YouSaid · the spoken record

David Pakman

lines on the record: 228
first: 2023-05-06
most recent: 2023-05-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't know that I can say that it's because of what may be going on cognitively, but my sense from the people I talk to is that he's very much involved in the highest level geopolitical and big domestic economic stuff, but that a lot of the smaller issues that presidents might or might not be sort of plugged into, that he's not plugged into the details of a lot of the lower level stuff.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mentioned student loans. So I think that that's a deficit for Biden. I think the upside to Biden is when it comes to foreign policy, diplomacy, high-level negotiations, knowing how to engage with allies in a productive way, it's tough to find someone with more experience than Biden. I know that there are counterpoints to what I'm saying. And those include that was the old Biden, the new Biden doesn't have it. That includes, that's just a sign of rot because he's been around for so long. Nobody should be around that long in politics, perfectly reasonable criticisms to talk about. But I do see that as one of his strengths. And he also is good at knowing when he can work with Republicans and when he can't and not wasting more time than is sort of expected for posturing reasons. And I think that that's a good thing.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weaknesses, I think, are some of the things you've identified. He is not seen as high energy. He is not the same Joe Biden that debated Paul Ryan in 2012 and ran circles around him and just an incredible debate performance. He is not inspiring in the way that someone like a Barack Obama was to people coming up and starting to get interested in politics. I think a lot of those are fair criticisms. I think on policy, he's not interested in a lot of the things that younger voters are interested in.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the real reason is they want to keep them for healthcare workers. And then later, the masks are what's going to solve. I'm with you 100%. I think the other layer to it is you can't ignore the political situation at the time. If Trump had won re-election and the vaccine distribution had taken place while Trump was president rather than Biden, my belief is that the same number of Democrats would have gotten vaccinated, but way more Republicans would have as well because they were following not science but political leaders. And when it was Biden in DC instead of Trump, a lot of those people said, I don't trust the vaccine. But wait, it's Trump's vaccine, I thought. Yeah, but something about the way Biden's distributing it. So I do think you can't ignore that political layer. I agree with you, the communication was a disaster.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I generally agree with you. And for me, it's really about shared blame. And there were a lot of different reasons why that the early communication wasn't good. Part of it was, I mean, for me, I prefer accuracy rather than overconfidence. I would prefer, listen, we don't really know right now whether masks do X or Y. What we do know is the supply is really limited of this type of mask. We're going to try to keep them for the frontline workers. I love that. That's the way I want to be communicated to. A call was made to do it differently, which was to say the masks don't actually help.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Originally, the first vaccine related to the wild type strain did seem to be very effective not only at preventing death and serious illness, but also transmission. There were people then saying it doesn't prevent transmission. Over time, as the variants came forward, the vaccine became less effective at that. At that point, I started telling my audience something different because as far as I was concerned, the reality on the ground had changed. In my mind, that's how science works. It's not backpedaling. It's we're adjusting our beliefs to what is taking place in the real world.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, we don't have rigorous science that tells us that some of these things work. It doesn't mean that won't come in the future. At which point, if there was something as cheap as hydroxychloroquine that treated COVID effectively unbelievable, fantastic. It's not there's no way it ever will be determined. We don't have that information right now. So it's not super wise right now to go and start taking this stuff. We eventually learned like with vitamin D having an appropriate vitamin D level does seem to be based on what I most recently read generally protective and a good thing when it comes to infections of different. Great. Okay, so that one we figured out. One of the really difficult things is that the quote truth about the vaccines did change. And the original, again, this is all, I don't pretend to be an expert, but just someone who synthesizing the medical data and writing about it.