Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous idea for you. The most important country in the world, the indispensable nation, the most powerful nation in the world, gets to choose between two leaders, one of whom is an unrepentant liar who has no respect for the norms of democracy

and wants to subvert the independent judiciary and all the independent institutions that make

America great. And the other is a corpse, or, you know, close to being a corpse. That's a conundrum

that many people suspected we had before Thursday night. It's one

that we now are certain we face. So this episode is about the positives of what Democrats

might be able to do about it, what people who don't want Donald Trump to become president

might be able to do about it at this late juncture. I wasn't going to do a debate episode. I thought, you know, debates don't move the needle really on the opinion polls. This one is very, very early. There are many, many months left to go before the election. And, you know, I'm not going to get into the horse race. I want to talk about the big things. I want to talk about the big issues, the future of democracy.

I want to keep you guys focused on what really matters rather than getting into the minutiae of the political battle.

However, Joe Biden has left me no choice.

That was an extraordinary, revelatory insight into cognitive decline. And, you know,

when people say debates don't matter, and I've sort of been saying this as well, you know,

Barack Obama lost the first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012. You know, Donald Trump

lost the first debate against Hillary Clinton.

What that normally means is that if you have a gaff, if you don't do a good performance,

it doesn't undermine the fundamental basis on which you're asking to have the job of the presidency.

Like, people forget about minor snafus. They forget about

things that were accidental to that night that were kind of, I suppose, arbitrary. What they're

not going to forget is something that reveals something fundamental about the candidate.

Certainly not if that thing is likely to get

worse over time, not better. Like when Obama lost the first debate to Mitt Romney in 2012,

he lost it because he was having a bad night. If the reason why he'd lost it had been because

the top of his head opened up and an alien jumped out and said, I am in control of

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