Lex Fridman Podcast #375 - #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. The following is a conversation with David Pakman, a left wing progressive political commentator and host of the David Pakman show. I hope to continue to have many conversations on politics with prominent, insightful, and sometimes controversial figures across the political spectrum. David and I have been planning to speak for a long time, and I am sure we'll speak many more times. This conversation was challenging, eye opening, and fun. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got A Sleep for naps, Shopify for e commerce and ExpressVPN for security and privacy on the internet. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our team, with our amazing team, we're always hiring. 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Go to shopify dot com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN, a VPN provider I've used for many years—way, way, way before there was a podcast, way before there were a sponsor, there were a source of happiness, a source of security, a source of. A kind of blanket protection that help ensure that to whatever degree at the very basic level, my privacy is protected on the internet. Everybody should be using a VPN. It's a in the digital space, it's the first layer of protection. You should definitely be using it, and one I recommend the one I've always used is ExpressVPN. There is a lot of other features like you can watch different. Shows that are geo constrained on Netflix and other services, but honestly to me the the security and the privacy that comes with the VPN is is the big plus. And the and the other point is with ExpressVPN it's fast and it works everywhere, works on Linux. I don't know why that's such a awesome thing for me. Maybe now it's obvious, but in the early days when they worked on Linux, like early early days—I don't know how many years ago—but I was like holy crap, this is so awesome. This is so awesome that they care about this operating system that I love so much. So yeah, it works anywhere, Android, your iPhone, all of that. By the way, I should mention that the peer pressure I have to switch to an iPhone. I do have an iPhone, I just don't use it. The peer pressure is immense, but I remain with the Android. It is the phone of the people. I still like the the customization. I like developing for the Android as well. So and I have several Android phones and I love them very much. The customization, the freedom, actually the the principles that's behind it. But of course, I also love beautiful design. Johnny Ive is one of if not the greatest tech designers of all time and he's a hero of mine. He's somebody that inspires me as a human being as a designer. So all of that combined, I don't know. I should be using both actively and giving both love and developing for both. Let's see what the future holds. The point is ExpressVPN works across. All of those, no matter what choice I make, go to expressvpn dot com slash lexpod for an extra three months free. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here is David Pakman. Are there interesting differences to you between terms like liberal, Democrat, left wing, leftist, progressive, socialist, communist, Marxist, far left, center left—all of these labels? Is there interesting distinctions between them? Yeah, there is two sets of distinctions. One is if you just want to say, let's define each of these as political terms. They're all different terms. You can be a progressive ideologically, but not be a member of the Democratic Party. Many say the Democratic Party isn't even really very progressive. So these are certainly terms that we could define in order to have a conversation about the next thing, kind of as a precursor to a conversation. Sometimes the terms are used in order to tag someone with a certain ideology that's not really linked to policy or any particular political question, but they can be used positively or negatively to just kind of say here is the image of this individual that I have in my mind. So like Marxist is right now very popularly being used by some on the right to attack Democrats. There is very few actual Marxists, certainly not in positions of power in the United States, but even among the general population. So I think it's important to distinguish. Are we defining these terms because we want to compare and contrast the ideas that a particular group might bring to the discussion, or are we using them as insults or to stifle conversation? There are terms that can be used to start conversation or to stop it. And the use of those terms is evolving rapidly month by month. So the term leftist I think is a relatively popular term now to use in the negative context to describe. What an outraged left wing commentator. I think what you are kind of grasping onto is that there is probably some set of ideas that would apply to most of those who consider themselves to be on the left. The discussion of how that term is mostly being used is not about policy ideas. You are accurately kind of identifying that. And it does seem like progressive is no longer being used as a smear and leftist is being used as a smear more at this point. Okay, but sometimes some of these terms are useful. Like can we try to pick the terms that are useful like liberal and progressive and Democrat. Liberal and progressive, is there an interesting definable distinction between liberal and progressive to you? That's a maybe one of the most interesting ones. Ten years ago, liberal often meant what now we mean by progressive. More recently, the progressive socialist leaning part of the political spectrum has started to use liberal to mean Joe Biden to mean someone who is not really left enough. So liberal is very interesting because I remember talking with my audience years ago—maybe eight years ago or something like that—where I identified. I am going to now use the term progressive more commonly to describe my own beliefs because liberal has now been made a smear. It's being shifted into something else, and it