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm less, I don't know if interested is the right word, but the kind of the Fauci review is less interesting to me in terms of what comes next than the first part you mentioned, which is the distrust in science. And sometimes I'll get voicemails or emails from people in my audience who say that I have had to backpedal on certain things related to this. And one of the things I tried to do from the beginning was not speak in certain terms when we really didn't have complete information. So there was this period where hydroxychloroquine was first sort of mentioned as a possible treatment, prophylactic or proactive treatment for COVID or active treatment for COVID, along with a bunch of other stuff. There was Ivermectin, there was vitamin D, there were all sorts of different things. And I tried to be careful to say,”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't disagree with that. I'm not aware of really any governments that got in the way. I mean, it seemed given the global situation, everybody, European countries were pre-purchasing vaccine, African countries who were going to be later to receive vaccines. We're partnering with the European countries that had pre-purchased. But the most interesting thing about all of this is Trump did play up the vaccines for a long time until his crowd didn't want to hear about it anymore, which was crazy. It was sort of like he became a victim of the monster he created to some degree.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't get in the way. Fair. I think now we're on the same page. He did not get in the way of vaccines being developed, which is good”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he actually got booed at a couple of his own rallies when talking about the vaccines. But let's back up a little bit. Fast tracking. My understanding of what he did is he did what any president in his situation would do and what many world leaders elsewhere did as well, which is he agreed to pre-purchase supply of vaccine in order to provide money to pharmaceutical companies to scale up the manufacturing, which is absolutely fine. But he wants one of the stories he tells is it usually takes 12 years to develop a vaccine. We did it in nine months thanks to me. Decades of mRNA technology being developed created the platform in which you can make a particular vaccine in nine months. It didn't have anything to do with Trump. He did pre-fund and say we will buy huge supply and that provided liquidity to the pharmaceutical companies.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a couple different things. I know you don't necessarily follow Trump's rallies as closely as I do. And I'm jealous of you for that. But he did tout the vaccine stuff hugely for a while. Until his audience turned against him. And then he had to draw this line where he was going, I made the vaccines, which none of you have to take, by the way. Freedom. You don't have to take them, but it's fantastic and nobody else could have done it. But don't worry, nobody's going to make you take the vaccine.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If he had handled it in the following way, and I've said this to Rogan and I've said this to Patrick Bet David, and they tend to all see my side of this. If Trump had said, listen, we don't know how bad this is going to be, but I care too much about the American people to take a shot. So it's not going to be two weeks. It's going to be a little bit. But I need your help. We're going to bring everybody together. I don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican. We're going to have MAGA masks and you could have kept 50 cents on the dollar to pay off Stormy or right, but it would have been, I think he wins re-election because the perception was, and reality is a version of that. The perception was that he was way too cavalier about it early on. People died who didn't need to die. And I think that it was arguably...”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The con for him is he'd be president right now if he had handled it differently. I think it's abundantly clear. Early on, and there's now a lot of really good reporting about the conversations he was having with Jared Kushner and others, he became convinced either because of things he was being told or because he decided this is the way it's going to be, this is going to go away. Fine. It's in China. Okay. It's in China, in Italy. Okay, we have 15 cases, but it'll soon be zero. We'll be opened by Easter of 2020. None of it ha”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trump. I'm not coming down on one side or the other. It's not my area of expertise, but it's not the open shut slam dunk that, you know, Trump likes to say to us, Putin didn't invade because he knew I would crush him. Okay. So it's not obvious to me that there were imminently wars that would have started during that time. That being said, for all the criticism of Obama during Crimea. Trump seemed to just kind of forget about that after all the criticism and say, I'm not actually going to do anything about that. And so there are foreign policy criticisms that could be made. But it is true, no new wars were started under Trump. And I like that. I don't like wars.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's interesting. There's a few different approaches to dealing with that. First, it's really important to remember that the counterpoint to that from the folks who like to say that was that Hillary Clinton was going to start three wars. Sometimes they say four wars. Sometimes they say five wars. Okay. The geopolitical situation during the four years that Trump was in office, I don't know that they obviously lent themselves to wars that Trump just barely was able to keep us out of. I think the Russia thing is interesting because now it's very popular to go back and say, you know, the reason Putin didn't do the Ukraine thing when Trump, right? And to somehow give Trump credit for that, there's a counterpoint to it, which is Putin under Trump, particularly if Trump got four more years, would have been able to maybe consolidate power in other ways because of his relationship with”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This goes well beyond politics. You know, Wayne Gretzky has weighed in about this, Michael Jordan is weighed in about. I mean, this is, yeah, is it better to have tried and failed than never, is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved? I don't know. I mean, listen, we live through four years of Trump. We know what that four-year term was like. And it's very hard for me to say that the things he tried were overwhelmingly reasonable. But I get the point you're trying to make. And I appreciate it. And if we don't do any of it, then where do we end up? Sure. We know where we ended up with Trump. And it was pretty embarrassing.