OA 1082

OA 1082: When Elon Musk Violates Immigration Law It's Fine Though was an Opening Arguments podcast that was published on 2024-11-01.

Stats

• Title: When Elon Musk Violates Immigration Law It's Fine Though
• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/when-elon-musk-115140554
• Date: 2024-11-01
• Hosts: Thomas Smith, Matt Cameron

Transcript

Opening music

So, just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan? I have concepts of a plan. That is a damning non-answer. I'm not trying to make it about myself, Your Honor. I'm just trying to show his bias toward the defendant. Just don't make it about yourself. Something simple as a crack pipe, a used crack pipe. The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check.

Intro

Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1082. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. That over there is real life lawyer, Matt Cameron. How you doing? Hold to. Three, four, and release. It's terribly unprofessional. You need to manage your stress before we start recording, Matt. It's called box breathing. I'd recommend everybody give it a try. Nice four count when you breathe in, four count when you breathe out. It's pretty good. Strong recommend. Does it get rid of the fascism? Only in your mind. Then it won't help me. So, I breathe. I'm perfectly calm. I open my eyes. There's still fascism. It doesn't. It's just I'm calm and there's fascism. That doesn't matter. I don't know. If you haven't tried breathing exercises, they go a long way. I'd strong recommend. Well, speaking of going a long way, I don't know why I'm doing that transition. It's the end of the month, so there's so much Smith family household content to consume. Gavel, gavel. Reminder, that is our podcast where we do trial stuff. We are almost done with the Trump trial. It is not currently available except on patreon.com/gavelpod. But Matt had a great idea that since we're coming up on the end of the trial and we're going to go over the closing statements, why not also take a look at the opening statements and kind of compare and contrast, see where the trial went, see what the expectations were. And so not only is the final day of witnesses, the incredibly funny day with Robert Costello available over on patreon.com/gavelpod. It is essentially two days, like two half days. And that is the end of the entire case. Not only is that available, also recordings of the opening statements. Are available for not only the people in the defense, but also the judge has has some words in the beginning. If you enjoy just listening to people make promises they can't possibly keep, you're going to love this one. That opening is just really something. Yeah. If you're listening to my shows, you do enjoy people making promises they can't possibly keep. Oh, come on. We did get all that stuff out, though. That's actually out. And it's really cool. I can't wait for you all to hear it. People have already listened to that one and they're enjoying the chaos that happened. If you remember. That last day of Trump trial testimony was chaos, really fun. There's also on where there's woke, we're doing some election stuff as well, because Hey, I'm pretty stressed about the numbers and what it's looking like. And I wanted to talk it out and look into, you know, is something wrong with the polls? Are Republicans juicing the polls? There've been some allegations about that. I want to take a look at them and talk about the situation there. So that's on where there's woke. So people who listen to my shows have a lot to listen to is the message there. Well, speaking of a lot to listen to. I'm really. Excited to get to today's show because we're going to talk about another thing that's been stressing probably while you're doing the box breathing. What is Trump's secret that he alluded to in the creepiest way? I got to say, we have been alarmist. We've been almost on purpose because there's a lot to be alarmed about right now, but there's a point at which you're just putting a flashlight under your chin and doing a Halloween story. And that's what people have been doing on these election things a little bit. So I'm gonna break down maybe about how it's maybe not going to be quite as bad as people are saying, or maybe we should just stop with the imagination and wait and see what happens. Oh, okay. But I mean, it's bad if we just regular lose though, is my biggest word. Oh yeah. But people are coming up with these scenarios in which we might just like fancy lose and like a really weird and, you know, esoteric wear. Well, I will be excited to separate kind of fact from fiction there. And then we got to talk about everyone's least favorite immigrant, Elon Musk. Yeah. Big news about Elon that kind of put some, put some of the dots together that I've been wondering about for a while about maybe how he shouldn't have ever become a citizen. Yeah. Possibly is deportable. I am full on MAGA when it comes to immigration. But when it comes to exactly one immigrant and that's Elon Musk, I agree. You know what? Find common ground these days, you know, full agree Trump with regard to exactly one immigrant, Elon Musk. Now I don't agree anymore after that, but find common ground. We might as well, right? Bipartisanship. Sure. Yeah, no, I'm with you. I've been having the same thought, but we've also got a tasty footnote at the end in which we're going to find out how the librarian of Congress is going to solve McDonald's ice cream problem. That can't be right. That is absolutely correct. Check your notes again. I'm sorry. You read it wrong. The librarian of Congress is going to help McDonald's ice cream. Okay. I love it. Can't wait. All right. Well, at the other side of the break, we'll get into those stories. All right.

