Has something changed in our politics to allow for more George Santos.

You know, yes, there are people who've lied, you know, even including recently, Republican

J.R. Majuski lied about being deployed to Afghanistan. Biden himself lied about his academic record in 88.

There is a difference between what he's doing and the sort of run-of-the-mill lies that we've seen, which are bad.

Where the lack of accountability really is, is the fact that local journalism is dying.

That resource in our country, holding people on the local level accountable that's kind

of withering away is allowing for situations like this to go by.

Welcome to The Lost Debate, a Show for Politically Ecclectics. I'm Robbie Gupta.

And I'm Ricky Schlaught. Well, Ricky, happy 2023. How goes it out in California? It's been cold and rainy and windy and miserable the entire time, which has kind of been a bummer. But I'm out here for the month, so I'm hoping that I'll get my share of good weather. But I imagine it's better than New York. Yeah, what's cold in California? Like 50 and windy and humid. So it's kind of, it's not as bad as New York, but, you know, I did come here thinking I'd have my L.A. January, and so far it's, it's been kind of a flop. It was pouring rain on New Year's Eve and on ideal, but how is Costa Rica? I assume it's better than here. Costa Rica is amazing. I mean, it's dry season here right now. It did pour yesterday, but it was great for me because I was back to work yesterday, so I was excited to see that I wasn't missing any of the wonderful weather. But it's interesting. This town, I've been coming here for a couple of years now, and it's actually quieter during this time of year than it's been in previous years, which may be interesting to our audience, because I think it's a story of tourism right now. The theories abound in town as to why there are fewer Americans and Europeans and Canadians than before. And some of them are obvious. Obviously, we're in the middle of a recession-ish.

There's also flights are more expensive and there's a lot of chaos around that. Remote work is

less common so people can't stay here in remote work like they've done in years past and coronavirus

and other flus and whatnot are seem to be ravaging certain cities like New York City.

Most of these are things we talked about on this podcast, interestingly, all of it adds up to

me being able to surf the waves without a lot of people to contend with.

Well, no complaints for you.

Although I feel like there weren't, weren't there like record-breaking amounts of people

traveling for the holidays?

Like there was a crazy airport meltdown.

I think a lot of that was domestic.

I think people are visiting relatives more than ever,

but not taking more extravagant trips like coming out here, although, important to say,

Jack Dorsey and Jay-Z have been milling about this area over the past few weeks. There have been

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