You're listening to? Serious inquiries only.

Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries only. This is episode 262. I'm Thomas Smith and it is, while right now for me, Election Eve.

As a tweet I saw said, there's a real night before Helm's Deep Energy, whatever the battle of Helm's. What's it called? Helm's? Whatever. That whole Helm's Deep thing in the Lord of the Rings.

It's been too long since I read those books. Need to go back. Those are fun.

Other things like that I want to do in the Aftertimes when we get rid of Trump. That's just lots of things.

Everything of things are like, I want to do that, but I just don't feel like it now. Too much going on. But that's bad.

So anyway, what does one say? Really? Like what words do I have so many thoughts. You know, four years worth of crap. Just tumbling around in my brain.

One thing I wanted to do was just for fun. I thought, you know, just in case I'll go back and listen to what I said four years ago, roughly.

And I wanted to see if there's any insights there or anything that didn't maybe turn out to be wrong or turned out to be right.

And it was interesting. Not, you know, not that interesting.

But it was kind of interesting. I certainly, I remember in July, well, I wouldn't remember it exactly when, but I do remember doing an episode called President Trump over the summer and it turned out to be in July.

And I remember the point of that was that the very words President Trump, the very phrase President Trump was supposed to be offensive to the eyes.

It was the episode was done as though like, this is absurd. Like the uttering the words President Trump is an absurdity.

And it still is. It absolutely still is. These four years haven't, it's made it more absurd. But that was, that was, it came across as really quaint, you know, just like, uh, those were the days back when that was like a warning.

And yeah, if anybody has been listening to me for this long, I predicted Trump would lose. I don't, you know, I don't pretend that I predicted otherwise.

So that episode called President Trump wasn't in fact a prediction that he would win, but it was a warning. I went back and listened to it.

I was very concerned with burning your bust people. It seems back then I did in retrospect, you know, I don't, I don't know if that was the deal breaker.

I don't know that the numbers, you know, support that we've gone through all this. There are a lot of reasons why 2016 happened.

And it, they're not entirely applicable to 2020, you know, it's sort of a new set of issues.

And I'll get to that. But more than anything, what I noticed in listening to myself, which I don't normally do, I do edit opening arguments, but, you know, that's main, I, I mainly think of that as me being a listener to Andrew.

So I don't spend a whole lot of time listening to myself anymore. But no, it's not a big deal, except that when four years have passed and you've completely, I don't know, forgotten what you were thinking at that time, you know, I, it'd be, you have some rough idea of what was going through your brain four years ago, or at least I did, you know, I, I would have been able to roughly speaking tell you what I was thinking.

But it's really interesting to hear the day to day, like stuff that you learn and forget within a day or a week, you know, all those kinds of things. And hearing this other me from four years ago, just rattle off all these things that were important to me at that time or issues or things I want to talk about was really eerie. It's kind of weird. It's like a different person.

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