Trump's secret plan

Well, I'm excited that you've packaged this as possibly not something to worry about, but just in case people aren't aware, they haven't read the article, they didn't see the thing. What are we talking about with this secret that Trump has? Well, let's break this down. So in Madison Square Garden last weekend, I'm sure everybody caught that there was a bit of a Nazi rally. Mm-hmm. Like nine hours worth of MAGA hits and celebrities coming up on stage. And during that, let's play the quick clip here of Trump indicating to Mike Johnson, who was also there, that they had a secret. Was also there is Mike Johnson's, that should be on his tombstone. That was his graduation quote, was also there. And I think with our little secret, we're going to do really well with the house, right? Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a secret. We'll tell you what it is when the race starts. Do you have a secret? Yeah. So, okay. Straight up. Are they boning? That would be amazing. October surprise. It'd be so good. Ultimate. But no. It turns out, okay. I'll tell you straight up. I think he's trolling. That's my first read on this. I think he just wants us to sit around and talk about what the little secret might be and do kind of what a lot of people are doing this week. It's just kind of like sitting around thinking about all the possible scenarios that the house might be able to do. Yeah. But the house doesn't really have that much to do with it, as we're going to talk about. And I think that a lot of this is really overblown. And again, I'm alarmist. I think MAGA is fascist. I think we should be aware of that. I think we should be ready for anything. Yeah. And certainly, if things start to develop, we will talk about them. But I don't think there's a lot of point in sitting around and thinking about every possible scenario. I think it's worthwhile to look at the weaknesses that are remaining in our system right now after the last round of reforms in 2022. But it's not really helpful to think about everything that could possibly happen right now. Let's just kind of wait and see. Yeah. They have a bunch of weapons in way. They can cheat. They're not really that secret, is the thing. Sure. We can know them. Yeah. We do kind of know them, and I'm sure you're going to tell us. I've done some thinking about them. That's right. I also want to say before we get started on any of this that we have better lawyers. We have smarter lawyers. And I think we have just overall more competent and ethical lawyers than they do for what that's worth. And we have a bunch of people ready to go on this, too. It's not just like they're the only ones with lawyers. So I think that's worth mentioning. Yeah, but they're the only ones with a Supreme Court. That's true, too. Yeah. And it may or may not get there. To be clear, Mike Johnson, of course, did later say, well, his first statement to The New York Times was, by definition, a secret is not to be shared, and I don't intend to share this one, which is extra cryptic. And then a couple days later, he's at some small rally, and he's like, well, you know, that was all just fun. Nothing scandalous. We're having a ball with this. The media, their heads are exploding, which, of course, you know, to trigger the lips, it's like a fun thing to do, right? But then he says, the thing we have is about, it's a get out the vote. It's one of our tactics on get out the vote, which is not what Trump was talking about. He was not talking about a little secret for getting more votes, you know, getting people to the polls. But the House of Representatives has a little secret that we're not going to know about, but it's a get out the vote thing. That doesn't seem right. Right. We're going to get more people to the polls than the other party. That's our little secret. Yeah. I guess we're going to kidnap them and drag them to the polls. I don't know. All this conjecture is actually hilarious to us, that people are apoplectic about this. It's our get out the vote strategy, he says. That's what we're talking about. And it's almost a tongue-in-cheek thing. Yeah. It's very funny. We need a joke about throwing an election. Everybody enjoys these jokes. It's also just what politicians have become. You know, it's like every so often we should recognize how far we've fallen. Isn't the job of politicians to be like, hey, constituents, what do you need and how can I help you? Instead of, we love that everyone hates that we did this and we're trolling you. And there's just like high school bullies now. Yeah. That is weird. That didn't used to be how it was. I also remember back when politicians were calm and reassuring and trying to make us feel better about things. And not, you know, get people amped up. But here we are. It's 2024. So, Elie Mystal wrote a piece in The Nation. I do like Elie Mystal. I think he's generally got a good perspective. I think that this is clickbait. And I'm just going to break down why that is. The piece is called “That Little Secret Between Trump and Johnson”. Here's what it could mean. This is in The Nation a couple of days ago. We'll link to it. And on the first read, this is pretty terrifying. And this is something that people have been sharing a lot. There's been a lot of commentary about it this week. And I haven't really seen the pushback on why this is honestly kind of ridiculous. So, we're going to get into it. I do think that some of it is worth paying attention to because certainly we should be watching these people and we should be ready for anything. But he starts off with the idea that obviously what the Republicans really want to get us into is an electoral college tie. And the chances of that organically are, I've seen, about one-half of one percent right now. Literally one-half, one percent. And just to be clear, if people don't know, under the 12th Amendment, if there is a 269-269 tie, and I should be clear that there has only been a 269-269 tie possibility since 1969, when the 23rd Amendment gave D.C. the electoral votes and created the possibility of a tie. So, we've only ever had to use the 12th Amendment once. And that was in 1824. And there were four candidates. We don't have that anymore. That's just not going to happen. We're going to have two candidates forever, it seems like. At this point, when you only have two parties, it's either going to be a tie or a win. In that case, the House gave it to John Quincy Adams. But again, we're a two-party country. This is just extremely unlikely that you're going to get a straight tie. There are some freak scenarios. I'm not a statistician. I don't care. If it happens, it happens. We'll talk about it. But the... The chances that it actually happens are so low. So, in that situation, however... And this is something they were trying to drive things to in January 6th as well. The House delegations line up, and they cast one vote each. It's very strange. It's not... Like, each member... It's just a stupid, arbitrary thing. I think it was just like 3 a.m. during the Constitutional Convention or whenever they wrote this amendment, rather. And they're just like, yeah, let's just do it this way. It definitely has a feel of like, we've already kind of done the other stuff. Like, let's do a different sort of tiebreaker. Like, you're designing a game. Like, this will be a... Dead-and-death overtime, but each state gets, for some reason, one vote, which makes no sense. It's a little mini-game where you line up your House delegations. And so, right now, even if we have more... Technically speaking, there's still going to be 26 out of 50 House delegations will be majority Republican, even if we flip a few seats. So, because they're majority Republican, they'll get to cast that vote. So, you'll get the scenario of 26 out of 50 electing the president, deciding who the electors are. Excuse me. Say that again. Electing the president in lieu of the elector. It's just like doing a sudden death, like you said. You know, just end of the soccer game where you just take a shot on the goal. So, that, he's saying, is not very likely. We understand that to be the case. And he's making an argument they don't have to get there. That they don't have to rig it in such a way. Because, you know, you can think of different ways they could try to rig it to get to a tie so they could reach to that point. And he's saying that the states will play games to get there. The chain of events he's presenting, I'm going to suggest to you, are easily overcome by the Electoral