Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - Cuomo Doubles Down
Aired: 2023-11-02
Duration: 01:00:43


=== Government Overreach and Surveillance (15:15) ===

[00:00:09]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:11]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:13]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:17]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:22]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:27]  You're listening to portal problem on the gas digital network.
[00:00:31]  Steer your host.
[00:00:34]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:34]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:37]  I am Dave Smith.
[00:00:39]  He is Roberto Bartonstino with a, I like your, your blinds are like a new take on the pride flag.
[00:00:48]  I like it.
[00:00:49]  Very nice.
[00:00:50]  Just getting a couple colors out of the equation.
[00:00:54]  It's just the B's and the T's now.
[00:00:56]  Yeah, a more core group of prideful people.
[00:01:00]  You are out on the West Coast?
[00:01:02]  That's right.
[00:01:03]  Porch tour has come to a conclusion.
[00:01:05]  This was a really great final run of it.
[00:01:07]  So thanks to everyone that came out.
[00:01:09]  It was really a lot of fun.
[00:01:10]  Hell yeah, dude.
[00:01:11]  Well, that's awesome.
[00:01:12]  And then you're staying there because we'll be there this weekend, San Diego, coming Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
[00:01:18]  Me and Rob will be out there at American Comedy Club.
[00:01:21]  So come check us out there.
[00:01:22]  ComicdaveSmith.com for tickets.
[00:01:24]  And then me and Rob are all over the place.
[00:01:25]  Virginia, Arlington, Virginia, Poughkeepsie, New York, got a bunch of cool stuff coming up.
[00:01:32]  All right.
[00:01:34]  So, you know, Rob, with obviously for a while there, the war in Ukraine was kind of this like crazy story.
[00:01:46]  I mean, still is a crazy story that's going on where we're fighting a proxy war of choice on Russia's border.
[00:01:52]  It has led to a whole lot of, you know, interesting realignments around the world.
[00:01:59]  Now we have the war in Israel.
[00:02:02]  I'm sorry, the war in Palestine, I should say, the Israeli-Palestinian war there.
[00:02:07]  This, of course, is a very dangerous situation.
[00:02:10]  We've been focused on a lot of this stuff.
[00:02:13]  But as crazy as all of these things are, it can lead you to forget, or maybe not forget, but at least not place the proper emphasis on the fact that we, it's 2003 still.
[00:02:31]  The year is coming to a close.
[00:02:32]  I'm sorry, it's 2023.
[00:02:34]  Yeah, you got to see that.
[00:02:35]  Excuse me.
[00:02:36]  I got that wrong.
[00:02:37]  It's 2023 as the year is coming to a close.
[00:02:39]  It really took you making that face before I went, well, that sounded right to me.
[00:02:43]  Is it not?
[00:02:44]  It's 2023 as the year is closing to an end, but it's only been three and a half years since the start of America going through the most tyrannical domestic period in modern American history.
[00:02:58]  It's pretty big deal, this whole COVID insanity.
[00:03:02]  And it's kind of crazy when you think about how these huge wars have come in the wake of COVID and have taken a lot of the attention.
[00:03:12]  And it is worthwhile sometimes for us to kind of look back and think about like what exactly happened here, how our society so quickly went so tyrannical.
[00:03:23]  And I will thank Bill Maher and his show for kind of giving us an opportunity to think about that again.
[00:03:32]  So that's where I wanted to start with today's episode.
[00:03:35]  Recently, former governor Andrew Cuomo and a couple other liberals were on Bill Maher's show, real time, on HBO.
[00:03:46]  And I think, do they put it on CNN too?
[00:03:48]  I don't know.
[00:03:50]  But I think they were for a little bit.
[00:03:52]  Anyway, this was From, I think this is the first time I've seen Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo, since he was forced to go away.
[00:04:04]  It was, it's kind of a little bit strange to see this guy.
[00:04:07]  It was such, I don't think there's anything I could compare it to of, I mean, the guy was obviously a career politician, but in COVID, again, we're only going back to the year 2020.
[00:04:21]  We're only going back three years ago.
[00:04:23]  He had a rise that is about as big a rise as you can have in politics.
[00:04:31]  Not just any governor was willing to shove old people into old age homes and boost COVID numbers to try and sell the whole thing.
[00:04:37]  I'll take it a step further.
[00:04:38]  Only one was.
[00:04:39]  He was a star player until they decided to accuse him of sexual assault and then just drop all cases once he left office.
[00:04:46]  But yeah, it was so bizarre.
[00:04:47]  But I mean, look, when you're talking about the guy was like, he was the most popular governor in the country.
[00:04:53]  He was on television every single day.
[00:04:56]  They were the entire corporate press was hailing, including the Republicans, were hailing him.
[00:05:03]  Yeah, he won an Emmy for his TV appearances.
[00:05:07]  He was that people were calling themselves Cuomo sexuals.
[00:05:11]  Like it was the fanfare was unrivaled.
[00:05:14]  And it's so bizarre because he was, and this is, I mean, you can go back and listen to any of our shows.
[00:05:19]  If you want to go subscribe, go to guest, go to gasdigital.com, use promo code P-O-T-P.
[00:05:24]  Subscribe, get all the archives of our episode and go listen to what we were saying while the entire corporate press was celebrating him.
[00:05:31]  But it was really something because he was the worst governor on COVID.
[00:05:35]  Like, I mean, there were some pretty bad ones.
[00:05:37]  Newsom was bad.
[00:05:38]  A lot of people were bad, but he probably was the worst charts.
[00:05:42]  And right.
[00:05:43]  And was being hailed for his response, which was insane.
[00:05:48]  And then goes from an Emmy to all of the sudden, there's speculation about him being the Democratic presidential candidate.
[00:05:56]  All of the sudden, these accusations come out.
[00:05:58]  As you said, he's ruined.
[00:05:59]  He's forced to resign.
[00:06:01]  Then they drop everything.
[00:06:02]  And then just haven't heard from the guy since.
[00:06:04]  So it's interesting to hear from him.
[00:06:06]  It's interesting to reflect on this.
[00:06:08]  This was, by the way, I should point out that this was in the overtime segment.
[00:06:16]  Bill Marsh says there that this question didn't come up.
[00:06:19]  They didn't get to it on the show, but they got to it on the overtime segment, which already to me, I just must say is crazy.
[00:06:26]  Like, how is this?
[00:06:27]  You've got this guy here.
[00:06:29]  How is this not the first thing like you ask him about?
[00:06:32]  It's like, you know, it's like having George W. Bush on in the year 2005 and then an overtime being like, oh, you know, we never got to this.
[00:06:41]  The Iraq war.
[00:06:42]  What's going on with that whole jam there?
[00:06:44]  Like, this just seems like the thing that you would want to talk to him about.
[00:06:48]  My question would be, you know, when he got accused of the sexual assault stuff, he just said that he was being Italian.
[00:06:54]  So now that he's been vindicated, has he gone back to being Italian?
[00:06:57]  I'd like to know.
[00:06:59]  Yeah.
[00:07:03]  I wouldn't even start with a question.
[00:07:05]  I would just say that the defense to accusations of sexual assault being I'm Italian is the best defense I've ever heard to a sexual assault allegation.
[00:07:15]  I'm Italian.
[00:07:16]  That's what we do.
[00:07:18]  A little pinch on the tukas.
[00:07:20]  All right.
[00:07:21]  Okay.
[00:07:22]  Here, let's play this.
[00:07:23]  And so you can hear the question and then hear the response from all of all of the members of the panel.
[00:07:31]  Governor Cuomo, knowing what you know now, is there anything you would have changed about the way you would administration handled COVID?
[00:07:38]  Okay, that's the question we didn't get to.