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly think that's an argument that can be made. My question would be what tangible positive outcomes did it lead to? And it's tough to identify any. But I think it's a great thing. I mean, listen, one of the things you're kind of getting at maybe indirectly is that there's been this sense that politics has been done very similarly for a long time. And even between Democrats and Republicans, still, even with some policy differences, they're still the kind of feeling that it's disconnected folks in DC mostly dealing with issues that don't directly affect that. I'm with you on that. I think the question is to whether Trump's bluster was positive rather than extraordinarily humiliating in many ways. I just come down on it was an absolute and total humiliation. But I understand that you can recognize Trump doesn't know a lot of stuff, but his attitude was...”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can make the argument that if there is a suitable alternative domestically or from a different country, that it will reduce imports, but it didn't happen. And we actually have reports now that the tariffs on China cost about a quarter million American jobs. The other problem with that idea is China created and released a virus in order to hurt you. But as of today, 5.7 of the 6.8 million deaths were in other countries, it's a very indirect way. You're mostly killing people in other countries to hurt Trump. Maybe there was a, this is the sort of thing where when I think about how Trump dealt with China, it's very scary because given another four years, who knows what he might do if he still doesn't understand how tariffs work?”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give you it's tough to make. So the China thing is really just very recently to when we're recording this, Trump was on Fox News, interviewed by a guy named Mark Levin. And Trump proposed a new, I call it a conspiracy theory. Maybe it will strike you as something different about China, COVID, and tariffs. And Trump's suggestion was that the tariffs cost China so much money. China sent the US so much money in tariffs that they released COVID as punishment. Now there's a couple problems with that. One, American companies pay the tariffs. Trump still doesn't seem to know this. Trump seems to believe that when he puts a tariff on Chinese imports, someone in China is cutting a check to the United States. American companies buy the stuff from China, and then American companies cut a check to the United States for the tariff.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, it was logical because of Kim Jong-un and the way that it was so ego driven and they both as sort of authoritarian strongmen types to different degrees wanted that. There was actually a kernel where I actually thought as I read it Trump's initial idea wasn't crazy. The problem was he knew nothing about the backstory of the relationship. He fell for all sorts of lies from Kim Jong-un and he made offers that didn't make any sense to make. It fell apart. Fine. But that's an example where I think Trump's personality was not actually at its base the problem when it came to North Korea.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think at some point, though, when it comes down to voting and saying one of these people is going to be ostensibly in charge for four years through all of the departments and secretaries and choices that they make, we do want to apply some level of realism with the understanding that your examples are from the tech space and they're good examples. There's no question about it. One thing I'll add to this, I recently read Bradley Hope's new book about North Korea. And it's really about an activist who doesn't even really matter. But in the background of the book, it's written much of what is written about happens during the Trump era and when Trump did the first and then the second, I guess you'd call them summits with Kim Jong-un. And it actually did seem like to some degree Trump's were going to handle this like I do a business deal approach to Kim Jong-un. In some sense, it”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with you 100%. I think it's interesting that all of the examples you gave of successes are from the technology space. Not from politics, which, I mean, listen, I would love to be able to make headway on some of these issues more quickly without a doubt.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know there are people who believed it because they would call into my show and say, I'm voting for Trump because of it, but it's hard to believe that anybody serious would fall for that unless you were deliberately wanting to just believe whatever was being fed to you. Or you just hadn't ever thought about these issues before. The health care plan. In 2017, they proposed one would have led to 24 million or so people ending up without health care. Didn't go anywhere because it was so terrible. And then in August of 2020, Trump said, in two weeks, I'm going to finally have my healthcare proposal. It's 2023. We still never got it. You know, with all of these things, when you think them through, it was just sort of arrogance. And I get the perspective of I want optimism and I liked that optimism. It worked. I mean, fair. A lot of people saw it and liked it. As someone who followed a lot of those issues closely, they seemed, of course, like impossible promises.