that everything, there's so much gridlock in our system is so broken that that's the only place anything matters.

0:40:59 Thomas: And given that there's, there's a good chance, no matter who the president is, if it's Bernie, if its Warren, if it's anybody, if we don't have the Senate, nothing's happening anyway, except some limited executive action. Some stuff will get fixed, but not a lot will proactively happen. And that therefore the difference in these candidates is just perhaps, perhaps not as much as we want it to be. And if Bloomberg would nominate liberal justices, which, you know, that would be a question I want to hear from him. Like I want somebody at the debate to ask him or something. But if he supports, you know, Roe, if he would nominate justices who support Roe v. Wade, and I know he's also, he's actually, his main issue is gun control.

0:41:46 Thomas: And so I know He's not going to appoint an originalist Second Amendment nut if he were the president. So bottom line is, I guess I would vote for him, but I would vot for him in a choice between Trump and Bloomberg. And it would completely crush my, any hope I would have for the rest of my life about this country. I'm not even joking. If, if all we can do is pick the slightly blue shade of awful misogynist, racist billionaire, then just F it. Like we'll just, okay, fine. I'll, I'll mitigate the damage because I know there are people whose lives will be hurt by not mitigating the damage, whether it's with Roe v. Wade or whether it'S with trans people, whether IT's, you know, migrants, whatever it is, I want to eliminate that damage When I get a choice, when I get a binary choice, if it comes to that in the general, I will do what I can to to mitigate real damage that happens to people's lives.

0:42:42 Thomas: However, I will do so with zero hope for the future. And and it really it will kill. I think like a generation of people will just be like, well, this country sucks and there's no point in trying and it will have disastrous consequences going forward.

0:42:58 Jamie: Yeah, so I hate you for even making me say this, but if it comes, I would vote for Mike Bloomberg on the sole condition he is the nominee against Trump, Because as you said, the Supreme Court is of vital importance. We are, and you brought up, this had slipped my mind, we are running out of time to meaningfully address climate change. We are reaching a critical point with climate change, where if we don't do something dramatically different yesterday, the Supreme Court isn't even going to matter because the extent of destruction that we are going to face, we just, it won't even matter. Matter, we are so screwed if we don't deal with climate change, and for that reason alone I would cast a vote for Mike Bloomberg, because the scale, the magnitude of what we're up against is just too big to wait another four years before we could not only do anything about it, but begin, but even begin to undo some of the damage we've done. It's just too long to wait. The good news, I was just, I was looking up some polls while you were talking.

0:43:21 Thomas: Yeah,

0:44:07 Jamie: Biden is still up 10 points according to the RealClearPolitics average for South Carolina. But in California right now, in the most recent poll, Bernie is literally the only candidate viable for delegates. And so maybe this all just, yeah, I just thought on RealClearPolitics that as of right now Bernie Sanders is the only person who breaks 15% in their polling data on the average with 27.5% of the vote. Biden comes the closest was 14.3. Then Warren's at 13.8, Bloomberg at 13, Mayor Pete at 11, the Globe at five, and then she

0:44:20 Thomas: Really?

0:44:48 Thomas: Yeah. She needs to exit the race, by the way, I meant to say that earlier.

0:44:51 Jamie: Won't. I don't think she will. Did you hear she's got an Uncle Dick in the deer stance? I just wanted to say that sentence.

0:44:54 Thomas: I know I Didn't understand. Yeah, I was gonna say, like, my brain just was like, that's garbage and I don't know what that means, so I, I think my brain just spit it back out. I was like, you just heard gobbledygook. What, an uncle and the deer is it a band or something?

0:45:08 Jamie: Uncle Dick in the deer stance. It's my new favorite sentence ever. I don't know. I just, I just it's so much fun to say try it.

0:45:12 Thomas: Yeah, Well, I, it is it as good as, uh, Dog Face Pony Soldier? I really like Dog Face is Pony Soldier. That was, that was awesome. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's, wow. California could single-handedly really deliver this race to Bernie if no one else is getting via, is even viable. So, you know, stupid question, 100, despite getting what, 20, what'd say? 27%? 20, what is he at?

0:45:21 Jamie: Yes, yes, it's even better.

0:45:42 Jamie: He's at 27.5 in Florida, or California. I'm sorry.

0:45:45 Thomas: So he could, or California, How dare you confuse my state with Florida. Um. So.

0:45:49 Jamie: I'm Sorry.

