Hello everyone on the live stream and welcome. My name is Yusef Severs and I have the pleasure of being a director in this year's Trans Plays of Remembrance Festival but I wanna invite you to enjoy Friday night in the Trans Plays of Remembrance Festival. Tonight you will be seeing two pieces. First will be Wah Africa, one, two, three, a queerly scripted, tragic African Fantasia by Nick Mualuko. And second I'll introduce in just a little while. I briefly want to say that I'm coming to you from the unseated lands of the Chumash and Amumu peoples and I hope that we are all doing what we need to do in order to maintain relationships and in order to better take care of the land that we are all now on. So I hope you sit back, relax. There will be a brief talk back afterwards with some of the artists that you will see very shortly. Please prepare any questions that you may have or things that excited you or things that made you question. Bring all of those things forward into the comment section and if you know where you are coming from or where you're tuning in from, please feel free to put those in the chat section as well and we'll be sure to shout those out. So that's all for me. I'm going to turn my camera off now and the next piece that you will see will be While Africa, one, two, three, a queerly scripted tragic African Fantasia by Nick Mualuko. Scene, sexing while trans, queer, African and black.  This is your first time with a woman, I mean. Any woman. Have you ever? Oh. Nervous? Are you? Your breathing is, it is. Talk to me. Don't look at me. Not while I say this to you, Bobby, okay?  I'm a man.  Mask face soul. I've never told. Not anyone. You're my first. You're my first, Bobby. It's true. So I need to show you how to read my body. So you can unmask me. What do you see here? No. My chest. This, say it. I see your chest. And this. Is my penis. I have to do this.  But listen to me, Owino. Nothing in my eyes. Nothing. Say it or I won't take off my clothes during sex. I swear on my ancestors, I will not. I struggle. It's because I. Please. But I'm trying to expose. Bobby. Look it personally, I self identify as a lesbian. It's a struggle for me to refer to male body parts during sex because I just. Okay, but I need. Say it, Bobby. Please.  Owino is big. And beautiful. Are you lying to me? And.      My man body won't let you be disrespected or feel small. I promise. Never. Do you understand me? I mean, what I'm asking is, do you understand all of me? Please say yes, but do you? Until now, I did not believe I could show my full me to anyone. Until now, I did not believe if I show my man body, full me, that I would still be loved, but now is different. Now I believe I can exist because of you, Bobby. Because of you, I exist. I believe. Thank you so much. So, do you believe I am who I am not when I am who I am? I do, absolutely. How does it feel as witness to see all of me seen the audacity to call that love? One more space, quick change of atmosphere. We know goes to table, turns on radio. He adjusts the station. Light romantic African music is playing. Bobby gets up literally collapsing into here arms. They sway very slowly, gently. Listen. The pulse, Bobby. The beat. Karakara, karakara, karadrums. It goes straight to my legs. Like my moves. Nice, eh? Now check this out. Eh, eh, eh, eh. Is this the national radio station? Sweet, right? My dancing, eh? Well, that's why you're laughing, right? What's this song about? A We Know Whisper Something in Bobby's Ear. Really? On national radio, nah. Really? Liar. A We Know Whisper Something Else in Bobby's Ear. No way! Never on national radio. Think I'm dumb. You're beautiful. That's what I think. A We Know Kisses, Bobby. This is where you belong, Bobby. In our space. The radio crackles with static. Ah. What is it?  Maybe the batteries are low. No matter how much you spend on batteries, the guy at the kiosk always robs from you. Pinching a ceiling here or there to empty pockets. A We Know walks over to the radio table, lifts it up, opens the back where the batteries are stored. He takes the batteries out, music stops. He wipes the battery clean with the corner of your shirt. Maybe they're sweaty. A We Know blows on the batteries, then reinserts them back into the radio. Music resumes. They kiss, dance, and static crackle from the radio again. And now what is it? A We Know walks over to the table again, lifts the radio, shakes it, puts it back down on the table, music resumes. Suddenly, music stops. Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, KBC. We interrupt our regularly scheduled music program for Brief News Bulletin. His Excellency, our most esteemed leader, President Daniel Arap Mwai, issued the first of a series of fiery speeches condemning the recently formed Kenya Gay-Lesbian Queer Alliance, Umoja Wa Wasinge.  His Excellency, the president went on to say, I personally sanction fellow Kenyans and all Africans to do whatever is necessary by whatever means necessary to root out deviant, perverse, extremely sick behavior from our national soil. This will make you a true citizen, a true patriot. This, my people, will make Kenya great again, end of quote. Umoja Wa Wasinge, a Calentine organization claiming social justice for all, won national attention a week ago. Today, when its leaders, two Kenyan men, were arrested for kissing in a local park. Their case sparked a recent wave of violent protests throughout the country that is raging into more rural areas. Both men remain on trial for the death penalty. Meanwhile, fighting continues to escalate in response to the president's inflammatory remarks. And now, on to sports. Awino pulls violently away from Bobby.   What? There's no time, we... Listen to me, listen, we... Put the clothes inside there. Are you listening to me? Listen. Get the suitcases from under. Tell me where we're going first, and I'll... Just pack. I am, I am packing our... They packed together in silence. Will you listen to me, please? Sweetie, you and I, we both have to think of a plan for us. To be able to pick up and just leave. What, eh? What are you? I can't do this by myself. Where do you, where do you want us to go? Go without... Is this your country? Is this your country, huh? Is it? I didn't think so. Can you, do you know how they will react to us? Lesbians, deviance, faggots, queers. But what about what, what in the hell can we do if we don't have any money? Do you know anything? No.  Take the rest of the clothes and put them inside of the suitcases. Bobby doesn't move. A wiener walks over and literally shakes Bobby. Do you know anything? No. What do you want me to say? That I am scared? Here, I am terrified when they come, Bobby. And they are coming. That'll be it. We'll be arrested. I'll be put in prison though. They'll put electricity here. No more me. No more you. No more us. And believe me, they are on their way. So either you help me pack or I'll do it myself because I couldn't care less what you decide at this point. Listen to me. Listen. What? We up and lead this house. Where are we going? Who house us? Nobody. We're the sick, contaminated, deviant, toxic, lesbian queers, remember? And we're broke. We're so broke it's not even an option to all I'm saying. You say, you say, you.  Who are you? And what are you doing here in this village, really? Today morning, I told you this would happen, didn't I? First thing through that door, what was I saying? Hey, Bobby, what did I say? We are going to die.  But what did you say, huh? There is no they are we know. Who is they? Only personal truth.  I ignore everything I know about my own people, my own culture and believe in what you say.   Like puppetry, is that right?  What a passport! You will leave me here in a minute with you say, you say. Fly back on to the airport, to the United States, never mention my name nor what happened to you ever again. That is your plan, right?  I know, I know you are nothing but destiny.  We know Razum's packing, Bobby takes a moment. Never leave you. Never ever, look at me. I said I won't ever. Sorry, I didn't mean to say I or suggest that I'm centering my experience. We are going through this. You and me, together. Oh, we know. But baby, please, please don't ignore me. If we look at the larger picture here, we leave this house to go where? To home without two cents in our pockets. Look, we get to check first thing tomorrow morning. One of us should stay to collect the money. But you do want to leave me. Fine, you stay. Collect the check if that makes more sense.  They will bust through that door and they will just. Stop. The situation is bad enough as is. Calm down. Use your smarts for a second.  I'm an American. I work for the Peace Corps, so we know. They so much as touch me. There will be a media frenzy so big, every new station in the United States, plus Kenya, plus the international. What happens to me?  What happens to me? Go to your father. Yes, sir. Mungu mungu, what have I been saying all day? What has the radio been saying, eh? This is beyond chief and child. Nothing is beyond chief and child.   I'm no clue what I'm saying. We've run, how far do you think we get? How far before they find us out as the contaminated, deviant lesbos? It splattered all over the national radio. Everyone is listening and talking. Tomorrow's paper's headline is already a given, so it's not a question of if. It's a question of when and how. Today, tomorrow, half an hour from now, but they will find us. They will definitely find us. That's what I'm saying to go straight to your father for protection.  Better you tell him the truth than tell him about the absolute freedom of. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. How you found the purity of your very own personal truth.  No, you don't know how much you're. Your ancestors. It's vital. It's larger than your fear, Owino. It's so vital. It's larger than yourself. Anything and everything that's ever kept you down or away from discovering who you really are, what you really need, what you want, what you believe in, that's what it is. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Stop how sacred it is to you. What? Stop translating my culture to me and come. Don't you see, baby? It's impossible for us to go anywhere. No, if we leave this second body, we can protect truth. We can preserve our love. I have the audacity to call what we have love. We sneak around corners, living like shadows. None of your friends come to visit you anymore because of the way you look. Can't get a job. One of the only people in this village fluent in Swahili and English to count them, to difficult languages. You've gone to high school. Your dad is Kenyan royalty, a true chief. But you're unemployed. For how long now?  Is that the love you're asking me to protect? Is it worth my life?  From family to neighbors to ourselves. We have to lie to ourselves every single day. Just so you don't go too crazy. All in the name of love you want me to protect, right? I mean, once, just once. I like to walk out, talk to someone in our village about our relationship. Instead of wasting millions calling the states for a simple conversation on the phone. Is that the love you're talking about? Look, point to one, just one. Sex positive space in our home, huh? Space where we celebrate the uniqueness of who we are. What we share together together. Pointing to the picture of the smiling presidents on the back wall.  No, God forbid my lover be on the wall in our home where we live.  