[00:07:40]  And I was going to read you the ProPublica statement, which they basically said New York was the only state.
[00:07:46]  Now, of course, the scandal, the issue involved that people don't remember is that, you know, obviously this is the beginning of the pandemic.
[00:07:54]  Everything was chaotic.
[00:07:55]  We didn't know what was going on but uh, we did know this.
[00:08:00]  It mostly affected the elderly people, like most pathogens do.
[00:08:04]  They were the most vulnerable.
[00:08:05]  So you allowed people who had been in the hospital older people from a nursing home now they go to the hospital to go back into the nursing home without testing them.
[00:08:16]  That public PRO Publica says you were the only state to do it without testing them when they went back into the nursing home and that's what caused such death in the nursing.
[00:08:23]  Yeah, is that true?
[00:08:24]  No uh, short answer is no.
[00:08:27]  Also, remember you say what we knew.
[00:08:30]  Uh first, this is monday morning quarterbacking, by which I could make the NEW YORK JETS champion.
[00:08:36]  Right, if we could do this.
[00:08:37]  The when?
[00:08:38]  Okay, let's just pause it already.
[00:08:40]  Can I just tell you how much I love that.
[00:08:42]  That joke didn't hit at all.
[00:08:45]  I just I i'm I, i'm sorry, I find it rather appalling.
[00:08:49]  Um, and this is uh, coming from a show posed by two comedians, but i'm sorry, it's.
[00:08:55]  It's one thing to be in the space of being a comedian.
[00:08:58]  It's another thing when you had real power and abused it in the most horrifically tyrannical way, and then you're asked, you got everything wrong.
[00:09:07]  There's really no debating this.
[00:09:09]  You got everything wrong.
[00:09:10]  I mean like, look and we'll, we'll go through this, even being as generous as possible.
[00:09:17]  You got everything wrong.
[00:09:19]  There's no.
[00:09:19]  He was sitting there demanding 50 000 ventilators and then they found out the ventilators were like killing people.
[00:09:25]  You know.
[00:09:25]  He sent covet positive patients into nursing homes, killed a ton of people like real people died over this, and and then millions and millions of people's lives were just, you know, destroyed livelihoods, destroyed kids.
[00:09:40]  You know uh um, falling behind left and right um, all types of metrics that you could measure how awful it was.
[00:09:47]  And for your first thing to be like well look, this is monday morning quarterbacking, and if I was doing that, I could get the jets a ring.
[00:09:54]  It's like well yeah, it is monday morning, quarterbacking.
[00:10:00]  I suppose yes, we're looking back at what you did when you were in power.
[00:10:06]  What exactly is funny about this?
[00:10:09]  And also, for him to just say no right away is just, I mean, it's just not true.
[00:10:13]  Um, he may be hand, he may be hanging on to the?
[00:10:15]  Um the, the shred that some of the people were tested, which I think he's about to get into here, but look that the real scandal of it all was that even many of the people were not tested and were then sent from the hospital into the nursing homes.
[00:10:32]  But of the ones who were tested, the ones who tested positive still got sent back into the nursing homes.
[00:10:38]  And that was what was unique about New York.
[00:10:40]  From every other state, even every other state who, many of them, almost all of them, were doing crazy tyrannical things at this point.
[00:10:47]  By the way, that doesn't make it okay that you did it.
[00:10:50]  Um, you can't just be like everyone was murdering people uh, but New York was the only state.
[00:10:56]  Every other state, even in this moment of insanity, was like, well yeah, if you test positive, we're not sending you back into a nursing home amongst the most vulnerable people.
[00:11:06]  That's the real, real scandal here.
[00:11:08]  Anyway, so let's hear Cuomo's response after the bad joke.
[00:11:12]  It was all the disinformation was amazing, right?
[00:11:16]  It was coming from China, wet markets, zootropic virus.
[00:11:19]  It was going to California and state of Washington.
[00:11:23]  So we banned travel to China, from China.
[00:11:28]  It turned out that China had already spread it to Europe.
[00:11:32]  All the European flights were coming to New York, JFK.
[00:11:36]  So it had been here for months and it was astronomical.
[00:11:40]  When we first found out about it, and Scott can appreciate this, they were projecting we would need 150,000 hospital beds to deal with the number of infected.
[00:11:51]  We only had 50,000 in the entire state of New York.
[00:11:55]  So we did it to free up beds.
[00:11:57]  We were afraid of losing hospital beds, but people who were in hospitals, who were considered medically stable, who were tested, were sent to nursing homes if the nursing home said they could treat that person.
[00:12:15]  Okay, pause it right there.
[00:12:17]  I know what happened there, but you go for it.
[00:12:19]  Well, okay, so he's for, okay, first off, there's, there's a lie by omission and then there's a blatant lie.
[00:12:25]  Okay.
[00:12:26]  So he said, if they were tested, they were sent back to the nursing homes.
[00:12:31]  And yes, that is true.
[00:12:33]  The problem is that they still were if they were tested positive.
[00:12:36]  That's the issue.
[00:12:37]  That's the whole scandal.
[00:12:39]  Okay.
[00:12:39]  And then the second part is just a blatant lie that when he says only if the nursing homes, go ahead.
[00:12:45]  I actually don't think it's the lie you think it is.
[00:12:48]  I think he called them up and said, you will treat these people.
[00:12:51]  And so he's being technically accurate here when he says only nursing homes that said that they can treat them.
[00:12:57]  No, no, it's worse than that.
[00:12:59]  It's just an actual lie.
[00:13:00]  It's more scandalous.
[00:13:01]  There were several of the nursing homes who went on the record saying we don't want to take these people back in because they have COVID and this is going to spread here and kill people.
[00:13:09]  And then he like cracked down on them for doing that.
[00:13:12]  Right.
[00:13:12]  But I'm saying it's technically true that these were only places that could treat them because he threatened them and said that they said only if they were like willing to take them in.
[00:13:23]  And that part is a lie that they, many of the nursing homes explicitly expressed that they were not okay with it.
[00:13:29]  So, and look, all this other stuff too, it's all just beating around the bush to try to justify how you got everything so catastrophically wrong.
[00:13:38]  But this, the, the, the point about how like, well, at first we thought it was in China.
[00:13:42]  And so we banned travel to China, but then we realized it was actually in Europe.
[00:13:46]  Look, all of that, that may be true at a certain point, but you're talking about December, January, the latest of, so December of 2019, January of 2020.
[00:14:00]  None of the tyrannical shit really started happening until March of 2020.
[00:14:05]  And by March of 2020, when we started doing our tyrannical shit, there were already European countries.
[00:14:10]  Italy was already locking down.
[00:14:12]  There was no question over whether this had made its way to Europe or not.
[00:14:16]  And there was no question whether there were cases here in America.
[00:14:19]  So this is all like just completely beside the point.
[00:14:23]  And yes, he's right that there was a lot of misinformation coming out from the establishment, but that, again, we can, we'll get more into this in a little bit.
[00:14:31]  But like, yeah, again.
[00:14:34]  And the question, the question was, by the way, if you remember, knowing what you know now, would you do things differently?
[00:14:42]  And so right away, he's going to this justification of why what he did at the time with the information he had was right, but that wasn't the question, you know?
[00:14:52]  So that's, that's a pretty important thing to note, too.
[00:14:54]  I also, Even if nursing homes could have treated the elderly, the better question would be, do they have facilities to contain sick people within the facilities?
[00:15:07]  Because maybe they can treat them in their rooms, but are you going to be spreading this to the other old people?
[00:15:11]  In which case, it's still a mistake.
[00:15:13]  The fact that they can be treated doesn't really have the primary issue.