also means more of like a center left politics. So it's changed in some sense by by necessity by force and also because the the spectrum has shifted to some degree. So the term liberal has evolved. Now liberal meaning some kind of embodiment of the mainstream Democratic Party almost to some degree. Sometimes I am called I am written off by you know within my space there are all sorts of shades of gray which I am sure we can talk about about where I am versus should be could be or am wrongly placed and sometimes. An attack on me is he's just a lib meaning I am not left enough I am not progressive socialist wherever else you want to go so yeah the the problem with a lot of these terms and they're used very casually by people who call into my show is that unless we actually define them each time they very often mean very different things to different people and often come with an agenda attached to them and so I find that they often stifle meaningful conversation rather than encourage it. Do you sense that there is a drifting of what is the threshold to be a progressive or is is there should be used progressive synonymously with democratic socialist. I think we should not use it synonymously with democratic socialist and this is where there is another linguistic confusion and a political confusion. So we'll first talk about the linguistic one. Social democracy versus democratic socialism—very similar words in a different order. Okay, my the way I operate is democratic socialism is actually a form of socialism where one would seek to socialize ownership of the means of production as an example. Social democracy is a very highly regulated form of capitalism the likes of which we would see in Northern Europe, Denmark, etc. These are very different things. I associate progressivism in twenty twenty three with social democracy and would consider democratic socialism a form of actual socialism that is different. It is we're no longer talking about a capitalist organization of society. So transition from one to the other is a fundamental shift in how in how society operates then. Absolutely, and when you talk about social democracy, you are talking about socializing a couple more things than we socialize in most modern capitalist countries. I had this conversation with Patrick Bet David recently. Social democracy is okay. We've socialized the military already in the United States. We've socialized some healthcare in the sense of like the VA and Medicaid, etc. We're talking about socializing a couple more things still in a capitalist country. Democratic socialism would be something beyond that and and as someone who is not a democratic socialist myself I am maybe not the best. Advocate for explaining exactly how that system would function, but it would have some version of socializing ownership of the means of production businesses, etc. So you mentioned you appeared on the PBD podcast with Patrick Bet David. The debate was pretty intense. I I should say I personally enjoyed it. I thought actually you did well and I thought Patrick did well and it was a good conversation. I think there was a little bit of tension. Yeah and I I thought that Patrick actually so I disagree with the internet. I thought Patrick just took on a kind of devil's advocate like he was he was purposely being stubborn to bring out the best in you but the internet thought that he's being stubborn not being open to your ideas. I thought the tension between ideas. I think a lot of the tension had to do probably with Donald Trump and Trump supporters. That certainly could be the case and people wrote to me after people wrote to me the full gamut of everything you can imagine from this was your best thing you've ever done in public to you got humiliated and your mother should have aborted you okay so every and everything in between so you know take your pick but. The most interesting feedback I got was from people who asked me after was it incredibly tense and awkward and because it seemed so combative and I think for I am so used to those types of tensions in the discussions that I have that it's very comfortable to me it's not like afterwards it's it's there is a grudge or it's tense or whatever the case may be. I am very comfortable just I I disagree with people and that's it so I did not find anything that happened inappropriate. I disagreed with a lot of the things he said certainly. So you also spoke on Michael Knowles, I think about the idea of what is a woman. Do you can you speak broadly about your conversations with the people you disagree with? You know some of the cases it feels like it's gone wrong. The conversations have gone wrong. Yeah, yeah, I mean I think there is a couple different things and I am the first to tell you that depending on who I am talking to I go in with a different attitude about how seriously I am taking it in the sense of whether I think it's going to be a deep policy discussion versus whether it's going to be more of a performance for an audience that is expecting a certain thing and I think there is different types of shows when I was interviewed by this guy Jesse Lee Peterson in Los Angeles it's very different for example than when I am talking to Patrick Bet David just to give two two examples. I think the reason I stopped doing the Michael Knowles show was the number of of threats I would get after the fact. That's really the I was glad to engage with him to the extent that the interviews were interesting and you know we could organize it reasonably efficiently. But the reason I stepped away was sort of the aftermath. But I did find him to be someone who was abundantly clear about his view and where he comes from and while I could not possibly disagree more with him in terms of politics and culture and our backgrounds everything is just so so different. I found it easy to engage in the conversation just because of how upfront and clear he was about what his beliefs were. But the number of threats too much yeah it was just too much and this you know I don't know if how much you saw about this recent Twitter