Sam Harris speaks with Andrew Yang about the Covid-19 pandemic. They discuss the future of the middle class, Andrew’s experience campaigning for President, the need to build new digital infrastructure, universal basic income (UBI), concerns about the Biden’s age and #MeToo allegation, hostility between the United States and China, problems with the global supply chain, concerns about social cohesion, market failures, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
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Sam, how are you?
Oh my gosh.
Andrew Yang.
You launched my entire presidential run.
Really, that's barely an exaggeration.
There was this period when everyone who was supporting our campaign was because they heard me on your podcast.
Yeah, well, it was amazing to witness, and I was very happy to play a part in it.
Obviously, the major assist was to get you on Rogan's podcast after you did mine, which just completely blew you up because he has an audience so large that the mainstream media has yet to even understand what's happening in podcasting.
It was fantastic to watch your ascendancy, and I can only imagine it's the beginning of the Andrew Yang Show on various fronts, so I'm happy to see the adventures.
It's great to be a part of it.
Well, you've been a huge part of it, Sam, and I have to tell you that I remember our conversation, and then I remember watching your conversation with Joe on AI after you and I spoke.
Right.
And then I realized, oh my gosh, Sam was waiting for someone like me, where you'd been talking about trying to prepare Society for AI for years, and you were like, how the heck is this gonna happen?
And I only figured out after the fact that you'd essentially paved the road for me before I'd even come along. - I think in any political cycle, you would be a breath of fresh air, But in the current environment, I mean now even more so, but back when you first appeared, what was so amazing and depressing was the juxtaposition between what should be possible in a U.S.
president and what is actual in the case of Trump.
Before, you know, anyone ever heard of you, we all knew that there are people in the world who understand science, and who have read widely, and who are deeply curious about the way the world works, and who are normal human beings who have fallen in love with some person at some point in their lives, you know, who feel real compassion for the suffering of other people, and people who are clearly moved by ethical arguments and the progress of ideas
And you are clearly one of these people.
You're someone for whom it's obvious that the last thousand years of human progress has meant something.
And what we have in place of a person like that in the Oval Office, we have a barbarian with a smartphone.
Who appears to love nothing but fame and money and golf.
And an interesting thought has never escaped his lips.
I mean, the juxtaposition is so grotesque.
The level of hope that was, you know, hurled on your shoulders was kind of abnormal because of, you know, the context in which you're appearing.
But really, it's the fact that you're not in any sense a normal politician
That is wonderful, and I hope we draw more and more lessons from how far you got in the last campaign, and I hope you stay in the center of our conversation about how to dig out of COVID land, because obviously your primary plank in your campaign, the UPI, I mean, that is an idea whose time has come, and it was almost like you were a prophet in light of what was soon to arrive in terms of an economic cataclysm.
So yeah, I'm looking forward to talking through all of this with you.
It's quite a moment we're living through.
Yeah, I thought we're going to automate jobs and send everyone home, and it turns out that we're all home for a different reason right now.
You know, I was joking with someone, but I was serious.
I do think that I had the only stump speech that referenced the Spanish flu of 1918.
For me, I was saying that that was the last time American life expectancy declined for three years in a row.
Right, which we just had happen in the last three years.
But this time, I have to say, Sam, it's like the things I was concerned about have all been compressed into a very short time frame.
Now, instead of closing 50% of America's malls, we've closed virtually all of them.
And now I know some of them are reopening.
But a lot of those jobs are going to be gone for good.
Yeah, so maybe we can talk about what you think the COVID pandemic has exposed in our society.
Obviously, it's accelerated the arrival of the future.
What are you expecting to be true once we emerge from this at whatever point, in terms of the effects on the economy and How effective or not our pumping trillions of dollars into the system will be and how the post-mortem on that might reveal incredible levels of corruption.
What are you expecting to be true in six months or a year?
I think these are catastrophic times for tens of millions of Americans, and it's frustrating that, for whatever reason, the gravity of the situation is not as clear to some people as it is to me or others who know how tenuous a hold many Americans already had on their month-to-month, paycheck-to-paycheck ability to make ends meet.
And watching our government try to send money to people even is incredibly frustrating because we're missing so many people and the mechanisms we're using.
You know, like hearing these stories of people calling their state unemployment office day after day and just never getting through.
Because we're asking systems to do things that they're not designed to do.
Like the State Unemployment Office is not designed to all of a sudden take millions of inquiries.