Count Reform Act, which was the 2022 reform of the Electoral Count Act. I think that if the Electoral Count Act of 1877 were still in place, the way that it was... Still in place, the way that it were, we should be a lot more worried. But we did actually install some pretty good guardrails. There's good safeguards right now. But let's just talk about Mistal's chain of events here. And this is what's been freaking people out this week. So, I think it's just worth getting into. Sure. So, the 12th Amendment provides that the winner is the majority of the whole number of electors appointed. So, the denominator is the majority... Excuse me. The denominator is the whole number of electors. Like, whatever pool you're working from. And Mistal is coming up with a situation in which a majority of how many electors show up. So, somehow we're able to reduce the... The pool of electors, but still have the same sort of majority numbers. And he's saying we don't have to use fake electors like they did last time. That they could just convince legislatures and governors not to submit their slates before the deadline. And just delay things out. And kick everything past. And there's two deadlines built into the ECRA. The one of them is for the electors to meet on the 11th. And the other one is for them to have everything certified by the 17th. So, he's coming up with these ideas. The example he gives is that if Harris wins 270, but Wisconsin refuses to submit the state's 10 electors by the deadline... So, the new total number of electors becomes 528 rather than 538. And then Trump just needs 264 to get to the majority. And so, you're just kind of playing with the numbers. And whittling things down and making it easier and easier. So, at this point, he's saying that Mike Johnson could play along and just say, Well, the deadlines are passed. These electors aren't coming in. You know, the states had their chance to get things in, but they didn't do it. And he could extend the deadline. And obviously, Mistal is saying that wouldn't happen. Nancy Pelosi would have extended it, but Mike Johnson wouldn't. Okay. So, I'm a little unclear about what he thinks is going to happen at this point. Because it takes a joint session on January 6th of the House and the Senate, presided over by the Vice President. Mike Johnson may not be in the picture at all. Because he may be out of power on January 3rd. The new Congress will be sworn in between January 3rd and January 6th. That's right. Because the new Congress is sworn in before the President, right? Right. And they'll be coming in as a joint session as a new Congress. Right. And so, the House clerk will be in charge until there's a Speaker elected. And they won't get that together until then. If it is the Democrats, it'd be Hakeem Jeffries. He's the minority leader right now. So, this is a joint session. Mike Johnson, at this point, I think if I understand Mistal's argument correctly, he's saying that because he's allowed them to blow these deadlines, and states haven't submitted these things, that the new Congress has to just accept whatever the electors are, whatever's been certified and sent up to them at that point. And the Republicans could game it such that you don't have enough certifications to actually be able to carry it. So, I don't really understand, to be honest. I read this several times. The first time I read it, okay, I thought maybe there's something to this. And then by the fifth or sixth time, after I read through the Electoral Account Reform Act again and thought about how this all worked and looked up about how it's been applied. Now, this is the first real test run of the ECRA in a presidential election, obviously. So, there may still be holes and leaks that we haven't thought of. Maybe things could still happen. But a couple of things. The Electoral Account Act deadlines are not the same as certification. They're just deadlines that can be extended by Congress. There's provisions built in into 3OSC 15. In which judges can come back. Federal judges can be like, hey, where are those certifications? Would you like to get those in? The archivist can come back after the deadline and say, hey, where are my certifications? Because you're supposed to send them into the archivist for official inclusion to be recognized and passed on to the joint session. So, the deadlines are not, like, I think Massal is treating them as if they're in stone. And they're not quite like that. That's one of the reassurances that I have here. Is that, you know, sure, they have to be certified by the governor. They have to meet. These are shells that are in 3OSC 15. All part of the ECRA and all part of these reforms to try to eliminate these different places where there were weaknesses. So, the shells mean that you can immediately go to federal court and get a mandamus if any of these people refuse to do their jobs, including the governor. You can get a federal court order. It's very strong. And it's all built into the ECRA to allow you to get review as quickly as possible. If there's any challenges to the electors, if there's any challenge to fraud or process or anything else, there's a mechanism built into the ECRA by which you go in front of a panel that's going to be made of two district court judges. And they're going to evaluate this claim, and they have to do it before these deadlines. It's like an extremely expedited schedule by these panels. This is all considered. But Stahl doesn't get in any of this. I'm not sure if he's not familiar with the ECRA or if he just doesn't trust these things or maybe he doesn't trust the judges. I don't think we're at the point yet where we can assume we have that many bad judges that you're going to have them allow them to pass on all of this. And again, we cannot count on the good faith of the Republican Party. But we do have enough Brad Raffenspergers and people like that. And the Michigan Elections Board has said very clearly that they are not going to have. Any tolerance for this. The state election officials have specifically said that if the canvassers who are responsible at the county level refuse to certify that the law is clear in our responsibility, that they're going to make everybody understand that any attempts to refuse to certify results will be futile and they should not be deceived by it. This is from Republican state officials in Michigan. Maybe they mean it, maybe they don't. But, you know, I think that's for now. That's that's pretty good. Thirty five state officials tried to refuse to certify in 2022, and they were all overridden. It didn't work. And in fact, two of them in Arizona were actually indicted. They were indicted for conspiracy and election interference because they were so flagrant about it. So, again, as long as you have a judiciary that we can trust and again, that that may not be maybe a few election cycles, we can't trust the judiciary the way that we can now. But for the most part, I don't think that federal judges want to be in a position of upholding a completely lawless refusal to certify elections. And these things are built in their shells. Right. So the electors have to be they shall be certified by the governor. They shall meet on December 17th and vote. And if these things don't happen, there's pretty strong safeguards built in to make them do that. Mistel doesn't get in any of that. And I think that's telling somewhat. So, you know, he's putting all this power on Mike Johnson that just doesn't exist. Fortunately, it is still a joint session and you can't just have Mike Johnson unilaterally do anything at that point when it's in front of Congress. Also worth mentioning, just in case we get another sort of rogue Republican administration, that the Electoral Count Reform Act made it very clear that the vice president's role is completely ceremonial at this point. There's no question that the vice president has no power over these votes, just in case that ever comes up again for any reason. Yeah, I'm sure Mag will be like, we still want to hang Mike Pence, though, just because. Right. So Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution allows the House to set its own rules on these things. It can be flexible if it needs to be. And at the end of the day, Ira Goldman is an interesting follow on Twitter. He had some things to say about this. He's an attorney. He's done a lot of parliamentarian work. And he was actually suggesting something I hadn't thought about, which is that it actually would be. This is very strange to think