dust up I was involved in that peaked with Donald Trump Jr. Tweeting about me and then that then declining from there. Let's let's talk through it. I didn't see it. Okay, I have to understand like the way you study Shakespeare. I have to study your Twitter. I have to understand some how much of it sarcasm. It's mostly sarcasm. I mean here is the thing and I know that there are people who will say David you are dealing with such serious issues. It's really not okay not to take everything you do completely seriously. But my view is. It's so incredible that I've between chance and timing and so different things fallen into a position where this is what I do professionally and it's a career and it's financially sustainable and all these different things. I don't want to end up taking myself too seriously because I recognize the timing and luck and all of these other things and this could have gone a completely different way. So my approach to a lot of this is let's not take ourselves too seriously and in particular on Twitter a platform that you know the degree to which it should be taken very seriously maybe has changed over time. I am always sort of thinking a little bit tongue in cheek on Twitter. So what happened with Donald Trump Jr. So or the full arc of it. Yeah, to give you a one minute arc and then we can pick whichever parts we want after a mass shooting. Now you might say there is like two or three a day. You are correct after the Nashville mass shooting at a Christian school. I tweeted snarkily, tongue in cheek to point that thoughts and prayers not only aren't particularly useful after a shooting they also don't prevent shootings. That there is some confusion about how there would be a shooting at a Christian school given that it is a place where prayer is taking place. I think I you know jokingly said something like, were they not praying enough or correctly in my deep journalistic integrity. You have it. I have your tweet. This is the only display of journalistic integrity. I will show today. Okay, and I have a couple of responses. Beautiful and you deleted the tweet since then, which I regret. Oh interesting, we can talk about that. I would love to because it's such a interesting decision. Because when you tweet something, one of the things I've also learned is you don't often understand how it's going to be read. It's going to be analyzed like I mentioned Shakespeare like there is certain the use of certain words that you regret saying in a certain kind of way maybe just because it wasn't as eloquent as as powerful it didn't actually convey the thing or is a distraction to the main message all that kind of stuff okay. The actual tweet is very surprising that there would be a mass shooting at a Christian school given that lack of prayer is often blamed for these horrible events. Is it possible they weren't praying enough or correctly despite being a Christian school. And a lot of people quote retweeted that which I am assuming was a criticism. So Colin Wright wrote, I used to consider you a reasonable progressive but you clearly devolved into partisan hackery. I am an atheist. It cannot begin to fathom using the murder of children and adults at a Christian school as an opportunity to dunk on the concept of prayer and you responded, I am dunking on the people who send thoughts and prayers and do nothing else and the shootings continue. Okay, I am sure there is a lot of other interactions. There is a few other hundred thousand interactions. So do you want the arc leading to yes leading so so basically I just wanted to display. Do you know what time of day I tweeted the original one? I feel like it was in the afternoon or evening of on a Monday. Three forty-two PM on twenty seventh March twenty-seven, which was a Monday, okay. So basically, I tweet that and then I finish the day and. So you tweet, and then you go on with your day. I might have looked once at Twitter and it had two thousand likes and a few people saying, "This might have missed the mark, but it's sort of like it's one of my twenty thousand tweets. " I don't know. I wake up the next morning. My baby daughter did not sleep till seven thirty the way I would like, so she's up at six AM and I get up and I'm just there starting to make breakfast and I glance at my phone and I'm starting to this was when verified meant a different thing than it means now. I'm seeing all these verified accounts that are you know tweeting it and demanding a retraction and whatever and I go, oh oh okay this looks like it's getting looks like it's getting some attention. I then continue about my day. Around noon, I hear from my dad that he got a hundred messages from, "You should have aborted your son to we're going to find all of you to whatever else. " My dad has no idea what's going on. He's like, "I don't know what this is, but I have a hundred DMs to everything else you can imagine. " And I start to get emails about you know we you know your Jewish faith this and that and the other thing and so at that point to me I thought this is just going to get worse and worse and worse and so I deleted the tweet and I really regret doing that because over the forty-eight hours that followed yes the attacks escalated it went through Candace Owens and then at FoxNews dot com Newsmax kind of peaking with with Donald Trump Jr. And it was horrible I mean thousands and thousands of the okay but once I told my audience about what happened I got thousands of messages from people saying David only someone who doesn't know you and is determined to interpret this in the worst possible faith would think you're blaming kids who died for getting shot of course you weren't doing that I wish you hadn't deleted it so that it would still be up and you would now see the tide kind of turning on it this was not a fun three days regardless but I do regret having deleted it because it was a I wanted to do the quickest thing I thought I could to get people to stop trying to find family members and send them threats and so around noon that's what I did and the truth is the threats