[00:15:17]  Yeah.
[00:15:18]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:15:19]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, our newest sponsor, who we're thrilled to have on board.

=== Nursing Home Containment Failures (15:42) ===

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[00:16:24]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:16:26]  Okay.
[00:16:26]  All right.
[00:16:26]  Let's keep playing.
[00:16:27]  The other people in the nursing home.
[00:16:29]  And that was a way to make sure we had a lot of people.
[00:16:31]  But it didn't, did it?
[00:16:32]  I mean, they also, I mean, the same organization, ProPublica, says you counted the number who died differently.
[00:16:40]  In other words, you only counted the ones who died in the nursing home, whereas many people came from the nursing home and died in the hospital.
[00:16:46]  And you didn't count those.
[00:16:47]  You only counted if they died in the nursing home, which they felt was deliberate.
[00:16:51]  Well, let me not get weedsy with you.
[00:16:53]  We got every day I did a briefing and every day we collected information from the hospitals and from nursing homes.
[00:17:00]  And we printed two numbers on the screen every day.
[00:17:03]  This is the number of people who died in the hospital.
[00:17:05]  This is the number of people who died in the nursing home, which means you had to go back every day to 1,000 hospitals, nursing homes to collect this data.
[00:17:13]  And this is how many died in the hospital.
[00:17:15]  This is how many died in a nursing home.
[00:17:16]  They then raised the question and said, well, how many died in a hospital who were originally in a nursing home before they went to the hospital?
[00:17:29]  That's a different question.
[00:17:31]  And that actually took the state controller a year to figure out and go back and do the audit.
[00:17:38]  But we said, this is how many died in a nursing home.
[00:17:41]  This is how many died in the hospital.
[00:17:43]  Different question.
[00:17:44]  How many died in hospitals who were originally in nursing homes?
[00:17:49]  You then have to go back to forensic.
[00:17:52]  Pause it there for a second.
[00:17:53]  All right, I'll plead a little bit of ignorance on this one.
[00:17:57]  Like, I don't exactly remember or if I ever exactly knew this.
[00:18:01]  But that, I don't think that defense is right.
[00:18:04]  I think the accusation is that he started counting, like that other states were counting the total nursing home deaths, even if you ended up dying in a hospital.
[00:18:12]  And he was specifically not counting the numbers that way to make it look like the nursing home deaths in New York weren't far worse because of his policy.
[00:18:22]  I don't know exactly how difficult that was.
[00:18:24]  I believe other states were able to get these numbers.
[00:18:26]  So I don't exactly think that's a legit defense, but I'll admit I don't exactly know.
[00:18:34]  I don't exactly remember what data other states had on that, but I'm pretty sure that is the accusation of him.
[00:18:42]  Regardless, that's really not the point.
[00:18:45]  Once again, the point is, okay, fine.
[00:18:47]  So then after the year later, what do we know now?
[00:18:50]  Now that we had that data, what happened?
[00:18:53]  Was this a good decision or a catastrophically bad decision that killed people?
[00:18:58]  That would be the question.
[00:19:00]  And, you know, even if you're going to go with this, like, look, even if you're starting from a point of, let's, let's just say for the sake of argument right now, which I can't, I'm saying this for the sake of argument.
[00:19:15]  I can't actually say this because of the lies I've already pointed out.
[00:19:19]  And there's going to be more lies coming here.
[00:19:21]  So he's clearly lying about this situation in a lot of different ways, saying the nursing homes all wanted to take the people in.
[00:19:26]  So like all of these things, these are just, this is just not true.
[00:19:29]  But again, let's, for the sake of argument, give him all the charity in the world and say, okay, yes, this is right.
[00:19:39]  He was doing the best with the information that he had at the time.
[00:19:43]  Okay.
[00:19:44]  The question was, knowing what you know now, would you have done things differently?
[00:19:51]  And he's starting off going, well, you know, we, at the time, we thought we were going to need 150,000 hospital beds.
[00:19:58]  It's like, okay, what do you know now?
[00:20:02]  You were wrong.
[00:20:03]  You didn't.
[00:20:05]  You thought you were going to need 50,000 ventilators.
[00:20:07]  Well, what do you know now?
[00:20:08]  You were wrong.
[00:20:09]  You didn't.
[00:20:10]  You thought it would be a good policy to free up hospital beds by sending COVID positive patients back into nursing homes.
[00:20:15]  Well, what do you know now?
[00:20:16]  You know, that killed a lot of people and we never even needed those hospital beds, right?
[00:20:20]  So the point is that even if give him all the charity in the world that he was just wrong and he was working off faulty information.
[00:20:28]  The question is, what do you know now?
[00:20:30]  And if, and if you honestly answer that question, he'd have to go, oh, yeah, I got everything wrong and tons of people died because I got everything wrong.
[00:20:38]  Wouldn't you think you wouldn't open up with a joke and then a defense of your track record if that's the case?
[00:20:45]  So like even if you come on a public show like this again, the only thing you should come on it to do is like get on your hands and knees and plead for everybody's forgiveness and apologize while you're crying, that you just ruined so many people's lives and led to the, your, your horrific tyrannical policies led to the deaths of so many people and the destruction of the lives of so many people.
[00:21:09]  And it's just insane, like only a politician.
[00:21:11]  And, you know, there's this thing that I even have this tendency.
[00:21:16]  I'm sure you have this a little bit, Rob, but once somebody has the whole establishment turn on them, it almost makes them like a sympathetic figure in some way.
[00:21:25]  Like it's almost like, oh yeah, you got burned by the system.
[00:21:27]  You get it.
[00:21:28]  You get how corrupt the whole thing is.
[00:21:30]  But I'm sorry, there's some people who you just can't extend that to.
[00:21:33]  Not governor lockdown.
[00:21:35]  Sorry.
[00:21:36]  Like this, this was you.
[00:21:38]  You were in a position where it really could have made a difference and you got everything wrong.
[00:21:42]  Have some fucking remorse instead of sitting there and bragging about how you really did everything right with the information you were working with, which also, by the way, is just not true.
[00:21:51]  It's just not true.
[00:21:52]  Like the idea, whatever.
[00:21:53]  Let's let's keep line.
[00:21:55]  We'll go through some more.
[00:21:56]  I would run that number now, which nobody asked me for until months later.
[00:22:05]  But it would have been, you know, this is in the middle of COVID and you're asking all these people to do accounting.
[00:22:09]  But if that's a number that people would have wound up wanting, which they didn't say for months, Bill, I would have put that number.
[00:22:17]  All right.
[00:22:18]  So that's the one thing he can give us is what he would have done differently.
[00:22:22]  Not that I wouldn't have sent them into the nursing homes.
[00:22:25]  Not that I wouldn't have done lockdowns.
[00:22:27]  Not that I wouldn't have done all this.
[00:22:28]  But knowing what I know now, yeah, I would have tried to do the accounting a little bit better.
[00:22:32]  I would have still killed just as many people, Rob, but I'd have been telling you how many people I killed.
[00:22:37]  Can you believe that's the best he can give us?
[00:22:41]  It's just so appalling.
[00:22:43]  It's also, it's so government, like we're making centralized decision based off of information and we have bad information.
[00:22:51]  And yeah, it's the middle of a pandemic, so we can't get good information, but we still have to make these decisions for everybody.
[00:22:56]  And yeah, if I just knew that you guys wanted the number, I'll tell you numbers.
[00:23:00]  By the way, let me know.
[00:23:01]  No one asked.
[00:23:02]  No one asked for money.
[00:23:03]  Still like kind of defending himself.
[00:23:05]  No one asked.
[00:23:05]  But no, no.