Flexing like African presidents, like strong men, dictators. Saying in fact, demanding people kill African queers to be true patriots. See how they're grinning?   Speaks directly to the picture of the smiling presidents. I was out and proud and free. Black woman, but now I'm back in the closet, back inside the fricking, oh! In her frustration, Barbie marches to the cupboard, takes a pot of water from underneath. She throws the water then the pot at the picture of the smiling presidents. This is considered an act of high treason, meaning if caught they would be executed. The picture liquidates to the ground, Oino is utterly, utterly shocked at this blatant open transgression. They both stand perfectly still.  How much you're terrified? I can feel your fear is screaming from your insides.  You could lose another parent, not to death this time, but abandonment, which feels worse. Trust me, I know how wounding it is to be erased, denied to be shut out in exile by the person you love the most. Pain piercing past heart to your core, touching even screaming in places you've been told are unlovable, unwanted, unreachable forever. Worthy of nothing but screams. Howls that turn into numbness. I know what that's like. Believe me, but I swear to you, Oino, your father, he will not, he cannot abandon you. He will never, ever, ever deny you to be seen. It's okay to not make yourself invisible. You have the right to center your truth, to give yourself permission, permission to scream back at a world that constantly, non-stop, keep screaming at you. Why? Because you're you. Oino pulls away to resume packing. Who were we supposed to live inside their closet? How long did you think we could stay invisible? How long were you supposed to, how long were we supposed to keep lying to ourselves? How long were we supposed to make ourselves absolutely nothing on every level imaginable and call that love?  It comes with risk, with pride, with utter audacity, fiercely fearless. Abandoned, and yeah, there's always a threat to your life. But queer love goes beyond courage. It's about taking real risk.  But what we have here, in our relationship, is a threesome between you and me and oppression. I mean, what does love mean to you? Asking. It's a serious question, Oino. Bobby, I don't want to die. Won't, promise. Suddenly there's a knocking, and then a hard pounding at the door. Who? Quickly they all dim the lights. Who is it? End of play. Yes, indeed, yes indeed. Hands clap, so I mean, we can't hear you all, so y'all can clap. Yay, fantastic, fantastic. We're going to keep it rolling and move forward with our second piece that we're going to be showing this evening called Entitled Bananas, which is a prerecorded performance written and performed by Kezia Walters. Yeah. Yeah, Derek over here, talking about something. He got a little girlfriend. I feel like his daddy putting that stuff in his head.  He is only eight years old. He just barely stopped being in bed last year. You know, I'm putting the seasons and stuff back. Yeah, this morning, I don't need to record anymore. And I don't miss out on it. I don't miss out on it. Mm-hmm, I know what was enough. It's a neutral season. Some women pepper. Because we don't need salt in this house. I keep on telling them that. We do not need salt in this house. But you want to be able to put some salt in everything and I hid the salt. I put it in the bag. I even saw that Lil Nas video. Girl, she's the only man because she can't slide on the floor anymore. You know, she was a ball dancer. She was on a pole. She was stripping. And that's how she paid her way to college. How do they say she can't?  When I was in school, I was over here. Oh, I was over here, I was over here, I was over here. What were you doing, I got to do. When I was in there to school, she was there with me. I was there all day long, I was there all day long. I'm over here, I'm over here, I'm over here. Yeah, I told you that. There ain't nothing but eight years of we just got to be related. Come over here, tell me something. You got a girl. A girl? Well, he is over here in college today, that is not true. He is not over there, I have a girlfriend. That's not true to me. I don't know. You should have a girl. You should have a girl and you try that and you have a girl, but they didn't keep it. That's not right. Can I take it again? I'm sorry, can I take that one more time? I realized I wasn't being a man. I'm not I, a man. Ain't I non-binary? I mean, I'm clearly painting my nails, nigga. I mean, sorry, I'm liberal. The fuck? Y'all fuck, bro, have you ever looked in the mirror to see your mom, bro? Fuck, to see my mom.   I see my mom. I see my mom, bro. Yo, I see my mom, bro. That was little, I asked my mom. A couple of hours ago, could I get a banana? As you was like, nah, I did not write. Come on, could I get a banana? Nah, they're not right, I looked at my mom. I said, but I'm a man. I can have whatever I want. No, I'm not a man. Hello, hello, fantastic. First, I would like to correct the pronunciation of the playwright and performer in that last piece. And it is Keezy Aya, Keezy Aya. So wonderful. So I would love for everyone who's gonna be joining us for the talk back to go ahead and turn your cameras on. And we can just get this conversation started. Hello. Oh, say that again. Oh, hello. Oh, there you are, I can hear you. How are you, kid? I'm well, thanks for asking, how are you, Yusef? Fantastic, fantastic. Good to hear.  Oh, okay, I thought it was just the playwrights. Hi. If you're still here, feel free to turn your camera back on. So to go ahead and get this started, I'd love for everyone to just go ahead and introduce themselves. And say your name, pronouns if you're comfortable, where you are, the role you might have just played or what you do in the rest of your life, kid, for those folks who don't know you, but I'd love to just go around, we'll start with the actors and then kid can close this out, just do some introductions, yeah? Fantastic. Jenae LaShawn, my pronouns are she, her, hers. I decided to go ahead and cut Troy in line and go first because I'm actually going to peace out here. But this has been an amazing experience to be able to play Bobby in this festival. And in my regular life, I'm a theater practitioner. I'm fresh out, it's like how I like to describe being graduated from grad school with the MFA in acting. I recently directed Blood at the Root at Eastern Illinois University. And so, yeah, your girl is just out here trying to make that art that is meaningful and impacts our communities and the world overall. Please be looking out for me the top of next year. I'll be directing Blacks and Fats by Kevin Wren. It's a new work and that will be at Kalamazoo College. So thank you again, everyone, for this opportunity. I can't wait to see the discussion and I'm going to peace out. Thanks so much for joining us. Well, before you leave, Jenae, so good working with you. Amazing job and good luck with everything. Thank you, Troy. We'll be in touch. And it was a pleasure working with you as well.  I am in touch. Thank you. Cool, so I'll go next. My name is Troy Rocket. He, they pronouns. I'm over in Kalonely known as, you know, California, open California on the Muehme Alone people, the land of the Muehme Alone people. And I'm out here. I'm a playwright and an actor in the Bay. And I loved working on this piece. Hello, everybody. My name is Kit Fenrir M. Ray. My pronouns are Day and or She. And I attended the place last year. And I was invited to come back and talk back with you all. So I'm just so excited to be able to hold space with you in my every day to day life. I am both a restorative and transformative justice practitioner, a global instructor, and I help facilitate direct reparations across New England for a piece of work. So I'm just so excited to get started talking. Amazing, amazing. And a slightly larger introduction for myself. You said Severs, I use he, they pronouns. And I was the director of why Africa. And I'm also a movement teacher at a conservatory here in the Central Coast of California. So first, I would love to just talk about first, I would love to just pick both of your brains all day long, first of all, I'll say that. But I'd love to know from either of you, what is vital about transplays being told and being shared in today? That is, thank you for this question. Yeah, I guess it's just a discussion, so it's not a, I feel at least in my community, we just have such a deep well, like, of compassion as trans folks and non-binary folks that coming from that place, writing stories from that place of compassion. And I think, yeah, our stories are nuanced, they're lovely, just like the last one we watched. I just, I think it's very important, especially that we speak, we share as loud as we can. This is about our dignity. This is about legacies and the continuation of that. So, but yeah, I love this question and whatever the discussion happens, but I'll just start there. I also just thank you for expanding upon that, Troy, I really appreciate it. I think it's just like a revitalization. It's rejuvenation. It's like changing the biochemistry of our hearts by telling us our stories and also like being able to become visual storytellers and to craft art, right? And to be able to just have a larger conversation, but also say we're here, we're present and we're doing art. So that's not gonna change a little while. And I think just having that open field to just honestly expand and explore and play with different dynamics and ideas. It's just one of the reasons why festivals like these are so, so crucial and important, especially during a pandemic. Absolutely, you both bring up such wonderful things. And when I think about changing narratives or when I think about expanding or shifting values, somehow, some way it's always rooted in the stories we tell. And so the values we have now are because of the stories we learned, whether or not they included all of us or were useful to all of us is to be written. But what's vital is that we continue to tell stories that amplify the nooks and crannies and all the nuanced portions of life that have been strategically or unstrategically unamplified. And so I find that it's so, so vital that we have these spaces where these stories can be told and be heard. And I find Zoom to be quite fantastic in this way because you can have what may be uncouth-like responses in your own space. You know what I mean?  Which in most cases, in a public setting, there's not really time to leave the theater when you feel uncomfortable. And so in our home spaces, it's so beautiful to watch stories like this come to life and come into people's homes and private spaces. I would love to know from either of you, do you have any favorite transplays of any kind? Stories, either your own or someone's you've read.  I'm gonna take it through my mouth. No, that was a good question. I think just hearing the stories even today and not being prime for them, but also being able to resonate with the different components and themes of each play has just been like, I feel seed. I feel like I needed this TVH. And even compared to last year's plays, which were also phenomenal. So I think it's just experiencing things that are not within my local sphere is something that's really, really revitalizing and eye-opening and I just love the energy. So thank you. Yeah, you Troy, any favorite plays, playwrights? I don't, yeah, it's like kind of, I don't know if I have a favorite, but I just enjoy.  