And the thing that occurs to me, as I think would occur to a lot of people listening to this, why do people have to call a phone line and connect to a person in order to access these benefits that have been authorized?
Andrew, let's drill down on that for a second, because this is so bizarre, and potentially it's such a missed opportunity.
So your idea, which doesn't originate with you, but which you have brought into such prominence of universal basic income, is that this is something that the government can do well, right?
We should be able to just send checks to everybody.
But in the current environment, we're recognizing that Even that isn't good enough.
We need a digital infrastructure that can directly give money to people.
And correct me if I'm wrong, currently you can't even apply for this money unless you have a previous tax return, which is going to leave out millions of people who most need money.
So maybe you can discuss how far we're falling short of what should be possible here in terms of just getting money to people as quickly as we can.
So I just want to relate my experience with my organization.
Just a number of weeks ago, we were trying to get money into people's hands.
And we called JPMorgan Chase, we called Citigroup and said, Hey, can we get money to people in the Bronx who have accounts with you and need it?
And they couldn't help us.
We even asked them, can we buy bank cards from you that we will somehow physically get into people's hands?
They couldn't help us with that.
We wound up working with a local organization that had people's financial info, neighborhood trust, and we sent a million dollars to a thousand families in the Bronx through that organization.
And my direct experience with this is the same experience we're having society-wide, where the government's saying, OK, let's send everyone money.
Let's send everyone $1,200.
And then they look around and say, well, how do we know where people are?
How do we know what account to send the money to or address if it's a check?
And the best information they have is through tax returns.
That's the majority of the mechanism they're using.
And that misses tons of people and misses, it turns out, millions of people who didn't file taxes because they made below a certain amount or they're working in, frankly, some kind of informal environment where maybe they're cleaning people's houses and they're just getting paid cash.
And so, you know, they didn't file taxes either because they didn't make enough or because, frankly, they were just like, well, like I'm just going to operate and pay my bills in cash.
So because we're using people's tax returns, if you didn't have That connection to the government and a bank account on record for them to return your tax refund to, then you're not getting money.
Unfortunately, that's tens of millions of the most needy Americans.
Because if you can imagine the folks that aren't filing taxes, many of them are quite poor.
Yeah.
The thing about UBI, which strikes me as so much better than many remedies that seem very much like it, is that there's no question of means testing it.
Because people worry, well, does it really make sense to be sending Jeff Bezos a $1,000 check?
That seems like a waste of money, but obviously if our tax structure were rational, Jeff would be paying an enormous amount, I mean more than anyone, back into the system in taxes.
So it wouldn't matter if he was also on the dole getting UBI, right?
So it seems like we should just take all the friction out of this and get money to everyone in the right increments, whatever that is.
Yeah, we should be flooding the zone with money, honestly.
And the incredibly frustrating thing is that if you really wanted to account for the Jeffs of the world, you could just take out of their tax returns later.
You know, it's like they can just pay it back in 2020 or 2021 in their tax returns next year.
And I've talked to people who did not qualify for stimulus checks because their income was too high in 2018.
And they're in desperate straits now.
And I was like, their income has gone to zero.
Maybe they had a small business.
And so they're looking up saying, like, why am I not getting this $1,200?
We should be giving them the $1,200.
And if it turns out they didn't need it, we can always just claw it back in taxes later.
Though, to me, that shouldn't even be that necessary.
But if you were going to worry about the Jeffs of the world, you could always just get it back after the crisis has abated.
You know, like the theory being that right now we're in crisis mode.
Right.
So my concern now is that this is going to increase wealth inequality in ways that will be politically intolerable.
And how we navigate that moment, I think, is everything hinges on that.
I mean, I worry about the loss of social cohesion.
I worry about a level of political partisanship that Trump really seems to be indicative of a failing country and I feel like we've been on the cusp of that really every day under Trump with respect to the level of partisan rhetoric and the degree to which the two sides can't get on the same page for the purposes of ordinary political compromise.
And you obviously at this point know much more about that than I do.
But I just worry that in the aftermath of whatever is going to happen here economically, the people who will weather this, you know, much better than anyone else are the people who are already very well off.
And whether a middle class exists in a year is really an open question.
And so I just wonder what your What your thoughts are about that and what did you learn through the experience of campaigning all that time and going to more American cities than I will ever go to in the rest of my life?
You should join me next time, Sam.
Join me.
You can come to every city.
We could be tied in terms of number of town halls.