[00:23:06]  So you can't say, oh, yeah, we, what would you have done differently?
[00:23:10]  We shouldn't have done any of it.
[00:23:12]  Or wait, so that number wasn't important to you in terms of evaluating whether or not you're killing people.
[00:23:18]  You weren't curious to see if there was an uptick in death off the decisions you were making and you're continuing to make decisions without looking crucial information.
[00:23:27]  I didn't realize you guys like the numbers.
[00:23:30]  If I had realized that, I would have given you the numbers.
[00:23:34]  Okay, let's keep playing.
[00:23:35]  Up front in the beginning, people died in a lot of nursing homes simply because the people who take care of the people in the nursing homes are poor.
[00:23:43]  And the poor people.
[00:23:45]  And it goes back to incentives.
[00:23:47]  We have a social media algorithm.
[00:23:49]  I mean, the reason why people died is because poor people get COVID.
[00:23:54]  This is the utmost in science right here.
[00:23:56]  If wealthy people had been caring for the old people in these old age homes, when sick people were sent in, they could have made it.
[00:24:05]  The problem is the wages of the people working at the old age home.
[00:24:09]  He's got a point, Rob.
[00:24:10]  Name a wealthy person who got COVID.
[00:24:13]  I can't tell you a single one.
[00:24:14]  I don't think a single one.
[00:24:15]  I don't think anyone making over $100,000 a year.
[00:24:17]  Got it.
[00:24:18]  That's the problem.
[00:24:19]  That's the thing right there.
[00:24:20]  We need, it's just more inflation because we can get everyone's making $100,000 a year.
[00:24:25]  We need a the only way to really take on COVID would have been to really raise the minimum wage.
[00:24:31]  Got a minimum wage that COVID right out of the whole society.
[00:24:34]  That's that would have done excellent analysis, Bill Maher.
[00:24:37]  And again, like, you know, the idea that people who worked at nursing homes were catching COVID and bringing it into nursing homes.
[00:24:44]  It's like, yeah, that was very tough.
[00:24:46]  That was very tough to stop.
[00:24:48]  That was just, that is one of the things that I will say, probably no matter what government response you had, I don't think there was much of a way to get around that.
[00:24:58]  People brought in COVID.
[00:25:01]  And, you know, COVID is a virus that it's you can be contagious with COVID, especially like young, healthy people.
[00:25:12]  You can be contagious with COVID before you really realize you even got anything.
[00:25:17]  You know what I mean?
[00:25:18]  Like you really, you might have a slight runny nose and you, you know what I mean, in the first few days of COVID, and you're pretty contagious at that point.
[00:25:25]  And some people don't even have a slight runny nose.
[00:25:28]  And so, yeah, it's certainly that was a problem.
[00:25:32]  And it was very hard to keep out of nursing homes.
[00:25:34]  And people across almost, I think, every, I was going to say every state in the country, but it's much bigger than that.
[00:25:39]  This was a major problem.
[00:25:41]  Nursing homes were filled with the people who are most vulnerable to this virus, especially in that first alpha wave of it.
[00:25:48]  And it was very hard to keep out.
[00:25:50]  But that's why that's not a big scandal anywhere.
[00:25:53]  The reason why it's a scandal in New York is because on top of dealing with that, like everyone else did, you were also knowingly sending COVID positive patients into nursing homes.
[00:26:03]  Okay, let's keep playing.
[00:26:06]  We have social media algorithms that get more engagement and more Nissan ads if they call out people and really make them look as stupid and as mean as possible.
[00:26:16]  I was on the board of my kids' school during COVID.
[00:26:18]  I wanted a harsher lockdown policy.
[00:26:20]  And in retrospect, I was wrong.
[00:26:23]  The damage to kids of keeping them out of school longer was greater than the risk.
[00:26:27]  But here's the bottom line.
[00:26:30]  Myself, our great people, the CDC, I'd like to thank the governor.
[00:26:34]  We were all operating with imperfect information and we were doing our best.
[00:26:43]  So let's learn from it.
[00:26:47]  Let's learn from it.
[00:26:48]  Let's learn from it.
[00:26:49]  Let's hold each other accountable, but let's bring a little bit of grace and forgiveness in the shit show that we're COVID.
[00:26:56]  Okay.
[00:26:57]  Pause it right there because that is the line of the entire show.
[00:27:01]  So let me respond directly to this gentleman who said, let's bring a little bit of grace and a little bit of forgiveness for the shit show that was COVID.
[00:27:09]  No.
[00:27:11]  No.
[00:27:13]  And here's why.
[00:27:16]  You, sir.
[00:27:18]  You, sir, as you just admitted, were on the school board and you got it, as you acknowledge yourself, catastrophically wrong.
[00:27:30]  Your decision as a school board member destroyed children's development.
[00:27:36]  Okay.
[00:27:37]  That is a serious offense.
[00:27:39]  That is a horrible, horrible thing to do.
[00:27:43]  And if you want to ask for forgiveness for that, okay.
[00:27:48]  But the way you ask for forgiveness for that is not by starting out with being like, you know, I mean, and the real problem is social media and they're just trying to make everyone look bad and look stupid.
[00:27:58]  And that's the real culprit.
[00:27:59]  And yeah, yeah, I made this catastrophic mistake.
[00:28:02]  But you know what?
[00:28:02]  I mean, it's over and it's time to just forgive us.
[00:28:05]  And then you get a round of applause for that.
[00:28:07]  Like, no, I'm sorry.
[00:28:09]  Apologize with no conditions, with no blaming social media posts.
[00:28:15]  Oh, yeah, it's my fault because I was posting on social media about how catastrophically wrong the decision you were making was.
[00:28:22]  It's my fault that I got a lot of likes for that post, right?
[00:28:25]  I'm the bad guy for being right.
[00:28:28]  That's who you're really blaming when you say that, right?
[00:28:31]  He's saying, oh, social media was rewarding all the people who were calling us monsters for ruining kids' lives.
[00:28:37]  Because actually, in fact, it turns out there was enough information at the time to know that shutting schools down was stupid.
[00:28:43]  And, you know, it's not as simple as to go like, we were working with imperfect information and we were just all doing the best we could.
[00:28:50]  And the great people at the CDC.
[00:28:53]  Why do you get the presumption of greatness?
[00:28:56]  Why do all of these people who got everything wrong?
[00:28:58]  You don't, if you're asking for forgiveness and grace, then you don't start with the fact that the bad guys are really the people on social media who were calling you out for this, who were getting a lot of attention because what a lot of people were agreeing with them.
[00:29:11]  And the good guys, the presumption is the good guys are all the people who got everything wrong.
[00:29:15]  Now forgive us, by the way, because we were wrong.
[00:29:18]  That's bullshit, dude.
[00:29:19]  And it's not just that, oh, we were working with imperfect information and so we got things catastrophically wrong.
[00:29:25]  It's much more than that.
[00:29:27]  The school closures weren't in the fucking first two weeks of March of 2020.
[00:29:31]  They went on for months and months and months.
[00:29:35]  The COVID tyranny went on for years, for years after it was undeniably obvious, undeniably obvious.
[00:29:44]  And then all you same people turned around and celebrated Black Lives Matter riots when you weren't letting fucking teenagers go to the beach.
[00:29:51]  And then what did you do to all of the people like us?
[00:29:55]  What did you do to all of the people like us who were against the lockdowns, were against the school closures, were against all of this insanity, were against all the vaccine insanity when that came out.
[00:30:04]  We were demonized in the most vicious ways, in the most vicious ways.
[00:30:09]  Even here in your fucking apology, you're demonizing the people who got it right.
[00:30:14]  So no, that's not how forgiveness works.
[00:30:17]  I'm actually open to having forgiveness and grace.