So I just, I love people who tell stories and take up space and expand. I wanna put some names in the chat though, because I feel like I can't just say one. So I'm gonna take a moment to type out some names so people can go see them, because we got a lot, we got a lot. And aren't you writing a play, Troy? Am I making that up? Do you? Oh, yeah, yeah, that happens, definitely. You could have said the name of your play or... Yeah, so I have, yeah, it's three plays that all have the themes of transition and belonging. And it is kind of auto-fiction me going and talking to three of my loved ones who have passed and I didn't get a chance to come out with them.  And we just talk about all the way, all the things, all the transitions, all that. So it's been a joy to be in that writing space and have those conversations that I didn't get to say, but I'm saying them now. So those are great. It's fun. Absolutely. And it brings forward the thing that Kit brought up earlier about changing our biochemistry and our hearts when we are able to take our own stories and say, this is that bit of reverence, yes indeed, for my journey, for my life and in that offering of reverence and change and honesty, folks start to pick it up on the other side. And that's when people lead the space differently or leave the experience with just a little bit more inquisition about their own lives and their own experience. Okay, fantastic. Okay, big question, not a big question. What does this type of work and artistry look like in the future in terms of non-binary work, transplays in general, what is your vision of that moving forward if you could have it all your way? I think I would love to see just like more like non-binary and trans youth, especially black youth to just have the creative spaces to be brave and to just be black and be wonderful and like share that collective confusion. I think that's something that I really hope to see take off in the future. I feel like there's so many different ways and so many different mannerisms and ways that our intersectionalities like impact the way we move throughout the world. So to be able to paint a picture accurately of what we envision is really important. And I think the more space we are given to do that I think the resonance will be able to increase and amplify as a result. Always about amplifying that resonance, David. I really love, I love that you brought in the youth. I am thinking about just the accessibility or just what I've learned through the pandemic. Not that everybody has this, but just connecting across, like just collaborating, connecting across. I've met so many of my siblings this pandemic and it's been great, especially during a moment, a time of isolation. It's been great to expand my siblinghood, all of that, it's been very fun. So I think the future, yeah, collaborating and just like no genre, just genre, genre, like beyond it, outside of it, new genre. It's, yeah, it's gonna be fun. Absolutely, absolutely. And one last thing I'll say is that for me in the near future, it looks like more disruption. It looks like more, because before we get to the seed coming out of the ground, we must till the soil. And we have yet to really till this soil. Okay, okay, you know what I'm saying? So I find that it to be most exciting that it is going to be quite mucky and messy and a little more blurry and a little more confusing and a lot more riskier choices, sharper decisions, more risk. I feel like there's much more to be till before we actually get the bloom in the fall. So I'm very excited about that. And I feel that this series is also a wonderful way to just continue to move that conversation forward and have people hear conversations happen in which love, compassion, harmony, resonance and reverence can all exist in the same space. So unless we have any questions from the chat, I'm gonna wrap this up. Those were the things that I really wanted to touch upon in this brief time about what's vital, what does it look like moving forward and the people that we can look to now for the stories that allow us to bring these things light. Yes, lovely, fantastic. So for those of you watching the live stream, thanks so much, I appreciate you all being here and watching and celebrating. Thank you, Kit. Thank you, Troy. Thank you, Lauren. Thank you, Wendy. Thank you, Janae. Thank you, Kiziaia, everyone for being a part of today's work and the days prior, all the back channels, we would not be here without all of you. So thank you all so much and have a fabulous, fabulous Friday.


Alright, so you guys voiced your opinions.   So I'm gonna go through as many as I can and read them. To clarify what I said earlier, I'm not kidding when I say I barely have time to do this. My days are about 15 hour days and I usually have like 9 hours of turnaround between going back and forth through shifts. And I try to get these videos done before the next episode comes out, so that's why I say I don't have time. Because I barely have any at all. Why do I bother? Nailed it. This was a typical boring paint by numbers episode. They even dusted off the Dean lies to Sam for no reason whatsoever other than to start a fight between the two trope. I thought we were done with that. Shouldn't these episodes be building up suspense to the biggest confrontation of all time? The show's protagonist versus actual god. Instead Sam and Dean are hand wringing on whatever to let Jack blow himself up. What is this even the show even about anymore? And yeah, nope, you're 100% there. Admittedly, I think that dab is gonna do what he's known to do, which is three story arcs. The last three episodes, well, the next three episodes will be the finale of the story. Whereas episode 20 is the finale of the show from what they've seen. So that's what I'm gonna probably think will happen. They can't stay with the main story because Chuck being a mustache twirling supervillain is ludicrous. It's one note metacrap with no other depth, credibility, or character motivation. Hence rehashed or retcon superficial trips down memory lane. Yeah, they can do anything else. I feel like Sam's anger was over the top. It's not like Dean has kept the secret for long. It's two three days at most. It's not like Sam hasn't been on board with using Jack as a weapon since he came back munching on Angel Hearts. Sam and Dean have been around the block enough to know that the plan is going to require a sacrifice by a Sam acting like it's a major revelation. Yeah. And why aren't they acting like they have any sense of urgency? Miss Butters announced all the other worlds were gone and Sam and Dean are like, Oh, yeah, sure. Let's go hunt the issues of the good of the one versus the good of the many have been done and done better. It's not like Sam also didn't keep secrets from Dean for his visions earlier this year. It just seems like manufactured drama 100%. I thought it was weird that Sam was so angry. It's like, man, like they didn't even that was like a day. That's the shortest kept secret in supernatural history between the two brothers. Some of the scenes legit may had me cringe out loud like when she was escaping the hotel and Sam kept saying, I kept talking so bad or when the child Dean called Sam a dumbass so bad. Yes, that was very bad and felt weird and was so bored at the last three episodes since it came back. And I am more of a positive fan than you multiple moments did. I don't know the energy feels low. I feel like they're trying as much and what a waste of an episode also retrading on keeping secrets. My God, seriously, CW, do they think only secrets create conflict? This could have easily been an episode dedicated to fixing heaven or even addressing Lucifer versus via Michael saving himself or something. And also how many friends they got for lonely kids? They sure had a lot of friends. Are their friends with every person in America? It's like it's their it's like their well pick of a random person in to fill an episode. This whole episode is a retrait of so many tropes. By the way, actually, this episode is written by the same person in the last call, which is that singing one with that friend that also never appeared in the show's history but apparently appeared there. Two episodes of the same style in the same season.  What amazes me is how no one saw how bad dab and company were going to end this show. Has no one been watching the last three seasons? Season 15 is a continuation of season two, which was poor season 13 was bad season 14 was awful. The decline in ratings and the decrease of activity in the fandom was a massive sign that the writing was on the wall for supernatural as soon as dad took over. Many of my fellow fans have been saying this since season two 12 and very few have listened. Don't worry. That was me. I was very, very vocal of how season 12 ended and I was in the minority and now it seems that it's obviously starting to become more relevant. Another Thursday, another filler. I just stopped watching and started skipping through them. Just until I find a glimpse of Amara, Jack, Cassie, or God. You're going on a hunt right now, said the side character, the main character, reminding them that there's still a universe ending event that he's on addressing. When you have a remind your main characters about the main villain in the main plot driving event of your series, you're doing something wrong. This isn't just the finale. It's the death of our love and appreciation for the show. 100% there. How can we come back from the final seven episodes of the season and they skip over Sam and Dean's reactions to sell the Jack's soul returning three filler episodes in a row. And next week's episode looks like it's going to be another one. What the fudge? What the what is dad going to wait to wrap up stuff the very last second of lost faith? I haven't heard about the last episode or the next episode of whether it's a filler or not. I don't think it should be. I really goddamn hope it's not. But I feel you man. I'm defeated as well. I can't believe that they're doing what they're doing. There's literally zero build up to the finale, a conversation here with Amara and a conversation there with death.  I'm actually watching season nine right now and I can't believe how much more entertaining that is. This is than this BS. I love the show. I love the boys, but this is unworthy. P.S. Dabb reckoning stroke again. Slash Dean. Teen Dean being okay with Sam going to college and leave the family business. Watch season one Andrew Dabb. I'm praying for season 11 episode 20 to 23 finale. That would be really cool. That was a great arc. It was really, really freaking good. It was one of my favorites, at least of the latter. But fun new I haven't seen season nine in so long. So when I eventually get to that in my retro reviews, I will be interested to see it. I'm smiling reading these comments and watching this review. I stopped watching Supernatural as a continuous story after Dabb's first five episodes. So I watch every episode as an entity within itself. Therefore, this episode wasn't bad. The writing was like from a 10 year old. The writing was hard, but the story was okay. Everything about Sam and Dean was contrived and not canon. Sam's anger at the end was over the top and he was like a five year old that never grew up. The final kill of the monster of the week was sad. Very sad. It was so boring. But again, it's the writer who has no idea how to narrow a narrative to a coherent type of story. I still enjoy the episode for how simple it was. I'm so sorry J2 have had to ruin your character so thoroughly. I strongly agree with you Jeremy. For me, this whole episode really felt like I was watching a cheap rip off of a Stephen King it.  