didn't stop anyway because everybody had screenshots it and I do wish I had left it up. And is there some degree, maybe stepping outside yourself? Do you regret tweeting that, in that it feeds the mockery engine that that fuels Twitter? So like, does that tweet really represent what you believe? It absolutely represents the disgust with a politics that includes saying we can't touch guns we just we can't but we're willing to point to mental health or say we need more prayer in schools or whatever one thousand percent it represents that view. Is it the type of snark and sarcasm that I would use if given an hour to discuss the topic rather than whatever the number of characters is now on Twitter? No, definitely not. And so I am very cognizant of the fact that it was unnecessarily provocative how it was written. I think I asked similar question to Ben Shapiro. Do you worry that this style of presentation can turn you from being you know a deeply thoughtful objective political thinker to somebody who is just a partisan hack or partisan what's a good word talking head? Do you mean with regard to Twitter or the format of my show in general? So Twitter for now let's start with Twitter for now and can you silo your style of communication on Twitter from being a virus that affects your mind right. I don't have deep thoughts about the Twitter component beyond I think across all sorts of disciplines this is not the best way to most effectively solve problems and figure out solutions to complex issues you're talking about Twitter now right now I'm talking about Twitter that being said I think all of us to some degree have to adapt our content to the platform that we're using in the same way that what I post to YouTube is different than what I post to TikTok what I post to Twitter is also different do I think Twitter has been an unmitigated good for society no have I chosen to step into Twitter as one of the ways in which I get my message out with the good and the bad yes and I think that there is a deep conversation to be had there I think zooming out a little bit in terms of what I do and I was hoping this would come up because I think it's really interesting I will often get emails from people who say two things I will get the you would have such a bigger audience if you did X type emails and usually they are plays to sensationalism salacious and titillating content more pop culture stuff etc on the other hand it's folks who say listen what you're doing really isn't as serious as it could be and it seems like you could do something more serious and you should consider doing deep dives you know once it was do a deep dive into Calvin Coolidge and I was like nobody will watch that so there it's not by accident that my show is the way it is right in an hour I'm thinking of all the platforms I'm on and I'm saying okay I want to do a relatively deep dive on the federal budget and I want to talk about some of the political tomfoolery going on within the post office and I'm going to do a segment about the wacky rally where Trump said crazy things and made up three words and said he endorsed the candidate who's named right I'm crafting that in total to find a balance between let's build this audience as much as I can in order to have a bigger base to get my message out there and include the more serious stuff with the hope that there's a little bit of something for everyone and I'm finding a balance between those two sides of the spectrum it's a deliberate thing and I'm aware that if I were producing my show fifty years ago the balance would probably be different and it would probably change again if we didn't if the show was audio only rather than having all these video platforms it would also be different but it's a decision that's proactively made to try to get the best and most out of the hour that I'm creating every day it just feels like there's an entire machine fed by Twitter and journalism that wants to divide people and the drama of that division highlighting the the partisan division the drama of that division feels like it's a tension with objective clear thinking sometimes and so that's the I worry that there's a drug to it there's too much fun to mock ridiculous people on on the other side I think you're right about that and the fact that that is true to me supports I've talked with my audience about you know like the old food pyramid which I guess was like wrong but let's imagine that there was a pyramid that that made sense at the bottom bread I think like whole grains maybe I don't remember it's been a while sugar is on the top junk food is at the very top I am very open with my audience the vast majority of what I do is the top of that pyramid and I tell people very openly I don't consume a lot of the type of content I produce and I think it's really important to as a base be doing critical thinking epistemology how do we believe the things we believe basics about the world after that reading history economics philosophy etc after that now we're getting into current events I would mostly be looking at consuming primary source reporting things like Associated Press whatever I know everybody will have a different list of what counts there after that is when I'd say indulge in some of the commentary type stuff that I do if you find that I'm thoughtful enough to make it into that but I'm very open and really what I try to do on my show often is in being that at the top of the pyramid tell people there's all this other stuff that should be forming your foundation that I hope you're consuming in addition to just watching me and I'm very open with my audience about that what about the shape the dynamics the the characteristics of your audience is there some degree to which you're through mocking maybe Republicans that there's a there's a lean to that audience and then you become captured by the audience do you worry about the audience capture I worry about it I'm relatively comfortable that it's not shaping the program to a great degree in the sense that at this point I have a pretty good sense of the things