[00:30:21]  I've forgiven people who were like hardcore war hawks.
[00:30:24]  I've forgiven people who fought in the wars and killed people.
[00:30:27]  I've forgiven people who were wrong about COVID.
[00:30:29]  But if you want to actually make an apology, that's not how you do it.
[00:30:33]  You don't get to do that and then demand grace from the other side.
[00:30:37]  Fuck that.
[00:30:41]  The concept of being.
[00:30:42]  I just thought it'd be so great if after I said that, then you just went, I forgive them.
[00:30:47]  The concept of being an authoritarian with imperfect information is exactly the problem.
[00:30:53]  And I don't know specifically what this guy did like during COVID.
[00:30:58]  I don't know specifically all of his policies, but just the general flavor of you were showing for the regime.
[00:31:04]  That's what you were doing.
[00:31:05]  And they were removing people's freedoms.

=== Demanding Grace After Mistakes (03:41) ===

[00:31:08]  And these were all little pieces of the puzzle of, hey, you got to wear a mask.
[00:31:11]  You got to do this.
[00:31:11]  It was all about compliance.
[00:31:13]  And you were on the side of government compliance with imperfect information.
[00:31:17]  And the reason why you did that was because you were incentivized to do so.
[00:31:21]  You're an NYU professor.
[00:31:23]  You wanted to be a part of this system.
[00:31:24]  You wanted to side with the people that pay your bills.
[00:31:27]  You kind of know what the incentive structure is.
[00:31:29]  So you took that side and you took the side that stripped people of their freedom because you were incentivized to do so.
[00:31:34]  Like to me, and I don't know exactly all those decisions this guy made, but it's like being an auditor at a company and you're being paid by that company.
[00:31:41]  And then it turns out to be tremendous fraud.
[00:31:43]  And you go, well, I was working with imperfect information.
[00:31:46]  Yeah, but you put your stamp of approval on it.
[00:31:48]  You didn't turn around and go, hey, I'm not sure about this information.
[00:31:52]  Yes.
[00:31:52]  Even write the investors and you said, I'm putting my stamp of approval on this.
[00:31:56]  Yeah, look, like I said before, even if you buy into the, it's a double whammy here because even if you buy into the idea that, hey, you were working with imperfect information, okay, you still got it catastrophically wrong.
[00:32:07]  And this had serious ramifications.
[00:32:10]  So acknowledge it.
[00:32:11]  Don't impose on people if you don't have imperfect information.
[00:32:14]  Then you say, we don't have great information on this.
[00:32:16]  So it's going to be your choice whether or not to attend school.
[00:32:19]  You're 100%.
[00:32:21]  You're 100% right, Rob.
[00:32:23]  But it's much worse than that in reality, because we did have all of the information.
[00:32:28]  And I mean, I don't know.
[00:32:29]  It was, it was, I think it was the first week in April.
[00:32:34]  Again, go subscribe, gasdigital.com, promo code P-O-T-P.
[00:32:38]  Go look it back at the episodes.
[00:32:39]  But I think it was the first week in April when on the show, I was reading the numbers of the age demographics of who was dying from COVID.
[00:32:49]  And it was obvious.
[00:32:51]  It was, it was just overwhelming.
[00:32:53]  I mean, at this point, already thousands of people had died.
[00:32:55]  There was enough of a sample size.
[00:32:58]  And it was like overwhelming.
[00:33:00]  It was all old people.
[00:33:02]  It was all old people.
[00:33:03]  Children were not dying from COVID.
[00:33:06]  And so the idea that you just didn't have this perfect information.
[00:33:09]  And this is, I'm talking about April.
[00:33:12]  Schools were closed for some of them for the entire year.
[00:33:17]  You're talking months and months and months after this.
[00:33:20]  We had all of the information that we needed to know that school closures were absolutely not necessary.
[00:33:26]  And anybody with any sense of, I don't know, anybody who's like heard of a child, you don't even have to have met one, but if you've heard about what children are, let alone anyone who has any type of expertise in education would know what a disaster just doing remote learning was going to be for kids.
[00:33:51]  Not to mention anyone who has, again, has ever heard of psychology would know what the psychological impact of isolating children was going to be.
[00:34:02]  This was not like some, it is just completely untrue that we were working with imperfect information and we couldn't have known that this would be a disaster.
[00:34:10]  Of course we knew.
[00:34:12]  It's, you know, we all, people knew this was insane right away.
[00:34:17]  They were doing things, dude.
[00:34:18]  They were, they were closing playgrounds and literally chasing people off of beaches.
[00:34:27]  Everybody knew this was insane.
[00:34:28]  And anyone who had any sense about them knew this was insane.
[00:34:32]  Knew that the idea of driving people inside to counter an upper respiratory virus.
[00:34:40]  This was madness.
[00:34:42]  Then it went against, and by the way, it went against every like standard medical practice.

=== Quarantine Experiments Gone Wrong (02:07) ===

[00:34:50]  There's never been, there's never been a quarantine experiment before where you quarantine the healthy.
[00:34:59]  This was against all of the like the like best practices.
[00:35:03]  So this, it's just, it's just, you're right, but even beyond that, it's not true that you didn't have the information.
[00:35:09]  Like it's like if you were the bookkeeper for this corrupt company that you're talking about getting paid by them and saying everything's good here.
[00:35:16]  And then add to that on top that, you know, 10,000 different experts have said, no, they're cooking the books here.
[00:35:24]  Look, here's all the information.
[00:35:25]  Take a look at this.
[00:35:26]  And you still didn't do it.
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=== Shipping Discounts for Businesses (09:36) ===

[00:36:57]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:36:59]  All right, let's keep playing.
[00:37:00]  States didn't do it differently.
[00:37:02]  I mean, I read Florida asked for two negative COVID tests before you can get back into the nursing.
[00:37:10]  Look, if you want to, first on Scott's point, he's exactly right.
[00:37:13]  All the early information was wrong, as a matter of fact.
[00:37:16]  A lot of it now.
[00:37:17]  Not just from President Trump.
[00:37:18]  Dr. Fauci, who I have great respect for early on, said this is not going to be a problem.
[00:37:24]  They said it was, you can contract it from touching a surface.
[00:37:29]  We sprayed all this.
[00:37:30]  I remember washing the mail.
[00:37:31]  And we had, yeah, I still do, by the way.
[00:37:37]  But we had no idea how infectious it was for seniors versus children early on.
[00:37:45]  We had no idea.
[00:37:46]  We didn't know if it was airborne, if it was by touch.
[00:37:49]  Again, let's pause it right there.
[00:37:51]  Again, he's being kind of careful in his language here, but this is just not true.
[00:37:57]  And technically, I guess what he's saying maybe is true, that we didn't know how infectious it was for children versus seniors.
[00:38:06]  But that's not the question.
[00:38:07]  The question isn't how infectious it was.
[00:38:09]  The question is the death rate, the hospitalization rate.
[00:38:14]  That's what matters.
[00:38:15]  It doesn't matter like if COVID spreads like wildfire, if nobody gets very sick or dies.
[00:38:20]  What matters is how many people get very sick and die.
[00:38:22]  And it is just absolutely not true.
[00:38:24]  And the information I got on that when I'm talking about in the first week of April was from the New York City government website.
[00:38:33]  This was their information that I was reading.
[00:38:36]  So no, this is absolute bullshit that the governor of the state didn't have access to the information that was publicly available on New York City's website.
[00:38:45]  It's just not true.
[00:38:47]  And at the time, if you remember, you know, New York City was the epicenter of the pandemic.
[00:38:52]  So looking at those numbers were very useful.