about after January 6th, but it would be legitimate for Kamala Harris electors to meet if it were certain. That Kamala Harris were actually lawfully elected in that state. They could meet and submit something purporting to be certified election results. And that sounds a lot like what the Trump people were doing, the fake electorate scheme. But it wouldn't be, because what they'd be doing is what the Trump electors properly did in Pennsylvania to Mexico, which is that they used language saying that the electors would only be in place if Trump won his pending challenges. They said this is a contingent thing, right? So if it works out, if the courts say that we're supposed to be here, that these are our certificates. It's like in golf when you hit a provisional, when you might've hit it out of bounds. I love just using sports stuff with you and you're like, yeah, sure. Yeah. When your golf stick. I didn't know there was a provisional in golf. And your disc. I don't know. There is in normal people golf where it's like, it takes too long to go check if your ball is out of bounds and then go back and hit another one. So you hit a provisional ball. And then if your ball's in bounds, you discard that ball. If it's out of bounds, you got to play it. That's exactly what you're talking about. I didn't just bring it up arbitrarily, right? But the problem in Michigan and the other places where people in Georgia where they've been charged with crimes, and we talked about the Georgia one not too long ago, is that they said that they were the duly elected and qualified electors. So as long as they don't do that, you can still send up the slate. Now, the whole thing is with the ECRA, though, is they're specifically trying to take any power away from Congress and leave it in the courts to determine which things are being lawfully certified. So if you have a situation in which something has not been lawfully certified and you have to object on that reason, that means the courts have failed pretty badly. Something has gone wrong because it should have all been sorted before it got to Congress. And on top of that, for the joint session, another thing that really made things easier on January 6th for the bad guys was that it only takes one objection from the House and one objection from the Senate in the joint session to trigger an objection process. And after the ECRA, fortunately, you actually have to have 20% of the House and Senate agree on an objection if there's going to be an objection to one of the certifications. I wish we had written in, and it can't be Ted Cruz. That's right. At that point, once the objection is put in, it has to be a majority to sustain the objection. So this is pretty serious. It's not that easy to just say we don't want to see these. My memory is that that bill did not fix everything, and there were things we wanted in that bill. But I do remember that it did fix a lot, and it did make me feel slightly better. And this is one of those things. Yeah, if we're still rocking with 1877 law on this election, I'd be very concerned. But we're doing a little better at least. There's also the question about what if and how this gets to the Supreme Court. And that is a longer conversation. But Rick Hassan, the election lawyer that we talked about last time, he did some interesting analysis about the Morby-Harper holding, which is the independent state legislature theory. Now, that was swatted down by the Supreme Court last year as it regarded redistricting. But there's some questions based on some language in Bush v. Gore that suggest that maybe there might still be some federal court review. Is that language, we win, ha, ha, ha, ha? Yeah, pretty much. But just this time. Yeah. Can't look at it again. Like, what if that applied to next time? I believe, actually, as you mentioned, Morby-Harper was the first time that a majority decision cited Bush v. Gore since it had come down. That's right. I remember that now, yeah. So, yeah, it's a little weird. So, the essential holding, though, was that when state legislatures prescribe the rules concerning federal elections, they remain subject to the ordinary exercise of state judicial review. But there's something in the Kavanaugh concurrence that's sort of suggesting that based on what he sees from the Rehnquist language and Bush v. Gore, that there's a possibility we could still get federal review out of this. That there might be a path to federal court. And that's what I'm concerned about, of course, is if we get one of these challenges that the Supreme Court finds a way to take in a crucial state, we could actually have an issue. But that's apart from the ECRA. That's just the Supreme Court being the Supreme Court. And that's not even something that Mustahl gets into. I was just thinking about other ways this could go wrong. And especially anything that involves right now the Supreme Court reviewing it could go wrong. We know that. So, this is an interesting read, the Elie Mystal piece. But the more I thought about it, especially in light of the actual ECRA protections, I'm not naive enough to think that the system always works or that we can count on everything to work. Yeah, of course. The way it's supposed to. Certainly, I don't count on Republicans of good faith in these positions, but there's enough built in that we don't have to. Yeah, and there's a certain number of people who will just try to out-cynic and say the whole thing's going to be wrong and not work at every turn. And they might be right, but those people don't ever count their misses. Yeah. So, it's like if every time they say, nah, it's corrupt, they'll steal it. It's like it's worthwhile to worry about that when we need to worry about that. But if you just say that every time, it's not really actually helpful. So, I appreciate you digging into the details. I appreciate you digging into the details and looking at, you know, how this could actually happen. Sounds like this article, maybe not that great. Didn't quite do it. No, I think it got a lot of attention because it scared people. And it's that time of year when we all want to read horror stories and get scared. But, yeah, I think we can safely put the flashlight away on this one at least. And, again, I hope I'm completely correct. This is one. Usually, I don't mind being wrong. I really hope I'm not wrong on this one. My primary take on this is that Trump was trolling and that Johnson was happy to go along with the troll. But if they do have some kind of secret plan, I don't think it's to somehow... Maybe that's the closest thing, is finding some way to get the states to reduce the total number of electors that are sent. Yeah, here's the other thing. Just feeling out who we know Trump is. I kind of feel like this quote-unquote big secret would be something that we all already knew. Because, like, that's always... Hey, no one knew. No one knew X thing. No one knew. What was the one he said? Remember when he was like, yeah, Frederick Douglass getting all... Whoever knew. Get a lot of press these days. Like, everything he comes across. God, it's so good. Everything he comes across is new. If he hasn't seen it, it's brand new. And I feel like maybe someone told him the ties thing. Although, I don't know. I feel like he would have known that from last time. But that's what it feels like. Like, oh, okay. If there's a tie, then blah, blah, blah. Or, well, now that I say that, maybe not. Maybe it is some stupid plan that they think they can do. But they're not the best students. They're not on the right. They're not the best students. So maybe they are misreading this law. Or maybe we're screwed and don't know it. I don't know. Yeah, could be. But like you said at the beginning, I trust our lawyers a little more than theirs. Yeah, for sure. I mean, they had John Eastman, who's now been disbarred and disgraced. And, you know, we'll go through his plan. Honestly, his plan could have worked under the previous version of the UCA. It was a long shot, but it certainly could have worked. But I just don't see. And again, maybe there's going to be some equivalent of the Eastman memo that comes out in the next few months where we see their big secret plan. And there's certainly. I'm not a parliamentarian. I'm not an expert on how you get things through the House and Senate. But I just don't see this particular one being the way. Well, that's a relief. Thanks so much for that breakdown. Appreciate it. One less thing that I have to worry about for real. That's how I felt. Yeah.