I can say that will upset what I might call my core audience you know one of the interesting things just to briefly go back to the Twitter thing was those people who were furious with me on Twitter and they contacted my advertisers and some advertisers dropped me and on and on and on none of them are actually in my audience none of them are regular consumers of my audience they were kind of weaponized against me by people who said hey look at this the people who follow Candace Owens on Twitter other than for their kind of shock value they're not in my audience and with my core audience I know there are things I can talk about that will generate um displeasure I guess you could say with my audience sometimes when I touch the Israeli Palestinian conflict that will happen sometimes on vaccines there's a portion of my audience that is more generally skeptical of vaccines sometimes on some foreign policy issues or you know I'm not a big fan of Marianne Williamson nor Bobby Kennedy Jr's challenges to Joe Biden not because I love Joe Biden but because I don't consider them to be the most serious challengers I know there's people in my audience who don't like that they get they get mad at me about that and I'm totally okay with that and that tension with with my core audience so in that sense I don't feel as though I've had that audience capture take place but I know it can happen and I'm very open to to being told ways in which it may be happening without me noticing so I've made a call for questions on Reddit for this conversation there's a lot of good questions that I'll probably bring up but one of them was about Marianne Williamson asking why David thinks she is a garbage candidate which of course I've never said but perhaps you have more eloquently criticized so let's let's go there sure to the 2024 election okay so Biden Joe Biden officially announced that he's running again Donald Trump officially announced that he's running again in if that's the matchup who do you think wins if the election is held today I think Biden why well first of all I believe he won last time and if I start with the results from 2020 and I think to myself what has happened since then that would push or pull voters one way or the other I have a hard time making a case that Trump is in a better position today than he was in November of 2020 so that's kind of my starting point which is it's a rematch of an election with a known outcome what has changed and I can't make a case for circumstances having changed in Trump's favor to give a couple of state level examples Florida seems to be kind of moving more to the Republican side since 2020 but Trump won that state already in 2020 so it wouldn't really change the outcome Arizona was close I think Arizona has moved to the left since 2020 so I don't see Trump taking that one Wisconsin I think the same sort of thing applies so being very like practical that would be kind of the start of my reasoning do you think Joe Biden is a better candidate now than he was in 2020 I think he's a worse candidate this is going to sound ageist but I think he's a worse candidate in that he's even older and there already seems to be an appetite for younger candidates particularly on the Democratic voting side so he's going to be four years older and in a sense that could be a liability however he also is going to have four years of accomplishments now you might not like the things he's done in which case that would hurt him but he has started to accumulate a not insignificant number of accomplishments some of the big things that are known Inflation Reduction Act and COVID stimulus you know but also less well known things like a bunch of little tweaks to healthcare bunch of little tweaks to student lending there's been a lot of little things at the macro level I don't actually think Joe Biden has that much to do with this the same way I didn't credit or attack Trump for a lot of the macroeconomic stuff but inflation has started to come down significantly the stock market's quite steady these sort of things I think looking historically it's a pretty okay environment for Joe Biden with the exception that he was already the oldest president to be inaugurated in 2021 and he would beat his own record in January of 2025 and I just don't know how voters are going to see that so in terms of just a public human being how would you compare Trump and Biden so if I were to give criticism towards Trump it would be that he's chaotic maybe to the point of being disrespectful to a lot of different groups to a lot of different ideas to a lot of different nations and leaders and all that kind of stuff and then the criticism towards Biden would be that he maybe perhaps because of age or any other kind of cognitive capabilities is not really there mentally as a you know in the way that perhaps you could say like Barack Obama was there just mentally being able to handle all kinds of aspects of being a public representative of a nation to the world and to the people of that nation so which in the competition of personality flaws which do you think is more powerful you've laid out fair and I believe accurate assessments of elements of both of those men yeah you haven't weighed in on to what degree you value each of those assessments which is where I think the the kind of meat of this question really is I don't see and I know that you know Biden is going to get us into World War Three World War Three that doesn't seem to be happening I don't see the Biden deficits you listed which I agree with you on I don't see them as dangerous or threatening to the standing of the United States in this kind of environment with our Western traditional Western allies and geopolitics etc in the way that the sort of unhinged personality of Trump combined with his lack of knowledge about most issues is a threat so for me if those two are the candidates Biden would be my choice now are there people I would rather see on the Democratic side yes if I knew the president would be a Republican can I think of better options than Trump absolutely you know