[00:38:54]  So like, this is just, it's just not true that we didn't, we just didn't know whether this was going to kill kids or kill old people.
[00:39:02]  We knew within weeks, within weeks of the insane COVID tyrannical policies.
[00:39:10]  All right, let's keep playing.
[00:39:12]  I say it's all hindsight now.
[00:39:15]  Now you know.
[00:39:16]  And the way Scott's exactly right.
[00:39:17]  You know how it got into the nursing homes?
[00:39:19]  It got in months before we knew it was here.
[00:39:23]  The staff walked it into the nursing homes.
[00:39:25]  I said the poor people.
[00:39:26]  That's a lot of people.
[00:39:28]  Oh my God.
[00:39:29]  That's why you got to stick away from poor people.
[00:39:31]  I've been out here saying it.
[00:39:32]  We got to remove ourselves from poor people.
[00:39:34]  They spread disease.
[00:39:35]  That's why we got to build a wall at that border.
[00:39:37]  You got poor people all over the place.
[00:39:39]  We should segregate every city right now.
[00:39:41]  Make sure that I don't have to be around poor people.
[00:39:44]  These poors.
[00:39:45]  Look, I mean, this is just not, again, this is a blatant lie.
[00:39:48]  The idea that COVID was being walked in by the staff at nursing homes.
[00:39:54]  Immigrants that work in nursing homes, poor immigrants.
[00:39:56]  Bill Maher's finally taking the stand against them.
[00:39:59]  Well, but look, for him to be saying that this was all months before, I mean, yeah, I'm sure there was some of that.
[00:40:05]  Again, that's not the controversy.
[00:40:06]  The controversy is that after you sent COVID positive patients back into nursing homes, many more of them died.
[00:40:13]  And that wasn't from staff members bringing it in months earlier, obviously.
[00:40:18]  This is all, this is like a total baldface lie.
[00:40:21]  He might as well just be honest and go, listen, when Fauci went ahead and he bought this virus from the Asians, it wasn't deadly enough.
[00:40:27]  And so I had to help him boost the numbers in order to lock down the country.
[00:40:31]  So we imported some ventilators.
[00:40:32]  We put people on that for a couple of days till their lungs exploded.
[00:40:35]  And I shipped some people into old age homes.
[00:40:37]  We only needed a couple weekends to shut down.
[00:40:41]  And then after that, if he just went, I'm Italian.
[00:40:44]  Bada bing, bada boom.
[00:40:46]  Your pinch of tukus, you kill an old lady.
[00:40:48]  You know, call it a bit.
[00:40:49]  And if he just turned and goes into think after I did all that for them to help sell this virus, they still accuse me of sexual assault and pushed me out of the job that I love.
[00:40:59]  That's the real crime, if you ask me.
[00:41:02]  Real crime is the lack of loyalty.
[00:41:04]  Yeah.
[00:41:05]  All right.
[00:41:05]  Let's, let's keep playing.
[00:41:08]  It's a war.
[00:41:09]  In war, people die and generals, it's not like they're trying to kill them.
[00:41:15]  Oh, my God.
[00:41:16]  Pause it.
[00:41:17]  Generals have.
[00:41:18]  What an awful analogy.
[00:41:21]  Listen, people die in wars, but it's not like generals are trying to kill people.
[00:41:26]  That's exactly what they're doing.
[00:41:28]  What are you talking about?
[00:41:31]  This is like, it's precisely what generals are trying to do is kill people.
[00:41:35]  I'd say that's the only thing they're trying to do.
[00:41:37]  All right.
[00:41:38]  Let's keep playing.
[00:41:41]  Have to make decisions.
[00:41:42]  Not all decisions are the right decisions.
[00:41:45]  You don't know until after.
[00:41:46]  And to that point, I mean.
[00:41:48]  But just pause one more time.
[00:41:49]  I'm sorry.
[00:41:49]  You know what's infuriating about this?
[00:41:51]  And bring it back so we can hear that lady's comments.
[00:41:53]  Here's what's infuriating about this.
[00:41:56]  Bill Maher was actually pretty good on COVID.
[00:41:59]  Not great.
[00:42:01]  He wasn't like, he didn't get an A, but he got like a B minus.
[00:42:05]  I don't know if you remember, but Bill Maher was like, he was doing shows from his backyard, kind of calling out the insanity of this.
[00:42:13]  So this is lockdown time.
[00:42:14]  And he was like, yo, this is insane and blah, blah, blah.
[00:42:17]  And we can't like live like germaphobes and stuff.
[00:42:19]  So for him to go, yeah, people make decisions.
[00:42:21]  Sometimes you get the decisions wrong, but you know, you have to make the decisions in real time.
[00:42:25]  Like if you actually want a real, like, say like, oh, we want some forgiveness and let's have some grace for the people who got it wrong, then you got to fucking acknowledge that there were some of us who got it right, some earlier than others, but there were a lot of us who got it right way before any of you did.
[00:42:41]  And we were viciously demonized for that.
[00:42:45]  So this is just bullshit to sit here and just be like, well, you know, you make some decisions, you get some right, you get some wrong, but you can't blame the people who make wrong decisions.
[00:42:53]  Yeah, you actually can.
[00:42:55]  You can blame the people who make wrong decisions that have catastrophic repercussions.
[00:43:01]  What else can you do but blame people who do that?
[00:43:03]  I bet even generals get promoted when they win battles.
[00:43:06]  And that they probably don't move the ones who are losing battles up the ranks.
[00:43:10]  Unless, of course, they're trans and, you know, fill some quotas on the proper queers in the military agenda.
[00:43:17]  Well, that's who you want leading war.
[00:43:20]  All right.
[00:43:21]  Let's keep on.
[00:43:22]  Everything different.
[00:43:23]  Everything's literally everyone.
[00:43:25]  I never understand these people that interviews and they go, do you have any regrets in life?
[00:43:29]  No, I don't.
[00:43:30]  No.
[00:43:30]  Like, what?
[00:43:32]  And that's why we have to tell the story and we have to understand it because there will be another pandemic and we've got to learn from this one so we do it better the next time.
[00:43:39]  All right.
[00:43:39]  This is all right.
[00:43:43]  Pause it.
[00:43:43]  Yeah.
[00:43:43]  And of course, she gets a round of applause for being the only one who finally admits like, yeah, we did everything wrong.
[00:43:50]  Yay.
[00:43:51]  And we, and that's, and look, she says, that's why we have to tell the story so we can learn from the story.
[00:43:55]  And then this kind of ominous, there will be another one, which I don't exactly know why she's confident in that.
[00:44:02]  But okay.
[00:44:04]  I mean, I can kind of agree with the first part of that.
[00:44:08]  Like, that's why we need to tell the story so that we can learn from it.
[00:44:12]  Okay.
[00:44:14]  But tell the actual story.
[00:44:16]  Like, that's all I'm saying is actually tell the story of what happened here.
[00:44:20]  Here's what happened.
[00:44:21]  You guys got everything wrong.
[00:44:25]  It destroyed millions of people's lives.
[00:44:30]  It killed on, it killed needlessly, I mean, hundreds of thousands of people.
[00:44:37]  And while you were getting this wrong, there was plenty of information to know that you were getting it wrong.
[00:44:44]  And even if there wasn't, in a professed free society, you don't err on the side of tyranny with imperfect information.
[00:44:51]  But the fact is that there was more than enough information.
[00:44:54]  And that's why a lot of us got it right.
[00:44:57]  A lot of us don't have to say in real time as we were on the record giving our opinion about what should happen.
[00:45:03]  A lot of us don't have to say, hey, we were dealing with imperfect information.
[00:45:07]  So we got a lot of things wrong.