0:45:51 Thomas: He could get 27 and win all of the delegates? Then wow.

0:45:51 Jamie: That's that's fair. Correct.

0:45:57 Thomas: I didn't think the math could ever work, but that's again, that's Bloomberg for you. That's the genius of this idiot coming in here and knocking Biden out of viability and not reaching viability himself. He may just hand this contest over to Bernie. That's incredible. Wow. I

0:46:16 Jamie: Yeah, he's not just knocking Biden out. But I'm sure he's pulling some from Mayor Pete. I'm sure he's even probably pulling a little bit from Warren, because apparently in this bizarre universe that we live in, people prefer, you know, Warren and Bloomberg together. Um, so this is really fascinating, really fascinating.

0:46:36 Thomas: Love it. Let me, as we're running out of time here, let me take another example from Bloomberg's awful past, because he's a misogynist POS, and link it to what I think will be a nice handshake meme between, you know, Bernie supporters and Warren supporters, because this was in a deposition. So in the Bloomberg company, an employee was unfortunately raped by a supervisor. And I think there might have been multiple, by the way. It's just awful. Like the the culture at this company is disgusting.

Like it seems as though it was, you know, it's one thing to say, like, is this just a bad apple kind of thing? Or like, was there a culture that would promote this kind of things? And honestly, my indication from reading all this is that like there might have been, it might, the culture might have helped this, might have, like, drip, you know, because it was a real point-scoring misogynist, like, oh, you know, bragging about sexual exploits kind of thing, like that kind of environment at this company combined with, you know, it being all men at the top kind of thing, may have led to this. It's absolutely disgusting. Disgusting. And in this case, Bloomberg was deposed, and he was asked, um, I don't have the entire interaction written down. I have some, some quotes here.

It said Bloomberg was asked in the deposition, "What would constitute," quote, "satisfactory proof that one of his employees had been raped by another," quote, I guess an unimpeachable third-party witness. He responded, responded the lawyer seemed stunned, and it said, "In what kind of rape," he asked Bloomberg, "would there be a third-party witness?" Quote, "There are times when three people are together, but if there are only two people present and they gave conflicting accounts, there would be no way to know who is telling the truth. And all we can do is provide separate working environments for the two." End quote. And

0:46:37 Jamie: Yeah.

0:48:33 Thomas: That's how he responded about one of his employees raping another one of his employees. And I just want to point out that this is the view of a lot of people who are rejecting Me Too, and I, I know they probably don't want to say, some, by the way, listen to the show, like, and they argue with me. If your, if your view is, "Well, it's a he said, she said, and therefore we cannot know, and therefore nothing, there should be no consequences to the the alleged perpetrator in that scenario," you are taking on this view that there can only be consequences when there's like video or an unimpeachable third-party witness. I just want to say that. And I bring it up. Yeah, go ahead.

0:49:17 Jamie: And fortunately that's never how rape actually happens, and so men will just be able to do this forever, and so that's a really great world view. I

0:49:27 Thomas: Yeah. This guy, so Bloomberg sucks. And did you catch the Chris Matthews stuff with Elizabeth Warren? Because I was going to tie that into this because it's honestly kind of the same view, which is Elizabeth Warren has said that Bloomberg has has, has, um, merely brought to our attention on the national stage, the fact that an employee sued Bloomberg, and I believe this is the garrison complaint, if have the name right, uh, that, yeah, no, it is, I have it written down right here, that when she was talking about, um, that she was pregnant and that the baby was due, uh, in a matter of months, that he responded to her, quote, kill it.

0:50:09 Thomas: And, um. The whole, the whole reasoning behind it was that, great, you know, he said, he was also reported to have said, you know, by by this woman and also later by another witness, you know, "Kill it." And, like, great, number 16, uh, as in, and this is why Elizabeth Warren has been harping on pregnancy discrimination, because that's that's what's going on here. This is somebody who's really mad that he employs women who sometimes, you know, have children. Um, and he denies it, of course, but, like, not only do we have the the woman's word for it, we also have another witness who who corroborated it.

And so Chris Matthews, after the debate, is like grilling Elizabeth Warren on this. Have you seen this clip? Oh, gosh, well, he's asking, I mean, I guess I maybe I should have had it ready to play, sorry that I don't, but he's asking Warren about the fact that she challenged Bloomberg on this, and he says at one point, "Well, why would he lie?" And it's like, what? I mean, because he doesn't want to seem bad. What do you mean, "Why would he die?" And she said, "Why would she lie?" Warren gave a really great answer, because he's saying, like, "Well, where's the proof?