She lures kids and eats them, shapeshifts into different people and seemingly killed at first, but actually returned, what wasn't in returns 25 years later. Actually, that was it. That was basically the, but again, it was also kind of like something wicked from season one. I will admit I don't hate this episode as much as you do and find it better than the previous two episodes, but it's still no good. It's just bad. Just like the majority of the people in these comments section already mentioned it before, why do we still have filler in the last seven episodes of the season? Just why? This is ridiculous and I really don't get it. I loved your reviews more than the show itself for a long time. It's so reassuring to know there's other people who are frustrated as me with how the show has turned out. Don't worry friendo, you are not alone. It's been rough, but hey, we're almost done. We're almost done. Overall, I didn't hate this episode. However, it did bring up an issue I have had with this season for a while and the episode reinforced this issue and that these episodes would have been fine if it was any other season. I'm okay with the concept for this episode. If it had better acting and it was in an earlier season, it might have turned out great, but regardless, it didn't. Also, when you find out in the beginning of the episode that Dean didn't tell Sam about Jack, it made me frustrated. This is the last season and there shouldn't be any secrets between the brothers. I did like the ending though. I liked the acting from both Jared and Jensen. I'm still looking forward for the rest of the season. Your title is a bit off because it says season 16 and it shows pretty much how you felt about the episode. Oh yeah, for some reason I had this issue where I accidentally wrote season 16. And yeah, that was my bad. That was a mistake on my part. Honestly, if these episodes weren't lit up to pieces, shot on film and wide lens were used as much as this episode could have been creepier. All in all, 5 out of 10 for me. Not bad, but not amazing either. Honestly, as supernatural fans, we're all here for the end. I'll be honest, their overwhelming dislike on Reddit and Twitter is really surprising me. Where was this during season 12? Yes, nowhere near as much as it is now. I'd like these episodes over anything from that. Jeremy, you and this channel don't count to me because you've always been critical of the show past five seasons and I respect your opinion. Is that a compliment? Anyways, but yeah, if you've got any links to these Reddit things, I would love to see more people having a reaction. Just a critical reaction because if you go to IMDb, people just get shut down because people who fantasize this show apparently can't take any form of criticism. The whole three minutes dedicated to the main plotline, all of it was delivered via dialogue. It would have been nice to see how Amara comes to her decision to help the boys are not considering she's supposed to be on the fence right now. Would have been a good opportunity to see her interactions with Chuck.  Instead, we decided to give us an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? That is irrelevant to the main plot. That is definitely a sign of how lazy it is. It's a filler episode, but how do we make it about the story? Well, in the previous, they always had conversations. But this is different. You can't do that right now. You have to build up to the end. This is it. This is the end of the show. Admittedly, it doesn't help that we've been on this big break. Like, maybe it wouldn't be as critical. We wouldn't be as critical. Maybe, maybe, maybe not. Like, that's not a big maybe, but a little maybe. We wouldn't be as hard on it. If they actually had planned, like, if these episodes were coming out back in May. But even still, I would still be critical of it because the writing is just so goddamn lazy. I don't know, man. I really enjoyed this episode. But it might be because I loved the movie It, and this episode felt just like that. Well, if you want a better version of it, watch Something Wicked. That's it. This is like a cheap, cheap, cheap dollar store version of that. I'm related, but your intro, I'm confused. How is that mug always hot? It's not always hot. That's a secret. For the first time ever, I turned it off 21 minutes in. First of all, how dare they sully my beloved Baba Yaga from my childhood. Secondly, stop trying to make this into Stranger Things or a rip off of the Goonies. With new actors playing young Sam and Dean who look nothing like their previous actors and even less like Jared and Jensen. So, so, so, so bad. I can admit that is an issue. It always is difficult to try and find kid actors who look like your main cast and let alone kid actors who look like other kid actors who look like their main cast. I can understand that, but funny, funny, like, I really wanted to. I really wanted to go back and watch Ratchet. Much of this season has been a poorly done superficial rehash of how far, of far more interesting past episodes and events. Yes, yes, definitely rehashes of their own goddamn writing. They can come up with anything original, so tweak a retcon, whatever they steal. With a death in each universe, closed systems concerned from their own worlds, I don't know why Billy would know anything about them. I don't trust her or believe her. She is and manipulates everyone. Rowena's belief in prophecy, Jack's need for forgiveness, Dean's anger, at least Sam is asking questions. I'm going to need to re-watch of the first five seasons after this so I can watch the last ten seasons out of my mouth. I'm just glad that I can come all, that we can all come here and complain together. Have you ever seen Penny Dreadful? It's an incredibly well done show. Three seasons in Darkville. Yes, I've seen Penny Dreadful. I didn't mind the first season, however, there was a few things that I called off right off the bat, mainly Josh Hardnett. And it did kind of deviate, but I want to finish the rest of it. Also, not season six. I would say season nine and ten and eleven aren't bad. Eleven really good. Eleven's where it should have ended. So it's not all terrible, but yeah, the last four seasons have been horrible. I tried to tell you Supernaturalist Trash. After season five, they've been on borrowed time and now they're showing the true colors. After this, the last four episodes better be amazing, but I'm not crossing my fingers. Honestly, man, I'm just, I'm just waiting to see it end. Just waiting to see it end. You know, I personally enjoy Supernatural filler episodes, but considering we're this close to the end, how about we don't, I know, actually have episodes that are, that's about the plot. I mean, they had seven episodes left and they wasted half of it on filler episodes. I know you said you don't like Arrow, but give the show this at least when it came to his final season. It didn't waste, it didn't waste half of its episodes on filler episodes. I don't want to watch a show. It's just Batman, but if that's what you're seeing, it's true. That's how you do a proper final season. You actually focus on everything. Like, justify. Justified was focusing on everything, all about the main character and that. And yeah, that's, that's actually because I've been watching The Good Place. That's why I made that reference. I think that Sains got not only Winchester's dad, but all the adequate Supernatural fanbase too.  I'm, I'm sorry. I'm hope I'm not that, oh God. I'm hope I'm not that torturous to you. Oh man. I feel like this season is going to be worse than 14. All of the writers from season 12 slash 15 are all over the place. Clearly, they don't know how to write a proper story, especially coming from dab. What happened to the original Supernatural? This show went from a scary to a fan service era. Oh yeah. And the series finale has been changed to a bunch of times. So look out for that. Yeah. I actually liked this one and wasn't expecting to. I suppose that not really saying much considering how bad the season is, but at this point I'll take anything that's not Jack the great savior. I agree with a lot of the comments I've seen on various sites from fans who have had enough of Dean being portrayed as the bad guy.  Does dab just hate Dean? Is that it? I'll admit. Yeah. Dab and Dean just seemed to have this issue back and forth about Dean's. I don't know. Dean's just a cartoon. He's been a cartoon for a bit and he went full cartoon in that episode with Miss Butters. Like I couldn't take him seriously at all. Last week I watched a promo for the next episode before watching Jeremy's take on that one. Just aired and thought, oh boy, wait till he finds out he's watching a filler episode next week. Hang on, Jeremy. Only four more weeks of torture. I will do my best. This episode was absolute trash. I've never wanted to skip an episode so badly before. Remember how much build up their earlier seasons had? Remember how much height there was for Azale, Lilith, Lucifer, the apocalypse?  Did they seriously try to sell us another brother hide something from the other brother gets mad?  I don't care if they ever say they need to fill time for the ending because they could have easily filled it with anything of the ten plot lines that they have established and dropped. Remember Heaven Dying? Yeah, Dab doesn't seem to remember either. It's sad watching my favorite show die like this. It's hard to watch it considering we're always going to have to associate this season with the entirety of the show no matter how hard we try not to, but it's rough. I can't believe we're heading into this. This is so close. This is so close to the end. The actors besides Jared and Zenson were absolutely terrible in this episode especially Caitlyn who tries so hard to act like she's grieving. Although I thought this episode had almost had that creepy atmosphere from season one but too bad it got ruined by the most shittiest jump scares on the show.   Other than that, the episode overall was like you said, underwhelming. Still can't believe this is the final season. This is what we're doing with the little time we have left to wrap it up. I feel like one of the only people that likes this show and more positive about it. You do, you man. Anyways guys, those are the comments I wanted to read. Thank you again for your outpour.  This video is going to be the longest comment video I've done. Also, by the way, for all of those of you who tuned in, thank you for those of you who tuned into Emilio's charity stream. We were able to get it over his goal. We were able to get up to $1,300 and something, something. His original goal was $500 and then it went to $1,000 and then we got it up to there. That's great. Thank you to those of you who tuned in. If any of you donated, also thank you because it's all going to a good cause to fight cancer. Otherwise, that's all for me guys. We've got the next episode coming up. So make sure to stay tuned in for that. I'll see you guys next video. Four more episodes left. That's all I got to do. But I'm happy to say The Click is finally getting back together in an all-new movie, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign. But we are still asking for your support. To see any and all updates about the upcoming Undergrads movie, be sure to check out and like the Bring Back Undergrads Facebook page. And with any luck, we'll see you guys soon.