[00:45:08]  I'm sure there's some things that almost everybody got wrong.
[00:45:11]  And there's some things that more information came out and then we learned more about that.
[00:45:14]  Okay, fine.
[00:45:16]  But there's a reason why a lot of us got it pretty much all right during the time in real time because we did have information and we were looking at that information.
[00:45:25]  And for those people who were getting it right, seeing as how you guys all tacitly admit, some of you explicitly admit that you got it all wrong.
[00:45:34]  Well, for those of us who were getting it all right, we were not only, we were frankly dehumanized for doing so.
[00:45:47]  We were told that we didn't care about old people dying because we wanted to get a haircut while you were killing old people.
[00:45:57]  Many people lost their livelihoods and their reputations were destroyed simply for getting it right in real time.
[00:46:05]  People were censored on a level that I've never seen before in my lifetime.
[00:46:12]  I'm 40 and I've never seen anything like it during COVID.
[00:46:17]  The people who were getting things right were censored.
[00:46:19]  People lost their jobs.
[00:46:21]  People lost their reputations.
[00:46:24]  Like horrible things happened to the people who were getting it right.
[00:46:27]  And you guys who were getting it wrong cheered that on.

=== Censorship During the Pandemic (02:18) ===

[00:46:33]  You cheered that on.
[00:46:34]  This didn't go on for weeks or months.
[00:46:37]  This went on for years.
[00:46:40]  So if you're going to say we want some grace and forgiveness and we have to tell this story and what happened because we got everything wrong and we have to learn for the next time, include what I just said in your fucking story because that's what happened.
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=== DeSantis Slams COVID Decisions (05:16) ===

[00:48:51]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:48:54]  All right.
[00:48:56]  Okay, sticking on this topic of COVID, there was another governor who did a much better job than Governor Cuomo here.
[00:49:12]  Not a perfect job, but a much better job.
[00:49:15]  He is running for president and he is losing.
[00:49:19]  He will not be president.
[00:49:21]  But he was on my boy Patrick Bette David's show.
[00:49:24]  And I did think this was pretty interesting.
[00:49:28]  It was, I think, probably the harshest I've heard him go at Donald Trump.
[00:49:32]  Of course, I'm talking about Ron DeSantis.
[00:49:34]  And he was going at Donald Trump on Trump's weakness.
[00:49:39]  And I kind of can't believe it took this long for DeSantis to really be laying it out like this.
[00:49:45]  But anyway, let's play this clip.
[00:49:47]  Here is Ron DeSantis talking to Patrick Bette David on Pat's show.
[00:49:55]  Was a very tough season where, you know, even Obama, Biden, none of these guys had prepared for a pandemic.
[00:50:02]  The only one that knew a pandemic was coming was a guy named Bill Gates.
[00:50:04]  Everybody else is like, well, yeah, but here's the thing.
[00:50:07]  You don't know.
[00:50:08]  That's true.
[00:50:09]  And I think there was a lot of uncertainty in March of 2020.
[00:50:12]  The question is, what about November of 2020, December, January of 2020?
[00:50:17]  What should he have done?
[00:50:18]  What should he have done?
[00:50:19]  He should have fired Fauci.
[00:50:20]  He should have held these people accountable for being wrong, for lying to the public on all these different issues.
[00:50:28]  The corrupt medical swamp in DC was a total disaster.
[00:50:32]  I'll tell you what they also shouldn't have done.
[00:50:34]  January of 2021, last few weeks in office, they're sending me missives from the White House task force saying, impose a mask mandate, close restaurants.
[00:50:44]  And I'm just thinking to myself, and the media here would use it as fodder.
[00:50:48]  They would say, DeSantis is not following the Trump White House task force.
[00:50:53]  And I wasn't.
[00:50:53]  That's true, but the media use that as a wedge.
[00:50:57]  So I think that the whole Fauci, and here's the, I think the issue for the election going forward is I'm the only one running that is talking about bringing accountability for what happened to this country during COVID.
[00:51:08]  It's one thing to make a judgment call that's wrong, but it's another thing to ignore evidence.
[00:51:12]  It's another thing to lie.
[00:51:14]  When you tell people like CDC did, that if you take an MNRA shot, you will not get COVID and you still stand by that when it's obvious that people are getting it.
[00:51:23]  When you're having the FDA approve an MNRA shot for six-month-old babies where there's no evidence that that's benefiting them, this is a swamp.
[00:51:33]  This needs to be cleared out.
[00:51:34]  I will do that.
[00:51:35]  Here's a concern.
[00:51:37]  Okay.
[00:51:38]  So listen, I don't think Ron DeSantis is going to be president.
[00:51:41]  I don't want Ron DeSantis to be president.
[00:51:44]  I think he's god-awful on foreign policy.
[00:51:47]  And that's kind of the most important thing as president.
[00:51:50]  But I got to say, that is him at his strongest.
[00:51:53]  And this is his strongest attack against Donald Trump.
[00:51:56]  And this is where he comes off as undeniable, undeniable.
[00:52:01]  And look, I wish he was better.
[00:52:03]  I wish he was better.
[00:52:04]  I think there's a stronger argument like I was just making that even in March and April and May, they were totally wrong.
[00:52:11]  That there was more than enough information to know.
[00:52:14]  But I do like the way he kind of like points that out because there is something revealing where you go like, look, dude, take all of those Andrew Cuomo, you know, talking points and let's just sacrifice our far superior arguments to Andrew Cuomo.
[00:52:32]  The fact is that what about November of 2020?
[00:52:37]  November of 2020, where Dr. Fauci was saying you can't have Thanksgiving.
[00:52:42]  How about December where he was saying you can't have Christmas?
[00:52:45]  By the way, Dr. Fauci was saying that of Christmas of 2021 and Christmas of 2022.
[00:52:54]  He was saying, if one of your relatives is unvaccinated, you can't have him over for Christmas.
[00:52:59]  And the fact is that there is just no excuse for the Trump administration's handle.
[00:53:06]  Obviously, 2021, 2022 is Biden now, but even just through 2020 and early of January, 2021, there's just no excuse for how he was handling it.
[00:53:17]  And DeSantis is right about that, that they were still sending recommendations out to the states that they have mask mandates and even in some cases, close businesses that do the outdoor seating thing, which is insane.
[00:53:31]  And it was also in the middle of winter, which is just ridiculous.
[00:53:33]  But it was there is, I'm sorry, there's just no excuse by that point how you had not figured this out.
[00:53:42]  You had not figured out what was going on already.
[00:53:45]  And that all people had figured out what was going on.
[00:53:48]  And they should have been free to take their own risks.
[00:53:53]  I agree with you 100%.
[00:53:55]  This is great to actually see him slamming the COVID point and how you could have made good decisions and how we do need to investigate Fauci and all the fraud that transpired to try and sell these mRNAs.

=== No Excuse For Delayed Action (06:35) ===

[00:54:07]  With that being said, what happened to this guy?
[00:54:10]  He starts off here.
[00:54:11]  It's his best topic.
[00:54:12]  He starts off as like a whiny grandma.
[00:54:14]  He's trying to find his footing, explaining it.
[00:54:16]  Then he almost turns into like a Trump impression.
[00:54:18]  It's like something about this process just stole, stole this guy, stole, like stole his soul.
[00:54:23]  Like, no, I know what you mean.
[00:54:26]  He seemed like, um look, sometimes there are these people, um and i've seen this with with a few, not just politicians, but just people in general sometimes there are people who can um, like certainly on on something like social media, like on twitter, they can sound really sure of themselves and really confident, and then they can even get up to like, i'm behind a podium and I sound really confident in this, but in like conversation,
[00:54:55]  or especially any conversation where there might be pushback and there might be they get like nervous and they're just like not good at performing in those environments.