I it's it's so funny when in 2012 it was Obama versus Romney the difference seemed so significant between them thinking back I'm sure I would disagree with Mitt Romney about tax rates and his views on LGBT or I'm sure I I know are different than mine but it seems without looking at him with rose colored glasses so comparatively benign given the the four years of Trump so that's kind of where I come down even McCain and Obama the the the differences seemed quite drastic yeah McCain was interesting because Palin as his running mate opened the door to the sort of cartoonish stuff that we've started to see on the Republican side Palin Trump Marjorie Taylor Green it started going in that direction which has made the party a bit of a joke aside from what you believe the tax rate would be right you can say taxes are too high but Jewish space lasers come on you know so but but I I agree with you on McCain also so going back to the political terms we talked about what where in that spectrum do you place yourself today which of the label do you think captures your political views progressive social democrat which which again is a capitalist I own my own business I pay the taxes I'm legally required to pay and not a penny more and you know all all those things that's where I place myself would you place yourself to the left of Joe Biden yes yes where does AOC fit into that it's a good question what do you think about AOC as a candidate do you think she eventually runs I think that if she doesn't run into some kind of scandal and I don't mean scandal in the sense of some personal impropriety that you know but I mean some kind of major political problem it seems that she has the staying power to be an American elected politics for a long time whether she would even want to be president versus maybe going to the Senate or being governor whatever the case may be I have no idea what her ambitions are in that sense but certainly like policy aside she has this combination of charisma likability to some but also something about her personality that angers the people who don't like her in a way that only fuels her sort of presence which I think applies to Trump as well that I do think that she has the potential to be to have significant staying power in American politics president I don't know do you think that's the future of political elections and politics in general is people who are able to skillfully piss off the other side like AOC and Trump did I think it's an aspect of it I think it's also understanding how to communicate policy ideas Trump you know I have things I can praise Trump about if we want to get to that segment at some point you you let me know when that is but I I do think that there are some things Trump is very good at and this is why it's very hard for me to believe that Ron DeSantis has what it takes to actually fight Trump in a national primary and one of those things is Trump has a even though he often says very strange things that if you transcribe them you go That's what language is that. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. In the moment, the way he relates to adversaries on stage, et cetera, is very good in that he is very much aware of how it is going to be seen by the audience, and so that's why a lot of times it's more about doesn't matter that a word salad came out of his mouth how he immediately responded and related to the person very good so I think that knowing how to be good when clips are shared all the time often out of context is extraordinarily important knowing how to use social media which every election cycle that means something different but understanding how to use social media very important those things are absolutely so important and whether you're able to do a deep dive on the deficit certainly useful but I would say it's a bad thing it's becoming less important in terms of figuring out who we want to represent us so just lingering on the AOC and then maybe let's throw in Bernie Sanders on that yeah so where do you place yourself and how do you do the layout of the land of Bernie Sanders AOC Joe Biden and David Pakman my instinct is and the I'm going to answer it the thing that makes this tough is Bernie says he's a democratic socialist he ran as a social democrat he didn't run on anything that was really socialism so I'm going by their public facing platforms I've been listening to him for many many years and all the way back to the Tom Hartman show and I think using the terms as you've been using them yeah he has I don't think ever been a democratic socialist I haven't heard him speak about socialism I think I've heard him speak about social programs and the value of social programs yeah throughout the history of the United States and there and how they've been beneficial my understanding is very similar to yours although there may be stuff from the 70s where he really was talking about bona fide so shit in the 70s yeah yeah you and I even who weren't around we were doing stuff in the 70s I feel like we did yeah my sense would be you know Biden is like center left and then I'm to the left of that but maybe just inside of where AOC and Bernie are very very similar to Bernie I mean I identify with a lot of Bernie's ideas maybe their implementation I'm more flexible on I'll give you one example Medicare for all one way of trying to get healthcare to everybody which Bernie is very big on is you take the current Medicare program you just eliminate the age limit make it available to everybody pay for it through taxation interesting however I'm open to other models if they get everybody healthcare that is good quality and affordable Singapore has an interesting model Germany has an interesting model I am I am more agnostic about how we do it than just saying let's expand Medicare whether that puts me to the right of of Bernie I don't I don't know but I'm not like exactly right there on it has to be Medicare for all yeah that's more of a that's more just flexibility versus dogmatism so I don't know if that puts you to the left or to the right I don't either