It had to be an amazing experience.
So what's your view of our ongoing economic emergency between now and next year?
You hit the nail on the head where we are going to eviscerate what's left of the American middle class.
There was an executive in Silicon Valley, Vala Afshar, who said 2020 will vastly accelerate the adoption of, and then he listed 10 things, and you think about them and you're like, oh yeah, all of that's happening.
E-commerce, drone delivery, digital contactless payments, video conferencing, autonomous vehicles, wearable health monitors, 3D manufacturing, voice mobile applications, online learning, and smart robotics.
Those things were already on the table, and now we've just revved them up into overdrive because we need to do some of these things for public health reasons.
And if you look at autonomous cars and trucks, Wouldn't you rather get picked up in a vehicle that has been sanitized and a human has not sat in?
Unfortunately, like, all of the arguments is like, oh, you need a person for that.
It's like now that the person is a net negative in terms of someone's confidence level, some in terms of Not just the way we feel about it, but the actual transmission rate of the coronavirus.
And so you're seeing companies that were on the fence about throwing people overboard and automating processes, now making a very, very clear investment in these technologies.
And you can see it in what the stock market is saying, where when people are announcing record layoffs, their prices The stock values go up because investors know that if you can shrink your workforce, then the returns on capital will be higher.
So this is going to be disastrous for tens of millions of American workers over time.
And the government is the only entity that can meaningfully try to resuscitate the middle class and the opportunities available to most Americans in the days to come.
And I know many people listening to this are not going to love the message that the government is going to be the center of the universe for these decisions, but unfortunately that's what we're faced with.
Yeah, well that's always the first sticking point.
When you talk to someone who, a fantastically wealthy person, who recoils at the idea of paying more in taxes, who doesn't like the concept of redistribution, not because they're callously inconsiderate of the suffering of other people, not because they don't care about wealth inequality,
Really, the first thing you encounter is that everyone has a fundamental skepticism, and granted some of this is well-earned, that the government can do anything right, that it just seems like a waste of money to give the government more money to try to solve problems.
And there's this, you know, the strain of libertarianism that suggests that it should, by default, more or less always fall to the private sector to solve these problems.
But a few things I think should be obvious here.
One is that there are many problems for which the private sector can't produce a ready solution, either because the incentives just aren't there, or you just have a massive coordination problem and you just can't respond flexibly all at once.
And I think, you know, responding to a global pandemic is certainly an obvious commercial for a problem that needs to be solved, even beyond government.
I mean, we need a global response to this problem.
The lack of, you know, our internal leadership is galling and terrifying, but, you know, our complete abdication of any role in the wider world in coordinating a response to COVID is also just embarrassing.
But so the idea that we should be starving the government in the context where, at any moment, problems of this sort can appear, and we're dealing with, you know, a public health emergency and an economic emergency simultaneously, and, you know, we have these piecemeal efforts of, you know, various well-intentioned billionaires, you know, riding in on their white horses to solve some very local problem, you know, delivering PPE or something.
You know, and in probably the most heroic case, you have Bill Gates really doing great work, inspiring, you know, vaccine research and... Or Jack Dorsey committing a billion.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, so that's great, but I mean, clearly that is not a surrogate for the wise use of government resources.
And even if you think the government is just incompetent and can't spend your money well, the answer to that problem is to create a better government.
Yeah, it's to actually get it operating at a higher level.
Not to say it's like, oh, well, because like you said, there really is no other answer to some of these massive problems.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's, uh, it's an incredible time.
It's the impossible task, man.
I remember when I was telling people I was going to run, there's a Silicon Valley CEO who said to me, he was like, what are you doing?
Like, you're going into the most useless environment possible.
Because he liked me and like, you know, thought I was effective.
And he was like, why are you running headlong into the universe of inefficacy?
And then I said to him, I said, look, Like, are things working well in government?
No, in many, many respects.
But like, do we need to get it working at a higher level to avoid calamity?
I say yes.
And I said this, obviously, before the coronavirus crisis came.
You know, it's funny, Sam, my wife and I, and this was a little while ago, but there was like an interview you sat down for and you were you were describing me and you said something about it's like, This Andrew Yang fellow, he seems like a normal enough guy, except that he's crazy enough to ruin his life running for president.
I don't know if you remember saying that.
No, no, I don't.
Yeah, so what are your thoughts on that front?
I mean, what was your, what's the net of your experience running and do you think you will run again or find or seek some other role in government?