Illegal immigration of Elon Musk

So let's talk about something a little more fun. Oh, is it fun? Okay, good. Elon Musk is not usually fun. He's not my idea of fun. Not usually, but he's been caught in a pretty serious lie. And I think that's worth highlighting. And it's a lie that has a lot to do with the stuff he's been talking about recently. As we all know, I think Elon Musk, especially since he took over Twitter and especially within the last year or so, has been obsessed with immigration. Talking all the time. About how it's time for mass deportation. About how people have to follow the rules. About how we need more legal immigration. He's been fully behind great replacement stuff. He's been talking about how the Democrats are bringing in undocumented people to vote. The whole thing. So he's gone full MAGA on immigration especially. So that was why I was especially interested over the weekend when The Washington Post. The story was led by my old friend Maria Shachetti, who used to write for The Boston Globe. Who continues to do great work with The Post. She reported, along with others, that Elon Musk had registered at Stanford to maintain a student visa. But never actually attended. She attended classes at Stanford. And when you start to unravel this, it gets pretty interesting. Now, this seems like a pretty credible report. And for what it's worth, it's consistent exactly with what his brother said in public in 2013. So let's play that. Like, oh, we did this reporting. Oh, also, it turns out his brother has said it already. But, you know, we still did the reporting. In fact, when they did fund us, they realized that we were illegal immigrants. Well, I'd say it's a great area. Yes, we were. We were illegal immigrants. We were sleeping in the office. We didn't have a car. We had one car, but the wheel kept falling off. Oh, well, I can hear that he has the same accent as, what's his name? Trevor Noah. Yeah. His brother does. But I've never heard that out of Elon. I don't know. Elon has, like, a different accent. Am I wrong? It's very strange. That is weird. It's like a weird hybrid. But there you go. So, you know, obviously, Elon is very upset that Kimball is saying this in public. But he's like, no, no, it's a gray area. It's fine. But he knows full well that he was out of status. And I'm going to talk about what that means and how he was out of status. Because I think it's worth filling these blanks in. And I wouldn't usually care that much about what I consider to be a fairly minor immigration violation. It's a minor immigration violation with major consequences, or it should have if you weren't Elon Musk. But this isn't the kind of thing I would harp on about a normal person. It's certainly the kind of thing I defend all the time. But this is Elon Musk. And this is somebody who is an absolute hypocrite on so many different things, but especially on this one. And I think it's worth really pointing out how that is. So I went back and looked through the history of what we know about Elon Musk online. And I found some lies straight up. We'll talk about those. But there's a defamation case, Eberhard v. Musk, in 2009, when the co-founder of Tesla actually sued him because he had referred to himself essentially as the sole founder of Tesla. He sued him for defamation over this. And so Martin Eberhard. Just FYI, he's always been a liar. Elon has always been. This isn't new. He's always been a liar. And about his education, on top of everything else, his actual educational history. He's openly lied not only to the public, but to the SEC, as we'll get to. So Martin Eberhard, in the course of this discovery, he details that he's been lying about his educational history. This is in 2009, so we have some kind of a basis. Before really understanding completely what's going on with immigration, that quote from Kimball was in 2013 when they're in public. And he's just like, yeah, we were undocumented for a while. And that's the kind of thing that perks my ear up. So Elon came to the U.S. to attend UPenn as a junior in 1992. And he didn't actually finish that degree. He told people he did. He told people publicly that he did. Let's play a clip of that real quick. Gee, it sure is easy. It's easy to find places where he's lied. That's weird. Way too easy. It really depends on what somebody's goal is. If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing college. In my case, I had to. Otherwise, I'd get kicked out of the country. Yeah. So that was important. Although you went on and got a master's degree as well, right? I came out to Silicon Valley to do a Ph.D. at Stanford in applied physics and material science to work on all the things that I was doing. I was working in the field of electrical capacitors for used and electric cars, and that's what I was going to do. And then I started to put that on hold to start a company. But since I already had my undergrad, I could then get an H-1B visa and that kind of thing. So the H-1B visa requires a degree. Okay. So correct. Very interesting. It's like he knows all of the elements of the crime he's committed. Right. Yes. Really spelling it out. Yeah. It is true that an H-1B requires a college degree. It is not true that Elon Musk had a college degree in 1995. Ooh. There's a lie. I forgot about that. Yep. No. He got his degree in 97, and he actually got both degrees in 97. He got a B.A. in physics and a B.S. in economics, and he finished them both in 97. He did not receive an undergraduate degree in 1995. So just off the bat, he's lying about something because he knows he needs to pretend that he had an H-1 at that time. An H-1 would be a pretty standard employment visa for high-skilled tech workers, especially. It's used in all kinds of different high-skilled fields. Yeah. But we just know off the bat that's not true. Wow. And he also, as I said, he put that on his SAC filings when he was on the board of directors, that he received a degree in economics. Yeah. He received a degree from UPenn in 1995. And UPenn has confirmed that he completed both his B.A. in physics and his B.S. in economics in 1997, and he does not have a degree from 1995. Wow. Very important. So J-1 visas are strictly tied to your academic program. And what he was saying in that clip was when he went to Stanford originally, he was going to go do this physics degree and a Ph.D., and that he was going to do this on a J-1. And what he did instead was he dropped out of Stanford after two days, and he founded the startup Zip2. Now, again, nothing wrong with dropping out of Stanford. Plenty of tech guys have done that. It's just, unfortunately, when you're an entrepreneur, you're not going to be able to do that. Unfortunately, when you're a non-citizen, your J-1 visa is tied to your academic program. And the moment you drop out of classes, you're done. You don't have a visa anymore. Wow. You've got 30 days to leave the country. And also, your employment has to be authorized through your J-1 program, and it has to be related to your program. Remember, he's getting a Ph.D. in physics. He's not getting a Ph.D. in computer science. Oh, yeah. So they wouldn't have approved his tech startup as something that he could have done in what's called optional practical training, OPT. So it's completely unrelated to physics, and it's his own startup. Now, I'm a little more sympathetic to this. Because I really believe there should be a startup visa. There should be an entrepreneur visa. It doesn't exist. And it's really a problem for my clients. We work with a lot of people here in the Cambridge area that are trying to start businesses, that are getting involved in companies, and they want to share. And you can't sponsor yourself. And I really