[00:55:04]  And you're absolutely right that, even while he's delivering, even while he's on his best footing, like this is just the issue where you got this guy dead to rights.
[00:55:13]  You were in power and he was in power and in in many ways you, your power uh trumped no pun intended his, because really, like you were kind of the dictator of Covet in Florida and he was just the facilitator and advisor of Covet for all 50 states, right.
[00:55:35]  So in, in some ways, you had like more power because even as he, as he's pointing out he ignored these directives from the White House.
[00:55:41]  So you have this thing where you're in power and he's in power and debatably, your power rivals his.
[00:55:47]  You know, and you did so much better than him, so much better, in the biggest crisis.
[00:55:54]  You got it much more right and he got it much more wrong.
[00:55:57]  And even in that moment, you're failing to like deliver something with presence and power, and that's why this guy's just not going to be president, at least not this go-around.
[00:56:09]  Who knows what the future holds, but he's, he's just not good at this.
[00:56:13]  From one short, uncomfortable person to another.
[00:56:15]  I hope he figures that part out.
[00:56:17]  Oh man, uh.
[00:56:18]  Then there's that we don't have time to play it today, but the moment my boy Pat, did him dirty.
[00:56:22]  Pat did him dirty bringing up those shoes.
[00:56:25]  Just give him a nice pair of shoes.
[00:56:26]  You did try to give him a nice pair of shoes, that is true, and he's like, oh, there's a rule and uh, there's a rule that you can't uh.
[00:56:32]  All right here, it's one minute, we'll play it.
[00:56:34]  Let's play it real quick.
[00:56:37]  I'm sure your marketing team points out how they're trying to troll you in the marketplace.
[00:56:42]  Okay, i'm sure they're doing that.
[00:56:43]  Can you bring this one clip?
[00:56:44]  I know you were on uh uh, uh.
[00:56:46]  What do you call it on?
[00:56:47]  Uh uh, what was it Bill Maher?
[00:56:49]  And Bill Maher talked about the boots.
[00:56:51]  I've seen you walk with these boots.
[00:56:52]  Go ahead and play this clip.
[00:56:53]  This, on tick tock, went viral.
[00:56:55]  It doesn't have a million views.
[00:56:57]  It doesn't have, you know, 10 million views.
[00:56:59]  This thing's got 1.2 million likes and and some people are wondering, how do they?
[00:57:05]  I don't even understand that.
[00:57:06]  What there's?
[00:57:07]  They've not shown this to you.
[00:57:08]  Okay, what they're trying to say with this is that in your boots you have heels.
[00:57:13]  No no, no.
[00:57:14]  Those are just standard off the rack um Lucase, um.
[00:57:18]  How tall are you?
[00:57:19]  How tall are you, Governor?
[00:57:20]  How tall?
[00:57:20]  5'11.
[00:57:21]  okay why don't you wear tennis shoes and dress shoes uh i do wear tennis shoes when i work out yeah you do okay i got a gift for you i'd love for you to wear okay i shop at fergamo okay I don't accept gifts.
[00:57:39]  I can't accept it.
[00:57:40]  I totally get it.
[00:57:41]  I'm sorry.
[00:57:44]  Well, is there any campaign finance law against trying them on?
[00:57:48]  Ron DeSantis' shoes look like if you spray painted the Wizard of Oz shoes black.
[00:57:54]  There's like this overwhelmingly weird quality of female dress shoe sparkliness to them.
[00:58:01]  Yeah, like, why would you want to wear those with your suit?
[00:58:04]  It's fucking bizarre.
[00:58:05]  Unless someone on your team came to you and said, hey, we were able to hide the most amount of stilts inside of these ugly shoes.
[00:58:11]  Now, I know they don't look good, but at least you don't have to feel short.
[00:58:15]  But he just, the problem in a moment like that, and first off, PBD is fucking, dude, hilarious and vicious for doing that too.
[00:58:24]  Dude, I can't believe he still keeps getting these interviews.
[00:58:27]  Why are these people not scared to go on his show?
[00:58:30]  But I actually, I guess, like for Ron DeSantis, you kind of have to because he's got a huge show and it's based in Florida.
[00:58:36]  And he's somebody I think who was, you know, he is look, he should be low-hanging fruit for Ron DeSantis.
[00:58:43]  This is a guy who moved his business to Florida during the lockdowns, right?
[00:58:51]  So certainly would be more than open to hearing what this guy has to say, you know, and certainly, I think, is a big supporter of his as the governor of Florida.
[00:59:01]  But if you're Ron DeSantis, dude, this is why he just doesn't have it.
[00:59:05]  It's like, dude, you got to just be laughing at this like you find it hysterical.
[00:59:09]  Don't lie and say you haven't seen it.
[00:59:11]  Don't do any of those.
[00:59:13]  You have to laugh and be like, yeah, I did see that.
[00:59:15]  He goes, what are you guys talking about?
[00:59:16]  It's like, I don't know.
[00:59:17]  I guess they're kind of weird, but I like these shoes.
[00:59:19]  I'm not doing it to be taller.
[00:59:21]  I'm fine.
[00:59:22]  You know what I mean?
[00:59:22]  Like, just like, you know what I'm saying?
[00:59:24]  Like, there's just a way to handle it.
[00:59:25]  But him just looking so nervous and uncomfortable and then immediately like, I can't accept the gift.
[00:59:30]  I can't accept the gift.
[00:59:31]  Instead of like, it's like, dude, chill.
[00:59:34]  Take a look at the shoes.
[00:59:35]  Compliment the shoes.
[00:59:36]  Go like that.
[00:59:37]  It's very thoughtful of you.
[00:59:38]  Unfortunately, campaign finance lie have to be on the record.
[00:59:41]  I'm not accepting any gift or something.
[00:59:42]  You know what I mean?
[00:59:43]  Like, there's just, there's just a way you could handle that with an ounce of charisma and not come off like it's such a devastating moment.
[00:59:51]  But it really, as dumb as it is, it really is a devastating moment for him.
[00:59:55]  All right.
[00:59:55]  Anyway, we got to wrap.
[00:59:56]  Me and Rob will be out in San Diego in a couple of days.
[00:59:58]  Looking forward to that, buddy.
[01:00:00]  We'll go see the sights of San Diego.
[01:00:02]  Maybe we'll go down to the border.
[01:00:03]  See if we can't fortify it a little bit.
[01:00:05]  I think San Diego is pretty close to the border.
[01:00:07]  From the Tijuana?
[01:00:10]  I don't know.
[01:00:11]  I don't know stuff.
[01:00:13]  No, but it's Southern California.
[01:00:15]  All right.
[01:00:15]  It's down there.
[01:00:16]  Let's take a border tour.
[01:00:17]  You want to do it?
[01:00:18]  Yeah, I'm down.
[01:00:19]  You want to go in there?
[01:00:20]  Help smuggle in some MS-13?
[01:00:23]  We could see all these people that Bill Maher hates.
[01:00:25]  Yeah.
[01:00:26]  Oh, yeah.
[01:00:27]  You know what?
[01:00:27]  We actually, yeah, I don't want to go down there.
[01:00:29]  That's how you get sick.
[01:00:30]  Bill Maher's got a point.
[01:00:32]  That's how you get disease.
[01:00:33]  I'll go, you know what?
[01:00:34]  Bring some binoculars.
[01:00:36]  We'll stay a healthy distance away, but we'll scope them out.
[01:00:38]  Okay.
[01:00:39]  All right.
[01:00:39]  That's the end of our show today.
[01:00:41]  Catch you guys next time.
[01:00:42]  Thanks for listening.