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, only someone, I would include the North Korea plan as well, which I'm glad to talk about, only someone who doesn't know anything about the size and scope of these issues could so arrogantly say that they could solve them in that way and on that timeframe. I'm all for optimism and bringing a new face to things. Absolutely, without a doubt. a wall with Mexico that Mexico will pay for at the end of my first term.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The causes of the problems that those folks were experiencing, and his solutions were laughable, right? Like Jared was going to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in year one. He was going to replace Obamacare in 2017, things that were never going anywhere, anywhere. But what he did really well was he put up a united front of I know what is ailing you. I know how to fix it, and I know how to fix it, I guess because he's a businessman and he's been above the fray of politics for so long, knowing how to use political donations to his advantage. He called that smart, et cetera. I think that's his greatest strength.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, Trump's strengths are mostly superficial and in terms of presentation. Trump was able to, I call it a grift, some on the right say he's just so good at relating to different types of people. Trump, as a rich guy from New York City, was able to convince people that he spent most of his life trying to be kept isolated from, that he had their best interests in mind, that he knew why they weren't doing well in the 2016 economy, and that he had solutions that he was going to bring forward. The truth is, he never really liked those people. And as soon as they weren't useful to him for a brief period of time, that love affair with his followers stopped. And then now it's back that he needs them again. He didn't really understand.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The strengths of Trump, let's see how I can frame them in a way that is both accurate and accurately assesses my feeling about it.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What he ran on. I mean, just two examples I would give are during his campaign, he played up a little bit his interest in doing student loan forgiveness and something on cannabis. I never bought it. I told my audience, I think he's saying this stuff because this is the way the tide is kind of, the wind is blowing and he's being advised to say this stuff. I don't think he's going to do very much on either of these things. He did actually do some student loan stuff. That would be two examples, I think”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a lot of framing. And the other aspect to that is on paper Joe Biden's platform was arguably the most progressive of any Democratic candidate who won the nomination. Now, of course, there were people who challenged the nominations who were to Joe Biden's left. A lot of this is perspective. And that's how you end up saying the guy who's a couple years older than Biden is actually the guy with the fresh perspective, which is interesting because I don't disagree with you.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Arbiters and to stay as much on the side as possible, it would make sense to be furious that they've gone against their stated kind of mandate. But we know that the DNC negotiates and is it working behind the scenes and has a favorite, that favorite was Hillary in 2016, 2020. So I share the frustration about the power that the DNC has, but for people who were saying they did something illegal or whatever else the case may be, that doesn't seem to be the case. But this is part of why, I mean, I would love there not to be this duopoly of Republicans and Democrats. And there's probably four major changes that have to happen in order to make that a reality. But I share the frustration of folks while recognizing that Reddit was not accurately representing Bernie's level of popularity.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was my sense. And to some degree, we saw that in certain states. I don't have the exact primary order and results in front of me or in my head. But the big turning point was South Carolina. South Carolina was when Joe Biden won and won handily understood to be because of the larger African American population in South Carolina. And right around that exact same time, I actually don't remember now whether it was the day after or the day before. Some of the smaller Democratic candidates smaller in terms of support got out and said, I'm endorsing Joe Biden. And to some degree, of course it was all organized and timed to help Joe Biden. There's no doubt about that. This is what the DNC does. It's hard for me to be mad at the DNC because this is sort of like if we believe they were there to be unbiased.