think that you should be able to if you're working with it. Basically, you should be able to put out a business plan to immigration and say, this is what I got. These are my qualifications. You could have people write opinions saying, this looks like a good business plan. This could work. Sure. And that would work. But that's not how it is. So you have to stay on your academic program while you're getting your PhD. And you have to work in a related field. He didn't do either of those things. And this was all in 97 at this point. But Matt, what are rules when a white person is breaking them? You know? Like, what are they really? A white, wealthy South African with emerald mine money. Yeah. Yeah. It's just paper. It doesn't matter. That's right. That's right. So in 95, at this point, again, he has dropped out of Stanford. He is not lawfully in the United States. And he is not lawfully employed. And Zip2, the board member. Becomes very concerned about this because they say, we don't want our founder being deported. Their immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed running a company in the US. Like, they knew this. The board was aware. Wow. That the musks were out of status. And it was a major concern for the investors because they want to try to go public here. And so they got a funding agreement that specifically said they had 45 days to figure this out. And so that meant everybody understood that they were out of status. So you've got two distinct violations here. You've got your failure to actually participate in the J-1 program that was sponsoring your visa. And then you've got unlawful employment. Under INA 245 C, either one of these things is a hard bar to residency through employment. Wow. If you've ever been found to have worked without permission, if you've ever been here without permission. Wow. Yeah. You can get a waiver potentially, the hardship waiver through family. But there is no general way to just get around that, no matter how qualified you are. And so under normal circumstances, under the enforcement, the way that it is now, not as of 95, 97, when he was kind of going through this. That should have been the end of his immigration pathway. J-1 visas are very strictly enforced right now. Elon Musk could have been averted. We could have avoided this whole Musk. Could have been denied residency, could have been denied citizenship. And he could have been deported, frankly, over this. Boy, it's complicated to have feelings of like, dang, I wish they deported this guy. Tell me about it. Yeah. No, it's the kind of thing where it's kind of a technicality. And going into Zip2. And sticking with the path that he was on allowed him to sell it for $300 million in 99. Sets him up for the rest of his career. Makes him who he is. Because he spent that time out of status without working lawfully. And who knows what would have happened if he'd finished his PhD at Stanford instead and gone through this whole physics thing and missed out on the late 90s tech boom. It could have been a whole different thing for him. So it really benefited him, as it often does, for him to go to status. From my understanding of reading this, it seems like he might have been out of status for about a year, which is a pretty big deal. It's a lot of time. And people would be wondering, is there anything to be done about this now? Or is it like statue of limitations? No. There's no statute of limitations because he's a citizen and he lied to get his citizenship. That's the other part of this. It's a great question. I did want to talk about denaturalization. Because you can have denaturalization proceedings initiated under INI 340A. The US Attorney will initiate those proceedings based on a finding of fraud or misrepresentation specifically under 340A. There are other ways that you can have your naturalization taken away. Obviously, this doesn't apply to people that were born here. But if you naturalize, you were doing it after going through an exam where you swore under pains and penalties of perjury that everything in your application is correct. And one of the things you're doing when you confirm before you go through naturalization with kind of their last look at you before you're somebody that we can't deport, you have to swear under pains, penalties, perjury that you have never committed any kind of fraud or misrepresentation to get to the place where you are now, immigration-wise. And they have to be able to show that was both a willful and a material misrepresentation. And material doesn't even mean that it would have made the difference, but just that it would have been important for the analysis. Like as a matter of discretion, it would be important. Right. It's important to know that you'd lied about this. You dropped out of your J-1 program. So this is, again, I don't want him to be naturalized. I don't want him to be deported. Oh, I do. I do. Maybe this one. But typically, too, I should say, denaturalization proceedings were vastly expanded under Trump. I think he doubled the size of the denaturalization force. They made a big thing about it at the time. But they still only do it for people who are like war criminals or like seriously, like if you lied about killing a guy or something. Well, he might be. Yeah, could be. It's true. There's the Starlink stuff. I mean, he's not definitely not a war criminal. I don't know. He's a future war criminal, maybe. He's on his way. He's an aspiring war criminal. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yes. America's next top war criminal. Maybe you can get a war criminal visa, though, a business plan. Here's my war crimes plan. And somebody in the Trump administration approves and they're like, that is a good war crimes memo. I do want to contrast this with a couple of other famous examples of people that have definitely committed these kinds of violations, both also white immigrants. So we've got Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course, who admits in his biography that he made more arrangements to work as a bodyguard. He was a body builder before he came on his tourist visa. So that's a huge problem. He came in in 1968. I didn't realize he'd been around that long. So just agreeing to work on a tourist visa, let alone working on a tourist visa, but having that agreement ahead of time before you come in the country is pretty bad. You're really not supposed to do that. Really? Yeah. Because tourist visa, you're not supposed to get paid. You're allowed to receive compensation if you make an appearance or something, but you can't get a salary. That means you're getting a visa under false pretenses, essentially. That's right. And that you're violating the terms of it when you get here. You're not getting paid. And we know from his biography that he said he did this and he didn't receive his H2 employment visa until about a year later. So again, there's this gap where he's definitely working for pay. And that's the same thing as with Musk, where that should be an instant disqualifier for residency and for citizenship in the future. Who could have avoided his governorship of California too. God, this is complicated because now I'm like, well, maybe we should tighten up on these policies. What could we end up with? Yeah. Well, there's another one too. While he was running for governor. I didn't know this. I knew about the bodybuilding one. But he bragged in a Spanish-only campaign that while he was on his H2 that he set up a bricklaying business, which is completely illegal. He was here on the H2 for bodybuilding. You're not allowed to do other kinds of employment. It's just like with the J1. It has to be cleared in your field. And so this would have been side