Where's the truth?" And he says, "Well, I have her words." And I just love this, because because it it's the the paradigm shift that I think we need, you know, it's it's it's not necessarily, and again, because we're gonna have reactionaries who say, "Well, okay, so any woman says anything and then they get a man arrested," it's that it's to shift from, um,

0:50:55 Jamie: Have not. Now, yeah.

0:51:53 Thomas: Nothing happens if if a woman says that she was abused or harassed or whatever, absolutely fucking nothing happens, it needs to shift away from that to, let's believe women, and we can, we we can look at other corroborating sources and that kind of thing as well. But what frustrated me about this is so many things, but also Chris Matthews kind of grilled Elizabeth Warren like she was on trial for it. It was really odd. Like he at one point called it her accusation. He was like, "Well, what, your accusation?" Like, "Why should we believe your accusation that he said this?" And it's just like, really, that's what? What? So if, if a woman just says, like, "I," here's this other woman, what she said, and I believe her, now, now we're, we're like going to grill Elizabeth Warren, like, on account of that.

0:52:42 Thomas: And she has to stand trial for it. It's just, it's so basically the handshake meme is Bernie supporters and Elizabeth Warren supporters shaking hands, um, fire Chris Matthews. Like this guy, he's a dinosaur. He's got these archaic, terrible views, by the way, people have pointed out to me on on Twitter that he had his own, you know, harassment case that was, somebody was bought off with an NDA in 2017. So I guess you could probably see where he's coming from there, you know? And in what he's trying to do. So let's get, can this guy be off the air and can we be done with this?

0:53:13 Jamie: So I would really like that. He also had, he's just not not having good moments. He had a compare, he compared Bernie's victory in Nevada to brown shirts and Nazi Germany. And that just seems like a poor choice to use to describe someone whose family perished in the Holocaust. But before we go go down that rabbit hole, I do want to talk about the way that this was was handled and discussed, because it's just gross.

And and for those of you who are going to write in and complain about this, I want to make a couple of things clear. In a case where you have a he said versus he said, in order to give the man the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's lying or assume that she's telling the truth, what that means, the flip side of that is his benefit of the Doubt comes with burden of guilt for for his accusers, because by virtue of defaulting to believing that what he says is true, you are by virtueof that defaultingto the belief that what the woman said is true.

And so when we talk about a presumption of innocence, we want to be very clear that that's an illegal context. And the social context at your work is something completely distinct from that. And you can have a default position where if a woman says that she was sexually assaulted, you default to believing her. Because just by virtue of making that claim, a woman exposes herself to risk. Just as simply as we've seen here, by virtueof being sympathetic to a woman saying that shewas assaulted, Elizabeth Warren has her own credibility questioned by Chris Matthews, and she's not even the one making the accusation.

0:54:12 Thomas: I

0:54:59 Jamie: And so just by virtue of raising these sorts of claims, women are dismissed, they're immediately treated as suspect, as not being trustworthy, they alienate themselves from their fellow co-workers. This is not a thing that is done without significant risk. And very often, women face worse social consequences for saying they've been sexually assaulted than the men who sexually assault them face. And so when you talk about a presumption of innocence, you want to to make sure that that's being, that's taking place in a legal context when the powers of the state are being leveraged against a civilian. But when you have a conflict between two individuals in a work environment, you have to be very clear that when you're advocating for the benefit of the doubt that you are putting the burden of guilt or the burden of dishonesty on somebody else.

0:55:49 Jamie: And when there are power dynamics at play like this, particularly when it involves rape, rape, you may end up very well contributing to the re-traumatization of a victim and your eagerness to uphold, you know, innocence until proven guilty outside of a legal context and do even more harm. Couple

0:56:07 Thomas: Want to, I want to yes, and that, say yes to all that, but not only that, in a legal concept, context, people are convicted based on testimony all the the time, and it's it's amazing, and now it's one thing if, you know, if you have a consistent view of of, uh, you know, reform criminal justice reform and all that, but but a lot of this is coming from conservatives who are a-okay with putting black men in prison every single day based on someone saying they saw them dealing drugs or whatever it might be. There are non-stop, uh, he said she said or equivalents, you know, they said, they said, whatever it may be, um, and and seemingly conservatives have no problem putting people into jail for that all the time. Happens every day. But all of sudden, when it's this context, it, we turn into these hyper skeptics who will not accept anything, even if it's like multiple people saying, or, you know, someone has corroborated it.