I would like to convince you that you can not only train your muscles but you can also train your fat. So you can think of your fat stores as a bathtub where fats are coming in from the diet through the tap on your right hand side. And if a lot of fat is coming in you either need a big bathtub or you need to remove the plug very often. But interestingly it's not the size of the bathtub itself that matters. What matters is the ability of your body fat stores to keep the body fat within the adipose tissue where it belongs. So on your left hand side if too much fat comes into the bathtub it gets stored in other compartments of the body which is increasing the risk for metabolic disease. One thing that is important with the bathtub is the plug and that's tightly regulated. So when we rest the plug is in but when we exercise the plug is removed in order to fuel the working muscles with fat during exercise. And a number of proteins are responsible for the function of the body fat stores including the plug function. So me and my research group we set out to investigate if the amount of certain proteins changed with exercise training. So we took 19 healthy male subjects in two groups. One group exercised three times a week for 10 weeks while the other group served as sedentary controls. And we took out the biopsy from the abdominal region of the body fat and investigated the expression of a variety of proteins. And we actually found that one protein essential for the plug function while we are resting increased with exercise training. Which means that while we are resting then less fat is released to the circulation which is actually what we wanted. We wanted to keep the body fat where it belongs. So you can actually train your fat.  So that our body fat is not only about judging it by size, it's judging it by the quality. And we found that exercise is at least one way to improve the quality of your body fat. Thank you for your attention.


Hey what's up you guys welcome back to my channel if you're new here hi hello Lydia and today we're reviewing this amazon fidget pack fidget bundle fidget sensory toy sir first thing i have to say is that the top is like sticky the first thing we've got is a pineapple puppet which is a gutted sensory toy i like i like puppets i think i've got a big one that i like to use so that's a good sensory toy i love the ears i like to worm the stretch and we've got a handful of marbles and these i don't like these i don't see the point at all you get four of them i probably won't use these i don't like them personally i'm gonna get four of these squidgy cats i used to have the ears but i lost mine so i'm glad i've got these you get four in different colors oh an infinite few of two of these skateboards again i won't use these i don't see the point of them the ear that i i love i had some of these poor but again i lost them they're sent left fidget roomies they twist round each of them so i'm glad i've got them i love to use them and i'll take them with me tomorrow to my well-being appointment and a mini puzzle cube above i've got a big one of these i don't know where it is actually it's not in my sensory box and that's it for this box is it worth the money and guess it was eight pound and you get quite a lot of sensory toys and we're gonna use everything in the box no i'm not is it worth it though still yes i think it is so that's this you know like this three box sort of thing so yeah that's it for that box thank you for watching this video and if you want to see more stuff like this let me know in comments down below and i'll definitely do more there are loads of different sets on amazon you can buy this is the one i chose because i'll pop it in it this is this is what the amazon listing looks like so that's that thanks for watching this video and if you are new make sure you hit subscribe and as always and i'll see you guys in the next video peace


Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burris. Joining us today is our colleague Chris Edwards. He's the director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute and editor of downsizinggovernment.org. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Chris. Thanks a lot for having me guys. How's that downsizing government thing going? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. You've been working at it for so long. So we're gonna have to assess your progress. When President Obama came to office, right after, you know, he won the election, he said something to the effect that, you know, we're gonna go through the federal budget line by line and cut out all the wasteful and unnecessary programs. And, well, we thought here at Cato, gee, that's a good idea. Maybe we'll help them. And I talked to Ed Crane at the time and his original conception was to have, let's have a guidebook to every federal government department and, you know, with solutions to, you know, cutting the agencies. And of course, the, a lot of young folks don't read books anymore. They read the internet. So we thought of the idea of a website to guide policy makers and inform the public about cutting cuts that we can do to every federal government agency. Unfortunately, Obama didn't follow through on his suggested cuts. So we've still got a long menu of cuts available at Cato for policy makers who are interested. I mean, but it seems that Trump maybe will be, but he's a growing other parts of the government. Is the total size of government been shrinking at all from the numbers you have? No, I don't think President Trump, to his credit, he has a very good budget director and Mick Mulvaney, a former conservative member of Congress, who has, you know, proposed two very good budgets now with really dozens and dozens of pretty substantial cuts to everything from food stamps to farm subsidies. But Congress hasn't followed through really at all. It's basically thrown the Trump budget in the garbage. It's true, Trump wants to, you know, has expanded defense spending greatly, but he has proposed cuts to many other areas of the government. What's the total federal budget right now? Oh, it's around $4 trillion a year. And how, how does the budget get spent? Generally, not like specifically, but the kind of cuts, you know, if you cut a little housing program or something in, in education or thing like that. Really going to do much to affect the budget of the federal government. So, you know, the big part of the federal budget over half now is entitlement programs. Social security itself is a trillion dollar program. I thought it was foreign aid was all of it. And public broadcasting. Yeah, of course. So of course, Social Security Medicare and Medicaid are the real elephants in the federal budget, trillions of dollars of spending there. But you know, I think, you know, if we were ever going to get this government under control, we got to do cuts across the board to everything. For one thing, that'll be perceived more fairly. If you actually had a reform mind in Congress and president who wanted to do cuts, I think cuts across the board to every federal department would be perceived to be more fair and maybe more likely to actually get through. When you cut a program, the money that's going into these programs, how much of it is actually being used for the output the program was created for such that like, so, you know, we propose a across the board 20% cut, you're going to get 20% fewer services, however we define that versus we cut it by 20% that there is there's enough slack in these programs, you know, by too many administrators, whatever, that you could you could get that 20% out without really cutting the quality of service or the quantity of service. So the government does two things. It produces stuff and it transfers income. And these days, the biggest part of what the federal government does is it transfers income. So the government produces stuff. The national defense is the main thing it produces, but it also produces, you know, the Census Bureau and the Patent Office. Those are actual services the federal government produces. So if you were to cut those programs, it would have an immediate effect on, you know, how much services the government provided. But most of the federal budget is simply transfers, social security, $700 billion of aid to state programs like housing programs, for example. So if you cut those programs, you're cutting direct benefits to people, which in my view is a good thing. You ask how much bureaucracy is sort of in these programs. Of the $700 billion the federal government spends on aid to state programs for things like housing programs and highway programs and urban transit programs, about 10% of the cost of those programs is just the bureaucracy in Washington. So if we spend, say, $50 billion a year on housing subsidies, that's money that the federal government taxes, the federal government will keep about $10 billion of that, and then about $40 billion will be dished out to state governments to spend on housing programs. Why do federal programs or pretty much any government proposed thing we're going to expand the highway or build this train or build a VA hospital or something like this? Why does it always seem to cost substantially more than projections? I mean, maybe it's just that I'm reading just those headlines as opposed to the ones when they come in under budget, but I don't feel like I see that very often in, you know, my home state of Colorado, they have this VA hospital, which is the overruns are almost comical at this point. But why is that so often the case? Right. That's not just your perception. That is the reality. There's been a number of academic studies that have looked at dozens and hundreds of big government projects, highway projects and urban transit projects and building projects, not only in the United States, but in Europe there's been lots of studies, and there is no doubt that government projects, especially big complex projects, end up costing almost a double or sometimes even more. The original projected cost. The reason appears to be not just that the government has a lot of bureaucracy and the like, because if the government was and policymakers were fairly estimating the cost of projects, they would look at the cost overruns and past projects and they would adjust their projections, but that never seems to happen. They always seem to low ball the cost of projects. So the reason is they do it on purpose. They low ball the cost of projects to get them through the legislatures. And then when they're actually in the process of constructing the projects, the Go-G story we made is a mistake. We left out these critical requirements we need for the program. It's like they'll vote on a fighter jet that's supposed to cost $100 million a unit, and it'll end up costing $200 million a unit because the defense contractors will say, we want these additional bells and whistles on here and policymakers will say, we want these bells and whistles on and so the cost just inflates. And there's no consequences generally to politicians. The politicians, if you think of military cost overruns, the politicians just blame the defense contractors. The defense contractors blame the politicians for not giving them the proper details of the projects up front. So there's a blame game, but this continues year after year of the cost overruns. Is that related then to why it seems to be so difficult to actually cut any spending? If you go around to Americans and say, hey, do you think the federal government spends too much?  