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The winner. There's nothing illegal about them being involved in picking the winner, but we might say it's not in people's interests. I think the 2020 primary was really interesting. Bernie's supporter myself. I started telling my audience after a couple primaries and even before based on polling and different things, I see a real uphill battle here for Bernie. And it's really important people in my audience are not the average union worker in Michigan who is mostly working and raising a family and then goes to vote on primary day and goes to vote on election day. If you spend a lot of time on Reddit and Twitter, you're going to have an inflated sense of Bernie's popularity within the Democratic Party.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly right, exactly right. And whether it matters, I don't know. The DNC and the RNC really are organizations that to some degree exist to justify their own existence because if they were no longer necessary, they would go away. And so they have to assert their value and their importance. They do this in a number of different ways, organizing the way that the dominee is chosen, the convention, working with states on everything from redistricting to whatever else the case may be, setting the order of primaries and having some involvement in how that's all going to happen, and also coordinating behind the scenes, I guess they would describe it as making sure our candidates don't get in each other's ways. We might see it and say they're picking.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I think there's a couple things here. First, the DNC, I'm not a Democrat, just your audience may not know. I'm just an independent. I mostly vote for candidates that end up being Democrats in local elections. Often there's no party designation. So, okay, I'm obviously on the left. I'm not denying that, but the Democratic Party as an institution has never really been interesting to me.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My sense would be 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's very big on, is you take the current Medicare program, you just eliminate the age limit, make it available to everybody, pay for it through taxation. Interesting. However, I'm open to other models if they get everybody health care. That is good quality and affordable. Singapore has an interesting model. Germany has an interesting model. I am more agnostic about how we do it than just saying, let's expand Medicare. Whether that puts me to the right of Bernie, I don't know.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My understanding is very similar to yours, although there may be stuff from the 70s where he really was talking about bona fight.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My instinct is, and I'm going to answer it, the thing that makes this tough is Bernie says he's a democratic socialist. He ran as a social democrat. He didn't run on anything that was really socialism. So I'm going by their public facing platforms.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A deep dive on the deficit. It's certainly useful, but I would say it's a bad thing. It's becoming less important in terms of figuring out who we want to represent us.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's an aspect of it. I think it's also understanding how to communicate policy ideas. Trump, I have things I can praise Trump about if we want to get to that segment at some point. You let me know when that is, but I do think that there are some things Trump is very good at. And this is why it's very hard for me to believe that Ron DeSantis has what it takes to actually.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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 or whatever the case may be. I have no idea what her ambitions are in that sense. But certainly policy aside, she has this combination of charisma, likeability 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 have significant staying power in American politics. President, I don't know.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Progressive social democrat, 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 all those things. That's where I place myself”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. But I agree with you on McCain also.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Options than Trump. Absolutely. It's so funny 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. I'm sure I know are different than mine, but it seems without looking at him with rose-colored glasses, so comparatively benign given the four years of Trump. So that's kind of where I come down.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meat of this question really is. I don't see, and I know that Biden's going to get us into World War III, World War III. 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, et cetera, 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”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've laid out fair and I believe accurate assessments of elements of both of those men. You haven't weighed in on to what degree you value each of those assessments, which is where I think the kind of”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, but also less well-known things like a bunch of little tweaks to healthcare, a bunch of little tweaks to student lending. There's been a lot of little things. At the macro level, I don't actually think.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That one Wisconsin, I think the same sort of thing applies. So being very practical That would be kind of the start of my reasoning.”
2023-05-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #375 – David Pakman: Politics of Trump, Biden, Bernie, AOC, Socialism & Wokeism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source