What's the plan there?
Well, my motivations are the same as they've ever been.
And the problems have gotten bigger, unfortunately.
I thought, well, it's unacceptable that we're letting this freight train just bear down on us and just ignore it.
And in my mind, the freight train was the progressive dehumanization of our economy.
And I saw in the numbers that we had already blasted away millions of manufacturing jobs.
And there was no real feedback mechanism unless you count Trump and his victory, because most of those manufacturing jobs were in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, like the swing states that Trump all won.
And now the problems are bigger than ever.
And, you know, my motivation is as high as it's ever been.
So I'm just still trying to solve problems every day.
And my capacity to solve problems is higher now than it was when I started my presidential run.
So there's no change on that front.
I mean, I certainly learned a lot about becoming president by running for president.
Where I have a sense as to what I'd missed when I sat down with you a couple years ago.
I didn't realize that the process was going to entail certain things.
But as long as the problems are there and I'm able to contribute, I'm going to do it.
And if that includes running for office again, then that's what I'm going to do.
Is there anything you would do differently in hindsight?
No, it's really fascinating, Sam.
I mean, I could definitely talk about this for a while.
I mean, one change I would make is that I did not realize that there were a couple hundred Beltway journalists in DC that had significant influence over the press narrative.
And I did not sit down with most of them, and most of them treated me like a marginal anomaly slash novelty slash ignoramental go-away.
And I'm not sure if my sitting down with him would have changed that.
Not all of them are as thoughtful as someone like you, where you just evaluate someone based upon your own judgment of them.
Like, that's one thing I figured out, too, is that there are so many people that represent these institutions that didn't really think for themselves.
They just like operated on whatever the institutional incentives or motivations were.
So I don't know if my sitting down with these couple hundred people would have moved the needle, but I would have done that.
There were so many learnings in Iowa and New Hampshire where we got my favorables up, and this is actually true nationwide, where my favorability ratings were as high or higher than virtually any other candidate in terms of do people like me, trust me, think I'm reasonable, think I'm well-intended.
And we just couldn't get them over the threshold of this person should be president, like right now.
Right.
We got a lot of people to a point where they were like, really like Yang, like really hope he becomes a cabinet member or something along those lines.
But we couldn't quite get people over a threshold of put him in the White House this year.
And if I run again, that's one of the things I'm spending my time doing is, frankly, normalizing myself more, where it just felt like a little bit too much change for some people.
Right, right.
Yeah, I can imagine it was also the calculation of electability.
It's like, you know, I want this guy to be president, but I would imagine that the rest of the country might not, or he's not gonna be able to sell himself in this election cycle.
And so, for anyone who's privileging getting rid of Trump above all else, That has to be a factor.
I mean, that's how we wound up with Biden, right?
I mean, is Biden anyone's first choice?
I'm not sure, but the electability and not-Trump calculus has gotten us here.
I don't know if you want to plunge into a discussion of the remaining months of the 2020 election now, or if you have other topics you want to hit.
Well, I mean, I'm on the same page you are, Sam, where I think that Trump's a total disaster and defeating him is job one.
That's why I ran.
And now I'm going to help Joe defeat him because Joe's going to be the Democratic nominee.
And to me, any day Trump's in office is bad for civilization, bad for humanity.
Yeah.
Let's jump into that.
I'm not sure if your tongue is going to be tied on any of these topics, but I'm just going to push until I hit a wall.
Obviously, he's confined himself to picking a woman for VP.
Which he did not mention to me when I talked to him about this very topic.
Right.
That's funny.
So, do you have a strong opinion about who you think he should choose to make his chances as favorable as possible?
No, I now obviously would spend some time with Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris.
I've met Stacey Abrams, but I don't know her well.
I don't know Whitmer, the governor of Michigan.
I don't know a couple of the other people that we all know are in the consideration set.
I like both Kamala and Amy.
They're good, warm human beings behind the scenes.
Oh, and Elizabeth Warren, I shouldn't leave her out because I know that she's also... Elizabeth has always been very generous to me as well, where, I don't know if you remember the debate exchange when she was like, when, you know, we were arguing over automation, and I asked her to read my book, and then she actually read my book!
And then we talked about it like the next day!
Debate where she, you know, commended me on it.
So I like the candidates that I know, Elizabeth Kamala, Amy, in particular.
I don't have any insight as to where Joe's going to go with that choice.
Do you have a sense of what would be the best choice, purely from a pragmatic point of view, just getting elected?