You ask them to look at how much money comes out of their paychecks and taxes. Probably most of them would say, yeah, it'd be great if it spent less. And we get candidates like Obama are like, well, we're going to go through and we're going to cut out. And the medical stuff is always the waste, fraud and abuse that we're going to get rid of and so on. But then it doesn't ever seem to happen. And so what makes this such a hard problem? I think a couple of things. One is policymakers never admit they made mistakes. If you think about the private sector, if you have a CEO of a company that makes a really bad bat and spends a lot of the company money on something that turns out to be really a bad choice, the company will start losing money. Investors and shareholders will realize it. The financial press will start writing bad things about his choices. Like New Coke or Crystal Pepsi. That's right. Business leaders have to eventually admit their mistakes. Politicians never do. Politicians enact these programs. They promise the world to everyone. They promise all these lovely benefits. The programs never end up working as they're supposed to. They cause all these negative side effects that the politicians didn't think of. But have you ever heard a member of Congress admit that they made a mistake on a program? They never do. So that's part of it. And the other part of it is log rolling, which is a central and fundamental problem with the way Congress works. And it's something that I don't think our founders really got. They got the idea that there would be factions and special interests. I don't think they got the reality that as the federal government got bigger, Congress would not work like the simple naive view of a democracy that policymakers would get together and you'd have a majority vote for programs that seem to make sense. That is not how Congress works. How Congress works is like this. You have small groups of legislators over here on one side who have a really dumb program that doesn't make any sense for the country, but maybe it benefits some special interests in their districts. They can't convince other members of Congress to go along with their program. A different part of Congress, you'll have other members with a different dumb project that is going to cost a lot, but it benefits people in their district. So, you know, they both get a light bulb. Hey, let's get together. We'll join these two kind of dumb projects that don't make sense on a cost-benefit basis standalone. And they agree to vote for each other's projects and they eke out a bare majority in the legislature and these projects pass. You see that log rolling problem manifest itself in bill after bill. I mean, with farm bills, for example, you know, every different crop, corn and soybeans and the rest, they get together and they say, I'll vote for your crop if you vote for my crop. And then they get together with the urban left of center legislators and say, if you vote for our farm programs, we'll vote for the food stamp program to help urban inner city folks.  And of course, once they're passed, as I said, politicians never admit that they made mistakes when these programs end up costing a lot more, as you said, Trevor, and they don't work very well. So you mentioned special interests, but what is a special interest? I mean, isn't a special interest ultimately just Americans? An interest. They're a group. We're all unique. We have different interests. So is there a definition? Is it a term of art? What is a special interest? No, of course. It's a judgment call. One thing that really strikes me about the U.S. Congress is how unbelievably parochial it is. We all know this, but it is astounding when you watch it up close over many years that members of Congress, people in the districts vote for them. They assume they're going to go to Washington and do things that are in the general broad national interests that are good for all of us, studying national defense and determining the proper size of the Pentagon budget, that sort of thing. But in fact, they spend the vast majority of their time fighting for business interests that are powerful in their state. If you're from a farm state, you vote for farm subsidies and other narrow parochial things. Members have this enormous emotional attachment to their states and their districts, and they put that above the general broad public interests of Americans time after time. It's remarkable. Is that bad inherently? It seems that that's part of the point of having localized representation in the House of Representatives. It doesn't seem to be corruption if you represent Seattle and you listen to Boeing when they call, because many people in your district are employed by Boeing and Boeing brings a lot of communities. It doesn't seem strange that you would vote things to help your district. That might be their job and what they're supposed to do. Right, but the basic problem is this is that you have to first think about where is the proper and most efficient level of government to deal with certain issues. So, properly local things like housing policy, it can best be dealt with by state and local legislators because they live within the area that will be affected. They can properly balance the costs and benefits of the taxes and regulations that they're going to impose on the public. They'll hear back from the public if the program isn't working properly. The problem is that these members of Congress who, frankly, they want to fix potholes and housing problems in their districts, they go to Washington where they're supposed to be dealing with national issues and they want to deal with all those local issues at the federal or national level. And that's the basic mistake, it seems to me. So, we've talked about the budget, but then there's the debt. So, what is the debt at? And is it important where we should really care? Absolutely. It's one of the greatest crises facing our country in years down the road. The federal government debt will be a trillion dollars in the new fiscal year, 2019, that starts soon. The deficit, right, the federal government debt is around $20 trillion. I'd like to pull up a website because it's just ticking, right? It's moving so fast that you can't say it before it's already changed. As a share of the national economy, the federal government debt is by far the largest it's ever been in our peacetime history. The only time the debt has been larger is at the end of World War II. Then the debt fell rapidly in the decades after World War II, mainly because of economic growth. What is astounding if you go back and look at the fiscal history of the United States back to 1789, federal government debt has spiked occasionally. During wars, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Second World War, debt spiked. But then members of Congress ultimately were of both parties at the time, different parties over time, of course, were pretty responsible and paid down the debt, as the Nobel economist James Buchanan noted. Prior to, say, the 1930s, there was sort of a Victorian fiscal morality where people thought debt was bad. Our founders thought, like Jefferson and Madison, thought that debt was sort of equivalent to corruption. It was caused by bad motives. It was irresponsible. That kind of disappeared in the later 20th century, and that's one of the basic problems today. The federal government has never had a balanced budget requirement, but somehow before the 1930s, politicians as self-interested as they are managed to balance the budget, the vast majority of times. Is it possible that maybe one of the reasons that we're not really doing anything about it right now, at least, is that there's like a chicken little problem? I remember even kind of during the Reagan administration where I don't think it topped a trillion yet at that point, but there are people saying, you know, if this tops a trillion, this is going to be a crisis, and then we top 10 trillion, and now we're topping 20 trillion, and nothing seems to have changed in our lives. So you have people saying, oh, I guess the debt was never that big of a deal because now it's so big that it's hard to even contemplate that number. So what has happened in the last few decades is the global economy has happened. If you go back and read budgets from, say, President Carter, who was worried about deficits, and President Reagan, who was also worried about deficits, there is a real fear that federal government deficits would cause short-term immediate pain to the politicians. They thought, for example, if you ran deficits, interest rates like mortgage rates for homes would spike, and it would make Washington politicians look really bad. Well, the fear of that has dissipated as we've run large deficits year after year, and because we have global capital markets now, the U.S. federal government can borrow seemingly endless amounts of money without it affecting our interest rates. In fact, interest rates have been remarkably low in recent years, partly because of federal reserve actions. We borrow about half of our federal government debt now is borrowed from abroad, from Chinese creditors, from Indian creditors, from British creditors, and that makes it so that they can spend endlessly, run these large deficits with apparently no short-term political pain. So when we're borrowing money, is this these creditors that you mentioned in China and wherever else, is this basically the same thing as like when I buy as an individual a savings bond? Are they kind of just buying savings bonds from the U.S. government? Yeah, the government debt is very much akin to an individual borrowing or the credit card or borrowing for personal purposes. Everyone knows with their credit card that you can borrow in the short term, but once debt sort of has this exponential sort of feature to it, that the more you borrow, the higher your interest rates are going to be, and you get deeper and deeper into trouble. And so can these creditors, are these like banks in other countries that are lending? Well, they're ultimately individual savers. It's ultimately individuals. So a lot of Asian countries, for example, have very high savings rates. And a lot of that excess savings that is not used domestically is ultimately flows to United States, which has a very low savings rate, both for individuals and the governments to save, of course, they borrow a lot. Okay, so these individual creditors out there who have, they've loaned money to the U.S. government. Right. Can they just decide tomorrow, could one of them just come to the U.S. government and say, okay, I want my debt repaid now, and then the government would have to repay it? Yeah, absolutely. Well, they'll trade.  