0:57:01 Thomas: Nope. Sorry. Uh, somehow it's, it's innocent until there's like camera footage, innocent until camera footage. And honestly, probably not even then there'll be some other thing to excuse it. So, uh, yeah, yeah, this just outraged me and I'm hoping we all can unite in, uh, wishing Chris Matthews off the air as soon as possible. I don't know what it's going to take for that to happen, but it should have happened years ago. Um, and, uh. . think we're, uh . We're right about at an hour, so, uh any last words on all this, Jamie?

0:57:33 Jamie: Of things. Yeah, you know, as it relates to what we were just talking about, you got to be careful that you aren't inadvertently making the male perspective, the male experience of what you're talking about into a default perspective in a way that renders it neutral and sort of obviates the fact that it does have this bias and it does have this slanted perspective. So that's going to be my closing thought on that. And the last thing I want to say is, you know, as Bernie continues to do well, we keep hearing a lot of talk and a lot worry, especially about his overall electability. And I went through the Real Clear Politics polling for all of the the swing states for 2020. And I just wanted to let everybody know, so as of right now, Joe Biden does still do best head to head with Trump in that he beats him in more states.

0:58:22 Jamie: But then Bernie comes next. There isn't a single moderate candidate who does better in the swing states than Bernie, with the exception of Joe Biden. And Joe Biden only does better in two states. There are only two states that Joe Biden has an advantage of over Bernie. When you talk about Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, New Hampshire, Maine, and Virginia, in all but two of those states Bernie beats Trump, I know, I'm sorry, he beats Trump in all but two, and Biden beats Trump in all but two. So if you're worried that, you know, people aren't going to vote for socialists or we're gonna lose to Trump and I'm gonna have another four years if we nominate a socialist, breathe a little bit easier. All of the polling that we have on that so far suggest it's not the case in the majority of the swing states that really decide the presidential election. Bernie not only beats Trump, he beats him quite comfortably in most states.

0:59:23 Thomas: I confess to fretting a little bit. I'll, I'll confess. I fret a little, but then I go through the following thought pattern, which is, yeah, what if, you know, what if once they run these opposition ads where they're pinning a socialist, what if it changes the polls, all that kind of thing? And also people will trip back at you. Yeah, but Jamie Hillary was, you know, beating Trump in all the polls and that kind of thing. And the thought process I go through every time is, well, who's the other option and what's the evidence that they will do better? And I don't have it. You know what I mean?

0:59:55 Jamie: Yeah, I mean, my only pushback to that is Hillary ended up, Hillary was polling a couple of points ahead of Trump right up until the end. You know, the model showed that there was this freak electoral path that he had, but she was reliably polling about two percentage points above him. And ultimately that's the margin by which she won the popular vote

1:00:13 Thomas: Yeah. The key was the state by state breakdown, which, as you pointed out earlier, you're going through the state by state. I think we're, you know, we, a lot of people learn stuff from 2016. I mean, there will be more emphasis on state polling, hopefully, especially in swing states rather than an overall nationwide number, because our stupid system has made it such that even if you win by millions and millions of votes, doesn't mean you win. So Florida

1:00:15 Jamie: Right Yeah.

1:00:38 Jamie: And So to be clear, right now, as updated as it can be, Bernie beats Trump head-to-head, not national polling average, head-to-head by state, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire Maine, and Virginia. In fact, Bernie beats Trump by a higher margin in Florida than Joe Biden beats Trump in Florida, almost double.

1:01:04 Thomas: Even, wow. Wow. If we win Florida, like almost none, nothing else matters. Like that's such a huge swing that like It obviates many swing states like it doesn't matter if he takes a couple other like Rust Belt states because Florida just has so many electoral college votes. So that's well, that's encouraging. Thanks, Jamie, for that encouraging note. I agree. And yeah, thanks for listening, everybody. And we will see you actually very soon, because like I said in the beginning of the episode, we are going to release that at least part one of that interview on Freewheel, which is a ton of fun. On getting back to some philosophy on this show, which is always a good time, especially with philosopher Jamie Lombardi on board. So look forward to that episode very soon. Thanks for listening. We'll see you then.

1:01:59 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, if you'd like to follow Jamie on Twitter, she's at Euthyphro. And follow me at SeriousPod. If you'd like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If you're not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.