income, unlawful employment. So he's admitting twice over to unlawful employment and possibly unlawful status from what I understand about the original. Unless he's like, well, the bricks are part of my workout. So it could be. Yeah. It could be a product of bodybuilding. I'd make that argument. Why not? Let's say if I had to defend him, I'd go for that. But you know, again, somebody else under today's standards wouldn't have made it. And I meant to mention before, J1 enforcement has gotten much harsher since 9-11, especially. And he was benefiting from the pre-9-11 immigration regime. And I've seen them track people down in places like Vermont. They will come for you. Like if they know you've overstayed your J1, they will send somebody up from Boston driving six hours to go find you and track you down. Even though you don't have a criminal record or anything else, just because you've overstayed the J1. I'm concerned about that. And I'm sure you know that a lot of the, almost all of the hijackers in 9-11 overstayed student visas. So that became something they really were looking out for. Only a couple of them were J1s, I think, but J1 and F1 are the two major student visa categories. So the other one I want to talk about was Melania Trump. You might've heard she had a very shady immigration history. You're not making it easy for me to continue to be on the left on immigration. Yeah. No, I'm with you. Could have avoided her too. The other way to look at this too is it's so common to commit immigration violations. Yeah, it's true. All the good stories of people who we would want here. You picked some, at least two of the worst examples and one pretty questionable example that is really like, and that's, and that's why we don't want to be like the other side that takes single stories and tries to make policy out of them, disregarding the wellbeing of so many other people. And I mean that seriously, but oh boy, you do make it hard. Yeah, I know. And it is, I mean, I've met hundreds of people who've overstayed their visas or worked on awfully. You are otherwise absolutely model citizens and absolutely deserve a chance here. And I think this really does highlight when you're talking about people you've heard of, here's like three celebrities that you've heard of who all had pretty serious immigration violations and got away with it. And these are, you know, and, and Melania Trump happens to be married to somebody who spent years and years and years focusing on the people who committed one immigration violation of coming across the border. But arguably overstaying a visa is actually worse than coming across the border, depending on who you ask. So Melania Trump, one announced at the time, came to the US August 27th, 1997. And she was like, you know what? I'm not going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm not going to do this. I'm going to do this. And so she got her H one B work visa on October 18th 96. So there's a couple of months there where she wasn't supposed to be working and the associated press did a pretty thorough investigation that we'll link to. It's actually very well documented. And then determined from the, the receipts and information they reviewed. That she was paid for 10 modeling jobs in the United States for $20,000. This was in 1996. That's pretty good. Yeah. For the seven weeks before she had legal permission to work, she had those contracts and was paid 20,000. thousand dollars. It's huge. It's a really big violation. That's something that would absolutely get you denied residency. Now, as somebody married to a U.S. citizen, she would have been eligible for a fraud waiver. So she would have had the opportunity to say that not granting the waiver would cause extreme hardship to Donald Trump. I have to say that out loud. That's kind of funny. They go, Donald Trump, is this true? Nah. Yeah. I'll just buy another one of them. Remember, he said something about that in his trial. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm measuring. It's funny. Oh, I mean, yeah, it's kind of inconvenient, but it's not. True love. We already got married. I want to get divorced. Pretty much, yeah. But I think that's a pretty good example as well of somebody that is right there. She would have at least been eligible for a waiver potentially, but those waivers are not automatic and you still have to prove some kind of hardship. So I think it's a good sort of way to examine how common these things are. And the fact is, though, that Elon Musk, by the rules that he is preaching, by what he's saying, is a good example of how common these things are. He wants us to believe. Should have been out of here, man. Absolutely. He's very big on legal immigration, and I think he should be held to that. Yeah. No kidding. It's the age-old story of differences in privilege, where it's like, we know by the numbers that white people, for example, do more drugs, but they don't get policed as much. And so privileged white kid gets busted for something. It's not a big deal. They find a way that it's okay. These things for people of color just disqualifyingly instantly ruin their lives because they don't have the resources to get out of it. Yeah. In the same way that white people do. It's just another example of that, it seems like. It's the same crap that he's talking about. He just did, and it didn't affect him. It doesn't matter. And it's exactly the same thing, where black drug dealers are held up as the model of dangerousness, where white college kid drug dealers are just kind of doing college. It's just the same kind of thing. Industrious. It's the same approach to immigration. I've always seen it the same. That is really interesting. I love when we do these stories because I often, again, at a glance, I don't know like, ah, what's kind of a bullshit gotcha, that isn't real. It sounds like this is very real. Like, this is a very real thing that happened. This is not some left conspiracy theory gotcha. No, and he's trying his best to explain it, but he hasn't been able to do that, really. His best he could do is October 27th, actually at 3.30 in the morning, he tweeted, I was on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H-1B. They know this. They have my records. Losing the election is making them desperate. It did transition to an H-1B somehow at some point, but he definitely violated the terms of his status before he did that. No question. So it doesn't matter. Okay. But could we get him out of here? Is there still, you said they don't tend to do it, but like, what has to happen for that? You'd have to have a U.S. attorney initiate like denaturalization proceedings in a federal court and very likely a criminal. Do you know any or? It'd look pretty bad if Kamala Harris came in and immediately started denaturalizing. No, let's do it now. Let's have a Biden do it. Yeah, he's fine. And he's immune. No, I can't say it's correct. Or in the lame duck period, you know? Yeah. Why not? Go nuts. Get him out of here. It's a good idea. Make a big example of it. You know, we try, I'm like, hey, we tried to pass the toughest border bill. Donald Trump said no. Well, here's something we can do to try to enforce the law against law-breaking immigrants who did it wrong. They didn't do it the right way. He did it wrong. Therefore, Elon Musk, you're gone. You're out of here. It's over. Making an example of you. Thanks for playing. That's right. It's a good chance for Democrats to get tough on immigration. There you go. Because they are doing that. So like that we do do this thing where, oh, we'll find little examples to get tough on immigration. But hey, here's one that we all will be happy about. Every Democrat will be like, okay, sure. Why not?