You know, I'd have to look at the numbers, because I know Joe's team must have numbers on this where they're running it.
And I don't have that data, so I wouldn't want to, you know, play pundit.
It is funny, Sam.
It's like, like, you know, obviously, if anyone had run the like, hey, should Andrew Yang run for president?
Before the fact, the answer always would have been no.
And so like, obviously, that wasn't a very data driven decision.
But when we were running, did we try and get data for any opportunity that we had in front of us?
Whether it was how we were spending our money, or who we were targeting, or what to name the freedom dividend, or whatever the choices were.
It's like when we could get information, we'd get information.
There was a point, thanks to you and other supporters, where we actually could run private polls, which we would do.
And they were very helpful and insightful.
We kept figuring out... One of the things I was proudest of, Sam, is we got the approval for universal basic income up from something like 25% to 66% in the state of Iowa.
And we knew that because we were asking people about it.
And so Yeah, it's like, it is funny.
It's like certain decisions you make based upon instinct and gut and what you think is right.
And then certain things you try and put a finger in the wind and get some numbers for.
Right, so now how worried are you about the Biden campaign at this point?
I mean, so the two major things that I see pulling the wind out of his sails are obviously the sense that he's too old to be doing this.
And here we have a, I mean, there are two forms of asymmetric warfare here.
And the first is, I guess, neurological.
I'm saying every one of his gaffes seems to suggest senescence on some level.
Every one of Trump's gaffes seems to just suggest more Trump.
And, you know, I have no doubt that Biden is showing the signs of age.
I mean, you just have to look at video of him speaking 20 years ago to see that.
I also know I don't really care, given the current circumstance.
And, you know, Trump is, whether you want to think of him in neurological terms or psychological ones, I mean, he's a deranged person, and he's also A terrible speaker.
It's also word salad that you get out of him much of the time.
But strangely, it doesn't suggest anything like normal infirmity, even to his detractors.
Trump has this preternatural energy of a 300-pound child and On some level, there's an unfortunate comparison between him and Biden with respect to age and the inability to get to the end of a paragraph with something like 100% confidence.
They both show it, but it just shows up very differently and it has different political consequences.
So there's that concern about Biden.
Is he just too old to be in a debate with Trump or to campaign successfully?
And then there's the Me Too scandal, or incipient scandal, with the Tara Reid allegations.
And again, he's up against somebody who can match him 10, 20x for every Me Too scandal.
But it doesn't matter in Trump's world.
Everyone has priced that in.
You know, it wouldn't even matter if we had video of Trump mauling some young woman at a beauty pageant, right?
I mean, it's just, he's functioning in a different political universe.
So I'm just wondering how you think those two issues that are dragging on Biden are likely to play out.
How concerned are you?
I want to say three things about this, Sam, and I've seen Joe Rogan's commentary on Joe.
I had a 30 minute sit down conversation with Joe Biden last week because I was on his podcast, it should air soon, and he is Fine.
Lucid.
Strong.
Like, in that setting.
And having been on the debate stage with him a number of times and then seeing him debate, like, that stuff's not easy, you know?
Like, if you can just stand up there and just, like, debate on national TV or do a town hall for like a, you know, hour, two hours...
He still is very, very strong in many respects.
And I think that the concern around his aging is overblown from my exposure to him as a human being.
Like I've been around him and like, he's fine.
Right.
You know, it's like, and you actually could not do some of the things he's done if you really were struggling, you know, in the serious, serious way.
I mean, of course, you know, he's getting older, you know, in the sense, I mean, that's just empirical fact, but But that stuff, in my experience with him directly, is not as much of a concern.
And it's been overblown for a number of reasons.
Part of it's, I think, in the internet.
It's like, if you wanted to parse something, you could make anyone, I think, seem very gaffe-prone.
Yeah.
And, you know, obviously, Joe, you know, I mean, he's, you know, it's like he's had some turns of phrase that you'd look at, you know, and see that, you know, they weren't ideal.
On the tarot read front, you know, the way I think about this, Sam, is like when we've seen other people in this circumstance, like a pattern has emerged where if you look at any of like the serial predators, you know, it's like it's never one.
It's like that there's just like this whole freaking drumbeat.
And in my mind, like if you were to say, hey, has Joe, you know, like sort of intruded on someone's personal space in a way that we're like, you know, rustled or touched the shoulder, that sort of thing?