But, yeah, there could be a broad-based feeling or shift in politics or views about the U.S. economy that would result in foreign creditors saying, hey, United States is a bigger risk than we thought. They would demand higher interest rates and interest rates would start spiking on our government debt. Federal government debt now is actually a fairly short term. I think the average maturity on debt is something like four years now. So in the short term, the government could kind of get away with being irresponsible, but if there's a sort of a herd mentality to go against to be more suspicious of U.S. government debt, interest rates would start rising pretty quickly. And, of course, in recent years, we've seen debt problems reaching crisis proportions in places like Greece and Portugal, where no one saw the problems coming and then creditors just suddenly felt very scared and interest rates spiked and caused a financial crisis in those countries. Does the primacy of the U.S. in terms of the global economy protect us somewhat from that? Because so a creditor might say, like, I think the U.S. government's looking like more of a risk than it has been. So I'm going to get my money back now. But if they do that, if it has that effect of shocking the U.S. economy, and so therefore collapsing it or severely hurting it, that's going to have huge negative effects to the global economy. And so is there, does that act as a buffer that people are like, well, we don't want, even if we start to get antsy about the future of the U.S. government, we don't want to go quite that far because the costs from doing that are going to be far more than what I might lose on my individual debt down the road. Well, but I mean, that's not how an individual creditor would think. An individual creditor is looking at it for his or her own money. It is true that United States, there is a feeling of safety and security with, by investing U.S. debt, because for one thing you know that a lot of international institutions and other country-central banks and the like hold U.S. dollar-denominated debt. So there's that, and there's also the fact that, I mean, the United States government's debt is ultimately backed by the enormous taxing power of the U.S. federal government and which is backed by our strong economy in general. So on the one hand, you sort of, you suggested that this is sort of advantage of the United States, but politically, and if you believe in smaller governments, a disadvantage. The fact, of course, that United States can borrow so easily is a huge negative ultimately for U.S. individuals and American taxpayers because their government has an incentive to be even more irresponsible than governments in other countries. So I grew up in Canada, for example, in the early 1990s, 25 years ago, the Canadian federal government was just borrowing enormous amounts of money about as much as we're borrowing now, but international creditors got very scared, interest rates spiked, and Canadian politicians of every political persuasion sort of got the message and they became a lot more responsible. And Canada started running surpluses, paid down the debt. So that happens with smaller countries. They get into trouble. International capital markets basically force fixes on them and they fix them, reform themselves. So far, U.S. politicians seem immune from those sort of international pressures. You mentioned Greece and Portugal. When their debt crises happened, do you have an idea of what their GDP to debt ratio was? It wasn't that much higher than where we are now. Our debt is around federal government debts, around 100% of GDP, depending on how you measure it. And other countries, some of the experts who've looked at these many different country examples and looked at them historically have argued that you get to around 100% of GDP with your government debt. You will start getting into trouble. But as you said, the United States is sort of unique in this sense. So we might need a different theory for how debt works for an economy as big as in the United States. No one knows when we're going to hit a wall, when stuff's going to hit the fan. Nobody knows that. Many times in Washington meetings here, I'll ask finance experts and CBO directors and those sorts of folks, that same sort of question you're asking, well, where is the limit? Where will things start unraveling? No one really knows. But of course, it makes absolutely no sense. It's extremely imprudent for politicians to keep sort of pushing ahead and running these trillion-dollar deficits. Because eventually, these are all costs that we're going to bear in the future. The New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman has written many columns saying, well, don't worry too much about the debt, we owe it to ourselves.  A basic libertarian way to think about the government debt is this. In the short run, when the government, say, borrows another $10 billion to spend on a spending program, everyone's happy because it's all, in the short term, it's all voluntary. The people who get the new benefits from the spending program, they're happy because it's voluntary. The politicians are happy. And the creditors who lend that extra $10 billion to the government in the short run, they're happy because they're going to get a return on their investment. The costs come in the future when the government has to raise taxes and extra $10 billion plus interest. And taxes, of course, are where government coercion comes in. So government debt is like the government moving coercion to the future. And coercion is the problem here. Coercion causes all the damage and distortion on the economy from government action. So that's what deficit spending is. No one gets hurt in the short run. In the long run, you're shifting coercion ahead. And you're going to create this great damage when the government tries to extract that extra tax money out of the economy. What about inflating away the debt? That's not going to happen. So governments in the past could get away with that. And I mentioned that our debt was the highest it's ever been in our history at the end of World War II. It peaked at over 100% of GDP. Debt plunged in the decade after World War II. And historians have gone back and looked at why that was. And you might think it was because, well, maybe politicians were responsible back then. They ran surpluses and paid it down. That is not what happened. What happened was after World War II, much of that debt had very long maturities, like 10 years or longer. And the government ran substantial inflation after World War II, which eroded the real value of that debt. So debt plunged after World War II. Today, the average maturity in federal government debt, as I said, is much shorter. You're not going to be able to fool the creditors. If the federal government starts trying to inflate away its debt, creditors are going to demand higher and higher interest rates very quickly. But that seems to be the crux of when it becomes a problem is when people start getting scared of how trustworthy the United States is. Is that true? That happens if they start saying, well, I really don't think I'm going to be able to get my money out of this. And so they start kind of having a run of the bank. And other things may happen too. For example, I mentioned that a lot of Asian countries have very high savings rates. And so our biggest foreign creditors now are Chinese. Well, in the future, their economy may change. And they actually may start being as spendthrift as we are. And their savings rates may go down. So there's going to be less savings going into sort of the global pool. And that'll push up interest rates as well. So there's lots of things that can happen that could push up interest rates. You also have recently, I think, been doing work on the state budget situation. Right. And how does that picture look in general? Is it sort of widely variant across the board that some states are pretty responsible and some are out there with daddy's credit card just putting everything on it? Well, the way I look at it is that politicians are the same everywhere. They're short term oriented. They follow political self-interested incentives rather than the general doing things for the general public good in general. But state policymakers are forced to be more responsible, mainly because in 49 of the 50 states, there are pretty strong legal requirements that states balance their budgets every year. And there's some cheating that goes on. There's big fights between the legislatures and governors often on how to balance state budgets. Some states, like Illinois, I've tried to get around the constraints in various ways and they do cheat a little. At the end of the day, though, and just about all the states, they ultimately, they have to pass balanced budgets and they do pass balanced budgets. So if you're a state politician, a governor who wants a new program, you've got to identify a revenue, a funding source for that program. Or you've got to cut other programs or you've got to try to increase taxes. So in many states, for example, they're debating their highway budgets. Governors and legislators know if they want to spend more on highways, they've got to raise the gas tax. So there's political pain to match the political benefits of the spending. You don't see that in the federal government. Like I said, there's never been a balanced budget requirement in Washington. And because, as we were talking about, politicians in Washington can borrow from global capital markets these days and spend this license to just be incredibly irresponsible with deficit spending. Should there be a balanced budget requirement? Like if we could pass, say, a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget, do you think that would be a good idea? I think, in theory, it's a great idea. I strongly believe that. That's something that, you know, Thomas Jefferson strongly believed that, you know, that's something that unfortunately was left out of the U.S. Constitution was a balanced budget requirement. There are some technical problems with that. One is that the federal government, as it's structured today, runs a lot of counter-cyclical programs like unemployment insurance that where the costs soar when you hit a recession. So when you hit a recession, federal tax revenues plunge and spending on a lot of these programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps and the likes would soar. I don't think any economists would think it's a great idea for the federal government then to have to hike tax rates greatly to try to balance the budget during recessions. So there is that sort of, there's an economics problem with it. I think ethically it makes a lot of sense. What I would say instead of a federal balanced budget requirement, I would like to see either a statutory or constitutional amendment that limits federal government annual growth. So a simple rule that said federal government total spending cannot increase more than say 3% a year, period. It would be harder for the politicians to cheat during recessions. When revenues fell from the weak economy, that would be okay. You could run a deficit for a few years during recessions, but then ultimately you couldn't have any big spike in spending. Like for example, when Obama came into office, he spent, you know, he had that $800 billion stimulus bill. That sort of thing would be sort of barred by this strict spending growth requirement. This is maybe a question for Trevor as our lawyer in the room, but let's say we had.  