McDonalds Ice Cream

That was already so delightful. I almost feel like I don't need a footnote fetish, but I still want one, Matt. Well, it's dessert. You got to have your dessert. Absolutely. There's always room for dessert. We deserve dessert. We've been through a lot here. So we've got a tasty McFootnote from the request of listener Lydia S. has put this one in. This is something that matters a lot to me. I will tell you right away. I love ice cream and I love fast food ice cream. I can't help it. I will not apologize. I even go in for shamrock season. I am that depraved. Oh, wow. I know. It's minty-faced. That one's a little too weird for me. But sure. It's so gross. You do you. I just can't stop sucking them down. I know. It's a terrible habit. So we're combining two of my favorites. One of my fetishes today, ice cream and footnotes. This is an example of the administrative state really getting it right, because I think we all understand, at least those of us who frequent McDonald's for the ice cream understand. It's a meme at this point. The ice cream at McDonald's breaks all the time. Yeah. Ice cream machines are just completely unreliable. And you can actually go right now to mcbroken.com, which is a website that uses bots to test out if you can buy ice cream at different McDonald's locations. They have a robot walk in. Hello, can I have some ice cream? Sorry, I know that's not what it is, but that would be great. I like that. Somebody, some deranged billionaires. Yes, I would like one human ice cream, please. Just sending an army of robots to every McDonald's in the world. I do like that idea. Yeah, but no, mcbroken.com right now is showing that 14.5% of all McDonald's ice cream machines in the United States are down as of today. Wow. They reported. Wow. And just to pick two cities at random, that includes 9% of the ice cream machines in greater Boston and 20% of San Francisco's. That's a lot. Wow. That's a lot. A one out of five chance of just not getting the thing you want. It's a bummer. I mean, it's, yeah, no, and it's, it's a disappointing thing. I mean, I've heard it so many times. The ice cream machine is broken today. Do we have any, this is not important, but do we have any baseline of comparison, like in and out or something? Cause that's a lot. Anyway, we don't, it doesn't matter. Wendy's has made a big thing about how their ice cream machines never break. They've actually made a campaign out of it. That anecdotally is true. I do go for the frosty or used to, and then, you know, notice that the frosties were staying with me a lot. Like I was just seemed to be accumulating like a protective layer of frosties that I wore around all the time. Couldn't get rid of. And so I stopped doing that as much, but I don't think I ever had a time where they were out of order. I don't think I ever did. Same. And I frequented more than one would admit. Yeah. So the deal is the reason, do you know about this? I, this, I, I'd read about this long ago and I was very, I was delighted with what they brought this up today because I read this story in wired, which we'll link to about four years ago. And it really stuck in my head because, you know, this is something that matters to me. It turns out that Ray crack, the, guy who made McDonald's what it is today, right? When he bought the McDonald's deal, when he bought the whole thing, he made a handshake agreement that he was going to give exclusive rights to the ice cream in 1956. He was going to give exclusive rights to the ice cream to the Taylor company. This one company that makes ice cream machines. And it turns out the Taylor company has been exploiting this exclusive deal for a very long time. These machines are $18,000 each and they have no right to repair them. So you have to get a really fancy, all the franchisees and McDonald's have to get this really fancy, expensive repair contract for thousands of dollars a month. And I could not believe in the wired story that includes things like just like helping you get through. There's, there's like a secret menu in the machine where you're doing things like setting the temperature of the hopper and like how much glycol is going in. So like stuff you should be able to do like with your own machine that you have to get a technician out to get to. So this is like wired said, this is not only a right to repair issue. It is a milkshake shakedown, which I appreciate milkshake. So Melissa Nelson and Jeremy O'Sullivan were students when they invented something called the kitsch that could access the machines. And they started selling it to franchisees. This is very, borderline because the digital industrious, it's great. This is a real need in the market. Like this is capitalism demands it, whatever visa they were on. I approve it. Franchisees were very happy to be able to pay them a few hundred bucks or whatever, instead of the thousands of thousands of dollars in these contracts to have some people come out and just to reset the machine every time it overheated, which is all the time. It turns out because they're just, so this is where the 1998 digital millennium copyright act comes in the DMCA and that you've probably heard about the DMCA in other contexts, but the 17 USC, 1201 specifically prohibits devices, which prohibits circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works, which includes software. So things that jailbreak phones, for example, now there's been an exemption for a while to allow you to jailbreak phones. That's just like a temporary exemption has been strung along, but the DMCA was at the time trying to maintain some kind of proprietary stuff for a lot of different technologies. And so there's a provision in 17 USC, 1201 that allows temporary exemptions. And those can be for three years at a time, and they can only be authorized by the Librarian of Congress. What? Very strange because the Librarian of Congress has a lot to do with copyright overseas, generally copy in the United States. So if you're going to do something that circumvents copyright, you have to have the Librarian of Congress sign off on the ice cream machine. That's what has happened here. Who is the Librarian of Congress and how do they get there to beat all the other librarians in a Dewey decimal system contest? Library of Congress is a super cool place. I bet. So right now, Carla hidden is the incumbent. She's actually been there since September 14th, 2016. Her job duties include, just to mention this, she appoints and oversees the register of copyrights of the US Copyright Office. She has broad responsibilities around copyright, and she does all the fair use stuff and the DMCA that we were just talking about, as well as the temporary exemptions and determine specifically which works are subject to DMCA prohibitions. But she also appoints the US Poet Laureate and awards the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. So she's got a lot to do. Yeah. A lot of different hats on this librarian. So anyway, I just thought that was cool that she had to sign off on this rule. What's a librarian's favorite song? I don't know. John Cage's 433. That's right. I think, I feel like you could have guessed that, Matt. He's right on the edge. Librarian's favorite song. She just gives the award to that, to John Cage. She's probably dead. Just gives it every year. Like someone else write a really good library song like this one. It's perfect for libraries. So this 48 page rule has all kinds of interesting stuff on it, including Abandonware, which is a another interest of mine. Mm, yes. Old video games that are no longer being published. Yeah. So they've allowed a temporary rule. They've extended this one and they've expanded it as well on allowing archives of games that have been abandoned by developers. But more importantly, for our purposes, proposed class five computer programs, repair of commercial industrial equipment. And this was actually supported not just by the company that was making this software, but by the USDOJ's antitrust division and the FTC failed comments. That's pretty big when you've got two big government agencies saying that McDonald's should be able to fix its ice cream machines. This isn't just for McDonald's, by the way, the John Deere is having a similar issue where they make ice cream. Apparently their tractors are a lot more complicated than I thought. I guess I've only seen the old John Deere tractors, but we just found out actually today that the FTC has been investigating them thoroughly, but they have a similar kind of a rate to repair issue where the people can't get into their own tractors. So this is good news. This is nice. I think that it's going to be great for franchisees. It's going to be great for consumers. Wait, are you saying this happened or? Yeah, it's official as of today. The librarian was like, I want ice cream. Wow. She came out with just covered in McFlurry. Just apropos of nothing. No, I haven't been bought off by a McFlurry machine. What are you talking about? Yes, it's okay. Licking her giant spoon. Yeah, man, I love a McFlurry. I don't know why they did away with the Butterfinger. That was the best one. That was many, many years ago, but that was the best one. But yeah, so I'm excited. I'm looking forward to not having the ice cream machine be broken sometime in the next year or two. That's a delightful footnote fetish. That is what the segment was made for. That's excellent. Good news. Then you got to do the punchline where it's like, ha, right to repair, and then they open up. They're like, we don't know how to do this. Okay, nevermind. We need the company still. Well, that's impossible. All right. Well, that was a fun episode. You know, weirdly, as dire as all my other things kind of currently are, that was kind of a good news show. He wants an illegal immigrant to 100%, and Trump and Johnson's little secret is nothing, hopefully. Let's hope. Well, like I said, lots of gavel gavel to listen to, patreon.com slash gavel pod. Lots of where there's woke to listen to as well. Answer your inquiries only. You got any other podcast, Matt? Just me. Well, you do, gavel gavel. You're also, you know, that's also yours, and you're fantastic. So go check that out, everybody, and we'll see you with even higher blood pressure on Monday. All right. This podcast is a production of Opening Arguments Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved. It is produced and edited by Thomas Smith, who also provided the fabulous intro and outro music used with permission. I just used the word denominator for the first time in 24 years or something, so, yeah. But there's a reason that I didn't feel too bad. You need to get out more. I've got more math parties. Yeah. That, but unironically. Anyway.

See also

• OA 1082 transcript
• Opening Arguments

External links

• bk4, reboil.com