It's like, sure, you know, but to me, one of the reasons why the media is treating the Tara Reid allegations the way they are is that there's like this one isolated event that seems very, very out of character and that if he was the sort of person that could do what he's accused of doing, in my opinion, the odds of there being other episodes that are similar to that sometime in the intervening 27 years would be like 99.
100% plus because in every other instance, it'd be like if Harvey Weinstein did it to like one aspiring actress and then like never again.
That's not the way someone in that position of authority who's a true predator would operate.
Like you would see it, it would happen again, you know, like months later, months later, like, you know, there'd be this whole freaking cascade that we've seen with other folks.
And which we've seen with Trump.
I mean, you know, what is he spreading 19 allegations?
Yeah, exactly, like someone accuses Trump and then it's like, you know, and when you talked about this video of him, like, you know, fondling someone at a pageant, I thought to myself, it's like, does that exist?
I mean, you know, it's like, like the, we wouldn't be surprised if it did.
Right.
So to me, those two concerns are not really the, the, the main areas of this election where it's going to be contested.
And that leads me to the third thing.
The third thing is that this really is going to become, like it or not, I believe, like a referendum on Trump.
And whether 50% or more of us say this is not the direction we want the country to be heading in, we need a change.
And the funny thing is Joe defeated me, among other people, and Joe won states that he didn't set foot in.
I mean, like, there's like this familiarity and comfort people have with Joe, where this election I believe is going to be like an up or down vote on Trump.
And I think that People are going to put thumbs down, because we're trapped in our homes.
This pandemic has been mishandled at the highest levels.
You still have chaos in the PPE procurement markets, with the federal government outbidding states and just swooping in and grabbing gear for a national stockpile, and rich states are outbidding poor states, even as the biggest public health problems are in poor parts of the Southeast, in Louisiana and Mississippi.
So, I think that Joe, like, you shouldn't evaluate it as, like, oh, you know, like, in the way where Joe's campaign is limited right now because of the crisis.
Like, he's, you know, there's no massive rally.
Like, I expected at this point in time where I'd be out there campaigning for Joe because we'd all be out there having rallies and the fact that we're not is categorically not a good thing.
Because it deprives Joe's campaign of the opportunity to make a case in conventional ways and have these great backdrops and have press and surrogates and me and a dozen other people out there pounding the pavement making the case for him.
So all of that is not good.
But I still believe that there's a great chance that Joe wins and Trump loses because so many people are fed up with this White House.
Well, how much should we blame the other Republicans?
And I guess it's an interesting question to put to you because it's pretty obvious that the way you campaigned and your political intuitions here to be as non-partisan as possible and just to focus on problems and your recognition that there has to be a bipartisan solution to these problems is fairly overt.
Well, when you look at the way in which the Republican Party has become a personality cult around Trump, people with real political reputations, you know, people who used to be serious people, even if you, you know, whether or not you agreed with their policies, the way in which they have enabled this incompetent crime family, the Trumps, and propped them up in the face of a deluge of scandal, really,
But the deluge has been so incessant that it's impossible to focus on any part of it long enough to blow it up into a proper scandal.
It's just, this has not seemed like normal American politics.
I mean, everyone expects some degree of venality and complicity and cowardice in politics, but this is just, it just seems like we're in another universe.
I mean, we are in some kind of banana republic territory with how our politics has Turned, and it is the story of Republican complicity, people like Mitch McConnell.
And so I guess even beyond the election, I mean, I think if Trump loses in the fall, I think many people will feel like there should be some reckoning, right?
I mean, I feel like we're going to need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to process the toxicity of the last four years.
And that's in the best case of Biden winning and all of us being able to hit reset in 2021.
There's no truth in reconciliation tribunal coming.
Right, right.
Politically, how should we walk that line in the next six months with respect to casting blame on Trump's enablers?
And just in the case of Biden winning, I guess I'm tempted to say, all right, we're giving a mulligan to everybody because there's so many problems we have to solve.
So, you know, you remember those four years where you utterly destroyed the reputation of the United States on the world stage and flirted with the complete unraveling of our institutions?
Well, we're just going to give you no harm, no foul on that and let's reset.
But I feel like the rancor may not end.
I think that it just may not be open to us because we will finally confront what a horror show this has been.
One thing I disagree with you on, Sam, is this thing has been going on for decades.
Yeah, well, I wouldn't actually deny it.
I wouldn't deny it.
Yeah, I don't think you would.
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