He's really not. Play one on the podcast. What would the enforcement mechanism be for that? Like you have a, you know, okay, so we've got a requirement that says the government can only grow by 3%, but then the government grows by 4%, 5%, or 6%, or 7%. How do you enforce that? Yeah, that's another issue with any balanced budget amendment that you could go to the court possibly if you can get standing, which is a totally different issue. I would say that the Congress didn't obey the Constitution, which you could do now, and then the court could rule. They might be a little reticent to do that because they don't always like to try and tell what the other branches of government have to do. I mean, they will, but the easiest thing is to strike down a law. But to say you go back and do budgeting again, even though you already spent it, or then Congress would say there's a war. The thing that scares me, that scares me, what concerns me is that all these amendments have, and maybe rightfully so, something like an emergency out clause. You know, the budget has to be balanced except for times of national emergency and exigencies or something like that. And as a lawyer, I read that and I just say, well, there, everything will be an emergency. I mean, everything's already an emergency. The Patriot Act is an emergency. The War on Terror is an emergency. Everything's already an emergency where they can hype it up as an emergency and said, well, no, we're complying with the clause of this new amendment. And we've got tariffs for national security reasons. Yeah, tariffs would be an emergency, yeah. I think the answer to that, though, is you put in the clause, you say the limit is, say, 3% annual growth in total spending, but you have a supermajority vote, whatever the threshold is in House and Senate, you can set it aside. So that's the answer to concerns about war if we needed to spend a lot more for national defense or some other crisis in the short term. So in the states, we hear that some of these states are in fiscally bad shape, but if they have balanced budget amendments, 49 of them, as you mentioned. Which one doesn't? I think it's like Vermont, but they, by tradition, they balance their budget every year. So in like half the states, there's a constitutional requirement and about half the states, it's a statutory requirement. But the surprising thing is, even in states where there's just a statutory requirement, they actually, they follow it. They do it. They balance their budgets every year. So states are in trouble because they mainly, so unlike the federal government, a large share of the cost in state and local governments is employee compensation. In fact, about half of all state local spending is employee compensation, which is very different than the federal government. Employee compensation is maybe only about 10% or less of federal spending. So in many states, especially the northern more unionized states for many years, there's been these excessively generous pension and post employment health care benefits promise to state and local workers. Now, baby boomers who work for state and local governments are retiring in droves. It's pushing up the cost of these pension plans and health care costs on state budgets. So this was a way, it was one way that state governments sort of got around these strict annual budget balance budget requirements is that they made the promises now that will be imposed on taxpayers in the future. So that seems to put some states in a pretty big bind in the sense that they may have to make some pretty difficult choices. Of course, Chris Christie kind of came to prominence talking about difficult choices in New Jersey. But you have, it's, I mean, my heart goes out to some extent to the retiree unionized who is going to depend upon some sort of guaranteed salary. But if the money's not there, the money's not there and there's limits on how much they can raise taxes, correct? Right. So what I would say is actually that a lot of states have been irresponsible with the over promising of pension and post employment health benefits. However, there has been a movement now for over 10 years for states to start fixing these problems. New accounting standards came in for government entities, state and local governments to force more transparency as to how much these future pension costs are going to be. And that has forced politicians to start handling and making reforms to pension plans. And so there has been a lot of forward progress. In Washington, we haven't made any progress towards doing anything about the giant and growing deficit. State and local governments generally, there's been resistance. The unions have, you know, tried to block reforms in the heavily unionized states. But there has been a lot of progress, I think, towards starting to solve some of these pension problems. So I think it's an example where state governments, for a number of reasons, they do seem to be able to solve problems and legislate and do fix things that arise. The federal government seems to become increasingly incapable of fixing even the most obvious problems like our trillion dollar deficit. So which state is the worst though? Is there any state in dire straits right now? Some of them you can guess. I mean, Illinois is perhaps in the worst fiscal shape. It has the lowest bond ratings from the bond rating agencies. And that is yet another check, by the way, on state and local budgets is that their bonds are rated by the rating agencies.  So policymakers, even left-of-center ones, they know that if their bond ratings fall, they're going to have to pay more on interest in their budgets, which, again, have to be balanced. So they know higher interest costs are going to squeeze out the programs spending they like. So there's an incentive across the board to not let the debt problems get too bad in state governments. Also, a lot of states actually have constitutional limits on how much debt they can issue, at least how much general obligation debt they can issue. And a lot of those requirements actually go back to the 19th century, when a lot of states, Illinois and many others in the Midwest, got in a lot of trouble because they used taxpayer government money to invest in canal and other irresponsible infrastructure projects that turned out to be boondoggles. And there's a lot of disastrous fiscal situations in the mid-19th century that led to reforms and these tighter limits on state government debt. So if we're looking at the federal level and we need to start cutting, where is the first place to start? Let's assume that the cross-the-board cuts are not on the table. Where is it most critical to cut and where do you think if we're going to do meaningful cuts, it's most politically feasible? Oh, I thought you were going to ask, you were asking what's the most useless government program. Well, that would be the first one, right? Do you have one that is your favorite, useless? The obvious things to cut are the things that are obviously and logically state and local responsibilities where there's no obvious advantage to federal involvement. Education spending and housing spending, HUD Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Department of Education, there's absolutely no reason for federal involvement in these activities. We're taxing people who live in cities, we're sending the money to Washington, it goes through the Washington bureaucracies, the politicians play games with the money and then some of it trickles back down to local government. Why not just keep the money in a state or local government? This is true for highways too. I see absolutely no reason for the federal government to fund highways. They need more highways in Texas. Texas can raise its own gas tax, can spend the money locally. So I get the federal government out of the things that are obviously of state and local concern and there's no real obvious reason for federal involvement. When I was doing this one Supreme Court case a few years ago about agricultural cartels, essentially I ran into the Raisin Administrative Committee, which is my favorite federal program. I didn't know about before, not a character in a ran novel, but actually this existing thing. Do you have a favorite like going all the budgetary, looking through all the books of all these agencies? Have you ever found something where you just said, oh my gosh, there's a federal gopher fund or something like that? Well, I mean it has to be farm subsidies. The federal government spends about $25 billion a year in giving cash to farmers, mainly crop farmers and generally not fruit and vegetable farmers or folks who raise beef cattle and that sort of stuff. It goes to crop farmers. And I have never read in all the pro-farm subsidy advocacy pieces any real good reason why we do this. Farming is no more inherently risky than many other industries like the high-tech industry. There's no reason why farmers know that they're going to have poor crop years in the future. Maybe the weather won't cooperate and that sort of stuff.  They can use private insurance. They can use commodity hedging strategies. So there's really no inherent reason for these programs other than the fact that these programs are started in the 30s. The farm lobby groups got their hooks and members of Congress. And for some reason every member from a farm state goes to Washington and they believe that their highest calling in life is to keep demanding those farm subsidies and trying to keep expanding them every year. It's really remarkable. But even if we got rid of that, that's $25 billion out of what? $14 trillion? That's right. That's what you said. So that's a drop in the bucket. It's a start. It's a start. So that's the kind of depressing thing about all this is that no matter what you're cutting unless it's Medicare and Social Security, it always feels like it's just a drop in the bucket. So the easiest cut from my point of view economically, the easiest cut should be the Social Security. It is the largest federal program. As I said, it dishes out over a trillion dollars of benefits every year. The simple, long-term, reasonable solution that many economists of many different political persuasions have proposed is simply to slow the growth and benefits. A common strategy right now is that initial benefits rise as nominal wages rise. If you change the law to say initial benefits should rise by just the price level rising, which is a little bit of a slower inflation rate over time over many decades, that would be enough to balance the Social Security program to slowly trim benefits down the road. And so young people looking to the future could see that those benefits are going to be a little less than originally planned and they can save more and plan for the future. So that simple Social Security fix of slowing the growth and benefits I think would be fair and reasonable. People could see it coming and it would save enormous amounts of money. But is there, you keep hearing that there's a sort of day of reckoning coming for Social Security where they move the date out and whatever, do you think it will take? If such a day of reckoning is a real thing, will it take that level of kind of crisis or maybe just people stop getting their checks and something for anyone to do anything?  So oddly, you know, so around the year 2030 or so now, the projected year changes every year with the new estimates. The Social Security so-called trust fund, which is this accounting identity, will only have enough money to pay about 75% of promised benefits. So if Congress doesn't change any law, that year after it runs out of money, benefits will have to be cut legally by about 25% or so. So that's sort of the crisis. But that's obviously not going to happen. If Congress doesn't fix Social Security between now and whatever that year, 2030 or so, obviously what's going to happen in that last year, Congress will simply pass a law injecting new fresh taxpayer funds into the Social Security trust fund. Gee, problem solved. We've seen that already with the Social Security Disability Program, which is about $150 billion program. It has its own trust fund, which has already run out of money, and Congress has already simply done that. They simply injected more general revenue into the Social Security Disability Trust Fund. So, you know, there won't be a one-time immediate crisis with Social Security. The problem is the same with Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. All these programs keep growing relentlessly faster than tax revenues are rising. So those programs are eating out a bigger and bigger share of the overall budget. It's pushing up deficits.  Thanks for listening. Free Thoughts is produced by Tess Terrible. If you enjoyed today's show, please rate and review us on iTunes. And if you'd like to learn more about libertarianism, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.